Robert Habermeier, Co-Founder of Polkadot: Why Early Crypto Adopters Didn't Care About the Money

Robert Habermeier is a Co-Founder of Polkadot, and a former core developer for Parity. In this conversation, Habermeier and Anthony Pompliano discuss Ethereum, the scalability issues, Oracles, layer two scaling solutions, and why the best people in early crypto didn't care about the money. ----- This show is sponsored by The Grove: thegrove.co/pomp Your branding and website are the first things your customers will see. You never get a second chance at a first impression, which is why it's so important that your website is sending the right message to the world. Luckily, you have The Grove to help you with that. The Grove is a full service creative and design agency that helps new and established companies tell their stories. The Grove firmly believes that a brand is more than just a logo - it is the entire essence of who a company is. That's why The Grove works with companies on every aspect of their marketing, from brand identity, to web development and design, to SEO, to specialized graphic design projects. The Grove has helped grow companies like Tiffany and Co, Bloq, AAA, The Red Cross, and the Chamber of Digital Commerce by amplifying their branding and web presence. Get big results today, and visit thegrove.co/pomp. ----- Join the Off the Chain newsletter. Pomp's daily email analyzes the crypto market for institutional investors. Simply, it’s the best crypto newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning. No frills. No bullsh*t. Just everything you need to know in a 3-minute read. https://offthechain.substack.com/ ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Robert Habermeyer is the co-founder of Polkadot and a former core developer for Parity. In this conversation, we discuss Ethereum, the scalability issues, oracles, layer-two scaling solutions, and why the best people in early crypto didn't care about the money. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Before we get started, I want to talk about one of our sponsors, The Grove. As many of you know, branding and online presence is crucial to the crypto space. With so many damn scams out there, it's tough to tell who's legit. The Grove, however, is a full-service creative and design agency that will help you amplify your brand with the perfect website, logo, collateral, or custom design project. Branding isn't just about looking pretty,

• 0:56Anthony Pompliano?

  though. Dot, dot, dot. Like me. The Grove understands it's about driving revenue. If you want to check out what they're doing, you can go to thegrove.co/pomp. Again, that's thegrove.co, not .com. C-O. New age stuff. Thegrove.co/pomp. Let's crash their servers and light up the webpage. Let me know when you do it, and I'll shoot you some fire emojis on Twitter. Thegrove.co/pomp.

• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, I'm here with Robert. I'm super excited to do this. You're way smarter than me, so I'm hoping I can learn a little bit while we chat here. Thanks for coming.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on the show, Anthony.

• 2:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right, why don't you just give us a little bit of your background, and then we can talk about how you got into crypto and go from there.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Sure. So, my background is... Well, I guess my background is not really that long. I guess I'm pretty young. I haven't been working professionally for a long time.

• 2:24Anthony Pompliano?

  How old are you?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I'm 21.

• 2:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  So yeah, I basically started in crypto, mostly in the Ethereum space. So what I first started to work on was the Parity Ethereum client. This is how I got to know Gavin and the other folks from Parity. I started there when it was still called Ethcor. It was just six guys sitting around a table, basically, in Berlin. Now, of course, it's a much, much bigger company.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  The kind of stuff I did there was working on scalability solutions like WarpSync, working on a light client, which I think are super important. Maybe we'll dive into those a bit later. And for the past two years, basically, I've been focusing on Polkadot stuff, which is the project I'm working on now.

• 3:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Cool. What was it like early, kind of in early days of Ethereum and Parity? Like, what are some of the takeaways you had while working on that stuff with now, what many people would think of as kind of these legends in crypto already?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  I guess because it was so early, it definitely humanized a lot of the people. Like, you can, if you look at the social media presence that some of these people in the early days of Ethereum or of Bitcoin have now, it's crazy, right? They have huge followers. If they go over to conferences, they get swarmed by people. But really, in the end, they're just, you know, people building things. The early days were a lot different. I would say the, you know, the atmosphere was much different. People were mostly just interested in building something very new, that was very technical, that was very exciting to them to work on. I mean, it's definitely an interesting problem space.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  You have all kinds of cool problems to tackle. If you like to write code, it's definitely a good space to be in.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  In 2017, things really changed. I'm sure that's been talked about ad infinitum. But it's, you know, the huge influx of money into the space changed. Even how the developers were operating all of a sudden. I think the jokes got a lot more cynical sometimes, like, oh, yeah, this is a scam. This is, you know, that's all bullshit, whatever. But it seems to have mellowed out recently as well.

• 4:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, when you guys were originally working on that, there was kind of five or six of you, you know, sitting around a table, basically. Was the idea to build, you know, cool technology, to build something that would make money? Kind of what were, what do you think the motivations of the people at the table, you know, at that time were? Because it fascinates me, you know, look, at that point, there was people who were paying attention, but there's way more people paying attention today than there were, you know, when you guys first kind of got started. And so the motivations were probably a little bit different then than they are today for many people.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it wasn't a space that people would get into because they thought that they could get rich doing that. Like, there was not really a precedent of that. That didn't exist in 2015, 2014, even up to 2016. So I would say everybody there in that room and all the people I met at the Ethereum Foundation at that time and at Bitcoin meetups at that time were really just in it because either because they're interested in working on cool problems, and there's a lot of people who just like to do that, doesn't really matter what else, or because they could see the impact or some potential impact. Because we haven't, obviously, we haven't fully realized the extent to which blockchain is going to alter things,

• 6:13Speaker 01

  if at all, if you're a skeptic, there are many skeptics, they would say, well, let's, let's wait and see. But I would say everybody in that room was interested in exploring to see how far that avenue would go, to see, well...

• 6:29Speaker 01

  We hope it'll change the world. We hope it'll do so for the better. Maybe, maybe it won't, but we're gonna actually go and see, right? We're just gonna go build it and see how far we can take it.

• 6:39Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. And let's maybe talk through Ethereum today, right? Kind of how you see from the beginning of the project to where it is now. Do you think that it has been able to achieve what many people originally thought it was possible of? Do you think we're kind of halfway through that journey? Maybe it's actually disappointed some of the early people working on it. Like, where do you think we are today compared to what some of the early conversations were like?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the early conversations were more in the frame of move, fast, break things. Like, very quick iteration, changing things very often. Of course, as soon as you acquired press and lots of users, the governance process becomes much more set in stone. And all of a sudden, little things that you thought you'd be able to change are a huge burden to go and change in the future. Yep. A lot of it was also, you know, scalability problems. How many transactions per second you can actually achieve on something like the EVM, on that frame of technology?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  We weren't sure exactly how far we'd be able to push that, to what degree of optimization we could actually take the nodes. Now we know it's around seven to 10 transactions per second on, on proof of work with the EVM. This is probably the biggest limiting factor in terms of preventing Ethereum from achieving what it's meant to achieve. Well, one of two, I would say. So, the, the first one is, of course, scalability, that, you know, we actually have to build all these things and do all this computation.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  And if there's no space in blocks for that to be done, then it's just not going to happen. The second is just, there have not been that many material improvements in the abstracts, on the research level, on the academic level, of problems like decentralized oracles, geolocation, those sorts of things. And that was, a lot of the narrative around Ethereum in the early days was really around those technologies, right? Can I? Order an Uber that's controlled completely by the blockchain. For that, you need something like geolocation. You need to prove the location of the car and a view to the blockchain at different points in time to show that you really were picked up and they really were taken to this place.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  And there have been attempts to do so, but they haven't. They haven't been as fruitful as people might have imagined three, four years ago.

• 9:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And how do you think Ethereum can overcome some of these hurdles, right? So like, let's talk about scalability to get started with, right? In, in your opinion, what's the right path forward to solve some of these problems and help it achieve what many hope is, is kind of world-changing potential?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, when it comes to scalability, there's, I see three major avenues for, for Ethereum or for other blockchains to basically proceed and to surpass what's been done so far. So the first would be something like Layer 2. Like, this is the classic example with the Lightning Network or with Raiden on Ethereum state channels. And the idea is that you can open a channel on the blockchain, close it later. So it takes two transactions, but in the meantime, you can pass as many messages back and forth as you want. This can apply to money. It can also apply to something like games for gambling. It's been used very effectively there. And this can increase the amount of throughput that you have quite a lot, but still the bottleneck

• 10:14Speaker 01

  is how many channels can you open? How many channels can you close? There's still this limitation. The second avenue would be sharding, essentially, which is to split the responsibilities of transaction execution across many different sort of sub-blockchains. And each of those will proceed within its own little sandboxed environment, essentially, but with the ability to communicate and send cross-shard transactions. And the third one would be something like zero knowledge proofs. If you can, because the crazy thing about zero knowledge proofs that not a lot of people realize. So zero knowledge proof is where I can prove that I know the answer to some problem without revealing to you what that answer is.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And this is in like a very strong mathematical security model. So that's a very powerful tool, but the cool thing is that the problem can actually be very hard to compute. And the answer, when I prove that I know this answer to you, can actually be very, very fast to check this proof. So I can do a lot of computation and then send you a proof that takes a very small amount of time to check. Zero knowledge proofs in that sense can almost be a tool for scalability.

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's spend a little bit more time on sharding and the zero knowledge proof. So let's start with sharding. Maybe explain a little bit more about what exactly sharding is. And then how has this previously been implemented across computer science to be effective? Or like, why do you think that it can actually solve this problem?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So sharding, I mean, if you take a regular blockchain, what you've got is sort of the set of, in the case of Ethereum or blockchain like Ethereum, you've got a set of all accounts. And you have transactions that are included in the blockchain, which manipulate this set of all accounts. So send from account A to account B, perform a smart contract call from account D to contract C.

• 12:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  In the case of Bitcoin, you have a set of all unspanned transaction outputs. And you have transactions that can manipulate any UTXO in that set. So what you do with sharding is essentially you're just splitting all of that up. Essentially, the idea is that instead of having one set of all accounts, you have many sets of accounts. Like, let's say numbered one through 10. And within those sets, it's very fast to transact. That's one shard, like in shard one, you have this first set of accounts and you can easily transact among all of those. And then start what two through 10, you also have their own sets. And they're all sort of their own blockchains.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  And then you have validators who come to consensus over all of these blockchains at once.

• 13:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so what's interesting about this is that there's a whole bunch of possible avenues, right? But like, take the zero knowledge proofs, for example. What is a real world application where that would be important, right? So this idea that you know, an answer, you don't want to tell me the answer, but you want to prove to me that you do know the answer. What's a directly applicable way where that becomes important?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Well, for example, one, one really good application is in digital identity. So let's say you have some kind of digital identity and you have to prove to a bar that you're over 21. So one thing that you can do with zero knowledge proofs is something called a range proof. So with a range proof, you're proving that a number falls between two other numbers. So you're going to say, my age is somewhere between 21 and 100. And this has been attested to in some decentralized identity system by the United States government, by this hospital where I was born, something like that. That it's a, you know, it's a,

• 14:09Speaker 01

  it's a document that has some kind of reputation assigned to it. And you can prove things about this document to others without having to actually reveal the whole information about what's your name, what was your place of birth?

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Because what you're really doing there is you're proving that you are 21 or older, but you're not revealing your identity or all the sensitive information that is associated with maybe your driver's license, your birth certificate, your passport, etc.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, for example, your address, you don't always want to give that out.

• 14:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. Because what you're really doing is you're identifying, or you've predetermined the reason why your ID is checked, let's say, before you walk in a bar, is for no other reason than age. Everything else doesn't matter. And so you can actually pinpoint, here's what somebody wants to know, and then use a zero knowledge proof to reveal almost a true false statement, right, for age, and then you completely shield any other information that happened to be exposed or shared.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's that's basically it. Use a similar technique when you do zero knowledge payments, right? Like, I can prove I have an account with this much money, or you could do it with an apartment, right? Like, I can prove I have enough to pay rent.

• 15:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Without having to give out all your account details out.

• 15:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Um, okay. And then, uh, so that's kind of Ethereum parity, right? Some of the the issues there. Uh, what are you working on now?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Uh, well, what I'm working on specifically today, or the last week, or last month.

• 15:49Anthony Pompliano?

  In general, where where are you kind of spending most of your time right now?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm spending I'm spending most of my time working on Polkadot stuff. So, uh, what Polkadot is, is basically a, it's a blockchain for interoperability. The idea is, and I guess we're gonna get a lot into interoperability, the idea is that we don't believe in this future where there's only one blockchain to rule them all, but that there are many blockchains, each for very specialized purposes.

• 16:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  So with that, we're sort of creating this network for them to communicate. Uh, it is, it incorporates a degree of this charted system that we talked about before. Uh, so what I've been working on lately for the past, uh, uh, over a year now is to just code this up, essentially. We have a ton of code on on GitHub. It's all open source. Um, if you think you want to see what I'm actually working on, you can go see, it's all there. Um, been doing quite a lot in consensus algorithms. So we we came up with some new, uh, innovations in that field of research of consensus, of BFT consensus, uh, where some of the participants

• 16:58Speaker 01

  might be, uh, malicious, they might be collaborating, forming a cartel, and you still want to reach consensus, uh, despite that. That's sort of what makes Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies so resilient to to many kinds of attacks.

• 17:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, let's go a little bit deeper, because I want to understand this idea of many blockchains surviving and thriving, but working together for what is called like the decentralized world, right? So you said something that was interesting around each blockchain has a very specific use case, and when they are brought together or connected in some way, that's what creates a really powerful product service, you know, infrastructure, etc.

• 17:43Anthony Pompliano?

  How specialized do you think blockchains end up being? Right? Are we talking about there's one blockchain for payments? Or are we talking about there's one blockchain just for international remittance payments? There's another for consumer payments at like point of sale, right? Like, how specialized or detailed do you think this gets if, in fact, we do a bunch of different blockchains?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of it has to do with the degree to which you can optimize from an engineering standpoint.

• 18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  A phrase that I often use is that specialization breeds optimization. If you take a very general solution, you can't often, you can apply it theoretically to many kinds of problems, but in the end, it may end up being very inefficient. So, for example, with something like many smart contract languages right now, if you were to write a smart contract in Solidity, it ends up compiling down to a list of instructions. And for each instruction, which is a tiny thing like add a number, multiply a number, you end up charging a fee in between. So it's like, okay, we're going to add two numbers together, then charge a fee. Multiply two numbers, charge a fee. Send a little bit of ether, charge a fee. So this is basically doubling the amount of work that you have to do to execute some

• 18:55Speaker 01

  kind of smart contract. If you can have coarser, more specialized operations, something like upload a file to the Filecoin blockchain, make this available, enter this specific kind of contract, register my IOT device, you have to spend a lot less time during execution to charge fees. So I would say we'll end up having blockchains for, definitely for payments. One that's, that comes to mind is the Blink network. They're doing something that's specifically designed for very, very fast payments. You'll have some for smart contracts still. The reason for that is that actually, smart contracts are specialized for generality,

• 19:40Speaker 01

  as funny as that sounds. So most blockchains will have a specific purpose, whereas the smart contract blockchain's specific purpose is to be general.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  And we might end up with many different kinds of blockchains for different kinds of payments, but it really all depends on whether people can get engineering optimizations out of that.

• 20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then what would you say, or why do you not believe that we will end up in a world where, let's say, just Bitcoin wins, or just Ethereum wins, right? Kind of these more maximalist views of the world. What do you think the holes in those arguments are, or data, or points that you could point to that show that those folks may not be as right as they think they are?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Well, I would say it still boils down to this same degree of specialization. If you can specialize, it's a lot more powerful. If you're saying, "We're going to deploy something, and as is, it's going to be the greatest that it ever is going to be."

• 20:53Speaker 01

  So personally, I don't think that what we're building with Polkadot is not the end game, right? Like, people aren't going to use that in a thousand years. That's ridiculous. But you need to understand that people will always invent something better. So the better idea is to come up with a system that can incorporate new ideas as well as old. So whatever has been built already, but what will be built as well can be incorporated into that same system. And that's sort of the ecosystem that's going to come around.

• 21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  This is really interesting to me, because I'm not an engineer, right? So you are a thousand times smarter than me when it comes to anything technical, and probably a lot of other things as well. But one aspect of this open source software that seems to be just moving forward at an incredible pace of innovation is that not only should we be focused on what is new, or what's being created today, but we're also ripping out things that were innovative three, four, or five years ago and replacing it with that new stuff, right? And so as you're building a lot of this technology, how much do you worry

• 22:03Anthony Pompliano?

  about building it in a way that will allow someone to easily replace old code, or kind of, you know, older innovations, versus you just say, "Look, I'm going to push the pace of innovation today. I'm going to do whatever solves my problem right now. And then in the future, we'll figure out how to kind of replace this code if there's new innovations."

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we generally, we tend to lean on the side within the code of generality. And this might sound like a bit of a contradiction to what I just said. But actually, with, you know, the technologies that we're using, writing general code is not a de-optimization.

• 22:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  It's simply, you know, when I, when I say that specialization is good, I mean specifically from a standpoint of solutions in the abstract, not of actual implementation. Implementation generality is good. So we tend to write things where, you know, if I have a consensus algorithm, right? I don't really want to, in the logic of the consensus algorithm, care about where are the messages coming from? I mean, it might be coming over the internet through some kind of gossip network. It might be coming through a USB drive that's been carried by a pigeon. I mean, it doesn't really matter at all where the messages are coming from. And likewise, on the, the other side of, of, of the field, if you have the blockchain's logic about what transactions are supposed to be doing, you don't really care what is

• 23:27Speaker 01

  providing agreements on those transactions, right? You don't care if it's proof of work or if it's a proof of stake algorithm like grandpa in Polkadot or like Tendermint in Cosmos or like Casper in Ethereum. It doesn't matter. So this means that if you write code in this way, if somebody invents a new consensus algorithm, or if somebody invents a new, what we call a state machine. So a state machine being that which defines the logic that transactions perform. If someone defines a new state machine or a new consensus algorithm, that it can sort of be plugged together. And this means that it's very resilient to new research being, being created.

• 24:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Right now, and again, this is coming from a non-technical person's perspective. There's a lot of elements that go into what make up a blockchain. Everything from the technical code to the consensus algorithm to elements that I probably don't even understand. And when you are trying to allow for connectivity between these blockchains, how much of your time is spent focused on the actual technical code and making that? Those languages or the different code bases talk to each other or have some sort of interoperability versus spending time on, let's say, maybe consensus algorithms. If you have two separate consensus algorithms that work differently, just walk me through like where you really focus on

• 24:51Anthony Pompliano?

  and what are the important parts of making two separate blockchains interoperable?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so maybe to take a step back in the interoperability field.

• 25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  So what we do, what we do in Polkadot is we sort of have two ways that blockchains can connect. So one is where we have sort of shards. They're called parachains. They're parachains. They're parallelizable chains and they're all agreed upon by one consensus process. So these are all sort of advanced in lockstep. Chain one advances at the same time as chains two, three, and four. And if any one of them is attacked, they all have to be attacked together. That means you can pass messages really fast between them. However, you might also have a situation where the Polkadot parachains want to talk to a blockchain which is using an entirely different consensus algorithm,

• 25:46Speaker 01

  which is providing its own security through proof of work or some other proof of stake system. And what we have to do there, I think the bulk of the work is really not on the coding level, but it's really on the abstract level. How do you figure out how to evaluate the consensus of one blockchain from the logic of another? And this is for every pairing of consensus algorithms is slightly different. But it is typically possible as long as that consensus algorithm provides what we call finality.

• 26:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And I guess, so go back to the parallel chains, right? How many chains can you actually put in parallel? Is this like up to four, up to 100? How many can you actually do there?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Well, we haven't benchmarked yet, but our expectation is that it'll be around the several dozens. So maybe sixty-four to one hundred forty-four to the low hundreds. And that's that's at launch is about how many slots we're going to have. We expect that with further optimization post-launch in Q3 2019, we're going to have the ability to deploy even more parachains than that. A lot of it is just a question of economic security, right? So you have all these chains, but you have to provide security for all of them. And that's a large amount of capital that has to be deployed specifically for the purpose of deploying, of securing blockchains.

• 27:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Why would I ever put so many sixty-four or more chains in parallel? Like, what is the application of the technology being able to do that? Or what benefit do I get out of that?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I guess I wouldn't think of it from the, I mean, what would you get out of that, right? It's more, what does the world get out of that?

• 27:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Of course, not every person is going to use every chain.

• 27:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And one thing that's quite interesting is we've heard a lot about the DApp in the last couple of years, right? So what's going to be possible with this system is with interoperability is that you have DApps which span across many chains, right? So one portion of this DApp is living on file storage. One portion of it is using something like Ocean Protocol for

• 28:02Speaker 01

  machine learning and data. One portion of it is connected to the IOT chain, right? So you can have applications that utilize many different, you know, some few blockchains that suit their needs. Everyday users probably won't use all of them. And if they do, my bet is that it's really generally going to be obscured through the user interface. The user experience is really important. I mean, if you would have a wallet where you had to say, "Okay, now I'm going to do this on chain A, this on chain C, this on chain D", and you had to explain that to your grandma, I mean, good luck. You need a PhD to do that, probably. So definitely, the user experience is really important.

• 28:43Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What other projects are you really excited about and think people are working on that have some really, you know, high levels of technical innovation? And if they come to fruition, could be fairly impactful?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  So I've been very impressed by the ZeroX team. I think ZeroX is doing really cool stuff with decentralized exchange. The fact that you can just trade tokens, swap them without having to rely on some trusted third party, I think is amazing. And I know a few members of their teams pretty well. And I can say with very good confidence that they're very, very smart people. I quite like what they're doing. And this is all like moon math. It's out of my, out of my level. But a lot of the teams that are working on things like bulletproofs and Starkware, those guys are crazy, but they're, they're really doing something awesome.

• 29:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I've never heard the term moon math before. I'm gonna have to start using that because everything's moon math to me.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Well, I heard it, I heard it first from Eli Ben Sasan from Starkware.

• 29:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Starks in 2017. Yeah, so that comes from, from the mouths of these guys.

• 30:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, just because I usually ask everyone about aliens at the end, but what do you think the probability is that they fake the man, the moon landing?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know, 110%.

• 30:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it, I love it. All right. And then, so one other thing for you, because I'm really interested in, you're 21, right? And most people who listen to this are not 21, right? So they're gonna be a little bit older. What would you tell kind of an older audience, let's say, you know, 30s, you know, give or take a couple of years on either side, about your friends, people your age that are excited about this cryptocurrency and blockchain space that maybe they don't know? Like, is there one or two things that you're like, you know, I wish that these people realize, like, I don't know, how much people believe in it? Or two, like, how much of their wealth are actually storing in digital assets? Or, you know, what would you say to those people?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, well, generally, the people that I meet who are into crypto are also a bit older, like tend to be in their mid to late twenties or, you know, thirties and beyond.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  I think among the younger folks, it's actually much less common to have all your money in crypto. Something like that. Usually, you know, you're just out of school, you've got a job, you're, you don't have that much money to throw into crypto. Usually, it's, it's those who are,

• 31:29Speaker 01

  I don't know, more into, to other kinds of subcultures and,

• 31:37Speaker 01

  yeah, or tend to, tend to be rebellious.

• 31:39Anthony Pompliano?

  The people who are not as excited about crypto, right, that young twenties, maybe not as excited as you are, what else are they working on? Are they working on other things in technology? Or, you know, some of your friends just go and get jobs at, you know, some consulting firm or become a lawyer? Like, like, how do you see the, the other bodies of, of work that they're excited about?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, generally, it's just, they're, they're usually interested in crypto in passing. Like, oh, that's cool, but it's less of a, a passion. It's less of them that they're really just going to focus all their spare time onto, because that's a huge commitment. And of course, you do meet people who do that and they, they see what's going on in the crypto scene and they say, wow, that's, that's something amazing. I gotta put all my time into that. Yeah, I would say, most of my friends are, are fairly technical. I mean, I, I guess I was like a video games, computer guy in high school. So I know a lot of people who are also in that sphere. So they know how to use computers and a lot of them know how to program or you do computer science.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  But it's still the barrier to entry is, is quite high. Although, to be frank, I would say that may be a blessing in disguise for now.

• 32:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Right? Because people say like, oh, it should be easy enough that my grandma can use it. Well, not when there's network congestion. I think that might, might take a while before we get beyond that point.

• 33:01Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. All right. So before I finish up, I usually, uh, you know, end with some rapid fire questions. You ready?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Sure. Let's go.

• 33:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your most controversial thought in crypto?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Most controversial?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  This is not rapid.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  There's way too much money in crypto. Developers don't know enough about math.

• 33:35Anthony Pompliano?

  That's because they can't do moon math. You and I can do moon math, so we're good to go.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's why we put it to 110.

• 33:43Anthony Pompliano?

  What is, what's the most important company in crypto?

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Most important company? Well, I haven't thought about that at all. I don't know. I think it's less about companies, more about people.

• 33:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, who's the most important person?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Sorry, what was that?

• 34:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Who's the most important person?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  No clue. I don't know. Looking more at repos than people.

• 34:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I, I love the fact that you're willing to say, I don't know. That you're the first person to ever say that. I love that answer.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Well, thanks. I don't know. I think there's, there's a lot of people working on cool stuff. But if you ask me like, who's the most important? I don't think that there's any that much degree on anyone. There's tons of people working on this stuff.

• 34:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and, and part of the, the value is that there isn't one person. Right? It's kind of the, the beauty of this entire thing. If you could wave a magic wand and change one regulation or improve it, what would you do? Which one?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I would make it definitely.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  I would make it much more simple to use, credit cards to use, electronic payment. The barriers to that are actually really high. So getting rid of those regulations a bit would probably open the doors to a lot.

• 35:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Love that. What's the most important book you've ever read?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Siddhartha.

• 35:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  I, I didn't like the philosophy.

• 35:22Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, that's fair. So we already talked about the moon and moon math. What about aliens? What's the probability that aliens exist?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Hmm. They probably exist. I think it's very high chance, like sixty, seventy percent, but we're never gonna see them.

• 35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Why not?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Oh, they probably exist in some kind of like different form, or even if we could see them, we wouldn't even recognize it, you know, like, we don't know what life is gonna look like in in other planets and other parts of nature.

• 35:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I like that. I like that. All right. I end each one with letting you ask me one question. What uh what one question do you have for me?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  What's the best pizza in New York?

• 36:12Anthony Pompliano?

  The best pizza in New York. I'm Italian. You know that people get hurt for answering this wrong, right?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  All right, just send it to me later.

• 36:21Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I I uh this might not be a popular answer, but I really like the like ninety-nine cent slices, you know, that are like on every corner in New York. They're just super greasy and usually there's no place to even sit down. You just walk right up, you know, get a slice or two and then you gotta go stand outside and eat it. But uh to me, that's like the ultimate uh New York slice.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Do you fold?

• 36:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I do. I I fold, but not in the like aggressive fold way. You ever seen these people who like make it into like a sandwich and they basically like flatten it?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's that's me.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  That's you. Oh, you do the sandwich?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:00Anthony Pompliano?

  No, we we gotta come on. You when you come to New York, you let me know and we'll we'll go teach you how to do it.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll take you up on that.

• 37:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I'm I'm super excited. We gotta do this. I am uh I I I just really think that what you guys are doing is pretty cool and and you're having a hand in the building the future. So thank you from uh from all of us over here and I hope we get to do this again in the future.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks for having me, man.

• 37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. I appreciate you listening to that episode. I enjoyed it and I hope you did too. Before we go, I want to remind you that it was brought to us by The Grove, a full-service creative and design agency that has worked with companies like Block, Chamber of Digital Commerce, AAA, and the American Red Cross. You can check out more of their work at thegrove.co/pomp. Again, that's .co and not .com. Thegrove.co/pomp. Go check it out and let me know what you think. Hey, everyone. Pomp here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate,

• 38:06Anthony Pompliano?

  review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.