36 Burst results for "Algorand"
Thinking Crypto News & Interviews
A highlight from BIG XRP NEWS! DUBAI APPROVES XRP FOR USE! RIPPLE GEORGIA CBDC
"XRP gets approval under the virtual assets regime in Dubai. This is huge news for XRP. Let's break it down. Welcome to the Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. If you are new here, hit that subscribe button as well as the thumbs up button and leave a comment below. Well, folks, big news around XRP. Here's what Ripple tweeted out. Today, the Dubai Financial Services Authority, also known as the DFSA, approved XRP under its virtual assets regime, allowing licensed firms in the Dubai International Center to incorporate XRP into their virtual asset services. Folks, we are seeing global adoption of crypto and XRP continues to get adoption as well. And obviously, Ripple had a big win against SEC, showing that XRP intrinsically is not a security. And that is, of course, a huge win for the entire crypto industry. But I've often stated that crypto is not a United States asset class. It's a global asset class. And we are seeing different countries, jurisdictions and regions are embracing XRP, giving licensing and approvals and much more. Very bullish if you are an XRP holder. So here's what the press release had to say regarding this. Since the DFSA opened up external applications, XRP is the first virtual asset to be approved by the regime. XRP joins Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin as assets previously approved under the DFSA's virtual assets regime. XRP now stands to benefit from legal and regulatory clarity in the DFC and will be available for use by institutions located in the DFC to accelerate faster and more efficient global value exchange. Huge news, folks. Huge news. Very, very bullish if you're an XRP holder. And we know Ripple, their on -demand liquidity product is being set up for global adoption. It will use XRP. They're trying to improve cross -border payments. And we know in Dubai, there are many, many migrant workers, people who send money back home and they want to send it service providers and banks in those regions. And it's great to see, you know, XRP adoption. Here's what Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse had to say in the press release. Dubai continues to demonstrate global leadership when it comes to the regulation of virtual assets and nurturing innovation. It's refreshing to see the DFSA encourage the adoption and use of digital assets such as XRP to position Dubai as a leading financial services hub intent on attracting foreign investment and accelerating economic growth. Ripple will continue to double down on its presence in Dubai. And we look forward to continuing to work closely with the regulators to realize crypto's full potential. Folks, Gary Gensler is punching air right now. He's not happy. Dubai's listing of XRP has the potential to unlock new regional payments and other virtual asset use cases on the XRP ledger. As a key builder and user of the XRP ledger, Ripple chose the DFC as the location for its MENA headquarters in 2020 due to Dubai's innovation forward regulations, expansive network and reputation as a leading global financial center. Approximately 20 % of Ripple's customers are based in the MENA region. Huge news folks, very, very bullish if you're an XRP holder. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse also tweeted some thoughts around this. He said Dubai's regulators have consistently demonstrated their pro innovation approach with this announcement as the latest example. Ripple will continue doubling down in regions where there is regulatory clarity for crypto. A key reason we're hosting Ripple Swell in Dubai this year. Now Ripple's chief legal officer Stuart Alderati said the following regarding this news, doing business in the DFC free zone puts you under a regulator, DFSA, that is providing clear guidance and rule books. No wonder entrepreneurs are flocking to Dubai. So clearly there's clarity on other countries and regions and the United States is lagging behind folks. There's also some big news that came out today around Ripple and the XRP ledgers. So the central bank payment news account here tweeted out, Ripple is the official technology partner for the national bank of Georgia's digital gel G E L CBDC pilot. According to a press release issued today in next steps, the national bank and ripple will jointly plan the project execution and gradual rollout plan. So this was a press release on today and we're seeing central banks around the world are minting their CBCs on the XRP ledger. So there's a lot of pilots going on, a lot of testing CBDCs and are coming folks, whether we'd like it or not. And they're being built on different blockchains. So don't get me wrong, right? Their block, their CBDC is going to be launched on Algorand, some on Ethereum and obviously the XRP ledgers. So huge news folks, I am still bullish on XRP, still holding my portfolio. And obviously it's been moving pretty well since the lawsuit wrap up news. I expected to do well in the next bull market to hit new all -time highs. That's not financial advice. That's not guaranteed because I don't have a crystal ball, but based on the facts that we have today, based on the clarity we have in the United States, based on all the adoption that's taking place, like the one mentioned here in Dubai and getting clarity, XRP is primed to hit new all -time highs. And it's still my number one holding. I hold Bitcoin and Ethereum as well and other all coins, but XRP certainly my number one holding, still bullish on it, folks. Now I want to end it here with Jurien Timmer of Fidelity, continuing to share his thoughts on Bitcoin. Today, he shared a new chart titled Bitcoin Drivers, which he sourced data from a variety of folks like Bloomberg, Haver Analytics, and much more. He said, with Bitcoin moving up once again, will its adoption curve accelerate as it did a few years ago? And how does the macro trend on rates affect it? Here's some data to consider. Above, I show a fair value band based on both the slope of the internet adoption curve and the path for real rates. The bottom boundary assumes a TIPS real rate of plus 2 .5 % where we are at currently, and the upper boundary assumes a minus 2 % where we were in 2021. The macro can speed up or slow down the adoption curve, which we have seen played out recently. Assuming for a moment that Bitcoin will mature as an asset class that plays on the same team as gold and silver, how should we think about where it would sit in a 60 -40 portfolio and what would be a reasonable position size? The good news is that its annualized volatility is down from its 2018 peak, weekly returns below, although at 58%, it is still head and shoulders above traditional asset classes. So here in this chart, he's looking at a conservative price point top of $96 ,210 for the 2025 peak. However, if you look at the chart, Bitcoin many times breaks out of the set boundaries and goes beyond that. So I think it's safe to assume based on this chart here, Bitcoin will be over $100 ,000 in the next peak, which is in 2025. And I love data like this and looking at different data points like this, because you want to be educated and understand the market cycles because the liquidity usually flows to Bitcoin, then it flows down to the altcoins. So this is really great data. And we're seeing the bullish momentum building again, and I'm excited folks. And I think Bitcoin could possibly, now it's not guaranteed, hit 50, maybe 48, 50 K in the next two months or so. We'll see. Not guaranteed. It could top out at 40, but we certainly have a lot of narratives like the spot ETF approval, and as well as the Bitcoin halving, which I think has signified the start of the bull markets for the last market cycle. So folks, that's the news. Let me know what you think about this XRP news. Huge in my opinion. Are you bullish on XRP? Leave your thoughts and comments below. Do you think we're going to hit a new all time high in 2025? And thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Appreciate the support. And I'll talk to you all later.
Tech Path Crypto
Fresh update on "algorand" discussed on Tech Path Crypto
"It really loves sunny and dry weather. Your own digital plant. Now it's your job to grow it. Just open your Zeads app, go to the Magic Garden, select your little Punti Zeadle and plant it on the real world map in a real world location. Here it grows with the actual live weather and earns resources. Also, you can team up with other players to fight real world extreme weather events and earn cool rewards. When you take good care of your Zeadle, it will grow into a more precious, more beautiful version. You can accelerate that growth with in-app purchases and subscriptions. Getting a new Zeadle or getting a new item is going towards climate projects across the globe. Reforestation, solar and wind energy, biogas and much more. Alright, the reason this is important is because we're talking about geolocation. Geolocation through NFTs, all of this starts to play into brand IP use cases. This is important, especially in loyalty, because this is one of the key ways that brands can kind of connect the dots to consumers and tying this all in. This is one thing that has been missing within the loyalty industry overall. Don't forget also, crypto is of course injected flow. You'll be one of the lucky to pull these. This course happened with Star Wars, all tied into what's happening with flow as a network. The other thing was is they also integrated the AR component, which again is another one of the tests that was in that incubator that Disney was in the middle of, all flowing into what we're seeing now. Another tweet right here, Disney's vision for Apple AR VR headset, Vision Pro, now revealed a little bit. And this is going to get into this whole brand and IP integration, especially into gaming and other use cases. Now we're talking about things like ESPN Bets, the whole sporting side of things where it plays into this. And don't forget, all of this plays into the bigger strategies that are already happening right now within the gaming center, especially if you think about what's happening in the sports side, sport-fi, we'll call it. And I think that is the thing that a lot of people kind of forget. Don't forget, this was the NFL Toy Story broadcast where they kind of did the dual broadcast of the Toy Story and an actual full-blown NFL. Again, good test, trying to see what the fans would look at and also trying to understand where this is all going. All this writing in their own flow. Look at ESPN Bet downloads, one million in mobile sports betting apps. First week, this first week out, one million downloads. This is going to be a skyrocketship for sure. All right, so here's Rainmakers. Again, these are on Polygon, but could we see something like an ESPN Bet jump over to the Flow blockchain, mainly because we need transaction, transaction speed, obviously adoption and the technology that comes into a lot of this. So I think this is some interesting things that could play out right here. All right, here was a tweet right here. Here, EVM on Flow allowed developers to deploy solidity contracts on the Flow blockchain. So you should still be able to learn cadence. This is basically talking about smart contract tech that is going to be able to be created on Flow. So this is another big advantage for the tech pickup around a lot of this, because remember, these guys are all building right now. So they're going to be utilizing and looking at test, trying to do things as markets pick up, especially as we see adoption. So go back in, look at Flow Diver, you can get into some of the tokenomics. Remember that the tokenomics, 5% right now, the reward rate tokenomics really solid on this project overall, if you look at this. So this one right here, guys, I think is going to be one to really pay attention to in this next run. Now, some people say, all right, well, that's happening. But at the same time, Dapper Labs, they're doing some cuts. You got nine months after this NFT slump, a lot of companies started to kind of lose steam, so to speak. I don't think that's the case. I think the situation was more on, hey, let's get into quantity over quality. That's kind of been the premise in the past. Now I think what they're looking at is really focusing in on getting into the right teams building at these places. And I think that's the thing that we'll probably see coming out in the next cycle, next bull run, is really nimble teams capable of moving quickly as market uptake starts to happen. So pay attention out there to all of this. Couple of things here, just to give you an example of where Flow is right now. Number 53, look above it, you've got Algorand, FTX token, obviously render is going to fly. But if you look at this, Flow's got some blue water here of potentially making it solidly, maybe into the top 25 tokens out there, especially if we see the adoption pickup around what could happen with Flow. Just to give an example, here's market cap right now, remember market cap on Flow at the top right there, $5.4 billion, hovering in right now around less than a billion. So is this a 5X token? Is this a 5X opportunity? Or are we about to see something absolutely unhooked on the NFT and brand IP connection? I think all this is playing out, hopefully this is the kind of videos you guys like is a lot of these deep dives that help you kind of get a narrative around some of these projects because that's really the chance that you get to be able to maybe, hey, let me go take a look at that one a little bit longer. Or maybe I'm in the business side of things and I want to look at trying to integrate this into my own brand. Those are things I think that a lot of people are trying to pay attention to right now. A lot of moves in the market for sure. All right, if you guys are not part of the Diamond Circle, make sure and get in. It's really easy. All you have to do is click the link down below. We got additional content over there. Very simple to join. And of course, if you want to catch me out there on X, it's at Paul Baron. We'll catch you next time right here on Tech Bath.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from THE PROTOCOL: Token Allocations, Airdrops, and Data Availability
"This episode of The Protocol is sponsored by the Algorand Foundation. Dive deep into the blockchain realm with The Protocol podcast with Coindesk founding editor of The Protocol newsletter Brad Count and tech journalists Sam Kessler and Margo Nykerk. They unravel the intricate technologies powering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum one block at a time. Just a reminder, Coindesk is a news source and does not provide investment advice. Hello and welcome to The Protocol podcast. I'm Brad Count here with my co -host Margo Nykerk. Our co -host Sam Kessler for The Protocol podcast is still down covering the Sam Bateman free trial. I was just reading his story from last night. It sounds like they are but it is an amazing story and we're super psyched that Sam is down covering that. On the other hand, he'll be back here probably I was just talking Margo probably like a week or so. Yeah probably next week hopefully. Yeah wow okay huge story. Just a quick plug for The Protocol newsletter. Margo and I and Sam work pretty hard on this every week and it's really good. We are on coindesk .com. A lot of the stories that we're discussing today were in the issue of The Protocol newsletter that just came out. You can read more about it there if you subscribe and it's also on coindesk .com a web version of the newsletter but let's get right into it. Okay our first story today this was a story that that I covered Starknet. I mean Margo you're the expert on Starknet but you were out on Monday so I took this one. Starknet they announced that they are going to award 50 million of their STRK tokens. This is the Starknet foundation to what they're calling the early community member program. I mean this is pretty common kind of thing although often it's done when there's already a public token. In this case these tokens are locked from trading until next April. I mean Margo do you have any thoughts on why do these teams award these tokens? Who are they awarding them to? I guess my take on this is that this kind of move is done to sort of incentivize those early community members and those developers to sort of adhere to an ecosystem or thank them for their contribution to an ecosystem while also sort of like incentivizing them to sort of stay there but I want to sort of also know from your conversations with folks over at the foundation why the certain amount I saw that it was like five million tokens that are being awarded to those early members but also just generally speaking I'm we talk a lot about this like in our own conversations like how tokens are allocated to certain entities and this case 50 .1 percent of the token like the total supply of the token is being handed to the foundation so I'm sort of like curious what your take is on the token allocate like the different token allocations when it comes to this.
Thinking Crypto News & Interviews
A highlight from SHOCKING: SEC & Gary Gensler's Lawbreaking Assault on Crypto (SAB 121)
"Welcome to the Thinking Crypto podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. If you are new here, please hit that subscribe button as well as the thumbs up button and leave a comment below. If you're listening on a podcast platform such as Spotify, Apple or Google, please leave a five star rating and review. It supports the podcast and it doesn't cost you anything. Well, folks, we got huge, huge SEC Gary Gensler news. Folks, the Government Accountability Office, also known as GAO, this is a government agency, has concluded that the SEC's controversial staff accounting bulletin, SAB121, which requires crypto custodians record customers' digital assets as liabilities on their balance sheets, is considered a rule, not merely guidance, and therefore require the SEC to submit to Google, which it did not. In short, the SEC is now in violation of Congressional Review Act, CRA. Folks, this is big because we continue to see Gary Gensler and the SEC acting unlawful. And you may say, well, Tony, these guys in Washington, DC are not doing anything to Gary. But remember, folks, they're trying to build the case. They're trying to build a record of all these failures. Gary Gensler losing in the courts the grayscale and ripple, right? And he's fighting Coinbase right now. And the courts, the judges are tearing the SEC a new one. So as they're building this case, they'll be able to take action. And that's the insight I've gotten from many of them right now, because Elizabeth Warren is backed by the Biden administration and she has Gary Gensler the gimp on a leash. They have a lot of power because the Biden administration is in power, right? And Gary Gensler is appointed by the Democrats. So many folks don't understand this dynamic that even if the Republicans and the House Financial Committee want to take action, they have to tread lightly because Elizabeth Warren has so much power. And there are other things at play here, like other legislation, other rules they're trying to make for other industries and things that are happening overall. So that's the insight I've gotten speaking to lobbyists and politicians as well. So, folks, another black mark here for the SEC showing they are not abiding by the laws and they are hypocrites and liars and they have fallen far from their core mission, folks. I've been saying it for years now, right? I know some of you probably get tired of me hearing me say this, but I am out here exposing Gary Gensler and the SEC. I'm drumming up as much noise because I'm a crypto investor and this guy is using unlawful tactics to try to stop crypto, try to kill the gains that I would get, right? Trying to say, I can't stake my coins and all these things, right? I'm not going to stand for it and I'm here to fight and I'm going to spread the news. And I think many of you agree with me and it's going to take all of us to drum up as much noise on social media and put out content there to build the record of all the bad things the SEC is doing and hurt their optics and hurt Gary Gensler's narratives. You see, Gary Gensler is much more timid these days. He's not as aggressive because he's losing. And I smell blood and I hope you smell blood too. And we got to keep going, folks. Now, a lot of people weighed in on this. Ripple's chief legal officer, Stuart Eldorado said, while Mr. Gensler is making bad Halloween jokes on X, so Gary was tweeting about Bitcoin and Halloween and all kinds of things. His agency is being shamed for ignoring the law that requires agency rules to be reviewed by Congress. Seems the SEC has become the lawless Wild West Gensler loves to talk about so much. He's absolutely right. And remember what Judge Sarah Netburn said in the Ripple lawsuit, the SEC lacks fateful allegiance to the law, not to mention they were called as the SEC was called hypocrites. And there's different cases where the judges are just coming out saying, what are you guys doing? You're not providing any clarity, right? We know the SEC lawyers, they're hypocrites, they're liars, they don't respect the law. They just want to go around shaking down companies. And we've talked about the reason for that is that the Wall Street crowd, those incumbents are getting disrupted, have weaponized the SEC to go after these crypto companies to kill them. They want to kill Coinbase. They want to kill Grayscale and Ripple and Binance and so forth so that they can come in and take over. And I think we're seeing the cards on the table now, right? Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and these folks launch a crypto exchange. PayPal launched their own stable coin. BlackRock wants a Bitcoin ETF. BlackRock is investing in Circle USD and much more. So we are seeing the move from Wall Street to enter this market. They want it. They want to control it. They want to make money off of it, but they don't want Coinbase to be leading the market. They don't want Grayscale to be the first to get the Bitcoin spot ETF. Can you imagine that? They don't want that. They're sitting in their boardrooms and they're like, wait a minute. These guys are coming to steal our lunch here. We got to get control of this. So they have weaponized Gensler, who's a, you know, Goldman Sachs guy to call them Goldman Gary Gensler. So it's clear as day what's happening. Now Jake Traversky of the Blockchain Association weighed in on this. He said, this is huge. The GAO reviewed SAB121, an illogical anti -crypto accounting bulletin issued by the SEC last March and found that it's a rule under the CRA and APA. The SEC didn't comply with either. This is a clear statement from a federal agency that the SEC broke the law. SAB121 basically required crypto custodians to double count digital asset liabilities on their balance sheets. It has done extraordinary damage to the crypto industry and costs untold millions in legal and consulting fees over the last 18 months. It was illegal from the start. The SEC should immediately withdraw SAB121. If it does not, the GAO's analysis makes a slam dunk out of a lawsuit against the SEC, alleging a violation of the APA's notice and comment requirement. The Blockchain Association will be watching closely to see what the SEC decides to do next. So, I hope, folks, the industry sues the SEC, I hope multiple crypto custodians and companies sue the SEC and put them in litigation hell and they start fighting back. We know Coinbase and these folks have been fighting back and this is going to put the SEC in a lot of trouble. Marissa Tashman -Koppel, who I've had on the podcast, she's also at the Blockchain Association, said, huge in all caps, one of the means by which the SEC has tried to unfairly strap crypto. SAB121 not only was illegally published as guidance, not subject to notice and comment, but it makes no sense and has seriously harmed market participants. Representative Mike Flood, who I'm hoping to get on the podcast soon, said the GAO has spoken. Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 is a rule, not mere guidance, as the SEC claims. Rest assured, Congress will act to rein in Chair Gensler's overreach on this issue. So I hope to have him on the podcast and talk about this and find out what steps they're going to take. Now, Attorney John Deaton weighed in on this as well. He said, ever since the Ripple lawsuit, the SEC has consistently not followed the law. A federal judge literally stated that the SEC's enforcement lawyers and the leadership they report to are not only hypocrites, but they also lack a faithful allegiance to the law. It was an incredible statement for a federal judge to make. I was shocked at the little attention mainstream media paid to such a shocking statement. Here's what I can say with great conviction. Today, the SEC does more to hurt investors than it does to protect investors. It has become both an inept and corrupt organization. Full stop. I absolutely, absolutely 100 percent agree with John. And I think you all know that listening to me over the years. Folks, the power is in your hands to fight back. And we have social media. We can drum up a lot of noise and expose the SEC and Gary Gensler. They are paid by our tax dollars. It's time that we held them accountable. Now quick word from our sponsor, and that is Uphold, which is a great crypto exchange that I've been using for years. They have 260 plus crypto currencies. You can trade precious metals on this platform. They also have over 37 fiat currencies that you can trade. They are transparent. They are safe. They have a full app and full functioning website. They don't commingle your funds. They don't lend out your funds. Everything is 100 percent reserved and they have audits, which they do to show that these things are in place. So it's an exchange that I trust and I use to this day. And I've interviewed the CFO, the CEO, and many more. So if you'd like to learn more, please visit the link in the description. Now, lawyer Jason Gottlieb shared the following analysis regarding the SEC versus Coinbase lawsuit. And it was a great thread, a great writeup that he put here. I highly recommend you guys go read it and follow him. He highlighted that the SEC charged SolarWinds and chief information security officer with fraud internal control failures. He said, let me explain how this is relevant to the SEC versus Coinbase case. From the press release in its filings, the SEC, SolarWinds allegedly misled investors by disclosing only generic and hypothetical risk at the time when the company and Brown knew of specific deficiencies in SolarWinds cybersecurity practices. In Coinbase, the SEC allowed Coinbase's S1 to go effective at a time Coinbase was actively allowing crypto trading on its platform. The SEC knew fully the business model at the time and allowed Coinbase to be publicly traded. Thus Coinbase correctly argues the SEC didn't think the business model violated securities laws at the time. The SEC responds, well, approving an S1 isn't approving the whole business. And the SEC adds Coinbase disclosed the possibility of regulatory risks as was proper, but that's just it. The disclosure was of a generic and hypothetical risk, just like the SEC's beef with SolarWinds. If at the time a company is making a disclosure, there's an active materially bad thing the company is aware of. It can't just disclose that there could be a risk of a bad thing. It has to disclose the bad thing itself. He says, I had to litigate this issue, a case where the risk of a bad thing happening was disclosed and the SEC went to litigation alleging that the bad thing was actually happening, which wasn't disclosed. No more comments on that case, which is settled. In Coinbase, if the SEC corporate finance staff actually thought a purported bad thing allowing securities trading without registration was happening, they would have never allowed a disclosure of only the generic or hypothetical risk. They could have required Coinbase to say, our entire business model is predicated on securities laws violations, otherwise a material omission. But come on, no company is going to say that in an S1 because corporate finance would never allow an S1 with that language going forward. So as you can see, the SEC is getting caught on their hypocrisy and lies, right? They greenlighted Coinbase saying, you can go public. And they knew what Coinbase was about. No one had a question, what is Coinbase doing, right? And Coinbase had to go through multiple hoops. They had to jump through multiple hoops to go get an S1 and prove and go public, right? They had to be audited. They had to have certain things in place like other companies that go public. So the SEC is getting caught with their lies here. He said, the reason why this is obvious is because the SEC isn't going to bless public investment in a company predicated on securities laws violations, which it would then think it needed to put out of business, hardly investor protection. Great, great thoughts here by Jason. The only possible conclusion the SEC correctly did not believe at the time that Coinbase's model, which was fully and amply disclosed, violated the law. Something changed. There was no change in the laws or regulations or guidance. That's an important fact there, folks. He said, there was no change in the laws or the regulations or the guidance or the case law. The change was political. There it is, folks. Elizabeth Warren, Wall Street crowd pulling the puppet strings behind Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler, that's what's happening, right? I hope you see what's taking place here, folks, and why we gotta fight. So Jason continues, he says, it was frustration at an industry that didn't merely accept the chair's illegal dictates of what the digital economy should look like. Yet that same chair, remember, was promoting crypto before he joined the SEC. He said, Algorand, you could build Uber on it. The man was teaching crypto at MIT. He tried to go work for Binance. Then all of a sudden he's saying and doing these things. It's because he is a puppet. He was just doing the bidding of his puppet masters. So regardless of how he felt before or how he still feels about crypto, he's a gimp, right, as I've said before. So let's move ahead. Today at the Breaking Point Conference, it was revealed that Solana nodes are now available for deployment on Amazon Web Services. So I have some sole tokens. I'm not hugely bullish on Solana. And look, I'll have a swing traded and make some money, which is fine. I'm still weary of Solana. And you know, some people have said this is a VC pump and dump coin. I honestly don't know. It seems that way, but look, just be careful, folks, because be prepared for some sort of dump. I see a lot of people pushing Solana. So we'll see where this goes. Finally, in the Sandbank Murphy trial, Jacqueline Melanick of TechCrunch is reporting that the case has rested. Closing are arguments coming tomorrow. The jury deliberates to determine whether he's guilty or not on the seven charges related to fraud and money laundering. So this guy needs to go to jail. Let's hope that he does. And let's hope he doesn't get off lately. He is the Bernie Madoff of crypto. And he has to go to jail just like Bernie Madoff had to go to jail. Well, folks, that's the news. Let me know what you think. Leave your thoughts and comments below. Hit the thumbs up button on the podcast platforms. And I'll talk to you all later.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from INSANE Solana Price Prediction! (100X Incoming!)
"It is a great day to discover crypto, everybody. It is one day away from Halloween. I hope you're feeling spooky. The only thing spooky is you're not hitting the like button. We got some insane price predictions from VanEck, one of the largest asset managers in the world. And they have some very, very bullish price targets, but they also have a very bearish price target. We're going to go over those for Solana, plus their nice Bitcoin thesis and why there's going to be a lot of institutional money flowing in, and we're seeing that in the stats as well. Also, we're going to talk about Miles Deutscher. That guy's insane. I've been following his stuff for years. It's really, really interesting. Got some stuff from Ralph Paul as well. Plus, we have a brand new person, an oldie but goodie on the sidecar today. How are you doing today? I'm doing good. First time on the side desk, I think, so I'm going to be testing out, chatting with everybody in the chat. But yeah, when VanEck is pumping your bags, it's a good day to be in crypto. So yeah, I'm loving it. All right. Well, let's look at today in crypto. So we have the crypto market cap. It looks like it's up 1 .7%. I do want to go ahead and hit refresh here. We might need to, I don't know if I have coin, I don't have coin market cap at the time, but we'll look at this. CoinGecko, we do have Bitcoin up slightly. It's about half a percent, so it looks kind of good. But ETH, it's got double the pump, baby. It is up 1 .0 % here. But when we start scrolling down, we see some bigger winners. First big winner we see, well, relative. XRP up 3 .6%. Bigger than that, though, we have Solana. Solana is up 7%. I may or may not have bought Solana this weekend, folks. I may or may not have bought this weekend. That's all I'm going to say. We have Chainlink also looking good. Chainlink is up 3 .2%. Just defying all expectations of a pullback on the short term. And then Avalanche up 4%. But let's look at the biggest ones, the biggest gainers, the biggest losers. I think maybe one of the coins I took profits on, yeah, rollbit, baby. I took profit. I took some more profit. I've taken profit once before. I took profit a second time on rollbit. This is one that we put in the Crucial Crypto newsletter a long time ago. I told you about before the pump sold. I can't remember which peak I sold. I remember going down, I didn't buy more, and now that we're kind of testing this $0 .20 resistance level, I said, you know what, it might be time to exit out. So I put a little into Solana, I put a little bit into USDC. I have a little too much USDC in that wallet, so that's why I didn't go all Solana there. Alright, ThorChain. Look at ThorChain. We did a video on ThorChain. It is up 9 .5%. We did a video on Solana. If you go here to here eight days ago, folks, we did this video. If you haven't watched it, make sure you give it a shout out, give it a like, give it a comment on there. It just made me excited. It made me excited for Solana. Was that the deep dive Solana video? That is the deep dive. Top 3 reasons for Solana pump. I'm not saying we called it, but you know what, if you turn all those notifications, you can get these videos nice and timely. What's your Solana thesis here? No, it's good. I mean, I've liked Solana for a long time. A lot of you guys know I bought it last cycle around $5. It's an interesting layer one. Obviously being pumped pretty hard by institutional money, VC money, something we've been watching for a while. It is a little bit, it's conflicting a little bit when you see these big financial asset managers pumping things because usually when they're coming out screaming insanely bullish predictions that represents a local top or even a macro top. So I don't take everything they say with a grain of salt, $3 ,000 is an absolutely insane price prediction. We're going to get into that a little bit more as far as like what that would actually mean for market cap for it to get to that level. Their base case is a little bit more reasonable in my opinion. But in that video that you did like a week or two ago, it really breaks down the plan that Solana has the roadmap and it's a very strong narrative for the next couple of years. And it's something that people with influence and capital, there's a lot behind it. Jump capital I know is one of the ones behind Solana, a lot of big money behind it. They're going to want to pump their bags and there's a really good narrative around that. So it's fascinating to me when you see somebody as big as Vanette coming out and making these insanely bullish predictions. So it's going to be wild as we get into this. I feel like we're just getting started in this bull market. So keep an eye on who's saying what, but we really need to keep an eye on where the dollars are flowing more than what the headlines are. Yeah. Watch the capital inflows and outflows. We have Love Breakers. DZ, you rule, man. Please listen to our band. Is your band name Love Breakers? We're going to find it. Love Breakers sounds like a UK dating reality show. Love Breakers. Love Breakers. It's like where their mom is like hovering over the date saying, uh -uh, he didn't open the door for you. I'm a Love Breaker now. That's a show. That's a show. Let's go. All right. Let's get back to the show at hand here. And that's looking at the top crypto gainers and losers. We've got a couple more gainers we want to look at. Gala, baby. Gala is pumping. I'm going to put out a short today on gaming tokens. So we have Gala pumping. There's another big pumper today and I want to talk. It's an Axie Infinity ecosystem token. SLP is way up. I'm going to tell you the next two tokens that's on my radar because I see what pumps. What's the next thing to pump? So that's a really good short. You're going to want to make sure you check that out. Probably be out next couple hours. Monero is up 6 .5%. Somewhere Mind Your Biz is feeling pretty happy about that one. That's almost a stable coin, folks. Algorand up 4 .6%. And those who don't know, I mean, let's just, I almost probably can't show it because, Max, I don't know how. Yeah. If you go to the one year chart, that is very unlike most crypto charts. So very, very just kind of trading sideways there. All right. Now it's time for the top losers. Is your coin going to be in there? Is your enemy's coin going to be in there? Is that Jerk Boss, is his coin going to be in here? Is Deezy's coin going to be in there? Let's look. Maker. Maker is down 2 .2%. Then oh, well, yeah, you don't go far. Apecoin. Apecoin is down 2 .1%. But it is up 25 % for the week. Kind of just pumping off this gaming narrative. DYDX is down a little bit. But after that, really, things aren't moving too far down. Decentraland's down. Casper's down. Really, other than that, though, after that, we're in less than 1%. But you're ready to talk some insane price actions. But first, VanEck. They got some other news. They got an insane Solana prediction there. You can see it, 32, 32 .11. What are they saying about Bitcoin? And then we'll get into the Solana stuff. So new spot Bitcoin ETF filing submitted by VanEck is the investment giant. They resubmitted the application to the SEC here. Stitch over there. Oh, look at a little scoochie here. In June, the firm came up with a new application to the securities watchdog for a spot ETF. This came just months after the agency shot down its prior request, though. Is it inevitable though? The Galaxy Digital predicts the much coveted products could attract more than $14 billion. Yeah, we talked about the inflows, potential inflows last week. All right, well, let's see here. And VanEck joins the amendment. Here's the Jeff Seifart. We really got to get a hold of this guy. Him and Eric have just been crushing it lately for Bloomberg. They're the ETF analysts there. But this is the important part. I want to talk about VanEck Bitcoin ETF may use Bitcoin for seed funding. Okay, so why is that important? I thought they all use Bitcoin. No, I'm using cash for the seed investment portion of it. So let's look at this. So according to Scott Johnson, with an extra S there, he speaks Parseltongue, the updated prospectus for VanEck's ETF contains seed funding language similar to BlackRock. However, there's one important difference here. Instead of using cash for seed funding, VanEck recommends using actual Bitcoin. Why do I think that's a good idea? And TJ, I want to bounce this off you. I think Bitcoin is going to go on a largely upward trend over the next 12 months. And so if you do have this ETF, say it comes out in March, say it comes out in January, maybe it comes out in June, maybe it's further down than everybody's expecting here. If you're buying Bitcoin today versus buying Bitcoin in March, well, I happen to feel like you're making a better choice today. So yeah, BlackRock, they're putting in, I'm just throwing out a number here, they're putting in $500 million. For VanEck, they might be putting in the seed amount that's buying actual Bitcoin. Well say we go live in March, who's going to be better off? The people that bought Bitcoin or the people that have cash invested ready to buy Bitcoin? Well I think they're going to be better off buying Bitcoin according to the four -year cycle here. Well, if we look here, what is seed funding? Seed funding is when financial institutions contribute capital to purchase an ETF's underlying assets in exchange for shares that can be traded when the ETF launches. This provides initial liquidity. Think of the rich players getting in on the ground floor. You know, you're going to have, here's how it's really going to work, BlackRock is going to give $10 billion to State Street, who's going to give $8 billion to Vanguard, who's going to give $7 billion to BlackRock, who also gave money to Vanguard, it's just going to be a big circle right there. But then they say, hey, you know, there's no monopoly, there's no monopoly here. Well, VanEck filed for a new application in July 2023, and several other companies including BlackRock, Bitwise, WisdomTree, Fidelity, and Invesco also have filings for potential ETF's before the SEC. I want to see if Jeff has any latest tweet here, because he's always got the new new, the fresh data, and they operate in the morning sometimes, he could catch a tweet like four minutes old. I'm still feeling like March, I guess more and more people are starting to feel January, I'm just going to be the one that goes with the prediction markets. I don't have any inside information with the SEC, I'm not Gary Gensler's nephew, I don't know if they're going to do January, I don't know if they're going to do March, but I will say this, it's increasingly likely that we are going to see an ETF in the next six months, next five months. What odds would you put it that we have it by March? I'm going to put in insanely high odds, you know, I'm really bullish. I'm going to say 85 % plus by March, I don't see it really getting past March. The question in my mind is, do we see it before the end of the year? You brought up several different things there, I think it's fascinating that VanEck's talking about seeding this ETF with Bitcoin rather than with DollarsDZ, you made a good point. Either way, a spot Bitcoin ETF means buying pressure on spot Bitcoin, that's going to be very, very good, it's just a matter of how much buying pressure and when. If VanEck is trying to seed this thing with Bitcoin, the ultimate question becomes, where do they get that Bitcoin? Where does that Bitcoin come from? Because we can see right here, you know, this was put out by Bitcoin Magazine, see if I can back this out just a little bit. Oh, I like the colors there. Yeah, it basically, you can see this is supply on exchanges since May of 2020 and it's just continually dropping, I guess it's auto adjusting my screen over there, but it's the lowest it's been, I think, in about six years. So where is the price, where's the Bitcoin going to come from? Because it's going to create an insane amount of buying pressure on Bitcoin very, very quickly, whether they're converting those dollars into Bitcoin end of this year, early next year, or if they're accumulating all that Bitcoin dramatically quickly right now, it's a good time to be in Bitcoin. And like I said, when you see institutions and hedge funds and trillion dollar asset managers starting to pump your bags, it bodes well for where the price is going. So yeah, I can't wait. Let me, let me crap on my own point here. Here's why it might be bad that they're buying spot Bitcoin versus putting in cash today. Well, imagine everybody's unleashed at once and then, you know, to TJ's point, small amount of Bitcoin on exchanges, what if it was a surprise announcement, Gary Gensler, he knows he's being watched for the one time in his, I'm just joking, you know, he didn't give Goldman Sachs, his cronies, the inside info there. Imagine if every BlackRock employee, Vanguard employee, what if they all just woke up to the same news and they had a spot buy Bitcoin? Well, Vanguard has the Bitcoin already. They wouldn't have to, or VanEck had the Bitcoin already. They wouldn't have to buy it. But if they all had to buy it once, that's when you could see a parabola. That's when you could see that insane amount of just crazy one minute candles, one hour candles, as exchanges just go into FOMO mode as I don't have enough, they don't have enough, I got to hurry up and buy some, I don't care if the price is spiked $10 ,000 in two minutes, buy that Bitcoin now before it goes up $20 ,000. Next thing you know, it is up $20 ,000. That would be the scenario that plays out that way. But people are ready for the Solana price prediction here. I see people talking about it. What do you think? Is it going to hit a new all time high? First, let's get Drew's two cents here. Drew, will Solana hit a new all time high next bull run? What do you say? I'm having to say yes at this point. It's got a lot of the community stuck through it to the really bad parts of the FUD that it ran through with FTX and Sam. He's out of the picture as being handled in courts. I think it's it's going to probably at least hit its previous all time high. All right. All right. I'm tending to agree. I'm more likely than not that we do go above was it 260 or so. So I do think we get strong rejection at three. So we go above it, but barely. That's DZ's two cents here. Where do you come in? New all time high. Yeah, I think I mean, we're basically the previous all time high is about 258. So we're talking that 300 number. I think that was within the base case of Vanex prediction. It it can do that. It's just going to have to keep that narrative. And it's not that's one thing you need to keep in mind when you're investing in crypto. Speculation is part of the game and it's not necessarily the coin that should reach the highest market cap. It's which coin can reach the highest market cap and who's behind it, who's pumping it. All of those things matters. ETF is going to matter. Grayscale, what they're doing with Cardano. You could see how that quickly reignited that narrative. So many people over and thinking Cardano was and I don't know if it'll reach new all time highs. Hey, if you can get institutional money into it, you know, maybe there will be. So, yeah, I think we're going to I think let's see, what do they have? They had the base case at three thirty five, the bear case at ten and then the insanely high case at thirty to eleven. So base case at three thirty five here, which again is just off the bottom of my important note, twenty thirty next bull run. No, no. We're talking about not only the next bull run, if there's still a four year cycle, we're talking about the one after that. It would be a peak in twenty twenty nine if the four year cycle still play out. So two cycles from now, I definitely think a base I would come in at higher than three thirty five conservative. Yeah, I would say three thirty five is slightly high for the next bull run. I would say three thirty five is pretty low for the one following that. This is an interesting number in chat. What do you think of this number? Worst case scenario, ten dollars, ten dollar Solana, not twenty twenty five by twenty thirty. So ten dollar Solana, I feel like that's a little bit bearish. I mean, the chain shut down over a dozen times and it didn't drop. You didn't see huge declines, FTX collapse. And what was their biggest holding Solana by far? They're dumping Solana, they're dumping Solana on everyone's face. Still didn't get what it bounced off ten. Right. And that's as low as it went then. So you're talking about for all time high for next cycle, top ten dollars is a little low. Now let's talk about the bull case number here. I would put this at less than I want to say less than one percent odds, but I would say less than maybe two and a half percent. I would put that it's it's around a one percent chance, maybe a three thousand two hundred and eleven dollars Solana by twenty thirty. I know a lot of people are saying, oh, you have it on the thumbnail. You think it's going to that, don't you idiot? I don't think it's going to go to that. I put it at one percent odds and then that one percent that is you know, that is the hundred dollar gallon of milk, maybe even one percent a little high. What do you guys feel about thirty two hundred dollars Solana? I mean, you got to think they're taking into account a severe impact to the dollar not being as valuable by twenty thirty. I have to imagine that's part of the analysis there. It is fast. It's funny to me when you see Vanek making it couldn't be a more broad from ten dollars to thirty two hundred dollar prediction. You know, you you pretty much covered the entire spectrum there where it's like no matter what happens, you're not going to be, quote unquote, wrong. So it is funny when you see asset managers with more bullish predictions than YouTubers out there. But this is what I think is interesting for the three hundred and fifty dollar mark to be hit. What market cap would be required on Solana? Can you see that? I'll scoot you just a bit. Other way. Yeah, there you go. Perfect. Perfect. Yeah. Here you go. So three hundred to get a price of three hundred fifty dollars, you would need a market cap of one hundred and forty six billion, which doesn't say it's high. I mean, that's you're talking about basically a 10 X for Solana, but it's not out of the question when you come over here and you look at that. Basically, there's worse tokenomics. Well, I mean, it's basically getting close to what Ethereum is right now. Ethereum is at 218 and you're asking for Solana to get to 146. So it's like if Solana could get to a market cap similar to where Ethereum is sitting right now, which, again, is very plausible, very feasible. We're talking the entire market coming up. We think the you know, if we move from one point two trillion to a three trillion dollar market cap, a five trillion dollar market cap. Now, again, these would be huge gains all the way around. I do think we'll get back above one trillion for Bitcoin fairly easily. So two, three, four, five trillion for total doesn't seem out of the question and seeing that flow into some of these other top performing layer ones with lower caps right now, it is very feasible to me. So three hundred fifty dollars. It is right in the middle of their insane prediction. Three thousand seems crazy. Ten to your point, Dizzy, I don't see that happening, but right within that, you know, I see it in the pushing new all time highs again, which I think that was 250. So it could easily break new all time highs into the 350. People asking about the leader of Anatoly Yakovenko, I think is how you say his last name, he's the CEO of Solana. If we're going to talk to anyone about Solana, we would probably target him because he would actually know what's happening. All right. Let's talk. All right. We got another article kind of breaking it down to Vanek believes Solana can grow ten thousand percent in value if it on boards. A hundred million users there. So that's a big if a hundred million is a lot of users. That's a lot of people. That's a whole lot of people. That's a whole lot of people stepping for their crypto there. All right. Asset manager Vanek says, hey, we could see a 10K pump there by 2030 if we attract one hundred million users. The most striking prediction is, I guess, is the ten thousand percent pump there. It's only one hundred X, folks. Comparatively, the price target is set at eleven thousand eight hundred. OK, that's for Ethereum there. So, ETH, they're saying going to twelve. Let's go. I like that. I like that for two bulls from now. I would say that's maybe a little bit higher than I'm thinking. But, you know, that's that's plausible. That's definitely doable, especially depending on how deflationary it becomes. You're so everybody feel like it's so conservative this time around. So that's twelve thousand for two cycles. That's because we're hitting these astronomical market caps. You know, I do think we'll get big gains. But, you know, we're talking about Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, these top ten coins. Once they 10X, it's a whole lot more work to make that 3X. Just because it's going to be a giant boulder. You know, sure, your gaming token, it's a little pebble. You can you can flick it and get a 50X. But when you have this giant boulder called Bitcoin, it takes a significant move just to move at 10 percent. So, yeah, I mean, I do think ETH.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from THE PROTOCOL: Deciphering New Developments | Polygons Evolution and Ethereums Safeguard
"This episode of The Protocol is sponsored by the Algorand Foundation. Dive deep into the blockchain realm with The Protocol podcast with Coindesk founding editor of The Protocol newsletter Brad Count and tech journalists Sam Kessler and Margo Nykerk. They unravel the intricate technologies powering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, one block at a time. Just a reminder, Coindesk is a news source and does not provide investment advice. Hello, and welcome to The Protocol podcast. I'm Brad Count here with my co -host Margo Nykerk and Sam Kessler. Let's dive right into it as we say with the latest news and developments in technology behind crypto and blockchains. In our first segment, we will be talking about Margo's cool feature just out today on a cybersecurity expert at the Ethereum Foundation who works on a team there who literally they just spend their entire day trying to hack the network, trying to break it before anybody else does. Margo, tell us about this amazing cool feature. Yeah, so the feature is about a security researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. His name is David Theodore. Basically had a couple conversations about him and what he does at Ethereum. And as you mentioned, his job is basically just to find vulnerabilities in the blockchain and hack it and identify it before any bad actors can get to it. And he's one of a member of team of like about 10 people. And they all come from like a cybersecurity or an info security background. They've all worked at like big tech firms or the defense industry where they've led like offensive cybersecurity units. So they know sort of all the tricks of what bad actors might be looking for. And so now they get to play the other side of this, where they do the defensive, where they make sure that the blockchain is up and running, that there are no critical malfunctions in the blockchain. So the Ethereum Foundation is very central to the Ethereum ecosystem. It was created by Vitalik Buterin, along with a bunch of other well -known people in the Ethereum ecosystem. But basically they do a lot of research and help support a lot of network upgrades that go on in Ethereum. And so they employ a bunch of developers to work on teams to sort of improve the blockchain. And for instance, they were very central in coming up with the coding and the tooling for the merge. But they're not, let's say, like the ones that are necessarily responsible for Ethereum. They're just sort of a big player in this ecosystem to help maintain and improve and move the blockchain along as it matures. All right. Well, this team, you know, what are the kinds of things that they're doing all day? Yeah, they're different from some of the other teams that, they're different teams at the EF and these guys specifically, their whole job is just to hack the blockchain and find these bad functions so that they can patch it. There's a technique that they like to use, which is kind of like a cute word. It's called fuzzing. Basically what it means from a high level, again, I'm no like cyber sec expert, but supposedly they put in invalid inputs into the system and that's how they're able to detect vulnerabilities. So David sits around all day. And as he told me, he just fuzzes, he fuzzes all day, every day, even when he goes to sleep, they just fuzzing his life in that. And Margot, you had this really colorful detail in there he about works sometimes from an Airstream like recreational vehicle. How does he manage to do that? Yeah, well, he's based in Texas most of the time, but he does have a love for the outdoors. And so he has an Airstream and him and his fiance or his partner go around to the different national parks. And because he's able to connect to Starlink, he's able to keep fuzzing from wherever he wants to fuzz. There's a tweet inside the article showing where he set up right before the merge, he was fuzzing in a national park. And then he used the Airstream to meet up with some of the other EF folks before the merge in Colorado. So yeah, you can fuzz everywhere as long as you're connected to Starlink supposedly. That is so fascinating. I mean, it feels like it's part of the crypto industry where so many people are working remotely. And I mean, I personally know that from my own setup, I need to have everything in the right place. I know a lot of people do. But it could be that, you know, some people just take advantage of it. They're just all over the place all the time, right? Yeah, I mean, I think even us, right, we're all in different places. And, and like the EF also, specifically, I think everyone is sort of everyone I talked to is always somewhere around a different place around the world. So, so like, Margo, I'm curious, there's the core Ethereum protocol, which is most of what, you know, this group at the Ethereum Foundation sounds like they focus on and this guy that you interviewed, but then there's all the smart contracts that are built atop Ethereum. And those are, of course, like the bugs and the exploits and the hacks that we mostly hear about. Ethereum itself famously has not been, you know, the victim of any massive hack, unless you consider like the DAO exploit from years and years ago to be a hack. Anyway, that's like a whole rabbit hole that we can go down later. But anyway, okay, so there's kind of like two things that I guess we usually talk about when we're discussing bugs on Ethereum. There's bugs or the potential for bugs on Ethereum, the protocol itself. And it sounds like that's what this team that you reported on focuses on, Margo. And then there's all the bugs that we usually hear about the hacks, the exploits, the, you know, all of the other shenanigans that we hear about on the news happening on the apps built atop Ethereum and the smart contracts that programmers around the world deploy onto Blockchain Network. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, whether you over the course of your reporting got into any discussions with the Ethereum Foundation about that kind of like second order of attack on smart contracts? Or is that not really in their their sort of purview? Yeah, that's not really in their wheelhouse. I would say everything is more of a focus on the protocol level. He did mention that there were some critical vulnerabilities that they found for CL and EL clients. CL being consensus layer. Consensus layer and EL being execution layer. Sorry that. about
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from THE PROTOCOL: Exploring Scroll's Layer 2 Solution, Ethereum Staking, and Stellar's Smart Contract Evolution
"This episode of The Protocol is sponsored by the Algorand Foundation. Dive deep into the blockchain realm with The Protocol podcast. With Coindesk founding editor of The Protocol newsletter Brad Count and tech journalists Sam Kessler and Margo Nykerk, they unravel the intricate technologies powering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, one block at a time. Just a reminder, Coindesk is a news source and does not provide investment advice. Hello and welcome to The Protocol podcast. I'm Brad Count here with my co -host Margo Nykerk and Sam Kessler who's been down covering the Sam Bankman free trial at the federal courthouse in Manhattan and was kind enough to join us remotely down there last week but is here with us in real life today. Sam, we're happy to join us. Welcome. Excited to be here. Yeah, welcome. Well, let's get right into it. As we say, with the latest news and developments in technology behind crypto and blockchains in our first segment, we will be talking about Scroll's main network goes live. Margo, you want to just give us a quick rundown on what the news was here. Yeah, so Scroll, a layer two to Ethereum, shared that their mainnet went live on Tuesday, though blockchain data suggests that their smart contract was already deployed on October 8th. So it's a little ambiguous in terms of why they waited so long to announce that they went live. But regardless, it's up and running. Basically, this adds Scroll to the already growing field of newer ZK rollups that have hit the market. And basically, for those who don't know, the difference between an optimistic rollup and a ZK rollup is both bundle up transactions and post it to Ethereum. But on an optimistic rollup, the transactions are assumed to be true unless proven otherwise. And ZK rollups use zero knowledge cryptography to share a little bit of that information from those transactions that, yes, that is part of the bundle. But we have a clip of Sandy Pang, the co -founder of Scroll, who talked about this earlier this week on CDTV. And let's hear what she has to say. So we're a ZK EVM. And that means compared to some of the earlier rollups of the optimistic variety, ZK rollups as a whole provides instant finality. And that's very important for high -stake transactions and for any particular kind of on -chain transactions where users prefer to bridge back the funds instantly. And that is really important for pretty much most of the DeFi primitives that we see on -chain today. I think compared to some of the ZK rollups that currently exist in the space, Scroll is meeting developers where they are. So part of our launch slogan is called copy, paste, and deploy because anyone who is an existing EVM developer can copy, paste, and deploy their existing Ethereum application on Scroll. So we've taken two years in a very painstaking and a very complicated engineering process in order to build something that is EVM equivalent. So essentially replicating every Ethereum by code and so as to provide developers exactly the same experience as building on Ethereum layer one. Cool. So one of the things that I thought was interesting that Sandy brought up there is she alluded to the differences between Scroll and some of these other products that you mentioned Margo that have launched recently with on their face the same technology of Scroll which is a ZK rollup. But Scroll is kind of taking this sort of more in their telling rigorous approach to the ZK rollup to allow developers to literally in her words copy, paste, and deploy code onto their platform. So without getting into the you know super super nitty -gritty the reason why she kind of talks about this whole copy, paste, and deploy thing as a differentiator for Scroll is that all of these ZK platforms take a different approach with regards to how they interpret code from developers and then port it into their systems. And Scroll's approach at least in their telling is even more EVM equivalent meaning it's even more similar to how Ethereum works natively. It's something called bytecode level you can read about it on Coindesk but without getting into all the nitty -gritty the interesting thing here is that just you know they took a long time to develop relative to their competitors because they think that their approach is better but you know we'll see if that actually plays out. Margo I wonder if you've looked at any of the numbers that I've seen on like usage data have you seen any? Well I was actually just going to ask you about that because I haven't looked at those numbers and I was wondering as you mentioned that it's geared towards developers who basically just copy paste from this Ethereum environment is that really like a big in -demand approach that developers want or do they have to poach developers from the polygon and matter labs ecosystems like or zk sync ecosystems like I wonder where this sort of falls in the other roll -ups that have like hit market earlier. Yeah it's a good question because right there's the developers and there's users so scroll will say will say that they needed to take the approach that took them much longer than some of their competitors to create something that is more seamless for developers whether that's but you know on the user end they probably don't really care all that much as long as they can use these products that are built atop the zk evm and they probably honestly I think it's fair to say won't really notice much of a difference so the fact that scroll took longer to launch might have put them at a comparative disadvantage when it comes to people looking to engage in a vibrant ecosystem. Brad I wonder what you think about all that.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from Reddit Crypto $MOON Crashes 85%! (Rugpull Alert)
"It is a great day to discover crypto. It is Wednesday, October 18 is 1035. We got Drew and Kelly on the ones and twos today. And today, folks, we're going to be talking about Bitcoin. Of course, we got to talk about the main story here. Reddit rug pulling their community tokens, the RCPs, the Reddit community points, a lot of Reddit users are pissed. The moons are down, the Fortnite tokens down as well. And it is down big, folks. I'm talking about a complete bear market retracement in one hour. It was insane. Also, we're going to talk about Bitcoin. We're going to talk about X slash Twitter. We might mention Sam Bankman, Fried's father. We got some interesting info on that. Also ZK roll up, ZK sync stuff. A lot of people really love it. And last but not least, we have SWE and ETH we're going to talk about. But Kelly, how are you doing today? I'm doing good. I'm feeling charged up, sleeping well. Got a big trip planned tomorrow with TJ. Got some big things in the work for BitLab. But you know what? I'm ready to dive into the stories and the charts. We got a lot to talk about today. Let's give it to the people. All right, folks, make sure you follow us on YouTube. We're putting out a lot of great content now. Let's just look at the crypto market cap here. Crypto markets. How are things moving? Let's see here. We're going to move a little bit over here. All right. We can we have to fix that. Maybe I can move it just a smidgen to the downside. Right there. All right. So you can see the crypto market cap is up 0 .2%, 24 -hour volume is down a little bit. Now we're down to $39 billion Bitcoin dominance coming in at 49 .1 and gas is literally exactly where it was yesterday. Yesterday, it was 18 Gwei as well. All right. So Bitcoin is largely flat, folks. It is down, but it's only down 0 .1 % is still coming in at above $28 ,000. $28 ETH, ,300 Bitcoin down 0 .1 ETH up 0 .2%. You can see ETH is up a little bit still coming in below $1 ,600, however, is now coming in at $1 ,577. BNB is up half a point, but really everything is flat till you go to TonCoin. TonCoin's moving a little bit. It's moving about 2 .5%. But let's see the exciting coins. Okay. That's all boring. I need something to excite me. I need some juicy candles, hopefully double digits, right? Do we get that? Not quite. Not quite. It's Trust Wallet. Trust Wallet's up 8 .1 % here. It is up 15 % for the week. Bitcoin SV, BSV is up 5 .4%, but look at that weekly gain. It is up 26 % this week. Then we have Stacks Hedera, Synthetix, Chili's, Injective, TonCoin, eCash, Render, Tron, GMX. So then outside of the top 10, we have Apecoin in there because these, you can't have any winners today. All right. Let's look at the losers. I got a streak going. I think it's about 200 days. Oh, man. Here it is. 201 days. Number one loser of the day is RollBitCoin, RLB is down. You know, it's funny. Yesterday, I actually, because I don't always say it, I said, oh, I should take profits on it. I feel like today I will take profits. You get a little busy? I got a little busy. I got a little busy. I'm working on this Larry Fink script, guys. You guys are really going to like it. If you like the Joe Rogan one, it's going to be in a similar style. So I think a lot of people like the Joe Rogan one. All right. RLB, RollBitCoin, the gambling casino coin is down 4 .6%. You think it would have got extra attention with the Cointelegraph news, right? A lot of people are like, oh, leverage trading. Okay, let me go check out the site. Now, the token's down a little bit. Conflux is also down. Frax is down 3 .6%. We have Clayton down 3 .3. We have OKB, Caspa. Caspa's down. Okay. Maybe a little Caspa opportunity for myself here. However, still in the green for the week. It is up 7 .7%. Immutable X, Algorand. People are talking about Algorand. New lows here for Algorand, right? New lows. Everybody who's bought Algorand is literally in a loss right now, right? If I'm not mistaken. This is a dangerous thing to do. Let's go to Max. Yeah. So the Max is, the line's almost too flat, but if you look here, yeah, it is the lowest it has been. I mean, maybe it was a little bit of a brief September. So if we go to the 90 day, okay. Alright, so there's 17 people who bought in a two -hour window. They're in the green, folks. They're in the green. But everybody else except for those 17 people, they are in a loss right now. It's more than 17 people, folks. Timing is everything. Timing is everything. Yeah. Looking at the chart, it's not looking good. But it does seem like it likes, it's almost like a magnet to that 10 cents. So I mean, if, hey, if I was a spec trader, no, I wouldn't hate spec trading this coming in at 9 cents and jumping out at 10. And that's an 11 % gain for the normal people. That what's their beat. That gets them excited. Me, it's nothing. Hey, it's coming into a pretty tight range. So I have the algorithm chart up here, massive, massive falling wedge. I mean, look at this coming right into the apex area. Will it break down or break up? You know, interestingly, not things they don't always have to break up. We saw that on gold broke down from the falling wedge and then came up. So I don't want you to look at this, say, well, everybody says a falling wedge is a bullish pattern. It has to break up. It very well could, you know, wash some people out. So trade carefully. I do think there's a possibly even some better prices in store and I'm still like an algorithm for the next bull run. All right. So you get a hundred algorithm for $9 that means you can get a thousand for under a hundred bucks. So if you want to scoop a thousand of a coin for under a hundred bucks, maybe algorithm could be a choice though. I do have to do some DC ang here. I heard a good investment thesis. I'll have to, maybe I'll type some in at the end so I can remember. I'm going to share my investment thesis on what I might buy next. And the reason why I'm just going to have a, I'm a whisper, a word, black rock. And so I think it might pump this thing. So I'll, I'll share that at the end. I am going to do a DC a last week. It was boring. It was East this time. It's a little bit more speculative. So maybe, maybe we'll maybe you guys can make fun of me or agree with me. Of course. No, no, no. It's not that. All right, folks. If you want to get some merch, we got pretty cool merch here. What's the come and take it. I like that. I wear that shirt yesterday. It's a great one. All right. So this is brand new. Yeah. It fits good. Morel is crushing it. It's killing it with the merch. Yeah. Morel's the one who made that nice XRP hoodie. Crypto blood is not a fan of this clothing right here, but I think this thing looks awesome. All right. Let's also give a quick shout out to link to, we want to give them a quick shout out to, because we're talking about the ripple IPO yesterday with around the blockchain. So if you want to check that out and hey, we give you a quick shout on how maybe link to can get you in on that ripple IPO, but now it is time for the top story. We do. I do want to shout out a comment DCA and pray, Hey, you guys remove the random are at the top of the rundown. R I P random are R I P random. Are you ready to get this going? I am ready to get this going. Let's speaking of our, it was a segue. I don't know. It wasn't. I'm just making it up now. Reddit, Reddit rug pulled everybody and people are feeling regarded. Actually they're not feeling regarded. They're feeling ridiculous. Here. Reddit is killing blockchain based community points. Morgan sung. Uh, I did a quick short on it. Maybe I can, uh, we'll, we'll play the short real quick. And then, uh, then we'll get into the articles. This is 30 seconds here, folks.
Crypto News Alerts | Daily Bitcoin (BTC) & Cryptocurrency News
A highlight from 1435: Bitcoin Will 50x Gold - Max Keiser
"In today's show, I'll be breaking down the latest Bitcoin technical analysis as Bitcoin metrics improve bullish odds as the Bitcoin price holds the 200 -week trend line. That's right. Also BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says Bitcoin and crypto will play a role in investors' flight to quality. Also breaking news, ARK Invest's Spot Bitcoin ETF application is seeing progress as SEC shows change in behavior. According to their CEO, Cathie Wood, also Bitcoin's market cap can do another surge to 5X as financial titans circle around Spot Bitcoin ETFs according to CryptoQuant, as well as Anthony Scaramucci of SkyBridge Capital lays out a potential price target for Bitcoin of $100 ,000 per BTC. I'm also going to be sharing with you his targets for Ethereum as well as Algorand. Also in today's show, I have a Bitcoin price prediction of $220 ,000 per BTC from Max Keiser for the short term and quoting him here, just in time for Bitcoin's next leg up, getting rid of naked short selling means big guys like BlackRock, etc. won't have their primary means of manipulating prices down. This will also benefit gold and silver, but Bitcoin will 20 to 50X them, send it and let's go. We'll also be taking a look at the overall crypto market, all this plus so much more in today's show.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from THE PROTOCOL: Exploring Crypto's Role in Times of Conflict | Israel's Crypto Scene, Smart Contracts Under BitVM, and More
"This episode of The Protocol is sponsored by The Algorand Foundation. Dive deep into the blockchain realm with The Protocol podcast. With Coindesk founding editor of The Protocol newsletter Brad Count and tech journalists Sam Kessler and Margo Nykerk, they unravel the intricate technologies powering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, one block at a time. Just a reminder, Coindesk is a news source and does not provide investment advice. Hello and welcome to The Protocol podcast. I'm Brad Count here with my co -host Margo Nykerk, our other co -host Sam Kessler is down covering the SPF trial at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. So he will be reporting from there later in the show. And now for exciting conversations on the latest news and developments in technology behind crypto and blockchains. Let's get to our first segment here. Margo is really crypto firms scrambled to deal with war in between the sirens. Wow. What a story, Margo. I mean, really a lot of pretty serious reporting here by you tell us how did your journey on this story begin? Yeah. So I think what's maybe set up some of the events that's happened over the past few days, but Israel and Hamas, which is a terror group operating out of the Gaza Strip, went to war on Saturday. And I think that's consumed a lot of the media. And that's also affected many sides of or in different industries, including the crypto industry in Israel. And so I wrote this story about how different crypto firms are dealing with the fallout of war, because this is, I think, not something that a lot of countries experience necessarily. And so I spoke to some sources. I think the main takeaway is that there's a lot of reshuffling when it comes to employees that work for these crypto firms in Israel. They have this mandatory military draft between the ages of you go when you're 18. For women, it's two years. And for men, it's three years. And as a result, you are also called up as a reserve in times of need. And this is one of those times. So a lot of young folks who work in crypto and work crypto companies in Israel might be called up by the army to leave their jobs, to go back out of civilian life into military life. But also there's been a lot of activities and AIDS campaigns set up by the crypto industry to sort of use their resources to help Israeli civilians. And so one of the larger campaigns that came out of Israel over on Monday was this organization called Crypto Aid Israel, where people can donate their crypto to this wallet and that crypto will be used and cashed out for necessities for families and civilians who are affected by the war. I believe it was the cryptocurrencies that they accepted were Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDC and USDT. Let's talk about Israel for a second. I mean, it has this reputation as a tech hub, and now we're talking about it as kind of a crypto hub. I mean, there are quite a few companies that are based up there. Do you have a sense of how does the Israeli crypto scene fit into kind of the overall Israeli tech scene? Yeah, I think crypto scene is just like a lot of technological innovations that fit into the overall tech scene. It's known as the startup nation. I think you just said that there's a statistic that 14 % of the workforce in Israel is high tech jobs. And so there's a lot of innovation that's happening. Like Starkware, the layer two is a company that's based out of Israel. Collider Ventures is a big VC firm that invests in crypto web three Israeli companies. This is a growing field in the Israel tech scene. AI is also like a really happening place. But for the sake of Coindesk, I think we focused on the crypto scene specifically. And then there's, of course, a lot of smaller startups. I talked to a startup called Addressable, which is a bunch of professionals that have cyber security experience and big data experience. And they use those techniques that they picked up either in previous jobs or in the military to decipher or help web three marketers know their audiences despite like pseudonymity and anonymity. So there's a lot of people who have used sort of military and their civilian background to join the crypto space and create these crypto innovations. And Margot, reading your story, there was a line in there that talked about how there were not severe business disruptions that were reported in terms of, say, Internet outages or electricity outages. But obviously, people in the crypto industry in Israel just dealing with a lot personally. Right. What are some of those challenges that that you heard about that people experienced? Yeah. So I think a lot of my sources have told me that on the one hand, Israel is sort of used to war and conflicts that, you know, a lot of these homes already have bomb shelters, safe shelters where if rockets are and the alarm sirens warning citizens to take cover, that they can go into these shelters that are built into their homes. But I think what makes this round different is just like the severity of of the fighting. All my sources were telling me they all either know someone who has been killed or has been kidnapped or is missing. And so a lot of the sources then have found ways to sort of support one another. On the one hand, they're moving to remote work so that they can accommodate those that might need to serve or want to volunteer, donate blood, help provide meals for soldiers on the front line and families that, you know, have lost everything. On the other hand, there was also firms that said that working is sort of an escape for them from this harsh reality and helps them take their mind off of things. So I think the industry right now in Israel is really suffering mentally and they're all giving each other space to sort of uplift each other and understanding that you might need to accommodate that for some people. You do need to lean into those feelings. And for some people, you need to continue on life as is. That means working. Then that's what they have to do. Margo, just staying here with this story for a second, but shifting a little bit. There have been reports that Hamas raised money in crypto and that was how they were funding some of their activities. And there was a report that the authorities have moved to try to shut down some of those wallets. What's the latest on that? Yeah, so this isn't particular. I mean, this is news, but it's not particularly new. A lot of these terrorist organizations, Hamas, Hezbollah, they have turned to crypto in the past to raise funds and to help them on with their attacks. I think the report that we were referring to is the Quindesk article where Israeli authorities have shut down wallets and accounts on Binance that may have used crypto to fund their accounts. I think the authorities, I can't speak specifically, but I think the authorities are definitely taking a harder look at this also because crypto has now been along for longer. So there's a lot of intelligence and expertise that have now gone into understanding how these networks use crypto to funnel illicit funds. So that's still a developing story and I'm sure we'll be hearing more about that soon. Well, that's a really fascinating story, Margo, that you've been following and thank you for reporting on that. And let's just switch to our next story we're discussing here during this segment. This is the publication of BitVM. And, you know, it sounds pretty arcane, but it is apparently a play on Ethereum virtual machine EVM, you know, which is sort of the framework that all the Ethereum blockchains, a lot of the Ethereum compatible blockchains use. But this is Bitcoin we're talking about here. And there was one of the core contributors to Zero Sync, which is working on various ways of using zero knowledge proofs on Bitcoin blockchain, published this research paper. And in that paper, he essentially outlined the design or the blueprint or the plan for BitVM.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from War SHOCKS Global System! (What This Means For Bitcoin)
"Good morning, everybody. It is Monday, October 9th. It's 10 .32am. Thanks for joining everybody. Yeah, a lot of crazy news going on right now. A lot of happening all across the globe. Looks like some geopolitical tensions are ratcheting up. What's it going to mean for oil, energy, Bitcoin? Also, US debt spiraling. So we've got some Cardano, SPF stuff. Charles Hoskinson speaking out about SPF. What does he have to say? Is he championing him? Spoiler, probably not. Also, we've got Tim on the charts today, correct? Yeah, they're doing those charts again. And we're back to having Drew. Drew, how are you doing back there? Just absolutely fantastic, DC. Thanks for asking there. All right, you've got the flannel on. You're looking good. Did you chop any wood this weekend? I did. I did. My son stole my shovel and had an accent on it, though, and he did most of the work himself. A lot of digging, a lot of building, having fun. Now, that child is under the age of seven, I think, right? Five years old. Okay, young start. That's right. And you got to get them young, you know, child labor camps, you know, I mean, America. I just I always tell him to do dangerous things carefully. That's the best I can do for him. So yeah, yeah, that's the best way to learn. All right, folks, make sure you hit that like button. Let's just get right into the show, folks. There's a lot to cover. So we're going to go and start with the crypto prices. Where are things headed? It looks like Bitcoin is down slightly. I just hit refresh 20 seconds ago. Let me hit it one more time. 27, 521. All right, 27, 521 still. All right, so Bitcoin is down one and a half percent. Ethereum is down 2 .2%. The markets are not looking too great today, folks. XRP is down almost 4%. We have Solana down over 4%. Cardano down 2 % here. Polygon down four and a half percent. Not showing much time strengths here. Bitcoin cash down 5%. Really, though, what is surprising to me, look at the weekly here, look at the seven -day. Are you seeing anything in the green? Nothing is really looking positive. The markets are on some downward pressure right now, for sure. All right, let's look at the top gainers, though. There's got to be something out of 100 coins. There's like five of them or something that's going up, right? Oh, Jesus, two, two, two coins. I didn't know it was going to be that bad, folks. All right, we have BYDX is up 1 .7 and then Tether Gold. So Gold, we are going talking about what's happening in Israel, Palestine, Hamas, the Gaza Strip, and what that might happen to some of these assets like gold, oil, some of these things. So we're going to cover that in a little bit. But I have a feeling this top loser is going to be pretty bloody. There's going to be a bloodbath here. I didn't even bring up DZ's coins. I didn't want to bring up DZ's coins, you know, but I was leaving the weekend just feeling new vibes, and I should have realized number one loser today is going to be one of my coins. It is Robit. Robit has pared back all the gains for the week. Essentially, here is now down 10 % for the day, 10 % for the week. Sui's down 6%, Gala's down 5%, Bitcoin, SV and Bitcoin cash down above 5%. Here, Chili's down as well. And hey, why not? Why not? Let's just knock Apecoin back down to a dollar. Let's hit a dollar, folks. Algorand's down as well. Apto's down. ICP. But it could be coins that I don't want to put a whole lot of money in, but I wouldn't mind putting a little money into Apto's. I wouldn't mind putting a little money into, I need to get more Filecoin. I wouldn't mind putting a little money into ICP. So, some of these coins, you know, being down 5 % for the week, 25 % for ThorChain right there. Yeah, it's pretty rough. Maybe there's a chance to get some coins here. Well, ThorChain had a good week last week, of course, DZ, and that's pretty, it's pretty common when you have a really good week to then alternate unless there's news, of course, last week, and then the fear can continue to come out about ThorChain. Is it something to invest in long term? Yeah, let you guys decide. Well, I'll tell you what is surprising on the weekly here. We look, Trust Wallet is the number one gainer for the week, followed by TKX, and then we have Monero. Monero is in the top four for the weekly gainers here. So, Monero, just one of those tried and steady, really loves that $150 range, just kind of been hanging around there. So, you see here, right here is $150, goes below it, then goes above it, then goes below it, then goes above it, then goes below it, then goes above it, then goes below it, and now we're above it. What's the next thing that's going to happen? Probably going to drop back down $150, but really, really likes that $150 range for some reason there. All right, well, let's get right into the top story here.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from THE PROTOCOL: Ethereum's Overcrowding & Optimistic Fault Proofs Unveiled
"This episode of The Protocol is sponsored by The Algorand Foundation. Dive deep into the blockchain realm with The Protocol podcast. With Coindesk founding editor of The Protocol newsletter, Rad Count, and tech journalists Sam Kessler and Margo Nykerk, they unravel the intricate technologies powering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, one block at a time. Just a reminder, Coindesk is a news source and does not provide investment advice. Hello and welcome to The Protocol podcast. I'm Brad Count here and I'm so excited to start this podcast. I will normally have both of co -hosts, Coindesk tech journalists, Sam Kessler and Margo Nykerk joining. However, due to the SBF trial happening this week, Sam is off reporting down at the courthouse in Manhattan, but hopefully he will be able to join us soon for some exciting conversations on the latest news and developments in technology behind crypto and blockchains. And I'm here with Margo Nykerk and we're going to start off today talking about one of the hot stories that Margo has been following, which is optimism finally delivering proofs fault and why this arcane thing became such a flashpoint in the blockchain wars. Margo, tell us, what is this story? Yeah, well, it's good to be here on our first episode, just by the way. Yeah, this was a big story this week and it's not yet delivered. It's only on testnet, but let's, let's maybe just like get into this a little bit about like why this is all important. For those who don't know, fault proofs are basically at the core of optimistic rollup technology. The tech of that behind that is used to prove that certain data from the rollup can or cannot be trusted. And so basically like these proofs, you transact on an optimistic rollup, the proofs are submitted to Ethereum. And if someone thinks that the data on that is wrong or tampered with, they can issue a challenge to basically show that there's something not right here. So without fault proofs, you just have to assume that all that data is like good to go. And optimism has not implemented fault proofs. Back in 2021, when they launched, they had it briefly on mainnet, but they took it, they decided to go down a different path and take that sort of out of the picture. And so the people behind optimism got a lot of heat for not implementing this secure, like this really important security check. Some have compared this sort of to driving a car without airbags. And so now the optimism people have been quietly working on implementing fault proofs and bringing it to its OP stack. They announced earlier this week that it's now on testnet, so it is coming to the OP stack, but it's not yet live. So this is an exciting sort of development that will probably keep following over the next few months. You know, that analogy of the car, the fast car without the airbags, you know, I mean, that is, there's, this has started to percolate, you know, on Twitter and other places, it seemed like some of their competitors were starting to take pod shots at them, almost like it was an embarrassment. You know, I mean, I'm curious, do you think they accelerated this just because it was kind of embarrassing that they're an optimistic roll -up without this key part of an optimistic roll -up or, or was it really, you know, was it really an unsafe situation? Yeah, I don't know if embarrassment is like what the, well, the optimism folks probably wouldn't admit that it's an embarrassment, right? Like, no, no company is going to come out there and say like, yeah, this is an, this is an embarrassing thing we forgot to do, you know? So, but like Stephen at Stephen Goldfeder, I should know how to pronounce his last name, but Stephen, Stephen from Arboretum, he's definitely in the past tweeted out some things about not having those checks in place. And Arboretum is the main competitor to optimism. They also, so they call them fraud proofs. You can sort of use it interchangeably, but, but they also have like a limited amount of fraud proofs going around in their ecosystem. So it's not like everything's not perfect. I'd say that the different teams probably have different takes on this. Like the reason why optimism did not come out with fault proofs immediately is because they believe they wanted to pursue this, what they call like stage two decentralization and get to this point of certain governance procedures to be in place. Because if you do have fault proofs without the right governance, like you can override that. And so that's sort of their argument behind it. It's interesting if going back to this analogy of the airbags, there was a time where cars did not have airbags. And I guess maybe the question is, where are we in the state? What does this say about the state of blockchain development today? Is it just the situation where we're, these teams are coming out with these protocols and they're not fully finished, but they're live, they're sort of experimental systems, or is it that they are actually pretty advanced and now they're sort of tucking in some additional features? I mean, that's a really good question. I think it really depends on like the project itself. You know, this is specifically for the OP stack and that's gotten also a lot of press recently because a lot of companies are using that stack to come out with their own layer two is probably the biggest one coming to mind is I don't want to speak for the optimism folks, but from what I've done from my reporting, they've realized that as there's more and more interest, there's this security feature that needs to be shipped. And you know, there's about $3 billion. I read on a tweet that there's about $3 billion in the bridges of base and optimism. And so without the security feature, the more people that transact on base, the more risky it is without these fault proofs. Yeah, I think maybe it is because there is more and more development taking place on these layer twos, and there are more and more users that are making use of these layer twos that there needs to be these kinds of security mechanisms in place. Yeah, I think that's really, really, really well said, Margo. I mean, just to put this out there, I spoke with Jesse Pollock, who is the head of base, working for Brian Armstrong at Coinbase running their blockchain.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Yeah, that thing just turns on without me trying. I think I'll have a different answer next year, to be honest. I would say I'm still relatively in it, but I would say first, I think a lot about just collective honesty and owning some of the realities that we face and truth as an industry, I think recognizing the failures and own up to what needs to evolve would be a really powerful statement as a collective. Secondly, thinking a lot about code switching and being more comfortable code switching and really building bridges, because I think language often determines culture and really can help control culture. And so I think the language that we use, we just have to be a lot more thoughtful about how we are defining how we are enabling comprehension and enabling education. And so code switching, I think, is incredibly important. And of course, mass market use cases that really demonstrate the true benefit. I think we need a lot more of those so that people really can grasp what this is. I think all of these things are in the intermediate. But in terms of the long term, I think Sam and I have talked about this, the ultimate win for crypto is when this whole thing is invisible to users, like they don't know the thing that they're interacting with, just like when you're Venmo and you don't know all the systems that go underneath. I think that would be when we know that we've overcome that giant hump and really overcome our branding problem is when it's completely invisible and it's facilitating what people need to do to get to the things that they need. It's like your voice, Steve, like, right? I have no idea how this works, but I know that it works and it's amazing and I love it. Yes, that's what consumers expect nowadays. Like, you cannot go less than that. That's exactly right. I would say finally, I think this is more of like a human take, but in terms of diverse voices, kind of goes back to a little bit my Stacey story. But people like Avery, people I've met so many incredible women now in this space, but I just feel like we need a lot more, especially from the global south, especially from the developing markets. I still feel like what's so loud right now is the Western majority, and we just need more under represented voices to show, tell, build, develop, and we need to be listening to them because right now, yeah, the loudest voices in the end are kind of more focused on the things that I don't think we should be focusing on as industry. Awesome. Just you've been such an incredible guest. Last question. And just as you sort of look into your crystal ball of the future, what are you excited about both at Algorand Foundation and at Web3 in general, if you think about like the next one, three, five year horizon? I am excited. I think there are moments I'll be like very vulnerable and realize there are moments where I don't feel excited and I feel very overwhelmed. But on the days that are maybe days like this one, I'm just so encouraged by the number of builders that are building, collaborating, and something meaningful is actually coming from it, something that is actually moving the needle for people who need it the most. And so I feel like in so many ways industry is like, I think we're in like our awkward middle school years right now. We don't really know who we are. We don't know like how to talk about ourselves. I think in some ways we have an identity crisis and I think we're at the cusp of like maturing and really like this is what we're here for and this is like the good that we can do. And so I feel like as we kind of as people put their heads down, build meaningful solutions, I think yeah, the future is bright is my hope. And I still believe in my heart of hearts. Blockchain is revolutionary. We're going to look back and laugh at the cartoon animals and really see that, you know, we left the world a better place. So on that note, at Algorand, I just think regardless if you're a developer or not, I think get involved, get building. I just want to invite, we have some really like incredible announcements that were slightly just teased at token 2049. But there are some really like meaningful ones. I want to plug our hackathon. We just launched a buildable, again, I love the play on words, hackathon to invite all devs to come build, come pitch, get access to VCs, get access to mentors, as well as we've just announced as well that if you're a Python developer, AlgoKit 2.0 is coming in Q4 in a big way. And we're very excited about the different kinds of languages that are going to drive more accessibility in general in the space that is really well needed. Then finally, if you need a really slick, incredible DX secure wallet, we have para, we have some incredible new ecosystem features that are going to be coming in in the next few months. So I would just say I would love to connect with folks who are here and are excited about what's happening. You can follow me on my handle or DM me. Would love to have a chat. All right, Jess. So here's my free prong. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Number one, thank you for sharing your insights, punches and hugs. We're going to know and use this framework moving forward. Number two, we won't reveal the location you're at, but it is beautiful. And I wish I was outside in that location right now. And three, your neckwear game and jewelry game is on point today, as people will see in the videos. So thank you for also dressing for us. Clearly, I did not because I'm about to go to work out. So thank you for spending time with us. You really appreciate it. And this is fantastic. We didn't even think that about your quarters up until you just said it, Sam. I know we don't talk about this Avery. We look great. And thank you guys both. This is so, so great. Thank you, Jess. So fun. So amazing to hear your stories. We're going to have to talk more about your journey abroad and all the amazing things that you're doing in India later. So we'll catch up on that separately. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you both.Avery, thank you for dropping all of your India knowledge in that pod. I keep thinking how little I know about the rest of the world, despite having traveled to a few places. But it sounds like what Algo is doing and what you guys know much more than I is just like the robust opportunities that exist in the world around us. Yeah, well, I know you're going to Portugal soon, so I'm looking forward to hearing about your trip. I'm not sure that's the same. Hey, cultural immersion. All angles, Sam. There you go. But Jess was great. Yeah. What do you think? Jess is amazing. It was great to hear her perspective. She's been at some of the best companies in the world, the best marketing organizations. And I loved her commentary around moving from being product centric to more emotionally driven. Yeah, I also think she highlights and, you know, granted, she was at three companies that all are product obsessed with Metta, with Nike and with Apple. And I do think it's something that founders in Web three need to take away, because I honestly don't think there are very many product obsessed founders just to be like real. I think there's a lot of hype obsessed founders. There's a lot of price obsessed founders. There's a lot of like vision obsessed founders. But those who are actually building tried and true product that may move the needle forward for us. I think they take their eye off the wall too much. That's why I think you need people like just coming to the industry who can help be guides and mentors and advisors. And you can say, OK, I get that people are excited, but now what are you going to do to make this thing realize the vision you've sold? Yeah, agreed. And I also, you know, we always call that just consumer obsession, and that I think is a through line of everything that you talked about. Yeah, no, absolutely. All right, Avery, it's been an amazing time. Great to see you. I hope you have an amazing week. Always great to see you, Sam. I hope you have a wonderful week as well. Gen Z community, thank you for tuning in. Tell us how amazing you think Joss was in the comments. We should also ask our community who's built on Algorand. Get to know her and her team are really, really interesting group of folks. And we're very impressed with what they're doing. So we will catch you all next week, Gen Z.
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"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"It's corporate training, and it's a very clear way to think. I love that anecdote around Hyderabad. You know, for our community, most folks don't know that actually Hyderabad, they refer to it as cyber bad. It is like the tech hub of India in a lot of ways. I didn't know this until I went there for the first time in 2014, and I realized there's tens of thousands of Googlers when I went into the office and getting to know like various tech folks there. It is a thriving digital ecosystem and no surprise that they're embracing blockchain. They're finding ways to integrate this into their tech ecosystem as well. That's awesome that you've been there, by the way. I also think like you guys are focused on India. Some other folks are really focused on Africa. I was speaking to a lot of people in the last week who just had come back from Korea Blockchain Week and token 2049. And everyone unanimously says the energy in all of those places is so exciting compared to what we're dealing with in the U.S., in Canada, some parts of Europe where it feels a little like we're feeling a little beaten down. And that's clearly one, just the regulatory environment. But two, I think that places where this technology can be transformational get excited because we're looking at the transformation opportunity. They're not looking at the like, oh, we're all going to get rich, which is part of the branding problem that crypto has. And so I guess my question for you, Jess, is you are a marketer at heart. Like crypto, at least in Western countries, has a branding problem at the moment. I think we're known a little too much for get rich quick and for scams and for broken promises. As a marketer who's marketed technology, product, kind of emotionality. What do you think your suggestions are for kind of getting the world to see crypto differently? Yeah, I have a few. A three pronged strategy.
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"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Just when I think of your career, right, you are in consumer product, innovation, technology. At WhatsApp, your role was really focused on privacy. Also at the enterprise level, it feels like when you put all those together, it was predetermined that crypto would be a place that you would feel comfortable because all of those things are part of what we do here. Right. And so I'm just wondering, kind of prior to taking your role, what were you thinking about blockchain? Why was it interesting to you to even have the first conversation? You know, were you playing in this space or not playing in the space? I think there's a lot of tension between Web 2 and Web 3. So I was wondering how blockchain crypto got on your radar. Yeah, it's a really great point. I would say for me personally, it was really about I'm a very relational leader, I think, and also a lot of my roles really have been through just really meaningful relationships. I followed Web 3 mainly through the incredible friendships that I had of people who were experts deep in the field, like years and years in the field and following their journeys. And I'll be honest, while following their journeys in the ups and downs, I was always like, you know what, three more years later, I'll come in. That's kind of how I thought about it. And that was earlier last year. I was thinking, you know what, I'm going to do this like two roles from now, like I'm going to dive in about two roles from now. And then I had the opportunity to meet Stacy Worden, who's our current CEO at Algrand Foundation. And I would say all my friends at that point had all the men in the crypto space. And she was the first woman I met. And she's not your ordinary woman. She's incredible. An incredible leader, a thought leader, Milken Institute, JP Morgan, and also just a champion also for women leaders at large. And so meeting her, I just really felt like there was a click. She met me and she was like, why don't you join the team pretty immediately, actually, when we met. And I think we just had a lot of shared conviction, shared value, shared perspective of where and how blockchain should be used and therefore also the story should be told. And from there, yeah, I decided, you know, this is the right moment for me to come in. How's it been so far? You've been there for nine months. You've been the CMO of Algrand Foundation for that time. How is it working at a sort of decentralized company? Is it a fully decentralized company? Maybe share a little bit with Jen to see what Algrand is all about. I also want to share about the space itself, because there's been a lot of just like learnings and differences that I've just like also kind of experienced. I think first there's a lot of brands that are very personality driven, very hype focused. And I think it can sometimes feel a little bit transient and it's sometimes hard for me to keep up. I would say specifically at Algrand, I think where I've really enjoyed is this desire and I think strangely a collective desire to really build a lasting brand. I've really appreciated that because I think this idea of like longevity, intergenerational mindset of purpose that is like greater. I think Twitter is important, but being greater than just the everyday potential echo chamber of what that could be. I think it's been in terms of decentralization. I cannot tell you how one, how much teams everywhere around the world, how incredible that has been. It's actually surprising to me that there's not really a central hub ever feeling. It's just like this idea of like peer to peer is like very real. I think my past structures where I come from a place of very strong structure versus culture. And I think I am grateful to find that structure does not dominate the conversation. And then also decisions being made are a lot more very, very much shared. So that's been kind of a learning experience and also the deep dive into this community deciding and moving us along. And the idea that like this brand isn't static, but actually it's the brand that is our community. The community is the brand that has been a learning for me. I definitely feel like even though I come from a lot of brands that say that we care so much about community, it's true to a certain extent. But I also feel like I haven't experienced it truly where I think before a lot of even though we said the brand is a community is still very one directional. But here every single day, I need to spend the time and energy and hours really thinking about where they're directionally headed, having them connect more with one another to make just conscious recommendations and thoughts and actually listening on a day to day basis is something quite, I would say, like challenging, but also refreshing for me as a leader. And so in that sense, I have really enjoyed. There's some incredible people in this community and also something community at large in this industry. And I feel like there's a lot of ways for us to evolve and not be that one directional kind of just single ad campaign that I'm kind of used to. Jess, I think that people sometimes read too much of the headlines around how much is this cartoon JPEG? How much did someone make because they invested early in this token? I think that we sometimes forget part of what blockchain's role as an innovation is about reimagining payments and speed of payments and disrupting fees. That it's about the idea of self-sovereign identities and the ability to own your own assets on all your platforms. The things that actually truly make a difference in a world where we are being monetized all day long by the platforms that you used to work for, that I worked for in the past. So, yeah, how do you see the opportunity of blockchain to truly solve some of these big problems that were created in the world we all, the three of us, all grew up working in? I'll say that this particular question is such a big passion point of mine because actually, I guess I'm sharing it here, but so much of the brand strategy of where I feel like Algorand needs to go and really represents actually is this idea of real world solutions at scale that we're solving real problems that are deeply felt by people. And so for me, and I again think a lot about functional and emotional, the technical stuff I think is incredible learning about it and what problems that it solves around providence, disintermediation, getting rid of the middleman and also identity. But for me, the emotional story around just agency and true control, because again, as a marketer from those other larger places, a lot of the marketing was, our core insight was around control and a lot of the selling points that we gave was like have control over your data. But it wasn't true to a certain extent while we were saying that, because ultimately Web2 is still dominated by gatekeepers in many ways. And these companies are giving you a shared rented economy of your data and and it's not really true ultimate ownership and control. And so I think the idea of agency is incredibly important. I think being someone who has come from more of the consumer side, I love the idea that now you can actually own and decide what you have to access, things like personal tickets, access to new markets and own digital copies of the book, because Amazon currently just gives you a sense of that control through Kindle, but it's not really yours. And also for me personally, I think these examples get a lot more profound when you're thinking about developing markets as someone who's lived abroad and lived among just people who really are affected by government policies and just economy, current economics, and a lot is out of their control. And again, why I feel like this idea of control is super important. And so I think about places like LATAM, India, where specifically at Algorand we're seeing a ton of adoption, actually probably way more adoption than a lot of the Western markets in the Middle East as well. And I think for me, two of my favorite projects that exist at Algorand, one is this group called Hasab Pay. They are a platform that's built on Algorand, but what they do is they issue digital fiat deposits and these digital payments normally come in from international organizations like UNICEF or WFP, but it can get very frozen or paralyzed and the assets end up not being able to go to these Afghani women and refugees. And so they built this to facilitate like these digital payments. And we're seeing these women, I'm hearing these stories on the ground of these women who are able to buy and sell goods. And I really do hope to meet them one day, actually, and be on the ground, I will do that next year, to meet them on the ground and see them actually like have a completely different economy and experience and livelihood compared to what they had before. And the second one is this incredible group called Agro Token, and they enable farmers to tokenize greens and they're based out of LATAM. They transform them into digital assets so they can trade, exchange for supplies. This is kind of a similar concept, but since they've launched this platform, they've scaled from a thousand tons of soy to two hundred and fifty thousand in just a few months. Like two hundred fifty thousand tons of soy. And this is all across Argentina, Brazil and a few other of those markets. And so it's secure, frictionless. It allows these farmers to actually have a lot more efficient and reliable process. And so stories like that is where I'm like, OK, this is starting to make more sense to a former consumer marketer to really hear the stories of like real human impact on the ground. You just said a lot of amazing things all at once, Jess, but I want to sort of dive a little bit deeper into what you're sharing about algorithms growth outside of the US. So I think most of our listeners are American. Everything they're hearing is bear market down, slowing growth. And I do think that's true in the US and I think outside of the US that couldn't be further than the truth because we see explosive growth happening in APAC, in LATAM, in other markets where this technology is not facing the same level of regulatory concerns and secondarily solving like real world day to day problems for more people who might have currency instability in their market or various things that provide a real immediate use case for crypto and for blockchain. Can you talk a little bit more about Algorand's strategy as it relates to sort of global versus domestic in the US? Yes, I mean, I also just want to say as well, like specifically for what you think about the India market, I think I just saw some data points come out saying that India is the fastest mass adoption happening right now in the world, which is incredible knowing some of the challenges that they face. It's incredible knowing the challenges, but at the same time, India is the most populated country, right? And I have a very deep sweet spot for the Indian culture, as some of you all might have guessed from my last name. It's surprising, but it's not surprising. Like if you go there, you're like, oh, wow, like the vast majority of these people are unbanked. A lot of them are kind of coming online all at once in their population is just so massive. There's like thirty six cities in India that have populations of multiple millions of people and you've never even heard of them. So like just a few of these sort of cities and markets and pockets picking it up can like really be transformational from an adoption perspective. I fully agree. There's like some crazy stats, which I will quote the source because, you know, it is what it is. But 56 percent of India businesses are moving towards blockchain or at least looking into it. The India Web market is expected to reach again. These are forecast numbers, but like one billion by twenty thirty two. There is just a lot going on in these developing markets. And for us specifically, I would say I think about it in a three pronged kind of approach. One, we are doubling, doubling down. I've said this to other people, but this is a year of the Devs in India in terms of a developer market and also those who are interested in what they were just seeing so many come through and be hyper interested in learning and comprehension and base education. And education is in our grand DNA in terms of our bread and butter where we're founded from MIT. And so being able to bring that level of education and partnership is incredibly important to us up leveling. And then deep government and partnership and enterprise connections. We were one of the first to partner with they have a incredible innovation hub on the ground in India based out of Hyderabad. Shout out Andhra Pradesh. That's right. Actually, I think it's just called Andhra now. This state recently changed names, Andhra. Yes. Yes. For Andhra. But in the city of Hyderabad, there is all the big companies are there. I mean, you name it, Google, Microsoft, et cetera. But we were so excited to be a part of really establishing blockchain innovation in this space when the government's looking at it and had a lot of officials present as well and kind of partnership. And then, of course, we have a lot of incredible advisors that are very well known in the web to technical space that brought web to technicality into India and are continuing to think about Web3 and what that could mean for India as an economy. So that kind of move is really incredibly important to us. And then finally, real world impact. We actually this is a side plug. We have an incredible summit coming up called the Global Impact Summit that was held in India. We have hundreds of developers as well as policymakers and India enterprises coming in and speaking meeting and also having some incredible projects kind of being built that really solve real world problems that India faces so they can really see and feel the difference that blockchain can make. And we've already made some really significant inroads, especially for women. And that's something I am just so deeply passionate about. We're partnered with SEVA, which is an incredible organization in India. And yeah, just really seeing how we can, again, lift all boats there. So I think that's kind of a three pronged strategy of how we've been thinking about markets like that. There's a lot of three prongs, and I feel like that structure comes through in the way that you communicate. There's a lot of three pronged approaches, which I love.
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"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"I was not part of the union and I didn't want to be a scab. Hilarious. So, Jess, you know, besides your experience at these massive companies, you also had experience sort of advising and working with a number of smaller companies, a number of startups. For the founder of today, what do you think that they can learn from some of these big brands? Is it that consumer obsession? Is it something else? Yeah, it's a really great point. I feel like the three above are true, but there's a few, especially for a lot of the small companies I advise that have really rung true. I would say a few. One is making sure that you're actually meeting a real world need. Like product market fit is a real thing. I don't know. I can't tell you how many founders and entrepreneurs I've seen that just develop a product without really, really caring deeply about what problem is solving. And there's a lot of factors to that. I think tied to that is like feedback loops, really building in, again, that listening on the ground to your actual real audience that you're trying to reach. Dogfooding is a very real thing that is true in big companies. We incentivized engineers and not just engineers to dog food all of our products, every feature. Can you define dog food for the audience? Oh, yes. Yeah, it's not eating food of dogs. It is actually really listening and just beta testing products to ensure and get out all the kinks and also learn and iterate on the product to make sure it's actually serving a real problem, serving the real need. So dog food is something I highly, highly recommend, even if you're not technical, to really try and test and use every possible product that is adjacent to yours as well. And then I think thirdly, my mentor, one of my incredible mentors in my one of my previous roles always asked me this question, how are we zigging when others are zagging? And for me, I really love that because it's all about how can we have an outsized voice and you can actually get a lot more brand ROI when, you know, you're not just being vanilla and looking like everyone else in the market and really choosing to be fierce or bold or in so many ways different. I think a lot about Duolingo's social handle. I think it was founded by an intern, but the kind of fandom they've driven through that handle with just like pure tone of voice for that social handle is a great example of how to use it while others zag. I think finally I talked already about insights, but this idea of punching and hugging, also for my mentor, how are you punching your target audience in terms of something really cut through, something that really hits, like think functional. But then how are you also hugging them with like emotional storytelling? How are you hugging them, making them feel cared for? The punch and the hug is a really great way to kind of test out the great framework. Everyone can learn from the punch and the hug. Yes, that's basically mine and Avery's whole relationship, frankly.
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"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"All right. We want to welcome Jess Shin, CMO of the Algorand Foundation to Gen-C. I don't know. She'll give me the credit, but I want to take credit for being one of Jess's first Web3 friends we met on some cold night in some month in January or whatever in New York years ago. And she was asking about this new technology and we had a long conversation, which was amazing. And we've been friends ever since. So, Jess, first of all, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. And yes, Sam, you can get the award of being one of my first friends in Web3. You have had quite a career, you know, just as we think of your positioning here at Gen-C. Yes, you are the CMO at Algorand Foundation. We'll get into what that is a little bit later. But the show really focuses on kind of like how Web2 brands primarily are looking at the Web3 world. And I thought it would be great to have you on because you have played amazing roles at some of the most storied Web2 and traditional businesses there are. So I'm not going to spoil it, but I would love for you to give our audience a little bit of your career arc and how you got to then make a decision to come into Web3. Yeah, I'm really excited to kind of share a bit. To frame it, I would say overall, my ethos and my passion has always been about finding and building connection points between audiences and brands and really finding the white spaces there. I started out in big tech Apple. I was an expat there really looking at retail expansion and online expansion in Asia, stayed in Shanghai for many years. It was an incredible experience. And when I think about that, it really was more of a technical connection points between digital and physical was really what I was focused on. And I think from there, I really wanted to move from the technical side to the emotional, especially the emotional storytelling side. So I had the privilege of joining Nike. I'm a huge athlete. I play basketball. I'm a runner. And for me, like my dream brand has always been to work there. And so I had an incredible opportunity to join the global marketing consumer marketing team and really help them think about digital experiences, help run the World Cup campaign in 2018, worked with the likes of Neymar and Bape and Ronaldo, thinking about access points around storytelling. And again, that emotional piece is really where I learned the importance of emotional appeal and insights. And it was honestly an incredible time. And more recently, I was at Metta right at the cusp of joining WhatsApp. So we had two point five billion users, but we hadn't really built the brand. And so really thinking about both the functional and emotional of connecting these consumers who loved the technical aspects, but didn't really understand what this could mean for their lives and this idea of deep connections that lead to progress and really be able to tell that story of just the diverse, incredible users around the world. So that really was, I would say, like that next stepping stone of really understanding that my ethos and really leaning into that passion. And for Web3, I just feel like it's so interesting because it's always about increasing those touch points between audiences and brands. I think it's been definitely an adventure. We'll talk more about it, but I think it's really about finding new ways to connect people with each other and then connect people with brands and creating more touch points. I'm really excited. It's definitely been a journey, but it's been a really good one so far. Sounds like an amazing journey. And before we dive fully into crypto and Web3 and all that fun stuff between Apple, Nike and Metta, what do you see as sort of common traits of what it means to be a transformational brand? You have experience at all these amazing places. What's like the secret success that you've seen happen across those three giants? I have three, and I first have to start with this one because it is truly the bread of butter across these three brands. I think first is obsession with products. I cannot tell you the insane amount of research dollars and customer insights that go into inform like world class engineers and really thinking about how to not build this product in a vacuum and the design processes that I've seen across all three companies and also at Algorand. I have a really interesting anecdote. When I was working at Nike, I got to work really closely with a lot of the product teams and they were obsessed with researching. We were researching for a sneaker for Asia, a certain place in Asia. Actually, I won't go into too much detail there. But when we think about how granular they would study those consumer needs, it was insane. They would consider the concrete mix of the pavement, the athlete, like shape, form, air quality, all the things to really just even think about like the size of the foam in the shoe and just the amount of time that we would spend with athletes and around us in the office. And the obsession of informing that product with consumer insights was incredible. And I would say secondly, just really around their focus, that consistency and messaging. I feel like blockchain has a bit to learn from this. I think sometimes we try to be all things to all people, but I think there's something really to be said about like consumers. They see so many things. They won't remember unless you just like pound them over and over and over again with like a singular point, a singular message. And finally, I just think this idea of like things being built on human insights and human truths is something that I felt like I really, really came to realize and learn at Nike. For the World Cup in 2018, one of the big insights that we realized is we kept talking to both like senior and incredible athletes all the way to like just your everyday football player. One thing that we realized is, you know, good athletes, they listen to their coach, but great athletes, they listen to themselves. And that really became the ethos of an incredible campaign and everything that we lived, breathed and told that story came from that insight.
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"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Yeah, exactly. And using those then as a token of membership into the club. What I don't like is it's still one of those things like in the future, you may be able to do X, Y and Z. So there isn't really anything that they're promising other than this token. But I did sort of like that we're still seeing a pretty steady stream of these brands coming in. And in the article I read, which we'll put in the show notes from Digiday, the thing that I thought was really interesting was it said about five years ago, Ducati really started to look at how to curate its own community better. And they're using this as one of those pillars, which is the exact right way to think of NFTs and the power of this or an immersive world or any of this stuff. You get to go direct to your community. Any thoughts on motorcycles? One, I haven't thought about Ducati in a few years. I had a boyfriend in college who had a Ducati. So shout out to him. That was my first experience with motorcycles. I am personally terrified of them. But I think that this collection is a really bold move by the brand. Accessible price point. One hundred dollars for a luxury brand. They do have a really rabid community of fans, people who are super into it, big collector culture. So I think it makes sense. The timing is certainly unusual just given like where market perception is around NFTs right now. But I wish them the best on this drop. It'll be interesting to see how long this goes on for if they need to shift to an open edition or something like that. I still see so many brands like kind of following this formula from like two years ago that is it makes it hard to win. And whenever like we're advising our partners, we're like, how can we make this a win no matter what? Right. Like this is a good idea. You've got some great history. We're going to have some people who are really into it. But the pressure of a certain amount that you're publicly sharing is just not something that we do in any other form of selling items. So I'm curious when that will sort of get like rebooted because I feel like scarcity was such a selling point in the past couple of years. And I think that that's shifting to more of something that might be a little bit more behind the scenes if I was planning a mint launching in fall of 2023. Let me ask you just one question, because I think you are the exact person who can answer this, which is when I look at something like this, there is a part of me that thinks maybe they began this in 2021. They definitely did. I didn't work with them, but I just feel like they must have. Right. And I think that's part of it is that so many large corporations and entities and brands work so slow that they actually don't let themselves take advantage of current trend when current trend is happening. And then it seems like an afterthought. And I do wonder if this is more about the strategic opportunities for brands themselves to pivot quicker and to be more nimble as an organization than it is about whether this is the right time. Yeah. You know, I think that it's funny. I was just on a call with a client and we're sort of talking about something that we just decided to put on hold because timing is everything with all this stuff, right? Sometimes that means you need to move fast, hit a deadline, sometimes like, you know, let's sort of plan the right window. I think that this is probably something that they've been looking at for years. I think the idea and the rationale is solid and they've got a really cool creative collection and it's probably something they're like, OK, now we have to push ahead and do it. I think for some brands, though, you also have to kind of avoid that sunk cost fallacy. It's like, hey, we've put all this time into it and it's like, OK, great. Sometimes that means you have to put it on the shelf. When I was at Google, we used to do whole campaigns, like fully produced that were amazing. They're like, yeah, this just isn't good. This isn't the time. This isn't the right minute for it. And let's put it on the shelf. And sometimes we'd revive them. It's actually funny because during covid, we started dusting off a lot of things that had been on that shelf for a while. Actually, we did the shoot that we didn't think was that amazing. But now it makes sense because it was shot at a home or whatever. Now we have content. Yeah, exactly. And now we've got this content that we can reuse in this new way. So I think it's an astute observation. And then, Sam, I've also got to get your take on speaking of the tides turning. Rolling Stone recently published a piece that said only five percent of NFTs have value. What do you make of that? Well, I loved how they framed it that basically all of your NFTs are worthless. It was sort of the title of the article, which then, of course, within the NFT community went very viral because people are then putting up two hundred thousand dollar NFTs. And I say, oh, I guess it's worthless right now. It was really interesting to me to see this for two reasons. One, I mean, look, media wants some clickbait and this is a very clickbait article. But Rolling Stone, we all have memories. Not that long ago, Rolling Stone had the board apes on its cover, had had its own NFT drop. We're kind of proclaiming this new era of artist and fan collective action through NFTs. And this article just really turned the tides on that in a way that like it has not been that long. And it just feels a little bit disingenuous to be just like, let's always chase the thing that we want to talk about today. Rolling Stone, like, let's be real, especially this past week or two weeks, has had his own big issues with some of its own brand challenges with its founder, Jan Wetter. So, you know, like not saying this is a distraction from that. But I do think that this was one of those things where it's like, of course, the article can get written and can write itself. But we've all known, Gary, your partner has said forever that most entities are going to be worth nothing in the same way that most A.I. companies in the end are going to be worth nothing. Most products and small businesses in the end are worth nothing. Those publishers. Yeah. Right. Yeah. This is the way it works in the business. And this cream of the crop gets amazing. So I don't know. I just thought it was a little bit of like a too easy gotcha article that is there for the clickbait more than anything else. What were your thoughts on seeing it? I mean, Rolling Stone's job is to get eyeballs and catchy headlines, get eyeballs. And I'm sure this is part of their strategy. They not a year ago featured Board Apes on their cover. They dropped a collection that worked with a number of different artists. The Lisa Mayer and her team from Boss Beauties, they did some stuff with the Delve Fellows crew, like they worked with a bunch of independent artists, which I thought was really nice. I think that launched at Super Bowl of 2022. So they've definitely been in the mix. I think it would have been interesting to hear their own perspective of like as a brand, I would respect it like, hey, we jumped into this and we decided we didn't like it for X, Y, Z. That wasn't really the take, which leads me to believe these were probably two different teams, one team that might have been focused on like business development and one that's focused on editorial. Sam, you know how that goes. I do. And I think we try to avoid that a little bit at Coindesk and not always successfully. I'm sure that some people think. But yeah, I don't know. I also think that while everyone is not dropping an NFT collection anymore and hoping to make millions of dollars, four weeks ago, we saw Sam Spratt close his monument game project that was one point eight million dollars. We saw DK Motion with Onchain Summer and Coinbase, and they did like over a million dollars in an open edition. I think we're still seeing some great successes here. Yeah. And we've seen a ton of like really interesting brands come in during this time. I'm just not a price speculator and I don't think we should be looking at technology in that way. I don't think anyone ever joined Instagram thinking they were going to get rich on it when they first came on. They just liked playing. And so I would like us to be thinking about Web3 in general like that, whether it's immersive worlds, NFTs, DAOs or anything like that. The more we kind of put price speculation, the worse things get. I completely agree. Well, Sam, let's get into it. Always love catching up on the news. You bet. What's going to show? Yes. Our next guest, Jess Shin. Jess is amazing. She has worked at three of the most historic brands in the world. She will tell us all about that. She now is the CMO of Algorand Foundation, which is really trying to like focus on payments and refi and some of the just like really cutting edge use cases of crypto. And I'm just really excited to talk to Jess. So we'll get into it after the break.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"The other thing I think, Avery, is I'm not trying to be snarky about this, but maybe it'll come out that way, which is don't always pay attention to your thought leaders. And I say that because if you were a listener of it could be either the sort of libertarian approach of like the all in podcasts with Chamath Palatia and Jason Calacanis, or it frankly could be like Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher. All of them were sort of singing the death knell for the writers and the actors and labor in general. And I do think that there is this sort of interesting collective power of labor that is saying technology shouldn't always be there only to replace us and make you more money. And I think it'll be interesting because we do think, yes, that the writers strike had gone on for 150 plus days. And the sort of themes, if you listen to any of these thought leaders across so many different podcasts and shows, was that the writers were delusional and that they weren't going to get anything they want. And this is just the era of AI. And I think that when you see how much the studios have been hurting also by not being able to create as much content, you're seeing that they rely on good content, right? Like Squid Games creates so much more shareholder value than an AI-driven derivative of a dating show. And so great writers and great actors and really the creator economy, great creators will make things that are worth paying attention to. And I think that is also a win for all of us in many respects. I also think, though, to your point, and you're right, that every bit of creativity is driven from something that's inspired you. I think the real difference with something like this is, let's call it the tail of the two spikes, is that if you said generate a script for me in the style of Spike Lee or Spike Jones, both are so definitive in their styles that you could see AI coming up with something that was a poor man's version of either of them. And that's the thing we don't want versus, yes, if I want something in kind of a Truman Capote style that I can then edit and make into my own, I'm fine with that. It's really when you start taking things that really feel like, oh, this feels like Wes Anderson, but it's not. How is that different? How is Truman Capote not protected and yet Spike Lee should be? Well, one is just probably copyright law since Truman Capote was writing in Cold Blood. It was a long time ago. But the other, I think, is let's look at it through the creator lens. Creators, I think, now have more distinct styles than they probably did way back when. We don't know all of the screenwriters. There were farms of people in Hollywood and in the music industry that were meant to just write in the current style that was trendy. And they would write films, whether it was westerns or war films. They would write songs, whether they were jingles or pop songs. And those people who knew how to write that stuff were hired back in the 50s and 60s. And that's where you got a lot of... Motown was basically that for the most part. I think you then start to get, let's fast forward really far, you get someone like Billie Eilish. And when Billie came out, she was antithetical to what Trend was. Her songs were hot and she was very not current in terms of the Ariana Grande's of the world. And she ended up becoming one of the biggest stars because she zagged when others were zigging. And that's where I just wonder, again, I just think of why I picked Spike Jonze and Spike Lee specifically is because they do have a very strong voice in their work. There are most writers we don't know anything about, and most of those writers probably could have derivative work based on theirs. But I do think anyone who has a distinct style might have a little bit more power to go to a chat GPT and say this version of Do The Right Thing that someone created by basically copying mine is not acceptable. I think there's still those farms of people who are just making shows that they know are going to be popular because people have an insatiable desire for content and vanilla. And I think that creativity has always been and will always be zigging when everybody else is zagging. And whether you're talking about Elvis or Billie Eilish, it's the same idea of there are these disruptive creators who shock the world by their like sort of style and their creativity. And I think that that's happened since the dawn of time. Copyright laws have changed. And today's creators are rightly so more thinking ahead about how this type of thing can happen because they've seen generations of how royalties work and how things happen over time. And that can be such a major revenue stream. Things can get popular decades after they were written. Like the Black Panther example is one of my favorite ones, right? Like that just became popular like decades after it was written. So I think it's an ongoing problem. It's a very nuanced problem. I'm not an entertainment lawyer or expert, but I'm very excited to hear the strikes might be coming to an end. And I hope the same for SAG-ACTA because I think that humanity benefits when we have creativity. And I hope that both parties can come to a resolution that makes sense. And I agree with you. I think some, especially folks in the tech world, were really writing off the power of the writers who do, you know, Yellowstone's one example that keeps coming up just because it's so hot right now. People got to get their Yellowstone. And Taylor Sheridan literally has 55 shows right now on Paramount Plus. And I think that is the thing, which is, it's kind of like the James Patterson effect, right? Which is Taylor probably has a giant team of writers writing in his style and he's creative directing at that point. And I think that's also something where I don't think you would get the same output if he was just sitting with like a bunch of chat GPT windows open and trying to write his war story versus his Western story versus his country boy goes to the city story. So I think that is the opportunity that creativity survives, sometimes despite. And with that said, technology, especially in the creator world, is an accelerant, right? So I think of all the people who are on TikTok and will get 200,000 views on a video only because they also use the exact same soundtrack that is the trending audio track. We need to have a session on TikTok. I think the TikTok vocation of everything is so real and maybe we should have somebody on from TikTok, actually. This would be focused on our creator pillar, but I think we need to have something on that because TikTok is like the new TV. Yes, we should go for Sophia. Sophia heads business at TikTok and she would be wonderful on here. We'll make some calls. And Sophia, if you're listening, we're heading up. Let's make that happen. All right. Let's quickly jump to NFT stories. Yes, NFTs are still around. One of them would have us doubt that. But the first one I saw this week was Ducati, the motorcycle brand, is actually releasing its first NFT collection still here, September 2023. It's one hundred dollars per piece, five thousand pieces. One of the things they did, which I think I like compared to, say, when Playboy tried to do it a couple of years ago, is they actually did go into their archive and are tokenizing things like classic illustrations of motorcycles.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"That's actually a great point. I always liked the conversation around, oh, crypto is so energy intensive, which it can be. Definitely can be. Mining is very intensive. But I'm like, have you ever calculated the energy costs of cash or something like that? And similarly, I think AI uses so much compute. I remember last year there was a stat that I saw that like the average Google search versus the average chat GPT search was like a 75 times difference in terms of the amount of energy. I do think they'll get more efficient. Of course. With the way that they do that. But yeah, it's really energy intensive right now. So I think that will also be a factor in terms of even if it is possible, it might not be affordable right now unless people just sort of get used to paying for a bunch of these subscriptions, which, as you and I know, that's how Hey Gen works. That's how 11 Labs works. That's how Chat GPT Plus works. Like all of these, you need your subscription. So are we going to see bundling? Are we going to see people with a ton of different subscriptions? Let's see where that happens. And that kind of brings me to something that has been very top of mind for us over the last few months, which is our friends in Hollywood. Sam, what do you make of the potential strike ending? I heard about this like yesterday, the day before. I think it's pretty fascinating. An article just came out in the New York Times, so by the time this podcast is out Monday, we'll know a lot more. But it says that there are key paragraphs that were inserted last night, specifically around AI and that AI was the sticking point for the writers, especially around the things like old scripts and how those might be utilized in the future. And from what it sounds like, and we have not seen these clauses yet, but from what it sounds like is that they have addressed that AI can be a productivity tool but cannot replace the writers. And I think that's really was the key sticking point. We're waiting to see that stuff get released. But I do wonder, you know, I was thinking about this in the broader spectrum of this strike. My guess is the same types of response are going to lean the actor's way in the SAG strike. And then I think of, for example, some of the recent like Supreme Court and other court stuff around IP rights and ownership around derivatives. And almost all of that has been leaning towards the original IP holders. So I think that we're going to just see more and more of this combined with all of the lawsuits coming from comedians and authors and personalities that are hitting. I think there's going to have to be a standardization of what it means for AI. And don't get me wrong, I don't think this is about us not having these tools. I think it's going to be about a payments rights organization that is making sure that the original source folks who came up with the content are being compensated. What are your thoughts? It's still very nuanced because any form of creativity was influenced and inspired by another form of creativity. And that can go on since the beginning of time, right? So, yes, I do think this is perceived right now to be a win against AI. But productivity tools is a broad categorization. And I think it's impossible to completely snuff out the potential use cases for AI. And I think that was the sort of position of many of the networks is it's too early for them to even understand how this will be used. For now, I think it's a win and it's a win for the writers across multiple things that they wanted. They wanted better pay. They wanted protections against AI. They wanted increasing royalties. So I think those things macro were a big win for them. I think it potentially lays the groundwork for a win for the many thousands of people who are not famous actors, are not famous directors. Maybe they're a makeup artist or camera worker who have been impacted by these strikes going on for a few months, which has been really challenging for a whole broader swath of people. I think many times and a lot of our listeners and sometimes even us, we forget about how many people are behind the scenes of actually making this stuff happen or really negatively impacted by these strikes. So I'm excited that it seems like they've reached a resolution. I'm looking forward to the subsequent resolution of some of the other ongoing strikes that have been kind of mixed up in this as well.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"algorand" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"I don't know about you, but once I put my Hey Gen video up, I had so many people who are just like, okay, great, so I can do this now. And it's like part of my AirPods and it's in my phone and especially people who are not like deep into tech. In their mind, it was like, how soon is this thing happening? And I was like, I think we still got a couple of years, but I wanted to know your thoughts on soonness. I think a couple of years feels right. Same thing happened to me. I think I told you this. I posted this and a lot of my clients were like, wait, do me. And a lot of people I know were very surprised. I know a ton of Indian people. So they were also like, it sounds like you. And it was actually funny. So I was also reading the hater comments were like, that's not how normal people speak Hindi. And it's like, of course it isn't. It's like a textbook translation. It doesn't have that colloquialism built in yet. To your point, that's because people don't really understand like how it's working right now. I think we're looking at two to five years before this is sort of embedded into being like very useful for normal people every day. I think the other piece and we've touched on this and didn't see before is the computing costs for all of this are pretty significant and real. And, you know, we're just coming off Climate Week in New York and the conversation around the environmental concerns for AI is still quite quiet. And I anticipate in the next year or so, people are going to realize that all of this takes a lot of energy and translating videos at the blink of an eye and the touch of a button is something that right now is pretty computationally intensive. So I think that will need to reach a place of better efficiency before it can really scale out just from a cost perspective.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from GENC: Three-Part Strategies for Growing International Brands with with Jess Chin, CMO of The Algorand Foundation
"The Internet. new In Gen C. The C stands for crypto, but it also stands for creators, the connected consumer and collectibles, both digital and physical with on chain provenance. It stands for culture and characters, the ones we play in games and the companion ones that a I is building alongside us. It stands for community and digital citizenship and the new set of transparent and trustless tools being built to govern them. These are the people who were raised on a different philosophy on how they look at money, how they look at identity, how they look at privacy and how they look at the hybrid digital and physical spaces being built all around us. And finally, how they reimagine their relationships with the communities and companies they interact with. We focus on how brands large and small are building for these audiences. Welcome to Gen C. Hey, Sam. Avery, how's it going? It is a wonderful fall day. Excited to start the week. How about you? Good. I'm a little jet lagged. I just landed this morning in Madrid for an event that we're being involved with. We have a big celebrity interview we're not going to be able to talk about next week. But let's just say next week, you are going to want to know me even more, Avery. The internet's going to break. I can't wait for it. And how's everything in Madrid? I'm unimpressed so far, but it's just because I had, like in my head, I was like, great, check into the hotel, go find some little cafe, have the best ham I've ever had in my life. And just nothing worked well. So I think I just chose the wrong cafe. I was too late to get the right meal, you know, three hours of sleep. So we're just running on fumes, Avery, but I'm very excited to be here with our friends at Stellar who we're doing a bunch of work with. And then I think towards the end of the week, I go to Lisbon and I know you spend a bunch of time there. I love Lisbon and keep your Hey Gen handy in case you need to do any immediate translations. I will. Keep your 11 labs at your fingertips.
Crypto Altruism Podcast
A highlight from Episode 122 - Sweat Economy - Building The Economy of Movement with Web3
"Whole industries are born when you can break a trade -off that is considered standard. In our world, the trade -off is if you want to be healthy, if you want to be active, you got to pay. You got to buy a kit, you got to get your membership, you got to do all of these things. How can you be physically active if you're not paying? Actually, because it's beneficial to you and to a lot of people, we believe that you should be paid for it because it is incredibly valuable. Welcome to the Crypto Altruism podcast, the podcast dedicated to elevating the stories of those using Web3 for good. I'm your host Drew Simon from CryptoAltruism .org. Now, before we get started, a quick disclaimer. While we may discuss specific Web3 projects or cryptocurrencies on this podcast, please do not take any of this as investment advice, and please make sure to do your own research on investment opportunities or any opportunity, including its legality. And now, let's get on to the show. Welcome and thanks so much for joining. Whole industries are born when you can break a trade -off that's considered standard. I think that bears repeating and I can't think of a better example of this than Move to Earn. For too long, exercise has seemed like more of a chore for many and a very expensive chore at that, with the pricey gym memberships, expensive equipment, you name it. With the advent of blockchain, however, there is a unique opportunity to disrupt this and transform exercise from a chore into a rewarding and income -generating activity. To dive into this, I'm excited to welcome Oleg Fomenko, co -founder of Sweat Economy, an OG in the Move to Earn space with a mission to reward movement to inspire a healthier and wealthier planet. We discuss how Web3 tools can incentivize healthy actions, the evolution of Move to Earn, onboarding hundreds of millions of users to Web3, and much more. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Oleg to the Crypto Altruism podcast. Okay, Oleg, thank you so much for being here today on the Crypto Altruism podcast. Such a pleasure to have you. Thank you very much, Drew, for having me. Very nice to meet you, Drew. Thank you very much for having me. So excited to have you. I had mentioned this before we got on the call that I've been following it for quite a while, and I'm really fascinated by this whole Move to Earn movement that's going on and how Web3 tools can really change how we get people to be excited about wellness and making healthy life choices. So before we get there, I want to learn about your aha moment that got you excited about Crypto and Web3 in the beginning. I learned about Bitcoin in 2011 from a childhood friend who described what it was, and that definitely perked my interest. Stupid as I was, well, stupid as I am, I got really, really hooked on technology. And I read an awful lot about how it works, the white paper, the Byzantine generals problem, and just basically as much background as I could. In 2011, there wasn't an awful lot. Then I have installed BT Guild. That was the first sort of pool mining software on my old laptop and put it in the corner, and it was sort of chugging along there for about a month, and they mined a few satoshis. Well, actually quite a few satoshis, but because the price was like 20 cents, it wasn't even covering the electricity that I burned on it. And I just threw away a laptop's hard drive for quite a bit right now these days. So I got hooked on tech, and despite the low prices, I actually didn't buy an awful lot of Bitcoin back then. And I had a very interesting sort of music streaming startup back then, and I was trying to figure out how we can do something in crypto, but at best we could just accept Bitcoin payment, which was cumbersome, slow and not terribly interesting, and just handful of people even knew what it was. So opportunity represented itself in 2014 when I started talking to my co -founders about the problem of why are people not as active as they want to be? How come that I used to run some crazy distances and climbing some of the highest mountains in the world, and all of a sudden I couldn't even complete 5k. And, you know, kind of one conversation after another, we very quickly realized that the reason why 100 % of people want to be more active, but they can't, is because nature didn't build us to be active. Nature built us to survive, which means preserving calories rather than spending them. And nature was so serious about it that it gave us this behavioral feature that helped us surviving back then, but right now it's probably a behavioral bug that prevents us from being able to burn those calories called present bias that stops us from, you know, kind of moving and forces us to sit, unless there is a mammoth on the horizon that, you know, that we need to run and kill, or there is something about to make us into food and then we need to run away. And we realized that there is only one solution to present bias, instant gratification. So we kind of went, ooh, so can we actually create instant gratification for every step you take? And that's the story of Sweatcoin. As the name would suggest, we were thinking about building it on blockchain back then, but forking Bitcoin was slow, cumbersome and expensive. Building on Ethereum, we discussed with Vitalik in 2015. We met with him in London. That wasn't really an option because it was just too early. It was a research grade code back then. And we launched in 2016 centralized. And we thought, you know what, give us six months, maybe 12 months, there will be some wonderful blockchain that, you know, we're going to migrate onto. Little did we know that it would take until 2021 for blockchain to get fast enough and robust enough to be able to hold our scale. So, you know, we looked every year and we analyzed everything that was sort of popping up. And until 2021, the answer was consistently, no, we were processing more transactions per second than theoretical throughput of any chain. And in 2021, all of a sudden there was this explosion, there was Algorand, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB, well, BC back then, and Flow and Celo and, you know, kind of all of a sudden it just sort of, there was a rush of these new technologies. And we got really excited and put a team on this and analyzed more than a dozen different chains. And sort on of after spending, I think, four or five months, we made a decision that we want to build on near. And yeah, the rest is history. We launched last September and it's going incredibly well, incredibly well. I'm sure that we're going to have an opportunity to talk about some of the numbers and metrics and, you know, sort of, yeah, totally. Definitely. I mean, you've had quite many, many, many achievements and it's really grown at an incredible pace and the amount of people that you have engaging with this platform now every day. And, you know, it's good that you really took that time to kind of like, you know, think and make sure that you had the right blockchain, the right timing. And it sounds like you made a good choice there with Near. And sustainable business model as well and token economics. Yeah, for sure, for sure, which is great. And so you talked a little bit at a higher level about sweat economy, but do you mind giving an overview to our listeners of, you know, what it is, what the mission is of your organization? Sure. The mission of the regional sweat coin and that's what economy is to make the world more physically active. And, you know, it seems like it's sort of a tree -hogging mission. And the reality is it couldn't be further away from truth because we actually realized that physical activity has tangible financial value. When I say that your physical duty has value, everyone nods, like you just did right now. But if I ask how valuable it is, people kind of go, could you reframe the question? Could you use different words? I'm like, no, I don't have to. Typically, if something is valuable, it has value attached to it. And here we have something valuable, but we cannot attach any number to it. Maybe there is an opportunity there. And then we started thinking there is an interesting economy that draws parallel with physical activity. It's attention economy by some estimates attention economy now is about $7 trillion business, all the Googles, Facebooks, everything advertising related sits in there and actually quite a lot more. And the interesting parallel between physical activity and attention is that like attention, physical activity is valuable to you. You know, when you pay attention, something starts, you know, you can engage with something, you can get new idea, you can meet somebody, you can, you know, potentially entering some sort of a conversation transaction and purchase something. Very similarly, physical activity is a better physical state, it puts you into a better mental state, it extends your life. And like attention, physical activity is beneficial for a lot of other parties, a lot of other participants on the market, starting from your family that is, of course, would prefer to have you physically active rather than not because they want to enjoy your company for longer, they want you to be in a better mood. Your healthcare provider, your insurer, your employer are all interested in you being physically active and actually prepared to pay for it. Especially insurers, they know very well that your health insurance and your life insurance, if you're physically active, should be a lot cheaper because you're a lot better risk and you genuinely a lot better business for them. Now, attention economy exists and it's $7 trillion, movement economy or physical activity economy doesn't. There is absolutely nothing there. We can talk about it, we can discuss these use cases, but it doesn't exist. And then we thought, hang on a second, in order for humanity not to spend 200 years building this economy, why don't we actually think of creating a token that is tokenizing your physical activity and makes it into a liquid asset that you can exchange with other parties? That's how the concept of Sweatcoin and now Sweat was born. So coming back to your original question, Sweatcoin is our health and fitness app. Despite the name, it's actually not crypto because for eight years we couldn't operate in crypto. We got 240 million users using this application. And when we could move to Web3, to blockchain, it was too late to tell everybody, like, look, from tomorrow, it's going to be completely different game. tokenomics is going to be different. You can't do that. So we had to put out a new token that's called Sweat and it is a crypto token built on NIR. And effectively the way the two businesses work together is you choose, you either play Web3 game and you just create your crypto account and then your steps are converted into Sweat. Or as a lot of people, you know, kind of choose to, they don't opt in and then they get Sweatcoins, which is a centralized points, think of it like air miles that you can gather and you can use inside Sweatcoin, but they cannot be traded on exchanges. They are not real crypto and not as liquid as Sweat, the token. And of course, these two tokens have very, very different token economics. Sweatcoin, for every 1000 steps, you earn one Sweatcoin and Sweat is constantly demanding an increase in number of steps in order to meet next Sweat. This way, supply dynamics are a lot healthier and we have become deflationary already from the month of July. So July and August circulating supply has been slowly shrinking. Wow. Interesting. So much going on there and like incredible. First of all, with the amount of folks that you've been able to onboard the love, the idea of like offering, you know, Web3 and Web2 version, because it might just be those people that maybe aren't quite ready yet, but want to experiment a bit, want to learn about the technology first, then it gives them an easy kind of entry, you know, accessible entryway, which is great. And so you talked about the Sweat token, which is the built on the near blockchain. And that's kind of the for the Web3 version, the currency that kind of behind this whole movement economy. So you talked about that users will get this, they'll earn this from from walking, engaging in that physical activity. What can they do with these with these tokens once they actually receive them? What's the like utility of them? Yeah, no, there is there is plenty. But actually, if we take a step back, because I think in the crypto world, a lot of people are sort of obsessed with the word utility. I actually think that the more important question is, if you ask somebody, why is this token valuable? Yeah, what is the answer to that question? And I have answered to both of these questions. But I would like to start with the one that I think is more relevant in long term, why is Sweat valuable? And the reason why Sweat is valuable is because it is produced by your verified physical activity. So when you move, and if you try to cheat, it doesn't work. In fact, if somebody is trying repeatedly to kind of break into the system and you know, sort of game it, then we just disable accounts and they can never return. But if you put in genuine physical activity, so you sweat it, then we verify it. And we issue with this token that is tokenized physical activity of yours. And because of that, there is no single question in people's mind that it is valuable. It's a very, very different relationship to a string of numbers that sort of miraculously appeared out of, I don't know, nothing, airdrop, I don't know, whatever activity. And then people, majority of people, not crypto natives, but crypto curious are wondering, why does it have any value at all? Why is it not zero? And that is an extremely difficult question to answer. Now we don't have this problem. However, crypto educated or crypto informed you are, that's my physical activity. That's my sweat. That's not zero because, you know, it cannot be, you know, can I sweat it over it? Right. And this is an answer to the longterm question. So in five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years time, when people are going to be talking about why is sweat valuable, they're going to say, are you kidding me? It's a tokenized physical activity. How can it be zero? However, it doesn't stop there. You know, in order for us to build movement economy, in order for us to feel sweat with this meaning that it is tokenized physical activity, in order for us to establish financial, you know, kind of number or just a value to it, we need to play a game in the interim that is effectively creating utility and demand drivers for sweat. For a lot of projects, that's all they do. We do have a longterm vision that I've just described to you. The short term vision is extremely simple. You need sweat in order to participate in our kind of network in our platform, you stake sweat, and you earn interest by taking sweat, you also have access to a lot of rewards that are linked to health and fitness, well being fashion, etc. So this is an extremely engaging thing for our users, you are also earning sweat from our learn and earn. And because 90 % of our users are brand new to crypto and web3, they are seeking and are very interested in information. So what is taking? How does it work? You know, how do you transfer? How do you receive crypto? So we are building this whole ecosystem of effectively onboarding products and information, how do you become a proper crypto native? Last but not least, are a lot of functionalities that are being rolled out right now as we're ramping up for our US launch. The most exciting one is Sweat Hero. It's a free NFT game that effectively, if you engage, come in, we give you an NFT of legs. Because, you know, we're about walking and running. Yeah. And, you know, you get the NFT and you can play with other people, literally walking, I'm not going to go into mechanics, if you're interested, you can sort of go and look at it yourself in Sweat Wallet app. Or if you are in the US and you can't still use all the functionality, then you can just go on YouTube and put Sweat Hero and there are plenty of screenshots and screencasts from users that have been participating in beta testing. So you basically go into battle and the game and I battle you and I put 10 Sweat, you put 10 Sweat, the winner takes 80 % and the 20 % goes into what we call a battle fee, which is effectively a token sync that community votes on later on. And that brings me to your one of the first and earlier questions, you know, about move to earn and sustainability of the business, because we're frequently asked, you know, how are you different from, you know, kind of other projects out there? And we say, well, tens of millions of users is one thing, nine years of history and therefore ability to spend time thinking about building sustainable business and sustainable token economics. And what we are doing right now by scaling and not going into that spiral is evidence that we know how to build sustainable businesses that really function. More than that, as I already mentioned, in July and in August this year, Sweat has already become deflationary. So the sources of demand on a monthly basis are higher than emissions of token by you walking, plus all unlocks, users, team investors, and everything. So the number of tokens that hit the market is lower than the number of tokens that are extracted from the market, which in web two world would basically be definition of profitability. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Very interesting. Yeah. So much on the go. And, you know, I love this idea as well of the Sweat Hero NFT game. I think that's a really fun way to engage people in a different way and to bring NFTs in the mix as well. You mentioned move to earn in there too. And so I know that obviously Sweat Economy kind of is a great example of that, you know, move to earn ecosystem fits within there. You know, there's, it's a pretty early stage space for sure. You know, fairly nascent, a couple projects for sure, like yours that are really growing at a rapid pace, but still very early. Where do you see things when it comes to move to earn in the future, let's say five to 10 years from now? What do you think? How do you think it'll shape, you know, the overall wellness sector in the coming years? I mean, there are several very interesting things here. One is, whole industries are born when you can break a trade -off that, you know, is considered standard. You know, for example, internet broke this trade -off where you could deliver rich message, but very few people, or you could deliver extremely poor message and extremely narrow message to a lot of people. Reach and richness was a trade -off. Internet broke that and the rest is history. You know, you can talk to individual with extremely rich message and sometimes screw with their heads as well as Cambridge Analytica has proven, right? So it's a double -edged sword, unfortunately. So in our world, the trade -off is, or if you want to be healthy, if you want to be active, you got to pay. You got to buy kit, you got to get job membership, you got to dress, you got to do all of these things. You know, how can you be physically active if you're not paying? Actually, because it's beneficial to you and to a lot of other people, we believe that you should be paid for it because it is incredibly valuable. Like in attention economy, you are given free products in exchange for your attention. Why wouldn't we be doing exactly the same thing in exchange for my physical activity? So move to earn is breaking this trade -off and I believe that it is going to become a more or less standard approach because if physical activity was only valuable to me and me alone, I would need to pay. But given that it drives an incredible amount of value for everybody, including countries, I mean, if you're physically active, you're going to be more economically active for longer. The tax revenues from you are going to be higher. It's good business. You know, even if you're looking at it in the dry light of day, obstructing yourself from taking care of people, making sure that, you know, this country is a good place for them to live. But even just in financial terms, it's good business. So this is the first thing that all the businesses in move to earn are doing, regardless if they're Ponzi or non -Ponzi actually think that it's great because businesses are reminding people that their physical activity has value. Bingo. That moves this whole idea of movement economy forward. The other trend that I see is that we need to get fewer people who are focusing on crypto natives, which is the case with a lot of other products and are focusing on mass market, because the value is not in making very, very narrow field of already reasonably rich and wealthy people more physically active. The real value to humanity is going into the lower social stratas, because that typically is where behavior change is most needed. If you look at dominant in A and B social groups, but it's starting to ramp up as you go lower down the income tail. So we need to start focusing on these people. We need to start developing propositions that are absolutely free, that are extremely simple to engage with, like what's what economy is doing. Because a lot of people are asking me, crypto, web3, what's your advice? And my simple advice is, look, we're so early, I can't even point a finger where to go. But if any of you remember internet of 96 and 97, you would remember that, I mean, there was Yahoo, right? There were very, very early businesses. None of them are really sort of dominating. And the opportunity is still there. And the opportunity number one is we still don't have an email for internet. We don't have an ubiquitous use case for web3. That email became for internet. That's what we're focusing on. Can we develop something that every single person on planet earth would be interested and benefit from if they engage with? And if you have legs, and if you can take steps, you know, you can engage with sweat economy. And I think we're on the right path there. The other thing that I would say is that if you actually look at the overall web3, and all the different tokens that exist, I see right now only three use cases or three classes of tokens that can be explained in a very simple fashion. Why on earth do they have value? Case one, Bitcoin digital gold, inflationary protection. It's capped supply. Everyone is paying attention to it. Everyone is in because of the first mover advantage. Therefore, it is playing the role of digital gold and probably is replacing gold as that inflationary protection asset. Case two, layer ones, computers securing asset ownership on the internet. Like electricity powers computers, like tokens, like ETH, like NEAR, like Avax, like MATIC. You need to have them in order for these computers to work for you and secure ownership of assets. And case three is tokenization. And here there is kind of wide range. The most simple one is tokenizing fiat currency, USDT, USDC. Basically, you are turning an asset that already exists into a token to make it more liquid, easier to transfer, easier to exchange with a lot more censorship resistance and with fewer parties being able to tell you can you or cannot you conduct this particular transaction. And there is a lot of experimentation with other assets like TDELs, for example, kind of tokenizing them. And we are pushing absolutely boundaries of that because we're not tokenizing an asset that already exists, that already has markets that can be exchanged. We're creating new asset class because as I said, everyone agrees that physical activity has value. It should have been an asset, but actually without blockchain, it cannot be turned into an asset. And we are creating new asset, new asset class, and the whole new industry that cannot be created without blockchain participating in this.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from Interest Rate Hikes FINISHED?! (Crypto War NOT Over)
"Welcome to Discover Crypto! It is September 20th. It's 11 .30am. How are we all doing? We got Drew and AJ on the ones and twos today, folks. We're going to talk about the Fed. We're going to talk about what are they going to be saying with the interest rate hikes. And also we're going to be talking about Bitcoin and other cryptos. AJ, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, man. Another day in the life. Let's get it. Drew, how are you doing? Oh, just great. You know, can't complain. Well, you can. You can. You complain when you get home. You'd like, you know, just really vent to your two -year -old. Yeah, that's where I do it. Deezy, did you see the tweet that went out yesterday about the show I'm doing with from George from Cryptos R Us? What? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's with Blockchain Boy and Neutron. Joshua Jay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we're all like, it's for crew, like, plus, you know, and basically we're all doing something different. I believe, like, Josh is doing like a news kind of show and Blockchain Boys. I'm not really sure what Blockchain Boys doing, but I know the videos are going to start coming out here pretty soon. We're still like brainstorming my concept, but I have a really good, like, rough idea of what I'm doing. But it's going to be really interesting to see how, like, where this goes. And I'm just fun to excited to do something different, you know? And I'm excited. We got Frankie Candles doing the charts today. I see Frankie getting ready in his neon square. He's in his, like, little neon area. I don't know if, oh, he can hear me. He's showing some recognition and anticipation of what Deezy is going to say next. Yeah, we saw the Donald Trump Jr. tweets. It looks like he got hacked. Also, Rob, you're popping it. Hey, we're going to see you back. Can't wait till you come back. All right, let's just get right into crypto. Marc Kepson's Drew is done. Am I too tall? Am I too tall? Too tall for the camera? Look, I got to stand. I got to do these shows a lot, you know? I take the shoes off. So I shrink, you know? They come in. I'm like 6 '11", and I take the shoes off. Then I drop back down to 6 '3". I got the Tom Cruise lifts. All right, Bitcoin is falling a little bit, folks. We were in the green this morning when I first woke up. Now we are down 0 .6%, and Ethereum is down 1 .3%. But XRP looks pretty good. XRP is up. It is up 0 .8 % on the day so far. Meanwhile, Cardano, I woke up this morning. It was up, but now it's down. It is down 0 .7%. Dogecoin down 1 .3%. TonCoin finally cooling off a little bit for the week here. It is down 1 .2%. Litecoin has taken a little bit of a beating, folks. Litecoin is down 5%. We talked about Litecoin a little bit yesterday on ATB. I highly recommend you check that out after this stream. All right, let's look at the top gainers. Then we're going to look at the top losers. You know, I have a streak of keeping my coins in the losers, but not today, folks. I'm feeling good. In fact, maybe I'll have a coin in the top 10. Who knows? All right, here we have Caspa leading the way. Caspa is just on fire, folks. The people who bought Caspa at $0 .01, $0 .02, looking good. Just put in a higher high too. You got past that last one, yep. All right, we are now above a nickel, and it looks like maybe price discovery mode for a Caspa. XDC is up 4 .3%. Maker is up. Radix is up. Aave is up. I have a coin in the ties. A little Solana. I think maybe I have some Arbitrum. Maybe. I'm not even sure I have to check. Then we have, you know, XRP is up 0 .8%. We got gold. Gold's moving to the upside. The graph moving to the upside, even though Bitcoin and ETH are down. Okay, so it's not all blood in the streets, but hopefully, it's not going to be blood in Deasy's wallet, guys. And again, I promise you, I do not check this ahead of time. I kind of like being surprised. I like discovering it with you. So let's discover cryptos, Deasy's coins in here. I'm looking good today. All right, I don't know how long the streak has been continuing. I don't know when's the last. I think I last held Litecoin in 2021. Never had Thor, Phrax, eCash, or I know Frankie likes to trade Adam. I like to trade Eve. So maybe we'll talk to him about the Adam is falling 4 % here. Litecoin down 5%. Thor chained down 5%. Any of these coins, you know, peak it. Well, if you go at it, I do have two in the top 10. I got two in the top 10. Just, you know, just to make it feel good. But any of these screaming at you here? Yeah, Thor, Litecoin, Phrax. Not surprised really to see. I mean, everything kind of came up yesterday. I'm still kind of sticking to the theory that the pump we're seeing could possibly be a bull trap. I think, you know, when we get into the FOMC news, the pauses that is likely coming is going to be bullish for the sentiment. I'm just still like kind of macro worried based off of the stock market sharks. Actually, the Algorand, you know, down 2 .8%. That one's kind of obviously yelling at me a little bit. I have a theory coming up, but I'm not going to say it right now. But I'm making a video about it, about Algorand. So stay tuned for that. OK, so you're going to create more? I'm going to create more. I create more crypto content every day and some of it's about Algorand. But I like how it's a period. Create more. No exclamation point. Just create. It's more like create more. Oh, OK. Great. More. Great. Great. Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to create some stories here about the feds. What are they doing? I don't know if we've ever had an article from this news organization. ABC. Shout out to Mickey Mouse and the Disney crew here. Fed to decide on a rate hike. Testing optimism about a soft landing as inflation rises again. Upon announcing the Fed Reserve's latest rate hike decision in July, Jerome Powell spoke out a lectern in Washington, DC for a half hour before he dropped a bombshell. The Central Bank staff has abandoned its forecast of a recession. Staff at the Fed, in other words, now expect the Central Bank to achieve a soft landing, an outcome in which the US brings down inflation while avoiding a downturn. Inflation has ticked up for two consecutive months, reversing some of the progress made in the effort to bring price increases down to normal levels. Meanwhile, oil prices have soared, threatening to push inflation even higher. Well, they got like moving ads. Whoa, whoa, what's going on here? Calm down, ABC. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect the Fed to leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged, affording policymakers time to weigh their next move as a rapid series of previous rate hikes take full effect. I was looking at Caleb Franzen's tweets. We're at 99 % on the prediction market unchanged today, right? Have you been looking at the, when is the next one? Is it November? I can pull the calendar. I'm pretty sure it's the end of October. I think it's like maybe on Halloween. Let me double check. Oh, on Halloween is going to be spooky. Okay, Drew, are you going to give out candy this Halloween? Absolutely. You know, but actually I'll be doing candied apples. Okay, I'm going to be giving out pamphlets on inflation to children. Yeah, you know, you could have got Reese's pieces, but blame Jerome Powell. You can take advantage of the time and the season to teach your children about tax. Tax them. Like attacking kids for their pillowcases of candy? Taxing them heavily. Yeah, take 33 % of every Snickers bar they get. That's right. Yeah, that's just the way it is. Why wait? Welcome to America, you know? And yeah, the next FOMC is October 31st, November 1st, so. Okay, okay. October 31st. All right, all right. Halloween, what's Jerome Powell going to dress up as? Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Pat, do you want us to dress up on the channel? I might be willing to dress up in a costume. I might be willing. You know, every - I could break out the green spandex, go old school. You know, every Halloween, AJ disappears and a Mr. Meeseeks just shows up. Okay, I heard existence is pain though. Existence is pain. We're not fumbling around for meaning here, Deezy. All right. Well, I'm fumbling around for this rate of inflation. It eases slightly 6 .7 % despite the oil prices surging. You know, like we said, I think the oil is going to be a leading indicator, so inflation will trickle down from the oil prices. If you want to think about it, it's going to cost more money to get those bananas to drive from point A to point B because they're going to have to spend more in the gas tank. This is going to be - It's just give it a while, let it roll out to the rest of the economy. Namely, food. Oil prices really, really like to impact food prices a couple months down the line. Well, we're looking at the ONS as the Office for National Statistics, and they said the consumer price index measure slowed in the 12 months to August from the 6 .8 figure reported the previous month thanks to food rising at a weaker pace during the month compared to August 22. During the X minute, I have a tweet about Canadian food prices, and I just kind of look at where they've gone over the past 20 years. It is shocking. It is shocking. I used Bard. I was like, this doesn't feel right for the price. I went to a Canadian grocery store, and I went low. I went low. There's expensive eggs and cheap eggs. I typed in the cheap egg price. It was still very scary. All right, well, we have predictions. Jerome Powell's got his ideas. You notice I was thinking about this BlackRock. What is BlackRock thinking about all this? BlackRock and others predict the Fed's next move. What does it mean for Bitcoin though? According to Marilyn Watson, is a BlackRock's head of global fundamental income strategy. The central bank's federal funds target rate will remain roughly the same until the end of the year going through its September, November, and December meetings. For the record, I think the economic data has consistently surprised to the upside, she said. That includes GDP, the unemployment rate, and the labor market. Beware, beware of recession. The analyst has previously argued that Bitcoin's price is macroeconomic determined by conditions, including its four -year cycles, which I am still a firm believer in for this cycle. Might be less of an effect of the previous one, but I'm still a believer in the four -year cycle, going to push Bitcoin to the new high. I do think we'll set in a new all -time high. I don't think we're going to hit a quarter million dollars in two years, but I think we're going to flirt with $100K, which they do not believe are related to the Bitcoin halving. So they're saying the four -year cycle is not related. I don't know what they're saying here. Risk assets go lower in recessions. So I'd expect Bitcoin would not perform well in that environment. It has not seen a real recession in its existence. It was birthed out of a recession, but yeah, hasn't really gone through one from the beginning stages to the end there. Yeah, there's never been a Bitcoin bull run during a phase of quantitative tightening. We've always been quantitatively easing the money supply anytime Bitcoin goes up into the right. And that obviously is what it takes. I think they're kind of leaning into if we're in a recession, and that lines up with the four -year cycle. But just so far, we're three for three with the having idea playing out. And the trend hasn't broken yet, so that's why I always say sticking to November 25 as a benchmark, but that's just a benchmark. It could be behind that. It could be in front of that. We don't have a crystal ball, but we can go off the pattern that we've seen before. All right. Well, speaking of quantitative tightening, we also have calfskin tightening, the tightest calfskin in the entire world. I don't care if you have a baby cow jacket for an extra small on an 800 -pound man, there is no tighter calfskin than the man I'm looking at right now. That is Frankie Candles. Frankie Candles, welcome back. How's it doing? Does it feel good? It feels good. The calfskin is tight, and so is Bitcoin's price action. But yeah, I don't want to waste time here. Let's go ahead and jump right into the charts here. Now, here we are. Now, obviously, I talk about this all the time. I don't typically trade on newsdays like this. It is usually a complete washing machine. Usually the shorts get wrecked, then the longs get wrecked, or the longs get wrecked, and then the shorts get wrecked. So I don't typically trade. Now, I am in a few trades right now. I am in this Bitcoin long right now. I have profits locked in on this trade and my stop loss is at my entry. So kind of how I am playing this today is I'm going to be holding my long. I am long from about $25 ,000 to $50 ,000 just below this range. And again, I have taken profits on that stop loss at break even. And then I am also in a short position from somewhere up here. I am slightly in profit on the short position. So I am long up and now I am in this small short position that is in slight profit. However, this is kind of how I'm playing this today, DZ. Because basically, like I said, I never recommend people trade on these newsdays just because of the complete unpredictable volatility that you're likely to see. Now, the last FOMC meeting, I believe, was on the 25th, 26th of July. I believe someone could correct me if I'm wrong on that. But we actually have seen a few FOMC meetings where we didn't really have too much happen. And I've been telling people that we are likely in that kind of boring accumulation phase of the bear market. A lot of times, if you go back to at least the 2017 or 2018, 2019 bear market, we had that bear market rally. And once we topped off at that point, we kind of just bled out. And for the most part, if you kind of just ignore this panic wick from March of 2020, which was obviously a Black Swan event, we kind of just wiggled sideways. We got that big bear market rally, we topped off, bled out a little bit, and then we just kind of went sideways again with the exception of that panic wick. And I do think we are in somewhat of a similar situation here where the rest of this bear market may not be the most exciting thing ever. But for today, basically how I'm handling this, DZ, is I'm going to be kind of...
Thinking Crypto News & Interviews
A highlight from Joshua Stone Interview - Bringing Books To Web3, Book.io Books on the Blockchain, Mark Cuban Investment, Cardano ADA
"Welcome back to the Thinking Crypto podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With me today is Joshua Stone, who's the CEO and co -founder of Book .io. Joshua, great to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me here. Appreciate it. Well, Joshua, I think it's timely that I'm speaking with you because I'm in the process of writing a book. And so I'm very curious about Book .io and what are the other options for me as a soon -to -be author where I can publish my book on the blockchain and get some additional benefits. Before we get into all that, though, tell us about yourself, where you're from, where you grew up. Yeah, for sure. So I grew up in Oklahoma. When I'm traveling, I like to tell people I grew up in Indian territory and, you know, kind of encapsulates this sort of free spirit, unregulated environment that I just kind of grew up in. And my dad was an electronics engineer. My mom is a really incredible amateur artist. So I grew up in a very left brain, right brain kind of background. And what was your professional career before founding or co -founding Book .io? Yeah. I got online. Like I said, my dad with the electronics engineering, I got online really, really early and kind of got fascinated with this intersection of graphic and engineering kind of where they cross over. So I really gravitated more towards like a product design and user experience strategy side of things. So I actually got my first large job out of school. I went to Oklahoma State University and worked on the very first version of Fandango for Subark. And that was back in 99 and then worked at some larger internet companies that did a bunch of stuff for AT &T, led the product group for hotels .com with Expedia, and then kind of got more into the startup scene, was in a social media startup that sold. And that kind of got my interest into the book publishing industry. So I actually previously had co -founded an ebook company that we specialized in bulk distribution of eBooks to universities and really large organizations. And we sold that back in 20, I think we sold in 2015, I stayed till 2018. And so, I had kind of approached the book industry from a technologist sort of standpoint. And yeah, and then took some time off after that, really got just super deep into crypto and tried to kind of determine my next startup. I wanted to be a Web3 based company. That's awesome, man. Because you have a Web1, well, you have experience in Web1 and Web2, and now you're building in Web3. That's pretty incredible. What was your first encounter with Bitcoin? I'm always fascinated by folks' different stories, and what was your aha moment? Yeah, I feel like a lot of the story is always like a story of frustration of, I wish I would have. And so, I read the first white paper pretty quickly after it came out, just because I was in a social media startup. So that stuff like circulated quickly of like, oh, there's this internet money thing. And I talked to some engineers and I'm not heavy engineer. I've done some engineering stuff, but at that time, I wasn't capable of studying, I guess I could have really went and stood up a stack and tried to figure out how to mine it, but I tried to convince some engineers to mine it. And that happened a couple of different times. And it was a kind of classic argument of like, hey, this will cost us more in electricity than we'll ever make. And in hindsight, it's like, dang it, I should have just put them in a headlock and made them do it. So, it wasn't really until 2017 that I came around and jumped back in where I could actually start to buy from exchanges easily. I think at that time, maybe Coinbase only had like four coins listed. And so, I spent a lot of time on like foreign based exchanges and just really like diving super, super deep and through all the kind of ICO crazes of 2018 and the crash and yeah, I think I really was becoming more obsessed with what does blockchain mean at like a bigger level from a, just like a decentralized nature and like how, my entire career up to that point, just like sort of thinking like what all would need to be re -architected in this way of like a decentralized blockchain based way. Oh yeah, for sure. So, tell us about book .io, how did that idea come about and what are the different services? How does it work and so forth? Yeah. So, Yeah. you know, one of the biggest hindrances in crypto in my mind has always been just like mass adoptability, right? Like making it accessible to the masses. A lot of times, like I pick on my mom and just say, you know, my mom's not going to use this, you know? Yeah. So, you know, it occurred to me at some point that, you know, all books could be decentralized, like the actual contents of them and be blockchain based. So, you know, a big issue in the book industry, which you'll definitely experience now that you're working on a book is, you know, if you buy an ebook or an audio book from Kindle or Audible or iBooks, you're not really buying the book. You just buy a license to view the content. So, you don't actually own anything, which is why you can't sell it or give it away when you're done reading it. So, making it a book, a blockchain based asset actually changes from a digital licensing to a digital ownership model and that allows you to resell the book. So, you know, when you look at the entire landscape of crypto, there's like, you know, less than a hundred million total wallets, but there's over a billion people that buy digital books every year. So, like by far and away, like digital books are the biggest digital asset that people currently buy on like an a la carte basis since most of music and movies are streaming. So, you know, we have a focus that's very, you know, targeted at true mass adoption and, you know, experiencing the tech benefits. So, really more of a, you know, web two usability, but with a web three functionality. And then even in, you know, inside of that current licensing model, what's really radical, you know, once you buy a book, of course it's stuck on your shelf, but then it also gives the retailer, the author, the publisher, anybody, the right to remove that book from you. It's like literally coming in your house and just like taking a book off your shelf that you bought or changing any of the contents inside of it. So, our mission really became two things. One is to decentralize all of human knowledge and put all books on the blockchain so they can't be changed or taken away. And then second is incentivizing reading. So, really, you know, the core kind of the process of how it works is like we take any media asset could be, you know, a book or a music or video, we break it into a bunch of shards and we encrypt all those and store them in decentralized storage. Then we have a DAP web based reader and we also have mobile apps, mobile reading apps that basically stream those contents in, reassemble and decrypt them and then allow you to read it. So, we sort of, you know, while we use an NFT and decentralized storage and like, you know, smart contracts to program and royalties and all that, we sort of summate all that into an asset that we call a decentralized encrypted asset. So, then you truly own it. You could lend it out. You can give it away. Has huge impact, you know, not just for the end user, but also for the creators, because as you know, you'll experience with your book, you know, once, you know, the traditional model on the payment side is very, is very archaic, you know, like you, if you go the traditional route, you're going to be looking at, you know, you might get some small advance. It's not nearly what the old advances were. And, and then it's going to be probably a year to 18 months before you see anything, you know, from that book. Whereas, you know, when it's blockchain based, it's immediate, it's instant, it's paid out. So yeah, we launched the platform a little over a year ago. We've already sold over 160 ,000 books. And, and we've had some books trade as high as like $10 ,000 for like really unique books. Wow. That's pretty incredible. So, and I want to make sure I emphasize the benefits because I know there's going to be people who are new to blockchain crypto and say, oh, so what I get my book on Amazon, but, um, as the author, uh, there, this feature creates a secondary market, right? For the book is let's say, um, Joe down the street buys my book. He has on a blockchain, he finished reading it. He's like, oh, you know what? I'm going to sell this. Now, if he sells it, he's making a return. And then I, as an author also getting a royalty there. Yeah, absolutely. So that, I mean, that really is the big difference, right? It's like on a traditional print side, you know, I have the freedom when I buy a print book, I can take it to a secondhand, you know, resell bookstore, but I don't even really know what it's worth, you know, and then they're giving me, you know, pennies on the dollar and I'm happy to take it. Cause I have no way to substantiate if that's what that book is worth versus if it's digital, then I can see, you know, multiple global marketplaces and see what the trading, you know, what the actual trading price for that book is right. And then every time it sells and resells and continues, like it's giving you the creator, you know, royalties back, which is really cool from a social side too. Right. So, you know, current kind of, you know, opaque kind of wall with, with an Amazon and iBooks is that, you know, publisher author doesn't have any connection to their audience. So they can't see who owns their books. They can't market to those people. So with this, it's like, it's all on chain, right? Like we couldn't hide it. If we wanted to hide it, they can see who has their book. So then as an author, right. You could go airdrop like, you know, an extra chapter of a book to everybody that has your book, or you could allow them, you know, if they have that book, then in their wallet, they could, they could get a discount on the second book. Like you can begin to merchandise and do things that are just like impossible in the traditional version. Wow. So that's pretty incredible. You said you can airdrop like additional chapters or I don't know, additional information or anything attached to the book. That's, that's pretty incredible. Yeah. It can be a short story or, you know, extra behind the scenes type stuff, like how the book was created. It could be video stuff, author interviews, like all kinds of additional content that you can't get or deliver in a traditional method. Plus, you know, like a social interactivity of, you know, we're building out a structure for, for book clubs as well. Right. So, you know, there's not, there hasn't really been a good solve for like online book clubs. And like, part of the problem is you get so many trolls that come in and you see this on Amazon, like with reviews, right. It's like a book hasn't even come out and all of a sudden it's got, you know, 8 ,000 negative reviews in our system. We can see and verify if you've actually read it. So not only would you have to own a book, but we could, we could put it in place where you have to own it and you would have had to read it in order to get access to a book club and maybe the authors in there participating as well. Right. So it creates a richer, like, you know, environment for discussion. Oh yeah. I was going to bring up the reviews thing and verifying users because that is a game or something that is gained, I should say, with ratings and reviews and it could be manipulated. Now you mentioned that there's a lending feature. So let's say once again, Joe down the street buys my book, he, that person, he or she can lend the book out. And tell us how that, how that works. Yeah. So a lot of times what we say is, you know, everybody's a bookstore, everybody's a library. Right. Because if I, if I have the ability, you know, globally to lend out my book or to sell it, like then you could come and you could rent it for a particular price. Right. And we put that in a smart contract. You could either pay it or it could just be like a free thing. And, you know, one party's covering the transaction costs or, you know, in our method, like we haven't really talked about yet, but we have a token, you know, the person reading it could earn the token that the person that owns it could read the token that somebody else is who's, who's borrowing it is, is reading it. Like there's a ton of different ways to, to construct it, but it really changes the, the idea of, you know, it almost like makes micro libraries of everybody. Right. Then I could borrow from anyone. That's great. Yeah. Because I think about that sometimes I see different books and I'm like, I don't know if I want to buy this or necessarily, and I don't want to have a ton of books in, in, in my home. I do appreciate physical books, but I do have some digital books, but to be able to rent something and then just go see, you know, is this, is this good or whatever, and, you know, I actually want to own this. That makes sense. So tell us about the incentivization of getting folks to read. Is that how the token plays a part in the ecosystem? And if you can tell us about the book token. Yeah, definitely. So it really, it really does like an issue inside of, of the publishing industry, really. And when you start to look at the statistics behind it, it's like, you know, people do buy books and the publishing industry in general is hoping that people read those books, but a lot of times it becomes like just very commoditized. And it's like, they're just trying to sell you the next book and selling the next book. And so when you look at the stats on like how many people per year are reading and like averaging down, and it's like, what we're trying to do is build in an incentive program. So people actually consume this knowledge because very clear data, you know, supports when people read books like society, like definitely progresses, there's less crime, there's more, you know, GDP. So the, you know, that kind of secondary part outside of decentralizing the incentivizing portion of it is we have a read to earn system. So whenever you get a book, you read it, you're earning tokens while you're reading it. And we have kind of a whole distribution schedule and like how the mechanics of all that work. We just released a new white paper that details in kind of great detail, like how all that functions. And then we actually have a initial token offering going on right now as well. We waited a long time to do that. Like we launched the product, we launched all the apps. We started selling books before, you know, and a lot of it was just like from a regulatory reason of wanting to do things exactly the right way. Oh yeah. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Now there was news that Mark Cuban was collaborating with book .io to release an NFT ebook on the Polygon blockchain. Can you tell us about that and how that partnership came about? Yeah, for sure. So Mark was actually one of our earliest investors and came on board. And at the time we were Cardano based. So we argued back and forth a lot about other chains, which we had always had a very multi -chain strategy, which I'll say real quick too. Like our, you know, we deployed to four different blockchains. We deployed to Ethereum, to Polygon, to Cardano and to Algorand. But yeah, Mark was one of our first investors in. And so we worked through his publisher as well with him, created a bunch of different, the way that our construct kind of works is, we don't limit a book to like a single book cover, like it can have tons of different book covers. So that makes those different covers collectible for different reasons. So with him, I think we did about 400 different covers. Some of those were like rendered pictures of like him fighting sharks and stuff, like all kinds of fun stuff. And he actually thought it was really, really cool. So it just gives you a whole lot more flexibility. And I'll say too, like on the investor side, like Mark's been a great investor, like great advisor, lots of great like networking. I think I was a little hesitant, like just from all that, you know, what you see on Shark Tank, but like his group's fantastic. You know, we really only have two other investors. We have Ingram Content, which is the world's largest book distributor, and they actually distribute and warehouse all the books for Amazon. And then we also have Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House, and they're the largest trade publisher. So we've tried to really be selective about our investors and working within the industry. But yeah, Mark's been great and all the guys at Polygon, the Polygon team has been great to work with as well. That's awesome. Are there other publishers that you're targeting and trying to work with and, you know, what's your strategy? Is it getting them to integrate book .io as another option? Tell us about that. And I don't know how much you can, you know, tell us about your strategy. Yeah. Yeah. So we've I think we, you know, we're somewhere around 20, maybe publishers or so that we've we've had sign up. You know, the publishing industry is very splintered. There's there's basically five main, you know, the big five publishers and they own a bunch of imprints and then there's a bunch of kind of mid tier and smaller ones. And so, like, you know, some total like our last publishing company, like we had close to 200000 different publishers signed with us. You kind of have to go like some of them you get like in big and big batches, right? Some of them are just like one on one. So like a lot of it right now, and especially over the last kind of beginning or last year was just a lot of experimentation, right? So it was going to publishers that we've worked with before in the past and saying, Hey, let's do like a test project together so we can like see what happens and gather some data and make some choices. So like this year's like much more on like the scale up side. We're going to be releasing audio books as well. And delving so into that and like how we do more mass ingestion. But, you know, ultimately, it's like what we're introducing back in is not necessarily say, you know, you know, we think we'll just dominate Amazon and it goes away or anything like that. It's more of a both end, right? Like you could, you know, I see that as like licensing and like streaming almost. And this is like ownership, right? So for the for the audiences and the authors and the people creators that care about ownership, like we provide like that mechanism and all the benefits that go with it. And it reintroduces the, you know, um, just the law of supply and demand, right? When it's digital licensing, there's, there's an infinite supply. It drives down, uh, you know, the price when there's a limited supply, then the price actually makes a difference. So then I can buy a book, you know, for $20, I can read it and maybe it's gone up in value and I can sell it for, you know, 25 or something. Even if I could sell it for half of what I bought it for, I still get more back than, than I do. If I buy that as an, you know, a licensed book. Yeah, no, that's great. And I love the secondary market options that open up with this new world of blockchain and tokenization. So Joshua, you know, you mentioned Amazon, uh, you guys are certainly a disruptive platform. Uh, if I could put it that way, let's say Amazon comes knocking on your door and saying, Hey, we want to acquire you. We want to integrate book .io into our, because we got the biggest marketplace, you know, what would be your thought process? And would you say yes, depending on the number? Yeah. I mean, you know, we get that question sort of semi often, which is kind of funny. Um, you know, I, I think that, uh, if, if this, if the situation was right and an Amazon was, you know, if, if we, if it was functioned in a way that like it kept the core model, right. So like if they didn't, uh, if, if the idea was to integrate and like expand what currently exists into digital ownership, right. Like, I think that makes sense. And some of the stuff they've done with like avalanche and, you know, some of the integration stuff, it's like, I think they, they see that, I think they're a bit more hesitant just from the regulatory perspective to like jump in to that kind of thing. And what we're doing is definitely, you know, quite, quite a bit different, but like, you know, we're, we're doing great. Like the team's grown in a bear market. Like we're adding employees and we're, you know, we're right at profitable. So we don't have any like reason to, to try to rush out and sell. And I think we're going to continue to grow. And I think we're, you know, we have an, you know, community that's, that has materialized behind it that just really agrees with the ethos of, you know, you really should own the things that you buy. So I don't see us, um, selling anytime soon. And even if we did, it would only be to like expand and, um, you know, continue the mission not to, to, uh, to end it or have it just shelved, you know? Oh yeah. I mean, I certainly, I think you and I being in this space, we can certainly agree. This is the future with block tokenization and fractionalization, secondary markets, and much more. It's just the adoption curve. And, uh, just like web one had its adoption curve web two, and now web three has its time. Um, you know, you mentioned Algorand, uh, polygon, Cardano and so forth. Are you planning to expand to other chains as well? Uh, yeah, we probably will. We don't have any plans to expand to any others. Right. Right now, um, we've done some interesting things with, with a few of the chains. Um, we gave a book away at consensus with Algorand to all the attendees. Like we're, we're doing some other expansion stuff or we'll be announcing some, some really cool stuff we're about to do with polygon as well. Um, so just trying to work with, with the chains that we have right now. And, you know, a big issue for publishers is really, uh, you know, I mean, when you get down to it, it's like they chop down trees to make print books. Right. So they, at first were very adverse to, um, to anything blockchain based, right. Especially when it was, you know, like when Ethereum was proof of stake. Um, so they, some of them have had corporate mandates where they would only work with it with a proof of work and they would only work with a proof of stake chain. So, you know, the ones that we've selected, I think, uh, encompass like a, a, a decent size portion of the market, not to say we won't integrate, but like, you know, kind of a thesis on being a multi -chain company is that we really want to be a platform. So creators could deploy to other chains. So we've talked to a couple of others as well. We just haven't put anything official on the roadmap yet. Hmm. Now more of a personal question for me and maybe other authors who are going to watch and listen to this, we'll have this question. So like I'm already in the process. I'm, I'm signed with a publisher. The book is right on tentative date launch next year. Could I go that traditional route, but also integrate with book .io and, you know, have you guys thought about a strategy for authors like myself who, you know, we would want to do both and how would that work? Yeah, for sure. So I think today, like of the hundred something books that we've done, like, um, a little over a third of them have been with, um, with publishers or with, um, with authors. So, you know, basically the way it works is, um, you know, you would just connect this with your publisher and then we work through like exactly what kind of program you would want to do. Right. So, um, we just kind of define those details. Um, we walked through with the publisher, what, you know, exactly how it works most of the time. Like, you know, we're doing limited quantity sort of collectible type stuff right now, but we have the capability to do like a mass, like we actually just, uh, sold a book yesterday that, you know, wasn't necessarily a collectible. It had just a regular singular cover. That's the same cover that's on the print book. Um, and, uh, you know, and it's sold out in like 20 seconds or something. Right. So the publisher's super excited because they've never seen anything like that in publishing. Um, and so it's a great way to drive, like kind of viral traffic and like excitement. So what we found too, is what ends up happening. We've seen this like multiple times in a row is like, we would do something with an author and then it will directly correlate to an increase in print sales because people get that book, they're excited about it. Then they would go and they're like, Hey, actually, you know, I want to own both. And so that's actually one of the things we're working on with our, our, um, uh, partnership with, with Ingram is what we call mint and print so that you could just buy the digital and automatically get the physical, uh, dropshipped to you at the same time. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's really cool. Um, so walk us through the user experience. Um, let's say someone's listening to this and like, you know, I want to go check out book .io. Maybe they have some books that I'll be interested in. Is there, obviously you have a website, is there an app and with purchasing, um, is it crypto and Fiat or both? Yeah. So, uh, so, I mean, we're trying to make it, um, very much, like I said, you know, web to functionality. So it's very easy to sign up. Um, we do take credit cards. So, um, on, uh, you know, you can, you can buy a book with a credit card. It's easy to set up an account. And actually like the, uh, the, the giveaway things that we're doing, the promotional stuff, like you don't even have to have a wallet. Um, we're getting to the point where you won't, you won't even have to have a wallet. You don't have to store seed phrase. You don't have to do any of that. All of it's like self -driven kind of in the background. Um, and so you don't have to buy with crypto. You don't have to know anything about crypto, um, and just making it real easy onboarding process for like, you know, the billion plus people that are honestly just not going to go take the time to learn crypto. Yeah. I've been talking a lot about that recently. With a variety of folks. Um, how do we make it easy for the next billion people? And like you, I've kind of used my mom, my dad as an example. Right. Cause like, they don't know that, like they see the wallet addresses. They're like, what the hell is that? They're scared of it. Right. It's intimidating. I still have to show my mom how to do certain things on her smartphone. So I, you know, but certainly like she's interested in, in crypto and blockchain and, you know, I've invested some of her funds in it, but yeah, to your point. How do we make it easy for the next billion people have the capabilities, but make it make the gooey easy for them. Right. Yeah. One of the funniest comments I got recently, which I won't say who it came from. Um, somebody within my family, um, was like, wait a minute, there's more than one blockchain. Cause like they thought blockchain was like internet, you know, thought it was one big blockchain, you know, which like from the outside, it was like, I never really thought about that, but it's like, if you really didn't know anything about it, you might think like, blockchain is just like internet. And they're like, you know, maybe there's only one and it's like, it's just, it's such a barrier. And so I feel like a lot of times, like in the crypto side, like we're in this bubble where it's like, you know, we're really excited about the technology and stuff, but other people just don't, they don't have the, it's not like, you know, intelligence thing. It's just like, they don't have the time to like onboard and figure all that stuff out. So like, how do we, how do we meet them where they are, bring the solutions and like the benefit of web three and what it actually provides to them, like directly to them. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think more, more companies building in a space need to think about that. Not just for the crypto native folks here, but yeah, like you said, the next billion people who, you know, they've heard about it in passing, they don't, they haven't used any type of crypto or done anything and we got to make it easy for them. So what's on the remainder of your roadmap for 2023? We do have quite a bit of stuff planned. So a lot of it, you know, like I said, you know, we launched like a year ago, so we're really trying to kind of scale up in a lot of different spots. So you know, at the top of that list right now is, is definitely audio books. And then we have a marketplace also that we're launching. And actually on the audio book side, we have one of the larger audio book companies that we just signed with, which is super exciting to have some like celebrity read audio books. And that's like a real growing market segment as well, just in general within publishing, which is very exciting. We have a lot of AI tools and development that are maybe more focused on publisher author, like, you know, helping them out you know, continue updating the reading apps. And then we have some really big author launches coming up that are going to be like, they're pretty massive, like celebrity level authors that are going to be launching some projects with us, which is super exciting. No, that's awesome. Well, I certainly after this conversation, you and I need to chat because of my own book. But yeah, that's exciting, man. And I love the idea of well, you know, you mentioned it's a growing part of the market of celebrity read books. Yeah, I certainly would want to listen to Morgan Freeman read a book.
Crypto Banter
A highlight from A Massive Crypto Bull Market Is Starting VERY VERY SOON! Crypto Banter 649K subscribers
"This special episode of Crypto Banter is brought to you by Isla Micron, a digital asset designed to create ethical finances in crypto. We're back in Singapore. In fact, right there, the Formula One is going to start this Sunday. More importantly, this is Asia's financial district, and we're here for token 2049. It's the biggest crypto conference I've ever seen. You've got more people and they're excited. There's a great energy. They're talking about big things, like what's going to power the next bull market? Is it going to be the ETF, the institutionalization of crypto? Is it going to be AI? That is what people are talking about here, and the energy is insane. Let's go take a look inside. Welcome to Singapore. The energy here is absolutely insane. We speed up the stairs into the hall, right to our Crypto Banter set. We'll be planted here all countries, talking to top guests, market movers, market innovators, extracting alpha, bringing people in crypto together, and delivering the best that the week has to offer right here to you. I mean, get the vibe here, get the energy that's going on here. Unbelievable. There's no bear market in Asia, that's for sure. Biggest conference I've ever been to. We're surrounded by no less than what makes this market go round. On the one side of us is Ripple. On the other side, Casper. Across from us, Clayton and Polkadot. Down the way, Cardano, Chainlink, Algorand, Antron, Layer 1's oracles, and more, building on the backs of Bitcoin and Ethereum in this ever -growing ecosystem of technology, currency, information and community. But with institutions and mainstream Web 1 companies pouring in, like Google, Bakkt, Sony, CME, and ETF applications from big banks, at what cost? And at what point in the battle are we? All right, so we're here at token 2049. As you can see, I'm running the show here. Well, let's go. This is the entrance. It's much bigger than last year. You're going to see a lot of the big protocols, a lot of the big projects here. You've got Avalanche over there. You've got... What is this? Uh, wow, look at this. This is the entrance to token 2049. Thank you, ladies. Ciao. As we walk in, it's all about exchanges. We've got Bitkiet over here. Big, big, big presence here. We've got Leo Messi, obviously, you know, the ambassador. Definitely, definitely my favorite, favorite, favorite player. I can tell you where we are. Singapore, Asia's de facto financial figurehead, and the Marina Bay Sands, its futuristic fortress, and the center where we've all come. 10 ,000 people plus, and here's what we see. A bullish setup of battle with a volatile mix of regulation, AI, and the halving, all facing us ahead of 2024. Bitcoin price end of 2024, $120 ,000, that's what it says. Look into the ball. Speed ahead, and you'll hear Ripple's CEO himself talking about all things regulation. We can't pretend that, like, government regulation doesn't matter. But here's the overwhelming takeaway from all these market experts. We've definitely hit the bottom, and things are looking bullish. But don't take my word for it. Take Arthur Hayes'. So that when this thing starts rhyming, potentially, it has a lot of room to grow, and from a low level, it doesn't take that much of effort in terms of money coming in the system, but it's going to go up 220x. Did he just say 220x? I think he did. It's not just bullish by setup, but it's also bullish by philosophy, according to Bellagio and to the Winklevoss twins. I think that's actually what everybody here shares. It's free speech, it's free market, it's voluntary, it's entrepreneurial, it's global, sort of the Utopia idea of the open internet of Web 1. And indeed, if this Web 3 narrative is here to stay, everyone from CZ to Nick Carter and Jake Bruckman from CoinFund to Sandeep at Polygon all believe that AI will play a crucial role. It needs to preserve its competitive advantage in terms of being able to on -board more and more developers. And developers and builders continue to do just that. Building, especially ahead of the all -important halving, which is less than nine months away. Even building on Bitcoin, like the ordinals, Munib, Alion, Stacks. And what Willy Woo says is that there's much more activity on chain these days. What you see here is the maturity of the market on the Bitcoin network. Another bullish indicator, gaming. More games than ever here at token2049, and its principal proponents here promoting Web 3 gaming from Pixelmon to Yuga Labs to Animoca and many, many more. As you can see, the conference is so full, people are sitting here on the floor, on stage. The two biggest countries that are looking at exporting Web 3 games right now is Korea and China. Ah yes, Asia taking center stage here with the regulatory uncertainty in the US. We're in Singapore helping spearhead crypto adoption on this continent. In fact, one of the highlights of the whole conference and one of the biggest announcements was Jeremy Alair from Circle announcing a partnership with Grab, the pan -African Asian app integrating USDC. We're focused on working with established consumer internet companies, established payment companies, digital wallet companies, commerce companies. So you're going to see partnerships with a lot of different firms like that, that we continue to roll out.
Tech Path Crypto
A highlight from 1251. SHOCKING Visa + Solana Test Results | MASSIVE Crypto Payments Update!!
"All right, so today's topic is going to be talking about crypto payments and some of the biggest companies that are involved in this, including Visa and PayPal. What's going to be interesting, though, is how crypto payments may be integrating into the traditional finance system. We'll break all this down for you. There's going to be some interesting information around some of the blockchains that you'll recognize. You guys don't want to miss this one for sure. So, my name is Paul Berra. Welcome back in to Tech Path. All right, so I want to thank our sponsor today, and that is Tangem. All you have to do is visit tangem .com. You can learn a little bit more about self -custody. They have a really cool aspect of how they do self -custody. It's done through a wallet versus a hardware. Now, many of you guys have probably used hardware devices before. This makes it a lot easier. It's an NFC. It just slides right in front of a really slick app on your phone and gives you that secure connection to your self -custody wallet. And there's a couple things you can do. If you go over to their website, one thing that kind of shows a little bit about how this works, the card just slides right there in front of the phone itself, and the app pops right up. Now, you can get into all of your assets. They do have a three -card package available. That's the one I would recommend going with. And then also, on October, early October, if you go to their website, you can actually pre -order their new version that can give you an actual seed phrase. So you've got a couple of versions available, the basic and then the more advanced seed phrase. So you choose. If you like a real simple, quick, easy one, go with the basic version. Always order the three -pack so in case you lose one. Anyway, that's going to help you guys out. Cool thing is you're going to get an additional discount by just using our code down below. So just make sure and put PBN in there. And it helps the channel out. All right, so let's get over to the topic today of Visa and what's happening. So Visa did a deep dive on the Solana blockchain along with a whole slew of other blockchains, primarily that were attached to USDC. Here's what their findings were. Let me kind of scan in up here. First, over the past year, team at Visa has been closely following the technical innovation behind the blockchain scalability. You guys may not be able to read that a little bit. Let me zoom in on that a little bit. There you go. And then they go into what they were testing. They have Visa's capacity to execute more than 65 ,000 transactions per second. Solana has not exceeded transactions at that scale. They average around 400 user -generated transactions per second TPS. So it typically surges to more than 2 ,000 users generated during periods of peak demand. This is a significant level of demonstrated throughput, making it viable to test and pilot payment use cases. So in comparison, Ethereum handles 12 TPS. Bitcoin manages around 7. This is all coming from Visa. Further into it, while blockchains like Bitcoin and ETH process transactions sequentially. So this is interesting because as we've talked about this before, Solana's architecture allows for multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously. So that's the advantage of the Solana blockchain. And you can kind of see the average transaction fee right here in this chart. Solana is that orange line, very stable and very low versus what we see with Bitcoin and ETH that are all gastro. Popularity of NFT release could increase network congestion, making consumer point -to -point transactions, which may be happening at the same time, more expensive and economically infeasible. This has happened on many NFT drops in the past. We've seen various ones that have run into these kind of congestion problems. So this is a real issue that is facing blockchain. But more importantly, if you get into payments, you're going to have a lot of payments happening at the same time across the network. So you've got to be able to handle that. Further into this, they go in and says Bitcoin may take up to 60 minutes. That's one example. And then they show all the blockchains they tested. Solana right there, Blocks & Tilt Confirmation, Time. There was Avalanche right there, right at the same level. Flow coming in, Algorand, Stellar, Tron, Arbitrum, ETH, and then Polygon. So you can kind of see the problems that would occur right here in terms of the speed. Right now Solana is clearly the winner, Avalanche coming directly behind it, and Flow could be coming in there as well. So you look at the ability to transact at the level that Visa needs to go to. These are very, very important scenarios that have to play out. Fire Dancer. So this shows a little bit that Visa is paying attention. Fire Dancer stands out for its most potential and brings substantial performance enhancements as evidenced by a live demo. This was 600 ,000 TPS. Huge. Outside Ethereum, Solana is one of the only chains to have multiple fully independent validator clients. Now I know a lot of you guys are probably saying, Paul, you're just a Solana shell. I get that so much on Twitter. I could care less about any of these technologies. What I do care about is the technology's success, because if it can change things, then it has a use case. I don't care if it's Solana, Avalanche, Cardano, whoever can drill down. This is Visa. These guys are not playing games. They're testing this stuff and they're going to find out which blockchain can walk the walk. This is what we're talking about. So meeting modern demands. These are some of the biggest reasons that we decided to expand our stablecoin settlement pilot to include transactions over the Solana network. Kudos for Solana. As we pilot our stablecoin settlement functionality on Solana, we plan to test whether they can beat and or meet the demands of a modern corporate treasury operation. This is not a done deal. Solana still has to perform. This is going to be a hard, I think, level to match up to when you look at traditional transactions. And this means a lot in the payment ecosystem for sure. I want to go to this clip right here with Tolle talking about this. Let's cut to that. I'm very excited that Visa chose to use Solana. And I think it came about from the strength of the Solana ecosystem and the engineering team and kind of the technologies that have been built over the last five years. I think if you look at the data and the stats, it's pretty obvious that Solana is the cheapest and one of the fastest networks out there. And USDC and Solana is my favorite version of the US dollar. What does this announcement mean for Solana? Are there more new partnerships with financial institutions in the works? Well, it's up to those institutions to make the decision. I'm hoping that when they see Visa choose to build on Solana, that they will also consider the network as well.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from Ethereum Spot ETF: Bullish Or Nothingburger?
"Oh, welcome to the morning. Ow! My foot. Welcome to the morning stream, everybody. We're going to discover some crypto news today. It is September 7th. It's 11 .31 a .m. Eastern Standard Time. 8 .30 for the West Coast, folks. They're still waking up. They're still getting sleep out their eyes. Is it sleep or sleet? I remember I used to think it was sleet out your eyes. Sleet. What a weird name, right? I don't know. I never heard sleet out your eyes. Eye boogers? What do you call eye boogers? Eye boogers is what I usually say. Chat, let us know. Guys, make sure you're hitting that like today. We got some huge news with Van Eck talking about the ETH ETF, also Ripple Labs. We got Ripple Labs CTO revealing some secret XRP news, but we're going to try to guess because someone put out a list of like, hey, I bet you're going to do four or five of these things. He said, we're definitely doing two of them. So we're going to look at that list and maybe try to make some XRP predictions. It'll be pretty cool. We got the China ban, some Cardano news, and Reddit NFL stuff. Where are the NFL fans at? What's your team, Tim? I don't have an NFL team. I love the NFL. I grew up in Tampa, so you could maybe say the Bucks, but I don't really like the Bucks either. I don't know. I always have a team I choose. Right now, I really like more recent years what Detroit is doing. So I'm kind of a lion's fan. What is it? Barry Sanders? I was a Barry Sanders fan. Barry Sanders is a goat. I was but no, I love the coach at Detroit right now. If you guys like Detroit Lions, let him know in chat. Tim, do you know how much a pirate pays to get his ear pierced? I feel like that's an obvious answer that it's not coming to the tip of my brain right now. So go ahead and tell me the punchline. It's a buccaneer. Oh my God. There we go. That's good one. You hated it, didn't you? I'm sorry. All right, let's just get to the crypto news, folks. All right, CoinGecko, what is going on, everybody? We are down a little bit, but not too much. Let's hit that refresh. I lied. We're up, baby. We're moving up. We're up 0 .8%. It looks like market cap still largely coming in at 1 .08 trillion. 24 -hour volume is down slightly, $31 billion. Bitcoin dominance not really moved that much. Looks like it's actually down 0 .2 % and gas coming in at 27 Gwei. All right, let's look at the markets. We have Bitcoin up half of 1 % and Ethereum up only 0 .3%. Really not exciting news off that ETF, so the markets haven't reacted that strongly. BNB up 0 .4%, XRP up 0 .4%. Keep scrolling though, we don't really see too much stuff. I mean, just to get into the single digits, you got to get out of the top 10, go all the way down to Tron. Tron is up 1 .6. Very, very boring. So let's look at the exciting charts here. This is the biggest gainers and the biggest losers of the day. When you say biggest loser of the day, don't say DZ or don't say DZ's portfolio, although it might be, we're going to find out. The biggest gainer is Render. Render is up 6%. Stellar. Stellar was down and beaten down hard yesterday. I thought Stellar was down earlier today, so it's made a little turn out. Yeah, let's click on that chart. We'll see once we click on that seven -day, you can kind of see where we went from a negative into positive. Yeah, so you can see right there at one point, this is about 24 hours ago right around here. So yeah, at one point, yeah, it was just down and down heavy, but now since we kind of capitulated from that bottom, it's looking a little bit better. It is up, let's click on it one more time, was it 4 .2%, Iota up 4 .1%, Casper continuing to leave the station without DZ on board. Casper, please turn around, hit the brakes, do a U -turn, crash into a ditch, do something, let me pump up a bag, let me fill up a bag of Casper. We have Maker up 3 .4%, Algorand up 2 .6%, so I know AJ's excited about that one. Let's look at the biggest losers, though, the biggest losers of the day in the top 100 crypto market cap here. We have number one, not too much, folks, it's only down 1 .5%, that is nothing for crypto, especially with a gaming slash gambling token like RollBit, followed by Shiba Inu down 0 .7%. But then the graph, the graph is, you know, firmly under a dime, now coming in at $0 .08. I think, you know, it touched around a nickel, even a little bit lower at one point, let's just see, not even that long ago. Get out of here, yeah, yeah, yeah, cookies, something, yeah, whatever, I like them. All right, let's click the one year. Yeah, we got close to a nickel, I think it went below a nickel on some exchanges. But when you look at the 30 -day, it's looking down, but maybe find a little bit of support at this 8 .5%, so it looks like it touched it right there, touched it right there, and still kind of hanging out above it. Do you like the graph? No, I mean, I don't own any of it, so. How do you feel about the graph of the graph right here? I prefer charts to graphs for a trading view, but, you know, it's not worthless to see the charts or the graphs on, was that Core Market Cap or was that Gecko? Oh, this is Gecko. Yeah, they're not worthless, I just, it's easier to see a chart, so. Okay, okay, so you're more of a chart guy, not a graph guy, so you like Magellan, not, I don't know, I don't know my, I don't know where you're going with that one, yeah. I don't know, some sort of worldwide maritime chart person, I mean, Drew, Drew probably knows. Oh, God, they weren't escaping me. Can you look at the stars and know where you're going? Absolutely, that's what they did for thousands of years. It was like the North Star, that's about the extent of my knowledge. Listen, the fact that, do you just know that people were constantly going back and forth from Europe to different places in the United States in a time where all they had was the stars and they kept going at the same place over and over again, those stars worked pretty good. All right, all right, well, you know who's the star of 2021? Some say it was Ethereum. Ethereum, you know, blew up, had huge, huge gains, outsized relative to Bitcoin, but then when it fell, also fell outsized relative to Bitcoin. Well, it looks like ETH is trying to get another ETF on the board here. You know, first, got a lot of companies that started with Bitcoin, and now we have VanEck officially starting the in the coming days. The race for the spot ETF has officially begun after the Chicago board options exchange will ultimately start the clock for an SEC decision. Let's see, they filed these to be listed on CBOE's BZX exchange as the Chicago board options exchange and a pair of tweets. Looks like as opposed to the previously submitted filings, this finally means that the countdown is now in motion. The race is on saying, guys, this is a long, long deadline from now. We're not talking about next month. We're not talking about next week. Talking about March of next year. 3 -2 -3, 3 -2 -3 -2 -4. No, no, 5 -2 -3 -2 -4 there. Keep scrolling, keep scrolling. ARK Invest and 21Shares teamed up to file the S1 of the SEC on the 6th, although VanEck's filing dates back to July of 2021. They were trying to do this years and years ago, but now maybe the SEC might take it seriously. On the 17th, SEC reportedly singled its intention to Ethereum approve futures products while several firms including Grayscale and BlackRock are currently fighting to get the Spot Bitcoin. So we have ETH futures, Spot Bitcoin, and now we have Spot ETF in the process right now. Alright, so what is going to happen though? Some people are saying approval is inevitable. You know what's also inevitable? The fact that you're going to hit the like button in the next three seconds. Hurry, hurry, I'm starting to count down three. You only have two seconds to move the mouse, grab it one. You feel that? Oh my God, it's just a huge wave of relief and awesomeness just crashed over your body. Alright, let's talk about this approval though. Approval is inevitable. SEC Insider primes crypto market for a $15 trillion Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP price ETF game changer. These major cryptocurrencies could be headed into one of their biggest ever months. One crypto watcher has said it's going to be crazy. He said it's going to be like a movie, man. Last night was a movie. Now former SEC chair Jay Clayton has said eventual approval of a Spot ETF is inevitable following the SEC punting a decision on the ETF filings from the managers who looked after a combined $15 trillion until October. Looks like he's maybe looking at the fact that they punted the ball. They didn't go for it on fourth down. That's for you, football fan. Maybe because they didn't say no, and they said, I'm going to kick the can down the road. Instead of saying no, he's saying a yes is inevitable. But the signaling of the kicking of the can down the road. But it's not all roses. It's not all balloons and clown faces for Ethereum. There was a hack in this summer reporting. This is the largest fishing hack in history for Ethereum at least. It looks like this crypto whale lost $24 million in staked Ethereum to a fishing attack. Looks like they were transferred into the fully automatic exchange fixed float. Never heard of it. Here we have Joaquin, Joaquin dancing down the stairs. Cryptocurrency whale has fallen victim to a massive fishing attack, losing millions in staked Ether on the liquid staking provider Rocket Pool.
Tech Path Crypto
"algorand" Discussed on Tech Path Crypto
"The other point that's kind of funny, this was just a tweet. I'll show the tweet in a second. But obviously Hoskinson, I think he does this with everybody right now, but he's trying to get Algorand proposing a sidechain collaboration and Algorand is kind of like not having any of it right here. This was just funny. I just thought it'd be a good joke. Anyway, as you can see, might be interested. But listen, if you believe in Algorand or if you believe in Cardano, there's some things you would have to look at here, some of which would be in the reference to market cap and the current size of each of these projects. Just to give you an example, here is Algorand right here, and you can kind of see a little bit here on market cap right there. Total supply almost fully circulated right now, so that's a big deal. And market cap setting at right now about $740 million. So if you like this project, and again, trading at one of its lowest points in a while, so nine cents right there. Let me go to the all-time just to show you how far down this has been at. Right there is market cap at $746. Yeah, right at $746 right now, trading currently at one of its lowest points ever. I think the last time we saw this was, gosh, all the way back in 2021. So anyway, all of that might be good timing here for Algorand. And then if you look at just the charts in general, Algorand setting here at number 46, right there, you can kind of see their market cap right there. I'll zoom in on that a little bit for you guys in case you can't see it. All right, now let's take a look at who could they leap over. A lot of projects here, they could easily top going into what they might be competing with, which would be more in the lines of Cardano. And of course, Cardano being a top 10 token. You can kind of see just the alignment of a lot of these. Right here is Cardano holding a $9 billion market cap. So big difference here, guys. I think these are the kind of projects if you are thinking, hey, what's going to blow up in the next run? Is this one that you would consider? I'd love to get your feedback. Make sure and smash the like button. I want to play one more clip for you that goes into their market cap growth. Listen into what he had to say. Now, how do you sort of penetrate the market, right? How can you sort of go from a blockchain that maybe is in the top 40 coins to top 20? And how important is it to sort of be sort of in that upper echelon in terms of developer interest, folks building on the chain? Even if you have the best technology, maybe if you don't have the best marketing, it might make things difficult. But I believe that after this speculation goes down, what remains is the blockchain technology. So just remember, T plus two is the settlement time right in the financial market. T is the time of the transaction and two is the number of days to settle. In two days, anything can happen. So I really believe that technology is going to be important and to be technologically ready and positioned for the next wave of real world application of blockchain is what really matters. All right, so if you've been following our channel for some time and maybe you're brand new to this, this is where you get a chance to pick up real alpha. And I feel like it because we started reporting on Algorand over two years ago. And if you look back at just the charts, I just want to show you where we were back in, we'll go, let's say January 2021 where Algorand started its move. That is a 412% gain right there. Even if you go into the last time that we did a big interview with them, that was in July of two years ago, still holding at 122%. Now, when you think about that, because many people, including us, we were buying and selling Algorand trading in and out of it. Granted, that was during a period of time in which we saw markets at all time high. But the point being is now that you see a market correction from that all time high, we won't go from the wicks. We'll just go from the top right here at about $1.80 to where it's trading right now. This is a 94% market drop. So this is something that we see often in these cycles, in these bear cycles are and if you believe in projects that are doing these kinds of initiatives and especially if they're starting to potentially release some projects advancements, then this is the perfect time to be looking at some of these projects. Not saying that you should invest in these, but these are the markers that we watch for in all of these kinds of tokens. And again, it goes back to, do you believe in the project? Do you like the team? And if you do, has it fallen enough in this bear market at 94% down, literally from its top, maybe Algorand is one of those that might be one for consideration. All right, so if you guys like these project breakdowns, what I'd ask for you to do is drop some comments and the tokens you would like us to maybe break down for you. I can't promise all of them, but we try to do more and more project breakdowns, especially in these times where there are some potentials to really identify. So make sure and just drop some comments down below. We love all that. If you're not part of our diamond circle, make sure and get in. It's very easy and it's simple. Just click the link down below. It's a place where you'll get additional content. We do podcasts, all sorts of additional TA analysis, market analysis, a thing we call the market mover. All that is done over in the diamond circle. All you have to do is click the link down below. And of course, if you want to follow me, it's out there on Twitter, at paulbarron. We'll catch you next time right here on Tech Back.
Tech Path Crypto
"algorand" Discussed on Tech Path Crypto
"All right. So this, of course, was in 2022, and the event was around the idea of NFTs used in the travel industry. TravelX was the project, I should say. They hit a milestone. A million passengers right now with their NFT tickets. Right here on their Twitter page, we take immense pride in announcing over a million passengers are already experiencing NFT ticketing technology, and this has really just started when you think about where they've come from, which is just less than a year ago, and they've already started to accelerate and have not really cracked into the major air carriers. So when you see this going into major air carriers, this could be one that is very interesting, especially around ticketing, and they're right. I mean, you heard the host there talk. He was talking to Silvio about the idea of Ticketmaster, because there are some problems with Ticketmaster. We've talked about this before. NFTs, smart contracts, these can help to fix this. Could Algorand be one of the projects that actually goes in and nails it? We'll see. A couple other aspects. If you look at just TravelX's concept here, you'll notice here. Let me zoom in on this a little bit so you can kind of see the NFT ticket concept here, but what is interesting is where these NFTs' new channels could start to become enabled. So new channels, you'll see things like Coinbase, Binance, OpenSea, Amazon, Alibaba, then into ideas around social sharing like Instagram, et cetera. All of those could essentially find them their way into these new ways to interact with getting tickets, even into idea of reselling. So it starts to change the future of how tickets and travel, and even in some cases, entertainment will be managed, anything that requires ticketing out there. So I think this is another big one that TravelX is on top of. Another aspect to this, concert ticket turmoil, getting into Ticketmaster, kind of to their point that they were referencing there was a couple of points here I wanted to hit on. And this is talking about fans who have to kind of navigate these prices, which are ridiculous in many cases, fake tickets, bots, et cetera, endless queues, kind of a blurred line between verified sites and shady ones. When you're buying, if you've ever bought a ticket for a big name artist, you know what I'm talking about. It's a difficult track. And in many cases, both bad tickets and good tickets are being marketed almost in the same fashion. So this gets back into the potential of where blockchain could solve all of this. This was just another story talking about Taylor Swift's tickets could be useless. If they were bought from a resale site, this was kind of the point that I'm getting at. So fans have been left kind of baffled after they discovered resale sites such as Viagogo and StubHub are still advertising tickets to Swift's concerts after Ticketmaster announced that they're non-transferable. So that's another big factor that would play into this. Again, this kind of technology would solve a lot of these kind of problems. So when you look at projects and you look at major market disruption, because that's typically what some of these blockchain projects will be able to do. They will be able to do major market disruption. That moves you into this next era of Web3. And who are those winners going to be? So those are the things we're watching anytime that we can when we look at kind of the growth of some of these projects. If you look at the Algo Explorer, you can see a little bit of growth right here. But I want to go back here to April 2023. Let me zoom in on that a little bit and see if I can zoom in on that for you guys. This is April 2023. You can kind of see Algo transactions around 2 million. Look at this explosion right here to where they are right now, 3.5 million. So now maybe this isn't massive. But when you look at Algorand already being depleted to pretty much one of its lowest points ever, you look at the timing in the market, because remember, a lot of these projects almost go into hibernation mode during these bear markets. Then you look at the impact of what they've been working on over that period of time and the alignment that they've put into play for major issues like MICA, like ESG. And then you look at the use case in some of the aspects of things like travel and ticketing. And what else does Algorand have up their sleeve? That's going to be the real question is what else do they start to really release out there? One thing I will say, and this is just, you know, if you, and I'm sure you guys, if you're following Algorand already know this, but not a great NFT platform. This is one of the areas they could use a lot of innovation in, and maybe there's something starting to brew in that area. The other area that is really lacking is gaming. You can kind of see just some of the game projects that are out there. I won't say that these are not great projects. I'll just say that these are projects that they're definitely not at the front of the pipeline when it comes to Web3 gaming. So this would be another area in which Algorand could improve. So you kind of have to look at all the aspects of it.
Tech Path Crypto
"algorand" Discussed on Tech Path Crypto
"All right. So it gives you a little bit of insight to the difference between Al Garan and Bitcoin around pure proof of stake. And this is something that they've been pretty much campaigning on and have built their house on this. The other aspect that Al Garan kind of brings to the point is this whole idea of the power of randomness. And I want to play another clip here of Silvio talking about this. Listen in. I believe actually in the power of randomness. Can you generate randomness out of nothing? No. What it turns out, what you can do, you can expand randomness. What is at the basis of Al Garan is a cryptographically fair lottery. We play a game. The users select themselves based on how many algos they have. Essentially, think of it, having one algo allows you to operate a slot machine that whose labor you can only pull down once and with two possible outcomes. Most of the time, you don't win such a case. I can say anything I want about the next block. Nobody pays attention to what I say because I didn't win the lottery. The one time when I actually operate my lever and I win, I get also a winning ticket, mathematical proofs that I won my own lottery. And therefore, what I do, I disseminate on the network both my winning ticket and my opinion about the block, say, up or down. Even a national state with huge computational resources cannot alter minimally the probability of my winning. How long does it take to lower the labor? One microsecond. Now, the other question is that scalable? Yes. Distributed? Yes. Is it secure? Well, I'm going to corrupt the 1000 winners, but I have a problem. What is my problem? I don't know, do not know who the winners will be. And once I know, it's too late to corrupt them. Roughly, that's the idea. And this is the power of true randomness. Yes. The anti-controsis and the possible outcomes are as many as the elementary particle in the universe is mind-boggling. The first time you realize this is an aha moment for everybody. It is one of the things that we've talked about with the Algorand team here before. I remember when Sean came on our show for the first time. He talked about this idea of the power of randomness and why it was in a position where it couldn't be manipulated. It is one of those kind of core competencies that Algorand brings to the game. Another one that they bring to the game is their idea of carbon neutral and even carbon negative. This, of course, is the greenest blockchain technology or, and is it possible, this was an article that was written over there by their climate trade. And it kind of breaks down a couple of things within their framework. But more importantly, we actually were on with them to talk about this partnership and some of the things that they were executing on trying to create a green blockchain. And they've been able to do it to a fairly good extent. I want to go to a clip here that talks about their carbon negative benefits. Listen in. In Europe, what is happening is that already the non-financial reporting is mandatory in the European Union. And also, there is a new regulation that whenever you go to invest in an investment fund, it asks, they ask you, they have to ask you if you want your fund to be sustainable or not. What are you going to say? Same price. I want it sustainable, not to say 90, 95% of the of the of the occasions. So what is happening now is that all companies are going to run towards sustainability because if not, the asset managers that have a rating of that company, if that rating is a good, is a bad rating, they want to include that company in their folders, in the investment fund. So what is going to happen is that the shares would go down. So they are going to run towards sustainability. And then you have to do it for real because the investors every time will have more information and you cannot fake these and make greenwashing anymore, you know? All right. So that was a clip actually that we did here on the channel two years ago. And the interesting thing about that is they preceded a lot of what was happening in the development of MICA, which is the European regulation body around blockchain and crypto assets in general. And part of that, preceding that, part of that is really going in toward this whole idea of carbon neutrality. It is one of the things that is going to start to separate of how investment managers can go into certain projects. MICA has already put that into their regulatory alignment. So that's another factor right here. I want to jump over here to a quick tweet. This is from Dan Reed's Finance. Average energy usage per transaction in kilowatt ascending order. This is Hedera, Algorand, Polygon, Avax, Dot, Solana, Cardano, etc. You can kind of see the list right here on the actual usage. We played a couple and showed a few of these, but of course, Algorand right there, Hedera, Polygon, Alera 2 playing into this Avalanche, Polkadot. All of these are really the blue chips of what's happening out there in the crypto space. The difference, of course, is how you would be able to invest in those. And even if you look at Ethereum, which is way down on the list here at 238 kilowatt hours in comparison to what Algorand, which is 0.0028. So those are big factors kind of playing into this. The other thing that starts to go into this is the ISO 2022 list, which is a whole list of compliant projects and tokens. Let me jump over to that ISO list real quick, and we'll just jump into the list right here. Number one was Quant, Ripple, Stellar, Hedera, Iota, which is Miota, XDC, which we've talked a little bit with those guys before, Algorand right there, Cardano, and then VGX. So again, these are all ISO 2022. Many people have looked at what the compliancy of this is. And it's really around this idea of these tokens and cryptocurrencies being approved by centralized banking, which is part of this toward how this may play into the future of a lot of these projects, which is why some of these projects have had some pretty good accelerants, especially around a lot of the CBDC news. So if you're not aware, Algorand was part of a lawsuit along with a lot of other tokens, but Algorand and Flow obviously were some of the ones that got hit the most. They crashed all-time lows, all of this happening really around the whole idea as to what is security, what is a potential commodity. And this is where it gets into the gray area, which is what we've talked about on this channel quite a bit. I want to go over to a clip real quick. This clip will give you a little bit more of an alignment of how Algorand thinks they and what they are versus what the SEC might think. Listen in. We got financed only by selling equity in our company, which is an honorable and traditional way to do things, and our tokens we sell at auctions. What is the price? You decide the price. We never sold a token, period. At lunch, in the mainnet, we start a sequence of Dutch auctions. So we are going to see all the bids on the blockchain, so you know they're going to have a fair price. And everybody plays the same price. The typical SEO says, hey, I fixed the price, one token, two euros. How many tokens do you want? There is nothing fair about this. How can sense of a community you build if everybody is unfairly treated from day one? That somebody else got a token is unimaginable, right? All right, so I think the argument is there. It's interesting that even Chair Gensler, which formerly M &T, also with Silvio at M &T, all of that, and even Chair Gensler has kind of talked promisedly, I think to the high side around Algorand as a whole, and then obviously included them in that list. So it's an interesting thing. The other thing that you have to look at is the overall team that surrounds a lot of these projects. You guys probably heard me say this before. When you're breaking down tokens, you want to look at their, of course, tokenomics, their metrics. Obviously, you want to look at the team behind it, and then just look at the project and the eventual things that this project is trying to solve as a solution. Jumping over to their foundation CEO, this, of course, is a former JP Morgan exec. And just to give you an idea, let me kind of, I think I had some highlights here. Yeah, all right. So she was an executive director at JP Morgan for eight years, where she led public sector vision. This was in Europe, along with Middle East Africa, et cetera. All of this was on improving markets and emerging markets. Now, there's two things here that are interesting. One, JP Morgan. Two is she's very aware of what's happening in the European zone. So when you look at the advancements of MICA, which is the regulatory body now inside Europe, and you've got an executive that already understands how to navigate those waters, that's a recipe for some good success, especially if there's some alignment with MICA around the whole idea of ESG, carbon neutrality, all those kind of things that play into this. So that's another advantage for Algorand as a whole. Algorand also boosts performance in their latest protocol upgrade. A couple of points here I want to kind of flow in. The upgrade now on the mainnet reduces block time to roughly 3.3 seconds, about 10% increase in speed. That's a good one. And then Algorand has experienced, this is a big one, zero downtime since it went live in 2019. Now we can't say that for a lot of blockchains, including some of the best ones that we find out there that are being used by a lot of projects right now when you look at Solana or many others that are out there, but literally 100% uptime since 2019. Pretty impressive, I think, overall. I want to jump to this next clip, which is going to be a good one. This gets into the idea of how Algorand's use case could go into the travel industry. Listen to this one right here.
Tech Path Crypto
"algorand" Discussed on Tech Path Crypto
"All right, so getting into a little bit of a project breakdown for you guys today. It's going to be one that I think will give you an insight to one of the blue chip tokens that have been around for a while. And I think some of you have probably invested in this one, maybe looked at it for over the past couple of years. We're going to break that one down for you. It's going to be interesting. It is Algorand. Don't miss it. My name is Paul Beryl. Welcome back into Tech Path. All right, so let's get into a couple of things here today with Algorand. We're going to give you a project update, kind of go over some history as well from where this token has come from. First I want to just kind of jump into Silvio McCauley, who is pretty much the guy behind Algorand. If you can follow him over here on his Twitter account, looks like he's got a new profile picture up there. So doing a little bit of fun-ness there. And if you don't know who Silvio is, first of all, he's a Turing Award winner, one of the highest accolades you can get as an engineer or a scientist. And Silvio, if you look over his Wikipedia page, he's known for a lot of things. But one of the things he's known for most, which I want to kind of flow into, and you guys will be a little bit surprised here when I zoom in on this, he's best known for as one of the co-inventors of Zero Knowledge Proofs. Now, of course, that technology is being utilized by a lot of blockchain projects out there. So the fact that he has done so much in this space, blockchain, but even more importantly around ZK Proofs, just shows you what the vision is for Algorand, what it might mean for the project overall. All right. So I want to get into a clip here in case maybe you're not aware of what Algorand is. It'll give you a little bit of a breakdown. Let's go to that clip real quick. Proof of work, you know, that is the first we all know. Very expensive, very slow, and generates a centralization. So expensive and fast, sometimes is okay. Expensive is low, excuse me. Now expensive and slow and centralized, no. Miners are, if you want to know my opinion, the sub-product of an incentive scheme that Nakamoto got wrong, and everybody that does proof of work copied the wrong thing. Hatoff had a great vision. I vision something distributed. They didn't say, on top of these things, I vision the rise of money pools. Who cares about money pools, right? He didn't want them. But the incentive scheme that he did, because he was not well thought out, generated all this. Okay. So these approaches do not quite work, and that's why the nearest, just a few of them, that very often you don't get free out of free. We all have good goals here, right? The question is, do we have the technology to attain our goals? That blockchains are all, and foremost, about technology. All right, so as you can see, there's a lot there from Silvio. These are, some of these clips are coming for as many as five, six, seven years ago. But this is something that I think, and many people have kind of recognized this with Al Garan, because we have a lot of people in the audience that have talked about it and rave about where Al Garan is going in the future. But he is talking about proof of stake and kind of the centralization of some projects versus decentralization, obviously Al Garan being decentralized. I also want to go into another clip here around the pure proof of stake. Listen to what he had to say there. When you put the entire economy at the mercy of a very small part, you are asking for trouble. What is the small part of the economy that must be honest for Bitcoin to work? The miners. So what do we do in Al Garan essentially is the following. The economy is represented by tokens, 10 billion tokens. And if the majority of these 10 billion tokens are in honest hands, the system is secure. Put it in another way, who can really destroy Al Garan? You need the majority of the token collude together to destroy the very economy of which they own the majority of. That's what we call pure proof of stake and is really somehow the Al Garan approach to security in blockchain.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
"algorand" Discussed on The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
"That's right, you can be a bee buzzing around in the Algorand ecosystem in just one click. The version of the one -click nodes that is out right now is the beta version but the full version will be coming out in the near future. My question is this, does the rollout of one -click nodes mean that there might be consensus rewards coming in the future? Stay tuned. In my opinion, it is so hard to not be bullish on Algorand and how well oiled that machine is. Here on the Algorand website, you can look into how intricate the ecosystem actually is. First of all, Algorand DeFi is awesome. Algorand has its own meme coins. Shout out to Coop. I'm not making this video without shouting out to Coop. You guys are awesome. It has its own lending and borrowing sites like Folk Finance. It has trading protocols and marketplaces like Tinyman. Continuing through here, they have art, music, and NFTs. I know Rand Gallery is very popular. EXA Markets isn't listed here, but I know that one is up and coming as well. Algorand has gaming, they have oracles and bridges, they have infrastructure. I think one of my favorite things about the Algorand ecosystem is that they listen to their holders and this is why governance is so important. Governance works for Algorand a little bit different than it does for other coins. Instead of just staking your coins forever and letting them sit in there, with Algorand, you lock your coins up for three months at a time. When you lock your coins up during that time is when you can vote on proposals and have your voice heard in the Algorand network. Since you're watching this on Sunday, you still have three days left to lock up your coins for the next three month period. There's a number of places you can do this, but personally, I'm doing it on Folk Finance. They have everything you could possibly ask from a Layer 1 crypto and they are doing a really great job of building it out and I am proud to be a part of this ecosystem.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
"algorand" Discussed on The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
"Like there are a lot of coins that are really crazy good in tech that are in the top 50 and they should take a page out of Richard's hearts book. I know he's a controversial figure but one thing he has figured out is the hype factor and the hype is very important especially when you have the tech when you have the utility the use case to back it up. So it's not a surprise anyone this post, you know got a lot of feedback some positive some negative a lot of people completely agree with me on this. So today I talked to John Allen Woods someone very high up the ladder out Algorand and we hashed it out. We talked about all of this the whole kit and caboodle and we had a very meaningful conversation and it's not categorically fair for me to say that the Algorand Foundation doesn't care about hype because they do and when I say hype I mean attention and money flows where attention goes. So I don't like when people when you talk about price action they're like, oh like why are you talking about price action like dude like this is crypto to suggest that it's a bad thing to not talk about money in crypto to not talk about price action in crypto. You know how relevant it is this whole game is speculation. This is a speculative market. Those whole game is based around attention. Yes tech is very important, but you cannot deny how important attention is. Like I said look at Pepe. So once all the dust settled I reached out to John Allen Woods. He called me a couple minutes later. If you don't know John Allen Woods is someone very high up the ladder at Algorand and him and I had a 20 -minute conversation. We hashed it out. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered them and we had a very meaningful conversation and the truth is like it's not categorically fair for me to say that the Algorand Foundation doesn't care about hype and when I say hype I mean attention and money flows where attention goes.
The Crypto Overnighter
"algorand" Discussed on The Crypto Overnighter
"A sign of the agency's increasing focus on regulating the industry. That said, they have been met with mixed reactions from the crypto industry. Some have criticized the SEC for its aggressive approach to regulation. Others have said that the SEC is simply trying to protect investors. It remains to be seen how the SEC sections will impact the industry. However, it is clear that the SEC is taking a more active role. But there may be some challenges in reconciling that active role with past actions. I say that because gensler stands accused of hypocrisy and not for the first time. This, after he praised algorand in 2019. But his presence on that video didn't stop him from suing bittrex for selling algorand tokens as if they were securities. So in this video, gensler, who was then a professor at MIT, he said that algorand founder Silvio Macaulay has, quote, a great technology, the best performance you could create Uber on top of it. Now, this is the same guy that in the lawsuit filed on Monday, accused bittrex of selling algorand tokens as securities without registering with the ACC. The SEC said that algorithm tokens are securities because their investments in the success of the algorand blockchain. His actions are clearly hypocritical, but that did not prevent him from trying to explain. Now gensler said that the SEC is simply enforcing the law. He said that the SEC has a responsibility to protect investors from fraud and that it does not matter whether the technology is good or bad. So the SEC's lawsuit against bittrex is still pending. It's not clear how the court is going to rule yet. So what do you think of gensler's actions? Is he being hypocritical? Or is he simply enforcing the law? Or worse, maybe he's driving business away. And maybe that's intentional. Here's why I say that. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that they could end up leaving the United States. That is if the regulatory environment does not become much clearer. He said that the U.S. has the potential to be an important market for crypto. He also said that the current regulatory uncertainty is making it difficult for coinbase to operate. Now Armstrong's comments come after bit tricks problems with the ICC. Now, bittrex got their walls noticed from the SEC in March, which is a statement that the SEC has found evidence of legal violations. It means you better lawyer up. So Armstrong compared the UK regulatory environment to the U.S.. He said that the UK has a single regulator. The financial conduct authority. And they are responsible for both commodities and securities. Now in the U.S., there are two separate regulators. The commodity futures trading commission and the securities exchange commission. Armstrong said that a lack of a single regulator in the U.S. is causing confusion and uncertainty for businesses. He said that he would like to see a clear rule book for the crypto industry so that businesses can operate without fear of regulatory scrutiny. Coinbase has been a vocal critic of the SEC's approach to regulating crypto. In March, coinbase received their own wells notice. Armstrong said that coinbase had met with the SEC 30 times before receiving their wells notice. But that the SEC had not given coinbase any clear guidance on how to operate. Armstrong said that the SEC's approach to regulating crypto is too broad and that it's treating all crypto companies as if their securities firms. He said that that's unfair to crypto companies that are not securities firms, and that it's stifling innovation in the industry. He said that coinbase is committed to operating in the U.S., but that it will have to consider moving its operations elsewhere if the regulatory environment does not improve. He said that coinbase is a global company and that it has the ability to operate anywhere in the world. His comments are a sign of the growing frustration that many crypto companies are beginning to feel with the SEC's approach. It remains to be seen whether the SEC is going to change their approach in the future, but for now, it looks like coinbase and the other crypto companies are prepared to move their operations elsewhere if they can't get the regulatory clarity that they need to operate in the U.S.. Which brings us to our cover story for the night, which asks, could a move already be in the works? Because coinbase has said that the UK could become a global leader in the web three economy. And we know that Armstrong is a fan of how they regulate both commodities and securities in one office. These comments came at a London FinTech conference on April 18th. Armstrong said that the UK has the potential to be a hub for innovation for the web three economy because of its strong financial sector. Its history of innovation and its commitment to free markets. Armstrong also called on the UK government to create a more favorable regulatory environment for crypto businesses. He said that the current regulatory environment is quote too restrictive, that it's holding back innovation. The UK government is taking steps to address Armstrong's concerns. In February, the treasury announced plans to revive the asset management task force, which will work with the private sector to develop crypto regulation. So what do you think? Is coinbase looking for a move to the UK? Or will something be done to rein in gensler's clear overreach? Let me know in the comments down below. And from here, let's take a look at the land of the rising sun. Because the ripple based payment system money tap is growing in Japan. SBI remit is the remittance focused arm of the Japanese financial services conglomerate SBI holdings. And they have added support for their mobile money tap application to three local banks. And so this integration enables Japanese regional banks to offer a peer to peer remittance service to their customers. All through a mobile application, as well as online identity verification and biometric authentication. The intent is to ensure a high level of security for their customers. Money tap is based on ripple's blockchain solution, ripple met. It was launched in October of 2018, now initially it only supported three Japanese banks so that has now doubled the number two 6. In September of 2022, SBI remit merged with money tab. This allowed SBI remit to provide a next generation financial infrastructure with high functionality and low cost. And that's going to do it for us tonight. I want to thank you my listeners because when you stop listening, I will stop talking. If you enjoyed tonight show, then please like follow subscribe. We have a rating, maybe a review. And in the meantime, we will see you tomorrow night.
The Crypto Overnighter
"algorand" Discussed on The Crypto Overnighter
"In most cases, when a company gets in trouble, they hold on for as long as they can. Then they start selling off their assets in an attempt to make good on their debts. Eventually, they end up selling all the assets off and then the company dies or it gets absorbed. But not always. HODL not wants to go a different way, because for sure, HODL not is facing some financial difficulties. But its founders are working to rescue the business. However, creditors want to shut down the company, on February 28th, the managers overseeing hotel nuts operations released an affidavit from cofounder Simon Lee. In it, Lee reportedly suggested that selling the business could be a preferable solution for creditors over liquidation. A report from Bloomberg states that Lee and his fellow cofounder Zhu Zhu Tao have been in contact with various potential investors. Lee allegedly wrote that the cofounders believe that the company's user base could be moved to digital asset platforms owned or affiliated with these investors. Now Lee argued that such a move could be the best way to maximize the value for the creditors in a business transaction. Basically looking for somewhere else for their customers to go. This document confirms that HODL not is still interested in selling the company, and that it has been in talks with potential buyers. Now, some of these buyers, they showed interest in purchasing hotel not and its claims against FTX back in February. Earlier, in July, major creditors of hot or not, including the algorand foundation, rejected a restructuring proposal. This proposal would have allowed the current directors to oversee the company during the restructuring process. The creditors argued that the restructuring would not be helpful and that it would be better to liquidate the company's remaining assets. Exactly the approach we were talking about at the beginning of this segment. By December of 2022, had not group had a debt of $160.3 million. This accounted for 62% of their total outstanding debt. The company owed this amount to various entities like algorand, Sam trade custodian, and Jean Marc tramo. Once a prominent crypto lending platform HODL not had to halt its services in August of 2022 due to a lack of liquidity. This was caused by the bear market in 2022. Moreover, the companies reliance on FTX had further impacted its operations. HODL not had over 500 bitcoins stuck on FTX and that had a significant impact on their bottom line. Sam claims another victim. Nigeria has a new president, bola tanu. He won the presidential election, although there was some disagreement about the results.