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In-depth discussions and explorations into the whole new world of web3 and the metaverse with leading thinkers and industry experts. Presented by the NYU Metaverse Collaborative.
The Whole Metaverse - #8: The Human Element of Web3 | with Frederik Gregaard
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Pierre Gervois: Welcome to the whole Metaverse podcast, the NYU podcast about the Metaverse Dr. Elizabeth Haas and I, Pierre Gervois or the co-host today. We had the pleasure to meet. The c e o of Cardano Foundation card is one of the major blockchains.
It's the headquarters of the Cardano Foundation or, or based in Switzerland. And it, it was a truly insightful interview. we asked to the the CEO of Cardano Foundation. When is saw the interest of blockchain and he told us he started his career as an executive in, in the financial industry, and he was concerned by the social justice issue.
What about individuals who are not considered bankable by big financial institution? That that's a, a, a major issue in. Equality and you realize that cryptocurrency was a decentralized way of. Allowing individual to exchange funds without the need for a central bank. So he liked this concept in that regard.
And also he, he put an emphasis on the concept of trust behind the blockchain. the lack of trust can be a very big issue in our society, in business transaction, in government relations with citizens, and the blockchain is solving this particular issue. So trust for him was really one of the killers of the blockchain.
And also it took in a. Poetic way about the human aspect of a particular blockchain and, and the human aspect of Cardano in particular. It was referring it as what is important is not just the programming, the lines of code of the blockchain. It's the people who work around it is the, the team spirit, the soul of a block.
And the entire community. So we had a very human-centric approach about the blockchain that was really interesting.
Elizabeth Haas: You know, I also thought that host whole concept, looking forward, being interoperable across geographies and blockchains, and what was so important about it, it remaining decentralized was quite interesting too. Not letting you know someone else own your data.
Pierre Gervois: Yes.
Elizabeth Haas: And how that plays into whether it will be successful or not, in his mind, somewhat of the other side of trust, what it, what it's . Gonna take.
Very enjoyable.
Pierre Gervois: So let's watch and thank you for watching.
Pierre Gervois: I would like to, to open a question about your personal story as an entrepreneur. At what point in your career did you realize, oh my God, the blockchain web three, the metaverse, these applications are going to change the way society. Do business the way people can work together when this moment happened for you.
Fredrick Gregaard: Yeah, well, so I was basically working in the institutional business of building infrastructure for banks. So I was building infrastructure for banks, and I was building asset managers and fund managers, and I was kind of on this journey of democratizing capital markets and access to capital markets because I had this.
this dream that everybody should be equal and have equal access to the tools of finance because we cannot have this, like, you know, an upper class who has, you know, you know, always wins, right? So I, I thought that it must be good if everybody has equal access. And I was working in Switzerland at that time.
And then suddenly, you know, , the first, you know, Bitcoin companies came and then a little bit later the Ethereum Foundation Incorporated and so on. And one of the things I couldn't understand was why couldn't they just get normal corporate services? So just like a, a a currency hedge, you know, Euro dollar in my bank.
so I spoke a lot to to, to the compliance functions, and they all said, you know, oh, this is really bad. And I said, yeah, but hold on a second. The tech, the technology is not. Use case might be bad. And secondly, they're following all the rules in Switzerland. So why can they not have a bank account? If they can be incorporated?
They can be regulated, they're following all rules and all compliance. , why should they not be able to work with my bank? But the bank was still like, oh, pushing back. And then I said, you know what? Then I'm going to help them anyway. So I started, you know, ensuring that they got banking services and ensuring that they got access to capital markets, because somehow in my mind, they became unbanked which was a bit odd, right?
Because at that time Bitcoin was all around, you know, dis intimating banks and, you know, killing the, you know, the trust equation and so on. So in a certain way it was like a little unbanked population , which I was starting to help. And the more I started to understand the underlying technology, the more that fascinated me a lot and showed that there might be some hope for humanity in a different way where we can interact with each other.
So not only were I interested in the actual crypto space where I was much more interested in about this equal footing, the actual Bitcoin blockchain could do for us.
Pierre Gervois: Okay, so social justice and access was important.
Elizabeth Haas: I have a couple questions on that front because it's so aligned with, really what mayor. Sees, in, in terms of much of crypto, it's, it's about the ability to bank the unbankable. it's a vehicle for transactions, not an asset. And I just, wonder, you know, your view on that black and white perspective.
Fredrick Gregaard: So I would go even further, right? Uh uh, you know, imagine a world where the richest people in the world uses the same system as the poorest, and both groups have a better system. That they had before. So instead of going from this kind of split system we have today, we go to more like a unified system like interoperability.
And the way, reason why I want to go further is because I don't only think about transactions. So sort of in a capital markets aspect, I think about that. A good third generation blockchain, specifically one who needs to incorporate the metaverse. You need to be able to articulate. Not just as financial value, but also as intellectual property, right?
As art, as title registry, as you know, cooking recipes, you know, wherever that might be. It can be a lot of thing we associate with value. The second thing is identities. So going back to this banking, the unbanked, I wanted to re, biggest reasons we are not able to bank a big part of the, the world population today is because they don't have a, we in the west called a, you know a, you know, a solid identity.
We see, you know, for instance, there's 7 million Palestinians living around in Europe and, and in Israel, right, who don't actually belong anywhere really. Right. So they kind of, they see themselves as a society, but they don't actually have an identity as we would like to think of an identity. So very often you think about Fishers in, in, in Ethiopia and so on who might not even have paperwork, right?
But there's actually also, you know, in very, you. Developed countries, we see large populations who don't, uphold to the, those kind of, let's say ideals about what identity is today. So I think identity is a, a good blockchain, need to have multiple layers of identity. And we don't need to necessarily think about this as threatening democracy.
And the contrary, if you look at eBay, I think eBay is a fantastic exam. I'm a big fan of eBay, by the way, . But if you look at eBay, right, If you don't know the other side of the commercial transaction, you look at how many times did he sell something before and the more times he's kind of been selling something and everybody gave him a good rating, you can see he actually paid on time.
The more you trust that person, so in in essence, if you're sitting, you know somewhere and thinking about micro-lending or microfinancing in Kenya, You know, we don't necessarily need to know that it's Mr. Frederick Gregaard on the other side of the equation. Right? But if I can sort of prove through some kind of a digital identity that I pay back my small mortgages, whether it's $5 or $10 every single day, and I might slip once or twice, but overall I have maybe like 500 transactions.
I would have no problem sitting in Switzerland and, and, you know, being the counterpart to a. micro-loan on that equation. Right. So I think these blockchains, as we see them today, are really going way beyond capital markets and into identity, into to trust, into the ability for us to express ourself. So we can go away from double voting and, give people the ability to maybe participate in the local community and have a voice where they might not have before because they never had the opportunity to get a national identity.
card
Pierre Gervois: How would you. A potential user of a blockchain, let's say, a person working an executive in a company who is considering to choose a blockchain for a particular application, there is a lot of choices out there. They could think about cards, Solana, Tezos, polygon. What would you say to say, Hey, we think that car is the right choice.
Fredrick Gregaard: So I'm a very boring guy. I think about uptime. I think about, you know, if something really matters to you and is really near and dear to your heart, or is near and dear to your family, or near and dear to your employees or near and dear to a hospital who's treating patients, what you really want is a high resilience, right?
So the first thing I always say is that the blockchain is a very horrible value proposition. We are asking people. To rely on a database you don't own, you don't control, and where you cannot really predict if it would even exist as it does today in the next five to 10 years. So under normal circumstances, you will always go with a centralized system where you hold, the keys to the control and you can put it into your, your hard drive or into your servers, and you can run a bespoke side of it.
So, I. What I would do as a, as a, as a ceo, first of all, was take one step back and think about why would I even need to use a blockchain? Why does that really matter? And the second thing I would look at is how does that become economic sustainable? And what is the governance model of the blockchain? And thirdly, if this really is an immutable database who has these hard written rules, is there some places where these rules has been broken or it's not holding true?
so I would probably really start by not looking at the internet, not looking at YouTube and really start, you know, you know, looking into the game theory of what makes this blockchain work. and then suddenly what you will discover is that, there's not that many blockchains out. Because the blockchain's value proposition is not the technology. The technology has to be up to a certain standard, but most of the real good blockchains have what we call public source technology or open source technology, which means that Lis and Pierre and me, we can actually spin up a version of Cardano which technically will be just as good as Cardano is today.
Within a few. So if it's not the technology and we are giving this away for free, we're giving, you know, we've written like over 170 peer reviewed papers in a, in academia, right, with a research background for this blockchain. We're giving that, all of, that we're giving away for free in open source licenses, and we are encouraging people to copy it.
What is it that makes the blockchain safe? Immutable? Who makes it, economic sustainable? And that's actually the people and the businesses who live on it. It is the people who take the choice. You were just asking me about Pierre and says, I'm going to pick Cardano instead of something else. It's their belief and how much belief they show into it.
And then it becomes a bit scary because then suddenly we are back to a social system. So if you wanna look at it from a very high level, I don't know how technical you wanna be today, right? But there's two systems who need to meet to make a perfect block.
One is the technical system with, as I told you, is for free, right? So it's given away and you can just, you know, like Legos, you can take, you know, from Tessa and Al Goran and us, and you can build whatever you want, right? And the other one is the social system. And if the social system does not become the trust anchor underlying the blockchain, you just have a dumb piece of technology with, you know, it has no.
So this social system is actually the underlying value proposition of the blockchain, and we are not used to looking at that from a commercial perspective. When we do due diligence and we are looking at technology, we are looking at price, we are looking at transactions per second. We are looking at branding, we are looking at affiliation, but we are never really looking at the social systems.
Right.
Elizabeth Haas: So, so if it's a social system, that's the differentiator. What's unique about Cardano's social system that makes it better than everyone elses?
Fredrick Gregaard: so I'm always very scared about talking about why Cardano is the best, because obviously I'm very biased. I work for the Cardano Foundation, I'm the c e o there, and I, I contribute to, to this system every single day. But there's a couple of things I would like to highlight. When you ask me about the social system and The first thing I would like to say is if you do, you have these kind of parties in New York where everybody brings a dish. So you bring a little bit of food and then you share and then you're having a good day. So there's something specifically happening if, if you go to one of those parties and there is not enough food, you know, then there's always a little bit like, why didn't you bring more?
And it kind of has a bad, you know, mood, a bad vibe to it. So a good blockchain, people actually need to contribute more to. than what they're getting back. If that's not the case, it won't really scale. And what's very special with Cardano is that we have over 3000 anonymous. Stake pool operators, we call it validators.
So this is this very environmental friendly way of, of building security into blockchains, right? And they are every single day contributing to the security and the continuous operational, part of Carran. And a couple of weeks ago we had a, we had a, we had a sort of a, a kind of a block in the system, right?
And what we saw was that the arch. Restarted the system automatically. So there was
no single inter, you know, in single entity. The Cardano Foundation didn't need to go in and do something. Right. The architecture of the system restarted itself. But you know what? In the middle of the night, these validators got out of bed and they're not working for the Cardano Foundation.
They're just, just actively contributing here. They got out of bed and started doing buck finding and doing error protocols, and they, they, you know, not everybody, not all 3000, right? But a good handful. Started professionally collaborating together across Discord channels, slack channels, and started, you know, figuring out what was wrong here together with the companies.
And I think then you have this party, right, where people are willing to contribute more than what they give back. And I think that's one of the really special things about Cardano is that what ties us together as the. The hope that we have the technology to change status quo and change the world, but not only do we have the hope, we also have the people in the community who's willing to go that extra mile and sacrifice some of their nice lives wherever they are, to contribute without actually asking for something back.
That's very special, I think in, in this world we live in.
Elizabeth Haas: I don't know if you know, but we did we created a student N f T Gallery, that we built on Cardano
Fredrick Gregaard: I didn't know that.
That's
amazing.
Elizabeth Haas: it's called Art lab, A R T L A B B for the double B, but blockchain.io. So we, we built that on with Cardano actually. For our students,
Fredrick Gregaard: thank you very much for, for doing that because actually this is one of the things I'm, I'm really hurting with at the moment as I'm trying to teach people the differences of what NFTs are and what they aren't and the different ways you can create them, but also the different incentive models and the different constructions you can do around it.
So the fact that you did that as a university, I think that's, you know, mind blowing and amazing. Thank you very much for,
Elizabeth Haas: We thought it was important that students could experience. El, and be part of it. So
Pierre Gervois: you work with the Ethiopian government, the Ethiopian Ministry of Education in 2021. To create a recordkeeping for the ID of students. I think that's really a great application. Could you tell us a little bit more about this particular project?
Fredrick Gregaard: Yeah, so this is actually a project from IOG, which is the, the creators of the Carran blockchain. And the reason why it fits very well into what I'm speaking about here around social systems is because specifically in. In small and medium income countries. the rest of the world, we have a lot of distrust to the institutions and probably rightfully so, right?
We've seen a lot of changes and it's very hard for us to kind of, you know, look at the quality of education or the quality of counterparts and so on. . And one of the things we notice is when we look at displaced people around the world, that if a, if a person gets displaced and like a refugee for instance, it's very hard for them to verify and authenticate their live story, but also being able to add economic and social value to the country who's, you know, taking care of them either for permanent or for, for a short while.
And the idea about having sort of, Economic identity or student identity, is that in Ethiopia? Is that this is one of those countries which unfortunately have seen a lot of change and a lot of social unrest, but if you could get to a situation where, , the students were able, not just to prove that they have a, a certificate of education, so the last mile, you know, but they were able to prove the whole ray, you know, the road to getting there.
So the, the, the, the primary school, the high school, the different classes they were taking, like proof of participation potentially through an N F T, like this was mentioning here. Right? But the fact that they can prove that thing means that there's a higher trust level towards it. So that means that the.
Independent institutions you have who can verify and validate that the higher the likelihood that if they are forced to go to another country or if they choose to go to another country, that they can verify and validate their whole student story. . And by that we can, you know, and leveraged out those systems because it can be very hard if you're sitting and you wanna verify somebody from Ethiopia and you're sitting in London, right?
And you're like, oh, so, so I, so I call Africa, right? And you, you speak to a complete different system and they might also have some privacy rights and they don't wanna say anything because, you know, there's, you know, the notion of privacy also there, like we have in European Union with eo, G D P and so on, right?
So this is actually quite hard to verify those things. So having this ability to do that we thought was extremely, I. and the last I heard is that IOTs and Track took get about two to 3 million students on this system by December this year. And we are also onboarding the teachers and the schools, which also allowed the educational ministry to go back and see what works the best.
So maybe there is a way to teach physics in one part of the country where the students get a better result out of it, and then you can go in and start drilling into what is, what are they doing differently, and try and scale that out across the country. So it also gives a good feedback loop to compare data, because you find biases better on the blockchain than you find it, on a traditional data.
Elizabeth Haas: you said that you couldn't find biases better on blockchains than on traditional BA databases.
is that because you have more data?
Fredrick Gregaard: no, it's the quality of the data. So first of all, you is, there's the one law, you, it's just how it is, you know? So if, if really bad data goes in, really bad data goes out. But what the blockchain does is it standardizes data and it, it, it creates a, a very, very powerful. Audit block. So if you imagine there is a small school and a larger school, and the larger school is adding, you know, like tons of data every single day.
And the small school might not be adding so much data. So what the blockchain does is it forces them to be equal in the system, but both uses the same standard data type. That means that in general, The data seems to have a higher quality and doesn't need to be cleaned in the same way as unstructured data because the factor is to become structured data straight away.
So when you're looking for biases in an unstructured data pool where you have some trust issues in it compared to a blockchain with tends to have structured data and you are equalizing that in a standardized format, it actually becomes easier to manage. but there's still a chance for biases. You always have to check for biase.
Pierre Gervois: And does Cardano has a particular strategy to work with. Go governmental. Like government re at regional level, at city level, have you considered working with cities, working with mayors to improve the life of citizens through blockchain based projects?
Fredrick Gregaard: I think we maybe not on a nation state, so on a city state level, no. But we do have a nation state and a larger strategy, and that goes along two ways. So there's a big problem with blockchains, and it's sort of the elephant in the room. So a really, really powerful blockchain needs a cryptocurrency, but a cryptocurrency does not need a blockchain.
And unfortunately, what we've seen right now is that there's a lot of confusion about cryptocurrencies, and there's a lot of, I wouldn't say, I mean, a lot of people are just kind of being very opportunistic about all this cryptocurrency stuff. So that means that there's a lot of. Scrutiny around u what we call a utility token, which is the access to a, a really good public permissionless blockchain.
So we have a regulatory strategy where we've divided the world. So I'm covering Europe uk Switzerland, Luxembourg Lichtenstein Asia's, mainly Singapore. And from the regulatory perspective where we are interacting with the regulators, we are helping to answer, Questions around how should they regulate this?
How should they enforce this? How does the incentive schemes looks like? And in general, trying to ensure that wherever you are, you can actually use the native token ADA to get access to the powerful blockchain of Cardano the other approach we are having is that we are actually working with nation states to try and in solve real problems by using blockchain.
So an example of that is the, the country of. So what many people don't know is that Georgia, the country of Georgia most likely was the birthplace of wine. , but they were a part of the Soviet Union. So when all this marketing boom came, you know, where we really learned about, you know, Cutlass World, you know, with all this, you know, marketing and so on, you know, Spain and Italy, California and so on, was really making a very, very strong brand for themself.
And Georgia was not even allowed to sell. So the European Union are outside the Soviet Union. So there was huge gap there, but actually, Export wine from Georgia as some of the most quality controlled wine in the world. But how do you prove that if you don't have a brand and you don't have billions of dollars to engage in a 20 year history of actually learning this?
So what we actually did is we put, export wine bottles from a little family owned winery on the blockchain. And I thought by securing the actual, quality and the supply chain, we would make a differe. and we didn't . What happened instead was that there was, I call it blockchain citizens who are suddenly going in and finding wine on the blockchain, and they were like, oh, so I can actually find some wine on the blockchain, and that means that when I buy something on the internet, I will have a higher trust that it has the quality that the actual wine bottle is tracked and so on so sudden.
It became the distribution who was the sort of the carrot and, and not the actual supply chain. Now the supply chain added to that trust equation, but suddenly we had a situation where up in Norway they were starting buying George and wine and then we we're not, You know, the Georgian government have never seen that before on that kind of scale.
So now we're actually putting a hundred thousand bottles and we are adding the Georgian government as being a validator. So they're writing directly to the blockchain around this 32 per 32 quality parameters on it. They're also using some AI and some other stuff. so we are trying to kind of look at where can we help, you know, nation states.
To solve real problems, like for instance, how they, trade with other nation states, but also how they position themselves in the world economy and use blockchain for good.
Elizabeth Haas: so that example of the Georgian wine in some sense is a, is a branding issue, is helping nations create brands. is that the primary role? You, you're, you, you're playing with Nations now
Fredrick Gregaard: We have not seen it yet, how
it will play out. I mean,
this is just an example of how a, a nation state is using blockchain in their infrastructure to change the brand, but also to push products and get economic growth into very small businesses who is having difficulties in attracting capital, to grow their business.
Right? I think, you know, you know, it's nearly the same if you
look inside the country.
Elizabeth Haas: did card find this or did the country come to you with the issue?
Fredrick Gregaard: Oh, that's an excellent question. I think it was a little bit of both. So we actually worked with the Georgian government also to change the legislation to be able to do some of that. But the Georgian government, before we interacted with them already, were working with the title registry and some other blockchain use cases. So this specific use case was sort of a little bit of a, a trial and error, meaning that they had some ideas.
We had some ideas, and then it turned out to be a third idea, which was a really good match. And now we're working on a range of other ideas there. , it tends to always be not what you think you will do, you end up doing, but you're doing something. else around these things because it's sort of like you are learning about what their problem is and they're learning about what the technology can do because the technology is still very new.
Right. And, and specifically when you think Metaverse as well, there's a lot of confusion about what is the metaverse and what isn't it, and ship blockchain at all be involved and, and so on, right? So there's, there's quite a lot of learning from both sides of the equation. So I think it's a very hard question to, to answer right now and say, you know, who's looking for who here?
Elizabeth Haas: on the definition piece, how do you define the metaverse and how do you define blockchain?
Fredrick Gregaard: So this is where I always get hurt, right? Because I remember I went into the Metaverse and 20 years ago in something called Second Life because my bank opened up a, a virtual bank branch in there, and I had to sell structure products including Lehman products, which as you probably know, went really bad, right?
And it was a complete disaster, right? And now here 20 years later, people are really excited about these virtual worlds and they can express themselves in there. And I was like, you know, I was a banker 20 years ago with an avatar. You know, trying to democratize access to capital markets in a computer made world.
But the way I think about it, I think more about Web three. So I think about Web three as being the third generation of the worldwide web. my hope. , but that doesn't mean that it will be zoned. But my hope is that it's going to be more decentralized and open up to everybody with a bottom up design. And I hope that it was going to build on top of blockchains and developments in the Semantic web, which describes like a network of meaningful link data.
So if we go back to the web two, right? So web two was disability that we could not only read, but we can also express ourself in there. What's happened in web two specifically is that we've seen a very large central. we see some very centralized operating models, which earns money and is made to give you what you're looking for, but not necessarily what you say you're looking for, but you know, kind of sparks and centers up in your brain to kind of, you know, give you joy by saying, Hey, you are right.
You know, whatever issue it is, it will just show you more to kind of, you know, get you into that situation. Now blockchain is different because blockchain, It has a different concept. Everything costs something on a blockchain. That's the whole notion, which means a lot of these web two models won't work in web three on a blockchain because if nothing is for free, it also these giveaway scams and all of these kind of, you know, spamming emails, all of that stuff becomes way too expensive to do, and that means that you're suddenly starting to get some quality control for good or for worse, right?
You have the ability to authenticate, verify, and validate. Data sets compared to what you have today where it's really hard. I mean, I, I don't want to use your university as an example, but if I as a, as an outsider, I don't know, university, how do I even know that it's your university's website? How do I know that there's no man in the middle?
How do I know that the professors or whatever information there is accurate and verified, how can I even check your credentials? Right? Everything is sort of like our ability to have a brand and build that brand around. It's actually super hard to check those things without actually either breaking a privacy law or something like that.
And the blockchain allows us to do a lot of that, so. In terms of the metaverse, I will, I will not really say so much because I'm still looking at how it's going to, to pan out, right? Because I think it's an old concept who's who got a lot of, you know, traction lately. Right? But my hope is that Web three will be much more decentralized and built from the bottom up and built with a different incentive model, which allows everybody in the world who wants to participate to not be the product, but can actually create a product and can.
Around the world on equal footing. That's what I would like to see of the web three.
Elizabeth Haas: What are the most important requirements as you're looking forward? What are the things that government, cities, corporations can do to facilitate that? and what are you most afraid of?
Fredrick Gregaard: I'm most afraid of user experience. So when we look at the web two today, we see that UX and UI has become such a science. So on YouTube for instance, they have a, a whole set of psychologists who is building YouTube for kids. . I mean, how, I don't know how many people are aware of that, right? But if there's a whole team of psychologists building YouTube for kids and there is product placement in there, right?
I mean this is, this is scary, right? As an infrastructure banker and as an infrastructure provider of blockchain, I don't know how to compete with the amount of money and the amount of experience there is in some of these large platforms on the UX and UI phase, and what we see today is, Many of us, potentially the three of us in this call, we've been giving away our identity through single sign on using Facebook and Google and you know, Mac, and we just kind, oh, it was easier to log on, just share my data.
Right? But we actually don't know how much we are sharing and so on because we are taking this trade off. From the nice fluent user experience, and we, we haven't even started touching that in the blockchain decentralized space because we're still building the bridges, the sewage, the internet, you know, we're building the core infrastructure of blockchain at the moment.
So this user experience is, is one of the things I'm really scared about because, you know, there is these large platforms and they have so much experience and so much money that the humanity probably is willing to do that trade. To basically just continue with a centralized model on a web three or even a meter or a solution.
So this is my biggest scare, and from a government perspective, my hope is that they will be able to have the knowledge and the wisdom to separate utility tokens from. Financial tokens and cryptocurrencies in such a way that they're not hindering the innovation, which is happening right now on public permission.
There's blockchains, and that requires to be that you need education, you need to be bold and you need to be able to define a kind of a token qualification like we've done in Switzerland, including understanding the incentive models, to be able to, to protect the consumer.
but also not hinder innovation in the real public commissioners blockchain space.
Elizabeth Haas: is Switzerland really ahead of every place else? It seems to be in some ways, on the regulation.
Fredrick Gregaard: Yes, it is. but Switzerland is just a very, very small economy, and what we're really talking about here is interoperability. not just between web two and web three, but we're also talking about interoperability among blockchains and interoperability across borders. So even though Switzerland is ahead of the curve, it doesn't matter if MICA doesn't catches up, if the Australian government doesn't catches up, if in the US you don't get some kind of an alignment about, you know, who's actually taking care of this.
so I mean, it is about removing insecurity. From the builders and the architects while still protecting your constituency from making you know, you know, bad calls. and whether you are libertarian or not is not what we are discussing here, but we are discussing, a long arc of innovation, which is moving a lot slower than what AI is doing today, but also other emerging technologies because it's sort of the backbone of many of these things.
So it's a tricky one and I just, visited Brussels to be a part of the, parliamentary discussions there. I was just invited to, a hearing in the UK Parliament around this topic as well. So we are trying what we can do, but it's not very sexy to talk about the infrastructure, what's sexy?
is To talk about the new Google Maps and talk about the metaverse and talk about all these applications, but allowing the innovation to happen requires that you have comfort around the infrastructure and specifically this utility token and what that represents in the ecosystem. Because it's a concept we didn't have before.
it's fairly,
new
Elizabeth Haas: can you define utility token for me?
Fredrick Gregaard: I can certainly, so when I said earlier that a true blockchain needs a cryptocurrency, but a cryptocurrency doesn't need a blockchain, it's because for me, a true blockchain is what we call a public permissionless blockchain, which means everybody can interact with them, but the way we protect the blockchain means that there's no, Contractual counterpart.
It's not like you are, having a, corporation that limits liability cooperation and then you are signing up and there's, general terms and conditions, right? what actually runs this blockchain is these validators stake pool operators, and in order for the economy to go around and they can get incentivized to keep adding data power and get up in the middle of the night, what you do is you, sort of have a subscription.
fee to using the services. That subscription fee is paid by a native token or utility token on the network. However, from a regulatory perspective, it doesn't matter how you design the utility token. If the population uses this for gambling and speculation and get hurt, you are concerned, right? So there There is a battle between hope and dreams and marketing and getting rich fast, and then this long arch of innovation where we haven't seen yet all of these, you know, radical new innovations, which is coming up. So the utility token, you can compare to the subscription fee or the way you pay your subscription fee, not against the counterpart, but against the. system And That is the access to the public permissions blockchain, who allows you to do smart contracts? Who allows you to mint an nft? Who allows you to do these?
Pierre Gervois: Thank you very much. Fred, Eric Gregory. We learned a lot. We really loved your very human approach, the way you see a soul in the metaverse and the blockchain, not just as zero and one. So that was very very interesting insight. So on behalf of New York University School of Professional Study, Dr.
Elizabeth Hess and myself, thank you so much and we wish. Personally the best of luck and the best of luck for Cardano projects. Thank you very much.
Fredrick Gregaard: Thank you for having me, and I'm extremely proud that you chose Carran for your NFT art collection. Need any support in terms of education materials or in terms of, you know, other contributions and how we can spread the love for public commissioners, blockchains, whether it's us or, or another, just, you know, reach out to us and we'll be very happy to support in whatever format we can.