Epicenter – The Hosts Look Back on 2021

Hi, welcome to epicenter of the podcast. Where were you for crypto Founders? Builders and thought leaders. I'm suggesting questio. And today, I'm here with Brian, Fabian, crane fed, AKA Ernst and sunny Agarwal. Today. We're, we're doing our yearly tradition of having a epicenter host. Just Extravaganza episode where we just get to Talk Amongst ourselves. Talk about what happened in the last year and where we think things are going and usually break apart our predictions from

the previous year. Before we do that. I'd like to tell you my responses today. We pair of swap. You can beat the market price every single block. It's fast as highly liquid and they just launched 35, which has a new contract and new apis. It has a more modular infrastructure, which is more gas friendly and now supports free approvals using If you're a permit messages, they also recently launched to support for

Avalanche polygon and BSC. And you can always use a swap with your Ledger device right in let you live. If you go to Paris w, .i o to get started. If you have crypto assets, sitting idly in your wallet. Well, you need to do something about that and you should start earning rewards and contributed to network security by staking. With course, one there is taking providers, securing five billion in assets for over 25. Decentralized networks, including Solana Cosmos in aetherium.

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So well, So the best part of epicenter, I just grind through the rest of it just to get to these yearly episodes. Yeah, and like every year we say, we're going to do this more often, but we never end up doing it more often so much. You have to take what Sonny says today with a grain of salt. Because for him, it's really already. He's a, he's over in Puerto Rico and it's noonish for the rest of us and Sonny got up, especially Yeah, really appreciate it.

Sunny. So, yeah, I think like, there's lots of different themes that we want to talk about today. And so I think we'll start with, you know, what were the big themes this year and how we perceive them into an ni, you know, themes for the future. And how we think things are going to evolve in the next year or two. I think the thing that everybody had brought up and it's probably on everyone's mind is like and if T's ha like and if he's

absolutely blew up this year. So, you got, you were not surprised, but somewhat surprised. So basically, I mean, yeah, so basically the nft is thing, it caught me, totally, by surprise. The really I always thought that nft is were coming. But very much not in the way

that they've actually arrived. So, basically, to me the way that they have manifested themselves is mostly in the status as a Still Main. And I thought that basically nft is what manifest themselves in the in the realm of all things Financial but non fungible, which is actually the majority of assets. So yeah, totally surprised. You think that this current form and appease is what's going to be like that, what's used long-term like I do, is it?

So, what I'm personally, really interested in is, like, figuring out how do you like, use at ftes in, like, more defy, protocols? I think most of defy, currently is like, it's like one prediction I have, which I know may be true. But I think that, like, defying and of teas are gonna become more and more like combined with each other, right? Because I think that like, you know, what's Defy Kurdish really built around these fungible tokens.

And like you mentioned like, you know, most Finance Financial assets are like entities, if you want to like bring like homes and stuff onto a blockchain, like we need to have like those BNF keys. And if I want to have a protocol that gets a mortgage on those homes, you need to have defy the interact with those entities. Now the thing is like, yes, I agree with you that like, you know, third pfp and of T is profile pic and and of tease, you know, they're not exactly

that. But I think like, you know, Oh, they're just like s to groundwork and there you can think of them as these are the easiest things to build. And so that's why they got there what got built first and you know, there's all this stuff that's building this like tooling around them and that will be usable for more things. Well, it's I mean, it's interesting, right? Because like anything eise. I mean, they've been around for

a while. But actually I think the first use case of any tea that I remember clearly is like centrifuge, right? And they've been working on this for like years and years. And that was actually exactly that, right? Because they have basic enfps for like non fungible Financial assets, where you would basically have like an energy for some sort of loan, and then they would get pulled. And then You'd have like a fungible token that is them back by using ft.

So like you've had you've had that it just hasn't taken off in the way that it did around all kinds of stuff. No, no. No, it's not. It's not just profile pictures, right? It's like all kinds of like art. The interesting thing about the art thing is, I mean, I remember very well. The so, you know, this is team. Team that now works on Ocean protocol, but they've had a bunch of freed assessors, right? So, they had this thing called Big Chain.

You be at one point and before that, they had a thing called, The Scribe, and describe, was basically be basically doing something like, and if he is rather like cracking art ownership on the Bitcoin blockchain, and I remember having a lot of discussions with them back. Then this was a 2015, 14, maybe 14. And because I was so positive. Also, like, how is this is

having value, right? Because, like, you have to Define this like separate, you can still copy like there are thing, but then you have to stay still ownership, and this is really how value. And I remember having these discussions with him and like, yeah, 2014. And then, of course that didn't take off, but now it is, but it makes sense to me in a way, right? Because I think you have something where you, you didn't

have a market before. For like, it was basically not possible to kind of trade, a lot of these intangible pictures, images, ideas memes. And now you can have it. And that's a pretty huge, I think. I feel like, I mean, the thing that I'm most interested in it with regards to nifty's at least in the next couple of years. Like, I don't know how this plays out, sort of like more.

I'm not sure. I have fully formed ideas about the how this plays out with non-financial assets, like, homes and loans, and things like that.

But the whole pfp thing and sort of the status of the service for me, I think can serve as a sort of a base layer for new forms of social networks where financial services and this kind of ties in. Into like what you were saying earlier, so I like fine, social networks and financial products, kind of like end up merging and it's like the the financialization of status and the financialization of these sort of like, in this sort of like intangible idea of status

and I can see where, you know, these things start getting boostrap where infps are actually used as collateral. So, like you kind of steak you're in a key in this, these you're in a teasing this new in these new networks, and then, From there, these sort of new social networks would issue tokens that that users could use to like using defy things like that. Like, it's not fully formed by like this is where I see like at least of the pfp aspect of an EFT. He's heading in the next couple

years. Yeah. I think that's two overlapping things here. Right? So, basically, the SNF teas and then there are social tokens, right? And I mean basically tokens, that kind of grant you access to The Network's to me, that's a different use case. It's not because nft is to me. This is a very clearly one-dimensional thing where basically you have an exact price point for each n ft. And so on and for social tokens, it kind of allows for much more for much richer Dynamic, right?

What are some examples of social tokens and talking about? So for, I think the first ones were the Friends with Benefits people at, but I think it's proliferated. So actually, I am not particularly active because I have two little time, but I know there's tons of tons of social networks out there that are gate kept by tokens.

So, here's one like, option of what You know, I agree that I think a lot of NF teas are currently being used effectively as like social gaming tokens Community tokens and maybe maybe what's going on is that these are it's a sort of proof of work, right? Because you know, once you have an EOC 20 standard kind of thing, it's very easy for anyone to just go mint a token and just like release it. And I say, oh this is a community token, right?

But it's like if everyone touching that then like, you know, maybe it's the barrier to entry is just like so small. Small. But it's gonna get flooded with all these Community tokens, other lose their value. I think by making them ftes and like having to put some artwork into it. The community Creator had to sort of look a bit of proof of work that they have to do.

They have to do this like minimum threshold of like investing like finding an artist and like creating at least like, you know, whether it's generally like Auto generative or like hand drawn or something, but you have to like create like, you know, okay, I got to go create 10,000 artworks and then you can have this, like, Community token.

Yeah, I think I think one of the things that's important to recognize here is the importance of first and you know, like on a theory in like the the sort of first big and ft projects like, you know, the crypto pumps or whatever.

Like those are going to have. Those are going to remain valuable like for a long time, like the first crypto bunker, like the first generative art or like the first like pixelated art or whatever and then like, you know, on Solana, the equivalent of that is like DJ. So I think that's the first kind of like pfp. And I'm like everything else kind of like comes like Goes To Zero from the Army. Like, you know, the prices are like, don't maintain the same

value. So I think like the kind of Blue Chip and ftes will remain valuable on every platform. And then, like once in a while. There's going to be like, a first of something, like, it is gonna be a first up, some new kind of art, whether it's like visual art or film, or, or or audio or music. And you know, that will happen on a theorem. It will happen on salon.

And these kind of like new experiences will always remain sort of like the Pinnacle of like what people expect and if to use to deliver the value and the floor price will probably likes a super high and then like, everything else is kind of copies. It kind of goes down from there. So two things I want to add, what's up.

So one is you know, about the status thing, you know, I mean, I actually don't think it's that surprise and I think that's actually been this like missing piece in crypto. We're so if you guys know Elaine who she's like, you know, I really like her blog and I think I mentioned it in the past couple times, but I remember like she had this post from like 45 years ago where she says like, hey people often forget

this like other values. Like, you know, we talked about the, you know, Reuses of money, right? Like medium of Exchange store, value and unit of account. And say, there's actually this like very forth, very commonly used one, which is display of wealth, right? And she's like, gold is actually, you know, made for a very good like money because it actually served as a good display of wealth where you could turn it into jewelry and use it to show off. Right?

And that was something that was missing from the digital, like what what what Bitcoin was and like, you know, in a few joke like, oh, maybe what we got to do is rather hit like, You know these like gold chains that have them like some like trusted Hardware that like shows, you're like, Bitcoin balance on your thing. Is it?

Clear? That's not what's happening and I think and if he's our sort of what came in and like field in that Gap, all the being the display of wealth digital Lambos. Yeah, they're digital Lambos, right? Okay. So question. How about we go around what is everyone's favorite nft collection or nft here. I mean II. So I you know, I my interact with any of these been fairly limited, you know, there's like some things like this centrifuge or irbid. Some that. I actually like non-traditional

use cases. I bought a few entities. When when we were preparing the rarer podcast, right? Good that because that was kind of but otherwise I have not been very active. I have actually not bought any kind of a Nifty swimming a collection. I think I have you. Maybe three does this count sunny. I think that was like so epic.

What they did where like, you know, they mentioned that oh, yes, these be three positions are nft is but like when they dropped it, they actually had like a cool artwork for each n ft. And I think that like surprise anyone and I think that was like, so cool. I also said, I also still have a very extensive not-safe-for-work collection of clovers. I don't know whether you guys remember this and I'm still waiting for this to come back so

I can dump my clovers bags here. You have to tell people that like, you know, this was like an OG and if he kills all the OG n of P projects are what's like become really popular. It was an OG n ft project. I mean this this I mean it's like this gent. It's this generative art thing. We're basically Am I on? I mean, it's a black and white thing and basically the the It's The End state of a goal of a go game. Right? So basically it's and so basically, it's genitive.

It's actually super cool. But yeah, I feel like there's not a lot, not a lot of people pushing this my favorite and if he's that I bought, I bought them like way before. This was any like was The thing, I mean, I don't know they're not like worth anything, but I just think they're cool.

And but like there are these sort of Ninja Turtle figures on you can't really see it here, but like with a background of like the US dollar, they're not worth anything, but I just thought it was cool to get that collection. And and of course, you know, my junk dick pics. Got a and I'm holding onto them because I'm convinced I'll hear be worth something someday. I think for me, I think my favorite one is it's called stacked toads.

And what happens is you get these little toads and then you like steak them and what happens you by staking them, you earn stack tokens and you use a stack tokens, like take the toads and like, stack them on top of each other and you get like a tower of toads. It is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but I think it's hilarious and funny and like, yeah, and I think what's cool is it kind of what?

It did was it started introducing a lot of like nft people to like Concepts from like elsewhere and crypto like ideas like staking and things like this. I think that was actually kind of pretty cool. Well, let's go to the let's go to the next topic. We just sort of I think Sonny brought it up. No, because he had the entity explosion. And at the same time, we've had 35, I mean, in some ways, it's exploded, right? There's been like explosion of

activity. But at the same time, like, defy tokens that I think were like their age. It's on point, especially these kind of etherium, defy things like, you know, maker curve, compound urine, etcetera, Etc. They have not done so well, what's going on? Yeah. This is this an They should I made recently which was like Hey, like, you know, if you go to 2020 and you talk about like what were the D5 Blue Chips,

right? You know what, we had like make our Sushi uni wifey snx comp, like all these things.

And like, I think out of all the D5 Blue Chips, like none of them are in the top 50 by like market cap anymore other than uni, like, you know, Sushi and x n x star like Not even in the top hundred compound is barely hanging on Ave is like, you know, I don't know number 70 or something and it's like, you know, it's so, you know, I asked a lot of people of, you know, I was asking if you people like more investor e friends. I'm like, hey, you know, what's going on with defy right now?

Why is it like, just like, not know this this slipping in, like, valuations? And they're like, yeah, honestly, I call the in all the interest says, like not. It's kind of boring. Everyone's just more into like nft is in gaming now. And so I wonder if that's all it is or if there's something deeper going on where like, you know, you know, we had these like Forks upon Forks upon forks, and I wonder if that's finally like, you know, starting to be felt. We're like everyone's like

right. And you know, we always like joked about oh, these are just valueless governance tokens, right? But I think you know, it might be coming a little bit true. Now where I think a lot of people are track starting to realize that like, hey do these If I tokens really have any actual value and it's in for a lot of them, they don't even use useful for governance either. So, but it's also it happened to the one project that has had no notable, folks, right? So, if you look at maker, it's

also slit down. It's at like 65 or something. Now, maybe even that isn't meme like the fork of effectively the fork of maker right there. Like I think what I think in 2020 everyone else started getting forked and like added a Added like yield farming to the forks, right? But maker never got forth until this year. And but now I think spell is like flipped maker and like I think ma'am is actually in the top is not in the top 50 by market cap as there like stable coins.

I think maker actually did get out competed or is in the process of getting out competed right now. Yeah. I mean, I also Guess that different topic, we're going to get to but I also you know Wonder to what extent. There's a factor here that you know here in gas costs. Just gotten like so crazy expensive that actually means. Like the, you know, the amount of users has really shrunk a lot, right?

Where it's only now, people have like a huge amount and then, you know, you have people going to lots of other things, whether it's, you know, it's Lana, Avalanche Cosmos chains. Polygon. I don't know where and then I mean that's obviously these defy blue chips on aetherium. Have generally not been able to, you know, like replicate the success only theorem elsewhere or like even that even how does that work? Right?

I guess always maybe the ones who seem to be, like, most aggressive in trying to do this and trying to, like, kind of launch of another chains. but yeah, I think that's also something where like It's not working in favor of these D fibers of chips. So you're saying that there's a sort of dilution of the user base relative to other chains and the defy activity happening on other chains.

I mean like let's say someone now, right, someone new is like hey, I want to start using like crypto and like you're not even going to tell her. I mean, I wouldn't even say to me like hey, you know, do some hearing thing, right? Because it's like doesn't make sense. But I like the gas calls to like way too high. Yeah, they're gonna go to be a c or something. I mean, most people I think via cease Lana, Avalanche, you know somewhere, right? Yeah, that's obviously bad for

the serum defy projects. Yeah, also, I feel like I feel like the the D5 protocols that have, you know, tried to like obvious example, like having, you know, tried to deploy

multiple chains. You know, there are tools like move your liquidity over but they haven't made it like super simple for their users to like, you know, move their positions on to other chains where you know, like these might be lower and and I finally kind of frustrating it kind of as a user of of these protocols like being able to just like a one-click movie liquidity over. I think that user experience aspects, like not there yet II do think that.

So what I think that the multi chain approach of Ave and Sushi is like wrong, right? Because I think that like the Application specific approaches the right one, but we'll get into that later. But I think like with the Ave, so specifically. So I wonder what one thing. I need to understand a little bit better is like, how well are these things competing on these other platforms? Right? Because I like, for example, I think that like, I don't know how, I don't know how.

Obviously anybody knows who she is, getting pretty out competed on the other platforms. Right? So if you go and Pauly, got like so Sushi has redeployed themselves everywhere. Are but like, you know on polygon Creek swap is the biggest the biggest acts on Avalanche. Looks like Trader, Joe and like,

thanks. So I think what's happening is like, you know, these protocols that started on a theorem and then try to expand are not able to compete with the protocols that are, you know, maybe native to the other ecosystems. Why do you think that is sunny? I think part of it is just like Community sentiment like or like, you know, the core team would rather promote the things that are like native to their ecosystem because they have a higher sense of loyalty and

things like that. So I think that's a large part of it. And I think also the things that are native to it, maybe started their first, right? Like, quick swap was on polygon first and then like, Sushi came over and stuff, right, but it's like by that time because because if you're expanding your sort of like playing this like, you know, mercenary of the okay. All right, fine, you know, the usage on your platform is good enough that I'm going to.

It's worth it for me to start, like deploying there. But by that time like the the missionaries who really like that platform and a charge of building stuff earlier. They've already built up a user base. Yeah, I mean I think go so well on one thing is if you have like

an existing token, right? That's already distributed to like it constrains you a lot right versus okay, you can start from scratch and in Hughes like the entire token Supply, you Tara Mae to that, try to incentivize the bootstrap to project on that chain, and then I think the other thing is also If you don't have like some coordination, it's just it increases complexity in some way. So I think it will also tend to slow down this project.

A little bit, make them a little bit, less agile, and Nimble and maybe maybe customized through the particulars of that chain. So, if you think we'll see. You know, etherium defy applications Port over to Cosmos, when, when kind of Moses. Live, and well, I think, I think we will see you through my applications poured over the cosmos. I'm not sure if it will be via Atmos because I don't think every most solves the problem, it just, you know, everyone's just another polygon or

something. Right? It's like, you know, maybe a more IBC compatible polygon, but at the end of the day, it shows us a not, you know, it's an evm running on tenement. I think what might happen if you might start seeing so everyone has built on the software, called ether man to which is, you know, built a lot of it was built by the atmos team, but also, A lot of other teams as well. Look good.

I'll calm and stuff. And so I think we're going to see more through applications deploy, their own like, Sovereign chains with an evm, right? So they're going to take put an evm module and just have their contracts on it. And I think, you know, I like I said, I had a bet. Two years ago, that within three years maker will be on its own chain. So I only have a year left in my background. I'm you know, now I am getting a little bit more worried about that. I bet I was like pretty

confident. All right. Well, you know, I made it back because we thought it was a 50-50 over under, but like, it looks it looking like that might not happen. But, you know, I think things like compound. Like, you know, they have for a long time, you know, they haven't been playing that like, multi-chain game of working deploy everywhere because they

made this bet on compound chain. And saying like, Hey, we're going to go build an application specific chain to go and have that be the living market for everything. Do you think these chains will be IBC compatible or or the that's unlikely? Yeah, I think they will be. I think that like, so one, because I think, you know, for example, compound has been built on substrate right now. I have it on good authority, that they kind of hate substrate

right now. I haven't heard anyone who has had a good time building on substrate. But like, I think that You know, there is an IBC palette being built for substrate, so that so those with IDC, so subject change will basically become IVC compatible. Yeah, I think, you know, cost us just already has this like, big Network effect on application specific change and being able to interoperate. And so, I think we're just going

to see more and more of that. Yeah, I'm super bolus on this Vision. Like, I think that I think that it's kind of interesting to see if your IAM starting any Theory and I like I sort of and, you know, evm application start going down this route. And like, when I hurt, you know, when when when I heard about like, gnosis kind of merging off into his own emerging with, with exercise and it becomes its own chain, if I like, it makes so much sense.

And I mean like it's basically the cosmos Vision playing out on aetherium only like without the bridging technology yet. But I would be so happy to see, you know, evm chains. Well, like first of all IQ, theorem really adopting this eat this. This this sort of interchain vision and it's like application-specific blockchain Vision, but also integrating IBC. So that just everything works together. Sorry. I have to clean up. I think it's my misunderstanding here.

So basically gnosis chain is not going to be a Application specific chain, it's going to be very general evm base chain, that kind of that basically is any theorem Forerunner in terms of implementing eips and does it very best to to scale in such a manner as to retain reasonably cheap gas prices, which I think is currently. So I mean, obviously there's pros and cons for the EVAP, right? So basically if you were To sit down at the drawing board again. What would you modify? The evm.

Almost certainly, but I mean, there's such a huge Network effect around EVMS that basically the bet we hired noses chain. Is that EVMS are going to be there. And there are they are gonna stay kind of like, I mean various Internet Protocol is actually pretty. Eddie bad standards, but once they hit a certain level of adoption, you can't get rid of them anymore. You can't change the email standard or something. It's like I mean, yeah, maybe It's Tricky but it's there. And so basically.

Yeah, I mean that's kind of the bad behind gnosis chain. That seems like give to be honest. He's kind of like a strange bed to me. Right? Because if you look at it today, right? You have I don't know what some tens of millions of crypto users. Right? And we're so much at the beginning and if you say like, oh actually deviance bad, but like I mean, I don't believe she's never takes exist the same way. Right? That you have. It's like whatever TCP IP or

like. Yeah, I mean they they kind of do, don't they? Yeah, you know, I see both sides of this a lot because like, you know what? So I will I will, I have this like tweets and he and my drafts that I, which is like, but it goes something like, cause like the early Cosmos came, like Cosmos was right about everything except evm skepticism. I think that like, the early cause of seemed like, we had this entire vision of like multi-chain things, everything

interconnecting. I think the one mistake we made was that we were way too, evm, skeptical. And we thought, Tweets been in your draft since last year because I think you mentioned the same thing online, really? Well. Okay. Well, yeah, it's been sitting there. Yeah, but I think like, you know, I think, you know, I did not expect that like the multi chain would play out in such, just a bunch of generalized UVM, change that are talking to each other, right? I think that's.

And that is kind of mostly what we have right now, right? Like Avalanche, Phantom polygon. All of these are just evm change and I'm still not sure that this is like their Because I do, I still do think that like the evm is the bottleneck on

scalability, right? And like, I think so Lana has showed that we're like, you just if you want achieve any sort of real scalability, you just have to throw out the evm because that like you like Avalanche, you know, they say they want, they do all these like cool things that the consensus protocol there, but end of the day, none of it matters because the evm is the bottleneck, but I mean, what he could do is I mean you could reduce like the database or the state sighs.

Bye. Taking a snapshot every year or something. I mean that's way is to actually combat this and make it workable right? Or you just build like a compiler from solidity to like llvm and like, you know, let people write their contract and solidity and you know running on other state machines. You know, I guess it was another sort of thing to talk about would be like I think so this kind of double head because this

is what I want. One of the things I wrote as like a prediction for the future of. I think it's mix in where I do think that 2022 will be like the year wrap change. Where like, I think that Tara has like set the precedent for this, right. Tara Tara was like the execution of the cause of the cosmos division where what they did was they start, they started with this like application-specific blockchain, which is a stable

coin. And then they have like sort of built like a tiny ecosystem around me where they're like, okay, we have this like app this application and then they're like, okay, we want to like Drive usage with its

application. Let's start building more sub, protocols on top of it, and they built up a little ecosystem on top of it. And then, you know, I think what's going to start to happen now with terrorism, going to see applications on Tara, start to break off onto their own chains because, you know, I'm already talking to Applications that are sort of in the Pro, you know, thinking about this right now.

And I think that like, people and I think there's like, you know, projects like the door chain and osmosis and stuff have been like following in that vein. And I think we're I think we're going to start to see more and more applications start to do that being like, hey, you know, I why aren't we also taking this like more application, specific route and I think 2022, we're just going to see a huge explosion of these. Yeah, I mean, I think that's another. Another thing.

That was a big thing in in this year. I was, I think I BC launching and then it's act, every division, development forever. And then it's pretty. I think the amazing thing is been like, you know, just I don't know. It got to like 1 million transaction, ID transaction saying like, you know, very quickly, I don't know less than two months or something and then

Are they feeling that? Maybe surprised me the most, and I think a big credit to like, sunny and osmosis teams, and that was just the user experience. I've always liked shockingly, good because I was all like, worry, it won't wondering, is that going to be okay, but I think that's actually. Yeah, it's good. So I think that's, that's clearly playing out well, and I think that's just gonna Grow a lot.

And of course, you can have all the chair other types of Rich technologies that will also have great user experience. I think the ancient did anything to you. Same thing. It's interesting also. Yeah, they think about bridges and sort of CDs like two ways. I think it is is breaking out, right? I think there's like one thing, which is a bridge where you have like some trust, you said two parties.

And I think that maybe the two leading contenders there seemed to be like Wormhole and axel are. And that's pretty nice because they conveyed, the trustee parties can basically run like a full node on like whatever chain and they can make the footprint on the Chain, very easy, and it could make a great user experience and you can support like all kinds of chains and then but of course, the downside is, these operators have to then decide.

Okay. We are going to run the full node on this chain, and, of course, the nice ring, right? You see that? Again, pretty amazing. It's just a permissionless nature. Right? Like you can just spin up connected chains. And and and and so I think that's that's having both of those technologies have a huge future. And then yeah, I think both of those have come a very long way. This year may be trusted bridges are like a little bit behind but not much right?

I think that it's also very soon that I think they'll have You know, be basically like, very usable for like normal users. I want to ask you guys about like so IBC and Wormhole Bridges like type acknowledge. What, what do you what are the cost structure is look like here and where are like, is IB? Am I right to assume here? Like, IBC is cheaper for for users? Then like the Wormhole kind of model. So what I would say here is how what I see the difference here is.

IBC is much much higher integration costs. Where could I be see? Is this like, very trustless like client protocol and then you have these trusted Bridges, where you basically have people run note to get IBC integration. You actually have to build something into the Block Chain itself and getting that IBC protocol into more Frameworks is challenging, right? So, you know, we're working, you know, the console's teams are working on like, you know,

getting Needed to substrate. And you know, I know course, one is working on getting into cell 0 and this, you know, it's a work in progress with something like Wormhole. It's very easy. You just have to ask your validate. Mr. Set up to run nodes for the counterparty blockchain. And you know, there's no, there's no development work to be done.

You know, she'll have to integrate multi saying after like, you know, there's work to be done, but it's not as much, but I think the key word there is, you have to ask your validators. I think that the difference will come down to So something like Wormhole is really useful for connecting what I call Trust famous blockchains. It's like, you know, it's great for connecting things in the top hundred to other top hundred chains, right?

Where you have to have this. Like, you know, you have to get people to agree to make that connection and run nodes and houses like higher cost. The beauty of IBC is given how permissionless it is. Where literally to make a connection between two chains. You just make a Action on each chain and you have a connection going, right? And I think what happened that. I think that's how you move from the world of hundreds of blockchains to thousands and

tens of thousands, right? There's like chains. I have never heard of that are like, enabling IBC on Cosmos right now and connecting to osmosis and like don't even have to talk to us about it right there. Just like going ahead and doing it and I think that's like the permission. Listen. This is what's going to be like, very different. Yeah, I mean, I think it's also if you think of like, okay, what would these fridges? Well, I sort of did apology of

these fridges. So I think if you look at something like Axl are right, we'll ask her is a cosmesis Decay chain and I think yeah, I think we're almost going similar Direction. I says cosmesis Decay chain, and then you have basically any bre any calls most share any IBC chain can just like connect to that, right? And you don't have to ask anybody. You can just use the IBC and then acts like an basically have their protocol the connect to all these other chains, right?

So I think it makes sense to have like, you know Cosmos Pages via IV. C connect to like, you know, the bridge chain that then connects to like all these like non-ai you see ridges. And so you kind of see both their IQ can see the the advantage of both both approaches and then you can just combine them by having Saying. Yeah, basically, like a chain that's run by a bunch of alligators that you're connecting to. All these doesn't change, that then connects to all the others

like IBC. so I think one of the other topics we want to touch on and you probably get to the to the the prediction soon because we're already at like 40 minutes here, but really interesting is like the proliferation of Dow's doubt rulings and the Emergence of new organizational Paradigm Zach, I think like one of the areas where we've seen lots of dows come up this year is around in a fees. So that I've been like lots of entity projects that I've created douse with varying, a

say like like very utility. But what are some of the other kind of Dow projects that you guys have seen perhaps like outside of a set of n of T so I can defy or like, Community governance. I mean, I think what we saw was like the We've started taking Telegram and Discord groups and calling them Dallas, which I think is kind of funny, but like

kind of not wrong either, right? We're like, you know, we I think So what one of my, my friends, they built this project called Commonwealth, which is this like governance forum for like and for they pitched this idea to me called token curated communities where like you launch a token and it builds Community around it and the community figures out the use case and I was all I was actually a little bit skeptical when they pitch it to me, but it's like interesting that like what they did.

So if anyone's familiar with like the ion token ions are Like secondary token in osmosis that, like it started as like just two days before launch were like, hey, let's just add in a token and airdrop it to a bunch of people and don't tell them why, or what it's for or why they got it or anything, and let's just see what happens and like it, drew this like, really big organic Community around it. And this like Community is like, doing all sorts of like, you know, like, you know, they're

they're building stuff and, like, designing protocols, and all this kind of Of cool stuff and it's like funny enough. I think the most powerful doubt tool that's been created so far as Telegram. Brian, what's going on with like

free time? Because I was just thinking about it the other day because I'm like man, imagine telegram figured out a way of monetizing like all the value that's being built off of there like platform and like it's kind of sad that it kind of just like failed in such a spectacular way. Is there anything still going on with that? Yeah, I mean, yeah, so probably most people don't know the history here, but like, I can spend like few minutes on it.

But basically, I telegram was, was wanted to launch a blockchain and they did this huge token tail is like race like 2 billion or something like that and then the ACC and they had done a lot of development work. And then the ACC basically like last-minute was like, you can't launch this thing and then Telegram, Kind of like we paid stare investors, but the code was kind of there and there was some other company that was also like working on this thing.

And so then the other were like, oh, let's go and launch this thing anyway. And put most of the tokens in the community pool, right? So and then we of course also we were like one of the validators that kind of like, you know, helped launch this thing and it's still running. They actually rebranding to ever scale now though because apparently like the whole tall and thing has been like You know, a bit of a. So, it's still running.

I think this is, it seems to be like a pretty active Community. I sort of, you know, there's not too much intersection. Like, you don't really hear about it much because I think it's like its own community. So let's see where it goes. But it's pretty active. Of course. It's totally decoupled from telegram this point, right?

It's just, it's basically just another like layer once more contract blockchain now, Of course, maybe at some point, you know, telegram like integrate that or maybe something else. Who knows? I think in the end it seems Very likely to me that telegram will probably right turn the telegram app into some kind of crypto wallet. I guess it seems like probably not launched her own blockchain at this point, but But I guess that's another thing that's starting to happen. Right?

Is that you have just two more more crypto features being added to like mainstream consumer apps. And I think if you see the, if you see the kind of monetization and business models and economic effects, like crypto, then I'm sure this is some also something that's going to continue in a big way. I mean, I think even just this year we did see it added to a lot of like traditional payments apps and stuff. But like, I think we're gonna

see crypto and more. You know, I'm hoping that we will see more like proliferation of existing crypto, you know, I don't know. There's a lot of controversy this year around, like, signal and how they added mobile coin. And everyone is like, what is this thing? And like, you know, it's go out of Bitcoin wallet or something like that. Right? So I went, I wonder how that's gonna play out.

I remember there was a couple days ago where the Discord, you know, I don't know the CEO of Discord was like, oh, we're experimenting with some crypto stuff and then they got this like massive backlash from like their Community, which is obviously a lot of Gamers and it's funny Yankee. So basically that was also what what amazed me, how big the

backlash. From the Discord Community, who for me would have been people who are so familiar with in-app purchases and so on, still was why do you think that was funny? They're still mad at us for stealing all their gpus, but I would generally think that's like you said, that's it. Yeah. Okay. I think that the Gaming Community is still pissed about the gpus. Has anyone talked to them about proof proof of stake. Maybe probably, I don't know,

maybe probably not to be honest. I mean, I don't know how well they understand it. But, you know, we could tell them all we want about proof of space-time Sonny. You you sort that out you go sneak to The Gamers. We created a cohort. I think it should be. You is I mean, what's this doing here? I'm not a gamer at all. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean well, even if we did tell them, Every day they understand purpose take. But we told them that, are we coming in? Like what 2017?

And here, we are like four years later and like we're still sucking up their gpus, right, you know, I wonder even once theorems which is away from her steak. I don't know if that's when I get solved right. Because you know, some other GPU coin is going to pop up and still going to be the stock of like GPU compute. So I'm not sure that's really going to be a solved problem. I think basically the I mean that the demand is going to go

down though, right? I mean, so basically, I think, I mean if like large market cap chains shy away from from proof-of-work. It's bound to happen. Oh, I don't know if we're going to get to a world where I think that the I mean no matter what, the opportunity cost of using GPS or gaming vs. Mining is always going to lean towards the mining. And so the costs are so it's

going to go up for gpus. I have a thesis that kind of brings together the last two points we talked about so I think a good Shane fordow tooling and is going to make a huge. It's going to be a huge asset in the layer 1, horse, between between different chains. So, I think the chain that kind of draws other communities around hours. It's just it'll be difficult to

beat. You know what another thing to discuss about the, you know, kind of semi related to the ESG stuff like, you know, kind of stuff is, you know, or talk about like that Ilan stuff and like the return of Dogecoin and, you know, so I think for me, I think that was actually one of the biggest things that happened this year is, like, sort of this, like, return of meme coins, right?

Where it started at the beginning of the year, with the gme stuff that happened in, like, you know, don't boast like Wall Street bats and all that kind of stuff and I No, I wonder how much of it which direction this like cultural thing came from. Like was it a lot of like, you know, it felt very like this moment.

We're like, oh crypto culture is like or like Vibes are like proliferating into like the normal market and but I wonder if at the same time it was also like heavily influence in the other direction as well. Yeah. I know if anyone has any thoughts on like, you know, this, how much like, you know, just the meme culinary that's been happening. And like Sheba entering the top 10 by market cap and things like that.

Yeah, I did not see that coming. So basically I thought you know II didn't even get to, I mean I kind of semi get Dogecoin but basically. Yeah, I mean cheaper, I just don't get it. I mean, yeah, I yeah, maybe I'm too much on the boom, aside here. Yeah, and I mean, in the end it's like a lot of non crypto people who are getting burned by those things. I mean, all right, so I have two interesting, sock, Tom Dogecoin,

right? One, is I, when I left tender moment, like last summer and I was freaking out, what do I want to spend my time doing this once before I start working on our smokes as one of the things. I spent like a couple days actually like researching and looking into was hey, I want to bring do Coin onto proof of stake because I have this like whole idea of that like, you know, okay, we're going to show Dogecoin moving to proof of stake.

And this is going to be like set the groundwork to move Bitcoin on to proof of stake and like 20 30 years from now. And so and I you know, I don't know. I just feel really like Dogecoin Dogecoin was actually my first like exposure to crypto and it was like it has like the special place in my heart and I guess but then when I looked into it last summer, you know, I spent time like researching the community and going through their Reddit and stuff. So and I came out with conclusion.

Oh, no, one Dogecoin is dead. Like no one seems to care. But Dogecoin I'm just this, like, weird. Oh, that's still seems to care about it. But like otherwise, there's like a dead project and then like you fast-forward, like six months and it's like, holy shit. I was very wrong obviously, right? And so, I think that's like a very funny. You'd be a dose billionaire by. Now you have, maybe, I still think there's a good chance that we can get those going on to

pursue state, right? I think that you Stuff actually helped. We're like, you know because of this whole like energy usage stuff with Bitcoin if we can get Dogecoin on to proof of stake and get like a tweet from Elan like supporting this. I think don't want to move on to prove steak and I think this will be like actually hit.

Here's the other thing, right? I actually I am very bullish Dogecoin and I just like, I think it's the second most important crypto because the thing is I can go out. Out on the street today and ask someone if they know what Bitcoin is and they will write they've heard of Bitcoin but I can ask her if they know what the theorem is. That they actually probably don't know what it is.

They don't like, you know, but like you can ask them if they've heard of Dogecoin and they have heard what it is and I do think that those who and is legitimately the thing with the second highest like cultural permeance and like I think that is very important. I've okay. I think this year crypt the number of People involved with crypto has expanded massively and I generally think it's from two things which is 1 is to n FPS and the other is Dogecoin.

So when hyper dojin is ation once well, you know, we got we got we got to find some people to switch it onto proof of stake. I think this will, I think this is like a 11 year project and we know if anyone is anyone. Listening is interested in taking this on like please reach out to me. We will fund you to do this like we have funding for this funding secured an allocation of the

osmosis community pool. That is and as was put aside for Yes, there's a there's there's going to be a hundred fifty million dollars in the offices community pool by the end of the week. And we will make sure there is a solid allocation for anyone who wants to help move Dogecoin on to prefer steak. Yeah, I mean I think that in a way is that those going thing? I go KY and I think the GameStop analogy may like makes perfect sense, right?

Because basically it's sort of like the power of the crowd. I could people can be like, oh, let's just rally around this thing. All like, you know, pop it up together and it's kind of fun and it can have an impact and it can, you know, Pumping make money and then maybe crash but who knows. And I think that's Yeah, that's just a very powerful thing. Right? Like, I think we see again. And again, like this means and ideas are just very, very crucial. But you need, you need a common enemy.

Right? So, I mean basically the entire Apes together, strong thing. This only works if you ready, can someone like, I mean the hedge funds or, you know, the people who say, oh, why are you poor? You're eating too much avocado toast. Just invest in stock and then you You do it and they go like no, not that way. So yeah, I mean it's like I mean you kind of you need this, you need this image of what you're

going up against, right? So question is that is that is the CEO of Citadel. The what like is he like a literal Bond villain? Because like, you know, he must have heard of constitution. Now, trying to, by the Constitution and this like whole Community organizing and I feel like he like specifically wedding is like no, fuck this. I'm gonna like go. Ghost rug this like Constitution from like this like Community organized effort. Yeah, that is actually Constitution.

Does I mean, in a way it makes sense to write because he's like, you know, I'm a front-runner. Yeah, right. It's like, well, this thing I can forward this pretty obvious. Right? So in a way it's like, you know, hanging a fish in front of his mouth whenever they like, yes, eat the fish. But actually the Constitution guy was like another weird thing to me like crazy thing because I was like This is a good idea. I would like support this, and I'm so I put some ether into it.

And I honestly thought of it as like, oh, it's just like, it's like a donation, right? And then, and then the thing failed. And the people said, oh, we're going to shut it down. Bob there is a token and is hoping and so I ended up you know, like then selling these people token and it was something like 20 times up in these terms right? In within like two weeks for a project that basically seems to fail. That's that's also such a bizarre thing.

And and the most amazing thing would be okay. Like Now what if these people actually turn it into something because that's the real thing right? Like okay, they lost the auction. But actually this in a way that whatever 40 million that was like, put into that thing was at some point. Then, you know, market cap of, I don't know.

It was like a billion or something or definitely like more than 10 times up from So yeah, these are clear but I think goes to show the power of these, these memes. I like how in the mainstream press basically, the way that the constitution doll was described was frequently as a group of internet friends, which I think it's funny and it's totally not wrong, but it's so funny. So wholesome. So, to bring it back to, you know, just bring it back to the Dogecoin thing.

One more last five years is. This one thing I wanted to mention as well, as you know, I think like every epicenter episode every end of your episode. I've always liked brought up this idea like sort of this bet with Brian that like a Litecoin is going to remain in the top 10. And I think this year is fine. I've been winning that that for the last three years, but I think this year I finally lost that but I will say it is because of the Black Swan of do toys flipping like going.

I did not expect right? Because II my whole life pieces. Unlike coin was this like mimetic of like, hey, it is number two after Bitcoin. And that is a funny meme and

that will keep it going. But once Dogecoin had flipped like coin, I think that like meme stops working and I think don't want has basically taken that, like, cultural place of that Litecoin did even Sheba flipped Litecoin now, So I guess the last thing that we had on her like, on our like interesting things for this year was Bitcoin and El Salvador. So what are your guys thoughts on this? Is it is it, is it a big deal or not? I think it's a big deal. I think in the end if you if you

look at the crypto thing, right? Like what what are the potential response is? I think one big response is going to be like this thing is threatening, you know or power it's threatening, you know our control. So we are going to like, I don't know, try to ban it. I don't know like in China or maybe. Restricted in some like very, very narrow control wave seems

to be like India now, right? Or like in some other ways try to control it. But there's obviously that obviously means with the ability to just like move somewhere else and all of this being basically open accessible anywhere. Anyway, it means like actually the more some countries do that. The more there is to win by other countries, going the other way. And and then you also Half the thing and then you get supplies, you know, if you look at crypto, right? If you look at Bitcoin, you

always have to affect that. Like if you know, this thing's going to happen. It has a good chance of happening. If you go first, you have the most to gain. And I think the same thing is true of countries, right? So I think countries that, like, deviate from this control crypto path and countries, that go early, you know, have a huge amount of gain and then I think that El Salvador thing of basically now, Yeah, supporting the coin issuing bonds to buy Bitcoin and stuff like it.

I think it is huge and I think it will end up being a huge amazing decision for them. I think you had like an interesting thing you mentioned earlier where it's like the microstrategy like play applied to a country. Yeah, totally. I mean, the opportunity cost for a country like El Salvador was also a lot lower than of countries that actually have a financial Market policy for their for their currency. Right?

So basically if you're for instance, the US you have a lot a lot more to lose than the country that de facto uses a foreign hand, foreign currency as its as its currency anyway. Totally. Yeah, exactly. Like who's going to do that? Yeah, make countries that don't have their own currency. I think it's like small countries. Poor countries. It's not and it's not going to be, you know, the US and Germany and China and India, you know, it's huge countries that have.

Yeah, and the end of course, let's see. Okay, I would say, like, you know, for me, it was like, I know a lot of people were like, oh, yeah, it's just like, you know, it's out Salvador. It's like this tiny car. But you know, for me when I took me a while to like I was just very busy with a cosmos has lots of that time. But then one day I was just like sit in the shower just thinking and I was like, holy shit. Like can we like let's rewind

back five years ago. Like at least when I got into crypto like I would have never like imagine like we like eight real country, like not like a fake country, like Lieber land

or something. I know this is like a un recognized country just aired Bitcoin as legal tender, and that the just be like, magnitude of like, wow, how far have we come in this like, great, like, geopolitical game of the 21st century that like Bitcoin is like legal tender of a country from being this, like, Internet dark money from like five years. I think that's a big like big leap for one small step for coin one, great leap for coin kind. I don't know.

I think this kind of ties in well with one of the themes, you know, you had mentioned Brian, which is like government legitimacy and You know if smaller countries that have like less opportunity that had like a lower opportunity cost start, you know using Bitcoin as legal tender issuing bonds as legal tender denominating, you know, perhaps government services in crypto. If a lot of a lot of these countries start using Bitcoin, do you guys think that there's

potential for that to become? A sort of dividing line between, you know, Western countries that try to I'm talking like us and Europe. That that try to keep like grasp on like their power of the world and a finance versus like all of these kind of other countries that Western countries and want to portray as being like anti-establishment, you know, anti, whatever money. Laundry and commodity like anti anti money laundering like anti anti terrorism.

Like do you think that will if this starts to play out and like lot of African countries and like South, South South American country start adopting Bitcoin that this new axis of Evil, you know, we might want to put it like starts to emerge. II. Let me maybe talk about but I'm not sure at this point, but let me talk about like this. My idea of the around this golden legitimacy point because I see the maybe little bit differently. So if you know how do governments have legitimacy,

right? Like they make basically a bunch of rules and then they need to be able to like enforce those rules most of the time. Of course, there's going to be like, some people who like don't follow the rules but in general, you have to be like, okay, if you're going with makes it rules. I better follow them because otherwise like they're going to come after me and if they can, if they could do that, then like okay, you have to like respect

the power of the government. But already, I mean crypto is it's kind of a problem for that, right?

Because even if you looked at now the SEC, right, the SEC at some point made the statement of like, you know, all these tokens sales of Securities and like, you know, that kind of function that most people were maybe like intimidated enough and they didn't do it and they enforced if they went after a bunch of projects, but they even there, they had the problem that, you know, the number of projects they could go after. It was like limited because the resources are limited and they

have to do like this. Nations very doesn't scale at all. And and then, of course, you had all kinds of stuff going on for a long time that, you know, I guess is against are the sort of spirit. And now if you look at, if you look at all of the things happening now is like defy and dolls and entities, and everywhere is like the SEC right there, like years, behind

somewhere else. And I was recently speaking with, you know, some German company that's like Regulated speak of regulators and everything. Like, oh, you speak with regulators and like each time. They're like what's taking again? Like how and they're just like totally somewhere else like

years behind. And so I think that's already is a huge problem for like the regulators and the legitimacy and power Regulators. But I think where it's going to get like much much worse is around taxes because Taxis is not something that's just applies to like a bunch of companies and project, but it applies to like everybody.

And I think that already, you have to chance that if you like active in crypto, and if you make guy in a dnf TD5 stuff about, you know, deal forming a bunch of transactions becomes like really hard to file taxes, right? Because first of all, like what he even detachable said, apply and second of all, even if you have some understanding of the tax rules, how are you going to go?

Like, get all together these transactions and mean it's, it's like, get pretty quickly to sort of the point where it's like an impossible task and you know, it's long as it's a small group, you know, crypto people that do that.

Maybe it's not such a problem. But I think if you get to the point where you have, you know, 10 percent of the population, 20% of the population that are like using those things because they're like, I don't know, games and artists and their just part of, like, the consumer application people, use. And then they're also even without wanting to basically violating the taxes, and not fighting it properly. And like, I think that's going to be like a huge, huge problem.

And I extremely hard to address. I agree. And I, so basically, there's a couple of governments that have started addressing this, by just texting. Ramps, right. So for instance, Austria does this now? So, basically, there's you pay capital gains tax on earlier games at 27 and a half percent or whatever, Austria's capital gains taxes, but it only applies to our to off ramps and even to a certain extent. That's a good rule because it you can forget all your crypto

to crypto. You just need to have like some cost base that you construct somehow. But basically all the crypto to crypto, Is actions, they kind of you can forget about them. But on the other hand, I would assume that we move into a direction where the where the line between crypto and non crypto acids will be will be increasingly erased and then basically what are you going to do then? So basically then your tax like a certain class of assets said 25%, you class didn't

Differently you class. I mean it's it's a total mess and I don't know how to go about it. What do you guys think? Yeah, I mean like friends does the same thing right? It's like you you only get taxed on the off-ramp and already there.

It's complicated, right? Like even as a even as like a crypto user because like you have to you have to kind of like keep track of like every time you go in and every time you go out and it's like is that like it's also not clear whether or not like off, ramping is just selling into Euros on like cracking or actually moving money to your bank account. This kind of like it's kind of vague there. What if you buy it? What have you buy a house with you as DC? That's also unclear.

That's it. So that's that's that's also some Advanced area. What if you buy a token that allows you to live in a house for you? Yeah, or like what if you use u.s. D.c. To like invest in equities, or invest it. Like, I mean, there's all these sort of edge cases that like, what if you take a loan against like, you know, like position Ave and use that us DC to like invest in a company like or you know, where you get shares essentially. Like, there's all these sort of

edge cases that laws. The lock currently doesn't account for at least in France. I think like a lot of places there are. All these things are gray, areas that probably will get figured out. next couple years, but then then there's just the question of control, and I think it touches on Brian's point is like You know, we're like how easy is it for governments to actually control these things? And I think it does fall into the bigger problem.

The bigger issue of legitimacy that I was talking to about it.

I said a different facet, you know, it's like the legitimacy of crypto as the thing that people use to like, you know, like by things in fast, excetera versus the legitimacy of like existing institutions and whether that exists sort of at an individual level where it's like, people You know, having to pay their taxes or whatever or like a government issuing bonds and being like, fuck you to the, to the, you know, to the dollar standard it touches on like the same, I think legitimacy issue

of like well established economies and well-established countries, like trying to really have a like the development of crypto. And that's your look to see what the response is. I think the taxing off-ramp things, just, that's clearly not going to work, right? Because I very quickly using a stable coins and all that kind of stuff. You don't need and you don't have to offer. Am I ever, right?

Or like maybe only if you have some sort of consumption, but then it may be like just equates to like the 80 right? Or something. I mean, so I don't think the off ramp thing is gonna is gonna fight. I think, from a confirm, it comes Respective of like it being easy for people to like pay their taxes. I think a wealth tax is actually easiest to do, right? Because I let's say if it's at the end of the year is just have to see. Yo, what am I crypto assets?

And then like self-report it and you're like, oh you're paying like half a percent of that in taxes or something like that? Like that. At least I think that's going to be pretty, you know, you have to think worry about your transactions during the year and like I think That that will, of course still be hot. Everything's not.

It would be hard for governments to like, make sure people reported honestly, but at least if people want to pay their taxes, honestly, I think that's something that's, you know, going to like work. Well, even in the future, but of course, that's completely different from the way taxes work. But even where you have a wealth tax and in the Mean Streets and you have wealth tax, you don't

have capital gains tax. So like that it kind of like still Pretty well, I think there I'm not sure, you know how like staking and yield farming and stuff like that is treated. So it's probably still going to be issues. But I think that tax system works like much much better than a lot of others in this kind of environment. Yeah, and I mean Germany and principle that has a wealth tax. Basically, it's just current 20 percent. So I mean in principle this has been done before, right.

I just basically we just got a new government and there's a, there's a one of the one of the parties that have come to Powers the business-friendly, free Democrats. And yeah, so basically in Germany, there's no chance of that happening in the next four years. Do you guys want to talk about, Mev? I know it's one of the things that kind of, we Talked about in advance and speculate about what would happen in 2022. And there were, there were pretty desperate opinions here.

It's a solvable problem. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Yeah, I'm 100% with Sonya on this one. Great on to the next point. Katie. Yeah, so you can gets how is it so low or like you think it's a solvable problem for like a particular application or like let's be more specific.

I guess what I'm talking about is like yeah, what I care about more about than Mev is front-running, which is like a, very specific type of Meb. But, you know, I think there's just like, harmful meme that's in the community right now, that Mev is like an inevitable. Like evil that Have to like deal with and like, okay, we should just like, you know, instead of instead of a trying to solve the problems.

We should instead, you know, it is build these tools to like extract them and like, you know, have this be a profit source and like all this stuff where it's like no this is like literally harming users and like, you know, I think one of the were talking about were the our team like, okay, why is why our decks is better than centralized exchanges.

And I think the biggest reason we could come up with was Because they can provide immediate assistance in a like front-running resistance in a way that centralized exchange just can't I think that is you know, that is the reason why you should use a decks over a centralized exchange.

And yeah, so, you know I think that certain times, you know, is Mev going to be eliminated, 20 know there will always be some Mev and some front running but it's like I just think that the community is like settling on a very harmful like spot where it's like oh, this is actually okay. So if he can quite a lot about this and also thinking a bit about, you know, like that ethical thing, but yeah, like one. So, you know, sandwiching, right? People are like, okay, that's

clearly bad, right? People using, and like, okay, that seems to be bad and but then I was like, looking at this other things. So, this is like liquidity sandwiching. It was called my basically. It's like, okay, someone's making like a trade on like Yuna swap, right? And on units will be three, right? You can say, Where you provide

your liquidity, right? So you can provide it in that very and, you know, normally somebody might say, oh, I provided in this larger range where most of the trading is. And then, but if you can concentrated very narrowly, right? It means like with little Capital. You can provide a lot more

liquidity. And so basically just because he's tarnishing was like, okay, someone seeing all some Traders coming in there and they putting in basically the quiddity in this pool before the trade happens to take it straight out, right? So basically they have like Like provided liquidity for like, an infinitesimally, small infinitesimally, small moment. And now, is this like good or bad? Right? Well for the Trader, it's good, right?

Because they're getting less slippage for the liquidity, provide the other liquidity providers in the pool. It's bad, right? Because they get less 50 fees. And this other guy just comes up with, like, little There was some guy from unit swap right to like comment and adults thing and it was like this is amazing. Like what? An amazing use of the power of units. What we see right now, if you think of this know that called that's called that's called an order book.

Yeah, well, but I think if you think I'm like, okay, what are they like second? I mean, first of all, what a second-order, consequence of that like, I don't know, maybe you can start with three as to change their design, right? Maybe you could make a maybe it just is the reality of how it works. Right? And maybe liquidity providers have to just like, but it makes it very much of a thing. Like, good bad heart. Like, how do you even know how to even look at it?

And so I think if she looked at, he, I kind of like feel that. So, Phil died in, you're the guy who they loved his work and is one of the flash co-founder, yet an article where you use, basically, sort of saying, okay, if you look at that, maybe there's like, if you like a minor about later, you should like extracted if you're not application developer. Well, you have to design your application, right? So for example, Eunice, well 33 has to Think about.

Well, it's possible for somebody to show up right liquidity for a single block. We move it straight again. And like what does that mean for their Design? This is designed to work or not. I'm not sure right, but maybe they have to change it and then by of course, right? Like if you like, let's say it was, Moses is something maybe probably makes a lot of definitely will make a lot of sense to think like, okay, what are the types of things that

validated could do, right? That would be bad for the user and And then prevent those right? That always say make sense. Yeah, I think that what I mean, two things one, I think I so about the u.s.

Rb3 liquidity example cheering. I think this is going to have like second batt - second order effects that like, you know, like I said, you know, your devolving back into an order book and I think the a M&M's work because they have these like, really cool second order effects where it became very easy. It's okay. When you have this angle quiddity sniping charging, the more prevalent, No One's Gonna Be Price of LP anymore because you're basically going to get screwed.

You're only going to take that IL and basically get none of these. So what's going to happen is, people are going to stop being passive, LPS. You can evolve into an order book and part of the beauty of a M&M's was like you're like, hey, if you have a new token, it decreased the barrier to like entry for new projects right where you know currently without an mmu, have to go higher

basically professional. Get makers to go, like market-maker token and like do all the stuff but like without that M&M's you could just have your community be the market makers for the thing and this decreases the barrier to entry to launch new projects. And like, that's how we got this proliferation of like, New Tail End assets of which some of them go on to become these multibillion-dollar things,

right? But like, if you get rid of that and like basically make it so no one can be passive. LPS anymore. You're gonna Basically just increased the barrier to entry and that's going to have like harmful effect on the ecosystem as a whole. But don't you think that there are ways to actually design Market mechanisms that also work for basically for a for for discrete time as you have on blockchains and be for long for a large number of long tail tokens.

So basically my position would be that of course Phil day and says what he says because Cuz I mean, I mean, I mean, of course he would say it's a morally upstanding thing to extract Mev to kind of keep the system secure. I also find that I mean to me it's it's it's not just questionable. It's its outright morally wrong and whoever come see that is is I don't know what they're looking at. But yeah, I think there's lots of ways to actually design Apps to eliminate Mev to a large

extent. I think privacy is going to do the rest. So I think that's going to be the solution. I think, I think, I think the burden falls on a combination of the app and the protocols, right? Because I think the blockchains can actually do a lot of the heavy lifting here, right? Where I think you can do, you know, threshold encryption, you know, order randomization. We have this thing called Joint proposals where, instead of having one person proposal

block. You have multiple actors be allowed to contribute transactions to a block and like you can buy a lot of these techniques together at the protocol layer. You can get rid of like 90% of the heart. So let me be and then you know, I think you tack on additional application layer things like batching and like they like this. I think you can you can solve this quite a bit. I want to hear Brian's taking honor bit because you've been talking about it recently and again today.

And this is a project that I've not followed very much as we like that one side them on, but that usually, to be pretty bullish on. So, what's going on with Urban. Yeah. I mean, I was, so I guess I've known to orbit. Oh, Kailyn. And like some of their with Team since like three and a half years, I also Bought some some, some Intergalactic real estate back then. And I always liked enormously, like, strong to the division of irbid. But basically, having, I mean, it was the vision over be.

The one explanation that has to me, always felt like understandable and kind of makes sense to me is okay, like back in the day you have like your own computer and You went to the store to buy a CD with the software and like you put this to talk through it, like CD in your computer, and your data was in your computer, and then you run the software on your data. And like, that's kind of how Computing work, right? And then you'd the cloud and then the program is in the cloud

and you dated was in the cloud. And it sort of my understanding were B is crazy. Okay, let's create something. Like a basic Computing framework. Again. That kind of works out back in the day, were I have my own kind of virtual computer and my software runs my computer and my data is in my computer and I can and and then you can yeah distribute software and you can communicate with other peers. And so I was always very drawn

to this. Now, of course Urban is gone like ultimate hardcore in terms of we don't use any existing technology and we do everything from scratch, right. And And if the Project's 20 years old at this point, right? This is the first 12 years. The guy, this is just one guy who did it on his own and then I think Kailyn and so, it's a very old project, right. A huge amount of work went into

this. But now I think earlier this year, you know, there was like now you I honor bit like landscape and I've been yeah, like using it a little bit and, and it's nice, you know, you can You can see actually I think you can see the potential already. There's some people who built a Bitcoin wallet in Arabic. All right, so you can have like, you know, so your Bitcoin in orbit make transactions from

there and And it's cool. We've had we had some people at course, one who like pretty in like rainforest innervate to and so we've been actually been wanting to like on board everyone in the company on to Urban. So like maybe you can start using it a little bit. So I I'm definitely bullish in urban and I think it could become a sort of a bunch of different stuff. I didn't know. It could definitely be a replacement for this court may be right at.

You can have communities on there and chat and stuff like that. I mean you have an addressable name, right? So like you can easily like message others on Irv it. You could have it as a sort of. Yeah, you can still keys in there. There's also one thing there's something called herb advisor where they basically built some kind of Minimus like thing.

So it's like a browser extension and then, you know, you could like go and something and then you can basically like, you know, sign something from proving your of it. Right? Like you asked exactly. This is your herbal planet and like that. So you could use like, I know sign in Reverb it right? Then you are like, I think that would be would make a lot of sense. Right? Because you also have your yeah you username. That is human readable and they have great design.

I think we always had like just amazing aesthetic. So, yeah, I'm excited. I'd like to read a little while ago. Asking people what project do they think has the best Aesthetics and I think like herb it was like buying far like the number-one like response. Yeah. I totally agree for sure, for

sure. Okay. So let me get, let me take a stab at trying to explain irbid because I think that like, no one understands it at because part of the problem is every time you You ask them, they like go on through this like deep weird tangents about like division, which is cool. But like no one had no one explained to me correctly, how it works. And so this is my understanding. Can you confirm whether I'm correct or not on this? From what I can do. You guys remember secure scuttlebutt?

We did an episode with them a little while ago, you know, while ago. And it was basically this like social network that used like Hash a dag like hash linking structure to build like a network. So basically it will use a gossip Network and you know that Sebastian will send a message to me. I'll add it to my little hash chain. And then next time I send a message to Brian.

I'll also pass. Along all the messages that Sebastian had said to me and basically we get some sort of eventual consistency on the Topography of the social network. And like, you know, if people like you and it's okay for an eventual consistency because like a double sign problem is less of an issue when we're talking about social networks than it is when we're dealing with like payments and money. So here's my theory of what Urban is. Okay.

So Bitcoin invented this cool new data structure called a blockchain and it was just like very fast and system see all the stuff cool things and they invented it for payments and then etherium came along and said, hey cool data structure. What if we slap a turing-complete VM on top of this? Now, my theory is what herb it does, is it looks at Sakura scuttlebutt and says, hey, cool data structure. What if we slap a turing-complete VM on top of this?

And so, basically, what's happening is, I have my little VM that's like doing all this computation and it's like it's hash linking the result of all the computation. But every time, your VM sends a message to my VM, let's say it's a your scent, you know, anything that you would send over the internet, but Message you sent me.

I include that into my sort of hash linked tree and then when I talk to Sebastian, I tell him, hey, by the way, Brian's VM sent a message to my VM. That's what I understand Urban to be. Is that am I on the Mark here? I'm not sure. But that so here's another like when we had this internal talk and then we had escaped from the team Irvin who gave talking one of the ways he explained

additional support was nice. Was that if you, if you look at crypto right in crypto, we have that transactions, right? When you focus, you have all these chains where you have different accounts, any different transactions, and then identity, and data, often something as kind of, like, layered on top of it, or on the I and then Weaver bead, right? You really have. It's like identity and data that's like the the foundation and there's actually no

blockchain, right? And there's no transactions, but then you can put those on top. And, and so it's kind of inverts a little bit normal approach. We are having in blockchain, and I think that Makes sense, right? And also sort of like what or maybe another way to think about is like, what's your like you digital home? Like, where is where is your like you base in a way? Like maybe it's like your

computer. I don't know like that your heart is going to computer or is it something like LastPass like a poor? A password manager, maybe or like I get I get that. My question is I want to understand is how does it work? And that's what I'm like, you know. Go, I haven't fully understood like, okay, they say like, okay. Yes, you can transfer your like state of your computer. So, you know, instead of being linked or physical server. It's just like transferable

thing. But my question is like, yes, how am I assumption? What's happening here. Once again is like, you know, let's say I have this entire hash think of all the computation I've done, I sent that over to Sebastian and then I destroy this computer move to a new computer when I'm thinking up. Again. I find out from Sebastian. Oh, here's the current. State of or at least Sebastian's knowledge of the current state of my VM. This is all the computation I had done up until then.

Yeah, actually I so that is something. I don't know that you have to ask somebody more technically competent of a sudden. I'm not sure. I'm trying to boot up a ship right now and it's telling me it's going to take an hour or so. No, I mean this sounds really interesting II. I think I mean I was like secure Scott about was a project that I thought was really cool like technically and like I like this idea. Of. Yeah, being able to create a sort of hash chain without a

blockchain. And like I said, chily, you, you you sort of like sink State like whenever whenever you want, right? Like you send a message and you can sink that state over, you know, even a like over over when like, if you're in the same in the same place or over like a USB stick or some like that. And so yeah, it seems cool that you could also do that sort of like with computation. Yeah. If my understanding of describe, that's really cool. I think there's a lot of cool

use cases of that. That this was super fun and I will look into a bit now. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find And subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify, YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcast. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter, .t V /, subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and

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