Agentic AI Takes Crypto to the Next Level?

Transcript

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Fedria anst and today I'm speaking with John Pala who is the founder and chief steward of ETH Denver. >> We're not crypto Denver. We're not blockchain Denver. We're not anything like that. We're we're very much Ethereum first. We were never propped up or supported by the Ethereum Foundation. We just did our thing and they sort of just said, "Hey, that's part of a permissionless world." You know, anybody can do an ETH event somewhere.

I mean, as North America's largest event and probably the world's largest aggregator of Ethereum folks, you know, we've done this for 9 years. I think that Agentic AI and coming on chain is probably the biggest innovation that we've seen in the 12 years I've been in it. But it actually looks like increasingly traditional finance institutions are besting us at our own game and they're executing extremely well. >> So the only reason why crypto didn't scale bigger than it is or didn't really make it in mainstream because we didn't have distribution.

Welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Fedria ans and today I'm speaking with John Pala who is the founder and chief steward of East Denver. East Denver just concluded the week before last and it is typically one of the biggest crypto gatherings in the space. Um before we talk with Don let me tell you about our sponsors this week. This episode's brought to you by Lido. As Ethereum staking continues to evolve, more teams building staking products are running into a familiar challenge. On one hand, poolled liquid staking gives you liquidity and access to DeFi, but can limit customization. And on the other, bespoke staking setups offer more control over things like pricing,

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and get in touch with lighter contributors today. >> John, thank you so much for coming in. >> Thank you for having me. >> Fantastic. Um, te tell us about yourself. So, before East Denver, what were you doing and uh what pulled you into Ethereum in the first place? Um I would say serendipity pulled me into the space but the actual story goes a little something like this. So I was in the uh Uber of era in startups, right? Where you know the Uber for laundry and the Uber for this and the Uber for that, right? So everybody was trying to build these marketplaces using apps to connect you know the bit in the ask on things

and I was involved in that and I was working on I've been employment I've been in the employment and HR tech space for a very long time and so I was working on a project that was building you could say like the MLS system for recruiting. What's an MLS system? >> So, the MLS system is like the real estate system that we use here in the US where like, okay, >> the buyer's agent finds the seller's agent and they get together and then they sell a piece of property. Well, we we tried doing that with jobs. But some of the issues that we ran into were very um very challenging to scale it um for lots of different reasons and I'm not

going to get into that. But I'd started talking about the democratization of employment back in 2005 before I knew anything about blockchains or smart contracts or web 3 or any of that stuff before it was even a thing before Bitcoin was even a thing. I was thinking about these things. Um, and I started studying economic models and social anthropology and incentive design, game theory. I started really digging into like, well, what makes things actually work the way that they work, right? Like I was curious to, you know, really think about how could we create better systems that actually create more sustainable outcomes. But

then in in building this sort of like platform for recruiters to to like share information and share jobs or candidates or whatever, we I mean we really learned a lot about the game design of that industry. And I in January 2014, I was at a technology conference in San Diego, California, and I happened to meet a guy by the name of Dimmitri Bdderin, who was also at the conference. and um he and I became friends and stayed in touch on social media.

And then later in 2014, I started seeing about the Ethereum white paper and I was curious about what all that was and I read it and I'm not sure that I understood it. Actually, I know that I didn't understand it. Um, but I had some early ideas of how to use the technology and I was really intrigued by some of the um, like after they did the uh, the Ethereum pre-sale, I was intrigued. They like raised 156 million in like a matter of hours and I'm just like, what's like tokens? What is all this? Like so it started getting me curious and

you know but I I still hadn't had my sort of conversion moment I guess you could say my red pill moment. I hadn't had that yet. that came in early 2016 and I was talking with well my CTO at the time for my my startup and he was like no blockchains no it's not going to be a thing and all this and I'm just like yeah but we're in the middle of all of these issues as a company like wouldn't it be better if we just had code that that sort of ran everything and then we could just not be in the middle like so behavior is organized based on the appropriate designed incentives and he

just was not having it. And I was speaking with another colleague of mine and he was big into Bitcoin and a few other things that were going on at the time and um you know he's he got kind of he I wouldn't say he got mad at me but he he kind of proverbially grabbed me by the ears and said, "John, you're not paying attention. This isn't technology for corporations. this is going to rewire the entire system in a way that we're going to build all new things. And like, you know, I'd always been thinking about blockchain tech is like an efficiency capture. I mean, technology has always been in terms of corporations like, you know, let's make it cheaper, let's make it better, let's make it faster so we

have a market edge, right? We can build a moat of some sort. Well, it finally dawned on me. I was like, "Oh, wait. This is going to change everything." >> Caves together strong moment. >> You had this like, "Whoa." It's kind of like Neo coming out of the Matrix. >> Yeah. growing like you know you know I what you know my whole life changed and you know up to this point I had a recruiting business that you know was very nice business and I had a startup that you know did pretty well and you know all of a sudden I just lack I just lost interest in all of that so and I I couldn't change it.

It was just like once you saw it you you couldn't unsee it. Well, then I was talking to Dimma Dimmitri and I I was asking him like, you know, about developers and like all this because I had all these ideas and I I you know, I at the time I didn't really understand how to code anything and you know I was the entrepreneur guy so I needed a I needed a few dabs to like but I didn't even know what I wanted to build yet. So the only people I could get in touch with were people that wanted like $400 or $500 an hour just to like you know build you some little prototype thing and like if you don't know what you want to build they don't know what to build you. So you

know it wasn't just like a hacking thing like hey let's p let's try let's just figure some stuff out. So that didn't exist. Uh you couldn't find anybody that knew Solidity. So, um, I found my way to the Ethereum Denver meetup that was started by a guy by the name of Kent Barton. And Kent, we just had a passion for education and community. And, you know, I started going when it was pretty small. And then, you know, it grew in the spring of 2017 like exponentially. And it was one of those things where it went from like, you know, low double digits to like 4 or 500 people every month wanting to come to

this thing. And, you know, so I started getting more involved and I I was asking Kent and the guys that were running it. I was like, you know, have you guys thought about doing a hackathon? I mean, there's like all these people here that like don't know anything about web 3 or, you know, smart contracts or but they're curious, right? Everybody wants to know about Ethereum. It's this like Cambrian explosion of interest. And so we asked a question one time at the meetups. It's like, you know, who would be interested in attending a hackathon? And like, you know, half the room or more raised their hand. And um I was like, well, we should do that. And they're all like, well, you know, we tried a hackathon one time and didn't really go anywhere and blah blah

blah blah blah blah blah. You know, it was just I don't know. It was just uh it was just not they didn't want anything to do with it really because they had said they had tried it and it didn't work. So then I >> So why did you sway them? >> Well, I didn't sway them. I just went and did it. So I told them I was like well I'm going to go do this. So you know and they're like well you know all the reasons why. And I was like, "Look, we're going to make Colorado the epicenter of blockchain and web 3 innovation and we're going to, you know, why don't we get three or 400 people together?" And like, "What?" You know, this is like I mean, we got like 30 people last time and it was sort of weak. I was like, "No, no, no, no, no.

I'm talking about like let's bring in the best educators, the people that know this. Let's bring in Vitalic. Let's bring in like all these people to do this. Why not?" And so they're like, "Well, if you want to go for it." So, I started reaching out to guys like Joe Luben and uh Vignesh from Sun from Lendroid and you know the guys from ZeroX and Mlan from New Cipher and uh I mean just a whole bunch of people right um that were early, you know, Joe Joe Luben from Consensus of course and um I just I said look I so I put together like a deck and I said well like look

here's here's what we would get and you know will you support this hackathon like we want to we want to build some devs and at the time like there were no devs. So like everyone's like yeah we should build some devs. So what we thought was going to be you know 3 400 people ended up being 1500 people the first year and it just you know it kind of hit hit the right sort of notes. You know the location was good because everybody could get to Denver from you know either coast pretty easily. you know, the airports are very easy to get to. Um, cost of living is low. We used to do it over the President's Day weekend because, you know, we wanted to give people an extra day to travel,

especially students. And we did it for free because we didn't want to pay while learning how to do this. Like, you're not going to get people who are curious about something to come spend $500 on an event. So, we we just didn't like any of that model. So, we we said it's like, you know, community of communities and like let's let's build some stuff, right? We uh invented the Bidd meme at Eat Denver 2018. So, the whole hodddle for Bitcoin, we built our version of it for Ethereum, which was Biddle, which has now been mentioned on X like 90 million times or something like that.

Um so yeah, so that that's how it kind of got started. I mean it it was out of the need for devs. It just nobody had any and I didn't have any and I wanted to build some and then you know it just sort of took off and then we're like well we should do it again and then so we did it again in 2019 and then we did it again in 2020 and there just was a lot of demand for it and so it got a lot of recognition internationally. I mean even the first year we had people from 35 countries come in and now you know I think this year there's 140 countries or something represented over you know 6,000 people or something that

came in. So you know and this is significantly smaller than it has been. Uh it's been about 20,000 people or more the last several years. So um you know all the tourists are gone right? So it's mostly just the core community people who really care about this um and decentralization and the kind of ethos and values of web 3. So that's how it got started and you know nine years later here we are. So we just finished our ninth season. >> Yeah. Before we kind of get into how it's changed over over the years. Um did did you find your devs for your project?

>> Oh yeah I did. And then so yeah, I can pretty much get any I can get anybody I need now. Yeah, I know a few people. >> Cool. Um, tell me how um a kind of the format of East Denver kind of um developed over the years and kind of how how that corresponds with kind of the sort of people who attend. >> Yeah. Well, there's there's narratives that form in the ecosystem and I've been pretty good at seeing them before they happen. Um, like we predicted DeFi, you know, 18 months before Defi summer happened.

Um, you know, we saw it, we saw it early and we said, "Oh, you know, all this lend onchain lending and derivatives and all that's going to be really big." And then you know DeFi summer happened and it was just like whoa you know that was you know post ICO boom that was probably the biggest sort of driver of things but then it it you know the narrative started shifting right so then it got into NFTTS and and then it got into Dows and then it got it gets into all sorts of stuff right now it's prediction markets and now it's you know perver But if you look at the undercurrent of all of it, it's all financial use cases,

right? It's all about um well, you could even argue that a lot of this is just neo casinos. Not that the stock market itself isn't really a giant casino because it is, but like you know, we're kind of in the wild west and you know, the asymmetric gains that people can get by playing the roulette of well meme coins is another one, right? You know, let's get in early, pump and d and then pump and then dump, right? So people don't really care about these projects. They don't I mean there's a few that they do, but like for the most part these are vehicles for asymmetric upside. So it's gambling.

So what happened in the in terms of the event was, you know, we we were never propped up or supported by the Ethereum Foundation. We just we have a lot of friends there but like you know we just did our thing and they sort of just said hey that's part of a permissionless world you know anybody can do an ETH event somewhere and the market physics are going to determine who wins and who loses and so we were just really good at sort of predicting the kind of what's next right so every time one of these cycles would come up we would see it coming Right. And now we're in the institutional phase with stable coins and, you know, modernizing the the

current financial systems infrastructure and whatever. And we saw that coming, you know, with the President Trump's election. That was pretty much inevitable that was going to happen. And uh, and here we are. It's happening. So, we pretty much let the market dictate what the kind of format was going to be. So as people became more interested in booths for example, we figured out a way to cater to that. Now what was that really about? It was about the need for engagement. They want to talk to people. They want their brand to be seen. So we just we we appropriated space for that.

when Vitalik started talking about the scaling roadmap for for Ethereum and the need for L2s and um you know what that meant to the ecosystem. What that was really saying to the market is hey we're kind of admitting that Ethereum by itself can't scale and so we're going to leave it to the market to figure out what the solutions for that are. This is very on brand for Ethereum. They'll just kind of throw stuff out. Vitalic will just throw stuff out and and then people will just build things, right? And so L2s became prominent and then all L1's or EVM L1s and like all this kind of stuff happened. So um the demand but the

demand for the same stuff was always there you know booths developers speaking opportunities the hackathon engaging developers hiring developers like all these things were very very hot topics and so we just happened to attract everybody that wanted to be participating in that. I mean, as North America's largest event and probably the world's largest um aggregator of Ethereum folks, you know, we've done this for nine years and like even I think we've even had a higher attendance than DevCon in aggregate, you know, so it's been a big thing, but but we've really kind of let the market dictate it. Um because again, open permissionless decentralization sort of

we never really tried to fabricate much. Now I would say today though some of those choices Ethereum doesn't have as strong as a narrative I think as say Salana does. Um, no one can really tell you what Ethereum's narrative is cuz it just is and just does, right? And so th those of us who are still very passionate about Ethereum are passionate about Ethereum because it's really the only credibly decentralized blockchain in my opinion. Um, there are some that are doing great things like our friends at Near are doing great things. Um we there's the guys at base

are doing great things is an L2. Um there's lots of interesting things happening around the space. Um but that doesn't mean necessarily anything to us. So we try to keep things as market base as possible but then you know as Ethereum sort of just kind of took you know its own intentionally sort of quieter voice you know from especially the foundation's perspective other voices have tried to become more prominent which you know has definitely made it a challenge for us to manage that being ETH Denver right so we're we're not crypto Denver we're not blockchain

Denver. We're not anything like that. We're we're very much Ethereum first. Um, but managing that has been really interesting because the narratives have been tried to push here and there based on what other people's interests are, but we've tried to kind of manage it based on market kinetics and then also just what we feel like is, you know, at least net neutral to Ethereum or net positive for Ethereum. This episode's brought to you by Near AI Cloud. OpenClaw is one of the biggest stories in AI right now. rapidly. It gained over 200,000 GitHub stars with adoption from Silicon Valley to Beijing. Why? Because OpenClaw makes it easy to create an AI agent that actually does stuff like manage your emails, browse the web, schedule appointments, and remember contacts across weeks of interaction.

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>> What do you think um the narrative should be and uh what do you kind of see as um competition for that? >> What do I think the narrative should be? Well, uh that's a good question. I think that Ethereum like the foundation should take a more prominent role in discussing the roadmap of where the community should go. I think they should uh that is not a position that they share. Um at least not up till this point. I think you know I've worked a lot with Tomas and he's done an excellent job. Uh he's still executive director for three more days I guess. Um, but he's done an an amazing job at sort of creating more, I guess

you could say, structural vision and just, you know, like intentionality around um, moving to where the puck is and like actually even guiding where the puck goes. >> Um, >> no more the infinite garden. >> Yeah. I I mean, look, I was never I I'm a 25 year entrepreneur. Okay. The infinite garden always came off to me as a little naive and a little bit unrealistic. I think it's not uncommon for people younger, especially in their young 20s, to like have idealism as their their sort of core philosophy.

Like I mean, look back in history, this is not the first time that youth have been idealistic about how things should be. uh we're just now sort of taking a technological viewpoint to it versus something that's a little bit more just you know analog but like still I think human behavior is a very complex thing and you can't assume that people are just going to behave in ways that on paper make sense like humans don't always follow what you think are good incentives or they might not always do what you feel like is the right thing and because the right thing is somewhat dependent on who you ask, right? There's infinite amounts of like individual

incentives and goals, you know, and then whoever gets to define what's best for the collective, who gets to decide that, right? Like I mean there's so many um variations of outcomes, in other words, that like designing a technological system for that is very hard where incentives are aligned at scale sustainably. And so the infinite garden thing, you know, I don't know. I mean, I just I just I think it's a little too simplistic and I think it's a little too idealistic.

Now, do I do I believe in positive sum games? Yes. Do I believe in moving from an uh scarcity based mindset or economic model to one that's based in abundance design? Yes. Do I believe that technology and you know cryptoeconomics and the tokenization of all the things and has the ability to drive those outcomes. I believe that um I'm still in the camp that I think web 3 is going to be a thing especially with the advent of agentic AI on chain.

I think if you expect human beings to use complex, you know, user interface to like sign a transaction or manage a private key. If you think that's going to happen at scale, you're high. It's not going to happen. People aren't going to do it. But if I have if a if agentic AI becomes a thing, does it matter what blockchain they're working on? Does it matter what token they move from here to there or whatever or how that money gets to you? It doesn't. So, I think I think that Agentic AI and coming on chain is probably the biggest innovation that we've seen in the 12 years I've been in it. Yeah. The the the infinite garden,

you know, I just I don't know. It it just it's very it's very complex and you know the notion of abundance at scale to where private property is not necessary and all these other I don't know just I I just I don't I don't see it in in my not infinite experience but I've got enough to know a few things and I've got a few gray hairs to prove it like you know I just I don't I don't have the comprehension of that in our lifetime. But I do still have lots of hope and there's a huge amount of opportunity now with Aentic AI combined with the primitives

that we've built already for a decade and building these now into really usable systems that could very well disrupt most of what we know in the financial system. And whether that's going to be dystopian or a super positive thing, I don't know yet. But I think it's worth a try. >> But what does that mean in terms of kind of the the global vision for Ethereum? Is it kind of um is it uh the the global financial settlement layer? Is it the world computer? Is it the anti-censorship layer? Kind of like any of these narratives in principle kind of work technically, right? But um h kind of putting one front and center would would

help the story because people inherently kind of they like stories right kind of if you say okay these are the docs that's not a very good story and if you say look this is um this is credibly neutral and because it's very decentralized it is um it's it's uh also extremely resilient um that also doesn't it doesn't move simple, right? So, kind of like why why why would you care? Um, so what what what do you think the story should be here?

>> To the average person. >> Yeah. >> Or to whom? >> I mean, so I Yeah, I think that's a fair question. So uh kind of uh both kind of to um the people whom we want to build on this infrastructure rather than say Solana or B or NIA um and to the people kind of who who end up using. So kind of if you if you had to explain um to your non-crypto friends why Ethereum is better than Salana, what do you say? >> Well, I mean that's an easy one. I mean, Salana isn't isn't isn't sufficiently decentralized in my opinion, and that's just a function of how many nodes they have validating their blocks. Their uptime is questionable. Their downtime

is unacceptable. And quite frankly, the only use case that they've demonstrated is memecoins at this point. So, if they've got other things up their sleeve, that's fine. And I'm I'm rooting for everybody more so in the space than I am for the banks, okay? Like don't get me wrong, I'm not like anti- Salana like I have my criticisms and I but it's based on just objective understanding of you know how these things work. Now their design decisions you know they are going to argue one set of things that they made these these choices about scaling and and getting product market fit and all that over pure decentralization and then we'll decentralize later. Well, it doesn't

always work that way, right? like you know people in power are very unlikely to give up power right so I don't know I have my criticisms about it I I would say d yo r do your own research figure out what you care about and then align that with what you feel like the objective analysis is um actually chat gbt gemini grock these are all good tools nowadays to actually like ask them like what are the features of a good blockchain like theoretically what should it be and do a comparison analysis against all the major chains and it'll tell you. It's not hard to figure out like which ones are actually doing it. Ethereum

isn't impenetrable. Ethereum isn't the guaranteed winner. Um, I think that Ethereum, what I said earlier about Ethereum needs to take a more prominent role in figuring itself out as far as like what its actual stated goals are versus these theoretical sort of pseudo religious narratives, right? Whereas, no, the infinite guard, it's like, yeah, okay, well, that's not really actionable. Like, how are we actually getting there? and what what should we be doing as you know people in the ecosystem. So what should the narrative be?

My point of view is I think the global settlement layer is probably the most likely everything gets built. Well, trustlessness is important, right? It's you don't have to trust somebody on the other end of a smart contract transaction if we do this correctly, right? And I don't have to trust the people running the blockchain either because it just is and does, right? It just works. So, however we get there, I think largely well, there was a piece that I saw somebody write that said, "Well, the non-financial use cases for blockchain." No, they're all financial

uses. They're all financial uses. Dows are all financial. NFTTS are financial, you know, they're all financial in some way. Like, I think it's the world economic layer, right? So, how do we actually engage in commerce with each other globally? I think it it happens on Ethereum. Now, why the institutional adoption makes a lot of sense is because, you know, quite frankly, it's going to be much easier to get people to do things when they're already on chain. We were never able over 10 years to get people to come on chain in droves unless it was for a particular thing like buying an NFT, but they didn't want to do everything else in there. They didn't want to do social onchain. They didn't want to do all these other things because it's too complex. It's not cheaper, better, faster, which is kind

of the rule of thumb. So like if you're not going to get to cheaper, better, faster, people aren't going to use it long term unless you're incentivizing them by a lot, but it's not enough. >> But it actually looks like increasingly traditional finance institutions are besting us at our own game and they're executing extremely well. Right? So kind of if you look at kind of what Stripe is doing with um integrating um stables and crypto rails directly onto global payments infrastructure and if you look at what kind of brings people on chain or kind of what gets them tokens it's the revolutes and

binances of the word the Robin Hoods then Black Rockck is tokenizing assets on Ethereum. So kind of in many ways um kind of these players are shipping faster user experience and reaching more users than native crypto teams. >> Yeah, they have natural distribution too. I mean Stripe already has a huge distribution network for their analog products, right? So web 2 is not an unfamiliar thing to any of these guys. They already have >> So what does that say about us that kind of like we've been trying to do this for 10 years and kind of failing? Well, it says that we were trying to tackle too many things at once. I think we were trying to get we were trying to innovate technology,

right? Trying to prove entirely new economic models and we're trying to get users to to opt into using something that's more difficult than just signing into your bank all at the same time and trying to get product market fit for completely new things. I mean, we're trying to bowl the ocean and for trying to bowl the ocean, we did pretty damn good. But like what I'm saying what I'm saying is when everybody comes on chain and look, I'm just going to say it, but like it's kind of like when the Roman Catholic Church was formed, it got, you know, how it got formed. I mean

the emperor Constantine was basically faced with a situation in Rome where there was all of these sects of Christianity that had popped up and they didn't even really call it Christianity back then but there was all these various sort of things happening in Rome and it was a lot okay and and they basically TLDDR Constantine said well if you can't beat him join him he couldn't stop it he tried he tried or even his predecessors tried like But he claimed that he had this big vision where the, you know, the Roman army was had this big cross on their shield. So he felt compelled to convert to Christianity and then like, oh well, we're just going to make it the

state-based religion and all this. Well, what was that really? What that was a co-opting of Christianity is what it was. So the principles of Christianity were up for debate. you had dozens and dozens of various types of sex believing different things and he wanted to consolidate it to one thing and then he outlawed everything else, right? So the council of Naa and all the the kind of canonization of the Bible and all of that became a thing. So that was that was kind of like the institutions taking over crypto. Now fast forward you know 1800 years 1700 years and where are we now? Well, Christianity is all over the

globe and it's not just the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church is a very small component of overall Christianity, although there are a ton of Catholics. Um, but generally Christianity is a uh a worldview now more than it is just a religion. Okay? It is kind of how a lot of people operate from a principal perspective. And it all started, you know, you can trace it all the way back, you know, and and the real scaling of it happened with Rome. What's different? It's really not that different. It's just going to accelerate a lot faster because it's technology.

And it's not just, you know, I don't have to get on a horse and go travel somewhere or get on a boat and go travel somewhere to spread the good word. I can literally type it into a Reddit chat and I can do whatever I want. But if the banks are on chain and all the payment companies are on chain and everyone's on chain and everyone you learns how to use these things and Aenic AI is kind of running around doing things for you on chain like what's to stop decentralized applications from then already having access to distribution. >> So kind of let let me push back a little bit. So kind of if if you kind of look at Jesus's um kind of uh kind of the statements that he actually made kind of they are

not very commensurate with kind of what Christian doctrine is today. Right. And I did not see the podcast going this way. So kind of I'm a little I'm a little rusty on on my uh uh >> I'm only using it as an example not to be precise. >> Yeah, I know. But yeah, but um in the same way kind of that uh kind of uh uh Constantine kind of co-opted Christianity as a tool kind of banks and financial institutions are doing the same, right? kind of like they're not used as a paradigm shift like kind of we thought um should happen in the sense that kind of like this enables um

coordination at unprecedented scale and kind of it um uh it allows collective ownership of whatever and and kind of distributed reward systems and kind of just making everything fairer and better with a lid man kind of I mean even kind of the the the platformification argument that kind of you alluded to in the very beginning with kind of like the Uber of this and the Uber of that kind of like if if everyone kind of came onto the same platform we wouldn't have this we wouldn't have the problem and kind of like your HR um your HR problems would have gone away and so on. So kind of the the idea that kind of um this would be um a paradigm shift in kind of how

societies work um that is done away with by banks just using it as a backhand upgrade, right? By kind of saying, okay, in principle kind of we're now we're kind of we're we're um >> but what's the bank what's the bank's what's the bank's mode, though? So I agree with you that that if that's where it ends then we've completely and totally failed. >> Yeah. >> If that's where it ends and I think for some people the co-opting of crypto by the banks, by the financial institutions is failure. I think some people actually believe this.

Um, what I'm saying though is once the cat's out of the bag or the genie's out of the bottle when it comes to, you know, the the tools, the crypto tools, and making it easier for people to just function on chain, how do you stop any of these other things from resurging again? >> What's the bank's moat? Like, what's if I if I can if I can cut out So, let's put it this way. The banks coming on chain isn't going to save me any money as a consumer.

It's not going to save me a dime. They're not going to charge me less from my me my Visa transactions that I swipe because they sell it on arbitrum or whatever. Okay? They're not going to charge me less. It's a way for them to automate and abstract complexities away on their end so they can charge me more probably. Okay? when when PayPal charges you, you know, or anybody charges you just to move crypto around, well, we're charging you two and a half%. It's like, why are you charging me 2 and a half%. It's the same thing that we're already doing. Why do I Why do I care about crypto? Because supposedly it's peer-to-peer cashless transactions. I pay a small fee. I send money to you.

You receive it on chain. I can verify that you received it on chain because the blockchain said it happened. And all we're doing is moving the ledger numbers around, you know, at the end of the day. And cool, it's great, >> but it's not funible. It doesn't compose, right? Kind of like say your your on Revolute kind of like your your your ETH on Revolute, you can't do anything with that with with it that they're not explicitly permitting you to do, right? Kind of, >> right? But what what I'm saying though is like once so the only reason why crypto didn't scale bigger than it is or didn't really make it in mainstream it's because we didn't have distribution.

So if you look at the adoption curve of things, you know, there's a the the typical adoption curve. We were down here in the early adopters, right? So those people are willing to do things that other people aren't to adopt things based on philosophy. This is based on an ethos. And we got all those guys, okay? So we start we started building things for those guys because they're willing to do all the things and sign all the transactions and degen all the things and whatever. But we could never get up into the deep the steeper kind of pieces of the mid adoption and the later adoption and all that. We could never get there. And it's because again we're trying to do too many things at once and we just didn't have distribution because it's not easy to use. So we never solved

UX. We never solved UI and we basically are now looking to solve it through institutional adoption. But I don't think it start stops there. In the end, what are the banks going to be able to do to protect their, you know, their their moat? Like, is it going to be possible that regulated, collectively owned digital cooperatives, for example, exist on chain? Yeah, it's going to happen. So, credit unions at scale, highfrequency ethereal network stakebased credit unions are going to eat the banks.

Okay. So, but that's once everybody's on chain. We weren't able to do it because no one's on chain and nobody knows what it is. Nobody trusts it. It's like, oh, it's too spar. Oh, Teruna. Oh, SPF. Oh, ICOs. Oh, memecoins. Oh, Trump. You know, it's like, okay, let them go on chain and then we're going to build around it and we're going to basically build better products than what the banks have and we'll just once the distribution networks are on chain now we can actually do the things that we want to do. It's just it was just it was too ambitious to completely without simplicity and users and like for users you can't get everybody to do it even if it's the best

thing ever. Now I I'll just use my own experience. Okay. If I have a choice to take out an a loan against my assets or to deal with a bank forever and over and over and over and over again with my KYC and this and that and all this, I would even rather KYC with a just, you know, have my portable I was talking to the SEC about this last week, you know, let's let's have portable KYC and there's companies working on this, right?

um that that actually like for example, if I had a company that I went to and and got my identity verified, I could go get my KYC. It's on my wallet. It's a soulbound token. I could go to Jave. I can automatically log in. It's verified that I'm good. And then I can take put put up my assets and I can take out a loan. >> Yeah. >> Why would I want to deal with a bank? Why would I ever go to a bank if I can just do that? Okay, the answer is I wouldn't, but we didn't do it because >> nobody knows about any of this and it's like they don't trust it. But once it becomes normal, >> people are going to do it and they're

going to leave banks in droves because they don't really want to deal with banks, but they're necessary evils. >> I financed my house weather maker CDP um years ago. So kind of it's >> There you go. But to be to be fair, I um I would have gotten a better rate with my local bank. But it doesn't matter. Well, actually, I got a fantastic rate because I borrowed um uh because uh uh I borrowed USD, so kind of uh and paid for my house in euros. So, it's uh yeah, anyways, um I want to share your enthu enthusiasm, but I don't um uh I don't for various reasons. So kind of um the this idea

that kind of we just need to get people here and then we can get them to care about this. I think this is something they don't care about. So kind of Exactly. No, they don't care about >> because I've I've actually I've actually had my people call um kind of pretty regular people about ownership. So kind of we we kind of um uh so kind of my company knows this. So kind of we um uh we were going to um start an onchain neo bank that's kind of like the modern version of a cooperative bank, right?

Where basically everyone kind of co-owns the bank and kind of that means and I mean cooperative banking it it used to it used to be huge. It's still huge in some parts. >> It's still used in it's huge in the US regionally. It's not a national scale thing but regionally it's very big here. Yeah. Yes, >> it's actually um this this is funny because kind of it's it's it's kind of it shows you that Germans are kind of the the sort of people who kind of bring spreadsheets to the party. So kind of we we we have um we are on the UNESCO um uh world heritage untangible wide heritage intangible wide heritage list for cooperative banking. So kind of and I mean other other countries have like um

Italy has uh pizza culture and uh Belgium has beer and Spain has flamnco and kind of we have cooperative banking that's how cool we are so um so yeah so kind of and kind of so a lot of people >> very German of us yeah so kind of um >> uh so we ped a lot of people about ownership and kind of showed them pictures of okay this is this is Revolute it's a billion dollar company who help build it. You own 0%, the investors own 70%, the founders own 30%. How does that make you feel? Um, and people don't care. So, the thing is the the the the sad thing is um people don't care because >> but not to care.

>> Well, I think it's more what am I going to do about it? >> Yeah. Yeah, I don't know because kind of for other problems that kind of have a similar um to have kind of a similar output matrix kind of we also don't care. So kind of if you for instance look at privacy. So kind of everyone knows that kind of having a proton email is probably better than having a Gmail. It's also free kind of it's it's feature kind of it offers feature parity but for some reason still everyone has a Gmail address because people are lazy and they don't like to move right so kind of inverse >> well and I think I think the reality is the worst that people have used our data

for is to try to sell us more stuff um >> you know if they started using it politically or to put you in jail I think you'd care a lot more >> but we are using it politically kind of they are. >> Yeah, they're starting to more. >> Yeah, >> they they are definitely. Look, I agree with you that there is a possibility that regardless of how much good intention and good economic modeling and incentive structure that we build that humans because of human frailty and laziness are just going to default to what's easiest. Now, if we can make it easiest to do the things that are, you know, uh, better for them, that's

how you win. You've got to make it cheaper better faster. If you can't make crypto cheaper, better, faster, that's how market physics work. Cheaper, better, faster. The reason why Google wins is because it's it's fully integrated into everything. It's ooth into everything. Like, I can manage it. I can do it from my phone. They've made user experience so easy that like I'm literally willing to trade my privacy for it. >> You know, it's terrible, isn't it? >> It is. And I can't say that I'm completely innocent on that. Like I I I probably am on a scale of one to 100 in terms of like living all of the web 3 principles and probably 5050,

you know, like I'm 6040 maybe if I'm generous to myself. So, I don't know. Um, I I think that big organizations are not going to go down without a fight. I think they're going to try to protect or co-opt anything that gets in their way, even quietly if they can. Like the whole stable coin thing, the maker CDP, we don't even really do make or die anymore. You know, like it it's still there. You can still do it, but like the collateral that we use was largely USDC.

So it's like you're collateralizing with a counterparty asset, you know, like it's not a >> reg assets now it's T bills and so on because kind of >> Yeah. Yeah. It's going more that direction. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, exactly. So I mean and some of that's not all bad, but like I mean at least the permission to use it is permissionless, right? So whether or not you've got counterparty risk. I mean the US financial system has a ton of counterparty risk. That's so I mean the whole global economic system has a ton of counterparty risk. So like to say that oh well die is not sufficially decentralized. It's not like USDC doesn't have counterparty risk. Of course it does. So like yeah the volatility is probably the more the the weapon or the uh the the

enemy of decentralized stable coins because even 1% volatility seems like a lot when you're moving around a lot of USDC, right? So people don't like it. So they like the solid peg of $1 is $1. They like that. And that's how USDC got its market dominance in the US. And that's how I mean that's how USDT got it internationally. You know, just parody is always a dollar. Anyways, I I don't I don't disagree with you. I'm being I'm saying best case scenario the way I see it and the thing I'm working toward is you know look the I think the financial system coming on chain is inevitable. I think it makes

sense for them. I think if if I'm them there's huge green field opportunities and market share and and all sorts of revenue streams that can come from this. I mean stable coins are probably the most profitable use case that would come out of crypto. >> Yeah. So it's all it's it's it's inevitable and natural that they would do that. It's very rational thinking on their behalf. So I'm not going to get in the way of that. But I almost think like to an extent it's like bringing the Trojan horse inside, you know, because once everyone's using these things more uh commonly and if we legitimately figure out scaling issues where we're not paying

two and 3% for where I can literally send you a wire transfer peerto-peer with, you know, cost me 25 cents. People are going to use it if it's easy to use. For example, easy to use to me would be imagine a future state where I have a self-s sovereign AI agent bot. Okay? And let's call him Buffy. Okay? So Buffy is my bot. And I just, you know, one day he's on my phone. He's in my telegram. I was like, "Oh man, you know, I forgot to send Frederique that 50 bucks that I owe her.

Can you send that to her uh right now?" Done. I don't need to sign anything. He's already got access to a wallet that has some discretionary money. You know, he can go do it right now. He can even send me back if I want the Ether Scan transaction receipt. And it's >> Open can already do that. And it it doesn't >> That's what I'm saying. It's like, but imagine it being so easy the average guy down the street's doing it. Okay. >> But open easy to use. Have you >> I know, but I'm of course I've tried it. Like we just had a huge component of E Denver that was all claws out AI openly agents. We built literally Buffy bought the thing I'm talking about to be the co-host of the opening ceremonies. We

built an AI agent to do that. So like it doesn't even have to be 5 years from now. But what I'm saying is it might take 5 years for your nextdoor neighbor down the street who knows nothing about crypto to be doing this that but it will inevitably happen though because it's like oh well crypto's not scary because it's now everyone uses it right right now nobody wants to touch it. It's just it's an evolutionary thinking. It's it's partially generational thinking and it's part evolutionary thinking around what's acceptable, what's scary, what's risky. And once things are not seen as risky, people are just going to do it.

>> So kind of when we zoom out, um by what what metric do you think we should monitor to see whether blockchain is actually making the world a better, fairer place? So kind of is it things like I don't know self-custody adoption or um new cooperative models or censorship resistance or um capital formation without intermediaries. I mean there's there's an endless list, right?

>> Oh my goodness. Um what are the metrics? Um, >> sorry. It's just a little bit of kind of like it's it's kind of like like put putting my finger on it because I I I feel like um >> it's it's something sometimes where we idealists kind of we blank, right? You say, "Oh, but clearly this is better infrastructure. Clearly this is fairer for people. Clearly this is but kind of like how how will people's lives actually improve?" >> Well, I think a common metric is GDP per capita. I think uh right now for example cooperatives contribute to about $600 billion dollars in GDP for the US.

I think it'll be really interesting to see like how are we going to measure the network state GDP not the US GDP not the German GDP not the EU GDP but like the GDP of the network state meaning onchain. I think that's a really interesting metric to follow. I think that you're going to see um active daily users balloon, but then we got to know like what does that mean? Like how you know what does that equate to in terms of transactions. So I think average transaction might be an interesting metric >> to see and like geographically where geographically where are people using it. Like if the network state really takes hold, you're going to see people

globally doing business with each other and that's going to be pretty hard to get away from seeing it. And I don't think it's going to be easy to measure like India's GDP versus the US GDP. I think you're going to have to start measuring network state GDP. So, and then what does that how how do we actually analyze that in the context of what we know is is is existing kind of metrics and fundamentals. I don't know the exact metric that's going to nail it nail it like the northstar metric that you might say in like a business pitch like well here's our northstar metric here's how we measure everything. I'd have to think on that for a little while, but like I think it's probably something around

onchain activity. Like we look at ghost chains, right? They have all this activities, but then you look at it and there's no one really moving anything around. It's just nonsense. Ethereum is probably the best one because you can see the total active users or the monthly active users. You can see the transaction volume and that's sort of a correlation to to ecosystem health. Now, how do we see the difference between whether somebody at at Black Rockck is using Ethereum versus somebody who really needs it in Mexico or somewhere? Like that's a good question because anonymity or synonymity is going to be a thing in the future even more so than it is today. I don't know how you're going to measure that. But I think >> but does it matter that it's used by people who really need it?

>> Well, does it matter? I think it matters because if all we're doing is creating a better system for the banks to move stuff around between each other, then it's just vanity project. >> That that that's that's totally I mean that's that's that's totally fair and I I I I conquer. Um but kind of if if you kind of say uh the the the average transaction size is kind of like what you're looking for. um >> we'd have to have some way to delineate enterprise or institutional movement versus just average movement. I don't know that we're going to have that. So, I'll tell you what, I'm going to punt on this particular question because I think it's a good one. The next time we talk, I'm going to have a better answer for

this. But I think there's there's some economic measurement here that that is going to look we can't get away from the fundamentals that GDP is what drives the world. We can't. We'd be foolish to say that we're going to get away from GDP in general. I just don't think that's going to happen. I don't see how you >> I mean GDP is also somewhat misrepresentative, right? So kind of for instance, Germany has a lower GDP per capita than West V, West Virginia, which is the the poorest state in the US. Um, and kind of quality of living is is much higher than it is in West. So kind of it's it's kind of it's an it's an imperfect measure, right? But kind of if

you look at things like um economic agency for instance, kind of like how how much um how much choice do I have in what I can do? How do you measure that? >> Um, if I if I want a loan, um, how, um, how hardressed for choice am I? Kind of do I have one payday lender or kind of do I have um variety >> infinite opportunities on on chan or whatever. Yeah. Um, and then I think what what also might be um kind of I I know this is somewhat dystopian um but I feel that kind of censorship resistance

might become much more important in the future. And I mean you kind of you can see how kind of uh uh large tech companies kind of uh kind of uh lose their principles faster than you'd like. Um in >> well you know as >> I there was um some censoring that happened recently with Tether. Did you see that? >> No >> where they they froze the accounts of certain they froze the assets of certain people um in their USDT.

>> Okay. I mean it happens all the time. I mean basically it's it's fully it's fully permissioned just as as is USDC and so on. So kind of I mean basically it's Yeah. It's it's >> Yeah. You're on a blacklist. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. You know, the the libertarian in me doesn't like any of that stuff because it's like, you know, a lot of that's just subjective political warfare. And you know, I don't know, not all of it, but a lot of it is. And you know, you could say we're doing the good work and all of this, but you know, we all know that political pressure and political censoring is the oldest tool in the kit when it comes to like, you know, you know, tamping down the the

opposition or whatever from, you know, removing you from power or whatever. So, I don't know. It's a hard problem. I think privacy is going to be, you know, the censorship resistance is really correlated to privacy. And if you've got privacy, then you don't have to worry about censorship resistance as much because I can do things privately. Um, but then you've got all the worries about um I would I was just meeting with the SEC last week and you know there is um a deep belief by Commissioner Pur that um who's the crypto task force leader that you know privacy is a fundamental human right. That's her personal view

>> and and I mean that's that's that's admirable. I mean too often >> I know >> elected officials don't have that >> and well and she's not elected. She's an appointed official and she is uh but she's very well respected um inside her community and ours for these points of view. But what's sad is the US Congress there are people on both sides of the aisle that actually you know want the government to be able to see everything. And it's just like scary. It's >> Yeah, it is. I mean, it really is. And and um you know, I was a I was a victim of the operation chokepoint 2.0. I got uh debanked after 26 years of relationship with Wells Fargo and

no explanation, no nothing, just a letter in the mail saying you're done and the decision is final and there you we we can't tell you anything about it. >> No. And it's h it's it's it's happen happening systematically. So kind of um the the judges at the HG were recently put under economic sanctions by the US um because of uh judgment they had reached uh in relation to Benjamin Netanyahu. Um and so basically which meant that kind of all their banks uh debunked them. Um they uh kind of were deplatformed from tech platforms. they their Google accounts were closed. Um uh

and they're not even able to kind of book a flight anymore because kind of they can't have a Visa or Mastercard. Um because those are US entities and kind of like it it's kind of the the the guy who gave the interview, he said it's basically like being in the '9s again. If I want to go to a hotel, I have to call them and say, "Look, I want to come day day after tomorrow. Do you have do you have a vacancy?" Um yeah, and it's crazy. I think kind of just the fact that and I mean this is not a terrorist, right? Kind of like these are the judges at the at the international um >> it depends on who you ask, right? I mean it sounds like it sounds like the US is treating them kind of kind of like terrorists.

>> Yeah, exactly. Touche. Um yeah, so uh yeah, so maybe final question. Um so kind of when you kind of think about the next couple of years and kind of you say that you are very good at kind of predicting trends. So um what what what do we absolutely need to get right um for kind of this kind of entire ownership narrative agency kind of paradigm shift to matter structurally? Do you think it's kind of like it's things like user experience or interop or governance or economic sustainability or where where where do you think kind of we should um we what do you think we should pay most attention to?

>> Well, I have a personal belief that we don't especially in the US we don't have currently a legal framework that would actually support the network state appropriately at the federal level. So if you look at the contortionist act that we've put together in terms of launching tokens and doing TGES and things, we've done it basically around a very murky regulatory environment. And we've done it uh you could say with creative lawyering and using offshore entities to skirt the system, right? So, we've launched what would be in the US essentially securities, but we do it offshore or we do it through

cutesy ways like governance token. >> What do you mean? This is a governance token, >> right? >> It's for it's a governance token for for a and like Yeah, but I mean this goes against the entire principle of the the number one coordination mechanism in the history of mankind is profit. Profit is a wonderful coordination mechanism because we can profit we can coordinate around profits much better than we can pro coordinate around decision-m much better but we don't have a way in the US for example to share profits so with with nonacredited investors without a lot of complexities and

without a bunch of crap that it just doesn't work so we've created things like DAO LLC's and Dunas and all these things to like do that well I've been working on a project that I think is probably one of the mo and of course I think my my baby's cute but like I think it's important to get the legal stuff right. So what we did was we built a proposal for Congress um to include in clarity in the Clarity Act which is currently in Congress to um basically give a federal exemption for cooperatives from securities registration. So it's like the regggd D for co-ops. So we call it regulation membership. So anybody who's curious about that can go to regulation membership.com

and you can see see what we're working on. So I think the legal framework has to be right. So if we're not going to get to the if we can't get the legal framework right I don't think any amount of you know cutely lawyering or engineering around you know trying to work around stuff is going to actually get us where we want to go. I understand the reason why we don't want to be securities tokens and I don't think that that network state tokens should be securities. I think that if you're actively participating in a business or a protocol then that should be exempt because it's my work not somebody else's. That's it doesn't pass the howy test in other words. So that's why regulation membership is so important.

Okay. Now other than that I think the single most important proliferation in web 3 is agentic AI by a landslide. So what do we need to get right with that? I think user usability yes it's very easy to set up openclaw. I know. Um, but I would say there are going to be optimizations and methodologies and security and making sure that you don't let your, you know, Austin Griffith was telling a story at ETH Denver the other day about how his OpenClaw agent tried to export his private key and you know, you know, so

>> this is why you do it on a virtual machine, >> right? No, I know. and and it's but but there's that you think that's going to be the beginning and the end of it. No, we're going to have a whole bunch of problems with this. So, I think the smart maturation of self-s sovereign agents where my agent isn't controlled by Google, my agent is running locally on my hardware, whether it's my phone or or it's my machine or whatever, it works only for me. And that combining with the primitives that we've already built, call it the sort of agentic Legos, you know, how do we build, you know, the crypto economy with the primitives, the money Legos that we talked about, but

building around it with agentic Legos to interact with other agents that abstracts complexities from humans in a legitimate way, making it cheaper, better, faster because I don't have to spend time. It's just easier to do. I think those two things, getting the legalities right and getting the agentic AI right are the most important things. But then not too far behind is we've really got to get privacy right. We've got to get privacy right. And I think it has something to do with zero knowledge identity.

So like how do I prove who I am without me having to tell every person that I interact with who I am? How can I with a zero knowledge proof prove who I am on chain so that even if I've got some weird pseudonym like original Buffacorn, right? Nobody needs to know who I am and I can transact freely on the internet because there's a zero knowledge proof that I've been verified. But how do you do that safely without being censored in an inappropriate way? >> That's the question.

>> Last words. >> Exactly. Fantastic. John, it's been a pleasure. Um, thank you so much for coming on. Um, and, uh, where can people find out more about your baby and Ethan? >> Well, eenver.com is the the most common place. If you're looking for content, go to our YouTube channel. So, just look up Eenver um or and Ethereum Denver on YouTube. Um, we also have presence on X. you know, it's quieting quieting down quite a bit now because, you know, most of that's kind of over for a season. Um, if you're interested in the legality side of things, go to regulation membership.com. That's my personal project. And then my day job is

oppos.co.co. That's the US-based employment platform that we built for independent workers and, you know, digital nomads and, you know, solarreneurs and things that or DAO workers that don't have an employer to give them legitimacy, payroll, and benefits, including health insurance in the US. So, that's where you go. >> Thank you. Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. Thank you. Hey hey hey.