How crypto will transform the world within 10 years?

Hey, everyone, it's Rachel Wolfson. Today I'm here with Margaret Rosenfeld. She is the Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Deltech. Hi, Margaret, how are you?

Hi. Thanks so much for having me on and really great to see Cointelegraph here in the Bahamas coming covering everything that's going on in crypto in the Bahamas.

Yeah, well, thank you for joining us. And Margaret, you spoke on a panel here today and you were talking a little bit about Web3 frameworks and the regulatory frameworks around Web3. Can you kind of discuss that with us?

Sure. So with crypto, everyone focuses on the fancy words like bitcoin, stablecoins, but underpinning this is a tech revolution that is going on called Web3. And part of that tech tech revolution is looking at things such as the digital divide that we have in many nations everywhere. So I'll say in the US everyone's familiar with this, where you have counties that just don't have broadband access to Internet. Well, how can we move forward with crypto without that? That's part of Web3. Also part of Web3 are technologies like artificial intelligence and big data. The telecom has to catch up with this as well. So we're, we were talking about what governments are doing to make sure they can be nimble, almost be ahead of the innovators, which is what we have in the Bahamas. That's the viewpoint when you talk to the different regulators here. They want to try to be ahead of where the innovators are so they can be ready to meet them and support them.

So why are we seeing that mindset in the Bahamas versus somewhere like the United States, for instance?

Sure. So, and you know, I'm trained as a US Based lawyer, so worked with companies in the US for many years, public companies, securities lawyer, corporate lawyer. So I have a lot of background in exactly what the US Is grappling with. And the United States is the standard bearer in terms of regulation. And it's developed this by having lots of specialized agencies, the irs for example, then you have the sec and our industry hits all these different agencies. So a coordinated effort among the agencies was really needed. And President Biden with his executive order earlier this year, set that forth. So we're starting to see that coordinated effort. So it's a little harder for a larger country which has established domains for ownership of different things, for, for smaller countries where they can be faster, they can be more flexible. And that's not to say they're easy. I will tell you that the Bahamas, I've worked in banking for 25 years. And the Bahama regulator, the central bank, is probably the toughest regulator I've ever had to deal with from a banking perspective in terms of compliance. So it's not that they're easy, it's just that they're more accessible. You're more closer to work with you. Look at Christine Roll, who is, with. Who is the head of the Commission Commission of the Bahamas. She is at the leading edge coming up with the DARE act, the white paper that has come out on digital assets. They're able to do this because they don't have as many agencies where responsibilities are divided as in the U.S. i.

See now, is the Bahamas looking at any other models being implemented in other places, like El Salvador, for instance, and what they're doing with bitcoins, the Bahamas looking at those types of. Of frameworks?

Well, actually, the Bahamas had the sand dollar way before anybody else. So when I say the Bahamas in the lead, the Bahamas has been in this for a bit. And a lot of that has to do with Deltec. Delco. Deltec was here in 2017. It was really the first bank in the world you could go to if you had a blockchain or crypto company and say, hey, can I bank with you? I was, I had, I had clients that I was working with, and I couldn't get them into any bank in the world just because they were working in this new fringe technology. Technology moves from fringe to frontier to familiar. And in 2017, it was fringe. Deltex. That's what we focus on. The innovators, the trailblazers. But we also are in a great, in great country, the Bahamas, which has a huge regulatory system or a bank that's gone, goes back to the 40s. So we have all this compliance that you're not. You're not working with. No. You know that the bank has really vetted every single thing that's going on every step of the way. So. But they were the first bank that banked people in blockchain, in crypto, established bank. There are a lot of startup banks, some of them very shady, that took money. But they were the first established bank in there. And that's what we like to do. We like to work with those people.

So when you say banked people into, you know, the cryptocurrency space, what, what exactly do you mean by that?

So if you, for example, you're a company, a startup company developing something in using blockchain technology, and you raise your first round of 10 million and let's say that's in fiat, which is paper money. Getting a bank account to put that in so you can pay your employees. You couldn't find a bank that would take you, so you would not find established bank because what the area you were working in, it was considered fringe. Now that it's moved into what I call the frontier and you move into frontier with technology and technology revolutions. When you start to see establishment come in, in 2017, we had, you know, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan saying, Sham, never going to happen. Now JP Morgan has, you know, established they're in the space, they've accepted the space. So we're in that frontier space. I call it still frontier because people still want to grapple with understanding it completely. What is crypto? What is blockchain? How does it work? Explain to me in depth. We'll eventually get to the familiar. Think about like cloud computing. When you first heard put your data in the cloud, you had to really understand how that worked. When it. And when it was early on, it was fringe. Nobody did it. When it was frontier companies, you would spend hours explaining to them how it worked. Now it's cloud based. Okay, it's familiar, right? That's how technology moves. So right now we're in the frontier space and that's. It's exciting because there's still so many more opportunities for what we're going to see that this technology can do.

Right. And what do you think we'll see next? Because right now we're in this stage that you just explained. So what are we going to see moving forward?

One, I think we're going to start to see, and we've seen this with Ukraine, the breakdown of international borders that will occur with the move towards some kind of digital currency. And perhaps in, I would say maybe 10 years, we'll actually have a global digital currency. What does that do for freedoms for people? That's just amazing to think about. If I am no longer dependent upon my government and my government can't control me because government is mainly controlled with money and how money is used and I can freely move with money. Then think about Afghanistan and the women there that were left behind. A lot of them are getting supported by cryptocurrency right now in order to. They can't work anymore, they're trying to go to online schools, but they can't pay for them. There are foundations that have been set up and all the money is being set via cryptocurrency because you can't send it via a traditional bank into a country like that. So I think we're. The major thing that I'm excited about is the breaking down of these borders of totalitarianism that occur. But we will see new industries. Health care is going to be an industry that can be majorly changed by blockchain technology but it has a hurdle which involves data. Right. So we have HIPAA in the US we have GDPR and so we have all these data laws that developed but now we have a system that is going to let, let patients own their data. So it's a very different concept. What we can do in health care with blockchain technology could be amazing. Clinical trials information where you're tracking that information and it's immutable and then can easily be shared. Taking AI technology on this, on this immutable blockchain and tracing, you know, patterns and things, it's going to be pretty amazing what we can do in health care with not just, it's not just blockchain, it's the, it's the triangle of a big data AI and blockchain. Right.

Definitely the convergence. What are your thoughts? You mentioned the sand dollar.

Yes.

Now is that the Bahamas stablecoin?

That is the Bahama government. Yes. So they issued that. So, so it's interesting. I think we're going to see a lot of coins issued by governments that will occur in the next year. Truthfully I, my belief is that the private stablecoins will be the most successful ones overall because they are arising because people do not necessarily trust governments and also the dominance of a government over other governments in cross border transactions that could result. So I think I actually have more faith in the private stablecoin approach.

And that's what the sand dollar is.

Well no, the sand dollar is not but, but if you look at like tether USD those would be examples.

How do you obtain the sand dollar? I asked this question a lot because I don't know.

And then we'll have to get you some sand dollars. Okay, so we're going to work on that. We're going to get her some sand.

How do you, how do you get it?

Well you have to have a wallet. Do you have a digital wallet?

Of course.

Okay, that's the start. Okay. Yes. And then we'll have to do some KYC aml. We can get you some dollars.

And now you mentioned tether and usdc. There's a lot of potential there. Can you explain why?

So cross border payments and this is really the great thing that digital currency can do and you know the stablecoin pegs it at something that can work cross border.

Right.

Quite. Quite simply. Right. Most of the payment symbol systems have to use some sort of stablecoin. So that's why we're going to see the rise of the stablecoin even more. So.

Yeah.

Wonderful. And regulation, of course.

Yeah. I was going to say. And the regulation that comes with it.

Yes. Great.

Well, Margaret, this has been wonderful.

It's been so nice talking to you.

Thank you so much for joining us.

And thank everyone for coming to the Bahamas to listen to us.

Yeah, thanks, Margaret.