0:21Kamal HubbardOkay. Hey, I do not blame you. I think you said it’s, uh, Not even 5 o’clock yet there.
0:27Loretta Joseph4:30, not even 4:30.
0:29Kamal HubbardHow about for you, Stefano? What time is it over there?
0:32Stefano TrescaI’m in London, so we’re quite used to work until late because the US and because Hong Kong. So basically it’s, yeah, you know, working in DeFi, it’s maybe like a 22-hour working day.
0:44Loretta JosephOh, piece of cake to you though.
0:46Kamal HubbardWell, regardless, I really appreciate you guys taking time out of your day. Once again, no matter what time it is, It’s, it’s got to be earlier or later than it is for me. So once again, I appreciate that. My name is Kamal Hubbard, and I’m so happy to join as a moderator for today’s conference with the Governance Research Institute. We’re gonna be covering governance and blockchain, and our guests this morning, or this evening, this afternoon, are Loretta Joseph and Stefano Tresca. And just to kind of give them some brief introductions, Loretta is a fintech consultant currently serving the governing board of the Financial Services Commission of Mauritius. She also serves as a senior digital asset consultant for Nigeria’s Financial Intelligence Unit and is a visiting facility for the Institute of of Indian regulators. Loretta, could you please give us some more background on yourself and, uh, the work that you’re doing with these governments?
1:58Loretta JosephUm, morning everybody, it’s, uh, 4:30 in the morning in Australia, so good morning, afternoon, good evening wherever you are. Yeah, so my name is Loretta Joseph. Um, in my previous life for 30 years I was a derivatives trader. Um, I, I started way back in the day in 1991 with a piece of paper and a pencil trading 3-year option bonds on the Australian financial on the SFA, the Financial Market Australia. I then spent the next 30 years running around the world. I’ve run a number of global banks. I ran RBS in India. I ran Alara Capital. I set up Macquarie Bank India. I got into the great world of blockchain and digital assets in 2013, so long before it was cool and regulators knew much about it.
1:58Loretta JosephI think at that time Bitcoin was about $40. I went on to to facilitate the Australian Digital Chamber of Commerce, which was a lobbying body with the Australian government to understand what crypto assets and digital assets were. So in 2016, we came up with the term across the government of being digital assets. So we looked at what crypto assets are, virtual assets, and all these new assets, and we said, well, what are we talking about? So we came up with a single term of a digital asset, which cryptocurrency is a subset. I then went on to buy some Bitcoin, which I found pretty cheap with that amount then if I look back, but it was very difficult.
1:58Loretta JosephSo we wrote the first self-regulation for Bitcoin in the world. That seemed to go off very well. I think 37 jurisdictions adopted my self-regulation. Following on quickly after that, I went to Davos. I met the Premier of Bermuda. I didn’t know where Bermuda was at the time. It’s a little island in the Atlantic Ocean. It was 2017, and he said to me, what do you know about these initial coin offerings? I said, oh, a fair amount. He said, good, jump on a plane and come and write my legislation around digital assets and ICOs tomorrow, of which I actually did. So there we wrote the first legislation in 3 months that gave guidelines around what an ICO was, an initial coin offering.
1:58Loretta JosephAnd I wrote the first legislation in the world that discussed digital assets as an asset class and a business act. Move along, I work with a number of governments. I’ve currently in the last year been in Mauritius. I wrote the regulatory framework around digital assets, around the custody of digital assets, around security tokens, and the platforms you can trade on them. I’m just about to write the digital asset marketplace, i.e., the cryptocurrency exchange regulation, which I refuse to call exchanges because I find these guys -- they’re not exchanges. I’ve worked for many exchanges and they’re marketplaces. They’re just matching engines for buyers and sellers. So I think the terminology that I’ve seen over the last number of years with governments has been very difficult.
1:58Loretta JosephHad Bitcoin been called Zen token, no central bank would have worried. Had we ever called initial coin offerings initial business offerings, we wouldn’t have had security regulators running around. So, for me, it’s a very important job for me is to sit between the technologists. I understand how to code across a number of blockchains. My 16-year-old now taught me when she was 9. I was 43 years old. I use Bob Kahn, who built the internet, he wrote the IP and the Transmission Control Protocol, to explain to me how he built the internet. And I’ve spent a lot of time with the industry understanding what the industry are doing.
1:58Loretta JosephBut I, then spent a lot of time on the other side, but with central banks, especially now around central bank digital currencies and heads of state. So, I sit in this very particular role about explaining the terminology and what the technology does and what things like crypto assets do to regulators and governments that probably some of us blame as not being too forward-thinking, but just trying to figure out where do we put these new asset classes in legal framework. framework. So that’s what I do.
5:45Kamal HubbardWow, that’s pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing that, Loretta. I want to introduce our next panelist, Stefano Tresca. Stefano is a fintech advisor and entrepreneur who’s worked in over 22 countries scaling various startup ventures. From 2005 to 2010, Stefano lived and worked as a digital nomad Making his way through Europe, helping businesses grow and expand. He’s also the general partner to Purple Hat Capital and the managing partner of iSeed. Stefano, please introduce yourself a little bit further and let us know some of the great work that you’re doing with the Maltese government.
6:27Stefano TrescaI’m -- yeah, well, I’m an entrepreneur first, but I started my career as a programmer and then I went to law school. So it was very, very painful at the beginning. Can you imagine in the ’90s? I mean, just using the computer for my PhD thesis was like cheating in law school. But eventually, eventually, it was quite helpful because when I graduated, I got my JD, I was one of the 5 lawyers with a tech background. So really had the chance in the ’90s to see what is happening again now with blockchain and what was happening with the internet. Nobody believed it, a lot of fraud, a lot of really, really bad projects, but eventually Amazon, Google, they all start during downturns, during like black swan during the internet.
6:27Stefano TrescaSo it’s happening again. It’s quite exciting. I had the chance to work in different companies. The biggest exit we did was $12.1 billion. Unfortunately, it was not my company. I was a very young professional and employee number 8. But again, all the experience that is working today. I had the chance, and I will be very brief, I had the chance to spend 2 years in regulation and lobby, and in the last years being an advisor or just meeting with different parliaments and governments. I’m still in the roundtable of the blockchain roundtable of the Isle of Man. Again, that means that I have quite an expertise in working between tech and politics, and probably my view of this is not exactly like optimistic or just diplomatic as the one you have, or Loretta has.
8:20Kamal HubbardOkay, well, yeah, let’s discuss that a little bit further. I mean, I really want to hear some of your opinions on the United States a little bit later, but just to kind of kick things off in the discussion between the two of you, now that governments are understanding and beginning to understand at least the benefits that blockchain holds, how do you convey the importance of good governance within blockchain to them?
8:50Stefano TrescaWant to start, Loretta?
8:54Loretta JosephAre you up? Okay, I was on mute. Yes, so it’s -- governance models are very important, and that’s if you look at how governments work, they talk about governance. But governance in decentralized systems means something else. So the governance models that we see that come out of Bitcoin or the public blockchains ensure that the consensus mechanism -- i.e., everybody that opts into the network has to play by the rules of that network, which are governed by mathematics -- not people. So, in laws -- and I deal mainly with Commonwealth, I’ve written law in Commonwealth countries, but I’ll get on to the US in a bit, as you said, because I find Europe and the US very convoluted because you’ve got so many regulators and it’s like a big jar of spaghetti and you’ve got different countries.
8:54Loretta JosephSo, that’s why I choose the easier ones. The British mightn’t have done much for us, but they did give us a legal framework across 53 countries around the world, which is exactly the same. Australia, Canada, India, a lot of Africa, Mauritius, a lot of the Caribbean. So that’s why I’m lucky. But governance is important. And but explaining to people that generally traditionally use governance models in a very different way about decentralized systems that rely on maths has been quite challenging, as the other speaker said. So, but, but the realization is that blockchain can actually take out a lot of the the idiosyncrasies and the problems that we’ve seen with governance over the years by removing the governance from people and intermediaries and making it done with mathematics.
8:54Loretta JosephI think decentralized systems in a lot of services that governments offer, whether that be voting, whether that be land registries, whether that be most things we can now -- we can digitalize and put on a blockchain, are going to have no control. So, it’s an interesting one to explain to governments because you can’t go down the path and talk to them about decentralized and libertarianism, which is where Bitcoin was born from, but how they can better use decentralized systems which run on mathematics to have better governance systems. Now, don’t forget also a lot of governments don’t really want this. There’s still a number of countries in the world where you don’t -- you still don’t have land over your right, right over your land, and a government can come in and take that from you very quickly.
8:54Loretta JosephSo, it’s a very steady tread explaining governance models to governments, and depending on what they do and where they are and where their appetite is to start using these decentralized governance models that maybe do not take out the control that they have at the moment. So, I think it’s still early days and there’s a little bit of trepidation. They all like to talk about DLT, distributed ledger technology, which I don’t think is blockchain. So, So, I often start with that, like, if you’re gonna have a distributed ledger system, you might as well just have a centralized database. I think they’re a little bit more comfortable with that, but I mean, I don’t think that’s the true nature of blockchain and why Satoshi built it.
8:54Loretta JosephSo, I go against the grain a bit, and I’m not your normal advisor to a government because they’re not used to understanding decentralized systems and the economic and social benefits that I think that these systems were built for.
12:02Kamal HubbardThat actually leads to my next question for Stefano. How do regulators, or how will regulators educate their constituents on all of this, being blockchain as well as governance?
12:19Stefano TrescaThe first answer is, do they really want to educate the people on this? Because there is a common terrible mistake that we have to avoid first. So if we are here, we like this topic, we are passionate about this topic, we are educated about this topic. But the great mistake is not checking what the rest of the world thinks about this topic. So I’ll take some notes about what they’re saying about this topic around, just mention a few of them. Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, expressly said, we don’t need this technology. The New York Times called this technology impractical. Joseph Schenck, president of United Artists, constantly repeats to the media that this technology is just a fad.
12:19Stefano TrescaAnd the last one, but I have more, but I’ll go with the last one. Robert McAfee, founder of 3Com, says that in one year the entire technology is going to collapse and nobody is going to use it again. So what if I say that actually all these quotes that I mentioned were about other inventions? So Sir William Preece was chief engineer of British Post in the 18th century, and he was speaking about the telephone, 1878. The New York Times was speaking about the automobile, 1902. It’s impractical, like a carriage of horse, much, much better. The fad refers to adding sounds to the movie. There was really no market for the movie.
12:19Stefano TrescaThink today about Netflix. And the last one, the founder of Tricom, was talking about the internet. So he knew that the internet was going to end in 1996. It didn’t. So there is a message here, like, we should not think that the world is going to use DeFi and e-governance just because we need it, because this is not how the human brain works. The human brains like to use the same identical invention, but go for something that is cheaper and easier to use. So I was, you know, building internet companies in the ’90s, and internet really became mainstream when there was a big boom of the email.
12:19Stefano TrescaWhy? Because the email is a very simple invention. It’s a low-cost fax, and everybody understood it. And it took 10 years for the email being recognized as something of legal value, but eventually it did. And that’s, I think it’s the same now. So if you think that the world is going to use DeFi because it needs it, forget. If you think that we just need to agree, all techie diplomats, politicians about this, forget. This is not going to happen. What is going to happen is that we, because we are here, so we are passionate about this topic. We should invent work, of course, work with the regulators, but also invent something that is quite easy to use.
12:19Stefano TrescaIn fact, it’s so popular that the politicians are going to adapt to it instead of enforcing something to it. They will try to enforce something to limit it, but eventually, if it’s so easy, if it’s so convenient, it will be very difficult for them to ignore. And that’s, I think, where we are in Europe, Asia -- spent many years working in Asia -- or the US, where I still invest.
15:50Kamal HubbardYeah, I think to a certain extent politicians wanna stay in office and governance can kind of eliminate their roles or some of their duties. I mean, I think really the politicians will need to evolve. All of us will need to evolve to some degree. But Loretta, in what ways do you think governance will need to evolve to best serve the people of the various nations who are going to be adopting these protocols.
16:23Loretta JosephYeah, no, I have to agree with what my last friend just said as well. It’s, yeah, mass adoption is the greatest validator. And I think, you know, something you talk about the internet, because my mentor on all the tech stuff is Robert Kahn, and he built the internet. And he always says to me, Loretta, When we built the internet, we didn’t mean to. I sent a message across an open network to a man called Vint Cerf and said, hi. And he said, you know, 10 years into that, we got called in by a lot of people in the US. They said, shut it down. He said, oh, I can’t really shut it down.
16:23Loretta JosephIt’s an open network. And then he said, he laughed to me still. He says, yeah, 10 years later, everybody came to him and said, how do we buy it? He goes, no, no, you can’t buy it either. So, yeah, you’re seeing the same thing, I guess, what I would like to think that blockchain is has made what we’ve seen in peer-to-peer transfer of value, which came out with the internet, which democratized media. I guess that’s one thing it did. And you’re seeing the movement of blockchain and things like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and DeFi, which are coming out of this, which will democratize finance. And that’s an important message because whether people like it or they don’t, but if they don’t understand it, they don’t like it.
16:23Loretta JosephYou know, I walk into central banks now and they look at me and they go, don’t talk about the Bitcoin. I’m like, all right, we won’t talk about the Bitcoin. But that’s all they want to know about, to be honest, is what they want to know about Bitcoin. And I’m saying, well, you can’t go and build a central bank digital currency if you don’t understand what you’re building or why you’re building it. But governance is important, and I think, and especially in these decentralized systems, as I talked about before, because it’s opt-in or opt-out. If you opt into the system, you have to play by the rules.
16:23Loretta JosephAnd a lot of governments don’t like that. They like to be able to say, oh no, no, we didn’t like that, we’re going to opt out again. But once, you know, you start to do, um, you know, create e-governance models based around blockchain and, you know, some of the other merging techs, um, you’re going to get a bit of resistance because they can’t get out of it if they’re, they’re in. And once, um, people understand that secure, immutable, traceable databases that are decentralized, uh, a much more democratized way to run governments, uh, where you’re going to see huge mass, mass adoption. And I’m not going to say it’s in the US or Europe first because they’re the markets that I don’t work in.
16:23Loretta JosephI work predominantly across the emerging world where you have already adoption, you have mobile money, like in Africa, you have the M-Pesa. And I think COVID has just accelerated that. So, governments in India and Africa don’t have much choice because they have the majority of their people who have a handset. In the US, you still talk about cash and checks. I find that quite amazing. Whereas if you go into Africa and India, you don’t touch cash at all anymore. So, I think these governance models self-evolving. I think that’s a good way to push it, because if you look, most governments remember the DAO and they go, oh, but that thing got hacked.
16:23Loretta JosephIt’s like, well, yeah, some idiot wrote the source code the wrong way, but that was a trial. And that’s their biggest pushback on that, that these governance models, decentralized models, don’t work. But I think you are seeing, as our last speaker said, mass adoption is the greatest winner. And you are seeing mass adoption of these systems in many different areas, whether it be a supply supply chain, finance, voting across India and Africa. And I think these are the markets that take off, but they’re also the markets that have the biggest populations. So, I think the emerging world in the world of where blockchain is and people adopting governance models and governments adopting this, they’re not going to be in Europe and the US to start with.
16:23Loretta JosephThey’re going to be in the emerging world that always leapfrogs. And I think that’s an important thing to note because don’t forget that over 5 billion people don’t have access to a bank account. still in most of the emerging world. So, these new models are the places where these have the most impact and where it’s going to be most important. So, I don’t even look at the US and Europe and even Australia, where I live -- well, for the next month -- as being where I see the biggest impact to governments. It’s really in the emerging world because I see every person has a handset. Yeah, every kid, rich, poor, or in between has access to a mobile device now, and that has changed everything.
20:36Kamal HubbardYeah, absolutely. The mobile device and the access to the internet just lowers the barriers to entry tremendously. So I’m looking forward to what’s to come, most certainly. Stefano, just to kick this back to you, we’re talking about the difficulty and maybe reluctance for governance or governments to adopt blockchain and governance models. Can you kind of talk a little bit more of why? I mean, it’s probably pretty obvious to a lot of folks, but kind of talk about some of that tension between the adoption of governments when it comes to blockchain.
21:21Stefano TrescaI think that’s always a good question because yes, it’s obvious to so many people, but sometimes they are wrong. This is not the main reason. So about that, the funny thing is that I will say there are 2 answers. One is in the heart, one is in the mind. So the one is in the heart is, of course, the human being tends to not be pro-innovation. Most of them are conservative. Politicians are more conservative. If you are a not conservative person, Many of you are going to become an entrepreneur. You’re not going to become a bureaucrat. I’ve been both, so it’s both super fine, both very helpful, but clearly it takes some time.
21:21Stefano TrescaAnd that’s a matter of the heart. There is also a matter of the mind. And about this topic, actually, Elliot, that is a co-organizer of this event, well, actually, some expert of MIT wrote exactly what Elliot wrote just a few weeks before. So a few weeks before on Medium, Elliot, a couple of weeks later, MIT. It’s about the same. It’s a human element. So yeah, cool. Blockchain is fantastic. Cannot be tampered. We know that. It’s our passion. But what about the app that you have to use to send your vote to the blockchain? First of all, it’s very hard to convince people to install the app.
21:21Stefano TrescaJust imagine, just think about the last US election. What, how much energy the Democratic Party spent to have Afro-American and Latin American to register themselves in a paper register. That is something that everybody knows and understands. It took quite a lot of energy. So can you imagine going to these people and say, install an app, Download the token, use the token to vote. Very, very hard. So on top of that, yes, blockchain cannot be tampered, but the app that sends the vote to the blockchain can. And who’s going to do that? A consultant of the ministry, a consultant of the president in charge. So again, that’s, I think, the 2 reasons why it’s so difficult.
21:21Stefano TrescaIt’s why the e-government is -- the e-governance is being used so much and so well by entrepreneurs. Think DeFi, Balancer, Uniswap, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s not used yet. In fact, if you want to read more, just go on the Medium page of the Governance Research Institute and/or Google MIT, Don’t Use Blockchain to Vote, because this is probably a good summary of these 2 issue, the one from the heart, the one from the mind.
24:11Kamal HubbardYeah, well, thanks. I definitely think once again, you know, that people do have their biases and preconceived notions. And just from the politicians and political side, so applying that to our voting system, like you said, is It can be a tricky thing. But now I want to get to the question I kind of posed earlier about what your opinions are, both you and Loretta, on the United States government and how they should be approaching blockchain as well as e-governance from a perspective of adoption and regulation. So, Stefano, would you like to answer that question first?
25:05Stefano TrescaI can, yes. I don’t think that I can tell the US government how to approach the regulation, but I’m not a consultant of the US government.
25:15Kamal HubbardWell, just your opinion on what they could do.
25:17Stefano TrescaNo, no, no, I know I’m joking, of course. So again, I think there are 2 matters here, one about from the heart, one from the mind. From the heart, clearly, because the system is so advanced in the US, it’s much more difficult for the regulators to innovate. And I saw that when we launched a mobile company. So when we launched mobile company, and we’re speaking about 1996, in Europe, we were much more advanced than US. Why? Because the landline was working very, very fine in the US. In Europe, it was a disaster. Spain, Italy, Greece, especially Southern Europe was a disaster. It takes 2 weeks just to have a phone, very expensive, tricky, tricky bills.
25:17Stefano TrescaSo the moment that the mobile came up, it was -- it grew much faster in Europe than in US. So today, it’s happening exactly what Loretta said. There are 2 billion people without a bank account. Every European, even the kids, they have their credit card. If they don’t have a credit card, at least they have a prepaid card. So for us, it’s not so painful to not use the blockchain. But especially in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, this is going to grow a lot. So then comes to mind, there is a tradition in the United States when they are behind the technology, because they have such a rich market to be very, very aggressive from the regulation point of view, because that’s going to slow down all the other countries and allow the US company to become bigger.
25:17Stefano TrescaThat’s happening in gaming, gaming and online gaming and online gambling, in a way, is much similar from a regulatory point of view to the blockchain. In fact, some countries like Isle of Man, They have legislation for the blockchain since 2012. Why? Because they use their knowledge about e-gaming, where they are very strong, and move the same legislation, anti-money laundering. We want to be sure that nobody’s using this money bad. And if you say you’re Bob, you’re really Bob. So, I think that when we are outside the US or inside the US, and we believe that the legislation the regulation on blockchain in the US is not really open.
25:17Stefano TrescaIt’s true. But one of the reasons is that they’re doing this on purpose. And this is a very smart thing for them. Think how Coinbase became so big for being super regulated against other exchanges that were not in the US, because the US market is clearly the richer one from traders. And if the regulation is very, very aggressive, and you are a US company and you play by the rules because you have, or else you go to jail, then, you know, the SEC is much more aggressive than any other financial authorities in the world, then that’s going to slow down a bit other companies. So, it may be not completely stupid for them to be so much not open on the regulation on blockchain.
28:35Kamal HubbardOkay, now I want to ask Loretta’s opinion on this. What do you think the United States can do in this area?
28:48Loretta JosephI have a different -- I do have a different view. See, as I said to you, the first regulations and laws I’ve written in the world have been in common law countries that we have the same law system. In Australia, we were -- as I said, we wrote the first regulation on digital assets back in 2015. Now, why could I do that? It was because I had one regulator, one government to do that. In the US, you’ve got multiple regulators across multiple states. States have very different regulations to federal. It’s a big jar of spaghetti. It’s very difficult to get alignment across 52 states, whereas in many of the countries that I work in, you’ve got one regulator, it’s one country with the same policymakers, and federal and states don’t matter.
28:48Loretta JosephSo, I think that’s a key key factor on why adoption is slower, because you’ve just got too many regulators to make happy. And if you look at something like Bitcoin, Bitcoin’s a commodity, so who’s regulating it? An ICO is regulated by the SEC, but the Commodities Commission take over some of that regulation. So, you’ve got multi-pronged regulators doing the same thing. I think the second thing is the US is a very large country, but some states are doing it well. A very good friend of mine, Caitlin Long, has been amazing in the regulations that she’s written in Wyoming. I mean, they have digital banks now.
28:48Loretta JosephThey have been unbelievably progressive. So, I don’t think there’s -- I think on the whole it seems like it’s not, because maybe there’s not the political will there either, but on some state levels they’re probably more progressive than I’ve seen many countries. I think it also comes down to -- I’ve had big problems in large countries changing legislation, because don’t forget, when we’re talking about regulations of a new asset class, there’s a whole lot of different legal frameworks that need to be changed. Now, to do that in even Australia or Canada or the US, to take it as the maximum, or Europe, is nearly impossible. So the countries I’ve been able to walk in, write legal frameworks, and put them into legislation have been the smaller, more innovative island states, to be honest, because they don’t have these legacy systems where it takes years and years and years to get bills and laws passed.
28:48Loretta JosephSo, I think that slows down the adoption of technologies. It’s not that they don’t understand. It’s not that they’re behind. I think the SEC could be a little bit more progressive sometimes on certain things. But they’re busy. They’ve got plenty of other stuff to regulate. So, I think it comes down to that. Legacy systems. The bigger the country, the harder it is to get regulation and more change because you have to lobby. Having so many regulators in so many different states which follow different regulations.
31:27Kamal HubbardThanks. So we only have a few more minutes left, so there was a question in the chat that I wanted to address, and it’s to Stefano. And if Loretta could chime in afterwards, that’d be great too. It says, Stefano, what’s the best legal tool to allow and make it easy for people that don’t know much about crypto and blockchain to invest in this new technology?
31:49Stefano TrescaWell, I will suggest to join an angel syndicate because in many countries, and I’m a member of the Solicitor Regulation Authority here in the UK, although again, I’m now an entrepreneur. So in many countries, especially, well, Europe, UK, Canada, US, if you spend 6 months in an angel syndicate, you automatically become a qualified investor. And what’s happening a lot in the last years, especially in the US, is that normal people are going to lose great opportunity. I’m an investor in 3 unicorns, I believe now there are 4, and I can do it because I’m a qualified investor, but my father can’t, or a lot of normal people, they cannot enjoy these kind of projects.
31:49Stefano TrescaSo if you join a good angel syndicate, that is focused a lot on blockchain, or drop me a message if it’s possible here. And we have one in the UK, but it’s open to people from other countries. 6 months, you’re qualified, you see what’s going on, and then you can invest at the beginning a small amount of your money with other people that are probably investing in 5, 10, or 15 years. Because if you’ve seen Silicon Valley, that’s where all these startup ideas started. The people that are making money is just people sometimes that are not smarter investor, but just they have more information. They were able to invest in Twitter at the beginning.
31:49Stefano TrescaThey were able to invest -- well, we were able to invest in Uber at the beginning. A lot of people didn’t know that was possible. So yeah, just join others, follow them, then you learn and maybe you become a leader.
33:33Kamal HubbardLoretta, your thoughts on that?
33:40Loretta JosephSo I was a derivatives trader for 30 years, and I’m just going to say to everybody, buyer beware. There is no asset class in the world that goes one way forever. Whatever goes up comes down. So do not invest in anything you don’t understand or you’ve done your research in. And I think that’s what we as regulators say. It’s not that we’re trying to ban technology, but what is our role as a regulator? Whether that be the FATF trying to stop money laundering or me as a security regulator, I’m trying to protect an investor and a consumer. Now, the way a consumer and investor has developed out of the last 10 years with, say, the phone -- my daughter at 16 probably understands risk much better than I did as a trader in the GFC because she has access to information.
33:40Loretta JosephI really believe it’s, you know, the dynamism of understanding your risk and how much to invest. It comes down to the point where Don’t invest anything you can’t lose because everything can go to zero. And I always tell that to people, but I think education is the key. Yeah, sophisticated investors are called that for a very reason, because they understand their risk. If we let everybody come out and become sophisticated investors as regulators, we’d have lots of problems because a lot of people that got ripped off, scammed, or lost their money would come back to us as regulators and say that that shouldn’t have happened.
33:40Loretta JosephSo education. I think, as our last speaker said, is very important. I mean, I started my whole journey by reading a book called The Blockchain Revolution by Don Tapscott. That changed my life. So I think read as much as you can, understand as much as you can, don’t take anyone’s advice, only invest as much as you can -- you’re prepared to lose, and just do remember that no asset class goes one way forever.
35:19Kamal HubbardWell, thanks so much, Loretta and Stefano, and that concludes this panel, and, uh, I believe I’m gonna pass it off to the next, uh, panel here. So take it away.
35:32Loretta JosephThanks, guys.
35:34Stefano TrescaAwesome.
35:35Kamal HubbardThank you, Kamal.
35:36Stefano TrescaThank you, Loretta. Thank you, Stefano.
