Industry committee  I'll just go quickly. I would add two points to this. First, a lot of people will bucket the iteration of the web into three buckets. The first is Web 1.0, which was basically read-only. You're connecting directly to someone else's information. You're reading it, and that's it.

Industry committee  Yes. I believe we're almost out of—

Industry committee  I know you're bumped up against time, but the short answer is that in the long term, we believe that there's going to be very important activity that takes place on these open networks. The question is going to be who owns the tokens that verify, validate and secure all of that activity and those transactions.

Industry committee  Do we have 30—

Industry committee  I will give a short answer and then ask Mr. Hyman to chime in. As far as I know, if quantum is able to break blockchain technology, it would force the space to move to new algorithms that would be quantum-resistant. Some of that research has already begun. More worrisome would be that the entire Internet security would be broken today.

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. I think many joining us today would talk about us having a fragmented securities regulatory environment. I think it's important to understand that retail investors—and I'm going to talk about them specifically for a moment—don't think of things as commodities or securities.

Industry committee  If I can take a step back, I think it's important to recognize that a lot of the activity that has taken place so far inside of these ecosystems has largely been what I call “digitally native”, or blockchain native tech. It's kind of this self-referential loop rather than touching real-world businesses that are out in the “meatspace”, as people in tech would call it.

Industry committee  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.

Finance committee  People would be purchasing our stock through a traditional brokerage account.

Finance committee  I'd also point out, before I get into the specific act, that there are some things that globally we have done very well. We were the first to create true spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. We've led the way in regulation and policy on certain fronts. Platforms and exchanges are starting to come into compliance and have a path towards appropriate registration.

Finance committee  That is accurate—

Finance committee  I'll let you take it on, but that is accurate. Despite our being a public issuer, we are very fortunate to have banking relationships and a “big four” auditor. Those were not easy to obtain. I do hear from a lot of other industry players that this is difficult. They come to us for advice—there's pressure from the audit firms, or above them at the CPAB level—on what can be appropriate activities that can be audited.

Finance committee  Thanks for the question. This is where things get very nuanced. It is much harder to use a self-hosted wallet as a choke point. Due process would need to take place. You don't have a centralized entity that can shut off that wallet or activity, but the opportunity here is to use new tools and train new personnel to use the analytics software available.

Finance committee  I would add—

Finance committee  I was just going to add that recent studies show that even though the dollar value of funds being used in illicit ways is rising, that's also just because of the rise in the value of these assets as a percentage of the activity taking place on the networks themselves, rather than centralized platforms, and the percentage of these transactions is falling significantly over time.