Lukas Seel: 0:00

Welcome everybody to Helios Horizons, episode 30. Today we are welcoming the co-founder and CEO of Noble, Jelena, and very warm welcome to you, Jelena. How are you?

Jelena Djuric: 0:15

Awesome, thank you, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. I'm, just to be honest, back-to-back today with a lot of calls, so this is a nice little break and, yeah, happy to chat about Noble and stable coins and real world assets and the like. So thanks for having me.

Lukas Seel: 0:35

Amazing. Yeah, I think I obviously went digging through your past a little bit and we always wanted, like we always like doing a little introduction and get to know who we're talking to. So I want to, um, start with your background, because it's quite, I'd say, unusual in the in the crypto space, to have somebody who actually, uh, studied, comes from like the political realm and, and specifically, um, peace and conflict studies, uh, and then made their way into this field. I'm just very curious about your first steps and how you even discovered the crypto space and perhaps how your background informs you. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jelena Djuric: 1:17

Yeah, absolutely For sure. So I do come from, I guess, a less kind of typical background. I do come from, I guess, a less kind of typical background. I studied, as you said, a very interdisciplinary degree composed of political studies, economics, international relations, history, philosophy While I was in school here in Toronto at the University of Toronto.

Jelena Djuric: 1:55

I discovered Bitcoin, more of a political sort of, I guess, system for how to organize society and, of course, how to think about money and this idea of peer-to-peer kind of electronic cash. You know you could have this pretty performant, global, distributed system of many independent, you know actors that don't know each other but can sort of trust the system to transact and use Bitcoin and mine Bitcoin and be incentivized to do those things. And I just thought it was really interesting from a governance perspective, from a kind of systems thinking perspective, and I was into, of course you know, governance, different governance systems. I got to travel quite a lot and go to Asia and you know the caucuses and kind of travel the world and you know governance and kind of political systems are something that I think deeply about and so that was really interesting for me.

Jelena Djuric: 2:43

From a kind of theoretical, intellectual point of view I'd never really interesting for me from a kind of theoretical, intellectual point of view. I'd never really thought of it as a money investment, for better or for worse. It was always something I was just kind of fascinated with conceptually. And then, yeah, discovered Ethereum shortly after.

Jelena Djuric: 2:57

Of course, ethereum has its roots in Toronto in Canada, and a lot of the early meetups and kind of founders of Ethereum of course Vitalik Buterin is from Toronto that actually happened around the University of Toronto area so I would sort of go after class and chat with the early community and kind of understand OK, so Ethereum is this like extension of Bitcoin. It's this programmable blockchain where it's not just kind of one application being Bitcoin or kind of digital gold, but it's actually built to service a growing ecosystem of developers that can kind of deploy these dApps and have them run on this kind of, you know, very global virtual machine and you know you can kind of build all sorts of cool applications that way and service a you know kind of global audience, and so that really resonated with me.

Jelena Djuric: 3:47

I graduated from university and still kind of work again go to meetups on my days off, on the weekends, after work I would read about crypto, read about blockchains. And then my first role in the in the space, kind of full time as a as a job, was with DFINITY and being the of the early DFINITY team. And so that's when I joined them to run community management. So obviously, community management is a really interesting role in crypto. It's not really talked about as much as it used to be, but it's this idea of advocacy and education and developer relations and finding those kind of use cases for these technologies that you know can really help to kind of bring on the masses, so to speak. And so that was really interesting. Left that and then eventually joined Celo for a little bit.

Jelena Djuric: 4:37

Celo really interesting project also focused on kind of stable coins and kind of emerging economies. That was interesting to a lot of incentivized test network and more DevRel type stuff and that was really fun. And then, yeah, that's when I pivoted and joined the Cosmos ecosystem. So I've been a contributor to the space for about four or five years now and really found my home here and so, yeah, joined the informal systems team early days and then contributed to Cosmos in a variety of ways we can talk about if that's interesting, but eventually founded the project Noble in late 2022, after Terra collapsed, and then, of course, left to work on this full time and still very much working within the Cosmos ecosystem. So I guess I kind of sped, run through that a little bit. But that's kind of the overall yeah, overall background.

Lukas Seel: 5:29

Yeah, and I think it's so interesting because one thing that, at least in the past few years, has kind of been forgotten is the sort of political revolution that comes with the opportunities that you know blockchain even blockchain, money, cryptocurrency represents, and I think it's super interesting that you ended up founding a company that is specializing in RWAs and all of that, and I want to talk about a little bit later on how your background informs all of that.

Lukas Seel: 6:01

But I do want to talk a little bit about the Cosmos ecosystem, like how you know how that maybe like your background informs all of that. But I do want to talk a little bit about the Cosmos ecosystem, how you got involved there and you know, like how that background then informed you know the need for Noble and something that really you know brings together you know assets across different chains. You know Cosmos obviously as an ecosystem or as an infrastructure already. You know assets across different chains. You know Cosmos obviously as an ecosystem or as an infrastructure already you know enables this sort of transacting between different chains. But, yeah, let's talk a little bit about getting involved with Cosmos and maybe what drew you into that ecosystem.

Jelena Djuric: 6:42

For sure. It kind of goes back to actually philosophy and my own values. But you know, when I was working with you know, these different projects I mentioned, there is always or not always, but consistently this idea that you know to build performant, kind of scalable applications and kind of release them to the world and have, you know, millions, billions of people kind of transacting on crypto rails and using kind of apps that you know run on top of blockchain infrastructure. You know you'd need this kind of idea of a super world computer right, this like one chain to rule them all, this idea that you know all of the world's kind of data and money will be on, you know add any one, you know layer one, and at the end of that sentence that was kind of a consistent thread right. I mean, dfinity definitely kind of pushed that narrative. You know there's definitely some Ethereum kind of folks kind of have pushed that narrative historically and that just never really resonated with me. I never really kind of got behind this idea that there's going to be one kind of chain to rule them all. You know, actually, at the time that I was being very interested in crypto and blockchains, this was, you know, at the time when there was a lot of discussions politically around you know, kind of China and the internet wall that kind of existed. There was a lot of political discussions around just internet freedoms in general and privacy, right. These were the days of, you know, wikileaks and Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. And so, you know, politically I never kind of got behind this idea that there would be one chain to rule them all right, and philosophically I never got behind that, which is obviously now, kind of many years later, very much the reality. Right. There is kind of this idea of you know Ethereum, of course, being kind of fragmented across you know many different, distinct layer twos and roll up frameworks and distinct app chains, and and that's actually was always the Cosmos vision from sort of day one. And so when I discovered the project being Cosmos back in 2018, 2019, it really resonated with me right.

Jelena Djuric: 8:48

This idea of sovereignty, this idea that you know you can build kind of application specific blockchains with you know your own validator, set your own security guarantees. You know it could be everything from a single validator chain to you know a chain kind of operated by thousands of validators. I mean, this is the beauty of kind of Tendermint and kind of the original consensus design and there would be different kind of security guarantees and security kind of trust assumptions, but at the end of the day that is all within the kind of rights of developers to decide kind of what future they want to build or what kind of makes sense for their own particular use case. And so this idea of kind of sovereignty and, you know, kind of choosing your own adventure was really kind of, you know, resonating with me, and then with that also is this idea of interoperability and kind of permissionless interoperability.

Jelena Djuric: 9:38

And of course that's where IBC comes into the mix, or the inter-blockchain communication protocol, for those that may not be familiar, and that also resonated with me. Right, this idea of kind of internet level communication, right, I can, you know, it's still magical to think that I can, just, you know, have instant, instantaneous communication with someone across the world, you know whether that's through text or video. And anyways, those kinds of ideas were very prominent in the Cosmos white paper and in the IBC spec and again, this all really resonated with me on a kind of philosophical level. So, yeah, eventually was kind of fortunate enough to contribute to the ecosystem, and of course we still are, with Noble and everything that we're building. So yeah, that's the basic kind of reasoning for why Cosmos appealed to me, but maybe there's kind of follow-ups there.

Lukas Seel: 10:33

Yeah, I mean brilliantly put. I think it's so interesting too, like going back to the earlier days, how everybody was obsessed with like creating that one winning L1 or something, and I think we very much have come to terms, or I think it's a great thing actually that there are many chains solving different problems. Let's pivot to Noble and what you saw in the Cosmos space or maybe in the Web3 space in general, that still kind of needed fixing in general, that still kind of needed fixing, needed a new approach to. You know whether that was the digital assets that you landed on or whether it was a broader problem that you were trying to solve. What was kind of the first impetus for building Noble?

Jelena Djuric: 11:21

Definitely, there was very much a specific reason why we decided to work on Noble. It's funny sometimes you get development teams or founders that try to throw a dartboard at the or, sorry, throw something at the wall and see what sticks right. Actually, just always one idea that was very, very specific and we ran with that, and that idea was, of course, a purpose-built chain for stablecoin issuance. And so why did we come to this idea? So, as I mentioned, this was back in 2022. It was shortly after Terra collapsed and I'm sure you remember UST, their stablecoin, effectively just kind of going to zero overnight. There was many billions of dollars of market cap just wiped out. That was the catalyst, of course, for FTX and the general kind of meltdown that we saw in crypto over a period of many months and years.

Jelena Djuric: 12:22

And here I was, of course, course, working within the cosmos ecosystem. And, for those that don't remember, tara was very much a cosmos project. Um, they didn't necessarily advertise that. Uh, their founder didn't necessarily like tweet about it or kind of talk about that too much, but under the hood, you know, it was very much a cosmos stack, less cosmos project. They used, uh, you know, cosmolism, they used ibc. They very, very integrated within the Cosmos ecosystem from a value perspective.

Jelena Djuric: 12:51

And so when that went to zero, it occurred to me and a few other people that for us to kind of rebuild and kind of move on from that disaster, we would have to have stable and reliable and safe stablecoin liquidity for developers to kind of tap into. And so we decided the best way to do that would be to build a purpose-built chain dedicated to that one very specific function, which is how do you issue stable coins to dozens of app chains and, in the future, hundreds of app chains in a way that's fast, secure, reliable, seamless from a UX perspective? And so we got to work on that, and so we talked to Circle and a variety of other stakeholders and we kind of presented this idea and they very much got behind it and thankfully, we kind of had our marching orders at that point, but it was definitely something that we had to do a lot of convincing on. I would say there was a lot of skepticism around Cosmos and just generally a lot of confusion and questions like okay, well, how does Cosmos differ from Ethereum? And okay, what does it mean to issue a stable coin in Cosmos versus, let's say, on a monolithic kind of layer one or even a layer two, and so it was something that we had a lot of kind of education to do on, but it was inevitably kind of a success. So we went live with Native USDC in September of last year so September of 2023. And then since then, we've expanded our scope to support a number of other asset issuers, a number of other stablecoins and real world assets.

Jelena Djuric: 14:35

We actually see like this idea of kind of multi-chain expansion as kind of a pain point for stablecoin issuers. Right, they always have to decide, okay, where's the demand for these stablecoins, where's the liquidity, where are the developers? And so, typically, you know they'll deploy, you know their contracts on Ethereum. They'll kind of go to Solana, they'll think about, you know there are two like Arbitrum. But really, once they go down the list, cosmos, like, is pretty high up there right there, just Cosmos is pretty high up there right. There's this very large ecosystem of dozens of app chains, hundreds of developers, thousands of developers, perhaps even over a longer period of time, and they understand that to, of course, be natively available across all these protocols. There are kind of partners you have to work with, right, and so Noble is that partner when it comes to the Cosmos ecosystem, and we've actually been able to do that quite successfully over the last year or so.

Jelena Djuric: 15:29

So, yeah, that's the basic idea and I'm happy to kind of go into more details on this problem or challenge around kind of multi-chain issuance, because it's a really important one. Actually, someone just reached out to me, like right before this space, and was like I'm having troubles like redeeming my bridge to USDC and taking it back to Ethereum. Like can you help? Right, and so not Noble, by the way, this is not like a Noble challenge, but I'm, of course, always happy to help, and even when people interact with Noble, whether that's through our front ends, like Noble Express or kind of, in the future, other products that we're putting out into the world, you know we're always making sure, like is the UX good? Do people feel safe using this? Like, is there confusion? Because ultimately, you know we have to build for a much larger group of people than just ourselves, right, like we might be good at using a crypto, like a wallet, like MetaMask or Kepler or a bridge, but like that's just not gonna work for, like onboarding hundreds of millions of people to the space.

Lukas Seel: 16:34

Yeah, I think I mean so many interesting things there. I want to go back to sort of the idea of having you know the value of having these stable coins even available, right, we you know whether they're on Cosmos or elsewhere. What was sort of what, to your mind, is sort of the most the biggest pain point that we're addressing with bringing stable coins, whether that is with Circle or other. I think you have PiUSD as well. What are we like? What's you know the value in bringing those kinds of assets on chain? And you know, like, why did Noble decide to you know specialize in you know solving that problem specifically?

Jelena Djuric: 17:15

Yeah. So I mean, it goes back to like our vision for kind of blockchains. We believe that there will be you know thousands, if not millions, of kind of distinct blockchain blockchains in the world, distinct roll-ups, right. These are applications kind of running on their own dedicated execution environment, whether that's you know, the movie VM or that's Tendermint, whether that's you know a fork of the EVM or what have you. And so, if that continues to be the case, all of these developers, all these teams, will need access to reliable stablecoin liquidity, right. And so you had bridges, sort of filling the stopgap, kind of historically right.

Jelena Djuric: 17:53

So if I'm a, you know, developer, let's say building a Cosmos app chain and this was, of course, before Noble existed and I needed access to a stable coin that is stable, right, so not UST, let's say USDC or USDT. Typically I would bridge that over. I would have to find a complicated route or mechanism, maybe strike a deal with a bridging provider to say, okay, bridge X, I would like you to support my bridge X, I would like you to support my app chain and I would like to bridge over all of these stable coins so that we can, you know, build, let's say, a DeFi application, and that was like a pretty painful process, right. You know a lot of these. You know teams had to kind of make trade offs around UX, maybe even security, maybe even speed, speed to be able to kind of offer those stable coins on their chain and kind of build products that leverage these bridge stable coins. And so we just saw the pain points around that kind of consistently and we said why not just go to the source, why not build a dedicated app chain, a very, very, very application-specific chain that would issue these stablecoins and would be able to mint and burn and redeem these staples in a native way, right, that could plug into Coinbase, that could plug into centralized exchanges, that could plug into the kind of minting infrastructure provided by these various stablecoin issuers, whether that's Circle or Ondo or another one. And we figured, you know, the Cosmos stack is so flexible and so you know modular, to kind of use a buzzword that it would actually be pretty possible to do that.

Jelena Djuric: 19:35

And so we kind of created that initial design and kind of pitched that to the issuers. And so they understand, right, that this is a pain point, right. They have like teams going to kind of going to their, to them and saying, you know, we need native USDC, we need native USDT, we need native T-bills, euro, the yen, et cetera, help us. And ultimately, what happens is these issuers have to like, prioritize right. They have to say, okay, we'll get to you in six months or in a year, and if you're, you know, a scrappy team that's just looking to again build like a really cool DeFi app or build, like you know, some sort of NFT platform or whatever it might be, that's just not really reliable. And so Noble has almost become this like very kind of neutral, kind of flexible, highly highly interoperable protocol for the issuance of these stables, such that these teams can simply kind of plug in and kind of start minting, burning and tapping into this liquidity.

Lukas Seel: 20:38

These teams can simply kind of plug in and kind of start minting, burning and tapping into this liquidity. Yeah, super interesting. And now I mean we're now what? 5 billion in transaction volume later? I think you guys hold over 550 million, if I'm not mistaken, on the platform and you mentioned starting with stables and now, you know, expanding into other RWAs. Let us in on some of the thinking behind that and what else you're bringing on chain. After you've kind of solved this stablecoin problem, what's next?

Jelena Djuric: 21:08

Yeah, we've done it, actually over $6 billion in transaction volume in the last year, which has been great. We're at about $570 million of kind of total value on the noble chain about 570 million of kind of total value on the noble chain, and that's really good because that's actually all completely organic. You know, there's no like weird token incentives or you know inflationary mechanisms to kind of make those numbers look juicy. It's pretty, it's all extremely organic. And so what we realized is there's, you know, usdc is a hugely popular, well-adopted stablecoin for a very good reason, but there's also kind of a long tail of other stablecoins and RWAs that are also gaining traction, and so we've partnered with a number of other asset issuers, including Ondo for their USDY. It's a yield-bearing asset. We've partnered with Hashnote. They offer USYC. It is a tokenized T-bill. It's actually the largest tokenized T-bill right now. The total tokenized T-bill market is somewhere around 3 billion. I think Hashnote is a large portion of that. We've partnered with Minarium for the euro and also more recently with a team called M0 to actually mint a yield-bearing stablecoin, I should say a yield-bearing dollar stablecoin, which we're branding as Noble Dollar. So that's called.

Jelena Djuric: 22:33

Yeah, that'll be live pretty soon and really, again, the idea is just to make sure the infrastructure and the routing and the actual issuance mechanism is sound. And if you're again a team, you know a chain within the Cosmos ecosystem and you just, you know, want like that instant ability to kind of have USDC liquidity or any other kind of stable coin that we support, have USDC liquidity or any other kind of stable coin that we support, that should be day one, so long as there's an IBC connection to Noble. That should be available and seamless and things like this. And so that's what we're continuing to do. There is a kind of larger roadmap behind us. We're still focused very much on the kind of stable coin issuance piece, obviously, but we're also really excited to start building applications on Noble that again just make multi-chain issuance of stable coins really, really easy.

Jelena Djuric: 23:37

So if I want to go between two stable coins, let's say, let's say the dollar and the euro, because that's an emerging sort of use case, right, there's a lot of people, uh, that might get be getting paid in usdc living in europe, but they want it off.

Jelena Djuric: 23:43

You know, on off ramp to the euro they should be able to do that um, kind of on chain they. They can actually in the future, use noble, so building stable swap modules, kind of taking your usdc maybe from some sort of like uh kind of, let's say, dydx. Maybe you have your USDC on DYDX and you want to swap that for the euro. You can actually do that on Noble kind of swap that for the euro E in this case, and then directly withdraw that to your bank account using Monarium's banking infrastructure, which is really really cool. So there'll be more information kind of on that in the coming uh months, but that these stable coins are already adopted. You know there's infrastructure and integrations for these stables and it's a matter of just getting them kind of uh more useful, more integrated, um kind of natively on chainchain.

Lukas Seel: 24:38

Yeah, super interesting. I mean, I want to talk a little bit about the Noble Dollar, obviously, because that is a huge sort of new thing on the roadmap and something that is obviously a competitor with some of the other founding partners that you worked with, including Circle, et cetera. Tell us a little bit about that and what the thinking behind that is and why it's important to have these yield-bearing stablecoins as well.

Jelena Djuric: 25:08

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's necessarily competitive.

Jelena Djuric: 25:12

I know it might sound that way, but these are assets that will be interoperable, right, and like we're not looking to create like walled gardens or, like you know, kind of be exclusionary.

Jelena Djuric: 25:24

Like we believe in like maximum, like freedom and choice for developers and end users. So we believe that, for example, in the case of Noble Dollar, like there is like a really good kind of argument to be made that there should be a way for people to kind of earn some, be made, that there should be a way for people to kind of earn some form of yield on their dollars, and that's what Noble Dollar will provide. And so, you know, there is kind of more information on that in the coming weeks. But ultimately, you know, I do imagine a situation where Noble Dollar is like a key kind of pair with USDC and kind of people are kind of going in and out because all of these stable coins they kind of sound the same, right, like it's just a dollar, but they do have like different functionality under the hood. Some pay yields, some don't. Some are super well integrated into TradFi or exchanges, some aren't, right, usdc being a good example. So, yeah, there'll be more kind of information on that soon.

Lukas Seel: 26:23

Okay, there is also, obviously, when we talk about RWA's, USDT, all of the stable coins, et cetera, there's always the question of legality and compliance and all of that. That must have been obviously a huge concern for you guys. How do you work with regulators and other institutions to kind of like make sure this is usable, compliant, and yeah, I think you're based in Canada. I'm also super curious what the sort of you know cooperation with the government is like in that case.

Jelena Djuric: 27:01

Yeah, I mean we're very fortunate to have strong partners on everything from you know kind of monitoring on-chain activity, aml, you know that kind of thing we work with you know we're integrated with Chainalysis and different kind of providers to kind of ensure that any sort of you know nefarious activity is kind of flagged and there are appropriate measures to, of course, like block and transactions and things like this. It's all very, I would say, kind of transparent like how that works. So a lot of those kind of permissioning authorities are you know. So a lot of those kind of permissioning authorities are you know kind of live on our code base. Excuse me, no-transcript.

Lukas Seel: 27:49

Okay, Is there something that you work with? How is the government approaching the regulators? How did you overcome it? Like you know, take us kind of to the meeting room when you were settling the legalities of the whole company.

Jelena Djuric: 28:24

Okay. So, to be clear, Noble is a protocol. We're not actually like Circle. Is the issuer right? So, in the same way that you have USCC on arbitrum or optimism, you have those kinds of discussions around okay, how is the stable quite collateralized? How do you blacklist, or things like this? That kind of takes place on the issuer level. For Noble, we do have kind of governance in place such that, of course, if something kind of goes wrong, there's like ways to kind of, you know, deal with that, and that's something that, again, we work really close with our partners on.

Jelena Djuric: 28:57

But yeah, I mean, overall, I would say that stable coins are more and more being treated as kind of digital cash, which is good. In Canada, there was some challenges with our regulators approaching stable coins not in that lens and saying, okay, maybe they're something like securities. I don't really think that's going to continue. Personally, I mean, you never know. But if you see what's happening in Europe with MICA and also even in the US with the stablecoin legislation that's been put forward in the House, you're seeing more and more kind of acceptance that these instruments are very much. First of all, they're well, more and more kind of acceptance that these instruments are very much. You know, first of all, they're well defined in terms of, like what they do, but also you know there are kind of like mechanisms in place against to deal with, like you know, kind of the worst case scenario. So yeah, that's kind of the main piece there.

Lukas Seel: 29:49

Yeah, yeah, I think that wrinkle, that it's this protocol and and you still the issuers, need to go through through that. Um is is uh, important. Um a little bit of taking like a broader um approach here. Now. Um like, does your in a very easy sort of question, does your mom understand what you're doing? And like we about, or you talked about adoption earlier is this it's like the stable coin thing, um, something to bring our parents into this? Is this like a um a vehicle, um getting these RWAs as like really understandable assets, Cause like okay, I get it, it's like a digital representation. You were just calling it digital cash, right? Um is, is that something that you guys also kind of think about as a protocol, bringing in new users, bringing in the millions and billions of users that are either unbanked or, you know, need or could really make great use of these assets?

Jelena Djuric: 30:50

Yeah, for sure, this is one of my favorite topics, to be honest. How do we kind of plainly explain these systems to to our friends, family, our neighbors and so on? So, when it comes to yeah, I mean my mom, yes, it's funny. So a lot of people that have like pain with, let's say, setting money cross border, you know, even have experienced like severe kind of inflation and kind of experienced what it looks like when their currency is devalued. I think a lot of these types of people actually inherently understand the meaning of kind of cryptos and, and I would say, stable coins are just an even easier kind of explanation than like, let's say, bitcoin, right, where it's like okay, we have money, we all use money on the internet. We have like bank accounts, we maybe have used like some sort of like payment service, or we've used PayPal or what have you, and really all that is needed to kind of understand the power of stable coins is okay. How about we remove additional intermediaries from the equation, right? How about, instead of you know, having to like link your bank account like your PayPal account and then having to like wait for PayPal to like approve it, all of that can happen instantaneously, in a second, and you can, you know, as easily as you can send like an email to your friend across the world. You know you could send money to your friend across the world and it's like, really you know a fraction of a cent and it's instantaneous and it's also self-custodial. Actually, that's another important part, right, I can kind of be in control over over those funds, of course, assuming you know best security practices, and so that's something that you know. I've explained kind of to my immediate family and they can really understand. It's funny.

Jelena Djuric: 32:36

My mom actually like works in a bank in Canada and she's constantly explaining how complicated the systems are internally at the bank for their employees, for their customers, having to go between like different, like departments. You know these are all just like cumbersome, you know antiquated, like systems, in my opinion, and you know of course the banks and you know Trifite will kind of eventually have to incorporate these technologies, stable coins, into their systems. But that's going to take time and until that happens, you know startups and kind of smaller players and of course the the broader kind of crypto community can really offer, I would say, superior experiences and products to people such that they can, you know, send dollars, you know across the world in a second and you know, uh, help someone that really you know needs that to pay their bills or pay for their groceries, and maybe they're experiencing currency devaluation, maybe they're in a war zone, and these are all just important things to consider. So, yeah, definitely in that process of continuous education, I would say yeah, super interesting.

Lukas Seel: 33:47

Is that something where you guys approach businesses specifically or sectors specifically for like business development, or are you more of like okay, we provide the protocol, anybody free to use it. This provides this utility and that utility. Or is there more of an, you know, active, educational or business development outreach that you guys focus on as well?

Jelena Djuric: 34:11

yeah, it's a good question. I mean, right now, you know we we are still a small team, so we're trying to focus our efforts and just making sure the infrastructure for around noble, around the noble protocol and and all of the kind of places that we're connected to, is just really sound right, like like fun facts, like noble has the second it's noble is the second fastest chain after Solana with native USDC, so we have about 1.2 second block times. Solana has half a second of block times, which is great. We're trying to get that down and again just make Noble even faster. You know, kind of more performant, more reliable.

Jelena Djuric: 34:49

And then, you know, in the near future we're actually expanding towards building these user facing applications. Right, you know, whether that's payments, whether that's lending, whether that's swaps. You know we believe that the kind of realm of possibility of what can be built with stable coins is just so huge. You know, in the same way that you know there's just so much to be built within like DeFi and just generally within the space. But we believe Bitcoin are almost even more accessible, kind of more prime ready for or, sorry, ready for prime time when it comes to kind of building these more mainstream use cases.

Lukas Seel: 35:28

And is that something let's let's talk a little bit about the next decade or so in crypto and Web3 and blockchain Is there from your perspective, and the protocol perspective too. What are you guys focusing on after this is all built out? Do you guys see this space developing toward, just like digital cash, for example? Of the space developing toward, you know, just like digital cash, for example? You mentioned applications that just run on blockchain. That's perhaps not what your protocol is focused on, but, like, where do you see sort of this stable coin market, the RWA market, developing toward and the space in general? Where are we? Where are we going? Is your mom on chain yet?

Jelena Djuric: 36:14

Yeah, that's a good question. No, she's not, and so it'll take time for her to get there. Yeah, so I mean, for us we're focused on like okay, so number one, there's still this like really big problem with like multi-chain UX, right, so, using stable coins again, like across different protocols, having to have like the right fee token to pay for gas, like dealing with like speed and like finality on like Ethereum mainnet offboarding, onboarding, like these are still problems. So these are still things that we need to figure out over the next year or so. And that's what we're doing, because for me to kind of have you know an application that's, let's say, it's a payments app right, it's a peer to peer payments app. For me to kind of show my mom and be like hey, look, you can like pay your friend for whatever, for getting the bill for dinner with crypto. Yeah, pickleball on this payments app, like look, how easy it is. Like that still actually wouldn't work because the fundamental kind of underlying protocol UX is still not very good. I mean, there are ways to abstract it and like again, this is like being solved as we speak, but that's like step one, okay, and then step two is okay, now that we have, you know, kind of the protocol, ux stuff figured out. Okay, how do we kind of mirror features that you kind of have in web two stuff figured out? Okay, how do we kind of mirror features that you kind of have in web to take any payments app, venmo, what have you? How do we kind of mirror that for a crypto use case? Um, that's again like user-friendly, that's secure, right, that's like fast, you know that people can you know safely, like self custody, they can safely pay for stuff. Like that's a whole other like product exercise, um, um.

Jelena Djuric: 37:53

And then I would say, third, it is also, of course, um, like institutional trust and support. Um, we're definitely getting that now. Um, you know the recent kind of acquisition of strut of a bridge by stripe. I think it's like a wake-up call, right, like every boardroom and like whatever the west is is like think like intratify or in in fintTech or neobanking is thinking, oh God, what's our stable price strategy, right, what's our crypto strategy? Again, like that'll take time to kind of figure out for themselves. But once you have that, I would say the floodgates are open and you can actually bring like the hundreds of millions, of billions of people on chain and like a way that is like safe, compliant, but also a superior kind of experience to what you have with the existing tools, just like one other example.

Jelena Djuric: 38:41

So you know there's obviously reports all the time. You know where it's like stable coin adoption happening Right now. There was a report sponsored by Visa a couple months ago and the top five countries include Turkey, nigeria, venezuela and then I forget the other two, maybe India, and there's obvious reasons for why that is right. These countries experience currency devaluation, inflation. These are countries with unstable political systems and so people are kind of going to stable coins. That's great, but at the same time, you still need a way for people to actually use those stable coins, like in their like local kind of economies, like where they are right.

Jelena Djuric: 39:23

A lot of the use cases for stables are run DeFi and just kind of holding it, which is good. That's like a huge step forward. But again, like, how do you have these use cases and these applications develop Lending payments, savings right? How do you actually have more optimal savings like crypto products where you can actually hold effectively a T-bill in Nigeria? That would be amazing. That's not currently possible under this existing kind of traditional system. All of these things will kind of take time. So yeah, I mean that was a bit long-winded maybe, but the point being is that this is an iterative process and of course it doesn't happen overnight, but I think the writing is pretty clearly on the wall.

Lukas Seel: 40:12

When it comes to um, you know just how much stable coins will be, um, you know a key part of of people's honestly everyday kind of financial lives in in the coming years and decades yeah, yeah, I think that was comprehensive and also, you know, like there's so many different uh routes or ways to think about the upcoming period, but also, just, you know, I think, realizing that there is a certain inevitability, you know, becoming a reality.

Lukas Seel: 40:57

It's used by so many people. You mentioned a bunch of countries where these use cases are just so clear and so clearly superior to, you know, traditional banking even for them, even though there are still friction points like offboarding, onboarding, all of this stuff, ux security obviously being a huge one, but even so, even right now, there are many, many people that just rely on this or can use it in ways that is simply superior to existing options, options Kind of in closing. Soon I want to go back to some more personal stuff. You building, you know, been in the space for a long time, kind of an Ethereum OG, even. What are some things that you kind of learned in the past years? And also, how has the space you think you know developed, matured in the past decade or so that you've been around?

Jelena Djuric: 41:58

Yeah, it's a good question and, by the way, thanks for having me. I do have to hop in a couple of minutes, unfortunately. This has been super fun, but I want to just address that because it's a good question. You know, I mean it's funny you see so much over a relatively short period of time. Right, like you know being, you know eight years in crypto is like obviously a long time being in crypto.

Jelena Djuric: 42:21

But like imagine you know being at like one job for eight years, like I feel like you would grow so much, less than growing over an eight period of time in crypto and one thing I learned is actually it's really really important this is going to sound very basic but who you work with and also what the actual organizational structure is of a particular team, you'll actually notice if you've worked in kind of different call it organizing organizations, depending on kind of leadership or depending on kind of like what the org chart looks like, you actually get different outcomes. You might have like the same people, let's say, working under, let's say, a holocratic method, which one of the projects I work with was a holocracy. Take that and bring them into a cooperative structure like a co-op or a type of co-op, and you'll actually get different outputs, like just different work products, even with the same people. Because I genuinely believe that the way like what we do and how we live is a function of like how our society is structured and you just have different incentives and like different value systems along the way is structured and you just have different incentives and like different value systems along the way, and maybe this goes back to my sort of learnings around like governance and like different political systems. But you know, obviously a communist society looks very different than a capitalist society, right, like it's like different incentives, different bureaucracies to contend with different, you know, different, different values, different, different types of relationships with with your kind of fellow neighbor, different trust systems and things like this.

Jelena Djuric: 43:57

And so I have noticed that on a very micro level working in crypto because, for better or for worse, people working in crypto and that like have their own companies they like love to experiment with different, like organizational structures, and so, yeah, one thing I like learned is like be very, very careful about what those structures look like. You know, make sure to kind of bring on good people, do a good, good, good job of like onboarding and hiring. I actually think that's something that's like typically overlooked. Like a lot of, especially in a bull market, right, like a lot of founders, a lot of management teams. They'll just be like, oh, let's just hire anyone and anyone, like anyone and everyone. Like let's work with recruiters and let's just like grow the team from like 10 to like 50 and we'll ship and everything will work out just fine.

Jelena Djuric: 44:36

Um, no, like that does not work, um at all. That's actually a recipe for disaster. Um, and so you really have to be careful about, again, like the organizational structure, like what it looks like, uh, in terms of, um, yeah, just just like the team construction, the team you know, the team culture, everything like this. So yeah, I don't know, that was maybe like not expected, but that's something I learned kind of very intimately and something that I'm very cognizant of.

Lukas Seel: 45:05

Yeah, so important, couldn't agree more.

Lukas Seel: 45:08

And I think super interesting point actually about like the same people in different structures work differently literally Right and there's different results coming out of that how you set it up. So, yeah, I think a very, very interesting point to think about. You know, for anybody who has ever run a business or is planning on it, you know people are important, but also the way that you let people work and work together is very important. Thank you for that. Well, you have something to go to, but maybe, in closing, how can we follow along with Noble? What's the kind of ways to get involved on a community level as a partner? Anything there and anything in the short, mid and long term that you're looking forward to in particular.

Jelena Djuric: 45:58

Yeah, thanks again for having me. I would just say feel free to you know, check up on our Twitter Noble underscore XYZ. I'm also extremely available, maybe too available sometimes. So feel free to follow me and, um, you know, you know, uh, dm or whatever. Like, I'm happy to have like conversations, uh, with folks about things, as long as you know it's like respectful and a good, good conversation, um, and so, yeah, uh, that's pretty much it.

Jelena Djuric: 46:28

I mean, there's a lot coming for noble like very, very soon, we're making a big community push finally around things like a discord, um, around things like different kind of campaigns. So watch out for that. There's a lot more kind of being done behind the scenes than what meets the eye, and I'm super kind of looking forward to, yeah, having more of a community focus for noble in 2025, such that, you know, we can all be part of this, because I mean, yeah, crypto is just amazing. Stablecoins are just this incredible tool and kind of unlock for the technology that we're building, and yeah, I'm just excited to see kind of where that all goes. So, yeah, thanks again for having me and it was a pleasure.

Lukas Seel: 47:09

Thank you so much, jelena. Thank you everybody for listening. You heard it here. If you have any questions for Jelena, just DM her. She'll respond to basically everything. Be nice. But yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, giving us some insights and some good pointers, I think, for the future. Yeah, this was Helios Horizons, episode 30, with Jelena Djoric of Noble. Thank you so much for joining us and talk very soon. Thank you, jelena.