Searching for Mana with Lloyd Wahed · 2026-05-21 · 1h 5m
"Getting banks to use blockchain has never been about the technology. If you cannot answer why a bank makes more money by going blockchain, there is no reason for them to adopt it." In this episode of Searching for Mana , Lloyd Wahed is joined by Alex Buelau, founder of Rayls, the Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for institutional finance. After more than a decade building infrastructure for banks and financial institutions, Alex believes the next evolution of blockchain will not be driven by speculation, but by the convergence of traditional finance, tokenised assets, and artificial intelligence. Rayls was built around a simple premise: existing blockchain infrastructure was never designed for the operational requirements of institutions. The conversation explores why Rayls chose to build a Layer 1 rather than another Layer 2, the importance of instant finality and stablecoin-based gas fees for banks, and why Alex believes the future of crypto increasingly resembles foundational internet infrastructure rather than an alternative financial system.
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