The Future Economy is Decentralized ft. Sandy Kaul

29:19And also, what does it mean for VC? What does it mean for private equity? We've seen Robinhood is blurring that boundary really fast and Republic and a few others are, which are tokenizing private vehicles like SpaceX. Yeah. Okay, that's interesting, the later stage. But what basically a lot of crypto is already is just early stage that is tokenized as opposed to equity. And some do token and equity to make it even more confusing. But it feels like the capital markets are changing structure in front of our very eyes. That, you know, things like the Circle IPO are going to be less and less relevant in the future.

29:54Because as you say, what is an equity? What is a token? Does it matter? because once the regulation is cleaned up, they can accrue rights, they can accrue dividends or economic rights, whatever it may be. And therefore, my idea for a long time was using a company as complicated as, let's say, Exxon. Yeah. A lot of people don't want to invest straight up in an oil company, but they've got hundreds of different businesses within a company like that. And to be able to break it down, it becomes a much better business for a CEO to run because you've got more efficient capital allocation because the market's giving you signal.

30:33You can decide what needs capital, what doesn't need capital, all of these things. Well, and to build on your point, because I think you're 100 % correct, Raul, and to build on that point, one of the most difficult parts for these corporations is how do I fund sufficient research and development while making sure that all of these different businesses are funded adequately to grow. And I think that opening up research and development is going to be huge, right? Because a company really has, if you think about it, all the different stages of investment in it. You can have venture through their research and development arm.

31:10You can have early stage through new business launches. You can have growth stages as new businesses really start to become a more important part of the company's economic ladder. And then you can have later stage and value portions of a company based on their most successful and most established business line. So, you know, you could actually really start to break every company down into the full range of the equity markets and trade every part of that ladder within a single company. Yeah. And Google's another great example. Alphabet's a great example of a company that people would love to invest in some parts of and not other parts of because there's some really interesting stuff the issue i've got with all of this is the question is what is a token what is equity what happens in m &a um what happens when tokens don't die equity does die what happens when a line of business goes bust or whatever it's just there's still a complexity around what the hell this thing is yeah well this is where this is where I think the programmability of tokens is going to become the real focus of discussion, right?

32:23We've kind of treated tokens as this kind of very generic wrapper, but a token is a lot more than a wrapper, right? A token is programmable. And with many of these blockchains that they run on, you can have smart contracts. More and more of these blockchains are bringing agentive AI into the monitoring and the administration of their smart contracts. And I think at that intersection is where we're going to start to really see some sophistication build into the marketplace. So if you think of the early days of crypto, it was buy or sell, right? Then we started to get derivatives. We started to get perps.

33:01We started to get staking. We started to get all of these new models that made this very basic marketplace increasingly attractive and opened up more and more opportunity. And I think you're going to see the same thing happen around the wrapper of the token itself, right? We still think of a token as a pretty straightforward wrapper, but it can be much more, right? It can almost be a, you know, I hate to use the term smart wrapper, but you can start to program it and you can start to say if business profitability falls below X, you know, this becomes a distress token and new rules come into effect.

33:37Or, you know, if you hit a certain stage of growth, this is now going to switch from being a venture token to a growth token. And that can be programmed into these contracts so that they can actually morph and change and respond to market conditions that can be delivered. And the data needed to really feed those potential changes can be delivered via oracles. So I think that you're going to see a real rethinking of what does a wrapper need to deliver? And can we use this to really help evolve these instruments to become growing and shifting instruments, just like we've seen machine learning start to increase and allow AI program activities to become more and more sophisticated?

34:23I think these rappers themselves will become more and more sophisticated. Yeah, I mean, it's super interesting. And just thinking about, you know, the centralization of the big corporations or the decentralization of a tokenized corporation. Right. And then the ability to what kind of portfolios to go back to your previous point is like, OK, now what does your portfolio look like? You could have oil income streams and real estate in Manhattan and you can have crypto exposure and you can have some tech exposure. You know, it's like it becomes super defined in what you can do in a way that does not exist now.

35:03Well, and you can be very deliberate, right? Like you can really start to get down to what is my specific goal, right? What do I need? How much money do I want to have in retirement? And what is going to be the fastest way for me, my, for my portfolio to get me there, right? And it can isolate different income streams that have different degrees of confidence about their repeatability. You can have high risk income streams that might pay off much more than you think versus completely conservative, steady income streams. We've used bonds as just a fill in for what could become a much more nuanced ecosystem around how do you create income in a portfolio.

35:48I think that's just one example of what might change so profoundly when you have all of these very distinct and very targeted opportunities that you can utilize to build the portfolio. Yeah. Sandy, the other thing that makes me think, and we touched on it before, is the nature of the capital markets and how you raise capital changes. Because now you can be a, you know, a technology company or manufacturing company who say, I want to raise money for a specific thing. And it's not a generalized pool of capital and people get access to that specific return. so it creates a lot more specificity which is an easy word for you to say difficult for me to say um in in capital raising as well yeah and i think that that is where i think the the new thinking around how do i manage an organization forget it doesn't have to necessarily be a company because we're seeing the same thing come up with these foundations right that are running the different blockchain-based businesses, how do I think about my goals as an organization?

36:58And how do I think about opening up participation and ownership in a new way, right? Ownership used to only be, I could own a share in the company, but now ownership can be participatory as well. And so, you know, I might actually want to use expertise from outside my organization and offer people with that expertise benefits through having special classes of tokens for people who contribute to my projects, right? So it could even change employment. Let's say Microsoft have the world's best corporate treasury, let's say, and they could then just basically tokenize that ability to manage it for other corporations.

37:41It kind of decentralizes asset management at scale as well because of different people have different skill sets. You know, commodity trading houses are very good at certain things, whether it could be currency overlays. And then before you know it, you're getting their currency overlay from you because they offer a token that offers it, which is extraordinary. Yeah. And it becomes a marketplace, right? Your idea marketplace, your capabilities marketplace grows to such an extent. I mean, today we have what, maybe a thousand investment firms globally that are managing money, 2 ,000 firms globally, right?

38:20You could have hundreds of thousands of specialty firms that are each offering their own expertise that you can access and put together into a portfolio of services. So it really kind of, this idea of decentralization, right? Goes much further than we've been thinking about it today, right? We're at the, I think, just the very, very beginnings of unpacking what a decentralized economy might look like. The other side of it is everybody wants to tokenize their funds, whatever fund it is, equity funds, private equity funds, real estate funds, all of that stuff. A lot of them just want to do it to get to retail because they want to scale, particularly the private equity guys.

39:04But it feels that, talk me through where's your head with the tokenization of the kind of existing fund business. and then we'll talk about what it might look like in the future. Because I think we're pulling on this thread that whatever we see today and whatever tokenization happens is not where it's going. Yeah. So I think for today, the way I look at it is I think it's going to be a barbell, right? I think that the reason that there's so much interest in tokenizing these private funds isn't so much about the fractionalization of those fund exposures or isn't so much about, you know, this ability to democratize access.

39:41I think a lot of what's happening in the tokenization of the private fund space is about creating operational efficiencies and creating some ability to share standards, share information and share data in an industry where there's no real standards. So it's very complicated to onboard different private funds today to, say, a big wealth management platform, because each private fund has its own documentation, its own data fields, its own way of creating valuations, its own way of calling for capital. there's no standardization whatsoever. So by tokenizing some of these processes, I think a lot of people see just adding efficiencies and taking costs out of the private marketplace.

40:32And even if you're not using it to provide direct exposure, there's lots of opportunity there. But then at the opposite end of the spectrum, I think it's going to be the most liquid things that go to become tokenized first. And you're already seeing this, right? We talked about tokenization of equities, tokenization of ETFs. These are the most commoditized products we offer. And by moving them out of their traditional kind of offering platform onto a tokenized platform, we're actually being able to take cost out of these instruments. We're actually creating more velocity for being able to move these instruments and more utility, because now they can start to be used in different kinds of financing arrangements and in different kinds of staking arrangements and in different kinds of liquidity pools in a much easier manner.

41:23Right. That used to be something only the most sophisticated institutions could afford to do. But increasingly, it's going to become something that just becomes second place for everyone. There's also, you know, there's no secondary market liquidity in a lot of these things. And, you know, at various points in the business cycle, people have got locked up in a VC fund or private equity fund and they want to get liquidity. Yes, you can get some, but it's very illiquid. But, you know, it's going to create that. But then that creates, I guess, it creates an arbitrage between the NAV versus the tokens, which is good because it creates liquidity around the ecosystem.

41:56I can see a lot of that. The one that comes up a lot is the one that I'm least excited about. I thought I was excited about it, but I'm not, which is tokenizing real estate. And the reason being is every person who comes up to me and said, can you help me with this? is somebody wants to sell real estate. I've not had a single friend or single person I know say, I'd love to tokenize a part of an apartment in Manhattan because young people just don't want that exposure. It just doesn't make meaningful returns compared to the returns of the things that they prefer, tech stocks, crypto, stuff like that.

42:32So I don't know who the buyer of that would be yeah i think real estate it always did seem like that would be the easiest and first place to go um title deeds sure you know all of the contracts and stuff for sure but the actual estate i'm not so sure anymore we've actually looked into it a few different times um over the past few years and you know there's problems there's problems with the way that you do the valuations there's problems with how do you you know look to exit right you know if you're only owning a portion of a piece of real estate and you want to exit, what does that look like?

43:08So I think that there's logistical issues around real estate as well as kind of, I think, interest issues. I do think that there are other assets that are much more appealing to people and that I think that real estate is also something that people are starting to have very different views around. And you're seeing that because of the difficulties of getting into the housing markets and the housing ladders, I think that people are looking for things that are more accessible to them. So I agree. Real estate seemed like that was going to be kind of a slam dunk first pass. Now what we're really seeing is it's much more the efficiencies around real estate that people think there's opportunities in, like moving titles and moving land grants and things onto blockchain-based rails rather than tokenizing the actual investments in real estate.

43:57The other thing that we're certainly pushing towards at Real Vision and I think will happen is this whole market of hedge funds, which is basically investing in people who have excess talent in managing money in whatever markets. And what we're seeing is that you can basically prove somebody's abilities in a community. And then if they tokenize it, I can tokenize Sandy's trading portfolio. right now. Sandy's a hedge fund manager and gets paid, which is incredibly disruptive, considering the hedge fund industry is a$4 trillion industry. And suddenly, everybody can essentially become a hedge fund manager.

44:39And that, again, puts the power back into the people, as opposed to these lumpy, complicated corporate structures to make it super easy. Well, and you and I, right, we both have hedge fund backgrounds. And so really, what is a pod structure for a hedge fund, but a platform. It's really just a platform play. And if that platform becomes something that you can offer out in general, right, there's a huge opportunity in that. I will say, though, the one piece that I do think about, because as you're exactly right, you can find all sorts of opportunity and anyone could really become in part a hedge fund manager, one of the things that do make these platforms very successful is the way that they allocate capital at the top level from a risk perspective.

45:28And that is probably where hedge funds, the future of hedge funds may lay. They may lay in that risk management layer that sits on top and then all the talent that feeds the hedge funds could become almost open source. Sandy, it's all going to be AI. The asset allocation. So if there's a basket of a thousand traders available and you train your AI on it and say, okay, this is the kind of risk profile. Can you build me a portfolio of the, everybody can become a platform. And we don't need Easy Englander to be worth a hundred billion dollars or$200 billion to do it because it can be done by AI for almost zero cost.

46:07Yeah. But then there's going to be, you know, maybe Easy Englander can build a better AI, right? Someone who hasn't really had that experience. And then the hedge fund becomes the strength of their AI algorithm and that becomes the platform. Right. But I do I think your point is perfectly taken. I think that, though, there is skill. Right. We know that there is amazing skill in being able to invest. And that skill is becoming increasingly decentralized and we can be sourced very differently. But in the end, there still needs to be skill that builds these algorithms and trains these algorithms that to really be able to do this.

46:48And just like people are better or worse at it, my guess is that algorithms are going to be better or worse at it as well. So the other side of this whole equation, we've kind of talked about moving this industry on chain. But what about moving the assets into crypto? Where are we with that? Because you're also involved in that whole thing as well. So where are you with all of that, with seeing what kind of demand is coming, what kind of products are needed? What's happening with the institutional investment with crypto? Yeah, so I think institutions are investing in crypto. I think that this is one of the reasons that, you know, some of the trading patterns feel very different now than in other cycles, because institutions are investing and institutions wait for market dips to buy.

47:34Right. Institutions don't typically chase markets higher. and so you get this pattern of kind of higher lows but not always necessarily big breakouts and so i think that you know in the altcoin sometimes that volatility gets a little bigger because they can kind of wait for their entry points and they're less involved with alts as well that's right and then i think in bitcoin right which is probably the most liquid you're seeing that you know this pattern of higher lows keeps happening and that will eventually create the foundation for a move higher, but institutions don't drive markets higher in the same way that retail participation does.

48:11So I think you're already starting to feel the impact of institutions in the crypto markets. I also think that with more regulation coming into place and more regulators looking to create clarity around what is a security, what isn't a security, what is a commodity, what is a token, I think that there's still some fundamental questions that need to be answered and maybe some redesign that needs to happen, right? Because a lot of these blockchains use their native cryptocurrency to drive volume, right? And to try and make the platform ever more profitable in terms of how you purchase block space, right?

48:53So as I become more successful, there's more demand for my tokens and more need to use those tokens to actually feed the transactional volumes that we're creating. But we also are using those same tokens as the investment vehicle into those platforms. So the hope is that the value of the token goes up because we want it to be an investment exposure. But in reality, the value of that token should go down as the volume grows because it's helping to drive volume. It's really hard, this thing, because the more successful it is, the least attractive the block space is because of pricing. So it makes it really difficult.

49:36It'd be interesting to see how that resolves over time. Right. So I think that we might have to just like separate out the two. Right. Why can't you have an investment token and a utility token? Well, I guess that's what base versus Ethereum is. Right. You can't actually invest in base or or layer twos in general. So ETH was so successful that it became too slow, too expensive. So they had to scale the layer twos to allow high volume transactions at low fees. Yeah. And so, you know, that's one solution. But maybe another solution is someone like an ETH issues a utility token to buy block space and an investment token to reflect the value of the overall blockchain and its treasury.

50:18Right. And then if it's an investment token, then you can also start to distribute profits from it. on community votes, right? And so that becomes even more attractive as an investment instrument. And so, you know, this whole use of tokens as an investment exposure is new. It's really only at best 15 years old. And so I think that we're still also needing to, you know, evolve and think through some of the implications to get the whole ecosystem growing, right? Not every token is necessarily suitable as an investment token. And maybe we need to think about new options there. One of the things interesting, I didn't think this would be the case, but we got equity wrapped crypto before we got crypto wrapped equities.

51:04Well, we got crypto wrapped ETFs. So maybe that did come first. But yes, you're right. We did not get crypto wrapped equity. No, we got the other way around. You know what I mean? Because we actually wrapped a bunch of crypto in an ETF to make it accessible that way around, which is not the way most people would have thought it would have happened. It was like more disruptive than that. It was actually TradFi saying, well, we like it, but we don't want to change yet. So we're going to stick with the ETF side. Do you think that at some point, I guess you're seeing this as a lot of the time, you're still having to turn into a fund structure, you know, crypto investments for clients, whether it's the hedge funds that you have internally or whatever it is or you have to turn it into an equity are you yet seeing them saying how do we do tokens and buy tokens and hold tokens only only in venture right that's really the only place that i think we're seeing how do i buy and hold tokens right um it's it's very hard right now to get investors heads around holding the direct tokens.

52:09I'm talking institutional investors now. I'm not talking individual investors. But I think that institutions are still not clear on the tokenomics and how they work. I think they're still not clear, or I think that they realize that there's not a lot of clarity and transparency in some protocols in terms of what their tokenomics are and how they operate. And I think that that makes it more challenging, right? Not only do you have all the business dynamics that you need to model to determine the attractiveness of an investment, you also need to model these new things called token pools, that there's not a lot of legal clarity around what the obligations are there.

52:51And sometimes there's not even a lot of clarity around the plans of the issuer themselves on how they're going to deal with the token pool. And then there's the whole community aspect, which they've never had to deal with in an investment before. So I think that it's still a challenge to get these institutions to understand the tokens. What we try and do through our education role is really help them to understand that there has been a reliance on open source protocols in our society for decades now, but we were never able to invest in those protocols. and that if you can get their mind around this idea that a token is not an equity, but a token is a way of sharing ownership of open source code, that starts to help.

53:38But that's a big leap for a lot of traditional investors. And the VC team might get it again, but the general portfolio managers are like, oh, this sounds like too much like early stage technology investing. Exactly. So I think that we'll get there, but it's much more of an educational hurdle. than putting an equity into a crypto wrapper or putting crypto into an ETF, right? Those are still things that are easier for people, I think, to understand. I think another thing that I envisage happening pretty fast is the massive pools of excess capital, the Apollos and the Blackstones and those people to enter the DeFi market in size as providers of liquidity.

54:21It's all they do anyway, right? They're massive lenders of money, credit to the system. And it feels that this is a market they'll understand very well. Sure, there's some esoteric risks, but they're used to dealing with esoteric risks too. And they will see there's trillions of dollars in that market can easily go into DeFi and create enormous liquidity pools. Yeah. And it's not even going to be DeFi or CeFi. It's going to be some interesting combination of the two, because there probably will be some regulatory boundaries that get set to make it easier for regulated entities to participate, but still maintaining some of the, I think, real opportunity space of these new models.

55:08So I think that this is going to be one of the most exciting areas we see. I completely agree. I think tons of liquidity is going to move into these new models because they really are so much more effective. And you can really time them to a much greater degree with much less difficulty than you can in any kind of financing arrangements today. And, you know, this is where the ability to embed the smart contract in the actual instrument is going to become critical because that's what's going to facilitate the transferability. That's what's going to allow for the secondary markets. And these are things that just don't exist in financing arrangements today.

55:46So I think that this is going to be a huge area of innovation and the risks. We want those risks, right? People forget that, you know, you make your best return in areas where there's the most risk and you have a trusted risk manager that can hedge that out. So I think this is going to be a very exciting space. These have high rates of return. You know, there's a lot you can do in in DeFi world that is similar to the complex financialization in the finance world where people seek returns by layering on different slices of risk. they can do all of that and the returns are extremely high so it's got to be attractive for them well it's this whole new concept of return stream structuring right we've never really been able to do that because the contracts around any type of structured trade have been so difficult to you know to put into place and to manage but now we're really getting to the point where I can engineer portfolios of different types of DeFi yield and return and hedge them off in different ways and start to have these products that build one return on top of another return on top of another return.

56:56And that's super exciting. I mean, we've just never had the financial infrastructure to be able to do that previously, but the financial knowledge is very well understood. So we've gone through all of the things that are possible and what is happening and where we're going. I'm obsessed by distribution. I just think you're going to go to the sales force at Franklin Templeton and say, we can do this and this and this. And they go, I can just sell a money market fund and get paid. How do you get through that? Because the change is not just educating the customer, it's educating your whole distribution chain as well from internal distribution through to RIAs or third-party asset managers or all of the clients you deal with who work for distribution.

57:43How on earth do you do that, apart from you speaking to as many people as possible? Yes, sometimes that feels like the way we are doing it. I think that a few things here. First off, I think that we need to understand that the wallet becomes the access point to the client, right? That, you know, that I cannot understate or cannot overstate how important this shift from account-based to wallet-based ecosystem is going to be. So explain what that means in your head for anybody watching this. I don't know really why that's a difference. Right. So today I have a checking account. I have a savings account.

58:25I have a brokerage account. I have a retirement account. I have several of each of those sometimes, right? And who aggregates all of that? Me, right? I'm the only person with that view into my total net worth. And therefore, I'm the only person that can look across all of these different pools of exposure and think about what's the best way for me to really utilize my set of assets. maybe if I upload all of this information and my advisor can kind of aggregate it all they might have a rudimentary view and be able to give me some rudimentary advice but everything sits in so many little pockets of accounts that having one view into the potential of my portfolio is very difficult now if everything were tokenized that would all sit in my cryptographically protected wallet, right?

59:25My operating capital would be sitting there in the form of stable coins or tokenized money market funds or tokenized deposits or central bank digital currency. My investments would be sitting there in the form of tokenized equities or tokenized portfolios or crypto. My real estate exposures might be sitting there in the form of tokenized deeds or tokenized home equity that I can be able to then allocate if I wanted to, right? My, you know, all of my different assets would be sitting in my wallet, right? And having all of those assets in my wallet then gives me one view into my totality of my wealth that I can put those algorithms that we were talking about, these allocation and risk algorithms on top of, and they can start to optimize my use of all my assets and getting them all into the same container is the first part of that challenge.

1:00:22And this is what I mean by the shift from an account-based system where all my assets are held in all of these different little pools in all of these different little locations into a wallet-based ecosystem where all of these assets are sitting in my cryptographically protected wallet that any blockchain can access if I give them my private key to unlock and send assets to that holding. So I think that this is where the biggest shift needs to occur. And that distribution will become via the wallet. I will offer you in your wallet services, I will offer you in your wallet product, and it will go based on algorithms that are telling me what might be useful.

1:01:03I think of the wallet as my Uber portfolio of everything I own. But somewhere within that, we're going to need zero knowledge proofs and stuff like that, because in the end, this becomes very sensitive. You don't want to show people your bank account. Crypto right now is, as soon as somebody knows your wallet, they can see everything. And so we have to get to a place where we can obscure that because institutions just will not carry gazillions of dollars of different exposures for everybody to see what they're doing. Yeah, I think zero knowledge proofs are going to be a foundational component of the future ecosystem without any doubt, right?

1:01:43We need to get to this point where, and we need new identity solutions, new identity solutions that move with transactions. And so I think those are also two components that will become part of this world, but we're already seeing great use cases emerging there, great new offerings emerging there. So I think that all of the components that we need to make this shift from the account-based to the wallet-based world are on the table. It's just a matter of waiting for them to be pulled together in a really effective way that give us this opportunity to really unlock this space. And that's where I think distribution moves.

1:02:22And then I think what we think of today as sales or distribution, these people become almost consultants to human advisors that are trying to keep trust in how these algorithms manage the portfolio. Right. I really think that advisors, they will remain important because people like to talk to people about their money. Right. But what they will be doing is they will be really handling the relationship piece, not the money and the optimization piece of the portfolio. But to go back to the question today, when you're trying to distribute new product that you've come, how do you get the distribution to even understand this stuff?

1:03:05Or do you just selectively go out and find kind of flagship clients who are interested in doing something, try it out, see how it works and kind of build momentum that way? Yeah, we're doing a little of both. I mean, we are training. We have a lot of training that we do of our Salesforce, particularly for the products that they should be able to understand a little easier, the crypto ETFs, some of these new tokenized equities and funds that are coming, right? That will be a little easier to train the existing sales force on how to really work with us. We're hiring some new types of specialists that can really go into channels and talk about the new technology and why these new products might be more suitable.

1:03:47So, you know, the tokenized money market funds are a great example of, you know, it's not something that you typically go into, you know, the chief sourcing manager of a large corporation and talk to them about their supply chain management through an investment product. Right. So we're opening up some new channels there. But I think that, you know, a lot of it is going to be that these products become direct to consumer. Right. This has been the trend in the industry. and it's going to become more and more about putting the product availability and the education to really, and the analytics that show how these products impact the portfolio in front of the individual.

1:04:26And I think that's more and more where a lot of this is going to migrate. A final question for you on all of this is custody. So you've got your own wallet, you've got your own self-custody, which is a great thing and a terrifying thing. And, you know, the reason I got into all of this in the beginning is realizing that in the financial system, in the financial crisis, nobody owned anything because it was all rehypothicated. And then I lived through the European sovereign crisis where all the money got taken out of the banks in Cyprus and in Spain. And you realize you actually don't own your money in the bank.

1:05:00So anything self-custody, this is the way. And then you're like, holy shit, I'm now responsible for this. There's no one 800 number to call when something goes wrong. How do you think of that? You're custodians as well for assets as well. Is that how you do it? No, we're not a custodian. But I do think that it's a very important point. And here's where the word custody, I think, does us a disservice. So there is the way we think of custody today is that the custodian holds the assets. Right. And that the assets are what is valuable. Right. And in the future, when I have a wallet, my assets sit in my wallet.

1:05:42And of course, my assets are valuable. But the thing that is the most valuable is the key to open and close my wallet. And so when we talk about crypto custody, what we're really talking about is custody of the key. And that is a mathematical string, you know, and that is something that these custodians are breaking up. and making dynamics so it becomes almost impossible to put your key together unless you give a certain type of authorization. And so I think self-custody of assets does not mean not using a custodian for your wallet, right? And I think that the custodian for the wallet will be the key manager.

1:06:29And we almost should start to call them that as opposed to custodians, because I think it would help people get their mind around the role of these entities in the future. Yeah, because they're kind of your security team for your vault, you know? Yes, exactly. They're like your cyber security manager, right? Exactly. Sandy, as ever, fascinating conversation. You know, we do live a few years in the future, but so far, most of our conversation, everything seems to be moving that way. and as ever, I'm sure I'll catch up with you in a few months time to figure out where we are today. But thank you as ever.

1:07:08Well, thank you, Raul. I love our conversations. I think you're really one of the top thinkers we have in the entire industry. So it's a pleasure to be able to speak with you. Thank you, Sandy. As ever, charming, interesting, fabulous conversation with Sandy. We all get to peek over her shoulder of what's actually happening, what companies like Franklin Templeton are doing, and where the world could be going. So it's much bigger still than most people imagine. And that's what I try and do here, is help you understand where this is really going. Hey, Real Vision viewers. A quick pause to introduce you to today's sponsor, Axelar.

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1:08:29If you believe the future of finance is open, programmable, and interoperable, Axelar is the gateway. Want to digest deeper? Visit realvision.com forward slash Axelar or follow on X at Axelar. That's A-X-E-L-A-R, the gateway to open finance. Today's video is sponsored by VeChain, the leading layer one built for real world adoption. VeChain launched all the way back in 2015, built for real world utility before most people had even heard of blockchain. One of the oldest protocols and boasting 100 % uptime since launch, it's known for powering real world solutions and partnerships with global brands like the UFC.

1:09:14Now, they're entering a new user-focused chapter powered by adoption in the vBetter ecosystem and an ambitious technical roadmap dubbed the VeChain Renaissance. Renaissance builds on VeChain's history of real utility and adoption to deliver a faster, more flexible core protocol designed to meet the needs of builders and drive mass adoption. The next phase kicks off on July 1st with the launch of Stargate, VeChain's new staking program. It's an evolution that brings VeChain closer to delivering its vision of a world powered by Web3 without compromising on reliability or stability. The future is here and it's scalable, sustainable and evolving with purpose.

1:10:00Check the links in the description to find out all you need to know about VeChain Renaissance and the updated staking opportunities available through Stargate. If you like this episode, I'd love for you to head over to realvision.com forward slash join for a free membership. Start your journey today to unfuck your future. Just one click away.

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