Cardano Adoption Will SURGE in 2026! Here's Why! with Frederik Gregaard

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you think about it from our crypto perspective, custody

(00:02):
could be a phenomenal place they could deep right into
Many of the banks has not been able to create
let's say, the best user experience or the cheapest or
the most secure way of actually storing your crypto. And
for me still I think there's nothing who beats you know, Kedano,
a bit kind on a hardware wallet. I mean this
basically keeps it in your control.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Do you see the evolution of financial markets and banking
going on chain where it's no longer let's say a
brick and mortar location, but it's on my phone a wallet.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Well, yes and no. We have to kind of think
about what is banking and what has banking become?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Right, This episode is brought to you by I Trust Capital.
I Trust Capital gives you a great alternative for buying, selling,
and custoding your crypto assets. They allow you to set
up a self directed IRA, which gives you huge tax advantages.

(00:56):
You can even roll over your four oh one K
to this platform. And they not only offer crypto, they
also offer gold and silver and as mentioned, the custody
gives you another very safe alternative. So many of you
know about self custody. That's a great option, but you
can also use I Trust Capital's Premium custody accounts also

(01:16):
known as PCA. So with the rise of crypto scams
and phishing attacks, a lot of retail investors are losing
their shirts. I mean, let's be honest, right, it sucks
to hear that exchanges are getting hacked.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
I Trust Capital does things a bit different here. They
use Ford Bank as they're qualified custudents, so they're actually
using a bank here, and they have partnerships with coinbased,
Prime Fidelity and Fireblocks. They are fully US based and
their client experienced team offers direct phone support, so not
many platforms offer this. This is very unique to I

(01:49):
Trust Capital and folks, most recently we heard from President
Trump that the United States is looking to unlock for
one case to be able to participate in crypto. You
can get a head of the curve by using I
trust Capital and getting started in that process. And folks,
I'm a user of the platform. I have an account
with them. If you sign up with my link, which

(02:09):
is I Trustcapital dot com slash Thinking Crypto, you can
get an exclusive one hundred dollars funding bonus, So go
learn about this great, safe and awesome way to buy, sell,
and custod your crypto. A great alternative once again with
tax advantages and a lot of safety, very safe compared
to many exchanges, and all the links will be in

(02:31):
a description.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Check it out.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Edward and joining me today is Frederick Gregard, who
is the CEO of the Cardano Foundation. Frederick, great to have.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
You, Thank you, Thank you for having me. Frederick.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
A lot's happening with Cardano and I'm excited to dive
into the details and all the newly exciting initiatives. Let's
kick it off with your background. Tell us a bit
about yourself and your professional background.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Oh that's always an amazing question. And I guess I've
been building banks for about twenty years in one way
or another. So it turned out I was not the
best sort of trader myself. I was a bit too emotional.
So I stuck my nose deep into the technology and
saught Okay, if I just had better technology, if I
had faster lines like radiant lines and no frequency and

(03:18):
you know, high frequency trading and no latency and really
short of like, you know, use technology to my advantage.
But I was still a bit too emotional. So I
went readly deep into infrastructure banking and spent the close
to twenty years building banks and asset managers and investment
banking rails, while I started dappering into crypto and blockchain.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
For real, that's amazing that line. I build banks, and
it's amazing that you're now here in crypto. So do
you see the evolution of financial markets and banking going
on chain where it's no longer let's say, a brick
and mortar location, but it's on my phone a wallet.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
Well, yes and no, so we have to kind of
think about what is banking and what has banking become? Right?
But I think diffinitely you would see is much better
user experience on your phone and you'll be able to
do much more things. Unfortunately, we are still fighting a
little bit with finding it the right place for banking. Right,
So what should they actually do? I mean, if you

(04:18):
think about it from a crypto perspective, right custody could
be a phenomenal place they could dab right into, but
many of the banks has not been able to create
let's say, the best user experience or the cheapest or
the most secure way of actually storing your crypto. And
in many ways for me still I think there's nothing
who beats you know, Karano or a bitcoin on a

(04:39):
hardware wallet. Hunh. I mean this basically keeps it in
your control, but it also requires that you have more education, right,
and it requires that you take responsibility of your own life.
And there is some people who are still saying some
two businesses to do that. And therefore, you know, you know,
going to a crypto custodian or going to even a
bank who has highest scrutiny around that is a good option.
And when you go go to sharing risk for instance, right,

(05:01):
we've seen that most banks don't share risk anymore. In
the old days, you know, it was very frequent that
you know, the banker was on the board, right, or
the banker was helping to do a generation change and
stuff like that. That's we nearly don't see that anymore.
I find that's a shame. I mean, banks actually do
have a role to play, but it has to be
aligned with what the clients want and expect, and I've

(05:24):
seen less of that in the last sort of eight
to ten years unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, that's a great point, because we are seeing the
convergence of tradifying crypto. And to your point, a lot
of the banks are now partnering with exchanges to offer
crypto trading, some are launching stable coins, some are doing
custody as well. And to your point, there's going to
be a segment of the population who's going to say, look,
the private keys are scary to me, and custoding my

(05:49):
own crypto assets, I'm too scared of that. But I
trust maybe JP Morgan or City Bank, which I've been
using for a long time. I put my money in there,
I may use them for custodial services, So I guess
you know, to your point, some folks are going to
go that direction, right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
I think what we're seeing more innovation is actually in
the asset management space. I don't know if you notice, right,
but the Karana Foundation actually was that the London Stock
Exchange that was bringing the bill a couple of weeks back, right,
because we actually tokenized a reinsurance product and normally the
entry ticket for that is one hundred million dollars, and
you know that's nearly everybody, nearly impossible and therefore the

(06:27):
only access to that is through investment banks are really
last asset managers. But we've been able to bring that
on chain on Karana, right, and we're able to do
that with the highest level of security and compliance, and
that's why also we could list that on the you know,
on a Tier one stock exchange with the London Storage Change.
And now this week actually you know, the most successful

(06:50):
etf ever created, the black Rock Bitcoin etc. Have actually
launched on the London Storage Change And I find that
sort of quite cool, right because we actually made it
to a Tier one European stock exchange with a Kardano
r W, a product before black Rock did. But you know,
hands down still as I still think the asset managers
are starting to do some really innovation. Another example, and

(07:13):
that is we've been working with Franklin Templeton, which is
sort of the third largest, fourth largest asset manager in
the world, and they actually run ten different notes, So
they run a Bitcoin note in the Theium note, but
they also run a Cadano note. And Genning, the CEO there,
has you know, for a long time been you know,
tokenizing things sort of like for instance, the Benji which
is their money market fund and I think this, you know,

(07:34):
you've done some real numbers on it, and I actually
find that running decline registry on the blockchain actually can
cut cost and increase operation resilience. So I do think that,
you know, there's some real transformation happening right now in
the asset management space and less so in the banking space.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Absolutely. So let's double click on the tokenization happening on Cardano,
which is really great. You highlighted some great examples there.
How are you you interacting with these institutions who are
looking to tokenize and let's say they want to pick
Cardano the blockchain to you know, tokenize money market funds,
stocks and other assets.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
So, I mean there's still a big aspect of pilots
and MVPs and parks right and I think what mainly
asset managers are looking at right now is to figuring
out if we can create a new settlement layer or
a new custodial layer, so basically changing the FMI because
there's a lot of extra fat on that infrastructure. There's
a lot of intermediaries. And I think with you know,

(08:34):
crypto and blockchain becoming you know, acceptable acceptable technologies, not
for everything, but it's getting there, right. It increases this
you know, if we can just you know, get a
one percent improvement, we can actually share that with our
clients and that actually shows in the performance and gives
us a better tracking era. And what we do very
specifically with the Karana Foundation is we help them with

(08:56):
the technical integration. So the Karana Foundation is actually the
one who built and maintains the tooling you need as
an institution to integrate with Kardano. Now you can run
completely native and build your own right, but you can
also run the supported tools from the Karana Foundation. So
we have an integration team working with about you know,
one hundred two hundred and fifty banks in exchanges and

(09:17):
asset managers on these types of integration, which also includes
custodians worldwide. The other thing we do is we help
them on the regulatory side. So we are very closely
anchored with our legal team, and we speak with the
European Parliament, we speak with the you know, the US regulators,
we speak with American regulators, we speak with ms I'm

(09:38):
here right now in Dubai speaking with Vara ADGM right,
So we work very very close with them and we
understand the current regulation. That means that we can help
them on the intersection between thread fire and blockchain and
bring them you know, an extra level of comforward. It
is true that they would like to go with their
own lawyers and they would like, you know, to have

(09:58):
their own teams doing that, but you can shortcut quite
a lot by using the knowledge from the Karana Foundation.
And then last, but not least, we give distribution, right
so we you know, when we actually going to Copenhagen
next week because we want a price launching a et
P as an exchange traded product together with United Nations
Human Tearing Crisis Organization, which is an alternative way to

(10:19):
basically give funding to ngngos who's looking for that in
this case for displaced people. So we also, you know,
we're quite innovative and do some financial engineering with you know,
partners and others to show the power of blockchain for good.
So it's just a couple of examples on how that works.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, that's really great. And then you mentioned regulations and uh,
you know, the card Owner Foundation joined the Micro Crypto Alliance.
Tell us about that and you know, working in the
EU space.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah, so we've actually been part of also negotiating the
first you know, the first micro regime, right, which is
the stable current policy for the European Parliament. And you know,
I feel quite strongly that actually the the intent of
this was amazing, but the implementation was not so good.
And that's what you see right now with the clarity

(11:09):
and the geniac which basically superseds and and creates your
huge growth, but all stability and some clarity on the
US side, where more on the European side due to
the implementation, And what basically has happened is that crypto
companies are basically running away from the European Union. And
that's a that's really that was not the intent, right.
The intent was to actually create certainty and create jobs

(11:31):
and create opportunities for the European Union, including you know,
adding some more to the captor markets at large, right,
because caviacter markets is a dollar based economy, right, and
there were some ideas that this could help on the
on the European So on the euroside. Now, US joining
the MICAH Alliance is really a big step because what

(11:52):
we found was that we were quite alone in these discussions.
So alone means we were alone from the protocol side, right,
so we were the own the protocol at the table
discussing that the rest was you know, the very large
stable coins and the very large, extremely regulated centralized exchanges, right,
And they basically said, yeah, well it's okay. We are
regulated in multiple jurisdictions, so everything is financial. That might

(12:16):
be true, right, But when we start going you know,
into DeFi, or we start going you know, along the
axis of financial engineering and blockchain, well not everything is
playing cod you know, financial markets. Joining the MECARE Alliance
for us is really a fantastic opportunity to not be
the only one at the table. And I think if
you look at it from a market cap perspective, you know,

(12:39):
the more market cap who participate in the MECARE Alliance
from a protocol level, who sits at the table and
can speak as adults and understand the current regulation, understand
the current financial market infrastructure, and can understand blockchain and
can push in a direction that we can still have
public permission as blockchains and we can still have experimentation
until we see how it goes. We don't have to

(13:00):
do everything as we do in capusal markets today, which
something can be done better cheapa and fast and still
protect the end consumers. This should be allowed, right.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Absolutely, and hopefully the EU can get the MICA regulation,
you know in a good place where, like you said,
companies are not leaving. I know here in the United States.
You know we're waiting for the Claritiact to pass. Are
you in the folks at the Cardina Foundation optimistic? You
know that we may see that pass, let's say, by

(13:31):
the end of the December ourself.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
So I'm not very good with timelines when we talk
about politicians, but I do think that after I was
in Washington lately, right, and I was the pleasure of
being in the Parliament and also withsiting the Treasury and
meeting both sides of the isle, I do think this
will pass. That's my view, right, And but when I
just don't know.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
So let's say it gets passed maybe end of year
or even Q one twenty twenty six, what would that
mean for the cardan of Foundation and the adoption of Cardona.
Do you feel that more US companies will be able
to start building faster and innovating on the Cardona blockchain.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
Yeah, so we are already quite big in North America, right,
and I think what you will see she will just
see way more deployment and way more rollouts. So yeah, no,
I'm very positively optimistic that this will bring more transactions
on chain and will bring more economic opportunities to the
American population for utilizing systems like blockchain. So I'm very
optimistic about that well for sure.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Now I want to talk about some of the great
initiatives that are happening on the cardinal side of things,
and one is the Digital Product Passport. The DPP tell
us about this and what's the mission.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, So sometimes regulation enables innovation, and I think this
is one of those times. So this is basically a
piece of regulation coming out of the European Union which
basically says that any product which is sold or manufactured
in the European Union needs to have a so called
Digital Product passport. So this is a bit like you

(15:03):
know these small flyers you see when you buy a
piece of furniture, right, which basically says, you know, those
use these chemicals and this is how you assemble the furniture.
And you know this is you know the content of
the furniture, right, is it all wood or is the
plastic and so on? And for certain let's say countries,
you won't find a lot. You just find like two
pictures and this is how you put it together. And
others there quite far in terms of easy certification and

(15:26):
you know, child labor and so on. So what the
digital product passport really is is a very comprehensive guideline
or a piece of policy. Really who says the minimum
requirements for things produced in the European Union or sold
in the European Union is from the start of the
production to the end of the product lifetime. So if

(15:46):
you have a chair, for instance, it's not when the
company goes out of business, is when the chare no
longer exists. You need to support a digital manual or
product passport who basically describes also how you get rid
of it, so how you basically recycle it. And this
potentially can actually be a liability on your balance sheet.

(16:07):
So if you create a new company, right and you're
selling a physical product, you know in the European Union,
you know, who knows how long that can actually exist.
And if you're very good at producing, this might be generations, right,
But if you have your startup goes you know barey
up after a while, right, there's there's some liability and
the balance sheet because you need to maintain that digital
product passport, which means you need to have some money

(16:28):
for a cloud database to be running for as long
as the product runs. Right. And I think what we
sort of homed in on here is quite unique is
that what it requires in the world of today is
that many of these supply chains they have multiple contributors
from different companies. And if you want to have a
database where multiple companies contribute to the database, well, blockchain

(16:53):
is a pretty good hit, right. Secondly, due to the
fact that the community maintains the blockchain, right, not the business. Well,
basically you can base you can write off all that
liability because the blockchain will be maintain as in Kadano's
case favor right. So I think this is a you know,
there's some really good reasons why the digital product passport

(17:13):
could be a super opportunity for the blockchain based in
the European Union.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
But do you feel also that the direction the world
is heading in where a lot of data and information
will be on the blockchain, that this type of data
and information tagged to products and services is actually helpful.
For example, let's say I want to buy a product
on Amazon. Maybe there's some sort of digital product ID
or passport or whatever you want to call it in

(17:38):
a dropped out dialogue box, and I can verify it
on the blockchain that it came from this region, it
was manufactured at this specific date. It didn't go through
any regions that are blacklisted, so to speak, it's not
a fake product. Do you feel that these things are
going to be added to products and services that people
can verify it and we can do it because of
the blockchain.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
I think some people would like that, right, But I
think a lot of people would like to have the
option to do that. Right. So it were very few
people who actually uses it and verifies it, but there'll
be more people who just like the idea that I
can do it if I need to write, And then
there will be some people who just goes after the
lowest price possible no matter what. Right, it's just a
it's a penny game, right. But I truly think that

(18:20):
when we look at the experience we had both with
you know, tokenizing wine, right, so putting the George and
wine on the blockchain, and suddenly they were selling in
countries where they've never done marketing. Because people buying George
and wine, which doesn't have the strongest brand, were able
to verify the story and the content of the wine
and have an external third party verification of this, it

(18:40):
suddenly sold wine and for instance Norway with no marketing right,
so the whole badge was sold out straight away. So
I do think there's a huge demand for it, and
I think as we the generations that start changing, I
think this demand will go up. The younger generations will
simply not accept, you know, to buy crap, and they
know the internet so well that they also know the

(19:00):
risk very well, so sometimes they will gamble on it
and other times if they have to pay the real
dollars for it, they actually want this. So I think
this is one of the cases where you know, it's
nice with this regulation because it creates, you know, an
opportunity for blockchain. But I think this opportunity was there
anyway on the table.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, that's a great point in regards to the future generation,
and you know how they may vi certain products like
wine and other types of merchandise and want that verifiability
and see the history and so forth. I know there's
certain things that I personally would want to do that
like wine and some other things, not everything, Like I
don't necessarily need to know if my chair was you know,

(19:40):
made at some place. It's just a chair, But my
wine and certain merchandise I would definitely want to verify.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
I think you know, you know, we involve as humans, right.
Maybe another example we did on Kanana was we actually
tokenized the merchandise for the World Across Championship in the US.
I believe that was last year, right. And what was
quite unique about it is that actually has critical infrastructure
connected to it because the tickets were actually also part
of the t shirts and the you know, the bumber

(20:06):
jackets and so on. And can you imagine, you know,
if fifty thousand Americans that bought their tickets, they line
up to the stadium and suddenly they can't get in
because the blockchain is down. I mean, this is actually
a security concern, right. So one of the reasons why
it was done on Karana was that we could actually
you know, Karana has never been down, right, So Bitcoin
and Karana has been up running since twenty seventeen and

(20:29):
never missed the beat, right, And this is the two
only infrastructures which I'm aware of, which includes also defense
architecture and others who has never been down And I
think this is truly unique, and I think you know
them always sort of thinks through these things, right, the
more important this becomes absolutely.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
Now I wanted to ask you about the Cardano Foundation
is preparing to apply for two generic top level domains,
dot Ata and dot Cardano. Tell us about this initiative
and what we can expect as far as features and
so forth.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah, So it is so that these processes they take
a lot of time, and they take a lot of
effort and money, right, And what basically happens is that
once maybe five six years, the organizations who guard the Internet,
they open up for this opportunity that you can apply
for what's called top level domains. And you know, as
Karana has just moved into the world of Woltaire, which

(21:19):
is the governance era, right where there is no privilege
for the Karana Foundation or IOG or something like that.
We don't have specific governance keys, We cannot just mind
Aida or anything like that. We are truly we wrote
a constitution, you know, expressed it online in smart contracts,
and we're living through it today. But these some of
these classic organizations like that they need a counterparty, right,

(21:40):
they need a classical entity. You can prove that, you know,
they've done something with the Karana and the Ada logo
and with the trademarks associated with this. So this gives
us the opportunity to use the Karana foundation as approxy
for the community to apply for these top level domains. Now,
what you can imagine actually having out of that is
not just email addresses and so one, which would be nice,

(22:01):
but you can also imagine that if I want to
send Ada to you, right, normally I would need your address, right,
but you can actually associate that with a top level
domain email address for instance, right, So we can start
using that as ibend numbers. We can start keying and identity,
so we can use the Caroana foundations really on wallet
for instance, to to to create a type of identity

(22:23):
which we key together with your domain name. Right. So
I think first and foremost this is going to create
a better user experience. And also I think what it's
going to do, is it going to you know, move
the Karano brand out there even further than it is today. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
I love the user experience aspect of it because to
your point, you know, if you want to send someone
stable coin or some crypto acid EIGHTA, you need their
wallet address, and you know there's still some friction there.
But if I can just give someone, uh, you know,
Tony at or Tony dot cardano or something right or
thinking crypto at cardanou, they can just simply send the

(23:00):
funds be an app and it's just like an email address.
It becomes so simple, right, And it's what we have
all been trained and a society. Everybody knows what an
email address is for the most part, how to send
an email. It will make it that easy, so to speak.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
Yeah, exactly right. And then you can also make it
programmable as well. Right, So the superpower of kadano is
you can send one to many, many to one and
many too many. Right. So you can bold these things
up using top level domains as well, and I think
that's going to come a lot of innovation about that.
But the first and foremost, it's not as easy as
it sounds. Right. So, yeah, we are applying for this

(23:36):
right now, right, we are asking the community for acknowledging
that we're doing that on behalf of the community. Right.
It does require a lot of legal work. We're already
paid went through a rigorously process around this. It does
require a lot of say yeah, documentation, backing, et cetera.
And in the end there's a committee who basically decides
whether we will get that or not. Right, But yeah, no,

(23:56):
I think this is I think right now we really
need user experience, that we really need marketing to create
more transactions, but also to spread the love of what's
actually happening out there and where does a blockchain really matter? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (24:10):
Absolutely, Let's talk about digital asset treasury companies. This is
a huge trend, a lot of publicly traded companies getting
involved putting crypto and in a balance sheet. Of course,
it all started with Michael Sailor and Strategy, but there
there's one that is launched for Cardinal, and that is
Reliance Global Group. Tell us about this and what's their

(24:31):
mission and how much data tokens are they holding and
things like that.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
I actually don't have too much information about them right now.
It is totally fresh, right, and but I can get
back to you on that, right. But in general, what
I do think is that what's really important is this
idea that you can run your balance sheet in a cryptocurrency, right,
And I think this is truly unique. The second part
is that for these things to really kick off and
be ver interesting, you need you need really good access

(24:59):
to capital markets, right, so you need to be able
to have access to the lending market on an institutional
scale to run something like a Michaels sailor strategy right
on Karana. What's truly unique is that you need to
take a view on voting, right so having a digital
acid treasury on Kardana, you need to figure out will
this be able to act as a de rep yes

(25:20):
or no? And I think this is where the Constitution
also comes into play and where it becomes you know,
extremely important.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Now, yeah, and I'm curious to see how this trend continues.
Certainly it makes sense, you know, put some of some
of your balance sheet, your cash on your balance sheet,
in these assets to help you fight against the basement
of currency that's happening globally. But then, you know, I
wonder what's the long term outlook for these you know,

(25:47):
is it do these digital ascid treasury companies hold for
a very long time?

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Do they sell? You have to we have to separate
this into a couple of different buckets, right because what
my Michael Saila is doing is actually it is true
financial engineering, and he has he has a game plan
which is really about how he raises money and separates
that from the from the shares and from the balance sheet. Right,

(26:13):
so he has a really strong view around that. And
many digital ass the treasury companies are running something different.

Speaker 3 (26:18):
Right.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
They're saying, you know, not everybody has access to crypto,
so is there a way we can actually give them
access through an ASTAC listed entity that they can trade
it as an equity. And if you don't have access
to crypto, right, this might be really good for distribution, right,
but if you or if there is a tax delta,
for instance, in Japan, I believe the text delta is

(26:39):
about twenty percent, So if you hold crypto and you
realize that there's a twenty percent different compared to if
you hold equity and realize that, right, So therefore I
think the MNF can trade as a premium of twenty
percent in Japan without you know, I was sort of
thinking more about it. But if the if the data
is as symbol as you know that you use a

(26:59):
vehicle to basically hold the underlying the question is you
know how much are you willing to pay on top
of the underlying asset, and why are you willing to
pay that there's an arbitrash there. And what we see
with most arbitrast opportunities is that they don't fare that long.
But I want to be quite clear that what Michael

(27:19):
Taylor does is not a regulatory arbitrast opportunity or like
a tax arbatrast opportunity. Right, he uses a very specific
formula that he's able to raise money or raise money
through depth in capital markets by basically challenging the unwinding
of the T bill. So we have this very specific

(27:40):
situation since a few years that people are not that
interested in the tea bill. I think you saw the
president and another working very heavily on changing that situation,
right by him actually being able to offer for institutional
investors a little bit of a premium or a little
bit that they get a little bit more extra yield
out of basically financing him and him be thinking about

(28:01):
his whole balance sheet in bitcoin and not in dollars. Well,
basically he can take the inflation out of the equation,
and if you minus the inflation with what it caused
him to raise the death that's nearly a zero sum game,
and then he has the whole appreciation value and still
a free floating stock cut. And I think that's quite
different than what we've seen with many of the debts
out there. They've been simply constructed differently. Yeah, yeah, we'll

(28:23):
we'll put and explain there. On the flip side of
the token, you have et apps, right, and there's a
lot of all coin ETPs getting approved. The SEC still
has some on its table to approve here in the
United States. Anything you can share as far as Cardano
ETFs or eight A ETPs that may be on the horizon.
So you've seen probably quite a few ETPs. I just

(28:43):
mentioned one earlier in this show, right, But there's quite
a few ETPs specifically on the European side and some
in Asia on Ada. Right. And yes, it is correct
that there is also coming. So I don't know what
we really should call it, right. I think the media
right now calls the ETFs, but in reality is an
et he traded as an ETF, right, so it is
a is an ETP, right, And there is some some

(29:06):
big asset management houses who's applied for that. I'm thinking,
you know, when you know that we're talking probably like
within a month, we'll get some clayerity around that, but
it's it's very likely that you have something on the
horizon there. And I think there's been some public announcements already,
but we need the you know, the US state to
go back to work.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, for sure, waiting for the government to reopen. Yeah, well,
like it is, right, I mean, yeah, it's funny, a
funny story. I interviewed SEC Commissioner Hester Purse right before
the government shut down. Now, because she's a government employee,
they need to review the interview before it gets published.
So we edited, we sent it to them, and then

(29:46):
the government shut down they couldn't review, so that interview
has been sitting on the table because of the government.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
He is really a great gal. Huh.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
You know, she's amazing work. She's been doing right, and
I think she's very clear about absolutely. There is the
Cardinal Summit coming up in November. Tell us about this,
where it's going to be at and what can we
expect there.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
Yeah. So actually the Calano summers are already rolling, so
there's multiple summers going on, but the flagship event that
is going on in Berlin in mid November and what
you're going to expect is about you know, eight nine
hundred participants, So it's not going to be as big,
for instance, as where I was just doing a keynote
and some panels today here at the Blockchain Life in Dubai.
But what is really truly unique about it is it
brings some people to the blockchain space which normally is

(30:30):
not in the blockchain space. I'm talking about Volvo Cast,
Johnson and Johnson Boston consulting groups, so were really big
names who is right now starting to use blockchain technology,
and we are matching that up with the Karano community, right,
so think two three hundred very deep Kartano fans who's
a part of not just building and supporting, but actually

(30:51):
are running Kadano today. So bringing this match of you know,
traditional industries together with you know blockchain native people and
invest us, we believe it's going to give really a
truly unique opportunity for other people who's also participating to
see something was very rarely happening, right, So this is
blockchain adoption on the day happening and use cases you

(31:13):
haven't seen before. We also announced together with Mazumi, which
is a daughter company of someone called service plan supported
by Inmaker that we now have over one hundred German
companies using a gendic AI on Karano and most of
them actually don't know that on Karano right, So this
is also truly unique because what they want is agenda AI.

(31:34):
They want secure, regulated, a gentic AI where they know
that they can share data with other companies without breaching
data privacy rules and using this grace user experience. And
that's where Karano comes in so compared to other blockchains
to sort of people that does a pe vote towards AI.
What we've done is we stay true to a decentralized

(31:56):
infrastructure and we use that for identity collaboration, the regulatory
activity lock right and the incentive model underlying these agenda
AIS and a lot of those will also be present there.
So I think that's also really really interesting and mind
blowing to see into the engine room of that.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
That's really great and to kind of drill down into
the AI and AAI agents on blockchain. You know, I
would love to get your thoughts on the outlook for
that is, you know, along the lines of what you're
stating that these companies they want to create like multiple
AI agents and they're running on the blockchain or they're
running alongside the blockchain and can you know, I don't know,

(32:40):
come over to the blockchain like I'm just I want
to wrap my head around that. Are they like creating
an AI agent on the blockchain itself?

Speaker 1 (32:48):
No, So that's not how it works with Karana right now.
There is blockchain who's trying to do that right, But
then you need a much bigger data lake environment to
do that right and you need to different architecture. What
we do here in this case is we use Kaarana
for what Karana is very good at as Karana is
very good at identity. Right, so we might not have
that many expressions of identity right now, but we started

(33:08):
really from the Karana foundation with the really invalid right
but we now have dits and vcs all the way
up to you know, first level quantum secure identity. So
what we have. What's really important is that when you
have an AI from one company who needs to delegate
work or find answers from an AI from another company,

(33:29):
you are in a very bad situation from a privacy perspective,
because if you are the end consumer who's trying to
get an offer on a ticket to talkyo, or you're
trying to optimize something. Right, you have not given Company
A the permission to go fishing for your data and
Company B. Right. But this is essentially what we would
like to see, right, because alternatively is that all of

(33:49):
your data exists in one glorified spreadsheet, and there is
only two databases in this world. Right, there's databases who
have been hacked, on databases who will be hacked. And
if it lives in one glorified spreadsheet, then these businesses
need to basically buy each other and become like a
global company, right, And I think a lot of us

(34:09):
would like to have choice. Right. So what we basically
have here is that this AI agent is supported by
an identity which is verified on the blockchain, and not
only an identity, but something called a verified credential. So
not only do they say they are who they are,
but they also say, I do have the data about Tony,

(34:30):
and I do have his travel records. I'm not going
to give it to you, but I'm prepared to give
the output to the request to optimize his travel Itgineery.
The second thing you can imagine is that you have
a company who's very deep into tech. They might have
a lot of CPU, and an AI agent who has
access to a lot of CPU might be able to
do millions of prompts and hit a Maybe an inferior

(34:53):
AI agent who don't have the same sophistication and might
be able to work around some of these defense layers
and actually fix, you know, get your data anyway. So
by using meta compliant us D m U is a
stable corn and Kano transactions, you basically have an economic
moment that the AI agent just can't ask a million
questions without paying for it.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
So you're basically trying using the blockchain to align these
two CPU AI agents against each other so you don't
have an arbitrast opportunity. Then, due to this being in
the European Union, you know, we have something called EUDPR,
which is the European Data Privacy Act, which is very tough.
You if you failed that, you might end up with

(35:36):
a double digit find of your total revenues. Wow. Yeah,
well this is what breaks companies, right, So for companies
to actually trust that that that their company is getting
data from another company without the consent of the user, right,
what you really need is you need an activity log
vers is you know, privacy compliant, but also can show

(35:58):
the supervisors that everything has happened as it should happen.
And last, but not least, they's say you didn't buy anything.
You know, sometimes we just ask, right, we want to
see what's out there. It still gives an incentive to
the companies for having these AIS agents available out there
for queries. Right, there's some micropayments, so as you can see,

(36:18):
actually the AI agent doesn't really touch the Cadano stack
at all. It just uses it for security and collaboration
and regulatory purposes. Got it, Okay, very very interesting. I
know you touched on a lot and there's a lot
happening with the cardenter fination. Is there anything else on
your roadmap that you want to highlight maybe that's going
to happen and let's say in twenty twenty six, potentially

(36:41):
a lot. Right. What I'm really interesting in at the
moment is a use case we started that the Dubai
police around forensics, most specifically ballistic forensics. Right and as
I'm in Dubai right now, it sort of came to
my mind, right, and one of the community projects in
Kadana has taken this to the next level in India,

(37:01):
it's called Indian Net. And what they're basically have done
is they basically use Karano technology to hash a part
of the criminal investigation journey when I don't know, some
accidents happened, I mean a drunk driver or somebody is
dead or whatever. Right, what the basically is done is
they're using Karanas to secure they invested the gift journey,

(37:22):
so you cannot manipulate that downstream. Right, So when the
when the different tests are being sent to the laboratories
and so on, right, all of this is basically hashed
and stored on Karano. And we already have a think
about seven eight thousand transactions on main net. And I

(37:42):
think what we're seeing here is really somebody who actually
took a deep look into what has already happened on Kardano,
got some inspiration, and then rolled that out into the
state in India. And I'm really excited about that, and
I'm hoping we're going to see a lot more of that,
because this really shows the power of blockchain become physical, right,
and when things become physical, it becomes real well for

(38:05):
people who cannot really grasp it so realm when they
suddenly can start feeling that the true impact on their
lives in this case, you know, more ORA and better
cridinal investigations. Right, this is where you see the hockey
stick really flying. So that's something I'm really really passionate
about at the moment and really sort of proud of
the Indian ned team putting that together also because I

(38:27):
see that whole lifeline coming from the work with it
with the Dubai Police but also some work with it
with NASA at the Space Agency is really coming through there,
and you see the power of open source software as
well and inspiration happening through these channels. So that's that's
that's really cool. Another thing which I'm very excited about
is of course the new ross note coming from the

(38:47):
AMAR routine. So I'm not supposed to say too much, right,
but I think in at the summit, you you're going
to see, you're going to you're going to get a
really you know, bigger harm moment, right because the team
has really done a phenomenal job in ensuring that we
at least have a not a blog producing note yet,
but we have a valid data note who's basically able

(39:11):
to run on so little power you won't imagine it
and in such a little instance, and I think it
really shows that we are still committed to economic opportunities
outside the Western hemisphere. Right, So wherever you are, you
can actually you know, you can still use Kerano. You
don't you're not required to have a super professional data
center and so on. I showed the video to some

(39:31):
professional bitcoin minors here in Dubai and they were, you know,
they couldn't believe that this is running on a double
A battery, right, So I'm quite excited about that because
it also means the next generation of operation resilience. And
then obviously we go into the midnight area as well, right,
So very excited about the launch and hopefully soon from

(39:53):
the midnight foundation of midnight and see what kind of
use cases we can unlock using that kind of technolog
as you.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
That's really great, Frederick, And you know you mentioned like
the data forensics with the Dubai there, and I'm fascinated
by that, you know, the bridging of the real world
in different segments of life and connecting the blockchain there.
So that's that's very interesting. That's like something I want
to nerd out on and like, you know, figure out
how the components and everything works.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
So I love that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
Another thing is that we of course are coming with
some announcements sort of it around the summit. So my
marketing team always tells me, oh, I don't share too much, right,
but but I think you should really pay attention to
our digital identity team. I mentioned that a few times, right.
So the Origion stack is really is really taking shape
and form, and everything is open source, right, so you

(40:45):
actually don't need a blockchain to run it. And we
already have requests from nation states and from large enterprises
to use the stack because it's the only wallet implementation
of what's called the ELI was is the first level
quantum resistant extension of the ALII, which basically moves eighty
percent of world trade. And the fact that that's coming
out of the Karana Foundation, and you know, and we're

(41:09):
now proactively being asked also for non blog chain implementations
of that, I think it really shows that there is
really some power in the Karano ecosystem and when we
get the right people together, we can move the world.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
I love it, Frederick, great, great stuff. Looking forward to
the summit and the announcements coming out there, you know.
Thank you so much for taking the time. I have
some wrap up questions here for you. First, so, if
you could create your own metaverse, what would the team be?
Where would you put your OPU Lister Apple Pro and
go to.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
I mean it would either be in the mountains or
in the depth of the ocean, somewhere between thirty and
forty medias where there's still a good light for sure.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Okay, rapid fire questions.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
Favorite food steak and salad or my wife's lasagna. Favorite
musician or band It's called Disneyland after Dark or Dad
is a Danish rock band and the Unfortunately we're not
allowed to be called Disneyland. They were suited by Disneyland
by the d a D. Yeah, very cool. Favorite movie, Wow,
you called me on that one. I'm not sure I

(42:10):
have a favorite movie, but one I'm looking forward to
seeing again with going to get a lot of noise
for it is something called Starship Troopers is a fairy
old movie. There's sort of a being the meal with
alien insects, but it has something about leadership and something
about you know, ideals and about fighting for the better
world but also doing it in the wrong way. And
I think sometimes that's sort of an epiphany moment. We

(42:33):
are so focused on trying to do something that we
accept sometimes to do it the wrong way, and in
blockchain we do that through centralization, so when something gets hard,
we centralize. And Starship Troopers is really a situation where
they you know, they centralized democracy right and created that
you have to be a citizen to be able to
do anything, and to do that you have to serve right.

(42:53):
And I think it really is sort of in a
weird way, you know, teases some of these leadership principles
with you know, how wrong it is to go the
wrong way for the right reasons, for sure.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
And it's one of my favorite sci fi movies. I
remember watching it in the nineties, so yeah, you know,
if it's on TV, I watch it.

Speaker 1 (43:13):
Favorite book, you have some really good questions. Huh, damn.
Favorite book. So a book I learned a lot about.
And the one who came to mind right now, because
I just don't have a favorite book right now, is
actually from the royal family of Lichtenstein. So they basically
wrote a book about governance using Lichtenstein as examples. So

(43:36):
what he basically wrote about here was, you know, something
about voting with your feet, which the thing is very
prevalent for the blockchain ecosystems. If you don't like something,
you go to another blockchain because there's many of them. Right,
So we should be super proud that the Caronal community
is so strong, right. But he also wrote these examples about,
you know, being a small nation state who actually has
a royal family who basically decides right, so as a monarchy, right,

(44:00):
and have no resources whatsoever. Right, how you actually navigate
you know, governance, and how you serve your population and
make this attractive and some of those examples in that
book is just mind blowing. But it's not a book
you can read from, you know, from a to set.
You have to sort of take a chapter and then

(44:20):
chew on it a bit. So I can definitely recommend
that perfect. Yeah, I'll check that out. And then when
you're not working at the Cardono Foundation, what are you
doing for fun? Anything in the mountains. So I love
to go to the mountains, and you know, I run,
I mountaineer, telemarkski, I actually am part of the Voluntary
Mountain Search and Rescue. I play in the mountains with

(44:42):
my kids and my friends. So yeah, anything in the
mountains all four seasons. I mean, so that's awesome, Frederick,
absolute pleasure. I love what Kardon is doing, and as
mentioned earlier, I'm looking forward to the updates. But thank
you so much for taking the time to join. Yeah,
thank you, and thank you. A great show. I love
watching it from time to time.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
M m m hm

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Hmm

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

Are You A Charlotte?

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Cardano Adoption Will SURGE in 2026! Here's Why! with Frederik Gregaard

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

Are You A Charlotte?

All Episodes

Cardano Adoption Will SURGE in 2026! Here's Why! with Frederik Gregaard

Stuff You Should Know