Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
1 year of DOGE UTILITY! Anniversary Celebration Spaces
Recorded: Sept. 1, 2023 Duration: 2:05:03Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you for listening.
Our goal of making a Layer 2 was to bring smart contracts to Doge.
So different reasons, but using similar technology because we use Polygon Edge.
But yeah, a little brief history there.
Yeah, by the way, Ian is a speaker, our satellite man.
Yeah, hey guys.
So yeah, it's been a pleasure being able to kind of be an advisor and helping out with this project.
My day-to-day is I build satellites, so spacecraft that are going all around Earth.
We're launching one next year, dozens and eventually hundreds in the coming years.
And one very exciting thing that we're working on is the first one that is launching on SpaceX
will actually be transmitting some data back down to Earth.
And I have my engineering team working now to figure out how we can actually be transmitting
Doge-chain-related messages back down to Earth.
And this would be a radio broadcast that anybody with a standard ham radio that you could go
buy on Amazon, buy at the hardware store, would be able to listen into and actually read the messages
coming from this satellite about Doge-chain.
So this would be, this is truly Doge-chain going to the moon.
Well, first to low Earth orbit and then eventually beyond that.
So, you know, it doesn't really go higher up than that.
Amazing, man.
Yeah, it's pretty cool, man.
The people that came together to make this all happen, all the contributors and advisors
and all the builders, it was really a cool dream.
What was so cool about it was when, you know, the idea was first being even tossed around.
Um, I remember, you know, like, uh, some of the members coming to me and talking about
I was like, oh my God, this is like, wait, I was like, has no one done this?
This is crazy.
Like, how has no one made an EVM for Doge?
This is just such an obvious idea.
And, uh, and then, you know, we're looking around and I don't remember if I think at the
time, I don't think she had announced they were thinking about this, but then as we were
building it, I think in our early days of building this, cause we built this.
So the ideation, the building and all that was, uh, almost a year before it made it to
the public.
Um, and you know, in that time, I think we saw she was trying to do this.
They announced they wanted to do this, but we beat them.
Like, and I actually remember speaking to Billy Marcus, the creator of Doge and talking
to him about, uh, you know, supporting us and stuff.
And, uh, I don't know if I've said all of this, but I might, might as well, but he actually
was supposed to join as an official advisor to, uh, Doge chain.
He actually agreed to join as an official advisor.
Uh, and then, uh, he said, Hey, look, the Doge foundation is probably gonna try to poo
poo on this.
I think were his words.
Uh, and you know, they're very skeptical of things like this.
He says, don't worry about it.
I think this is a great idea.
Yeah.
I don't think I've ever said this fully on, on, you know, publicly or to anyone really,
uh, just like out of privacy sake.
But I think it's been so long.
I think it's, it's fair to talk about now.
Um, but yeah, he loved the idea.
Uh, this is the Billy Marcus, the creator of Doge spent many hours on calls with him,
um, over like a month period.
And he, he agreed to be an advisor verbally.
And then we said, okay, cool.
We'll send over some paperwork.
He said, let me introduce you to the Doge foundation.
Some of these guys will be skeptical.
Some will probably be cool and like the idea, but let's, let's try to get them on a call
and see what they think.
And then hours later, he emails us and CCs, you know, all of us or whatever, uh, to intro.
And I guess hours later, he messages, Hey, let's put our deal on hold.
Uh, the foundation is concerned that, you know, what if you guys like scam or rug or something
and they just want to know more, they want to let's, let's talk first before we formally
move forward with anything.
And, uh, you know, we talked to them, it went, it went okay.
It went as well as we would have thought.
I don't know if people saw, but there was some, uh, I actually didn't attend the call,
uh, because I didn't want to.
So there was already some debates if others had seen between myself, not debates, very friendly.
I was always very respectful to all the Doge core devs and still talk to, um, a few of them
still today, uh, a couple of them.
Um, and, but you know, what happened was Sandeep, uh, from Polygon posted about Doge
chain being a super net on Twitter.
Uh, and you know, Sandeep is a very big famous guy and Polygon has, you know, a couple million
followers on their account and him and another, I think, Gentie from Polygon, uh, one of the
creators of Polygon, uh, posted about Doge chain and one of the, uh, either foundation
or core devs, I forget, um, posted a reply to his tweet and said, Hey, this is a very
irresponsible of you.
Why are you promoting this, this Doge knockoff or whatever they called it?
I don't remember.
Excuse me if I use your words wrong, apologize, but basically he said, this is irresponsible.
You should take this tweet down.
Uh, and this was before we, we, Billy had introduced us to them.
So I said, this is irresponsible and started like this kind of debate going online.
And a lot of, uh, that person in some of the hardcore Doge maxis, uh, started jumping
on that and saying, they're using the Doge name.
They should change the name.
This is a scam.
They didn't have any good reason for why it was a scam, but they were saying, this is
a scam.
This isn't Doge.
And we said, yeah, we agree.
This isn't Doge.
This is a layer two of Doge and Doge.
Like any other web three protocol is free for anyone to build on.
Um, and we were very respectful about it and we tried to answer any questions, but at the
end of the day, many of these maxis, uh, for good reason, by the way, we're skeptical and
just said, no, this is a scam.
Uh, you're, you're taking this name.
You're using Doge name for profit, all, all these things.
And that's a fair point.
And, and, and, you know, having Doge in the name, of course, does give some affinity to
the brand and does help get the word out.
Obviously that's part of the strategy.
We're building something for Doge.
Why would we not have Doge in the name is my argument.
And so they really pushed us to take Doge out of the name.
They also didn't like that.
We wanted to do Doge burn when one of the big things originally I wanted to do with this
was to have EIP 1559, which is an Ethereum, uh, uh, protocol, basically where, uh, a piece
of every transaction burns ETH.
And that has been one of the most amazing things for Ethereum because between that and
the merge where they merged a proof of stake and dropped the rewards by 90%, it made Ethereum,
uh, deflationary.
So over the last year, even in the bear market with not a lot of transactions, Ethereum has
been officially deflationary, meaning more deflationary than even Bitcoin itself.
Pretty fucking incredible.
Uh, it means if you're holding ETH, you're going to, that supply is getting smaller every
year, not larger like Doge is.
And so a lot of the Doge maxis said, no, we don't want to burn because Elon says that
Doge should be inflationary.
And, uh, it's good for it to be inflationary because then people spend it instead of hoard
it like Bitcoin.
Okay.
Fair point.
I disagree with this point and Elon's like my favorite person on earth, but I disagree
with that particular point.
I think, look, the most, the majority of people holding Doge, you're not holding it, uh, to
spend it.
They're holding it to hopefully the value goes up and they're using it more as a store
of value and a speculation.
And I think if we could burn some, I don't think that's going to stop people from spending
Uh, I think it's just going to help the, the Doge community have more value and not get
their value inflated away like the U S dollar.
So I really liked the concept of EIP one, five, five, nine, which would burn some Doge
with every transaction on Doge chain.
But because a lot of the, the maxis didn't like it, we said, okay, we will hold off on
that.
We will not launch with that feature.
We will wait later and we will let the community vote on this.
And I still want to do that at some point.
We all want to put this to a community vote and see what the community thinks.
Um, but for the time being to try to like, show them, look, we're trying to concede here.
We want, we're part of the Doge community.
We want to do what's right for the Doge community.
We want to listen to the community.
And so we got rid of the burn.
Okay.
Uh, but we didn't take Doge out of the name because we thought that was kind of silly.
And we were already so far with all the, you know, documentation.
We had already launched parts of it.
Uh, I think the project was already launched and like to change the name would have required
lots of, lots of sacrifice and changes in marketing changes in the Twitter, all these
things.
Right.
And it just didn't make sense because it's a great name.
So we kept the name.
A lot of people didn't like that.
A lot of people loved it.
A lot of people told us it was a good idea, uh, especially in DMS.
Um, but yeah, there was this kind of drama.
And so when Billy agreed to join, that's the same time that this drama started happening
and the foundation told him, Hey, you should wait to work with these guys.
What if they're scammers?
What if they're ruggers?
What if they're just doing this for profit and run away?
Which was a very reasonable thing because in Doge, there have been a lot of people who've
come and gone.
If you go back to a lot of these different things, there was a guy who, Oh, and I'll let
you, uh, speak.
You want to tell us about some of the old, you were there from the beginning, developing
yourself and helping fix some of these, the exploits.
But tell us about some of the like fucked up stuff that different projects have done
in the name of Doge and why the foundation and some of the maxis are rightful and to
be skeptical of us.
But we've proven that we're not going anywhere.
We're not a scam.
We're not a rug and we're still here to stay.
So, uh, eventually I think they'll, they'll all come in and believe in us hopefully.
But yeah, like, Oh, and what kind of stuff was there on the early days?
Man, early days.
So nearly the first thing I would talk on there is when you were talking about, you
know, the kind of the Doge maxis and the Dogecoin core team, stuff like that.
And they always do have, I think the best intentions at heart.
But I think that when it comes to the general social media crowd, even a message of like
even kind of, you know, a sit back message as wait and see how it plays out.
By the time it gets filtered through people on Twitter and comes back to you, it can be
literally a message of condemnation.
Things can go nasty in that kind of sense.
Now, I've always said that, you know, Doge is something that belongs to everybody.
You can call your coin Doge if you want to.
There's like nobody should be allowed to take ownership of that one.
We know what Dogecoin is.
So, you know, Doge chain, having the word Doge in it, like, I don't think that that
should really ruffle anybody's feathers.
And that's one thing I'd really step in on.
As we saw a lot of that in, like, people are even saying that, you know, SHIB should
change their logo because it looks too much like, you know, Doge.
And they can't have that.
I don't think that's the case at all.
It's literally a dog, a very different looking dog.
But those are the kind of arguments to kick off from people that just kind of tend to get
themselves way too entrenched.
And yeah, this is kind of similar to the ultra hardcore Bitcoin maxis where, you know, they
won't even look at Ethereum.
They won't look at anything.
It just has to be Bitcoin.
And it can get, you know, these heated conversations.
But look, I do think the foundation, they always have kind of the best intentions at heart.
But I mean, I've bought heads with them a hundred times, if not more.
And look, sometimes things go the way they go.
But given enough time and with community direction, I have seen minds being changed on stuff like
that, if it's ever one person who changes their minds, it's a community.
Yeah, absolutely.
But yeah, so some of those early scams, I mean, there was like there was projects that
were doing things like they said, oh, we're going to take all this money and we're going
to donate it to dogs or donate it to, you know, there's a bunch of different projects
that did stuff like this and then just ran off with the money.
And they used the Doge name and got everybody kumbaya and all happy about doing something
nice for the world.
And then they ran off with the fucking money and gave a bad thing to everyone.
Yeah, I was about to jump into like the absolute worst of them, in my opinion.
This man went to jail for a decent amount of time.
Now, I will say at this juncture, he did not go to jail due to crypto related crimes.
He stood trial for them.
But as the judge said, and I'll quote him here, the details of this are a bit too exotic
for me, and eventually it just kind of went to no settlement on it.
Now, he was later raided while liquidating an account that held essentially all of these
goods in it.
The liquidation of that meant that he lost, I believe there was about 20 or 30 million
dollars worth of Ethereum listed in the actual, sorry, pounds.
So a little more in dollars at that point, basically found and redistributed it to what
I would assume would be victims of, well, the larger scale crimes that he committed in
the world of cryptocurrency.
But there's actually a post for myself that's still linkable on Pacebin.
I think if you search my Reddit username, you actually find the full story on it.
So this is when I essentially do a whistle.
I like that, Owen.
Let's, we want, I like having...
Yeah, let me, let me, let me, yeah, let me find the actual link.
I think if you just search my username, his name, and then Reddit.
Core and Pacebin.
There we go.
So, yeah, so, oh, I don't know where to actually post it, since it won't show up on here.
Yeah, so it's on Pacebin.
Hang on, let me, I'll throw, I'll throw the link into the Dogechain.
We can continue the conversation, and then afterwards, yeah, you can post if people want
to go look at these old, this old history and stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So join the, join the Dogechain Telegram channel if you haven't already, and I'll be
dropping the Pacebin in there.
You can have a read through what was essentially the first time I ever whistle blew, once we
found out what this guy was up to.
So this guy, and I'm going to use his pseudonym because he constantly changed his name, and
I mean by deep hole, he changed his name.
So at that point, he called himself Alex Green.
That was not his legal name at the time, but we'll stick with that one.
And if ever it comes to a point where this is played out in court, I will attest that
I use a pseudonym.
And so essentially, this guy came along as one of Doge's saviors.
He wanted to build a lot of stuff with Doge.
And ATMs were the first big thing that he wanted to build for it, but he also wanted
to touch over multiple other areas.
The guy nearly presented himself as a real Tony Stark.
Like, you know, he wanted to build everything.
He had a lot of cash to throw around, that kind of stuff.
He donated greatly to, if you remember Josh Weiss's NASCAR efforts, he was a huge contributor
to that.
He really gave, seemingly gave a lot to the Dogecoin community.
He started hiring from within the community as well.
Now, at that time, I was part of another foundation that we started within Doge, which was, I think
it was called Hash Rate for Doge or something like that.
But essentially, we wanted to get the community mining.
We didn't want, like, we saw the ASICs that were coming along.
We saw that there are farms starting up, basically being able to do, you know, hash rates that
we could only dream of with our little GPUs.
And we figured, you know, there are a couple of GPUs out there, which, or sorry, a couple
of ASICs out there, which are in the lines of affordability.
But they really have no match at all to what the big players are starting to run in with.
So we figured then, you know, what if I were to receive a bunch of ASICs and I will then
voltmod them and we can ship them out at cost to people we know are actually mining Dogecoin
from the community, stuff like that.
So he stepped in and said, hey, I'll fund that, actually.
Why don't, you know, I'll fund it.
I'll get you all the ASICs.
You voltmod them and send them out.
So I did that with him and got all the ASICs delivered to, I still have photos of all
the ASICs that I got.
It's like, we calculated the compute power and basically had Ireland's strongest or most
powerful supercomputer running in my living room, just from all these ASICs running at
the same time.
Got them voltmoded.
We got them out to the community.
Everything was perfect.
So later then, he essentially offered me a full-time job working with his company then.
And he said that his next big thing is that he wants to get a mining pool up and running
and he also wants to have an exchange.
So, you know, he'll have ASICs on the market.
He'll get those ASICs which he'll essentially want to, you know, send on to tokens onto his
own exchange and stuff like that.
And anybody who's mining with the ASICs go through his pool.
And, you know, that's, it's a very clever, it's a very clever kind of business opportunity.
So I figured, sorry, one moment.
Sorry if you could hear me pouring out some water.
That's getting a bit dry.
No worries, brother.
But yeah, so everything went perfect, accepted the role with him.
He was successful in purchasing an exchange called MintPal.
And that exchange had a lot on there already.
Now he got it at a good rate because MintPal was previously hacked for their dark coin allocation.
So that was an X11 token and it had a pretty high market cap at the time.
I believe, you know, about 10 or 20 million was, you know, absconded with after that hack.
So he got the exchange at a pretty good price and there was, you know, no dark coin on there
anymore, but it had lots of Doge on there.
It had lots of Bitcoin, lots of Litecoin, all the good stuff.
So I met him once or twice in real life and he, you know, he was decent.
I mean, he did kind of strike me as something was off, that kind of thing.
And, you know, you know, when you're just sitting with somebody and something is not
adding up every now and then he'd make these kind of odd mistakes and talking out loud when
talking about tech.
And for a developer, it was just strange that he would have certain mistakes in there when
he seemed to be an expert in other topics.
But look, there are people in the industry like that.
And I kind of brushed it off.
So I had a message received then asking me, it was a picture of him much younger.
And one person asked me, does this look like him?
And I said, it does actually.
Yeah.
And they asked me, do I know his date of birth?
I said, actually, I do remember his date of birth.
Yeah.
Because I wanted to essentially, you know, know who he was outside of the pseudonym.
And, you know, in trust, he basically handed me his passport where I could read his real
name and had his date of birth on it.
And I said, oh, yeah, he's only one day different from my date of birth.
So I said my date of birth to them.
And they said, right.
So, yeah, he is one day different from that on this document as well.
So what document are you reading?
So they sent me on.
It was actually a post from Encyclopedia Dramatica.
So this is like an old, nearly an old Wikipedia that's only like run by 4chan members, that
kind of thing.
But it was a good source of information on Internet scamsters and stuff like that.
So they sent me on the article.
A lot of the stories that he told before were essentially in this, but with extra details
added.
Now, I still read it and said it is possible that somebody just really doesn't like him.
But then we're able to look him up using his real name and see that, you know, he changed
his name after there were already criminal charges put against him.
And he changed his name, I believe, so that he could operate online under this new name
without people already knowing he was a criminal.
So after news came out about that, there was similarly at the same time, there were rumblings
going on that some people may not have been able to withdraw from MintPal.
So we were saying, right, there could be something extremely wrong here.
He started spinning a yarn about how the exchange got hacked.
Now, I couldn't do on-chain forensics back then, really, I guess, to the level I do today.
And now you know why I do it to that level today.
We got somebody in to take a look at it and there was no evidence of any hack there, but
there was evidence of coins being moved out.
So I posted in the pay spin that I wrote up following that one.
And obviously, I, you know, quit my role at that point shortly before he fled the country.
But what had essentially happened was he purchased the exchange and myself and all his other staff
members, he essentially encouraged us to, you know, get some movement going on the exchanges.
We all had a lot of Dogecoin at that point.
You know, we were mining from day one.
This is back when OneBlock was getting half a million Dogecoin.
So we were all, you know, trading on us.
We kept all our coins on there.
We basically considered it like having a hardware wallet.
That's, you know, how confident we were in that kind of platform.
Oh, no.
All of us also had.
Yeah.
You can tell where this is going.
Was this before Mt. Dox?
I think so, right?
It was after Mt. Dox.
After Mt. Dox.
And you still trusted it?
See, it was this guy in particular.
Like Mt. Dox, you know, had an inside job.
And I just figured, you know, this guy would never do that to us.
He wants to look after us and grow a really legitimate business from here.
Now, I didn't have 100% of my stuff on there.
But there was a decent pile of it in there.
And he was always encouraging us, you know, trade on the exchange.
Even if it's Bitcoin or Litecoin, just trade on the exchange.
And we're going to have our fiat on ramps back up soon.
And we're going to have our off ramps up and working when we get through the legal stuff.
So we all had coins on there.
And, yeah, he pulled the rug out on the entire exchange.
He bought an exchange that I would say back then would be the equivalent of maybe KuCoin.
Like one of the top exchanges just to rug it and then fled the country.
He fled to Japan.
Was it Japan or Korea?
No, Asia.
We'll just say Asia.
And he was extradited from there by the authorities.
Where he was then sent back to the UK.
And standing trial, I can say this out loud.
That's the only stood trial that was guilty for it.
And it was actually for sexual assault against multiple women.
And by multiple, it's in, you know, over, I think it was 11 was the total amount of accounts that came in against it.
Quite a stand-up guy, this guy.
Yeah.
Like, if you can think of evil incarnate.
Like, I think that that was, like, a lot of people now, whenever I, you know, talk about security and crypto and keeping everything as safe as you can.
And I think it's because solely I met him.
That was somebody that, you know, I trusted.
I met up with in real life.
I used his products, his exchanges.
And in the course of a day.
And, I mean, this is the same guy who still tried to essentially get me on his side after he did it.
Very much a, you know, everybody's against me kind of story.
Stuff like that.
Now, in getting that whistleblower message out, there were people who were able to recover some of their coins from the exchange.
Mine, of course, were absolutely not coming out of that exchange.
I don't believe any other staff members were either.
But it helped in actually catching him.
I believe it was presented in the case that was brought against him for his crimes in, well, financial crimes.
It was, God, 2016 or 2017 when I was still getting calls from the Metropolitan Police Force in trying to take this guy down.
And as far as I know, he is actually out at the moment.
Now, I haven't seen or heard from him in that time.
But this is the type of person that you can find in cryptocurrency.
And this is what made a lot of the Doge community as paranoid as that.
I mean, for all the stuff he did, like the ATMs and all that, before he even wrote the exchange, he did what was essentially one of the first ever ICOs of the day.
Like, he essentially had what he called an investment pie.
You basically buy in and, you know, with the profits that are made, you get paid back out a little bit.
Stuff like that.
And this was, for all intents and purposes, a Ponzi scheme.
The people who got in were getting paid by the people who went in afterwards.
Well, he claimed there was revenue in other systems in his building.
There was no revenue at all.
He just tried to look more legitimate by hiring people, like, say, myself, to build.
He wanted me to build the actual pool that we had.
And previously, I was, you know, voltmodding ASICs.
If you want to look legitimate, I guess it's a very quick way to do it.
And, you know, there's physical hardware being shipped that has been modified.
So we voltmodded it.
It's not, you know, it's not the simplest thing in the world to do.
You have to, you know, you have to solder something onto a board.
So it gave more confidence and credence to what he was doing.
And he hired the operator of one of the biggest pools back then.
I think, what was it?
He previously helped the code on Netcode Pool.
And that was essentially to make sure that we can build the best mining pool ever.
Stuff like that.
Hired a lot of very public-facing people.
Like, at that NASCAR event, he sent people down there to represent Dogecoin.
Like, this is criminal to the point of, just to be blunt, psychopathy.
And it's a sociopath's way of doing it.
There was no thought to the amount of harm that's being caused, either to the people he indirectly scammed.
Well, no, it's still a direct scam.
He'd rip their money off an exchange.
But then there's the people he befriended, met up with in real life, drank with.
And one staff member who, well, had the same issue that he, you know, stood trial for.
He sexually assaulted.
Like, this guy, like, people like that exist.
And call it naive or whatever, yes, I knew at that age, you know, by early 20s,
that there were some fairly shitty people in the world.
But I think at that point, I was nearly on to the impression that, you know, nobody like that could exist.
Like, this is something out of a television show.
It's a made-for-TV horror character.
Yeah.
Like, here's the reality.
Most people that were involved with him, like, a lot of money was lost as well.
But a lot of people wound up, like, I mean, therapy was essentially, you know,
a shared camaraderie of a lot of people who had to deal closely with him.
And the damage goes beyond financial when it comes to people like this.
And that's why I am as paranoid as I am today.
So, yeah.
So, with all that being said, you know, this isn't to, like, try to scare everyone.
But it is important that, you know, we are all skeptical.
And that's why when these, you know, some of the people from the Doge Foundation
were skeptical of Doge chain in the early days, like, we understood.
And we said, look, like, it's going to take time for us to earn your trust
after all the things that have happened.
In the Doge community.
This isn't the only thing.
There's been lots of things that have happened in the Doge community over the years
where people came with seemingly good intent and did bad things.
So, the only way to prove yourself is just with time, right?
So, we've been here a year.
We're going to be here more time.
And hopefully, eventually, we're able to prove ourselves to all these people
that, you know, we really are here to do good for the Doge ecosystem.
And, you know, many of us here have been in this industry for a long, long time.
I mean, I, so, like, LDA, our, my, I'm the CEO of the marketing and incubation firm
out of California, has been around now for six years.
We've been working with Polygon for four years.
Quick Swap for, we built three years ago.
So, but still, I mean, it's important that we prove ourselves to these people.
And it's rightful for them to be skeptical.
That's, that's kind of the moral of the story is that we don't hold it against them
for being skeptical of us a lot.
The Doge community has been really jaded by some bad actors.
Absolutely.
Yeah, the worst is that, you know, especially in the, especially.
Oh, no, that was it.
I was just putting my phone.
When, when in the beginning, you know, Doge Foundation was trying to.
Is my reception messing up?
Hello, hello.
I think people are not able to hear me.
Can you guys hear me?
No, no, we can hear you.
It's, you know, Rock, you're all good.
You might be a little bit late.
Cool.
So, yeah, anyways, a lot of stories there about, like, yeah, we had never, I don't think,
told publicly this story about how Billy Marcus had agreed to be, you know, an official advisor,
really loved what we were doing.
One of the things he was actually really excited about, this is what even brought it up in my
mind was we were talking about Shiba Inu, and them trying to build this, their own EVM
chain was, Billy said, when we were on a call with him, talking about when we could, you
know, have this shipped, and it was before, it was before, you know, we were already far
into the process, and we could ship it well before Shibarium, Shib's thing, and he was
like, yeah, good.
He wanted us, he wanted to ship this for Doge before Shibarium was shipped for Shib.
Yeah, man, I mean, we shipped it like a year in advance.
And you didn't lose everybody's Eater, so it's a total win.
Yeah, I know.
God, I feel bad for them, because I don't, like, I actually, I actually support them,
and I'm not, like, one of these Doge Maxis that, like, hate Shib.
Like, who cares?
It's another meme coin.
Like, we're not, like, I don't know, to me, as a Doge supporter, I don't believe in shitting
on other people, just because, like, you know, they're a different dog meme, whatever, dude.
Yeah.
Like, let them do what they want to do, and I think Shib actually probably helped Doge
to get more famous.
Like, they went out and brought massive people into this ecosystem, too.
I learned early on, I used to think more, like, along the lines of competition in this
space, and, oh, but that Dex is a competitor of ours.
Like, you know, QuickSwap, we are working with ApeSwap very closely now, and they, you
know, you could look at them as a competitor.
I met the ApeSwap guys out in, I think, at East Denver or Miami or something.
I don't remember where.
But we met when we were, you know, we partied together, we danced together, and we were
like, why, you know, we're not competitors.
Like, we should be working together.
Like, the crypto industry is only 1% of the world.
So, like, for us to be competing and infighting against each other is so silly.
When there's the other 99% of the world that's not in Web3, that includes governments, that
includes, you know, TradFi, that includes, like, BlackRock and all these people who own
the entire system.
So, we shouldn't be fighting each other.
We should be working together to expand the pie, and, you know, the rising tide will raise
all ships.
So, yeah, I don't, I've never fallen into this, like, oh, we're Doge, you know, F-you
Shib people.
I think it's, I don't know.
I think it's, like, I might get shit for that.
Some of the Doge Maxis might not like that I'm saying that.
Whatever.
I don't care.
No, man, you're completely right.
And this is the thing, like, I mean, inclusive of, you know, QuickSwap and ApeSwap, et cetera,
that, you know, you're good actors in a space that has some bad actors in it.
The good actors do need to stand by each other and actually help build the space that we all
want to take part in.
And even if it means, you know, if we have essentially a competitor in the space, it
can be friendly competition, and that benefits absolutely everybody.
I mean, like, just on what I was saying with, you know, the stuff with Alex Green and so
on, like, once I kind of, you know, fully re-entered the space, which, you know, I dabbled
in it up to about, you know, through the 2017 markets and that, and in 2020, I wanted to
get back into the development side of it.
When I came on board with Dogeera, their lead asked me if I'd come in and started leading
the development on it, they had a guy in there who was unbeknownst to the rest of the team,
actually siphoning money out of, well, essentially the liquidity.
And he managed to get something like 300 grand out of it or something like that.
Like, I was only with the team, I think, a day and a half before I spotted it.
And we essentially had federal agents talking to that guy within 20 minutes of us.
Wait, you were the whistleblower on that one, too?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
So, well, we got...
Bro, this is why we like to have you, like, so, like, for those who don't know, we've had
Owen help us with, like, projects on Dogechain that we were worried about or skeptical of
or thought they could be up to no good.
We always have Owen go and do the blockchain, like, forensics and analytics to try to see,
like, are these guys legit?
Do they have any backdoors in their contracts?
And so, yeah, it's been good to have you on our side.
And, you know, I knew some of this stuff, but I did not know how deep this stuff goes.
So now I see why you have such a good skill set in finding this stuff.
Pretty much.
It's like that was one thing that I always kind of held myself to, you know, over a decade
ago that, you know, whatever about if there's a bit of naivety when, you know, you're
a bit younger or whatever, whatever, but if you had the skill set to be able to look
at everything that was going on on chain and fully understand it, then you can catch
them in advance of needing to, like, say, oh, shit, everything's on fire.
So, yeah, and I think it's why I'm also so skeptical when I'm speaking to people now
and waiting to hear, you know, how does this actually work, like, that kind of stuff.
And I think that there is a healthy point of where you can still be approachable but
skeptical.
It's the same with, you know, Dogechain.
I waited for that to be, you know, up and running for a day or two, look at the bridge,
checked out things on it.
And then I was like, yeah, this looks pretty good.
And there's a good crowd behind it.
There's people that are doxxed on it.
There's, you know, it's got quick swap operating on there.
There's good players in it.
Like, and that was one of the biggest things for me in that, like, I don't want anybody
to take the very mistaken impression that I am somebody who would be easy to string along
at this stage in life.
I will break your legs if you try.
But when it came to Dogechain, I had the exact same level of skepticism towards, you know,
that that it would any other project until I looked into it, had a look at the team, saw
what was being built, saw the resources that were invested into it and saw all of the other
stuff that, you know, involved team members have built.
And that's what gave me the confidence in it.
And I think that once, you know, the Dogecoin Foundation just have seen enough time pass
by where people are on the chain, they're interacting with it, they've, you know, making
new tokens that are backed by Doge and stuff like that.
And I think that they will come and there'll be essentially a very official level of support
behind it.
I mean, Elon himself said that he wanted to see Doge with utility.
So that's the big thing that they had the argument to do about inflation versus deflation.
But Elon's biggest thing was saying that Doge needs utility.
So, you know, that's essentially doing everything that Elon really wants.
This is all the utility in the world.
Yeah, exactly.
And to be clear, it was not all of the Foundation that was, like, skeptical.
There was, I would say, of the people that I spoke with, and I know Andrew spoke with a
lot of them, but I would say maybe half of them, okay, out of, like, all the core devs
in Doge Foundation people, I don't know, there's probably, like, and junior devs, too,
and, like, people like Inevitable360, Rich Dev, all these people.
So when speaking to these people, I would say it was, like, say, out of, like, eight
or ten people, maybe, like, three were vocally against and were very aggressive about it.
And then there was maybe three or four who were, like, okay, this seems interesting.
We want to know more.
We want to see more.
Let's keep line of communication open.
And then there was maybe two or three that were very supportive, but only one of those
was supportive publicly.
And so, like, one of them sent me messages.
Actually, this guy was originally one of the most vocal against us.
He was probably the second most vocal against us at first.
And then after talking to him for a long time, him seeing what we're doing, you know, I offered
to get on calls with him.
I kept trying to, like, show him, like, you know, here's the code.
Can you look into the code?
Tell us what you think.
We'd love your advice if you can help us to make this, you know, better if you don't like
what we're doing.
We never fought anyone.
We never, like, said, oh, you don't like what we're doing.
You know, screw you.
We always said, look, we understand you're skeptical.
Give us some time.
Please just have an open mind.
Keep an eye on us.
Look at what we're doing.
And if there's anything you want us to do, we'll try to work with you.
The one thing we didn't do, and I think some of them were pissed off about this, was we
wouldn't take Doge out of the name because it just doesn't make sense.
This is a chain for Doge.
And by the way, reasonably, one of the reasons they were upset with that, too, this came kind
of, like, later.
They didn't even think of this at first.
This just seemed more like a, hey, we just need to find reasons to attack these guys, was
because there was DogeChain.info, which was one of the big public block explorers for
Doge.
And so that was a reasonable thing.
That was very reasonable.
Okay, there already was something that had DogeChain in the name.
But at that point, you know, we were so far into it.
And the name is just so perfect that we were just like, you know, we're just going to go
with it.
Nobody owns the Doge name.
And there's been lawsuits over this, not with us, but there have been, the foundation
has actually tried, I think, and you'll know this probably better than me, I can't remember,
but didn't they try to, like, sue people for the trademark?
And then the judge said, no, you guys don't own the Doge trademark, something along those
lines.
Or am I getting that wrong?
Yeah, it might be what happened at one point.
Like, I know at one point, it was somebody else was attempting to trademark Doge.
And their claim was, you know, oh, we trademark it, but give you the infinite license of it
and stuff like that.
And I believe that went to court.
And I, like, I'm aware that a lot of the Dogecoin community were involved in that.
And they were essentially able to prove that, you know, this is open to everybody to use.
And that was a case that essentially ensured that, you know, anybody can use Doge.
Now, I didn't hear about the Dogecoin Foundation.
You know, I might be, I might have, I might be getting that wrong.
It's been a long time.
But I knew there was something that happened where the judge, I apologize.
If I'm getting it wrong.
But I knew there was something that happened where the judge said, no, nobody can, nobody
owns this name.
This is public domain.
Yeah, that's essentially it.
I mean, what's the name of the dog?
Kasumi?
Is that it?
But her owner has already said that, you know, this is a public image.
It is a public name.
It's, you know, I'm not going to sue anybody for using this.
And that was essentially what solidified it.
But yeah, I know there was a court case with somebody like another third party who was trying
to trademark Doge.
And I know that the Doge community was up in arms about it.
And thankfully, yeah, the judge said that, no, you don't own it.
You can't trademark Doge.
Like, come on, this is a public good.
It's, to me, nobody, nobody owns that.
And as much as I love what the foundation has done for Doge, and it's great that they're,
you know, and the core devs and, and people like Inevitable 360 and the hackathons that
they do and all the, all the stuff they do for the Doge community, absolutely amazing
stuff.
Even if, you know, a couple of them didn't like what we're doing, that doesn't matter.
They're doing great work and we support them.
But I will say this and, you know, hopefully I don't ruffle feathers with this, but Doge
foundation, Doge core devs, Billy Marcus himself, they don't own Doge.
Doge is public domain.
Doge is the community and people could build whatever they want on it whenever they want.
And it's up to the community to decide what works and what, what wants to be used and
what doesn't.
That's for the market and the users to decide.
Yep.
100% agree.
But that's the magic about it.
I mean, if it was owned by just one person, I don't think I'd like it.
I mean, here's the thing with Shibarium.
And again, like yourself, I do hope that they actually get stuff sorted there and it
does turn into basically another good ecosystem of meme coins.
It helps everybody when we have that stuff.
And there's a lot of holders there who put, you know, they've essentially invested into
They want to see it do well.
And I'd love to see that happen for them.
But this is one of the great things about, you know, Doge being, you know, more decentralized
in that aspect and the fact that Doge chain was started essentially by the community
rather than being, you know, run officially from the very top.
But like Shibarium was run officially from the very top.
And I think there might have been a little bit too much confidence involved in launching
this, particularly in not paying for audits and things like that.
We have community members.
It's not easy to build something of this scale.
I'll just say that.
And, you know, I've been rooting for them and I've been really hoping that their chain
will succeed.
Um, I've said that publicly when, you know, we had some, uh, guests even on this show and
some people in the community who were like, oh no, Shibarium's launching.
Is it going to kill Doge chain?
Is it competition?
And from day one, we always said, no, like it's, it's proving out our use case.
Think about this.
We did this first.
We were the first community chain and then they're doing the same exact thing.
And if they have great, massive success, even if they have bigger success than us, it just
raises the bar for all of us and gets more people to see this is a real use case.
You know, we had someone come to us recently wanting to do this exact same thing with Bitcoin.
Kind of interesting.
Don't know enough about it, you know, to know if we would want to like support or whatnot.
But, uh, it's interesting to see now that people are wanting to do this.
Actually the ape coins, the board ape team came to us.
Uh, the, the ape coin guys came to us when we were first, when we first launched this,
they saw our success and they came to us and said, Hey, can you build this for apes for
ape coin?
Uh, not ape swap guys.
That's a different thing we mentioned earlier, but the board apes, uh, collection with their
ape coin, which was, you know, massive, one of the biggest, you know, if not the biggest
NFT collection in the world, they asked us to build this for them.
And we said, uh, well, we let's talk, but we're focused on this right now.
This is, you know, going to take a lot of effort and we don't want to take our resources
away from this, but maybe at some point we can support with that.
Then a week later, they did a vote with our community.
Should we build a chain?
I think, I don't remember, but I think the vote was no.
So I think they never ended up building.
I think they were going to try to do it themselves since we, uh, we're saying, you know, at the
time we were focused on those chain, we don't want to take our, our eyes off this and we
got to keep focused, laser focused.
But anyway, so that, that, you know, ape guys want us to do it now.
Bitcoin, uh, group wants us to do it with Bitcoin as the gas on the EVM chain.
It's very similar to this.
I think that's interesting.
I'm a Bitcoiner, so I am interested.
I'll take a look at it, but you know, that's just very early talks anyways.
But I, it's cool to see that there are people who want to do stuff like this, uh, building
a chain, an EVM chain that uses some other coin as gas, whether that's a community coin,
whether that's SHIB or in their case, oddly, again, I don't know why they used bone.
That was weird.
They should have used SHIB, but whatever, you know, whatever they want to do.
Um, so anyways, yeah, one, one thing I didn't, uh, I, I didn't get too earlier when we were
talking about, and we have Sam Kazimian here, uh, one of the smartest, one of the smartest
devs and engineers and minds in this space that I've ever met.
Uh, so great to have Sam here.
He's, uh, the founder of Frax and a core contributor of Doge chain as well.
Um, but I wanted to say one, one last thing about that stuff is that, you know, one of
the most vocal guys that was against us, uh, early on, uh, over time, uh, you know, we
started talking more and he started to, I think maybe have more trust in us.
And he said, look, you and I both know that if you do this right, this could be bigger than
Ethereum.
This was one of the Doge core devs.
And, uh, you know, I said, look, I'm not, we're not trying to be bigger than Ethereum.
I love Ethereum.
We're not trying to compete with Ethereum.
But the fact that he said, you and I both know this could be bigger than Ethereum if you
do it right.
At the time he was trying to convince us to change the name.
And I, you know, unfortunately we just, we just decided not to, but, uh, everything else,
other guidance he's given, uh, we've, we've, uh, we've agreed to, uh, some things and,
and explored things and, uh, and we'd love to have his input some more.
Um, he actually came to us later.
Uh, complaining that I don't want to get into politics of the Doge foundation, but, uh,
I don't know if people heard this, but the Doge foundation had a big problem with, uh,
it, the, the core devs run off donations and there's a wallet where these donations go.
And, uh, someone from the foundation kind of commandeered these donations and they weren't
going to the core devs directly anymore.
And I don't know how that ended.
I didn't follow the, there's like hundreds of pages of it on Reddit arguing about it.
But anyways, he came to us venting about his frustration with that.
Uh, down the line.
Um, so it was cool to see that he like started to like have some trust in us and wanted to
talk to us about these kinds of politics stuff.
I don't really like getting involved in that stuff.
So, but anyways, yeah, we got, uh, Sam, uh, Kazimian here, uh, one of the most brilliant minds
in the space.
How you doing?
Uh, uh, you, you talk too highly of me, man.
But, uh, yeah.
Hey guys.
Um, I, uh, I identified like a original, like Doge minor first and foremost.
And obviously I'm, I, uh, on Ethereum, but, uh, as, as Owen was telling his story.
Sorry, did you cut it?
Did you cut out for other people?
I think, could you go back 15 seconds?
You cut out.
Yeah, I think your connection might be a little bit dodgy.
Oh, okay.
Hopefully, uh, hopefully this is a little bit better.
Um, but, uh, yeah.
So as Owen was saying, uh, when, when he was telling his story, I, I originally actually
got into crypto back when I was at UCLA and Doge was actually one of the first cryptocurrencies
I mined in like early 2014.
I remember when there was like simple Doge, Doge mining pool, there was like the waffle
pool, multiple that always mined Doge and, and, and all of these things.
And so, you know, when Owen was telling his story, uh, you know, a lot of stuff when you're
talking about Darkcoin, I was like, oh, that was before it became Dash.
And people don't know originally Dash was called Darkcoin in the early days and all these
things.
So, uh, yeah, my original history is, is all, uh, all Doge.
So, um, so obviously Doge chain is pretty, it's ethos.
So I'm always trying to, uh, encourage like, uh, Rock, Andrew and everyone to think of how
to build Doge chain in the most technically, uh, technologically, you know, advanced way.
And so like recently I've been trying to kind of push for them to use L2 technology.
Um, most likely, can you guess it was Polygon's, uh, technology.
There's others that, you know, they're, they're considering in terms of the final decision.
But when, you know, Rock was talking about trust, I think what's really important is,
uh, a lot of this stuff doesn't have to be trusted if it's built right.
But we all know in crypto, a lot of stuff, uh, is not built right.
But the thing with crypto is you can build it right.
If you're very, very, very, very meticulous about the, the technological, uh, implementation.
And so like, I'm kind of, you know, sometimes I'm not really fun to talk to and stuff.
And, uh, you know, because I try to pick out all, like tease out all the things and, and,
uh, why we, you know, it's better to do this or that.
And it's, it's, it's harder to do it, but you know, in the end, uh, everyone is more,
uh, thankful for it, but that's why I've been kind of pushing, you know, Rock and Andrew
and, and the, uh, core contributors and stuff to really consider a formal L2 spec, hopefully
a ZK roll-up or something like that, like Polygon, ZK, EVM, and make it so that from a data
availability perspective, there's literally no trust needed other than that Doge bridge,
right?
The Doge bridge where Doge itself has to be moved to Doge chain to actually, uh, gas.
If we can then tackle that at the same time, then none of the, for example, the stories
about the, the early exchanges, the early Rockfuls and stuff, uh, then there's no trust
needed, right?
Like everyone can exit all of their assets, uh, in either direction, any asset from
your stable point, never lose, you know, your, your ETH or other assets.
And then if, after the technology stack is fully L2 compliant, then we can actually focus
on, uh, the Doge actual bridge.
And so, like, that is obviously very difficult because the Doge chain is a Doge coin for a
client, because Bitcoin is difficult to build a fully trustless, essentially kind of impossible
with the current, uh, Bitcoin and Doge coin clients to build a fully trustless bridge.
But we can, you know, you can get there if we tackle it like once.
Sam, you're, you're cutting out pretty bad there, bro.
You're cutting out pretty bad.
Maybe if you could, uh, go maybe close to your router or something.
It sounds like a robot the last, uh, 10 seconds.
Okay, uh, well, I, I don't want to take up too much of, uh, in case.
That sounds, that sounds good there now.
But anyway, uh, you know, the, the guys to turn Doge chain into a full, uh, ZK, uh, L2
so we can focus on a fully trustless Doge bridge.
So, so yeah.
Yes.
And Sam, you were, I, I always, I, I hope I haven't misquoted this, but you were one of
the first Doge, uh, minors from your UCLA dorm room, right?
And I don't remember if it was top first 50 minors or first 500 or so.
What do you do?
What was that?
Damn, we can't hear you, bro.
It's really bad.
Shoot.
Yeah, we were probably competing for hashrate back in the day then.
Me and my little GTX, I had a 590 and then I got two 680s.
Man, those little beastly things.
We used to get like 20,000 Doge a block back then just from, I mean, just from a GPU.
It was unbelievable.
It just literally like rolling in Doge.
But of course, that was only worth like $10 back then.
We spent more on electricity.
So, yeah, we're having a bunch of technical issues today on the spaces.
I don't know why it just happens sometimes, guys.
Sorry about that.
We can't hear you, Sam.
Unfortunately, we're losing you there.
I'll jump in.
Oh, yeah, go ahead.
Go ahead, Ivan, if you got something.
Yeah, I wanted to jump in.
I'm trying to just to clear up some things.
I'm also trying to get James up as a speaker who has been dealing with BD on the chain, which
is one of the biggest challenges, but as soon as he comes up, we'll try to get him to give
a rundown of his experience with the builders on the chain.
Another thing is we wanted to have some of the dev team here to talk a little bit about
the technical side of the dot chain, but unfortunately there as well, there's a typhoon where our team
is, and apparently they haven't been able to come back online.
So we're missing quite a bit of information there.
But we can roll up to do some of the stuff that Rock wanted to talk about, and we can jump
on other stuff if we are able to get James back up on the dev team.
I just wanted to say, you know, it's been really an honor having Sam, you know, help
so much with like, I would say probably the biggest contributions from Sam is his eye on
security and on the engine, like the engineering side, working, you know, with the dev team
about the direction of the project.
I think, you know, his push for a Doge chain to become a true layer two of Ethereum, meaning
it'll now be a, you've got a sort of a pseudo layer two of Doge or a side.
Really, it'll, I think more technically it would be a side chain of Doge and it would be a layer
two of Ethereum.
And if you, when we do do that, what happens is you're using Doge as a gas and all the
branding and all the focus on all the art, the NFTs or the art and everything is built
around Doge.
Wrap Doge is the main currency on the chain, et cetera.
But you're using Ethereum's security, which is really, really important.
And the coolest thing about that is if we can pull that off, which now, if people were
on the previous spaces today where we had Sandeep from Polygon and Mahilo founder of
Polygon and, and all the, you know, different Polygon team and all the different builders,
they, part of the, so we merged those two spaces because we had our 25th, you know, best of
kind of anniversary.
So like the all road lead to Polygon spaces, it was the six month anniversary.
And then we had Doge chain one year anniversary just happened to be the same exact Friday.
That was not even planned.
It was kind of crazy.
I didn't even realize it until last week that they were going to fall on the same day.
But so we had that spaces set up with like 30 speakers.
We had, you know, a phantom wallet.
They actually had to leave early and didn't get to speak because we were, our, our, our Polygon
announcement went so over time, but we had what Gala games, we had DAP radar, we had the
graph, we had anchor, a bunch of huge, huge names on our best of, but we actually merged
with the, the Polygon announcement of how it's like, again, this is not planned, completely
aligns with what we're talking about here today.
And like, you know, our exploration of becoming a true layer two with the optimistic rollups
or ZK rollups, you know, obviously we're leaning towards ZK rollups with Polygon, of course.
But so what was interesting though, is the only stack that was really available for a chain
to be like a standalone rollup was the OP stack with optimism, which is very interesting.
They've done great work.
It is an optimistic rollup.
Uh, ZK rollups are like more of the future, but optimistic rollups are what is being used
now.
And so now kind of crazy, uh, Polygon came out with their stack, which is, uh, called CDK.
And this is to make people be able to launch their own standalone ZK rollup chains, uh, in
the, in the ZK, the Polygon ZK EVM framework.
So really crazy how that has worked out because we've been in, in, you know, deep discussions
about how to, uh, move for the next, you know, iterations of the chain.
And the, the, one of the main reasons for this, I mean, one, it makes, it makes things
much more decentralized, which is always the goal for every project.
That should be your goal, uh, to become like as decentralized as Bitcoin.
Uh, in my opinion, that's just my personal opinion.
But, um, the other, the big thing that this does, one of the most important things that
this does for like usability of the chain is that it makes it so you don't have to trust
bridges anymore.
And that's something that Sam in particular, uh, uh, of the contributors has been very vocal
about, has said, uh, from like basically day one, he, he really doesn't trust bridges and
most bridges, uh, will be like broken or hacked eventually.
And that we, the whole industry has to move away from, uh, the way that bridges are built
now with like third parties, like, you know, multi-chain, Axelar, uh, one chain, all these,
uh, a chain port, all of these different third party bridges just present.
This huge risk to the community, um, whether that's hack, you know, hacks, exploits, uh,
the, the people running off with the money or in the case of multi-chain, which just happened.
Uh, and, you know, Sam basically warned us against that this could happen and, you know,
but what else, there was no other option in the industry to, to, to move liquidity.
Um, and so, um, multi-chain, what happened with them, some inside information that, you know,
they've told us some of their representatives have told us is that, uh, the money was so
like, I guess one of their founders was like involved in some money laundering or some, some
criminal activity.
I think their CEO and he, uh, basically was arrested by the China, the CCP, the communist
party.
And that, uh, they think some people are claiming that it was the, the, the Chinese government
who took them funds from the bridge because they saw it as part of like, as if they owned
it, as if, um, as if the multi-chain team, that was their funds.
But the truth is it's not their funds.
That's community funds.
So I'm hopeful that like someday the Chinese government gives it back if that's what really
happened.
But then there's also rumors that it was like the guy's sister stole the money.
So who, who damn knows in this industry.
But the point is if we can move to being a true layer two, uh, using rollups, then there
will be no bridges like that.
It'll be trustless because, uh, it'll be like with ZK rollups, you, you make a proof, basically
you move funds and then there's a proof that stamps to Ethereum and you could batch up a
million transactions to Ethereum in one 45 kilobit proof, for example.
So that's, that's the magic of the ZK and optimistic rollups.
Optimistic rollups work a little differently, but the concept is, is similar.
You do lots of transactions and then you batch them to Ethereum and they're, and it's provable.
And then you know that there's no funny business and you don't have to trust some third party
to custody your funds.
Cause with multi-chain, even though they had like aspects of it that were like smart contract
or, you know, quote unquote decentralized, clearly it wasn't that decentralized if, you
know, the Chinese government or someone was able to take those funds.
So we have to move past that as an industry.
It hurt this, you know, the multi-chain hack hurt a Doge chain.
It hurt Doge chain users.
I was one of them.
I had a bunch of stable coins on that and I lost money and that really sucks.
Uh, so we have to, as a, as a industry move away from these centralized bridges and centralized
exchanges is the same lesson, uh, as Owen, uh, put eloquently earlier with that, that,
uh, Alex Green guy.
And then like you had Mount God.
Yep.
What's that?
The tale of trauma.
Yep.
Don't put your money on the P.
But the good thing is like what Sam said, we can move past these things.
We can, through technology, build better solutions and remove trust.
That's the whole point of our industry is to remove all these trust layers, counterparty
risk, right?
Um, we don't want to know that like, oh, if we're working with some entity like a bank
or an exchange that if they like don't manage their accounting, right.
Or their taxes or something that like your own money is at risk, like could, because they
go and solve it and they take your money to pay creditors or something like happened with
Celsius and what happened with, uh, oh, by the way, there was news about this, uh, just
yesterday or today when I was falling asleep, I think I saw that, um, was it Genesis or DCG
was going to make whole Genesis creditors a 90% of the value, I think.
So that's a good sign for the industry that, you know, in the midst of all these bankruptcies
and stuff that at least the, the, the users are going to get 90% of their funds out of that
one.
So sometimes there's some semi happy endings, I guess, but anyways, we got to move away
from this stuff and through technology, we could do this.
The original way we did this was through self custody and, you know, originally self custody
was very, very hard.
Oh, and I'm sure you remember you were in the industry even before me, I was in, in 2015
and even then it was, you know, pretty hard.
I mean, I, my first, uh, my first self custody wallets were air gapped computer.
I had to take the network card out of a laptop, uh, and then, uh, basically start a, um, a
wallet, uh, using Electrum from Bitcoin on one computer, generate a private key on that
offline computer, and then, um, then generate a public key and put that onto a hot computer,
an internet connected computer.
And then I would have to take transactions with a flash drive back and forth, create the
transaction on the, I believe on the, on the air gapped computer, no, on the, on the hot
computer, take it over to the, in a, through a flash drive, put it into the offline computer,
sign it, and then put it back onto the hot computer to broadcast it to the network.
So like really complicated stuff back in the day.
Uh, and I still recommend that's actually a good method still.
I'd say it's like the safest way of doing it, but man, you must've had a full blown bank
on there to be doing that.
Like, uh, generally.
No, no, man.
But you know what, even when you're poor, like, you know, even a hundred bucks matters
to you, right?
Like, and you know, I always calculated, I always calculated things differently.
I always looked at like, okay, I might only have a thousand or 10,000 bucks, you know,
back in 2015 or whatever.
But, uh, you know, I actually, actually, I sold all of my belongings.
Uh, I sold my dream truck.
I sold everything I had actually cashed in all my coins, everything I could do to get my
hands on some more Bitcoin and, uh, in like 2016 or so.
And, uh, my friends laughed at me, you know, even my crypto friends were like, dude, what
are you doing, dude?
You sold your truck.
I was driving a $2,000 Honda Civic to, to put all my money into Bitcoin.
I sold, you know, my very expensive truck, uh, and everything else I had.
Um, so anyway, so that money meant a lot to me.
And so even if it was say only a thousand or $10,000 or whatever it was, when I was doing
these crazy signing, uh, schemes, uh, that money I always looked at as that's not $10,000
in future Bitcoin.
I always, everybody would always laugh at me.
My family, my friends would always laugh.
I would never say Bitcoin.
I say that's no, that's like $10 million in future Bitcoin.
So I'm going to take really good care of it.
No, a hundred percent, man.
I mean, I think I said this before about when I was in college, I gave one of my friends,
in there, uh, I gave a couple of people in there, like small amounts of Dogecoin.
I remember one of the guys in there, I had to get, uh, he gave me a hand with the advanced
algorithms project we were doing and I gave him like 15 bucks in Dogecoin, like nearly
us, you know, uh, you know, just nearly more of a, what'd you call it?
Like, uh, uh, word, words, words are eluding me, but basically, you know, not to really pay
him for help, more just, you know, say, thank you.
Here is something that you might find funny, like that kind of thing.
And yeah, he found it funny and he got in touch with me in 2021.
He never sold that Dogecoin.
It was worth about 75 grand.
So eventually he got it, you know, pretty much.
Yeah.
And I did that so much to so many people, bro.
Uh, I think I've given, I've given at least, I don't, I don't know.
I don't want to thousands and thousands of dollars in donations and tips all the time.
Like Cindy will get annoyed with me.
We'll be at a restaurant and I'll start talking to the waiter about, you know, why he like
the history of money.
And, you know, and then at the end, you know, I'll always tell him here, give me your email
address, download any Bitcoin lightning network wallet, and I'll send you some, uh, I'll send
you a big tip.
And, you know, you normally, I'll, whatever I normally would have tipped say 20%, I'll
double that.
So like, I'll send them, you know, 50, a hundred bucks or whatever.
And, uh, and a lot of time they email me later and say, you know, they asked me for, Oh,
do you have any videos I could watch?
I want to learn more about this.
Uh, it's really cool.
A lot of these people have become, you know, true crypto people.
Yeah, absolutely.
And like, that's kind of the thing with it.
Like, I think I was the recipient of like the largest ever Dogecoin tip on Reddit after,
um, after I built like an AWS image to allow like everybody to mine Doge.
Basically whenever it became profitable to rent an EC2 instance and just immediately start
mining Doge, it would spin up automatically.
So I wrote the image for it.
I released it for free on Reddit and somebody gave me a tip on there and it was only, well,
it was pretty big at the time.
It was well over a thousand dollars, maybe $2,000 he gave me, but that was back in like
2014.
It was actually like 1.4 million Doge or something like that.
So yeah.
So what is that?
So do wait, are you still holding that tip?
Oh, no way.
That was on MintPal.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
But I was about to say with your, with your actual proper secure setup.
And yeah, I did also have like my cold wallet storage and stuff like that.
And that was, it wasn't as extreme as your one.
It was an external hard drive.
And I think mine is so much more extreme.
That was just the first layer, bro.
Yeah.
All my private keys, even to this day, because I'm pretty scared.
I heard a story about a crypto founder being chopped up recently, man.
That stuff's scary.
Yeah.
It happens, man.
Just, you know, don't go to like, you know, an Ethereum, like an Ethereum.
Oh, words are old.
Sorry.
I'm super tired and I keep running.
Conferences.
No more words.
Yeah.
Don't go to an Ethereum.
Yeah.
There we go.
Don't go to an Ethereum conference, like, you know, down deep in South America or anything
like that.
I was just, I was just in Columbia, man, for East DevCon.
Jesus.
Not just there.
I don't know.
Six months.
I hope you did not bring a ledger with you.
No, but you know what?
One of our, our dummy, one of the smartest guys I know, too.
He actually, he had his, his laptop to do some work and he was like, oh man, I accidentally
brought my ledger to Columbia.
And I was like, dude, what are you doing?
Make it, make it even worse.
We went out drinking and he had his laptop with him and he left his laptop.
I mean, look, nobody can get into a ledger anyways, but he left his laptop with his ledger
in Bogota, Columbia at a bar.
And, uh, luckily, uh, we, they, they, they, they held onto it.
It was a, it was not a bar.
It was like a nice, uh, it was where there was a crypto meetup.
So it wasn't, you know.
Yeah.
See, my issue with that is not like, you know, they, they might find a way to get into my
ledger.
It's more of the $5 wrench attack that hits.
Exactly.
Dude, that's the thing I'm most scared of.
Girl, I take big precaution.
I mean, even when I'm on these spaces, I'm walking right now, I've walked almost 10 miles
today on, on these five hours of spaces.
And I'm always kind of scared.
Like I'm kind of, I'm a loud guy, if you guys can't tell.
And I'm always worried, like I'm speaking so loud with these people here, who I am.
And I get, you know, I'm in Los Angeles in a nice area of Los Angeles, but I do worry
about that a lot.
So I'm always like, yeah, you're going to get knifed.
Serious.
I mean, like, or just kidnap or they watch me go into my house or something, man.
That's why I have like, you know, a security system and it's scary.
Like crypto does add risk to things, you know, like it's not like a normal bank where, you
know, nobody, nobody kidnaps like, you know, rich people that much in America because like,
what are they going to do?
Like, Hey, make your bank, send my bank money.
I mean, you're not going to get the money, but with crypto, you know, they can, man.
It is scary.
So you got to be safe.
That's why I don't keep any of my private keys with me.
I, I have, if I ever need access to stuff, I have multi-sig and I have to get multiple
wallets.
It would take me hours to just to get even to my small wallets.
But most of my larger wallets, my deep, deep cold storage, I call it, are spread across
countries.
Keys broken up and spread across multiple countries.
Self-custom is dangerous, man.
But it comes to life.
You have to.
It's a, I don't know, maybe I'm ultra paranoid, but I'm like.
No, I absolutely know the way now.
Like maybe I was obviously far too trusting in my younger years.
But nowadays, yes, it's an extremely different story.
So back then my like top layer security would have been an external hard drive, which being
plugged into a laptop, which essentially had nothing on it, but like, you know, Dogecoin
and Bitcoin wallets and stuff like that.
And nowadays I would look at that and say, wow, that was really insecure.
But I guess we weren't such big targets back then.
Well, dude, did you hear about, I mean, even like when you do things right, though, did
you hear about the Bitcoiner, Luke Dash Jr.?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Man, that was weird.
That's crazy.
I mean, those were super old servers he had or something that were like offline forever.
And someone actually stole Luke Dash Jr., one of the core devs of Bitcoin, one of the most
important devs of Bitcoin.
They stole his assets, man.
So if he if he can mess up, any of us can mess up.
So you've got to be extra safe.
And that's why we've actually had a few episodes of of this DogeChange show over the last year
where we went deep into security and things you can do, just low hanging fruit, things
you could do to protect yourself.
The first thing we don't have time today, but the first thing is don't put your stuff
on centralized exchanges or only use them as on ramps and off ramps.
Hold your stuff on on a ledger, please.
But anyways, that's a story for another day.
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, the point of all this was that, like Sam was saying, we can solve stuff through technical
advancements.
So, you know, hardware wallets was a great one.
HD wallets was a great thing.
Hierarchical deterministic wallets was a really cool thing where you can hold multiple wallets
within one private key.
And then that private key could be generated by something as simple as a seed phrase, which
is, you know, 12 to 24, 25 words.
So like these were things that didn't exist in the early days.
You didn't have hierarchical deterministic wallets.
You didn't have ledgers and hardware wallets.
It was paper wallets.
It was like you had to generate the math yourself.
There were people who were like, you could generate a wallet and you'd have to add randomness
to it.
So people would like make so some of these wallets would make you move your mouse cursor
around a lot for like 30 seconds to generate randomness.
There was all kinds of stuff like it was not like it is today.
So like it's much better, but there are lots of things we can still improve.
And one of those is and this is what I think is going to happen is I think Bitcoin is going
to be the global settlement value settlement layer.
And then things like Lightning, Doge, Liquid Network will be like transactions and payments.
And I think Ethereum to an extent, too.
And then I think Ethereum will be the smart contract settlement layer.
But yeah, there's there's a bunch of things we could do.
Oh, the point of that is that I think 80 percent of the smart contract settlement will happen
on Ethereum.
I don't I don't think a lot of these other layer ones will succeed.
I'm going to I'm going to say this.
People might not like it, but I don't think Solana will have a large market share.
I don't think Cardano will have a large market share.
I think it's going to be mostly Ethereum.
And then all the functional stuff on Ethereum will happen on on these true layer twos, these
these roll ups.
And that's that's what our intention is.
So that's not an announcement as like we kind of have mentioned this before, but that's
what our goal is for Doge Chain is to become a true layer two so that there's no more
trust.
First, we don't have to worry about, you know, bridge problems.
We can move to a fully like trustless environment.
The more we can do, the better.
And then, like Sam said, then eventually we can move the Doge native proof of work to proof
of stake bridge, move that to some more trustless way.
And I actually have some ideas about that.
I wanted to talk to Sam a little about on here, but he he was having connection problems.
But like some probable possible routes we could take with that is either a lightning network
atomic swaps type stuff that in theory, it can do this, but it's not really ready yet.
And we actually and it could do this even more likely if we can get Doge to join lightning
network, which I'm already in talks with one of the people who's trying to build lightning
network for Doge.
And I already told him Doge chain would love to support and getting Doge to have lightning
network, because if we did that, we could have atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Doge.
And then maybe if we could plug Doge chain into lightning network, then you can have a
true trustless bridge between Doge proof of work and then Doge chains, EVM, all secured
then by like stamp to Ethereum.
So this is all, you know, stuff, it'll take time for all this, but this is the goal so
that we can remove any trust, because none of us want to be like, I don't want to have
any responsibility over this stuff.
Like I don't have any custody over anything, obviously already.
But like nobody, we don't want any layers that can have any vulnerability.
So the more we can push in the direction of security, the better.
And Sam with Frax has done already done great stuff with that.
Like Frax doesn't use third party bridges.
They have this thing they built called a ferry.
So instead of going through like multi-chain of these other bridges, they have this ferry
that happens every, I think it's 24 hours from one chain to another, you can mint native
Frax, which is super cool, and removes this like bridge risk.
And it's something we want to definitely bring to Doge chain as well.
Yeah, absolutely super cool.
Love that stuff.
That's for the future roadmap.
We kind of went from memory lane to the future and going to space and everything like that.
Like developing a layer, a true layer two for Doge chain.
But yeah, one of the, we have James now.
Finally, we were able to get him on the speaker list, who has been working with the projects
closely on Ground Zero with the builders on Doge chain, which is one of the most important
things because the chain without projects has no utility.
Basically, the goal is to bring utility to Doge, and that's what these projects do.
So let's have a word from James and his experience with these builders on Doge chain and everything
that has happened in the past year.
Hey guys, can you hear me?
It's a little weird, but it's okay, I guess.
All right, I'm trying to use the name better.
Is that okay?
It's okay, it's good enough, I think.
Sorry, usually use my computer to talk through, but you can't do it on Spaces, so we'll have
to deal with this.
Apparently, you can do it since like a couple of weeks ago.
I know that Pennybags here, which is one of the ambassadors, was speaking through his
PC the other day, so I might try it next week or something.
Yeah, next time it's better, but we'll have to deal for right now.
Those of you who don't know me, my name is James.
I've been a little less outspoken on these spaces, but I deal with Doge Chain BD, doing
a lot of business development for Doge Chain.
But since I don't speak so much here, I'd like to introduce a little bit myself, maybe
qualify myself a little bit and let you know about my background in the blockchain industry.
So I got into blockchain in 2013 off the back of the Silk Road hack.
And just to let you guys know, every time crypto goes down, everyone says blockchain
is a scam, crypto is a scam.
And they were saying that about Bitcoin back then.
Little did I know, purchasing Bitcoin in 2013 would have been providing the backdrop to my
whole entire life moving forward.
But I didn't know much about it.
I put it into a Bitcoin Core wallet on an encrypted CD in my closet and forgot about it because
that was what we had to work with in terms of tech back then and wallet storage.
You put it on a CD?
Yeah, encrypted on Bitcoin Core.
I've never heard of someone doing that.
Yeah, yeah.
So we got it from Coinbase.
Coinbase was around back then, but they weren't as prominent.
Everything was a little less, what do you say, fleshed out back then.
Everyone says if they can go back and buy Bitcoin, they would have bought so many.
I beg to differ because it was totally a hope, wish and a prayer at that point.
It all made sense, but it hadn't really manifested at that point.
Okay, so fast forwarding, I was working at a prominent Fortune 500 aerospace company in
Los Angeles, working with DOD, Air Force, Navy, NASA, pretty much contracting and negotiating
deals that those agencies wanted to do for like their defensive missiles.
But mainly I worked in liquid propulsion spaceflight.
So, Ian, I was getting my toe in that world just a little bit as well.
I was there for about seven years, well, I think five years, and I left and went to another
aerospace company, very, very big, one of the biggest in El Segundo, where I did the
same thing, worked for F-15s and F-35s and all that kind of stuff.
But the reason I bring that up is because what I gleaned from that, I was able to, a lot
of those people are very smart, very, very special people, intellectually gifted, I would
say.
So that helped me identify those people, be able to work with them and, quote unquote,
become like an unofficial project manager, working with them.
But the whole time, you know, I knew what Bitcoin was, especially around 2016, 17.
Obviously, Bitcoin had one of the largest bull runs in its history, maybe not by percentage,
but definitely by attention.
So basically, I, one, took the CD out of my closet, remembered the password, got that
onto a hardware wallet, and really started taking it very seriously.
And watching it the whole time between the 2017-18 bull run, the ICO craze, and all the
money that was coming from it, it just made me double down and pour everything I made into
what I believe is going to happen in the future, which is crypto and the rise of it.
So basically, for that whole time, I was working, shoveling everything I could into there.
I was driving the same car, Honda Civic, shout out, 10 years.
Pretty much the same car, grew up in college, renting a single room, just going hard in the
paint, because why do anything hack-ass?
You know, that's pretty much my motto.
So basically, with that said, I just couldn't stay in the industry anymore.
I mean, yeah, it was a good job, well-paid, you know, pretty good prestige, but why be
in an industry when it's just not going to be the alpha moving forward?
That's what I thought crypto was.
So I left that, and there was pretty much no guarantees, right?
So I just want to emphasize, people who are here building the space really practice what
they preach, they believe what they preach, and the proof is in the pudding, right?
So basically, I went out, did some influencer work, and I pretty much was increasing my network
and my reach within crypto, and I found a few people who put me in touch with LDA and
DogeChain, and I've been there ever since.
I also do some work across the space with other crypto companies you've probably heard
of, some of you don't.
I do extensive work with Wanchain.
I also have been very involved with the DigiBuy community, Bitcoin Cash community, here
to Hashgraph community, the list goes on and off, because I was an influencer at a point.
But with that said, all that has, I believe, helped grew me to where I am now, doing BD with
DogeChain, and it's been a very good experience.
Learning experience, just to see how blockchain is code, is tech, but it's really built on people.
And that's one thing that I would say and reiterate and pretty much sum up my whole experience with
this, is that blockchain industry is no different than aerospace industry, is no different than
the tech industry.
Business is about people and built around people.
And the main thing is, I've had the pleasure of meeting a lot of the builders in the space.
I talk to them monthly, sometimes multiple times a week, and just getting to know them.
We used to have a lot more builders back in the bull run than we do now.
So is life.
So is crypto.
But what I will say is, the people who stick around in the bad times are definitely the ones
who deserve the payoff and the good times.
And those are the people we like to share our success with.
It's all about sharing success.
So with that said, little things that I would say that help differentiate some projects,
the good ones, versus the ones that are lacking in some ways, I've seen both throughout the
last pump, would be the ones that focus on people, right?
Because blockchains, I like to think, are valued in network effects.
The amount of people involved in the network means more people can communicate with the network.
More activity can occur on the network.
And if that can happen, and you focus on that, you treat your community right, you do right
by them, and you don't look for a quick grab of profit, you'll build a much more organic
way, a much more foundationally solid way.
And, you know, like...
Yeah, Metcalfe's Law, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Metcalfe's Law, basically, if you guys don't know what that is, look that up.
Metcalfe's Law, basically, compounding value, it's more came into effect when the internet
came to be, and that was the main switch between business, right?
Like, everyone was looking at traditional revenue analysis and all that, but Metcalfe's
Law kind of put that on its head.
It's the new valuation for the digital age, I like to think.
So if you look into...
Now, it wasn't how many people come into your brick and mortar store to buy something.
It was how many people or nodes are connected in the network that you're building.
Like, if you have a...
Like, when you build the fax machine, if there's only one person with a fax machine, it has
no value, right?
But now, if you have two people, there's value.
Guess what?
When you have a third person...
So, like, Metcalfe's Law is exponential.
Like, you add a third...
If two people have a fax and similar, let's use email.
If two people have email, then you could send messages between two people.
Now, when you add a third person in, well, the third person can send messages to A and
B and vice versa.
And then you got four people and now these networks become, like, bigger, exponentially
larger.
And that's, like, how a lot of kind of fundamental people who try to value stocks and value companies,
they really look at Metcalfe's Law and, like, how many people are in the network.
And that's why you could see how, since the internet age, that connected everybody, right?
As nodes in a network.
