Thanks, everyone. I'll be happy to answer questions in English or French.
My name is Pascal St-Jean. I am the president of 3iQ Corporation. We are a digital asset manager. We were the first to bring a fully regulated crypto product, spot bitcoin, an Ethereum product, globally through the regulating process. We believe that this industry should be regulated in the right way to protect investors. Our mission is to make crypto safe and secure and easy for investors across Canada.
A lot of my colleagues at Osler—not colleagues, but friends—had talked about a lot of the challenges in the industry, which I will repeat in a little bit, but I'd like to frame this a little bit more in terms of stories of actual Canadian citizens, particularly friends and family, and how this industry is impacting them. I think, in the end, what we're trying to do here is not only help industry but help Canada and our citizens across the nation, as well as our businesses.
I'll share a story of my parents, who grew up in northern Ontario and started a very small business in the early 1980s. During that time, as small business owners they were out of reach of real estate and out of reach of accredited investors, solutions that today are mostly very sophisticated investment products available for individuals who meet certain standards. They had no access to necessary capital or to debt to scale their business, and at the same time were poorly advised personally on their investments.
Fast-forward 40-plus years. They were in a spot, and it didn't look like retirement was ever possible. Thanks to these new industries and our products, which were launched actually before I joined the company, my parents were able to invest in this new emerging asset class, which gave them the ability to take their retirement last year. It was quite an amazing piece of news from that perspective.
Why I'm sharing this story, though, is that Canadians need access and need clarity.
Fast-forward to today. I'm seeing more and more similar stories for our younger generations, people in their twenties and thirties asking us all the time how to gain access to assets and how to move forward in life in terms of being able to grow financially. We know for a fact that wage earners are behind in Canada, not keeping up with inflation, not keeping up with the cost of living. On the flip side, asset owners—people who own businesses and real estate and other types of asset classes—are getting richer. The reality is that we need to create technology that will simplify asset ownership and fractionalize asset ownership. That's the power blockchain could bring to multiple industries, not just cryptocurrencies, which I'll be happy to talk about moving forward.
From our perspective, we're seeing that the solution is less about distribution of wealth and more about empowerment of wealth. That comes through blockchain technology. We believe that blockchain is not going anywhere. It's here to stay. The question becomes one of which countries want to participate and utilize this new industry and this emerging asset class to help grow their economies.
We believe that Canada has seen a head start in certain areas. There are banking challenges. There are insurance challenges. From our industry, from the finance side, we were able to get a head start globally. We are seeing that becoming more and more difficult as regulation is not being clear. As my friends at Osler were saying, our compliance costs, our legal costs, are very high, because we are educating the regulators. We are educating everyone we work with. Again, we're doing so because we want to be fully regulated and bring safe, secure products to the market.
From our perspective, our analysis of the benefits for Canada are job creation and talent retention. Last year we saw billions of dollars globally, from a venture capital perspective, enter the space, the fastest-growing investment space globally, and a lot of talent—engineers, mathematicians, scientists, as well as marketers and many other types of roles—is going into the blockchain space. We either keep the talent here or it will go somewhere else. There will be a brain drain if we do not act.
Global investment is knocking at the door. It's holding off, though. It's waiting for clarity. With Canada's being a G7 nation, if regulation becomes clear and a clear road map becomes present, we will see billions of dollars entering the ecosystem, both as underlying asset investments and as new capital for industry.
I also believe we need diversification of our economy. Being able to take charge and take the lead globally on blockchain will allow us to do just that.
From that, if we have clarity in regulation and allow the economy or the industry to boom in Canada, the digital economy itself will give wage earners the ability to participate in the digital economy, whether as asset owners or as participants in this new space. Fractionalization of ownership, whether it is of cryptocurrency, real estate, fine art or other assets, will enable Canadians across the country to have a small piece of assets to help them grow their net worth as they try to build a life for themselves across Canada.
These are the opportunities we see, including access to debt and to capital and to financing through peer-to-peer networks and through decentralized finance. There are a lot of opportunities across the board for businesses, for citizens and for commerce coming here.
With that said, I look forward to talking about some of these stories and the technology behind this. I have tons of examples of companies we've invested in, such as Neoflow and Stablecorp, bringing cross-border payments for businesses, enabling blockchain for the oil and gas industry and saving hundreds of millions of dollars in that process.
I look forward to your questions.