uh can someone check if i'm audible
lauren clear okay great great thank you
Welcome all to this wonderful, lovely team talk session of today evening, today morning, depending on wherever you are in the world, or maybe even midday.
It's so great to have you all here.
And this is going to be a very, very, very special team talk session.
It might not be a large panel in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality, we are looking at a lot of different things.
We are looking at one of the best panels that we have ever had on Jump.Trade's team talk session.
We have two CEOs who will be sharing their insights and information and intelligence about so many things that are happening in the blockchain world and in the Web3 space right now.
It's such a great delight to have with us our own Ramkumar Subramaniam, the CEO of Jump.Trade.
We also have Jack O'Halloran, the CEO and co-founder of Scale Blockchain.
Scale, it is an upcoming...
It has been there for like five years, a half a decade of lasting in this space.
It's such a great achievement.
And it is all set for a magnificent bull run.
And we are looking at these kind of...
These bits of information from really authentic and really reputable institutions.
Blockchain has also had a fantastic record of having been in a lot of DApps.
And we have also been working with Scale Blockchain at Jump.Trade for a couple of games as well.
And it's so nice to have Jack O'Halloran here.
And it is going to be a lovely and great team talk session.
It's so great to have you both here.
So let us not take a lot of time.
And so let me just start my conversation with Jack.
So, Jack, we believe that you might not need an intense introduction in the blockchain world.
But for the sake of formalities that exist, I'm going to ask you to introduce a little about yourself and talk a little about Scale and its awesomeness.
And maybe, if possible, just finish the intro with something.
There's something interesting about Scale that many people do not know about.
Pleasure to meet you or speak to you if this is the first time you've had a chance to hear me talk.
And, you know, I just really, really want to thank the team here today for inviting me.
It's just such a vibrant community.
Scale is incredibly honored to be partnering with Jump Trade and all the amazing products that are rolling out in and around the world.
And around that ecosystem.
So, my background, I started in traditional technology.
I actually started in mobile computing.
I was at a company called Good Technology that I think 92 of the Fortune 100 utilized to do mobile email back in, you know, the mid-2000s.
And that was, you know, but I got a good foundational knowledge in security.
And we had top-grade security.
And we had the U.S. Senate and the FBI and, you know, NSA.
The CIA all used our product.
And we had, you know, actually, you know, deep cryptography.
And funny enough, my co-founder of Scale was the cryptography expert that did our cryptography certification back then a very long time ago.
So, that's where I started my career.
I then got into, I started my first company in 2008.
And it was actually a digital currency platform.
And NASA was our first customer.
And you could, you could.
You could tokenize assets inside of a company or an entity.
And, you know, you could tokenize, like, wind tunnel time or supercomputer time or legal resources.
And essentially, people could pay for these internal assets.
And the price would fluctuate based off the demand.
And it was, you know, first foray into digital currency for me.
And, you know, that was, to make a long story short, I think it was one of these really good ideas that was too early for its time.
And then in the 2008 market.
And, but we ended up building, you know, a world's leading machine learning AI platform for the life science industry.
And, you know, did this AI product for almost a decade.
This company I started and, you know, raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
And I think 18 of the top 20 pharmas use this product all around the world and grew the company to over 400 people and did that.
So, I really learned a lot during that time.
And, you know, I think good founders always.
Learn from their mistakes and you have successes, you have failures and you just keep going and growing.
And that was a good education for me to get into the blockchain world.
And when I was starting my next company in 2017, it was a no brainer to do it in Web3.
I was just captured by, you know, all the things you could do with Ethereum virtual machine.
And then, yeah, I started a scale with Stan Kladko back at the end of 2017.
A lot of good ideas don't come from the idea.
They come from the need and we both wanted to start applications.
And we realized I personally kept running into all these roadblocks saying, well, I can't do that with Ethereum at some point, Ethereum will no longer scale and I can't roll this out and have this many transactions.
And I met Stan and he's just a brilliant technical visionary Ph.D.
And a physics researcher at Max Planck Institute and Stanford and, you know, been in cryptography since the late 90s.
And he was one of the physicists that built the Java virtual machine.
And he had designed a scaling technology for the applications he wanted to build.
And then when we met, we were like, well, why don't we just build the scaling technology?
This suits our strengths so much better than just, you know, building.
We're more infrastructure builders anyways.
And so we ended up ended up doing that.
And I think, you know, that was five years ago and it's just amazing to see how the industry has grown and scale was a big, big vision.
And I think your question, the last piece of your question is something interesting about scale is scale is that right now there's so much talk about multi chains and sub chains and sub nets and super nuts and app chains and scale was the first.
Live multi chain network that all utilize pool security around the Ethereum and it's becoming a hot topic.
But as it becomes a hot topic, you know, we're thankful because we have such a head start.
There's already 20 EVM chains in the scale network and just some amazing builders every day that keep joining the network.
And, you know, we were just excited to support their growth and their goals.
So so that's my introduction.
That was really fabulous, Jack.
And, you know, like, I really like the way, you know, the Web 2.0 world changed the way we think about the spellings of the words Flickr and Tumblr.
Like, you know, we don't think about the E.
In the same way, when we are talking about Web 3, scale has changed the perception of the spelling.
We don't think about the C anymore.
I think that is one of the biggest brand impacts the blockchain had got.
And, you know, on a personal note, I'm a physics student, so I really like the involvement of physics in it.
And, you know, like, it's just a little bit personal.
And now let's get to Ram.
So, Ram, you are not, you know, you're not new to Jack.
You're not new to the listeners.
You're not new to the community.
And, like, come on, like, you are a part of the Jump.Rate community.
And scale, it is one of the most prominent blockchain partners for Jump.Rate.
I stopped so much, like, about how scale came into being, how it was a serendipity and it turned out to be something really big.
So, how was your feeling at the time of making a choice of blockchain, you know, during consideration and, like, and then coming to the finalization phase?
First of all, thanks, Jack, for joining us here today.
It's an honor to have you with us.
So, when I actually I met Jack.
In US when we were there for a trip for a conference and met the scale team, had conversations with them for quite some time, as Jack was saying, right, I was actually wanted to point it out that scale is probably one of the first model of blockchain based solutions that actually came out right now.
Everyone is about model of blockchain and scale did it about five years back.
And what one good thing that we figured out with scale was that it is highly scalable and very.
Low cost, right, and that is what we wanted for our products that you're looking to launch as well, both on the game, the early game that you're looking to launch, because it the plan was to get more and more Web2 users to Web3 and let them do, like, microtransactions and almost give NFT for everyone that comes in.
So we need to have work on it.
We need to have an ecosystem that can provide scalability and also doesn't come at a large cost.
With our opening trading platform as well.
So for both of this, we want to have a platform which is highly scalable.
And that's where, you know, we are figuring out solutions and we met the team.
We got the conversation further and we figured out this is the right solution.
And in fact, there was this conversation with Jack once that, like, you know, we had an issue about, like, you know, there is opening trading platform and we had another game and Jack was the one saying.
You know, was I increasing?
Let's go ahead and launch the opening trading platform because that's much more scalable and brings in much more users and also much more on chain data, which brings in real use case for Web3.
So that one led to another and we started working on that project as well.
So scale has been great partners for us.
And Jack especially has been very great, you know, supporter and a mentor for us as well.
It's been a great experience.
It's been a great experience.
great time working with them and we're looking forward to work more stuff on scale as well
so yeah so happy to have you have you here jack and i'm glad to be a listener and listen more
about what you say and probably we ask you some questions along with jeff as well and share my
thoughts also thank you thank you ram thank you so much and uh it's it's always nice to hear such
stories of um just finding uh the right fit of requirements and the right availability of
the technology and uh the way it meets the way it comes together the way it progresses
in the positive direction it's so it's so nice to hear like probably a few few more years down the
line when you look back this will be like that's that uh moment of spark and uh so now let's get
back to uh picking on jack again so jack uh this part i mean this part you have already
but like i'm just curious about the the mindset or uh the the thought process you know like scale
founded at the end of 2017 beginning of 2018 that was the time when bitcoin everybody was talking
about wow bitcoin is at 70 000 and uh that was a time when blockchain was a fad not because of
the technology but more because of something that had increased in value that was i mean like that
was worth merely cents a few years ago and now we are talking in terms of thousands of dollars
and uh so that was i think a time
when blockchain companies were just sprouting like mushrooms after rain but uh your scale it it seemed
to have a vision i mean you were talking about uh compatibilities we're talking about scalability
you're talking about roadblocks being hit in terms of scalability and so uh except for this
particular thing that you have already spoken about is there any other pain point that the
founding team looked to address when you were creating scale yeah and i think that's a really
really great question i i imagine there's probably a lot of people that
listening that you know we're part of the crypto community at that time and uh you know the
interesting thing is there was so much excitement so much vision about where things could go but
there really wasn't a lot happening you know we were still in this uh you know early early stage
and i don't know if anyone's familiar with the the there's a book called crossing the chasm and
really it's about getting through that first you have like early adopters you have innovators and
early adopters and you have to cross the chasm to get to mass adoption and you know we had a big
chasm to cross as an industry and you know there were a lot of projects that died as we've crossed
the chasm but we just didn't have real products that gave real value to people and now there's
so much more i mean it's unbelievable the amount of applications you can use that leverage blockchain
today compared to in 2018 in 2018 i would go look at um
data um for the ethereum main net and there'd only be about 10 000 wallets a day interacting
with ethereum and ethereum still had this huge surge and obviously uh price during that phase
and as in a lot of things into you know 2017 2018 and then there was as everyone remembers
there was a huge huge crash and that was uh you know because of the chasm we didn't have
the use cases so so for scale we've really been focused on helping builders
and that's like that is our mission and i think every project every community every company you
know has to have a goal and you if you want to be successful you can't have a goal about making
money or you know being you know having like publicity i think you've got to have a real
mission and our mission is to help builders to help ethereum developers and i think that mission
has helped carry us through the chasm and through the tough times and you know if you
focus on helping people and creating value um you know that's the that's the game to win and you know
it's been a strength and weakness for us because there's a lot of projects that are like really
focused on price and really focused on mass awareness and i think you know we're getting
you know a lot better about creating awareness and having a presence on Twitter but um I think
you know you look at all these winning or you know like the projects that help and achieve
their mission the most are going to win and that's our goal is just to uh
you know really follow through and helping developers thank you thank you so much uh Jack so
uh it it really resonates with uh a lot of success stories at an organizational level you know like I
can only think of Google immediately uh you know their vision was to organize world's information
and make it universal universally available and I think they have been in that pursuit and it has
helped a lot they are not talking about products they are talking about helping people get
information easily and uh scale I think is
uh very much a reflection of that kind of philosophy in the web3 space with respect to
builders and it has showed that's really great thank you thank you John and now let's get to
Ram again um so Ram uh so you we just heard uh Jack talk about uh his vision and so jumped
our trade and Guardian link so we also you know like I I don't think it's an exaggeration to say
that we also have a vision and we have been looking to take the aura of decentralized technology beyond
the confines of cryptocurrency and uh so from your perspective of things how is this uh desperation
for you know this crypto equals Bitcoin equals blockchain Association how how desperate are we
to break it and uh how how is this entire landscape in general so yeah so um and I think
uh Jack would also resonate on this so unfortunately in the market is kind of uh you know I mean the
industry is kind of market centric right
if Bitcoin does well then the market uh kind of does well and that leads to one thing another and
then everyone is getting into uh in a web3 so what we are trying to do here on a lot of firms across
the globe we've been trying to do as well is to break that is to provide real world use cases where
blockchain tech can be used for to solve an issue or a problem or us honestly or even a statement
that is there so that the consumers can make benefit out of that right that's that's the
fundamental thing that we wanted to solve and we took a niche called gaming and we started building
around that and our ultimate goal is to provide necessary platform and the tools that's required
for any game studio to use us launch their games and have their games as it's trade in our Marketplace
right that's the ultimate goal and be that platform that provides everything that is required for it
that is where we work with partners like scale so that we can provide the right ecosystem and
that is required for any games to come on board and then launch the platform uh we are trying to
make a dent in the gaming space and and gaming fundamentally also like you know gamers are quite
uh passionate I would say right they don't kind of get into this ring of like making money and that
has been positive for us because gamers want to have the game to be very playable uh should be a
game and so they don't kind of drive for uh earning through games much right so they want
the game to be great so that they can play that and the byproduct can by because of that can be
earning and that's one of the reasons why we saw these pay-to-earn games not go well right because
it's all focused about learning it's not about like playing the game anymore it felt like people
are going to work while they're playing accident we wanted to change that that's where we are
partnering in the gaming studios and now we have launched a couple of games which are uh like really
playable games and very exciting games which gamers come to play for the uh you know the fun in it
and uh and and we we want to launch more and on a longer run there will be more games which are like
mid-core games and to play rated games that we'll be launching and we've obviously been watching
across various players in the globe and that would uh definitely see change how web3 is seen right
it like it'll be more about the tech and the and and the product behind than the market
than the signal from the Bitcoin holders thank you thank you so much Ram and I think that should
answer the comment from Mohammed Shafan who wanted to see more scale games and I think that answers
you Mohammed so hope you're happy and uh you know I want to jump in there too because that's that was
such a great point I think game you know we we look at all like you know what's the low-hanging
fruit what are the first use cases that are really going to drive value and Ram's right I mean gaming
is I think going to be the the sweetheart or the darling of you know the next couple of years just
like DeFi was in 2021 and and scale right now has six of the top 30 games in terms of active users
uh in the the gap radar rankings and you know we are really excited about what jump trade's doing
I think they they get it I think Rom uh your you know this team here understands that games have to
be a supportive uh instrument and technology uh that brings even more value but if you don't
start with a fun game and that you know get the you know solve for that core thing then you're
not going to be successful in this next uh next phase of growth thank you thank you thank you so
much Jack and uh I I really like the synergy the camera that is happening here because uh this one
proves you know like uh blockchain
is being used as uh a technology that enables and it's not uh being carried on as something that that
is more of a fad you know like it's not that I need to create a blockchain product it's more
like I need to create a product that is useful I need to create a game that is useful and that
usefulness or the utility has to be enabled by the blockchain I I really like that train of thought
and uh that is uh that is brilliant either that's going to result in real good games and as Ram said
maybe games of triple A standards and that's going to be a nice
uh future for gaming and for the technology as well so uh let's get to um Jack again so uh Jack
uh like what to say you were talking from the beginning about uh how awesome scale is you know
like uh it's it's got uh quite a lot of advantages that uh someone would expect out of a blockchain
you know faster commit times greater throughput and low uh transaction costs and it's scale has
been around for like half a decade now so uh and you've seen it all uh and uh you your association
with digital money and with cryptography goes back to the start of your career having seen all of
this what would you call as scales most resounding achievement that you are like so I mean uh that
you are the most proud of from a co-founder's point of view you know what that's a that's a
great question I have to say when you see the metrics and you see data um you know I think
when we first crossed two billion and gas fees saved that was like that was wild it was just like
wow um when we crossed 200 million on-chain transactions that was wild and now we're at
a point where we have more than a million on-chain transactions a day happening across all of these
various scale chains and and you know I think uh one that's enabled by just a community of
builders and game developers and web 3 social builders and AI uh builders that believe in scale
so I think that you know one I just you have to thank them first but then two
you know I think the vision we had early was multi-chain we thought scale both vertically
and horizontally and I think that modular perspective of you know you know it's all
physics right and if you have you know just a certain amount of compute space well it only
can grow to a certain amount you only have one chain and the way consensus works at some point
you're going to run into bottlenecks and you know we saw this opportunity to have many chains
without breaking the security Dynamics you know you don't want to have x increased capacity but
start over from a security perspective at each step you know you want to have collective security where
your security is always strong and it keeps getting stronger as more more chains join and
all the chain share security so anyway so I'll uh you know I just you know seeing that today getting
up and be like wow we had a million transactions on chain yesterday that that's a pretty good feeling
thank you Jack you know like the way you made it sound right uh it it I think scale should be it
should be the uh the string theory that could be understood by a kindergartner like that that level
of that level of dynamicity but at the same time without compromising all the simplicity and when
you're talking about how you were talking about I mean how those billions of dollars saved in gas
fees and now we are talking about uh millions in transactions uh this is one uh thing that a lot
of gym people say that you know like what was once my
most difficult workout is now my warm-up so like that there was a time when your stat was like it
was it was so big and now it is okay fine I'm doing it every day of sorts it's it's a really
nice yeah it's a really nice achievement thank you thank you and uh let me let me tell you the one
of the challenges of working in blockchain is you have to talk about really complex things but you
have to try to make them understandable by a lot of people and I know you and your team do a great
job of that right but it's
it's one of the it's one of the you know yeah it's it's a it's a fun challenge so
yeah the the fun part of it is that and like what to say uh I'm coming from the physics point
of I'm a I'm a big fan of Richard Feynman so uh I think that yeah I think that guy succeeded in
talking about what you were doing I mean in doing what you were talking about making
complex things sound simple and understandable and yeah the blockchain world faces that now
and let's get back to Ram
uh Ram I think like uh you are probably uh nearing the 9 30 IOC mark so let me just ask your last
question so as the CEO as a fellow CEO and as a fellow web3 entrepreneur and someone who has known
Jack someone who has worked with Jack and someone who you know has met Converse and I mean like you
would have had a lot of insightful discussions so what would be one word of encouragement that you
so I'm not sure if I can encourage Jack because Jack has done so much what I can uh he's actually
so much in the name like in web3 and his other uh uh you know Ventures that he has done right
so what I can uh those tell that you know we have you're so happy with the scale ecosystem and the
team and what we've built on scale and I just hope that he continues to support more and more projects
on to web3 and he kind of like really focuses on the people building uh you know better products
in web3 than getting into this hype of uh you know um creating values valuations and stuff like that
and just creating hype around uh you know in the overall market right that that is my only request
to uh jack i think he already does that he's a guy who really focuses on getting the great projects
to web3 and i'm sure that he i'm i'm very sure that he will do that more as well so uh that's
that's the request probably i can ask jack but apart from that you know he's a great guy he's
taught me a lot of stuff and he's helping me out in a lot of other ways as well and uh i am happy
to you know work with you and with the team as well so let's look forward for more stuff jack
and i know that there is not a lot to announce to the community as well and we'll keep on doing that
thank you thank you thank you the feeling is mutual too it's been really fun working with you
guys yeah and um jack so uh one of the comments that i've had is that uh one of our community
members uh wants you to come to india because india has a lot of scale fans so yes we look
forward to your visit and probably uh it should happen sooner than later let's see when when you
can make it i i feel like i need to do that i have been ram and i talked about that yeah
there's here there's a huge community there and we have a lot of scale you know scale community
there and be really fun to go we should do a scale community event in our office
all right so uh jack the next question is for you again and that is from a very uh you know
subtly selfish point of view i'm gonna make a confession right now all right so like we are
very happy you know to have been associated with
scale and uh we have worked with you and we have worked with hurley and uh that's a fabulous game
the super surfer and uh you've also talked about how uh important and how relevant gaming is when
it comes to onboarding people into web3 so uh how how do you feel about scales relevance when
it comes to uh the gaming space yeah and by the way one quick kind of kind of fun note about hurley
is uh and someone gave my son a backpack
and he's a first grader and he wears this backpack every day to school and it's hurt it's a big hurley
backpack and so i always think of uh uh you know the game that you know the hurley the hurley game
so it's just fun um you know every day i get that reminder um as i see him go to school wow
yeah that's a fun thing i didn't know that okay yeah um so but you know hey i think gaming if
you think about blockchain gaming is the i talked about this earlier it's the low-hanging fruit it's
perfect use case right and it just makes so much sense if you can have low-cost transactions but
getting having more transparency in the game logic having more transparency around ownership
and immutability and you know being able to own the asset own nfts and utilize them in a game
being able to have game currencies instead of just trusting these game developers that
you're not going to have insane inflation of the currency it's all publicly available and so you
think of you know what a blockchain and what
cryptocurrency and what smart contracts and nfts can do um it's just such a great fit for for gaming
as long as like rom said earlier you know you're doing that with the right perspective you're
doing it around playing for fun and then you know really turbo charging that instead of just
playing for thank you thank you so much jack and uh i like the way you ended it up you know
with a little bit of a gaming jargon you know turbo charging it kind of feels a lot connected
thank you and power boost right we got a yes all right so um
we just need to get into like what is it the other side of things i mean like
just from a point of curiosity again so not uh not that games aren't serious in the web3 space but
you know like um the apps and uh d5 so they are considered to be more serious maybe like
um you you also said you know like how 2021 is going to be like you know like you know like
you know like you know like you know like you know like you know like you know like you know
they wear the year of d5 so um how uh do these two uh spheres and segments how do they uh how do
um like what to say how to how do they benefit from scale and like both in the long run the
short run how do you expect the utopia of scale to be ideally like you know it's a really i think
a really good question and if you think about d5 d5 also needs to have a like end utility
if the utility in d5 is just to swap tokens and just for you know 10 000 people who are whales to
be you know you know having games with each other to see who can make the most money um or and like
tvl incentive mechanisms if you're just participating in d5 just to make money
and and not supporting an end use case you know that's really not you're not fulfilling the goal
the role of d5 and the goal of d5 and so at scale we think
of DeFi and DeFi is, um, there's a big DeFi launch that is commencing now on scale. Um,
when scale V2 rolled out in June, 2022, when we tried to do the big DeFi push, if everyone
remembers where the market was in June, 2022, it was just, you know, really difficult time to do
anything. Um, and, uh, anyways, so, uh, we really focused on the strengths of scale and just said,
Hey, let's go keep building gaming, keep building web three, social products, high volume
applications. And now we have, you know, this, you know, uh, you know, huge amount of, of active
wallets in the network. And, uh, you know, these millions and millions of, of active wallets per
month. And I think there's been over 5 million active wallets and think about it. Um, DeFi
should be about utility. And so let's connect that to gaming. If I'm playing a game and I have
this game currency, well, Hey, and now,
I can't go buy a cup of coffee or breakfast or dinner, um, with my game coffee or my game token.
So what I need to do, I'm going to swap that into USDC. And then I'm going to go,
you know, convert that back into my native currency through an off ramp.
All of a sudden I played a game and I like, you know, one, and I sold an NFT, you know,
I can convert that into real world value, but let's say you're on a high gas network and you
spend all day, you know, you're playing this game and you got the equivalent of, you know,
And I'll use us currency. Cause that's what I'm familiar with. But let's say, let's say I got $3
out and then I had to pay a 40 cent gas fee or 80 cent gas fee or dollar gas fee to swap the
token that is punitive. Right. Um, and especially, you know, we've got a global audience here,
those gas fee rates at USD, that's really painful. That really, you know, you could have fed two more
people. Um, and so, so that's the goal of DeFi and scale is to help utility swapping and help
you know, high vol lots of transactions happen that are smaller amounts. And we want to support
the, you know, hundreds of millions of people that want to swap currency, not just the tens
of thousands of whales. And, you know, Hey, I think those whales will live beyond scale too,
but that's not our goal. Our goal is to help the game players use DeFi for utility reasons. Um,
yeah. So that's hopefully that makes sense. Yes. Uh, and like, uh, thank you for explaining
it so beautifully. It's, uh,
you know, completed the circle and, um, it's been lovely to have you here, uh, Jack, and like,
we learned a lot from you. We learned a lot about scale, not that, uh, you know, like it was, uh,
not already known, but the way you amplified it, the way you gave an emotional garnish to it was
really nice. Thank you so much for being here and you made this team talk really eventful and
wonderful. And, uh, we look forward to having you in another team talk and maybe, uh, in,
in India very soon. Thank you so much. Thank you. And thanks for everyone listening. It's just,
it's amazing turnout today. So it's been fun. I appreciate it. Great, Jack. Thank you for, uh,
being here and always being a good friend and a mentor. I'm so glad that you could, uh, do it.
It's been my pleasure. Okay. Okay. And, uh, thank you everyone. Uh, it's been so lovely to
meet you all here and let's catch up again with another team talk very soon. Uh, have a lovely
weekend and a week ahead. See you all. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.