Ethereum as the base layer of finance, with SharpLink and EigenLayer

Transcript

Yes, Ethereum is actually a store of value. At points in its history, it's been deflationary, but actually you're investing in what could be and what is becoming an emerging fundamental new kind of public infrastructure almost like web one where the internet was a category of investments. And if you believe that this is going to be kind of a world computer, the universal sediment layer for both financial and other economic things, it is going to have a tremendous role in the global economy.

>> Good morning. Welcome to the Milk Road Show. The daily crypto show where missing that entry is the portfolio equivalent of forgetting her name. I'm your host Jay Hamilton. It's Monday, September the 15th. ETH treasuries are booming. Why is smart money piling into DATs? And what does it mean for the future of Ethereum? Who will win the race to hold the most ETH? Is it going to be Treasury Dows, staking platforms, DATs, new players, and what is the long-term view? We have so many technologies colliding right now, AI, uh, blockchain, Ethereum, this global shift to a different way to do trust and to do financial trust. We'll hear from

two of the greatest visionaries in the space about where they see finance going and how Ethereum and blockchain plays a role in that. Today we're joined by Joseph Shalom, co-CEO of Sharplink Espet. Joseph oversees the second largest ETH treasury in the world and also previously led Black Rockck's digital asset initiatives including Bidd. We're also joined by Shriram Kanan, founder and CEO of IGEN Labs, which is the creator of IGEN Lair, which is Ethereum's restaking collective, which now secures over 23 billion in TVL. Before we jump in, if you guys are making swaps ahead of the coming possible rate cut this week, you should

check out Milk Road Swap at swap.mmillgro.com. Why? because we built it to have a cheap place to do our own swaps for our own team. And we want you to be able to use it, too, because swapping should be cheap. Before we jump in, today's episode is brought to you by Figure Markets. Grow your cash like a bank. No lockups, just real returns. It's also brought to you by Ken, the verified distribution protocol, changing the growth game. With that, Joseph, welcome to the Milk Road Show. >> Thank you, Jay. Good morning. >> Good morning, Tree. Welcome to the Milk Road Show.

>> Thank you so much, Jay. really excited to be here with you and Joe. >> Pleasure to have you both. Really excited about this conversation. Let's start zoom out a little bit uh on we've been talking a lot about DATs digital asset treasury. It's been the the talk of the last few months. Uh I would love to get both your perspectives on the current state of debts where we are now and maybe a little bit of where you see it going in the short term. Let's not go too long term yet. Joseph, maybe you could start us off.

>> Sure. So, uh, I have been leading Sharlink, which is, as you said, the second largest Ethereum, uh, treasury, uh, for about six weeks. I had spent 20 years at BlackRock the last five, uh, essentially leading, uh, our digital asset initiatives. I think we are in the very very early innings. You have ourselves at Sharlink and a few others who collectively have raised uh and invested in about 14 or 15 billion dollars of ETH. We are the second largest corporate holder of ETH. Um, but I think what you're going to end up seeing over the next several months to a year are increased paces of accumulation and I think the numbers uh will be much

faster than what Michael Sailor did uh at Micro Strategy and then strategy. I also think you'll see a consolidation to those who have the largest scale and liquidity. I think the more interesting story than just accumulation is what these institutions are going to do to stake that ETH and drive performance and to drive uh returns and yield for their investors. I think it's going to be one of the greatest moments in the Ethereum ecosystem of investing in protocols, providing liquidity to pro protocols and basically the best protocols will get the best allocations and I think this is

going to be a really virtuous cycle. I just think we're in the very early innings. That's why we got Sher Ram here because we all know that yes, when you have a bunch of institutions that hold ETH and their pure objective is to operate the most profitable business that they can, well, what are you going to do with that ETH? You're going to try to get the best yield possible. Shri Ram, from your side, what are you seeing in terms of working with these DATs and the way that they are interacting and using their ETH to to gain yield? Yeah, this is a the core differentiator of ETH as a productive asset as opposed to Bitcoin as a hold asset. I think that's the main

reason the increased velocity that Joe just pointed out why people are concentrating more in the Ethereum direction. And so if you think about how to make Ethereum productive, what are the ways in which ETH is usable? The base level in which ETH is usable is in the Ethereum protocol is a proof ofstake protocol which means you lock your ETH up and promise to run the Ethereum protocol correctly and so the protocol and earn a portion of the protocol fees. So that's the core foundation of ETH being productive but it extends far beyond that. We have a thriving uh DeFi ecosystem where you can you know lend borrow do uh you know other instruments on top of ETH. one of the critical uh

and you know these different instruments have different risks and different rewards right so that's standard financial things you know higher risk higher reward so there's a parto curve of like how much risk and reward that uh these kinds of uh digital asset treasuries will take and allocate and this is going to be a core differentiator across the different apps and when you think about this riskreward curve staking is at the lowest end of this risk curve right so and you It gives like a base level yield. We think of reststaking as providing just slightly higher risk at higher reward, right? Because you're staking ETH and promising to run the Ethereum protocol correctly. You can also stake ETH. The

core premise of Igen layer is to stake ETH and run not just the Ethereum protocol, but many many protocols built on top of it correctly and thereby earn fees from all of those protocols. So it converts ETH as powering just the Ethereum blockchain to ETH as powering a much larger family of chains and services built on top of a letter. So that is our vision and so you know in this risk reward of course other than that there is the more financial like lending borrowing you know where you're taking underwriting price risk right so when you're borrowing USD against ETH you're basically taking some kind of price risk on that relative instrument

whereas what I layer lets you do is to take only operational operator risk which is what you take in staking and so by providing this like new category of yield. I think it's very attractive and I think Joseph mentioned this virtuous cycle and I want to highlight that how that's going to play out here in the layer as so services and chains built on top of layer are called as autonomous verifiable services. Autonomous because they run on their own. What do I what do I mean by they run on their own? Anybody can stake ETH and keep it running. So they run on their own. They're verifiable. they run correctly as expected because otherwise they're going to lose their money. So these AVSS we

have you know 50 plus on mainet right you know bridges oracles new kinds of you know decentralized networks any new decentralized network needed a new layer 1 before I layer with IGEN layer any network can just be built on top of layer really easily so and you know a portion of those fees acrew back to the ET stakers and so that's the uh that's our position in the D that ecosystem really exciting to see you know this new um institutional interest coming up uh towards the Ethereum ecosystem. Yeah, it certainly strikes me that there is if you are a investor and you don't you

don't want to spend the time trying to understand staking and restaking and DeFi, well, why wouldn't you trust a operating company that is fully set on being the best at doing that while at the same time accumulating more Ethereum with this long-term belief that Ethereum is the future backbone of the financial system in the future of value on online. And so I think everybody listening here gets that. Joseph, for you at Sharplink, how do you I kind of want to take this from two angles. First I want to talk about how you approach yield and operating this this business. And then I want to talk about it from the other side, which is how you manage risk. And so if we could kind of tackle both those

that would be great. >> Sure. The good news is they're both the same answer. there there isn't a difference of how you get yield and how you manage risk to date and we're a debt that's only been around for uh really been doing this for less than 3 months at this point. The early days were largely going through the vanilla native staking. We work with two custodians Anchorage and Coinbase and on a delegated basis we have that staked. you earn roughly 3% um in a fairly lowrisk way. We've also participated in the liquid staking uh token space uh with an allocation there.

And I think the more important thing is not to think of these as a series of decisions. And what do I mean by that? No different than if you manage a portfolio for somebody, you start with asking what their risk tolerance is. In our case, you really don't want to lose money for the treasury. And then you build a strategic asset allocation. We're going to stake nearly 100% if not 100% of our ETH. But then the first decision is how much do you want to do in native staking? How much do you want to do in reststaking? What are the liquid staking approaches you're comfortable with? Should you go into the OTC market? Should you lend? So, you build a strategic asset allocation. And in each of those buckets, you go out to

the ecosystem and in our case with help from our strategic partners at consensus who have the deepest knowledge of any Ethereum company and start making riskreward decisions in each of these buckets. And my expectation is we are not going to be doing 100% in DeFi, but we're also not going to be doing 100% in just native delegated staking. That said, there are many risks across this pendulum of of rewards. In many cases, it's as simple as, you know, you have smart contract risk. In some cases, you have counterparty risk. In other cases, you have credit risk. In certain cases, you have duration risk. So to me, we're

going to manage this no differently than you would manage an institutional portfolio for somebody if they entrusted you with 3 to four billion dollars of ETH, which is what we hold today. I think the biggest risk that has just not been thought through is smart contract risk. We will only work with protocols where we can do due diligence and actually understand the inherent risk relative to the reward. My fear is like in any ecosystem there are going to be people and I don't just mean DAT companies who just see the rewards and don't look at it as a risk.

And we've seen that in almost every financial cycle in web one. We saw it we saw it in the mortgage uh crisis. We saw it in 2021 and 2022. So we're going to do this in a highly institutional way because our first priority is to safeguard uh the assets and the second priority is to to make them productive. So my answer is both risk and reward are the same uh decision-m process. >> Shriram, I curious what your thoughts are on the risk, but I also I've got to ask um when was the moment when you realized and you knew that DATs were going to be a thing? cuz my bet is that your phone might have been ringing

before all of this started with a bunch of people kind of coming to you and saying, "Hey, we're thinking about doing this. How do we do staking, restaking, DeFi? What's your advice? You're one of the leaders in the space." When when was that moment for you? >> Um is I didn't have too much alpha, but you know, I I do know uh for example, Joe Lobin from was our investor from day zero, right? In fact, the the riskreward discussion we're having just have deja vu. I was just having exactly this discussion four years back. He's like, sh we're just creating this riskreward portfolio of like how to allocate you know into these different networks definitely have a lot of those

relationships but uh you know when the uh u the micro strategy as a treasury has been running for a long time. So of course we've been talking a lot to the leaders in the space about where is our you know Ethereum's position in this thing and you know when some of those early uh discussions with Jolubin and like the uh other uh asset treasuries I was super excited to see that like you know maybe 3 four months back >> and for your from your view is smart contract risk the biggest risk here?

>> Absolutely. I think the smart contract risk is the biggest catastrophic risk in this kind of system right because you know imagine you're like taking a position in a lending market and you can you know there's well sophisticated financial models that Wall Street's well used to to understand okay you know you're taking this much leverage you know is it worth it all these kind of things but smart contractors is is a new object that is entering in the crypto ecosystem so that's one thing I would say on the risk side, on the reward side, I think I think of like staking and restaking as the new category of rewards that are coming up

in the uh crypto ecosystem as different from anything Wall Street would have nominally thought about, right? So, you are essentially think of it as you're putting up the capital to promise you're going to run these networks correctly. If you don't run these networks correctly, you're going to lose this capital. But this is a new kind of uh investment. It's not the same as investing in a company. It is not the same as you know lending against it. So it's a new kind of object. So I think that's again another thing that is new differentiated from other kinds of you know financial investments and instruments that Wall Street's quite familiar with. Joseph, where do you think we're at in that uh education

cycle? Uh you you you come from Tradfi, you have a good understanding of what Trad understands about crypto. Is are you are your conver are they understanding it in a new way? Are is there still a lot of learning to be done? >> Sure. I'd like to go backwards before I go forwards, which is the education didn't start with the debts um for institutions in Tradfi. Um my previous role was running digital assets with an amazing team at BlackRock. We started these conversations with institutions first about Bitcoin probably around 2021 and to be honest with you the institutions got that story immediately.

Okay. Digital gold store of value deflationary. It hedges against um inflation. It hedges against geopolitical risk. and just tell me what I need to do and how to own this in my portfolio when the ecosystem was mature enough. So those conversations were easy to have. It just so happened the ecosystem needed to raise its standards to those of the traditional financial players because we weren't lowering our standards to meet theirs and that happened over 21,2 and 23. The Ethereum conversations which we started in 2022 actually took less convincing but it took more explaining. And what do I mean

by that? We sat uh with the largest investors in the world with the home offices at wealth managers with wealth adviserss insurance companies pension plans and we had to explain yes Ethereum is actually a store of value. At points in its history, it's been deflationary, but actually you're investing in what could be and what is becoming an emerging fundamental new kind of public infrastructure almost like web one where the internet was a category of investments. And if you believe that this is going to be kind of a world computer, the universal sediment layer for both financial and other economic things, it is going to have a tremendous

role in the global economy. You had to explain that to them. But once they understood it, uh they got the story. So the actual education started um in the early 2021-22 when the ETFs were launched. um the ETH ETF was approved and launched. Uh my team launched one at BlackRock in July of 2024. That's when the adoption started and I think it was tremendous. It was a inflection moment. I think we are probably going to stop talking about education at some point and really start talking about adoption. And if you see the growth of stable coins, tokenized real world assets, and what I call high

quality DeFi activity, borrowing, lending, exchange, I'm not talking about NFTTS and memecoins, we're at the beginning of a massive disruption and we're going to go from educating to showing people. Um, but it didn't start with DATs. Dats are just putting this in more of the public entity domain. Yeah, it's it's a great perspective. Uh I want to talk quickly about how many DATs can we have and what's the competition like within DATs? Maybe Joseph, this might be you again, although Sheram, you can jump in too if you want. Uh are are all these DATs friends? Are you is it cooperative competition? What's the uh what's the vibes between you and and long term, how

do you see this all playing out? Because it feels like right now we're talking about a new dad every day. >> Yeah, I'll give a few perspectives. One is it is really important that we at Sharlink aren't aren't the only ones with this great idea. Um it is really a lonely thing if you're the only one with a thesis. The fact that there are a number of people who believe in a long-term Ethereum opportunity. I don't call it a short-term trade is actually a really validating thing. The amount of capital flowing is reinforcing. But I call it coopetition. We want our competitors to be successful just like we want to be successful. I admire Tom Lee and what Bit Miner is doing. Um we've spent time to with one another. Um

we're just going to differentiate ourselves from everyone else. Uh we want to do it in a more institutional way. We want to do it in partnership with Consensus who's a strategic investor. Joe Luben is my chairman. He is a co-founder of Ethereum and runs the largest Ethereum company. and we are looking at opportunities to build operating companies uh that are supportive of Ethereum and drive Ethereum denominated revenue. So that's like do I think it's good to have competition 100%. Um, where I think this will end up is in most scale businesses, liquidity begets liquidity. And I think over time, and I won't tell you what that time frame will

be, there will be a handful of winners who will get the vast majority of the mind share and the flow. And to raise capital in this space, your stock has to have trading volume. And right now, Bit Miner and Sharplink are essentially getting 95 plus% of the trading volume. But let's see how it works out over time. On the one hand, this is a race. On the other hand, we're all going to get to 5% ownership of ETH. So, we're going to do it the right way in a risk controlled way. And we welcome the competition. We hope we're all successful because we all have the same goal. drive Ethereum adoption and let people participate in that investment

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I want to talk a little bit more about the Ethereum opportunity because it is still so early that uh it is so exciting to hear everybody describe what is the Ethereum opportunity to them. What is the future of finance look like? But before I get I want to get both of you to answer that question. But before I do, Shriram Ram, I just want to ask you one question first, which is what do you think the impact of these treasuries has been on the current Ethereum price action that we've seen and the current run in the market has definitely been positive, but I think we are at the very early innings.

I think Joseph mentioned this. I cannot agree more. the as because what the DATs are really doing is to to take the next innings of the education that Ethereum is going to be the fundamental backbone on top of which verifiable finance happens and once that is clear the market opportunity for the value of ETH and the economy that it powers is obviously going to explode and so that's really the I I think of that as the most foundational thing that the DATs are doing. Number two, the DATs are expanding access to invest in this ecosystem in an abstracted simplified you know

investorfriendly manner. I think this is going to uh massively expand the new inflow into the ETH ecosystem. So our thesis here is that the DATs are really really really positive to because they're solving some of the foundational problems. How do you get anybody to invest in ETH and participate in the onchain economy without them necessarily having to go through all the complexity and hurdles which you know most people are not experts at. I think that's the problem that's being solved.

Simultaneously the problem of educating everybody about what is Ethereum, why what is this concept of verifiable trust, the decentralized economy, all these things are new concepts that are entering into mainstream along with these deaths. So that's super exciting to us. Okay. What's the Ethereum opportunity if you were to explain to uh let's try to explain this to a broader audience, not necessarily to you know the the crypto native or the financial uh public market native. If you're trying to explain to a broader audience what the Ethereum opportunity is, what would you say?

>> I'd explain it first with where the ecosystem has existed for decades. And what I mean by that is in financial services, it doesn't matter if you're a giant institution or a retail investor, you want to buy or sell something. It's pretty hard to do. You usually have to wait a day for that trade to settle. If you do it on Friday, maybe you get it Monday evening. People are holding your money over weekends and nights. If you work a night shift, you can't trade in the US markets. And because of that there is massive risk in the entire system which costs tons of money. And what I mean by that is you take risks

every day that your counterparty is going to deliver that your instruments will settle a day later. You have to put up collateral overnight. You have to get money for financing. to just take me at my word that the current ecosystem is pretty inaccessible and filled with friction with it where intermediaries are take are taking rents. In contrast, the future and you see it now with stable coins and you see it with tokenized assets and you see it in DeFi. Imagine a future where you don't have to rely on overnight trust with counterparties and contracts, but you have a giant decentralized computer system. You can think of it as the world's computer that Joe Luben talks

about where trades can settle atomically, meaning in seconds or maybe even just in a few minutes. You don't have to worry about your counterparty delivering. You don't have to put up capital because you're waiting a day to finance a transaction. And these transactions are completely programmable. What do I mean by that? You can rebalance a portfolio using a smart contract. you can get dividends in a matter of minutes or hours instead of it being measured in days or or some date that the stock market sets for you.

And in the future, because they're composable, and what do I mean by that? Today, if you want to buy the S&P 500, you exchange a dollar for the S&P 500. Tomorrow, you should be able to exchange 50 of the holdings in the S&P 500 for 50 of the holdings in NASDAQ. like you can trade anything for anything at any time and it provides a neutral platform where trust is embedded. And so the Ethereum opportunity is that Ethereum as the blockchain with its layer 2s have about 10x the number of transactions as Solana or Tron and they have the license to win especially for institutions who look at

its 10-year history from you know its genesis block in July of of 10 years ago and the fact that it has liquidity. So you have a broken system today. A decentralized platform that's programmable can make it more efficient. And Ethereum is the leading beneficiary across the most important assets, stable co stable coins, tokenized assets, as well as uh highquality DeFi. So I would use the term it has the license to win.

And if you own Ether, the token, you're early in the process of benefiting from that long-term appreciation. I know that was a very long answer, but I wanted to put it in context of where we were, where we are, and where we're going. >> Sure, Ram, what would what would you how would you depict Ethereum's the Ethereum opportunity? >> Ethereum is the platform for verifiable trust, right? So you know Joseph described all the ways in which verifiable trust transforms the financial economy because you have no counterparty risk. You can do trades.

You can do lending with you know verifiable uh liquidation. So I so when you're lending to somebody what are you most worried about? You're worried about the borrower going to take the take your asset and run away. But if there is a verifiable mechanism to verify the collateral then you solve that problem. Similarly, Poly Market which is built on an Ethereum layer 2, right, is a verifiable prediction market. You know what what are you worried about when you read the news? You know, uh you look at a poll and then you see is uh is Trump going to win or you know Biden going to win and how do you assertain what is the level of trust you have on these polls?

prediction markets where anybody can permissionlessly put bids on either side and then you have a marketdriven odds that you can see again a power of verifiable trust as big as the verifiable finance scope is I think this is already like massively transformative right completely rewrite how Wall Street has built become the backbone of the global financial system because it's global instantaneous verifiable trustfree really really powerful ful properties. But our vision and Ethereum's own original vision goes much beyond this verifiability. The fact that some computation or action happened

as stated means you can trust these systems. And now today you see like you know it's not just the financial economy that can be transformed but the broader economy and I'll give some examples here as we move into the era of AI and agents. Part of what you know we people are worried about is how do you trust these AI and agents? you know, if if the did this AI get changed as my kid is talking to, you know, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO says, "Hey, you know, if your kid is talking to an AI, can you trust that even if you vetted the AI to begin with, didn't they upgrade it in a way that is counterproductive to your

kids? How do you verify these kinds of things?" And part of what we are building at ien cloud extending expanding the utility of ETH to actually secure say build verifiable AI agents. You run an agent you know this agent executed exactly as stated on this data and that's how it's making these actions. So verifiability is transformative not just in financial applications. Verifiability is the substrate of society itself. And so Ethereum as the bedrock for verifiability I think transcends transcends this. Another example you know recently Elon Musk and Sam Alman

were kind of like fighting on Twitter about hey is u Sam Alman saying hey you know is X biased to favor Elon's tweets and Elon saying hey is the Apple app store not promoting Grock instead promoting Chat GPT. How do you solve these things? This is a question of verifiable feeds and these protocols on layer are already building things like verifiable feeds. We just announced today a partnership with open rank a product which is basically doing this.

So the scope of the verifiable economy is much much much larger than finance and finance is already you know a multi-trillion dollar industry. So we are talking about like you know a 100x growth from where it is today to uh to realize all these applications. >> J can I can I double click on that? So >> um AI is a buzzword. It's a cliche. Um I want to go technical and then I want to take it out a level because I'm an optimist. I'm a futurist and I I believe in technology transformation. And what what Shrian was talking about is this idea that if people want to have fun this weekend, they should go read the ERC8004

uh proposal. It's an agentto agent trustless protocol. And what does that mean? Imagine a world where there's a trust layer on Ethereum that allows any user or participant to discover, choose, interact with AI agents without having to understand organizational boundaries. What does that mean? There'll be registries for an agent to understand its identity, its reputation, that it's valid. Okay, that sounds super technical. What does that actually mean for a user in the future? So imagine a world not too far away where daytoday AI agents that are paired with users uh can

sit on a decentralized protocol like Ethereum and essentially have a wallet almost a digital twin of you who can auton autonomously manage your portfolio or execute on your intentions. Or if you believe in a prediction in a prediction market, express that view financially or through voting. You could do it because it's connecting through swarms of AI agents to real time market data. They can execute the strategies.

Eventually, these agents will learn what are your intentions, your preferences, your goals, your risk tolerance, your time horizons, and it will continually optimize what you're asking it to do. It could be financial, it could be how you vote in elections. It could be how you govern your co-op board. So, I think it's going to move beyond finance and prediction markets to governance. And I think there will be contracts and treaties that will be backed um in a way that's verifiable.

And um I think it is not as far away as people think. It is going to change how you interact with your financial world. It'll increase the velocity of financial transactions, but more importantly, it'll make them more open and democratic so that people don't feel excluded from the financial system because it's complex. You'll have an agent that'll help you express your intentions and execute on them. And I know that sounds like I'm talking about something 20 years in the future. I'm talking about something uh in the next few years. >> Joseph, just double clicking on that, but I think we're going to see something next quarter. We have some very exciting announcements from IGN cloud on how you

can build verifiable AI agents with you know the standards that Joseph just mentioned which is you know uh Ethereum's uh standardization uh framework called ERC there is just uh the potential for verifiable in the absence of verifiable agents I think it is you know we are trusting you know a gro or a chat GPT or one of these things to hold to their end of the bargain. And we've done this many many times in the tech industry. And it's time for us to hold these systems accountable and govern them democratically in a decentralized verifiable manner as well as enable empower these autonomous agents with

their own systems of property rights of contracts of laws that apply digitally and enforce them on chain. So I think that is the scope of what we're talking about. There is an another anecdote I would just want to add here. Satya Nadella the CEO of Microsoft was on a podcast where he was asked like do you think this AI is a new kind of life or like some kind of species? And he says no no it's not because you know it can't own property it can't enter into contracts. It can't start companies. It can't take liabilities which is what all people and you know according to the legal system can do. But in in a blockchain, a piece of code can enforce all these conditions. This is really the

Ethereum vision. And we're really excited to be at the forefront of this revolution where we can bring AI and agents to account to hold them verifiable to act in our common interest to enable new kinds of coordination that were not possible before. We are so lucky that blockchain exists. at the same time that AI is coming out because if it didn't we would be in a dangerous future in 5 years and I don't think exactly what you guys are talking about paints that picture. I don't think people get it yet though because we are not quite there but as you said it is we are going to be there much sooner than

we all realize like this is we're talking months and maybe one to two years. We're not even talking decades here. We're we're in a short time period when so much is going to change. I want to touch on before we wrap up. I want to touch on the Lineia consortium uh Lineia TGE earlier this week. We don't need to speculate on on that TGE or get into price predictions or anything like that. Uh I want to talk because both of you sit on the line consortium and this concept of um blockchain consortiums. sort of a new concept that we're seeing roll out and something that I'm actually going to be chatting next week with Avich on the show. Him and I have been chatting about it a little bit back and forth and I want to hear your perspective on what is the role of each

of your organizations in the linear consortium? Why are you part of that consortium and why is why why is this consortium important to the long-term view of Ethereum and the future of Ethereum? >> Sure. Can I start with explaining to users what Lineia is? >> Sure. And I'll do it in simple terms if that's okay. I don't want to to presume everyone knows but you know you have Ethereum the layer 1 mainet uh where all the security um and the bulk of the standards are being written and because it wasn't able to process as many transactions you had an ecosystem that uh derived benefit uh called the layer 2 blockchains and they were

compatible uh EVM compatible with the mainet Ethereum layer 1. Lineia is not compatible. Lineia is code aligned fully compatible as a layer 2 with mainet and it allow for amazing things like much faster throughput, lower gas fees. um they will burn uh tokens and ETH uh to essentially have what I think is almost Ethereum extended in a fully compatible way to users and builders. Lineia consortium is composed of a whole bunch of companies. Sharplink is a member as

is uh Sharia at iigen. Our job is to actually allocate the linear tokens and a massive percentage of the overall token supply is not going to be retained. It's going to be given out to developers and builders and others who will bootstrap and build incredible innovation on the line uh layer 2. So our job is to consider how to give out those tokens to optimize uh that as a community. Shar you might have a different view but that's how I think of it and it comes with massive responsibility

um because you are essentially fertilizing and gardening and incentivizing good actors and benevolent on the most Ethereum compatible fully aligned layer 2 ecosystem. >> Yeah my uh is it's a privilege to be a part of this Lana consortium. Uh I think Joseph already explained what the the goals of this consortium are. I just want to double click on a couple of points. One is the power of zero knowledge proofs which is what Lineia is built on right it's imagine somebody does a computation using a supercomput but how do you verify we I use this word verifiable many times right and like I

want to just highlight this techn technological unlock. to do a computation on a supercomput but you don't have a supercomputer. How are you going to verify that it happened correctly? And there's this whole technology of a cryptographic zero knowledge proofs which basically attaches a proof that hey I did this computation correctly and you don't have to go and re-execute this computation. You can just verify the proof and you'll immediately know that it's correct and you can do this in a privacy preserving manner. This is like sci-fi right? So when you think about what is possible I was like I entered the space I I was a professor you know in computer science at the University of Washington Seattle and you know entering into this space in

2017 2018 I thought this is a really amazing idea but it's not going to happen for 20 years but here we are today Lana launching the mainet like actually being able to do this stuff and so this is the core underlying technological unlock that line has on the community level this is again like goes very similar to how Ethereum itself launched 83% was allocated to the community when Ethereum launched and with Lana you have a similar 85% allocated to community it's very very unusual in the kind of like recent history of token launches including how I launched so I'm super happy and privileged to to to be a part of this

where the tokens are actually there for growing a decentralized community and So and and and we are seeing already that the the crypto users are reacting very positively to super happy to be a part of it. >> Joseph Shiran, absolute pleasure to get you on the show today. Thank you so much both of you for joining us. Joseph, I'm going to call you up one time to as you say have some fun and read a read read about ERC contracts is that that sounds like a good idea of fun. Uh nice Friday night glass of wine and we'll read some ERC contracts.

you you told me not to get technical, but I'm respectfully I'm respectfully anti-bureaucratic and um it's been a pleasure uh both being on the podcast and Shri sharing our views together. Um so thank you for having me. >> Amazing. Thank you so much Joseph. Thank you Jay. My pleasure. >> As always I need to remind you all that none of today's episode is financial advice. I'm not your financial adviser. Joseph Shroom are also not your financial adviserss. If you need help with your investments you should speak to a professional. Today's episode is for educationalformational purposes only. Thank you so much for tuning in everybody. Have a wicked awesome day.

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