#647 Understanding Decentralized Exchanges w/ Peng Zhong

Peng Zhong is the CEO & President at Tendermint. In this conversation, we discuss decentralization, centralized infrastructure, the pros and cons of decentralized exchanges, and what to expect as more users move into decentralized products. ======================= Do you have a business idea you’ve been dreaming about, but don’t know how to actually start building it? Use Bubble’s drag-and-drop tool to develop custom, interactive, multi-user web apps in hours. Go to Bubble.io to build, launch, and scale real ideas and products without engineers or code! Bubble is the go-to no-code platform for over 1 million builders, and has recently closed a $100M funding round to continue supporting startups like yours, from MVP to IPO. Go to Bubble.io/pomp and the first 500 listeners will get their first month free on any of Bubble’s paid plans. ======================= Okcoin is one of the most popular licensed exchanges. Okcoin is the first to bring new cryptos to market, offering some of the lowest fees in the industry, an easy to use app, and Earn feature--you got to check out their brand new, beautifully designed app! And as of today, they also became the first US exchange to list NEAR. It’s easier than ever to sign up, buy and trade crypto in just 2 minutes on Okcoin with credit & debit cards or just link your bank account to the best new crypto assets. So get started, and go to okcoin.com/pomp =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Peng Zhang is a CEO and President at Tendermint. In this conversation, we discuss decentralization, centralized infrastructure, the pros and cons of decentralized exchanges, and what to expect as more users move into decentralized products. I really enjoyed this conversation with Peng, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Bubble. Do you have a business idea you've been dreaming about, but don't know how to actually start building it? Use Bubble's drag-and-drop tool to develop custom, interactive, multi-user web apps in hours.

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Go to bubble.io to build, launch, and scale real ideas and products without engineers or code. Bubble is the go-to no-code platform for over 1 million builders, and has recently closed $100 million funding round to continue supporting startups like yours, from MVP to IPO. Go to bubble.io/pomp, and the first 500 listeners will get their first month free on any of Bubble's paid plans. Again, if you need a no-code platform that can go from your MVP all the way to your IPO, you have to be using Bubble. Go to bubble.io/pomp, and the first 500 people get a free month. Bubble.io/pomp, go check it out. It's an awesome platform. I highly recommend it. Next up is OKCoin.

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  OKCoin is one of the most popular licensed exchanges. OKCoin is the first to bring new markets and assets, offering some of the lowest fees in the industry, an easy-to-use app, and an earn feature. You gotta check out their brand-new, beautifully-designed app. Super slick, easy to use. And as of today, they also have a number of assets that no one else has. It's easier than ever to sign up, buy, and trade crypto in just 2 minutes on OKCoin. You can use your credit or debit cards, or you can just link your bank account to the best new crypto assets. So to get started, go to okcoin.com/pomp. Again, okcoin.com/pomp. I've had a number of people from their team on the podcast before. They continue to support Bitcoin developers, and I'm generally a big fan of the philosophical approach they take to the market.

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So go to okcoin.com/pomp today, and let me know what you think. okcoin.com/pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with Peng. I hope you enjoy this one.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. I've got Pong here with me. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Very happy to be here.

• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Let's jump right in. I wanted to spend a lot of time today talking about centralized versus decentralized exchanges and kind of the pros and cons. So maybe if you can give us a couple of minute background on yourself and like the perspective that you're coming at this with, that'll help people just have that background.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Sure. So I got into crypto almost a decade ago. I started hearing about Bitcoin on Hacker News when it was around $1, I think around that time. And, you know, like everyone else, there were not very many exchanges available at the time. So I use Mt. Gox, like a lot of people. And Mt. Gox was hacked, right? And for a long time, no one knew about it. It was being, you know, it was operating as usual, but you weren't able to withdraw a lot of your assets, or maybe your withdrawals were delayed for a long time. And at some point, you know, the news broke that, you know, Mt. Gox was hacked, it was operating as a, you know, as an exchange that didn't have

• 3:51Speaker 02

  all the assets it should have. And that was a big deal. And that, when did it happen? Was that 2013 or so? Do you remember?

• 4:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it was.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Luckily, I didn't have my Bitcoin on there at the time. I withdrew it, I think, a couple of months earlier. So that didn't affect me personally. But, you know, the fear of centralized exchanges getting hacked has been, you know, something I've thought about a lot for over the past few years. And, you know, over and over again, centralized exchanges continue to get hacked. And, you know, it is very convenient to be able to exchange your tokens, you know, for fiat or other tokens on centralized exchanges. But at the end of the day, they're all centralized points of failure. And it's, you know, always worth, if you can, keeping your assets yourself, conserving those assets yourself.

• 4:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you think about the centralized exchanges, they seem to have risen in popularity. Most of the institutions that are coming into the market are using them. They have kind of the mental energy and the kind of brain focus of the retail consumers to start with. Is that a necessary part of the evolution of this? Like, do we need people to come in to use centralized exchanges first? And then you think that they'll eventually transition and some people will use decentralized exchanges as well? Or is that a misstep by the industry in that we should have not even built the centralized ones? We should have went right to decentralized ones?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  I think that it was natural, I think, for centralized exchanges to become as popular as they are today. Right? There's just so much you can do in terms of user experience.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  As a centralized company, a centralized entity, and there's so much you can do by custoding assets that, you know. One cool feature, I think I've heard of on Binance is the ability for you to like, turn all of your dust, you know, all of your tiny bits of tokens are not worth anything. And to smash it into like a fiat currency or something to let you withdraw, right? That's something that's really, you know, a little bit annoying to do, especially on Ethereum. With transaction fees being the way they are, if you have $5 here, $10 there, this or that token, you know, that's essentially just useless to you that you can't do anything with. So, yeah, custoding tokens and making that experience as easy as possible. And not to even speak of, you know, onboarding via fiat, right?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  That's one problem that I don't think any decentralized exchange has managed to be able to solve. All require a centralization.

• 6:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you start to, when you start to think through decentralized exchanges, what are the pros and cons of these things? Right? Obviously, everyone knows that they're becoming much more popular, but how do you evaluate? What are they better at than centralized exchanges? And what are maybe those trade offs or the downsides potentially?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  So I'd like to start off with the trade offs, the downsides first, because that's, you know, probably what anyone faces with when they, you know, care about DEXs and want to try, let's say, Uniswap. So a few years ago, when I started using Uniswap, it took me a while to actually use it. It took me a while to be convinced that it's worth using. And that's because I had to install MetaMask first. And I don't know what MetaMask is or how it works, you know, up until that point, you know, I was more comfortable keeping my tokens.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  You know, on a hardware device like a ledger, right? I didn't even realize that MetaMask allowed you to use ledger through MetaMask, right? So you weren't keeping your tokens, let's say, stored in the metadata of your browser extension, which was, you know, something I was worried about. So there's a lot of concern

• 7:27Speaker 02

  over learning new tools, you know, before you can use a DEX. And that's something I experienced personally. And this is, you know, I've been working here at Tendermint for like seven years now. You know, I've been in this company since 2015. And this is something that I struggled with. So the user experience of, you know, DEXs and DeFi is still really bad. And there's a lot of ways we can improve on that. So that's the biggest downside, user experience. The advantages, though, are, you know, decentralization. It's really core to the philosophy of crypto that, you know, anything that you value should be secured in a decentralized way. And that's exactly what DEXs provide, you know?

• 8:13Speaker 02

  They allow for larger amounts of

• 8:17Speaker 02

  people, larger amounts of community to, to secure your assets, to secure your exchanges. And they have a very hard time going down. You know, as we've seen with Bitcoin, you know, it's never gone down once since its existence. And that's possible with exchanges that are built today on decentralized networks.

• 8:35Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think through a kind of technical underpinnings of these decentralized exchanges, I think that there's a bunch of debate as to where they're going to be built and kind of where they'll be adopted. Maybe not so much like the tribalism aspect of it, but just like, what are the considerations from a technical standpoint? What's important from a technical standpoint on a DEX? And then what is not?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so most DEXs, the vast majority of DEXs, you know, up until today, the midpoint of 2021, have only operated within one blockchain ecosystem, right? I'm just going to point out Ethereum again here. You know, any DEX on Ethereum is great at trading assets on Ethereum. Of course, the vast majority of them can also trade wrapped Bitcoin, right? When you bring Bitcoin in over a bridge. But for the most part, you know, anything beyond bridging Bitcoin to Ethereum is very, very much, you know, early adopter territory, very dangerous, you know, early adopter territory. So that's where, you know, the next innovation is coming. That's where the focus should be for DEXs in general. It should be about, you know,

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Building auditing and verifying cross-chain bridges and ensuring that you can, you know, replace more of a centralized exchanges functionality, right? For the longest time on centralized exchanges, you can do things like swap Bitcoin for, you know, Bitcoin Classic, or, you know, any of the, I mean, tokens have existed for many years now, like Ethereum for Dogecoin or something, but that's really, really hard to do right now with DEXs. And so that's what we've been working on here at Tendermint as well. We've been working on Cosmos, the idea of the Internet of Blockchains.

• 10:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Right, so Cosmos is a philosophy, but it's also, you know, a number of products. So the main idea of Cosmos is that all chains that can be bridged together should be bridged together. And we believe, you know, in a world where you should be able to access your tokens and transfer your tokens across all interconnected chains at will, permissionlessly, without having to go through a centralized exchange. So that's been our aim since 2016, when the white paper was created. So the white paper was drafted in 2016 with our former CEO, Jaekwon Ethan Buckman.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  And they, you know, started creating noise around this idea. And in 2017, the Interchain Foundation raised some money to create the first Cosmos blockchain, called Cosmos Hub. They raised roughly $17 million over the course of 30 minutes. And it really sort of came before the large wave of ICOs in 2017. It was deliberately capped at a very low amount raised. I think some of the projects in 2017 ended up raising hundreds of millions. But because we raised in BTC and ETH, those amounts have increased, you know, rapidly since then.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  And the ICF right now has a very large treasury to continue funding development of Cosmos.

• 11:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you think through building out a DEX, walk us through kind of where you are, what this timeline looks like, and what you've watched so far.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the launch of Cosmos, the blockchain that was fundraised in 2017, happened a couple of years later in early 2019. So the blockchain as of now has been running for over two years.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  We've upgraded it five times, I believe. And the latest upgrade in March of this year.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Okay, there were two upgrades this year. The earlier one this year enabled cross-chain token transfers for the first time ever. And the second upgrade, which happened last month, added the DEX on top of it.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  So as of mid-August, there are currently, I believe, nine blockchains with the IBC protocol enabled. So the IBC protocol is an open-source protocol, similar to TCP/IP, that allows proof-of-stake blockchains to send tokens between each other. So as of right now, there's roughly eight blockchains with that enabled. And the DEX on top of the Cosmos hub allows you to swap and liquidity provide with all eight of these blockchains.

• 12:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And so today, I think that you have the underpinnings created and also the interface. Describe the difference from a technical architecture standpoint between like the underlines of a DEX and then what the UI differences. I think we saw this at one point where Uniswap, for example, went out and they actually, the front-end interface made decisions to de-list some stuff, but people could still access the backend, kind of how those two things interact with each other.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the DEX on the Cosmos hub is called Gravity DEX. And it's a tool that you can use on the command line, right? Unfortunately, not many people know how to use the command line. In fact, over the course of the last month since this was released, I think we've had less than 10 people use this DEX successfully.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  You know, CLI users are just such a small minority. So what the UI does, the one that we've launched yesterday called Emress, is it should, you know, greatly increase the number of people who can use this DEX, use this cross-chain DEX.

• 14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the idea of interoperability, that's something that has become very, very popular. We've seen some challenges there. There was a recent poly network hack, et cetera. Talk a little bit about, you know, maybe the state of interoperability today. Where are we making progress and then where is maybe people should be a little bit more cautious or slow down a little bit?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think people who are investigating and trying out cross chain technologies should be very careful. This is very early stage technology. There are a lot of projects that that say they're, you know, creating or adopting or launching a crossing bridge that hasn't had enough, you know, sort of rigor and auditing put into it. One big difference with what Cosmos has been doing is, you know, we've been working on this stuff for five years. Sort of quietly in the background. Cross chain has been our focus for a long time. And it's taken us a long time to build something that's capable of being able to, you know, transfer billions of dollars worth of assets across chains and also keep them secure.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  You know, with the poly network hack, you know, luckily the hacker returned all 600 million, I think USD worth of the hack back to the network. But it really underlines the idea that, you know, bugs are very problematic in a cross chain world because the moment you send tokens to another chain.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  In many cases, in most cases, you lose control of those tokens on the original chain. Right? So almost anything can happen to them at that point. And one thing to be aware of with any crossing technology is that if you're trying to send assets to a network that has low amounts of security, right? So what does low security mean? It could mean either the number of miners or validators in the network is very small. Right? So it's fairly centralized or just the value that's secured by the network is very low. Let's say in the tens of millions or so, you should be very careful because you're giving them control to the assets that you're sending over. Right? So if you don't believe in the set of validators of the set of miners, then you shouldn't be using the bridge at all. Because at that point, they're holding on to it for you.

• 16:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to think about kind of where this is all going, is it in our interoperable world inevitable? Is there just going to be one chain to rule them all? Somewhere in between, like, how do you think about kind of what the end state is?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm a multi-chain maximalist. I think that there will be many blockchains. And, you know, every blockchain will have its own purpose. Right. And many of those purposes might be exactly the same, right? And we'll see over time the winners emerge and losers sort of disappear. There is even a future where, you know, one or two or three blockchains take up, you know, 99% of all traffic in crypto. But there will always be a place for other blockchains. And you know, I think one of the biggest reasons is environmental and sustainably sustainable reasons. There are just some activities you can do on a blockchain that doesn't require it to be, you know, validated or broadcast across the entire world.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  You know, specialized industries that want to keep account of this thing or the other thing, you know.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Anytime you have like a group of people, maybe spread around the world who want to focus on one idea or the other, they can build a blockchain for that. And they can, you know, secure what they need to know with an untrusted group of validators. But

• 17:41Speaker 02

  maybe that doesn't need to be shared with the entire world. Right. So there'll be a world, you know, with many blockchains doing different things. And maybe they're not very valuable, but those will all exist. And they'll probably transact with some of the bigger networks, maybe every week or every month as needed to settle balances.

• 18:03Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about users for the various centralized or decentralized exchanges? Right. So institutions is a group that everyone's focused on right now. Are they coming in and going to these decentralized exchanges? They start out centralized and move to decentralized. How do you see them maybe kind of working through the ecosystem?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think it's natural and it makes sense for institutions to start with centralized exchanges. Right? Generally, if you're holding on to a lot of money, you know, you'd want to make sure there is someone responsible if that money is lost, especially if you're using exchange or if you're doing things like market making or liquidity providing. So that's really only possible, you know, there's only

• 18:46Speaker 02

  you know, one throw of the choke if you're working with a centralized entity, right? That can be

• 18:53Speaker 02

  that can be dealt with in a legal manner. So, you know, I do expect to see institutions adopt DeFi and to use decentralized exchanges over time. But it's definitely a real risk that they're taking with assets that might not be theirs.

• 19:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you start thinking through

• 19:13Anthony Pompliano?

  this idea of a potentially interoperable future world, you think about institutions and retail starting to come in. What are the actual assets that end up being traded here? Is this a set of assets that looks and feels like cryptocurrencies today? Are they eventually securities as well? How do you think about the various types of assets that could be traded and eventually will?

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm pretty bullish on crypto taking over the world. So I see just about every asset that can be traded, being able to be traded via crypto. You know, they can be assets today, they can be securities.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  There's a lot of work that needs to be done on the

• 19:57Speaker 02

  regulation front and clarity on the regulation front that can help us make these, you know, these trades and these assets possible in crypto. So I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of, you know, let's say in the US, for example, the infrastructure bill that was just passed, I think a few days ago, right? And how that impacts crypto as a whole in the US.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  But, you know, I always think legislation is coming to DeFi. And there's no way to really avoid that. So I think figuring out how to operate in a world where, you know, the government's looking to take their, their share of, of the proceeds is, is fairly important.

• 20:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. What is, uh, what's the thing that you're spending the most time thinking about right now as, as you all launch Dex? Is there one thing that kind of sticks out above everything else?

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the thing I'm thinking about right now is how to prevent people from losing money. I think it's very common when we're all surrounded by people who hold lots of crypto and who are very, you know, friendly to, to managing lots of risk, you know, that they're, they're open to trying all sorts of things. They, they dump in, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars into new protocols, untested protocols that maybe have like a, you know, anime avatar who's running it. But, um, you know, for everyone else, this is very dangerous. And I think educating people on how all this stuff works, right? Even if they know how to use it, maybe they don't know what it actually means, right? So making sure that if cross-chain transfers, you know, becomes a thing that more people uses,

• 21:29Speaker 02

  you know, we need to really explain where their tokens are really being held. If it's no longer, you know, Bitcoin on Bitcoin, you know, that's a big problem if you don't know what can happen to it.

• 21:39Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And then when you start to think through, um, th- this idea that, uh, you've got an interface and you've got the backend. Is there a world where actually the end result is the backend, uh, ultimately has 20, 30, 50, a hundred different front ends and, and all of these different people are, are kind of leveraging off of it. Uh, and that's part of the beauty of this is that there's a level of innovation that comes from, uh, the open source nature.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Oh, I really agree. I think that, um, one app maybe more people are familiar with that has multiple UIs is Reddit, for example. Um, or maybe Twitter. Twitter is maybe not such a good example because they like to shut down third-party UIs. But with Reddit anyway, there are lots of ways to use it. Let's say on your phone, lots of different apps that use the Reddit API. And people use different versions of the app depending on what they, what they value, you know, in reading, let's say news or something. So in a very similar way, I think over time, you know, Dex's will have lots of different front ends. And it might take a while. The biggest issue that I see right now, having built a front end ourselves over the course of the last few months, is that it takes a lot of engineering effort to build a front end.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  And then it takes a lot of effort to keep it up to date, right? As blockchains upgrade themselves, or as new integrations come in, it's very expensive to keep up to date with all this work. So, one concern I do have is that, you know, frontends might become a centralization risk.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  But yeah, that really requires just a lot more work on the documentation front. You know, we need to be able to document the APIs, create sample frontends that are maybe toy applications to allow people to build custom versions of that. But yeah, all of that will happen over time as we get more and more people into into DEXs in general.

• 23:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a secret chat group of everyone building DEXs that is all, everyone goes and talks about all the lessons learned and the challenges they face and everything? Seems like everyone's kind of coming of age at the same time.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Maybe there is that group, but I'm not in it right now.

• 23:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It just feels like there's a bunch of different people building these DEXs across all kinds, everything from Bitcoin to Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Cosmo, I mean, just everywhere. And yeah, there's a lot of similarities, but there's also some key differences as they're building.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, the key differences will become more important over time.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  But going back to my previous point about education, it just feels like, you know, they all look the same, maybe on the front end, right? They all have this very similar swap interface that that Uniswap really championed. But in the backend, that's where you need to, you know, understand better. Like, is this chain, let's say, entirely owned by, you know, a crypto exchange?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Right? And can people D-list tokens whenever they want? That's another issue. So, yeah, it'd be great to have some sort of ratings agency to actually review all these frontends to see what they're doing.

• 24:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it possible to do this on top of Bitcoin?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Um, I believe so. I haven't looked into Bitcoin recently.

• 24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, let's say that it was possible. Why do you think no one has done it with great success yet? Is there some advantage that others have that Bitcoin doesn't? You know, if you talk about kind of decentralization and security, it would seem like Bitcoin is the most decentralized, the most secure, etc.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm not very involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem. It's, I think it's really up to agreement, right? Between the core developers and the miners. If they want to add a new feature to Bitcoin, like, like different types of colored Bitcoin, for example, then it would require a lot of coordination. And, you know, the advantage of being the most decentralized network is it's also very hard to get consensus over adding new features.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  But if there were different types of tokens on Bitcoin, you know, it would be very possible to build a UI for that and allow people to, to exchange those.

• 25:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a world where, let's say Uniswap is both on top of Ethereum, right? So you don't really need the buy-in of the Ethereum Layer 1 to be able to get Uniswap built. Is there the potential to do something similar on Bitcoin? I think there's one I've heard of called Bisk Network. But outside of that one, I'm not really sure of that many others. Is that kind of the better path to pursue? Is more of like a Layer 2 or a side-chain-based DEX? Maybe like a Sovereign or a Stax, something like that?

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Um, I think it's more realistic and that's why people have been, you know, looking into these alternatives. So what we're building, right, with the DEX on the Cosmos hub is also a way to bridge to Bitcoin in the future, right? So the hub itself is secured by over 5 billion USD worth of assets and

• 26:35Speaker 02

  As long as there exists like a very good bridge from Bitcoin to Cosmos, you know, even this DEX, even Emress can be used for you to trade, you know, Bitcoin with every other asset that's bridged through Cosmos.

• 26:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so let's zoom out 10 years from now. What's the world look like? How do you think about that?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think 10 years from now, what we've been building, right? The idea of a UI that lets you look at all your assets across multiple chains at once is going to be very competitive, but also very mature at the same time. I would expect to see centralized exchanges slowly phase out just because the technology is inferior to what DEXs can provide. I'm also really hoping we can solve and provide better solutions for, you know, self custody of private keys. I think private keys, you know, mnemonic seed phrases, they're very dangerous and allowing people to hold them in a safer way, you know, to allow to share them in a safer way, you know, something happens to them. I think those are questions that we still have to solve.

• 27:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. That makes a ton of sense. Before I let you go, ask everyone the same three questions. The first is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 27:45Speaker 02

  The most important book I've ever read? I don't have a most important book, but I have one of the most inspirational books. I really liked The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It's about a world, I think it was written, I think 25 years ago or so now. It's about a world where, you know, iPads existed, but they weren't just iPads. You know, they, they held all the knowledge about everything and they, you know, taught you everything you need to know about anything that existed, you know, in the world. And it was handed out to basically everyone in that world. So it's a great way to learn about anything you need, you know, it's your teacher. And at the same time, it's entirely democratic, right? You don't need to pay for internet. You don't need to pay for the device.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  And yeah, I really like the idea of a world like that.

• 28:35Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about sleep schedule, our friends over at Eight Sleep gave me a Thermo cooled bed, ice cold. I sleep like a baby. What's your sleep schedule? And how's that changed over the years?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Um, it's been fairly stable. So I'm in Toronto now, which is a very great place to be when you're working with mainly like EU or, you know, US people, you know, North America people. And I used to work in Malaysia for a while. So every night I used to, you know, work from like 12 AM to like 4 AM or something. It was awful for, for me. But now that I'm here, my sleep schedule is pretty regular. I've heard about Eight Sleep and I may try it at some point.

• 29:19Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fantastic. Uh, third question is more fun than you get to ask me. One is aliens. Are you a believer or a non believer?

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I definitely believe in aliens. I don't know when we'll ever get to, you know, interact with them. But at some point, I guess, the world is just so big.

• 29:35Anthony Pompliano?

  That's basically my thought process. They're out there somewhere. I don't know if we'll ever actually, uh, uh, you know, meet up with them, but that's okay. But being there is good enough for me. Uh, what one question you have for me to finish up?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Um, where do you see Bitcoin in 10 years?

• 29:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It depends on how you think about it. Um, more adoption than today, higher US dollar exchange price than today. Uh, more decentralized than today. Um, and uh, kind of more mainstream acceptance. In terms of people aren't as scared of it, more educated on it and all of that. Outside of that, you know, what's the price? No clue. How many people adopted it? No clue. Uh, it just feels like you can take the directional bet or the more probabilistic bet like that. That's much easier. Kind of cheating to answer that question than, uh, than trying to put, uh, numbers on things.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  It's just such a powerful idea, right? And it really kickstarted everything that we, that we know in crypto today.

• 30:34Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like it's kind of just doing exactly what uh exactly what you would expect it to do. Right? Is like it's slowly gaining adoption, but surely gaining adoption and we're heading in the right direction. Awesome. Where can we send folks to find you on the internet or find out more about what you guys build?

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Emeris, like I mentioned before, is our really first retail ready product that we've ever built. In fact, there's even a way to to get tokens through our fiat on-ramp partner through Emeris. So I recommend people going just to emeris.com. That's E M E R I S. And giving that a look. I'm also very available on Twitter. You know, if you have any questions about anything I just brought up. Uh, it's at Z C P E N G.

• 31:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about sending folks that they can just DM you on Twitter?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  They can DM me if they want. I'm happy to talk.

• 31:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I think we'll send a couple of people over there with some questions.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  That sounds good.

• 31:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I really enjoyed the conversation and they'll have to get in the future.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Pamp. Have a great day.