Validated

Tommy and Taylor are the founders of PsyOptions, a DAO developing the leading options primitives on Solana. 00:09 - Introduction and Origin Story04:04 - What are the challenges / improvements in Solana?11:49 - Integration of Serum v314:32 - ​​Adoption of PsyOptions17:19 - Architecting the system22:11 - Liquidity mining vs. options trading26:27 - Background in trading options28:05 - DeFi vs. Traditional finance products30:56 - Gaming as a market32:56 - Exciting things out of the hackathon34:09 - Announcements for PsyOptions37:53 - If Solana could change one thing? DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Anatoly (00:09):Hey folks, this is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have with me Tommy and Taylor, co-founders of the PsyOptions protocol. Awesome to have you guys.Tommy (00:18):Thanks for having us.Taylor (00:19):Thanks for having us.Anatoly (00:21):Cool. So what's the origin story? How did you guys get into crypto and what made you build PsyOptions?Tommy (00:27):Crypto, it goes back to... I remember watching the Ethereum ICO, just being a broke college student, but felt we were too broke to actually throw anything into and that's a big regret, but that shaped up how we got into Solana later on. Really dove deep into everything back in 2017, right before the summer hype. And then in the summer hype, tried developing a little bit on Ethereum, doing some solidity development in the spare time, but I never jumped full time into it until PsyOptions. Taylor has a little bit of a different history with crypto.Taylor (01:03):Yeah. I've actually been full-time in crypto since late 2017, after Tommy and I shut down a previous business we started in school. We were looking for different things to do and I knew crypto had a lot of hype in 2017. I was like, "All right, this is definitely an industry I could see myself being a part of." I eventually took a job at Blockfolio and then as well as doing some freelance solidity development and then been full-time ever since.Anatoly (01:27):How did you guys meet? What was the genesis for you guys to go build PsyOptions?Tommy (01:32):Well, Taylor and I are twins, so we met a long, long time ago. We've always been hacking on ideas and stuff. And I guess, Taylor had his eye on Solana from 2018, right Taylor?Taylor (01:47):Yeah, pretty early on. I remember Multicoin writing about it. I was like, "Oh, this is actually a really sweet architecture, solves a lot of problems that we saw in Ethereum." And kept following before Mainnet beta was launched.Tommy (01:59):Yeah. And so we had been tinkering around, created a GitHub organization last summer, like the same one we're using now and just started reading the documentation. And then had a few projects we tried in the fall that never really took off. And then in October we were surfing with Tristan from FTX and he was just talking about Serum and everything that they were working on. So we knew what was in the pipeline and had that in the back of our mind. We did the first hackathon, did in place, built a trusted third party Oracle. And then after that had an issue with TradFi, trying to get API access to automate a options trading strategy, and that was what kicked it off. We were for fresh off that first hackathon, wanted a fresh idea, had our feet wet in Solana. And it was like, "Taylor, what if we just built options into the blockchain? We can get this API access built in. We have the order book already there, there's some basic infrastructure." And that was the genesis.Anatoly (02:59):That's awesome. Limited access to data was one of the reasons I started building this thing. Because I used to try to build stupid deep learning models on interactive brokers and you never have access to data. It's always even the quality is really suspects. It's like, "Do I really know that this is where things got executed? Or did they just copy and paste stuff from a database with a bunch of errors?"Tommy (03:26):Yep.Taylor (03:26):That's terrible. Yeah. If you want good data quality, you have to pay up for it. That's why Bloomberg Terminal is what 20, 25K a month. And if you're just the hobbyist or just trying stuff out, it's just not feasible to pay that much.Anatoly (03:41):Yeah. This is to me I think part of the beauty of the space right now, is that you can build up a lot of what finance is with just a bunch of hobbyist. It's like Linux. Linux in the '90s, you're competing with Microsoft, billions of dollars of engineers buildings stuff, but it's just a bunch of people over the weekend can compete. It's crazy.Tommy (04:03):Yeah. It's wild.Taylor (04:04):I think that's one of the best parts, all that coordination.Anatoly (04:07):So what are the challenges? You guys are one of the earliest I would say teams working on Solana. What have you guys seen, or what were the real painful points? What got better? What still sucks?Tommy (04:18):Oh man. All right. This first Solana season hackathon, the one that we won, we wrote everything in Solana native. I remember pinging [Armani 00:04:29] back in February saying, "Hey, I hear you're working on some framework, can I poke around? And checking out the repository." But it wasn't anywhere near complete or, I didn't dive in enough to use it for the hackathon. So now I rewrote the entire American option protocol in Anchor and it took me very little time to actually write that. So the development life cycle and just ease of getting up to speed, has improved ridiculously.Taylor (05:07):Yeah. And documentation has improved too.Anatoly (05:07):That's awesome. What is Anchor doing for you guys that Native, Rust isn't?Taylor (05:13):It's helped simplify our integration tests. So that's one thing that we try to do when we first started was, we wrote our own integration testing framework in Rust. I guess I wouldn't even call it a framework, it was pretty rough. But Anchor takes care of that. You're just writing your test in JavaScript, it's pretty easy to get up and running. And then also handling a lot of different edge cases that you wouldn't have to think about, checking account addresses and other things just to bring safety in. And it removes a lot of those headaches that, if you're just getting started and trying to hack something together, you're not really going to be thinking about.Tommy (05:48):Yeah. I think the account, de-serializing accounts, token accounts and things like that. You just have your accounts structure, passing that into the context and it de-serializes all that. The amount of little issues we had just because oh, we mis-ordered one thing in the array when we were refactoring, the accounts array, and it's like, "What the hell is going on?" And then you're trying to debug and add messages and stuff, because you're just like, "Oh man. And what is..." And then it all turns out to be a typo or you fat fingered moving one line up or, and it was... So the account structure and dealing with that is just incredibly easy. You don't have to de-serialize anything yourself.Well, anything that has a token, SPL token program or even some of the DEX infrastructure. And it makes cross program invocations a lot easier. I've been working with some teams for this hackathon, and wrote a bunch of cross program invocation examples for these teams to get up and running with PsyOptions pretty quickly. And it was just seamless for them to use our data structures and serialize it, de-serialize, because as long as we're all using the same framework, it works.Anatoly (06:56):Yeah. This was is my decision, so you can blame me, but I really didn't want to build a shitty framework. And until people started building on Solana, it was really hard to know, what do they need? I think it would've been worse if we built a bunch of code that nobody could build with, because it would've been incomplete. I'm going to say, it takes a lot of discipline to do that, versus laziness.Tommy (07:22):It makes sense to offload it on to the actual DAP developers. It's a different beast when you're programming the underlying system versus the actual just Solana runtime program. So it makes a lot of sense how Anchor came out and who really is leading it.Anatoly (07:40):Can you guys tell me what worked really well? Or what features or anything for any other Devs that when they're coming into building on Solana, what stuff actually feels like a superpower?Taylor (07:52):Well, one thing that's improved a ton is the SPL token program and how you manage the token accounts and whatnot. That's definitely something that a lot of the new developers on Solana don't have to deal with. But back then we were building into our UI the ability to have multiple accounts for the same SPL token and it was super frustrating and whatnot. So using those associated token accounts and other kind of, I guess you could call them rapper programs or things like that, that just improve the UX significantly. Understanding those and why they're there is pretty important when someone's getting started.Tommy (08:30):I think taking it a step further too, how does the associated token program work? And what's really under the hood is the program derived address. I put together some documentation for people starting to onboard to PsyOptions or related protocols. And I'm like, you need to read up all these Twitter threads, these documentations on PDAs, because there's just so many things you can do with a PDA that's very unique. You can get a mapping just to accounts, you can create a unique constraint. So for PsyOptions, there should never be... Right now, there's no reason to have more than one of the same option and the fungibility of those options are based on the expiration date, the strike price, the asset pair. And so we just have a PDA that is seated with those parameters and it creates this unique constraint.Anatoly (09:24):Oh, that's cool. So you encode the constraints as, basically hash it into the address.Tommy (09:30):Exactly.Taylor (09:30):Exactly.Anatoly (09:31):And the taker then has to satisfy those constraints to be able to take that trade.Tommy (09:36):No, not on the trade level, just on the general structure for creating the option. It's like, okay, if you want to spin up a BTC 70,000, USDC strike for the October 29th expiration, just that structure that creates that... because that's structure is the core structure of PsyOptions, the Psy American program. And that's what then controls the option TokenMint and writer TokenMint and how you dull out those option tokens. And so it's just there can never be more than one of those specific to those constraints. So it's separated from the trading concerns.Anatoly (10:14):Got it.Taylor (10:15):Yeah. I think you thinking of your stateless escrow. I thought that was a pretty cool proof of concept.Anatoly (10:21):Yeah. I wasn't sure that you guys already built... I think this idea has been around in crypto for a while, so I wouldn't be surprised if you guys use it too. But I like that idea that, because you don't want to generate infinite number of these markets, if everybody enters the same data, then it's going to spit out the same BTC month increment whatever, like May 2021 option or whatever you want.Tommy (10:47):Yeah. And we've seen it too. It's really useful to have these deterministic ways to look up an account address. So it's like, "Look, I can just check if this option market already exists by using these parameters, the PsyOptions market exists." And we also ran into some issues that we had to hack together, on the client side, because Serum doesn't have these kinds of constraints. And an adversary could come in and spin up multiple Serum markets for the same asset pair. And then when you're pulling that data from the chain on the client, it's like, "Well, which one is your UI using? Which one are these automated traders using? All that kind of stuff. How do you sync them up?"And so that was a pain point, and we had to whip together a package. But now with Serum's permission markets and some other stuff, we can now use PDAs to say, "This is deterministically how the UI is going to determine the market. Here's how everyone else should do it. These are the seeds." And then it keeps everyone in line in a more decentralized way, rather than having to have some NPM package with metadata and it's painful to maintain.Anatoly (11:54):Got it. That's cool. What actually runs the market? Is it a Serum Q, a Serum V2 or V3 Q?Tommy (12:03):Serum V3 right now, for the Americans. Yeah.Anatoly (12:05):Awesome. Man, that's super cool. How was that integration? Is that blood, sweat and tears still, or are the tooling itself around Serum getting better?Taylor (12:15):It's getting better.Tommy (12:16):Blood, sweat and tears.Taylor (12:17):Yeah, but it was definitely blood, sweat and tears. I think that's what took us the longest part in the original hackathon that we won, was doing the Serum integration. And we weren't even doing any cross program invocations to Serum at that point, it was literally just client site integration. And that was really difficult. No documentation, got to read through the source code. I think we even found some bugs in their type script package and had to patch it ourselves. So yeah, definitely blood, sweat, and tears there.Tommy (12:48):There's still room for improvement. I'm like drop in list every time as hackathon participants start asking, or users are complaining about settling funds. I'm just at a constant stream of, "Hey, we should document this and add a flow chart for that." Because all the customer surface is offloaded to the people using the Serum stuff, so we get that inflow of feedback from users and other developers building on top.Anatoly (13:12):Yeah. People don't realize how strapped every team is.Tommy (13:16):I agree.Anatoly (13:17):It's literally like three, four engineers at best to, no customer service, no nothing, just pure software, open source software. It's not like when you look at a market cap of something, you think there's a equivalent to market cap S&P 500 company with 30,000 engineers just all cranking away. Thank God it's not, honestly.Tommy (13:41):Yeah.Taylor (13:42):Yeah. It's got its ups and downs. At least you can move fast, it's not a bureaucratic process. But at the same time, customer support definitely dwindles and I think 70% of people are probably testing in production. So the end users are just going to have to deal with that and understand that's just the way things are done in crypto right now.Anatoly (14:03):I guess, how close are you guys to launch and what are the next blockers?Tommy (14:07):So we actually are on Mainnet trading with BTC and ETH markets right now. We have been live since the end of August, just with BTC and ETH for the September strike. Then we upgraded to a V2 of our American protocol with Serum permission markets, so we can eventually close those markets. And so that gives us the ability to open a bunch more. And so we're live with those, we're working with a couple other partners to get some SOL markets up pretty soon. So we'll probably announce that here.Anatoly (14:40):Awesome. What have you guys seen in terms of adoption, and how are people using it and has anyone surprised you with what they're doing?Tommy (14:49):It's tough right now from the retail side using our user interface. I think what the biggest thing that I'm excited... There's been a lot of great feedback. Options are not an easy instrument to use, managing your own positions is tough. And so we've gotten a lot of great feedback from the community and it's shaping what some of these projects that are work thing on during this hackathon. I think that's what's most interesting and surprising is these teams that are building on top and they're not user interfaces. These are protocols that are going to be managing certain strategies and rolling positions for users, and so you can have this more passive product. It's like a ribbon finance to the basic ones, where it's just selling covered calls and secured puts or things that.But there's a lot of plans, I don't want to leak their Alpha. But a lot of plans for additional products where it's more just, set it and forget it. And it has certain properties detailed out to hedge for various things, give you certain direction on volatility. And it'll make these... all these products, some more user friendly for retail, but also big institutions that are looking to hedge existing exposure.Anatoly (16:00):That sounds like you guys are building more of info level for options.Tommy (16:04):Yep.Anatoly (16:05):That's awesome.Taylor (16:06):Yeah. We chalk up the V1 American that we built as just a primitive, and as decentralize as possible. It doesn't rely on Oracles, it doesn't need pricing information. So the only dependency is the Solana runtime and SPL token program, I guess now Serum with the permission markets. But the original one had only SPL token as dependency.Tommy (16:29):Yeah. So there's capital inefficiency with the American style, because you can exercise at any time up until the expiration. So we're about to hopefully announce pretty soon, we have a European that we've architected and we're going to break ground on that and we'll crank it out pretty quickly. That will have a little bit more dependencies, but it'll be more capital efficient because it'll be auto exercised and we'll have a margining system built into it. And the American will continue on because we're going to build, I like to call it Carta for DeFi, but just a place where people... We whipped out a vesting contract the other week. And we'll be able to show people their tokens that are vesting, their options that are vesting, the ones that have currently vested and the options all in their portfolio and whether they should exercise them or not. It'd be less like trading based and more of just an interface for managing your portfolio of vesting stuff and options, so.Anatoly (17:33):That's awesome. How many engineers do you guys have?Tommy (17:38):We actually just hired another front-end guy today. So we're two full-time front-ends, and we hired another protocol developer, so we're two full-time protocol developers. Then we have a community guy and a marketing guy, and then couple of part-time and open source contributors.Anatoly (17:52):That's so small, I mean that's awesome. I feel this is the biggest thing in crypto, is how fast small teams can ship really sophisticated products.Tommy (18:04):Yeah. I think, as I've learned, the hardest thing nowadays or right now is, it's not the programming, it's the architecting the system to fit the runtime and developing the instruction set. And once you wrap your head around how that whole system works and you have your instruction set, writing the actual code is not that hard. If you actually take the time to just think and focus, and you have to have the knowledge and experience to understand that, it's pretty easy to start architecting a bunch of stuff and delegating and managing a little bit more.Taylor (18:35):The thing I will say on that though is that, the runtime changes here and there, but the changes aren't that drastic. But when you're using dependencies like Serum, Pyth, whatnot, those change a ton. And so you're seeing a ton of changes on Serum, so one week you might have architected something for Serum B3, sounds great. All of a sudden Serum updates to some new thing and that might change the optimal architecture for it. So you have to be nimble in order to just go with the flow as different protocols update, and as new versions come out and new architectures are viable.Anatoly (19:14):It's weird to think of immutable code still having dependencies. But something with Serum, you're so dependent on liquidity in those markets that if they move to V4, you have to update because you can't point to a empty market.Tommy (19:29):Yeah. We bring a lot the liquidity ourselves. Well, these are brand new markets that we spin up. It's not as much of a pain point, it's more just announcing and coordinating. But it's more of the European protocol and architecture, it depends on a lot of the stuff like... it doesn't depend heavily on the SPL token, contracts aren't represented as SPLs. And so it depends on this new architecture that they just announced, that Bonfida has been working on. So it's just interesting, you have to keep up to speed with what exists in the ecosystem, so you can constantly be like, "Is there an improvement? Can we squeeze something out of this is?"Anatoly (20:03):Is the European option, are you also planning for it to be Oracle free, or no Oracle?Tommy (20:08):No. We'll rely on an Oracle just for the exercise. We're wrapping up the architecture and probably just, we're going to develop this one totally open source from the scratch. I just put up the boiler plate repository and its open source. We're going to open source, or at least make public the architecture, so everyone can read and comment on it while we're just cranking it out in the next week and a half. So there's a Oracle dependency just on one instruction, just to actually lock in the index price, that would be for the expiration. But we don't see it being too risky of a dependency, considering it's not an instruction that has a lot going on so we can do a lot of checks. We could pull two different Oracles and reduce the potential pitfalls there.Anatoly (20:53):Yeah. This is a hard problem too. When an option is exercise it's still going to hit the Serum market to actually exercise the price?Tommy (21:03):No. So on the base layer, the European, it's just going to... essentially the architecture is locking in the price, and then users basically have to settle up the positions and collateral themselves.Anatoly (21:14):Got it.Tommy (21:14):The best way to describe this one is Deribit on chain. It's really just like P&L, not the full underlying.Anatoly (21:22):Okay. So you can actually settle in any collateral. You could have an option on SOL, but settle in wrapped ETH or whatever?Tommy (21:29):Well this one, it's actually going to be... well, it's going to settle in the currency that it's trading. So BTC, it's going to have this siloed market and account that holds all the BTC and manages the entire portfolio, margining for someone's BTC options. And so it has it's own realm of just, this is the BTC world. And everything settles in BTC, everything's traded in BTC and premiums are even in BTC, but then it just uses the USD index price to actually settle up on the strike. And then SOL would have its own world, with its own portfolio margins system. So they're not cross margined between all those at the moment.Anatoly (22:10):Got it. Is cross margining something you guys are also thinking about?Tommy (22:15):Yeah. It's one of those things where we want to just crank this out and ship fast, because it's improved from the existing architecture, for when it comes to a trading perspective. And then we'll discuss a more improved cross margining system.Anatoly (22:27):Do you think that there's a gap still in this idea that I think, what's popular on DeFi Ethereum is liquidity mining, and I just want to put my tokens and get yield? And is there a gap between that and options trading and central limit order books?Taylor (22:46):I think there's a knowledge gap. The closer you are to dealing with the primitives, the more knowledge you need to have, the more hands on you have to be in managing your positions and whatnot. So I think that reduces the addressable market or the end users that are willing to participate. And so that's why you have people building programs and tooling on up to manage the position, so it can be more passive. Because I think that's one of the biggest things that drove a ton of people to DeFi, is the passive yield, all the token incentive programs and whatnot. So I do think that there's a bit of a gap, but it's slowly being closed. And the more passive it can be, the more non crypto people or even crypto native people, but the less financially sophisticated you could say will come in and utilize DeFi.Anatoly (23:39):So you guys imagine that... or there's probably somebody already building this, where I have my token, I'm an LP, which is under the actual thing behind that position is a covered call or some other fancy strategy, iron condors or whatever, right?Tommy (23:58):Yeah. So there's a couple teams from the hackathon building that right now, actually.Anatoly (24:03):That's awesome.Tommy (24:04):That's what I'm really excited about. Because that's what we've seen is, there's decent order flow, I haven't looked at the volumes because we're just very focused on product. We know what the low hanging fruit is, so we're not focusing on the vanity metrics at the moment and not really talking about the TVL and whatnot. But it'll just increase order flow because these people can just get passive yield from covered call products, or they can hedge certain positions just by depositing tokens. And it's all going to be managing these underlying options and straddles and things like that.Anatoly (24:38):How long does it take to go from, let's say I wanted to build an iron condor or something that as a strategy, can I do that? Do you guys have examples already, reference implementations for things like that?Tommy (24:53):Are you talking as a protocol or as just a user, using the... like a client?Anatoly (24:58):As a, here's my DAP, I'll take tokens from LPs and then automatically generate the position on PsyOptions.Tommy (25:07):The hard part actually isn't to the generating the initial positions, the hard part is handling how they want to roll, if you're trying to do it over time, where they just can keep that open. So the generating the positions is super easy, placing the orders. We have examples, CPI examples in the repository for minting options, exercising, placing an order, opening a Serums open orders account, all that kind of stuff. Just been cranking out examples as people ask for them. And then, it's onto those teams to handle that really tough part of, how should we roll? There's certain concerns in there for manipulation. There's certain concerns for front running, there's certain concerns for eating through the order book and having to build your own TWAP into it and stuff like that, so.Anatoly (25:59):Yeah. Man, you guys are taking on some really tough challenges, that's cool. This is something that I wanted to get good at, trading. Trading options and deep learning into these things, but I got it to work.Taylor (26:15):Yeah. It's a full time job. That's why we try to focus on the primitive and lower layers and try to get that right. So then other teams can focus, if they're much more financially savvy or have of better trading backgrounds, can handle that. It's a full-time job to be a trader, to come up with those models, to build those positions and roll them, it takes a long time. And you constantly have to be updating them too.Anatoly (26:44):How long did you guys trade options before?Taylor (26:47):Not much. We're just retail traders. I interned at an investment bank once a while back, but to the extent of my full-time finance career, that was about it. And then we would trade options here and there, but nothing serious. And then, when we wanted to automate that option trading strategy, that would've been probably the first automated system we would've built. I don't think we built an automated option trading strategy before that.Tommy (27:15):Yeah. I would say we relate best with the retail, speculative, YOLO option users, rather than very sophisticated options traders. But it's been nice building this and winning that hackathon and getting some attention, because then those people show up. And we have some really smart TradFi people who have been around crypto, some really smart TradFi people who have never been around crypto, contributing to the thought leadership of where we should go, what's needed to get to certain structured products and things like that. And that's been super helpful because we've been early in Solana and have the engineering capabilities and knowledge to work with them of a translating their vision into a Solana architecture. And so we've just been helping as many teams as possible that have that background and can bring that knowledge. And then, that's why we're just like, "Look, we'll help you as much as we can because you're going to help us answer some of these questions that we don't know." So it's been good to fill out the team and the surrounding circles with that.Anatoly (28:23):Do you think that DeFi is something that... I always think of it as growing faster than TradFi versus replacing it. Do you think these products are good enough to compete with traditional finance, or are we just going to see more stuff being built on open finance because it's easier? I don't have to go talk to a CME to launch an option for my in-game bullets for my shooter game or something like that.Tommy (28:52):I think it will be just the fact that it's open and anyone can do it. Looking at the architecture here and designing an ideal architecture for the most capital efficiency system, it's just not really... You could do it in CeFi so much easier than you can do it in DeFi. I don't even know if it's truly possible. We're still just on the back burner trying to figure out how you could portfolio margin everything. I think a lot of teams that we've talked to are all thinking about that in the back burners. It's like, how do we margin against everything? So I think it's definitely moving faster. I think they will rival CeFi, a lot of these products, but I think they're still going to be both working hand-in-hand.Taylor (29:42):Yeah. I think both have their ups and downs. The speed that DeFi innovates because of the open source nature and things can be represented and it's all digitally native, it just makes the pace of innovation faster, also makes what you can build much faster. Like CeFi you're beholden to, not that you're not beholden to regulation in DeFi, but CeFi there's a lot more red tape. You got to jump through hoops in order to be able to launch a market or... You can't just launch your own equities exchange, it's takes tons of money and resources and whatnot. So it stifles innovation in that respect. So I think even if DeFi can't become as capital efficient as CeFi, you're still going to have more innovative products, more flexibility in what you can do with your assets, that at the end of the day, you might not need that capital efficient, high, super fast, low latency systems to do what you want to do with your assets. So I think there's a place for both. And I think DeFi is just going to continue to innovate and outpace growth in terms of TradFi.Anatoly (31:00):Well, our goal is to get that latency to be as low as physics allow, and then we're competitive.Tommy (31:10):That's why we're here.Taylor (31:10):Let's do it, man.Anatoly (31:11):Won't rest until we're building neutrino emitter detector. I just think with gaming especially, the first massive multiplayer games instantly within six months had a market for the digital items there. As soon as you get something like Star Atlas or equivalent, like World of Warcraft that's decentralized with all these assets on chain, I think the idea of options as a service, people are just going to, "Well, I got whatever... I got more gold that people want to use because this game is hot right now." People are going to definitely spin up those markets, it's just going to happen.Tommy (31:48):100%. We've been talking about game... we're gamers ourselves, and I haven't played a game since I really dove into Solana development 11, 12 months ago. But I'm hoping to get back to it once Star Atlas and Aurory and all those other... Kaiju cards, everyone starts actually launching the game play, I'll jump back to gaming. But we've been thinking about it a lot and what could be done with this American primitive, and that got us into talking to other teams and other games, just to see what's out there. And then I actually got connected with Metaplex and built out a contract that they just announced that's focused on gaming. And it all stemmed from trying to think about, these games, everyone's so early and not really thinking about how these game assets are going to plug and play into DeFi protocols and things like that. And there's still just so much work and research that needs to be done, and some infrastructure needs to be built for it all to work perfectly together.Taylor (32:42):Yeah. I think the interoperability for gaming is still... there's still going to be some rough edges there, because it's harder to build standards across games. But I think you'll have a few games come out and maybe they'll have transferability between games and whatnot, but it's going to take some time and some trial and error before we get to this on chain metaverse where you can transfer assets between different game worlds and whatnot. But I do think that is going to be one of the ultimate killer applications on blockchain.Anatoly (33:19):What are you guys excited about out of this hackathon?Tommy (33:22):Oh, for me, it's really just the stuff we've mentioned with the structured products, passive yield products, all that kind of stuff, being built on top of PysOptions. I'm very heads down on product and everything at the moment. So aside from the people that are ping me, asking me for help, I don't really know what else is being built.Anatoly (33:42):Yeah, likewise. I see NFTs being launched and then I'm deep in the trenches and optimizations. I guess that's good. It means that there's more stuff to do than you have time, so you started actually going heads down and working.Tommy (34:00):But there's a lot. The roadmap with just these teams alone, is ridiculous. We have so many products that we want to whip out on top, and hoping to launch the first few in the next week or two. And then the framework's there, it'll be a little bit easier.Taylor (34:14):Well, it's just fun to see people building on software that you've built. I'm sure you and the rest of the Solana team get excited as new projects come out and new people innovate. And I think that's one of the more fun things to do, is just sit and watch what people come up with because you can't come up with every idea yourself, so might as well open source stuff and have community run with it.Anatoly (34:33):For sure. What should we be looking out for? Do you guys have any announcements you want to leak?Tommy (34:40):Oh man. SOL options coming soon. Passive yield products that will make it extremely easy for people to get volatility exposure or generate yield. And this is yield that's not going to go away. A lot of these pools are based on rewards, and API is based on rewards and things that will dry up and aren't sustainable. But the volatility is a little bit more sustainable in a sense. Sure volatility will decrease over time, but.Anatoly (35:09):So these are like covered call strategies, basically?Tommy (35:12):The first few are the most simple covered call and secured put strategies. But then there's going to be a few other vaults coming out once these are launched, then it'll be focus on a few other vaults that have different strategies. Eventually, we started talking to some other teams like Symmetry, because we want to get a good crypto index, because then if we get liquid index options, we can create a nice volatility index for certain baskets. So that's all on the horizon. And so, you need that rolling and rebalancing and infrastructure, and that's what we've been working on the past few weeks, or other teams have been working on. And then it's formulas for just managing array of positions.Anatoly (35:57):What is your development process like? How do you guys go to build test and ship?Taylor (36:03):In terms of roadmap and how we determine what to work on, it's pretty ad hoc, things change up weekly, biweekly. But we try to run in two week sprints, at least just pick like, "Okay, what... base on user feedback, check GitHub for issues." Obviously anything that's blocking usage is number one priority. And then it's, "All right. What do we want to see built? What do our partner teams need, and how can we get them going?" I don't know Tommy, you have anything to add to that?Tommy (36:35):Yeah. Protocol development too. I'd sit and focus and start drafting up a full architecture doc with the instruction sets and potential functions that are needed, black box some stuff, just to make it a little bit easier and then put a to-do to dive in later. And then you have this whole instruction set and a general outline and framework, and you know it fits into the Solana runtime because you've made sure that the constraints are handled. And then I'll dive into running a test driven development process with Anchor, just doing full integration test. You end up writing a lot more test code, but I just find that the confidence level is so much higher. You can refactor and upgrade versions and you're just so of confident in your code when you have all those tests, so. And then, it cuts down the time from DevNet testing, where everyone just puts up a contract and then just relies on interacting it to test it. Especially when you're building a primitive, you want to have all those cases handled.Anatoly (37:36):In your use case specifically with options, what bug are the most worrisome? Is it overflow or actual logic and economic?Tommy (37:45):Probably logic and economics. The American protocol, overflow is not an issue, not really. We do all the check map of course, but it's not an issue. Maybe if we get some weird [Altcoins 00:37:58] eventually trading, then we'll have some weird issues. But I'd really just say logic, economic attacks, things like that, when we get into the capital efficient Europeans that has the margining system built into the base layer, and liquidation built in the base layer. And just always thinking about account management. You have that limitation of number of accounts you can pass in, and how to architect around that.Anatoly (38:19):So if Solana could change one thing, what would it be? Or anything, and things-Taylor (38:24):Two things.Anatoly (38:29):... two things. Finite numberTaylor (38:29):Fixed account length. If we could make it-Tommy (38:32):Oh, sure yeah.Taylor (38:33):... dynamic sized, I think that would be great.Anatoly (38:36):The length of the data.Taylor (38:37):Yeah.Anatoly (38:37):Okay.Taylor (38:38):The account data.Anatoly (38:39):That's actually... I don't know if you guys saw, but believe-re growing reallocation from the program itself or the account that it owns, I think it might be live already in 1.8.Tommy (38:49):Yeah. I saw ...Taylor (38:51):I think I saw the PR for that.Anatoly (38:52):Okay.Taylor (38:53):But that's one thing that... Sorry, but when people jump over from ETH to Solana, that's probably the biggest gotcha, that we're like, "Oh crap. I can't readjust or create a larger array, more mapping data, whatever." So that's one thing. And then also the number of accounts you can pass to an instruction [crosstalk 00:39:14].Anatoly (39:13):In a transaction. Yeah.Taylor (39:15):... open up more. Yeah.Tommy (39:17):And I think 1.8 handles a lot of these headaches, but you still, when you're trying to think, for the long term, just the limitations in general. I'm assuming they're always going to be there, the number of accounts you can pass in, can't be-Anatoly (39:32):109, the goal is to double the transaction size basically. So the number of bytes that a transaction can maximum size. That means you can double the user data or encode more, put more accounts in there. So there's always a limit because of the real time nature of the system. You're not submitting an arbitrary large transaction that then the block producer decides, "Okay, I'm going to pick this one." You're really like, "How do I write to the block right now?" And making sure that doesn't slow everything down, is a challenge. But really cool, man, you guys are shipping like crazy. It's awesome. It blows my mind that you guys were hackathon team that is now... there's teams in the hackathon building on top of PsyOptions.Tommy (40:23):I love it.Anatoly (40:24):Yeah.Tommy (40:24):I've been doing office hours, every Tuesday and Thursday, just letting people come in and ask questions because it's just nice to see people building on top. And we're going to do whatever we can to help them out and keep them there.Anatoly (40:36):That's super cool. Man, really good to catch up with you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Is there anything you want to add for the listeners in the final bit?Tommy (40:46):Yeah. I would say, check out PsyOptions to trade your BTC and ETH right now, SOL coming soon. And then we'll be announcing an under collateralized European protocol pretty shortly, going to try and crank that out as quickly as possible.Taylor (41:00):Yeah. And get in touch. There's no shortage of projects that we can dream of and I'm sure others are too, but happy to help any team out that we can.Tommy (41:08):Yeah. And if you're a protocol too, looking to do option liquidity mining with American PsyOptions, reward contributors with options, or use the PsyOptions vesting contract, we're trying to get that. The vesting contract's a unique one, where you can delay your vest. The recipient has the option to delay their vest if the issuer grants it. So that way they can keep pumping the vesting and the potential taxable event. Not an accountant, so don't take that tax advice. Not financial advice.Anatoly (41:39):Not accounting advice, not financial advice. That's awesome.Tommy (41:42):Yeah.Taylor (41:42):No advice.Anatoly (41:44):That's super cool. Well, thank you guys.Tommy (41:46):Thank you.Taylor (41:47):Thanks for having us

Larry Cermak joined The Block as one of the first employees with the mission to provide professionals with accurate information about crypto. He now leads a 30-person research team that delivers insights to institutional customers.00:09 - Intro00:20 - Larry Cermak’s origin story / His work at The Block08:25 - The fundamentals of Bitcoin16:03 - The value of SushiSwap19:35 - Investing based on Memes23:42 - Market Value for future gains in Crypto26:12 - Will NFTs be backing internet money?28:44 - Thoughts on Algorithmic Stablecoins31:00 - Regulation in the US34:47 - Decentralization and tokens in the context of regulation39:45 - Volume of users / social networksDISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Anatoly (00:09):Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Larry Cermak, who's the VP of Research at The Block. Awesome to have you, man.Larry Cermak (00:18):Nice to be on, it's a pleasure.Anatoly (00:20):Yeah, so tell me your origin story. How'd you get into crypto?Larry Cermak (00:24):Yeah, it's probably slightly longer. But really high-level, I got involved in late 2016, I was in college in the US and was thinking about what to do my thesis on and Bitcoin seemed like one of the more obvious options, to not make it incredibly boring, so I just decided to go with that. And throughout the research process, I just kind of found that there isn't good research about Bitcoin, just in general crypto. There was either the super bullish people that were like all in on Bitcoin, or super bearish academics, and there nothing in between, and I felt like I can fill the gap a little bit.So after I published that research, I shared it publicly as well with a few people, and based on that I got my first job offer to work at Diar which is a research company, focusing only on crypto. So I worked there for a couple of years, and really just tried to focus on data driven research, which now it sounds kind of obvious, but back then it just wasn't very common. Most people were just looking at the really simple metrics and munging data, but mostly it was just price discussion, price predictions, all that stuff. And we were really looking at just analyzing the market a little bit more fundamentally, that sounds even more silly now looking back.And I got lucky that in 2017 when I joined full time, like early 2017 I joined full time, and that's when everything popped off massively, and it was just a bunch of shit ICOs, like a lot of sketchy stuff. I consciously started looking more into these projects, so I was one of the people that were kind of cautioning against some of the ICO stuff, and it was a lot of fun but I was quite skeptical back then still. So actually, a lot of people who have followed me for a while, they know initially I was a no-coiner, I had no crypto, and I was convinced that initially actually that a lot of this is just kind of hype mania, it's just all like overblown massively. But something really drew me into it, and it was mostly the permissionless nature, ability for anyone to participate, but what really I didn't like was just the hype around it, the marketing, the emptiness, and all that stuff.So I over-focused on that I think initially, but after some time, I realized that that's probably not what this is all about. Initially, I didn't think that it was necessarily important for most projects to have tokens and I was very skeptical that most tokens need a project, and I started massively changing my mind on this with the DeFi beginnings. So early 2020 my mind started completely changing on most of the space and I stared allocating a little bit more, and now I also do seed investing privately. And obviously, I lead the research department at The Block which is now 25 researches, probably the largest research team in crypto.Anatoly (03:33):So you went from Bitcoin skeptic to full shit-coiner.Larry Cermak (03:38):Kind of, yeah. It's a little bit concerning honestly.Anatoly (03:42):In four years.Larry Cermak (03:44):Yeah, I don't think I was really a massive Bitcoin skeptic, I was just skeptical of everyone is just so positive, and Bitcoin maximalists, I just could not handle that. When you just start using really bad arguments, just kind of shit-post and being really negative about everything other than Bitcoin and not being open-minded, that really pissed me off and I wasn't open to it.Then I was like relatively active in the Ethereum community early on and DeFi. We had Teo on the team initially who was one of the people the most involved in DeFi early on, he's now the Director of Strategy at Uniswap, and he definitely showed us all on the research team why this makes sense. And when I really started understanding that these tokens are not just useless, they can actually be used for real things, and they do get closer to almost equity in some ways, even though obviously a lot of them try not to, but when you have some sort of a claim and some sort of cashflows, that's when it gets interesting to me. And governance obviously as well, but that's when I really completely started flipping.Larry Cermak (04:57):But yeah, you're kind of right, I went from a skeptical no-coiner to then kind of a shit-coiner now, like spreading seed investments that I like.Anatoly (05:06):Do you still believe in this idea of sound money, or?Larry Cermak (05:10):So a lot of Ethereum community members think that Bitcoin is just a meme, it's going to go away, I actually don't believe that myself. I do believe that what's really powerful about Bitcoin is that it's been around for the longest time and it's very hard to compete against what it has, which is basically just the belief of a lot of people, and it's difficult to break that. And then you also have a lot of buy-in recently from, not only hedge funds, but also larger institutional investors, and that counts for a lot more than just blockchain, even though it sounds silly, something that's established as internet money and a lot of people pushing for it is really powerful.So yeah, I still kind of believe in that and I don't think that Bitcoin is going to be surpassed by Ethereum anytime soon, I actually have a bet going with Kyle from Multicoin about that. But yeah, generally I believe there is some merit to it, but I definitely also believe that people should be more open-minded, and because a lot of people are close-minded, they are missing on a lot of really obvious opportunities. Really my bread and butter is exploiting these things, when people underestimate something, and when there is actual merit to it that they don't see because of some reason or another, that's when I usually perform really well.Anatoly (06:35):Yeah, that's digging for alpha man, that's real work.Larry Cermak (06:40):Yeah. But yeah, The Block's research team, when I started obviously it was just two people, and now we have 25 full time researchers that a lot of them digged that up for me now thankfully. It is a lot of hard work like doing a lot of that myself, but now there's a massive team behind me. It's going really well, like we're reaching a lot of institutional customers as well, and the market just exploded massively this year for institutional access.Anatoly (07:08):That's amazing. So 25 researchers at The Block, how many people total?Larry Cermak (07:15):Around 70 or something, 75 maybe. But The Block initially, even when we started, I joined one of the first employees like 2018, and the vision was always to go through all the noise and bullshit and price predictions, and SEO plays and all the click bait nonsense, and try to go through that and have more data driven, research oriented coverage on the news side. We started with that and then eventually turned into actually a research product that just mainly focused towards institutional customers. But obviously, the news part is still a really important part of the business, it's what most people know, the institutional product is not really accessible for regular retail customers.And it's been a really, really fun ride, just going through this in the last three years. I don't think people realize how really difficult it is to go from nothing to building a media company that's recognized by people and somewhat respected. It's something that took a lot of hard work, and it's a very thankless business, like media, it doesn't usually make too much money, it's something that's really undermonetized in a lot of ways. So that's why we're going more into research, more into data, and just going after the institutional customers because they just have deeper pockets and they're more sophisticated, which is easier.Anatoly (08:44):What are the fundamentals with something like Bitcoin, something like money? It's just such a dumb idea for somebody that's like a value equity investor that's looking at the Amazon.Larry Cermak (08:56):It's a really good question, a lot of it is just a common belief that this is worth something. If you ask the same question about a lot of other things, you're going to arrive at the same answer, it's basically like the value is because a lot of people believe in it. Similarly with gold, like who's using gold for stuff, very little people for jewelry and chips and all that. Most people don't care about that, most people use it because they believe it will retain value and because they believe there is some sort of a scarce supply that's somehow protecting their investment.And it's Bitcoin, it's something similar, where you have a lot of really, really religious supporters who are the holders of the last resort who are just never going to sell, that creates a pretty powerful price for a lot of these things. And then on top of that, you also have guaranteed fixed supply, which obviously I think there are going to be some issues about in the future, but it is a meme that people buy, it is a meme that people believe in, and I think that in itself is more powerful than-Anatoly (09:58):But people don't write research reports on gold, or fundamentals of gold, or how gold is going to get more gold.Larry Cermak (10:06):... Yeah, no, I agree. And I think it's like funny, we started the research firm three years ago, and since then what can you really research about Bitcoin? We've done obviously a few research pieces about mining, and few like micro looks basically on how Bitcoin is performing, but ultimately there really isn't much you can research. It's more so about just like enough people believing, and the better the buy-in is and the longer Bitcoin survives, I think the better the likelihood that it will continue surviving, is kind of my thesis. But there are a lot of issues obviously, like it's still not exactly figured out how everything is going to incentivized when there is not many subsidies anymore, and a lot of people just don't want to answer these things right now, because they just put it off.But generally, yeah, there isn't much to research, we don't research much. What we also do from time to time is just explain what Bitcoin is, explain how it works, to just institutional customers that want to learn just fundamentally what it is. But generally yeah, if you want to dig a little bit deeper, really like Bitcoin mining is the only thing where look at a lot of data and analyze how that's going, everything else not much honestly.Anatoly (11:19):Part of this research right is to give you some ability to predict price I would imagine, like why would I care about Bitcoin, is because I hope that it doesn't crash or it goes up, something. So where does that come from?Larry Cermak (11:36):It just comes from people that... and I think that this is somewhat justified, let's see what's going on around us for the last two years and see that inflation is spiking while a lot of people have been denying that this is going to happen. It's just like this belief of finally having control over something, something like being programmed before, is a powerful concept that a lot of just hedge fund investors and institutional investors just buy into.Anatoly (12:02):Is it like a fundamental though? Are we going to have accounting standards for how much of a religious belief is spread?Larry Cermak (12:15):I think that by itself is somewhat fundamental, like why are people investing in gold, you can be asking the same questions. Central banks have some gold, but ultimately it's just because enough people believe that it will retain value, and it has done that relatively well historically. And as we are moving, everything as you know is now moving to the digital world, everything that used to be physical is somehow transforming into the digital world, and there's probably no reason why that shouldn't happen to money either.And I think fundamentally, there also is some value to Bitcoin not changing that much. A lot of people make fun of it and I think it is kind of funny as well, there is not much innovation in Bitcoin, but also that it's one of the benefits, where you have something that's totally predictable, you have something that you know what to expect from. I kind of buy that as well, I think Bitcoin is one of the most boring things that you can invest in, but it's also the thing that usually gets people in the door, and it's always when friends come to me and when they say what they invested in, it's almost always Bitcoin first, just because it's talked about the most.It's kind of like also the most safe, if you think about it. Everything else is kind of still unclear, even Ethereum, even Solana, it's not totally clear if all this is going to end up working out and if there's ever going to be some larger issues. Whereas with Bitcoin, it's a lot of more guaranteed that if people keep having this belief and if something is digitally scarce, it will probably retain the value in the future. So yeah, it is kind of ridiculous, but almost everything is a meme recently, so why not Bitcoin as well.Anatoly (14:02):Well, I mean it's weird, again, we're not looking at a company even like Google or Facebook, which has people and memes, or Twitter, but they still have like cashflow.Larry Cermak (14:14):Yeah, but Bitcoin was the first as well, which in itself has a lot of value. For every project, if you look at everyone who was always the first, even in crypto, there is always a big premium to that. And I don't think it matters too much if there are cashflows and if there are real people, it just matters if enough people believe that this will retain the value in the future and if enough people do.I think like Tesla was a massive fundamental shift, like we saw that with our customers on the research side, it absolutely exploded after the announcement, just institutional interest, more companies inquiring into what Bitcoin is, more companies thinking about treasury management. Those things really matter, and it's hard to go back from them.Anatoly (14:59):Can you like measure that? Can you measure how many people believe that Bitcoin is safe or like an inflation fund? You're literally just testing how many people are part of the religion basically.Larry Cermak (15:20):I think you can say something similar about Ethereum, probably about Solana as well, you always need some sort of a belief. Of course, there is some backdrop of some sort of cashflow, some fee generating, but it's the same shit as people saying oh, I'm only investing in cashflow generating DeFi projects, but ultimately who cares. Ultimately, if the price goes down generally over the market, it doesn't matter if you have cashflows or not, everything is going to crash. It's just like a general belief in the market overall.Anatoly (15:48):Especially if they're marked in the token itself, then if the price goes down, so do the cashflows.Larry Cermak (15:58):Exactly, yeah. So a lot of TVL metrics and all the revenue metrics, and not only that, but we've talked about this before as well, but a lot of the revenue or what people call revenue is basically just going to the participants, like LPs, it's not even distributed in any way. So a lot of this thing, I think it just doesn't matter too much, what's important is social belief. It really is, it does sound ridiculous, even to people on the outside, but when more people are buying into it, it is basically a Ponzi but it's really like a well working Ponzi.Anatoly (16:32):You said it. What about something like SushiSwap? What is the value there?Larry Cermak (16:42):I think SushiSwap is interesting, and the value is your belief that this will continue existing in the future, that the people involved in SushiSwap, the developers will figure out ways how to get some value out of the ecosystem. And even though I said it's kind of bullshit, it is, but it does have some claim to cashflows, unlike Uniswap at the moment.But yeah, the value is just you believing that the currently associated developers and the community will just build something that will end up sticking around. So right now, a lot of people are betting on the fact that they're developing an NFT platform to compete with OpenSea, they also have a token launching platform, it's always just going to be a bet on the people involved with the protocol and on the community.I think that's one theme that I see constantly, time and time again, crypto is very much about the community, it's very much about engaging with the community, listening to what they want. I think what SushiSwap has shown even though it was really, really cold early on, for some really good reasons as well, is that it does listen to what people actually want, because if they listen to what people want, they will get more support, they will get more public support, price usually is pretty reflective of that. So that value is just like betting on this being around for a longer period of time, adjusting to the market, so if people figure out that AMM is not the right way to go and it's [inaudible 00:18:17] based exchange, they're betting on the fact that they'll be able to pivot to something that is meaningful. I think that's a relatively reasonable bet, but SushiSwap is still giving out, or was giving out a lot of incentives. What a lot of people don't realize or maybe don't want to realize is that if you look at how much they're giving out in incentives and how much they're actually generating in revenue or cashflows or whatever, it's usually negative, even for the most successful protocols, because it's still right now-Anatoly (18:50):Like Bitcoin even.Larry Cermak (18:51):... Yeah. Bitcoin is slightly different, where you're ultimately burning energy to prove something. But yeah, it is similar.Anatoly (19:00):So why couldn't Sushi become the meme for internet money or a store of value?Larry Cermak (19:07):I just think because Bitcoin was the first, it's the most established, it has probably closest properties to something like gold which is also a meme that people believe in. I think it potentially could, it's just unlikely. Ethereum could potentially replace Bitcoin at some point if enough people believe that that will happen, but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. If I was betting someone, and I think I bet Kyle that this is not going to happen by the end of this year which is ridiculous, I don't know why he made that bet, but even in the next three or five years, I don't think that's going to happen.Anatoly (19:47):I'm a logical person, I'm an engineer, this stuff doesn't make sense to me, so I try to break it down into things. The pieces that I see is that there's the technology to coordinate shared state, Makimoto, BFT, whatever, and then there's the people participating in that shared state, and the size of the people is that super connected social network and the technology is the piece of tech that does it.Larry Cermak (20:13):I mean, look at equities right now, no one fucking cares about the fundamental value, no one is investing based on that. People are investing based on meme, based on what they believe the future will be. So even something as dumb as Tesla, no one is looking at the cashflows, everyone is looking at the potential to become something larger in the future, and I think that's the same in crypto. People are looking at Bitcoin as being able to capture a lot of that. If you have someone that's right now, institutional investor or a big hedge fund, and they're looking for instruments to hedge the inevitable inflation that's coming in the market as central banks kind of went nuts in the last two years, what are your options right now? You're probably not buying Ethereum, you're probably not buying Solana. Maybe you're buying some gold, but probably you're already overexposed to gold in some way, and then also the upside in gold is probably relatively small, it hasn't really moved, it's not volatile, the opportunity isn't that great.So if you're looking at it from like a really pragmatic approach, and I talk to these people so I know how they're thinking and this is how they're thinking, I mean it just works that way, it doesn't matter if there's no logic to it, what matters is enough people just buying into this meme and buying it because they believe that the price in the future will appreciate.Anatoly (21:40):Because the meme will get stronger so you get more people into that?Larry Cermak (21:44):Yeah.Anatoly (21:44):So if these are like memes, these are basically social networks.Larry Cermak (21:49):How much of the recent price appreciation in Solana do you think it's because of strong memes and because of strong community buy-in? Maybe you think differently.Anatoly (21:59):I can be totally honest, I think it's purely people comparing us to Ethereum. And they're like, well Ethereum is more and this [crosstalk 00:22:07] good.Larry Cermak (22:07):Exactly. And then if you make this comparison to Bitcoin and gold, it's exactly the same stuff. People are like, oh shit, what if this goes up to the gold's market cap, the upside is still 5 to 10x, or whatever it is. It's just like, that's how people think, and I think that's exactly right, you're totally right, it's because people in Solana or a lot of investors in Solana, they're like all of a sudden, what if there is 5% chance that Solana takes Ethereum's users and replaces Ethereum in some way?Anatoly (22:39):They're not doing the fundamental valuation comparison of what is the actual value of this thing to the world? What is the benefit derived from it even?Larry Cermak (22:51):Again, we can go back to this in almost everything, what's the benefit of any company, it's to satisfy shareholders, and people don't really care about cashflows anymore lately.Anatoly (23:05):Sure, but we can remove the cashflow component, maybe in a fully super connected peer to peer system, that doesn't make any sense. Maybe there is no cashflow because you don't have like a centralized coordinator that's doing it, it is purely peer to peer, then how do you measure what is the fundamental value that this thing is providing to the world? Like if this didn't exist, is the world poor? Can we even say that?Larry Cermak (23:34):Yeah, probably not, but again, you can this about everything. A lot of things don't need to exist.Anatoly (23:40):I can say that about Tesla, I can say if Tesla didn't exist the world would be poorer, because there would be fewer electric cards, high quality electric cars. I can clearly say that.Larry Cermak (23:54):I guess so. But the utility is always a small aspect of why people are buying into it, it's more so just your bet that in the future, this will become more important. And as people are grasping with how much inflation is hitting right now, there just aren't many other options, and I think that's really the main reason.Anatoly (24:14):So I can see price being inflated due to... there's so much money available, so much capital that is seeking future gains, that anything with potential for upside is now overvalued. But maybe not overvalued, maybe it's just market value, it's just the market value for future gains is so large right now. But I can still kind of look back at the dot.com era and look at like okay, Amazon was overvalued, Microsoft was overvalued, because there was a huge crash, but I could see that if I remove this thing from the world, the world is poor. Are we there yet with crypto, 10 years in?Larry Cermak (24:58):I think honestly we're getting there. I think crypto now, in the last two years, showed us there's potential to do good, which is basically giving access to something that they didn't have before, and tangibly making their life better for one reason or another, and also just giving people access to this new asset class. I think those are really powerful concepts by itself. And on top of that, you add like composability of all these different protocols working together.I think yeah, I would say if crypto wasn't here, the world would probably be worse of, and I also think that the longer crypto is around, the higher the chance that it's not going to go away. I'm very sure, I can't imagine a world where in like three years, we bump into each other on the street and we say, holly fuck, this crypto thing was dumb and it's not around anymore, I just can't see that.Anatoly (26:04):We're all infected with the same virus.Larry Cermak (26:06):The concept of crypto makes a ton of sense to me, and it is definitely empowering people, even in jurisdictions that normally don't have that much access to the financial system. For example, we have a researcher from Kenya on the team, and we only pay her in stablecoins I believe, or it might be crypto, and we initially tried to pay her through the regular banking system and it was almost not possible. She's just one example, but there's tens of thousands of examples like this, where you have people all of a sudden getting access to something that they couldn't access before, and even if crypto just helped with that, that by itself, I love that, I love giving people more equal access to stuff.Anatoly (27:01):Okay, I'll throw some theories out and see if they stick. I think NFTs are a clear good to the world because any luxury spending that we move away from, like fast cars that burn fuel or penthouses into digital goods, is good for the world. Let people waste their money on digital things, because it costs nothing to create, that's great. So that's one theory.Anatoly (27:35):The other one is, if we are moving into post-capitalist society totally where everything is plentiful, what would people be doing? They would just be messing around in the digital metaverse, this is all just part of it.Larry Cermak (27:56):No, I think those are pretty good theories. I think it is kind of fascinating how you had this shift from NFTs basically being in like a digital flux, the most luxurious NFTs only owned by the elite, that's really, really interesting to me. I remember 2017, I was looking at CryptoKitties, and none of that made sense to me, and even with CryptoPunks, I was probably one of the biggest CryptoPunks skeptics as well, even earlier this year. The price is probably like 100x or 1000x since then, it makes almost no sense to me fundamentally as well, but it's what it is.I think NFTs are quite similar to Bitcoin, Bitcoin is basically one of the original NFTs. It's the same thing, you're trying to collect as many of them as you can, and because you believe it's something that will have some value, and similar things are happening with NFTs. And yeah, maybe it is removing some luxury overspending on dumb cars and watches and all that, but who knows, I don't know if this is going to stick, but it seems sticky so far.Anatoly (29:08):My theory is that we're going to see internet money be a perpetual basis trade of a NFT floor market, that's going to be the asset that's backing internet money. It's not going to be Bitcoin, it's not going to be ETH, it's going to be entirely backed by culture, [crosstalk 00:29:32].Larry Cermak (29:36):Yeah, maybe. But I think that you kind of hit it on the head, a lot of this is just literally backed by culture, backed by communities, backed by culture, and that's what matters.Anatoly (29:45):Do you think algorithmic stablecoins can make it?Larry Cermak (29:48):Oh, no. Again, there are going to be people that are going to say, I'm super dumb and not looking at it from the right perspective, maybe I am, but I think algorithmic stablecoins are fundamentally broken. You're always relying on some sort of demand to be the backdrop of stabilizing these things, and I'm just not skeptical that that's going to hold up in really maybe not as favorable market conditions long term, and I have not seen a single evidence to show that these things will be resistant to some sort of scrutiny in the future. That being said, stablecoins are probably going to be regulated by the US government, and maybe if you create enough demand for these, it can sustain for some time. A lot of the algorithmic stablecoins have performed incredibly well, because they're really like, what happens if stablecoins are called securities in the US now, it severely impacts the rest of the crypto space. And when you look at something like DAI, it's backed massively by centralized stablecoins as well, and then all of a sudden what's the alternative. If none of the centralized stablecoins are allowed to be used by investors in the US, even on Solana, a lot of the DeFi apps still use USDC and on Ethereum as well.I think that's why there's a lot of interest, is because people are realizing that centralized stablecoins are obviously prone to be regulated, and if they are, it's going to affect how the rest of the space operates. DAI hasn't shown that it's actually really decentralized, especially now that it's backed massively by centralized stable coins, and you don't really have any other options at the moment if you want to just transact value in some sort of stable instrument. But generally I think the idea of algorithmic stablecoins is never going to work. It's much better to just use Ethereum, or Solana, or Bitcoin as [inaudible 00:32:06] value and just [inaudible 00:32:07] if stablecoins are regulated, at least that's my belief.Anatoly (32:11):How much do you guys spend researching regulation in the US specifically?Larry Cermak (32:17):Not much on the research side, mostly on the news side, we have people in Washington that talk to these guys. But I guess the problem with researching regulation generally is that it's super opaque, like you don't see into it. Unless you talk to people and actually ask them what they're thinking, you don't really know. We know some people who are talking to the SEC, we know some people that are talking to CFTC and some regulators, and we have a directional idea of what will happen, but ultimately none of us can know until this is actually going to go into effect. We sometimes talk to the lobbying firms as well and they also don't know, it's a black box completely.But I think what most people that we talk to that actually are in the know or some sort of insiders, they agree that some sort of regulation is coming. The SEC obviously, there have been tons of indications already, but the SEC will do something, the question is how severe this will be. And it is very likely to me right now that within the next year or a year and a half, there will be some sort of a framework for crypto assets from the SEC, so they can actually with some sort of certainty know if it could be a security, or if it just a utility coin, or a governance coin.And there are also some serious indications that stablecoins are going to be in some way regulated. I've heard rumors that there are a lot of people who are trying to label it as securities, but none of that is final, and I don't think we're going to find out until actually that gets released in some way.Anatoly (34:00):Yeah, there is this like a lot of big uncertainty. You don't think there's any hope of US actually just creating clear, simple rules that just open the space up to innovation? Are you both bearish on regulation and bullish on crypto at the same time?Larry Cermak (34:22):I think the US is likely going to release some guidelines, the SEC will likely release some clear guidelines for what is and what isn't a security, I think that's going to be coming. That could be positive in some way, it's probably going to label a lot of the governance coins as securities, it could be negative short term as well.Generally, yeah, I'm pretty bearish on US regulation. What I've seen anecdotally is a lot of people just getting out of there. I frankly don't understand why DeFi teams are based in the US, why Uniswap team is based in Brooklyn, it makes no sense to me. I think if you're trying to build a really censorship resistant DeFi protocol you should get out of the US, because there is uncertainly for you right now and also for people to invest in your protocols, there's just too much uncertainty. And I think a lot of the future in crypto will be anonymous developers developing these protocols, I'm pretty convinced about that as well, that this eventually will shift into pseudo-anonymous developers that are not doxed. I don't think this will happen to like L1s, so the networks that will be securing these protocols, but I do believe that those that are really trying to empower people without being limited by sometimes nonsensical regulations, I believe those will have to be build by pseudo-anonymous developers, in some way or another, and then just decentralize early. I think that that's going to solve some of the issues. There are obviously some doubts about people trusting these projects, but there have already been some hints at this potentially happening. So I'm pretty optimistic that this will happen.Anatoly (36:12):What is decentralization mean in that context for these projects?Larry Cermak (36:16):For me, it means just inability to shut something down. So if you're the SEC and if you're looking at Uniswap, maybe you can call the UNI token a security, but ultimately what are you going to accomplish if you go after the project? You're not going to able to shut it down, you're probably just going to look like a fool afterwards, so you don't have that many options. So to me, decentralization means if someone really wants, if a regulator really wants, or if some third party really wants, it's possible to shut you down. So just having unchangeable [inaudible 00:36:50] is a point on Ethereum or on Solana, that's decentralized to me, and I think a lot of that will go towards that direction.We've seen examples of this with 1inch for example in the last two weeks, 1inch started limiting US customers or at least letting them sign a message. And that's partially because they're doing a lot of [inaudible 00:37:15] computing and they can be targeted in some way by these regulators, they can be threatened, whereas some other protocols really can't be. And I do also think that in the future, like in the next couple of years, there's going to be a lot of front end basically blocking or geo blocking, and restricting uses, blocking assets. So there's going to be a shift into alternative front ends for example, or making people interact with the protocols more directly that what they do now, which is they google Uniswap, go on the Uniswap's website, and then swap an asset, like that's not going to be sustainable, I'm already pretty certain about that.Anatoly (38:00):I'm just annoyed that like, if this is pure code, what is there to regulate? The token right, or the UNI token. So to speak to your original point that you've become a believer of every project needs a token, but if the contract itself doesn't need a token doesn't do anything, besides run this mathematical function, there's nothing to regulate.Larry Cermak (38:22):That is true, that is all true. I think why projects need a token is pretty simple, it's because it builds communities and it builds engagement, and it helps you incentivize some sort of usage or bootstraps these protocols. So I don't think that if Compound didn't do the initial liquidity mining last year, I don't think DeFi would be where it is right now, and the same goes for Airdrops. It just helps to engage people, it helps to get them invested in some way, and that's why I think they're important. But you're totally right, they are opening up a possibility for regulators to go after these tokens and regulate it in some way.But tokens are also opening up opportunities for not only people to invest, but also institutional investors and more capital to be draw in. A lot of the VC firms right now, they're completely stacked in cash, there's billions of dollars on the sidelines right now waiting to be deployed, they're only investing because they know there's some sort of an exit strategy, which to them is selling the tokens at some point in the future to enough people that think it's going to be more valuable. And I don't think this would happen if there were no tokens, I used to believe this myself as well. It's like Uniswap doesn't need a token, it's a perfect protocol, it's totally fine the way it is, but because it does have a token, it just attracted more usage and it's trending more people to actually use these things. And I think that by itself is something that probably overweighs the negative consequences which is more regulatory capture.Anatoly (39:56):Do you think we could separate the devs from the community? Could you have the Shiba token adopt the best developers in the space? They built the distribution and the community and they're like, we're going bribe Vitalik to work on some more contracts for us.Larry Cermak (40:26):I don't think that can happen or will happen. We've seen this before as well, a lot of projects raised a lot of money, like Tezos or EOS, and they haven't been able to do much with it, they haven't been able to accomplish much. And I think a part of it is just because communities are built by people actually believing in the project, in the future, and I just think that communities rule everything in crypto, and that's how I think it's going to stay.Anatoly (40:55):This is like both utopia and dystopia at the same time.Larry Cermak (40:59):Yeah. I think it's just a pragmatic approach. You look at how everything has worked in the last three years, and the conclusion is like it makes sense for people to interact with these protocols early because you believe that in the future there's going to be some sort of an Airdrop. And then there are like loops to this, if enough people believe that there are going to be Airdrops for all the protocols on Ethereum and on Solana, they're going to use these protocols more. So even if you look at the number of transactions on Solana or just generally how many people are using these things and for what reason, a lot of it is just speculators, a lot of it is literally completely useless activity, and people just hoping that they're going to make money out of it. And that's fine, like if you're bootstrapping usage, if you bootstrap attention with purely capitalistic intent, I think that totally works. If Compound didn't do the incentives, I don't think we would be here right now talking to each other, I don't think Solana would be worth as much. And it's just a way to get more of that interest, and almost like abuse the speculators to get more attention for this, to get more mainstream media to cover this, to get more investors interested in this.Larry Cermak (42:11):I think it's much deeper than you think, where yeah, a lot of these are probably useless to some extent, but a lot of these are just social experiments, social tokens, and a way for people to get exposure to some of these things.Anatoly (42:25):If we use that as like the fundamental thing, then you really should be looking at these as social networks, how many people, how connected they are, what are they doing?Larry Cermak (42:35):Yeah, you should be, and then also utility on top. If I can get a stablecoin swap for cheaper than I can get it on [inaudible 00:42:43] exchange, that's probably worth something. Similarly for Uniswap, if some of these players have more liquidity and it's cheaper for me to go there instead of on Binance, if I want to sell $1 million of something, that's also worth something. But generally yes, it's absolutely a function of how many people are using these things, how many people are interacting with this. That's why I think for crypto, the most powerful indicators are really social indicators, it's like looking at how many people are using these things, how many people are actually transacting. What's more difficult sometimes is to remove all the either fake activity or non-essential activity, and that's the hard part. But generally yeah, it's just a function of attention, function of which people are involved, and eventually you hope that this will turn into a mainstream thing.When I look at DeFi right now on Ethereum, and even on Solana, it's a relatively meaningless number of people using these things. Even Uniswap, maybe 150000 users maximum, it's a joke. None of us think that this is why we're here, all of us think that this will eventually go to tens of millions of people using these protocols, and that's really the end game. And I think even obviously for Solana, one of the premises for why it's designed this way is to support a lot of these new people.Anatoly (44:06):Yeah, I've said this a bunch of times, that trying to predict how this stuff is going to be used is like trying to predict Facebook in '94, zero chance I would've believed you that sharing pictures of your cats is going to be worth a trillion dollars, it's ridiculous.Larry Cermak (44:24):I totally agree, and no one knows. I think that's kind of the fun part, that it's like enabling people to really do whatever they want, it's really cool. Even just me talking to some small teams about seed investing, it's like you're talking to people in Pakistan and India, those guys normally would be somewhere closed up in their office, not really having these opportunities, and now all of a sudden they can develop these protocols, they can arbitrage them, they can make money. Like we have a guy in Russia, a genius coder, he's exploiting these arbitrage opportunities and making a ton of money, that's awesome. That's really powerful.Anatoly (45:07):Awesome man, really good to go deep down the rabbit hole with you.Larry Cermak (45:13):Yeah. Honestly, I didn't expect I would be the one convincing you of crypto's potential, I thought it would be the other way.Anatoly (45:21):I'm an engineer, so I look at a system and then I try to like, where does it break down? What does all this stuff not seem backed by strong arguments and real physics? Why is it all bullshit?All right man, really awesome to have you. Thank you so much for being in the Solana Podcast, and always enjoy your work at The Block.Larry Cermak:Thanks a lot.

Packy McCormick is the author of the tech/web3 newsletter Not Boring and runs Not Boring Capital.00:09 - Intro01:34 - What are people building in the world of crypto / What does ‘Not Boring’ invest in09:36 - Ownership in Crypto16:00 - Conversation around Play-to-earn19:06 - The regulatory aspect22:14- How does Anatoly balance his time23:54 - Thoughts on DAOs29:33 - Network Effect and defensibility in Crypto32:18 - Centralizing in Crypto35:20 - Solana in relation to DeFi, the cultural and the metaverse side of things.39:13 - The internet is Silicon Valley41:12 - NFTsDISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. Anatoly (00:09):Hey, folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast, and today, I have with me, Packy McCormick, author of Not Boring. Hey, man. Good to have you.Packy McCormick (17:27):Good to be here. Thanks for having me on.Anatoly (00:21):So, You're an author and you're also an investor. How did you get into crypto?Packy McCormick (00:26):Yeah. So, I got into crypto back in 2013. I read Fred Wilson's blog post on investing in Coinbase, bought a bunch of Bitcoin, I think 38 Bitcoin, and then I went on a trip to Oktoberfest, and I felt bad about it, I had just quit my job, so I was like, "You know what, instead of spending money when I'm unemployed, let me just sell this stupid Bitcoin and I will pay for the trip."So, because of that, because of the pain of selling then, I avoided it until earlier this year, later last year, and really, really got back into it as I was talking to a couple companies that I was thinking about investing in and thinking about the intersection of crypto and the metaverse and how an open economy just fits so much better with that vision, since then, I've just gotten deeper, and deeper, and deeper down the rabbit hole.Anatoly (01:18):So, you held Bitcoin because you can sell it? That's just too big of a pain in the ass.Packy McCormick (01:24):I felt so bad about selling it and missing out. I think at the peak, it was like a two million dollar plus mistake, and so I was like, "You know what? I'm out of this for a little while."Anatoly (01:34):That's funny. What do you guys invest in?Packy McCormick (01:39):Yeah. So, I run a small 10 million dollar fund called Not Boring Capital, and we really invest across stages, across geographies, across verticals. For the first, I'd say, half of the fund, it was really traditional investments, I'd say for the second five million in the fund, it's been pushing up against the 20% non qualifying limit. I'm actually investing in my first Solana based project this week, which is yet to be announced, so can't talk about it, but something in the real estate space and something I'm super excited about. But doing as much crypto as I can in there, but I still think some use cases are perfectly well suited to crypto and some are really not. There's plenty of things in Web 2.0 that I'm super excited about as well, so really trying to balance investing across both.Anatoly (02:27):So, by traditional businesses, you mean like software internet based ones?Packy McCormick (02:32):Exactly.Anatoly (02:33):Cool. I mean, I've been in crypto for like the last... I can't remember... it feels like a decade, and I can't imagine what the world is like. So, what are people building?Packy McCormick (02:48):It's a good question. So, today, I talked to a company, for example, that is making it a lot easier for a restaurant to order the food that they need. So, right now, if you're a restaurant and you're ordering food, you're getting a bunch of PDFs from suppliers every week that aren't even searchable, and then you're going through the 6,000 items on there and picking something. So, there are still a bunch of these huge unsexy categories that are completely ripe.There's some security stuff that bridges into crypto, but there's one, again, stealth right now, but is also dealing with some Solana projects on the security side that I'm really, really excited in, but they're also securing Web 2.0 projects. There's some FinTech stuff I wrote about a company called Uni, yesterday. There's definitely a little bit of mental gymnastics that I have to do to be super bullish on FinTech and super bullish on crypto, but I really think adoption cycles are going to be super long and there are some really huge opportunities on that side too. I think everybody is trying to make the existing system that doesn't work, make it work better for people, and so I'm all for things, on either the Web 2.0 Side or in crypto, that make finance better for people.Anatoly (04:01):The mental gymnastics are curious about. I always thought that crypto is just part of this general story of software eating the world. Is that your take on it too?Packy McCormick (04:12):Totally. I mean, I wrote about Solana and I wrote this in the piece, but then I'm a maximalist-minimalist, and that's cross chain, but that's also I don't think crypto is going to eat everything yet or maybe ever. Just like on the internet, Web 3.0 is really about the dynamic interfaces where you could interact with each other. While there are companies like Facebook and Twitter and all of this social media companies that were more interactive, there were a ton of huge companies built during the Web 2.0 Era that weren't social media, that weren't real-time interactive at all, and I think the same thing will play out. I think you need to pick the best stack for whatever you're building at the time. And so I think we'll see a world where a lot of stuff moves to Web 3.0, And hopefully, even things that don't incorporate crypto become a little bit more liquid, a little bit more decentralized, a little bit better for people, but I don't think that crypto is the answer to every problem that the world has.Anatoly (05:05):So, when you look at a company that is building out the basic, "Let's convert PDFs to a searchable interface," that feels like something that should have happened 10 years ago, right, in your mind, at least?Packy McCormick (05:23):Totally. I mean, I think there have been attempts in that space actually, and some of them haven't worked. There have been different approaches. People have tried to do marketplaces and different things like that. I think what changed in that particular case is that over the past year, one, restaurants are super cognizant of cutting costs and getting profitability to the best possible spot, and so they're more willing to try new things. These people are taking an interesting approach without actually changing the interface that the restaurants interact with at all, they're just making everything behind it more powerful. So, things have been tried... there's people that are trying new approaches every day. I mean, I'd say 80%, because that is the literal max that I'm allowed to do is 20% crypto out of my fund, so 80% of my investments are non-crypto, and there's a bunch of stuff that's growing fast and is really exciting.I think the other interesting thing is that there are a bunch of companies that aren't going fully decentralized but are incorporating maybe a DAO in one aspect, where they have members who might be running something and want to vote on what that thing is coming up, or will incorporate NFTs in a particular part of the business where it makes sense. So, I think we'll see that blur a little bit more, but even within companies, they'll be doing some Web 2.0 Stuff and some Web 3.0 Stuff.Anatoly (06:32):So, I guess, in a way, you're bullish on non-crypto on the rest of the world as an investor?Packy McCormick (06:41):Yeah, my worldview is bullish tech and innovation, and I think if you're talking on the... I have a medical device company in the portfolio and a machine learning company that helps make sense of medical documents, and all that kind of stuff, I don't see a need yet for crypto, and maybe there's better decentralized storage of that information in the future, so it's not a centralized entity. And so over time, I think more, and more, and more of it will potentially become decentralized as the tools catch up, but for right now, that's just stuff that needs to improve.There's a company called NexHealth that I invested in that has really complex long term plan to first, sell SAAS into doctor's offices, use that to connect the EHRs, use that to build out APIs, use that to build out a platform, to ultimately try to make it easier for people to just hack on medical products, because right now it's such a pain in the ass to do anything in the medical space. I am super bullish on that kind of innovation because if you ask me what doctor I went to two years ago, I'd have no idea, if you asked me what my stats were, I'd have no idea. So, anybody fixing any of those kinds of things, I'm super bullish on.Anatoly (07:52):Man, I mean, the internet is basically 30 years old, right, at this point, and it's wild to think that we're still connecting just data...Packy McCormick (08:00):Totally.Anatoly (08:02):... data to format.Packy McCormick (08:03):It's why I'm going to be bullish on all of this. The internet is still early in terms of penetration, and then crypto is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of that, so there's just a lot of room for all of this to run.Anatoly (08:13):It feels then like everything is happening at the same time, we're still onboarding the world to the internet or now, part of the internet is being on boarded to crypto. Is that something that you first saw? What do you think about that?Packy McCormick (08:29):Yeah. I mean, I think most of the world... I think well over 50% nowadays is internet connected. I think it's just more and more things that were not internet connected are being tackled. I think a lot of the big obvious opportunities get taken and then people realize like, "Oh, shoot." I think I've seen, in the past week, a couple of companies that are making it easier for truckers to pay for gas and track those expenses. There's just all these big things that touch the physical world, where primitives needed to be built first, you needed banking as a service type things to make it really easy for companies to issue cards, to build it for specific use cases, so I think it's all just a matter of what primitives have been built and then what you can do on top of that. That's one of the reasons I'm so excited about crypto is because you and other folks in the space are building such interesting things for other people to build on top of.Anatoly (09:15):Since you have, I think, a more maybe practical or realistic view, since you're dealing with non-crypto projects that are trying to get revenue, right? That's generally the pitch to an investor.Packy McCormick (09:33):Yes. Over a long enough time horizon, some of them need to get revenue.Anatoly (09:36):What do you see in crypto itself as promising to use crypto in a way that actually increases revenue for that business? What are those things?Packy McCormick (09:48):Yeah. I don't know. One of the fun things about exploring both sides is that I really try, when I look at any crypto project, to understand what business physics laws it's enhancing. Businesses are businesses because people buy things the same way all over the place or people like to make money. People are the same, and I think all of this comes down to people, obviously. Solana comes down to how many developers build on top of it and how many people use that. And so obviously, I think one of the big important things is the ability to build network effects by giving people ownership. And I think the idea of using ownership in crypto to even have negative customer acquisition costs, to be able to essentially make the price of something negative to be able to get adoption, to use crypto tools for retention and network effects I think is one of the big things that excites me.I think it's also just moving way, way, way faster. I mean, look at Ethereum and Solana, right? Ethereum, strong network effects, people building on top of it, and then Solana comes in and looks like the same chart but faster. And so you can get these network effects, but then somebody else will come in with network effects that are even faster, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how those types of things play out.Anatoly (11:05):Negative acquisition cost is a really interesting topic because that's basically yield farming, right, like DeFi? The foundation of DeFi, how I get users is, a lot of these projects give away their coin. Do you think those patterns is something that you're going to start seeing in traditional businesses, like AMC popcorn, if you buy AMC stock is some form of liquidity mining, right?Packy McCormick (11:39):I think the challenging part, right, is that people want either money pretty immediately or they want ownership in something, and it's really hard for Web 2.0 Companies to give away ownership, there's a ton of paperwork involved. There are platforms that are trying to make that a little bit easier, but it's still really hard for them to give away ownership the way that, if you're a DeFi protocol, you can give away your token to attract users in the beginning.So, maybe there will be some things that Web 2.0 Companies steal and bring over from crypto, but I do think that's one of the uniquely beautiful things about it, is that it's this... I mean, we'll see. It's still so early, right? But that it's this beautiful thing where because you're early, you're able to earn more, and then because you were there, you actually support the network and make the network more secure and all that. So, there's actual justification for it, but it's just that shift in who gets the ownership of things, which I think is kind of beautiful.Anatoly (12:35):Do you think that the Web 2.0 properties, or like Facebook, Twitter, that those are at risk for being disintermediated by crypto?Packy McCormick (12:44):Yes. On a long enough time horizon, absolutely. I don't know what it looks like, and I think the early attempts to do it have been a bit skeuomorphic, and that's one of the things that interest me here is that BitClout was, I guess, interesting, but it was Twitter with coins, and I don't think that the next social network will look like Twitter with coins, I think it will look like something that is maybe wallet first, or maybe in the 3D world, or something that looks different but then achieves a very similar end. And so I think, yes, 100% they're at risk, but I don't think that they're at risk from something that looks like a clone but adds a token.Anatoly (13:23):Man, I love that word, skeuomorphic, because that's how I started thinking about it as I'm talking to a bunch of projects that are trying to shove crypto into what is a Web 2.0 thing, a Web 2.0 product. Do you as an investor see that as a red flag or like, "Okay, maybe this might work and you should try it, but clearly, you're going to have to iterate away from it"?Packy McCormick (13:46):I think it comes down to what you're trying to do. I talked to an investor who is way smarter than I am about this the other day, and she was like, "You know what, actually for me, because I invested in the series A and beyond, if one of my portfolio companies came to me and said that they're going to incorporate crypto at this point, that would be a red flag because that means that they don't have product-market fit and they're trying to figure out how to get product-market fit by doing something else shiny." There are other projects, like there was something that I was talking to her that was totally Web 2.0 Based but that asked people for feedback, they were having challenges with retention, they were asking users to submit information, they were thinking about how to reward them, and for something like that, particularly when it's so early, I do think that adding crypto into the project makes a ton of sense.If you're trying to incentivize contribution and improve retention, crypto is an amazing tool for that for the right type of community. So, I really think it depends on what type of product it is, and some things I think skeuomorphic might work in some cases where you're ripping out an internal reward point and replacing it with crypto, I think that can make sense, but when you're trying to just shove money into something to see if you can attract more users, that's when I feel like there's a bit of a problem.Anatoly (14:59):So, Reddit Coins, do you think that's going to work?Packy McCormick (15:02):I mean, they're at least early and I feel like they're such an interesting community of people, and the idea of karma has existed in Reddit for a while, so maybe making that a little bit more fungible and exchangeable is interesting. I mean, there's a bunch of behavioral economics on the idea that if you just pay people for stuff, you actually fuck up incentives in a bunch of different ways that are hard to predict, so it could be tough. When you actually assign a dollar value to something, you make people think about it in terms of the dollar value, and they're like, "Wait, I just spent a day moderating the subreddit for $1? Are you kidding me?" So, I think you need to get that part right, right? Where you can give them a million karma points and it doesn't matter, but then it becomes $1 then there's an issue? So, I think people need to be wary of that, but certainly where there are internal scoreboards, giving people a way to actually monetize that I think is interesting.Anatoly (15:56):Have you looked into play-to-earn stuff?Packy McCormick (16:00):Yeah.Anatoly (20:39):Okay.Packy McCormick (16 :02):I wrote a piece on Axie. I think it's so fascinating.Anatoly (16:05):I'm terrified of a world where everything we do is like, "You got to do this to get your 20 extra cents on your dollar." Right? It just sounds like a nightmare.Packy McCormick (16:15):I know. I mean, I am of the mind that dystopia is probably overstated because people have to opt in at every gate, and so I've had conversations with people where they're like, "Isn't it wild that we'd be spending time in the metaverse? Isn't that dystopian?" And then you think about how we spend a lot of our time right now, we're in a two dimensional screen. Wouldn't it be more fun if there was an immersive environment that we were interacting with here, and would we just continue to choose to do the 2D version until the 3D version got realistic and fun enough that we made the shift? And so there's going to be those gates at all times where people can opt in or not.A lot of the people playing Axie right now are in the Philippines, were unemployed, thanks in large part due to COVID, and so their options were, "Don't do this and figure out some other way to make money or start playing this game, that you might be playing anyway, and actually make money while doing it." So, that's an incredible option that people have, but you also don't see a ton of people in the West flocking to Axie to make a couple of bucks because the trade-off doesn't make sense for them. And so I think the trade-offs have to make sense for people but everybody has agency, to some extent, and will opt in to the things that make sense for them.Anatoly (17:29):When I played Ultima Online, I bought digital items in that game on eBay with a cashier's check. So, I get this idea that you can get really into a game.Packy McCormick (17:41):Totally. And then you stop playing Ultima Online and that money is just wasted, right? And so the idea that you could easily transfer that item to the next generation or person that wants to go all in on the game is nice, it means that you're accumulating something while you play. I think, over time, those experiences will fade more and more into the background and it will feel less like play-to-earn and will probably just be play-and-earn, but there's going to be a transition period where you have to just be bold about it and the play-to-earn piece has to be front and center, but I don't know.We can go to deep down the philosophical rabbit hole on all of this, but there is a point at which, at some point in the future... and I know this is debatable... but at some point in the future, we're not going to have to actually work to eat, to shelter ourselves, to have clothes, all of that, and so what do you do that provides meaning, right? I don't think we're going to evolve into a world where we feel comfortable not having to work for anything, and so people will find new ways to make meaning.Anatoly (18:47):We're going to be NPCs in each other's games.Packy McCormick (18:51):Seriously.Anatoly (18:53):How much do you pay attention to the regulatory side of it? Do you think World of Warcraft is going to have to file W-2s?Packy McCormick (19:06):Man, I do not envy the IRS or the SEC trying to keep up with... I do this all day, every day. I'm fascinated by it and I can't keep up with everything. There's going to, obviously, need to be a total paradigm shift in the way that this stuff is tracked and managed, even taxes. I am going to figure out, at the end of the year, whatever the best tax software that I should use to make sense of everything that I've done all across Web 3.0 This year, but if I didn't, the chances that somebody sitting in the IRS for my small potatoes amount of money is actually going to be able to go and figure out what I did is minuscule. So, I don't know how they're going to do it, but there needs to be a common sense way that doesn't end up in just this constant clash.Anatoly (19:54):Yeah. All my Degen Ape trades.Packy McCormick (24:36):Seriously. I mean, there's a thread that went viral on Twitter a couple weeks ago that was someone being like, "Hey, by the way, did you know essentially that when you buy an NFT, you're also selling your coins at a game and you're going to have to pay taxes on that?" There's going to be a lot of people who get hit pretty hard at the end of the year.Anatoly (20:15):Yeah. I'm curious how that's going to play out. That's wild. I mean, like one of the investments should be like, "Here's tax software for all your crypto shit." That seems obvious one.Packy McCormick (20:28):Yeah, there are a few people working on that. I mean, the other one that I really want to see... I had mentioned this 20% limit. So, if you're not an RAA, if you're not a registered investment advisor and you manage over X dollars, you can only buy 20% non qualifying, and crypto is included in that. I really want to see someone build RAA in a box, and RAA means that you need a chief compliance officer and you need all this stuff. And so somebody who makes that easier to do and easier to set up crypto funds I think is going to make a killing as well.Anatoly (20:58):I mean, that seems like something that the smart contracts should be doing, right? If you're investing purely... Most of that compliance is just transparency, right? It's like, "Am I doing the thing that I said I was going to do?"Packy McCormick (21:10):Totally. But some of it is, "Is there a person here looking over what I'm doing?" The rules are written for a world in which it makes sense for a person to look over something instead of computers talking to each other. So, there's going to be a transition period there, but over time, yes, it makes a lot more sense as a smart contract, and I'm interested to see.Are you familiar with Syndicate protocol?Anatoly (21:33):I'm not.Packy McCormick (21:34):So, Syndicate protocol is I think mostly on Ethereum at this point, but it makes it easy to set up investment clubs, SPVs, a bunch of other things, and so brings a lot of the group investing activities on chain. Is there anything similar on the Solana side?Anatoly (21:50):I don't know yet. The network exploded in terms of people building on it to the point that I can't track.Packy McCormick (21:57):That's awesome. That's a milestone.Anatoly (22:00):Yeah, that's a milestone. It's just like, "Pooh," so now I'm like, "Okay, go back into the weeds, back into optimizations."Packy McCormick (22:08):Yeah. Sorry to turn the mic on you, but I'm very curious. How do you balance your time right now?Anatoly (22:14):Poorly, I would say. I think there was an effort to get the word out to as many developers out there that this is how you build stuff and these are the reference implementations, and now that that's moving on its own, I almost feel like me putting energy there is going to have such a small amount of gain. So, I think of it in value against replacement terms, which is a very dumb engineer perspective, or maybe that's a pretty good one. I don't know.Packy McCormick (22:48):No. I mean, if you can view yourself from a remove like that. I mean, that's the goal of running a company or an organization or a protocol is, "How can I replace myself in as many different spots as possible?" But are you in the Discords? Are you getting Degen on some of these projects and stuff?Anatoly (23:07):I used to be more Discord just telling devs, "This is where the doc started, this is how you unblock that compiler error or whatever." I was in there, and now there's enough people doing that, I'm like, "Okay, I'm useless here." So, in the early days of Metaplex, helping out people set up their Heroku servers or whatever, I spent a little bit of time doing that, but then all of a sudden, our engineers took off with it.I'm curious how you think about DAOs? Are these truly amorphous blobs where nobody knows anyone else and there's some voting mechanism that you trust, or as normal people actually that do this stuff, it feels to me that they are humans that are all know each other and they're coordinating with software?Packy McCormick (23:54):Yeah. There's been a meme going around, I feel like this week, again, on Twitter, where people have been talking about like, "Oh, it's impossible to get fired by a DAO. Why not just get hired by a DAO and then don't do anything because who's going to fire you?" I love the idea, and I love the fact that crypto makes it possible to organize and incentivize huge groups of people across the world and get them to work in the same direction, I also think there's going to be a ton of challenges.People are very used, for the past at least couple 100 years since the dawn of the corporation, people are very used to working in hierarchical structures where there's somebody making a decision. And so I think there will be a balance that gets struck in a lot of cases, like delegation I think will get more, and more, and more popular. And ideally, there's some projects being worked on that I'm excited about where people's on-chain contribution and activity and resume is almost tracked, and maybe you give more power to the people who've contributed the most and proven expertise in a certain area, and all of that. So, I think a lot of things need to be worked out there.I think that we're in the stage now, frankly, where a lot of DAOs will not do as well as a centralized thing would have done, but then some DAOs will just do this crazy emergent stuff that never would have been possible in a normal structure that was a little bit more hierarchical. So, I think we're in the, let 1,000 flowers bloom, phase of DAOs right now where emergence will produce some really interesting stuff, and then emergence will also produce some total failures, and we'll see where it all shakes out.Anatoly (25:25):Corporations have politics, right? There's definitely politics in large corpse, and I feel like small DAOs have politics, and that's typically not true of a startup.Packy McCormick (25:39):Yeah, I think that's true. Although it can happen faster to startup, but the interesting thing that happens at a startup is, if the CEO allows it to be political, it can get political really quickly. And so it's interesting, in the DAO structure, when you don't have a "CEO," that either the community ethos will be away from politics and you'll get shunned and banned or whatever for politicking, or there's no one to say, "Don't do that," in which case, it can get out of hand really quickly. So, if you have a bad CEO, it's probably better to be a DAO, and if you have a really good CEO, there are advantages to having somebody making the decisions.I'm also fascinated to see... and I don't know if you've seen anything on this side yet... but can a DAO build products that are as good as something with a little bit more centralized control? Like products are traditionally made by a visionary, and then a team, who has a clear roadmap and all of those types of things, and is it possible to do that in a more decentralized way?I mean, even Solana itself, one of the things that attracts me about the project, and again, not a decentralization maxi by any stretch of the imagination, is that you were involved, right? And when there were code errors, you were getting in there, you were telling people how to fix them and all of that. And I've talked to a bunch of people, since I read that piece, who were building things on Solana, who site that as one of the reasons that they like building on Solana, is that the team is there to help when there are errors and help direct them towards best practices. So, I don't know. I think something like that model is probably going to succeed.Anatoly (27:18):I can only get blamed myself.Packy McCormick (27:21):Exactly.Anatoly (27:23):At the end of the day, yeah. Balaji had this quote that I've used it a bunch of times, that decentralization is not the absence of leadership but it's the abundance of leadership, and I love it. I also feel like that because of Bitcoin and it's like history. People started assuming that disorganization also was required for decentralization, which I think is bullshit too.Packy McCormick (27:52):Yeah. How do you view DAO versus social token, or I guess more just governance versus upside sharing?Anatoly (27:59):I think tokens are social networks, almost first, and then anything else later, because any community, it's all contracts. All this open source software is reusable. I can take Uniswap, fork it, and then stick some random token on it, and it's as good as Uniswap. You cannot tell me that it's worse in any way, right? It's the same thing, right?Packy McCormick (28:27):Someone should do that.Anatoly (28:29):Yeah. And then that community takes it in a different product direction, right, for whatever reason. I think that really fast fail is probably the most important part of decentralization. Anybody can fork you and then just take it in a different direction and form a community around it.Packy McCormick (28:50):I agree. Which project was it that Justin Sun tried to take over and then everybody just stopped using it?Anatoly (28:50):Steem.Packy McCormick (28:55):Yeah.Anatoly (28:57):And that is, I think, part of the beauty of the space, right, is you can only be a benevolent dictator. As soon as you lose the benevolent part, they're like, "Well, everything's open. F off."Packy McCormick (29:12):It's amazing.Anatoly (29:13):Yeah. Did you follow the SUSHI saga?Packy McCormick (29:19):I didn't follow in real-time. I went back and looked at it after the fact, but I would not consider myself a SUSHI expert.Anatoly (29:26):Do you think that we're going to see these communities stick around for the long haul, like Uniswap, etc?Packy McCormick (29:33):I think that is the billion dollar, trillion dollar, whatever number you want to put on it, question. I mean, I was alluding to it before with these network effects being replaced by things that pick up network effects even faster and faster. I think that's the blessing and the curse that I was talking about. You could remove every single person working on Facebook except for the person who made sure that the servers were up, and people would keep using it for a long, long time. If the people disappeared from Sushiswap or Uniswap or wherever, it just fades away and they move on to the next thing, and that takes off. So, I think virality in crypto has been proven. You can get viral really, really quick. Defensibility over a very long time horizon I think is still TBD.Anatoly (30:19):Where does defensibility come from in Facebook, in your mind?Packy McCormick (30:24):In Facebook, Facebook has a clear network effects, one where I guess if the people on the network decided to stop using it, it would go away, but there's not a clear place that you would all go when you have... Maybe there's switching costs too because you have your whole network mapped, and they won't actually let it be portable. To your point, you can fork anything... you should be able to fork the relationship graph and all of that over time as people build new mechanics to make that happen, and when you can just bring your whole relationship graph with you across Web3, then maybe you just all go to the next place, or maybe there's not even a place, and it is just that your wallet, at some point, keeps track of all the connections that you have, so maybe the wallet is the central point where a lot of the value accrues and the thing that makes everything portable, but I'm not exactly sure. What do you think?Anatoly (31:22):When I first saw Facebook, I thought, "This is a shitty news group. I can run my own mail server and ask my friends." And then you realize that normal people don't want to run their own mail servers or news groups, but you centralize around convenience. Where things centralize around convenience in crypto has, for me, been really tough to pin down. NFTs especially are a really good example of people jumping from one set to another but still maintaining both, right? They're able to be in multiple places at the same time.Anatoly (36:44):I can be a Degen Ape and like a Monkey MBS member at the same time.Packy McCormick (32:12):Where do you think that ends up? Where do you think people end up centralizing, or do they not?Anatoly (32:18):I'm not sure. This is like, again, a trillion dollar question. I feel like if we get to, three, 400 million people self custody with wallets that are doing stuff, we'll start seeing those patterns of like, "Okay, this is like the Facebook, it's a social graph or the... I don't know... the super connected now," something.Packy McCormick (32:42):Yeah. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, I wrote a piece called the Interface Phase, and it was a little bit like a high kid post where I was like, "What are the interfaces going to be?" But just the fact that the first internet needed Netscape and needed a graphical interface, Web 2.0 needed things like Digg and Facebook that were interactive for that kind of capability, the read-write interface to really be there, and I don't think Web3 has gotten there yet. I do think that either a wallet based thing, and I don't know what that looks like, and I'm not smart enough to figure out what that looks like, or the kind of metaverse. And I think it's such an interesting mistake of history or just a coincidence of history that the tech for the metaverse and Web 3.0 Are peaking at the same time, but a world in which...One of the things I think crypto does well is give physical-ish characteristics to digital things, and so I think a interface that makes that clear will have a lot of value in just making a lot of the stuff that feels a little more ethereal feel more real and tangible, and actually, there will be physical places that people meet up and all that.Anatoly (38:28):So, I think what's interesting about crypto is that it's more like Ultima Online. When I was playing the game, I got a mental model of the map and the ownership of those items because it was persistent. I would go to the thing and I would change something and then come back and it was still there, and your brain, I think, just rapidly just plugs it into the rest of the stuff that it interacts with. If you got a lot of humans all doing this together, I think they'll start forgetting that it's nothing more than a bunch of computers.Packy McCormick (34:23):Totally. I mean it's interesting. I forget the name of the book, but there's a book about the memory competitions and the world memory championships, and the way that they memorize things is by putting different objects throughout a house and then walking through that house, So, we are, I think, a lot better at memorizing things and grokking things spatially than we are... and maybe this is just me talking as a non technical person, but just picturing computer networks without some physical reference point.Anatoly (34:54):I don't have as good of a mental model of space crypto Twitter or like social networks. It's not a map to me in my mind. But with something like experiments like DeFi land and stuff, I think that actually might bridge that because of this ownership thing. And I don't still think it's the fact that I can modify stuff and come back and see it and feel that I'm doing it.Packy McCormick (35:20):Totally. Yeah, people like building, and showing progress, and all of that. I'm going to turn the mic again. How do you view Solana at this point in terms of DeFi versus the cultural side of things or the metaverse side of things?Anatoly (35:37):We don't. I think, to us, DeFi was always I thought was an important part because you look at any kind of markets, NASDAQ, those are the obvious ones, "Oh, yeah, that's probably going to be on some blockchain," but advertisement, right? It's like Google Search shows you a page, they take your data, sell it on an Ad Exchange, and that to market, that's centralized right now, how do you disintermediate it? Oh, you can do that with cryptography, right? And a replicated censorship resistant database. That's it.You can break those things down into marketplaces and remove the middleman. And that, I think, is how we think about it, is like, where does that make sense? And culture NFTs are I feel like that non skeuomorphic social networks. It's not somebody that stuck Twitter with coins, these organically sprung up, right? It's like lodges in the whatever, 1700s, like I'm part of this Masonic Lodge or this club or whatever, right? Now, I'm Degen Ape or whatever.Packy McCormick (36:57):Totally. And right now, I guess, that often manifests itself in Discord where people are hanging out. I've had this conversation with people before in this debate. Do you think there needs to be a decentralized Discord where this lives or where do you think all of this ends up living?Anatoly (37:12):I don't think so. Like a year ago, I thought somebody needs to build a decentralized Twitter, a decentralized Instant Messaging, and the working mechanics of it, being decentralized or on chain, don't change the social impact of it. You're still talking to people. Why does it matter where you talk to them, right? Who cares?Packy McCormick (37:34):Totally.Anatoly (37:37):It's like, I think, stuff where you can start making connected modifications of the same state, that mental model of like, "Hey, we're all doing this thing over here." That becomes a place and that's where people actually do things, but here's where they talk about it.Packy McCormick (37:56):Yeah. And I don't think you can find a more minimally extractive corporation than Discord, and they make less dollars per user than anybody.Anatoly (38:06):Yeah, they're pretty awesome. Also, yeah, the high fidelity audio and stuff like that I think is pretty cool. I think they built it for gamers.Packy McCormick (38:19):Yeah. It's so interesting, and I'm probably going to write about Discord at some point here too, but I've written something called The Great Online Game before, which is essentially we're all just playing this big video game across the internet. And so it's really funny that Discord, which was built for gamers, is where all of this activity is... If you're playing a big video game and the chat app designed for video games, it makes sense as the place that people go.Anatoly (38:43):Yeah. Crypto and the internet is... at least the internet part of crypto is very much a big video game.Packy McCormick (38:49):Exactly.Anatoly (38:50):Are you investing mostly in the US, US companies or all over the place?Packy McCormick (38:54):I'm investing mostly in the US but have done a few in India, I've done Sweden, I've done Canada, very open to doing anywhere on the world.Anatoly (39:06):Do you feel like there's been a shift towards everything becoming Silicon Valley, that it doesn't really matter anymore at this point?Packy McCormick (39:13):The internet is Silicon Valley. A more amorphous idea is Silicon Valley at this point, but I'm in New York, I'm probably 30 minutes away. I'm in Park Slope and the crypto hub has become Williamsburg, and I talk to all those people all the time, and I never take the 30 minute trip over to Williamsburg because I have Twitter, and I have Discord, and I'm pretty much right there with them. So, I don't think physical place matters nearly as much. Gathering in physical places is awesome. I think the idea of conferences, and quarterly team meetups, and all of that kind of stuff is absolutely going to explode. There's a really fun thing about only knowing somebody on the internet and then meeting them in person and feeling like you've known each other for a long time, but I don't think the physical place where you all live all the time matters that much.Anatoly (40:03):Yeah. I think what's weird is like I have a sneaking suspicion that the remote work worlds, everybody's working remote is actually going to mean more people travel and get together.Packy McCormick (40:17):And it's not just going to be like FaceTime and waiting around the office and sitting. When you're together, you're together, and then when you're working, you're heads down working, and I kind of like that.Anatoly (40:26):Do you think people are more efficient that way or is that the natural state?Packy McCormick (40:30):It depends how many Discords. Before this call, I was supposed to be writing and I've gotten obsessed with the Wanderers NFT projects, so I just bought another Wanderer and then was trying to figure out how to display it in my cyber gallery. So, I think there's not somebody looking over my shoulder, so in that sense, maybe it allows you to get a little bit more distracted. But I also think a lot of things coming together at the same time, more and more people are responsible for themselves, and so if I don't work now, then I'm working all weekend, and I have to get the same stuff done anyway. And so I do think that's, hopefully, the natural state of things, is that people are allowed to get their shit done when they want to.Anatoly (41:12):Are NFTs what you're looking at mostly in crypto? Is that the most exciting part?Packy McCormick (41:16):NFTs are, I think, very exciting to me. My first internship was on an energy trading desk. I should want to get into DeFi and I feel like I'm going to get wrecked unless I can spend all of my time getting into DeFi, so I've largely steered clear. I do think that NFTs are super interesting for the reasons that you suggested, and I think that they are a little bit like a social network. I think it's going to be really fascinating to see how these things evolve and the worlds that get built around them. And they're the most tangible crypto thing out there, right? You have an item. I like these Wanderers because there's audio, and they're these eight second clips, and so the richer that you can make them, I think the better, and over time, more, and more, and more things will just be ownable digitally, and I think that's very cool.Anatoly (42:09):I love the trend of like 2DR first, like really low res, because it's like a forcing function in creativity, right? It's actually hard to make something look good with that low fidelity.Packy McCormick (42:22):Totally.Anatoly (42:25):So, I'm a fan of watching the space self, almost evolve, right? This is definitely going to get better, right? You're going to have full scale renders with 3D models and high production stuff in a few years, but it's exciting to see what it is now, right?Packy McCormick (42:42):Totally. I have another portfolio company called Arco that's doing... essentially, it's trying to replace the design software that companies use. So, Autodesk has Revit to do 3D modeling, they're doing the Figma version of that, but then could you just take this physical building that somebody's designed for the real world, turn it into an NFT and let somebody bring it into the digital world? I would love to own the Chrysler Building and then bring it into my world.Anatoly (43:10):Skeuomorphism.Packy McCormick (43:14):I thought about that too when I was trying to write about the interfaces, I was like, "Why are we even thinking about buildings and worlds at all? If you don't have to follow the rules of physics, then why do you?" But I do think, through our conversation earlier about maps, reference points are also important, so you need to, one step at a time, go away from things that people are familiar with.Anatoly (43:34):Yeah. Cool, man. So, this is a really awesome conversation. Thank you so much for being on the show and really getting into it.Packy McCormick (43:43):100%. This was fun. Thank you.

Jonathan "Moshe" Schemoul is the founder of aleph.im, a cross-chain p2p storage, computing network and first decentralized indexing provider for Solana.00:36 – Intro & how did Jonathan Schemoul got in crypto02:09 – What is Aleph and how does it work?06:48 – Is Aleph database a blockchain?09:20 – Understanding core nodes and Aleph’s economics11:22 – How does Aleph interact with DNS?15:29 – How does Aleph get verification of certificates?  21:44 – How does Aleph check integrity of computation?25:06 – What is Aleph’s vision?30:32 – Will Aleph always be project facing or will it one day be user facing?32:28 – What load can Aleph currently handle?39:00 – How do the economics work for people providing hardware and bandwidth?DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Anatoly Yakovenko (00:12):Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Jonathan Schemoul with me, who's the founder of the Aleph.im project. Really awesome to have you.Jonathan Schemoul (00:22):Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here today.Anatoly Yakovenko (00:25):Cool. We usually start these with a simple question, how did you get into crypto? What's your story? What's the origin story?Jonathan Schemoul (00:36):Well, into crypto it's a long story. I started way back in time, a bit on Bitcoin then I stopped because it was only money back then. And that wasn't the end game for me. Then I came back into crypto in 2015, 2016, and I started doing a bit of development because I saw that I really wanted to be part of Web 3, to do nice things with it. I started developing as an open-source developer for a few projects. One of these is the newest project which is Chinese blockchain layer one. I'm not really involved with it anymore.Jonathan Schemoul (01:16):But working with them as a community open source developer, I saw that there was some missing links somewhere that you couldn't decentralize all the stack with just layer one, it is not the one that they were building back then. So that's how the Aleph.im project is born. For me, besides that, I've been developing for a lot of companies before in the IOT space and also for big banks sometime ago. I've been a developer for a lot of years.Anatoly Yakovenko (01:48):That's great. I mean, that's a great background. The thing that you're focusing on with Aleph is this idea that Web 3 is just a small part of the piece, but you still need UI front-ends, business logic and things sitting on top of the blockchain. How does that work?Jonathan Schemoul (02:09):The idea is that, okay, now you can have smart contracts on Solana, that's great. You can even do way much more on like just money on smart contracts, that's great. Now, you need to have a front-end. So you need to have storage for that front-end. That's not all because a smart contract, a program doesn't have all the data that you need. So you will need some kind of indexing to get history. You will need a back-end for that.Jonathan Schemoul (02:37):Most of the DeFi application that we see have some centralized back-end behind them. They're running on AWS, sometimes on dedicated servers or stuff like that that is still centralized. If a government, and we just saw something about it today, wants to shut down the DeFi protocol that is organized like that, they can. With Aleph.im what we are trying to do is decentralize the last mile, because for that last mile most projects are using AWS, so we need to decentralize AWS.Jonathan Schemoul (03:11):So we provide storage, as in file storage for the front-end files, database storage, because most applications are just databases and also an equivalent to Amazon Lambda, where you start small functions that will be launched on a decentralized cloud, where there is place for them and will get you a return value, and these can be written in any language and connects the web and also a PC from blockchains here at Solana obviously.Anatoly Yakovenko (03:42):Got it. Super Cool. So this is a storage mechanism. Does it guarantee consistency? How's it decentralized? What happens if you nuke it? Yellowstone flows up, the current set of servers from Aleph get destroyed in the volcano. How do I move, switch, what state do I lose? Those are the hard distributed systems question.Jonathan Schemoul (04:08):Yeah. It's a really good question. Aleph.im is not a blockchain at all. We don't have a blockchain. There are enough already. We just accept messages from blockchains. All the supported blockchains are accepted on the network, that means that that message that is signed by a material address is accepted on network, a message that is signed by a certain address is accepted on the network. All our network, hence the name .im, dot instant messaging, the whole system works with messages on the network.Jonathan Schemoul (04:45):Those messages are organized by channels, just like you would go on telegram channels and get the history of them. The network keeps track of those messages and when you start a new node, you get the history of messages, not directly from the other nodes, you will connect two blockchains to specific smart contracts on blockchain. Look at past events, for example, on the Ethereum or on Solana. You look at past events for the synchronization of the network and you look, okay, there has been all these events, okay, let me ask the whole network what those messages were. Then you resync, when there are missing parts you leave them apart and then you get a view on the channels on the messages.Anatoly Yakovenko (05:31):So you write your software, your Lambda hook as if it's a re-entrant, right? So you're kind of recording your progress potentially on Solana as you're processing it.Jonathan Schemoul (05:43):For the Lambda it's a bit different. Here I was explaining how the network works for the messaging on the global state. For the state of pure application, you could either get your state from a blockchain here at Solana. For example, all the indexing effort that we are doing is using Solana as a source of synchronization for these Lambda. But then you can have multiple kind of volumes because since it's Linux Micro VM machine, everything is a volume.Jonathan Schemoul (06:18):So we have local storage volume that is local to the running host. And then the Lambda kind of issue messages on a decentralized database of data and project or under storage, and then raising to the local file system and then issue messaging, et cetera. And we are also working on another kind of phase system that is distributed, where any of them that can write in it on the overall receive the changes, which is kind of tricky.Anatoly Yakovenko (06:48):Is the database, the Aleph database, distributed database? Is that a Byzantine fault-tolerant database? Is it designed with that in mind?Jonathan Schemoul (06:58):Yeah. The idea is that when you send a message on the network, it gets stored by all the over nodes that are interested in your channel. And then there are synchronization node that go and write hashes of the data and signatures inside messages that they push on blockchains. So that when overcome, they can synchronize it and replicate all the data. So that even if one part of the network gets totally disconnected, you can have one part that gets reconnected to the other therefore the peer to peer network for blockchain, for APFS. We have multiple kind of different connectivity solutions so that they can reconnect on resync.Anatoly Yakovenko (07:42):So the Aleph database, if it's Byzantine fault tolerant, I mean, doesn't that make it a blockchain? Is there a token? Is crypto economically like fault tolerant?Jonathan Schemoul (07:56):Yeah. So we have a token, but the token is living on multiple blockchain, Ethereum, Solana, and a few others, but those are the most used today. We have a token, you need a token for your data to stay there. If you don't have any more your data gets garbage collected. But we don't have a blockchain because we go and write on over layer ones. We are technically a layer two database which is computing pre storage.Anatoly Yakovenko (08:23):But the data storage, like the Aleph distributed database, what is that backed by? Or can I pick my own blockchain to use it as a common interface or something like that?Jonathan Schemoul (08:34):Well, currently it writes on Ethereum, we're working on making it write on Solana. For this we need our indexer to be super powerful. So we'll get it writing on Solana very soon. Basically you can write on multiple blockchains and use it as a source of proof.Anatoly Yakovenko (08:53):Got it. That's pretty interesting. So it really doesn't have its own blockchain and you're just using the fault tolerance of the chains you're connected to.Jonathan Schemoul (09:04):Exactly.Anatoly Yakovenko (09:06):Awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. So the other challenge I think is like how do you deal with domains and the web? Where do you run these executed nodes? How do you connect all those pieces?Jonathan Schemoul (09:20):It's a really good question. To connect all the pieces together, we didn't develop some really fancy stuff like proof of space and time and things like that to verify that the data is really stored. We are using something much more low-tech, which is just a quality control. We have core channel nodes, which are the controllers of the network, which needs to keep some Aleph have stakers on such economics. They are verifying that other core channel nodes are behaving well. And that also the resource nodes are behaving well. Then the resource nodes are really doing the work of storing data, providing computing, et cetera. And they're continuously controlled by the core channel nodes.Anatoly Yakovenko (10:09):That's great. So they're basically like a tokenized health check, right?Jonathan Schemoul (10:14):Yeah.Anatoly Yakovenko (10:14):I can spin this up and they can continuously monitor whether this computation is making progress, right?Jonathan Schemoul (10:21):Exactly.Anatoly Yakovenko (10:21):Is that verification, is that programmable? Can me as an app developer, can I kind of code up my own apps, specific health checks or an interface or something like that?Jonathan Schemoul (10:35):It's a really good question. That's what we are working on exactly right now.Anatoly Yakovenko (10:40):I'm leaking all the features. My imagination is going.Jonathan Schemoul (10:44):No, no worry. Well, it's really interesting because to understand if an application behaves well on one host, you need to understand what the application is doing. So yes, we will give some kind of health check, which is kind of a unit test of how the app should work. So you will be able to provide unit tests for your app basically.Anatoly Yakovenko (11:11):That's really Cool. What about domains? Like actual DNS?Jonathan Schemoul (11:17):Yeah.Anatoly Yakovenko (11:20):I'm asking all the hard questions.Jonathan Schemoul (11:22):Yeah. These questions will be answered if I explain how we handle access to this virtual machine. Because for DNS, for just IPFS, there is already quite a few solution, that's not an issue. But then if you want to make a domain point to one micro VM, you want your micro VM to be able to serve your data. How we do first the load balancing because that's the important question. For load balancing we have two ways, one, which is a regular cloud load balancing, which could be blocked by government, could be censored, because that's what can happen when you have centralized point of control.Jonathan Schemoul (12:07):We will run it ourselves and a few of our partners might run some of the cloud load balancers that basically you can just point your domain to the cloud load balancer. And then the cloud load balancer will create certificates and stuff like that. It will work. We will run one instance. Ubisoft will likely run another. And like many of our partners. Well, for Ubisoft it's not sure, just some talks about it. But perhaps over partners could run cloud load balancers that we'd go on point on specific micro VM host to see where your app is running and point it to them, that might work.Jonathan Schemoul (12:48):Now What happens if a government says, "This app shouldn't work, this domain shouldn't work." Then you have two solutions, you either put the front-end inside IPFS, use some IPFS gateways, et cetera. And then the back-end is on the VM network. But then what happens if a government blocks the specific DNS inside the micro VM global.aleph.sh .aleph.cloud Whatever. Then we have a decentralized load balancing that comes into play.Jonathan Schemoul (13:24):The idea of the decentralized load balancing is that your browser will connect to the IPFS network using leap peer to peer, just leap peer to peer, find Pi Aleph nodes running, contact them directly then ask Pi Aleph node, "What micro VM host are running this software?" And then you can contact them directly. We are working on the JavaScript library that will do all this work on the client side so that you can have your front-end in IPFS that will then go and find all the back-end hosts that could answer your request.Anatoly Yakovenko (13:58):That's super cool. You guys are working on some really hard problems. I think it should be fairly easy to kind of have basically a resolver that points to ENS in the system, right. That's fairly straightforward. And basically you should be able to use any kind of like name, system, command any blockchain.Jonathan Schemoul (14:25):Yeah, clearly.Anatoly Yakovenko (14:26):Do you think that this is something that browsers are starting to recognize as standardizable? Is there a future where you think this technology could start percolating to the UI level where the end user can pick like blockchain based DNS resolver that kind of like connects all the pieces, right? From the human to this decentralized one.Jonathan Schemoul (14:51):I think that something that could come, I think that those that could really help in this is Mozilla foundation, I think that they would be the one to talk with. We aren't in talk with them because we don't really take that step right now. We have a lot on our plate. But in the future I'm pretty sure it's the way to go. We will connect to any effort in that area and we will recognize it. I know that for IPFS for example, IPFS, IPNS, there are some efforts on some browser extension that you can install to have it, et cetera.Anatoly Yakovenko (15:29):How does like certificate chaining play with us? What happens if I need to have a cert on my service and things like that.Jonathan Schemoul (15:38):A certificate on your service? Yeah.Anatoly Yakovenko (15:41):Like their sign or whatever.Jonathan Schemoul (15:43):Well, we use the one that everyone uses, which is-Anatoly Yakovenko (15:48):Let's Encrypt. The EFF one.Jonathan Schemoul (15:49):Yeah, exactly. We're using this one, we used the discovery with the content, so that we switch to a specific content when Let's Encrypt connects, then we serve this content, then we get a valid certificate, we can serve the good content.Anatoly Yakovenko (16:07):Can you unpack that a little bit?Jonathan Schemoul (16:10):Yeah. Well, Let's Encrypt has multiple ways to certify that you have a certain domain, for sub domains of .aleph.sh and .aleph.cloud, It's easy, we are using wildcard certificates. For custom domains that you could make point to your content directly, what we do is that you put a key inside your DNS to say, this is the virtual machine that should be mapped to that domain. Then you do a CNAME to our cloud load balancer and then the VM host when they get a request for this one, they go and check the DNS to see what VM they should serve on the generator certificate using Let's Encrypt for that domain and they start serving it.Anatoly Yakovenko (16:59):Oh man, this would be really cool. But if we could have like an ENS where in my ENS registry I set my Let's Encrypt domain, and then I run a local DNS server on my home machine where I run my browser and point that as a resolver, you could kind of tie these knots together and get-Jonathan Schemoul (17:23):Yeah, it could work.Anatoly Yakovenko (17:24):That's really cool. What happens if these instances die, where do you guys get more hardware? How does that process work?Jonathan Schemoul (17:36):Well, an instance can just stop, then the load balancing system will find another instance to run your code. Then what happens when an instance get a request for a code that doesn't have for the micro VM network. I mean, it goes on the network, checks, okay, what is the database entry that is in front? It takes the database entries. Has there been any upgrades to it? Okay. I get the upgrades. I subscribe using web socket to the upgrades of this database entry basically because it's a document about database entry.Jonathan Schemoul (18:14):And then it looks, okay, so this is the root FS that I should load. Do I have it? I have it, could I use it? If not, I download it from the network. I applied that root FS, where is the code? Okay. What volume does it needs and it builds and retransits and gets you the answer. For a cold start with no root FS or whatever, it can take a few seconds. But in general you use the same root FS as others. So you can get the code start. If you don't have the code, it's less than a second. If you already have the code of the application is like 150 millisecond for a cold start.Anatoly Yakovenko (18:53):Got It. And is the coordination to decide where to start this particular instance? Does that occur over the underlying chain, like Solana or Ethereum or whatever?Jonathan Schemoul (19:08):Again, that's something that we're working on. At start it's on the cloud load balancer. So the cloud load balancer are semi centralized for that. The idea is that each micro VM running node that starts running one will register a message, which is a database entry with a reference to say, "I am running this one." And then the cloud load balancer looks at the uptimes of the available micro VMs and say, "Okay, this micro VM has it ready." I'm forwarding it to it.Jonathan Schemoul (19:40):And then if there is none, then it could just route it to like a random one that has a good uptime. And then this one, the next time kind of like be choosing automatically because it is already serving it. If there is a lot of requests, it will provision multiple ones.Anatoly Yakovenko (19:59):Interesting. Got it. And you anticipate that you'll basically be able to move if the underlying chain is cheap and fast enough you should be able to move the coordination and kind of like start this instance, pull this volume. This would be really cool with like Arweave backed storage volumes. Because you could almost then see the lifetime, the life cycle of the application as its business logic is evolving, right? That state is very useful to developers who are being able to go back to a checkpoint effectively at any given time too.Jonathan Schemoul (20:38):Well, right now we are using our own storage engine, which is APFS compatible. But in the future we will allow to choose other storage engine and we will also develop gateways with like Arweave, Filecoin and other.Anatoly Yakovenko (20:53):Super cool. I used to work at Mesosphere so I don't know if you've heard of them, like D2iQ, this was kind of Kubernetes competitor, trying to build this decentralized operating system using Mesos as the jobs kind of Q-engine. There's a lot of similar challenges there, and this is really cool that you guys are building this in a decentralized web application that's kind of hosted in the real cloud, the mythical cloud.Jonathan Schemoul (21:28):Yeah. Well, there's a saying, there is no cloud, it's just other people computers. Here it's really other people computer. So it's pretty good because then you don't trust those computers because you know it's other people computers.Anatoly Yakovenko (21:44):How do you guys ensure the integrity of the computation itself? How do I know that the virtual machine, the execution environment that's running isn't malicious.Jonathan Schemoul (21:54):It's a really good question. There is multiple questions there. How can I ensure that this computation isn't returning a bad result because it knows who is on the other end. The load balancing system ensures that you don't really see who is in the other end, so you don't know who is making the request. So you don't know if it's a quality control call or if it's a real call. It goes back to your question of the testing of the application. And there is another one there which is the question of the secrets, because you might need secrets. If you want to do push notification based on a smart contract event on Solana, let's say, because that's something that we are working on right now, thinking about it.Anatoly Yakovenko (22:48):That's super cool.Jonathan Schemoul (22:48):So you would need secrets. You will need to story a secret to being able to go back to this device and send these device and notification. So you either store secrets in the local storage of the instance, but then if the instance dies, you can get it back or you try to get shared secrets between multiple hosts. We are working on it. We don't have a total answer on that. What we are working on is using free shirt cryptography, so that multiple host defined by the developer come under these secrets. And then you go back to a question of trust, which is problematic.Anatoly Yakovenko (23:30):By the threshold cryptography, is this like an MPC to compute, or are you guys thinking like BLS or like Schnorr aggregation?Jonathan Schemoul (23:42):More like you encrypt something that can be decrypted by multiple private keys.Anatoly Yakovenko (23:47):Got it.Jonathan Schemoul (23:48):And then if they want to send a message, it needs to be signed by at least x of y.Anatoly Yakovenko (23:54):Right. Got it.Jonathan Schemoul (23:57):Because this micro VM I mentioned can also send messages on the network. These messages on the network will be database entries that in the end might end up also on-chain using all records or whatever. Because these micro VM can read from on chain data and the idea is that we are working so that they can also write on chain as well. So then you might need some kind of trust somewhere. So one developer could say, I trust this host this host this host, but they need at least to do that calculation three times, let's say. But it's a bit problematic and we are still working on it. It's not finished yet, so yeah.Anatoly Yakovenko (24:40):That's what I mean, that's a really hard problem.Jonathan Schemoul (24:41):Yeah.Anatoly Yakovenko (24:43):Really cool. Yeah, the secrets thing is really challenging. I guess, what's your vision for this? You guys are tackling on some really hard problems, you get all of them done in the next year.Jonathan Schemoul (25:01):I hope so.Anatoly Yakovenko (25:06):What happens then? What is the vision for Aleph?Jonathan Schemoul (25:08):Well, here we are only speaking about a few crypto issues. We aim at bigger than just the crypto ecosystem. What we really want to do is decentralize the web, so getting bigger, way, way bigger, that's the goal. We are working with a few bigger partners who are part of the Ubisoft entrepreneurial labs, for example. We want to have a lot of hosting partners in the game that start providing resources so that I want it to be as easy as spinning up AWS server or whatever, you would just spin up VMs under the .im network. I want it to be as easy as using Firebase, using Amazon Lambda, et cetera.Jonathan Schemoul (25:51):And we have another big project going on, which is the indexing on Solana, where we are indexing data for a few protocols, currently Raydium, we might have another already soon. Well, I can say the name. We are working a lot on Orca, on port finance right now, and a lot of others actually that I can't really talk yet. But the idea is to have all these data available, have all these data feed coming up so that you can have events based on them, also do off-chain computation and things like that.Jonathan Schemoul (26:29):I really want DeFi to be totally resilient because until it's totally decentralized, you can stop DeFi. When it's totally decentralized, you can't. And if there is only the smart contracts that are decentralized, you can still stop it.Anatoly Yakovenko (26:48):Yeah. That's definitely a fair point. I think the UX issues around building also just like push notifications and all these other things for projects are really hard to overcome if it's a decentralized project, because who's going to host those servers, right, to connect to mobile and everything else. Yeah. You guys have a lot of work set out and it's pretty exciting. What do you think is missing? If you guys had like another, somebody else was building this other piece that you think is missing in the Web 3, what would it be?Jonathan Schemoul (27:26):What is missing today in the Web 3 ease of use for all this. We are trying to tackle this, but we have so much on our end. So this is a big issue, ease of use for developers, ease of use for users. Well, Phantom is already doing a great work on that end on Solana. But yeah, this and also I think that there is some kind of breaks between the ... In DeFi, if you want to move money into the real world, it gets hard really fast because there has been some kind of complications that have been put in place by regulators, by banks, by whatever. If we could just get all these parts simpler, it could be great. Some kind of link between FinTech and crypto that would work everywhere in the world, including Europe, USA, et cetera. It would be great. There are a lot of people working on it, but that's something that is missing as well.Anatoly Yakovenko (28:28):Yeah. Identity and like having those easy ramps is still hard. What about DNS? Just straight up resolving, do you think that's tackleable from a Web 3 perspective.Jonathan Schemoul (28:45):The issue is the way DNS is done. DNS protocol is great, but it implies centralization points, a lot of centralization points, which are problematic. Then you will need another standard on DNS. But if you have another standard on DNS, then you have the issue that the network right now is done, is not done for it and the browser don't understand it, et cetera, and operating system don't understand it. We would need gateways for that. I think it's doable. It's definitely doable, but it's a lot of work. And you would need multiple root servers, even virtual root servers, like what you said, local DNS server that would resolve your request, it could work.Jonathan Schemoul (29:38):If Let's Encrypt could understand it in the same way, it would work. Or we could even have something different than the root certificate that we have today, because with blockchain, we already have private keys. We already have signature. So if you sign your content with your private key, then you can verify it on the other end. And you don't really need all these chains of certificates that are here today. So that could also be another solution, but it would need another way, because right now we have roots certificate, children's certificate, et cetera. And it all goes back to central authority. The whole DNS on certificate system today goes with authority. With blockchain we are trained to remove authorities.Anatoly Yakovenko (30:33):Yeah. Do you guys see this as becoming developer facing, or maybe someday eventually kind of like client facing and want these decentralized applications running for me, kind of my own instances. Or is this always going to be here I am, team Orca, go to this domain as a user.Jonathan Schemoul (30:56):It's a good question as well. It's always the issue between hosted components, locally run components and kind of pragmatic on that. At start I would really like to, everything runs inside my browser, everything works. That's great. In reality, you have mobile phones, you have tablets, you have computers, you have a lot range of devices that can be running all the time. So real peer to peer application can't really work that well, unless you go and say, "Okay. While you are waiting for me, please send it to my friend, that will forward the data for me, et cetera.Jonathan Schemoul (31:40):Blockchains are really helping there is that we have a centralized authority, which is the blockchain that you can trust and that can hold data for you and can even encrypt it for you or store it on aleph.im, whatever, and only you can decrypt it. I think that the mix between the two would be good, like self hosted data and remotely hosted data on the decentralized cloud, a good mix of the two could be good. And the efforts by the leap peer to peer team, with the javascript leap peer to peer. And there are a few of us like that helps, because once you have access to a peer-to-peer network directly from your browser, you can cut middlemen. You can cut central authorities, et cetera, if you're the blockchain that serves as a central authority.Anatoly Yakovenko (32:28):What kind of loads have you guys seen or been able to test this out, in terms of like users request per second, kind of WebSocket connections per second.Jonathan Schemoul (32:39):It depends because when it's per server, that's not that much of an issue because the micro VM supervisor just forwards the request to the underlying software. If you don't choose local persistent volume, the supervisor can run as many instances of your program as needed, then you can spawn multiple one even inside the same supervised cluster. And then the network, if it sees that this one has issues adding the request load you can load new ones.Jonathan Schemoul (33:18):I don't think that there is really a limit on the request per second for that. So it's not really the issue that we have. And then on the database part, same, if you access one API server and you give it 500,000 requests per second, it would go down, because it's a server. If you target multiple API server, you are good. So that's also where the decentralized load balancing helps because if you use a cloud load balancer obviously even this cloud can go down. But if you contact a peer to peer network to know what host can answer, then you can contact multiple host. And all our core channel nodes, we are currently 54 of them are also API servers that users can connect to to get the data, which will be certified by our core channel node.Anatoly Yakovenko (34:10):Cool. As a whole, how many, I guess, do you have an idea of how many users per second or humans per second have you guys served in some peak times?Jonathan Schemoul (34:21):We don't, because we don't store metrics currently, we should. We don't have it because we didn't want to have any kind of log or whatever on the users, but we should add it, that's actually a good point, we will.Anatoly Yakovenko (34:37):Yeah. I mean, I think you got to be really aware of privacy and how that impacts some applications. But really interesting to see how this works. Caching is another one of those things, basically having a distributed cache around the world for often queried data. And this is an issue that I think doesn't have a good solution in Web 3 right now. You do all this work, set up a purely thin client, that's like loads from code, only talks to the chain and then you got to go fetch assets. And if you're using centralized ... Yeah, they can basically inject whatever they want.Jonathan Schemoul (35:25):Yeah, that's the main issue. And the good part is that if you also randomize where the request of the users go, if there is one bad actor, it will only inject bad data once in a while you don't even know where. Once there is a quality control it will detect it, so that can also be a solution. It's not a silver bullet either, but it can definitely help. So like for Solana what we are doing right now, for Raydium for example, is that we have an indexer that talks to multiple RPC of Solana then get the transaction history, store it inside the level DB, inside the micro VM, and then index the data.Jonathan Schemoul (36:09):Then we can get data on the pool's latest trades and stuff like that. The idea is that if there is too much request on one index, it will start another index or another index or another index, or et cetera, so that when you do a request, it reroutes you randomly to multiple hosts that have the same index.Anatoly Yakovenko (36:28):How fast is that?Jonathan Schemoul (36:31):Not fast enough currently. Well, it's fast enough for Raydium.Anatoly Yakovenko (36:35):Okay.Jonathan Schemoul (36:36):It works really well.Anatoly Yakovenko (36:40):Raydium gets a ton of hits. I mean, some of their IDOs have seen half a million requests per second-Jonathan Schemoul (36:48):Yeah. So for the Raydium data, it handles it well, like all the trades, whatever, it handles it pretty well. We don't get behind blocks in the indexing, so it works well. For Serum it's a bit more problematic because you need to watch, event cue all the time. I really hope they will have some kind of flux in the future. I think that they are working on it. So that would really help us either to get history even when we aren't watching their event cue.Anatoly Yakovenko (37:23):Yeah. So not half a million per second, half a million total, which is quite different, but yeah, they see some really good traffic.Jonathan Schemoul (37:30):Yeah.Anatoly Yakovenko (37:32):Cool. I mean, that's really cool. I think really hard part I think in designing these systems, one, is the problem is difficult, but then once you build the first version of it and you start hitting real traffic, there's a lot of parts that fit together that break under load. So what is your debugging like? How do you guys actually monitor like debug, like PagerDuty, what do you guys use as a team?Jonathan Schemoul (38:01):Right now our team is still small. We are growing a lot. Right now we are like 10 developers. A few months ago we were only three. A year ago I was alone. So we are growing really fast and we are putting all these things into place. Right now everyone monitors and checks what happens and it helps. There is Hugo who is on the micro VM side, Ali was mostly on the indexer side, myself we can get everything. But we are putting really real stuff in place right now to have it, because we are a growing startup so it takes time to get everything in place.Anatoly Yakovenko (38:43):Yeah, for sure. Do you envision a PagerDuty team for this?Jonathan Schemoul (38:48):Yes. I think that we will need one. Once we have more application that are using it, we will need one. So yes, if you have advices on that day, I'm really happy to get them.Anatoly Yakovenko (39:00):I mean, it's just part of life. It's not complicated. It's just work. This is I think that like response team I think is a difficult thing to set up in a decentralized community. If you guys are building a decentralized network with providers that are supplying hardware and all this other stuff, those are the folks that we found to be really responsive and have a lot of stake in growing this. How do the economics work for all the people actually supplying the hardware and bandwidth, et cetera?Jonathan Schemoul (39:36):Again, the research and economics aren't live yet. We are working on them. The core channel nodes economics is already there for like a year, now it works well. For the core channel node you need to have 200,000 Aleph to start a node and 500,000 Aleph, staked on a node, so that it can start to run. And then all the node operator get a share of a global envelope daily for all the nodes. All the stakers get a part of the envelope for stakers. The more nodes active, the bigger the envelope for staker is. But then for each node, they will earn a bit less if there are more nodes because it's a global envelope. So it helps stakers grow the number of nodes that are active, so that's for the core channel nodes.Jonathan Schemoul (40:25):For the resource nodes, to get storage or computing on network, there is two ways to get it. One that is already live, which is hold X amount of Aleph and get that amount of storage, hold X amount of Aleph and have the ability to start one VM with X megabyte of RAM, X virtual CPU, et cetera. And then the multiplier, and all that gives you the total count of micro VM I mentioned that can be running on your network based on your balance. The good part with that is that partner project could use a lending protocol to borrow Aleph where depositing their own token to get service. They would get the service for free just paying interest in their token, inside the borrowing protocol.Anatoly Yakovenko (41:14):Got it.Jonathan Schemoul (41:15):So that's a way for protocols to get it, but it's quite expensive because they don't directly pay for it. So for this way of using it, Aleph.im network is paying for them from the incentive pool, which right now it's one fifth of the supply, and we are changing it in the next few months, we'll change a bit of economics. It will be nearly half of the supply that would be dedicated to pay for that. Because since you lock a part of the supply, then you can release a bit inside circulating because of this new use. So that's for the hold X Aleph tokens.Jonathan Schemoul (41:51):And then there is another way that isn't developed yet that we will likely use Solana for, because it's fast enough for micro-payments in that area. It's like pay per action, pay X Aleph per gigabyte per month. You as a provider, you can say, "I am okay to be paid at least that much." And then users will say, "I want my data to be replicated at least four time. And I'm okay to pay at most that much for this." Then you get divided by those who provide service and the payment is done as micro payments. And same for the micro VM you pay per CPU per hour, et cetera.Anatoly Yakovenko (42:32):Got it. That's really cool. Well, this has been awesome to have you on the show. I mean, we got into I think the really deep, deep tells of how Aleph works, so I had a blast because it really reminds me of the spending, working on the stuff for centralized systems. It's really cool to see this kind of built ground up for decentralized ones as well. So appreciate the work you're doing. Thank you, Jonathan.Jonathan Schemoul (43:00):Thank you very much for having that call. It was really great talking with you.Anatoly Yakovenko (43:04):Awesome. And good luck to you guys. I mean, startups are blood, sweat and tears, so just keep working on the vision. You'll get there.Jonathan Schemoul (43:11):Thank you very much.Anatoly Yakovenko (43:13):Cool. Take care.

Jeff "Jiho" Zirlin is the Co-Founder of Axie Infinity, an NFT-based play-to-earn online video game. 00:23 – How it started through CryptoKitties?02:41 – What is Axie Infinity?04:13 – Game design and constant iteration05:52 – What is a blockchain game? A mix of social network, gaming and the start of a new economy13:15 – Why is crypto important to Axie?17:24 – Building and relying on your community  20:47 – Is the future of gaming the metaverse and user-owned assets?22:22 – The feasibility of crossover between games with NFT ownership27:35 – Where are Axies user from and what kind of players are they?30:45 – What's Axie's endgame?37:16 – Thoughts on competitors41:18 – Generative art and creating an Axie DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. 

Yutaro Mori & Grace Kwan are the Co-Founders of Orca, a user-friendly cryptocurrency exchange built on Solana. 01:15 – About Orca and its vision09:48 – What’s the future of DeFi?20:48 – A little bit about Orca’s roadmap25:50 – What does Orca’s team look like?32:11 – The internet hasn’t changed much, people grew into it. How will crypto grow more present in our life?36:22 – Solana and zero knowledge proof40:02 – Orca’s next features planned for Q2 and Q343:46 – How does Orca plan on growing their worldwide community? DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. 

George Harrap is the co-founder of Step Finance, a platform for Solana DeFi users to track their portfolio performance. Before Step, George was the CEO of Bitspark. 00:29 About George Harrap and mining05:03 From Bitcoin to DeFi, how can crypto solve currency issues in the world18:27 STEP Finance’s vision for the next five years21:20 Censorship resistance and layer 1s27:11 Hackathon: what would you like to see created?30:30 Thoughts on Rust and why it was the better choice for Solana38:08 Why you can’t innovate in the traditional financial system DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. 

Kevin Rose is a partner at True and a serial entrepreneur best known for founding Digg and Revision3. Most recently, he founded Oak, a guided meditation app, and Zero, an app for tracking intermittent fasting. 00:08 – Introduction of Kevin Rose, Modern Finance and the story of Reddit vs. DIGG06:04 – From DOS to Windows, where are we in the evolution of crypto07:50 – Crypto is here to stay. Could we see countries getting into it in the future?14:47 – The NFT craze19:58 – NFT: dynamic art and encrypting mystery over time23:08 – Blockchain is persistent and permanent; how will this impact NFTs in art and games?32:49 – From investing into educating people on crypto39:35 – Discussing the repercussion of Christie’s endorsement of NFTs43:22 – Kevin Rose’s investing philosophy49:34 – Kevin’s advice: test features DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. 

Jason Choi is a General Partner at Spartan Capital, one of Asia’s first crypto funds. As Spartan Capital’s first employee, Jason helped scale the fund from $9M to $200M within 3 years, and supported the launch of Spartan’s $50M DeFi-only venture fund to back world-class teams shaping the future of finance. 00:23 – Getting into crypto and about Spartan Capital04:33 – How does Spartan Capital invests?11:47 – Next wave: building for current users vs future adopters?19:47 – DeFi and the yield farming phenomenon30:36 – From CeFi to DeFi for the mainstream adopters43:33 – The NFT craze and where it could lead us51:37 – Thoughts on the next wave? DAOs? Social Networking? DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. 

We are excited to have Dan Gunsberg, Co-Founder of Hxro, sitting down with us for Episode 41. During this discussion, Dan talks about his history in traditional finance, how this experience guided him to building out Hxro, the importance of community, and the powerful disruptions he believes are going to happen over the next few years. 00:25 – Dan’s crypto story and what’s Hxro?05:38 – Centralized crypto exchanges vs legacy exchanges15:07 – Community capitalism24:11 – Community building around projects35:23 – Closing thoughts and what’s next for Hxro DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.