# Plug and Play or Plug and Pray?: DeFi Programmability and Compliance | DC Fintech Week 2025

- Channel: [DC Fintech Week](https://streameth.org/dc-fintech-week)
- Date: 2025-11-21
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Y4zy13E8byQ
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4zy13E8byQ

## Transcript

All right, thank you all for coming on back. Uh we got a great panel here today on DeFi programmability and compliance. An excellent panel. Uh I'm going to hand it over to Nick with Coindesk. Uh, we have Maha here with BIS, Lee Schneider, uh, who I think everybody knows with Avalabs, and Yaya now with I'm gonna say it right, Alo. >> Alio. >> Alio. I am not going to say it right. Alio. Um, let me with that, let me turn it on over to Nick. Take it away. Thank you very much. And thank you all for being here and thank you to the Fintech Foundation for hosting what I'm really excited for. It's a great panel. Uh we're gonna talk about DeFi and compliance, but really quickly, my name is Nick Day. I'm with Coindesk. I cover policy stuff. I'm gonna ask my panelists to just very quickly introduce themselves as well. Maha, let's start with you. >> Mahal Dimashki. I'm the BIS innovation hub center head in Singapore. The BIS is the Bank for International Settlements and the Innovation Hub innovates with central banks on, you know, interesting stuff using new technologies to try and close gaps in the financial system. I'm Lee Schneider. >> Thank you. I'm Lee Schneider. My microphone doesn't work. Uh, apparently Adam thinks that if he knows me, everybody knows me. I I don't know how that came about. Uh, I am the general counsel at Avalabs. We work on the Avalanche protocol and we do a lot of other kinds of blockchain technology stuff. and I've been kicking around and doing these kinds of panels for a while, but I'm very excited for this one. >> Good morning everyone. I'm Yaya Fenusi. Uh, currently, well, not currently, I just became global head of policy for the Alo Network Foundation and Alo is a layer 1 blockchain built on zero knowledge proofs, which maybe we'll get into, um, that offers confidential transactions but builds the ability for risk management. Um, and I'm also an adviser to the Crypto Council for Innovation, a digital asset trade association. >> I see the CCI folks in the back pumping arms back. >> Uh, let's get started because the first question is going to be maybe an obvious one. Are DeFi and compliance two words that actually go together? So well maybe should should well I I'm gonna push not push back but um DeFi and compliance first of all both of those terms have to be defined and I use the term compliance um precise I try to be precise and sometimes use it rarely because when people say compliance um that doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. Are you saying that all of the activities in this service are compliant with regulation A, B, and C of jurisdiction XY X, you know, jurisdiction X or and when you talk about DeFi, what are you talking about? That's maybe a bigger conversation. Is this a descent? Is it fully decentralized, etc. So those terms have to be picked apart. I'm not going to avoid the question, but I I'll I'll respond with this answer, which is what is probably going to be more appropriate at least in the medium term, the next few years as we as the private sector and regulators really engage on this issue is the term risk management because when you if you are creating a decentralized service, right, if you have a decentralized protocol, even if you talk about frontends, so what are the specific rules that a frontend has to comply with. Who's written those laws? Who's written the rules? So, a developer knows, oh yeah, this is compliant. We throw out the term compliant, but the rules for compliance for parts of this ecosystem haven't been written, haven't been promulgated. So, I would be careful about using the term compliance too often. But I think what people are thinking about now is what can I do to manage the re the real risk that are out there in the world? If I'm building something, if I'm building an interaction, obviously because we're humans, some funds may be attached to illicit activity, theft, cheating, exploitation, whatever. So, we realize that that's a fact. It's not it's a DeFi thing. It's not a trady thing. It is human civilization. So, if that's a a fact, if that's a the nature of things, what might you do? What can you do to mitigate that risk? what can be done so that um uh to minimize the amount of illicit funds that you're dealing with or interacting with. Well, I think um what Yaya just explained is is to what I would consider to be more the integrity of the financial system as opposed to the narrow definition of compliance that when you talk to financial institutions, they tend to have sort of a a very neat uh you know um list and they tick the boxes and everything else which I'm not advocating but I I'm I'm just drawing the distinction and I think it's very helpful to think about the integrity of the financial system. Um but also uh sometimes some of these compliance requirements are quite prescriptive actually. Um some aren't and and some are. Um what we've been doing uh and to answer your question actually uh which I I'm not going to avoid. I I don't think we have a choice to uh to with DeFi coming coming down the line. Let's take sort of tokenization as as one we've be we've been hearing about tokenization throughout the whole conference and how it's really going to be the next frontier of financial services. We don't have a choice uh to have the kind of a contradiction between compliance and and DeFi. We have to find a way to ensure that we hold high standards um in this new uh this new world. um and and you know we we kind of um ensure sort of the integrity of the financial system. We ensure uh consumer protection. So we've been experimenting with that. One of our projects, this is what we do. This is the fun part of sort of you know what we do. Uh we've we've we've looked at how can we um I don't know if we coined the term programmable compliance. Certainly um we heard it from you know some of our central banking partners but programmable compliance or compliance by design where we have taken you know peer-to-peer technology so we've we've borrowed from the D5 world to test whether we can um encode compliance requirements in a protocol and then you can uh prevalidate all the compliance requirements for a particular transaction and create a verifiable proof using smart contracts and that travels with the transaction and we've tested it with quant quantitative type of compliance, sanction screening, capital flow management measures and it's proven that you can actually do that technically and the interesting thing about that and you know um but back to your question is that when you build something that's modular which we did with project Mandela and fun fact Mandela is the universe in perfect harmony. So we've chosen that word for a uh for compliance projects. Um we it you know if you build it in a modular fashion you can actually use this kind of streamlined automated compliance by design kind of idea to um to work with existing systems tradfi as well as with digital assets and we've tested that actually in our first phase and we're going to the next phase. So I think yes we they don't have to be in in contradiction. >> Uh I very much agree. I I really like the phrasing that Yaha used around risk management and I think a lot of what Maha said is geared towards that kind of riskmanagement uh approach uh as opposed to sort of a tickbox compliance approach which I think by and large people recognize now is not really useful. Uh it's more of an exercise in ticking boxes than in ensuring compliance. Uh I'm going to take Yaya up on his challenge to define uh DeFi and compliance. And I'm gonna define both of them at the same time with one definition. Uh which will be a neat trick if I can pull that off. Uh making sure people's money doesn't get stolen. So uh something is decentralized if it makes sure that people's money doesn't get stolen and something is compliant if it makes sure that people's money doesn't get stolen. very gross oversimplification that I just pulled off there. So, we should think about it in more nuanced terms than that. But I think that's a really good baseline for us to start the conversation because at the end of the day, I don't want somebody stealing my stuff and I don't want somebody stealing mahas or or yayas or anybody else's stuff. we should be able to be in control of our own stuff and in a digital world that poses uh problems just like it does in the physical world. So sort of starting from that beginning point is really important from my perspective. And I think the notion of decentralized blockchains and decentralized applications that are built on those blockchains is premised on the idea that nobody's rewriting transaction history or changing balances without the certainty that a transaction's been signed with a private key. And so from my perspective, since that's the base of blockchains, that should be the base of both DeFi decentralization and compliance. So let's let's break all of this down. I do like that baseline definition. Uh Mah, let's start with you. Generally speaking, you know, what are you looking out for? What should regulators be looking out for as they think about and look into DeFi projects? Well, I think um I mean we're talking about uh compliance, they should look at a whole bunch of things, but um but if we focus on on compliance, I think you know regulators, I love the word risk management, by the way. So this is what regulators are. They they're risk managers on a systemic basis, particularly central banks, but that's that's what they do. So it's important for them to think about when, you know, new technologies are coming in, when innovations are happening, how is it going to be developed in a in a safe way? And I know that there's the debate around the balance of how much you allow to um you know for for parties to innovate um and and and not stifle the innovation but it's an important questions that regulators actually have and before my role here I actually was at the financial conduct authority so you know in the thick of regulating financial institutions that are innovating indeed um and so you know it it it's um it's recognized at regulators and central banks that these new technologies um are uh different. I think there's now I mean there's certainly a recognition that that when you look at DeFi the nature of the transaction compared to centralized finance is very different you know peer-to-peer is very different what does that mean from a legal perspective what does that mean for you know the current frameworks that we have do they actually apply to this new very different way in which transactions actually happen and that's a fundamental change that we we really need to recognize and so I I think regulators and and central banks are recognizing and in fact there's you know despite what people think there's quite a few innovative regulators out there the monetary authority of Singapore is one of them and if you look at some of their projects they think about programmable compliance by design as they're thinking about sort of you know whether it's financial market infrastructure their um uh global layer 1 uh is is one of their projects that they um uh that they have uh running they've just launched something new I'm just hot off the press this morning um again looking at a key component is uh is compliance. But what's important in all of this and and this is also recognized and I think we found this with our project work is that we can't add compliance that will add layers and burdens to the process. We need to find ways to streamline and automate. And that's a a kind of a motivation for, you know, existing systems that are quite entrenched, frankly, um, and compliance is cumbersome and compliance costs go up and they're not necessarily solving the problem, but also as we're looking at new technologies, how can we really build that in very early on? Regulators are thinking about this. Um, they're experimenting with it. The speed at which obviously the public sector experiments necessarily is different to the private sector. I think the private sector has a really great role to play here working with public sector. We had private sector and part of our projects. It's very important for public private partnerships because you bring the innovation and I think we need to and maybe we could talk later on about you know the process of kind of getting getting to that stage and how quickly do we need to move but it's definitely uh there and and think about it and and it's it's it's a surmountable problem we can actually together try and solve it I believe >> uh I definitely want to come back to that and at uh in a minute but really quickly what's the flip side what do developers need to look at how should they maybe looking at compliance. >> Yeah, if you don't mind, I'll go first. >> Uh, so maybe I'm just going to challenge a little something that you said, Maha, which is, uh, you seem to suggest that transactions naturally flow through intermediaries. And while that's often true, that's not the exclusive way that transactions get done. And there's a lot of peer-to-peer transactions that happen in the real world. Uh, um, and so we shouldn't forget that fact. Because what's happening with blockchain, what's happening with DeFi is the ability for peer-to-peer transacting, uh, which is sometimes a misnomer in DeFi, which is maybe more maybe better characterized as peer-to-process, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Uh a and so because peer-to-peer now happens over the internet in a way that has not been possible before really um that's that that is sort of doing away with some of the need for intermediaries. And so to answer your question a little bit more precisely Nick um we we do need to now think about what compliance means. How do we frame compliance in a peer-to-peer world or a peer-to-p protocol world? And I think there's some real challenges for that. We don't uh as lawyers have really good ways of thinking about, for example, what it means to transact with um with uh something that is not another person. Uh, and a DeFi protocol is a protocol that you transact with that's not another person. It's autonomously functioning code. And figuring out what that means is going to be a big challenge for policy makers. It's going to be a big challenge for lawyers. And not just in the blockchain world. You know, uh, people keep telling me I'm going to have an AI agent next year doing transactions on my behalf. uh I'm waiting for that AI agent to charge stuff on my credit card that I did not authorize and figure out how I'm going to get that money back. Right? So all of these kinds of questions are sort of coming together at the same moment. I think you know what Maha said about sort of embedding compliance in uh code uh uh regulators working as part of the ecosystem on these projects and everything like that so they can better understand how things work. I think all of those are are really positive steps and necessary steps but we do need to sort of reconceptualize how we're going to deal with a lot of these issues. Can I say something real quick? I would say um because you're asking, you know, what should developers be thinking about and and I don't think I can tell people what to I can't tell people what to what to code, right? Um you have the freedom I I'll put this out there. You have the freedom to create whatever type of protocol you want to create or service or or um you know that you want to create. Um, I think what people do is they probably listen to what users want. What do people want? What's their demand for? But also, what is the environment? And this may be controversial. So, I'm going to be careful how I say this because my my point my my general point is is that you just have to consider what's in the what what are the risks, what's in the environment, what do people want. No one is saying that there's only going to be one type or I'm not saying there's only going to be one type of DeFi protocol or one type of DeFi service that should exist and it should have these boxes. A lot of times when we have these conversations, especially in the private sector, sometimes there's this I think a bit of a defensiveness because sometimes we're talking past each other because the regulators may say, "Oh, this is how uh D5 protocol should work." But maybe that's one example. It doesn't mean at least in the in the here in the US in the context I think most of us are are dealing with most of our economies. We're not saying that this should be outlawed. This should this should not this other type of protocol should not exist. But I'll sh I'll share a thought which may be may be controversial which is there I'll just put out there tornado cache right tornado cash serving a need for privacy um uh at a certain time right obviously served you know had served a need a lot of issues happened which we all know about and legal cases that that are being that are that are being dealt with offchain right Um after tornado cache there are some developers that said you know what hey maybe we could also figure out ways to do this privacy and obfiscation but work out ways where if you're on a sanctioned address you can't get into that pool of funds right that's a new sort of crazy that's developer so it's not me saying okay you have to do xyz it's people responding to okay we created something oh we see some of the issues that can come up this is life right oh what are some other ways and that's the beauty of I think the blockchain space which does react more quickly which can innovate which can build new things which is a developer might have a choice and say you know what I'm going to build a different type of um function within the DeFi space and and you're open to do that >> well so the the thing I wanted to add onto this I mean and you know um it it's great hearing the the perspective of panelists and every time I sit on these things by the way I learn as much as you know um everybody else um it shouldn't be seen seen as sort of regulators must do this and developers must do that. I I think it it really is is everybody's responsibility and and this is a not not a controversial thing to say at all. I think you know we all want the right outcome and so you know that that's a great example in terms of tornado cash but wouldn't it be great if when you're developing something you're thinking if what could go wrong and how do I make sure that I'm building for that thing that could go wrong to ensure it doesn't go wrong. That's that's kind of that's the mindset of risk management from a very early stage. Now um you know regulators obviously think about that private sector not not so much innovators not not as much and and um you know I say that because uh again having um dealt with quite a few of the wonderful entrepreneurs that you know do a lot of great things and I constantly encourage that you think about this at the design feature so you you as much as possible it's not all avoidable but as much as possible you're part of the solution and I so so when you ask the it it's not really about I think if all come together and again with all of our projects particularly on this particular uh subject we try to bring in the private sector the commercial banks the financial institutions as well as regulators to be to to cocreate what this would look like and actually we break down the barrier I also think that there's a bit of a language issue where you know we don't understand each other in regulation versus uh the industry and and and we could break that down a little bit >> so I want to I want to come back to this. I just want to take a quick detour. Um Lee, you were talking about peer-to-p peer transactions um or peerto-p protocol transactions and just kind of the general lack of intermediaries in DeFi. My perhaps crazy, you know, ridiculous hypothetical, not quite pathetical, but a question I have about that is the protocol itself not kind of just the intermediary somewhat abstracted away from what we traditionally think of like it's not a bank. It's not a uh traditional financial institution, but when you're doing a peer-to-p peer transaction in DeFi, you're not it's not the same as me handing you a dollar bill. it's uh you know the protocol executing whatever. Does that make sense? And is that maybe a way to be thinking about for you know developers as they look at how they're building uh you know compliance uh compliant or risk management tools into this. I I think it gets to uh part of the heart of the issue which is how should we be thinking about autonomously functioning code and what responsibilities if any should the builders have uh with respect to that code. I I think we would all agree that if I program somebody something that was designed to steal everybody's money who put their money into it, sure, I can program anything I want and maybe I'm protected under the First Amendment, but I'm still guilty of stealing everybody's money and I should go to jail for that. So, there are sort of some primitives that we know should be unlawful. Um, and figuring out how to build from there, I think, is useful. Uh, sort of part of what you're suggesting, Nick, is that maybe developers should be the ones who are either regulated in some way or at least have responsibility for what it is that they program. Uh, and I don't fully disagree with that. The example of me programming something that steals everybody's money is a good example of where I should be responsible for it. Uh but these are not easy questions to answer. Um and they are not easy questions not just because it's blockchain. These are not easy questions because of the way that the law has developed over the last 40 50 years with regard to technology more generally. uh to the extent any of you have ever read the terms or the user agreement of any app that is on your phone. If you haven't, I'll tell you what it says. It says, "Hey, we tried to make a thing that you want to use and if it doesn't work, we're really terribly sorry about that, and your maximum recovery is $10, right? Or it might be $100, but it might also be zero dollars, right?" Uh and and that that's just the way everybody accepts software. Um and nobody is running around saying by golly Microsoft are a bunch of criminals because all they're doing is saying that the software may not work and I have no recovery against them. Uh nobody's saying that Microsoft should be regulated on that basis. And I'm not picking on Microsoft. You can pick any technology company large or small. I write these things for us. I know what they say. We do the same thing. Uh and and so my point is right, this is not just a blockchain thing. This is an overall technology thing. And we have to decide whether or not the world we want to live in is one that allows that escape hatch. Um, and I think people by and large understand that, but it's much harder to understand that when you've lost all your money. And so, we need to think about how we're going to handle those types of situations. So, thank you for that. Uh, kind of looping all of this together. Um, one of the things about DeFi is theoretically anyone can use a project, right? All you need is access to the internet and a device that can handle you know having a front end. Um with that in mind and you know tornado cache is I think a great example of a project that you know has a very specific goal privacy and transactions and a very uh as we've seen practical use case for uh laundering funds that some parties like for example the US government don't want to see happen. um where in the development of something like that and I'm using tornado as an example because it's you know perhaps the best known but just generically where in the development of a DeFi project should you start building in and looking at risk management and compliance is it even possible to do it at the very beginning or I I think that again without prescribing the specific like okay you do it at this time all the time I would sort of zoom out and say what would really help is even doing the thought exercise of what could go wrong. And you know I heard there's a there's a uh compliance expert out there AML expert named Sarah Beth Felix and um I uh for something else I interviewed her once and she was talking about how in compliance you're only good at compliance. She said that compliance is not something for the typical person. She said even in banks a lot of those compliance officers she was she was criticizing she was saying the problem is they're not curious and cynical enough that they'll look at these things and she used an example I forgot what it was I think it was a real example like Epstein or something and she was like oh they see these things and they're like oh yeah this is probably just you know this is probably okay because if you're not thinking like the criminal if you're not thinking like the sanctions evader the launderer. If you don't think like them, you're going to you're not even going to conceive of how this service could be used in a certain way. So, I would zoom out and say, um, even before the you know, throughout the whole time, actually, maybe that's the answer. Um, throughout the whole time, it just makes sense to think, okay, I've built this. Okay, what would a criminal do? You know, just like you would do with cyber security, right? you're thinking about how this is can be more secure from a cyber perspective. Um, since you're dealing with the trans with since you're dealing with funds with with crypto with value, you should be thinking about hm people like value. They like to uh uh accumulate it, they like to steal, they like to mix it. So, how will my what I'm building interact with that? >> One thought you want Um I mean um I I feel like again we come back to risk management and the mindset of risk management. There are tools out there that allow you I mean you know you do red teaming that there's all sorts of tools that allows you to think about I mean further to that to that point around sort of compliance officers I think they also need to be strategic what is your business model actually offering and you know and and and what are the scenarios and extreme scenarios where things could go wrong how could it be exploited I mean I think these should be natural things that from incubation stage as far as I'm I'm concerned erned and you know I'm kind of uh sort of uh this is this is sort of uh dealing with some of these startups in in a from a regulator perspective you know thinking about that up front and having that mindset it doesn't stop you from being an entrepreneur uh but it allows you to really use risk management as a friend and and and because if something bad goes wrong down the line that could be catastrophic for your business so you're kind of protecting yourself you're not just protecting the ecosystem and the reputation of the ecosystem and I agree You have to have this happening at every stage of your growth because things change. You know, your product might actually the target market that you and we've seen this actually um uh with with a number of examples. Your target market might change based on you know, all of a sudden you you find that what you've developed actually works for a different target market. Is that the sort of thing that you were hoping for? Um and then if your target market ends up being, you know, sort of crooks and criminals, then that's a big that's a big problem. So these things need to be thought through right from the start. I don't think you should leave it until a certain stage. You as as a good entrepreneur, you think about risk management from right from the start in in my view. >> So from the kind of a regulatory policymaker perspective, is it possible to keep up with these tools as they're being built and you know the example I want to use is Facebook unveiled Libra in you know summer of 2019. Uh Europe had ma as kind of a response. uh the US eventually passed a stable coin bill this year. Uh but it took years for these, you know, laws to come into effect and to be written. So what how can regulators keep up with these projects as they're being built? You know, I would say in a much more rapid manner than uh we've seen actual laws and policies develop. >> Well, sorry, you >> I was going to say something controversial. Uh regulators can't possibly keep up, right? Like uh I can't keep up. >> Controversial. I [laughter] mean, more controversial. See, that's not controversial. Just kidding. Just kidding. >> No, I I I mean, look, uh we are only human beings. There's only so much we can do. So, until regulators have uh AI agents out there scouring the internet, figuring everything out that's going on and reporting back to them, regulators are not going to be able to keep up. You know, I I'm I'm a blockchain lawyer. I've been doing this stuff for 10 years. I can't keep up with all of the changes that are going on around the world. Uh it it's just it's not it's not humanly possible. So what you need to do uh is develop sort of a game plan about the things that you care about and and uh you need to take action accordingly. Now people can argue about uh you know prior US regimes and whether or not they were doing a good job of that. It's not the point. The point is that you have to figure out what your strategy is as a regulator just like you have to figure out what your strategy is as a lawyer in a company or as a business person in a company. And and so you're not going to be able to do everything, know everything, be everywhere. You have to figure out sort of what's important uh and and you have to be flexible about it and and build from there. >> I wonder if I could give a parallel. It's not for a reg perspective of a regulator, but when I worked in government, I worked in in the intel world. Um, and you know, in in that space where you have a group of intelligence analysts and they're focused on threats. You know, I worked on counterterrorism threats uh for much of my career. And the thing that I noticed is that a good team that's focused on threats, obviously, there's going to be a lot of focus on like what is happening now? how can we deal with the risk that we're most concerned about today? But to really have a um to be effective, you should also have maybe it's a minority but a percentage. You should have some people who are thinking of emerging things like that. The team should include all of that. So you have the folks who are just focused on you know maybe it's the 8020 rule. You know the main stuff that's happening right now, the stuff that needs to be answered, but you have to have someone who's thinking about okay what's next? we dealt with this threat, but I see this threat down the line. I see I see things here. And maybe again, it's not a perfect analogy for the regulatory world. I'm not trying to say [laughter] I'm not trying to say, you know, uh financial services or crypto is the same as uh terrorism. Definitely not saying that. But you get my point. My point is is that as a team, as as a unit, as an FIU, as a regulatory team, I think you always have to have uh some people who are thinking about what everyone else isn't seeing. maybe that's their specialty like what's happening what's going to be built be built in the coming years >> there's a lot of different ways in which these things can be not necessarily addressed but at least we can start to have the the conversation I think if you wait for regulation then we're looking at it in the wrong way because you know the world is changing so rapidly and and um you know and and it's it's natural that you're going to get and if if you if you operate globally you'll get different regulations at different stages ages, different paces all around the world. And actually, as a as a fintech, you're going to have to think about how to deal with this um very normal uh kind of reality. And I come back to the principles of of risk management embedded in in in your business. If you're thinking about, you know, how how is what you're delivering actually delivering value to the market um is is safe. You've thought about the safety. You've sort you've thought about the outcomes. you've looked at the uh potential things that you know that can go wrong and how how you address them and of course you you'll have sort of a um a riskmanagement framework and a risk appetite to these sorts of things and you explain that if you happen to be a regulated entity you explain that to the regulator then again you're sort of you're you're part of the solution regulators can't actually keep up unless there's a dialogue with the industry on how how you know regulation needs to develop and and and again I'm going back to the point of you know is it the responsibility of the regulator all the time to kind of say this is what you must do. Um there there's a great um well I I mean I I I think it was a it was a good piece of legislation in the UK which is the consumer duty which basically said look you know think about outcomes. It's outcome based regulation. What is what is the outcome of you know the development of your product? Um how you're putting it out in the market and how how do you you solve things when um when things go wrong? How do you ensure that things are and and it sort of changed the whole mindset of how companies actually think about this, you know, large and small. Um, and so it you I mean when when we think about um uh compliance projects with regulators, there is a there is a process in which this you can't move from, you know, we developed a proof of concept. You can't move from proof of concept to production. We're now in the stage where we're looking at building empirical evidence. you have to prove that these things actually work, you know, and so there's stages until you you get to that point and it's not at the same pace as um as as uh the industry. And that's because regulators have to be responsible. So, sorry I phrased that incorrectly. Regulators feel the responsibility because of the the the market impact of what they what they do. There's there's a bit more um uh space for for innovators to actually, you know, experiment if you like. So it's different different sort of uh dynamics and I think I think that's just how we if together we try to solve the problem I think we get to the right outcome. >> Awesome. So we have just a few minutes left. Um let's close this out just really quickly with each of you. I'd like you to just kind of maybe you know what is what would be your closing thought? What would you want people to take away from you know this conversation we just had? and uh yeah, let's start with you and work our way down. >> So, I'll end with something I mentioned uh the concept or the the technology of zero knowledge proofs which some of you know about and many of you um if you haven't you'll probably hear about it. I'm not going to go into a technical description. Maybe Lee would I'm sure could do a much better job of a zero knowledge proof. But what I will say because Alio network is built on zero knowledge proofs is you know think of the concept of need to know right um it's not a perfect analogy but the reason why I say it is you know you think of the idea of sharing information just that a person needs to know for its job for its function right for if it's a machine for its function the idea of need to know and we don't operate in our general offline world with that in some maybe in some environments you do but generally We're sharing a lot of information that maybe the recipient does not need to know. And the the beauty of of cryptography and of zero knowledge proofs in particular is that you can build interactions where the only data that is is is shared is what is necessary for the next process to happen. So zero knowledge proofs help to build that. So if that's something you're you're curious about, I would that's one thing I would leave with people um as a as something to look forward to. >> So I want to build a little bit on things that both Maha and Yaya said. Now I feel bad that I don't have an A at the end of my name. >> You can call me Leah. Yes, there we go. Um maybe Lala would be good. I'll take Lala. Is that okay? All right. Um, what I'd like to leave, what I what I I guess my parting thought is like there's a lot of work to do here and we need smart people like Yaya and Maha doing that work and spending the time thinking about it. We need smart people like all of you in the audience to be doing that work because the questions are are tough. We are not used to living in a peer-to-peer world. We are not used to living in a world of um autonomously functioning code. And for better or for worse, that is what the future looks like. Not everything, not every aspect of everything is going to be that way. But there's a large part of people's day-to-day lives in the future that are going to look like that. Uh and so so getting smart people to really dig in and and come up with suggestions and debate ideas is super important. So I invite you all to do that as much as possible. >> Well, I like a lot what Lala said. La maha and yaya [laughter] the combo. Um, maybe I should say zero knowledge proofs to me is is people knowing what I am, not who I am. So, you just need to know that I'm above a certain age or I have a certain character, but you don't need to know what my name, address, and and date of birth is. Um, maybe that's something you can steal. There you go. Um, for me, uh, you know, and maybe this is a biased view because obviously we work with technology, new technologies. I think there's a lot that this technology can actually solve for us and let's really understand I mean I I I I really want to know more about sort of the layer one and and how you're you're looking at sort of the privacy element on layer 1. Um so what can what is the art of the possible with technology and where do we continue to have gaps? What are these gaps and how do we solve them and how how do we close them? Is it a policy choice that regulators, central banks, governments need to make? Is it are there things that actually at a firm level at a at a company level that can be achieved and if we start to think about it from that perspective actually you know and and creating more of the public private partnerships on this particular topic I think we can uh you know we we could move things forward but it isn't easy and I do think we need sort of a systemic way in which we um we look at approaching it but one that that uh has collaboration at its heart. >> Awesome. Well unfortunately that is all the time that we have. We could have gone on for I think another hour but I want to thank Maha Lee and Yaya and I want to thank all of you as well as the Fintech Foundation for hosting this. >> Awesome. [applause] Awesome. Uh thank you all. Uh we're now uh some real pearls of wisdom in there. So thank you all. Uh we're now going to take a 35minut break here and then we'll reconvene. So thank you all.