It is great to be back at a Global Interdependence Center conference. Given recent events in crypto, it is certainly timely to have a day of discussions related to digital assets.1 Before diving into today's talks, which will touch on various parts of the crypto ecosystem, I'd like to clearly define some concepts to ensure we're all talking about the same things.
I think of the crypto ecosystem as consisting of three parts: a crypto-asset, which generally refers to any digital asset implemented using cryptographic techniques that is being traded; a database management protocol used to record trades, commonly referred to as the blockchain, which includes both permissioned and permissionless distributed ledger technologies; and technology that directly facilitates trading crypto-assets; this includes smart contracts and tokenization as a form of data privacy.