Transcript
our track partner, I excess finance and dig into one of the areas that we're really most
excited about at OvenServe which is a genetic finance. AI agents are really moving from just
assisting us with financial decisions to managing and deploying capital at scale. So there's really
a lot for us to unpack here around what that looks like across various asset classes like
RWA's tokenized assets, financial markets more broadly. So as mentioned we have joining us
today, Tim Hathner, founder and CEO of OvenServe, who I'm sure most of you guys already know
and Julian Kwan, CEO of IXS Finance. So yeah, we're just going to keep things pretty open, talk
about where we things are headed, what both teams are building and how devs and builders can really
start experimenting with our tech. So yeah, let's kick things off with a quick
control, Tim, maybe you can just kick us off and do the honors for anyone discovering
OvenServe first time maybe just joined our community. Can you just give us an overview of what
we're building with serve and the bigger vision? Absolutely, thanks, Adam. Cool. So yeah, so at OvenServe
we're building what we call the reasoning layer for agents and we tackle kind of three dimensions
within that that's around kind of the main issues that plague agents today, AI agents and kind of
hamper their adoption across different spaces and verticals and those are sort of reliability and
performance, cost and auditability or observability kind of interchangeable there. And we essentially
embed or add on top of OVA agents and their models, like basically the AI models they use,
we implement like custom reasoning graphs and architectures and agent harnesses and context
engineering features to basically uplift the intelligence of the AI models that the agents are using,
which as a consequence makes them more reliable and more performant. And as a consequence of that
allows institutions and builders and companies to use smaller models for their agents that cut
down on costs, cut down on latency and improve the performance and reliability of their systems.
And as a final piece we introduced this auditability aspect, which is particularly crucial for
sort of like critical use cases and larger scale use cases where
agentech finance being one of them in particular where the decisions that agents are making need to
be tracked and traced and need to be able to point to something. So different stakeholders can
understand why results were produced, why certain outputs were put forth compared to other
decisions that the agent could have made, which allows for greater visibility, transparency
and accountability ultimately as well. So that if something goes wrong, you know where to look
who to ask and what to do. And yeah, the goal of what we're doing is to essentially
yeah become the kind of like default intelligence and performance layer for AI agents across the space
and unlock the adoption curve of AI agents in real settings and enterprise context that currently
they're not able to do because they don't basically possess the properties that we're building for.
So yeah, that's us in Anacha, we'll pass it on to Julian.
Hey guys, can you, I guess you can hear me. Yeah, hey, Ron. Thanks for joining in, taking time out of your
day. I'm Julian Kwan, I'm co-founder of IXS Finance. IXS started as the first real-world asset Dex
about four or five years ago, that was the original business model. The back in that day,
we hadn't actually, as an industry, seen any of the financial instruments and the fixed income
and institutional assets at that point in time. So the
I think we lost Julian. Yeah, I think we lost you. Oh well, yeah, let us ping Julian.
Oh, you there? Oh, you're back Julian. So you lose me just that a bit of a glitch.
Okay, sorry, yeah, there's something wrong with XC, but yeah, so what happened was in the last year or two
we started to see kind of the institutionalization of the RWA space. What that really meant was
much higher quality assets, publicly traded assets, you know, money market funds and
treasuries, a lot of fixed income yield. They're a really good product market for stablecoins
that earn no yield. And that's where our platform kind of evolved to. And then what that has meant
is that, and then the beginning of the year, we were looking, we implemented a lot of AI into the
business starting January last year, 18 months ago, 20 months ago. But we really sat down and thought
about what's this whole agent growth. It's really getting exciting. I'm excited to sort of really
coming in alive in Q1 this year, I would say, or a lot of it did. We started seeing a lot of stuff
going on blockchain related. We met the serve guys thought they were building something really
valuable. We saw a lot of people launching agents kind of investment agent type kind of projects.
A lot of them were, you know, sort of like an ICO utility type token that was tied to
an actual agent that was doing trading and then parts of the, I guess the profits would be shared
with the token holders. There was a bunch of people experimenting in different models.
So we originally then thought, you know, hang on, we need to get, we need to look at what we could
do, what we wanted to do for the industry. So we have, you know, the regulated infrastructure,
and we started building real estate vaults and then initially those vaults were for human investors.
Then we thought, well, why don't we provide real estate vaults for the agent economy. So agents
could interact with these vaults and there'd be sort of different parameters and metrics to that.
And that's what I access is focused on in relation to the agent world and the agent economy.
It's building like additional products on top of what we need to have any way to do this.
And so that was sort of how we got into kind of the space we didn't ourselves want to build another
agent that there's lots of different products and projects out there doing that. We want to provide,
we see, we see agents who are putting idle capital into defy vaults and defy yields and earn programs.
But when it comes to RWA, you know, it requires licenses and security. So we sort of a big opportunity.
to step into that first and that's what we did. So that's how that's how we got here and,
you know, obviously, came to do a lot more with with servant, you know, the, the,
what we realized very early on like anything new, there's a lot of experimentation,
there's a lot of people doing all kinds of different things. I just finished a long tour of America,
meeting a whole bunch of different groups, people building bank, banking services for agent,
but building, building trading services for agents, like all the things that, you know,
human investors or human would need, but with the agent spin on it. And at the end of the day,
every single agent at the moment is predominantly kind of owned by a human.
There might be a human that uses agents to spin up a whole bunch of sub agents, but at the end of the day,
they're not just topping out, they're not coming from nowhere. And especially on the investment space,
they're looking to make money for somebody. So it is this interesting layer. I don't think it's as
crazy and galactic as a lot of people think at least in the investment side of the world. And that's
how focused. Thank you, Julian. And thank you, Tim, for shedding some light on what we're building
with open-serve and I access respectively. So to take a little step back and let's say maybe you're
new to our communities, you haven't really researched a lot about agentech finance and what the
opportunity is at hand. What does that actually mean beyond, you know, let's say crypto use cases
or payments, trading about simple automation, gardener predicts, divide 23, at least 15% of day-to-day
transactions will be made autonomously now. Bit of a bold claim there. We know these predictions go,
but that's definitely the trajectory of the industry is going on. So I guess what changes when agents go
from like assistant humans to actually making these financial decisions and managing capital. I know
Julian, you've mentioned compliance there and making sure it's regulated. So I'd love to take both
your takes, Tim and Julian on this. Yeah, sure. But yeah, I can add to you. Sounds good, thanks.
Cool. So yeah, I definitely agree with what Julian just said at the end there that,
you know, I think we like to sort of like mystify what agents really are today and kind of imagine
them as into a galactic autonomous being that traverses our world and makes decisions by themselves
which at the moment is not the case, right? And we're kind of on like on a curve, right? On
like a sort of like quote unquote, like autonomous curve. And right now agents are not particularly
autonomous. They're still relying on a ton of guidance from humans and there's a lot of
guardrails baked in because it's such a nascent technology. And we know at the moment with how
sort of like reliable and trustworthy these systems are that those guardrails and human sort of like
human contribution is still super, super important. But you know, when we look into the future that
is likely where we're going to get more and more as we can trust the underlying infrastructure
and technology more and more that these agents are going to become more autonomous and require less
human involvement and make their own decisions in an increasing manner. And you know, the reality is
we don't know where where that ends up, right? Like to what degree will agents actually be performing tasks
on their own under their own sort of directive under their own creativity. And we're going to have to
see where that kind of lands in the future because I'm sure one can imagine if we get to that state
and then agents start acting maliciously and you know, holding sums of funds for ransom or what
can cut those what that we're definitely going to be throttling back the if possible, right?
Throttling trying to throttle back the autonomy that these agents have. So what that means in terms of
sort of like actual applications in this space is yeah, hard to say what it really looks like looking
further out. But right now we're super early on in this curve. And I think right now, yeah, we're
looking at the early days of trading bots and simple payments and sort of like commercial interactions
and transactions. And it's just going to expand into a larger, into a larger slice of what
finance is, right? Like finance is a massive massive industry spanning different geographies
and different types of finance. You know, we're talking about Web 3 finance, which is an entirely
different world at the moment until they too until, you know, both of them merge. But is is
largely a different world than what exists in, you know, regulated banking in somewhere, right?
So we're talking yeah, payments, commerce, you know, even back office stuff for an exchange
transactions. Like imagine some large entity or sovereign world fund is has some agent that's
you know, autonomously gathering price data and aggregating news feeds and, you know,
executing 4x transactions to swap it in out of different currencies and maintain certain like
risk profiles against there, whatever their directive is. And it's going to expand into
a whole number of things all the way down to like customer support at a bank, right? Like you're
not going to talk to a human anymore. You're going to be talking to an agent to process your
banking loan or check your credit score or whatever that may be. And as the sort of capabilities of
these agents continue to improve, that will only expand into more domains based on that kind of
like trust coefficient, I suppose you could frame it as. And yeah, we'll yeah, go ahead Julian.
I think yeah, I think we love. Yeah, I think it needs to be a speaker. Yeah, just add on
to invite to speak. I guess Tim in the meanwhile, as we get Julian back on,
you know, you briefly touched on serve reasoning, the availability, the availability.