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“Anonymity Is Dead?” The Future of Crypto Explained

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— 21 min read
“Anonymity Is Dead?” The Future of Crypto Explained

In this Bitcoin.com interview, host Alex Richardson sits down with Concordium CEO Boris Bohrer-Bilowitzki for an hour-long conversation built around a single hardened argument: anonymity is dead, for the time being, because the institutional adoption the industry has chased for a decade is finally arriving on terms that make anonymity structurally impossible. Privacy, on the other hand, is just getting started. The full interview is available on YouTube.

Most of the architectural pillars will be familiar: identity at the base layer, PLTs, the smart-contract-as-honeypot critique, the Ofcom alignment, the fourth-generation framing. What is new is the assembly. Boris is no longer pitching these pieces as a feature list. He is using them to argue why the top 50 of crypto will look vastly different in two to three years, and why Concordium is positioned for the realization rather than the meme cycle.

The Mar-a-Lago and Larry Fink mention, dropped almost in passing, is the kind of detail that tells you more about where Concordium actually sits in the institutional pipeline than any press release will.

1: Boris's Background and How He Joined Concordium

  • Host and framing
    • Bitcoin.com interview hosted by Alex Richardson
    • Boris Bohrer-Bilowitzki introduced as CEO of Concordium
    • Concordium framed as a privacy-preserving, secure, scalable L1 built to enable enterprise-ready stablecoins with built-in trust and compliance, unlocking Web3 for Web2 businesses
    • Stated agenda: privacy, institutional adoption, and other narratives driving digital assets
  • Boris's personal trajectory
    • Originally from Liechtenstein (referenced Bank Frick as the local crypto-world anchor)
    • Moved to London to open a restaurant, which never materialized
    • Landed in asset management, which became the actual starting point of his career
  • Copper years (2018 to 2024)
    • Co-founded Copper in 2018 with partner Dimitri
    • Copper grew into one of the largest crypto custodians and prime infrastructure providers
    • Boris served as Chief Commercial Officer through Series A to Series C
    • Owned full commercial strategy: SaaS B2B sales through enterprise trading
  • Growing disillusionment with the industry
    • Frustrated by the meme coin direction and the gaps in foundational tooling
    • Foundations and large clients kept asking Copper to solve infrastructure problems that should have been solved at the protocol layer
    • The cypherpunk in him wanted real innovation, not surface-level product cycles
  • The Concordium connection
    • Concordium became a Copper client in 2022
    • Founded by Lars Seier Christensen, co-founder and 20-year CEO of Saxo Bank
    • Lars took Saxo Bank online in 1996, when the internet itself was still being debated as a serious medium
    • Boris read the same pattern in Concordium: a project that was conceptually early but architecturally right
  • Joining Concordium
    • Left Copper in September 2024 to take the CEO role at Concordium
    • Came in with a mandate to revamp the project end to end
    • Framed Concordium's technology as a corner piece of what the industry needs going forward, setting up the rest of the conversation

2: The Elevator Pitch — Identity Enshrined and PLTs

  • Framing the elevator pitch
    • Crypto and blockchain are not the same thing
    • DLT in the widest sense is on the brink of real adoption across various angles, tokenization being the most visible
    • Concordium exists at the intersection of regulatory compliance and the original privacy ethos of the industry
  • The origin story
    • Lars Seier Christensen tried to become a pre-TGE investor in Ethereum and got close with Charles Hoskinson
    • Lars raised the question of compliance, privacy, and basic KYC rules at a lunch, anticipating that regulation would eventually arrive
    • Hoskinson reacted dismissively, telling Lars to build it himself if he wanted it
    • That dismissal became the catalyst for Concordium
    • Boris notes that Midnight is now trying to copy what Concordium has been doing, while Concordium has been live for roughly five years
  • The Aarhus cryptography foundation
    • Concordium's technical foundation traces to the University of Aarhus in Denmark
    • Names referenced: Ivan Damgaard, Torben Pedersen, Jesper Buus Nielsen
    • Conceptualized in 2017, roughly three and a half years to build, launched in 2021
  • How identity actually works in Concordium
    • Verification happens once at the entrance of the ecosystem
    • The ID line items are cryptographically hashed to the user's wallet, forming an ID object
    • All subsequent interactions use zero-knowledge proofs to selectively prove specific claims
    • Boris's "stadium" analogy: nobody walks into a stadium with their full ID held up on a shield, yet digital life has effectively forced everyone to do exactly that
    • Concrete example: proving age over 18 should require nothing more than that single claim, never the full birth date or address
  • Boris's reset of the project in 2024
    • On taking over in September 2024, the original identity approach was reworked
    • Management team completely rebuilt
    • A deep cut was taken on scope and direction to focus on what the project genuinely needs
  • Identity at the base layer, not the application layer
    • Concordium's identity is enshrined in the protocol itself, not bolted on as an app
    • This is the foundational architectural distinction
  • Protocol Level Tokens (PLTs)
    • Released mid-2025
    • Stem from Boris's view that programmable money has so far only existed in applications and smart contracts, never natively at the protocol layer
  • The smart contract custody problem
    • Smart contracts take custody of user funds during execution
    • Boris's payment illustration: either trust the counterparty to send 100 each month, or lock 1,200 into a smart contract that releases 100 monthly
    • While funds sit in the contract, they form a honeypot
    • Major industry hacks trace back to smart contract flaws, referenced examples: Bybit (early 2025) and Balancer (most recent at time of recording)
  • What PLTs deliver instead
    • Issuance happens directly on the L1 base layer
    • All necessary tooling is built into the protocol
    • When combined with the identity USP, issuers gain capabilities like geo-fencing
    • Example: a stablecoin issuable only to holders who are over 21 with a US government-issued ID — the issuer never learns who the holders are, the transaction simply does or does not clear
  • The two-pillar summary
    • Identity enshrined at the base layer
    • Protocol-level issuance with full tooling, including locking mechanisms
    • Together these are positioned as the only way to actually deliver on the long-promised vision of programmable money

3: Why Another L1 — The Fourth Generation Argument

  • Framing the question
    • Alex flags L1 saturation and asks why Concordium needs to exist as its own chain rather than as an app on top of an existing one
  • The Vitalik L2 reversal as backdrop
    • The L1 vs L2 debate was re-ignited the previous Monday by Vitalik
    • Boris reads this as Vitalik conceding something he had likely known internally for a while
    • The reversal is read as counterproductive to what Ethereum was supposed to be
  • The base-layer argument
    • If the core tools for what you want to achieve can be built into the L1 itself, owning the L1 makes sense
    • L2s can patch parts of the blockchain trilemma, but congestion at the L1 still cascades down
    • The whole industry is over-anchored to ETH and SOL
  • The fourth generation thesis
    • Boris's argument: ETH and SOL are not fit for the next leg of adoption
    • Fourth generation blockchains are what is needed to embed crypto into the daily workflows of normal users
    • The industry has failed to draw people in because it cannot pass the basic usability test
  • The "auntie test" for usability
    • Trying to explain a mnemonic seed phrase, custodial vs non-custodial wallets, private keys, and the 24-word recovery flow to a non-technical relative ends the conversation immediately
    • Banking apps already work for ordinary people, so the bar for crypto onboarding is much higher than the industry pretends
  • The cost predictability argument
    • Cash is effectively over and everyday life is already digital, so the question is which technological layer can scale to it
    • Ethereum reference: the October 10th congestion event drove transaction fees up to roughly $50 to $60
    • Unpredictable transaction costs are a major business problem
    • Concordium pegs transaction fees on a fiat base, currently fixed at around one euro cent
    • For any CFO in a traditional business, this gives a predictable cost base, especially critical in payments where transaction volume compounds the exposure
  • Why the early-mover advantage of ETH does not settle the question
    • Boris questions whether the first chain to ship is automatically the best
    • Many current chains will have a role to play but their relevance in 10 to 15 years is doubtful
  • What the winning L1 actually needs
    • Scalability built in
    • Cost predictability
    • Native issuance tooling for whatever asset type is needed
    • Regulatory compliance handled at the base layer rather than bolted on at the application layer
    • Boris's reading of Ethereum: everything is being attempted on the application layer instead of being properly anchored in the L1
  • EVM and SVM verdict
    • Boris is direct: EVM is not great, SVM is not great either
    • Fine for meme coins and DeFi yield farming
    • Not applicable for the level of adoption the industry actually claims to want

4: Identity as Institutional Unlock

  • Framing the question
    • Alex notes Concordium has called identity "the next big unlock for institutional adoption"
    • Flags that the identity narrative in crypto often evokes dystopian imagery (eyeball scanners, biometric DAP faces)
    • Asks why identity, of all things, would drive institutional adoption
  • Why identity is against the crypto grain but unavoidable
    • The Satoshi whitepaper was not written with identity in mind, so resistance among crypto natives is understandable
    • Regulatory constraints are a fact of the society we live in and are not going to disappear
    • No regulator will ever wake up and tell users to "YOLO into Uniswap and Hyperliquid"
  • The purpose of regulators
    • The sole purpose of a regulator is to safeguard retail
    • Without that function, the alternative is Wild West conditions
    • The industry has already lived through that: 2017 ICO fraud and the wave of subsequent scams
    • The "there is also fraud in TradFi" rebuttal is conceded, but it places the burden on the industry to build a better layer rather than to use traditional fraud as cover
  • The compliant privacy positioning
    • The opportunity is to build a layer that stays compliant in the widest sense while preserving privacy at the level of day-to-day interactions
  • The BUIDL example as the institutional case
    • Tokenized securities are conceptually compelling: tokenized Nvidia, Apple, and similar exposures already exist in various setups
    • Stablecoin landscape framing: non-yield-bearing (Tether, Circle), synthetic yield-bearing (Ethena), and tokenized money market funds
    • BUIDL is BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, with TVL approximately $2 billion as a reference point
    • A tokenized money market fund is, by definition, a security and therefore must adhere to securities laws
  • Why there is no secondary market for BUIDL today
    • Access requires KYC and AML directly with BlackRock
    • Investors must prove accredited status, meaning minimum tickets in the magnitude of $100,000 plus
    • The investor base is therefore capped by default
    • With no streamlined identity rail, there is no path to a real secondary market
  • The Copper-vantage observation on risk-off behavior
    • Every major crypto hedge fund was a Copper client during Boris's tenure
    • In flat or risk-off conditions, those funds would benefit from rotating into yield-bearing instruments like BUIDL
    • But if the only path is to "call the bank and put it in a money market fund," tokenization adds no real advantage
    • The tokenized version becomes a marginal improvement at best unless the access layer changes
  • What Concordium changes
    • Issuing BUIDL on Concordium (simplified framing) would allow regulatory requirements to be cryptographically proven
    • Retail could access it in a privacy-preserving way while still being verifiably compliant
    • Without this, the industry "does not innovate jack shit"
  • The Wall Street middle and back office reality
    • Wall Street and Canary Wharf are not the glamorous trading scenes from movies
    • The bulk of the work is middle and back office, sifting through passport copies and KYC documentation
    • As long as that manual workload persists, institutional adoption stalls
    • Without a technological layer that eradicates this friction, there is no real incentive to migrate workflows on-chain
  • Bottom line
    • There is significant regulatory nuance underneath, but the core differentiator is straightforward
    • Concordium is positioned as the only real layer that resolves the institutional friction problem
    • Identity at the base layer is what unlocks the institutional pipeline

5: Privacy vs Anonymity — Compliant Privacy as Balance

  • Framing the question
    • Alex notes privacy has become a major narrative beyond crypto, sitting in the broader zeitgeist
    • Asks whether privacy will continue as a leading crypto narrative and where the opportunity sits
  • The anonymity ceiling
    • Crypto was built on the core premise of anonymity, which does not fly in practice
    • Reference points: Monero and Zcash, and Binance having to delist privacy coins
    • No regulator will sign off on pure anonymity
  • The balance argument
    • Without privacy at maximum extent, crypto-native users disengage
    • Without compliance, regulators stay away, and so do any compliant businesses
    • The viable position is a balance between the two
  • Base layer vs application layer for privacy
    • Privacy that sits at the base layer is structurally different from privacy bolted on at the application layer
    • Concordium's privacy lives at the base layer
  • The institutional question is "defensible," not "decentralized"
    • Institutions never ask whether something is decentralized enough
    • They ask whether it is defensible
    • Boris's bond example: pitching the middle and back office on issuing a bond on Concordium with coupon payments programmed into issuance generates compliance questions, not philosophy questions
    • Nobody is asking for Vitalik's phone number for incident escalation
  • The hypocrisy of self-declared anonymous users
    • The "I'm anonymous anyway" framing collapses on contact with reality
    • Anyone who onboarded on Binance or Kraken has already submitted a selfie with a date card and full ID
    • Repeating that process across every new service is the actual problem
  • The "do it once" principle
    • Verify identity once, then interact across an ecosystem in a privacy-preserving way
    • The UK Ofcom alignment is cited as proof this works in a live regulatory context
    • Use cases to be expanded later in the conversation
  • Privacy is not anonymity
    • In a digital economy, the demand is for privacy-preserving interactions that are also easy to use
    • The job of the protocol is to provide businesses and institutions with the tools to stay compliant, since otherwise they will not engage at all
  • Returning to the fourth generation thesis
    • Privacy is being pulled out of the application layer and brought back to the core technology layer
    • This is framed as the only viable path to adoption
  • The UK digital ID rant
    • The UK pushed to introduce a digital government ID that would log every interaction
    • Boris's reaction is unambiguous: "Fuck that. I don't want to live in a world like it"
    • The frustration is not with verification itself but with centralized state visibility into every interaction
  • Where verification does make sense
    • Australia's under-16 social media ban is cited as a regulation Boris agrees with
    • Age verification for adult content and online gambling is legitimate
    • Current verification methods are all broken: AI age estimation is defeated by selfie manipulation (the 74-year-old woman example), and sending passport or driver's license copies is unacceptable
    • The Concordium model: scan a QR code, prove over-18 from the wallet, the site never learns the user is Boris, never learns the exact birth date, never learns the address
  • The middle ground positioning
    • True anonymity cannot be adopted because of regulatory constraints
    • Privacy in a digital economy needs to land somewhere between full anonymity and full transparency
    • Concordium positioned as the strongest option in that middle ground
  • "Anonymity is dead — for the time being"
    • Alex asks the direct question
    • Boris's answer: yes, for now
    • The cypherpunk in him remains, but the realistic next step is not anonymity
    • Seven or eight years on panels at Copper hearing "institutions are coming" before any institution actually arrived informs the pragmatic stance
  • The tokenization concession
    • The fact that the industry now talks about tokenizing trillions implicitly concedes that the original anonymity-first thesis was not what wins
    • A bank tokenizing shares is not the original purpose of the industry, but once you accept that direction, anonymity has to step aside intermittently
  • The marathon framing
    • Anonymity might return at the endpoint, but it will be a marathon, not a sprint
    • The next logical step is compliant privacy
    • Privacy is the narrative for 2026 and beyond because it solves the regulatory problem while drawing the world in
    • Black-to-white transitions are not how systems actually change

6: Bitcoin.com Partnership and Concordium ID — The Tooling Argument

  • Framing the question
    • Alex lists Concordium ID, Verify, and Access as shipped products across e-commerce, adult content, creator content, and gaming
    • Raises the historical pattern of failed enterprise blockchain integrations: Walmart on-chain food tracking, NFT ticketing, on-chain supply chain and logistics
    • The shared failure mode: blockchain was shoehorned in and ended up slower and more expensive than a centralized database
    • Question: how does Concordium avoid the same fate
  • The Bitcoin.com partnership
    • Bitcoin.com is an OG wallet with long-standing success and very large user reach
    • The C-suite responded to the proposition of privacy-preserving verification through a wallet they already operate
    • Bitcoin.com needed an infrastructure layer to deliver it, and Concordium is that layer
    • For Bitcoin.com, the partnership unlocks substantial new user adoption through their existing infrastructure
  • Why high-risk verticals adopt first
    • Online casinos, adult content, gaming, and similar verticals always lead in adopting new technologies
    • Stablecoin payments already work in many of these settings, but the verticals still operate under hard regulatory frameworks
    • Fines for letting unauthorized users access content or services are escalating sharply
    • In a digital world, evading these checks is structurally easy, so any compliance solution has to be both robust and frictionless
  • Why prior enterprise blockchain projects failed
    • Boris does not single out Walmart specifically, but locates the failure in the tooling layer
    • Wallets themselves are the bottleneck
    • The "auntie test" with mnemonic seed phrases applies just as much to enterprise rollouts as to retail adoption
  • Concordium's two-pronged response
    • First prong: partner with consumer-grade distribution like Bitcoin.com
    • Second prong: abstract away crypto complexity entirely via the Concordium ID app
    • The Concordium ID app has no seed phrases and no wallet-style complexity
    • Positioned explicitly as not a wallet but an app whose only purpose is to draw users in
  • The stagnant user base data point
    • Average monthly dApp users across the industry has hovered at roughly 4.5 million for the last four years (since 2021)
    • Boris flags this as a question the industry has refused to confront
    • His diagnosis: the experience is too complex
    • Before pitching users on yield farming and Money Lego, the industry needs to deliver something simple that they actually need
  • The age verification economic case
    • In 18 US states, adult content sites are shut down if they cannot prove users are over 18
    • The adult industry is one of the largest globally, so the regulatory pressure carries real economic weight
    • Existing verification flows have already failed catastrophically: the Pornhub data breach exposed roughly 200 million IDs
    • Nobody wants their identity sitting in a list of that nature
  • What the Concordium ID app actually delivers
    • The site never learns the user's name
    • Never learns the exact birth date
    • Never learns the address
    • Never even learns what document type was used
    • The only data point shared is the specific claim being proven, e.g., over 18
  • The verify-and-access principle
    • Digital interaction should never require exposing the full identity "bare ass" in the ether
    • Yet that is exactly what happens today, on a daily basis
  • The Apple Pay on Shopify example
    • A normal e-commerce checkout exposes every piece of identity information to the merchant
    • The question is whether anyone actually wants that, or whether a privacy-preserving alternative is now feasible
  • The GDPR cost argument
    • If merchants never need to hold a copy of a passport, the entire GDPR compliance overhead largely evaporates
    • No more PPI handling burden, no more data protection officer headcount, no more layered compliance staffing
    • This is the cost-saving case and the adoption case simultaneously

7: Competitive Positioning and Scalability Headroom

  • Framing the question
    • Alex asks who Concordium ID actually competes with and how it differs
  • The comparator landscape
    • zkSync and Worldcoin named as adjacent players doing different things
    • Worldcoin specifically called out for "the facial stuff"
    • Midnight flagged as the most aggressive copy attempt
    • Boris is unsure whether Midnight is live on mainnet yet, and says he hopes it will be because the space has been lonely
  • Concordium's architectural differentiation
    • Identity is treated as a hashed object bound to the user's wallet
    • The framing principle: your ID is yours and should only be yours
    • Zero-knowledge proofs handle the interaction layer without compromising throughput
  • The TPS dismissal
    • TPS is dismissed as a 2021 hype metric
    • Boris's challenge: get to 500 real transactions per second in production before debating the ceiling
    • Concordium can already do 2,000
  • The forward technology roadmap
    • Quantum-proving and related upgrades are already on the radar
    • Horizontal tech stack integration is the path to higher throughput when needed
  • The Visa hypothetical
    • If Visa came tomorrow and asked to run global payments on Concordium, two things would happen
    • First, costs would come down dramatically, from one cent to roughly 0.0001 cent for all intents and purposes
    • Second, throughput would scale horizontally to handle approximately 2,500 TPS
    • The capacity exists and the implementation path is understood
  • The core differentiator
    • In terms of how Concordium does identity, there is nobody else doing the same thing
    • Most competitors live in the application layer
    • Concordium lives at the base layer
    • That is the difference

8: The Coming Reckoning for Non-Compliant Projects

  • Framing the question
    • Alex asks whether founders are still underestimating regulation
    • Raises the prospect of a wipeout among projects unprepared for rising regulatory scrutiny
  • The one-word answer
    • Yes
    • Boris does not feel the need to elaborate further on the binary question, then proceeds to lay out the structural argument
  • The rankings will not survive
    • The current top 10 is widely known
    • In 5 to 10 years, most of those names will have disappeared
  • Cardano as the cautionary tale
    • Heavily hyped, then collapsed
    • Now down roughly 91% from all-time high
    • Cannot be considered a success by any reasonable measure
  • Solana as the second data point
    • From a high around 260 to 270, currently sitting around 84
    • Significant drawdown despite Solana being one of the names "apparently going to save the world"
  • The historical pattern from 2017
    • When Boris entered the industry in 2017, BitMEX was the dominant exchange
    • Binance was not yet visible
    • FTX is acknowledged as a different kind of issue
    • The pattern is that the dominant names of one cycle are not the dominant names of the next
  • The innovation credo that no longer works
    • The industry's prevailing logic has been to ship new things as fast as possible
    • That logic was driven by meme coin cycles where speed of iteration determined who won
    • That credo is not what wins going forward
  • The tokenization paradox
    • Mea culpa across the industry for chasing the "tokenize everything" narrative under frameworks like Clarity and Genius
    • If everything gets tokenized, you are tokenizing securities
    • Securities laws then apply
    • The notion of Apple shares freely trading in non-custodial anonymous pools on Uniswap was never realistic
  • The permissioned DeFi recognition from 2021
    • By 2021, the industry had already realized DeFi would need to be permissioned in some form
    • The unresolved question was which layer handles the permissioning
    • The answer the industry chose was the application layer
    • That answer does not scale
  • The Ethereum and Solana two-year horizon
    • Both chains will do all right for the next one to two years
    • After that, Boris expects the dynamics to shift
  • Reading Vitalik's L2 reversal as panic
    • When Vitalik publicly downgrades L2s in his own ecosystem, Boris reads it as a survival reaction
    • The concern is not the next year or two, but viability beyond that horizon
    • Business will always favor the stronger and better solution
  • The top 50 prediction
    • Boris's call: the top 50 of crypto will look vastly different in two to three years
    • Implied corollary: the projects that survive will be the ones that handled compliance architecturally, not as an application-layer afterthought

9: PayFi — Time Value of Money and Programmable Payments

  • Framing the question
    • Alex asks what is broken about payments and why Concordium is better suited than traditional rails or existing crypto infrastructure
  • Payments are not actually broken at the consumer surface
    • Paying for a coffee at Starbucks or Pret works fine
    • That layer does not need vast amounts of innovation
    • Behind the scenes is a "shit show," but the user-facing experience works
  • Where Concordium does not play
    • Not trying to revolutionize how you pay for a coffee
    • Not trying to displace existing rails for payments that already work in the traditional system
  • E-commerce will be won by incumbents
    • Stripe is positioned to win e-commerce
    • Stripe has the infrastructure and can extend through its own stablecoin to own more of the value chain
    • That ownership is where the additional margin sits, and Stripe is well placed to capture it
  • The high-risk verticals are where Concordium positions
    • Gaming, gambling, and the adult world require regulatory features that mainstream rails cannot deliver
    • Age verification and geolocation are core requirements at the payment layer itself
    • This is where the different setup of Concordium becomes the answer
  • Current Concordium issuance footprint
    • Roughly 10 stablecoins issued on Concordium
    • Approximately 11 to 12 currencies represented
    • TVL is intentionally not at scale yet because the last year was spent revamping the project
    • The expected funnel is into 2026 and beyond
  • Payments as the lowest-hanging fruit
    • The opening line of the Satoshi whitepaper talks about global electronic peer-to-peer cash
    • Bitcoin took a different path, but the original framing still defines the opportunity
    • Whether money sits as Apple Pay digits or as a yield-bearing token, the underlying experience is the same ones and zeros
  • The time value of money argument
    • The industry has never properly priced or designed for time value of money
    • Longer-dated payments from A to B are where this matters most
    • Money in motion should not sit idle
  • The rental deposit example
    • When signing a rental agreement, the landlord's first ask is a security deposit
    • This is exactly what PLTs are designed for: smart contracts handle conditionality, PLTs handle custody
    • The tenant and landlord can agree to use BUIDL as the deposit instrument
    • At the end of the two-year term, the smart contract simply queries: was the kitchen smashed up, yes or no
    • During those two years, the PLT yields to the depositor rather than sitting dead
    • Smart contracts are great at enforcing conditionality, bad at holding custody — the architectural split is the point
  • The pizza restaurant analogy
    • A restaurant does not present the card machine before serving the food
    • Payment occurs after the customer is satisfied with the service
    • Today's online food delivery model inverts this: payment first, then a large finance department refunds errors after the fact
    • Programmable money should match the restaurant model, not the inverted one
  • The Amazon delivery example
    • A three-day Amazon delivery involves an entire supply chain of drivers, scanners, and handoffs
    • Smart contracts can query each scan via oracle, verifying progress at every stage
    • Payment releases on confirmed delivery, not on order placement
    • During the three-day transit window, the buyer's funds earn yield, whether from a tokenized money market fund or a more aggressive vehicle like a tokenized long-shot equity fund
    • At settlement, 17 different drivers across the supply chain are automatically paid their specific share programmatically (e.g., 0.1%, 0.15%)
    • Drivers no longer wait until the end of the month to get paid; they are paid in the split second of scanning
  • The optional identity layer
    • Identity can be pulled in where needed (e.g., confirming that the package is being received by the intended recipient)
    • The buyer scans the driver's device with their wallet and proves it is them, completing the transaction definitively
    • Different solutions can be composed depending on the use case
  • The thesis sentence
    • Protocol-level issuance with full programmability tools, paired with identity when needed
    • This is the space where Concordium plays

10: Five-Year Forecast — The Reckoning and What Wins

  • Framing the question
    • Alex asks for a five-year forecast, specifically the biggest trend everyone else is missing
  • The death of the utopian thesis
    • The most shocking realization will be that the utopian system imagined by crypto's founding fathers is not going to ship out of the gate
    • The original ethos really only prevailed through roughly 2023
    • The industry is already past it, whether participants acknowledge it or not
    • If anyone is willing to wait 25 to 30 years and keep walking the same path, the answer is still that it will never happen on those terms
  • The motivation reality check
    • In the end, people will play where the money is
    • That is why people go to work in the morning
    • Boris admits he originally joined Concordium for non-financial reasons, wanting to drive the change he thought was necessary, but the broader industry does not run on that fuel
  • The 12-month timeline
    • Boris's call: the realization will hit within roughly the next 12 months
    • The market will converge on the view that something like Concordium is the only way forward
    • Copycats will follow
  • The top 50 critique
    • The current top 50 projects are mostly the same thing as Ethereum and Solana with a different color and feel
    • Tribal alignment dominates: ETH maxis, SOL maxis, the XRP army
    • There is no genuine differentiation across the field
    • That sameness is one of the reasons prices are falling
  • Why Solana shipping more projects does not move the needle
    • The chain can onboard new projects endlessly
    • The users are not arriving
    • The pipeline is broken at the demand layer, not the supply layer
  • The gravy train is running dry
    • The DeFi model of luring users with 25% APY in exchange for buying a token that then gets dumped on them is unsustainable
    • At some point there is no more token to sell because the price has fallen too far
    • APYs must come down because no one can actually fund 25% in a random DeFi pool
    • Somebody is paying for those returns, and the industry has refused to name who
    • Boris will not be sad to see this model end, though many projects will collapse fast when it does
    • The founders are already insulated, sitting in their 20-million-pound Notting Hill mansions
  • The institutionalization paradox
    • The industry spent years demanding institutionalization
    • Institutionalization means tokenization adheres to specific rule sets
    • If that were not true, Monero and Zcash would still be rallying — but they have come back dramatically
  • The five-year top 50 forecast
    • Maybe one or two of today's top 50 will still be there
    • The rest will have disappeared down the rankings, surviving as zombie chains at best
  • The tooling realization for users
    • The market will eventually recognize that today's ecosystems do not solve for the tooling needed
    • The money-making logic forces this realization: serious DeFi on tokenized Apple shares requires KYC and AML at the base
    • Efficiency must follow: traditional venues like NYSE and NASDAQ are extremely efficient at trade execution, but settlement remains a nightmare
    • Wall Street has already accepted that the answer is tokenizing everything
  • The Mar-a-Lago and Larry Fink data point
    • Boris is flying to America the next day to attend the World Liberty Forum at Mar-a-Lago
    • The agenda includes listening to Larry Fink on the next layer of tokenization
    • The fact that a chain currently ranked around 300 was invited tells Boris something: these are the chains that solve for specific real problems
  • The falsification scenario
    • If Boris is wrong, the industry returns to cypherpunk rules and a Bored Ape goes back to $5 million
    • He doubts it, but that is the scenario if his thesis fails
  • Alex's reality check on precedent
    • The 2017 top 50 looks night and day different from 2021 or today
    • Boris's prediction is not sensationalist; it tracks the empirical pattern
  • Boris's self-framing
    • He is usually cast as the bad guy in these conversations
    • His method is logic and reason, asking "why" as a discipline (the Simon Sinek reference)
    • Cycles exist for everything, and more importantly, sequences exist
    • Nearly 10 years in the industry, including non-public conversations, gives him visibility into who is in trouble if they fail to solve specific problems
    • The pattern recognition feeds the call
    • If the call is wrong, it will not be the first time, but the trajectory currently points in his direction

11: Sign-Off

  • Where to follow Boris and Concordium
    • Boris on X has a relatively small institutional-side following at around 2,000, and is acknowledging he is still improving at the platform
    • Concordium on X, Discord, and Telegram for the active community
    • LinkedIn presence exists but is deprioritized, since Concordium's focus is the everyday user rather than large corporates
    • concordium.com as the central source for the full roadmap
  • Closing invitation to ETH, SOL, and other-chain believers
    • Take five to ten minutes to read into what Concordium is building
    • The complete roadmap is publicly available
  • The Bitcoin.com partnership as the closing emphasis
    • One of the first partners to recognize what Concordium can solve for and integrate it into their tech stack
    • The opportunity Boris highlights: Bitcoin.com's roughly seven million wallets interacting in a privacy-preserving way through the Concordium layer
    • Framed as a major channel into mainstream adoption
  • Closing exchange
    • Boris thanks Alex
    • Alex closes out the Bitcoin.com interview

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