Bridging Wall Street and Silicon Valley: Insights from the Permissionless Conference

Clockworks permission list is taking place across the water in Brooklyn.

The conference is exploring what's next for digital assetsDI, Web 3, and more.

Now Web 3 is the next iteration of the internet, and big tech leaders are showing more and more interest in it.

Still, regulatory clarity and improved infrastructure are needed to drive institutional adoption even further.

Joining me live here at the exchange is Pranav Raul, who is the.

Of infrastructure at Atos Labs, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

This is great.

Well, first and foremost, tell me about what's been happening across the water from Manhattan and Brooklyn at the Permissionless event.

Permissionless is an amazing event.

It's one of a kind event where you see web3 developers and institutions coming together.

So we had presences from Citi, Ernst and Young, Oppenheimer, and all these amazing Web 3 developers.

So for us it was a perfect opportunity to reveal our new product, Shelby.

So tell us more about this Shelby.

So Shelby is the first cloud grade data layer for decentralized applications.

So if you think about in cloud, you can store, serve, and process data with very low latency and very high throughput.

This layer is completely missing in decentralized technology and Shelby aims to fill that gap.

We announced they had permissionless and we got tremendous positive response from everyone.

And since we are about to wrap up the first half of 2025, believe it or not, I do want to take a step back and look at the regulatory landscape here and what the expectations are moving forward into the second half, especially when it comes to the institutional side.

Yeah, sure.

So the regulatory guidance is a kind of a cycle of Um, proof point, acceptance and guidance, right?

And we already saw that play out with stable coins.

There are some very solid proof points, very good acceptance, and now there is guidance.

And now we see payments being the entry point into the rest of the financial ecosystem.

And we see more and more guidance coming out soon.

For example, we just saw that that crypto will be considered as an asset when you are thinking about your mortgage.

So that is that is great for retail holders, right?

So we are going to see more and more of that.

And in decentralized infrastructure we want to create equal proof points working with some big institutional partners to show that the infrastructure is actually great, is ready for the prime time, and then once we show the proof point acceptance, the guidance will follow.

Yeah, and Pranav, you highlighted what you expect to see in terms of the regulatory side as well as institutional side.

So what does all of this mean for the layperson out there and retail investors?

Yeah, so I want to kind of step back right with blockchain technologies.

I'm going to make a statement and then I'm going to explain what we see is that with blockchain technologies we have achieved we are on our way to achieving something equivalent to Wall Street and with shall be.

We are achieving something equivalent to Silicon Valley and we want to create the symbiotic relationship that we have already seen play out.

So let me explain.

So with blockchain technology, for example.

We have a very high speed, low latency high throughput blockchain, and we have mailed the digital currency and digital assets use cases.

So we have real world assets coming on chain.

We have stablecoins coming on chain.

We have about $1.2 billion market cap of stablecoins, right?

So from payments to trading, and we are on our way to becoming the most scalable global trading engine.

So that is an amazing value exchange loop that we have created and with Shelby, the new data layer, we are going to unlock the power of data and AI in decentralized world that will create the decentralized applications with amazing value and that will get listed back on this exchange, right?

So that is the Silicon Valley.

This is the Wall Street, and that's what we are creating as our high level vision.

Yeah, and that brings me to my next question.

So from an infrastructure perspective, what needs to be done?

Yes, so infrastructure perspective, we need first of all that is a myth that decentralized means slow and decentralized means expensive, and it shall be we are bursting both the myths, right?

It's fast, it's cost competitive, and it is very scalable.

On top of Shelby, we are going to also build a compute layer, and when you put data and compute, this is where the unlock happens.

I worked at Facebook creating their data infrastructure.

It was an exabyte scale infrastructure, and when you put data and compute together, we have seen the value unlock that has happened with the big tech companies, and our goal is to enable similar value unlock in decentralized economy.

Yeah, and you mentioned Facebook, and that is a familiar name across America.

It is a household name and especially for investors out there who might be investing in big tech.

So what else is happening in the bigger companies and also the smaller companies as well?

Yeah, I think look, the AI wave is taking over, right?

There is incredible new opportunities which are coming.

What we had not previously seen possible, it is becoming possible very, very rapidly, and it is a very exciting time for anyone in technology, big and small companies alike, and that's one of our goals.

It shall be.

What we are seeing is that in the AI world we have the generalized LLMs now they're being enhanced with very.

And domain data.

So Shelby, we are aiming for Shelby to become this host for domain specific data where small companies and big companies can host their data, feed the contexts to the LLMs, and bring the answers that the agentic AI revolution is looking for.

So I think that is the most exciting thing that's happening across the industry.

And finally, before I let you go, what are some trends that you're watching as we head into the second half of 2025 when it comes to your space?

Yeah, so there are two major trends.

One is that we are building.

The trading engine that is competitive to what is already out there, so there is a good push to build very high performance, very low latency trading engines and the trend I mentioned is that value creation that should happen and feed into the trading.

OK, great to have you here at the New York Stock Exchange.

Thank you so much for joining me this morning and thank you.

Thank you.