The co-founder of Aptos (APT) is weighing in on what developments in the digital assets space could attract the next wave of mass adoption.
In a new interview with crypto influencer Scott Melker, Aptos CEO and cofounder Mo Shaikh says that three main things could result in a billion new users flooding the space.
The first on his list is a universal identity application allowing users access to their crypto assets.
“A killer app might actually be credentialing. Identity. No one likes to talk about it. But if I had the same identity that I can take with me everywhere, that would be amazing. And if it would give me access to my assets in some custodial manner, self-custodial, full-custodial, I’d be happy with that. That is something that we’re all pretty excited about. We’re seeing that in the work that we’re doing with someone like MasterCard.”
Next up, the Aptos co-founder says that stablecoins have great growth potential because of the demand for dollars and faster payments.
“The second thing is actually money. We’ve seen stablecoins reach massive opportunities across global reach. And it’s been the demand for the US dollar actually where we’ve seen that adoption. One would have thought it might have been things like Bitcoin or other protocols, but the demand for the US dollar has been a phenomenal growth lever for some of the largest stablecoin issuers that are very popular today, so much so that you see someone like PayPal entering the space…
And it’s been just an amazing ray of light for the Web3 world to see here’s one of the largest money movement networks take on and embrace and bring money movement to the world.”
Lastly, Shaikh says that decentralized finance (DeFi) innovation has the potential to further expand access to crypto and attract users with new ways to generate wealth.
“The third one is open finance. DeFi has done a great job of showing us what it could be for someone like Mo and Scott who’s in Singapore get access to yields that would never be available, because we had credentials, we had access to dollars or stablecoins, and now we can put them in these interesting pools.
We think that’s going to evolve in the next permutation of DeFi. Someone like Sushi might be a driver for that. Other EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) based DeFi protocols might be able to benefit immensely by opening up the world through new reach and infrastructure like Aptos.
I think access to global economies through open DeFi protocols could really be empowering to the next generation of wealth creation in the world.”