my name is AJ Wright's crypto
Algorand unfiltered. My guest for today's show is the CTO of the Algorand Foundation, John Allen Woods. John,
thank you so much for being here today. How are you doing? I am great. Thank you so much for having me on.
It's great to speak with you and great to amplify the work that we're doing
across this ecosystem, so thank you for the opportunity. And you know, I just want to say something here today. Before we even get started,
AJ has been killing it with organization around this space, and Twitter's fault, or X or whatever they call themselves these days,
they let him down, the first space wouldn't start, the two of us together, two tech bros could not troubleshoot it,
and so we are now in a new room. I don't know, I've already tweeted it out. Do we have to do anything else to kind of make people aware that it's here?
Maybe you could all tweet it out for me, is that okay? Or for AJ? Yeah, if everyone, yeah, everyone in this space right now,
the first one, Elon just was not having it. He said not today, so we had to make a new room.
Very frustrating because so many people were signed up for the other space, but it's okay.
You guys can help right here, right now, the AGO fam, just retweet this space that you're in,
like the space, add comments, do whatever to juice the algorithm to get as many people in here as
possible. And also, I mean, there's already over 100 people in here, so this is actually massive.
And on top of that, this space is also being recorded on streaming software on the back end,
so you will be able to come back and watch the video of this interview as well on my YouTube
channel in the very near future. So John, man, this is amazing, but let's get down to it. I mean,
this is big news, but the technical roadmap just released yesterday. First off, I'm going to start
by saying I love how well it was written and how it was framed as the agaran gambit with all the
chess references that was very well done and done with style, in my opinion. And to be honest,
that really summed it up for me, like crypto is chess and chess is a battle, except in this
world, we don't fight for bishops and pawns. We fight for our market share. We fight for our users
and our audience. And most importantly, we endlessly fight to solve the blockchain trilemma.
And I stand by my statement that agaran still has the best argument for it. So now with the
technical roadmap, we're bigger, we're better, we're faster, we're stronger. We feel like a Kanye
West song over here. So I'm going to start off. So John, I'm going to start off with this,
because I really want to gauge where you're at. My excitement level on a scale of zero to 100
is about a 92. And those last eight points can only be gained in the bull run. Where are you at
right now? I am at an 80, which is the highest I have felt an excitement since I got here. We
still have more work to do though. And I'm kind of acutely aware of that. So I don't want to kind
of get too ahead of our head of myself or ahead of ourselves. And so yeah, let me say
I started with the Algorand Foundation about a year and a half ago or so. Can you hear me okay?
Everything good? So I started with the Algorand Foundation about a year and a half ago.
And it's been an incredible journey. There's been times when I felt like we as a team, as a group,
as a company, as an ecosystem, didn't have a beaten path forward. And we didn't have kind of
the obvious way to go. And I think we've set ourselves up together, okay? And this is not just
the Algorand Foundation's work or Algorand Technologies, Inc., as they used to be known as,
their work. It's not just the work of me or my team. It's the work of the entire ecosystem.
And we're all driving forward success. We cannot do it without a joint effort. And I feel
probably for the first time in the year and a half that I've been here, that all the blocks,
no pun intended, are falling into place. All of the problems, all of the issues, all of the friction,
we have an answer. Some of the answers are not implemented yet, but we have an answer.
And so I've never been more, I guess, positively forward looking about the opportunity that we have
to turn Algorand into a platform, which is truly the Linux of blockchains. And just on that,
sorry, just on the one point on the chest, right? Because we went, like the community
even asking for a long time, give us cool names. And at Cardano, we had like Goguen, Basho,
whatever, you know? And so when I was there, they got into the naming thing. And so we felt
for a long time, like it was something we needed to do. But we finally had this kind of roadmap,
a tech roadmap that was worth the time to sit down and go, hey, let's name all these things.
Let's give people something that they can kind of like grasp. And so I think chess is quite sexy.
We looked at other things. There were some other ideas. I personally like space and black holes and
planets and things like that. Some other folks were thinking about Greek mythology. There was
some other kind of ideas, but I think chess fits it perfectly. You know, it's strategic.
It's a bit of a geek's game. And also I know it harks back to one of Silvio's loves.
I think the chess thing is absolutely perfect. Because like I said, like chess is a battle,
and crypto is a battle. Like we're all fighting for our share in this mid here. And you know,
you're 100% right, like with where Algorand sits, it's positioning right now. I think really the
only direction is up from the forum as you know, the blockchain itself and from the community as a
whole, and especially off, you know, the back of this roadmap, you know, I mean, looking at this
roadmap, man, I really want to break this thing down. What I see here is that we're looking at a
push towards a more decentralized future. And the two quote, transformational upgrades helping us
get there are the transition to a peer to peer network, and the introduction of incentivizing
consensus. And we will, of course, we will dive into both of those concepts in a moment.
But in your own opinion, how will these two, you know, massive upgrades from the roadmap
help drive widespread adoption for Algorand moving forward?
Yeah, great question, AJ. And look, by the way, I should give a quick shout out to the recoup.
I know he's listening right now. And I was on a show earlier on, I said I'd give him a shout out,
you know, he's one of my faves. And I'm going to be on the recoup in the next couple of weeks.
I'm looking forward to it. And I just see him there in the audience. Good to see everybody.
And so, and so yeah, look, we've there's a whole bunch of stuff in here that I think is critical.
And like, it's across a whole bunch of different kind of tenets of what we need to do. So some of
it's addressing decentralization, some of it's addressing security, some of it's addressing
sustainability, some of it's addressing user experience and developer experience. And so,
you know, there's Yeah, there's some broad themes. But in general, like there's a lot in here that
addresses different areas. So we're like, we're fighting on all fronts, to keep to use your
analogy of kind of a battle. And so, you know, to directly answer your question,
consensus incentives, and peer to peer, as two technologies, and let me let me break that down
with people who because I know there's lots of people that I just assume know things. And I want
to make sure that even if it bores a couple of people in the audience, I want to make sure that
everyone gets it. Consensus incentives is a term we use to describe the fact that from now on,
oh, sorry, not from now on, but from say Q2, Q3 this year, so by submit mid this year,
the Algorand protocol will pay
proposers and validators of blocks. So if you're actively involved in consensus,
you're processing transactions known as mining and Bitcoin, but say on Algorand,
it's a proof of stake network or pure proof of stake. And so there we call it, you know,
validating transactions. If you're doing that work, at the moment, you don't get paid for it.
By the middle of this year, you will get paid, there'll be a reward in Algorand for that act of
putting blocks in the blockchain. So that's consensus incentives, in a nutshell. And
secondly, peer to peer is a we call it peer to peer, because it comes from the expression of
sending information from a peer, so from a person to a person directly rather than going
through a middleman. And so, you know, folks, I know there's lots of people in the audience
who understand this implicitly, but just to state it, Algorand right now, has a network topology or
a network design, where the consensus nodes are in the middle, running the VRF and doing
the Silvio magic, okay, and keeping the blockchain in sync, but they don't talk to each other.
They talk instead out to this ring, or relay, relay nodes, right, where, and the data travels
around this ring. And so consensus nodes or participation nodes talk to the relay nodes
directly, but not to each other. And so we recognize, of course, that although that has
virtue in some ways, from a design point of view, it's not optimal from a decentralization
point of view, for a decentralization point of view, you don't want to have any chicanes or
any, you know, what do they call it, like bottlenecks in the design of the system, where
you're reliant on a small number of nodes or people or entities to do the right thing.
And so we're going to be moving away from this style of depending on relays to a new system,
where we still have the speed of relays, but we don't have to depend upon them.
There's always a path for your data, your blocks, your transactions, to travel from consensus node
or participation node, as it's known, to the next consensus node or participation node,
without any middleman or any kind of relay. And so two things that I just described,
really important for both the decentralization and the security of the network. And so why is that?
Well, they marry well together a little bit like toffee and apple, or, you know, strawberries and
cream. And the reason they marry well together is because consensus incentives will naturally
encourage individuals to get out there, open their computers, run an algorithm node, it's not
computationally heavy, won't it won't cause your computer to get hot, it won't cause your fans to
spin on your laptop, certainly not after it sinks. And folks will be running these nodes,
because now they're going to get rewarded, they're going to get more algo for staking their algo.
Okay, this is good. And so we have more consensus nodes, or I call them consensus nodes,
because I think it's easier to understand, but more participation nodes that are out there,
doing consensus, making blocks and, you know, securing the network, making sure that it's
harder to cause any security issue with the network, the more algo that's staked,
the more consensus nodes that there are, the more decentralized and secure the network is.
Then we hit them with the follow up, which is peer to peer. And so now that we have
many more of these consensus or participation nodes, all out there, they formed this like network,
this like, this like neural pathways of data propagation. And so now there is loads of
different paths, loads of different roads from consensus node to consensus node, that your blocks
and transactions can flow. And so step one, increase the security of the network, increase
the nodes, get people involved, get them rewarded for running nodes, step two, start to rely on
those nodes for the transit of blocks and data in the network, making it strongly decentralized.
And so it's just a one to killer blow.
I mean, well put, and that really is the one to punch of, you know, how we're going to drive
widespread adoption for algorithm moving forward, I completely see how well those two bits work
together. And like, you know, I do want to circle back to some of that in a minute. But you know,
in terms of the peer to peer, you know, gossip, whisper style network, we're moving towards,
I mean, I mean, tell me if I'm right or wrong here. But to me, based off what I read, based off
what you just said, this kind of silences a lot of the naysayers who tried to claim
that Algorand is decentralized. I mean, is that a fair assessment?
Or rather that Algorand isn't decentralized?
Yeah, it's not exactly. I misspoke.
Yeah, no, no, no, no problems whatsoever. So yeah, there's a lot of folks out there. And by the way,
criticism is good. I mean, I think it's good to hold a light up to things and see them in the
reality that they are because, you know, deluding yourself. You know, I remember when I was in like
the early privacy game, like, like trying to like, like I invested very early in Monero. And I was
really still a huge proponent of privacy on blockchain. And so I remember at the time,
there was like, cryptocurrencies like verge and dash that were saying that they were they were
private and they weren't they objectively weren't if you held them up to the light,
and you looked at them cryptographically from an engineering point of view, they were bullshit.
And so it's really important, you know, from a privacy point of view. And so it's really
important that we don't like top, like we don't we don't fool ourselves and we don't
consider ourselves better than we are. And so some of the criticisms were a little bit heavy handed,
because I felt like, you know, functionally, we're not we are actually very decentralized.
But I can see the angle that people like Justin bonds and other commentators and other industry
pundits come from. They look at this and they say, well, this could be improved. And you know,
what, we didn't have to do this, we could have we could have spent that that in that
engineering time or that those resources, doing something else that was sexier or more
glamorous. We could have added, I don't know, you know, we could have like pretended we had a
trillion transactions a second and add some bullshit like that. But instead, we didn't.
We recognize that, you know, the network is extremely fast. And what's more appropriate now
is to go back and focus on things that are maybe less sexy to some people, because,
you know, you know, you can't get up on stage and talk so much about it the way they do
with some crypto currencies. But these are important things. If you truly care about
the virtues of crypto, right, if you truly care about this decentralization, self sovereignty,
permissionlessness, censorship resistance, these things are things you want to make sure you get
right. And so I'm proud that the team have chosen to go address these criticisms and ensure that
the protocol essentially is, you know, people say this term, I know I totally said it the other
day about about Solana is like a cockroach protocol is one that just cannot be stamped out,
right, is resilient. And so by making it decentralized, by not relying on relays,
by having options for people to basically run this network by themselves without the
foundation without the ink, these are the things we need to do to make it truly,
you know, the crypto dream. And that's what that's what we've decided to do. But at the
same time, of course, we're concentrating on some other things to make it faster,
like dynamic ground times, and indeed, things like algo kit 2.0, which is going to be just,
you know, a super slick WX. Yeah. And that's exactly what I wanted to ask you about ask you
about next on the roadmap. I mean, you know, many of us in the audience are familiar with
algo kit 2.0, you know, bringing Python to Algorand and literally opening the door for
millions of developers to build on Algorand. We all see the silver lining with the accessibility
and even more importantly, the innovation, right? And the exact line, the exact line
from the roadmap that I want to focus on here is this, I'm going to read it straight from the
roadmap. We're not stopping there, the smart contract experience will also be upgraded.
And the rollout of app building libraries will allow users to easily incorporate third
party smart contracts into their own applications. And when I read over the roadmap a couple times,
and I feel like some people might have read over that specific line, and its implications,
can you elaborate on how the smart contract experience will be upgraded? Because it kind
of feels to me that that's sort of like the rocket fuel for the trip to the moon. I don't know,
maybe, maybe I'm right or wrong there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you know, the rocket fuel is
fuel, sorry, the rocket is fueled by the tears of the non believers, you gotta know that.
And so I like that. I like that. And so there's something nice about being able to work on
something like advocate three and drop these like mic drop moments, of course.
The problem is you got to balance that with like not doing things in private too much,
because this is not like a, this is not like iPhone 16. This is, you know, an open source
decentralized project. And so although it may be a little bit less exciting, and a little bit
less mic droppy towards the end of the year, where we come out with these like heavy statements about
like all the cool things we're doing that are totally new, and no one's ever heard of them.
So we won't, we won't be able to do that. But what we are with the balance, so what we get back for
being more open is that you guys can contribute now. So we're going to be developing everything
in open source. So the development of allocate 3.0, including all the tickets that make up the
the features, including all the epics that make up the requirements, including the issues,
the pull requests, the if you like internal dev, so the work that the foundation are, you know, doing
on a day to day basis, it's all going to be in the open on GitHub from from from now, I believe,
I mean, if it's not now, it'll be like by the next few days, but I think it's, I think it's
already open. And so we want people to, we actively want people to get out there and get involved
in this, we want you to develop advocate with us. We're going to have like badges for people who
get involved, and we're going to try and champion and make it gamified a little bit so that we get
people excited about it. To answer your question, there are some crucial things like advocates
pretty, pretty good right now, like just to remind people without the kit version one,
we started where people were developing teal and py teal. And some text editor wasn't great,
no automation, no CICD, no test frameworks, just a bit shit, really, I'll get 1.0 came along and we
now have a command line tool that helps you build, test and deploy, right? It helps you
initialize new projects, it helps you kind of templatize projects, it helps you compile your
code, it helps you do continuous integration and continuous deployments, it helps you do
growing up things with software engineering. I'll get 2.0 is where we bring Python, right?
And so this is critical. Still at 1.0, you're still in production, you're writing your
code in teal and py teal, which is a nuanced language that not a lot of people know.
It's Algorand specific. So teal is like the assembly for Algorand, and so it's very low level,
and py teal is half a step above that. So it's not great experience. We have it in developer
preview right now, so you can go and you can play with it at this moment. So we have Python
on Algorand right now, but we're saying that it's not fully ready for public consumption,
and we're going to be releasing it in March, in March of this year. So in a couple of months,
or a month and a half. And so when we do this, I think it's a watershed moment for Algorand.
You got to remember that these platforms like Algorand and Ethereum and Cardano,
they are essentially operating systems, they are essentially distributed computers.
You run code on them, you run your applications on them, we call those apps dapps or smart contracts,
but you are writing code and it has been run by other people. And so we got to make it easy
for developers to realize their vision, to realize their dream, their game, their idea.
If we make it really hard, they're just going to go somewhere else. And so Algorand 2.0
is a watershed moment where we bring a language that's used by everyone from students to
quantitative analysts at banks, and everyone in between, the AI, ML guys, the group of concept
people, everyone is prototyping. So many people understand Python. And so this opens the floodgates
so that we have hundreds of thousands, millions of developers around the world that have an intuitive
understanding of the syntax with which you need to build applications on Algorand. So this is
super important. So that's a brief history of 1.0 and 2.0 with 2.0 dropping in a couple of
months. And so now you asked, hey, what's coming in 3.0? What do I mean by all this stuff around
the local developer experience and enhancing that and allowing you to bring in libraries and stuff
like that. So the wonderful thing about using Python, actual Python, not a different flavor
of Python, not kind of like Python++, it's just normal Python, is that we can take libraries off
the shelf and we can select parts of them to include and make available for people.
And so now the types of libraries that make life easy for quantitative developers, for options
traders, for people working in banks, for people working in software engineering, those same libraries,
not all of them, because not all of them are appropriate in a smart contract, but many of
them will be possible to use on Algorand out of the box. On top of that, we're going to be
bringing the ability to kind of build your app in a little bit more of a Lego brick style,
where you start off with someone else's work and you kind of stack on top of that, like a Jenga
brick and you stack on top of that. And so this Jenga brick style approach is what we mean when
we describe those kind of templates and libraries that are going to help you build. And so not only
is the language easy, not only can you leverage frameworks that already exist, but now that you
can, we also have a mechanism to quickly and easily build things sky high, leveraging the
work of other people. And then, you know, to give a flavor for the other kind of high level features
that I think are going to kill with with Advocate 3, we're going to be bringing another language,
another extremely popular language. I kind of want to, I want to let Alessandro and the wonderful team
who look after this kind of break that news in a way that's a bit more exciting, but we're
going to add yet another language on top of Python, which is going to open the doors to
basically everyone else who doesn't know Python. And we're going to focus on the developer experience.
And there's two things I'd like to call out here that I think are super cool. One, right now,
you kind of need to install Python and all that kind of stuff. A lot of Python libraries and a
lot of Python frameworks in order to use Advocate, it kind of depends on a whole load of Python-y
things. It's normal, okay, we write it in Python, that's okay. But we want to get to a place
where you can just run that on any computer. And so even if you're someone who doesn't have
a Python kind of developer environment set up, you can just run it like an app. And so for 3.0,
we're going to be releasing a version of Advocate, which is just an app that you can run locally,
you don't need loads of dependencies, they're all baked in. Just like when you run a game,
you don't have to have all these dependencies. That's number one. And number two, we're going
to be focusing on the developer experience at a level that usually is only focused on by
enterprise-grade, mature languages and mature ecosystems. I'm talking about like the Golang,
Rust, NPM type stuff. And so well, NPM is a package manager, but the Node.js type stuff.
And so what I mean by that is we're going to have line-by-line debugging. So right now,
if you want to debug, you're debugging your teal after writing it in Python. With 3.0,
you're going to be able to do a line-by-line debug in your Python and in the next language that we
bring. And so what this means is, if people find bugs in their code, they don't have to step down
into like the bowels or the sewers of the wrap. They can stay up in a high-level language where
it makes sense and debug where you don't need to hold the mental model of your entire
application in your head at the same time. And so these are critical things, but long story short,
Algorand is open for business and it's open for everyone, no matter how good
you or bad you are at software engineering.
Wow, dude, thank you for that detailed explanation, not only on what we already have from AlgoKit,
but what is coming in the future. I mean, I remember the second, it was put out that
Python was going to be available. My brain went straight to, all right, what's coming after
Python? Because if you can do that, you can do everything else. And that would just open the
floodgates up that much more. Really fast, some quick housekeeping for us in the Twitter space here.
There's about 360 people in the house right now. Make sure you smash the like button and
retweet this space while we are still in the first half of it. Really appreciate each and
every one of you that's inside the AlgoFam or outside the AlgoFam. I don't want this
interview, this space to just be for inside baseball with Algorand. I want it to be from
the outsiders looking in to see what is actually being built here and how amazing the tech is.
So John, to continue on with the roadmap, the section on the Queen's Gambit, great show on
Netflix, by the way. But essentially, for the chess players out there, the Queen's Gambit is
a popular chess opening that involves sacrificing a pawn for a greater strategic advantage.
And in terms of the roadmap, the sacrifice here is the relay note. And to be clear,
they still exist, but not exactly the way they did in the past. Can you elaborate a
little more on the significance of the sacrifice? Sure. So we want to be very careful stewards of
the Algo that we hold. And so everyone across the foundation has a mandate to be cost-obsessed
about how we spend things. So we think twice. We think twice before we spend anything. And
so we have tightened things up. I've mentioned on many other entities before, we scrub the deck,
the ship is clean, it's tight. We don't have any obvious areas of waste.
At the same time, you look at the relay network, which is going to be around for a little while
because we're rolling out peer-to-peer. I expect towards the end of this year, it's going to be
a Q3, Q4 kind of upgrade. And so we have some time where we're going to be running relays
still. And even after peer-to-peer, relays are optional. So you absolutely do not need them.
You can just use the peer-to-peer network completely with zero reliance on the foundation
or relays or anything else. But if people want to run relays, they're still an option
for people who want very high frequency trading and little things like that.
And so we recognize that the relay is the heaviest bit. Like if you look at the relay
and you think, well, how much does it cost to run a relay per year? And so the global relay network
is expensive. It's millions of dollars a year that it costs to hire a globally distributed
cloud vendor agnostic network of very high performance machines that have, and this is
probably the most important bit, huge disk space. You need like, well, not huge, like Solana huge,
but like relatively large disk space. So not petabytes, but terabytes. You need like three
terabytes of storage. Now, you're probably thinking, that's not that much, John, I've got
two terabytes of storage on my laptop. And you'd be right. It's not that much in the grand scheme
of things, but it still costs money to have highly performant disks available in a cloud
context where you're renting them from Amazon or Google, or you're doing bare metal in a data
center. And so it turns out we don't need those things. So we've made an optimization
to the relays. And folks will remember that the Algorand code base is a single code base.
I mean, there's a bunch of different repos, but essentially, it's a single code base that
defines all of the code for the node. And it has a polymorphic behavior. And what I mean by that is,
it changes its behavior depending on how it's configured. And so it can be configured as a
consensus node or relay node. And now it can be configured as a non archival relay node.
And so what this means is, in a nutshell, it's a relay without the blockchain,
without a full copy of the chain. It only keeps the last, say, thousand blocks or whatever, right?
A bit like a consensus node or participation node. And so this will dramatically reduce
our cost of execution for relays. And anyone who now wants to run a relay also doesn't need to have
like three terabytes of highly performant NVMe SSD in the cloud. So the sacrifice is,
talking about the queen's gambit, the pawn is really that we are reducing, in a way, I guess,
the number of full archival nodes on the network. But we're doing so in a way that there's still
absolutely the right number of nodes that are out there to seed the network for anyone who
starts to know fresh and just wants to get a full copy of the chain, but without having waste.
And so again, it's another efficiency measure. We don't need hundreds of these relays holding
these full copies of the chain. And that's what non archival relays would be. And where does that,
you know, it's cash savings that essentially gives us more funds to invest in the system.
Exactly. That's what I kind of interpreted myself is kind of about, you know, about becoming
self sufficient completely. And when there's all this excess going on, it just doesn't make sense
to keep them in that form. So I think that's a perfect queen's gambit, in my opinion. So to
keep the ball rolling here, I really do want to touch back on the consensus incentivization.
And I mean, this is the first significant upgrade to Algorand's consensus mechanism since
the beginning, since its inception. I mean, John, this is a big deal. And I want to talk
about the significance of this decision. Because to be honest with you, in my eyes, this,
this incentive is like the crypto equivalent to a supercharger in an engine bay, like,
would you agree with that assessment? I think outside of, you know, changing the
language to Python, which I think was essential. I think it's probably the biggest thing that's
happened in the history of Algorand since we released the first note. I think it's huge.
The paper as well, you know, we released the paper, not everyone will have seen it,
but there's a paper out there, a white paper, it's about like 15 pages or 14 pages,
and it kind of goes through our thinking on how we're going to approach this on how
engineering think it should be done. This is a discussion paper. So these are not final decisions.
Okay, this is not a it's not a specification. It's a discussion paper. And it's to kind of
get people thinking about it. And we want your feedback. And it was written by Naveed
Michaela JJ and I. And so that they are, you know, the four of us work across the
foundation and on Algorand technology slash inc. And so we feel that we have, you know,
within that paper kind of captured the essence of what we're trying to do. But if you look at it,
like empirically, if you look at what's happened with the with the formation around
decentralization on Algorand, we want nodes out there, we want as many consensus or participation
nodes as possible. We want, you know, within reason, as I mentioned, on some of my Twitter
replies, you know, millions of nodes don't make sense, of course, because the network will become
too congested. But we want a large number of nodes, of course, we want a large number
of algo being staked, the more algo that state the more secure the network is. And so this
is like a north star for me. Decentralization and security of the network are paramount,
they're number one ahead of everything else. And this move, where we're changing our thesis,
originally, you know, the conjecture was that as a kind of this is all the paper, but just in a
nutshell, the conjecture was enough people would altruistically stake their algo of their, you
know, their own goodwill, run the computers, deal with the headache that is running those computers
or the friction of, you know, getting getting, you know, software running on a computer all the
time, that it would secure the network. Well, you know, we've seen a posteriori, or you know,
you know, empirically, that that just doesn't seem a critical mass of stakers doesn't seem to be
there. Yes, we have some, but you know, I want more, and we want more. And so we think the
right thing to do is to start using some of the funds that we're currently using as an example,
to pay things like voting and governance to use them instead to secure the network.
Now, I appreciate that this is a tectonic kind of shift in the thinking and the thesis around
Algorand. And of course, we've done it, consulting folks at the foundation in the ink, and now we
bring it to the community because it's reasonably well thought out. And so now it's in a place where
we can discuss it with the community. You know, if I brought this to the community in a one liner,
it would be, it wouldn't be well formed enough. And people were like, Oh, that's about a deal.
And so what we tried to do is put our kind of full thesis down in a bit of paper that says,
Hey, this is the reason this is why this is the angles. And because by making these changes,
you do introduce new gaming angles, you do introduce new threat vectors, you do have to
think about how the network will perform how the topology will change. This is a shift away from
Silvio's original thinking around how how things would work. But you know, a few years into the
game now, we just think it's the it's the right choice. And so we bring it we bring it for the
consideration of the community. And it's a work in progress. And it's very much open to influence.
But I think, after we do this, we will have one of the most secure and decentralized networks out
there. And that's got to be, you know, core to our DNA and core core to our to our focus, you
know, not one 100%. I mean, to add consensus to it, we'll just supercharge everything, it will have
more stakers, it will have more security of the network, it just it makes the most sense,
in my opinion, out of everything on the roadmap. Right. And as I kind of mentioned earlier on,
if we didn't do this, so if we didn't have consensus incentives in place, with the current
number of participation nodes or consensus nodes, as I like to call them, we wouldn't have the
density of pathways for data propagation. Okay, so we wouldn't that switch to peer to peer,
which is, which is truly decentralizing the, you know, the data layer of the network,
that wouldn't have been able to come about, because we just wouldn't have had the density
of nodes there to essentially transit that data across the network. And so I think it's I think
it's the I think it's definitely the right choice. But there's lots of questions that
there I've tried to address some people's concerns. And of course, I understand why you have concerns,
if there was monumental shifts in the thinking or architecture for something that I held and loved
for so long, of course, I care about this, and I want to be involved in the decision making.
And so I care about that. And I understand that I'm empathetic to it. And I want,
I want to understand how people think. What I would just say is when you're reading the
paper, and I released a little video that came with it to kind of try to walk through it,
not in massive depth, but just to kind of give a flavor for what the thinking was in the different
section. But when you're looking at this paper, and you're looking at it, for example,
one of the things I'd like to bring up is people have said, Hey, what about this minimum amount
of steak? And what about this maximum amount of steak? I don't like that, because like,
I was told when I'll go one vote, and I get it, like, I do, I get that. And it still is one
I'll go one vote. But what we're kind of saying is, well, there's a minimum entry to the club,
right? If you want to, if you want to be part of the club of voters, you got to be,
you know, sticking with a x number of algo. Now, in the paper, I think I say something like,
you need about 8192 algo as a minimum, it's a suggestion as an example. But someone pointed
out, okay, maybe that's two grand today. And it's not not crazy, depending on where you live in the
world. But in the future, if algo is $2, well, that's 16 grand. And that is a lot of money,
I think, objectively, pretty much everywhere in the world. And so these are, you know,
again, these are not decisions, these are suggestions. And I'm gonna maybe go through
the why in two seconds, but also they're configurable. And so we intend to make these
things parameters not hard coded, and so that you can actually make these changes over time,
and they should go for change consideration to things like governance, governance should
be voting on some of the most important topics, and these things become important, important
measures that can be voted on the future. They're very meaningful. And just to address the, you
know, the min and max, the max was put in place very simply for one reason, essentially. And the
reason is, if we allowed anyone if we allowed any, any, any, like arbitrary amount of algo,
we could potentially hit a stall if an individual was to have an enormous amount of algo, let's say
there was one individual with 20% of the algo, it doesn't doesn't I don't know anyone who's
holding that much, but let's pretend if if a person went online with 20% of the algo on a
computer, and then just turned off the computer without without going offline appropriately,
or elegantly, the network would stall. And this is part of the security assumptions of the network.
And so we want to make sure that we have a kind of a limit there that you can't run that much algo
trivially on a single on a single on a single node, or can't stake that much algo on a single
node. And then for the minimum, there's a couple of reasons why we have the kind of
suggested minimum, which may be lower, by the way. The first is because if you look in the in the gaming
mitigation section, we need to try to remove inactive stakers from the network so that they
don't harm the network, because people who say they're going to stake and then who don't stake
that's not a good thing for algorithm for a bunch of techy reasons. And so we have this idea that,
you know, one, if we introduce kind of some kind of minimum, we kind of weed out a lot of the
folks who maybe are kind of half interested, but know that they're not going to, you know,
a person with 10 algo or 100 algo, maybe there's a few that do care about staking it. But in general,
they'll be voting so seldomly that it probably doesn't make sense. And we don't want to have
millions of people with a very tiny amount, like 10 algo, 100 algo, 1000 algo. Because it'll be a
lot of work to kind of for the network to cope with them going on and off all the time. And the
second reason, and this is quite much more technical and more important, I guess, is because
with the absenteeism thing that the way the network handles, or the way the protocol will
handle people who say they're going to be there and then are not there when the VRF comes knocking
to ask for the validation of a block or the proposal of a block, it requires nodes to hold
the entire staking set in memory at the same time. So in the computer's RAM. And so, as folks will
know, computers have like 16 gigs of RAM, whatever 32 gigs of RAM, etc. And so we need that to be
bound. We need some kind of like bound on the number of of stakers so that we can ensure that
it's able to sit in a reasonable amount of RAM. And so I guess what I'm trying to say in a nutshell
is there's lots of things in the paper that maybe at first glance, you might think, huh,
I don't really like that it's a little antithetical to what I was told before about Algorand. But there
are hard engineering reasons why we've suggested the things that we that we have. And I hope people
understand understand that. I mean, I they should understand it. I mean, we're shaping and growing
as a community as crypto as a whole, not just algorithm, like even with the regulations and
everything this, there has to be a certain amount of pros and cons and weighing out and
making big decisions like this. And I think for a self sustainable future, for a more decentralized
future, I I'm I see it 100%. And I also know that like, you're also very open to, to working out,
I feel like every, you know, hardball that's got thrown at Algorand, you guys have hound the way
to to hit the ball and knock it out of the park every time. So I do give you props for that.
So but john, I do. I just want to say first of all, the roadmap, very well done. It's amazing. I feel
like everyone is really seeing the lining here, the silver lining here. And I do want to touch
the on topics outside of the roadmap on this interview, while I still have you here. But before
I do that, is there anything else on the roadmap that we didn't get the touch on that you want
to talk about before we keep rolling? Or do we hit it all? So the only thing I think we didn't
go into in detail is dynamic round times. Folks have seen that it's brought the block time from
three point point three seconds down to 2.8 or so 2.9. And depending, and I think it's been a huge
success. You know, it's quite again, it's it's an it's an efficiency enhancement to the network,
what we're basically doing with dynamic lambda is saying, well, if you take 100% of the nodes
out there, or 100% of the people that are proposing, there's always a few slow coaches,
right? There's always like that one dude who runs late to the to the tube and or the subway and like
puts it in his hand and tries to block the door. We're not letting that person block the door anymore
and and you know, hold up the train. Okay, and that's what dynamic lambda is. It just kind of
slices a tiny bit of the late people off in order for the rest of the train to get going
quickly. And just I just had to shout out to like my colleagues at the foundation, because you know,
I didn't write really a word of this 2024 roadmap, of course, I was talking about it, and I'm part of
the journey. But like, we have people who've written this, who spent, who've, you know,
created the graphics, who spent time thinking about the the, the framing, the branding, the
whole lot. And I think they've done a terrific time, a terrific job, bringing this about. And
so I just want to say thanks to everyone who helped this, I may be the face of it today,
but like, it's the work of like, 10s of people, if not more. So I appreciate everyone who worked on it.
For sure. Big shout out to everybody on the team and the entire ecosystem. And there's so many
people involved with Algorand at some level, if it's a project, if it's the foundation, if it's
the other side of the, I mean, so many people definitely big, we should all definitely be
proud of how far we've gone so far. And yeah, so we went from four seconds to 3.3 seconds,
and we changed the lyrics of the song I wrote every month, because you guys, because you guys
are just keep getting better. Here's some, here's some, here's some alpha for you. And we can
actually take dynamic round times. Dynamic Lambos has not, or sorry, the Sicilian defense
has not, has not stopped giving. And so we'll be able to make further optimizations. You know,
we wanted to take a cut at it and decide, okay, like, how does the network perform when we do this?
Because we want to be very careful, stewards of the network. But we can go, we can push a little
bit harder on dynamic Lambos, or the Sicilian defense. And we can get it to a place where
it's increasing block time even further. But we're, we're, you know, going to, conservatively,
if you like, make those changes. For sure. Just kind of keep getting faster over time. I see,
of course, it's gonna, it's gonna be one second in like six weeks. I'm watching,
I see what you're up to. I see what you're up to. All right, so, all right, so, so next I do have a
couple questions from the audience that I'm going to get to in a couple minutes here. But of course,
you know, we're approaching the back nine of this space of this, some people, some of you might be
watching this on the video re record later. But you know, john, I do have to throw you some hard
balls here. I have to everyone wants me to I have to do it. So so here we go. I'm going to start off
with tokenomics. But to be fair, I really don't think this is the toughest as tough as the question
as it used to be. Because you know, it's a fixed supply in 80% of the max supply is already in
circulation. So we really don't have that far to go. But you know, but simply put, there's a lot
of theories in regards to, you know, how fast the rest of the ago supply will come into circulation,
you know, some people think the last 20 is going to come in pretty fast, and others, including myself,
think it's going to come in a lot slower. And my line of thinking here is that if it comes
in too fast, agaran loses its ability to help support and grow the ecosystem. So without
asking for, you know, a direct timeline, like, would you agree with my assessment that I feel
like it's going to come in slower? So yeah, let me just say that, you know, the whole idea of the
Algorand unfiltered show and premise is that we do ask the questions from the community that they
want answers to. And I think we should be held accountable for the things that they're concerned
about. And so I'm totally cool with going into these. And at the same time, I'm the CTO,
not the CFO. And so my world is very focused on on the things we've just talked about for
the last kind of 40 minutes. And so I'm not an expert in these in on the financials. But what
I will say is this, the the care with which we handle algo is second to none. There's not a
single person put it this way. We even got rid of like calendly this week, because it was like
1000 bucks a year, because Google have a free one. Okay, like we are we are very, very careful with
with how we spend we how we spend money. The second thing is, we have thanks to harpal who's
come in as a CFO, we have a really strong transparency report that goes out quarterly.
And we've been on time with it, thankfully, for the last couple of quarters. And the current one
for q4 2023 has been prepped, I think it's nearly complete, and it will be issued very soon.
And so within that report, they've kind of broken down all of the spend across tech,
across all the other sides of the business that I can't even remember. And so you can extrapolate
from that, you can look at that report, you can see exactly how much we're spending per quarter,
the quarter previous, the quarter previous, and you can essentially extrapolate. And that's what
what I would do is just look at those reports, see the global spend, and then extrapolate that
into the future. But yes, I agree with your assessment. We are being very, very careful.
I'm spending it like it's, you know, my parents money. It's not, I spend my parents money, some
people blow their purse. You spend your parents money way different than I spend on parents.
I'm very careful with my parents. So, so yeah, we are very careful stewards. And if you look at
if you want a real metric on it, you want a quantitative, you want a quantitative look at it,
rather than listen to words, you can go look at the transparency reports and extrapolate it.
But as you will see, we are we are being very careful stewards of the of the of the funds.
Yeah, well, well put, well put. And like you said, you are the CTO. And, you know,
I still feel like you have pretty good answers all these questions. So I'm not gonna I feel
like I feel like you still answer them pretty good. And, you know, I do, I do have another
hardball for you, but you actually kind of just answered it in how you answered the question
before about tokenomics, because, you know, a lot of people are thinking that I'm just going to say
it, I'm going to say the word and the word is marketing. And it's the biggest nine letter
word in crypto. And of course, you know, with the rumors of the rebrand, like we have to dive into
it. And my question is this, we saw, you know, the push with the FIFA partnership and big
sponsorship dollars like that, you know, in the future, where do you see that money being
redirected to? Yeah, so great question. And so, like, maybe I'll just take this opportunity to
kind of clarify this. You know, the FIFA deal was an ink or technologies led initiative,
it wasn't it wasn't one of the foundation. Now, I know it was a big deal. And I appreciate
that we are all in it together in a certain way, in a certain kind of spirit of things,
of course. But but ultimately, that didn't come from, you know, marketing and biz dev or whatever
at the foundation, it came, it came from our colleagues at Algorand, Inc, slash technologies,
as they're now known. So in a way, it's not like we've gone from spending
a grand amount of money on marketing at the foundation. And now we can have we have all
that that plot to redirect, we are still very focused on on making sure that we get value
from money and whatever we market. I agree with you, though, as I've said on on, you know,
on text on spaces before, this industry, like it or not, is kind of half tech, half marketing,
I kind of kind of still very much believe that core to my philosophy on cryptocurrency and on the
web three space. And we still don't yet have, we have not yet hired a replacement CMO. Okay.
We are actively trying to replace that. And there's there's candidates going through in
the interview process at the moment. And so we care about it, it will we're going to fill the
role and we but we want to be meticulous about about who we bring in. I'm, I'm,
I'm not the hired manager for that role, clearly, but but we are, we are very carefully, you know,
trying to bring the talent on board to do that. I think, though, if I could sum up,
what I think is the thinking and the thesis at the foundation around marketing generally,
if I look at the work that Min is doing with her wonderful team and communities and Christine
under her leadership, and then the work that that my team do around the techie stuff and the work
that the business that people do, it's kind of grassroots, like grassroots is the name of the game,
it's doing stuff like this with you. I'm going to be on some some pretty prominent podcasts and
interviews over the next couple of weeks, we're starting to get invited, thankfully,
to speak at some of the really kind of exciting and big speaking venues. We just did CFC,
we have someone at Davos, Christine's actually at Davos, we did CFC, we met with like, as you've seen
from my photographs, I met with Lehman Baird at Herrera, we met with with Anthony Scaramucci
and others. And so, you know, there's a lot of grassroots networking and momentum building going
on. And I'm very excited about it. But that doesn't cost money, right? It doesn't cost money,
well, cost plane ticket, but it doesn't cost a ton of money to do that kind of marketing. And I
think grassroots is where we need to be. 100%, if you win, if you can win in the streets, you're
going to win on the charts, because that's really where it's at. And it's always been like that,
even like with music fans trying to get following, it's about how many live shows do you play? Oh,
you're not playing live shows? Well, no one's going to find you. And I really feel like that
translate well, like the winning in the streets translates very well in crypto for sure. And,
you know, you did touch on something there. And I do want to say this, you know, John,
about a week ago, I had probably one of the best days I've had in recent history.
And this was such a good day. I woke up, I refreshed my phone, and I did not believe in my
eyes because I saw a photo of you on stage on a stage shaking hands with Dr. Lehman Baird,
the co founder of Adara. And what brought you two together was decentralized recovery.
Can we discuss direct in the role Algorand will play in it?
Absolutely. Like, so I met Lehman on a call a few months back, like personally, of course,
I knew I knew I knew him from from the industry. And we just hit it off. Like, he's just a really
interesting guy. He's, I mean, we cut from the same cloth. I mean, he's obviously an academic and
very accomplished, but we're both into cryptography, we're both into applied cryptography,
software engineering, that kind of stuff. And so we found it I find it very easy to chat to him.
And at the end of the call, he said, Hey, you know, why don't we spend I've got, I've got a new
initiative, I think it's I think it's important. And so he said, why don't we just jump on a call
and we can talk about it. So I said, cool. So, you know, way prior to CFC, which is the crypto
financial conference at Samarits, which is, you know, any kind of an invite only conference full
of industry kind of leaders, way prior to when I met him in person there, we were chatting about
about D rec. I, for me, D rec was it was an easy thing for Algorand to be involved with, okay,
for, for two big, chunky reasons. Reason number one, it is one of the fundamental user experience
problems that we see in the industry. I know everyone gets that like, I've lost my keys,
my keys have been compromised, blah, blah, blah, you know, sorry, not my keys to be compromised,
because of course, doesn't help with that. But I've lost my keys. I don't know where my ledger is,
I've written down my seed, and I can't find it. These are critical user experience issues,
and they have to be eradicated if we're going to have the normal person use this technology,
especially with the, with the responsibility of self sovereignty for people who have their
pensions, and they have their life savings in it, etc. Okay, that's, that's number one.
Number two, Lehman's approach to D rec, so this decentralized recovery of your keys,
to securely close to your keys with multiple people in a mathematically secure using
mathematically secure technologies, and doing so in a way that you can rely upon those folks
when the time comes and you need to recover your keys. His approach was agnostic to any
blockchain, it was nonpartisan, it didn't leverage to Hedera tech, it didn't leverage
agar on tech, Cardano tech, state proofs, mitts roll, you know, it didn't leverage anything
proprietary didn't leverage, or, you know, everything that leverage was, was, was bread
and butter cryptography. And so I love that I was taken by it, because it wasn't an attempt
to blow the profile of Hedera up a little bit and make it make it a bit more exciting and make
it the leader of a thing, it was like, hey, I truly believe this, it was a thing for common good,
Lehman wanted to solve a problem that affected users of the industry that he works in.
And so it was kind of a no brainer, when he comes with a great protocol that he and he's
obviously smart guy, and his team have created. When I look at this protocol,
it makes perfect sense, it's checking all the boxes in terms of being secure,
using well understood cryptographic primitives. It's not trying to like, you know, be blockchain,
you know, aligned with any particular blockchain, there's no token, it's just well engineered
technology for dispersing your key securely amongst people you trust, and then checking that they
have it on a daily basis to make sure that you don't get caught up. And then when you
need to recover your key, you can go through these people in a secure way. I thought, wow,
great idea. And so the Algorand Foundation is part sorry, is proud rather, to be a founding member
of this direct alliance. And so there's a handful of other seats as founding members, and then you
can join as a company or an entity at a different layer. But by joining as a founding member,
you get you know, to start rolling forward the technology and being part of this technical
committee and other great things. And so it's open. And we want other blockchains to be part
of it. So great, if totally wants to send people from Solana, I would love that. If Charles wants
to send people from Cardano, great, you know, ripple whoever, you know, even people that you
might see as industry competitors or, or arch nemesis is in some way. I think this is a
great initiative. I think it's really going to help people I applaud Lehman's work on it. And
I'm proud to be part of it with the Algorand Foundation. Yeah, I mean, I find it very funny,
I actually saw Lehman Baird speak at Web3 Atlanta, probably two months ago, and his whole speech,
his whole hour was about decentralized recovery. And then hearing it straight from him for an hour,
90 minutes, he stayed late to answer questions and getting to meet him afterwards. Class act,
for sure. And then to learn that, you know, Algorand is actually going to help him with that
same initiative, I was just blown away that I even had a chance to like, he just happened to be
speaking in Atlanta, I was like, okay, you know, and, you know, so I have to ask, like, is there a
potential for more collaboration with Hedera outside of the direct alliance? Because, you know,
I've been thinking, john, like, you know, we have the algo fam, and they have the H barbarians,
and I'm members of both tribes. Like, could we could we have like the algo barbarians? Is there
is there a where where somehow some way I think there's something there? Well, you know, I know,
as I said to Lehman, you know, crypto is tribal. And I have my own, you know, my own personal
thesis on what I consider the best architectures and the best, the best cryptography and other
things. And there are aspects to the Hedera architecture that I would probably prefer
were changed in certain ways, okay, everyone's got their own technical view on things. But one
thing I will say is that the team at Hedera are incredibly professional from working with them for
the last few months, and they're incredibly capable. And Lehman and his and his engineers are
second, second to none, right? They're, they're, they're incredible, incredible people. And so
yes, I would be more than happy to work with Hedera, because they're easy to work with,
and they're smart people. And so, so yeah, Lehman was was wonderful to chat with. And by the way,
you know, he believes, and I agree with him, that the, for this thing to be the most successful it
can be, it needs people to come along, get involved. And so this is not about kind of making it the
Lehman and John show. I want, you know, as many blockchains and entities to get involved as
possible, it really is otherwise it won't work, we need everyone to be playing by the same rules.
And, and finally, I think with this, with this direct technology, the rules are rules that
everyone will be okay with.
Well put, well, but I definitely feel I agree with you when you were saying how like how
any and every blockchain could get behind that cause, because you know, when you really hear
the whole I am doing an interview with Lehman, I believe the beginning of February, and I'll
definitely go into more for direct for any of the audience that wants to learn more about that as
well. But it's very well put together. I do want to pivot to another topic before we get to like
the rapid fire audience questions. This is probably like the last bigger question, really.
So I want to pivot here and talk for a minute about RWAs. And, you know, this is a topic,
a lot of a lot of projects has, you know, RWA and RWA initiatives, you know, Hedera, Chainlink,
you guys, Algorand. And this is really a conversation we could spend hours just talking
about RWAs. And, you know, Algorand is known for being heavily integrated into the future of it,
you know, and so recently I read this statistic that really intrigued me, that as of right now,
the market cap of RWAs in crypto is projected to be somewhere around the 2.2 billion dollars
for the market cap of RWAs in crypto right now. But I also saw in this article that by 2030,
that is projected to be over 16 trillion dollars. 2.2 billion now projected by 2030, 16 trillion
in six years. What takes us from point A to point B, and what role does Algorand play in
that expansion? Well, it's an interesting question. And so there's elements of this that I think I
know well, and elements of this answer that I'm not really equipped to answer. But what I would
say is, what takes us there? I think general acceptance of the concept of tokenization by many
different jurisdictions around the world. And so, you know, obviously, to me, it's as obvious as I
want to buy plane tickets on the internet, I want to be able to call my girlfriend using the internet,
I want to be able to text someone in a different country without paying crazy SMS charges. It's
obvious to me that tokenization is one of blockchain's res on betras, and it's a perfect
use case. The portability of liquidity, the ability to tokenize an asset, trade it globally, make the
liquidity globally available, mathematically verifiable, it's basically a perfect fit.
In terms of how do we get from what is now, I guess, a proof of concept style level,
obviously billions of dollars and still a lot of dollars, but how do we get from there to
the big leagues? I think the answer is by, as I just mentioned, by various jurisdictions and legal
bodies and countries and regulators, you know, getting more comfortable with it, I would say,
broadly. And the second thing is having networks that are fit for purpose, having networks that
people can understand, you know, if you're working at Citi, you're working at Saxa,
you're working at Doji, you're working at Goldman, you're working at one of these major banks,
you want to be looking at, you know, rolling out your liquidity or your RWAs on these platforms,
you got to be comfortable with the security of the platform, the resiliency of the platform,
is it going to be there when your customers come to use it, and the scalability of the platform.
And so Algorand checks all those boxes. And it also does so in a way where the people who are
building the contracts and starting to, you know, do the software engineering are using regular
programming languages. And so I think a combination of maturity, global maturity by major institutions
by governing bodies to understand this stuff a bit better, because it is a bit tricky to understand
sometimes. And also, by just giving that best in class, you know, by having by having a platform
that people can trust rely upon and feel comfortable developing on just just like Linux,
and that's where we're trying to position Algorand. For sure. I mean, even if it went to
one fourth of the projected expectation, I mean, that would still be extremely massive for crypto
and anyone involved. So I definitely see the silver lining with RWAs there. So I do want,
you know, we're definitely in the back nine of the space here. And I put out a tweet the other
day, you know, asking the algo fam, if they could ask you anything, what would it be,
you know, and of course, it's very important to both of us that you know,
they have a voice here. So rapid fire. I'm going to go through a few questions from the
community. Is that cool with you? Absolutely. Let's do it. All right. So we got a couple here.
We got CL Sheriff asked, What do you think about the possibility of enabling trusted addresses
permanently or temporary through a change in the contract that you can send
tokens to without the need to opt in? Okay, I like it. So I think what he's suggesting is,
and I know, I know, Carlos actually from, from my dealings with him. So I know, I know this
gentleman. He's a good actor in the ecosystem. And I think what what he's suggesting is opting
in to opt ins. So having an opt in opt in, I kind of like this, as I mentioned before,
I'm not a big fan of opt ins, I appreciate the filter to spam, I understand why people
like him, I totally get it. So you can't be saying crap. You can't be tainted,
all that kind of stuff. I get that love that. But it does cause some friction. We look at
Coinbase adding US USDA. Sorry, yeah, USD. Yeah, see, yeah, USDA. You know, they've taken their
time because they have to opt in all their customers wallets and other things. I think
they would have been faster. You know, I think we'll get it soon. By the way, I do think that
they're coming around to the idea. But it's a layer of friction this opt in stuff. So I think
having optional, having the option to kind of opt out of opt ins is a positive thing. But again,
as I mentioned before, we've got to be very careful when we make these changes,
because there's probably applications or adapter contracts on the network that rely upon this
concept. And so we can't rug those and kind of change the rules from under them. And that's one
of the just the harsh realities of blockchain. Once it once it's there, you got to support it
forever. Yeah, immutability means immutability. Yeah. But all right. It doesn't mean that we
can't do something fresh like this, right? It just means that we can't just kind of, you know, pull,
pull, pull a concept like that immediately from the chain. I totally understand, totally
understand. So we're going to keep it rolling here. We have our guy, g host. How do you and
Algorand envision implementing a privacy layer to interact with public chain slash markets?
Anyways to integrate your personal favorite Monero? So yeah, I mean, like, folks know I'm a privacy
maxi, I think privacy is very important. You know, if you want to send me an encrypted email,
you can do so by just taking my GPG key from my Twitter bio or my X bio, it's right there,
you can it's my public key, you can use it to send me an encrypted email. And so I think it's
very, very important. I think it's a human right. And I think networks will only really be
absolutely fit for purpose when we have privacy. How does that come about? It's a big change
technologically for Algorand. So I think, you know, and for other networks like Cardano and Ethereum
that don't have native privacy by default. It also adds scaling challenges, as we've seen with
other networks, like Monero, where, you know, it does it doesn't scale as elegantly as Bitcoin.
And so I think it's going to it's going to take time in the short term, I suspect something like
atomic swaps with Monero, or maybe contract, contract rolled on Algorand with ring signatures
or something like that will probably be the answer. Okay, there you go. I hope he's answered.
That's a great answer to that question. I'm excited. So we got our guy fantastic.algo.
Can you name any promising projects coming down the pipeline? And what will be Algo's biggest
use case in the near future? I feel like he's stuck two questions in there, but I like them
both. So I'll do it. I'll try to be quick. So I think biggest biggest use case is going to be
identity. Identity and tokenization, I think are probably the going to be the biggest use cases.
And then secondly, in terms of like exciting projects, I mean, there's a whole ton of people
who are building a lot of them, I can't just like, just drop on this on this podcast. Because,
you know, I don't want to I don't want to upset their launch plans. But you know,
one project that I'm particularly a fan of is book.io. They've recently added support for
Algorand. So you can you can buy books, where you own an actual self sovereign copy of the book
that's stored on IPFS. It's your copy of the book comes with custom generated cover art.
And they're on Algorand, Cardano and Polygon. And the performance is best when when when it's
used on on Algorand. And they're going to be adding tons more books soon. So I think they're
a very cool project. Boom, there you go. Love it. And finally, from the audience questions,
Zenobia Godschalk actually made the list here, the SP comms, SVP comms of Swirl Lab slash Adair
actually interviewed her a little while back. She's super cool. She asked, how, how can Algo
ecosystem partners get involved with the direct alliance? And what benefits does it bring them?
Yeah, I mean, so by getting involved in the direct alliance, you have a seat at the table
for a standard that we think is going to be industry defining. You get to be a steward of
the technology, you get to influence its development, and you get to be someone who
supports generating a critical gravity mass, a critical well for the standard. And so
standards only work if everyone adopts them HTTPS only works because all the browsers use it.
And so we need people to get involved. And there's no reason not to. So please,
if you care about the user experience for the average person on on on blockchain,
and you want to make their life a little bit easier, let's get together and set the standard.
And I think if you want to get involved, you can either go to the direct alliance website,
you can come to myself personally, you can go to Zenobia, you can go to anyone who's involved,
and they'll they will help you. But we're talking already to a whole bunch of foundations and
layer ones who are who are interested. And so I think it's going to be successful, hopefully.
Yeah, I see the silver lining with that one for sure. And of course, you know,
everyone wants you to answer the question, when moon and how high can the price go,
but sorry to break it to you guys, john cannot talk about that legally. But but guess what,
but guess what I can, I can. So make sure you check out my updated Algorand price prediction
video coming out next week on AJ writes crypto. And with that said, john, I guess my one of my
final questions is, you know, what is the ultimate goal for Algorand and where and where do you
see it in five years? In five years, I would like to be in the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap,
I think we probably will be in the top 15. I would hope worst case, how do we get there,
we get there by giving a best in class user experience by giving best in class security,
scalability and resilience. So it's there when you want to use it, it doesn't get defrauded,
it's not up and down all the time. And you don't need to have a supercomputer in an NSA
basement to run a node. All the while, by keeping the community and the ecosystem engaged and
convicted about what we're doing together. And also by by making sure that it's an open platform
that people can influence by making it accessible with linguistics that we choose to use. And by
accepting peers and development of the core software by the by the community, I would love
to see in five years time, I want to see this thing being pushed forward by everyone, and not
just the foundation or the ink. Well put, well put. Let's go. Top five, baby. Top five, let's get it.
Don, I appreciate that. I really do. I mean, we've covered a lot of topics. And if I was bullish on
our grand before, I really don't know what I even am now. I think I have to develop a new word
for it. And I do want to say, you know, congratulations on how far you've come on the
roadmap. I'm very optimistic, you know, the algo fam is going to have an amazing time here as we
inch closer to the bull run. And John, is there anything else you want to bring to the audience's
attention before we close any closing thoughts? Now, I just want to say, you know, between dynamic
rounds times, advocate 2.0, Python, non archival relays, consensus, incentivization,
peer to peer. I mean, the futures never look brighter. I don't know, you know,
what more we could do to push this thing forward. I think we're firing on all cylinders. And I
can only hope that we're successful, because we are trying hard. And so the community has
been incredible getting behind this, I see the excitement out there, I see like, just the
attitude has been amazing, you know, just the general, the general vibe in the community. So
just keep it up, keep supporting and just, you know, get developing and get behind us. And we're
all gonna make it. There it is. John, I want to thank you so much time. So much. I want to thank
you so much for your time. I want to thank the audience for being here. Definitely everybody
like and retweet the space if you have not already. Definitely go give a follow to John
and the Algorand Foundation. I mean, stay tuned for the next episode of Algorand Unfiltered.
We do have more coming this month. I'm definitely looking forward to doing that. And I mean, this
is it like guys, it is up to Algorand and is up to John to take the Algorand to the next level.
But it's also up to us. And never, never forget that because it's up to the community to we have
to do our job too. And we have been but we need to keep doing it. And with that being said,
my name is AJ writes crypto. John, thank you so much for your time. Have a great rest of
your day everyone. Be safe out there. I'll see you next Thursday. Yep.