Money 2020 is taking place at a time when the Defi industry is enjoying a favorable regulatory environment here in the US.
I spoke to Bruno Carratori, who is the co-founder as well as COO of Hashteck, to hear more about this, take a look.
Welcome to Fintech TV.
I'm Remy Blair.
We're here at Money 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I'm joined by Bruno Carratori, who is the co-founder and CEO at Hat.
Bruno, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Absolutely, it's great to see you, Remy.
Well, here we are the 3rd day.
This event in Las Vegas, Nevada.
A lot has been happening, a lot of announcements and meetings.
But first, when it comes to the crypto market, there's been a lot of volatility in 2025.
So when it comes to diversification and allocation, what is your perspective right now?
So 2025 has certainly been a very volatile year Remy, for us we've been in this industry for almost 8 years now.
We see it as par for the course.
Crypto is a volatile environment, especially after all the flood of news that have been happening around crypto and the external circumstances too, right?
Uh, you know, the macro circumstances certainly affect crypto, the geopolitical uncertainties, uh, it's a characteristic of the assets class.
Uh, and in, in our, in our projections we think the volatility will continue to be there.
We think in the long run it's gonna go down as data has shown us for the last 10 years or so, but investors in crypto, they need to know that they need to deal with volatility and that's, that's a part of the system.
Yes, so tell the viewing audience about NCIQ and why now.
So NCIQ is an ETP that hashtags issued here in the US.
It is a crypto ETP that follows a diversified in this.
So as opposed to the ones that got launched earlier that follow just Bitcoin or Ether, NCIT seeks to follow the NCI, the Nasdaq crypto index, and the NCI is a benchmark that seeks to represent the entire market.
And we think that the moment's ripe for investors to not just consider crypto as an allocation but also to look into diversify allocations.
We are very fond of Bitcoin and ether individually, but in in our vision for the industry, we think that crypto is way larger than these two assets.
We think that.
As more use cases find their way into the public, we will see other, uh, crypto assets gaining in value and and index as the NCI and in product as the NCIQ is well poised to capture that upside and deliver returns to investors.
Yeah, I'm Bruno.
I'm sure you're having a lot of conversations with other organizations, other attendees here at Money 2020.
So what's been different this year compared to other years?
I gotta tell you that a striking thing at the conference that I'm reading is the convergence between crypto and AI, right?
This is a theme that's been that's been talked about, discussed for a long time, and I think interestingly these two technologies that have been maturing on their own path for the last 10 to 15 years.
Are now converging and cryptos finding real use cases in AI and we're seeing this across presentations that we attend.
I've been seeing this in conversations and AI is amazing but it presents problems.
There's a problem of, uh, you know, the proof of identity.
A problem of provenance of content there is the, the problem of AI agents being able to transact economically and we're now reading that crypto can offer solutions in all of this and I think it's an amazing thing here how crypto and AI are coming together to deliver even more value for applications for businesses, etc.
Yeah, and as you mentioned, it does seem as though every other panel, every other fireside chat focuses on artificial intelligence, but you mentioned use cases for crypto, so tell us about that.
And of course when it comes to AI, the potential is there and with challenges come opportunities.
So what are you looking forward to?
So, I'll, I'll start by saying.
That we, we envision crypto as a technology that has applications beyond what we can dream right now.
We think that in the future crypto networks will be underpinning marketplaces.
They will be enabling new types of monettizable media.
A lot of work needs to be done until these actually get devised and in use.
However, the last, I wanna say 1.5 or so have been pivotal in showing that in some specific things crypto has a real use case, notably stable coins, a really big thing.
Uh, tokenization of assets and it's interesting how all of this has applications beyond of AI but also within AI.
If you think about it, crypto tokens make value understood by machines, and this is what AI needs.
So as we see this trends coming along, we're incredibly excited.
And for viewers out there who may be wondering what does all of this mean in terms of impact?
What do you envision not just heading into next year, but beyond that.
Again, hard to dream, all that's gonna happen for the next the next few decades, I, I, I assume, uh, but what I think is getting more and more concrete.
Is in AI leveraging crypto networks to transact value and as stablecoins become more mainstream as consumers such as ourselves or even businesses start to use AI agents to facilitate transactions to facilitate commerce to buy air ticket, to buy, uh, you know, source input for for their own businesses.
They will be used in stable coins and now we're in our projections we'll be seeing this as a real thing in the next 12 2 to 24 months.
And finally, before I let you go, since we're talking about ETPs and ETFs, how do you actually see multi-asset crypto ETFs evolving here stateside?
In the US, so interestingly, our, our ETF was one of the pioneers in the space andIQ was not just the first crypto index ETF.
Uh, to holdpo products but also more recently the first crypto index ETF to adhere and leverage the SEC's newly issued generic listing standards, right?
So what happened in in September of this year was very pivotal for all the issuers, all the the players out there seeking to build investment products.
Uh, and one of the, the areas that's going to be affected instead of index ETFs, so we think that more and more we'll be seeing index ETFs, not just such as ourselves that seek to represent the whole market, uh, but it is a more tailor made for specific investor needs all the, the lack of clarity that existed before.
Number one and also a lot of friction.
It was expensive to launch a crypto ETF no longer, right?
Just this week we had a number of single assets ETFs being announced and as I believe I'm not sure of the detail, but they're all leveraging the generic listing standards.
And so we're already getting a feel for what the new rules will will allow and how innovation is going to flourish even more.
Well, Bruno, it was a pleasure speaking with you here at Money 2020.
Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today.
My pleasure, Remy thank you thank you.
