Hey everyone, you're watching Coin Desk Live. We're coming to you from Consensus Hong Kong, and our next guest is at the desk.

HexTrust CEO and co-founder Alessio Quaglini Alessio, great to have you here with us.

Thanks for embody me. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being the partner for our desk. We've had a lot of great conversations from the desk. Before we get into it, talk to us about what your experience of consensus has been like. Oh my God, it's been really amazing. There's a lot of energy. The vibe has changed completely from the previous years, but there's still a lot of positivity. There's a lot of energy. The vibe has changed completely from the previous years, but there's still

a lot of positivity. There's a lot of new ideas regarding financial institutions and how

this final upgrade of their operating system is going to plan out.

We've been hearing that theme a lot. Tom Farley from Bullish was on earlier. He was saying the same thing, this idea of really upgrading the operating system of finance is happening finally throughout the world. What do you think was the biggest impetus of it? Was it Washington sort of relaxing the reins? What's your take on that? I think obviously the regulatory green light, or at least a kind of a more amicable stance, has helped.

Obviously, there's also been a few years of adoption of crypto assets, that has also brought hundreds of millions of users to the blockchain, to using wallets, etc.

But it's also the fact that finally we have found a first use case for blockchain technology that is really addressing one big,

huge problems that we have in financial systems, the one of payments, which is a trillion-dollar

problem.

And it's a problem that financial institutions, especially banks, have actually kind of, I would

say, avoided to solve for decades.

Well, just to follow up, I feel like banks, that's how they made money, right?

And then they have people like yourselves, and a lot of the people that show who are saying,

okay, but you created friction, you created higher fees.

Technology has evolved. We can reimagine that.

So as part of it, them recognizing, let's finally step into the future instead of being

sort of levered to the past.

It's been until now a monopoly, but a monopoly can be also an efficient monopoly.

In this case, we've had a monopoly where basically when I want to transfer my funds from

one country to another country, it's not that I know that it would take three days.

I don't even know how long it would take, and I don't know how much I will pay in fees.

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