The Geopolitical Bitcoin Space Race with Muneeb Ali

Transcript

a lot has changed since Rob there has been a lot of developments in the institutional space and it applies to Ai and deep seek as well right they just went and open- sourced their entire model so tokenized assets make a lot of sense because then it's just a digital representation crypto doesn't have a tech problem it has a goto Market problem and that I think is like a nail on the head with what you're saying welcome back to the rollup your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future nothing on today's show is to be construed as Financial advice you can see our full disclosures list at tholl up.co ventures sit back relax and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome Partners Redstone is defi modular Oracle

supporting over 100 clients on over 50 chains offering 1,000 assets Redstone is the leader for Bitcoin staking and yield bearing assets they offer the most robust customizable price feeds available in any model join the Redstone exhibition [Music] today what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup today we have munip from Stacks to talk about the latest developments in Bitcoin on the institutional side and on the rollups and scaling side so L it's good to have you back welcome thanks thanks for having me a lot has changed since Rob there has

been a lot of developments in the institutional space AB absolutely I mean money I think we had you last probably about six months ago when the entire Bitcoin rollup L2 space was taking off there was much discussion about opcat and and people trying to scale the expressivity of Bitcoin uh with different side chains and networks um can you just kind of give us like your your quick and dirty take on the last six months and uh get us get us caught up and then we'll we'll push forward yeah I think I think I would say at a high level uh what's happening is that if you go back like a year or the time of that podcast or even slightly before you know at that that time like I've been working on on on

this for for a while like I'm one of those believers who always thought you know Bitcoin is going to become programmable there are going to be l2s there's going to be ton of Bitcoin liquidity and a lot of a lot of stuff will actually end up getting built on bitcoin and people are very skeptical of that for a very long time so a year a year and a half ago when you know ordinals sort of like was taking off new l2s and designs and bitm sort of a bridge we'll get into it was coming up there was I would call that phase like initial excitement so there was sort of like a flurry of you know uh new teams coming up new capital coming up everything's exciting you know it's like initial excitement phase and I think we sort of like passed that and some of the

excitement dies down and I sort of like really like that phase because what happens is that it sort of like separates out the really good ideas from the soo ones and really good teams from the soo ones right because people who are dedicated who actually know what they're doing and they're going to solve these problems but the initial excitements are like dies down and a lot of people that this happens all the time like it's like a it's like a mini be market for uh for Bitcoin l2s right and what people are not realizing again there's a lot of alpha here now what people are not realizing is that some of the tech Technologies are actually moving faster than even I thought I'll give you one concrete example um a bunch of this was enabled by this technology

called withan um at a high level that it basically enables trustless l2s uh like AUM so initially people get it it's a simple idea you know e l2s are like 80 100 billion Market people always thought you can't have l2s that are trustless on bitcoin and then suddenly there's a product that says oh you can right like it's a you can get into the the security models but it's like a one ofen which is basically trustless right like one could be you yourself you're trusting yourself only um and and and then when when the excitement died down a little bit people like ah maybe this is going to be more complicated than we thought it's going to take longer than we thought and what people are not realizing is there's a thing called bit

vm2 uh and multiple teams have done their own versions of it and and there are even bitm two based bridges that are live on testet today which in a grand scheme of things is faster than even I predicted right like we have our own abstack ecosystem we have our own R&D going on on these things and we like wait a minute this actually went faster than we thought so I think we need to recalibrate here a little bit but it's super exciting right so it's one of those phases where there's Alpha hair uh where excitement died down some of the people are like oh maybe you know this is going to take a while and things are actually mov faster so people who would be able to sort of like do they come in both developers investors and and you know sort of like people who are

interested in the space I think they can do a lot uh here at this point in time and personally like I'm I'm I'm super excited about that so the way that bit VM and and bit vm2 was explained to me initially and the way I understand is almost this natural progression where you're read there was this initial excitement we had bit VM and it provided this trustless bridge from uh the Bitcoin L1 to these Bitcoin l2s um but it had some problems there was an issue with kind of it was crypto economically secured and so there was an issue if everyone left at once it'd be almost like this Banker on on the bridge if you will and then so we had bit vm2 maybe you know you can explain some of the differences um and then and then maybe there's even a

progression you know after that which is cat VM and and that enables like an even grander uh implementation into the Bitcoin protocol which is opcat and so could you kind of walk us through and we'll we'll get into the the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve stuff and the institutional stuff maybe a little bit later but could you walk us through the natural progression of this idea okay people want expressivity on their Bitcoin we come up with a bridge a trustless bridge bit VM walk us through how bit VM got to bit vm2 and then ultimately maybe to cap VM yes so I think I um my mental model is slightly different in the sense that bit VM 2 I see as a clear progression of bit VM uh the op Cad and cadan type stuff I see

them as more like parall like they're parall going in the same direction but not not like a direct direct Evolution um and for bitum 2 I would say at a high level we're not getting into the the technical details but at a high level there were again with the initial excitement there were a ton of issues like issues like oh these um you know the this writing B Bridges is very inefficient you know the the logic gates are going to be a lot and how do you actually sort of like practically do this right the number of steps take that you need to do are going to be very long who's going to wait like you know so many Bitcoin blocks right so it's it's a list of sort of like uh um like

inefficiencies in in the design and same with the bankr Run type of thing it's like a liquidity issue right like hey if everyone tries to withdraw or you always be limited by this amount of capital and so what happens is that people sort of like you know see too much into the inefficiencies and like my my general rule of them is you always bet on uh the uh Innovative capabilities of the human brain especially when a bunch of Engineers are sort of like poking at it from different angles which is what I clearly saw in the bitm community like a bunch of independent Engineers not even like paid by anyone and they're just like poking around so we saw like multiple designs come out right like some of the original root stock Engineers went off and they have their

own uh version a bunch of teams that got funded on the initial excitement uh they have created like different Bridges like alpen lab has created a bridge there are other smaller teams that have created a bridge and so a bunch of bright minds are hitting at those inefficiencies and what we are seeing is the round times for doing these proofs is getting shorter and shorter right uh or the the code base of for you know have like there was a lot of redundancy and people like this is very inefficient and it's becoming more and more efficient or the trust assumptions are getting clear and people are finding problems with these things so I think that b two and when I say between two I actually don't mean any single version of it there actually like multiple versions and multiple

Forks um and it's actually a great thing right like because you do the these experiments and then see which one is actually working better or can do a pros and cons sort of like a comparison and the way that I see this from the stack perspective is like stack is sort of like the largest L2 that is live it has a lot of developer traction and momentum going on we almost see this that at some point these bitm 2 or bitm 3 in the future type bridges are going to become Commodities right like the best design will get replicated across a lot of l2s so it's almost like a commodity uh at some point that you know everyone's going to benefit uh from the research work that that's that's

happening for the opat stuff it's slightly different like in the in the sense that it does rely on you know some of some changes being made to bitcoin even though people are arguing that the change are not a lot um there seems to be some support for it as well and I think um over there the the thing that I like about BBM is that at least it doesn't ask for any any changes to bitcoin what whatsoever yep yeah and I think the the op cat route is very much still in development we are quite close with some of the Stark net folks um and I know Ellie is very very focused on this um and frankly the this idea of being in a ethereum rollup I think uh as soon as we

get some of these like bit vm2 and I know there's like bit VM 2.5 even it's kind of like weird terminology here but but there's a world where rollups do not need to just settle to one base layer where we get Bitcoin rollups that also share settling on ethereum you could even share to uh settling on something like a Celestia or a salana right and so like I think our mental models of rollups are going to be or l2s are going to be changed over the coming years partially because of the work with BBM and and kind of Bitcoin scaling and then just how people are thinking about ideologies I think there's there's a world where there's the largest rollup can uh somehow uh have this multi settlement feature across different uh

base layers and so that's going to be uh particularly interesting and I think maybe just maybe we get some of the ideology camps that the tribalism to diminish but I'm not sure I think the Bitcoin versus ethereum tribalism May forever persist yeah yeah so I think I I'll give you my take on this right this is something like being a computer scientist and sort of like technically heavy I feel like this was something that I used to do before where I would get deep in the weeds of the technical differences with a very strong thesis that you know the if you do a pros and cons comparison and then this uh bridge is like you know better in in six out of

seven uh features versus the other is clearly sort of like the the better design is going to R and same for rollups and security models and data availability and so on and I think over the years one thing that I personally just evolved and and realized is that out in the market I think your goto Market uh your speed of execution you how you actually are doing in the capital markets and exciting exciting the community and developers which you know from from a computer scientist perspective it might seem like soft skills uh but they're not soft skills right like they actually end up mattering a lot more than the pure technology part and we've seen some of that in in ethereum right if you look at

ethereum 80 plus different l2s and the ones that are getting the most traction are things like base because they have the best go-to Market strategy they're just partnering with the largest exchange and you know they have a thriving developer Community even to some degree if you look at Solana initially got criticized a lot uh that it's true centralized it's this and that and if you look at it they have progressively improved their decentralization uh capabilities like there are more nodes now they're more geographically distributed they're working on a lot of uh angles to actually become less centralized in a way and they got so much criticism initially but I think their go to market

was so strong it was so simple that hey look this is a single chain you it's fast it works so I think when I look at the Bitcoin world and I see a lot of these projects and they're sort of like fighting over hey my design is better than yours assuming that because my technical design is better than yours we are going to sort of like dominate the market and my personal view here is for users and also for a lot of developers this 1920 difference between a lot of these Technologies is actually not right yeah I I totally agree going to be your goto Market strategy and how and a lot of these quot quote unquote soft things in the project that's actually end up letting to marrow a along I just put out

a tweet that was saying well two tweets that really kind of routed people up the first one was end users don't care about decentralization they just want like basically good ux and a good product that was one that got like a ton of views and all the ethereum people were coming at me in pitchforks which is classic my somehow my brand has turned from like I was I my entire career was made on ethereum and now I'm like not aligned with ethereum I don't know what's going on it's weird I need to I need to rethink my My Life Choices I think and then the second one was crypto doesn't have a tech problem it has a go to market problem and that I think is like a nail on the head with what you're saying um and so like like I don't care like where it's built or what ideology

or how the nodes are you know four five eight 12 like as long as there's like some sufficient decentralization there's a level of censorship resistance there's a road map towards Pro Progressive decentralization just like give me a damn good product um and make it work and get users and on board new people um and so I I've been kind of fighting the ethereum camp in this the last couple weeks and been kind of fun yeah I I mean just to kind of build on top of that which is that you know this is like made the best Tech win and it's kind of like going to diffuse and permeate throughout you know the the industry anyway uh the ones who end up adopting that technology and then continue to drive it Forward are the ones with the best go to market that end

up Surviving and I think this this applies to the bit VM conversation that you mentioned you know and it applies to Ai and deep seek as well right they just went and open sourced their entire model they did it way more efficiently than you know open AI or some of the other ones bit VM I imagine will follow a very similar path you know the best models will get open sourced and then adopted by the ones that the companies that end up Surviving um and so you know Stacks like you said you've been doing this for a very long time you have survived and did the test of time what what lessons you know have you drawn from your own go to market strategy you know if you were to reflect a little bit on on the stacks go to market what what worked well and

what what maybe would you have changed if you if you had a second go at it um because we have a lot of Founders and builders that listen to this podcast and you know they they are trying to get educated on the best go to market strategy so please reflect a little bit on what went well what could have been better in terms of what could have been better I think one thing I already mentioned that I do think that we were too much focused on technology and less focused on hey how good is the product how good is the ux how good is the the the speed of exe execution right like like like one thing if you're in the Solana ecosystem and I'm not like fully in it because I'm fully focused on Stacks but I but I but I see it like

there's a culture of shipping right like if people see that you know the velocity of shipping is actually very fast that even if they see something that's like not fully there they're still excited about it because they know there's a new version coming in like two weeks or a week or three weeks or whatever right so I think those were the things that probably we didn't pay that much attention to but one of the things that I realized just personally even before the cpto industry and even definitely during the crypto industry is that you have to go back to like day zero right like just reset everything like if you were starting today you know what would you do and what are the things that are important so I do think that from a cultural perspective even at Stacks like we have done this like extreme like

product Focus like just look at the product is the end product something that you know you would you would love to use like I had this tweet recently which you know for people who were deep in ethereum or salana they wouldn't really appreciate it but for bitcoiners where the ux is typically you know creting 10 to 40 minutes for a transaction best wallets are sort of like electrum or Sparrow right like on your desktop like being able to move like and if you have tried using lightning like you know it's sort of like clunky and has these Channel capacity or routing issues sometimes things move sometimes they don't and it's fairly Limited in terms of how much Capital you can move so I was moving

like 2.5 BTC like roughly through 50k uh like it's it's not like you know 10 20 50 million dollar but I could move it on stacks and being able to do it so I did the transaction it's a great ux wallet called leather it's a b wallet and by the time I click Send to I went to the Explorer to check my transaction it was confirmed just having that ux of oh I actually just sent 250k which you could never be able to do on Lightning because most channels don't have enough capacity like might be fast and Bitcoin L1 is slow as hell right 10 to 40 minutes right and having that experience in Bitcoin was like a aha moment oh finally we have a product that we can actually

love and use our our El and which maybe able stay export a l right but I think Bitcoin is such a large market and maybe we can connect this to some of the institutional talk that is happening that being able to bring sort of like that table Stakes type of ux and programmability and enabling Bitcoin defi I I do think it's a it's a pretty big deal yeah I I I've I've been pushing a lot of purpose built chains like I think purpose built chains are very important purpose built chains like we like general purpose chains are kind of you know and you you you may not agree because I I'm not sure how you kind of categorize Stacks but Bitcoin to me is kind of like very purpose built for it's very it's very much just a there's not much execution that that happens there's

no staking there's no there's no defi it's just very much just payments and store value and then you kind of have stacks be becomes this purpose built environment for basically all the bitcoiners who want to do yeah for B basically sta is for for BTC right that's correct right and so that that to me is like a very easy mental model to understand why these chains are built in these in these ways and so kind of looping that to this institutional conversation unfortunately we did not get to meet in St morrat last week or two weeks ago but I was there for about 36 hours 4 48 Hours shook hands with at least one guy that was buying Bitcoin in 2011 and now runs a public company I think he there was rumors that he was

like $500 million of Bitcoin uh there was so much talk about stable coins about Bitcoin staking Bitcoin yield uh Ripple was a big topic of conversation ETFs for salana so before we get into just exactly like what's going on with stacks and institutional side what were some of your key takeaways from CFC what was the biggest surprises uh what what got you the most excited was it bullish bearish are the institutions coming to buy our bags what's going on imagine if the world's GDP moved on chain guys say GM to safet the newest protocol by safe isn't a blockchain and it's not a new layer 2 it's a transaction processing Network built to send money anywhere and

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L2 blockchain built by fra with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of fractal images and it explains how l2s become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle goes through its Evolution the frax ecosystem is made of some of the top builders in the space and has stemmed from its OG days of the frax stable coin it is now in the LST space the LRT space and this fraxel L2 joins the existing Suite of frax products including Frack Swap and frax lend you

can see frax fairy the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fra main net Bridge your tokens and bring your FRA assets into the fractal ecosystem join today to get the best out of fraxel you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity yeah I think CFC is one of the one of the best conferences out there uh nicoo runs there he Sayes like an amazing job paying attention to like every detail of the event and I think the the way it's set up is also very interesting because what happens is

that a lot of people like once once they they cross a certain threshold level of success they're not interested in going to a lot of these events right like it's like even even for me like I'm like working full-time going hard right but when I go to conferences like sometimes I get mobbed sometimes the the conversations aren't that interesting I think CFC is like one of those places where because it's sort of like a semi vacation for people like especially if you're really into skiing so you're staying at a nice place is very controlled the the especially the speaker list and even people who attend like you have to get approv to even even just attend so they control the quality

of the people that would be interacting there and especially within the speaker circles like there's always a high quality crowd um so people like Arthur hes would always show up right like our our other sort of like top like Brad from Ripple I know Ripple can be controversial depending on serle you're talking about but people actually show up in person and they spend time there like some of the best uh I think business meetings happen in in the coffee area of of the event and I think I had some good ones at the hotel lobby there yeah you just walk around you shake hands and all of a sudden you're talking to like some somebody who's done X Y and Z and you're like what so I I share those similar feelings yeah it's a

it's a great event like basically um the feeling I get there is at very large conferences like let's say token 2049 in Singapore the high quality people would try to avoid the big crowds and they would have smaller either meetings or events where it's like they're doing their their side events right like that that typically for me like just more interesting yes you'll go speak at the big event uh and I think CFC just cuts off the big stuff and it just focuses on what would have been a side event at at at a large conference so for all of us who are plebs who didn't make it into the event because I let's be honest I didn't have a ticket I just showed up um what was the key takeaways of the conversations what are the what are the

the The Heavy Hitters in in the industry inside in out discussing uh with the institutional crowd where is the institutional money flowing what are they most interested in um you know and talk to us about Stacks too yeah so I think I do think Bitcoin dominance is going up like Bitcoin is crossing a certain threshold level now where it's just too hard to ignore not just only too hard to ignore people sort of like get that on a risk adjusted basis it's your best bet in in in C so I think you the profile is very different right if you're a large institution you care about risk if you were a 19y old like you know was just sort of like gambling

your risk profile is very very right like people who are in the business of preserving their wealth risk matters a lot to them so they it is very hard for them to allocate Capital to something that comes across as risky and I think one thing that people still don't fully get is on a risk adjust basis Bitcoin is by far the best bet in in the crypto uh and what I mean by res adjusted basis is if Bitcoin I think Arthur H had this essay came out last night that if Bitcoin goes down 30% everything else is going to luk right like more than 50% 60 70 maybe 80% right so uh and everyone knows that right all

these assets are correlated to bitcoin so if you're sitting in Bitcoin at least you're protecting or your downside whereas your downside on some of these other things could be 98% and Bitcoin and some things might never come back right like there there are these interesting charts um actually let me tie that back into into Stacks uh because this is just from today uh someone was posting a thread about a lot of projects were basically losing value against Bitcoin for the last five years right so the curve looks like you know it's like it looks like that like if they're just losing value against Bitcoin and they're it looks like they're they're going down to zero and Stax is actually one of the rare projects that has appreciated against

Bitcoins three times out of the last five years so it it it is trading at some of the lowest points right now like I think because of the Slowdown and the initial excitement in Bitcoin l2s and so on but it has done this three times in the past where it appreciates like 5x against Bitcoin and most qux don't do that even ethereum hasn't done that right like ethereum's alltime High against Bitcoin was back in 2017 and it has sort of been like slowly losing value uh against Bitcoin or that so so I I do think that the way I think about Stacks is it is it is a very complimentary uh Network to bitcoin because it makes Bitcoin more

well and we we've sort of like already achieved some of that so far because if you remember last cycle Bitcoin was treated as a pet rock everyone's like you can write this thing off it's just old funy technology you know ethereum salana and these things are the future and now whenever someone tries to say you can't do x with Bitcoin you actually have a project you can show them oh you think you can't take loans against your BDC in a decend way here go right and and and try that right now it works today or you don't think Bitcoin has nfts look at the the trading volume of ordinals that that is happening right now so I think for every criticism we already have like a comeback and stats become sort of like this unique thing

where because Bitcoin has to be simple and you can't change it and it can't innovate at the L1 you almost have to have this other L2 and now there are other options as well but I think there's likely going to be one big one or maybe a handful uh in in the future but you need that you need that really successful L2 for Bitcoin uh to defend itself against every other project that's out there because other capabilities that that these projects have you can just plug that into the L2 straight away I the l2's get evolve much much faster exactly that's the whole point it's like they are like these iterative adaptive beasts on top of like this dormant Bedrock that is fully censorship resistent that's that's like

the endgame Vision which is again beautiful four Bitcoin so back to the in institutions here they're they're very interested in tokenization what's going on with the tokenization of like stocks bonds like why like I feel like this has been like a meme for so long like Robie and I would have been in since 2017 was like we're going to tokenize everything and now we have Larry fin on CNBC talking seriously about wanting to tokenize stocks bonds and other assets was was there much talk about that at CFC and what is your takeaway here I think that there was and this is like a uh there has been an emergence of interest in rwas which are basically these tokenized assets like real world assets and my personal takeaway is it's

again because of the these like new types of Institutions uh entry the market where it's hard for them to understand the value of something if it's not back right something so tokenized assets make a lot of sense to that because then it's just a digital representation of value that's actually held outside of the chain and that that is like sort of like call it like Boomer mentality or something but that is something that it's this Boomer very easy for them to understand that the value is actually outside of the chain and they're like I don't understand how there can be any value on the Chain but yes it's just a digital representation of it so that that sometimes actually makes sense to them

even more than Bitcoin and then the next step is when you tell them how Bitcoin has has inherent value because you know energy is consuming it's like you know this a representation of energy uh somehow sometimes a pitch it pish it that way and it it makes sense to them and then I also separate Bitcoin from other things that hey look Bitcoin is actually uh like digital gold or digital energy however you want to think about it and then everything else is technology right like this is it's easier uh for them to think of that as like a tech St uh than than other explanations right but rwas or tokenized assets uh to the booer crow is actually a much simpler simpler

PCH that makes sense um did you hear much about stable coins like was there like excitement about stable coins for International payments maybe from like Asia or Latin laam I know that there there's a senior advisor of Brazil there and there's some other kind of representatives from uh you know Latin America so was there much talk about that and what's kind of the status there with the institutional appetite for stable coins yeah so I I'll would say two things one is like I've personally missed the stable coin sessions I'm probably not uh fully updated on it but in general I think stable coins are um the thing that has the most product Market fit and a lot of people understand that they're like yes this clearly has product market like I think

tther they they report some numbers like 3400 million users right and that's that that's like one stable coin and then there's usdc uh aa's founder was there and you know they're they're they're seeing a bunch of traction uh with their work so in general I think stable coins are considered one of the Prime examples of when people ask like hey show me Product Market fit in uh in the industry and what are people actually doing in stable coins you're great examples like people who don't have access to bank accounts uh way they're using tether to make payments and all sorts of like like countries around the world and did you meet um Paul from plasma I know no I didn't okay okay plasma is a really cool project I'm not going to show it too

much here but they're doing uh stable coins on bitcoin um you should definitely chat to them but yeah there's I I thought that that was going to be a lot of institutional interest and then what about um what about like the asset flows in particular to uh like either the like Stacks token or other crypto tokens themselves like is there much appetite for like private deals or conversations around like hey you know there's an opportunity to invest into you know X Y and Z Pro uh protocol here's our road map like like is there there institutional interests not from like you know Black Rock but from like you know High net worth individuals or family offices to invest in you know what what we know as like crypto assets

or altcoins Etc or is that is are are we not deep enough in the bull market quite yet no I think I think it's definitely interest especially the type of uh people who come to CFC bun of them are like family officers so they're not looking to make direct Investments but they are looking to either put LP Capital into funds but they want to stay updated on like hey what's going on so that helps them sort of um uh look at which funds to allocate and then there are some family office people that I met or like let's say LPS in like five different funds and then there are some projects who just come up a lot like imagine like a Solana or a stack or something and they're like wait a minute this project I have exposure to five

funds to to this project maybe I should just go and build direct positions as well and so you know not not pay the fees in the middle uh so I think there's there's some of that but I would say in general uh the type of capital that comes to CFC they they don't do direct deals unless it's a very big deal uh like you know hundreds of millions of dollars and and it's a bit large round and they're getting some sort of a discounted sort of like an offer they would put their capital for early stage projects they would rather go through LPS because the LPS specialize in in sort of like evaluating those projects and typically these family offices don't feel like they have the SK set to play in the seed or even series a uh type

type stages yep makes sense well cool Rob I appreciate you uh let me fire off some questions here I've just got one last one and I think man you're probably uh ready to go I know you're a busy guy um it's a kind of a double parted question the first side of it is I'm curious what your p uh what your perspective is on what's next for Bitcoin right we've we've like I said Robbie and I joined the space in 2017 and we used to always make fun of of the idea of Institutions are coming and they're beyond here uh it feels like nation states are coming now so like what's what's your vision for what's next on bitcoin kind of like where are we at in bitcoin's uh life cycle if you will um and then similarly where we at in Stacks what's coming up for Stacks um

and kind of like how how are those two gonna kind of intertwine here yeah I think the institutions are coming meeme I remember from like 2017 and so on but if you think about it it's a it's it's a little bit like when when you get a certain when you cross like a certain threshold level then everything happens at once so I'll give give the example of the ETF right once like Black Rock has a ETF that's actually doing really well you are going to get like 10 20 others like it's almost at some point like it's it's it's it responsible for a large financial institution to not play in a market that is seeing so much fracture right so you you're not going to get just one right

you're suddenly going to get 20 uh and I think think of like the Nations state adoption is something similar like initially it's going to be hor but as soon as some big I know El Salvador has done it but people also think of it as a small country right like yes they did it uh but as soon as I think a larger country that has like real political muscle uh in the world does it I mean forget about even the United States the United States doing it is is is just going to be like you know shocking news uh when it's real like a Bitcoin Reser and there's actual Bitcoin in it and and I think everybody would if that would just force the hand of everybody to do it but even I would say um there are so many other countries and then this could

come country like Switzerland would be like anywhere right and I think it's just a matter of time there's so many private sort of like conversations I'm hearing I'm not going to repeat here but it's just a matter of time like as soon as as someone does it it's going to force the hand and then suddenly 10 20 other countries are are doing it and we will be you know in in a very different world for Bitcoin so I think that's that's super exciting what's happening for sort of like Stacks over here is that you know our our thesis is that there's going to be one big successful L2 uh that's going to be worth a lot uh we are sort of like the market leader people you know credit us for even creating this category but we want to have this like like da your mentality

that you know in this market right now like when we are thinking about you know the next saturation of the product meaning the protocol the change but also like like the ecosystem like how do we stay on top of the game and there's some like very sort of like exciting things going on like for example Stacks already unlock you know 100% of Bitcoin hash power for security I think that's a huge deal that you do transaction on the L2 stable coins nfts rwas whatever you want you do that on the L2 and you get 100% Bitcoin hash power and Bitcoin hash is just going to keep on going up right so in terms of our security we're now just like pity bagging on on top of Bitcoin but the next big unlock is also going to be bitcoin's economic power right we are

already unlocking it through sbdc getting deployed in the L2 but there is a lot of interest in people want to stick this Bitcoin and you know like help bring economic power BDC and we're we're we're looking into some design some of this is already public so we want to iterate fast we want to sort of like incorporate any of the best designs it might be like oneof end bridges that are that are coming up and sort of like really focus hard on the guro market and and uh we we see ourselves as sort of like the flag bearers for Bitcoin and you know most of the users will actually end up using VDC on an L2 than an L1 so we take our job very very seriously when it comes to that fantastic uh I've just learned that

I can also do portrait mode so uh thanks for teaching me something new about podcasting to Mana amongst other things and uh Robbie it's been a pleasure to chat with you again as been our first pod in some time man thanks so much for your time I'm truly excited about what's happening in the future for Bitcoin I the nation states uh fighting a space race to accumulate Bitcoin is something from our wildest dreams of of the early days so uh props to you for staying heads down and I look forward to seeing you at the next event uh won't miss you next time awesome take care this is a lot of fun thanks a lot thanks for