Joe Lallouz: Bison Trails – Building a Better Proof of Stake Ecosystem for Everyone (#329)

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 329 with guests Jolla lose [Music] hi welcome to epicenter my name is Sebastian Cujo today our guest is Joe la Luz Joe is the CEO of bison trails they're a company which provides staking infrastructure for a variety of proof estate block chains including cosmos Tasos halgren and many others and their testing and adding several new chains on an ongoing basis like e 2.0 of course that'll be supported when it comes out

bison trails focuses on providing enterprise-grade infrastructure and they've built a really impressive system for deploying nodes across multiple cloud services spreading micro services across several clouds and over different geographies and they recently raised twenty five million dollars so it will be really interesting to see where this company goes because I think it holds a lot of promise so here's what you'll learn in the interview how bison trails got started and their vision to build a better proof of stake ecosystem for everyone the types of customers they run Valladares for and their approach to improving the product the network's they support and their approach to adding new networks their technical infrastructure design and all the cutting-edge stuff they're working on in terms of

deployment redundancy and key storage how the company thinks about infrastructure centralization and proof of stake of course the question is here if most Valladares on our network are using the same infrastructure service provider does that mean the blockchain is centralized their involvement in different crypto communities and discussions around protocol improvements and this is really interesting their role in the Liebherr association and the work they're doing in the technical steering committee sunny a may heard that this episode of course they both run Valladares they're both highly technical so it was only logical that they would interview Joe I thought they'd asked all the right questions and produced an excellent interview so hats

off for them and I really hope you like it you might have noticed a bonus episode in your feed last Friday and I wanted to address this briefly because it's the first time we published a sponsored interview now we get a lot of requests to be on the podcast and we can't honor all these requests for one there's just not enough weeks in the year to run episodes with every company who reaches out to us and to sometimes companies have very specific marketing goals that they're trying to achieve and so we see an opportunity here to enable these companies to sponsor their appearance in the podcast now I've done a lot of thinking about this because our reputation is so important to us and what it comes down to is making sure that we have a high degree of due diligence for sponsors for sponsored

episodes and for any project that we have on the podcast for that matter so this basically sums up my thinking around this of course if there's anything that you want to share with me you can always reach out to me on Twitter or directly by email at sebastian at epicenter TV now I do want to talk about this episode briefly because many of you are concerned by this I interviewed Clinton Donnelly he is a crypto tax expert and he's helped hundreds of US crypto holders file their taxes this episode is chock-full of excellent practical advice on how to prepare a rock-solid tax return he shares the most common mistakes that people make and he talks about two very important anti-money laundering forms that if filed incorrectly could cost you

tens of thousands of dollars in fines he has excellent insights and helps us understand how to get inside the head of an IRS auditor so if you have crypto and your US taxpayer this is a must listen episode you'll find it in your podcast feed just before this one of course you already know this but this week is ECC in Paris and I am so excited to be going we have a podcast studio booth up on the third floor you can't miss us come check us out and if you can't be in Paris this week you can follow all the action from ECC on Peppa go Peppa calm to download the app and I just want to thank Peppa for making this happen I think it's so freakin cool that we have a podcast booth and hopefully I can get rid of

this cold so that my voice holds up for all these interviews that I've got planned this week anyway it's gonna be a lot of fun I'm very happy to welcome back to the show as a sponsor shape shift now let me tell you something the shape shift you grew up with is nothing like the shape shift of today of course you know shape shift does the cryptid a crypto trading platform but now you can also buy crypto with fiat you can trade you can track and you can secure all your digital assets in one place the new shape shift is your crypto portfolio dashboard it allows you to see all of your crypto holdings in one place and you have trading built in and when you sign up at beta shape-shift com you'll receive a hundred Fox tokens and you can

trade commission free so each of these Fox tokens equals ten dollars in trading fees per month which means you start off on the platform with the Heusen dollars in free trading you can connect your ledger your treasure or your keep key Hardware wallet and of course we're giving these away for free you just need to do the survey that I mentioned at the top of the show or you can even create a software wallet to begin your journey so go to beta shape-shift com to get started and be sure to follow them on twitter at shape-shift underscore i/o for all voice updates as the company continues to build out its robust crypto ecosystem status is here the status secure messaging app is out of beta and

available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store status is a private secure communication tool that combines a decentralized messenger a web 3 browser and a crypto wallet with status your messages and your identity belong to you it leverages state-of-the-art protocols to protect your data and never require a third-party validation to create your account there's no phone number there's no email address there's no bank account you know what there is there's a private key that's it plain and simple it's crypto one of the things I like about status is that you can easily access the entire DAP ecosystem and I think that the release of status is an important milestone because it demonstrates that crypto can address a

use case that can potentially reach billions of people so download status in the Apple or Google app stores and be sure to join the public channel hashed I kept ascender come and say hi and we'll give you some free SNT tokens to help you get started and with that here is our interview with Joel alou's so we're on here today with Joe la Luz who is the CEO of bison trails nice to have you on Joe thanks so much for having me guys really really excited to be here and real excited for the conversation today yes I mean really happy to have you on I think you are the you know you're the first proof of steak infrastructure related person that we've

had on the show I don't know if it's partially because you know three of the hosts are like running proof of steak infrastructure so we've always felt a bit weird having and another proof of steak press infrastructure person on but you know it's glad to see you on to finally you know it's been something that's been people been calling it the year of staking so it's good to finally have someone actually running staking on as a as a guest so before we jump into the staking stuff could you tell us a little bit about what your background is and I know you are you've done a number of startups in the past and you know you were a partner at some venture funds how did you get involved with startups and entrepreneurship and yeah absolutely so again thanks for having me on the show

even though I know you you all have a lot of experience in the infrastructure space in proof of stake which hopefully I think will make for like a really great conversation because it's relatively rare that I get to have you know interview type conversations with folks that you know have a maybe like deeper more nuanced understanding of like what we're doing and why we're doing it so definitely looking forward to that as far as my background goes and I'm obviously very happy to share this as well so I've been a start-up founder for the majority of my career so I've been a my co-founder and I have been working together for close to 17 years we've built a few venture backed companies together venture backed being that you know they were software companies financed by venture

capitalists we worked on probably 20 or 30 different projects that never really made it into a sort of company state or company stage you know a couple proof of concepts or you know MVP is that ultimately we either decided where it went really worth pursuing or didn't sort of didn't pan out our hypothesis didn't pan out the way we thought it would and however we've you know so I had a couple that did make it into the sort of like company phase company stage and we have put together some financing and built a team and built a really great product so you know couple of what I would say like sort of successful outcomes and then a whole bunch of failure outcomes which is all part of the process and yeah you know so we're both technical I'm the CEO bison trails

I'm a software engineer I've been a software engineer my whole life my co-founders also he's the CTO of bison trails and also a software engineer and really have been focused our whole careers on building software services and products in particular in sort of emerging spaces and emerging technology spaces people kind of ask like the I've got the question I should say people ask but I've gotten the question a couple of times you know why crypto or how blockchain or you know how or why are you involved in this space and funny enough like I tend to skip the when and blockchain or when crypto question because the truth is that we've actually been pretty involved in some way shape or form in the blockchain crypto space

since like really really early days but not because we were building in the space or because we were fortune tellers and can tell the future but really because we're just huge nerds you know my first my first interaction with Bitcoin which was my first interaction with crypto was a colleague of mine who was infrastructure engineer at a company that we were working on together was running Bitcoin mining on my company infrastructure and we were like hey what are these long-running processes that are running on these servers you know out and out in our data center I actually don't even want to call out a date but I think it was probably somewhere like 2011 yes you know like I'm not sure exactly when it was but that was like one of my first

experiences and then realizing like oh holy smokes this is really cool this is really interesting and that was kind of like when we first started getting it like interested in the space and so we've been working on bison trails for about three years now we've you know we've only really been building in the space for about you know three or so years been definitely interested and a participant in in this space for for many many years and and so you know really about where the space is going and kind of being able to finally from a professional perspective work day to day on blockchain in crypto but yeah you know like you mentioned worked on a few different projects have been the CEO and founder of a few different startups the most recent one was a company called

grant Street it was an online marketplace specifically focused on folks that were building new hardware devices which is interesting when I was one of the first projects I looked at infrastructure in the blockchain space was actually looking at trying to demystify or create transparency around the biding processes in proof-of-work networks and had spent a lot of time in China where most of the hardware manufacturing was happening around these these you know basics around specific devices and was a really good springboard for me because our previous company which was a marketplace focus on hardware development had put us in contact with a lot of folks in chandra and sort of southern china where a lot of electronics manufacturing actually happens you know kind of interesting interesting little tidbit there about

you know some of the first projects and then similarly like you said have been an investor but actually an angel investor so I run a very small angel fund with my co-founder and another one of our partners were three of us and we invest in founders so we don't run like a venture or venture capital fund I'm not really affiliated with any venture capitalists but we you know as entrepreneurs sort of said you know one of the things we'd always like to do is be able to give back to other entrepreneurs we know how hard it is to start companies and how hard it is to get off the ground and and so for the last five or six years we've been investing in entrepreneurs a sort of let angel stage out of this quote-unquote fund I think but it's really just our own money and we spent a lot of time

working with and advising early-stage founders helping them kind of get off the ground and understand the you know the nuances of building a new product and getting getting people excited about it and you know iterating on it and all that stuff and as a participant in the blockchain and crypto space one of the first things I actually did was you know really quite frankly like was more from an investor perspective right like you know either mining or buying the coin or other crypto assets like or you know any of the other ones so that's that's a little bit of my background you know currently 100% focused on bison trails and 100% of my time I want to say every day all day every weekend every night all the time

I'm nuts I'm not sleeping I'm spending focused and on building a really great team of you know super technical folks to help make it easier for folks that participate in blockchain networks one of my curiosities has been bison trails has been in operation for something like 20 months or 21 months correct well it's actually a little bit longer than that it's actually closer to three years it's like officially about 20 months or so I think like if you look at like our company formation documentation and stuff like that it's like about 20 months but before we even went through any of that stuff we spent a lot of time building out like MVP products essentially the product is you allow any party that wants to Don infrastructure

the nodes or validators or proof of stake networks my curiosity is I mean I have been in the proof of stake space myself for two and a half years and I I can confidently assert that maybe two years back they weren't any people looking to run validators or proof of stake networks so given the customer demand wasn't there why did you get into this vertical of having people run validators because I came across no customers at that point it's a really great question and it actually allows me to kind of sidestep into a little bit of the back story around bison trails you know it really is like why build this product and why

build this product now so I'd mentioned quickly that really early on in sort of my building phase of my crypto and blockchain experience that we were looking my co-founder and I were looking at creating transparency around this concept of securing a blockchain and infrastructure around the blockchain and so you know really this came out of founder and software engineer and technical persons mindset of you know you want to engage in something that you need to understand exactly how it works how do you take it apart how do you break it into pieces how do you understand all the different pieces and one of the things that we had found them they were looking at the blockchain space and this was you know call it three four years ago was that there was probably some of the most interesting

and smartest people that I had ever met were working on designing building pushing you know code to these open-source protocols and they were they were working on existing blockchain it's not even like new ones but like existing block chains and protocols and some of the new block chains and protocols that were sort of in development and these people were some of the smartest people had ever met and ever had a chance to interact with which was very cool however if you actually looked at what was powering the chains themselves and what was securing the chains themselves and at the time and proof of worked it was mostly you know mining and you started talking to folks that were doing mining not everybody because I don't over generalize but a lot of the folks were incredibly cagey very closed off didn't want to actually talk about what

they were doing and why they were doing that and for me it felt like there's this crazy dissonance and in a market that I felt very passionate about which was you know really open really collaborative protocol blockchain development and then really closed off really cagey sort of closed-minded like mining and security and infrastructure and to me that didn't make any sense and so really early on we were like let's let's actually just open this up you know one of the one of our first sort of initiatives it wasn't like let's go build a mind let's go build a company that focuses on proof of stage or let's go do you know XY and Z it was actually like let's how do how would one open this up how would one look at the space and say okay I want to create more transparency here I want to make it user

for people to understand how this will I want to make it easier for people to truly understand like how a business works here and so the we do that the only way we know how as founders which is like let's build let's build it let's build it so one of the first things we did was actually built a proof-of-work mine so my co-founder and I own and operate an automated a proof-of-work mine in the Pacific Northwest we built that from the ground up and you know not because we wanted to specifically get into mining but because we really wanted to have a deep understanding of how blockchain infrastructure works and how securing Network works and at the time that was mostly proof of work really quick can you explain what an automated mine is yeah it's you know so when you look at I can also I should like

probably characterize that a little bit better it's not an automated mine we automated a lot of the processes around mining things like you know how do you operationalize a mine so we write like custom software to do things that normally we're done in a mine that we're done manually so we have very little staff that actually run the mine and there's almost nobody there ever things like you know diagnostics or identifying parts of the mine that are off or not working well or temperature control so like the things that matter in approval for mine are well your electricity costs are how your hardware is running and then generally speaking temperature and cooling so in a normal scenario or in a lot of Approval work mines if you've ever been to one I don't know if you have but you've ever been to one there's often a lot of staff that are kind of

like you know running around doing stuff and measuring things and we said to ourselves like hey we can operationalize the hell out of this by writing software which is something really uniquely positioned to do being software engineers and so we did a lot of that stuff and so we still have some folks that help us out but it's like you know pretty ad-hoc and a lot of the things that you would sort of do on a day-to-day basis to diagnose an issue with something like a miner or a network Leibert and software to automatically do even as simple as like hey this thing's not working like how do we automatically restart it does that make sense yeah yeah it makes good sense yeah and in doing that we actually talked a lot about like some of the issues so when we built this mine we actually did it with

some friends some other angel investors and other folks in the space and so the gate we're building a mine like this what we're doing and we were pretty public about the process I've actually been thinking about maybe like publishing some of like are some of her like investor updates it's unfortunately son something I'd have to get everybody kind of on board with but I don't think anybody would really be against it maybe be able do that so is this mine operated by bison trails was it something that you guys did separately before bison droves yeah completely completely separate is something we did before bison trails I would say it's like a you know one of the one of the first projects we did before starting to really work on but we were kind of like in tandem working on bison trails while we were building this thing out it's

actually the name the name bison trails comes from that project the very very short version is that we had while we were building out this mind we'd spend a lot of time in places where building out a proof-of-work mine is a favorable place to be generally you're looking for cheap power we were specifically focused on renewables because we only wanted to use wind and water the places where you find those things are kind of like in mountainous regions in the middle of the country or in the Pacific Northwest in the United States budget same in both of the United States and we had at the time spend a lot of time in Wyoming and the state animal of Wyoming is the Bison and when we were naming the company we were like why don't we name it something instead of naming it something that sounds like very sort of infrastructure

II why don't we name it something that gives a little bit of a hat tip to some of the early work that like sort of led us here and if you don't know anything about bison they're actually really interesting animals in the early pioneer days in the sort of gold rush days pioneers would follow paths that bison had paved across the country these bison trails and so they were sort of like a leader in showing people the path forward and we thought that was like a really cool interesting piece of imagery and that's where the name comes from that's a cool story it's definitely a welcome change from like you know like the 20 or 30 different validator companies that had the word stake somewhere in their name so yeah exactly and honestly naming a company is always really hard so you

sort of have two options like make it really literal or make it something that's like you know just interesting and something relevant to you and we opted for the latter which I'm very happy about because I actually like the name a lot I think it's has like some fun imagery and some front fun branding to it but yeah so that's what I mean by automated mind it's not really automated right it's it's we've automated some of the proper a tional processes around it that make running a mine a little bit cumbersome or I have a lot of overhead and costs and so I should also know that in doing that you actually reduce your cost significantly so independently mine a few different networks and we do that in a pretty pretty low cost relative to the rest of the hatchery on the network so anyways I was kind of saying like why

why build a well build a platform to help folks deploy validators and really what I was kind of getting at was we really wanted to open up the whole process and make it a lot easier and in starting to understand proof of work and understanding how the these networks were secured and how blocks were formed and how mining works we actually started realizing that one if you want to be a miner or you want to get involved in the space like you're basically connecting to one of you know four or five major mining pools which kind of sucks because you have like centralization around decision-making whether you won't like it or not otherwise it's so on economic all to be a part of it that people just don't do it so that didn't really make sense and too we found ourselves in this position where operationally running a

mine is fine but it doesn't really play to our strengths all that much no we're stuck like I said early on where software engineers my co-founder and our both software engineers we've built you know large-scale software projects for many many years and so we were you know paying really close attention to the sort of protocol space and realizing that there's a shift happening towards using alternative consensus mechanisms to secure networks in particular things like proof of stake where you move away from like hardware specific or ASIC based you know models to secure network and you move more towards a model where superior infrastructure can support both the security as well as message propagation and reading and writing from a protocol and so we were really intrigued by that and you know things like infrastructure is code and like

understanding how we can make it way easier for more people to participate in these block chains you know I think like you know at the time like Kenneth tezo's was still sort of you know had really launched yet and cosmos was still pre game of stakes and and so you know there was this was I want to say probably about two years ago ish you know and we were looking at the space and saying like okay if this is a successful space the way this is going to be successful is if there is much easier ways for folks to run validators and run infrastructure on these networks not just to secure the network but also to make it a more healthier ecosystem for people to interact with the protocols themselves and so to answer the question

like the reason why we were doing it is we weren't looking at this and saying like oh there's customer demand for this today we're looking at it and saying like what do we want the world to look like I want the world to look like massive distribution of token so that lots of folks are using these protocols there you know developers are using them and really as a you know a core tenant or ethos of the space like if you are interacting with a network like cosmos or Tasos it should be part of your duty to help secure the network and run validation on that network and Ron you know nodes on that network I mean that that's kind of like you know the gist of kind of why we started doing that and why we started building this this platform it was really to sort of

support this thesis that if any of these protocols and if the entire proof of stake protocol space was going to be successful there needs to be a lot of people that could do it we needed to have networks that could support you know not just the protocols themselves but and consensus and you know bft protocols in particular being able to support hundreds or thousands of nodes but it needs to be possible for people to do it and it actually needs to be secure and incredibly well orchestrated and Ronn and so that's kind of like the sort of impetus behind the company and why we think it's important what we're doing and why we're excited about lauder does that answer the question yes sure thank you yeah for sure it's a long winded way of saying we wanted to build it for something that we wanted to see

as opposed to the thing we were seeing today I guess one of the questions I have in my mind is where do you see the proof of proof of stake validation ecosystem go in the next five or 10 years like which parties are going to be a major validators that's a that's a good question by parties you mean like what types of companies or like who what groups so maybe for the listener so proof of stake validators today are what like exchanges then you have custodians then you have some hobbyists right then you have some professional validation companies that just do validation you have some you know fun script or finds

venture capitalists doing validation and those are I think the major parties today and then you could add a few putative potential parties to this list so there would be a firm like fidelity you know traditional traditional finance entity running running validator it's very much possible also right and all of these parties come to the validation game with very different strengths and very different focus areas and some of them are well equipped for the validation game others are not and so my curiosity is what do you think happens in in five or ten years and all of these different kinds of players interact in a

competitive market out how does the market shape up that's a great question so I could walk you through how I think that sort of works in the next few years and then how it hopefully will work later down the road I'd say the first and foremost most important thing is that competition is actually a really good thing for everybody because it sort of makes everybody need to do a better job and ultimately that's better for the protocols themselves so if we're all doing a better job validating these networks in the protocol it's going to be a much better shape if it's easier for more folks to do this at a hobbyist level or at a professional level then we're all in much better shape as well because there'll be more folks doing it and the more folks doing it more robust and the more resilient these protocols

and networks are and ultimately that's what we want to see long term in ten years right I want to see a network where it's actually quite hard to stall the network because you know you need to have thousands of validators drop out for that to actually happen our tenth is tens of thousands of validators to drop out for that to happen and ultimately that's like a world that I want to see I think that you can we can kind of look to a few other ecosystem not gonna point out any specific ones because you know I feel like it's not maybe the right way to do it but you know it's not uncommon for a market to start with like a hobbyist market and then some sort of professionalism kind of you know start to form around it and a market start to form around it so you know I'd say like

obviously there's I think we're already seeing signals of this where something that maybe was kind of hobbyist ish you know you're starting to see a little bit more professionalism like you said there's like so you know specific companies focus on validation and then some of the more dominant or more incumbent players in the crypto space like custodians and exchanges are starting to get involved in validation and staking and proof of stake so I think that you know those are all really good things too I actually think that you know this is maybe an unpopular opinion I think the majority of people the majority of companies individuals even the existing staking as a service force taking you know validation

companies are not that well equipped to scale and run a network at you know a trillion dollar network at you know lots and lots and lots of transactions per second and lots of transactions in a year and I think that we're still sort of early on the adoption curve of a lot of these different protocols and you know this is kind of getting back to not to chill bison trails cuz it's not why I'm here but getting a little bit back to sort of why we think what we're doing is important to why we think what we're doing is interesting is we actually think that being a company that's uniquely focused on solving this exact problem we can make everybody better and give the power to some of the smaller folks that maybe only some of the bigger folks have resources to invest in so as

a company and as a service provider that can do things that are incredibly professional that are focused entirely on infrastructure security and securing and validating networks we can actually put tools in the hands of an independent hobbyist or an independent company or a smaller company that's safe for instance a large exchange or a fidelity like you mentioned could normally only afford and spend you know two-three years researching and building and so ultimately the goal long term is to make it so that lots of people can to participate and compete and the only way you can compete is if you know you're actually providing value and services that are equal to everyone else in the ecosystem and that's why I think like what we're doing is really interesting

and and I'm hoping that like more folks will push us to do better then we can push other we can make it so that more foot we're pushing other folks to do better as well down the road like ten years down the road I think that you know hopefully we'll have a really healthy ecosystem where any like I said before anyone who's building a product or service that uses a proof of stake network in any way shape or form part of like your I don't want to call it civic duty but part of your you know crypto ecosystem duty is to help secure the network and you know ideally incentivize networks design it so that your actual it's actually just part of your business as well and that you know maybe it's not your core business and you work with a service provider or you partner with a

small company or partnering with a validation company but you are validating the network so would it be correct to extend your answer to say that your target market is the sort of hobbies today that can that can run a validator that can run a decent service but you foresee this hobbyist getting outpaced by the professional validator is like exchanges and buy with bison trails you want to give this hobbyist and somebody who just has maybe a few hours a week to dedicate to validation and equal opportunity is a V the exchanges and custodians your

target market is not to for example you go to the fidelity's of the world or the custodians of the world and offer to run their infrastructure for them is more the business-to-consumer startup rather than a business-to-business startup is that right no it's actually not so our target market right now and the what we we currently are working with some of the world's top custodians and exchanges to power their validation on our platform currently today we're trusted by some of the world's top because certain exchanges as a security infrastructure provider to be able to do this so more so is that we think that we can build products and services that are

enterprise-grade such that you know a large scale custodian or exchange you know it is is happy using our products and services and similarly provide that access to the hobbyist and the smaller companies so it's not it's less about the target market our target market is still pushing the whole ecosystem forward so we are setting the pace for what it means to securely and successfully run infrastructure on these different networks and by setting the pace we're appealing we're an appealing partner for custodians and exchanges in the space and we're currently seeing that which is great we're also an appealing partner for smaller companies that want to be able to you know run nodes on these networks or validation companies that want to run nodes on

these networks and I can talk a little bit about the sort of success case we don't so one of the things we don't do is we don't talk about it really talk about our customers too much because it's for their privacy we can't really talk about them and as part of you know how we work with our customers but there's a couple that have called us out publicly that they use us and so we're you know happy to talk about those and I can talk a little bit about like a couple success cases that have been quite cool to see how bison trails gives the power to a small company that only a large company normally would have could you talk a little bit about some of these public ones so the one that I know is my friend Anna at Sur knowledge validator but

other others who are also very public about working with you guys so we are in the process of making a couple more public and it's kind of you know partially part of our ask as a company is like we're sort of talking to some of our customers and saying you know but we've generally have that conversation pretty regularly okay how would you feel about talking about this mostly for the benefit of the ecosystem but I can speak specifically to Anna Anna zero knowledge podcast and you know they help if you go to syke validator comm they have on their website they talk about like what they're doing and why they're doing what they're doing and that they use our platform to support their validation in cosmos and in Kusama which obviously will eventually be polkadot and host of other protocols that we we support on

the platform and to me that's like a really really great success case you know it's it's a podcast that you know that actually send from I was on the podcast with Anna and she was asking us about what we do and I was explaining this is what we do and I was like you know you could run a you know zero-knowledge podcast validator and she was like well we don't really have like you know the skill said an engineering ability and you know the time to put into this while we could probably figure it out it's actually quite hard to do really well and I was like well that's the whole point of our platform and so we did you know they became a customer of ours and they've been you know running their validators on our infrastructure platform which is really cool and to me it's like exactly why

we're here right like the more GK validators the more zero knowledge you know folks types of folks like the zero knowledge team that want to run infrastructure on these networks the better it is and in their particular case they're really focused on ZK and really focus on privacy and they're sort of a mission-driven validator and I think that's great I think it's fantastic you know I think being able to support all the different players in the space is really is really big period so I'm really happy to sort of share the work they'd be doing there out of the customers that without mentioning any names were saved but could you give us like some sort of sense of what makeup like you know what percentage of them are funds what percentage are exchanged is what percentage are is like you know things

like the podcast like the ZK validator and more the hobbyist style ones yeah the truth is I actually don't know those numbers off the top of my head otherwise I would I can give you like ballpark just like from what I do know and this is totally shooting from the hip okay so we work with really what happens is that we work with a lot of folks where tokens are aggregated and in more mature networks we see broader token distribution so network like aetherium for instance I was like a much broader token distribution than a network like even cosmos maybe while cosmos actually isn't that bad or Tesla's isn't that bad you know I think like over the next five to ten years we'll see much broader token distribution as more usage developer your surging products and services are built on these these

protocols so we tend to work with folks that have you know that are sort of in possession of LOD tokens and a lot of these newer networks that does tend to be investors so either traditional venture capitalists or you know the somewhat less traditional you know crypto focused or blockchain focused venture capitalists so we work really closely with those folks and I would say that you know probably a big chunk maybe like half fish of our current partners are in that category and then the other half are a mix of large scale custodians large scale exchanges and hobbyists as well and sort of independents like the DK folks so it kind of looks like that it does depend protocol to protocol so a

protocol that has broader distribution we'll see more folks on the less on the investor side and a protocol that is like really young that hasn't even launched yet it tends to like a little skew a little bit more towards like hey these are our investors they're holding these these tokens and they want to help participate in scale and they want to help secure the network early on mm-hmm yesterday in prepping for the episode actually I went on the website and tried to make an account just to you know try out the product play with the dashboard but it turns out actually at the moment sign-ups are you guys are not accepting open signups and it just has a pop-up that says to the contact at this email so what's like the roadmap towards making it so it you know it's open

sign-up anyone can just go make a account as easily as I make an email account and just start validating yeah so there's two questions baked into that one that I'll answer simultaneously because I think it's an important one the first is kind of like strategically when we would want to do that or the timing around that and then the second is can you actually do that and can can we actually do that so I'll answer the second question first so currently once you've been on boarded onto the platform it's essentially a we call it a one-click it's actually more like two to three clicks and fill out a couple pieces of information to deploy a validator into any network in some networks we can actually deploy validators automatically and autoscale them so like for instance in something like Kusama where you want to optimize

your infrastructure based off your stake and based off the ecosystem we can optimize things like that automatically which is quite cool and very unique of an automatic an auto scaling platform that we have so once you've been on boarded onto the platform you can actually go through that process independently by yourself and sort of you know I'll just call it click a couple buttons to get a validator up on cosmos or get a validator up on tezo soar Algar and/or d credit or live peer or any of the protocols will be support we currently aren't open for open signups and there's actually a couple reasons for that the first is we still think it's kind of early in the ecosystem and we'd like to talk to folks about like what their goals are and why they're trying to do what they're trying

to do and okay get just get like a much better understanding both to help our product and our services and also to help them make the right decision so what we found is that not everybody really understands exactly what they should be doing and why and we don't tell people what to do but we help guide them sometimes you know and you know if someone comes to me and says okay I have 500 atoms or you know 500 tessie's I want to run a baker I want to run a validator I'll tell them like you probably shouldn't it's not going to make sense for you to do that you should probably delegate to one you know and here's how you would delegate to one and there's a whole bunch of them and and so it's really more about like getting to know the folks that want to be involved

in this space than it is about you being restrictive or stopping people from being able to do what they want to do it's really just like understanding what their intents are and what they're looking for in a product and service most our onboarding process actually takes like you know a couple minutes it's not very it's not particularly long and you know if you sunny if you came to me and you said okay like I want to run a cosmos validator on bison trails and it would be a pretty pretty seamless process so it is more just about like us getting to know the folks that want to be involved in space than anything else and and then also you know like any product and service that is still quite young which I you know I think 20 months or 24 months is still quite young it's a

way for us to always get better and ask people the questions that we think that we want to ask could you talk through a little bit about the help the pricing works let's say I do want to run a cosmos validator on bison trails is it a sort of fixed fee or is it taking a percentage of the revenues that the validator makes how does that work yeah so generally speaking it's a fixed fee we also take a small percentage of whatever you want to call it inflationary rewards participatory rewards that a validator makes as well it generally is quite low and we think of that as a way to both incentivize and align interests between us our customers and the protocols so you know we're in

it for the long haul we're the protocols that we're on we want to see them succeed long term and so we want to make sure that we can be you know really aligned alongside our customers and the protocols themselves but generally speaking it's a fixed fee on a monthly basis so people pay us a monthly fixed fee to run a validator on our platform and that is really dependent on the protocol itself and dependent on how the protocol is set up and what those validators or those nodes need to be able to do so we have built pretty what I would consider cutting-edge technology around cloud orchestration computing infrastructure deployment management platform that's you know by default multi-cloud multi

VPS multi zone multi-region with redundancy built into it and scaling built into it and so that's a pretty professional type service that you know even some of the best enterprise companies in the world that aren't in the blockchain aren't even doing and we've done that in a way for an ecosystem where let's be real a lot of the software is still beta software huh so that we're actually quite proud of the platform that we build and so I really depends on like the protocol itself like what does that need to do and you know what kind of security do we need to be able to support here you know what what is our HSM setup look like what are those what does that redundancy look like stuff like that right so maybe we can jump into that a little bit so

what I use bison trail what exactly am I getting I'm assuming I'm getting something a little bit more than just some like terraform scripts that you guys wrote and I just go deploy them so what what exactly goes into designing of your Orchestrator system and like do you guys handle the monitoring do you guys handle do you guys have physical snowed somewhere or is it all cloud-based yeah could you walk us a little bit through the technical design I can I'm going to very deliberately walk through the technical design but kind of at a in an abstract fashion but still technically just because like you know part of what we do is you know the stuff that we do is you know part of like the what I would call like you know really exciting secret sauce of bison trails and why we're kind

of what we do so the first thing is is that it's entirely interface based interaction with our customers so we don't ship you terraform scripts for instance you know but we're built on top of modern technologies like column and terraform and kubernetes and we're built in multi cloud multi zone multi-region fashion so we can actually move easily move nodes and portions of nodes or micro services around nodes around the world very very quickly and very easily and so that can be like you know century for instance or a query and transaction portion of a node cluster and so what we do is we build security and we build monitoring and we build redundancy and

scaling into our node clusters automatically for our customers so you don't actually have to go and deploy anything you come on you've become a customer you click a button and we make sure that everything is working perfectly and well and in the right place and communicating well and signing blocks and producing blocks etc so that's what it's like to use us as far as how technical you want to get into that it's actually like on a you know we work with our customers some of our customers we have like things like secure API you know either RPC or or API access to node infrastructure themselves we will do combination of cloud and bare metal deployments depending on the

protocol itself as well so we do a lot of cloud work but we also in some instances do you have bare metal deployments for portions of node clusters that are distributed all around the world data secure data centers all around the world as well then interact with our infrastructure platform to make sure that we can securely assign blocks you know using the right like hardware security modules and making sure that you know we're not at risk of bleaching any keys like stuff like that and so from a technology standpoint it's super super modern and super cutting-edge and can auto scale and has really great failover processes the thing that isn't the technology platform which is really great is we actually offer support and

services around what we do as well so if there are issues we have communication channels with our customers if you have questions about how protocol works or what's going on you can call someone and ask them about what's going on and why it's working that way we're constantly monitoring so we obviously have like things like enterprise grade DevOps teams as well they're monitoring 24/7 with things like response teams and responding catastrophe response teams and incident reporting and pager duty in the event that you know things do go wrong you can kind of sleep well knowing that you never really have to worry about this and someone else is on it so is it correct imagine that like my imagination of what's really happening behind the scenes so I go to bison

trails and I click a bunch of buttons and what's really happening on the Bison traders infrastructure is essentially like a bunch of docker containers are probably spinning up specific to me and these containers are spread across with say two or three different cloud vendors ews google cloud maybe one of these containers is is signing on my behalf and then there's failover so if this particular container dies there is some other system that will activate one of the other containers to sign on my behalf and in this entire process my validation keys are somehow treated in a way that only I

know my validation keys by Cintas doesn't is that the right imagination so it's definitely a lot more complicated than that in that imagine you were to do that but so there's a couple things I won't talk about mostly from the security because of security I want to talk about specifically how we do things like deployment orchestration but just imagine you were to take what you just described to break it down into much much smaller pieces and then distribute those all over through a distributed system we have in some instances designed and developed you know pretty unique containerization processes as well so it's not just like the docker container that's deployed to like AWS or the document endows deployed flycatcher or something like that it's actually a good amount more broken down

into pieces than that but but some of the fundamentals you're describing is right so yes that's right you're like validation keys are not accessible except for by you and actually in most cases not accessible really by you either they're not accessible by anybody and so you know they can be destroyed by you for instance but but that's about it oh yeah that's in a lot of ways there's pretty close to a lot of what we do and then manage monitor upgrade update and make sure that failover processes are working well and signing processes you're working well and then mr.

propagation is optimized so imagine a world where you have part of your clusters that are moving to optimize for receiving and sending messages in the protocol itself spending time thinking through you know one of the things that we've noticed is that like an overwhelming number of prove the stick protocol infrastructure is run on AWS East so spending a lot of time making sure that the protocol itself at a protocol level is decentralized is something that we're really excited and focused on in that there's sort of much broader VPS participation in the protocol itself so if we see that you know half a protocol is running on AWS these will probably not be putting nodes on AWS East but being able to do things

like that which is really interesting what pieces get reused across participation clusters so you know let's say you have like five customers all running cosmos nodes what pieces are are they gonna be like sharing sentry nodes or are they like all of these values are completely independent from each other yeah sure good question so one I'm actually the wrong person to ask about that question because I personally didn't design it and two I actually don't think that we would say just from a security perspective it's a little bit dangerous just to speak specifically to that what I will say is that we building an enterprise-grade platform means that

you 100% need to create delineation between customers and so we generally treat customers infrastructure independently of anybody else's so there's very little shared resources if any at all but I won't i won't i don't want to confirm or deny either of them just from a security perspective it's a little too dangerous what about within a customer so let's say you know cosmos for example I can run a validator with different weights but on some networks like Kusama each validator has a fixed weight and so if I want to if I have more stake than the fixed weight I have to run multiple validators would I have to run a new participation cluster for each of these validators or could I have it so I'm running multiple using one cluster and

just putting a bunch of keys on one node yeah so we will both optimize for try to optimize for security and infrastructure reliability in those cases it really kind of depends on the protocol itself and how how the protocol is in particular like for Kusama for instance like it depends like how the protocol is working in and so we know I don't think we Jeff we actually generalize it all that well in something in some instances in particular with those different protocols we will you know design that in a way that's optimized for both we can optimize your node infrastructure your validator infrastructure in the network itself based off of network conditions and your stake which is really quite cool and that's something

we can do automatically if you want us to do you guys ever end up modifying node software to increase security so for example you know myself and chorus have been like walking through some ideas of how to modify kahneman core in order to allow better like failover a system so you guys ever end up doing any like software development work to help improve the NIT note infrastructure in that way yeah it really depends on the protocol we have in some ways that would be something that we would most likely open-source if we were going to do so we're not we're not if we are going to go through the process of modifying note software itself to help for whatever it is like I can give you an example right

now we're actually talking to one of a protocol team about making small changes to help with sort of key management on the notes themselves and you know we'll sort of take it a few different avenues there sometimes we'll talk more work directly with the protocol teams themselves and help them understand why it matters and let then make those changes sometimes we will propose or try to make pushes upstream to a protocol but that's that that type of thing is the kind of thing that we believe should be open and public and open source and part of our community development should be you know helping the protocols get better and making folks understand why those things are important and so you know and also quite frankly like should be up to the community so the answer your question is like no we're not

really and if we do it's normally out in the open open source so as a protocol developer one of the things I think about a lot is about some of the centralization risks of the network and you know putting a lot of effort into helping encourage decentralization yeah how do you guys think about some of the centralization risks you may pose by having everyone depending on or not everyone of course but a large number of people depending on your guys's infrastructure first off I appreciate the vote of confidence sunny I think that we would love if a lot of people who were depending on our infrastructure that's it we're you know obviously still we're

still growing and we're excited about our position in the market and we think we're helping a lot of folks in a lot of different ways I think it's a very good question but I also think quite frankly that a lot of the sort of conversations that I've had around decentralization are basically trying arbitrary lines in the sand around whatever is this doesn't I don't mean this to come out like combative because I actually don't mean it in about a way but it's like sort of often for convenience for whoever you're talking to they sort of like draw a line in the sand it's like well here's my line in the sand but don't you know this it's on this side of me you know like there's there's you know pieces of that that I think that so there's two things that are important to me one is a from

an ethos perspective and an emission perspective decentralization is a path that we are constantly working on is a product and technology path that has constant staffing against so we want to end up in a world where we can be a force for helping decentralize the networks without posing additional risk to the protocols themselves and we've been put in positions where at some point we would be running to what specific Vienna BMT Network where Lou would be running too much of a network and potentially cause not even like necessarily cause but potentially cause issues with that network and we've just opted to not bring on new customers in that Network because of that answer just from like a mission perspective we're pretty aligned with making sure that we're doing the right thing for the

protocols themselves so that's the first thing the second thing is is that you know we do a lot of work to help decentralized networks and so yeah sure you could have folks that are depending on bison trails infrastructure platform but if we build in a way where ownership and we move towards a world where you know ownership of keys or ability to move things around or outside of our control and potentially verifiably outside of our control that's actually a really interesting way to help combat some of those issues as well and then the last thing I would say is kind of something I mentioned before which is like we make it easier for people to run nodes and validators around the world in different zones in different regions on different bts's that's actually something that is really hard to do and

when left to their own devices most protocols don't see that independently so if you play I mentioned this earlier like there's plenty of protocols where we see like a huge portion of that network run on AWS used that's not because people are think it's the right thing to do it's because people know and do what they know best and what people do and know best is AWS east and that's unfortunate for the protocol and so there's actually a very very strong case where we are creating enterprise-grade redundancy and infrastructure deployments that are geographically distributed that are VPS distributed that have independent Geographic fail overs that doesn't exist in the ecosystem without us which is which is really quite cool and that's something

I'm really excited about and then you know the last thing I would say is like every computer on the internet runs Linux and no one's asking about that do you guys think that you have an obligation to disclose your how many customers you have on a particular network so like at because I think it at least helps without disclosing who they are but at least giving a ballpark of like do 1% of the validators users to 5% to 51% that how do you guys think about that that's actually a really good question to do I think we have an obligation no I don't think we have an obligation and we're privately owned and operated company so I don't think we're obliged to do I think that like ethically and sort of from a mission perspective should we I meant like moral obligation

yeah like morally or a civic obligation I think that that's right I think that there's like a right way to do that and a wrong way to do that and there's also like the right time to do that and the wrong time to do that right now we operate that way internally where we're paying close attention to those things and we're sort of making internal company decisions based off of our penetration or our ability to do a really good job of solving the problems or do a better job in the market and so we're being careful something I could see us doing down the road is sort of like that makes a lot of sense right like we want to protect the privacy of our customers and want to protect security of our customers and security of our systems but also like I said before like we're incentive aligned

to see these networks be successful which means that if we put ourselves in a position to be detrimental to the network we're not helping anybody including ourselves I can see the world down the road where we're a little bit more public about our position in a network itself and also like being public about like parts of our roadmap about how we're all trying to help solve those problems and what are the issues and what are the things that we're doing way better you know kind of like what I'm describing now like how are we making that better and how are we more dangerous earlier you mentioned that you've known to me some customers one if when you felt that it would imply a lot a large percentage of the stake was running on your infrastructure to give us a sense of what's the line in your mind when you

would turn away customers for a particular network so there's a good question there's like the very obvious BFG lines right if you're three F over n plus one of the network then you actually hold the network so there's that right if you're running more than a third of the network and it be empty network you can hold the network that's no good if you're running two thirds of the network you can actually alter the change and that's also no good so in our head until we have solved a lot of the using technology to solve a lot of the decentralization issues that we think we might be bringing from a risk perspective we would most likely never run more than 30% of the network or whatever 33 percent of a network could you give us a sense just out of my personal curiosity what magnitude of the

Kosmos hub network you guys are operating out of my own curiosity what magnitude of the cosmos hub do you think we're operating somewhere between 10 to 20 percent would be my personal guess I love it that's fantastic we're not of the cosmos hub or not as big as that I actually don't know but it's not even like 10 to 20 percent that would be phenomenal if we were running 10 to 20 percent of the cosmos off that would be amazing because we'd be doing phenomenal job orchestrating validator stuff on that network on cosmos I actually wrote a proposal hasn't been pushed to the chain yet but called proportional slashing and you guys actually wrote a pretty good response to it it's the idea that we should punt way only in the case of slashing should we

punish validators more heavily the larger they are so if a validator of 5% of the stake gets double signs you'll get slashed much more heavily than someone who's 1% of this end of the network as part of that proposal to stop Sibyl attacks where that one valid or 5% is splits into five validators we do have to account for correlation where we basically say okay look if five of these validators all go down at roughly the same time we can kind of punish that as well as like one valid or five percent going down and that has this sort of side effect of heavily harming your architecture we're like I know you guys

spend a lot of time on D correlating log architecture but let's say there's something that goes wrong with the likes I don't know you exactly infrastructure but let's say like there is some sort of central point of failure in your orchestration system it does people who are using or infrastructure are probably more correlated than people who are not assuming they're not all running on AWS East so what are some of your thoughts on proportional slashing first off thanks for the work that you've been doing in cosmos on that I think like having focusing through this problem is it's an important part of Community Development and the maturation of the network itself I do remember sort of seeing that and I do remember us sort of writing our thoughts on proportional slashing I think ultimately where we

netted out and obviously we're totally open to interpretation and to conversation and debate about this is that platform like bison trails because of the amount of work that we do to D correlate our infrastructure deployments sort of puts us in an advantage over a smaller validator in the ecosystem I think where we met it out is like we're not sure if this is the right answer but it's so maybe it's probably the right questions to ask like you said like if they're not using AWS East and they're not you know doing XYZ and they're not using docker and they're not using Linux and they're not doing it things then like you know they'll be more correlated if they're using bison trails then I actually think that that's not necessarily true I don't think you would be surprised since you guys are infrastructure operators and validator

operators like a lot of folks are using docker a lot of folks are using Linux a lot of folks are using AWS having a sort of enterprise grade platform that is multi stone and multi region multi-cloud and then has like infrastructure set ups that are decorrelated can be super helpful to the protocol and someone who is using bison trails might actually be less likely to be proportionately slashed in a correlated fashion one of the things that you guys wrote was that guys think it so it's probably a bit too early for proportional slashing on the cosmos network and so I actually wrote up response to that kind of saying that in was thanks to you guys there's post there I actually went ahead and modified the spec because I think you guys made a valid point and so I

actually altered the spec so we can actually make it more gradual over time so we can start in the original design I had it so it always uses a one of the parameters was a two and it does look kind of hard-coded in there I made it so that's actually a dynamic value so if we start from zero slashing stays exactly how it is today and then over time governance can kind of increase it so we could go from 0 to 0.5 to 1 to 1.5 to 2 maybe even higher I don't know if we'd ever want to go higher than 2 really but by the two I mean like it's sort of quadratic so if it's 1 it's linear in regards to correlation if 0 it doesn't care about correlation at all so do you think that this is something that's like

a reasonable approach to take I don't think I know our position was that it's a little bit early and the reason why our position was a little bit early is because a lot of you know like not to pick on cosmos but cosmos still has plenty of professional validation services but also like has plenty of obvious and it would put hobbyists at a disadvantage to think of a world where someone who's like running a hobby validator on cosmos can recover from an outage faster than a platform that's designed to be VPS independent and geography independent seems kind of crazy to me do you think it's an issue on other protocols like polka dot because I know they're starting with proportional slashing as well I think it's an issue on every protocol and I think it's completely fine we mentioned this in our response like this would

actually be good for our business but it might hurt the ecosystem and discourage independent folks from being involved early on because of the risks we don't want to see that either you know like we're sort of looking at it as like how do we get more people not how do we make it so people are afraid and less people do this I like the idea of having governance parameters help decide what the proportional /ik should be so that to me makes a lot of sense right it's like okay this is still kind of an experiment and we are agreeing that or acknowledging that it's we don't know the perfect answer here and that like those our cells up to be able to change it if we're wrong I think we also have to recognize the magnitude of what slashing is there's a loss of funds in

slashing it's very very real a mistake with decisions around proportional slashing could be pretty detrimental to an independent validator or an independent staking company not necessarily independent one but just like a smaller one like let's say it's not financed right it's like you know a smaller company that's doing this like it's pretty bad finance loses a couple million bucks they probably don't care you lose a couple million bucks like you're probably pretty mad about it we're generally in agreement with a lot of this and I like that we have a nice iteration process going back and forth here and try to figure out what's the best way to help the network really I didn't know that the spec was changed in part or partially because of some of the stuff that we did I'm actually really happy about that thanks for listening and I guess like thanks for hearing us I

appreciate that that's that's like I said part of what we're trying to do as a company is just move the whole ecosystem forward make everybody better make all the network's better and so that's really great I'm super happy to hear that so talking of ecosystems we'd like to move to a different ecosystem which is Libra like Libra is always an attractive topic to talk about because it's unlike so many of the other networks right it has a different scale it has a different approach it frankly has completely different regulatory challenges to other crypto networks and bison trails has been one of the few blockchain companies that part of the Libra association and so we'd like to hear your thinking on why you join the

Libra association and how it came to be so you're right Libra is a hot topic to say the least for us folks ask us a lot of questions about Libra and we are in a somewhat unique position were one of the few blotching companies that's involved in the Liebherr Association last month I was actually elected to the technical steering committee of Libra so elected to this technical committee that's governing and overseeing the open source project which I'm also very proud of so heavily involved in the technical roadmap and maintenance and commitment to that project itself and super excited to be involved there I didn't really get a chance to talk about this I sort of who talked a lot

about like bison trails the infrastructure and kind of why we think what we're doing is important for the ecosystem but I didn't really talk about all about our view generally speaking on the ecosystem so as a company bison trails and this actually extends myself and my co-founder and our company is really what we would call protocol agnostic or blockchain agnostic in that we think that the space the technology that's being built and the sort of moral and ethical changes that are happening are an important part of the sort of technical advancement over the world as a whole and it sounds like kind of very fluffy and big radios the company was designed to do that so believe we support eight protocols and maintenance right now and then we're in the process of either some form of test

phase or test net or pre main net or you know whatever adversarial test net with another 20 plus protocols we're not a platform that's designed to and built to support one protocol or actually designed and built and support many protocols and the whole idea here is that we think that there's the world will be made up of many different block chains and protocols some of them will be generalists some of them will be currency some of them will be application-specific some of them will be smart contracting platforms some of them will be video transcoding platforms you know whatever it is there's plenty that haven't been built or designed yet that we haven't seen and that if we make it easier to build on top of and orchestrate and participate in these protocols that we will all be very successful and that the space will be

successful Libre represents different type of protocol that we've normally worked with in the past it's different in a lot of different ways and what they're trying to do what we are trying to do I should say what they were trying to do originally before we got involved obviously we're involved now so it's different in what we were trying to do but also like just generally speaking the magnitude and scale of the project is pretty different than any other protocol we've worked on it's really interesting to be sort of involved in the room from a governance perspective with the Libre Association alongside having a one-vote alongside Facebook's one-vote alongside ubers one-vote we have a voice in the room that I like to believe is the crypto native blockchain voice the sort of keeping in mind morals and ethics of the space and I'm

obviously very excited about that and ever proud of that work that we're doing the story about how we got involved is actually pretty straightforward we for like you said 20 or 24 months ago or you know two and a half years ago have been working very closely with a lot of different protocol teams and working in different communities being involved from the early stages in different communities and have been building some really robust enterprise-grade infrastructure to help support the deployment and orchestration of pretty large-scale protocols I want to say it was about a year ago I was at a conference and a mutual friend of mine introduced me to one of the people that was working on building Libre that was at the time a facebook employee but was planning to join the Libre association and we had a Connick they said hey like

we've talked to lots of folks in the ecosystem we've heard that you guys are an incredibly technical team it's helping build infrastructure building robust infrastructure in a way that's you have geography distributed we had also had done stuff like open source some code that we've done for a couple protocols and they were sort of like a like we have looked at the space a lot we've looked at a few of the other companies that are kind of in this space a little bit and we've seen and heard that like you know you guys are doing some of the best work so then they did some diligence on a few other folks in the space as well and asked us if we were interested in joining the Libre association alongside the 99 other partners to help govern this blockchain and help provide crypto native expertise and blockchain native expertise

I would say the biggest difference for bison trails for within Libra is that we're probably a little bit more involved in governance with Libra than we are with a lot of other protocols we are still involved in some governance we're pretty involved in communities and most protocols we engage with and we work with a lot of these protocol development teams pretty closely Sonny I'm sure you've talked to other folks as well I mean but you know generally speaking we work pretty closely with a bunch of different protocol teams I'd say like we're a little bit more involved on the governance side with Libra and then we're also obviously like I said before I was elected to the technical steering committee so we're involved in the technical governance as well which is a little bit atypical for us as well we're not really involved the technical

governance on most protocols and we sort of contribute and we have opinions and we talked about proportional slashing publicly and we have you know engage in discourse but we don't necessarily aren't crazy ain't all in the technical side generally speaking that's kind of how we got involved with Libra over the last year we've been working really closely with the team building the protocol the Libra core team building the protocol itself and we've been working really closely with the Association that's how we got involved that is kind of our the state of our current involvement let me asked us to join the Libra Association and get involved I'd say like we were naturally skeptical at first kind of like asking a lot of questions what are you trying to do and what's the purpose what is all this you know how is this helpful for the ecosystem and then ultimately came

to this conclusion ourselves in asking these questions that you know this really was about creating an independent Association that could govern this watching and really help move the entire ecosystem forward and this idea of having access to you know literally billions of people and putting crypto and watching technology in the hands of billions of people is incredibly appealing to us as a company we think it helps move all of our mission forward ours you know yours the work that you're doing the different protocols we're all here to help move forward the ecosystem and to help drive more mainstream a technological adoption and we think that this helps that significantly so we're pretty excited about it when I first saw a bison getting involved in Libra it

didn't make sense at all because on the one hand you know the business model of bison is to help people run validate and on the other side to run a validator on Libra is 10 million dollars so what spice annuity doing there doesn't make any sense I think that that's maybe like a nuance in this idea of like 10 million dollars and what that actually does running a validator and orchestrating a network that secures trillions of dollars of assets and transfers billions or tens of millions or hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets has nothing to do with investing in or giving money to or helping support the Treasury of or you know whatever you

want to describe like ten million dollars they're the kind of independent of each other for us this was entirely about like you said right bison trails as a company in a platform that's designed to help run infrastructure on protocols in the Liebherr network there's a hundred independent Association members that are gonna help secure and validate that network and we have domain expertise that a lot of these non crypto native companies don't have and we have domain expertise that even folks in the Crypt of space aren't really doing or thinking about and so this is really about being able to help orchestrate and build a network that can support the scale that Libra is trying to build and that's why we're involved more than anything else it really has nothing to do with anything else so when I think ultimately about the success of

Libra I think about how can bison Trails help make sure that libras safe secure orchestrated well geographically distributed and is run using everything from best practices to sort of cutting edge technology to make sure it's amazing the idea of being involved in the project and you know the original idea of the ten million dollars was really making sure that everybody in the Association is involved in the project and sort of has alignment in the project as well it's not like a pay to join situation it's really about like impact how can you provide impact to the Association what is the you know current state of the Liebherr project so you know a lot of people are aware that like earlier on or a couple months ago a bunch of teams started leaving but then

you know it seems that there's a lot of people who are structure joining so you know I was scrolling through your Twitter before this episode and I saw that Shopify actually just joined the Libra Association so could you give us some sense of like what is the current state and the progress of the Libra project and when can we expect to see something live the thing about the Libra in general and being a part of the Libra Association is that it's actually you know we're an association of equal members and it's unfair for me to speak out of turn and on behalf of the Association so I generally try not to there's sort of bits and pieces about like my involvement that I'm happy to speak about things like the technical steering committee and the technical pieces of the project so I'm not going to tell you

sort of when you should expect things to go live or anything like that it's just one it's not entirely in my control and it's also just not fair for me to speak on behalf of the entire Association so I won't do that from the technology perspective it's moving along incredibly well obviously the product is open-source you can see it on github slash Libre you can see the entire roadmap is public you can see all the commits to the project itself and sort of what's going on there and from a technology perspective it's coming along super super well and as a language move is pretty incredible I'm excited about it at least there's plenty of reasons why it could be very very cool from you know an association perspective I would say that over the last few months we've hit some pretty great milestones

including you know officially forming the Association in October which the Association talked about we talked about publicly so that was like you know hey we're actually going to officially create this association sort of sign the paperwork like saying yeah like we're an association now and so we did that in October and then creating the technical steering committee as well we did that sort of in the late fall before the holidays we've had new folks really impactful folks like Shopify join the Association and we're in talks with lots of really great folks that want to be a part of this impactful companies that have not just reached but are have you know really great reputations and our really great technology contributors to the world so we're super excited about all those things in terms of like folks

leaving the Association I think like any project has like you know you kind of get involved in the project you start to ask questions it's tough to get starts to get real different people for different reasons at different times decide that it's not right for them at that moment and the way I see that in sort of the way that you know my personal opinion on that is that's a very fair level-headed way to approach it you know maybe this isn't right for me today it's not about do I think this is going to be successful or not or do I want to be involved ever it's really like you know what right now I can't contribute the type of time and effort and resources it might take to make this successful so maybe I should involve so you guys recently raised around twenty five million dollars in your

series a you tell us a little bit about you know what was that process like and what was sort of the main pitch that you guys gave to investors and well I'm kind of looking at this as as well from is there's a proof of stake web conference about two or three weeks ago Victor spoke on that and one of the general themes that we noticed throughout the conference is that a lot of validators were kind of saying that like you know running Valadez on their own isn't profitable enough you know it maybe it's validation is often just a lost leader in something else so how does your guys's valuation reconcile with that we're like you know most relatives seem to be struggling while you guys aren't our validator you're an infrastructure

company but but you guys have reached that great valuation and like valuation isn't the end goal of course but like how did that come about so that's right in the fall we raised twenty five and half million dollars from some really great investors including blockchain capital kleiner perkins sound Ventures and our hosting cap table also all participated as well I'm forgetting some folks in there there's a couple other really great investors that are involved that I always forget whenever I talk about never I talk about our investors I always forget to mention them but they all know I love them a little bit about the process and why and sort of like how we're seeing the world differently and what the pitch looks like and I think you sort of hit the nail on the head yourself actually as you were sort of introducing the topic we're not a

validator company our entire mission is about democratizing access making it easier to run infrastructure on these protocols we have seen some traction in particular in a highly secure highly important part of the ecosystem which is staking and participating in these networks something that we do incredibly well and we support the sort of deployment orchestration and management of lots of different folks participation is blockchains and so for us it's really about like we are poised for long-term success in the ecosystem and less about independent by protocol extraction unfortunately there's some folks are looking at validation and they're like incredibly aligned and they're amazing and I'm super excited they exist and

there's some folks are looking at validation it's like how do we extract as much money as possible from a pro and so we look at this much much longer term than the dominance or the sort of penetration of proof of stake in the blockchain ecosystem to that if you look at proven stake in general it's actually slow quite small the amount of staking that's happening is in some networks is like kind of high but in a lot of networks is still not high at all we're seeing new types of products and services that are being built either on or adjacent to some of these new protocols so for us it's like really how do we support the entire ecosystem and that really is like the gist of it it's just staying true to our mission and our vision it's like we want to make it

easier for people to participate we're seeing traction in staking we're pure-play technology providers so we don't package assets we're not trying to build a financial services company we're not doing lending or trading or anything like that we're really just making it easier for companies for developers for entrepreneurs to build and deploy infrastructure in these different protocols that's kind of like you know there's not really much to it more than that that's like that's our pitch and that's what the company is doing it's you know publicly stated in our website the process itself is not easy I would say still I mean like you know crypto is still kind of I mean obviously like the last few months have been not too bad from a market perspective but I think investors are still like a little afraid

about blockchain and crypto in general I think 2017 scard a lot of investors they thought that a lot of these projects were going to ship and they were gonna be like transformative and there's a lot left to be desired from a lot of the different blockchain and protocols that have even launched and like any one building in a nascent industry it's always hard to convince people all that what you're doing is super important and so we went through that as well - it's like not an easy thing for me and I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that what we're trying to do is super impactful and that's really the gist of it and you know we're obviously really excited about the position that we're in and the protocols we can help support and if we make it easier for more people to participate more people

to build in the space then that's a win that's what we're trying to see and that's why we're sort of at the stage that Raph what can we expect to see next like in next few months like what kind of new networks are you supporting what are you excited for we are incredibly excited about more than twenty protocols that we are supporting that are in some form of like pre main net or you know late stage test set and we're excited very excited for those things all to go live things like polka dot and scale and do cipher and you know near and mobile coin and so on uh solo and coda there's some really incredible projects that are coming out that we've been supporting for more than a year if not almost two years and we're super excited for all those to come up

so over the next like a few months expect to see us continue to support these protocol teams you need to support their launches hopefully we'll continue to onboard new folks onto the platform so new entrepreneurs independent validators taking as a service companies custodians exchanges just generally speaking community members that want to help support and validate these networks so you know that's kind of like major focus for us over the next year three to six months and then continuing to move the ecosystem forward and move the technology forward so we're also trying to consistently ship code that helps move our vision and mission forward and you know engage with the community is kind of like we did will we talk to you all about portion of slashing and our

thoughts and trying to help make the entire ecosystem better so you expect a lot more of that and you can see a lot of those announcements and sort of conversations are happening on our Twitter at bison trails and also you can see kind of like the protocols we're supporting and the ones we're excited about any news on our website bison trails Co it was great to catch up with you Joe I'm always impressed by bison because I think it's one of the companies that took a different look at the proof of stake ecosystem really early compared to all of the other players and you've been one of the most successful with your fresh approach so congratulations on that and I look forward to how the future unfolds for bison and the proof of steak ecosystem

in general thanks so much and honestly we feel the same way we really you know appreciate all the work that the different ecosystem players are putting in and the community development that's happening and we're really excited to help support everyone in the space so really excited to have been on the show and really appreciate you guys having me here and continue to ask us the hard questions and continue to have us help push everybody forward awesome thanks thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV

slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them well thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week [Music]