Why Trump's World Liberty Fi Chose Aptos (and What It Means for Crypto’s Future)

Transcript

you know, the entire world is going to move on chain when it comes to finance, right? Uh we're gonna start to get paid uh onchain whether it's gonna be stables or native crypto and those stables would probably earn yield through your point around like these these different kinds of ass these different tokens have different yield structures. How do you see the injection of USD1 into aos and into world refi? How do you see this playing out as it proliferates into the rest of these defi ecosystem? Welcome back to the RUP. >> This is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation.

>> Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. >> We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. Welcome Avery Ching to the rollup TV. It is an absolute pleasure to host you here on the rollup. Um, tons of action. The plight back to America is in full force when it comes to crypto. the regulatory landscape is evolving. You guys are uh are are certainly aware of this because World Liberty Finance USD1 very Ethereum or excuse me, not Ethereum, very America aligned uh when it comes to the things that are happening on Aptos. Avery, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to

have you. >> Fantastic to be here, Robbie. Looking forward to this. >> Yeah, same here. So, um I just got back from Singapore and and Seoul and and the whole conference tour. I think you did as well. It's a shame that we didn't, you know, get to meet up out there, but uh one of the things that I picked up was that like there's a certainly a retail audience out there, but when it comes to building, it comes to institutional access and developments, it's happening right here in America. Um maybe you could talk about what you're seeing on a more general note. You know, you guys were in America, you guys were out of America, now coming back. So maybe you could just kind of tell your story about how you saw the landscape evolve and and how you were able to navigate that as a founder.

>> So I think the story of uh blockchains in America is definitely a complicated one given the previous administration to the current one. Uh our story begins back actually while we were at Meta working on the Libra project uh DM project and I think you know definitely uh ran into some pitfalls and some challenges working with the existing administration at that time as well as the current regulatory climate. Obviously things have changed a lot with um with Donald Trump taking the presidency and the crypto forward effort and I think all the you know positive work coming out of the st the stable and genius as well as the clarity acts. Um I was very fortunate to actually participate in a hearing and a testimonial uh from the house agriculture committee on the clarity act and uh uh definitely try to promote as much as possible and it seems like the

there's tremendous progress being made in this space. So um we've we've definitely been full force and trying to be upfront in in our policies and you know working closely with um the administration with our our our partners across the space our investors to push forward towards responsible regulation in America uh especially towards DeFi for American citizens as well as um with um clarity around how how does market structure work uh for companies like ours that want to be based in America. So, it's been a tremendous experience. I think, you know, talking about world liberty, they have a lot of the same goals, right? They want to see DeFi and cryptocurrency expand in America and the world beyond and they're amazing partners to work with in this space starting off with USD1. Um, but then

many more things to come. >> Why do you think the the team backing and obviously there's there's the Trump family that's affiliated with World Liberty Fi. Why do you think the Trump team chose Aptos as one of the launch partners for World Liberty Fi? Yeah, we're definitely proud to be chosen as like their first kind of move partner for World Liberty 5 for USD1. Um, I think there's just a really strong alignment of mission, right? Like they we've met the team team many times starting from our time in Washington uh throughout the months until now and we've always been looking for ways to work together. Uh I think there's just a strong alignment of like seeing the same kind of values and like looking for that American innovation to be present and you know we're definitely happy that they're launching their stable coin but it's just one of many products right

they have a debit card announced they have other retail apps and consumer apps being planned and uh we want to do more with them I mean because partnering the USD1 integration with uh the fastest and cheapest way to move money around the world just enables it to to to reach many more customers to uh replace existing obsolete systems and to kind of support distribution of scale that you know was built for billions of people around the world. >> And for anyone who's unfamiliar, USDU1 is the stable coin that is born out of the world liberty ecosystem. It it's similar and I think there's a lot of synergy here because uh world liberty is a friendly fork of a and so it's actually got very similar smart contract infrastructure in the back end. It's going to be uh uh its front end will be

very directed towards um US citizens. It'll be it'll be friendly in the US and it'll have the same sort of integration that a has with go but it'll be world liberty and USD1 and and this is generally part of the US's strategy for stable coins. I think you know we we've seen this burgeoning market for stable coins. It's expanding. We're seeing public stable coins like the state of Wyoming is launching a stable coin. Private stable coins um where Liberty Fi isn't going to be an issuer. I'm curious how how do you see the injection of USD1 into Aptodos and into World Liberty? How do you see this playing out as it

proliferates into the rest of the APOS DeFi ecosystem? What do you think the the effect of maybe generally the the effect of a growth in the stable coin supply, but then more specifically USD1? How do you think that will affect the rest of DeFi? Yeah. So going back again, Apptos was built as a payments engine. Uh and um that's kind of evolved now the global trading engine which is like serving not just stable coin assets moving around but all assets in the world but stable coins are a huge part of that. We've got all the major stables on a today USDT, USDC, USD, PYUSD, now USD1 and more to come for sure. Um we think that there are different use cases for different stables and uh so seeing

like USD1 start to grow extremely rapidly. I think in one in in a day it like went from zero to like 30 million uh of TVL and it's going to be growing extremely rapidly I suspect given the high demand for the networks and also we've seen a strong proliferation of it into different D5 products Hyperion um Panora um you can today use your wallet and swap into USD1 super easily and super cheap right it's going to be less than half a second and cost you a hundth of a cent like basically free uh so I think it'll grow very very fast um and but we also see that you know if you look at the various trends USDT has been growing extremely fast in Aptos we're now like number two by by transactions number four by TVL um just starting from the beginning of the year really and

then USDC has also been growing very rapidly I think we're the fastest growing USD chain since their launch um and it's no surprise stables are really meant for a blockchain that can move assets extremely quickly extremely cheap and a lot of that transactional volume today happens on centralized exchanges but definitely to proliferate more towards the kind of remittance use cases and then payments use cases over time >> the wait is Over the Talis test net is live. Be part of the revolution. Join now at testnet.talis.network. Relay low fees, lightning speed, and the power of multi-chain at your fingertips.

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Some of that is attributable to the stable coins. USD1, World Liberty F, all these successful launches. What what else? What what do you think is a prime some of the primary drivers of the TVL growth growth in transactions the general activity that you guys are seeing in appos now? >> I mean if I got like paid every time someone came and told me like I used UST on uptos to like transfer my funds around from different networks I you know we wouldn't have to be working anymore but like that's the usual use case we hear about. It's just a cheaper and faster way to send money around. Um you know you don't have to wait for those like confirmations. It's it's there instantaneously. There's no guessing games. there's no counterparty risk. Uh money transfers very freely and efficiently and that's really want for a global like trading engine.

>> Got it. I I want to circle back to something just in in the early history of Aptos being born out of the move ecosystem uh part of the Libra project at Facebook which is still kind of this mysterious thing that kind of got shut down back then but is now seemingly coming true in in a variety of ways. If if Facebook had tried to do Libra now with the administration, the regulatory landscape, it feels like it would have gone through no questions asked a and they would have been another one of these issuers of stable coins. And so do what do you think has changed from then to now? Do do you think the technology has changed? Has it been kind of on the builder ecosystem or is it simply just the regulatory landscape? I think the

regulatory landscape has changed a lot and I think that you're absolutely right that the new administration whatever what Libra and D were trying to do would definitely go through today. Um just to be very transparent but that being said like the technology has advanced a ton. I mean we've been able to get uh scalability well beyond what we could do back in our Libra DM days and that was you know meant for billions of people but now you know it's definitely a worldwide based system now. uh we can support more transactional volume than Visa, Mastercard and all the other payments processors put together combined and we can do it at a latency that's just unbelievably fast like to support not just the general payments use cases but microp payments streaming payments and all deepend projects are kind of just when you think about it giant payment engines

>> right like you're just transferring economics from one party to another >> uh so that's exactly what opt is built for and now we can expand that mission from just like a payments engine for Instagram WhatsApp etc to like you know kind of any kind of transfer of assets and use cases around the world. >> Yeah, the social media companies are still extremely effective at distribution and and embedding a stable coin or some sort of cryptocurrency economic function into those applications will again just explode the the activity. Are you do you guys have a stable or excuse me a social media strategy? Are are you building out any social financial apps on your own at Apptose? you guys planning some sort of uh integration with any of the major

social media apps? >> So, we definitely been working closely with a lot of our men's partners. We've got Bitso as a partner. We have Coins PH, we have yellow yellow card and many others to come. Uh so on the Mins side, there's a lot of use cases uh for money transfer around the world. Uh especially in in countries in which um people kind of work uh for a living and then they want to send back money back to their relatives. It's a it's a really great use case. But for the social media use case, I mean it's it seems so obvious, right? Like likes uh and other kind of um emojis or like kind of reactions are definitely a inferior method compared to people kind of contributing funds toward creators. Um you know those are much more scarce. Those are kind of not gameable um and I think a much stronger

signal for content um uh kind of up voting and down voting than just like a you know someone hitting a button and spamming that with a ton of bots. Um and so we are definitely in deep discussions around uh different options for that. Um another area that we kind of focus on is loyalty. So we've been working on some kind of prepayments type things with like LE who is like the largest retail in South Korea. They've already deployed voucher type programs to millions of people there and looking to expand that. So we work with very large corporate. I have a kind of a some big upcoming announcements in this space like around how um how loyalty programs how distribution of of stable coin uh uh usage towards kind of high volume applications are going to really transform the market. That's kind of

really what is built really well for. >> Don't front run your announcements, but is there anything you can share? >> Yeah. Yeah. Can I can front run the announcements? My marketing team will uh will get me. >> Okay. All right. Well, come on. come on again soon. You know, we'll we'll talk more about those when they do come out. It it makes so much sense. I think, you know, you're describing loyalty programs for major retailers. Ultimately, now it feels like the vision that again, Facebook had back then, it's coming true now. It's everyone's launching a stable coin like Walmart stable coin, Facebook stable coin, like world liberty finance stable coin. We're h how do you think our perception of money and finance is going to adapt once we have all of these

different stable coins in the back end? You know, those who maybe don't see the back end, they're going to have this idea of fungeability. It's all just going to be considered dollars. But could you just talk a bit more about how loyalty programs and company issued stable coins might look similar, might work together to sort of adapt this this landscape? Well, we definitely see a lot of people think about loyalty programs in relationship to kind of being able to transfer value into stable coins and stable kind of fiat, right? Like so it's not it's not dissimilar today like if I get certain amount of points on my Chase Sapphire card, I might transfer that to like 100 bucks uh you know in in in real fiat, right? So I think those are kind of the natural synergies between those two products. But I think of loyalty

points as also just like a very cheaper form of currency and one that's more regulatory compliant. So easier to start with uh and something that a lot of the large companies are thinking about. But this is where Apptos really shines because of its low fees, right? Because if you're going to transfer like very low values like of like a cent or something like that across the network, you can't pay a cent for it. You can't even pay a tenth of a cent for it, right? So just it's just too expensive, right? Even a hundred of a cent is kind of like the bare minimum. That's like where apps is kind of standing alone in that category being able to support these extremely low value transfers very effectively and efficiently. And that will work well for kind of any social media app or for loyalty points or for

anything you want to transfer value across the network. >> Yeah. And that's why it works so well for payments and remittances. >> Exactly. >> Um I I'm curious. We've had a lot of stable coin conversations on this channel. Um with the likes of, you know, uh RWA experts and tokenization, you know, these guys and and generally people who are thinking a lot about this category. There seems to be this natural sequence where you start thinking about payments and remittances and once you build up that foundation and you kind of have the distribution network for stable coins, the next logical step is to get yield on those stable coins. And you know that could come from DeFi, but that might you know require some movement and

and some user interaction at least how DeFi has been enabled up until this point. That's that's kind of where RWAS are coming in. Do you guys have an what what is Apptos' RWA strategy? >> Well, Aptos is definitely one of the leaders in RWAs. Uh just you can take a look at RDXYZ. We're always among the top. Um we have tokenized money market fund and other funds from Black Rockck, Franco Tatton, Apollo, uh many others as well. Um and we work closely with Pack Protocol uh who is deploying um kind of smaller loans of 10 to 50K uh uh across emerging markets to help people for instance like buy a scooter to get a job at delivery delivery company things like that. Um it's it's something I think that fits very well with kind of our our

background, right? We have very safe asset movement with Move. We have kind of supportive institutions and we want to see a lot of the real assets kind of making their way on chain to to your point provide different kinds of yield options. But the kind of future we see here is you know the entire world is going to move on chain when it comes to finance, right? uh we're gonna start to get paid uh onchain whether it's g be stables or native crypto and then those stables would probably earn yield through your point around like these these different kinds of ass these different tokens have different yield structures some of them a bit you know um more risky some of them a bit less less risky and those will be automatically earning yield when we get our paychecks and then you you'll see the kind of world then transition to um

to loans and to credit and then to kind of offboarding into the the fiat world with credit cards um and then ideally ideally toward investment, right? Like that's the that's why we're building out like a really powerful exchange technology to support people invest in different kinds of assets, crypto, non-crypto assets um as well as composits of these assets using AI bots and others to kind of generate um their portfolio construction that matches their risk tolerance and their desires, right? So that that seems like the clear future and I think that's exactly what we're building towards. Let me just give you some data for all the haters out there that might be questioning, oh RWAT STR, like what is Aptos doing in RWAS? Like these numbers actually speak for themselves. Um almost

a billion dollars of Tether on Aptos. Um >> yeah, >> and so that that's obviously kind of topline stable coin numbers that are going to end up flowing into several of these in into these instruments. Berkeley Square emerging markets portfolio number one has 160 million. Uh number two has 190 million. This is and then there's an NPA portfolio that has another 100 million. But when it comes to the scale of RWAs and generally the the progression of off-chain finance meeting onchain finance and generally these things just becoming finance, how do you like close this loop? What what do you see as the potential? Where where are we at now and where are we going?

Uh we're obviously growing very fast. I think Abdas is pretty much the fastest growing network when it comes to our RBAS and stable coins kind of moving to network as quickly as possible. We've been very pleased with our trajectory. Um and with all these new stables like world liberty f1 being selected um uh but as their move chain to start with like we're very very excited obviously about that but the future of course is trillions on chain like that's a real number. uh we see the kind of money movement that happens across today's fiat currencies across banking systems that's got to move on chain at some point um for the efficiencies we mentioned like there's no other system that can move money as quickly and as efficiently and as safely as possible than than the blockchain and then specifically the future runs on intelligence creativity engineering

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it focusing on RWAs, payments, remittances? Is there is there kind of a root of this industry that you're focusing on and from that kind of grows out the these other sectors? What what are you mainly focused on these days at Appto? >> Great question. So, we kind of have two major focuses. So, first it is we're building the global trading engine. Again, talking to our mission, we kind of expanded from a payments network to this like trading of all assets and of course stable is the largest RWA today but is not the only RWBA um and we see a lot more coming on board through these kind of private credit through money market funds through many other um issuances we're starting to see tokenization of other assets um real estate assets on top of aus as well uh through company called propbase but much

more expansion to come in the future on that side but trading in general we feel is a very uh underserved market we've definitely seen the likes of hyperl kind of capturing minds and attention But the reality is the centralized exchange market is a $50 billion a year plus industry that is um not able to provide the kind of asset access to both users and assets and even trust that a decentralized exchange can do. And so I think we're just scratching the surface like Hyperlquid and Aster is scratching the surface of what can be done but there's a lot more to do here and it kind of requires I think a a complete redesign of the entire stack and this is where I think we have a huge edge because with the move language with the apps blockchain we are building we already have a great foundation of

course with our like extremely performant infrastructure but now we're adding in specific kind of key exchange principles that are important like how do we you know inc like give a slight edge to market uh market makers versus kind of takers um through a priority or last look type features. How do we support um the ability to kind of prevent any kind of me type attacks on traders? Like it's horrible to think about when I trade on certain certain kind of exch uh blockchains, I get frontr run or I get sandwich attacked. And yes, those profits go back to network to some degree, but it's nobody wants that experience as a trader. It's not we've seen existing trading systems, right? So the ability for us to, you know, hide those transactions, encrypt those transactions until they're ordered prevents that from happening at all. But that requires again really redesigning

the entire stack around these kind of features and performance and then supporting trading operations at a scale that's not possible elsewhere. It's not a general purpose smart contracts language. It's not going to work. You need to have very specific trading primitives enshrined into the core VM into the language itself and then kind of the interoperability with other parts of the DI DeFi ecosystem including stables. So we're very focused on building the global trading engine and fastest exchange of assets. Uh we have a project called decibel uh we've been working alongside with to make this happen. a full stack exchange for both per and spot and of course other opt ecosystem projects that are kind of work in the same space will benefit from all these features. Um so that's one thing that we're very very focused on. We think that is is a you know important

part of the future landscape of crypto. The second area that's also important to us is going to be around decentralized comput cloud comput and the first one I think that's very different but we kind of think of these things as very complimentary. you have on the cloud side uh huge opportunities uh like there's no real technology in the space that can be meant to serve any of the cloud workloads that centralized cloud providers have like the ads the Azures um the GCPs of the world and so we've been working closely with jump crypto on a a new project called Shelby which is the first hot like kind of real-time decentralized storage that can serve like sub-second reads um this means you can kind of build out great creative platforms have the decentralized Tik Tok decentralized YouTube you talked about social earlier this is the missing piece

to have decentralized kind social platforms paired with payments engines and rails to kind of support creators in an unprecedented scale. Then you have kind of of course AI is blowing up, right? The Oracle just signed a $300 billion year contract, not billion a year contract, but a $300 billion contract with OpenAI, right? And that's a massive contract. The the space itself is a $300 billion space growing 30% year-over-year. uh and so for us to kind of um you know support these uh AI use cases around data licensing, data modeling, data data usage, training, inference, all this other stuff. Uh we think Shia is a key component of that infrastructure. And the last use case is like for enterprises. So folks like the NASDAQ actually have more than half their business actually happening. It's not part of the exchange, but the

offline analytics and services that come after that be able to service those markets um and and support those infrastructures that traditionally use cloud, but they're really about sharing data across the world. um having those feeds proliferate having analytics built on top of it like those kind of use cases are also very important and can be done on more effectively and um more performantly on top of decentralized infra. So these kind of in summary like again clu global comput global trading engine decentralized cloud are our two focuses and these are like you know on the cloud side we see as like value creation and on the exchange side we see more as the um value exchange and so they're very complimentary to each other. AB: Absolutely. And these are uh core pieces of the of of the technology that are innovating on finance. And I think we're we're just continuing to see

the integration and convergence between finance and technology to make our financial system more efficient and the the Shelby partnership sounds really really cool. Jump crypto curious to learn more about that. But I I just want to have a a a couple last a last couple questions. Um because you also announced a a recent partnership with chain link CCIP is coming uh to Aptodos. Um and this again just opens up the door for more efficiency, more capital efficiency and and a generally more performant economy. Um maybe you could just say a little bit about how how partnership with chain link is happening and generally what CCIP brings to aos. Yeah, we've been very pleased to work with alongside partners like chain link and a who all kind of work very closely

together in this space to bring what we call like very trusted financial services on on chain right so a obviously very trusted used by world liberty um deployed to appas is kind of the first uh nonvm chain and then like chain link kind of we're the first move chain working alongside them to kind of bring on their their railroad assets on the network and um very I think they're they're huge partners in how they we support uh world's USD1. So, um yeah, we're very very pleased to work with such, you know, well credit credible and trusted uh institutions um on bringing DeFi and finance on chain.

>> Awesome, Avery. Well, thank you so much for joining. Uh it was an absolute pleasure and uh you know, you guys have a great network of partners. I I'd love to, you know, bring you on again next time you come uh and announce another great partnership and and uh we continue to talk about it. >> Absolutely. It's been a pleasure, Robbie.