Emanuele Francioni founder of Dask Welcome. It's great to be here. Excellent. I want to begin with, would love to hear about Dusk and what you and the team are doing, but before we do so, will you mind, do you mind telling us a little bit about you and how you got into crypto? It's a very, very long story. It's a very interesting story because it highly depends on what you mean with crypto. mean, if you're thinking about a decentralized system in which value and programmability is disintermediated, then I think I got into it as early as 2012. First of all, I was completely skeptic about it. And then I turned into a convert around 2014, 2015. I had the privilege of seeing the Ethereum ICO at that time unfolding. But if we are talking about what really what really empowers crypto to be decentralized and disintermediated, then my interest dates back to 1999, 1998, crypto or any kind of decentralized system is based on the capability of reaching consensus among distributed network of peers. And so it happens that one of the problems that I had been working back then in avionics was the capability of reaching consensus among different kind of sensors deployed on an aircraft and And then you have something which is called the bison team Or by Zantin I'm never sure about the pronunciation of that thing problem when you have a sensor or appear in this network that starts to say one thing to a peer and then say something else inconsistent with what it just told the peer to another peer. So this is a Byzantine behavior, so to speak. And in avionics, then this is a huge problem because you have hundreds of different sensors that are deployed on an aircraft, right? And they all need to talk with each other to a certain extent. And the capability of achieving consensus over what is the state of the sensors when they start to behave in a faulty way, then that is a very, very interesting problem to solve. So I started back then to try and sort that out. Of course, wasn't really any kind of decentralization possible. There were different kind of amelioration that you could drive inside of such a system. But then when I... When I first I've been reading the white paper, then I found it incredibly beautiful how the consensus was achieved, how a decentralized network could, in fact, achieve consensus without a staggering amount of messages going around in the network. And that is how I got sucked in. And then fast forward to 2018, when I launched. I founded Dusk. Back then it was called Dusk Network. And then we have been all inspired by the famous movie, the social network in which at some point there is one of the characters that says, drop the cleaner. Well, then we did the same thing. We dropped the network. But apparently without really achieving the same kind of degree of success. So Dusk. It was created around 2017, 2018. And initially the reason why we created Dask, it was because there were some features that were missing on Ethereum, right? So on programmable, on the capability of introducing programmable processes in a decentralized way. these two, the main two features that were missing were privacy and compliance. And back then, wasn't really, they weren't really must have, so to speak, because crypto was still, blockchain as a whole was still trying to find its own soul, trying to find the killer application, the killer use case. And to some extent, it still is. But back then, my thesis was that, I actually wanted blockchain to be a useful technology. I wanted basically to improve and increase the, actually to improve certain particular situation on the so-called real world. And in the real world, then businesses are essentially just incomplete if they do not take all these two specific problems. privacy and compliance. And of course, in a centralized environment, these problems are actually much more approachable. They are not really seen as antithetic, whereas in a decentralized environment, they are. So back in 2018, then I created Dask with a vision of introducing privacy and compliance into programmability. And then the vision evolved during the years. we were successful in taking these two different requirements. But then the application surface was what we started to focus more and more on, like I said, finding basically a niche, finding a sector where blockchain could really solve problems. And we found that in... in providing a new paradigm for creating a financial market infrastructure. A financial market infrastructure is essentially a platform, if you will, where different kind of operations that pertain to the purchase, trading, post-trading, clearance, and settlement of different kinds of financial products is performed and is carried on. by law, then these processes had traditionally or needed traditionally to be split among different kind of entities, primarily the venue, the exchange that was especially here in Europe, but it is more or less like that also in other region, a trading venue for this kind of financial products, regulated financial products. or regulated RWA, real world assets, then by law, the trading venue cannot do clearance. So it cannot clear a transaction or the cash lag of the transaction. By law, it cannot settle transactions related, for instance, to securities. So securities like bonds, securities like equities, securities like ETFs, and so on. These need to be settled by a CSD, which is which stands for a central security deposit. And then you have a lot of different other actors, each of which they perform a certain function and they are responsible for that function. a traditional financial market infrastructure is basically vertically oriented, vertically integrated, different kinds of platforms that do not really talk to each other. And therefore, you have leakage of value, leakage of information, and inefficiencies all the way. So that's. you describe the kind of the, I'd say the customer journey or the supply chain of the of real world assets. And we definitely want to get into that. I want to go back to your time in aviation, avionics. When the sensors don't talk to each other or they talk to each other and they don't come to consensus, the potential outcome is death, potential is for for people. Well, it depends. It depends what kind of sensors we are talking about. Of course, on avionics back then, because I didn't really keep up with the industry, so it might very well be that now there are very innovative solutions. But essentially, then you can think of an aircraft to be a very big truck. So on a truck, on a modern truck, you still have the same kind of thing, the same kind of structure in which you have something which is called the CAN network, C-A-N-N network. I sort of forgot what it stands for, but it is essentially a bus where all the different kind of information travel. And then at some point, sensors suck what they need to suck or the information that they need at that particular point in time. And then you have different ways to achieve in consensus, but the... Pretty much the strategy back then was when there is a bit of fault that is detected, then the amount of messages that need to be exchanged increases quite drastically. So that at some point, certain particular sensors start to talk to each other and they ask, or rather they push on the CAN, on the C-A-N-N, the information about the fact that they got some potentially wrong measurements and at that particular point in time then there are different kind of arbitration techniques. The what I wanted to get to was having come from an industry where having the correct information of state is so important because people's lives are at risk. What? How did that help you approach blockchain and the development of dusk? Because we're talking about industry where the risk is very high for me. If there's a mistake, the risk is very high. correct. I mean, with blockchain, it's a little bit different, but what guess, what did you learn that you brought to your entrepreneurship journey as you developed desk? OK, so keep in mind that my past in avionics in air traffic control systems, because I've been working on both, is, again, quite outdated. I stopped working in that environment roughly in 2004. Then I joined TomTom. was one of the director of research and development for TomTom, the navigation company. But I guess I want to, yeah, the principles. but there is a principle there that actually I kind of brought with me. And that is the capability on working in very, very, very constrained environments. For instance, one of the technologies that are used in avionics, and I'm generalizing, but I do believe that it is still correct. The technology was very solid technology. I we developed all the systems using Ada, which is a language from the 80s. And when you are coding in Ada, then you can forget a lot of stuff that nowadays are readily available for a lot of developers. mean, forget things like garbage collection, forget things like having almost infinite memory at hand. You have a very constrained environment. It is deployed on specialized machines that you can think of like being incredibly constrained, but practically invulnerable. You can probably hammer them literally and still they will keep working. Memory management is another thing that is done very, very well in Ada, and it is incredibly efficient for what it does. It is a pain to do anything else. mean, forget user experience and these kind of things. But for a physics engine and these kind of things, basically, working in Ada or working on those kind of constraint environment is a little bit like trying to work on a virtualized machine. Why? Because a virtual machine, which stands at the very bottom of the stack of any kind of smart contract implementation, a virtualized machine, a virtual machine essentially is a constrained environment that is deployed on God knows what kind of machines, you still need to have a certain, you need to level the playing field a little bit for what concern memory constraint, for what concern performance and these kinds of things. And you need to make them sure that what is deployed there, doesn't matter what kind of machine it is using, it's still using the resources. in a way that is consistent with all the rest of the machines that are part of that network. Now, we didn't have any kind of virtualization back then. if you, I mean, principle-wise, then you can think that it is a very similar philosophy in deployment. Also, that gave me a little bit of a I mean, to abuse a little bit of Latin, would say formamentis, which means a way of thinking directly from Latin, which is anything that gets deployed needs to have 99.9999 % of availability. That was in avionics, of course, in blockchain. We have completely different percentiles. But still availability is incredibly important. you know, I've seen in my career, I have seen many people yoloing. deployment of very complex application. we have been probably at fault to have been a little too careful because it took us six years to deploy our main net. And we are still developing, there are still components of the task which we are working on and we are going to deploy later this year to completely bring the network to commence. let's talk about that. So January 7th is when the Dusk mainnet launched. But before that, and the team have been developing Dusk for the last six years, which tells me that you have been very thorough and careful in its development. And I appreciate that because right now we're seeing many, projects launching that are not as careful. and could potentially put users and users assets at risk. And it tells me also that being so careful and thorough can give the user more confidence when they transact and when they do things on Dusk, they're gonna be a lot safer. Let's talk about the Dusk features and offerings. For those that are not very familiar with Dusk, you know, what, guess, what could you tell them and maybe make a contrast in terms of what Dusk is purpose built for, what applications are perfectly suited to deploy on Dusk, and what users can, you know, why they should be thinking about Dusk in addition to other protocols they might be thinking about. Right, so to understand Dask, then we need to talk a little bit about the privacy and compliance feature, because that was the engine or the idea that brought to life the entirety of the network, right? So to understand Dask means to understand Also back then in 2018, the fact that there wasn't really anyone that was working on privacy preserving smart contracts. Not only we try to work on privacy preserving smart contract, which at that time and still largely today is almost science fiction, we also wanted to introduce compliance into the stack. Now, what do I mean with compliance? Because compliance... might mean a lot of different things. And when people are talking about compliance in a vacuum, then you can be sure that they don't really know what they are talking about. Compliance, you can talk about compliance when you're talking about a set of different rules. You can comply to certain particular rules. There isn't really any system that is compliant in general. Why? Because there are a certain set of rules that have been tackled and some other rules that probably are even antithetic that haven't been taken by that particular system. So that system is compliant with something and non-compliant with something else. In our case, compliance meant since the very beginning, because I always wanted to take a real-world asset, it was compliant with the set of rules and regulations defined in the MiFID or MiFID2 directive in Europe. What is the MiFID2 directive in Europe? It is the regulation that regulate or a set of different kind of rules that need to be followed when issuing securities, when trading securities, when clearing and settling securities. So what we wanted to do was to be compliant to a general framework with, know, when we're talking about KYC, when we're talking about AMS or know your customer regulation. anti-money laundering regulation, GDPR regulation, which, you know, that's regulate privacy and data transmission and whatnot, DORA compliance. These are general frameworks. So things that everybody need to comply with in the business world. And then there are certain specific regulations that have got to do with, you know, the use case, the niche where that you are attacking at that particular point in time. For us, compliance meant the capability of automating or encoding the satisfaction of certain particular rules that are generic plus those defined in MIFID. So those that, in fact, need to be satisfied in order to be able to tackle certain particular use case. as a financial market infrastructure. I'll give you very, very, you know, probably trivial examples of what I'm talking about. But for instance, when we are talking about a blockchain, when we're talking about Bitcoin either or any really any kind of a blockchain out there, then we are talking about transfer of different things, know, assets, tokens, value, whatever you, but we are talking about transfer. In order to comply with MIFID, then we can no longer talk about transfer, which is essentially just a transfer of value from me to you, but we need to talk about transactions in which I am transferring value and you are accepting value and your acceptance is explicit. Because if it is not explicit, then you cannot be accountable for that particular asset, which is the reason why in the real world you have notaries. Notaries essentially intermediate a certain transaction between different kind of individuals. And normally this transaction pertains to two different trans actors that are exchanging values. They are not transferring. They are exchanging value. So the capability of doing an exchange of value in a decentralized fashion is one of the things that you need to have there. Do you remember during, for instance, during the scandal of tornado cash when tornado cash has been sanctioned by practically all governments in the Western hemisphere? then some point somebody had the brilliant idea of sending sanction tornado cash tokens to everybody. So, you know, and there is no explicit acceptance of these things. So suddenly I have on my account, you know, money that has been sent by sanction address and this money, by the way, considering that is non-fungible because you can It's not like one of the difference between an account model and a UTXO model is the fact that you have certain unspent outputs. And you can redirect these unspent outputs. you can actually keep all your funds non-commingled. So you can keep outputs completely separated. but on an account model, then everything is commingled. So you cannot say, hey, I'm not spending the sanction tokens. I'm spending these other ones which are legit. You cannot do that. You cannot prove that the tokens that you are spending at that particular point in time are not part of the sanction ones. You are essentially just one link of the chain of payments in which that that is in the middle of a sanction address laundering, which is a huge problem compliance-wise. And this is also the reason why Dask had to create privacy preserving transactions, privacy preserving smart contracts and compliance not on top of the account model, which essentially 99 % of different kinds of chains out there use, but based on something else like an output model. Also because an output model can also preserve privacy. Why? Well, simply because if you have an account, everything is linked to your account to prevent double spending. So there is a link with an account. So it's a hybrid UTXO and, but programmable. Got it. Okay. yes, so in 2018, so we needed to introduce this kind of feature. So we couldn't really fork anything that was there. We couldn't even fork a consensus for a lot of different reasons. So in 2018, the only consensus that had fast finality or immediate statistical finality, if you will, was Tendermint, but that wasn't even done. Cosmos was still sort of an experiment, if I'm not mistaken, it was created during a hackathon on Ethereum in 2018. so we had to, I had to, and I had a lot of fun doing it, but God, will, if I could just do stuff all over again, I would never embark on such a nerculean task. I had to create a consensus that had immediate finality and that was based on proof of stake that could work on a on a virtual machine that wasn't account-based but it was you know output based that had privacy that could work with privacy things that you know in retrospect just made my my hair a little grayer during the time so we've established that when people talk about compliance, it's compliance to a set of very specific rules. And when you develop Dusk, the rules by which you developed compliance against were the specific rules in Europe. Is that correct? were, needed to, yeah, that is correct. We needed to, you know, we needed to create a system on top of which it was possible and very easy to deploy a certain transaction model that could in fact take all that set of rules. These set of rules are not encoded in Dask itself because otherwise we would be too specific of a chain. So we would be probably more a colored coin to use a very old reference. But we tackled immediately, and we took into consideration immediately the kind of standard, the kind of transaction model that we wanted to implement on top of our network in order to satisfy all the different kind of use cases. I see. we had in mind. So Dusk retains to this day its identity of a general purpose, privacy friendly layer one, on top of which we are going to, and this is one of the things that we are working on at the moment, and is our immediate priority in which we are deploying on top of which we are deploying the standard in order to satisfy the MIFID tool and the security regulation and to encode the security regulation. This particular standard, we call it ZGIR, which is also a transaction model. And it's a transaction model that has been born pretty much immediately. It's not really something that we developed or we thought about. just with the time. Yeah. Let's talk about, it, is a general purpose one, general purpose layer one chain. But on top of it, let's call it a module that's very specific to complying to regulations in a specific geography. Let's say Europe. And that makes sense, that kind of model makes sense, because in a world of more modular, a more modular versus monolithic approach, the general purpose layer one, and on top of that, the compliance module for Europe makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about the benefits that does for Dusk. When you're very compliant to the regulations in Europe, what does that enable Dusk? in terms of partnerships and features and offerings, what does that allow you to do? Well, one of the main benefits is something that we unlocked and achieved practically almost immediately already in 2019. So we entered in a partnership, which is very symbiotic. It's a symbiotic partnership with a stock exchange, with a regulated stock exchange. So that was a partnership. we are also shareholders of that stock exchange. keen focus on compliance and our also knowledge of two worlds, two worlds that do want to talk with each other. One is the DLT world or the blockchain world or the distributed ledger, however you want to call it. So very technologically driven, very dynamic, fresh, crypto, Web3 and all that. And on the other hand, the the regulated environments, right? So fintech, which is among at the same time, it's quite a weird, it's quite a weird sector, because at the same time, it is very conservative. But at the same time, it is very forward looking, you know, because efficiency, the capability of shedding costs even to a 0.1 % makes or breaks businesses that are billion dollar worth. Right. So we have been, since we, our, our focus was on both, we could bridge this to work very well. Um, when we are talking about regulators, when we're talking about licenses, these kinds of things, acquiring a license is 80 % education, 80%, 80 % educating the regulators about the technology that you're using and 20 % about policies. about how you are bringing certain particular policies that have been there and have been proving effective for quite some time, how you keep them alive, how you can still satisfy them, how can you still fit inside of these. So in that scenario, our focus and also our stack just allowed us to engage in early conversation to speak the language of regulators when we spoke with regulators, the language of issuers and fintech providers when we talk to them, and the language of innovation departments of different kind of regulated institutions at the same time. Because of that, have been, I think, among the first protocols in the world that were cleared by a national bank, so the Dutch National Bank. the day and day gave us clearance to own shares, to own equity in a regulated stock exchange. This was something that already happened in 2019. Now, since last year, we got even the go ahead from the regulators not only to own, to hold shares, but also to base the development and the restructuring of such stock exchange on our own technology. As a matter of fact, I, at that time, I also became the CTO of the stock exchange. I am in fact, not only the CEO and founder of Dask, I'm also the CTO of MPEX, which is a stock exchange in the Netherlands with whom we are pursuing the license to be able to use DLT. So to be able to use the Dask ledger in order to do post-trades services in order to do clearance and settlements, in order to do issuance, tokenization, essentially need to bring the financial world and the financial market infrastructure natively on the blockchain. And I don't think that there is any other protocol out there that got a similar clearance from the regulators. I was gonna say, I've met with several real world asset protocols and none of whom are at the stage that Dusk is in with being very regulatory compliant and have these partnerships with highly regulated industries. And it shows that the progress that Dusk has made and very difficult, difficult progress because getting these licenses is not easy. Let's talk about how, I mean, I think you've shown us how difficult it is to become licensed, that the technology that Dusk has built is both layer, it's a general purpose layer one, but also has a module or is very regulatory compliant. to the specific set of rules in Europe, which enables Dusk to partner with highly regulated financial industries that allows for the securitization, for the issuance, for the post-trading settlement, the entire customer journey of transaction, a financial transaction. When people talk about real world assets, know, Dusk is clearly at the very, very edge of this. It's probably the furthest ahead based on all the projects that I've interviewed. What are they getting wrong that Dusk is getting right? So in order to succeed as a crypto protocol, you need one of these three things. And this is something that I came to realize after a long time. You either have... a lot of users, a lot of users, or you either have a lot of money. or you either have. best them status that you can have. Now, when you have a lot of users, then institutions wanna talk to you because they want your users. Unfortunately, the cycle of adoption from regulated parties, it is so long that normally users don't stick around for a very, very long time. This is something that we have seen over and over again. are protocols that are older age, and then at some point, their users migrate somewhere else to the next shiny thing. If we take the example of meme coins, then this is probably to the extreme. One day, everybody is on one meme. The next day is on something else. But this is true also for very convincing and very, very good protocols. If you have hell of a lot of money, then institutions want to talk to you because essentially they want to access your liquidity. Now, the problem with having a lot of money is an intrinsic problem. It's you know, It's an endogenous problem. It's not really exogenous, it's endogenous. If you have a protocol, if you are the founder of a protocol that has a treasury that is so big, at some point you are satiated. Who cares? I mean, you have billions, right? So why would you jump hoops in order to comply to this and that? It's much better basically to start throwing money at a lot of different applications. And then one is going to stick. Why going the regulated route? It doesn't really make much sense. The third one is the most important one, which is status. Now, dusk does not have status per se. But like I told you, we are very symbiotic. in our relationship with a regulated entity and a regulated entity like a stock exchange that has got an MTF license and by the way NPEX has got also another couple of licenses here and there. It is in the financial world, it is the highest status that you can have. So when I am actually talking with other entities, I'm not talking as Dusk, I am talking as the CTO of NPEX. If I am sending out emails as a CTO of MPEX, then I will have a response to my email. I actually counted it within two or three hours on average. And sometimes a couple of days, sometimes after five minutes, but I always get an answer. When instead I started to message people as the CEO of Dask, this technology provider, this great that has... great technology has probably the most advanced technology because we have been doing things that even Ethereum right now is adopting. So Poseidon hashing is something that Vitalik himself started to advocate for Ethereum Foundation to start adopting. It is one of these hashing algorithms, zero knowledge friendly hashing algorithm that we created also together with Ethereum. back in 2019 and we have been adopting in 2019. So after six years, the Ethereum is actually... So from a technological perspective, I seriously think that Dusk is probably top 10 in innovation. Hands down. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about technology. Nobody does. If I am going to compete with other projects on the base of how good my technology is, and how bad the technology of some other protocols are nobody will actually answer the phone nobody will reply to my email nobody cares and it's it's it's actually it makes perfect sense i mean the evm the evm is a kind of worm it's a dumpster fire it is very ancient technology and yet It is practically everywhere. It is very well known, right? So if I am starting to, you know, to shield RASC as or a Dask VM as the great VM that it is because it allows to do stuff that you cannot do with the EVM, like for instance having, you know, having natively, having native access to all. plethora of different kinds of zero-knowledge proof system and being able to have confidential smart contracts, all these things, institutions don't care. Institutions don't really, you know what they care, what institutions care about? They care about this thing. If I am integrating your protocol, am I putting my license at risk? Who is guaranteeing to me that your protocol, which is so innovative, so great, will make me, you know, will keep me safe in my policies and if an audit happens I can still do things that I have been doing, that I've been showing to the auditors for 25 years. It's a huge risk because if they lose the license for whatever reason, because I don't know, there is a leak in in our stack and therefore we start leaking information about the user, for instance, then these institutions, they lose the license. If they lose the license, they lose their business. It's not that they decrease their sales or something, no, they lose their business. Billion dollar funds, billion dollar venues, exchanges, CSD. transfer agent, what have you, they lose the capability of actually just turning a profit for their own shareholders. So this is a huge risk. But if I am actually contacting them as one of the highest regulatory bodies in the Netherlands saying, am actually the CTO of a stock exchange, I want to integrate with you. but I want to do it through dusk, then you can rest assured that I will get a reply. And the reply is yes more often than not. And this yes probably may come with we need to do due diligence on the protocol first. And again, it's not that I am shortening the sales cycle too much, but at the same time, I actually have a shot. Mm-hmm. If instead I come as, I don't know, whatever kind of protocol that tokenize real estate and I go to a stock exchange or I go to a transfer agent or I go to any kind of venue that treats securities and I say, hey, want you to list my product. And by the way, it's not their products because somebody else is doing the tokenization. their protocols. So those that do the tokenization in the end will have a lot of different protocols because they do not want really to lock themselves with these or that, but I digress. So the venue will start to see all these different kind of risks. The compliance officer is going to barrage questions. Hmm. Even getting to that point is a huge success because if you are getting to the no from the compliance officer, it means that at least they've been reading your email or that they have been considering doing something. So all these different kind of real world assets, what they are doing at this point in time, most of them, primary market. What is primary? Essentially the capability of issuing a financial product. And that's where a lot of them are. They haven't gone up the supply chain. They're still at the stage of issuing the real world asset on chain. But do you know why? My guess is, and I haven't asked, but based on everything you've shared, sounds like because they lack the relationships, number one, and also the regulatory worldview. They may not even know what regulations they need to comply against. The actual answer is because they do not need any kind of regulatory compliance. Well, they need the basic regulatory compliance, but they do not need any particular license to issue. So if you wanted to issue an asset, I'm not talking about on chain, off chain, on an Excel sheet or on a piece of paper. If you want to issue a bond, you can do that. You just create a prospectus, you create an information memorandum if you actually are, if you don't really need to appeal to qualified investors, kind of stuff, then you can issue. Anybody can. Any business has been issuing bonds, has been issuing unsecured loans since the 18th century. So primary market doesn't really require, there isn't really any barrier, any license barrier. When you are going towards secondary market, now the story is completely different because at that particular point in time, you need to deal with licensed entities that are going to go through practically any minutiae that are not really about your protocol because also they will probably not even understand what the protocol does. the capability even for financial institutions, for people that have been working in financial institutions, to become a regulated entity with the right license to do anything on chain with DLT or something like that, even for them it takes an average of three years. I mean in Europe there is 21x which recently recently got the DLT TSS license. So it allows them to have a secondary market venue that also can use DLT in order to do some post-trade, some clearance and settlement using DLT. It took them three years. And these guys have been interfacing with Baffin, are the regulatory bodies in Germany, with ESMA, which is the European regulatory bodies. And they have been brought there by Deutsche Bank, by essentially behemoth absolute leaders in the financial market. Even for them, it took them three years to get that license. So you understand that basically everybody that is trying to get into the real world asset, the RWA train, they better have a very symbiotic relationship, very advanced relationship with a certain licensed entity to be able to provide liquidity, to be able to provide a marketplace. for these assets. And even in that case, it's going to be extremely hard. And this is also one of the things that, you know, the strategy that we are pursuing, because at some point, and this some point is definitely something that is already happening, by the way, we as Dask, I am going to any single RWA protocol out there telling them, hey, do you want secondary market for your assets? Well, you better basically integrate with Dask because that is when you have a shot. Because I can speak both languages. I speak both Web3 and compliance language. Yeah, it sounds like, I want to do a quick recap because you've shared a lot. So, Dusk has one of its key competitive advantages is you've put in the work, which took years to build a regulatory compliant engine. And you've also built a relationship with all of the regulatory bodies in Europe so that Now, Dusk is recognized and has the right licenses to enable us to partner with highly regulated financial industry or financial players. Yeah. Okay. that has got the license is NPEX, the stock exchange. So it is NPEX that vouch for Dusk and this NPEX that gets into all kinds of partnership, but imposing the use of Dusk in closing these partnerships. the key part of the technology stack. Now, in the next little while, in the next 10 minutes or so before we end, I think one, I mean, it's very clear that Dusk has put in the work, it has competitive advantage when it comes to highly regulated industries, especially initially here in Europe. What... When people think about Dusk the token, what can you say about how value accrues to the Dusk token? If people are wondering, because it's really clear from partnerships perspective, from a regulatory compliance perspective, Dusk is a clear leader. What can you the token in which value can accrue to the token? Before, before, no, no, without, without, without making any pro promises. I have been talking a lot about what Dask does, but I haven't been touching upon why. mean, having DLT that does all these and that, right? So why bother? So the vision has always been to give users the capability to run a piece of the infrastructure on top of which financial transactions are cleared and settled and verified and validated. What Dask is doing is trying to make sure that people, people like you and me can participate in the financial market infrastructure. Because at this point in time, the financial market infrastructure are vertically integrated platforms that are in the hands of a few regulated entities that are actually making a lot of money out of it. What I want is for this to become an horizontally integrated decentralized platform. And I want to provide any user and all people the capability of participating in the operations of the financial infrastructure by running a Dusk node. So in this particular scenario, the task, the Dusk token accrues value because in order for any kind of operation to happen from this financial market infrastructure, then essentially you need to have Dusk in order to pay for gas. But that's not the only utility that we have. And by the way, everybody that is running a node stays incentivized exactly with the same kind of mechanism that incentivizes miners of Bitcoin to validate, verify transactions and create a block. And that is one of the principal utility, but it's not the only one. Our symbiotic relationship with NPEX allows us also to expand on this utility. pretty much in the same way that Binance, for instance, has a symbiotic relationship with BNB. And that is another way that we are accrued or that thus called accrued value. At some point when we are fully at the regime in... in tokenizing assets, in clearing assets, in creating investment opportunities, in getting money and TVL and whatnot, then at that particular point in time, then we are going to turn APEX also in a Binance for regulated assets. And at that particular point in time, then this unlocks a lot of different other value accruing mechanism. which are simply inspired by what Binance does with BNB. Just Binance burns BNB depending on the profit that it does. The profit is accrued by all the different kind of trading fees that Binance accrues plus all the different kind of services that it provides to the Web3 users. We intend to do exactly the same thing, not only for Web3, but also for for regulated assets. This is very ambitious, but this is already happening. And this is also the reason why, I mean, we have been announcing two different partnerships. At the moment, Dask is one of the few protocols that can issue digital euros. The one that has through Qantos, which is the issuer of EuroQ. So it's a fully MICA licensed EMT. And if you read the announcement, the announcement is Qantas, APEX, and Ask issue, EuroQ. We closed the partnership with Cordial Systems. Cordial Systems is last weekend. These guys are incredible. They have one of the first zero trust architecture for digital assets. are the first to use this zero trust architecture for custody, treasury and vaults of regulated digital assets. again, Cordial Systems partners up with Dusk and NPEX. You see where I'm going with this. NPEX is definitely, like I said, has got a symbiotic relationship with Dusk. Dusk is The technology arm is the decentralized protocol, is the general purpose layer one on top of which we also have very sophisticated compliance transaction models that are deployed onto. But we also have a business arm that in fact has already penetrated the market and is going to do our bidding in there. And the value for our holders comes from a vast range of different opportunities and possibilities. Everything that is going to happen with Quantos, for instance, is by issuing not really a stablecoin, but digital euros that we can create and we are creating, in fact, is on our roadmap, a payment network. Now, this payment network is going to serve certain specific niche actors with whom, with which, by the way, we already have an agreement that we are going to unveil. quite soon. And just having a payment network using the stable coin that it's already accruing transaction and transaction fees. Now, the capability of doing TVL based on that EMT for a lending protocol, for instance, which is completely securitized, for example, or even a non-secure one, well, that's Have. a business model that's basically or core if you are an OG. MPEX itself provides a Binance-like opportunity for value accrual. The capability of issuing assets and doing primary is interesting. It's still interesting also for us. But what is interesting for us is the capability of actually attracting brokers and attracting market makers to use MPEGs as a sort of a B2B trading venue in order for them to jump all the different kind of costs to avoid all the different costs that come from the clearance and settlement system. so that there are things like atomic settlement and these kind of things already on the venue. But brokers and the market makers are essentially going to trade on the venue itself, on tokenized assets, even if they don't even see the tokenization. So blockchain is essentially a backend technology that for the right use cases, like for instance, for use cases that do not really pertain to the real world quote unquote but you know when you are dealing with virtualized and digital assets well that's explosive because the costs are are not more by the by the those that make use of these venues like i said it's the vision of dusk is to make sure that people like you and me we incur the costs of running the infrastructure And because of that, we also are incentivized and we get and we accrue tasks to run the infrastructure. So NPEX doesn't really have to pay for this infrastructure. It has to pay for the transactions that go on the infrastructure. But one thing is to pay for a transaction fee. Another entirely is to maintain a system that needs to vertically integrate with a lot of different kind of actors and stay compliant at the same time. We are saving a huge amount of costs for NPEX. So why is NPEX doing this? Well, for this. Because it's extremely convenient for them. They essentially completely had their own technical department outsourced to the community. And still they can provide much better, much cheaper, more efficient services. to brokers, market makers, users, issuers, and traders in general, and also asset managers that want to issue and trade their products on the platform. And of course, and this is the last thing I'm gonna say about this overall use case, and then we can probably wrap up. The good thing about this is the fact that Dask is also non-exclusive for MPEGs. We already have relationships with other kind of venues because the capability of outsourcing the infrastructure to the community is not really something that only one exchange, one stock exchange or one licensed entity is interested in. Practically everybody is interested in doing that. Of course, we are not going there too fast because if you are just positioning yourself in the market like the financial market infrastructure for everyone and anyone doesn't work. So you need to have a lighthouse case. need to prove that our thesis is correct. And then at particular point in time by creating an actual business case, an old school business case of PowerPoint saying, before Dask, Empex was spending 3 million per year, 4 million per year in costs. After Dask is spending zero, well, at that particular point in time, when I can do this kind of business cases and present them, then something's going to happen. Probably I would be shut up as a snake oil seller or something because it's too good to be true. But essentially that has been the vision all along. I think you've shared with us some pretty amazing information about Dusk and the value that Dusk has brought the financial markets through MPEX in Europe. And I want everyone to know about Dusk. And I think your sharing of knowledge in terms of how Dusk accrues value through the transactions that are made on the network is also really, really valuable. So Manuele, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. And we look forward to seeing what dusk is up to in the next little while. Thank you, it has been really a pleasure to be here.