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Blockchain at Michigan w/ Abdullah Umar🎙
Recorded: Jan. 28, 2023 Duration: 2:11:10Space Recording
Full Transcription
studying at Michigan, what you've done in the industry so far, as far as career or as far as
work, and then what your career aspirations are going forward. For sure. Yeah. So I'm currently
a third year at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. And I, for BAM,
blockchain at Michigan. I am currently the lead governance lead for our governance sector,
which we manage a couple of delegations for Uniswap, Aave, Compound. And then at the same
time, I'm working at an investment firm, a local investment firm called Arana Ventures. And we
started about a year ago. So we're a blockchain investment firm and we have mostly the Michigan
crew there. So it's a nice local firm. And we started off with some help by some real estate
guys. So we're currently pursuing that and trying to create synergies between the entirety of the
blockchain community inside of Ann Arbor, the university itself with students, and of course,
any investors that we can find there. So happy to speak on any of those points.
Yeah, let's dive right into it. So tell us first about the origins of BAM. I like that
abbreviation of blockchain at Michigan. When did you guys get started? And who started the club?
And then also tell me a bit more about how you guys are facilitating each other, rather how you
guys facilitate the club, what kind of events you throw, how you're educating each other and how
you're educating the broader student base of Michigan. Sure. So our club is actually slightly
older than most other blockchain clubs arising in the past few years. So we started
actually during the previous bull market. So around 2017. And it was really, it's very much
dev oriented. It was the idea was to bring in engineering students to effectively work on
protocols, to effectively create things, well, solidity projects, etc. So and that really goes to
our current demographic in the club, where about 70% developers, 70% CS students, and then the rest,
the other 30% is just a mix of well, business, econ, and whatever else there is. And so the club started
as, you know, just a way to bring people into the space of cryptography, of building blockchain projects,
and has sort of evolved a bit more over the past few years, to be accommodating to multiple,
multiple different interests. And so our sort of purpose on campus is to simultaneously teach people
about what blockchain is, and what the purpose of it is beyond the mere, you know, the financial
aspects of it beyond the trading aspects of coins and tokens. And at the same time, we're trying to invite
as many different people as possible, because blockchain can be applied to so many different industries, right?
It's it's a technology. It's like any other technology, say, say, AR, VR, or AI, right? It's,
it can be used to facilitate the growth of any sort of space. And that's what we're really trying to
teach people. Say you're like a like a business student, right? And you're you want to go into into
healthcare consulting. If you have a negative perception of blockchain, and that's typically what
has occurred over the past year, especially, well, we all know the events that have perspired over the
past few months, and crypto, blockchain, NFTs, all of these terms have sort of become pejoratives.
And when this sort of dogma exists, a lot of people tend to stray away from blockchain. And that's what
we're really trying to prevent. Because say, let's go back to the healthcare consulting example.
If you are working with a client, and they are, say, posing an EMR system, an electronic medical record
system, if you don't have that toolkit about like what a blockchain is, and how you can implement it
into your current incumbent technology systems, then perhaps you wouldn't be able to provide your
client with the best possible solution. And blockchain is, in fact, one of those solutions.
And so the club is divided at the moment into, let's say, three parts. The first part, the first part
is really education oriented. We have, this has been part and parcel of our club since day one,
and is for most blockchain clubs. This is where everything starts. It's garnering that community
and teaching the people about what blockchain is. And so we take it around, it used to be more,
but now we take around like 20, 25 students per semester, per cohort. And we help them go through
about about 10 weeks of education. We meet weekly and teach them about the technical side of blockchain,
as well as sort of the conceptual and business side of blockchain. And for reference purposes, we
we talk about it, well, decentralization, consensus protocols, smart contracts, NFTs, dApps,
all of those things. And then afterwards, they have the chance to take part in some of the other
divisions that we have, namely consulting and governance. So my role in the club is primarily
to do with the external part of BAM. And the external part is really the consulting and governance aspect,
where we are able to work closely with protocols, with startups, with other companies to develop
whatever solutions they need to help them make decisions in the industry. And the amazing thing
about the crypto and blockchain industry is that it's so nascent. There's no such thing as a, so to speak,
veteran. And so we're able to provide a decent amount of value with the work that we do. And like,
for example, last semester, we worked with Immutable X, we worked with Solana, and a startup called Bitwave,
which provides like tax, tax work to incumbent businesses trying to get into, into the blockchain
space. And then the third part, which I'm currently in charge of is our governance sector, where we have
a handful of delegations for a couple of blue chip DeFi protocols. And we are involved in voting on
the major decisions that occur with these protocols. Like, where should say, for example,
Uniswap launch? What next change should it launch on? And with like something like Aave, what sort of
risk parameters do we want to, do we want to adjust for say borrowing and lending purposes? So that's
really an overview of what we do. So when it comes to the governance sector,
how did you guys get the money to invest in these delegations? And also how many people are deciding
on, on, on the boat per protocol? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So
we started our, our governance sector started about a little over, a little over a year ago. And the way
we sort of facilitated this is, is by reaching out to A16Z. So A16Z is, is a very prominent VC. And they
have a ton of tokens for basically every protocol. They have a huge crypto arm. And for a couple of
reasons, and I'll mention two of them. One is just why they gave us tokens. And by, this is what
delegations mean. A16Z owns the tokens. We actually don't own them. When we work with these tokens,
we're not able to sell them. We're not able to do anything with them. They are given to us on loan,
effectively by A16Z to make decisions. So what we own is the voting power, the decision-making in
these protocols. And the reason A16Z does this is because one, the ethos of decentralization,
if they had all the voting power to themselves, that's completely defeating the purpose of these
different protocols. Right. And so that's why they gave these, these delegations out to a couple of
other universities. Us, we're one of them. We've got a handful of others we work closely with,
namely Berkeley, Penn, UChicago, LBS, London Business School. So there are a handful of delegations
that have been given up by VCs and protocols directly. So that's when we actually attain this
voting power. And the way our governing structure works right now, it's a pretty tight community.
And we're trying to find ways to make it as, as broad as possible. But here's the thing that we've
noticed. Our team right now consists of five people. We have a lead for each protocol. We have a lead for
Aave, we have a lead for Uniswap, we have a lead for Compound, and then other people doing research
for other protocols that we are seeking to gain delegations for, like Maker and DYDX. So we have
a pretty small community and we make most of the decisions. Our job is essentially to talk to a
bunch of other stakeholders in the system. We talk to other big delegates, other token holders,
and we talk to, and we can get into this later, different companies that are providing services to
DAOs, like, like Gauntlet, for example, that provide risk assessment services to DAOs. So we work with these
guys continually communicating with different parties to assess how a protocol should be developed and
how to, you know, garner the most robust community possible. But from an internal perspective, it's
only like five of us making most of the decisions. And so far, we've kept the community tight and we're
trying to expand it. But the reason we've kept it tight is because these, these decisions that we're
making are relatively high stake. And this is where we get to sort of the idea behind the issues of
decentralization, right? If you give everybody the ability to vote on certain important decisions,
you don't always get to the best result. And this is the issue naturally with like democracies, right?
Versus say like a meritocracy. So if we were to give each of the, each of the members in, in our,
in our club, say around 70 members, the ability to decide what we do with our delegations,
we wouldn't make the best decisions, at least from our current assessment, and it would take a lot
longer. And this is the current issue with a lot of DAOs where you get voter fatigue and you get
degrees of incompetence and you have to train people how to do stuff. And so this is where democracy
really becomes like a representative democracy. And that's sort of the structure we have right now.
But we're trying to decentralize as time goes on and sort of create like a structure where
we have a DAO regulating our governance model rather than just five people making decisions
and having access to let's say like one MetaMask wallet, right? So that's the sort of path that we're
going on right now. But we're trying to decentralize slowly and make the community as, you know,
inform as many people as possible so we know that there's competency present in this space. But yeah,
that's essentially what we're dealing with on the governance side at the moment.
Yeah, I can agree with that. It seemed that especially towards the beginning of the bull
market, everything needed to be a DAO and everyone needed to have an equal vote. And I think that
conceptually, it sounds nice, but in practice, it doesn't work very well because the people that
are voting need to be educated on what they're voting on. And I think it's a fine line between keeping
things decentralized and fair, but also keeping those that are making decisions informed. I wanted
to ask really quick, you said that you guys are able to talk to other stakeholders and big delegates.
How do you make those connections? How do you set up those tunnels of communication?
I've never heard of Telegram. Yeah, but you know, a lot of people that hold big delegations,
big amounts of token are anonymous, right? So how do you guys?
Sure. Yeah, that's a good question. It's actually relatively difficult to reach out to the more
anonymous ones. But we have a circle of people that we know that we tend to communicate on these big
decisions pretty continually. It's usually the same people we go towards. For say, right now,
one of the biggest proposals going on is launching Uniswap on BNB chain. And essentially,
the way I've sort of been communicating this is, well, one, Ilya is the guy who is currently
facilitating this, who actually launched the proposal. I didn't know him previously. Nobody
from our club knew him. I just sent him a Twitter DM just to talk to him, just to have a phone call
with him. So that worked out. So just like, it's very spontaneous. That's what I'm trying to say.
It's very spontaneous. And it's very much like a network that you organically grow. Like if we know
somebody at, if we know somebody at BNB chain, they probably have a governance lead, that governance
lead knows somebody else. And we just create a bunch of group chats. And my Telegram is an absolute
mess right now is for a lot of you. So we have a bunch of different group chats for a certain protocol,
for a certain proposal with all of these different stakeholders. And to your point with the anonymous
stakeholders, some people just don't want to be found, right? And that's okay. That's fine.
And we don't really worry about that too much. But the good thing about some of these protocols that
we're dealing with is that a healthy number of delegates have actually disclosed who they are,
whether it's through like an ENS name, or whether it's through partaking in discussions in a forum.
Because not only is your vote, like your address available on chain, but sometimes you can copy
somebody's address, you can go to like Nansen, and you can see who actually owns it, right?
Because we don't have an ENS domain for our wallet, for example. But when somebody copies and pastes
our wallet address into Nansen, Nansen has a portfolio tracker, has a tracker of who people are,
even if they haven't disclosed themselves. But a lot of people are still very good at keeping
themselves anonymous. And two, where all the discussions occur is in the forums. So before,
prior to making any sort of decision, proposal, a proposal draft is essentially released onto a
forum. And in that forum, you have a bunch of different stakeholders and people who are not
even stakeholders, giving their comments on what they like about the proposal, what they don't like
about the proposal. And through this continual discussion in the forum, we're able to find out
like who the stakeholders are, who are the people who are really interested in partaking in voting
and actually making a difference in that, in the governance, in whatever proposal we're dealing
with, right? And so from that perspective, we use the forums, we can use Nansen to disclose,
and a lot of it is just organically reaching out to people and creating a bunch of group chats.
And eventually, that creates a snowball effect of a broader and broader network. But that
simultaneously creates a fear for people who are not, say, delegates or don't own too many tokens
that there can be collusion between large delegates and stakeholders. And that's certainly true.
And that's where we need to, you know, effectively have more decentralization. And certainly, if A16Z,
for example, didn't give out delegations to these universities, you know, it would be a lot more
centralized already. So I think we are tending towards that more decentralized system, but we're
simultaneously trying to find an optimal point where it's centralized, it's decentralized enough.
That's what we're trying to do. Yeah.
So I'll make one point first. Have you ever heard of folders, Abdullah? I will tell you that I used
to hate Telegram. And once they implemented folders, it changed my life. I've basically been able to
organize my team, my leads, my friends, all in the different folders. And Telegram went from an app that
that was just a flood of spam and nonsense to something I use every day.
I'll be honest, I have not. I need to start using that.
Yeah, it's a game changer.
Yeah, I'll look into that.
And then a question I had was, what are your thoughts on Uniswap going multi-chain? I know that
a lot of members from the community that I would speak to weren't so much about it. They wanted to
stay on Ethereum. They didn't really want to explore the way that Aave and Curve had.
Sure. That's a good question. I mean, most of the stakeholders that we know
are pretty, quite pro on the multi-chain thesis. And it's an interesting debate because right now,
Uniswap is actually launched primarily on, well, it's obviously Ethereum and then most other L2s.
The only chain that Uniswap is on, other than something that is Ethereum-based,
other than L2, is Celo, right? But Celo is also EVM compatible. But we actually proposed the initial
governance vote for this about a year ago. But that's the only other chain. But we've been talking
to over the past few months, we've been talking to Evmos, which is, well, part of Cosmos. We've been
talking to Moonbeam, which is part of Polkadot. Celo obviously has already launched. B&B chain,
which is currently going on. And then Aurora as well, which is part of Nier protocol. So all of
these EVM compatible sort of silos of other protocols are very interested in launching
Uniswap on their chain because the protocol itself is a lot more efficient. It has a brand name. It has
something going for it. Something interesting that's actually a good point to mention is that
Uniswap code can't actually be copied. It can't actually be forked right now. Before you launch
Uniswap on a different chain, you actually need to get a license exemption. And we can get into this
later if you'd like, but that license is about to expire in nearly two months. And that means we're
going to see a lot more forks of Uniswap on different chains. But that, and the reason we're
going to see a lot of forks is because there's a higher degree of capital efficiency that you can
attain from using Uniswap V3. So it's just a better way of providing liquidity. And it's a better,
and it's a really solid experience for both sides, for the liquidity providers, at least for the most
part, because there's a lot of impermanent loss, for example, so it can get tricky. But also from
the standpoint of the person who is just swapping between tokens. But the multi-chain aspect is
actually overall, in my opinion, beneficial for Uniswap because it brings in more revenue streams
for token holders if we implement a fee switch, if we implement a structure where those fees actually
go to token holders. But it essentially provides a more robust business model for the protocol itself.
Because we have to look at this as operating a business. And one of the reasons why we should
like launch on BNB chain is because BNB chain is very active. They have a lot of members. They have
a lot of games and dApps and developments. And if we don't launch on them, you're sacrificing so
much activity and so much potential revenue. So from a business model standpoint, it's like going
international. It's not just staying siloed in one country, but going into multiple different
countries and not being afraid to do that. And again, that's completely feasible when you have
other chains that have EVM compatibility or EVM equivalence even. So that's my personal perspective
on this matter.
Listening to you make the points for, it seems like a no brainer. Why do you think it's
taken them so long? Why do you think it's taken the community so long?
Well, that's partly because it's not the easiest thing to do. It takes time. And this is one of the
issues, again, when we're talking about DAOs. When you task a DAO to implement something or to do
something that's of a relative degree of difficulty, it takes a lot of time. And if we just had a
centralized authority running the DAO, let's just say A16Z ran the entirety of Uniswap.
I guarantee by now they would be on a lot more chains than what we have at the moment.
But here's the thing. When we launch a proposal, we have to draft the proposal. We have to put it on
the forums. We have to communicate to a bunch of different parties about it and get a lot of
feedback from a bunch of different risk assessors and other people who are large stakeholders. And
then we create a second draft. And then here's something that Ilya, who actually, like I mentioned
before, launched the BNB proposal. You have to reach out to other delegates. Because in order for
your proposal to pass, you have to pass something called a temperature check, which is like an off-chain
vote. And then after that, you have to pass another vote, which is an on-chain vote. And you need 40
million votes, Uniswap votes, or Univotes for that to actually pass and go through. So there are a lot
of levels of friction and a lot of issues that you can run into. And not everybody in the community is
always satisfied with these proposals and they're always put on a halt. And we actually, previously,
Moonbeam was about to launch, was about to have Uniswap launched on it, I think over the summer. It was
not too long ago. But then the wormhole bridge got hacked. And that was the bridge we were using
for cross-chain governance. So there are so many different issues you can run into. And it's
partly because you have a decentralized system that you have to come to consensus with. And you
have a complex structure where you have to figure out how you draft this entire proposal and go through
multiple stages of voting. So there are levels of friction, and that's there on purpose. I mean,
you don't just want every proposal to pass because that would be an efficient system as well. But
that's primarily why it takes time for these things to happen.
Thank you again for the breakdown. And I don't want to go too far off on a tangent. I'm going to
bring it back to the educational oriented, I guess, part of your club. You said that
you guys are taking in 25 students per semester, they go through 10 weeks of education, you teach
them about the technical and business side of blockchain, NFTs, dApps, consensus, etc.
Why is it a low number of students per semester? Why just 25?
Oh, it was a lot higher prior. First, we were completely open. And then we went to like 50. And
we just went lower and lower. Because one, we were testing out how it would work. Because
there's obviously a trade off that you make by presenting yourself as an exclusive club.
Because the more you try to get into a club and the higher degree of exclusivity that you see,
the more you value your position. So in the last semester, we only had like 20 people,
20, 25 people. And we had nearly 100% retention rate, which was really nice. Prior, when we just
opened the doors up to everybody, when you open the floodgates, you know, you have a higher degree
in dropout. So that's sort of what we were testing. That's the hypothesis we proved to be true.
And honestly, what we're trying to do as well, or what we were trying to do last semester, it was
provide individualized attention to students as much as possible. Because in the cohort, you're not
only learning, you're also applying, you have to go through a project by the end, they have to present
to graduate from the cohort. And that project can be a research project, or you launch something on
a testnet, whatever it may be. But we want to give you an individualized attention to actually apply
the material that you're learning. So that's sort of the trade off there. I will say, recently, we have
started more of other clubs on campus, like an investment club, like a blockchain or crypto investment
club, and another club that's more involved in research to create one bigger conglomerate,
to co-mingle the communities together and make it stronger. But now we're taking in more members
and trying to provide education to practically everybody who wants to join. But last semester,
it was a bit more exclusive. But this semester, we actually got a record number of applicants,
and we're providing everybody some sort of room and some sort of ability to attain exposure to the space.
Focusing on quality over quantity and more individualized attention. I mean, I can see
why that works and why that's better for member retention. I had a question about credentials
and metrics. What are you looking for in the students that apply? What are you guys considering
before accepting? Yeah, so the most important criteria for assessment is simply interest.
Why do you want to join? If you have no idea what a smart contract is, if you have no idea how
Bitcoin works, anything works, it's fine. It's completely fine by us. The primary aspect is how
much effort did you put into that initial short application essay and why you want to join. So once
that interest box is ticked off, then the second round is like, okay, we look at your resume and a
couple of the projects you've worked on in the past, etc. But we're not looking for experience in
blockchain or any of that. We're looking for you are somebody who likes to innovate, you're somebody
who likes to learn and are excited about going to this space. So yeah, it's pretty straightforward and
basic. But that's sort of the it's just an it's just a very basic application that we have for people.
But it's worked out relatively well. So once you present your your project and graduate from the
cohort, then what then it's what part of the club do you enter? Right, then you're like officially a member
of of your you're allowed to partake in any sort of like external work. And by that, I mean,
you have the ability to apply to governance or consulting, primarily, you would go to towards
consulting. And once you have a hand in that, perhaps you want to do more research, and you
can go into governance. But let's talk about consulting quickly. Our consulting process is
every semester we have, we partner with around three different companies, whether it's an open
protocol, whether it's a company, like we've worked with, we worked with PayPal before, we've also
worked with Solana before. So it really, it really varies. And the types of projects also vary. Sometimes
it's like a research oriented project. Other times, it's well, we're building out a system of smart
contracts for the company. So it can vary. But the application process for that is, well, it's very
similar to getting into the cohort, you basically provide your provide an essay, you provide which
project you want to work for your resume. And then we do, we do like an office hours slash interview to
see your interest level and what you want to apply towards. But those projects last for about three
months. And, and, and again, they're the teams are a combination of, like, probably three devs,
and one, say, economic student, or say, like a, like a mathematics student. So that's sort of the
consulting aspect.
Based on your breakdown, and just based on what I know about Michigan, there must be some
brilliant young minds that come through the club that graduate from the cohort,
bringing it back to the governance sector. Why do you think it's taking you guys so long to expand
that team of five people and add more heads?
I will have you know that previously, it was three, we just got to five or the path like
two months. But it's, it's again, that aspect of one, we don't just want to hand out or metamask
to everybody, because everybody on the team essentially has access to the seed phrase and
has the ability to vote on whatever they like. So we want to vet the people first. But that isn't
to say that everybody on the team has to have access to that. And so that's the sort of model
we're going towards. But the structure, I really want to start implementing is we have researchers,
we have like researchers who are involved in, in researching other protocols, and in providing
information about a certain providing information about say, an Aave proposal goes up each week,
we have a handful of Aave proposals, maybe like three. And one person leading the charge for that
is, it's oftentimes too little, we don't have too much time to be very analytical. But we can have
somebody who's like an Aave lead. And then under them, we can have a couple of researchers who are
helping provide information to that Aave lead. The only reason we have sort of been slow about initiating
this is because it's, it's hard to, it's hard to manage a structure like this when you have
so many different people partaking in this, because we meet like twice a week, our team of five meets
twice a week, and our meeting, meetings last around an hour. And if we have more, and that's only
discussing three protocols, and just a small number of people, the more people we have, it becomes,
it becomes a problem of scale. And so we need to operationally divide it up into, you know,
we have multiple meetings, multiple different sectors, it's just, it's an operational hazard.
And it's more difficult to take, you know, keep track of. And that's the only reason we haven't
done it. It's not like we can't do it. I agree, there's a degree of, there's a degree of complacency
that is present there. But we are certainly trying to expand a little bit more, and also making it
more transparent. Like recently, we, one of our, one of our missions for this year,
we actually started like a couple weeks back is being more, being more transparent about why we
make certain governance decisions, just to show the members like, okay, we have this governance sector,
this is what's involved. And this is what you are, you can potentially join in the future. And we also
want to provide help to external companies, like if we're working with, like recently, we worked with,
with Boba network, in order to provide them publicity, and simultaneously in order to
show why we support them and voted yes on the proposal, we recently released a couple of threads,
like we released a thread last, last week about, about Boba network. And so that's what we're trying
to do nowadays as well is to provide more content. And in order to do that at scale, we also need more
researchers. So we're slowly getting there. But the only reason we haven't is partly complacency and partly
because it just becomes a mess.
Fair enough. And Abdullah, I'm curious to know how the greater Michigan student base
feels about Web3, how your friends feel about Web3, people that you don't work with and people that
aren't really in this industry, but you spend your days with your family. I don't know if you have
siblings, but I would love to hear more about how fellow Gen Z's in your circles feel about this
industry. Yeah. Sure. Let me start off by talking about our faculty, actually.
The sentiment from faculty at the university is,
it's not, it's not great. It could be a lot better. The only course we have currently about
blockchain or crypto or anything to do with that space. There's this one business course on that
right now. There's no other specialized engineering course. There's no course like on solidity or smart
contracts or any of that. And that's really a barrier to entry to the space for a lot of students.
And the course of the business course that we have, it's actually a thin tech course. That's
technically what it's called. And part of it just talks about blockchain. But there's a lot of work
we have to do to sort of bring faculty on board. And this entire initiative of BAM and all of the
stuff we do is really internally oriented. It's very much student led. Everything we do is initiated
by the students. And we're trying to bring faculty on board a little bit more because that increases
the degree of validity from the space. And it actually allows for students to see that
that this is a valid and viable career path for the future. So for students,
most of it is actually pretty negative, the sentiment. And that's partly because of the
events we've seen recently. It's partly because the like, like NFTs are seen as complete scams.
These words are, like I said before, they're just pejoratives at this point. And over the past few
months, obviously, we saw Terra Luna, 3AC, Celsius, FTX, all of these different issues happening.
And the tabloids and the news articles that are released, they have a pretty negative tilt on
crypto itself. And so most of the students simply look at those, look at those things and look at the
market and see a lot of red. And that leads them to believe it's a, it's just a scam. So most of the
perception for students is that this is not a viable career path. And it's not something they're really
interested in going towards. And even in our club, it's not like people see this as something they want
to do full time. Like I, most people I say, actually, yeah, I would say like 95% of our engineers,
even they don't want to go forward and be like solidity engineers or work on a web three product.
They look at the club as a, perhaps a stepping stone to get introduced to a new industry. And that's
completely fine. But what I'm trying to say is that the industry hasn't reached that point of validity
where people can see themselves being like a, like a digital asset consultant.
But what we need for that to, for that to advance in the future is we need to get validity from
faculty. We need to start implementing courses that show that there is something here, something
of substance here they can bring into the future. And that's partly why we're, you know, we're running
these, I'm putting a lot of emphasis on consulting and governance is because we're working with
companies. We're working with some of the largest companies in the space and some of the largest
stakeholders in the space to show that there is validity here. And like yesterday, I spoke to,
um, uh, I spoke to a consultant at, uh, at EY. Um, and they're, they're, they're starting to create a,
you know, a digital asset sector. Um, there's also a program going on at say Deloitte. They're creating
a digital asset sector as well, but it's not very big and it's not very, it's like a side project almost,
right? Like a side venture that they're, that they're partaking in. And one of our goals in
the coming months is to start putting up career fairs with, with, uh, with known brands like PayPal
and with known companies, recruiters like a, like a JP Morgan or some of the top four consulting firms
to show or, uh, to advertise their blockchain divisions because they exist. They may be small,
but they exist, but we need to have those recruiters on campus to sort of shift that sentiment,
um, uh, for these students. But there are a handful of students who are just, you know,
you can say that all, no publicity is bad publicity. And that partly goes to like why we attain so many
different applicants because this semester is because, uh, I mean, it's in everybody's purview
at this standpoint. Everybody's has heard of an NFT or crypto at, to some extent, and they're curious
about it. So as long as that curiosity is cultivating, and as long as we're getting some of the larger,
uh, brands and professors and, you know, larger stakeholders presenting the, the, the space as
something valid, then I think we can have a pretty large impact in shifting the perception of students
and allowing them to see that this is a valid, um, direction to take.
Mm-hmm. Abdullah, I, I can't remember. I think it was Duke when we had them on, but the, uh, yeah,
I think the Duke blockchain lab, they teach a course, or I think in conjunction with a university
professor, they help teach a course, a basic course on solidity, smart contracts, et cetera.
Is that something that you guys have explored or have ambitions of doing?
Right now we have, um, we, so the technical education is part of our cohort. Yeah. We teach
basic solidity, basic work with smart contracts. So that's like the only,
the only exposure students have, you know, basically on campus to this sort of work.
Um, but something interesting too, is that a lot of these protocols too, they're really making a,
making a pretty large effort to start, um, to be involved in the creation of these different,
uh, curricula, these blockchain curricula. And so they want to like, like, for example,
we had scroll come on the other time, the other, uh, a few weeks back, and they wanted to create,
to, um, sponsor a part of our curriculum by teaching students about ZK EVMs. So that's one
way to sort of integrate this into the system and show the school that we're working with big
protocols here who are giving us like educational material to teach students about, you know, the space.
But right now, the only sort of exposure to like learning solidity on campus is probably just
through running, um, running through our cohorts, but nothing, nothing much else, but that's starting to change.
Okay. You did mention a career fair, uh, potential career fair where you guys bring in brands like
PayPal, JP Morgan, et cetera. Have you thought about throwing your own conference, hosting your own
conference? Yeah, we're, um, we're, that's one of the things we want to start implementing, uh, very
soon, uh, a conference like throughout the business school or at the engineering campus and bring in,
like I said, protocols, native web three, bring in consulting companies, bring in, um, recruiters,
like, like a big tech companies. And so we're planning on doing something like that soon. There's
also another group on our, uh, on campus called a college doubt. They're also working on throwing
a couple of these events and different universities. Um, but we're, we're working with a couple of people
to sort of figure these things out, but we definitely want to run like a conference or like a career
fair sometime this semester or next semester, but it's definitely on our timeline.
Crypto moves fast. The space moves fast, Abdullah. So I typically would say three to five years, but
with respect to our industry in the next one to three years, where do you want to see, uh,
when do you want to see BAM going? Like what, what's your, what are your aspirations for the club?
Right. Uh, so my hopes for the club in the, in the next few years are we have a very, we are like the
predominant, predominant hub in the Midwest for, for crypto. And that comes from multiple different
standpoints. That comes from the standpoint of, we want to be like the de facto, um,
um, like education community for where students go to learn about, about cryptocurrencies. And we have
very direct involvements with courses on campus. Uh, we also, one of the, one of the things we want
to work out is creating a sort of incubator on campus. Uh, this is something that has naturally
proliferated throughout campus. We have a couple of different startups popping up.
They're not directly associated with like clubs. They're just doing their own thing. And that's
partly because the clubs haven't really provided, um, a, a space to work on, to, to work on anything
that's in the vein of entrepreneurship. And so one of the main things that I would love to have
for BAM in the next few years is we have something, uh, we've been talking about this before. It's like
BAM labs, which is kind of like an accelerator or an incubator that we have running, um, for
students to come in and build out their projects. Like I mentioned, like the students in the cohort
that after completing their cohort, they present a project. A lot of these could just be startups,
but they're just ideas that, you know, that these guys present and never return to again. So we want
to actually make something of that. And if we can create like an incubator where, you know,
a lot of students come in for the sake of entrepreneurship, for the sake of building
out these projects to BAM, that would be absolutely amazing. And we have networks with different
VCs and different, uh, grants programs who want to give us money. It just takes time to implement
these systems. We can't just take advantage of every single opportunity. In fact, in this space,
the issue really is there's so much going on. It's like an always overstimulation. There's a lot of
money out there. There's a lot of opportunities out there. It's just, you have to be very selective
about which, which ones you take because the time is important. Right. And so this is one of the
things we sort of have set off for the past few years, but now that we're gaining a lot more
traction that we're becoming a bit more solidified in the space, we can actually start applying for
these grants and have competent people to build out these projects. So something like a labs or an
incubator would be absolutely phenomenal. In addition to the current education, consulting and governance
divisions that we have. I'm going to quote you here, Abdullah. We are in the midst of a tug of war
between numerous L2s, each claiming to bring higher degrees of efficiency and lower transaction costs.
So how do these L2s differentiate themselves? By identifying a niche to dominate by unique
tactical methods, tactical methods, today's L2 of interest, BOBA network. Now, I want you to
answer that first question. How do L2s differentiate themselves? It's a pinned tweet on your profile.
I thought it was interesting. Sure. Yeah. So this was actually the tweet that we, that I released
recently in addition to the BOBA, like the BOBA advertisement. So we wanted people to be aware of
BOBA's on-chain vote for launching unit swap on their, on their chain. And so this is one way we
sort of put this out there. So this thread was just talking about, talking about differentiating,
differentiating between the different value props of different L2s and how perhaps BOBA fits into that
structure. Now, right now, as you mentioned, Noah, we are, we're involved in, in this sort of space where so
many different L2s are popping up and a lot of them are just general purpose L2s and they don't
have a mechanism that differentiates themselves or makes them unique. And this can, this can go for,
this is actually primarily attached to most optimistic rollups. Like ZK rollups is, is a
completely different space right now. It's a lot more research oriented and we'll see how that plays
out with like, uh, with scroll, uh, with polygon Hermes and ZK sync and all these different projects
coming out. But with just with like OP or optimistic rollups, we're seeing like Arbitrum and Optimism,
all of these chains pop up and they're very much, they're very much just focused, focused on DeFi or
have some random gaming projects launching on them. And that's fine for the, for the start,
you can be very general purpose in the beginning when a space hasn't been dominated. But as more and more
L2s come in, and this is analogous to basically a bunch of different companies coming into an
industry, you have to start differentiating yourselves. You have to start posing some
sort of value proposition that makes you distinct from current chains. Now let's just say Arbitrum is
like the, the primary, the primary DeFi chain, because you have like GMX and, um, other protocols that
have launched on, uh, on, on Arbitrum and they have a very high TV on, they've established themselves
as a predominant player. Um, and then we look at optimism and see, okay, what are they doing
differently? It's not, it's not too different. They have very similar models and one of them could
easily cannibalize the other. Uh, one of the reasons like optimism is staying alive is because
they have like airdrops, right? You are incentivized to partake in an activity in that system.
But what happens after those incentives run out, you get cannibalized, you get eaten up by the
bread, by the better protocol. So this is even worse for other protocols coming in for other L2s
coming in. If we, if we're talking about like loop ring, or if we're talking about Metis or Boba,
they have to do something different. So the reason I mentioned Boba here is because they have something
unique that other L2s don't necessarily have. By the way, Boba network about a year ago, or actually
maybe like half a year ago, they were just a general purpose L2. The idea was, okay, come to our
chain and build stuff on our chain because we're faster, we're cheaper, basically the promise of
every L2, but that's not, that's not unique enough. So over the past few months, they rebranded
themselves as a, as a gaming chain focused on the, the chain that people go to develop. Their, their
dApps are gaming oriented and they're able to access web two systems. This is the most unique
part about Boba. Boba network, their value prop is something called hybrid compute. Hybrid compute
is essentially a mechanism that allows for smart contracts. So stuff on chain to connect to web two
APIs. So if you are like running a video game, or if you're running like a complex algorithm,
like an, like a machine learning algorithm, you can't really do that on chain because stuff on chain
right now is you can't over encumber, you can't over encumber a chain right now, or else it just
doesn't work. So what you do is launch or program whatever you need off chain on a traditional,
in a traditional manner, and then use an API to connect that to a smart contract. So essentially,
now you have a game running on traditional systems. But on top of that, through hybrid compute,
you have like that economic layer, that token layer on top of it that is run by Boba. So that's
sort of the value proposition there. And there are other L2s coming up with value props like, like
Metis is, they're doing a lot of things to bring in like traditional, like companies into web, into
web three, and simultaneously creating like a, like a reputation system. Again, this may not be
specialized enough. But if they can get away with it, they can become like one of the more predominant,
decentralized identity, L2 protocols, where you have like a very robust credit system and reputation
system, relative to other L2s. But that's, that's sort of the idea, we want to specialize in the type
of the type of services we provide, or else you will not succeed in the L2 space.
So we had Metis on, and I want to get Boba on now, because it sounds really interesting. You just,
I'm going to reiterate what you said, just to make the connections in my head. You, you said that
they use something called a hybrid, they use something called a hybrid computing mechanism
that allows smart contracts to collect the web two API. So does that mean that a video game that is
currently a web two oriented video game can utilize the power of smart contract and tokenizations
via this kind of off chain to on chain tunnel? Exactly.
Right, right, right. So exactly, you can run everything, like, say you're playing like,
say you're playing like RuneScape, right? World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft, okay.
All the operations, all the missions, everything that is running on, in your game is going to be
run on the web two system. All the heavy lifting, all the algorithms, all of that is going to be,
is going to be running on, on web two. But the economic layer, and maybe like the, the item,
the item, um, owning like different, say different skins or weapons, all of that stuff can be
represented as an NFT. And the entire game economy can effectively be on chain. So essentially the
operations of the game are off chain, but the economy itself, that layer on top is on chain.
So you have that meshed in like mechanism there. So that allows you to essentially have the effect,
the efficiency of a normal game, but simultaneously the ownership aspect that you attain
from a web three system. Wow. This is really cool. And I want to ask you more questions about this,
but I also don't want to get too far off track. Um, Abdullah, how much longer do you have with us?
Um, I'm willing to go as long as you'd like. Okay.
Careful what you ask for. Oh, I know you've done an eight hour, eight hour, uh, space before,
so that scares me. So then one last question on this, and I think you already answered it, but
how easy is it for a traditional web two game right now to say, Hey, we see the value in asset
ownership by NFTs. We see the value of tokenizing our in-game economy. Um, we want to get in contact
with Boba. How easy of a lift is it to like, let's say runescape, for example, to take runescape
and basically have the assets and the token be represented by NFTs and utility token
or the in-game currency rather. The bigger the game is, the harder it's going to be. The later
the stage of the current game is the harder it's going to be. So if you're a startup, a lot easier
for you to start implementing these systems simply because there's the number of assets
you have to convert and the number of changes you have to make. It's a lot easier. So that's,
that's like the sort of the worry here, because I don't think you can expect realistically to take
like a triple a game that currently exists and change and change the mechanisms of it to make it
on chain. That's just too difficult. In my opinion, it can happen. It's not impossible, but it's,
it's a big hassle. So it's a lot easier for like a startup or a new game to, to, to sort of work here.
So like the current partnerships that they have, they're just, they're just small games, small games
that are, you know, that are just starting out that don't have too much publicity. And that's the
thing. If people want to change, like they want to have like these big games like runescape or GTA,
all of these things to, to have, to have on chain mechanisms incorporated, but it's, it's not that
simple. So the more, the easier, the, the, the newer the game is, and the less stuff there is already
on the game, the easier it is to incorporate on, on chain mechanisms with it. So sorry to kill the
party, but it's, it's unlikely that most incumbent games will, will incorporate this into the system.
It's going to be in the near ones. All right. Well, we'll, we'll turn this tension train around
and head back to, um, head back to the conversation that started this whole broadcast. Abdullah, you're
obviously doing incredible things. You're very well-spoken, you're very intelligent and doing
incredible things with BAM. When you graduate, what are your career aspirations? What do you want
to do? Sure. Um, so the reason, for example, I am like, um, I decided to go with something like,
like, like business. I'm a business student. And the reason I decided to go down this path
is primarily because it leaves me with a ton of different options and the business side of things,
the money side of things is often the thread that goes through all other industries. And without
that sort of knowledge, it's difficult to, it's difficult to, um, sort of get your, get yourself off
the ground. And, and another thing about being a selling business is that you actually have a little
bit more time to do other things. Like right now I'm working at, uh, at Arana Ventures. So that's
like my, I'm working in governance and Arana Ventures. That takes up a lot of my time.
Say I was, uh, like previously I was actually a pre-med student. Um, I couldn't do this if I,
if I was pursuing that, um, that career path. And so that was like sort of a tactical decision that
I had to make previously to start doing more things and, uh, more things in the,
so to speak real world and outside of academia while being, um, while pursuing my degree. So
my goal, um, and my current, my, my current goal, like right after I graduate is going to work at,
uh, at Arana. We are, we're currently, uh, in the middle of like raising our current fund. We are,
our strategies have shifted relatively over the past, um, over the past year or so. Um, but right now,
what we're trying to do with this fund is we have two different initiatives going on. One of them is
launching a fund of funds and the reason we're, which basically means we are a fund that invests
in other funds. Yes. It's a bit meta, but, um, hear me out. So the, the reason we're sort of
pursuing this, this structure is because it allows us to get access to a lot of fund managers and people
who have experience running different funds and have experienced trading crypto or investing in
crypto, um, for a handful of years, obviously, like I said previously, nobody's a real veteran
in the space and there's not too much historical data to go off of. However, it's nice to have
experience and it's nice to have some sort of main backing that you can provide to your investors.
So essentially we look for different types of, um, different types of funds to invest in,
whether it's a high growth fund or more so like a market neutral, low beta fund. Uh,
so that's our first initiative. It gives us a degree of credibility and access to a network
of other investors. And then our second fund is that we're currently working on more heavily
is, is using internal capital at the moment. But what our current, uh, pursuit is, and right now it's
myself and my business partner, uh, part of the ledger, uh, uh, working, uh, on this with me. It's,
we're going through like the top 2000 projects on coin market cap or coin gecko and weeding them out,
looking at all of them and saying, okay, this one works. This one doesn't work. This one doesn't work.
And we're using like a sort of funneling process to break down what the best projects are,
what narratives we can sort of find from this analysis. And we sort of started this, uh,
about a month ago and we're a couple of weeks in, but we're just trying to identify different
narratives, uh, different trends in the market, um, and see what, how we can prep ourselves prior
to the next bull run and make our positions, uh, as soon as possible. And, uh, and keep, uh,
keep, uh, keep a, keep a lookout for a couple of different, uh, threads that we're going to release
and some content we're going to release regarding these different spaces. Uh, right now we're
actually pretty interested in, in the NFT space, NFT five and, uh, and gaming, anything that has
to do with like easy user adoption. So my current plans are to go work for that fund at the moment
and perhaps afterwards or, you know, whatever opportunity presents me in the, in the, in the
vein of entrepreneurship, that would be very exciting for me because my goal is to build something from the
ground up. That's what's most exciting to me rather than going to work for a larger firm.
That's sort of the direction I've always tended towards. And, uh, that's the direction I will
be heading towards, uh, for the foreseen future. That makes two of us. So you guys are doing your
business partner going through the top 2000 projects, finding out which ones you like,
which ones don't, what metrics, I mean, NFTs and gaming, no brainer. What other metrics are you
guys looking for to decide what you like and what you want to funnel out? Right. So the, the due
diligence process differs at what during, it depends on the state of due diligence,
right? We have like stage one, stage two, stage three, but the, the earlier stages,
which we're currently at, we essentially just look at, we open up a project, go through the website,
go through the team and analyze. Okay. These are the people who are building,
we're building this project. This is their credibility. This is what they've done in the past.
Okay, cool. Now we've got to look at, now we've got to look at the sentiment and the social media
and how people are reacting to this, because there are two components when, when, uh, investing in,
in, in, in these projects. It's, we have to have the traders on our side and we have to have that sort
of momentum. And simultaneously we have to have a community that is currently being garnered,
because if you just have traders, you're going to see them go away after a certain period of time.
That's very transitory. But if you have that community that is consistently being solidified,
and if you can see that through Twitter or through any other social media or like a website,
like sentiment, we can see that there is a community being established here. So there are two things,
but again, only a community is not enough to, because we need that momentum, that financial
incentive for people to trade and have, you know, we have to have high volume. We have to have all these
other factors incorporated there as well. Um, along with that, along with sentiment and team,
uh, we, in our second round of due diligence, we tend to go more into the technicals, uh,
whether it really depends what we're looking at, because with a gaming project, one of the important
things to look at is just the aesthetics of it, the appeal of it, and whether it's usable or not,
because a lot of these games that we've seen are basically just a unity package copied and pasted over
and over again with very small changes and they're presenting themselves as unique.
But you have to see sort of through that facade, right? And so that's like one of the metrics we
have to analyze for gaming is how different are they actually from each other and how, how appealing
are they to people? Because we have to look at the psychology of these things as well. So that's for
gaming. But when we're looking at an L2 or like an L1 project, those are a bit different to analyze.
We have to look at other metrics. We have to look at the consensus mechanism. We have to look at how
they're addressing, say, like the blockchain trilemma, how they're differentiating themselves
from an Ethereum. I mean, one of the reasons something like a Solana makes sense is because
they have a clear, clearly different value prop. Like we mentioned before with L2s, you have different
value propositions and you're bringing something different to the table. But all these other Ethereum
killers that are, you know, that are, that are providing nothing different than just, you know,
just a small different chain, different, like one interesting example, actually, that comes to my
mind is BNB chain. BNB chain is actually just a regurgitation, is a regurgitation of Ethereum.
It's just a fork, copy and paste. But what they've done differently is their value prop is that they're
actually centralized. You think that is, you would think that is a bad thing. And a lot of people do,
and I'm not going to say it's not, but that's their current value prop is because, because they're
centralized, they're able to make their chain a lot faster. Therefore, their ecosystem is really,
really fast at iterating on projects and very good at releasing a high quantity of different projects
out there. So again, it depends on what sector we're looking at, what type of projects we're looking
at. And it really varies depending upon, you know, whether it's an L1, whether it's an L2,
whether it's gaming, but there's a decent amount of crossover. And a lot of the crossover, again,
goes towards the team, the sentiment, the socials, and, you know, just some of the basic heuristic
aspects of weeding down what a project is.
Yeah, beautifully put. And this leads really to the next part of the conversation that I love having
with all the students that have come on so far. This is a kind of Q&A section. So let's start with
Bitcoin. What are your thoughts on Bitcoin? And do you see Bitcoin ever being flipped?
That is an interesting question. Now, first, we have to look at, yeah, we have to look at the
purpose of Bitcoin. So the purpose of Bitcoin is to be a store of value. It's not exactly a great
medium of exchange. It's pretty expensive and clunky. And that's on purpose. That's how it's meant to be.
And the things that you want to you want to make sure that Bitcoin has the features is it has to be
secure, it has to be decentralized. And it has to be it has to be the case that it just it's immovable.
It's a strong, solid asset. That's what it's supposed to be a store of value. My only contention with
Bitcoin is that after all of the Bitcoin are essentially mined, the 21 million Bitcoin after
they're mined, what's going to happen? The security of the system actually wanes.
And here's what I mean by that. Currently, the Bitcoin miners earn their rewards. The business
model for Bitcoin is this. The miners earn their rewards by mining the Bitcoin and attaining a certain
incentive by new Bitcoin being put into the circulating supply. And you also get an incentive
for the miners through transactions. So whenever you transact, a portion of that goes to the miners.
And whenever new Bitcoin are created, a portion of that goes to, again, the miners. But what happens
when you run out of new Bitcoin to issue? Well, the only way miners make money, again, miners are the
people who are securing the system. The only way miners make money after that is through transaction
fees. But where's the issue with this? Bitcoin is meant to be a store of value. A store of value
is supposed to increase in its value over time. And it's supposed to be like a deflationary asset.
So what happens when an asset is supposed to increase over time and it's supposed to be a strong
store of value? It means people tend to hold on to it and tend to transact less with it. That's just
the nature of an asset like that. And what happens when less and less people are trading Bitcoin? Well,
less and less money is being put into the pockets of the miners. Okay, what happens then? Less miners
are involved in securing the chain. What happens then? The chain collapses. That's sort of like a doomsday
vision. But hopefully, the number of transactions remains high enough over a long period of time for
miners to stay miners, right? So that's the only issue with Bitcoin that I currently have. But
there's only one true store of value that really exists right now in the entire crypto ecosystem,
and that is Bitcoin. It's a strong money. Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, I guess we'll see. Well,
you were going to answer that second part of the question. So I guess we'll see. I guess the last
Bitcoin is supposed to be mine sometime in 2060. I'm not sure that the year always seems to change,
but we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. And then you wanted to answer the
second part of the question. Do you ever see it being flipped? We could. Again, I can't answer that.
That's a speculative question. Obviously, it depends. 100%.
It really depends. Ethereum right now is obviously the king. It's the decentralized computer of the
world. And if Ethereum is able to scale properly, if it's able to have a robust enough L2 ecosystem,
if large incumbent companies come onto Ethereum and the upgrades go well, so everything is more
effective, more efficient, secure. Again, Ethereum has a huge advantage. They've subverted the blockchain
trilemma by creating their modular structure, right? By creating all these L2s and all these different
systems. And that's why Ethereum is in a really, really good place to potentially flip it. Can I say,
yes, will it or will it not? I don't know. But when you're talking about just a store of value,
and let's just compare Bitcoin to gold versus a computerized system, a global network, what's more
valuable? A global network over time or just a store of value? Well, that could be the answer there.
That could be the flipping there. But here's the thing. You also simultaneously have to look at the
value accrual mechanism for ETH, because it's not just about the network effects and about the
modularity of Ethereum. It's about how the tokenomics work. And it is very possible that
that the value accrual for Ethereum itself could not be as optimal as we think. And that's one of the
threats there as well. But only time will really tell. But again, I wouldn't be surprised if Ethereum
at some point does flip. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't. That's a very cop-out answer,
but that's just my honest answer. No, it's a fair answer. And what concerns you? I don't know you
use that word, but what concerns you about the tokenomics?
Right. One of the things that you can say is because it's a deflationary token,
right? Because again, when you're looking at a deflationary token, prior to the merge itself,
the token, the Ethereum token was inflationary. And that can have some repercussions in the long
run because people are incentivized more to hold onto a deflationary token. And that, again, that's
probably not best for an ecosystem for its growth. And also when you have a ton of different L2s being
built on top of this system, the people who are securing the Ethereum blockchain will not be earning
as many fees if you have a ton of L2s. But here's where it can sort of work.
You have to run into a balancing act. You have to run into sort of like an optimal point where there
are enough L2s that exist and simultaneously that there are enough transactions going through to the
L1 to incentivize people to stake their ETH. So it all depends upon how much value accrual there is for
the Ethereum token as well. And the introduction of L2s can actually take away the value accrual for the
Ethereum token because it's a lot less transactions going through and all of the throughput is essentially
outsourced to a different layer. So that's why I'm only concerned with Ethereum's value accrual. But
again, my personal opinion is that the market itself will run into an equilibrium point
where there are an optimal number of L2s and simultaneously there are an optimal number of
transaction fees being fed to the stakers that keeps them happy and keeps them happy and fed.
So the Ethereum layer becomes a chain of proofs and pretty much all transactions happen on highly
scalable roll-ups and L2s. Right, exactly. So you're essentially outsourcing all the transactions, right?
That's the issue. Because if you had all the transactions occurring on the L1, again,
it would be good for the people who are staking, right? But then the user experience just sucks. It's not
great. You only have very limited block space, the gas fees, rocket. And so the way to mitigate that,
again, is to have L2s. But the issue with L2s is that you're outsourcing all of that execution to the L2s.
And that decreases the number of fees that are collected by the stakers.
Which L1s, which alt L1s and L2? I think you mentioned Boba. So which alt L1s are you currently bullish on?
Right. Boba is an L2, so it's an optimistic roll-up. It's basically a fork of optimism.
So alt L1s, again, I very much teeter towards Ethereum. But if I had to look at other ones,
I would say Cosmos is very interesting. Solana is interesting too. Let me just quickly mention Solana
here. Solana began and was propped up very, very much by VCs. And a lot of, you know,
one of them was obviously FPX. And so a lot of the projects on Solana as well, they were,
they were started by, started by, started by these VCs and there was a heavy involvement by
other VCs, like, like a, like jump. And one of the issues that, that created was,
there was a lot of fake, there was a lot of fake transactions. The TVL was faked and
a number of issues ran into, ran in with the ecosystem that you can't really confirm whether it's,
whether things are valid or not. But the thing is, even though the ecosystem,
the Solana ecosystem was propped up by, let's just call it like a Fugazi, you had legitimate
developers coming into the space. So it just so happened to be the case that this fake community
or these, yeah, this fake community actually brought in legit, a legitimate group of people.
And they started creating these different protocols. They started creating a bunch of
NFT systems, some DeFi. Well, it's, it's very, very, very much oriented towards NFTs.
But we worked with Solana last semester. I mean, and the group, the group of devs that we worked with,
they're very passionate about what they did. Obviously, it's not a perfect system. But the thing about
Solana is that they have a, they have a very passionate community. They went down to like
$8 and now they're back up to, you know, like 24. So there is a stability that is present there,
I believe, even though they went through a very rough period. And the value prop for Solana is clear.
They want to be quick. They want to be fast. And even though they sacrifice some of the other elements
of the, of the trilemma, they have a value prop there. And another interesting thing that's coming
out with these guys that a lot of you perhaps have seen is, is the phone is the Sol phone.
And that could be an interesting, interesting move too. I don't know if it's a, it's a positive,
I don't know if it's a greatest move, but it could set a precedence for gravitating away from
a more centralized or yeah, more centralized system that is run by say, like Apple,
that ecosystem is very closed off and there's a tremendous tax apps have to pay for transactions.
So, you know, this could lead to the different revolution for, you know, for, um, a decentralized
sort of hardware system, because not only does, not only does the, the innovation for a certain
technology rely on software, hardware is imperative. And I think that's overlooked quite often. So
Solana is an interesting one. Cosmos is an interesting one simply because it's a
very grassroots community and they don't, they actually have quite the opposite problem of,
of Solana. Solana was heavily propped up by VCs. Cosmos is not propped up like at all by VCs.
They pretty much have an animosity towards them and it's very grassroots. And that's the thing. These,
the L, the alt L ones that I'm excited about are the ones that provide something unique and different.
And the fact that Cosmos is out there, um, just doing whatever they want in their own silos,
not bringing in too much, uh, too much attention from external money. It's something different,
right? It's chaotic, but it's exciting because it's unique and it could work out. It's, it's,
it's a test. So that's, yeah, that's sort of my opinion regarding all the ones.
Yeah. I've been learning more and more about Cosmos. Super interesting. We've had a couple of guys come
on, but we have one guy come on so far and then we have another, another speaker coming on, but
the Solana phone is something that I'm very interested in exploring. I'm probably going to
end up buying one just to play around with it and see how it works. It's the first of its kind. So
always fun to be part of that tech and participate in, you know, in what they're building. I've not too,
I haven't been too, uh, curious about exploring the ecosystem, but I do remember how big and, and how
much hype there was around it back in 2021. Really quick, what are your thoughts on Avalanche, Abdullah?
Avalanche, the only reason I have sort of looked into them a little bit more is because they do have,
they're becoming more robust in their gaming sector. The games are launching a little bit more,
you know, more effectively and they're playable. That's the thing. You can play some of the games,
but they don't have a terrible amount of traction. When I look at like Avalanche and I look at
like a, like, like a Polkadot, they, they're pretty, they have a lot of differences, but
they're sort of in the same camp for me. And what I mean by that is it's hard to sort of scale their
systems, especially with like a, especially with Polkadot. Avalanche actually has less of a problem
there, but I think their, their systems and scaling their systems is a lot more difficult than,
than other blockchains, particularly like, like an Ethereum has, it's been a lot more effective.
So, you know, I, I'm not terribly familiar with the ecosystem in Avalanche other than their gaming
parts, but it's not something I'm very, very interested in simply because they have lost that
first mover advantage in terms of the L1 advantage to, to Ethereum and their value prop is, is not
terribly different from, um, is not terribly different from other L1s. That's sort of my opinion there.
I'm sorry, I'm gonna, I'm gonna spitball here, but L2s to Ethereum are subnets to Avalanche. And
you're saying that because L2s, because L2s exist, and because Ethereum has been around so much longer
than L1, it kind of eliminates the need. And I'm not saying this is what you're saying, but this is
what I'm kind of conceptualizing. The necessity for Avalanche as an L1 with subnet technology might be
overshadowed by Ethereum's network effect and it, all the L2s that are being built.
Right, right. So like subnets or parachains on, on, on, on Polkadot, like these are very similar.
They're different and they have their own mechanisms. Like a parachain or a subnet is,
is different from an L2 slightly, but they're very similar in terms of like their end, their end value
that they're providing. Right. So they're very similar to an L2. So you're completely right. It's,
it's, it's a very similar structure. It's not terribly unique. They just have other,
some other mechanisms built in that make them slightly different. And I mean, it could work
out at some point, especially when you, when you're going between like, I don't know, maybe,
maybe Avalanche does become like the primary chain for gaming. Um, something interesting though, um,
different L2s can connect to each other. So you can have like a subnet and an L2 simultaneously exist.
Like Boba, for example, is an L2 on top of Ethereum, but it's also, it's also a subnet for, um,
it's kind of, it's kind of like a subnet. It's not exactly how it works, but it's,
it's also on Avalanche. It's also on Phantom. It's also on, on, uh, on Moonbeam. So that's,
you're exactly right in the, in that statement. It's, it's a very similar structure. It's not unique
enough. Um, but again, it could still work out, but I, again, from that, from that perspective,
I'm still, I'm still not seeing enough distinction from Ethereum and simply by the fact that Ethereum
has so much more going for it in terms of first mover advantage and building on top of it. I mean,
it's, for me, it's a no brainer to focus more so on, um, on Ethereum itself right now.
So NFTs, we've talked about gaming apart from gaming, art, music, what are some industries you
see being disrupted by NFTs? Well, practically anything in the world that has, I mean, most
things in the world are, uh, non, uh, non-fundable, right? So anything that has a non-fundable
quality, which is most things can be disrupted. And so whether it's real estate, whether it's
fashion, whether it's, uh, healthcare, it can be practically every, it can be practically anything.
And look, the, the misconception with NFTs is like, you just have a digital image that you're
looking at, right? Which is not, which is not, there's so much more that can occur with that.
Different protocols like, uh, like Uniswap B3 use NFTs to mark your position, to see your LP position.
You're using an NFT there to have like a decentralized identity. You're using an,
you're, you can use an ERC 721 token and an NFT. That's, that's exactly what you're using in those
cases. And you don't, you often don't realize that you're using NFT technology because it,
it serves as, uh, it serves as functionality for so many different, for so many different
aspects. Um, one of the interesting things that's not coming out in like DAOs as well is
you're going to start voting with like non-transferable NFTs. The, as Vitalik calls them,
soulbound tokens. Um, these have a lot of implications attached to them because it means
your wallet that you have, you have an NFT that is attached directly to you and you can't send it
to anyone else. And it, it's, it's isolated to you and that can allow for degrees to come on chain.
That can allow for, um, reputation to come on chain. It can validate like a, like a credit score. It can
be, uh, it can be, an NFT can be used to represent your, uh, represent KYC. Like, like BNB chain, for
example, has, uh, I believe they have non-transferable NFTs. They recently rolled out, they call them
BABs, if I'm not mistaken. And these are issued to people using BNB chain through the same process
of KYC that you go for their centralized exchange. So if you're doing, if you're validating yourself,
uh, for their centralized exchange, uh, through KYC, they essentially give you, they issue,
issue you a BAB, which is a non-transferable NFT. And you can use that on chain. And a lot of games
on BNB chain, for example, are using that reputation system, that credit score system
that is enabled by NFTs, um, start now. So, um, again, another project we mentioned before is
Metis. Metis is doing something very, very similar, reputation-based systems with non-transferable
NFTs. Uh, something recent that I, uh, uh, that I looked at actually, as I mentioned before, uh,
our, our cohorts, our BAM cohorts, we have to present a project at the end of our cohorts.
And, uh, the project my group worked on was actually ticketing, was using dynamic NFTs for
ticketing purposes. And the way that works is, okay, you issue an NFT to a person who wants to go to say,
like a, like a football game, a U of M football game. And you use that ticket to get into, into
the stadium. But in that stadium, you can accrue value for that ticket by saying, okay, we issued
10,000 tickets, but a hundred of them are going to turn gold. Okay. And they're going to have embedded
within them some sort of video highlight from the game that increases the value of that NFT. And how
does that change is because you can take, you can feed some data from a game. Say,
for example, somebody scores a touchdown and you can feed that onto the NFT and say,
here's a score. It's seven zero or whatever it may be. And the way you can do that is by using
oracles like chain link to dynamically, while you're in, in, in the, um, in the stadium,
change your ticket and accrue some value to it. So you can make it into a collectible. You can make it
into like a live, like a, like a live holographic feed for the, for the score. So you can add so
much utility, even from an entertainment perspective for these NFTs. Um, so yeah,
the, the, the, the possibilities are quite literally endless with the utility of NFTs.
Oof. Yeah, that's all. That's awesome. I didn't even think about dynamic NFT that gives you special
features, perks, functionality. Once you enter the stadium, just based on how well your team does,
based on some arbitrary metrics. Is this something you, you said something that you guys spun up for
the cohort? Yeah. So we created a, we created a little marketplace. It was just on a test net on
like Polygon. Uh, we spun something up quickly with dynamic or like, it was very basic, but the idea
was where we had this like ticket and in response to something that happened in the real world,
the condition of that ticket would change. Um, so that, yeah, that's just the idea behind dynamic
NFTs. Again, there's a, there was an article I saw like, I think yesterday, um, as a LinkedIn post
where the dynamic NFT concept was being used for real estate, where you are essentially,
you have the deed of a house and that is represented as an NFT. Now, say you want to
say something bad happens, uh, and you have to, you know, reconstruct the, the, the roof or you have
to replace the roof or get a new, uh, install a new like heating system or whatever it may be.
All of those different, all of those additions and changes that are made to the house can now
be represented into the NFT, into the metadata of the NFT. And you can have a log of what has occurred
with the house and you can have a chain of ownership. And simultaneously, you can, you can
have a log of this person worked on my house to fix this and that they can have a lien on that NFT
essentially. So these are the debt holders you have to pay to. So basically all that information
can be attached to the NFT itself and it can change as the stuff changes in the real world.
But the issue with this is that dynamic NFTs is that it takes time to, uh, to structure systems
where you're, you're able to send and feed live, like IRL information on chain. This is where oracles
come in and they have chain links. Fantastic. But again, there's a lot of work to do to create systems
where you can instantaneously get something, something that happens in real life. That chain,
that change is represented right away on chain. So, um, those systems are being in play, uh,
being, uh, consistently introduced in different areas. And one of them, again,
is just be real estate. So it's exciting.
Abdullah, you're clearly highly knowledgeable and, uh, with respect to this industry, very well spoken.
If one of your peers came up to you today and said, Hey, uh, I, I find your knowledge of the industry
inspiring, you know, a lot, I want to learn as much as you, where do I go? What do you tell them?
Well, uh, maybe I should break down like what I did. What did I do?
Yeah, do it.
Yeah, sorry. Um, my sort of introduction to crypto itself was, uh, it was a couple of years back, but
there's always this sort of feeling that I had about this, our current economic system. I read a couple of
different books. Um, like, uh, like one of my favorite ones to always mention is, uh, the
confessions of an economic hitman. And then there was a book about like the federal reserve called, uh,
the creature from Jekyll Island. And these sort of, you know, make me, made me a lot more skeptical,
skeptical about the financial system that we have. I was like, okay, do I want to go into like a wall
street position or one of these positions, or do I want to explore an alternative system? So that really
was my introduction to crypto. It was really started by, it started by introducing myself
to economics and seeing and thinking about how a different economic system or a financial system
can be introduced. That is better than our incumbent system. So that's really where it started as. And
so that curiosity about learning about finance and economics really spurred this. And after that,
um, like there was sort of a hiatus during, uh, like the bear market of like 2019, 2018.
But as soon as NFTs took off, that really was my gateway drug to start playing around with protocols
and buying NFTs and all these different things on chain. So I really didn't get the hang of stuff
until I started messing around with things, messing around with DeFi, messing around with
NFTs. So if you really want to, if you really want to get into the space, you have to go on chain,
you have to mess around with things. So it's not only a philosophical element, it's also,
you have to practically start implementing these things. And then if you have some sort of, um,
if you have some sort of organizational club around you that you can join, that would be fantastic.
That really spurred me forward because, um, the first sort of job that I had with the club was I,
I led consulting and then now I lead governance. So that really has allowed me to meet a lot of
different people, a lot of different companies and, um, and also allowed me to get that position at,
at, at, uh, at Arana Ventures. Um, and so from different perspectives,
it's really just diving into the, into the space and taking advantage of,
of, um, any opportunities that you have around you and online. And basically all the information
I learned is online. I just use YouTube. I use Twitter. Twitter's fantastic. Read a bunch of
different threads. Um, they'll, they'll get you informed pretty quickly. Uh, started off with a
couple of, uh, interesting YouTube channels, like, I don't know, whiteboard crypto is a fantastic one
to get started with and just newsletters. There are a handful of solid newsletters out there that
report on the daily ongoings of crypto. And so just keeping up to date with that,
um, and with the space I think is just the best way to get in. Um, yeah, so that's, that's really
what my journey has been. Yep. Agreed. I'm mostly self-taught myself, uh, with respect to crypto.
There's, there wasn't much around when I got into it in 2017 and YouTube, Twitter, and articles here
and there. I think there's such fantastic infrastructure for students at the collegiate level, clubs,
courses. None of this stuff was around when I was in college. So I don't think people have any
excuse. It's nice to have that guidance though. And it sounds like you guys are leaving the, um,
kind of leaving that front, uh, back to speculation because it's fun. Abdullah, do you think that we
have bottomed? Do I think that we have bottomed again? That's, that's an interesting question. I think,
um, I think, I think, I think the lens that you have to sort of look at this is just to probably
a macro, macroeconomic viewpoint. And just from a macroeconomic perspective,
we were, it was a high degree of uncertainty that came about when you had, when you had COVID,
right? And then you had a very strong bubble that formed, um, afterwards in the stock market
and the crypto and crypto, uh, Bitcoin reached all time highs, et cetera. And during this period,
we had a high, high degree of over leveraging. I mean, the entire reason we have this, this,
this collapse that we, that we ran into during 2022 is because people became overzealous. Uh,
things started rising. People started taking out loans and leveraging, yeah, beyond what they should
have. And that only works until it works. When the arc comes down, you're, you start getting liquidated.
You start getting liquidated. You have to pay about your debt holders. When you can't pay them back,
you have, you see, you can see more and more liquidations. That's effectively what occurred
with all the funds, um, that collapsed and along with FTX. And so all of these reasons are primarily
because of that increase of money inflow because of say money printing during COVID and all of that.
And that led to this, that leads to where we are right now. Um, so over the past few months,
we have seen the, the fed like tapering off, uh, over the past few months and, you know,
inflation reports are getting better. Um, we're seeing the employment rates getting better as well,
but again, it's, it's a high degree of, uh, of uncertainty practically everywhere you are.
Uh, the dollar became pretty strong relative to other economies. Um, but right, right now,
I'm actually in London. I'm studying abroad at the moment. And the system here is, you can see some
of the pain because you've got the energy crisis going on. Uh, you've got the pounds actually almost
reached parity at one point with the dollar. So you have a bunch of different economic factors
that are being involved, that are involved in, in, in, in stifling the growth of crypto at this
moment, at this moment. And so this is not just something we're looking at in a silo, right?
It's not just like what's going on in crypto. Can we see, uh, you know, can we see a resurgence in,
in, in, in Bitcoin, ETH, all these different alts. We also have to look at, we have to look at
equities. We have to look at inflation rates. We have to look at, um, we have to look at interest rates
and what the fed is doing and actively, uh, actively watch them. And at the moment it, at least for the year
of 2023, it seems like that recovery is, is going to be slow and steady, but this is the point where
we, especially like at our fund are looking at identifying as many projects as possible because
this is the point where everybody's sort of fleeing. And if you've been on Twitter, you know, CT has been
pretty dormant, at least in the past like month or two. And because people, people are scared and
they're leaving, but we had a small rally here, but likely it's not, it's not going to be what is,
at least in my opinion, the next run up. Um, but again, you can't really predict that. So
compared to where we were six months ago, a year ago, it's always an entry point. So from our funds
perspective, we're just entering whenever we, we really can and waiting for the next cycle to come.
But, uh, the year of 2023 is, is still going to be relatively tumultuous largely because of the
impending, um, the impending issues going on with the macro economy.
Has anyone told you you're a fantastic storyteller? And what I mean by that is I'll ask you a question
and you take that question and you paint an A, B, C, D from beginning to end story about
why the question is being asked, why the answer is being given, what the reasons are behind it,
what the micro reasons are behind that reason. And you kind of bring it all together. It's very impressive.
Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate it. Thank you.
So let me ask you this, and I, I'm going to ask you some percentages. What, what do you hold in your portfolio?
Uh, in my portfolio, interesting question. All right. Uh, right now, um,
um, I primarily just don't eat at the moment. I am start, I want to get into, as our fund is like
researching micros, right. Um, I want to start, start gravitating away from, from the larger cap
and into the smaller cap, because I mean, obviously we're doing it with our fund. I want to do it with
our, my personal, um, my personal holdings, but right now I'm mostly holding larger cap tokens.
Um, Ethereum is one of the primary tokens. I hold a couple of other L2s, um, a couple of other L2s,
including like, uh, like IMX. I actually consulted, uh, for IMX last semester. So I'm working pretty
closely with them. So I, I hold some of that. Um, do I regret some of, some of those things? I, I do,
because the, the tokenomics for a lot of these L2s in particular, especially optimism is, um, is not
particularly favorable, but you know, uh, I own a couple of L2s, primarily Ethereum, uh, have a
couple of Atom and, uh, that is pretty much it. That was pretty much it, but I'm looking to cycle
out of, uh, cycle out of these, these coins that I currently hold and go into smaller caps that have
the potential to do a lot, um, 10 X's, 20 X's, things like that. So that's ideally the goal,
but those positions are going to be, I'm going to be rotating into them during 2023. So that's the
idea. And those smaller caps, what's, uh, what's on your wishlist? On my wishlist? Oh, that is,
that is consistently changing right now. I, I, I can't give an exact, exact, uh,
list right now because I don't have one. I have a couple on my mind, but I'm still going. It's,
it's like the funnel idea that I mentioned before, right? That initial layer of due diligence
that we're working on. I have some of those coins in mind, but I want to look at, you know,
the second layer, go into the white papers a little bit more, but, um, I am not entirely disclosing
those yet because it's not robust enough, but there are, most of them are probably,
most of them are not like on the top 100 or top 200. They're going to be further, further down in
terms of market cap. And, uh, they're, they're, they're, they're a lot, they're unseen cryptos.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Thoughts on stable coins. I mean, and forget the BUSD issued by Paxos, USDC. What are your thoughts
on algorithmic stable coins? Do you think that it's even possible to have one that can
sustain itself for a long period of time?
Well, if you are looking at history, no, but potentially, potentially, yes. Um, I mean,
the issue with that is my personal perspective on stable coins is that whenever you have some
sort of stable money, you want it to be backed. You want it to be backed one to one. And that's
my sort of bottom line there, because there's so many vulnerabilities you can run into with stable
coins. I'm not saying it won't work, but it's not backed by anything. It's, it's,
it's a software that is sort of creating a system of balancing between like, like we had a, we had
Terra and Terra and Luna, right? We had them, it's like a balancing act and it can fail very,
very easily if you take one blow. And we saw that debt spiral occur with Luna and it was very,
very difficult for them to recover. So, um, when it comes to stable coins, I'd rather have my stable
coins completely entirely backed. Um, that's why something like a, like a USDC is solid. Tether again,
Tether is a bit of a bit of an interesting topic because, uh, we don't know exactly what's going
on. It's a little bit more of a black box than, than, um, than say, say, um, USDC, but you know,
their, their attestations came out. Okay. A lot of what they hold is, you know, just treasuries. But
here's the, here's the issue. Like if you're holding, if you give a company a bunch of money,
right? And they issue stable coins, they're going to do something with your money. That's where the
problem comes in. So if I give you a hundred thousand dollars and you give me an equivalent
amount of say a stable coin, what are you going to do with a hundred thousand dollars?
You're going to want to make more money off of that. But if you want the system to be completely
secure, you don't want that money to be lent out or do anything with that money.
But here's the issue. The, that money deflates or that money gets inflated out of the value is,
is lost, right? So you have to sort of try to accumulate more wealth with the money that you
have. And this is the exact problem banks run, run into. So when you look at Tether,
a lot of its holdings are, they're not just in dollars. Like your, your Tether stable coin is not
directly representative of a, of, of like a, like a paper dollar, right? Instead,
those dollars that you give to Tether, they go out and buy, like they go out and buy like other debt
to collect interest on. And it depends what type of debt that you're holding that really gives you
the level of safety for that stable coin. Because if you're going into commercial debt,
that's a lot more volatile, a lot more risky, and you are going to have a more difficult, it's less
liquid. If you want to sell that money, when you run into a crisis and you want to pay back the
people who are, who want that stable coin from you, want to cash out, it's going to be very hard.
But with Tether right now, over time, they have become better and better because they have
circled, circled from, circled towards treasuries and treasury, treasuries are quite liquid.
They're relatively safe, but that doesn't always work because when we saw the, the latest crisis
in the UK with, after Liz Truss, her, her latest, her deployment that really sent the pound a lot
lower, a lot of the, a lot of the pension funds started selling off, selling off their, their bonds,
right? And so that created a liquidity crunch because nobody even wanted to sell bonds. Nobody
wanted to sell treasuries. So nothing is safe. Even the safest, so to speak, treasuries are not,
not, not, not, you know, not necessarily safe, but that, again, that was the UK and it wasn't the
US. We haven't really run into that issue, at least recently with the, with the US bonds. But
what I'm trying to say is whatever backs a stable coin gives that stable coin, it's validity and
something that is not entirely backed or what backed enough, well enough, like algorithmic stable
coins, which are not backed at all. I personally don't really trust.
Agreed. CBDCs, are they inevitable?
Well, the governments want it to be, because when you give out CBDCs, you effectively have a grasp of
the people and of what's occurring inside of an economy to a much higher degree. Because if you're
able to, whenever you issue money online, it means it's connected to a web and the internet,
right? That means it can be tracked. And when things can be tracked, they, you can, you can have a data
bank that other entities can use to say manipulate people or, or thwart forward their own agendas.
So the issue with CBDCs is exactly that you're able to see exactly what everybody is doing, what
everybody is transacting. There's nothing, nothing's going to be like over the counter.
One argument you're going to, you could make is that, okay, Bitcoin is completely transparent,
right? Uh, yeah, it is, but at least it's pseudonymous. At least it has some degree of
opacity, right? Even though you have algorithms that can easily track down
what wallet, who, which wallet belongs to who, and you have other companies like Chainalysis who
are coming, who have, who are very good, very good at doing detective work on chain. It's still a level
of transparency that is present and it's decentralized. It's not really owned by any other entity.
So if countries start issuing CBDCs, that really adds a struggle for, you know, it, they use blockchain,
but they take out the, the idea of decentralization and people really owning the system and where does
the data go and that we're, who actually monitors these people. So, um, the alternative is just to,
you know, just ask governments to sort of start implementing or utilizing rather current stable
coins, like just work with circle, uh, work with like, like USDC, just to, um, just allow for these
decentralized stable coins systems to, to, to, to run forward. So, um, I have some fear with CBDCs,
potentially some countries will likely issue them like, uh, well, you have more authoritarian
countries. Uh, they're likely going to be able to administer stuff like this more easily, but, uh,
but yeah, overall, I think some countries will adopt them, but others, if the, if the policy is
addressed properly, especially in the U S I think these stable coins that we have present are could suffice
well enough in order to, uh, not necessitate the creation of some sort of CBDC.
Such as USDC. Correct. Yeah.
You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that you're also into AI and VR. How do you see these
two in, well, I guess, I guess they kind of overlap, but how do you, how do you see these two technologies
integrating into, into, into web three, where do you see interoperability between the three?
That, yeah, that's, um, that's definitely something that is on the come up, but it's particularly the,
the issue with blockchains is that it's hard to right now, at least it's hard to integrate
other algorithms and other systems into blockchains because blockchains are quite clunky.
And if you want to have like a system that like runs an AI, like in a very decentralized manner,
or you have like some sort of, I don't know exactly how you would do that with VR or AR,
but you would need to, you would need to use some sort of off, off chain compute system. Well,
like something like a hybrid compute. I think, I think Chainlink is also working on something similar
to this where you can, um, I forgot the name of the project, but effectively you're, you're able to
connect web two to web three, um, systems together. But something like a hybrid compute would be the
way at least right now to go with taking AI, launching it on traditional mechanisms and then
using it or, um, and then connecting it to some sort of on-chain incentive structure, um, by using the
blockchain. Other, but, but the thing is these, these technologies don't have to commingle like that.
You can also, you can also create applications like, uh, like say a virtual reality, like say
metaverse. And within that, you can just have a blockchain system. That's not a very, that's not
very novel, but it's just the integration of these different technologies. Um, a couple of different
apps that are, I mean, one of the more interesting apps in my opinion is, is Vivi. Um, Vivi is actually
a licensed NFT platform. A lot of it is off. Uh, a lot of it is, is, uh, centralized. So that's one of the
people, that's one of the issues that people have against it, but you can essentially buy
licensed NFTs and then place them in, uh, and then you can place them in AR in different places.
So, but the issue is blockchain is more advanced than VR and AR in my opinion. And AI is actually,
I think a lot ahead. Um, AR and VR is especially, especially difficult, um, especially augmented
reality. Augmented reality is very, very messy, requires a ton of computational power and is very much
a hardware problem. And the reason that things like Google glasses failed in 2014 and nothing
has really sprouted afterwards is because it's just the hardware isn't there yet. It takes a lot
of computational power. And, and, uh, a friend and I were actually working on a project, uh,
I think last, it was like a year and a half ago, actually we're working on, we're working on a startup
where we could take NFTs and place them in a precise physical location. So if you have a desk and you
want to place your, your like Batman statue, if you want to place it in that exact location, that exact
geography, it's very, very difficult because GPS isn't precise enough. So what the, the sort of mechanism
we came up with was using different hardware, different hardware, uh, devices to triangulate
the position of an NF of a, of a, of a, of an augmented reality NFT and make sure it doesn't move
because we're sort of not using GPS technology. We're using like triangulation methods, but, uh,
something like that would be very interesting. And if the project comes out where you can take NFTs and
place them in your room and they don't move, like when you open your app, you place those NFTs.
And the next time you open your app again, they're in the same place. That is a really
revolutionary technology because right now you can't even create like a sticky note app.
If I want to put a sticky note, like by my dresser and I place it at a certain coordinate. And the next
time I close that app and open it again, that sticky note won't be there. It could be all the way,
like in China for all I know. It's a geolocation is a huge mess, especially with, uh, especially with AR.
And so there's a lot of work to be done there, but again, these technologies are mixing together,
but the mixing of these technologies is relatively difficult. And I, I, I don't see like a, like a
direct, like there's a lot of like the AI tokens and whatnot. I mean, that's okay. Some of them are
cool. Some of them work, but there's not like too much of a mix that I see right now or is relevant.
I think these individual technologies need to develop themselves. And if something so happens to come
up where they can integrate, so be it. That would be cool. That's interesting.
What kind of consulting do you do? Uh, as far as doubt, you said, I forget who you said you were
helping, but you said you were helping someone with DAOs, a company with DAOs. How do you help them
with DAOs? Is it heading and helping them set up their DAO structure? Give us some insight into that.
Um, let's see. Did we, I don't think we worked on a, on a DAO consulting project. Um,
let's see, but I can go to like any other, so I can talk about DAOs first and then I can talk about
some of the consulting projects. So in terms of DAOs, we are the current exposure to DAOs that,
that I personally have, a lot of them just relate to the blue chip DeFi brands.
So whether it's the Aave DAO or Uniswap DAO, the structure for these is, I mean, I'm hitting
on some points that I mentioned before is that you have like an ERC 20 token. You have a, you have a
fungible token that you use. And the more of those tokens that you have, that's represents the amount
of voting power that you have in a system. So for BAM, we actually, we actually created an LLC and are
trying to launch BAM DAO at the moment. It's currently under underway, but our idea is to
like sort of use like non-transferable NFTs, where we just have, each person has one vote,
no matter who you are. And that's how the system effectively works. And the proposal,
the proposal systems and how things go through, go through the voting structure are very much like
Uniswap. Um, it's like you have, you have a temperature check and you have non-chain votes.
So it's, our DAO mechanism is not very, very different. Um, you did mention like a DAO consulting
project. We haven't done one of those, but we're doing one actually this semester. So we're actually
consulting for Cello and Cello is, is, is known for refi, regenerative finance. And they're also known
for being a, one of the spearheading protocols for mobile, um, for mobile, uh, crypto for,
so essentially what you can do with Cello is you can send crypto just using your phone number.
And that they call, it's called like an attestation system. And effectively, I don't
completely understand how the mechanism works, but essentially you have people governing or
governing these different phone, these different, um, these different phone numbers. And they allow
for these phone numbers to be recruited onto like the network of phones that are sending money
between different people on Cello. And in order to run that system, you have to have proper
incentive structures in place, meaning you have to make sure that the people who are validating the
phone, phone addresses are, are not acting, uh, not acting maliciously. So our consulting project is
like adding some sort of governance layer to that phone system where we can send crypto back and forth
and adding mechanisms like slashing for people who don't, or for validators who don't act well,
things like that. So that's sort of like the DAO slash governance project that we're currently
working on, but that hasn't started quite yet.
On the topic of DAOs, when you look at certain traditional governance structures,
where do you see a necessity for DAOs? What, where can you see DAOs kind of displacing
uh, the archaic ways of ruling over, uh, ruling over a population of individuals?
Yeah. From, from, from an, from an efficiency standpoint, it's probably just best to keep your
organization in a normal structure. You don't need to make everything decentralized. I think that's
the first point you have to throw, uh, you have to hit home is that everybody in crypto, they want
decentralization and all of these things, but you have to look at efficiency too. And so from a DAO's
perspective, you can create a DAO that is quite literally just a copy and paste of a normal,
like corporate system, right? A DAO is supposed to be, the function of a DAO is supposed to be
giving as many people as possible the ability to vote on certain decision-making. And I think there's
going to be a lot of transformation over the next few years regarding how this system works.
And a part of me feels like we, we may just tend towards centralized systems because they're more
effective and efficient than here's, and I, I don't want to say if that's a bad thing or a good
thing because it depends on the use case. Let's take an example, like with, with Aave.
Right now we have, we have like, uh, I think we have 80,000 Aave tokens. We have a decent amount of
voting power. And we have, and whenever we're voting on a certain, a certain proposal, we can
make a pretty large dent in terms of where the vote goes. And so it's important for us to continually
stay on top of things because if we don't, well, the system becomes more ineffective. But here's the
thing. If a protocol has like three votes, that's a lot of time to look into each vote. And the issue with
Aave is that a lot of the votes that a lot of the things they have to vote on are technical.
You have to look at risk parameter updates. You have to look at value at risk, which is like a,
which if you don't know how to do risk assessment, and if you're not acclimated with like finance,
you probably don't know what that is. And so a lot of people don't, a lot of Aave holders,
for example, don't even know what's going on. And one, two, they're, they have voting fatigue.
If you have to vote on something three times a week, you're going to get tired. And that's why
you want to have silos divided up into like a representative democracy of where different
groups of people vote. So right now, whenever we do any sort of risk adjustment, we actually,
Aveda actually hired some, a company called Gauntlet. And Gauntlet does all the risk parameter
updates or runs like risk parameter calculations because individuals can't do that. And so they have
the power to essentially give us information and persuade our decision-making by telling us,
this is risky. That is risky. This is not risky. But recently, Gauntlet is not the only one in the
market. We have now something called Chaos Labs. It's another company that came out and they also
provide a risk assessment. So now we have two companies battling each other for providing
risk assessment updates to us in Aave. And that makes it even more confusing because sometimes they
disagree with each other and they're in competition with each other. Can we vote yes or no? One risk
assessor says yes, the other one says no. And that's a pretty frustrating thing. So a lot of systems
right now are really trying to figure out where they're, where they're trying to, what direction
they're trying to go. And my fear is right now, the idea of centralization just makes things more
and more efficient. And we need to come up with a way to make things more decentralized and
simultaneously efficient. And that's a very difficult problem. And the best solution I can
sort of think of is simply just creating like a representative democracy system where you have
different guilds. And some DAOs have this, where you have different guilds that take care of certain
stuff. And like you have this risk assessment division for AaveDAO. You have like protocol division
for AaveDAO. So I think that's probably the best way to create or to reduce the degrees of
friction that currently stand in the way of adopting DAOs.
So knowledgeable silos made up of individuals who are knowledgeable on a certain thing. And those silos
are kind of spread out in a decentralized way ultimately leads you with a kind of a DAO hybrid
where it's, it's pretty centralized, but it's also kind of decentralized.
Essentially. Yeah. And that's simply because it's like a DAO within a DAO almost it's, you have a DAO
and then within that you have a circle that works on risk assessment. You have another circle that works
on, works on say maybe like the UX and UI. You have another, you have another, uh, circle that works
on, uh, that works on like protocol launches. So yeah, exactly, exactly like that. But, and that's
the only reason you need to have something like that is because you cannot sacrifice, you cannot
sacrifice efficiency over decentralization because then the system will just fail.
Abdullah, how many hours a day do you sleep?
Well, that varies. And, uh, let's just say I need more sleep. Um, yesterday was, uh, let's see,
like five hours, six hours last, last night. That's probably my average. I definitely need more.
Yeah. Something tells me that, I mean, you seem like you're doing so much and you, how old are you?
Just curious. Uh, turned, uh, 21, eight days ago. Wow. You're doing a lot, man. That's,
it's really impressive. Uh, and tell us a bit about you, you're doing a semester abroad at,
is it London School of Economics? Correct. Yeah. London School of Economics.
And how's that going? Tell us about your decision to go abroad for a semester.
Yeah. So, yeah. So this semester I'm, um, from, let's see, I came here about two, three weeks ago.
So beginning of January until the end of the end of March, like the beginning of April. So this is
only a few months, but the reason they decided to come out is one, because I really have not been out
of the country too much. And I want to, wanted to explore somewhere where I can study, but not have
too much of like a culture, culture shock. Like a lot of students tend to go towards like, uh,
like Beijing or like, you know, some completely different countries with different languages
and a completely different culture that becomes a little bit difficult to sort of balance, especially
when you want to, you know, balance a couple of extracurriculars, your academics, et cetera.
So London was sort of a no brainer in terms of getting used to the system, no language barrier.
And also it's a, it's a great university. I've also found here the, um, the, um, uh,
the blockchain community is obviously way more robust than, uh, than the Midwest.
So, uh, they have like these, they have like these like Monday, every Monday, they have these
meetups with like blockchain people at like a local, uh, like a local restaurant. Um,
so just go to those last week, LBS London business school
actually had a conference. So we got to meet a couple of cool people there.
The near foundation CEO was there, a couple of other speakers from a couple of prominent VCs,
protocol leaders were there as well. So it's, it's a, it's a vibrant and exciting place.
And I can, I've obviously seen it with the, through the few weeks that I've been here,
even the blockchain community is a lot more robust. And so, yeah, it's an exciting experience.
Yeah. I spoke with the Imperial blockchain society earlier today, and it does seem to me
that the blockchain community there wants to turn it into a crypto hub, similar to the way that Dubai
and Singapore have turned into crypto hubs. Is that the vibe you're getting?
I am because basically all the universities or major ones are starting to create, uh,
their own societies. Like, like LBS has a really good one. I talked to the, the,
one of the guys at Cambridge as well. They have a pretty solid community.
Oxford has a really good community. Um, Imperial. Yeah. I haven't spoken to them,
but I know they're, they're, uh, they're very, they're very close by. Um, and then a couple of the
other colleges, including LSC, they have like a consortium of different
schools, like King's college, LSC, these guys, they're sort of trying to create their
community as well, but the schools here, they're a lot closer to each other. So there's a lot more
overlap. Unlike we're in, in Michigan, we have like one city, the entirety of Ann Arbor,
where we just have, uh, the university and we're the predominant blockchain club there.
But so it's, it's a lot more, a lot more activity here, which is exciting to see.
You're also close to a lot of other countries. Have you thought about visiting,
I don't know, maybe Spain or France or even going up to Scandinavian countries?
It's, uh, it's definitely on my checklist. So I'm looking forward to maybe, uh, I have
a week off coming in, uh, like the latter half of February. So maybe heading down to like
France and then, uh, going forward from there, maybe like Belgium or, uh,
Netherlands or something like that. So yeah, definitely on my, definitely on my list.
Check out that Euro rail pass. It'll do you wonders, especially if you want to travel a lot.
Yeah. Yeah. I do. Yeah. Yeah. We can definitely talk offline about it. And look, man, it's,
this has been awesome. I've really enjoyed this. This is the longest space that I've done with, uh,
with the university blockchain club in this case, bam. I forgot to ask you a question earlier though,
and I do want to get it in. So I think I would love to hear your insights on Dogecoin. What are
your thoughts on Doge? Let me tell you something. I did a seven and a half hour space on Doge with
the community. And I actually learned a lot about Doge that I didn't know. I didn't, you know,
I didn't recognize that it was its own layer one. Uh, you know, it's, it's much different than
all the other meme coins out there. So I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I'll be completely honest. I have almost no interest in Dogecoin and you're going to have
to enlighten me if you have had a seven hour conversation on it, because I clearly don't
know enough, but, uh, I mean, it's, it's not something that I'm personally interested unless
something more compelling or foundational comes out of it. All I do know that, you know, network,
network effects are very, very powerful. Um, the, when you have a spearheading figure like Elon Musk,
leading the charge with that as well, I mean, some things beyond these things are beyond the
fundamentals. They're beyond the white papers, beyond the traditional analysis. Um, they have,
they have a stronghold, um, that partly annoys people, especially those who are more technical
and want to focus on the fundamentals, but it is what it is. But I personally have not paid too much
attention and I'm not the person to speak on this, but I'm, I, if you, if you had a seven hour space,
I'd love to learn more, but I can't, uh, I can't say much right now. Yeah, of course. And I'm in your
camp. I was always, I'm still for the most part turned off the meme coins. However, the, the more
I've opened up and kind of the more I've tried to have, uh, an open mind, I recognize that they,
whether we like it or not, have our, have their place in the industry and whether we like it or not,
or rather, whether we accept it or not, they bring a lot of people over into crypto. Now,
how much of those individuals are retained or actually come in and, and come over and care
about the tech is, I don't have numbers on that, but I did found, um, I did find some interesting
metrics or excuse me, interesting facts about Doge that really set it apart from all the ERC 20 crap
that, uh, other, other people have spun up and I'll send you the article. It was written by Alex.
Um, I can't pronounce his last name at the moment, but really smart guy.
I'll send you over that article and you can read that and we can talk about it offline. But look,
Abdullah, it's been a man. It's been an awesome space. I really appreciate you coming on. I've
been getting a lot of messages from the community members saying that you're very impressive and
they've really enjoyed this, uh, this broadcast because people want to hear others that can break
stuff down the way you do and tie it all together and also be able to convey in layman's terms.
I think it's a special quality and it's going to take you a long way. So, um,
um, if you have any final words for the community, man, go for it.
For sure. Yeah. No, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Uh, thanks for the kind
words. Uh, and yeah, I mean, just keep exploring. Um, this space is very interesting because there is,
there is room for practically everybody. Like I mentioned before, if you are interested in the tech
side of it, if you're interested in cryptography, if you're interested in law, I mean, right now,
a lot of lawyers are just trying to overwrite what the definition of the security is ever since like
1930, 1933 or something like that. The securities act, we're completely rewriting things like the
how we test potentially. So there's stuff in law, there's stuff in cryptography and development.
There's from a philosophical standpoint, there's a lot of debate there as well. And basically,
I mean, this is, this is a technology, this is a data structure and it can, it can permeate it
throughout practically every industry that exists. So there's definitely a place for everybody here.
And, uh, and it's certainly an exciting one that can take you a long way. So thanks now for having
me on. Uh, we really enjoyed talking and yeah, hopefully we can, uh, hop on another one sometime soon.
Yes, you are definitely welcome to hop on another one. I didn't even get into regulation and law and
something tells me you can speak a lot on that as well. I have lists of questions that I have, uh,
that I can, uh, re funnel and ask you, uh, ask these, the different attorneys that I've had on.
So, you know, if you want to come on to our aquarium panels, we have Socratic style discussions
every Wednesday at 4 PMGC, or if you want to come on and just shoot the shit like we did, uh,
towards the end of the broadcast today, you're more than welcome, man. Best of luck.
All right. Great. Sounds good. All right. But you know,
Waypoint Talk community. Thank you for joining. Remember that everything you hear on this broadcast
is meant for educational purposes only. Nothing is financial advice. So be safe out there and take
care. My name is Noah signing up. Bye-bye.
