Tom Teman, Co-Founder & CEO of Portis: Fixing Crypto's Usability Issues

Tom Teman is the Co-Founder & CEO of Portis. In this conversation, Tom and Anthony Pompliano discuss the usability issues in the cryptocurrency industry, how those issues could potentially be fixed, what Portis does, and why it's so essential to gaining user adoption across crypto. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Tom Teman is the co-founder and CEO of Portis. In this conversation, we talked about the usability issues in the cryptocurrency industry, how those issues could potentially be fixed, what Portis does, and why it is so essential to gaining user adoption across crypto. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions

• 0:44Speaker 00

  and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Alright guys, bang, bang. I'm here with Tom. My voice is a little scratchy. I wish I could say it's because I'm cool, but it's because Blockchain Week has been wearing its toll. But thank you so much for coming, as you're here in New York.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  For sure. Alright, for those that don't know, you live in Israel, Tel Aviv. Maybe give us a little update on your background or an overview.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So I was an officer in the Intelligence Corps. After I finished my service, I did my bachelor's in computer science in Tel Aviv University, and started working in a cybersecurity company called Watch Dogs. And I was there for seven years. It's where I met my co-founder, Itai. He was also in the Intelligence Corps in the technological unit, and...

• 1:47Speaker 00

  How come every Israeli works in intelligence? Everybody?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Well, the guys in this space usually. You see a correlation. And then, so we worked together for three years. I've been into blockchain since 2013. I remember reading the Ethereum White Paper, getting really excited about the possibilities. I got into Bitcoin before that. And in 2017, there was a Facebook hackathon in Tel Aviv. So Itai and I built a decentralized application. We built an app called Attendder. It was basically for event organizers. We used to do technical meetups. And people would click Attend, but not show up. So we decided an event organizer can create a deposit box. People place a little bit of deposit, show they're serious. If they show up, they get it back. Otherwise, it goes to a charity defined in advance in the contract. People loved it. We want first place. Facebook flew us out to the global hackathon in Palo Alto.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  But people who approached us saying, hey, we want to use this application. It was impossible, basically. Like, if you're a technical person, it's hard. And if you're a non-technical person, it's not going to happen. At the time, MetaMask was the only option. So, you know, the first thing you got to do is give the person a list of instructions on how to use it. And, you know, you don't get a list of instructions when you download Instagram or Uber. It just works. It's easy.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  And, you know, if you want to have users on this system, it's got to be at least as easy as that. So being both developers ourselves, we decided we want to solve this challenge. And we created Portis, which is a tool for developers to kind of take all of that problem off the table. The users can create a wallet inside the browser without installing anything in their existing browser. No additional friction. And we use end-to-end encryption, which means that the user creates a wallet and encrypts it on the device. So that way, he has absolute control over his private key. We're not custodians.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  All right, before we get into what Portis does, let's talk about what those usability challenges are, right? So pretty much almost any application that's actually built on a blockchain is hard to use. What are some of the obstacles that you see as the most challenging?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a lot of the obstacles can be solved with good user experience. But the two, what we see as the two inherent issues that in blockchain, because of how it's architected, is the private key management and the network fees. These are two things that you don't see in Web 2. And those are the challenges that we're aiming to solve. So the private key management, that's the end-to-end encryption. We see that as a good starting point for a user. Now, as you gain more and more value inside your wallet, which is like your identity in a sense, then we can start thinking about adding additional layers and more and more layers of how you protect it. But we feel like that's a good, you know, balance between the usability and the security that you want to have.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  And which is easy for users and the network fees, we also have an interesting solution for that that we're doing, which is, well, we'll get to it.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And so as this continues to evolve as an industry, do you think that the usability gets solved just over time? Or do you think that it has to be an intentional effort from companies, you know, like you guys to to really kind of drive that that improvement in user experience?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  No, definitely the latter. It's not going to happen by itself. There are there are challenges there, the two I mentioned, but others as well. And there will have to be an effort by the companies to solve that. You know, at the end, the final result should be that it's, you know, users don't really care about blockchain. They shouldn't care about about it either. It's like, you know, people care about the value that your product delivers to them. They don't care how you do it. You know, you're using the web two applications. You don't care about TCP IP and the underlying things. You care that you can send a cute picture of a kid into your friend and memes and stuff. And that's the value you get. You don't really care how it works. And I remember when I was preaching

• 5:41Speaker 01

  about Ethereum to everybody I knew back then, I used to say that like the problem, the hard problem about Bitcoin is that it's very hard to explain to people. And with Ethereum, hopefully you wouldn't have to, because you know, you kind of abstract that away for the user.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  And I definitely agree that people don't care about the underlying technology, right? They just care about what they're able to accomplish. Like, can you solve my problem or not? Or is that what I think about it? It feels like the people who use something built on MongoDB, or an Excel spreadsheet, or anything else, they're not being told what the underlying tech is. Is this something that maybe the developer community is just focused on the technology because that's where they spend most of their time? And we don't yet have kind of the people who are product or marketing focused? Or do you think it's more pervasive than that? Meaning that it's not just the the technologists and the engineers that are focused on the technology. It's actually the marketers, the

• 6:40Speaker 00

  business people, the product people, like the entire industry is too focused on the technology?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  I think we don't have enough marketing people and product people and people who will take this to the to the next level. And it's funny, you saw similar situation both in the early days of the internet. When it was very hard to use because the people in this system, in this ecosystem were very technical people. You also saw in places like even gaming in the eighties. You know, when when you used to play Super Nintendo, you had games, and well, not Super Nintendo, even the regular Nintendo. You had a problem that games were very, very hard. There was a couple I can mention like Contra and Battletoads or whatever. They were really hard to play because the people who build them were, you know, gamers who played these games day and night.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  And they were kind of, you know, blind to what the people, the average person will be able to accomplish. And you sometimes see that in in this ecosystem as well. The people who are building this stuff, they're very tech savvy. They they're also very motivated because they have this belief that this is something that should happen. And while I agree with that, you can't expect your users to be that motivated and that, you know, sophisticated. We need more product people, more marketing people, more people that user experience that can bring us to the same level of what we have in Web two. Like I mentioned before, there are a couple, two, what I believe inherent issues in blockchain that you can't ignore.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Which is the private key management and the network fees. Those are things inherent in how blockchain works. You know, with great power comes great responsibility. You gotta have your private keys. We're very, we were very, it was very important to us that we are not custodians of private keys. There are some solution that go that path. We feel that's kind of like taking a shortcut. But you're, you know, if someone build the next decentralized Facebook, what good does it help if you have someone in the mill? Who's like, you know, the Zuckerberg who's holding everybody's private keys? Kind of defeats the purpose, not to mention the liability.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  And so what is Portis? What are you guys actually building?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  So our goal is to make sure developers don't need to worry about this whole issue of onboarding the user and letting them use your app. You have enough on your plate. You're writing the smart contract. You're worried about the user flow inside your application. There should be a solution for developers, just like if you need payments, you're using Stripe, you're using messaging, you're using Twilio, then Portis solves the whole problem of the private key management, signing transaction, getting more crypto into your wallet, and a host of a lot of other stuff that users have to do when they're using a decentralized application. So we give the developers an SDK. It's standard Web3. We're supporting other blockchains as

• 9:22Speaker 01

  well. We recently added support for EOS, and we're adding Aon, and we have a lot of other EVM-compatible blockchains, simply because we want to make sure that any developer on any ecosystem can use, can solve that challenge, but also for our users. They don't care, just as much as they don't care about blockchain, they don't care which blockchain. It's the same. This is Mongo, like you said. This is SQL. It should work the same for both. So we give the developers this SDK. They integrate it. It's the standard way that if they use MetaMask, it's the same code. They don't have to change anything. But now their users don't have to install anything, don't have to understand complicated terms, just use an email and password. They encrypt the wallet on their side, and now they're

• 10:07Speaker 01

  in control and they can access it from any device they want and under existing browser.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  And so as you're thinking about this, it sounds similar to like a Facebook Connect, right? Facebook basically has a single button that you can press anywhere on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of websites around the world, asks you for a username and password, and then you're permissioned in to use that site under the account that you have at Facebook. With this, maybe there's not the account back at the centralized entity, right, like Facebook, but it's very similar in that I can go to a whole number of different applications, and rather than using private keys or different various levels of

• 10:55Speaker 00

  cryptography, I can actually just use my email and password to then get permissioned in to use the application, is that accurate?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's accurate, but there is a private key behind the scene. We just don't wanna bother the user with that. If you wanna go inside your wallet, you can export your private key if you're that kinda user, and we're not boxing anyone in. You can export your wallet, go to whatever other wallet you want, and import your mnemonic phrase, private key, whatever you want inside. But yeah, as you mentioned, as opposed to something like Facebook Connect, we don't hold anybody's private keys. A good equivalent is LastPass or OnePassword, if you're familiar with them, which is the same concept. Recently, LastPass was approached by the authorities in the US, and they told them they wanted to get someone who was using LastPass, and they asked for their passwords. And LastPass were just like, guys, we can't, we literally can't. And by the way, we have the same challenge when a user approaches us and say, look,

• 11:46Speaker 01

  I forgot my password, I never wrote down my recovery phrase, help me. And we're like, sorry, we can't. Now, we want, we're looking to solve that. We're adding social recovery and other means that will let the user, you know, find a way to solve the problem if they lose their private key, and also smart contract wallets, which is, but these are things that we wanna, you know, the user has to progressively move into that. Because when they're just starting off, when this is the first application they ever see, they don't have, they're not invested so much. So it has to be just email, password, boom, that works, but you have your private key, it's yours. I'm not holding it for you, we don't want that, it's a liability, and it goes against the whole ethos of the ecosystem.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  And so as you're doing this, keep with the kind of LastPass or OnePassword. Walk me through, not from the user's side, but from the developer's side. What does a developer require to do in order to, you know, use this, use Portis? And then what's the benefit to them? Is it just simply a much easier user experience?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Well, it's a much easier user experience, but it's it's not just on the level of, okay, you have a prettier button or anything like that. And you're removing the need for a user and in terms of what it takes to integrate, by the way, it's very simple. It's just like two lines of code. Since like, for instance, Ethereum, we're a standard Web3 provider. So if you have MetaMask working, just import us and it works the same. So trying it out shouldn't take you more than a couple of minutes. Now, in terms of what you give to your users, so we mentioned they don't have to install anything. It works on their existing browser and they can access it from everywhere. But the other challenge that I mentioned is the network fees, is which is a very alien experience. Like you're walking to a website, they're not saying, oh, you gotta pay for my AWS fees or my hosting fees.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  That doesn't exist. No, in blockchain, you gotta have that. And when you're talking about something like Bitcoin, that's not that much of a challenge because if you're updating this state of the blockchain and you have to pay network fees, in Bitcoin, that means you already have Bitcoin. So paying a little bit extra, okay, no worries. But with Ethereum, a lot of the use cases that we're seeing is the user comes into a DAP, they're getting maybe some weird DAP tokens that give them like reputation in that system or whatever, but they don't have Ether. They can't pay the network yet, but they wanna update the global, you know, blockchain state. So that's a big challenge for them. Like now you're telling me I have to go to an exchange, do KYC, do all the things, and only then I can like vote for something? I'm not gonna do that.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  How do you handle the KYC AML? If I sign up, right, and I have a Portis wallet, I have my email and my password to basically authorize or confirm that it's me, am I KYC and AML'd at the Portis level? And then every time I go somewhere, that KYC and AML goes with me? Or is there no KYC AML done and each individual service is required to KYC and AML me?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Well, we KYC and AML you through wire when you wanna buy something.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So and we're not focused on the people who wanna buy, you know, a hundred thousand dollars to speculate and to invest. We're focused on the average user who wants just to, you know, use an application. So the KYC is very low, the bar. And we allow you to buy up to forty dollars a day through wire with a debit card and KYC is just your email and phone number. That's it. Like, you know, your your credit card details and address, but there's no taking a picture with a passport or anything like that because you're not buying that many. That much, sorry. And if you wanna buy more, you can do it through ACH. And then you just login into your bank account using Plaid, which is just like what you do in Venmo. And then you can buy up to twenty-five-hundred a day. But the KYC is an interesting bit.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  We do allow you to share it, but that ties into how we tackle the network fees challenge. And so, when we started off, you know, there weren't that many DAPs out there. So what we did is we gave each new user just one dollar for free. We asked them to, you know, verify their phone number with a PIN code. And we give them one dollar for free. Now, we had to block off some countries because it was abused, but in the US and Europe, it worked well. It wasn't scalable. It was just so people can have a little bit of gas in their tank. So they can take this car on the test drive and see how it feels to use a DAP. We were trying to show how easy it can be. But this was still a problem. Giving everybody one dollar for free. People just took that one dollar sometimes and just, you know, moved it into a different wallet and said, "Thank you."

• 16:12Speaker 01

  And we didn't want, that wasn't our goal. So, recently, the guys at Tabuki, it's another company. That they released something called the Gas Station Network. Now, the Gas Station Network is something that was, you know, it was released after a long time of discussions in the community. There's the Metacartel community. And it deals with meta-transactions, which is letting someone else pay for the gas fees of your transaction. So you sign a transaction with your private key, it's you, nobody can tamper with that. And then you send it to someone else who, you know, tacks on the gas and sends that to the network.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  So this whole architecture that they created is very interesting. It has a lot of game theory in it. Basically, what it does, it lets us tell the DAP, "Hey, you can sponsor your user's gas fees." Now, that sounds great, but you mentioned the reputation before, the KYC. So, think of it like a collect call. When you called, when you call someone in a collect call, how do they know they wanna accept the charges? Well, they recognize your voice, they know what reputation you have with them, so they say, "Okay, I'll pay for that." So we need something similar. So, we, you know, piggyback on the KYC and AML that we already do for users when they buy. Or through other means, if it's the email verification they did, or phone verification, just for, you know, when... Not necessarily if they want to buy, just if they want to do that KYC.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  So the DAP can say, okay, we trust you, we'll sponsor your gas fees. So if the user agrees to, he will then share his reputation with the DAP. The DAP will say, okay, I'll pay, I'll, I'll accept the charges. And they'll pay your fees and then there's no friction. Then you're just, you're coming to a DAP on your browser. You don't have to install anything. The, then DAP is paying your network fees. So you can just start using it right away.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  And so as you're doing this, I guess one of my questions is the user experience component is really compelling. Right? So there's less friction for me. The developer use case is definitely compelling in that there is a more efficient way to get people to onboard. Right? There's less friction there. And also it offloads some of the risk and complexity with managing who my users are, how, what's their credentials, all that kind of stuff. All of that said, there's added risk in that you now are

• 18:44Speaker 00

  adding a level of complexity, right? There's another layer or more software that's involved. So the user experience gets better because you kind of build this on top of, you know, the digital wallet, wallet, et cetera. How concerned are you about security and some of the regulatory components that I think other companies, you know, really kind of, I don't, I don't say they fear, but it touches on? Do you see that as part of, of the business and things you have to pay attention to? Or is that kind of outside of what you guys are doing?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Well, security is a concern from day one. That's like, we're always trying to make sure that we're not, we're not, you know, compromising the security for the sake of usability. But we also think that you don't have to compromise usability. You can find the right balance. And in terms of regulation, well, thankfully our life are a bit easier just because of the fact that we don't hold any private keys. We're not the custodians of money, we're not holding the private keys. So we're not custodians. We're not dealing, we're not, we don't have access to the users, you know, funds. So in a sense, regulation wise, that's easier. We have stuff like GDPR and things like that, but that, that also applies to non crypto challenges.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I'm assuming it helps that you're not based in the US either.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know. I'm not sure if it does, but.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Uh, Israel also has its own various regulations for stuff.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Wha- wha- what is the, uh, tell me more about the Israeli regulatory environment. Good, bad?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Overall, I think it's good. There are, I, I think it's very similar to the US in some regards. In terms of the tax for, for any holdings you have, it's pretty much the same. And it's, it's having, I, I think we have the same approach as the US, which is, you know, we can't just let everybody do whatever they want, but we don't want to stifle it because we, we don't want to get left behind by other countries, which might be a little bit more lenient. So.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  And, and it seems to me, I think when I was in Israel last, uh, there was a lot of talk of like, uh, trying to become Crypto Nation. Right? Was I think that the, the language that was being used. Um, how's the progress towards Crypto Nation coming?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Um, I, well, I, I hope it's good. I, I mean, you have a lot of very strong cryptographic capabilities in Israel. And that obviously ties in very well with cryptocurrency because that's the underlying concept, which is, you know, we don't have to trust anybody. We trust that the math works. And there's a lot of great projects that came out of Israel. And, um, yeah, Tabuki, which I mentioned, a guest station, that's an Israeli team as well.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Really?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  What, uh, what's one or two other projects in Israel that, uh, that you're super excited about?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Well, there's Bancor, which everybody knows, and.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  It's a pretty popular one.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And trying to think of any others that's come to mind right now. Um, can't recall the moment, but.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Okay, that's fine. Um, all right. And then, so where do we go from here, right? From user experience standpoint? Um, once you've got this, um, kind of, you know, one password or last pass type experience with Portis, um, what are kind of the next hurdles that need to be knocked down by, whether it's you guys or other teams, uh, to really get the user experience to be, um, at parity with, uh, kind of the non crypto world?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  So moving forward, we do wanna make sure the user can progress into, you know, I mentioned before that you don't wanna put your a hundred thousand dollars on it, but we still wanna enable that. So we're talking with hardware wallet providers to do an integration. So your hardware wallet is like your, you know, wallet, your bank safe, but you have your checking account, but you can easily move around between them. So you can hook up your hardware wallet, and now your porters can take a little bit out of it every time you want, but it has a restriction up to a certain amount per day, month, whatever you feel comfortable with. So, and that also kinda is related to the whole recovery issue, you know?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  It's kinda weird that this is the cutting edge of technology, but we're telling people you gotta write something on a piece of paper and not lose it. You know, it's a hard thing to explain to people.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  It's ridiculous.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's ridiculous in a way, yeah. And it's a very big challenge to private key management, because even for IT professionals, private key management was a difficult problem up until blockchain hit the scene. But now we're saying, no, it's not the IT professional has to do it, it's the average person on the street, it's your grandma, now she has to know how to manage her private key. And that's a challenge, that's a big challenge. And other than that, I think we're gonna see, you know, blockchain by its nature is very interoperable. So we're seeing a lot of interesting things happening, and, you know, it's even in a way hard to predict, because sometimes things that might sound ridiculous now will make a lot of sense later on. And one of the DApps using us called Ethereum,

• 23:38Speaker 01

  which is a game, it's like Magic the Gathering, but on the blockchain. So they have a feature where you can take a Cryptokitty, if you have it, and forge it with another card and create like a Cryptokitty dragon or something like that. So that's something you couldn't do before. You can't take one asset from one game, you can't take something from a game on Playstation and one from Xbox and kinda have them talk to each other with blockchain, you can't. And, you know, that's part of the value that people sometimes miss out on, you know, people sometimes focus, oh, it's anonymized or that, but the interoperability, for instance, that's really important. I don't think anonymization is that important, in my eyes. I mean, the value of other stuff, I think, is higher.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it makes sense. Before I finish up, I always do a rapid-fire set of questions. What do you think is the most important company in crypto?

• 24:27Speaker 01

  I can't say Portis, obviously.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Ah, you cannot say Portis, that is not allowed.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, wow. Uh, the most important company in crypto right now. Need to think about that. Um. Give me a second.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Oh, you're fine?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's a tough question.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  I only ask really tough, hard questions on this podcast, obviously.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  No, because I'm thinking like which part of the, I'm not even thinking of a specific company. I think like what's the thing we want to advance the most right now? Um, I want, I think Prismatic Labs is a very important company.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Oh, Prismatic Labs, I talked with them. Uh, this is Ethereum 2.0.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  The layer two scaling solution for Ethereum.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, because you know scalability is a big concern now. And what we're saying a lot is that we should also worry about usability because if you don't have a lot of users, then you know scalability won't be a problem sadly. Like we're creating, we're building up the ground for nothing because if there's not going to be a million users, then yeah, great, we're scalable, but nobody's here. But it is something that needs to be solved and the guys at Prismatic Labs are doing great, a great, a great job.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Mm hmm, that makes sense. They, they definitely are taking a big swing, right?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Um, what, uh, what's the one regulation that you would change or improve if you could?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Hmm. I wish people could, you know, buy crypto in a, you know, more easily.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  More easily?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that they wouldn't, the KYC wouldn't be as hard.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  And I get why it has to be in a way, in a sense, because there is room for doing nefarious stuff if it isn't. Uh, I don't know, but I wish there was some way to make it easier.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  That's fair. Um, what is your most controversial thought in crypto? Like what do you believe that a very high majority of other people would disagree with you on?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  He's deep in thought, which means this is a great question as well.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  That's, that's, yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  I'm two for three on the rapid fire.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, wow, an unpopular opinion.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't know, yeah, I guess that could be depending on which circles, but

• 27:03Speaker 01

  you know, people are sometimes kind of knocking various blockchains, like for instance, I mentioned EOS and trust me, I'm well aware of the fact that it's 21 nodes and the decentralization there is not really decentralized, I'm aware of that, but you know, when you're talking about the world of a blockchain, it's always like a blanket which you're moving, you're pulling in different directions, if you want to have really

• 27:27Speaker 00

  It's trade-offs.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  It's trade-offs, exactly, and

• 27:31Speaker 01

  there's room for those blockchains as well for specific reasons, it's like when you have people who are just, oh, Java is the best language, or C is the best language, no, depending, it's like different tools for different missions. Now, you have to be aware of the fact that it's not really as decentralized as Bitcoin, of course, as Ethereum, or as other blockchains, but it has its values for specific use cases. If you're talking about gaming, for instance, sometimes you want it to be super fast and cheap, just because you can stop every once in a while and make sure it's on a more decentralized blockchain. And so, you know, you shouldn't automatically say, oh, these blockchains, you just, they're, they're, they're not worth anything, they have, they, they have their own use cases, but you know, not for,

• 28:14Speaker 01

  not for what Ethereum does, or Bitcoin does.

• 28:16Speaker 00

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

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And I really like the book, like I read tons of, and Discworld books, I really love the whole series, it's, it's great. But I think like a great book is Surely You're Kidding, Mr. Feynman, you know that one?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  I've never read it, but I, but I've heard of it, yes.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  It's just like the thought, the thought process of that guy, he was like the Albert Einstein of the 60s and 70s. He also won a Nobel Prize, and he has just like a really interesting way of looking at stuff.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  A lot of mental models and stuff like that, right?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, so it's really nice.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Well, um, so I have one non-crypto related question, and then you get to ask me a question to, to end this. Um, what do you think about aliens? You think they're real?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I find it hard to believe that we were the only sentient life out there, especially since science is showing more and more how easily it is for some sort of life to take place. Although we're very unique, like where the earth is and positioned to the sun and all that. I just think like.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Do you think it's like life on Mars?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  No, I don't think, I, there might have been life on Mars at some point in a very like, you know, ameable level. I, I wouldn't rule that out. But I think that we're not gonna, the chance that we'll see another sentient being. I always used to say that until we are able to move around the galaxy really, really quickly, we're not gonna see anyone. Because they're all moving on these super highways and we're just stranded in some god knows where. And the chances that they'll just run into us are very low, but if we start moving around, then the chances that we intersect with someone grow. So until we, you know, uh, we need to talk to Elon Musk to, you know.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Speed it up, man, it's taking so long.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Where's the faster than light speed?

• 30:05Speaker 00

  It, uh, it always amazes me, there's many country, or many countries, uh, many planets where uh, they believe that uh, we may either have the technology or be getting close to having the technology. Um, that could go right in terms of, of, uh, of distance. Um, but humans could not survive the trip. Because it literally takes so long to get there, that we would die before we got there.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Right, so you're thinking you train like a, you know, twenty-five-year-old. It would take forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years to get there with space.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Well, sometimes they're talking about like, you know, freezing people along the way and stuff like that. And there's a, there was an animated TV show, uh, when I was a kid.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  The Jetsons?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  What? No, no, no, not the Jetsons. The Jetsons is supposed to be taking place close to now, isn't it? Like, what, what is the Jetsons taking place in?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  I don't know, but probably around now.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's around now, uh, it's not really the same. But, no, it was a different TV show where they flew out to a planet to do something, and they froze everybody and everything. But by the, it took them like, let's say, two hundred years together. In those two hundred years, I mean, show, but in those two hundred years, the technology advanced so quickly that when they got there. Other spaceships already arrived and populated, so they got there and they're like, yeah, good thing you made it. We're already here. We already have everything. Let's and it's kind of like it was a it was an educational show. It was a very old show. There was there's this history show where they teach you about history with a guy with a beard, you know, a a story about life, something called. So it was the same company.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And it was just like there.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  That's a really interesting thought, though, like this idea that the technology could actually be so outdated that.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  You'd be the last one there.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Leave first, arrive last.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  In the US, we just call that slow.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  What uh one question you have for me to finish this up?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Uh, well, what do you think is the most interesting project right now in the space?

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Bitcoin.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Uh, why? If I can, if I can follow up on that question.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  It's the it's the most important. Right? In the sense that uh Bitcoin stands to disrupt the very foundation of money, economics, global power, et cetera, right? And and so when you look at it from that lens of what is likely to be the most disruptive,

• 32:40Speaker 00

  coupled with it probably being one of the simplest, right? To me, that's just it's really interesting, truly important, uh and it's really powerful, right? And so so I always say that and I think that that's um it's an easy answer, right? So a lot of people are like, oh, come on, like, you know, what what do you mean? But but I mean it because uh I think that a lot of times when folks talk about crypto, it's like Bitcoin's too simple. It's too easy, right? Like, oh, we all know about Bitcoin, like, what else? And, you know, to me, that just shows that we are underestimating the potential it has and then the power it has. Um, so it'll be kind of interesting to watch this play out over the next, you know, twenty, twenty-five years.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  No, I I agree. Sometimes it's something that just does one simple thing. It's much better than, you know, trying to get everything inside. But let's say, you know, there are a couple of Bitcoin equivalents out there, which sometimes even improve on some of the problems of Bitcoin. You think that Bitcoin right now is just has that network effect and that's just like.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Network effect, it is brand awareness, it is uh the um.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  The security, the regulatory acceptance, right? So it's not a security, it's a commodity. It's got the institutional adoption or what appears to be demand for adoption, right? It just has all of these components. It's got infrastructure, right? That a lot of these other things don't get support. It's just got a lot of things that other cryptocurrencies or even competitors don't have that I think give it a significant advantage.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Can I follow up on the question?

• 34:20Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  So if I had a chance to rephrase my first question, besides Bitcoin, what do you think is the most important project? Or interesting, doesn't have to be important necessarily, but like really like-

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'll talk about a company, many people have already talked about it. It's called Figure. We're an investor in the business. Mike Cagni, who formerly founded SoFi, is building a business to digitize legacy assets. He started with mortgages and reverse mortgages. He essentially takes, if you think of a mortgage, there's a borrower and a lender. You've got, you know, it's called five to seven middlemen, seven, eight percent fees. He wrote software and basically automates away the middleman. And he can compress those fees because he owns the whole stack, you know, in the transaction, down to about five percent. And then what he's able to do is you can actually go online and apply for a mortgage.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Within five minutes, he tells me whether you're going to get it or not, and within five days he funds it. And so it's really interesting because what this does is, again, he's digitizing a legacy asset. He's creating more efficiencies, he's bringing the cost down. But the best part is he actually wrote a white paper with Morningstar. And Morningstar talked about how these types of bonds are going to get higher ratings, right? So the actual debt will be rated higher because it is on a blockchain. It is transparent, it is secure, it is more compliant, you know, all these things that I think are really interesting. And so- For me, everyone always talks about, you know, do you want something that's cheaper or faster, right? It's trade-offs.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  In this case, you're talking about something that's cheaper, it's more efficient, and it gets a higher rating, right? You kind of get multiple positive impact. And so when you get that, I think you can just build a really, really big company. And he's done a great job so far in terms of going from zero to, you know, a lot of money in revenue, and I think they will continue to do that.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  That's interesting. And it runs on Ethereum or a different blockchain?

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Uh, it's a blockchain called Providence, which they built.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Oh, they built their own blockchain?

• 36:27Speaker 00

  They did.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  That's always the kind of stuff that I find kind of problematic, because would you have enough of a network size to make it, you know?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Well, he's working with, he's working with financial service organizations, right? So they're serving, because remember, in that world, the, the advantages of a public blockchain are not necessarily needed in the legacy system, right? A lot of these banks, they already work with each other, right?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  So they want to have like their own consortium blockchain?

• 36:55Speaker 00

  I, I think that's generally, you know, in a directional way, correct? I don't want to speak for them, because I don't quite know exactly how they think about it, but, but what I would just say is, in many cases, I think that JP Morgan actually is another good example. I think a lot of these folks are going to start with these private blockchains or semi-private blockchains, and they're going to move to public ones over time.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Or you guys are going to communicate with each other, you know, you've got to work with the private, and sometimes you've got to tap into the public, because you're talking to another private consortium, yeah.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So, you know, and again, I don't know how, exactly how it's going to play out, but I, I do think that's probably the, the project or company that, you know, is the most interesting.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  So, listen, I appreciate you doing this. It's been a long week for everyone.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  And I think that, you know, what you guys are doing is pretty cool, and anytime that we can start to reduce the friction in user experience for people in Bitcoin crypto and the blockchain ecosystem, it's a positive thing, so I'll be cheering you on, and let Susie get in the future as you guys make progress.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Happy to. Thank you for having me.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.