Ambre Soubiran, Jerome de Tychey & Mounir Benchemled: EthCC 4 – Liberté, Égalité, Décentralisé #401

Transcript

Hi, I'm Sebastian Cucu, and you're listening to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders, and thought leaders. If you can't tell by the sound of my voice, this is the day after ECC. Um, it was an amazing conference, and uh, one of the things that I heard a lot from people, and was certainly my feeling, is that it was it was great to connect with everybody again. The last conference last ECC uh, was just before all the lockdowns happened in early March of 2020. And for a lot of people in the space, you know, I think we had mostly seen each other on Zoom calls, and to to be able to, you know, see each other again, I think was uh, one of the things that people loved

the most about this conference. Of course, you know, there was um, many great talks and uh, and and panels and and you know, the workshops and everything, but you know, getting to see everybody again was I think a major highlight here this week. Um, I want to congratulate uh, the uh, Ethereum France team for putting on this event, given all the restrictions, and you know, we're still in the pandemic. It was a really amazing feat to be able to put this on, um, and you know, bring in, you know, over a thousand people in Paris. There were uh, uh, you we we couldn't count the number of side events. Uh, that's how big this conference was, cuz a lot of people just couldn't get in given the restrictions.

So, you know, it sort of overflowed into all these side events. So, it was great, and I'm really looking forward to uh, next year's conference. Today, we've got uh, sort of panel discussion uh, with Alm Shouriane, the CEO of Kaiko, Jerome de Teche, the president of Ethereum France, and Mounir Benchemled, uh, CEO and founder of ParaSwap. And you know, we just uh, talked about the conference, and you know, sort of like get their feeling on how things went, and you know, the ecosystem, how it's evolving, and we talked about the future as well. So, it was a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy. If you're listening to this on the audio version of the podcast, we recorded this in the ECC uh, podcast studio, and so there's like cameras and everything. So, we you know, it's also on YouTube if you want to watch the video. It's pretty

cool. Before we go to the interview though, I'd like to tell you about our sponsors for this week's episode. ParaSwap is a sponsor this week. So you with ParaSwap you can beat the market price every single block. It's fast and highly liquid and they've just integrated with Ledger. So if you're using a Ledger device like me, you can now swap directly in the Ledger Live app. So it makes it really easy to do swaps without having to like connect your Ledger to you know, your browser and everything. So you know, check it out if you're using Ledger and go to paraswap.io to learn more. And Chorus One. If you have crypto assets that are sitting idly in your wallet, you can start earning rewards and contributing to network security by staking with Chorus One. Chorus One is a staking provider with over a billion

dollars in assets in over 25 decentralized networks including Solana, Cosmos, and Ethereum. If you're interested in running your own branded node, they have a white label node as a service offering that leverages Chorus One's highly available and proven infrastructure enabling you to participate directly in decentralized networks. So head over to chorus.one to start your staking journey. And with that, here's my conversation with Mounia Ben Cheikh Ahmed, Jérôme de Tiché, and Ambre Soubiran. So I'm here with Mounia Ben Cheikh Ahmed, founder and CEO of ParaSwap, Jérôme de Tiché, president of Ethereum France and organizer of this fine conference, and Ambre Soubiran, who's CEO of Kaiko.

My three compatriots, may I say? So thanks for joining me today on this little round table as we find ourselves at the end of the conference. Everyone's a little tired, I think, but I think we'll get through it and have a have a cool conversation. So yeah, thanks for joining me. Um so who who went to the rave last night? I did. You did? I was there, yeah. I didn't. I saved my energy for today. Okay. Tonight. Yeah, I didn't go. I I also wanted to save my energy for the for tonight and on the rooftop of EFM it's going to be quite cool, I think.

It was amazing lineup. I want to say congratulations to have a for organizing this. Like we had the all Ed Banger crew plus plus Breakbotz. Yeah. Plus Boys Noize. It remind me of my 20s, like 10 years ago when we were going to clubs in Paris. It was like this was the label to follow and boom. Suddenly reunited. Yeah. Crypto makes all your dreams come I couldn't I couldn't have dreamt a better a better party. Except that I had to work on the next day.

Yeah. I didn't really party a lot, but What's amazing is that this could actually even take place given the given the context and everything and so I think that's pretty cool. Like it it ended up lining up quite well, I think like with the the measures and everything and things seem to have gone quite smoothly. Um so yeah, let me let let's there's a few things I want to talk about. I'd like to talk about, you know, of course the conference, but also like kind of looking at the ecosystem since since well since we last chatted last year and we also talked last year. We didn't talk last year, but I think like your perspective on the DeFi side would be would be interesting. Um you know Last year the name of this panel was flash loans and elbow bumps.

Um elbow bumps are still here. Yeah. Uh Fist bumps too. Fist bumps too. Now we have fist bumps and upgrade the fist Nobody nobody does the feet bump anymore. It's not a thing. But we but you know, in terms of like What are your takes on how the how the Ethereum space has evolved in the last year and like do you think that the pandemic had a very sort of like specific like specific ways in which it affected the Ethereum ecosystem and like what are your thoughts on like how things have grown? What?

Yeah. Left to right. Just thoughts. Yeah like Yeah, I think it's evolved a lot in terms of traction in terms of the category of users. A year ago, we were mostly it was mostly driven by what you call DeFi degens or power users who are using DeFi. And right now we start to see much more retail using using Ethereum. And I think part of that is due to side chains like Polygon BSC that have seen a big traction. And a year ago if you would tell ask me if Polygon or BSC would succeed, I would say definitely not. But that's was one of the my biggest surprises. But it they definitely attracted new categories of users that we can see on any DEX

including ParaSwap. Yeah, and that's probably also catalyzed by the fact that the market went up. So suddenly the focus on the blockchain space went crazy. And from the overall ambience that we that I kind of felt in the in the conferences a a lot of confidence. People feel confident, happy that we had market validation that what we were building was good. Also traction in terms of users and that's that's a pretty very positive feedback loop that we can feel in the in the community right now.

And from my perspective, so I address a B2B audience with Kaiko. So we work with institutions in the space. And for me 2020 was really the year of institutional adoption and something that I've been hoping for very intensely which is institution obviously still focusing on Bitcoin but really trying for the first time to give Ethereum the attention it deserves. And obviously it kind of starts with the launch of derivative products on Ethereum. It's not necessarily the way you would want to see institutions adopting the space but at least it's not like Bitcoin or Bitcoin or nothing. Now Ethereum is definitely in the spotlight. We're starting to see regulated entities and capital markets kind of giants look very seriously at Ethereum not just from a price

speculating like let's try this new asset class standpoint but also from a how can we use this thing? How can we build industrial applications on top of this thing? And I find that super interesting and it really came out of 2020. Yeah, I like what what you see when you say well, it's institutional acquisition and from my perspective Bitcoin is the gateway drug. They look at this and they're well, cool. Now I have Bitcoin. So some sometime because your bank and your private bank sector will tell you like hey, we really need to have Bitcoin because all of my clients they want to have Bitcoin. Okay, let's do it. Let's have some Bitcoin. Have some custody of Bitcoin. And companies in the field just like some of our sponsors Ledger are providing a a B2B custody solution and they they see traction on this.

And when they end up having Bitcoin on their account, they're like well, what can I do with this? And now you have companies like Aave we have launched Aave Pro and saying well, you know, you can have a yield on your Bitcoin if you wrap it into wrap Bitcoin and deposit on Aave. And suddenly they kind of feel like okay, it's just not a a dead cat sitting on my account. It's something that I can actually lend that I can actually apply some derivatives that can some financial primitives that I'm either aware of or that are like a little bit familiar and after hearing again and again that you can use ParaSwap that you can use UniSwap that you can use SushiSwap that you can use liquidity and so on. They they kind of get to this.

I would caveat that institutions I don't think they're yet kind of trading on UniSwap or going through ParaSwap for executing trades but at least they're looking at it and they know what what it means kind of. Yeah, that's the major shift is that they are considering now using those technologies. I think they maybe you know better, they still see them as technologies and maybe they're not looking to trade on DeFi but maybe use these technologies in their context. And I think that would be a blessing actually for the space, right? It's not just like honestly if we have institutions buying ETH that's great. It you know, drives the price up, good. But what is really interesting is understanding that blockchain and Ethereum in particular as a technology can be used to actually implement financial contract, implement financial services. And it's not about just trading ETH, it's about building on

Ethereum, just like all of us here are building on Ethereum, right? Mhm. I I I like this um this sort of uh dichotomy between like the institutional and the you know more um you know end user side of things. Uh like since since uh this la- the last conference, you know there was of course like DeFi summer and there's like all this kind of degen activity. Uh just before we had this talk, I was speaking with Italic. That episode will be out next week on Epicenter. Uh and one of the one of the things we talked about was what he discussed during his talk was this uh you know where he's I don't want maybe not lamented, but you know he was somewhat cautious about um you know the fact that like Ethereum has become a platform for financial uh instruments and you have

like layers upon layers upon layers of derivatives and at some point, you know the thing can just collapse. And I I I this resonates with me because I'm you know I I I sort of think that the entire world right now is like focused on prices and you know this is like kind of idea of financial nihilism. And I I hope that you know that there will be like actual uh you utility built on Ethereum, but at at the moment it seems like the things are going full finance and like and But but there's finance and finance, right? There's finance kind of degen. I agree like super leveraged position and like you create value that literally doesn't exist. Like there's not enough ETH to fulfill all of the derivatives contract that have been issued. That's kind of you know literally taking the bad things of traditional finance and

putting that on Ethereum, which is kind of you know a shame. However, there's incredible things that a huge multiplier. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But but I mean it's it's like you know the subprime crisis is a very good example of like the like things that can happen when you keep embedding and wrapping too many things into too many things and like you lose track of what was inside in the first place. Uh however, I'm also kind of a proper like I think it's important to realize that there are good things in traditional finance and that we should think about bringing that on chain. I was talking to a guy who was building credit reputation, credit kind of rating credit scoring on chain to assign credit scoring to wallet so that you don't need to give your ID as long as your wallet is reputable or deemed reputable, you

can participate into different types of on chain applications and and that's why like it's not just about finance in this, you know, in terms of API's and all of that, it's also about having industrial applications, having real life use cases and they could be financial. I mean like it's what's wrong with having everyone and their mothers sending tokens to each others? I just there's just been a new thing and You're too smart to say to say things like that. No, but I anyway, I agree to say I I didn't hear Vitalik's interview but yeah yeah, I I completely copy that.

There's there's a tendency to create new uh tokens with a the name of a of any elements and and say like this is the cucumber token and now bring all your things and I'm going to give away some cucumber and then the previous one said to the previous one and so yeah, there is a tendency to do that and to print super high API and and trying to bring people. But on the plus side, right? Having great reputation like this should be super cool. Also from a VC perspective cuz we see like I mean you you're better placed to to talk about this but uh uh when you see ETVC last year and you were at ETVC last year as someone looking for funding, um the the VC crowd has evolved as well.

Like it How many how many VC was there were there last year? We had like 27 and this year we had about 50. Yeah, so like doubled doubled, right? And we had huge like awesome VCs this year. We also had amazing VCs last year but like ETVC is sort of side track that's organized with Kaiko and then yeah, exactly. And it really emanated yeah, and it emanated from when we raised Kaiko's seed there was such a disconnect between like traditional fintech VCs and the blockchain founders that we thought it's good to just break that ice and get fintech VCs just more into the Ethereum ecosystem and I wanted to do that thing inside at CC because they needed to see the energy, the intelligence, the camaraderie that there is in that ecosystem and understand that if they see a founder that kind of

doesn't know how to play the VC game or the VC pitch whatever but there is a different form of intelligence that I adore in this ecosystem. Because the credit score like tell us like this founder is worth nine out of 10 or this one is worth eight out of 10 and tell the VCs like well look this is super credit score team and it should they should have more money because what I hear what I heard from VCs this year is that well okay this is complex this is interesting or we don't really know what the market is but we will do a team play and then okay let's try to get validation about that.

Early stage early stage VC is a founder's bet and the founder's bet in an ecosystem where you don't necessarily understand the tech and the founders are inherently not your traditional kind of you know fresh out of whatever college knowing the VC game type founder it's it's harder for them to navigate. So my experience of pitching last year in a TVC and meeting those VCs in a different context when we're not pitching like raising right now I saw big shifts and do their approach last year I felt like traditional VCs were not really in crypto were kind of in a discovery phase like trying to understand and careful a little bit on what has to be done and only few months later and maybe it

coincides with DFI summer that some some extent right now they built a full teams and they have a very deep understanding of what is DFI and what is decentralization and so on and they are now ready to deploy significant capital and they were talking about tens of millions of dollars that is ready to be deployed right now. They're like looking for entrepreneurs. So, I think maybe E VC is one of the biggest contributors to this shift in FinTech. Yeah, I'm serious. I mean, I talked to them and many told me this yeah, I saw you in E VC at that time. Didn't really we it was still new for us and we needed more time to understand this thing and right now they are like investing in D 5 protocols and that's a good that's a great thing.

Are we even starting to see traditional equity VCs that are kind of, you know, now building token funds which sounded impossible a year ago? Yeah. Mhm. How how I mean, here in France we have the BPI France which is the sort of sovereign fund. I know that they're like quite involved in the in the Yeah, they were a big crypto space. Yeah, they they were big supporters this year. Very present. They've done kind of giant leaps into understanding the space and getting to know the space. I think it's they're still taking their time to actually deploy capital, but at least they're really now very much willing.

Yeah, and supporting. They're very supportive. They're very highly supportive. Yeah, many VCs also thanks to them to their encouragement that they are able to invest and they invest I think in some venture capital. Yeah, they invested in in a white star. In white star. Yeah, white star is So, basically white star has a mandate to invest in French blockchain startups using kind of also that extra fuel from BPI. Yeah exactly. So, one one thing that I I really want to talk about since since I'm here with you know, the creme de la creme of the French ecosystem is how the French ecosystem has grown and specifically the D 5 ecosystem.

I think like Paris Swap is like one of the important players there, but you know, like last year like 2 years ago you know, there were a lot of crypto startups in France, but you know, you had like ledger and a lot of like smaller ones and and not so much happening in D 5, but like in the last few months even like we've just seen like tons of really high quality D 5 products coming out of the French ecosystem and like teams based in France, starting up companies in France, and and like gaining traction and you know, exciting gathering excitement around their projects. Like, where do you think this is coming from and uh you know, are are are we going to start seeing like a sort of shift towards more DeFi projects in France? Um

Well, we can only assume that Ethereum France is doing good. Trying to promote the fact that Paris is a good place on the map to to see things happening on Ethereum. Um and also it's like I think in the financial space in the financial industry, the the French individuals have a good reputation because they do math and abstraction to a certain extent. And they like being a quant, like being a trader or whatever. Um and now they are applying their brain juice to doing crypto stuff. Um I'm very happy to see APWine here as a as a sponsor behind us.

A very young company of two young out of school uh that just build a way to separate yield from a token and re-tokenized it and doing cool derivatives of them. Yep, we just talked about it, but the approach is very very very very smart. I love it. And one of the thing that I love also is Mangrove, a project by academics in France from the super interesting project. that I'll try to try to address one of the problem we have with uh automated market maker and also DeFi projects where it's highly capital inefficient and yeah, they're tackling this problem with a very nice approach as well. So, it's it's it's great. It's great to see happening and I think also

that the fact that we have a background of doing lots of public goods, we're lots of research, deep research um and applying this to crypto is it's only starting to happen. So, very very eager to see what And I think a lot of these projects, if you look at the founders, I think many of them are probably like former ConsenSys France, people who have worked at ConsenSys France even even though ConsenSys France doesn't really I mean I think they probably have a few people still, but I think that was like a really good incubator incubator for creating much of what's happening now in the French ecosystem.

I think it's like a network effect. So, you you need to have one project that's going to attract another one and once you reach a critical mass, then you create an ecosystem. And I think Ethereum France contributed a lot. We were also organizing DeFi France, which we were very surprised to see how much traction in that was in 2019, the middle of the bear market. And we had like 100 people in a small room coming to listen to DeFi. So, that was also early signs that there is something happening and now we see the results of this top quality project that we've seen and I think we're going to see more in the near term.

I think something something very beautiful about the Ethereum ecosystem in general, maybe in France in particular because I just see it more, is that in bear markets people get their head together and try to think kind of proactively around how they're going to build things versus kind of just being down and depressed. And why is that? Is just because Ethereum offers tools that enables you to build, right? Versus I guess the biggest divide would be Bitcoin Ethereum where well, Bitcoin drops, you know, you're kind of like looking at your screen and you can't do anything about it. With Ethereum, you can actually think, "Hey, you know, the ecosystem needs a DEX aggregator. The ecosystem needs a fiat on-ramp." You know, there's so many things that you can do to enable growth and application and collaboration between companies. And this is done

thanks to organization like Ethereum France or like bringing people together so that intelligence kind of is shared and and yeah, education, for sure. Next time the price drop, we'll spend some time breeding some Axie Infinity and playing some games. Um you know, we we couldn't have a an Ethereum ETC panel without talking about NFTs and what's been happening in the NFT space in the last few months. And I'm glad you're here because you're building a product that very much, you know, uses NFTs.

Um Do you do you guys think that, you know, what's the what's the real utility to come out of that of that space? And you know, we were talking earlier with with with Sunny Metallic and you know, I think NFT space is probably not the right way. It's like there are several sort of use cases. So like there's the art use case, there's the collectibles use case, there's like gaming. And you know, there's like finance kind of intermingled with all of that, you know, it kind of interwoven into all all these use cases.

Uh What is the like what is the you think the use case that it will be that will kind of pop out of this as as the most like widely used? Um well, um well, What What is that? Okay. From the beginning. So, this year we had a a hot exhibit from NFT artist. I know it's a bad name. I'm a NFT artist. Well, basically an artist that put the representation of their digital art into the blockchain. So, as a form of NFT.

Um and I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on this cuz we still have to see how this trying to uh use the blockchain medium to make them their art evolve. Uh We had a one speaker in 2018 that came again and again into ECC, which is Kevin Abosch, a photographer that is experimenting with the blockchain with work like or his collaboration with Ai Weiwei on using blockchain to do new kinds of arts. Uh so that's super exciting to see and we are only seeing the beginning of this. I think maybe the art space will be super active on doing blockchain stuff pretty soon.

Now when it comes to blockchain I'm I'm a deep believer of having gaming as a way to onboard people into blockchain cuz it gives them a a reason to actually try to install a wallet. And if they don't succeed on trying to install a wallet, having another game pushing a wallet to them in another way. And suddenly solving the problem that you are actually playing when you are doing a video game or you are you are enjoying a video game. And at some point the thing that you earn in the video game or the thing that represents your character or the thing that your character has, you want to give them value. You want to have something outside of the game or eventually you have the thing that you have in the game being usable in another game. Um and that's what NFT is bringing to the bringing to

the table. And now what can you do with this? Well, we can use the blockchain to do pairing of players. So instead of doing everybody to a server and play Fortnite, eventually you can play on the blockchain doing everybody together on a smart contract and have peer-to-peer rather than multiplayer for example. And using the blockchain as a way to uh run a blockchain game engine uh can be something very exciting as well. So I'm really excited to see where this is going. Yeah, and it's it's also it's also kind of encouraging to see that it like in France we have like Sorare who's you know like one of the probably the the biggest like NFT issuer uh and also like Cometh this and Sandbox as well. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of cool to see like this kind of

gaming this kind of gaming uh ecosystem like French gaming ecosystem also moving to the blockchain space. Yeah, we have a big tradition in France to be known for finance but also known for video games. Yeah yeah yeah. So it's only natural to see and I'm very happy that it embraces blockchain. Um what uh in terms of everything that you've seen here this year like you know what are you most hopeful uh in terms of like technology advancements or new types of applications being built on Ethereum? Like what will we look back on next year and be like, oh, that was the thing that you know, kind of blew up in in 2021?

I say it's especially scaling solutions. I think there was a proof of concept with side chains that proved there is a big need and it works. When we put more, I would say, resources and make this thing cheaper and faster, it definitely works. It works, sorry. And like now we're entering a phase of layer twos, like effective layer twos, not independent side chains. And I think this will bring new possibilities, like we come back to finance, things like high frequency trading that is not possible right now, today. It's going to be It's going to be possible. And I think the challenge right now is we are breaking what we know as composability in in DeFi. And but we're entering this new phase, so

new challenges going to come in order to solve what we just broke. And but that's going to take DeFi and maybe at the other use cases to next stages. And maybe we will start getting closer to CeFi or TradFi. But I think I think you you you know you know better on one like how to take leverage with risk and how to to to to use derivatives in order to have best execution. And I think DeFi would grow like that in the future. It's going to be maybe better, maybe not. I'm not sure, I mean. But yeah, those are the new challenges that are coming with those new scaling solutions.

In my opinion. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm for like high frequency trading on the blockchain. It it suits you because it generates fees fees on Marathon. But no, but in general I I I'm, you know, again, I'm B2B, so I'm very close to what's going on on the enterprise institutions capital market side. Very very excited about like Societe Generale Forge against like French version of kind of one of those institutions looking at using Ethereum in order to implement equity derivatives, traditional equity derivatives. So, they're looking at kind of European indices derivatives that could be living on Ethereum where obviously we could play the role of bringing the settlement data on chain. So, what I'm looking at from I

guess a more infrastructure perspective would be those on-ramp, off-ramps, bridging traditional finance and on-chain finance from a from my perspective, from a data perspective, but it could be custody, it could be reputation. I think oracles are going to be extremely important in the future. You know, having reliable information that is brought from outside the blockchain onto the blockchain enabling the implementation and and and delivery of contracts that are tied to instruments that live outside of the blockchain. If you think about it, most financial contracts are kind of signed on a piece of paper or Docusign or whatever and they represent code. If you think about it, code like a legal

agreement is is code. You define functions and then you implement functions, etc. So, if you can translate a lot of those financial contracts or whatever type of contracts into code, what you need are the inputs and those inputs will be provided by oracles. We, you know, we believe this is going to be very important in the future. Also, the enforcement of those agreements can be automatic. Exactly. No, no, that's the purpose of putting it into a smart contract is like automation of a legal agreement that can represent any type of contract. Absolutely. What struck me this year is the humongous amount of DeFi sub DeFi application that we had on the call for speaker. So, when we were reviewing it, we're we're lucky to have lots of talks that were kind of similar. So, we

could have like two different talks and do a selection uh keep it keep the the DeFi track quite small, even if it was like 30% or 40% of the world conference. And at the same time, literally little to no each one two talks. Uh so, maybe it means that each one two is on track and we are just like, okay, let's let's let it come. And uh and hopefully everything will be will be good. Um and and and it feels like each one two is a a little bit too far away or too virtual, like not not concrete yet. And maybe why we have all of those layer two solutions or side chains that are thriving right now.

Mhm. Um but in in the end we will need both, for sure. Uh yeah, if you take for example, let's say let's say we do proof of stake tomorrow and all the chains runs like three times faster than what each one mainnet is doing right now, and we have 64 chains, well, that's three times 64 more blocks. So, lots of blocks yay. Mhm. Maybe maybe the prevalence of uh you know, of scaling solutions and like layer twos is is taking the pressure off a little bit off of like the each two stuff because people can actually build things and But let's say we have exponential adoption because suddenly like, hey, we are mature for this market. We are mature to go retail and we have lots of video games. We have lots of DEXes. We have lots of DeFi projects. Um like I'm um

I know the matrix from Cometh for example. We've been live for six months is on Polygon and we did 8 million transaction in six months. Uh 8 million transaction of an average 1 million gas per transaction because we execute lots of things inside the blockchain, so that's uh well, eight eight eight trillion gas consumed. That that's just huge. Like we needed in layer two solutions on top of the side chain or layer two solution on top of the of the of the shards that you all deployed in. Um so, what I liked a lot is the the talk about uh ZK-EVM by Hermez. And there are other people trying to go to that that direction, like stock market and so on. So very very happy that people are

are are already seeing the next step. What happen if next year we have a successful video game, successful DeFi stuff, successful new things built on Ethereum, successful governance built on Ethereum and we are we have to deliver that to 1 billion people not only tens of million. Yeah, I think what what will be what will be interesting to see is like how these different types of applications with very different sort of platform needs will coexist. And yeah, we were also talking about this with with Sunny and Vitalik earlier I said, you know, that so I I you know, I'm very close to the Cosmos community as well and the vision in the Cosmos community is that you have like application specific chains and so which is what I think has enabled a lot

of like non-financial applications to to exist. So you have like a chain that's like for VPN, like a chain that's for like, you know, building like sort of cloud. Um because there's like a you know, for so in the Ethereum space the analogy is like you need you know, things that are good for finance, things that might be good for gaming, things that might be good for I don't know, minting NFTs or things like that. And you know, perhaps that with, you know, scaling solutions we'll start to see like some sort of fragmentation in terms of the applications because like building a DeFi app and like building, you know, like a game necessitates like much like quite quite different like technical infrastructure and and and scaling.

Well, I can disagree with that. Please continue. No, I I No, I think it's a it's a good approach from an engineering perspective. Oh yeah, we want to make dedicated chain with dedicated architecture and things but the beauty of it is composability. Like how Yeah, I want to see I want to see a video game where you have an economy inside this video game represented by ERC-20, ERC-721 and so on and being able to have all the DeFi primitives to list those resources in game so that the the economy of this video game can thrive with those primitives rather than have to go to another chain or have to have to go to another shop. And maybe that can very well work without it, but I think we are like we are it's like it's like having a

a good a good a good thing to eat, but no sauce to pour on it. Like what what would you what would you say like hey, well No, but also that's one of the box of the proof of concept that's side chains like Polygon has proven is that you can have video games and they are interoperable with financial assets and at the end I mean you're creating a new virtual world that's also has its economy and like you can trade NFTs for instance and so on. And having composability make things much much easier.

It doesn't mean that this fragmentation will I mean will make it impossible, but it's just will make it challenging and it's going to take some time to to fix. The only thing is how to manage this transition phase. I don't see like there's no magic formula, but I think we're going to have to live with both and wait until we find those solutions and battle test them and how long this will take maybe one or two years maybe more. It's hard to say. Mhm. Yeah. I feel like perhaps the the sort of fragmentation might come later when you have more real world things that are on the blockchain. It's like when you have like the equity for your house for example on the blockchain, you know, perhaps it's not so useful to have like sitting it's not so useful for that being sitting right next to like, you know,

your your your Shiba Inu NFTs or things like that. I'll counter that as well. I'm just I'm just thinking for example like I just bought an apartment and we Congratulations. Thanks. And it was a loan that was collateralized by the actual house. So basically instead of having an insurance where if I die, the insurance pays the whatever is left of the loan, here I have a credit hypothecaire so collateral a mortgage that is I have a house and I don't have a mortgage.

And and actually the mortgage is collateralized by the real estate. And so in some way if I have a representation of my ownership of my house on a blockchain, maybe I want to use that as collateral, for example. So, I I obviously there could be some rare cases where you don't necessarily need the ability to have that kind of different economics. It's just like it's a shame to have a system that offers it and then not benefit it by putting it in a corner. Wait wait wait wait wait wait that's awesome. That's a great idea. Okay, let's let's have an NFT project where you you you take a loan to buy the NFT. And if you don't reimburse the loan, we take the NFT away.

Yeah, the big problem here is the value, right? I mean Use your Sorare cards as collateral for your house. Exactly. The problem So, that's a huge problem with collateralized loans in general is how do you monitor the loan to value and how do you pay margin calls, etc. And that's what you have when you borrow stablecoins against crypto. You have those margin calls, etc. So, liquidity of the underlying asset is important. In the case of a house, they basically take a discount, and it's not a very volatile asset price. But if you start putting, you know, spaceships and Sorare cards, and I'm not sure how I would trust Okay, you read my mind.

solidity of my collaterals. Um cool. So, what's what's what's next for ECC? I mean like I think this was given the pandemic and and given the context, I think it was like such a fat fabulous conference. I just loved it. a boner. Um you know, basically you know, you've had 2 years of ECC during the pandemic, and I think it's like the two biggest ECCs have been during the pandemic. We'll see if there's like a Google spreadsheet with like, you know, D variant infections that'll come out in the next few years.

I might I might actually I was thinking of actually like creating the spreadsheet and like just putting it out there like as a pin tweet so people can start, you know, if there are infections, they can at least you know, list them. of 2021. First first first COVID cluster, first Delta cluster. Yeah, yeah, let's be proactive here cuz it's probably what going to happen but yeah. After the Delta cluster come the E cluster but it's the E4 cluster. This will be the best best advertisement possible. Like last year I was joking saying that we we kind of created the herd immunity of the community. Yeah.

So so So yeah, what what did you learn this year and what what what what are your plans for next year? Oh yeah, well well just just a little remark about last year because maybe people are watching us like well like those careless people like holding conference in the middle of the pandemic. So SCC happened last year the first week of March. And the the weekend before the SCC there was the salon de l'agriculture agriculture gathering with 30,000 people going there and the first day of SCC we had our president Macron going to the theater being interviewed saying like hey guys just enjoy Paris, go out, live live as it was normal like we are things are under control. By this time we didn't know exactly what was coming. We were relying

on the WHO uh recommendations and so on. And and yeah yeah this is this was crazy basically. Um and now we were thinking about how we're going to do it this year, how we're going to be able to organize it or not. Uh we were thinking about doing it in March and then and then May and then June and then we said okay, let's let's we have one bullet left. Let's go for July and if it doesn't happen in July like we'll see. The rules have changed during during the preparation like the week before we were supposed to have SCC we had the the president coming to the the TV and say like okay, so starting this day we were going to enforce this which we had to enforce on the second day of the conference. It didn't change much.

We didn't want it to enforce that initially and stick at 1,000 people. We maybe could have had sold 3,000 tickets also. But yeah, we stick to that and and everything went fine. So now the question for us is to say well are we going to host a conference in March 2022? They started to get ready for this. Are we going to aim for May, June, July? Maybe it was too hot for Paris this summer and maybe a little bit earlier would be better. Um and People I think generally like the I I I got a lot of feedback from people that they they liked that it was in the summer.

Yeah, and and we are very close with the the Berlin community, the German community in general and we know that they were organizing a conference Devcon and and everything around this in in if Berlin uh in August. So, we don't want to to to be in a position where we impose the competition the competition or we impose our agenda or and so on. So, we will synchronize with them to see what works best or even if we can have one thing at the year and one thing there. Let's let's see what what could work. Um and moreover, the big question for us is, you know, where whether or not we're going to have a Devcon this year, uh whether or not it's going to happen this year in Bogota as as planned in December. Uh and that's going to to be also part of the the decision. Like if

nothing happened in December and we cannot party because we just moved to the next phase of Ethereum 2. Well, maybe we should do something about it. Maybe we should have a half at CC or something. Okay. Well, um hopefully we can have a full uh instead of a half at CC, we can have a double at CC. And we can have like 3,000 people here at the at La Mutualité. How much can we fit here? How many people tops? Uh The place isn't huge. Yeah. I'm not I'm not entirely sure. I think I think if every every room is filled of people and everything and everywhere and it's I think it's close to 12,000.

Uh okay. So, we have room for for growing in here. Yeah but I I don't know if if the you know, I don't know. Let's Let's discuss that. One thing that I'm happy about and I I I didn't use it very much, but I'm very happy about this the studio. Um because last year I had my little rinky-dink podcast booth under the stairs, and which was great. Um but I mean this is I think such a great a great thing to offer uh you know media and and podcasters is to have like a proper studio and you know hats off to you guys for doing that.

We are two professional teams organizing a well shooting a documentary. Uh two different teams and let's see what comes out of this. Yeah, yeah, that's right. There's going to be like maybe a Netflix documentary film that eats you. See, so that's pretty cool, too. All right. Well, uh it's late in the third day. I think everybody wants to go have a drink uh on the on the rooftop at the next to the sand. So, um we'll end it here and see you guys next year. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.