Paolo Ardoino: Stop Tokenizing Apple Shares

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Rejoining me on the show today is Paolo Ardoino from Bitfinex. Paolo, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Stephan, for having me. It's a great pleasure.

Yeah, Paolo, so obviously very topical right now, the Binance hack, about $6.3 billion worth of Bitcoin and other crypto that was stolen. Obviously, from a Bitfinex perspective, I'm sure listeners will be interested to hear any reactions on that. What does it mean for our industry?

Well, first of all, I think that the surface of attack has been multiplying across the last years when it comes to trading exchanges. I think Bitfinex has done a very good job in minimizing the attack surface, from, from the state-supported, supported hackers. I was reading the FBI suggested that North Korea is behind this, this hack and, you know, has many of the recent hacks. Seems like it's most, common pattern there. At Bitfinex, we are trying our best to, you know, reduce the number of, of, of, of products that are out there that could be in any way, in any possible way, leveraged by, by intruders and by hackers and attackers. And, Bitfinex has had a very long-standing history of security. you know, we keep on our cold and, well, we keep on our hot wallets the bare minimum amount to support the pending withdrawals so that in Any case, the, even when it comes to the hot wallets, that, that was one of the main issues, I think, in the Binance hack, the amount of assets there is extremely limited. So that, you know, even in the worst case of a security incident, the impact on the platform will be very limited and well within the ability of, of Bitfinex to cover, to cover, any losses.

Although, again, we are not expecting any security incidents since we, we, we take the, the, the security of our platform, the OPSEC, the OPSEC, the DevOps very, very seriously.

And I'm curious if you see any broader loss of trust in the industry, right? If people look at Bitcoin and the related industry and say, "Oh, wow, there's all these hacks going on." Do you think that scares people away? Is there anything we, we, the industry should be doing about that?

Well, the, here's the thing, right? Is, these, we saw Coldcard being hacked. And then we saw some Ledger wallets being sold with, with, a tampered firmware. And so that could reduce the, the trust in, in self-custody. And basically the narrative back then was, oh, by the way, let's, let's use centralized exchanges are more secure. And now we are seeing, we have saw, seen the CoinDCX hack, we have seen the Binance hack, and, and so also centralized, custody has been subject to, a lot of scrutiny and, and concerns. So clearly there is an issue in, in, in the safety of, of, of the solutions that are provided by, by industry leaders to the average Joe. And I think that definitely raises concerns, right? So I don't want, you know, I, I think minimizing the issue, I think would be the wrong thing. I think that one of the main issues that I believe, we are seeing is that hardware wallets, they still are subject to a chain of trust, i.e., where you are going to buy these, these hardware wallets.

When it comes to the exchanges or even the software wallets, then you still have a similar issue. What if the developers that are, that are building these, these things are going to be hot? Of course, you could argue that you could use open source wallets, but the majority of the people will rely anyway to a developer and a distributor to package, these, these wallets, software wallets, and basically build them, build the source code into an application that then can be downloaded from a website. So, I think the, the industry needs a better pattern of security and, more professionalism around, around the deployments and building, and building applications. OPSEC has to be treated very seriously. So, Yeah, it's an unfortunate situation. I think there, there, there has been a setback, not just for the recent events, but also due to, you know, this year has been very ugly, I must say. I'm, you know, I'm a super Bitcoin enthusiast, and honestly, Bitcoin is very young. I mean, it just turned 18, and so I think we shouldn't be upset, we shouldn't be worried.

I believe that is not detrimental in the long term to the success of Bitcoin. I'm very, very keen, and I'm very, very sure that Bitcoin is the right tech, is the most beautiful currency ever created. But it shows these happenings show that there is still a lot work to do.

Yeah, and as you said, there's a few things that are kind of table stakes almost, right? Exchanges should have a hot wallet and a cold wallet, they should be using multisig, you know, these are some of the basic things that, you know, it's, everyone should be expected to do that, at least at the professional level, maybe even certain individuals should be using multisig, this kind of thing. But maybe there's also an element of OPSEC level at employees at exchanges, like because one rumor going is that an employee had his laptop hacked, his or her laptop hacked, and then that was what led to this particular Binance exchange hack. Do you see that as like, maybe that's, there's more scrutiny or security needed on that, or another idea people were saying is, you know, LinkedIn can be used by these hackers or attackers, like North Korean hacking groups or whatever, to research and exchange, and then find out, oh, here are the targets. Do you think anything should be done on that side of things?

Well, one thing that I would encourage is for exchanges to strongly recommend to their employees to not brag on LinkedIn about being developers at, at the specific exchange. That is, you know, happens with all exchanges, by the way, so this is not finger pointing, but happens to all exchanges, and that, I think, will reduce the attack service. So, this is, this is the thing, right? So, exchanges has to be perfect 100% of the time, hackers has to be right 100% of the time, 1% of the time. So, it's, you wake up in the morning every single day, and, you are, you, you need to be perfect, and, and so every single measure that you can take, also, of course, having proper software and computer analytics on the, and on the devices of, of your employees is very important, just because, every single step towards increasing the percentage of, of security makes sense, right? So, is, is, there is no magic, magic wand that, that you can Move and swing, and then everything will be secured. So it's an everyday battle, and basically you need to monitor your infrastructure very, very carefully. And, you know, it could be that a single laptop led to the hack.

It's very, I mean, I, I, it would, it's still a speculation, don't think confirmation went, were, were given. But it can be, like, and, and, you know, you are, in certain cases, if your DevOps are not incredibly, extremely secure, then, you know, the, the platform is at risk. So it's, it's, it's a good reminder that no one is exempt from, you know, trying to be perfect all the time. We have a huge responsibility towards our users, and we do our best to, to act accordingly.

Yeah. And then I guess one other thing, just on the user side, obviously more interest in things like YubiKeys as an example to authenticate and to know that, let's say the, if you're doing a withdrawal request from the exchange that it's truly authenticated, it is that user, it's not a hacker impersonating, this kind of thing. Do you see anything there on that side that, you know, the industry is going to progress? Like, is that going to become more of a standard or a way to know for sure that that authentication or that withdrawal request is valid, this kind of thing?

Well, the, the currently, the, the, the particular issue of these days was, like a hot wallet that was hacked. So, you know, YubiKeys might not have, would not have had too much of a success if you deploy a container that contains a Trojan horse, so that, I mean, again, it's just speculation, might be, you know, it's, it's, it's clearly outside of the scope of a YubiKey. What I believe we should be doing as, as Bitcoiners is to promote much better user experiences for multisigs. And right now, I can say they all suck. And, it's true. They, I mean, they are made with the eyes and taste of geeks, of Bitcoin geeks. And as many times happens, we are obnoxious. We believe that is we look at,

I'm talking about the, the broader community, Bitcoin community. I feel sometimes you look at the normal people. We keep telling ourselves we want normal people to, to understand Bitcoin and use Bitcoin. Also, we look at them as peasants, you know? we look at them as if they don't understand, you know, it's their problem. Well, either you, we want them in or we don't want them in, right? But if we want them in, we should have applications that are nice, super polished, that are make, it's like a family wallet. I want to give an allowance in Bitcoin to my daughter, that how, you know, it's still clicks away, it's very simple, very nice with modern, UX and, and, and design. So it's very, you know, the most of the wallets, I mean, look at Electrum wallet is, it's, it's very hard for anyone to, to use, and then, of course, you download it, and then you have to check the signature with GPG, and, and, and so, yes, I mean, yeah, you can use it, but is very far from being the ideal of user experience for most of the people.

What do you think should, is it just a matter of improving the UX? Is there something else? Like, what can be actually done there by the Bitcoin industry, you know, if we want to onboard normal people per se?

So, I think that we should, I think centralized exchanges, I mean, represent Bitfinex, and I think that they are very important because the efficiency of trading and the, you know, liquidity is there, and it's very important to provide very good trading services there. But also, I think exchanges should promote the concept that whatever is not needed for, trading should be moved in self-custody with proper tool and very good tool. I think the incentives of exchanges most of the time are to push actually, users to believe that exchanges are banks. And I, I believe instead should be the opposite. Exchanges should be the tool to, to be used as a way to trade from one currency into another and then move back the funds to, to, to, to custody or to your ownership. With Bitfinex, we had in the past many campaigns around, around, the importance of self-custody. We keep reiterating that in many of our messages. You know, we are a trading platform, we are not a bank. We should not be a bank, and the people should continue keep control of their funds.

You were chatting a little bit, kind of getting into agentic payments, but also some of your discussion around, you know, L1 and Lightning style channels and the way you see things evolving in an agentic payments economy and supporting that level of payments. So, talk to us on that, on agentic payments and how it works with, you know, how you're seeing that with Bitcoin and Lightning.

There are many blockchains that are, that are pivoting in terms of narrative to, to agentic payments. The reality is that agentic payments didn't even start because when they start, when there is a real world using trading API agents and the billions of robots, there is no

Centralized, blockchain, let's say, even share, global shared state blockchains, most like 99.9% of the blockchains are global shared state, right? So, you have many validators or nodes across the world, they all need to acknowledge the same common shared version of the blockchain. So, they need to agree, 51% of them need to agree that this is the correct state of the blockchain to avoid double spending and so on. And that's how all blockchains are. The problem is that We are bound to the speed of light. So, in order to achieve the global shared state, every single node needs to connect to others through internet that is basically going on the speed of light. So, there is a latency to that. So, the, the fastest block time you can get there is 400 milliseconds because then you have, like, truly, you know, you need 150 milliseconds, for the speed of light to go, you know, around the Earth, I think it's around that. So, you need a couple of times that in order to make sure that you get to a valid consensus. Now, this is not scalable if you have a trillion AI agents sending transactions all day long, and actually every second or every millisecond.

So, the way to do that, the way to solve it is clearly peer-to-peer. So, if I send the transaction to you, Stephan, I, a guy in Tokyo should not acknowledge that. So, or, and similar, the guy in Nigeria should not acknowledge that, and the guy in, in Buenos Aires should not acknowledge that. So that's the beauty of Lightning, the fact that you can open channels among people, you can send gazillion transactions in those channels, in channels, and basically then once, once you close the channel, then you can settle the transaction, basically the main chain, the global shared state chain, that would be Bitcoin in that case, would see one single transaction. That is how it should be. That's the only way, actually, it's, it's physics, right? So it's not, we cannot change physics. That is one single rule that we have in our lives, we cannot change physics. So that is how It should be. So there is no marketing, there is no pitch that could say otherwise. There is no way to say, oh, but I built a global shared-state chain, blockchain that can do like 10 million transactions per second in a real true global shared state and it can scale more than that. The way sometimes these claims go is that they can, they advertise very high throughput, but actually they shard the blockchain in so many parts and it's all, it's all made in lab, in laboratory.

But when you confront it with the scattered world with where connectivity sucks in many parts of the world, then it never will never work. The only way to make it work is actually peer-to-peer and I think Lightning is the most sophisticated transport layer for transactions that is truly peer-to-peer made today by humanity.

I see, yeah. And of course, as that we have these different things that connect to Lightning, even if they're not directly Lightning. So you've got ARK and Spark and Liquid and ecash, Fedimint and Cashu and these kinds of things which connect to Lightning also. Talk to us a little bit on the Bitfinex and Lightning side though. You were early as an exchange to get Lightning, one of the first, if not the first as, as I understand. And you still, I believe, run one of the largest public nodes. Tell us a bit about what that experience is like nowadays.

I think Lightning is very stable and solid. I mean, there were some security issues recently that were fairly fast-patched. So there are pros and cons to, for Bitfinex to be one of such a big, big node in, in Lightning because, of course, it's great. We are proud of being contributing to Lightning. At the same time, It shows that also Lightning Network is not exempt from a gravitational force that attracts liquidity in one single place and could act as a, as a kind of a single point of failure, in the sense that if I would prefer for having our liquidity provided by hundreds of nodes rather than having only our node provided that amount of liquidity is more than one dozen Bitcoin at this point. And so we, Lightning needs to go more, more decentralized, needs to have a more evenly spread liquidity rather than have more, a liquidity that gravitates a lot around Bitfinex, I would say.

It's interesting because that was perhaps during the Blocksize Wars era, or just afterwards, 2017, 2018, one of the big criticisms from the big blocker camp towards those of us who are small blockers was, hey, Lightning is going to be a hub and spoke thing. And I think, you know, to an extent, that criticism has been somewhat true, that it has been that way. Is it just kind of the economics of the thing that drives it that way?

I think, look, the I think the narrative that Lightning is suffering from a hub problem is true. But there is an important but here. The beauty of the protocol is that in the best case scenario where everything works, and let's say things are okay, yes, in order to get more efficient, there is a gravitational force around Bitfinex. Okay. But at the same time, if tomorrow Bitfinex disappears, The protocol will continue to work because routing will might become less efficient, might fail a little bit more, but the protocol is resilient to that. So it's a very important example because you want technology that works perfectly well when the world is at peace, but at the same time if shit hits the fan, you want something that can continue to work and is extremely resilient and then the Lightning is that a good example.

Yeah. and then just when it comes to agentic payments, like on the Lightning side, like there's different standards out there, right? There's L402 by the Lightning guys, there's X402 by Coinbase, and I think there's one called MPP also. And just any thoughts on where you see that going? Like, do you see it as like personal agents that will start to drive this kind of Bitcoin and Lightning agentic payment side, or is it more like business users, like software paying software? Any, any speculation on where that goes?

might be a bit controversial here, but I think that we are a little bit obnoxious trying to create protocols for our agents in order for them to pay each other, when agents will become soon, well, they're already better than us in coding, and they will become much better in deciding what they need and how they need it, right? So it's almost like pretending that forever, AI agents will conversate among themselves with in English language. Why the, why they should do that when maybe they can find a better, more compressed way to, to dialogue among themselves that will make them more efficient, and they will decide what that is, in a quote-unquote language that will make them more efficient among themselves. Same goes with payments. You know, we have built Lightning, but the way agents can leverage Lightning and build their own protocols, even imagine in a peer-to-peer world, if I have my AI agents talking to your AI agents, maybe our two agents will decide a dialogue protocol, also a monetary dialogue protocol, while your agent with another guy agent will have a slight Different protocol, just because the, these protocols could be coded on real, real time based on the current conditions of the current context. So, I believe it's a very important distinction. We should, we, of course, humans like to be in control and we, but we tend to design things as we see them and how we would use them rather than allowing agents to build things as they would think is best to do, to, to design them.

Yeah, interesting. And so I guess it comes down to, yeah, how is your agent set up? What kind of mem, is it a long lived? Does it have the memory of this kind of thing? But then, of course, we, maybe, as you said, maybe it won't be the human written standards, maybe there'll be an agent written standard, who knows, that they find and use that to coordinate, you know, for my agent to pay your agent, this kind of thing. Yeah, and then I guess changing more to, you know, the Bitfinex, the exchange side of things. Talk to us a little bit about, you went to zero maker-taker fees, I believe, end, was it December 2025? Talk to us a little bit about that, the decision around that.

Let me tell you the truth, right? Most of the big exchanges are subsidizing the fees, if not all, I mean, really all the exchanges are subsidizing the fees of the big guys or the big traders. And so, you know, and they, then they try to make money on the small guy. They try to apply very high fees to the, to the retail. And I don't think it's fair. I believe that everyone should have the same opportunities. And Bitfinex has remained profitable even when we're removing trading fees. So, you know, we could afford it, we can afford it for a very long time. And so we, we are not here to just make a couple more bucks, but we are here for long term and we believe that we should Try to open the, the, the, the road for all Bitcoiners that want to use Bitcoin as, and trade Bitcoin in a safe way, but also without an additional friction that is the trading fees.

What replaces the trading fees on the P&L side? Is it, you're, you're just making money on some, some other products or?

We have lending. We have probably the biggest lending market in, in the industry, so that is, is a good way for to generate fees and cover more, much more than the operation.

I see. Yeah, and, talk to us a little bit about, the customer types that you're, that you have. Obviously, Bitfinex is a very OG exchange. You have a lot of old-time Bitcoiners. Is it still those kinds of traders or who, who, who would you say are the, the people who really, the, the kind of customer types that you see on Bitfinex?

Mostly is, mostly is a professional and an institutional center trading on Bitfinex. The platform is really oriented to them. We offer a lim- more limited product suite of, compared to other maybe more retail oriented exchanges, but I think is best for to, to do so because we can reduce our tax surface, com- against the hackers, and also we focus on a ca- on a type of user that will enjoy on zero trading fees at the same time, will get super high professional customer support, and, and, and trading tools. We have fixed gateway, we have, we are, we have very high frequency trading related products, and, and so in the end, you need to pick your, your customer type, and I think we do our best situation. Also, you have, might have seen, we have reduced the trading pairs, removing all the dust, let's say, I call dust, all the, all, many altcoins that, you know, from the previous years that, that went nowhere, and we want to focus on Bitcoin and the Tokens that really matter in this world.

I see. I know there's a lot of interest around tokenization and you have Bitfinex securities, obviously, to kind of handle that. We'll start with the overview on Bitfinex securities, and the, the main appeal there.

Yeah, Bitfinex securities is, I think, the Bitcoin way to do securities. Everyone in these, in these days is tokenizing, all the other exchanges are tokenizing Apple shares, Google shares, and SpaceX, and all that. But the reality is that the majority of the people that are coerced on a centralized exchange can already have trade those on their, you know, bank account. I believe that the opportunities to build capital-based platforms and, and, and securities trading platforms that are allowing, you know, the SMEs and companies from the emerging markets to have access to capital and liquidity, they, you know, with Bitfinex Securities, we can allow these companies to issue a bond and raise debt or raise for equity, and, that is the, the, I think, the next frontier of, of, of a proper digital asset securities exchange. Otherwise, again, we are just reinventing the wheel and not changing anything. So basically,

tokenizing, you know, Apple shares and trading Apple shares will not add much benefit, but actually doing that for, like, a great company in Argentina. I mean, if you are a company in Argentina, your ability to raise capital, for equity or debt is, is probably 50 times higher the, compared to if you were a Manhattan-based company. And so I think we should fill the gap and, and reduce the complexity and create more inclusion when it comes not only to, you know, access to Bitcoin, but also access to from the buy side and the sell side, access to good opportunities by coming from everywhere in the world.

Okay, so to summarize then, you see it as the, the appeal here is that you can broaden or let's say democratize the ability to raise debt and equity financing and have it not be something that only the, let's say, large US listed players can do it, but the idea is that people can do it around the world. And I know, obviously, in Bitcoin land, there's like the Bitcoin treasury names, some of the, these have been like tokenized and put onto Liquid, things like Strategy, Metaplanet, H100, Capital B, this kind of thing. And then I know there was things like, Blockstream Mining Note as like a Liquid token. Talk to us a little bit about those. Like, I guess these are some of the names that people might already know of. What are some of the other Like tokenized things that you have that are there on Bitfinex securities.

So definitely we have, we have few products that are very interesting to me that are microcredit, opportunities where, there are funds that are basically tokenizing themselves, raise capital to offer then microloans into the emerging markets. They are very good products at the same time. they are doing a lot of social work. In, in the emerging markets, again, access to liquidity and fairly interest loans, is very hard. And so if we can do something about it, it's great. Definitely being in Bitcoin exchange makes sense for us to have, also listed some of the Bitcoin, related companies like MicroStrategy and, and, and, and the dots. So we did that. We are looking at very, some very, very, very cool opportunities that would be very unique to Bitcoin securities. I will not spoil that, but there might be some huge news coming in the next, couple of months. So yeah, I, I think we are trying very hard to diversify ourselves and, and create something that, that gives some hedge or diversity to our user base in terms of investment opportunities.

I see. And then from a platform perspective, now you're obviously using, is it mainly Liquid for those, right? Or are you also doing other, like other platforms for the tokenization side of it?

We try to be agnostic in a certain way. The, one of the main interests is privacy, of course, when you deal with securities. And so we are looking at different options, but right now is mostly liquid, yes.

Okay, yeah. And then, obviously, got to ask the question there, because obviously the liquid hack, that, that was, what, maybe a month ago or so, where 4,000 BTC were drained out of that. And then I believe the hacker, I think, put back 3,600 BTC or, like most of it, I can't remember the exact numbers. But, just give us your thoughts on that, liquid as a platform then, how you're seeing it there.

Well, AI is going to be very tough on, on everything, on every single blockchain, every single weakness point is going to try to crush it. As an industry, we're not ready for that acceleration. I mean, everyone will talk about the quantum computing issue. The reality is that AI will and have much more Ability in the short term to create issues to also the most solid or considered solid blockchains out there. So it really requires a self-assessment from the developers and, you know, it won't happen to me is not a good excuse to, you know, to sit down on our hands.

While we're still, still in the zone of tokenization and securities and things, I guess That we're probably going to start to see this interest, you know, in obviously in the recent years, things like treasury companies and lending, like Bitcoin collateralized lending. And then I presume that also means we're seeing interest in things like Bitcoin denominated yield, these kinds of products, these kinds of debt offerings and things like this. And I presume those kinds of things could also end up being tokenized and then offered on the platform also. So I guess any other thoughts there on things that are not, you know, already an existing equity? Where do you see the opportunities there? Is it like things like yielding instruments, bonds?

I love, there is so much that can be tokenized that, again, from

Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina, farmland could be one, could be

Really, even just an interest in, in the geothermal electricity production or hydro product, electricity production. So I think there is an opportunity for, for creating these tokenized versions of, and, and of, of these, these products, or actually not even tokenized version, they're starting as, the only product should be the tokenized version. And so that if I live in, in my, in my country, I would like to participate to certain interesting opportu- interesting opportunities. I want to be able to buy them and hold them in the wallet and earn interest out of that. And, or I want to be able to trade them on an exchange, right? So I think basically tokenizing everything, when, when you read the pitch deck of many tokenization platforms, they will say tokenizing everything. But, are they, at in the end, basically, they will say, they, they, they will always fall back in tokenizing the few things that they know, Apple shares. And I believe that real world assets

I, when we talk about real world assets, everyone consider them actually real world stocks. I believe real world assets are is, is farmland, is, is agriculture, is, is trees, is factories, is, is actual production, is actual real estate. It's that what is matters, a real huge opportunity that would be impossible to do with the, so because Trying to just change the technology, but remained having the same concept again, tokenizing Apple shares is not that exciting, but the reality is the unique thing that I think tokenization can bring to the table is to tokenize really everything, but really everything means the real world, the almost the air, the oxygen that we breathe. Not that far back, gives the concept.

Yeah, and I guess for some listeners, maybe especially the, let's say the US-based ones, where they kind of already have their, whatever, Robinhood and, you know, Schwab and whatever, all the platforms that they might already be using, I guess, maybe it's not as

I'm curious, maybe you tell me, is it that you say maybe the average US investor might not see as much appeal in this, but maybe a non-US investor sees more reason for these things, because maybe they don't already have easy access to these tokenized things?

Yeah, but the majority of these products, anyway, require a KYC on an exchange, a payslip, and so on. So, I think there is, and, and so, if you, so,

I think the Apple shares have enough liquidity, and, and, and anyone that wants to trade Apple shares can trade Apple shares, right? It's, it's almost like you participate to the hype of the market, you participate to the S&P, and so on. I'm not saying to not do it, but that is not where the innovation sits. That is my point. So,

it's What we're doing there, let's ask ourselves what tokenization adds to the, the equation. If, because honestly, you know, without even tokenization, an, an exchange can add the basically futures on Apple shares. Well, great. There are settles so people can participate to the, to basically the price exposure to the P&L of, of Apple. Great. And then what? So what we did add, yes, a bit of access, great. Let's, and that's fine, let's do that. But then what?

What is the Bitcoin way to do, to do tokenization? And I believe when I think the Bitcoin ways is inclusion, the reason why Bitcoin has a 10 minutes block time to me is one of the main, many reasons, but with the thing, the one that I do care more about is that if you are middle in Africa with a very low, connectivity, you can still download 30 megabytes per every 10 minutes. And so that means accessibility, that means inclusion. And so I think that in the, in the, equities market, inclusion and the Bitcoin way to me would be giving access to people that didn't have access before, not only to the big stocks, but also on the sell side, because only we are only thinking about the buy side. Oh, how a guy somewhere in Africa can buy Apple shares, but what if instead we think about also the sell side, what if a company in Africa or in Argentina or in Thailand can have access to liquidity on the sell side?

I see. And then, you see it as we're in this new world now with the internet and these people can post out internet updates on the business that they're doing and they want to raise money online, this kind of thing. And of course, then it matters like, maybe the regulation in each of these different countries on who is allowed to raise and who is allowed to buy. So how do you sort of solve that side of it, or is it just more like an opt-in system that like once you're opted in, you're able to buy these different things that historically you would have had to be a so-called accredited investor to be able to access those?

I think El Salvador has a very good legal framework around that, and it's very solid. It's very, is not discounting the importance of, of good disclosures to the investors, but also creates or tries to reduce the friction, friction as much as possible. So, I think the world will go, I mean, it's not perfect now and today, but it will be going, I think many countries will see the opportunities on having, imagine if you hire a country and you can get a lot of liquidity and investors, new investors for your companies, you definitely have the incentive to build the regulation that supports that.

Yeah. And also, also thinking, you mentioned the Bitcoin way to do things, and I know obviously from Bitfinex perspective, you also support RGB, which is a, for listeners that I know, that's client-side validated. It's like a way of using Bitcoin's chain to transfer, to create and issue assets and things like this. So, would you see that as also a way that some of these tokenized securities in the future could be done? Is that a possibility for you?

Yeah, also, tokenization should be agnostic from the transport area, but I think RGB could be a very good product for that.

Okay, yeah. So yeah, so that, that could be, another interesting Bitcoin way for these things to be done. That's the other aspect. There's so, there's so much competition between all these different things, right? Because even just in, let's say, Bitcoin world, there's Liquid, there's RGB, there's Taproot Assets, there's, Spark's one, I think it's called BTKN. And that's just like a few in the Bitcoin world, and then there's all these in, in altcoin or other. So, how do you, compare these different platforms or ways of doing tokenization?

very transparently, I believe that for the end user, the end user really does not care. So, here's the thing. Bitcoin is the only product that is truly decentralized and is truly unstoppable.

The app, if you tokenize Apple shares or tokenize the shares of a random company somewhere in Argentina, You still rely on a centralized issuer. Your risk is on the centralized issuer. So if you are using a decentralized transport layer to, to transport a centralized issued token, doesn't change much. So what changes is the usability and the feature set of the protocol. So, and I believe that things like RGB or Taproot assets still have a, a great opportunity because they are more scalable because they use a peer-to-peer protocol. So when agents will trade that stuff, then you could argue they are the only ones capable of cope with the throughput. But in general, I think that running on Bitcoin or not, it does not add too much.

Yeah, so at the end of the day, it's more just about what is that actual asset, the debt or the equity or whatever. It's more about what that is and do people want it or not, right? That's just at the bottom line, that's what, that's what matters, which, to be honest, makes sense.

Back in 2017, Bitfinex had these B1X and B2X tokens during the Segwit2X saga. Would, would there be something similar, like let's say the Bitcoin community is fighting about quantum, right? Or what's the right way to do quantum? Is that something Bitfinex would do again?

I think with those, the Segwit2X tokens, we were, we showed to the world the reality. It was almost the first prediction market ever created in, in our industry. And I believe that putting Your money where your mouth is is very important in these cases, and in the end helped the community to understand what was the right side of history. this should happen every single time we are concerned. I believe that, and I hope, that on the real threat of, of the entire blockchain being hacked or the entire wallets to be hacked by AI or quantum, I believe the community will come together. We have seen recently another attempt of hard fork. You know, the, this is a good reminder that Bitcoin is very resilient, and we'll continue this direction. I think more, the more the also institutionals are going to be part of it, the, the, the different will be in the future, right? Because, you know, they might have, so, you know, everyone will try to steer narrative and their actions in, in, and, and so on, and, and, and they have all very different incentives compared to the past.

In the past was like Geeks Wars, and now is much more than that. So the difference is players are different and they will use whatever they can to change and shape the narrative. So we need to, we need to be aware of that, be aware of that.

Yeah, well said. So I know, I know you've got to run, Paolo, so we'll let you go. So listeners, that's, Paolo from Bitfinex. Thanks for joining me.

Thank you, Stephan.