Banking the Blockchain: Crypto, RWA e Istituzioni a Confronto

year precisely to talk about how banking the blockchain, therefore how to use the blockchain. Hello morning. Yes, exactly. At a somewhat institutional level, eh real world assets, in short a few things. Very interesting panel.

The panelists have already taken their seats, but we'll introduce them one by one. Certain. We're moderating this with Luca Piermantini, Digital Asset Product Specialist at Bancasella. Let's give him a round of applause, please, and give him a little encouragement. Then Massimo Cervesato, Director of Blockchain and Digital Assets at Mastercard Europe, Rosario Napolano, manager of Bancasella, Agostino Guarino, vice president of product manager for digital assets at Intesa San Paolo, and Gianluca Di Bella.

The good thing is that you didn't give yourself titles, though, I mean, you gave us all the titles of everyone else, but you didn't give yourself, so you have to give yourself, we'll leave you the stage and the moderation. Please. Good afternoon everyone, welcome to the panel on banking, the blockchain, crypto real-world assets, and institutions compared. Today, we'll explore how traditional financial institutions and technology players are addressing the evolving crypto ecosystem, from the convergence of payment systems and stablecoins to the challenges and opportunities of tokenizing real-world assets. We will also discuss how these changes are transforming the banking infrastructure and the expectations of both institutional and private customers.

We are supported by four highly experienced professionals from the worlds of banking, wealth management, fintech, and payment infrastructure. In order, we have Rosario Napolano, manager at Banca Patrimoni Sella, Massimo Cervesato, vice president of Global Blockchain and Digital Assets at Mastercard, Agostino Guarino, vice president of Inesa San Paolo, and Gianluca Di Bella, CEO of Next Labs and organizer. So, let's start with a broader vision . Hey, Agostino, how do you assess the impact that DLT technologies will have on the banking infrastructure in the coming years? Do you think this is an evolutionary change or a transition that will mark a radical transformation of operating models?

Yes, okay, it works. Well, certainly the question is extremely relevant in our context and as a traditional legacy bank we are trying to understand how DLT, what DLT will change within our world, in the world of the financial ecosystem, um, and more generally of financial services. Um, I think we need to take a step back before we get to this point and understand what kind of digital era we're currently in, because it's important to understand the relationship between a user and technology, which in this case is the basis of all technologies and blockchain is also based on the internet. Drawing a parallel between the birth and evolution of blockchain, the internet's adoption of blockchain, may seem obvious, but it's extremely relevant. If you think about the Internet at the beginning of its evolution, it has not reached full maturity and the use that is made of the Internet every day.

The Internet was seen as one of the media, just as blockchain is now seen as a new asset, crypto-asset, and so on. The Internet has become all media and this is an extremely important finding because there has been a transition from the early 90s together with the arrival of web browsers. I remember Mosaic in '93 which practically made the internet mainstream and we entered the era where information became democratized, there was access to information. There was a new era that started practically in the 2000s around 2005 and we can practically say that it ended in 2020, which is what is commonly called Web 2. It was an era in which you could write as well as read, so a new era in which there was the possibility of a new type of democracy, a new democracy that allows you to interact with the basic infrastructure that is the internet.

The one we are entering now is the new digital era that DLT has unlocked. It's an era in which we can write, er, we can read information, but we can finally own, because DLT allows us a transfer of value, something that wasn't accessible before and had to be managed by large institutions. And now it's information management that is fundamental with everything that concerns privacy and everything else, bringing it back into the hands of the end user is certainly something incredible. What is it that is probably currently stopping this evolution that I see as disruptive to revive demand, not as an evolution per se, but as a disruptive transformation that will necessarily have to change business models. What is currently missing is what used to be the web browser for the Internet.

Um, and what is this interface to this new infrastructure in the new world of DLT, of blockchain ? it's Casty. The Casty Digital Asset is a central element that will allow everyone to make innovation accessible, to understand the efficiencies, the benefits deriving from programmability, automation, and process efficiency, but reported with a simple interface that allows all users, businesses, and financial institutions to access this new world. And we, at San Paolo, see the Cassodi as a foundational layer, a bit of a building block on which to then build a series of services, which will not once again centralize, distorting the concept of blockchain, the user's approach to the network, but must be a simplification and security. From my point of view, banks will have to become gatekeepers, gateways that will allow everyone to benefit from the new technology.

And while on the one hand banks are starting to rethink their infrastructure, on the other hand the big payment players are already experimenting with new models. Massimo, Mastercard is uniquely positioned to bridge traditional finance and the crypto world. Which projects or partnerships do you consider most significant for enabling new forms of payment and interactions with digital assets? Yes, good morning everyone. First of all, nice to meet you, thanks for the invitation, it's a phenomenal place.

Sorry for the accent if I blurt out words that don't make sense unless you make yourself clear. I am Belgian, I am of Italian origin, I was born in Belgium, I lived abroad and it was crypto that brought me back to Italy. I had the opportunity with Mastercard to work in our Global Blockchain and Digital Assets segment. I have been doing this very interesting job for 2 years now . Obviously, as our colleague Agostino has already heard, companies like banks, like Mastercard, obviously to be able to absorb these types of innovations, new infrastructures, it is very important that we first understand what the impact is on our company, on our brand, on our consumer base, which we have been nurturing for 50 years now, and so these are decisions that are obviously made slowly, but in any case, there is a lot of breaking to do, many things need to be broken, rebuilt in a different and optimized way.

So my background is precisely in the digital transformation of payments, fintech, so I'm not an expert in crypto, I've learned a bit over the last 23 years, I'm not an expert like Agostino, but it doesn't matter so much because learning new things, that is, important for everyone, but having the mentality of saying "Okay, we've done things a certain way for 50 years, now we have to change it because otherwise we'll miss the boat." And this is exactly the phrase I often repeat within Mastercard. All right? Yes, there is potential here in blockchain, stablecoins with all these very topical subjects. Let 's go slowly, let's do things well, but we mustn't miss this train because there is also potential for business, there is also potential for disintermediary players like Mastercard players like banks.

And so that was a bit of an introduction. I forgot about the question, but it doesn't matter . What do we do at Mastercard and especially in this world? The first thing, eh, obviously I always remember one detail that the original Bitcoin, I know we're at an Etherim conference, the original Bitcoin paper was titled A peer to peer electronic cash payment system, right? Payment I added, there was no payment, but electronic cash system.

So the topic of payments is already at the heart of the original white paper, so for a company like Mastercard it is obviously a very, very important thing. What do we do in short? Because I came here with a longer list of things that I can't say out of respect for the things I can talk about, but if we make a short list, pay the payment and offer the choice to the consumer - today more than half a billion people who touch crypto - obviously the choice has already been made. They, people want to use this technology, these tokens, this infrastructure for all the benefits that are clear. So offering this consumer the choice to be able to go and buy something and have the choice to pay with Revolute, pay with Intesa San Paolo, pay with their cryptocurrencies or US dollars, etc.

, is very important. So the first thing is to be able to pay anywhere easily and securely, which is the very thing that is at the heart of our consideration, let's say. The second thing we rely on from a strategic point of view in the blockchain environment is the acceleration of institutional adoption, banks, governments, brands, fintechs, er, of their own blockchain infrastructure and all its advantages. The third thing, and something that for me is perhaps the most important, is helping to improve, as they say, user experience, the user experience, the UI, because today, honestly, it's a bit broken, right? even for me, who, well, I'm quite young, I go on Bybit, I go on Binance.

com, I go on Coinbase, I go on all these different layers, blockchain, swaps, it's not intuitive, it's not easy and it's complicated for us, we are, that is, we are quite immersed in this world. Image for everyday people who don't want to pay with crypto, do a swap, bridge through chains, i.e. this doesn't make sense. I want to pay, I want to receive the money, I want to send $100 to my aunt who is in Bogota, easily, quickly, in a potentially programmable way, etc.

etc. So it's really about bringing the use case to the center of who these things are for, how can we get mass adoption to make it intuitive, easy to use and fast? Thanks Massimo. And now let's talk about the end customer. Rosario, as a private bank and well-being manager, what perception and demand do you see from clients regarding digital assets and cryptocurrency instruments?

Eh, is it still a niche curiosity or a more structural trend? Good morning, first of all. Come on, it's interesting being here because I realize I'm practically the only old one. I'm the only old one, so bear with me as I listen to an old man because he was nice there. That we are every day.

Bravo. He was nice because he couldn't say otherwise when he was next to him. Well, the question is funny because this is my job, right? I've been doing this forever, since I was about your age. And the approach to this new world.

Curiosity or niche? Niche in Naples has a double meaning and then it's ugly, let's get rid of it. So, let's start with some numbers. Savings around the world. How much savings do you think there is in the world?

A crazy figure. 530,000 trillion dollars, without counting the ones Gianluca has hidden under the tile, eh, so they are much more miscounted. This is savings. Then there are people dying of hunger, but perhaps this would be a topic to discuss at another table. How much stuff is crypto?

3000 billion. 3 out of 530,000. Is that not enough? Is that a lot? If I do the percentage calculation, but maybe I'm wrong, so forgive me, we should be around 0.

5 or so. For me it's a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff. And this stuff came through a different process, right? Because he said before that we've been thinking the same way for 50 years, not just 50 years because he's young. 50 years of my generation, those before me.

We had the lira. Here we are talking about a change because change is a word that is easy to say. We face change, then we apply resilience. It's a huge thing, that is, taking away coins, the way of thinking about money and investments that we are used to and changing it completely. So, there's a lot of curiosity and at the beginning there was also skepticism because it remains a fact that I can buy a Rolex with Bitcoin but I can't buy a coffee.

It's a paradox, right? And it continues to be so. but it grows and then skepticism becomes curiosity and becomes a desire to invest. And something even more peculiar is happening now that if the largest client on duty wants to buy Bitcoin from me , he can't do it in a traditional bank, he can't do it, but he can do it through constructed instruments, ETFs, ETNs, I think you all know that. So it's paradoxical, I can't buy it directly, but through a vehicle.

This tells us something important, that this curiosity is becoming an opportunity for us and for our customers. This is a transition that will still take time. How much? I don't know, because post- Covid times have changed everything a bit, right? That is, digital diffusion has accelerated , everything has changed.

I agree with Massimo that the process must be simpler to access this type of investment and we as an institution, but not only us, but also politicians, must accept that this change exists, a change generated precisely by politicians who wanted a more transparent process, as Lorenzo said in a lesson together when we were talking about blockchain, right? something that explained all the steps of a cryptocurrency, of a gigantic exchange. Okay, this will still encounter some opposition, but I'm telling you that this is the direction. We need the first one. In the world of credit, it's like this: you need the first person with courage, the first fund with courage, and then the world changes and then runs.

I'm happy that I'm here because maybe, as an old man, I'm the only one who still tries to run. I don't know if I'll make it , but you'll make it for sure. And as market interest grows, US cases are also beginning to consolidate. And Gianluca, what are the use cases for tokenized real-world assets that are attracting the most interest and concreteness today? First of all, good afternoon everyone.

It 's an honor for me to be on this panel with institutions of the caliber of Banca Patrimoni, Banca Intesa, and Mastercard. And my role on this panel is kind of the nerdy guy, right? The guy who programs, who wants to touch on a more technical point of the situation because we need institutions, but innovation moves too fast. So the time has really come, and with this panel, perhaps it's a bit of a small test of what we're trying to do, that institutions are finally following the pace of innovation. Obviously it's very, very difficult, but we're getting there .

Um, definitely the main use case of Real World Asset for me is stable coins. Maybe when we talk about real-world assets, we don't realize that fiat currency, which is money, is a real asset and currently the real use case. I've been in the crypto world for years now, and the real use case is what people use, stable coins. That is, we see USDT having managed to provide a payment method in countries where money did not exist before. It was very difficult to have a bank account, it was very difficult to make transactions.

We have countries in South America, Africa, Asia where inflation is skyrocketing, and thanks to USDT we have a payment method with USDC, with Dai. Obviously, there are various forms that can be decentralized or more centralized, but I would definitely say that the biggest use case for Real World Assets is stable coins. In fact, I'm very curious to know how institutions will behave with stable coins, because we've heard a lot about central bank digital currencies. how the central bank will behave, but in my opinion there will be a sort of race to see who will make the best stable coin , who will make the best partnerships to use this type of real world asset. So surely in the next few years we will see more and more adoptions of stablecoins, and I'm curious to see adoptions not only of the dollar.

Obviously we know that the dollar is the main currency, but it is very interesting to see how other nations will behave because in the end we do not understand well, but Teter has become one of the largest holders of American treasury bonds and how will the states behave? So there is a side of use cases that the masses use, but there is also a whole other side of how governments will behave with these use cases. In addition to stable coins, the tokenization of real assets like real estate is very interesting to me, and obviously there we still have, especially in Europe where we regulate everything, we have a real regulatory problem with regards to real estate because it's still very difficult, it's all a mess, MICAR is still complicated in terms of legislation, but certainly the opportunity to invest, to buy a token that represents a fraction of a fund or a fraction of a real estate asset is still an important step, and therefore any type of asset that we can think of, such as art, like real assets, such as luxury watches, are certainly assets that will be self-coined over time. Obviously we need a framework both on a legal level and on a technical level and on a technical level we need that we, I live in Amsterdam, we have a programming company among other things, in addition to Next, in addition to also being one of the organizers of this event and we have worked on various frameworks for the totanization. One of our favorites is T-Rex which was also done with the guys at Tokening.

We have done various research and published various articles on the subject. So we want to tokenize a real asset, okay? But if, for example, I want to tokenize a house, maybe there's confidential data that I don't want to show, so, okay, blockchain is important, but there's data that needs to be hidden because then maybe we don't respect privacy. So, as a result, there are these frameworks that use Zero Knowledge Proof, which is a technology that allows you to obscure certain data. So, in my opinion , to really use these types of real assets, both at an institutional level and at a mass level, we need these frameworks that comply with the law and are scalable from a technical point of view.

To comply with the law, we need ZIK because to comply with the Micar, to comply with the GDPR and all the major European legislation that always seeks to protect, because we perhaps always criticize Europe, you know, all the people in the crypto market, no, Dubai, Asia and so on. But Europe protects us, that is, people don't realize that Europe protects us, that is, Europe is going to respect the citizen. So consequently, to follow this flow it is very important that there are these frameworks that comply with the law and are useful in terms of scalability. So I advise you to follow the T-Rex, the T-Rex which is the tokenization contract. Well, for the more technically minded it's called LC 3463 and it allows you to touch any type of real asset while respecting the law.

Then obviously if you are a business there are all different compliances that need to be done while if you are a user you always have to be casy. So to summarize this concept, stable coin is definitely number one, so the tokenization of currencies is much simpler. If I want to send a bank transfer from Italy to Japan with Swift, maybe I pay X, it takes x days, instead I use USDC one address. For example, we have a lot of Asian programmers, we pay them in half a second, so definitely the first stable coins and then we have the whole real estate category which in my opinion will always take off and with other categories such as Luxury Watches and Luxury Art. Thanks Gianluca.

Well, getting back to you, Rosario, can your organization help democratize access to investment classes typically reserved for a few, or do you foresee it remaining an offering primarily for private clients? By definition, blockchain is absolutely democratic—that is, cryptocurrencies are the most democratic thing there is—but in reality, they aren't that widespread yet. What could be the reason? Dinners are different in my opinion. The first one and let's go back to the discussion of a bit of skepticism we had before, right?

Because one of the first things we all hear when we talk about crypto is what's behind it, right? What's behind a Bitcoin? What's underneath Etherium? I always answer what's under the coin? What's under the dollar?

Debt. Below 530,000 trillion there is only debt. What is the guarantee for that debt? Why do we buy it? Why do we use it?

Because it is guaranteed by the taxes we pay. So we are the guarantor of the currency . We who pay taxes, not Gianluca who puts bricks under. Okay? Bitcoin works the same way.

The guarantor of Bitcoin is me who buys it and Gianluca who sells it. I resell it, Lorenzo buys it. It's the same system, so in theory it's a little cleaner too. What is blocking this beautiful democratization? The same concept that is in the diffusion is the struggle that is between tradef and Defi.

The Defy system makes it accessible to everyone. We can all buy crypto without the middleman, which by the way I'm speaking against myself because the bank is one of the primary intermediaries, right? I am the middleman. Yet that intermediary acts as a guarantor and we still pay for some of the mistakes we made at the beginning. Initially made with tokenization of stuff that was worthless and we saw all the crypto that disappeared.

I always imagined that blockchain would allow that thing you were talking about, that is, to buy the gaze of the Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, but if you tokenize the Mona Lisa I could buy a small piece and that would have a great value. I participated in the growth in the value of that painting and in reality, precisely because a whole series of bubbles have occurred , we find ourselves with a path that protects us, as you said Gianluca, from Europe, but it slows us down a lot. So, two paths must start to agree. When Trade Fy accepts the possibility of trading cryptocurrencies, not just as an extremely speculative or volatile instrument, but as a real investment asset, then we will certainly have made a huge leap forward. Today it is still not very widespread, but as I said before the demand is there and it is growing, so the system will have to adapt because one thing is certain: the banking system, the economic system but banking in this case, ultimately doesn't let the train pass, it slows it down because it wants to drive it.

We are used to leading, not to being led. And now two worlds are colliding, you and us, but also in terms of age. Because of those 530,000 trillion. We older people have the bulk of the burden. We have to accept, you who are arriving, you have to agree to keep us on board too and in my opinion this thing will happen quite soon and the system will become much more democratic and among the various real assets, as you said before Gianluca, your real estate organization is one of the most promising segments.

What are the obstacles and opportunities on this front? So, yes, following on from what we were saying before, real estate is certainly one of the organized asset categories that is gaining most traction, but as I mentioned, Europe protects us, but as Rosario was saying, it slows us down. So most of the projects we 're seeing in real estate tokenization aren't coming from our continent, but they're coming from Singapore, from the Middle East. eh more from US. So, it's definitely a fantastic technological advantage to use blockchain as a real estate tokenization model, but at the same time, is there actually some protocol that is tokenizing it because it seems to me that sometimes we use blockchain for transparency.

Like, I've been hearing for 4 years, I've been hearing for 5 years , right? Blockchain will be used for transparency in agri-food supply chains, for example. Okay. Okay. But what protocols are actually doing this?

There was IBM with Food Trust that would ask you for 20k per month if you wanted to trace a certain supply chain. [Music] Computer soamo sorry. Answer maybe mom. Exact. Anyway, I was saying, in the end, it all seems a bit like a mirror for Lod because we're talking about tokenization of real assets like real estate, but which protocols are actually doing it and in reality there are very few.

I can think of Parkol, which is a US protocol on Solana that allows you to both take APIs of real estate prices and actually purchase certain fractions of various real estate assets. So there's definitely a need for more programmers, more investors, because okay, it's nice to make laws, but if the process of building a platform to tokenize real assets like real estate isn't easy, what are we talking about? So I would definitely like to take a step forward, which is that there is a need for both financial education and programming education. We need more programmers, that is, without programmers nothing can be done. We can talk about institutions, we can talk about the law, but if there aren't companies that start programming and creating these platforms to tokenize real assets like real estate, we'll never get anything done.

So, okay, we're talking about real estate, but finally let's look at the volumes. If we look at Defile Lama, the real estate volumes of tokens that represent a real estate fraction don't even exceed 50 million in the last quarter, so we're really talking about - sorry for the term - really a pittance compared to everything else that happens in Defi, right? there is Uniswap in Defi which makes 40 billion a day in volume, while real estate parcel makes you 100,200 million a year. So there is definitely a need for more planning, there is a need for more startups that focus on this and we will definitely see now with the Vara conference that took place in the mid-term, in my opinion, that whole area, that is, where I see if I want to follow the thread of the discussion on the real estate organization where I see a lot of attraction is definitely the middle list. where precisely thanks to the new legislation, every new property that is put up and registered in the land registry is done directly in blockchain and this is beautiful and I would also like to connect to what Rosario said because the moment you trade f list that is you do ok but if Black Rock comes to me and creates the centralized ETF for me to buy Bitcoin but what's the point?

That is, that is Bitcoin, we who are a bit cryptonerd, not your not your not your keys, not your coins, right? I mean, how do you say, and then I go and buy the Bitcoin ETF, what's the purpose, right? So consequently we will certainly need the trade f, for example, one of my secret dreams is to see the trade fista, that is to see the NASDAQ directly on the blockchain, that is to see Wall Street directly on the blockchain, the listings on Wall Street directly on the blockchain and on real estate it is happening now on the midlist. There's a new property, it's registered at the land registry, the land registry has a digital copy on the blockchain, it's all transparent, but it has to be from inception, that is, we must not be a duplicate, because as Rosario also said, we currently have the blockchain and most real assets except for stable coins which in my opinion are the big use case, they are just duplicates, that is, it's just all a duplicate which in the end, I mean, why would I ever use a duplicate, maybe for the various strategies? You can stake it, you can put collateral on it, but we're not really solving the problem if we continue to create digital twins, replicas, right?

It must be inception directly in blockchain. He's coming from Circle, which made 500% in a month, and all of Wall Street is talking about it, okay? listla directly in blockchain. In fact, an Alpha, I'm very curious to see what will happen in Texas now that they're creating an exchange, a sort of no- exchange directly on the blockchain that should launch in America in 2026. So to follow the discussion a bit, I wanted to say that okay, the totanization of real assets is important, but in the end, in the real estate market we have 50 million on Solana, nothing special in volume, so we need an inception and we need to follow a bit of what's happening in other territories like Middellist.

For these changes to truly scale, however, as we said before, it is essential to address operational and regulatory barriers. Agostino, what do you consider to be the most critical obstacles to integrating blockchain into core banking processes and institutional client services? So, I'll echo what all my colleagues on stage said. Um, in my opinion, Gianluca has already brought up the big elephant in the room, and it's privacy, because all the institutions right now , the institutions that want to innovate, that invest budgets every year in innovation, in trying to streamline processes or bring something new to the market simply because we're opening a new line of business. um they approached the DLT world by saying "Ok, all our technicians have studied and the real innovation lies in public DLTs".

What actually happens is that most of the use cases we've seen in recent years, and I'm talking about capital markets within the DLT world, so moving on to the tokenization of financial instruments, I agree with Gianluca when he says that it's quite senseless to have twins even at the financial instrument level and we need to talk about digitally native financial instruments created to be on DLT. Well, to get all the efficiencies from a possible atomic regulation to an automatically paid corporate action for a capital increase, rather than, um, we can achieve levels of efficiency that are unthinkable in the financial markets today, and everything becomes extremely complex when we combine public DLT with total transparency, because first we went from, oh God, I'm talking about crypto in the bank and I see Crypto as something completely hidden. Then there was a little step forward, okay? everything that is crypto, so I'm saying it's crypto because it's verified, certified, so it already takes on a different meaning and at that point comes the understanding of how much transparency there is on a blockchain and transparency scares an institution, it scares because no one wants to make the payroll of an institution public. Well, nobody wants to make their investment strategies clear .

maybe you have different desks that apply particular strategies and having everything tracked all the transactions on DLT would be available as information available to everyone and so this is where all the solutions that Gianluca was talking about come to our aid, eh ZKi Rollaps which will help us maintain confidentiality by supporting us, having as still certainly well-structured layer one and which will help us access all the efficiencies that DLT talks about. Certainly, alongside privacy, it is also important to mention this cultural change. I mentioned it a bit while I was speaking, but within the institutions, the cultural change is devastating because the banks are objects that I would say giants of large institutions, sometimes they have been defined as " big to fail" in reality they also have a fundamental impact on the real economy especially in Italy and consequently also having an approach, um, which is a prudential approach, is the number one mantra of a bank, unfortunately. And this type of innovation that often comes from the bottom up , because we talked about different generations and so on, this type of innovation comes from the bottom and reaches the top management who must try to understand and define what the institution's strategy is. And it's certainly not an innovation that's brought by a big tech company, by a big tech company that's simple enough to understand because it's a business case, it's an innovation that's solving a problem.

Blockchain isn't solving a problem. It was born like the internet was born for a purpose, thanks to the brilliant intuition of a group of people and so on. However, from there to saying that blockchain is solving a problem is not reality, because blockchain could solve n problems or none. Well, therefore the approach must be a pragmatic approach. All the US cases that pop up like mushrooms day by day need to be analyzed.

In reality, of this plethora of use cases, probably 10% will become operational and will probably change the lives of many people and certainly also the impact they will have within financial services. Um, I'll just spend a minute because, well, Gianluca has already mentioned Micar, I won't go further with the regulatory part, but it's essential to understand what the Eurosystem and the ECB are doing in Europe, because they are working to give us access, at least on the bull market, and also to the Central Bank's digital currency. Well, there was an experiment, a regulatory sandbox last year. As agreed, we participated, we issued a commercial paper worth 10 million and it was a transaction that we settled in 2 minutes instead of 48 hours with a contract defined within a smart contract. So we eliminated, we created operational efficiencies, we brought in new liquidity that is unthinkable to have intraday liquidity in two minutes.

It was n't the one that licked the email. We also have a proprietary initiative by Trin , which is connected to Castodi, which I mentioned before is the reason why we saw Casty as a foundational element, and the ECB is working on a 3-5 year plan to get institutions to work with DLT and ensure that there is this exchange, this connection between the DLT world and the institutional, legacy, traditional infrastructure world, I'm talking about Target 2, Target to Securities, and tips, for example, for instant payments. So, let's say that banks will likely take on an interface role between the legacy world and the new world that is developing through the new DLT ecosystems. And thank you Agostino. And looking instead at the short- to medium-term prospects, as we said before, one of the most concrete themes is that of the stable coin.

Massimo, do you see a realistic path for their large-scale institutional adoption as payment settlement tools? Yes, of course for both. First of all, I think this is one of the last questions, so I want to rely on what I 've been told. Um, Gianluca, yes, for me one fundamental thing that you touched on is regulation. In fact, without regulation, things struggle to move forward in a purposeful way.

Um, you can see that too, I wanted to throw in some stats from my world to reinforce your point. It has been seen in the crypto payments environment, especially crypto cards, in the last 3 years 80% of the innovation and volume of crypto payments has come out of Europe, especially there an innovation and I have brought evidence to support it, but we'll talk about it a bit later. So certainly this has to do with obviously a certain appetite for risk that there was in Europe and other other regions more than in the United States. there was a certain infrastructure that was available, but there was also Mica and a regulation that was pioneered in a certain way and this helped Europe, at least in my environment, to bring forward a certain innovation in this sector. Then Agostino, you said something that there are currently 100 use cases per day.

It would be phenomenal if that were the case. There are actually certain things that come out every day, but I'm not sure they are use cases because that's the point in this world there are these technologies, these innovations, these swappable things and there, but if you don't bring one, that is, a utility, a use case, that is, that someone needs it, that someone does something with it, that you can go and get crypto, Bitcoin, eh, go and buy yourself a coffee up there, down the street from the house or go and take your girlfriend out for a slice of pizza, if there is no real utility it doesn't come to life. So that was a point I wanted to make. New things without direction. Sure, there are so many use cases, it would be nice in the future if there were 100 real cases a day.

Um and obviously Rosario um with the subject of the age I'm the only one here on the panel who wrote the nights with the penalty, so the new things are not necessarily the best things. The question, sorry if I never answer your questions, I'll try now. So the stable con Yes, it's a very very open topic at the moment and I don't even want to hear about it anymore, but in my mind it's a bit pragmatic and and in this big mess the stablecon in the end what is it and what is it for, right? For me, it's ultimately the simplest way to tokenize everything, right? because we're talking a little about autoconization, about everything, about bringing the advantages of the blockchain system and infrastructure, the programmability Global 2047 eh fast, effective, without the exposure, without the risk of volatility and without the speculative speculation factor .

So for me it's just that, you get the benefits and you don't have the risks. Okay? Then what do we do with these things? For Mastercard, honestly, it's more of a means than an end. Hey, why are you laughing?

I'm spouting off words that don't exist. And for us it is more of a means than an end. And what do we do about it in the short term? card payments, paypal, cross-border, global remittances, correspondence banking and then another thing, global settlement and bringing once again bringing the blockchain infrastructure into the banking system, into the institutional system, into the government system, bringing these advantages at scale. And since I think I'm closing the panel, I wanted to end with fewer words and more and more and more use cases.

So, talking about stablecoins with, since we're at an Ethereum event, in the end I wanted to, uh, I wanted to demonstrate to everyone that you can make very nice innovations in this environment, uh, on the Ethereum Chain. We launched the first one, this was already a couple of weeks ago, even months ago, maybe you've seen it, the first Real Decentralized Payment Card Global with MetaMask. What does it mean? This means that from this point on, payments were made by attaching a card or payment method to an account. There was a custodian, there was someone in the middle who had the custodian of the funds.

What's happening in the blockchain world? There are these self-assets that give control to the user, to the consumer, who has the funds, and so there is real growth in the, um, in the use cases of Self Custodial Wallet, and one of the biggest players, MetaMask, has been working with Mastercard for more or less 3 years, so there are data privacy issues, regulatory issues, and technical reliability issues. technique, that is, it was really something innovative and new to allow the user to spend his crypto without taking them to a certain point to an average custodian actor. We've worked with MetaMask, with Mastercard, with other players who also get involved in this value chain and we have it here, I brought it like this to show everyone if you want to share it . Help, guys.

And here there is no open bar, eh, so Gianluca pays for the open bar, but if you are interested in spreading the word, you are available to spend your stable coins anywhere where Maciascar is accepted and eh yes, so I wanted to close for a moment with something a little more colorful and maybe with some closing points for me if I have to summarize the most important points. The first thing is that in this space 1 + 1 must equal 3. 1 + 1 is equal to 3. Why why do I say this? Because nothing can be done alone.

Nothing is done, everything is anarchy, decentralized, without government, without banks, without No, yes we must all work together and contribute our skills. Things that have been done before must and can improve, but I mustn't say they disappear, right? So we have to work together. The power of partnerships in this world is worth much much much more. Mastercard can't do anything on its own except through collaborations with custodians, banks, fintechs, crypto-blockchain players, and so on.

Well, that's the first point. The second point, obviously, that I'm discussing is the importance of bringing forward real-life use cases and bringing forward an improvement in the user experience of the UI and then the power of the regulations to bring forward these innovations. These are some of the points that I remember. Thanks for the insights you shared. I do n't know if there are any questions from the audience.

If anyone has any questions. There they are. Let's take a walk among the audience. HI. Do you have a question?

No. No. Hello. So, I wanted to ask this question. Basically, on Real World Asset, many people always talk about the organization of the real estate market.

I really appreciated Gianluca, who instead focused on the fact that we started from real world assets, starting with the first thing to touch on, which is money, and the first use case is the dollar with USDT and USDC. However, between the dollar and, let's say, real estate, because we are in Italy, we are very tied, let's say, to real estate, there are other things that are easier to organize, because in my opinion real estate is very difficult to organize. There is public debt, private debt, stocks, and I wanted to ask a question especially to the banks, even if they are moving mainly on private debt, because they basically have private debt in their hands, if they are doing something they can capitalize it. No, go, go, go. So, as far as using the one in front is concerned, you also have it right in front.

So, as far as debt is concerned, actually, debt tokenization is what we started with, pretty much all the institutions started with debt tokenization because it makes corporate actions easier to manage. Tokenizing equity is still a fairly long and complex process, because essentially there are too many cases to manage, which need to be included at the smart contract level and everything behind equity management needs to be automated. This is because it involves important corporate management , which is the basis of corporate law, and therefore a series of extremely difficult issues need to be managed. Debt is the primary use case from which all institutions, including mine, started. Well, I brought up the case of a commercial card earlier.

Commercial paper is, you have to think of it as a bond that is not in single [Music] at the end of its life, that can be shorted at will. Well, tokenizing debt is certainly the easiest thing and can bring liquidity to a market that at the moment, at least in financial instruments and utilities, doesn't have any and therefore it can unlock both—uh, as far as I'm also thinking of the world of treasurers or all the corporate treasurers who manage asset and liability management that has maturities—uh, probably at times they're short on liquidity and at other times they're long on liquidity, having practically instantaneous tools that allow you to make your liquidity investment, whether intraday, overnight or whatever, which is limited only to banks today and being able to do it on the corporate side is certainly something new and so I see I absolutely agree with what you were saying, which I imagine was the point of the question. Debt tokenization is certainly the number one use case, on the financial instruments side. I will be very brief in my answer. Yes.

No, it's actually the easiest thing, he said so. There are already some, you can already find tokenized debt on the market. There are some 1- or 6-month short bonds that you can find already tokenized, so we're going in that direction. Then, as I said before, ours is a world that is supported by debt, so the more its circulation is facilitated, the more they make us buy it, the happier everyone is. It's the first thing that will be touched.

The regulations are also simpler. One more question? C. Come on, don't be shy, otherwise I'll ask a question. Here you are.

Hey, Madonna, how many of you are there? 1 2 3. Go. No, and I wanted to ask what is the advantage of some tokenizations, for example the tokenization of debt, the tokenization of equity shares, that is, what advantages does it bring to an investor who, for example, bought Google shares and is now given the opportunity to buy Google shares on Polygon. Um, I mean, what's the advantage, apart from the fact that he's no longer tied to the broker where he holds these shares, but let's say they 're not highly regulated entities and you never see them failing, right?

I mean, surely on the issue of regulation before investing one's money, each person has to do their own diligence, right? So, regarding the security of the platform, there is always a management that needs to be done before investing even a cent for this little initiative. As for the benefits of organization, there are many, and certainly the concept of owning an asset that is in your own wallet and not perhaps on a centralized platform, you remove the intermediation between you and the asset. I feel sorry for my bank friends here, but if I have my money in the bank, that is, the bank that we know very well what they do with our money, they invest it, etc. If I have the wallet, the relationship is direct, so consequently the first benefit is the selfie, right?

We call it that. Then as a consequence there are many strategies with Defi, primitives that can be done. If I buy it, they've tokenized the NASDAQ now, right? If I buy the NASDAQ on Revolute, it stays there. If I buy the Nasdaq on a DeFi platform, I can take it, I can put it as collateral and take a loan against my Nasdaq.

then buy the Nasdaq again and I find myself with 20-30% more capital. Then maybe I can leverage it directly in DeFi without having to rely on new centralized platforms and consequently I can also send it to you. That is, if I buy a Nasdaq on Revolute, I can't send it to another user on Revolut, or if I buy it on a centralized broker platform, I can't send it to anyone. If I buy tokenized Nasdaq, I say, "Mom, look, I want to send you some money, not I'm not sending you USDC, I'm not sending you euros, I'm sending you a piece of Nasdaq." I mean, it's an absurd concept anyway because we're going to create a communication for assets that was impossible to communicate before and then especially if I, okay, maybe it's a bit with it's a bit similar to a limit order, but if I want to trade the NASDAQ when the market is closed, I can open positions that are not the limit order, but I buy them directly in DeFi and it opens the position in DeFi for me.

Then obviously when the market opens there will be the settlement transaction that will buy you the underlying asset as in this case it will be the Nasdaq. So it's all a concept, the benefits here are very much on the digital twin, as I was saying before, the real innovation must be at inception, that is, if there is this technology at Inception there we have truly destroyed the la the def will take the trade fil. But now with this digital twin technology I see these benefits of communication and self-custody. I hope I answered your question. Thank you.

Let's ask one last quick question, we're a bit long. Greetings. I wanted to ask about the card with MetaMask, given the current laws, the 2025 budget law and given the payment methods that can be made via stablecoin and, if I'm not mistaken, via wrapp for Ethereum. Uh, as far as a transaction goes, a purchase is considered capital gain, so do I have to pay taxes on every purchase? Yes, the short answer is yes.

So a No, no, it is in fact a slightly complicated point that we are looking at, but yes, there is therefore a crypto card transaction, even if it is a microtransaction, um it implies a conversion from crypto to fiat because the merchant ultimately receives fiat, so there is always a conversion in today's world and therefore it implies a micro tax event, if you put it that way. So the answer is yes. And how do we move forward with these things in the future? Unfortunately I don't know, but the answer is yes anyway. Well, maybe even for things like, um, in this case, even building a credit history, especially for those users in the United States, because there's something obviously important for them, it could also become something to exploit, an opportunity, but nowadays it should be a tax event, that is, whether it is or not, depends on you, but yes.

Perfect. I have one last, very last question. Since Lucrezza and I are launching a talk show about crypto, how are we budgeting for September for the B. Come on, a round of applause for the guys. A thousand thanks.

A thousand thanks. Let's go.