Cardano Adoption Will SURGE in 2026! Here's Why! with Frederik Gregaard

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about yourself and your professional background.

But I was still a bit too emotional. So I went readly deep into infrastructure banking and spent the close to twenty years building banks and asset managers and investment banking rails, while I started dappering into crypto and blockchain.

on chain where it's no longer let's say, a brick and mortar location, but it's on my phone a wallet.

So what should they actually do? I mean, if you think about it from a crypto perspective, right custody could be a phenomenal place they could dab right into, but many of the banks has not been able to create let's say, the best user experience or the cheapest or the most secure way of actually storing your crypto. And in many ways for me still I think there's nothing who beats you know, Karano or a bitcoin on a

hardware wallet. Hunh. I mean this basically keeps it in your control, but it also requires that you have more education, right, and it requires that you take responsibility of your own life. And there is some people who are still saying some two businesses to do that. And therefore, you know, you know, going to a crypto custodian or going to even a bank who has highest scrutiny around that is a good option. And when you go go to sharing risk for instance, right,

we've seen that most banks don't share risk anymore. In the old days, you know, it was very frequent that you know, the banker was on the board, right, or the banker was helping to do a generation change and stuff like that. That's we nearly don't see that anymore. I find that's a shame. I mean, banks actually do have a role to play, but it has to be aligned with what the clients want and expect, and I've seen less of that in the last sort of eight to ten years unfortunately.

convergence of tradifying crypto. And to your point, a lot of the banks are now partnering with exchanges to offer crypto trading, some are launching stable coins, some are doing custody as well. And to your point, there's going to be a segment of the population who's going to say, look, the private keys are scary to me, and custoding my own crypto assets, I'm too scared of that. But I trust maybe JP Morgan or City Bank, which I've been

using for a long time. I put my money in there, I may use them for custodial services, So I guess you know, to your point, some folks are going to go that direction, right, Yeah.

the asset management space. I don't know if you notice, right, but the Karana Foundation actually was that the London Stock Exchange that was bringing the bill a couple of weeks back, right, because we actually tokenized a reinsurance product and normally the entry ticket for that is one hundred million dollars, and you know that's nearly everybody, nearly impossible and therefore the only access to that is through investment banks are really

last asset managers. But we've been able to bring that on chain on Karana, right, and we're able to do that with the highest level of security and compliance, and that's why also we could list that on the you know, on a Tier one stock exchange with the London Storage Change.

And now this week actually you know, the most successful etf ever created, the black Rock Bitcoin etc. Have actually launched on the London Storage Change And I find that sort of quite cool, right because we actually made it to a Tier one European stock exchange with a Kardano r W, a product before black Rock did. But you know, hands down still as I still think the asset managers

are starting to do some really innovation. Another example, and that is we've been working with Franklin Templeton, which is sort of the third largest, fourth largest asset manager in the world, and they actually run ten different notes, So they run a Bitcoin note in the Theium note, but

they also run a Cadano note. And Genning, the CEO there, has you know, for a long time been you know, tokenizing things sort of like for instance, the Benji which is their money market fund and I think this, you know, you've done some real numbers on it, and I actually find that running decline registry on the blockchain actually can

cut cost and increase operation resilience. So I do think that, you know, there's some real transformation happening right now in the asset management space and less so in the banking space.

which is really great. You highlighted some great examples there. How are you you interacting with these institutions who are looking to tokenize and let's say they want to pick Cardano the blockchain to you know, tokenize money market funds, stocks and other assets.

for everything, but it's getting there, right. It increases this you know, if we can just you know, get a one percent improvement, we can actually share that with our clients and that actually shows in the performance and gives us a better tracking era. And what we do very specifically with the Karana Foundation is we help them with the technical integration. So the Karana Foundation is actually the one who built and maintains the tooling you need as

an institution to integrate with Kardano. Now you can run completely native and build your own right, but you can also run the supported tools from the Karana Foundation. So we have an integration team working with about you know, one hundred two hundred and fifty banks in exchanges and asset managers on these types of integration, which also includes custodians worldwide. The other thing we do is we help

them on the regulatory side. So we are very closely anchored with our legal team, and we speak with the European Parliament, we speak with the you know, the US regulators, we speak with American regulators, we speak with ms I'm here right now in Dubai speaking with Vara ADGM right, So we work very very close with them and we understand the current regulation. That means that we can help them on the intersection between thread fire and blockchain and

bring them you know, an extra level of comforward. It is true that they would like to go with their own lawyers and they would like, you know, to have their own teams doing that, but you can shortcut quite a lot by using the knowledge from the Karana Foundation.

And then last, but not least, we give distribution, right so we you know, when we actually going to Copenhagen next week because we want a price launching a et P as an exchange traded product together with United Nations Human Tearing Crisis Organization, which is an alternative way to basically give funding to ngngos who's looking for that in

this case for displaced people. So we also, you know, we're quite innovative and do some financial engineering with you know, partners and others to show the power of blockchain for good. So it's just a couple of examples on how that works.

you know, the card Owner Foundation joined the Micro Crypto Alliance. Tell us about that and you know, working in the EU space.

And that's what you see right now with the clarity and the geniac which basically superseds and and creates your huge growth, but all stability and some clarity on the US side, where more on the European side due to the implementation, And what basically has happened is that crypto companies are basically running away from the European Union. And that's a that's really that was not the intent, right.

The intent was to actually create certainty and create jobs and create opportunities for the European Union, including you know, adding some more to the captor markets at large, right, because caviacter markets is a dollar based economy, right, and there were some ideas that this could help on the on the European So on the euroside. Now, US joining the MICAH Alliance is really a big step because what we found was that we were quite alone in these discussions.

So alone means we were alone from the protocol side, right, so we were the own the protocol at the table discussing that the rest was you know, the very large stable coins and the very large, extremely regulated centralized exchanges, right, And they basically said, yeah, well it's okay. We are

regulated in multiple jurisdictions, so everything is financial. That might be true, right, But when we start going you know, into DeFi, or we start going you know, along the axis of financial engineering and blockchain, well not everything is playing cod you know, financial markets. Joining the MECARE Alliance for us is really a fantastic opportunity to not be

the only one at the table. And I think if you look at it from a market cap perspective, you know, the more market cap who participate in the MECARE Alliance from a protocol level, who sits at the table and can speak as adults and understand the current regulation, understand the current financial market infrastructure, and can understand blockchain and can push in a direction that we can still have public permission as blockchains and we can still have experimentation

until we see how it goes. We don't have to do everything as we do in capusal markets today, which something can be done better cheapa and fast and still protect the end consumers. This should be allowed, right.

you in the folks at the Cardina Foundation optimistic? You know that we may see that pass, let's say, by the end of the December ourself.

Digital Product passport. So this is a bit like you know these small flyers you see when you buy a piece of furniture, right, which basically says, you know, those use these chemicals and this is how you assemble the furniture. And you know this is you know the content of the furniture, right, is it all wood or is the plastic and so on? And for certain let's say countries, you won't find a lot. You just find like two

pictures and this is how you put it together. And others there quite far in terms of easy certification and you know, child labor and so on. So what the digital product passport really is is a very comprehensive guideline or a piece of policy. Really who says the minimum requirements for things produced in the European Union or sold in the European Union is from the start of the

production to the end of the product lifetime. So if you have a chair, for instance, it's not when the company goes out of business, is when the chare no longer exists. You need to support a digital manual or product passport who basically describes also how you get rid of it, so how you basically recycle it. And this potentially can actually be a liability on your balance sheet.

So if you create a new company, right and you're selling a physical product, you know in the European Union, you know, who knows how long that can actually exist.

And if you're very good at producing, this might be generations, right, But if you have your startup goes you know barey up after a while, right, there's there's some liability and the balance sheet because you need to maintain that digital product passport, which means you need to have some money for a cloud database to be running for as long

as the product runs. Right. And I think what we sort of homed in on here is quite unique is that what it requires in the world of today is that many of these supply chains they have multiple contributors from different companies. And if you want to have a database where multiple companies contribute to the database, well, blockchain is a pretty good hit, right. Secondly, due to the

fact that the community maintains the blockchain, right, not the business. Well, basically you can base you can write off all that liability because the blockchain will be maintain as in Kadano's case favor right. So I think this is a you know, there's some really good reasons why the digital product passport could be a super opportunity for the blockchain based in the European Union.

is heading in where a lot of data and information will be on the blockchain, that this type of data and information tagged to products and services is actually helpful. For example, let's say I want to buy a product on Amazon. Maybe there's some sort of digital product ID or passport or whatever you want to call it in a dropped out dialogue box, and I can verify it on the blockchain that it came from this region, it

was manufactured at this specific date. It didn't go through any regions that are blacklisted, so to speak, it's not a fake product. Do you feel that these things are going to be added to products and services that people can verify it and we can do it because of the blockchain.

it's a penny game, right. But I truly think that when we look at the experience we had both with you know, tokenizing wine, right, so putting the George and wine on the blockchain, and suddenly they were selling in

countries where they've never done marketing. Because people buying George and wine, which doesn't have the strongest brand, were able to verify the story and the content of the wine and have an external third party verification of this, it suddenly sold wine and for instance Norway with no marketing right, so the whole badge was sold out straight away. So I do think there's a huge demand for it, and I think as we the generations that start changing, I

think this demand will go up. The younger generations will simply not accept, you know, to buy crap, and they know the internet so well that they also know the risk very well, so sometimes they will gamble on it and other times if they have to pay the real dollars for it, they actually want this. So I think this is one of the cases where you know, it's nice with this regulation because it creates, you know, an

opportunity for blockchain. But I think this opportunity was there anyway on the table.

made at some place. It's just a chair, But my wine and certain merchandise I would definitely want to verify.

jackets and so on. And can you imagine, you know, if fifty thousand Americans that bought their tickets, they line up to the stadium and suddenly they can't get in because the blockchain is down. I mean, this is actually

a security concern, right. So one of the reasons why it was done on Karana was that we could actually you know, Karana has never been down, right, So Bitcoin and Karana has been up running since twenty seventeen and never missed the beat, right, And this is the two only infrastructures which I'm aware of, which includes also defense architecture and others who has never been down And I think this is truly unique, and I think you know them always sort of thinks through these things, right, the

more important this becomes absolutely.

We don't have specific governance keys, We cannot just mind Aida or anything like that. We are truly we wrote a constitution, you know, expressed it online in smart contracts, and we're living through it today. But these some of these classic organizations like that they need a counterparty, right, they need a classical entity. You can prove that, you know, they've done something with the Karana and the Ada logo

and with the trademarks associated with this. So this gives us the opportunity to use the Karana foundation as approxy

for the community to apply for these top level domains. Now, what you can imagine actually having out of that is not just email addresses and so one, which would be nice, but you can also imagine that if I want to send Ada to you, right, normally I would need your address, right, but you can actually associate that with a top level domain email address for instance, right, So we can start

using that as ibend numbers. We can start keying and identity, so we can use the Caroana foundations really on wallet for instance, to to to create a type of identity which we key together with your domain name. Right. So I think first and foremost this is going to create a better user experience. And also I think what it's going to do, is it going to you know, move the Karano brand out there even further than it is today. Yeah.

all been trained and a society. Everybody knows what an email address is for the most part, how to send an email. It will make it that easy, so to speak.

that we're doing that on behalf of the community. Right. It does require a lot of legal work. We're already paid went through a rigorously process around this. It does require a lot of say yeah, documentation, backing, et cetera. And in the end there's a committee who basically decides

whether we will get that or not. Right, But yeah, no, I think this is I think right now we really need user experience, that we really need marketing to create more transactions, but also to spread the love of what's actually happening out there and where does a blockchain really matter? Yeah?

a huge trend, a lot of publicly traded companies getting involved putting crypto and in a balance sheet. Of course, it all started with Michael Sailor and Strategy, but there there's one that is launched for Cardinal, and that is Reliance Global Group. Tell us about this and what's their mission and how much data tokens are they holding and things like that.

And I think this is truly unique. The second part is that for these things to really kick off and be ver interesting, you need you need really good access to capital markets, right, so you need to be able to have access to the lending market on an institutional scale to run something like a Michaels sailor strategy right

on Karana. What's truly unique is that you need to take a view on voting, right so having a digital acid treasury on Kardana, you need to figure out will this be able to act as a de rep yes or no? And I think this is where the Constitution also comes into play and where it becomes you know, extremely important.

it as an equity. And if you don't have access to crypto, right, this might be really good for distribution, right, but if you or if there is a tax delta, for instance, in Japan, I believe the text delta is about twenty percent, So if you hold crypto and you realize that there's a twenty percent different compared to if you hold equity and realize that, right, So therefore I think the MNF can trade as a premium of twenty percent in Japan without you know, I was sort of

thinking more about it. But if the if the data is as symbol as you know that you use a vehicle to basically hold the underlying the question is you know how much are you willing to pay on top of the underlying asset, and why are you willing to pay that there's an arbitrash there. And what we see with most arbitrast opportunities is that they don't fare that long. But I want to be quite clear that what Michael Taylor does is not a regulatory arbitrast opportunity or like

a tax arbatrast opportunity. Right, he uses a very specific formula that he's able to raise money or raise money through depth in capital markets by basically challenging the unwinding of the T bill. So we have this very specific situation since a few years that people are not that

interested in the tea bill. I think you saw the president and another working very heavily on changing that situation, right by him actually being able to offer for institutional investors a little bit of a premium or a little bit that they get a little bit more extra yield out of basically financing him and him be thinking about

his whole balance sheet in bitcoin and not in dollars. Well, basically he can take the inflation out of the equation, and if you minus the inflation with what it caused him to raise the death that's nearly a zero sum game, and then he has the whole appreciation value and still a free floating stock cut. And I think that's quite different than what we've seen with many of the debts out there. They've been simply constructed differently. Yeah, yeah, we'll

we'll put and explain there. On the flip side of

the token, you have et apps, right, and there's a lot of all coin ETPs getting approved. The SEC still has some on its table to approve here in the United States. Anything you can share as far as Cardano ETFs or eight A ETPs that may be on the horizon. So you've seen probably quite a few ETPs. I just mentioned one earlier in this show, right, But there's quite a few ETPs specifically on the European side and some in Asia on Ada. Right. And yes, it is correct

that there is also coming. So I don't know what we really should call it, right. I think the media right now calls the ETFs, but in reality is an et he traded as an ETF, right, so it is a is an ETP, right, And there is some some big asset management houses who's applied for that. I'm thinking, you know, when you know that we're talking probably like within a month, we'll get some clayerity around that, but it's it's very likely that you have something on the

horizon there. And I think there's been some public announcements already, but we need the you know, the US state to go back to work.

not in the blockchain space. I'm talking about Volvo Cast, Johnson and Johnson Boston consulting groups, so were really big names who is right now starting to use blockchain technology, and we are matching that up with the Karano community, right, so think two three hundred very deep Kartano fans who's a part of not just building and supporting, but actually

are running Kadano today. So bringing this match of you know, traditional industries together with you know blockchain native people and invest us, we believe it's going to give really a truly unique opportunity for other people who's also participating to see something was very rarely happening, right, So this is blockchain adoption on the day happening and use cases you

haven't seen before. We also announced together with Mazumi, which is a daughter company of someone called service plan supported by Inmaker that we now have over one hundred German companies using a gendic AI on Karano and most of them actually don't know that on Karano right, So this is also truly unique because what they want is agenda AI. They want secure, regulated, a gentic AI where they know that they can share data with other companies without breaching

data privacy rules and using this grace user experience. And that's where Karano comes in so compared to other blockchains to sort of people that does a pe vote towards AI. What we've done is we stay true to a decentralized infrastructure and we use that for identity collaboration, the regulatory activity lock right and the incentive model underlying these agenda AIS and a lot of those will also be present there.

So I think that's also really really interesting and mind blowing to see into the engine room of that.

the AI and AAI agents on blockchain. You know, I would love to get your thoughts on the outlook for that is, you know, along the lines of what you're stating that these companies they want to create like multiple AI agents and they're running on the blockchain or they're running alongside the blockchain and can you know, I don't know, come over to the blockchain like I'm just I want to wrap my head around that. Are they like creating an AI agent on the blockchain itself?

very good at identity. Right, so we might not have that many expressions of identity right now, but we started really from the Karana foundation with the really invalid right but we now have dits and vcs all the way up to you know, first level quantum secure identity. So

what we have. What's really important is that when you have an AI from one company who needs to delegate work or find answers from an AI from another company, you are in a very bad situation from a privacy perspective, because if you are the end consumer who's trying to get an offer on a ticket to talkyo, or you're trying to optimize something. Right, you have not given Company A the permission to go fishing for your data and

Company B. Right. But this is essentially what we would like to see, right, because alternatively is that all of your data exists in one glorified spreadsheet, and there is only two databases in this world. Right, there's databases who have been hacked, on databases who will be hacked. And if it lives in one glorified spreadsheet, then these businesses need to basically buy each other and become like a global company, right, And I think a lot of us

would like to have choice. Right. So what we basically have here is that this AI agent is supported by an identity which is verified on the blockchain, and not only an identity, but something called a verified credential. So not only do they say they are who they are, but they also say, I do have the data about Tony, and I do have his travel records. I'm not going to give it to you, but I'm prepared to give the output to the request to optimize his travel Itgineery.

The second thing you can imagine is that you have a company who's very deep into tech. They might have a lot of CPU, and an AI agent who has access to a lot of CPU might be able to do millions of prompts and hit a Maybe an inferior AI agent who don't have the same sophistication and might be able to work around some of these defense layers

and actually fix, you know, get your data anyway. So by using meta compliant us D m U is a stable corn and Kano transactions, you basically have an economic moment that the AI agent just can't ask a million questions without paying for it.

a double digit find of your total revenues. Wow. Yeah, well this is what breaks companies, right, So for companies to actually trust that that that their company is getting data from another company without the consent of the user, right, what you really need is you need an activity log vers is you know, privacy compliant, but also can show the supervisors that everything has happened as it should happen. And last, but not least, they's say you didn't buy anything.

You know, sometimes we just ask, right, we want to see what's out there. It still gives an incentive to the companies for having these AIS agents available out there for queries. Right, there's some micropayments, so as you can see, actually the AI agent doesn't really touch the Cadano stack at all. It just uses it for security and collaboration and regulatory purposes. Got it, Okay, very very interesting. I know you touched on a lot and there's a lot

happening with the cardenter fination. Is there anything else on your roadmap that you want to highlight maybe that's going to happen and let's say in twenty twenty six, potentially a lot. Right. What I'm really interesting in at the moment is a use case we started that the Dubai

police around forensics, most specifically ballistic forensics. Right and as I'm in Dubai right now, it sort of came to my mind, right, and one of the community projects in Kadana has taken this to the next level in India, it's called Indian Net. And what they're basically have done is they basically use Karano technology to hash a part of the criminal investigation journey when I don't know, some accidents happened, I mean a drunk driver or somebody is

dead or whatever. Right, what the basically is done is they're using Karanas to secure they invested the gift journey, so you cannot manipulate that downstream. Right, So when the when the different tests are being sent to the laboratories and so on, right, all of this is basically hashed and stored on Karano. And we already have a think

about seven eight thousand transactions on main net. And I think what we're seeing here is really somebody who actually took a deep look into what has already happened on Kardano, got some inspiration, and then rolled that out into the

state in India. And I'm really excited about that, and I'm hoping we're going to see a lot more of that, because this really shows the power of blockchain become physical, right, and when things become physical, it becomes real well for people who cannot really grasp it so realm when they suddenly can start feeling that the true impact on their lives in this case, you know, more ORA and better cridinal investigations. Right, this is where you see the hockey

stick really flying. So that's something I'm really really passionate about at the moment and really sort of proud of the Indian ned team putting that together also because I see that whole lifeline coming from the work with it with the Dubai Police but also some work with it with NASA at the Space Agency is really coming through there, and you see the power of open source software as well and inspiration happening through these channels. So that's that's

that's really cool. Another thing which I'm very excited about is of course the new ross note coming from the

AMAR routine. So I'm not supposed to say too much, right, but I think in at the summit, you you're going to see, you're going to you're going to get a really you know, bigger harm moment, right because the team has really done a phenomenal job in ensuring that we at least have a not a blog producing note yet, but we have a valid data note who's basically able to run on so little power you won't imagine it and in such a little instance, and I think it

really shows that we are still committed to economic opportunities outside the Western hemisphere. Right, So wherever you are, you can actually you know, you can still use Kerano. You don't you're not required to have a super professional data center and so on. I showed the video to some professional bitcoin minors here in Dubai and they were, you know, they couldn't believe that this is running on a double A battery, right, So I'm quite excited about that because

it also means the next generation of operation resilience. And then obviously we go into the midnight area as well, right, So very excited about the launch and hopefully soon from the midnight foundation of midnight and see what kind of use cases we can unlock using that kind of technolog as you.

actually don't need a blockchain to run it. And we already have requests from nation states and from large enterprises to use the stack because it's the only wallet implementation of what's called the ELI was is the first level quantum resistant extension of the ALII, which basically moves eighty

percent of world trade. And the fact that that's coming out of the Karana Foundation, and you know, and we're now proactively being asked also for non blog chain implementations of that, I think it really shows that there is really some power in the Karano ecosystem and when we get the right people together, we can move the world.

some wrap up questions here for you. First, so, if you could create your own metaverse, what would the team be? Where would you put your OPU Lister Apple Pro and go to.

old movie. There's sort of a being the meal with alien insects, but it has something about leadership and something about you know, ideals and about fighting for the better world but also doing it in the wrong way. And I think sometimes that's sort of an epiphany moment. We are so focused on trying to do something that we accept sometimes to do it the wrong way, and in blockchain we do that through centralization, so when something gets hard,

we centralize. And Starship Troopers is really a situation where they you know, they centralized democracy right and created that you have to be a citizen to be able to do anything, and to do that you have to serve right. And I think it really is sort of in a weird way, you know, teases some of these leadership principles with you know, how wrong it is to go the wrong way for the right reasons, for sure.

prevalent for the blockchain ecosystems. If you don't like something, you go to another blockchain because there's many of them. Right, So we should be super proud that the Caronal community is so strong, right. But he also wrote these examples about, you know, being a small nation state who actually has a royal family who basically decides right, so as a monarchy, right,

and have no resources whatsoever. Right, how you actually navigate you know, governance, and how you serve your population and make this attractive and some of those examples in that book is just mind blowing. But it's not a book you can read from, you know, from a to set. You have to sort of take a chapter and then chew on it a bit. So I can definitely recommend that perfect. Yeah, I'll check that out. And then when you're not working at the Cardono Foundation, what are you

doing for fun? Anything in the mountains. So I love to go to the mountains, and you know, I run, I mountaineer, telemarkski, I actually am part of the Voluntary Mountain Search and Rescue. I play in the mountains with my kids and my friends. So yeah, anything in the mountains all four seasons. I mean, so that's awesome, Frederick, absolute pleasure. I love what Kardon is doing, and as mentioned earlier, I'm looking forward to the updates. But thank you so much for taking the time to join. Yeah,

thank you, and thank you. A great show. I love watching it from time to time.