IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews
00:03:34 · Saumya Saxena
[00:03:34] S1: If you're very focused on tokenized uh equities at the moment, and because just very similar to stable coins, I think where stable coins were two, three years ago, uh tokenized equities are now where they're in that new uh era where we've brought this asset class on chain, which means that any stock anywhere in the world somebody can invest in and trading 24-7, right? So, for example, if a US company stock, like say Apple, somebody wanted to invest in earlier from India, it's possible now, but there are lots of brokerages. And the more brokerages that are involved in such a setup, the higher the cost uh for you to get that asset, right? When every single asset is being brought on chain in a tokenized capacity, it means that you can A trade in a free market uh 24-7, which again, like it's it doesn't depend on the stock exchange of a particular asset where it is listed, but uh it has just like it means like fairer trades, it means more transparency, it means like better uh liquidity and so on. So I think uh very, very useful as to as an asset class to be you know brought on-chain. And uh it in increases investor access in a very deep way. Uh I'm very excited about this because I think people don't realize how creating economic value for everyone uh starts from these small things that can you enable access to an asset class? And uh I'm glad that we are able to, you know, like we're pushing the frontier in making that happen. So you've got lots of tokenized stocks on base. Uh in fact, we I think we launched those I think six weeks ago. And since then, we've now like 40. I think now we're touching 100 uh stock tokenized equities on base. And uh and we're gonna continue pushing that barrier, right? So by the end of this quarter, we're gonna be at some 500 odd uh tokenized equities on chain. And uh and that means like equities across the world, so US markets, uh, Korean markets, Japanese markets, Hong Kong markets. And suddenly now a consumer in the Philippines can access all of those assets and uh can hedge against different things. And that is not uh it's not just that, right? Uh enabling firstly, just that is a very big piece that you can enable such a broad uh access and like uh fair trade for 24-7 timelines.
00:06:02 · Saumya Saxena, Puja Sharma
But beyond that, once an asset class is on chain, uh you can be creative with it because it is now permissionless and somebody could deploy liquidity pools and create uh like a lending borrowing system. So you could potentially lend your Apple stock and borrow against it, which again is not uh as freely possible uh in the current world. And that is again just one component of lending and borrowing, but you can be way, way, way more creative uh with these asset classes, and you can put that as collateral for something else. So the more asset classes that come on-chain, think of tokenized equities as a primitive that is now on chain, which enables more and more things to you know flush up and flourish. [00:06:48] S0: Now, speaking of elephant in the room, and elephant in the room is always AI. So, what role will AI agents play in the future of financial services? And how will on-chain infrastructure enable autonomous payments and transactions?
00:07:03 · Saumya Saxena
[00:07:03] S1: On AI, I think the way we've been talking about AI finance uh for a while. And uh we started treating AI agents almost as customers, and we're now very confident that we're starting to see that, right? Like we've built out the x402 Protocol uh alongside other uh major industry players. And uh I I feel we're at that juncture where it's started to happen that AI agents are now transacting for you know digital commerce, uh for across supply chain to buy different things, retail, uh, and even like fund managers are using agents to scout uh for assets to invest in. And and they're moving from the research layer to the execution layer, where they can now go from hey, I spotted an asset that you should invest in, for example, to making that that transaction, right? And that means it's it's almost going into this like autonomous trajectory where we've started treating them as a real customer segment that we want to build for. So, and that is just online trading, right? So there's obviously a large element of financing, there's an element of payments uh with people using more and more AI uh in their daily lives. Like, for example, even I, when I'm looking at booking my trip uh for New Year's, I'm looking, I'm just asking Claude, hey, dude, like where should I be going? And then Claude will point me, okay, these are the few countries in Europe that you could look at. You can have a great Christmas here. Then the next question I'm gonna ask Instinct, uh, which is another like a model that I use, is I'll ping Instinct and say, hey, now this is where I want to go, find me places, right? And then it's gonna go to those places and make bookings for me, right? So it's gone from recommendation to bookings, all it needs is a wallet. And uh, in fact, we just signed a deal with Cloudflare where all of Cloudflare's wallets are now on base and uh settling x402 transactions on base. The way to think of it, and I'm going on on like a monologue here, but the way to think of it is that every like these LLM labs scraped all your data. That was because there was no way for you to pay for your data, right? If they could. So now Cloudflare has this wallet, uh, which is a base wallet and it settles in USDC. Essentially, you can now charge a fee for someone to scrape your data.
00:09:30 · Saumya Saxena, Puja Sharma
It's almost like every single page on the internet will have its own uh way to monetize, and it's all gonna happen on online. Stablecoin infrastructure and the work that we've been doing and building. [00:09:43] S0: As blockchain evolves beyond crypto, what foundational infrastructure is needed to support the next generation of payments, trading, and digital financial services?
00:09:52 · Saumya Saxena
[00:09:52] S1: Yeah, so here I think there are lots of pieces that we have focused on. And it's essentially you want to now level up the game on the infrastructure side that enables the innovation that we spoke about earlier. So on the base side, we recently we've been constantly upgrading uh the base chain. And uh, in fact, the recent recently we came up with our own token standard, the B20, which is very useful for you know tokenized stocks, uh for different types of asset uh classes, contains validity transactions. And it's for essentially like builders to use the infrastructure that we are uh creating, specifically tailored to the on-chain finance case. And uh and I think we're gonna continue to do that, right? So we're gonna like the the focus is how do we increase reliable liquidity and market access for different ecosystems and participants in those ecosystems. Uh, we're gonna see a lot of uh, in fact, we are working very closely with lots of uh stable coin providers across geographies because people want to transact in their currency and uh bringing those uh you know different stable points on chain and helping them get deeper liquidity, deeper access to markets, distribution, and so on. So yeah, I think we're gonna continue leveling up uh in a way, and blockchain is gonna fade into the background, right? It's uh it's gonna be an obvious backend uh for the software that we built. It's all gonna live on chain. And our focus is to make sure that we have we're there's this notion of you know crypto and blockchain being like perceived in terms of speculation and volatility versus the value that it brings around transparency, around privacy, around uh verification. So I think that is increasingly changing, and we found a lot of uh enterprises now going from hey, should we be you know uh tokenizing this to now, hey, we are going to tokenize this? How can we use this best? So the conversation with enterprises has changed. The conversation across the board uh has changed, and now people see blockchains as necessary infrastructure in helping them grow.
00:12:16 · Puja Sharma
[00:12:16] S0: How can India's developer talent, fintech ecosystem, and digital public infrastructure position the country as a global hub for on-chain innovation?