In this edition of the Crypto Trailblazers series, Maja Vujinovic of FG Nexus offers valuable perspectives on the technological and financial landscapes from our NYSE CUBE Studios. Vujinovic's extensive experience in pivotal markets such as Africa and Latin America during the early stages of mobile payments underscores a profound understanding of cryptocurrency's transformative potential, as reflected in their pioneering work with Bitcoin and stablecoins.
John Furrier, co-founder and Co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., hosts this conversation. Vujinovic delves into their early discovery of Bitcoin, noting the pivotal moments that sparked their interest in its peer-to-peer capabilities, and explores the evolving role of stablecoins in the global economy. This discussion also includes insights from theCUBE Research Team, highlighting important developments in the cryptocurrency sphere.
Key takeaways from this discussion involve the strategic significance of stablecoins, particularly in emerging markets, and the role of Ethereum as a cornerstone of the global financial system, according to Vujinovic. Their experiences offer valuable lessons on integrating new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence within traditional sectors, urging a closer examination of how these innovations can reshape established economic frameworks.
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Maja Vujinovic, FG Nexus
In this edition of the Crypto Trailblazers series, Maja Vujinovic of FG Nexus offers valuable perspectives on the technological and financial landscapes from our NYSE CUBE Studios. Vujinovic's extensive experience in pivotal markets such as Africa and Latin America during the early stages of mobile payments underscores a profound understanding of cryptocurrency's transformative potential, as reflected in their pioneering work with Bitcoin and stablecoins.
John Furrier, co-founder and Co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., hosts this conversation. Vujinovic delves into their early discovery of Bitcoin, noting the pivotal moments that sparked their interest in its peer-to-peer capabilities, and explores the evolving role of stablecoins in the global economy. This discussion also includes insights from theCUBE Research Team, highlighting important developments in the cryptocurrency sphere.
Key takeaways from this discussion involve the strategic significance of stablecoins, particularly in emerging markets, and the role of Ethereum as a cornerstone of the global financial system, according to Vujinovic. Their experiences offer valuable lessons on integrating new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence within traditional sectors, urging a closer examination of how these innovations can reshape established economic frameworks.
>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE at our NYSE CUBE Studios here on the East Coast. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street tech and money coming together. This is our Crypto Trailblazer series where we interview the leaders. We've been blazing the trail in crypto, DeFi, now TradFi, front end, back end, entrepreneurs, money, the people making it happen from day one. A lot of great guests. We have great guests who have been there from the 2010 days. We're going to do a little walk through some of the historic key moments and what they mean today. Maja Vujinovic, FG Nexus, a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ. Great to have you on. Thanks for coming.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Thank you, John for having me. This is great.>> On the intro I mentioned 2010, and I think it's important to note that at that time Bitcoin was like 12 cents, 22 cents, now it's a hundred thousand, but it was still early days, an alternative form of currency, a lot of Silk Road stuff, so it was just now coming out the paper and then obviously the rest is history. And this goes back a few years, it was still lower priced, but now obviously store of value, historic. They don't make any more of it, it's scarce. It's a real great store of value. It's gold as they say. In the early days you have been there. You've seen the revolution grow the importance of the international piece. I'd like to explore that first, I'd love to talk about with FG Nexus too, but let's talk about your history because I think it speaks to what's happening today in the US if you look back at what happened, take us through the early days.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, sure, John. I think it is very interesting, particularly as you said, what's happening today with the stablecoins and of using this technology for that. I think in early days I was a pioneer in mobile payments in the early 2000s in Africa and Latin America. And I think the only reason I saw the potential of Bitcoin when I read the white paper is because I was living in those markets and I saw how hard it was to receive my own salary, how to pay others with everything from high interest rates to FX trades, to just really even transferring money internationally was really difficult. So when I read the white paper in 2010 while I was living in Africa, as I said, a payments pioneer, I thought to myself, "Wow, I don't understand anything what it says here," but I did understand one thing which was peer to peer and that to me was a bit of a light bulb moment. Again, nobody knew where speculatively the coin and the price would go. But I think for me it was extremely important to say, "Wow, if I can do this peer to peer, why do I need a bank?" And so I started going down the rabbit hole at that time and then it led me to other things that I did in space.>> I remember the early days of Bitcoin, we would give Bitcoins to each other just to share, "Give a bitcoin to your friend, share it so they can use it." It's now, "No, it's too expensive." You bring up a good point and I want to get into this. I think we're students of history here on theCUBE. We like to look back at why things happen and what conditions. The mobile payment really was a great time because mobile computing was surging internationally as a penetration. People had more mobile phones in emerging markets than computers. Internet connectivity as the digital divide, they call it. Some say you have no digital, cell phones, mobile was preeminent. That brings commerce.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right.>> You hit on that. But then you're like, okay, there's other things. There's banking, the money movement.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right.>> You know World Bank is thinking about all these things. So it really was the breeding ground for the incubation of what is now global currency and that's huge. Now take us to the next level because, all right, we saw the developers come in, the hardcore alpha geeks pick up on the white paper, that's another progression. They start building-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Certainly.>> Yeah, you got Ethereum, the first programmable smart contracts, very interesting. Bitcoin, layer one, not really flexible. In comes Ethereum, boom tsunami with developers, solidity, coding. Cool things start happening. Take us from there.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, sure. One thing I think you bring up is programmable money. I think again, that was my second light bulb, not again because I understood that this was going to go somewhere X in price, but also because of practical uses. And in 2013 when I started to get involved with the initial stages of Tether, I also knew about Ethereum. And as I said, while I was at GE, I brought Joe Lubin to explore the Ethereum as a potential use case. And Joe Lubin himself would tell you that the leadership wasn't receptive at first times, but then we kept going back and second time and third time. And what I pieced together was, "Wait a second, if I can program anything in these smart contracts, then that means all of that learning that I had in emerging markets becomes possible because all of the difficulties that I had in emerging markets, they become actually possible but programmable money." And so that's where I thought, "Well, maybe we should explore the capability of the programmable money in everything that we do in every different business vertical." And so I got to work and that's where we launched the first trade finance deal between JPMorgan and GE was on Ethereum as a pilot, and this was very early on before Ethereum was even a discussion outside of the cyber rooms.>> Well first of all, that's a pioneering trailblazing moment. Some of those trailblazing moments can go up in flames, but this was early. What were some of the conversations like then? Because that was very early, what was it like because GE a very well known global multinational, huge industry player. Joe Lubin starting Consensys, that was developing. You had kind of the two worlds coming together
Maja Vujinovic
>> They were very opposing worlds->> Take me through.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, GE->> in GE.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, exactly. By the way, you don't just start a GE in a garage that's an exceptional company with some exceptional people. And lots of GE's products we are going to use for many years to come. It is an incredible company. It's also a company that really advertised and put forward a digital twinning, which is extremely compatible to crypto. And so when I spoke to them first time I said, "Look, an IOT, we need smart contracts. AI in the future is going to need a much faster highway to communicate on than the back office systems we have. AI is going to need some kind of capacity in terms of paying each other in tokens. It's not going to be putting dollars out on a table or Venmo, it's going to need things to communicate on that are much faster." And it wasn't their priority. And so I got kicked out of rooms a few times and while I kept one foot in the degen, kind of as we say degen ecosystem and a crypto native ecosystem. And when I met Joe Lubin, I thought, this is an exceptional innovation that these guys are doing and we need to somehow bridge those worlds. And so little by little we brought them into the GE and then later we did our own pilot thing, not just with Ethereum but with many other things at GE.>> All right, now take us through the next step of the journey because the journey gets more interesting because you're also early pioneering stablecoins. Take us through that history piece because I think that's very instructing too, relevant.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, that's the piece you love, I think the most.>> I love it. Well I love the international... I didn't like the regime we had before in the US. No one did, and thank God that's over because you have commercialization happening rapidly now, but the tell signs were all happening around the early formations of stablecoin. Yeah, I mean there might've been some bumps and bruises, but it's still the same game. Take us through what was going on at that time because it sets the globalization conversation up.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, absolutely. I went to present in front of New York Fed in 2015 I think on blockchain and I remember them telling me in the room, "Don't you think we already thought about blockchain and digital dollar? We've been thinking about this since 1994." And I went, "Wow, what am I doing in this room telling them something that they've already known about."
So I do think this is something that has been at works and been studied by people who have been running our system. What I think is interesting is that Tether first launched a synthetic dollar on Ethereum, that's really where it started. And tether is massive today. For us and for me what's really important is that I see Ethereum as a pure backbone of our financial system. I can tell you that in the next 20 to 30 years, the whole Wall Street will be tokenized and I think that's fascinating. You're going from T3 to T0 and you go in an instant settlement, we're going to be living in a world of AI and I think that's going to need, as I said->> Agents under the covers, doing things as software.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so I think for me, the first introduction to stablecoins was emerging markets really where I saw inflation overnight, I saw it firsthand, I felt it on my own paycheck. And then coming to work in technology like this, seeing Tether what they've created, I started to piece it together. And then in 2017 and '18, I already started talking about stablecoins as the main killer use case for crypto. And so what's most important here to understand is that we almost to some extent have an obligation to push the proliferation of stablecoins for the others in certain markets where inflation is just rampant. We might not feel it here as much because we use credit card, we pay off our debt. But in other places people feel it on their daily lives. And so Ethereum->> Very unstable, the instability is brutal.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Exactly. And so Ethereum also plays a massive role in that because 65 to 75% of all stablecoins are built on Ethereum. And so we almost have a kind of national security obligation to push Ethereum because we will be then pushing a US dollar globally around the world.>> Yeah. And talk about the stablecoin. This is one of the biggest exciting areas I've seen in a long time and some other things I like MCP, which is a little bit more near an AI thing that's organically growing. But on the crypto side, the infrastructure stablecoins really changes the game because now you can introduce the key elements on the financial side that allows things to take place, you mentioned some of the dynamics. What does that do in your mind? Why is it important for people to understand the role stablecoins play for the US and for the global economy? What is the key takeaway that people should understand besides the fact that sometimes they might not be that stable, but it's, okay, they're still stable. That's my opinion, I shouldn't say that, but go ahead.
Maja Vujinovic
>> We are going into a world that is a barbell world. On one side you're going to have full on L1s launching like we've seen Tempo and Circle and Google launching their own L1s, their own blockchains to maximize and benefit from the data and capture all the payments, integrate vertically. And then there's Ethereum that is completely decentralized and the world that is going to want to use Ethereum and the world that wants to use stablecoins. Reality is today that most of the emerging markets would rather hold a stablecoin of some sorts, be it Tether or Tron or whatever it is, versus their own local currency. They want USD because of instability, because of inflation. And so this is where very kind of helpful, I would always say stablecoins do God's work in emerging markets because if I wake up one day and I can't buy groceries because of a massive amount of inflation, that directly impacts my family. And so I think stablecoins need to be understood first of all in that context. I know that some would potentially argue that stablecoins today are mostly used by traders, but yes, but they're also used by folks->> And your comment about the inflation is that the US dollar, USD has backed up the stablecoin one to one.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. That's right.>> So that means in a country that might have its own currency and out of control-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Like Nigeria, Argentina, whatever->> Fluctuations-
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. Yeah, yeah.... >> uncontrollable, who knows the black box, what's going on in the black box. It's comfortable because if the merchants take crypto, it's just like a dollar.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. And they would rather take that than they would take their own local currency. We're seeing that more and more. I mean stats are just coming out now. So I think that's a fascinating ->> An extension of the US dollar basically.
Maja Vujinovic
>> It's absolute extension of the US dollar. And as I said earlier, I think what's been interesting with this administration, you brought it up earlier, is that this administration and Trump has realized that, "Look, this is something that we can use to our advantage, that is also one of the tools in a toolbox to backstop our debt.">> Explain that.
Maja Vujinovic
>> So we will be using stablecoins and this is why we passed the GENIUS Act as well to put the US dollar in the hands of many people around the world.>> Yeah, and that's going to help us. All right, so as we go forward, as we came into the 2018, 2019 timeframe, you saw the momentum slow down in the US, expands international because of the US had a policy that was a headwind, I say that politely for this market, but that kept going internationally. Talk about that dynamic.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, a very important point you bring up because at that time it's not like we were not doing anything. I think the major banks in my opinion almost help pause that for a minute until they figured out where they play a role. Because technology usually moves faster than the politics. And we've seen that yesterday with an announcement of NASDAQ that wants to trade tokenized securities. This is going to inadvertently push the regulation to change the rules and reg on the tokenization. And so I think when I backpedal, I think all that was was really kind of putting a pause until->> Let's figure it out....
Maja Vujinovic
>> folks like JPMorgan figured out where their blockchain fits in and where everybody else fits in.>> And of course their message was, "Oh, we're not working on anything."
Maja Vujinovic
>> But they were working on it since 2015.>> But they were working on it around the clock.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right, yeah.>> Around the clock too.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. That's right. That's right.>> A magical, "Whoa, look what we have." But that's good R&D. I mean. I think this is smart money working. I mean finance-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Absolutely, yeah.>> The term we've been kicking around is smart risk on, and the ones that had smart risk-on mindset are doing well right now. The somewhat conservative risk-on, catching up, risk-off is way behind. So we're seeing that catch-up now that we're accelerated the GENIUS act, the clarity act, really good. Now you got, how do you regulate? Now it's-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Now I think it's tokenization and decentralized finance, or DeFi. That's the next step because I do think that part of Wall Street would like to tap into the billions of dollars of decentralized capital that's out there.>> Exactly. Exactly.
Maja Vujinovic
>> And that's mostly again on Ethereum, which is another reason why we chose to launch a treasury vehicle on Ethereum.>> Well, exciting history. It's such a great pleasure to have you on and give that history. Now let's get into what you're working on now.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, sure.>> Talk about what's happening now. You've got an exciting opportunity, explain.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, and thanks John for that. It is been exciting and it's been kind of cool to be part of that. A lot of pressure, I'm not going to lie. So a lot of pressure to really be able to explain and to be walking that thin line of innovation and regulation as well. Obviously as you said, you can be on crazy spectrums of them both. So we, two months ago we raised a $200 million pipe for Ethereum treasury vehicle and we've deployed all of that into Ethereum. We are staking it all. What that means, we are actually contributing to the network. We are earning yield on our Ethereum and we are exploring now really interesting opportunities with our partners like Galaxy Digital who Mike Novogratz and I go back early days of starting all this and it's really exciting. I love the team and that's been kind of cool for me to work and go back and work with that team again. And we're exploring really some interesting additional yield generations and DeFi. Obviously we are being really careful around how we do that and what we do, but I think we owe that to our shareholders and we owe it to kind of innovation of what we're trying to do in Ethereum is to constantly push the boundaries and see where we can return that capital back to our shareholders.>> And also blaze the trail because you now have the major markets. One of the themes here in the Crypto Trailblazers besides highlighting the leaders is surfacing some of the trends. And one of the biggest trends is the mainstreaming of what was once an insider game.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. Yeah.>> Which has been how things develop, that's just natural progression. Now, it's like everyone's coming in, so here comes everybody. And that's a good thing. So I think we got to battle test the system. And the other thing I would like to get your reaction to is one that trend, or here comes everybody, but also the entrepreneurial side of finance. We're starting to see entrepreneurship in finance unlike ever before. Now, entrepreneurship in technology has been there because it's been kind of a libertarian environment, not finance, everything was kind of, the back office was contained. Yeah, you can maybe do some innovation Pre-paid cards on someone else's network, but now you can actually take territory down.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, absolutely.>> It's a whole new ball game. Welcome to the entrepreneurial finance. So you're seeing a lot of building going on, young talented senior people in the industry, leaving the big firms saying, "I could replicate that and do it better, smaller, faster, cheaper, better infrastructure, the plumbing that's going to be tokenizing Wall Street."
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, no, I think you nailed it, absolutely. A lot of the folks I see from traditional finance, the BlackRocks of the world are leaving and really figuring out where are those nooks that they can disrupt and they can do it 10 times better. And so I think this is the power of a combination. As I've said before, blockchain and AI are a perfect marriage and AI can't do without blockchain at a large scale. And so most folks that have worked in these traditional institutions are saying, "Hold on a second, I can actually have this cheaper. I can have it a shorter time. I can now pull in liquidity," because I think you mentioned earlier, a lot of the banks never cared about a small guy. How do you bank a small guy? Nobody really cared. But now because the power of this technology, you're seeing also fintechs such as Stripe and similar are rising to almost become banks at some point. And they're also faster to the blockchain because they have less regulatory hurdle. And so I think that's also interesting where you are going to get a bit of a pushback. And we've seen that with Libra. Libra was a clear no-no by the government to say, "Hey, you can't overstep on our finical ways," because if tomorrow Libra woke up with two billion users that they can distribute a coin to, that's a massive disruption.>> And I think the other thing too is, just to add to that is that other weird things happen that are good. Like for example, I just interviewed the folks who did the easyBitcoin app, easyHotel, easyJets, they do jets, easyFlights and hotels democratizing access. They just started their own credit company, they have distribution, they have users and they're turning into kind of a neo-bank, and it's like where did that come from? Enabled by the new infrastructure, unattainable in the old way. They'd have to go through an intermediary, go get set up. But the visionary manager's like, "Well, I have all these users, here's an app."
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, you've got to monetize it. Yeah. And I think that's->> And provide value.
Maja Vujinovic
>> And that's what's happening now with Tempo and Stripe and Google launching their own L1 as I mentioned, and then Circle having their own. But again, here's the thing, you've been around the block you know that open source is the way.>> Yeah, .
Maja Vujinovic
>> Open networks are the way, and this is where protocols like Ethereum come in place. And for me, I've seen it over and over again. I mean, even the early days of sending an email within the company and now sending it to somebody outside was a bit scary because you didn't know how that works and so we kind of obviously went across that hurdle. But I think open source is the way, and I think this is where that decentralization comes into play. And I think it would be crazy for this government not to continue to push as they've been pushing on adoption of Ethereum as a decentralized network, as a backbone of our infrastructure.>> I mean, open always wins. Everyone who watches theCUBE knows we have a huge open source background. We love open, we're open content.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, that's right.>> But open requires an ecosystem.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yes.>> Ecosystems are super critical. And with Ethereum and entrepreneurship and money, programmable money, a money store, is the perfect innovation storm. Every theater is popping with innovation.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. Yeah.>> This is a great time. So advice for entrepreneurs, I'd like to get your thoughts because I think you're a dot connector, you've always been connecting dots, you're a trailblazer from the time seeing payments to Bitcoin, not a lot of people put that together. So that's huge. So a lot of people are trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I contribute?" And if I'm not sure, how do I create value and capture that? And I was riffing with another guest and they said, "Well figure out the ideal steady state of the future. Where is it easy to use? Where is it not hard? How is it simple?" What's your reaction to that? If you were going to do a startup, let's just say we were in college and we're riffing, what would we do? What would you do if you were going to do a startup right now from scratch if you were fresh, ready, motivated?
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah. If I had experience in let's say TradFi financial system, as you said earlier, I'd probably go hone into a problem that is quite big in that department or a vertical of a business and I would go solve for that problem. One of the problems in crypto technologies is that there are a lot of devs and they build a protocol and then there's an empty room and so they're looking for a solution. But I would say if you have experience in payments or anything related to that, this technology provides such an incredible way to build on that. And AI as well, I think finance is already disrupted by AI, travel industry, disrupted by AI, we don't have to wait anymore. And the next two, three years, other industries will be as well. And so I think having machine to machine communication and manufacturing is a fascinating way to also disrupt and future work in general. So I think, yeah.>> It's funny you mentioned digital twins earlier because one of the things we cover is physical AI, NVIDIA is big on that. Quantum's right around the corner. The convergence of those two, and you mentioned AI and blockchain, we're going to , you just mentioned it again, in AI and blockchain and DeFi and TradFi, you know what the common thread is besides power, being bounded by power, is that people with domain expertise actually have an advantage-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yes, that's right.... >> on both fronts, you mentioned the use case. That seems to be the common thread. If you have a domain skill and see business logic, the technology's coming up to the table. You don't have to go build it and be client zero.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Because you almost have all the technology we need right now. To your point, you just have to understand what the business methods are or where you're trying to take that business or what your customer is, what's the underserved customer, and then technology's already there for you. Yeah.>> Maja, great to have you on. A final point for you, give a plug for what you're working on, what are you excited about, what's your to-do list, what's your goals? What's going on with you?
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, thank you for having me again. I believe that the next stage of evolution, you brought it up earlier, I think it's absolutely correct, is we've gone from ICOs into kind of DeFi now into treasury vehicles and who knows what this is going to evolve into. We've certainly built an incredible team. Our team comes from TradFi, these are guys who understand merchant banking, operating businesses, technology, reinsurance, everything that could potentially be tokenized. And there are many of these vehicles out there. I would say there is a space for a couple of really strong teams and why would you put all your eggs in one basket when you can invest in teams that have been around for so many years and understand this and are not going away. This is extremely important for us. We see Ethereum as the backbone of the new tokenized Wall Street, and I see it as a backbone of a lot of stablecoins, and so we are really excited about that.>> Tokenizing Wall Street, the trailblazers are here, you're a trailblazer. Thanks so much for coming on.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Thank you so much.>> The Crypto Trailblazer is here on theCUBE. We're doing our part to blaze the trail and share the data and information with you. Again, so many big opportunities as the world shifts into tokenization, real world assets, we already have a physical digital convergence. It's getting coded up and the technology's available for entrepreneurs and also a big business. So we'll keep covering it. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.
>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE at our NYSE CUBE Studios here on the East Coast. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street tech and money coming together. This is our Crypto Trailblazer series where we interview the leaders. We've been blazing the trail in crypto, DeFi, now TradFi, front end, back end, entrepreneurs, money, the people making it happen from day one. A lot of great guests. We have great guests who have been there from the 2010 days. We're going to do a little walk through some of the historic key moments and what they mean today. Maja Vujinovic, FG Nexus, a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ. Great to have you on. Thanks for coming.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Thank you, John for having me. This is great.>> On the intro I mentioned 2010, and I think it's important to note that at that time Bitcoin was like 12 cents, 22 cents, now it's a hundred thousand, but it was still early days, an alternative form of currency, a lot of Silk Road stuff, so it was just now coming out the paper and then obviously the rest is history. And this goes back a few years, it was still lower priced, but now obviously store of value, historic. They don't make any more of it, it's scarce. It's a real great store of value. It's gold as they say. In the early days you have been there. You've seen the revolution grow the importance of the international piece. I'd like to explore that first, I'd love to talk about with FG Nexus too, but let's talk about your history because I think it speaks to what's happening today in the US if you look back at what happened, take us through the early days.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, sure, John. I think it is very interesting, particularly as you said, what's happening today with the stablecoins and of using this technology for that. I think in early days I was a pioneer in mobile payments in the early 2000s in Africa and Latin America. And I think the only reason I saw the potential of Bitcoin when I read the white paper is because I was living in those markets and I saw how hard it was to receive my own salary, how to pay others with everything from high interest rates to FX trades, to just really even transferring money internationally was really difficult. So when I read the white paper in 2010 while I was living in Africa, as I said, a payments pioneer, I thought to myself, "Wow, I don't understand anything what it says here," but I did understand one thing which was peer to peer and that to me was a bit of a light bulb moment. Again, nobody knew where speculatively the coin and the price would go. But I think for me it was extremely important to say, "Wow, if I can do this peer to peer, why do I need a bank?" And so I started going down the rabbit hole at that time and then it led me to other things that I did in space.>> I remember the early days of Bitcoin, we would give Bitcoins to each other just to share, "Give a bitcoin to your friend, share it so they can use it." It's now, "No, it's too expensive." You bring up a good point and I want to get into this. I think we're students of history here on theCUBE. We like to look back at why things happen and what conditions. The mobile payment really was a great time because mobile computing was surging internationally as a penetration. People had more mobile phones in emerging markets than computers. Internet connectivity as the digital divide, they call it. Some say you have no digital, cell phones, mobile was preeminent. That brings commerce.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right.>> You hit on that. But then you're like, okay, there's other things. There's banking, the money movement.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right.>> You know World Bank is thinking about all these things. So it really was the breeding ground for the incubation of what is now global currency and that's huge. Now take us to the next level because, all right, we saw the developers come in, the hardcore alpha geeks pick up on the white paper, that's another progression. They start building-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Certainly.>> Yeah, you got Ethereum, the first programmable smart contracts, very interesting. Bitcoin, layer one, not really flexible. In comes Ethereum, boom tsunami with developers, solidity, coding. Cool things start happening. Take us from there.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, sure. One thing I think you bring up is programmable money. I think again, that was my second light bulb, not again because I understood that this was going to go somewhere X in price, but also because of practical uses. And in 2013 when I started to get involved with the initial stages of Tether, I also knew about Ethereum. And as I said, while I was at GE, I brought Joe Lubin to explore the Ethereum as a potential use case. And Joe Lubin himself would tell you that the leadership wasn't receptive at first times, but then we kept going back and second time and third time. And what I pieced together was, "Wait a second, if I can program anything in these smart contracts, then that means all of that learning that I had in emerging markets becomes possible because all of the difficulties that I had in emerging markets, they become actually possible but programmable money." And so that's where I thought, "Well, maybe we should explore the capability of the programmable money in everything that we do in every different business vertical." And so I got to work and that's where we launched the first trade finance deal between JPMorgan and GE was on Ethereum as a pilot, and this was very early on before Ethereum was even a discussion outside of the cyber rooms.>> Well first of all, that's a pioneering trailblazing moment. Some of those trailblazing moments can go up in flames, but this was early. What were some of the conversations like then? Because that was very early, what was it like because GE a very well known global multinational, huge industry player. Joe Lubin starting Consensys, that was developing. You had kind of the two worlds coming together
Maja Vujinovic
>> They were very opposing worlds->> Take me through.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, GE->> in GE.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, exactly. By the way, you don't just start a GE in a garage that's an exceptional company with some exceptional people. And lots of GE's products we are going to use for many years to come. It is an incredible company. It's also a company that really advertised and put forward a digital twinning, which is extremely compatible to crypto. And so when I spoke to them first time I said, "Look, an IOT, we need smart contracts. AI in the future is going to need a much faster highway to communicate on than the back office systems we have. AI is going to need some kind of capacity in terms of paying each other in tokens. It's not going to be putting dollars out on a table or Venmo, it's going to need things to communicate on that are much faster." And it wasn't their priority. And so I got kicked out of rooms a few times and while I kept one foot in the degen, kind of as we say degen ecosystem and a crypto native ecosystem. And when I met Joe Lubin, I thought, this is an exceptional innovation that these guys are doing and we need to somehow bridge those worlds. And so little by little we brought them into the GE and then later we did our own pilot thing, not just with Ethereum but with many other things at GE.>> All right, now take us through the next step of the journey because the journey gets more interesting because you're also early pioneering stablecoins. Take us through that history piece because I think that's very instructing too, relevant.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, that's the piece you love, I think the most.>> I love it. Well I love the international... I didn't like the regime we had before in the US. No one did, and thank God that's over because you have commercialization happening rapidly now, but the tell signs were all happening around the early formations of stablecoin. Yeah, I mean there might've been some bumps and bruises, but it's still the same game. Take us through what was going on at that time because it sets the globalization conversation up.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, absolutely. I went to present in front of New York Fed in 2015 I think on blockchain and I remember them telling me in the room, "Don't you think we already thought about blockchain and digital dollar? We've been thinking about this since 1994." And I went, "Wow, what am I doing in this room telling them something that they've already known about."
So I do think this is something that has been at works and been studied by people who have been running our system. What I think is interesting is that Tether first launched a synthetic dollar on Ethereum, that's really where it started. And tether is massive today. For us and for me what's really important is that I see Ethereum as a pure backbone of our financial system. I can tell you that in the next 20 to 30 years, the whole Wall Street will be tokenized and I think that's fascinating. You're going from T3 to T0 and you go in an instant settlement, we're going to be living in a world of AI and I think that's going to need, as I said->> Agents under the covers, doing things as software.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so I think for me, the first introduction to stablecoins was emerging markets really where I saw inflation overnight, I saw it firsthand, I felt it on my own paycheck. And then coming to work in technology like this, seeing Tether what they've created, I started to piece it together. And then in 2017 and '18, I already started talking about stablecoins as the main killer use case for crypto. And so what's most important here to understand is that we almost to some extent have an obligation to push the proliferation of stablecoins for the others in certain markets where inflation is just rampant. We might not feel it here as much because we use credit card, we pay off our debt. But in other places people feel it on their daily lives. And so Ethereum->> Very unstable, the instability is brutal.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Exactly. And so Ethereum also plays a massive role in that because 65 to 75% of all stablecoins are built on Ethereum. And so we almost have a kind of national security obligation to push Ethereum because we will be then pushing a US dollar globally around the world.>> Yeah. And talk about the stablecoin. This is one of the biggest exciting areas I've seen in a long time and some other things I like MCP, which is a little bit more near an AI thing that's organically growing. But on the crypto side, the infrastructure stablecoins really changes the game because now you can introduce the key elements on the financial side that allows things to take place, you mentioned some of the dynamics. What does that do in your mind? Why is it important for people to understand the role stablecoins play for the US and for the global economy? What is the key takeaway that people should understand besides the fact that sometimes they might not be that stable, but it's, okay, they're still stable. That's my opinion, I shouldn't say that, but go ahead.
Maja Vujinovic
>> We are going into a world that is a barbell world. On one side you're going to have full on L1s launching like we've seen Tempo and Circle and Google launching their own L1s, their own blockchains to maximize and benefit from the data and capture all the payments, integrate vertically. And then there's Ethereum that is completely decentralized and the world that is going to want to use Ethereum and the world that wants to use stablecoins. Reality is today that most of the emerging markets would rather hold a stablecoin of some sorts, be it Tether or Tron or whatever it is, versus their own local currency. They want USD because of instability, because of inflation. And so this is where very kind of helpful, I would always say stablecoins do God's work in emerging markets because if I wake up one day and I can't buy groceries because of a massive amount of inflation, that directly impacts my family. And so I think stablecoins need to be understood first of all in that context. I know that some would potentially argue that stablecoins today are mostly used by traders, but yes, but they're also used by folks->> And your comment about the inflation is that the US dollar, USD has backed up the stablecoin one to one.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. That's right.>> So that means in a country that might have its own currency and out of control-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Like Nigeria, Argentina, whatever->> Fluctuations-
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. Yeah, yeah.... >> uncontrollable, who knows the black box, what's going on in the black box. It's comfortable because if the merchants take crypto, it's just like a dollar.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. And they would rather take that than they would take their own local currency. We're seeing that more and more. I mean stats are just coming out now. So I think that's a fascinating ->> An extension of the US dollar basically.
Maja Vujinovic
>> It's absolute extension of the US dollar. And as I said earlier, I think what's been interesting with this administration, you brought it up earlier, is that this administration and Trump has realized that, "Look, this is something that we can use to our advantage, that is also one of the tools in a toolbox to backstop our debt.">> Explain that.
Maja Vujinovic
>> So we will be using stablecoins and this is why we passed the GENIUS Act as well to put the US dollar in the hands of many people around the world.>> Yeah, and that's going to help us. All right, so as we go forward, as we came into the 2018, 2019 timeframe, you saw the momentum slow down in the US, expands international because of the US had a policy that was a headwind, I say that politely for this market, but that kept going internationally. Talk about that dynamic.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, a very important point you bring up because at that time it's not like we were not doing anything. I think the major banks in my opinion almost help pause that for a minute until they figured out where they play a role. Because technology usually moves faster than the politics. And we've seen that yesterday with an announcement of NASDAQ that wants to trade tokenized securities. This is going to inadvertently push the regulation to change the rules and reg on the tokenization. And so I think when I backpedal, I think all that was was really kind of putting a pause until->> Let's figure it out....
Maja Vujinovic
>> folks like JPMorgan figured out where their blockchain fits in and where everybody else fits in.>> And of course their message was, "Oh, we're not working on anything."
Maja Vujinovic
>> But they were working on it since 2015.>> But they were working on it around the clock.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right, yeah.>> Around the clock too.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. That's right. That's right.>> A magical, "Whoa, look what we have." But that's good R&D. I mean. I think this is smart money working. I mean finance-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Absolutely, yeah.>> The term we've been kicking around is smart risk on, and the ones that had smart risk-on mindset are doing well right now. The somewhat conservative risk-on, catching up, risk-off is way behind. So we're seeing that catch-up now that we're accelerated the GENIUS act, the clarity act, really good. Now you got, how do you regulate? Now it's-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Now I think it's tokenization and decentralized finance, or DeFi. That's the next step because I do think that part of Wall Street would like to tap into the billions of dollars of decentralized capital that's out there.>> Exactly. Exactly.
Maja Vujinovic
>> And that's mostly again on Ethereum, which is another reason why we chose to launch a treasury vehicle on Ethereum.>> Well, exciting history. It's such a great pleasure to have you on and give that history. Now let's get into what you're working on now.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, sure.>> Talk about what's happening now. You've got an exciting opportunity, explain.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, and thanks John for that. It is been exciting and it's been kind of cool to be part of that. A lot of pressure, I'm not going to lie. So a lot of pressure to really be able to explain and to be walking that thin line of innovation and regulation as well. Obviously as you said, you can be on crazy spectrums of them both. So we, two months ago we raised a $200 million pipe for Ethereum treasury vehicle and we've deployed all of that into Ethereum. We are staking it all. What that means, we are actually contributing to the network. We are earning yield on our Ethereum and we are exploring now really interesting opportunities with our partners like Galaxy Digital who Mike Novogratz and I go back early days of starting all this and it's really exciting. I love the team and that's been kind of cool for me to work and go back and work with that team again. And we're exploring really some interesting additional yield generations and DeFi. Obviously we are being really careful around how we do that and what we do, but I think we owe that to our shareholders and we owe it to kind of innovation of what we're trying to do in Ethereum is to constantly push the boundaries and see where we can return that capital back to our shareholders.>> And also blaze the trail because you now have the major markets. One of the themes here in the Crypto Trailblazers besides highlighting the leaders is surfacing some of the trends. And one of the biggest trends is the mainstreaming of what was once an insider game.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. Yeah.>> Which has been how things develop, that's just natural progression. Now, it's like everyone's coming in, so here comes everybody. And that's a good thing. So I think we got to battle test the system. And the other thing I would like to get your reaction to is one that trend, or here comes everybody, but also the entrepreneurial side of finance. We're starting to see entrepreneurship in finance unlike ever before. Now, entrepreneurship in technology has been there because it's been kind of a libertarian environment, not finance, everything was kind of, the back office was contained. Yeah, you can maybe do some innovation Pre-paid cards on someone else's network, but now you can actually take territory down.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, absolutely.>> It's a whole new ball game. Welcome to the entrepreneurial finance. So you're seeing a lot of building going on, young talented senior people in the industry, leaving the big firms saying, "I could replicate that and do it better, smaller, faster, cheaper, better infrastructure, the plumbing that's going to be tokenizing Wall Street."
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, no, I think you nailed it, absolutely. A lot of the folks I see from traditional finance, the BlackRocks of the world are leaving and really figuring out where are those nooks that they can disrupt and they can do it 10 times better. And so I think this is the power of a combination. As I've said before, blockchain and AI are a perfect marriage and AI can't do without blockchain at a large scale. And so most folks that have worked in these traditional institutions are saying, "Hold on a second, I can actually have this cheaper. I can have it a shorter time. I can now pull in liquidity," because I think you mentioned earlier, a lot of the banks never cared about a small guy. How do you bank a small guy? Nobody really cared. But now because the power of this technology, you're seeing also fintechs such as Stripe and similar are rising to almost become banks at some point. And they're also faster to the blockchain because they have less regulatory hurdle. And so I think that's also interesting where you are going to get a bit of a pushback. And we've seen that with Libra. Libra was a clear no-no by the government to say, "Hey, you can't overstep on our finical ways," because if tomorrow Libra woke up with two billion users that they can distribute a coin to, that's a massive disruption.>> And I think the other thing too is, just to add to that is that other weird things happen that are good. Like for example, I just interviewed the folks who did the easyBitcoin app, easyHotel, easyJets, they do jets, easyFlights and hotels democratizing access. They just started their own credit company, they have distribution, they have users and they're turning into kind of a neo-bank, and it's like where did that come from? Enabled by the new infrastructure, unattainable in the old way. They'd have to go through an intermediary, go get set up. But the visionary manager's like, "Well, I have all these users, here's an app."
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, you've got to monetize it. Yeah. And I think that's->> And provide value.
Maja Vujinovic
>> And that's what's happening now with Tempo and Stripe and Google launching their own L1 as I mentioned, and then Circle having their own. But again, here's the thing, you've been around the block you know that open source is the way.>> Yeah, .
Maja Vujinovic
>> Open networks are the way, and this is where protocols like Ethereum come in place. And for me, I've seen it over and over again. I mean, even the early days of sending an email within the company and now sending it to somebody outside was a bit scary because you didn't know how that works and so we kind of obviously went across that hurdle. But I think open source is the way, and I think this is where that decentralization comes into play. And I think it would be crazy for this government not to continue to push as they've been pushing on adoption of Ethereum as a decentralized network, as a backbone of our infrastructure.>> I mean, open always wins. Everyone who watches theCUBE knows we have a huge open source background. We love open, we're open content.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, that's right.>> But open requires an ecosystem.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yes.>> Ecosystems are super critical. And with Ethereum and entrepreneurship and money, programmable money, a money store, is the perfect innovation storm. Every theater is popping with innovation.
Maja Vujinovic
>> That's right. Yeah.>> This is a great time. So advice for entrepreneurs, I'd like to get your thoughts because I think you're a dot connector, you've always been connecting dots, you're a trailblazer from the time seeing payments to Bitcoin, not a lot of people put that together. So that's huge. So a lot of people are trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I contribute?" And if I'm not sure, how do I create value and capture that? And I was riffing with another guest and they said, "Well figure out the ideal steady state of the future. Where is it easy to use? Where is it not hard? How is it simple?" What's your reaction to that? If you were going to do a startup, let's just say we were in college and we're riffing, what would we do? What would you do if you were going to do a startup right now from scratch if you were fresh, ready, motivated?
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah. If I had experience in let's say TradFi financial system, as you said earlier, I'd probably go hone into a problem that is quite big in that department or a vertical of a business and I would go solve for that problem. One of the problems in crypto technologies is that there are a lot of devs and they build a protocol and then there's an empty room and so they're looking for a solution. But I would say if you have experience in payments or anything related to that, this technology provides such an incredible way to build on that. And AI as well, I think finance is already disrupted by AI, travel industry, disrupted by AI, we don't have to wait anymore. And the next two, three years, other industries will be as well. And so I think having machine to machine communication and manufacturing is a fascinating way to also disrupt and future work in general. So I think, yeah.>> It's funny you mentioned digital twins earlier because one of the things we cover is physical AI, NVIDIA is big on that. Quantum's right around the corner. The convergence of those two, and you mentioned AI and blockchain, we're going to , you just mentioned it again, in AI and blockchain and DeFi and TradFi, you know what the common thread is besides power, being bounded by power, is that people with domain expertise actually have an advantage-
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yes, that's right.... >> on both fronts, you mentioned the use case. That seems to be the common thread. If you have a domain skill and see business logic, the technology's coming up to the table. You don't have to go build it and be client zero.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Because you almost have all the technology we need right now. To your point, you just have to understand what the business methods are or where you're trying to take that business or what your customer is, what's the underserved customer, and then technology's already there for you. Yeah.>> Maja, great to have you on. A final point for you, give a plug for what you're working on, what are you excited about, what's your to-do list, what's your goals? What's going on with you?
Maja Vujinovic
>> Yeah, thank you for having me again. I believe that the next stage of evolution, you brought it up earlier, I think it's absolutely correct, is we've gone from ICOs into kind of DeFi now into treasury vehicles and who knows what this is going to evolve into. We've certainly built an incredible team. Our team comes from TradFi, these are guys who understand merchant banking, operating businesses, technology, reinsurance, everything that could potentially be tokenized. And there are many of these vehicles out there. I would say there is a space for a couple of really strong teams and why would you put all your eggs in one basket when you can invest in teams that have been around for so many years and understand this and are not going away. This is extremely important for us. We see Ethereum as the backbone of the new tokenized Wall Street, and I see it as a backbone of a lot of stablecoins, and so we are really excited about that.>> Tokenizing Wall Street, the trailblazers are here, you're a trailblazer. Thanks so much for coming on.
Maja Vujinovic
>> Thank you so much.>> The Crypto Trailblazer is here on theCUBE. We're doing our part to blaze the trail and share the data and information with you. Again, so many big opportunities as the world shifts into tokenization, real world assets, we already have a physical digital convergence. It's getting coded up and the technology's available for entrepreneurs and also a big business. So we'll keep covering it. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.
