Summary of “Crypto Adoption in Institutions & Retail” session at Blockchain Thailand Genesis 2022 -

“Crypto Adoption in Institutions & Retail” session at Blockchain Thailand Genesis 2022 hosted by
✨Art Kavin Phongpandecha, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Bitazza with industry fellows including Minh Ho, Head of Growth of Coin98, Kampanat Vimolnoht, Executive Director of KX Venture Investment and Pat Patel, Executive Director of Elevandi

Question 1:
For the past few years we have lots of activities in the crypto space and despite having a lots of adoption, financial technology being created, we also ran into issues as well, and this issue has amplified in recent days with regulation as a big exchange went bankrupt, so this obstacle is significant and how do we move forward with the industry given all these happened in the past few weeks?
.
Minh Ho (Coin98):
As a DeFi focused-company, we do see a short term negative impact for the industry. However, in the long term we see that we will have more transparency, how this will be helped by regulators and people come together and find a better way to move the industry forward. We do see a growth in our basically user base in non- custodial wallets. People are moving to DeFi and our job is to help educate the user in how they can actually control or do their own self – custody. Another way to try to get users more familiar with DeFi is education. With Coin98, we do have a community, people that share knowledge to everyone starting from DeFi and crypto. That would be the great start for the retail user side.
.
Pat Patel (Elevandi):
If you frame it in 3 ways, financial contagion – got trust issues / regulator and policy maker are now on string with central government about what happened, why it happened, what we need to do as an industry. A lot of regulators are very unhappy at the moment, there are lots of papers to write, lots of answer for. In parallel we can draw in the past, the journey from Web1 to Web2 in the middle of that you have the dotcom bubble burst. There are lots of people who lost lots of money there. It’s smaller compared to what we have seen today, but there were a lot of challenges there. Middle journey of a sudden in around 2007 where you had mobile, social and cloud come together which ultimately feel like the Web2. Within that journey hopefully we get over this bubble and challenge ourselves. It’s not a bubble, it’s another form of industry challenge and so once we get over this period that we’re seeing now, you will start to see the value that Web2 delivered in 2007-2008 and it formed the companies such as Airbnb, Uber. You saw these huge giants and they scale those businesses to ultimately billions, so we will start to see that in 3-5 years time frame. From my perspective, nothing changed, you have bad actors everywhere. It’s such a shame this thing happened. Hopefully, we start to have more of a moral purpose on the compensation because the spirit with this technology first came out from Satoshi’s whitepaper to the spirit of how to equally build blockchain. That should remain and not the cowboy out there to make it a quick buck and what we’ve seen now is we’ve seen people come out and hopefully get caught and found out because their motivations are different than what this technology was intended for.

Question 2:
What do you think from the banking side, working on traditional finance, and coming to this space and seeing everything that has happened in the past few weeks?
.
Kampanat Vimolnoht (KX Venture Investment):
It’s very expectable to happen, when you let the retail user and investor get into crypto jungle. Not many of them understand what technology is all about and the purpose of technology. Then, they jump in and lost a lot of money. They don’t have great tools to manage their own risk as well. They don’t understand the recent profoundness of themselves. From a capitalist perspective, there is only 3 percent of startup success, but now we throw that 3% to the public, so everyone can get invested in the same project. It’s so hard to find a successful project. Moving forward to the future, I believe that to make the crypto world, blockchain, DeFi ,Web3 business successful. The part of it is that education, financial and digital literacy is a key thing to educate people and they can understand more about that there is no easy profit. We need better financial literacy and educate people to understand technology baseline, purpose of technology, who are the people behind them, understand risk. It’s still a lot to learn even VC, traditional finance or investor. It’s a long way to go.

Question 3:
Aside from centralized entities being in a self – regulatory mindset, what other things that other players would need to do to regain the trust and to move to mass adoption of this technology ?
Pat Patel (Elevandi):
Maybe just be audited in the right way
.
Kampanat Vimolnoht (KX Venture Investment):
What kinds of technology that can help. I divided into 2 types – infrastructure and use case rolling over development in between, when you have use case, kinds of we are building candy crush on FB on Nokia mobile. When the use case reaches the demand of the people and is valid. Infrastructure has to catch up and get rolling development to get massive adoption. For the infrastructure side, whatever technology that can help blockchain developers develop things much easier and faster. It will help the infrastructure side and when it is ready then a good use case will come in, a lot of things will be clearer for marketing strategy , you can onboard customers, there is no worry about retail and business users. We get there, given that rolling application, development for both infrastructure and use case parts

Question 4:
Can you give a little bit of insight about infrastructure development, especially during this time?
.
Minh Ho (Coin98):
One of the key things for infrastructure is that we need the help from one builder doing everything and need help from everyone to build the space. What we would like to see is people are building out at a younger level. We kind of want to move from education as well, working with universities to have more coding camps or hackathons that talk to the developer. In that way we will have more developer, builders that help to build the space. Besides that education thing goes a long way in terms of getting the right knowledge to the right people. People are really skeptical right now, if we have a way to help retail users, especially to get the right knowledge. That would be a really good way.
.
Pat Patel (Elevandi):
Industry needs to come together for accredited courses, that needs to happen and may bring different groups in a mix here, academic institutions, regulator and government as well. So then it will make it above board. We’re yet to really tap the full potential of smart contracts. There is a lot of value in there, we are just scratching the surface of what that can do in the industry. If you’re starting to think about the betting rule, different processes and practices into the smart contract we can do a lots more and make it more clear it’s transparent as well.

Question 5:
How do you see the DeFi and CeFi worlds coming together with the development we have seen so far?
.
Pat Patel (Elevandi):
It’s natural revolution, I don’t like the terms everyone talks about the Web 2.5 world we’re seeing that it’s very clear that it’s a bridge more than anything else. We see a number of projects that go from pure DeFi and then slowly some along the line in CeFi along the way but they’re talking about the DeFi game there is a bit of confusion. Industry involve to bring everyone on that journey. There need to be the middle ground that’s what we need to define and make sure that the issues and problems that we had in centralized infrastructure is not replicated in this new world that being created because ultimately we’re all here to try to change the financial system and there’re a lots of wrong things with it, there’s a lots of actors in the middle- a middle men that make a lots of revenue out there and try to remove that make things more transparent, quicker, and cheaper. So as long as we’re not moving to this new world and taking the same issues and problems without going into that use space that is needed to be worked through.
.
Minh Ho (Coin98):
We’ve always been really active in terms of like educating or providing the products that can help users really get into DeFi, we also give an option to the user like we also want to support them and one thing that we want to highlight. For example with our products that we really care about user experience and also we have a dedicated to our live support team, chat for our user. It’s quite rare for a DeFi product, but things like that will have onboard more users and getting support at the right time is critical for better user journey especially in DeFi.
.
Kampanat Vimolnoht (KX Venture Investment):
It’s going to be a transition period in between, sometimes, whoever in this hall cares about people outside the hall. So, you have to deliver better user experience, care about how you onboard them, how you get them to use your product safety, you have your own risk measurement, internal control to make them safe and working with regulators.

Question 6:
What types of financial and non-financial products could potentially be unlocked, going forward, to reach mass adoption?
.
Minh Ho (Coin98):
Healthcare is a pretty interesting sector. We can go like medical data, something that really private, medical supply, tracking and all those things with blockchain technology. It will be easier, cost efficiency and help to manage the whole of the healthcare system.
.
Kampanat Vimolnoht (KX Venture Investment):
CBDC, to be part of blockchain based payment. If you imagine CBDC as cash, compared to the money that we know today. Cost of cash that a fintech developer has been trying to for the past ten or 20 years. They said the cost of cash is like Imaginary the bank cost a branches, it’s actually also the part of the shareholders of the bank as well they get lots of profit, when CBDC come in I believe it’s gonna help solve shareholding structure, Web3 described themselves to solve the problem where giving away distribute more economic value to the ecosystem instead of getting shareholding to get richer, so CBDC will be the part of it as for payment. But another technology and use case comes in like socialFi when the people can have their own identity and data on chain. Whatever activities will embed their own identity there, so that part has a big potential on the use case in the future to get massive adoption.

Question 7:
What summarizes something that people in the industry are working on to protect user privacy, and to push this forward, where people are more willing to give up the information, and at the same time they control their information but also retain their privacy?

.
Minh Ho (Coin98):
It’s the choice of the user. It’s the same way that if user choose to use CEX or DEX. they’re giving up the privacy data and do they really need to do the KYC, KYC for DeFi is that necessary. They’re giving up in terms of security, the data of privacy at the same time we want to have more safe and a better environment, the project for KYC is more decentralized way, everything is encrypted no centralized point where anything can break down also another key part is that user have to make the choice of how much privacy that they want to give, if they won’t to go on DeFi mode where they don’t everyone to check all on chain activities so it’s more choice of user again come back to the education part where the user got all information that they need then after that they make a choice that they want to use what kinds of protocol or CEX or not.
.
Kampanat Vimolnoht (KX Venture Investment):
On the user side, how they can understand identity is meaningful to them, what kinds of downside can be identity exposed on chain. Education part will take a huge contributing factors as well to massive adoption and privacy part too.
.
Pat Patel (Elevandi):
I think I want to flip this because where your multiple sources like data or footprint are , I do not know which one is secured, which one is not, which one has been hacked ,If I have one place, and I have great ownership over, how I want to protect that, I have greater control over what measure put it place I can monitor on daily basis and I would take that all day long, so I think we flip this and say what do currently have today? And how bad is that ? If everyone knew how bad that was, It would be no-brainer that you want to move to the new world because you won’t be able to control that otherwise your information is everywhere as not necessary as secured that we may think it is.

Question 8:
Where we have the war in Ukraine – Russia, China – US and the world seem to be very divided at the moment in terms of the transaction setup in different countries. You have to switch to networks that are controlled by a group of people, but also other people who have been pushed out of it just because of a different essence in belief. Just wondering if that would be one of the catalysts in terms of pushing CBDC , decentralized technology in your opinion?
.
Kampanat Vimolnoht (KX Venture Investment):
Blockchain is now embedded to everyone who leverage on interoperability between country. I believe that critical event around the globe will help endorse blockchain adoption for sure, what is subsistence for payment use case , moving asset from country to other countries. In terms of mass adoption for crypto to be as payment that it’s going to take a while. For example, in El Salvador they are trying to give the people free credit to have their wallet to get the people to pay. I don’t think that it’s going to be the case in the near future because if you were to get your wallet to get massive adoption, the key thing is how do you add the use case into your wallet. The key successful factor for e-wallet around the world is to get the merchants and merchants controlled by the central bank in the particular country and jurisdiction. The regulator hold the power to control the merchants anyway, for my opinion is that I don’t think it going any time soon, still merchants are having the business, they are having supplier and other part of the business that using the fiat still, in the future is that the case all of the part of business may be more than half it’s on crypto it transacts by data on chain. I believe it is going to be good timing for crypto massive adoption for payment.
.
Pat Patel (Elevandi):
According to interesting of El Salvador, there has been some success, but I think each government bank in certain market they may not trust the government so there is some challenge certainly from that perspective I think the implementation there was very good and there was some challenges around implementation and communication these things need to be resolved also choices that you make you are going to go down to cryptocurrency loop why not look at CBDC , why not look at digital currency why not look at other options, stablecoins could that have worked instead , so i think it’s choices as long as their countries like El Salvador or another are brave enough to do this we can all learn in the industry and say what actually in higher side that may be you can do this better, so for the next country that go down to this road and believe me there will be more country to do this they can learn from El Salvador or others and start to build something that really work and may be isn’t rely on the US dollar
.
Minh Ho (Coin98):
I do agree with that a lot, For example, in Vietnam, the government only has one policy that cryptocurrency cannot be accepted as payment. That’s the only thing, but in other areas they are keen on supporting blockchain technology, digital government. I think it’s really tricky and look at El Salvador as an example. Some countries may not want to do exactly what they do. They can’t take more risk or they find other ways to make adoption of cryptocurrency. For Vietnam, I think it will take a while, especially on the cryptocurrency side. But then as we are all here for the tech and it’s going to be for us to keep building and that would be the metaphor for everyone.
.
Pat Patel (Elevandi):
According to great initiative project from Cambodia, manage to change the payment system in country to make it cheaper, faster and great way to transact so I think that could be a blueprint model worth looking at across multiple markets.

Art Kavin Phongpandecha, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Bitazza wrapped up the session:

Having talked to you guys it seems like we’re in a very critical stage where we’ve got big obstacles here and also seems like there is a lot to look forward to in terms of creating the right infrastructure, technology and also educating the right people coming together. Now more than ever, we need to come together and have this conversation going.

See more of interview from Thairath news here starting from 2.10 mins

.
See more of the event atmosphere here https://bit.ly/3HpdWQo
.
*The person in this picture is the person of Bitazza Ltd and this event is held by Bitazza Ltd as marketing partner of Freedomverse Ltd
Disclaimer: Cryptocurrency and digital tokens involve high risks; investors may lose all their investment money and should study all the information carefully and make investments according to their own risk profile.