John Lilic - Is Your Crypto Safe? Quantum Computing Could Shatter Blockchain Security

Is Your Crypto Safe? Quantum Computing Could Shatter Blockchain Security - Brian Rose of London Real with John Lilic 🍿Watch The Full Episode: http://londonreal.tv/lilic 🔐 Is your crypto truly secure? In this explosive London Real episode, Brian Rose dives deep with blockchain pioneer John Lilic to expose how ⚛️ quantum computing could break the very code behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Web3. 💥 From cryptographic vulnerabilities to future-proofing your assets, this is a wake-up call for every investor, trader, and tech visionary. 🚨 Don’t miss the truth behind the tech that could rewrite the rules of digital finance. 🚨 Learn To Make Money In Crypto: 💰The Investment club: https://londonreal.tv/club 💰Crypto & DeFi Academy: https://londonreal.tv/defi

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Quantum computing.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Quantum is gonna break crypto.

• 0:02Speaker 02

  Three years national security at stake here. Is he going to destroy Bitcoin?

• 0:07Speaker 03

  Quantum computers, one of the things that they do well is factoring large numbers. Somebody with your public key can actually take your Bitcoin, but nobody will know about it. That's the risk. When we lever trillions of dollars into our economy with Bitcoin as the underlying, Bitcoin becomes a military target for the CCP or potentially as proxies like North Korea. Wherein you can do tremendous economic damage to an adversary by taking Satoshi's coins and moving them around, triggering cascading waves of margin calls and liquidations and sending the price of everything trending towards zero.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  So what do you think the future looks like?

• 0:46Speaker 03

  I think having a strong quantum roadmap towards post-quantum resistance or post-quantum cryptography will be the most bullish indicator of price. Because when that time comes, that's where the liquidity is gonna go. And if none of them are ready, all the liquidity is just gonna go into post-quantum bank accounts.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  I wanna get back to your early days with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Tell me how John Lilic decides to go to New York City.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  I met a guy named Nick Spanos. He started the Bitcoin Center. He would have us go outside, stand right in front of the stock exchange on the street trading Bitcoin in 2014, right? From there, I learned about Ethereum and I started basically volunteering at ConsenSys. You could see that like New York was one of the hubs. It became very clear that I had to get deep into Bitcoin.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  You know, a lot of people look at you and they're like, "I wanna grow up and be John Lilic one day." How does that make you feel and what do you advise to the younger guys and girls getting into this space?

• 1:42Speaker 03

  When you find an asymmetric opportunity that you're very passionate about, it's going to require tremendous amount of work, sustained risk, and application of like whatever aptitude you have towards helping develop that opportunity is the key there. There's just a wealth of opportunities out there. It's unbelievable.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  The world is changing.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Inspiration is everywhere.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  It has never been so easy to connect, share, and bring people together.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  We're learning from others and finding the best in ourselves.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Challenging our beliefs.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Sharing our vulnerability.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Overcoming our fears.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Transforming ourselves so we can transform the world.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  How far can we go?

• 2:54Speaker 00

  This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is...

• 3:09Speaker 00

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• 3:53Speaker 00

  I know investing crypto can be scary. That's why you gotta join the investment club. Pull the trigger.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is John Lilic, the Ethereum pioneer, blockchain strategist, and quantum security advocate. You were a core member at ConsenSys, the software company behind MetaMask, which scaled Ethereum to global adoption. You later served as a strategic advisor during the early development of Polygon, and today focused on preparing Web3 systems for the disruptive impact of quantum computing. You've warned that much of our current cryptographic infrastructure, including Bitcoin and DeFi protocols, is not equipped to survive Q-Day, the moment when quantum computers can break classical encryption. Today, through your work with Thilo's and other forward-leaning projects, you're helping to develop zero-knowledge cryptography,

• 4:47Speaker 00

  decentralized governance, and post-quantum frameworks to secure the future of digital assets and AI. John, welcome to London Real.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Oh, well, thank you for having me. That's very kind. I think more than anything, I'm just a lucky guy who stumbled into Bitcoin and kind of like had a bit of an interesting journey over the last 10, 12 years. But it's very nice to be here. I have to say, just real quick, while we've known each other for a little while, I'm a big fan of everything you've done over the years. A lot of my friends are very excited that I have the opportunity to be here with you as well. And I just want to, before we get started, I want to commend you, because here's the thing, at the margin, in the moment, that's when it counts, and that's when it's really hard to do what's right, because the consequences are very high, right? That's when it's very costly.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  And so these days, there's lots and lots of folks, media people and so on, that are kind of backtracking a bit. And it's a little bit of a reversal and, you know, obfuscating the truth and what actually happened. But, you know, I admire what you did, you know, obviously with all this COVID stuff, going back a few years. And yeah, it's a great honor to talk to you. Thanks for that, John. I appreciate it.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  When all that was happening in 2020, Alex Jones had me on his show remotely, of course, because nobody could travel. And he was like, Brian, you know, why did you fight back? Why did you find the strength to say, no, I'm going to keep broadcasting? And I was just like, it wasn't a conscious decision. That day when YouTube banned and deplatformed that video, I was so angry that my only reaction, John, was to re-upload the video. And then when they re-upload the video, and then when they took that down to upload a vlog about how they had just taken down the video, it just, it just was so fundamentally wrong. And I don't know if it's because I grew up in America, or just because I'm a human, that someone could stop free speech, that,

• 6:40Speaker 00

  I don't know, what we did was just a reaction. And then, in a weird way, I felt like I'd been trained my whole life for that. And also that we were just privileged to be in a position where we could serve with that message. Here we were in London with a studio, with people that could function during lockdown, with the broadcasting platforms and the audience, and then David Icke was two hours away. And so we were in a great position where we could hold these live conversations that really changed a lot of people's lives, at a point where there was no other media offering any other alternative viewpoint, except the one

• 7:21Speaker 00

  that they were portraying. So, man, it was just a real honor to be able to be of service.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, going back to that time, you know, I've talked about this off-camera a bit, it's kind of like, it's fine to have differing viewpoints. There's compelling data from both sides on, for example, vaccines and masks and things like that, okay? And I'm not going to give, you know, an opinion either way. I'm just going to stick to the fact that

• 7:49Speaker 03

  the right to informed consent is enshrined in every single human rights document that every single Western democracy subscribes to. I mean, it's a core tenet, right? It's one of the things we learned from what the Nazis did in World War II, to never infringe on that right. And the right to bodily autonomy, so, so, you know, you should have the right. And Novak Djokovic is a guy that I admire very much, and this is the point that he made as well. The way he was treated, obviously, in a lot of countries and so on. But he wasn't anti-vaccine, he was pro-choice, pro-informed consent. And I think that's the, the big message, you know, that kind of you were advocating for as well. And, and, you know, that is why today, I think, I mean, you're kind of, I mean, you are an icon.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  A lot of people admire you, and I think those moments going back when it's like hard and the truth matters, that's what stands the test of time. You know, and I think that's where things got a little bit, you know, it was kind of a tough time, but, uh, but, but here we are now, so it's all good.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I agree. I just, we had the right to have those discussions. And the other thing which boggled my mind is that you, not only do you have the right to speak, you have the right to hear someone else speak.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  And here I was with 2.4 million subscribers in the world, and I wanted to talk to them, and they wanted to listen to me, and it's someone in the middle, in this case YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, later PayPal, LinkedIn, said, no, you can't talk to each other. And it was like, well, there's something fundamentally wrong with that. And they always say that, you know, the, the solution to bad information is, is more information.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  You know, or if you disagree, well, let's have more of a discussion about it. And so, we just knew there was something wrong, and we were at the tip of the spear. I mean, we were in March and April of 2020, when no one was really doing that. Now, a lot of people came later and they helped continue fight, which was great. But yeah, it was an interesting time, and when you're getting shut down by platforms, like six platforms in one day, and everyone says, and you're like, this, this can't be coordinated. No, you're, you're just being a conspiracy theorist. Of course it can't be coordinated. And I didn't actually believe that. And then later, when you look at the Twitter files, you're like, oh, it's all coming from DC. And then the whole thing, but, uh, at the time, we were just fighting and getting up every day.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Brian Rose, a legend. Outstanding.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  So, look, I want to get back to your early days with Bitcoin and Ethereum, um, back into New York City and hear about that whole journey. That's incredible, especially compared to where we are today with Bitcoin and Ethereum, these two massive chains doing massive things. But I'd love to start with quantum computing.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Maybe we jump in and talk about what is Q-day? It's a term I never heard before. And how close are we to it? And why do people need to know what it is? Because I think your average person has heard of quantum computers. They've heard of some Dumerism around it, but they don't know how it's going to affect them. Even people in crypto probably don't know how it's going to affect them.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's a very good point you make around Dumerism. And I've given a couple of talks and presentations. You know, quantum hopefulness is how I like to call it. And so there are risks and we have to understand those risks. But then there's tremendous opportunity as well. And so for me, this started last summer roughly. And I basically was very fortunate to meet some interesting people, including a couple of guys from Oxford, Stefano Gomiozzo and Fabrizio Genovese. They are both, you know, PhDs. And they, it's a very interesting Venn diagram with these folks and similar folks.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  We were kind of talking about this earlier, but you've got, you know, quantum physicists, computer engineers, and they're crypto-native. So they understand the blockchain ecosystem. And, you know, I started talking to these guys. And actually Stefano is a fellow at Oxford. So it's like, you know, Roger Penrose level. I mean, he's a brilliant mind and Fabrizio as well. And they've been in the quantum computing space for more than a decade. And in my mind, it was like 40 years from now, the CIA or the US military is going to build this gigantic machine that looks like it's something out of Star Trek.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's going to change the world and we'll have new material science and new chemistry and so on. And it's going to be one of the components that takes us to a type-one, you know, civilization and so on. But I've got plenty of time and it'll be a great thing. And I don't really need to worry about it. And so that's just how things were in the back of my mind until I started meeting these people. And that's when I realized, in fact, I've got

• 12:16Speaker 03

  pretty much all of my wealth and most of my entire professional life anchored on the blockchain in one way, shape or form. And as it turns out, quantum computers may not, and I want to be very clear, they're not necessarily a silver magic bullet to just do all sorts of incredible things, certainly not in the near term. But one of the things that they do well is factoring large numbers, right? And so you look at not the consensus, you know, because that's hashing based, but the accounts, the public-private key pair infrastructure part of it. So if I know your public key, it's going to take me an extremely long time with a classical computer, you know, billions of years, to try and calculate your private key.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  And when you look at a classical computer, it's sort of ones and zeros and it goes in a sequential way. And because you have so many combinations of possible scenarios, it's just going to take a very long time to go through it all. And that's fundamentally the reason why you can go to sleep at night, and by the grace of God, if you wake up tomorrow, two things will be true, right? Like, the sun will be shining and your Bitcoin is still going to be there, provided you have securely stored your private keys in a safe, in a vault, or really a brain wallet is the best way to secure them. But what happens when technology gets us to the point where somebody with your public key can actually determine what your private key is? And that's the risk.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  So I just want to be very clear, there's a lot of confusion sometimes. Hashing is very different. I think the consensus, I mean, it's much stronger. It's not really the thing that's under threat in the near term, or possibly for a very, very long time. And so then you kind of start to look at these various blockchains, and this is one of the things we were talking about off-camera as well. My view is, everything is intertwined. Okay, I started with Bitcoin and then I moved to Ethereum and, you know, and I have investments in Solana and other ecosystems. I'm not a maximalist in that sense. I love Bitcoin. But, you know, it's kind of like, these tokens are everywhere now. And so the reason things are highly intertwined is because most Bitcoin trading today happens

• 14:27Speaker 03

  against stablecoin pairs, like USDT, for example. I think it's right around 80%. And so when you see a lot of the criticisms from hardcore Bitcoin maximalists about other networks, you know, and I don't know if I'm allowed to swear or not. Go ahead. But, you know, they call them shitcoins, right? And there might be merit to... That claim very often when we see these scandalous, you know, pump and dub schemes and so on. But at the same time Bitcoin relies on stable coins in order for it to have price discovery and volume and liquidity and the thing that makes Bitcoin king is liquidity, right?

• 15:10Speaker 03

  So it is intertwined and so the problem is multi-variable. It's multifaceted and multi-tiered. It's not just Bitcoin. Of course, it's very important that we start with Bitcoin and we take steps to secure Bitcoin and there's people who are very active. There's a guy named Hunter Beest. He put together the BIP 360. Great guy, I've talked to him a few times. You see innovation with, you know, Mara for example, I think they launched something called Enduro. Isabel Foxon, I believe her last name is, she's leading that effort and there's lots of great dialogue and robust discussions. You see a guy like Alex Pruden and P11 and they've released some stuff in terms of trying

• 15:55Speaker 03

  to, you know, take early steps to protect Bitcoin and so on. So it's already starting to happen, but then you also have to think about other networks too. And so when you go to the smart contract platforms, the problem is much worse. And this is something that I think also has to factor into it. So with Bitcoin, you know, some of the old address types like Satoshi's coins, I think it accounts for roughly 20% of all Bitcoin. The public keys are exposed, okay? And so a sufficiently large quantum computer and whoever has that capabilities, and by the way, my view is, and I wrote an open letter to J.D. Vance, I mean, I'm sure he's probably never gonna see it, but, you know, he was at the

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Bitcoin conference recently in Vegas and he said it's a big strategic advantage that the United States is moving into Bitcoin and China is not. And so, you know, I'm Canadian, but I grew up in the States. My father was in America and he became an American, my brother, my kids, I love America. I just never became a citizen. I want to see America do very well, but, you know, we have to also realize that when we lever trillions of dollars into our economy with Bitcoin as the underlying, Bitcoin becomes, in my opinion, a military target for the CCP.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Or potentially as proxies like North Korea wherein you can do tremendous economic damage to an adversary by, yeah, taking Satoshi's coins and moving them around. And, you know, it's less about cashing in those Bitcoin and more about causing chaos and panic and sending the price of everything, maybe not to zero, but trending towards zero. Triggering cascading waves of margin calls and liquidations and massive economic damage into the US economy as a result, especially if you consider the trend we're on, which is generally, I think, a good trend. It's good that we consider Bitcoin as hard money or an anchor for our financial system,

• 17:55Speaker 03

  but we have to understand this risk, okay? And so, yeah, I wrote an open letter to J.D. Vance and I think that, you know, and by the way, you know, you look at a lot of these quantum companies and I think a good analog is AI. So China caught up very quickly. I mean, Deep Sea came out of nowhere. Another analog I like to look at is, you know, for example, reusable rockets, like hard technologies. And so they're now landing reusable rockets. They just landed a reusable rocket in the sea like a couple of weeks ago, went under the radar. So their ability to scale up and other adversaries as well is, should not be neglected. And so if we don't take any action, Bitcoin sits there as, you know, potentially a multi-trillion-dollar

• 18:40Speaker 03

  opportunity. Aside from that, you know, a lot of these folks who have lost Bitcoin or other crypto, there's a poor guy here in the UK, threw his hard drive away. I mean, he's a very famous story.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Laptop. Yeah. He's still trying to find it.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, in the dump. He's trying to sue the dump and his wife divorced him. He's had a tough time. And, you know, people like that could go to a lot of these advanced R and D companies like a SciQuantum, an IonQ, a Regetti.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  You can pick. I mean, I'm not opinionated about which companies, which startups are going to get there and what their roadmaps are like, but you could go there and sign a perfectly legal contract and you can say, "I have a claim to this Bitcoin. It's mine. If you recover it for me, I'll give you a hefty finder's fee." And so even perfectly legal avenues where recovery of lost private keys, for a lot of these companies, you know, this could be tens of billions or more in potential revenue. And in that scenario, everybody is highly incentivized to be very quiet about it. So one of the other complex parts about all of this is, like, there's no bat signal or obvious warning or indication that a quantum attack is underway. In fact, what you're going

• 19:51Speaker 03

  to see is, and I'm not saying what we've seen recently is an example of quantum attacks, but you're going to see threads on Twitter, on X, "Oh, this GigaChad held for 15 years and just, you know, moved his Bitcoin or her Bitcoin and now they're selling it for, you know, billions of dollars in profit." You're going to see people celebrating that somebody was able to hold that long. Okay? So even like trying to understand what is actually going on will be very hard. So that's kind of a little bit of the landscape with Bitcoin. Now with the other networks, you know, because they're smart contract platforms, and so just going back to Bitcoin, most Bitcoin addresses are not public, right? Right.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  But a significant chunk of them are. And so Jameson Lopp proposed, for example, I'm not saying he proposed it, I'm saying he outlined options, and one of them was effectively confiscating those coins. So the Bitcoin community agreeing to take Satoshi's coins. That, I think, would break the social contract in many ways and would be very hard. So in other words, for every solution, when you dig into this stuff, it unfurls many other hard trade-offs that are like not palatable and very difficult. Okay? So for that chunk of Bitcoin... You know, it's a hard problem and that's currently being discussed as far as what to do.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  But even if you can migrate all of Bitcoin, I mean, there's a few papers out there and it's sort of like, if you imagine 100% of the block space available for post-quantum migration, so you send your Bitcoin to some post-quantum, you know, secure wallet or address or whatever, it would take, I believe, 77 or 78 days to migrate everything, assuming 100% of the block space was used for this purpose. If 10% of the block space was used in an orderly fashion, it would take like three years.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Right, so, and in reality, if quantum chaos comes, like the scenario I described with the CCP or I think maybe even through their proxy, I could see them assigning this task to the Lazarus group, for example.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  In North Korea, right?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Very, very famous for hacking.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, they even have their own name.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Which is fascinating, we think they were behind the Bybit hack and...

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, very sophisticated actors, this is all they do, it's a military operation. You know, and the quantum chaos comes because it's, it's become clear that they've actually been responsible for this attack. Then you'll see people panicking, trying to move their Bitcoin, so the memple will be super full, the transaction fees will be very high. Imagine having $10,000 of Bitcoin, but the transaction fee is $30,000, right? You'd be stuck. And we start to get chaos. Okay, so we have to take it seriously. Even if you're opinionated and you think that quantum computing is a scam and it'll never happen or it won't happen for another 40 years and we don't need to worry about it, there's still good reasons for Bitcoin to be ready.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  In my opinion, quantum readiness, in the context of Bitcoin, very soon will become one of the bullet, one of the most bullish, like, impact or indicators of price. The price will reflect, let's say, strong action take, correct.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Okay, got it.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  And just to reiterate what you said, the quantums can't affect the hash rate, which means the mining itself or the verification of new blocks, that's not an immediate threat with quantum, but it is with any public key exposed. And that's, for anyone listening, was a reason not to get your public key out there because you can leave this trace behind that can be exploited later.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Correct, you don't want your public key known.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  And, but the thing is, you look at... You know tremendous innovation in the Bitcoin space like the Lightning Network, for example, and Jack, you know Bitcoin, Twitter founder Jack, I got a lot of respect for that guy. But you know, Square just integrated Lightning with like four and a

• 23:47Speaker 02

  investment club. Today, I considered the best investment that I've ever made. We get four projects presented a week by their associated CEOs. Personally, I'm completely blown away by the quality of these projects, and I know of nowhere else where I would be given this same opportunity. Each week that passes, I feel more appreciative of the fact that I'm a member of this group. The vibe was just tremendous. Everybody's on the same wavelength. We just clicked. Everybody listened to each other, enjoyed their company. It was just magical, magical. Take action. Don't take my word for it. Do Dylan's you need to do. And I really hope that someday down the road, I see you in the club. It far exceeded expectations, without question.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Half million vendors, right? So the Lightning Network exposes public keys. Okay. So as that grows, we have another issue and so on, right? So yeah, it's very important that people understand that it's your public key and deriving the private key from your public key is the risk. Okay. Now, we go to the smart contract platforms like Ethereum and Solana and so on. All the public keys are known by default. That's how the system works, right? You can see everybody's public key. You can see the amount of ETH and other whatever, stable coins or other tokens. So that problem is even harder. And then you have DeFi and you have

• 25:19Speaker 03

  the smart contract capability and composability and so on. So it becomes very complicated. Now, I also wrote an article that basically talks about stable coins as the first, let's say Exodus, in my opinion, wherein what we see today is very quickly, we're heading towards trillion dollars of stable coins on chain. One of the use cases, I think probably the preeminent use case of Ethereum and a lot of the smart contract platforms, frankly, is that they have propagated dollar hegemony globally. I actually think it's really good for the world if the US dollar is. Kind of the main currency. And so when you're in a developing country and you know, in that country, it might be

• 26:03Speaker 03

  difficult to get a US dollar bank account, you can just download a wallet, Metamask, Phantom, whatever wallet you want, and suddenly you have a US dollar bank account because you can accept stable coins. And I think this is a fundamental good for the world. That's just my opinion. And so as we head towards a trillion dollars of stable coins, and again, we know that stable coins are the main trading pair against Bitcoin, it's actually very little USD. Well, think about who is deploying stable coins on chain. At this point, it's quite institutional. So you've got smart capital, smart money allocators who do things like, you know, you see something like Morpho, for example, which is a lending protocol on Ethereum,

• 26:45Speaker 03

  where you can create your own vault and curate risk and offer up that basically basket of lending services to the market. And so, you know, you can generate yield. Aave is another example. You can put your stable coins in Aave and earn interest. Okay? So these smart capital allocators are the ones who do things like, you know, send 100 million bucks to Tether or Circle and through a bank wire, and then they take the stable coins and deploy them on chain to earn yield in a variety of different strategies. Okay? So smart capital allocators are currently earning, in most cases, if they're doing

• 27:27Speaker 03

  a good job, more yield than they would just holding treasuries in a bank account. And that's the reason why they use DeFi. And that's one of the reasons why this institutional growth that we're seeing now, particularly on Ethereum and starting on Solana as well, is so robust. However, if you're a smart capital allocator, and I don't know, fast forward a couple few years, and I tell people, you should look at all the roadmaps, not just one quantum company. So Ion Q recently put out their roadmap, and they're talking about 2,500 logical kubis by 2028. That's enough, okay, to create a scenario where this risk of factoring private keys from public keys becomes feasible. Look at DARPA, look at Google, look at IBM, look at all of them and overlay them.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  And it seems to converge around 2030 based on the roadmaps. One of the things that's accelerating the roadmaps is You know, AI is driving tremendous algorithmic improvement, okay? Without good algorithms, it doesn't mean any, the quantum computers don't mean anything because qubits are inherently noisy, so you need good algorithms to cut through the noise. And so AI driving algorithmic improvements is sort of one of the vectors that's materially improved and actually, in my opinion, accelerated some of the roadmaps. Okay, so now you're a smart money allocator, you're, you know, you've got hundreds of millions of dollars on chain, you're earning an extra 3% or 4% above what you would with the Fed.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  And you're looking at this stuff and you're like, wait a minute, Larry Page or Jensen Huang, and by the way, Jensen just did a conference and he had all the quantum computing startup CEOs on stage with him, after the conference, or maybe right before, I can't remember, he was quite bearish and all the quantum stocks dumped. Couple of weeks later, he changes his mind. And in fact, right now, SciQuantum, which is one of the leading photonic wafer platforms, is doing a round, they're raising, I think, 700, 800 million at something like a 6 billion valuation, and Nvidia is already publicly committed to taking half the round. So you see these tech luminaries, right, and they start talking about quantum and you're a smart money allocator, you know, in the blockchain DeFi space, and you're like, wait

• 29:41Speaker 03

  a minute, this risk now is unknown to me. I don't know when Q Day is going to come. And, and I've got a tremendous amount of money fully on chain, so I'm exposed completely. Is it really worth, and in fact, especially if these guys, you know, are public companies where they have fiduciary responsibilities, can we even take this risk? Yeah. Versus when you look at the Bank of International Settlements, when you look at a lot of the big banks, they're well on their way to basically, and by the way, a lot of internet browsers now are post-quantum and so on, I mean, other institutions where, you know, they don't have to deal with decentralized governance and consensus.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  are already taking proactive measures. So I think by that time, maybe in a couple few years, if you're a smart capital allocator, you're going to say for an extra 3% on-chain, potentially at the risk of 100% total loss, I think I'm going to take my stablecoins off-chain and just keep them in my quantum safe bank account at JP Morgan and ride this out until I have clarity on what's going on. Okay? That I think is going to cause the first mass exodus of liquidity from blockchain systems, which goes back to my original point earlier, not just with Bitcoin, but with all blockchain networks. And I've publicly said this, I think having a strong quantum roadmap, okay?

• 31:03Speaker 03

  And demonstrating like measurable steps towards post-quantum resistance or post-quantum cryptography will be the most bullish indicator of price. It'll be the biggest driver of price, in my opinion, maybe not today, but very soon. Because if you imagine Solana, for example, getting there before Ethereum, well, then all the smart capital allocators are going to just move their stablecoins to Solana. Right? So, and this is what I've said before. I think for these blockchain networks, post-quantum is the most important strategic priority for this reason, because when that time comes, that's where the liquidity is going to go. And if none of them are ready, all the liquidity is just going to go into post-quantum bank accounts, parked at the Fed. Okay?

• 31:48Speaker 03

  So now here's the other way to think about it, and this will, I think, illustrate the point. Let's say our crypto ecosystem is worth 3 trillion for the sake of argument, everything in aggregate, all the market caps added up. And let's say you assign a 1% chance that the IonQ roadmap of 2028, 2,500 logical cubits is accurate. And if you assume, if that's the case, and you know, somebody breaks elliptic curve cryptography and everyone finds out about it, that total loss is going to be close to 100%. Okay, then we should be, you do the math, 3 trillion times 1% times 100%. We should be spending 30 billion a year right now, rationally.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Okay, on, you know, post-quantum, like, migration efforts. We currently spend fuck all, excuse my language, like, basically nothing Yeah. in the blockchain ecosystem. Even a guy like Hunter Beest, uh, you know, I would expect to see the entire institutional blockchain ecosystem supporting people like him and others uh, in this effort. But that's not happening right now. So, you know, and, and, and really, when you look at a lot of these, uh, so there's a guy named Antonio, he's the lead post-quantum researcher at Ethereum, wonderful guy. Absolutely incredible. First of all, he's a great human being, he's very smart. He just did a talk at SCC in Cannes, and I, and I was there, I was there with a friend of mine, Melody.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  And, you know, he outlined all the different trade-offs, and he said, "This is a hard problem." And, you know, it's just him right now. I mean, I understand they're talking about this, but, you know, we need to think about this, let's say, from an Ethereum standpoint. Like, we need like, like, an AWS-level engineering team dedicated to this, with tremendous resources, where this is a priority. So does Solana. Solana, as far as I understand, is right now focused on BLS. BLS is a way of aggregating signature schemes, which, you know, would make Solana even more performant. Which makes sense, because right now their meme is kind of the capital markets and so on. But, you know, and you look at a guy like Matt Sorg, he's a VP of Technology at Solana, great guy, very smart guy. You know,

• 34:00Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, if you go in the BLS direction, I think in a couple of years, you have to change the plumbing. And you have to restart. So, if these timelines continue to accelerate, and it doesn't even need to be that, it just needs to be that people believe them, and start to remove liquidity from, Yeah. you know, stablecoins, for example, in the first instance, it's gonna have a pretty devastating impact. So that's kind of how I think about this stuff. You know, and, and, uh, and, and, you know, you also look at, um, well, for example, Tron. Tron has a huge amount of USDT. Yeah. And, you know, I, I don't mean to denigrate anyone, I've met Justin a couple of times, he was always very polite to me.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  But like, I have not seen anything from Tron as far as any kind of focus on this area. Likewise, I also wrote another article talking about what I call the institutional force function. So this is another element that I think very soon will become critical. So you look at BlackRock, okay, and BlackRock recently, and it kind of made a little bit of news, updated their post-quantum or their quantum risk disclosures for their Bitcoin ETF products and Ethereum ETF products and so on. I tweeted at them in December and I sent them an email because I own some of their products. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not. I like to think it did, but probably not. But their previous risk disclosure was like very small little blurb.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  You know, and you read the fine print on those big documents, right? Now it's much more substantial, okay? So you look at Sailor as an example, whom I have a tremendous amount of respect for, but I think he has basically not articulated the risk, okay? And so I believe very soon, Strategy will also be forced to update its post-quantum risk disclosure or quantum risk disclosure in line with what BlackRock has done. And in fact, even BlackRock's risk disclosure, I think, will get much more in-depth. So you look at Circle, and I was kind of talking about this with the Circle IPO and Jeremy Leir, another great guy.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Circle doesn't have any risk disclosure around this stuff.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Really? Yeah, we had Jeremy on the show a few years ago. You know, and they just had a massive, you know, 6X, 10X oversubscribed IPO. Amazing, yeah. But there's nothing in there?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  As far as I know, as of today, I mean, I didn't check today, but as of like, I don't know, I probably checked a week or two ago, there was nothing. And yeah, now there's a fiduciary responsibility because they're public. That's also one of the changes, right? And so then you go down the line and you look at regulators. So I'm very fond of ADGM, Abu Dhabi Global Markets. I think they're one of the smartest in the world. And Abu Dhabi is going in a direction where, I mean, it's the new global finance. It's like the new Switzerland, you know? And everyone goes there and gets along. And... The entire crypto ecosystem is basically in the UAE. A big part of that was a guy named Ali El Noami, who's a brilliant guy, he's a nuclear engineer.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  You know, during Covid, for example, their borders shut as well, closed as well, and they've got nuclear power. And so they actually had too much power in the grid. So they needed off-takers of power, and he's one of the guys that architected bringing in all the mining to off-take power, which I think, in the context of proof-of-work blockchains, ancillary services to the grid is the use case. It's tremendously important, because if you have to shut down nuclear power plants, it's very expensive. Those turbines are designed to spin for 20 years. They shouldn't stop, because you get micro abrasions, suddenly that thing, you know, becomes very expensive to maintain and fix. And likewise, if you have too much power in the grid, substations start blowing up, and so on, right? So you need off-takers, and that's when, you know, the Bitcoin mining infrastructure came in, and of course,

• 37:49Speaker 03

  the rest of the blockchain infrastructure. And so you look at a guy like Dr. Marwan, for example, who's a pioneer there. He's a guy I've known since 2016, brilliant guy as well. And he brought in, you know, the Blockchain Center and all the different companies and so on. The whole ecosystem's there. Okay, so then they innovate, now the Vara license, you know, that full license is like the coveted license. I think the regulator in the UAE, whether it's ADGM or whoever, is going to start mandating soon, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but as this risk becomes clear, to the exchanges. If you want your license, then you have to make sure that the coins you list at least have, you know, some standard, right?

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Like a roadmap, they're beginning in this direction, and so on. I think that's going to be another institutional force function, the exchanges. So the ETF and other institutional financial product, you know, issuers, like BlackRock, Fidelity, and so on.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  The stablecoin issuers in particular, you know, and I admire Paolo very much. And by the way, I think he's right on the MICA stuff. He hasn't been compliant with MICA and his argument is it introduces systemic risk. And I think he's absolutely right.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  This is Tether.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Tether.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  But nonetheless, and so he doesn't have the same fiduciary because he's not public. But, and by the way, it wouldn't surprise me if he moves to America IPOs on the NASDAQ. But in any case.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  They are creating a new stablecoin that's Genius compliant, apparently Tether is.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and that's smart, by the way. I think the Genius act is much better than the MICA stuff. But in any case, he's a guy that also will have to start looking at this stuff, you know? And so you kind of start putting it all together. And this is the institutional force function. It's the ETFs, it's the public crypto companies, it's the regulators, and it's the stablecoin issuers. They will force function blockchains to move in this direction. Again, it goes back to my thesis that having a strategy around post-quantum is the most bullish thing you can do, frankly. Now, I get their skepticism and I think, you know, you look at a guy like Martin Shkreli. I think he's a smart guy. You know, he says a lot of smart things.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  He's very skeptical, and fair enough. And a lot of the points he makes are valid points. First of all, quantum computers, you know, they're very limited in terms of what they can actually do. And certainly for the foreseeable future, that's definitely true. However, even he admits that at some point, they're going to be able to, yeah, break public keys by virtue of having access to public keys. I'm sorry, break private keys. So it's a matter of time. Now, even if you're a skeptic, and that's totally fine, there's not really any good argument against blockchains taking this seriously now. Because in case the roadmaps are actually accurate, and you know, one of the arguments

• 40:48Speaker 03

  is, well, you see these startups, these quantum startups, and they have really good incentives to put out. Flashy headlines that are bullish and indicate that they're moving along quickly because, you know, they're raising money, right? And so, and I buy that. I think that's a valid argument. It's one, let's say, salient point where people should be skeptical of these startups for that reason. However, DARPA doesn't do that, right? DARPA is one source of information. NIST is another one, okay? NIST is the US government standards body for, you know, basically cryptography standards, okay? And they release post-quantum cryptography candidates, which then go into the market. And by the way, two post-quantum cryptography candidates

• 41:32Speaker 03

  have already been broken as well. Psyke, one of the isogeny approaches. And so, even, and I do think-

• 41:39Speaker 04

  What the London Real Investment Club actually does for you, it gives you the keys to open that door to the inside. Deals, in the last three weeks, I've participated in three incredible deals. A layer-two Bitcoin protocol, an incredible AI protocol. The deal flow is beyond what I expected. I don't think I've ever seen a model like this that just gives average folks the opportunity to be behind the deals, and that's exactly what we've done. Not only that, you get to hang out with Brian Rose every week. And for me, that was huge, because I look at Brian as somebody who's not only an expert in the space, and I think is on the leading edge, but just the leading edge of thought with London Real and the work he's doing there. To anyone who's taking a serious look at this, I know

• 42:21Speaker 04

  it's a big decision. It was a big decision for me and my family, and it is one of the best decisions I've ever made. So I wish you all the best and hope you come join us.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  A lot of the candidates that we're looking at right now, Sphinx and other lattice-based, you know, some of these post-cryptography standards that'll become more common name in the future, but they're pretty solid, although you need time to test these things in the real world. And so- You know, even if you're skeptic around all this stuff, which I think is totally fine. Again, if there's a 1% chance that these roadmaps are accurate and we're looking at 100% total loss, that should tell us rationally what we should be spending now, given the size of this ecosystem. Let alone, and I think we're gonna see like a major pump in this ecosystem over the next couple of years, I mean, it's just my opinion, it's not financial advice, but what if we become a $30 trillion ecosystem in the next few years?

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Okay? All the incentives I laid out earlier, including, you know, folks going to these post-quantum companies or these quantum advanced research labs with claims of lost private keys, I know people who lost their private keys to Ethereum ICO. Okay? There, I don't know, I guess there's different claims out there, but maybe 10% of all crypto is lost, right? People accidentally sending to burn addresses, people doing this, that, the next thing. I mean, you won't be able to recover a zero address, but you know, there's lots of claims that people have, so even that segment of the market can go and engage in private commerce with these companies.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  And imagine if that starts... So here's another scenario, and this is kind of like an edge case, which might not be an edge case, but you know, you hear these stories of these guys in Miami and they're at a party and they have some crypto and they're showing girls on their phone and you know, oh, look at my wallet and blah, blah, blah, and you know, just, okay. Loose lips, you know, talking about things they probably shouldn't be talking about. Okay. So let's say you're one of these guys who's, or one of these people, one of these folks who lost their crypto, and you managed to recover it, you know, in this fashion that I'm describing by signing a contract with one of these companies and somehow it works out. And you have a super NDA and you've all agreed not to talk about it. And nobody knows, and again, there's no like bat signal, there's no way to know a quantum

• 44:49Speaker 03

  attack has happened, or a quantum-enabled recovery has happened, a legal one. So now this guy's super happy, he's got his, you know, 10 million bucks, he's on a yacht somewhere, having drinks, and he starts telling the story to another group of girls that he's hanging out with, you know, this is what... And suddenly, these rumors start flying around on the internet. Okay? That will start to cause panic, right? There's a lot of different scenarios where... Chaos can ensue if trust or the perception of trust has been broken as a result of this. And that's the point that I think a lot of people miss. Even if you're a skeptic and even if you think this stuff is very, very far away, the perception is also a threat.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  And the only way to mitigate that is to take this stuff seriously now. And so even if that perception, you know, starts to permeate, it doesn't matter because Bitcoin has taken steps to be quantum secure. Ethereum has taken steps and so on. So that's kind of my take on it, you know, we'll see what happens. Personally, I can tell you, um, I've with respect. So I've been running my own fund for about five years, just me. I don't have any LPs. I only use my money. Uh, the reason for that is because, uh, if I, if I fuck it up, uh, I don't have to answer anyone, you know? I just lose my own money. So that's fine. But, um, I've stopped doing crypto deals. I stopped that, uh, late last year.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Because most of the time as a VC, you invest in these projects and you get your tokens over a long period of time. Right? It's easy to, you know, criticize VCs, but like we have to wait, right? Uh, and very often and most of the time these things fail, right? Like vast majority of the time you lose money. It's just that the one or two times that you do hit, you want to hit big, right? That's, that's how the game works. Okay. So if I start doing venture deals now, it could be four or five years before I get all my tokens between the vesting and so on. I, I, I can't, I'm just not going to take that risk anymore. Uh, so I, I pivoted. Now I do, um, you know, post-quantum investment only more or less. I mean, I do other industries too, but as it relates to crypto. So Never Local was my first deal.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Uh, that's, uh, you know, these two guys from Oxford, Stefano and Fabrizio. Now it's a team of, uh, I think there's seven and they all have the same pedigree or background. It's that Venn diagram physicist, engineer and crypto native. And I think, you know, and this is one of the things you and I have talked about. And maybe this initial part of the conversation was a bit of doomerism, but it's not to be a doomer, it's to just articulate the risk and think about it. But then the other side of it is what I like to call, again, quantum hopefulness, which is the opportunity. And just like when Bitcoin came, and then later others, Ethereum and so on, so much opportunity and wealth has been generated. And I think we're on the verge of quantum money.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  And we're on the verge of entirely new systems that don't require this trust infrastructure, i.e. consensus. I like to say consensus is the last middleman remaining. Whether it's miners or validators, whatever the consensus mechanism is, that's the last middleman remaining.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  And so thinking about entirely new systems and new paradigms without that is tremendously exciting. And I think it's going to be a massive wealth generation effect that many entrepreneurs, particularly ones who are early, will do very well. Just like how, you know, we were talking about Max Keiser earlier. You know, he's a great guy, and obviously he was early to Bitcoin, and he's done tremendously well. I disagree with, kind of, you know, because again, it's all intertwined. The Bitcoin price is dependent on stablecoins, so you kind of need those other networks as well, right? But in any case, those people who do well early on, I think we'll find a wealth of opportunity as this technology, you know, nears, right? And gets closer and closer.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  And that's quantum money. And that's better money because of quantum computing, where maybe you remove a consensus layer, which you call the last middleman, or maybe the last attack vector on money.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so, correct. It's kind of like, in blockchain systems, finality is protocol-defined, okay? So, for example, in Ethereum, we had the DAO, and we all agreed to unwind a transaction. So you can see how, you know, the protocol could be changed if there's some consensus among humans. Likewise, even with Bitcoin, you know, if the miners decide, right, and could kind of come together, things could change, right? And so if you believe that AI or AGI will attack every probabilistic or game theoretic attack surface in the financial system, then finality being protocol-defined is the target, in my opinion. Okay.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  So this concept of quantum money doesn't have that attack vector. And quantum money is actually quite an old concept. Brilliant physicist Stephen Weisner, I think in 1970 is when he first came up with the concept, and then in 1982 or 83, he published a white paper. And so basically, when you have a quantum state, okay, so you sort of had this like, you know, kind of like entangled qubits, or entangled particles, measuring that state produces a very unique result, okay? And so you can't clone that. It's impossible. And so this is called the no-cloning theorem.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  So the, the fact that you have this very unique footprint, if you will, which you can measure from a quantum state, means that you can anchor the security of the system in a very unique measurement, or output, if you will, okay? And so you anchor the financial system to the laws of quantum mechanics, rather than the laws of the Federal Reserve, or the laws of, you know, the blockchain protocol. And this is unbreakable.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  If you can break it, probably you can also like create a portal or a wormhole into another dimension, in which case who cares about digital assets? Like, I want to come along for that ride instead. And so, quantum money is digital assets that are based on this principle, where, just like with cash, so I give you a hundred dollar US bill, we don't need a blockchain or any kind of registry to verify that bill. In fact, the bill has security built into it. The hologram, the material, and so on, and you can kind of check it, you know, you go to the store, they put the marker on the hundred dollar bill and so on.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  So, we can transact cash, and it's totally private, it's peer-to-peer, and we don't need trust infrastructure. You kind of do, because the security is baked into the bill, but aside from that, you don't need some ledger, for example. Same thing with quantum money. So, you've got your wallet, your digital wallet, and by the fact that, you know, that digital asset appears in your wallet, and the security baked into it that's inherent to it, you have basically perfect cryptographic assurances that it's real and hasn't been forged. Okay?

• 52:31Speaker 03

  And so, now you can transact without needing to verify on the blockchain. And I think this is going to be the future of stablecoins. However, we have to be very clear. In order for us to reach this point, we need technological dependencies like quantum memory, which doesn't really exist right now, or it doesn't exist for more than brief instances in time. So, this is like a significant dependency. We need quantum internet telecommunications infrastructure.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Um, we need all sorts of other like complementary technologies. That I would say, and I would encourage everyone to do their own research. When you look at the totality of all, let's say, the most relevant, uh, biggest, important tech companies. Sovereign wealth funds, governments, anyone you can think of, smart money, researchers. They are like well into developing this infrastructure. Okay? So, um, the quantum internet, and I would encourage people just go on YouTube and type in. Don't go on YouTube, maybe go on Rumble or wherever Brian Rose is. But just go online and type in quantum internet and you'll see tons of information.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  And it's something that, um, you know, at an institutional level, a government level, a military level, corporate level, startup level, academic research level, has been well underway for some time. It might be new to the casual crypto person, but what I'm saying is the development of these dependent technologies is well underway. And when you look at all the, uh, largest sovereign wealth funds, and this is what happened to me last year when I started getting into this stuff. I was like, how is it that I have no idea what's actually going on in the space? I had like existential angst when, again, it's the most salient, let's say, attack, you know, it's like the thing that threatens the blockchain.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  I mean, that's one of the things quantum computers can actually do potentially. You know, of all the things they can't do that people think they can do, this particular thing they can do well. So the biggest risk that I face, I have no hedge against, I don't even know about. You know, that's kind of what caused me angst. But when you start digging into this stuff, you'll see, for example, Global Founders, we, you know, we actually met at the UAE through, through a mutual friend. Great guy named Ron, um, but it's kind of like the UAE, Abu Dhabi, that's very smart capital, right? Very smart, uh, Mubadala and others, you know, and they invested in Global Foundries a very long time ago. They've been investing, TII, which is the advanced research, uh, lab there, they've been running their own quantum computers for a long time. Uh, they have a quantum cryptography department, et cetera.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  They've invested many, many, many billions. And you'll find every single sovereign wealth, every single big capital allocator for a long time has been investing in this space. Google, IBM, Microsoft, right? The CEOs of these major companies, we talked about Jensen earlier. The CEO of Microsoft, Sundar, uh, um, yeah. I've drawn a blank here. I think Sundar Red is his name.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  Satya.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Satya, Satya, yeah. And Sundar is a Google.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Google, yeah.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  Correct. They're on TV talking about this stuff. Okay. So, um, it's moving and blockchain, and in particular, the fact that we can sleep good at night knowing our private keys are safe so long as we take care of them, is a byproduct. It's a, it's, it's, you know, a casualty along the way. There's another thing I kind of wrote about, you know, when you look at the incentives for developing quantum computing and developing all these components that I mentioned like quantum memory and the quantum internet and new types of infrastructure and so on. They're extremely high, much, much higher than even the value of Bitcoin.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's a technological, like, progress, the road moving forward, where elliptic curve cryptography and the basis of like this thing that allows us to sleep good at night is the lowest hanging fruit along the way. And so, um...

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Are your assets secure now?

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Well, I don't, I, I, I don't think, like, this isn't something that I worry about today realistically. I, I, I have it in my mind that in, by 2028, so first of all, I monitor the road. I, I, I'm into this stuff, like, and by the way, it's also very fascinating because I'll be perfectly honest with you. Very often, I felt a little bit bored with, with crypto, especially since like, really, when you look at Ethereum or Solana or whatever, it's like, how do we rehypothecate this? You know, that's kind of the innovation layer we're at right now, compared to 10 years ago where it was all new and interesting. But getting into the quantum stuff, every single day I learn something new and I don't know anything. So it's like mentally very stimulating. I don't think this is a risk. I still have my crypto assets and I will for, for a number of years.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  I'm definitely not looking to sell now because I think the market is heading in the right direction.

• 57:38Speaker 03

  But 2028 is when I start to get, yeah, a little bit cautious. And I try to follow the timelines. I try to learn as much as I can. And at that point, I may be one of those people that just decides, okay, I don't know what the risk is anymore. I'm confident it's not today, so I'm fine with keeping my crypto assets. But at that point, yeah, I may just want to put them in a quantum safe bank account somewhere. One other point on this, and so, again, you know, it's kind of like, it's easy to say and dismiss someone as a conspiracy theorist until later, you know, it turns out they were 100% right. And I'm not saying I'm going to be 100% right on this, but I don't think it's a conspiracy

• 58:21Speaker 03

  to suggest that the first run of quantum capability will be for the military and intelligence services. I don't think that's a conspiracy. I think that-

• 58:33Speaker 00

  They're already thinking about this. They've been thinking about this for a long time.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  Correct. Correct. And I don't think public, you know, I don't think the markets are going to get access before like the CIA, the NSA, the US military. Likewise, I don't think Chinese companies are going to get access before the PLA and so on, right? So then you kind of look at it and you say, well, and the, you know, the analog I like to use, the SR71 Blackbird, they started that in like 1949, right? That is an amazing piece of technology that you would look at today and think is ultra-modern and was just built and, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's very old.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, once in a while, we get a glimpse into the true state of military tech, very, very rarely, and people are always shocked. So I think it's reasonable to assume this category of technology falls under the same because it does have such tremendous applic-

• 59:32Speaker 05

  How do you get out of a rat race? How do you create wealth not only for yourself, but also for the generations to come after? I am absolutely amazed with the quality of companies that we're getting exposure to. We go on to Zoom calls with the innovators and the folks who are building new applications in Metaverse.

• 59:50Speaker 06

  Blockchain, artificial intelligence, decentralized finance. What's going on everybody? Thumbs up if you can see me.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  We are focusing on early-stage investment.

• 1:00:02Speaker 06

  And the quality of people that we're getting exposure to, whether it be Dan Tapia with OneRT, Jason Ma from Open, Yatsu from Anamoka.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  It's been a phenomenal experience thus far. It has far exceeded my expectations. We are focusing on cutting-edge technologies. I view it now as the best investment I ever made. The upside, I view, is unlimited.

• 1:00:24Speaker 06

  And as a retail investor, I would never get this exposure anywhere else outside of Investment Club.

• 1:00:30Speaker 05

  See you in the Investment Club.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  ...in military context. If a military, you know, had such capability, they would be not incentivized at all to disclose it to their nemesis, you know, or their adversaries, because, you know, they may be able to get tremendous information that otherwise wouldn't be available.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  So, 2028 is what the public roadmaps say for these public companies like INQ. But let's just say they coalesce around 2030, 2031.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  I don't know. Maybe the military and intelligence communities are ahead of that, maybe. So I don't actually know, really, when the... Do I think the NSA or the CIA is going to break Bitcoin? No, I don't think so. I think it serves American interests. But like, you never know. You see, for example, yeah.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  I love the United States. I think it's the greatest country in the world. Like I said, my kids are American. All my family is. I grew up there. But the reality is, every once in a while, yeah, it's not so great when, for example, those FBI agents with Ross and others steal the Bitcoin and then they end up going to jail. Okay, so even in a country as great as America, you get corruption from within. So, I don't know what's going to happen. What if the intelligence services do have access to this type of technology way ahead of anyone else? And somebody there is opportunistic and thinks, "Hey, I can steal a hundred million bucks for myself and nobody will know about it." We've already seen former federal employees attempting to do that. So that's another, like, leakage risk that is hard to account for.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  So yeah, when you start to unfurl like all the different ways this could go squarely, and then you're just sitting there, and really, your entire life is just anchored on elliptic curve cryptography, and a lot of these attack vectors and risks you don't even have visibility into. Yeah, I think as the market begins to process all of this, again, it goes back to what I was saying, being ready for this stuff will be the most bullish catalyst for price for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, and for all these networks, and they have to start taking it seriously now, in my opinion.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I appreciate you calling that out, and I hope we start to see it in, you know, like you said, the public companies, in the ETF companies, the Black Rocks, and then all of these blockchains. And I really appreciate the way you articulated all of that, John. I want to turn the, switch it now, and maybe go 180 degrees to your background, because you're a pretty unique guy. You alluded to little bits of this, but tell me how John Lilic in Chiang Mai decides to go to New York City at the Bitcoin Center, which strangely enough was next to Wall Street and the Stock Exchange, where the early minds were coming there, including the bankers, I'd love to get that thought, that later led to a group of people starting Ethereum. What happened to Ethereum, good or bad?

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  And then what's the current state of what you call Bitcoin-Ethereum parallel financial states, and they matter more today than they ever have before? And we're seeing that today. I think the Ethereum ETF outpaced the Bitcoin ETF last week, and now we're seeing massive treasury companies in Ethereum, including Joe Lubin, who I'm sure you know from the beginning of Ethereum, and now the Ether Machine, which is funded by Pantera, and then Tom Lee, famous Wall Street analyst, is starting his own, and this is becoming a big thing. And of course, we know Solana's going to follow, your buddy Justin Sun, who's been a guest on this show, was just down at the New York Stock Exchange, I think to hit the gavel on his Tron treasury company.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Not to mention, all the institutions are embracing these things, including stable coins, which Tom Lee reminds everybody are mostly run on Ethereum. I don't know if that's entirely true, but he says that, and it's a great talking point. So, I know that's a lot of questions in one, but you're the guy to ask. So take me all the way back. What year was this, when you decided to move to New York City, and why?

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Uh, well, so, so we were kind of talking about this off camera and I hope you don't mind me saying this. I mean, I, I guess it's public that you've had your ayahuasca and DMT experiences and, and I have as well. And yeah, so actually I was in Manila at the time and uh, um, yeah, I, I was exposed to DMT.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  And I was going through a real tough, personal, you know, breakup at the time.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  And in the midst of the DMT experience, I could see my neural pathways shifting. And for whatever reason, it became very clear that I had to go to New York City and get deep into Bitcoin. I think what happened was my subconscious just realized what I had been noticing online. Because I did get into Bitcoin in 2013, a little bit here and there. But you know, BitDev meetups were starting to pop off in New York and you could see that like, New York was one of the hubs.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Excuse me. So, yeah, I got on a plane, went over there. My brother was living in New York at the time as well.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  It's interesting though, how that psychedelic can sometimes get you to see things you normally wouldn't see. It's like the frontal cortex blocked all that out because, you know, maybe people around, everything, it was like the wrong decision to make from society, but then deep down inside, you knew it was the obvious decision.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, uh, yeah, I, I was very fortunate that that happened, basically.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  Uh, and then I got to New York and I met a guy named Nick Spanos.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  Big fat Greek guy.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  I interviewed him onstage at one of the conferences in Dubai and he is, he's old school, crazy as you like. Yeah. And so he was there.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  He was my first mentor in all of this and, uh, and he's lost a lot of weight right now. He's doing great. By the way, Nick's doing wonderful. Um, and so he, uh, he started the Bitcoin Center. And my buddy Austin Alexander, who I think you also know, um, he was at Kraken for many years. So we all volunteered, like it wasn't a job. I wasn't paid anything. I was just volunteering. And it was, you know, this incredible facility that Nick was able to commandeer, 40 Broad Street, right next to New York Stock Exchange. Um, and it was just an open place for talking about Bitcoin. All the early pioneers, Jesse Powell from Kraken came there, the Winklevoss came there, I mean so many people.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  And I was just hanging around pretty much every single day helping run the place. I was cleaning up and just, you know, volunteering. And in the course of that, I met lots of Wall Street people. Um, lots of them, they would just pop in and it would be, and you know, that's when, and it was a discovery process for me too. So getting in arguments with people and trying to argue for Bitcoin. When really smart Wall Street people would make salient counter arguments that I couldn't defend at the time. That was a tremendous learning curve for me. Um, and yeah, along the way I met Joe Lubin as well, who later became my boss at Consensus. I heard about Ethereum. And, uh, you know, just kind of like, so many things happened during that time.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  Um, the Bitcoin Center ultimately, I think, was phenomenal for Bitcoin, particularly in those early days. We, uh, had a major moment with Morgan Spurlock, you know, rest in peace, he passed away. Uh, not too long ago, but you know, he did a big feature on us at the time.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  He was like documentary filmmaker, people know him from the Super Size Me.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  Super Size Me guy.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  Where he ate McDonald's every day for a month or two and.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so he did a mini-doc on Bitcoin?

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, he came and, uh, it was probably one of the first major events. And then, uh, this guy Chris Canuzziari produced a, uh, it's on Netflix called Banking on Bitcoin. Um, another great piece. And so, yeah, I think the Bitcoin Center, cause you know, people would come and trade Bitcoin. And so the visuals and the aesthetics were phenomenal and Nick would spice things. But Nick was, he's a genius. So he would have us go outside, stand right in front of the stock exchange on the street, trading Bitcoin. For cash with each other, you know, just, uh, the aesthetics of that were in 2014, right?

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  I mean, the, the, the original exchange was under a tree on, on that same road. Where they used to buy and sell, I think the commodity futures or something like the.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Correct, yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  Ag futures. So I don't know if that's what Nick was thinking, but they used to do that in the open as well.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  We used to have a guy, Alan Stevo, wonderful guy, wore a bow tie. Just incredible orator, like, I mean, he would stand on a little pedestal with a gavel and, you know, and it was just like a show, you know, and it was great fun. But yeah, from there, I learned about Ethereum and I started basically volunteering at ConsenSys, which I did for most of 2015.

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

  Okay, so you were there at 13 originally at Bitcoin Center?

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  Well, I got to the Bitcoin Center like February of 2014, maybe.

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Okay, and the Ethereum ICO was in 14?

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, correct.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  Okay, that was later?

• 1:09:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, I was at the Bitcoin Center in January 2014.

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, then the Ethereum ICO.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  Did you know that was happening? Were people excited about that? Or was it just like, eh, we don't know what's gonna happen?

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  Well, I had already traded shitcoins prior to that. So I got into Quark, which was Bill Still. I don't know if you remember Bill Still, he used to be on YouTube. And anyway, Quark, so before Ethereum, you know, like in 2013 and even before then, people would fork Bitcoin, like Litecoin was the first one, right? Change a few parameters and launch a new coin. Problem with that was the network effects, you'd have to build network effects. And there was some innovation, like Feathercoin came out, Proof of Stake early on, Next, NXT, and some others. So Quark was one of the things I traded, and I actually made some Bitcoin on that.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  And then, yeah, I was really thinking about, okay, what's the evolution of this gonna be? Because you can't keep starting new networks each time you make a coin. And so, excuse me, when Ethereum came along, it was kind of like, oh, this is a way to generalize it.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  A network where other coins could launch on top of it?

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Well, potentially, yeah, yeah. And then later at ConsenSys, one of my former colleagues, this guy named Simon Dela Rueir, he's the one that basically created the token standard.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  And then, you know, things started rolling. But yeah, throughout 2015, volunteered at ConsenSys. They had a co-working space in Brooklyn, in Bushwick. And then, kind of moved into like, where they continue to be to this day, this like, kind of hipster warehouse thing, 40 Bulgard, just off the Morgan stop.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  How was ConsenSys linked to Ethereum? Is Ethereum the foundation? And then, some of the money went to create ConsenSys? So these were just a separate company? The ConsenSys is, that just advances Ethereum?

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  Oh dude, today, ConsenSys is not so critical for Ethereum, but back then, it was everything. So Joe was one of the founders of Ethereum. And then, he left Ethereum and founded ConsenSys to start building applications for Ethereum. But the thing is, early Ethereum, in my opinion, you know, the management structure at the time was like, very dysfunctional. And so, ConsenSys ended up not only building applications, but a lot of infrastructure as well. And then, even, so DevCon Zero, that was the first DevCon event I didn't go to. But DevCon One in London, that was November 2015, that was a pretty seminal event. Even, I think, I think Joe pretty much paid for that, or ConsenSys did.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  So even, like, very early on, probably until 2018, maybe 2019, ConsenSys was critical.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Built a lot of applications, built a lot of infrastructure, developer tools. There was something called Truffle, and it had this integrated developer environment, which was really important. Obviously Metamask.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  When did Metamask start?

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  I think like, 2016, this guy Dan Finley and this other guy, Aaron Davies, people know him as Kumavas. Kind of like a hackathon thing, that they started hacking together.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  Is it still the most popular hot wallet in the world?

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  In terms of number of users, maybe.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  Probably still. And in the beginning days, it was probably the only hot wallet.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it was, well, you know, the wallets back then were a bit clunky. Um, and so the innovation was to have it as a in-browser, you know, experience. And yeah, at the time it was quite innovative and then, you know, it just sort of grew. And then really the other big catalyst was when they activated MetaMask swaps, which happened in late 2020. So now within your MetaMask wallet, you could swap. And you got to realize even before then, of course, the automated market maker, you know, with Uniswap innovation was tremendous, but before then we had such a clunky on-chain experience, like Ether Delta and a lot of respect, I mean, very early, it's hard to build these things, but it was like a tough experience.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  Uh, so, but anyway, all of those early, so 2015, 16, 17, 2018, just so many things that ConsenSys built, so many things it funded. It did so many different like spokes, if you will, like, uh, spinouts. Um, most of them failed, but that's how ventures, venture, ventures go. And then, um, yeah, that ecosystem started to, I mean, the Ethereum ecosystem started to stand up on its own feed and we started to see tremendous innovation elsewhere. Obviously, in hindsight, I mean, the automated, the Uniswap revolution was tremendous, um, because it brought, uh, on-chain DEX experience to the masses in a way that was really great. Um, and then DeFi summer in 2020. Yeah.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  And, uh, with Compound and everything else and Inave and, you know, and then, and then things just started to rip. And then 2021, we had, you know, pretty monster, uh, rally. Uh, obviously money was real cheap back then. It was all the, all the COVID money and so on. Um, but by then ConsenSys was less important or critical to the Ethereum ecosystem, um, which was always the goal, like we wanted to make Ethereum sustainable on its own. And yeah, so a lot of these folks, um, you know, you mentioned the Ether Machine, that's Andrew Keys. Andrew was the first guy at ConsenSys doing biz dev and, and then, and then I came and we worked closely. Uh, his buddy, James Lozus and my brother at the time, a couple others. So what Andrew did was phenomenal.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  In October 2015, ConsenSys signed a worldwide partnership with Microsoft, uh, which was like the first big piece of news that everybody was like, wow, this is happening. And Andrew was the guy who made that happen, uh, by himself, basically. Really hardworking guy, tremendously dedicated and, you know, he bet the farm on Ethereum, basically, all of his, everything he had, everything he could borrow, everything he could put in, and he's done very well. So Ether Machine is his play right now.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  And he just reminded someone on CNBC that Ethereum, since 2014, is the best performing asset. No, it's not Bitcoin.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  Well, so that's an interesting point, and, yeah, like, I want to be clear, I love Bitcoin, but I really don't like this, yeah, toxic maximalism, because I think these things are intertwined, and we talked about that, right? It's like, the stable coins on Ethereum, and Solana, and Tron are traded on exchanges against Bitcoin, so they're good for Bitcoin.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  But when you look at the price of ETH going back to the ICO, over the last 10 years, it's like, the only asset in the world that's like, outperformed Bitcoin. That's the thing.

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  And that includes the last 3-4 years of, you know, the ETH BTC price taking a pretty big dump. And yet, still. So, it's important to think about those things. Now, obviously, when you bought makes a big difference, right? If you bought in the ICO, then yes, you have outperformed. If you bought last year, then no, you have not outperformed. I mean, so it just depends on your temporal view. But, yeah, we're seeing definitely a big shift in Ethereum. I think finally, and this is kind of one of the things we talked about off-camera, that I think is important to talk about, in my opinion, going back to the COVID stuff, and seeing what people like you did in the moment, which was very brave,

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  but I think one of the reasons Ethereum had a really tough last few years was because the social layer shifted. And one of the reasons it shifted was because, during COVID,

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  and back then I had a big Twitter account, you know, eventually I got banned as well, but, and I might have been one of the first, like, big Ethereum people that was like, taking an open stance against it. Again, not commenting on whether you should take vaccines or not, but advocating for bodily autonomy and informed consent and so on. And none of this hurting people into, you know, open-air prisons or, you know, locking them in their houses and so on. But I took a lot of heat for that. And there was a lot of prominent Ethereum people who, yeah, the masks came off. You could tell. They were like advocating for tyranny,

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  taking unbelievable positions that you would never think. And you've got to realize, the genesis of Ethereum was very much rooted in the same, I would say libertarian ideals as Bitcoin. And that's how it was in the beginning. And suddenly, it was like something flipped. And we went into like, you know, draconian communism or something where like COVID was like the mechanism to enforce, you know, tyranny. And a lot of people I know were put off by that. And so, you know, at the same time, I give them credit. The Solana community, for the most part, was approaching it different, in a different manner. More liberty-minded and individual freedom-minded.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  And I know personally several big Ethereum whales who shifted into Solana. Or people shifted back into Bitcoin because they wanted to identify. Like, the way your community, you know, it's like identifying with your community is a big part of which token you want to hold. And I think for a number of years Ethereum went into like this ultra-woke, you know, hellscape. Which, and I think I'm like a classic 1960s liberal, to be honest. Like, I like free speech. I like less government. I don't want any violence. I don't want any war. Yeah, you can smoke pot if you want or whatever. Like, I don't, you know. But I'm not into this, like, weird stuff, right? Which the world is coming out of right now, I think, for the most part. I mean, it's still a little bit there, but...

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  There's hints of it in the US and Europe.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  But it's not like it was in the peak of this stuff, right?

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  And so Ethereum, of all the blockchains, embraced that stuff the most, frankly.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  And it hurt it, you think?

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  100%. And I think part of what's happening right now is there's been a realignment in the community, which I think is great. Also, part of it too is like Ethereum's quite young. So when we're young, we tend to be quite leftist, you know, when we're not really thinking about things thoroughly. And ideals should be quite simple. And you know, the community's grown up a bit, I think, and now I'm 43, I'm probably one of the older Ethereum people, but a lot of them are now in their kind of early mid 30s and they have more life experience and they're more rational and more centrist. So I think as Ethereum goes back to the center, you know, which is where it should be. It should be a place that's home for everybody. And really, it should be a place where what we care about is the technology and it's

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  always been a tech-centric hub, in my opinion, where, you know, the thing that you feel really good about is wow, there's a lot of really smart people here who are thinking about hard problems and, you know, the dynamism. I understand Bitcoin doesn't want to change and I think that's fine, that's one of its appeals, but also Ethereum, you know, it hard forks all the time, it versions all the time and so on, and that's its appeal and there's room for both. When we focus on being that technology leader, that's when people feel really good about Ethereum and I think over the last, particularly a year, and really over the last six months, there's been changes at the foundation and different people have come in and now it's all shifted and it really feels a lot more centrist now.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  And it feels good for a lot of people, like I can embrace this, it's just like a brand, like, you know, you don't want to wear certain things if like the people supporting that brand.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

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• 1:21:43Speaker 00

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• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  They're not aligned.

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  Bud Light getting rid of their tranny endorser.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 00

  They're like, "We don't want to do that anymore." Everyone's like, "Okay, we'll buy your beer again."

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like, there's lots of examples of brands making certain decisions that may or may not alienate certain audiences. And so I think that's at the social layer, a big shift is happening in Ethereum. And when it's in a good spot, in that sweet spot, man, that thing can just rip and go, you know, it can just absolutely fly. So we'll see what happens. But that's kind of my take on it. And I think when you see mature, intelligent, hardworking people like Andrew Keyes, for example, putting together a great product like the Ether Machine, it's a signal that, like, things have changed a bit.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  The narrative's changed a lot in the last six months.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  Because they were coming to the end of a four-year cycle. I'll ask you maybe later if you think we're still going to have four-year cycles. But Bitcoin has quite literally dominated this cycle, much more than most people thought. Bitcoin dominance did come off at 66%, now it's down at 61%. But, I mean, people were counting out Ethereum, maybe not you, but like a year ago. And now the new narrative is it's, you know, the rails of stable coins. And, you know, it's going to be the next big thing. You've got the treasury companies coming up. Other people say, "Well, you've got these, all these, there's other layer twos, and it's going to be a ghost chain, and the layer twos are riding for free on top of Ethereum." Tom Lee says Ethereum's the new Bitcoin.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  And then he says most stable coins are actually on Ethereum, which I don't know if that's true, or if that will stay true. So what do you think the future looks like?

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  I think that, you know, those are all very good points. I would say that... So Bitcoin dominance indeed has been very strong over the last few years. And you know Benjamin Cohen into the crypto verse guy, very smart guy.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  I like him a lot. I'm a fan.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm a big fan. I subscribe to his thing and everything, but like. And he's right very often. I mean, sometimes when he's wrong, he takes a lot of heat. Usually when he's wrong, he's wrong about alt season and you know, like last December or November and things pumped like crazy. But I think Bitcoin dominance going up when the cost of capital is high, like we're in quantitative easing. Honestly, I think the reason it does that is because Ben has created an incredible meme. Like people believe it. Frankly, because actually when you know, the cost of capital is high, when we're in a quantitative tightening phase. The place where you can earn and maximize yield is on Ethereum.

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  And so to me, it's a little bit like, I don't, I don't know. I get it. Bitcoin liquidity is king. And so, you know, there's perception of its strength and so on, and people believe that. But yeah, definitely the last few years dominance has been really strong. The thing is, what happens with these four year cycles, and I still believe in the cycles. I think just like with war, typically war tends to last four years and then it kind of dissipates. One of the things that happens is people forget how reflexive and asymmetric this stuff. Like I'll give you an example. I was with Polygon for a couple of years.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  And the Matic token, like let's say, I don't know, March, April 2020 was like half a penny. A year later, it was like three bucks, right? It happened in no time. Or you see some of these other weird things like Shiba Inu or even Doge. Doge went up like 8X in one day. So when, when these things start to flip.

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, we tend to forget how quickly that can really, really rip. And it tends to be right, kind of as people are forgetting, which somehow seems to be four years. Of course, the Bitcoin halving plays a big part in that. But then, at the same time, when you look at issuance, issuance on Ethereum now is actually lower. You know, because it's a function of like the utility of the network and how much gets burned. And then that impacts the inflation rate and so on. And then to Tom Lee's point, I agree with him insofar as when you look at

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  all of the assets that are on Ethereum and you look at these companies that are putting more assets onto the chain. And by the way, the same is going to start happening in Solana too. Solana doesn't have anywhere near the number of stablecoins, but it has much faster stablecoin growth.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  Those companies and those institutions are going to want to own a piece of the infrastructure.

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  They almost have to.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  They have to.

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  Right, because if they're using it, they have to have some skin in the game for actually verifying transactions, you would think, right?

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  Correct, 100%. And by the way, I think that's going to translate into DeFi protocols as well. I'm a seed investor in Morpho. I love those guys very much. I love Ave too. Stan is a friend of mine. But like you look at Morpho and now companies are using Morpho to deploy their own vaults. They're going to have to own that token because they want participation in the governance as well. And so that theory, generally speaking, is going to apply broadly to a lot of things on Ethereum as well.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  In addition to Ether itself. Now, yeah, the biggest catalyst, though, is definitely the stablecoin growth. And again, it's sort of like what Ethereum does is it helps propagate US dollar hegemony around the world, which is fundamentally good and the demand for that is like insatiable. I think that most people around the world, particularly in, you know, tough economies, where they experience actual hyperinflation all the time, strongly prefer US dollars.

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of them try to keep it. I mean, in Russia, you would keep the dollars under the mattress and you would do that in Latin America. When you could get them.

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  But if you're in Zimbabwe, you might not be able to, but now you can.

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  So, you know, that's kind of the thing. And that use case seems like it's going to have legs for a very long time. And so if you believe that's true, then you have to also then look into, well, what is the composability of DeFi mean for three trillion dollars of stablecoins on chain, right? For example, which I actually think, you know, at the rate things are going and and could potentially pick up as well, could be, you know, if you and I have this conversation three years from now or less, maybe we're at that point.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  Three trillion in stables.

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we're well on our way to a trillion right now. It's just going like crazy. So you start to put these things together and it's like, what is the upper bound of Ether? You know, and then you kind of start looking at the numbers and you're like, you don't get to 10,000, okay? In my opinion, you get to like 70, 80,000, 100,000 Ether, more. Now, you look at that on the surface and you think, that's crazy, right? This guy, what's he talking about?

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  It's currently around 4,000.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  And the all time high is just under five.

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  But, but I remember people, yeah, maybe crazy people like Max Kaiser at the time when Bitcoin was hundreds of dollars talking about, you know, six-figure Bitcoin, million-dollar Bitcoin, right? And now it looks like he's right and it's not so shocking anymore. So one of the things Bitcoin has done has conditioned the market to accept the upper bound of this stuff is actually not so crazy. Uh, which I think is probably one of the things that's also discounted in, uh, in, in all of this, right? Like it's not going to be so crazy. Uh, so we'll see what happens, but, uh, my, my biggest hope is that, yeah, we continue to move forward, um, things continue to revert back to the center.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  Technological innovation on all networks continues to, to, you know, propagate and, and accelerate. And yeah, that, um, all this crazy quantum stuff I'm talking about is really, you know, 10, 20 years away.

• 1:29:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I'm glad you prefaced it with all that. Let me ask you a couple more questions about blockchain. So again, we saw that Bitcoin dominance and I believe, so I had Michael Saylor on the show in 2021 and 2020, I think. And he had actually watched our old interviews with Andreas Antonopoulos in 2015 and 17 and 19. We had probably some of the few really in-depth, close interviews, like in that chair, where you could go inside his mind, whereas usually it would just be him presenting that conference. And Michael has told me he watched all those when he did his deep dive in 2020. And I remember at one point, he said, Brian, I like Bitcoin because it has low aspirations. He's like, it's not trying to do anything fancy. And that was the right asset for him to acquire because he could stay out of the way of the SEC,

• 1:30:29Speaker 00

  you know, during the dark ages of the Biden administration. And I think obviously it was the first ETF and then the first one for other institutions to embrace, like BlackRock. And then the first one for other treasury companies to embrace, like Meta Planet. I actually met Dylan at the Satoshi Roundtable a year and a half ago before he went off to Japan to do that, or Meta Planet. And so I think what we saw, maybe that dominance spike was maybe a hangover from that period. But obviously, things have changed. Ethereum now, I mean, these companies have huge chunks of it. They own more Ethereum than Ethereum Foundation now with Joseph's company. And then these other two are coming up fast behind it. I guess what's next is the Solanas and the Trons, potentially. I guess two questions I want to ask you.

• 1:31:13Speaker 00

  First of all, what other Layer Ones do you have your eye on? I interviewed Costas Crypto from SUI when I was in Dubai recently. And he's one of their lead developer guys, very impressive what they're building there. There's obviously Justin, son of Tron, who's really owning that whole Asian audience in a way that only Justin can. And Justin's, he's a great, he uses media really well. He knows how to ride the headlines, whether it's buying $70 million pieces of art or showing up to the Trump coin thing, or buying huge chunks of World Liberty Financial, the Trump DeFi thing. So there's that. I'm curious what you think of those other Layer Ones. Will they become factors?

• 1:31:52Speaker 00

  And then I want to ask you about what everyone's predicting is that treasury company defaults are gonna, you know, make the crash in 26, you know, it's gonna be the FTX moment when we do have a bear market. So there's a bunch of questions. Maybe we'll start by any of the blockchains that you have your eye on. Obviously Solana has a lot of transactions per second. The criticism is it's been down in the past. There's the trilemma and the quadrimmas and all those things.

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I mean, I try to keep an eye out as best as I can. Sui is definitely, you know, and my buddy Ali is a big guy in Sui and everything. And I think, because it's object oriented, right? They have a totally different approach. And so you can do some interesting things there. They've got a great community and so on. What I'm looking for, and of course Solana, I think is going to keep doing what it's doing. My introduction to Solana was through Streamflow, which is kind of like this big Solana app where you can lock tokens and manage the tokens and so on. And so I think continuing to move towards giving that incredible user experience that's very fast on the L1 and cheap.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  And now their whole meme is internet capital markets. Moving in that direction, I think, is really interesting for them. And then, of course, looking at all the meme coin stuff. Bonk Fund seems to be flipping Pump Fund. And I think Jupe is also, they have their own Launchpad. And so that speculative element will continue. Because I forgot who said this, but, oh, maybe Ansam said this. I met a really nice guy, tall guy. He said, "Solana meme coins are better odds than buying lottery tickets." Right? You're gonna lose most of the time, but once in a while you hit. And so that speculative element, I'm not embracing, I mean, it's not my thing, but it exists. And it's going to continue.

• 1:33:41Speaker 00

  Almost the reason capital markets exist across the board.

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  Well, that's the dirty little secret no one wants to talk about, exactly. Just, you know, capital markets can be a little bit more sophisticated, but it's still putting lipstick on a pig.

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  But in terms of L1s, what I'm really looking for now is innovation. So there's two in particular. And one of them is called Pangea. And what these guys are doing is basically making data, rich contextual data, accessible.

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  Where instead of relying on RPC providers and basically providing data that's usable so that developers have a tremendous experience is quite centralized. Making that the network, so the nodes in the network serve up data. And so distributing in this way, I think is quite an interesting innovation. And then I also really like Noble Assets, which is a stable chain, basically, like Plasma. But they focus on composable yield. So how do you actually get yield just by holding the stablecoin? I think like pipping these stablecoin issuers by offering yield to the user is very compelling.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  And then how do you compose the yield into the stablecoin? With different strategies and so on. So I think those kinds of innovations, really specifically data and stablecoins. There's another great data company called Liss as well. But and they're focused on Solana, but making the data available in a decentralized way, I think is the next big innovation in blockchains, frankly. It's kind of like data availability was a big thing with Celestia and so on. But the actual data, making it usable and accessible, is where I think the L1 ecosystem will go next. So I'm very curious to see how that develops.

• 1:35:36Speaker 00

  While we're there, can you tell me about L2s? Because and specifically Ethereum L2s. I mean, Base has become probably one of the most popular ones. We have a whole portfolio of over 100 companies. And I would say for tokens being launched, it's either Base or Solana is probably the only choices right now going forward that we're hearing. Although we have tokens on Arbitrum and a few others that definitely have life.

• 1:36:00Speaker 00

  Just curious what you think of those L2s. And then being an old school Ethereum guy, at some point, does Ethereum start charging those L2s for the use of them as a master layer? How does that work?

• 1:36:11Speaker 03

  Uh, well, so I agree with you on Base. I think Jesse Pollack's amazing. I don't know the guy personally, but I follow him. This Zora thing, I don't know if you, Zora's like pumped like 89X in the last week or something. It's like where you get paid as a content creator.

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, of course, I saw that, yeah.

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  But like, they seem to have cracked it.

• 1:36:27Speaker 00

  They're creating like a little community inside the Base app.

• 1:36:29Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:36:30Speaker 00

  Right? Yeah, okay, yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  And they've integrated-

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  And I like that, because we're, we're still censored in community creation places in Web 2. So it's interesting to see what they're creating.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  Correct. So one guy, I forgot his name, uh, he made like 50 grand just in the first hour of using the app. I mean, there's like spectacular outcomes. Check it out, definitely. I mean, Jesse from Base is like a source of major alpha. I think Coinbase is a phenomenal company. Uh, what they've done with Base is incredible. They even have an L3 on Base called DGEN.

• 1:37:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, or Base 3, is there something? Oh, the Base 3 is a gaming layer, I think, in L3.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, but, but DGEN is kind of like this other layer, and then there's, uh, token, uh, issuance frameworks there, like Mint Club, which has this bonding curve. They even have like Depe, which is like DGEN Pepe. It's like the original Pepe on, on this DGEN L3. And so the innovation is spectacular. Um, and I definitely agree with you. It's either Solana or Base in terms of like, you know, new tokens. We'll see what happens. Um, I just wouldn't bet against Coinbase, frankly, ever.

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  So, you know, that's kind of going to be the race. With respect to Ethereum as an infrastructure layer, I think that the L2 narrative is a little bit misunderstood. Um, you gotta go back to like, let's say in the beginning, or even the first few years, when usage would spike, gas would be totally out of control.

• 1:37:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember.

• 1:37:57Speaker 03

  And it was like the biggest hurdle that we faced, right? Like, how can I use Ethereum when it costs me 50 bucks to send a transaction? And from a scaling standpoint, now initially, when Ethereum came out, we had this world computer meme, and we were going to shard the L1. So the initial promise was 1,024 shards. Later, that became 64. And then, I think in 2018, Vitalik posted on his blog, "Okay, we'll have like one shard maybe." I mean, it's a hard thing to do. Okay, very hard. So then the L2 approach begins. And I was very fortunate to come along for the Polygon ride when it transitioned to Matic. Um, but you gotta realize, and this is where it gets a little bit confused, and I think

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  especially with maximalist thinking when they simplify and like they want to dunk on someone on Twitter. Like, the way the L2 ecosystem developed is a response to market forces, right? It's not like the Talic waves his wand and this is how it's gonna be. No. Because people have to choose to use it, right? So, uh, the cost of using Ethereum was very expensive and the scalability was a big challenge. And other approaches like sharding were very hard. So instead, we had innovation, proof of work sidechains and later optimism and Arbitrum and so on. And they've largely been adopted. And now we have corporates using them. Uh, Sonium is another one.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  Obviously, they're censoring it, but again, you can customize it for your use case and that's fine. And I think you're gonna see every large institution consider coming on-chain with its own L2. Potentially, financial institutions with their own, um, DeFi vaults. I can imagine them using Morpho as an example. And so now you have your own L2 and your own Morpho vaults, or perhaps other services, Ave white labels and so on. And that's the experience you create for your user, right? Like, now Coinbase or Base, I guess Coinbase we can say, has tremendously benefited as a company from its L2, where the fees to Ethereum maybe have not.

• 1:40:04Speaker 03

  But that's the point. The point is, from the scalability standpoint, to enable these low-cost, very fast transactions uh, that increase user adoption. And then, you know, a future where the number of L2s massively increases. Like, this is another point that gets lost. The number of L2s is so much higher today than it was last year, let alone a few years ago. So I think the model, generally speaking, is going in the right direction.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  When the price of a token is going down, it's easier to accentuate and highlight certain arguments about why, such as the Ethereum L2 parasitic argument. But suddenly sentiment flips. The price starts pumping and so on. Tom, Leo, it's a stable chain, all the companies, you don't know. Oh, maybe the L2 thing isn't such a bad idea, right? So I just wouldn't like anchor technical arguments on price sentiment. But it is going in the right direction, in my opinion. It's got, and look, as a user, you have different flavors. If you want a monolithic, you know, you want everything within the L1, use Solana. Right? It's not like you're forced to use anything. That's the beauty of all this stuff.

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  So, you know, we'll see, but definitely going in the right direction, in my opinion. I think some of the user experience can improve. Like, you know, whether that's a better wallet experience. I mean, like the Phantom experience is really good, as an example.

• 1:41:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:30Speaker 03

  But, you know, maximally decentralized trust infrastructure for large blocks of capital. That seems to be the clear narrative for Ethereum right now. And

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Investment Club. Today, I considered the best investment that I've ever made. We get four projects presented a week by their associated CEOs. Personally, I'm completely blown away by the quality of these projects. And I know of nowhere else where I would be given this same opportunity. Each week that passes, I feel more appreciative fact that I'm a member of this group. The vibe was just tremendous. Everybody's on the same wavelength. We just clicked. Everybody listened to each other, enjoyed their company. It was just magical, magical. Take action. Don't take my word for it. Do diligence you need to do. And I really hope that someday down the road, I see you in the club. It far exceeded expectations, without question.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  You know, I mean Apollo is using Ethereum, right? I mean, very large institutions are BlackRock and so on. So the thing is, that doesn't really have much of a ceiling. I mean, the sky's the limit on that. So, you know, and really, at the end of the day, the security side of it for issuance of tremendous amounts of assets is what wins the day, in my opinion. And I think Ethereum has generally done a good job in that direction.

• 1:42:57Speaker 00

  So when does Ethereum flip Bitcoin for market cap?

• 1:43:00Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I don't know that it's going to flip Bitcoin. Because the immaculate conception of Bitcoin and Satoshi and everything is hard to, I mean, you have to love that, right? And it's something you have to ascribe to and, you know, Andrew was on Squawk Box and he said, "I'd rather have an iPhone than a landline," right? That was his kind of argument.

• 1:43:30Speaker 00

  Comparison, yeah.

• 1:43:31Speaker 03

  But, you know, why not have both, in my opinion?

• 1:43:35Speaker 00

  But if Ethereum goes to 100,000, which would be, you know, what, 25x from where it is now, you know, would Bitcoin go up that much? 25x. Now, that would keep the equal, but it would have to go up, I guess, 5x only to get those market caps kind of on par. I guess your point is that Ethereum can really scale because it's programmable and has all these other uses, where Bitcoin is still everybody's favorite pepper up to a certain extent. I don't think we're going to program anything on the Bitcoin ecosystem anytime soon.

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  But, but, well, so, so, fair enough. However, and this goes back to my quantum stuff, Bitcoin is a lot easier, from a post-quantum standpoint, to mitigate and migrate than Ethereum or any other smart contract platform. I think, so, for Ethereum to overcome Bitcoin, the ETH-BTC ratio would need to materially change, which means people will actually have to start selling Bitcoin for ETH. I'm not sure that a lot of people are going to do that. I mean, some people will, opportunistic people will, but other people will literally never sell their Bitcoin, like, the community is just very diehard.

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  What if institutions just come in and only buy Ethereum going forward?

• 1:44:43Speaker 03

  Well, that...

• 1:44:44Speaker 00

  That becomes the new meta, the new narrative, the new media. Like you said, maybe Ben pushed the Bitcoin, but if everyone's just, it's all about ETH, ETH, ETH ETF, ETH ETF.

• 1:44:55Speaker 03

  Well, the problem is liquidity is still king and Bitcoin still has all the liquidity. So, you know, there's a lot of market forces. I definitely think Ethereum is going to do very well. I'm not sure it's going to flip Bitcoin, at least not in this cycle. Maybe it might kind of have a chance, but I think by the time we get to that point where maybe it's starting to flip. And let's see, we'll see. I'm sure we'll be buddies for a very long time, I hope, I'm sure. And so let's talk about it next year or the year after, we'll see. But if this quantum thesis is right, there's going to come a moment where, yeah, the flipping is almost there. And then the market realizes, wait a minute, Ethereum is much more vulnerable to this quantum stuff than Bitcoin.

• 1:45:39Speaker 03

  And in fact, nothing is easier to mitigate or migrate or manage than Bitcoin. And I think that's going to be the biggest thing to pump the price. And that's kind of the thing where I vehemently disagree with, you know, like, you know, Adam Beck, for example. I think calling it a scam and all of this stuff and just being outright dismissive of it is like later going to be tremendously costly, right?

• 1:46:05Speaker 00

  These are the hardcore maxis like Adam saying recently even that all whatever coins you call them or anything not Bitcoin is going to zero.

• 1:46:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:46:14Speaker 00

  Just like all fiat systems are going to zero. My argument was, yeah, you're going to zero as well. What's your point? You know, like, does that mean, you know, I don't know, like, you know, the earth is going to zero at some point. So it's a bit of a silly thing to say.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  Well, I gotta give him credit though on the quantum stuff, just coming back to that. He has put together some proposals and, you know, he's got really good takes on it, I think. From a technical standpoint, I think, yeah. But historically, he's been very wrong about Ethereum in the past. In terms of price. And again, when this stuff starts to rip, it's very reflexive and very asymmetric. And I think, yeah, just like with war, every four years, we kind of forget how this stuff goes, or we get, you know, and then it just absolutely rips.

• 1:46:59Speaker 00

  I think we forget how things do rip. It's funny, I just had a flashback, John, that I got to Wall Street in 1993. I was 22 years old and I was on the 33rd floor of Bankers Trust Plaza. There was this massive 300-person trading floor and I was on the derivatives desk, fixed income derivatives, and it was fucking nuts. And it was amazing times and brutal times, like people used to abuse you physically, mentally, there was no HR department to call, people cutting off your tie and trying to break your fingers with phones. And it was good times. But I remember they would show me around the room, be like, oh yeah, that's the Latin American desk. Of course, the Latin American crisis kind of thin that out. And there's the Asian desk. We remember the Asian crisis. And then that's the Russian rule desk. Of course, the Russian crisis. Then this is the mortgage desk. You remember the mortgage crisis.

• 1:47:42Speaker 00

  And I remember thinking, doesn't anybody ever learn? Like, there's the same crisis every four or five years on Wall Street and you guys just go in a cycle. And I'm like, doesn't anybody learn? And I think that was a reminder that as humans, we just don't learn, right? We forget the really bad times and then we forget those, you know, 8X moments indulge and we just go back to this euphoria and then we get hurt and then we just repeat it again. And I think that's just a human. And it's amplified in crypto because you don't see assets on Wall Street as big as like a Doge doing 8X in one day.

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:48:18Speaker 00

  So, yeah, it's great that you bring that up. I guess maybe I want to finish on this concept of the four-year cycle. I had Michael Turpin in here who wrote Bitcoin Supercycle and he was going down to the day before Thanksgiving of where Bitcoin hits an all-time high. I think this cycle, he was calling for 193,000. Unless it's a supercycle, then it could go to 300,000 or 400,000. But what I didn't understand about his supercycle is I thought that might extend the time, but he said, no, no, Brian, it's still going to come off. Lately, I think the Bitwise CEO and someone else came in and said the four-year cycle is over. Look, it's, there's, the problem is, there's only a few data points of the four-year cycle. Obviously, the halving becomes half as important every four years, but also it's hard to argue

• 1:49:02Speaker 00

  with something that's uncannily predictable in the four-year cycle. But also... So people say the four-year cycle was dumping your altcoins and all your new friends coming to crypto, and now we got these institutions coming in. So what do you say about this four-year cycle? Because if it's true, 26 is a massive bear market. Ben Cowan has said it's going to be. Michael Turpin has said it's going to be, which means we don't have much time left for this ether season, altcoin season, whatever, before 26 is a correction year.

• 1:49:32Speaker 03

  Well, I'll tell you one thing. So I definitely believe in the four-year cycle. And I think that 2021, things absolutely ripped like crazy. The first year of the Biden administration. And if you had asked me in 2020, okay, what would happen if Biden wins and we get all the things that I would say we got, which is like, I mean, I didn't agree with a lot of his policy decisions. I would have said doom and gloom. I would have said we're toast. But instead, we just absolutely skyrocketed, right? And credit to the Biden administration, you know? So, yeah, I think, and I've heard Ben say 2026 is looking pretty

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  bad, but I-

• 1:50:19Speaker 00

  Typically, that year in the four-year cycle is bad.

• 1:50:22Speaker 03

  Potentially, but at the same time, Ben also talks about altcoin season isn't coming until interest rates start to go down, right? And so it looks like Mr. Powell might be out pretty soon. I guess March 2026, if I recall correctly.

• 1:50:39Speaker 00

  May, he's out.

• 1:50:40Speaker 03

  May, okay.

• 1:50:40Speaker 00

  It's the end of April, so May.

• 1:50:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, so there's a lot of different scenarios that could play out. Again, I never would have imagined 2021 would have been so spectacular. I would have thought it would have been doom and gloom. So it's very difficult to predict. There's one guy I really like. I think he's Dutch. He's called The Rational Root. He draws that Bitcoin circle, you know, chart, and it just shows the four-year cycle.

• 1:51:06Speaker 03

  Um, kind of like a lunar calendar rotation or something. I mean, it's a really interesting approach. And so we're due pretty soon for the next move. I think Bitcoin's done a phenomenal job of ingratiating itself globally. And, uh, you know, it just takes a little bit more. Um, I think we have to sustain, you know, the effort. I think we have to continue to grow the industry. Uh, but, you know, they still keep printing fiat. And the thing is, in a lot of other countries, they're printing more than ever, even now.

• 1:51:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:37Speaker 03

  Uh, and I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon. Um, I've never

• 1:51:42Speaker 00

  It's never going to stop.

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  It's never going to stop.

• 1:51:44Speaker 00

  Let's just be honest.

• 1:51:44Speaker 03

  And the quantity of money is sort of the last point I would leave this on. It's changed. In other words, when you see OpenAI, Facebook, the tech companies battle for employees, kind of like, you know, professional sports, hiring a free agent or whatever.

• 1:51:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  People are getting hundreds of millions of dollars, a billion dollars in some cases.

• 1:52:02Speaker 00

  I used to think they paid us a lot on Wall Street.

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 1:52:04Speaker 00

  It was chump change compared to this.

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  The quantity of money has shifted.

• 1:52:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:08Speaker 03

  Uh, or even look at professional sports. Like, I remember, you know, I like, I like watching basketball. I remember when guys would get, you know, a $60 million contract. It was big. Now, like, pretty good guys, not the superstars, they get $200 million contracts, $250 million contracts. The quantity of money has shifted. It's changed. Um, I don't think that part is realized yet in the crypto asset marketplace. Like, $200 million is a lot of money, but it doesn't mean the same thing as what $200 million meant even five years ago. Let alone even two years ago. It shifted. Uh, and so, yeah, I think the four-year super cycle will play out again. Uh, I'm very optimistic. I mean, I'm betting on it, right?

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  Uh, so we'll see what happens, but, uh, I still think Bitcoin will lead this cycle, although Ethereum will do very well, and I think Solana will do well. Uh, but I'm not yet prepared to say that, you know, the flipping will happen.

• 1:53:07Speaker 00

  Um, this cycle, it's

• 1:53:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:09Speaker 00

  It's, it's far away.

• 1:53:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Speaker 00

  Do you think we're going to see some pretty crazy price action in the next six, six months? I mean, even Cowan is saying to expect it. He thinks, honestly, we need one more sell-off back to Bitcoin before alt rip. That's what Ben thinks. He could be wrong. But do you think we're going to see some, some, some pretty crazy stuff?

• 1:53:26Speaker 03

  I think, I think he's right. I think he's right. He was right about Ethereum going home. He was wrong on the timing.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  I think he's right, but you know, the alt bottom is not far off at this point. And there's already signs. I mean, there's certain things that have gone ballistic, like this Pengu thing. It's done like a 10x in the last month.

• 1:53:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and other people are buying up. Old school NFTs.

• 1:53:48Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:53:48Speaker 00

  Never saw that happen.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:53:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and certain alts are screaming.

• 1:53:53Speaker 03

  Just ripping. Uh, this useless coin. Uh, is up like 2,200% in the last month.

• 1:53:58Speaker 00

  Let's have a check that out.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, it's like the new fart coin.

• 1:54:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:54:01Speaker 03

  I guess, I, I don't know, it's not financial advice, I'm just saying, but there's already things that you can see are just absolutely ripping. Those are kind of like, I, I see, I think with a lot of the meme coins and a lot of these like unexpected things, as you said. They're early indicators of something.

• 1:54:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an early indicator that the narrative isn't as obvious as we thought it was.

• 1:54:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:54:19Speaker 00

  Because with, with Ben, it's like, okay, well, collectively this has to move and then they're gonna go, but we're already seeing, well, wait, there's that, and there's that, and there's that, so. It's not that simple.

• 1:54:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it shows how reflexive it is, it's like. To, to go up 8x in a month is crazy. On tremendous volume. Right, it's not like this, you know, Pengu has low volume, right?

• 1:54:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  It's a, so. That's what I'm saying, like, when this stuff starts to kick off. It, you know, we kind of forgotten a little bit. Uh, what can happen, but, uh. There's gonna be some monster winners for sure, for sure. And I don't think, by the way, the last point, you know, you mentioned earlier, will the treasuries be like FTX? No, because FTX was fraud based, right? And actually, had FTX not committed for, I mean, obviously, they wouldn't have, uh, had the same position in the market and so on, if they hadn't used customer funds. By the way, his, uh. Their investment in Anthropic. Today is worth, what, like 15 billion?

• 1:55:22Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:55:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were forced to liquidate it at like a billion or whatever.

• 1:55:25Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 1:55:26Speaker 03

  Crazy, right? So.

• 1:55:28Speaker 00

  If they could have held on. And not gotten liquidated or found out, they'd be back profitable again.

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, 18 months was the window and Sam would be like, you know, an icon.

• 1:55:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I had Scaramucci in there and he was like, the exchange was a crazy, amazing cash cow business.

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:45Speaker 00

  They just hadn't fucked that up, it would have been great, but.

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  Well, you know, a lot of people in the euphoria, they get dislodged. Uh, you look at Genesis and Barry Silber, I mean, I got a lot of respect for Barry, I've known him a very long time. Genesis was his, uh, trading and lending business. At one point, I think Q1 2021, their lending book was 50 billion. And I know a lot of the traders at Genesis, and many of them have moved on. And Genesis, of course, went bankrupt. But now they're at places like Wermute and Galaxy and Flowdesk and so on. Really talented people. The traders weren't the ones. It was like the upper management who made the decision to write, you know, billion-dollar IOUs.

• 1:56:26Speaker 03

  You know, on... By the way, the three arrows like Widowmaker trade. I mean, it was the right trade, just the timing was wrong. And the whole thing was structured, you know, incorrectly. But in any case, I guess the euphoria caused dislodgment, which resulted in unbelievable risk, which crushed their business. But that business was printing money. It was a money-printing business. It was tremendously successful. So to your point, it's like, okay, I don't think the treasuries will be the same systemic risk with FTX as an analog. But I do think there will definitely be people and groups that get dislodged in the euphoria and take some kind of risk. Whether that will cause contagion across the ecosystem, I'm not sure.

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  Whether it'll be more contained within their company, like people will blow up their companies. I'm certain of that. You know, that's kind of probably almost unavoidable. But I'm not so sure, like... The only, so the only big scandal I see potentially on the horizon is, and people talk about this online. I'm not making this accusation, but that, you know, the big centralized exchanges trade against their customers.

• 1:57:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:57:40Speaker 03

  If that proves to be true and they get, you know, in trouble with the authorities, like in a serious way, then that could be probably the only real systemic issue that I see potentially happening.

• 1:57:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:57:56Speaker 03

  Now, again, I don't want to speculate on that. I'm just saying that's, I'm just reporting what people talk about on Twitter or whatever on X. But, you know, otherwise, I don't see like a big actor right now that's, you know, causing enough clear fraud that, you know, systemic risk with their fraudulent behavior. Where FTX was kind of like, I mean, even Elon said, you know, these guys don't have the money. I mean, he was very public about where's the money, right? And so unless it came from customer funds. But yeah, that's my only, if there's one parting shot as a worry, and again, I'm not saying this, but people talk about it on Twitter, if that proves to be true, then, then yeah, we have a problem.

• 1:58:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, centralized exchanges, there are some just real big messes out there. Not only your customers, but even your token issuers. And we've had a lot of portfolio companies that have been jacked over by centralized exchanges. And I always tell them, be careful what you wish for, because those top tier exchanges are going to dump all your marketing tokens on day one. And I've seen amazing projects with years behind them with crazy founders get wrecked from what I believe was bad market makers and bad exchanges. So, and none of them regulated. It's a crazy business. So, I don't want that to happen, but they're going to need something to happen, probably, because they're going to need to be changed. Now luckily, I don't, I think Coinbase is really gonna do it the right way.

• 1:59:24Speaker 00

  But, you know, you got the Binance's and BuyBit's and all these other things in the world that don't have to do it that way, yet.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  Let's see.

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I, I know a lot of the folks at Binance. I think CZ is wonderful. I think, I think if somehow he could be the CEO again, I, I think that would install, that, that would, that would be a tremendous catalyst in the ecosystem. I'm not saying Richard is doing a poor job or anything. I'm just saying CZ is the man. I don't know which exchanges are potentially trading against their customers, or if that's even true at all. But, uh, yeah, I agree. I mean, and by the way, to your point. It's tough to get listings on exchanges and for a while now, listings have done very poorly. But that also speaks to why bonk fun and pump fun and these, you know, because you create an asset with equal distribution that everyone has a fair shot at.

• 2:00:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  And you don't get that same kind of manipulation, right? So.

• 2:00:17Speaker 00

  Then you gotta deal with snipers.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:00:20Speaker 00

  That flip side. John, this is all extremely helpful and it's great to talk to somebody like you, OG in this space with all that, and then also thinking about quantum. I never thought that the potential flipping of Ethereum Bitcoin would have a quantum element, but of course it does now because anything three years out has a quantum element. So, I don't know, really fascinating stuff and I like how you're not dooming it as well, although you are telling people they better wake up. What's the best way for people to learn more about this? Is following you on X also the best way to stay in touch with things that you talk about as far as quantum and a bunch of your projects as well?

• 2:00:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twitter, X, I'm on LinkedIn, never local. You should talk to these guys. By the way, they're, they're based here in London.

• 2:01:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  Stefanum Fabrizio. You know, both quantum physicists from Oxford and, you know, Advanced R and D Lab. Definitely talk to them. Take a look at P11, Alex Pruden. He was one of the, one of the guys behind Aleo, this big ZK project. He's got a great team, a guy named Connor on his team and some other really great folks there. There's Quantum Punks, quantumpunks.org, kind of loose affiliation of interesting people and, and you, and then Hunter Beast, of course, the Bitcoin guy and Enduro and, you know, you just kind of start digging into it, but there's a lot of interesting people with great takes on this stuff and.

• 2:01:48Speaker 03

  I think it's gonna be the biggest meta in the space, you know, in the not-too-distant future, so.

• 2:01:53Speaker 00

  Let me ask you one final question, John. You know, a lot of people look at you and what you've done with your life in the last 10 years, 11 years, and they're like, "I wanna grow up and be John Lilic one day." You know, here came a guy, smoked a little DMT in Thailand, and then basically, you know, saw the future, got into Bitcoin, got into the Ethereum ecosystem, and, you know, you did really well. You've now been able to take some of that and invest it in your projects. You can spend your brain working on cool, challenging stuff like quantum, because when blockchain got a little quiet, you can do all this stuff. And I'm just curious, you know, I don't know, how does that make you feel?

• 2:02:34Speaker 00

  And what do you advise to the younger guys and girls getting into this space that think, "Okay, I really wanna create wealth in this space, but also take this somewhere else to the next level"? Because it feels like that's what you're doing, and I wonder if you can give us a little advice?

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  I mean, a lot of it is luck, to be honest. People don't wanna admit that, but I just got lucky with being born at the right place at the right time, and, you know, and so on, with the right set of confluence, you know, of events out of my control, like Satoshi making Bitcoin and so on.

• 2:03:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you still made the right decisions.

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:08Speaker 00

  Because there were tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people with those opportunities.

• 2:03:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:03:12Speaker 00

  That to this day have nothing and are maybe even jaded.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I think, so to that point, that's true. When the opportunity presents itself, or you believe it's there, you really have to go for it. I mean, I work like crazy. I've been working like a maniac for more than a decade. The concept of vacation is not something I understand, and so there is like a heavy, heavy work component to it. I think risk as well. You know, there's been lots of times where I've, you know, had major ups and downs and so on, and, you know, but when you find an asymmetric opportunity that you're very passionate about, it's going to require a tremendous amount of work, sustained risk.

• 2:04:00Speaker 03

  An application of like whatever aptitude you have towards, you know, helping develop that opportunity, learning, constantly learning, like right now, today, I'm probably like a reasonable like junior developer, but I didn't have any coding background in the past. So, you know, continuing to evolve your skill sets is also really important. But yeah, I think getting a bit lucky also, but really finding, yeah, that asymmetric opportunity and just like going all in on it. And frankly, I think we're in an age, a golden age of incredible technological evolution. The pace of everything is increasing.

• 2:04:43Speaker 03

  There's just a wealth of opportunities out there. It's unbelievable. And yeah, thinking about how to maximally apply yourself and take a lot of risk, I think is, uh, is kind of the key there.

• 2:04:57Speaker 00

  Sustained risk-taking.

• 2:04:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:05:00Speaker 00

  I like that. I like that.

• 2:05:02Speaker 03

  Not financial advice, but you know, that's, that's kind of like, yeah, I think it's an important part of the equation.

• 2:05:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:08Speaker 03

  Cause you know, there's lots of times where years ago, I could have just probably taken, taken everything off the table and I don't know, bought an apartment and coasted along and so, but then it's like, you know, I risked all of that to keep going. And even now, more recently, like with my fund, it's like, I mean, I've deployed lots of capital into different things and some of those things have already failed and many more will fail. But I could have put all that capital into like, I don't know, treasury bills and, and just chill out and you know, just whatever. But then I wouldn't be so deep into this

• 2:05:49Speaker 03

  quantum stuff or into this space right now as I am. Maybe, yeah, maybe it all fails, but you know, there's no way to proceed without continuing to sustain the risk that you take, whether it's your time or your capital or effort or whatever, especially when things move so quickly and they're so dynamic, like the way the tech and you know, the financial and tech and technology space like just fuses more and more with each passing day.

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  It's super dynamic, I mean, you know, let alone other technologies. Charlie Munger calls it the Lollapalooza effect, where you have like multiple concurrent, like within a firm, if you have an engineering team, a chemistry team, a physics team, and you have all these like, you know, compelling technologists and they all work together in their own special way and the pieces start to come together, you get a Lollapalooza effect. It's a mega multiplier on what the company can do. And so, yeah, I think learning new skills and taking advantage of the fact that, I mean, dude, now you can like vibe code things. Or you can, you can run your, I mean, you can have an AI co-pilot, right? You have a multitude of products and services available online for very little that can

• 2:07:03Speaker 03

  assist you in different things that you do and so on. You start putting those pieces together and you can become like much more productive, right? So, but it's a very exciting time. It's a, you know, tremendous opportunity, lots of competition, very good overall, I mean, to have lots of competition, but it's an exciting time for sure. I mean, we'll see what happens, but no shortage of action in this ecosystem.

• 2:07:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. What could you want? John, really appreciate this. Really been great getting to know you the last, you know, part of the year. And yeah, let's do this again another year or two, find out where we are. For everybody else out there, go check out everything you're talking about with Quantum and then of course, Quantum Money on the back of that. If you're in the Bitcoin ecosystem or Ethereum ecosystems or Solana ecosystems, it's time to start talking about that and getting the people involved to thinking about that. And also really love your thoughts on Ethereum and look, it's going to be an intense six, 12 months. It's exciting time. So, what do they say in China, "May you live in interesting times."

• 2:08:07Speaker 03

  Well, thank you very much. Super cool and I really appreciate the opportunity. So, thank you.

• 2:08:11Speaker 00

  Awesome. Thanks, John. Appreciate it.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:08:12Speaker 00

  All right. Thanks.

• 2:08:16Speaker 00

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