So quantum computer is what's known. They have certain algorithms that allow to break these cryptographic methods right, and people are word to your point. You know, would this chain be affected? Would this mechanism be affected.
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and USBC. They will be supporting Ripples's upcoming launch of rl USD. So this is a really great rewards program and if you'd like to learn more, please visit the link in the description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. I'm your host, Tony Edward and my guest today is Sergei Gorbanoff, who is the co founder of axlr Protocol and the CEO of interrop Labs. Sergey is also an associate professor at
the University of Waterloo. Sergei, great to have you on.
Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sergei, you have an extensive background with crypto and blockchains. You are on the founding team of Algoran and I have a lot of questions for you. I want to get your perspective on many of the things happening in the crypto market. But before we get there, tell us a bit about yourself, where you're from and what's your professional background.
Yeah, my professional background is distributed systems and cryptography. The PGM T. Afterwards, spend a little bit of time at Universal Waterloo kind of doing a lot of research and pryptography at Blockchain, you know, distributed Systems, worked on the Outground project, as you mentioned, kind of helped to design that and take that to the market, and then afterwards been focusing on the interoperability problem in the in the blockchain space.
And what was your first encounter with crypto or blockchain or what was your AHA moment?
Yeah, my first and Congress were at the end of grad school, so I was doing work in kind of more advanced cryptography. I had my I set on sort of graduation and had everything up for the thesis, and you know, it's pretty much done with it, so it's looking around for new challenges, new problems too to solve. There was a small bitcoin club that Ron Rivest, you know, one of the founders of ours a protocol Brandt mit So I joined that were reading some white papers and
the topic became very very interesting. Of course, kind of quickly realized some of the technical you know, limitations of bitcoin and ethereum like protocols, and so we started to think about how do we do how do we do better right, and how do we design something that could scale further along And that's where you know, some of the early ideas behind the out Ground protocol with you know, Sylvia mcali were originated and yeah, kind of took it from there.
And how long were you at Algoran? Obviously that's one of the bigger projects in the crypto industry, and Sylvia I've heard him speak over the years and al Grand certainly is doing things differently. You know, how did you end up working there and what we were some of your contribute contributions.
Yeah, I mean we did a lot of work there, so, like originally it was a sort of research type of a project, right, we wrote like very first white paper with Silvia. You know, it wasn't kind of a called out Grand at the time it was live twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen. You know, for a few years after that, the blockchain crypto space was still you know, not as developed, right,
and people were still thinking what to do. I remember actually like some first emails from Metallic at the time when they read like our manuscript war Oh, it's great to see like you guys thinking about some of the similar ideas that was thinking, you know, at the theory, like they already realized that the theorem would have to migrate to proof of steak from proof of work and so you know, he's on us some kind of nice notes on like you know, highlighting similarities in the thought
process and you know what needs to evolve for those proof of steake systems too, you know, to become reality. Right, the concept of proof of say, didn't exispect the right it was. It was all being being originated. But you know, so I think after I finished school, I think Silva tried to get kind of funding for the outground project. It took a little bit of time until the markets kind of picked up, until like twenty twenty seventeen is
when I believe kind of the ico boom came again. Right, you had good funding that was that was available, So we'll get some funding for the out ground protocol. And like a few of us, you know, from MIT and Sylvia kind of came together in Boston and started to you know, continue to design, right, continue to figure out what it actually looks like as a product, the blockchain stack,
whether smare contracts, look around it. Yeah, and then you know, I think beyond like the al ground itself, we've done some nice contributions to the broader ecosystem. So as an example, that led centriization of kind of a BLS signatures with a team that was you know, at our Grand and the few other places you know, like Dan Bone and
Stanford and some of his students at the time. So and BLS signatures, if you know, is what ends up being used in the theory at the proof at a proof of state consensus and many other blockchain networks today. So I think it was a very good project to try to align everybody to the new you know, to the new foundations of cryptography that it needed for those systems to be efficient. And so yeah, I kind of a bunch of other work along the way.
Now, obviously you spend time at MIT and you were in that those circles. But were you by any chance there when current SEC chair Gary Genser who's going to be former SEC chair Gary Genser soon was was there I think teaching at some point, and I remember him making statements about Algoran over the years that you could put uber on Algoran. Were you around at the same time.
Yeah, I was around at the same time. I believe I actually gave a couple of guest lectures of the Business School of Management that might see at the time. So they had a good group, right, you know, Christian Catalina was there. He ended up working at you know, Facebook Libra and now now they have a new project around bitcoin l two's. Yeah, there was quite a lot of talent at the time.
Mm hmm. Now talk to us about Axelar and what was the goal behind starting this and what's the mission?
Yeah, I mean the goal was really try to figure out how do you help innovation at the blockchain layer to continue while preserving kind of composibility across different blockchain layers, right, so as to be more concrete. You know, when we launched all Grand, it was very new stack right, new consensus, new way to approach more contracts, transactions, kind of security.
As soon as we launched it, problem number one was how do we connected to everything else so we can bootstrap both developer activity and liquidity right, bring new assets to the ecosystem, allow developers to easier migrate their users
or interact with applications that are built on our Grand. Ideally, from our view, we would have loved to see a protocol that we could just plug and play into the out ground right, to be connected to like ethereum, Bitcoin, you know, Ripple and like you know XRP laver and like other other chains, but we couldn't find anything right, there's nothing really available, and so we thought that you know, look,
the blockchain ecosystem is still young. We're going to continue to see many other layer ones being developed and innovated on right in parallel, like Solana was being built, Avalanche was being built, near was being built, Polka Dot was being built. You know, we didn't even talk about layer twos. That all came later at the time, and so we thought, look like all of those innovations are going to continue
to happen. People will keep on figuring out how do you optimize consensus, how do you optimize smart contract language, how do you maybe have your own unique kind of go to market or use case that you want to target and have your own you know, chain or application around it. And they will need connectivity. Otherwise we just continue to build siloed ecosystems right that don't talk to one another. And yeah, we thought this is going to be a very major problem for the ecosystem to solve.
And you know, first year, we have to do a lot of education. In the first few years, we have to do a lot of education in the market around it. But you know, now it's a very well established, of course, problem, very well established domain, and I think we still keep on seeing introperability almost like one step behind innovation that
happens at the layer once. Right, I think there's still so much work that needs to happen and the interoperability layer to keep unifying the ecosystem enable simple developer, simple user experiences and very exciting times.
I had Yeah, absolutely, And I was looking at the Xlar network website and I noticed the different categories of folks that are working with you guys. Enterprise wise, you have Microsoft, Deutsche Bank, MasterCard, Wallet's Ledger, MetaMask and so forth, RWA, Circle Ondo. So you're trying to help enterprises, wallet services in different facts actions of the digital asset space be
able to connect with each other obviously have interoperability. And would the interoperability be the movement of certain tokenized assets or NFT stable coins? Is it that? Or is there other use cases as well?
Yeah, it's kind of the use cases span dependent on the application, but it's essentially unification of developer and user experiences. Right. So you brought up you know, token token, so as an example, as a token holder, if I have a stable coin like UCC. I want to and if I have it on multiple chains, I don't have to think. I don't want to have to think about it, right,
I want to see it as one token. Sure, maybe it has a place on you know, different chains, incentiated depend on what applications I use on those chains, but I don't want to have to think about it. So from a wallet perspective, as a user, I want to see it all abstracted. I have my tokens, I have applications. No matter where that locations are, I should be able to go and use them, right, and then interoperability under the hood is responsible for yeah, token transfer if there
needs to be information transfer, if there needs to be right. So, as an example, you want to deposit you're token from one chain into an application on another chain, but you don't want to have to just like move the token, then switch a wallet, then deposit to the application and
have like twenty clicks in the process. Right, you want to have seamless as one transaction, one click from the wallet, and so you know general message passing types of primitives that the interroperability allow you to do that kind of a streamlined the process of you interacting from the wallet to multiple applications across different chains in very unified experience as you were interact in on a single chain.
Now, I want to make sure I break this down for those who are new to blockchains and crypto. So does axel R have its own blockchain? Does it serve as a layer two or layer three? And if axl are for whatever reason and not saying will goes down, does that break any of the bridges?
Yeah, so great question. So first of all, actually itself, you can think of it as a it is a blockchain that connects out the blockchains, right, so you can think of it as like you know, the mega highway of highways, right, So it's a it's a transportation network. But it's designed is to route messages, route tokens from
one chain to another in an efficient way. It is powered by blockchain technology, so everything that the protocol is fully decentralized, open, you know, permission less, so you can see, you can audit it, you can contribute to it and build connections and keep on extended this highway, right, and then you know to your point what happens if acceller
you know, goes down. So first of all, I think decentralization in the blockchain systems is what we have seen to be the most robust way to make sure the systems don't go down, right, and actually is the only introperability product that has, like I said, fully proof of state based, open consensus, open decentralized network. So we've never actually had the protocol or the network itself kind of go down, you know, and it has one hundred percent
up time. Maybe individual like transactions sometimes don't go through because there are gas issues, but the network itself has a full one hundred percent up time, and that's thanks to the just decentralization of the network itself, right, And yeah, if it starts, if something happens, you don't have enough notes, because again the protocol is open, you know, you can go and run your own notes and continue to operating the network.
Right.
The inclusion in the network and participation is just as open as like on bitcoin and the theoryum where anybody can help network make progress, and so same properties, very strong liveness properties are then inherited by the actual network.
And I'm assuming the vision is as we get the next billion and people to come into crypto and making it as easy as possible for them to onboard. And you mentioned the interoperability. So if whether they're using JP Morgan or deutstr Bank or match the card, you're running behind the scenes and they don't necessarily even need to know about xceller network or what's happening behind, just that it works, right.
Yeah, exactly, I think you know. To your point. So, first of all, a lot of these enterprises that you mentioned, they're all looking to launch assets either on you know, their own chains and then connect them to everything else outside, right, or they go and they partner with existing chains like you know, like x or p Ledger, like Stellar, like Suite. They'll launch the assets there and they still want to interoperate with either other bank chains right or enterprise chains
or other public chains. So they all need interoperability. But to your point, for the end user, once you're beyond you know, technical analysis and developer analysis that developers need to validate security and robustness of all these building blocks that they're using, and user just wants to be able to use these new efficient rail systems right, be able to be the beneficiary of it, have global settlement, cheap transactions, you know, global reach, to be able to transact with
anybody across the world. They don't necessarily care so much where the assets are, how they interact with one another, how you move from one chain to another. So those things are abstracted away. And I think, you know, the analogies that you can make are similar to the intranet right right now we have in this you know zoom call.
The information travels across probably over a dozen different networks to allow us to do this podcast live in a very seamless way, right And so it's the magnitude of the of all of these networks and interconnection between all
of them that enables these experiences. And I think when it comes to blockchain and financial assets, it's inevitable that we're going to be in a very very multi chain world too, and that scale is needed to support all the new primitives and assets that are that are entering the space. But for average user, the experience needs to be a lot simpler. It's again all the way from your wallet or application to the apps and the underlying infrastructure rails uh you know, need to be hidden.
Yeah. Absolutely, Does Axeler have a token and what's the protocol that it's based on? You know, you mentioned proof of stake earlier. What is it used with typic mechanism.
Yeah, so actually has a utility governance token, right that powers taken on the Excel network. It powers governance on the Excel network. And yeah, the actual protocol has been designed originally from the Cosmos and Tenderment consensus and then we had to like customize it and modify everything from the incentives you know how validators propagate information to facilitate this introperability use case. And so it's been quite a lot of work to design the stack to make sure
it is robust in the way that is. But you know, kind of a COSMOS framework is actually pretty flexible. That allowed us to do a lot of those changes.
I mean, you guys have some amazing partnerships and just once again looking at the website and maybe you can tell us a bit about, you know, your roadmap for twenty twenty five and can we expect to see more enterprises of the caliber of JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and so forth coming on board.
Yeah, So we recently launched a very new framework, it's called the Amplifier framework that effectively changes i would say interoperability landscape and takes it to the new level. And what that means is that introoperability now with it becomes completely permissionless, meaning that you don't necessarily have to you know, talk to us as a as the builder or anybody else to get connectivity of your chain to all the other chains. It's fully permission less framework. It's full of
permission less model. And so we have an array of very big partners that are building around this framework to connect their stacks, right, everything from enterprises to you know, some of the big public chains like Xo, b Ledger, Solona Suite. There's a connection to Bitcoin being made, there's a connection to stacks ecosystem being made. So I'm super excited for all of those connections to go live, you know,
through this Amplifier framework. And I think it would essentially interconnect everything everything that matters in the in the crypto space.
And yeah, to your point, there's there's quite a lot of ongoing work with enterprises initiatives, a lot of them around to organization verticals, right, So we essentially want to make sure that tokenization becomes as chain agnostic as possible, right, And towards that end, we have just recently a couple of months ago launched a product called Interchain Token Service that allows you to you know, launch it token on
many chains at the click at one transaction. And so I think that's going to be the default mode of operation where people go and launch it token on all the chains without having to you know, launch it at one and then bringe it back and forth, which is a very very old process of doing things.
Oh, for sure, I love it. This is certainly the infrastructure for the future of blockchain and a multichain world, no question for you. Let's say, for whatever reason, a blockchain goes away. We know not every chain will stick around for the next ten to fifteen twenty years. Let's say one goes away, what are the mechanisms in place to then have those maybe tokenize assets then be either burned or pulled out from that system and moved to other blockchains.
So that's a great question. So you could actually use products like the Interchaine Token Service that I mentioned to do that, right. So it allows you to you know, map either an existing token that you have and you know, replicate or clone into all the other chains, right, or you can mirror it across across multiple chains, or you can simply you know, relaunch it with the same with
the same state. So yeah, once you have this interconnectivity kind of a fabric, do you do you point this sort of token migration, right or token clone, it becomes you know, a function on top of this infrastructure, which projects like interchange token service support.
Mm hmm, okay, god, so that mechanisms in place. Yeah, that's just a question I thought of because you know, I know, not every like I said, every blockchain is going to exist. There's probably going to be a handful of winners, you know, right now, there's so many, and it's a yeah, I.
Mean, I think there's like two lines of thought, right, like, which is a you consolidate to a few you know, big chains and like that's that's more than sufficient. And then there's everything is like an app chain, right, kind
of l two type of type of stuff. And I think the reality is that we're going to be probably in a hybrid, right where we're going to have big, monolithic, efficient stacks that have the best kind of composibility and the best equidity that you can go and launch, you know, and and leverage very efficient you know, new new iterations of chains like swite, you know, like stellar like, uh, you know x RPL support thousands of transactions you know,
per second and things like that. But there is a world where we're see more and more applications that do have a product market fit launching their own chains so they can customize the entire stat right, So we've seen this from dy d X, We're now seeing it from Uni swap. You know, we've been seeing it from you know previously before that kind of a couple of years
ago Compound, right. Uh so so so yeah, I think applications that do have a product market fit that you want to customize more of the you know, rewards mechanism, security mechanisms, maybe you know, liquidity mechanisms of the underlying validation layer will go and launch app chains that will still be interconnected to you know, these bigger, bigger chains
and bigger, more monolithic designs. So I'm pretty confident that we're going to be in a hybrid world between those, and you know, I think that we're ready seeing that trend where applications that have found the product market fit then migrate from these monolithic chains into their own like app chains and then customize more logic around those.
Hm. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. So, Serge, I want to get your perspective and thoughts on quantum computing. This has been a big topic lately and it's impact on Bigcoe and other blockchains. Given your expertise in cryptography, kind of give us the lay of the land, you know, do you feel there's going to be a threat here too many blockchains from quantum computing?
Yeah, so I think quantum is still very early, right. I think if you look at some of the news from the last a few months from from Google of the world and some of the folks like, there are definitely problems and there are definitely in the right direction, but thereby no by no means kind of close to being able to break cryptographer, right, that's used in the blockchain. So, and for those that are not aware, one of the reasons people talk so much about quantum is that all
the blockchain systems rely on cryptography. Right. Cryptography is what's you know, used to generate your accounts on the blockchain, used to sign transactions so that nobody else can can uh, you know, maliciously sign on your behalf right or fake transactions. So cryptography is fundamental. It's used by the validation of all the of all the activity that happens. So quantum computers,
what's known. They have certain algorithms that allow to break these cryptographic methods, right, and people are worried right to you to your point, you know, would this chain be affected with this mechanism be affected? And the reality is, like I said, you know, we're still quite far from those attacks being practical. At the same time, there by, cryptographers and researchers have been ongoing efforts to design cryptography
that's resilient to quantum algorithms. Actually, a lot of cryptography that I worked on in my graduate school is resilient against quantum cryptography. There is now a NIST, which is a National Institute of Standardization Technology effort to standardize primitives that are used that will be used in this post quantum you know, signature and encryption algorithms. So those efforts are well underway. I think we know quite well what
we're doing and what those algorithms are. And I would see essentially a migration over the next ten years by the blockchain, and not only blockchain systems, like all the financial systems would be affected when the quantum computers come to reality. So I do think those threats you know, need to be everybody needs to be mindful of them.
There's no reason to panic or do anything, you know, overnight, but you should think about, you know, how would my algorth, how would my system blockchain or traditional financial system migrate to those algorithms, and what the effects of them would be on my overall security, and you know, have a plan in place to over the next I would say
a decade migrate. I don't know where it's going to be, you know, a little bit less or more on the timeframe, but you know, it's it's it's a multi year project and we're definitely make at least you know, I would say ten years. This is a guess right now. I think it's a little big guess on everyone's part. But there's quite a lot of stuff that has to happen for those two to actually affect you know, blockchain systems that we use today.
Oh for sure. And and I'm assuming the logical step for many of these folks with nodes or whene it's mining equipment that they would upgrade with the same technology. Right maybe there's a bit of a lag, but if you have this respective chip from the video or whoever, I'm going to build mining equipment around there, or I'm going to build computers that can run proper nodes with that with that chip, right.
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And you know, to your point, I think the security threads of these quantum computers really come in like two folds. You have to analyze the consensus itself and you know, ask yourself, am I vulnerable or does anything have to change with it? So, as an example, Bitcoin uses you know, of course proof of work consensus, but it's mostly using hash functions, and these hash functions are not vulnerable to quantum attacks to the
same extent as signature schemes. Okay, so you will need to adjust parameters of bitcoin to make sure it keeps on minding efficiently, you know, and nobody can can kind of create forks at a fraction of a cost, but that's a privator change at the consensus algorithm. Nothing changes
to the Bitcoin consensus algorithm itself. And then there are signatures used by the bitcoin community right to sign transaction that actually sends the funds from you know, from you to me, right, and those things will be vulnerable to those quantum attacks. And then the bitcoin community and the communities will have to migrate to a new type of you know, cryptography used to make sure that those individual
transactions are then not affected to the same extent. Right now, for other blockchains, you might be vulnerable at both with the consensus and individual transaction player and so then yes, you would have to migrate to the right algorithms you know, along the way. But some of them already protected right at the consensus, like Bitcoin, and you know they will only need to address in the digital transactions.
Mm hmm, Okay, that that definitely makes sense. I appreciate that perspective because to your point, there's just you know a lot of headlines, Oh, no, quantitum computing is going to take down Bitcoin and this blockchain, but you know they we're not close to that yet, and folks will evolve and iterate and make them dates.
Yeah, And like the last point that I'll make on that, I actually think blockchains are best suited right now to embrace the upgrades as transparently as possible compared to sorry, like I said, traditional systems, right, most blockchains do they have upgrade mechanisms, right, you know, we have seen upgrades on Bitcoin, we have seen upgrades and ethereum and many many chains have those kind of on chain governance based, consensus driven upgrades where the whole ecosystem switches to a
new mode of operation. Traditional financial systems don't have those, right, It's a lot of bespoke systems and pieces of information and APIs that are sort of stitched and glued together communicating her bespoke way. It would be much harder to upgrade those than it would be to upgrade any blockchain system in my view.
Yeah, because many of those systems are so antiquated in try. Yeah, just the old systems, and we're trying to get them to move to blockchains and right now. So that's a great point.
Maybe that would be the you know, a way to push them into blockchain system that's your way to be quantum secure.
Right. I didn't want to get your thoughts on AI and crypto. We're seeing kind of a symbiotic relationship where AI is being used to enhance blockchain attributes and then blockchain is being used to police AI from a deep fake perspective. You know, how do you see this relationship and this intersection growing as we head into the future.
Yeah, I think the way that I like to summarize is that AI creates AI makes the cost of generation to be almost zero, but it requires verification to be useful. Right, So, anything you know that's AI generated today people asking questions that how do you differentiated from real Right? How do you differentiate what's AI generated, what's not AI generated? How do you differentiate what's generated by malicious AI versus versus
you know, non malicious AI. Right, And so blockchains systems are very good at given the ground truth of information, and I think that relationship today is very you know, it's very early. I think there's a lot of you know, buzz, and there's a lot of hype. You know, it needs to be developed more. I think it needs to be explored more. But I do think it's there are real intersections, there are real use cases because of these very two
conflicting properties. Right. One is let me generate things as fast as possible, as much as possible, and that information, you know, ends up being very hard to validate, to verify, to communicate, to authenticate. And then we have blockchains that are very good at you know, validating, distributing, rewarding, you know, verifying all of that. And I think for the AI to go to the level that it needs to be at.
It will need to be combined with a sort of verification layer in some sense, and I think blockchain is very good at doing that in addition to have and of course, you know financial rails embedded in the in the AI systems, which I think are necessary as well.
Yeah, and do you think this is something I've been noodling on that social platforms where many of us get our information from, right, we see what our friends, family are doing. That when we upload an image or a video, there's going to have to be some sort of blockchain encryption tag to it, so that if someone comes with a different version that's AI manipulated, we can say, no, that's that's that was not from Surgey or not from Tony.
I think we need to get there right Otherwise, again, like we live in the world of you know, made up facts and made up information, right, Like, I really hope we can get to the world where information is validated,
can be authenticated with full providence. If it's been modified along the way, we know what the modifications are and you can like you know, go down the roots because because yeah, again I think the cost of information is going to be negligible unless it's verifiable information going forward.
Mm hmm. And do you foresee that in the future we may have I don't know if this makes sense AI to police a the world of AI, right, you have these AI agents from the government or law enforcement or from companies that are just monitoring what's happening overall, what people are doing and what rogue AI agents may be doing. Do you see something like that?
Definitely? I mean like a new AIS like no other. There's no different as like other software system right, Like, yes, we have software today that you know, does certain things used by you know, good actors, bad actors, educational institutions, medical institutions, and of course we have a lot of software that you know polices today software right monitor and
for vulnerabilities, for attacks and everything else. So if you're in the AI world and if that's a better way to build software and systems and propagate information, of course you're going to need to you know, uh, the the A itself to to police one another. Right, then the software systems will need to leverage it to to kind of keep up right with the with threats, with attacks, with the you know, information explosion that that happens in
other AI systems. So yeah, I mean I view it as the as the better, more efficient way to both build systems, to search systems, to analyze information across the world. And you know, I think blockchain it plays a critical role by providing some of the properties need it, you know, around authenticity of the data.
Mm hmm. This is a very far out question, but I'm just thinking about what the future may look like. What if we have an AI it creates its own blockchain, its own token, and no human can control it. What do you think that that may be possible in like forty years or something.
I don't see why you need to do it, you know, forty years. I'm sure you can. You're doing employ the days right for a g I. So yeah, I mean, like you know, you've seen projects of a kind of a launch in tokens right, generated some keys these days, and like applications, there's no there's no reason why it cannot launch. You know, the blockchain system decide how the validation logic is have and you know, under the hood. So yeah, I mean, like I think, what it is not forty years?
Yeah, and maybe that's like you know what we saw in the movies with sky Neet right, and it's doing its own thing you can't control anymore. But hopefully there's no I don't know what.
Not being able to control like that sort of a you know, too far out there. I think all systems can be controlled, you know, like, hey, I systems are systems that you can isolate them. You can you know, restrict their scope of run time and things like that. So yeah, I'm not I'm not afraid of you know,
uncontrollable sky Night takeover of things. I'm more afraid of just abundance of these systems and the result of abundance of these systems, you know, lots of errors coming up, lots of misinformation, lots of you know, bad you know, just bad decisions being made potentially by other system is right, And you know, if you want to call the sky net type of drama, maybe it will lead to that. But you know, I think we're pretty pretty far from that.
But but there are real, I think challenges that we're going to have to address, right with just the just the abundance of information the AI systems, and they have bundands of actions these AI systems can take.
Yeah, absolutely, It's it's a brave new world, exciting but also, like you said, some things we got to be cautious about. I did want to get your thoughts on the maturity of the crypto market. Obviously you've been in this space for a while. What are your thoughts on how the industry has grown, the change of the environment for crypto starting this year with the new president of New Congress and TRADFI is here looking to build tokenizing and much more.
I definitely think it's become more and more mature and more and more ready for war, you know, a kind of a mass adoption, right and like real, real distribution. So you know, as an example, when we're even working at out ground, we had a lot of conversations but you know, some of the same institutions as we're you know, talking to today, and in many cases a lot of the conversations were around doing pilots in the you know, R and D departments in some sense, right, and that's
where the conversations remained. And that's where the conversations were left. Today we'll find it outselves in conversations with product teams right at these institutions, So product teams that are looking at tokenization, product teams that understand that you know, blockchain systems can provide more efficient settlement of their transactions, more efficient accounting of their transactions. Right, if you're operating costs and those product teams are figuring out what the products are,
how do you launch behind them? Right? So, I think we're definitely in a new aram for adoption amongst the you know, institutions and enterprises. I think the technology is there, technology is already. We know how to build good experiences. We know how to build you know, chain abstracted interfaces and tokens. We know how to scale underlying consensus as well.
So all I think, you know, a lot of the infrastructure problems that we've been working on over the last decade, I think are solved, and you know, we need to enter the world of usability, you know, clear value proposition
for around the use cases. And yeah, I think these conversations are very very exciting, very very real, and I'm kind of looking forward to what's going to happen over the next few years with you know, new new administration on board as well as the technology being at the phase that it's at.
Yeah, for sure. And one of the things I've been thinking about, and this is a conversation out of people are been having as well. Is getting the wallet right so that my mom and dad, the average Joe and Jane walking down the street can just they have the Web two feel to it right, the interface, but it's powered by blockchains. It's powered by Web three. And while they may know, okay, this is a crypto blockchain related app,
it doesn't feel like it doesn't. I don't have to worry about a twenty four phrase password and all that. Are there any wallets that call out to you or that you think might be leaning to charge here?
So there're actually kind of a quite a few wallets that are embracing kind of a traditional sign on mechanism to generate cryptographic keys. So as an example, you know, we're working with Slee Blockchain quite a lot, and they have this project called gk log Game, which I'm really which I really love. The basic ideas to be able to generate all the cryptographic materials that you need using your standards credentials from more additional like online platforms that
you use. Right, so you can like go to Google, authenticate to your email from Google, and that would serve as a credential to generate U you know, a cryptographic key on a blockchain, right, You'll never have to think about this cryptographic key. You'll never have to think about recovery beyond recovering your you know, Google credential, but it is going to be sufficient to establish your identity in the blockchain system and then use that for all the transactions.
So I'm a big fan of these new projects that leverage you know, zke type of technology to establish traditional credentials that a lot of people are familiar with and then take those for them into the blockchain, establish an identity for the user and use that then throughout the blockchain.
M hm, yeah, And I love that idea as well, where it just makes it simple. There's not necessarily anything new to the end user per se, but on the back end the cryptography, all the respective items are there. Do you think it also needs the buy in from the Googles and the facebooks that they may need to agree their infrastructure with using blockchain to help make sure this is all sealed tight?
I mean, the beauty of actually these cryptographic methods is know that they do not need any buy in from Google, right, they do not need anybody from traditional vendor. You applying kind of cryptography on top of these authentication methods and they won't have to change at all.
Mm hmm. That's good to know. Okay, Serge, great information man, very insightful. I got some wrap up questions here for you. First, if you could create your own metaverse, would the theme be?
What would the theme be? That's a good question. Clarity of thought hmm.
Rapid fire questions, favorite food, fish, favorite musician or band Metallica, favorite movie.
Uh Matrix, favorite book, thinking fast and slow?
And when you're not working at Axelar, what are you doing for fun?
I try to exercise as much as I can, you know, spending time with family, but exercises, uh one of my ways to you know, relax myself in the brain.
SERGEI absolute pleasure chatting with you. Appreciate your knowledge and your experience. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me. This is awesome.
M