AI-Powered Future of DeFi: John Nahas, Chief Business Officer At Ava Labs, In Dinis Guarda YouTube Podcast

John Nahas, Chief Business Officer at Ava Labs, delves into the unique features of the Avalanche blockchain, its global expansion strategy, and successful use cases in diverse industries. He also discusses the future of blockchain technology, the transformative potential of Decentralised Finance (DeFi), and the challenges and opportunities in driving real adoption and innovation within the ecosystem in the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast. 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 highlights how Avalanche sets itself apart by providing a platform with multiple blockchains:

“Avalanche is a platform that allows for the distribution of blockchain technology into any industry, any business, any use case, any asset, and any innovation. We have separated ourselves by really focusing on the use cases and the solutions that blockchains provide.

I don’t really believe the token is there yet, the economic side is not as mature, you have disconnections between ecosystems, what’s happening within them and the token price.

But we allow many other systems to be built, bringing in different use cases. You can add infinitely scalable lanes for different needs.”

Avalanche ecosystem: Global expansion and real adoption

John provides an in-depth overview of the Avalanche ecosystem:

Let me separate Ava Labs and Avalanche. I think that’s an important distinction.

Ava Labs is a for-profit entity based in the United States. We are a licensed service provider to the foundation. So we provide services to the foundation in support of their mission.

We have heads of countries or heads of jurisdictions in a number of places now. So we have Korea and Japan, we have Singapore, we have India, Vietnam, the Middle East, covering the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as just the MINA region. Turkey and Latin America focus as well.

Great technology is global, but business is local. Something I learned a long time ago, of course, in my days doing international trade, what works in Korea doesn’t work in Japan, right? What works in India doesn’t work in Abu Dhabi.

I find it kind of contradictory to be a general-purpose blockchain but with a niche; that’s still a remnant of a first-generation business plan that is now starting to show that it’s broken.

I think we keep creating these, or the industry keeps creating these six-to-nine-month narratives that become exciting, and then we do it again and again and again on something else, whether it was NFTs or memecoins or tokenisation.

We like to focus on bringing real adoption, real use cases, and innovative use cases. Reinventing old or established businesses by reinventing them more efficiently using blockchain as an infrastructure layer as a service.

This industry really is missing the revolutionised moment, the killer app. What social media was for web2 or even email, was for the early days of the internet. We still don’t have that.

I think decentralised finance is the innovation hub that actually DeFi summer a couple of years ago really pushed people’s imagination and allowed for a new wave of development.”

Avalanche use cases

John highlights various successful use cases across different verticals within the Avalanche ecosystem:

“On the enterprise side, particularly in Asia, we’ve seen a lot of adoption. We have SK Planet, one of the largest SK group companies in Korea, bringing a nationwide loyalty and rewards program called OK Cash onto their own blockchain, the UPM blockchain in South Korea.

We’re seeing a lot of activity in NFT ticketing. So, Tickspace is an NFT ticketing platform. You use blockchain on the back end. The tickets are all actually NFTs. They allow for less fraud, less abuse, better provenance of tickets, trading, etc.

They will be powering the Sports Illustrated stadium in New Jersey starting next year. So the entire stadium, a major sports stadium in the United States, will be all NFT ticketed starting next year.

Just last week, Maple Story Universe, a 23-year-old IP with 250 million global users, launched on Avalanche, its own blockchain. We had worked with Nexon, a publicly traded company, for over two years to bring this to market.

We’ve tokenised a fund for KKR. We’ve done a tokenisation for a venture capital firm, Paraffy, for a sleeve of one of their VC funds. We’ve also worked with BlackRock’s Biddle money market token, Franklin Templeton’s token, as well as our.

A lot of these institutions and banks have been very happy and comfortable to work with Avalanche because it gives them the customisations that they need to be compliant.

We launched with a cohort of a bunch of new blockchains. At the time, most, if not all, DeFi lived on Ethereum. Ethereum was getting expensive to use. We made a conscious decision to go after DeFi.

We can continuously build more and more crypto products, but it’s like we’re building on a different planet. If we can’t get people there and back easily or better, then we’re still not expanding the pie.

I think we’re at an inflexion point in the industry now, particularly after the elections in the US and the Trump administration being more crypto-friendly, that institutions are willing to dive in at a faster rate.”