Good morning. We're here at the Network Effect event and I'm here with Ronek Daya.

I'm Andy Baer, head of product and research at Coin Desk Indices.

Ronak, it's great to be here. You're head of product at Paxos.

It is exciting day, exciting week, exciting times.

I'd really like to get started with a little bit of your

background and what brought you here because nobody got here in one year, right? This had to be a

passion from a long time ago. Sure. Thanks for having me and excited to be here. It's awesome to see

everyone come into New York. We have global dollar cars outside. And so it's fun to see this

come to life and take shape. I have been working in fintech for the last 15 years, started in

Deutsche Bank back in the day. Oh, we were both Deutsche. Okay. We have a co-alumni ship. And then, you know,

in the early days of New York, FinTech focused focused on ad tech, which is the new thing. It worked at a few startups. But found quickly that while hard problems are fun to solve, they need to have a purpose. And so spent a decade after that building small business lending and helping small businesses get access to capital and banking services when through the pandemic and otherwise.

So through that, it became evidently clear to me, you know, coming out of square and block where I built something called capital and banking. It was very clear that while, you know, coming out of square and block where I built something called capital and banking,

it was very clear that while, you know, the new wave of fintech apps have made access to

dollars and banking services and transfers really seamless for you and I who can use

cash app and Venmo and everything else.

This is all sort of behind the scenes held with a lot of scotch tape.

There's still pre-funding.

The beauty of FinTech is that it has abstracted away all the nonsense that happens in the antiquated

systems that powered those applications. Right.

But those systems are still there.

Those systems are still there.

And so as I evaluated what I wanted to be doing, it was very clear that anything I do

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