In the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast, John Nahas, Chief Business Officer at Ava Labs, explores the synergy between blockchain and AI, the transformative potential of Decentralised Finance (DeFi), and the opportunities and challenges facing the Avalanche ecosystem. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.
John Nahas is the Chief Business Officer at Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain. At Ava Labs, he drives strategic partnerships and international expansion in key markets, including Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. With a strong fintech background, having raised $18M and secured 43 licenses at Onsa, he blends regulatory insight with innovation.
During the interview, John and Dinis engage in an insightful discussion about the crossover between artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain:
“I think blockchain has needed AI, and I think AI has always needed blockchains, and I think the two go hand in hand.
Web2 allowed for web2 or web1. Chris Dixon has a great book; read it and write your own. Web1 was your ability to read and only ingest. With Web2, you’re able to write, and with Web3, you’re able to own. What Web2 did is allow for the free flow of information, and that’s great. Web3 should allow for the free flow of value. Value, in our definition, is anything that can be digitised and transferred or traded around; that means your identity, your data, your records, and your attention may one day be tokenised and digitised.
This stuff all happens on blockchain, and that should easily be able to move just like you move a file on your computer. You should be able to move it between blockchains or let value flow person to person, company to company, B2B, B2C, B2B2C.
I believe AI with blockchain will be able to be kind of the executor of actions on the chain. Blockchains will be the financial rails that allow AI agents to exchange value amongst each other.”
DeFi: Bridging the gap for global financial literacy and inclusion
John discussed the transformative potential of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) in providing financial access to underserved populations globally:
“DeFi is definitely going to spread, and it’s going to spread to the places that are in need of financial applications and tools and are lacking them.
The countries that are in need of development are usually the first adopters of a new technology. The rate of adoption of mobile phones in Africa, Latin America, and East Asia skyrocketed because those people didn’t have a traditional phone line, so they didn’t have to gradually add cell phones.
In Africa, there was a big gap in banking. There are no local community banks on every corner like in the Western world, and mobile banking was the first kind of banking people understood.
I believe crypto, for as much as it’s heralded as new technology, actually is the opposite. I think we have an elitism problem in this industry.
We like our seed phrases and our mobile wallets and our jargon. Those platitudes are actually things that we take for granted. And it’s somewhat condescending and also exclusionary.
We need to create a system where you have this… DeFi can sit on the back end. So, if I’m sending money or earning money in stablecoins, which is the closest thing I think we have to a killer app, digital dollars, we also need to expand that to digital local currencies and FX.
If you have a mobile app, that app is a wallet. Stop calling it a wallet. Just call it a mobile app. In the app is a wallet.
You can have your dollars in there, and you could say to yourself, ‘I want to have 10 in petty cash and 90 I want to earn interest on.’
You hit a button. You earn interest. And that should deposit your funds into an a or a bank or whatever, depending on the chain, or depending on the application, you can provide liquidity, and you can earn interest at a higher rate than a bank will give you.
DeFi allows for anybody to contribute, anybody to have access to their own value, to earn on their own value, and to trade.
If I’m in Southeast Asia and I want to own some gold, but I don’t want to buy physical gold, I can buy tokenised gold. With that, there’s education and trust. We need to know that these applications are secure and safe.
DeFi opens up the possibility of finance to anybody for any use case across the globe instantaneously. There’s no T+1, T+2, like the traditional rail. Swift was built 50 years ago. We still have not changed the plumbing on how money moves in the world.”
Avalanche challenges and opportunities
John from Avalanche shares his insights on the challenges and opportunities facing the Avalanche ecosystem:
“Our biggest challenge is the ability to tell our story in a concise way. I can talk for a long time, and I just did with you. Our strength in that instance is our weakness because we do a lot because we enable anybody to do what they want and build their application, their utility.
Our story is actually the story of everybody who’s building on Avalanche and the ecosystem that we’re building.
In other instances, other ecosystem stories are how that application or asset helps the blockchain. We are the one facilitating the infrastructure to support the use cases and the businesses.
Our story should be the success of our partners and the success of the participants of our ecosystem that are building amazing companies and businesses and use cases and innovations, using Avalanche.”
Concluding the interview, Dinis and John discussed how AI agents will simplify financial transactions, the automation of agreements, and the role of AI agents in contracts:
“Banks can have AI agents. You can have your own AI agent. I can have my own AI agent. I can tell my agent, ‘Pay Dinis $10 on Thursday at 5:00 PM.’ I don’t have to go and code it. I can just put the instruction, and the agent executes my demand or my transaction, and it’ll pull money from my wallet and just pay you.
Think about the future of escrow. Think about the future of legal agreements. Lawyers won’t be needed to do agreements anymore as much as they’ll be needed for negotiations and the human aspect.
Imagine all of the supply chains in the world and the logistics in the world and all the actions and reactions and orders and demands and everything that exists being automated and understood and executed immediately.
I think AI is going to be supportive of what blockchains can deliver and should deliver, and has yet to fully deliver on. There’s a lot of promise.”
