Hey everyone, We are recording at Halburn's Access Summit at the New York Stock Exchange and joining me is Jacques Bouchang, who is the CEO of Halburn. Jack, great to see.
You, great to be here. Nice to have you with us today.
Yeah, really excited. I love what Alburn is doing. I love this summit And did you guys are put together? You know, security is such a core pillar for this asset class, the crypto acid class to grow. So we last spoke in the Q four of last year at the chin Lay conference.
Indeed we did. Yeah, yeah, So what's.
New with Halburn? What can you tell us as far as updates?
Yeah, what's new with Alborne is that we have a fiscal year behind us, which is good. It was a great year. We had a fantastic Q four. We see a lot of traction, which is a reflection on the traction of digital asset in the market itself. Yes, we see a lot of adoption which is also rally from traditional financial institution into that new class of assets. But also even more importantly from my perspective, in the tokenization of asset being the new promise.
Land right, Yeah, the toganization race has really heated up. A lot of big institutions, many on Wall Street, bank stock exchanges, and fintech firms are tokenizing assets and many different assets.
They do. They do, but you know what, it's not even the beginning of the beginning if you think about it. I was speaking yesterday. We were running a big workshop with twenty of the most important financial institutions on digital asset custody. So the topic was how to optimize what are the difference versus classical type of facets and one of the participants represented a very large bank. It told us, oh, we have one smart contract, so you see, still a long way.
Yeah, so tip of the iceberg, right, yes, yes, yes we believe.
You know, most probably we add in twenty twenty five something like twenty two billion of ascetic equivalent tokenized and most probably this market could be as big as a thirty trillion in twenty thirty four. So depending on the forecast. For instance, cities are seeing something like five trillion for twenty thirty of tokenized assets. So it's it's gaining momentum. Jaques.
It feels like they're taking the entire trad fire world and putting it on chain. It seems that's the end goal. We're gonna put all assets on chain and open up a whole new world of markets twenty four to seven trading, global liquidity coming in from different parts of the world.
And access and fraction able to find. So that's incredible. Yeah, I wish this is really the thing that will happen. So we at Alborne we call that the third digital revolution of the financial industry. To think about it, eighties nineties that was just digitizing stuff. Then twenty ten and so on, it was the cloudification of things which happened,
which is not complete. We still have plenty of a cobbol on mainframe in banks, and now that new transformation which is even more impactful because it's not only putting digital things which were in the physical world, but it's much more transforming completely some of the key processes, some of the core tenets of the banking system. So we are very excited about what's happening and we are here to make it safe.
So it's allks about the summit that we're at today, and there's a lot of institutions that are here. It's amazing the names Swift and much more.
Yeah, so we have great names. Indeed, both in the audience and on stage. That's absolutely right. We have large banks like Socieation General, the French Bank, but we have also the FinTechs. You know, we partner with gray Scale, we have people from Robin Wood, so we have a very broad i would say representation of the financial services market.
Indeed, yeah, it seems everyone Jacques maybe last year with the change of the approach to crypto in the US, it opened up for everyone, stock exchanges, banks, financial institutions, they now have to have a crypto strategy.
It was a kind of unleash the potential effect.
Right.
So first the Genius Act, which is solving a lot of questions around stable con which is really making a big difference. And now everybody is working on this Clarity Act. By the way, we had we had one of those panels today at the end the moderate or ask about, okay,
what about the Clarity Act? Will that happen, what will be the impact, because it's really classifying those assets in the right buckets, like a utility token, which are cryptocurrency essentially being ruled by the CFTC as opposed to of course organized bonds, which we'll stay with SEC. So I
think we are. We are getting in a lot of clarity, as the name calls for it, and it will require when we get there, a lot of discipline from everybody, especially in the financial institution, in really taking into consideration the risk which are linked with that potential. So it's both opportunity and a massive risk, and we can certainly speak about that.
Yeah, let's let's talk about that. You know the institutions, Howard, what are their thoughts when they come to you? They help burn Jacques rob can you help us to have a security strategy and to make sure we're doing things right when we set up our smart contracts or re tokenizing.
So when we speak about those institutions, we are not speaking about I would say a monolytic block of people in the bank. You have compliance, you have legal department, you have cyber security, you have the product team. Within the product team, you have the guys in charge of digital asset okay, and you have a competing forces. So you have the digital asset guys who wants to go fast and make it happen and they don't want to miss you know the famous statement fear of missing out.
So it's really that what's happening. But then you have the guardrails of all the big financial institution, which are legal compliance and cybersecurity. So in many instances we are a sort of bridge because at Alborne, so first we are fully dedicated to financial services. This is the business we understand. Okay. Second, we are indeed speaking the language of the cyber security guy because we do a lot of things in what I call the whip to cyber security.
But we also understand fully what the digital asset team wants to achieve and accomplish. So we are able then to create that bridge with everybody. So in many cases, I know many cases where we have been used to make the education of everybody, putting sixty executive in a room from all those different discipline banking discipline, and we do the education to try to create that common denominator.
Yeah, you know, that's really great insight because there's so many stakeholders, as you said, within an organization, you have to get them all on the same page educate them. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense.
So this year I was sup, if I may real quick, I was speaking with a very large asset manager today, the head of the digital asset product strategy, and she's that person is recruiting team, her team, but she's very much aware of those internal hurdles sort of she will have to face because there is still this confusion digital asset is cliptocurrency, and then there is this gray zone and money laundry and violation of KYC and all that, and we are speaking about something else here.
Wow. Yeah, it's a lot of moving parts and components.
Yes, and we we are here really to help. We are here to help because when also that's also a very important conversation with the classical cyber security team. The classical cyber security team in the bank, they are used
to web to space. They are used to threat which can be apt so advanced persistent threat, but which are more in a sense for you know what, ransomware type of things or data leak or combination of both, where you can really do classical manage detection and response, whereas in Web three on chain there is no such a thing as response because when the bad guys are on chain, the money is out almost immediately, yes, okay, and you don't have that in the web too classical world, even
for a functional institutions. So that's why you need to shift cyber security to the left to do preventive cybersecurity.
Yeah. Absolutely, And I'm assuming you're seeing incredible demand because a lot of these institutions now have a crypto strategy. So it sounds like your business is growing and there's going to be even probably more demand this year. Yes, once legislation and these things get Yes.
Yes, it's growing. We see the momentum. We are surfing tide currently. But it's also because we are most probably as far as I'm concerned, the only provider of that type of service is sitting at this intersection of Web two, Web three, CRATI FI, DeFi. We understand all those worlds. We have eight hundred customers in total. Of course, a lot of them are smaller Web three type of entities of DeFi, you know, of a decentralized exchange, all those guys.
But we have more and more enterprise class customers. In fact or enterprise class customer business grew by four hundred persons here on here in twenty five. So that's where the big big game is happening. Oh.
Absolutely, So what's on your rob map? You know, what are the high priorities for you this year?
Yeah? So in terms of a priority, so we are so we are. We are automating a lot of our operation okay, and I will not use the AI buzzworld, but it's pervasive at our in our systems. AI is pervasive in our value chain, okay. So it's supporting every step we are doing with the customer, from the scoping to the project to the final report. You know what I mean. This is what what we are doing with AI.
So we will continue to advance that and to make it even more and more agile and lean so that customers are relegating the highest value for their money and also the highest quality because AI is efficiency but also effectiveness delivering the right level of quality. That's one thing. The second thing we really want to focus on strongly on a custody because digital asset custody is one of the big challenges. It's a totally different discipline than traditional custody.
If you wish traditional custody, it's a pointer to a central security depository right with some legal and process constraint. Whereas digital asset custody it's a technical discipline with all the processes constraint on top. So you need to master that technical discipline. So we are doing a lot of that. We'll be publishing white paper on that to help our customers structure their thinking around all those class season assets.
That's exciting, Jack, and I'm really excited to listen to some of the talks today and everything that's happening here Access. But thank you so much for joining me, Thanks for your time. This episode is brought to you by v Chain. V chain is one of the top layer one enterprise blockchains in the crypto asset class and they are getting adoption by many big brands and companies around the world who are built Web three and decentralized application technologies. I've
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