Working on fixing the financial system with reusable KYC. A ruthless empiricist, Co-founder/CEO @OpacityLabs
NYC
Joined November 2021
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Hersh Patel retweeted
Can attest to this as someone who has built lending in emerging markets.
There are hard unit economics of scale and verifiability that makes a “Maria silva” unviable to lend to in the old world order.
What opacity is proposing, is an orders of magnitude upgrade to the “poverty of verifiability” that can make capital markets work for the rest of the world in a way that was never possible before.
Excited to see a lot of unsexy work fructify for the team over @OpacityLabs ❤️
I'm at Money20/20 in Vegas through Wednesday. Fintechs and asset managers working on emerging-market onboarding, DM me.
Hersh Patel retweeted
Check out @OpacityLabs labs if you want to see how cool the future will be.
Your $NVDA stock token isn't Nvidia stock. It's an IOU from a fintech.
If a fintech in the emerging markets that sold it to you fails, you're a creditor in its bankruptcy. A properly tokenized share is still yours, on a US register.
Why does that matter if the price moves the same?
There's about $51 trillion across all US retirement accounts. That's a lot of money.
If you hold a passive index fund in your retirement account, there are 5 legal entities between you and Apple.
Stop and think about how crazy it is that the system works.
You can comfortably leave money somewhere for 30 years and sleep at night.
Call it unattended trust.
Arguably, this trust we take for granted is why our capital markets are as big as they are. Trust in the system facilitates capital formation.
That's not true everywhere in the world. In places like India, physical gold at home and land are better stores of value than a brokerage account.
That's not because of entrenched cultural norms. People just don't trust the institutions enough to be comfortable with anything better.
Without unattended trust, wealth has to be guarded, so it goes into things you can watch yourself.
Wrapped or synthetic exposure strips out the regulatory regime that has made our markets so robust.
A stock token puts you back on watch. Shares on a US register let you leave them unattended.
People will definitely day trade "stock tokens" for fun, but it's not conducive to compounding wealth over the long term.
The compounding wealth version is a much bigger opportunity if you have the grit for it.
The @SECGov just cosigned that access to markets isn't enough.
Opening the gates for retail access to the private markets we need the assets more transparent.
sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-st…
Hersh Patel retweeted
In BlackRock's annual chairman's letter, Larry Fink wrote that every stock, bond, and fund can be tokenized, and that if they were, transactions that currently take days would clear in seconds, and capital immobilized inside delays could be put back to work.
Be first.
Hersh Patel retweeted
SPY, IVV, and VOO hold the same 500 stocks, but SPY was first, to compete, BlackRock (IVV) and Vanguard (VOO) cut their expense ratios to 0.03% vs SPY's 0.09%. SPY stayed the largest ETF in the world for three decades anyway.
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Does anyone know if @dashiellvosh is really at Franklin Templton?
I got a dm and seems sus
> Institutions do not want to avoid KYC, they want to avoid redundant KYC
banger mcshlanger
@OpacityLabs version: bring the compliance to the liquidity, not the liquidity to the compliance.
One of the core challenges that traditional financial institutions face when growing adoption of their crypto-related products has been the ability to reach KYCed customers who want to purchase these products. However, onchain KYC itself has not fully been solved.
I did a deep dive of current onchain KYC solutions, along with corresponding regulatory frameworks, alongside my @a16zcrypto partner @MicheleKorver. We also discuss the forthcoming Know Your Agent (KYA) landscape and emerging solutions.
Hersh Patel retweeted
KYC as we know it is dead. We can do better.
opacitylabs.com/newsroom/ai-…
Hersh Patel retweeted
Source-grounded verification means users connect to multiple authenticated sources directly. The user's own login and TLS encryption prove the login and account are real.
Cryptographic proofs bind to user accounts, so credentials are portable. No fake selfies needed.
Hersh Patel retweeted
Private funds want your money, and you should be able to check their numbers.
Opacity CEO Hersh Patel argues for source-verified records that let buyers test a fund manager's claims before deciding what to pay.
Hersh Patel retweeted
No redundant onboarding is a better UX for investors. Reusable credentials can simplify investor onboarding across many independent wallets and front-end apps.
There must be some way out of here: footage from nearly nine years at the commission
in all seriousness thank you for everything you've done to facilitate innovation in our capital markets @HesterPeirce 🫡🇺🇸
Hersh Patel retweeted
Opacity is building what will make this happen.
"I want Wall Street's assets working in our wallets, in our applications, on our chains."
Opacity Co-founder & CEO @EulerLagrange
