Thank you, and hello, everyone.
My name is Brian Mosoff. I am the CEO of Ether Capital, a Toronto-based, publicly listed company focused on Ethereum infrastructure and its ecosytem.
I am also the president of the Canadian Web3 Council, which is an education group that's here to service folks like yourselves on understanding the technology, its potential for Canada and thoughtful regulation.
I have also been an adviser to the Ontario Securities Commission and IIROC. I have helped Purpose Investments, which is an entity related to Ether Capital. I put together the world's first Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs.
I would say that we've done some things very well as a country. We've led. Other countries did not come first to the ETF market. We did that in Canada. In terms of structured products, we've done incredibly well.
I've been around the industry for about a decade now. I've watched it grow from a small asset, which was basically just Bitcoin back in 2012 or 2013 when I first started following the space. The entire industry was worth just a few hundred million dollars. At the time, that seemed quite large, but by today's standards, the tokens themselves—there are hundreds or thousands of tokens or cryptocurrencies—based on the price—which fluctuates, of course—have near a trillion dollars of total market cap.
The industry has grown into hundreds of businesses and new verticals. We're no longer talking about an industry that's just a few players and a few hundred million dollars; we're talking about some of the world's leading venture capital firms allocating billions of dollars over the coming years—and over the previous number of years—into this industry.
I think many technologists—people like myself—view this as the future, as society moves from a world based on assets in specific jurisdictions to a more Internet-friendly, global population. You have communication tools like Twitter that are disrupting local media. Now we have digital currencies that are perhaps challenging central banking policy.
The assets are volatile—there's no question. I'm not saying that today people will replace the way they pay their rent with something like bitcoin or ether, but I think there's a societal shift, as we move to a more digital economy, to embrace these technologies. I think it's important that Canada recognizes this as an opportunity. There's no question that it's going to be volatile. It's going to be a scary time, as the world we know today will not look the same in 10 years.
One thing I think a fair bit about is that cryptocurrencies get tangled up with blockchain and things that are making the headlines, or about the volatility price of these assets. When I think about the future of Canada's economy, I imagine how our dollars are going to move to something more digital, whether we call that a central bank digital currency or a stablecoin, which is regulated in a certain way. I think that we can't and shouldn't design that technology or those dollars—and it would be dangerous to imagine building them—without recognizing that a global financial system is being created here in an alternate universe. That is happening largely around these digital currencies.
The opportunity to program the money and to have developers build more transparent tools and ways of trading or interacting with these assets outside of siloed, black-box institutions is very important. I think it's actually an opportunity for Canada to get this right, to ensure that we remain relevant and that people still have a desire for our currencies. That's something I'm very passionate about.
What is at the heart of Bitcoin? What is the heart of Ethereum? Why are we so excited about this? Why do you have a number of members in the industry on this call right now?
It's that we see that these assets are more than just a single token with a price. I think of specifically Ethereum as a global settlement layer for all sorts of activities.
In the early days, perhaps it was just people trading or moving ether back and forth between accounts. Over time, we've seen verticals emerge that have grown into their own industries. They may have started in a petri dish and were worth just a small amount of dollars, but we ended up with NFTs, which is the ability to have a piece of art tokenized on a blockchain, whether it's a digitally native piece of art or someone trying to take a painting to tokenize that asset to be swapped or fractionalized.
We have the metaverse. We also have something called stablecoins, which are tokenized dollars. Most that exist in this industry are tokenized U.S. dollars. It used to be only a few billion dollars, and now we have hundreds of billions of dollars moving around these ecosystems.
I think about Ethereum as this global settlement layer for all sorts of activities, all sorts of assets. With some of them, over time we're going to have the spectrum of things that may not make sense to us today or to many in this room. It's hard to imagine maybe why an NFT or a digital piece of art holds value, or why the metaverse is something exciting, but then you have something like stablecoins and businesses like Visa coming along and saying that maybe this is a better form of settlement between their data centres, so we will have this spectrum of activities taking place and being cleared on this single layer, which is Ethereum. It could be something that's not Ethereum, but today it does seem that Ethereum is what is emerging to be the leading platform.
I think this is really exciting. There's no question that the recent news around FTX is unfortunate for retail investors, for companies or businesses or pension funds that had invested in that leading platform. This was a platform that existed outside of Canada, outside of the U.S., although there technically was a U.S. registration. As Mr. Hyman was saying, we need to recognize or separate that fraud is fraud, and that's different from the industry, and that in a way there is no regulation that will pass such that if someone on the inside of the C suite level wants to be nefarious and go out of their way to hide certain activities, we can prevent that.
We're here today to lend our time, as much of it as needed, whether it's today or people reaching out to us via email, to help educate, to help figure out what the opportunities are for Canada and how we move this industry forward, and to recognize that despite the price of today, the industry is not going to go away, and we need to be thoughtful about policy and how to move this forward so we are well positioned over the next five years or decade to play a meaningful role in this technology.
Thank you.
