How Trump's Election Win will Impact Real World Assets on Ethereum

Conor Svensson: So, Dennis O'Connell, thank you for joining us today. And can we start by just giving us a bit of background on who you are please?

Dennis O'Connell: Absolutely. So I am the co-founder and President of the ERC3643 Association, which has over 80 institutional members around the world composed of various organizations that are involved in a financial proliferation of digital assets. It includes law firms, fund administrators, asset managers, crypto protocols, blockchains, custodians, the whole list. And our community's interest is in creating a dialogue, and action around a standard, an official ERC standard called 3643 built around RWAs. My day job is I am the partner, and CTO of PSG Digital and Peregrine, which is a global asset management firm. Peregrine is an asset management firm with over 2.8 billion in assets based in Abu Dhabi. Its mission is to take assets and tokenize them with first class partners. and then I also do a fair amount of advisory and board director work along the way. So I've had Almost a 20 year plus career on Wall Street, primarily in derivatives and then capital markets. Then I left that world in 2022 to go full time digital after nearly five years prior to doing it on the traffic side. So it's my pleasure to be here with you today Conor.

Conor Svensson: Thank you. And so let's just get a little bit more into real world assets and how it is that the ERC 3643 organization formed. Today's obviously been a big day with the election victory but I think if we just prime people with a bit of background to start on why the standard needed to be created in the first place and why all these organizations have got behind it.

Dennis O'Connell: Yes, that's a great question. So standards are really important. They're kind of like that boring thing that people kind of overlook. But once they start to build anything they realize how important it is. And standard is effectively an agreed upon method of doing something that everyone can take and look at. If they all implement it faithfully, things just work together and it makes life much easier. The dawn of standards in Ethereum really described how tokens are controlled on a blockchain. That started with the first official standard ERC20 which enabled the mapping of an account to token and had effectively no governance. And it was well adopted by the decentralization, the disintermediation blockchain community and today has become one of the most prolific blockchain standards for representing a token. But of course when certain parties and institutions took a look at ERC20 and tried to get it approved, it failed approval because in the eyes of counterparties, institutions and even regulators there wasn't enough certainty that the asset could be represented correctly. So a family of standards in the wake of an SEC ruling that enabled private market investors to elect to receive their shares on a blockchain on a digital ledger, which became known as a SAFT or Simple Agreement for Future Tokens spawned the whole ERC 1400 family. A family that never had an individual official approval standard but had a collection of some really great innovation standards and different firms and tokenization platforms and even some members of 3643 use the 1400 standard to great success even today. And originally it was known as the security token standard. So ERC 1400 was a great step but it still was not far enough in certain areas for regulators and for certain assets. So there was more innovation that occurred and eventually 3643 was introduced and that had just enough in terms of identity registry and on chain control to really start to turn the corner for some of these institutions to meet those minimum requirements for larger institutions and even DeFi protocols to be able to get permission from regulators to launch assets, real world asset, real world asset securities, on chain, and to this day 3643 has had tremendous proliferation. We are around just over 30 billion in assets tokenized using the standard it's been recognized, and mentioned by seven different global regulators. We've been in countless institutional POCs and production initiatives all because of that advancement. So the standards matter quite a bit. It really is the kind of main vector for adoption of RWAs and what's key about the standards is just like ERC 20 and ERC 1400, that they are backwards compatible, that all the great things about the prior standards are adopted and continued on. And eventually you know, 3643 will have a successor as well that does something better than what it does today.

Conor Svensson: Well and one of the things that you mentioned just there was that the ERC 1400 previously with the security token standard wasn't enough for certain types of assets. So what are those types of assets that just weren't really covered by it, that really sort of pushed for why it made a lot of sense to work on an ERC3643?

Dennis O'Connell: So the 1400 community was aware of these different things and that's why you had kind of a proliferation of different 1400 standards. And when you look at these different 1400s from the original one, the main thing generally is what we call on chain compliance and that's the ability to know exactly who the party is, assign that party rights and then enforce any kind of rules or certain rules on the asset itself. These rules could be something benign to no more than five trades a month, to no more than 10% of tokens, to no trading with a non KYC person and that was adopted in different flavors. And to this day some of the 14 understanders do that. But it was never really made concise. The identity still was a weaker part of it. And so with 3643 one of the main things was having a much more described identity, answering a critical question for regulators. And even counterprice wasn't just regulators because this standard exists both in the DeFi and in the TradFi world. It was who are these people that's participating? How do we know who's who and what happens if they become compromised in some way? How do we remedy that? So identity became a big part of that. The next thing that was a big part was the registry. The idea that we can issue rules, we can issue claims, and those claims and rules can be mapped to multiple tokens. So you didn't have to redeploy a Registry. Every time you deployed a token you can scale it in a many to many, or many to one kind of relationship. So one registry for a firm defines all their roles and then as they deploy different assets through their business activities, they simply link it to that registry. So that was a one, two punch. The knockout punch of course was the recovery and the more fine grain control over the tokens as well that 1400 did a good job of. And 3643 just took it to another level of controlled granularity that regulators really looked at. So the reality now with 1400 as I mentioned is it's adopted, it's used, some major firms use 1400 but it really never hockey sticked to the census of 3643 because of the sort of isolation of the registry, the identity, the way identity was implemented and then also the individual nature of each of the fourteen hundred substandards, you know, 1404, 1408, how they each had a different, slightly different approach to compliance. And so 3613 kind of took that, it standardized a lot on the compliance side and then it added the registry and identity and that was enough to go over the line and so 1400 is used today. It's used a lot for what we see for private equity use cases, private debts. Art is a big one that we see a lot for 1400. But it really never got the big hockey stick where we see bonds, institutional large scale bonds, sustainability at carbon credits, massive funds as well, and even in some cases stablecoins are looking to use 3643 as well. And so those abilities enable 3643 to take much larger assets, on chain in addition to all the other assets that 1400 had because of that additional capabilities. And that's great because 1400 was absolutely critical for 3643 to succeed. It still succeeds in its own right and has a very bright future. But when given the evaluation and given the choice, we generally see firms go more towards 3,643 because it's more standardized, it has more of the identity, and then that gives them the comfort to deploy much bigger offerings, like larger institutional bonds and that sort of thing.

Conor Svensson: And as you mentioned the 3643 has been a big success in terms of the number of different firms that have got behind it and you've got a real roster of different companies, a lot of big established firms as well in the mix there. And so was it quite an easy conversation to get all of these firms on board initially just because it's really catered for these shortcomings so to speak of these earlier ERC standards?

Dennis O'Connell: No it wasn't. 1400 is a great standard, and it was actually very much a hockey stick kind of grind. I mean the 3613 was introduced about almost two years ago initially. Iit was introduced by a company called Tokeny, and at first it was kind of scoffed at, it really wasn't understood, and they ended up making an official Ethereum proposal which took nearly two years to get through. And I would say the major difference between 1400 standards in 3643 is that the 3643 went through a formal, concise and canonical ERC approval process, and actually got it approved, actually went through it. There's a 1400 EIPS that are out there, in the proposals, but as far as I'm aware, none of them were adopted in principle. They became an official canon. They were just sort of noted to the community that hey, the standard exists if you want to use it. And so because in December of last year it became an official Ethereum standard, became the canon of standards, the game completely changed. We already had great adoption by individual firms in Asia and Europe, who had great relationships with some of the users. But it never really took on a different mode I would say than with the last December almost a year ago with the official approval of it as an ERC standard. So Luke, my other co-founder for the association, co-founded the nonprofit association to help educate people about the standard, help build proliferation, organize different events and different projects around the standard. But after that December it became almost an overwhelming response from all the major banks in the world and a lot of the major regulators in the world. And the email subjects were very simple. Hey, we want to understand this more. And so given that opportunity, I did a roadshow of various regulators that was well received. In the wake of those regulatory dialogues we saw more engagement from large institutions that felt that the regulators were actually more comfortable with what the standard had offered. So that created a feedback loop of additional standards pushing it using for POCs other smaller institutions adopting it then DeFi protocols adopting it. Then it just kind of had this sort of natural gravity of its own weight and the association was a major factor of organizing that interest into a, I would say a constructive effort. And we started getting massive, massive interest by the springtime. We just took on a different vertical and today we see this association has its own momentum. We've never had more institutions using it. We never had the growth rate of adoption for it. Almost every major blockchain, every major institution, every major regulatory firm, we've been featured in countless reports, all that sort of stuff all because of its own perpetual momentum, because of how important standards are, that if it works for somebody and you have that great word of mouth you get that adoption. And so that's really what was kind of the breaking point for it. We'll continue for some time but it won't continue forever.

Conor Svensson: And it's very interesting to hear as well that getting the standard actually approved as a legitimate Ethereum standard at the sort of cascading effect of these larger, more traditional organizations to be supportive of it because one would think that they wouldn't pay as much attention to these details in the same way because it's such a nascent industry at this point in time. And so it's quite refreshing to hear that by really working to really make it an actual approved standard as far as the ERC community is concerned that it made all the difference there.

Dennis O'Connell: Well absolutely. The last thing I'll say is you know the institutions and the regulators, they don't want to be in the way of innovation. They don't move as fast as we like to be. But their view is the rules are the rules and for certain assets, not all assets but for certain assets that's a non negotiable thing. So if we really want to have that kind of hockey stick moment of private market, commodities, debt markets coming onto chain, the gatekeepers are governments and regulators and obviously the ones who have the vast majority of assets are going to be well excited, will be cautious not to overstep because they have existing businesses and they don't want to get in trouble with the police. So the standard checks a lot of boxes and it gives that kind of control framework that as I mentioned is not always appropriate for every use case. And we're not saying that every token should use 3643 at all. Quite the opposite. We believe in a multifaceted standards ecosystem. But we do feel for certain assets where there is a large amount of interest, where there are serious ramifications if something goes wrong on the ledger, where the participants must be known, and must be recoverable. That's really where the standard shines. So you know a token is a token is a token. A token can represent art or represent utility. It has a certain monetary value. It also can represent a large equity index, for example, and those are all tokens on the blockchain. But the consequences of getting those things wrong are vastly different. Everyone loves blockchain until their ERC20 tokens are stolen and they're like well where do we go? Well there's nothing we can do and that doesn't feel good. It's also criminal and there's no remedy. So in certain cases you kind of want a nice balance, almost like a centralized governance, a DAO governance on top of the standard that you're using. Because people want the certainty that their assets are going to be held safe. And that's really the main thrust of what the regulators look for, is to make sure that control is maintained, that things don't get out of hand, that bad actors can usurp an asset and you know basically cause a tremendous amount of damage. Because at the 3643 level we're in the multi billion dollar class for these assets. These are not, you know 1400 is really, really great for anywhere from 5 to 20 to 100 million. I'm sure they could argue they could go up to a billion or so in terms of the asset size and class, and there's definitely some great products. There are. But in terms of the multi billion, multi trillion dollar asset classes like your major principal money market funds, your indexes, your commodities, we're absolutely seeing a massive preference for 3643 to capture that. And that's a great thing. That's a great thing because that brings TVL and institutions on chain.

Conor Svensson: You know there's a lot there to unpack with what you've just covered off. But one of the points I wanted to dig into is on the regulatory side because it was recently announced as well that MAS, the monetary authority of Singapore, has recognized the standard as part of its project Guardian. And so you're able just to say a bit more on the significance of this because MAS is obviously a very well regarded regulator held in high esteem.

Dennis O'Connell: Well, absolutely. We've been doing a lot with MAS. As I mentioned, we do seven different regulators around the world. We do what's called a dialogue. I mean a dialogue is a very simple approach where we're not really looking into seeking any law change. We're not a lobbyist group. But where we can help provide clarity and education especially for some of our members. We do so. So you know, if you ask me what my activities are for most of the association, it's doing regulatory engagement, it's having conversations with regulators in a non intrusive way, on behalf of our members. Again, it's not lobbying, we're not seeking policy change. We're just merely educating. So the announcement from MAS this week is on a long parade of endorsements. And I won't say endorsements but recognitions. I'll use the word recognitions and that will continue. And the great thing about it is MAS is one of the preeminent regulators in the world. For digital they're probably top three easily. That compels other regulatory jurisdictions that are following that lead to take notice. It gives a certain momentum and it just expedites adoption. So when people say oh it takes so long for RWAs to come in and it's very slow. I always tell people the regulators are very smart, they want to understand, they're capable of understanding. And ultimately it takes time to understand. That announcement today is a major step. And so to be recognized as an official standard means that companies that want to do commercial activities on chain, that want to go into m. Singapore for m. Tokenized debt instruments and funds can adopt the standard with ease and confidence, knowing that they are on the right side of law which is fantastic. And E.C. you have Schroeder and Franklin Templeton, UBS, and a few others involved in that standard. And so that gives them the confidence to scale assets in Singapore and give investors confidence that the regulator has looked at the standard of the field that they are protected. And so the butterfly effect as you would with something like this cannot be underestimated. This is a sort of momentum. I could probably tell you from this NASA, we'll probably get a few more in other jurisdictions that will follow suit. Ultimately that's how we continue this kind of hockey stick trajectory and also print the ability for more adoption, new standards to come in, and interoperability. So it's a great step and certainly more to come.

Conor Svensson: And certainly there's been this, as you said, that there was the MAS announcement and then now with Trump being confirmed to be the next American president, no doubt that has some significant implications as well. And it's broadly considered that it will be very positive for crypto regulation and so on. And I know it's probably, it's still very early but at the same time what's your current thoughts on RWAs and how Trump's presidency can impact the space?

Dennis O'Connell: Absolutely. So obviously last night, I'm here in New York, we just concluded the 2024 elections. It was a tight race. A lot of people voted on both sides. So from our association perspective, we knew we were going to see a policy shift in the United States one way or another. The way our team looked at it was we called go fast or go slow mode. With President Harris or Kamala Harris, we viewed it as a go slow mode. There's certainly good interest to revamp the regulators, expedite regulators and we sort of saw this inevitable trajectory. I had the pleasure earlier this year of presenting to the Securities and Exchange Commission and their leadership on the 3643 standard, which was very well received and we were very impressed with their comments. It's now public so I could disclose that. I can't say too much else about it but I was left feeling okay, you know this is a regulator, that actually despite the narrative, is really on top of the ball. I think that's very, very daring. Impressive questions, with the shift now, for I believe it's President Elect Trump, as of today, I'm assuming some confirmations. You know, obviously people, not everyone, voted for that candidate. So some people are taking time to process. So from a policy perspective we now believe we're in a go fast mode. There were a few things that we saw from the candidates during the campaign that were very encouraging for digital assets and the crypto as an asset class. I think that the big thing for us to distinguish is 3643 lives in both of these worlds and they're different realities. So crypto, which is an asset class, these are your virtual assets, your stable coins, your meme coins, your NFT art, and all your different blocks, your favorite blockchain coin or project, they were the most scrutinized is the word I would use. That was, in my opinion, a very antagonistic regulator. And I say that quite neutrally in a matter of fact because from the association we work with, all the regulators around the world, there's different norms and biases in MLU that they implement and they have different expectations but generally they are professional neutral parties. Unfortunately, in the United States the politicization of the regulator created additional headwinds that didn't need to occur. And so what that translated into was a very antagonistic environment, and a difficult environment for different crypto firms to operate in. On the RWA side, on the institutional adoption side, because it was a different animal and sort of like following the letter of the law and about compliance, it was more of this sort of slow, methodical approach that continues to be checking in, working, getting opinions and moving forward. So from this policy shift we can definitely expect new leadership at the regulators. We may see a reduction in the size of the regulators, we may see a change in attitude towards different legal, I'll say legal matters being adjudicated right now. We may see some significant policy changes. One of which that we look at will be how the United States government views crypto as an asset class, like Bitcoin, how the government looks at CBDCs, how the government looks at monetary movements and donations in crypto, and of course how tokens are classified. And so a lot of activity from the association is driven internationally. One, because global markets are changing and there's a globalization that's happening. But two, a good portion of it is flight from the United States to jurisdictions down much more friendly. Now that's not going to happen overnight, but it will happen. With the suggested post, policy changes, what happens during a campaign versus what actually happens are two different things. But what we can certainly look forward to is a much friendlier environment in the United States for crypto and RWAs. And even a small change, a 5% change in policy would create a massive, massive opportunity for all of them. So it is what we believe a go fast mode. We'll see if that translates. There are certain things internally that we're looking to see actually happen before we get necessarily excited or change our strategy. I do not think it hurts what I would call Asia and the Middle East and Europe efforts and even Latin American efforts. I think it only helps and I think by enabling US persons, US Investors to participate in these other jurisdictions on blockchain through RWAs. I think that is truly a big deal. So we'll see. But it is definitely a major event today in the United States for crypto and RWA policy.

Conor Svensson: Yes, this is certainly fascinating as well when you conceptualize it in terms of the crypto assets versus the more established kind of tokenized and real world assets. And so just to kind of paraphrase some of the things that you were saying, it's likely that the more crypto native stuff would see a more natural acceleration due to what we believe will be more supportive and friendly legislation towards that and potentially remove some of the big question marks which have been around for some time over the actual classification of crypto assets there. Then on the flip side, you have your more traditional institutional products which already kind of live within quite a heavily regulated environment. Do you think that now we'll start to see as more crypto classification is cleared up, that it'll be natural for these large institutions to really start pushing more heavily and investing more heavily in this technology if they have the relevant regulatory clarity that they've kind of been seeking.

Dennis O'Connell: Without a doubt, without a doubt. When we looked at the structural differences between different markets around the world, and that includes venture markets and includes policy and institutions, the regulators control the tempo, and even a small shift in the United States because there is so much interest. You know, I think the joke is that most United States persons are investing over a VPN. There's a lot of innovation, there's a lot of companies. You know, when I go to these different events around the world, there's a lot of Americans that almost felt, I would say I don't want to use a strong word, but they felt that the United States was not their main area where they could do business. And with a policy shift that's going to encourage institutions, it's going to encourage VC activity, it's going to accelerate different projects that are already in progress and it's going to bring in a fresh perspective, a fresh set of interest into space writ large. So that's RWA's crypto, the whole thing. People who may have been hesitant to issue assets because they want that clarification, will now have a little bit more comfort. And so we'll see. Again it's not overwhelming. It's you know, drip by drip. You know, those who are waiting for a less antagonistic regulator when now they see it maybe more passive or even a regulator that's remaining plateaued, in their response will come in a regulator that would change course, that would have a different direction, that would reduce and change its approach, would greatly accelerate the industry in the United States, and all over the world. So this is about degrees. You know, small changes, small degrees have massive implications. Given the size of the United States markets, given the amount of projects and initiatives, given the size of funding, given the interests, I think most of the large blockchains have a significant US presence. Some of them are outright started in the United States and a lot of the largest exchanges and other providers are operating in the United States and it's extremely difficult. Whereas it's better in Europe because there is at least a pathway and a framework. And for 99.9% of the projects that I interact, both on the DeFi and institutional RWA side, they want to comply with sensible regulation, they want to put in regulation, they want to be able to engage and have a counterparty that has a different approach than what's been there, you know, will vibrate around, will vibrate around the entire industry. So 2024 could be that transformational year, and I use that word deliberately for the entire world of blockchain. We may see, there's a thing where I'll probably butcher it but you know there's decades where weeks happen and then there's day, you know, then there's weeks where decades happen. And this could be a moment where given the right team, given the right approach, we may see decades of policy shift in the United States happen across the board.

Conor Svensson: Yeah, it's going to be absolutely fascinating to see how it unfolds over the coming months there. And so if we think in terms of what you referenced earlier on how the ERC3643 is in effect designed for these multi billion type asset classes, money market funds, index, ETF products and so on, at what point do you think that we'll be at a point where you have truly kind of tokenized funds on public blockchains? Now there are obviously companies out there that have tokenized things, like Vanguard ETFs and so on. But it's one thing actually just having this kind of tokenized funds where they have their own sort of custody provider that they're using versus there being that sort of upshift in significant market infrastructure being underpinned by the likes of DTCC and where you've got your established income incumbents getting in on the mix.

Dennis O'Connell: Right.

Conor Svensson: How far off do you think we are in your view, having some of that sort of scale of these, truly, multibillion dollar assets on chain?

Dennis O'Connell: We're a lot closer than you think. I think we're a year away. I truly believe that especially now with the change in leadership in the United States and a potential change in policy, we're looking at a year because a lot of these things have existed at scale. A lot of these funds, including my own company, Paragood, we launched a closed end fund on private blockchain back in 2022. You mentioned some very large institutions. There's a whole litany, but there's about 12 or so significant institutions I would consider like a GCFI class which GCF is a globally important, globally systemic important financial institution that basically means if there's a bank run on that institution, it could take down the world economy. So at that class, you know, you're talking about your Blackrock, Cimidelli, Franklin Templeton, JP Morgans, they are very active. Right? They're active internationally. They've offered products, obviously BlackRock offered a product using the 1400 standard. 3643 has several large institutional bonds. But again they aren't in what I consider a pilot or go slow mode, even if they're launched publicly and that's very much driven by policy. So to have a change in policy that enables the real work. So I think another aspect is why it's so important is that what most people don't realize is for the last five years there's been a massive push for RWAs on chain RWA securities by the institutions. The tech has been spoken for, the operations have been spoken for, the modeling and the products have been spoken for. It has been a very frustrating grind with the legal side, with the legal and regulatory side for very good reasons and some very smart people working on it and they're not naive to it, they understand it, but their behest to you know the regulator and the tempo and the permissions that they sent. So that's why something like MAS or Hong Kong Monetary Authority or Abu Dhabi, the FSR and ADGM, the DIFC, Switzerland obviously, your offshores in Panama, Cayman, Bahamas, Bermuda have really led the way. You see the same thing to a lesser extent in the UK and then way back is the US. All those jurisdictions define a different reality. And so what I honestly tell people is your view to Western centric. But with the policy change potentially, all of those questions could be alleviated quite quickly and the answers are no. The answers are no for the most part. They just need to be approved. So I easily could see you know, towards the tail end of the year, we could be sitting here next year, next November and if we see some of the policy changes we think we see internally at the tail team, then it could be a very significant shift in what that institution is comfortable disclosing, comfortable pushing and ultimately comfortable funding and offering. So no, we are very much in the end game now with this. We saw the activity because of the frustration in the US going to this kind of unique combination of other jurisdictions which with neutral regulations there's a sufficient banking, financial infrastructure, their own macro considerations, really coming in and building out of amazing tokenization, digital asset infrastructure. You know credit goes to Abu Dhabi for that, to Singapore, Hong Kong, other areas. But it was done also in response to Europe and the US kind of going into this go slow mode, this kind of caution approach in Europe but methodically moving forward. Whereas in the US almost like I said, almost like antagonistic or not at all. So with that removed, a lot of backlog of projects in the US will come to fruition. Should we see what we see? So I say confidently, in a year you will see a major shift with institutions because they've done a lot of hard work. We're not flat footed on this whatsoever.

Conor Svensson: Yes, it's crazy to think where we could be 12 months from now based on that. So if we think about stablecoins, I mean they're arguably the RWAs that have established the most kind of product market fit, thus far anyway, with regards to the cryptocurrency industry anyway and how widely they are actually being used now, for a number of different use cases, from just remittance to actually just standard being used as payments. Do you see that? There'll be a new breed of stable coins that work with, start to embrace more of ERC3643 or even some of the existing ones sort of uplift themselves to comply with it. Because no doubt there's probably a lot of crossover between some of the offerings, operational things that need to happen with them right now versus what you cater for in the standard.

Dennis O'Connell: Yeah, correct. I'm limited in what I can say with this, but I would say just generally speaking we are seeing both of what you're mentioning. We're seeing issuance and we're seeing migration across the world for a variety of what you would classify as stablecoin, products across a variety of chains. We are definitely seeing as much interest on the stable coin settlement side as on the asset side, if not more. So I can't say much more than that. But yes, the short answer is I would expect to see some announcements in the coming year around that topic.

Conor Svensson: And if we move our lens kind of beyond the confines of crypto and more traditional financial market products and maybe into other industries as well. Where are you seeing momentum for this standard outside of what you could consider the more traditional financial arena right now.

Dennis O'Connell: I think Hong Kong is the biggest momentum play we've seen. HKMA and the regulatory bodies underneath the HKMA are on significant move. Well structurally Hong Kong and Asia are really almost on fire right now in a good way. So we're seeing massive interest, massive new members coming in, massive new projects. I mean the scale of China is just different. So structurally Hong Kong is a great place. It's got an established regulator that is very shrewd and efficient. It has an excellent market infrastructure. It has a very, very deep well of established institutions. I also say that its ecosystem and financial markets are also more so they'll probably lead the world in being the most amenable to tokenized offerings. From a cultural point of view, they are ready to adopt at scale some very large offerings that are naturally digitized and tokenized. That's really critical. So, like any other regulator, you know, the same first principles are true. Who do we know who's participating? Should they be allowed to participate? What happens if things go wrong? How does the asset control itself? Those questions are universal. So it's not a surprise that in Hong Kong with again, policy changes, we were talking about the US Today, but Hong Kong had a major policy shift over this year with their digital assets. And that again has created this effect that we're seeing now months later. So we see that continue to grow. We actually think that with the shift in US Policy, Hong Kong will continue to heat up, because one feeds off the other actually, which is great. So, for people listening and looking, take another look at the HKMA, Take a look at Hong Kong in terms of the digital asset offering. I think we're going to see another transformation event happen in Hong Kong over the next year.

Conor Svensson: With regards to the actual types of assets as well, one of the things that the standard can extend towards is like loyalty programs. Are there many other kinds of areas that you're seeing growth outside of these more traditional financial jurisdictions and traditional financial products?

Dennis O'Connell: Absolutely. We are. We have a lot of members that are not in the financial space that are of the, you know, the corporate loyalties on the retail side, on hospitality side. Some of them are members, some of them are not. I think one thing that's important is I think 3643 we talk to everybody, which is astonishing, you know, large retail credit card institutions, large hospitality institutions, large travel institutions. I'll be general on purpose. And again, the same kind of control plane that we see is tremendous, the same considerations. What if we give you know, airline rewards to a member and that member loses their wallet? What do we do, how do we know this member is connected to that wallet? What if we want to do something like a special event? So yes, we are seeing a massive amount of rewards, commercial rewards, adoption as well. Not as much. Doesn't make the headlines as much because they actually exist in the background. Really it's not very like good media. If we have like today a regulator or large institutional bank using the standard, we'll see a lot of engagement. If we see like a rewards program or something like that, we see less so and I think just because people are less concerned if their reward points are missing versus, you know, their shares in money market fund. But both are still true in terms of concern. One is just more well known and broadcasted by the industry media than the other, which is totally fine. But we see a lot of it and a lot of it's deployed. A lot, some of it I can't talk about. But on public and private chains we see a lot of 3643 applications for rewards for all the same reasons.

Conor Svensson: And so looking forward now, I know with the changes that are going to be coming over the next 12 months, it's going to be probably hard to predict exactly where we're going to be. But what are the big areas for focus right now of the ERC3643 organization?

Dennis O'Connell: Great question. So, the future is extremely bright for 3643. The obvious ones being we continue to grow the membership, we continue to diversify the membership. But I would say that we are probably going to be dropping the ERC part of the name. A couple weeks ago I announced a major update to 3643 when there, for the first time in the history of ERC standards, we are going to be not only embracing alternative implementations so non ERC, non EVM or non solidity, but we're going to make it a major priority and our first launch partner to do so is with Movement Labs. Movement Labs is based on the Move, SMART Contract language, a Rust based language that has significant improvements in terms of security and performance and capability. Movement is a layer 2 on Ethereum, but enables us to develop on Movement and then deploy to Aptos, Dewey and even potentially Solana. So our embracement of MOVE and Rust and even things like token extensions with Solana is a major initiative for our Standard, we're seeking interoperability, but we're seeking to be a standard implementation. So we're going to continue working with some of our blockchains that have expressed interest in adopting the standard. So that, and again it makes a ton of sense, they have a particular view on their technology. They think it's superior for their reasons and maybe they're right for their use cases. It makes it a lot easier for them when they go through regulators to say hey you know, let's focus the conversation on technology, not the functionality. We're using the same functionality you approve, using the prior art and the precedent. And that's the 3643 standard which is a collection of interfaces and functions and methodologies. And if they can implement that in their own language they open up a whole ecosystem of RWAs because they've effectively, you know, pre flighted and pre approved themselves to be able to handle those apps assets. So that's a huge thing for us to expand beyond EVM. That'll be a secular thing that we'll do in the years coming. The next thing that I'm very excited about is upgrading and maturing the standard beyond a community driven blockchain standard from the ERC process which is a two year significant process but there's certainly a delta between a community driven blockchain standards process and an international standards process. And so we are working with partners behind major international standards to re envision, reimagine 3643 again migrating all the things we love but into a formal international adopted standard. We believe that's extremely important because just as the regulatory bodies come in, the standards bodies come into space and start developing world class first AAA standards that they've done so in other applications for data, trading, message transmission, et cetera, et cetera. So moving beyond ERC into a full bonafide international standard is also a major part of us. And then the third thing is we have some really great members, members like Applied Blockchain, that are doing amazing work on innovating, privacy concerns. We have really amazing use cases coming on. So there's just several projects that the memberships are working on to improve the standard. And so you know my job as president is to evolve the standard. It's not about having a standard and holding on to it greedily. There's a shelf life to a standard. So what we look to do is evolve that into a longer term strategy where the standard has staying power, has additional relevancy and ultimately promotes interoperability and growth. That really requires us being very keen on innovation, being keen on improvements and constantly improving the standard where we can and so I think that's a very important thing for us not to be static or myopic, and continue to build up the standard in that capacity.

Conor Svensson: And it's no doubt going to significantly help it grow this cross blockchain platform support but also as you say move it beyond being this kind of Ethereum focused standard to be more of the standard that the industry actually requires. If people want to learn more about the organization and the work that you're doing, what is a good way for them to engage with it and keep up to date.

Dennis O'Connell: I mean two things I would always say is you could follow our socials on LinkedIn and on X primarily for the association you could go to erc3643.org for my company, you could go to either ph or paragon studio.com we keep it fairly up to date on the projects that we do. So gives you a good flavor of what's happening around the world, around the community. And then also my firm which uses it in practice as well so you can see that macro and micro level and anyone can reach out to me through LinkedIn or DM me on Twitter for more questions and if you want to join the association you can also reach out to me on my public telegram realDennis O'Connell.

Conor Svensson: Awesome. Well Dennis O'Connell, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you today and just so many useful takeaways about exactly where we're headed especially in light of the election victory that's happened in the last day.

Dennis O'Connell: Absolutely. And you know for those that didn't vote for the incumbent, you know, let's hope this is a moment of unity. Obviously some people are not happy in the US and you know we want to be fair to them while they adjust. What we do hope is that we all come together, that the industry can accelerate, and that ultimately this can be a very positive thing for the industry to innovate and ultimately embrace, kind of catch up to where the rest of the world is and that's something that, again, campaign promises versus actual policy implementations are two different things. But I think the team internally is very excited and confident that we'll see a very transformative year in the United States and for our foundation going forward.

Conor Svensson: I look forward to it. Thanks again, Dennis O'Connell. Speak again soon.

Dennis O'Connell: Thank you, Conor. Thank you, everyone. Bye.