Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me here to speak.
I am the chief executive officer of Ether Capital, one of the leading public companies in the cryptocurrency sector. We do not face retail directly, meaning crypto assets cannot be purchased through a platform that we hold. We are an access point in the capital markets for exposure to the Ethereum ecosystem and a lot of the developments that are happening in Web3.
I've been a member of the cryptocurrency community for about a decade now, so I wear two hats. I wear the hat of what I would like to believe is a good actor in the space, someone who wants to work with regulators and the government to figure out what appropriate access points are, and to be a leading access point in the capital markets. I also wear the hat of someone who's been in the space for many years, who has a lot of knowledge and experience and who understands the lexicon and complexities of this new industry.
Broadly, I'm excited to be here today to help paint a picture of an industry that's largely been marginalized and pushed to the side for the 13 years or so since its formation. There's an opportunity for Canada to lean in to this industry. It's a new technology. It's an asset class that has grown from essentially nothing into multiple trillions of dollars. We're seeing Canadians who want exposure to this asset class and directional exposure to the assets. They want to do it in appropriate ways, and there's an opportunity to provide that access.
I think most of the conversations that have happened to date have largely been at the regulatory level, figuring out what appropriate registrations would be like for platforms, how that would work, which assets are appropriate and which activities should be accessible to Canadians who want to be good actors. Recent events have kicked off a new conversation. This is the opportunity to recognize that this asset class is here to stay, and it's likely going to be orders of magnitude bigger within the next decade. Ethereum was largely incubated and invented in Canada, and the opportunity here is to lean into a technology, not push it aside and ensure that we have a seat at the table at the next iteration of the web and finance. It's something I care about deeply as a Canadian, as a technologist and as someone who wants to see Canada win here.
There is an opportunity for us to secure a seat at the table. In order to do that, we need at a national level to coordinate better communication across various agencies, a plan of how we're going to create appropriate access points and what our participation is going to be like in the space.
I will also say that there are going to be good and bad actors in the space. In a lot of the focus, the light is shone on the bad actors, the people using it to evade taxes or launder money. However, most of the activity that's taking place in the space is by good actors, the people who want to participate in a growing asset class. There are many new verticals. Some of you may have heard of centralized financing and NFTs. Perhaps none of this stuff makes sense to you, but I'm here to offer my support to anyone on this panel and to anyone in government who wants help navigating this new world.
I think we're all here today to understand how we create appropriate frameworks going forward, to see Canada win in this new sector and look at technologies that can help monitor inappropriate behaviours in these realms. There are new tools that are maybe not familiar to the traditional banking system—I'm happy to chat about them further—to monitor activities, wallet activity, wallet interactions and behaviour analytics to ensure that good actors are safe and using things in a compliant way, and that bad actors are able to be brought to justice.
Thank you. I'm very excited to have this conversation for the next few hours.