Hey, folks, we're recording at chain links smart Con event and joining me is Ashpompati, who is the head of ecosystem at app Toss.
Ash.
Great to be doing this in person with you, man.
I can't believe I get to do it again.
Tony, Yeah, we spoke earlier this year. Lots of great things happening with ap toss. But for the folks who don't know you, tell us a bit about yourself in ap.
Toss one hundred percent. So ap toss was actually a blockchain that was incubated at Meta to move value across a billion user super ap economy. It's spun out and has been in market for about three years and since then has been a leading blockchain and driving stable coin movement DeFi and now investing in infrastructure bring the next billion user apps on chain now.
One of the great features of ap tooss it's super fast. How are you guys able to achieve this speed?
So I think it goes back to what I said before, which was the technical thesis around what a blockchain needs to do was always built from a first principle's perspective that it needs to support metas billion user app economy out of the box, speed was a non negotiable, but also security which came with it move the smart contract programming languages. I think we've both seen several hacks in market over the years, which is maybe the cost of
business of being in this space. But for the technical team at that firm where it was originated, that was a non negotiable. In order to move billions and trillions of transactions across the world, you needed a premier security language. So embedded within app toss is to move smart contract programming language, so not only cheap, highly secure.
Yeah, and you know, as far as usability and use cases, I read recently that stable Flow integrated app toss and that's going to allow put a transfer of more stable coins. Tell us a bit about that. Yeah.
I think that was an amazing launch and I think part of an example of how Bottom's up technical thesis driven building can actually reduce friction. I believe on that one it was through an integration through not only ap toss, but near and through the intense network. With that, I think it's natural in terms of stable coins finding the best path and the most efficient path, and smart users
making that as a default choice. Even though AP toss is less mature as an ecosystem, especially with stable coin integration versus some of the legacy players. We've already seen unbound growth, which tells us that smart users, when they have a dollar on X chain versus Y chain, the one that's faster and more efficient and secure, they will default choose. And so that is a huge signal for us, and we're going to push a lot by multiples in terms of growing that usage.
I also recently read that Calshi is now supporting aptoss's USDC native USDC and the apt token.
Yeah. Well, so, I think one thing from a foundation perspective, or a foundation that's supporting a permissionless network like aptoss, is to make sure that users can access assets on your network as well as stable coins on your network, no matter where they are.
Right.
So you know, we knew. I think last time we talked about NFTs, NFTs evolved into meme coins. Meme coins are evolving into prediction markets. So for us, our goal as a foundation is to make sure where ubiquitous acrosshol services and culsh is an amazing platform.
You use the word ubiquitous, and that's where blockchain has to go. Right where it's running through the rails, through the markets, the financial system, pop culture, society. But people don't necessarily need to know, just if they are sophisticated enough to know, Hey, I can choose the aptass blockchain, but the idea of speed and usability is the key, right, I completely agree.
You know, I think we're kind of in our middle child phase, you know, where we look a little funky. We kind of like music we probably won't like for a long time. Sure, and we're very tribal. But I think when we talk about an everyday consumer, right, whether it be your wife or my father, they don't have time to think about this stuff or even subscribe to a quote unquote technical religion.
Right.
They want something that is usable, they want something that is reliable, and they want something that either gives them value, make them money, or save them time. And so I think that's where applications built on blockchains will need to head towards. And we're already seeing that with founders looking to build now, which look very different than founders who wanted to start building in twenty twenty, which look different
than twenty seventeen. These are founders who have scaled enterprise and consumer businesses should come from traditional tech backgrounds who are ready to make their foray into entrepreneurship, and for them, they look at scaling businesses as an outcome. And so I think we're starting to see that start to graduate a bit.
Yeah, you're right. You know, I look back at twenty twenty eight and I been here since twenty sixteen, and the amount of adoption we're seeing. You know, there's once the okay, crypto native firms are building technologies, but now TRADFI traditional tech companies if you want to call them, that are now coming in. And on that note, I read that Indian telecom giant Reliance Geo is partnering with apptoss. Tell us about that.
Yeah, so you know, these are the kinds of efforts that take a lot of time. When you think about the scale of a company like Reliance Geo, the biggest telco provider and not only in India but in the world, And when you think about the amount of foresight a firm like that and the executives within the firm have to have to believe in Web three technology. You have to ask the question of what is the actual urgency behind it? And business need sure, and the business need
is Web three at its core. Not only is it better rails for trading or moving a dollar, but for retention. Yeah, which completely shifts the advertising market, which is heading towards a trillion dollar year market by twenty thirty. Wow, some of us don't realize that when you compare it against trading fees on chain. Sure, right, So they're a firm that understand. Now the next question is once you understand that what technology can actually support your billion plus user
use case? You can't just use any sort of SaaS rights to be reliable. Your users can't have a second of disruption otherwise they'll churn out, which affects your business absolutely. Supercent users churn out, you affect your business big time. And so naturally they came to aptos and said, well, you guys are the best and fastest and you can actually support this, so let's work together.
That's pretty incredible. That's a big one. I mean, the largest heelcom company. And what are you seeing as far as the vision that these companies have. Are they looking to use blockchain in different ways, create reward tokens or like you mentioned, keeping customers and how are you thinking about it? And I don't know if you can share the details here, but as much as you.
Can, yeah, I mean I can share how they're thinking about it, because I used to work at a company that thought about this like YouTube a lot, right, which is how do you in line incentives with your users in the most efficient and economical way that's value add for your business and also value add for their time spent. I think right now we've had pretty archaic ways of doing this. Advertising monetizing eyeballs, creating so much friction so
you can convert them to subscription. Then they're paying subscription and they question, why do I have to pay this? I don't even use this anymore. I have ten different subscriptions. So I think advertised like large companies with a swath of loyalists but also a broad consumer base. Think I'll see this about to happen In terms of fragmentation, the ad models isn't going to work. CPMs are going to go down. Big brand advertisers are going to less ROI
because of dilution. Subscription people are overindated with subscription service. They literally cannot afford it, and so they say there must be a better way. So I think for them, they're looking at blockchain and web three incentives as a layer to rechange advertising, sure more stickiness with the user, and put more money in their pocket by using the
app micro transactions for subscription services. So imagine if I could pay ten cents or a penny every time I watch versus have a choice of do I pay twenty bucks on Amazon Prime foret?
Yeah?
Right? And so I think this is how they're thinking in terms of the smart businesses. And the other thing I would say is we still have not yet seen the Fortune fifty companies. The C level execs in their boardroom say what about crypto alongside AI? And that I think will start to happen very quickly, especially as things like the Genius Act being passed and the Clarity Act. Once those things happen, every Fortune and fifty firm will not only say in their boardroom what are we doing
with AI? They will say what are we doing with crypto?
And speaking of Fortune and fifty, I don't know black Rock fits in this. So they're king of the hill in the finance world in many ways. They expanded their Biddle money market tokenized money market fund on app toss tell us about that what that means for a chain like app TOSK.
So I think one thing with our history obviously based on how we originated, but the technical principles that we put around the network on security, the emphasis that naturally inclines towards institutions right. Institutions want trust, they want to know there's a team behind the network that's well funded, that in perpetuity can support the needs of a network, and they want to make sure there's a high level
of security. On one hand, you could look us look at us as a controversial bet for institutions because we're not eth we're not Salana, we're moved, we're a new ecosystem entirely. On the other hand, you could look at them as saying that's the bar for innovation that needs to happen for us to actually invest in networks. Sure, So I think with the Biddle Fund, who's been a long time partner with us, it's been incredible to work with them, and they truly believe in the mission on ap toss.
You, I think addressed this in our interview earlier this year. But I want to make sure folks are aware of how the building is happening on app toss. Is it a layer two is it subnets? Like how can Blackrock or somebody else if they want to create a private aspect on app tooss, how can they do that?
So, you know, when we think about RWA's, it's a pretty broad term, right. It can include stable coins, it could choose credit products, it can include tokenized funds, and so I think for us we have coverage across all those things. What we are excited to see is the
real world utilization of those assets. We're already seeing it with stable coins, We're already seeing it with private credit markets where credit is being extended by protocols, to emerging markets for micro loans, or we even just had a new company, Creator five come to ap toss who raise fifty million in debt financing to help loan creators and artists wow stables so that they can create and not get locked into bad distribution deals. I need to contact them, Well,
I'll send, I'll send, I'll send to you them. They're backed by the biggest MCNs and everything. Oh, so we're seeing like tremendous utilization and opportunity and specific sectors of RWA's, and I think there's more to come outside of that as well.
What do you think about the tokenization race that's happening for stocks, gold, I'm hearing real estate and even like you know, somebody's money market, funds and bonds and so forth, and what do you see that market by twenty thirty or.
So, you know, I think I see it as like the way I look at it is RWA's minus stables are where stables were at three years ago today, And so it's still the concept of tokenization in terms of should I token this, what's the value of tokenizing this? And then what's the roadmap? Right, yeah, what does it look like in DeFi across ecosystems? And so I think for us, that's how we want to push forward with those folks. So by twenty thirty, I look at is
you know, a user can go collaterize QYZ alone. It's something that they're used to and tradify, sure, and go use that money, send that money somewhere in an instant you know, trade it they have if they're on the risk curve. Sure, that's kind of where I see it. So I see tokenization as having unlimited upper bound, but it will be driven by the real world utilization from everyday users.
Sure. And then we got to figure out if there's a market for as certain assets. Right, is there liquidity? Even if you tokenize something, is there a market is your demand for it?
Yeah? And there's so many different use cases, right, there's there's borrow, lend what assets are good for that? There's trading, there's high risk curve trading. You know, there's different types of assets that I think work. And I think crypto luckily has supercomposability where you quickly learn once in assets in market, what has product market fit or signal, unlike more traditional standards where there's tons of bureaucratic red tape
to actually get something live. So I think with this administration and their philosophy and crypto and technology, we at large we're going to learn very soon. And I'm very excited for institutions to come on board.
Speaking of this administration, a lot of people are chomping at the bit to get the Market Structure bill pass. We know we have the government shut down now they're going to eventually open up. Are you thinking we might get it passed by December or Q one of twenty twenty six.
You know, I'm not a macroeconomist. I'm also not a political commentator. But what I would say is this administration has shown pretty clearly two things. One they want America to be the center of techno optimism, sure, and number two, they believe crypto are better financial rails. Yeah, and so I think with those two things in consideration, you will
see high urgency to get those things done. And I think it's up to the rest of us to make sure we're driving and building products to drive adoption.
Oh, for sure, we covered quite a few items of APTOSK getting adoption. Is there anything else you want to highlight? And maybe you can tell us a bit about what's on your road map.
Yeah, I think we can combine the two. Sure. So one thing that has been very exciting to see, albeit not having the best results for people currently subscribed to those products and services, is we have spent this year focused on a few things. Number one, we believe exchanges should be fully decentralized and users should be able to trust them. We also believe the blockchain to support that paradigm needs to be as fast as a centralized exchange.
Sure.
So, two things have happened. Number One, we've pushed our blockchain latency, which is basically the lagant between something deciding to happen sure down to sixty five milliseconds. Finance is at five milliseconds, So we are basically encroaching towards having the same latency as a centralized exchange. Wow. On top of that will be built this company called Decibel, which
is a fully decentralized exchange ultimate transparency. You can perpose trade, you can spot trade, you can even do multi asset collateral, and so that's really exciting. Now why is that exciting? Well, Number one, there's tons of purpose exchanges in market, but we think the pie is so much bigger than that, especially when you add additional services. Number two, you saw
Black Friday, our version of Black Friday. What happens when you have opaqueness in centralized entities, Users get punished at the end of the day. So that is a huge validation for us that the market needs trusted and reliable exchanges that are fully decentralized. The second piece is infrastructure. You know, the greatest bottleneck to web thory adoption. Do you know what it is? The on ramp data data. Right now, data is a huge bottleneck to fully decentralized,
billion user scale apps running on chain. You dig deep enough eventually every blockchain, every DAP uses a centralized cloud service. That's one person with one button that can shut off everything that owns your important asset, which is data. So we're building Shelby. It's hitting dev net, a co build with Jump Crypto that is essentially decentralized AWSGCP Azure, which allows for Web three incentives. That is no middleman.
That is so needed.
I mean, I mean you saw with the recent events AWS went down and then what happened right after Azure went down. Yeah, so it's huge validation in the technical roadmap and we're uniquely set up our firm to deliver on that. Avery led production engineering at Meta for Libra DM, but before that he was scaling systems for what's up in Instagram. Anytime a new feature needed to be launched, you know what, they'd call Avery. We got to make
sure this doesn't break. That's his whole team. So we are building in the right direction and the market is validating the need for these things.
That's exciting. We're going to have to do an in person interviewer at my studio downtown New York when that is ready to go. I like that, and that is so needed. What are you looking for most to in twenty twenty six for the industry and so forth.
I love the institutional narrative right now. What I believe, as I believe is true in any technological sector, when institutions get excited, is we need hardcore innovation, the aha magic moments that AI has had for the last two years. Sure, and we need immense consumer adoption and innovation to compound
upon this institutional interest. And so for me, I'm very excited about seeing apps that may not be so relevant as they are today but tomorrow start to focus more on how are we bringing commerce on chain, advertising, how are we changing subscription, how are we changing media and entertainment, And so I believe we'll probably see that trending towards twenty twenty seven.
That is another item that I am really looking forward to as well, because to your point, you know, I go through my normal Web two experience. Where's blockchain? Where where's the integration? I know it's a work in progress, but I haven't seen it yet. You know, you're mentioning like micro transactions and microfez, where is that? You know? So sounds like you guys are ahead of the curve working on it.
It's in our DNA. We've always believed this in the timing couldn't be better for us.
Ash, great stuff, looking forward to our next one. Appreciate it and uh yeah man, great stuff happening at aptols. Thank you for joining me.
Thanks, great stuff happening at Thinking Crypto. Appreciate you man.
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