Building Interoperable Blockchain Ecosystems

We're clearly not building walled gardens, right?

We truly believe in the power of interoperability,

and we believe in an open ecosystem.

And what you're going to see,

and when Roy was talking about the challenges

of different financial institutions on different sides,

it may not be digital technology,

it may not be right front and center of what they're worried about,

but you're also seeing the world becoming a lot more interconnected in this space,

and we're moving away from vertical ecosystems into more network-driven organizations.

So yes, everybody wants to be the standard of the chain of choice.

We personally don't believe, and I rambled off the numbers that we're dealing with,

there's nothing out there that can handle the speed, the scalability that we need.

So we are working with the market,

and actually we've done a fair amount of work with BCG

and the two other large ICSDs in the marketplace to start to think through what standards we can put in place.

So I'm less concerned about how many chains we're operating on,

as long as we've got good interoperability standards, good data standards,

good risk standards, if you will, that we can overlay over that.

So that is what's driving, Mark, our multi-chain strategy.

Canton and Stellar and Beizu are among the first,

I promise you they will not be the last, and you'll see more,

but we have to do a lot of work behind the scenes to get comfortable.

Data chain, first of all, satisfies client requirements, so that's the first request.

The second one is liquidity, and then a lot of technical terms there.

So we are building the harmonization layer that sits on top of it

to ensure that you can move assets very easily. the various chains.

The most important challenge we have is every single chain treats data differently.

So what we're trying to do is harmonize that data.

Because think about this mark, we have to process corporate actions.

We process the dividends that everybody gets paid on, the interest payments and all that.

And if you've got an Apple stock that's trading on multiple chains,

there's a fair amount of work to harmonize that data so we can pay people what they're owed,

deposit it in their wallets in a timely and accurate manner.

So that's why we don't, it's not our job to pick winners and losers and we will not do that.

We will follow where our clients want to go.

There's clearly technical requirements and other things that we need to look at.

And that's how we will build the ecosystem. Maybe over time.

I mean, I can't tell you, I get an email a day

from somebody going, hey, we've just built the most amazing blockchain on the planet.

I get one of those a day, if not more.

And we will look at all of them.

And if there is something in there that would make the markets more safer, more scalable,

then by all means, we will engage.

So no wall gardens, no experimentation.

This is an open infrastructure. We're building shared infrastructure.

We want people to connect into it so we can avoid any fragmentation of liquidity,

any fragmentation of data, right?

Because everybody can tokenize.

And how do you know that if you started with a thousand shares of something, after all this iteration, you still have a thousand shares, right?

So you need a good control location is what we do.

You need to make sure the liquidity doesn't get fragmented.

And that's why the digital shares and the traditional shares share.

one Q-SIP and that was done on purpose by design and we,

listen, we will continue to work with FinTech, VicTech, it will take a village to get us to where we need to be.

So we're open to everybody and anybody that has a great idea.

We may not adopt it immediately, but we will work with people to make sure that we're operating towards the common good.