Ava Labs, Kaiko, and Hedera: Blockchain, Data and AI Innovation at DAS 2025

At the 2025 Digital Asset Summit hosted by BlockWorks in New York City, The Edge of Show brings exclusive insights from blockchain leaders revolutionizing the institutional space. Host Josh Kriger sits down with Olivia Vande Woude and Amy Zhao from Avalabs, John Motzel of Kaiko, and Shyam Nagarajan, newly appointed CEO of Hedera. The episode dives deep into institutional blockchain innovation—from Avalanche's AvaCloud and its tokenization breakthroughs to Keiko's data normalization for TradFi, and Hedera's positioning as the trust layer for AI. The speakers highlight how financial giants like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are adopting tokenized funds on Avalanche, and how AvaCloud offers cost-effective, customizable Layer 1 blockchain deployments. From government partnerships to gaming and stablecoins, the guests share real-world use cases driving blockchain adoption globally. It’s an unmissable dialogue at the forefront of Web3 and AI convergence.

Key Topics Covered:

• Avalanche's Institutional Ecosystem: Olivia explains how Avalanche’s customizable Layer 1 architecture supports tokenized funds like BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s Benji.
• AvaCloud’s Managed Blockchain Services: Amy introduces AvaCloud's SaaS model, enabling easy, scalable blockchain deployments in 15 minutes with privacy features, gas-free design, and social logins.
• Government Blockchain Adoption: Use cases like FEMA payouts and California DMV's tokenized car titles demonstrate public sector innovation using Avalanche.
• Keiko’s Data Normalization for TradFi: John Motzel shares how Keiko bridges crypto and institutions by operating nodes and normalizing on-chain and off-chain data for firms like Bloomberg.
• Hedera’s Trust Layer for AI: CEO Shyam Nagarajan reveals Hedera’s mission to support verifiable AI with partnerships like Stanford’s Equity Labs, and tools for decentralized identity and tokenization.

Episode Highlights:

"Avalanche allows institutions to build customizable blockchains—sub-second finality, low cost, and regulatory fit." — Olivia Vande Woude

"AvaCloud lets anyone deploy a blockchain in 15 minutes—no dev team, no meetings required." — Amy Zhao

"We track wallet balances, reverse-engineer protocols, and give Fidelity-quality data to DeFi." — John Motzel

"Hedera will be the trust layer for AI—verifiable compute, auditable data, and real-world integrity." — Shyam Nagarajan

"Privacy in blockchain isn’t just a bug—it’s a must-have feature, and AvaCloud has it built-in." — Amy Zhao

People and Resources Mentioned:

• Avalanche (Avalabs)
• Olivia Vande Woude
• Amy Zhao
• Kaiko
• John Motzel
• Hedera
• Shyam Nagarajan
• Franklin Templeton – Benji Token
• BlackRock – BUIDL Token
• California DMV Blockchain Project
• Project Guardian by MAS Singapore
• Inversion Capital (Santiago Santos)

About Our Guest:

Olivia Vande Woude is on the Institutional Business Development team at Avalabs, driving adoption of Avalanche among capital markets giants. With prior experience in financial investing at T. Rowe Price and a background in history and French, she leverages her liberal arts training to push innovative Web3 strategies with clarity and rigor.

Amy Zhao is a Web3 Solutions Architect at Avalabs, leading AvaCloud's product for easy, scalable L1 blockchain deployment. With a consulting background at Deloitte, she bridges enterprise needs and blockchain tech through infrastructure innovations like gasless chains and built-in privacy.

John Motzel is the Head of U.S. at Keiko, a firm specializing in institutional-grade crypto data infrastructure. With a background in fixed income and TradFi, John ensures high-quality data for leading institutions via node operation and protocol normalization.

Shyam Nagarajan is the CEO of Hedera, formerly of IBM where he led blockchain and AI innovation. Now he’s spearheading Hedera’s mission to be the trust layer for AI, with a focus on tokenization, decentralized identity, and enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure.

Guest Online Contacts:

• Olivia Vande Woude
  Twitter
• Amy Zhao
  Twitter
• John Motzel
  LinkedIn
• Shyam Nagarajan
  LinkedIn
  Twitter

‍

Transcript:

Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Krueger here. Welcome back to The Edge of Show. I'm here at the Digital Asset Summit produced by BlockWorks. It's the 2025 edition in New York City. It's a really exciting time for sort of the next wave of institutional innovation. And I get to talk to some folks at Avalabs who also will learn some fun facts about these ladies and some serendipity that we learned a little bit before the show. But it's great to have Amy and Olivia on the show. Welcome to The Edge of Show.

Olivia Vande Woude : Thank you so much for having us. I'm so excited to talk about how we're on the cutting edge of all things blockchain today.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah. It's been a minute since we've had Avalanche sort of on the show. But before we get into that, you know, we'll share the fun fact that we all share the same alma mater, William & Mary, which is sort of a lesser known but really cool school in the middle of Virginia. It rains a lot. a lot of cool old buildings, but it's also a mix of liberal arts and IT. So I'm kind of curious for both of you, how do you go from a liberal arts school to being in the blockchain industry?

Olivia Vande Woude : Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having us. My name is Olivia Vandewood. I'm on the business development team at Avalabs, focused on institutional and capital markets use cases. I was previously to a price group investing in small mid-cap bank stocks. And as for your question, I would argue that with a liberal arts education, having majored in history and French myself, it gives you the blueprint for learning critical thinking as well as writing skills. And that's quite important, obviously, in an era where CHAT GPT has eliminated many of those skills for the younger folks. So we know how to think.

Josh Kriger: I'll pass it to you. I feel like that liberal arts school William & Mary made me an expert prompter, too. I like prompting.

Amy Zhao: Certainly. So my name's Amy. I am also at Ava Labs. I work with the product Ava Cloud as a Web3 solutions architect. And what that means is that essentially I help institutions, Web3 startups, everyone in between to deploy their own L1 on Avalanche and have their own blockchain.

Josh Kriger: Wow, so I wasn't aware that you could do that now on Avalanche, that's really exciting. We'll have to talk a little bit about that, but let's start, you know, we're at sort of this Digital Assets Summit, obviously institutions is the theme here, and I think, you know, there's the ETF use case, of course, but I think there's a lot more to break down in terms of the possibilities that institutions are exploring. And you guys are sort of on the cutting edge trying to help institutions figure this out. So maybe talk to us a little bit about some of the emerging use cases for institutions and how they're in a playing with the Avalanche ecosystem.

Olivia Vande Woude : Yeah, absolutely. So stepping back, I would, for those who are not as familiar with the Avalanche ecosystem, in terms of the Avalanche architecture, what's really exciting about the Avalanche ecosystem is that it's like Ethereum and that it's EVM compatible, but unlike Ethereum or other single monolithic blockchains, you can think of Avalanche as a network of layer one blockchains that are highly customizable for any industry or use case, and especially those that are institutions in a very regulated industry. So, in terms of what we're seeing with business use cases, we see a lot of institutions that are building on Avalanche because of the Avalanche consensus mechanism, which not only offers the customizability that I mentioned at the transaction level, at the smart contract deployer level, or at the validator level, but also the Avalanche consensus mechanism underpinning these L1s offers sub-second finality and very inexpensive transactions, which is critical for any institutional use case, right? So what we're seeing is a very high-quality asset supply and high-quality builders that are building on the Avalanche ecosystem, including BlackRock, which launched Biddle on the Avalanche blockchain last year.

Josh Kriger: What's Biddle?

Olivia Vande Woude : Biddle is the on-chain money market fund or tokenized money market fund.

Josh Kriger: That's a fun name.

Olivia Vande Woude : It is. It is indeed a very fun name. But what's even more fun is the liquidity and peer-to-peer transfers, daily dividend accruals that putting a money market fund on chain allows. And so there's the Biddle obviously that launched on Avalanche as well as Franklin Templeton's Benji token which launched on Avalanche. And so there's been quite a bit of interest and continued activity on the tokenized cash and cash equivalents or more liquid side of the spectrum.

Josh Kriger: And what's the Benji token?

Olivia Vande Woude : Benji is Franklin Temple's equivalent tokenized money market fund. Okay. They have different investment requirements, but they're both tokenized money market funds from industry stalwarts like Franklin Templeton.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, they're definitely getting into it. We have them on stage for a Bitcoin Next Summit we did with Bittler and Ethan. Amazing. Julian.

Olivia Vande Woude : Yeah, star power, stars over there.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah, they're doing some really pioneering stuff. And Amy, I guess you get the chance to sort of help them architect these solutions, right? And sort of, is there some customization involved? And how does Avalanche Labs sort of go through that innovation process with institutions?

Amy Zhao: Yeah, so maybe I'll take a step back and also tell a little bit about my backstory for how I got here. That'll explain the impetus for why AvaCloud exists, as well as what we're continuing to build today. So when I first started working, we both, in addition to sharing an alma mater, we both also shared our original first job at Deloitte Consulting. I was consulting in the government and public services space. I was particularly building blockchain use cases for government clients and at the time there was a lot of hyperledger being used in the space but really when Avalanche came around it was so novel because it had all this customizability for enterprises for institutions that were highly, again, highly regulated and needed that level of control when first starting a blockchain system. So they wanted like something closed loop. The one that we ended up building with Avalanche at Deloitte was closed as you go, which was a use case with FEMA for natural disaster relief payouts. Wow.

Josh Kriger: I had no idea.

Amy Zhao: Yeah, yeah. So that was like the first predated AvaCloud L1 before AvaCloud existed as a product.

Josh Kriger: And you helped with that from the consulting side.

Amy Zhao: Yes. So I wasn't on that exact project. I was actually building other hyperledger based blockchains elsewhere in the government. But that was the first one that really put Avalanche on the map.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, I think it's really interesting when when you learn about these things to wonder, well, you know, how ubiquitous is blockchain in government sector, but it's actually being used and has been used for a while. And we don't talk about these things, right? Yeah, like, it's this idea that the government is a pro blockchain or anti blockchain, but the fundamentals of this technology are applicable to use cases in enterprises, government, globally, and it's being used. We explored that in Riyadh at our event. There's a lot of blockchain use cases going on in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Their crypto policies are more rigid, but they love the idea that blockchain, this distributed system technology, can help solve problems that other systems don't enable.

Amy Zhao: Totally so in addition to well now that I've moved over to the technology side of the house And I'm no longer you know just restricted to government projects There's a whole range of you know not just US government-based projects, but also you know US state and local ones other countries across the entire globe a lot based in Asia, so there's East Asia, Southeast Asia, huge market makers that are continuing to put out work. And a big theme this year has been stable coins and also financial markets, which Olivia and I have been very excited about for a lot of the developments in this space.

Josh Kriger: That's cool, yeah. Well, I'm glad to give some positive attention to these use cases because they don't seem to make the headlines that often, right? Olivia, are there any other use cases that maybe Amy covered or you covered that you want to elaborate on a little bit more? Because I think these are really interesting.

Olivia Vande Woude : Absolutely. Well, to close the loop on this government discussion, we're also involved with the California DMV. Yeah, we covered that story. Yeah, you probably did cover that story. Our chief business officer was just discussing it on stage. But that was the case where 42 million card titles were tokenized and placed on the Avalanche blockchain by the California DMV.

Josh Kriger: And this is something that people are talking about, I feel like, since I got into the industry, that this is an obvious use case. And you guys did it.

Olivia Vande Woude : Congrats. Thank you. And the efficiencies, I think at the end of the day, if you look at the efficiencies and quantifiable metrics that can be gained from blockchain, it was really remarkable. For those who aren't familiar with the card title process or transfer process, it's very manual. You historically have had to go into the DMV or a government office or location. It takes two weeks, manually intensive with a lot of patchwork of paperwork. And this implementation by Avalanche reduced it to a single California DMV app, making it feasible to do the card title transfer process with a DMV employee connecting with you on the application, reducing it from two weeks to a matter of one to two days. really exciting to see the quantifiable benefits there. But going back to my vertical, that being institutions and capital markets use cases, we've worked very closely in the past with Project Guardian out of MAS or Monetary Authority of Singapore. And one such example was the work that Citi did in producing a request for streaming application and on a layer one test net on Avalanche. And what that entailed was the pricing and execution of bilateral spot FX trades. And the likes of T-Row Price, for example, participated and tested out that application that Citi had produced, but which was settling and actually running on the Avalanche network. And so that's one example where we've been involved with these larger institutional BMS. But we're also excited about Apollo, for example, placing their diversified credit fund on Avalanche just a couple of weeks ago. And the likes of Inversion Capital from Santiago Santos, who's a crypto angel investor and also is obviously very involved with BlockWorks. And he's creating this, his brainchild essentially is this on-chain crypto-native private equity strategy, whereby he'll take the traditional PE business model of acquiring businesses, but then re-engineering these, generally speaking, lower margin businesses perhaps, re-engineering their back ends with Web3 technologies such as Deepin, such as blockchain enabled financial rails, to gain operational efficiencies. And you can think of it as Berkshire Hathaway on chain. And so we're very excited about partnering with Santiago and his team on Inversion Capital. All of these activities will be anchored to an Inversion Capital layer one blockchain. and just thrilled to see continued innovation, but also the penetration of existing robust distribution channels in these companies that will be acquired by Inversion Capital, and their loyal user bases, because that's where we get the, quote, next billion users that we're all talking about.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, that's really exciting. And appreciate, you know, again, you sharing all these different contexts for the use of blockchain that don't often get covered, at least on our show, but we want to talk more about and that's one reason why we do an upcoming event you guys will hear about soon. Amy, on the cloud side of the house, you know, I was just, I was just over at Leap and Riyadh and had the pleasure of interviewing the CEO of Together AI, a new cloud solution competing against Alibaba and Google and have had many conversations with other cloud providers and compute providers in the Web3 space. I just learned about AvaCloud. So my sense is that there's a lot of specificity in sort of innovation that's possible around cloud when you look at different use cases as opposed to the broad cloud computing environment. What is it that we should know about AvaCloud and some of the things that you guys are doing differently?

Amy Zhao: Yeah, so AvaCloud is a, again, it's a managed blockchain service and where the roots come from is from, you know, users and enterprises like Deloitte and also just companies that don't want to deal with the blockchain management crap that comes with Having a blockchain based business So you want to work on your actual like business use case your application level stuff, but not really work worry about the Piping and all of the stuff in the back that's running and just keeping your blockchain up so what our service looks like is that we have AWS and GCP, and we also have a couple of other integrations for like bare metal or like potentially even on-prem coming down the pipeline for where these services are deployed. So to that, essentially there's a large level of customizability for where things are deployed for your services and your infrastructure. And then on top of that, the actual service itself is a very automated deployment. So you can go and click through this website and deploy your own L1 in 15 minutes. And you never have to talk to a person from Avalanche. You never have to go through a bunch of I guess, conversations together.

Josh Kriger: What's the cost of doing something like that? If I want my own Josh L1? I have a doubt. Josh doubt. What if we want to create our own L1?

Amy Zhao: Yeah, so if you wanted to, first, you could just trial it out for actually five days. What we've done is allow people to use that as a sandbox environment on the test net for Fuji. And that allows you to deploy everything that you need to just get a good proof of concept that you can achieve what you need to out of your application. And then beyond that, it's $50 a month, so like a SaaS service currently for testnets, and then 999 for mainnets for starter service. And then obviously there's a lot of customizability, so we enable, you know, Great amounts of customization in terms of if you want to scale up your infrastructure or scale down.

Josh Kriger: Are you able to share some of your current clients that are using the product?

Amy Zhao: Yeah, I would say beyond some of the really awesome financial use cases like JP Morgan. We definitely will talk about in a little bit. But in terms of other places where we're seeing like high volumes of transactions, we are seeing lots in the gaming sector. So gaming is, I mean, it's been on the top of our minds for a couple of maybe years even, but in particular, in the last year, there's been a ton of traction, especially when it comes to, you know, Gunzilla is one of our clients, and they are just logging tons and tons of transactions every day with all of their users, and based out of Asia, you see ones like Nexon, which is bringing back the nostalgia for me as like one of the people from that generation. What's Nexon? Nexon has MapleStory. So they have this MapleStory universe, which is collectibles type of... Yeah, I've heard about MapleStory. Yeah, renewal of their game. So yeah, I really, I think gaming is a great unlock for just the common person. Totally.

Josh Kriger: I mean, I've been talking, one of my favorite games is NFL Rivals where it's just like a mobile game, you know, where all these characters are NFTs and there's a marketplace and you don't know what's on chain, what's not. You're just having a great gaming experience, right? That's what was the aspiration and I think we're finally getting there.

Amy Zhao: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, we have the off-the-grid game in our office, so you could like, you know, whenever you're taking a break from work, you go ahead and play it, see actually how your transaction's like logged on the blockchain. It's not totally in your face, but it's a cool experience.

Josh Kriger: Alright, next interview we're gonna do there.

Amy Zhao: Yeah, we'll do a gaming interview.

Josh Kriger: Cool, cool. Well, one more thing I just want to touch on as you guys are working on some cool privacy solutions. Maybe you can just hit on that before we wrap up.

Amy Zhao: Yeah, so one thing that I wanted to mention in addition to everything infrastructure-wise that we offer for AvaCloud is that we actually have a ton of features that are kind of baked into the product itself. So you don't have to go outside to, you know, I don't know, a dozen different integrators to build your full application. So if you wanted to have a very seamless, you know, gas-free experience on a blockchain, we offer that in-house. If you wanted to have a social login, you have that in-house. We have our own in-house privacy solution, which is pretty revolutionary. Dare I say a game changer. It's basically a whole suite and a team that's dedicated to enabling privacy. On blockchains. So the team that has worked on this, you could think of it as like, you know, transparency for blockchains. Maybe it's not a feature for everyone. It's sometimes a bug, right? Like you don't always want full transparency, whether that's for the actual values that are being transacted across the blockchain. or also the addresses that are being transacted.

Josh Kriger: The analogy I like to use is it would be a lot better if you go to a bar and you get ID'd where the bouncer only sees what they need to know to verify that you're of legal age, right? But there's a lot of details that they get in that moment that you'd wish, you know, maybe I don't want to share, right?

Amy Zhao: Yeah, and so this is different from actually how your blockchain is configured. You can have a public blockchain where anyone can transact or, you know, like it's kind of open in that way. Or you can have a very, you know, permission network that might be more typical of like an enterprise. But regardless, this privacy solution plugs in where you can obfuscate essentially with the EERC solution, which stands for encrypted ERC, the values that are being transacted. And that means there's an auditor capability that if you designate certain people to be an auditor, then they can go in there for regulatory or compliance reasons, and actually unencrypt those values. So, that's a little bit about the EERC. There's also a ton of really cool stuff that our privacy team's working on. So, not just that, but there's a lot more to come. And we're really excited about that and having it in-house in Apple Cloud.

Josh Kriger: Cool. Well, thanks for shining a light on all these different aspects of avalanche that I certainly wasn't aware of, and I think probably a lot of our audience wasn't as well. I assume if folks want to learn more about what you guys are doing, can they follow you on X? Are you guys over there? So what's your X handle?

Amy Zhao: My ex-handle is TheAmyZao. I have exactly 13 posts right now, and I just started really expanding my ex, so... So let's give her some ex love and, you know, get those follows up.

Josh Kriger: So we'll work on that.

Amy Zhao: Yeah, but I'm excited. This is the year that we're going to be marketing a lot, and I'm committing to posting a lot more. So definitely follow me there.

Josh Kriger: Well, you're now accountable on our show.

Olivia Vande Woude : And my ex-handle is CryptoRen, C-R-Y-P-T-O-R-E-I-N-E. It means Crypto Queen in French. I went to a French school, but Josh, thank you so much for having us on the show. letting us live on the edge.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, I don't know if I had any other fellow alma mater from William & Mary on the show before. So we checked that box as well. Great to meet you both. And sounds like you have an exciting year ahead. So we'll have to check in with you at some point. Thanks for being on the show.

SPEAKER_05: Thanks so much. Thanks so much.

Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Krieger here again, co-host of the Edge of show. We're live at the Digital Asset Summit 2025, produced by BlockWorks, and it's a really exciting mix of folks that are playing in the institutional space. My next guest is John Motzel, who's the head of US for Keiko, and it's great to have you on the show.

John Motzel : Hey, very nice to meet you, thank you for having me.

Josh Kriger: Keiko.

John Motzel : Keiko. Keiko.

Josh Kriger: Got it right the first time. So you were telling me a little bit, what's that word actually mean?

John Motzel : Yeah, so Keiko was the first unmanned submarine or unmanned vessel to make it to the bottom of Mariner's Trench. So it's a little play on words of bringing depth of data to the surface and making it ready for everybody.

Josh Kriger: Cool, and that's a little bit about what you guys do, but what brings you in particular to New York to this event at this sort of moment in our space?

John Motzel : Yeah, so Keiko, we have an office in New York, so this is home turf for me finally. I don't need to travel. Nice. But what we do, we bring institutional players to the crypto and digital asset ecosystem. So we take data that is disparate, hard to find, hard to dig up, hard to normalize, and we make it readily available for larger institutions that are more focused on traditional finance that are looking to dip their toes or fully jump into the lake.

Josh Kriger: It's a really important thing. I have a data analytics background. I did some government consulting in data. So, you know, data cleanup, data normalization, it's a thing. And, you know, it's like the phrase, right? Data you get in is what you get out, right?

SPEAKER_05: You have data in, data out.

Josh Kriger: So let's talk a little bit about the sort of gradients of data, like baseball cards. So how do you sort of look at data from a quality perspective?

John Motzel : So from a quality perspective, we've been doing this for 10 years, but we're always working to get better. So when it comes to digital asset market data, it is so disparate. And if you think of the different venues, like you're sometimes gathering data from the likes of Coinbase or Kraken or Gemini, but then there's also new exchanges that might not have the same data infrastructure.

Josh Kriger: And now there's all these DEXs.

John Motzel : All these DEXs too. So on the other side, so we have these centralized exchanges where you can connect to a web socket, but then you also have to operate a node if you want to interact with some of these DEXs. So we're talking Uniswap, SushiSwap, Curve, Balancer. So you guys have nodes? We operate our own nodes. You have to. We have to. So a lot of times firms will leverage a node as a service, but we've decided to put the investment to collect it ourselves. And what we do is we reverse engineer each protocol. So each one has their different flavor, and we try to standardize. So the same data feed that you'd use for Coinbase, you can use for Uniswap, SushiSwap, Curve, and Balancer. So it's that extra step of taking those disparate index data and turning it into a normalized file that can be consumable from I don't want to name-drop companies, but the Fidelity's of the world, the Bloomberg's even, the BlackRock's, bridging the gap from TradFi to DeFi.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, I mean, data is really important to these guys. They have high demand for high quality data.

John Motzel : And they have high expectations, too. So when you're talking about data from NYSE or NASDAQ, they're used to a different degree of data that they're getting. Accuracy. Accuracy. Also support white gloves. So we are purely institutional basis, no retail. And you find that I've worked in TradFi most of my career in the fixed income side. I never really needed to worry about having a support team that's backing up my clients. This was an industry I was surprised when I would get feedback on all my discussions like, yeah, your data's great, your data's great, but you know who's awesome? Hunter on the ops team because I had a question, he responded to me in five minutes. That's never happened in this space. So that's like a differentiator. And when it also comes to, how people actually use the data. So it's not just, is the data good? How do they use the data? So we have a research team that will, we don't sell research. We publish research for free that shows how data can be used, either to look at, you know, to analyze wash trading, or to look at the liquidity on different venues. And if a trader wants to explore trading on bullish versus Coinbase, what's the depth of book and are they going, is there going to be slippage on their large block trades?

Josh Kriger: We were talking before and you were talking about how TVL is one of those things that's really misunderstood as a key indicator. Maybe talk a little bit more about why that is and what are the key indicators that these institutions are honing in on?

John Motzel : Yeah, so TVL is, in my mind, a little bit of a red herring. So when you're looking at TVL, it's a single number, but it doesn't take into consideration all the different factors that, when a token is launched, what's in circulation? Who's owned by what? What's the lockup period? So you should really start taking the next step from TVL to circulating supply. That even becomes difficult because you don't know, there might be a reported figure from these protocols or these tokens, like this is our circulating supply. But you have to look deeper. What is held by the founders? What is held by VCs or what is being locked up over a stepstool of like this is being released on this date?

Josh Kriger: Do you get into the gradients of who's selling?

John Motzel : So we do we actually track wallet balances as well So we can we can correlate and track that like what protocol and then what wallets and what those transactions are looking like So when you're looking at Bitcoin, for example, they're just the big name there's There's the set number, there's a set volume, but there's also that lost volume. Let's say there's maybe one third that will never be in circulation. So while there will be the 21 million Bitcoin outstanding, there could be a third to a quarter that will never get traded again. So you actually lose that liquidity. So even with something like Bitcoin, that is not fully understood. at a lot of different firms. They understand the concept, but there still is a circulating supply of that full potential number. But there is lost coins, lost tokens from lost wallets. So there is actually less liquidity on a lot of these tokens that people just don't get. Yeah.

Josh Kriger: I mean, we covered on the show that the gentleman that lost that hard drive in that dump, and he tried everything, man, to get those tokens.

John Motzel : How much did he spend?

Josh Kriger: I don't know.

John Motzel : He tried to get a loan for like $200 million to buy the dump or something. He's tried everything.

Josh Kriger: I'm sure that saga will continue. I guess one more thing I want to touch on since we are in New York is the ETFs. sort of relationship between traditional finance and DeFi. I'm curious just what your perspective is on that. How has that sort of evolved your approach to data and analytics, and how is that sort of reshaping how institutions are playing in this space?

John Motzel : Yeah, so there's an interesting dynamic here. Data has always been important in all markets, right? Traditional markets. But it's always been a reference point for the financial contracts. So for settlement purposes, it's just a reference. Now, when we're talking about smart contracts, I'll get to ETFs in a second, but we've gone from data being a reference point, but actually now data has turned into a catalyst for these smart contracts. So we're feeding data into these smart contracts where there's actually a smart contract that's executing and certain things can be liquidated. There's a lot of things that can be done, and if the data is not accurate, then people are going to lose a lot of money, or there's going to be misappropriated funds, or something wrong will happen. So this is the blending of TradFi and DeFi. ETFs are great exposure, where this is taking an on-chain product, it's crypto, and taking it off-chain, putting it into an off-chain wrapper. A traditional market is an ETF. The US, we've lagged behind the ETP market, the exchange traded product market from Europe, but they really jumped the gun with their micro regulation. And so we're playing a little bit of catch up, but we saw how well the Bitcoin ETFs performed last year. and we're just expecting there to be more approvals, so XRP, Solana's being approved, XRP may be next, and then we're gonna start talking about basket indexes. Is there going to be a redemption in kind versus cash settled? Is there going to be the approval for state ETFs? So we just need a little bit of patience, and I do think there's one criticism I have, Everybody will try to compare each new launch with Bitcoin. You can't. It's the most successful ETF launch in history. I used this yesterday and I got made fun of a little bit. It's a funny anecdote. Comparison is a thief of joy. When you look at ETH, the Ethereum ETF, the numbers weren't Bitcoin, but it was still extremely successful by comparison to any other standard ETF in traditional markets.

Josh Kriger: So one follow-up question there. I know you're not on the research team, but how is the ETFs impacting the overall liquidity of the market? And is it sort of a neutral impact, a positive impact, a negative impact, or it just depends?

John Motzel : It's a very positive impact. There's just natural flow. You've seen it in the price action over the past several months. But the one thing that held this back from reaching its full potential is when I mentioned the cash-settled versus in-kind. Are you familiar with cash settlement or in-kind? Educate me, you're our audience. So when we're talking about iBit, when you have a cash-settled operation, I am buying iBit with cash. but there should be the option to be able to buy IBIT using Bitcoin I have. So you're actually getting transactions of Bitcoin if those ETFs are settled in coin.

SPEAKER_00: It's a direct swap.

John Motzel : Yep, direct swap. So while there has been a positive impact, once we see this in-kind approval, and I expect to see it in the next three to six months, I might even be more conservative on that approach. But once we see that, there'll be a much more impactful, much more impact to the price action of Bitcoin.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's straight viscosity at that point. Yes. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, really appreciate your insights. Anything else you wanted to sort of mention before we wrap up?

John Motzel : Yeah, I would just say patience is a virtue here. The market is going extremely well. One thing I like to note, this is the only technology that has a self-sustaining currency. So, Keiko is a crypto-focused company right now, but we're more focused on the future of digital assets. Like, we care about the future of digital assets, the rails, the distributed ledger technology. We are very lucky that we have this crypto market to fuel all these interesting products that we're building. And we see it like in the room today. There's a lot of really interesting products that have been able to run research and look at the RWA and tokenization market because of the amount of funding that they're able to provide through crypto assets. So what I would say is things are going well. People want things to be regulated and approved now, but things are going in a really positive direction.

Josh Kriger: It's great to hear. If folks want to learn more about your organization, maybe follow you guys on X, follow you on X, where should they go?

John Motzel : So kyco.com is our website. You can follow Kyco on LinkedIn. My name is Jon Motzel. You can follow us on Twitter as well. The research team gets most of the hype. So if you follow Kyco Research on X, then you should get all free research. We don't charge.

Josh Kriger: Institutional-grade research for free.

John Motzel : For free. There you go. Can't beat that.

Josh Kriger: All right. Thanks, Jon, for hanging out and sharing a little bit more about what you guys do.

SPEAKER_05: I learned a lot. Yeah, I hope so.

Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Krieger here, co-host of The Edge of Show, live at the 2025 Digital Asset Summit in New York City, thrown by our friends at BlockWorks. So we're getting to see some new friends, meet some old friends, like our friend Shyam Nagarajan, who was last on the show back in Davos. It's been a minute. It's good to have you back on the show, my friend. Yeah, good to see you, Josh. So you've taken the role of CEO of Hedera. Congrats on that position. I'm curious, sort of, what gravitated you in this direction?

SPEAKER_00: Well, it was an interesting time in my career where I'd spent 22 years at IBM and I'd worked in blockchain technology, was really leading the charge for AI. But I saw an opportunity for an intersection of blockchain and AI. And I thought the opportunity was right. The regime was changing from a regulatory bad situation to more of a supportive situation in the crypto space. Time was right, and it made sense for me, and I'm here to see if I can have a big impact.

Josh Kriger: So, I think we are at an interesting point in sort of AI. We've talked about on the show DeepSeek and how that's changing the industry, and it's like every day something new comes out. There's this sort of general debate whether AI can bring more benefits to blockchain, or blockchain can bring more benefits to AI. What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00: Well, look, it's very... How should I say it? It's chicken or the egg, right? What's AI? AI is providing new value, new insights, the ability to make decisions. But what truly runs AI is data, right? The key question you have to ask is that, can you trust the data that AI is using to build and provide you the outcomes that it does? I think that's where blockchain really comes in. I've seen this in several opportunities. In my last job, I actually was leading our AI consulting, and our customers, one of the biggest issues that they had is that AI and looks like it can do great things, but can it be accurate? Can it do the same thing again and again in a predictable fashion? And can it provide me why it made that decision, when it made that decision, and what was the reason behind it? And oftentimes, they couldn't find the right answers. I think this is where blockchain really brings in, brings that layer of trustability, auditability, and explainability that every AI solution needs.

Josh Kriger: So, it doesn't sound like there's one way to solve this problem or one sort of solution that's going to come to the market that you think is going to dominate. Is this a situation where, similar to sort of the specialty of AI models and especially of AI products, where there's going to be a lot of different AI solutions to this problem, or how do you see this playing out?

SPEAKER_00: Look, AI market is really fragmented right now. Everyone is focusing their efforts on LLMs, right? You got the OpenAI LLM, you got DeepSeq LLM, and you got, you know, somewhere in between all of these. And these have been trained by what you call as open source data as much as possible. But while we all know that's not truly the real case situation, there is no provenance of the data that was used to train it. And so you don't know whether the outcomes that it produces is trustable. So while LLMs is one portion of the AI world, there's still machine languages. There are small language models. Now the evolution is into agentic models. And in all of these, there is an underpinning need. The underpinning need is a trust layer for auditability, for governance, for being able to explain the decisions that these AI systems are making.

Josh Kriger: So, from an Hedera perspective, are you looking to partner with folks solving these problems, or are you guys looking at building some technology in-house? How is this going to work from your perspective?

SPEAKER_00: Look, the way I see Hedera as being the trust layer for AI, right? And why I say that is that we have a really good ecosystem. We work with a lot of organizations. We are very closely working with two particular organizations that's focused on this area, Equity Labs, and it's offshoot of the Stanford Labs. And they are focused on what you call as a verifiable compute. The same concept of data provenance, data integrity, all the way, roots from the machine and the compute GPU and the chips that actually make those decisions, what memory, what context, what data set was used, all the way up, being able to do that. The second thing is that Hedera is really, wants to support the acceleration of AI, so we are building a numerous number of toolkits, like agentic toolkits that supports the Eliza OS framework standards, and we're working with LangChain, we're working with a lot of these toolings that's available for the developers to develop these models to have an underpinning trust layer that's built into it. This is a little different from all the other layer ones, Layer 1s are starting to focus more on these AI tokens and AI to AI agent communication, which is all interesting. But if you can't trust the basic things that the AI does, all of those don't matter as much.

Josh Kriger: Fair enough. And, you know, there's not too many Layer 1s here at this event. I saw Avalabs and you all. What sort of attracts you to this type of event, and what is it they're doing on the institutional side of the house?

SPEAKER_00: Look, Honora for the longest time has been primarily looking at the broader adoption of this technology in the traditional world, so the enterprise world, right? And appropriately so, representative of that is our governing council, which is made up of 31 different large institutions, all the way from Google, IBM, Dell, and the likes, to we have universities on it as well. Now what has changed is that we are doubling down on very few things that we want to do really well. One area is AI. The second one is around tokenization. I think the regulatory regime is open to it. The technology is mature and institutions want to do it.

Josh Kriger: So does that mean real-world asset tokenization to you, or is it broader than that?

SPEAKER_00: It's not just real-world asset tokenization. Real-world assets are definitely one form of it. Now, the biggest, biggest thing I really think is going to have an impact is the AI driving the need for more data centers, and data centers need energy, and data centers need land. There is a very cyclical need for new types of assets that's starting to come up. And where are they going to find the capital and the liquidity in order to build these? And how do they monetize these? And this opens up a whole brand new way of doing things in the tokenization space.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, that's very exciting. Let's touch on DeFi a little bit. At one point, I think people were predicting this might be the second renaissance of DeFi would be this year. It hasn't necessarily played out that way. What is Hedera's perspective on DeFi and how does that play into the conversation we just had about AI and institutions?

SPEAKER_00: Look, you are at the Digital Assets Summit and everyone is here because there is a belief that DeFi will continue to hold good. I do think this year will be different than the previous years because of the support and in general I think because of the You know bear market everyone has been heads down building and now there are new capabilities that's available.

Josh Kriger: I'm definitely What do you call this? I don't even know what this bullish bear market. That's how I got bearish bull market But

SPEAKER_00: In the long run, it's truly about creating value for the token, whosever token it is, right? And it's about circulation, it's about liquidity, it's about access, it's about institutional adoption. You see the ETFs being filed, which is good signs. Bitcoin being very stable and considered as a strategic reserve among all the states, not just the national level. So a lot of good things happening, but I still think there is more to happen this year. in the space and need to look out for it.

Josh Kriger: Cool. Well, congrats on the new role and I'm looking forward to seeing what you all do in this sort of space of the intersection of AI and blockchain. We're going to have more conversations. You all will be with us in Riyadh this year, which is really exciting. Any closing thoughts? Anything we didn't cover you wanted to mention?

SPEAKER_00: A lot more very interesting things to come at Hedera. We are, as I told you, doubling down on AI, doubling down on technologization in DeFi, and as well as decentralized identity. And we want to make sure that the world knows we are the trust layer for enterprises.

Josh Kriger: Cool. And if folks, obviously people can look up Hedera, Google it. If folks want to find you, are you on X hanging out?

SPEAKER_00: I am on X at Shyam Nagarajan. I am on LinkedIn. And I'm on hedera.com as well. You can find me up.

Josh Kriger: And that's S-H-Y-A-M and then N-A-G-A-R-A-G-A-N for those of you that cannot sort of hear something and immediately know how to type that in. So we got you covered now. Great to have you back on the show. Thanks for the update. Best of luck with your new role.

SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you very much, Josh. Thanks for having me.

‍