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Layer 2 Solutions: Scaling Blockchain with ZK Rollups, Smart Contracts
Recorded: June 12, 2025 Duration: 2:26:30Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent BitAngels discussion, key topics included the launch of Layer 2 Solutions aimed at enhancing blockchain scalability, upcoming tokenized events in Puerto Rico, and strategic partnerships fostering community growth. The conversation highlighted trends in DeFi, fundraising opportunities, and the importance of skilled hiring in the evolving crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Hello everybody! Thank you for joining us today for our weekly BitAngels space that happens every
Thursday at 1 p.m. Pacific time. We're super excited. Before we get into our main topic today,
which is Layer 2 Solutions, I'm going to announce a few events that we have coming up.
We have on June 23rd, two events, one in New York City and one in Philadelphia.
So whether you're in the city of Brotherly Love or the Big Apple, you're all invited to come.
The first one in Philadelphia, hosted by Kirk David Phillips, Michael Gann in Decentralized Philly.
This event is going to run from 630 to 830 Eastern Time.
They're going to have networking, startup presentations, and they're going to talk about 6.30 to 8.30 Eastern time. They're going to have networking, startup
presentations, and they're going to talk about blockchain and AI. You'll hear pitches and talks
from Super DCA, OKBets, and Crypto Bullseye Zone. It's a curated approval-based event,
so you'll need to register in advance. So go to bitangels.network and explore our events section
there, or you can contact Kirk David Phillips, our Philly city leader,
if you'd like to get involved or have any questions.
In New York City, we're having the Bid Angels Builder Pitch Competition at PubKey.
This is also June 23rd, same day as the other.
This one's from 6 to 9 p.m. Eastern,
and it's hosted by our New York City city leaders, Charles Forrest,
Monica Prophet, and Dwayne Jacobson, all amazing people. So stop by and meet those guys. It's
going to be at the Pub Key. They're going to have startup pitches as well as a fireside chat with
Michael Turpin and Luke Herner. So again, go on over to bitangels.network after this show, check out all our events,
apply to pitch. We've got the tokenize in BitAngels Day coming up in December. We've got a whole bunch
of things always popping up. So yeah, so let's get started. We're going to talk about layer two
solutions. Hello, Warren, our wonderful co-host. How are you today?
Hi, I'm on. How wonderful.
Yay, and we see, I see we got Elise and Anthem here. We got Dr. Adele. I'm going to invite
our New York City leaders on. I see you guys there to tell us a bit more about your event, if you'd like.
Great.
It's always good to get the announcements.
I don't know about the detail.
I'm not going to be able to remember what time it starts in New York, but that's okay.
That's okay.
I just took care of all of that, so I already announced it all.
To find out details, you don't have to wait till the end of the program. You can do it
right now. Come on, admit it. We're all multitasking. Go to bidangels.network and you
can see the schedule of all the upcoming meetings. And it's getting to be, I don't know how we'll do
during the summer, but by the end of the year, it's going to be that we're not going to be able
to announce them all on the show here,
which is wonderful because you just need to know to go to bitangels.network and you can see them all.
The next tokenized is coming up in December in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
And I just saw the logo for it.
It's labeled the Latin America one too.
So the, whatever the right initials is for that, I'm, I'm drawing a blank LAT.
Yeah.
LAT AM.
Boy, I, that's what I can remember that part.
I just can't remember what it stands for.
I know Latin America is in there, but there's that. There's the Caribbean
because there's a lot of activity in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, just tons of stuff going on in
Puerto Rico. So yeah, I heard some details about them looking at places to hold it. It is going to
be larger than anything we've done, I would say, because the market's going to be going extremely
well. So book now, you know, you get your ticket as soon as possible. But the main thing is to
make sure you get it on your calendar and start planning on not being someplace cold at the
first week of December, the 8th through 10th. And that whole week is activities in Puerto Rico.
And it is just, you know, the tokenize is the best networking ever.
Wouldn't you say so ever?
I think it was incredible.
I went to a bunch of conferences in Vegas and the tokenize Finangels one was my absolute favorite. I felt like I had the most in-depth, amazing, and like
friendship conversation. That's really getting to know
really smart people. Yeah, and don't take it from us because we're
very biased. But still,
ask anyone. The network and the people you
meet.
There's very few places I go and most, if not all, of the speakers stick around.
So, you know, famous or infamous or whatever the people we have tend to stick around.
Occasionally we'll get somebody like, you know, a government official or somebody that comes in for an hour and then leaves.
But almost everyone there, or these are people that are billionaires, people that have started large companies, and people that run huge funds.
And they're there together. I know Michael estimated $5 billion in investment funds in the room at one time
and he should
know he's among those
and so yeah put December
8th through 10th on your calendar
and make it the whole
week because it's a great place to spend
a week in
colder months
and you still get
home in plenty of time for the holiday.
Or stay for the holidays.
I'm sure that Michael would tell you that you need to move there and become a resident of Puerto Rico.
Great tax advantages.
I can't speak much to that, but it's pretty nice.
Yeah, but it's pretty nice.
And so great.
And we have some guests today from the people that were pitching when we were at Tokenize, right?
Well, Tashi might come on.
I'm not sure.
But Rock is here to tell us all about Litecoin VM and what they're doing, which is very exciting.
I don't know if we want to do that now or when we get more listeners.
We're all super about it we always have news to talk about so i'm sure i'm and i'm sure rock is anxious to talk about layer two but um so uh you know he's he's expert in those areas
so whenever he pipes in with that'll be fine but fine. But yeah, let's talk about the news.
What's happening this week?
L.A. is burning again?
It's kind of wild how often L.A. seems to be burning these days.
Yeah, it's almost like somebody's out there manufacturing kindling for these various fires.
I don't want to name any names, but you might look at those who have political office right now.
Again, not a political statement, just common sense that you've got to start at the top and figure out,
why can't we do something better about it?
And, you know, it shouldn't be a big media story fighting amongst the politicians.
I couldn't care less about that.
It's, uh, it's the infrastructure, it's running things that, uh, scares me over
there and, uh, I'm biased again here.
I left California 20 years ago.
Uh, and, uh, you know, and it was for these reasons.
And so, uh, you know, I got kids living in California, relatives, and I wanted to do well.
And, you know, I still consider myself a born and raised Californian, but I've less and less reason to go back now and a lot of other people leaving.
Anybody want to take the other side of the pro-California?
Well, I still live here, but I left San Francisco.
I felt like it was too chaotic, too dangerous, too dirty, and just not a lot there to keep me there.
It just changed so much over the years.
I ended up staying in California, but I did move out to the woods away from everybody where I could be an introvert.
They used to say that about where I lived in the Inland Empire, but boy, it's all just part of the mess now.
I think the rural areas are still nice.
The thing is so that I'd be someplace that people wanted to go to.
So with all the craziness happening over there,
you know, the chaos, the riots, you know,
the different fear from different, you know,
demographics, obviously it's kind of
one of the things as well.
I mean, does this, I mean,
do you think that this has any effects like to Bitcoin
or like crypto, like maybe futuristically
and maybe like scaring
people away from banks and when you're no chance to oh I'm sorry yeah I mean
yeah you know basically people you know being a little bit more afraid of the
government because you know they're gonna either stop them deport them
debank them or whatever it is I mean mean, is this, is this a positive
maybe for like Bitcoin or crypto maybe?
Well, it's positive for living in any other country.
Just looking at a little bit light at the end of the tunnel, a weird angle.
So yeah. Um, you know, I, I added up and I say by far United States has got the best options going.
I've been other places.
I've lived other places.
I do business in other places.
But, you know, there's a reason why we're ahead.
There's geology reasons.
There are political reasons going back to where, about as good property rights kind of basic law that
we have, although you can see that could be changing in a heartbeat.
I think the fight that's going to be fought here is whether or not we give in to these
ideas that we're so utterly divided that we can never get
back together, which is, to me, just ridiculous. It's not much different than what they were saying
in the 60s. And at that time, everybody was mad at the people who put on war, and the people that
put on the Vietnam War were very happy. But that's what I knew as a kid. When I grew up and found out what was really going on,
it was a tremendous time for the economy and things like that.
It didn't need just the war machine for that, although that was part of it.
And then I found out the...
You're saying that during the Vietnam War,
the economy, the u.s economy was
was booming interesting the 60s were fantastic the um they you know and we didn't really start
to have problems until the 70s uh the 50s were were great because it was post-war everybody was
was you know happy with that we we had some fighting communism. Of course, I don't remember any
of this because I was born in 55. So it's not like I remember anything from the 50s.
That's all Bob Groove.
Yeah, the story is that the hippies wanted to drop out and have communes and live where
Amber lives. But they also wanted to live right in San Francisco and take over.
The Occupy movement was not called that back then,
but there were plenty of people living, you know, the Haight-Ashbury district.
I remember going, you know, in the backseat of the family Rambler.
I was too young to be a hippie.
But I remember seeing it. We drove
through San Francisco. It's been a couple of days in the area, and I didn't see anything
good or bad going on. It was just like, you know, you'd hear on TV that it's all going to hell in
San Francisco, just like you do now. There's a difference now as the government going on now is different. It used to be things
were fairly normal and even, but of course, I'm saying that as a white male. It seemed normal to
me, but lots of changes for the better have happened in the last 60 years. But meanwhile, the government is looking at
what we've got to be fair to everybody. And boy, I just heard this. I was reading a book or listening
to a podcast this morning, completely different thing. And suddenly somebody said, and you know,
the one thing my mother always told me, the one thing I got from her to help me be successful was, the world is not fair.
And I don't think we say that often enough.
So it's an unfair world.
It's an unjust world.
Things don't go right.
And the more we try to fight to make everybody equal and get equal outcomes, the more we're
going to have trouble.
trouble. But that's a constant struggle. I think right now, it's actually most of the world,
But that's a constant struggle.
most of the country are going back to some semblance of normal. We can give up DEI without
giving up civil rights. It's not an either or. You're racist or you're pro-DEI. Get rid of DEI and all of the good stuff you keep.
You just stop putting a whole lot of budget to teaching ourselves how divided we are.
And so I think that's a very positive thing.
I think the government, what they're doing with Bitcoin, very positive.
And innovation in general, where things are coming out, the AI is growing so fast that we just don't see it.
It's going to come like smartphones and like the internet changed our world.
And, you know, we're going to definitely all know this in a few years,
but it's hard to see right now because we're going through some turmoil.
So, I mean, bottom line, I i'd say hang on things are are not
that bad and bitcoin is the one thing you can count on so you keep the safe money in bitcoin and
um you know and this is not investment advice
yeah i mean it's we have some normalcy coming back in some ways but things are pretty wild
right now yeah did you guys see that uh elon uh said he regrets some of the things he said
about trump that went too far yeah he definitely went too far yeah but that you know that was
staged from the beginning elon didn't go there thinking that he was going to be lifelong buds with Trump.
There's just no way.
He's too dang smart for that.
And Trump, of course, he knows his own record.
Everybody he buddies up to becomes his enemy, you know, in the next news cycle.
It's kind of not a good sign for a leader.
It definitely isn't you know boy you know you study trump to learn what the world is is doing what's going on and
what parts there are in the world i certainly wouldn't recommend anyone emulating i don't think
i i would be challenged to think of one person I've ever worked with that wouldn't
want to work with me again or would say a bad thing about me.
Right.
Maybe that means I'm doing something wrong.
Maybe that means I'm like too nice or too giving or something.
I don't hide your back.
I never feel that idea that, that, you know, basically even, even bad publicity or bad PR is good PR.
I don't feed into that.
That's just you, though.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, we all have stuff that either we regret or people regret knowing us or whatever like that.
The other thing I heard from that discussion this morning, and it was, you know, sometimes we do something and, oh, I get mad and angry.
And then a minute later, I'm over it.
And the guy was admitting, oh, as I aged, I found out that, no, it wasn't over because whoever I hurt in the minute I was mad is going to retain that for some time.
And, you know, we have there's consequences of our actions.
And so we all have things like that. But, Rock know, we have to, there's consequences of our actions.
And so we all have things like that, but Rock, I can't think of one on you. I'd bring it up if I could. Just kidding. But yeah, meanwhile, though, to go into every deal looking for how to screw the other side so so i i i would say um you know rock is
is quite amazing actually to work with and for um yeah definitely absolutely um you know the the
the network uh the information the stories um you know just as far as character as well. I mean, for me, I, you know, obviously it's early,
but I'm just saying for me, I think,
I don't think anybody would say anything bad in my opinion,
but from my side, I think you're great.
So, appreciate that.
I mean, there's a reason why
I specifically wanted to work for LDA.
I don't know if anybody knows the story, but I mean, I think I applied like six times or eight times over like six months, bugged everybody.
Yeah, until they let me in, even offered to be an intern.
I mean, that just goes to show a couple lessons.
I mean, that just goes to show a couple lessons.
One, that persistence pays off, but also that, you know, sometimes you miss things, right?
If our team turned you down, and I didn't even know this until like, I don't know, six months into you working with us.
I didn't know that you were applying and that, you know, other team members had turned you down, turned you down.
And finally, we gave you a shot and you're like one of our greatest assets now in
only like a year, year and a half.
To be fair.
I wasn't turning him down because I didn't think he was a good, a good, a
good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good strategy officer.
Certainly the one who I know I perfect timing.
That's pretty funny.
I know I must have annoyed asic like crazy
but the the main reason is we just weren't hiring you know so at that time uh and as soon as it
made sense we found a uh place where you could uh thrive and do all the awesome things you're doing
we just brought you on board yeah this this this is fascinating because the thing I was listening to this morning about life not being
fair and you're not knowing the implications of the thing you did, the whole point that they were
talking about was that if somebody turns you down, it doesn't mean that they made a judgment on you.
In fact, more likely, they don't even know you well enough to have made
any kind of judgments. They were just doing something else. Like you say, not hiring at the
time or, um, or for whatever reason, maybe a dumb reason, like, you know, somebody, uh,
kicked, kicked their cat this morning and they were mad and you kind of remind them of that person just because you're in the same hemisphere so what's even funnier reason what's even funnier i'm not going
to mention any names i actually turned down two two pretty decent opportunities um and offers
while i was still waiting so anyways So what you're saying is that
one of them is a big computer
company that starts with the
S and rhymes with Oni.
I'm going to leak.
What is your
GMAs, right?
Little Pony?
What? Is it Little Pony? No.
Is that Adele?
Hey Adele.
Hey.
Nice to meet you.
Hey Adele, good to see you, man.
Good to see you too. Greetings from Alexandria.
I guess it's a good question.
This is actually a question I've had, and it's something that I
wrestle with as the CEO of LDA and, you know, leading a lot of our different kind of portcos
in different ways and guiding founders. You know, that's a lot of the panels and, you know,
advice I give to founders is like, so my style is just really take care of the people around you and, you know, build a team
that would follow you to hell and back and like be generous with your team, pay yourself
the least.
I think at LDA right now, there's probably like, I think there's like 13 people who make
more than I do.
And I'm the CEO and majority owner, but I just pay everyone very well.
I take longer term bets.
You know, I bought more and more equity in the company over time. I bought out a lot of our investors and people over the years, and I just bet on the future. And, you know, if that's a good
bet down the line, I'll do very well. But in the short term, I don't pay myself very much. I live
relatively frugally. I don't touch my Bitcoin
that I've been accumulating for the last 10 years. But I don't know if it's the right way. I think it
is. And this is where when people talk negatively about capitalism, it's very hard for me to...
I always get offended by that because my view of capitalism is very
positive. It's like, you know, the way you like, you know, ALC says you don't make a billion
dollars, you take it that, you know, and that, but I've always looked at capitalism and free
markets as you, you make money by providing value. That's how you make money. You don't make money
by taking money. Nobody's just going to give you their money or let you take their money. They're going to hire you or
work with you or et cetera. If you're giving them value, that includes the people, your clients or
whoever you're selling your product or service to. And that includes your team members that are
going to want to work for you if they're getting value out of it. So that's how I look at it. But
then I see,
you know, like, like Trump is an example of, you know, if, if everybody that works with him,
not everybody, but a lot of people that work with him, like afterwards, super bad mouth him. And,
but look, the guy's a billionaire. That's why I'm only worth, you know, you know, eight figures, he's worth, you know, 12 figures or whatever. I don't know. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Yeah. Part of that is that, you know, it looks like the guys probably made $100 billion
and lost most of that. And what a rocky road to have to live on. And, you know, it's something
I say all the time. You know, it might be because I'm relatively poor, but I figure I do well compared to the average
person on the planet.
So I never think about that.
It's not about the money.
It's about what you can do and who you...
When the journey is over, you don't want to have money left over.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Go ahead and have some fun and accumulate stuff and give it to the,
your kids and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah,
sure.
But I mean,
end of the day,
you're not taking any of it with you and to be a,
you know,
to figure out some way to just get over on everybody so that you can
accumulate more.
Boy,
if that's what you want to do,
but that's not me.
I'm not implying that that's you, Rock. I'm sorry. I was talking about
in general, the people that say it's capital. The one I saw yesterday
was when Tesla
gets the robo-taxi out, somebody was trying to say that
Waymo was going to be better because they were first,
and that obviously doesn't prove out. You have to be the smartest, you have to be the brand,
and you have to have something that captures, which is where Tesla is. That's not the point.
The point was, they were saying, the rebuttal to them was, no, Tesla's going to win or take all.
say the re rebuttal to him was no tesla's gonna it's a winner take all tesla's gonna get everything
and i said really tesla's gonna be a hundred percent of the robotaxi market that's impossible
of course not but they i think they will i think they will be a significant portion they
they took a longer term bet this is that goes back to my absolutely true and you're and you're
right what the person was saying wasn't right they They were saying, well, you know, he's an awful billionaire.
All he's going to do is figure out a way he could be a monopoly and raise prices.
And I go like, that's never worked. Monopolists can capture a market and in the old days, you know, could do stuff.
We didn't have any antitrust laws and stuff.
There's, the case could be made,
although I also read some things about the largesse of people
that were robber barons.
And while they might have, you know, they might have seemed awful,
maybe in their heart they were better people than we know.
I don't know.
I can't go back 150 years to when there were those people.
But I think robber baron was wrong. I think, you back 150 years to when there were those people. But I think Robert Barron was wrong.
I think, you know, some of them were actually good.
We have, you know, Carnegie Library were built all over the place and brought public libraries to every community in the United States.
And, you know, a lot of things.
Rockefeller Foundation, you know, is because the guy gave away a whole lot of money.
Could they have done more?
Yes, they could have done more.
Were they a net good to the world?
Yes, they were a net good to the world.
And so that's my point.
I've never seen somebody that just says, I want to capture everything and then screw everybody working.
And we know that the alternative socialism doesn't work.
So you have to say, yeah, there's good and bad in capitalism.
And hopefully it's going to go well.
And I think the smart thing to do is to have a position where you're bettering the world.
Rock, if you just sat back and lived on your Bitcoin, you probably could do that.
Oh, easily.
Yeah.
I mean, I can, like 10 people could live on my, just my Bitcoin returns.
Right.
And so the, yeah, the alternative is you sit around and enjoy that you're wealthy and somebody
else isn't, or you say, where can you use your wealth and your talents more importantly to better the
world and have a fun a fun ride while you're doing it it's a lot more fun to go hang out with you at
tokenize than to try to figure you know stay home and figure out how i can make another two percent
this year i mean i guess so look you can make the argument that um okay you make a bunch of money
and then it gives you a better life.
You sleep better.
You're happier.
But I think there's actually a good argument for the most – the 40-chest, super selfish, best thing you could do is do good business and take care of the people around you.
You want to make good money.
I call that the selfish paradox.
Yeah, and that's kind of the beauty of capitalism.
Yeah, the most selfless thing you can do is to make sure you're doing well.
I mean, I learned at a church as a kid.
They were saying to something, wait a minute.
If I give away everything and end up, you know, jumping on a grenade to save my friends, I'm going to heaven.
What's this thing about selfless versus selfish?
The most selfish thing you can do long term is to take care of other people.
That also comes with, you know, if you're a person and you jump on a grenade and you
save a bunch of people, I mean, there's a level of legendary, a level of, you know,
almost, I guess, immortality in a way, right? So, yeah. Some would argue the greatest thing
you could do in your life is create a legacy, right? Absolutely. That's kind of what children are. It's a legacy.
You know, it might be that your legacy, and you know, I don't know another word to use for it,
but your legacy might be that everybody that you ever, you know, whose life you touch
goes off to do great things and they don't know anything about you because chances are
most of us are not going to be remembered 50 years
after we're dead and so if that's you know that's that's a kind of scary thought huh
we could try to put our name on a building or something like that no i've come to terms with
it going like i'm going to be the very best person i could be right now again it's selfish
and and here's the trick once once you're fixing your mind, hey, I'm
going to rig the system and be selfless and everybody, you know, it'll be the best for me.
Well, then you've lost your selflessness. You can't be selfless and be thinking,
what's it going to be for me? So I just just said stop worrying about what I'm going to get
and see what I can do for other people and then it magically works and you know in the back of
my mind and when we have these kind of conversations I say yeah being selfless is the best thing you
can do but I mean I guess you could argue that like when you are selfish you could still be
selfish uh that's okay you could be kind of selfless in the short term while still being selfish in the long
term.
So like when I pay a bunch of people at my different companies way more than I pay
myself and many of my companies like quick swap, I've never taken $1 from it and we made
a hundred million in our first year of revenue and I never took $1 and I never will just
cause my, I guess you could call it ego.
You could call it good guy you could call it community first you could call
it wanting to build a legacy or reputation you could you could call it
it's a good marketing thing for all the stuff I do you know you can call it a
lot of things yeah something that came to me like i went broke and then i rebuilt every
rebuilt enough you know so i'm doing okay and then one day it just occurred to me i'm not really sure
you know are the kids going to have enough kids and grandkids will i be remembered you know because
i thought where else am i going to be remembered i don don't think, you know, having the best-selling book I wrote
is going to mean anything to anybody 10 years from now, let alone 50 or 100. And, you know,
I'm not putting my name on the side of the building. And one day I said, it doesn't really
matter. I'm going to do the best I can. If somehow I wind up with a billion dollars next year,
I'm going to, you know, spend the
rest of my life giving it away. I don't anticipate that, but I'm going to act as if, because anytime
you need money, it can be, it's there. It can be found. If I had a cause that was really good and I
couldn't afford to fund it, I'd give Rock a call. And not with a, hey, Rock, spend some money with me. But this is
so good, I want Rock to know about it, because he's going to want to get in on it and tell other
people. And I don't, I wish I did. I'd be calling you for sure. But the idea is, you can always find
a way to do it. And obviously, as we've seen with USAID, you can come up with just about anything
and somebody will write you a check. So if you spend your time trying to raise funds that way,
but again, if you're selfless and you're trying to figure out what's going to be the best,
that'll be great. There's the famous quote I love. forgets, it's amazing what a few people working without
any, without trying to take any credit can accomplish.
You accomplish much more by not taking credit.
Can Twain say that?
I think Dr. Dell has his hand up, and I don't know who said that, not taking credit.
Great.
I'm on the phone today and can't tell, so interrupt me and go on.
Talk to Dr. Dell.
First the station break.
Sorry.
We're BitAngels Spaces.
We're here every Thursday at 1 p.m., daylight savings time.
And we are also at Bitangels.network and we are a group of
people that match funders and founders and we are looking to further the cause of blockchain.
So you're in the right place, stick around and please will everybody retweet, tell your
friends, leave a comment, follow the speakers. I love that.
Follow everybody you can and communicate.
Leave a comment.
I get around to reading all the comments, and I know others read and respond live.
I like to make sure I get to them after we get done talking.
I'm an old man, and I can't think of one thing at a time let alone two
but uh let's stay at it and uh coming up we've got uh some guests telling us about uh some
fascinating stuff rock i'm you're in charge of that one i i know this is an area you know and fund
um and but first dr adele well i i was uh just uh you know like thinking and
reflecting on what uh you and rock were mentioning uh earlier around the capitalism and different
modes and uh if uh should you be selfish or selfish uh in all of that and what comes to my
mind is that we are all have the same amount of time.
So everybody got 24 hours per day.
You're not going to buy any more.
You're not going to get any less. So the question is, how do you use those 24 hours to achieve things?
And the second thing here is that it used to be where it was really, really hard to accomplish things.
Like we had scarcity of
resources all of that stuff you had like tribes raiding other tribes because it was very scarce
and then we organized ourselves into countries and we had conflicts and all of stuff also all
revolving around scarcity but you But even like 70 years ago,
it was predicted that we would not have enough food.
What we did not count in is the innovation.
What makes us different as humans
from any other species on this planet
is our ability to innovate, to create something new.
So today we have plenty of food for everybody and the evolution of things
like blockchain which allows us to create newer systems that allows you not only to have a bigger
piece of the pie or access to the pie but really increase the pie size because what blockchain is in essence is an ability to
rewrite the current financial systems and how we conduct commerce both in terms of increasing
the money velocity access to the money globally does not matter if you are in in Africa or
in the US or in Europe you still have the same access to it
and you can create something new
and have part of that,
just like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin before 2008 was nowhere.
Now it's, you know,
like a couple trillion dollars.
So it's an amazing thing to think
that we are able to create
much larger amount of value.
Finally, if you think about what ai adds to all of this
stuff for the last you know 10 000 years we have been working on things that extended our physical
capabilities you know like being able of going from point a to point e on horseback cars airplanes
if they don't fall from the sky that made it easier for you to go and extend your capability
to build things and do that physical capability.
AI, for the very first time, is allowing us to extend our cognitive capability,
meaning that if you don't know how to do something,
you can just ask AI, get some help grow create things new so now add
those two things together the ability for blockchain to allow you to have a a financial system that is
accessible fast ai to extend your mental capability and your cognitive capability we are on the precipice of a whole new world where we are
going to increase the amount of opportunities the amount of wealth for everybody by orders of
magnitude which is very very interesting and uplifting but at the same time very scary for the powers to be because they will lose control
no doubt about it so we have an opportunity we need to take that opportunity and instead of just
kind of like complaining and blaming on it just participate go look at what rock is doing go look
at what warren is doing sheldon tokenize learn
come to the conferences build things and you never know your life will be changed and when it does
you're not only affecting yourself but everybody in your inner circle and everybody globally
that's what i wanted to say yeah i love that, Dr. Adele. And ultimately, you know, all these technologies
that you're talking about are going to bring more prosperity and freedom to everyone. And
I think that's probably why a lot of us are here. You know, we want to see these things
come to fruition. 100%. 100% great
yep really well said
do we want to go into layer 2's
we've been on some side
I have like lots of things I'd like to say but I don't want to keep the side rant going too long
so we should probably get to
I just have to say yeah amen to everything Adele said.
You know, thank you, Dr. Adele.
It's always a pleasure to have you here.
So, yes, teach us something, Rock.
Bring on your guests or our guests.
Yeah, so I guess we could give a quick overview of what what layer twos are.
Maybe if there's newer people in the audience, i'll try not to go too like shallow but um basically layer twos are solutions that scale or add
functionality or features that the that layer ones like bitcoin ethereum uh litecoin whatever
cardano what have you um, that they don't have.
So that could be scaling, it could be privacy, it could be programmability, it could be quantum
resistance.
So there's all these different things that you could do on these layer twos.
And the reason we build layer twos is generally because layer ones inherently have this, what Vitalik called the blockchain trilemma, which is that you can't increase, if you increase scaling, you decrease either security or decentralization and vice versa.
They're all like inversely correlated.
And so the solution to that, that most, I think most people would probably agree
to is that not all, there's some people who disagree with this, is that you do that by having
layers. So you have, you know, the layer one is for, you get your decentralization,
you get your security, and then you get your and then now you put the scaling into higher layers so that you don't have to sacrifice decentralization or security on the L1.
And so lots of people have done this in different ways.
Lunar Digital Assets, our Venture Studio incubated Polygon, and Polygon was for a long time the biggest ETHL2.
Polygon was for a long time the biggest ETHL2.
There's some other great competitors now like Base and Arbitrum and Optimism.
We also incubated Doge Chain, the largest Doge L2.
Let's see, what are there, I guess, outside of Bitcoin?
Okay, yeah, here's some other ones.
Like Lightning Network is a layer two.
Lightning Network is, for some people,
either like a layer two or even almost like a meta protocol.
It's almost like more ingrained in the layer one.
And then there's other things called side chains
that people would say are more detached from the layer one,
but maybe support the layer one in some way.
Maybe they use a gas.
Maybe they use like you could have like, you know, you could have, for example, Doge chain was actually a side chain technically because it used Doge as the gas and the main currency on the chain.
But it wasn't settling proofs or anything to the layer one. So there's all kinds
of flavors of these. I'm bullish on layer twos. I think the only way we keep the integrity of the
layer ones is by doing stuff on layer twos or maybe layer threes or other kinds of things,
meta protocols and side chains. And there's all kinds of different names
because these things are becoming a lot more technical now.
There's like based roll-ups and optimistic roll-ups
and ZK roll-ups and all these different kind of things happening.
So let's see.
I think Tachi is not here.
They're building something very interesting for Bitcoin.
We have Omnity, who actually may have some opinions on this.
We can bring them on stage.
Omnity, if you want to come on stage.
Here, let me send you an invite.
I know you're building in this space a bit, tangential to this space.
But what we do have right now is Aztec from LitVM. So LitVM is
a project that LDA is incubating. We were going to have them speak last show, but it was a very
long show and we just didn't get to it. So we're going to talk about LitVM today, but LitVM is scaling Litecoin.
I am a founder on this, actually.
It's the first time I'll be an actual founder in, I don't know, five or six years since we started QuickSwap.
You know, we think LDA is incubated.
Just out of curiosity, how does that feel?
It feels good to be in founder mode.
It'll be difficult for me to balance.
You know, I'm still, you know,
a co-founder of QuickSwap and still, you know, I had, I don't know, two or three calls
about QuickSwap today.
And, you know, we work heavily on Polygon
and I'm on the grants board for Polygon.
And I had a call about that yesterday.
But luckily for me, I guess my real superpower
is just having good people around me
and picking good people
and then I guess paying them well
and taking care of them
so that I can be a little, you know,
I could spread myself thin
but still be able to accomplish a lot
on a lot of different things.
I guess I hate comparing myself to Elon.
I love Elon.
He's one of my favorite people,
but I am not on his level, but I kind of take notes from
him.
And I think the way that he has so many companies and they all are able to do well is because
he just puts really good people in place, right?
And then he's just kind of making high level decisions and making sure that the people
he puts in place are doing a good job.
But anyways, LitVM, I'm going to be focusing heavier on that, a lot more heavy on than most of the projects that we incubate, because I will be a founder on it.
But I'll let Aztec jump in here and talk about what's going on with LitVM. We just came off of
Bitcoin Vegas and Litecoin Summit and Tokenize, and that was the big release.
And so, yeah, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening. But yeah, Aztec, why do we need a scale or why do we need an L2 for
Litecoin? What is this? How does it work? What kind
of stuff is LitVM up to?
So, Aztec, before you answer that really quick,
just so everybody knows, Aztec
was the visionary for LitVM.
It was basically ZK, LTC.
So just to kind of give you context,
Aztec was the visionary.
He did a lot of the research early on.
So yeah, just want to give a little bit of context
before Aztec.
Yeah, thank you, Richard.
And thanks, Rock.
So I think a little differently about Layer 2s.
We had a great experience at LDA to help incubate Polygon,
it was Matic Network before they transitioned over to Polygon.
But Layer 2s have always been, you know, transitioned over to Polygon. But it's always, like,
Layer 2s have always been,
you know, how do we scale
the Layer 1?
So, for example,
Polygon helped
the Layer 2, the idea
behind that, and these other Layer 2s is
we have
the same
kind of ecosystem and builders,
but we just have a platform that's faster and cheaper to use.
And that gave me a really unique perspective of layer twos and building on
them. And, and we kicked off DeFi summer on Polygon early in 2021. And so during that time and working with projects within the cosmos and getting my hands dirty,
building, you know, like projects that are closely interwoven with interoperability.
And that in those ecosystems gave me new experiences and so
litvm is litecoin's zk omnichain and i'm taking all the experience that i've learned from
early layer twos and the ideas behind those and working in other ecosystems with interoperability
and my experience with DeFi Summer
and pushing ecosystems early on.
And we're bringing that all to Litecoin.
And why does Litecoin need a layer too?
Because currently, for the most part,
it has limited utility so you can
send your litecoin to someone you can buy things with it there are some places where you can lock
up litecoin and there are some institutional things but for the most part it doesn't have uh program ability so litvm
what i i'm saying is we're building hard money web3 so we have the hard money aspect which is
litecoin and we have the web3 aspect which is bringing Litecoin to LitVM so that, and we're doing that in a trustless manner.
It's real native Litecoin on LitVM.
So, so earlier, Aztec, you said Omni, Omni chain.
Just for people, can you explain what OmniChain is exactly?
Definitely.
That's actually what I was, definitely.
So basically when you bring Litecoin to LitVM,
you're going to be able to have,
you're adding programmability to Litecoin.
So now with your Litecoin, you'll be able to play in defi you'll be able to vote with
it potentially you can build more complex payment systems that has litecoin interwoven into it
maybe there's litecoin in gaming and in all the other categories but now it just has that programmability
the omni chain factor is that on litvm the way we're building it out is that
uh you'll be able to use your litecoin not only with litvm but we have this other component just to keep it kind of short and
simple. That's we call it the ag layer or it's called the ag layer, Polygon and a bunch of other
brainiacs are building out the ag layer. And what this does is any assets that are
integrated or platforms that are integrated into the ag layer,
layer are it unifies the liquidity between all of the chains that are integrated into the ag layer
and in the future it also add a composability so technically in the future you know you'll be able
to bring your litecoin over to litvm native trust Litecoin, you'll be able to do programmable things,
DeFi and et cetera.
And further down the roadmap,
you'll even be able to potentially do
more complex strategies.
That composability factor means that you can potentially
have Litecoin on one chain and swap it
for something on another chain or
do some type of defy loop strategy between multiple chains with your litecoin and that's
what makes it an omni chain because you're the not only the not only do you have that composability
but the applications that we built on top of the platform litvm will will be in the future
be able to be composable and interact with other you know not only the layer one litecoin but other
uh platforms like solana or other layer twos or other l1s and um but i i have some really
i'm really excited to try out some other things as well on uh litvm like real world assets backed So let's say you have real estate and you, you back it by Litecoin and use that.
And instead of, instead of just transacting with some type of ERC 20, it's actually backed by Litecoin. institutions will find what we're doing very interesting and have more use cases and,
and be more inclined to, to jump into like the real world asset space and things because it's
actually backed by hard money. But anyways, that that's it in a, in a nutshell.
So I'm going to jump in because, uh, actually here we have Scrim has a question and then I'll jump in because Aztec is good at explaining all the kind of tech and the fundamentals.
And I guess I'm as a business slash marketing person, I can bring a little of the hype of why this might be interesting to everyone.
I like all the interesting things that are going on with it.
I'm a little more on the hype side.
I like to be a little bit of the hype guy.
When I was young, actually, that was my kind of title amongst all my friends.
Whenever we would go to parties or, you know, I was the president of the fraternity,
and I was kind of always the guy who could bring a little hype.
So I'll add some fuel to the fire here.
But Scrim, you have a question?
I'm just going to add on.
That's kind of what we're working on with Nyla on Solana, where you can basically, like, trade on X.
So it's basically, like, cash app and Venmo on X.
You can send and receive.
And the AI basically makes its own wallet for itself and has like peer-to-peer payments.
So I was just adding on.
You guys want to check out Nyla.
You guys go go do that.
There's good devs working behind that of staying up 48 hours.
Hey, don't mute me, man.
I'm rude.
Go check out Nyla.
Good night.
I don't know who muted you, if anyone.
Did anyone mute him um okay uh so i think he said he's building a they're building a layer two of solana i mean i
think it's interesting i don't know what does i don't know how much like um excitement that brings
people when isn't solana's kind of thesis that you don't need layer twos that they're just going to all do it on the l1 but i know there are people building
l2s for it um eclipse or as eclipse is a layer two of ethereum i think built using solana virtual
machine but anyways uh i didn't mute you i didn't kick you uh i don't know if you got kicked or left
but um okay good to hear i'm not like a super fan of Solana,
to be honest, but I didn't kick you. Okay. So yeah, some of the exciting stuff about this is,
you know, early when we were thinking about doing this, we've been thinking about doing this for
almost a year. But for us, it just didn't make sense or it wouldn't be a big enough thing if we didn't get official support from Litecoin Foundation, Charlie Lee, etc.
And so we noodled on the idea.
We were actually building the tech for over a year.
It was actually a Bitcoin layer, too, that we were building originally.
And we spent a lot of money.
I mean, I think we spent lda spent close to a million
incubating that project but then we started to notice that the bitcoin l2 space was getting
very congested there was a lot of really good projects including projects we're working with
like tachi and uh bitcoin os and uh you know we were looking at hemi and we've been talking to
them and they're they're doing they have some great technology and you know there's were looking at Hemi and we've been talking to them and they're, they're doing, they have some great technology and, you know, there's Merlin and Bob and Stax and Rootstock.
And so there's like a hundred Bitcoin L2s, but we noticed, or Aztec actually noticed,
there's no Litecoin L2. And Litecoin is like one of the most sound monies there is. I think
I would argue, I have a preference personally for proof of work.
I think proof of stake is cool too.
And I've built a lot of stuff on proof of stake,
but I have an affinity or preference. And I think there's like a safety in proof of work,
the way it's designed,
like an anti-coopting kind of mechanisms built in.
But anyway, so we were like, wow, this is crazy.
There's no one building a layer two for Litecoin.
Litecoin has a massive payments community.
They have on many wallets and applications.
Litecoin is used more than Bitcoin for payments.
And that makes sense.
I mean, Charlie branded it as the silver to Bitcoin's gold.
It's cheaper.
It's faster, et cetera.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I'm not bashing Bitcoin here.
I'm a hardcore Bitcoiner.
You guys all know.
But anyways, we saw the
congestion and we thought, gosh, do we want to launch this Bitcoin layer two and then be competing
against a hundred people? And then if it doesn't go well, our community will be upset. And so we
were like, gosh, we already spent a million dollars building all this technology. And Aztec
had this idea and said, well, let's go to Litecoin foundation and Charlie because we
work with them on some stuff we do a lot of spaces with them and uh we support them in a lot of ways
and it was the first uh crypto Aztec ever had and it was I think my third crypto I ever had and you
know I got my parents yeah please I could add one thing also is I watched the Bitcoin layer two phenomenon unfold.
And I've been a big fan and participated here and there.
And I just noticed that it seemed like an uphill battle as well, just because of the culture on Bitcoin.
And a lot of
Bitcoiners don't want to see any experimentation. You know, there's people that want to ossify the
chain there's, and there's good reasons for all of these things. And if you followed the
relationship between Litecoin and Bitcoin, um, Litecoin was the first for many things,
Bitcoin, Litecoin was the first for many things, many technologies that then Bitcoin adopted.
So I just noticed that a lot of really hardworking guys that were building really cool technology
were running up against these hurdles and kind of the culture.
And so I thought, you know,
it makes more sense to build these things on Litecoin,
let Litecoin prove it.
And the community is more open-minded
and ready for innovation.
And then, you know,
then I think Bitcoin will have more case studies
and things like that.
I just wanted to add that.
That was a big part of my research early on.
Yeah, definitely.
Also, a fun little fact about Litecoin.
It was actually the third token ever created.
Is that true?
Yes.
Are you sure about that?
I'm like 98% sure.
I would have thought maybe, um, yeah, maybe I'm trying to think now.
Cause Feather coin came from light coin master coin.
I'm pretty, yeah.
Master coin came, I think later.
I'm trying to think.
Yeah.
You might be right.
Yeah.
But rock, i interrupted you i think you were
going to start talking about the teams and and how they're uh you know bringing everyone together and
uh some of the awesome partners that we have i think that's where you were going uh with
from your side yeah um i mean i was kind of yeah going into the whys of like, why are we building this? Why does Litecoin need this?
But yeah, now the, you know, how are we doing this?
What's like, what is it?
Who's involved?
So yeah, LDA is incubating it.
We're co-incubating it alongside CJN, which is Mario's company.
And then, you know, Waheed, their chairman, and a bunch of others on their team are focusing on
this it's one of their number one focuses um and they're launching some pretty cool stuff like
they're launching um i hope this is public info but they're launching humanity protocol pretty soon
um that one's pretty hyped and a pretty cool project um but anyways yeah so cjn is involved
uh they'll be doing a lot of
like distribution marketing. Um, you know, Mario has a big network. Um, and then LDA will be doing,
uh, all of the like core marketing and business development, fundraising, et cetera. We also have
Michael Turpin is, uh, coming in as an investor and advisor. And you guys all know his history.
So he's leading especially PR for this.
So he did the PR for Ethereum and Tether and others.
And then we also have Polygon has been heavily supporting.
Maybe we can, if someone could pin a couple tweets,
maybe by Litecoin Foundation, Charlie Lee, or Polygon, Sandeep, etc.
So we're getting a lot of support for this.
We're getting institutional support.
DNA Fund has some really interesting institutional stuff they want to build for this to bring yields to Litecoin.
And we'll most likely be doing something with that.
And that'll give people a way to
bring litecoin to the chain and get a yield on it um and then there's some other ways we're going to
do that but i see we have some hands so i'll uh i'll let uh adele you got a question probably
sorry if i could just add one more big partner you know bitcoin os who's who on the development side is we're taking some
of this technology that already
exists and then
making modifications
for Litecoin. So this
technology is right around the corner.
This isn't something you have to wait years for.
And then also we have
maybe you could just say a little bit about Gateway
FM. You talk
really great. You know how to
kind of talk about the industry a
little bit yeah i didn't get to developers yeah thank you for for bringing that up um so we have
two dev teams working on this one is um like some of the best in zk roll-ups for ethereum and that's
gateway they helped build uh the aragon client that now a lot of all ZK chains are using. They helped develop the recent version.
They were a major contributor to the recent version
of the SP1 prover that they're building with Sysynct.
And this is an iteration of the Plancky technology.
So there's like Plancky 1, 2, and 3.
Polygon acquired Mir for $400 million.
And so we're using basically for free.
We get these technologies, which is pretty cool, just thanks to our relationship.
And also they open sourced it, which is really an incredible and bold move by Polygon.
But yeah, so we're using Gateway is on our Ethereum roll-up side and the EVM side.
And then Bitcoin OS, we're getting a ton of hype right now and
raising a lot of funds and and doing some really incredible work um i know hoskinson who i'm not
the biggest fan of but he's uh he's supporting them pretty heavily they've been doing like
panels with charles hoskinson recently because they're building some stuff for cardano as well
but uh yeah they're so they're on our litecoin roll-up side we'll be managing all the litecoin assets and the zk of those so
we can have these trustless litecoin assets and we could have you know institutions and retail
and everybody be able to use litecoin in a trustless way instead of what you had to do in
the past was you know put it on blockfi or you you know, not Mt. Gox, but things like that,
Quadriga and FTX and Celsius and Voyager and all these things that went down. We want to avoid all
that crap, all the centralized crap and give people decentralized Litecoin that is programmable
that they can use for loans and get yields and DeFi, etc. But yeah, Adele, you had a question
and then we had another person,
Litecoin electrician had his hand up.
I don't know what happened.
Guys, is someone kicking people?
Let's let people come up.
I don't know if anyone's kicking
or if they just are dropping,
but yeah, if you want to come up,
Litecoin electrician,
if you ask any questions,
feel free to come up.
You're all actually, I can accept you actually. I don't know if anyone's,
I don't know if anyone's kicking. I just saw two people leave. So no, they're just leaving. Okay.
Oh, no worries. Okay, cool. Just making sure. I don't want to censor people.
No, no, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. No no thanks for having me up here i actually was trying to get up here uh during the whole um debate on what what came first the uh the what
coins was what and i just want to be the actually guy right oh please yeah so you got you guys were
kind of correct on it being the third cryptocurrency however it's the third s crypt uh cryptocurrency
so you had you had ten of bricks which was heavily pre-mined.
And then you had fair bricks, which was actually created by Charlie Lee before Litecoin.
And then you had Litecoin, which was like his final vision.
Before that, before those three, you also had Bitcoin, obviously.
And then you had Namecoin, which I'm sure some of us are familiar with and kind of like a DNS kind of setting.
But yeah, I just want to give you that input. Yeah, there's a three pattern here. It's like third script coin, third, I think a lot of
people, it was like the third coin they held. I know a lot of people, my friends from like the
2015, 16, 17 era, who, you know, they got Bitcoin first, then they got Ethereum or Litecoin, and
then they got Litecoin or Ethereum as third. But yeah, thank you. Appreciate that.
Did you have any other questions or just wanted to help us with the history?
Yeah, that was it. That was it. But I'm loving what I'm hearing and I'm definitely
paying attention. So if I got anything else, I'll tune in.
Cool. I'm curious, since you're clearly a Litecoin lover from your name and your bio, but have you heard about LitVM?
Have you seen anything about what's happening with LitVM?
I have. I actually tuned into the panel remotely after the summit.
I wasn't able to make it to the summit this year, unfortunately, but it's really cool to see stuff happening with
Litecoin first and foremost. And second of all, like bringing ZK into it. I think that
I got to learn more about that stuff in particular, but I know what it does and I'm curious to see
what you guys do with it. Yeah. Thank you, man. Yeah. Actually,
now that you're mentioning, there's another really cool part to this that Aztec is noodling on.
There's no confirmation.
We haven't built anything on this yet, but we have our dev team looking into it.
Aztec, do you want to talk about or do you want to wait to talk about potential MWeb integration?
I can just say in general that the idea is, I think I can say that we're all at LDA big privacy proponents.
So I think it would be exciting to have MWeb Litecoin utilized in a native trustless way on LitVM.
in a native trustless way on litvm so you could peg in from the l1 to mweb to make to have like
this private litecoin and then we can beam it over to litvm and and then you'd be able to do
whatever you want on the chain and if you wanted to bring the litecoin right back out and then peg out for whatever reason you'd be able to so just a whole other more utility for not only
just like litecoin itself but uh the the mweb function more mweb functionality
for those who don't know mweb is um if anyone, this was a really big topic back in, I want to say like, I don't know, 2017 or maybe earlier, but it was Mimble Wimble.
Now, I really hope that we could have this, basically what Litecoin did, which is super cool.
I really hoped we could have this on Bitcoin.
I don't know why it didn't happen or if there wasn't enough appetite or, or I think it did require, um, a consensus change or like a soft fork. I don't know. Like coin electrician, do you know, did M web mimble, wimble extension blocks? It did require a soft fork. Okay. That's, I thought it might. Um, and so, yeah, that's probably why it didn't get implemented into Bitcoin. And unfortunately, instead of people implementing it on Bitcoin, they just went off and made like, um, a couple mimimble Wimble projects and tried to like kind of capture money from it, which is fine.
I have no problem with people capturing money, but they didn't work out.
Their inflation was shitty.
And so like one was Grim, I think Grim or Grim.
Grim?
I think it was Grim.
And there was another one I forget the name of.
But yeah, the Mimble wimble technology it's a
privacy technology it's it's super cool it's like very very cool and advanced kind of uh
cryptographic uh i don't know computer science problem that they solved um but yeah so litecoin
as it often is becomes the uh the testing ground for a lot of these things. So Litecoin was the first to have Segwit.
They were the first to have, I think, I might be getting this wrong. I think they're, okay,
they brought Lightning Network first and as a testing thing, and then it came to Bitcoin
shortly after. And then they, I think they were either first to have
Taproot or they had tap, or there's some technical like technicality there on why they might not have
been first or, um, I'm trying to think, but anyways, basically Litecoin is like usually
the first to implement things and then test them, see they work and then the bitcoiners adopted after
which is it's cool you know litecoin's been a testing ground for bitcoin for a long time
and they did that with mimble wimber it's hard to interrupt you i just think it's
yeah yeah please had a hundred percent uptime while being the testing ground for bitcoin
little little shots fired there on on my bitcoin. But yeah, I mean, the only downtime,
the only downtime we had in Bitcoin was the, the whatever, like infinite or almost infinite
inflation bug we had very early on. We did have to fork from that in what was that like 2013 or 14
or 12 or something. But, you know, it was very early days of the protocol and,
you know, no one got double spent or anything like that. So it's kind of like, I guess, you
know, Ethereum, they had the Dow hack and they had to revert the chain, but they did that to like
move to change the funds and to take the funds back from the hacker, which some would argue was
a good thing. Some would argue it was a bad thing, whatever. But the Bitcoin reorg didn't take any money from anyone. It just fixed a
catastrophic bug that would have destroyed the chain. But you could still argue, yeah,
that is downtime. It wasn't very much downtime. I don't think it was more than like three or six
hours, right? If anyone remembers. Now, anyways.
now anyways um uh rock i i just want to say apologize dr adele i i had interrupted earlier
i think you were going to ask a question um i just wanted to highlight the uh dev teams really
quickly but um i'm just wondering if you still had something you wanted to piggyback off of
yeah absolutely so first rock you're right litecoin was my third coin as
well uh so and and i do have like two questions i'm i'm very excited about uh the development
of light vm and uh i i think i heard you say that you will be able to uh aggregate the pools across different chains
that can come in is that right yeah so um go ahead aztec so in in the future uh we'll be
the goal is to be integrated with the ag layer and the ag layer is a unification type solution
for liquidity.
And so that will enable the assets on our chain
to interact with other chains.
I believe that's what you're asking about.
Yeah, this is gonna be huge because one big limitation for DeFi is the fragmentation of those assets.
So you end up with different pools and sometimes there is an ARB opportunity between all of them. pull it all and unify it through one chain, then that, in my opinion, will usher a huge DeFi 2.0.
So that's the reason for the Omni chain branding.
And so one of the things, it was really interesting,
on our calls with the Litecoin Foundation and Charlie,
it was it was
really interesting to see the things that they were excited for um obviously mweb um adoption
and privacy were big for them um institutions and and uh bringing more um programmable payments
because litecoin is a payments chain right that's what that's the main thing it's used for um rwas
uh was interesting them but one of the
things that they really lit up about which was super cool and made me super happy was uh when
we talked about how we're going to be like uniting basically bitcoin uh litecoin doge um even cardano
which i'm not the biggest fan of but i'm starting to not be as upset with them since they're finally deploying their funds and actually building stuff.
They kind of seem to be smoking mirrors for many years, but they're actually doing some interesting stuff now.
And I also just have personal beef with Charles for like talking trash on Bitcoin.
But anyways, that's my personal stuff.
But yeah, they were really excited, though, to hear that we were going to be bringing Doge and Bitcoin together through this technology that is.
So, OK, the way we're bringing Bitcoin, Doge and other UTXO chains and other chains in the future.
But all those together is through Bitcoin OS and their various technologies.
Maybe Aztec, if you want to jump in, you can talk about that.
But then, and then the second part is AgLayer brings all the EVM chains together and possibly
more chains as time goes on too.
I just wrote a big grant to plug Cosmos into Polygon's AgLayer as well, which me and Aztec
have been working on that from other angles for like five years or something, trying to
get Cosmos uh work with polygon
um and now i got to you know have the honor of writing them a pretty big grant to um from one
of the main cosmos teams to build that but um yeah go ahead aztec on the on the bitcoin os stuff
oh oh sure uh so and add on to the interoperability part of it, you know, I agree, Dr. Adele, like if you look at all the clusters, you know, there's the layer twos and the liquidity is just kind of stuck in certain layer twos and those DeFi ecosystems.
And you have a pretty, pretty interoperable network like the Cosmos, you know, but it's like a bunch of walled gardens and all that liquidity can move very
easily between each chain with cross-chain messaging the intra blockchain uh uh the ibc
protocol um intra blockchain communication protocol um and then you have like avalanche
and the subnets and you know so there's all these clusters. But the ag layer is, it utilizes DK technology.
So just pure cryptography and it's decentralized.
And it enables people to unify all of these and bring all of these pools of liquidity together.
So I 100% agree that it's going to change the way we look at DeFi
because everything will be unified.
And with that composability, let's say there's a loop strategy
and you have some assets on Ethereum,
but you would be able to increase your yield
by also looping that strategy through avalanche and then through
cosmos and then back to ethereum well you'll be able to do that with that technology so that you
have it would be more complex strategies but you'll be able to do it and uh that's the technology that
we're going to integrate
we're going to integrate into so with um
into
so IBC
plugging into the ag layer
they're doing that through union build
correct or
yeah
no no actually the grant we wrote is separate from that
so there's actually two teams now
working on bringing
polygon ag layer
and all the chains plugged into that.
So that's like OKX's chain called XLayer and a ton of other chains.
Immutable, the gaming chain is part of that.
Union is doing it separately.
The grant that I wrote was actually to one of the core Cosmos teams.
core Cosmos teams?
Yeah, so Cosmos is
recently just connected to
Ethereum with
IBC Eureka.
So I wonder if they're using
that technology to tap in.
Not fully,
that might be it. But yeah,
then there's also Union,
Richard. But yeah,
real quick on the question you had,
Rock, or you wanted me to highlight about the Bitcoin OS tech.
Basically, Bitcoin OS created charms and that is just programmable UTXO assets that can be beamed over to any currently, you know, it's any any UTXO type chain.
currently, you know, it's any UTXO type chain.
And it has programmability built into it.
And that it's able to, those assets are able to move seamlessly between chains using ZK technology.
So basically all that means is there's this cryptography that proves that the asset is on the L1.
So the asset never needs to leave the L1.
It's there.
And with the cryptography, with this ZK tech,
you're able to move it over and utilize it on other chains.
We're doing some slight modifications.
So that same cryptography enables us to do that within the EVM, so on top of LitVM.
I think that's what you're asking about, Ron.
I hope we're not going too into the weeds on the tech.
I don't even know if people know what composability means, for example.
This is actually a really cool one that people should know um is so many of you have heard the phrase defy legos actually here before i go
into that because that might throw off uh it looks like um light coin electrician you had a question
yeah thank you um i just want to know if you guys are doing Litecoin OS, if Bitcoin OS is behind that as well.
So, I mean, we are bringing their technology and then the Polygon Aglier and EVM, all those technologies all together.
And that's under the umbrella of LitVM.
So you could look at it as a Litecoin OS.
It's exactly what it is.
At least half of the technology is Bitcoin OS, but now Litecoin we're adapting it to.
And then there...
My question was because I saw something on the inscription server, the ordinal server.
And I was just wondering if you guys were doing stuff with the ordinals as well and testing stuff out, or if that's another party.
It's possible i don't know if if uh the bitcoin os team is doing
stuff uh that you might have seen but i'm not i'm not sure but i mean certainly part of what we're
trying to do is is also support ordinals and ruins um or lordinals and ruins and lrc20 and these kind
of things so we want we want to have really cool It's cool to see like that, like the programmatic, uh,
program mobility, sorry, I can't talk into it,
but also bringing the immutability cross chain, I think is, is huge. Um,
especially with, I mean, you're making,
it looks like whole applications are going to be made immutable and that's
going to be fricking cool.
Yeah, exactly. That was something that was really, I think,
important to the litecoin
foundation and charlie was that this is truly decentralized actually if you want to post if
anyone can pin the funny baby uh videos that they're pretty funny and and one of the things
like charlie we make charlie a baby in it and uh as second myself are in it and yago from bitcoin
os and cindy from polygon but um and, and maybe more people, I can't remember.
But anyways, it's funny because, you know, they're babies.
So, and it's funny, kind of video that went viral.
But it's Charlie saying, yeah, this better be like decentralized.
None of that wrapped, you know, crap.
I want raw coin like raw milk.
It was, you know, crap, I want, I want raw coin like raw milk. It was, you know, kind of funny.
But yeah, it's really important that we do this stuff all decentralized. And I, and by the way, for the first time, I think technology's caught up to be able to do that. So like not to bash
on any of the Bitcoin layer twos or others, others but or like even polygon but like i said polygon
was more matic polygon was more of a side chain now it's adapting and becoming more of a layer
two and it's zk uh chains are all like pure l2s but this is all new technology so you couldn't
build it like back when rootstock was around or um you know even even Bob is, I don't know, Bob is optimistic rollups. So that's
more of an L2, but like on the Bitcoin side, a lot of these are, I hate to channel Gary Gensler
here, but a lot of these Bitcoin layer twos are dyno, what Gary Gensler said, which is decentralized
in name only. And, you know, for a long time, I think that's all that was possible, right?
Like ZK rollups is a very new technology.
People are spending billions to build this out and it's still not fully done.
But it's now to a point where it's usable and we can actually have,
and Bitcoin has proved this by having ZK proofs on Bitcoin and also like not too expensive
because ZK proofs can be very expensive,
but they were able to do it in an actual production usable way, not just like a theoretical kind of
MVP. But yeah, so that was really important to bring true decentralization and trustlessness
to this. This Litecoin that you bridge to the chain will be completely managed by just math and code.
There's no human or central element or centralized bridge.
Like, for example, I mean, there's been other things we built like that you can argue even Matic Polygon.
I mean, there is a multisig that could be hypothetically co-opted or something.
But luckily, the people on bridge of, you know, hundreds
of billions of dollars have flowed through that with no problems. I'm one of the multi-sigs on
that or our team quick swap is, and Aave is one of them. And it's a lot of big people.
So you'd have to get like a lot of very respected and big people in the industry to try to do
something. I don't even know that they could actually take the funds, but they can maybe like censor transactions or freeze funds
potentially. I don't think that there's a way to actually take the funds. But anyways, that's still
not good enough. And that's how the whole industry has been forever until just recently. We've really
cracked some cryptographic stuff, particularly with optimistic rollups and ZK rollups. And we're
opting for ZK rollups, which to me is much more decentralized than optimistic rollups and ZK rollups. And we're opting for ZK rollups,
which to me is much more decentralized than optimistic rollups because
optimistic rollups, basically, they're still very cool,
but there's, um,
there's a chance that they could be lying about the proofs that they put on
on the L1.
And then someone has to be watching and has to like call out their bullshit
and then catch it.
which isn't the worst thing in the world
because people are watching
and nothing bad has happened
on any of the optimistic roll-up chains,
but it's always there as a risk.
And then it causes an issue with composability,
which is actually the thing earlier I wanted to talk about.
So composability means I want to build something on one chain
that talks to something on another chain,
not just vanilla bridging. You know, interoperability, you can argue is bridging.
But like a higher level of interoperability is composability.
And this is DeFi Legos or cross-chain DeFi Legos.
So when you guys have heard of people talk about cross-chain Legos, sorry, people don't talk about that much, but they talk about just DeFi Legos, which means, okay, I can have liquidity on QuickSwap.
I could have liquidity on Uniswap, but then I want to get the best trade, so I use 1inch.
And 1inch will do a multi-pathing route.
It'll take some liquidity from QuickSwap and some from Uniswap and some from Curve.
And sometimes there's like 18 different transactions in that one transaction to get you the best price.
But that is limited to single chain. And so cross-chain DeFi Legos or cross-chain composability is the holy grail.
That's when you can have Uniswap on one chain or their new Unichain. You can have QuickSwap on
Polygon. And you could have OneInch on either its chain or a whole nother chain. And they're all talking to each other through the main way we found to do this is through ZK rollups,
where you can batch proof. So all these chains communicate, they make a central proof. It's not
centralized, it's decentralized, but it's one, I guess, I don't know a better word for this,
but central proof. And that proof then gets posted to Ethereum. And so now you know, I guess, I don't know a better word for this, but central proof. And that proof
then gets posted to Ethereum. And so now, you know, all the chains transacted at once. So I
took a little bit of ETH from this chain and a little bit of ETH from this other chain. And then
I, you know, it, and then one inch, you know, did all the calculations and yada, yada, yada. So
there's, that's one example, but there's like infinite examples of times where you need to communicate with more than one application at once.
You know, you have liquidity lockers built on top of DEXs. You have auto compounders like
Beefy Finance. There's, you have strategies that, you know, if you wanted to build a strategy where
you're looping on Aave, but you know, some of but some of the liquidity is on Uniswap or something, these things are really complicated and they can use up to many, many applications at once.
But you can't do that on multiple chains.
But ZK rollups allow for that.
I think that some people might listen to us and think, wow, this all sounds complicated.
This is what the future looks like.
But a lot of this complexity will just strip away the complexity of, you know,
trying to figure out how to loop things or whatever.
And there's also going to be different technologies built out that will make it a lot simpler.
So this can also...
Account abstraction, chain abstraction, wallet abstraction.
There's all kinds of things that make this easier.
So you don't have to know all this at the point.
Yeah, at the end of the day, I guess all anyone needs to know is that you'll get more yield.
Or better trades. More yield, better trades, less slippage, a cheaper swap, lower gas fees,
like the things that the consumer actually cares about.
Brock, I've got to break in with a question, but first a station break.
Really quick, though.
Gake, someone was trying to talk, but he kept talking over Aztec.
I, again, did not kick this person, but he's gone now.
Come back if you want to ask a question.
Yeah, we're going to take a quick break and remind everybody it's BitAngels Spaces,
brought to you by BitAngels.network.
Be sure to follow everybody that's speaking.
Tweet and comment and share things.
Retweets are fantastic.
Really build the, even your likes really build
the presence of what we're doing. We have a growing audience. We want to keep growing.
And so my one question for you, Rock, and then I'm going to take a backseat and let you
go with this because I'm learning a bit. But if I'm an investor and I want to either hoddle or
invest in the next thing and leave it alone, do I need to know any of this?
I mean, I think it helps to – you should understand.
I personally, like whenever I invest in anything, I read the white paper, I dig deep, and I really want to understand it.
But, I mean, I guess that's for your own risk appetite.
You know know some people
buy things without knowing much about them i don't usually recommend that so yeah it's a lot
of them should not be investing in layer two then what you're telling me uh probably i mean i think
a lot of people to be honest shouldn't be investing in anything in this industry if they don't really
understand it they should probably stick uh and my bitcoin maximalish is coming out here but if you don't understand a lot of this stuff you should probably dig a little
more before you invest in anything you should probably just stick to bitcoin i found that
investing in companies is a lot more than because if the people are doing a good job and they have
and you have the basics right uh exactly how it gets taken taken of. Of course, if you're trading, you want to skim every little bit of fat
off of things that are slowing down
your ability to get yield.
But some of us aren't trading.
So that's good too.
Great, great.
I'm learning from this.
I don't mean to be negative in any way.
Just bringing up the obvious question.
I think we have people that have come on and they've not invested in any crypto.
And your answer is right.
Get yourself some Bitcoin.
And then none of what we're saying is investment advice.
I mean, most of that, that's what I tell most people.
Until you really understand this industry, you probably shouldn't be investing in very many things in this industry like stick to that if you're just starting out there's a lot of things
to be studying and understanding that uh this is pretty pretty high level compared to that
but uh it's all good to know i mean i i get from for most of the new rock you get the concepts
i i can't see you have the time to be coding all
this stuff so i think me and aztec are both like i think we we're we're real like um like we're
we're business people we're not devs but yeah me and him are very interested in this stuff we have
many i don't know how many hundreds of hours of conversations we've had on team calls or
just me and him or on Twitter
spaces. So it's interesting stuff
to us, but I don't know.
Let's take care of the questions and the speakers that want to come on
and I'll let you close it out
because I have something coming up and I'll
drop off silently in a little while.
Bye. Warren and
Rock, it's Sheldon coming to you from Houston,
Texas. Oh, we have to have Sheldon
talk. Okay, go ahead, Sheldon. Just a minute., Texas. Oh, we have to have Sheldon talk.
Okay, go ahead, Sheldon.
Just a minute, I want to tell you, actually,
I've been sitting in ICU with my twin brother the last three days,
and I stepped out because, you know, the importance of understanding what,
yeah, well, the most important thing is to understand that opportunities don't go away.
They just go to other people.
I say that time and time again.
And I was sitting on the sidelines here listening to Rock talk about what Charlie Lee's working on.
And thinking about when I met Charlie the first time about 11 and a half years ago.
And Litecoin was looked at as the silver option behind Bitcoin, which was the cold option.
And then listening to Warren and the whole idea that we are on the BitAngels network and that this is an amazing platform where emerging market projects can come and pitch
to these angels and we have an opportunity to make a decision as it relates to investing
in them or not investing in them.
But realize that opportunities don't go away, they just go to other people.
So you know, Rock, I'm pumped when I listen to what you guys are working on,
and the use case of using the Litecoin blockchain.
And I just want to come on for just a minute and say, man,
I really appreciate this community.
And for those of you that are listening here today,
to realize this is a super powerful community,
you can bring your idea.
You can put it on a stage.
You can pitch it to some people that have been angels in the industry
and have been founders and are funders,
and that you get to collaborate
with some brilliant people,
just clearly listening to Rock,
listening to Warren,
and listening to all the other speakers
that have been speaking here today.
And so I want to remind everybody
we have a permission list
and NFT NYC coming up the end of the month i am intending to be in new york for
that there is going to be a bit angels event i want to remind you go to bitangels.network
take a look at the opportunity to come in sit and listen from those that are pitching or position
yourself to pitch your project and let us learn about what novel strategies you have and what you're working on.
I myself am working on a very novel strategy.
I had the opportunity, I'm going to share with the listening audience today, with a multibillionaire here in Dallas, Texas.
I met with his CIO on Tuesday over in Arlington, Texas.
over in Arlington, Texas.
And it's very interesting to see how corporate America
and major institutions are looking at blockchain
and the use case of a stable coin
and how it is and will continue to revolutionize
and change the course of how financial services are provided,
how they process transactions,
and that I just have to encourage everybody
to learn as much as you can,
and then consider participating in the space
because otherwise you look back
with a lethargy of regret
that I didn't get in
when Bitcoin was only trading at $107,000.
So just realize this industry
isn't even 16 years old, relatively speaking.
It's not old enough to have a driver's license.
And so to be in the industry now is as good a time as any.
So thank you for the opportunity to share a few words with everybody today.
I wish you all a great day.
Thanks, Sheldon.
And for those who don't know, Sheldon is one of our BitAngels city leaders for Austin
and just a great guy all around.
Actually for Houston, but yes, I have.
I knew I was going to say the wrong one, man.
I do not know Texas well enough, and I should because Cindy's from there,
but I always mix up all these places.
I'm going to do it again.
I'm pretty sure I've done this already.
I'm pretty sure I've done this already.
I just want to say Houston is the fourth largest city in the nation,
I just want to say Houston is the fourth largest city in the nation.
And we have a great blockchain chain community there across a lot of different use cases and applications.
Obviously, when we look at immutable record keeping for the likes of accounting for oil and gas and for other industrial uses, we have a great development community. We have the Houston Blockchain
Alliance, Crypto EQ and Event Horizon Capital, and the BitAngels sponsors and co-hosts a monthly
BitAngels get-together. So if you're in the Houston area and you want to pitch your event,
you can come there and any other major city around the country. But again, Zach,
Houston, Texas, I am the city leader for BitAngels. Thank you.
All right. Now I don't feel bad Bit Angels. Thank you. All right.
Now I don't feel bad because you called me Zach instead of Rock.
But, you know, it's so funny.
People have done that my whole life.
My dad, that was like one of his nicknames.
I'm a junior, by the way.
But people would always call him Zach.
So I actually love it.
Rock, it's Rock Zacharias.
And so for those of you that can find the humor in me calling Rock Zach and me,
the city leader in Austin versus Houston, just a little quid pro quo, but thank you,
Rock, for all you. And Sheldon's one of my favorite people. So thanks, Sheldon.
Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for having me up on this space. I'm going to step down. I know
there's a couple people probably wanting to come up and speak their mind.
I know there's a lot of great light corners down in the listening space.
So I'm going to take my step down and I appreciate you guys having me up.
And yeah, great content. I'm excited. What's to go?
Hey, two talks. I don't know if you watched all the talks.
Go ahead, Aztec.
Go ahead, Aztec.
Cool.
So, yeah, Lightroom Electrician, I don't know if you saw all the talks.
I would recommend, I'm sure you saw the Charlie Lee talk.
It sounds like you saw ours.
But I would actually recommend the Nexus wallet.
That is pretty cool that the foundation is supporting.
It has Mimble wimble and some
other really cool stuff and then i would also uh recommend the luxfolio talk um they're doing
really cool stuff they're doing a litecoin etf um actually we're gonna put out a funny video about
um uh one of them as michael saylor about litecoin soon lux folio is actually the litecoin mic microstrategy
yeah yeah they're like well think about it like this it's it's uh it's litecoin treasury but
they're they're not doing um uh leverage like microstrategy and stuff like that
yeah i think they said that they're so they're not doing that but they they are not closing the
door to the potential of that in the future but yeah it's like a combination of like an etf treasury
strategy slash uh investing in cool litecoin stuff um but uh yeah uh really really smart
guys over there though doing some cool stuff.
But yeah, thanks for coming.
Okay, we went on for a long time about this.
I mean, we talked a lot about just the general L2 tech, and I hope people learn some stuff.
This is one of my favorite topics, actually, so I hope we didn't go on too long about it. But yeah, Layer 2s, I think, are super interesting.
ZK roll-ups are very interesting.
Optimistic roll-ups are a cool middle ground.
But this stuff is what we really need, guys, if we're going to get this to the masses.
You know, Bitcoin right now, for example, is not usable for the whole world, unfortunately.
It's usable if people just bought Bitcoin and then never touch it, never use it to spend or anything like that.
But we want Bitcoin to be used for more than that.
We want Litecoin to be used for more than that.
So we have to find ways to scale them.
And my big push is let's not scale the L1.
I think that just causes too many issues.
And mainly that it opens up the doors for changes in the future.
And I think we should let these chains ossify, like Andreas Antonopoulos says, and we should
do all of our scaling, our programmability, our privacy on the higher up layers.
I think that's the right way to go to keep decentralization and security right and not
sacrifice.
All right, guys. virtualization and security right and not sacrifice um all right guys uh omnity i don't know if they came up or not let's see animal we're gonna let you come up you got litecoin
doge bitcoin and bitcoin cash in your name so this this will be an interesting one we'll see if
you're you're uh we'll see how this goes but I'm going to let you come up if you have any
questions or want to say anything about scaling or Litecoin or anything. You're up, Anil.
What's up, guys? Thanks for having me up. Yeah, so I'm a longtime Litecoin fan, and having you
guys come into the space, introduce Layer 2 Solutions, it's really exciting. It's validating,
right? Obviously, as a Litecoiner, you kind of feel like a second-class citizen in the crypto space these days.
But yeah, having you guys here, it's exciting.
All that said, I'm kind of new to the Layer 2 smart contract concepts. So I just want to run by my thoughts as to how things might work with LitVM on Litecoin.
And maybe you guys can correct me where I stray from the truth.
So the way I see it, there's this smart contract that gets executed somehow, somewhere.
And then once a block on Litecoin,
the sum of all the smart contracts and all the ZK applications
gets rolled up into some kind of a ZK transaction hash
that gets put onto the Litecoin blockchain so like every two and a half minutes
there's like a it's i guess its own little block right uh zk block for litvm um in the form of a
transaction hash is that is that about right uh i believe so it might be a little more technical
than that but that's the general concept we're than that, but that's the general concept. We're not devs, but that's the general concept. Yeah.
Okay, cool. So like all these, all these things, all these scaling solutions and ZK roll up things and whatever else the builders might be building, they'll be consolidated. That's pretty cool. So yeah, it does enable,
I guess, some finality and it doesn't, you know, I guess the fees will be much lower than they would
be on Bitcoin, especially in the future when more people will be using these things.
Yeah, the theory behind ZK rollups, the whole point of them is that you can do theoretically,
The whole point of them is that you can do, theoretically, now we haven't gotten to these kind of numbers yet time. And, you know, we're being able to do a lot more with less. So in the early
days of ZK proofs, you know, one, you know, one, and there's a lot, there's like so many factors
that complicate things. And so like, for example, if you have, you know, let's say you have a chain that's only
doing one transaction every, you know, every minute, but if you're stamping that to Ethereum
or let's use Ethereum, cause there's, it's a more fleshed out ecosystem on the Z case and
there's better examples to be like case studies, but let's say you're only doing one transaction
every 10 minutes and it's, it's stamping a theorem every 10 minutes well that proof is right now still uh it costs you know you got to put eth gas and it's
storing things on eth l1 and and it would be too expensive to do but if you have a hundred
transactions every 10 minutes and you're rolling those up you know every 10 minutes or two minutes
or even down to 10 seconds or whatever you can. So right now, the way Ethereum is, is people are, some of the chains in Ethereum
are putting a proof on Ethereum once a day.
Some of them are putting a proof every hour.
Polygon generally is every 10 minutes.
So they're doing it kind of not too often.
That's what you want.
You want it to be as fast as possible,
especially for the interoperability stuff.
But then the problem is it becomes very expensive
to be using the L1 constantly. And so there's a bunch of ways that we can actually
improve that cost. And that's going back to the batching that I talked about. So the more
transactions you have and the more economic value behind those transactions, the more frequently
you can put that proof on the L1, whether it's ETH or Bitcoin or Litecoin.
Another trick you can do is you have multiple chains rolling up their proofs together in batches.
So you could have 10 chains or a thousand chains rolling up a million transactions each,
and then you hypothetically can get to billions of transactions in one proof.
We're not there yet in anywhere, not on Ethereum, Bitcoin or Litecoin, but
this is the end state of this and why I'm bullish on this stuff is that it scales really well.
There's some things that as they get bigger, they scale worse or cost more. And then there's
some things that the more you do on them, the stronger they get and the cheaper they get.
Lightning Network is a good example of that. The more nodes you have in Lightning Network, the more transactions you're doing, the more
payment channels you have open, the cheaper it gets over time, which is, and faster,
because it doesn't have the bandwidth like restraints. There's a lot of early scaling
solutions. They would get bogged down or they would have too much bandwidth. So like,
that's why people don't want to scale on the Bitcoin L1. And it's not just because of the
size of what you're putting on the chain, it's the bandwidth. Because if you have like on Bitcoin
cash, which is in your name, for example, if you're doing hundreds of gigabyte blocks,
which some people think is a good thing. I'm not as much of a fan
of that. I think maybe there's some combination somewhere. But anyways, when you do that, though,
it's it's it bloats the blockchain in size, which we can probably handle through Moore's law to some
extent. But then it also bloats the bandwidth. So that means at your home internet connection,
or if you're using a commercial internet connection,
or your, you know, if you're using a, you know, a commercial internet connection, you know,
if the nodes have to process millions of transactions on the L1,
then they get bogged down over time.
So it can still work, and there's arguments for that Moore's law
will outpace that bandwidth constraints.
But what's better to me is build solutions that get faster
as you have more transactions and cheaper as you get
more transactions, not more expensive. So that's kind of what rollups do. Awesome. Thank you.
That makes a lot of sense. I had one more question, if you don't mind. Yeah, please.
Are these, are like Polygon smart contracts going to be compatible, or is there going to be some crossover between how they work with LitVM?
Yeah, this is an EVM chain.
So it is going to be kind of a first of its kind, or maybe second of its kind, or even third of its kind if you consider.
But the people who built this stuff in this way is only Bitcoin OS. There's other teams building kind of
similar stuff, but I would argue they're the only ones who've really cracked the proof of work ZK
roll up and what we've built. And we have an MVP of this. We actually have two separate MVPs. So we
have a devnet for the Ethereum stuff. And then we have another MVP for the Ethereum stuff rolling up to Litecoin.
And so it's not an easy thing to do to roll up EVM and be a real pure ZK roll up to Litecoin.
In our early iterations of this, we thought that there would be two roll ups happening
simultaneously. We thought that it would be two roll ups happening simultaneously.
We thought that it would roll up to Ethereum for any ETH assets like ETH, USDC, USDT, WBTC,
we thought it would roll up to Ethereum and that was going to be kind of more of the core
of it.
That was a simpler thing to build and then it was still hard.
And then we would have the Litecoin assets um like ordinals ruins anything else you know
litecoin itself any of this kind of stuff would roll up to litecoin but actually what we're the
the current iteration and and i think this we finalized the spec but no promises but it'll be
rolling up purely to litecoin uh but will still be plugged into ethereum through ag layer so you'll
still be able to move all your assets and do Ethereum stuff.
And it's all Ethereum, EVM smart contracts, which are plentiful.
And there's great tooling and auditing and all, you know, huge dev community around.
So we are not going to make someone build a new, like, you know, this is not going to have a new programming language.
No one's going to have to, there's no learning curve.
It's all EVM, but purely rolling up to Litecoin.
That's a pretty big, I think, computer science breakthrough.
Yeah, awesome.
I mean, if it means that a lot of developers will have a skill set that they can easily bring over, it's amazing.
I know a Litecoin electrician who was up here before, he's a builder.
And I'm sure he can't wait to sink his teeth into this.
Awesome. Great, great to hear. Yeah. He had some good questions. Yeah.
We're pretty excited about it. And I mean, to me, what it gave us a lot of,
I guess, confidence that, you know,
this was the right solution when, you know,
we got the support from the foundation and Charlie and other
people in the Litecoin ecosystem, including Luxfolio, who's doing the Litecoin ETF reserve
strategy and all that. So yeah, we're excited to, I mean, I have a lot of nostalgia with Litecoin.
I know I got my parents buying it pretty early and I know they made some
money from it. Not that that is the biggest thing, but I do have a lot of nostalgia from Litecoin.
It was the thing I always told people. What I said earlier on the panel where I said,
if you don't understand a lot of this stuff, you shouldn't invest in it. You should stick to Bitcoin.
For many, many, many years, I always told people, don't touch anything. Just get Bitcoin,
Ethereum, and Litecoin. Those were the big three that I told everyone. Then over the last many years, I always told people don't touch anything, just get Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin.
Those were like the big three that I told everyone. And then, you know, over the last few years,
I started moving more, having more favorability to Polygon. But yeah, this is cool to this is like
a super throwback. And Litecoin has such a big community that it's cool to be building stuff.
I think there, I think a lot of people,
the reception we're getting is everyone's eager to see something like this
because, um,
I know that the foundation has been looking for something like this for a
long time.
They've had a lot of people pitch them on ideas and none of them were the
right.
Someone is calling me. Uh, so it was really cool that, you know, they decided this was something
they would support. And so they had us come out to Vegas and pitch it to Litecoin Summit and all
that. And yeah, it's been great. They've been introducing us to great parties that we can
collaborate and build stuff with. And yeah, it's exciting. We went on for a long time about this, guys. We don't normally talk about one project this long. I apologize if we went on for a long time about this guys we don't normally talk about one project this long
i apologize if we went too long uh but it was a fun conversation normally i'm the one i'm on the
other side right projects are pitching to me and and ron and amber and uh you know richard anthem
and other people at bit angels at these conferences uh It's very rare that I'm kind of pitching something.
This is the first time.
So it's fun to be on the other side.
Yeah, it's been really great hearing all about it.
Thank you, Amber.
We won't think that you have your finger on the scale or thumb on the scale,
whatever appendage on the scale when you're judging.
Because you're not judging today.
It's not a pitch competition.
It'd be a bind.
But you won.
By the way, you win as best pitch of the day.
And definitely longest pitch of the year for Ben Angel Spaces.
But, hey, if you're with us still, come back next week.
We'll have even more BitAngel Spaces.
And make sure to follow BitAngels,
Rock, me, everybody else that spoke
and retweet us and let people know.
We really appreciate having you in the community.
We appreciate even more.
Go to bitangels.network.
Join mailing lists. Look for local meetups near you. happening in the community we appreciate even more go to bidangels.network join mailing list
uh look for uh local meetups near you there's going to be more coming uh in the later part
of the year so pay attention lots yes it's something really cool coming um michael mentioned
it last week um michael turpin but we're gonna start doing pretty soon here. Once a week in like, I think
Zoom, I think it'll be, we'll be doing individual pitches. So BitAngels, typically we have, you know,
10 to 20 or even 25 projects come pitch, you know, like in Vegas we just had, and, you know,
we have New York coming up in like a week or two and all these all these
places around the world but what we're going to be doing is taking the winners of those uh pitch
competitions uh actually vm was a winner one of the winners from uh vegas and they'll be pitching
to a bunch of investors so i'm not sure what how that will be gated like if it's only for investors
or accredited investors or if uh community is going to be able
to come to that does anyone know i actually don't know the best way to find out is to follow bid
angels on on x and uh or twitter as most of us call it and uh to sign up for the mailing list
bitangels.network have i mentioned that yet today? No.
Yeah, it's in development.
Boy, there's a BitAngels cruise coming next year. There's all sorts of things that we're working on.
There's even a Bitcoin super cycle fund that I just saw mention of was announced at Token ISU.
was announced at token isu and i really like uh what's going on there because uh michael has
figured out a way to uh trade a bit in bitcoin and greatly increase the yield some people like
that and this is the way to do it and uh other people say uh you know buy it in hodl uh and i
think i'm speaking to one right now.
I'm definitely, I mean, I'm more of a
HODLer for 10 years. I've never
sold any of my Bitcoin, but I
not 0%,
but basically I've never sold any Bitcoin.
But I will
be putting money into that fund.
I'm very interested. I mean, because I was going
to do that myself this
time and just with a small portion of my portfolio try the the turpin uh cycles like playbook i trust
that he'll pick the top and bottom closer than anything i would do that's what i'm that's why
i'm excited about i actually once was at his house when it was down and going down more.
I mean, the price had just dropped below $5,000 back then.
And he was selling some.
And I did the same and thought myself a genius
until I realized that I didn't buy back until way past 10.
And so I didn't do any good for having not had that i think the last few
hundred dollars i had left in that cash uh account where i went in at 39 000 so you know still in the
long run i'm doing okay but bitcoin uh according to my prediction is selling at a 89% discount right now.
So, you know, why not pick up some wealth? What is that, 89 to 1 million?
Yeah, it takes, we are 89% off of the 1 million price
that is when I'm thinking of catching in.
So I don't know that I will,
but I'll reassess it at 1 million.
So, and that could be this year.
That could be 10 years from now, but it's coming.
And so, again, not investment advice, just, you know, one crazy guy on the phone.
Don't check out with your own advisors or rock before you invest.
I, yeah, I'm, I'm pretty interested in turpin's uh new cycle fund i i'm
definitely gonna put uh i don't know how much i'm gonna put i'm definitely gonna put at least six
figures who knows maybe maybe seven i don't know um yeah because if i could have like i've never
trusted myself to trade the tops or bottoms but but I would not mind putting, you know, 10, 20% maybe of my Bitcoin into that.
I trust Michael to, and I'm sure he's not, well, I'm not sure, but I don't think he's going to underperform Bitcoin.
The only chance that happens is if he calls a signal to sell and then with a super cycle takes over and makes it jump up to 500,000 or a million.
I mean, that's the fear, right?
And breaks the cycle. But even then, you're locking in a doubling this year.
So, you know, yeah, I mean, though, and and the math his math is interesting you know if you read his
book is that you don't have you don't have to hit the top um within 20 is what he says
yeah so yeah it's it's interesting we'll know soon enough. I apologize, guys.
I have to hop off.
I just want to say thank you before I leave for the opportunity to speak here and to talk to some of the awesome Litecoin community that joined this space.
But I just want to say thank you.
And it's really great to talk with all of you and meet some of you.
And I hope you guys have a great weekend.
Yeah, it was great seeing you in Vegas, Aztec always a pleasure man it was it was it was a lot of fun and it was so great to just
hit the ground and and meet people in person that we've been talking about and
networking with and working with for years so yeah it was it was an absolute blast um yeah much love
everybody i i have to hop for a call but it was, it was really great hanging out with everyone.
Yeah. Thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate it. It's been awesome.
Thanks everyone. Thanks. I guess we could call it here. Thank you, Amber and Anthem and
Sheldon and Adele and Richard and an animal there.
And yeah, we'll see you guys next week.
Yay. Thank you, Rock.
Your best co-host ever.
Not as good as you or Warren, but.
Or Adele or Anthem here.
I wish Anthem would speak more.
When he jumps in, he has pure gold.
I'm so selfish.
I'm so selfish.
I love listening.
I love listening.
It's like mana for me.
I'm in heaven, and I've already died.
So I'm loving it.
You've been sharing some of the comments.
That's been awesome.
At least I can help contribute on the side like that.
I'm super gracious and grateful for the opportunity to participate as a co-speaker and a guest whenever you all need me to step in.
I'm always here to chime in if you'd like, so feel free to ask.
I'm here.
I'm not always going to be very useful, but I really appreciate all of the knowledge and information.
I've said this before, but I'll just, I think, say it again here, but Anthem has such a long history with his family in gold and then in Web3. And I remember in my early days,
when did you get into Bitcoin Anthem? Well, Trace Mayer introduced me in 2009, and then I acquired some ViaTrace in December 12, 2012 for $12.
So that's kind of my entry point date, remembering.
Yeah, I was going to say it must have been pretty early because I don't know what year I started following you
and listening to the stuff you would say or write about online.
But it must have been like 2016 or something.
So I remember learning from you in my early days.
Well, that's humbling.
I mean, I've fallen on my face and have a lot of arrows shot in my butt as a pioneer,
as I like to say, or elsewhere.
I'm super grateful. I hope that some of my experiences helped you and others.
And I'm happy to have broadcast as much as I possibly could without violating certain sanctities that I was obliged to in various capacities, operationally especially. So I'm super grateful
for how far things have come and, you know, Matic and Polygon, Ethereum, etc. And, you know,
that's kind of what got me into the space is really seeing it as rails, I thought, for gold,
originally physical gold. And I saw the, I really love the concept of Bitcoin. I just really thought
it was a honey trap by the intelligence agencies and the defense department for the concept of Bitcoin. I just really thought it was a honey trap by the
intelligence agencies and the defense department for the first few years. And maybe it was
originally designed, but kind of like private protocols were kind of Dr. Frankenstein's
metaphorical monster with the administrative state. You know, it's like the more useful we
make something and the more we automate things and the more we obsolete things as well, kind of as a result, including administration, as it turns out.
So it's been fascinating.
You know, I love learning.
AI is kind of making me maybe an aspiring developer now.
So, you know, with like hearing Warren's stories about it and other people's stories, playing around with various tools that are out there.
Who knows?
So I'm excited.
I'm super enthused.
And thanks for having me.
So I'm super excited for next week.
Yeah, always good to hear from you, Anthem.
I think I can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure you were an influence on me becoming
like a mini gold bug uh in my early days of
bitcoin i i loved gold um i i own a lot of physical gold i own much more bitcoin but i do own a lot
of physical gold is it like just a hedge basically an insurance hedge it's asleep it's asleep at
nice it's obviously off blockchain it's technically you know you know, you can remelt it, of course, at a pretty low melting point. So as long as we live in a violent world, which sadly we still do, as long as it's administrated, it will be violent, in my opinion. And so hopefully it ends soon. And until then, you know, gold is a really good sleeping pill.
really good sleeping pill. I didn't think about that. So you can, uh, so you're saying it wouldn't
be that hard to like, cause I all, most of my gold is in ounces, but I also have a bunch of,
um, smaller 10th of ounce, uh, little coins. Those are pretty cool. Um, but you're saying that
it has a low melting point. So if there was a crazy catastrophic event and we had to go use
gold, uh, could we do that at home potentially? Like make smaller denominations? And actually,
you have to be kind of careful because if you go too crazy with the heat, then I think it kind of
like turns into little particles. Like this is above my pay grade and definitely not investment
advice or FinCENSE, Bank Secrecy, Patriot Act advice or anything even tangential related to that,
Patriot Act device or anything even tangential related to that, just as a little disclaimer.
So my understanding is that gold has a very low melting point.
It's like a relative to like a platinum group metal that's, you know, maybe two or three
times higher depending on the metal.
And so it is, and obviously it's very bendable, right?
It's like one of maybe if not the most malleable metal that's not like a synthetic, quote unquote, at least.
You know, these days it's kind of all bets are off with all the synthetics.
But yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm reading on Reddit right now that you definitely can do it at home.
Okay.
You need some equipment, but you can do it at home.
I've seen it before.
I've actually done some testing of that.
I ran into a startup years ago that was doing gold notes,
and I still don't know if they were real or not or if I over-melted them.
I kind of thought they were fake,
but it could have been me overdoing the crucible, but who knows.
Maybe it was fake gold.
That's one of the problems with gold, I guess,
is there is fake gold and there is no fake Bitcoin.
You can verify Bitcoin on a Raspberry Pi
or an old cell phone at home, right?
Yeah, it's expensive, right?
Gold is very expensive to validate.
It's very expensive to transport.
It's very expensive to secure relative to software keys
of a public protocol like Bitcoin's, for example.
Yeah, I mean, it's good to hear your honesty coming from your history in gold.
I mean, Elise mentioned once, did she get that right, that your dad helped re-legalize gold after they confiscated the gold?
Yeah, he was paraplegic.
So he got into a really, really bad car accident at like around 18, 17. And he basically became like fearless and he smuggled gold bars from Canada that was illegal at the time for U.S. people to hold gold and threatened called press conferences threatening the government to arrest them and knew it would be a disaster public relations wise and they never
did and ended up within like uh from so in 1971 and then it got legalized January 1st of 1975 so
in that period my my dad gained a lot of notoriety started a newsletter company investment conference
or parlayed it into an investment conference.
And it actually is still the oldest longstanding investment conference in the world, I believe.
The New Orleans Investment Conference, like Henry Kissinger spoke there, Margaret Thatcher,
Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, Gerald Ford, Ayn Rand, Hayek.
Wow. Yeah, Milton Friedman, Jay Gordon-Liddy, Oliver North, Steve Forbes, modern times like
Kiyosaki.
What was this?
Peter Schiff, of course, is a regular.
It's a New Orleans investment conference.
It's owned by a super
probably the nicest guy in the gold industry brian london is his name he's a super good dude and he also owns gold newsletter he bought all that from my dad's estate when my dad died in 99
from the executor so that's that's how all that shook out and so yeah yeah fascinating stuff i'm
super we got to do it we we gotta do a spaces it would be
cool to have a uh maybe like we could do one day a a gold versus digital gold spaces that would be
so cool i want to do that that would be and then i think on that for sure my yeah you used to be
the host of that my hope well i don't know i'm happy to guess whatever you want. And my hope for gold and all of the elements is really all physical things is that by unlinking physical things to like credit markers and a monetary system like they are today, that we're going to actually unleash a whole lot more utility from an industrial commercial side and rather than having to have so much pent up value from a monetary side. So we'll
see. We'll see. I think a lot of business models are going to unlock for us as we eliminate the
need for administration that I suggest is the vast majority of the cost ultimately in all
commercial models today. So we'll see. We'll see how this all plays out. But I'm honored. Yeah,
anything you want from me, just let me know. And I'm happy to pro bono, whatever, free. You all have been so kind and
generous to me. And I kind of look like Michael Turpin. I met my wife because of Cynthia, because
of Michael, and kind of indirectly. So I'm super grateful. She worked for MarketWire back in the
day, like 20 plus years ago. So that's kind of how we met. So in Michael,
Michael founded that company. So I don't think he was, I think Sequoia had already kind of taken it
out at that point, but you know, he already got his exit good for him. So he's good at that.
Wow. What a crazy story. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have some cool tangential
and that was like, obviously pre-cryptopto i mean i was technically in digital currency back
then but you know i don't know i'm sure michael was too knowing him so um but yeah that's crazy
yeah yeah me and michael i stayed at his house uh for the last week actually at the tiger mansion
uh for those who don't know it's mike tyson's old mansion it was in the hangover and stuff but
we had our our token eyes and pit angels events there.
But I stayed with him for like a week.
So I got to hear some crazy stories, man.
Like, I don't know if you know, but like back in the market wire days, I think, or even earlier, maybe he was doing the PR for AOL and Earthlink and Yahoo.
And so AOL and Yahoo, I hope I'm allowed to tell this publicly.
I'm sure he doesn't mind, but AOL and Yahoo offered him equity, uh, like to pay him in
money plus equity instead of just money.
And he said, nah, nah, that's too risky.
And he, so he didn't take the equity in either AOL or Yahoo, which became billion, you know,
multi-billion dollar, huge companies later.
Uh, so I think, I don't know if he would call it a regret, but you know what I've learned is that at the end of the day, like that might've been the complacency,
you know, God has, God has a reason is what I've learned for me is that, you know, when my dad
died, it took years for my dad's estate to settle. And that was a blessing. Cause I don't think I
would have busted my ass at gold money had that happened, honestly. I mean, if I'm really real with myself, as purpose-driven as I see myself
and world peace and voluntarism and commerce as a purpose, even back then,
would I really honestly have been as driven with gold money
and done all the all-nighters and the craziness that I did over there
to try to get that thing to turn? know like I don't know I don't know and obviously I had a massive team I was like
one of a part of a critical team over there right so you know it's just it took all of us kind of
being crazy for that thing to to go cash flow positive and it happened right so I unfortunately
I had a lot of failures since then at the same same time, I'm grateful for them too, right? Because I've learned a lot. So, you know, I'm sorry for my stakeholders
and, you know, it's mea culpa and hopefully the next one will make up for the rest of them if
anyone wants to ever be a part of anything with me again. So, you know, I don't know, right? So
at the same time, gold money was a really cool experiment. I mean, we I know we're about to wrap up
But we really should have a space on this sometime because I would love to hear the whole story of all the things that happened there
But it was a really cool experiment, right? It was it was amazing. I mean, you know incredible people Eric Sprott
You know as part of it Durban deep harmony gold at, some really big IM Gold, some big mining companies,
you know, a founder of Archipelago, which merged into NYSE.
A bunch of really big people that were kind of a part of a very small startup, honestly.
And even still, I mean, it's, you know, it's doing all right.
It's humming along, maybe around 100 million market cap.
I think last time I checked in on the TSX.
So it's, you know, hey.
That's not so bad.
It's not bad.
They kind of missed the crypto boat.
But, you know, it was kind of early for centralized exchanges, kind of.
But that's another story.
Maybe for another space.
Yeah, I would love to hear it sometime, man.
Sure.
Are you still in? You were in California, right? We moved during COVID to Oklahoma,
which is where Cynthia grew up. She's a fifth generation Barshan, which is where plastic was
invented. This is where Phillips 66 was founded. So it's where oil was first discovered in Oklahoma.
so it's where oil was first discovered in Oklahoma um so yeah we've been here about five years and uh
made quite a splash and again that might be for another x space do you ever come to uh man what
about would you want to come out to Puerto Rico maybe and we tried we lived actually for a year
we got act 2022 um I actually first found out about Puerto Rico through Peter Schiff.
Oh, wow. Not from Michael?
I was on a cruise called Summit at Sea.
It was actually a conference on a Royal Caribbean boat.
These guys named the real estate guys put on that are really tied into Robert Kiyosaki.
And that's kind of how I first started introducing Robert really to Bitcoin.
Well, really before that, I met Mike Maloney in Santa Monica like 20 years ago. He approached me
when I was working at Gold Money and we would meet like weekly and he would read me drafts of
his book and he put my dad in the book. And so that's kind of how I got to him and with Trace
and him to Bitcoin basically. so because I introduced Mike to trace
right because trace introduced me to Bitcoin right so that was race was one of the first
people I listened to about Bitcoin that got me to believe in it yeah yeah well you know I mean
he went like the super maxi way and I got kind of hardcore during that time of the Bitcoin wars I
mean I was on you know and it got a little bit weird with all of us, I think, at a time.
And we all just chose our different paths.
And I think there's no right or wrong to it.
Looking back on it, you know, it all kind of had a purpose.
So if you I don't want to bring up old craziness, but which side of the wars did you side with?
Well, you can still look it up.
It's one of the few interviews that's still up on mainstream media.
So it was like Bloomberg West.
It was the headline.
And I convinced the people, basically, that were going to be speaking for it, that were from Forrester's, I think, that were more academics, that, you know, Bitcoin XT wasn't the way to go.
And going to like, you know, the bigger eight megabytes, you know, quote unquote, et cetera, bigger block size wasn't the way to go. And, you know, and Trace honestly helped me
with a lot of that message behind the scene. I mean, I had a PR company, right? Dukas.
Yeah. Trace was a, Trace was a small blocker. I'm assuming I can't remember.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. A hundred percent. So yeah.
Yeah. I was a small blocker, but I will say I know a lot of people I really respect that
that sided with the other side.
Now, we won in the end, the small blockers, but.
Yeah, we did.
We did.
To me, Bitcoin's utility is the world's strongest timestamp.
It's the world's strongest database generally for me.
So to me, like security is
most important. So, you know, cause I see it as rails. I saw, I see protocols as communication
rails more than anything else. And each private protocol has a singular utility that we use
commercially today. And I think public protocols as they commercialize will be the same. They'll
have like Ethereum is the world's best computer processor to me, or strongest,
right?
Most secure computer processor.
Like, it's a singular utility.
That's why I think Ethereum will have a great chance of commercial success, right?
Yeah, I was muted.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Man, we could go on forever, man.
But we've been on this space, I don't even know now. Is it two and a half hours or three and a half hours? It's been going a while. But yeah, thanks Amber for staying on so long.
I have to. How can I miss out on this conversation? I really enjoyed it.
We kind of have you hostage as the host because you can't.
See you later, guys. But no, this is an awesome conversation i'm really enjoying it hey we should talk uh anthem i i'm you know i live out here in puerto
rico now and i know peter's here i know michael you know meets with him you know here and there
and they have dinner and he's friendly to the crypto people as much as he talks trash on us
online i i have another kind of thing unfortunately i had a former employee that's been a stalker for seven years that is very, he's very public on X. It's a very complicated
conversation, but it's a very simple conversation. But he was kind of really nasty to Peter when
Michael was still working for me. So, and I didn't kind of know the extent of it. And it's,
it's, you know, it's a lot of, you know, kumbaya kind of stuff, I think, going on right now.
Did you say Michael was working for you? Michael Turpin?
No, no, no, no. It's a guy named Michael Eric Nelson.
Oh, okay.
He's been bothering a lead. He's been bothering thousands of people I know for seven years.
He threatened to kill a board member. I fired him.
Anyway, it's a sordid story, but it's related to Peter Schiff, unfortunately.
So I'm sorry, Peter, if you're hearing this in one way. So that wasn't me, but I'm sorry that
the violence got to you with other people that I had no control over. And I hope that the Justice
Department takes care of this person. I will say that you hear the craziest stories in early Bitcoiners and gold bugs.
I mean, and libertarians.
I'm a libertarian, but you hear some crazy stories.
Like, it reminds me of, you know, Anarchapoco and Jeff Berwick.
And, oh, my God, I heard so many crazy stories from people.
Yeah, actually, yeah, I mean, I got to create.
Yeah, we need to go probably, but yeah, I helped co-organize for two years the first Red Pill Expo with G. Edward
Griffin. Wow. And Jeff Berwick and Robert Kiyosaki were speakers, and, you know, they both
came to have some fun, let's just say, with the beverage especially, and, you know, Jeff kind of triggered Robert, you know, and it was kind of
this crazy thing. So, but, you know, hey, you know, we kind of have fun in this world, right?
So, yeah, my brain is like, we've been talking for so long, my brain's foggy.
It was a creature from Jekyll Island. Yeah. And also like a cure for cancer. He's a super man.
Dude, that is such a good book.
It's so long.
It took me so long to finish it.
But that is such a good book.
The Creature from Jekyll Island.
Ed is one of the best investigative journalists that's ever graced our planet.
And I think he's like in his 90s.
And he takes these B-17 apricot seeds.
And he swears by them. And, you know, it's like natural cyanide
supposedly that supposedly combines with your pancreas enzymes, you know, like an apple a day
keeps the doctor away because there's natural cyanide in the apple. So I know, I know this
isn't, this isn't scientific doctor advice, by the way. No, there's a lot of, no, but there's so
much, there's so many case studies of things like that. I mean, this is why like some people will say vegetables are poison and you shouldn't
eat them because they're there. They develop these defenses. So you don't eat them. Like
fruits are meant to eat. Uh, most fruits are meant to eat because they, that's why they have seeds
and they're, they're tasty so that you eat them. And then you poop out, you know, animals poop out
the seeds and spread the seeds, but vegetables they say are, you know, just meant not to be eaten. So they're all poisonous, but
like my grandma was Ukrainian and like, you know, she would make sometimes like rose petal jelly or,
you know, jelly with the cherry, you know, jelly with, with the, with the seeds pitted and
put the seeds in there, put apple pie with the seeds in there, right? For
more of an American thing. And so that's all like to help us because that it's a natural way. I mean,
that's at least what Ed says. And he's got a great book all about it and all about the game.
And I was a board member of a pharma company for four years, a decade ago, and it made it to Russell
2000. Now we weren't involved involved like we had over I think 300
skews called pernax at the max I don't think we ever gotten anything real nasty and I kind of
my buddy was the youngest board member I think of a publicly traded pharma company at the time he
did a reverse merger when he was 30 and so um oh Hey, sorry guys. I probably need to go anyway. So, but yeah, anyway, you know, um, do you ever talk to Sterling? Do you know Sterling? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been a long time. I love Sterling. He's a, he's a kindred soul.
favor if I could speak on this space about the network state and stuff. But it would be cool to
you, me, him, and some of the, I don't know, more like the people, I don't know, people who are
interested in like all this philosophical or old history of Bitcoin and all this stuff, if we got
some people together. But I was going to say about Peter, sorry, additionally, I was going to say
about Peter, I really want to get him involved in some kind of gold crypto. I want him to come over to the darker light side, however he looks at it.
Maybe Trevor, because I'm technically an advisor of Matador,
although I haven't really done much.
Sorry, Trevor.
But I think it's his brother that mainly is running it.
But they're like Mata on TSX,
and they're doing kind of like a Michael Saylor strategy.
They kind of started as a gold app, and then they kind of pivoted Michael Saylor strategy. They kind of started as a gold
app and then they kind of pivoted, I think, wisely to kind of Bitcoin gold. That could be something I
could see him kind of getting. We are looking at a project actually that is doing gold on blockchain
that seems very interesting and has a lot of support from a lot of the African, like, government leaders.
It looks very interesting.
It's called a Buntu tribe.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I actually, Mamadou, I ran into in Dubai, like, four or five years ago.
We met a bunch.
Is that the same guy?
Yeah, that's him.
Oh, that's cool.
I really like him, man.
He's been at it.
He's been a grinder, for sure.
It seems like they really are putting
something special together there i don't know yet i still haven't dug deep enough but i i actually
owe him a an analysis and like my team's been dd'ing his stuff and we're considering investing
in it and and maybe incubating it and stuff but we're trying to do like an ed thing with him when
we were doing software web3 custom builds builds with Hera that fell apart, basically.
Not only with him, but just in general.
But we never even got, I think, to, I don't even remember.
I don't even think we got to LOI stuff with them.
But we had a few meetings, and I've kept in touch with him over the years.
I really like his vibe.
Yeah, me too.
I'll tell you what.
I'll look more deeply into it, and then I'll get you up and make a group
where we can talk about maybe tag teaming or I don't know.
Whatever you want.
I mean, I'm happy.
I mean, you know, those days I think I'm doing like a lot of like CXO work.
So if anybody is looking, other than like CEO or CTO,
I can pretty much help probably.
So if someone's looking for fractional or, you know, anything like that,
I'm happy to, you know, lend an ear.
So just DM me.
Sounds good, man.
Happy to go there.
All right.
We've kept everyone forever.
I hope you guys found this stuff as interesting as me.
A lot of it as I did.
A lot of this stuff has been pretty interesting to me.
I love this stuff.
But yeah, great talking to you, Anthem.
All right, guys, let's close it out or we'll get get sidetracked in add on something again cheers cheers everyone thank you again amber and adele and everyone who
stayed and all the listeners i see thanks for this marilda yeah ale crypto chick really good
to see you from crypto magazine uh good good old uh good old friend um Digital Fellow, Gerard.
Who else do I know out there?
CK Cardano, good to see you.
And everyone else in the audience, NFT, Crazies, AGT, Scrooge McDuck, Cliff Kent, Doomsday
AFK also.
I see you in a lot of our spaces.
Sushi Bits, Leo Isakov, Khaled znun amish royale sola um steve uh moanza
daniel bati we got a very global audience here today but okay cheers guys bye bye
and if anybody's still listening remember you can apply to pitch for any of our upcoming pitch events.
And also, we're having a free membership for a limited time.
Just to touch back on, we were talking about the Zoom pitch events.
So if you're interested in that, head on over to Bidianals.network, become a member.
I believe it's free right now.
And then you'll get to learn all about that part of what we're doing.
So thanks for sticking around.
Thanks for being here and supporting us.
We love every one of you and that you're here and you spend your time with us.
And thank you to everyone who's spoken on here today.
It made it such an incredible show.
And I learned so much.
And it's just so exciting to turn over all these ideas with each other.
So thanks again, everybody.
Have a great day.
And BitAngels Vegas was super successful.
I heard several teams actually got pretty nice size checks
or multiple checks from that event.
I know one of our portfolio companies,
I don't want to dox their internal information,
but got a half mil check.
I know, and I think they got like,
they have two other checks coming from that event.
So that was a really successful event.
There were some great investors at that one,
but okay.
Cheers guys.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
The next one's,
the next one's in New York at the end of the month during,
what is it called?
Permission list.
So go to bitangels.network.
And if you want to apply to pitch there,
go ahead and do so.
Okay.
Cheers everyone.
Bye-bye.
Bye everybody. Thank you.
