The Missing Layer of Institutional Onchain Finance

Transcript

[applause] >> Public blockchains have the potential to become the world's financial rails. But public money will never becomes the world's money. And this is exactly what I want to talk about today. I'm Paul Henry Cayfas. I'm the founder and CEO of Unlink. Uh we basically are a company that does privacy and compliance infrastructure for companies that want to move money on chain.

The reals are real. On chain money is not theoretical anymore. We moved around 9 trillion dollars last year in real volume. So it's like you discount the bots, you discount wash trading, you discount these things, and then we have around 9 trillion dollars of actual volume on chain. Which is about five times more than PayPal. Which means that this these things actually work. It's not a POC anymore. And what is extremely interesting, and I don't think that I need to convince you about it, is that because especially like you wouldn't be in this room if we were potentially not convinced of it or maybe you're trying to get convinced, which I will.

Um those are fundamentally better rails than what we have in traditional finance today. Um and they're better rails because the rails that we have today are pretty slow. They take days to settle. They're costly. There's a lot of intermediaries. There's a lot of fees involved. Uh there's a lot of borders. Usually it's more uh silos that are interconnected. Um it's uh basically running on banking hours, so quite 9:00 to 5:00. It's very static. Uh and there's no financial benefits really of using them. They're very commoditized.

But when you compare this to on chain rails, they're just fundamentally better rails. You can do the same things, you can own money, you can create assets, you can move these assets, you can do finance, but they gives you a lot of benefits, which is you can have instant settlements, you have near free transactions, it's global, 24/7, it's fully programmable. And so, most importantly for companies, this means millions of dollars in fees lowered or additional potential revenue. And so, this is the question, like why isn't every single person or company not rushing towards this? Why isn't every single financial company or CFO like integrating stable coins and blockchains

directly into their stack if they knew they could actually have that? So, it's it's very very interesting to ask this question. I want to do a quick show of hands. Can you raise your hand if you use blockchain in your daily [clears throat] life, like every day? Okay, so I think there was one person, maybe two. And so, that's super interesting, right? Because imagine this conference is the most tech savvy, blockchain savvy you will have in the world.

So, if not if we don't even use our own technology, is the world actually going to use it? It's quite crazy. So, we we believe that it's better rails. We believe that on these better rails we can create better money. But then, if you looked around when people raised their hands, there's only two people in this room. So, I think it's it's very very interesting to think about that and to try to understand why. Realistically, there's less than 1% of the whole of humanity today that are using these rails. And so, the penetration is extremely low.

And so, this is the question and this is what I'm going to talk about in my talk is while we all believe that these are better rails, uh that could make companies millions of dollars every single year, these companies are not using it at scale. Users are not using it at scale. So, something's wrong. We have better rails, but we're not using them. And so, the point that I'm trying to make today is that we created better rails, but we did not create yet better money.

And to understand this, we need to go back to fundamentally what money is. Money was created around 5,000 years ago, and money had how it always worked. And fundamentally, money was private by default. So, you could know how much you had. Probably, your bank could know how much you had. Maybe the taxman could know how much you had, but nobody else. It was private to you and a few counterparties. So, it was something that we call selective disclosure. But, today what we have is something that is fully public. So, every single transaction that you make on a blockchain leaks all of your information.

So, this is very interesting when you think about it or that's actually quite bad and quite crazy because from cowrie shells to cash to gold to bank transfers, we've had this um this very consistent way of working with money, which is money is private and I can use it how I I like it to. But now, there's this anomaly and we broke the fundamental model of money by making it fully public. And so, imagine especially now with AI, I just need an internet connection and a few tokens in an afternoon, and if you use this at scale, I can know everything about your company, everything about your flows,

and everything about you. Uh and so this is very dangerous. And I'm going to prove that point where with public blockchains and public money, everything leaks. So it's not usable, it's not integrable by companies. And there's multiple examples that I have here, but then a very easy example is basically being a CFO. So you're the CFO of a company, you need to run payroll, and now you're at the end of the month, okay, I'm going to send payroll to people, I'm going to do it on chain. If your companies have enabled that, Ripple and others.

But then now the issue that you have is that what you everybody can see the salaries of other people. So now you have one employee that's coming to you and it's like, "Hey, sorry, like why am I getting paid less than this guy? Or why is my salary immediately like under like the average? Can I have a raise?" And so now politically it's impossible in the company. Uh all your treasuries, so your balance sheet is public, etc. All the B2B payments, all your partners, all your counterparties. Every single trade you take on chain is fully public. So it's not just very usable realistically by companies and institutions today.

And it stops being about business at one point. Especially this year in 2025, research says that over 72 physical attacks have happened in the world. Which means that if you own like money on chain, if you're a company that uses money on chain, if you pay your employees on chain, if you do these things, then most likely you're very there's a high probability that this is an actual risk. Uh so there's been kidnappings, there's been torture, there's been really really horrendous things that have been happening because of the publicity of the money.

Uh and because we broke these rules. And so if people start using this at scale, which fundamentally they should because they're better rails, and we should be able to create better money on better rails, um this becomes a very, very big issue. And so, this is the real reason why adoption stalls. We have our answer here. Is that we broke the fundamental rule of money around the privacy and the selective disclosure of your assets. Uh and so, we need to build some systems that adapt to how companies and users and people have been using money for the last 5,000 years. We shouldn't force people into a new system. The the

hardest thing that you can do in the world is actually breaking behavior. And so, what companies require is privacy by default, compliance and controls. They need workflows and approvals. They need integrations that fit, like APIs and SDKs that are used to integrate in into their flows. But they But what they get with blockchains and these better rails is everything being public instantly by default. Uh compliance that's kind of bolted on and not really inside the chain. Uh they need to move into a new world that they don't fully understand. They don't They don't understand the risks or the benefits. They need to adapt to the chain and integrate the chain. Well, we should build systems that adapt to actual companies and not the opposite.

Um And a lot of people have understood that. Well, it's It's not the first time people talk about privacy. Privacy has been here for many, many, many years in in crypto. And there's been many very successful projects and less successful projects. But I would say that it has never It It always stayed pretty niche. It always stayed pretty niche because basically, we were between a rock and a hard place, especially companies that wanted to use blockchains privately. Because what they had the choice of is using private mixers that were not really built for them at all. That was more of a Cypherpunk ideal.

And that were mostly non-compliant or tainted. And so this was totally off-limits for companies and non-integrable. And then on the other side, you had a lot of companies and some of these companies I I worked for and I built that were building new blockchains that are fully private, that are fully compliant, new L1s, new L2s that are incredible projects. But then now the difficulty with that is also that you have you're breaking the network effects. So you have no liquidity, you have no users, you need to bootstrap a whole ecosystem, you have no protocols, no developers, most likely a new virtual machine and a new language. And so you you lose all the Lindy effect and all the work that we've done on Ethereum in

the past 10-15 years. And so basically these were kind of the two choices that companies and people had and I think these were pretty two pretty bad choices. But it changes now. What we need to have and the missing piece basically in my vision is something that encompasses three main things. And the three main things are privacy. So you should be able to use blockchains privately, have private money on chain and benefit from these better rails privately. You should be able to have compliance, AML, anti-terrorism financing, potentially KYC, potentially KYB, have all these things fully uh first-class citizens.

And you should have it fully integratable into your flows. So APIs, SDKs, dashboards, and using the chains that you want to use. Uh most companies and most institutions wants to use chains with network effects. Um and so these chains, Ethereum, Solana, and other chains that have a bunch of users, that have a bunch of users um because they're important for them and for their flows and also for their trust. And so this is in my vision the missing piece and this is exactly what we've been building at Unlimit. We're basically a compliance and privacy engine for companies that want to move money on chain. We have multiple booths like one just there, one just there.

We're also talking at the startup stage and we're going to do a a lot of events and I'm very very excited to basically build this world. I want to envision a future with you and with our partners. We're partnering with Monad, we're partnering with Euler and many many more people around bringing these flows on chains, bringing companies, bringing institutions, bringing users. And the future that I want to build together potentially with your companies and your users is how can we bring all your flows and trillions of dollars fundamentally onto these better rails. And I think that we're going to do this with compliance, with integrations and with privacy.

Thank you.