Podcast

RedBelly Network The FUTURE of Fintech TODAY.

February 28, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Vincent Gramoli

Dexter Cousins invites Vincent Gramoli, founder and CTO to talk about his innovative work at RedBelly Network.

Vincent charts his journey in the blockchain environment from academia to entrepreneurship.

He outlines the innovative approach RedBelly Network takes towards the tokenisation of real-world assets and the need for collaboration between Tradfi and Defi.

Vincent shares insights on blockchain technology safety measures, the importance of compliance, and how he sees the future of fintech in Australia.

About RedBelly Network

Redbelly Network is a team of innovators, engineers, and visionaries committed to building a secure and inclusive blockchain ecosystem.

They believe in the power of collaboration — within both their team and the global community, working towards reshaping the future of finance and technology.

About Vincent Gramoli

Vincent Gramoli is the Founder and CTO of Redbelly Network and the Head of the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney.

Vincent has chaired the Cybersecurity Committee for the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) and the Blockchain Technical Committee for the Australian Computer Society.

His accolades include the Digital National Facilities & Collections Award from CSIRO, the Best Paper Awards at ICDCS’21, IPDPS’22, ICDCS’22 and DSN’24 for his research on blockchains

He received the Education Leader of the Year Award from Blockchain Australia and the Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council.

Vincent has been affiliated with INRIA, Cornell, Data61 and EPF.

Key Takeaways

RedBelly Network aims to provide a compliant blockchain solution for traditional finance.
The company focuses on tokenising real-world assets to lower barriers for retail investors.
Safety measures include linking accounts to real-world identities to ensure accountability.
The collaborative approach to scalability is a key feature of RedBelly Network’s technology.
Commercialising innovation in Australia can be a lengthy process due to regulatory hurdles.
Emphasising the importance of learning business skills for tech founders.
Building stong networks is crucial for finding talent in niche markets.
Investor interest in compliant asset tokenisation is growing.
RedBelly Network aims to reduce transaction fees by maintaining a fixed fee structure.

Sound Bites

“We’re entering a new era with tokenisation.”
“I had to learn the business side of things.”

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Vincent and Red Belly Network

05:27 Navigating Regulation in Blockchain

08:58 Tokenisation of Real-World Assets

12:08 Safety Measures using Layered Technology

19:33 Transitioning from Tech to Business

24:36 Hiring the right Talent

27:19 The Challenge of Funding

30:51 Reducing Fees for Consumers

34:30 The Pro-Crypto Movement

39:23 Learning from TradFi for Future Innovations

41:33 Future Plans for RedBelly Network

Links from this episode.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I chat with fintech leaders about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm dedicated to connecting high growth fintech companies like Wise, Revolut and Lendi with exceptional talent.

Today’s guest is Vincent Gramoli, the founder and CTO of Redbelly Network. He’s also the professor of computer science at the University of Sydney. Vincent is considered an authority on blockchain technology. He’s the recipient of multiple awards, the chair of the blockchain technical committee for the ACS, the chair of the program committee of international scientific conferences and a blockchain expert for central and commercial banks. Vincent joins me today to talk about his journey of how to commercialise innovation here in Australia. Vincent, welcome to the show.

Vincent Gramoli
Thank you for having me, Dexter.

Dexter Cousins
It’s been two years in the making, this podcast interview. We talked about doing this I think all the way back in December of 2022, so it’s fantastic to finally have you on. And I guess, look, the other great thing about having you on is there’s a lot to talk about as well since that 2-year period. But before we do go into that, Vincent, maybe if you could tell listeners a little bit about who you are and a little bit about Redbelly Network.

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, sure. Thanks, T. So I’m Vincent Gramoli, I’m the founder and the CTO of Redbelly Network, and my background is academia. So I’ve been working on distributed systems for quite some time, especially consensus problems, trying to have machines agreeing on something as simple as single bit. And back in 2016 I started looking at blockchain technologies, where essentially the consensus was a central problem, because we thought we could do better than what was existing, especially around certainty, trying to offer certainty properties like instant finality or what you see is what you get.

And so we’ve been working on that for quite some time, devising distributed algorithm, publishing scientific papers. And then we finally decided that we had something very interesting, both from a scalability point of view, so a solution that could scale to very large networks like blockchain requires, but also a secure solution, in the sense that we had a deterministic consensus algorithm that would work in every instance where you would invoke it.

So we decided to continue working on the research behind it, trying to improve the security. We’ve done that successfully with formal verification using model checking, guaranteeing this certainty property is at a higher level, reducing considerably the risk of human errors in that. And we implemented it, we tested it, we implemented a blockchain or distributed ledger technology around it, and it turned out to be very efficient because we took a collaborative approach, which was also a new things compared to the competitive process of trying to choose a single block in the blockchain out of many proposers. Instead we were collaboratively creating a block out of multiple blocks proposed by proposers.

So we got good performances. We presented this results to the scientific community and we decided to commercialise it, which became Redbelly Network. So that was back in 2021, and the Redbelly Network is the fruit of this great discovery, but also a collaboration between Block8, venture studio out of Sydney, Australia, and CSIRO and University of Sydney, were my employers at the time. And we created this joint venture between these three entities that is now Redbelly Network. The goal of Redbelly Network is to lower the barrier of entry to accessible assets, and we’re doing that by bridging the gap between the traditional blockchain environment and the regulated environment where we believe this trades should occur.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So it’s interesting to hear you talk about that, because the language that you’ve used is very different to what you might associate with blockchain or crypto, where it’s very kind of hyperbolic around completely changing the economy and a new way of storing value and a new way of exchanging value. What’s been the approach of kind of Redbelly Network to, I guess, kind of be able to take the technology but then, as you say, have intelligent conversations with regulators, where you’re immediately not putting them on the defensive because what you’re talking about is basically absolute chaos and destroying kind of global economy?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, since day one we had a mission of complying with Australian regulation. That was really our intention, not only because the Australian government through CSIRO was the shareholder of our company, but also because we received funding from the federal governments to do a research in the first place for the Australian Research Council. So it was very important for us to be Australian, to grow a company in Australia, to hire people in Australia.

Now in terms of the regulation, technology goes so fast in general. In this particular instance of blockchain development it went much faster than the regulations, right? And we have seen radical shifts, especially in the US, around the strategy that is adopted to regulate this environment, the cryptocurrency exchanges, the technology itself, or what it can enable. So I think what we were trying to do is to anticipate what the regulation would look like. And if you think about something very simple, which is that this technology allows people to trade securities, commodities, then if you step back a little bit you can imagine that there is a need for compliance checks, the same type of checks that you would have in the traditional finance industry. I’m thinking about simple ones like AML/CTF checks.

So this is something that is very important, but the problem was that if you look at this technology and where it comes from, it comes from Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous author that published a Bitcoin paper. But if you can trace back some of his ideas to the cypherpunk mailing list that was created out of California, where cypherpunks were extremely attached to their anonymity, and they were looking for a system that could allow them to trade assets without revealing their identity, even to the government, right? So their intention, as they were tech savvy back in the ’90s even, was really to use cryptography as a mean in order to trade between themselves, but without revealing their identity or who they are in this process.

Now if you move that to today, then you realise that there is a bit of a clash with this AML/CTF checks, right? And that’s really the mission of Redbelly, that was to bridge the gap between this anonymity that exists in the blockchain space, which is inherent to really the blockchain philosophy, and really bringing it to TradFi, and which means also trying to comply with the regulation.

So one of the first thing we had to do was simply to make sure that every user on the Redbelly Network would be identified. So it’s not really as demanding as a sophisticated investor check or even a KYC process, is just trying to show an identity document of your jurisdiction and pass a biometric check. And if you don’t do that then you cannot access the Redbelly Network. So it gives some certainty as well in the identity of the people you’re trading with, and it protects yourself in doing actions like trading with someone or giving money to someone who can use this money for terrorism financing or money laundering. So that’s the first barrier.

Dexter Cousins
Got you. You’ve started now to also, I think rather interestingly, have the tokenisation of real world assets on the platform. We had Andrew Ward on the show last year from Liquidise, which I think that was one of the first partnerships that you’d announced. Can you talk us a little bit through the tokenisation of real world assets?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, that’s a very interesting question. So it’s true that if we look at the blockchain complete history, right, there had been booms in the usage of this technology for different type of application. But I think today with a tokenisation of especially real world assets we’re entering a new era, where we’re talking about assets in a much mature way. So if you compare it to for example 2017, blockchains were heavily used for CryptoKitties. People were exchanging images of cats for fun. You can imagine that probably the young generation was doing that, and they were selling them, they were modifying them, so there was a market for this.

Then if we advance few years later, we realise that NFT, non-fungible tokens, were also a use case on top of these blockchain technologies, and they were incurring a lot of traffic. So non-fungible tokens that would represent pieces of art, but it kind of drifted to memecoin, right, where people would just represent something funny and make it a coin that they would sell as well.

So what we see now is that we’re no longer using that for fun, but we’re starting to think about investment strategies. So we’re talking about real world assets, we’re talking about commodities, we’re talking about securities. There is a huge opportunity for that. I think KPMG published a report last year where they were saying that by 2030 there would be a big boom in terms of the market opportunity, like multiplying between 28 times to 80 times. So there is a huge opportunity. It’s currently expected to be in multi-trillion dollars opportunity, and we’re talking about real world assets and not this funny CryptoKitties and NFTs anymore. So there is a huge appetite for that, but of course what you need when you talk about real world assets, like for example I could talk to mortgages, right, then we’re really expecting a technology to be extremely secure.

Dexter Cousins
Given the kind of speed at which this technology operates, and we saw two years ago kind of Silicon Valley Bank, bank run within minutes, not months, what are some of the kind of safety measures that Redbelly Network would have in place that you kind of don’t have all of a sudden what’s coming in and creating a kind of black swan event on the network?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, so that’s a good question. Redbelly Network is not a bank, so when you mentioned the Silicon Valley Bank bankruptcy, it’s hard to relate it to Redbelly Network. Redbelly Network is really a medium, if you want, or a network that puts in relation different entities that could be trade finance, that could be neobanks, that could also go beyond the finance industry.

But I think the first safu that we have is that every single account on our platform is linked to a real world identity. So there is an inherent notion of accountability that we create out of this network that doesn’t exist in the blockchain space where people are anonymous, right? So a hacker in the traditional blockchain, if it’s fully anonymous, then he will steal assets from someone else and of course there won’t be any recourse, there won’t be any accountability.

By building this layer where every account is linked to a real world identity, then you make sure that there is this layer of accountability that allows someone, if they want to complain, or they can seek a recourse, maybe with the government, with the financial institutions they’re dealing with. But there is a way that people can trace back all the trades and also ask an identity provider, if it comes to this, to retrieve the real world identity that is related to an account. So we are building this accountability layer where people will think twice before stealing the assets of others. We believe that it’s extremely important, but it’s also a nice side effect of the identification process.

Now it could be the case that someone, and we can talk about that as well later, but it could be the case that someone use AI for example to automate his trades or for portfolio management of his assets on the network, right? But in any case, if you have this bot that is trading, it will do that on behalf of his real world identity, right? So the user itself can trigger or can activate this bot, but the bot cannot be an autonomous entity like it would be in anonymised system.

Dexter Cousins
You talked about layers there. I’m kind of familiar with layer one and layer two technology, but that’s about it. Can you talk us a little bit through the technology and kind of where it sits within the realm of Ethereum and kind of layer one and layer two, and some of the thinking behind that? And I guess premise of this question being very much, Vincent, that technology is moving that fast that oftentimes your stuff that you’re building today can become redundant within 12 to 18 months. How have you kind of future proofed the technology so that it doesn’t become redundant within the next few years?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, that’s a very interesting question. It’s really interesting because I teach distributed systems at University of Sydney, but I also have a massive open online course online where I teach blockchain technologies and their scalability. And I tell my students when I start, like, I won’t teach you about a specific technology, like Solidity programming language version, blah blah blah, but I will teach you the foundation, because the foundation is the abstraction that when you understand them you can apply them to different applications, right?

So we talk about blockchains, but what we’re teaching when we’re teaching blockchain, it’s about the cyber security abstraction, the cyber security software that you can build that has to be secure. And all these things, maybe 10 years down the road may not be called blockchain anymore, but the things you would have learned, like this foundation, will still remain relevant, right? That’s what is important.

We do the same at Redbelly. We’re trying to change the way things are being done. We adopted a particular technology which comes out of Ethereum, which is the ability to execute smart contracts, which are programs that can do pretty much whatever you want, as opposed to just a transfer between a party and another. And these smart contracts, the reason why we have decided to go down that path is we realised that there was an opportunity not just for CryptoKitties and NFTs, but really for traditional finance to jump on board and to essentially create any type of complex application, allowing sophisticated investors to execute some transaction, not allowing others, and also to build structured products, right?

So you were talking about Liquidise earlier, all these products that relates to private equity shares that you want to digitalise. How can you pack them up into a structured financial product? These smart contracts, they allow you to do that, and that’s extremely promising. Now we’re building upon this specific Ethereum technology because as of today it represent the largest ecosystem of existing decentralised applications, so people have been innovating and we want to be compatible with this technology.

But in terms of the foundation we have worked much harder in trying to achieve what we have now, which is around security and scalability, which is a platform with some very simple foundational concept like collaboration that will allow you to leverage resources that you have in the network. Like for example, Bitcoin and Ethereum were essentially incentivising all the computers around the world to do exactly the same thing, but it’s not because they were having more and more nodes in the network that they would become faster, right, because they were doing exactly the same thing. So that was a huge waste of resources. We thought that that was a problem, not only an environmental problem, like in terms of carbon footprint, but also it was just a waste, and we wouldn’t achieve scalability, which is preserving or increasing the performance as you increase the number of resources that you have in your system.

So instead of that we came up with this collaborative approach that is called the Superblock, that has been patented since then, that essentially says that we’re going to leverage resources of computers as we are adding them to the network, but everyone will have a chance to get some reward, contribute to the protocol, but not everyone at the same time, because it doesn’t make sense when you pass a certain threshold, right? When you have this kind of representation of every jurisdictions around the world, you start believing that you have enough nodes, you’re decentralised enough, and you don’t need like all the computers of the world to do the exact same thing. So we do that in a collaborative fashion, and also we allow people to get reward out of that. So there is an incentive mechanism, but by limiting the number of contributors within the network.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Now, can you talk me a little bit through the journey that you’ve had of commercialising the technology? Because famously Australia has a very strong reputation for innovation and not so great reputation for commercialisation of that innovation. What’s that journey been like? And look, I’m kind of really intrigued because you’re coming from an academic background as well, so it’s not a skill set that’s kind of comparable with you being a salesperson and kind of getting out there and kind of driving clients and winning business. What’s that journey been like for you, Vincent?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, do, I will be honest here. I think it took a long time, so it has been quite a journey. And I think for Australian founders I would recommend to be really hopeful about the future and to be really diligent, like keep working on what you believe is interesting, because it takes a lot of time. And it’s often the case that it’s not because of what you’re creating, which is not appealing enough for customers, or it’s not because the tech is not good enough, but there are some hurdles around legal processes, licensing, selling out the intellectual property, things like that can take a while.

I remember I was talking to my colleagues in the US, they were also from academia, and I was trying to compare the system back then. I remember presenting Redbelly at MIT, that was the year of 2017 if I’m not mistaken, and at the same time MIT came up with a blockchain technology, so a colleague at MIT, another blockchain company, but it did that in a much shorter period of time. So once he created the algorithm, published the paper, it could commercialise it right away, because he was granted the licence effectively, which I didn’t have at the time. So it took a bit longer. I had to negotiate with different parties.

My situation was a bit complicated as well because I was working both with the science, CSIRO, and because of that I was both CSIRO and University of Sydney, and so the intellectual property was a split between different institutions. So of course you have to make sure that they agree with each other about the way this will be commercialised before you can activate it. But it took some time. Between 2017, when I decided to commercialise, and 2021, when we created the commercial vehicle, four years went through.

But today I’ve learned a lot, and I’m also working with the same individuals I’ve been working with in the past, both at CSIRO and University of Sydney, and we’re also streamlining the processes, so we’re discussing about ways to improve things. So a lot of time passed and things have improved, so I’m glad about that. But yeah, I think there’s still a bit of work to be done in this space to make sure that Australia will be more competitive.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And with, I guess, the kind of commercialisation piece, what are the skills that you’ve had to develop to kind of move into that role of CEO, where it’s not just about being the tech guy and being absorbed in the tech, but you have to have that commercial lens on, and then all of the stress and pressure, right? Like, eight years is a long time to work on a project and to finally see it come to fruition. What have you learned about yourself on that journey?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, so I’ve been through accelerator. I’ve got successful through, in accelerators. We got some prizes that were also helpful. We went through incubation as well. But these were interesting experiences where I had to learn the business side of things, things that I don’t do usually. I created then Redbelly Blockchain, the company, and I was a CEO for not so long actually, because then I teamed up with people who were much better than me at doing business, right? And I think that was the right thing to do. So I’m really in tech, so now I’m the CTO, and I’ve always been in tech, so I’m happy to talk about science, technology and so on, but it’s much harder to be the business person and to just negotiate contracts with partners and customers.

Dexter Cousins
And when it’s come to hiring, obviously it’s such a kind of nascent technology that you’ve got such a limited pool of people to be able to go after, and you’re basically developing something that doesn’t exist, right? Where have you gone to find talent and the right people to help you build Redbelly Network?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, so I’ve built a network of really brilliant, talented and sharp people who work in distributed computing or distributed systems over the years, just because I was teaching so many students one year after another, but also because I was doing my research. So I started essentially in France. I went to the US, I did research over there. I went back to France, did a PhD, went back to the US, Cornell University, travelled to Switzerland, where I spent like four years and a half working with different institution, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology over there in Lausanne, University of Nel, before ending up in Australia.

And I think as a researcher you have to do that, you have to travel around the world. You go to conferences, that’s also part of your job. When you present new research outcomes, you go and you present to the community and you also network with the community, and this networking exercise is so valuable for making sure that you are connected to the right persons who are knowledgeable in the space. And when it comes to creating a company, and when you start growing like we did, and you need to find the right sources, then you can tap into your network.

And yeah, some examples of that is I’ve been hiring postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney, people that I knew from before because I was part of their PhD jury. Then they moved on, they had their own life, but then at some point Redbelly Network hired them because I reached out to them and say, hey, why don’t you join Redbelly Network? And then we could get access to people were working in the Silicon Valley through these connections, and attract them in Australia to work on this great technology, because there was this relationship of trust and we knew each other, and we knew that together we could achieve something very promising, like we’ve done in the past in different research topics actually.

Dexter Cousins
So one of the things that I found has been really interesting in this last 12 to 24 months is, whilst it’s been very, very difficult market for funding, there has been funding going into what I’d say are big, bold, ambitious projects. Now I don’t think there’s anything more kind of big and bold and really promising to completely change the way in which we exchange value and the whole infrastructure behind that. What have you found as being the kind of appetite from investors around the vision of Redbelly Network? And I say this through the lens of 2025, you feel as kind of this is the moment where we look back and say this is when TradFi and DeFi kind of started to come together and merge. What’s the sense that you’re getting from potential investors around the actual belief in not just the technology but the premise of a solution like Redbelly Network?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, so initially it was not easy to get the first investments. We’re really coming out of academia, so we are considered deep tech, which I think we were at the time, really trying to advance innovation, so creating this new software. And at the time, as part of the lab that I was heading, when it was just a research project, it was hard to anticipate what would be the first use cases, the low-hanging fruit in terms of applications. So we knew that security was extremely important, and performance, but we didn’t know exactly where to go. When we reached a throughput that was more than what the Bank of China would need, we thought, okay, maybe we should stop there, stop optimising it, right? 660,000 transaction per second, it’s just fast enough. Yeah. And then we thought about, okay, let’s do that, but we didn’t have a clue about the low-hanging fruit, the really killer application, let’s say.

And then over the years, when we commercialised this vehicle, we realised that there was a need for, and there was an interest and an appetite from the traditional finance industry in tokenising, digitalising assets, lowering the costs of the processes, cutting the middleman. That was essentially something promising, and by bringing security you could give hope to the TradFi environment that there was a technology that could suit them.

So at the beginning in terms of investment we had to go abroad, look at partners in the US, South Korea, UK, and little by little I felt like we attracted the interest of also Australian investors, and now we’re in a very good situation, I have to say. So things have completely changed. I think it changed also when we managed to really phrase our key value proposition, which was around compliant asset tokenisation, so bridging the gap between, or combining if you want, tokenisation with regulation, so making sure that anything that would be digitalised would be assets that people would trade knowing where the assets would end up with.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And I guess we’ve seen as well discussions around, you talk their fees and reducing fees. If you go back to the NFT craze, famously people are paying more gas fees than they were in the actual NFT that they were buying. How is the Redbelly Network kind of helping reduce those fees and make those transactions not only trusted and in, but also how do you kind of keep the fees down on that?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, so it’s very simple actually. This period where Ethereum and Solana in particular were congested, so first Ethereum 2017 was due to the CryptoKitties boom, so there were so many transaction that it became congested and it couldn’t serve all the transaction issuer. So the tendency was, because of the technology itself, the tendency was to increase the fee associated with the transaction, in the hope that the node or the machine that would receive your transaction would try to prioritise it, because if you attach a fee that is higher it means that the machine or the person that owns the machine that will prioritise your transaction will get this higher fee as a reward.

So because of the nature of the protocol that was extremely competitive, the fees attached to every transaction went very, so if you wanted to see your transaction being accepted by the system, even accepted, not only committed in a short period of time but also accepted, you had to pay a high fee. And this happened in Solana recently, where there was this surge of demand, where Solana started losing transactions as well because of the demand, like there were too many transactions.

Yeah, I think the fundamental problems is what we call scalability. If you cannot really handle a very large demand then you probably are capped in terms of capacity. And so that’s why we have put so much effort into the thinking, into the research in the first place. That’s why we really thought through the system as a collaborative environment that will have this scalability property in it. So that’s also the reason why we achieve such a high performance back then, and we still do. It’s because we thought about being scalable and making sure that we could treat a lot of transaction per unit of time.

Now this allows you to reduce the risk of having congestion, and if you don’t have congestions then nobody will try to pay a crazy fee with their transaction because there is no need for that. Your transaction will be anyway committed in less than, or roughly half a second, which is really, really short. In addition to that we also have a fee mechanism that is completely different from Ethereum or Bitcoin or other blockchains, in the sense that we maintain the fee fixed with respect to the US dollar. Of course there might be some surge if there is a denial of service attack, so we have things in place to mitigate the problem, but we don’t accept a transaction because someone has put a higher fee associated with it, right? So there is no such competition in the Redbelly Network.

Dexter Cousins
So one of the other things I think it’s kind of really struck me, Vincent, is obviously new change in leadership in the US, which is, everybody’s excited because they’re pro crypto and regulations coming into place. I can’t help but think that regulation will actually slow things down, not speed them up, in regards to the US, where, yeah, I think kind of the reality is Gensa might have gone legal on people, but there were very few guidelines to stop what we’ve seen kind of really happen in the US around meme coins and all of those things. What’s your sense as to kind of upcoming regulation? And I guess, given the investment that you’ve put in and the care that you’ve taken around crafting the solution and addressing all those issues like scalability, do you feel that you’re kind of in a strong position to actually benefit from regulation in the industry?

Vincent Gramoli
Yes, so yeah, those things have changed a lot in the regulatory space, especially in the US landscape. I think initially, because they were regulating the technology a posteriori, so saying, okay, oh, we’ve decided that this type of token is considered a security, therefore you have breached the rules around security and you didn’t register yourself with the SEC, for example, this was really scary for innovators, right? So you might have slowed down the innovation because people were a bit reluctant: oh, will in the future this new beast that I’ve created be considered something illegal, and therefore I will have to pay back 10 years down the road what I’m doing right now? These kind of question marks will scare people. So there was this sentiment that, oh, we should be extremely careful here, and even, yeah, you couldn’t even seek legal advice at the time because what you were building was so innovative, right? So there was this, I guess this scare that could have slowed down the innovation progress.

Now things have changed, and things are much more friendly around cryptocurrency and the blockchain space in the US, and I believe that this would have an impact with the regulation in other countries. I think Redbelly Network has a very interesting role to play in that. I think it’s the middle ground that everyone would expect. I’m not saying that we should go full on, deregulate the market. I think we should give enough space for innovators to innovate, but we should also be careful about putting safeguards at some point, and making sure that they’re — to give you an example, like if the president of a powerful nation wanted to list a coin, and where he has a very large interest in this coin, then —

Dexter Cousins
Don’t think that would ever happen, Vincent.

Vincent Gramoli
This would have, no, but this kind of problem is leading, with the current technology that we have, no, anybody can invest, right? You cannot know the identity of the investor. So you can think about a sanctioned country now investing and buying all the coins that exist, right? What would it mean? Like, if the person has a very large share of the entire treasury, then it means that it controls the price of this as well, right? If you sells it, the price drops. So what does it mean in terms of diplomatic influence?

Now if you take a Redbelly Network, where everyone is identified, and you have a decentralised application that sits on top, like a smart contract that can say, okay, there are people from sanctioned country were not entitled to invest in this particular structured product, or you can say you can invest at this amount, but it has to be per real world identity, right? So maximum amount invested per real world identity. So even though the person has multiple addresses, it will be capped in the amount of tokens he can buy. And then you see that Redbelly Network has a lot of value, right? While otherwise, I mean, the risk is that the blockchain space become a jungle, right? So I think it’s very important that we have safeguards, and that are enabled through the technology, like what Redbelly is doing.

Dexter Cousins
One of the things that I think is kind of tough is kind of having the grown-up conversations. The crypto space is kind of a really diverse group of people, all with very different views. Yeah, some of them can be extreme in many different directions. How do you have those conversations with regulators and banks, etc., and kind of how do you get the balance, if the TradFi and DeFi world is going to kind of collide or kind of merge in this next decade? Which side do you go on, where crypto is kind of like there’s not much regulation there, there aren’t many guidelines in place, whereas you go to TradFi and there’s huge amount of regulation and compliance and guide rails in place?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, so we’ve learned a lot from TradFi, to be honest. We’re partnering with different financial institutions, including thans, and we learn a lot from their processes. So like just doing the desability discovery, we talk to them, we try to see where is the pain point, and then when we understand them we say, okay, here is a solution that could suit your needs. And then they come up with all these constraints that they have, and we start understanding how we have to tune the solutions that we have to fix their need. So it’s heavily dictated by the TradFi industry, I think, and also the commercial partner at large, so not just the finance, but all the partners we’re talking to.

Now there are ways where you can influence the regulation. I think when the government is trying to do new things they’re also open to discussions. I’ve been part of the Australian Computer Society, that was a way also to be consulted, to respond to request for comments coming from the government and trying to make your voice heard. We’ve done that as well. I think it’s important because in Australia the government, the federal government but also the state governments, are listening to what academics have to say as well. So I think we should use our voice, just try to make sure that things are done the right way. But we’re also anticipating what might happen when we look at other jurisdictions like the US that are so influential.

Dexter Cousins
And in terms of, I guess, some of the, we mentioned Redbelly Network, who are some of the other clients that you’ve announced recently?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, so you mentioned Liquidise. There is Hutly as well. So Hutly is very promising. They want to essentially digitalise the assets around real estate. They have already started digitalising and tokenising some of their assets on the Redbelly Network. What they are looking at is essentially what we call rent rolls, contracts if you want, between a tenant and a real estate agent, that brings usually around 5% of the rent to the real estate agent. So this type of contract can be digitalised, tokenised, and they can be used as collateral as well, through structured products as well, on our Redbelly Network. So there is a huge value here.

And we were talking about Liquidise earlier, that have private company shares, and this private equity can be digitalised and liquidised somehow easily on our platform. It can be also traded. So these are the new type of products that we’re seeing coming out of real estate and finance.

Dexter Cousins
I don’t want to go too deep, but you are an academic, and yeah, I can’t help but think that we’re kind of getting to the end of the road of capitalism and constant growth and constant growth. And if you look at the first kind of iterations of your digital assets, it’s kind of been creating things that don’t exist to create value. What I really love about Redbelly Network is it’s just unlocking value that already exists and using that efficiently, rather than just create new stuff, create new stuff, create new stuff. Yeah, build up a frenzy, build up a frenzy. What’s your sense as to kind of the role that Redbelly Network and these types of models can play in perhaps reshaping a new way of the way to exchange value?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, I think Redbelly Network will allow retail investment, especially around fractionalised, highly fractionalised market. So you think about big institutions who can make money by investing, but I think the future is about really lowering the barrier of entry, making sure that people can invest a very small amount without being sophisticated investor, but getting a huge return on what they have invested through low-cost investments, trading with minimal transaction fee. These are the things that Redbelly Network offers. So I believe that it will democratise the use of investment in the future.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Now I want to talk a little bit about, I guess, the fintech industry in general here in Australia. You get to travel a lot, Vincent. What do you think kind of Australia needs to do better in order to be able to really kind of compete with regions like Singapore, for example, that, 5 million people, and yet seems to be way ahead of kind of where Australia is right now?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, so that’s a difficult question to answer and I’m probably not the best person, place to answer that, but I could see that, yeah, in terms of the cryptocurrency regulation I think some countries have been very proactive. I’m thinking about Switzerland, for example. I spent some times over there, like more than six years. So it’s true that there are some country that have this dynamism, in the sense that they can quickly regulate new products or new solutions in the finance space. I think Australia should be part of this country, because I think Australia is a very tech savvy country. Yeah. And so it has the technology knowledge, but it’s also a very financially healthy country. So I believe that if we could put in touch both the people from the finance and technology, then we would have everything we need in order to progress fast in terms of regulation of fintech.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Well, Vincent, before we wrap up I just want to kind of find out a little bit more about your plans for 2025. What kind of exciting things can we expect from Redbelly Network?

Vincent Gramoli
Yeah, we have a lot of work in the pipeline, as you can imagine. We are decentralising our platform even more. We are thinking about having different subnetworks for different partners. So we’re talking to different potential customers as we speak, and they have a need for their own subnetworks. So this is one way of building a hierarchical kind of set of networks, as opposed to just one global network. But yeah, we’re trying to increase the amount of value that we have sitting in our blockchain as we speak. This is growing every day, and you can track it online.

But we’re also working on verifiable credentials, making sure that we extend the offer of the type of verifiable credentials that people can use in our network. At the moment they use biometric just to show that they’re an adult from a non-sanctioned country, but there are also other types of verifiable credentials. We were talking about sophisticated investor earlier, but you can think about work with children check, university degrees, and all these kind of verifiable credentials can be used across different sector, sorry.

Dexter Cousins
That’s all right.

Vincent Gramoli
And it doesn’t have to be strictly in the finance sector.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Well, Vincent, it’s been fantastic to have you on the show. We get obviously some great talent listening to this podcast. Really exciting point in Redbelly Network’s journey. If there’s anybody who’s kind of really interested about the work that you’re doing and they’d like to find out about careers at Redbelly Network, where’s the best place for them to go?

Vincent Gramoli
Would say HTTP colon rb. Network, https red. Network. That’s our website, it’s the best source of information.

Dexter Cousins
Vincent, thanks so much for joining me. And thank you for joining me too. If you’re new to the show, make sure that you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts and give us a review, or if you’re watching on YouTube make sure you give us a like and hit subscribe. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. It really does help me in getting great guests like Vincent onto the show. And if you’re feeling super generous, please consider sharing this episode on your social networks. Until the next episode, keep well.

← All episodes