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Bitrue 5th Anniversary AMA | How Many Years in Crypto | Share 100 USDT
Recorded: Sept. 14, 2023 Duration: 0:56:48Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you so much for joining us.
We've got a number of questions to get through.
So what I'm going to firstly do is just get the guests to introduce themselves a little
bit more about their background, then we'll get into the questions.
So I'm going to start with Brian, if I may.
So Brian, if you can tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background, and then
I'll head into Daniel.
Great, great.
if you if we if we can go to you next and give us a little bit of background on you and tell the
audience who you are what you're doing hey guys thanks for having me can you hear me all right
we can hear you we can also hear your dog which is quite funny um but yeah sorry for that yeah
it's feeding time so i already closed the door and tried to lock him out but it's like i can't
do much about it don't worry yeah so yeah um i'm a crypto since 2010 i'm the cto of of eminence who
is the issuing party behind casino coin which is a digital payment solution for um casinos and casino
operators uh we also did a nice little tool that's called non-fungible which is the leading xpl nft
viewer so if you haven't checked that out it's right in your x apps and in some same as the casino
coin lobby um we recently released a tool which is called um p2p bet which allows friendly bets
between friends like the things where someone is bragging at a bar that he can get that girl's
phone number um and you always have that one special friend who never pays up his debt so now you can
have that on the blockchain uh and we recently uh worked with rock and roller casino to launch
rnr.poker allows you to play uh poker utilizing casino coin and xrp as a table currency
i'm also an xrpl ambassador so if you want to start a business utilizing the xrpl and you got
questions just hit me up um on the side note i'm also running a dunl note for the xrpl so i'm one of
the 35 people voting on amendments and and trying to keep the network up and running insecure and stable
so that's a very very short overview of what i'm doing you got a few things on the go there it sounds
pretty busy um yeah it is i mean it's that's that's that's the crypto live right yeah crazy
uh and then lastly francis uh so francis if i come to you tell us a little bit about your background
which is fascinating um and what you've been doing you know over the last 10 10 15 years
yeah it's a long time isn't it um i'm interested in this kind of how many years in crypto and i was
trying to work out how many years it was actually i think i started writing about crypto in about
2011 2012 sometimes around about then so it has been over 10 years that i've been involved in crypto
i'm afraid mostly as a critic although i started off actually being quite enthusiastic about bitcoin
because i did think it was a better payment system than some of the other stuff we've got
um but i'm afraid i had my my um illusions rather sadly shattered in about 2014 2015 when we had
the lock size wars and it became evident that bitcoin just didn't scale in its base form and then you know
where we've gone from there is like yeah um we've ended up with lots and lots of changes in the whole
space the growth of stable coins the um creation of other coins alt coins and then ico's and then um
oh you know other things so there's a lot there we're going to get into all of it don't worry fear
not we yeah don't worry good so that's really i've been writing about all of that in you know the
course of the last decade or so and you you are the author of a book the case of the people's
people's quantitative easing and you have a new book coming up as well um the absolute essentials
of banking which are i know a fair bit about banking but i will probably buy it and read it
um to be fair so that's very kind of you i mean yeah so you've got one yeah my book on qe i mean
people kind of assume because i wrote a book about people's qe that therefore i must be in favor of qe
and actually i was a critic qe from the start and my general argument about it is it doesn't really
work and we really need to find a better way of doing things that's really the basic premise of
my book um and then the absolute essentials of banking is all about the fact that here we are nearly
15 years on it is actually 15 years on from the financial crisis tomorrow and yet people still don't
understand banking and that is shocking so we need a book that people can pick up and read that isn't
too long and is written in clear language and so forth and hopefully that will help people understand
how these things actually work yeah well soon we'll have one i guess um yeah so i'm going to get to my
first question which i'm going to give to all of you i mean some of you you know some of you have
already sort of mentioned it like how long have you been but there's a there's a saying in crypto
which is one year in crypto is like 10 years on earth or some people say five but five ten years
in effect that a lot happens in one year's worth of time so i mean if you could tell me individually
and we'll go the same order again brian daniel and then onto yourself francis so tell me how long
have you been in the crypto landscape and have you seen it changed over that time um so brian to you
first so i think compared to this group i'm i'm probably a relative newcomer uh you know my my my
journey started with the satoshi white paper i think within a year or so deciding i was going to
set up a a bitcoin mining rig on the cloud and then life sort of got the best of me and i let the thing
fall over uh and that i stepped away for a while and i watch a lot of sort of uh the the the crypto as
a store of value or as an investment vehicle or digital currency really i've just succumbed to saying
crypto uh like web three right but digital currency uh as a store of value and an investment asset um
and you know that you know i'm a technology sort of a technologist technology focus but i really
started to dig into blockchain and the promise of blockchain not only in supporting um uh digital
currency and and financial use cases but also a number of other use cases so then when i joined
a company called linux foundation um who hosts the hyper ledger community uh i started to dig in more
and i'd say that was about uh 2019 so about five years and then in the past two years uh it's sort of
been my life right across spectrums from uh the financial assets and the financial use cases as well as
uh a number of other use cases wow um daniel over to you i mean i know you've been around since 2010
um you know i've actually got a chart here in front of me which sort of looks at the the market cap
growth of digital assets and crypto over that time and i mean for the first five six years nothing
really happens and then you know the needle starts moving in 2016 2017 and then obviously exponentially
um grows in sort of 2020 onwards and then obviously declines again so um tell me you know how how has
that journey been for you tell us all not just me there's the audience here too tell us how it's been
yeah i've told this a couple of times before but just just a quick rundown so in 2010 i read an article
about bitcoin in a german's tech news website and i was intrigued so i was like yeah that that totally
makes sense i should look into this so i i turned my my pcs and a couple of systems i had lying around
into miners and i started mining bitcoin which back in the time was still possible right you just needed a
good gpu and you could make a couple of bitcoin very easy right i mined around 200 btc back in the day
um i lost hundreds of them uh the other hundred i found years later on it on a usb stick so that was
very nice um i i was around when bitcoin was around seven dollars i took a break from crypto back to
when btc was around 650 dollars um that's when i when i got in um so around the around the time when
my gox was failing um i then i actually mined dogecoin on my laptop which was giving um cool
results amount i mined around five million doge or something but i sold them a long time ago so i
missed the craze on that one um and then around 2016 i started being exposed to the xrpl because casino
coin which was originally a litecoin fork did the coin swap over to a software fork of the xrpl
um and that's when i got started looking into the technology i was running a a fork maintaining the
network for the casino coin ledger which pretty pretty much is like the very first sidechain if
if you still want to use the word sidechain right so um got some experience in that um and then in 2000
2020 we switched over from the casino coin ledger to the xrpl ledger and we're here since then uh the
journey in crypto was quite wild um and i like when you say it's like one year in crypto it's like it's
like 10 years in the real world it kind of is right there's so much happening in 24 hours there are so many
hot trends so i i very much remember the ico craze from 2017 i remember when masternodes um
so everything that was a dashboard was quite hot uh i remember the defy and the yield farming craze
right um so that was wild i remember when we could kicked off the token craze um on the xrpl i also
remember meeting kuris back in 2016 17 uh in amsterdam um right after we got listed on be true
so yeah it happy it has been quite an interesting time and for instance you've you've given us a
sense of you know your original you know your initial um positivity and then skepticism um and i
guess i'm i'm intrigued if you can you know very briefly just say you know just a very top line on
on the last couple of years and that wild ride that people have experienced you know can you can
you tell me you know what your thoughts on that have been i always thought it was an unsustainable
bubble and it would crash as it did and and i said so fairly publicly i mean you know quite famously
really kept looking at the various exchanges and and um lending platforms and saying you know these
are not going to work algorithmic stable coins they they they it is possible to switch to um a
different equilibrium if you like where the whole thing collapses you can't stop it um and when and
under those situation in that situation normal price incentives don't work um and that's really just
informing um people from my experience of banking from my knowledge of banking bank runs you can't stop
bank runs by raising interest rates um you know you and you can't stop the collapse of an algorithmic
stable coin by raising interest rates either for the same reason um you know things like that the
the way in which these insights from traditional finance really do need to inform what is going on
in crypto this time is not nearly as different as people think it is yeah interesting interesting
um and i think you're you're you're right to some extent you know synthetic stable coins it all gets
very complex very you know you know in any in any in any form of asset class i mean you know hedge funds
are guilty of this too um private equity firms are guilty of it as well you know getting way way ahead
of where things are and then things get a little bit um wow just overly complex and then people just lose get
detached from the reality of it so i'm gonna get to my next question go on i did if i'm if i may just
jump in quickly robert because i think this is really important that actually it's the old old
story that when you get a build-up of leverage you're in a credit bubble it is going to burst we've
seen it multiple times before and what happened during the pandemic years in crypto was this build-up
of leverage it was always going to crash we can touch on that in a bit yeah there are you know there are
there are bubbles in many parts of the world uh in many different asset classes from real estate
to some some areas of commodities uh to certain countries um you know it it crypto alternative assets
digital digital digital assets are no different in that respect um you know and you know you've
you've seen it you you do see it all the time in different parts of the world you know as we as
we sit here today you've got china and real estate you know you've in the past it's been australia and
real estate uk and real estate looks looks pretty iffy um you know germany's industrial issues look pretty
pretty pretty uh pretty scary so i take your point and i'm not saying i disagree with you i'm just
saying at the same time it's important to remember that there are obviously um other other other bubbles
in other in other sectors and asset classes um of course always brian daniel one for you which is uh
obviously xrp has been uh the base currency of be true from the beginning and i know that the two of
you have quite a lot of knowledge of it so if you could in just one or two minutes for me just
say how you've seen the the evolution of xrp over time um and sort of how the broader landscape has
developed over the last you know last three four years um and i'm going to start with daniel you
first if i may uh well to me to me the use case of xrp is pretty simple right it's it's made for
payments whatever you want to make out of that it's used for payments and then when we started coming
over it opened up the the token landscape right so we reworded ios to tokens um that brought a whole
lot of new people in then now we had nfts which is more or less successful and now we're getting
more features like um amm bridging and and oracles on the horizon so the xrpl is pretty good in in
payments it's pretty bad and everything else so it's glad that we are catching up finally um also kind
of excited about the stuff that's happening with the how where we're getting um hooks like smart
contract ish stuff uh native on the ledger so i'm thrilled to see what's happening yeah and i'll you
know kind of uh dovetailing after that um you know i i i think it is really interesting to see it evolve
as daniel said as this payments purpose fit chain um to something that is building a con upon kind of
that base implementation to enable a number of other use cases and i'd really say it's um uh you know
really post sec lawsuit which i'm sure will come up here during this conversation um where there's a
shift in a particular um sort of additional drive towards innovation so xls 20 was one we have the
amm spec we have federated side chains um all of this basically providing this phenomenal underlying
base architecture through uh new on ramps xrpl hooks and wasm federated side chains xls 20 the
decentralized identity standard and so i i think um over the past year or two um we've seen xrpm the xrp
ledger transition from you know solely a financial use case chain to a chain that can solve or a
protocol that can solve a number of other real world business problems and pairing that with some of the
policy and regulatory contraction and expansion and confusion and clarity i think we're positioned
um to see um to see xrpl and xrpl along with that really sort of take off in its recognition value and
purpose interesting interesting and daniel i'm going to come back to you again if i may and say and ask you
you know from a technological perspective i mean what have you what's got you really excited i mean
are there particular projects you believe have got you know some serious impact to be had um around
utility around adoption um that maybe you know have been there for a long time or maybe a more recent
so i'm keen to get your view on you know what you what you might have in what your views on that might be
well if we if we talk about adoption then everything that xrpl apps is doing excites me right because i'm
more into the retail side of things so i know ripple is doing some exciting stuff for the cross
border payment stuff i'm not really keen on that so i i don't pay much attention to what they're doing
i'm not really paying much attention to to the xrp price or something like that i'm i'm more like
all things xrpl and if you check the achievements we have made with on and off rams uh the advancement
of custodial solutions to for for normal people to to hold their funds um that's what i'm most excited
about right i think it's more beneficial for crypto to get the regular people in and give them power
over their over their finance okay interesting francis it's your turn you're up um and i i want to come
to some of the economic side um and because i think it's you know crypto has been a three billion
sorry three billion three trillion dollar industry uh by market cap and then there's obviously something
gone down to to one to one trillion but i wanted to ask you that what have you seen as some of the
more significant economic factors or breakthroughs you know over the last five years from a you know
in relation to digital currency because there has been very clear spillover effects in terms of
investment um in terms of employment um etc so i'm you know the economist in you must have some views on
that and and hopefully some positive ones not just negative ones um so yeah yeah far away okay um i mean
if you look back over the last five years or so or actually probably even longer than that it's fairly
obvious that that cryptocurrencies and um have become um really um a liquidity play in the sense that they
respond to um central bank liquidity when when central banks increase the amount of liquidity of
fiat liquidity in the system cryptocurrencies go up and we get lots of new ones and then when um central
banks tighten then crypto crashes and um the whole market cap of the entire industry falls dramatically
and everybody says oh my god it's a bear bear market it's going to it's going it's and you know this script
skeptics go yeah this is the end it'll never come back from this and and i'm of the opinion that it
does seem to be pretty firmly attached to the business side because so i would say that um when
we get out of our present tightening phase um crypto will go back up again um because that's what's
happened that's what's happened before and actually i don't back to my general theme that this time is not
as different as you think it is um there's no reason to suppose it wouldn't do that again yeah it's really
interesting isn't it because i think like you as we came into this year and interest rates are going
up and you know the major advanced economies and just just discretionary income was going down um
in many respects it made sense that people were going to sell out of certain asset classes
so you know if people were surprised um i don't know real estate you know for example it seems odd that
people will you know we can't afford it anymore you know so don't expect people keep buying it you
know you're right in that high rate environment um it it is uh that's true and i think the other the
other area condition that you see crypto from a asset appreciation perspective doing very well
is when um economic confidence is shaken sort of to the core does that make sense so not what not
in sort of the environment we're now where it's a bit up it's a bit down it's it's when i don't know
an emerging market is going through massive economic headwinds and the people in the country say
i just can't hold this currency anymore if i can distinguish a bit between those two because
there is this kind of niche case for quality um cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin um actually as
safe assets for in countries which are economically very unstable like venezuela and argentina and zimbabwe
because they do offer actually a less volatile way of holding wealth and they also create a means of
obtaining dollars um so there is that use case and i wouldn't want to ignore it and actually i think we
need it i think you know some countries just are not good places to be to have have to have wealth and
you know people do need a means of of screwing it away you know why should people lose everything
because they've got a totally profligate government that can't that does some very silly things um so
from that point of view you know there is that use case for things like bitcoin um that's a little
bit different from the point i was making which is about the general um economic conditions in the
world so one of the things that cryptocurrencies generally are regarded as a risk asset class i know that
for some emerging markets they're actually a safe asset but generally they'd be regarded as a risk
asset class because they are volatile price rise and and they can deliver very high returns
um so i would expect them to go up when confidence is high and fall when confidence is low
yeah and that's pretty much what we see yeah that makes sense makes sense um no thank you good
that's good to and fro brian i wanted to you've got a unique position having been you know leading
partnerships for ripple to see how that has developed in the time that you were there and beyond and you
mentioned the sec case um so maybe you can expand on it a little bit for those that aren't aware of it
but what have you seen as some of the more significant um you know developments within ripple
that you think have impacted the ecosystem there and that could be positive or negative but you know
you know you go where you want because of you know the position you've had so i mean
yeah if we if we can can we get can we go into that and i'd like to ask you that because when you
you know you given the role you had you you really did have yeah the ability to do you know to lead
that lead it out and say well this is where we want it to be this is where we're taking it what
do we need to do to get there and then what you know how did that end up working out do you know
what i mean yeah yeah well there's some there's some you know on that last point sort of really
had the ability to define what we're do going to do and where we're going to go i'd say uh probably for
better you know that wasn't necessarily quite the case i think one of the things i'll say about ripple
in general is uh it's sort of internally a very collaborative community driven organization
you know obviously brad garlinghouse and monica long um sort of set the direction uh and and help
help you know tell us i'll use the word us where we're heading um now that said uh there is a group
within ripple that is ripple x ripple x dev is the handle on twitter or x and that was very much
focused towards not the commercial objectives of ripple as a a fintech service provider but rather
ensuring the health of the xrp ledger um so those were the partnerships that i primarily focused on
and you know once that group was founded which was founded under monica long i think it was pretty
amazing to see kind of this this this focus on driving innovation incubation on an adoption of xrp ledger
and that meant you know a team of people uh you know not just deploying capital but progressively standing
up programs um that uh establish access for the capabilities new tools and middleware new what i call
infrastructure on-ramp off-ramp custody providers right new elements in the ecosystem that allow more
people to come on and engage in xrpl and engage in xrp and some some of the really um um interesting and
impactful things uh that were related to that after definition of the xls 20 um standard was you know
exploring entirely new sort of verticals that address real world business problems so central bank
digital currency carbon markets um and i think there's another question where we go into partnerships
so i'm trying to you know sort of hold some but i can go into a lot there and going back to the
evolution question i think it is uh really um uh opening up and making sure that people are clear
that this is a decentralized open source ledger and then enabling the infrastructure and tools and
middleware and programs and supplying capital to enable people to access it has been really really
powerful you see so i'm going to go back now and just think about some of the lessons that you know
have been learned could have been learned over the last five years and and sort of put it to all all
three of you um as to you know what do you think are some of the most challenging moments or setbacks
that you've encountered maybe at a personal level but maybe maybe more so at an industry level um in
this space or related to it and what have you taken from it so i mean you know clearly ftx has been a
was a watershed moment um and luna you know you can see how just how damaging those were and i guess
francis your perspective would be that uh you know it was about euphoria sort of a minsky moment people
getting too far um but if i may daniel i'll start with you if you could sort of tell me what you think
you've learned and what you found challenging over the last five years i'd appreciate it
so i think the biggest takeaway for me is there's never a dull day in crypto right um every day is new
drama um something goes bust uh something gets hacked so um after 13 years my main takeaway is
it's like really i'm no longer surprised right so you're opening the news you're reading stuff it's
like it's the same old over and over again if you really are surprised by something like ftx going down
then you're pretty new to the space this happens all the time it will be the same going forward right
it's just it's it's another entity that goes bust it's another bridge that got hacked it's another
project that rucks with millions of dollars um that's the nature of the space we did mature a bit
right and it's it's getting better but i think that the biggest takeaway is um when like people say
we're still early in some sense that's correct we have a lot to learn um what people should keep in
mind we're just seeing the same stuff from the traditional financial world like the same scams the
same issues the same black swan events it's the same in crypto it's just 10 times or 100 times
faster it's exactly the same like in other industries just on steroids yeah i was talking to someone the
other day who ran a digital asset exchange in europe and and they were saying you know traditional
finance is so lucky because their market shuts at four five you know three o'clock in the afternoon
on a friday and it doesn't reopen again until monday and i think you know people do forget that
that's the biggest benefit for them yeah exactly that's the thing is this is running 24 7 right and
every you could have a 14 year old sitting in his mom's basement looking through your code and they can
figure out that online 1337 there is an issue and they just change a couple of characters and they
they drain your whole bridge or your whole exchange right so that's that's the thrilling thing scary
absolutely terrifying um francis i'll come on to you hi um i was just mulling this over in some sense of
generally like i said the business cycle i was talking about talking about before so in their time
each of the major crashes is a really major issue for cryptocurrency so if we go back to 2014 and the
collapse of mount gox we don't tend to see that as a big deal now because bitcoin was worth so little
then and they although we had altcoins then we didn't have anything like this sort of the universe
of of all sorts of things that we have now and we hadn't got the involvement of institutional investors
and retail on a wide spread basis it was a much smaller niche industry so we don't see it as a big deal
but at the time it very much was and said people were saying oh you know it'll never recover from this
um and the same really with the bursting of the ice of the ico bubble in in 2018 as in as well um
you know and it bitcoin was lost an awful lot of its value is something like 60 70 percent maybe a bit
more and it didn't really recover until start to recover until 2020 and so and then obviously in 2022
we had uh rolling disasters of starting really with the collapse of terra luna um and then you know
three arrows and um and the all fallout for that carmating and the collapse of ftx so we seem to have
kind of like a four-year cycle here where um where we get some kind of major crash like every four years and
you know when we look at them from the perspective of history the recent ones always look bigger
so of course you know last year's um rolling collapses were the worst um in history by a long way but
oh francis i think we've lost you or we're losing you
francis are you still there if not i'm going to come to brian brian we're going to go to you
oh we lost you temporarily sorry i mean basically based on what you said i mean that means people
should be pretty risk on for the next four years um based on the on the sort of the time frames that
you suggest as you know being the peaks of troughs and then vice versa yeah absolutely um but brian
we'll come up we'll come on to you now and what you what you think you know you've learned over the
last five yeah i'd say and going off of the starting with sort of what is uh i think been most challenging
um along with you know again we spoke the sec lawsuit etc etc for the xrp space in particular
i think it's been fud i think it's been fear uncertainty and disillusionment especially
within uh the mainstream audience as someone said earlier we really need those mainstream adopters
there's been an overabundance of loose venture capital which has created a race that has meant
things haven't always been built in the sound way by the best people unbridled optimism and then i'd say
violently thrashing policy have been the challenges right but all of those things kind of have their good
side uh as i as i say uh and i may have to parse this if we have more time but uh uh innovation
happens at the intersection of opportunity and greed right so some of this flow of capital and unbridled
uh optimism um provides a lot of sort of power now um in terms of takeaway i'd say what i'm what i feel
i've learned is um have a stomach right because things are going to oscillate um this is not a sprint
as it felt it was this is a marathon rome wasn't built in a day and ultimately lasting solutions are
going to solve real world business problems uh for for for real world people so uh and i'll also hark
back to something earlier to sort of sort of package that up i think i could summarize it as um you know
uh prepare to dig in for a while and remember the lessons of time well that's really really interesting
sort of that long-term view and counteracting that with francis's sort of four-year cycle view
so i'm not i'm not saying you're opposed in your viewpoint i just find it interesting that the two
views well i think we're in line i i think we're saying the same thing i think i'm saying you you
you have to weather the storm and be prepared to power through those cycles right and if you're
uh a sort of a commercial venture in this space a technological venture in those space you need to build
your business and and also your mindset to to power through those cycles uh uh because over time
they're gonna they're gonna sort of even out and settle right all right so i think we're aligned i
don't think we're fully disagreeing um uh uh based on what i what i interpreted francis saying
francis i'm gonna bring you in now if i may because as i alluded to earlier so at its peak
three trillion dollars uh in market cap but it's obviously gone down yeah 66 since then and hovers
now between one trillion to 1.3 1.4 in the last 12 18 months so i mean if you if you could could you
give me a sense of some of your thoughts maybe on the macro or the microeconomic impact of that fall um
yeah yeah i'd be really because i mean i don't think that gets discussed enough um but you know on
both sides when it falls and when it rises so if you've got some views that i'd be really intrigued
to hear them yeah i mean i think i mean the falls last year um were particularly disastrous i think
for retail for people who'd who'd invested really small amounts of money really but for them
representing a huge amount and got wiped out and unfortunately it's often the way with financial
crashes that the people who really get hurt are the people who can least afford it um and i mean as
you know there's absolutely no protection in in crypto there's no bailouts there's no nothing and
so those people said you lost money um and uh that will have had an impact on them from a um
an economic point of view so yeah i don't yeah i don't but i it although it was a three trillion industry
in terms of the overall financial system speaking globally it's really not very big and so actually
quite a lot of people can lose quite a lot of money in crypto and it doesn't have a great deal of effect
on the financial system or on the macroeconomy but it obviously it does very much hurt
some people i mean i i read the stories from the people who lost money in celsius for example and it's
heartbreaking it really is yeah you're right i mean on a purely quantitative qualitative sorry
qualitative quantitative basis you're right it's not a huge industry i mean i think hedge fund industry
is worth three and a half trillion dollars of assets under management i mean private equity has got two
trillion dollars of assets in uh in dry powder to deploy so when you consider it against some of the
alternative asset classes that are out there you're right it's not you know it's not massive in that
respect or if you look at you know whole economies the us the china you know you're talking what 35
trillion between those two so you're right it gives a sense of the scale or in some senses the lack of
scale in terms of you know adoption and i guess that burning burning desire that people have had for
utility so i'm going to move it forward now um i want to come on sort of community building and
utility as a topic um i'm brian i'm going to give this one to both you and daniel um but slightly
different in the way that we approach it so i mean brian from your sense and your experience i
mean how important do you think it is to build community engagement and partnerships and what
can be done better to achieve that and then and daniel if i will come on to you in a second but
obviously you you have a project you're running so i mean you're still doing this day to day
um so i'd be interested to get your view on you know what it is you look for when you're doing
these types of things but brian if i can go to you first yeah maybe as to answer the question about
how important is it to build community and partnerships and what are some ways to do that
i'll start with first saying as we look at this term web 3 that we use right which is um uh encompassing
of blockchain and crypto it started with web 3.0 and this is you know really about um point services
that interact together um to build a dynamic web and in a way it's it's a major step towards um
decentralization i'm going to take that concept and apply it to uh then this idea of partnerships right
we um uh blockchain and crypto is so pervasive one it's very difficult if not impossible to build as a
solo entity um two um one of the powers of decentralization powers of open source are that
you get to bring together sort of the hive mind um to achieve innovation at scale um so for me when we
talk about partnerships in this
um other inputs other partners other mindsets to bear to ensure that we do it in a way that is
safe and in consideration of all the others that can benefit from it um very quickly i'll speak to
the kind of how you know i think the how and it's one of the things we learned uh at ripple x is it's
more than just deployment of capital right it is uh it has to do with you know uh who you bring in the
quality of the participants in the ecosystem how you reach out to people how you support people so it's
it's really sort of approaching the problem yes you may have your core objectives as a commercial
entity as a protocol etc etc but really approaching the situation with a core belief
that we are better if we build this new protocol this new economic system this new ecosystem as a
group instead of disparate individuals
so it seems like rob got kicked out from the amm and while he's fixing oh i love moderating so so
daniel what is your take on what is your take on that question
yeah i think community building is is very important right because most projects start out and
they're building a core group of supporters that that spread the word and and introduce others to
to your project what a lot of people tend to ignore is a community is great but depending on what you're
building you're also looking for users and i just take ourselves as an example right we're having a
we're having a really huge community they're all very active they're spreading the word they're
amazing right so just a funny example if we want to make some someone trending like we did this a
couple of times in the last years like let's say we want to trend uphold um we can get this easily
done right which just shows the dedication of the community however you need to convert some of the
people from your community into users or customers yes that means if you are you are you are bought a
couple of tokens um let's say casino coin what we want you to do is we want you to use them if it's
legal in your jurisdiction right because we offer gambling and we want you to be reasonable uh with
that money so what tend to happen with a lot of project is you have this initial hype everything is
nice and shiny you have a road map you start building you start delivering it's an it's an uptrend
right um and then sell buy the rumor sell the news kicks in right you release your main product
everyone is excited you look at your numbers and only a fraction of people are using what you just
build so i think what a lot of projects need to figure out is how to turn your community
into into users so make them use your products enjoy what you build get feedback for what you build
and that's a a very difficult thing to do um when it comes to partnerships it's it's of course
important right so if you have a solution like we do let's take for that example non-fungible
which is is is tapping into the nft ecosystem you want to partner with nft projects to tell their
community about the product and to use it so you can't win this uphill battle being on your own right
we tried this for a long time where we're like well we want to be careful who we partner with
because especially if someone is new and this is crypto and we're in this for so long so we know the
history and how things go we want to be very careful about who we're going to make our partner
because it's always like a give or take right they're getting some of our credibility credibility
we're getting some of their credibility we're mixing our communities we're exposing our community
to this new partner so we need to be very careful about how we do this um however most of the cases it's
it's beneficial right because we're introducing our community to to another community so everyone wins
um what we see a lot on the xrpl at the moment especially from the nft folks and i kind of like
that it's like well you you want to build a cult and for an nft project i totally agree right because
that works that works pretty well but if you have a product like we do you you don't want a cult you
want you want you want a community and you also want a user base daniel that's really good useful
and brian thank you too i'm back by the way i temporarily left us but i've rejoined i was i was
i mean you're doing a great job but i was hoping to take over as moderator but no you're doing better
i'm not leaving that's what uh so that's it that's i'm staying um but so i've got three or four more
questions uh that we hope we get through um and so i think one of the ones brian if i can go to you
as i think uh for me i'm intrigued to know um how do you think xrp will grow in usage and demand in
the future and why um and then daniel and francis i've got some for you don't worry you're not getting
away with it just too quickly uh um yeah actually i'm gonna go there's a there's a couple of quick
things here i'll hit one is daniel set it up well talking about well you know in a community new
users and i think um one of the ways it's going to grow is by continuing to complete the virtuous
cycle and i wish maybe later on i'll i'll post this on twitter this upside down pyramid um i was
using so with anything like this first of all you need kind of pioneers that become your luminaries
and then ultimately the experts those pioneers help establish kind of the platform technically
it's tools and middleware right in other spaces it may other areas it may be policy and systems
that then allow kind of developers and builders to come in contribute to that ecosystem that revolts in
in uh the ability to now to establish commercially viable ventures and then that brings users and they
work together in kind of a complex way but just look at it as a virtuous cycle and i think what uh
ripple and the ripple x team and then even more so you know people like casino coin at large building
partnerships extending relationships bringing more capabilities to xrpl we're going to finally close
out that virtual cycle right and that's when we start to see sort of a full and rich and complete
ecosystem similar to some of the other protocols we see that is also when we start to see um xrp the digital
currency um really um establish its role and i know i'm speaking kind of nebulously here but establish its
role as a true transfer of value as opposed to just a speculative asset um and and you know to me uh
that's when xrp ledger and things associated with it take yeah i think that's interesting and i think
if i might go to a slightly broader point um there's still a lot of venture capital capital to be deployed
into the digital asset space and then obviously increasingly um you've seen the
not introduction but you know the involvement of traditional finance firms you know the black rocks
the vanguards of this world getting involved at both um a product level with exchange-trained funds but
then sometimes buying a particular projects or exchanges um and so you're you're seeing that you
know there's that that evolutionary move um happening not just at individual project levels but also
exchanges and then beyond that um so i think that's really interesting amen and just yes i what i
ignored say i'm thinking small projects but it's a similar cycle for getting to a point where we
have stable institutional adoption right and i think daniel said something quickly look at the end of the
day um users adoption users and adoption are going to drive the overall success at individual project
level or institutional level i think i'm gonna bring it home a little bit and talk about be true for a
moment and i i guess daniel i'm intrigued to know you know i guess also to accept brian yourself as
well um what do you think were the main factors that drew xrp uh a casino coin to be true in the first
place because uh you know it's always interesting hearing someone's external view of how a particular
you know entity business works you know um so if you can give your views on on that i think that'd be
interesting well well i'll start i think mine will be a bit shorter uh i'm gonna say first of all it's
the people right it's curious it's it's the team um that brought me there before um the name um and then
it's you know really one of the broadest range of xrp related products uh that at least was out there at
the time that i discovered uh be true um and then uh not only sort of a projection and that that led
to a perception of of trust and confidence uh but a track record of trust and confidence
yeah so if you if you i would ever get the question correct it's like oh why do you think
beatrew picked xrp is that correct right there's a base currency it goes along that line well i think
it's also just you know what you know casino coin you know you your involvement with be true um
you know not just because of the xrp stuff that's probably that's clearly clearly had an impact but
is there something more broadly that it's influenced you know yeah well my answer will go in into that
anyways because so so beatrew did pick xrp or was like xrp centric um and i think that decision was
made by beatrew because they were looking for a point that made them stand out right so and there
isn't really much that can make you stand out other than saying i'm going to double down on my focus
on a specific ecosystem and i think xrp was odd
