Welcome everybody into another space hosted by Coinnage the only community-owned award-winning media-dow steered by our NFT holders and backed by the co-founder of Netflix. I'm the host of Coinnage Zach Uzbo and I'm coming to you live from our Brooklyn studio in New York City.
that we've done staging a crypto comeback. I think a lot of people would enjoy a nice crypto comeback and stoked to have with us today. One of the builders looking to do just that the chief technology officer at Algarine, John Woods join us here today. John, thanks so much for taking the time, man.
Hey, listen, thanks for having me. Every opportunity I can get to talk about how great Algarand is and also talk about how the industry is evolving generally. I love to take it. So thanks for having me. Yeah, it has been evolving. And constantly, obviously, every day there's something new going on.
And for those who don't know, you can just kick off the space. But either way, with a little bit more on your background, because I didn't overstate it when I said some of those original builders trying to build a comeback here because you've been kind of at a lot of big places.
behind the teams at Cardano, you've been behind the team that was at Ethereum. I mean, now you're at Algarand and it's been about a year, so congrats almost on making it a year over there. What's it been like for you kind of hopping around seeing the space from a bunch of different angles now at Algarand?
Yeah, sure. I think it's funny. My dad worked in the same place for, you know, 40 years. And so he thinks it's crazy that I've had like, you know, more jobs than he's had, I guess, hot dinners. But that's the way it is in tech, right? And especially so in crypto, because it's so quickly evolving. I guess, you know, my background just in a nutshell, kind of 30#
like geeky kid playing with computers, started off with it with a 286, 386 Intel box playing with DOS figuring out how that worked. Study at a university level with computer science, computer engineering. And then you know, we had a bunch of different jobs from development in Ericsson to working in banking, our work in
After banking for a while, there's a solution to architect. The relevant crypto stuff really came when I started with the Ethereum blockchain studio who focused on building enterprise-grade applications with Ethereum with big customers, right? Deutsche Shell, big companies that folks will know.
I led software architecture and applied cryptography of their professional services group. So I was responsible for producing the design of enterprise grade systems using Ethereum for both private and public settings for their biggest customers. And then I did some cloud security stuff at a US firm, but then I went back into crypto again when I
when I joined Cardano where I was responsible for all of architecture, engineering, and applied cryptography there. And I only spent a year working with Charles and I loved my time there. It was really great. It was a wonderful opportunity. I learned a ton and the people there are super smart. But when the opportunity came up, exactly nearly a year ago to the day, to join
Alvarand and to become the CTO, which is really, I guess, for folks who maybe are not familiar with the term, is the technical lead for the whole company. So you're focused really on setting strategy and vision for the technology broadly. It's such a cool job and it's something I wanted to do since I was younger.
I got the opportunity to jump to that level. I took it. Algarand is killer tech. I think it's fantastic and I think it's a great story to be part of. Yeah, no, I mean, that's that's kind of what we wanted to dig into today is more of how Algarand sees itself set in, you know, with all the other chains out there. Obviously it's coming at a time that's very
interesting for the wider crypto industry here in the US as the SEC makes moves, but specifically there. That's one of the big questions that we as a community on show had been hearing from a lot of our members. We've hosted Anatolia from Salona, John Woo from Avalanche. One of the questions that always comes up is how exactly Algrans looking to differentiate itself with this technology?
and you as CTO who better to ask. I mean, what is it exactly right now that Algrins looking to do to kind of set itself apart with the tech it has? Yeah, I mean, we did say no hard questions before we started, but okay. I'll go to the best. You know, here's the thing. All of these chains, Salana,
Cardano, Ethereum, Algorand, they are like bleeding edge technology. They are like right at the forefront of what's going on, just like things like chat GPT and the AI technologies that people are excited about now. This is kind of like the first time humans and software engineering has gone through this place of building this scale of decentralized systems.
building the self-sovereign permissionless censorship resistant networks of money and networks of value. And so I guess what I'm trying to say there is this is the, we are building systems that are the intersection of so many different disciplines from computer engineering, software engineering, applied mathematics and applied cryptography, distributed systems engineering.
All of these different projects that I just named have some of the brightest people in the entirety of computer science working on them. And so I guess I just start with that because I want to be clear that I don't like to throw shade on other projects. Don't get me wrong. There's lots of projects out there that I think are nonsense. There's plenty
that I think are really weak, but certainly the ones that we mentioned have tons of effort going in by very, very smart and intelligent people. And so I think it's just generally an exciting industry to be part of. To answer your question, maybe more directly, as in what says Albright apart,
I think it's interesting, so many of the modern third generation or whatever they're called, blockchain networks will say, well, we're fast. 10s of thousands of transactions a second, which Algoron has, like the others do too. We're green. We don't use much power.
is about 80 kilowatts of instantaneous energy for its main net, which is, so for the production network that's globally available to everyone in the world with an internet connection or with an on-sensory internet connection, you know it's using as much power as a charging Tesla, so you know not very much. Everyone will say you know we're
We're permissionalists, we're censorship resistant, and we're decentralized. And I guess all the blockchain networks are representatives from those networks, we'll stand up on stage and say those things. I think with algorithm, what sets us apart is that we try to be, to care deeply about the user experience. And so maybe
Maybe I'll tronch it, right? So one of the things that sets this part in is two or three of them. I'll go through them. One of the things is that we care deeply about the user experience. So when I'm building the developer tools, I'm not building, which is one of my strategic focuses for this year and next year. And we launched this product called Albuquit and it's our baby for developer tools.
It's a box that has everything you need to build an app on Algarine. So when I'm looking at this at Algarine, I think one of the key differentiators that sets Algarine apart from other networks is that we care deeply about the products that we release. And so these developer tools, I don't just look at them like
a bunch of tools for geeks who are going to be, who are going to have to figure this stuff out and get their app to the main net. Instead, I think of it like a product which is a first class citizen within the organization, a product that I care about the user experience, and a product that I want to be fun and easy to use. And so when I approach things even like developer tools, which
not very sexy. It's not a consumer product, it's not a retail product. It's not like a new phone or a shiny car. It's a technical product for technical people. But I still, and we still at the foundation and the algorithm project, approach these things like we're making products for human beings. And that leads to an experience that is great for the end user.
user, great for the developer, but also it should lead over time, results in these networks are quite young, to a bustling, metropolis of activity on the main net, which effectively makes these networks useful. I think as well, maybe one other thing that I just like to mention is that Aldraman has
best in class engineering and so if you look at who's on the roster the people who are working on this there's some of the people who invented the mathematical primitives that are used by other networks so you know Silvio McCauley who's our founder is still a part of the engineering team he invented VRS or verifiable random functions which are these you know cryptographic building blocks that are used by other networks like
card on. So we have some of the OGs of the Snoop dogs of crypto working for building a consistent, you know. And so even even building on that again, I would say that if you look at our state proofs, which are a tech that we rolled out that allows Interom to be loaded between between chains like a bridging technology. Now we're getting into the nitty gritty.
But I'd be remiss if I didn't play it because he meant to silly on the idea that Gary Gensler has been out there talking about Algarance technology before he became the chair of the SEC. Of course, it's been played around crypto Twitter, but for people who haven't heard it. Just want to play it again. Gary Gensler talking about it back at the MIT conference about Algarance. Take a listen. >> Algarance#
One top of a blockchain technology today? Well, maybe in five years you could. It would be, have the performance. Soviu McAlley's Algorand, who's a Touring Award winner at MIT that I work with. Soviu's got a great technology that has performance you could create, Uber on top of it. The question is then, who would update this?
could build Uber on top of it. We're talking about the technology. Obviously Gary Genser was a big fan of that technology before. Now it's been interesting to see that evolution since the SEC listed Algo as one of the securities potentially in the crypto space. It's a lawsuit against finance. I'm not going to specifically ask you about your stance on what is and what is not as security because
frankly, does really matter. But I am curious as builders in this space, how some of that clarity/confusion, when you got a guy who's running the SEC talking about how great the technology is and then cracking down on it, how confusing it is for builders in the space. For you, John, kind of trying to build out the technology and the ecosystem around it. What's it been like?
>> Yeah, sure, absolutely. I'm happy to talk about it. I would say, of course, I'm the CTO, and so I'm the geek, rather than the regulator. So I don't have a deep knowledge of how we test and all this other stuff. And so what I say is really just my view. But we at the Algorithm Foundation don't believe that Algorithm is a security and from our interpretation of
of the law. And we're keen to have clarity on it. We thought it was confusing when we were mentioned in some of the cases. And I think now that the whole field has been mentioned, I don't know where every single one of them, but I think Salano has mentioned, I think Cardano has mentioned.
a lot of the big names have been now dragged into this confusion. I'm really looking forward to having clarity on it. I'm hoping, again, this is just as a tech leader within this space. I don't know really the details of what does or doesn't make an asset of security, especially
in terms of crypto, I think it's very confusing, clearly even the SEC or themselves are quite confused. But I think for innovation within the context of the US and of course the world is bigger than the United States. I mean, I know we focus a lot there on tech and some of the biggest tech companies, best tech companies in the world are there. But I think for the United States
generally it's just good to have clarity on this because otherwise what happens is a lot of these brilliant engineering firms, the bleeding edge firms that talked about whether it's Algorand Labs or Inc. or or indeed IOHK or other other entities that have engineers in the United States will probably end up off-shoring it because they're going to like this idea that we have of permissionless money, this idea is
that we have of programmable money, internet native, decentralized, self-sovereign censorship resistant assets. That idea is not going to go away just because a regulator in a single country doesn't like it. It's a concept. It's not a particular product. This kind of, the current way that it's being
handle in the United States is confusing to me personally as a leader within the space and I just hope against the point where people can stop worrying about this stuff. And you know, I asked Chuck G.P.T. what the mandate of the SEC was and it came back with a statement and it was quite short. I asked it in like five words because I didn't want to read too much. And it said, you know, protect consumers or protect
retail end users and to regulate the securities industry. And to me, these kind of actions where it's very confusing. There's long drawn-out court cases. You've got small startups that are just trying to build cool new technologies that are dragged into things like this for years. That isn't helping that the end user, in my view,
I guess we'll see where it all goes, but yeah, like I said, we don't believe how those security, but let's see where it all goes. Yeah, the clarity piece of it all is something that we continually hear from almost everybody in the space. Ourself's included, by the way, as a community on crypto show, it's trying to figure out, all right, what is the law and how does this all go? I mean, and#
but I think he rated Gary Gensler in a scale of one to 10 to game of one in terms of clarity coming out of the SEC. I don't know if you'd agree with that, but that's kind of the sense that everyone in the space has. I know this is, I couldn't possibly rate him. I just don't know enough about him. But you know, Anatoly, he's smart guy. Yeah, the thing I think
about, I guess, what this all means, right? And obviously, as you said, it's not just Alga that was listed in these lawsuits. It's basically, you know, like you pointed out Cardano, Polygon, it has impacts, I suppose, in terms of how the space reacts to that. We saw some of those being delisted by E Toro and Robin Hood as well. I mean, you know,
We could talk about price but I'm not entirely sure what the impact is when you're trying to scale an ecosystem if price is going down if you have questions about what is and what is not a security. Obviously from the outside looking at it seems like it would make your job harder to get developers to build but at the same time if prices low launching some of these products also seems like it would be cheaper.
for the end user. So how do you kind of put us in the context of building in the barit's a cliche? But how does it have impacts on actually growing an ecosystem as we said in the space, staging a crypto comeback? Yeah, sure. I think there's a few different angles to this. The first is I would say that I spent my time on a
consensus when a Ethereum dropped from a thousand bucks down to about 80 bucks, which is like a really, really, maybe maybe just under a thousand, but you know, certainly from high three figures down to two digit numbers. And, you know, I remember the atmosphere around that time wasn't great, but I think when in general, in retail,
When you looked at the work we were doing internally, people were extremely motivated. It's funny, I know it sounds cliche, this build in the bear thing, but it has been the case that it's true in the two huge bear markets that I've worked in crypto through. When we put out a job advertisement, or we're globally distributed
company, I think nearly every other cryptocurrency company is, which means that we have people all over the globe. When we put out a job, we have like tens or hundreds of applications with in-dates. It is trivially easy to find great talent who are passionate and interested and want to interview.
absolutely seen no downturn in terms of interest. Where I do think is hard. It's where you've got projects who've been given grants in Algo or Mavic or ADA or whatever and they're runway shorter because of the drop in price. And I think that we have to be cognizant of that. We want to support
projects as much as possible, but of course we have a certain amount of money, a certain pot that we have allocated to helping projects. And as the general price goes down, those algos and that ADA and that Matic and everything else, reduces value of course. And so that is a very real and tangible issue that we have to face up to.
And so I do think in prolonged bear markets you do end up with a situation where projects go under and sometimes great great great software or great great concepts will not see the light of day and it is it is tough What I would say is that because I go out and I meet builders all the time I was just back from powers where I
that proof of talk. I'm constantly meeting people in the industry, I've just offered phone call, one of our prominent community members, a gentleman, Kyle who runs Akita, which is one of our assets on the other one. I talk to people all the time in many different contexts and the energy that they have and the kind of
focus on the future with this, like, blinkering out the financials of it is really refreshing. And I guess, yeah, it's cliche, but it seems to be that the people who are attracted to this space generally are quite ideological and they take the longer term view. So, yeah, I think it's a double edge sort of, it's not as easy. And one last thing I'll say on the price is
that I think it's, people don't see to mention this, like there was a question about it on stage in Pripyat Talk and I wasn't on the panel, I was listening to the panel and it wasn't brought up but I think it's worth bringing up which is proof of stake networks rely on stake coins to secure them. Those stake coins, Ada, Maddie, Alderian etc.,
all coins that can be bought on the free market. As the price drops, the cost and dollar terms of attacking the network reduces as well. We have to be realistic and say, well, in prolonged bear markets, there is a factor there where proof of stake networks end up in a situation where there
they cost less in dollar terms to disrupt. That is not a fact that we have to be aware. It's interesting. I think we saw that in Terra's collapse, what happened there as well when things got prohibitively cheaper for people to attack the network and what actions needed to be taken. It was a wild time back then. But you do
I mention, I guess, the technology itself and how things can be used differently, obviously, proof of stake, unlocks different use cases. Again, I can't pass up the attempt to use Gary Gensley to pivot, to transition back into the technology because he said so much about it.
We have a second clip. We got a second clip of Gary Gensner talking positive things about other technologies. So we're going to play it. Take a listen. The point right now is about 550,000 blocks. And the blocks are added on average every 10 minutes. And we'll talk about why it's every 10 minutes.
and not only why Satoshi Nakamoto made it every 10 minutes, but how they maintained that. Other blockchains, like Ethereum, it's about every seven seconds. So don't get too caught up that it's all the same. And there are some technologists here, Sylvia McCally,
is working on Algarine and that's even tighter, less than seven seconds. I mean, he keeps doing my job for me, basically, in talking about this technology. But I mean, that's just to kind of, again, differentiate what Algarine can be used for and John, when you dig into that and what you've seen, that's one of the things that I think previously
and cycles we've seen ICO booms basically take the space off and have chains differentiate themselves. We've seen NFTs certainly in this last bull market become the thing that drove attention to certain chains. What do you think is going to be the next big thing that maybe drives attention back to Alagrand or the space in general that will unlock that next wave of excitement?
Yeah, it's a very good question. I would just say that, you know, one thing I wanted to mention earlier on the tranches of things that differentiated, I'll go from the rest of the pack, is that I think we excel in all of the different characteristics that you want to excel in, the fees, the speed, the sustainability, the robustness of it
the fact that it's not had any downtime, etc. But also the consensus algorithm has one unique property which is very important for products that want to build on the chain. And that is this concept that Alderheim doesn't fork. So it doesn't have block reorgues or block restructures or block height battles. And so in a nutshell, folks who may or may not know what that means.
Sometimes blockchains roll back a couple of blocks. It's quite normal happens all the time. That never happens in algorithms. So, algorithm never has block rewards. It's always moving forward. And so this means that blocks are agreed by 100% of the network on every block. And what's great about this in and not shell is when you're building apps on algorithm, you don't have to
worry about transactional orchestration or dealing with any of those little hiccups that happen in normal blockchain networks. And that is our secret sauce. In terms of answering your question on what is the super exciting thing that's going to kick off the next wave? I mean, I don't know. If I did, I'd be super wealthy. But there's things out there that I think are interesting. I'd say maybe two that I could get.
First is interrupt. I'm talking about elegant interrupt. I'm not talking about interruptability where you have, I want to say interruptability just to be clear. Transparent value from chain A to chain B, maybe from cardano to algorithm, algorithm to Ethereum. So this idea that you'll be able to not only transfer tokens between blockchains, but also for example have cross block chain apps.
you have an application that's built across multiple chains and you can call from one application on chain A into you know interact with an application from A into this application instance on B and you can have applications that span across multiple chains. It's very powerful and so we're seeing cooler and cooler ways that we can talk
across blockchains cheaper in a more secure way and in a way we can trust that things are done correctly being developed all the time. So that's something I think might be quite exciting and we might see a bit of a rush of excitement back to the industry around interoperability. The second I think, and I may
maintain this position for a long time because I'm a big fan of Monero which is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. So I think privacy is really important. As you will see in traditional financial markets, there's tons of proxies. I mean, you don't know what city bank are trading on their prop book. You don't know what BlackRock are doing and all their trades. Of course they expect there's an extra
of privacy, international financial markets. And I think that chains like Algaran, Cardano, etc. will benefit from privacy features on chain in layer one. And I notice a bit of, you know, it's a little bit, it's a sensitive topic right because we see what happened with tornado cash, we see what happened
You know, when one arrow as an example being removed from certain exchanges, etc. And so a dash in others, although, gosh, I don't think is a privacy coin, but the people who don't understand it think that it is. But we've seen a kind of a movement against privacy. And I think actually we have to push back a little bit on that because I do think that although blockchain is wonderful, one of the
things that lets it down. And this is across all blockchains from Bitcoin to to to to Agron is that you it doesn't they don't have privacy inherently. And so you can see the movements of coins on chain. And I think that that's quite an exciting area of development. John, we got about almost 700 people in the space right now. So if you're just joining us, I want to reset and let people know
what we're doing here at Coinnage today because we aren't diving deep into this idea of a crypto comeback with John Woods, Chief Technology Officer at the Algrant Foundation, talking not just about Algo, but the wider space in general, of course, a call to action for anybody listening. If you'd like this so far, retweet it, bring some more people in, throw some questions
and the replies. And obviously I should note that as a community on show right now, you can join this experiment with us in Cologne, what we are building at Coinage by minting one of our entities to unlock exclusive content and actually own the show with us and our dividends as we grow. John, one of the main things too that I think has been interesting is watching kind of
Like I said, a lot of these different use cases for each individual blockchain and NFTs being a huge thing. Algrants kind of unique in itself in the technology unlocking pretty easy ways called ASAs over a billion digital assets called ASAs been minted
on Algorand, the idea of just going out there and creating your own experiments very easy to do. I am curious, I guess, how you see that technology being used in this next wave. Us as a media experiment, we're tokenizing media, essentially. We've seen musicians, we've covered this before,
where do you see that going and how do you see the technology algorithms bringing to the table being used? Sure, so yeah, you know folks will probably be familiar with ERC 20 and ERC 721. They're Ethereum technologies or standards that allow someone to create a token on a
theory. And these tokens kind of fall into two categories, fungible and non-fungible. Fungible being interchangeable, you know, you have ten coins, they're all the same, million coins, they're all the same. And non-fungible being the NFTs, right, where you have a unique token that represents something very specific, like a piece of art or a piece of music or ownership of a certain specific asset.
And so on the other hand, the way we've tackled this is not to roll it in a smart contract. So on Ethereum to roll an asset, to create an asset, you have to use a smart contract. You've got to roll out a smart contract and you need to declare it inside the smart contract. On Cardano, you do something similar. You have a minting policy and you basically fill out this kind of what looks
a smart contract and you roll it out onto the chain that creates your asset. On the other hand, you don't need a smart contract to create an asset. Instead, you declare the asset. And so what I mean by this is that you just specify the values. You say, my asset is called this, this is many units there are. This is the metadata around it. This is a, you know, who gets to own it. This
is where the conditions of its mint and you can create it. So you don't have to write any code. And that, again, makes it quite easy for the end user to roll an asset. But functionally, it's similar to Ethereum, Cardano, et cetera. Once you have your asset, you can move it around. You can do things when you can lock it up in smart contracts, et cetera. Again, you know,
Whether we move forward into a standard that maybe moves ASAs to a smart contract style of execution or not, I think the moral of the story should be for all blockchains, by the way, not just Algorand, focusing on the user experience. Things like Algorand, they are decentralized operating systems.
And like what does that mean? It means like when you're when you're when you've got a laptop in front of you, you open Chrome, you open Safari, you're browsing the web, it's all local to the computer in front of you. What are these blockchain networks really doing that's different to that? The answer is the little applications that you run are the apps that you run on chain are just similar to Safari.
And so this is an incredible thing. And the most important thing is that we move
And so whether it's making it easier to develop those apps, which are usually done by technical people, or instead, whether it's declaring an ASA or minting a token on Algaron because you want to have an NFT based memento of your wedding, we should make sure that you have a
this so easy that it can be done by nearly anybody with a computer. And so that should be, I think, where we try to push the technology to make it seamless, to make it invisible, and to make it accessible. Yeah. And you mentioned decentralization being a key element. And, you know, for anyone who's been following what's going
on here in the US. It has become, I think, a key element of looking at project to project because I say that because the House right now, for those who maybe aren't in America, the House is looking at the idea of decentralization and how decentralized projects are as maybe one of those elements
that can move a token from being "security to" or looked at differently in the eyes of regulators. And decentralization is one of those interesting and tricky things to measure, depending on you can look at metrics of usership, metrics of who's actually running nodes on these networks.
I mean, when you look at that and you talk about how Graham being decentralized, how do you measure it and how do you centralize? Is it when you gut check it compared to I guess other other change in the ecosystem? Yeah, yeah, I think it's an excellent question. And you're absolutely right. People view this thing through so many different lenses.
And so I like to think of it in the following kind of tranches. There's decentralization in terms of the network, i.e. how decentralized, how distributed are the computers that run the nodes and the data that flows between those computers across different parts of the internet. And so when a block is created,
Is that flowing through computers owned by the same dude or is it flowing through hundreds of computers that are owned by different people? Of course the latter being much more decentralized. Then you have consensus. What is consensus? Well, it's the process with how new blocks are created, how we process transactions on cryptocurrency networks. Consensus is how we all agree that
a block is valid and it's added to the chain. And so one might also look at that because you could have a very non-decentralized data propagation there where the blocks are actually being sent around through nodes that are only run by a handful of people. But you might have a very decentralized consensus where the process of minting a block, the process of validating
actions is done by thousands of people. And so that will be something that will be quite decentralized. As an example, people use Bitcoin as the champion of decentralization. But in a way, it isn't. So it is, in the sense that for me to defraud Bitcoin, I would need a Gantw, an
The ability to process chat to 5.6 very quickly. I would have to have tons and tons of special computers or ASICs to fraud the Bitcoin network. It's just not very possible. But with another lens, if you look at Bitcoin's consensus, you might say, well, actually there's two or three mining pools globally that have most
of Bitcoin's hash rate and technically those mining pools, those two or three entities, if I can call them that, could come together to collude and start censoring the type of transactions that they're willing to process, etc. So, you know, I guess what I'm trying to say, even if you look at the coin being the king, you know, you have to always look through different lenses to assess
the Nakamoto coefficient as people call it or the decentralization coefficient. And then finally, of course, the third tranche is the holders. I mean, how distributed is it? Bitcoin, if it was held by 10 people, wouldn't be very particular distributed. And so you say, well, Alvarado, proof of stake coins have a harder time with this. So, you know, Cardano, etc., Alvarado, etc., these
proof of stake coins, it's harder to decentralize the holders over time. It happens over time, of course, this is natural and you have more and more holders over time, but with proof of work, coins of course they emit very slowly during the mining process and it tends to have a better distribution. So yeah, loads of different ways to look at it, and if I then contrast Algorand
against avalanche, you know, cardanos, salana and the other kind of key players in the programmable lock chance base. I think we hold up pretty damn well across most of the metrics, but that does not mean it's perfect. And so we're going to be moving to decentralized networks further to move to employ techniques such as
gossip-based networks where you have more organic pathways, like pathways between the nodes where you've got many, many different roads for the data to go around, so it doesn't have to go through the same actors all the time. And so that's something we can improve. And then, of course, over time, the number of people doing consensus is important. >> Yeah, on that latter point, the
the idea, I think right now that government and regulators here are looking at in terms of how decentralized control by ownership of the tokens in that I think the bill outlines depending on what percentage, I don't have the number right, but what percentage of the tokens in total are controlled by either one foundation or one person or
entity versus how much is actually distributed in ownership across people in the ecosystem. I feel like that's an important metric when you talk about it. Totally. It's a very important point. But they're all important because if you make a mess of any one of these whether it's consensus, the data propagation piece or the holders, it
was lead to a suboptimal outcome. And so all three of these things are important. What I would say is most of the major cryptocurrencies that are out there have been quite transparent about how the token distribution was done, whether it was done in a Ethereum and an ICO and a pre-sale type thing similar to Cardano and Audra, or indeed whether
know what what chunk was kept by foundations, whether it's the Alderan Foundation or Alderan Foundation's, and indeed the the the inks or the developer of the of the protocol itself. And so with with nearly all of these proof of state coins, there's a certain chunk that is given to the foundation to support the ecosystem and give out grants, etc. And many many of these foundations give out those grants. And indeed a certain kind of
chunk that's required by the engineering teams at the at we sometimes call the inks to pay the engineers to actually develop and push for these protocols over time though these foundations will tend to become less and less relevant as the token distribution grows wider and they're giving out all the grants and they then just become I guess leadership by
that are out there promoting the ecosystems. And indeed, one would expect that with the various software houses that are building the actual core protocols, whether it's parity looking after polka dot or whether it's all around England looking after all around, one would expect over time that that will become more and more like Linux or Blender or one of these other open source projects where you know what, it doesn't matter whether you're paid for it.
do it, some smart person will rock up and just open a PR and start adding to the code base. And that's how it should be. That's how these networks need to get to. Yeah. And I feel like we've seen that example, I guess, in the network paved out by Ethereum and others. And obviously, as you mentioned, Bitcoin, a bit of a weird example in itself.
Satoshi Nakamoto is still unidentified and no one really knows. But all of these things, John, are being discussed right now in the US. We talk so much about the US because I think a lot of people understand there's a huge market for usership and developers here. And obviously, I think a lot of money floating around for some of these projects. But I think it's worth a question because you, my friend,
Right now I believe are not in the US we're calling you from our Brooklyn studios, but is the US is rolling all this over hyped? I mean can crypto survive if it's not kind of in the blood of the United States? So it's a great question. Yes, I'm calling from Rainey Dublin, Ireland at the edge of Europe.
Europe. Look, as you said, and it's not an overstatement. Some of the greatest technical innovators in the world are in the United States or United States-based companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Some of the greatest engineers globally are in the US. The US's position can't really be overstated at
is a tier one country when it comes to tech innovation, which is why I'm so surprised that they're making such a mess of this situation. But I do think that crypto can survive without the US. I don't think it will have to, by the way, I think that the US will, and I think we've seen evidence of that across the public
I don't know all about politics in the United States, but I've seen lots of noise from the Senate and other government bodies where they want to protect innovation in the US, and it's very clear that that message is coming out. So I don't think we're going to have to have a world where the US is excluded from this. I don't think the US would exclude itself from it. I don't think it should do. But at the same time.#
If crypto was originally invented to solve this very problem, the whole idea is that it's nobody's and it's everyone's at the same time. And so if crypto can survive without corporate America, I don't think it ever needed to exist in the first place. And so my kind of view is if it doesn't survive
it doesn't deserve to survive. I know that sounds a little bit not nihilistic, but that's how I feel. If America banning crypto ends crypto, it wasn't very strong to begin with. Yeah, that is a good point to raise. We've been as a community grappling with, I suppose, in the idea of, you know, decentralized
Permissionless blockchains and then having kind of the permission system trying to shut it all down What really happens and how far do you push this is a huge question? But it's it's one that we've heard from again other builders in the space like I said and it's only from Solana basically said if crypto dies in the US It's it's gonna be dead everywhere else because
because the US is a leader in all this and it becomes harder for you to prove out in other jurisdictions that it should exist. But we're already seeing a huge upticks and usership around the globe, not just here in the US, but in places like Turkey and Argentina where this is needed. I mean, have you seen the same thing at Algorand in terms of where right now around the globe, developers, users,
everything else is being absolutely and so I would kind of disagree with Ann it totally on this one and so I you know I think that even if crypto did have to to survive it at the US I think I personally think that it would and the reason I think that it would is because it is non maybe it's not
essential in the United States because you enjoy a relatively stable dollar and I know there's people who say well the dollar debt ceiling is increasing and there's many many factors around recessions and other things that are there and that they're real they're also real in the eurozone by the way we have similar problems in the eurozone and COVID didn't help any of us etc etc but generally speaking we have a relatively stable currency and when I go to
to the store of Pine de Milco is the same price as last year. And so that's not the case in huge, parts of the, huge quadrants of the world. And so, you know, I was having lunch today with one of our interns, who is a computer science graduate, who's just joined and is just beginning their career. And they were
They were saying, you know, in parts of South America, they were saying, like, why isn't the case that stores over here don't accept crypto as much? Because in South America, where they were from, most stores accepted. And the answer that we kind of came to over lunch was just simply folks in parts of South America really rely on crypto.
they can't rely on the peso or the ours or whatever. And so I guess it's driven nearly by necessity. And so I very much believe that there's more of the world needs crypto than doesn't need it. And maybe Ireland and the US don't really need it on a day-to-day basis.
It's a nice tool for building decentralized applications, but as a payment mechanism, we don't on a day-to-day basis need it because we can use Apple Pay or Google Pay or our Visa cards. But I think that there's a significant amount of the world that does need it. And in those places, it truly has become the answer for
folks who are who need financial freedom. I mean, they were telling me today that there's people who've literally lost their entire pension pot to hyperinflation. And I know it might be crazy to think you might store that kind of wealth inside Algorandr Cardano or Bitcoin or Ethereum, but it's not if it's literally being, if you're, if
your entire pension is being destroyed on a week-to-week basis in the national currency by a government that's potentially corrupt. It's definitely something that we have seen. Obviously, there are other examples to point to in crypto that maybe haven't panned out all that well. I'm thinking about people in Argentina who had used UST, terrorist,
Also, try to escape huge massive inflation and then get hit with that collapse. It's just kind of like, I don't know, escaping a burning building to get hit by a car. Sometimes it doesn't pan out. Obviously, technology is technology, so you've got to use it and it's got to be used correctly. But on the developer front, I think that that's kind of the interesting thing because you can talk about money as a use case, but#
is focused on gaming so much attention is focused in on now quote unquote Web 3 kind of a catch all for where this technology goes. What is the thing that you guys at Algorand right now in terms of developers and attention on that front that you've seen kind of become a great use case when we're talking about technology that even Gary gets
loves and the speed and transaction throughput. I mean, where do you see gaming fitting into all this too? Yeah, super, super interesting question. And I would just say just briefly on the last thing as you mentioned, there are people that move into crypto or move into stablecoins and they end up getting hurt too because of things like USD or FTX or other things. And so I want to be clear, it's not that crypto is like
a perfectly safe haven. It's just that, and by the way, some of these networks are using cutting edge mathematics and computer science that we're just learning about and we, you know, just that we think it's safe, but we're not, of course, it's not certain. And so you should always be careful when you're investing money that you kind of ought to lose into networks like this, but they can, in some cases, be better than a#
hyperinflating fiat currency. So on gaming, I think it's very interesting. I noticed two kind of mind sets on this or schools of thought. One is that blockchain will be used for gaming in the sense that it will store the moves like chess style or turn-based games.
For me, a much more interesting use case is the emancipation of both the licenses for games and indeed achievements, skins, assets within games from the networks that currently confine them. So being more specific, when you're playing your PlayStation 5 or PlayStation 4, you're in the PS4,
When you're playing your Xbox 360 or Xbox One X, you're in the Microsoft network. When you're playing PC games, you're usually using Steam. And so, if you're playing Rocket League or Counter-Strike or any of these kind of games, any achievements that you get, any skins, any advancements, upgrades, etc., they're always represented within the bounds of that platform.
I can't pick up my PlayStation and just start running away with the skins that I've got on my PC over there. And so this is an area where blockchain can absolutely be, it can be a killer app. By freeing those assets from those networks and making them tradable on secondary markets, making them swapable peer-to-peer,
That is I think the killer gaming app on blockchain and so to that end what we've done at the Alderman Foundation as an example of where we spend some of this book of money that we have We worked with engineers We worked with grantees to build integration with Unity and Unreal which are the two big gaming engines folks might know
most video games that you play are based on either Unity or Unreal. And what we've done is we've built plugins so that folks who are building games and Unity on Unreal in their regular Unity environment can now integrate with Algarine. They can issue an NFT within the game very easily. So they have some skin for a gun or a car or whatever. They can now quickly represent that as an NFT and issue it on
So again, it's about reducing friction for developers, whether it's with Alokit, which is the, you know, the dev tool, the box of dev tools that I described that we built this year to make things easier, or indeed with these kind of plugins for things like Unity Unreal. We can't expect AAA game developers, you know, pushing forward on Elden Ring or the latest version of Doom to spend time
for our documentation. We have to make it as easy as possible for those guys to issue these kind of NFTs, issues these assets, whether it's on Algaron, Cardano, or any other chain. If we don't make it easy, they're not going to bother. And so when they do take the time to do this though, I think we're in a world where gaming, which is a multi-billion dollar industry, is going to get#
I don't think there's a better example of how blockchain can improve the gaming experience than allowing one to actually emancipate and own the assets that you work hard for in those games and potentially make revenue from them on secondary markets. Yeah, and I think that that's kind of, you know, as we wrap up, we've been going almost an hour here, John, and I think
I think that's one of the main points that I was excited to talk with you about as a man, as I said, who's built on the teams behind Cardano Ethereum and now, Algorand. You've seen a lot of things, right? And you've been through a lot of cycles. And I think that, you know, in times like these, it's super important for people to hear from people like you. And, you know, maybe remember#
we've come, how much the spaces of all of the use cases have now come into crypto, when there are so many headlines that are basically being a little bleak, right? And so, you know, when you have people out there saying, oh, let's look at the facts. Let's see what's going on. I think there's a good thing to end on is kind of your estimation of where we go from here. Your reason
to be optimistic, right? Because people could say, "Ah, the space is down. Algo being named a security in this lawsuit. Prices are down across the board near an all-time low, but the enthusiasm and the excitement drawing people back to Algarand and crypto in general. What makes you most excited right now in this moment?"
the core concepts of what we're doing. And I'll be more specific. Just a touch on your point, you're absolutely right. I've been on a number of different events this year that we're nothing to do with algorithms specifically, like consensus in Austin, which is a pan industry, proof of talk in Paris just just this week. And you've got to sit there and look back and look at how far things have come.
in this industry. In this industry of building decentralized applications and decentralized networks of value. Like I sat around with hundreds of people sitting listening to others talk, discussing the industry. There's so much energy out there. Not even, I'm not talking about builders and developers because we have the week
We have more and more applications have been developed. We've seen a surge of tens of thousands of apps being built with our developer tools since we launched them. Separate to that stuff. Just even watching the business folks talk about this. Talking to some of the major companies that I'm talking to, which I won't name, but there's pretty much everyone is
is interested in this space because no one wants to get left behind. And what makes me most excited, the reason I stay working in the space rather than jumping to a traditional self-regionary world is because I deeply believe that we are changing the world of finance. We're changing the world of
social networks and we're changing the world of distributed value. And so the idea or the concept of an internet native asset class, which sits alongside other traditional asset classes such as gold, precious metals, bonds, securities, etc.
But does so in a way that it's internet native decentralized outside the realms of quantitative easing and other governmental controls. In a way that's robust, permissionless, as in you can you don't need someone's permission to have an account or to use it. Sensorship resistant, as in you can use it globally once there's interest
in that place. These are very powerful ideas and I think not only are they essential but I don't think that those ideas are going away. Lastly, John too, as we wrap up, I think that's great to hear and I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank everyone who's on the space for listening, everyone at Algorand that helps set this conversation up because I think
it's great for our community here. One of the things we always offer our guests are bold claims, bold predictions, big calls that we can have John Woods back on and say, "Look, you were right or you were wrong, either one, but the bigger the claim, the better it is, I think." I mean, what is the big prediction you have looking
forward based on everything we talked about for you in crypto. Sure. Well, you know, I can't predict the future, but I do think this industry has a very healthy future ahead. Here's my bow claim. We will have quantum computers within seven years and
for the networks that are not ready to deal with that threat and haven't got the engineering talent on staff, we're going to see some of those networks fail.
computers. And Algorand is one of the only ones in the space that I'm aware of that has taken steps to make it quantum resistant. So I think it's an interesting one. That is an interesting one. And one that we continually talk about, the advancement of technology and everyone's talking about AI right now, how much that introduces
But if the underlying hardware is also accelerating at the same time, crazy shit's going to happen. I think that's totally fair. Yeah, we got to have you back on to digging to all that and digging to the discussion around the threats of evolving technology and AI too. But I want to thank you again, John Woods from Algrant, the Chief Technology Officer, taking the time
out of his day and everyone in the Algo community to join us today. John, thanks so much. You gotta have you back soon, man. - Thanks very much for having me. - All right, appreciate everybody for listening. That'll do it for us again. If you haven't watched or subscribed on YouTube, you've got more episodes coming out. You can learn more about Coney, or Project at Coinage.shop Media. Have a great day,#