Chatting with Cryptonews Podcast host Matt Zahab, the CEO talked about finding Ethereum, mining on its genesis block, selling ETH, and getting into Radix.

Ridyard told us about the project’s key principles, and how it goes above and beyond to keep users’ funds safe.

In this interview, Ridyard discussed:

• the founding story of Radix DLT;
• Y Combinator’s secret sauce: setting the tone and levelling up in business;
• Radix having a much simpler coding language than other blockchains;
• Radix as a game engine for DeFi: it is significantly quicker to build applications on;
• how Radix Wallet improves crypto user experience.

Piers Ridyard gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can watch above – or you can read a part of it below.

Wild Ride Through Smart Contracts and Y Combinator

Ridyard started the interview with his background. Notably, he described his experience with Y Combinator as “a wild ride.”

First, he entered the Ethereum community very early and got very interested in smart contracts.

At the time, smart contracts were a new thing in the space, and everybody wondered what they could create. Ridyard finds that most of these ideas will come true, it’s just a matter of timing.

But he had something specific in mind:

“One of the things that I thought – it was an obvious use case for smart contracts – was insurance.”

Ridyard started “playing around” with this idea of automatic insurance. Having no knowledge about insurance, he first reached out to “a bunch of” insurance companies to understand their problem set.

He talked to them about blockchain, and they told him about insurance. “So I ended up speaking with a bunch of the senior people in some of the biggest insurance companies in London.”

However, the crypto sector was very different at the time and was ultimately not equipped to facilitate automatic insurance. Specifically, there were no stablecoins.

They could only use ETH as collateral, and that wouldn’t work, he said.

Meanwhile, Ridyard learned from the insurance companies that their sector was a slow, manual, disorganized “mess.”

Soon, he began the process of product discovery and came up with the idea of Surematics: a way of creating smart contract-based deals around large syndicated insurance deals.

It would enable the control of the programmatic flow of money, creating criteria for insurance, and more.

He went on to apply for Y Combinator. And Surematics got in.

Y Combinator taught him that,

“There can be a million excuses, but if you want to be successful, this is what you have to achieve. Either you’re going to move heaven and earth to achieve that, or you’re not going to be as successful as you could be, and that’s your choice. We’re not going to give you shit for not doing it, we’re just going to be like, this is the bar and this is what you need to get to. And that changed my perspective from that point forward.”

And at the same time, Ridyard “started playing around” with other blockchain technologies because he had realized that Ethereum had a number of issues.

He soon discovered this new platform called Radix and became friends with its founder Dan Hughes. He then decided to build Surematics on top of Radix.

Why should you apply to YC?https://t.co/jMbniHoJK4 pic.twitter.com/NBDxvlqkwf

— Y Combinator (@ycombinator) April 4, 2023

Mining On the Genesis Block

In July 2015, Ethereum created its “genesis block,” i.e. the first block in a blockchain.

Ridyard was one of those mining on the Genesis Block. More precisely, he had already set up the mining equipment before the Ethereum mainnet launch.

He stated that,

“I think we probably mined maybe in the top 50 blocks, something like that. And so it was a really weird entrance into crypto for me because it started from a point of complete skepticism.”

When he first learned about Ethereum from a friend, he wondered if either of them should invest. Ultimately he told his friend it was a scam and not to buy it.

However, Ethereum started testnet mining a few months later, and “I was like, oh shit, I’ve taken a completely wrong view on this.”

Following some intensive research, he realized that they “just need a bunch of GPUs.”

Notably, before he got into crypto, Ridyard had manufactured consumer electronics for the Apple market. So mining was “right in my wheelhouse.”

They bought “a bunch of hardware” and started mining on the testnet. And then they simply continued mining on the mainnet.

“And we were mining sequential blocks at many points where we would win a block, and then we’d win the next block. And that’s how low the computing power was at the time.”

Ridyard was there for many of Ethereum’s firsts.

Following his mining entry, he got into smart contracts, invested in the first decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), known for The DAO hack, and was there during the debates about whether or not Ethereum should fork.

Meanwhile, he sold most of the mined ETH.

“I think we mined 10,000 ETH in about three months. But the irony of it was if we’d taken the money that we’d spent on hardware and just bought Ethereum, we would have done about 5X better than we did through mining.”

That said, Ridyard wanted to buy his first house, and he had enough money from mining to make a deposit.

There appeared another irony. This one hurt. It took six months to close on the house. By that time, he could have bought the house in cash.

On the other hand, he had put his ETH in various wallets. When he opened one of them previously holding about $300-500 in ETH, he found it reached $20,000.

“I think the thing that I learned from that is never sell your moon bag,” Ridyard said. “Always make sure that you’re always holding something. But yeah, Ethereum has definitely treated me well.”

Today marks the 8th anniversary since the Ethereum genesis block.

One of the most significant moments in crypto so far.

Happy birthday to Ethereum! pic.twitter.com/rKezCxTZWl

— Binance (@binance) July 30, 2023

The Core of Radix

Ridyard noted that the technology of Radix excited him “way more” than the application of insurance.

The three things that make the core of Radix, and that the team delivered, are scalability, developer experience and tools, and user experience.

The company took a thorough approach, thinking:

“Let’s take a bit more time, and let’s actually work with developers to get to the point where you have a programming language that feels really intuitive for doing the things in Web3 that make sense”.

Therefore, they spent about two years talking to about a thousand developers.

They knew that the syntax had to be “super easy” as well.

The team kept iterating until they got it to the point where “developers are just getting it immediately” once they went through the documentation.

“They spend an hour going through it. And they’re like, I understand how to build Uniswap, I understand how to build Aave.”

That’s when they released the programming language at the end of 2019. It has grown “incredibly well” since.

They also worked thoroughly on what the user experience (UX) paradigm needed to look like.

The team wanted to shift the way people think about wallets. It’s not just a place where they keep their money – it’s their portal to Web3. It’s how they interact with Web3.

“And without it, without that making sense, you are in a situation where consumers can’t use it,” Ridyard argued.

Step One: Download the Radix Wallet

You can download the wallet from here, following the steps highlighted on the page https://t.co/YQVhNz1q73

— Radix – Radically Different DeFi (@radixdlt) March 7, 2024

No Nonsense on Radix

Radix is seen as a no-rug-pull, no-nonsense place.

But Ridyard stressed that it’s always possible to rug pull someone.

The point is to assume that everyone at every level of the stack is malicious – to make sure that everything acts on the minimum trust possible and the maximum user information possible.

This leads to two key actions:

• put as many guards up;
• make sure that every interaction is human-readable so that users know what they’re signing.

What Radix offers is transparency that ensures more security. Users can see in their wallets the information about the token type issued to them.

People behind tokens are not able to hide the rules associated with the token, Ridyard said, and added:

“You can’t stop people from scamming, but you can make it a lot harder to scam a user into doing something that they don’t consent to because all of the information is available to the user.”

Furthermore, Radix doesn’t allow project makers to “present an action as one thing” and get the users to approve something else.

What you see in your wallet is the action that you signed to happen on the ledger, said Ridyard, adding:

“And once you signed it, no one can play with it.”

Therefore, somebody can’t commit a rug pull via something that looks like Uniswap, for example. Radix shows users if they are not actually interacting with the genuine Uniswap application.

Also, there is always a guarantee. For example, when a user clicks to confirm a transaction and it fails, the smart contract built by the app enforces the swap guarantees.

But “if you’re with a naughty one, then they’re just going to take your tokens.” Radix doesn’t allow that. The guarantees are then enforced at the ledger level.

“So even if I signed it, they couldn’t steal my money, because for the transaction to succeed, they would have to return to me the minimum guarantee that the transaction was enforcing in the first place. And if it can’t, then the transaction fails,” Ridyard concluded.

This is not just another year for Radix; it's the year everything changes.

The question of "wen" for too long was answered with "soon."

The days of "soon" are over. The answer is "now."

Get ready for #Breakout2024 https://t.co/OkPWD8j93I pic.twitter.com/JV5vkgjQmo

— Radix – Radically Different DeFi (@radixdlt) March 7, 2024

__________

About Piers Ridyard

Piers Ridyard is the CEO of Radix DLT – a decentralized network that will enable developers to build quickly without the constant threat of exploits and hacks.

Radix will reward improvements and will ensure that scale is never a bottleneck.

Ridyard also founded and exited Surematics, a Y Combinator company, and was mining on the genesis block of Ethereum in July 2015.

He graduated from the University of Manchester and the University of Law and has a CFA level 1.

The post Piers Ridyard, CEO of Radix DLT, on The Future of Web3, Wallets, Account Abstraction, and Creating the Game Engine for DeFi | Ep. 315 appeared first on Cryptonews.

He talked about growing the Solana ecosystem, accelerating its adoption, and how the Solana Foundation hackathons help accomplish just that.

In this interview, Taylor discussed:

• Colosseum as a platform focused on growing, accelerating, and investing in the Solana ecosystem;
• Colosseum streamlining three pillars: hackathon, accelerator, and venture fund;
• Colosseum’s aim to onboard the next generation of on-chain developers and make decentralized technologies as ubiquitous as email;
• Bonk DAO making a first-of-its-kind investment in Colosseum to back ecosystem builders;
• hackathons as the backbone of the Solana developer community, attracting $600m in venture funding for the winners.

You can watch the video above to learn what Matty and Matt talked about – or you can read a part of it below.

Not the Y Combinator of Solana

The team announced the launch of Colosseum in late January this year. The organization aims to run Solana’s hackathons, accelerate winning founders, and invest in crypto startups.

Many have described it as “essentially Y Combinator (YC) for Solana.”

The comparison comes due to the organization’s aim to sponsor and nurture promising startups.

Taylor commented that the Colosseum team is flattered by the comparison and that they have a lot of work to do “to lift up to that sort of legacy.”

However, he said,

“Honestly, long-term, we don’t really want to be compared to Y Combinator, because we think we have a very differentiated model on what we’re trying to do. This is specifically built for the crypto industry and Solana in particular.”

While one can think of Colosseum as a traditional accelerator, like YC, there is no written application. Instead, projects must win a five-week hackathon to be even considered for the program.

Taylor argued that this model is “a much better indicator of potential founder and founding team talent” than a traditional written application.

Therefore, Colosseum will run hackathons that the team has been doing for the past three years at the Solana Foundation.

Besides hackathons, they have added two more pillars to the organization: the accelerator and a venture fund.

The funds raised will be given to the hackathon winners. Up to fifteen teams per hackathon will be accepted into the Accelerator program and will receive a pre-seed $250,000 investment each.

Colosseum will continue to support them and help them go from DevNet to Mainnet, where they can sufficiently pitch seed investors and raise a proper venture fundraising round.

Two Touch Points with Solana

Asked if Colosseum is directly involved with the Solana Foundation, Taylor explained that it is, in fact, a fully independent organization.

However, there are two particular touchpoints between the two.

Firsts: The Solana Foundation is a liquidity provider (LP) in the Colosseum’s venture fund. They have invested in the fund itself and have signed a commercial agreement for Colosseum to “take the reins” in administering their official hackathons.

Second: Colosseum is focused on Solana “just generally.” The team feels “very strongly” that most of the growth of applications and the ecosystem around them will happen on Solana over the next several years.

And so, Taylor said,

“We’ve basically decided to focus all of our efforts on that particular ecosystem.”

This approach also helps the team modify the accelerator experience to help embed the projects in this ecosystem rather than going multi-chain and “diffusing the experience across many different L1 or L2 ecosystems.”

Moreover, Taylor commented that we are still early in crypto’s evolution – and hence, Solana’s evolution.

That said, Solana’s Mainnet went live just four years ago, in March 2020. “There’s a ton of room for growth left,” Taylor said.

Therefore, Solana will inevitably get to the next level of adoption, he argued.

Taylor added that “we’re seeing the fruits of that right now, where the developer ecosystem and founder ecosystem is stronger than ever, hackathon submissions are at all-time highs.”

Renaissance is On

Colosseum recently announced the start of the next hackathon with the Solana Foundation, called Renaissance.

It will run from March 4 through April 8.

“It should be pretty big,” Taylor said.

Today, the Solana Renaissance Hackathon officially kicks off!

Tomorrow March 5 at 10am PST join an X Spaces AMA with @SolanaFndn & @ColosseumOrg to learn how to better position yourself for success.

Set reminders & drop your questions in advance in thread below! https://t.co/z5jsvrMGtx

— Solana (@solana) March 4, 2024

This will be the first hackathon where the team will choose winners and then select a subset of those winners to join the accelerator program. These will receive the funding.

More specifically, there will be 30-40 winners in the first round. These will then proceed to have an interview with the three Colosseum co-founders.

The second round of evolution will determine the top 10-15 teams that the organization will invest in.

“And hopefully, this will usher in the next wave of breakout startups in the Solana ecosystem,” Taylor said.

Interested projects can sign up now.

Renaissance will also show the level of interest in the Solana ecosystem, but based on the activity on the Colosseum platform, “we think it’s stronger than ever.”

BONK DAO’s Surprising Investment

BONK DAO made a first-of-its-kind $500,000 investment in Colosseum earlier this year.

Taylor noted that the move was “pretty surprising” to the team.

But the BONK DAO Council had been looking for ways to use their treasury to help support the ecosystem. And they felt that becoming an LP in the Colosseum fund accommodates this.

The DAO held a vote on whether to invest, they voted ‘yes,’ and Colosseum accepted the offer.

Per Taylor,

“I’ve never heard of this happening before for another venture fund. So definitely uncharted waters. But we’re excited to help fulfill the vision that they have, which is growing the startup ecosystem on Solana and helping founders get off on the best foot.”

BONK DAO, he argued, is not your average meme coin. There seems to be a lot more actual development around it.

“It’s probably one of the most integrated tokens just into the Solana DeFi ecosystem,” Taylor noted.

As for other developments, Colosseum finds the social network space interesting.

“That’s a whole green field of opportunity that we’d love to see more experimentation with,” Taylor concluded.

__________

About Matty Taylor

Matty Taylor is the co-founder of the independent organization Colosseum. The other two co-founders are Clay Robbins and Nate Levine.

Taylor was previously the Head of Growth at the Solana Foundation, where he kickstarted the Solana hackathon program in 2020.

Over the past three years, that program cumulatively resulted in over 60,000 participants, 4,000 projects launched, and $600 million in venture funding for winners.

Top Solana ecosystem founders from Tensor, Squads, StepN, Jito, and dozens of other leading projects got their start through Solana Foundation hackathons.

Taylor previously worked at 0x Labs and Square (now Block).

The post Matty Taylor, Co-founder of Colosseum, on Solana, Hackathons, and Growing the Solana Ecosystem | Ep. 314 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview, Pierce talked about the US returning to the crypto scene as a participant following the spot Bitcoin ETF approvals, democratizing real estate investments through tokenization, and projects avoiding the ‘securities’ label, even when it suits their products better than ‘utility.’

In this interview, Pierce discussed:

• his motivation to join EstateX as an investor and strategic advisor;
• the difference between securities and utility tokens;
• brick and pixel = where physical and analog meet;
• how crypto provides solutions to the traditional banking system;
• Bitcoin ETFs and 52 million Americans holding digital assets.

The Bull is Running

This has been an exciting year so far for everybody in crypto, Pierce told Matt. The entire space went from “bull-ish” to “likely full bull.”

And we’ve just begun.

The first massive event for this year was the approval of the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Pierce argued that people don’t really understand how big of a deal this actually is: both for the Bitcoin (BTC) price and the crypto industry in the US.

Had the opportunity to discuss Bitcoin hovering around $43K after post ETF selloff today on @TheBigMoneyShow at @FoxBusiness

Amidst the 2024 US elections, the launch of the Bitcoin ETF marks a pivotal success for cryptocurrency, showcasing its growing acceptance and sparking… pic.twitter.com/pWWAU5kjHb

— Brock Pierce (@brockpierce) February 3, 2024

This former presidential candidate argued that the USA is an innovation leader but that its position on crypto is “a very real concern” in the country’s congress.

“American entrepreneurs were leaving the country left and right in droves. A lot of America’s greatest talent was leaving. A lot of America’s highest-potential businesses were leaving because of regulatory uncertainty.”

The ETF approvals changed this. There will be more regulatory issues and discussions. But “everyone can rest assured that America’s position in being a participant and not continuing to make this industry go away and pushing America’s finest across and out of our borders. It’s a game-changing event.”

Besides ETFs, another major event will be the much-anticipated Bitcoin halving in April.

Meanwhile, people tend to feel two kinds of ways in these market circumstances.

On the one hand, “all of a sudden, everybody feels poor,” said Pierce, because they measure their wealth based on their highs, not their lows.

However, a lot of people who have invested in crypto now understand what it is to have some degree of wealth. Per Pierce,

“This has been one of the greatest wealth transfers ever.”

The problem arises, Pierce argued, when people don’t diversify. Many people who have already invested in crypto will choose to diversify a bit in this next run, he said.

Notably, they are unlikely to reach for memecoins or non-fungible tokens (NFTs). They will seek to invest in real estate.

From ‘Brick and Mortar’ to ‘Pixels and Bits’

The tokenization of real estate is not exactly a new idea, but it’s an increasingly popular one.

And now is a good time to jump into democratizing real estate investments through tokenization, Pierce argued.

There are many ways to democratize access to this type of investment product, and blockchain is not necessary to do that. However, these novel technologies are helpful in the space, Pierse said and added:

 “We talk about the brick and mortar business, call it real estate, and let’s call it ‘the pixels and bits business.’ This is where brick and pixel, the digital and the analog, the hard and the soft assets meet.”

This is a very clear value proposition, Pierce said. Real estate is a major asset class that most people do not have access to unless they are very wealthy.

Tokenization is here to help them enter the real-world asset (RWA) space and diversify their portfolios at the same time.

Per Pierce,

“[Real estate] is just something that any person that is going through asset allocation and wants to have a well-rounded portfolio with a diverse set of assets that can weather any storm or market condition that comes […] should consider.”

Near the end of February 2024, Pierce joined real estate tokenization startup EstateX as an advisor and strategic investor. The company aims to democratize access to real estate investments, allowing investors to benefit from increased liquidity and lower investment minimums.

Welcome aboard @brockpierce! The #EstateX Fam is thrilled to have you!

Here's to disrupting entire industries and more! Onwards and upwards! https://t.co/DsptxH8BRz

— EstateX (@estatexeu) February 20, 2024

The possibility to invest as little as a hundred dollars and speculate on real estate as an asset class is something that “will make the world a better place,” Pierce said.

He continues to look for more real estate projects that can deliver the types of yields and returns “that are needed for this to be a viable long-term solution that is ultimately delivering on the promise, which is value.”

Also, another theme he is interested in is self-sovereign identity, describing it as the Holy Grail.

This is the foundational layer, he said. “Identity is more foundational than money value finance. […] So I’m interested in sort of the continual tokenization where people can be enumerated for their participation in open source software development.”

Security v. Utility: Some Things Are Better Left Securities

Pierce also touched upon the ongoing battle within and beyond this space: securities versus utilities.

Real estate is a regulated market, and rules are much clearer than they are in the crypto industry. The latter’s lack of clarity has been a sore point for years now.

A lot of work has to be done to be compliant when offering securities – it can’t happen fast, and it creates a barrier to entry.

Therefore, Pierce stressed that,

“Some people are busy taking what should be a security and making it into a utility to avoid rules and regulation and to not have dilution and getting free money for themselves.”

He referenced the security token BCAP, created by Blockchain Capital under Pierce’s leadership, which went through an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017.

At the time, Pierce stated that BCAP was a security and was critical of projects that tried to avoid this label.

“I was watching a lot of people doing their ICOs back in the day where I’m like, you’re really better off being a security,” Pierce told Matt.

“Because there is a difference between utilities and securities. It doesn’t all have to be a utility token. There are things that are designed that way. And then there are some things that should be securities.”

It’s taken a while for the right infrastructure to occur, argued Pierce. But one thing that hasn’t happened yet is security token exchanges and offerings becoming “the thing.”

For something to get mainstream adoption, it needs to be an order of magnitude better than whatever it’s trying to replace, he said. “Otherwise, it’s a long, slow grind.”

Pierce concluded by saying that he’s “just so excited by the world’s potential and what it can be.” He told listeners that “the future is going to happen to you, or it’s going to happen with you. So get involved if you want to live in a world that is of your liking.”

A woman in Costa Rica used #Bitcoin to sell her eggs at the farmers market.

Bitcoin empowers developing countries by providing access to financial services through smartphones, acting as a hedge against inflation, and fostering global economic participation. pic.twitter.com/0eUjtO60LU

— Brock Pierce (@brockpierce) January 29, 2024

__________

About Brock Pierce

Brock Pierce is a well-known figure in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, recognized for his contributions as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and advocate for the digital currency ecosystem.

Pierce began his career in the entertainment industry as a child actor but later shifted his focus towards technology and innovation.

He co-founded several high-profile projects in the crypto and blockchain sectors, including Blockchain Capital, Tether, and EOS. He has also served as the chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, aiming to standardize, protect, and promote the use of Bitcoin cryptographic money worldwide.

Pierce is also involved in certain philanthropic efforts and supports organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the Brennan Center for Human Rights.

The post Brock Pierce, Co-Founder of Tether, EOS, Blockchain Capital, on Tokenizing Real Estate, 2024 Crypto Markets, and Bitcoin | Ep. 313 appeared first on Cryptonews.

The two talked about ETHDenver setting the main themes for the year and what we may see in 2024.

The founder further explained how investing in UI, UX, and specific tools leads to greater DeFi and DAO adoption.

In this interview, Paller discussed:

• shifting regulatory dynamics in the US and how crypto can influence it;
• evolving public sentiment of crypto post-FTX and Terra;
• preparing the Web3 community for the impending bull market;
• Web3’s focus and capital allocated to infrastructure needs to return to users;
• predictions for DAO 2.0, DeFi 2.0, NFT 2.0

Read a portion of what Matt and John chatted about below, and listen to the full episode above.

Super Bowl of Crypto

ETHDenver 2024 has started on February 23 and will last until March 3, boasting a number of events and speakers.

Paller noted that over the years, ETHDenver became two things.

Firstly, it’s the Super Bowl of crypto. There are family and friends reunions, and the community gathers.

Secondly, it’s a menu of topics to be discussed during the year. This is the first major event following the holidays in the US, so many are curious to see what will be placed on stage, what and how it will be talked about – that is, what the year’s main topics are.

The event often sets the main themes, movements, trajectories, players, etc.

Per Paller,

“I think what ends up happening is ETHDenver becomes sort of the distiller for that narrative for the year. […] The narrative gets formed and then walks into the rest of the year as a sort of fairly big thing.”

The team behind ETHDenver gets a lot of input about what goes on their stage – and there are bound to be changes to the narratives and themes throughout the year – “but we’ve been pretty consistently successful at [setting the year’s themes] over the past six years.”

As for 2024, we’re going to see some finality around Layer-2s, Paller argued. The “protocol wars” will end. There will be no more fights, we will “just use it.”

Also, Paller opined that the industry has already solved many of its issues. And while there is plenty left on that list, all of these will eventually be crossed out.

Investment Leading to Mass Adoption

Paller noted “a huge opportunity” for investment into user-facing tools, be it user interface (UI) or user experience (UX) in general, governance tools, tooling for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), or anything else.

There is a clear difference in the amount invested currently. If you look at the dollar-for-dollar investments in protocols versus just DAO tooling or UI/UX, “it’s like a thousand to one,” said Paller, and added:

“Imagine if we had put in that kind of money to UI/UX, where we would be with adoption.”

Therefore, Paller’s prediction is that we’ll see “a huge effort from” the community to improve UI/UX and crypto products, which is how we compete with Web 2 products.

You don’t win acknowledging a trade-off in crypto, Paller warned. For the past five-six years, the industry has been making excuses about trade-offs that we have to make around security, privacy, and transaction costs, among other things. Something is always sacrificed.

At the same time, we must accept the truth that the average user will never use the products as we make them because it’s not convenient and fast enough – simply put, it’s not better than what they’re currently using.

And while some people are willing to, most do not want to go through “eight layers” of a decentralized finance (DeFi) product to figure out how to “stake their damn tokens.”

This is not getting the industry where it wants to go. It proved not to be durable. Also, we don’t really have a product market fit for DeFi, Paller argued.

Furthermore, most people, “let’s be honest,” said Paller, don’t currently care about owning their self-sovereign data.

What they do care about is using something easy, fast, and better than what’s already out there.

“Now, if we can give them fast, easy, better, and sovereignty, will they take it? Yeah, they will.”

Therefore, be it DAO tooling or DeFi products, investing in usability and UI/UX is the key.

“I think the 2.0 on the back of all of this stuff is the application of better user accessibility,” Paller opined.

And though he supports making money, all that these products are currently doing is just making money. That’s a problem. It only showcases the opportunistic side of what this technology can do.

Per Paller,

“If that’s all we do, then we’ve already failed, and it won’t work.”

We’ve got to have more than just making money as the goal. We’ve got to make what we’re creating widely accessible, transparent, permissionless, secure, and convenient for all to use.

The DAO That’s Got It All Figured Out

DAOs are going to make a comeback, John Paller said.

He couldn’t say when exactly, but as other aspects of the industry improve, the DAOs will rise. These aspects include user experience and user interface technologies, which will make DAOs more functional, usable, and configurable.

But DAOs have so far been just “grand experiments.”

Therefore, what’s missing is “a use case to point to that says, here’s the recipe [that] can be used to replicate the success in various contexts of the world,” Paller argued.

We don’t have that yet, and it’s a key ingredient.

Until we get it, we’ll continue to see a lot of experimentation. We’ll be seeing fidelity, development, and tooling enhancements.

“And then one of these days, it’s going to be slow and steady, and then all at once, you’re going to see this big narrative pop up where there’s this DAO that’s got it figured out.”

And who’s that going to be, Paller couldn’t say yet.

What he could say with near certainty is that,

“It’s got to be something people genuinely need, not just what they choose to want.”

This will create a natural demand for this and similar DAOs.

Paller noted that the industry needs to keep working methodically on user experience and abstraction technologies, not compromising security, privacy, data, and identity – but also making it cheaper, better, and faster for people to use “so that we can find these use cases to plug-and-play.”

One of these days, such a DAO will appear.

__________

About John Paller

John Paller is a US-based blockchain entrepreneur, inventor, and futurist. He is the Founder and Executive Steward of ETHDenver, the world’s largest Web3 and Ethereum-based innovation festival.

Paller is also the Founder and Executive Steward of Opolis, a digital employment cooperative for independent workers.

Prior to discovering Ethereum in 2015, Paller spent more than 15 years in talent acquisition, HR Technology, and employment systems, building multiple successful enterprises.

He brings a breadth of experience in fundraising, investor relations, community outreach, and crypto economies, guiding his vision of democratizing employment and growing decentralized communities.

In 2014, Paller was awarded “40 Under 40” by the Denver Business Journal for his contribution to shaping the future of business.

The post John Paller, Founder of ETHDenver, on Present State of ETH, and Future of DeFi, DAOs, and NFTs appeared first on Cryptonews.

Rajat further talked about the protocol’s industry-altering partnerships with Unstoppable Domains and MetaMask.

In this interview, Rajat discussed:

• Web3 UX and how Web3-native communication can help in getting to a billion users;
• Unstoppable Domains token-gated group messaging unlocking the power of community-based engagement;
• what security considerations are crucial when building a token-gated group messaging platform;
• Web3 notifications: bringing Web2 notifications to a Web3 world;
• MetaMask Snaps partnership: integrating with the most popular wallet.

Continue below to read a portion of what Matt and Harsh discussed, or listen to the full episode above.

A Billion-User Idea

Web3 can have a billion users in the future. Web3-native communications and user experience (UX) are a path to that number.

Push Protocol is working hard to contribute to the adoption.

Rajat explained that, in terms of communication, Push abstracts away all the Web3 complexities of “how to make the thing work,” how to make it compatible with wallets, and how to have the blockchain of communication.

All the protocols need to do is just use Push to re-engage the user and “get that entire Web2 UX to Web3.”

What Push did was invent the pre-notifications. These help all its users be notified about the things they are interested in and which they often engage with.

Therefore, Rajat noted that,

“This idea is so crucial, for Web3 to grow into a billion users. I always maintain and say that we have to remember that a million devs does not equal a billion users.”

He went on to explain that Push is a decentralized communication middleware. It enables protocols, blockchains, and even Web2 companies to send notifications (on-chain or off-chain), send chat, audio and video calls, etc. – that are now directly tied to a wallet address.

And because this is an interoperable and secure network, mobile apps or crypto wallets can now just tap into it and show their users all the important notifications about their activities. This can be related to loans, governance, social media, and pretty much anything you can think of.

With this, Rajat said,

“Push [has] changed user experience.”

More than 600 protocols are using Push. These include DYDX, Decentraland, Uniswap, Gitcoin, Polygon, and many others.

“They are using Push to basically make sure that this re-engagement is getting into Web3,” the co-founder added.

Unstoppable Path to Connecting the Community

The Push team has had a long relationship with the popular Web3 domain names and digital identity provider Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable too has integrated Push.

In April 2021, Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) integrated .crypto domains to the EPNS products. In September 2023, the partners enabled business-to-user (B2U) messaging through Unstoppable Messaging.

And in January 2024, the two announced the launch of the token-gated ‘Group Chat’ on Unstoppable’s messaging platform.

With the Push integration, Unstoppable shows all notifications to its users. Per Rajat,

“When that integration was happening, we understood the value of community, and we understood that Web3 communication as a whole hasn’t tapped into the community part of it.”

Going back to the billion-user aim, Harsh Rajat said, they had to ask themselves why anyone would switch from a popular site where their friends are, for example Telegram, to something else and unknown.

“The user will shift when you provide them a feature which is over the top of what they are already doing, and that led us to creating this gated group functionality.”

The idea here is that a gated group works like a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Be it an NFT project, a DAO, or a project with some unique tokens – anything really – these entities can create a group via Push Chat and specify the parameters to join, i.e. how many tokens one needs to have to join and/or send messages within the token-gated group.

Unstoppable, on its side, has a Badges feature, which translates a user’s wallet transactions into achievements.

And all of these communities, “they love to talk to each other,” Rajat noted.

“And there is no way for Web2 chat to bring that community together.”

But with the gated group chat, you can define those Web2 chats, personas, or attributes, he added.

“And all of a sudden, you have a way by which all of these communities that shared the same vision can join this group chat and can talk about it.”

‘Huge’ MetaMask Partnership and Incoming Push Features

Unstoppable Domains is not the only major partnership for the Push Protocol.

It has also partnered with the popular MetaMask wallet.

MetaMask was working on the Snap feature, and “they asked if we would love to work with them so that notifications can be natively bought into MetaMask,” Rajat said.

And they did. In September 2023, the two announced Push Snap, a tool designed to seamlessly integrate notifications directly into MetaMask wallets.

Therefore, MetaMask users can now see the notification section where they can click to install Push snap.

“Once you do, whatever protocols you have opted into to receive notifications, they can send it right on your MetaMask, and it will appear right over there.”

As for Push’s near-term future, Harsh Rajat named two events the team is “very excited about.”

One is the upcoming launch of Push Network. With it, Push becomes, “let’s say, our Layer-2 for all the communications.”

The other thing is the unveiling of Push nodes, which will “basically make this a network in its own, or a blockchain in its own,” Rajat concluded.

____

About Harsh Rajat

Harsh Rajat is the co-founder and Project Lead of Push Protocol (formerly EPNS).

He has over 12 years of entrepreneurial experience in various spectrums of tech. This includes system architecture, as well as development and design in different tech fields, such as mobile, web services, SaaS, and blockchain.

Rajat previously spoke/judged at multiple tech conferences and hackathons, including Messari Mainnet, ETHCC, ETHDenver, Schelling Point, ETHAmsterdam, NFT NYC, Liscon, HackMoney, EDCON.

The post Harsh Rajat, Co-Founder of Push Protocol, on Bringing Notifications to Web3, Token-Gated Messaging, Web3 Native Communication | Ep. 311 appeared first on Cryptonews.

He told us how the game came to where it is today, despite the obstacle; how the team utilized the circumstances in the space and the knowledge they gained to set up a platform to help others launch Web3 games; and how user acquisition changed over the past six years.

In this exciting interview, Johansson discussed:

• the origin story of BLOCKLORDS and what inspired creating the game;
• BLOCKLORDS dropping 300,000 LRDS to mark more than 60,000 players;
• industry layoffs at companies such as Riot, Epic, Activision Blizzard, and what this means for the future of the industry;
• the possibility of AAA developers venturing into blockchain/Web3 gaming:
• the secret sauce of airdrops for Web3 gaming.

Check out the full podcast episode above, or read some of the many things Johansson and host Matt Zahab talked about.

Marriage Between Crypto and Gaming

Web3 games weren’t really a thing back in 2018 when BLOCKLORDS was born. Notably, this was always a Web3 game, its co-creator noted.

The pitch has always been the same: BLOCKLORDS is an MMO strategy game that’s designed entirely around Web3.

Per Johansson,

“I’ve seen many games come and go. And so definitely that’s one of our strengths as a team; we’ve stood the test of time, we’ve survived the bear market. “

Johansson’s work in the film industry in Hollywood, followed by the gaming industry in China, taught him countless invaluable lessons about creativity and the creation process. And then,

“In 2017, I discovered crypto. I fell in love with it.”

Wanting to start something new, he joined up with co-founder Nicky Li, with whom he has worked since 2014.

He learned about crypto, and as soon as he understood how smart contracts worked, Johansson realized that,

“Gaming and crypto are forever linked.”

Gamers are already used to digital ownership, scarcity, and value. They care about what they do inside a game.

Meanwhile, crypto needs a better onboarding vehicle: a way to reach the masses. “Crypto people handle financial markets the same way gamers handle games essentially,” the CEO said. “So it was just perfect.”

From Zero to 15 Million

The BLOCKLORDS’ team is working on the game’s third iteration now. But the road to this moment was a bumpy one.

In the spring of 2018, the co-founders started looking for investors. However,

“Nobody believed in crypto gaming back then.”

On the gaming industry side, many would state that crypto is a scam. On the crypto side, particularly in the young decentralized finance (DeFi) space, many wondered why they’d bring gaming into a serious financial matter.

But in August 2018, the team won the Best Blockchain Game in NEO’s competition, earning $80,000. “That was essentially our seed funding,” Johansson said.

Building the game was difficult, and the funds quickly ran out. The team, however, won a TRON contest, receiving $30,000. So they launched on Tron, “and that did pretty well.”

However, noted Johansson,

“What we noticed right away from launching blockchain games was that it was easy to get users who were very dedicated and who would spend quite a lot on their game experience.”

But getting users was a problem.

The team of about half a dozen people continued building the game on various chains in 2018-2019, but it was a learning curve with numerous issues popping up. In addition to that, they were living off of grants.

And then, the DeFi Summer of 2020 arrived. By this point, the team had gained extensive knowledge in blockchain gaming.

“We started getting a lot of requests and demands [from other teams to help them make their games.”

That’s when the idea for Seascape came: to build a tech solution for NFT and DeFi gaming.

The Seascape Network launched in 2021. The team raised half a million dollars for it with Binance as the lead investor.

In 2021, following a number of questions about the status of BLOCKLORDS, the team created a new studio, formed a content team, and got to work on the new iteration.

“And investors really went crazy for it.”

The goal was to raise about $4 million, but BLOCLORDS ended up raising $15 million from a number of notable investors, including Makers Fund, Bitkraft Ventures, Delphi Digital, Animoca Brands, Shima Capital, WW Ventures, Spartan Group, Huobi Ventures, Funplus, YGG, and others.

User Acquisition Came Far Over the Years

Web3 user acquisition has matured quite a lot, David Johansson argued. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s definitely gotten better.”

Firstly, the ad platforms have opened up. Promoting blockchain games on social media sites, including Meta and Twitter, became easier.

“It’s much easier to get ads now, and it’s much easier to reach more users with the ads, which is great. And I definitely think our brand potential has grown with the ads.”

It’s not easy for Web3 gaming to go against Web2. It’s not only getting players that’s a problem, but keeping them. However, the ad system is essentially broken – as seen in Web2. And ironically, the way this is being revamped is through Web3.

Meanwhile, there are now many more sophisticated tracking tools, “so there’s a lot of experimentation” being done in targeting Web3 users that were active in the past.

Importantly, the community is a huge part of user acquisition, Johansson said.

“I would say that that is the vertical that really Web3 has an edge over Web2: the community is an integral part of your user acquisition and your user retention. So you need to put a lot of focus on that.”

Among other efforts, BLOCKLORDS rewards users with game drops where they distribute the game’s native token LRDS.

Shift in the Playing Field

Recruiting people to work in Web3 gaming has also become a lot easier. It is no longer a field from which people are running away.

For example, developers would previously not even entertain the idea of working on a free-to-play game. “And now basically every good game is a free-to-play game,” said Johansson.

“A lot of that hate is going to pass. I think there is a brain drain happening from Web2 to Web3.”

Additionally, talented game developers who want to start their own studio will have greater chances of getting the funding as a Web3 project than as a Web2 project.

“I think we would never have gotten the funding we got as a Web2 project. That’s just a fact. And […] strategy games don’t get a lot of investment generally.”

The capital is “much more fluid in Web3,” so projects are getting funded. Some are bad, and some are excellent.

There are more opportunities, so there is more capital in the space, creating more jobs – and all this will benefit the industry as a whole.

The Web2, or legacy gaming, has “a lot to figure out.” And Web3 will start taking some of its share over time, Johansson concluded.

____

About David Johansson

David Johansson is the CEO, Co-Founder, and Creative Director of Web3 strategy game BLOCKLORDS. He is also the CEO of Seascape Network and Metaking Studios, the creator of BLOCKLORDS.

A passionate gamer and industry veteran, Johansson has held numerous creative and production roles on some of the most successful products in their fields – including Crusader Kings, Liberators, and League of Angels – before turning his focus towards building out BLOCKLORDS in 2018.

He never looked back.

The post David Johansson, CEO of BLOCKLORDS, on Blockchain Gaming, Web3 Gaming Airdrops, and User Acquisition for Web3 Games | Ep. 310 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In this exclusive interview, Jon Trask talked about:

• blockchain and Web3 technologies revolutionizing agriculture across Africa and the globe;
• how Dimitra utilizes AI, machine learning, IoT, and data-driven insights to combat deforestation;
• Dimitra’s NFT Avocado initiative facilitating farmers with access to the necessary funds required for their farms to flourish;
• the future of blockchain tech in farming and agriculture;
• traceability and using blockchain to improve farmers’ lives.

Watch the Full Episode with Jon Trask

Check out below some of the many things Trask and Matt discussed.

From Farming to Big Tech

Trask noted that he grew up on his grandfather’s farm, after which he got into tech and supply chain business. He, in fact, worked for a number of multinational corporations in the food industry.

Six years ago, he built a blockchain-based identity system to manage businesses and farmers in Africa. Shortly after that, Trask traveled to DRC to witness some of the disparity between agriculture in Africa and agriculture in Canada, for example.

“There was a real need for things that we considered easily available and basic on farms in Canada,” he said, but farmers were not using it in Africa. This was due to availability, price, and technological accessibility.

“And we felt maybe we could do something about that.”

His colleagues and he started looking for other opportunities to expand upon the identity software that they had built. They created the foundation of Dimitra.

Dimitra Is Designed To Help Smallholder Farms

Smallholder farmers in the food industry make up just under 10% of the world’s population. But they’re very underserved from a tech perspective and earn very little for their effort.

Per Trask,

“A lot of them are really just focused on feeding their family and selling food into the community.”

He started working on bridging some of the gaps. For example, in Kenya right now, to be able to move their product out of the country and earn money for their product, need to meet several conditions. These include traceability, regulatory standards, satellite reports in order to tell if they’re deforesting their farm or not, etc.

“And we do that through working with cooperatives and governments in many of these countries. And I wake up with a smile on my face every day, I wake up happy to help and serve the community and work with all these great people around the world.”

Bringing Easy Access Through Mobile Apps

Dimitra has several valuable mobile applications. Farmers in the world, particularly in developing countries, have access to phones but don’t typically have laptops or PCs.

Dimitra has two Android apps focused on livestock, a government application that works on genetics, as well as apps for coffee and cacao farmers, among others.

The apps help farmers identify the aspects that work and those that need to be improved to increase and enhance production.

“Once they grow the crop, then we start to track and trace.”

In one of the examples Trask offered, he showcased how satellite analysis can help enrich solis with the correct supplements to boost crop output.

Solok Radjo in Indonesia is one of our cooperatives, 3300 farmers on the side of the mountain in Sumatra, all with coffee farms. And so we start with the satellite report and then we do some soil analysis. We know by the soil analysis that their soil is not pH rich. And if we can increase the pH by using calcium carbonate, we can increase their output. In some cases, we can triple or quadruple their output for a small investment.

Information like this is offered to Dimitra users throughout the ecosystem of mobile apps. Farmers get details about the soil, crop production, enhancements they can introduce and weather patterns they can expect. All in an easily accessible mobile app.

____

About Jon Trask

Jon Trask is the CEO and Founder of Dimitra and has been working with blockchain since 2017.

Prior to founding Dimitra, Trask had an extensive career building and developing enterprise software solutions to revolutionize supply chain processes and improve immutable traceability.

A recognized expert in his field, he is also the Founder and CEO of Blockchain Guru and a Partner with the Blockchain Training Alliance.

Trask’s mission now is to increase farming connectivity worldwide, particularly with those disenfranchised, and to leverage the power of innovative technologies to bridge farming and tech.

The CEO also won the 2023 Government Blockchain Association Annual Achievement Award in the “Social Impact” Category.

The post Jon Trask, CEO of Dimitra, on Blockchain Tech for Farming and Agriculture | Ep. 309 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In this exclusive interview, Li talked about:

• the future of modularity and how modular execution can help secure, lower the cost, and expedite the flow of transactions;
• the central role of user experience (UX) in a Layer 2 (L2) context and how it optimizes user engagement;
• simplifying adoption for widespread impact: zk-enabled applications can continue enabling both DevEx and UX;
• pioneering modularity in 2024: no blockchain can have all three tenets – decentralization, scalability, and security – perfectly balanced;
• revolutionizing cross-chain interoperability, functionality, and decentralized applications (dapps).

Watch the Full Episode with Kenny Li

You can also continue reading to learn what Li told us.

Manta Network’s Success Exceeds Expectations

Manta Network has experienced tremendous growth in a short amount of time.

Manta Pacific officially launched its Mainnet Alpha on September 12, 2023.

“Alongside Celestia and Polygon Labs, we are excited to unveil the next chapters for the Manta Pacific journey, one that will result in Manta Pacific as a modular zkEVM using the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK),” according to the team’s detailed roadmap.

The team has been building Manta for the past three years, Li said, with two and a half of them primarily focused on the technology and the development.

“Once we realized that this project is pretty much good to go, we shifted gears and really pushed hard on the marketing side.”

However, by that point, the L2 was already up for about six months and has grown to become the largest modular L2, says Li.

Furthermore, it’s the third largest Ethereum L2, behind Optimism and Arbitrum, and it’s got over 180 ecosystem projects deployed already.

@MantaNetwork's adoption is on display! TVL jumps to over $429M,

Take a look at the amazing deep sea of 185+ dApps on #Mantanetwork and discover the future of finance. pic.twitter.com/aaONggsAlY

— CRYPTUNEZ (@Talkmuzikdotcom) February 13, 2024

Moreover, Manta is the first L2 to leverage modular data availability network Celestia, which has helped save users $1.5 million in gas fees over just the past month.

“That’s almost like $20 million in savings and gas fees over the course of a year.”

Li noted that he’d lie if he said that the team expected such excellent results and that “it was a mastermind achievement.” However, it was simply a lot of hard work from a dedicated team trying to get the best outcome possible and making adjustments on the fly.

“And the best outcome exceeded all of our expectations,” Li said.

Re-thinking Yield-bearing

Li noted that he greatly respects the Ethereum L2 Blast, which introduced native yield for ETH and stablecoins.

Yield-bearing assets are a huge value proposition to users, especially for L2s, he argued.

In discussions with partners, including Binance, Manta came to the idea to pursue something similar to what Blast came up with.

“I think that what they did was really amazing. […] And so from there, we went to the drawing board, and we’re like, okay, let’s see how we can make this happen.”

The team needed to find a way to make it work for 180 ecosystem applications. “So that’s exactly what we did.”

So they launched their yield-bearing asset campaign, New Paradigm, with Phase 1 ending on January 16.

It was a success. “That just snowballed. It was pretty insane.”

Why Another Yield-bearing L2?

As the only live yield-bearing L2, Manta Pacific gives immediate token access on the L2 after depositing ETH or USDC on Ethereum. pic.twitter.com/x8KZhZoZ8I

— Manta Network (,) #MantaNewParadigm (@MantaNetwork) December 14, 2023

Importance of Modularity

Building Manta has always been product-focused and user-oriented, said Li. This is what allows it to be an early adopter, adapt as it goes, and integrate services like Celestia.

They can do this due to this new buzzword: modularity. This term is now popular as ZK was a year ago, Li opined, and added:

“But modularity itself is more of a philosophy, an approach to how to build.”

Basically, there are two schools of thought when it comes to building in Web3, especially on the infrastructure level:

1. Do everything in-house: build nearly everything from scratch; utilize base technologies, and build other components yourself. This is already somewhat modular.
2. Modular school of thought says we’re living in a world of blockchain now where there are all of these amazing, specialized services and technologies that other people are building out. So, instead of trying to do it all in-house, we can integrate the necessary pieces into our systems.

The second one allows developers to have “a plug-and-play sort of design” that continually can improve the system over time to stay powerful for many years.

L2 Must Be Able to Evolve With Web3

As an example, Yi gave the history of blockchains. If we take the giants – Bitcoin and Ethereum – we find numerous forks that aimed to improve speed, block size, fees, or something else.

But they all built it monolithically, which is the first school. They forked blockchains, made minor modifications, and then tried to compete with the original with no room to grow.

In the meantime, the Web3 space grew. It continued to evolve.

“But those projects now, because they’re building monolithically, they can’t really adapt to this new value proposition. […] I think at the core of the modular approach is being able to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the Web3 space.”

They can’t have decentralized apps (dapps) deployed on them, for example.

And now, in 2024, Bitcoin and Ethereum still stand. No so-called killers can match them.

The same scenario is now playing out with L2s. Many are launching with minor nuances in how they function. They are “racing against time in order to try to fight each other on market share.”

But Li asked,

“What happens in 2027? What happens in 2030 when the industry continues to evolve? How do you adapt at that time? I think that if you take the modular approach, then you are able to adapt because you can continuously take new technologies and integrate them into your systems.”

Manta took a modular approach to its architecture, which allows it to take the needed technologies and plug them in specifically for the purpose of deriving further value for users. The users don’t even notice when a new one is included as, for example, there is no downtime.

This year, Manta is switching to zkEVM, taking the modular approach using the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK).

Technology Could Be Amazing, But Product Useless

Li said that we should differentiate between technology and product. We often focus on the underlying technology in this space, but the end product is crucial – it’s what the users get.

Manta gets inquiries and requests for partnerships and integrations all the time, said Li. But they first ask what the clear value proposition to the user is.

“And honestly, I’m a little surprised at how often that question can’t really be answered.”

Therefore, something may be an amazing technology, but it’s not an amazing product, Li said.

Discussing the three tenants of blockchain – decentralization, scalability, and security – Li suggested that one can’t really measure either of those three things. It’s contextual and subjective.

These terms are qualitative and nowhere near a black-and-white issue.

For example, how does one define or measure decentralization in various contexts? Are we speaking about the architecture and the nodes, as is often the case, or do we look at who around the world is contributing to the core technology that is being presented as the network, and not just the core contributors?

Both are significant components of decentralization, Li argued. Manta Pacific, for example, is not one project built by a core team of contributors, but it’s “the result of all the efforts that all these other individual components and the contributors of those components have been bringing to the table.”

____

About Kenny Li

Kenny Li is Core Contributor for Manta Network and the co-founder of p0x Labs, the firm developing technologies behind projects, including Manta Network.

Prior to this, Li received an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2020. Whilst at MIT, he was a teaching assistant for several courses, mainly blockchain-based. He also worked with the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI).

Moreover, Li has started, advised, and invested in startups for over a decade.

The post Kenny Li, Core Contributor of Manta Network, on The Future of Modularity, Decentralization, and More | Ep. 308 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview, the CEO discussed:

• ensuring decentralization as AI and Web3’s convergence grows;
• transitioning away from centralized infrastructure to leverage the full potential of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs);
• the role of Digital Resource Networks (DRNs) in the function of DePINs;
• the building blocks for a freer Internet;
• privacy in the digital age, paved by decentralization.

Watch the Full Episode with Dr. Steven Waterhouse

Or read on to learn what he told Matt.

Decentralization Precedes Crypto

The concept of decentralization or distributed systems goes back to the very early stage of the Internet, Waterhouse said.

The core routing design, infrastructure, and protocols at the lowest level, are designed to be fully decentralized. Centralization came after.

Therefore, he said,

“The actual Internet itself is decentralized architecture. It’s designed to withstand a nuclear attack.”

You could do all sorts of different applications across “big decentralized distributed clusters of machines.” The backends of Apple, Google, and Amazon, for example, are all based on these.

“So we kind of went from decentralized to more centralized, and now we’re going to decentralized again inside the data centers,” he added.

However, the companies’ business models, which are mostly supported by advertising, don’t lend themselves very well to being decentralized. It’s economic interest.

But “along comes crypto” and, with it, the idea of having decentralized architectures that are widely available – not just side data centers. “And that becomes the collection of blockchain families that we know and love,” the CEO said.

Now, people decided to “try and do what we did before with making things in data centers, not just one machine but more, and do the same across a wide area. And that’s DePIN,” said Waterhouse. “It’s like decentralized machines doing things that are connected and incentivized using crypto.”

And if you want to get somebody interested in DePIN, give them a problem to solve.

“Tell them that story and say, this is why we need decentralized physical infrastructure. So you need to be able to solve that problem that not one person controls the algorithm.”

Decentralized Virtual Private Network

Blockchain was a solution to and an improvement on a number of things. But not all.

The concept around decentralized infrastructure  – and running a service where one’s being incentivized to do so and then likely being paid to consume it – was something most people assumed had been solved by blockchain.

Per Waterhouse,

“It became very clear very quickly in the summer of 2017, that not only was it a lot of interest, but that the ideas of trying to bring the concept of decentralization as it relates to security and privacy and bringing that as kind of a core principle within the blockchain/Web3/crypto ecosystem was possibly just as important as anything we could build.”

Orchid offers its own decentralized, pay-as-you-go VPN. Orchid Global doesn’t run servers on the VPN protocol, the website says. Instead, independent providers run the Orchid server configuration and stake the native token OXT to provide bandwidth in exchange for payments directly from users via the Orchid nanopayment system.

Users do not pay for service they don’t get, it added. Nanopayment tickets travel alongside data packets to the bandwidth provider.

With a decentralized VPN, Whitehouse said, there are two nodes in the architecture. Hence, “no one can figure out what it is you’re looking for and who you are, because the two things are never connected together.”

Enter AI

OpenAI’s popular AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT has changed the AI game.

Per Waterhouse, the idea behind it was to make it open-source.

“Basically the idea was like, do a lot of research in AI, publish it all to make sure that not-so-nice people don’t get all the good AI research and do bad things, have all the power.”

Things have changed since, but Waterhouse had another thought: “let’s do that for security.” He wanted to find a way to reinvent computing with security as the default component – not an afterthought.

“What if you could rebuild things with security as a foundational principle?”

When it comes to the concept of decentralization, people can talk about privacy, he argued, but unless you really have a decentralized architecture, you can never really be sure that privacy is there.

Related to this, Waterhouse said he does not worry about AI becoming self-aware and “creating Skynet.” He is much more concerned about the human proclivity to give AIs like ChatGPT everything – happily feed it information about ourselves.

“And for it then to be able to apply very sophisticated understanding and eventually reasoning about what you’ve told it, about what other people who know you have told it and so on. And this thing is gonna know you.”

Finally, the sense of what it feels like to be very powerful will come from a convergence of a lot of AI systems working together, Waterhouse concluded.

____

About Steven Waterhouse:

Dr. Steven ‘SEVEN’ Waterhouse is an active investor and builder in the crypto/Web3 space with 11 years of experience.

He is currently CEO and co-founder of Orchid Labs, advisor to various projects, including RiscZero and Squid Router, and is CEO and co-founder of Nazare Ventures, a new fund focused on crypto and AI.

Waterhouse was recently CTO & Venture Partner at Fabric Ventures and was previously a partner at Pantera Capital from 2013 to 2016. He served on the board of Bitstamp during this period.

He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from Cambridge with a focus on speech recognition and machine learning.

The post Steven Waterhouse, CEO of Orchid Labs, on DePIN, AI, Decentralized VPNs, and Fighting for Internet Freedom | Ep. 307 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Rob Solomon, Co-Founder of DIMO, what is DePIN and its importance to the broader crypto narrative, building a blockchain for consumers, and zk-tech.

About Rob Solomon

Rob Solomon is the Co-Founder of DIMO, an open-connected vehicle platform. Rob’s background is in finance, investing, and organizational design. Most recently, he worked at Consensys, the largest Ethereum-focused development company, focusing on finance, internal economics, and decentralizing the organization. Prior to that, he was at Vroom, a pioneer in the online used-car marketplace sector. He started his career at the Downtown Project in Las Vegas (a spinoff of Zappos.com), working on corporate finance and investments and implementing Holacracy.

Rob Solomon gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• What is DePIN and its importance to the broader crypto narrative
• Building a blockchain for consumers
• Peer-to-peer economies – the purest form of decentralization
• 2024 trends – zk-tech + DePIN
• The future of mobility – DIMO is the world’s first decentralized, open, connected vehicle network

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, still coming in hot from Mexico. And I’m super pumped to have today’s guest on the show coming in hot from New York City, the best city in and on the planet. Not even up for discussion folks. New York is the absolute GOAT. Pardon me wish that was there, but story for another day. Super pumped to have Rob Solomon on the show today. The Co-Founder at DIMO and open connected vehicle platform. Guys, I can’t wait to get into this. We are going to get buzzing on everything DePIN related and how these guys are truly connecting the future of mobility. Super pumped. Got to finish the bio though. Rob’s background is in finance, investing and organizational design. Most recently, he worked at Consensys. Yes, the Consensys we all know, the largest Ethereum focused development company. And he focused on finance, internal economics and decentralizing the organization.  Prior to that, he was at Vroom, a pioneer in the online used car marketplace sector. He started his career at the downtown project in Las Vegas, a spin off of zappos.com, working on corporate finance investments and implementing Holacracy. Rob, super pumped to have you on how you do my friend, pumped to have you.

Rob Solomon
Good, yeah, you got it all there. RIP, Vroom’s e-commerce business, they shut it down I think two days ago. Not selling used cars online anymore.

Matt Zahab
Two days ago they shut it down?

Rob Solomon
Yeah end of an era for them. Yeah.

Matt Zahab
How crazy was the used car boom when COVID hit? When used cars were going for like a couple grand less than new months?

Rob Solomon
Its the supply chain you kind of see what happens with housing with cars or anything like that when you have populations growing, people spending, and supply chains breaking down.

Matt Zahab
Obviously, you guys are, you know, you’re working in the web space right now in the car biz and you have a history in the car Biz, you big car guy?

Rob Solomon
I like cars. You know, someday I want to have a project car, like you buy like one of those like, you know, 91 Ford Bronco, whatever, Toyota Ford runner and like paint it, fix it up, make it nice. I’d love to do that someday, but I’ve always been honestly, I’ve been a little bit more of a point A to point B guy. And Vroom was just a good opportunity to join at a really interesting time at a startup in a great position. I followed somebody over from Zappos, from Vegas to New York to work there. And I wasn’t sure I would actually use the automotive experience again, but it’s super useful with DIMO. So yeah, everything makes sense when you look, you know, hindsight, you look back, all the dots connect pretty well. And you have Vroom plus Consensys equals DIMO. It was a pretty good path there.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, nice little synergy. What was it like working at the Downtown Project in Vegas, which was a spin-off of Zappos? I’ve, again, I don’t know anyone. Yeah, I guess you’re the first lad I’ve ever met who’s worked at Zappos, but I’ve heard some crazy corporate culture stories working at Zappos. Do you have any good stories to tell us?

Rob Solomon
Honestly, yeah, and it was the first job out of college. It was, we kind of got spoiled. Like, you know, we heard all about the culture there. It seemed fine, but then you kind of go on. I’m not saying that Vroom has bad culture, but like you kind of realize later on how special that place kind of, you know, was or maybe still is. I’m not as plugged in there anymore, but you know, Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos. He passed away a few years ago, but genuinely really great guy. I got to know him pretty well while I was there. Really great intentions, super smart guy. And so what he did is he wanted to move Zappos from the suburbs to downtown Vegas. Downtown Vegas didn’t have much of a residential or even like, you really had no reason to go down there unless you were going to the old strip. And he invested like half a billion dollars of his own money to just try to, and it wasn’t just like apartments and grocery stores. It was like, you know, cool cultural events and schools and health clinics and all kinds of stuff. So I was working on that. And at the same time, he implemented Holocracy at the downtown project in Zappos. And I was part of the team working on that. It’s idea of like decentralized organizations and managerless organizations and all that kind of stuff. And there’s, I have some, we can talk about that management structure if you’d like, but I think there’s some real issues with Holocracy specifically, but decentralized organizations as a concept is really cool. And I think it can work just maybe not exactly the way we were trying to do it. And that’s why when I was at Vroom and I came across the ethereum.org website and I was reading about DAOs and identity and whatever. I thought, okay, you know, I like Vroom, but I want to spend the rest of my life working on this stuff. Cause this is, you know, I can see the benefit to building systems on blockchains. The smart contracting is too cool. You know, there’s again, like, you know, DAOs are still a little bit premature or immature, I guess, and like the way that they’re operating, but long-term there’s a lot here. And so I was going to meet ups, met a bunch of folks from Consensys and worked there for four years.

Matt Zahab
I mean, that’s everyone. It’s crazy. Like the Consensys, I feel like the Consensys blanket of founders is almost similar to like the PayPal mafia where it’s like so many incredible crypto Web3 blockchain companies have founders that did a little stint at Consensys.

Rob Solomon
If you’re in the space of the time, it was one of the best places to go. It was a great environment. There was a lot of resources and smart people there. And yeah, also just like a numbers game. Like a lot of people worked at Consensys. I was interviewing, there was like 250 people there. When I actually joined, it was like 400. A couple of months later, there was like 1500. And I was like pretty quickly. And yeah, and a lot of respect for like Tony Hsieh from Zappos, Joe is a lot in common. Brilliant guy, really nice guy. Still really supportive of everything they do over there. And actually they invested in our last round too. So happy to be back in their ecosystem a little bit.

Matt Zahab
I love that. I want to keep buzzing on DAOs for a bit here, Rob. This is something that, again, I don’t know where I stand in this regard because I see the use case, I see the utility, I see how powerful it can one day become. But just to sort of fortify your point a couple of minutes ago, it’s like we still haven’t seen a whole lot of present day magic when it comes to DAOs. Very choppy. Perhaps the tech isn’t good enough. Perhaps the organizational structure isn’t good enough. The communication flows, the Zync, everything, the workflows. You’re way more in tune to this than I am. What can we do to actually make DAOs a thing? I hate to be the timeline guy, but how sort of far out are we from actually seeing DAOs really work magic in organizations as a whole?

Rob Solomon
Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessarily a technological limitation. I do kind of think it’s a bit of a system design thing. I have a very specific take on this, which is, so with Holocracy, the idea is no managers, right? For any system to work, like whether it’s a corporate system, a village, a country, whatever, like you need to be able to amplify good ideas, suppress bad ideas. I don’t mean like censor them, like arrest people. I mean, like if you open up a bad restaurant, it will lose money and it will go out of business naturally. Like you suppress bad things, you amplify good things, you create incentives to do good things. There’s positive feedback, right? Feedback loops, resources are allocated appropriately. And the things that the system wants to produce like should have some incentive and way to like emerge, right? And at a normal corporation, that is done where, at the top level, direction is set, resources are allocated from the kind of executive level down to teams, like a big budget goes to the marketing team, a smaller budget goes to the ads team, and a smaller budget goes to the Instagram ads. So, and everybody’s kind of responsible for metrics flowing back up. And that’s the way you do it at a corporation. And the limitation that we’re kind of sensing into, with Zappos and Tony was sensing into is like, that works great. You can run a village with 15 people and a chief who goes like, you guys get food, you guys get shelter, you guys get clothes, and I’ll make sure everybody is pulling their weight and everything will be fine. You can run an economy like that at that scale. You can run a company like that, up to a thousand people. The issue is like, you can’t run a country like that, right? You can’t have like the president appoint the head of agriculture, appoint the head of this, that, and then you go all the way down and then you have like that person managing the people making bread and then the president, make sure everyone’s sharing like it doesn’t scale. So what decentralized orgs attempt to do is push decision making to the people doing the actual work and kind of decentralized org of it. The issue is though, if you don’t also have these feedback loops on resource allocation and you don’t have a way for kind of like the incentives to exist for people to do the right things, then you just end up with like disaster of a program. So I think about DAOs and what could make them more effective. I draw a lot of inspiration from free markets. So, and I was trying to do this at Consensys a little bit and then there was some restructuring and then I left. So we didn’t get a chance to kind of fully play this out, but part of what I was trying to do there and part of what I was working, still consulting, after the fact was Zappos on was this idea of creating internal markets at a company. So if you have a shared service like marketing, for example, that’s like a Consensys was helping 20 different spokes, different startups within Consensys. The idea would be that they would all get funded as startups and they would pay the internal marketing team in some type of like internal Consensys dollar and that would count towards their budget. And that’s also how you hold the marketing team accountable. Like they are providing services to other kind of groups within this ecosystem and it makes the DAO in that case more of like an economy than a big blob. So that’s kind of the direction I was trying to take it in. That’s one way to do it. I worry about any type of organization that doesn’t have strict feedback loops and intelligent ways of allocating resources and aligning incentives. So it doesn’t have to be that way, but there needs to be something for that or else it won’t work.

Matt Zahab
Rob, we got to jump right into DIMO here, the bread and butter of the show. 300 episodes in here, more than 300 episodes. Rarely do we get real world use cases. So when this came across the desk for lack of better terms, this is tangled my fancy going. I’m not a huge car guy myself. Obviously I have a whip, not here in Mexico, but when I first learned about DIMO, I was like, this is so frigging cool. And the use case is so massive. This could truly be a game changer. I’m not even going to try to explain it because you can do a much better job than me. I got to throw the ball over to your court. Let’s start with sort of the just high level. Give us the elevator pitch, the TLDR on DIMO, and then we’ll get into all the nitty gritty stuff.

Rob Solomon
Yeah, it’s a connected vehicle platform that uses blockchain. And the one of the coolest things about this, and I think why people should be really excited about it, is blockchain happens to be what makes it possible. We’re not, it’s not blockchain for blockchain sake. Like we’re making cars smarter. We’re building a platform for anybody to build really sophisticated, interesting things for your car. You might have like a smart doorbell, a smart home speaker, you know, you have a smartphone, but your car is still like a landline, you know, more or less in terms of its technological sophistication. Maybe you have a car that lets you download an app, that lets you like unlock it remotely. But like, you know, that’s Tesla’s better. Tesla, I would say, like if a normal car is a landline, and then, you know, a newer Ford is like a flip phone. Tesla’s like a Blackberry, but we’re building the iPhone here, right? So we’re gonna make it possible for your insurance company, your bank, for social applications, whatever, to build applications for your car. That means no more going to the DMV. That means selling your car in an open-seat style NFT marketplace. It means you can share your car with somebody. It means, it means someone could build smart insurance where you pay per mile. You could join an online digital, you know, club for Porsche owners, whatever, you know, whatever applications people wanna build for drivers. You’ve got 35,000 cars connected today. We’ll have millions and millions, not too distant future. And if you wanna build an app for those cars, doesn’t matter what automaker they are, any car 2008 and up, you can quickly build an app on top of the DIMO platform and deploy it. So, yeah, like in a big way, you kind of see like, you know, in some countries, they skipped from building landlines directly to mobile phones, right? Or smartphones, and like they, you know, kind of like skip that generation of technology. Automotive never even really upgraded itself to Web2. And a lot of that’s cause like the industry is so fragmented. Like, you know, the biggest automakers have like in the teens percent of the cars in the road. Like Toyota is like 14% of cars on the road. Most of them are single digit, Tesla is like 2%, 3%. And so hyper fragmented across the automakers. And then even crazier is like, there’s no vertical integration either. There’s like different dealerships. It’s like, you know, Ralph’s Chevy of Western New York. It’s a bunch of different mechanics, bunch of different banks, bunch of different insurance companies. Industry is so fragmented. They’ve never been able to like agree on digital identity for vehicles. It’s still just like the Vin. It’s still like faxing documents. It’s still going in person to places. You go buy a used car. There’s a used car salesman like calling up banks, you know, negotiating prices. You’re not getting, you get insurance once. You probably never try to get new insurance again for six years until you get your next car, right? And why can’t you like get new insurance policies in real time, get new loans in real time? Why can’t you sell your car with all of its, you know, verified vehicle history? Why can’t you share that with whoever you want? So that’s what we’re building. And yeah, and the reason, as I mentioned, like blockchain is important for that, not so we can justify, hey, we’re a blockchain company, pay attention to us and fund us, you know, VCs. It’s because if you want all these different participants, you know, Toyota, SunTrust Bank, Geico, whoever to all trust this platform and want to build on it, it has to be trustless. It has to be neutral. It has to be an actual protocol and not just like an API service offered by a traditional Web2 company that could just like cut your access off at any point. So that’s why we’re building it that way. We actually started with a problem and found blockchain is the answer, whereas I think a lot of, you know, some projects start with like, what can we do in blockchain and so apply it to something. And we started, you know, we started very much with a goal in mind first and identify the blockchain as we were to do it. So at a high level, that’s what we’re building. As I mentioned, 35,000 cars connected. Anybody with a car 2008 and up can connect today. If you have a car that has a subscription already, like if you have the Ford Pass app or the Tesla app, you can probably log in depending on your region, depending on which subscription it is to our app and connect for free and that will meet an entity of your car. If not, we sell a device, we sell two devices. This is the bigger, more expensive one. There’s a smaller one that runs on the Helium network, the Loroan Helium network, that’s a hundred bucks. They’re both sold out now, but coming back in stock soon, you can pre-order them and connect any car 2008 and up that way.

Matt Zahab
That one that was incredible too. I have six good gajilion questions. So I’m gonna have to choose wisely here because you know, we only have a certain amount of time. Let’s start with the little device. What exactly is that device? What does it do? Where do you plug it in? And yeah, the follow up to that like how do all the cars talk to themselves? How do they talk to each other? How do they how do you guys pull data from the cars to you know, enrich the data set and and give the feedback that everyone’s looking for?

Rob Solomon
I can only go so deep on this is the non-technical blockchain founder. I should say the other founders, our CEO comes from Waymo and Transdev, our CTO worked at Ford, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen, GM, connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles. So really great fit for the type of thing that we’re doing. Our CEO comes from chain analysis. So they could speak much more eloquently to how this works, but think of this as like, it’s almost like a hardware wallet, like a Trezor or a Ledger with a raspberry pie in it and secure elements, so it has a wallet. And this plugs into the OBD port in your vehicle. Every car has one. We’re actually helped massively by federal right to repair law and standardization in the space. Cars are required to have this OBD port. And signals for the vehicle kind of run over this can bus. And this just plugs in and draws from that. If you go to get your car, you go to like the dealership and they want to see what your engine codes are, what’s going on with your vehicle, like they plug into the same port, they plug in the device, this effectively is the same type of thing. And it’s just, it’s passively listening while your car is driving to things like fuel, location, engine speed, like RPMs and stuff like that, the load on your engine. All kinds of stuff. It’s wild. It’s very, we’re limited mainly by our ability to decipher what’s coming off the can bus because we can actually get like 170 different data points. And right now we’re focused on like VIN odometer fuel and speed. And we can, this has a GPS and accelerator on it for acceleration and location. So that’s the device. That bigger one is LTE device. The other one sends data over Helium’s network. So it compresses the data down quite a bit and sends it in a very small payload on the Helium IT network, but that connectivity is incredibly cheap for that other one. And yeah, users who connect can access their data in the DIMO mobile app and they can share it and they earn some demo tokens every week just for staying connected.

Matt Zahab
So cool. What’s, I want to take a step back here. How did you, you mentioned you and the team started this with a problem. Was there a specific issue as a whole that, you know, like there’s, seems like there’s a multitude of problems that you guys are providing solutions for. Was there one specific one? What was that like aha moment when you guys came together and like, man, this is such an no brainer. Yeah, there’s a bit of that like. The industry and mobility network hasn’t, or economy rather hasn’t, you know, had a revolution, hasn’t leveled up in so long. Like what was that aha moment that made you guys make this?

Rob Solomon
So the other three co-founders were already together. We really started with our CEO and CTO linked up first. And they were doing a bunch of different projects. One thing they were trying to do, and actually I still think it’s one of the coolest, the first pivot of DIMO was a, you would 3D map a parking garage, you would mount sensors everywhere, and then communicate with self-driving vehicles where to go and how to navigate a parking garage. So you could just have a self valet parking garage. You get out at the front, your car goes, parks itself in the garage, you utilize space better, and the car comes back out. And one of the biggest challenges with that is like, okay, well, maybe you could build that for like just Teslas, or just, but how do you make this across? How does the Ford talk to the Chevy inside the parking garage? Like ask the Ford to pull out so the Chevy can go, and then the Ford pulls back. How do you build all that? So that was the first one where it’s like, that’s a bit of a challenge. There’s not a lot of standardization. There’s a problem here. But that idea was killed because of COVID, and nobody was driving anywhere. Parking garages did not care about this type of stuff. There were some like pilots brewing, but then that kind of killed that. Then later on, there was another project where Andy and I have, and I think Alex had joined them at this point, were trying to acquire electric vehicle battery data for a client, and they couldn’t get it. And they actually sourced a bunch of these devices, and we’re just gonna pay people cash to plug them in and subscribe to the battery data for the car and just see how they’re performing in the real world. And it’s like, why limit it to just that? Like, why have everybody who wants to answer one question has to go and install these things in a bunch of different cars? Why not just make a universal platform for it? They were mining Helium at the same time, and kind of like, what if we took this model over here and this model over here? And so they called me up, Andy and I worked together in Las Vegas. Him, RCOO and I had all done venture for America, say Andrew Yanks program before he ran for president was placing people straight out of college into startups over the country. So the three of us knew each other from that. And so they brought me in and I thought, I had the chance to go be the founder of a couple, when you’re at Consensys, things always come up and I could have gone and tried to start something else with other folks and whatever. But this was the first one where I was like, man, I really couldn’t see how this could be solved without blockchain. What a cool use case. This is something that I would just be excited to see exist. I want to go work on it. And I was kind of drawn to it. First is like other projects where it’s like, do you really need a token for that? Is this really a, you know, is that really a blockchain thing? Is it gonna move the needle forward even if you succeed? So it was an obvious answer for me. And then I joined and that was kind of the genesis of it.

Matt Zahab
And the rest is history. That’s so cool. Rob, we’ve got to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show, PrimeXBT. And when we get back, we’re going to keep buzzing on DIMO and because we barely scratched the surface and we’ve got to talk about DePIN, one of the trendiest topics in all of the crypto sphere at the moment. Until then, huge shout out to PrimeXBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. We love the team at PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders, always demanding and giving you highly reliable market data and performance. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can always design, customize your layouts and widgets. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That is CRYPTONEWS50, all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50, all one word, CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to show with Rob. Rob, we got to jump into DePIN right now. DePIN is sort of the underlying tech narrative acronym that you and the team are using to make this happen, to allow the vehicles to speak and pull data, to enrich the app, the ecosystem, just make everything happen. I’d love if you could give just a quick primer of DePIN and then we’ll talk about how you guys are using that over at DIMO.

Rob Solomon
Yeah, I mean, I think that the name is appropriate for what it is, you know, decentralized physical infrastructure network. So the key bit of that being, you know, physical. Now, where do you draw the line on that? Like, I mean, I don’t know, I guess Bitcoin is a physical infrastructure network. It has miners all over the world, you know. So it’s like, where exactly do you draw the line? I think it’s expanded a little bit over time. I think initially it was, well, initially there was DY, which was like Helium and wireless networks, building out, you know, wireless connectivity. People would install sensors all over the, or hotspots all over the world, and that would allow people to create wireless networks. Again, that’s what we were inspired by. And, but we’re not building a wireless network. We’re building like a vehicle network. We have all these real world cars and used to do other projects. There’s a high mapper doing something. You see a high mapper doing something similar. You know, there’s a couple in this category of sensor networks where we fit in high mapper fits in. Maybe you’d put like teleport in there as well, which is like maybe one level up of, like they’re building like a decentralized Web3 Uber kind of thing. People are doing this with drones and other kinds of things, 3D printers. There’s decentralized like compute networks. And so that was actually one of like the earlier, it’s like storage, file coin, render, you know, where you’re kind of borrowing compute resources from machines all over the world. That seems to have kind of found its way into the DePIN circle. And of course, you know, DY and I think that those are kind of like the main pillars. I’m sure there’s, you know, people will include more than just that in the little, you know, mind maps of DePIN that you’ll see, you know, circulated. But I think that’s the defining characteristic. Physical infrastructure is deployed, incentivized by tokens to build out a more peer to peer style network.

Matt Zahab
What’s the importance, and again, this is more for the listeners here, because I get asked this when rarely family, more friends or someone in my network says, hey, been on Twitter recently, see DePIN popping off, can you explain to me? And that’s one of the things that I always tell them. The peer to peer aspect is massive because this isn’t like, you know, for example, you guys where you could pick car company X, Y, or Z, where you go to that company and use their infrastructure, use their ecosystem without the people, without the peers giving to the peers and talking to the peers and interacting with the peers. This whole thing doesn’t work. It’s the same with any other companies, similar to HYGmapper, who obviously wants to do something talking to each other as well. What’s the importance of the whole peer to peer aspect of this as a whole? Like, I’d love you could explain how without the people talking to the people, this whole thing can’t work.

Rob Solomon
I don’t know, was it like Naval or Bollinger? I forget who kind of made this like tweet thread that has been reposted a lot, but this whole like the biggest taxi company has no taxis like Uber. Like the biggest hotel company Airbnb has no hotel rooms, right? And about leverage and all that kind of stuff. I think this is just like the next iteration of that. It’s like a more fair version of that. Like the biggest vehicle network has no vehicles, right? Like where DIMOs going, the biggest, you know, wireless network Helium, in their future, owns no cell towers, that kind of thing. I love that model. And I think we have the opportunity to build better and more fair networks that way with blockchain because ultimately with Uber, for example, like if you’re one of the early drivers, if you’re an early power user, you referred 500 people, doesn’t make, like, okay, you got a credit, you made maybe a little bit more money early days, but like you don’t own any bit of it now. You don’t have any say in where it goes. And, you know, an executive team is built a moat and they can just like decide, hey, we’re going to cut driver rates in half tomorrow and you’re going to deal with it because you have no other option, right? And we are the only show in town. Whereas when you build a more blockchain based network, I mean, there’s forkability, sure. There’s, you know, governance through the token and all that. But really what we’re building at DIMOs, it’s like our users are harder manufacturers, like the people who participate are the owners of this network. And they’re being, it’s a step beyond just giving like a ride credit, you know, like that Uber did when you refer people. So I think that makes it a lot more compelling and in the protocol nature of it, the kind of blockchain nature of it, the forkability aspect of it makes it a little bit more neutral as well. So that’s where I think this is a level up for that distance model.

Matt Zahab
I love that. I know we can’t divulge too much into this, just SEC and everything FINRA and regulatory related, but I’d love if you could talk about how participants of the ecosystem get DIMO tokens and how they plug in the DIMO machine, the car, gives the data, and then return the tokens. I’d love if you could talk about how that economy works.

Rob Solomon
Yeah, right now there’s a baseline reward and it’s called baseline because like if you connect and you drive that week, we received data from your car that week, it stays, you know, it’s a verified connection, then you earn your share of right now, it’s a little bit under a million. It goes down by 15% every year. So we just had our first decrease in December and next December it’ll go down 15% again, but that split kind of across all participants and the percentage of that that you get depends on how many people are connected. It depends on how you connected, like somebody who’s had one of these things connected for 50 weeks is gonna earn more than somebody who just connected their car with software last week, proportionally. So that’s the main way people earn today. You can also earn, you know, there’s a marketplace in our mobile app and when you book service, when you buy new tires, that kind of stuff, you get some reward back in DIMO tokens, really trying to kind of make the token like an airline reward point for your car. People are used to like getting reward points from Delta, that you can use to book flights and things like that or MX, you can use to, you know, buy hotels, whatever. So we want people to be able to think of the token as something like that for themselves. In the future, there’s all kinds of ideas being kicked around by the community developers or building different things. Someone just deployed a proof of concept of like a DIMO credit where you can burn DIMO tokens to mint a stable credit that could be used to, be the unit of account to pay for data. In the future, when people build applications on top of DIMO, they will be spending something, probably not actually needing to hold the token because we don’t want like Toyota or others to have to like hold cryptocurrency. But when they acquire data, it will result in some tokens going back to the protocol, some going back to the user, some going back to the people storing the data for them. And so there’s real utility for it, pretty much, you know, like other blockchain projects like ETH with its gas fees and so on. So and EIP 1559, they’re burn things. So yeah, you can expect similar types of primitives to emerge with DIMO that kind of expand what the token can be used for. And yeah, already it can be used for quite a bit today.

Matt Zahab
I love that. We’re gonna talk about ETH. Your big ETH guy worked that Consensys. You had a great tweet not too long ago on the reports of Ethereum’s death being greatly over exaggerated. You and I are in the same camp here. This was just classic Web3, classic crypto. And the price doesn’t go up like the others. Everyone’s shit’s on the coin. Everyone’s shitin’ on ETH right now. My only thing about ETH, still, gas fees, no bueno, way too high. It still kills you when the network’s congested. I mean, you’re hooped, especially when we’re onboarding someone from the land of Web2 and they come on and they go, wait, so I have USDT in my wallet. I wanna send it to someone else, but I can’t send it, because I don’t have ETH. You know, a couple little nuances here and there that definitely make it Friction City population less. But I’d love if you could sort of talk about that report from Polygon and why you tweeted that out.

Rob Solomon
The other side of that, you might assume that anybody’s saying that the reports of ETH’s death are exaggerated, would mean that they therefore think Solana is useless, like this is being the main other smart contract chain people are talking about. I like Solana still. I think they’re both interesting. I would say I probably do have an EVM bias, which for reasons I can get into, I like to think it’s about objective facts of it, but I have a history with Consensys and having built on it. So maybe I do have more of a just irrational bias towards it, but I think some of the stuff that Solana is doing is really cool. And I’m definitely more of a DIMO maxi than anything. Like I care about DIMO success. And if DIMO success is improved by moving to Solana, then I would support that. There’s a couple of different things I think I need a developer or people need to consider. There’s obviously a cost and security, and we don’t need to really get that far into that right now. No one gets that. The cost discussion is a little bit obscured, like Solana subsidizing transactions more than Ethereum. Ethereum is deflating right now. Solana is inflating. I don’t think that inflation is crazy, but it’s worth pointing out that there is somebody else helping to pay for each transaction on Solana, but it’s very fast, but there’s security, but it’s security good enough. I’m not really qualified by the way on that. I think it’s all kind of fine. The other really interesting thing, so being a Consensys for four years, I kind of got to see a bunch of different chapters. And when I was joining it was like the ICO boom. It was a bunch of people thinking crypto was ready for mainstream, it was pre-crypto kitties. We didn’t even know that the blockchain would just break itself when it got popular. So we saw a lot of like direct to consumer stuff trying to get built and they were building it without hard hat, without a mature, infura and alchemy without it. It was so hard and wallets were way worse. And to build a cool product that people like, it’s not good enough to just deploy some cool smart contracts in a good UI. You wanna have robust infrastructure around. And also too, it’s easier if you don’t have to develop those smart contracts. If you can just pull some open Zeppelin contracts off the shelf, they’ve been audited, they’ve been battle tested in other applications. And we’re just gonna kind of reuse these standard contracts, these standard things. Solana I just, I think today published like a bunch of extensions that are like, we call them extensions, but really it’s something like, vetted official contracts that you can use on the, just make it easier to deploy certain types of tokens, whatever, all that stuff is super helpful. And not just like the back end stuff, but even the front end stuff, we don’t wanna build a governance voting platform. We want you to be able to go to snapshot and log in there and vote there. And the reason we picked Polygon was whenever you go to any of these websites, and especially two years ago when we chose Polygon, and you click in the top right corner for where it says Ethereum, and there’s a dropdown, Polygon was always like the next one. Now it’s like, you know, optimism based Arbitrum, but it’s like still, those are the ones that are guaranteed to be there. Maybe you get Avalanche, but maybe not. And then if you’re on Avalanche, you have to go find a different solution. But like that was the, it’s like with Polygon, it’s like all these applications will just work. Oh, there’s a cool real world asset lending protocol being built by someone else that could be used to take out car loans that we can go talk to. Guess what, they’re deployed on Polygon. It makes it a lot easier. So that was a big, stick to the core, yes, stick to the core. Motivation behind it. And so, but I will say, you know, since then Solana, like the amount of DePIN projects moving onto Solana has been impressive. The kind of staying power of Solana has been impressive. So I wouldn’t write them off, you know, by any means and they continue to make progress. They’re, I think doing a lot of things very well. The part of what I was really starting to get confused about and, you know, still have some questions about is like the future of a kind of modular L2, L3, L1 million blockchain ecosystem, as opposed to like a more monolithic one. And I think Solana does some interesting things. They’re multi-threaded. They have this like CPI thing to make sure that, you know, you’re not executing the same smart contract on different threads, which kind of lets them preserve characteristics of a monolithic chain without having like the UX downside of having to bridge between, you know, different L2s. And that really bummed me out about, you know, kind of where Ethereum was going is like, I want you to be able to take your car on DIMO and attach other things to the vehicle issued by some other protocol and take out a loan against it and bundle and take your, you know, your home deed, which is on like base or optimism or whatever, package the two together, take out a loan against both, repackage that instrument into like another drip, you know, like this whole money Legos, experience being on money Legos, like it’s just, you know, the Lego, the composability Lego thing, you can build such solid, unstoppable, like perfect applications on blockchain because like unlike the real world, but if you keep stringing these things together and one goes down and it all kind of falls apart, like you can build these blockchain applications in such a way that as long as the blockchain is running and they all work, you know, like all the, all these recombinations of DeFi stuff, as long as the blockchain running, those smart contracts will, will work. And I guess you have to worry about smart contract exploits or whatever, but they’ll be there, you know, the team, the team can disappear off the face of the earth and that protocol, that contract will continue to exist. So I love that aspect of blockchains. It seemed like we’re kind of getting away from it a little bit. I’m really excited about what Polygon’s doing as it relates to when one, there’s ZK tech, but to this call like idea of aggregation and the ability to kind of build apps that, the key thing in that post I linked is like, it feels like a monolithic blockchain. It feels like you’re interacting with one chain. You don’t have to get ETH on multiple L2s in order to clear a transaction. You don’t have to worry about where the other person’s wallet is. And if they can deliver on that, I would be, I’d be happy to do that.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Rob, you’ve absolutely been on fire today. We are getting all tight for time. One last question and then we will wrap up. Give me some 2024 trends. Doesn’t have to be good, can be bad, but give me some 2024 crypto trends that are tickling your fancy at the moment. Things that you think will really help us out towards the end of the year.

Rob Solomon
I think it’s gotta be UX and more mainstream things. There’s been a lot of attention on wallets, a lot of VCs funding wallet companies, a lot of people doing interesting things with the account abstraction, even, you know, incumbents with pass keys like, it seems to be some broader adoption of authentication technology. And so we can get to a point where the wallet experience gets really good, gets really seamless. You can use wallets across applications. You don’t have to have these clunky secondary wallets and, you know, breaks down when you try to deep, you know, go from one app to bounce the wallet and then back. If you can make that experience better, make it simpler and more safe for people, I think we can really start to get to, you know, mainstream apps at the every app that your mom, you know, would be happy to use. And you already see the little bit, you know, Blackbird, the guy from Rezzy launched one recently. And other than like having the dollar sign before fly, that’s like, you know, dollar sign flies what you earn in there. If it weren’t for the dollar sign, you might not even realize it’s a crypto app. You don’t really see the wallet or anything. I think they’re using privy behind the scenes. But that is the thing that I think in 24, I thought we weren’t gonna have another bull market until that was, I was surprised at how much, how quickly we kind of bounced back. But I thought that was gonna be the thing that’s gonna unlock the bull market. I still think it’s needed as the next thing.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Rob, what an episode. Really appreciate you coming on. Before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and DIMO online and on socials?

Rob Solomon
Yeah, I’m @robmsolomon everywhere. So, R -O -B -M -S -O -L -O -M -O -N on Twitter, on Discord. Yeah, it’s dimo.xyz is the website. You can find links to our Discord and everything there. It’s @DIMO_Network on Twitter. It’s probably the best place to kind of just subscribe to updates. And yeah, you can find us in the Metaverse, drivedimo.com to buy a device and connect your card, DIMO Mobile in the App Store on iOS and Android. You can get connected pretty quickly. I definitely recommend. It’s a great one to try out. It’s a great one to show to people who are less familiar with crypto and want to have a good experience trying something new.

Matt Zahab
And last question here I totally forgot to ask. You guys are currently all sold out of the devices. One of those bad boys back in stock.

Rob Solomon
Very soon. We should have more of the smaller device back in stock next week. And the bigger one I expect will be fulfilling orders again within two to three months.

Matt Zahab
Amazing. Rob, what an episode. Really appreciate you coming on. And at the current rate that you guys are building and shipping, we will definitely have to around two and within the next couple of months. And truly treat, appreciate your time and can’t wait for the next one.

Rob Solomon
Yeah, it’s a pleasure. Talk to you soon.

Matt Zahab
Folks, what an episode with Rob Solomon, Co-Founder of DIMO. Absolute treat of an episode, everything DePIN, DAO is building the future of mobility and of course everything DIMO related. Rob brought the heat, knowledge bombs left, right and center. Really appreciate that. We’d love to see it. If you guys enjoyed this one, I hope you did. Please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking to team love you guys. Justas you’re the man I appreciate you. And back to the listeners. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.

The post Rob Solomon, Co-Founder at DIMO, on DePIN, DAOs, and Building the Future of Mobility | Ep. 306 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Alex Svanevik, CEO and Co-founder of Nansen, talks about the launch of Nansen query and Nansen 2, the importance of data in blockchain, and the relationship between crypto & AI.

About Svanevik

Alex Svanevik is the CEO and Co-founder of Nansen. He has a background in artificial intelligence, with 10+ years of experience as a data scientist and management consultant before co-founding Nansen in 2019. Alex is also one of the initial DAO members of Lido Finance and PleasrDAO and serves on the board of WalletConnect.With an academic background in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Alex is also an entrepreneur with strong opinions on data-driven insights in cryptocurrency and blockchain. Alex has secured over $88.2 million in funding during his tenure. He has an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh as well as a BSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Bergen (UiB).Alex Svanevik gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• Nansen is a blockchain analytics platform that enables crypto teams and investors to analyze billions of on-chain data points with essential market signals
• Data is one of the most important pieces of Web3 infrastructure
• How do AI and Blockchain Data mining converge
• Launch of Nansen query and Nansen 2
• The four C’s – Cute, Community, Content, CEO

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always. Got to start off by apologizing for the lights. We are recording, not super late, but late enough. Normally, we got some nice sunlight on me in Mexico. I’m recording at 7:20 p.m. tonight because we have the one and only Alex Svanevik on the show today. He is a whole frigging day ahead of me in the one and only Singapore. We’re going to get into all this super pumped to have him on. The CEO of Nansen. You guys know what Nansen is. Alex is the CEO and Co-Founder of Nansen and has a background in artificial intelligence with 10 plus years as a data scientist and management consultant before Co-Founding Nansen in 2019. He’s also one of the initial DAO members of Lido Finance and PleasrDAO and serves on the board of Wallet Connect. Super pumped to have you on. Alex, welcome to the show, my friend. How you doing?

Alex Svanevik
Thank you, Matt.

Matt Zahab
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Pumped to have you and it’s always super cool when you’re a whole day ahead of someone, you know, recording.

Alex Svanevik
I’m living in the future.

Matt Zahab
You’re living in the future. You were chowing down on some just a beautiful mackerel breakfast before we got started here. I just finished burritos for dinner. You just finished a good old brekkie. We’d love to see it. Before the show you and I were shooting the shit a little and you had a couple pretty awesome stories. I got to get you to tell those. But before that, we got a touch on your incredible little tweet about Singapore. You have been in Singapore for the last six years. I’ve never been. It’s on my to do list. Seems like one of the sweetest places on the planet. You touched over a couple good points. You can tell them better than I can. I think this would be a great place to start. Tell us why you love Singapore so much and how cool life is there.

Alex Svanevik
Yeah. So I’ve lived, I think in seven different countries. So I feel like you have a relatively good sample to compare, you know, Singapore with, I don’t know where to start. I think to me, it’s actually about values. You know, I, I really like Singapore because I feel like the culture here is very meritocratic first of all. And that’s how the whole society has been, you know, created since Lee Kuan Yew kind of started transforming this place from a swamp to a metropolitan city-state. And that’s probably a bit of an exact duration, but that’s at least how people explain it. So it’s very meritocratic. It’s very efficient, which I think most people know, but when you live it day to day, it makes a big difference. Like if you need to get from A to B, you can get a go check or a grab in two, three minutes, which is the equivalent of Uber, let’s say. And because it’s so small and because the traffic, you know, it’s typically not jammed but on stuff you can get from A to B in like 10 max, 15 minutes. And then if you, if you need to get anything done in the public sector, like if you pick up your employment pass or anything like that, it’s incredibly fast, right? This is something that was unusual for me as a European having lived in, say Spain or Italy, where you want to get like your ID card and you have to show up at 4 AM in the morning, this long queue outside, then you finally make it. And you learn that there’s something wrong with their system. You have to come back like next week or whatever it is. So it’s, I think it’s just very efficient. And then it’s interesting for people who are in crypto because it’s kind of getting that critical mass of a crypto scene here, which is quite exciting. Like I think some people, sorry, some places like Hong Kong where it’s a live is also interesting. And I love Hong Kong, but the crypto scene is a bit one sided and it’s mostly kind of the investors who are based there. Whereas in Singapore, I think you have both investors, you have founders of small protocols, companies. Then you have people who work in the big crypto companies like Coinbase, Binance, and so on. You’re based here. So you have a really kind of rich and diverse crypto scene that I really enjoy. I mean, I could probably spend the whole podcast talking about Singapore, frankly, but yeah, it’s a great place to live. I really like it. The weather is generally quite nice. If you like hot weather and it’s in a great location so you can travel to other great destinations like Thailand, Bali, Vietnam, etc.

Matt Zahab
So cool. Let’s jump right into Nansen here. When I first heard of Nansen, I mean, it was pretty close to when I got in the space not too long ago. I wasn’t as early as you were, but you and your team’s growth has been absolutely incredible. Kudos and massive shout out and well deserved to you guys. Before we jump into the whole thing, did you ever think that like you guys would literally be the behemoth of anything analytics and data related in the whole space? Like, cause again, you know, you had a, you left a good job to come start this in a risky industry. Did you ever have that hunch? Like we’re going to build the shit out of this thing and turn it into a monster. Was that ever a thought?

Alex Svanevik
Yeah, thanks for the kind words. I mean, to be totally honest, when we started Nansen, we kind of thought of it as a potential cashflow business. Like, I think that’s how we didn’t think, let’s go out with the spoil the ocean vision to become like a trillion dollar company. It was more like, hey, we know that there are certain unsolved problems in crypto, and in particular, a lot of the data was kind of either non-existing, the analytics were incorrect in many places. And there were just so many kind of basic analytical questions that you weren’t able to answer back when we started, in particular with regards to what’s happening on-chain. That’s what we are really good at. And so we thought if we just solve those problems, we’re probably going to have paying customers who want to answer those questions. And they’ll want to pay because investors at the end of the day want to make more money. So if we’re helping them make more money, then presumably they will be okay paying a subscription fee for the product. And so it was very much coming from a relatively humble place. But yeah, we did start growing very fast. Like we launched the product April 2020, we had our first paying customers the literal first day that we put up the landing page. And then word spread and we just started growing very organically. And then at the time, I was the only one working full-time on this project. And my other two co-founders were working part-time. And about six months later, we realized like this is turning into a real company. We need to hire people. You guys need to commit to this full-time. And so they did. And we raised a seed round so that we could hire people, even though we were making revenues, actually. But you still want to make sure that you have enough money in the bank, if things change, so that you can pay your employees and so on. So we did a seed round. We started hiring our first people. And then the next year, 2021, was incredible. And we did a Series A with A16C, we had a Series B with Excel and many other great investors later in the year. And yeah, I mean, some VCs we spoke to in 2021 said that we were literally one of the top five fastest growing SaaS companies that I’ve ever seen in terms of the revenue growth. So yeah, that was incredible. But it was also good timing with both DeFi really taking off. And so it was great. But it’s a good feeling for sure. And then you realize, actually, we can aim much higher here. And then you have to calibrate your vision and your aspirations, of course, which is a good thing, obviously. And then yeah, we’ve never looked back since.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Bit of a weird question here. You guys pull a shitload of data from, I mean, all the big boy, big gal chains. You pull data from over 250 million wallet addresses, which is absolutely bonkers. This is strictly my selfish curiosity here. Which chain is the easiest to pull data from and which chain is the hardest to pull data from? Which chain gives you sort of the sexiest and most enrichful and forward-looking, you know, trend esque data and are some you’re just like, oh, this is hogwash. This is nonsense. I’d love if you could sort of give us some gold on the pros and cons of pulling data from certain chains.

Alex Svanevik
I mean, I think those are two slightly separate things. I’ll answer first the version of your question, which is which one is the easiest or which one is the hardest. That’s a pretty straightforward answer. The easiest one for us is Ethereum, because that’s the one we’ve always started with, and we’ve developed the expertise to do that. It doesn’t have an insane amount of data volume, so it’s manageable with the block times and stuff. The one that’s hardest for sure is Solana. So it just has way more data. It’s not EDM, so it’s a totally different paradigm. But that’s why I say the questions you asked are a little bit different. So it doesn’t mean that the content for Hogwarts or that data is dirty or anything like that. It’s just that it’s very hard for us because it’s so different and the volume of data is so much greater. But we still do it because our customers want Solana data, and so you still do that. But I would say we have gotten insanely good at reading data from EDM chains. And of course, that is the dominant paradigm, if you will, of chains, like BNB chain, EVM, Polygon, Avalanche, SeaChain. All these different chains are all EVM chains. And so we’ve kind of sort of industrialized the ingestion of EVM chains to the point where if we decide to onboard a new EVM chain, we can do that in ours, in theory. Of course, there’s more work later with maintenance. You have to do attribution or labeling of the wallets that are active on the chain. That takes time. But the actual getting all the data into our database is pretty straightforward at this point. But it took many years to develop the technology to do it in such a streamlined manner.

Matt Zahab
And present day we have, you know, not crypto related, but semi-crypto related. Everyone’s still on the AI train. It’s left the station. There’s no chance it’s ever coming back. You are one of the few people who can actually chime in and who’s two cents and, you know, hands in the cookie jar we can actually listen to. You have an MSC in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. So, you know, I’ve asked a lot of people, what is AI going to do to crypto? You actually studied this shit. You know what’s going on. Especially as the CEO of Nansen, you guys are the bread and butter of data. How have you in particular, you and your team used AI to, you know, help pull data from all the different chains to help enrich your data sets, so on and so forth.

Alex Svanevik
Yeah, so we use AI in two primary ways. That’s our AI strategy at Nansen. The first one is that we use it to supercharge our product, right? So it allows us to build certain innovative features and also deepen our data notes in a manner that was not possible just a few years ago, right? So we kind of think of AI as ubiquitous throughout Nansen. It’s not like, here’s the one AI feature. It’s more like it powers our search. It powers the NFT price estimates that our machine learning created. If you want to get an estimate of your Pudgy Penguin, then we have a machine learning model that gives you an estimate, almost like I say, hello, this estimate. And it’s all machine learning power. And so, and then in terms of the attribution, the labeling and so on, that’s an area where we will be using AI much more going forward. But yeah, so the first area is just making the product better. The second area, which I don’t think is unique to us as a company by any means, and certainly not unique to the blockchain industry either, is using AI to increase our organizational productivity and our individual productivity. So this is kind of the, I guess this is where, if you read the newspapers, this is where many people talked about the implications of AI, like AI is going to take our jobs and stuff. I think in my experience, what ends up happening is that you just increase productivity quite dramatically. So if you are working with anything content related, right? It could actually be video, it could be audio, but often it’s text, of course, if you’re writing content marketing, if you’re writing Twitter threads, you’re writing research, we’re basically using AI for all of those different things to shorten down the process and just save time and effectively increase productivity in the sense that you’re getting more output with less input, right, and the input is typically ours. So the way I think about this in a very broad sense is that whenever you’re doing work, there’s sort of three primary things you do. The first one is that there’s a prompt, right? You have something like a drive, hey, I need to do the same, like writing down the name of the task or whatever. Then there’s a long process, which historically has been always from the most time, which is the production, like the completion of that thing, the tasks, and then at the end, there’s an element of quality assurance, like whatever I made, it’s like, it makes sense. Maybe you do that with someone else, you’re quality assurance someone else’s work. With AI, the interesting thing is you end up spending like most of your time only on the first and the last bit, which in a way are the two, that’s where like you spend the least amount of hours. And the thing in the middle, the production, that’s now takes like 10 seconds because the, or it can be like half an hour if you wanna iterate, right? Because typically you quality assure, you go back and then you try again and you kind of give feedback to the AI as you’re working with ChatGPT, for example. And so at Nansen, one of our goals this quarter is to just collectively spend 5,000 hours working with AI. And the reason we set that goal was I realized that a lot of people don’t actually have the gut reflex of trying AI first for a task because you’re not used to that, right? Like you’re used to just doing stuff yourself, but we have to train people to say like, hey, I’m writing a, I’m trying to make a list of strategic accounts that our sales team wants to go after, for example. That’s like, can you use AI to do that? And it turns out absolutely you can, like me and our senior manager of Radley Ops yesterday, we’re spending like two, three hours literally with ChatGPT building out a list of 500 target account lists to go after. And he saved us an insane amount of time just doing that, right? And so the surprising thing is that you can use AI and I would say in particular ChatGPT for so many things. And even now I’ve been using it extremely actively the last six months, even now I’m realizing every day that like, wow, it’s actually pretty good at this thing here. Like if I prompt it in the right way and if I give it constructive and clear feedback if it does deliver on my expectations. Anyway, so I think. If we get the team to spend 5,000 hours, that works out to about four hours a week per person, that’s 10% of their time, right? Then you will have built up a bit of a gut reflex to think like, in my area, this is an area where AI is great and super helpful. It increases my output by like 10x or 100x in some cases. And then once you get the next quarter, because we plan orders through objectives and key results and so on, OKRs. And when you get the next quarter, we can start looking at, let’s look at the outputs and the outcomes we’re creating with AI. But for now, I just want to focus on the input. It’s like, put as many hours as you can into the process of working with AI. And then the best is that good things will come from that. So yeah, so basically like those are the two areas, right? To innovate on the product, make a radically better product. And specifically for us, that’s about kind of creating great interfaces to the data on Linux powered by AI, as well as deepening our data mode. And then there’s the organizational productivity piece where there are many principles. Like one principle is, why AI first? Another principle is make AI a team member. Like you should literally think of AI as team members. Like, hey, did you invite this AI to the meeting? Did you share the documents with the AI, right? Did you give the AI enough context to be helpful, to solve this problem? You kind of have to shift your mental model towards this not being software, but it’s like another team member, which is kind of weird and a bit science fiction, but I think we are actually there where it makes sense to work with AI in this way. So yeah, it doesn’t answer your question on specifically AI for crypto, but that’s at least how we think about it.

Matt Zahab
I absolutely love that. You sort of fired me up there a little. I’m not going to lie too. I feel like you’re the kind of CEO where someone’s like, Hey, Alex, I need X amount of dollars for this AI subscription. You’re just like, you chuck the Amex at him.

Alex Svanevik
Specifically for AI, for sure. I mean, like the reality is it’s more expensive to not have a ChatGPT subscription than it is to have one. It’s like way more expensive not to have it because you’re ending up spending a bunch of time on stuff that the AI could be helping you with and doing a shot.

Matt Zahab
Do you know how many people and clients I talk to who still don’t use it every single day, who don’t have a GPT-4 subscription, where I’m just like, I can barely remember a year ago when this was not, you know, like I almost forget about life before it. And it’s one. Yeah, so you use it yourself. It’s in fact, every, I mean, it’s, it’s bookmarked. I mean, I don’t use the bookmark anymore because it’s just, it’s such a habit of just, you know, Google Chrome, C H A, boom, that just pops, you know what I mean? It’s just wild how it works. That’s a good sign. Yeah, shout out Sam Altman, OpenAI and the team. You guys are incredible. Nansen Query, this was quite the launch. I mean, just enterprise ready blockchain data, doing it all currently supporting Arbitrum, Avalanche Base, Bitcoin, Dash, Doge, Ethereum, Solana, Terra, you name it. You guys are doing, doing it all. I would love to read this and give everyone the lowdown, but you can do a much better elevator pitch than I can, so I’m going to throw the ball over to your end of the court. What exactly is Nansen Query and why is it so powerful? And I’d love you to explain how much help it is giving to big, large enterprises.

Alex Svanevik
Yeah, so the best story here is basically, we built the best on-chain analytics product for investors, right? And in doing that, we realized that, hey, we basically have built the most powerful data platform that powers this product. Why don’t we give access to that underlying data platform directly? It’s a bit like the kind of Amazon and AWS plane, right? Amazon builds a retail store, they have all the infrastructure, and then why don’t we just sell access to the infrastructure? And so that was the thought process behind Nansen Query. And we had many customers asking us to offer programmatic access to your data and so on. And so that’s really what Nansen Query solves. And we also realized that crypto is cool because you can get access to lots of data through APIs, often for free or very cheap. But the problem is that a lot of that stuff is not necessarily enterprise grade, and it’s not something you would want to kind of build your business on top of, whether that’s like products or trading algorithms and things like that. And so we had a real focus of making sure that this was enterprise grade, and we had the highest quality data, that we have unique data sets that you cannot get anywhere else, that we had extremely broad coverage of chains, and then also higher order things like DEXs, NFT marketplaces, and so on. And then overall, the platform itself was very performant with the best uptime and the fastest load time and things like that. So that’s how we ended up building Nansen Query. And I think where we’ve had the most success is surveying the kind of top tier crypto teams in the space, like an OpenSea or Arbitrum or Consensus, Binance, Coinbase, like the kind of really great teams that realize that maybe having like a data platform and having all these data pipelines in house is not a great idea because it just distracts us from our core mission, right? Like Coinbase is not a data company. You know, it wants to increase the economic freedom in the world and primarily, of course, they do that through offering a great exchange. And so instead of them spending a ton of time internally building out stuff, it’s actually much more economical to just buy this from us, right? So that’s the kind of basic premise of why we built Nansen Query and where we’ve had the most success. I also feel like it is a space where, you know, it’s great to have a few different alternatives for customers, right? You do wanna have kind of either free or cheap options for like hobbyists and so on. That’s not quite where we play with this offering. Like we figured let’s just focus on the kind of production grade and sort of enterprise tier customer segment. That’s kind of where we wanna play. And that’s where we think we will succeed the most. And then we will let other companies focus more on kind of the more downstream and broader pool of customers. So that’s where it is today. I think there’s still, and we support like 25 different chains. You mentioned some of them earlier. Like I said, we have unique data sets that are powered by, for example, our wallet label data, which makes it possible for people to create really unique insights that you can’t get anywhere else. And increasingly we are going to be focusing more on like the API endpoints surrounding this. So what we’ve learned is that, you know, we do have a user interface where you can just go in and write SQL queries, announce a query. You can create dashboards, charts, share them with your team, all this stuff. But we realized that many people actually just want to get the data where they are, right? So that’s why we added, well, like we have support for Google BigQuery, which is a data warehouse technology such that if you are already on that same technology, you can literally get all of our data sets in your data warehouse immediately. And so we’re exploring how we can do that with other data warehouse and technologies like Snowflake and so on. And of course, creating better API endpoints. But yeah, that’s basically what Nansen Query is. I think for those who are listening, there might be more investor types. So this is more like if you’re actually, you know, building a company, building a product, then this is a great product to explore.

Matt Zahab
Nansen Query’s for the Big Dogs, and Nansen 2, which we’ll get into is for the investors. And we’ll get into that in one second, but until then, we’ve got to give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show, PrimeXBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. We love PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for real beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. Use the promo code, CRYPTONEWS50, to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Back to the show with Alex here. We got to get into Nansen 2. Last year, you guys launched Nansen 2. AI functionalities, which to my knowledge was sort of the big sexy part of the launch. I mean, who doesn’t love that? Just reconstructed from its foundations, smart segments, more signals, you name it. Walk me through Nansen 2 and how you guys launched that because that was pretty spectacular.

Alex Svanevik
Yeah, so I think, again, just to kind of go back to the backstory of why we went Nansen 2, it was actually started because we realized that the tech stack we had were giving us a little bit of headaches, both in terms of being able to shift new features, as well as the performance that I was talking about earlier was kind of giving us some issues. We felt like it wasn’t loading fast enough and things like that. And so what we decided to do was to rebuild the whole product from the ground up. Of course, we could still make use of lots of the great work on the data platform side of things, but even though we had some improvements we wanted to make. So the kind of impetus for why we wanted to create an obstacle was mostly around our own ability to just shift new features fast and also make sure our customers had a really snappy experience when they used the product. It felt a little bit clunky and slow. That was some of the feedback we’ve been getting from users over the years. But then when we decided to do that, we also thought, hey, this is a great chance for us to really level up the user experience more broadly and also to shift some of these innovative features that we had been dreaming of building for a long time that we had been struggling with because of the old tech stack. And so now from the user’s perspective, when you start using Nansen 2, I think especially if you’re familiar with Nansen 1, what you will notice right away is first of all, it’s just way faster and it’s like a hundred times faster in some cases. If you click on either you’re using a profiler, which allows you to look up a wallet or even a cluster of wallets or an entity like a Binance or a three arrows or Alavida or what have you, you can do that and it loads super quickly and it gives you that overview that people expect from Nansen 1 that you get the soothing capabilities that you want and it loads super fast. So that’s the first part. The second part is the user experience, as I said before, is just a lot more streamlined. So in Nansen 1, you needed to know which dashboard to go to if you wanted to do something and that was kind of inhibiting for a lot of people. It’s like, do I use NFT God Mode, NFT Paradise, like what’s the dashboard I need to be using to just answer this question? And we’ve kind of abstracted all of that away to the point where if you go into Nansen 2 today, you just smash command K, which brings us the search bar and you just input whatever it is you need. You paste in a wallet address, you write Pudgy Penguins or an entity collection, you write the symbol of a token, you write the name of an entity like a Binance or Coinbase, whatever, and we just take you to the right screen. So it feels like kind of a trivial thing, but it is actually a huge improvement in the user experience. You don’t have to think too much about how to get from A to B. Maybe there’s an analogy where we’re going back to the Singapore story on like we just want to make things very efficient. You don’t want this bureaucracy and a maze of stuff, you just want to go straight to the point and that’s what we helped users do. And then the last thing is the innovative features that I mentioned and the probably the two most loved features that we have shipped with Nansen 2 are signals, which is kind of like a feed. So if you don’t have a very clear idea of what you’re looking for, you can just go into signals and you get a feed almost like a Twitter feed and it just surfaces anomalous events from the blockchain. So like here’s a token that had 100 times the amount of centralized exchange inflow that it normally has. Maybe you should look at that. Maybe there’s something going on there.

Matt Zahab
So it’s gold nuggets.

Alex Svanevik
It’s like, I don’t know what I should be looking at today. Let me just check out the feed and maybe I’ll just find something interesting. And then you can drill down from there, right? So the mission of our company is to surface the signal and create winners in the future of finance. And so this is literally what that feature does. It just surfaces the signal for you because there’s so much stuff happening on chain, especially with 20 plus different chains that you support. So, and that’s AI powered as well. It’s like the stuff that the AI thinks you should look at because it is anomalous somehow is what’s going to show up in that sheet. So that’s the signal. The second feature is smart segments, which, you know, like I said, like you mentioned before, we have hundreds of millions of wallet labels, right? That’s one of the things that we are known for. But we also realized that we don’t want to be the bottleneck for people to create their own wallet labels and groups of wallets. And so we created this feature called smart segments where you can decide your own criteria of wallets. You can say, hey, I want to look at every wallet that made at least, you know, 10 ETHs and profits trading Board Apes. And you just put that in as your criteria. And now you get a little segment of the, let’s call it, you know, 80 wallets that did that. I support a little more, few hundred wallets that did that. And that segment, you can now profile them collectively in the sense that like, what other things are they doing? Which tokens do they own, NFTs, which transactions have they made in real time as a segment collectively. And you can pull that segment into, you know, the other parts of Nansen. Like you can filter using the segment if you’re looking at a specific token or NFT. And so, yeah, this is another, I think, super powerful feature that we have shipped in a basic form, but it’s going to get a lot more powerful in the next weeks. And of course, yeah, a lot of these things, like I said in the beginning, are AI powered, right? Everything from the search to signals, to of course, a lot of stuff that happens on the backend with regards to the attribution and labeling of addresses. Even I think the congestion of data will over time become more AI supported, because you may not want to have data engineers spend a ton of time writing kind of transformer code and parsing code. It probably makes sense to have AI support for that as well. That’s the summary of what Nansen 2 does. But it’s early days still. And I think if you’ve tried it, you kind of will see a material improvement from Nansen 1, but you should also know that this is early and we have a ton of really exciting features coming out this year for it.

Matt Zahab
Alex, you’ve been on a roll. I wish you had more time here, man. This has been too much fun. A couple more questions and we’ll wrap up. Success story. I don’t know if you can tell me or not. I know the listeners would absolutely love this, but someone along the way must have used Nansen to find a specific signal and made an absolute shit ton of money. And we, on behalf of all the listeners and everyone at Cryptonews, we would love if you could give us just a little tiny, incy story of maybe someone. You don’t need to drop names, but just like the Board Ape example you said, where someone found something, bet a shit ton on it, and made an even bigger shit ton. I’d love you could give us a little nugget of gold here.

Alex Svanevik
Yeah, there are a few different ones. Probably the most famous one is MEDCollector, which is a Twitter account. And he wrote a thread about how he made an insane amount of money flipping NFTs using Nansen. I can’t remember the exact numbers. I think it might’ve been something like 10 ETH to 800 ETH or something ETH flipping NFTs using Nansen. And by the way, just to be very clear, that’s, to his credit, he is the hero. We are just kind of the, like he is Batman. We are the Batmobile, right? Like he is the guy actually doing it. We’re just a tool. But the cool thing was he was not doing that on just one bat, right? He was doing it consistently and just grew the portfolio. So that’s incredible. And I’ve met them in person, which is cool. There’s also another story of one of our customers who I think put 500 bucks on a token that they discovered in Nansen and turned it into one and a half million dollars. There’s also a tweet that’s out there and we have it in some of our marketing material because it is pretty amazing. And then there are of course many other examples. There’s another one where there was a fund that had a lot of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars in anchor when the Terra thing was happening. And they had set up Nansen smart alerts so that they got notifications when liquidity was being drained from the curve pools. And because of those notifications, they also exited the curve pools and basically saved probably like maybe hundreds of miles, at least tens of millions of dollars were saved because they were able to get out fast enough. And they have told me that the smart alerts basically saved them.

Matt Zahab
They owe you a dinner.

Alex Svanevik
Yes, yeah. It’s not only kind of the moonshot shit coins that go 1000X. It can also be used for like defensive purposes to make sure that they don’t lose their money, right? So yeah, and there are a ton of other stories but those are three that come to mind for now.

Matt Zahab
It’s so cool. Alex, absolute treat. Thank you so much for coming on. This was a blast. I can’t wait to have you on for round two. This was too much fun and we barely scratched the surface. You also had some electric stories that you told me before the pod. And folks, we will save those for round two because Alex, I mean, you would be up there for one of the people to have, probably not one, but maybe one dozen pints with and shoot the shit over some crypto stories. But we’ll have to wait until next time. Until then, wishing you and the team all the best. Before you let us go, please let us all know where everyone can find you personally and Nansen online and on socials.

Alex Svanevik
Yeah, so the best is to go to www.nansen.ai to try out our products. You can also find me on Twitter, @ASvanevik, just look for a very cute Pudgy Penguin. You can also find Nansen’s Twitter account @nansen_aiSo thanks for having me, Matt. It was great to be here.

Matt Zahab
Hey, pudgies have been ripping. I know you’ve been calling that for a while, but no free ads on the podcast, but we’re going to give them one. Why do they ripen so much? What’s the deal with pudgies here?

Alex Svanevik
You know, I used to say three Cs, but it’s actually now four Cs, cute community content. For example, they have like 10 billion views on DFC and they have more than one million followers on Instagram. But the fourth C is also the CEO, Luca, right? Luca is a fucking amazing operator and one of the truly great ones in crypto and he’s like 26 years old or something. Really an incredible operator. I’m actually helping on a call with him now in four minutes. So it’s the four Cs. That’s why Pudgy is doing so well, I think.

Matt Zahab
Four C’s, I love it. Alex, thanks again, man. Really appreciate it, and can’t wait for next time.

Alex Svanevik
Thank you so much, Matt.

Matt Zahab
Folks, what an episode with Alex Svanevik, the one and only from Nansen, CEO and Co-Founder. Huge shout out to him and the team for making this happen. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I, to the team. Love you guys, thank you for everything. Justas my amazing sound editor, you are the man. And back to listeners, love you guys. Keep on growing those bags, and keep on staying healthy, wealthy, and happy. Bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.

The post Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, on Blockchain Data, AI in Crypto, and Investing for the Future | Ep. 305 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Bobby Zagotta, US CEO & Chief Commercial Officer at Bitstamp, talks about the Bitcoin ETF, the halving, 2024 predictions, and Bitstamps’ 2024 plans.

About Bobby Zagotta

Bobby Zagotta is the US CEO & Chief Commercial Officer at Bitstamp. He came to Bitstamp from Kraken, where he served as Chief Commercial Officer responsible for strategy, business development, marketing, M&A, research and analytics, and global growth initiatives. Before that, he was a Senior Managing Director, Strategy & Execution and a member of the Executive Team for CME Group Inc., a global, publicly traded financial exchange.

As CEO for the Americas and Global Chief Commercial Officer at Bitstamp, Bobby is responsible for strategy and growing our presence and business globally, as well as overseeing day-to-day operations in the Americas.

Bobby Zagotta gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• Bitcoin ETF – represents a compelling gateway for investors to initiate their foray into the realm of cryptocurrency
• 2024 predictions – more institutions, more legitimacy, less high risk
• The halving – Bitcoin will see the block reward fall from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoins
• Present state of bitcoin – still bullish with bitcoin ETF + the upcoming halving event
• Bitstamp 101 – onboarding worldwide financial institutions to lead transformational change at the enterprise level

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, still coming in hot from Mexico. And I’m super pumped to have the one and only Bobby Zagotta back on for round two. He crushed it the first time. It was too good. We had to have him on for round two and today we have him. Even though you guys know who he is, I’m going to give him one intro just to tickle all of your fancies. We got Bobby Zagotta on the show today. As I said, US CEO and Chief Commercial Officer at Bitstamp. Before Bitstamp, he came from Kraken where he served as Chief Commercial Officer responsible for strategy, business, marketing, M&A, research, analytics, global growth, a bit of everything. Before that, he was Senior Managing Director of Strategy and Execution and a member of the executive team at the CME Group, a global publicly traded financial exchange. As CEO of the Americas and Global Chief Commercial Officer at Bitstamp, Bobby is responsible for strategy and growing the presence and business globally, as well as overseeing day to day ops in the Americas, super tied into everything regulatory, Bitcoin ETF, and crypto as a whole. Super pumped to have you back on. Bobby, welcome back to show my friend. How you Doing?

Bobby Zagotta
Awesome. It’s great to be here. And I wish I was in Mexico with you. That would be even better

Matt Zahab
I know, before the show, you and I were shooting the show a little. You are also a big fan of Cenotes. How incredible are Cenotes? What a treat they are.

Bobby Zagotta
You know, we stumbled on them on a trip a few years back where it was on the side of a highway. And I was like, what is this? And we pulled off and it changed my life. It was like getting into another world. And then we became quite focused on them. And we hit them all over the area when we were down there by Playa Del Carmen. And yeah, they’re amazing. They’re absolutely amazing.

Matt Zahab
It’s crazy. Mexico is one of these places, the more time you spend here, the more just insane you realize it is. They have these Cenotes everywhere, and I could be wrong. I don’t even know if there’s one Cenote in USA.I’m pretty darn sure there’s none in Canada. We have some beautiful lakes, like obviously BAMP with that turquoise, baby blue glacier like with the mountains in the background. It’s absolutely stunning. One of the few countries you have that. But Mexico has the Cenotes. They have all these ruins, they have the day of the dead. You have Chichen Itza, which is the pyramid that just like, how the hell was that thing built? No one knows. It’s a pretty wild place, and it would be pretty sweet. Any chance Bitstamp throws up a Playa Del Carmen office? Would you let your boy run that one for you?

Bobby Zagotta
Absolutely, yeah, I’ll put that on the agenda.

Matt Zahab
Crypto in Mexico. Funny note, Crypto in Mexico, I was here last year as well. And the amount of places that now accept Bitcoin and Tether is actually pretty wild. It’s still not a lot, but when you take a walk down Fifth Ave, you’re seeing a hell of a lot more last weekend, you know, spend some time out with friends, bunch of Argentinians, and they were telling us as well, and Buenos Aires almost 25%, 33% of places now accept Tether and Bitcoin as well, because the currency is so bad. And it’s pretty wild to think about.

Bobby Zagotta
Yeah, no, I think about it a lot. I mean, Latin America has a different use case basically and it’s a natural fit because of what you mentioned. The economic environment there and the level of trust in their institutions is very different than in the US or Canada, right? So here I think people look at Bitcoin as recreational or a potential investment, et cetera. But in many parts of Latin America, it’s much more than that. It’s a lifeline and it’s a means for very hardworking people to preserve their wealth versus watch it tumble in value based on bad policies or bad institutions or other factors. So yeah, I am not surprised to see that it’s becoming a little bit more an element of commerce there and I’m super excited about it.

Matt Zahab
It’s another wild thing too. We were with a group of Argentinians. 80% of them had a crypto app on their phone. Most of them had Binance, but that’s literally what they use. Like when they get paid here in Mexico, they get paid, they transfer over to Binance, transfer it to another account and withdrawal and the blue dollar, whatever the heck that is in Argentina. I don’t even know. There’s like a regular Argentinian peso, then a blue dollar and a regular dollar. It couldn’t really, anyways, we were sort of into one as well. So we won’t dive into that, but just always interesting to think because when I’m in Toronto or with family and friends or visiting family and friends in the States and unless I’m with someone who is orange-pilled and is in the crypto sphere, like no one ever messes around on a day to day basis. And we have people here where it’s become part of the life. So pretty darn cool to see. But Bobby, you just jumped into Bitcoin there. I think we must. It would be a disservice to not jump into this. We had the Bitcoin ETF. The news was great, but the price action and sentiment is not exactly what we wanted to see.

Bobby Zagotta
Yeah, I mean, well, firstly, there’s no underestimating what a historic event this is. And a lot of people are saying this, but it really is true. This is a level of credibility and validation that has been lacking globally and specifically in the US. So that is super significant. And then of course, the access by new segments, segments who have been on the sidelines and waiting for the regulatory cover and kind of the process that they’re familiar with, such as an ETF process. That just represents a lot more capital coming into the ecosystem, which creates momentum and creates opportunities. So super positive and super historic. Now, I didn’t expect a massive spike in Bitcoin price or in all of our volumes, et cetera, as much as I expected supported growth over the next few quarters. Because if you are a pension fund or a large asset manager who has been waiting for this moment to get involved, it’s not like you just flip a switch. There’s work to do there. And to get all of the kind of research done and positioning with their customers and whatnot. And so I expect that the real benefit here will be felt over a period of time. And same thing on the retail side, like the direct retail side, this is noteworthy for them to, even if they’re not as likely to buy ETF shares as they are to go on an exchange and buy Bitcoin directly and want to hold it and want to custody the actual asset. I think many of them see this as like, all right, I’ve been maintaining a sliver of investment here, but now it’s time to increase and to double down a bit. So yeah, from a Bit stand perspective, we’re definitely feeling it in terms of being a primary liquidity provider for many of the authorized participants or authorized partners for that ecosystem. And we’re excited about it. I think the price action with Bitcoin right now is just a little bit of a hangover from, perhaps inflated expectations that it was going to be a massive spike in bull rally.

Matt Zahab
I’ve been seeing so many rumors online and again, you gotta take these with a grain of salt, but I’m sure you’ve heard about this grayscale price action where it’s like so many people are getting out of grayscale and for that to happen, they need to sell Bitcoin, therefore price of Bitcoin is dropping so then they can get into the ETFs. Is any of this true or is this all just blah?

Bobby Zagotta
I don’t know. I’ve seen those rumors as well. And I don’t, I think any kind of new major, multi-billion dollar investment tool and or ecosystem is going to have to find its sea level, if you will, because there’s a lot of new entrants and there’s a lot of people who’ve been waiting for this moment to get out and other things. So I don’t put much credence into long-term effects or market flaws, if you will. I just think it’s gotta find its C level and then start growing.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, well said there. I’d love if you could talk about Bitstamps’ relationship with the ETF providers and how you guys are, again, just really providing regulatory light, not just for lack of better words, qualitative help, a quantitative help. You guys are a reputable exchange, obviously, and you’re supplying a lot of market data, a lot of surveillance to these ETF providers. They’re coming to you for advice. How are you guys working with them? How is this whole relationship, working on your end of the spectrum?

Bobby Zagotta
Yeah, it’s working very well. And to your point, when a particular authorized partner is servicing BlackRock or a very large scale, super reputable ETF provider or issuer, it does raise the stakes for them a little bit to make sure everything’s buttoned up and that there’s no undo or unnecessary regulatory risk or other things. So Bitstamp comes to the fore in those situations typically because we have in general the most extensive licensing footprint and we’ve got a level of governance and in our company that’s not typical in the space. So you’ve heard me say some of this, but seven years of global financial audits by a big four accounting firm, that just doesn’t exist in the space.

Matt Zahab
It doesn’t grow on trees.

Bobby Zagotta
Yeah, all kinds of ISO and other designations that we’ve got super professional governance, independent boards for all the entities. And it’s very much a compliance forward company and a compliance forward firm. And in the ETF side of the marketplace, that’s more important than it is on perhaps just the trading or speculating side. So yeah, we’re positioned very well as a liquidity provider for authorized partners to these issuers and certainly feeling that in a positive way in terms of volumes and opportunities related to it. Obviously the market is in this kind of funny moment right now, but still much better condition in my estimation than this time last quarter. When we were in kind of September, October, that was a very subdued market. And this is already a step function better than that.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, it’s true. I’d love to just keep us on this subject for a bit more and then we’ll get into some other stuff But I did tell the story on the pod a couple pods ago and I just love your two cents on this my buddy was at Atlanta Airport and flight got delayed had to go to a different terminal. And in two different terminals he saw an ad I want to say one was from grayscale and one was from or not grayscale one was from Valkyrie and the other may have been from BlackRock or someone else. But these ETFs are already pumping out ads in places with stupendous amount of foot traffic like Atlanta Airport, which is a Canadian I’m not sure but I’m pretty sure it might be the busiest airport in close to the world if not USA which is crazy. If you’re a consumer or if you’re a fund manager or or even just a financial advisor. And you’re getting your high net worth clients into these exchange or into these ETFs. Is it a simple pick is like a go for whoever has the lowest fee go for whoever’s doing the most social good and giving back 10 ticks to the Bitcoin miners like how do you feel about the ads already being out? I friggin love it personally and two if you were to advise, you know a consumer on which one to choose. What would what would you do and how would you tell them, you know the right one to pick?

Bobby Zagotta
Yeah, no, great question. I’m also excited to see the ads. And these guys have had a few years to prepare, unfortunately, because the approval took so long. But yeah, I think a lot of people, just individual consumers, as well as investment professionals working for companies, when they see ETF, it is familiar to them as their own kind of thumbprint. And so, they’ve probably been thinking, I really am curious about Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. I really would like to add something to my portfolio that is a little bit less correlated, perhaps, to the stock market. But you know what, I’m not gonna take the time to figure out how to custody this and how to do it safely, which platform to operate in. I’m not gonna spend that kind of time. But when they see an ETF opportunity, they’re like, okay, now I’m ready. This makes it easy for me. I’ve already got gold ETFs, and I’ve already done this. I’ve been just a well trod path for me. I’m just gonna add Bitcoin to it and get my feet wet. So that’s kind of the macro sediment, obviously. But within that, there’s a lot of different types of players. To your point, some who might like, hey, that’s a cool ad, I’m gonna go with Valkyrie. Others who might be like, you know what? The only thing that’s meaningful to me is BlackRock or Fidelity. Like guys who are at such a scale and at such a reputation that I feel very safe. So I’m just gonna go there. And then I think there’s a significant part of the kind of target segment here that just wants to learn and wants to do the research. And what I would recommend to answer your question is, yeah, look at the prospectus. You understand the differences in pricing. I’ve seen some good articles that lay it all out, all the different offerings, and make a decision. I think they’re all, if they’re approved, which they are, that means that they’re fairly safe and reliable. And so I think you can have the luxury of choice, but do the homework and see which one feels right to you.

Matt Zahab
Yeah DYOR, do your own research, one of the best, but most underused acronyms in all of crypto and investing. Let’s keep buzzing on Bitcoin, the halving. Everyone thinks April, to look in like April, if we go on this sort of current trend that we’re at, I’ve had some incredible guests on the Podcast over the last three months. And I wanna say it’s almost, three years ago, this would have been 100% as in the halving is going to be the best thing ever for Bitcoin. Now I’d say it’s almost 75, 25, 80, 20, maybe even 66, 33. A lot of folks, people who I trust and people who are much smarter than me and much more switched on in this space, are in the camp of it’s not going to have the biggest impact as it has over the last couple of halvings. What’s your take on this? Or is it still gonna help? Is this overvalued? Is it already priced in? What’s gonna happen with the halving? And I guess by the time this episode airs, really three months give or take.

Bobby Zagotta
I do think it’s gonna help, but I also agree with what you’re saying. It’s a little bit different sediment today than perhaps it felt like a few years ago. And I think that’s mostly a function of the space maturing. And people, particularly given the kind of tumultuous ride over the last 18 months, you know, are a little bit less ready to hype stuff, hype event driven stuff, and rather focus on the more fundamental aspects of this now fairly mature marketplace. And so I don’t think that’s negative or positive, but I think that’s, you know, that’s what’s playing out here. And that’s how I think about it. I cannot fully understand the relationship between the halving and the market effect. I can’t map it, but I can appreciate history, right? And the history is quite clear and quite compelling about the relationship between halving and price increase for Bitcoin, usually with about a six month gap, right? But between those two things. So I’m not one to count it out, but I’m also not one to ever assume some kind of flipping of the switch, spike, bull run, you know, everything changes. I just think it’s going to be another brick in the wall, if you will, of the foundation of a solid and growing marketplace. And so yeah, I’m enthusiastic. I think in addition to, you know, the ETF and more institutional involvement, et cetera, it’s just going to be a momentum creator, which is good.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, it’s exactly what we need. Last time we spoke, you did call this. And you did say that the Bitcoin ETF did need to happen. And if it did, it would have positive impact on the market. And from a sentiment perspective, I believe it has, obviously the price has fallen. Do we know if it’s exactly from that? Could it be grayscale? Could it be something else? None of us will ever know. What else needs to happen, Bobby, from a perhaps regulatory standpoint? Is there one of the few people who actually have the wherewithal and the experience and the switched on is to comment on this. Are there any other regulatory steps or building blocks that need to happen, short-term, long-term, for this momentum to really keep building? Any events, perhaps the election in November, is there anything else that could really help us that might be coming up in the next 3, 6, 9, 12 months?

Bobby Zagotta
Yes, absolutely. And, but I’ll start in the negative, right? So the uncertainty, this is my feeling, the uncertainty related to regulation in the US and the macro political environment in the US because the election is coming up. That uncertainty is really, I think, an anchor or a bit of a drag on progress and momentum in the marketplace today. So, my hope is that there can be some positive movement on regulation in the US this year. Now, that’s a tall order, given it’s an election year and everything. I certainly wouldn’t say it’s a given, but I’m wondering if Congress can act on stable coins, for instance, one piece of the puzzle that is super relevant right now and in my estimation, easier to operate on from a legal framework perspective. That would really help. That would really be another momentum booster. And then the election is gonna happen one way or another in November. And will that be favorable to the market or not? We don’t know, but what we do know or what we believe is that clarity, more certainty is gonna help one way or another. We’re seeing this in Europe already. So in Europe, I’m just the regulatory front, they’re a little bit ahead in my estimation, right? Because the European Union has adopted the MiCA framework which will come into play at the end of the year. And that certainty or that clarity is allowing more institutions in particular, but more individuals as well get involved with a level of comfort and a level of confidence. And it’s starting to shape the conversations there in a way that’s not happening here yet. And how we’re feeling that mostly is, for instance, we have this white label offering, good stamp as a service, I think I mentioned to you last time, but it’s focused on institutions, banks and fintechs. And those companies are quite, we’re engaged with many of them right now who want to be able to offer crypto services to their customers for all the obvious reasons. Like they don’t want their customers leaving their ecosystem or their app to buy some Bitcoin. They’d rather keep them in their ecosystem and offer that service, but they’re not gonna build it at this stage. So they turn to a very regulated, long track record, very reliable technology kind of company, like Bitstamp to help provide that. In the US, banking and crypto are not sympatico today. And there’s a lot of frictions that have been put in place. And so it’s just at a very different spot. So to answer your question, if we could get a little bit more regulatory clarity in the US, that’s the missing link, if you will, for me, to really get the entire global marketplace to a next level.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, it’s true. What’s that famous quote? If you don’t know the rules, you can’t play the game, something like that. Again, if there’s no rules, the big boys can’t get in. Do you guys white labeling that’s, I know we did discuss this a little bit last time, but I’d love to jump back into this. What exactly are you just really giving them exactly what they’re looking for? And I understand that this, you know, it doesn’t happen that much in the US it’s more Bitstamp global. As you just discussed because of the regulatory shit show in the States, but is this just financial extitute or institution X, Y or Z coming in and saying we want to keep, you know, we want to keep our people in our ecosystem and we need solution ABC. And you guys go look, we are, you know, we’re KYC’d and regulatory it up to Yin Yang and we’re going to give you what you want. You give it to them. They slap their label on it and boom, it’s just a good product, good relationships. That’s how it works for lack of better understanding.

Bobby Zagotta
Yeah I mean, in essence or at its core, it’s exactly that. But there’s a couple of nuances. First of all, we have different levels of offering. Some are like, you know, full white label, turnkey solution that a bank can just adopt. Others are kind of gradations of it. But what’s notable is, you know, these are some of the largest global banks in the world based in Europe that we’re in deep conversations with about this. And so, you know, that’s very noteworthy when you think about the overall crypto ecosystem. And these banks, of course, I can’t speak for them, but based on the work that we are proposing to do with them, you know, it’s exactly that. They want to be able to enable their millions of customers to just simply buy and sell, you know, it’s nothing exotic, but buy and sell, you know, the majors, the major cryptocurrencies in a simple, safe, reliable way. And so, you know, we’re kind of in Europe in particular, which is our home base and our, you know, kind of strongest marketplace. We’re a pretty obvious choice for that. And we’re excited. And there’s other related, you know, flavors of this, including with payments providers, you know, we’re in conversations with a couple of the world’s largest payment providers because they want to make it easier for their millions of clients to utilize crypto in their payments processes. And so, you know, these, if you just take those two, you know, possibilities, you know, that could really in Europe take the entire ecosystem, you know, to a next level. So, I’m anxious to, you know, for the rest of the world and specifically the US to get caught up.

Matt Zahab
Well said there. Bob we gotta take a quick break to give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. When we get back, we are going to keep diving into everything Bitstamp related. Until then, huge shout out to our sponsor of the show that is PrimeXBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. Use the promo code, CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And jumping back in. I was going to ask you about consensus, but I saw you take a big swig of what I assume is water out of that super nice looking bottle. Are you on the Stanley wave? Are you on the Stanley wave that’s absolutely blown up everywhere? Have you heard about this nonsense?

Bobby Zagotta
I don’t think I have. But it is water. Is that what it’s about?

Matt Zahab
I mean, this is like, this is pretty, you know, it’s TikToky, Instagramy, trendiness Stanley the cup company, the Tumblr, you know, keep your drink cold or warm. They’re thermos, yeah, they’re absolutely blowing up for no good reason. Just, it’s one of those things where it’s just like, in today’s day and age, you get lucky for going viral. I had to ask if you had one. I don’t have one. I’m seeing people down here, mostly American and Canadian tourists, you know, showing off multiple Stanley mugs. It’s like, it’s like wearing a Rolex now to show it’s crazy. Some lady in California stole like 60 of them and was going to resell them on like just nonsense. Little off topic, but I guess one more thing on that note is you and I are hockey fans. The Stanley cup for the first time and like, you know, since SEO was invented in, I don’t know, the late nineties got outranked. So when you search Stanley cup, it is no longer Lord Stanley, the, you know, the hardest trophy to win in all of sports for hockey, the national hockey league. Now you have some crummy tumbler. Just what is our world succumbing to?

Bobby Zagotta
That is wrong on so many levels. I don’t even know where to start.

Matt Zahab
Brutal. Let’s jump back in. As my duty, I always have to lurk my guest Twitter. And a couple days ago, you fired off a tweet that you are excited to share, that you are proposing a panel, DeFi for Capital Markets at Consensus. This seems super cool. You guys are obviously in the DeFi space as well, and especially in capital markets. That’s where we can really move the needle, not just retail. I feel like most of DeFi’s retail at the moment. Part of that is because, again, the complexities, the nuances, the account abstraction, it’s such a nightmare. It is truly just horrendously difficult to use. I’ll never forget the first time I dabbled with MetaMask or tried bridging coins or did anything of the like. It was nightmare fuel in the purest sense. What exactly is this DeFi for Capital Markets panel that you are proposing at Consensus 2024?

Bobby Zagotta
Yeah, it’s really interesting and I couldn’t agree more. It’s kind of like, I think the right topic for this time for 2024. There’s so many dimensions to the DeFi opportunity and ecosystem, but the thing that is a still, a common denominator is it’s just a little bit too hard for institutions and individuals to participate. And it’s associated with risk also, so I think it’s a little bit different kind of risk profile than operating with a centralized exchange or other platform, and that requires more education. So the real question here is, when does that really quite incredibly innovative space, the DeFi space become more legit and integrated with the rest of the traditional financial services, capital markets space? And I don’t think that’s gonna happen tomorrow, but I think it’s something that we need to be thinking about and talking about. So some very smart people put together this concept and this panel and were nice enough to include me in it. And, but yeah, super excited, but I guess we have to be chosen, right? It has to be somebody, people have to go and vote for this panel. So I encourage your audience to do that.

Matt Zahab
On the subject of 2024 trends, speaking of trends, are there any other trends, micro, macro, will stay away from any of the price prediction nonsense? But are there any other trends that are really getting you going again, or not even a month into the year? A lot of people, myself included, are bullish for a lack of better terms on this year. We have a lot of things that went in the right direction. Of course, the ETF just popped off. It should be good. The Fed also sort of said that there will be some rate cuts this year, and that usually goes hand in hand with good things for the economy. What trends do you see for 2024 that could take us in the right direction?

Bobby Zagotta
I definitely agree with those couple. And then what I would add to that is, you know, there’s, what we’re seeing at Bitstamp is really strong onboarding for institutions and for retail investors. And that’s always a leading indicator of confidence in the marketplace. So even during the last half of 2023, we saw a lot of increases in onboarding, even though the marketplace was tough, the volatility was quite low. And to me, that’s like, okay, people are getting ready, particularly institutions, you know, there’s some lead time there once they get onboarded, integrated, et cetera. And so far in 2024, that’s, it’s accelerated. So, and, you know, November, December, January have been really good volatility months, which is a big part of it. But also I think the, this wave of adoption that I believe we are embarking on here in 2024 is a little bit different investor, whether it’s an institution or an individual, it’s a little bit different mindset. They’re not the pioneers, right? They’re not the super comfortable with risk perspectives. They’re arguably the fast followers or the followers, right? Once the path has been paved over a bit, now they’re getting involved. And what they care about is a little bit different than what the first couple of waves care about, right? They’re not all about whiz bang, you know, Silicon Valley tech kind of mindset. They’re about like, is it safe? Who’s the right partner? You know, what I’m gonna, I’m not afraid to do my homework, you know, kind of it’s a different audience. And I think a little bit more conservative in many respects. And so that’s where, you know, companies that Bitstamp our position quite well, because it’s, you know, there’s, there’s a little bit of a fight to quality, you know, still happening given the Binance situation and of course the, you know, the FTX and the other situations prior to that. So this next, the other trend is this next wave of adoption is gonna be different. More hedge funds, more asset managers, more traditional financial services companies, not just hardcore traders. And, I think probably a little bit different demographic of individuals involved, which is great. The other trend I would mention is more generational, right? So I’ve been reading a lot lately about, about wealth transfer. And, you know, we are in the midst of the largest wealth transfer generationally from one generation to another in history of the world, right? So, and it’s something like 10 trillion, you know, dollars of value or something that’s going to move, you know, from essentially the baby boom generation to, you know, younger generations that are, you know, either crypto native or super mobile adaptive and people who can naturally relate to the idea of digital money versus where all the money’s fitting right now with the older generations where it’s not as natural for them to relate to digital money and all the possibilities associated with it. So that’s another thing that’s not gonna just play out in 2024 is gonna play out over the next several years, but it’s real and it’s big.

Matt Zahab
That’s, I always forget about this well transfer thing. It’s crazy. Like it really is, and I guess it’s my, would it be my generation as someone who’s born in 95 who is like, we’re the ones getting all this money now, right? It’s coming from our parents and my parents, parents, my grandparents, I mean, one left. But, you know, it is my generation, the millennials who are about to get all this cake, right? Exactly.

Bobby Zagotta
Exactly, and Gen Z also, but millennials primarily. And it’s, I think part of it is also the baby boom generation has lived longer than past generations because of all the advances in healthcare and fitness, et cetera. So they’ve held on to it longer too, so it’s more pent up. Yeah, I mean, like we’ve got an election coming up. We might have two 80 year old guys that we’re, you know, having to choose between in the US. Like how does that happen? You know, this generation really clings to stuff. And I sometimes like to see them retire and take a well-deserved break on a beach somewhere, maybe in Playa del Carmen.

Matt Zahab
That’d be great. Well, I mean, I know this isn’t a political podcast, but, you know, we got a drama teacher running our country. So it’s a, you can’t win them all. That’s a little off topic, but that’s something I often think about too, where it’s like the incentives of being at the top of the political food chain. I feel like with social media and everything else, the cons almost outweigh the pros nowadays. And again, obviously, and for the states for you guys, it’s most powerful, arguably best country in the world. Most freedom you guys, once you’re present of the United States, you are truly a geopolitical figure. You’re one of the most powerful people in the world until the day you die. And then your family gets to bear those fruits as well. But it’s like, why aren’t more quality people wanting to do this? Like, and use this social good, I feel like it’s, you know, it’s changed. And it’s like, Oh, I’d rather be an influencer or be a TikToker or be rich, you know, it’s like, we need more people to get into, to get into high level politics and, and actually move the needle. And I know in Canada, we have, I’m not as, I don’t follow the states, obviously, as much as I follow my own country, but we literally have zero people in the pipeline, Bobby. And to my knowledge, in the States, you guys don’t have a whole lot of people either. And it’s something that sort of baffles my mind. Why wouldn’t you want to be the most powerful person in the world? It seems like a pretty frigging cool game, you know?

Bobby Zagotta
I know, I think about this a lot. And I think it’s true what you’re saying. I think for many potential great leaders, you know, and people who perhaps have a passion for that kind of social role and leadership opportunity, I think they get, you know, first of all, great opportunities in the business world, you know, and arguably the business world is another great leadership opportunity, you know, that it’s a capital L, if you can progress, it’s a really worthy and noble leadership opportunity, but very different than government. But it doesn’t come with all the cons of government like you alluded to, you know, it’s not, I’m sure, I haven’t done it, of course, but, you know, any kind of political role, you know, it’s not for the faint of heart, right? You get criticized, you know, 10 times a minute and your family gets scrutinized and, you know, your privacy is gone. And, you know, there’s a lot of cost. You gotta really want it and really believe, but because of this, I do fear that we don’t have the pipeline either. You know, it’s a little bit more complicated in this, I don’t know the Canadian frame of reference well, but in the States it’s quite complicated, you know, because I think there’s a lot of, you know, back room deal making where, you know, where perhaps the talent can’t break in. The talent, you know, maybe has a hard time bringing us a little bit too old school networks, et cetera. But I don’t know.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, no, just building on your point about business. It’s like, if you can be a powerful businessman or woman and take a company public, make a couple of billion dollars, once you have a couple of billion, like there’s not much you can’t do in this world. You wanna buy an island, you wanna spend 500, you know, mil on a yacht, go for it. Like what can you not do, right? Wanna just fly private on multiple jets, wanna own a sports team. You can do whatever the hell you want without all the public scrutiny. So it’s like, it comes down to anything else in life. Life’s all about incentives. And I feel like we need to better incentivize, you know, the most powerful position in the world. But, you know, this isn’t the New York Times political podcast. So we’ll jump back to the crypto stuff. Bitstamp, you guys are shipping, you guys are always shipping. You guys are the king of shippers, just pumping out products at a crazy rate. We’d love to see that. What else do you guys have on the docket? I know you probably can’t tell me most of it, but of the things you can tell me, give me some gold here, Bobby. What are you guys up to over the next couple of months in 2024 for Bitstamp?

Bobby Zagotta
Sure. Well, we’re very excited. I’ll talk about retail and I’ll talk about institutions. Yeah, on the retail side, in 2023, we launched a new app experience that really is targeted at the types of users we were talking about earlier, this next wave of adoption. So, it’s a simple buy-sell experience, but it’s connected to our Learn Center so that people, it was a place people can go get educated in a very kind of bite-size and objective way, and then do simple transactions. And it’s in contrast to our Pro app, which is advanced order types and it’s really geared more towards traders and people who are very acquainted with the marketplace. So, that’s been great. We also have a lending offering available, not in the US, not in the UK, but in Europe and in Asia. It’s an opportunity for users to lend their crypto into a marketplace that is very highly organized and regulated and transparent so that they can earn a return or yield on that crypto. And this space a couple of years ago in the crypto ecosystem was a disaster. And, but it’s a place where Bitstamp can bring the Bitstamp version of it, which is regulated, transparent and super reliable. And so, that has grown quite a bit for us in its instance inception at the middle of last year. So, we are very excited about those two opportunities, fueling growth in 2024. We also think there’s some really interesting token projects out there, and we’re quite discerning about what we list on Bitstamp, but we think there’s some really interesting token projects out there that we’re evaluating. On the institutional side, we will have a fairly major announcement coming soon, but suffices to say, we want to give our institutional participants more ways to participate in crypto markets and participate with Bitstamp in our kind of safe, reliable way in crypto markets. So, that’s a primary focus with us. I wish I could tell you more, but coming soon. And then we’ve also launched an OTC offering in 2023 that we’re growing now. So, there’s an RFQ platform and also kind of a facilitation desk. So, this is, we just get a lot of requests from our client base and people who crypto whales or others who want to move size, and they’re smart enough about markets to know that that needs to be done in an orderly way, and we can make that turnkey for them. So, those are a few things we’re excited about.

Matt Zahab
Love that. Bobby, always appreciate you coming on man. We have a blast together and you always make my head spin in the best ways possible. Always leave me with some homework to do and I’m sure our listeners feel the same way. Appreciate you as always. Before you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Bitstamp online and on socials?

Bobby Zagotta
Yeah, we were very active on X and on LinkedIn from a social media standpoint as am I. And that’s our primary focus from a social media standpoint.

Matt Zahab
And folks, as always, I will plug everything and Bobby coming in hot with the X. Wow, I always ask Twitter. I still call Twitter. I’m trying. My name’s Twitter. I don’t call it X in or whatever. It’s always Twitter for me. The domain is nice. The x.com domain is nice, but it’s always Twitter. Bobby, thank you as always. Can’t wait for round three. And at your guys’ current clip, I’m sure that’ll be sooner rather than later. But thanks again, and we’ll talk soon.

Bobby Zagotta
Thank you, Matt. It’s been great.

Matt Zahab
Folks, what an episode with Bobby Zagotta. Always bring in the heat. We love having Bobby on as he gives us some gold every single time. We discussed everything Bitstamp related, Bitcoin ETF, the halving, DeFi for capital markets 2024, predictions, institutions, you name it. Huge shout out to Bobby and the team for making this happen. Listeners, if you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking with the team love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Justas my amazing sound editor, you’re the GOAT. And back to the listeners. Love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.

The post Bobby Zagotta, CEO of Bitstamp, on Bitcoin ETF, The Halving, DeFi for Capital Markets, and 2024 Predictions | Ep. 304 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Vince Yang, Co-Founder of zkLink, talks about solutions for building decentralized multi-chain infrastructure, the L3 ecosystem, and unifying the L1 + L2 ecosystems.

About Vince Yang

Vince Yang is Co-founder of zkLink, the company building the first multi-rollup Layer 3 to solve liquidity fragmentation on Ethereum Layer 2 rollups—pioneering more liquid, secure, customizable DeFi trading experiences. A former engineer, Yang began his experience in crypto with Bitcoin mining. This evolved into a deeper exploration of areas, including blockchain’s potential for financial applications and zk Proofs.

Vince Yang gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• 2024 Technical Roadmap: next steps for reducing fragmentation associated with L2s and boosting liquidity in the blockchain ecosystem
• Solutions for building decentralized, multi-chain infrastructure to unify the L1 and L2 ecosystems (more in zkLink’s new Whitepaper)
• L3 (e.g., Nexus) as a solution for fostering a more open, liquid L2 blockchain ecosystem
• Upcoming launch of $ZKL token; how $ZKL makes it easier for developers to realize the next generation of DeFi dApps and govern the zkLink protocol
• Incentivizing users and fostering collaboration through programs like zkLink’s Liquidity Alliance and platforms, e.g., Alpha Mainnet

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zahab. We are buzzing as always, bit of a flu game today. A little bit sick, a little under the weather. That’s what happens in Mexico. Sometimes you catch some bugs, c’est la vie. There’s a little bit of something going around, half of Mexico’s sick right now. But we’re battling through and I am super friggin pumped to have today’s guest on the show, the one and only Vince Yang, the Co-Founder of zkLink the company building the first multi-rollup Layer 3.  Yes, you heard that right, a Layer 3, a true Layer 3 to solve liquidity fragmentation on Ethereum Layer 2 rollups. Vince and the team are pioneering more liquid, secure and customizable DeFi trading experiences. Vince is a former engineer and began his experience in crypto with Bitcoin mining. Can’t wait to get into that as well. And this has evolved into a deeper exploration of areas, including Blockchain’s potential for applications as well as ZK proofs. One of the hottest topics out there right now. Vince, super pumped to have you on my friend. How you doing?

Vince Yang
Doing well. Thank you, Matt, for the introduction. Hi, everyone it’s my pleasure to be here. And as you know, Chado is mad, I have a very good opportunity to introduce what we’ve been building for the past three years. And also, talk a little bit about my journey in the crypto space as well. And what’s happening on the market recently is very interesting. Seeing that ETF got approved and also then surprisingly the market is going down. And we’re all surprised a little bit.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, Bitcoin ETF gets approved. We all think we’re gonna be rich and then boom, gray scale, classic. You still have gray scale. For grayscale and FTX still somehow hoping us years after the whole fiasco and we’ll get into that as well. Folks, before Vince and I went live, we were discussing where he is in the world, where I am at the world. As you all know, I am in Mexico right now on Eastern Time Zone. Vince is in Singapore 13 hours ahead of me and it is 9 p.m. for him. It’s 8 a.m. for me and him and the team are still grinding at 9 p.m.  Before the show, I was like, oh God, I’m gonna have to tell Vince to turn his or to find a better solution. There’s way too much background noise because his whole team is still hauling ass. That’s so cool.  Vince, I’d love you to talk a little bit about the team, what you guys are building and is this an everyday thing? Are you guys hauling ass till 9 p.m. every single day of the week? What’s the work life balance like over in Singapore?

Vince Yang
Our passion, I mean, work is our passion. I think it is quite normal to work at 9 p.m. still. I think it is also very normal for Blockchain builders, developer teams working on exciting stuff. We’re seeing amazing progress and daily process. And this happens with the hard work and also the grinding on different parts of the world. Yeah, it’s just very normal and we’re very used to this. And working with funds is naturally achieved. And when you love what you’re doing, what you’re building, this is work is a big part of our life. And we really enjoyed the whole journey, the process. And our team right now is we are mostly Asians on the team. So we have a few colleagues that is rooted in other continents of the world. And most of the team in Singapore, Hong Kong, a few in China, and outside Asia, we have a few colleagues in the US, in North America, in Europe as well. And roughly in total, we are a team of 40 people. We have been building this since three years ago, starting in the year 2021 in Q1. And we’ve envisioned the idea of Ethereum scaling solutions, ZK Rollups, OP Rollups this work going to be very popular. There was a lot of discussions there. And we thought that there’s going to be a very important primitive in it. It’s for the interoperability among the Rollups. Then we were thinking about bringing it really and taking this problem using the ZK knowledge, zero-knowledge proof technology. I myself started in the crypto space not on very early days in the year of 2019. I joined one of my close friends who returned to Asia from the US, resigned from World Bank, and joined the industry. And he convinced me that this is the future. So there was a very big opportunity cost for him to just let go of what he had been building for a career for a long time and joined a totally new industry. And it was tech, savvy, and financial oriented as well. So somehow he thinks this is the next big thing and this is the opportunity to change, to be part of the history and to ride the wave with the history. And then we joined together to start it in a Bitcoin manufacturing company and also started our own mining operation business. And after a year or so, we decided to dive deeper into the Blockchain space, understanding deeper into the technology. So I came from a technical background. I used to be an engineer working in a French company. I did my master’s degree in France. And after graduation, I spent the first three years of my career working in an international automotive company and building out the power train system. And I had a little bit of experience with coding, like riding the low level codes with the CEC shop. And after joining this Blockchain space in 2019 and 2020, I started to learn reading codes in Solidity, understanding reading the white paper, yellow paper, Bitcoin, Ethereum, understanding all the basic concepts that started from absolutely zero. I jumped into the rapid hole with zero understanding, zero idea of what’s coming and what’s the technology is all about. And then gradually I had this, you know, idea of, the first touch with the international proof was quite an amazing experience to me. And I was immediately amazed by the properties and also the potentials of this technology. And I had a lot of discussion, brainstorming with the friends that were interested in this topic. And started from there, we had the initial idea of building out something that could bring value and enable adoption and empower applications and user adoptions in Blockchain space. That’s how the whole thing started in 2021.

Matt Zahab
I love that. So you and your Co-Founder left some really cushy jobs as well, which I, you know, you got to take risks. You want to, you want to make some shit happen? You got to take risks and I love that. Vince, let’s jump right into obviously two stars of the show. One is yourself. Two is zkLink. Love the name as well. Beautiful name you guys have. And the comfort swag for the people watching this if not listening. That’s such a clean hoodie. Feel free to send one over to me Vince and I will rock that and everywhere I go.

Vince Yang
Send me your address. I’ll make sure there are some.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Absolutely clean. I want you to give our listeners the elevator pitch on what exactly zkLink is, but before we jump into that, when I was doing a bit of research for the show, I’ve heard of L3s before. Now, my understanding of L3s is there’s a lot of L2 networks, a lot of Layer 2 companies and ecosystems that tell the narrative that they are an L3, but they’re really not an L3. They’re more like an L2.5. Then obviously everyone knows what L1s are, the biggest one being ETH,  I mean Bitcoin if you quantify that as an L1. But the problem with L2s is they’re very general, purpose scalability-oriented, where we need L3s for applications-specific scalability customization, a lot of interoperability, actually creating apps and dApps on top of these L2s to really make things seamless and make shit happen in the Web3 ecosystem. This is when I was like, wow, this is going to be a really fun episode because this is something that we really desperately need as a whole. Everyone talks about how ETH can be the catalyst in the network and the ecosystem to onboard the masses into Web3, but it very well could be an L3 that does this because without a beautiful UX and UI and very simple interface, aka an L3, it’s going to be difficult for ETH to do that. I hope that stage setting was a decent explanation in my understanding of what exactly an L3 is, but I’d love for you to jump into it, tell us exactly what you and the team are building at zkLink and give us the lowdown on what exactly L3s are and why they are so important to onboard the masses into the Web3 ecosystem.

Vince Yang
Yeah, Matt, your understanding of the Layer 3 is actually very good. And you already touched the pinpoints that are, you know, Layer 3s first list is built on top of Layer 2s and Layer 2s built on top of Layer 1. And today, the most discussion of Layer 3s are like, a relative to the Ethereum ecosystem, right? So for Bitcoin’s also not deep. There are also discussions of Bitcoin Layer 2, but still not yet. They’re getting there for Layer 3 for Bitcoin or any other Layer 1. So the Layer 3s discussion nowadays is it’s within the Ethereum ecosystem. And a Layer 3 is a third Blockchain Layer built on top of Ethereum Layer 2s and the Ethereum Layer 2s are scaling solutions, building on top of Ethereum to scale the Ethereum and to try and to break the Blockchain trilemma on of Ethereum. At the second, we’re building the first cross Rollup Layer 3 or multi-Rollup Layer 3, meaning that this Layer 3 is unified Layer, the third Layer on top of multiple Layer 2s. We call it the Nexus. We have actually two platforms. So we recently launched the zkLink Nexus, which is the first multi Rollup Layer 3 on top of multiple ZK Rollup Layer 2s. And there are already very famous projects and companies building ZK Rollup Layer 2s scaling solutions for Ethereum, like Stackware, Stacknet, zkSync, Scroll, Polygon zkEVM, Tyco, Consistence Linear. All those are already big projects and popular. And these different zkLink Layer 2s, they have their own ecosystem. As you already mentioned, they are general purpose Layer 2s scaling the Ethereum to build, you know, so it’s built for general purpose applications and even compatible also and developers can build in any sort of applications using a Solidity programming language. But eventually, these Layer 2s will, at some points, you know, meet the same problem as the Layer 1s that did not have, you know, the throughputs performance. They need it by some high performance applications. So then there comes the needs of Layer 3. Layer 3 will be application-specific. They will meet the specific demands for certain applications for high performance and low transaction costs. And at the same time, you don’t want to make a compromise on security. So you build a Layer 3 on top of the Layer 2s using, you know, the similar stack, like the Layer 2 developers like Arbitrum, or PMizum, Stackware, zkSync are all launching their Layer 3 solutions using their Layer 2 tech stack. So Arbitrum launched the Orbit. It’s basically setting transactions on Arbitrum. And then zkSync, Hyperchain, the ZK stack on top of zkSync era there too. And then you have the Stackware stacknet. Stacknet Layer 3, the Matara scaling engine on top of Stacknet Layer 2. In comparison with these single row up Layer 3s, zkSync is building a new type of Layer 3, which is a cross-row up Layer 3 that settles transactions on top of multiple Layer 2s. The ones that I just mentioned are the ZK Rollup Layer 2s. The reason why it is only working on multiple Layer 2s is because the ZK Rollup Layer 2s can talk to the Ethereum contract through the canonical message channel at a quicker space. So because for any cross-chain or cross Rollup architecture, if you want to achieve the finality of the transactions, you need like a fast and secure state synchronization across the Layer 2s. And only the ZK Rollup Layer 2s talk to this, Ethereum contracts through the canonical message channel at a faster space. Now at the moment as these ZK Layer 2s is still at early stage, the settlement speed is like anywhere between several hours to 24 hours up to 24 hours. But OP Rollup will take up to 7, 14 days for this challenge period, you know, because this using a…

Matt Zahab
It’s that long?

Vince Yang
Yes. And then the fraud proof is not alive yet. So no, I’m not aware of alien OP Rollups that has already launched the fraud proof. So basically the OP Rollups is running, the finality of the transactional rule, the Rollup stakes up to 7 to 14 days. And the ZK Rollups, the finality of the transactions on Ethereum Layer 1, is much faster. And it couldn’t be even faster in future with the developments of these ecosystems. Well, by theory, it can go down to like, you know, within an hour, several minutes, like that. And then a Layer 3 on top of these Layer 2s, ZK Layer 2s, and will be able to settle the transaction happening on the Layer 3 on Ethereum through these message channel between the Layer 2 and the Ethereum Layer 1, ZK Layer 2. So there’s from Layer 3 to Layer 2, the text minutes, and from Layer 2 to the Ethereum, the text minutes. So add together, you can also set the transaction, have a faster finality on Ethereum within minutes. So this is the idea of how we consider the Layer 3 can achieve a Ethereum equivalent security because this is the fundamental problem, right? So anything when you develop, any problem you try to solve, you do not want to solve the problem with the price of making a compromise on security. When there’s a most compromise on security, then you think about what benefits it comes with, right? So with the cross rub Layer 3, you have the benefits of aggregated assets and liquidity from these multiple ecosystems. Currently, I think that there are roughly 500 million on TVL, each of these ZK Layer 2s respectively, when it goes to, when they’re live on Mainnet, this number will grow for sure with the development of the ecosystem, with the launch of their token respectively. And then on this, the cross rub Layer 3, you’ll be able to tap to all these assets existing natively in these different Layer ecosystems respectively. So application building on top of this Layer 3 can list the tokens across this ecosystem, can create a trading pair of a stock and ZKS from ZK sync or a USDT or to any token, and you will be able to merge Ethereum from different Layer 2s into the same pool, into the same token. And so it’s the same for the stable coins. In that sense, you will be able to aggregate this good credit and the unified liquidity on the third Layer. So it starts from Ethereum Layer 1, and then it goes up to multiple different Layer 2s. And then with the opening and access, it emerges again and be connected with the unified Layer 3. So this is a scheme, this is similar to the Ethereum logo.

Matt Zahab
Very cool.

Vince Yang
Yeah, this is how we solve this interprobability and also liquidity fragmentation problem that are going to be a major problem for the Rollup ecosystem. Because we’re going to have hundreds of Rollups, hundreds of Layer 2 for deeper purposes. One of my colleagues just left the team to build out another Layer 2 recently, RWA focused Layer 2 because obviously he sees a market demand for that for RWA focused Layer 2. And this seems to be a very good interesting idea and a very good opportunity. But the problem is that with the more and more builders entering the space, we’re going to see hundreds of Rollups, even thousands. And all they are going to create, become very complicated and fragmented user experience, liquidity fragmentation and navigation complexities and increase the fraction cost for moving from one Layer to another. Because hundreds of Rollups meaning you’re going to have to use a lot of different bridges.

Matt Zahab
That’s nightmare fuel. That’s not we need one one single unified solution

Vince Yang
User experience that you would want, you know, if you, yeah, like you for crypto master adoption, we think we believe that abstraction is very important. Simplification is very important. Every step you reduce for user journey, every step you abstract for the user understanding, the more intuitive it becomes, the simpler it comes, and the more users you will be able to to get, you know, outside of the crypto space. For crypto native users, of course, they will try so hard and try to try all you can to understand the concepts to try out the different you take knowledge, but for general users, even using the centralized platform like you centralized exchanges, sometimes, you know, a high learning cost for them. So we have to at least match the user experience of the centralized platform like, you know, as simple as Coinbase.

Matt Zahab
It’s got to be clean.

Vince Yang
Yes, clean and intuitive. Right. So it’s user friendly, awesome. How really and what they are trying to match the user experience from the Web2 applications, very smooth, sleek, similar.

Matt Zahab
It’s going to happen.

Vince Yang
Yeah, I think the decentralized applications you eventually have to match that kind of level of user experience. Otherwise, mass adoption or onboarding building next building of users, on chain or onto the decentralized applications will not happen unless we will have the infrastructure being ready for these types of applications. Second, it is exactly building these built, the infrastructure to build for this purpose to onboard the next building traders on chain to empower the next generation of super applications, starting with the trading applications by order book or AMM driven NFT gaming inter-sider us and achieve this target. I think there’s three comes with the natural benefit of hyperscaling because it is the third Layer. Each Layer you go up, you have like a scalability benefits margin again on that. And it comes with reduced cost because you can batch transactions and generate a proof and then set the transactions on the second Layer and then the Ethereum. So you have the scalability gain, you have the cost again. At the same time, you have the ability to aggregate assets and abstract the complexities of course multiple Layer 2s, which means simplified user experience, which also means simplified developer experience. This is the valid proposition of zkLink and Layer 3. And we believe this will be particularly beneficial for decentralized financial products like order book taxes for perpetual contracts for options or gaming companies. Yes, we’re hoping to get this infrastructure mature and production ready for the best developers that can deliver the best producer experience. Like you said, simple clean user interface, one unified interface for to serve multiple purposes and using the infrastructure we’re building.

Matt Zahab
I love that. It’s funny and you brought up a great point there, Vince. In order to onboard the masses, again, this isn’t fake news. This is the realist of news and it needs to be clean. It needs to be sexy. It needs to be easy. It needs to be frictionless. And the teams that build those products right now are nine times out of 10. They’re exchanges. They’re centralized exchanges. And when we onboard a Web2 user into the Web3 ecosystem, usually their first touch point is in exchange. But once you leave that exchange and you start messing around with DeFi, it’s nightmare fuel. It is way too complex. There is so much friction. I’ll still never forget the first couple of times I sent a MetaMask transaction or let alone had to bridge a coin to another coin. Like, are you kidding me? That was scary as hell. I’m just like, where’s my money? Is it gone to an abyss? And that’s scary stuff. So we need more teams like you guys build. And Vince, we need to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. But when we get back, we still have a bunch of topics to discuss. We’re going to get into ZK proof, some ETH, some DeFi unifying L1s and L2s. And of course, the Bitcoin ETF, we all thought it was going to pump and it dumped. We also got to get into ZKL token. You and the team had a lovely public raise going on. I believe it just concluded and we’ll get into that right after this. But until then, huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. That is PrimeXBT. We love the team at PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a veteran, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions and solutions to all of their customers. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. And you can use that to receive 50%. That is 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50. All in word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Vince. Let’s jump right into ZKL. I was flabbergasted perhaps as a bit of a big word, but it was such a clean raise done by you and the team. Obviously, we’ve been planning this for a couple of weeks now. So whenever I have a guest on the pod, as soon as we get them locked and loaded, I do my initial deep dive and then every couple of days after that, I’ll lurk socials, see what’s going on, read blog posts, check coin price whatever. You guys obviously don’t have a public trading coin, but this is what the purpose of this raise was for. It was done just beautifully in my opinion. Everything was super clean, really good update, clear communication. I’d love if you could walk us through sort of the rationale behind one launching the coin. What is its utility? And if you could start by talking about how you guys chose to do the public raise and how you guys made it so clean. So perhaps other teams who are listening could emulate and follow what you guys did. I think that’d be a great place to start your events.

Vince Yang
Yeah, thank you very much, Matt, for, you know, yeah, this whole process behind it, since actually, you know, we have been spending a lot of time and, you know, made a lot of efforts to make this happen. Or the reason that we choose to do this community race is mostly to, you know, engage and, you know, grow our community and to be able to deepen our relationship with our early community members and supporters. This is a very good opportunity for us to establish a deeper relationship with our community with this community sale. Because this token sales actually comes at a discount. Our last round of private runs was raised as a higher valuation than the community sale round happening right now. So we want our community members to have the feeling that their support, ongoing support is deeply appreciated and we will reward the early adopters and their non-term support in many different ways. This is the, I think, starting with the community sales is a good way, in our opinion, to show our appreciation. And the whole process is managed by our team together. And we have seen overwhelming support from our community. We have roughly in total 300 to 350,000 of community members in our Discord channel. And we’ve seen overwhelming support and very positive feedbacks from our community members. They like the idea that we are launching at the right timing after almost three years of grinding, technical grinding and building and seeing that the ecosystem is also beginning to grow very fast. Recently, as we continue to embody more ecosystem applications, developer teams, and we’re launching different initiatives to enhance the momentum of the ecosystem growth, we recently launched the liquidity alliance program to onboard market makers to provide the liquidity to boost equal liquidity in our ecosystem application. And to make all these initiatives possible, then a token will be naturally needed. And also this token, fundamentally, is the native utility token and the governance token of the protocol. It will be the payment token for the proof market to provide the necessary computational resources needed to generate the proof and sustain the operation of the network and also as a governance instrument to ensure the decentralization and the sustainability of the network in long term. And to govern the key developments and also the different matters like the community votes and how to develop our ecosystem for other important initiatives after the token genesis events. They will be collectively decided by the Katao member together using the token as the instrument to coordinate this process. And also it will be the utility token for developers to use as a license fee to pay for the infrastructure service. And also, of course, the developers in the beginning as startups, they might find it is expensive to pay in this token, so the DAO will provide initial support for the, to onboard the early-stage startups to facilitate the whole process and to promote adoption. And in return, there could be some sort of agreement between the DAO and the developer team is to pay by future revenue sharing, so it’s quite flexible over there. And with this token sale, we’re entering the fast track to bring the product and the Mainnet life and to involve multiple teams. And we have a very busy pipeline of key partnerships and integrations in the next few months with the strategic technology providers related to the Rollup framework that we’re building, and also some important applications that we think that will be very exciting for our community and the users. So I cannot reveal the details right now, but I’m personally very excited for what’s coming. And we hope that our community members who have been lucky and won the lottery for the whitelist to board and for those who have not, they will still have the opportunity to be rewarded. And we want to engage them in non term, and we really appreciate their support. And I think it appears to me that this community sale is one of the most popular ones in the recent history of current list. So we’re really happy for that, and we deeply appreciate the support from our community members.

Matt Zahab
100%. Well said there. I mean, I’m sure you can’t tell me this, but you know, you got to shoot your shot. What’s the plan for centralized exchanges? You guys are going to do the whole Kip/Bam and Kaboodle, Binance, Coinbase, everyone. You’re going to do all the big boys, all the big gals. Is that coming up soon?

Vince Yang
That’s definitely our target. Yeah, we definitely want to try our best. So we’re still in the process of figuring out what’s the opportunities, what was possible. We try very hard and we try our best to get the list on the best platforms to have a stronger momentum for everything. This is like, stay tuned.

Matt Zahab
Yeah. You know, Vince, I had to ask. I mean, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t. Let’s take a step away from zkLink and yourself, of course. And we’re going to talk about the Bitcoin ETF. I mean, this impacts everyone. Obviously, you guys aren’t involved in the Bitcoin space primarily. You guys are team ETH building an L3, of course. But did you guys expect this price action to happen? Like, you know, I want to say when the Bitcoin ETF launched at 46, 47, heck, we might have even been at 48 at the time. And then boom, we’re, you know, I think yesterday we hit 39,000. Like, what’s going on there? I know you guys have some very incredible and very switched on smart lads and lasses on the team. Like, did you guys expect this to happen? Was this a big shock to you? Do you think it’s going to increase long term? Do you think the halving will still have the effect that everyone thinks it does? What’s your sort of short term sentiment on Bitcoin?

Vince Yang
To start with, I have to admit that I’m not an expert in trading. So I’m really not very good at market analysis or pricing predictions. But we all care about the price of Bitcoin because of course it’s the beta of the whole market. So it’s the indicator that we all care about. I still have a lot of friends that are working in the Bitcoin space, the Bitcoin miners and also the mining companies, the mining farm companies. So I’m still pretty close to the Bitcoin community. The feeling that I’ve got from the Bitcoin community is that they really don’t care that much about the short-term price changes, whether it’s like writing from the 26K to the 48K, with the rally due to the idea of approval, the expectations, or whether it’s just the most recent, the last three days, the selling pressure coming from probably the grayscale and the liquidations. Within the zkLink team, I think everyone is very focused on building out the infra. So they don’t really know what’s going on.

Matt Zahab
But you guys don’t give a shit about that. I had to ask just because again, it’s, you know, it’s real estate. It’s some of the biggest news.

Vince Yang
It’s not actually 100% that we are not, you know, caring much about the price changes because this will give us more time. I think if we somehow we think this is, we expect this to happen. And it’s not a totally a bad thing for the builders, for the developer teams. When the pricing is really very fast, everything is rising very fast. And then you see, there’s a feeling with the team data, okay, are we too slow? Everyone else thinks really, yeah, the big boys is really, you know, made it and they’re going so fast and everything moving so fast. We have the feeling that we’re not doing it. We’re not executing another dealer in fast enough. But when the price is stabilized or slowly going down, then we feel like, okay, there’s more time for us and we can be more focused on the coding and developing the ecosystem and everything. But as we’re doing the community, so of course we hope that the whole market is going strong and we do believe that in, we don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next one, we got two, but we know that in this year, the overall, the market is will go strong. So there’s a lot of positive signals we’ve seen with the Bitcoin halving, which is gonna happen very soon, with the Ethereum upgrade, can go now updates. So a lot of impositives things and also with the infrastructure getting mature very quickly, new types of applications being unlocked, new doors being opened, and also with interest, a cut, is the expectation. Don’t think that this short-term dumping pressure will be a big problem with long-term. Yeah, so overall, we just do, once we’ve continued to focus on what we were building and once we ship fast, as fast as possible.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Vince, this has been absolutely incredible. A couple more questions, mate, and then we’ll wrap up. Let’s talk 2024 trends, 2024 hot topics. Besides the solutions and pieces of infrastructure that you and the team are working on, is there anything outside of you and your guys realm that really excites you at the moment? Obviously, you guys are doing everything. ZK related, L1, L2, L3, more specifically L3. Any other areas of crypto or ecosystems that really tickle your fancy at the moment?

Vince Yang
I think for the past few weeks, we have seen interesting things happen with the modular production space. So building a Layer 3 harshly is also part of the broader modular landscape, because you have to decouple some of the key components to be flexible, to be customizable, to meet the diversity of bounds. So we work hand in hand with the modular solution providers like Celestia, EigenDA, or the Oracle, the other shared sequences. This will be a very important trend for the Rollup ecosystem. You have to decouple the components to be flexible, customizable, to meet the diversity of bounds, to have a flexibility to reduce the cost and to have some enhanced performance in certain areas using different solutions, making compromise on different parameters. So I think this is the way. But we’re also doing this within the Ethereum ecosystem. This is still the strongest developer community where most of the fundamental innovations are happening on a daily basis. So we expect that this is still we want to focus on the Ethereum community. And there are constraints coming with Ethereum for sure. And outside the Ethereum community, there are also important innovations happening on a daily basis, like within the Cosmos ecosystem. We’ve seen exciting things, like dYdX building out at their way four, is a fully decentralized margin engine implemented in the Cosmos Layer 1 chain. It’s amazing. We’re internally exploring what their building and that we find is really amazing. And also innovations happening on other ecosystems, like Solana recently just, you know, what have come back, right? So after the FTX inclusion, and the Solana ecosystem is growing so fast that it’s getting strong. And for us, from the technology perspective, we think that the most important game changer in the year 24 is account abstraction. Because this is most fundamental element related to user experience, abstraction again is so important for user experience for adoption. Account abstraction will give us, will set the grounds for us to build out everything, you know, on top of it. So they can get also working with account abstraction solution providers. And we’re more like, you know, doing some deep work on the front of chain Rollup of abstraction, trying to integrate them and, you know, abstract these and simplify these for developers and users, while account abstraction is providing solutions for all end users, including you and me. And I hope that in 2024 we’ll be able to see some amazing products using account abstraction and, you know, give us like, this product that we like to use day to day, like exchanges with social accounts, social recovery, social login, et cetera. And I’m mostly excited about the progress on abstraction. I would say this is too pretty early and there’s a huge potential there. And a lot of the infrastructures will have account abstraction embedded. And it’s not mature yet. It’s not user-ready. It’s not production ready. I hope that it will get ready very soon.

Matt Zahab
Yep, well said. Vince, pleasure having you on, my man. This was a great episode, super pumped for you and the team. You guys are building something incredible and sky’s the limit and I’ll be following along. Really appreciate you coming on and can’t wait for our second round. But before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and zkLink online and on socials.

Vince Yang
Yes, you can find me on Twitter. My Twitter is @zkVinceReal, and it’s a verified account with a black punk. And you can find also Zekilink official Twitter accounts, @zkLink_Official. You can also visit our official website, which is zk.link. And there’s a detailed explanation on our documentation, the developer docs, explaining in detail how the solution works. And also, of course, you can also find us in Discord channel. There’s only one zkLink Discord channel, and we were happy to chat with you there and answer your question, any question related to the project or any other topic. And yeah, thank you, Matt. This is a great session. I love it. Great chatting with you. And let us know if there’s the second opportunity. When we can come back, and next time, maybe with bigger news, with more exciting progress and advancements on the tech and also the existing development. And of course, hopefully one day, when we come back, we’ll already have a token.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Folks, what an episode with Vince Yang, Co-Founder of zkLink. We jumped into a whole lot of stuff here. Everything, Layer 3 related, mapping ZK Proofs, DeFi, ZK Rollups. You name it, we touched a huge shout out to Vince and the team for making this happen. Vince was unreal, dropping tons of knowledge bombs left, right, and center. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I speak to the team. Love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Justas The gaudiest sound editor in the world. You’re the man. Appreciate you and back to listeners. Love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy, and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.

The post Vince Yang, Co-Founder of zkLink, on Layer 3s, Mapping zk Proofs, and DeFi| Ep. 303 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Dean Tribble, CEO of Agoric OpCo, on MetaMask Snaps partnership, Agoric’s partnership with BitGo, and institutional DeFi.

About Dean Tribble

Dean Tribble is CEO of Agoric OpCo, the software development company supporting Agoric, the JavaScript smart contract platform, and Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain. Dean drives the vision to build a safe and composable JavaScript smart contract platform to onboard the next 14M+ developers into Web3.

An OG Cypherpunk and pioneer in distributed systems and smart contract technology, Dean, co-designed the negotiation process and contract for the first smart contracting system, AMiX. As a Principal Architect at Microsoft, he co-designed the Midori distributed object-capability operating system. As founder and CTO for Agorics (acquired by Microsoft), he architected the brokerage information system for Schwab’s active traders and the WebMart electronic contract system for SunLabs. He was CTO of VerifyValid and VP of Deluxe, where his echeck systems have carried billions of dollars.

Dean Tribble gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• MetaMask has introduced Snaps, an application built to add extended features and functionality to MetaMask
• A behind-the-scenes look at why MetaMask Snaps partnered with Agoric and chose Hardened JavasScript as their language
• How Agoric’s general-purpose JavaScript library can support developers entering the blockchain space
• Hardened JavasScript – the new and improved version of web3 JavaScript
• Agoric partnership with BitGo – Institutional adoption of DeFi

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host Matt Zahab and we are buzzing as always. And I am super pumped to have one of the OGs. Now what I mean OG, this guy is a true original gangster, may or may not have worked on the first smart contract in the whole friggin world. And I’m not talking like you guys are probably thinking, oh, it was in 2010, a couple of years before ETH was created. No, this was before I was born. This is a very OG smart contract. We’re going to get into all this. But before we do the show, the star of the show today we have Dean Tribble, the CEO of Agoric Opco, the software dev company supporting Agoric, the JavaScript smart contract platform and proof of stake Blockchain. Dean drives the vision to build a safe and composable JavaScript smart contract platform to onboard the next 14 million developers into Web3. As discussed, Dean is a literal OG cypherpunk and pioneer in distributed systems and smart contract technology as he may have literally worked and built on the first smart contract ever. Also had another company called Agorics where he was CTO and it got acquired by Microsoft. Ever heard of him? He was also CTO of VerifyValid and VP of Deluxe where his echeck systems have carried billions of dollars. We have a true OG on the pod today and he has one of the most electric mustaches I’ve ever seen in my life. Super pumped to have him on. Dean, welcome to the show my friend. How you doing?

Dean Tribble
I am doing great. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. I occasionally say yes and this mustache is older than Vitalik but.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Dean, super pumped to have you on here my man. You have an incredible background and sometimes we get the term OG thrown around on the podcast and I usually refer to those as like OGs in the crypto space where they got in between 2010 to 2013, 2014. They’ve been in the space for a decade. In the crypto space that would usually quantify you as an OG. But when we talk about smart contracts here, you told me before the show that you worked on the first smart contract in 1989. That is friggin bananas. Dean I was born in 1995.

Dean Tribble
I was young, I was like three years old. No, the first production smart contract. I don’t know what people were doing in labs, but this was deployed to production with paying customers running pre-Internet, pre-web. You dial up on your, whatever it is, 1200 bod modem to connect to this thing in order to orchestrate. What’s a smart contract is sort of the heart of this software that is enforcing the terms of a contract like arrangement between third parties, right? So it’s so eBay, PayPal, Venmo, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, those are all smart contract businesses. So smart contract was trillion dollar market cap before Blockchain came along, right? It’s about the role of the software to the customers. And so it enables strangers to cooperate. And that’s really been our vision, our mission for now, literally decades, is software enabling strangers to cooperate. Right? Millions of people buy things from strangers that they probably wouldn’t like if they met them in person. And it works every day, all the time, because software is orchestrating and enforcing the terms of the exchange, the delivery, the monies, all these kinds of things. There used to be a comedian that would do an act of, okay, so I’m going to summon a stranger to my house, climb into the stranger’s car, and have them take me someplace that I don’t know where it’s going. And I’ve never met this person. And if you told someone 20 years ago that people were going to be doing this all the time, every day, they would look at you like you were crazy. And yet, because you could build software in the middle that could orchestrate and add safety and security and investigation and background and all these things. Now, people do that routinely, all the time, orchestrated by software, enforcing the terms of that engagement. And so it’s huge value. It’s really changed the face of the world and how we do business. And the first production, one of those that was really thought of itself as smart contract logic that was doing this sort of thing was the Amex in 1989, and I helped help get the smart contract part of it. Right?

Matt Zahab
That’s wild. How does building present day smart contracts on Ethereum and Solidity differ from the first one you ever built back in 1989? I mean, I’m sure absolutely every component is different, but I’d love if you could walk me through some of the biggest differences here, Dean.

Dean Tribble
So first there’s, what’s the big difference of having Blockchain? So forget any of those things, right? Blockchain, we’ve got replicated execution on machines that are in different jurisdictions and different, administered by different independent parties, and they’re all checking each other’s work and coming to consensus about what happened. And that difference means that now you can run software with a level of integrity that did not exist before Blockchain. Right? You’re not trusting any one party, you’re not giving a backdoor if you do it, right. If you really decentralize, you’ve got this environment where you really can rely on the software. So now you can have smart contract businesses without a trusted intermediary like eBay or PayPal or Venmo, Airbnb or StubHub. Sometimes they take huge chunks, 35% of your ticket sales. Sometimes they do illegal things like Enron did, where they were a trusted intermediary for electricity trading. And it was a huge value potentially to the world. And they got greedy and started slipping in trades after, in theory, businesses closed and they were manipulating the market and all these things that a decentralized, transparent system they would not have been able to do, right? And so being able to eliminate the trusted intermediary by having software itself be what you rely on to enforce the terms of a contract like arrangement is what enables the Uniswaps and everything from sort of smart contracts on Ethereum to rich and more programmable environments like Gork. All of those are enabled by being able to run software with high integrity, which we weren’t able to do anywhere near this safely before. So that’s the first thing is Blockchain makes a difference there in terms of what you can do. Now, the thing about Solidity is it was hugely important in making that shift, right? Run software in an environment where it can’t be tampered with by any individual organization or regime. And that’s really important, right? Because at the level of scale we’re talking about reengineering how humans cooperate, regimes do intervene, right? And  it’s Venezuela or the US government doesn’t matter, right? If you’re on the other side of it, it’s not a comfortable place to be. And them being able to backdoor stuff so that you cannot rely on the software that’s executing would mean that software cannot provide us the kind of safe environment that if I physically meet you at a swap meet and trade something with you, I’ve got control of what’s going on. And it doesn’t mean necessarily that I’ve got necessarily the Tim May Cypherpunk world, but it’s got to be higher assurance than what regimes tend to want to have happen. Okay, so that’s the first. Then there’s the programming environment. Now, I compare ETH with Flash, right? If you remember Flash, you were just barely old enough. No, sorry, you remember Flash. All the marketing sites were Flash, all the Internet games, Flash, right? That was how people built interactive WYSI things right? One of the things that a prior company that was inspired by the same papers, right? So Agoric, by the way, comes from the greek word Agara, which means the open marketplace and so in 1986.

Matt Zahab
I like that.

Dean Tribble
Mark Miller. Yeah, it’s lovely. We’ve tried various grecian pillars as logos and stuff like that. So Mark Miller and Eric Drexler wrote a paper called the Agoric Open Systems paper that really shared a vision of software agents creating and participating in markets. And that was a big early piece that shows up on a16z cryptocanon. It’s one of the real inspirations for Nick Zabo, who worked with us at the time, and various others, Hal Finney and so forth, for how to build software, how to build large scale distributed systems. And so we had a prior company called Agoric that was building smart contracts at Sun Labs for doing control of network systems, control of network resources, compute resources and memory and satellite dish time, and all these kinds of things, right? So it’s an early smart contract environment. And so that was an area of getting software to enforce the terms of contract, like arrangement between third parties, where those third parties might be software agents, they might be AIs, or they might be people, right? Or they might be businesses, they might be any of these kinds of things. But you really want to be able to have a level, smooth playing field where all them could work again. So one of the things we did, because the macromedia Flash was trying to be able to do this desktop thing where you could pull in software from lots of third parties and run it, and they were having problems from a security point of view. So they brought us in to audit their computational model and how you do that. And one of the things we discovered was, yeah, synchronous reentrant call and message sender as a security model were both really problematic, real security hazards that humans could not get their head around, right? And so we saw this in Flash, which was the dominant programming language for large scale interactive experiences on the web. We saw this in Flash, and it was really harming the ability of Flash to grow. It was the brick wall that Flash programming is running into. And EVM has all those same properties. It was inspired by that work. It built along the same properties because they make simple things simple. They just make hard things essentially impossible. And so we’re now very early in the world of programming, right? I mean, there’s a lot of money in Blockchain, but we’re very mean, you know, AMM, you know, Uniswap. That’s huge. It’s a lot of money. It’s a really simple program. It’s a few thousand lines, right? I mean, it’s just, we’re not really doing yet large scale distributed applications on Blockchain. There’s an economy there and that’s really important and valuable. And I don’t mean to deride that at all, but it’s all very transactional. It’s all, I do one transaction, I can figure out what that looks like and then we’re done. Right? But most software doesn’t work that way. You don’t do large scale collaboration on a whiteboard using transactions. Right? You do it using long lived experiences, long lived software activities and that sort of thing that just don’t work well on current Blockchain. So back to your current question. So the programming model is pretty weak. It has fundamental security hazards that are very dangerous. The biggest difference in Blockchain world in some sense versus Web2 smart contracts is Web2 smart contracts. I’m hosting my environment, running my program, provide a service to my customers that is a smart contract service, but I’m in control of all the software I run in my environment. Right? And that means that I don’t have a lot of security hazards of running third party code and having third party code all cooperate with each other and attack each other. So the developer deploying to a Cloud service, they’re generally not deploying, where they’re also embedding third party code. Or at least that’s the theory, and let’s come back to that in a moment. But in the cryptoverse in Blockchain, you’re deploying in a hostile environment where because of pseudonymity and anonymity, it is very easy for attackers if there’s a hole in you, in your code to exploit it. Yeah, and because money shows up there first, and there’s good reason why money shows up in the cryptoverse first before lots of other ways we might leverage this software because money shows up there first. It’s a rich target. So you’ve got an immature market with platforms that have fundamental security hazards that are hard for humans to reason about in a hostile environment. And so that’s been an interesting adventure and breeding ground and stuff like that. We’ve got people talk about ETH as sort of the proven, battle tested. No, it’s lost $9 billion. That’s not battle tested. That’s you lost. So it’s one of those things where it’s a hostile environment, it’s dangerous environment. We have much better techniques that have been deployed there that are one of the reasons why we built Agoric and other people have built other technologies to solve other parts of that hard problem. But that’s one of the ways in which it is a different environment is that you’re going out into a target rich environment, as it were.

Matt Zahab
100%. Great spiel there, Dean. Speaking of Agoric, let’s jump right into it. Give me the elevator pitch. Give me the 32nd TLDR too long didn’t read elevator pitch on Agoric. And then we’ll get into all the fun stuff because we have  snaps to talk about. We have your Mainnet One B partnership with BitGo, IST, ShadeSwap. You guys have been absolutely launching stuff left, right and center. Before we get into all the cool launches, though. Give me the elevator pitch, then we’ll get into it.

Dean Tribble
Sure. And then ask me in a month the elevator pitch will change just a little bit. So let me tease that. So the hardest thing to scale is developers, right? You can’t sort of scale users with one app that lots of people want to use, but that doesn’t scale the platform or the economy. For that, you need to scale developers. You need millions of developers if you’re going to get where a business that wants to roll out a website also wants to update the smart contracts or do something a little bit custom for their special business. And you don’t take over the world, you don’t take over the economy, you don’t take over how people do business unless all the developers on the planet can build this stuff, right? Web2 is all over the world because millions of developers can program it. And so to do that, you have to meet developers where they’re at, and you have to meet them with an abstract enough model they can program to it. They don’t care in the mainstream about wether it’s ETH or Solana or Agoric or Cosmos or whatever. What they care, what users care about is the experience they can get, and they care about it being safe and they care about it being usable, and they care about all the things that they care about in Web2. There’s nothing magical about Web3, except that you have early adopters that care to make sure it’s decentralized and private and enables them to do things that they weren’t able to do before. But as you start expanding that out, these fundamental basics of it’s got to be usable, it’s got to be focused on. My benefits are fundamental. So we enable the world’s developers to be able to approach Web3. And we enable it in a way that through our system, they can orchestrate, they can coordinate activity across lots of assets, across lots of chains without it being something they have to think about very hard. That ability to rapidly build rich, complex, interesting applications is something that has not been available to Web3 before. And that’s what we bring to the table.

Matt Zahab
Super interesting there. And the name, I love the name, too. What is it about everyone stealing names from the old greek language? They all slap, too, though. You know what I mean, Dean? I love it. But anyway.

Dean Tribble
Okay, so Agoric came was one of the early ones, right? That was 85, 86.

Matt Zahab
No, that’s very true.

Dean Tribble
Originally inspired by software. Sorry. Using markets to control resource allocation in software. Right? That computers were crossing the threshold where instead of talking about tens of bytes or hundreds of bytes or maybe 600 and 40k was a big machine at the time. Right? Instead of talking about that, you’re talking about gigabytes and terabytes, and now you can’t manage all of that yourself. How do you do that? And that’s where Agoric came from, was use markets to bid for compute cycles and memory and network space.

Matt Zahab
A little off topic here, Dean? But is that sort of similar to what we’re seeing in the AI space with all the race for GPU power?

Dean Tribble
Yes, actually, very much. And it’s another one of those things where there’s demand for a resource, there’s a lot of it. You’re not going to manage individual GPUs. You want to manage them by large swaths, and you want to allocate them to where they’re valuable for. You would like to do that in a way so that people can get large volume, but small players can still come in and get high value volume. Microeconomics and markets are great for that, and they’re better than all the central planning fallacies that governments across the world want to use for how to allocate resources. Markets are just great. And so using them for allocating compute resources for high demand is really valuable. And that’s why. EIP, what is it? 1557. The market based allocation of block space. One of the contenders was an algorithm from the original Agoric open systems papers. The escalator algorithm was designed to show how you could do incentive analysis and mechanism design for using auctions to do compute resource allocation. And we now see that showing up for blockspace auctions in Blockchain.

Matt Zahab
So cool, Dean, let’s jump into  Snaps here. MetaMask has introduced Snaps, which is an application built to add extended features and functionality to MetaMask. MetaMask is one of the most popular and important apps to the Blockchain space as a whole, minus the whole seed phrase part. It’s pretty darn easy to use. It’s pretty darn efficient to use. I personally think we need something a little bit better to onboard the masses, but in regards to MetaMask as a whole, it is a pretty friggin darn good app, and I’m sure a lot of us are very grateful to have it. You and the team worked your tails off to help launch MetaMask Snaps, and I’d love for you to talk about it.

Dean Tribble
So remember earlier I mentioned deploying Web2 apps is not the same hostile environment, right? You’re running third party code in your application. But in fact you are right, because the study of all these apps says that only 3% of the code in some large scale deployed web apps, and typical across GitHub, only 3% is actually application code you wrote, and 97% is libraries you got from somewhere else. So there’s this big supply chain of how do you trust those libraries? How much authority do those libraries have? And in typical web architecture they have all the authority of your application running, and you’ve got complete exposure to all of that code. You know, Aaron Davis, one of the founders of MetaMask, was concerned about that. He was concerned about their software supply chain. And so he and Dan Finley searched around and they saw what Agoric was doing for hardened JavaScript. It was called SES at the time, and that’s been an effort. That was one of the things that led to Agoric is it’s been an effort over the last 15 years, Mark Miller, our Chief Scientist, has been driving into the JavaScript standards, the elements to be able to do large scale safe programming where you’re not completely exposed to every library you try to use, where you can grab something and say, here’s the authority you have and no more. And it’s easy to program that. When I load a clock, it needs access to the timer, but it does not need access to Unix Exec, it does not need access to my password file, it does not need access to my keys, it doesn’t have to encrypt anything, it just needs to read the damn time, right? And so when I created, I want it to be trivial programming behaviorally, so it gets the authority to read the clock and that’s it. And now I can ask it the time and it could lie about the time, right? It could be a bad clock, but it can’t lie about the time. And oh by the way, send my password file to another country, right? Because it just launched loads with just the authority it needs in a natural programming style, and it does not check that the guy asking for the time is one of those people that’s allowed to ask for the time, like the message sender silliness that you get from Flash and Solidity and so forth, because that’s just a terrible model for composing libraries into larger applications. The model is I launch you, I give you the time thing, and now you can tell me the time I want, you can format, oh, I want to give you my location, my locale, so you can format it in international form, that’s great too. You don’t get to sniff around my disc and decide what area I’m on, you don’t get to look at the geo, and I give it to you to decide what physical location I’m in. It’s like, I’ll tell you where I’m at, you just give me the render. So they reach out to us and we connected on that. And that was the basis of the JavaScript execution model that we’re running on a Blockchain where we natively execute standard JavaScript just in a deterministic fashion. So you can run on 100 machines and come to the same answer, even though you’re running it at different times in different locations. So hardly JavaScript is the way I refer to it. And the way to think about it is it’s the JavaScript you thought you were programming in already. It is the version of JavaScript that does what you expect when you’re doing things. JavaScript starts out very malleable, right? You can change what it means to iterate an array, to walk through all the elements of an array and print them out, or format them, or do something with them. And the problem is you can change that to oh, by the way, read the file system, copy a file and send it to another country, right? And that is not what I expect when I iterate an array. That is not what I expect when I print a message to the user. And so what hardened JavaScript does is it locks down the world, so that the array iteration or printing a message to the user does what I expect, it does what the standard says. So JavaScript starts out very malleable, which is useful for certain kinds of things, but almost no application actually needs that or wants that. What it wants is the JavaScript programming language that they are all programming in. And so that’s what hardened JavaScript is. And in that process we lock down all of the security hazards that people sort of think of historically associated with JavaScript, but they’ve been locked down for a long time. It’s just people sort of still have this racial memory of early days of JavaScript, but JavaScript every day controls trillions of dollars in transactions across every facet of human existence. If it had big security hazards, people would not be doing that and they’d know by now.

Matt Zahab
Well said there Dean. We got to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor the show. But when we get back we have to discuss your guys’ massive partnership with BitGo and of course BLD staking, which is pretty freaking cool. Until then, huge shout out to our sponsor of the show, that is PrimeXBT. We love the team at PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. Use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50 that is CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Dean. Let’s jump right into the partnership with BitGo and you guys integrating BLD. This is massive for institutional adoption of DeFi, tons of financial institutions want access to creme de la creme grade smart contracts. They don’t have the wherewithal or the know how and the resources to do it themselves. So they piggyback off of people like yourselves and your team. You gotta love to see that shit. Walk me through the partnership here. What is the importance of partnering with BitGo? And walk me through a little bit more because full disclosure, Dean, I don’t  fully understand the whole BLD staking and how that helps. But I’d love if you could walk me through why the partnership with Bitco and the importance of the BLD staking as well.

Dean Tribble
So first, BLD is the native token of the Agoric chain. It’s, if you will, the foundation on which the economy is built. So it provides governance. It’s how you can get an account abstraction wallet set up, which we’ve had forever. It is an element that is used for getting rewards from the system. And the design of the Agoric system is a two token world where BLD is at the bottom and that’s the foundation on which things are built. And IST Interstable Token is a stable token natively built in JavaScript using all the best practices of overcollateralized, backed by crypto assets and other stables. But it’s all designed, the infrastructure and platform is all designed natively to include async network access, async secure access to assets on other chains. And so the IST stable token, for example, can you pull over Atom or staked Atom, some of the staking derivatives or Osmo or various other things, assets that the community will decide are appropriate backing, use those as collateral and mint the stable token IST and then you can take it to other chains across the ecosystem. Not just use it on Agoric to pay gas fees or pay for network services, but buy NFTs on Stargaze and OmniFlix, or buy assets in Osmosis or ShadeSwap or other places. And so it’s a stable token that is starting out on Agoric, starting out designed for the connected interchange, bridging across. It just went live on StellaSwap, on Polkadot, I think. And so it’s sort of appearing and spreading outwards because it’s very focused on being about sort of the chain abstract world, the world where, I’ve just got robust stuff that’s running on robust systems providing services to users. I don’t care where it’s running, I want to be able to pay for it with the same kinds of mechanisms. I want to be able to access assets on Aave or Solana or wherever it is and roll them up into complex, interesting interactions that needs to be programmed in sort of the Agoric nice async smart contracting model and so forth. So build is the fundamental token that lets institutions and whales and others participate in that new foundation that will be rolling out and ramping up this year. That’s why it’s exciting for them to have access to build is that something that as we start connecting to Web2 and getting some of these Web2 interested parties able to now start participating in Web3, start to build in Web3, that interesting to institutions, that here’s the place that they’ll be able to participate, they’ll understand how to do so, and that lets them participate economically as well. And the economy that grows with ISD, the economy that grows with functionality on the Agoric chain and with being able to coordinate access to assets on other chains, that economy, it pays rewards to build holders that stake. So that’s where the staking comes in is the way you really participate. You get build, you stake it, and now you go deploy your thing and you’re going to get rewards from the overall ecosystem based on the ongoing usage and growth of the platform. And we’re very focused on it tying to usage and growth. Right? The important thing is that participation be aligned with growing the economy, with growing participation, with growing activity, as opposed to aligned with charging rents for people coming on board, right? One of the things you see in a lot of these chains, there’ll be an underlying token. ETH is the canonical example, but it’s common and it’s useful for starters, where you pay gas fees on Ethereum in ETH, right? ETH is a volatile commodity. It’s different yesterday from tomorrow. It’s subject to lots of market fluctuations. And yet you’re paying effectively your postage bill or your rent using these volatile assets. I mean, that’s like paying for your rent with gold or with Apple shares. You can do it. But a few thousand years ago, we realized that an economy that used stable units of account and stable currencies for paying for services and long lived contracts was a better economy. Right? It had less friction. It made it much more plausible to do some of the kinds of things I talked about that you can’t easily do in crypto right now, like long term contracts, subscriptions, mortgages, these things where I’m not going to cut a mortgage in ETH, that I’m going to be owing a certain amount of ETH in 40 years. That would be crazy. I have no idea what ETH will be worth in 40 years. Right? But I kind of have an idea of what the dollar will be worth, or the euro, or anything that’s designed to be low volatility. Yeah, it’ll go up smoothly, but it’ll still be sort of a predictable thing so I can write a long term contract, I can hedge a long term contract, I can trade off different things. You really want your economy to be in terms of stable units of account of things with low volatility. And so we want that to grow. So the reward to the build stakers where build is this token that is intended to be able to grow with the size of the economy. It provides rewards for the economy growing the amount of IST transacting the amount of economic activity, not just the amount of thrashing of computers happening. And so that means it’s the equivalent of paying your rent in dollars, not paying your rent.

Matt Zahab
Huge.

Dean Tribble
Okay, so back to BitGo. So the thing that BitGo brings is they bring a network of 1500 institutions, make whales and exchanges. And so that provides much better, much richer, much easier access to build for the larger world of economic participants in crypto and growing. They also work with, and this is one of the places where it’s just so exciting to find this alignment where they work with major brands and sort of enterprises and small and medium companies as well, but they work with Web2 companies, they work with traditional companies that are trying to find their way into how can we work safely with crypto in a way that brings its value but keeps us in our lane, producing value that we need to for our customers. And wether that’s the Nikes of the world that are dipping their toe into NFTs to celebrate activity, or NFTs to provide access to events and access to private content, those are really valuable. But that’s not something that they should dive directly in and expose themselves to the kinds of regulatory thing that BitGo is already expert at and a lot of us are already experienced with. And so working with BitGo aligns well with we’re an ideal platform for Web2 applications to start getting to start moving over into Web3 and adding Web3 capability because you’re already programming in a language that they already know. It already works with their existing tools vs. Code and Webstorm, it uses the best in practice style of programming of libraries with components that you can reuse. And those are things that the rest of crypto just doesn’t really have. And it’s sort of the bar that Web2 programmers kind of expect. And this is one of the ways that we are one of the fundamental bridges for getting crypto access out to the mainstream world of developers and giving mainstream developers the ability to get in, try things without having to spend six months learning a language that they might never want to use again. Right? Instead, let’s just use the stuff they’ve got and meet them where they’re at. And so partnering with BitGo, we just got a bunch of opportunities there.

Matt Zahab
100%. Dean, you’ve been on a roll here. One more question and then we will wrap up as we are getting a little tight for time. Bitcoin, absolutely massive right now. More powerful than ever with the recent ETF news. We love to see that you’re big on institutional adoption. You guys are doing a bunch for institutional adoption of DeFi. We just talked about that with Agoric’s partnership with BitGo. Let’s jump into Bitcoin in particular and something that you guys are doing, which is the Babylon integration for Bitcoin timestamping. This is a little above my pay grade. I don’t completely understand the importance of this. I’d love if you could dumb it down and explain it to a non dev guy like myself. Walk me through this integration, this partnership, and why and how Babylon integration for Bitcoin timestamping is so important.

Dean Tribble
Sure. So remember I said the value Blockchain brings is multiple machines in different jurisdictions running the same stuff and coming to consensus. There are lots of different mechanisms for consensus, and that’s getting faster and stronger and better. So Bitcoin has the granddaddy magic that Satoshi brought to the world, which is this proof of work Consensus, right? So the simple thing, people, when they hear about Consensus, they think voting, right? I’ve got an electorate. There’s an issue at hand. They vote. The issue might be, did Dean win the election or did he get his money back? Because in Agoric, it’s one or the other, and I can’t get rugged, right? But it’s a bunch of machines that they vote. And if I know what all those machines are, I can count the votes. Okay, now, it turns out to be much more complicated than that, because I can count the votes, but why should you trust me? So instead, there’s these weird protocols so that all of them count the votes and they come to agreement that they all agree that Dean won the auction or whatever it is, right? And so that Consensus is critical for decentralization. It means that compromising some subset of those machines, you can’t compromise the integrity of execution, because two thirds plus one will still vote that Dean won the auction. And the people that some organization compromised, well, they just end up getting voted off the island, right? Because they’re clearly out to lunch. And so that ability to, if I can name all the machines they can vote, is where proof of stake and these fast finality engines come in. But what Bitcoin came up with was, this was before we knew how to do decentralized proof of stake. And people wonder about it. It still means that people with money could do the staking. There’s always concerns, as we continue to try to push the limits of how sure can we make it that these are not subject to compromise. The thing that proof of work does in Bitcoin in particular is it has a model where machines can come to Consensus without knowing all the machines participating, right? So there could be 10,000 machines participating, none of which I’ve heard of, and yet they can come to consensus, and it sounds like magic. That’s why I refer to it as the proof of work magic that Satoshi brought to the table. It really was important and novel. That was a huge contribution to the world’s ability to do safe computation. And so it continues to exist. One of the values of Bitcoin is that it kind of is the same thing. It’s kind of stable over time. It’s not evolving rapidly to adapt to what it is we need right now. People like to refer to it as money. To my concern, to my perspective, it is not a money. It is an asset. It is like gold. Its value may change, but it is this valuable asset. At some point, they’re not making more of it. It’s clear how much it inflates all that sort of thing. So it makes a great asset on which to base things and so forth. And so it has this novel security model that is time tested, is well understood and really seems robust and will be robust going into the future. The nice thing about what Babylon brings is let’s take all these additional things that people are doing for faster performance that we all think is secure. But like any crypto algorithm, you think it’s secure until it’s not. And so one of the nice things that the Babylon chain does is it brings back all of those things and links them back to the granddaddy security model of Bitcoin. And you don’t really want a lot of proof of work chains because it’s slow. It takes a long time to be sure it’s gotten to finality. It’s power intensive and so forth. But it is uniquely powerful in the assurance that it gives you. So by being able to link all these novel things going out there back to the security of Bitcoin, you now get all the security weight, all of that assurance that Bitcoin’s expensive security model provides, you can now provide it to all these much faster, much lighter, much more expressive systems out there like Agoric. And so it’s one of those things, where did we need it now? No, you don’t need security until, oops, I wish we had had security. You need it before you need to put it in place before you need it. And since this is a year where the ability to abstract across chains, chain abstraction, right? Agoric is a key part of the future of chain abstraction, the future of making it so that people coming in, they can just experience all these assets and services without thinking very hard about where they’re at. You were a key ingredient of that. We could ramp very quickly. And having that security in the bank as it were having that underpinning there in place is really a nice thing to have, right? It’s a nice value to be able to lean on when we need it going forward. So that’s why that’s exciting. Additionally, it is an example of this broad connectivity, this ability to orchestrate across chains. And so the ability to have Bitcoin and start to access it as an asset value Babylon is a great example. One of the earliest of hey, this asset out there, we can apply it in ways that don’t compromise its integrity, but instead leverage it to do these other things. Starting to get it in where Bitcoin is the token that everybody knows already. JavaScript is the programming language that everybody knows already. The future potential of pulling those together. And I note, incidentally, that BitGo is the one that does wrap Bitcoin potential of being able to enable all the programmers in the world to program the main asset they’ve already heard of. If they’ve been hiding under a rock or hiding in an IT group somewhere, that’s the kind of thing where opportunistically that could easily become really important.

Matt Zahab
I feel like you may have just hinted at something, Dean. This has been an incredible episode. Thank you so much for coming on. I wish we had a little more time. We do have to wrap up, but I can’t wait to have you on for round two because I know we literally barely scratched the surface here.

Dean Tribble
We will have more to say to you in a month or 2.

Matt Zahab
100% and we’re going to have to have you back on because you’re a great storyteller and you explain things in a great way. Really appreciate you coming on. Before you go, Dean, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you personally and Agoric online and on socials.

Dean Tribble
Absolutely. We are agoric.com or @agoric on Twitter x ten, whatever you call it. I’m @DeanTribble on several different platforms, especially Twitter and Telegram. And absolutely reach out to us on Discord, agoric.com/discord, agoric.com/telegram, agoric.com slash whatever your favorite thing is. And if you’re a developer docs.agoric.com any developer out there that’s ready know entrepreneur that’s ready to build something, we’re the place for them to start.

Matt Zahab
Love it. Dean thanks again. Appreciate it. Had a blast. Can’t wait for round two. Wishing you and the team all the best.

Dean Tribble
Thank you so much, Matt, and thank you for having me this was great.

Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Dean Tribble CEO of Agoric. He was on fire today, dropping knowledge bombs. We discussed a little bit of everything. Distributed systems, JavaScript in crypto, MetaMask Snaps, institutional adoption of DeFi, just to name a few. Dean was absolutely on fire. We’d love to see that. Huge shout out to the team for making this happen. Huge shout out to the listeners. Love you guys, as always. Justas, my amazing sound editor, appreciate you, my man. And listeners, back to you guys. Love you guys. Thank you so much for everything. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now. And we’ll talk soon.

The post Dean Tribble, CEO of Agoric, on Distributed Systems, JavaScript in Crypto, MetaMask Snaps, and Institutional Adoption of DeFi | Ep. 302 appeared first on Cryptonews.

About Matthew Graham

Matthew Graham is the Managing Partner of Ryze Labs and one of the key drivers of the firm’s long-term strategic vision and mission. Matthew founded Ryze in 2015, initially as a sell-side tech investment banking platform focusing on representing international technology companies for strategic partnership and investment in emerging markets. Matthew has been involved in the blockchain industry since 2013 and has supported many great entrepreneurs and companies through good and bad times.

Matthew Graham gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• VC Views – Trends with respect to the types of projects fundraising in 2024
• ETH ETF – could follow a similar pattern to the BTC ETF
• BTC ETF – record-breaking inflows and institutional investment is ripe
• The difference between the regulatory environment in Asia versus Western Markets, especially in light of the BTC ETF approval
• The secret sauce of making a pitch deck – crystal clear value proposition

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Za hab. We are buzzing, as always, still in Mexico, episode 301, what a treat. And I’m super pumped to have today’s guest on the show who also has the best name in the world and who is also rocking the off yellow shirt, the off yellow tarp. However, his looks like a beautiful traditional finance tarp, like a big old banker. And then there’s me looking like a peasant with the Uniqlo off yellow shirt. No free ads, but these Uniqlo shirts are pretty comfy. Time for the intro. Today we have Matthew Graham, managing partner of Ryze Labs and one of the key drivers of the long term strategic vision and mission of the firm. Matthew founded Ryze back in 2015. Wow, what a rip. Initially as a sell side tech investment banking platform with a focus on representing international tech companies for strategic partnership and investment in emerging markets, Matthew has been involved in the blockchain industry since 2013. A true chiseled veteran, and has supported many great entrepreneurs and companies through good and bad times. Super pumped to have you on, Matthew. Welcome to the show, my friend. How are you doing?

Matthew Graham
Great to be here. This will be a lot of fun. Thanks for that. Great intro. We got the same name. We’re dressed the same. I think we’re ready to go.

Matt Zahab
We planned it. Yeah. If you guys are watching this and not listening, you guys are in for a treat. This is going to be a good one. Let’s jump right into it. Talk of the talk, the creme de la creme right now everyone’s talking about the Bitcoin ETF. This is going to air on Thursday, January 18, folks, we are recording one day earlier. So this episode is going to be hot and fresh. Bitcoin ETF, it popped off. Everyone thought it was going to rip. I was glued to CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap. I was glued to Twitter for those first couple of days checking all the inflows. I know we did break all the records for most inflows and highest volume for any ETF over the first couple days. We love to see that, but we don’t love to see the price action. What happened there? Was this part of this whole GPTC where everyone was selling off in order to move into the ETF. Matthew, give us the laydown. Give us the lowdown. What happened with the first week of trading with the Bitcoin ETF?

Matthew Graham
Sure, it did end up being a sell the news situation for sure. We actually view these ETF inflows and outflows as quite important. So we’re actually currently internally doing a real deep dive on this issue. But currently my view is that selling from GPTC was probably a significant factor. Beyond that, it may be a little hard to say, but I think the short term price action is mostly a sideshow from what I think is really substantially more important. And here’s what I think is more important. The Bitcoin ETF has been an enormous success. In fact, the aggregate trading volume of the new Bitcoin ETFs are substantially higher than the trading volume of all, approximately 500 ETFs that were launched in 2023, all of them put together. So let me just repeat that, because it’s so important, you combine everything launched in 2023, all the United States ETFs, combine them all, the trading volume of all those combined, you compare it to the new Bitcoin ETFs. The Bitcoin ETFs are higher in trading volume than everything done in 2023. I repeated it because I think that’s really quite extraordinary. This is a blockbuster success for the Bitcoin ETF in terms of people demonstrating that they absolutely want this product. So what that means is very quickly, Wall Street is going to become addicted to this asset class. This is only the first domino to fall. I think that’s bullish for the prospect of an Ethereum ETF in terms of these powerful Wall Street interests that will be even more determined to make this happen. I think it’s extremely positive for Wall Street in general, getting more involved in this industry. I think that is the most important takeaway for me from the Bitcoin ETF rather than short term price action, maybe influenced by GPTC outflows. Honestly, who cares? I think that small potatoes compared to this much more important thing, which is that huge success for Wall Street, they’re going to want to do this more and more in all different ways, participate in our industry.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, well said there. Speaking of the ETF, I had a buddy, it was actually yesterday, and he was at Atlanta airport, and obviously that’s one of the biggest and most popular airports in the world. He had to go to two different terminals because his flight got canceled. Long story short, in both terminals, he saw an advertisement for two different ETFs. I believe it was the Valkyrie one was one of them, and the other one, it may have even been. I think it might have been the BlackRock. But these guys, it’s a weekend and they already have ads in airport terminals like, this is bananas. What can we see from an actual pushing the ETF perspective? Like, are these guys going to go balls to the walls with advertisements and calling all the brokers and trying to get this in everyone hands as quick as possible.

Matthew Graham
Matt, this is such a great point, so I’m really glad you brought this up. We’ve actually been having a lot of conversations with people around just this issue in recent weeks. So an ETF is fundamentally a commodity product, by which I mean that there is not a huge differentiator from any one Bitcoin ETF compared to any one of the others. Mechanics may differ around the margins, at least for this class of Bitcoin ETFs. There are some nuances around if it’s cash to cash, or actually, there’s some nuances on the mechanics, but you can think of at least this class of Bitcoin ETFs as substantially all the same. So what that means is that from the provider perspective, there is a substantial risk of a war on fees, and that these fees will ultimately be driven to zero, which means not literally zero, but 0.2%. Let’s say 0.1% even effectively. Here’s what that means. The Bitcoin ETF providers are trying to establish beachheads through marketing, thinking that at least some of the inflows will be sticky and they can decrease the probability of competing only on price. So, as Matt, as you identified already through the example of your friend, who, God help him, is in Atlanta, I think pulling out for that guy. But at any rate, through the example of your friend, we are already seeing that there is absolutely going to be balls to the walls marketing on these ETFs. And that is enormously powerful for our industry. It’s enormously powerful in showing people that our industry, I mean, we all know this, but people outside our industry still may have question marks that our industry is here to stay, that it’s going to be a powerful asset class. I know that’s hard to imagine because we’re at one point x trillion dollars as an asset class, 1.6, or whatever it is today. Hard to imagine. But for people outside our industry, they may still have question marks, and this is going to be very powerful for demonstrating our legitimacy. The fact that this is an institutional ready asset class, and it’s going to start causing people to really think about, not if they take this industry seriously or if they should buy some Bitcoin, but rather asking questions like what percentage of my portfolio should be crypto questions like that. So I really think it’s enormously important, the marketing spent.

Matt Zahab
So as a consumer, and I know we are buzzing on the Bitcoin ETF, it’s just such a powerful and present day topic. We’ll move on. But last question here. As a consumer or as a market manager, how do you choose what ETF to put your clients in? Is it strictly just like you said, the battle of advertising and marketing? Is it the one who has the lowest fee for the first little bit? Is it the one who’s doing the social good and giving 10% back to the Bitcoin miners? How do you choose which one to get into if it’s really all the same product at the end of the day?

Matthew Graham
Sure. So I’m not really in the business of advising on Bitcoin ETFs, but if a buddy said to me, hey, quick question which ETF should I do? I would say just sort them by fees. Go with the one with the lowest fee is probably your best bet. I would probably double check to make absolutely sure that that would be my final recommendation. But yeah, ultimately, these are commodity products, and the providers of these products do not want people to think like that. They want instead people to think emotionally, which is why they’re running expensive ad campaigns.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, well said there. Let’s jump into some, we can also get into some of you and your team’s investments. And you guys have done an incredible job, by the way, and I can’t wait to get into that. But let’s talk about some of the 2024 trends as we’re still hot and fresh, nice and early in the year. We’ve seen Solana absolutely rip its pants off and go for just an absolute ripper. Magoo it’s made a lot of people a lot of money, especially all those folks who sort of bought at the top last year. And if they did hold all the way down to the nine dollar mark and wrote it back up, good for them. We’re seeing Deepn, which is a massive trend right now, account abstraction in Ethereum. We’re seeing a lot of decentralized finance trends. A whole lot of everything. What are you most excited for? Liquid staking, I also have to mention, are there any trends in particular, Matthew, that are really tickling you and your team’s fancy right now that you guys have all eyes on?

Matthew Graham
Sure. So we’re looking at a number of different narratives, as we always do. Maybe I’ll just pick one that I spent most of my time on today. Today we’ve been looking carefully at the probability of an Ethereum ETF analyzing that very carefully. Will it be considered a commodity or a security? Maybe because of the futures product precedent that is passed. Maybe because of that, there’s precedent that it could be treated as a commodity. So we’ve been spending a lot of time looking at Ethereum ETF, if it’s going to happen or not. The first time that it could get approved is in May. Of course, it would not launch in May, but that could be substantially bullish for Ethereum. And additionally, the new Cancun upgrade and some of the new EIPs we think could be quite conducive as well to reducing congestion effectively and lowering the cost of transactions on Ethereum. On a related note, we’re also carefully looking at RWAs, and we do think that there’s a substantial probability that Ethereum will be a natural home for RWAs. So we’ve been spending a lot of time on Ethereum in recent days, and in fact, with myself specifically, I spent a lot of my time on Ethereum today.

Matt Zahab
ETH hasn’t gone up in price as much as everyone would have liked to over the last little bit. Is there a specific reason for this? I know you guys are obviously super tied into everything in this regard. And just as a quick little follow up to this question, how could the ETH ETF, are we going to see similar buy the narrative, sell the news kind of thing by the ETF, sell the news? What’s going to go on with the ETH ETF if it does happen in May, like a lot of people think it will?

Matthew Graham
I think that there is also a grayscale ETH product, so there could be selling pressure as a result of that. I’d have to look at the details, but that’s certainly a possibility, and I think that could be by the narrative and ultimately sell the official event. That’s a possibility, but I think there’s always high error bars around it. Your first question, or the first part of your question, was around Ethereum and perhaps why it’s underperformed a little bit in recent months. Yeah, so I gave some reasons why Ethereum possibly might have a more bullish 2024. There’s also another factor to that, which I think explains why it’s been underperforming recently. So, as I was explaining it the other day, if you have, for example, Bitcoin, which has a substantially smaller feature set, it’s robust, it’s well understood, it has a compelling narrative around it, it can do a few things very well, such as capture people that are interested in digital gold. On the other end of the spectrum, you have something like Solana, which has an enormously rich feature set that can do many, many things quite well, if you’re on those two opposite ends of the spectrum, I think those are two really interesting places to be. If you split the middle of those two things, I think that’s tough.

Matt Zahab
Good point.

Matthew Graham
You’re going to have a lot of people who are saying, well, Bitcoin is probably better for that than Ethereum, and a lot of people who are going to say, well, Solana is really more suitable than Ethereum for this. So I think that creates a lot of difficulties. But with that said, for example, RWAs may have a natural home on Ethereum. We’ll have to see. But to the extent that narrative does take off, to the extent these Cancun and these new EIPs prove to be catalysts, there could be a more compelling 2024. But I think that there’s still this fundamental challenge of competitive positioning.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, there’s so many different narratives about ETH right now, and your team sent over an incredible little cheat sheet to help prep for this Podcast. And one thing that I was completely unaware of, Matthew, is that Celsius has approximately 300 million cited in ETH as a primary factor planning to unstake its ETH holdings. I believe it actually started a couple of weeks ago on January 4, and distribute these to creditors in Ethereum or convert them to USDC. There is also a give or take, ten day elongated ETH withdrawal queue. I still can’t believe that Celsius has this much of a pull on the market, you know what I mean? Because it happened, what, two years ago with FTX and Celsius. You don’t even want it to be front of mind because it had such a negative impact. But these things, they’re still fucking our day up. It’s like years later what’s going on with the whole Celsius and FTX?

Matthew Graham
Sorry, go ahead. It’s like all those words you muted on Twitter, right? You can’t take it anymore. I’m going to just mute Celsius.

Matt Zahab
Exactly.

Matthew Graham
But yeah, unfortunately, there’s still to some extent an overhang for our industry. But you know, for specific products and in specific ways, we do still have aftershocks, even today from some of the tumult that we had earlier. I truly, really look forward to never hearing some of these names again, but unfortunately, they do impact us still.

Matt Zahab
It’s truly wild. I’d love to jump to some VC views here, just sort of strictly from a VC perspective. Obviously, you are currently in Asia. I’d love if you could talk about some of the difference in regards to the regulatory environment in Asia versus western markets. And if you could tie that into sort of the light of the BTC ETF approval, that would be great as well.

Matthew Graham
So I think the first thing that it strikes me as really quite important is I don’t think you can discuss it in terms of an Asia regulatory framework, for example. It’s very tempting to do that. I fully get that. But it really varies considerably from country to country. And in fact, it even varies considerably from mainland China to Hong Kong. So I really think you kind of have to go jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Mainland China, for example, is not necessarily super friendly to crypto. There are a lot of misconceptions. People think that Bitcoin is banned in mainland China, which is not true, but still, it’s not super friendly at all. Whereas Hong Kong is really quite permissive by comparison. So if it really makes sense to even differentiate between mainland China and Hong Kong, it definitely makes sense to differentiate between Vietnam and Singapore and Thailand and India and all these places throughout Asia. So that’s the first thing that I would really emphasize. I think there are a lot of dangers to treating it as a monolithic block.

Matt Zahab
Very interesting. It’s, again, for someone like me, mean the only part of Asia I’ve been to is India. I’ve unfortunately never been to China or Hong Kong or Eastern Asia. It’s on the to do list. I will get there. And we’ve had so many really incredible VCs, similar to yourself on the show, who do reside in Asia and work a lot of magic in Asia, and we don’t get to see or use any of these incredible products that are in Asia as well. That I feel like does have a lot of emphasis on how you would choose to invest. Even like the WeChat, right? These super products that us over here in, you know, we have our iPhone, we have WhatsApp. I mean, heck, unless if you’re in Canada and USA, you don’t even use WhatsApp, you use iMessage. And then you have these mega company conglomerates in Asia and China, like the WeChats where you have your bank, you have your messaging, you have your commerce, you have absolutely everything. It’s pretty freaking cool to see. Are there any crypto specific companies, Matthew, at the moment, that are really making moves in Asia because it’s such a massive friggin market? Are there any on your radar that are really getting you guys going?

Matthew Graham
Let me answer in this way. So one of the most important things actually, for my business is the fact that the information asymmetry between east and west, west and east in our industry is absolutely enormous. It’s staggering.

Matt Zahab
It’s crazy.

Matthew Graham
For a recent example is with ordinals. Ordinals took off far faster and is still far more popular in Asia, especially in China, frankly, versus the west. So as a result of having access to boots on the ground and information both west and east, we were able to be one of the first investors anywhere in the west to actually invest in ordinals and related technologies. It is absolutely fascinating. Far more than TradFi by a factor of ten, if not 100. How little the relationship circles overlap, how little information is transmitted both ways, east and west, west and east. It absolutely blows my mind whenever I think about it. There’s just absolutely enormous differences in consumer preferences, in narratives and popular coins and things like that. For example, if I were to name the most popular meme coin in recent weeks, or one of them in China, I think with high confidence. You haven’t heard of it. RATS like the animal. One of the most popular meme coins in Asia recently. Of course you haven’t.

Matt Zahab
Big no.

Matthew Graham
Right? And so there’s just this enormous gap. No, obviously. Please. That’s a shit coin.

Matt Zahab
Yeah. Not financial advice.

Matthew Graham
Absolutely not even like, it’s a shitty meme coin. Okay. But there’s shitcoins and meme coins and maybe there’s some overlap. This is a shitty meme coin. All right? It’s garbage. I just want to be clear. But at any rate, it has been enormously popular and there’s no visibility at all of that internationally. So again, similarly, ordinals massively earlier in Asia, massively more popular to this day. There are many narratives like that. Solana is much more popular in the west. Polygon is much more popular in India. There are a lot of geographic and community differences in our industry to an extent that really is quite staggering to me to this day.

Matt Zahab
It’s so cool and very well explained there.

Matthew Graham
I’ve seen so many crazy you know because it’s just like in Asia, it’s one thing, same as in the west. There are funny videos and all kinds of weird jokes. I’ve seen so many RATS videos, I never want to see another one. Please do not send me RATS videos.

Matt Zahab
Yes. Folks, not investment advice. He has just given us a good story to fortify the point of east versus west narratives. But huge shout out to our sponsor of Tthe show PrimeXBT. PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. Use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50. That is CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And I’m back to the show with Matthew. Let’s jump into a couple more VC questions and VC points here. I think being a VC is an incredible job. I know it’s sort of been glorified over the last ten years, especially with someone like me who spends far too much time on Twitter. I follow a shit ton of VCs. Seems like a really cool job. Obviously, you got to work your ass off, you got to work your tail off, and it’s all about getting that little itty bit of alpha to hit a home run. It’s a volume based game. Anytime I have a VC on the show, I always need to ask, how do you and your team go about your investment strategy? Are there any queries or nuances that you really dig down on that you really look into, right? Besides the obvious, like, what is the overall market? Like, what’s the tam, what’s the moat? How good is the team? Is this the first time founder. Are there any sort of weird ones, weird pointers, nuances that you could discuss about how you and the team go about your investment strategy?

Matthew Graham
I think ultimately, as a VC, especially in earlier stages, ultimately you are betting on people. And I think that especially in crypto, you want to have someone that you are confident will plug away. A lot of people work on projects for three months and then they say, oh, I didn’t immediately get traction. Now I’m going to work on something else, or they’ll have a huge success with their first product, and then they’ll say, well, instead of continuing to develop that, we will develop adjacent products, but we’ll do that under new tokens, which is not great for your investors. So I think one of the most important things, especially in earlier stages, is to probe and evaluate the extent to which you think that someone is likely to keep grinding away for long periods of time, basically.

Matt Zahab
And that’s number one, of course. Give me some weird ones here, Matthew. Any super weird ones where a team came in with a new narrative, or is there something about a pitch deck, perhaps, or the way someone dresses or anything, any sort of weird hunches and follow up to that is the importance of trusting your gut. Was there ever one where your gut was just like, Matthew, you need to do this. I have to do this.

Matthew Graham
I look for a lot of trust related signals. It’s probably one that is a good answer to your question. So I carefully observe how people treat their wife or girlfriend, their kids, if they have pets, I’m more likely to trust them. To be honest, I look for a lot of trust related signals. I’m less likely to trust someone if they don’t like animals and kids.

Matt Zahab
100%, I love that. What about some of your biggest winners and losers that you can talk about? Did you and the team pass up any behemoths that still sort of eat you away? And I hate to ask the negative s question, but the people are going to love it. Any big winners and big losers that you can discuss on the show here Matthew?

Matthew Graham
Sure. So, of course, it’s well known that we were very early investors in Solana. Although we accumulated most of our position in the secondary market, we were extremely early out of our institutional fund. We’re thrilled about our performance with layer zero, where we came in at seed. Those are two examples that we are well known for in terms of the ones that got away. Okay, I’ll give you an example. At this point in time, I was not yet investing my own money. I was not doing angel checks at this time, and I should have made an exception because I remember getting a deck in 2015, I guess it was. And I said to my team that this is the best deck I’ve ever seen in my life. This is the most compelling thing I’ve ever seen. And I should have said to myself, well, you’re not doing angel checks. Maybe you should do your first angel checks. But I didn’t think that way. I just thought, this is absolutely fucking amazing. And I just didn’t think, any guesses as to what that was?

Matt Zahab
ETH?

Matthew Graham
No, but I mean, the timing is right.

Matt Zahab
It wasn’t. ETH. What was it?

Matthew Graham
BitMEX best deck I’ve ever.

Matt Zahab
Oh, no.

Matthew Graham
Yeah.

Matt Zahab
What made the deck so good?

Matthew Graham
It was absolutely crystal clear that this was the right team. An opportunity that super fucking made sense. It was just enormously compelling in terms of them demonstrating clarity of vision that they had the people to accomplish the vision demonstrating that they already had, even in the earliest iterations, something that people wanted. It was like, jaw dropping g ood. I mean, it was really astonishingly compelling.

Matt Zahab
I’m just taking notes here on the secret sauce of making a pitch deck here. So BitMEX came across. And obviously they are bloody huge. What can you and the team learn from something like this?

Matthew Graham
Well, I think what I should have learned is that you should be willing to bend your own rules if something’s that fucking good.

Matt Zahab
If something that appealing comes across the table should be broken.

Matthew Graham
If you’re not doing angel checks and it’s the best fucking thing you’ve ever seen, maybe you should do an angel check.

Matt Zahab
Maybe write a check. I was just going to ask you about your gut, just because this is a subject that I’m extremely passionate about and I journal myself and I look back at times when I made good or bad decisions and either did or didn’t trust my gut. What was your gut saying at the time? Are you just reiterating the points that you’ve said over the last two minutes where just everything screamed, this is going to be a home run? This is absolutely freaking incredible.

Matthew Graham
Yeah, I just thought it was absolutely going to be a home run. Just like, this guy is going to fucking kill it. Which actually, I was off by a year or two because he struggled. Arthur struggled for the first year or two. In fact, he struggled to get funding. Even when he got some funding, he struggled to get substantial traction to the point where they entered an accelerator in mainland China, in Shanghai, I think it was. It’s called China accelerator. It’s owned by SOSV. So they had gotten funding. They were not getting traction. They gave away equity to an accelerator, is how badly they were struggling. So actually, it took them a good year or two of grinding. So I was wrong in the sense that I thought it was going to be an immediate fucking home run. I was wrong about that, but actually, the breakthrough moment for them is when they implemented 100X leverage was actually when they just went hockey stick.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, to the moon. Very cool. Matthew, you’ve been absolutely on fire here. We are getting a little tight for time. A couple more questions. I want to go back to 2024 investment narrative. Investment trends. I named off a couple. Is there any in particular that you and the team are super keen on right now? 2024 investment trends and investment narratives.

Matthew Graham
Sure, there’s a lot we’re keen on, but to give another example, we are having the most innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem that we’ve had in quite some time. So that’s really very fascinating to us, and we’re spending a lot of time looking at that. Already made some investments around that space. They aren’t public yet, but we’re very excited about them.

Matt Zahab
Anything else like Deepn or liquid staking? Are these narratives too far out for you guys to dabble, or are these actually the true thing?

Matthew Graham
We are actively looking at both those sectors. I can’t expand on that at that time, but we are actively looking at both those sectors. You could probably assume my meaning is more than that. And then with Deepn specifically, though, I do still hold the view that with the possible exception of Helium, I think in the bullcase for Deepn. In the bullcase three years from now, if you look at a top ten Deepn list, I think it will be very different than it is today, with the possible exception of Helium. But I do think that’s a very compelling sector, for sure.

Matt Zahab
Interesting. Last question. Give me a hot take. Something super friggin spicy. Seshuan spicy. I’m talking blow your socks off spicy. Matthew, give me one hot take before we let you go today.

Matthew Graham
Gary Gensler will be gone at this time next year. He’s out of here this time next year.

Matt Zahab
Why is that?

Matthew Graham
There have been a lot of rumors swirling that he might have 1ft out the door anyway for some time. Even rumors of he was thinking of making a congressional run. A lot of different stuff, but it’s not a high confidence hot take. You want a hot take? It was the first one that came to mind.

Matt Zahab
I love it.

Matthew Graham
Maybe it’s just a wish, to be honest.

Matt Zahab
Me too. I would love that. I would absolutely love that. Matthew, you were an absolute treat today. Learned a ton and had a lot of fun. Can’t wait for round two. Before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you personally and Ryze Labs online and on socials?

Matthew Graham
Sure. So I’m on Twitter. I’m notoriously addicted to Twitter, and I can be found @mattyryze on Twitter, and Ryze Labs, ryzelabs.io . And we are on Twitter as well.

Matt Zahab
Love it. And last question. I didn’t even ask. What about the name Ryze? Where did that come from?

Matthew Graham
Sure. So we rebranded because our initial name reflected our China specialty, but we’ve long since had grown to having an emerging market specialty. So we wanted a name that could fit with our growth trajectory and that had some good connotations around it. We have boots on the ground everywhere from Latin America to India, China, Singapore, and a lot of different places in between. So we wanted a name that could kind of keep up with us.

Matt Zahab
I love it. It’s clean and it’s got a z in it. Big fan. Matthew thank you so much. Absolute pleasure having you on and can’t wait for round two.

Matthew Graham
All right, thank you.

Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Matthew Graham, Managing Partner of Ryze Labs. He absolutely brought the heat today. Everything 2024 crypto investing related. We talk narratives, we talk trends, we talk BTC ETF, the ETH ETF, the nuances and differences between investing in the east and west. We covered it all. Huge shout out to Matthew and his team for making this happen. To my team. Thank you, as always, guys. Much appreciated. Justas, you are the man. You are the best editor in the whole wide world. Thank you for your incredible work, as always, and to the listeners, thank you, guys. If you enjoyed this one, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. And as always, love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy, and happy. Bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.

The post Matthew Graham, Managing Partner of Ryze Labs, on 2024 Crypto Investing Narratives, BTC, and ETH | Ep. 301 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Greg Magadini, Director of Derivatives at Amberdata, talks about the BTC ETF approval, how to understand & use crypto derivatives, and the differences between volatility and implied volatility.

About Greg Magadini

Greg Magadini, Director of Derivatives at Amberdata, spent over a decade as a professional trader in traditional finance markets with proprietary firms such as SMB Capital, Chopper Trading, and DRW before co-founding and working as CEO of Genesis Volatility, a leading crypto options insights provider. Genesis Volatility was acquired by Amberdata in 2022 to grow their options data analytics capabilities for their roster of institutional clients such as Citi, NASDAQ, Franklin Templeton, and more.

Greg Magadini gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• The differences between volatility and implied volatility in the crypto markets and the effect on BTC price
• BTC ETF approval – “buy the rumor, sell the news”, was certainly wrong
• Crypto derivatives – how they work and how to properly use them
• What does the upcoming halving mean for BTC prices as the ETF news continues to be the primary driver of current markets?
• Amberdata compiling on-chain data from CEX’s, direct CME data, DEX pool data, and offshore exchanges to provide a complete picture of the entire crypto market.

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, and this is an extra special episode for a couple of reasons, folks. Episode number 300 of the Cryptonews Podcast. This thing started almost three years ago, just less than three years ago. Crazy to think here we are still buzzing. The train is still on the tracks. 300 episodes later. Love you guys so much. Thank you as always for tuning in. Without the listeners, this show would still not be on the tracks. Love you guys so much gratitude. Thank you for everything. And it truly warms my heart that we have somehow gotten to episode 300 and it’s been a ride. Hopefully we have another 300 in store. Reason number two why this episode is extra special the Bitcoin ETF got approved yesterday. Folks we are recording on Thursday, January 11th. This is going to air on Monday the 15th and we have a Bitcoin ETF locked and loaded. It has finally happened and I can’t wait to get into it with the one and only Greg Magadini, Director of Derivatives at Amberdata. Greg has spent over a decade as a professional trader in traditional finance markets with proprietary firms such as SMB Capital, Chopper Trading and DRW, before co founding and working as CEO of Genesis Volatility, a leading crypto options insights provider. Genesis Volatility was acquired by Amberdata in 2022 to grow their options data analytics capabilities for their roster of institutional clients such as Citi, NASDAQ, Franklin Templeton. Ever heard of them? And more. Super pumped to have you on for episode 300. Greg, welcome to the show, my friend. How you doing?

Greg Magadini
Doing great. Thank you, Matt. And I’m very happy that we spoke a little French before the show. Very happy to hear that as well. That was very cool.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Got a fellow French Canadian on the pod. We love to see that. And it’s also episode 300, which is incredible. One thing that stands out before we get into the Bitcoin ETF, obviously you and the team at Genesis Volatility, you guys were acquired, and congrats on that. That is absolutely huge by Amberdata. And as I was reading the bio, the last firm of your roster of institutional clients was Franklin Templeton. Did you see the laser eyes that they put on their profile picture yesterday?

Greg Magadini
Yeah, I think it’s pretty on point. I mean, the laser eyes and 100k Bitcoin are sort of synonymous. And it’s pretty interesting that Ben Franklin is the guy on the $100 bill. 100k Bitcoin seems very much in the cards, so it’s on point.

Matt Zahab
I believe it was Will. The classic Will. How am I forgetting his last name? Anyways, you know who I’m talking about. Will. Oh, boy. The on-chain analytics guy for Bitcoin. My apologies, Will. I can’t believe I’m forgetting your name. You’re one of the GOATs in the space. But he was the one who tweeted out yesterday that Franklin Templeton put the laser eyes on, and he’s like 1.4 trillion AUM. So when you have firms like Franklin Templeton putting laser eyes on their logo, you know shit’s about to get spicy. Let’s jump right into it here, Greg, Bitcoin ETF got approved yesterday. Again, folks, we are recording on Thursday, January 11. When you hear this, it will be Monday the 15th. Let’s get right into it. What does this mean for us? What does this mean for TradFi? What does this mean as a whole market for all of us? Start us off and then we’ll jump into some of the nitty gritty fun stuff here.

Greg Magadini
Yeah, I think in the medium to long term, it’s definitely bullish, upside trend. The way that I like to think about it is that if I look at assets under management in, say, North America alone, there’s about $53 trillion under management. It makes a lot of sense just from like, a modern portfolio theory perspective. Allocate 1% or 2% of a portfolio to crypto as an asset class, specifically Bitcoin, which we’ll have the ETF for. And so that’s easily a trillion dollars of flows over, say, call it the next twelve to 18 months. And right now, the Bitcoin market cap is 850 billion or 900 billion, around a trillion dollars itself. So if you increase flows, purchasing flows by a trillion dollars, that doesn’t double the market cap. That does something like 5X the market cap. Buying a trillion dollars of Bitcoin is going to move the market cap along the way as you’re trying to execute. So what I expect to happen is that slowly, financial advisors, pension funds, kind of the big traditional, risk averse, protect my capital, preserve my capital sort of mindset. We’ll naturally allocate some portfolio to Bitcoin as an asset class, an uncorrelated asset class with positive expected value. It’s exactly what you want to put into a portfolio.

Matt Zahab
So you said it might 4X to 5X the market cap as a whole. What’s this going to do to the price? And I know price predictions. Little wishy washy. I know it’s a cop out question on my end, but it’s what the listeners want. It’s what everyone wants. You got to give the people what they want. What’s this going to do to the price? Present day we’re sitting at around 47K, give or take. If this 4 to 5X is, are we really going to hit six figs Bitcoin? Will this mean that we bring this up to 200k, 100k? What’s your price prediction here in regards to Bitcoin maybe a year from now, in 2025?

Greg Magadini
Yeah, I think a year from now. The $100,000 mark is very clear. That’s sort of the obvious mark. But 4 to 5X really puts it at 200 to 250 in terms of twice. Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s totally in the cards. Another thing that’s really interesting with sort of a Bitcoin ETF, as opposed to the existing ETFs that we have that are built on top of like CME futures, I’m thinking of specifically BETO, is that as people allocate funds to these ETFs, well, all of a sudden we’re starting to get coins put into cold storage in order to sort of back up the underlying value of these ETFs. And so the trading float of Bitcoin on-chain or the active coins  on-chain , that’s going to slowly diminish as well. So you’ll sort of see sort of a more passive holding, a new entry of passive holders in Bitcoin. So the people who are really investing for the long term or doing a portfolio allocation, they’re not trading Bitcoin, they’re putting in a portfolio for multiple years. So that’s going to reduce the float, and I think that’s going to be pretty bullish as well for prices.

Matt Zahab
I love that. I’d love if you could give myself and the listeners a quick rundown on how the ETF actually works, because this is to my understanding, and I’ve done a fair bit of research in this regard. It differs from the traditional ETFs as most ETFs have a basket of traditional stocks and bonds, equities, you name it. Many of the ETFs here have cut their fees and have some wild cash and carry models. And I was wondering if there’s any downside to sort of the cash and carry model versus the redemption of underlying assets. Also, not being able to withdraw Bitcoin from the ETF itself is sort of wild and just sort of fortifies the point that you just brought up in regards to there’s going to be a huge supply shock when so much Bitcoin is being held in cold storage. And with institutional custodial masters like your Coinbases, so on and so forth, what, and how do sort of all of these ETFs work? How do they work? I’d love if you’d give just a quick rundown in that regard, and then we’ll keep buzzing on this subject.

Greg Magadini
Yeah, so one of the things that’s really interesting is if we compare to the past products like Grayscale’s GBTC, which is a closed end fund, basically they have Bitcoin that they hold and they issue shares against that. But essentially you can’t do a redemption process. So that’s why we saw at first a premium to net asset values in the Grayscale ETF or the Pink Sheets ETF closed in fund, and then a discount later on. If we look at regular ETFs like we’re finally getting now, there’s two kind of models for creation and redemption of shares. The process of creating and redeeming shares is to enable the actual price of the ETF to track the net asset value accurately. So we won’t get these types of premiums or discounts that we saw in Grayscale’s previous ETF. And then there’s in kind. So basically, like you said, creating and redeeming shares with actual Bitcoin or in cash, which is going to be like the cash equivalent value. So I think the process of doing the actual underlying for creating a redemption was sort of a new complexity, especially with digital assets that I think the SEC was not fully comfortable with. But you essentially are going to get the same monetary experience, or the same economic value in terms of experience by the cash creation and redemption scheme. So basically, people will buy and sell shares at the cash value of the theoretical underlying Bitcoin. So that’ll be a great way to have a clean ETF product. And then if we compare it to what’s existing right now in terms of BETO, which is going to be rolling to two front month contracts in CME, that’s going to be, again, a deviation of spot. So CME futures will sometimes trade at a premium to spot, sometimes they trade at a discount, and then there’s this kind of consistent contango or carry that grinds away the value of the ETFs itself. And so now, again, with the new spot ETF, that will be adjusted for as well, and we won’t have that type of persistent grind from the contango basis.

Matt Zahab
That’s huge. How funny are the names as well? Like some of these names that are coming off like, I love the tickers, rather, not the names, but you have HODL, you have, like, do you not find it wild that again, the biggest financial institutions in the world have picked literal memes for their tickers? Who would have thought that that would ever happen?

Greg Magadini
Yeah, I think that’s really funny and it’s like, super interesting. It’s also some of the more new ETF issuers that have those crazy names like VanEck has. They’re on Twitter, they’re posting funny memes and stuff like that. They’re really engaging in sort of this younger investor culture with memes and sort of inside jokes in the industry that crypto Twitter often pings back and forth. So we’ll see if that really attracts the investor base, because right now there’s going to be a lot of competition for assets between all the various ETFs. So we’ll see who really wins. But it’s cool to see A, sort of that meme culture being included with some of these firms, and then B, some of these firms are actually sharing some of their profit splits and giving it back to the Bitcoin core foundation. So I think stuff like that is really interesting.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, that is great. Speaking of the different ETFs, how the heck does one sort of choose which of the, I believe 11 right now perhaps 13. How does one choose which ETF to invest in? Is it as simple as whatever your financial advisor has ties to? Like, if you’re with VanEck, if you’re with BlackRock, whatever the case may be, all the fees seem pretty similar. Everyone seems to be giving back between two and a half to 10% to the Bitcoin foundation or Bitcoin developers. How does one choose which ETF to invest in?

Greg Magadini
Yeah, so that’s really interesting. So there’s going to be sort of different audiences, but the way that I would make this choice, what’s really interesting to me is going to be the options market that are listed on these ETFs. I think this is the catalyst to grow crypto vault trading. 5X, 10X. So what we’re going to see is, first of all, not every ETF is going to have options listed against it. So the ones that do have options listed against it are going to be, naturally, the more popular ones will get most of the volume. And then from there, it’s going to take a little bit of time to see which ETF actually has sort of that sticky volume, and then volume begets more volume. So I think that’s really how it’s going to play out. It’s going to be the ones with the options market. And then within the options market, who has the most liquidity and where are most people playing? And then I think once that’s settled, it’s going to be really hard to dislodge the winner from that.

Matt Zahab
And what about the price of these ETFs? Because again, a lot of people online, I had two friends called me yesterday TradFi friends who were like, oh, should I just buy the ETF at 47,000? And I’m like, look, I could be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure the ETF is not going to replicate the price of Bitcoin. This isn’t just a way into Bitcoin. They’re going to be priced how the owners of the ETF choose to price them. Is there going to be different pricing between everyone? Are they all going to be priced the same at the start and then sort of rise and fall in a correlative value? I’d love if you could walk me through sort of the process of how it gets priced and some of the price action we’re going to see when the ETFs do go for a rip and then fall down as well.

Greg Magadini
Yeah, so pricing is going to be another one of those levers where people are going to try to bet, or these companies are going to best try to estimate what’s the most attractive trading price. I expect most of the ETFs to be between $20 and $100, what the price will be. And we saw something similar back when CME launches futures. So you saw the same type of scheme in terms of contract multipliers. CME had a 5X contract, whereas Sibo was able to secure the 1X contract. And so theoretically, the 1X contract is a lot cleaner product. You’re trading one contract for one Bitcoin. But in the end, that wasn’t enough of a differentiator to win over the volume that CME was able to capture. So I think, again, it’s one of those levers, but I don’t think it’s the main thing that will drive adoption for a particular ETF.

Matt Zahab
Well said there. Last question on the ETF, Greg, unless there’s anything else that you’d love to divulge into, but the difference in Volatility and Implied Volatility in the crypto market and the effect on BTC price, I’d love if you could tie this into the Bitcoin ETF. What is this going to do to Volatility and Implied Volatility in crypto markets? As a whole in relation to the ETF finally being approved.

Greg Magadini
Yeah. So Implied Volatility is the options market’s best estimate or the pricing estimate of future Realized Volatility. And Realized Volatility is historically, how has this asset moved around? So if we look at the past four years of ball markets, we’ve had a consistent trend lower in Realized Volatility as Bitcoin has matured as an asset class. And I expect that that structural trend stays intact, but we have cyclical moments of higher Volatility. And so from mid October, the rally, as we broke above 30K with the sort of geopolitical conflicts going on in the Middle East, that was a catalyst for Cyclical Volatility that was quickly followed through by the ETF deadline and a narrative around the ETF decision. So we saw a nice pump in Realized Volatility and Implied Volatility as the options market was betting that we’d have a big vol event with this announcement. Turns out that the announcement itself had almost no Realized Volatility. So the options market overpriced the future movement. And I think that’s really one of the interesting things about crypto Volatility. I mean, crypto Volatility is really what I’m passionate about. And it’s one of these markets that not only do we not know the true value of cryptocurrencies as an asset class, but we even know less about the path of that valuation or the wiggles along the way, aka the Volatility of this asset class. So everyone’s trying to kind of figure this out on the fly. So it’s a really even playing field. And a lot of the most knowledgeable people will be people who are retail by definition, who’ve been around crypto for a long time and have a really good feel for it. So what we’re going to see here in terms of the path of future Volatility, I expect well capitalized investors to start maturing this market and making Volatility go down overall. But we’ll have some good episodes of interesting moments. And I think this is really when people who’ve been around for a while in the crypto space can really outperform.

Matt Zahab
Yeah. Take advantage of that. And that is exactly what you and the team do at Amberdata, and we are going to get into that in one quick second. But until then, Greg, we have to give a massive shout out to our sponsor of the show. And that is the one and only PrimeXBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. We love PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimexBT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. Use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEW50. CRYPTONEW50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with Greg. Let’s jump right into Amberdata. Give us the elevator pitch on what you and the team do, and then we’ll get into the nitty gritty here.

Greg Magadini
Yeah, so Amberdata is a diversified digital assets data company. So we have blockchain data, we have DeFi data, we have spot market data, and then we have futures, perpetuals, and options data. So my role is really being in charge of the derivatives data, futures, perps, and options. But what’s really interesting about Amberdata is that we have the whole data suite, and again, crypto is a new asset class. We don’t know how to value it. We don’t know how to figure out how to trade the ball yet. We’re still figuring all that out as a community. But what’s even more interesting is that there’s new data assets. So on-chain  data is a very interesting aspect, and there’s a lot of hidden treasures there that haven’t been figured out. And then combining that on-chain  data with derivatives data with spot data, especially in a fragmented market where there’s exchanges all over the place, say, in Korea and Japan and in North America and Europe, that often trade at different prices or have different sort of investor bases, it’s a great way to essentially find patterns in the market that haven’t been discovered yet.

Matt Zahab
Greg, you and the team at Amberdata compile so much data from absolutely everywhere, especially from CEXs. And no, we’re not talking about porn sex, or wild sex. We’re talking about centralized exchanges here, CEXs. We’re talking about data directly from the CME Dex pool data, decentralized exchanges, and offshore exchanges. How do you guys sort of pick and choose which data to pull? What data moves the needle, what doesn’t? And then how do you sort of pile it all together to actually build out futures markets, derivatives markets, options trading markets, how does that whole process work?

Greg Magadini
Yeah, so, typically, especially speaking for the derivatives element, if we’re looking at DeFi derivatives or centralized exchange derivatives, or TradFi derivatives, the number one thing that we start looking at, especially with the DeFi space, is how much adoption and engagement is occurring for a particular protocol. And so once we see that a particular protocol or a certain exchange has a lot of sort of volume and tight spreads and is trustworthy, then it becomes a real good candidate for us to include the data sets. Obviously, everyone’s limited resources, so we have to pick and choose sort of the best candidates for our developers to incorporate the data sets. And then we often create relationships with these exchanges or these protocols as well. And so chatting with the people who run these exchanges or run these protocols is a great way for us to understand sort of the quality behind the team and the product itself. And then from there, we will build features around it. We’ll consume the raw data, and then build derived data, works around that raw data, and really create actionable insights for our customers.

Matt Zahab
And derivatives as a whole. I’d love if you could just give a quick sort of TLDR on derivatives trading in crypto differs a little from traditional derivatives. I get asked this all the time. I never have a good answer for it, as I rarely dabble with any type of future options or derivative trading. But how exactly does a derivative trading platform work? And what advice would you sort of give to, maybe not a rookie, because I would never, ever advise a rookie to dabble with derivatives, but perhaps a crypto trader who is becoming more seasoned and wants to dabble with derivatives. How would you explain it to them? And what advice would you give them if they wanted to get into the space?

Greg Magadini
Yeah, so there’s kind of two core derivatives. There’s Delta One products and then nonlinear products. So delta one products are essentially linear, but they’re leveraged. So that’s really the futures and perpetuals of the world. You can think of being long or perpetual as a magnified position on the price going up or down, and you pay some sort of carry for that privilege. And so in a perpetual, the carry is periodic, say, every 8 hours in a future. It’s implicit in the future’s expiration. So a future that expires in three months might trade at a premium of $1,000 to the current Bitcoin price. And that is essentially the implied interest rate for being long that future, or what you would collect for being short that future. There’s really interesting cash and carry strategies you can do there, which are low risk as opposed to just betting on a magnified percentage move in the underlying. On the nonlinear side, which is Options, you have these payouts that are convex. And so you’re either taking convexity risk or you’re selling convexity risk. And that really comes down to what we analyze in the Implied Volatility markets. Convex payments essentially have a non symmetrical payout. So it’s sort of one of those things where if I win, I might win a much larger amount from long options than what I’m risking. But on the flip side, I sort of have a time decay component there. And so for that asymmetry, you pay a huge premium. And so you want to understand how that is being priced. And you do that by looking at the Options market. In terms of venues to trade these things, Deribit is sort of the most trusted and the largest venue in terms of nonlinear products. In terms of linear products, CME has now become number one space. So we can see the greatest open interest in CME futures as of today. And then again, the spot Bitcoin ETF is really going to be a nice place to expand the venues for North American traders, especially, who want to trade options on a product like Bitcoin.

Matt Zahab
Well said there. One of the things that I’m always curious about, how does options trading, because again, it’s still not massive, massive in crypto, but I feel like after the ETF is approved and it has been approved, I feel like it will become and continue to get bigger and bigger. How will this impact just traditional trading and pricing as a whole? Because if we have, let’s say, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in interest, in forward interest, where you have tons of people and traders and institutions who all have levered longs, let’s just use Bitcoin, for example, and everyone thinks Bitcoin is going to rip, and they all have levered longs open. I’d love if you could talk about some of the network effects, like how does that affect the average Joe like myself, who doesn’t dabble in those types of products too often, what are the implications? What are the network effects of that?

Greg Magadini
Yeah, so that’s actually a really interesting perspective, and I actually think it’s a counterintuitive answer. So although options enable traders to take more speculative risk if they choose to, truly what options do is that they’re like insurance, and they allow you to isolate the risk you want to take and defer the risk you don’t want to take. So in a lot of ways, what happens is that big investors, what they’ll do is they’ll derisk their Bitcoin exposure or their stock exposure. You see this in equity indexes a lot, and what they’ll do is that they’ll sell calls and buy puts and essentially reduce the Volatility of their exposure in one place and then transfer that risk to a market participant who’s willing to take that risk. So that’s typically like a market maker or a speculator on the other side. So what you could actually see is that it’s going to be part of the maturing process that should theoretically, over time, bring Volatility down. Now, one caveat here is that, again, with leveraged products, although most of the time I do think it’s going to be a derisking event because it allows people to derisk, in certain scenarios, the variance of variance, meaning there’ll be episodes where Volatility will be increased if everyone’s leaning on the same side and we get some sort of like magnified event that could bring Volatility of Volatility higher. So most of the time Volatility is low, but all of a sudden it can flip on a dime. And so that’s one of those things to keep in mind, but that’s how I think about it.

Matt Zahab
Interesting, very interesting. Let’s get into some hot takes here, Greg, you’ve been on fire. You’ve been on an absolute roll. Doesn’t have to be price predictions, but will we continue to see sort of the present day narratives and trends keep ripping? Like the Solana ecosystem being on fire, Bitcoin going to 100k, ETH struggling with its sort of OG narrative being sort of digital gas for the ecosystem. What trends and hot takes do you have for crypto and 2024?

Greg Magadini
Yeah, so I think ETH the big sort of headwind there is, what is going to be the regulatory landscape for Ethereum? Again, EIP 1559 is really bullish in the sense that it can actively reduce the supply of Ethereum if transaction fees are high enough and frequent enough but Ethereum is still not still ambiguous. Is it a commodity or is it a security? And then all the protocols or the ERC-20 projects built on top of Ethereum are sort of falling into the security bucket. And so I kind of wonder out loud if there’s less activity on Ethereum because DeFi protocols are being sort of scrutinized in the regulatory landscape. Well, does that change the value proposition of EIP 1559? And then does that flip Ethereum from a deflationary asset to an inflationary asset? So that’s something that’s kind of interesting to me. I do think Ethereum has been a laggard, and I do expect it to catch up like we’ve been seeing recently. But again, to me, the big line there is going to be the regulatory landscape in terms of Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin has proved itself in 2023 to be a very interesting non correlated, positive expected value investable asset. What I mean by that is that Bitcoin rallied when everything else was crashing. SVB, banking crisis. Bitcoin benefited a lot from that. And then the terror attacks in Israel in mid October, Bitcoin benefited from that as well. We saw similar price action with the Ukraine and Russia crisis or Russia war a couple of years back. So it’s one of those situations that I think Bitcoin is proving itself to be a safe haven. But if we get a bull market you know, true, proper bull market, historically all coins outperform. So that’s sort of the trade off.

Matt Zahab
Interesting. What about Solana? Any takes on Solana? Everyone talk of the town right now went from $9 to $100 in what, 6, 7, 8 months, still room to grow there.

Greg Magadini
So Solana is actually not a crypto I’ve been following very closely. I kind of just forgot about it after FTX crashed. I know that Deribit is going to launch Solana options once again. And so it’ll be interesting to see when that option market comes back for Solana, what sort of adoption we see there in the derivatives market. But yeah, obviously it’s been on fire. I don’t have a good take on Solana, though, personally.

Matt Zahab
Greg, you have been on an absolute roll. One last plug for Amberdata. If an institution or anyone is looking to get involved, how do they get involved? What kind of products can you offer them in order for you guys to work together? Give one last Amberdata pitch, then we’ll wrap up and we will let our listeners know where they can find you and Amberdata online and on socials.

Greg Magadini
Yeah, thank you so much. So if anyone’s interested in working with us and visiting some of our data sets, you can contact us at hello @Amberdataio. If you want to visit our GUI where you can see all the derivatives metrics, including option volatilities. We have a free tiered version GUI website that’s pro.amberdata.io. You can also find a lot of our commentary online. That’s at amberdataderivatives.substack.com. And lastly, if you look at Amberdata Derivatives in YouTube, you will see a lot of our content as well. So those are great places to get in touch with us. And then lastly, if the data sets that we offer are blockchain data, DeFi data, market data, that’s spot prices around the world on various venues, and then derivatives data, perps, futures and options.

Matt Zahab
Love it, Greg. Thank you so much. And lastly, you got to plug yourself. Where can our listeners find you online and on socials.

Greg Magadini
Yes, my Twitter is @genesisvol. And then lastly, we have our own podcast as well. And if you just visit Amberdata Derivatives in your podcast provider, you’ll see our podcast as well.

Matt Zahab
Love it. Greg, thank you so much for coming on. You were on fire. You crushed it. You explained some very complex topics to myself and our listeners, and we love that. So thanks a lot for coming on. Wishing you and the team all the best and can’t wait to have you on for round two.

Greg Magadini
Yeah, thank you so much, Matt. Really appreciate it.

Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Greg Magadini, Director of Derivatives at Amberdata. He was absolutely on fire this episode. We talked everything Bitcoin ETF approval, Volatility on-chain data, futures, you name it, we got into it. Love to see it. Huge shout out to Greg and the team for making this happen. Listeners love you guys. Thank you as always, episode 300, absolutely massive. Couldn’t do this without you, especially my team. Love you guys thank you for everything. Justas my amazing sound editor. 300 episodes in. You are the man and the listeners again, love you guys. Thank you so much. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.

The post Greg Magadini, Director of Derivatives at Amberdata, on the Bitcoin ETF Approval, Volatility, and Crypto Derivatives | Ep. 300 appeared first on Cryptonews.

About Dan O’Prey

Dan O’Prey is Bakkt’s Chief Product Officer. Dan most recently served as Chief Strategy Officer as part of the executive team at Digital Asset, creators of the Daml smart contract language. He was responsible for defining the corporate strategy and aligning the top-level product strategy, assisted with over $300 MM of financing, and oversaw marketing and communications across the firm. Dan joined Digital Asset as part of the acquisition of Hyperledger, the first permissioned distributed ledger platform, where he was co-founder and CEO. Dan then co-led the creation of Hyperledger at The Linux Foundation, where he participated at the board level since inception and was elected as the Chair of the Marketing Committee for 3 consecutive terms.

Prior to Hyperledger, Dan was the Co-Founder and CEO of MadeiraCloud, a Sequoia Capital-backed SaaS company for designing, monitoring, and managing cloud infrastructure resources based in Beijing, China. The company later rebranded to HyperHQ and was acquired by Ant Financial. Dan is a frequent public speaker and co-created the Synchronize DLT and Crypto conference. He holds a BA in Business Management and Information Management from the Sheffield University Management School.

Dan O’Prey gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• Bitcoin ETF – it could trigger other applications being approved and would likely encourage greater institutional adoption
• Bitcoin in public markets – exposure to the crypto market via trusted public markets
• 2024 outlook & Bakkt’s key focus areas
• Custody – recent industry events have shown the importance of a secure, regulated, and qualified custodian
• Lightning – cross-border remittances, B2B settlement, instantaneous deposits and withdrawals for trading, and global, interoperable P2P

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, and we have some big news this week, folks. By the time you are listening to this episode, we very well may have a Bitcoin ETF hot and ready, or we could not. It’s an absolute shit show right now. No one knows if it’s going to happen. It’s looking good. Gensler just threw out a tweet a couple days ago warning people about buying and using crypto assets. I personally think that’s bullish as hell. I think that’s a good sign. I think he’s setting the stage. I think he’s laying some pavement for us. And I can’t wait to get into all of the Bitcoin ETF talk and everything back related with the star of the show today, Dan O’Prey, Chief Product Officer at Bakkt. Dan most recently served as Chief Strategy Officer as part of the executive team at Digital Asset, Creators of the Daml smart contract language. He’s a true veteran and has been in the space for over ten years. Crazy to think about that. He was responsible for defining the corporate strategy and aligning of the top level product strategy, assisted with over 300 mil of financing Wowza, and oversaw everything marketing and communications related. He was also part of the acquisition of Hyperledger, the first permissioned distributed ledger platform where he was Co-Founder and CEO. Super pumped to have you on. Dan, welcome to the show, my friend. How you doing?

Dan O’Prey
Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Real pleasure to be here and excited to talk about. It’s an exciting time, as you say at the moment.

Matt Zahab
It is. We’ve been waiting for this for a hot minute. Years and years and years. It’s finally happening. Folks, we are recording this episode two days before you will hear it on the 11th. Dan and I are recording on Tuesday, January 9th. Huge news. Everything ETF related. Is this going to happen, Dan? What is this going to do to the market? Give us your 360 degree take on the ETF. Give me the good, give me the bad, give me it all. 

Dan O’Prey
Yeah. So, wow. Asking for a prediction the day before. We’re expected to hear on that the first batch of the 13 ETFs that are looking to be approved. To be honest, I’m not sure if tomorrow will be the day or not, but to me it doesn’t matter as much the particular day. I think really it’s inevitable now and we’re getting into the final stretch. So whether it’s tomorrow, weeks, or even a couple of months, the spot ETF are going to get approved in some fashion. I think, as you say, it’s far too far down the line. We’ve seen multiple revisions and tweaks that the SEC have been requesting of these ETF of the kind of details that only suggest that they’re refining prior to approval, such as the cash redemption portion and lots of changes over the last couple of days and the filings from the various ETF providers. So it may well be tomorrow or yesterday when this goes out, but I think it’s still, you never know with the SEC, given their historical stance towards these. There’s always a lot more to button up and little I’s to dot and T’s to cross. So we could well see a few more tweaks before they finally get approved. But I think it’s extremely likely in the short term at this point.

Matt Zahab
Let’s put on our bearish hat for a second. Everyone on Twitter has said if it doesn’t get approved, everything is going to get absolutely nuked. I hate to be a bear in any capacity of life, especially when it comes to Bitcoin or crypto or Blockchain. If for whatever reason, this doesn’t get approved, are we going to see an absolute nuke? Is it going to be World War III for crypto? What’s going to happen there?

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, great question. I don’t think so. It’s the short answer. I think if it doesn’t get approved, it’ll come with a caveat of why and there’ll be one or two more specific changes that they’re looking for. So I can’t imagine it’s going to be a blanket, not approved. It’ll be to the ETF providers themselves not approved, but because of x and y, and I can’t imagine those are going to be substantial roadblocks. So we may see a short term hit to the market as everyone is presuming everything is going to go ahead tomorrow. But still, I think that will be short term, if at all, as we’re still marching towards that same end state.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, no, I completely agree there and really hope it does go through. Now, let’s flip the switch here. Let’s put on our bullish hats for a second. If this goes through, what does this do for the rest of the market? Is this the parade we’ve all been waiting for when massive institutional investors come in? Is this going to pump the price of Bitcoin? Is this going to increase mass adoption as a whole, not just on Bitcoin, but as the crypto market, as a whole, let’s just say that this does go through either before this episode airs or slightly after this episode airs. What does that do for the rest of 2024 crypto markets?

Dan O’Prey
It’s huge. I think everyone’s anticipating how large and making very large price predictions. It is massive. I don’t want to get too carried away with it because it is just a significant step towards the mainstreaming and institutionalization of Bitcoin in particular, but potentially more towards crypto generally. And it really, A, opens up, obviously a lot of potential for capital inflows from retail investing market, from pension funds and IRAs and capital that can’t go directly into spot Bitcoin or doesn’t have a vehicle for that today. And B, really gives it the credibility, like the rubber stamping that it gives to people within businesses, within institutions who maybe were a bit shy or didn’t want to say to their boss, hey, we should do something in Bitcoin now. Spot ETF with the SEC is approved. You’ve got BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, and it’s trading on national stock exchanges. So it really does change the game in terms of opening the door for capital as well as giving that stamp of approval that, hey, this is a serious asset class that you’re allowed to take seriously and you’re allowed to participate in now, given the types of players who are in the game and the quantities of money we expect to see involved.

Matt Zahab
And what about the 13 applicants that we currently have? Full disclosure here, Dan, I’m a bit of a rookie when it comes to ETF. I invest in a couple of ETF, but I really have no clue how the approval process works. Is the SEC just going to give everyone a kick at the can? Is it going to be one or two to start? Is it just going to be one half of them? I’d love if you could walk me through if you do know about this subject and sort of give us the lay the land in regards to how the SEC is going to roll out this whole ETF approval process.

Dan O’Prey
My guess is that it’ll be close to an all or nothing. I think it’d be very hard for the SEC to sort of pick winners and losers. And given these applications have been going for quite some time now and a lot of dialogue and feedback has been given to each of them, I’d be very surprised if they haven’t all coalesced towards something that the SEC finds acceptable or they all haven’t at this point. So maybe there’ll be one or two that doesn’t quite make the bar, but really with the ETF space, it very much is a sort of first mover advantage. The earlier, the better. The momentum, the branding. The size of the ETF really does tend to be that several winner takes all, but not far off it. So if the regulators were to approve one or two, they would essentially be blessing those two as the most likely long term winners relative to the others. And given the length of time, I’d struggle to imagine they haven’t all coalesced around something that either is or isn’t. Pretty sick at this point.

Matt Zahab
I love some of the tickers too. I believe it’s Valkyrie. I could be wrong, but their ticker is HODL, which is just absolutely phenomenal. I just can’t wait for this. This is going to be so much fun. And let’s just segue into Bakkt as well here. I’d love if you could give us an elevator pitch on Bakkt, just so the listeners can have a bit of an idea of what we’re going to talk about when we get into the nitty gritty, and then just sort of tie that into how the ETF is going to help your business expand as well.

Dan O’Prey
Sure. Yeah. So Bakkt formed in about four years ago, so we actually spun out of the intercontinental exchange, or commonly known as ICE. So they’re one of the largest and futures exchanges in the world and own a bunch of different exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange. So we were sort of incubated within them as the crypto division and then spun out to be an independent company. And we’ve since gone public on the New York Stock Exchange as well. So one of two publicly traded qualified custodians that I’m sure we’ll talk about a lot more alongside Coinbase. And really we’re very much focused on being the infrastructure and platform plumbing behind enabling institutions to participate in this space, as well as enabling retail facing companies that aren’t crypto native necessarily, who don’t have necessarily on the license, the infrastructure, the custody, the liquidity, the banking relationships for on ramps. So we’re on the one hand, powering a lot of trading for large retail brokerages, behind the scenes for crypto trading, and on the other, enabling institutions to participate in the space initially through our custody solution. So very much behind the scenes. We’re not a direct to consumer brand. Our play is really much more horizontally looking to power multiple companies rather than be an avertly integrated end to end offer us.

Matt Zahab
I love that. And one thing that I’m very curious about here Dan is someone who, when I first got into the space back in sort of 2019 2020, I didn’t want to put too many eggs into the just crypto basket. And I invested in a lot of companies similar to yourselves where I can use my, again I’m a Canadian, so it’s your version of the 401K kind of thing. We have an RRSP and a TFSA, just tax free investment vehicles where you can invest in stocks and ETF and so on and so forth and set it aside for a rainy day. And also, again, it’s tax free. That’s the biggest thing. I put a lot of money into stocks and publicly traded companies that have crypto on their balance sheet or are crypto custodians or do anything in the space similar to yourself. Right? A lot of infrastructure companies. As I figured, this is a good way for me to get exposure and not have to deal with all the crypto stuff. And obviously tax free. Was any of this part of your decision to go public on the best, realistically, the best stock exchange in the world? Was there ever discussion to launch a coin, an ICO, or from day one, was it always, let’s just go public, this is the right thing to do. This gives us more clout, this gives us more legitimacy, a better reputation, better branding. I’d love if you could sort of divulge the thought process behind going public as a stock.

Dan O’Prey
So I joined two and a half years ago. So it was the same year that we went public. I wasn’t at Bakkt since day one, but I think I can pretty confidently say I don’t think an ICO. I’m sure it was someone brought it up at some point. But Bakkt positioning in the space has very much been on the conservative, dependable, reliable, responsible end of the spectrum. We’re highly regulated. We’re trying to take the slow but steady approach. We know that this market is going to have ups and downs and bad players are going to come in and exit, as we’ve seen over the last few years, and really in the long term, as we get regulatory clarity as the market matures. I say long term, but not too long from now. That really a company that is compliant and regulatory friendly and working to some extent with the regulators to ensure that this is a safe and sound market for participants to come into, and given that we took a far more a traditional approach and wanted to make sure that we had access to the capital markets that being public brings you, as well as actually, as a nice side effect of that, it’s been a very large validation of our approach. When people are looking for companies, knowing that you’re public and you’re audited and your financials are available is a very different game, especially when you’re perhaps a much more conservative institution who doesn’t want to take risks as they’re entering what’s already perceived to be, or has been perceived to be a risky space.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, well said there. I hate to get into anything stock price related or coin price related, but one of the really interesting things with all publicly traded companies that have crypto exposure, whether they hold crypto assets or directly deal with crypto similar to yourselves, there’s almost always a correlative price action to Bitcoin and the crypto market as a whole. You guys are pretty similar in that regard as well. You’ve had a great couple months. Stock is looking super nice right now. It’s gone up a considerable amount. Is this going to change and will the Bitcoin ETF impact this in any capacity? Like me personally, Dan, I think if and when it gets approved, hopefully when it gets approved, I think all the Hut 8, the Marathon, the Michael Saylor MicroStrategy, the Coinbase, I feel like every company that’s publicly traded and has crypto exposure is going to take a little jump. And as more institutional money comes in, I feel like a lot of people are going to be like, okay, how can I get more exposure besides ETF? And they won’t want to invest in actual crypto coins themselves, but will want to invest in publicly traded vehicles that give exposure to crypto assets. Am I completely out the lunch there? What’s the deal with that?

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, I think it would be really interesting to see what the knock on effects are, as you say. Right? There is very much the bullcase, as you described, as it being sort of an entry point or a gateway into the wider ecosystem for those who wouldn’t necessarily have gone and signed up to a crypto exchange, transferred money across and put their cold, hard cash into crypto directly. But now their brokers and their IRAs are going to be making this available, in some cases promoting it to as a potential investment to people who hadn’t even considered it before. And that really will be their first step for a lot of people. And once they take that first step, obviously, depending on how well it performs, but assuming that the market continues to trend in this direction, as you say, people, I imagine, will look for other ways to get exposure. You mentioned mining companies, which have always been an interesting way to in some extent get leverage position. It’ll be interesting for companies like microstrategy as well who are holding large amounts of Bitcoin in addition to their software business, how a spot ETF impacts the investment around those as well. Then hopefully this will also be a stepping point down the road to people looking to buy Bitcoin directly and get direct exposure once they become comfortable with it as a regulated security trading on a stock exchange. I know the fees are looking very competitive. Over the last few days, we’ve seen a lot of compression there, as everyone sees, for a land grab to get that initial volume and the ball rolling. But I think it would also be quite positive for those that trade in spot commodity Bitcoin, as over time people look to just, I can just buy this directly as well and maybe even learn about self custody down the line too. Overall think it’s going to be a huge, just gateway into the wider ecosystem and massively positive from that regard.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, let’s hope the floodgates open there. You just brought up custody. Let’s jump into it. You guys have literally best in class infrastructure and the market has resonated with that and understands that you guys, multilayer technology, MPC, cryptography. I could go on and on, but you can explain this much better than I can. I’d love if you could talk about how world class your guys custody is and just sort of if you could segue into when you’re speaking with institutions who do choose you guys to hold their coins, what kind of questions did they ask where they’re like, hey, why should we go with you over Coinbase? Or why should we go with you over whoever else may also have a world class custody solution. I’ve never dealt with this again, I’m not a whale. There’s no point for me to be going to a massive institution like you guys for custody related, but when there is a massive institution, what kind of conversations do they have? What kind of questions do they ask you in regards to why should we go with you guys? I’d love if you could touch on your custody solution and why people end up going with you after the whole qubit and shabam is all said and done.

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, and in some ways it’s a very competitive space and in some ways it’s a very differentiated space still. So I think, again, sort of given that the last couple of years, quality custody has really been highlighted as something to take extremely seriously, not that people, but even another reminders of how critical that is. And I think generally, the crypto industry is a little immature in terms of the market structure for how the different entities within the crypto space enable institutions to participate. And by that, I mean you have companies where they do everything right. They’re the custodian, they’re the exchange, they’re the clearinghouse, essentially. They’re broker, in some cases have a prop trading company, and they’re all in one single legal entity. Whereas if you look at, like, say, US equities market, all these different things are broken out into deliberately different legal entities, so that if an exchange like FTX goes bankrupt, the funds aren’t at risk because the assets are held at a bankrupt remote custodian. And so that segregation of duties and roles is really important. And given our institutional heritage, that’s where we were born and where we started and where the original custody solution was designed to meet. And that sort of really shone through over the last year, several years, as we’ve massively reinvested in our custody solution. But also the market started to appreciate some of the approaches that we took and why those are so important. So to your question, we’re a New York Department of Financial Services trust chartered company, and why DFS are considered kind of the gold standard and creme de la creme of the strictest regulators in this space. I mean, they issued the bit license multiple years ago. And so we have a separate legal entity, a trust that’s regulated by New York, where all the assets are held, that has an independent board of managers, it’s chaired by the chairwoman of New York Stock Exchange, very much a legally, completely separate company. We’re not an exchange ourselves. We don’t take proprietary positions. We don’t take risk. So if, God forbid, anything happened to the remainder of Bakkt, that trust company is remote from anything in that. And the remainder of the company doesn’t take the certain kinds of risks that exchanges or prop trading companies have. So being a trust company being independent, as mentioned, being a public company, audited, and financials being public is super valuable and helpful. And, you know, if you look at the number of companies that even just tick those boxes, it’s very few.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, few and far. Well said there. Dan, we got to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. But when we get back, we are going to talk about how bananas the last half of 2023 has been versus the second half of 2022. You guys saw up to ten times qualified sales opportunities. The market is, for a lack of better terms, horny for Bitcoin and crypto, and we are going to get into that. But until that huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. You guys know who this is. This is PrimeXBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. We love them as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that deposit, that is, 50% will be deposited and credited to your trading account. Again, promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with Dan. You guys said that qualified sales opportunities were up ten times in the first half of 2023 versus the second half of 2022. This is just the first half of 2023. Not even talking about the second half. How horny is the market right now? You guys have a good gauge on the horniness better than most, as people are coming to you for custody to hold their coins for everything. How horny are people right now Dan?

Dan O’Prey
It’s a great metric I’m going to have to take back and start to measure as a key KPI internally. Yeah, it’s been a complete 180 from this time last year. Obviously the bar was somewhat low then, with multiple very high profile examples and money being lost and bad actors to say the least. But that said, it has been extremely encouraging how quickly the market has rebounded. I’ve always thought it’s mentioned I’ve been in the Blockchain space for ten years now, seen a few bears, and the market does tend to have a fairly short memory and is here for the long term, tends to come back pretty rapidly. This was quite a long bear market. But yeah, really the level of credibility that’s sort of come back. How quickly the market has rebounded from what were some of the biggest scandals, not just in crypto, but in business financial market history. To now be where we are talking about a spot ETF potentially being improved tomorrow is an incredible sort of turnaround and really a sign if anyone still needed one, that misses here to stay and that actually the fundamentals are unchanged by some actors on the bad actors on the edges. So yeah, it’s been fantastic for us. I mean, both actually, selfishly, as the product guy, having a bit of a breather and having six months to sort of focus and build and determine where we’re going to go next. Bear markets are for builders and it was nice in a way, in a sense, to not have all the hype and buzz and fads that were sort of coming and going when the market was as fought as it was, and every day there was a new shiny toy and distraction and potential products we could build and interest in this and that and that fuzzy buzzy interest has since faded and gone back to really, what are the core pieces, which are custody, trading and then also starting to invest in the payment space as well. So it was nice for me to have that focus time, and then it’s been amazing for us and everyone in the space to see how quickly everything has returned. And the interest in crypto remakes extremely high and only growing and hopefully soon to be taken to the next level.

Matt Zahab
It is crazy how quickly the sentiment changes. I’m sure. Of course, you remember literally a year and a half ago, like mid 2022, when it was just like, what are we doing? Like, even the sentiment on the podcast was much different. I don’t want to say not as fun, because it was still fun speaking to really intelligent people like yourselves, but the whole sentiment was just different. Twitter wasn’t the best kind of dumpster fire ever. All type of crypto communities were buzzing. There was no buzz in the air, no positivity. Extremely negative, you know, the SBF trickle effects, the network effects were still extremely present. And now it just seems like the party, it still hasn’t seemed like the party is fully started, but it’s just so much fun. And one thing I would love, someone has to make a movie about this. Like just the whole process of the last three, four years. Heck, even maybe the whole crypto cycle as a whole. But I would love to watch a good documentary or a good series on all this banana lands. I think it’d be a hoop.

Dan O’Prey
I think there’s definitely a series in there and then not just the movie. I agree. It’s been a fascinating time, crazy to be part of and watch unfold and even things that no one could have predicted quite the level of what was going on. So it’s been incredible. And I think while, as you say, it was bad for the industry and less fun, I think it is also positive for the market to have had the clear out and have had that reminder that not everything is a good investment and you should do your due diligence and you should invest in companies that have bought that crazy concept of. So that was the level that tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown around with very little oversight and due diligence being performed. And that meant that capital was going where it shouldn’t have and maybe not to where it should have. And so it’s a great reminder, I think, to the space to not everything is going to be valuable. Not every company is going to be around forever. Look for those who are doing it right, who are playing the long game, who are trying to do things by the book and not just make a quick buck, because those are the companies that are going to be the monsters in 5, 10 years.

Matt Zahab
Well said. There a couple more topics here, Dan, and then we’ll wrap up. Lightning network, you brought up payments a couple of minutes ago. This is still an aspect of Bitcoin that needs to giddy up. We need the train to leave the station for everything payments related. We’ve seen it with Ordinals, we’ve seen it with a lot of applications being built on the Bitcoin network. It’s still far too slow. It does not allow us to really crank up the mass adoption radar. You guys have dabbled in this space. You guys have more than just dabbled. You guys are building and executing and shipping a bunch of really cool things in this space. B2B settlements, instantaneous deposits, withdrawals, global trading, interoperable peer to peer trading. How has Lightning impacted your business and how are you guys building within on the Lightning Network present day?

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, I think as you mentioned at the beginning, right? We can talk about the ETF and the halvening and these kind of like big investment events, and these are fantastic for bringing money and credibility into the space, but they are still investment, right? They’re trading their investment and that is still the primary mass market use case for crypto and not pure utility. So really the investment, the speculation ultimately, I believe, is based on ultimately one day these things actually being used for a mainstream mass market use case that normal people who may not even care about Bitcoin or crypto or know it’s being used get value from. In the same way, most people today don’t know what TCP IP is and don’t need to know what it is. They can just use products which leverage it and get everyday value out of it. That’s where I see sort of the next major mainstream adoption driver being for Bitcoin in particular. And Satoshi’s white paper’s title was Bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic hash system, not Bitcoin a digital gold that you hoard and hold but go know. I think not everything Satoshi said was perfect. He’s not a God, but that was what it was originally designed for and that is still the best in my opinion, by far the best use case. Having an Internet native instrument of value that no one controls in the same way that no one controls the Internet, or in fact even less so than how people control the Internet will be absolutely massive for global commerce, for remittances, for programmable payments, for streaming, right? As people can actually stream sats while they’re watching a podcast and pay instead of 99 a month or whatever it may be. It’s obviously been a use case that people talk about a lot and has had a lot of attention but still hasn’t quite happened. And I think with the Lightning Network in particular that scalability, instantaneous settlement, near zero fees has been a massive game changer and Lightning is now four or five years old and getting to the stage where it’s starting to be mature enough to operate at scale and a lot of companies are taking it very seriously and making investments there. And I think that FIAT to FIAT use case where users don’t necessarily know they’re using Lightning or Bitcoin and don’t care, they just send dollars. Someone receives dollars or someone receives pesos. And behind the scenes that’s going in and out of Bitcoin and Lightning, I think is still going to be the killer app which really drives the person on the street who doesn’t care about Bitcoin to actually use it.

Matt Zahab
Well said there. Dan last question here before we wrap up, mate. 2024 outlook. Besides Bitcoin, we’ve discussed a lot about Bitcoin. It’s been the bread and butter of the show along with yourself and Bakkt any other non Bitcoin crypto related topics. Any hot takes you have for 2024 can be good, can be bad. What do you got for hot takes in the crypto market for this coming year?

Dan O’Prey
I’ll answer in the reverse in that I think the hot take is that Bitcoin is going to start to really stand out from the rest of the market for the remainder of the year, not just with the spot ETF, but the understanding and appreciation that Bitcoin is unique as an asset within the crypto space. And really there is no crypto space in the same way there’s no Internet space. There’s a bunch of different markets within that. So yeah, my hot take is that Bitcoin will not just continue to be the primary asset, but will actually start to pull further ahead in terms of institutional adoption acceptance, regulatory acceptance that we’ve already seen. It’s got a unique standing in. So I guess that would be my hottest take.

Matt Zahab
I love it. I mean, that’d be incredible for the market. And as we’ve seen in the past, when Bitcoin rips, everything else follows. So let’s hope that’s all we can do. Dan, incredible episode. Thank you so much for coming on, man. Really appreciate it. And for the non listeners, for the viewers who are watching on YouTube or Insta or TikTok or our website, wherever it may be, Dan’s background is absolutely electric. Dan, we got to finish with that. When did you kick up that background? I believe you said it was Covid related. It’s one of the best ones I’ve seen. It looks like a very cozy home office. What’s the story behind that?

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, I’ve got a little room which sticks out the side of my house, which unfortunately in New Jersey, it’s snowing, so it’s pretty freezing in here at the moment. That’s the one downside, but nice to have a little bit of space. And what you can’t see is I’ve built out a whole bunch of stuff in front of me. So now I’ve got multiple screens and all of that. So, yeah, just during COVID you know had nothing else to do other than invest in my home office and built out a gaming pc and just started adding and adding. So took a little bit of tidying up to do for those who are watching on video. But yeah, Lightning how it’s turning out. Thanks for that.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Dan, what an episode. Really appreciate you coming on, my man. Before you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Bakkt online and on socials.

Dan O’Prey
Sure thing. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. So it’s bakkt.com or on Twitter and @danoprey on Twitter mostly.

Matt Zahab
Amazing. Dan, what an episode. Really appreciate it. Can’t wait to have you and the team on for round two. And as always, folks, I will include everything in the show notes, huge shout out to Dan for coming on the show. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I, speaking of the team, love you guys so much. Thank you for everything as always. Justas, my amazing sound editor. Appreciate you, my man. And back to the listeners. Love you guys, keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.

The post Dan O’Prey, Chief Product Officer of Bakkt, on The Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin in Public Markets, Custody, and Lightning Network | Ep. 299 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Aaron Evans, Head of Operations at Moonbeam Foundation, talks about blockchain scalability, emerging markets for blockchain, and the case for diverse models of scalability.

About Aaron Evans

Aaron Evans is Head of Operations at Moonbeam Foundation. Aaron is an experienced software engineer, executive, and technical leader. He has been working with Moonbeam and ecosystem projects since 2021. He is skilled in crypto, people management, and startups.Aaron Evans gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• Blockchain scalability: The naivete of the conclusion that Ethereum + L2s are the only way forward (with considerations including rising fees, lack of connectivity, centralization, etc).
• The case for diverse models of scalability, including scalable L1s (Solana, Sui, Aptos, etc.) and parachain-type solutions.
• Decentralization / Governance: Projects that have neglected decentralization during the bear market will be revealed as just more centrally controlled tech companies during the bull.
• Apart from philosophy, there is a real business case to make for projects with decentralized control and ownership.
• Emerging markets for blockchain: In key areas, including Latin America, there is pent-up demand for better economic solutions than have been made available by TradFi and governments. Blockchain creates major opportunities for people in these areas to leapfrog into cutting-edge tech.

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zahab. We are buzzing, as always. Still coming in hot from Toronto, still freezing my tush off. And I’m super pumped to have today’s guest on the show coming in hot, 5 hours away from me in the capital of Canada. And I bet most of you guys, if I asked you what is the capital of Canada? I would say 80% of you would probably say Toronto. But the capital is actually Ottawa, a beautiful city 5 hours away from Toronto. And this is where our guest is coming in hot from today. We have Aaron Evans, Head of Operations at Moonbeam Foundation. Aaron is an experienced software engineer, executive, and technical leader who has been working with Moonbeam and ecosystem projects since 2021. This guy is a jack of all trades and is especially skilled in crypto people, management, and startups. He’s done it all. Super pumped to have a fellow Canadian on the show. Aaron, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you doing?Aaron Evans
I’m great. Thank you very much for having me, Matt. Really appreciate it. I’m super excited to be on the show.Matt Zahab
Pumped to have you on. Always nice to have a Canadian on board, and it’s always cool when I have someone a little close by. My last guest was in Singapore, and I was recording at night. She was in the morning, and it’s like, wow, it’s crazy how the world works. But glad to have you close by. Today, folks, we are recording on Wednesday, January 3. When you listen to this episode, it will be on Monday, January 8. We just had a multibillion dollar liquidation. The Bitcoin wick went from 45 straight down to 41, and this was on the news of I forget who the firm was, someone I’ve never even heard of before throwing out a tweet.Aaron Evans
Matrix Port.Matt Zahab
Yeah, Matrix Port. I’m like, how do these guys have so much pull? I’ve never even heard of them. Have you?Aaron Evans
No, I hadn’t heard of them. And it’s like one guy’s opinion, I think, or something I don’t know. Matt Zahab
Exactly. It’s like the Cointelegraph intern who threw out the Bitcoin ETF approved Tweet and gave us the $4,000 wick. Now we have the bad color red, $4,000 wick. Aaron, what’s going on here? When is crypto finally going to have a little bit more legitimacy? And when are these crazy wicks going to stop? Will they ever stop? What’s your two cent on this whole massive liquidation?Aaron Evans
I don’t know. Crypto is just crazy, right? And just wild swings, and I think that things will level out the more mainstream it becomes. And I think it’s just so still, so early in its history and so forth that and there’s so much sort of speculation around it. But over time, as the technology matures, becomes firmly embedded in enterprise applications and so forth under the hood, then people pay less attention to the individual technology stacks and this kind of thing. And maybe some of the wild speculation will go away. But on the other hand, you have DeFi. I think that’s just runs 24/7 unlike traditional markets. So who knows? Maybe we’ll be in for a wild ride forever. I don’t know. But I don’t know what’s going on with this latest ETF news. Who knows if this guy has the inside track? It beats me. Last I heard, it was pretty much a lock. For just like mid January or so forth. So who knows?Matt Zahab
Part of me also thinks this is like, again, if I’m BlackRock and I’m the biggest asset manager in the world, in the whole wide world, part of me is like, okay, if I’m going to launch this thing and I’m going to have to buy, and mind you, if it goes down, they’ve definitely already bought tens of thousands of Bitcoin. They’re definitely already accumulating. They could very well be the catalyst behind this sort of October to present day, early January rip that we’ve had. But if I’m BlackRock, I definitely want to tank the price a little bit more before we launch this thing. You know what mean, like, and if I have that much power and I know that Blackrock does have this much like, that’s what I’m doing personally.Aaron Evans
I suppose I kind of got to be a little bit careful to raise the IR of the SEC by doing some market manipulation. But who knows? Maybe you’re right. I think the thing with this sort of cash versus in kind contributions, this plays a little bit of trickiness as well, because they can’t just take the Bitcoin that they have and load it into the ETF. They’ll have to do some kind of cash transaction. You kind of wonder where that runs through, who does those transactions and how that impacts the market as well.Matt Zahab
100%. Let’s get into the bread and butter of the show here. Two parts, first is you, second is Moonbeam. We’ll start with Moonbeam. Walk me through Moonbeam 101. Give me the TLDR, give me the elevator pitch, a little bit of the history, a little bit of the vision. You guys have your two year anniversary coming up in Jan. 2024. That’s right, present day. Love to see that you guys have quickly turned yourselves into a behemoth in the space. Just sort of connectivity 101, anything app and smart contract related with a multitude of various blockchains. You guys are just connectivity gurus, and everyone always talks about interoperability, how important it is you guys are doing that. So give us the elevator pitch, give us the intro on Moonbeam, bit of the history, bit of the vision, and then we’ll get into the fun stuff here.Aaron Evans
Sure. Yeah, no, happy to. So, Moonbeam launched in January 2022, and as you mentioned, we have our one year anniversary coming up very shortly on the 11th, so we’re super excited about that. But the story really began way before that with the initial founding of the project and the vision. In short, I would say that Moonbeam is a smart contract platform for building decentralized applications that can access users and assets on any chain. It’s a developer oriented protocol. We’re sort of targeting builders, developers and so on. So that’s sort of the very short elevator pitch, the original vision. And this original vision continues to kind of influence what we’re working on today, I’ll add. So I think the theory was way back in 2020, 2019, the theory was that in a future world, there will be many blockchains and they’re going to specialize for specific use cases or functions. They’ll excel in certain areas and have all these things will have pluses and minuses, and some of them make it. I think some people think they’ll get very app focused or function focused. Right? So some excel at storage, some excel at transactions and smart contracts and so forth. And so the thinking was that connectivity between them will be a critical capability. And I think we’ve seen that happen. I think just look at the major GMP protocols like Axelar, Wormhole, LayerZero. Those are super important. We see Chain Lake also coming into the space. So I think that part definitely seems to have come true. I think back when the project was founded, we’re taking a look at what frameworks were available for building specialized chains. And then where’s a good home for such a chain if we’re going to launch such a chain? And so I think we’re attracted to Substrate as a modular development toolkit for building blockchains, and I think we’re seeing a lot of adoption. I think I heard even Cardano is moving to Substrate as well. So that just seemed to be a really good choice for building blockchains just because of its modularity. It’s written in rust. It’s one of the more modern then, you know, we came across Polkadot, and Polkadot was obviously an environment designed to connect Substrate chains together. So that seemed like a natural place and a natural tech stack to use. And I think one of the things that sort of became evident, and I think now it seems very obvious in hindsight, but back in 2019, 2020, that EVM, despite some of its challenges, would continue to be the preferred tech stack for application developers. And we see that obviously that’s still true today. There’s many EVM chains. There’s a lot of L2s using it. I’m going to sort of date myself here, but I see it kind of like VCRs, super old school tech. Beta was better, but like VHS had licensing with, and it became the standard. It became the standard. You could get the JVC VHS player for cheap, like beta thinks Sony tried to stay. So EVM seemed to be the natural choice. So we thought, hey, you know what we’ll do is we’ll make an Ethereum like environment in Substrate, and that would be very useful in this multi chain ecosystem of Polkadot and beyond for connecting chains together.Matt Zahab
Very well said there.Aaron Evans
That’s sort of the history, and as I said, that sort of continue on that vision even today, just sort of.Matt Zahab
A half on, half off topic question. How do you guys choose what chains to work with? Because I feel like everyone’s knocking on your guys door being like, hey, help us connect with other chains. How do you vet which applications, protocols, companies to work with? Because there’s so many of them, and it takes a lot of back end, front end work to really work on all the pieces of the pie, to make each blockchain connect and work with each other and to make it fully interoperable. How do you guys say yes and no to people who come in and teams that come in and companies that come in and want to work with you guys? What’s that workflow look like?Aaron Evans
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great question. There’s a number of different angles from which people are coming to us, or sometimes we’re going to them. I think when it comes to the Polkadot ecosystem, it’s fairly straightforward and in fact, we let our community decide. So in order to connect chains in the Polkadot ecosystem XCM channel, so that’s the cross chain messaging consensus format that allows the chains to interoperate under a shared security umbrella. So other chains in Polkadot, they can just put forth a governance motion on Moonbeam. And if it’s voted through by the community, then the connection is established. Now there’s more sometimes to get their assets listed.Matt Zahab
You give that much power to the community.Aaron Evans
Yeah, last year we’ve done a tremendous amount to empower the community and further decentralization Substrate allows us to have four close upgrades. We’ve done six major upgrades over the past year, so probably 15 or more since inception, but so just getting back to. So through the Polkadot ecosystem, they can connect to us. Now if they want to get their assets listed in our official dApp, there is more of an approval process there. There’s forms they got to fill out and kind of provide links back to things like security audits, because there’s certain disclaimers we want to highlight for people if they still have Sudo enabled or something like this. So that’s sort of the Polkadot side, I would say, for teams that want to deploy and seeking grants, we have a little grants program for people that want to work with us in that way. And then for connecting to chains outside of Polkadot, our angle there has just been to work with the major GMP protocols, as I mentioned. So we have Axelar, LayerZero, Wormhole, Hyperlane all deployed to Moonbeam. And that’s our strategy for interoperability with chains outside of Polkadot ecosystem. And I think what we found is a lot of parachains are leveraging Moonbeam. The chains in Polkadot are leveraging Moonbeam as a conduit to reach other ecosystems, which is quite interesting how that’s developed.Matt Zahab
You keep mentioning Polkadot. I’d love, and this is totally on me here. I need to do my research, but I’d love if you could give a quick little TLDR on the difference between Polkadot and Polkadot 2.0. The DOT unlock. And again, this is more my curiosity than anything else. I’m sure the listeners would like to learn about this as well. But what’s been going on in the Polkadot ecosystem? A lot of things have been happening. I’d love if you could just give me a quick little sort of TLDR on the difference between 1.0 and 2.0 and then segue into the DOT unlock.Aaron Evans
Sure. Yeah, no, happy to. Gavin Wood came up with the idea of Polkadot and it really is a tremendous tech stack. Moonbeam in itself is just useful without Polkadot. I mean, it’s deployed on Polkadot but when application developers deploying to it, they may or may not be super interested in the Polkadot aspects, but it’s an amazing framework and base for us to deploy upon. Polkadot 1.0 is such that where there’s the relay chain, which is providing the Polkadot relay chain, which is providing shared security across all the quote unquote Parachains. So that’s more of sort of the LayerZero, not to be confused with the LayerZero GMP protocol. And then there are all these L-1 Parachains which deploy on Polkadot. Now, you don’t want to have a bazillion of these things. There are limits to the scale. So there are slots that you have to obtain in order to have your chain deployed in the Polkadot ecosystem. And in Polkadot 1.0, the way you would get a slot is by winning an auction. And so you would have to bid with some amount of dots. And there are so many auctions and so much time, and you have to win your slot, and then you have basically a lease for some period of time to operate. Now, each slot is then you can think of as gets a dedicated core, is what they call it. So you have a dedicated amount of transaction processing that each slot is allocated. And so I’ll come back to that in a minute. But this auction framework is one of the things that, it’s kind of a pain because we’ve renewed ours somewhat recently and we’ve done it a bunch of times with our incentivized test network, moon river, but it is a pain. It requires a lot of preparation. And if, for whatever reason, if you screw it up, your chains could be offline. So it’s not amazing. So with Polkadot 2.0, there’s a couple of major changes. So one, they would do away, and they’re kind of related. They’re going to do away with the auctions, and there’ll be a marketplace for buying core time. And in addition, the core time is more agile in the sense that instead of each parachain getting a dedicated core, it’s more adaptable where you may or may not be using. Like, they can slice and dice the cores that are available to all the chains. And so this way, because what you have right now, there are some pairachains, when they initially launch, there’s not a lot of activity. They’re just producing empty blocks, but you still need a dedicated core processing those empty blocks. So this way that wouldn’t be required. You would only use the core time that you need with actual transactions that need to be validated. So there’s sort of that marketplace for paying for core time. And so because they have that marketplace, they can also do away with the auctions and they’ll get a lot more throughput and scalability with Polkadot 2.0 across the ecosystem.Matt Zahab
Very interesting. Another topic Aaron, I’d love to get into is DeFi on Moonbeam. DeFi has sort of had a massive resurgence. It’s almost like DeFi Winter. It was like DeFi Autumn over the last couple of months, and now we’re still sort of buzzing on DeFi Winter, you have airdrops. It is literally just airdrop city population us. If you have contributed to almost any new and more specifically Solana based DeFi platform, you have a lot of Atom and Cosmos DeFi platforms as well. Over the last little bit, you’re just getting free money, which is pretty bananas. Also on that topic, little off topic here, the IRS, I don’t know if you saw that news that came out yesterday where if you get an airdrop over $10,000, you have 15 days to report it or you’re hooped. Now, again, thankfully that doesn’t apply to us, but then again, anything that happens in the states, we usually copy. So I’m sure that will be coming our way as well. What new opportunities are you excited about for DeFi on Moonbeam as a whole?Aaron Evans
Yeah, so I think we have a great DeFi ecosystem. I think that macro forces what they are. DeFi, as you said, it’s gone through a bit of a winter period. There seems to be a resurgence. Definitely signs in the market. So great to see that moving again. Moonbeam being an EVM smart contract environment is just going to naturally, DeFi projects are naturally going to be attracted to something like that. And I think that was one of the first use cases to come to Moonbeam. And we have several decks and AMM solutions. We have BeamSwap and StellaSwap. We have a lending protocol, Moonwell. There’s a lot of liquid staking of DOT going on and so forth. So a lot going on there. I think what I’m really excited about, though, is to see that combined with the cross chain use cases and technology that we’ve developed. So, for example, prime protocol is a cross chain prime brokerage. They have connected to eight EVM chains, including Moonbeam, and it’s designed to function across multiple chains. And it uses Moonbeam as the central point for integrating functionalities across those chains. So it’s sort of a hub and spoke model. And so instead of the initial approach, when Moonbeam first launched all these DeFi projects would be like, oh, okay, here’s more users. There’s a venue over here, I better deploy an instance over there. But now you have these two instances. So you have fragmented liquidity, you have fragmented user bases, you have to manage them separately. So it’s kind of like going back to the old web days where before there were these major multitenanted applications, you’ve got these different standalone islands to manage and that comes with its host of problems. And so in a model like this, you actually have more of a single instance of an application that operates across multiple chains. And I think we’re just going to see a lot more of that now. It has its own complexities and security concerns and technical challenges, but in the end, it’s going to give a superior user experience, it’s going to be more manageable and it’s really going to allow teams to scale their applications to reach the most number of users and manage their liquidity in the most efficient way. So I think taking DeFi and combining that with the cross chain connected capabilities of Moonbeam is really exciting and I think we’re going to see a lot more of that.Matt Zahab
I love that. It’s crazy, this resurgence of DeFi. And I personally, I love to see it. I mean, the word itself, decentralized finance, it is a powerful one and I think that’s going to be one of the applications that really gets the masses on board. But right now, still, the UX is just absolutely horrendous. Setting up wallets, writing down seed phrases, it’s still nightmare fuel. And I don’t think anyone’s really moving the needle too far in that regard. Account abstraction needs to be much better. And man, oh man, it’s got to happen sooner rather than later because I feel like we’re getting. I don’t want to say close, but I just feel like we need more mass adoption use cases sooner rather than later, or else we as a whole, speaking on behalf of the whole crypto community, will never get the chance to go mainstream. That’s just my take. But who knows? Aaron, we have to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show that is PrimeXBT. And when we get back, we are going to keep buzzing on blockchain scalability, some governance, decentralization, emerging markets for blockchain and a super cool use case. And I can’t wait to get into this. You guys loaded Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu certificates that are on Moonbeam network. That is so friggin cool. And we’ll get into that in 1 second. But until then, huge shout out to PrimexBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is running an exclusive promo for listeners of the pod. Use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Aaron. Let’s get right into the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu because that is so cool, you guys. This was on your twitter on December 15. Official Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu certifications coming out of Brazil. This is the kreme de la kreme of MMA. And any type of combat like, these guys are the GOATs. All the best UFC fighters all have experience in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It separates the best from the mids. And you guys put this on chain. Walk me through the whole story. This is so frigging cool. How did you make this happen? Give us some of the goods here.Aaron Evans
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a super cool use case. I remember telling my kids, because they’re always kind of like, what do you do with this blockchain stuff? But it’s like, this is the coolest thing. My nieces and nephews, they’re into Jiu-Jitsu and everything, so I was super proud to show them that use case. So we’ve been making a lot of inroads in Brazil. In particular, you mentioned emergency markets and so forth, and Brazil is one of those areas of focus for us, and one of our members of the Moonbeam foundation team is from Brazil. And so we’re really working to develop relationships there. We have multiple partners. We’re working with other companies to blockchain enable their applications. And so in this case, I believe it was WeBlock who was the partner down there who connected us with the folks at the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And yeah, I mean, I think the BD function is kind of handled by other folks in the foundation. So I wasn’t super close to the deal, but yeah, it came together relatively quickly and I think it’s just a really cool use case to say, hey, look, these are, certifications are the kind of thing that you want to be able to prove this is the kind of thing that belongs on blockchain, right? You want to be able to prove that this certification is real. And I think we’re starting to see other applications, especially in Brazil, like, for example, to concert tickets. They have a big problem with fraudulent concert tickets because you could take a picture of the barcode, even if they’re digital and so forth. So I think longer term, you’re just going to see a lot more things where people can prove that they’ve achieved or that they own something. And this is amazing because it’s just such easy to understand use case, real world use case that’s solved using blockchain. And we couldn’t be more excited to have them select Moonbeam to track those certifications.Matt Zahab
So cool. This is the kind of stuff we need. And again, especially in a place like Brazil, which neighbors countries like Argentina and has their own currency issues as well, these are the opportunities that I feel like, really move the needle. The Brazilian population hears about this, they go, oh, this is really cool. What else can crypto do? They get to be a little more curious. Then, you know, the trickle effect happens and the rest takes care of itself. So absolutely love this. Another thing that you guys are doing is you’re really moving the needle in emerging markets, more specifically Latin America. Is there another reason that you guys have penetrated that market, besides the obvious Venezuela and Argentina with currencies that are just an absolute joke? And my apologies to the Argentinians and Venezuelans that are listening, but your currency is horrendous to say the least. And I feel terrible for them. I spend time in Mexico and there’s a bunch of. I have Argentinian friends and they tell me about doctors making $500 a month in Argentina. Like a doctor. You come to Canada, you make a couple of hundred grand. You go to the States, you make 500 grand. They’re making 500 us a month to be a doctor. It is insane. Feel terrible for them. Hopefully this new Malay or whatever his name is, I’m sure you’ve seen this guy, the new Libertarian Leader of Argentina. He’s a nutcase, but he’s sort of a beauty.Aaron Evans
He’s kind of wild.Matt Zahab
He’s wild, produces great content. But a little off topic here. Back on topic. Why crypto in Latin America? Why blockchain in Latin America in particular?Aaron Evans
You know, emerging markets? I mean, I think this is probably kind of well known, but we in Canada, North America, Western Europe, we take things like banking for granted we take, you know, the fact that we can get a bank account that we can transact and we can send you know for granted, I think, you know, a real eye opener for me was over the you know, last year and a half when there were all these issues with some of these banks that were serving crypto companies. And it just was like, okay, well, there was a period of time when we didn’t have a bank account, the Moonbeam foundation. We’re just kind of like running know, trying to find a banking partner. And so you really start to feel it then. But these emerging markets, it goes beyond that. As we said, they’re currency that can’t be relied upon and so forth. And so they really get it. And I think this is an analogy I would look at is like, in Canada and North America, United States back in, I don’t know, the early two thousands, we had excellent telecommunication infrastructure deployed everywhere with all these wires. And we were way ahead of Europe and definitely ahead of Africa and other areas like that. And then out of necessity, Europe deployed much better mobile technology very quickly, and they just sort of jumped over and they leapfrogged, having to deploy all these lines everywhere to people’s houses. They just went straight to wireless. And so I think in that sense, you’re going to see the same with these emerging markets. They’re going to be quick to adopt blockchain technology and crypto because their current financial rails are terrible. And so instead of spending all this time, money with probably in some cases, not the most on the level governments, and instead of spending the time doing all that and trying to fix all that, just jump straight you know, crypto and blockchain. And so emerging markets are where there is a tremendous amount of interest in solving real world problems that goes beyond just sort of speculation on tokens and so forth. And Brazil is one of those. And as I mentioned, we have a key member of the team that’s from Brazil. So that certainly helped. But it just seemed like there was a lot of teams coming to us for grants and interested in working with Moonbeam. I think they had heard of us. We have an ambassador program as well that’s very active in various communities, and there was just a lot of inbound interest. And we said, well, let’s pull on this thread. And it’s been going very well, and I think hasn’t sort of been dominated already by one of the other players in the space. But we’re looking at others, too. We’re spending a bunch of time exploring Vietnam right now, and we’ll probably look at some other markets as well. But right know, we’re having a lot of success in Brazil, and we want to keep building on that moment.Matt Zahab
I love the phone connectivity analogy. That is just straight gold. Just a little antidote here. Again, as I spend a decent amount of time every year in Mexico, don’t meet too many Brazilians, but meet tons of Argentinians. Again, they just come up so they can participate in an economy that’s doing decent. The Mexican peso isn’t too bad, and that’s what they do. And then they send it back to their own bank accounts or their families. Every single one of the Argentinians I meet, girls and guys, they all have a Binance or another crypto account. My friends in Toronto, I would say maybe 20%, 30% of my network outside of crypto has a crypto account. And it’s strictly for usually aping into shitcoins or HODLing a bit of Bitcoin or ETH or Solana, right? Otherwise it’s strictly like, I get texts, Matt, when’s the next bonk? When’s the next Doge? When’s the next Shiba Inu? That’s all it is. It’s just like, how can I throw a couple hundred bucks and hit a Moon kind of thing. And then you have the Argentinians who are actually using crypto for real world use cases. They don’t ape into shitcoins. They take money from Mexico, they transact it into their account, and they send it back to Argentina. And it’s just like, I love seeing that. It warms my heart, and that’s what we need more of. So love the work you guys are doing in Latin. Another thing I’d love to get into is blockchain scalability. We have seen Solana really sort of take the cake on this one. SUI as well. We had SUI on the podcast as well. That was a treat. Aptos. A lot of parachain type solutions, literally even earlier this year or last year excuse me. Jan, Feb, March, even April. I would say all the way up until late summer of 2023, the narrative was simply Ethereum and L-2s are the only way forward connectivity. You have the fees, which are a shit show. And now all of the other parachain type solutions are running the show. We love to see this. What are you guys doing to work on these? And I’d love your personal take as well. Is this the way forward? Is Solana going to turn into the next ETH? Does ETH have a chance for resurgence? The volumes haven’t dropped off a cliff per se, but all other pair chains are literally going like this. They’re going up into the right, and ETH is very slow, even on NFTs. Solana passed ETH for NFT volume last month as well. What’s your two cent on that? Are we going to see parachain type solutions keep buzzing, or is ETH going to have a resurgence?Aaron Evans
Look, I think Ethereum is like a mainstay for sure. And I think what’s interesting to me is that it looks as though Ethereum will become a bit like the Polkadot relay chain in the sense that it’s about the consensus. And I think the Layer 2s will continue to proliferate and show success. But I think at the end of the day, to get Web2, like scalability, there’s not, no one chain can do that, right? That’s just not possible. The number of users in the world, even if they’re not transacting very much just to handle that kind of load and that number of accounts, there’s no one chain that’s going to be able to do it. And so you have to have these stacks that work together in these sort of networks. I think Polkadot and Cosmos were early examples of those. And then Ethereum had this idea about sharding, and then it turned into the L-2 thing, and now you’ve got all these other chains doing similar strategies. Avalanche has got their subnets and so forth. So I think what we’re going to see over the next little while is some tech stack consolidation. And I think it’s likely that EVM will continue to play a major part there. I think a lot of the L2s continue to be EVM based and so forth. But what’s going to emerge is going to have kind of these islands of interoperability. And so people running the op stack, they’ll sort of have some level of interoperability with each other. ZKSync, they have their strategy, and as I mentioned, Avalanche and things like that. So that’s what we’re going to see in the next two to three years. But then there’ll probably be some kind of shakeout where certain ones will become winners. And I think one of the things that I like about Polkadot, for example, is that it’s a little top down where gabs kind of said, okay, this is kind of how it works, like the shared security model, but everyone understands it and has adopted it. Whereas these other say, take for example, the op stack for Optimism. People are launching all these chains with the op stack, but then they got to figure out how to glue them together, and they’re only figuring that out now. And it is a bottoms up approach, which I like. It’s kind of like grassroots, and they’re going to figure it out together. But I think that that’s going to cost valuable time. I think that over the next few years, getting that right and secure could prove difficult because it’s not only just having secure messaging between them and so forth, but just the security of those assets and consensus among those chains will be difficult. So I do think some form of Ethereum L-2 will exist for the foreseeable future and probably play a major part in the world, but there’s a lot of room for a lot of different stacks. I mean, if you look at the Web2 world, you have a lot of different industry players beyond just the Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud. You have a lot of other key pieces of infrastructure that have emerged as pillars of that. And I think we’re going to see the same thing play out over the next five to ten years in blockchain. And I think there’s a lot of room, but I think tech will matter in the coming five to ten years. And I think that’s when Polkadot and Substrate based chains will have their time in the sun because people will realize the capabilities that are there and that they’re built for long term scalability.Matt Zahab
Well said. Last question here Aaron. 2024 trends, predictions. We don’t have to get into any price prediction nonsense, but trends as a whole. Everyone’s still saying DeFi, everyone’s saying Deepn is going to blow up. Everyone’s still saying Solana ecosystem is going to blow up. What’s on your sort of hot take board? What is on the Aaron Evans hot take board for 2024?Aaron Evans
Yeah, I do think DeFi is great and I think there’s going to be a resurgence of that. But at the same time, I think the number of people in the world that will directly participate in DeFi, I think is so small, somewhat limited. It’s not as broad as social applications and this kind of thing. I think in this next cycle what we’re going to see is some meaningful enterprise adoption. And so where there are Web2 companies or traditional companies that have realized that this blockchain thing is real, there will be real use cases like the Jiu-Jitsu kind of thing, where there are certain things where users are going to start to expect more ownership and sovereignty over their data and they’re going to want it on the blockchain and these companies will start to enter and that’s really going to drive a lot of growth and I think they’re going to want to go to places where it’s easy for their developers to get going. So ecosystems with strong SDKs and really top notch developer relations teams and support and documentation, which Moonbeam has excellent. That’s, I think what we excel at. We’re well known for providing great support to developers. Our documentation is really good. So I think that’ll be a key driver. And I think a lot of these real world assets, whether those are financial instruments or actually just real world things like Jiu-Jitsu certifications, I think loyalty programs will continue to be a big thing where you have platforms where there’s more utility to those loyalty points. And that kind of thing flourishes in a blockchain kind of environment. So that’s kind of how I see. I mean, for Moonbeam ourselves, we have a lot going on. And on the scalability side, I think we’ll probably reduce block times by a half to help with speed and so forth. So that’s sort of more on our radar. We’re going to continue with real world assets and gaming and emergency markets as part of our tenets of our strategy. But yeah, in the space in general, I really think it’s going to be some form of meaningful enterprise entry into the space.Matt Zahab
I love that. Aaron, what an episode. Really appreciate you coming on. I had an absolute blast here and learned a ton. And you have an open invite anytime you and Moonbeam want to come on for round two. Hit me up. Because we barely scratched the surface here and we didn’t even get into all the cool shit that you do. Especially for the YouTube viewers. Aaron has an absolutely electric background of Star Wars Legos. These things are so legit. The spaceships, the monsters. So freaking cool. I’m a big Star wars guy myself. So on round two, we’ll have to get into all that. But until then, wishing you and the team all the best. Before you go, please let our listeners know where they can find you personally and Moonbeam online and on socials.Aaron Evans
Yeah. So on Twitter @DoubleARon2048 if you’ve seen the key and peel. So @DoubleARon2048 and Moonbeam, the best place to go is moonbeam.network. The website has all the documentation and links to all our socials and so forth.Matt Zahab
Love it. Aaron, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it and can’t wait for round two.Aaron Evans
My pleasure. Thank you very much.Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Aaron Evans, Head of Ops at Moonbeam Foundation. He was on fire all episode. We talked everything. Blockchain, scalability, scalable L-1s, Polkadot, you name it, we discussed it. Huge shout out to Aaron and the Moonbeam team for making this happen. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking to the team love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Justas my amazing sound editor, you are the GOAT. Appreciate you, and back the listeners. Love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.

The post Aaron Evans, Head of Operations at Moonbeam Foundation, on Blockchain Scalability, Scalable L1s, and Polkadot 2.0 | Ep. 298 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Veronica Wong, CEO and Co-Founder of SafePal, gives a brief overview of SafePal’s milestones & developments, and also talks about cross-chain swapping. The podcast concludes with her 2024 predictions and trends.

About Veronica Wong

Veronica Wong is the CEO and Co-Founder of SafePal, the comprehensive non-custodial crypto wallet suite with 10+ million users across hardware wallet, mobile app, and browser extension wallet solutions.

With a decade of experience in Big Tech/Fortune 500 companies like Tencent — Veronica leaped into crypto with SafePal in 2018 and has been committed to solving security, UI, UX, issues for crypto users, and cross-chain interoperability for 100+ blockchains (EVM and non-EVM).

Veronica Wong gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• Over $350 million and $320 million were lost to crypto exploits in November and September respectively
• Brief overview of SafePal and its milestones and developments for this year, and areas of focus for the future.
• Trends and predictions for which Web3 verticals will flourish in the coming year and reasons why
• Recent efforts to better serve regional markets and bridge the language gap
• The importance of cross-chain swapping

Full Transcript Of The Interview

The post Veronica Wong, CEO of SafePal, on Web3 Wallet Wars, Account Abstraction, and 2024 Trends | Ep. 297 appeared first on Cryptonews.

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Josh Jones, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Cornucopias, talks about integrating with both the Ethereum and Cardano networks, how increasing interoperability is the key to growing web3 games, and the current status of Cornucopias.

About Josh Jones

Josh Jones is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Cornucopias Game. Josh is an experienced startup entrepreneur for the last 25 years, specializing in building marketing teams and crafting strategies to go to scale. Discontent with existing monetary systems drives his passion for the crypto and blockchain industry. He is the Co-Founder and stake pool operator of Grow Your Stake [GYS], a mission-driven, #cleanwaterforall, Cardano stake pool. He is also half of the Cardano-based YouTube podcast Cardano Chats.

Josh Jones gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• Cornucopias is an open-world, AAA-quality massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) built on Unreal Engine 5
• Integrating with both the Ethereum and Cardano networks
• Expansion strategy for daily active users
• Increasing interoperability and marketing; the key to growing web3 games
• The current status of Cornucopias; what’s coming up in Q1 2024?

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zahab, and we are buzzing as always. Still coming in hot from Mexico. By the time this episode airs, I believe this will be the first episode of 2024. Crazy to hear the four come out of my mouth. It’s always weird writing things down, typing things down. The first month it always takes me like two, three weeks to really just click in and be like, holy shit, it’s a new year. But cest la vie, here we are. Hope everyone had a wonderful 2023 and hope everyone has an even better 2024. I am super pumped to have today’s guest on the show, Josh Jones, the Founder of Cornucopias, the one and only blockchain game that is absolutely tearing it up right now. Josh is an experienced startup entrepreneur for the last 25 years, specializing in building marketing teams and crafting strategy to go to scale discontent with existing monetary systems. He has a huge passion for the crypto and blockchain industry and is Co-Founder and stake pool operator of Grow Your Stake, GYS. A mission driven clean water for all Cardano stake pool. He’s also half of the Cardano based YouTube Podcast Cardano Chats. I will include everything in the show notes as always, but it is time to learn a little bit more about Josh and Cornucopias. Super pumped to have you on, Josh, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Josh Jones
Doing well, man. Thanks for having me on the show. It’s good to be here. I’m Co-CEO and Co-Founder, so we’ve got four Co-Founders together. And man, I need to update that bio a little bit. But hey, it’s good. We hit the ground running, so it’s good to be on the show, man.

Matt Zahab
Pumped to have you. I will change that bio right away as well. Co-CEO and Co-Founder. You know what? That’s a cool little one. Before we get into your past, let’s start with that. I’ve had a bunch of Co-CEOs on the pod. What exactly is a Co-CEO? How do you choose who does what? Is it as cliche as it sounds, whereas you would take your strengths and your Co-CEO would take his or her strengths. How do you guys sort of divvy up which tasks and things to tackle?

Josh Jones
Yeah, that’s a great question really. The reality was we started off and I was in more of a marketing role. I was starting off as a CMO, but it turned out that a lot of what I was working on was very much related to running the company. Token stuff, et cetera. And what we ended up doing is realizing that we have so much with building the game and also building the company and having it be Web3 that we needed to divide and conquer in that way. So he took on more of the tech based roles and some of the more of the game part of it. And then I’m taking on a little bit more of the company management. But we both have a big involvement in the strategy, the vision and the direction that we’re going with not just the game, but also the company. So it’s working incredibly well for us.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Let’s get right into it. A lot of the time I will usually ask our guests for a little bit about themselves. I think for this one we’ll save this at the end.

Josh Jones
Sure.

Matt Zahab
Your game, Cornucopias, you guys really sort of caught fire last couple weeks. Would really blowing up, especially on Twitter. You’ve had some big influencers unpaid. One who we had on the Podcast Ansem blknoiz, he was shouting you guys out as well. You’ve had a lot of organic massive shout outs. People finally realizing this is a team that is built and is building a sick and sweet game. And there aren’t many teams still in the space who are really building and actually shipping. There are a lot of those, but there aren’t a lot of those who are doing it for fun and really producing really fun games. You guys are give us the TLDR, give us the elevator pitch. What exactly is Cornucopias? And tell us a little bit about it. Then we’ll get into some of the fun stuff. The status of the game, the expansion strategy and everything else going on. But the floor is yours. Give us the TLDR on Cornucopias.

Josh Jones
Yeah, of course. Well, thanks for the compliment. And yeah, things have gone incredibly well for us lately. I think the industry has seen a little bit of an example of what might happen with gaming and Web3 gaming as a whole in this next bull cycle. So we’re getting a taste of that. We also expanded to Ethereum chain recently, so we now have liquidity on Uniswap, which has helped. So all of that working together with the fact that we are building an incredible AAA quality MMORPG game. The lore of Cornucopias is basically humanity has ascended from the earth’s surface due to a great calamity. And there are now these technologies that enable huge bubbles or domes in the sky. And each of these domes have a variety of gameplay experiences inside of them. For example, one that’s live right now, the status of our game is people are right now we’ve got about 1000 people that have access to play inside of our racing dome, which is Calido Valley Raceway. So that has a very metaverse type experience in the resort area. But then you can also leave the resort area and go into the raceway and race your NFT based vehicles. But each of these domes in the sky offer a different gaming experience. And you can use your vehicles to fly from dome to dome and explore the giant realm that is Cornucopias.

Matt Zahab
I love that the racing game is obviously, and that’s what I’ve seen personally, what’s really taken off on Twitter. It looks absolutely electric. Before we get into a bunch of the other stuff, I want to talk about the whole sort of aspect of a MMORPG. I used to be a gamer. I would never quantify myself as a massive gamer nowhere like yourself or a lot of the loyal fans and gamers and community members that you guys have. But this is a word that is an acronym, excuse me, that is thrown around all the time. And this is massive multiplayer online role playing game.

Josh Jones
Yes.

Matt Zahab
That’s six words strung into one. What exactly does that mean? I’d love if we could just go down a little rabbit hole on that topic. And I’d love you to explain why MMORPGs are so powerful and have such a high ceiling and such a wide spectrum of abilities for people to come in and join and have a lot of fun with.

Josh Jones
Yeah, well, massive multiplayer enables a lot of social elements that you don’t see in just a single player game. So that’s incredibly powerful in and of itself. And then when you combine that with quality graphics, so you get a lot of people into the game playing together. And then there’s quests and different things that allow you to socialize or spend time with others, with your friends inside the game. It creates an experience for people that just a single player game can’t do. And so I think that is why you see just amazing MMORPGs taken off. And there’s just a lot there in terms of experience for the player, for the gamer that makes it fun. And then when you add the Web3 element to that, it just makes it that much more powerful. Because with Web3 we’ve got the power of community. And I have to say, one of the things that is so compelling about Cornucopias, one of our differentiators, we have an amazing community. We’ve cultivated that completely organic from the very beginning. So people at our team, for example, very passionate and that has just carried down to our community and what we’ve done with community. And so now you bring this Web3 element into an MMORPG and these people are participating in the economics of the game with us. They’re participating in the token. And all of that together just creates this highly energized community. And ours happens to be a lot of fun. So we got people that get in, have a game party and go in and play together every day right now. There’s a group playing right now as we speak, I’m sure, but it’s just a lot of fun.

Matt Zahab
That’s so cool. We got to get into the blockchain aspect of this as well because everything you’ve really spoken about so far, and again, this is how you build a successful Web3 game, built on Web3 tech, but plays looks feels like a Web2 game. That’s exactly what you guys are doing. You guys have integrated with both Ethereum and Cardano networks and you plan to expand the access to additional blockchains and community partners as well. How the hell do you guys build a game that’s already integrated with two different networks? And I’d love you to talk about the complexities and the nightmare fuel that is present when trying to build a game that is interoperable, that allows users to play and compete and intertwine on a bunch of different blockchains. That’s got to be nightmare fuel. Walk us through it. How do you guys make this happen?

Josh Jones
Yeah, that’s a great question. So first of all, our strategy has always been start with one community in which we chose Cardano and then expand to all of Web3. And then eventually we’re going after mainstream gamers. That to us was a really wise strategy and so we were forced to build with quality the entire time because you’re not going to capture mainstream gamers without a real high quality experience. That’s just the way it works. So that being said, your question is around how do we integrate with multiple? So first of all, it was the token. So the token, we started off on Binance chain, then we expanded to Cardano when Cardano had more infrastructure. So the token is then on Cardano. Then more recently we moved some liquidity over to Ethereum as well. And so we have NFTs also. So that was fungible tokens. Now we have NFTs that are the player owned assets that empower our players to really participate in ownership and the key element of the game using these game assets throughout the world of Cornucopias. And we’re expanding to Ethereum with NFTs soon as well. And then when it comes to. So that wasn’t that complicated. But having NFTs that are dynamic, that change over time, that there’s all sorts of problems you need to solve with NFTs for games. And so that was a nightmare, to be honest. We had to look at, okay, what is the tech available for us to do on Cardano? And what is the upcoming tech on Cardano for NFTs, and what are the options there? And then what are the options on all of the different Ethereum protocols for NFTs and what is upcoming and what does it look like that is moving towards? And then we had to figure out what’s the lowest common denominator for both of those to make sure that we can have the same experience for NFTs with both as much as possible. So that was an incredible challenge. But for the most part, with the tokens, that part was easy. We had partners that helped us with that, and ChainPort played a big part of that. They’re a bridge that’s worked incredibly well. And yeah, we just deployed liquidity on various platforms, so overall it wasn’t too bad. But yeah, the NFT part was a little challenging.

Matt Zahab
Of course, that’s got to be a little banana lands there. Another thing I want to discuss, speaking of NFTs, is how you guys continue to sell out. The drops are gonzo in minutes, every single time. What’s the secret sauce here? I know this is a genuine million dollar question that I’m asking, but you guys have what I think you’re at 45k Twitter followers, about 50k on Discord. Really good. But there’s other communities that have more that don’t sell out in minutes. What’s the secret sauce here?

Josh Jones
Yeah, and that’s with a smaller community on Cardano. I mean, it is a top ten Layer 1 without a doubt, but in terms of community ecosystem, when you compare it to other chains. So the answer to your question is, it goes right back to people. Our strategy has always been, let’s put high quality graphics out and high quality gaming experience and high quality experience in everything that we do. Right? So the community is incredibly passionate. The team is passionate. All of those really add fuel to the fire. And when you have that and you’re delivering consistently over time. Rob and I, we have a show called COPI Cafe, where we communicate with our community every single week. We barely miss those. And it’s hard to pull off because we have to figure out around everything else we have going on. When are we going to shoot this show? But the effort of that, the point of that was this is crypto and people need to see what you’re doing. They need transparency because so many projects out there aren’t building and they keep kind of a veil of smoke and mirrors. And I don’t want to talk bad about anybody at all because a lot of projects are building and you see who’s doing that through the bear cycle. But what we’ve done with COPI Cafe is just show people over and over again what we’re building and remain transparent with the community. So when you combine a passionate community with transparency, with high quality graphics, AAA quality custom graphics, and the lore of our game, all of that pulls people into an exciting vision that’s just empowered even more by Web3.

Matt Zahab
Josh, you just brought up the word lore. This is a four letter word that is thrown around all over the place. You guys actually have done it. Every gaming team in the world, all creators in the world, want to create lore. How does one create lore, and my apologies if I’m overstepping here, but I feel like a lot of it is. There’s a shit ton of luck that goes into lore as well because you guys can’t really test the lore beforehand, you know what I mean? It’s like you have this vision of what the lore of your game is going to be, how it’s going to look, what is your messaging, what is your graphics like, what is the style, the lighting. And then you either have lore or you don’t. I feel like it’s binary, you know what I mean? How did you guys do it and what advice would you give to game studios, developers, creators who are trying to achieve and create lore in their games?

Josh Jones
What advice would I give? I don’t know that I’m qualified for advice on lore, to be honest, because I haven’t done it enough. But I will say this, I think our lore is incredible and what we have done is we started with a vision for the game and the idea was, and the reason I’m so passionate about it is this game allows us to create in so many ways. And creating happens to be a huge one of my values personally and that’s what I want to be involved in is something where we can continually create. And so the lore ended up really empowering that vision. So we needed to find a story that made sense. And as a team we worked together and we built this foundational story. We had a guy named Jake on the team that’s a writer, and he came in and helped us with some ideas, and we bounced that back and forth. We started cultivating this story that resulted in humanity transcending, ascending above the earth’s surface into these giant domes and bubbles, which happened to be really cool looking as well. So it’s almost like we’ve created this lore that involves space travel but also encompasses the huge amount of variety that is in our vision that’s needed. And so collectively, the lore empowered our vision, and our vision empowered the lore. That’s about the best way I could answer it. And so I think you nailed it. In some ways, we got lucky with how that worked out, but it was also just creative, like creative storytelling. How do we create this story, the backbone for what it is that we’re building? And we all got in together and we iterated on it over and over. Now it’s, I think, up to, like 50 pages that we haven’t yet released, but there’s a lot more to it. We’ve only released a tiny amount of the lore. There’s so much more, which is exciting. And if you go to the Cornucopias wiki, for anybody watching, there’s a ton. There’s like 400 pages in our wiki. You can really research everything that we’re doing. We started with a white paper, and it was like 30 pages, and then we said, well, we need a lot more. So we started building out the Cornucopias wiki, and that’s just an enormous resource for everybody to find out more about us. The lore will also be in there eventually when we fully publicize it.

Matt Zahab
That’s so cool. Lore is such an interesting topic, something I’d love to learn more about. Josh, you are buzzing, but we need to take a quick break and give a massive shout out to our sponsor of the show and longtime friends of cryptonews.com. That is the one and only PrimeXBT. You guys know and love PrimeXBT. They offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. If you demand highly reliable market data and performance and love to trade, PrimeXBT is for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50. CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Josh. Let’s keep buzzing on Cornucopias for a little bit. I would love to learn a little bit more about the status of the game. A bunch of cool things out right now. Way more cool things coming out in the near future. Again, for reference, this episode is dropping early Q1 on, I want to say Jan 2. Mighty me, Jan 1. It’s literally going to be the first two days of 2024. So with that in mind, Josh, what do we have to look forward to coming up? What is the current status of the game? And then we’ll keep buzzing on the game and what else there is to come.

Josh Jones
Yeah, man. So a lot of fun stuff happening. Number one right now, the status of the game is we’re in pre alpha. So 1000 people, or maybe a little bit more than that, already have access to play the game from the public, from our community, and we’re doing now these new things where we’re going to communities and we’re saying, hey, do you have people that want to play? We can give you 30 passes. And so we’re starting to grow with these different various alpha communities and influencer communities as well, so that we can really just empower the community to see how amazing this game is and how cool the graphics are, because you don’t really know from just watching the YouTube videos. Everyone says, wow, your YouTube videos are amazing. But then when they get in and they experience the game, they’re mind blown. So that is one thing, that’s the status. So that’s our racing game. Calido Valley Resort and Calido Valley Raceway is live. In addition to, since this is airing in 2024, Rumble Ball, which is a really cool new little tiny game that we have for people. So you’re running around the resort and you might just be able to engage in a game of Rumble Ball, which is very similar to soccer or football if you’re from the UK area. So the game is really cool. It’s a lot of fun. The physics are amazing in that. So I think people are getting, they’re having a lot of fun with that and a lot of fun with racing, but that’s only one small element of the game that’s been made live. So that’s the status. We’re also currently running a node sale. Nodes are a way to participate in adding value to our ecosystem. And the way the node sales work is, I don’t know what tier we’ll be on by the time this airs. But whatever tier you’re on, you can buy a node or you can buy ten nodes, and with our nodes you can operate up to 50, most likely from one computer. So you just buy these node license NFTs and then you participate in the rewards for that. And you’re providing us a service. By operating the node, you’re helping us to improve our game, download speeds for all the users, and you’re helping us to not have a single point of failure. So it creates more security and safety and better user experience in Cornucopias for all these tidal wave of new users that we expect to be coming from crypto in 2024. So it’s a very important piece of technology that we’ll be launching in 2024. And the node sale is active and live right now. Also, we’ve previously sold land NFTs and these land NFTs are coming available very soon. That’s going to be in our themed zones. Theme zones are the giant bubbles in the sky. Like I mentioned one of them, you might have seen this in some of our graphics, looks like Colorado. There’s streams and beautiful mountains and beautiful aspen trees and a huge landscape. 8 km by 8 km. We’re going to be opening up multiple of those domes, which each one in and of themselves takes about 2 hours to walk across on the X or the Y axis. So it’s a huge amount of land to explore. And so that’s going to be really cool. And people are going to be able to pick their properties in 2024. They’re going to be able to find out, hey, I’m taking my NFT that I’ve owned for a while now, and I get to pick my land and place that down and then start building on it, which is really exciting. So a lot of cool things coming up in 2024. We’re really going to be scaling up the team, probably more in abour March, April. And building out segmented teams for a variety of value adds to the game to speed up certain areas, which will be exciting as well. So for example, the character avatar creator should be launched early January, if not February, most likely. And that’s going to create variety in the game. But that means you can go in, create your own avatar. There’s tons of different presets that you can change, the lips, the nose, the mouth, the skin, the hair color, all that stuff, and then you create your own avatar. Well, we currently only have a few different outfits. We may be like 20 outfits for the avatars. That means we need to really ramp up our outfits team. So we’ll be ramping that up in 2024. We’ll also be ramping up the team that helps us to build out the custom domes, which is another really amazing feature of Cornucopias, which is where the community is empowered to build their own gaming experiences. So that means for those, we’re going to be building out player development kits or downloadable content kits. So you might say, hey, I’m going to start something for Cryptonews. This is for our community only. We’re going to do a PVP battle, and I want it to be a tropical landscape. And they’re going to be playing a battle like capture the flag. And you get to set that up with the kits that we provide you. So you get to create and place the trees and set the environment and all of those things, which really can be exciting because it’s going to be an incredible challenge for us. But that’s why we need to get a full team around it. So, sorry long answer, but we have a lot. Yeah.

Matt Zahab
So on top of beefing up the team and really just increasing sort of the internal and external bandwidth, main goal of every single game is to increase daily active users. Right? That’s sort of DAU. And I could be wrong here, but DAU is the most powerful metric when it comes to gaming. That just means you have the most attention. If you have the most attention, you have the most power. We live in a world of power. Everyone here gets the point. What is your guys expansion strategy to increase DAU daily active users? Interoperability, marketing, what else? What else do we have on the docket in order to really blow this up and grab a bunch of market share and attention from not only Web3 gamers, but Web2 gamers as well?

Josh Jones
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot there. So you name two of them. Interoperability is important because now that’s created a marketing plan that’s around marketing to all of Web3. And eventually what I mentioned before is going mainstream and so advancing our marketing to target mainstream gamers. Of course, we’ve been grabbing some mainstream gamers already through our marketing, but when you really start to focus strategically around that, you really start to get access to a new target market of people. So that’s just one start there. Then next up you have the actual game itself and the game releases. We’re involving our community with each game release and we do that on a monthly cadence, which is very exciting. And this is counterintuitive. It’s a different paradigm than mainstream games because mainstream games typically build five to eight years and then they finally release something and then they get the community input as opposed to Web3 gaming where you build, involve the community all along the way on a regular cadence and with our team, the regular cadence is awesome. We are releasing new stuff on a monthly basis. New game releases every single month that has tons more things to get people excited about. So the community gets more excited, more people are pulled in, more people are enjoying the game, more daily active users. We also have to be able to scale with that. So we’re setting up our server ecosystem to be able to handle high amounts of volume and remain performant. So there’s that as well. But the final thing that I would say for that question is the reward system. We’ve got a reward system and we don’t like to call it play to earn because our game is fun. People are playing to have fun, but we’re going to utilize our rewards in creative ways. For example, there might be a racing tournament. We’re likely going to do something called the race of the chains, where we involve multiple different chains. And we have a racing tournament in 2024. So things like that really pull people into what you’re doing and it builds hype. And we’ll have a lot of sponsors and various people that are involved in that to bring in multiple other ecosystems and involve the crypto community and have something incredibly fun that results in finally an in person, conference style live race of the final ten of the best in the world. So that kind of thing is another deal that we will have going on next year as well. So hopefully that answered your question. Go to market strategy is always for me about people first involving strategic communities and offering them value, significant value. So hopefully my answer covered each of those elements. I think it did.

Matt Zahab
No, that was electric. Thank you. We are getting a little tight for time. A couple more questions here. Josh, you got to give me the lowdown on COPI. COPI is your guys coin. We do not talk about a lot of price action on the pod ever. However, you guys, it would be nonsensical for me to not note that COPI has absolutely ripped over the last month. I want to say $0.02 all the way up to $0.12. Quick math, 600%. That’s pretty crazy. What is the reason behind this? I know, again, like I said, we’re not going to get into speculation. We’re not going to talk about anything by my coin related, but I’d love, just as someone who’s also interested in COPI, if you could give me sort of the quick value prop. What exactly is it used for? If I was perhaps interested in buying COPI, why would I buy it? And if you could just give us a little bit of TLDR on why COPI ripped so hard over the last couple of weeks, that would be lovely.

Josh Jones
Yeah, absolutely. Well, COPI, it gives you utility in our ecosystem, and so we’re going to have governance around COPI holders. We’re also going to have the ability to use COPI for in game assets and things of that nature, so you can participate in buying a special vehicle utilizing your COPI. So governance and in game assets and participating in the in game economy, which makes it a lot of fun. The TLDR on why the growth? I think there’s been a large amount of interest. We’re heading into the next bull cycle for crypto. So the bitcoin halving is in 2024. I think it’s like April 24 or something like that. March 24, somewhere around there. Anyway, that creates some anticipation with the OG crypto community. And so I think there’s a little bit just happening just from that because you see this new momentum with Bitcoin and many of the other coins are correlated. But we also, like you said, have started to get some attention based upon the quality of what we’re putting out there. And I think that’s the most important reason, is people are seeing that Cornucopias has been delivering. These guys have been working their asses off in the bear cycle, and they’ve been producing, delivering. So we have been building a quality game and a quality community, and people are finally starting to see it. Furthermore, we expanded, as mentioned before, liquidity to the Ethereum ecosystem on Uniswap. And there’s a lot of new users that are holding COPI from Ethereum. So I think it’s a combination of all of those, and there’s probably some other factors I haven’t even considered. But most importantly, people see what we’re doing and they get excited. Wow, this is a solid project. At least that’s what I would say.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Josh, give me a couple of hot takes before we let you go here today. It doesn’t have to be Web3 gaming related can be anything that tickles your fancy, can be health, wealth, happiness, space, AI, you name it. Give me a couple of hot takes or things that you are passionate about current day before we wrap up and let you go.

Josh Jones
All right. That’s a good question, hot takes. Well, I think, number one, I’m incredibly excited about, and this is kind of on topic, but Web3 gaming, I think we’re going to see a totally new crypto this time around because you have legitimate gaming projects in Web3 that are bringing in a new wave of users, and I think that’s bringing powerful utility for the crypto industry, and I think it’s an amazing thing and I’m excited to see that happening because I believe the crypto industry is very important for tons of reasons, read earlier in my bio, but also just empowering people and transparency and all the things that come with it. I also think that aside from the Web3 gaming and that tidal wave that we would likely see coming up this next cycle, I think AI is going to have a pretty cool implication in regards to how it combines with gaming and also crypto. So some powerful new storylines might be coming out this next year. I know for one, at Cornucopias we are looking to have AI powered NPC NFTs. So for anyone that’s noticing the mouthful of acronyms there, that’s basically you take an NPCA non player character that’s in the game. So maybe you and I are in Cornucopias playing and another character walks up to us. It’s not powered by an actual player, but it’s programmed in the system to add some sort of value, right? Well, if you empower that player with AI, like LLM, like a large language model like ChatGPT or something like that, but it’s refined to the Cornucopias lore and data set, you now have a player that you can have a conversation with, provided it’s performant enough and fast enough with the data. So now you have an AI powered NPC. We’ll take that a step further and turn it into an NFT and the player can own their own Ai NFT NPC. It’s hard to talk about that because there’s so many acronyms, but it’s just one little example of what I think could happen with AI and gaming. There’s so much more. And I think that I’m intimidated by what AI can do, by the power, because I think we don’t really know where it’s going to go just yet, and I think we do need to be mindful of it. But I also think it can add a lot of value as well. So it’s something that we intend to utilize and it’s something that we also want to remain cautious of. That’s from our team at Cornucopias. That’s kind of our approach to it. So yeah, those are my hot takes. Hopefully that covered it.

Matt Zahab
AI is going to be wild, especially in gaming, especially three, four years down the road when the best Cornucopias player is probably going to be some AI bot. That’s just all how it’s going to go. Is he or she or it is going to read the script a bajillion quadrillion times and it’s going to know all the best moves, how to dominate and boom. I’m excited for that. That’ll be a fun time, as always. We’re humans. We are the top dogs for a reason. We’ll adapt and iterate and we’ll continue to run the show. So I’m not worried. I’m excited for that. Josh, incredible episode. Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Cornucopias online and on socials.

Josh Jones
Absolutely. So you can find me @keyofjoshua on Twitter, and you can find Cornucopias game @CornucopiasGame on Twitter. And that’s C-O-R-N-U-C-O-P-I-A-S-G-A-M-E. That’s on Twitter. And then also our website. And please only go to our official sites because there’s a lot of scammers out there. When there’s value, there’s scammers. And so that is definitely occurring. So the website is cornucopias.io. So come check us out. We’d love to have you join our community. Go to our Discord. There’s a link tree on our twitter, so you’ll be able to easily find our discord and join our community and just get involved and ask questions because our community is very welcoming. It’s a cool atmosphere in there and everyone wants to help you get acquainted with what we’re doing and what’s going on. And so you’ll get all sorts of answers real quick.

Matt Zahab
Love it. Thanks again, Josh. Appreciate it. Can’t wait for round two.

Josh Jones
Thank you. Good to see you.

Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Josh Jones, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Cornucopias. An incredible game. We covered a whole bunch of stuff today. Gaming on Cardano, ETH, interoperability, and of course, everything Cornucopias related. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. If you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I, speaking of the team, love you guys so much. Thank you for everything as always. Justas, my amazing sound editor, you are the GOAT. Thank you, my man. And back to the listeners love you guys. Keep on growing those bags. Keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Let’s kick off the new year in style, hit the ground running and achieve our goals. Love you all. Bye for now. We’ll talk soon.

The post Josh Jones, Co-CEO of Cornucopias Game, on Cardano Web3 Games, Interoperability, and Cornucopias | Ep. 296 appeared first on Cryptonews.