Episode highlights

“People are constantly probing these blockchains to look for structural weaknesses in the software in the design, and also the economic exploits. Occasionally they find them, generally on the application layers rather than the infrastructure itself.” – 4:20 – Martin Worner

“There’s a massive, untapped potential for automation. We’ve tried to automate a lot over decades, but there’s still a lot of manual processing. The loss of automation can happen in between institutions, and we cut out some of the middle intermediaries that it’s done in such a way that you’re not introducing any further risks by doing that. So the cryptography and the automation secures that and mitigates the risks that you’d otherwise think will come in.” – 5:35 – Martin Worner

“I’m mixed about CBDCs, because you suddenly have an entity that can track and trace everybody’s spending, which is a bit of a problem. You’re trying to balance that with your right to enjoy some freedoms by keeping how I spend my money private.” – 8:00 – Martin Worner

“When you’ve got such poor governance, no segregation of duty, no real clarity about what your customer assets are for and how you use them, etc, then that’s not good. My assessment of Crypto at the moment is that we’re staggering around punch-drunk.” – 13:20 – Martin Worner

“In Europe, we’ve seen the very welcome MICA Act. It’s not perfect, but it’s an EU regulation. So that means it goes across the 27. It’s not a directive that the national parliaments can tweak and amend and adapt to their own benefits. This is across Europe. So that means you’ve got regulatory certainty right across the bloc.” – 17:05 – Martin Worner