04.03. When AI Meets Blockchain: Building the Rails for Programmable Finance

Perhaps we'll start with blockchain, just given the origins of your company.

You said Ethereum caught your attention.

Ethereum still, I think, is... is something that we point to and say that when you look forward to what programmable finance might look like, Ethereum with its ability to have smart contracts and things, it was something that excited a lot of people when it came along.

What do you remember of that time when you discovered Ethereum and then what led you to believe, okay, I want to branch out and make my own business around this technology?

Yeah.

So I have a technology background.

What I was doing at the bank and companies I'd worked at before then was integration.

So it was about how do systems within the organization and between organizations talk to each other.

And there are safer ways to do that, more secure ways, more reliable ways to do that.

And when blockchain came along, I saw that as a next level way of doing that.

So instead of just sending messages to each other, we're now transacting and we can do that in a way that the history is locked down and it's harder to contest and it's more secure.

And then you can store, you can use that as an asset registry and then you can transfer assets and it all becomes very efficient from a technical perspective.

And Ethereum from day one was an embodiment of that.

They added the smart contract, the sort of programmable aspect on top of these assets.

And then it just seemed like really so much was possible on top of that on a new paradigm.

So I looked at that as a techie and saw the efficiencies.

And that immediately drew me in.

And so the approach, my approach and the approach of the company was to go in deep technically to really understand the nuts and bolts and appreciate it from there.

So where's the efficiency? and then step back and help companies to look at it more strategically.

And if you understand the nuts and bolts, then you can advise, I think you can better advise strategically, because you're not talking about marketing hype, you're talking about what this thing actually does and how it works underneath, and therefore what it can bring to you, what it can do to the industry, and so on, where the efficiencies are.

And that's the same approach that we're taking now with AI.

So the first instinct was to lean in, get the whole team, anthropic, clawed, architect certified, so they all understand the tech under the bonnet.

And then we're looking at AI from that perspective.

So first of all, going really deep, and then step back and see what it can do for our business and for our clients as well.