Stablecoins, RWAs & DeFi: What Institutions Actually Want
episode
Talking Tokens: Crypto, Onchain Finance, Investing
28 min
2 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Jillian Friedman and what is her background in law and crypto?
I read the Bitcoin white paper and it was just a completely fascinating topic. This is not just a passing trend. This is like the beginning of the Internet, but of money. So do you ultimately see them kind of coming together? I do, actually. I think people will interact with financial markets. And the underlying mechanisms will be abstracted away. You know, when we use our phones, we don't need to know exactly how it's working. We just know that it helps us do something amazing. Do you think the tokenization market today is solving for maybe the wrong problem? We overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate its impact in the long term. Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions.
Today's guest is Jill Friedman, the Chief Operating Officer at Symbiotic, a decentralized finance infrastructure protocol. She is also a veteran crypto lawyer and former COO and CFO of Ether Capital. Jill, welcome on. Thanks. Happy to be here. Happy to have you. Yeah, I know when I was doing some research on you before the episode, You began your career in law before moving into digital assets at the National Bank of Canada, which is interesting. I don't think we've had anyone on the show who has worked there. So maybe what was kind of the transition like and then what convinced you that crypto wasn't just like this niche weird thing, but actually something that you wanted to move your career to?
Sure. So I actually kind of like fell down the crypto rabbit hole with Bitcoin because that was really like the only the first and really only crypto that existed in a meaningful way in the first couple of years. And it Honestly, it happened in a way that, you know, there's like a lot of people say that like failure is more is more important or more impactful than success. And like my story, just to like get a little personal here is I was working at a big law firm. I was really hoping to have that like balance. big law firm in the tower with the fancy clothes career, like working long hours, like working on big files. And the firm that I was at, the partners that I was working with left and it kind of like left me without a job and a path within that avenue.
And at the same time, this was like 2013, 2014, Bitcoin was starting to be something people were talking about more and more. And I was already very involved in the local startup scene and thinking like, well, I really like tech. I really like builders. I want to be around people that are building cool things. And I would go to these different meetups. And one of the meetups was about Bitcoin. And I read the Bitcoin white paper and it was just a completely fascinating topic. And just like the more and more time that I spent around people that were immersed in that space in the early days, actually from the very beginning made me made me think that this is not just like a passing trend. This is like the beginning of the internet, but of money.
And like, that's kind of what caught, what, what like sucked me in and what keeps me, keeps me in it actually after like a bunch of years is that from the beginning, this is really more than just a passing trend because I don't think I would have stuck around as long as I have, if that was the case.
What about the decentralized side of finance that interests you? Because obviously, like some people go down the path of like CeFi, which is like the centralized exchanges or some things that are more like akin to traditional finance. And then other people go down the path of like the DeFi side, which is a bit more technical, I would argue, and more, you know, self-custody and things like that. So what made you decide to go that route and then ultimately land at Symbiotic?
Yeah. So like if you look at what I've done, it's sort of like overlapped both of those. I guess you could say like sci-fi, defi worlds. And while like ultimately I'm not like a purist or like an ideologue and that's not my primary motivation. I think I can see the pros and cons of both approaches and that for many users and people that want to access this ecosystem and want to access digitally native products and strategies.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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