Built for the Agentic Moment: Boris on the Biometric Update Podcast

On Episode 41 of the Biometric Update Podcast, host Joel McConvey sat down with Concordium CEO Boris Bohrer-Bilowitzki for a conversation that was supposed to be about age assurance but quickly broadened into the agentic economy, accountability, quantum, and where verification and transaction become inseparable.

A crisp and quick overview that covers a lot of ground and helps anyone curious catch up fast. Boris walks through why protocol-level identity, the soon-to-release Protocol Level Locks, and PLTs end up being the quiet answer to the question agentic AI is now forcing onto the industry: when an autonomous agent transacts, who is accountable? Along the way, the British Airways agent example sketches the two-sided verification problem in one move, the quantum digression flips the standard doomsday narrative on its head, and a closing steak-agent vignette makes the whole stack suddenly tangible. The original podcast can be found here.

1: Boris's Background and the Concordium Thesis

• Career path into Concordium

Finance and infrastructure background, got into crypto in 2017

• Co-founded and served as CCO at Copper, building the global go-to-market from pre-Series A to Series C
• Stepped away because the company outgrew the build phase he enjoys ("committees of committees" not his style)
• Encountered Concordium in late 2021 / early 2022, joined as CEO in September 2024
• Why Concordium stood out
  • Founded by Lars Seier Kristensen, co-founder and 20-year CEO of Saxo Bank
  • Beautifully written code, but more importantly a thesis swimming against the grain of crypto's anonymity dogma
  • Anonymity does not fly for real-world use cases or compliance
  • Concordium's answer: identity built into the base layer of the chain at the protocol layer
  • Lars was too early, just as he was with Saxo Bank when he took it online in 1996 while people still debated whether the internet was real
• The protocol-layer pillars Boris saw as relevant
  • Identity (already in place when he arrived)
  • PLLs (Protocol Level Locks) about to release, allowing cash and stablecoins to be handled on the protocol layer without smart contract custody risk
    • Drift hack referenced as latest example, ~280-300 million lost
    • Boris's view from Copper: smart contracts should not act as custodians
  • PLTs (Protocol Level Tokens) issued at protocol layer rather than via smart contracts
• Why these pillars matter now
  • Built originally without AI as the explicit target because AI was too immense a moving target to plan around
  • Past year's work on privacy preserving age verification (gambling, adult industries, Online Safety Acts) was bulletproofing the core thesis
  • That same stack now positions Concordium uniquely for the agentic economy: protocol-level identity, token conditions, and locking mechanisms
  • Frames the central question of the interview: AI agents can transact, but can they be held accountable?

2: The Agentic Moment and Accountability as the Unlock

• Host frames the question
  • References Boris's recent Town Hall claim that Concordium was built for this moment, anchored on the identity-first protocol-layer approach
  • Asks Boris to articulate what the moment at hand actually is
• The accountability gap is the real story
  • AI agents can transact now, and it is happening at an exponential rate
  • No mechanism exists to hold them accountable once you abstract away from the application layer
  • Core formulation: "Without identity, autonomous action is just autonomous risk"
  • Verification is the complete nut to unlock the agentic economy
• The wrong question dominates the discourse
  • The industry obsesses over what an agent can do
  • The right question is who is responsible when it does it
  • Whatever form verification takes, solving that question unlocks everything else
• Speed of adoption is dramatically underestimated
  • Massive bifurcation in awareness: some businesses already run 2,000-3,000 agents; others have only just heard of AI for the first time
  • That gap itself is a scary concept
  • Dario Amodei (Anthropic) cited as the consistent voice flagging that the pace is happening faster than the public conversation reflects

3: Why Human Infrastructure Fails for Agents

• Agents are running on the wrong infrastructure
  • Agents already book travel, execute trades, manage supply chains autonomously
  • But they do it on infrastructure built for humans: slow, leaky, unaccountable when used by agents
  • The entire tech stack needs to change from the ground up for agentic activity to actually work
• Protocol layer vs. application layer is the decisive distinction
  • Concordium builds identity into the protocol layer, not bolted on after the fact
  • All the big chains are now jumping on the bandwagon, but can only implement at the application layer
  • The application layer bears a lot of risk by definition
• Zero-knowledge proofs deliver compliance and privacy together
  • Users can verify age, nationality, or any credential on chain without ever exposing the underlying data
  • Privacy preservation in interactions is essential, while compliance still has to be satisfied
  • No workarounds: you either do it or you do not
• Not theoretical: the bitcoin.com proof point
  • Boris's Town Hall claim that Concordium was built for this moment is now becoming visible as the dots connect
  • Bitcoin.com integration about to go live, bringing age verification to 75 million wallets

Section 4: Two-Sided Verification, Privacy, and Bitcoin.com

• Agents need wallets, and wallets need enforceable parameters
  • Any payment-capable agent needs a wallet
  • Parallels the problems on the Anthropic / OpenAI side when users hook up bank accounts directly
  • Without enforceable parameters, "book me travel to Carbon next week" can result in 16 first-class flights and a drained bank account
  • Accountability has to be built into the spending boundary itself
• Verification has to run both sides of the interaction
  • User-to-agent is only half the problem
  • When you interact with an agent on the other side (e.g. British Airways' booking center), you also need to know that agent is verified to perform the action
  • Otherwise the counterparty risk falls on you
• Privacy is non-negotiable in real-world agentic flows
  • Booking a flight should not expose your travel plans to the world
  • Institutional trading cannot expose what is being bought or sold
  • The locking mechanism Concordium built over the past year embeds these privacy properties, mirroring how protocol-level issuance works
  • Identity speaks for itself, the one piece that was already there
• The agentic economy does not need more intelligence, it needs accountability
  • Common framing of the agentic economy as needing more intelligence is wrong
  • The unlocking primitive is an agent that can verify who it is, prove what it is authorized to do, and pay without human intervention
  • That primitive unlocks everything else downstream

Section 5: Verification and Transaction as Synonymous

• Host's framing question
  • Beyond age assurance policy and tech, the longer-term framing is a world where verification and transaction become almost synonymous
  • Asks Boris if that is fair
• Compliance by default is the right framing, but stack-dependent
  • Boris: "completely on point," the two need to live in symbiosis
  • Compliance by default works only when the underlying stack supports it
  • Analogy: biometric login to a banking app vs. a transaction with no face and no fingerprint behind it
  • Building that bridge technologically is impossible for the big chains because they would need to rip out everything they are built on (Ethereum, Solana, everything else)
  • Their only option is application-layer verification, which Boris accepts as fair, but does not solve the problem
• Tokenization is boring, the real prize is digital actors
  • Nearly 10 years in the industry, DeFi summer was exciting, but tokenization is now a solved problem regardless of which player ends up dominating
  • The industry exists on the premise of a digital economy
  • The natural evolution is digital actors enforcing or using that economy, which is the whole point of making life easier
  • The hard question becomes: which stack can actually deliver verification and compliance at this level?
• The air gets very thin at the protocol layer
  • Few stacks can host verification natively in an immutable environment where data can also be obfuscated to the point of effectively not existing for the naked eye
  • The entire idea of crypto is cryptography, and that is what it comes down to
• Quantum bridge to Section 6
  • Boris flags the quantum threat as a fair conversation to have
  • But teases that the quantum age will actually solve the problem rather than being a threat

Section 6: The Quantum Digression

• The economics of quantum point away from attack
  • Hypothetical: would you make more money hacking the encryption on Bitcoin wallets, or creating a new encryption that supersedes AES-256?
  • The commercial upside is in selling the new encryption, not in stealing a million BTC
  • Quantum capability follows the money, and the money is in defending, not attacking
• Anonymity is already a myth, which compounds the point
  • Every actor on chain has been onboarded somewhere, often via a "stupid ass selfie" KYC at an exchange
  • Every coin is linked to individuals whether holders like it or not
  • Even if you stole a million BTC, the practical question is: where would you sell it?
• Boris's view from inside the quantum industry
  • He has invested in quantum computing companies and talks with founders directly
  • His thesis: photonic quantum computing is the only path that genuinely scales
  • Those builders are racing to create new encryption, not to break the world
  • Parallel to the security industry generally: bad actors with the means to "see it burn" already exist, and the world is not ending for specific reasons. The same principle applies to quantum.
• Stablecoins as crypto's true unlock for the agentic economy
  • Crypto has been waiting for a specific real use case at scale
  • The natural evolution points to stablecoins as the use case for crypto in an agentic economy
  • The agentic economy will be everything, not a niche: Boris already knows businesses using agents for full supply chain management and trading (he is invested in one)
• The scale framing
  • This is not GDP-level money in the sense of "1% of GDP into a Bitcoin reserve"
  • It is a multiple of global GDP in daily transaction volume once agentic flows mature
  • That scale demands a specific technological stack
  • Concordium has it. Nobody else does. People just do not know yet.

7: Boris Staying, the Social Cost, and the Steak Agent

• Host's question on Boris's tenure
  • Echoes Boris's earlier admission that he likes to build then hand off
  • Asks whether the agentic economy as "everything" will eventually bore him
• Why this role is structurally different
  • What Boris realized he does not enjoy is running a bank-like company
  • Being in charge of a protocol, a tech stack tied to code, is structurally different and will never become that issue
  • He is a commercially focused CEO who enjoys learning every day how things work
  • The pace of AI itself keeps the role fresh: the February quantum leap with Opus 4.6 and what is coming out now on the OpenAI side is mind-blowing
• The social danger Boris is most worried about
  • At this point he worries more about his children than anything else
  • Open question whether traditional schooling still makes sense, or whether homeschooling plus sport plus social networks would serve them better
  • Aligns with the Anthropic CEO's framing on the social impact, sees it playing out in a very dark way
  • The displacement is not the McDonald's worker who failed to flip a burger
  • It is paralegals, accountants, auditors, consultants: the technology attacks the middle class
  • That danger is precisely why verification and accountability become critical: if people can fall down a dark hole quickly, the guardrails matter more
• Boris is staying for the wave
  • Not going anywhere anytime soon, plans to ride this wave as long as possible
  • The pace is exhilarating: what is the latest thing today is outdated tomorrow
  • Crypto felt fast, but AI moves at a different order of magnitude because it touches every aspect of a person's life
• The steak agent vignette (closing image)
  • Wake up, fancy a steak, chat to the chef agent first thing
  • Chef agent checks the fridge, suggests steak with veg
  • No steak in the house, so chef agent talks to the ordering agent on Deliveroo
  • Wealth agent intervenes: given the big lunch paid on the weekend, the steak should be rump rather than fillet, 180 grams rather than 250, to stay within the spending limit for the rest of the period
  • "Closer than people think"
  • Closing register: humbling and exciting, more exciting than anything Boris has seen in his career