Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
RAC FM Hosts Omnity Network| Powered By Alphagrowth.io 🦝🦝
Recorded: April 3, 2025 Duration: 1:05:58Space Recording
Short Summary
Omnity Network is introduced as a new protocol focusing on interoperability and Bitcoin layer two solutions. The network leverages grants from the Interchain Foundation and aims to expand its user base significantly. Technical innovations include the development of a Cosmos SDK Lite client and a Bitcoin DeFi environment, highlighting advancements in blockchain technology and decentralized finance. The network also emphasizes security and scalability through its integration with various blockchain solutions.
Full Transcription
okay okay gmb bands you've got the co-host darling let's get this room set up let's do
what we do and do it the best to the max omni is in not tardy whatsoever so yes we'll get b-bands in as the core there we go
you go gucci b-bands yep
okay and we're going to get our friends in over at omni network uh we've just had a little warm-up
show was a really good bit of crack i'm exceedingly happy that B-Bands took the mantle
of doing the Bitcoin L2 deep dive research.
So it's just coming at this with all the facts and figures.
I mean, you know, we're blessed, aren't we?
Yes, we are, Robo.
I'm so glad because I have been doing research on Omniti Network.
The fact that it's using Bitcoin layer two solutions like Solana, Osmosis and Ton and the ICP,
the connectivity is achieved through a fully on-chain architecture, emphasizing security, scalability and decentralization.
Oh, I'm so glad your reading skills are up to scratch
Hey man, that's what you do, you have your notes, right?
Of course, of course, darling, you know how many joking, man
And you know, B-Bands, there's a two-pronged approach to this
It's quite rare that we would have on a project
Where one of our friends
uh is obviously one of the people like you know integrated within the project uh whether that's
you know running certain things certain aspects blah blah blah and it's kind of it's a two-pronged
convo of yes omnity we'll get to that but we also want to kind of know how Sheldon ended up there, don't we, B-Bans?
Because we all love Sheldon, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, it's loved, right?
Sheldon, good morning, brother.
Is it good morning for you?
Are you stateside, brother?
I'm in Miami, that's right.
Good evening, Robo.
How are you doing?
Oh, you're back in Miami, are you?
Oh, he's a great player, isn't he?
It's the classic, you know, come back to Florida to take care of the old folk story, you know.
Standard.
Well, mate, funny enough, you mentioned, I mean, I know you were in Indonesia and Bali and all that last year, whatever.
My friend today, he hasn't been back to Bali in six years.
And he's just left like Java. He's just been to to Bali in six years, and he's just left Java.
He's just been to Bromo, the volcano, and he went back to Bali, and he said,
oh, my God, he's absolutely disgusted on so many high levels.
He can't cope.
He's left.
He's basically left out.
He's went to Damasat, the capital to fly out.
Yeah, I only saw a little bit of it while I was there because obviously I was, you know, like showing up post pandemic.
But everyone who I talked to said it was just like a crazy acceleration of what was happening before.
Like foreigners buying a property through locals, you know, businesses expanding in this like wacky tourist oriented way.
Like, yeah, man, the island has changed a lot.
I feel like I didn't get to know what I was looking for, but at the same time,
you know, there's, there's still parts of Bali that are very real.
You just need to get the hell out of the city.
Yeah. Yeah. Ubud and stuff is still nice, but it's, if you're, if you're anywhere near,
like, be careful, be careful that to me, that's the biggest name that is supposed to have held up.
And it has become the most whitey, frou-frou, love and light place that I experienced while I was there.
So I just call that one out. That's how it went.
You know, there was some nice folks there, don't get me wrong.
But there was a wild amount of tourists in that area.
of tourists in that area so i only stayed there for about a week and a half wow dude it's like i
So I only stayed there for about a week and a half.
mean i'm commenting on this it's like 16 years since i've been uh especially especially ubud
i did i did travel through kuda for like i think a day or two around about 2016
but it must be like 20 2009 since i was actually like back there like living there and i lived
there like three months i I think it was.
Right, Sheldon, listen, we're going to get down to this.
Finn's probably going to do the recording.
He'll do the edit.
So we'll do obviously our little introduction that we do.
Good morning, Rat FM.
And it is a good morning, isn't it, people? I mean, it's 10 a.m. EST, all right, on the east coast of our friends over in America there.
It's Thursday, 3rd of April, 2025. And we're kind of blessed. We've got Omnity.
So not only do we have, like, you know, a fairly new network slash protocol in the room but it's also one of our
friends sheldon so you know this is a little bit of a different kind of interview uh some of the
normal ones we have where we just start to get to know people we already know a lot about sheldon
we've been you know mates with sheldon for like three years so we'll do this two ways first off
sheldon we're to kick it off bro.
We know where you were, what you've done previously, blah blah blah, we know your history.
There's no need to go into that detail.
It's not that kind of space.
How did you end up at Omniti?
Did somebody have to approach you?
Did you just meet someone at a conference?
We know you're not a mixer a player
uh right how did sheldon and omni come together so um i i won't get into the history but i will
tell you i've been with this organization for four years and change so this is actually the
same company that i worked for in the past uh we were doing consumer chains on Nier at one point.
We had a much, much heavier mandate to do IBC with IBC Go, with compatibility with the current version of the Cosmos SDK.
We didn't abandon that mission as much as we found a new way to do it.
It's funny that making an Evmos fork and making that interoperable with NIR is actually what led us to ICP and led us to rebrand the company.
So initially we were going to have this sort of like third product offering and just keep it under the umbrella of our previous name.
And we realized that this is actually a really good venue for us because we have all kinds of other light clients and, you know, work that we can redeploy and reorganize and make more productive. And goodness knows when you're an infrastructure
company or when you're, you know, kind of early in the stack, it means that you need to find
places where you can fit in as an app, where you can actually, you know, reach existing
products and services that people are working on and have a meaningful contribution.
products and services that people are working on and have a meaningful contribution.
So we've been doing this for quite a while.
And honestly, how it happened, I was a moderator in a Facebook group called Crypto Malaysia.
I have some friends there.
I've been moderating in Malaysia crypto groups for about four years at that point.
And I, you know, I saw this post that someone was talking about what was happening at octopus
with IBC and with the grant from the interchange foundation.
And I said, really, this is awesome.
Blah, blah, blah.
And I went on this little rant about things that I think, and nobody else said anything.
Everyone's like, this is too nerdy for us.
What the hell are you talking about?
So of course I had to come along for that.
And, you know, it's been a hell of a journey when we restructured the treasury and, you know, prepared to make significant changes to the company.
I was technically an advisor at one point so that I met in 2021 because our ideas really match. The idea that we would sort of carry app chain theory into a different thesis in a different future than just straight up IBC channels and individual app chains.
I think that was always the mission.
We just we weren't sure how we were going to get there.
And ICP has been our homage to getting there.
I figure I should mention that early.
It's practically in the logo.
in the logo so so well sheldon so omnity has like direct links and correlation to
octopus right i mean i know about this obviously i know what you were working on so this is like
directly linked to the neo neo ecosystem back in the day yeah well the connection to near is is kind
of in the old product suite uh but ultimately, yes, the same Lite clients that we were using to make things possible with Nier are the things that we're redeploying on ICP.
We don't have an urgent need to deploy, you know, Polkadot Lite clients because Polkadot's been changing their stuff more frequently recently.
You know, Interchain Foundation's doing restructuring. So we're hesitating a little bit there.
But yeah, our Cosmos SDK Lite client that makes it possible for us to interface with
osmosis from ICP, that is a product of the previous work.
It's been refined, obviously, and updated.
But yeah, yeah, it is a lot of the same thesis, some of the same code.
And, you know, a majority of the same people thesis some of the same code and um you know a majority of the same people majority of the folks are the the same from uh octopus so so sheldon why icp i mean
yeah like i don't want to talk about shade you know being thrown or whatever icp has had its
own problems and its own you know every blockchain has had its issues and it's,
you know, pushback, et cetera. So ICP, I mean, how did this end up? Like, can you give us,
I don't know, a bit of a synopsis about like how this actually ended up being what it is today,
what we're seeing right now? So we were trying to use
So we were trying to use Merkulization and some very standard cryptographic operations to get Cosmos SDK chain to talk to NIR.
We started with Evmos because that's pretty easy.
There's a stable version, even though it's deprecated and Evmos doesn't support their 1.0.
of 1.0, they're working on new product good for them. You know, we thought that was a good moment
They're working on new product good for them.
to take an open code base and use that as the candidate that would be the first Cosmos SDK
based chain to connect to NIR. So while we were working on that, we struggled with one really
critical design component, which is IBC Tau. You know, the base functionality that makes IBC possible
means that you have to be able to identify on a different chain that, you know, the block height is this.
And, you know, some metadata or some, you know, IDs or some information have to be attested to twice independently.
Trying to do that with just Near and this chain meant that we needed each of those chains to sort of keep copies of themselves on chain every block live.
And that's a huge pain for a number of reasons, especially because blocks on Near can be as fast as 200 milliseconds.
That's very expensive to maintain, especially at idle.
You know, if there's nobody crossing that bridge and you're just keeping a hot copy of those records, that's really rough. So when we were
struggling with that part of getting IBC Tau to work, you know, having that data available to
reference for the opposite blockchain on each blockchain, we realized that we basically couldn't
get near to keep up with that, not just because of the writing of memory, but it's because it's got this recursive level of silliness where you're trying to keep track of yourself.
Blockchains are notoriously bad at this.
So what we did at that point, we start to look for a component or some sort of third party solution that we could integrate to make that easier.
And it didn't take very long to find that ICP was a good fit for that. It took another,
I'd say like, what, 60 days, something like that, to eliminate every other potential,
maybe closer to 45 days. But we looked at a number of different offerings that were trying to
looked at a number of different offerings that were trying to, you know, act as a limited
validator network to, you know, act as a cryptographic schema like MENA. Personally, I'm
interested in MENA protocol. I think that's a cool concept. You know, we considered some of these
esoteric blockchain-like structures as an aid, and we realized that we would be stacking complexity
really significantly. and and we
decided okay you know this is too much you know we can barely keep up with this like there's going
to be code changes to other protocols that we're looking at and on the icp side that just got
rosier and rosier all the time because after we started chatting with them and you know saw what
they were already working on they were already already working towards some, you know, greater interoperability, what's the word, cryptography
that would have helped us a lot, like ECGSA and, you know, some other very, very, very popular
cryptographic tenants. And they have lots of cryptographers on staff. So we went from this,
you know, you could say we went into the wilderness for 60 days.
But for 45 of those days, we were kind of already thinking, hey, this could work.
And we spent time eliminating the other options.
So the design that we were pushing for a while when we thought we were going to stick around as octopus is really just using an ICP smart contract environment,
really just using an ICP smart contract environment, just a handful of ICP contracts as a way to keep that data, to watch the Cosmos chain,
to keep the block height, to keep some data about each of the transfers, to be able to recover some information from the far end very quickly and cheaply,
and then also store potentially a few gigabytes of the blockchain
itself on ICP.
So being able to do that for more than one chain meant that we could potentially set
up IBC between Polygon and a Cosmos SDK chain or a number of other interesting non-matching
chain types.
And as soon as we realized that, we said, okay, wait a minute,
we could pick lots of risk to stack here, or we could take this opportunity to stack some risk
some of the time, and when available, defer to Bitcoin as the lower risk asset in the environment.
And that just made more and more business sense over time it was
an easy technical choice when we found out what they were doing with threshold snore
and yeah it it became a uh pivot to bitcoin-based protocols relatively quickly um once we we really
landed and figured out how comfortable it was well bro so yeah yeah, let's go there.
For anybody that might be looking at your bio,
your bio looks like it was written by an artist that basically makes fucking Peter Pan look like he's a geriatric
with a sleeping disorder, if we're being very honest, right?
I mean, I know.
Well, like, so it would be very like i think it will be difficult
not difficult not if you like us intelligent you know but if you're a player and you click on your
bio you might not know what you do you know the expression like it does what it says on the tin
so if you were to summarize uh overall like generalized omnity in like a what if you're doing a pitch deck or
something and you've got like a you know one sentence at the beginning of presentation
like how do you summarize omnity network like i i are you focused as being a bitcoin l2
or what is the kind of like almost mission statement if If I have to dilute as much as I can and compress as much as possible,
I would say Omnity is interoperability tooling.
Omnity is how blockchains can talk to each other securely, publicly, and with open source code.
Even that is a little much.
I hear myself.
But I think that that's the tightest way that i could line
it up so you're talking you're talking about across languages you're talking about across
languages like real solidity you're talking across like evms or whatever like or virtually
like whatever so you're talking about across the board you're like very generalistic here yes
yeah i mean our our github is the same g as Octopus, which means it's still just as crazy.
There's like 150 repositories now that are public.
There's more that are private, obviously.
But yeah, roughly.
I can't, we've been struggling with the complexity part of this for quite a while because we never agreed to sort of get dumb on a marketing
schema that would actually make sense that would be dilutive you know like i know how you're
supposed to do these things you make a very general start to the presentation that's supposed
to draw in and ask questions you know and then you can get into the nerdy stuff but we've struggled
with that because our our focus has always been, you know, infrastructure side first, which
means our partners, clients, targets were never retail. We only have one retail product to this
day. We launched it a couple months ago. So it's been not the greatest marketing. And that's part
of the failure on my part, because I'm not a marketer but yeah we we definitely need to to refine that a bit
i do have a quick question is that okay if i jump no
go on darling
so um the bitcoin community is i mean they don't they're pretty like they don't like
they're dicks mixing things you know they don't like they're pretty like, they don't like mixing things.
You know, they don't like really mixing things.
You know what I mean?
So how do you, how are you going to convince them that, you know, this is, that they should do this.
Use the ICP.
You know what I mean?
Sure.
How are you going to convince them?
Because they're really like.
They're difficult on purpose. They're difficult. They're conservative. The word is conservative.
Well, we're in an era of accepting ossification in Bitcoin core. So as soon as we don't want to change Bitcoin core, we're already winning in comparison to some alternatives.
Right. If we're not asking for, you know, different SIG hash updates that are already proposed or whatever.
Like, you know, we're not asking for Bitcoin core changes.
So that's fact number one.
Fact number two, every other solution that is remotely close to what we're executing required either an authoritative linchpin or a black box.
And we don't do that.
And we don't do that.
So because everything that we execute exists on another blockchain, and that blockchain produces receipts at the point where you attempt to execute something, not when the execution completes, but when you start a process or an operation, that makes things really easy for us.
Because it doesn't matter if some process needs to loop around for 10 minutes or longer in order to, you know, serve
Bitcoin normally, as soon as that operation is started, there's a record. You know, that makes
our lives really easy besides the cryptographic work that ICP does and all of their, you know,
long journey with the market price going down and all this stuff. Like there's other advantages on
the ICP side that I'm not leaning into too
heavily because that's a little bit more of their journey than ours. But realistically,
there's been a sweep up of this in the past month where we've gotten contact from a lot of different
projects, including a couple of larger VCs like Draper. They're seeing that Bitcoiners can accept some moderate trust and security dilution
with the condition that it's all public.
That's the way that I think we're going to get people to accept or recognize the solution as viable
because don't trust me, check.
That's not what most of these kinds of protocols will do.
They'll say, oh, hey, well, don't worry about it. It's only unified at the web front end. Like, okay, people's websites
get hacked all the time. What are we talking about here? You know, so there's a moderately unique
approach, which is to number one, open source all of our code bases. we're constantly working on that we're at about 95 percent and also to you know
make sure that anything that is attempted can be verified at all steps and that's that's unique to
us i think i'm not sure of anyone else who does that and we have had a couple of our competitors
pop out recently and ask how they could use icp to you know sort of plug that gap that they have
you know it's normal to use a centralized solution to get through something difficult,
but it's not a long-term solution.
It's like a go-to-market solution.
Okay.
So then I got one more question.
Just one?
I'll yield the floor.
No, I got a bunch, but I want Robo also.
Okay.
He's really good.
He's good with his questions.
So there's like 20 chains you're integrated with right now, right?
We have backed down to 14, I believe.
So we have recurring security audits.
And part of what we learned from that is that we spread ourselves a little bit thin.
So yeah, we've cut down a little bit recently. Okay. So out of the 14 chains that you've like integrated, what do you, which one do you think is like going to be the most promising
for this Bitcoin, for the Bitcoin expansion? Like, and why? Interesting. So I think the easy answer is Solana, because there's, you know, 15 million monthly active users on Phantom. Like there's a Bitcoiner who is pretty adamant, you know, as a, I don't want to say maximalist, but Bitcoin only person.
His name's Fred Kruger. I think he's a professor at a college or something like that. But he pivoted pretty hard to Solana after prices rose on Bitcoin and smaller transaction things weren't really viable that he wanted to see people experimenting with.
you know, Bitcoiner could flip around and say, hey, I think that this is the, you know,
interoperable platform that's worth the trouble, blah, blah, blah. But he's also moderately honest
that it is a very high risk casino, you know, risk on environment that has maybe 1% of total
projects building on it with a value proposition. Like it's, it's difficult to sort of make that argument longer term, right?
I think that the more, let's say, the more appropriate suggestion, I think, is actually
the osmosis interface, not just because I talked to Injective and Akash when we were
at East Denver, but because those are two very different chain types,
where to me, Solana is not really a blockchain.
It's a hash machine.
So, you know, a hash machine that is built to look like a blockchain
versus a secure validator network that has connections
to maybe 100 other blockchains and tons of liquidity,
like, I could say that you might have the same risk-on kind of problem in osmosis that you have in Solana.
I don't think that's true, but I could say that.
And if you went to go validate or disprove me,
you would see a lot more products being traded on osmosis that are deep in,
that are attempting to offer a product or service that's
tangible, that isn't a promise. You know, I think that there is a good chance that Osmosis will be
the most important one, not just because their Bitmosis program has been singing our praises,
and we really appreciate that. But for two reasons, one, because it's a very different
chain type than either ICP, Bitcoin, bitcoin solano or others and also because the
amount of you know liquidity that's in projects that we think have this sort of sticky value and
are not just going to quit on the market real quick like that's that's way more significant
okay so you guys have had like me how like 12 million in cross-chain transactions already
How like 12 million in cross chain transactions already?
I think we're up to 40.
We're somewhere above 20.
I don't know.
It's been going up significantly.
Part of that is because our Explorer shows transactions that are handled through our contracts that are not done by us.
You know, like you can call our back end whenever you want.
I could drop a link for that and put it in the Jumbotron if you like.
But our back end is basically open. So that's part of our, you know, sort of way of doing security is
that, yeah, we've got to secure the front like anybody does, but, you know, you can call the
backend directly. So that's a little bit of a different design. But yeah, that's why.
But yeah, that's why
I've got a couple more
No, hey, go for it
No, no, let's go for it
You know, when he said
Our back end is fully open
I was like, that's what she said
I think Rubbo would like that one
I'm so glad I said something
I couldn't help myself
That one's for the dads in the room Any dads in the room
No no B-bands go on take the helm
Get it all out and then I'll come in after you darling
Don't worry
Get it all out of you already
Oh sorry
It's alright my boobs are getting bigger
I'm just joking You You got what we,
I just asked you about your transactions and stuff. So how are you for your milestones and
your metrics? What are, what are your, like, what do you guys start? What do you, what is your
target for like the next year? So, uh, we want to reach 5 million users.
That's our sort of like larger target.
We don't have good metrics for determining users.
We're still just looking at public addresses and behavior.
But because we offer a bridge and because our sort of Bitcoin DeFi environment is a little cumbersome to maintain multiple wallets on because it's Bitcoin based. We think
that there is a decent number that we could call users over time. So we're trying to grow the user
base, number one. Number two, for an on-chain metric, we were really focused on TVL last year
because our way of TVL is not like DeFi locked in a pool or anything like that. It's just, hey, this is activity on the bridge now.
The problem with that is that if someone, let's say, bridges their Bitcoin assets over
Solana and then comes back, that value will show up on our Explorer and then disappear.
So it's TVL, but the lock is like not that serious, right?
but the lock is like not that serious, right?
The locking part is literally just the usage.
The locking part is literally just the usage.
So, you know, we would have continued on that path to, you know,
focus on usage of the bridge,
but we pivoted to the Bitcoin defying environment being a little bit more of
the top focus.
So I'll try to break that down very shortly without being too buzzword heavy.
Our product suite is broken in half. So I'll try to break that down very shortly without being too buzzword heavy.
Our product suite is broken in half.
And that means that one side of it is this lost leader, the bridge service.
We need people to see interoperability function for Bitcoin to see why Bitcoin DeFi could be portable in these other environments, participate in Cosmos DeFi, etc.
The other side of it is actually Bitcoin DeFi on the layer one.
And because we're just contracts on ICP, we don't actually have a validator network or anything like that. That means that our environment that we're offering is also not really a layer two.
You can call it layer 1.5, but it's really just layer one with extra goodies um there's full
nodes on icp uh you know just complete like copies of bitcoin that are active and constantly consuming
information and broadcasting transactions we're basically just using icp's existing features
to make that more valuable so trying to get a user who is going to, you know,
play around with Bitcoin DeFi
and then also want to be involved in Cosmos DeFi
and then come back and say,
hey, I still want something out of my sats.
You know, that's a pretty wide umbrella of coverage.
Like I can hear how that's, you know,
this kind of all-consuming way to go about things, but it's not abstractive.
You still have your own accounts.
You still have your own direct control of each action on chain.
You know, there's none of this, like, trust me, bro, stuff in the middle.
We think that's productive long term.
It doesn't mean that it's necessarily the best thing for retail or for users because we, you know, we see the abstraction stuff.
We see Polaris and all kind of other projects trying to make things easier.
But we think that there's going to be, you know, pretty much forever a class of project
or user who wants to do things at the, you know, the more like raw scale.
Like, hey, I'm trying to build something on blockchain.
You can't just tell me, don't worry about it, bro.
You got to tell me how stuff works.
You got to show me.
So we think we'll capture that market decently over time okay so you guys have
this re environment or ruins exchange environment yep yep that's the bitcoin defy environment yep
okay and it's oh so it's a bitcoin defFi environment. So I'm reading here, it says you have the Turing complete functionality to Bitcoin. Can you explain how this works and what possibilities does this unlock for the developers?
I'm doing funny air quotes here, co-processors that people have suggested for Bitcoin and other blockchains over time.
Usually when someone does that, they're working on the bottom of the stack implementation.
They're working on how the co-processor connects to the thing that's co-processing.
We thought that was a little too deep.
So this is our sort of way to try to reach retail or try to streamline things for other developers without abstracting, without taking away too much of how things work.
So that means that the RE environment itself is really just ICP smart contracts.
They behave differently than smart contracts on other blockchains, i.e. you don't have to use gas to call them and you can just call them with
HTTP. So, you know, any web app that's already up and running,
you could just put some code into it that says, Hey, you know,
send a web request here and retrieve this information every five seconds.
You know, like that's,
that's much less work for somebody than, hey, I have to make the
Ethereum wallet connector or, you know, I have to figure out if I want to prefer Kepler or Leap in
my app. You know, like that's a lot more decision making. So we're thinking that without that,
it's just this sort of concept that's using blockchain as a backend without requiring the same pains of, you know,
hey, you have to log in with your wallet, blah, blah, blah. So I hear myself rambling. I apologize
for being scatterbrained in the morning. But the root exchange environment is really just
ICP smart contracts that have, you know, a sort of standardized logic among them,
a sort of standardized logic among them so that you can use Bitcoin normally and not even know
that ICP is there. And we think that's a healthy level of abstraction because everything is still
public and still publicly verifiable. But it's also not sexy. It doesn't have the same attraction
for venture to say, oh, wow, you're going to build up a billion retail
users and take over the world like every crypto project promises. That does look different for
us because we have always been a builder for builders. And I'm very proud of that. I think
that's great. But it means that the way that we meet the market is tooling oriented. I think I should probably drop one of those links
that sort of make this easy to visualize
because I'm talking a lot,
but I know that there's a lot of this
that's still kind of, not mystical,
but a little bit intangible.
So let me try to make some of that tangible.
I'm gonna hop around for a second.
We can keep talking,
don't think that I need a quiet to do that,
but let me just pop over to this little explorer for a second and grab a contract ID from our docs.
So what I'm going to post, if my stupid iPhone will play ball,
what I get for using an iPhone for spaces.
What I'm going to post will basically just be a way to see existing functions.
And I think that's pretty useful to say like, okay, instead of going through this
contract and picking out all these details, I could just, excuse me, I could just go look
and, you know, get some idea of what HTTP calls I might want to make.
So we try to, you know, keep them relatively lean. And that's hard to express in a GitHub repository, right?
Like you can make a relatively easy integration
without having to go deep on this stuff.
I'm just realizing that the docs website
actually is having an SSL problem at the moment, so I'm trying to get on
and solve that really quickly.
children,
I'll come in here quickly. You know lot i'm just going to be honest with
you a lot of people are going to hear the words like icp you know and i'm not a traditional uh
block chain uh or bitcoiner per se you know i came in after like you know ethereum and everything was up and running and smart i mean
i i do want to ask about the pushback you know from like traditional bitcoiners but also
on the other hand i'm being asked by people regularly you know if bitcoin doesn't progress
you know if bitcoin can't do more than it's just traditional uh forms that we've seen so what can
you do with bitcoin well you can buy it you can sell it you can save it right uh you can essentially
maybe you know through a third party lend it out uh you can apply obviously like leverage right
but very limited you know until obviously things like runes etc like bitcoin's
been extremely like limited so there's a double whammy of trying to get an engine started that
hasn't been like started before and obviously counteracting the the negativities from these
like you know always bitcoin people do you know
what i mean i mean going after bitcoin is is that like that that's the top level isn't it it's the
highest of the high and it's it's a kind of case of well you know what pushback do you get but also
how are you going to like be able to bring things to the particular the you know the service chain
blah blah blah you know what i'm saying bro like i feel it's not an easy battle is it going up like
or trying to integrate with bitcoin it must be the hardest job out of all of them integration wise
so i agree with that but i think that icp did a lot of the work for us. So when I try to talk to other Bitcoins about this, I usually get one of two responses.
One is, I don't want to work on, I don't want to deal with that.
I don't want to think about that.
You know, shitcoin is not ever going to be as good as Bitcoin.
Or how does it work?
I've never had a negative response from the how does it work side.
You know, maybe there's, you know, some,
what's the word, skepticism, which I think is warranted. And you're right that Bitcoin is a
difficult audience to pitch into because they're very risk off. But at the same time, you know,
the opposite for our business means that we would have to choose some really heavy, like risk on
parts of the business, you know. Interchain foundation restructuring
while people are waiting for specific IBC feature updates for their products, that's difficult.
We've been there. We definitely understand that it's reasonable to be a technology company that
depends on other technology companies. But at the same time, ICP had already built what's called the Bitcoin subnet before we got there. So when we started looking at ICP, they already had Bitcoin full nodes running in this sort of specialized segment of their network. for us. It wasn't available at a runes level. It's still not capable of some of these esoteric
signing activities like Frost and Noist. But there's a lot that can be done with that infra,
and their goal was always to meet this existing desire of, you know, like, hey, we want to do
stuff with Bitcoin, but we can't change it. Like, what the heck? How do we make that work? They've been chasing that thesis for maybe four years now already. You know, they knew that
because their project struggled so much due to the absolute cratering price after the ICO,
a very big ICO way back in 2017, I think, you know, they knew that they also needed a risk-off business decision. And although that's difficult to sort of get technical partnerships set up into, it is, I think, much lower risk in the long run than saying like, hey, we want to be ICP, but we're also trying to do all this other stuff for other popular blockchains, even Cosmos SDK, you know, it changes frequently. So Bitcoin core
changing almost never, actually a super big benefit for us. And I think that most people
don't see it that way because they're looking for more adaptive software. They're looking for
things to change, you know, a little bit more flexibly with the market. But man, I come from
network engineering. There's protocols that are handling, you know, literally billions of dollars in value right now
that are from like the 80s. Like there's credit card processors that depend on 128 kilobyte links
weaker than any Wi-Fi in any of our houses, because they're just they're built into the system.
The system can't be disabled in order to be upgraded. It has to wait until it breaks.
So that level of Bitcoin commitment or protocol commitment, that was really convenient for us for the reason of risk off, but also because ICP did a lot of that work first.
I can show you that Bitcoin subnet stuff if you like.
I always end up getting into some of this ICP architecture business, but I just don't mean to focus on that if y'all not asking about that.
Excuse me, trying to find some water.
And yeah, I did post that in the Jumbotron and also on the spaces itself. So if you look at that link,
you'll see that it's really just an ICP Explorer.
If you go to its homepage and then the subnets link,
I think it's just dashboard.internetcomputer.org
slash subnets.
You'll see that one of the larger validator subnets
is called the Bitcoin subnet.
And these subnets are different. They're not the same the whole way through. It's not one singular validator subnets is called the bitcoin subnet and you know these subnets are are different
they're not the same the whole way through like it's not one singular validator set
so those guys specializing in bitcoin before we arrived like that's that's what really made the
difference all right bro we've got b bands back i think we lost that would we lose you for a
little bit b bands would we lose you for a little bit b bands let me lose you for a little bit oh maybe we've lost her again i don't know we can't
hear you darling you can't hear us sheldon right no i cannot hear her i think it's the curse of
the co-host oh mate she's got some she's got some fucked up shit going on with these
Earbuds and shit I mean
Her husband keeps buying her like a new set
Of like earbuds every other week
I'm kind of like
I'm at the point where I'm thinking
He's either a shit husband
Or he's on wish.com
Like you know what I mean dude he's like
Every time she needs a headset
He's like wish.com okay let's go You know He's like, every time she needs a headset, he's like, wish.com okay, let's go, you know?
He's just going to
break him again. Are you raging out over there
B-Bans? You're doing okay? Can you hear
She's getting rugged. I bet she can hear us
but she like can't speak and she's fuming.
She'll be like getting so
angry right now, you know?
I mean, listen, Sheldon,
I am very, very, very very very very very bullish
uh on crypto's future in general and i am a big believer in that if we don't get like bitcoin like
working working uh i think we're always going to see like a bit of a slumbersome like cumbersome
uh ego system generally within crypto uh way before it started to come like a bit of a slumbersome like cumbersome uh ego system generally within crypto uh way
before it started to come like mainstream i mean is is i don't want to say like is omni the answer
i mean there might be more coming after you but in the interim period in the short term
is omni like the right answer is it is it what bitcoin needs like right now
within the market like place like within the the structure is is it is is is big is is bitcoin
crying out for an omnity right now i think it there's a few things and we should never say
that there will just be the the singular solution but we think that we can maintain some real market share based on the stuff that we're offering.
Like, what are the alternatives in the scope of getting stuff done with Bitcoin that is useful, that potentially connects to other blockchains, and, you know, also has some staying power and doesn't have that same kind of like, hey, we made a server, come buy our token. Like, you know, not the not the silly crypto risk on, you know, valueless
nonsense. Right. So I think there's us, there's BitVM, there's Lightning. And you could argue
that maybe there's like a handful of other concepts like RSEC. There's definitely less than 10,
I would say closer to five of these true competitors that are trying to do something interesting with Bitcoin and something
else. I think a good example of how this has been breaking out on the larger Bitcoin and
crypto side, if you're putting the Bitcoin part first, is the work coming out of Layer 2 Labs. I believe his name is pronounced Paul Storsch.
So Paul is the author of BIP300 and BIP301.
And also, if you've ever heard the phrase drive chains, that's him.
And also CUSF or I think it's, what is it, conditional something soft fork.
I think it's, what is it, conditional something soft fork.
So there's all of these proposals or concepts out there on how you could make a change that affects the Bitcoin network without actually touching Bitcoin core.
And I think that's the new normal.
That's what we're going to expect from, you know, the next wave of projects.
Like there are OpCAD and, you know, CTV built businesses, like there's a handful of them.
I think there's like three that are very serious about, hey, we want to make a change to Bitcoin
and that's worth the trouble. But the whole reason that OpCAD was thrown out as an opcode back in the
day is because it had some inherent risks that we didn't want to accept. The chain is more mature
now, so it's reasonable to accept them. But that's still Bitcoin Core changing.
So if you look at the environment as, okay, you want to do something cool with Bitcoin,
you're trying to reach a larger market, what are you going to do? The way to not
touch Bitcoin Core right now is either one esoteric cryptography that usually requires
people to be online at the time of doing the operation.
That's like frost noise roast,
these sort of like key ceremony type of activities
where, you know, someone starts a transaction,
partially signs it,
and then somebody else signs it and signs it and signs it
and then broadcast it as a transaction that's complete.
Like there's cool stuff out there that can be done, which is part of the benefit of why Bitcoin is such a dang mess. But we think that
there's a relatively small list of players who are willing to do that in a way that can be
verifiably functional, like verifiably acceptable. So when you take an action through VM, you know, you're moving some data by
hashing it from one place to another. Does that still do the job? Like, yeah, absolutely. Is it
perfect? No, it has drawbacks and you have a secondary, you know, network of servers. So
there's more risks introduced, even if they're the same servers that are running those Bitcoin nodes, blah, blah, blah. So to come back on my adventure of buzzwords
and acronyms that you all might not be familiar with, I think that there is a lot of room to do
valuable things with Bitcoin. And it's not just, you know, hey, we want to be an insurer that uses
two of two multisigs. Like there's a lot of stuff that can be done.
And hesitation was always, it's not worth it.
But the more Bitcoin's price goes up, the more we have to do more with less.
And that's a really good environment to say, hey, I need something that isn't going to
scale its price to operate directly with Bitcoin.
You know, if you make the coolest, best Bitcoin
protocol ever and everybody loves it and it makes total sense and it's too expensive to be usable,
congratulations, you've basically made covenants. Covenants are very difficult because you have to
be persistently active sequentially in a number of blocks. You can't just stop operating. You have to keep up the operation for a long period of time.
We know that that's really, really difficult. Trying to do an inscription or an etch or a
number of other things on Bitcoin that require more than one block to be timed correctly,
we think that's really difficult. And although some people are going to continue pursuing that,
Like, we think that's really difficult.
And although some people are going to continue pursuing that, it makes a lot more sense to
us to say, hey, you know, we would like to consider the values of BIP300 and 301, which
are ultimately to, you know, have a coprocessor for Bitcoin that can be verified independently.
And that means that you can do other stuff and still have Bitcoin data in
the same box like literally from you know a Bitcoin full node on the same computer that's
also serving these smart contracts like pairing up smart contract functionality with Bitcoin has
always been difficult right people been talking about that for years it's been almost a decade of that you know yeah i mean look i'm i'm eating every word right you know you're really good at what you do
we're positioning this uh sheldon because on one hand when you speak and i'm listening
i'm thinking wow programmable money you know like this is the future but then on the other hand there's all
of those like kind of well i'm not going to say like limitations or like almost like a bit of a
lethargic attitude to actually doing something on the premiere like you if you crack bitcoin
with like as proper programmable money right and you know like that that's the ultimate goal
like you're very good at like kind of like giving both viewpoints of like the positives
and the negatives you know you know what i mean b bands right we might not get as much buyers or
interest for that overall but we uh we definitely try to be pragmatic and reasonable with anybody who
wants to consider this because, you know, trying to get somebody to use our tooling, enjoy it for
a month, then find out something that's totally unacceptable to them. Like that's being a dick.
That's intolerable. We will not do that. I always do scoping calls with anybody who's
thinking about using our tools just to make sure that I'm not wasting their time.
Did she drop and come back?
Because I haven't seen her even on mic in a minute.
Yeah.
I think, mate, she's been a bit fucking do-lally lately.
So she's going through.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Okay?
I got things going on, all right?
I sent you a message, and I said, hold it down for a second, Mr. Robo.
And I had to have stuff going on with ads and menus and shit.
Okay.
Just, I'm sorry.
I know, but I mean, you were doing such a good job.
I didn't want to steal your thunder.
I mean, you were doing an amazing.
No, you can steal.
You can have all the thunder.
I can't have your tits though, can I?
I mean, if I was.
Like literally, if I would want anything in my life right now with b-bands as tits because they're getting bigger it's like weird science like i was gonna say
this is definitely a pregnancy thing but i've never heard it described as weird science before
this is this is the this is the recorded one we're're going to get in trouble.
You got to be professional.
Don't worry.
We're professional cypherpunks.
No problem.
I like, yeah, you've hit the nail on the head there
because this is one of the reasons I like listening to Sheldon.
He is old school.
And, I mean, he does give like zero fucks
and he spits at how it is.
Now, you know, Sh sheldon i get the impression
that you wouldn't be behind this the whole thing the whole you know the icp omni you think you
wouldn't be behind it if you didn't actually like believe in it it's not like you just kind of like
in the like you know in the shadows working for a salary or something you live and breathe cryptography to a very high level
and and this is what i think i think maybe you know icp maybe got a lot of bad press
uh in people's mind from you know what happened a few years ago you you know what i'm talking about
i blame bit boy i blame that well i blame everybody to get into icp icp at 700 i blame that woman and all you know the woman that
was always on with the definitive thing like you know the woman giving the speeches like
the chinese woman always given the fucking hobium uh it so we have to we have to kind of accept uh
sheldon that you know whether we've been paying attention or not
things have evolved in the last few years right and at the end of the day everything in blockchain
comes down to computational power or computational strength right at the end of the day so the hat
like you know for a year to be here will be a talk and involved in this i have to pay
reverence to that do you know what i mean bro
it's like not something that i can ignore like i might not want to have ignored icp for the last
three years now i can't it's it's totally understandable to write off a weird blockchain
and say hey they're just doing some stuff i don't really see the killer app coming out of there like
totally understand i think that's absolutely valid.
At the same time, I think they built their business for that.
Like, they must have understood somewhere between 2017 and 2019, okay, we're probably not going to catch the wave this time.
Like, I don't think they would have ever said that and totally understand why not.
Like, I don't think they would have ever said that and totally understand why not.
But if you look at the product work that they did between 2017 and 2021, they were entirely focused on cryptography, bottom of the stack, resilience, you know, understanding for data center providers and other like, you know, server infrastructure types of roles of in the regular industry, not in blockchain necessarily.
Like they've had a pretty good head on the shoulders for business.
You know, as they've gotten bigger, they're starting to get a little bit of that like
standard foundation, shiny craze is like, oh, hey, we want to focus on this because
this is hot right now.
Like that's normal.
I see that behavior in every L1 foundation and it's not too bad over here.
But I think that they had a significant advantage because they had that really, really bad ICO where the price was so dang high.
I bought two ICP at 600 back in the day, by the way.
So I don't know what I did with that. I think I sold it at a low price or whatever. I don't remember. But that negative starting point, I think, actually really helped with their cold start problem.
So I don't know what I did with that.
I think I sold it at a low price or whatever.
I don't remember.
Because instead of trying to capture the vibes or capture the market wave, they really had to focus on values that would make sense to a regular IT person and also to a blockchain
developer.
So, there's a number of projects out there that are trying to, I think, attain this level
of productivity and be pragmatic and reach businesses that are not so cypherpunky.
But I think that most of them are not hiring 10 know 10 cryptographers every quarter because they did
that for quite a while i think their staff is like 200 now or something but there is a really large
number of technical people on staff at their foundation and um i've got it and i've still got
a different i've still got a decent runway yeah it's the still got a decent i can imagine they've
got a decent runway if they like did what they should have done and the token went ballistic.
They do because of that.
And also simultaneously on the other side of that, like talking how to sell pressure affect them, they have eight-year staking locked in as part of their protocol.
So there's different choices you can make. You don't have to lock up your tokens for eight years, but that's the sort of top amount that they'll make possible in the protocol. I think you could do more than that. You just don't get a scaled up benefit for nine or 10 years. But those two properties of starting with a bag of money and then preventing the sell pressure from being extreme like that goes a long way interesting interesting i'll tell you what i hope everybody in the room has learned a little
So there's different choices you can make.
bit tonight right davans absolutely i've learned quite a bit tonight i've also learned that if i
leave you unattended you try to talk shit about my man and I'm going to let you know right now That though you know that they're
iPods the airpods the brand brand
Smanking new ones that
I lost but then I found them again
They're real though
I lost them and then
I lost the other set so then
I finally found both sets
I found the new set and the shitty set
I know but your husband
Your husband is like my namesake
So like I can never
I can never shit
I can never shit on your dude
Because it would be like shit on myself
He said you got
I don't think she's got a shit husband
Because he must be ordering headphones from Wish for her
I was joking man
I was joking
It was making me laugh
I was like too busy
I couldn't get on
and defend my health. I couldn't defend my family.
I bet your red eyes down there pissing themselves laughing at that one. Fucking wish.com.
Look, B-Bands, we're going to be coming up to the hour soon. People don't realize in
the room why we've tried to keep our interviews to an hour constantly is because on spotify and uh
google podcasts and apple podcasts the hour-long interviews right people will do 4x 5x the like
get hour and a half to two hour interviews it seems like the hour like people see a podcast
and be like oh it's an hour you know i'll tune into it on the way to work uh but we do try we
have been trying to keep them to
like like it's not that we i mean i could talk for another half an hour at the 45 minutes with
sheldon quite easily about this he will be on no doubt on one of the rack fm normal uh shows that
we'll have but yeah we we've got red eye i mean look b-bans he's waited all short so we've got
to give red eye a mic right we gotta give've got to give him some questions. Let's give Red Eye one, and then our friends are showing up on an unrecorded spaces,
and we can cover anything you want to cover.
Oh, mate, we love you, man.
You're part of the family, man, Sheldon, man.
You've been around Rack FM for, like, fucking three years.
Yeah, man.
It's easy to commit to that.
I still have my rack.
Dude, can you remember when we used to do the late-night shows
when you would have the piano music
and the elevator music in the background?
Dude, you used to be on your mechanical keyboard at 3 a.m.
with elevator music in the background,
and all of me and Gaines would be like,
has he got elevator music in the background?
Anyway, red-eye mate, aye, before we wind it up,
oh, bro, you've got the mic. Go on, son.
Yeah, I appreciate it. Quick question for you, Sheldon. Has Omnity worked with BitAngels at all
in the past? Interesting question. Yes. So we have two BitAngels on staff between direct staff and advisory. Our advisor, Aaron Ting, who brought me into the
organization and who's a good friend of mine in Malaysia, he's one of them. He's the Singapore
bid angels guy and I'm the Miami bid angels guy. So we do hang out with that group a little bit.
Nice. Yeah. I went to, I went to my first bid angels event uh out in denver uh i was
able to speak on a panel out there got to meet a whole bunch i'm actually gonna there's a bid
angels twitter space i'm gonna be on later today just as like it's not about me i'm just there to
kind of be supportive of swiss fortress and some of the other to sneak in there, though. Hey, well done, man. He's an expert.
No, the reason I ask is because DFINITY was sponsoring the BitAngels event out in Denver,
at ETH Denver. And I met a whole bunch of people working on ICP. And so I was curious if you guys
had any connection to them or worked with them in the past.
Yeah, we were a sponsor for that event.
I just was hopping through so many things and I did not spend enough time there.
I did do a very short pitch of the Friday event.
I did not show up to the one on Thursday.
But yeah, we were a small part of that.
We made sure that there would be a good Bitcoin project that came up there.
And we got a chance to screen some interesting stuff and decided to nominate
SatSurance. I believe they were the first one to pitch on Friday.
So Ancheid and his co-founder, whose name is escaping me, they were doing some cool stuff.
It's not even ICP yet or it might never be ICP, but ICP does have that larger understanding of,
you know, like Bitcoin software companies potentially being productive.
So I think we can see something good from them in the future.
And they'll definitely consider more BitAngels engagements, not just because we'll drag them into it, but because it's it's very on brand, you know, a professional open network of people trying to do something like whether that's a validator network or a network of investors, like that's the alignments there.
Awesome. I appreciate it. Yeah. Great space.
Is that, is that red eye just coming in and flexing there B bands? Did you catch these flex on us?
No, no. I really wanted to know if they, if worked with them uh i'm lucky enough i got invited
just because i happen to know some of the people who are putting on the event i was way out of my
depth at this uh event but i did get to meet a whole lot of people and sometimes you got to step
into arenas that uh you might not belong in to to learn something hey i hate being the smartest guy
in the room please you know join join. You'll always be welcome to learn something
and do something. But yeah, guys, I'm
so happy to be on the show. I don't mean to
run it long if you want to.
Rule number one of Rack FM is
never discount or downplay
your flex. I mean, Red Eye, look,
when you bring a flex to Rack FM, you bring the
flex, bro. You're going to do half measures over
here.
When you flexed i saw
the striations of your muscles like i saw that shit and i was like whoa whoa this guy he's like
i felt like you last night i felt like you putting out that tweet last night b-vans
right oh my goodness uh b-vans we will wind it down obviously sheldon like indicated he's got
meetings to go to anything you want to say b-bands before we wind this down oh my goodness that was
class red eye flexing like b-bands i'm gonna remember that one for next week
i gotta head on out i have an issue that I gotta resolve and just wanted to say goodbye guys.
Well, do me a favor, darling. Will you keep abreast of today's news topics for me?
Do you mind keeping abreast for me?
I'll keep abreast. I'll keep abreast.
Sorry, I said to Red Eye, I had to get one joke in tonight on this space i was like dude let me
take a run up and like okay uh sheldon on that note before we go a bit crackers uh which we've
been known to sheldon i want to say mine thank you very much and i hope everybody in the room
is following the project definitely guys make sure he is aware
that you know crypto space is evolving 24 7 you know what was like yesterday's news is today's
fish and chip isn't it like you know what i mean you've got to keep it so and of course sheldon
you're a dear friend of the family uh you were first believe it or not dude you were first on this show 28th of
march 2023 so we've just gone past the two year mark bro which is amazing to have you back on
mind i really appreciate it sheldon nick i really appreciate that you just know that date like that
okay yeah thanks for for having us and uh i i guess i also owe a shout out because i haven't
seen brian around a little bit but shout out to alpha growth in the team for, for sponsoring rack FM.
That's awesome.
Yes, mate. And I know we didn't even mention them,
but this is the cool thing actually is that we did a couple of times and then
Brian hit me up and he's like, dude, you didn't have to do this. Like,
you're not, we didn't like require the shout outs. Like we're quite happy.
Like I know he's, uh, tell you what, Brian is so underrated.
He's underrated in it how clever he
is like about everything like you can talk to brian you're like i know jack like like you're
like like and you i don't know jack's like he makes you like really feel like your iq is like 50.
uh but on that note mate sheldon i do want, you know, Rack FM's always on the go.
We often have unrecorded ones.
Anytime you want to come and jump in with any news, any updates, any developments, always feel free.
You know the Rack FM door is always open for you, dude.
We have a good relationship with you.
And you've been very gracious and, again, very informative, very articulate.
You know, you're in a struggle to get the main points across. You've been very gracious and again very informative, very articulate.
You know, you're in a struggle to get the main points across and it's very easily digestible.
And so for that note, I want to say a thank you and I'll leave it up to Beybans to end out the show.
Beybans, you want to take over?
Today... I think she said she might be...
I got to go but it's okay good day goodbye
it's been great
no lie we'll see you soon
get some rest
yes people on that note
we're going to say a big thank you
on that note we'll say a big thank you
to Omnity Network
and basically just tell everybody
you know people look after yourself
take care good night and god bless wherever you are in the world we love you loads all right
see you on the next show bye bye now
