Epicenter – The Hosts Look Back on 2021 #421

Transcript

hi welcome the epicenter of the podcast where were you for crypto founders builders and thought leaders i'm sebastian cuccio and today i'm here with brian fabian crane frederick ernst and sunny agarwal today we're we're doing our you know yearly tradition of uh having a epicenter host extravaganza episode where we just get to talk amongst ourselves talk about uh what happened in the last year and where we think things are going and usually uh break apart our predictions from the previous year uh before we do that though i'd like to tell you my responses today with periswap you can beat the market price every single block it's fast and it's highly liquid and they just launched v5 which has a new contract and new apis it has a more modular infrastructure which is more gas

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networks so head over to chorus.one to start your staking journey today guys thanks uh for being here today and uh taking part in this yearly tradition of uh yeah talking about what happened this year and what's happening next year so welcome everyone this is the best part of epicenter i just grind through the rest of it just to get to these yearly episodes yeah and like every year we say we're gonna do this more often but we never end up doing it more often somehow you have you have to take what sunny says today with a grain of salt because for him it's really early he's uh he's over uh in puerto rico and uh it's noonish for the rest of us and sunny got

up especially yeah really appreciate it uh sunny so yeah i think like there's lots of different themes that we want to talk about today and um so i think we'll start with you know what what were the big themes this year and how we perceive them into and then like you know themes for the future and how we think things are going to evolve in the next year or two um i think the thing that everybody had brought up and it's probably on everyone's mind this is like nfts um and if he's absolutely blew up this year um felika you were um not surprised but uh somewhat i was totally surprised so basically i mean yeah so basically the

nft's thing it it caught me totally by surprise so basically i i always thought that nfts were coming but very much not in the way that they've actually arrived so basically to me the way that they have manifested themselves is mostly in the status as a service domain and i thought that basically nfts would manifest themselves in the um in the realm of all things financial but non-fungible which is actually the majority of assets so yeah totally surprised i do you think that this current form of nfts is what's going to be like that what's used long term like i don't know

so i what i'm personally really interested in is like figuring out how to like uh use nfts in like more d5 protocols so i think like most of d5 currently is like so i guess like one prediction i have which i know maybe but i think that like d5 and nfts are going to become more and more like combined with each other right because i think that like you know what's all of d5 currently is really built around these fungible tokens and like you mentioned like you know most finance financial assets are like nfps if you want to like bring like homes and stuff onto a blockchain like we need to have like those be nfts and if they want to have a protocol that gets a mortgage on those homes you need to have d5 that interact with those nfts

now the thing is like yes i agree with you that like you know the current pfp nfts profile pic nfts you know they're not exactly that but i think like you know they're just like setting the groundwork and they're you can think of them as these were the easiest things to build and so that's why they got they're what got built first and you know there's all this stuff that's building this like tooling around them and that will be usable for more things well it's i mean it's interesting right because like nfts i mean they've been around for a while but actually i think the first use case of nfts that i remember clearly is like centrifuge right and they've been working on this for like years and

years and that was actually exactly that right because they have basically nfds for like non-fungible financial assets where you you would basically have like an nft for some sort of loan and then they would get pooled and then you'd have uh like a fungible token that is then backed by these nft so like you've had you've had that it just hasn't taken off in the way that it did around all kinds of stuff though no no it's not it's not just profile pictures right it's like all kinds of like art the interesting thing about the art thing is i mean i um i remember very well

the so you know there's this team that uh now works on ocean protocol but they've had a bunch of predecessors right so they had this thing called bigchaindb at one point and before that they had a thing called the scribe and the scribe was basically uh basically doing something like nfts where they're like tracking art ownership on the bitcoin blockchain and i remember having a lot of discussions with them back then this was in 2015 or 14 maybe 14. and because i was so puzzled also like how does this have value right because like you have to the file is like separate you can still copy like the art thing but then you

have this digital ownership but this is really have value and i remember having these discussions with them and like yeah 2014 and then of course that didn't take off but now it is uh but it makes sense to me in a way right because i think you have something where you you didn't have a market before like it was basically not possible to to kind of trade a lot of these intangible pictures images ideas memes and now you can have it and that's pretty huge i think i feel like i mean the thing that i'm most interested in with regards to nfts at least in the next couple of years

like i i don't know how this plays out sort of like more i i'm not sure i have fully formed ideas about how this plays out with non-financial assets like homes and loans and things like that but the whole pfp thing and sort of the status of the service for me i think can serve as a as sort of a base layer for new forms of social networks where financial services and this kind of ties into like what you were saying earlier uh so like social networks and financial products kind of like end up merging and it's like the the financialization of status and the financialization of um of these sort of like in this sort of like intangible idea of status and i can see where you know

these things start getting bootstrap where nfts are actually used as collateral so like you you kind of stake your nft in this these your nfts in this new in these new networks and then from there um these these sort of new social networks would issue tokens that um that users could use to like you know using d5 and things like that it's like it's not fully formed but like this is where i i see like at least the pfp aspect of nfts hanging in the next couple years yeah i think there's two overlapping things here right so basically there's nfts and then there's social tokens right and i mean basically um tokens that kind of grant you access to social networks to me that's a different use

case it's not because nfts to me this is um a very clearly one dimensional thing where basically you you you have an exact price point for each nft and so on and for social tokens it kind of allows for a much more for much richer dynamic right what are some examples of social tokens you're talking about so for i think the first ones were the friends with benefits uh people um but i i think it's proliferated so i actually i i i'm not particularly active because i i i have too little time but i know there's tons of tons of social

networks out there that are gate kept by tokens so here's his one like option of what you know i agree that i think a lot of nfts are currently being used effectively as like social gating tokens community tokens and maybe maybe what's going on is that these are it's a sort of proof of work right because you know once you have an erc 20 standard kind of thing it's very easy for anyone to just go mint a token and just like release it and say oh this is a community token right but it's like if if if everyone starts doing that then like you know maybe the barrier to entry is just like so small we're just gonna get flooded with all these community tokens they're gonna lose their value i think by making them nfts and like

having to put some artwork into it the community creator has it's sort of like a bit of proof of work that they have to do they have to do this like minimum threshold of like investing like finding an artist and like creating at least like you know whether it's generic like uh auto generative or like hand-drawn or something but you have to like create like you know okay i gotta go create 10 000 artworks and then you can have this like community token yeah i think i think one of the things that's important to recognize here is the importance of firsts um and you know like on ethereum like the the sort of first big nft projects like you know the crypto punks or whatever like those are gonna have those are gonna remain valuable like for a long time

like like the first crypto punk or like the first generation of art or like the first like pixelated uh art or whatever and then like you know on solana like the equivalent of that is like dj so i said that's the first kind of like pfp and then like everything else kind of like comes like goes to zero from there i mean like you know the prices are like don't don't maintain the same value so i think that the kind of blue chip nfts will will remain valuable on every platform and then like once in a while there's gonna be like a first of something like there's gonna be a first of some a new kind of art whether it's like you know visual art or or film or or um or audio or music and you know that will happen on

ethereum it'll happen on solana and these kind of like new experiences will always remain sort of like the pinnacle of like what people expect nfts to deliver the value and the floor price will probably like stay super high and then like everything else just kind of copies it uh kind of goes down from there so two things i want to add well so okay so one is you know about the status thing you know i mean i i actually don't think it's that surprising i think that's actually been this like missing piece in crypto where um so if you if you guys know elaine ooh she's like you know i really like her blog and i think i mentioned it in the past couple of times but i remember like she had this post from like four or five years ago where she she says like hey people often forget this

like other uh value like you know we talk about the you know three uses of money right like uh medium of exchange store value and unit of account and so there's actually this like very fourth very commonly used one which is uh display of wealth right and she's like gold is actually you know made for a very good like money because it actually served as a good display of wealth where you could turn it into jewelry and use it to show off right and that was something that was missing from the digital like what what what bitcoin was and like you know initially a joke like oh maybe what we got to do is we're all gonna get like you know these like gold chains that have them like some like trusted hardware that like shows your like bitcoin balance on your thing like clearly that's not what's

happening and i think nfts are sort of what came in and like filled in that gap of like being the display of wealth digital lambos yeah they're digital lambos right um okay so question how about we go around what is everyone's favorite nft collection or nft here i mean i i i i you know my interaction with nft has been fairly limited you know there's like some things like this centrifuge or orbit there's some they're actually like non-traditional use cases i bought a few nfts when when we were preparing the wearable podcast right because that because that was kind of

but otherwise i i have not been very active i have actually not bought any kind of nfts for my collection i think i have univ3 does this count sunny uh i i think that was like so epic what they did where like you know they mentioned that oh yes these v3 positions are nfts but like when they dropped it they actually had like a cool artwork for each nft and i think that like surprised anyone and i think that was like so cool i also still i also still have a very extensive not safe for work collection of clovers i don't know whether you guys remember this and i'm still waiting for this to to to to come back so i can dump

my clothes bags here you have to tell people that like you know this was like an og nfp because all the og nft projects are what's like become really popular it was an og nft project i mean this this i mean it's it's like this gen it's this generative art thing where basically um all all i mean it's a black and white thing and basically um the the it's it's um the end state of a go um of a go game right so basically it's it's uh and so basically it's it's generative it's actually super cool uh but yeah i feel like there's uh not a lot not a lot of uh people pushing this my favorite nfts that i bought i bought

them like way before this was any like it was a thing i mean they're they're not like worth anything but i just think they're cool and um but like there are these sort of ninja turtle figures on the uh you can't really see it here but like um with a background of like the us dollar uh they're not worth anything but i just thought it was cool to get that collection and um and of course uh you know my junk dick pics uh i love those and i i'm holding on to them because i'm convinced they're gonna be worth something someday i think for me i i think my favorite one is uh it's called stacked toads and what happens is you get these little

toads and then you like stake them and what happens you by staking them you earn stack tokens and you use a stack token to like take the toads and like stack them on top of each other and you get like a tower of toads it is the dumbest thing i've ever heard but i think it's hilarious and funny and like yeah and i think what's cool is that kind of what it did was it started introducing a lot of like nft people to like concepts from like uh uh elsewhere and crypto like ideas like staking and things like this so i think that was actually kind of uh pretty cool well let's go to the let's go to our next topic which is sort of i think sunny brought it up no because we've had the nft

uh explosion and at the same time we've had f5 i mean in some ways it's it's exploded right there's been like explosion of activity but at the same time like d5 tokens that i think were like their rage at some point uh especially these kind of ethereum d5 things like you know maker curve compound urine etc etc they've not done so well what's going on yeah i mean this is just an observation i made recently which was like hey like you know if you go to 2020 and you talk about like what were the d5

blue chips right uh you know what we had like maker sushi uni wifey uh snx comp like all these things and like i think out of all the d5 blue chips like none of them are in the top 50 by like market cap anymore other than uni like you know sushi and snx are like not even in the top hundred compound is barely hanging on ave is like you know i don't know number 70 or something and it's like you know it's so you know i asked a lot of people of you know i was asking a few people like more investory friends i'm like hey you know what's going on with defy right now

why is it like just like not you know just just slipping in like valuations and they're like yeah honestly like all the all the interest has like not it's kind of boring everyone's just more into like nfts and gaming now and so i wonder if that's all it is or if there's something deeper going on where like you know you know we had these like forks upon forks upon forks and i wonder if that's finally like you know starting to be felt where like everyone's like right and you know we always like joked about oh these are just valueless governance tokens right but i think you know it might be coming a little bit true now where i think a lot of people are starting to realize that like hey do these d5 tokens really have any actual value and it seems for a lot

of them they're not even used useful for governance either so but it's also happened to the one project that has had no notable folks right so if you look at maker it's also slid down it's at like 65 or something now wait wait but isn't that isn't mim like the fork of effectively the fork of maker right where like i think what i think in 2020 everyone else started getting forked and like added a uh added like uh yield farming to the forks right but maker never got forked until this year and but now i think spell is like flipped maker and like i think uh mim is actually in the top is not

you know in the top 50 by market cap as they're like the stable coin so i think maker actually did get out competed or is in the process of getting out competed right now yeah i mean i also i guess that's a different topic we're gonna get to but i also you know wonder to what extent there's a factor here that you know here in gas costs it's just gotten like so crazy expensive that actually means like the you know the amount of users has really shrunk a lot right where it's it's only now people have like a huge amount and then you know you have people going to lots of other things whether it's you know solana avalanche cosmos chains

polygon i don't know where and then i i mean that's obviously these d5 blue chips on ethereum have generally not been able to you know like replicate the success on ethereum elsewhere or like even even how does that work right i guess always maybe the ones who seem to be like most aggressive in trying to do this and trying to like kind of launch of it in other chains but um yeah i think that's also something where like it's not working in favor of these defaulting chips so you're saying that there's a sort of dilution of the user base uh relative to other chains and defy

activity happening on other chains i mean like let's say someone now right someone new is like hey i want to start using like crypto and and like you're not even going to tell them i mean i wouldn't even say them like hey you know do some hearing thing right because it's like doesn't make sense right like the the gas costs are like way too high yeah yeah they're gonna go to bsc or something i mean most people i think vsc solana avalanche you know somewhere right yeah and that's obviously bad for the ethereum d5 project yeah also i feel like i feel like the the d5 protocols that have um you know tried to like ave is a good

example of like having you know tried to deploy multiple chains you know there are tools like move your liquidity over but they haven't made it like super simple for for their users to like you know move their positions onto other chains where you know like fees might be lower and and i find that kind of frustrating as a user of these protocols like being able to just like one click move move your liquidity over i find that user experience aspect is like not there yet i i do think that um you know so one i think that the multi-chain approach of ave and sushi is like wrong right because i think that like the interchange application specific approach is the right one but we'll get into that later but i think like with the ave specifically so

i wonder one thing i need to like understand a little bit better is like how well are these things competing on these other platforms right because i like for example i think that um like i i don't know how i don't know how obviously but you know sushi is getting pretty out competed on the other platforms right so if you go on polygon like so sushi has redeployed themselves everywhere but like you know on polygon quick swap is the biggest is the biggest stacks on avalanche it's like trader joe and like like so i so i think what's happening is like you know these protocols that started on ethereum and then try to expand are not able to compete with the protocols that are you know maybe native

to these other ecosystems why do you think that is sunny um i think part of it is just like community sentiment like or like you know the core team would rather promote the things that are like native to their ecosystem because they have a higher sense of loyalty and um things like that so i think that's a large part of it and i think also the things that are native to it maybe started there first right like quick swap was on polygon first and then uh like sushi came over and stuff right but it's like by that time because because if you're expanding you're sort of like playing this like you know mercenary of

like okay all right fine you know the usage on your platform is good enough that i'm gonna it's worth it for me to start like uh deploying there but by that time like some the the missionaries who really liked that platform and started building stuff earlier they've already built up a user base yeah i mean i think also one one thing is if you have like an existing token right that's already distributed to you know like it constrains you a lot right versus okay you can start from scratch and and use like the entire token supply you'll tailor me to like try to incentivize and bootstrap the project on

that chain and then i think the other thing is also if you then have like some coordination it's just it it increases complexity in some ways so i think it will also tend to slow down these projects a little bit make them a little bit less agile and nimble and maybe maybe customized for the particulars of that chain so do you think we'll see um [Music] you know ethereum defy applications uh port over to cosmos when uh when kind of atmos is live and well i i think i think we'll see ethereum applications port over to cosmos i'm not sure if it'll be via

atmos because i don't think evmo solves the problem it just you know atmos is just another polygon or something right it's like you know maybe a more ibc compatible polygon but at the end of the day it's still just not you know it's an evm running on tendermint i think what might happen is we might start seeing so evmos is built on the software called ether mint which is you know built a lot of it was built by the atmos team but also by a lot of other teams as well like crypto.com and stuff um and so i think we're going to see more through applications deploy their own like sovereign chains with an evm right so they're just gonna take put an evm module and just have their contracts on it um and i i think you know like i said i had a bet

two years ago that within three years maker will be on its own chain so i only have a year left in my bet and i'm you know now i am getting a little bit more worried about that my bet i was like pretty confident or well you know i made the bet because we thought it was a 50 50 over under um but like it looks it looks like that might not happen but you know i think like things like compound but you know they have for a long time you know they they haven't been playing that like multi-chain game of work and deploy everywhere because they made this bet on compound chain and saying like hey we're going to go build an application specific chain uh to go and have that be the lending market for everything do you think these chains will be ibc compatible or or

that's unlikely yeah i i think they will be i think that like so one because i think you know for for example compound is being built on substrate right now i have it on good authority that they kind of hate substrate right now i haven't heard anyone who has had a good time building on substrate but like i think that you know there is an ibc pallet being built for a substrate so that so those with the ibc so substrate chains will basically become ibc compatible yeah i think you know customers it just already has this like big network effect on application specific chains and being able to interoperate and so i think we're just going to see more and more of that yeah i'm super bullish on this vision

like i think that i think that it's kind of interesting to see um ethereum starting an ethereum and like sort of you know evm applications start going down this route and like when i heard you know when when when i heard about hypnosis kind of merging off into it so merging with with exercise so it becomes its own chain i thought oh like it makes so much sense and i mean like it's it's basically the cosmos vision playing out on ethereum only like without the bridging technology yet um but i i would be so happy to see um you know evm chains um

well like first of all like if you're really adopting this this this this uh sort of interchange vision and this like application specific blockchain vision but also integrating ibc so that just everything works together sorry i have to clear up uh i think a small misunderstanding here so basically gnosis chain is not going to be a an application specific chain it's going to be a very general evm based chain that kind of that that basically is an ethereum forerunner in terms of implementing eips and does its very best to um to scale in such a manner as to retain reasonably cheap gas prices which i

think is currently um so i mean obviously there's pros and cons for the evm right so basically if if you were to sit down at the drawing board again um would would you modify the evm almost certainly but i mean there's such a huge um network effect around evms that basically the the bet behind gnosis chain is that evms are gonna be there and there they are gonna stay kind of like um uh i mean various um internet protocols are actually pretty bad standards but once they hit a certain level of adoption you can't get rid of them

anymore you can't change the email standard or something it's like i mean yeah maybe it's shitty but it's there and so basically yeah i mean that's kind of the bet behind gnosis chain that seems like to be honest it seems kind of like a strange bet to me right because if you if you look at it today right you have i don't know what some tens of millions of crypto users right and there's so much at the beginning and if you say like oh actually the evm is bad but like i mean i i don't believe these network effects exist the same way right that you have if like whatever tcp ip or like yeah i mean they they kind of do don't they yeah you know i see both sides of this a

lot because like you know one okay so i will i will i i have this like tweet sitting in my drafts that i which is like it goes something like cause like the early cosmos team like cosmos was right about everything except evm skepticism i think that like the early cause of scene like we had this entire vision of like multi-chain things and everything interconnecting i think the one mistake we made was that we were way too evm skeptical and we thought that tweet's been in your draft since last year because i think you mentioned the same thing online well okay well yeah it's been sitting there i i don't know but i i think like you know i think like you know i did not expect that like the multi-chain would play out in

such it's just a bunch of generalized evm chains that are talking to each other right i think that's and that is kind of mostly what we have right now right like avalanche phantom polygon all of these are just evm chains and i don't know i'm still not sure that this is like the solution because i do i still do think that like the evm is the bottleneck on scalability right and like i think solana has showed that where like you just if you want to achieve any sort of real scalability you just have to throw out the evm because that like you like avalanche you know they say they want they do all these like cool things at the consensus protocol there by the end of the day none of it matters because the ebm is the bottleneck but i mean what he could

do is i mean you could reduce like the database or the state size by taking um a snapshot um every year or something i mean there's ways to actually combat this and make it workable right or you just build like a compiler from solidity to like llvm and like you know let people write their contracts until indian you know run it on other state machines you know i guess another sort of thing to talk about would be like i think um right so this kind of maybe jumping ahead because this is one one of the things i wrote as like a prediction for the future but i think it fits in where i i do think that 2022 will be like the year of app chains where like i think that tara has like set the precedent for

this right tara tara was like the execution of the cause of the cosmos vision where what they did was they start they started with this like application specific blockchain uh which is a stable coin and then they've like sort of built like a tiny ecosystem around it where they're like okay we have this like app this application and then they're like okay we want to like drive usage for this application let's start building more sub protocols on top of it and they built up a little ecosystem on top of it and then you know i think what's going to start to happen now with tara is you're going to see applications on terra start to break off onto their own chains because you know i'm already talking to applications that are sort of in the pro you know thinking about this uh right

now and i think that like people you know and i think there's like you know projects like door chain and osmosis and stuff have been like following in that vein and i think what i think we're gonna start to see more and more applications start to do that being like hey you know i why why why aren't we also taking this like more application specific route i think 2022 we're just going to see a huge explosion of these yeah i i mean i think that's another another thing that was a big thing in in this year was i was having ibc uh launching and then it's act i mean it's been development forever

and then it's pretty i think the amazing thing has been like you know just i don't know it got to like one million transactions ibc transactions sent like you know very quickly i don't know less than two months or something and then uh the other the thing that maybe surprised me the most and i think yeah big credit to like sunny and the osmosis teams on that was just the user experience i thought was like shockingly good uh because i was often like worried wondering is that going to be okay but i think that's actually yeah it's it's it's it's good so i think that's you know that's clearly playing out well and i think it's just gonna

grow a lot and of course we can have other cha or other types of rich technologies that will also have great user experience i think the inc and it's interesting thing it's interesting also yeah to think about bridges and sort of see these like two ways i think is is breaking out right i think there's like one thing which is uh a bridge where you have like some trusted set of parties and i think that maybe the two leading contenders there seem to be like uh wormhole and axelr and that's pretty nice because they convey the trustee parties can basically run like a full node on like whatever chain and they can make the footprint on the

chain very easy and it can make a great user experience and you can support like all kinds of chains and then but of course the downside is these operators have to then decide okay we are going to run the full node on this chain and of course the nice thing with ibc that's again pretty amazing it's just a permissionless nature right like you can just spin up connected chains and and and and so i think that's that's having both of those technologies have a huge future uh and then yeah i think both of those have come a very long way this year uh maybe the trusted bridges are like a little bit behind but not

much right i think that it's it's also very soon that i think they'll have uh you know [Music] be basically like very usable for like uh normal users i want to ask you guys about like sort of ibc and wormhole bridges like type technologies what do you what are the cost structures look like here and where are like is ib am i right to assume here like ibc is cheaper for for users than like the wormhole kind of model so what i would say here is how what i see the difference here is ibc is much much higher integration cost where because ibc is this like very

trustless like client protocol uh and then you have these trusted bridges where you basically have people run nodes to get ibc integration you actually have to build something into the blockchain itself and getting that ibc protocol into more frameworks is challenging right so you know we're working you know the cosmos teams are working on like you know getting it into substrate and you know and of course one is working on getting into cello and this you know it's it's a work in progress with something like wormhole it's very easy you just have to ask your validators to set up to run nodes for the counterparty blockchain and you know this this little development work to be done you know so you still have to integrate multisigs and you have to like you know there's

work to be done but it's not as much but i think the key word there is you have to ask your validators i think that the difference will come down to some something like wormhole is really useful for connecting what i call trust uh famous blockchains it's like you know it's great for connecting things in the top 100 to other top 100 chains right where you have to have this like you know you have to get people to agree to make that connection and run nodes and has this like higher cost the beauty of ibc is given how permissionless it is where literally to make a connection between two chains you just make a transaction on each chain and you have a connection going right and i think what hap

that i think that's how you move from the world of hundreds of blockchains to thousands and tens of thousands right there's like chains i have never heard of that are like enabling ibc on cosmos right now and connecting to osmosis and like don't even have to talk to us about it right they're just like going ahead and doing it and i think that's like the permissionlessness is what's going to be like very different yeah i mean i i think it's also if you think of like okay what would these bridges what is sort of the topology of these bridges so i think if you look at something like axelr right well axl is a cosmos sdk chain and i think yeah i think one more is going

in a similar direction it says cosmos decay chain and then you have basically any br any cosmos or any ibc chain can just like connect to that right and you don't have to ask anybody and you can just use ibc and then axellar can basically have their protocol to connect to all these other chains right so i think it makes sense to have like you know cosmos bridges via ibc connect to like you know the bridge chain that then connects to like all these like non-iec bridges and so you kind of see both there right you can see the the advantage of both both approaches and then you can just combine them by having yeah basically

like a chain that's run by a bunch of validators that you're connecting to all these other chains that then connects to all the others via ibc so i think one of the other topics we wanted to touch on and you know we should probably uh get to the the to the the prediction soon because uh we're already at like 40 minutes here but it's been really interesting uh is like the proliferation of taos dow toolings and the emergence of new uh organizational paradigms and i think like one of the areas where we've seen lots of dows come up this year is around nfts so there have been like lots of nft projects that have

created daos um with varying i say like like very utility um but what are some of the other kind of dow projects that you guys have seen perhaps like outside of um outside of nft so like in d5 or like community governance i mean i think what we saw was like the we we've started taking telegram and discord groups and calling them daos which i think is kind of funny but like kind of not wrong either right where like you know we i think um so what one of my my friends they they built this project

called uh commonwealth which is this like governance forum for like uh and but they pitched this idea to me called um token curated communities where like you launch a token and it builds a community around it and the community figures out the use case and i was all i i was actually a little bit skeptical when they pitch it to me but it's like interesting that like what they did so so if anyone's familiar with like the ion token ions are this like secondary token in osmosis that like it started as like just two days before launch or like hey let's just add in a token and airdrop it to a bunch of people and uh don't tell them why or what it's for or why they got it or anything and let's see what happens and

like it grew this like really big organic community around it uh and this like community is like doing all sorts of like you know like you know they're they're building stuff and they're like designing protocols and all this kind of cool stuff and it's like funny enough i think the most powerful dow tool that's been created so far is telegram brian what's going on with like free ton because i was just thinking about it the other day because i'm like man imagine telegram figured out a way of monetizing like all the value that's being built off of their like platform and like it's kind of sad that it kind of just like failed in such a spectacular way is there anything still going on with that

yeah i mean yeah so probably most people don't know the history here but like i can spend like a few minutes on it but basically right telegram was was uh wanted to launch a blockchain and they did this huge token sales like race like 2 billion or something like that and then the acc and they they had done a lot of the development work and then the sec basically like last minute was like you can't launch this thing and then telegram basically kind of like repaid their investors but the code was kind of there and there was some other company that was also like working on this thing and so then the other we're like oh let's go and launch this thing anyway

and put most of the tokens in the community pool right so and then of course also we were like one of the validators that kind of like helped launch this thing and it's still running they're actually rebranding to ever scale now though because apparently like the whole tom and thing has been like uh uh you know a bit a bit of a so it's still running i think there is a seems to be like a pretty active community uh it's sort of you know it there's not too much intersection like you don't really hear about it much because i think it's like its own community so let's see where it goes but it's pretty active of course it's totally decoupled from telegram at this point right it's just it's basically just another

like uh layer one smart contract blockchain uh now of course maybe at some point you know telegram will like integrate that or maybe something else who knows i i think in the end it seems very likely to me that telegram will probably right turn the telegram app into some kind of crypto wallet i guess it seems like probably not launch your own blockchain at this point but uh but i guess that's another thing that's starting to happen right is that you have just the more

more crypto features being added to like mainstream consumer apps and i think if you see the if you see the kind of monetization and business models and economic effects of like crypto then i'm sure this is some also something that's going to continue in a big way i mean i think even just this year we did see it added to a lot of like traditional payments apps and stuff but like i think we're going to see crypto and more you know i'm hoping that we will see more like proliferation of existing crypto you know i know there was a lot of controversy this year around like signal and how they like added mobile coin in and everyone's like ah what what what is this thing and like you know just go out of bitcoin wallet or

something like that right so i wonder if how that's gonna play out i remember there was a couple days ago where like discord you know i don't know the ceo of discord was like oh we're experimenting with some crypto stuff and then they got this like massive backlash from like uh their community which is obviously a lot of gamers and it's funny so basically that was also what what amazed me how big the backlash from the discord community who for me would have been people who are so familiar with in-app purchases and so on still was why do you think that was sunny they're still mad at us for stealing all their gpus like i would genuinely think that's like 70 of the reason yeah yeah okay i think

that the gaming community is still pissed about the gpus has anyone talked to them about proof proof of stake um [Music] maybe probably i don't know maybe probably not to be honest i mean i don't know of how well they understand it but you know we could tell them all we want about proof of stakes sonny you you sort that out you go speak to the gamers explaining themselves it's your age i think it should be you is i mean i i i can't give him a call i'm not a gamer at all what's what's this puma doing here i'm not a gamer at all but uh yeah i i mean i don't know i mean well even if we did tell them maybe they didn't understand proof of stake but we

told them that it would be coming in like what 2017 and here we are like four years later and like we're still sucking up their gpus right you know i wonder even once ethereum switches away from proof of stake i don't know if that's going to get solved right because you know some other gpu coin is going to pop up and still going to be the the suck of like gpu compute so i'm not sure that's really going to be a solved problem i i i think basically the i mean that the demand is going to go down though right i mean so basically i think i mean if if like large market cap uh chains um shy away from uh from proof of work it's bound to happen no

i don't know if we're gonna get to a world where like i i think that the i mean no matter what the opportunity cost of using gpus for gaming versus mining is always going to lean towards the mining and so the costs are still just going to go up for gpus i have a thesis that kind of brings together the last two points we talked about so i think um uh a good chain for dow tooling um is gonna make a huge um is gonna be a huge asset in the layer one was between between different chains so i think the chain that kind of draws um other communities

around dows um it's it's just it'll be difficult to beat and you know one another thing to discuss about you know kind of semi related to the esg stuff like you know kind of stuff uh is uh you know i i i wanna talk about like the elon stuff and like the return of dogecoin and i you know so i think for me i think that was actually one of the biggest things that happened this year it's like sort of this like return of meme coins right where it started at the beginning of the year with the gme stuff that happened in like you know normal like wall street bats and all that kind of stuff and you know i wonder how much of which direction this like cultural thing came from like was it a lot of like you know it felt

very like this moment where like oh crypto culture is like or like vibes are like proliferating into like the normal market and i but i wonder if at the same time it was also like heavily influenced in the other direction as well um [Music] yeah i know if anyone has any thoughts on like you know this how how much like you know just the meme coinery that's been happening and like sheba entering the top 10 by market cap and things like that yeah i did not see that coming so basically i i thought you know i i didn't even get i mean i kind of semi get dogecoin but basically yeah i i i mean shiva i i just don't get it i mean

uh yeah i i yeah maybe i'm i'm too much on the boomer side here yeah and i mean in the end it's like a lot of non-crypto people who are getting burned by those things i mean okay so i have two interesting talk on dogecoin right one is i when i left tendermint uh like last summer uh and i was figuring out what do i want to spend my time doing this so this is before i started working on osmosis one of the things i spent like a couple days actually like researching and looking into was hey i want to bring dogecoin on to proof of stake uh because i had this like whole idea of that like you know okay we're gonna show dogecoin moving to

proof of stake and this is gonna be like set the groundwork to move bitcoin on to proof of stake in like 20 30 years from now um and so and i you know i don't you know i just still really like doe coin i think doe twin was actually my first like exposure to crypto and it was like you know it has like this special place in my heart i guess uh but then when i looked into it last summer you know i spent time like researching the community and going through the reddit and stuff and i came out with the conclusion oh no one dogecoin is dead like no one seems to care about dogecoin i'm just this like weirdo that still seems to care about it but like otherwise this is like a dead project and then like you fast forward like six months and it's

like holy [ __ ] i was very wrong obviously right and so i think that's like a very funny you'd be a dose billionaire by now yeah maybe i don't know i i still think there's a good chance that we can get dogecoin to entrepreneur's stake right i think that elon stuff actually helped where like you know because of his whole like uh energy usage stuff with bitcoin if we can get dogecoin onto proof of stake uh and get like a tweet from elon like supporting this i think i think dojo will move on to proof of stake and i think this will be like i i so here's the other thing right i actually you know i am very bullish dogecoin and i just like i i think it's the second most important crypto because

the thing is i can go out on the street today and ask someone if they know what bitcoin is and they will right they've heard of bitcoin but i can ask them if they know what ethereum is they actually probably don't know what it is they don't like you know but like you can ask them if they've heard of dogecoin and they have heard what it is and i do think that doton is legitimately the thing with the second highest like cultural permians and like i think that is very important okay i think this year crypt the number of people involved with crypto has expanded massively and i generally think it's from two things which is one is the nfts and the other is dogecoin so when hypertogenization

once well you know we got we gotta find some people to switch it on to proof of stake i think this will i think this is like a one one year project and we you know if anyone if anyone listening is interested in taking this on like please reach out to me we will fund you to do this like we have funding for this funding secured there's an allocation of the osmosis uh community pool that is put aside for yes there's enough there's there's gonna be 150 million dollars in the australian community pool by the end of the week and we will make sure there's a solid allocation for anyone who wants to help move dogecoin on to proof of stake yeah i mean i i think though it in a way is

the dosh going thing like okay why and i think the gamestop analogy may like makes perfect sense right because basically it's sort of like the power of the crowd right because people can be like oh let's just rally around this thing all like you know pump it up together and it's kind of fun and it can have an impact and it can you know pump and make money and and then maybe crash so who knows and i i think that's yeah that's just a very powerful thing right like i think we see again and again like these memes and ideas are just very very crucial

but you need you need a common enemy right so i mean basically the entire apes together strong um thing this only works if you rally against someone like uh i mean uh the hedge funds or you know the people who who say oh oh why are you poor you're eating too much avocado toast just invest in stock and then you know you do it and they go like no not that way so yeah i mean it's like i mean you kind of you need this um you need this image of what you're uh going up against right so question is that is that is the ceo of citadel the one like is he like a literal bond villain because like you know he must have heard of constitution now trying to buy the

constitution and this like whole community organized thing and i i feel like he like specifically went in and i was like no [ __ ] this i'm gonna like ghost rug this like constitution from like this like community organized effort yeah that is actually constitution doesn't i mean in a way it makes sense though right because he's like you know i'm a frontrunner yeah right that's what i do is like [ __ ] one sweep it's like well this thing i confront on this pretty obvious right so in a way it's like you know hanging a fish in front of his mouth and then like he has to eat the fish but actually the constitution tower is like another weird thing to me like crazy thing because i was like this is a

cool idea i would like support this and i put some ether into it and i i honestly thought of it as like oh this is just like it's like a donation right and then and then the thing failed and uh the people said oh we're gonna shut it down [Music] but there was a token and the token and so i ended up you know like then selling this people token and it was something like 20 times up in these terms right in within like two weeks for a project that basically seems to have failed and that's that's also such a

like bizarre thing and and the most amazing thing would be okay like now what if these people actually turn it into something because that's that's the real thing right like okay they lost the auction but actually this in a way the the whatever 40 million that was like put into that thing was at some point then you know a market cap of i don't know was it like a billion or something or definitely like more than 10 times up from uh so yeah bizarre but i think goes to show the power of these these memes i i like how in the mainstream press um

basically the way that the constitution now was described was frequently um as a group of internet friends which i think it's funny and it's it's totally not wrong but it's so funny it's so wholesome so to bring it back you know just to bring it back to the dogecoin thing one more one last time uh is this one thing i wanted to mention as well was you know i think like every epicenter episode every end of year episode i've always liked brought up this idea like sort of this bet with brian that like the light coin is gonna remain in the top ten and i think this year is fine i i've been winning that bet for the last three years but i think this year i finally lost that but i will say it is because of the black swan of dotecoin

flipping litecoin which i did not expect right because i i my whole like thesis on litecoin was this like memetic of like hey it is number two after bitcoin and that is a funny meme and that will keep it going but once dogecoin had flipped like coin i think that like meme stops working and i think doterra has basically taken that like cultural place of that litecoin did even shiva uh uh flipped litecoin now um so i guess the last thing that we had on our like uh on our like interesting things for this year was uh bitcoin and el salvador so what are you guys thoughts on this is it is it is it a big deal or not

i i think it's a big deal i think in the end if you if you look at the crypto thing right like what what are the potential responses i think one big response is going to be like this thing is threatening you know our power uh it's threatening you know our control so we are gonna like i don't know try to ban it i don't know like in china or maybe restrict it in some like very very narrow controlled way which seems to be like india now right or like in some other ways try to control it but there's obviously that obviously means with the ability to

just like move somewhere else and all of this being basically open accessible anywhere anyway it means like actually the more some countries do that the more there is to win by other countries going the other way and and then you also have to think and that that applies you know if you look at crypto right if you look at bitcoin you've always had the effect that like if you know this thing is going to happen or has a good chance of happening if you go first you have the most to gain and i think the same thing is true of countries right so i think countries that like deviate from this control crypto path and countries that go early you know have a huge amount to gain and then i think the el salvador thing of

basically now yeah supporting bitcoin issuing bonds to buy bitcoin and stuff like it i think it is huge and i think it will end up being a huge amazing decision for them i think you had like an interesting thing you mentioned earlier where it's like the micro strategy like play applied to a country yeah totally i mean the opportunity cost for a country like el salvador was also a lot lower than of countries that actually have a financial market policy for their for their currency right so basically if you're for instance the u.s you have a lot a lot more to lose than the country that de facto uses a foreign a foreign

currency as as it's as its currency anyway totally yeah exactly like who's gonna do that yeah make countries that don't have their own currency i think it's like small countries poor countries uh it's not and it's not gonna be you know the us and and germany and china and india and you know all these huge countries that have yeah yeah in the end of course let's see like i i would say like you know for me it was like i know a lot of people were like oh yeah it's just like you know it's el salvador it's like it's tiny but you know for me when i it took me a while to like i was just very busy with the cosmos launch at that time but one day i was just like sit in the shower

just thinking and i was like holy [ __ ] like can we like let's rewind back five years ago like at least when i got into crypto like i would have never like imagined like being like a real country like not like a fake country like lieberland or something right now this is like a un recognized country just declared bitcoin as legal tender and that just the like magnitude of like wow how far have we come in this like great like geopolitical game of the 21st century that like bitcoin is like legal tender of a country from being this like

internet dark money from like five years ago i i think that's a big like big leap one small step for a coin one great leap for coin kind i don't know i i think this kind of ties in well with uh with one of the themes you know you had mentioned brian which is like government legitimacy and you know if if smaller countries that have like less opportunity uh that have like a lower opportunity cost start um [Music] you know using bitcoin as legal tender issuing bonds as legal tender uh denominating you know perhaps government services uh in in crypto if a lot of um

you know a lot of these countries start using bitcoin uh do you do you guys think that there's you know a potential for that to become a sort of dividing line between you know western countries that try to um yeah i'm talking about the us and europe uh that that try to keep like grasp on like their power of the world and the finance versus like all of these kind of other countries that you know western countries will want to portray as being like anti-establishment um you know anti-whatever money laundering anti-like anti-anti-money laundering like

anti-anti-terrorism like do you think that well if if if this starts to play out and like a lot of african countries and like south south um south american countries start adopting bitcoin that this um new axis of evil you know we you know we might want to put it like uh starts to emerge i i let me maybe talk about so i'm not sure at this point but let me talk about like this my idea around this government legitimacy point because i see it maybe a little bit differently so if you like how do governments have legitimacy

right like they make basically a bunch of rules and then they need to be able to like enforce those rules most of the time right like of course there's going to be like some people who like don't follow the rules but in general you have to be like okay if they're going to mix rules i better follow them because otherwise like uh they're gonna come after me and if they can if they can do that then like okay you have to like respect the power of the government but already i mean crypto is is kind of a problem for that right because even if you look at now the sec right the sec uh at some point made their statement of like oh you know all these token sales are securities and like you know that

kind of function that most people were maybe like intimidated enough and they didn't do it and they enforced it they went after a bunch of projects but they even there they had the problem that you know the number of projects they could go after was like limited because their resources are limited and they have to do like this investigations where it doesn't scale at all and and then of course you had all kinds of stuff going on for a long time that you know i guess is against their their sort of spirit and now if you look at uh if you look at all of the things happening now with like d5 and dolls and nfts and i mean where is like the sec right they're like years behind

somewhere else and i i was recently speaking with you know some german company there's like regulated speaker regulators and they were telling me like oh they speak with regulators and like each time they're like what's taking again like how and and they're just like totally somewhere else right like years behind and so i think that's uh already is like a huge problem for like the regulators and the legitimacy and power of regulators but i think where it's going to get like much much worse is around taxes because taxes is not something that's just applies to like a bunch of companies and projects but it applies to like everybody

and i think that already you have to challenge that if if you're like active in crypto and if you make i don't know the nft defy stuff about you know yield farming a bunch of transactions it becomes like really hard to file taxes right because first of all like what are you even the tax rules that apply and second of all even if you have some understanding of the tax rules how are you going to go like get all together these transactions and i mean it's it's it's like gets pretty quickly to sort of the point where it's like an impossible task and you know as long as it's a small group of you know crypto people that do that maybe it's not such a problem but i think if you get to the point where you have

you know 10 of the population or 20 of the population that are like using those things because they're like i don't know games and artists and they're just part of like the consumer application people use and then they're also even without wanting to basically violating the taxes and not filing it properly and like i think that's going to be like a huge huge problem and like extremely hard to address i agree and i so basically um there's a couple of governments that have started addressing this by um just taxing um off-ramps right so for instance austria does this now so basically there's um

you pay capital gains tax on all your gains at 27 and a half percent or whatever austria's capital gains taxes um but it only applies to or to off ramps and i mean to a certain extent that's a good rule because um it or you can forget all your crypto crypto you just need to have like some cost base uh that you construct somehow but basically all the crypto to crypto transactions they kind of you can forget about them but on the other hand um i i would assume that we move into a direction where the um where the line between crypto and non-crypto assets will be uh will be increasingly erased and then

basically what are you going to do then so basically then um you tax like a certain class of of um assets at 25 um your class income differently your class i mean it's it's it's a total mess and i don't know how to go about it what do you guys think yeah i mean like france does the same thing right it's like you you you only get taxed on on the off ramps um and already there it's complicated right like even as a even as like a crypto user because like you have to you have to kind of like you know keep track of like every time you go in and every time you go out and it's like is that like it's also not clear whether or not like off ramping is just selling into euros on like kraken or actually

moving money to your bank account uh just kind of like it's kind of vague there what if you buy what if you buy a house with usdc that's also unclear so that's so that's that's also sort of run cleria what if you buy a token that allows you to live in a house for a year yeah or like what if you use usdc to like invest in equities or invest like i mean there's all these sort of edge cases that like what if you take a loan against like you know a like a position on ave and use that usdc to like invest in a company like uh or or you know where you get shares essentially like there's all these sort of edge cases that laws the law currently doesn't account for

uh at least in france i think like a lot of places there are these sort of gray areas that probably will get figured out in the next couple years but then then there's just the question of control and like i think it touches on brian's point is like you know where like how easy is it for governments to actually control these things and i think it does fall into the bigger pro the bigger issue of legitimacy that i was talking about earlier this is a different facet you know it's like the legitimacy of crypto as the thing that people use to like you know you know like buy things invest et cetera versus uh the legitimacy of like existing institutions and whether that exists sort of at an individual level

where it's like people you know having to pay their taxes or whatever or like a government issuing bonds and being like [ __ ] you to the to the you know to the to the dollar standard uh it touches on like the same i think you see issue of like you know well-established economies and well-established countries like trying to um really hamper like the development of crypto i'm not sure what to say what the response is i think that taxing off ram things it just that's clearly not going to work right because like very quickly you're going to stable coins and all that kind of stuff you don't you don't have to off-ramp ever right or like maybe only if you have some sort of consumption but then it may

be like just equates to like v80 right or something i mean so i i don't think the off-ramp thing is gonna is gonna fly i think from a com from it from the perspective of like it being easy for people to like pay their taxes i think the wealth tax is actually er easiest to do right because like let's say if at the end of the year you just have to see oh what are my crypto assets and then like self-report it and you're like oh you're paying like half a percent of that in taxes or something like that like that at least i think that's going to be pretty you know you don't have to worry about your transactions during the year and like i

think that that will of course still be hard it would not it would be hard for governments to like make sure people report it honestly but at least if people want to pay their taxes honestly i think that's something that's you know going to like work well uh even in the future but of course that's completely different from the way taxes work but even where you have a wealth tax in in switzerland you have a wealth tax you don't have capital gains tax so like that it kind of like still works pretty well i think there uh i'm not sure you know how like staking and yield farming and stuff like that is treated so it's it's probably it's still gonna be issues but i think that tax system works like much much better

than a lot of others in in this kind of environment yeah and i mean germany in principle has a wealth tax basically it's just currently zero percent so i mean in principle this has been done before right i just basically we just got a new government and there's uh um there's a uh one of the one of the parties that have come to powers the business friendly um three democrats and yeah so basically in germany there's no chance of that happening in the next four years do you guys want to talk about mev i know it's one of the things that kind of we talked about in advance and speculate about what would happen in 2022 and there were there were pretty um disparate

um opinions here it's a solvable problem anyone who tells you otherwise is lying yeah i'm 100 with sunny on this one great on to the next point can you yeah so you think it's how is it solvable or like you think it's a solvable problem for like a particular application or like let's be more specific i guess what i'm talking about is like yeah look what i care about more about than mev is front running which is like a very specific type of meb um but you know i think there's just like harmful meme that's in the community right now that mev is like

an inevitable like evil that we have to like deal with and like okay we should just like you know um instead of instead of like trying to solve the problems we shouldn't said you know just build these tools to like extract them and like you know have this be a profit source and like all this stuff where it's like no this is like literally harming users and like you know i think one of the we were talking about with our team like okay why is why are dexes better than centralized exchanges and i think the biggest reason we could come up with was because they can provide mev resistance and or like front-running resistance in a way that centralizes state just can't i think that is you know that is the reason why you should use a dex over a

centralized exchange um and yeah so you know i i i i think that certain types of you know is mev gonna be eliminated to zero no there will always be some mev uh and some front running but it's like i just think that the community is like settling on a very harmful like spot to where it's like oh this is actually okay so we've been thinking quite a lot about this uh and also thinking a bit about you know like the ethical thing but like like one so you know sandwiching right people were like okay that's clearly bad right

people are using and like okay that seems to be bad and but then i was like looking at this other thing so this is like liquidity sandwiching it was cold but basically it's like okay someone's making like a trade on like uni-swap right and on unit swap e3 right you can say uh where you provide your liquidity right so you can provide it in like a very and you know normally somebody might say oh i provided in this larger range where most of the trading is and then uh but if you can concentrate it very narrowly right it means like with little capital you can provide a lot more liquidity and so basically this liquidity standard thing was like okay someone's seeing oh some trade is coming in there and they're putting in basically liquidity in this pool before

the trade happens to take it straight out right so basically they have like provided liquidity for like an infinitesimally small uh infinitesimally small moment and now is this like good or bad right well for the trader it's good right because they're getting less slippage uh for the liquidity provide the other liquidity products in the pool it's bad right because they get less of the fees and this other guy just comes up with like little uh there was some guy from unit swap right who like commented those things he was like this is amazing like what an amazing use of the power of unit swap v3 right and now if you if you think of

this you know what that's called that's called that's called an order book yeah well but i think if you think of like okay what are the like second i mean first of all what a second-order consequence of that like i don't know maybe unisop v3 has to change the design right maybe you could make it maybe it just is the reality of how it works right and maybe liquidity providers have to adjust like but it makes it very much of a thing of like good bad heart like how do you even know how do you even look at it and so i think if you look if you i i kind of like phil that so phil diane you know the guy who uh did a lot of his

work and in this the one of the flashback founder he had an article where you he was basically sort of saying okay if you look at meb there's like if you're like a miner or validator you should like extract it if you're an application developer well you have to design your application right so for example unit swap v3 has to then think about well it's possible for somebody to show up right liquidity for a single block remove it straight again and like what does that mean for their design does this answer work or not i'm not sure right but maybe they have to change it and then but of course right like if you like let's say osmosis or something it probably makes a lot of it definitely

will make a lot of sense to think like okay what are the types of things that validator could do right that would be bad for the user and and then prevent those right that obviously makes sense yeah i think that so i mean two things one i think i so about the unison v3 liquidity like sandwiching i think this is gonna have like second bat native second order effect so that like you know like i said you know you're devolving back into an order book and i think the amms worked because they have these like really cool second order effects where it became very easy it's okay when you have this like liquidity sniping start become more prevalent no one's going to be a passive lp anymore because you're basically going to get screwed you're

only going to take the il and basically get none of the fees so what's going to happen is people are going to stop being passive lps you devolve into an order book and part of the beauty of amms was like you're like hey if you have a new token uh it decreased the barrier to like entry for new projects right where you know currently without an amm you have to go hire basically professional market makers to go like market make your token and like do all this stuff but like without that with amms you can just have your community be the market makers for the thing and this decreases the barrier entry to launch new projects and like that's how we got this proliferation of

like new tail end assets of which some of them go on to become these multi-billion dollar things right but like if you get rid of that and like basically make it so no one can be passive lps anymore you're gonna basically just increase the barrier to entry and that's gonna have like harmful effect on the ecosystem as a whole but don't you think there there are ways to actually design market mechanisms that also work for basically for a for um for uh discrete time as you have on blockchains and be um for for long for a large number of long tail tokens so basically my my position would be that of course phil dayen says what he

says because i mean i mean i mean of course you would say it's a morally upstanding um thing to extract mev to kind of keep the system uh secure i also find that um i mean to me it's it's it's it's not just questionable it's uh it's outright morally wrong and whoever can't see that is i don't know what they're looking at um but yeah i think there's lots of ways to actually design apps to um eliminate um mev to a large extent i and i think privacy is gonna do the rest so i think uh that's that's gonna be the

solution i i think i think i think the burden falls on a combination of the app and the protocols right because i think the blockchains can't can actually do a lot of the heavy lifting here right where i think you can do um you know threshold encryption uh you know order randomization we have this thing called joint proposals where instead of having one person propose a block you have multiple actors be allowed to contribute transactions to a block and like you you combine a lot of these techniques together at the protocol layer you can get rid of like 90 of the harmful muv and then you know i think you tack on additional application layer things like batching and like things like this i think you

know you you can you can solve this quite a bit so i want to hear uh brian's take on orbit because uh you've been talking about it all uh recently and again today and this is a project that i've not followed uh very much since we last had that you seem to be pretty bullish on so what's going on with urban yeah i mean i i was so i guess i've known the orbit uh or galen and like some of the urban teams since like three and a half years i also bought some some some uh intergalactic real estate back then uh and and i always was like enormously

like drawn to the division of orbit of basically having i mean what's the vision of verb the the one explanation that has to me always felt like understandable and kind of makes sense to me is okay like back in the day you had like your own computer and you went to the store to buy a cd with the software and like you put this software like cd in your computer and your data was in your computer and then you ran the software on your data and like that's that's kind of how computing worked right and then you hit the cloud and then the program was in the cloud and new data was in the cloud and and sort of my understanding of urban is basically okay

let's create something like a basic computing framework again that kind of works like back in the day where i have my own kind of virtual computer and my software runs in my computer and my data is in my computer and i can and and then you can yeah distribute software and you can communicate with other peers and so i was always very drawn to this now of course urban has gone like ultimate hardcore in terms of we don't use any existing technology and we do everything from scratch right and and if the project is 20 years old at this point right this is uh so the first

12 years the guy this is just one guy who did it on his own and then i think galen okay and so it's a very old project but a huge amount of work went into this but now i think earlier this year you know there was like now ui on orbit like a landscape and i've been yeah like using it a little bit and uh and it's nice you know you can you can see actually i think you can see the potential already there's some people who built a bitcoin wallet in orbit right so you can have like uh you know sow your bitcoin in orbit and make transactions from there and uh and uh yeah it's cool we've had we had some people at course one who like

pretty like very interested in urban too and so we've been actually uh been wanting to like onboard everyone in the company onto urban so like maybe you can start using it a little bit uh so i i i'm definitely bullish on urban and i think it could become a sort of a bunch of different stuff i don't know it could definitely be a replacement for uh you know discord maybe right like you can have communities on there and chat and stuff like that uh i mean you have a an addressable name right so like you can easily like message others on urban you could have it there's a sort of um yeah you could store keys in there um

there's a also one thing there's something called herb advisor where they basically build some kind of metamask like thing so it's like a browser extension and then you know you could like go on something and then you could basically like you know sign something from from in your orbit right like your asses as this is your urban planet and like that's so you could use like i don't know sign in with orbit right anywhere like i think that would be would make a lot of sense right because you also have your yeah your username uh that uh it's like human readable and they have great design and i think everything always has like just amazing aesthetic uh so yeah i'm i'm i'm excited

uh i had a tweet a little while ago asking people what project do they think has the best aesthetics and i think like urban was like by in far like the number one like response yeah i totally agree for sure for sure okay so let me get let me take a stab at trying to explain urban because i think that like no one understands it because part of the problem is every time you ask them they like go on to this like deep weird tangents about like the vision which is cool but like no one has no one explained to me correctly how it works and so this is my understanding can you confirm whether i'm correct or not on this from what i okay do you guys remember secure scuttlebutt we did an episode with them a little

while ago you know a while ago and it was basically this like social network that used like hash a dag like hash linking structure to build like a network so basically it will use a gossip network and you know that sebastian will send a message to me i'll add it to my little hash chain and then next time i send a message to brian i'll also pass along all the messages that sebastian had said to me and basically we get some sort of eventual consistency on the topography of the social network and like you know if people like you and it's okay for eventual consistency because like a double sign problem is less of an issue when we're talking about social networks than it is

when we're dealing with like payments and money so here's my theory of what urban is okay so bitcoin invented this cool new data structure called a blockchain and it was just like very fast consistency all the stuff cool things and they invented it for payments and then ethereum came along and said hey cool data structure what if we slap a touring complete vm on top of this now my theory is what urbit does is it looks at secure scuttlebutt and says hey cool data structure what if we slap a touring complete vm on top of this and so basically what's

happening is i have my little vm that's like doing all this computation and it's like it's hash linking the result of all the computation but every time your vm sends a message to my vm let's say it's a you're saying you know anything that you would send over the internet but any message you send to me i include that into my sort of hash linked tree and then when i talk to sebastian i i tell him hey by the way brian's vm sent a message to my vm that's what i understand urban to be is that am i on the mark here i'm not sure uh but like so

here's another like when we had this internal talk and then we had uh skype from a team irving who who gave the talk and one of the ways he explained it which i also thought was nice was that if you if you look at crypto right in crypto we we have like transactions right and you focus you have all these chains where you have different accounts sending different transactions and then identity and data are often something that's kind of like layered on top of it or on the side and then with orbit right you really have it's like identity and data that's like the the foundation and there's actually no blockchain right and there's no transactions but then you can put those on top

and and so it's kind of inverts a little bit the normal approach we have in in blockchain and i think that's makes sense right and also sort of like what or maybe another way to think about it is like what's your like your digital home like where is where's your like your base in a way like maybe it's like your computer i don't know like your hard disk on your computer or is it something like lastpass like or or a password manager maybe or like no i said look i i get i get that my question i want to understand is how does it work and that's what i'm like you know i don't i haven't fully understood like okay they say like okay yes you can

transfer your like state of your computer so you know instead of being linked to a physical server it's just like transferable thing but my question is like yes how and my assumption what's happening here once again is like you know let's say i have this entire hashtag of all the computation i've done i sent that over to sebastian and then i destroyed this computer and moved to a new computer when i'm syncing up again i find out from sebastian oh here's the current state of or at least sebastian's knowledge of the current state of my vm this is all the computation i had done up until then yeah actually i so that is something i don't know that you have to ask somebody more technically

confident about uh saturn i'm not sure well i'm trying to boot up a ship right now and just tell me it's gonna take an hour so um no i mean this sounds really interesting i i i i think i mean i i was like secure scuttlebutt was a project that i thought was really cool like technically and like i like this idea of um yeah being able to create a sort of hash chain without a blockchain and like essentially you know you um you sort of like sync state at like whenever whenever you want right like you send a message and you can sync that state over um you know even like over over when like if you're in the same in in the same place or over like a

like a usb stick or something like that and so yeah it seems cool that you could also do that sort of like with computation yeah if my understanding of it is correct that's really cool i think there is a lot of cool use cases of that this was super fun and i will look into abbott now