From Blockchain to Inclusion: The Next Frontier in Global Finance

We spent a lot of time looking at issues around digital assets, around regulation of digital assets, around the bringing together of digital assets and traditional finance around the world as a result of these emerging new regulatory frameworks. And the idea that this is going to, over the next five years, fundamentally transform not only the digital asset industry into a regulated portion of financial services, but also transform the traditional financial industry as digital assets and their underlying distributed ledger technologies and blockchain systems are implemented into financial services. But what are the implications from the standpoint of financial inclusion? And in many ways, I think this has actually been one of the greatest successes in the digital assets ecosystem. In other words, from the humble beginnings of the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, the launch of that first Bitcoin blockchain in 2009, over the next 15, 16 years, we have seen the development of a series of different blockchain platforms in particular, around systems like Bitcoin, around Ethereum, around a range of others, and around ancillary linkages across those systems, like stablecoins, systems for payment and store of value across not only individual platforms, but across different platforms and linking not only with the digital asset world, but also with the world of traditional finance. And if one thinks about this from the standpoint of financial inclusion, one of the most interesting aspects has been the building up of this infrastructure, which connects several billion people around the world. This is really in many ways, a parallel financial infrastructure to the traditional financial infrastructure that we've built up over the past several centuries, and the fact that we've built this digital asset ecosystem in just over 15 years, and that it successfully connects billions of people around the world, many in developing countries is really quite remarkable. And when we think about that from the standpoint of financial inclusion access, that's really important. But in many ways, the question looking forward is what are the opportunities to use this infrastructure to increase the quality and availability of financial products and services to these populations, which have often been underserved around the world, but whom are often more comfortable using the digital assets ecosystem than they are with traditional financial services. And for me, this is one of the most exciting opportunities of bringing together digital assets, traditional finance via regulation and aspects of financial inclusion. We have an infrastructure that is there at low costs that can be used with some thought and effort to deliver quite varied and useful products and services to populations around the world. And for me, from the standpoint of thinking about the opportunities of digital assets and financial inclusion, this is one of our most exciting opportunities for the rest of the decade.