# The Revolution will be tokenized - Aaron Day | ETHDam III - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 24:41 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-nEJulN9g0HI - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEJulN9g0HI ## Description Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ Brownstone Institute/Daylight Freedom | The Revolution will be tokenized - Aaron Day | ETHDam III - 2025 🎀 About the Speaker: Aaron R. Day is a multifaceted entrepreneur, investor, advisor, author, and political activist with a rich background spanning nearly three decades across various sectors such as e-commerce, healthcare, blockchain/cryptocurrency, AI, and clean technology. As a current fellow at the Brownstone Institute and the Chairman/CEO of the Daylight Freedom Foundation, Day combines his industry expertise with a deep commitment to advancing freedom and individual liberty. 𝕏 Follow: https://x.com/AaronRDay http://daylightfreedom.org/ https://x.com/brownstoneinst ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and ZΓΌrich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ πŸŽ₯ Credits: Intro / outro by babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ETHDam Photography by Paulus – https://concretestate.eu/ ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com πŸ’› Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩢 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero πŸ’› Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ------------------ 0:00 Intro 1:40 Tokenizing Everything: Assets & Surveillance 3:30 Living on Crypto Since 2019 5:00 Real-World Adoption Barriers 6:20 Introduction to Zano 8:00 Key Features: Privacy, Escrow, Aliases 10:00 Bridgeless BTC Privacy with Zano 11:00 Launch of Xanobay & Freedom Dollar 13:45 Obscura NFTs & Gold-Backed Tokens 17:00 Future of Private Tokenization & POS Tools ## Transcript Welcome to Easter. To eth to All right. Hello everyone. Hey, can the two children at the back please stop talking, please? The We'll wait for the two kids. Those two kids just sitting there chitchatting, you know. All right. Hope you had a nice lunch. Um so this afternoon and as always uh I'm telling this room in the hope that this information propagates throughout the entire building but what's going to happen is uh we're going to have one talk from Aaron who's eagerly ready to go and then we're going to have the top 10 autotank projects which is going to be pretty cool and then we're going to have the top 10 hackathon projects who have been selected from the judging that has happened today and then it's going to be absolute chaos. So right now the energy in this room is pretty muted. Let's call it that way. But over the next couple of hours it's going to be people running around in chaos. So really looking forward to it and we're going to get to see what everyone's built which is the reality is in a way why we're all here. Let's build the future of privacy. So before any of that I'd like to hand the stage to Aaron Dave talking about the revolution will be tokenized. Please give a round of applause. [Applause] Thank you. This is going to be a continuation of yesterday's talk. So this is my fourth talk, but uh yesterday's talk was privacy coins as an alternative to CBDC's. So I'll do a quick recap of yesterday just to stress the urgency of the threat of CBDC's. So there are 134 countries representing 98% of global GDP working on CBDC's right now. Over half of those beyond just the pi the uh research phase. And this isn't even just about CBDC's. The ultimate plan is to tokenize not only money but all of our assets, stocks, bonds, our homes, our cars, and add the same censorship and tracking and um programmability. So this is a threat. This is essentially how we end up owning nothing. Once that's done, all of our assets are digitized on a global ledger. the actual digital currency itself will switch to being backed by energy credits and then you get social credit systems, vaccine passports, etc. So, this is literally the plan of technocrats. They've been working on it since the early 1930s. They haven't had the technology to do it. They do now. This is the threat. This is what we're actually up against and it's real. There may be CBDC's in the EU as soon as this year. There's a plan to ban privacy coins in the EU by 2027. That's because they don't want any competition. In the US, you may have heard that Trump banned CBDC's, but he didn't. They're now called stable coins. The stable coin legislation, this is the quick top five points, there's a two-year moratorum on new algorithmic stable coins. Mandatory AM uh AML KYC for all users. uh centralized freezing functionality, strict onetoone reserves and huge federal oversight. So this will basically set up a situation where Tether and USDC will have to be acquired by a large financial institution. So as I said yesterday, whether it's Jaime Diamond issuing the programmable token or Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, it doesn't matter. It's the same digital tyranny. So now that we're all caught up, my background for the last two years has been warning people about CBDC's and then hosting these workshops across the United States. We've been to 26 states and have actually started doing some of these internationally as well. And the purpose is to educate people on how to start using privacy coins and living on crypto today so that you don't get stuck with CBDC's tomorrow. I've been living on crypto since 2019. It's not easy and to be honest, most of it isn't peer-to-peer. Most of it is you're doing things like buying gift cards or using crypto debit cards. But we have to start somewhere to ultimately get to the point where people are actually transacting directly. And what I've found doing these workshops is there's no overlap between the people in this audience and the people that I've been speaking with. I've been mostly speaking to people that just woke up during COVID and are now seriously asking questions about central banking, the Federal Reserve, and they're fed up with it. and they're fed up with the declining value of fiat currency and they want other solutions. But what I've learned when you try to onboard a hundred people in one room, you find very quickly that what we might find is usable for crypto wallets and point of sale systems. It's not ready for prime time for the general population. And in fact, a lot of our wallets and tools really don't compete with the products from traditional finance like Google Pay, Apple Pay, those types of things. So, we have to have solutions that are easy to use or we'll never get adoption. The other thing that I've learned talking to merchants all over the country and world as well is that one of the biggest barriers to crypto adoption is price volatility. They simply can't see a way forward where if you've got gross margins of 10% and you know your crypto goes down 40% in a month now you can't pay payroll. So trying to solve for that X is another problem. And it's not just about crypto being used for payments. It's about having a solution for what's coming next on the centralized side. So as I mentioned they're going to try to tokenize stocks, bonds, all of those things. we need a private alternative to that as well. So as I was doing these workshops and doing podcasts and interviews talking about this, Roger Ver reached out to me and he said, "Hey, look, you should really look at this project called Zeno." And so I did. I read the white paper, downloaded the wallet, started playing with it, and became very excited about the project because I've been working on tokenizing assets since 2019. And this particular project, which has been around officially since 2019, but actually started years and years before that, it's really kind of a 10-year movement, uh, allows you to create privacy tokens. So, imagine you can tokenize any asset with Monero level privacy. I'm not going to go through all the details because I want to show some examples of what you can do with it, but I want to talk touch on some of the key points that make it unique. It's a hybrid proofof work proofofstake model. And I know a lot of people, you know, you may have your fixed beliefs about proof of work only or whatever, but and I used to have a negative opinion of proof of stake as well. I kind of looked at it as this, well, it's kind of for oligarchs and you have to hold so many coins and because it's transparent, you know, large stakers could be targeted. But in this case, anyone can stake regardless of the amount. And the staking is private as well. So this combination proof of work proof of stake really adds to the security. It uses ring signatures um and stealth addresses. Again, very similar. In fact, the founder actually created and worked on the cryptonote technology that then, you know, became Monero. So he's right there. Andre is like the OG of this There are confidential assets so anyone can mint tokens on the same L1. So the way Zano itself is treated is the same as tokens that are created on Zano. There's a feature that is coming out trustless escrow. So no third parties are involved. If you're going to make a transaction with someone, you both put an amount in escrow. It's kind of a mutually assured destruction model and you resolve the transaction and when both parties agree then the funds are released. So again all peer-to-peer no third parties. There are additional usability features like aliases. You can have your own unique alias. Mine is at Aaron. So if you have Zeno you can just send it to me instead of having to know my address. uh and there is it's private by default but there is the ability to have uh auditable wallets where you can have a view key that allows a specific person to come in. So there's flexibility there as well and there's a toolkit for developing apps and so Roger told me about this a year ago and in just a year a ton of offerings have been released or are about to be released and I'll talk about a couple of them now. This one is the technology's finished. It just hasn't launched yet. It's called confidential layer. One of the things that not everybody's learned yet. Bitcoin and Ethereum are trackable. And some people still have this belief that these cryptocurrencies are anonymous. They obviously aren't. There's a whole industry now of people that are getting certification in chain analysis. It's actually been fascinating to me. I've had five different people that I know that either ended up in divorces or business disputes and the sophistication of this chain analysis is mind-boggling. It's very easy for them. It's in fact in one case it was easy easier to track the person's Bitcoin transactions than the actual bank account because they were able to go back more than seven years. So now what you can do is you can lock your Bitcoin. uh you use a I don't want to call it bridge because it actually uses it's called the bridgeless L1 uses threshold signatures to then basically bridge your Bitcoin into Zeno and now you have all of the privacy you can spend your Bitcoin with all the privacy attributes of a Zeno token and then when you burn those tokens you can exit back out the other way to a different address with your original Bitcoin. So, this is a way to take, you know, the $2 trillion plus that right now is are basically surveillance coins and make them something that you can spend privately. There is something that just released a week or so ago called Xanobay. So, I'm not going to call this isn't like the Silk Road. Uh, it's not for drugs, but I mean it's for any any product. So, you can go on there and you can post you can use your alias. There's going to be the ability for a reputation management system. So, this is live right now. There's actually encrypted communications as part of this. You can set up a PGP key so the buyers and sellers can communicate with one another in an encrypted fashion. There's something called Zeno X, which is the ability to purchase gift cards directly with Zeno. And then this is a really cool project because I mean you know to me actually stable coins are a ridiculous concept. We started out with the vision of peer-to-peer digital cash with no third parties and now we have fiat as the base and then all of this risk on top of it and it's trackable. And so this is probably the complete opposite of Satoshi's vision. But a project has been released called the freedom dollar on Zeno which is I believe the first privacy stable coin. So it is an algorithmic stable coin that's backed like 10 to one by you know there's 10x uh leverage or excuse me 10x collateral backing the token itself. And I'll well I don't know if you're going to be able to see this very well but it's very easy to actually do this. You can download the Zeno wallet. This is a mobile wallet and from within the mobile wallet you can access a browser that will connect you to a Zeno P2P exchange where you can swap your Zeno directly for uh the freedom dollar and then reverse that as well. So, this has just launched, but I think it's already been added to three or four exchanges and actually the volume um on the Zeno network itself has actually been surging as of late and this is a big component of this. So, the idea of being able to have a privacy stable coin is huge. This just shows you how kind of easy and quickly you can go through the process. adding the token, you go to the P2P exchange. And again, no third parties involved at all. There's no exchange. There's no KYC. It's a very straightforward process. And now in this person's self-custody mobile wallet, they will have a privacy stable coin. There's also something called Obscura which is a privacy NFT platform. So you can mint privacy NFTts now through Zeno. There are a couple of projects that are in the works. This is actually a project that I'm working on called Karma which is a goldback privacy token. There are a lot of people that are skeptical of algorithmic stable coins, don't like fiat, really like precious metals. So, this is an ability to have a privacy token, have all of the great technical features of Zeno, but backed by physical gold that you can actually physically redeem your tokens for. And then I'm working also on a a simple point of sales system. One of the most disheartening things about this is most of the large point of sale systems already don't offer privacy coins, but some of the remaining ones that are left have have started to cancel and not add new privacy coins. So, I'm building a very simple point of sale system that is privacy coin focused and easy to use and again focusing on those businesses and people that aren't already in crypto. So beyond that, beyond those applications, when I talk to people about tokenization in crypto, usually what comes to mind are NFTTS or memecoins. That is pretty much how the entire crypto industry looks at uh looks at tokens. But the reality is once you understand that the authoritarian types are truly building the technology to tokenize all of our assets, you realize that we need to have alternatives in place that are privacy focused. So one of the things I've always, you know, dreamed of being able to do is something like imagine you're walking down the street and you know, you see your favorite coffee shop or your favorite store. Imagine being able to pull up an app and buy $50 worth of equity and through a privacy token right there on your app. I mean, you can't do that right now with the existing centralized structure, but these are the kinds of things that you could build with a privacy token platform. Or imagine you go to an event and you have a privacy NFT and that privacy NFT can be used to gain access to the event so that there's no formal record or tracking of your whereabouts. Or lastly, and this is a little bit cut off, but I've actually somebody actually approached me about this looking for this solution. In the United States, there are a lot of people that want to sue big pharmaceutical companies. But the problem is that when you track the money, the institutions that are making those instments often get attacked and so they don't want the PR or any of the issues with being involved in funding the litigation. So imagine being able to crowdfund litigation against you know big pharmaceutical company or something like that where you can actually maintain the identity of the investors. So those are three examples but I mean there are thousands of examples you could tokenize mineral rights on an asteroid. You could you can tokenize anything of any size or any value and trade it privately. That really is the power of tokenization and the power of something that you can do with a platform like Zeno. So what I'm so excited about is that the most of those projects that I mentioned are live now. So people can begin selling things in a marketplace. People can begin using privacy stable coins, private NFTts, all of that is available today with many other projects that will be launched by the end of the year. So if we want to get out of this CBDC trap, we need to start trading with one another using technologies like Zeno today. So with that, if there are any questions, I don't know if we have any extra time, but happy to take questions. Thank you so much. If we could uh stick the slido up. Let's see if there's any questions. Um I think currently there are none. So if you do want to ask them, go nuts. Um, I guess like one question is is in the simplest way possible, how do you think we can get more people to use everything that you've just spoken about? Other than the the tools are there. I think you just highlighted that at the end. So the the key is use user experience and UI. And so I forgot to mention that Zeno has been integrated into three big wallets recently. Bitcoin.com, Cakewallet, and a couple days ago, Edgewallet. So that's huge in terms of making Zeno accessible to the public. But the big lynch pin is an easytouse point of sales system, that is what is throttling merchants. But now if you actually had a point of sales system where for instance the merchant could offer multiple cryptocurrencies but then basically a swapping service behind the scenes would convert that to either a privacy stable coin or a privacy goldback token that would actually solve the market volatility piece for the merchant as well. So those are the the big elements that I think will shift things forward. Yeah. Well 100%. I always get I live above a coffee place and I'm always annoyed that I can't go downstairs and pay with crypto. So, it's like one of my side quests in life is to fix that. Uh, one of the questions from the audience here is which tool in the Zeno ecosystem is the right one to use for local gray/ black markets, which I I would say probably Zeno Bay, Zeno Bay, Zeno Bay, the Mark online marketplace. H well uh the guys from Zeno are knocking around, right? So you can also go ask them. Uh did I get that one right? No, we'll see. You can buy your Etham hoodie with Zeno. Not a question, but a statement. Thank you, audience. Uh I didn't know Edge had integrated and a lot of emojis. That's nice. Fun fact. Need to make an announcement out of that one. Um you mentioned tokenizing assets like holdbacks. How do you verify the wallet and assets? Well, that's a whole separate longer conversation, but part of it involves on the one hand using an auditable wallet so that you can actually show the reserves and then issuing tokens and then being transparent about both both sides of those. And so, it's it's a complicated answer, but fortunately, Zeno allows you to have privacy by default, but then also have these auditable wallets. And so, there is a solution for that within the system. Yeah. Well, that sounds like where a lot of this space is heading in in that direction, that verifiability. Y um let's see. Uh the best way to get started with Zeno, go speak to Zeno. Um do you think the USDC is a hidden CBDC with MA blocking decentralized stable coins in USDT? Yes, I mean it's already trackable. They already work with law enforcement. And what I think is going to happen based on the stable bill and the genius bill coming out of the US Congress, it's basically going to put a force a situation where a large bank is going to buy USDC. And when that happens, they're going to be regulated in the same way and have all of the tracking features of a CBDC, all the bells and whistles, aka you're already cooked. Um, okay. And last question. Uh I guess this is a clarification. Why again hybrid proof of work and proof of stake is great. Well, you're alternating. I mean every other block you're using this different approach and so it actually adds to the overall security of of you can't just do a 51% attack for instance because every other block it Yeah. You All right. You want to Okay, good. Do you allow this? Do you allow this? Hi, my name is Andre. So yeah um consensus for privacy is really tricky especially if you want to build a proof of stake uh because especially for privacy because the amounts is hidden and also we cannot do things like PBFT family consensus which is give you a very quick finality and a lot of guarantees but uh because the uh holders are hidden and you cannot have this validators so we use a statistical uh consensus proof of take and uh the short answer why uh he breit is good because proof of stake is good and uh uh we cannot we couldn't get rid of proof of work because we have to secure our consensus against uh long range attacks and nothing get st that's just a big family of different attacks that could be exploited so we were keeping us as a hybrid and it's actually very challenging to create a bond between two different uh uh uh type of um proof proofs uh proof of work and proof of stake and we had a couple of iteration by improving this and right now we are actually in the middle of another iteration of improving consensus. We were making another improvement and we were working with another researchers from um company name common prefix and we actually kind of figure out how we can potentially switch to pure proof of stake. Um Zana will be skipping all the guarantees of proof of stake and uh get like really quick finality like in a couple minutes it's going to be enough confirmations and it's going to be really strong consensus. We're still in the middle of research. So I not saying that we are switching at consensus but we see the opportunity the door is open. So if we manage to build this if we if we manage to verify consensus is secure then we going to be maybe in one year we'll be rolling out new consensus and that's going to be from my perspective it's going to be huge improvements of Zana. It's going to be as quick as uh modern esetarium as the network like this, but it's going to be puly decentralized. I mean consensus when it has a privacy, it's way more decentralized than any other consensus with such a quick finality features. So I'm really excited about this. But right now we are hbrid which is way stronger than pure pure proof of work consensus but uh it's not as strong as pure proof of state consensus in terms of uh security and finality. That's it. Cool. Thank you very much. And um and with that that is the final keynote of Ethan. Please give it up. Thank you for coming to Amsterdam.