Hey, everybody, we're getting folks up so give us a second what we get people on stage.
All right, everybody, we are going to get started. We are pleased to have a partner
for today. I believe it's Firechain, but Paul or others who are part of the team would
be happy to hear actually how you pronounce it would be great. Paul, there's a mute on
the lower left, by the way.
All right, looks like we're having some connection issues for folks, but we'll get started shortly.
So we're going to be talking about an exciting new layer one blockchain that will be sort of in the last third of this segment.
Then we have sort of a discussion in the beginning, a lot of which is related to what it takes to build a layer one.
Right now, of course, for the audience members and we have a pretty, you know, pretty well informed audience.
But for those who don't know, layer one, of course, the base layer for a blockchain.
So Bitcoin and Ethereum both, Ethereum mainnet are both layer one blockchains.
For example, there are many others out there. Layer two, for example, in Bitcoin, we have things like lightning.
And the idea behind things like layer two is to add both functionality as well as cost effectiveness to blockchains.
Because initially, you know, even now it's getting more and more expensive to transact on some of the layer one blockchains like Bitcoin,
which, you know, only maybe a year ago or so, you could do a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain on layer one with one to two, maybe three stats per v-byte.
Then during the ordinal boom last year, you know, kind of went up to 60 stats per v-byte or more.
And we had hundreds of thousands of unconfirmed transactions. And now then it's kind of come down.
I don't know what it haven't checked the mempool for Bitcoin today, but, you know, something like 20 to 30 sets per v-byte range.
So still more expensive than it has been historically.
Ethereum is interesting because, you know, you've had, you know, you've had upgrades like, you know, upgrading to, you know, from proof of work to proof of stake.
And that has made transactions, you know, far cheaper, but and far quicker, actually.
So that's been interesting to see. So in that case, you see sort of the opposite effect.
But in any case, yeah, I would be happy to to dive into this discussion.
David Towell, it's been it's been a second since we've chatted.
How have you been and what do you think about some of the latest news?
We want to focus on some news developments. So, yeah, happy to hear.
Sure. I think I didn't comment yesterday on the Promethean news.
But to me, in terms of being an investor in more liquid assets in the space, you know, it is curious news.
I wonder what that means in terms of the SEC's position on Ethereum.
Does it clearly now fall into the security camp?
Is the SEC going to try to figure out how to double back or does it help an Ethereum ETF?
I just at this point, I don't know. I don't know other than the headline kind of where where the SEC's strategy, I should say, is on this.
The SEC has been getting berated in court about its lack of clarity on classification of cryptocurrencies.
And I think rightfully so. At this point, you know, we played a cat and mouse game with the SEC, the industry did for a long time.
And frankly, I think it's inappropriate at this point to continue to play a cat and mouse game, lay down your cards, you know, tell us what the position is so that we go ahead and flesh it out.
And, you know, if and I'm sorry to drag the point on, but I think it's a point, you know, if the SEC is going to take a certain position and it's clear and there's enough will inside of Congress to go ahead and legislate otherwise.
So give Congress the opportunity to go ahead and do that. I think the SEC taking a clear position will allow lawmakers to go ahead and more easily rally behind a move to legislate on crypto.
And so, you know, I think this is something we talked about a lot and it's important because it's something that's an issue that's continual. Right.
And, you know, this Promethean ember capital, the really interesting name, it's not Prometheus. It's Promethean.
I guess they want to SEO themselves or something. But with their aberration on naming. But the question around it.
So first off, there's no Bitcoin that they can use, because from my understanding, at least as of even now, as you see, is not considering Bitcoin security.
Right. So that's right. One thing. And also, it seems like the Bloomberg reporter is talking about how there's no trading or sorry.
And so I'm not really sure what that means. So you can custody assets that are considered securities. And I guess what would be the point of that? Right.
So you've obviously had stuff like Coinbase corporate where you can custody, you know, assets in a stefi way.
You've got, you know, a bunch of other services that that do this, like, you know, there's fire blocks, et cetera.
So I'm curious what what makes this, I guess, different, new and interesting.
The only thing that makes it different, new and interesting is the fact that they seemingly have a good relationship with the SEC.
And that's at the very least. They may have been, you know, they may be incredibly cozy with the SEC.
And that's what makes this interesting in terms of, you know, is the SEC trying to pick winners and losers?
Is it trying to go ahead and alienate the entire industry to the exception of Promethean?
What with what exactly is the strategy here? And the answer can't be there is no strategy.
There's definitely a strategy. Kudos to the guys that founded Promethean.
Not that they know much of anything, it seems, at least initially about crypto.
And now they must know a lot. But effectively, they they picked a strategy that that nobody else picked, which was we have no business.
We we're not doing anything. We want to get your blessing on whatever it is that you're willing to bless SEC and then and then we'll go from there.
So to push back a bit on that, though, I mean, wouldn't we say Coinbase, which has had its tough tussles with the SEC, has tried.
You know, Brian Armstrong and team have tried have tried to engage with the SEC and get on the SEC's good side to prove them going public.
They're still a U.S. based company, you know, but they already have a business that even when they tried to make, you know, and I, by the way, I totally listen.
I'm not a Promethean fan. I am certainly much more of a Coinbase fan.
And and I do believe that Coinbase was genuine in its overtures to the SEC.
And I think the SEC was wrong to go ahead and rebuff them. But, you know, at the time that Coinbase did approach the SEC, they already had a history in terms of operating history.
They already had business lines that they were operating. And maybe the SEC was like, look, we're not going to go ahead.
And again, I think this is the wrong position to take. But, you know, we're not going to go ahead and bless an enterprise that we believe has previously violated the law or an entity that we're going to go ahead and bring charges against.
And so therefore we're not going to entertain those discussions. I don't believe from a regulatory and legal perspective, that's the right dynamic.
You're supposed to go ahead and strike between industry participants and the regulator. But clearly that's what the regulator in that instance decided to do.
Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. We'll be this is kind of an evergreen topic. So I appreciate you bringing it up, David.
I'm going to go to the other speakers now, you know, talking about latest developments, you know, you know, things.
And then we're going to move on in a few minutes, actually, to the main chunk of the big debate, which is about what it's like to build a layer one blockchain in 2024.
But yeah, I would like to go to Powell of all. I hope I'm saying that right. And Camilia, if you guys want to jump in with some latest developments in your world, things that maybe people aren't thinking about or realizing.
So so there is a lot of things happening in the like my world is a tokenization world. So tokenization of a traditional market assets into the crypto and vice versa.
So in general, in that space, a lot of stuff is happening, like especially after Bitcoin ETFs has been introduced on those big organizations like JP Morgan, BlackRock, those big banks and financial institutions are deploying a massive amounts of capital to start building.
As they say, new opening for the financial markets. Why? Because they believe very strongly that the blockchain industry, not only crypto, because as Jimmy Diamond, as you know, Jimmy Diamond is saying that Bitcoin's shit.
That's those are his words on during Davos this year. But tokenization and blockchain is something that he's super into.
Why? Because it will allow them to provide liquidity to illiquid assets before, like, for example, Berkshire Hathaway, serious a stocks that you have 600 K per share.
So there is no liquidity almost there. But if you can fractionalize, do this, you know, tokenize that you will have 24 seven trade ability.
You will have even guy with five bucks in his pocket to be able to, you know, jump in being a shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway.
So they see a big opportunity and a lot of regulations are jumping into the space to allow for such a thing.
Like in Europe, just to mention, you have like three new regulations, Mika Dora and DLT. States are working on their regulations.
UAE have Vara and they're working on the on the new regulations as well.
So I believe that there is a huge shift worldwide of the whole financial.
Paul, where are you based out of this question of geography constantly comes up? But I'm curious, where have you chosen to build?
Yeah, I'm based in Poland by our company, Swiss based UAE. And right now we are, you know, pointing out our finger on to on to us.
That's interesting. And well, actually, by the way, it sounds like I'm just reading permission.
You were you were at Davos in 2024. You really?
Yeah, I'm Jimmy Diamond there. And I've had the conversation with him after he said that between his shit.
So he's been saying that for a while. He's been saying that for a while.
So, yeah, I've been I've been a few times in the past. I didn't go this year, but I'm a YGL.
So lucky to be kind of be as well as a tech pioneer. So lucky to be involved in the group.
And you're right. It's, you know, it's great to see the conversations one can have with some pretty big players when one walks the halls of the Congress center.
But yeah, are you related to wealth, you know, through like the tech pioneers program or some other some other way?
I'm related to what? Because I didn't hurt with the World Economic Forum. Are you not related to them?
I was just participating. I was speaking there like on a couple of houses, as I was invited, like Binance invited me to speak on this crypto world forum and a couple of others as well.
So I was speaking and, you know, making relations with the capital that is going to float in because like the liquidity will come from traditional market, especially from the derivative market that is looking onto tokenization highly.
And do you think that the folks there like was the conversation this year? I mean, people have been tepid and crypto over the years in general.
I mean, it really depends on the person you ask. But do you feel like the sentiment was generally positive or do you feel like it was not positive?
Can you repeat? Was the sentiment about crypto relatively positive in your view out of curiosity?
Because we're going to be diving into this, by the way, our sponsor Firechain is really focused on sustainability, you know, SDG, sustainable development goals, which we talk a lot about at Davos, for example.
So I'm curious about what the sentiment was there around blockchain as a tech.
Sentiment was amazingly good. Like I was surprised about, you know, seeing blockchain as an industry everywhere over the Davos.
Like basically there were three main topics, which was ESG, AI and blockchain, tokenization, especially.
So those are three main topics in Davos this year. So everyone was speaking about those three topics.
So it was everywhere. And like the whole new industries were looking.
I was seeing a lecture branch that were looking onto tokenization as an investment assets that might be liquid, like, you know, watch industries, both industries, this and that.
So, yeah, super positive, super positive.
That's super cool. Thanks, Paul. Appreciate it.
We'll come back about some of these SDG, sustainable development goals.
It's best to talk about Firechain, sustainable proof of stake.
But let's move on to Camilla. Camilla, we'd love to hear what is happening in your world.
Hey, thanks for having me. Well, there's looks like we get a hot mic.
Yeah, I was hearing myself. But yeah, thanks for having me.
This is Camilla, the founder of the Defiant, the best source of DeFi news.
And what we're seeing in the DeFi space this week, I think the biggest development is around eigenlayer.
This is definitely something to watch.
It's restaking has become probably the hottest trend in DeFi, together with RWA, that Paul was what was talking about.
But restaking is huge. It's an entirely new primitive in Ethereum.
So what an eigenlayer is a protocol enabling this.
So very briefly, what eigenlayer does is it allows stakers of ETH in the Ethereum blockchain to reuse that staked ETH to secure other protocols and dApps.
So it aims to make staking more efficient, right?
Instead of having your ETH locked up in Ethereum and earning only Ethereum staking rewards, you can now earn ETH staking rewards plus other protocols staking rewards because you're reusing that stake.
So that's what eigenlayer is enabling. And it's just become huge.
It's now the fifth largest DeFi protocol across all chains and not just Ethereum.
So it unseated Uniswap. That's the biggest decentralized exchange by TVL.
So eigenlayer is now holding over almost six billion dollars in total value locked.
And what happened this week is, you know, eigenlayer has been having this gradual launch where it's been slowly opening up its caps on deposits.
And this week it uncapped the pools for liquid staking tokens.
So it gets a bit complicated, but you have staked ETH, then you have providers like Lido and Rocket Pool, which are like middleware services that become the interface for staking ETH and issue liquid staking tokens.
And so now you can deposit those liquid staking tokens on eigenlayer to earn extra yield.
And so the caps on those liquid staking token pools were lifted this week.
And in just a couple of days, eigenlayer doubled its TVL from over two billion to almost six billion today.
So, you know, that's incredible. Yeah, like, yeah, incredible amount of growth. Yeah.
So perhaps for the audience, it'd be great to hear what's driving this growth.
Is it, for example, retail? Is it, you know, yeah, I mean, is it companies? Is it on the corporate side?
Yeah, I mean, you know, usually these fun flows, you can have traders behind the scenes know kind of what's going on.
Would be happy to hear some insights as to why the TVL has grown so much just even recently.
Yeah. So, you know, in DeFi, most of participants are whales, are deejans, as we call them.
We don't see. Wait, do whales have to be deejans? No, not necessarily.
Or the other way around. Exactly. Are usually whales either. But, yeah, maybe all whales are deejans, but certainly not all deejans are whales.
Exactly. That might be the right the right order. Right. So we have whales and deejans, aping in, I can layer right now.
In DeFi, you know, these are mostly the types of participants you see.
You don't see a lot of institutions dealing in DeFi yet and not many funds.
In DeFi, you're really interacting with smart contracts directly with noncustodial wallets.
You are taking on more risk usually.
So, you know, it's not something that many funds are comfortable with.
So you usually see either, you know, smaller crypto-dedicated funds, smaller hedge funds.
And again, like whales, like high net worth individuals who are comfortable with this level of risk participating.
So what's the driver? So, I mean, we're talking about TVL, right?
So, I mean, these are not necessarily all comparable, but you got Lido in the top $24 billion, Maker $8 billion, Abbe about $7.5 billion.
Just lend at $6.6 billion, an eigenlayer sitting at number 5 at $5.85 billion, which to your point has exceeded Uniswap, surprisingly.
So there are these developments you talked about. Is this like, well, what else is happening behind the scenes?
Or is it kind of like a mystery? Can't figure it out. So the staking limit has been removed. Is that really just it?
Is there anything else that has happened? What's the catalyst?
The catalyst is people wanting to get yield. Like this is the place where you get the most attractive returns right now in DeFi.
So like I said, you get Ethereum staking yield, then you get the yield that participating in eigenlayer in restaking gives you.
And really, this is being incentivized on top of that with points.
And that's probably a lot of people here now, like points have become a precursor to airdrops.
So what the projects in DeFi are doing is they're distributing points to users.
And then these same users will get airdrop tokens according to how many points they have.
So eigenlayer is now distributing points to users of eigenlayer, to stakers in eigenlayer.
And so are different liquid restaking protocols, which have become the interface of eigenlayer,
similar to what liquid staking protocols are to Ethereum and issuing liquid staking tokens.
Now we have a new kind of ecosystem of liquid restaking token protocol, and they are also giving out points.
So it's like all of these incentives are driving this frenzy of people who want to farm points to get future airdrops.
That's basically what's driving all this activity.
It's interesting. Yeah. And it looks like based on the latest developments that about 25 percent of the Ethereum network of these applies currently state, which is the highest ever ever been really exciting developments.
If anybody has something they want to add on this or any other developments, of course, feel free to raise your hand or or jump in.
We will be getting to fire chain our partner for today at the last third.
But, you know, I think Camilla, that's great segue into the idea of, you know, layer one versus layer two.
So, you know, I mean, I already started the show talking about the differences between layer one and layer two.
And then you have brave folks. A lot of people are building, you know, on layer two or they're building like ordinals on Bitcoin, things like that.
There's a lot of as always, there's a lot of really good and interesting developments on the technical side as well as the business side happening in crypto.
But, you know, I guess, you know, the question that this begs is what are the ways to add value to consumers?
Right. And it kind of comes back to a question we've been asking in recent spaces, which is about like basically like the killer app.
Right. Yesterday, we had an A.I. and blockchain space. It was great to have A.I. and blockchain people on at the same time.
And it's interesting that crypto has been around for. Well, A.I. has been around since like the sixties or before. Right.
But we've had, you know, ups and downs on that. But crypto is a concept, of course, you know, has been around for, you know, certainly a little over a decade.
And the recent craze in A.I. where you had chat GPT come in, I mean, in two months they reached chat GPT reached 100 million users, which is the fastest 100 million users.
By comparison, Facebook took about two and a half years to get there. And that was considered really fast.
So basically, I guess the question is, like, what's what's the core use case?
And it really comes down to like payments. Right. I think I think payments is a case.
It's interesting. A.I. is relatively new compared to modern. Well, current A.I. is new compared to modern crypto, but it's gotten way more users because it's way more user friendly.
Right. So, Camilla, do you have thoughts? You have thoughts on that?
Yeah, I think, you know, definitely the financial use case has been the main one for crypto.
But this year we're seeing a really interesting development in social, so-called social fire, like social media apps built on blockchains.
With Farcaster, obviously, the main example, we saw kind of a glimpse of that with FriendTech last year.
But now Farcaster has really, you know, blown activity out of the water, surpassing 100,000 total users.
It's it has over 40,000 daily active users now. If you look at the charts on Dune Analytics, they're all it's just, you know, it's incredible to see.
It's just, you know, spikes like vertically up in all measures of activity. And this is a Twitter like app that's built on the on Coinbase's base blockchain, layer two.
And it enables some pretty interesting utility. Yeah, I feel like a lot of these are. Yeah, I feel like a lot of these.
I mean, it's interesting to see like funds raised and stuff like that. But a lot of this stuff is still like solutions looking for problems.
You know, like, I mean, we're still in that phase. Right. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, I'm a big crypto fan.
So I want to say that. But also we got to be pretty critical of ourselves in this industry.
We're basically just creating solutions. You know, we've created all these solutions. And the plumbing and crypto is so fantastic.
I mean, compared to ACH and things like that, the network that was, you know, decades, that's now decades upon decades old.
But I don't know. I mean, I'd be curious also to hear from from other folks like what what here is actually going to have sustained engagement.
Right. I mean, look what happened with friend tech to your point.
I mean, this is maybe there's something back to, you know, pal David and some of the others. And by the way, the sponsors, if you guys want to jump in, feel free to add to this discussion.
But yeah, I mean, David David towel, like, what are we, you know, are we just building solutions, just hoping one of them sticks?
We're just throwing spaghetti at a wall. Right. At this point, when it comes to usability, I think so.
I think, you know, there is a frenzy of development, which I think is great.
No, I'm sorry. I came back.
So I think there's a frenzy of development and it, you know, to your point about adoption, right?
There's always that that is the next biggest hurdle after you come up with a great mousetrap.
And so I think that it will be a scattered approach to adoption.
I think that that's the heart. I mean, as an investor, right, finding the right horse that wins the race is a really hard thing.
I mean, you can use metrics. You can use buzz in terms of chatter and things like that.
But in terms of what and it's not always the best mousetrap that is the one that ends up being used and adopted.
And there's fierce competition. There's a lot of functionality out there that does similar things.
You know, is it a one size fits all solution for things or is everything going to get its own niche product or niche piece of plumbing?
It's unclear and it's hard to tell, but I think, look, I mean, I see myself in two roles.
A, as an investor. And I think the fact that there is an incredible opportunity set on both sides as a user and as an investor, I think it's great.
We're in a we're in a at a point of plentifulness and we will find the right solutions over a bit of time.
But I think it's going to take time. I don't think anyone can pronounce, you know, any victors in this yet.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, I keep going back to it. I was done.
I interviewed the founder of co-founder CTO of Ripple, David Schwartz. Great, great thought leader.
Just awesome person. But I mean, you know, in our chat and I was even thinking about this yesterday, too, like just randomly.
But I was like, you know, payments is just like the thing, right? It's a real problem.
You know, cryptocurrencies do it better, cheaper, faster. Right. I mean, try to spend a wire.
I mean, minimum, you're paying like 10, 15 dollars to try an international wire, paying more.
You know, and that's, you know, after all the issues with current fiat systems, you know, on the Ethereum blockchain, you can send a whole load of ether or even USDC, which costs a little bit more at fractions of the price.
Right. Globally around the world on a 24 seven network. So it's just but it's still somehow not solved.
And I think usability, the whole can your grandma use the test? Can your grandma like get a ledger and remember 24 words and all that?
Yeah, that's that's where it's still it still fails. Right. So that's why it's interesting to see Farcaster, like not even having to, you know, you can't even sign up with a crypto wallet.
So it takes, you know, I think part of it. And Camilla was was kind of referencing this. I'm glad she brought it up.
I was talking about how the ease of onboarding, I think, is really important. But I would be happy to hear your thoughts on this.
So I believe that we have two major challenges right now. One is one challenge is use of the end user experience of that of the tools that we have in crypto, like most of them, like maybe not most of them, but a lot looks like from 90s.
So that's one thing. I don't have a problem is like how hard it is, how hard it is to use, how hard it is to understand, to get into, you know, security.
I will give you an example when I tried to educate my mother about metamask. And she said once our problem about the gas fees high, is it because Putin is not selling gas to Europe?
And I said, wow, like we are making things worse for ourselves, because instead of saying transaction fee, we are saying some kind of, you know, some kind of gas fee term which has been written by a bunch of engineers in the basement.
And it was fun back then. But right now, a mass of people are using that. So we need to, you know, simplify two things. So that's one challenge, this usability, as you mentioned.
One is also a mindset shift. Like so far, most of the people over the world were used to the current models where they are not owners of the things, they are leasing those things.
If you have money in the bank, you are not owner of the money, you are leasing the money. If you have stocks on the brokerage account, you are not owner of that stock, you are leasing those stocks because they can be blocked anytime someone wants or court order or anything.
You don't have full control over that. So saying that, we need to educate a lot of people about, you know, the mindset shift from being lease takers to being an owner of asset and taking responsibility for that and also understanding what kind of security measures are involved with all those elements.
And that reminds me, those challenges reminds me early 2000 and the dot com bubble. And after the dot com bubble collapse, and also during the dot com bubble, you had like hundreds of businesses, everyone was, you know, putting their money onto the businesses that were just adding a dot com to their name, etc.
And after the dot com bubble collapse, a couple of business models survived. And those couple of business models that make sense, build a whole new economy that right now is a home for hundreds of millions of peoples and a place where trillions of dollars of revenue are happening.
And just to mention digital marketing, social media, or e-commerce. And those things haven't, as David said, haven't happened over a day. It happened over a decade because tools were needed, tools that were simplifying and avoiding people properly.
And just to mention one tool that was super crucial to development of e-commerce, our online payments. Without that, how we would pay, how we would pay for grocery store. Right now, I'm in my home, I'm only ordering a bottle of coke from the grocery store downstairs.
And I don't need to go for that because they will bring and I'm paying online for that. So this is what is needed. And this is how I see that. And the good thing is that there are rumors that Apple is working on that.
And if Apple, for example, will onboard people through Apple Wallet and making a digital wallet as well for digital collectibles and different things, that might be the game changer if those big tech companies will join the race.
Okay, yeah, I think you made great points. But like, kind of diving down into each of those points, it's like, I think you made a great point about how, you know, when you think about web, you know, web one and web two, and how in the, you know, basically in the late 90s, early 2000s, you had really the early 2000s after, you know, that the quote.com bubble burst, the NASDAQ peaked.
You know, some of those business models were just obvious, right? Like sell things online. And turns out, like, well, you know, maybe selling pet food online wasn't like the best first start, but you know, selling books online really was.
And obviously, we have Amazon today, right? But that was just like an obvious one. And it just was like figuring out, well, who's gonna win? The social media thing, I think was left obvious. I mean, it's obvious to people today, right?
I mean, in 2024, but in the early 2000s, you know, you have geocities, you have Myspace, then you have the and then finally at Facebook. And the idea of, I guess, I guess we call it, what is it called demand side, network effects or economies of scale, the network effects, which we call the supply side economies of scale is something we've talked about for decades, right?
Michael Porter talked about it in competitive strategy, where it was like, well, you know, if you want to build a steel mill, you know, just more steel mills, you can spread out the capital cost. And it means you can get supply side economies of scale, demand side economies of scale, i.e. network effects, i.e. Metcast law, where the value of a network increases exponentially as a square in proportion to the number of users.
That was, I mean, I mean, in retrospect, obvious, but certainly not extremely obvious. So I guess the question is, if you look at crypto, it feels like you're gonna get stuff that's super obvious, right? You know, payments, whoever gets payments to really work, you know, seamlessly across borders. I mean, I just thought there's a gigantic company to be had there. Maybe it's already there. Maybe it's gonna be one of the big ones that are already out today. And then I think they're obviously going to be non obvious things, things that in retrospect, we're like,
you know, most people would have just envisioned, right? Whereas in the early 2000s, most people were like, yeah, selling stuff online, which seems like I have a thing, right?
So yeah, I believe there are a couple of non obvious things that might happen because the blockchain is opening a lot of new opportunities. And just from starting with some simple examples, right? Right now, you're buying that people will not even notice, but it will happen. Right now, if you want to buy an Apple stock in Europe, you are not buying an Apple stock, actually.
You're buying derivative and ADR instrument. So with tokenization, you will just buy a stock. So this is one of those more obvious examples, but not obvious, like super obvious.
Yeah, but Tara, Tara Luna tried to do that, right? They had like, synthetics, Tesla stock, and whatnot. I mean, we saw how that we saw how that we saw how that whole thing, but the thing about it is because it's not just on the technology side, like synthetically replicating, you know, a stock and its price. I mean, it's not actually trivial from a technical perspective, but you know, it's doable, it's blocking and tackling. But, you know, there's the regulatory whole regulatory piece, which is a bigger piece of the equation, right
and why you can't buy these things in certain regions. We will have much more challenges because right now we are speaking about the financial market. But let's speak about the GDPR, about the data market, about the users, right? Like we have a lot of data on chain and you can identify, combine those data with user activities. And imagine right now, if you're buying somewhere, something in the shop with your credit, MasterCard, credit card, MasterCard, just know that in that shop, you spent 500 bucks. But with blockchain, they will know exactly on
what you have spent that money. You know, everything is going to be traceable. So the marketing companies will have a much deeper view on your preferences and everything. So this will create a new problems, but this will also create a completely new opportunities. Imagine right now, if I will have such an information from on-chain data and I'm the Starbucks and I can say, okay, I see that you were buying in other coffee shops. So maybe we will just give you a 20%
account. We will send you an NFT to your wallet that if you can use easily in the Starbucks just to convert as a client, you know. Yeah, you know, and actually, that's the thing about crypto among many things being used for payments, right? Like the whole privacy aspect. I mean, you know, it's just you have this public ledger. Anyone in the world can take a look at every transaction that's happening. I mean, even Vitalik back in, I think it was last fall, was talking about how it's important to upgrade Ethereum so that there's
more privacy embedded in the transactions, right? And then we see stuff like tornado caps and what's happening, you know, what's happened there with the US government as well as other things, right? So I mean, we'll see if ZK, you know, zero knowledge proofs will help improve things. But yeah, I want to move on to other. I mean, so, Lex, welcome to the space. I would be happy to get your views on all this and then we'll go to David as well. Lex, go for it. Absolutely. Can you reframe the question for me as I just joined?
Well, we're talking in general. The biggest thing is about what it's like to build a layer one in 2024 versus layer two, like where to spend your development efforts. But the recent thing I was talking about with Paul was about what are the obvious business models that are going to succeed in the coming era when it comes to crypto and what are the non-obvious business models that will emerge? Great. You know, there's some
kind of really straightforward, somewhat depressing answers available, which is, you know, when I was a consensus and MetaMask has a large wallet footprint and through some analytics that people opted into, you know, we could tell that pretty much all of the stuff that people are doing are financial services. And of those, the largest share is
exchange. So today, at least the whole thing is a market venue, you know, and I think it's a mistake to sort of have lots of feelings about what's in the market. Like you can have a market full of garbage or you can, you know, whether it's like the Bonk meme coin is good or bad, or whether like a tokenized hotel interest is good or bad, or whether
you know, a US Treasury is good or bad, or whether putting your things into a black box called blast and crossing your fingers is good or bad is sort of like, outside, I think the scope. That's like an asset class question. But today, the whole thing is largely financial processing. And, you know, that's fantastic. It's the Internet of Value. For me, and I've been beating this drum for a bit now, I think there is a hole in web three. And I think that web, that hole is
non financial GDP. So economic activity that is kind of in a regular economy, you've got 80% of organic or economic activity, goods and services, people making sandwiches and doing laundry and flying on airplanes. And then you've got 20% finance. And in web three today, we've got like 99 95% finance. And again, nothing wrong with finance is just that if you're going to bank something, you shouldn't
bank banks, you shouldn't, you know, like, another derivative of Tesla stock, you know, on a layer two with 100 times leverage, literally nobody needs that ever. So the question for me is, like, what's the economic activity? I agree with you, Lex on that. But like, the pushback, I would say is, is leverage, like, what is the value of finance, right? When it comes to, you know, creating value in the world, because I don't think we would say, like, let's say we just got rid of all financial institutions, I think, and they
said, we had, you know, we don't have the fractional reserve banking system anymore. Like, that would probably be a much worse world, right? There's probably a lot of utility lost. So we can't say that there's, but but I agree with you, like, you know, doing, you know, 100x leverage on doesn't sound quite right. I mean, you know, Lehman Brothers was like, what, 40x levered when collapsed? Yeah, I think commercial banks are 12x levered. So where's like that sweet spot, right? Yeah, you're taking, you
know, we were all at 30 to 35x, right? So compared to crypto, it was like, insane, right? Like, if you look at crypto as, as an overall sort of industry, and people complain about re high, like, rehypothecation of the assets and putting things in maker, and then taking that and putting it in the next thing, and so on, like, maybe you get two to three times levered on those positions, it's really nothing.
And compared to how, how levered the the actual traditional finance industry is, not to mention sort of like the whole machinery of the Fed, the dollar, the banking system, and so on. So I agree with you there. My point is a little bit different. It is the sort of like, how, like, what is it that you're banking with your banks? Like, how far do you financialize your economy, right? So when there's not enough finance in an economy, you start hearing things
like, is everyone's under banked, and you know, people don't have bank accounts. And so they can, there's no capital formation, they can't borrow money to create businesses, the sort of like narrative around the global south and bringing, bringing digital money to people. So they have access to resources. And there's like a deep truth and importance to that, you know, with Grameen being an incredible innovation, that's empowering both for entrepreneurs, but also for like issues around gender, right? So for women to have bank accounts, a lot of in a lot of these geographies is like amazing.
You know, so it's both like a capitalist and a social technology. So you can't be at zero, you can't be at five, like, it's not enough. There's the, there's that's a problem. But then also, like, there is over financialization. And I'm not saying derivatives, for, you know, derivatives, or like wrap tokens, or liquid restaking, or whatever, like, per se, are over the line. Because I don't think they are, like, there's no difference to me between the ADR,
and, you know, Lido's, Steak T's. There's nothing wrong with that instrument. What's to me, the issue is, if you're creating instruments that don't refer to organic economic activity of like, you're banking, like the shares of a company making phones, or, you know, like a transportation company, or something that people are doing in the real economy, like, you need finance to support that. And when you have a space where
there's not enough organic economic activity, that's where I think the problem is in crypto. And so, like, I've been focused with our venture fund on trying to answer that question. And that's kind of taken me into this AI world of will machine labor be the thing that brings kind of non financial functions, but more like digital content, digital asset, like, things being done for you on your behalf.
That that are more economic rather than financial in nature. So I don't want to go on and on. But that's, yeah, well, I think you're bringing up interesting questions. And we do have to move on to the Q&A. But I mean, I could talk about this forever. But I'll say, I mean, generally speaking, I agree with you, Lex. But, you know, I'm here. We're all about respectful debate and playing devil's advocate, right? Like, I think there's too much financialization just generally in the world, even without crypto and crypto is making it
New York banks. This is like there was a banking crisis later on. But, you know, banks were getting over and over levered. But guess what the leverage ratios were? It was about three point six, right? This is 1830. And then there was a big banking collapse because they were over levered. These banks were like, unsustainably levered. And by 1836, after the banking collapse, the leverage ratios went to about two point seven. This is on average across about 90 banks in New York, in the state of New York. So this data on this, they have, you know, obviously
over 100 years. So almost 200 years, we've gotten to a point where 12x leverage is sustainable, you know, by a commercial bank, or at least considered sustainable. Definitely 3035x leverage didn't work out so well, or so hot for, you know, for certainly for Lehman Brothers. But having sustainable leverage, having sustainable credit expansion, using technology, like basically using financial technology, right? Things like credit default swaps, and these other things that have gotten bad wraps, but allow
for the ability to manage risk. That does create value in society, right? Just like your talk about, hey, you know, the woman who can't get the credit card and someone can't get the credit card. So there's like a balance there. And what's interesting is I predict that more financial innovation will allow for more sustainable leverage, both in crypto and grad-fi. So there is real utility you have there, because I think finance gets a bad wrap, rightfully so in a lot of ways. By the way, I'm not saying that there's not criticism to be had, but like this whole sustainable leverage
through developments, like, you know, CDOs and CDSs, and just stuff that like a lot of people hate, actually probably doesn't improve people's lives, right? I mean, it certainly makes the rich richer increases, Gini coefficients and increases inequality that those are all very apt things to talk about. But, but I would say like, hey, it's not like it creates zero value, right? And the possibility about crypto is, I mean, isn't crypto mostly about finance? I mean, the reason why you're saying it's like 99% financial sector in crypto is because the whole point of it
is like, it's trying to replace, well, in some way money. And to me, the dead simple answer of what a killer, quote, killer app would be is like, why try to make, you know, a friend, tech, social network? Why try to do this? Why try? It's just payments, right? I mean, we can't even get payments, right? Because the thing is too darn complicated for grandma to understand, right? So that's my perhaps diatribe on that. But yeah, I'd love to hear that in your response to that. And then we'll dive into
that. I think it's taken me probably four to five years to get through the position that you're describing, which, which is like isn't finance enough. And in particular, like the institutional financial products are really important for helping large businesses navigate, you know, their, their, their risks and their operations. Like if I'm, if I'm a global business, and I don't want to
close to, you know, supply chain shocks, or currency shocks, or weather, whatever it is, right? Like, these are things that actually helped me make, make my products, you know, not finance for the sake of itself. But on the institutional scale, like the reason that the big banks are moving these very large derivatives and so on around is because they've got clients that come to the capital markets to help them improve business operations. And I think that's great. And what crypto's done isn't just like make a better version of
that. It's, it's given the sort of Pandora's box magic of financial engineering, like literal financial engineering as complicated as you want. And it's given it to every 13 year old in the world that has access to the internet. Right. And so it's, it's not necessarily helping the large institutions do it better. It's giving all of us the, the creative fire of that. And I think that's really exciting. It's, of course, also really dangerous. But where I am today is that
the infrastructure, and this is a little bit from just also observing what people do on chain, from if you look at the infrastructure, it's, it's there, you had DeFi summer. But you know, like if you just Google, if you reverse like the Google trends for DeFi versus NFTs, like DeFi is like one, one 20th, the interest that NFTs had. And that was very much against my mental model, like this
thing is just a financial infrastructure. And then after NFTs, it's the social networks. And after the end, and then it's also the gaming industry and the art industry and people still continuing to make their living in digital art on chain, you know, and now is artificial intelligence infrastructure, like render that's doing decentralized GPU, or it's file storage, or it's decentralized machine learning, or it's
AI agents, you know, and so, for me, I think it's not a financial infrastructure anymore, I think it's an economic one, it's an economic architecture for digital goods and services. And I think that framing is more powerful, because it liberates people to build companies across, you know, industries, and they get all of the finance stuff, basically for free, it's all been mutualized and baked into the protocol. So it, you know, you've got a digital architecture, digital economy
that comes baked in with state of the art financial services that are all open source with like millions of people excited to invest. And that's great. But that is not the engine. That is the sort of that's helpful. But you need the actual gears of the economy to turn this thing around.
I, you know, I could, as you can probably tell, I could talk about this for an entire space, if not more, but now is the time to move on to the AMA with our partner for today. So we are going to pivot for the audience. There's a purple button on the lower right. Feel free to ask questions. And by the way, the speakers, if you have questions for our partner for today, Firechain, please do, please do jump in. So just to tee it up, Firechain is, has implemented a sustainable proof of stake.
So S.P.O.S. can sense this mechanism that incentivizes validators towards sustainability to receive higher rewards. So, for example, we're talking about the world economic forum earlier and the idea of SDGs, the sustainable development goals.
So really interesting to see a blockchain really focus on that, especially given the criticisms that, you know, I think our unjustly lobbied at L1s like Bitcoin, but, you know, about energy usage and things like that.
But we got Prateek, Prateek and Utkarsh. Let me know if I pronounce that correctly. I would love to have somebody from your team jump in and tell us a little bit more.
Yeah. Okay. I'll start. Thanks. Thanks, guys, for having us.
So I call myself PG just for ease because my other co-founder is Prateek as well. So I call him PD and because of Prateek Devedi and I'm PG.
So we, I mean, my background has been into sustainability, ESG for more than a decade.
I've been kind of trying to propagate something called the Fifth Industrial Revolution for a long while, which would basically wanted to kind of prove the thesis that you can actually make more money while you do more good to the world.
So it was primarily in web to build businesses and then started fire back in 2021, primarily to solve the problem of sustainability in the whole blockchain space.
So uniquely, what we did is kind of integrated an ESG calculator into the consensus mechanism. So pretty much into a nominated proof of stake.
We call it a sustainable proof of stake so that all the validators are nominated and the rewards that they get are built in a way.
It's a weighted average where the weighted average actually also takes into account sustainability.
It also takes into account proof of stake, though, which inherently makes the whole blockchain tackle the problem of sustainability in a proactive way rather than a reactive way,
which is which people do using carbon credits or multiple ways.
So we started building back in 2021.
We are we are partners on the education side to the Indian government.
We work on we're working on educating kids and our course is live in about 10,000 schools in India.
It's a partnership with the government.
We are also working with Abu Dhabi University in UAE.
And we did a lot of police use cases.
So we kind of we made our test net buy back in 2023, had success with it, about 30, 35 million transactions, made our token live on Bybit and a bunch of other exchanges in December last year.
And going live with our main net in June this year and looking for more support so that we can kind of get the blockchain adopted.
And once that happens, we want to ultimately accomplish the goal of a fifth industrial revolution where we can, you know, prove the thesis at a pretty large scale that you can actually make more money while you do good to the world.
So this is just a small brief.
I think let me just build off of what Pratik Gauri said and then the other co-founder, Pratik, you can jump in.
So first of all, some comments on what what was discussed today.
So great to connect with you, I see we are also part of the World Economic Forum listed as the one of the unicorns there, both Pratik and myself, a global shaper, it's great to see a YGL and several other community members here.
And I think the premise of our fire chain is to build a new digital playground, which is decentralized and values the sustainable development goals by placing it at the forefront of business practices.
That's why earlier the conversation when we were discussing whether we are looking for, broadly, the industry is looking for a solution to find a problem or vice versa.
For us, we were saying that how do we build a new playground on which new kinds of applications can be built that have real world applications and in doing so, keep the sustainable development goals in mind.
Our entire premise of having these sustainability proof of stake is the core of our mission and also core of our business strategy.
If you look at our approach to product market fit is very simple.
First, we want to find institutional partners like the World Economic Forum, United Nations, Indian government, so on and so forth.
So that we have institutional legitimacy and we are nurturing the next generation of developers, forging partnerships so that blockchains, especially sustainable blockchains,
are part of the overall ethos.
The second leg of our strategy is to build a technology that is truly developer friendly.
Like, you know, the feedback that we've got from our testnet from developers have been fantastic.
What they say is that they enjoy building on it.
The developer support is super, you know, rigorous and we've designed that chain that way.
And the future of any playground comes down to how many kids actually play on it, how many people actually come and build on it.
So we measure ourselves based on how many new companies that we can enable and how many unicorns we are a unicorn, but how many other unicorns can we build on top of our playground.
And that brings us to the third leg of our strategy, you know, what is it that we're trying to do?
So we care deeply about, you know, important issues like climate change, so on and so forth.
There's so much greenwashing that has happened in the last five to 10 years that we were sick and tired of listening to things that sound good.
So we said that, OK, let's truly nudge organizations to join hands with this mission by not just saying the right things, but actually having them put their business strategy at the core of what we are doing.
This is, you know, this is essentially our pitch to every organization and this is why we've been able to join hands.
And this is a step in that regard.
We wanted to invite everyone listening in to actually check out, check our white papers, you know, explore the token if you must and, you know, quiz us as much as possible on, you know, our ESG footprint and so forth.
That's awesome. Yeah, great to meet some global shapers.
Well, yeah, thanks for that.
Prateek, you want to jump in?
Yeah, and to add to that, you know, we'll talk about the tech when you when you ask more technical questions.
I'm going to talk to what everyone's saying and hello, Pavel, a long time, no see.
He's been a friend of mine for a while.
I'm actually more from the Pavel and the school of thought.
I feel that there is over-financialization in the crypto space.
And that's why with fire, you know, with the entire ethos of the company where we look at SDGs, the it's a it's a pretty interesting bridge from there to real world use cases.
As Pavel was saying, I think that's that's going to be the most important aspect in the next in the in the next few years to come.
Because, you know, I think Kamila was talking about this taking and yeah, it's it's it's taken.
It's taken off really well.
But if you're asking the question that why has it taken off really well, what what could the reason be?
Then I think that's a little bit of a problem because we don't know why something works in this space.
It's it's pretty much people just trying to make more and more money, which is, of course, not wrong.
I've I've had my degent phases.
I still have them sometimes.
But the way we've tried to structure things is bring in nice use cases that will that will give opportunity to people that are not present and hence expand in the space.
One of the examples would be and Pavel, you would love this.
We basically, one of our partner companies is building a solar panel, a huge amount of solar panels in Democratic Republic of Congo,
5.4 gigahertz, you know, it's massive amounts of power backed by China energy.
So what happens after that is a part of that, even though it's fully funded, a part of that would then be.
Offered as a as a launch pad from through a far far launch pad to to, you know, the regular crypto users.
Now you and I, we would have never had a chance to invest in a government project which is back.
In short, the off-tech agreements are already there.
The energy that we produce is already sold.
So I think that's where we want to move.
And that's where the I feel the crypto industry should move, where we back some real important real world use cases.
And give opportunities to people that were not present to them before, because having a particular yield or making an interest on your money has been around for a long, long time.
And I think that's why, you know, the DeFi summer, as good as it was, it has sort of chilled out a little bit because we do not really have these utilities and use cases.
Everyone just chasing after the APIs and the money.
And that's sort of what we want to change with fire.
We don't want to have, you know, a thousand projects that would, you know, that that would just go into oblivion, but have, you know, some super fans, super projects like these, where governments come in, where, you know, there's billions of dollars in investments.
And we give opportunities to people to then participate in these new new ventures.
Yeah, I think it's fantastic.
There are so many things you all talked about, I'm curious, because we were talking about privacy earlier.
You know, we're talking about zero knowledge improves.
Homomorphic encryption is something that Firechain uses, right?
I would love for you to expand or elaborate.
We haven't implemented it.
We do have a paper on homomorphic encryption, and I think, in all honesty, implementing it within the blockchain is probably a five-year task, if not more.
So we have put out research on how we would want to implement it in the years to come.
But actually going ahead and implementing it is a totally different volume there.
So, you know, full disclosure.
Yeah, I know, definitely.
I mean, I was reading your white paper, which is very well-written.
I encourage everybody to check it out.
But, you know, it's fascinating to think about some of those possibilities.
And crypto and blockchains are always evolving, you know, in general, right, and improving.
So going back to the foundation of some of what you all were saying, it's been great to hear about it.
And I'm sure you guys have thought deeply about this.
I'm curious about what is the way in which, you know, an SDG focused blockchain,
like, how do you independently verify, you know, in an automated way?
You know how to like, because is it like through a DAO structure?
Is it going to be through some other structure?
Like, how do you figure out, you know, that aspect of it?
Because it does rely on sort of integration with real world, with the real world, right?
Yes, I mean, see, I'm very I'm able to to acknowledge that there is no perfect solution.
You would not be able to to have a hundred percent mapped solution.
What we are looking towards is to move towards more sustainability rather than tracking it 100 percent.
So what we've done right now is to make sure that all the all the validators that are there,
which have been used to score.
So that's why we're going after the governments and the Fortune 500s and the bigger companies,
because they do have verified scores.
Those will have higher rewards if you do not have a verified score, you'll you'll have your
sort of ASB calculator as zero and you would not be making those extra rewards.
So that's how we started.
But then it slowly and slowly is morphing.
And then we started having conversations with the particular government.
I can't name it because of India.
But they came to us and said that they want to use our calculator for for ranking the
companies in that in that particular country.
So now what happens is we start collecting data from all the companies in this is a GCC
country. So a massive, bigger country there of all the companies that are there in this
in this in this particular geography.
And these companies will be ranked based on what their systematic score is.
And if it is higher, then of course, they get lower credits, easier access to credits and so on
and so forth. And then we give a solution to to these companies to make sure how to make
So now what happens is suddenly we have data coming in from all sorts that give birth to an
idea that we can sort of democratize it by creating a node structure where people can come
in and add their own data on the blockchain and and sort of break the monopoly of these
two or three or four big companies that have that have that have all the data and they
just keep it to themselves.
So once the ecosystem becomes bigger, once more partnerships come in, once people start
adding their own data and start making money on their data, their data that will increase
the efficiency and the optimization and the accuracy of the data itself.
But till then, what how we do it is that if the data is coming from the government, we we look at
it as the highest tier data, which has higher weightage, higher scores.
If it's coming from an individual without much verification, it is it is a it is a lower
it will give it one rating out of five.
And we sort of mix and match all the data sets.
So that's how we're doing it right now.
Of course, it will be managed through a DAO structure where there will be independent
verifiers will be paid based on their their expertise and reputation.
But it's going to be a evolving system.
I'm very prepared to understand that this is not going to happen in one day.
Yeah, let me just add on EYC.
And I think you might appreciate it with your background and others.
So we're in the process of trying to get it the framework of ESG peer peer reviewed.
So we have a hypothesis of how data should be collected, how data should be managed and all of
that. But right now, as Prateek pointed out, there is a fidelity challenge.
Not all data is existing.
There are some centralized sources and we want to create like, you know, the data collection
make it as democratic as possible, a bit like citizen journalism, but done for ESG in a way
that people who add to the data pool have an incentive.
So that peer review process is on.
And as Prateek pointed out, it's going to be iterative.
But we want to get academia involved more seriously to have our white paper specifically
focused on ESG become like the industry standard.
And this closely fits in with our product market fit strategy as well.
So one of the things that we really want to do going forward is to have like ESG as a service
added as a serious revenue driver.
And we have, like, of course, a lot of governments interested.
But I think with 2030, you know, coming closer every year, the pressure on organizations and
governments who've previously talked extensively about climate change and so on to actually do
something about it would be would be mounting.
And since there isn't what you call a standardized ESG service provider on a calculator, we
hope to capture that white space.
So, you know, we think we are students of blue ocean strategy.
So that's basically our approach.
I think it's just fantastic.
And it's clearly a very thoughtful strategy.
Appreciate the insights here.
I could talk forever about these things, but we are coming to a close on our our time.
And I would love to invite the I would love to invite all of you to talk about what you
would like to leave our great audience who's gathered here today about Firechain.
Sure, let's start with the CEO.
Prateek, you want to go first?
I think I would love to invite everybody to be a part of the fifth Industrial Revolution.
And there are a lot of updates regarding how you can become a part of it on our Twitter
So please follow us for more.
We are trying to create a revolution where we promote the thesis that you can actually
do good while you make money and you can actually do make more money if you do more
good through blockchain and sustainability.
So please follow us for more updates as our mainnet is going live in June.
And for all the developers out there, make sure you try to test our testnet.
PG, I actually have a follow on question to that.
This is just an impromptu, but it comes from the discussion we just had.
So I thought all of your responses were just very thoughtful.
And, you know, I mean, your white paper I've been looking through during this time.
But, you know, you talk about SDGs, you know, fifth Industrial Revolution, you know,
using terms that we use, like at Davos, right?
Like at, you know, at the forum.
And the interesting thing is, I didn't really know this until I spent more time on X, but
there is a substantial group on, you know, social media that is very much against like
the forum, you know, and sort of what it stands for, which, you know, at your global
shaper, I'm a YGL. So we've gotten these, you know, I mean, even when I go to these
YGL meetups, we talk about how sometimes people just randomly get, you know, pounced
on by social media just for literally being a YGL and nothing else.
So I think these SDGs are great.
I'm so excited that there's a focus on them.
But how do we balance that with some of the, I would say, the fire, if I were to say to
speak on social media, you know, against some of these things?
Well, I mean, this is an amazing question and interesting one as well.
I think I, you know, since I've been associated with the forum for, I don't know, eight, nine
years now and I've been to Davos for five years.
And this is a lot of people who are actually, you know, against the forum primarily
because they think it's only for the elite and it's not for the masses.
And if you talk about blockchain, it was ideally built for the masses.
But the reality is, since, you know, once the ETF kind of kicked in, we all know that a
big part of the Bitcoin supply is also getting going to ETF.
So I was reading already more than 3.5 percent of the whole BTC supply.
So you like it or you, I mean, we like it or we don't like it.
The traditional players have kind of jumped in and it's good for the sector.
If you did, it's good for the whole Web3 space because there's a lot of, I think all of you
initially were speaking about how much traditional kind of money is kind of coming in.
And as regulations and traditional sectors kind of jump into the space, it's only going to
make the space more better.
We need to kind of, of course, maintain a balance to keep it decentralized as much as
possible. So we're trying to implement our structures as much as we can when you speak
about fire. And when you speak about, you know, sustainability, there are a lot of criticism
that kind of we face that how would you make it decentralized?
It kind of would be centralized in a way.
So we kind of implemented a doubt structure even for that.
So we're trying our best to kind of maintain a balance.
But long story short, until you have institutions, I think, like what Karsh mentioned,
until you have institutions coming in and adopting the chain, it's very hard to impact a
billion plus people. And when you when I talk about the fifth Industrial Revolution, I'm
talking at a larger scale, which means you're impacting a billion plus people and mobilizing
billions of dollars. And it's impossible to kind of do it just with retail without any
institutional involvement.
So we are we are moving to a space where I think this will become the next normal.
I mean, when, as I think you were mentioning about, you know, about MetaMask and how your
mom is kind of confusing with gas.
So I think the I think blockchain will become a household thing only when our moms, our
mothers and fathers and, you know, grandparents kind of start using MetaMask and trust wallets
and all of this. I mean, until that it's still it's still for the elite, it's still for the
young. So we are moving in that direction.
And I think we have to maintain a balance.
So you're trying our best to do that.
Also, also to add to that, you know, most people shit on for lack of a better word at
Schwab because the they perceive the ethos of the whole forum as more for themselves and
less for us. So as Gauraprit PG was mentioning an elite club, we are sort of neutralizing
that by democratizing the entire thing.
So, yeah, you you might perceive that as an elite club who want more for themselves and
less for you. But if we can use the same language because the language there is the
stages themselves don't do that.
They are just for, you know, they're just ways for us to act, you know.
So if we can democratize what they are saying, their language, then it doesn't matter if they
want more for themselves or not for us, because once that process happens, everyone's in.
And as and the ethos of our space is we don't keep anyone out in the blockchain space, including
the elite. So the for us, the the creating balance aspect is about democratization and
not listening to to what one or the other side is saying.
Yeah, and mostly when you talk about the language, I think if you talk about, say, education
and you're trying to impact, you know, in your working on education.
So it just becomes easier if you're using a language with kind of a lot of people already
understand. So I think STGs are just the languages PD mentions STG for.
So if I'm talking on education, I would rather label it as STG for, which makes it easier for
And, you know, we are just trying to make sure and as as STGs kind of try to get achieved by
2030, we're also kind of following the same agenda where we're trying to make blockchains
So we kind of just aligned ourselves with with the global goals and and the agenda.
But that doesn't mean that, you know, we are we are we are just for the I mean, we are just
trying to promote the elite thing.
I mean, we are we are both I think we are working at the intersection of both where we
want the elite to also kind of come in and we also want to cater to the masses.
And that's why we roll out a large education program specifically for the masses.
We're doing we're actually doing both.
Yeah, I think the people I love all those responses, PG and Prateek.
But, you know, I think the people who knock Davos and what happens there, like most of
them, almost all of them haven't actually been there.
If you do go, it's a wonderful time.
People are so humble and everyone's sharing, you know, like if if if you think and sorry
to cut you off there, but if if people who sit on Davos actually go to Davos, they realize
that it's the one of the most space where everyone is willing to share as much as they
can. So it's the exact opposite of an elite group.
Absolutely. Yeah, definitely.
It's incredible. And you know, all these conspiracy theories, I mean, most of the people
there are like focused on, hey, what color is my badge?
You know, did I get invited to the Salesforce Party?
Right. You know, things like that.
Just like kind of menial things.
But it really is a great place to meet people.
Like I said, people are so humble, down to earth, you know, people like Paul, just meaning
Jamie Dimon. I ran into like Al Gore in the elevator.
And, you know, he's great, you know, just, you know, seeing Angela Merkel, who was then
chancellor of Germany, of course, you know, walking down the hall.
I mean, it's and it's not just that these people are there.
It's just that they're humble, willing to engage and very genuinely curious about what
is going on with like frontier tech.
In my case, you know, metaverse crypto, for example.
Yeah, I ran into Al Gore super humble.
I he trained me back in twenty eighteen and I'm one of the climate reality leaders as
well. So I attended like about six convenings and he's super humble.
I bump into him every time I'm at Davos.
He's almost there every day.
Closing thoughts on this, if I see, I think, yes, white badge, brown badge, all of like
we've been to Davos and we've always come back inspired.
But some of the critique against Davos is not necessarily directed at a particular
organization, but it's about fundamentally, you know, crypto was an anti-traditional
institution and globally, the trust in all institutions of globally falling down.
And what we're all trying to do is to see if there can be an alternate version of the
truth. I will say that right now we're in Web 2.5.
It's not Web 2, it's not Web 3.
So the role of institutions right now is significant, not just for what we're trying to
build. But to take from Web 2 to Web 2.5, we've come here in about 10 to 15 years.
But to go from Web 2.5 to Web 2.3, the next few years are important.
And I think making it us against the institutions is probably not the right strategy.
So we'd like to take, you know, all our institutions along with us and critique them when it's
merited. Otherwise, you know, partner with them to advance the collective goals.
I think it's absolutely incredible.
I feel like we could be talking about these for so long, but time has come for us to end
this space. So I want to invite everyone in the audience, please follow all the speakers.
We are excited to see their progress in the coming months, in the coming years.
And we do these regularly, 9 a.m. Pacific, these spaces.
So please do join us for the next one.
I want to thank the Firechain team.
It's been awesome talking to you guys.
You guys are so thoughtful.
I look forward to seeing what you do.