Joining me now with more on the digital asset space is Cameron Neely.
He's banking and capital markets lead for Layer Zero.
Cameron, welcome.
Thank you so much.
Let's start by getting a sense of the state of the market from your view.
Yes, the state of the market from my view is, firstly, we hit all-time highs in the traditional markets, but from a digital asset perspective to really answer that question, we have to rewind 5 to 6 years.
5 to 6 years ago we saw this explosion of different blockchain ecosystems, and of course blockchains.
Just immutable ledgers that can help transfer value and information more seamlessly, but we saw this explosion and this diversity and think of like the cantons, the Ethereums, the salonnas of the world, and now there is this coalescence around what are the real blockchains that are driving true adoption in the institutional space.
So from an institutional perspective, what I see is a gradual narrowing of the playing field of what players are going to thrive, what chains are going to thrive.
And what assets and applications are going to thrive.
How does layer zero factor into that landscape?
That's a great question.
I appreciate that.
So I think generally what we've seen and the risk that we saw in the space was that with this emergence of different blockchain ecosystems that have emerged, people started to develop discrete third party applications to transfer value between those networks, and we felt that that was just not the right way to do it because there was a centralization risk and other risks that.
Came along with that.
What we built at Layer Zero is an omni-chain messaging protocol.
So what that allows for is asset issuers like the PayPals of the world, the Paxos of the world, etc. to create and own their own bridges between those chains so that they can distribute their assets to any customer on the planet.
And really the first product market fit that we saw was the explosion of stablecoins, of course, and I'm sure your, your listeners know all about that.
Absolutely.
How much capital are you seeing move across?
Your network.
So in general, since protocol inception in 2022, we've facilitated the secure transfer of $280 billion in assets, and just last month we facilitated $8.5 billion in value transferred, which represents a 20% month over month increase from the prior month.
Talk to me more about what your company is doing with Better Money technology.
Better money technology is something we are really passionate about.
We believe that blockchain, if used correctly, can actually represent a step change in the way that the world works and trade and finance work, and we believe that layer zero is the infrastructure that powers the global movement and exchange of value.
And so if you build on blockchain rails and are allowed to essentially reach your customer and have the right secure and compliance embedded within that asset once it reaches that customer, um, we are there to help.
We help customers, we help asset issuers reach their.
Customers, let's drill into that a little bit more.
You recently introduced Zero, layer 0's layer 1 blockchain.
What is it and what has been the reception so far?
I'm really glad you asked that because where we are right now is the reason that we introduced ero.
So for your listeners to be aware, we launch, we are launching a layer one blockchain called Xero, and the reason why we launched this is because of where we are, right?
NICE, the New York Stock Exchange, uh, processes 2 million.
Messages per second.
And if you aggregate all the major blockchains in the world in terms of their throughput, their transactions per second, Solana, Binance chain, Ethereum, etc. you don't come anywhere near what's needed to re-platform capital markets on chain.
So we created an entirely new architecture that's horizontally scalable, purely EVM compatible, that can scale up to 2 million transactions per second, purpose-built for capital markets trading.
All right, Cameron Neely.
Joining us down here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Cameron, thank you so much.
Thank you, Kristen.
