Noble: Solving Crypto's Liquidity Problem, One Chain at a Time - Jelena Djuric

**Jelena Djuric** (0:00)
Really, it's only now, I would say, that we've had proper scalable infrastructure, like ready to take stable coins to the masses. Noble is neutral purpose-built infrastructure for the transmission and proliferation of these stable coins. I do believe and can anticipate that the launch of the app layer will be like a new era for Noble, because again, we've never actually had DeFi on Noble itself, which is kind of crazy. And yet, there's all of this traction.

**Sebastien Couture** (0:30)
Is Cosmos finally dead, Jelena? I guess that's the question I want to ask you. Like, do you think...
This episode is brought to you by Gnosis, building the open internet one block at a time. Gnosis was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user owned finance. Gnosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others like Safe and CowSwap. At the center is Gnosis Chain. It's a low fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years, and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like Gnosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Gnosis DAO, a community run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web 3, or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at gnosis.io. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastien Couture and I'm here with Jelena Djuric, who is the CEO at Noble. Noble is a Cosmos chain that's purpose-built for native issuance of stablecoins and RWAs. They are one of the key players in the USDC ecosystem. I believe they're probably fifth or sixth in issuance now. You'll correct me on Jelena, but I think I'd check usdc.cool and you guys are sitting at somewhere around $350 million of USDC issued on Noble. You also have your own USD stablecoin, USDN, which we'll talk about. But yeah, how are you doing? How's everything going for you?

**Jelena Djuric** (2:16)
Yeah. No, thanks so much for having me on Seb. It's been great. Obviously, it's stablecoin summer that is going into the fall, I guess now that it's October 1st. It's been great. There's a lot of things going on obviously in the stablecoin space, and I'm excited to talk about that, and also some exciting updates on the Noble Front. So thanks for having me.

**Sebastien Couture** (2:35)
So like stablecoin, you mentioned stablecoin summer, and actually, I think it's a very apt way to talk about it because the stablecoin market is now surpassed 250 billion. It's up, I think something like 45 percent this year alone. There's much clearer US rules now. We have lots of announcements. Also, a few here, Paxos just announced their privacy-focused stablecoin. I also read that Circle is going to enable things like reversible transactions. Obviously, we have like Plasma that just launched their Neobank. It seems like everyone is trying to get a piece of the stablecoin pie. And a little bit reminds me of other hype cycles we have in this space, like NFTs and DeFi Summer and meme coins. And if we look at those, a lot of that innovation and certainly the valuations have dropped off a lot. Why are stablecoins different?
Why should we treat stablecoins differently? Should we treat stablecoins differently? Will we still be at this level of hype and excitement in a year from now?

**Jelena Djuric** (3:49)
Yeah, it's a really good question. So I think it's important to distinguish to your question, like, what is different about this time around? I think inevitably, you know, there will be over-hyped projects that maybe don't sustain themselves and don't last into functioning products and businesses. But despite that potentiality, there is something concrete kind of happening now, which is maybe different than previous hype cycles that we've had in crypto, you know, to your point, whether that's NFTs or meme coins or the like. And that reason is pretty simple. That's legislation, right? So we had obviously the passing of Genius a couple of months ago, where it was signed into law by President Trump. We've had a very concerted effort by multiple interest groups, right? That actually want to see Genius operational and in full force. One part of that interest group, of course, is the crypto lobby, but it's also actually bigger than that, right? Basically, what Genius is simply a revolution in payments, right? And so if you think about the payments industry and you think about what payments are and how payments work today, it's pretty antiquated, right? And a lot of this payments infrastructure is running on legacy infrastructure that is pretty old and antiquated. And so what is Genius? Genius basically set the standard, a legal framework, to issue stable coins as payment instruments, right? And obviously, you know, for crypto native people such as yourselves, we've been very familiar with stable coins for quite some time. You know, some of us maybe, you know, do payroll in stable coins, get paid in stable coins ourselves as employees. Myself, I've paid rent in stable coins in the past. You know, we're very familiar with these products. Not to mention the trading, DeFi use cases. But if you think about what Genius is and the framework it establishes kind of on a more mainstream legacy level, it actually allows, first of all, like legacy payments businesses to like legally, let's say innovate and, you know, offer really interesting, you know, kind of innovative products that maybe are cheaper, more seamless, etc.