SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Amy Zhang is Vice President of Sales at Fireblocks, a user-friendly platform for building blockchain-based products and managing digital asset operations. She sat down with Malandrino to discuss key use cases capable of unlocking the mainstream adoption of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets.
Zhang highlighted Fireblocks’ recent partnerships among its biggest 2024 milestones:
In June, Fireblocks and Chainlink were utilized by Bancolombia Group’s digital asset company, Wenia, to launch the Colombian peso-backed COPW stablecoin. Fireblocks also announced a strategic collaboration with Chainlink Labs to provide financial institutions with a secure, compliant, end-to-end technology solution for issuing transparent, regulated stablecoins.
“It is important for us to find ways to allow people to experiment, to build and see what innovation comes out of it, and then find use cases that ultimately will be adopted and bring more users into this space,” Zhang said. “We’re very supportive of that and also excited to see partners of ours doing the same thing.”
She underscored web3’s user experience as one of the hottest topics at this year’s SmartCon and explained why abstracting away digital assets’ technical complexity is critical to driving adoption.
“Users shouldn’t have to be thinking about stablecoins,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to think about the different assets or chains and what all these things are. From the user perspective, it should be a one-click friendly process in order for stablecoins to have true adoption.”
Protecting private information onchain is another essential component of the user experience. After achieving regulatory clarity, Zhang believes the “final piece of the puzzle” is organically uncovering use cases that deliver the most value.
“It’s about revenue, risk, and cost,” she said. “That’s definitely a theme we’re seeing, where many institutions are no longer simply funding thought experiments; they are looking for real use cases that can actually drive or solve those three things that they really care about.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Amy Zhang.