Lars Seier Christensen, Chairman of Concordium, on Bridging the Gap Between DeFi and TradFi | Ep. 283

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Lars Seier Christensen, Chairman of Concordium Foundation, talks about DeFi paving the way for a more inclusive financial future, bridging the gap between DeFi and TradFi, and marrying decentralization with regulatory compliance.

About ​​Lars Seier Christensen

Lars Seier Christensen is Chairman of the Swiss non-profit Concordium Foundation. With over 30 years of experience across the banking and financial sector, Seier Christensen is a global pioneer in FX and derivatives trading, having co-founded the online trading and investment platform Saxo Bank in 1992. He served as co-CEO of Saxo Bank for more than 20 years, in which time the bank grew to 1,500 employees across 150 locations serving customers in 170 countries. SaxoTrader, the bank’s flagship online trading offering, was launched in 1998 and was one of the first online FX trading platforms in the world. SaxoTrader has since grown to become one of the world’s most complete multi-asset trading platforms. Seier Christensen is also the founder and sole owner of Seier Capital, a private equity and venture capital firm that specializes in investments in angel, seed, and A-round stage companies. The firm invests in art & fashion, financial services, food and beverages, sports & entertainment, social media, and technology industries.

Lars Seier Christensen gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• DeFi is paving the way for a more inclusive financial future
• Legal clarity is the key to institutionalizing DeFi and will drive adoption at scale
• Concordium is bridging the gap between DeFi and TradFi
• Marrying decentralization with regulatory compliance
• The future of ID + KYC – self-sovereign identity

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zahab. We are Buzzin as always, and I am super pumped to have the one and only Lars Seier Christensen on the show today, Chairman of Swiss nonprofit Concordium Foundation. He has over 30 years of experience across the banking and financial sector, is a global pioneer in FX and derivatives trading and Co-Founded the online trading and investment platform, Saxo Bank in 1992, where he served as co-CEO for more than 20 years, in which time the bank grew to 1500 employees across 150 locations, serving customers in 170 countries. Wowza. He is also a founder and sole owner of Seier Capital, a private equity and venture capital firm specializes in investments in angel seed and around stage companies, the firm invests in art and fashion, financial services, food and beverage, sports, entertainment, social media and technologically industries. Super pumped to have this lad on the show. Lars, welcome to the show, my friend.

Lars Seier
Thanks very much. Thank you for having me.

Matt Zahab
Pumped to have you on. It’s crazy that you and I first met almost two years ago, almost two years ago to this day. Crazy to think back in Dubai, 2021 blockchain expo and you and I hit it off not so much for our love for crypto and blockchain, but our love for hockey and football, more specifically hockey. I absolutely love this. I think this is a super cool place to start. You got to tell me your hockey inception story. What made you fall in love with the sport and why do you love it so much?

Lars Seier
I have a good friend that was running a Danish Hockey team and brought it out of bankruptcy about 10 years ago. And he reached out to me and said, do you want to be part of this and see if we can take it to the next level? And I went to see a couple of matches and said, okay, let’s give it a shot. Before that, I wasn’t sort of a regular every weekend Hockey go or just watch the big matches on TV. But since then, I’ve spent a lot more time with hockey and we actually proceeded to win the Danish Championship a couple of times over the last four or five years. So it’s been quite good. This year’s a little dodgy, but we don’t know to the playoffs.

Matt Zahab
I love that. It’s crazy. A lot of Danes are playing in the NHL now. It seems like every year you guys have a couple more guys come to the NHL. I mean, the most famous Dane at least in my eyes, not league wide, but as a Toronto guy, is Frederick Anderson, you know, big goalie. He used to play for us. We used to love him. He was great for us. He’d always sort of choking the playoffs, but cest la vie. But it’s just such a good sport. It is true that there’s nothing like hockey. Like, and it’s tough because the game could grow so globally, but the barrier to entry is so bloody high, and the rules are just very difficult to understand. You know what I mean?

Lars Seier
Yeah, and I think I’m actually quite surprised also that we have that many players in any cell and other leagues because the sport is not big in Denmark. I would say we’ve probably got about 1500, 2000 serious players, but we actually seem to have some really great talent occasionally. And the national team, of course, has been a regular in Ruby for the last 15 years or so. We’re punching a little bit above our weight there compared to the times with this sport, but it’s very enjoyable. And I love going up to the hockey hall. It’s more like a family atmosphere than when you go to the big football.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, I love that. That’s awesome. Let’s jump into the business side of things here Lars. You co-founded Saxo Bank and that is obviously an incredible story. The barrier to entry of creating a bank is just absurdly high. And then let alone having a bank that succeeds is also just absurd. You and the team did it. Absolutely incredible. What are some of the biggest lessons that you learned, you know, perhaps some of your leadership or management styles? Like how did you and the team grow a bank from a small little thing to one of the biggest in the world? Because that’s again, you’re literally only a handful of people in the planet who’ve ever done that. What are some of the biggest lessons, key takeaways or perhaps even better stories that you have along the 30 years of growing it?

Lars Seier
I think there’s some interesting parallels to the blockchain industry because what really gave us our opportunity was being very early adopters of the internet back in the day. While we found it as a tiny company in 1992, when we were not a bank at the time that came later, we embraced the internet that was in the very early states in the mid 90s, obviously, and brought out one of the first trading platforms in 1997, which was extremely early days for online trading. So it was really the early adoption of a new transformative technology that I think enabled us to find a good place there. That has always been the focus of the bank. We are a bank, but there’s a lot of banking things we don’t do, right? So we’re more of an investment facilitating bank and have this trading platform that we then, over the years, continue to develop. So today it’s a very broad platform where you can basically trade tens of thousands of assets. And if you have a macro approach, you can cover most of that on this platform if not everything. So the internet was the key to that. And just like back in those days when we were fascinated by a new technology, which was, at that time, by no means a given. I had many conversations with top TradFi guys that said, you’re wasting your time with this internet people. Always want to speak with a dealer on the phone and stuff. We said, maybe, but we got to give it a shot. And I experienced a little bit of the same here. You have another transformative technology, which also is fairly early station and around, which is also low skepticism. So I think some of those learnings from back in the day with the internet comes in quite handy now and gives you confidence that we will eventually get with broad adoption of blockchain because it makes a lot of sense just like the internet did.

Matt Zahab
Was there a specific moment back in 1997? And again, that’s wild. I can’t even, I mean, I was born in 1995. So obviously I don’t remember, you know, anything that early on, but 1997, that you guys must have been one of the first trading platforms in the whole world. Like how did you even develop a trading platform that early on in the internet days?

Lars Seier
Yeah, I think for our sort of area, which at the time was mostly foreign exchange and derivatives, I think we were probably number two or three in the world realistically, right? And then, of course, it’s like everything else, like with the blockchain industry, you know, you start small in an area where, you know, the one-eyed is leading the buying, right? So, a little bit more very basic platform that we developed with a handful of engineers. And we just started it, you know, and nobody else was doing it, certainly none of the big banks. And, and to me, I mean, I’m not part of the same company anymore. I sold out my last years, about five years ago. But today there’s like a thousand engineers there. So, so we started very small, but very simple. I remember sitting designing, you know, we’re like a buy button here and we’d like a sell button there, B-scroll bill. There wasn’t a lot of competition back in those days. And actually, there wasn’t a lot of customers embracing it either the first few years, because it was just too different, you know? So as the first two or three years, we even ourselves sort of doubted it sometimes because we saw it was so obvious that it was a lot better than sitting with phones and dealers. And but, still, it took a few years to really gain traction. And I think that’s the story of new technology, no matter how value adding they are.

Matt Zahab
Oh, such a cool story. One last question on the good old days, then we’ll get into crypto and blockchain, DeFi and all the fun stuff like that. I wanna get into Lars for a second. You worked your tail off for so long, you still do, but how did you manage, and again, I would love for my feet to be in your shoes one day, how did you manage to pursue so many passions and fun projects on the side, sports teams, charities, you name it, while grinding so hard at the bank? Like it just seems like that’s an impossible feet. I’m doing one 100 of what you’re doing, and I’m having trouble with the work-life balance and grinding and making everything work. How the heck did you do it?

Lars Seier
Well, I guess, I just, I’m sort of quite emotional. And if I find something I like. I like to get involved in it. Obviously, the success of Saxo Bank and the subsequent sales have also given me some financial possibilities that I didn’t have back in the early days. But sometimes I also actually believe I bite off more than I can chew, to be honest, because some of my projects probably deserve a little bit more time and love than I have available for them. But particularly in later years, I’ve very much taken the focus at, you know, you’ve got to do stuff that you really enjoy, that you really love being part of. And not necessarily the monetary return for all of this. It’s nice to have a few things here and there that work out well financially, but it doesn’t have to be all about financial return. And so I got two wonderful restaurants. They’re not going to be the next Saxo Banks, but it’s a great joy. I got the Ice Hockey Club, I got the Football Club and a whole range of other activities. And also just keeping engaged in stuff that I really enjoy being part of, you know. And it’s a combination of like hardcore business things and stuff that are a little bit more less orientated where you make a lot of people happy because you give them experiences, etc. And then there’s a sort of third category of things that I would like to understand better. So I might make an investment just to force myself to understand it better, you know.

Matt Zahab
Some skin in the game.

Lars Seier
Yeah, exactly. Because if you have a stake in a business, you’re kind of naturally inclined to keep at least an eye on it. And that would spread to like lab based meats and stuff that I think will be very important in the future, but where I find it interesting to have a reason to follow it. You know, and I have a number of examples in that category as well.

Matt Zahab
That’s incredible. Lars, you gotta give me some gold mines here. Walk me through some morning rituals, nighttime rituals, daily routines? Like, how do you stay locked in, dialed in for such a long period of time and be so bloody efficient?

Lars Seier
I don’t know if I’m that efficient, but I’m not sort of a big… I don’t dream about going and be a pensioner, or sit on a beach or anything like that. I do like to have fun, you know? But I actually, you know, one of the things that people talk a lot about is this life-work balance word, which I hate because it’s kind of implying that life is one thing and work is another, right? And for me, work is a very significant part of life because I think that’s where you live out your own, you know, your own potential and your own ambitions. So for me, that’s a very important part. So I don’t have that distinguishment between some of the time I don’t have to work. Of course, I do stuff that’s not directly work-related, but most of my day is involved in some kind of work activity. I’m quite, in a way, quite happy to not be with the bank anymore because now I can put it exactly when I want. A lot of it is like here over Zoom or Teams or whatever. And you can basically be anywhere in the world. You can schedule your time as you please. You probably get to do a lot of hours, but you do them on your own sort of schedule, right? And then I can only recommend drinking a fair bit of good red wine. That’s good for keeping your energy levels on.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Hey, we’re down in Mexico. I’m currently down in Mexico now too. The one thing that’s lovely down here is the tequila. I mean some nice sipping tequila every once in a while. That’s lovely. It’s hard to get a good bottle of red down here. My friends and I have found, but the tequila is plentiful. The mezcal is plentiful and it’s nice. It’s not like back home where tequila, you know, runs in arm and a leg here. It’s a pennies on the dollar and you get some really quality stuff. So I feel it.

Lars Seier
You’re not going to run out to Tequila, Mexico City. That’s for sure.

Matt Zahab
No, 100%. It’s nice at night sometimes when you put in a good shift at work and you want to get the creative juices flowing, put a couple of words on paper, now put a couple of words on the computer, but you get what I mean here. Let’s jump into crypto and the fun stuff for a second. One of the big underlying narratives at Concordium and yourself is that DeFi is paving the way for a more inclusive financial future. 10 minutes ago in the pod, you just discussed the parallels you saw back in 1997 with the internet revolutionizing the finance industry and just all industries in the whole. On present day in the 2020s, we have blockchain, which hopefully and most likely will do the same thing. There are 1.4 billion people that are currently unbanked, which is absolutely bananas. What is there 8 billion people in the world, right? That’s just a crazy amount of people that are unbanked. DeFi has the ability to give everyone a bank. I’d love if you could, before we get into some more nitty gritty stuff and some more Concordium related stuff, just give me your thoughts on what exactly is the future of DeFi and how it will empower so many people and bank the unbanked.

Lars Seier
I think technology in general has a democratizing effect. And again, if we take the parallel from back in the day, I was a foreign exchange dealer prior to Saxo Bank, where literally you have to deal with people on the phone. You could have two, let’s say four phones, if you were four phones in your hands sufficiently, and you could sort of speak to four people at the same time. When we did our platform in Saxo Bank we could do for tens, for hundreds, for thousands, for tens of thousands of people simultaneously, right? Which also meant that we could bring down the barriers to be part of the financial industry, right? So it has a strongly democratizing effect. And I think it’s the same here, the traditional way of doing things is somewhat exclusive. It’s not necessarily because of bad will from the banks, but it’s simply that the systems are so costly and so complicated that it’s very hard for them to justify bringing on very small clients. It’s simply gonna be losing business. And it’s a total order to demand from a bank that it should lose tons of money on doing essentially the right thing, right? So it has a lot to do with the old technology and not being very suitable for banking smaller clients, basically, as opposed to a heavy regulatory aspect, which doesn’t make it easier. So some of the regulatory hurdles that you can, albeit on or as you can fulfill in Western Europe or the States or this part of the world, very hard to meet in some of the emerging markets where some people don’t even have an ID or unable to verify the necessary information for KYC purposes, et cetera. So we shouldn’t think that this is sort of conspiracy to keep people out of the market, but I don’t think it is. I think genuinely banks like to have customers, but the combination of old school technology, that’s very clunky and high requirements for ID KYC makes it very difficult for the traditional sector to bank this 1.4 billion people now. Blockchain and the internet, to some extent, of course, are solving one side of that issue, which is we now have a technology that actually makes it fairly easy to get people involved in the financial system that hasn’t solved the regulatory aspect. And I think that’s the next concern here. How do we find a way to comfortably integrate all these unbanked people into the financial system to a degree that’s acceptable to regulators? Because if you can’t do that in a way that is acceptable to regulators, well, then you’re gonna have to be on the borderline all the time and perhaps across the borderline of legality. And that’s, of course, what we’re already seeing, that some of these things while being very efficient, blockchain, DeFi, et cetera, are efficient and engaging people, but definitely borderline from a legal point of view and sometimes worse than that, right?

Matt Zahab
Very true. How do you even go about the whole regulatory aspect though? Because again, you nailed it on the head. We have the infrastructure and we have the tech, i.e. DeFi, crypto, blockchain. In order for the unbanked people, using an example of the many people in Africa who don’t have access to this technology, they can do this. There is an opportunity for them to get internet, but then just like you said, there’s the regulatory shit show. No banks want to come in and build their own infrastructure because it’s not profitable. At the end of our profit business, they’re not a non for profit, they’re not a charity. How do we get all the countries involved to at least talk to each other, to at least take down some of these walls, take down some of these barriers for the regulatory shit show to finally end?

Lars Seier
I think there’s a general consensus among most people in the world that we want to not make it too easy to be a criminal. We don’t want terror financing. We don’t want money laundering, et cetera. And that’s why you have these requirements for our ID and for know your customer rules, et cetera. So I think the idea is fundamental, but I think part of this technology as we’ve already seen now, as in yesterday, that you now say we’re going to have an ID for all citizens in the EU, there’s a number of also technology enabled ID solutions in a lot of emerging markets coming up. And I think that’s another thing that this makes easier than it would be to go around and issue physical passports and stuff like that. I’m heading down to Nigeria day after tomorrow, where I believe around 80 million people don’t have an ID. But then now you, you finally enough, most of them have a smartphone, right? So then now you’re linking the ownership of a smartphone subscription to the new national ID. And these things are essential because very hard for anyone to say I am willing to enter into a financial transaction, having no idea who you are, no idea what the money comes from, et cetera. That’s just not doable under generally agreed regulations or standards. So using also this technology to at least get people an ID, which is not just about financial services. Imagine that you have really have no identity. You are just that person living 30 meters from the church kind of thing, right? It’s a big problem, even apart from from being part of the financial system, that a lot of people in this world simply don’t have an ID. They don’t have an identity and you need that in many other contexts. So I think that’s one problem you need to solve. Then I hope to see regulators also making it a little easier. I mean, if amounts involved are not significant and are unlikely to be part of a criminal scheme or a terrifying thing, I think you can put some kind of minimum limit where you say, but below this level, we can be a little light on KYC, as long as we know the ID. That’s my hope because otherwise, you are not going to get this 1.4 billion people legally banked at least you can of course do illegal things and illegal transfers and that, but that’s not a very healthy business model and it’s not going to interest very many serious people, right? So there is a balance between getting more ID out there. Well, it’s a lot of initiatives around the emerging markets around regulators maybe losing a little bit on, let’s say the lower end of the income spectrum and then of course, use some of this new technology. So I’m optimistic, but it’s really important because this is sometimes the narrative in our industry that old banks are really the arctic people, they don’t want to support these unbanked people, but it is really very hard for them to do that on the old technology and the regulatory regulations that they are on the, you know, so, so we need to, we solve kind of a lot of the technology now, I think we need to now solve the ID and then we need to take a somewhat softer approach at least for smaller clients, right? Where it’s very unlikely that’s the criminals involved or something really bad. But at the same time, I think we all have an interest in that there are some safeguards against criminal activity and terror financing and so on. That’s an everybody’s interest, I believe unless you are a terrorist or criminal, but I don’t think we can let that decide our actions, right?

Matt Zahab
You’re on fire right now, mate. We do have to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor to the show. And when we get back, we are going to jump right into Concordium and talk about how Lars and the team are doing exactly what he just spoke about. And that is giving the opportunity for millions of unidentifiable humans to get their own ID, which I absolutely love. And again, crazy to think that some people don’t even have IDs. Like imagine again, being a 28 year old dude who doesn’t even know, you know, your parents were you from absolutely wild. But until then, huge shout out to PrimeXBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. We love the team at PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. You can use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50, that is CRYPTONEWS50, all one word, to receive 50% of your deposit, credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50, to receive 50% of your deposit, credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Lars. Lars, let’s jump right into Concordium. I feel like most of the listeners already know what you and the team do. One of the most interesting aspects of the biz is exactly what we just discussed, and that is giving IDs to people who don’t have them. And that is using a combination of ZK Tech and a bunch of other really fun, interesting, and novel pieces of tech. I’d love if you could give a quick sort of TLDR 360 overview on what exactly you and the team are building and how you are going to hopefully give IDs to all the people who don’t currently have.

Lars Seier
Well, I mean, the sort of fundamental idea of Concordium is to try to build this bridge between decentralization, which I’m a big believer in and see a lot of benefit from, not least because I’ve seen centralized the TradFi from the inside. And I know the huge amount of pain points and problems are that great. So decentralization is great, but we also have to be realistic around the requirements of society around you, the regulators, the lawmakers, general society has a lot of things they wanna impose on an industry. Now, that’s not very popular with the sort of the originals of this industry, but it’s just the fact that you can choose to live up to it or not, or to accept it and try to find solutions. So our vision with Concordium was to marry the decentralized, all the stuff that we all know is great about blockchain, but at the same time have some respect for the rules and society around us. And you can have all sorts of ideological ideas about that. You can be an anarchist, you can think you want a different world, but the fact is if you wanna see mainstream adoption for this industry, it is going to be, to a large extent, on the terms and conditions of the world as is. Now then we can go do things a lot smarter, a lot better, a lot more efficiently, a lot more secure, but at the end of the day, we have to expect to follow the same rules as everybody else. So that’s the key thing. Now, in terms of the bottom line of all sort of trustworthy interaction is really that you know who you’re dealing with. That’s kind of the baseline because knowing your client and the general KYC and checking people’s credentials and their understanding of what you might be proposing to them, et cetera, is one thing, but it’s all pretty relevant if you don’t know with certainty that you are Matt and I’m Lars, and then all KYC becomes pretty academic if we can’t be sure about that point. So that’s the core thing that we have built in at a foundational layer. I mean, most blockchains and outcoming rounds realizing it’s an absolute metathesis. So there’s a lot of Layer2 ID solutions being built and that’s fine. That’s a necessary direction for the space, but we chose to build it in at a time when it was less obvious to build it in at the Layer1, which then has the advantages that can go across all the use cases instead of being kind of the silos that we know from the old system, right? Now, just to correct you a bit, we can’t actually create an ID for an unidentified Nigerian. We can take his basic ID and lift it into an environment where you can get a lot of benefits from it, but we’re not issuing IDs to people that don’t have ID, right? We need to base ourselves off a credible ID, at least at this point, maybe it could be different in the future, but for us, it’s a question of taking that basic ID which you probably can’t do very much, to be honest, except that you at least have an identity and can use that in various ID and KYC processes. We take that ID and put it into an efficient environment where you can then use it across a whole range of different activities and projects and use cases, right? So just to clarify that, but we are dependent on the user having been IDed by a trustworthy ID issuer in the first place, right? But the whole thing here is that right now, this world is only going one way. In the old days, it used to be the financial sector where there was a lot of focus on ID and KYC, but today, you’re going to a gallery and you want to buy a painting, you have to go through KYC, you want to interact with a social media platform and you can see all the problems when people actually not appropriately IDed where people can do fake profiles, do all sorts of calls, all sorts of maim around it. So ID, at its basic form, I think, is increasingly very necessary across almost all walks of life now. But the important thing there is that having ID and being willing to ID yourself is not equal to not having privacy. There’s big difference between anonymity and privacy, so knowing that that person has been willing to, or an organization has been willing to ID itself, actually allows you to offer, extend more privacy to that individual than they used to in the current old system, right? As a simple example, if you send your kid down to the liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine, then if there’s any doubt whether that person’s over 18 or 21 and other jurisdictions, well, then they will ask for ID, which means you pass over a social security card or your passport and all of a sudden give a lot of information to an unknown person that’s just in the liquor store and could be abused from that point of view, right? Where with modern self-serving ID, you can control the watch characteristics of your ID that you need in any given circumstance. Now, in that particular case, the only thing that person needs to know is you’re over 18. Doesn’t need to know how old, yeah, actually he doesn’t need to know how old you are, as long as you’re over 18, doesn’t need to know where you live, doesn’t need to know your security number, doesn’t need to know your name, et cetera, but in the current system where ID is kind of the access, you say all or nothing type thing, right? It creates a lot of additional respect just when you actually ID yourself. So I think the beauty of a certain eyes-based ID on blockchain is that you get much more control over your ID and in that sense gain much more privacy than you have in the current system. So I think that’s something we’ll see much more of and with current developments in AI and deep fake and avatars and all that, already now you can’t actually be sure that you’re talking to me. This could be an avatar, in fact, I have one. And I think it could be my avatar you spoke to, except they’ll probably be more intelligent because I would have put more stuff into the brain of it than I have, right? So in those scenarios, which are gonna be more and more common, it would be nice to know with certainty, true in ID, that I am in fact lost and not an avatar, right? And I think this is only gonna get more and more up to you with other technology developments at the moment. Right?

Matt Zahab
Yeah, I do agree. We have to be getting close in regards to sort of the mass adoption of self-sovereign IDs well, especially with technology like ZK Tech, which is making it a lot easier and just more efficient to do exactly what you said and create this sort of binary identification system where someone can walk into a liquor store, grab a nice bottle of vino and it’s not a matter of, Lars, I need to see where you live, where you’re born, what color your eyes are, how tall you are. It’s not simply is he or she 18 or not. So I can’t wait for that as well. A couple more things on Concordium here, Lars, and then we’ll wrap up. And this has been an absolute treat. Having too much fun over here on my end. What else are you and the team working on? I know you guys have tons of plans. I know that on the video that was actually released this morning and doing a bit of show prep. There’s a bunch of noise on social media about something, maybe a little Christmas present from Lars and the Concordium team coming out. No one knows what it is. Will we see that Christmas present? That’s question numero uno. And numero dose is what’s on the agenda for 2024? What are you and the team planning on shipping and achieving?

Lars Seier
I think, I don’t know, I hope we give Christmas presents every now and again throughout the year, right? So it sounds like I have planned something massive for the 24th, the 25th of December, but that will be good news, an interesting news coming on as we go along, including a couple of partnerships that we will announce before Christmas. So I think that should keep people happy enough. What we’re doing at the moment is we’re strengthening our look at verticals that we really want to support. That doesn’t mean anybody’s welcome. This is a use case agnostic, blockchain. So anybody is more than welcome, but of course we see areas where we have more traction than others and hence we want to make sure that we have the necessary infrastructure support that as well as possible. So an increased focus on certain verticals without saying to anybody that they’re not welcome, but just trying to support in particular areas like ESG, where we see a lot of interest at the moment, carbon credits type things, DeFi, which we think has wonderful potential, but also needs those aspects of ID KYC that we talked about, right? We’re looking at stuff in the automotive industry and trying to sort of focus our own proactive efforts in certain areas while still being there for anyone really that wants to build something on Concordium, because we are decentralized systems. It’s not for us to say you can build or you cannot build. So anybody can build, but we can choose where we try to supply a bit more as a sort of technology and stuff that makes it easier for those particular areas to engage with us. So I think 2024, I think the thing that this blockchain, I think lacks a little bit. I think we build a really good blockchain. I think the vision behind it is good. I think we are cutting edge around scalability, around finality, around the balance between accountability and privacy. We have stable fees and stuff like that. So we have built a really good blockchain that works very well. And I think really we need to tell more people about it. And that’s also why I appreciate having the opportunity here. We need to get more visibility for how great this blockchain really is. And that’s a strong focus area for 2024 to really, through proactive, reach out to companies that we think could be relevant, but could see Concordium as relevant to their needs. So a more proactive lead generation and stronger engagement from outside. But of course, also general visibility that people find it easier to get in touch with us to build on us, to be aware of our existence. So a lot of focus we’re going to that increased awareness and visibility because at the end of the day, we got a great blockchain here. It takes the boxes that any sort of serious use case would be interested in, I think. And we just need to tell more people about it. So that’s a very strong focus area for 2024.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Yeah, it’s, I mean, heck, nowadays, you know, to quote Gary Vee, we live in the attention economy and it’s all about getting eyeballs on your product. And I mean, it’s sort of a key theme of the show is things that are binary and you either pay for it or create it. And that’s just how it works. But Lars, super pumped to have you on my friend. Great to speak with you again after two years. Incredible episode. And hopefully you and I can do round three together soon.  Before you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find Concordium and yourself personally, online and on socials.

Lars Seier
Yeah, the easiest access point I would say for broad access is concordium.com, the website where you can then see all of our many social media channels. We obviously got a Telegram group, which is quite active also, but if you want a full overview, I think concordium.com is a good place to start. Also there you will find that newly released AI-based chat box that actually amounts to very well questions in many different languages around sort of core information around Concordium. So that’s a good place to start. If you want to reach out to me, you can do it through the website or you can find me on other number of social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you know, have your pick, but probably most of my sort of most business and related stuff is on LinkedIn where I should be fairly easy to find on. And you can actually see one of the things we did for combating fake profiles. If you go to my profile, you see what we call our mysome.id, where you can verify on Concordium that you are on fact on my profile and that somebody else’s.

Matt Zahab
And not a Lars doppelganger, a Lars fake. I love that. Lars, thanks again. Incredible episode, knowledge bombs everywhere. We’d love to see it. Can’t wait for round three and wishing you and the team all the best.

Lars Seier
Thank you very much for having me, Matt. And then speak soon again.

Matt Zahab
Thank you. Folks what an episode with the one and only Lars Seier Christensen. He was dropping knowledge bombs left right and center. Anything on DeFi bringing the gap between DeFi and TradFi, IDs you name it, we covered it. Huge shout out to Lars and the team for making this happen listeners, love you guys as always. Thank you so much for listening. My team appreciate you guys. Justas my amazing sound editor. You are the man and you know it and back to the listeners love you guys keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon