Avalanche is Bringing Institutional Adoption...Here's How

GoGoPool, Landslide + Savvy Defi talked to Morgan Krupetsky Avalabs Director of BD about how Avalanche is bringing institutional adoption to web3.

Social Links:
GoGoPool Twitter: https://twitter.com/GoGoPool_
Savvy DeFi Twitter: https://twitter.com/SavvyDeFi
Landslide Twitter: https://twitter.com/CosmosAVAX

Transcript

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I would like to welcome everyone to the vacs ecosystem space. I am one of your lovely hosts. My name is Brey. I work for Gogo Pool. We're a permissionless liquid staking protocol with a specific vision of helping to expand the subnet economy. I am joined here by my lovely co-host. One of them is Alex Lumley with Savvy D five. They do non liquidating lines of credit and just launch, baby say, what's up my friend? Hello. Hello. Good to see. Good to talk to you guys again. Hey, it's good to have you on my friend. I'm also joined by my other lovely co-host. We have Nathan of Landslide and they are bringing the cosmos to Avalanche. Sonet say, what's up my friend? Good day. Good day. Good day. Good day to you, sir. And last, but of course not least, we have the boss of all bosses, the bigwig. When she comes in, you have to acknowledge the presence of the boss. In the room, we have Morgan Cru, pesky of Ava Labs, director of bd say, what's up my friend? I mean, I feel like I can only disappoint after that introduction. Thanks for having me guys. That's really great to be here. No, no, no. Disappointing. I have to change my LinkedIn profile to reflect that boss of all bosses exactly. Um, and today, uh, so we're gonna be interviewing Morgan here today. We're gonna first wanna start off with that. We're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about her crypto story, her role with Avalara. Oh yeah. And, and the trad fi story. We got, we gotta get bull flags on this. Uh oh. We don't have enough time for the trad five stories. We, we will stick, we'll stick to the crypto. Too many. Yeah, we will stick to the crypto end of things so that we can keep everything on time and on schedule and whatnot. But also, we are for sure gonna talk about her role at AVA Labs. We gotta talk about a little bit about Ava Cloud. We're gonna talk about Evergreen subnets, and of course we gotta talk about SK planet. I think they brought like 70,000 users or something to avalanche already, which is absolutely insane. Um, after that we'll open thing, we'll open things up. Close the remarks, my friends. So I guess just to kick everything off, Morgan, can you give us your crypto story? How did you land here on Avalanche? Sure. Um, so I've been at Aval Labs. Um, by the way, can you guys hear me okay? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Okay, cool. I decided to take this call outside, which is like very unusual for me, but it's, it's, it's nice. I think I'm gonna try do this more often. Um, so I, I got to Val Labs, um, a little over a year ago. Uh, I started on May 2nd and the crypto world blew up for the first time on May 7th. So my timing was impeccable. Um, but I knew that I wanted to get into the, the digital asset space, like professionally. Um, maybe like seven months, eight months before then, um, I. You know, like somebody mentioned, I have a background in trad fi. I worked at kind of a bulge bracket bank for 12 years, uh, before totally pivoting into this space. Um, and most of that time was spent on the FX and macro derivatives desk, um, at that bank. So, in a couple ways, I'd say, you know, was around kind of during 2017, during the ICO boom when we had clients like. Mike Novogratz pounding the table on Bitcoin, um, on CNBC, and, uh, and at the same time almost felt like, you know, crypto traded and does trade a little bit like what I imagine FX traded like, like 30 years ago. Uh, in a variety of different ways. One of which is obviously the, the volatility and kind of the ways, uh, and things that kind of drive, drive crypto markets. Um, but what really kind of got me personally excited, and maybe this is even just like. So the less, the less sexier, exciting parts of it was being at a, being at a bank and frankly, whether it's a bank or a big company, like saw the, uh, implications of what happens when, you know, systems are built in siloed manners and when things don't really talk to each other and where there is like a lot of manual reconciliation going on and what that looks like from a. Time and resource and, and people perspective. And so when I, you know, got more kind of into this space and started learning about like the, the capabilities of, of smart contracts and potentially what that could mean from, uh, the perspective of like upgrading financial services infrastructure. You know, I felt like definitely where I was, we should be focusing on it more. Um, but then as, as I got more into this space, I was like, I kind of just wanna do this. Full-time and almost like pull the institutions along as opposed to try to push from within. Um, so I knew I wanted to kind of get into this space professionally and really took like six months to like, talk to anyone and everyone in the space to really get a sense of like what was out there and how to, you know, what are the options in terms of how to get involved. Um, a lot of people, fortunately or unfortunately from trad fi went into cfi, um, because a lot of those CFI institutions were frankly like mirroring a lot of the sales and trading constructs. Of trad Fi, but you know, with just a different underlying asset class. And for me, I just like decidedly didn't necessarily wanna do that cause I felt like been there, done that. And for a variety of reasons really got pulled into, um, onto the BD side of things where from our standpoint, we work very much with partners on more medium to long term, like strategic outcomes, mutually aligned incentives. Um, and things that are, um, you know, mo more strategic and kind of long term in nature. Um, how I found Avalanche, uh, is actually through a former colleague, um, and ran into him randomly in, um, I think in like sometime in like late 2021 or no, late 2022 and started learn like that's like, that was my first foray into like the platform. And then from there I just like kind of dove in. I listened to more podcasts with Luigi and John Naja than I ever cared to admit. Um, and really kind of got into to the tech side of things. And then as I met more and more people from like Aval Labs and the Avalanche community for me, like, you know, where, where part of why like I chose, I chose this place is because just like the culture's awesome and the community's awesome, and that's something that's really important for me. Um, and so between all those things, um, you know, found, found this role which kind of married, uh, some of what I was doing in trad fire with just a completely new learning experience. I feel like I'm literally drinking out of a fire hose that's on fire, but it's been, it's been an awesome experience. Um, and, and yeah, that was kind of, kind of, uh, my journey. First off, I really appreciate you for talking about your journey, and it really does lend a lot of credence to kind of having those, you know, conversations, um, outside of the, the crypto bubble with let's say, um, people who are n necessarily not as privy to crypto as you. Um, And I, I really thought that was an ex excellent point there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you don't, you, you don't know what that person can bring to the crypto industry just by talking to them. Totally. I mean, the other thing is like, this isn't just one industry. It's like so many different industries. And I meet people, I mean, I'm sure we all meet people all the time that have like so many different types of like, varied backgrounds. Um, that, you know, I think a to your point, like they can, they can bring a lot of like. Expertise and frankly like practical like knowledge that a lot of us in the industry, we just like get in. Not only do we get into our rabbit hole, we get into like our rabbit hole of rabbit holes and like stop seeing the forest for the trees. And I think there's a lot of value in like a taking a step back and just talking about things in ways that just make this world more accessible to. You know, non crypto natives and frankly, that's like what we wanna get to, right, is just bring, you know, more than just like the 10 users of crypto into, into this world. And so you really need people, whether it's in Tri Fi or in government or in on the consumer, like whatever it is to really kind of come into this space and like tow the line in both worlds and, and like handhold some of our partners through that, through that journey, which we can kind of talk about in more detail. But, You know, obviously a lot of the information from, from like a learning curve perspective is out there, whether it's Twitter or, or in other forums. And that was like a lot like between that and podcasts and just talking to people where like a lot of how I kind of got up, I don't, I don't even, I wouldn't even say I'm off the curve, like I've learned a, a ton, but there's always like, the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. Um, but I actually found everyone was like super open to, to chatting with me, to connecting me with other people. And so, Like, while crypto Twitter can be a dark place, there's definitely, you know, generally my experience with the industry has been really positive in terms of, um, just like meeting different, different people and different types of people. You, you said like a, you said a bar there. I just have to point it out really quick. The more you learn, the more you don't know. I think that it's like a excellent summation of like my journey as well in the crypto industry. I just, I kind of started off as, you know, a guy who kind of learned about the kind of investment, more so opportunity of crypto. Not even nec necessarily the technological side, but as I started to kind of research projects more, then I got introduced to the technological side, then, Came onto Gogo Pool, now I'm in like the super, super deep infrastructure side of things, and that's a whole other rabbit hole within itself. Totally. So, totally. I just, everyone has their own, has their own like path and journey and it's like you can't assume that others know, you know, what you're working on or, or how it connects to what they're working on. Exactly. Exactly. So I actually, I actually have a question for you too. Like, you know, how can we make. It a little bit easier for like, let's say like a web two user, or we can even go into how, how can we make it easier for like, let's say institutions that you work with? Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. And I think like, part of the answer to that, frankly is like Aava Cloud, um, is in, we'll, we'll talk about that and what that looks like, but I think, I mean, and, and I see so is on this call, so is my, so is my, um, My growth marketing partner on the institutional side, and we do a ton. I mean, part of like our job, like day to day is a lot of like education, um, a lot of kind of deep dives into avalanche versus it's peers. And, and not only that, like from like a technical standpoint, but it's more of like, The so what, like, okay, you say this is this technical differentiator, but like, what is the, so what, what is the implication of that? What does that mean for you? So a lot of it's like explaining not just what something is in, in, in an attempted sim more simplistic and accessible way, but it's really kind of tying back the discussion to why, like, why this is important or why this, why, why the partner, whether it's a financial institution or somebody else should care. Um, and so it's just. You know, not really, again, like, not really taking things for granted in terms of, um, assuming that everyone has the same level of knowledge that you do, um, and kind of making it, um, accessible and understandable based on like what they're working on and what's, and how it resonates with them. Um, so just a lot of, like, a lot of education, a lot of handholding, a lot of like one-on-one discussions. And frankly, even the way that we talk about it, like on Twitter or LinkedIn or, or whatever it is, Um, I think we can all take a lesson in like taking a step back and just like being like, okay, like what does actually mean? Like, what are we actually trying to say? And, and that's something that I think we ch me and so challenge ourselves to doing a lot in terms of our like, blog posts and, and thought leadership pieces as well. Could, could you talk about, um, Could you talk a little bit about like, what your pitch looks like to some of these financial institutions or some of these, uh, kind of larger businesses? Yeah. Like what is, what is the so what of why they should be on, on Avalanche? On like, working with Ava Labs? Yeah. That's, or, or block or in blockchain general, considering how, it's funny you say that because actually somebody asked, asked me that the other day. They're like, how do you convince banks to use blockchain? And I'm like, I don't because like, And, and I say that kind of like half jokingly, meaning in terms of like the whole universe and landscape. And so we also, like, we also did like go through this like a hundred percent, but basically in my, in my role, um, I speak with like the whole spectrum of financial services institutions. So everyone from banks to asset managers, hedge funds, private equity firms, venture funds, and then the more kind of crypto native liquid token funds. Uh, and so in some way you guys can kind of see how. My world overlaps with the defi world, and I think that's actually partially of why we've been successful in this space, because we don't look at these things as mutually exclusive things. But all that's to say is like even within the groupings of banks and asset managers and so on and so forth, there's, and you can like see this in, in the news, like it's, it's public. You can see that even within those groupings, there's definitely some institutions that are being more progressive. So, Um, and dedicating resources to these initiatives and have senior management buy-in, um, than others. And so all that's to say is like in terms of convincing institutions to use blockchain, like right now, I feel like there's much lower hanging fruit to kind of go after and partner with from like a use case standpoint than sitting there convincing someone to use blockchain because that's just like an uphill battle that's like not necessary at this point. So in terms of focusing on those that you know are already. Have, have like, have placed some kind of strategic importance to these initiatives, have dedicated resources. Um, a lot of it's been, again, education and awareness. Um, and then in terms of like the value prop of Avalanche versus others, I'd say a few things. Um, at a high level, we really, um, kind of highlight the tech and, and our team. Um, so. Because I think there's like a lot of value add in both of those things from a tech standpoint, generally speaking, like when we have a seat at the table with our partners, like our tech wins out 99% of the time. It's just a matter of like having that opportunity to have that seat at the table and kind of go into some of these deep dives with institutions to really kind of show them like a, we know we know our shit to use the technical term. Um, and B like. To really kind of sit there point by point and kind of go through some of their considerations and, and be able to like intelligently speak to all of those things. But from a tech standpoint, like generally speaking, actually most, most institutions that I speak with believe that the future or target state of blockchain generally is somehow using or benefiting from public blockchain infrastructure and development. Um, which is like, which is like a nice. Place that we've come to. Whereas before, historically a lot of them have just thought like, oh, I'm just building on enterprise chains and like, that's it. That said, a lot of them historically have built on enterprise chains. So think about things like, uh, quorum, R three quarter, uh, Hyperledger. And so yeah, but that's so, so they've checked into rehab because those have just been dead end grave end projects. Well, so I mean, I will say like there are certain projects out there, um, that. Are being used on enterprise chains, but for a variety of reasons. Some of those partners like are exploring other possibilities because of the lack of interoperability and other things that, you know, have come, you know, that, that have led them to the conclusion, oh, like we need to somehow be able to benefit from like interoperability and composability of these, of these networks. And so that's like precisely where subnets come into the picture. Subnets and evergreen subnets in particular. Literally provide institutions with the best of both public blockchain infrastructure development like the all the defi, innovation, interoperability, and composability, while still enabling these institutions to own their own and customizer blockchain environment and to end and control for and manage a lot of the kind of internal considerations and industry-wide requirements that have historically. Led them to launching on enterprise chains in the first place. So it's a way to like position subnets as a way to like, um, be almost like a stepping stone to this world of like public permission, which may or may not resonate with them, but allows them to like, again, benefit from the best of both. And, and lastly like, um, uh, benefit from and see and see the possibilities inherent in. Interoperability where you may have two institutions that totally, you know, are, are, have controlled their respective subnets, but because of AWM now lets you, you know, facilitate whether it's like, um, asset transfer, trade confirmations, whatever type of messaging between them in a way that, um, you know, frankly, obviously doesn't rely on third party bridges in a way that they didn't have the ability to facilitate before. So from a tech standpoint, that's really kind of. Like the, the way that we talk to a lot of institutions, um, about subnets and about the, the network writ large. Um, and then from a team standpoint, I mean, and I won't like belabor this point, but, and part of the reason why I joined Ava Labs is like the team is this amazing mix of academics, engineers, and business people. And between me and Luigi, uh, you guys know, and John Wu and Lydia Chu and others on our team. We have a lot of collective years of tradify experience, both buy side and sell side, where, you know, we're literally, we we're, we're building trusted advisor relationships with a lot of these institutions. Like literally handholding them across, along their journey, helping them through their like internal governance processes, stakeholder discussions, um, blockers that might come up on their side. Like, we literally go on these meetings and they're like, this came up. Like, how do we address this? Or how do we. How do we position this? And so we, you know, I think, I think that from like a team standpoint just demonstrates a level of like professionalism that, you know, sadly stands out to the upside in this industry so far. So, oh wait, Nathan, you on pause. What were you about to say? Well, I, I also wanted to acknowledge the immense success that you guys have already had in building, uh, those bridges to those institutions. Right? You don't bring Cumberland on unless you have your compliance side issues, right. Morgan, you spent, you spent a long time at Citi dealing with compliance. Oh my gosh. Do, do you wanna share? Do, do you, do you wanna, uh, do you wanna share, uh, a compliance side, uh, uh, uh, uh, talking points that curiously coming from, um, you know, crypto, Twitter, avalanche sometimes gets labeled as the KYC chain. Can you tell us why that's important? No. No, I'm kidding. Great, great answer. Well, it's funny. Nope, like, so my last, um, my last role at. The bank that I was at, I was, I was actually chief of staff to the company's chief compliance officer. And uh, you know, if you ask me like, does compliance as a subject matter, do like laws, rules and regulations, like, am I passionate about that? Like, no, but it's obviously important and um, you know, as whether you're a bank or whatever company that you're in, whatever regulated industry you're in, like. Just because you put something on chain doesn't mean you can obfuscate those laws, rules and regulations. And so, um, it's a matter of just frankly being practical and understanding whether you're a bank or a government agency or whatever company you are. Like, you know, the rules or the rules as it relates to just like your industry. And so it's like how do we work with you to like express or manifest those rules on chain? In a way that still lets you kind of, um, operationalize your use case, but also in a way that like in some instances, whether it's like KYC and onboarding, maybe, maybe even like, makes the user experience more pleasant, um, because it might be less like manually intensive, um, or allows you to kind of verify certain credentials without giving away certain p i I. Um, so there's ways to make the process potentially better through, through blockchain. But again, just because like you put something on chain isn't, you can like obfuscate those, those laws. That said, I mean, down the line, I'm sure there will always be a place for like permission, public permissionless, defi. Um, and, and that's fine, but I just, I don't think, at least as it exists right now, like that's not where ins like regulated institutions will play. So there's a lot of different ways that we can kind of go on this conversation and that's what I actually really like about having you on Morgan. Um, so you mentioned Ava Cloud and Evergreen and Evergreen Subnets. I am very, very interested in AVA Cloud very specifically. Can you talk a little bit about like what Ava Cloud is and how that will affect, um, Avex? Yeah, so maybe we'll refrain from commenting on the token itself, but from like an avalanche growth perspective. Um, so AVA Cloud was a, was announced, um, a few weeks ago, and, you know, at a high level it's really kind of, you can think about it as like a no no. Code web three launchpad for deploying subnets. Um, and the idea is really, frankly, if it's a financial institution or a non-financial, like corporate or a gaming company or whoever it is, the idea is, you know, we from an Val Lab standpoint want to enable different types of companies to be able to deploy their use case on avalanche without themselves necessarily having to worry about fully creating or managing. Their subnet environment or their custom blockchain environment. Um, and so the AVA Cloud offering, you could think about as like a set of infrastructure and tooling, things like, um, you know, like RPC endpoints, block explorers, uh, uh, you know, the, the, the subnet customization and pre compiles themselves, um, you know, wallet provisioning, managed validator set, uh, cer like basically the infrastructure that like collectively makes up a custom. A custom subnet, um, in a way that, you know, again, like let's the deployer of the company focus on the application and lets, you know, others kind of worry about the actual hosting or managing or creation of the, of the blockchain environment. Um, if you, and if you even just like take a step back if you like, recall, you know, and I know that this group knows it, but like Avalanche as a network is and will continue to be a blockchain of blockchains. Um, or network of networks or subnet. Subnets of subnets, or however you wanna call it. Right. The vision has always been for the network to scale horizontally by adding more block space, because the view was, you know, from a mass adoption perspective, um, you know, it's, it's kind of crazy to think that like, I don't know, like an N F T drop from like, Pokemon or Taylor Swift is going to impede on a multi-billion dollar loan transaction between two institutions. So like, the view has always been through like the app chain thesis, which frankly, I think thematically is starting to, to gain greater awareness and popularity. Um, and so Aava Cloud is really that kind of solution where, you know, it, it allows for the creation and proliferation of, of subnets, of custom subnets. Um, without necessarily the, the whoever it is that's building to have to worry about all of that underlying stuff, because a lot of them don't have huge, like blockchain specific dev teams. Um, and frankly, like they don't, they don't necessarily need to. And the idea down the line is for it to be super easy where you just like go onto a website and just like click 10 buttons based on what you want customized and kind of go from there. But for now, a lot of it, a lot of our discussions and relationships have been much more kind of. High touch, high value add, because I think that's just like where we're, where we're at from like, um, like a blockchain proliferation perspective. Um, and then in terms of like avalanche writ large, I mean, again, like the, the, I'm excited to really kind of see the growth in the proliferation of, of different types of subnets, of subnets built on different VMs, um, to really demonstrate like the capabilities of. The things that we've always been talking about it, but it's really like to, to kind of walk the walk, um, as well as the ability to demonstrate like permissionless or elastic subnets. Um, and obviously the capabilities that come with, um, avalanche warp messaging. See, I, I love talking to avalanche folks because, you know, tech technologically speaking. You guys just absolutely crush it and always are just building something like, like Epic. You know, like when you come out with subnets, which is obviously the solution to scaling web three, and then you don't stop there. You come out with um, a WM and then you don't stop. Well, you go with Elastic Subnets, then a W M, then Hyper sdk, and now we're at Evergreen Subnets in Ava Cloud. Um, so it's, it's just great, you know, talking to you folks over ever labs cuz you guys are just, you know, huge builders and I just absolutely love it. You are too kind. Hey, I try to be kind to folks, you know, but hey, you know, ever pat on the back so I'm gonna on the back. What's up Alex? Yeah. So Morgan, I have a, first of all, like this, this has been super interesting. I find myself just kinda like lost in thought listening to it. So, so I appreciate it and thought you just gonna say lost. So also, also that, um, uh, but, but, but secondly, like, uh, so, so savvy. I mean, just, just, just to be clear, savvy launched on another chain, um, for a variety of reasons, but like on the team, we are incredibly, like long on, on, on avalanche overall that the tech is, you know, I didn't say this, but it's, it's the best in. In, in like on chain period. Um, I'm super bullish on like what you guys are doing in terms of like BD and, and getting like long term, like everyone jokes about you guys being the trad fi or the government type, um, chain. But like, I think that's really good for, um, blockchain overall. Now, how, how does, how does Avalanche kind of bridge the gap of getting, like bring in tradify, bring in governments, bring it, having the best tech and continuing to grow the community? Like, um, like, like these sort of avac ecosystem, Chas, is it, is it depending on things like landslide, is it depending on, um, continuing to bring in more traffic? Like how do you kind of bridge those things together? Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. So I would just say like, my, my view is like, I think that at the end of the day, it just frankly just comes down to like tangible use cases. That resonate with whether you wanna call it like traditional or, uh, web two users, whether it's on the retail side or on the institutional side. Um, that frankly at the end of the day, really like abstract and fu skate away like the blockchain and web three components. Um, and you know, from an institutional standpoint, I'm definitely focused on working with our institutional partners to, to do that in a way that, again, like we don't use the word crypto and like the, the, in my, in my case, like the blockchain and tokenization part is merely like a means by which you execute on something like in, in which you execute on solving a pain point or, um, Uh, operationalizing like a business opportunity or strategic imperative or whatever that is, as opposed to kind of reverse engineering it and going the other way around. And a lot of, a lot of just protocols or projects that we see, um, as a, as a mass generalization, um, you know, they'll look at it as like, how do we. Like soak up the liquidity that's on chain already. And, and that's fine as like an initial kind of go-to market. But I'm always like, I always ask them, and I always challenge them as like, okay, well how, like what is a plan? What is the distribution, what is the outreach? What does the go-to market that brings the other, like people on i e those that like dwarf the the Curto community, right? Like what is that thing? That, um, is gonna make like non non-current crypto users or web three users, uh, enter this space. That's like a lot of what, what we spend our time on, on the institutional side and what you'll see much more so, um, kind of coming outta the enterprise side as well. Um, and that's really kind of, I think the approach that we're taking is like how, like how do we work with these partners to get, you know, web two into web three? Frankly, sometimes even without even knowing it or without even caring. Yeah, I think it's, um, so I think I, I really, really need to hear, oh, my bad. What you about to say, Alex? Okay, my bad. Sorry. Uh, could, could you hear me? Um, I, oh, sorry. Um, Morgan, I just wanna say thank you. Thank, thank you for the answer. And I, and I guess to, to go off that like, as like forward looking protocols, like ourselves, um, how, uh, like, like ourselves who, like, you're obviously expanding the market, but what should we be thinking about now, um, for ourselves to be able to be ready for all those people who, who are, who are coming into Avalanche or to, to Ava Labs overall? Yeah. I mean, I think like, um, That's a good question. So I think just maybe a couple things like, um, those, those protocols that are focused, and it's tough for a variety of reasons, but just on, on crypto tokens, um, you know, I think it just ama, like what I've observed from like a defi standpoint is like the target audience or like the target user is someone who is, um, maybe different or, or a subset. Of like a retail, um, or a retail. Uh, and by retail I just mean like individual, um, investor base. So I think something of like what you guys are doing and others, like, you know, we spent a lot of the past couple of years building, uh, or, or facilitating the building of like the, you know, defi primitives on chain. And now, um, I know Luigi and team and you guys and others are really focused on really kind of taking things to the next level. Um, and building either on top of those perimeters or really bringing like new and novel products to market, which I think is always exciting for a variety of reasons. Not just from like, uh, bringing in new users perspective, but also frankly like there's some of our institutional partners that are now really starting to explore using the different Defi applications themselves, um, and really kind of forging those relationships to really kind of explore how they can be fit for purpose for their own purposes. So, I mean, that's frankly like why we created Spruce, which, which we could, which I dunno if it's on the agenda, but we could talk about that too. Um, and then those that are focused on bringing whatever you wanna call it, um, off-chain assets on chain or tokenizing off-chain assets or real world assets. Like the, the key there in my mind is really kind of, um, plugging into traditional distribution channels and. Uh, like traditional, um, like traditional like investors as opposed to, um, trying to bring those investors into web three. It's almost like bringing the web three offering to web two, if that makes sense. Um, where, you know, if you are, and I'm just making this up, like if you're like a user of like a Schwab app, right? And you see, you know, public, public equity and credit, or public equity and fixed income as options to trade, like. Oh, cool. Now you can see private equity, uh, and it just happens to be tokenized, but for you, it's just like another kind of asset offering, uh, as an individual or credited investor. So it, it's a, I think it's just a matter of, um, in that sense, like kind of meeting people where they're at as opposed to trying to like, um, you know, have them like Traverse, traverse, this whole field of like trying to figure out how to get into web three. I hope that answers your question. I actually like really, really love that approach, um, of just kind of a, like, you, you know, this much and then kind of. You know, educating them on the parts that they need to know, but then also having, um, you know, like Evergreen Subnets and AVA Cloud exist as well to where you can make it, you know, a lot easier for yourself as a non-native, uh, web three developer. Um, can you actually go into Spruce a little bit? Um, it's just not something I'm privy to. So can you, I'm actually curious. Super curious. Yeah, so we, I actually didn't, um, I just realized I didn't like describe Evergreen subnets, but. Um, and, and maybe just like taking a step back before we get into Spruce. So like in our conversations with financial institutions, we realized that, um, by the time we got into the discussion around like, this is probably like the four things that you wanna implement, um, at a subnet level in your, you know, specific subnet environment. It was like five conversations in, and it was pretty common in terms of like the. Uh, considerations. And so what we did was we created evergreen subnets as like a productization, if you will, of, um, subnets for institutional blockchain deployments. And so at, from like an outta the box standpoint, um, you know, you can consider evergreen subnets as E V M based, which most institutions want to build on so far these days. Um, Two is chain level per chain level, user permissioning. Um, what, and, and based on whatever that is, whether it's K Y C K Y B or, or any other like gating factor, if it's just on an email, you could do that. Um, as well as a permissioned validator set, um, as well as a custom gas token. Most, uh, financial institutions, but especially banks these days, can't hold crypto. And so, You know, the, the, the capability of subnets to have custom gas tokens, whether it is a bank issued stablecoin, whether it is a valueless token to just power the transactions on the network. Like these are the four kind of key things that we found were important to institutions and, uh, created this as like an out of the box offering for these institutions. And obviously you can like, tweak different things up or down from there, but that's kind of what we, what we started with. So now we've come to a point, which is really exciting for me. Well, we have different institutions coming to us being like, we want to build this on an evergreen subnet, or we want our own evergreen subnet, or whatever It's, which is, you know, I think really exciting for us. Um, spruce is an example of an evergreen subnet, meaning from a technical standpoint, it has all of these things embedded into the subnet, right? So there's embedded kyc, all the institutions that are. That, that are, um, either using, or those projects that are deployed on the subnet have gone through this onboarding process. They have non-transferable tokens issued to their wallets. That wallet address is whitelisted, uh, the pre compiled level at the subnet, at the chain level, whatever you wanna call it. Um, and then there is a permission validator set. Um, there's a custom gas token and then there is a variety of, um, Different blue chip applications that have launched on it, you know, more to come. Um, but it's really an environment that was created as a test net very purposefully because we wanted to create this controlled environment for major traditional financial services institutions, buy side and sell side to come in and like a test out what it, what it feels like or what it means to like transact on chain. Um, And, and also an ability for them to, to use some of these blue chip defi applications in this, again, this like controlled environment where first of all, like the applications have an, have an ability to kind of hear directly, directly from the institutions of like, you know, you should tweak this. This is not fit for purpose. We like this. And I think that feedback for them has proven really valuable. Um, and then in addition, allows the institutions to kind of test out using these defi applications or, or, um, Uh, enabling composability between them to really test out like, Hey, can we use some of these things to, to upgrade, like legacy financial services, infrastructure and institutional workflows, um, as it relates to traditional assets. So think about things like FX trades, um, interest rate swaps, like things like that where, you know, there's a very. A traditional way of doing things and it's like, can we maybe use these apps to like, up to like upgrade what that workflow could be and potentially save time, reduce potentially unnecessary intermediaries, uh, facilitate atomic settlements. So really like starting to, you know, talk the talk in like actually operationalizing some of this stuff. Got you. And. So from what I'm hearing is, it sounds like it's kinda like a, almost like a play environment for institutions who kind of want to get their toes wet in defi. Yeah. I iactually I should have said, walk the, walk on, talk, the talk. I'm, I'm really bad with idioms, but yeah. That, that, so a, that's exactly it. And then the other thing I would just maybe add is like, the environment's meant to be live for, frankly, as long as institutions show interest in joining and like testing out different things, we really didn't wanna be prescriptive in saying like, You have to come in and do X, Y, and Z. So different institutions are coming in at different levels of their journey, and you'll, you'll see and hear of others kind of joining as well. Um, and, and the idea is really it. Yeah, it's definitely meant to be a play environment, but it's really meant to also like, you know, determine if certain findings are, you know, what those findings are like, and frankly, some of the findings might be like, oh, this doesn't work. And like we can explore that and why that's the case. But also really to test out, um, things at whether it's applications or use cases within the environment. And then once an institution is ready to operationalize something onto, like a main net deployment to spin out and really kind of launch their own evergreen subnet in a, in a main net iteration of, of, you know, that particular use case. So I don't think, I definitely don't think it's a testnet for the sake of being a testnet, but it's meant to be like a sandbox environment from which. You know, different institutional use cases will start spinning out into main net iterations of whatever that thing is. Got you, got you. Wow. That's, that's sounds really exciting. I, I can't wait to see kind of what the future holds as they continue to continue to like, play around on there and kind of adopt more defi centric applications. Me too. Nathan, I saw you on pause. What's up? Yeah, I'm curious, Morgan, what, um, what is the mandate. That you're seeing to interact with like public bridges, like I b, C reason I'm being, reason we're building like the e the the integration with Avalanche to I B C in general. So that means e, v, M and Cosm. Wasm. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think in general what we've seen, and I mean I know a lot of, a lot of different companies and projects, um, are. Focusing on like the interoperability question. Not even like, you know, to your point, not just within Avalanche, but just across networks at large. And I think, you know, well like TBD in terms of like what wins out or which one's gonna gain the most adoption. But I think from an institutional standpoint, um, you know, most of those institutions that have been at this for. A while, and by that I mean like, you know, five years or so, or or four or whatever, like they realize that we're going to need interchange, uh, interoperability because A, they don't necessarily know which network or networks are gonna win out. B generally most of them do subscribe to a multi chain future. Um, and see like for them especially, Especially, well actually either bank like banks, I, um, being beholden to their customers and then in turn, like buy side beholden to their like investors. They're gonna have different preferences in terms of, um, you know, which applications and therefore, which chains they'll, they'll inherently be interacting with. So I think like the concept of interoperability is, is really top of mind for a lot of them. And from a institutional standpoint, a lot of them are starting to. Test the waters in, in the way that they can or can be comfortable with it, with these, um, other kind of enter, um, like public chains or public infrastructure. And so I think for them, um, kind of testing out the capabilities of some of these, like in inherent uh, uh, bridging our messaging protocols is really appealing. For a variety of reasons, but one of which is it's, you don't need to kind of rely on an additional set or external set of trust assumptions, um, which has not, you know, voted well for, for in, in certain scenarios. So, um, I think it's like very top of mind for them. And I think right now they're just like exploring like, you know, what's out there and what's fit for purpose for them. Well, I, I guess in, in the context of of, of what Gogo Pool's building and, and, and, uh, general I b C infrastructure, um, these evergreen subnets, don't they, they can talk to avalanche main net and other subnets via warp messaging, but they probably won't because they don't have, uh, counterparty risk mandate. Is that right? I wouldn't say that they won't, like, without giving things away. Like, I guess my like short answer is I wouldn't necessarily assume that they won't. Um, I think that there's examples of use cases where it might be interesting to test out. Um, so for example, like if you. Have an institution that builds on its own evergreen subnet, but wants to pull in assets that were deployed on spruce or on another evergreen subnet. Um, that's totally possible. Um, there's other like use cases or iterations where two institutions have built on their own evergreen subnets but wanna trade with each other, um, through AWM and send assets to each other or trade confirms or whatever it is. And so those are like, You know, two examples or, or you know, clear use cases where they would be interested in doing that. Um, so I would just say like on that front, like standby, because I think this is something that a lot of them are, are exploring. Great. Thank you. All right, folks, we're we're coming up at the, at the hour mark here. I'm gonna open things up for closing remarks. Um, We're gonna start off with savvy Defi. Alex, you got anything that you would like to say to the people? Don't worry, Morgan. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna save you for last. I was like, who? Like, I need to stop talking. No one wants to listen to me talk for 50 minutes. Trying, trying to give you a little break. I'll, I'm not gonna lie. This, uh, this, I, I, I really appreciate this Morgan, cuz I think, um, I think, uh, having speak, speaking to people who are, have deep tra fi knowledge and also have the blockchain experience and are able to speak and communicate in the blockchain way is, is not as prevalent as, as you think. And it is, and like from, not coming from a tra fi background, but kind of being around it cuz of friends and everyone. It is, it is always interesting to me about how much tradify institutions, government, et cetera, are actually getting closer to, to, to adopting blockchain. And so I guess I, I. Thank you for the work that you're doing, but also I appreciate this conversation because the biggest thing I got out of it was your point about how you're not having to go and convince people to get on chain right now because there's so much kind of, um, lower hanging fruit. And I think that's a great way for people in defi to think about, get the current defi users and then we can expand to the next billion users and, but be ready for the, for, for when we need to get there. So, so, so thank you for that kind of, uh, drop of knowledge. Appreciate you for that, Alex. Next up. We got our friend, Nathan, you got any closing remarks? Yeah. Uh, based on the congressional testimony for, I guess last week, Congressman Al Green from Texas said, quote, I believe this industry ought to have diversity. So I just wanted to acknowledge, uh, the Ava Labs team for the diversity that they have on the team. Um, uh, uh, outside of that, i, I, I wanted to give a shout out to, um, Eric, who is here, Eric Forge of, uh, cavalry, and they're building some really interesting multis swap assets. That I, I'd love to see expand. Um, and, and Morgan, it's a pleasure. We, we'd love to have you back Anytime you want to talk institutional subnets, we are here for it. He did not lie my friend. He did not lie. Uh, Morgan, we love to have you on today. Definitely gonna open it up for you, you know, if you have any closing remarks to the people. To the people. Um, well, no, I appreciate you guys having me on. Um, maybe like one last thing that I would just note is coming from like a major financial services institution. I like, I came here and I was like, this is gonna be tough. Right. Like this is gonna be like a very long slog. And I came in and I came into a lot of my discussions and conversations with institutions with like no expectations cuz I'm, I consider myself like a realist. And all that to say is I've been very pleasantly surprised with, um, you know, despite the, to use a technical term shit show of the past year. Like I've been very pleasantly surprised with. Um, you know, finding institutional partners who like, quote unquote get it and who have continued to forge ahead and who have continued to build kind of throughout, throughout the past year and even before then, obviously. Um, so I've just, you know, I've been, I've been very pleasantly surprised and, and I'm really excited. Obviously the, all these things take a long time, but, I'm really excited kind of for what's to come this year, um, and, and beyond. And so appreciate you guys having me on to kind of gimme the platform to talk about some of those updates. Um, and obviously if anyone has, has any questions or everyone wants to talk about anything that we talked about today or, or just anything in general from an institutional standpoint, you guys obviously know where to find me. Again, appreciate you so much for coming on today, Morgan. It's been absolutely amazing. You, you shared some alpha with us. We talked about Ava Cloud. We talked about ever evergreen subnet. We talked about spruce. We even talked about compliance. Oh my gosh, that was doozy. But again, just just wanted to say thank you so, so much for coming on. Um, to the people out there, to the audience, my lovely, lovely audience would like to say again. Thank you folks so much for coming onto the pod. If you ju, I'm coming onto the pod, coming onto the space. Um, if you just kind of popped in, we are recording the space, so after I end the space, you'll be able to, um, go ahead and listen to it right on back. And I'll also be uploading it to all the major streaming platforms, Spotify, apple Podcasts, all that good stuff, um, a little bit later on in life. So make sure you check that out, make sure you're following all of our lovely. Co-host, that's Gogo Pool savvy, defi landslide. Just pop on our, just, you know, just a little quick tap with your finger on our logo. Hit follow. That's all it takes. And please, please, please, if you're not already, somehow make sure you are following the biggest boss. Morgan Cru Petsky as well. Go ahead and talk. Oh my gosh. I have to do it more time just going with it. I have to do it one more time before we got out. Um, but getting everyone out there. Thank y'all for coming. Um, we do this every week. Wednesdays at 3:00 PM e s t. You already know the vibes. Uh, what's my usual saying? You don't have to go home, but you gotta get up on outta here, y'all.