Alex Buelau, Rayls | AI, Banks and the Invisible Future of Finance

Well, you know, congratulations for the exciting platform that you operate on.

I know there will have been a lot of challenges along the way and still will be, obviously, when you're an innovator.

But we're at this miraculous time, you know, almost in the middle of 2026, where it does feel like just a whole load of technologies are, um, transcending and, you know, some of the dreams that individuals maybe like you add 15 or 20 years ago, it's not the technology that's stopping them from happening now.

It's, you know, the district and it's the regulation, uh, it's the logic that people want it.

Um, so I'd love you just to, you've explained, I think really nicely there, the journey of the vision to date, but what's the vision if we move forward slightly? And let me preset the question, because that's too general.

Institutions are in.

Is everything starting to just, to the point you say, look like Web 2.5? DeFi has shown some incredible user case for a small community of users.

But can it really break out into the masses? It's like the hotly debated topic over the last couple of years.

And we're starting to see some exciting emergence within various categories like RWAs where you start to feel like, okay, perhaps this, this has a really big audience, but you're, you're a much better person to talk to that.

And really with the hope of the vision of what originally got you excited and now do you believe that it can happen or.

And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, like Ethereum layer one basically silently becomes the Linux of the financial services, and if it does, great.

But really, in terms of what sits on top of that, then banking just looks like banking.

Or are we actually going to see all of the positive change, which is inclusion to banking, sectors that individuals wouldn't have had 24-7 activity, less risk, like all the reasons that you'd actually want to do this.

Love you to speak to that, Alex.

Yeah, I think over the last few years, my opinion has changed on this because I think in the beginning, everyone was thinking this is going to replace finance, right? So crypto is going to be the new kind of rails for finance.

But I think one thing that people start to realize is that still today we have a UI problem.

is not for everyone i can't see like a regular person using crypto on a day-to-day basis because it's still very complicated you can lose our money if you don't pay attention there's lots of scams and and unfortunately it's been in reality ever since and so i think there's kind of two visions today okay two ways we can move forward with this so one is and this is what the one that we've been working with for the last several years now is that actually crypto is kind of like the underlying technology, like TCP IP.

but that the UI is provided by the ones that have the relationship with the end user, which is the banks.

And so that is one way to look at it.

So if you can get the banks that already have the relationship with the users and know how, I mean, already regulated, already have all the controls to make sure that money is not stolen or disappears or anything like this.

If they can provide the interface between the end user and crypto, maybe people don't even know they're using crypto.

Maybe you're going to be doing an FX transaction and it is actually going to be sent through a stablecoin on Rails blockchain or Tron or Ethereum.

but the end user doesn't even realize that you know and do they need to realize that i mean do people know they use tcpip when they open a website most people don't know this you know So that is one way of looking at it.

But the other way, I think because of AI, it may be that the user interface between end users and crypto is AI.

Because for agents, it's so native to them to send or to connect to an RPC endpoint and then send a transaction.