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Violet Abtahi is the CEO and Founder of Platonic, a company developing blockchain infrastructure to solve counterparty risk and privacy challenges in financial markets. With over a decade of experience in both traditional finance and blockchain technology, Violet transitioned from a mathematics background on Wall Street to building next-generation financial infrastructure.
Violet argues that counterparty risk is the fundamental bottleneck preventing widespread adoption of blockchain-based financial systems. By combining private blockchain technology with automated smart contracts, Platonic aims to create the infrastructure needed for a more efficient, automated, and less risky financial future.
In this podcast you will learn:
- Why she made the more from traditional finance into the blockchain world.
- The founding story of Platonic and the two major challenges she wanted to solve.
- How finance can be autonomous, intelligent, and borderless.
- Who they are targeting with their solutions.
- How instant settlement with smart contracts can remove the counterparty risk.
- The pilot they did with Vanguard, State Street, Citi and Ford.
- What it will take for all real world assets to be tokenized.
- Why automated regulation is a key component for this to happen.
- What asset class will lead the way in tokenization.
- Violet’s priorities for the next 12 months.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 546 – VIOLET ABTAHI
Violet Abtahi: The reason why these assets are sitting in these centralized vaults is that no one is going to put a high value asset on a public chain. And no one is going to, NASDAQ is not going to come and say, here’s my entire, all of these assets, I’m going to give them to a tertiary technology partner to put it in their centralized database either, because there is a lot at play. So what we need is again, privacy of these private vaults where you can actually tokenize the asset and the actual assets that is tokenized and digitized sits there. And now the shadow tokens can be distributed on these public chains, and they can sit there for liquidity. So privacy is one thing that is required. The next thing is interoperability between legacy systems that are going to bring these assets and tokenize them that has to be very seamless and easy. They can’t change their entire ecosystem.
Peter Renton: This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives.
Today on the show, we are talking tokenization and blockchain technology with Violet Abtahi, CEO and Founder of Platonic. Now, Violet has deep experience in traditional finance, but has spent the last decade or more immersed in blockchain technology. She explains how Platonic addresses two major challenges today, counterparty risk and privacy in blockchain transactions. The company has developed a technology stack that creates secure private vaults for tokenizing assets while enabling automated smart contract settlements that can reduce counterparty risk by 95% and settlement times from days to minutes. If you’re not sure what this all means, don’t worry, we explain everything in great detail in this interview. Now let’s get on with the show.
PR: Welcome to the podcast Violet.
VA: Thank you. Happy to be here with you, Peter.
PR: Great to have you. I’m really interested in hearing your story here. I mean, we were chatting before we hit record, and you’ve lived on both coasts, but tell us a little bit about your career arc and how you came from traditional finance into the blockchain.
VA: Yeah, it obviously has not been assured, and one day you wake up and you kind of like take the move over life is interesting and it takes you on a journey. But I started in traditional finance with my forte and background being mostly in mathematics. And the interesting thing, living in New York for about 15 years and dabbling in that world, was that I always thought things can be done a lot simpler and a lot easier. When you move and you live in the world of traditional finance, you realize that there are a lot of assets. We have worked for many, many years, and we have a lot of assets, but finance is meant to be an intelligent layer that can synchronize capital. The hardest thing to do so is trust. The cost of trust in our traditional finance world is very high. That’s why there are so many layers. There are so many time lapses. It takes a long time to do everything. It costs a fortune. And so, because of that, we have a coordination problem and we have a cost problem of trust. And so realizing that after years of being in this space, not enough, I would say, automation and not enough innovation was happening, was something that prompted me to want to take a step over to the world of technology and see how we can change things and how we can build better systems. Now, my journey, interestingly enough, started in AI and then learning about the Bitcoin asset, cryptocurrency, and blockchain ecosystems back in 2013 was something that just changed my journey forever. So it’s been over a decade of being on this side. And I think that I’ve never looked back. I think it’s just a breakthrough in not only computer science, but in our socioeconomic system and the way we can really make a difference in the way we live, in the way we coordinate, and the way we can get demand and supply connected, and potentially create a better world for people. So it’s been a long journey, a beautiful one, and it continues to be.
PR: Yes, indeed, indeed. Well, okay, so then let’s take us closer to the present day, but go back and tell us the founding story for Platonic, and what was the problem that you saw that you wanted to solve?
VA: Yeah, so my journey into the blockchain ecosystem overall and the crypto industry that are like crypto is one application of blockchain, and it’s the currency that really manages the ecosystem. But blockchain, being the actual infrastructure, started back in the days in the public blockchain space. And I think it’s just such an amazing, incredible thing, what we built both on the Bitcoin ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem. But one of the problems that we faced initially was scaling. And then the next problem that we faced was, well, if you want to actually take these technologies and we want to bring these infrastructures and build actual applications, both for traditional finance as well as capitalization of the crypto assets, we need to be able to have privacy in place. Privacy and interoperability are two really major problems that we needed to solve for. On public blockchains, we don’t have such a thing as privacy. And we also, on the DeFi ecosystem or the crypto ecosystem, we still haven’t quite solved for the counterparty risk problem. And when the FTX problems happened and a bunch of projects went down, and we saw that the centralized counterparty risk hurt us so much and pushed us back as an ecosystem so much, it was pretty clear that one, in order to scale the crypto ecosystem and the blockchain ecosystem, we need to solve for that problem. And two, if we want to create an interoperable ecosystem where institutions can also come into this DeFi world, there’s no way we can build these safe and secure bridges unless we solve for privacy, counterparty risk management, and proper collateral management, and systems that are compliant and interoperable. It’s a very complicated problem to solve. There’s so many different layers that you need to plug into each other in order to solve for that. But when you really break it down, and we wrote the white paper and we looked at the architecture, we’re like, well, a lot of this is built. There’s a few pieces that if we build, we can really bring it together. So it comes down to be a stack of technologies creating an operating system that can really give you the plug and play on both sides, that can sit in between the DeFi world and the institutional world and connect the two. And that’s really where Platonic was born. Again, it wasn’t an overnight story, and it wasn’t as eloquently as we can talk about it today. It was a one-step-at-a-time, solving a problem until we arrived. But the essential solution is, we need really secure and private vaults where we can tokenize assets, where we can bring in capital, where we can connect markets and connect borders, and then be able to bring a level of intelligence and automation. And then for liquidity and distribution, connect them to public blockchains. And for that, we just needed a stack of technologies that can connect to both sides. And that’s where Platonic was born.
PR: Right, right. And on your homepage here it says” The future of finance is autonomous, intelligent, and borderless”, which sounds fantastic, but can you just distill that down and maybe give us a little bit about who you are actually serving specifically today?
VA: Yes. So, on the first part of the question, I think as I said this, we believe that finance can be and should be a network of intelligence that synchronizes global capital markets. That’s really what it is. So we have many different capital markets across the world with different regulations, and they are siloed. But the future within a decade from now is going to be one connected capital market. Just like back in the days, if you think about, a good example, is the internet, right? We had siloed libraries and bodies of knowledge and universities, and all of a sudden, with the internet, now we have one global network of intelligence that brought information and globalized it and created an interoperable system where we can all come together. We can create content, we can connect, we can offer supply, we can get like everything is just this interconnected system, but we needed so many different layers to be built in for the internet to be able to act as an operating system or as a web of connection for us to become a fully globalized race in a sense, right, and have these trade markets. Now, the same thing happens for assets, but the reason why we couldn’t bring financial assets on chain into the internet the same way is that on the internet, everything is a copy. On blockchain ecosystems, everything that you see is stored, original stored value. It’s not a copy, so you can put assets that are very high value or very highly regulated on chain. That’s the difference that blockchain actually offered us.
So, when we talk about a global capital market and we talk about all the claims that we make on the website, it’s that belief system that we can create a network of intelligence that can bring all the capital markets together and create one global capital market. And I think that’s what all the hype and all the talk about tokenized assets and all of these financial institutions coming on chain. That’s really all that it is about. It’s offering a network for every asset to be sitting there and for us to be able to cross-border and cross-market, create these capital markets that can be more fluid and can coordinate better with trust being encoded. And what happens when there’s more capital market that is flowing is that there is more abundance of finance for everyone on the planet.
That is really the eventual goal of this, is that if there is not an asset problem and there’s over $400 trillion in assets, then how do we make these assets, how do we activate them, how do we make them smart? And another analogy that I use is that it is the same as how we went from paper maps to GPS systems, right? Like, it is the same as assets are sitting still on spreadsheets and in siloed or centralized systems. The minute you have an intelligence system, that can really carry the intelligence of the asset and connect into different markets, well, think about all the things that we can do and secondary and tertiary markets that can be created. So that is really the sentiment of finance being a network of intelligence that can synchronize capital markets. But to your second question on who our target is and where we’re active right now. This is a two-prong problem to solve, or maybe two sides of the market. And I think both of them are extremely important in different ways. On one hand, we have the traditional markets where we have 400 trillion plus in assets sitting that eventually, you know, it is projected that $16 trillion assets will come on chain by 2030. But eventually, within the next decade, we’ll have most of these assets intelligent. We won’t have anything as a stagnant or dumb asset sitting on a spreadsheet anymore in a decade or 15 years from now. Everything will be smart. Just like most of the books that are being used today are sitting on the internet, they’re not sitting on a shelf somewhere, stagnant. So we’re creating the rails so that with the two engines that we have, most of these assets can seamlessly tokenize, also be collateralized. And I think that is an important role that we’re going to play in the market. The other part that I’m really excited about, and where we have a lot of our activity happening today, is actually what we call the crypto institutional market. We have the DeFi ecosystem, and we have the traditional finance and institutional finance. There is a world in between where the institutions are using the DeFi realms in order to move capital around, create yield, and to borrow and to lend. And when we look at the crypto ecosystem, as of today, it’s somewhere around a $4 trillion asset, right, between Bitcoin and Ethereum and other assets that are sitting there. About 50 to 55 % of that alone is Bitcoin. And when we think about the capitalization of just the Bitcoin asset alone, we are really in the infancy of that world today. We’re not really doing as much yet, and we’re still growing at an interesting pace. And the decentralized economy is growing at a pace, if you think about just 2012 to today, it is the fastest-growing asset in the world. And it’s just continuing to grow. And one of the things that we’re really passionate about is how we can create a foundation where these assets can grow at a faster and safer pace. And the same problem that exists today in traditional finance exists in the crypto world, in a sense that there is that counterparty risk that exists. So if we can remove that counterparty risk and we can offer automation that removes the risk, what happens is we can allocate capital at much larger badges of capital, billions of dollars as opposed to moving slowly because the risk is sitting on the balance sheet. And we can create realms where everything is so automated that 24/7, we can continue to capitalize and create financialization of these assets. So that is something that is very close to my heart, having been in this space for over a decade. And really the passion that we have is in the future of a decentralized economy. An economy that is more cross-border, more like we can really eventually empower more people, more inspiration, and more assets coming on-chain in order to push us to the next phase of our evolution. You see a lot of information on us being in the crypto collateral side and collateralization of these assets and tokenization of these assets, such as Bitcoin. That’s a huge focus for us. And as well as offering the rails for a private credit fund to be able to be tokenized, a real-world asset to be able to be tokenized, and commercial paper to be able to tokenize. The engines are ready for any asset to come on chain, but a lot of our focus is on the crypto side today.
PR: Yeah, that makes sense. And now is a good time, obviously, to be doing this. We now have the Genius Act as law, it’s been signed by President Trump. There are other regulations, such as the infrastructure bill. I was just reading today about how the Senate is looking to clarify some more securities laws around some of the crypto tokens. So, there’s a lot of tailwind in Washington. And I’m curious, though, about the counterparty risk piece, because that feels like, if we can truly solve that, if you can truly solve that, then the sky’s the limit as far as rapid adoption with all the other tailwinds. So maybe you can explain how we can solve counterparty risk. It seems so huge. It’s the reason why finance is slow, right? We have to wait days for an ACH to clear because of the counterparty risk. So tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing there.
VA: I 100% agree with you, of course, given the fact that this is where we’re putting a lot of our resources and our energy. So, today, the way counterparty risk is managed is that a lot of this counterparty risk goes away when there’s collateral at play. So you put up collateral in order for a trade to happen, or in order to borrow money. And that’s like a lot of capital markets, I think what we don’t talk about enough, is that the one capital market is the bedrock of human evolution. With capital markets, we fund health care, we fund education, we fund everything. We are where we are today. We fund space, we fund everything that we do today. But the capital market itself is not disrupted as much as it could be. And the reason is because it’s very regulated. And a lot of that regulation comes to play because of investor protection. But the way capital markets grow is, a lot of it has to do with debt, right? So you put up collateral, you borrow money, and you go and you work with it and you pay the collateral back, and it just constantly moves forward in that way. But a lot of this collateral goes back to like, for example, in the crypto side, the problem is that the markets are highly volatile. Well, like in a boom market and the next thing, you know, from bull market, we go to bear market within like a matter of a few hours. It’s a fast-growing asset that’s also very, very volatile. So when you’re putting up collateral today, the way this is working is that we’re fully funding. One party fully funds the collateral piece and the other party with, let’s say, an ACA or some sort of an agreement is in place for this collateral to be managed depending on where the market moves. So you’re sitting there, this risk is sitting on your balance sheet. You’re fully funding these trades or whatever it is that you’re going into that agreement with, and you’re hoping that if a market event happens, you can be protected. But the problem is, these systems are highly manual. They’re sitting on manual contracts, on paper contracts. There are people in between that are managing, and in an event that an actual market event like FTX happens by the time everybody is serviced, 95 % of folks have gone bankrupt. And the very small number of people that survive are going to be highly impacted from the bankruptcy of the rest of the market. And this is what happened to a lot of us post-FTX, which is, I reference that because it’s one of the largest events that’s happened, but it’s not the only event that happened as a result of a market crash, right? So the only way to resolve this highly manual and slow-ended centralized way that counterparty risk is being managed is by automating it and making it so that it is decentralized and an event that the price moves or there is market movement or any of the terms of the agreements is triggered, a smart contract technology that is automated can instantly execute on the terms of the contract. In that event, your counterparty risk is removed because of the automation. And the instant settlement is something that we really, really need to think about today. And one of the examples and one of the pilots that we did on the traditional finance side, this is like an example between Vanguard, State Street, Ford City, a bunch of larger institutions. They do a lot of trades when it comes to EFX trading, right? Trillions of dollars in EFX trading happens, collateral is up. They each have a separate accounting system, right? And by the end of the day, they do all the calculations and all the margin calculations. Usually, they don’t agree because they have different accounting systems. Calculations have to happen again. And it takes quite a while in order for the settlement to happen. And the settlement always has some error in there anyway. There’s a percentage that they don’t agree on. When you put blockchain and smart contract technology in the middle of that, which is essentially an accounting system, that is an intelligent accounting system of our older version of accounting system, which is a double ledger problem that we solved, the calculation on one golden source of truth is being done on behalf of every counterparty that exists. And based on the agreement that everybody agreed upon, calculation happens instantly, collateral is distributed instantly, there is no risk. That risk doesn’t even sit on the balance sheet because it is being done autonomously and automatically. Now, why don’t people today use that? Because blockchains have been around for a long time. It’s because if you use a blockchain that is a public blockchain, and you want to do these kinds of calculations there, then you have to share the information that exists in these transactions. And most of the time, whether it’s in the crypto market and institutional markets on the crypto side, or whether it’s on the traditional side, these transactions and what exists in the terms of that agreement are highly private.
PR: Right.
VA: For the protection of the investors. That’s where regulatory comes into play. That’s where privacy comes into play. So if you put that information on chain and the entire world has access to that, then you’re out of compliance. Now you’re facing a regulatory problem, right? And no one is going to want to do that. That is really the problem that was solved is, the way it happens on our chain, is if we go into say, an agreement, same example as I used on the traditional finance side, the four parties each have a node, and they’re the only people who have access to what’s really inside that smart contract and agreement. We don’t even see that. I can’t see what’s happening. What is the amount? What is the trigger? What’s really happening? Who are the counterparties? They run the nodes and the blockchain and the smart contract technology automatically just settles for you. Same thing on the crypto side. So if you have, say, Fireblocks and like an investor, and a lender on one side, and the three of them are in an agreement of launching a hundred million dollar or a billion dollar trade, and they’re managing the collateral in a way that it’s instantly done and it’s decentralized. The risk doesn’t sit on one counterparty’s balance sheet. We don’t even have access to see what’s happening in the terms of the agreement, but we can instantly settle. And that’s where I think, Peter, we’re really going to boom the next growth of the crypto ecosystem. That’s where we’re going to go from 4 trillion to 10 trillion in a matter of no time, which is going to be unbelievable. And my belief and my vision is that when the crypto ecosystem and the DeFi realms get there, which is not in a very long time, probably we’re looking at a three to five-year horizon, it’s inevitable that the traditional finance and institutions are going to be floating into the crypto ecosystem.
PR: Right. Well, they’re already doing that. And I do want to, I just want to go back. You mentioned, you know, Vanguard, State Street, Citibank, these are all multi-trillion dollar companies. Ford, not quite there, but still, these are all strong, traditional companies. And you said you’re doing a pilot program with them, and you said it was FX related. Can you just describe in simple terms, exactly what the pilot is doing?
VA: So the pilot was done with part of the technology that we acquired about a year and a half ago. Part of our technology, about 70 % is built. We have also acquired technology. So that pilot was done using part of the technology that we acquired, and it was done in parallel production. So, where the collateral was being managed in their internal system manually, which would take three to five days to settle. We were able to do a parallel production, which means you use the current system, and then you use the technology that we offer, and you compare and see how this is really operating. And the counterparty risk was reduced by about 95%, which is a number that, in my opinion, is mind-blowing. And then the settlements were done in less than five minutes, settlements that could take up to 72 hours in traditional markets to be settled. That is one of the ways in which this technology is being used. One of our active pilots is with the crypto collateral side, and it is with the crypto market makers and option desks, right? That they do the same, very similar to what those guys are doing on the traditional side, just with the crypto tokens. And most of our focus is on the Bitcoin side there. So, it’s the same exact thing. How do we just put the collateral in a decentralized private vault, manage it in a decentralized way, automate the entire system, manage it atomically, remove the risk, and install it. They can increase the allocated capital by about 10x and remove the counterparty risk 100%.
PR: Interesting, interesting. So I want to talk about tokenization because we’ve, as you said, it’s a very hot topic right now. We saw news earlier this month that Robinhood was tokenizing stock. I think it was OpenAI were providing their customers; sounds like it’s a pilot program. But I’m curious about Robinhood doing interesting, small projects, shall we say. But what, what’s it going to take to go from a small project? People talk about having the entire public stock exchanges be tokenized. That feels like, while it’s certainly a possibility, it doesn’t feel like a 10 to 15-year time horizon for me. So I’m just curious, what do we have to do to get from where we are today, where everything is siloed and dumb, to where real-world assets are all tokenized?
VA: So when I was thinking about the same question about like a year, a year and a half ago on what does it really take for us to get there? There’s multiple things that we need to do, right? One of them, there’s multiple pillars at play. One is that it requires true interoperability, right? If you have a whole world of asks, what is tokenization? You’re digitizing an asset, right? And you’re creating a representation of it so that you can have a cross-market activity with it. You can combine assets, you can create, you can move them, you can offer instant payments. The digitization just makes it a global asset that can move, right? And it can have intelligence attached to it. So, if we have tokenized a bunch of assets, first of all, that are still sitting in centralized vaults, but then there’s a shadow token on Ethereum or on Solano that is moving around, that’s not true tokenization.
PR: Right.
VA: That’s just a shadow token. Hence why we’re still sitting at small projects and mostly POCs, we haven’t really moved forward despite all the PR and all the hype that we have talked about. We haven’t really arrived there. The reason why these assets are sitting in these centralized vaults is that no one is going to put a high-value asset on a public chain. And no one is going to, NASDAQ is not going to come and say, here’s all of these assets, I’m going to give them to a tertiary technology partner to put it in their centralized database either, because there is a lot at play. So what we need is, again, privacy, of these private vaults where you can actually tokenize the asset, and the actual asset that is tokenized and digitized sits there. And now the shadow tokens can be distributed on these public chains and they can sit there for liquidity. So privacy is one thing that is required. The next thing is interoperability between legacy systems that are going to bring these assets and tokenize them. That has to be very seamless and easy. They can’t change their entire ecosystem. They have to be able to literally plug into a tokenization engine and tokenize an asset, and then be able to also connect to multiple public blockchains, because all of these assets are not going to sit on one centralized entity. That defeats the entire purpose of everything we’ve been doing in the past decade. The entire idea is creating a decentralized, distributed global market where all the assets can interoperate together. And then the next thing that is also required, which is something that is somewhat up to us, somewhat not, is the regulatory side, right? We are, I think regulation is, we’re not anti, we’re all pro automation of regulation. The minute we can automate regulation is very small because it’s very manually handled. But when our assets are built to carry their compliance with the KYC rules, with the transfer restrictions, all the logic of the jurisdictions that they’re operating in, and they’re all embedded directly into the asset itself, well, we’re really living in a very different era. That’s what we call the era of a programmable layer of trust. The minute we have that, then these tokenized assets are going to come in. And it means that institutions can operate in a new environment, lock public and private chains without having to compromise anything that has to do with regulation. So I think it’s going to be a slow curve, but there’s going to be a very, very steep curve of all these assets coming on chain and not enough maybe players to even service them because there’s a lot of assets and there’s a lot of countries and there’s a lot of different tokenized assets that are going to come on chain. But it’s going to take an ecosystem, Peter. One of the problems that we’re facing today is that we look at these companies and technology providers that are providing tokenization. But what are they doing bringing in a centralized database? That’s not true tokenization, right? That’s not true decentralization. So we need to come together as an ecosystem and really plug and play the real pieces that are solving the problems in order for us to be able to see the next era.
PR: Okay, so then where are we going to start? Like, what is the asset class you think or the niche where this true tokenization will start to happen? What do you think are the first steps here?
VA: So we see a lot of private credit funds that are being tokenized. We’re doing one of those ourselves. The reason why is because it’s one of the easier ones to do that with. It’s not as regulated. It’s a little bit easier. I think real-world assets are a little bit more complicated. For me and where I sit and my passion comes from, I think, as important as it is to tokenize a bond and it is to tokenize a fund, it is to tokenize our own crypto assets. So think it’s going to come from both sides, where we’re going to tokenize a lot of the crypto assets to be able to create more capitalization around them. And that’s going to grow the decentralized economy massively enough to be able to contain all these traditional assets that are going to flow in. But I think funds and capital itself is one of the most important assets that needs to be tokenized investments. It’s going to start with private credit funds, but we’re going to move to ETFs, right? And depending on how fast we can move with regulation on these different assets, I think a lot of them are going to come together at the same time. It’s going to start, again, slow, but it’s going to be steep. Money market funds, right? Is another one that is going to make a big difference the moment we can tokenize those assets because of the liquidity that is offered. I think one of the biggest unlocks, I’m a firm believer in this, is pairing this tokenization engine with a collateral engine. Because if you tokenize these assets, but they’re sitting there like the private credit funds that we’ve tokenized today, there is no benefit in that. There is no benefit in digitizing an asset and sitting there and putting a shadow token there. But if you have a collateral engine that comes in and that collateralizes these assets, in order to remove the counterparty risk, automate the middle and back office, and all of a sudden you’re monetizing an asset that is tokenized, then we’re going to see a lot more assets coming in. I think the FX market is a massive market for that. I think the SWIFT messaging market is a huge market for that. There’s so many of these different assets that can easily come on chain, and we have the technologies to provide them a safe passage today.
PR: Right. Okay. Okay. So then last question, you’ve laid out this really rich world where it’s going to be just so much more efficient, and all the costs that we take out of the system. That’s a whole other story. Maybe we could end with looking at your company and what you’re working on. What are your priorities for the next say 12 months?
PR: The next 12 months, one of the biggest priorities that we have is offering being the trust layer of crypto capital markets and really playing a big role in the DeFi ecosystem by removing counterparty risk and activating the Bitcoin asset initially, because a lot of that, we don’t want to fragment the Bitcoin asset. We want to keep it on the Bitcoin blockchain, lock it up there, but be able to activate it in the DeFi ecosystem. And the only way to do that is by a technology that can, the Bitcoin chain itself, you can’t really build a DeFi realm around it. But if we can pair it up with technologies that remove that risk and can keep the Bitcoin in a safe space on the Bitcoin blockchain, but be able to use it as collateral, with removing the counterparty risk 100%. That’s going to be the biggest unlock for the crypto ecosystem, which I think is one of the most amazing things we’ve built in the decentralized economy so far. That’s a huge focus, and we’re working with option desks, we’re working with qualified custodians, we’re working with self-custodies, multiple lending desks. And I think that’s going to be one of the biggest roles we’re going to play, and gifts that we’re going to give the decentralized economy. And at the same time, the second half of this is going to be offering the collateral piece for a lot of these tokenized assets that are coming on chain, but they need a use case, and they need a safe place where they can put the assets in these private chains and that’s where we’re going to really play a role. So even if you want to tokenize the asset elsewhere, we can give you the tokenization engine. It’s built in; you can plug it into any traditional or digital ecosystem. But even if you’ve tokenized it elsewhere, but you just want to use this as an overlay to be able to automate your system and remove the risk and put it to work, you can easily plug into our ecosystem. So that’s the next 12 months for us is the interoperability, building the next generation of collateral yet again, and focusing on how we can support the decentralized economy further and building the safe bridges for these traditional assets to come into the crypto and decentralized economy and building one cohesive ecosystem together with a bunch of other folks that are playing crucial roles.
PR: Wow. It is going to be an interesting journey that you’re on, and that we’re all going to be on. What a pleasure it was to chat with you today, Violet. I appreciate you coming on this show and best of luck to you.
VA: Thank you so much. Wonderful being here. Thank you, Peter.
PR: Ok, see ya.
As Violet said, counterparty risk is the fundamental bottleneck preventing the transition to a new and more efficient blockchain-based financial system. Her key insight is that by using private blockchain technology with smart contracts, settlement time is vastly reduced and privacy remains assured. Now, we have a long way to go, but whether it is 10, 15 or 20 years, I expect we will see dramatic changes.
It would be a brave person who would say that the financial systems we have today will operate roughly the same in 20 years’ time. One thing I’m confident about is that it will be more automated, smarter, and less risky. Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.