From Accenture to Anseta: Brett Hornung on Institutions Going On-Chain and Agentic Payments

0:00Kinsa Durst Welcome to the Panoramic Content Suite Singapore Token2049 edition We got a long week ahead of us But got a wonderful guest here made Valuable time out of the day to be here with us for [unclear] jam chat Brett Hornung from Anseta, that he's a chief commercial officer there will let him do a proper introduction, but welcome Yeah, thank you for

0:22Brett Hornung Having me really excited for this. Nice. Nice.

0:24Kinsa Durst So yeah, I think we met and chatted a bit in Korea for Korea Blockchain Week had a blast there got a long week ahead Of us with the MBS in the backdrop But basically, you know wanted to kick things off with maybe a brief introduction about yourself how You ended up at Anseta today Yeah, awesome.

0:43Brett Hornung Well, thanks again for having me. So yeah, my name is Brett Hornung I'm currently based in Hong Kong, but originally from the States I spent the first seven and a half years of my career at Accenture the big consulting firm Doing enterprise blockchain. So my entire career has been with you know, financial market players telcos very large Fortune 500 companies Like how can they enter the blockchain Space?

1:08Kinsa Durst About super exciting.

1:09Brett Hornung Yeah Well back then it was super exciting. I think for because it was like the biggest companies trying to figure out how they come on chain and And you know fast forward To today the last year and a half I joined a company called BCW group and within the group I am the chief commercial officer Of Anseta And so I've been doing that for about a year and a half and It's kind of like life comes full circle because now all The institutions are actually coming on chain, right? So you walk around the conference. It's all suits and it's like, you know I've been waiting 9 10 years for this kind of moment. And yeah, it's very exciting especially with what we're doing at Anseta Yeah, yeah, I mean I his your blazers right there, too.

1:46Kinsa Durst Just took it off for the Nice nice cool. Yeah, I know we go back. I worked with you met you when you're at Accenture Yes, really exciting times. But right now you guys But you're still focused on the same Domain, I think right you're still working with institutions and bring them on chain Through Anseta exactly gotcha. Gotcha. Maybe maybe you can give a quick intro about you know What you guys are working on there?

2:12Brett Hornung Yeah, definitely. So Anseta it is essentially a Institutional white label blockchain infrastructure company. And so what I mean by that is we work with the world's largest organizations Let's call it the Forbes Global 2000 to help them Onboard to crypto So that is things like nodes whether they need custom RPCs to access the blockchains that they work with white label validators We run that white label data staking yield all the kind of things that Are you know that that initial entry point for big enterprises And more recently we've actually rolled out some stuff in the on-chain AI space Yeah, so this is our x402 facilitator as a service Offering We're seeing a lot of interest obviously in agentic payments and what that means And some of our larger payment clients and telcos and Hyperscalers are asking us like what infrastructure can they actually provide in that space?

3:06Brett Hornung And so we're very excited about that. Nice. Nice.

3:09Kinsa Durst So I'm assuming there's different types of demands from different institutions and it sounds like You guys are providing services according to that Where do You see the most demand?

3:21Brett Hornung I guess these days Yeah, I think today, you know as these institutions actually move on change So they're moving away from let's say proof Of concepts to actual production builds. They're putting traditional assets on chain They're starting to offer custody Tokenization of tokenize your tokens. Yeah, exactly. So that's all coming. So as they start to do that It's becoming part of their core business It's no longer sitting in an innovation department or in a Digital assets native team It's actually integrated into the business and with that, you know You have infrastructure needs because you're not just outsourcing the Entirety of it for like a POC and so we see a lot of demand on the RPC side in terms of like customers. Hey, we want dedicated swim lanes to interact with these blockchains We also are starting to see demand on both the validator side as more Institutions participate in these blockchains they want to have a seat at the table, right if you think about traditional networks today either a Financial institution owns their own internal network and it's not open to Decentralized or they're part of a consortium of other financial institutions, which they Then have a seat at the table And so these validator nodes are actually a great way for them to participate in the network have Some level of say But it also makes them, you know more embedded with that network because now they have a you they're participating at The core infrastructure level Right, so we're seeing a lot of a lot of demand there I would say those are like the two biggest Areas as institutions are moving on chain But we're excited to kind of about some of the more let's say innovative or exciting things versus

4:51Kinsa Durst Just the core the frontier The frontier exactly before we get onto the frontier I didn't want to ask, you know, there's so many exciting Announcements I think QNT was a huge one with the banks that are involved across North America Europe, etc Robinhood obviously have been the talk of the town I think Tempo with Stripe is seems like a power player as well Are you Allowed to maybe name some of your favorites or you guys just try to play like a neutral party within the ecosystem?

5:18Brett Hornung Yeah, unfortunately, I think we are trying to play more of a neutral party in the ecosystem I mean the things that do excite me Though I can name probably a few is, you know I'm very excited about when enterprises actually deploy on chain So like you look at Some of the white label or not white label You look at some of the stablecoins that have come out that are like the Fiserv, Fiserv, MoneyGram Those types of companies launching stablecoins is like super exciting. Yeah, right I think from a you know from let's say an infrastructure perspective I think it's very cool that companies like Visa have come out and Said that they're actually running validator nodes on layer one blockchains I think if you look at the validator set from Arc as well Some Of those fortune like 50 fortune 100 companies that are running validator nodes like to think that a G-SIB bank Would be running a Validator node on your public blockchain Ten years ago or even five even three years ago would have been like crazy.

6:15Brett Hornung And so that stuff is very cool I mean, I remember back in the day like we would have a enterprise doing something in blockchain Announcement like once every quarter Right, right and now it's like multiple every time you can't even fit it in anymore You can't you can't Stay up to date on it like you used to And so there's just so much exciting stuff going on and that's why I love Like being here in Singapore because there's so many events There's so many conferences and everybody is essentially announcing like a new partnership a new Tokenized fund a new tokenized asset a new stablecoin So just the the momentum that we have is incredible six.

6:47Kinsa Durst Well, thank you for paving the way. No, you were there early

6:51Brett Hornung I tried it tried It was definitely harder back then. Yeah, I think you know the challenges were that Yeah, I mean blockchain itself was just a challenge just to convince people what it was and why there were benefits, right? But I will say the cool thing now that we're seeing is people are asking obviously They're not asking as much like what is blockchain? How does it work? What should I be doing but rather they're asking? Kind of like hey, here's my use case. Here's how I'm going to do it Can you help me to do these certain things? So it's like they've kind of taken the ownership of what they want to do the business case why they're doing it how it's going To work and then they're coming to you to actually fulfill the requirements that they already know they need right just super cool Yeah, it's Real.

7:33Kinsa Durst The use case is there very real. Let's go Nice now That's yeah, that's a good lots to do that said I think we do want to keep an eye on the frontier What's coming up Next five ten years? Obviously AI is a huge part of that. It seems like you guys are Ready for that direction as well. You mentioned agent like payments Yeah, what do you what are you seeing in that direction?

7:56Brett Hornung Yeah, so we've been over the past year kind of building in the background behind our like node staking execution that core business We've been Building in the agentic payment space So we work today with very large payment services providers as well as hyperscalers that are in the payment Space And they've all kind of been trying to figure out, you know, just like everybody. How do I get involved in this space? What can I do? In this space especially as agentic payments are started to increase in volume And so we looked at you know We looked at x402 As one of the protocols that we wanted to focus on first and we really saw that You know in the x402 flow you Have the agent you have the merchant you have the facilitator and you have the blockchain now You don't always need the facilitator But we We see a world in which these large merchants will still want to work with their existing payment services provider in order to help Facilitate Their transactions and so in that world those types of companies can become what's called a facilitator And so we've rolled out this product that's Called facile x402 facilitator as a service and essentially any blockchain that supports x402 Any stablecoin that you want to allow payment in From From agents or able to support and so we can deploy that you know under their brand Just like we would deploy a validator Or like we would deploy an RPC or you know staking application or whatever.

9:12Kinsa Durst Oh, wow, that's sick Yeah That's really cool Yeah, yeah, I use like OpenClaw. Instinct is a popular one right now where it's like your personal agent. I think One thing that they're lacking is they are able to figure out bookings for you, but in terms of making the actual payments moving your Assets That's where I think people are trying to figure out the last kind of key unlock Yeah to make happen as they become actually More reliable than maybe a human EA or something like that Yeah, I think in the near term You you will still have the same

9:46Brett Hornung Payment flow for a lot of things just because it's from a human behavior standpoint You know anything more than a few dollars You probably Might still want like some authority over for sure, especially big purchases That's gonna go through normal payment flows You may use agents from like Hey talk to their agent to find the flight talk to their agent to you know Get the best deals But I think that from a payment perspective We are starting to see is like how will you actually facilitate the on-chain payment? And that's why we're excited about this facilitator because it does essentially play the role of that acquirer that would be in the picture at That point in time I think from a Yeah

10:25Kinsa Durst Nice. Yeah. Yeah yesterday. We had a guest from Surf AI which is more they're building out basically ChatGPT for asset management that has the ability to make Decisions and trade on chain and they also just closed a partnership with Bithumb in Korea to integrate that into centralized exchange as well So we're seeing it on like crypto native perspective in terms of asset management Maybe yield farming and the agents ability to actually manage some Certain amount assets We'll see how that plays out But it makes I think it makes a lot of sense in terms of payment protocols Payment networks for them to Integrate agents as well on chain payments.

11:06Brett Hornung Yeah I think I think that there needs to be a big kind of shift almost in payment behavior for this to take off Which A lot of people are starting to talk about but the merchants themselves are going to want to have to accept this Yeah, and they May also want, you know for this to really take off micro transactions Probably will have to become a thing and that will be a Fundamental shift in terms of how people pay for things Most things today you sign up for a subscription and it's monthly And that is How they the merchants are actually doing their business versus one-off payments. Like yes, you could be doing that But they need to be able to switch to say hey instead of paying a month for the Content for all my news articles I want to just charge on a per article basis And that is a just a business shift that Does does take time, right? Right, but if you start to see companies starting to do that, that's real, you know, the agentic payments up will really take off Gotcha.

11:57Kinsa Durst That is a feature. I hate managing my monthly subscriptions. It's really annoying.

12:00Brett Hornung It is very annoying Yeah, you sign up once for one thing when you forget about it. Yeah.

12:04Kinsa Durst Yeah, cool. Nice Well, yeah, so I'm excited sounds like you guys have a lot of exciting things coming up Super busy with dealing with institutions. I know I know it's really hands-on That said, you know Coming week. We do have Token2049. I was curious, you know, what is there anything that you're you're most excited about any Anything you're pushing from Anseta During this week at Token2049.

12:31Brett Hornung Yeah So at Anseta, we recently rebranded actually we used to be called StakeFi We rebranded to Anseta about A month and a half ago So a lot of the work that I'm actually doing is telling people I work at the same company But it's just called something else And so there is a bit of like kind of like marketing going on this week You know speaking At a number of events to kind of grow the brand There are a lot of institutions in town and they all kind of want To see like where they go What's next? Yeah, and so there's a lot of conversations this week around like institutions moving on chain They're kind of core infrastructure needs and so very Excited to be in those conversations. I think Token2049 this year Feels like it's different than years past in the sense that There's just a lot more institutional activity the side events that are with the World's, you know largest financial institutions It's just a very exciting time in you know from where I started in my career to now Just To see some of these things come And actually launch, you know It's just a very yeah, it's awesome to be in the industry right now.

13:35Brett Hornung Yeah.

13:35Kinsa Durst Yeah gotta keep your blazer on I got to keep my blaze around.

13:38Brett Hornung Yeah, I know

13:40Kinsa Durst Nice and if the audience wants to learn more about Anseta we're maybe get in touch with you Yeah, how does that happen?

13:48Brett Hornung Yeah, so you can visit anseta.com if you want to reach out to me I'm Brett Hornung on X and that's the Easiest way or on LinkedIn works as well.

13:57Kinsa Durst Nice and then Anseta, A-N-

13:59Brett Hornung Anseta, that's all I'd say.

14:01Kinsa Durst Well, thank you for hopping on great to great to see you again.

14:03Brett Hornung Thank you very much