Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[00:21]
Hello, everyone. Welcome to HFS Unfiltered. My name is Saurabh. I’m the President for HFS, and I have a genuinely fascinating conversation lined up today, and it’s about blockchain. Blockchain had its moment in the sun. It got, I think, a little buried in the avalanche of its hype, but the reality is that distributed ledgers quietly kept building. Today, everybody is so fascinated and talking about AI and agentic AI rewiring all the enterprise workflows, the question of trust is paramount. The biggest question that we keep hearing is, can I trust AI? And I think that’s where blockchain and distributed ledgers are—by design, I feel—the trust element for it. That’s really what I wanted to talk about today with Eric, who’s been in the trenches of this exact same problem, who’s the CEO of Hashgraph and has spent years working on distributed ledger technology. What does it really mean when you strip away the noise? So Eric, thanks a lot for joining us today.
Eric Piscini — CEO, Hashgraph[01:35]
Thank you, thank you for having me. Good to reconnect.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[01:38]
It’s good to reconnect. So Eric, tell me a little bit about Hashgraph, but also tell me a little bit more about, personally, how did you get into this whole world of blockchain?
Eric Piscini — CEO, Hashgraph[01:51]
Oh wow, so we have to go way back to 2013 then. I think that’s about when you and I started talking to each other already. In 2013, I was a partner at Deloitte, and I came across the Satoshi white paper and realized—because my background is computer science—that it was a real innovation. And because of where I was, and because of my background being in the enterprise market for a long time, I realized this is going to change a lot of things in the future. And like with every innovation, it’s really hard to predict when this is really going to happen. To your point, I think we had to wait 15 years for things to really take place in the enterprise market. We’ve seen a lot of things happening on the retail side over the years, whereas the ICOs, the NFTs, the memecoins and all of this—the enterprise market took quite a bit of time to get to real adoption. But now we are here, 2026. This is where things are becoming very real, and you can see a lot of traction around stablecoins and around asset tokenization, and many other things. So there’s a reason I came into blockchain, and it’s because of where I was, because of my passion for innovation. And because of, to be clear, because because Deloitte let me do this as well. I’m grateful they let me start a practice while I was there. It was not an easy decision.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[03:12]
I completely understand how big that was. But tell me, Eric, what problems are you trying to solve today at Hashgraph?
Eric Piscini — CEO, Hashgraph[03:34]
Yeah, so Hashgraph is the team behind the Hedera network, right? So Hedera is what we call a layer one in blockchain, so this is the foundation. Hedera started in 2018 and has been, since the beginning, focused on the enterprise market, and we have very unique characteristics as a project. I think that’s important to remember, because, to answer your question, I think it’s going to help. The first characteristic is the platform was designed for the enterprise market from the beginning. So forget about the technology for a minute. The technology is really good, very secure. It’s actually technically not a blockchain—don’t say that to everybody—it’s not a blockchain, but it acts as a decentralized ledger. And the decision was made to have transaction fees as a fixed price in dollars. When you make that decision, you actually enable companies, organizations, governments to build a platform with predictability of the transaction fees, which is very important compared to the other blockchains that you can mention. They usually use a crypto-denominated transaction fee. So when the value of that crypto moves up and down, the transaction fee changes. That decision is very important from an adoption point of view. And then we have the council, what we call the governing council, the Hedera Governing Council, which is a group of 35 organizations—very large organizations: Google, Dell, IBM, and the recent ones are FedEx and McLaren. And they are running the network, right? So we are a permissioned public blockchain. That’s the origin of Hedera. That’s the foundation. And today Hashgraph is the team behind the project, right? So Hedera is the governing council and Hashgraph is doing pretty much everything that Hedera needs—so product engineering, marketing, communication, DevOps, cybersecurity, and on and on and on. Everything that needs to happen to make this project successful. And so what we focus on today is really three big topics. The first one is we launched last year a private version of Hedera, because we had market demand for a private version, so not a public ledger but a private version of that ledger. Same technology, exact same technology, but a different set of configurations. So an organization can start building in a private setting, which is very, very important when you start your journey. The second topic is asset tokenization—I’m sure we can talk about that a little bit more. And the third one is everything around payments, stablecoins, agentic payments, and so on. Those are the three big topics: private network, asset tokenization, and payments.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[06:27]
All three of them, we can spend maybe an hour each on, Eric, but very quickly—there was a lot of conversation around CBDCs a couple of years back. I think that has been—and tell me if I’m wrong—but I think a lot of that CBDC conversation has been replaced by stablecoins. So why are stablecoins so exciting right now?
Eric Piscini — CEO, Hashgraph[07:00]
So I think it’s important to have definitions, because sometimes we use “stablecoin” and we cover every single use case, but it’s not the case, right? A step back on what people would think of today as USDC, USDT, and the PayPal version, PYUSD—there are a lot of different flavors of this, but it’s mostly focused on the retail market, the individual market, and it’s mostly focused on the crypto people, right? So the crypto people are using stablecoins to settle their crypto transactions in a stablecoin in order to have acceleration and pay less fees, as opposed to going from crypto to dollars. They go from crypto to USDC. So USDC is the stablecoin. And that’s the most common usage—it’s for crypto activities, really. So it’s getting more traction because now people start to think about payments with stablecoins, which is great. If you remember, the beginning of the journey is peer-to-peer payments, right? That’s the Satoshi vision. So that’s fantastic. But on the side of that, you have tokenized cash and tokenized deposits, and that’s mostly done by larger corporations, banks, and so on. So they tokenize a portion of the balance sheet in order to accelerate payments between different parties. So now we are talking B2B. Now we are talking about a very different set of use cases, right? It’s companies, global companies paying different subsidiaries, different entities across the globe using tokenized cash, and they do that because it’s faster, cheaper, and in some cases better—lower risk, for example. And then you have CBDCs, which are the same kind of technology foundation, but in the context of a central bank. That’s why I think it’s important to have definitions, because those three things are different use-case-wise, but they are leveraging the same platform, the same technology.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[09:17]
Yeah. Eric, help—one of the reasons why blockchain sort of went through a big curve of hype, and then that hype died down while people like you kept working at it, kept working at it and kept the conversation and the use cases alive—in fact, we’re seeing this in production in so many different avatars right now—but one of the fundamental reasons is, I think blockchain is so hard to get your head around, for a common person, because, you know, I’ve been in this space for maybe 10, 15 years trying to figure this out, but I’ve never seen a demo which doesn’t require three different screens, and you have to look at three different screens to figure it out. When you think of something like ChatGPT, which is so—it’s on your phone and you can actually see it. How does this change the life of a common person? What does it mean for me, if I’m not a blockchain enthusiast? Why should I care about what you’re doing?
Eric Piscini — CEO, Hashgraph[10:28]
So I think that’s where I was going a little bit earlier, right, which is, if you’re a crypto person and you need to trade, you need to buy, you need to sell, whatever you need to do, you would love stablecoins because that’s the settlement layer of your activity. If you’re a regular user, you don’t need to engage with crypto—which, by the way, that population is shrinking, because in the US, for example, about 15% of the population owns some kind of crypto assets, which is a big number. If you’re in that context, you would enjoy cross-border payments at a very low fee and a very fast settlement time, right? So if you want to send money to your mom in India, that would take two seconds and you would pay two cents, right? That’s kind of the use case that now is available in many cases, in many what we call corridors—so between two different countries, two different currencies. That is the most likely scenario of you being exposed to a blockchain-based solution. But I think one of the big challenges as well is the regulatory changes and the clarity that we got in the last few years now, which actually triggered a new wave of adoption by enterprises and corporations and governments, because now there is clarity on the type of assets they are engaging with, right? So for example, HBAR, which is the cryptocurrency behind it, was classified as a digital commodity a few weeks ago by the SEC and the CFTC, and that gives a lot of clarity to the people building on our platform, because now they know exactly what that asset is. It is a commodity, right? And that triggers a new wave of adoption by the enterprise market. I think that’s a really important evolution. And when you talk to banks, asset managers, financial market infrastructure players, they really understand what the blockchain is. They got it very quickly, right? They live in the world of settlement and trading and platforms. So when you explain blockchain to them, it’s very fast—most of them know already. They were just waiting for a signal. They were waiting for clarity from a regulatory point of view to actually do it. And that’s why it’s an exciting time, because now we can build real, live solutions for that market that we were struggling with before.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[12:55]
Yeah. No, that’s fantastic. The other thing that I wanted to ask you, Eric, is this relationship between AI and distributed ledgers. My hypothesis is that, look, people love AI but they also don’t trust AI, and that is one of the fundamental issues with artificial intelligence, whether you’re a consumer or a business: can I trust this black box to take decisions on my behalf? And if you look at blockchain or distributed ledgers, that is by design why they were created—to build trust in the technology. And at the same time, blockchain has so much data—you can’t have 500 people in India trying to figure out what that data is doing, so the offshore model doesn’t work. You need AI technologies to find out what’s happening within the blockchain as well. So I feel there’s a lot of synergy between these two technologies. One, do you agree with that? And two, are you seeing some of that play out in the real world?
Eric Piscini — CEO, Hashgraph[14:04]
Yeah, it’s a really good question. We’ve been working on this for a few years now. Maybe the summary is: one of the killer apps for blockchain is AI, and one of the killer apps for AI is blockchain, right? That’s an interesting way to think of it. But the way we think about AI in the context of what we are building is three different layers. The first one is to say, should we trust a centralized company to run everything that we do with AI, or should we find a way to decentralize the operation of that company, right? And we would use blockchain technologies for that in order for us to have a higher level of trust that that company is acting for the benefit of the world as opposed to the benefit of their shareholders, for example. So we can start thinking about decentralizing AI platforms. That’s the first layer of thinking. The second layer of thinking is there is the trust layer of AI. So trust comes from two different things. It comes from control, and it comes from the ability to have access to the history of what happened, right? The control is actually something we can enable with blockchain technologies. We can have a set of rules, and we can say: you AI model, you AI engine, you AI agent, you have to register every activity, everything that you do, on the blockchain ledger. And on the back side we can identify in real time if something is going the wrong way, because it’s going outside of the rules, and if that’s the case, we can notify a human and interject into the flow, right? So that’s a control mechanism we can activate with a blockchain platform. And of course, because we register every single action, we can also look back and say we understand what happened, we understand where the data was captured to actually train this model, we understand where the output was fed into another model—for example, another agent. We can capture all of that and we can have an audit trail of the AI workflows, and that’s also a way to create trust. So that’s the second layer of thinking, right? The trust layer of AI. And the third one is to say, we are entering into the age of AI payments by agents representing individuals—hopefully those agents are not going to go rogue and do whatever they want. Now we need to understand what kind of payment systems they’re going to use to exchange value with each other. And that’s what blockchain was, even at peer-to-peer payments. We thought of it as individuals’ peer-to-peer payments, but we can apply the same logic to the agents. So that’s the third level of thinking: AI payments enabled by blockchain rails. Those are the things we are working on, and we have actually significant assets online for people to start looking at those different use cases and see how they can engage. We have partnerships with a company called EQTY Lab, which has actually embedded their code and our code, by extension, into Intel and Nvidia chips. So those chips, when they run an AI model, we can actually tell them, please register everything that you do on the Hedera blockchain for future either control or auditability purposes. So there are a lot of exciting things that we can do. I think, to your point, it’s a responsibility that we all have—to find a way to increase the level of trust that we have in those AI solutions, right, whether it’s model and agent, by using the best technology that was really designed to create trust, which is blockchain.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[18:12]
Yeah. No, it’s fascinating and fantastic. So two things that I like: one, I’m not smoking something. So the idea that the trust layer for AI can be blockchain—and you guys are doing something about it—and then I really liked your statement around blockchain is the killer app for AI and AI is the killer app for blockchain. I think that’s very, very powerful. This has been a fantastic conversation, Eric, but before I let you go—if let’s say we fast forward, say, five years, what’s the one thing that you hope Hashgraph would have changed about how the world does business?
Eric Piscini — CEO, Hashgraph[18:56]
I have to pick one thing? That’s hard. That’s a hard question. I think, you know, I really like the payment side, but I think we’ve been talking about this for a long time, so maybe I’ll pick something else. I’ll pick asset tokenization, because to me, asset tokenization is a promise that, regardless of where you are, regardless of the technology you’re using, regardless of the assets, and regardless of the amount of money you want to invest, you will be able to do that in five years. You will be able to invest a little bit of money in a lot of different types of assets, as an individual or as a corporation, because the friction for you to do that is lifted, is removed, by using blockchain technologies, tokenization technologies, right? Today, the reason I cannot invest in real estate at the other end of the world is because it’s very clunky. It’s very hard. There are no rails to do that. And so only if I have a few million dollars does it make sense to do it, because of the fees and the timing and the risk. Tomorrow, with $200 I’ll be able to do this—and that to me, and in minutes, and for almost zero fee, that to me is a very significant promise. Not as much from an investor point of view, right, managing your portfolio of assets, but really from a velocity point of view, right? So we all sit on—think of data, right, the amount of data we sit on, our own data—we would tokenize that data and we would generate revenue from it, instead of having someone else using our data and making money out of that. We can tokenize our own data and make money, or get a better outcome from using that technology. A better outcome would be: you tokenize your health data and then you expose that data to a lot of different parties, and then suddenly you have better treatment or better treatment plans in order to get better as an individual. That’s another example of tokenization—not of financial instruments, but tokenization of healthcare data for a better outcome. Those are the things that I’m really excited about, and we are working on many of those topics today. One of the interesting challenges when you’re a startup is we dream big, all of us here, but we have to select a few things to work on. We cannot do everything at once, right? So sometimes we have to make decisions not to do everything, but that’s the nature of the business.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[21:23]
Well, this has been fantastic, Eric. I must admit that every time that I meet you, I learn at least five new things, and this conversation is no different from that. So thanks a lot for taking out the time in your changing-the-world conversations that Hashgraph is doing.
Eric Piscini — CEO, Hashgraph[21:51]
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s good to connect again.
