Rollup TV: Nillion, Vesu, Noon and Money Moves Fast

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>> Tuesday, November 11th. We are live here from Tampa, Florida. I am back from New York City. That was a hell of a run, guys. I have stories to tell you. I have takes to give you. I've got things that I need to update you guys on. Um, so look, it it should be a good stream. We've got some privacy focused conversations with our friend John from Nillian. Uh, we've got uh some some Bitcoin uh Bitcoin FI kind of like DeFi uh conversation to have some from some folks at Starknet. Uh, and we also will have um our friend Diego Fernandez from Saver who is in Buenosirus in Argentina getting ready for Dev Connect. Um, we have a lot to talk about with him about

what's going on with the Argentinian economy, why [snorts] they love stable coins and more. Um, so guys, it should be a fun one. We are running just slightly behind. So, we're we are going to get right into the sessions uh and go straight into uh our guy John. Uh, I see in the chat we've got a couple people popping out. What's going on? Um, good to see you guys. GMGM Andy, nice to see you. It is good to see you as well, man. It is good to see you as well. Um, hope everything is well and and yeah, guys, should be should be a fun stream. Let's get after it.

And it Why is my Why is my camera bad? No, I think it's fine now. All righty. Um, guys, I mean, we just had the biggest week in New York and it was absolutely insane. You're going to be hearing a term from us more and more called the nest. Stay tuned on that. Uh, more to come. We've got John Woods, the CTO of of Nillian. He's going to join us as our first guest today. Uh, let's bring him up and let's talk privacy, guys. Probably the the hottest sector in the space right now. Um, I mean it's undeniably exciting with Zcash's pump with the rise of Monero bulls. So guys, let's get John up and let's kick this

stream off. Should should be a fun session today. Um, yeah, I mean, I missed the Zcash trade. I don't know if you guys got it. I've been uh working on the business and taking some personal time the last several weeks, so I haven't really been trading much. Um, but I do have some portfolio updates that I'd like to share with you guys as well once we get started. So, um, let's get John up here. Uh, Nillian is one of our portfolio companies at the rollup, a friend. Um, and John is their CTO, CTO of the Nillian Association.

John, what's up, man? Welcome to the show, >> Andy. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me at the rollup, >> man. Your setup is sick. It's because um yeah, I I've worked in crypto for a while and if you don't have a decent setup like people you can't spread the message, you know. >> No, I totally I totally agree. Um and I was expecting you to come on with a blindfold on, you know, like your profile. >> I should have done that. >> You must not be a real privacy maxi man. >> Come on. What is this? The fake >> I'm holding I'm holding Monero since like 2015. I've done I've I've paid the penance, my friend.

>> Oh, you've paid the penants, have you? All right. Well, then you just set yourself up for the how did you get into crypto question, but in this form, what the hell were you doing with Monero in 2015 and how did you find this? >> Yeah. So, you know, it's funny because um I guess I I work, you know, working at software engineering, all that kind of stuff. But I got I got into into crypto pretty early actually. You know, my first uh crypto uh experience was one of my buddies was running Bitcoin in 2012. He sent me like 1.69 Bitcoin. 6ix9ine being so sexy. Um and and like [laughter] I lost that in Mount Gox, so that's no fun. Um and then yeah, I I guess I was like dabbling. I was working in like software engineering and applied crypto.

So I was I was close to the cryptography and kind of had decent enough understanding of it even early days. And so like like literally in 2015 I was like Monero was trading at like five bucks or something and I was like you know what would make sense here is privacy like to be able to spend this money privately. Um, what I should have said to myself, of course, was what makes sense is smart contracts because if I bought Ethereum instead at nine bucks, I would have been retired. Uh, [laughter] but yeah, >> smart contracts. That is a conversation to be had. I have some questions on that.

>> Right. So, I was early, but uh but hopefully I'm not wrong. Privacy is is is is sexy now and it's it's uh it's starting to rise in a big way. Hey, Monero is one part of that of course, but uh Nillian is is trying to do uh for privacy uh what I guess Ethereum did for for um global compute which is uh to provide a platform that you can build private compute um and private data storage. >> Look man, I'm calling this the return to fundamentals. >> I mean like it's happening right now. We're hosting a full event in Buenosirus. It's about alignment and the return to fundamentals. Privacy is a core tenant of the crypto ideology. I truly believe that. I mean, look, man,

Zcash is crushing right now because they've they've got this message that look, the European Central Bank is telling you that you can't hold more than 10,000 euros of stable coins. The the uh UK central bank is telling you that you can't hold more than $20,000 in stable coins, right? Uh the surveillance state post 911 truly and post internet has gone too far. I mean, Sam Alman is getting sued right now because uh his AI is telling people that that, you know, it's okay to basically commit suicide. All this data is is going all these places. AI is exacerbating these issues and it just feels like it feels like we're right and it feels like we've been vindicated here. What's your take on this kind of like return to fundamentals

idea? How do you feel about that? >> I mean, despite the fact that my Monero bags are packed and it's good in that regard, um it's I think it's really important. We started this crypto thing. Forget about, you know, any particular one of them. But the whole idea of the movement was this cipher punk rebellion against the global financial crisis. If you look at the Genesis block of Bitcoin or whatever, it's got the headline from the the newspapers about, you know, the global financial crisis. Um, and the whole idea was to push back against a money system that was, you know, essentially built by like villains. Uh, whether that's the Fed or the European Central Bank. uh all of these entities which are you know essentially publishing um you know sorry not publishing but but but uh issuing fiat currencies uh

through senorage with this like inflation and controlling the money supply and controlling the people and then you have what's going on in the UK which is like a total shitow with a digital ID and starmer's you know communist communist agenda and then you've got like the the on top of that you've got this um as she quite rightly said this like push back on like literally telling people. Hey, you can't move $20,000 to your wife or your husband from your bank account cuz like we need a good reason. Or hey, you can't pay for a you can't pay a guy to come into your house and paint the [ __ ] place uh for if if if it's going to cost more than €10,000. It's insane. And so um I actually see to answer your question I see this movement uh towards

privacy that we see macroscopically okay not just towards any particular one uh cryptocurrency but in just in general in the industry as a return to form as a return to cipher punk um and I hope uh as a as a message to governments that like you can you can try to push for control but you won't necessarily get it >> well isn't that the beauty of it all right and the power of of it all is such that uh like Like the whole point of of kind of DeFi and smart contracts is the immutability factor, right? Is the idea that you know once programmed or once executed and once you know kind of remove this this admin control or this admin key the you know I call them like unfuckwithable, right? Um, and I think

you can extrapolate that mentality towards like your your financial life and and and what you believe in and and you know, it just seems like the world is trending deeper and deeper into the surveillance state kind of mode. And I honestly don't think it's like corrupted from the top as bad as people think. It's more of just like the the willingness of people including you and myself to just willingly give data information to LLMs to social networks and just like we're on a call like it's just like there's just this open in information passing in the world right now and I don't truly think it's that bad but like it's not that bad until it gets bad and like you don't

want to be there without a kind of plan B and and so I think Nillian and these other kind of networks are working to provide that plan B. >> Well, here's the thing. I mean, some of the things I'm going to say now are would have 10 years ago or 15 years ago would have sounded like uh conspiracy uh theories from a whack job. The reality is we are entering a world where there will be basically, you know, and this move with cash is is is indicative of it. They want to know exactly what you're spending your money on. And when I say they, I mean governments so that they can better control the flow eb and flow of tax and and the macroscopic financial

environment so that they can essentially turn countries and their people into well functioning batteries. I mean that is the that is the truth of it. And by the way you you will see this play out because with this move to everything is digital. It'll be a case of like oh sorry you can't buy that vodka you've already had a bottle on Monday. Hey, you've had too much sugar. Hey, you've had too much fat. No more burgers for you. And uh and and I can tell you someday you're going to be talking to an LLM. Hey, you know, I've had this headache. It's been, you know, [ __ ] with me for like six months. I'm not sure. And then your insurance won't pay out on your brain tumor because like, you know, you asked the LLM, this is coming. And you know why it's coming?

It's coming not because of some evil dictator who wants to control the world. It's coming because money is what talks. And these things will save these companies money. >> Mhm. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So, when you're specifically, let's kind of dial into the um Well, okay. So, hold on. I I'd like to go down like the AI route, but briefly, there's been this guy on crypto Twitter, CryptoCondom, and [laughter] funny name, but but >> haven't heard of him, but he sounds great.

>> But, but so, he's got a pretty big audience, and he's pretty big chain link bull. You know, we were just at SmartCon the last couple days in New York City last week and it was fantastic. I mean, I'm talking JP Morgan, White House, the Fed DTCC Goldman. I mean, it's just it's incredible. Um, and you know, Chainley's doing an incredible job of bringing these institutions on chain. And so the his take is that we don't need more private chains like we don't need private you know L1 L2 chains private smart contracts are what we need like that is where the alpha and the value will lie in these networks where having sets of of permissioned or private smart

contracts amongst a broader piece of of the puzzle being of a public network. Um what's your take on the difference between a private chain and private money on like a existing like L1 like be it Zcash or be it a uh you know a different uh kind of chain versus you know let's say Ethereum implementing private smart contracts like which one do you think is more feasible more reliable like how do you see this playing out? >> Yeah it's a great question and so I think he's seeing some part of this but I think he's missing two very important parts. I think there's three parts to this story. You know, my background is like computer nerd stuff, programming, applied crypto, applied mathematics. So, I understand these things fairly well and I spel I spent time uh building Cardano. I spent time uh building

Algorand and so, you know, I know the layer 1 space fairly well. I know the smart contract space uh very well. Um things like Monero and Zcash, they do private payments, just the transfer of value between participants in a peer-to-peer way. Um what you'll find is that if you try to build your layer 1 to do everything, smart contracts, private payments, the whole lot, it's essentially impossible to achieve with our current cryptographic primitives. Um deep meaningful privacy. You kind of if you're going to do payments, you got to kind of just focus on that. You got to have, you know, just like there's certain tools for certain jobs. Uh you can't be both a great hammer uh and maybe a great digger. Okay? And so, uh, Monero, Zcash, they do they do, uh, cryptographic or, you know, private

payments very well. Uh, but if you try to shoehorn smart contracts in there, you quickly find, uh, that it's too much to try to do, uh, in a single network and it adds so much complexity and it also sometimes to achieve the smart contract piece, you got to sacrifice on certain elements of the privacy piece that you would like you would like to to do. Uh, private payments is hard enough. Okay. So then you have um, so I think that they will continue to exist. I think that the the sphere of Monero and Zcash will be a very prominent um crypto cryp set of cryptocurrencies in you know going forward into the future you know uh even medium-term five 10 years out I think they're going to become very important [snorts] then you have of course um private smart contracts now I think this is interesting because as you

quite rightly kind of uh insinuated uh Ethereum Cardano Algoran you know Salana whatever uh ICP their their contract platforms right now allow you to do these discrete pieces of work in these little apps we call smart contracts but they run, you know, typically for only a block or a slot. And so that's a couple of seconds or whatever. Um, and doing that privately, you need like math from the moon, right? To try to do these smart contracts privately, you got like it's homorphic stuff or it's exotic mathematics. And so you want to try to do things pragmatically. And so what most of these chains will probably do to achieve a private smart contract, and I do think, by the way, that is a cool idea. The idea that we can do all the cool things smart contracts do, i.e.

veracity of an agreement between two people, being able to program agreements between people, all very cool obviously and to be able to do that uh privately so much better. Now two companies can make a trade privately, they can do something, they can agree something privately. This is incredibly valuable stuff. In the real world, banks, institutions, people expect privacy, right? Like not everyone talks about everything they do in terms of business. But the way I think that that will probably be achieved is by doing off-chain uh contract execution um and then uh posting a commitment to to the to to the veracity of that execution or the truthfulness of that execution on chain.

Um but there's one more thing uh that I think is is a very important part of this and it's what something like Nillian brings. The reality is is that in the first trunch of of technology I talked about uh payments they don't do more than just payments and but they do payments in private well in the second trunch when we talked about smart contracts even if we say private smart contracts they're always going to be limited uh a private smart contract will never in a traditional blockchain um with the properties of a traditional blockchain i.e the decentralization and and and global consensus will never be something that you can execute an LLM inside, right? The complexity, the order of magnitude of complexity of compute is just too big to ask CHBT a question and get a response to do in a smart

contract. These smart contracts by definition even on Salana as an example of the you know the the the fast one uh the powerful one they have to basically run in half a second on Salena, right? That's kind of the the slot time. And so where does this leave you? It leaves you in a place that for certain classes of work and that is big compute, big data uh and and indeed AI which is just super heavy you know ma matrix uh multiplications you have to do that thing uh outside of a smart contract context. Smart contracts great for agreeing uh discrete tiny pieces of work not great for running heavy compute and so that's where something like Nillian comes in. uh Nillian provides federated um and soon to be uh decentralized with

Nillian 2.0 know uh access to a computer which is private but able to handle the kind of workloads uh that are that are meaningful those kind of AI workloads or running you know sophisticated uh simulations and things like that and similarly you know if you try to store a gigabyte of data on Ethereum god damn you're going to pay for that on Algoran similar on Salana similar um with something like a Nillian style architecture sure it's not maybe as decentralized as as an Ethereum but you can store terabytes of data in it and You know, I guess hopefully that made sense. I do think private smart contracts are part of the future, but I think there's other legs to this stool that are important uh to, you know, to take down the kind of set of use cases that we'll need to do.

>> Yeah. I mean, for sure. Um and so when it comes to Nian's primary, you know, use cases are when it comes to the the data issue in AI. Um, and kind of this this hey like I just told Chat GPT that you know I you know my girlfriend broke up with me because I cheated on her and I that my mom just pointed a gun at my head and that you know don't call the cops on me though like you know you you tell these crazy things that are like could be made up lies probably are to to this LLM and then all of a sudden you've got the cops at your door because like you know you've got like state level security ownership o over open AI's you terms and conditions and they're

mandated to report certain things to the state because X Y and Z. And look, I get it. You know, there are situations where having state level control onto technology can be helpful. But when it comes to like the privacy of the data around using LMS and um kind of like like Chachi BT, uh how do you think about solving that problem from millions perspective? Yeah, it's so [clears throat] it's a really interesting question and maybe just let me start by saying I'm not so out there that I think we shouldn't have laws and we shouldn't you know uh stop bad things from happening. I I do the I do think that that's important but at the same time it's a bit like this kind of this

kind of a couple of analoges of this. It's like well you know knives you can use a knife to cut your steak but you can also use it to kill someone. um you know uh you can use your car to drive on holidays with your family or you can also use it to drive into a you know a bunch of children outside of school. And so um you know similarly for LLMs sure maybe sometimes bad people will will ask an LLM something and it will help them concoct an evil plan. Uh or maybe it will give them malicious advice. But do we ban all knives? Do we ban all cars because because of this? Do do we restrict or destroy our privacy uh because maybe crimes could be committed?

And for me, you know, I think the maybe the the best example of it is should all homes be bugged with a government access just to make sure that no one is planning on anything evil. And of course, the answer to that is no. It's ridiculous to to think that we would be violated in such a way. So why should we um if we wouldn't do that in those other contexts, why do we seemingly accept it uh in a digital context? Why do we accept that governments are going to be pre-scanning our messages uh to make sure we don't say anything bad? Why do we accept that Apple uh will want to scan my photos to make sure there's, you know, to make sure that there I'm not taking pictures of anything bad or will it confuse pictures of my children in the bath with something malicious that

that it thinks is is is not acceptable or a cam or something like that. Um and similarly, why would I want um you know a chatbt or an XAI? And by the way, I use chatbt. It's a quality product obviously, but I use it carefully. I use XAI it's I think Grock is great, but I use it carefully. Um, and so will I be telling my uh deepest sexual desires to a companion and XAI? No, I won't. Um, and but but a lot of people are. And so how do we marry these two worlds? How do we bring the HTTPS, right, the lock symbol, the padlock symbol when you're browsing the web? It used to be you were searching for recipes. Everyone knew what you were doing if they were snooping on you. And then banks were like, "No, we can't have this. People

expect privacy in in finance." So they added this technology h the secure HTTP. and then everything was cool. Now if you go on to um browse for dog treats for your dog, that website will be encrypted too. So encryption is just everywhere in the web. And so how do we bring that to AI LLM? How do we bring that to our chats? How do we bring that to our interactions with all things digital maps whatever it is? And so Nillian is part of delivering that vision. Nillian is basically able to provide the padlock symbol, the HTTPS uh for AI inference.

And when I say AI inference, what I really mean, it's a geeky term for basically saying talking to a chatbt. So you can run a chatbt inside Nillian's blind computer. Maybe I'll talk super quick about this. I I won't I know not everyone out there is a developer. Uh but just to give a a brief idea, you've got a computer. Everyone's used to the idea. You got a hard disk, you store your files in your computer, and you got a you know, you got a CPU or whatever. You got a a desktop and it does the the computation, right? It gets hot on your desk. And so you can think of a computer as basically storage and compute. Okay. And so benilium blank computer is kind of an analog of this. It is a software product that basically allows you to execute uh compute cryptographically

provably privable sorry cryptographically provably private. So when you run things on Nillian's private computer, you get this like mathematical assurance that they have been run privately and no one has tampered with it and no one has seen what you computed on. And similarly for the the the hard disk piece, right, the data storage piece because you can't compute on things if you don't have the data. So we needed a data piece. For the data piece, you also get cryptographic guarantees of the security of the data stored within million. And so there's not just just like there's not one copy of the blockchain. There's not one Bitcoin node. There's not one Ethereum node.

There are many there are many instances of Nillian globally. And we're about to roll out uh Nillian 2.0. So what is that? It's basically what I just described. So a global network of computers that provide uh confidential storage, you know, private storage and private compute, but also we wanted to weave the community into this network because like we have this token and you use the token to to pay for the comput and the storage and that's great, but like one of the most important stories in crypto is like getting the community involved, right? That's what's made uh technologies like Monero great.

community are so passionate and so what we're going to do is weave our community and and hopefully grow this community uh new members into the community so sorry into the network. So what they do will is they will run a piece of software um we haven't uh we haven't rolled this out yet. This is coming in the next couple of months and this piece of software will check the global nium blank computer. will make sure that everything is private, everything is is is is stored safely and these these kind what the community will do is basically decentralize the work of ensuring cryptographically that things are private on Nillian and things are stored securely on Nillian. And so now we have this very beautiful kind of decentralized computer that can be used

to build enterprisegrade serious grown-up apps like chatbt where you're distributed across the world where the community are making sure cryptographically mathematically like no [ __ ] like not not trust me but verifying that everything is private and everything is secure whilst the Nillian token flows in this economy. they earn for doing the checking work. Uh, and the operators that run Nillian earn for providing that private compute and private storage. So, it's it's pretty it's kind of like AWS if AWS was guaranteed to be private and was checked by a decentralized network.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And so, who do you um who do you envision to actually want to kind of take this and build with it or use it? Is there a consumerf facing application, right? Like a private chat product, private LM product or something. Is there a developer interface that you kind of see uh you know people building on? How's that kind of >> right? So you know people can acquire the token and speculate or people can acquire the token and use it you know on an individual basis. But I think you know being being real about it this product will probably be used more by businesses. It's more of a businessto business product. Other businesses would take the the blind computer and use it as a platform on which to build customerf facing apps. But just to give people a flavor for the types of things

you can build with this. We took it ourselves. We took this platform ourselves, our own platform, and we decided to build something on it. And just just that, as you described, we built a private AI on top of of of Nillian. And so you can check it out at nilgbt. Uh I think it's xyz. Uh let me just double check that. Uh this the latest URL. Yeah. Yeah. Nilgbt.xyz. So that's nilgpt.xyz. And if if you go there, you can basically play with this thing right now for free. you can sign up and you can try uh basically a chat GBT in a guaranteed private context. So things you say to that AI at that website [laughter] cannot be seen by me even as

a senior tech guy at the company cannot be seen by our backup our you know backend devops guys. No one can see it. >> Yeah. So yeah, that's >> and it's the same it's the same models. It's the same quality of technology that you would get by using claude or using Gemini, right? Like in from what I've understood from privacy and AI, you're actually able to use the same quality of reasoning models while keeping the privacy embedded, >> right? So we we so so like you know just to be clear the absolute frontier GBT5 uh prolevel models which are trillions of of parameters in size right which is like ginormous of course they are at uh those frontier models are at a level

that is that is even above where nilgbt is at currently so ngbt are they are it is a thinking reasoning model it's it it's uh we use GPT uh open source versions with 120 billion parameters Gemma from Google, uh, Quen from Alibaba. So, we've got very capable thinking models that can answer can be everything from a companion all the way to a, uh, something that can help with your code or your work or your or or or writing pros. Um, they are, I would say, at the GPT40 level at this point. They're not at the GBT 5 Pro level. They're at that kind of GBT40. So, like like CHBT was, say, a year ago or so. But, okay. So you step down a tiny bit in terms of capability, but what you gain is enormously

important. >> Yeah, >> you you gain privacy. You can be absolutely assured. You can verify yourself that what you do in that environment is completely private. So you can talk to it about your blood tests. You can talk to it about your wife. Uh and and you you know that the police won't be called if you say the wrong thing, right? >> Yeah. A and um so what does that enable for actual like AI development right so like right now we're existing in a world where um the data transfer like basically you know I just grabbed a new tool like whisper.ai AI. It was like it's like a a voice dictation tool basically. Um so now I don't even type anymore which has been I mean that's

been insane. I can't believe I didn't have this you know earlier. And um you know so there was an option. It was like do you want to give your data to help train the tool? And I was like no I I don't want to do that. I just click no. Right. But like on on Claude they just did an upgrade that was like you all like you they basically force you to give your data like there's no optionality. Um, and so we've been living in a paradigm of, you know, let's say just call like AI development and then extrapolate that to like blockchain and AI development of like this forced data sharing to train the the models.

Uh, what is a what what what does the outcomes look like where we have privacy embedded into AI? Like what does that enable that maybe is not, you know, thought about today or even available to? It's it's a great question and and like you know this by the way the blind computer uh the nillian kind of like you know uh platform is of course beyond AI you can do what we call arbitrary compute on it you can run we can you can run doom on it and we have run doom on it and if you're really really mean to the monsters and doom no one can no one can hear him scream um and and uh you know but you can you can run spreadsheets on it you can run web servers on it you can run tour nodes on it you can run cryptocurrency miners in

it you can do whatever you want um but Of course, AI is a compelling a compelling story at the moment. Um, so what what kind of things can you do? I mean, maybe I'll give you uh a couple of examples. Number one, beyond the kind of like idea that you you don't have to worry if you're saying things that are salacious or or or uh sharing private details about your medical history or indeed um you know maybe legal contracts with a with with a customer or with with with a prospective employer and asking for advice on these things. You don't have to worry that now, you know, some back ops back ops engineer at at at OpenAI knows how much you you've been offered by by whatever company's trying to employ you. Um, so you don't or you don't have to worry

that that might come back to bite you later. That that's number one. Maybe it's a clear one. Um, number two, stuff like um, for example, let's say you're a company who has actual very important intellectual property. That could be code. It could be a recipe for Coca-Cola. It can be like, you know, some kind of secret sauce that you want to preserve. But you want to be able to for your for the rest of the employees be able to do retrieval augmented generation, right? This rag thing. You might have heard of this, but it's the idea that you take a powerful model who doesn't know about your secret sauce.

You tell it about the secret sauce at runtime and then it's able to answer questions convoluting your your your proprietary knowledge with its trained knowledge. Um, and so how do you do that? How do you create an environment where you can essentially keep all that ragged data, that secret sauce data in a completely secure environment and then when you're asking the LLM a question that the LLM in a private way can reach into the secret data store, pull out the recipe for Coca-Cola, as an example, um, and then take your question that you've just typed in, smash them together, and give you an amazing answer. Um, but all the while the the the AI thinking was completely private and the and the the

time that the AI took the data and destroyed the data is completely private. So, you know, there's no trace of your secret recipe and there's no trace of the questions you asked, but you received the answer. And so that that that type of kind of use case is everywhere. So many companies want to use these things, but they want to train them on their internal proprietary proprietary intellectual property, whatever it is. And so NILG GBT um well doesn't exactly do that perfectly but nian as a platform you could use nil the nil uh nil sto the private storage and the private compute to achieve something like that and and maybe one last thing and I think this is really cool we've gotten used to the idea that we give our data for free like Google scared me the other day because it's like oh you've

visited because I you know travel a lot for work and and in my private life you visited say a hundred and hotels in the last year or whatever it is and thanks for the reviews and by the way what did you think of this one and blah blah blah. And I was thinking to myself, why am I working for these [ __ ] for free? Like I'm basically, you know, I I'm working for them for free. Um, but I do think that that data is important. Like that data is valuable. I think that there's there's value in people's data, right? It can be something trivial like social media and how, you know, how pretty your pictures are and how many likes you get. Or it can be something less trivial like how you trade or your prop strategy for trading crypto or your thesis around certain stocks or you know

other things. And so or maybe one last thing is a great example is you know your health data. Okay, I'm a 41-y old guy. I don't smoke but I did for 10 years. I drink this much blah blah blah. How does that look um when I compare it with other with my peers? And so the idea of composability of data, taking people's data, being able to monetize your data, expose it in a in a zero knowledge way only to certain people who have paid you or who you are receiving something from. Or indeed the idea that we can we can take huge [snorts] globs of data globally and run compute on them without anyone seeing the full underlying data set. So you can say for all the 40-year-old guys who used to smoke who have the same kind of profile as me who are basically you know white

guys who are six foot tall how many of them ended up with cancer at 50 and that kind of da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d da composability is really informative and that can that can be an incredibly valuable tool for actur you know for acturial finance etc. And so there are just like unbelievably important use cases for for a platform which can provide private storage of data and private compute. Um, so it's a very exciting uh project. >> No, it's it's just so accurate because, you know, I think about training uh some of the the the folks that we work with, you know, internally with regards to prompting for different, you know,

copies or prompting for different marketing campaigns and such. You know, I I just had this thought the other day of wondering like if you know, if thousands of people spread a lie to ChatGpt about some individual person or if thousands of people uh get get or one person gets a trade secret and has thousands of people teach Chat GBT about this trade secret over and over again, day in and day out for months on end, all of a sudden chat GBT is known is is trained on this trade secret. A and like maybe that's an oversimplified example, but like the the like it is just insane how like you know you go on like Wikipedia, right, and you search for like an entrepreneur or a famous actor

and there's a biography. Um, but like what if we could just take somebody's biography, create it on your own or modify as you wish and figure out effectively a civil attack onto these onto these LLMs such that when a normal person searches about this individual, the answer has some parts of that modified specifically syd version. And it's just like holy [ __ ] like that is just like like like the the the quality of information is going to be a very important problem to tackle um just in the coming years for sure.

>> Absolutely. And by the way so I totally agree with that and I might say you know quite a profound notion um but to even build on that like the internet is even more AI slop than it's ever been before. Of course, we always had generative things. You know, you could use tools to help you write things fast, etc. But like it's now like like I crave actual human written content that's not just like, >> you know what I'm saying? Like >> you can tell there's some personality behind it. You know, you can tell there's behind it. Yeah. I totally hear you.

>> Right. Right. Right. And and and so like I honestly think that like that stuff's going to become more and more gated, right? And so we'll have our AI slop world, then you'll have the world where you'll probably be paying for access to some of this stuff. >> Yeah. I mean, I just I mean, we see it day in and day out. Like, when we just put a little bit of personality behind the brand content, like the engagement is way bigger because it's just it feels like there was some actual thought and effort into it. Um, John, look, man, I I I know that we could talk for hours. I hope to maybe see you in Buenosirus. Are you you happen to be going down there for for Dev Connect?

>> Okay. unfortunately, but I think some of the team are. But, you know, I really appreciate >> Yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to come up on the rollup. Maybe I can come on in a couple of months time and give you guys an update as to where we're at, but it's been >> Yeah, I'd love that, John. I appreciate. Thanks for coming. >> Keep shipping. >> Stay private, guys. How did I miss the Zcash trade thread? Guy was screaming about it. Ah. Oh, man. All right, guys. We've got Niels Bundy uh from Vesu and Arpin from Noon. Uh yield bearing BTCI on Starknet stable coins infra uh lot going on in this space. I'm going to prompt them with the institutional framing that we are really packaging

from SmartCon. So um yeah that guys that was a that was an insightful conversation. I mean, that just that was uh that was one of those ones where like you just get your mind going philosophically and kind of deep down certain rabbit holes and you just keep going and uh that's probably why I ended up a little bit late for the next segment. So, um guys, we've got Arpin and Niels up in the back. We're going to get them up and we're going to start to talk about stable coins, DeFi, Bitcoin yields, and more. uh first time for them on the show. So looking forward to hearing about what they're both building uh and generally kind of like where they're at. So yeah, ready to have them up when our team is ready in the back.

How are we looking in the markets today? Well, we don't have a chance to look. Guys, welcome to the show. Neils Arpin, pleasure to have you. Doing all right, lads. Good to good to see you. Happy Tuesday. We just came back from SmartCon NYC last week, uh Chainlinks institutional event. It was it was absolutely stellar. I mean, so much is happening with regards to tokenization, with regards to stable coins. The perception has flipped entirely on DeFi. Uh, obviously, privacy is a is is a big talk of the town now. A lot of things to jump into, but guys, I would love to just get a quick brief about yourselves and kind of what each of your projects are for the audience.

Um, and then let's let's jump into it. So, Niels, maybe you can kick us off. >> Yeah, sure. Um, I'm Niels, uh, co-founder of Vasu. We are um Starknet's main lending market uh where people are able to borrow um with their Bitcoin as collateral or other assets as collateral, earn yield uh and all of that in a fully non-custodial way. Um, I'm been in the space since 2017 and I'm really excited these days about uh the ability to build products that look a lot like uh Neo Banks uh a lot like M2.

>> The UX that we are able to deliver today is so much different and so much better from like you know going back to 2017 again and that's very exciting. >> Beautiful. Welcome on Arbin. We are so I'm the founder of noon. We are building the highest yielding, safest, and most rewarding stable coin in crypto. Um my background um started off my career at management consulting firm called McKenzie, spent some time at Goldman, built um a neo bank in the UK.

Um, so understand a lot of the trials and tribulations from that space, but also understand a lot of the institutional demand and this guardrails that we need to put in place in order to make this space as safe and attractive for not just people in crypto right now, but for the next billion plus users. Um, so yeah, super excited to get into it. Super excited to speak to you guys about what we're building with Niels on Starket. >> Yeah, awesome guys. So before we jump into some of like the nitty-gritty of the yields and kind of the mechanism design just kind of holistically we've seen a lot of regulatory landscape evolution the last you know six to nine months really since Trump got into office but feels like the last six

months it's really picked up uh in a positive way. I I I had the CEO of the digital chamber of commerce in DC on the show last week. you know, [snorts] he's optimistic about the market structure and the Clarity Act. Um, you know, the market structure bill being passed before the next Congress, which is December of next year. So, not as fast as many of us would have liked, but the Clarity Act seemingly has been like started to move forward. Um, we've been in this government shutdown as well for almost two months now. It's been absolutely unreal. Uh, so not much has been getting done. I I I don't think, but I think when that reopens, we should see an ushering of new ETFs. uh and you know just further progress on the clarity act and the market structure bill. So from the perspectives of you

know building neo bankanks of building defi products you know how do you guys position or think about the evolution of this space uh let's call it over the next year right so we are kind of entering I I'm viewing this year as like a line in the sand type of year meaning that like that the space is quite different uh going forward for each of your product designs for your users for your thought process about implementation distribution you know it's quite an open-ended question here but generally how do you think about the uh the industry evolving and and then how does that affect your you know decision-m as the as the founders of your respective companies and Arbon you know please >> it's a really good question and it's a question that we think about a lot I

think right now you've had a couple of big stable coin regulations come out Micah in the UK in EU uh Genius in the US and both of these are pretty conservative when it comes to sort of what are permitted regulated stable coins They only really allow stable coins to be very low yielding, invest in sort of the most liquid of liquid assets, right? And I understand why this is happening. Obviously, they want to walk before they run and they want to take as conservative and as safe of approach as possible, but frankly that kind of restriction is even more restrictive than the, you know, the HQLA

requirements imposed on mainstream banks by Basel 3, right? So, I'm a firm believer that that is a stepping stone while the regulators figure out the true risks behind stable coins to a future which is probably going to be a little bit more flexible and free. And so with that in mind, we are building a stable coin not with regulators in mind but with the end customer in mind. and we will basically adapt the jurisdictions that we actually go out and distribute the stable coin based on what the

regulator does. So right now we're not planning on any distributions in Europe. We're not planning on any distribution in the US because frankly that just restricts our product too much to an APY which is basically the T bill rate right which is 3 4% right now. um where our competitors are at seven or eight percent and we're at 15%. So that's the only way that we feel that we can really be successful. >> Nails. >> Yeah. Um I cannot speak to uh stable coin regulation as much as Arpon can of course. Um and I think uh we've really seen a lot of good progress on the regulation side and I think most mostly

in the sense that regulators and the broader industry starts to take an interest in this industry right I think that in general is a is a very positive development right which actually shows um where we have gotten to something that it's worth paying attention to um there have been different reasons of course why uh over time regular later started to look at certain things um um you know the Celsius and and all of these uh um incidents right but overall what I really like about this development is that um the industry itself is maturing right and regulations can um of course uh kind of you know hinder your product development uh I

mean ultimately what we all want to be is kind of an internet native um product what I always what what I always still think is mind-blowing is just on a technological level we can build a product that we can distribute very easily to any part of the world wherever the internet goes to right and I think this is one of the properties if you think in terms of a product that we try to p preserve right um so of course um there are you know developments also on that side which um u we we are very cautious about and and observing Um in terms of specific regulation um some of the things that we that is just a line for us that we don't cross are

the obvious um functions uh from traditional markets that you don't want to tap into right so something like you know custody um it's a line you know we we never touch user funds we design the lending market in a way where we do not control uh funds we don't have control over user funds and stuff so let's say you know some of the obvious things um that we can make right now we uh you know are very careful to not cross those lines and for those things where um we still don't have enough clarity of what's possible uh kind of in this new world and in this new environment um I think it's uh to a certain extent

um like uh the entire industry we are you know watching observing and learning every day where the industry um kind of uh heads into um I think we will see much more um kind of influence from regulators and the traditional industry as the traditional financial industry starts you know to take a bigger bigger interest uh in in DeFi let's say and um so we are um we are you know observing that a lot >> yeah I mean I think I think the the the traditional industry wants to get some sort of access, right? So, we saw these also treasury companies. Some of them

have started to use uh Ethereum DeFi. ETHZilla deposited a bunch into uh Puffer like a restaking product. Um Sharlink has deposited a ton into um Etherfise Cash product. And so, like we're definitely seeing this institutional demand for uh basically just yield on ETH. But I think Bitcoin is like the next big frontier. So uh Ellie the, you know, the co-creator of uh Starkware and Starknet, you know, he's he's he's got this saying that, you know, kind of like Bitcoin used to be this kind of uh dead under a rock type of asset, but now it's moving away from just being a store of value. Uh I think Stark has just recently launched a Bitcoin FI campaign. Um obviously you

guys are both, you know, bringing USN and S USSN on your side are on Starknet. Niels obviously ha have been doing uh you know have been have had your exchange there and your product there for some time. Maybe we can just walk through this. What is this Bitcoin fi campaign Niels? Um and what does Starknet and Vzu help uh Bitcoiners do with their Bitcoin? How do you help them get yield? What does that kind of look like? >> Yeah, sure. Uh I'm very uh happy to go into that. Um, look, uh, BTCI has one goal for for us, for Stark, for the entire ecosystem. It's to bring more utility to Bitcoin. It's to allow

Bitcoin holders to do more with their Bitcoin than just holding it in cold storage and selling from time to time when they have to pay their bills or want to renovate their homes or or send their kids to school, right? Um, Bitcoin I think we all agree is the highest, you know, quality, highest reputation crypto asset that uh exists. Um, and it should receive that treatment in terms of um being able to use it as as collateral to take a loan instead of having to sell um uh your Bitcoin um or to earn interest on it, earn yield on it and save Bitcoin. Um so this is the very you know objective of BTCI um on starknet and um

there are a bunch of things uh that starknet as an ecosystem does to do that. It's uh not a traditional let's say incentive campaign where you know we just throw uh some rewards on users to deposit their their bitcoin assets. um it's a really wellthought through um strategy behind it that has multiple levels and I think that's something um that people need to start to explore. Um I just want to highlight uh few things which are really different um from this BTC campaign. It starts with uh securing Starknet itself as a chain with Bitcoin assets. Um it's on the one hand the lowrisk kind of yield source that you

can get similar to staking Ethereum right and on the other hand it's uh you know an alignment with with Bitcoin with Bitcoin as the asset and Bitcoin the community. So you can now stake Bitcoin to secure Starknet and earn staking rewards staking yield on your Bitcoin. there are um LSTs. So similar to you know rep stake thief there are now um LSTs on Bitcoin on starknet um you can use those LSTs to uh borrow against them. You can use Bitcoin assets to take uh USDC loans. You can earn yield on your on your Bitcoin. everything that um Starat and the ecosystem, the apps do um

focuses on bringing more utility to Bitcoin and um give Bitcoin the you know the um uh the the quality that it that it should have as a as an asset that we can use in all sorts of transactions in DeFi. Yeah, Arpin, I must say one of my uh big regrets is not holding on to Bitcoin in 2017 when I first found it. I had a couple thousand dollars to my name. I had a couple Bitcoin and what I should have done back then is find a product that allows me to borrow against it, some solid stable coin, get some yield, hold on to it, keep borrowing against it as the price appreciates, pay

for my lifestyle. Um, you know, from your perspective with USN, SUSN, you know, in collaboration with, uh, you know, Niels here and VZOR, just generally, how do you think about the users for the stable coin? How do you think about kind of the demand for kind of like Bitcoin backed loans? Um, when it comes to who's going to be using and what are they going to be using, uh, you know, your stable coin for from noon, how do you think about that customer segment? you know you mentioned not in the states not in Europe kind of what is the holistic uh you know viewpoint here for uh types of use cases types of users and generally where you expect or where you have been seeing the most traction

>> yeah honestly it's it's kind of exactly as you say it right I think I've heard this story so many times with people who got into Bitcoin from like 2013 to 2017 even 2019 and a lot of people didn't really know that Bitcoin would become this kind of like inflationproof store of value that it's become today and obviously skyrocket if you knew that obviously you'd be like a multi-millionaire by now right um and as a result more and more people and this is when I say people I mean users both retail and institutions are thinking and saying okay we need to have Bitcoin on our balance sheet right be it our personal balance sheet or our corporate

balance sheet or our fund balance sheet Now, obviously, there's going to be some volatility. There's going to be some appreciation. There's going to be some depreciation. We're okay with that. But how do we maximize the yield? How do we sort of squeeze as much juice out of Bitcoin as we can without giving up on that upside, without giving up on that inflation hedge, right? And unfortunately, as I think everyone knows about Bitcoin, there isn't very much native yield, right? Native yield on Bitcoin is something between 1 and 3%. That's why I think when Starknet came to develop their BTC campaign, they approached us and said, "Hey, listen. We need real native sources of yield that

are going to allow people using Bitcoin to use the Bitcoin as collateral, borrow a non-yield bearing stable like USDC against it, and then deposit into a yield bearing stable." And what better yield bearing stable than something that is safe, high, highly rewarding, and extremely sort of competitive against every other stable coin out there right now. So that's what we're going to start with and we're going to focus on first bringing on, I think, some major institutions. Then we're going to start opening this up to your day-to-day retail user and allow people to keep a hold of Bitcoin, keep that value

appreciation going while at the same time generating really safe delta neutral yield against it. [laughter] >> We all love yield. >> You know what? I love safe yields. Um, and I think that especially I'm sure everyone has seen over the last week or two the distinction even within the stable coin space between safe yields and yields in general. So that's why whenever we talk about noon, we always distinguish between we're not always going to be the highest yielding stable coin full stock, but we're going to be

the highest yielding safe stable coin. Um, and we do that through a variety of risk management. So low risk to us means I mean we can spend like three hours just talking about that, right? Um but to us what lowrisk means is we so the way that we work is we deploy a bunch of deployment strategies across DeFi, CFI and Trafi.

So we go to wherever the lowest risk, highest yielding yields are but within so that gives us a massive universe to play around with. But what we need to do then within that universe is look at each yield strategy and do a very detailed risk assessment on this. And this is why this is when my and my team's background in traditional finance in banking risk management um investment banking etc all come in handy. So for each and every yield source, we have a detailed risk assessment that takes into account, you know, your typical risks, your market risk, your liquidity risk, your um smart contract risk, your volatility risk, etc., etc., etc. We

publish it to everyone. We let our community discuss it. We let our community vote on it. And only then do we actually allow our deployment strategies to encompass these new realities. >> Yeah. I mean I think that that the the definition and the terminology sometimes is hard to get in alignment of but Vitalic has been pushing this lowrisk DeFi. Lowrisk DeFi. Like he's like I love high-risisk DeFi. You know I love you know like you know the poly markets or whatever it is but lowrisk DeFi. Um, so when it comes to the actual yield opportunities for both of your protocols, uh, today, I think transparency is what people want. They

want to see that transparency of the yield. They want to know what they're getting. How do you guys provide transparency to your users? What does that look like when it comes to Bitcoin yields, when it comes to stable coin yields? Um, yeah, no, maybe you can try that one. >> Yeah. So, uh, Vaso is a is a DeFi lending market, right? So, it's built on the Starknet chain. Everything's, um, fully transparent by design, right? Uh, in the sense that it runs by smart contracts. Everyone can see at any time where the funds at that no one is just taking out funds that shouldn't or that even no one can, right? Because um, you know, everyone can verify permissions.

Now um this is the nature of DeFi and uh while all of this is available it's actually also not because a regular user cannot go and you know you know go through uh contracts uh on on chain or even use you know a a block explorer. So um what's really important there is to have the tools that users can actually uh make use of that transparency that we can provide them right [snorts] and so how that uh looks for us is uh first of all on the Visu UI where you ultimately make your um decisions your you know um uh decisions where you access yield

where deposit funds into we provide already uh very important information including what uh collateral exposures for instance you have if you deposit into that market right so just the really necessary information for a professional user to make their decision about the the risk that someone's exposed to and this is this covers most things that most people need to understand before they make a decision Right. Uh but then there is more information that you or some people actually use to verify things you know. Um and so uh an important tool that DeFi and crypto has

is dune dashboards right which is also if you think about it and if we come back to kind of the traditional nail banks is something that's um that's really again a very feature of DeFi. anyone builds a dashboard and actually verifies and make sure that what they actually claim uh where you're depositing into you know it's actually exactly that right so you know a human dashboard where if you need to understand more you can go and and verify um but then also I mean just um I think transparency to understand the data is one important thing that uh is characteristic of D5 but the other thing is actually um other safety mechanisms like there is a visi I want to deposit

and I want to be sure I can always withdraw again right now what's what happens if this UI is actually down it didn't really happen we have like a a really good uptime for the vas UI but still it can happen any time right we we have seen uh infrastructure failures like you know Amazon uh which was down um so yeah it it can happen and so um what I include in this transparency um uh conversation is also the tools necessary to access my funds if for instance the main UI is down right so there is there is a fallback UI where I can um get access to my funds if if the main UI is down um and so I think um what's really important is when you talk

about transparency is yes by design we can create transparency but we need to provide the tools that users actually can make use of of this transparency and you know the data. >> Yeah. And and then Arpin, when you're collaborating with teams like a Cubo, um, like VZU, others, it's obviously important for you to understand what's happening and and and have that transparency, but also vice versa into your protocol and into, you know, the design that you guys have. You know, talk to us about some of the collaborations that have been going on, how how those have been going, kind of what each of the pieces of the Starknet kind of defi ecosystem enable for you guys. uh from Non's perspective.

>> Yeah, for sure. I think first on transparency. So, we've actually been beating the drum on transparency and security probably for longer than anyone else. >> And so, we we we I believe were the first stable coin to have a independent live proof of solvency. um which our partners at accountable, we partnered with them probably six to nine months ago and effectively what we did with transparency and we said all right everyone has these attestations right where they're like okay cool we have all the money you think we have but most of that is just self-reported data and frankly I can come up with a website

that tells you I have $20 million if you think I have $20 million that's not very hard so rather what we did was we worked with our partners ers accountable and we said okay let's have a third party come in let's connect them directly to our custodians and our custodial partners and let the these two parties directly contact each other right without us in the middle so we have no ability to influence the data we're not giving the users the data they are directly getting the data from the people who who hold our assets and then they're publishing it live real time every 15 minutes. So our users can literally go on our proof of solveny website noon.accountable

capital right now and on a real-time basis see exactly what our reserve position is, what our supply position is. So if we're over collateralized or under collateralized and exactly how our reserves are deployed, so what's our current deployment mix, how's that changing over time, etc. And I think that is the ultimate level of transparency that this industry needs. And I think a lot more people need to start embracing. >> I I mean I completely agree. I mean we've we've kind of bucketed now yield bearing stable coins and genius compliant stable coins almost. And like the genius compliant are basically impossible to fail, you know, knock on wood

and then the uh the the yield bearing ones have a bit more leeway. Did did you guys watch what unfolded with stream and XUSD and these vaults and the drama between Gauntlet and Chaos Labs and a morph and all this over the last week or so? >> Did you guys >> Yeah, very closely. >> Okay. So, ARP from your perspective like what went wrong or what can we take away from that going forward as a community uh as far as implementation details for stable coins and vaults? I mean, so the the stream and DUSD situation in particular was the I think the TLDDR is don't take shortcuts to growing TVL, right? Um, which is exactly

what they did. They basically said, "Hey, listen. We're going to again in a much more complicated way. We're going to give you money. You guys give us money back and we'll just kind of loop it around and grow both of our TVLs really, really fast, right?" Um, and what that created was effectively the same dollar was underpinning5 to$10 of each of stream and elixir TVL, right? Um, we decided from a very very early point in time. So, we've been approached by several protocols and I mean Stream and Elixir by no means were the only ones going out there looking for these kinds of deals. We were approached by several of them and we

actually I think posted a screenshot of us again three months ago declining this saying there's no way we would ever consider something like this because it just erodess the quality of our reserves. Um, so I think that's the big TLDDR of for streaming an elixir is for stable coin protocols, don't try to take shortcuts because at some point it will catch up to you, right? >> I mean, just the over rehypotheation for for no reason other than just greed and yield and whatever. I saw it so many times in DeFi. That's always what the issue has been is the over over rehypotheation of funds. If I may, I think there's a very important

distinction to be made here between rehypothecation and recursive lending. Right? So rehypothecation, I think, is totally fine as long as you're not kind of doing this incestuous recursive lending. So that's the rule that we strongly adhere to that if we, for example, we have DeFi deployments within our deployment stack, right? we will never ever deploy into any D5 protocol that it deploys into us. So we've had lots of conversations with large funds, curators, etc. And we've been very very clear about that that if we deploy into you, you can't deploy back into us. And vice versa, if you're deploying into us,

we will never deploy into you. But otherwise, I think rehypotheation frankly is one of the superpowers that DeFi has and one of the advantages that DeFi has over trappy because of two things, right? One, DeFi is super transparent. I can see exactly what's backing my loan no matter what. And this is exactly what Niels was talking about, right? And then second, you have smart contracts who can actually automatically liquidate, automatically unwind positions the moment certain thresholds get met. I think rehypothecation is a massive advantage that DeFi has over trappy because you can't get that level of transparency and that level of automation in Trafy. So rehypotheation I think is fine.

Recursive blending where you're kind of intestuously looping between two protocols just for the sake of kind of nebulous TBL that really doesn't exist. That was the problem and that's what we need to avoid. >> No, anything from your side on that? Yeah, [snorts] I completely agree with the, you know, point that Arpan made around um don't take shortcuts to um boost your TVL. Um I think that is a big reason why these things happen and why they happen again and again, right? Uh in DeFi. Um and so you know just one comment from how things have been done.

There was a there was a program before BTCI and um Stark was always very very um um it was very important for them to actually not um reward for instance recursive borrowing and lending right um and it's for exactly that reason Starknet the team we at VSU we don't build to just create the bubble that may explode like in one or two months um but we had you know our stats looking nice for that time. Um, everyone builds for the long term and I think that's uh what's really important and that what uh helps you know the the ecosystem to stay secure. Then the

other part of my uh reaction would be it's so from the perspective as a lending market and in particular Visu being a lending market that works similar to more for Uler where third party curators actually curate pools and vaults. Um one thing that we are really watching closely is um how well can let's say the infrastructure provider like Morpho or like Uler kind of shield themselves from like the you know um uh impact uh that that this can have on on on lending markets right even though third party curators actually operate those pools. And I think that's something that that's uh yeah that's

that we're very interested in. uh I think it goes back to a governance level even in that uh curator based uh lending model which I personally still think is uh the model that will succeed in the long term um there is governance going on right and even if it's just the governance around what do you actually show your users on on your website right and that's very important because you want to protect your users and you want to protect your brand right and so I think um it ultimately goes back to um having different parties doing different things in this whole transaction who does governance um uh are there you know are they the same person people that actually then benefit kind of economically from such behavior and I I

think that's where um we will see the you know the industry mature uh we'll see it to be more professional and I think for lending markets is really important to um make sure users are safe and protect your brand >> if you guys got another minute I'm super curious to understand your takes on the unis swap proposal for the uni token. Um, did you guys see that? >> I did not have to say. >> Okay, so basically what's happened is that unis swap has been under fire by the crypto community for so long for um basically having the labs make all the money, nine figs in revenue a year and the token holders effectively have no claims on any revenues. Um, you know, they charge that small front-end fee now

goes to labs. they have that.3% LP fee goes to the LPS. Um, and so there's really like no way for the token to be represented as part of this. It's like why would you even have a token, right? Um, but you know, Hayden and the team just came out and said basically we're going to be distributing cash flow back to the token and like we're going to solve this equity token holder kind of dysmorphia problem. Um, you know, Hyperliquid has is has notably led the market this year with this model. Obviously, not everyone's going to be able to make as much as they make. Pers are hot. Uh, Starknet has had staking.

They've kind of started to think more deeply about this. ZK Sync had just put out a whole ZK token model thing that that that they're working on, a proposal. You know, it's it very much seems like uh the regulation has opened up for what would previously like uh the regulation has opened up for what would previously have kind of go into the semantics of what these things are. Um what's your take on this trend guys? Do you think that this continues, accelerates, decelerates? How do you see crypto asset mechanisms uh being kind of evolving through this better era of regulatory clarity plus you know I had this saying return to

fundamentals just like let's you know let's do the basics and bring value back to the shareholders kind of what is your what is your highle view on on this trend? Yeah, >> I think it it's a really important topic if you start to think about um issuing a token, right? Um I think you know uh unis swap uh but also a lot of the you know blue chip assets which have launched you know way back um and which have been launched around narratives mostly. Um I think we have seen the industry to move into a more kind of fundamental fundamentals based uh uh approach. Um I think both is still

you know uh possible. There are assets tokens that run purely on narratives um which is fine. Um I think for DeFi protocols you are by nature more under scrutiny because you're actually generating fundamentals and so um uh I think it's totally um you know expected that people will want to um have some of that and that your valuation somehow is is rooted in that. So you know on Viso we did not launch a token. Vis doesn't have a token. There is no token. there is no um um you know uh VCs actually who who uh you know have tokens and and

stuff. So um what we wanted to make sure is we need to have a product um that can generate fundamentals at some point. We need to have product market fit before we even want to think about um what the role of a token would be. Right? And I think this is really different nowadays than it was, you know, four years ago, five years ago. And and there are various reasons. So I'm not, you know, pointing fingers at how things have been done, you know, back then versus now. But I can totally understand. Yeah. The industry >> Yeah.

>> changes and people Yeah. look at the fundamentals now. >> Thank God. E Arpin, close us out, man. >> Yeah. So agree with everything Mills said and I'll give you a very sort of real example. So when we started noon, we knew that we wanted to make sure that our governance token holders first and foremost governed our protocol, right? That was super important to us and as a result, we actually said, hey, listen, let's not take in any external funding. Let's not give out any tokens to VCs, early LPs, or like a small group of individuals who are going to be able to dictate what our protocol does in the

future. Let's truly make this a democratized user controlled protocol, right? And as a result, if we put this much of an emphasis on users governing, we need to make sure that they get something else out of the governance token other than just governance votes, right? And I think as Neil said, right, I think in 2021 2022, you could get away with saying, "Hey, listen, we'll figure out actual dollar utility later on." Partially because of how, you know, conservative the US was being. Um, but partially just because the market was okay with it, right? VCs were fine pumping money in, retail was fine

pumping money in. But now, so from day one, we always said, "Hey, listen. We're always going to have a way to get dollar value back to our governance token holders. We were, I believe, the first stable coin to implement that. Um, our token is going to become, our governance token is going to become transferable in January of 2026, and we'll see that coming to life, which will be really, really exciting. And to your question, I think that needs to become the norm, right? I think you're seeing very very evidently that the public and the markets are valuing pure governance value at a marginal premium and unless there's actual like cash flow and NPV

going back into the governance token um valuations are just going to crater. So I think the market >> yeah the market spoken >> or you're just going to buy hype or you're just going to buy whatever because why would you not own the thing that actually you can sleep at night? We got a guy in the chat uh Bosco saying when Vzu I think it's probably a good time to wrap out. I think we're getting the when token question now. So that means that it's been a good conversation lads. Appreciate your time. Appreciate your work on Starknet. Uh and look forward to following along with what you guys are building.

>> Awesome. Thanks for your time, Andy. Appreciate it. >> Peace out, lads. Have a good day. >> Byebye. Bye, everyone. >> All righty, guys. Uh, we're going to take a little bit of a quick break and then I'm going to go on an absolute rant. Um, so just give me about 30 seconds or a minute and I'll be right back. See you guys in a sec. Heat. Heat.

All right, guys. I am honestly so back with my return to fundamentals take. So, if you have not been following me for the last several I like months, I was at a ETH Denver conference. They asked me to put up a tweet and talk about it. And my tweet literally just said return to fundamentals. And I want to understand I

want you guys to understand what that means. So fundamentals of our space, self- sovereignty, censorship resistance, private money, unfuckwithability, the ability to be anywhere in the world and have your hardware wallet and have hard money to resist state level attacks to be free of inflationary fiat currencies. Guys, we are building a plan B, an alternative for the people of the world. This is the fundamentals, guys. We've gotten off track because of the shitty regulatory regime led by Mr.

Gary Gendler. It is hard to describe and overestimate the amount of impact that that one person had on our industry. The Fugazi decentralization is gone. The doing a DAO for a state for the sake of being a DAO is gone. being having to do all these crazy foundation and labs and no revenue to token holders. So, I'm just going to sh hide the fact that I have no product market fit under the veil of regulatory scrutiny is gone. Put up or shut up. It is time to get real in this industry and we are doing it one day at a time. Refern return to fundamentals is something that we can

all get behind. I truly truly believe that our industry is at the cusp 2025 being a a line in the sand type of year guys. We are returning to fundamentals right now. In fact, why ever go away from them guys? You're seeing Zcash pump. You're seeing near pump. You're seeing Hyperlid do well. You're seeing unis swap launch a uh revenue proposal. The revenue meta is 100% here. It is not a meta. Although I coined that term on a joking poll, this is the future of our industry. And this is what institutions want. Guys, I was sitting at SmartCon in a Fidelity sponsored lounge with a suit

shirt on, a nice white dress shirt watching DTCC, JP Morgan, Fidelity, Goldman, the Fed, the White House, uh, City Bank, uh, you know, insert name here, JP Morgan. They were coming up and they wanted to know what we were doing, what the show was all about. And, you know, they are coming into the industry. ETFs when when the government shutdown ends hopefully this month before Thanksgiving. We will see an onslaught of ETFs. We will see the market structure bill get passed. I talked to the the chamber the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce. He said by the end of this Congress which at the latest is the end of next year.

The Clarity Act if you've seen has been put forth. There are still a lot of debates and discussions to be had but that is coming as well guys. The institutions are coming and there is a full-blown Wolf of Wall Street bull market happening in New York City right now and crypto Twitter is crying about the price of some shitcoin. Guys, you need to zoom out and understand where we are at in time. I've been in this industry for seven or eight years. It has never been this easy to be bullish on the space. You just need to have a longer time horizon than the attention span of a squirrel person next to you who's trading on high leverage and getting liquidated. Look, there's

still a lot of crap to unwind from the 1010 massacre on our bags. I get it. Frankly, it doesn't look great out there, but it looked better than what it did last week. But that doesn't even matter, guys. There is a full-blown tokenization bull run happening on Wall Street as we speak on the literal ground floors the of the biggest institutions and capital allocators in the world. Guys, guys, do not be dissuaded right now. Do not be apathetic. Be more bullish. This space has never been brighter. the industry. The United States has came and has been the capital of this industry. It is going to be the

future of this industry. We have established the US as a hub and this is going to be massive guys. Return to fundamentals is so back and I I can't even express my my my bullishness in one rant like like this is rant number one. I digress. Rant number two, which is quite aligned, [snorts] it's about DevConnect. Okay, Devconnect is about to be absolutely electric in Buenosirus. Here's why. The Ethereum Foundation has finally realized

that the best way to adopt Ethereum and to grow Ethereum into a global money, a global settlement layer for stable coins, for DeFi, is to simply host conferences at the locations where our industry is needed most. I went to Bonosirus with my dad probably 2023. We're walking down Florida A. Many of you are going to go to Florida A and you're going to see what I'm talking about. On Florida Avenue, you will have hundreds of Argentinian people asking you for Comio. Comio is espanol for change. Change, right? Like you want to change. They want to they want your Bitcoin. They want your ETH. They want your Ripple. They want your dollar. They want your stable coins. They want your euros. They want all of it. They want to do a swap. And they don't want the

government to know about it. And they want to take that, put it in their bank or put it in their under their mattress. They want to put it into cows, into land, into Bitcoin, into other uh fiat currencies. The entire purpose of return of fundamentals, of stable coins, of self-s sovereign money, of not being uh a subject to your nation state's lack of good decision-m is it is all happening in Buenosirus. When I was there, the the uh ratio was 1 to400. One US dollar to 400 pesos. Dude, I went back a year and a half later, so let's call it late 2023 or early 24 or something, and it was 1 to,200. That means that they

lost 75% of their purchasing power in less than a year and a half. Now, that was an insane run that that they had and they've sorted a lot of it out and there's a lot of stuff going on. Guys, it is a safe city. And I know that's uh contrarian, but trust me, I've lived in Bogota, Medí. I've lived in Sa Paulo, in Rio, in North Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama. Trust me, Buenosirus is safe. And it is clean, it is healthy, it is a vibe, the nightife is fantastic, guys, this is going to be the next best Ethereum conference following from uh can it is going to be absolutely electric. And why is because the people of this country

need us. They need Ethereum. They need stable coins. They need store of values more than ever. And this is what we came for. We wanted to bank the unbanked. We wanted to provide an option for other people to come in. And this is what we're doing in Dev Connect in Buenosirus. Guys, thank you for listening to this rant. We've got our episode of Money Moves Fast, episode number 10, coming to you live with nobody else than Diego Fernandez from Bonosares. We're going to be talking about what they're doing with SORA and more. Guys, we'll be right back. Let's go.

Heat. Heat. >> [music] >> All righty, guys. We are here with Money

Moves Fast episode number 10. We've got Diego Fernandez, the co-founder of Sver. Money Moves Fast is our premier weekly payments, tokenization, and RWA's show here on Rollup TV. No one better to have for this week other than Diego. Coming live from Buenosaris. We will be there with him very, very shortly. one of the premier hubs of crypto and blockchain where the use cases far surpass speculation and hype and are drilled into the everyday use case for the average folk. Diego, pleasure to have you man.

>> Andy, thank you so much for inviting me. Happy to be here. >> How's the city, man? How's the city? What? It must be picking up already. Well, I mean the city is crazy as usual, but [clears throat] now with the added decon stuff, honestly, I cannot be sort of a precise about because I love the place so much. And I'm convinced that most of our visitors for web connect will love it as well. We are very charming people. You'll have tons of asado. Hope you're not vegan or whatever. Uh beautiful wine, amazing weather and people are so excited about that connect. I think we will have thousands of guests and and everybody's really excited about it.

>> Yeah, man. I mean, I put out this tweet um that got some push back about it. Maybe you could answer this real quick. I think this would be helpful for for the people. Uh you know, I put out this tweet saying, "Bonosa will be one of the best locations for a conference for the Ethereum community. Uh, easy taxis, very safe, perfect weather, great food and cheap, beautiful Euro architecture, feels very homey, fun, nightife. I got quite a bit of push back from people saying very safe question mark. Buenos Iris is not safe, unfortunately. Very safe, not safe. So maybe you could just give us a quick rundown as to, and we'll clip this. How to be safe in Buenosirus?

How how do how does the crypto how should we act in Buenosirus? How should we dress? How do we stay safe and stay out of trouble down there? >> Honestly, and this is not my impression. This is a hard data. Wenocidus has the lowest homicide per 100,000 inhabitants. I think that in all of America now. So Buenosirus is objectively a very safe city. Of course, you have certain places in Buenosiris which maybe you shouldn't go out at night, but trust me, you're not going maybe you shouldn't go out at night with an iPhone 17 Pro Max doing like this or I don't know a 20,000k uh 20k [clears throat] watch, but trust me, you're not going to

be there. I mean, you'll stay in neighborhoods where where I live in Palmo, which nothing will happen. nothing. You can get a chance off if you're, I don't know, doing like this on the street. Someone comes and and pull your phone out. The same thing happens in New York, in any other European city. In my perspective, Wenoseris is a perfectly safe town and in everybody that comes can be very very comfortable with it and I hope that you enjoy it.

>> And that's how I feel too. I mean, I was saying like, look, I mean, I've I've lived in Medí, in Bogota, in Sa Paulo, in Rio, in Nicaragua, in Panama, and you know, I've I've been around the block. I've been in many places that I should not be at late night hours. And never in my time in Buenosirus did I feel threatened. Did I feel under fire? Did I feel like I was going to be threatened. So, man, let's get to the meat and potatoes here today. Buenosiris, Argentina is is a is an economic hub for for the the southern cone. It it is a a city of culture. It is a city of of um art, of food, of wine. It's also been a country that has been plagued with questionable economic

uh decision-making from the highest of powers. um crypto as a technology has absolutely infiltrated the countries that have needed it the most primarily with stable coins. Maybe we could talk a bit about how like the state of of of blockchain adoption in Argentina and and kind of why stable coins, why Bitcoin and these store value assets have been so important and just generally kind of like what the evolution you've seen over the last couple years as far as adoption has look like.

>> Well, first of all, thank you for being so mild about questionable economic decisions from governments in Argentina. That is honestly a complete understatement. I mean there's this saying I don't know who was the guy that said it there. There's developed countries, there's underdeveloped countries, Japan and Argentina which are two unexplicable cases. So Argentina has been sort of a victim of maybe the worst economic decision making for the last 70 years and we have had I don't know inflation I think 65 out of those 70 years and when I say inflation I mean crazy inflation it's not two three four 5% is 20 100 200 and even thousands of

percentage per year of inflation and uh [clears throat] the government before the government that we have now started taking these measures as for example not allowing people to to buy dollars. So when you have these pesos local currency in your hand with a 20% per month inflation literally demand melts in your hands. So what do sort of people try to do? Hey this money is losing value each day. So I have basically two alternatives. I buy things and spend my money and buy whatever thing. I buy a car if I can or I buy a refrigerator or I go out and have a dinner, but I prefer to spend my money.

I'm not keeping it. And the other alternative is I'm going to preserve this kind of shortterm store value. I buy dollars and by that way I'm preserving the value of my of my money. And that's that is so so so embedded in Argentine culture because of 70 years of mismanagement of the economic situation. So crypto got into Argentina in my perspective from two different sides. We have a really strong foothold in developers and and and really deep tech guys doing amazing things in Argentina starting with the Volterhouse something like 10 years ago where many OGs from the Ethereum community came out open sapling and others [clears throat] uh

lambda class working for 10 years in crypto and so on. So we had this sort of talent in Argentina which is one of the basis for crypto to to really get its momentum. And on the other hand side we got this sort of very bad situation in we in which we as Argentinians needed crypto as a means for survival for economic survival. So in crypto in Argentina is not an online 247 casino. It's not a dig stuff. It's not it's not a mecoin thing. is something that provided regular folks which didn't know a thing about crypto say, "Hey, instead of going, I'm I'm speaking literally with a bag a bag full of pesos just to

get $2,000, I may use this app and buy cryp crypto dollars. Oh, this is amazing." So I get my salary and instead of seeing how my salary loses 10 15% of its value over 30 days, I can get into dollars and then come back. So that that was a way of survival for us and many regular folks which if you wanted to buy I don't know 20k in dollars. Okay, maybe you had the way of doing that because you're kind of more sophisticated. But what happens if you I don't know want to buy $200, $300.

Okay, that is very very was very uncomfortable to the innocent. So crypto and stable coins mainly as you mentioned became a way for Argentinians to survive. But once they got into crypto some something very interesting started to happen. I was speaking with uh Cello which is the founder of Lemon is the biggest crypto wallet in Argentina and just a couple of months ago he shared with me that for the first time BTC and holding in their users accounts exceeded stable coins. So they got in stable coins but then they sort of say hey come on something is going on here and

started migrating part of their holdings to BTC and it so today of course there's not a very precise uh estimate but we estimate that between 20 to 25% of the population holds and knows crypto. Of course I'm not meaning again legions but they hold crypto in their wallet. They have a crypto wallet and they use it to maybe they have a card or a lemon card, a meta mask card or whatever, but they have crypto as part of their lives and not because of gambling. So for me that's that's a very interesting thing that's going on.

>> I mean I think any sort of store of value becomes extremely extremely appealing to the Argentine people and and and you can see it in in the day-to-day, right? I was talking about earlier how if you go down Florida Avenue, you know, you will see you will see and hear Comio Comio Comio >> Comio Comio. >> It is absolutely a part like if you guys are watching this right now and you're going to Buenosirus, you must go down Florida Avenue to get a sense of what it's like to exist in in these types of places.

>> You know what? We have a local slang word for that which is called arbolito which is little tree. >> Little tree. So those are the little the little trees. Cambio cambio cambio cambio. Yeah. >> All right, man. Well, so let's let's kind of formulate the payments landscape here. Is there a lot of activity between like uh the United States or other uh other countries sending remittances back to Argentina? Uh I know that happens a lot in Mexico with the US and you guys are doing some work down there as well which we can get in. But you know as far as the payment space goes in Argentina, who is dominating that? What is the preferred stable coin? What is the preferred application kind of what is some of the

you know volumes and velocities like kind of what is the status of payments when it comes to crypto payments in Argentina? >> Well, I I wouldn't say that remittances to Argentina are the main income from foreign from foreign countries. We do have a lot of income from foreign countries coming from freelancers and people doing whatever services, graphic design, coding or whatever offshore. And as we had this sort of capital controls, very aggressive capital and controls, crypto be became again a way of uh getting that money in Argentina and several different wallets started offering you the services of saying,

"Hey, you get this crypto wallet, we open for you uh or we give you a bank account in the US, you can get fiat money there from your customers and we put crypto dollars in your local uh in your local account or we we put crypto to dollar in your wallet. So that is that was that is and was a very strong way of getting money in the country and we do have a strong remittances going on with mainly Parawai, Bolivia, Venezuela which lot of people from Paraguay, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru maybe came or come to work to Argentina and they want to send money back to their families.

Yeah. So there is a money going out of the country but there is again a very strong uh a very strong strong player there and we do have a very strong connection as well with Brazil because we Argentinians spend holidays and and visit Brazil very regularly. So in the payments arena as you were asking well we have a sort of a behemoth of players here which is Marcado Pago. Marcobago is a company controlled by Mercad Libé which is uh a platform a local a local regional platform in the ways of Amazon which they do have a a payment railway so which is Marcado which is dominates I don't know 80 or 90% plus of the market we do have all of the fintech scenario

with our WA it's a very important fintech and and brewback and several others playing in that arena there is traditional fiat uh fintex and then we have the crypto wallets. I would mention lemon. I would mention uh bellow. I would mention when but it's a very sophisticated market. We in Argentina and when you guys come here are going to see it our we have basically the two most important means of payments are using NFC chips with credit cards or or or Apple Pay or Google Pay and we do use a lot QR codes. So we scan a QR code and you pay with your wallet maybe a crypto wallet

maybe the Marcado pile wallet but we use a lot of payments using uh QR codes. So digital payments are very strong here in Argentina. We're very used to that. >> Yeah. And so are is there any actual stable coin payments happening on the ground floor there when it comes to like POS systems like proof of point of sale systems? Are they accepting stable coins in any capacity? You know, I've seen sometimes I see a little sign of like USDT or BTC accepted here at some out of out of you know, kind of a random coffee shop or something. what's kind of been the the adoption with regards to accepting blockchain based payments in >> I would say that that is just starting

yeah today we have this sort of shortcut which is crypto wallets that allow you to hold your assets in crypto assets whichever PTC ETH USC whatever and you can go and do a regular payment using a QR code or a or a credit card and they do transform automatically your crypto assets to the local currency and that has become quite popular. I mean nearly all of us using whichever crypto wallet use that type of service. Native cryptoto crypto transfers is something that is just starting. It's not as popular. It's quite a niche thing. I would say sort of MVP style. But of course the the what all of us hope is

that that is going to change real fast. And in my view that should change in two ways. Of of course we have the crypton native users which will love to have USDT, USDC and or BTC or whatever and pay using their crypto asset to a crypto asset wallet. And I think that what we will start to see is financial services and fintex companies that use crypto railways because they're much more effective and safe than trai railways but show the user sort of a trap web two interface.

So maybe my 85year-old mother doesn't need to get into the understanding of USDT, USDC and whatever. she just has a wallet where she can save money in and then she can go and pay for the groceries and maybe that wallet and that fintech company is using crypto railways but as a back end yeah in the front end the regular user doesn't even get to know if the dollars are USD USDC crypto pesos or whatever. >> Yeah, I think I mean that the latter point there is where a lot of the I think players are trying to get to, right? because at some point you just want to stick to the same thing that you've been doing as a consumer but just have a better experience and a better

product. And so that's going to take time to get to where like the Visas and the Stripes and the Marcato Libras of the world you know accept the stable coin settlement. Um and then once that happens then that then the adoption should really really pick up. Yeah, I I agree with you and and I think that the complex thing about crypto is that we have this sort of uh the crypto assets, the native crypto assets, BTC, ETH, and all of the rest. You need to sort of be inside the thing to understand them. Yeah. To say, okay, okay, I'm going to buy BTC. That's an investment decision. But regular folks doing everyday shopping, every day grocerying and whatever, maybe they're not willing to spend their time in understanding that type of thing. They

just want a means in order to do their financial transactions to to keep on with their everyday life. And I think that this type of offering where when you abstract the the sort of the crypto back end which is again much more effective and safe definitely has a place in the market because uh just to give you a small example we in Argentina when you transfer money from one bank to another there's a sort of union of banks which created a company which is called coala which is basically a sort of a compensation arena in which if I send money to that bank and the other people send the money to the bank and the other bank goes to they they sort of keep that thing going

on and transfers money between bank accounts of all the banks in Argentina. I am positive that 99% of people using that system don't know that that system even exist and that's okay. We are kind of financial sort of cryptoners of course knew do know about that but I mean most people don't need to understand that or and I think that that's okay. >> I totally agree. I totally agree to I'd like to understand a bit of the work that you guys have been doing with human ID and this kind of decentralized ID system in Mexico. You guys have recently launched one of the first largecale decentralized ID systems. You know how that process happened? you know what was

the story behind that and you know in the lens of stable coins of payments of this kind of onboarding users on chain what does that really mean for the Mexican people that's a very good question thanks in our view all of the world transactions of trust and value is one of those will be dominated by railways today we have different railways for different type of things that we need to preserve and trust. So we have one railway for doing money transactions, one railway for doing sort of I don't know whichever document contract or thing that we need to sign in order to sign a contract or owning a car, owning

a house or whatever. When the financial system that is happening right now goes into crypto railways and the trust system I mean the first thing that you need to trust on is who you are your ID goes into crypto railway the interoperation and the effectiveness and the reducement of fraction that we will friction that we will have will be immense. So it makes every sense to say hey everything should be put down on crypto railways. You should be able of verifying identities of human beings of things of cars, boats, houses and whatever using crypto railways and saying hey this

issuer whoever that is this big company this small company this national state this subnational state issued this holder a credential and I should be able of verifying that very safely very cheaply and that will change the way we work and we're really proud about the noon thing. We'll be doing some big announcements during Dev Connect regarding other subnational big jurisdictions adopting these type of systems. We use open-source protocols. We're using we have a chain a layer two chain based on ethox client developed by lambda class which is using a line layer

[clears throat] technology to reduce costs and make it much more effective and we use the quark ID protocol which is an open source protocol for identity. So we we pack all of these together and we offer this type of solutions to governments to big institutions and uh we're really happy because we're gaining very big adoption. We're gaining big traction. We have a huge pipeline and the most important thing in my point of view is that of course it's important that governments issue their sort of driver's licenses, citizens credentials, birth certificates and so on blockchain but the most important thing is that that creates a local ecosystem

and then a regional ecosystem. What I mean is, just to give an example, if you have a shop, I don't know, whatever, a restaurant, uh, a gym, uh, if you own a building and you're able to sort of leveraging what the government does and say, "Hey, I'm I am able to verifying this guy's identity just showing a QR code." Yeah. Or tapping an NFC chip and instantly with no cost, I get that verification ready. Well, that is so different that what we do now today in Argentina, you will see it's very common that when you need to enter a building or whatever, say, "Hey, do you have an ID?" And I've seen this in the States, in Europe, never place. Do you have an ID? Yeah, I do. Okay, show me your ID. And you show

your ID and people start maybe taking notes in a computer. That doesn't make sense today. Of course, we need adoption, but it's so weird. We have an idea maybe that even is digital or not, but I mean you have a piece of plastic and then you have a computer and you have a human interface transcribing things from an ID to a computer. That's crazy. We should be able verifying that instantly. States have a big role to play there because they are the most important credential issuer in every society starting from driver's licenses, passports, national IDs and whatever and the whole ecosystem may and will take advantage of that.

>> Yeah. I mean I think for sure and I think some some of these nation states are getting in their own way, right? like you've called verifiable privacy the foundation for human freedom, but when it comes to these kind of governments who don't want to let go of control, it it's it's kind of hard to to make this balance. So, I'm curious, how do you make that message resonate with the governments that still feel or still fear this digital age or they fear this decentralization kind of mindset? How do you make that message stick with some of the people who are some of the most powerful in the world?

Well, I think that we we all should do this kind of crusade because people are not so and and I published an article I think it was last week regarding this digital identity is a extremely powerful tool but it can be used so wrongly if you do it bad so wrongly digital identity is like a hammer if you need to put down a nail it's an amazing tool but you can use a hammer to kill to kill someone. So it's very very very very dangerous. Centralized digital ID systems are everything that's bad. There are digital cage in which every movement that we do will be monitoriized. You

could suffer censorship. It's kind of a I don't know Nazi like state. And uh the argument that hey we want to do this in this way to prevent whatever crime or is a bad decision. It's a bad decision. It would be the same as saying hey I'm going to install a camera in every bedroom and every private home in order to prevent a potential crime. Maybe you do get some crime lower down. That is not the way to go and we wouldn't be able of allowing this kind of big brother state. Same thing happened with identity. I think that there are a lot of amazing institutions doing a lot of great work in toward to

promote this idea of hey guys you must not do a centralized identity and monitor everything that society does that that is bad and we have very important players in Latin America. We have two development banks the IDB and the calf which is CAF corporation for mento which are really struggling moving towards this. we have uh UN and several institutions sort of promoting this good way of doing things and several governments are starting to understand it. for me it's not something that is yet defined and we need to keep on working really hard in order to promote this idea and for me that is very important and the other thing that

uh that I think that we need to all of us struggle together is hey guys please abort the private blockchains initiative I'm going to pick up an EDM and I'm going to do a private permission blockchain which I control man that is The internet of the '9s is not the way to go. We need to rely on Ethereum's economic security. We have 100,000 plus nodes verifying our transactions. We have billions of dollars securitizing the information that's inside, but we need a public blockchain in order to avoid censorship, in order to avoid people controlling us. And I think that

that tendency today is much more smaller, but it's still there and we need to fight it. >> Yeah, I totally agree, man. I mean, it's part of this whole return to fundamentals ethos that we've been trying to really iron into people's minds and ingrain into the industry and I think that really you're you're capturing a lot of that today. Diego, as we kind of come to a close, you know, any final remarks for those coming to Buenosares, coming to your lovely country, uh h how will you welcome them? any big events that you are hosting or that you know where can we find you in the city?

>> Well, uh we have we hired a this amazing venue just in front of Deb Connect uh with Lambda Erodici Group and we're doing a bunch of events there. We have a an amazing GOP free summit which is people from governments all over the region that are coming precisely to a crypto event which is something I wouldn't say it's the first time but it's something really interesting to see and there are a bunch of events going on there the the amount of side events that we have is it would be so hard so hard to really choose which event to go other people are doing amazing events and so My recommendation is

do not eat for the last four or five days. Eat very little. You have amazing food here. Amazing food. You don't need to bring anything. Come here and try wine. Wine is a very special thing in Argentina. Don't forget about trying mate, which is a very local drink that we have in Argentina. We I will show it to you. This thing over here. Yeah. >> Yes. >> We do that all the time. Yeah. come and try mate which is this very very awkward thing and my last recommendation is I know that coming to Argentina from the states from Asia from Europe is a long trip. So my recommendation is Argentina is a big and beautiful country. Make your stay as long as possible. Go to

Patagonia. Go to Salta in the northern part of Argentina which is amazing. Go to Iwasu Falls which is out of this world. Uh there there are lots of things to do and we're really so happy to have you all guys here next week. >> Beautiful. Diego, thank you for your time. Thanks for being a part of the roll. We'll see you there. We are hosting an event at that space with Lambda on the 18th. So looking forward to that, man. >> We'll be there. Bye-bye, Andy. >> Bye, Diego. All righty, guys. We'll be right back and close this out.

See you. All righty, guys. Thank you for being here. See you guys tomorrow, Wednesday, for another show. We got two more or three three Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then we're going to Buenosaris and we're going to be live from BA. We'll kind of tease more about that and talk more about that tomorrow into the end of the week. Thank you for being here, guys. Thanks for listening to the rants, the awesome guests. Stay safe, stay strong. Return to fundamentals. See you guys later.

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