We caught up with Catherine Daly, CMO at Space and Time, during EthCC, to discuss how verifiable data is unlocking the next generation of artificial intelligence and onchain finance.
Catherine Daly is a senior marketing strategist with a deep passion for building community around emerging technology. Before joining Space and Time, she handled full-funnel marketing for both startups and established global organisations in the semiconductor sector. At Space and Time, she oversees all growth, community, brand, and product marketing strategies.
As autonomous AI agents begin executing financial transactions onchain, they face a critical vulnerability: the integrity of the data they rely on. If an agent makes a split-second decision based on manipulated information, the financial consequences can be disastrous.
Read more about her vision for a trustless data economy below, and how her team is solving massive real-world problems like student credential verification.
Last time we spoke in November, Space and Time and the agentic space were a few months old, and you were optimistic about AI, especially SxT's ability to offer both onchain and offchain data to agents. How have things evolved since then?
The space has evolved significantly, which has been exciting to observe. We now see Coinbase's X402, a growing number of agentic payment frameworks, and wallet providers actively building for agent use cases. We are beginning to see agents actually transacting onchain using stablecoins.
This vision of agentic finance that everyone has discussed for a few years is finally starting to materialise in practice. For Space and Time specifically, this is an exciting development because agents transacting onchain need reliable data to act on. Sometimes they require onchain data, such as protocol activity or price action.
Other times, they require offchain data regarding a user's assets or external activity. Importantly, they need a way to make decisions based on data they can fully trust. The value Space and Time offers in that situation is absolute proof. We can prove that the data an agent relies on to make decisions is accurate and remains completely untampered.
As an end user, this means you have cryptographic assurance that your agent is acting on accurate inputs when trading or making payments on your behalf. If the incoming data is flawed, everything downstream becomes flawed as well.
Now that you are well past the initial growth spike, what does retention look like for Space and Time, and how has your relationship with the community evolved?
We have concentrated mainly on growing the developer community. Most of what we have delivered in recent months focuses on making building with Space and Time as simple and self-service as possible. We launched a new Space and Time app that features a comprehensive front end.
It enables anyone to build with our data without requiring deep technical expertise. To test it, I actually used it myself despite not being a developer. I have never written a smart contract, yet I was able to explore the app and deploy one on Ethereum that queries Space and Time data.
That is the exact accessibility standard we aimed for. We wanted someone without a technical background to accomplish something meaningful easily. On the B2B side, we concentrate heavily on financial institutions. We see them entering the space and becoming very serious about asset tokenisation and stablecoin projects. That has become a key focus for our team.
You mentioned a collaboration with Indo Mobile to put student credentials onchain in Indonesia. Could you provide us with an update on the UGM rollout?
We now have over 140,000 students committed to onboarding to Space and Time. This is happening through our partnerships with UGM, the Salib Suci Foundation, Indomobil, and a few other organisations in Indonesia. When I spoke with Ryan previously, those partnerships had just launched.
Since then, we have made significant progress. Thousands of students already have their course credentials stored and verified on Space and Time today. This is one of my favourite use cases because it addresses a genuinely tangible problem.
Students worldwide need to demonstrate their qualifications to employers and institutions globally. Storing those credentials in a secure, verifiable, tamper-proof manner onchain makes that achievable. Centralised systems simply cannot provide that level of reliability. I am genuinely excited that this use case has come to us.
Space and Time has discussed stablecoin issuers creating reward programmes outside the stablecoin itself. Considering the direction regulation is heading, how feasible is that opportunity, and is SxT actively collaborating with issuers on it?
Yes, and I will add that I am not a legal expert, so I speak based on my understanding rather than providing formal legal analysis. As the regulatory framework currently stands in the EU and probably soon in the US, stablecoin issuers cannot offer passive yields.
That places them at a structural disadvantage compared to bank deposits, which attract and retain customers precisely by offering yield on idle capital. Stablecoins theoretically have the same appeal since they represent money that exists onchain and remains directly under the user's control.
However, the passive yield pathway appears to be closing. The latest signals from Washington suggest banks are winning the lobbying fight on that point. Issuers will definitely need compliant alternatives. The most likely direction points to activity-based rewards.
Users will earn rewards for depositing, transferring, or using stablecoins in specific ways. Space and Time serves as the engine that makes those programmes work in a trustless way. The setup requires absolutely no modification to the stablecoin itself.
We act as a database of everything happening onchain, making it simple to prove a user's activity and allowing an issuer to define reward logic. It provides an easy plug-and-play solution for issuers needing a compelling reason for people to choose their stablecoin. We are early in this area, but we are already in conversations with several issuers.
You recently shipped Uniswap V4 hook templates powered by Proof of SQL. From a marketing perspective, how do you turn something that technical into a story that actually hooks developers?
You need to work backwards. Consider what the product solves and who it benefits. In this case, we support Uniswap developers building hooks. The problem we solve involves making it extremely easy for them to access Space and Time data while they build.
The hook template does all of that heavy lifting for them. Once you identify the core problem and the target audience, the story writes itself. Most of what we release is highly technical. I have been doing this for four years now, and that framework is the exact one I always rely on.
The on-chain RWA market is growing fast, and Space and Time has argued that verifiable indexing and ZK attestations could serve as the compliance layer that firms like BlackRock and JP Morgan still lack. How are you positioning SxT to collaborate with these players?
Asset tokenisation serves as a natural use case for us because it requires data to flow in both directions. On one hand, you need to relay offchain data, such as reserves, asset activity, and real-world states, directly onchain to inform the asset.
On the other hand, you need robust compliance and reporting. This requires an index of what is happening onchain, what users are doing with the assets, and where the value is flowing. Space and Time handles both sides perfectly. What attracts an institution is the full loop functionality.
They can connect their offchain database through Space and Time to access that data onchain reliably and verifiably. This provides them with a fully indexed record of onchain activity for reporting purposes. Such a closed loop precisely meets the requirements of compliance-focused institutions. Very few infrastructure providers can deliver this end-to-end service.
February marked one year since the launch of the Grayscale Space and Time Trust. What has changed in practice, and has the trust altered who participates?
We are genuinely thankful for the partnership with Grayscale. They have been outstanding in helping make Space and Time accessible to institutional investors. The core value of the trust is quite simple. Many enterprises and funds are unable to hold crypto directly on their balance sheets due to regulatory restrictions or internal policies.
The Grayscale trust allows them to gain exposure to SXT without owning native crypto. What has changed over the past year revolves around volume and momentum. As more institutions enter the crypto space, assets under management in the trust have grown, and adoption continues to accelerate.
All the institutional interest in the world only translates into real outcomes if you build the access structures for it. The trust provides exactly that vital structure.
What are you most looking forward to at EthCC?
Honestly, I am eager to return to our roots. Many of the conferences I’ve recently attended have been very institutional. We see suits everywhere, bankers, and people at their very first crypto conference. That is encouraging because it shows what progress truly looks like.
We absolutely want those people here. However, EthCC feels like home. You have the Ethereum community and the crypto-native crowd in jeans and trainers having serious conversations about privacy and cypherpunk ideas. I was at Aave's DeFi Day yesterday, and it felt like a wonderful reset. The suits are welcome, and we love having them, but it feels incredibly good to have a conference that still feels like us.
One issue we discussed is the challenge of obtaining reliable off-chain data. Real estate serves as a good example where verifying the underlying data is genuinely difficult. How does Space and Time address that problem?
This is a crucial distinction to clarify. Space and Time can prove data integrity from the exact moment data enters our system until it leaves. We can guarantee it remains completely untouched and perfectly accurate while under our custody. What we cannot do is verify what occurred to the data before it entered the system.
If someone manipulates data upstream of us, Proof of SQL will not detect that. The honest truth is that most data integrity issues stem from clerical errors rather than malicious intent. A database administrator might accidentally delete a table or update a row incorrectly, corrupting information with serious downstream effects.
Our thesis states that by cryptographically proving data lineage at the database level, we can prevent a significant amount of financial loss and operational headaches. The broader principle emphasises reducing points of trust and failure as far down the stack as possible.
Proof of SQL serves as a crucial layer of that security. The more parts of the stack you can secure at different points, the better the overall system becomes. We are making a significant portion of the oracle problem considerably more trustworthy.