Episode 131 of the Public Key podcast is here! We all keep coming to this word ‘decentralization’, but the definition of decentralization is quite vague at the moment, with some companies using this term to avoid regulatory compliance oversight and others wanting to create a legal framework that allows for token issuance, smart contract-enabled governance and prescribing token holder rights. In this episode, we speak to Dmitry Fedotov, Head of DLT Foundations Oversight at ADGM, the Abu Dhabi regulators who created the world’s first framework for blockchain foundations, DAOs and web3 entities.
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Public Key Episode 131: Inside the World’s First Blockchain and DLT Foundation Regulatory Framework
If you are an active listener of this podcast, guests keep coming to this word ‘decentralization’. But the definition of decentralization is quite vague at the moment, with some companies using this term to avoid regulatory compliance oversight and others wanting to create a legal framework that allows for token issuance, smart contract-enabled governance and prescribing token holder rights.
In this episode, Ian Andrews (CMO, Chainalysis) tries to get more clarity on what decentralization really means to regulators, as he speaks to Dmitry Fedotov, who is Head of DLT Foundations Oversight at ADGM, the Abu Dhabi regulators who created the world’s first framework for blockchain foundations, DAOs and web3 entities.
Dmitry shares his time as a Stanford graduate with extensive experience in AI and blockchain and buying Bitcoin in 2014.
His entrepreneurial journey proved invaluable as he transitioned to the regulators. During his early days the Virtual Assets Regulator Authority (VARA), FTX collapsed, and Dmitry was tasked to provide a better understanding of the events to both the public and private sector.
Dmitry and Ian talk about what decentralization really means and how the ADGM created the world’s first purpose-built framework for blockchain foundations, DAOs and web3 entities, offering regulatory clarity and legal frameworks that are attracting global entities and fostering innovation in the blockchain space.
Quote of the episode
“It’s the first, world’s first, purpose built framework for blockchain foundations, DAOs or web3 entities, that allows a lot of things, including fun stuff like token issuance. So you don’t have to go to other jurisdictions where you do token issuance like BVI or Panama.” – Dmitry Fedotov (Head of DLT Foundations Oversight, ADGM)
Minute-by-minute episode breakdown
2 | Dmitry’s early days of AI, decentralized systems and buying Bitcoin in 2014
6 | From Bitcoin enthusiast and entrepreneur to Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA)
8 | Introducing the world’s first purpose-built framework for blockchain foundations, DAOs and web3 entities
13 | Blockchain Foundation’s journey to becoming fully decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)
16 | Progressive decentralization in blockchain and the regulatory challenges that ensue
19 | DAOs: To regulate or not to regulate that is the question
22 | What are the limitations of the EU MiCA regulations for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs)
26 | Why Hacken and other DLT-focused companies are eyeing ADGM as their new headquarters
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Speakers on today’s episode
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Transcript
Ian:
Hello, and welcome to Public Key. This is your host, Ian Andrews. Today, we have a special conversation with Dmitry Fedotov, who is head of DLT Foundations Oversight at the Abu Dhabi Global Markets, or ADGM. He’s a Stanford graduate with 11 years experience in AI and blockchain and one of the few regulators that I’ve ever encountered who has come from industry into the regulatory space. So, I’m really looking forward to getting his perspective today. Dmitry, thanks so much for joining us on Public Key.
Dmitry:
Yeah. And it’s such a pleasure to be here. I have the highest respect for Chainalysis as a company. You have been a beacon of transparency and a provider of accountability, and I also follow the podcast very closely. I think we have a few friends in common. I’m really excited to be here.
Ian:
Well, that is a huge compliment, Dmitry. Thanks so much. I’d love to start these conversations with the backstory. How did you find your way into digital assets? It’s an unusual industry, and for someone to have been in the space for 11 years and counting, takes you back into the very early days. So, maybe take us back to that point in time where you first encountered crypto.
Dmitry:
Thank you for asking this question, and it was quite a journey. So, back in 2008, I established a company called Multi Channel that was developing AI or back then, it would probably rather be machine learning algorithms to optimize marketing strategies. At the same time, I was studying at Stanford. So, at Stanford, I attended the course on decentralized systems, part of which was on blockchain. And I thought, oh, okay, so there is another very different angle to approach the problem that I had where I wanted to have decentralization for those AI algorithms that were spreading messages throughout about 2,500 platforms ranging from Google Ads to YouTube to Baidu in China, to Yandex in Russia or JMX in Germany. And this kind of stuck with me. A few years later, I was pitching the product of this company to Ogilvy in New York in their headquarters.
And after the pitch was done, the CEO of Ogilvy approached me and said, “Hey, can you do me a favor? There are this guys that want to be our clients, but we have absolutely no idea what they do. So, you seem to be on a techie side. Maybe you can go and check it out. They are right there on the Wall Street and explain to me what it is.” So, this was my introduction to the Bitcoin Center in New York in 2014 where I came in, and the people were very friendly. Pizzas were around. There was this big screen with Satoshi Square Exchange, and apparently, there was not many deals going on because they took time. They explained to me the vision. They explained to me who Satoshi is. They showed me the white paper, and I thought, okay, so blockchain part sounds interesting. Being potentially a complete different form of currency is a little bit shady. But on the other hand, my next stop is in Los Angeles, so maybe I can just sell the script to one of the producers.
And so, I bought about 1,000 US dollars worth for Bitcoin. So, this is the beginning of my journey. Later on, because of this slight overlay in AI and blockchain that is cryptography, I organically merged into the blockchain space. Unfortunately, I didn’t go all in on Bitcoin. It was not such an obvious path. But I went in on the technology and I established a few companies and some of the better, well-known ones are BC Vault, for example. BC Vault is a uber ultra secure crypto wallet. It’s actual cold wallet, physical cold wallet that has never been hacked. And I won’t go into details how it can be established, but there is a foolproof mechanism to verify that not one unit out there has been hacked.
Then, I was genesis team of GBC and we were optimizing blockchains. We were forking public blockchains, and then, using AI to optimize them for better performance. So, yeah, this was a way for me to very organically get into blockchain. Transition was great. I think I was very fortunate to have lived in kind of a historical epicenters of where the blockchain was born. I lived in Hong Kong for many, many years, Singapore, China, US, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. Now, I was almost following this migration. You can remember ever since 2018 probably, the exchanges and the industry players were migrating, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malta, Europe, Caymans, back to Singapore, and so on and so forth.
Ian:
Yeah, they were chasing regulatory clarity.
Dmitry:
Exactly.
Ian:
Or running from regulatory oversight depending on the year, it seemed like.
Dmitry:
Exactly. You’re spot on.
Ian:
I’m curious, so from that early days, seeing the Bitcoin Center in New York, buying your first 1,000 Bitcoin, when I think the price was probably a few hundred dollars per coin, hopefully, you held onto some of that. You don’t have to disclose.
Dmitry:
Unfortunately, [inaudible 00:04:50] don’t.
Ian:
Oh, no.
Dmitry:
No. I bought it for about 70 US or so. I sold it 1,500.
Ian:
It’s a good profit.
Dmitry:
Yes, it was.
Ian:
How did you go from there? What led you, I guess, to the Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority or VARA in Dubai? Because that to me, seems like such an interesting shift in career direction from entrepreneur to regulator.
Dmitry:
That’s a great question. So, at the time, when I started speaking with VARA in Dubai, I was living in Hong Kong. I was not really keen to move to Dubai. But in Hong Kong, I was part of the Bitcoin association and we were actively lobbying the government of Hong Kong to recognize virtual assets. So, when I started speaking with VARA in Dubai, I recognized that the approach is completely different from what I was used to in Hong Kong and Singapore and Germany. It was much more open and open-minded, and there was a clear mission to establish a standalone crypto regulator without legacy luggage. And this really spoke to me in a way. So, I decided to give it a go, and I joined Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority. It was an amazing ride. So, I joined in November, 2022.
Ian:
Just as FTX is collapsing, you walked in the door.
Dmitry:
Yeah. Exactly. Day one for me, and FTX collapsed, and I was the representative from the industry who understood what it means. It was a very interesting situation I was in on day one as a regulator. So, I had regulators on one side and I had the industry participants on the other side, and they were trying to understand each other. What does it actually mean? What is happening with FTX and what does it mean for that? But fast-forward about half a year later, we released the regulations in February ’23. It was an instant success. It was just the right mixture of people in the team and in the leadership and the fundamental work that was done by our legal team and our legal partners. Plus of course, Dubai by that time, became almost a crypto hub as it is now. So, it was closed on the way.
So, Binance already was there. FTX kind of was there. Kobe, major players were already in Dubai. And by the time when we released the REX, it just exploded. The interest just went through the roof. This was the beginning. And almost a year later, I was asked to head a new DOT foundations framework in ADGM. And this appealed to me because I had an opportunity to build something from ground up. The draft was there, the idea was there. There was an ongoing public consultation, but I had the opportunity to almost build a startup in a sense of those regulations. So, I needed to identify who is it for, what to onboard in the regulations and how to structure this. And I think a big part of the success was exactly as you mentioned in the beginning, the fact that I spent so many years in the industry and I had the right connections, I could pull in people from that actually required this framework to begin with, blockchain foundations, DAOs, Web3 entities, and immediately establish this frameworks in a way that it instantly became a success and instantly gained traction.
Ian:
Let’s dive in a little bit because I imagine we have some listeners that maybe haven’t had the opportunity to review the framework in its entirety. How would you summarize what’s different and special about what you’ve created there?
Dmitry:
So, in a nutshell, it’s the world’s first purpose-built framework for blockchain foundations, DAOs, or Web3 entities that allows a lot of things, including fun stuff like token issuance. So, you don’t have to go to other jurisdictions where you do token issuance like BVI or Panama and such. It creates a full regulatory certainty because it’s not a framework, it’s not a traditional foundations framework like it is in other jurisdictions where you adapt 100-year-old law that is actually built for inheritance planning or wealth management rather than to govern a protocol. So, this one is completely purpose-built for exactly this kind of operation. So, it allows for token issuance, smart contract-enabled governance. It prescribes token holder rights. You have the ability to delegate certain matters to token holders. And all of this creates a legal wrapper for entities that are decentralized, autonomous, and ownerless, which I think is quite an achievement for any regulator in the world to even think about this, about at this stage. So, it’s really very, very unique.
Ian:
We’ve had a number of regulators on the show as well as a number of entities who have been requesting regulatory clarity. And all three of the things you just mentioned are where they’ve really struggled. The concept that you can have an organization that is ownerless and has no traditional corporate governance where there’s individuals in charge seems completely foreign. I’m curious about how did that come about and what were some of the challenges maybe in bringing along the ADGM and related agencies to appreciate the importance of being able to do that?
Dmitry:
So, ADGM itself is an amazing place where really the ideas drive. I didn’t have any pushback in our jurisdiction. By the way, ADGM is a separate jurisdiction, it’s a international financial center. I think the best way to describe why we were so interested in making this happen is because we wanted the protocols to come to ADGM because the protocols usually come with the whole universe of their ecosystem companies. So, if it’s blocked layer one, it’s usually layer twos or wallet providers or DAEXes or exchanges or liquidity providers, market makers and so on, so forth. So, instead of going after each individual one, we decided to bring in the infrastructure here, which then resulted in all of this ecosystem companies following it to our jurisdiction.
And by providing this entity’s definitive regulatory clarity where they don’t operate between, let’s say two frameworks and a regulator make a decision that today, it’s fine, but tomorrow, it’s not. So, we decided to give this maximum level of comfort to the industry and perhaps enable them to stop shifting from one jurisdiction to another. This great migration that happened around 2017, ’18 where companies such as Binance and crypto.com and so on started off, let’s say in China, migrated to Hong Kong, then to Singapore, then to Malta and so on.
It’s a little known fact, but ADGM is the first jurisdiction where the virtual asset framework at all was enacted. It’s the world’s first jurisdiction where we recognize the potential of virtual assets, and we never stepped away from this concept. So, it happened in 2018. And if you recall, 2018, so what was happening, OneCoin, people disappeared, Bitconnect collapsed, ICOs were dying left and right, and ADGM decided, no, we are going to follow this. We’re going to roll out to the world’s first virtual asset framework, and we never diverged from this mission. So, I hope this will give the comfort to the listeners to explore the jurisdiction because we have been a constant in the space for the past six years.
Ian:
One of the interesting elements of the framework is progressive decentralization, which I think has been a bit of a challenge for the industry, right? Ethereum, I think, has recently been challenged on this point in the US in regulator circles where at the beginning, there were a small number of people who dreamed up Ethereum and the smart contract structure, everything that we know of the network today, and they distributed tokens. And at that point, you would be challenged to describe it as truly decentralized, right? There were a handful of people working together in collaboration.
But today, obviously, Ethereum has thousands of developers and thousands of node operators, and while they all participate in the network, they’re certainly not coordinated by a single entity. Even the Ethereum Foundation, which I think is an important player, is sort of hands off. So, I think that model has been seen as the ideal state for new layer one and layer two chains, and for many protocols operating in the space, but it hasn’t been really accepted as a regulatory framework. There’s been no legal standard that says, “This is actually okay,” that you can start as a centralized entity and over time, progress toward a decentralized model of operations. I’m curious how you arrived at the decision to include that in the framework and how that’s working so far.
Dmitry:
So, I think I’ve spoken with a lot of blockchain foundations and majority of them actually look forward to becoming a full-blown DAO. It’s kind of a natural evolution. Traditionally, layer ones, layer twos, layer zeros, layer threes, all this new acronyms, they start fairly centralized. It’s normal. It’s quite normal for them to be centralized in the beginning, but while the community grows, while the number of stakeholders grow, they want to be able to show that there are no strings attached to this protocol. There is no one single point of failure. There is no one single person that can decide what will happen. And it’s really important, especially for the big protocols and big blockchains, to have this ability to show that they will evolve regardless of what the founders do, where they go, whether they decide to do something else, and so on, so forth. The stakeholders always want to know, okay, regardless what happens with these guys, we can always take the protocol and continue its development and make it better and adjust to new realities. A little bit like the blockchain core, Bitcoin core development team is acting right now.
Ian:
Yeah, it’s interesting because one of the reasons that I’ve seen certain protocols really push the word decentralized. There is no group of individuals here, no company. That is because they seek to avoid regulation. So, the statement is, “Well, we couldn’t possibly participate in anti-money laundering efforts or transaction monitoring because we’re not a regulated entity and you can’t regulate us because we’re not an entity. We only exist in the context of solidity code running on chain.” So, I’ve looked at that and I’ve struggled to see that as a viable long-term solution. People just don’t, I think to operate in the modern financial system, there’s certain prerequisites. We have to have the authority to stop bad actors and prevent illicit activity. I’m curious, while it’s great the framework has adopted that tentative of pre-progressive decentralization and given a legal framework to a DAO, what’s the other side of that? What does it mean to actually be regulated under this framework? Maybe take me through the experience as if I’m a DAO or a Web3 firm applying to be regulated under the framework. What does that look like?
Dmitry:
Sure. So, perhaps that will sound some bit of unusual view coming from a regulator when I say that it’s a choice of a DAO or a blockchain foundation or a Web3 entity to be regulated or not. So, it’s always a choice. There are players that are fine being decentralized. Decentralization, by the way, doesn’t mean that it’s strictly unincorporated, but they always have the choice whether they want or need a legal wrapper for their entity or not, and where to establish as legal wrapper.
The reality is that people who were in the space for the past, I don’t know, five, six years evolved from, let’s say a DAO being a very close-knit community of several people to an organism that actually needs things like banking accounts, that needs to sign legal contracts with external partners or use insurance products. And the reality is, unless you have some form of legal wrapper, it’s not possible to do. So, I don’t think that it’s a task for the regulator to prescribe, okay, now everybody who is operating a DAO must register. But it’s rather, our mission is rather to give the ability to establish a legal entity that suits this particular purpose.
And this has proven to be quite successful in many ways for both sides. On one hand, yes, we do provide this legal certainty and the ability to establish an entity that has no owners, has no beneficiaries and is completely decentralized, is governed by smart contracts and token holders. And for these communities that were in place for a long time, it created the opportunity to have banking trails or to be able to sign the contracts or use insurance products and all kinds of other benefits. So, yeah, the interesting point, what you mentioned in the beginning is decentralization. So, we all keep coming to this word decentralization, but the definition of decentralization is quite vague at the moment, and I’m actually curious to hear your view. What do you think decentralization level should look like? What does it mean to be decentralized?
Ian:
Yeah, I have a somewhat skeptical lens on this topic because I think I can point to something like Ethereum that we just described, who’s went from a project started by a small number of individuals who had complete control, decision-making authority to something that’s now much greater. And it’s a wide number of uncoordinated market participants who touch different layers of the technology stack and are involved in different ways. So, I think that to me, is the ideal model. When people describe decentralized network, I would point to what Ethereum is today, and I think that process of progressive decentralization is very much what they’ve done.
But my skepticism comes in when I talk to organizations that talking a lot about decentralization explicitly for the purposes of avoiding becoming a regulated financial services provider. And I think in my mind, the reality is if you’re providing lending services or banking services or financial derivatives trading, regardless if you put a different label on them, like a crypto-specific name, generally, in most countries around the world, we’ve agreed that all of those things require some oversight because they can very quickly go badly wrong in terms of economic loss for governments, for individuals, for companies that may be participating.
I struggle with the, we want to be decentralized in order to avoid participating in the regulatory scheme because it’s expensive or it’s complex or it somehow disrupts the business model that we’re intending. That to me, doesn’t feel like a long-term sustainable effort. It feels a little bit like cheating. So, this is why I was excited about the progressive decentralization concept that you included explicitly. I’m curious about once an organization, a DAO says, “Okay, we do want to be regulated under the framework,” what obligations are then applied to them? How do they have to demonstrate if they’re doing a token issuance, for example, this safety of the issuance, the monitoring of the use of the tokens, things like that? How does that come into play?
Dmitry:
Yeah, so I think we approached it from really a 360-degree view, and the consultations that we had with layer ones, layer twos and all possible layers of blockchains and other participants of the industry help really a lot. So, in practical sense, whenever we register an entity under this framework, we require them to produce the basic documentation that describes exactly what they need to do. So, to begin with, it would be something legal like a charter of the foundation, but then, we actually do go ahead and read and study the white paper if there is a token to be issued, the tokenomics, and then, the DOT framework. So, let’s say somebody wants to issue a deflationary utility token on their own blockchain or on some other blockchain. We look for this in the charter, then we see whether it’s captured in the white paper. We’ll look at tokenomics that it reflects in the right way, and then, we go all the way to the code level in the smart contract, in the token smart contract where we check that it’s actually going to be a deflationary token.
Ian:
That’s amazing. So, you’re actually auditing the smart contract code as part of the application process?
Dmitry:
Correct.
Ian:
Yeah. That’s fantastic because I think there’s so many people that read the white paper but maybe don’t have the technical skills to actually go look at the code, and those two things don’t always line up in practice.
Dmitry:
That’s correct. This is a level of oversight that I think the investors or the stakeholders expect from the regulator to differentiate between unincorporated or loosely regulated entities and something that is actually being regulated. This creates this additional layer of certainty. Although this framework that I was called into to head in ADGM is currently about 10 months old, I’m already hearing that jurisdictions like Europe, MiCA, and Switzerland, when they hear that the issuance was done under this framework, they already recognize the standard and assume that, okay, so you went through this process. ADGM is not a joke. We are not known for being very loose on our ecosystem participants and they perceive them as ready to establish regulated exchange or broker dealer in their jurisdiction and so on, knowing that the base is covered.
Ian:
Yeah, that was actually going to be my next question is we’ve seen interesting progress in a number of different jurisdictions around the world on digital assets. I think most famously, the European Union with MiCA set up, I think a good structure for crypto businesses and probably exchanges specifically where there’s a common licensing scheme across all the EU member countries. So, you don’t need to go get regulated in each one of the 26 countries if you want to participate across the EU. Just recently, I think completed some of their stablecoin regulations. So, there’s some standardization around what a stablecoin is and how are the assets backing those stablecoins held? I think smart people might debate whether the regulations are favorable, not favorable to certain businesses, but at least it’s on paper and structure. They specifically though, postponed their efforts around decentralized finance, whereas it seems like in your case, you almost started with DeFi at the core. I’m curious what led you to that path and why was it maybe easier for you to develop a DeFi-friendly framework than the European regulators found it?
Dmitry:
So, ADGM is great in its approach of, we put it on a plate, so we’re not really big on advertising or frameworks, but we are really good at putting together the frameworks that are needed and necessary and demanded by the industry and just assuming that the players will come, and it worked out quite well so far. It’s going continue this way. So, taking this challenging areas that are huge, DeFi is an absolutely huge and largely unregulated space, and addressing their needs was a clear way to go for us. In addition, as you mentioned MiCA regulations, there are challenges that will come if it’s enactment, and I think that many players who count on this regulations to come into force, which they will obviously, in the beginning it’s ’25, there are requirements for all virtual asset service providers or entities that token issuance to be incorporated. So, MiCA requires that to do, but there is no framework to do so, right?
So, ultimately, they will all start searching for the way to create a legal wrapper around their DAO or DeFi platform or blockchain foundation or some form of Web3 product because without that, they will not be able to benefit from this regulation that allows you access to all these member states.
Ian:
Yeah, it’s going to be very interesting to see how MiCA continues to develop, but I could imagine a scenario where you actually have the primary organization licensing themselves under the ADGM framework based in Dubai, and then, having subsidiaries that operate limited scope inside of the European Union potentially for-
Dmitry:
Exactly.
Ian:
… residents of the EU, and then, similarly in other jurisdictions around the world. So, you become the headquarters for the DLT industry over time.
Dmitry:
That’s right. On the upside for this is also this framework already drew a massive number of companies to ADGM, as in, I’m sure you know Hacken, one of the leading blockchain auditors. They are relocating there. So, they establish a physical presence because of this framework, because we require technical audit of the entities and their DLT frameworks and their smart contracts, and they’re considering moving their HQ to ADGM now, which is one of the great examples when it’s the framework drives the adoption of virtual assets and consumes the services from the whole ecosystem of companies that we have here. We have here digital banks, we have insurance companies, we have custodians, we have broker dealers, we have centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, protocols, so all of them suddenly work together and consume each other’s services. It’s just an amazing thing to see when it all kicks in and starts flourishing in a fairly short period of time.
Ian:
I’m sold, Dmitry. How do I move my Web3 foundation to Abu Dhabi? What’s the process if I’m currently not in the region? I want to take on that opportunity that you described.
Dmitry:
Yeah, it’s fairly straightforward if you Google DLT Foundation, that our website with this framework will be the first result. But I’m also, again, a little bit of unusual regulator. I don’t mind getting in direct touch. Feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn, for example, where I’m very easy to find. I’ll be happy to start the conversation and give you the whole roadmap, how to establish this jurisdiction. And by the way, ADGM itself is just an amazing jurisdiction. So, we are in the middle of UAE in Abu Dhabi, the largest Emirate, despite the common opinion that Dubai is. It’s not quite the case. Abu Dhabi is, I believe, 82% of total Emirate area. The ADGM is an international financial center in the capital of UAE. And we are running on direct application of English common law, meaning that we provide 100% for an ownership structures, and at the same time, we provide access to enormous amounts of deployable capital from sovereign wealth funds that are currently at about 1.6, 1.7 trillion of dollars that are ready to be deployed for projects that stimulate innovation and tech and development of emerging technologies.
We are extremely agile. We have the ability to enhance our regulations as necessary when in response to industry requirements. So, it’s really an amazing place, and I really welcome everybody who is listening in and has some form of project that is related to blockchain, DOT or even AI. We have discovered very quickly that this framework actually has such a broad scenarios for application that for example, we are working on one case where the DAO is established to govern a large language model, completely autonomous entity, completely centralized, and it’s governing the development of a large language model by-
Ian:
Wow.
Dmitry:
… the researchers who have the tokens. So, they can reward the large language model by giving it tokens or penalize it by taking away the tokens. The model’s objective is to get all the tokens to become an ideal case, an AGI, artificial general intelligence level. So, this creates the possibility to exactly trace how the model is trained, what is coming in, and then, what the training looks like. And this is just an amazing example of how flexible the framework is, but of course the main target audience is pretty much anyone who is developing something on blockchain or doing token issuance, experimenting with those technologies.
Ian:
That is fantastic. We’re going to link to your website, and obviously, people can find you on LinkedIn where you’re quite active. And this has been an amazing conversation, Dmitry. I’m so excited about what you’ve produced with this new framework, and I think it’s going to be an amazing benefit to the entire industry. So, thank you so much for the tremendous work.
Dmitry:
Thank you so much for this interview, Ian. I’m going to be continuing to be a loyal listener to Public Key podcast, and I hope to see you in Abu Dhabi.
Ian:
Fantastic. I look forward to meeting in person.
Dmitry:
Likewise.
