“Nowadays, you deposit money in a bank and then trade and invest, but in the future, there will be a world where money and information can move across borders anytime, anywhere and at a low cost.”
Avery Ching, co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs, met with a Yonhap News reporter at a hotel in Gwangjin-gu, Seoul on the 1st and said, “The finance of the future will be an ‘on-chain (blockchain-based) economy.’”
He said, “Aptos pursues the perfect technology to move, operate, and trade (assets) within one network,” and “(in the on-chain world) it will become a network used by billions of people.”
Aptos Labs, which operates a global layer 1 blockchain platform, has built a blockchain infrastructure that supports large-scale movement and payment of digital assets, including stable coins.
Before founding his company, CEO Ching worked at Meta, an American big tech company, for more than 10 years, where he was responsible for developing large-scale distributed systems and led Meta's virtual asset platform team.
“As we built the payments infrastructure to support billions of people at Meta, we experienced first-hand how the world needs to move money quickly and cheaply, and what it takes to earn the trust of regulators and financial institutions,” he said.
He continued, "Today, Aptos is designed with safety and security as the top priority, with the belief that regulations are not an obstacle but a design requirement and that engineering is a field that must build trust, and is recording an operation rate of 99.9%."
CEO Ching said that tokenized financial products from several large financial companies, including Blackrock and Franklin Templeton, were issued on the company's network, and the size of RWA (real-linked assets) exceeded $1.22 billion (approximately KRW 1.64 trillion) as of October last year.
He selected 'currency' as the area that will see the greatest growth in the RWA market in the short term, predicting that "tokenized currency linked to real commerce will be connected to billions of people not as an investment portfolio but as a means of actual use."
U.S. regulations and the commercialization of virtual assets were cited as major changes in the virtual asset industry this year.
CEO Ching has been serving as a member of the Digital Asset Market Subcommittee under the Global Market Advisory Committee (GAMC) of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) since last year, and has also supported the passage of the 'Digital Asset Market Clarity Act' (Clarity Act).
He predicted that it would be difficult to pass the Clarity Act in the future and said, "I believe (the U.S. government) has turned to regulating through regulations of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and CFTC instead of the Clarity Act."
CEO Ching, who visited Korea six to seven times, said, "Korea is a country with unique strengths that are impressive in that the government encourages and supports the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for all citizens."
He said, “I think there are more possibilities if stablecoins and AI are combined,” and added, “Korea is famous for ‘K culture’ such as dramas and has a large export industry, so there will be many uses for stablecoins.”
He said he expects a shift from 'community' to 'institution' in Korea. "Next year, we will expand Aptos' community into a tokenization asset pilot project by linking it with actual institutional work. I look forward to discussing tokenization assets or payment and settlement infrastructure with companies such as banks and securities companies."
He also said, "We are considering a model in which Korean institutions issue assets with their own licenses and maintain control, and Aptos provides the underlying payment infrastructure. When we stand on the 'Korea Blockchain Week' stage again, I want to talk about what is actually being done in Korea, not what is planned."
