Financial use cases that touch our day to day life. They need to connect with the treade file stack right, And I think this connection between DeFi and treade file is clumsy, it's difficult, it is opaque and is prone to risk. So I think that the first the first aspect, I think the first evolution that will be required is for more stuff to come natively on chain. So we see a lot of securities to organized so called, a lot of things natively coming on a on a on
crypto stack. So I think the define needs to expand a little bit because otherwise we are just like patching different technologies at the same time and this create risk.
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Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward. With me today is Luca Prospery, who is the CEO and co founder of m zero Labs. Luca, great to have you on.
Thanks for having me Tony, Luca.
As stated before the recording, I'm excited to learn about m zero you guys. Recently ran is an incredible of funding round which was led by being Capital Crypto. But let's start with your background. Where are you from and what's your professional background?
Technically from Italy, although I haven't lived in Italy for a very long time, I actually spent most of my adult career in London. I'm a mathematician by background. I spent fifteen years more than fifteen years in traditional finance as an advisor, investment banker, or investors in financial institutions before deciding that DeFi was too interesting for me. To stay out of it during COVID, and then I decided to leave what I was doing before and join the
DeFi revolution. I mean, we can go as deep as you want there. But I spent the first couple of years being actively participating to some of the largest protocols INFI, most notably maker Out, advising some funds, investing in the space, and publishing my own research under a sub stack called dirt Roads that started as.
A game and became something more.
Then we decided to join forces with my two co founders, Oliver and Gregg, and found and zero at the very end of twenty twenty two.
Now you mentioned, you know, being in a treadfy historically and an advisor to companies and funds. What was your first encounter with crypto? Was it a DeFi protocol or was it bitcoin? And you know where did it click for you?
Yeah?
For me, it was not Bigcoin. For me, it was DEFY. Indeed, the reason is that I have been deeply involved in financial institutions for fifteen years, right, And you know, sometimes there is this conception of I don't know a banker that knows who knows banking. Actually bankers are service providers or investors or service providers.
They know the industry they operate.
And I used to be a banker for bankers, So I used to be a financial institution specialist at Morgan Stanley, so one of the largest investment banks in the world, and I used to invest in banks and financial institutions, so I knew deeply how money is created, distributed, and how actually financial intermediation works most people, most people ignore it.
But I stayed out of the so called fintech revolution because for me, it was a very interesting front end, let's say, innovation, but the back end of financial institutions world was always the same, like you know, the way we we create money, we move it, we store it, the way we the way we like we recognize value, et cetera. So when I started looking at DeFi protocols,
this was in the beginning of the DeFi summer. For me, it was like an Euroca moment in the sense that I realized that for the first time, maybe even unconsciously, there were teams that were trying to reinvent the way actually we create money in the first place. So there were actually innovating the back end of financial institutions, which is very philosophical in nature, so that's why I got fascinated. So for me to click, the real clique was maker
out I started. I don't even remember how I got in touch with the guys at the first place, but it was very quick down the rabbit hole time kind of process.
Wow. And does it surprise you that many of these firms like Morgan Stanley, black Rock and so forth are now participating with ETFs pick one ETFs, Many are testing tokenization, some are custodying stable coin reserves. I think black Rock custodies circled USDC reserves. Do you feel this is inevitable they all have to capitulate to this technology.
Yes and no, in a sense that it doesn't surprise me that very sophisticated and diversified financial institutions like the large investment banks for USET managers like black CROC are.
Active because the guys are very small.
They want to be at the forefront of innovation and they want to service an industry that emerges. The ATF, I think is a separate story. I think there is market demand and they want to be on top of the flows. At the same time, not everyone is the same, so on the other side, we see a lot of resistance from traditional commercial banks about proper innovation in DeFi because I really want to protect their business right and I think crypto is threatening the financial institution's business and
will keep threatening it. So in my opinion, the most innovative and smart institutions will adopt this revolution and thrive and transform themselves. The least innovative will not, and I think they will they will go back. They will just shrink with time. So it's interesting now to see the smart and most innovative ones get very active and the others one get very resistant at the same time.
Yeah, now, question on DeFi, because I'm a big believer in DeFi believe it's the future. However, we've often seen with technology version one point zero is you know, nowhere close to being perfect, and there's usually a lot of flaws, and we've seen a lot of exploits around DeFi. Where do you think or how do you think the industry goes from one point oh to two point to avoid these exploits in these things, I.
Think a couple of I think a couple of ways. First of all, DeFi currently.
In order to.
Absorb most of the financial use cases that touch our day to day life. They need to connect with the treade file stuck right, And I think this connection between DeFi and trade file is clumsy, is difficult, it is opaque and is prone to risk. So I think that the first the first aspect, I think the first evolution that will be required is for more stuff to come natively on. So we see a lot a lot of securities organized so called, a lot of things natively coming
on a on on crypto stack. So I think the the finance to expand a little bit because otherwise we are just like patching different technologies at the same time and this create risk. And the second point is I think the early early builders in defire, we're dejons, we're innovators, were disruptors. This is great, but obviously some sort of institutionalization and professializational services is going to benefit everyone. And we have seen it also in tach right in Web two.
Google now is not a startup. Google is the largest is the largest company in the world or something like that, so they have very standardized processes, a way to do stuff. So I think we are professionalizing ourselves as an industry as well.
M Yeah, great points. So let's talk about M zero, tell us about M zero, how it came about, and what's the mission.
I think it's connected to what you were saying before.
When us as founders.
We we got like we fell in love with the maker now construct and mission. You know, Maker it out was an early For those who are not too familiar, it's still like a very big defa protocol, but it was an early protocol that was trying to innovate the way you create money. So instead of creating money, I don't want to get to nerd your money creation. But in the world, banks create money out of thin air. It's not that they're giving you money that is someone
else's now. In the case of maker ow, they had this system decentralized and permission less to create fungible money by pledging certain.
Digital assets.
So we thought that that was a very very powerful construct and within the DOW we tried to expand it and to integrate it with the traditional financial world. And you mentioned Black Crock, but you know, we we spoke back in the days with many financial institutions Black Crock, Pin Costs, Sociotationeral, and a few others. They wanted to connect to the protocol and they were trying, but it
was very difficult. So I think that we we took those lessons and we decided to actually recreate a new protocol that would learn from those lessons, but without certain flows in governance, in retail participation that we thought were detrimental for the protocol to scale. And at the same time spend a lot of time thinking about the integration with the thread five and and and the protocol, and ultimately what we want to do is very ambitious. I mean, I think we want to create a protocol that the
the elevators. The Elevators pitch is a protocol that empowers a federation of minters, so any any approved institution can come and bring and print to fully fangible stable coin that is hyper transparent and it's fully fangible across the network. The real ambition is bypass completely banking institutions and issuers
from money generation. So instead of having a system with central banks and commercial banks just like taking a lot of risk but also participating in distributing money, et cetera, we would like to have a protocol like m zero at the center of everything, enforcing full transparency innovation so that money actually can be generated and used in fully fangible way without depending on the legacy legacy stack. So it's very very very ambitious and long term project.
So it's all us about the protocol of the blockchain. Is obvious there's different protocols out there, proof of history, proof of stake and so forth. What protocol does the M zero blockchain use?
So M zero is currently deployed on may not. So is on ethereum may not. So that uses obviously the standard consensus consensus approach of ethereum. But this is the engine we think the stable coin for a lack of a better term, that will be generated by interacting with M zero will exist on every chain. And how we are actually taking care of this portability is something that we're working on now.
Got it.
And then there's the M token. Tell us about that and the tokenomics.
Yeah, so actually we have three tokens. We like to be to do things complicated apart from the jokes and you know, like we if you look at the M zero, if you look at the M zero logo, it's M a power, a power symbol and zero. There are reasons why we M zero is called en of course. The nerdier one is empower anything power zero is always one, so there is a lot of stability within the logo itself.
So we actually have an empower, an MP token, a power token, and a zero tok Now the M token is what we what people in this space called a stable coin. So the M token is a token that represents a claim on the underlying collateral and is should be because before because the market forces softly packed to
the dollar. So for the use for the user, uh, the experience shouldn't be different from using a us DC and U S d T. We just think is a better better design in terms of transparency, in terms of resilience, in terms of ill portability. If within the stack, I think, uh, the MP token is not ill bearing itself, but can bring underlying yield to the to the user venues. So the M is some sort of so called stable coin. Let's put it like that. And then the power token
and the zero token are our governance tokens. So the power token and the zero tokens in jointly they govern the protocol, so they allow token holders to take decisions who can come and connect, how to parameterize the protocol, and how to claim the economics of the protocol. Now we are not a tao in the in the appropriate sense, in the sense that we don't have a decentralized workforce. We don't have a treasury that is accrued, but the protoct can be used by the tao. We're just like
a group of parties that take decisions through tokens. But there is no there is no treasury, there is there is no underlying workforce. Whatever whatever economic flaw is generated by the protocol gets distributed out. And these two tokens have a very like a rather sophisticated toconomics, a set of sort of in set of emission and set of mechanisms. And you know, we spent we spent a long part of our white paper describing those.
Your core use case seems to be stable coins, a US dollar backed stable coins. Are there other use cases? Could it be central bank digital currencies? Could the central bank use this for that? And are there other things like to organization that are possible?
So the central bank digital currency is an interesting question. I don't think central banks could use M zero for CBDCs. I think M zero could use CBDCs or collateral. So it's that a way around cbdc's most probably would be a wholesale instrument, meaning that central banks will use it interacting with all salors like commercial banks, et cetera. So we currently the M zero protocol approves only US treasuries
as collateral for the meanting of stable coin. Nothing forbids us to actually approve CBDCs as collateral for the issues of several coins because we always think there's going to be an additional layer for distribution required. So this is another point in the direction of bypassing the banking sector in sever ways when it comes to toganization, Yes, I think it is a very important point. I think our point is that we can we are using our technology
stack to mint fully fangible stables from many issuers. We could evolve these technology stack to allow issuers to create as the tokens that actually have different collateral and different nature. So we could actually use the protocol to create some sort of one chain securitization. So toganization platform itself, it is actually one of the.
Next chapters of our development roadmap.
But now we're absolutely focused on the stable coin use case, which we think is a massive is the largest use case encrypton in the world, and I think has already seen obvious product, market fit, market adoption, and very strong economics by the very few issues that dominate those markets.
Yeah.
Absolutely, Now, maybe you can do a mock scenario. Let's say Morgan Stanley, right, they want to issue a stable coin and do it and do it. Let's say on M zero, how would they go about doing that? And once they issued that stable coin, what could it then? Could they then use that stable coin to do lend it out, move it off onto another chain. You tell us about the different things an issuer can do.
Yeah, I think that it's supply and demand. I think the use of a stable coin is always the same. Like you use stable coins, you use money to store value, to transact, to settle.
To do everything.
Now, producing money is very profit doble like because what you are actually what you're.
Actually doing when you produce money is.
You are, let's say, keeping someone's wealth and paying someone an interest. Like you know, you deposit your money in a deposit, in a bank deposit, you get an interest rate, and then you use this money to invest it in the back end on certain assets. And typically the money you pay to the depositors is way less than the yield you get from the assets, and you benefit from this spread, so public printing money is a very profitable business.
The issue is that this system works if there is a lot of demand for your money, so there has to be used for your money.
And this is where this is why.
We're seeing the domination of very few parties in the stable coin because if you want to use a stable coin, the stable coin needs to be liquid, otherwise it is unusable. And currently the only true liquid stable coin in the crypto space is Tethered. It might not be a great stable coin in the way it is designed, but it's super liquid and in omnipresence, so people really use it, at least the people that are in crypto today. Now, whether this is good enough for the future of crypto,
it's not for me to tell. I have opinions, of course, but it's not for me to tell now. So let's say that everyone wants to print a stable coin. The reason why it's difficult for everyone to go their own way is because you imagine, if you have ten twenty fifty stable coins, you are fractionalizing late the liquidity. And if you fractionalize the liquidity, there is not a real use for stable coin. If there's not a real market for your stable coins. Who are you're selling your stable
coin into. So the fact that many institutions are thinking about issuing a stable coin, we think is not a viable solution. It's just like a race to the bottom. So what we're trying to say here is that we are like the call to action would be for institutions like Morgan Stanley, like large market makers, like some of the market makers in our cap table, the Winter Mutes, the Galaxies, the gsrs of this world is guys you think is very profitable to actually enter in the stable
coin business. So set yourselves up in a way to be compliant with the M zero requirements, and you all together meant the same stable coin. So you kind of help each other by creating something that is bigger and it's more liquid and can grow and benefit everyone so stronger together kind of approach. In order to do that, we are now launching our first issue of stable on the network that we are booth strapping. We are publishing guidelines on how those issues issues should be set up
in order to be hyper safe. For this for the backing of the stable, we will we will open source these standards to the institutions want to connect, and we will help those institutions to set themselves up to connect. So as soon as they have a good connector, which is some combination of legal structure and tact, they can actually part collateral meant the stable the same stable if they want, and use it in the network for everything.
So that we really want to empower the Stronger Together mantra, not only for the institutions, but also for other stable coin projects instead of going the wrong way and not everyone has the benefit of as the luxury of having raised the amount of mind with it just to come and participate with us Stronger Together.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And a follow questions to that, how do you verify that the issuer has the reserves? And in context of you know, there is new stable coin regulations coming in the EU, they're working in the United States, there's been questions about, you know, our certain stable coins backed appropriately, So how do you verify they have their reserves?
Yeah? Two elements for the answer.
The second one is more controversial, but I'll risk it. The first one is that we have created a system today as a set of cross checks that can allow the ongoing daily verification that the reserves are there. What it means is that we are suggesting how the vehicles that hold the reserves should set up, what are the contractual obligations of the parties that come and interact, how they should look like.
We are actually.
Planning to publish templates of those contracts to make sure that the contractual set up is as strong as possible, so that we are piggybacking on law. The second part is we are empowering a network of so called validators that have the ability to continuously check those reserves and publish signatures about what's in those reserves. And those validators are independent, so that there is an independent check ongoing, and the penalty for not having this independent check is
to be deepermissioned by the protocol. The third aspect is governance, Right, we want governance to be always ongoing on top of what's going on. So I think we have a system of several cross checks. But also we know that that part will evolve. Right at some point the reserves will exist directly on chain and we can just purchase them and put them in a smart contract.
But this is not what happens today now.
The second part of your question is that I think that the current m zero construct is not compatible with European regulation or US regulation because the US regulation and European regulation are not good enough. They are exposing the
regulator the holders to a lot of unnecessary risk. I make you an example, like you know, if the if the regulator wouldn't have would have decided not to bail Citicon Valley Bank, the circle called USDC holders would have been would have incurred like a massive loss and circle would have been doomed. And I think that when you park money in a bank account, you do it because you want to use your money, not because you want
to provide an unsecured loan to a bank. I think that there are other regulators that are more forward looking in how to actually store the reserves, like Singapore, like Dubai, like I think, I think New York as well. But telling someone that you need to back a stable coin with the posits that are sitting in a bank is not synonymous of risk free. It means that you are taking the risk of the bank, and the risk of
the bank is unsecured. If the bank goes down and you have more than one hundred thousand dollars in an account, which any stable cord issuer has you are incurring losses and it's not too safe, so it's as safe as the So I think that we are spending a lot of time, as you can imagine, in trying to make sure that the collateral backing, collateral storage, and reserve transparency is as pristine as possible, because this is very, very important for US.
Yeah.
Absolutely, I did have a question about there seems to be more demand and this is probably because the US dollar is the world reserve currency, but for US backstable coins versus euroback stable coins or any other VR currency. Is that what you're seeing and is that why you're primarily focused on US back that people around the world they want the US dollar because it has that store value, it is the well reserve currency.
Yes, absolutely, I would say US packed rather than US backed, but yes, absolutely, we are convinced that today the reserve currency of the world is a dollar and cryptoi is by definition global, so they will adopt the reserve country reserve currency of the world. At the same time, we
think this can evolve. The reason why we called the stable coin m A not M dollar or m USD or something like that is because we think that this pegging might actually change it might become a basket of currencies, it might become some sort of combination of digital assets.
We don't know. So we think that the.
Pegging, the reference, the reference currency in the world might change with time, but we think we live we live in a dollarized world and we will live in a dollarized world for a very long time.
Yeah, you brought up a great point about it might be a basketter currencies in the future as maybe maybe you know, these different countries launch their CBDCs. Maybe because it's in a digital format, it can be pulled together in a basket.
Absolutely, and then you have.
Like countries like the bricks countries are coming together and using alternatives to the US dollar, and that's a whole geopolitical thing. But they we're seeing signs of possible change.
Yes, absolutely. UH being a reserve currency. Going back to the point that printing currency is a very profitable business because you're it means that you are financed, you can finance yourself at very attractive rates.
Uh.
Printing currency is UH is a geopolitical gain. And the US, the US, the US dollar wants to protect its space.
Uh.
The I mean, I'm sure that other other geopolitical geo political and pillars want to do the same. Like funnily enough, and this is something that is shared by others in crypto. I think that stable coins that are packed backed by treasuries are doing a big favor to the US dollar. They are really empowering the US dollar as a reference currency on this new monetary stack.
Offshore dollars already exist, you know, there is this.
Weird concept of euro dollar, which is an offshore dollar that is printed outside of the banking system, a bit like as at back stable coins today, a bit like tether. This stuff already exists. You know, there are fifteen to twenty trillion dollars of euro dollars existing. It's just like it's so weird and so paiked and non standardized that people do not really know what it is, so we
can actually standardize it. But I think dollar treasury backed stable coins can do which are dollar packed, can do a huge favor to the US in maintaining their status as a reference currency of the world.
Yes, absolutely, And it was funny because I think just last week there was a report or an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal where a former speaker Paul Ryan mentioned exactly what you're saying, for the US to maintain that world reserve currency status, you need to get clarity.
We need to have that.
US backed US treasury back stable coin, and that could help maintain that status. So these yes, yeah, this is the dialogue is happening, right, Yeah.
At the same time, I think this is you know, the US, let's say, the regulated US banking system is way smaller than the universe of holders of US treasures, so a lot of most of US treasurers are sitting outside of the US, right. The natural buyers are outside of the US. So by forcing US dollar pagged stable coins to exist only originate only from the US, we
are massively limited the space. I think by allowing anyone in the world to pledge their collateral and mints the usd paged stable coins, we are really expanding this space because the holders of treasuries are way more than the
regulated banks we have in the US. Right, most of treasuries, I don't have the stats in my in my in my in my head, but I think I guess that most of treasure is US treasury are probably sitting in China, the Middle East, or in other countries which are not the US, and they want to have some sort of US reserves.
Mm hmm. What do you think the stable coin market looks like in five This is a hard question. It looks like in five years. You know, let's say we have different iterations of regulations, we have more DeFi protocols such as m zero, and you know, you have some of these big commercial payment companies like Ripples said they're going to launch a stable coin. Yeah, PayPal has a stable coin. We talked about Circle and Tether. What do you think the stable coin market looks like in five years.
That's a very difficult question, obviously, right, because it really depends on how much what would be the next big use case of crypto. I think the first use case of crypto was trading, so they needed a trading pair. That's why Tether was very powerful. Then DeFi came in and Circle had a pretty strong peg, and so the Circle grew. Now we're starting to use to see the use of stable coins for emittances or in fintech. So
it's really difficult to tell. But in my opinion, in ten years, no one would care what is the flavor and the brand of the stable coin. We will all look at our application that has a dollar amount and we don't know how actually this dollar amount is.
Created.
And stable coins will be very powerful back back end stacks, so in ten years people will not care and I think there will be a few big ones. But this market is going to be two trillion dollars, so there will probably be like ten twenty big players in five years. I think there is the risk of having more because everyone will just rush and try to run their own and I think we will still have like sixty seventy percent of the market dominated by very few players and
the rest just like a long tail. So there's gonna be a lot of activity I think the next four five years, because it's a very interesting space.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm already seeing rumblings and talks of random Wall Street firms and different folks look into launch stable coins. So it will see how things pan out. That recently, you guys had a thirty five million dollar funding round led by being Capital Crypto. Tell us about that.
Yeah, So we have been lucky that to have the belief of amazing investors since the very beginning of our.
Story.
I think we raised a twenty two point five million dollar seed at the very beginning of twenty twenty three.
It was led by Pantera. It was already a very very large seed.
In all standards, but then you know, we we have been discussing about very high quality investors since forever, right so Pain offered like their interest to actually come into the cap table at the beginning of the year. We really liked them because I think that they could provide they can provide this connectivity with the fintech space that we were looking for. And then we started conversations and I think that conversations then materialized into a Series eight.
It was heavily oversubscribed, but it was I think a very successful Series eight. We know, raising thirty familion dollars. And I think that another great success we had was not only the participation of being Capital Crypto and our current investors, but also the participation of some of the best strategic players in crypto.
Right.
So, Galaxy Digital is an investor of ours. We intermuwe GSR Caladan SCB ten X, which is the venture fund of one of the largest Asian financial institutions. Because our ambition is really to build an infrastructure for crypto savvy and crypto friendly institutions to expand their footprint in the industry. So I think we have an incredible cap table. I could couldn't be more like, happier or more proud of
the cap table we put together. Now we need to Now we need to demonstrate the guys they invested the money with the right team HM and.
What's on their roadmap for the remainder of twenty twenty four for you guys.
So we launched technically a large part of the stack on chain in conjunction with the race. So our governance protocol is on May not our poor protocol is on May at itself, and we will start issuing the first large chunks of stable coins through the protocol in the next few weeks and then the next The remainder of the year, of the next two years is going to be integrations, just like convincing venues that m is a
better stable coin to integrate with. So new chains, new DeFi protocols, new lending markets, new exchanges, new large users, and on the other side, on the supply side, as we say, convince issuers or want to be issuers and projects of stable coins that they should join forces and
issue on the mz on network. So I think most most of Our job in the next twelve months twenty four months is going to be in just educating the market, learning from the market feedback, and just convincing projects and issuers and participants and distribution venues to just integrate with us. So we will spend a lot of time outside of the company, not necessarily outside. We spent the first eighteen months of our journey, as always happens, very focused in building.
Now I think we need to we need to integrate what we built with.
The rest of the world.
Yeah, for sure. I did want to get your thoughts on the crypto market at large. Obviously, there's been a lot of success with the bigcoin et launch, Wall Street is here, There's been incredible inflows, and just recently the SEC started to approve the etherorem's body t apps. What are your thoughts on the et aps and as the success they've had so far.
I think from a business perspective, let's start from an innovator's perspective. I think from an innovator's perspective, it is an incredible success story. I think never like unprecedented that an asset like bitcoin that started started in the cipherpunk cycles and was antagonized by pretty much everyone managed without
any centralized coordination. To go through all the required processes and be the backing of one of the largest ETFs in the world is astonishing, And I think this is really an incredible positive story, whatever you believe in or not, the fact that a disordered movement can go through the ranks of Wall Street and take central place. It's it's just like for a builder and disruptor is spectacular from
a business perspective. It's also transformational. I mean, like the amount of liquidity that will come in the compartment directly or indirectly through the ETFs is going to be transformational for this space. There's going to be more money for builders to build, more money flowing through the pipes of crypto and defy requiring also higher standards for builders. And then naturally it will provide more familiarity for users about what those.
What those.
Those technology stacks can do. And I think on this the ETHEREOTHF ETF is going to be even more transformational than the bigcoin ETF. I think the big coin use case of being the uh like the digital version of gold now is it's completely accepted and I think this stuff will keep growing.
But itself, itsself contained.
I think the ethereum e TF with Ethereum consider being considered almost a common good. That is, like it's like a socialized platform to build interesting stuff on top. Like the global computer is even more transformational because the equidy is going to go straight into that. So I think it is it is impossible to overstate the importance of this for for the sector.
So it's it's it's pretty exciting.
Yeah, so it's on a noteway Etheroreum. Do you view it as you mentioned global computer? Do you view it as a software almost where anybody can plug in open source software.
I think Ethereum blurs the.
The distinction between what is software when is what is hardware? I mean, it's a software that allows the use of shared hardware. It's defacto hardware, but it's it's a it's
it's it's somewhere in between. But I think, in my opinion, is it's software hardware infrastructure that allows anyone to actually build something great without the cost of bootstrapping, Like an infrastructure that that provides security so anyone can do and do stuff by sharing this consensus security that the ethereum is and this consensus memory that ethereum is, so I think it's something, it's something in between.
Yeah, what are your thoughts on cryptoregulations? Obviously around the globe there's different countries working on these things. Here in the United States, there's been a lot of movement lately with Congress and Democrats joining Republicans where it's going to help bring clarity between what's the security what's not, what's the SEC's role, what's the CFTC's role, because that's hindering a lot of innovators here in the United States at least.
Do you think we see comprehensive regulations by next year?
This is.
This is too difficult for me. I don't think we will. I'm pessimistic in the short term. I'm optimistic in the long term for the same reason, which is political pragmatism.
I think this is this this issue is extremely.
Charged up politically, and politicians in good or bad faith, will use it as an issue to rally their own electorate on. It's also a very charged up point because there are powerful lobbies that are lobbying one side or the other. But I think in the long term, I think that the technological superiority of cryptoids so obvious that it will keep pushing use cases, and use cases will keep pushing interests of the public, and politicians tend to
listen to the public because the public votes them. So I think I think that in the next in the next year, I'm not too optimistic, although I hope for a constructive and an open, an open and good faith debate about about regulation required regulation. But I'm not too optimistic that we're going to find absolute clarity. But I think the direction is relatively clear, and I'm very optimistic over the next five to ten.
Yeah, I'm in agreement with you. There. Look, I got some wrap up questions here for you. First, if you could create your own Matter verse, what would the team be.
I have a I have pretty schizophrenic interests. There will be some sort of like radio player, one type of like randomic universe with everything in.
It nice and rapid fire questions.
Favorite food.
I'm Italian and I'm a Japanese obsessed person, so I think I would say both like Italian cuisine and Japanese one minimal great great ingredients, quality of the ingredients, and attention of the craft.
Mm hm.
Favorite musician are bad.
Ah. Going back to the ready player, one thing. I am an opera fan I love I love Italian opera, but I also love hip hop, mainly his.
Cost All School hip hop.
M favorite movie.
Tampopo is a Japanese movie about food from the seventies.
Pretty niche but pretty good.
I'll have to check that out. I haven't heard about it, but I'll check it out. Favorite book.
I think Ulysses by James Joyce.
Mm hmm. And when you're not working at M zero, what are you doing for fun?
I used to be a semi professional and and sathlete, so I'm not competitive anymore, but I still do a lot of sports. So I'm a mountaineer. I do a lot of like very very long races in the mountains without sleeping and when my wife allows me. So family is the most important thing for me.
Better will work, for.
Sure, Luca, really great chatting with you. I'm excited for the future updates around I'M zero. But thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks Tony, A pleasure.