The biggest web3 company you have never heard of

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird and I believe that the internet of ownership is going to change the world that's why I'm guiding doers on a path to build and invest in web 3. today on the show we have Josh new Roth joining us Josh is the VP of product at anchor and anchor is probably the biggest web3 company that you have never heard of unless you're a builder unless you're a Dev I

should say you might not know anchor because anchor is the infrastructure company behind web3 the best analogy for anchor is there the AWS of web 3. 10 years ago 15 years ago when AWS first started nobody knew about Amazon web server services and now they're one of the fastest growing companies in the world well anchor is on that trajectory but they're just in the early days they've grown from only a few people five years ago when Josh joined Josh was one of the first team members to join to over 130 today their token is one of the top app tokens one of the top tokens that is actually a serviced based

company token not a blockchain token so these guys are doing stuff and Josh brings a really interesting perspective to Today's Show because of the seed he sits in at anchor is he gets to see a lot of the base layer of the way we are interacting with blockchain who is interacting with blockchain around the world what countries are interacting with blockchain and what types of interactions are we looking to do and how is the increased complexity of the interactions and the use cases that we are building on blockchain what is that leading to and so we dive into so much in today's show we talk at the beginning

actually which is a great chat about the current trends and where Josh sees everything in web3 now and in the future and then we dive into anchor what they're building we talk about what it's like to work with polygon binance optimism Ave Avalanche these are all chains that anchor supports and what does that look like from the inside we also talk about Anchor's recent partnership with Microsoft and tencent and what that has led to in terms of Microsoft tencent two of the largest companies in the world to the largest web 2 companies in the world how does that open doors and how does that help

anchor reach new Enterprises and Josh also tells us how it's leading them to work with governments and what that looks like what are governments trying to build and how are governments planning to use blockchain in order to offer services to offer new stable coins to their citizens so we dive into that as well and so so much more in this episode just really Josh because of his he's been in the space for five years as a builder these are the type of people that we love to have on the show because they've seen a few Cycles they understand

the perspective of what it's like to build in web3 not just invest in web 3 Josh herself is an avid investor in web three so we touch on that and he actually gives some investment advice in this show which is really great to hear not many of guests who are willing to do that Josh is a no guy that's for sure and a no hype guy as well but he also really focuses on the importance of putting yourself in a position to build in web3 and in new tech and what does that mean how do you do that so really excited for you to hear this show let's dive in but before we do we'll just take a minute to hear from our sponsor the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens

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every link you click on is safe this is an absolute game changer for web3 as part of our partnership with wag we'll be using their platform to create verifiable links so that our community feels safe knowing that what they're clicking on is the real deal and if you don't have a community to protect and you're just looking to protect yourself wake has you covered with safe stops which tell you exactly who created the link you're clicking on head to the link in description click it see that it's verified by web Theory Academy and start protecting yourself today just use the code free 1000 when signing out and if you're among the first 1000 users you'll get free access for Life Josh what's going on welcome to the show hey hey thanks for having me really excited to have you Anchor's been on my radar from

the beginning we're going to dive into everything you guys are building at anchor I feel like you guys are the biggest web3 company that nobody knows about and so we're going to explain that but before we dive in there just give us a background who is Josh why did you get into web3 what's inspiring and exciting you every day about this space yeah well my personal story I've basically grown up on the internet in the 90s and I think there's something that was so special about kind of what I would call Web 1.0 where it was the you know the Yahoo the geocities kind of era of the internet with eBay some of that like Community Driven approach was frankly

lost in in the social era in web 2 and so I had always kind of wanted to find how can we make this open democratic decentralized system that really lives on the Internet is open in for everyone lower barrier entries and I found that a website and so that was my personal reason for getting into this space and I had met the anchor co-founders very early on in their journey of starting anchorg and started doing it working with anchor as a consultant and then moved on full time and so it's been almost five years now it's been an amazing journey have watched this space I mean when I effectively joined acre like ethereum was only three years old then and so it's almost been kind of

watching this grow up in addition to watching anchor grow up and so anchor has gone from about eight people at the time when I met the team there until now we're almost 130 people on on our staff so wow we've got massive growth on that and what do we do at anchor well we are an infrastructure provider that kind of sits behind defy it sits behind the apps that you know the exchanges the nft exchanges the some of the D5 websites out there and a lot more builders in this space and we empower power them with a toolbox of developer tools that make it easy to build and interact with web streets so we've been growing we grow as the as the space grows and the space is growing like crazy right now

that's nice to hear it's nice to hear the spaces growing crazy right now like I know that right but so many of us are in the space from an investment perspective right it's only natural that when you are building an economy and everything is an asset you're not just a running a business or working in the space you're also an investor and the roller coaster ride of that has just been tumultuous to say the least I want to go back to your point here you mentioned open and decentralized we talk about that on the podcast I think anybody that is currently in web 3 values those things but the rest of the world do they really care about

decentralization do they really care about an open internet I don't know I'm not sure I'm curious what is it about a decentralized internet or an open internet that you see as making a better internet what does that do for users for everyday people when they do come into web spree let me take that in a little bit different direction I seek the people that care most about having an open internet are entrepreneurs and the internet has been one of the greatest wealth creating tools ever in the history of civilization let me give you an example like if you were to try to launch a social media company today maybe there's a kind of a niche a niche that you want to get into if you have

any kind of traction you will immediately be copied by you know meta or Tick Tock by dance right like you have almost no chance in that space I mean there is some smaller chance of some traction but I really believe in the power of entrepreneur ship and you know it's really interesting because you know being in North America you and I are both based in North America like there's probably a lot of businesses that we could create in the offline world that could be pretty successful but for many people in developing countries the internet is really their only chance of having a good business to start and so the entrepreneurial nature of web3 and what it's enabling an entrepreneur space is is one of the most important things to me so to answer your

original question does the average person internet user really care about in open and decentralized web not probably not really but I think the entrepreneurs in the space really really care about that and we've seen that with artists getting into nfts right now they don't have as many Gatekeepers they can sell their art directly to users we've seen that with people creating Dows my definition for web3 is it's a collection of tools and internet technologies that that really enables communities to be organized in a way that's fair and meaningful to them and that has not been the case in in many of the other internet models and internet businesses that we've seen with data being exploited and privacy being exploited so I'm most excited about the open web for

the sake of Entrepreneurship and the sake of growth around the world you're so right it's so easy for us in North America I'm in Canada you're in the US we have access to Commerce we have access to building businesses we have access to a legal system to structures to regulation that allows us to create a corporation and then to get customers whereas so many people around the world don't and not only that I don't really we want to go too far down this rabbit hole but you just you just sparked my mind on this is we also have access to Identity and we also have access to banking which three billion people do not have access to and so web3 we often forget that web3 is solving those things as well and for a lot of people those

are basic rights that will significantly improve their life oh yeah absolutely and so people that don't have access to those services like how are they going to get access to them in most cases I think it's going to end up coming through web 3 so we're already seeing that the growth so something I get to see that's really really interesting is is a RPC provider which can go into what that means later but basically we provide a connection for Builders to the blockchain and so we have you know basic logs that tell us kind of where growth is happening and I see billions of requests from countries like Argentina from Turkey we even got someone from Antarctica peeing our

infrastructure the other day we see people in sub-Saharan Africa both Builders and just Traders it's really cool to see kind of This Global growth and especially when you start meeting teams in web3 there really isn't a headquarters of web3 there are cities that are very strong in web3 like Paris New York and Lisbon and Portugal but it's very distributed or even decentralized in that future as well should somebody from Antarctica yeah we think it was someone that was using our RPC in their wallet you know you can add your an RPC connection and you're like metamask squad or similar wallet and yeah you know probably someone is out of research tool and decided to do some trading while they

were or they were on a research trip and or through his trip it was trading while they were on it was funny yeah that's incredible since you brought up a social media as an example of the businesses I'm curious as you know because I haven't figured this out yet but threads just launched this episode is coming airing on Wednesday we're recording this on Friday so people will be listening to this about five days after we record this but we're very close to launching threats I don't know if you've played around on Fred's but the one thing that has stood out to me is they've talked about how they're building it on the fediverse and I don't even know what the fediverse is I don't know if you know but it seems like threads is

taking a step in the direction of a interoperable social graph do you have any thoughts on that do you know anything about that have you dove into that at all don't really know too much about how they're architecting thread yeah background or where the directions going you know at the end of the day like I did sign up for it and kind of checked it out at the end of the day it's like still asking you for basically as a disclaimer that literally all of your personal data is being shared you know with meta and So Meta is constantly thinking about how do we release these beautiful easy to use products that extract data from our users so that part is still the same regardless of what they say

is surrounding it they want to get better at serving Us ads and understand even like what we might be interested in in the future so that's the only reason they're doing this there's no altruistic reason that meta has for launching threads but to get more data and more users in their web it's a great reminder it's a necessary evil right now in my mind because there is an incredible connection that we get from these social media platforms and they've served a great purpose in our life it's unfortunate that their business model became what it is anyways let's not go down that rabbit hole right now okay I want to touch on you're at an interesting place you sort of mentioned

this even just knowing that somebody from Antarctica is interacting with web3 like you have this like I don't know what analogy you want to use back seat or you know this ground layer like you see things that the rest of us don't see what sort of your outlook right now or your perspective right now maybe you can give us an analogy to help us understand the way you see it yeah so anchor really sits at this interesting intersection in the space where you could think about it like we're almost like the air traffic controller at an airport we see the planes landing we see The Travelers you know boarding the planes that's where we sit so from the practical side we've integrated over 30 different blockchains and that grows literally every single week as we've onboarded more and more

new chains in the space and then our customers are developers that are working in Enterprises some of them now are in government organizations others are building nft Collections and others are just Traders so we have this like really interesting view of like the multi-chain space but then also the different types of Builders and different types of users in this space so once you kind of see that and you're talking to these people as customers and users you start seeing a more I'd say realistic view of what's Happening that's not grounded in hype but crowded in like this very practical approach to that thank you we see that view more often maybe you could start a podcast

actually from your data and share that with us on a regular basis the no hype podcast I mean we even tell it man dominant on the hype Center I'm literally going to look that up nice okay so there's a few ways we can take this what trends are you seeing maybe from if you want to focus on the use case side I mean you mentioned governments you mentioned Enterprise I know that you got to building out sdks for gaming like is there any use cases that you're seeing a lot of Trends on or the other way we can approach this is any trends that you're seeing Tech around before we hit record you were talking about ZK proofs I'm down to go down any of these paths that you are now

you know seeing from your seat and that as that air traffic controller thank you I think you know it's July 2023 ethereum has officially transitioned to profo steak let's just back up and like look at where we're at so two years ago we saw crypto at least in the US dollar value hits around 3 trillion what 2.5 some 2.5 billion to 3 trillion somewhere in there and then you know right now we're sitting at 1.2 trillion so I think investors are like oh what's happening we've seen these major failings like the FTX failing basically all of the speculative hype has kind of dried up which is it really has been a great healthy thing for this space but if you

back out and you kind of look at the trend lines things are growing one of the things that I love to look at is there's a company it's part of the S P 500 called equidex I'll tell you why I'm telling you this story but there's this company that's called equinix and they are sitting at the interconnection space of really the cloud the data centers the telecom companies they help most organizations that do business like the Netflix's of the world the digital oceans of the world the Amazons of the world they do business with that works well if you look at equinix they just celebrated a 25 year anniversary and if you look at their stock price you saw in 1999 or 2000 their stock went up to like seven hundred eight hundred dollars

something like that 600 I was somewhere in that range and then it went all the way down to like fifty dollars and then it's just been kind of a straight linear growth since then until now they surpassed the market cap that they had in 1999. and I think that ends up being kind of analogy for what has happened in crypto it's very similar to kind of that.com bursts or bubble and burst where there's so much speculative these tokens are getting insane valuations because so many new people are coming in there's so much by pressure and whether it was a really well known in 2017 that's when tech people started getting into early adopters by 2000 to 21 we really saw kind of everyone had heard of

Bitcoin more or less not everyone but you know everyone that's kind of in this trading sphere or puts disposable income into assets right so you know now we're seeing these protocols these projects these companies really start to justify their evaluations that's the stage we're in right now and so I think the market is slowly growing you know we've had some rough times in the last two years but we've seen more healthy valuations for protocols and genes out there and we continue to grow in that space so that has been happening but in order for there to be truly true organic and sustainable growth the user experience has to get better and companies in the

space have to make money like there has to be like real utility not just like oh the tokens used for this but like it actually has to work the model yeah the work has to be self-sustaining I think like what I've seen happening in our customers and the kind you know the partners that we work with is that people are really started to make advancements in the technology side that are growing and you know kind of justifying their valuations in this space so the the ZK technology is part of that we can get into that a little bit but I think it's a bit healthy and what we're probably seeing now in crypto is less volatility more of a linear growth I think there could be you know Bitcoin the Bitcoin happening is next year and

then the March April kind of time frame that will definitely push our market up I think my personal opinion but all the altcoins and all tokens are really kind of fighting for you know survival and they're growing their revenue they're growing their teams and the results are are really great I mean a lot of this is self-sustaining ecosystem now so the valuations are are a lot more normal now so that's been a good thing we don't see you know we kind of joke that East Denver of 2022 so it was February of 2022 like there's a protocol that spent 800 000 in their after party right they had a top five DJ open bar for like 5 000 people or something like

that for like Julio hours those days aren't here you know people are just having these meetups at bars and you know with a panel and a little projector you know we're back to that kind of atheist but that's been great you know that's been great all the distractions are kind of there's still some still are still there but we've minimized distractions and really focused on buildings in the space you make a good point the party is a great analogy because when you have a party like that which we had in 2021 and early 2022 everybody wants to be there and they don't necessarily care about building Community they don't care about the long term they're just hey I heard this party is sweet and I can benefit from it right

right and that's not what you need when you build one thing we talk a lot about on the show is the challenges you face when you are building a new tech when your business or an entrepreneur or builder in new tech you're not just building your business you're also building infrastructure you're also teaching your customers and your users about this new tech you're also likely involved in the underlying Tech by going to East Denver you're involved in the chains you're trying to understand the protocols everybody's trying to create new standards as well and then get everybody to follow those down they get so many

things that are happening for you guys over at anchor I know you have a token what's it been like to manage the expectations of having a token versus the objective of building a sustainable and profitable business absolutely want to talk about that that's a great segue so I think you know a lot of crypto projects that have tokens more or less sure governance tokens you know whatever but the startup Journey for crypto projects is very similar to other startups where you're trying to find traction you're trying to find what grows this thing you can't just have a

vision and just say okay here we go like you gotta you can if you're a PFT project or you could you could have right you could but you could afford you could have for a while but but to build an actual sustainable thing there's a lot of little micro pivots that have to be made we've released products and then turned them down we've told the community our community we're doing one thing and then move to something slightly different and that's not to misled them that's so so that anchor grows and it survives and it you know keeps being a force in this space of force for infrastructure and keeps connecting the dots you know for the ecosystem for our customers that journey is probably a healthy journey and I think every everyone in the space that's going to succeed their journey is going

to look like that now I will say that for us we really at the end of the day are an incentive Pro incentive protocol and a service provider and I think if you look at it like who's capturing the most value in the space it's the actual chains themselves like Bitcoin like ethereum like polycon et cetera Etc and as a service providers like search Riders definitely there's probably five or six in the top 100 and coin market cap they can't have a place there but it's a lot harder to bring token utility as a service provider right and so that it's definitely something we're exploring is how do you become more of a chain that has utility and we've really seen the space heading and kind of where we want it to go in order to enable that

so still too early to really talk through like the details of that but that's where we're heading with the anchor token is more into the gene space and especially as we get into kind of like this idea of layer twos and layer threes in the space we think we can add a lot of value by having all the pieces connected the other thing I want to say is that you started this conversation by saying you know we're the top uh infrastructure provider that no one's heard of and I I would have to say like a good analogy that is like Amazon web services Amazon web services more or less started in like 2008 2009 that kind of time period and now now it's just a basic tool that almost every business uses and you know we're 15 ish years later and so it's taken a long time for

them to grow and obviously they are probably one of the fastest growing organizations on the planet right now but these infrastructure plays like anchor is is they snowball over time and as you connect more and more of the pieces you build better and better tools for your customers and your users you know you get bigger and bigger with that and so definitely something that you know we are in that growth stage right now I will say though that our token has been on the market for five years and there's challenges that we have with that as well all of our supply is out there in the market today there's challenges with that and we probably have to figure out a way to decrease our supply in the future and for it to

really have a meaningful utility in our protocol I don't want to use the word regret but do you think it would have been better to not have launched the token back then I mean there's so many challenges that come with having a token that impacts your balance sheet when you're trying to build a business and all of a sudden you're talking this valued way less not because you did anything differently just because the whole Market crashed and sandbag ring freed went and stole everybody's money you know like all these things are totally external to what you're building how do you manage that I think that's something like a lot of Builders and Founders in this space really struggle with it's those the impact of the external on their business both from a mental health perspective but also from like a balance sheet perspective yeah

well I've heard someone told me the other day that we're like an OG project in this it's not that old but I guess compared to a lot of others we are an OG project in space or OG token in space we've kind of consistently hovered around like 120 and coin market cap and position in terms of market caps but we've significantly grown from where we started at like 200 in that space so there's been long-term growth on our market cap in relative to these other needs and protocols out there I think the market is very very different now so when we watched the choking in 2017-2018 there were almost no VCS investing in the space so you kind of had to launch a token now it seems like the model that most people are doing is they're

creating two entities they create more or less a service provider entity they have Equity rounds they bring in their VCS sometimes those VCS buy the token as credited investors kind of as a pre-sale right and then later they have a second Foundation or Dao or something that launches the token almost like as a non-profit so there are kind of models I think best practices that didn't exist in 2017 or 2018 the industry is adopting which has been healthy you know at the end of the day I do want to say this that like if you look at the space right now I think one thing Traders often ask me is you know where do you see the opportunities in the space so I do think it's important to realize that if you're

trying to to be if you're not just investing in Bitcoin or ethereum you know you're investing in these other kind of alts and whatnot that they are all kind of in this more or less this early stage right and so myself I have done you know Angel Investing and whatnot in the equity side with other startups and it's just like a risk it's a risky business right investing in early stage things like and some of the other Angel Investors I know they expect 7 out of 10 Investments not not to succeed or you know to die off and they're counting on you know one to three and so I think you know that that is kind of how the altcoin space is right now and that's the truth there's not a lot of people that will say that

on publicly that working the space but a lot of the chains are slowly dying and the thing about web 3 is that I'd say the the double-edged sword is that there are these amazing opportunities from the Builder side there are amazing opportunities from the investor side but there also are going to be a lot of like slow Burns in web 2 if you try a business you bring in investors that business doesn't work you shut it down and move on to the next thing in web 3 sometimes those products maybe live Vine too long when they really don't have a viable path forward but in any regard I think anchor is in a great place you know we've worked hard at finding product Market fit improving our cash flow so that we don't have to sell our

token to survive and you know that's been a really important thing for us that's the intro for your that your podcast the no high podcast was Josh new Roth telling you what nobody else in the space will say it's true we actually just published a report for our paid subscribers a few weeks ago talking about how to strategically and confidently invest in apps and in the service providers in the space and we talked a lot about exactly what you're saying is that it's it's very challenging it's very risky Investments yes there will be a few that are the next AWS there'll be the AWS web

3 and I think we all believe that web3 will be the base layer of the internet in the next decade so yeah you might get that but there's also a good chance that you might get somebody that nobody ever heard of look all the 100x opportunities in the space now you really have to be a core someone that's involved in the project itself so it's going to be almost impossible to find those from just like the trader side now there are stories I see on Reddit and R cryptocurrency of people that you know have made you know 100x thousand acts on you know some of the mean coins that recently came out but there's like out of every one person that you know did that there's a million that lost money

right so and a billion lost money they're not talking about it they're not getting well you know they go a year is their story yeah and so I think what's been really interesting is the the barrier to entry in the space has gone down significantly and so one thing that makes me excited is there's easier and easier tooling out there to get involved there's Dows that are compensating people with air drops and whatnot there's no code tools that are starting to you know come out and so what makes me most excited is the entrepreneur on nature and so I think for people that want to make money in this space the best place to do it is to try to do something entrepreneurial in in the web 3 space and get involved in a project and you know join with others or do

something yourself and try to figure it out that's where the real good opportunities are these days amen I love that everybody just wants the Thousand X without the work but really yeah you just got to put in the work okay let's chat about ZK proofs we haven't talked to tahun about that on the podcast mainly because it's just so technical can you explain ZK process if you're explaining it to a five-year-old and then may help us all understand and then maybe lead towards like why does this matter and what are the use cases that this will enable man hard question let me start with some of the use cases that I think CK can enable just to ground Us in that so ZK stands for zero knowledge it's a very mathematical concept of

basically how do you prove that something exists in a decentralized system and that thing could be an asset um a contract it could be you know that some activity exists that ends up being really really important so well the web 3 space right now has a lot of workarounds for what I might call trying to make a better user experience so like let's take two examples of those so in one workaround that is kind of clunky is the bridging bridging assets from one chain to another so for example you know maybe you bought some polygon erc20 which is their ethereum token and you want to get polygon native or the

native token you have to you know use the bridge for that or maybe you're trying to move your East from ethereum to a D5 project that lives on binance chain so you need to use a bridge for that right or go through binance as an exchange there's kind of these workarounds that really end up hurting the user experience like Bridges have been kind of the number one way that assets have been hacked besides phishing or there's been these big exploits on the bridges so bridges are really a terrible thing in the space they're necessary evil right now on the other side you know on D5 you have liquidity pools and certainly people make money on liquidity pools they're also easily exploited if there's any other things going on you know multi-chain has some issues today yesterday and uh you know

liquidity pools had to be paused because of those issues across the space including an anchor it's clunky and zero knowledge what it can do is it can kind of eliminate that clunkiness and so today if you're trading on D5 you're effectively you know swapping assets putting assets into liquidity pools and you're seeing things like impermanent risk and the slippage and all these different things that you're seeing now with ZK D5 protocols we'll be able to build order books so we can basically bring the experience of like a binance or a coinbase into D5 which will be amazing and then with Bridges we can Bridge it assets kind of seamlessly and in the background with our with CK proof

so I just think of like better use user experience equals your knowledge now it's not the only thing that will make better user experience security apps better wallet integration and wallets and things exactly so I'll save you some technical details and see that's why I'm excited about it is because I think it can really make this technology feel seamless and more of that web 2 experience so that's why we're racing towards and and to bring back my earlier Point what these valuations in order to have a better valuation in a lot of these chains and protocols they they really need more users they need more activity and they in order to do that they're going to have to have a better user experience so a lot of these stuff is trying to solve the core issues and I think everyone in the space that's

building is like reading a sigh of relief like I kid you not I know a builder that's built it's been part of like 20 products and kind of when the bear Market started he was like oh this is so great now we can focus on doing all these things that we needed to do for forever you know because look the Builders of space we know the activities coming back we are confident in the future of this thing and this industry and this ecosystem but it's going to take more time to get there when we just talk about the growth in this space right now and we do a monthly AMA in our Discord where we talk about what are the key numbers in the space not just from the investment perspective so we look at like active wallets and those interacting with nfts and we're seeing an increase in all of

those numbers despite the fact that the Financial numbers are all dropping right now what numbers do you guys see on your end and can you share any of them is there an increase that you guys are seeing yeah so we've seen a lot of growth in like one of the the numbers that I track probably the closest is what are the RPC requests what are the type of requests that are coming in you know in terms of talking to the blockchain those requests will get Button getting a lot more complex people are doing more with them there's more and more activity on the layer twos and the Roll-Ups and there's more International growth for sure I think some of the U.S regulation is is

increasingly pushing people overseas to from the US and keep in mind that when I say that there were lots of like companies in the space that were and dowels and you know projects whatever you want to call them that we're hosting their infrastructure in the US even though their teams were decentralized all over the world now they're starting to choose webos outside the U.S so there's our reports that other people have made around what are called connects so when developers push code to a project it's called a commit you can you know look at projects owned in the Ethereal ecosystem versus the sui ecosystem versus the you know Phantom ecosystem and look at you can track commits On Tools like GitHub that can

show you some really good data about where developers are going who's building what I think you know the conferences have been really good last year last August I was you know you're in Canada I went to eat Toronto I was really and the blockchain week that was happening there boxing Futures week it was really interesting to see that it wasn't just crypto Bros there it was like families learning about web3 it was you know University students it was people really from all Races all walks of life that's a positive trend I think that's more of a qualitative Trend not a quantifiable Trend that you see at the conferences increasingly which is great to see that all things that make me excited about the space yeah since

you're bringing up conferences I know you're headed to East Paris what is that two weeks this is very yeah yeah very soon what are you looking forward to what's anchor doing there are you guys activating there at all yeah so for us we are having a little Summit event with some Partners outside of that we're excited to just meet our customers our partners web3 is very you can be fully a not in the space fully Anonymous no issues but there is something that just about human nature when you meet your partners in person you shake their hands you buy them a drink just like traditional business where it does help with trust it helps get things done

helps Partnerships advance and so you know that is a really important thing about this space and I you know some of our team they have probably the majority of their friends are in web3 and they meet them there they you know you go to on the conference circuit you meet all your friends and you have fun you're building things together you're working at a project you also have something going on the side that you're working on you know it's very entrepreneurial in that sense so I think that you know people that aren't Builders should try to go to these conference meet up develop you know Network people are very friendly and open and there's not what I love about the web 3 conferences is there's not the stuffiness like people care about your title where you work they

just want to know what your Ambitions are and how you're passionate about and so that's a very refreshing thing about these conferences so I will say that whenever these conferences happen there's a lot of people that go to these conferences that don't actually participate in the events and so something that most people may not know is you know probably as obvious in hindsight is like a lot of deals are being made at these conferences they're usually not happening like at the venue you they're happening like on some like private room or restaurant or bar or something but you know most of the teams in the space that's how you get business done you go meet people make things happen um and uh that's definitely important to be part of those conversations in the room in those things so in a space where we're

building trustless and permissionless Tech we still need handshake trust I think that's a uh a great point one thing that I always say about the value of conferences right now is you can meet the most senior people in web 3 at a conference right now yeah three years from now you won't be able to do that right because right now it's still a very small community right there's not enough of us yet so the opportunity as you said you know you talked about the opportunity to be an entrepreneur to building web three well if you go to one of these cars even if you didn't have an idea you just show up to one of these conferences and you walk around you shake hands you'll meet very senior people and you will get so many

opportunities out of that exactly I'd say probably like 10 of the people we've hired have come just from handshakes at conferences and right you know Meeting those people they're like I want to do this I have these ideas and we're like all right you're on let's go it's a in a decentralized remote team it's amazing how different hiring and building teams is we don't have all of these processes and steps that corporations have you know your startup you're like you want to do this we like you let's start to go and let's you know and a lot of this starts this freelance work I think people who come from corporate world world can often get almost ahead of themselves if they're trying to get work in web 3 and they feel like they need to

go through the same process that they went through to get a job in their corporate job but it's you know just show up to a conference meet somebody and boom you don't even things are just gonna happen real fast I want to bring up a point that I was just thinking about this the other day I think one of the reasons we haven't seen say San Francisco Silicon Valley or even New York really take like the lead in web3 despite being so much talent there it's because a lot of the people that are in you know the last 10 years we've seen so much consolidation of talent into like the thing type companies you know Facebook and Microsoft and Apple right and you know they are kind of like these golden handcuffs they're making huge

salaries over there they're getting stock grants right and web 3 is inherently different working at web 2 is inherently different like there are some companies that have really great pay packages here here but I think what people don't realize is working at web 3 like the biggest opportunities are to be entrepreneurial set yourself while working for with another project that is an inherent quality an attribute of this space and so I think naturally it attracts people that are looking to be entrepreneurial in the space for someone that has like a big comfy job it's it's harder to transition into web screen I think that's one reason we've seen this like decentralization in the activity and the energy in the space it's a great

Point okay I want to touch on anchor recently I think it was about a month ago that you guys launched your partnership or announced your partnership with Microsoft and tencent which is a big deal to be highlighting these web 2 companies and enabling more Enterprises more of the web to you know we talk so much about what is going to be the onboarding ramp for the next billion users like how do we get them in and I think that a lot of us kind of thought that it would be building new businesses and new use cases but really the on-ramp often will be web 2 companies and existing companies utilizing blockchain bringing

it into their business and this partnership seems to be a partnership that's going to enable that can you tell us more about it yeah so our partnership with both in terms of Microsoft and tencent we're partnering with their Cloud divisions in their infrastructure division so Microsoft is doing a lot of other things outside of they own it obviously everything from gaming to Windows and whatnot but we're very focused on the cloud sector and you know cloud computing you know most Enterprises and businesses on the planet use Microsoft for something and so they have been an amazing partner they by the way Microsoft in particular has had a blockchain strategy for like

six or seven years now they were doing stuff in blockchain like 2015 uh have been a big supporters of the space in various ways researching us figuring it out and so what we're trying to do with this is is really make it easy for their Enterprises to consume high performance infrastructure nodes uh launch an application chain with us so the reality is is that you know anchor is still very much like a startup in the space and for us to work with some of the you know governments talk about National app chains and things like that we have to have a partner that has really all the levels of security and you know all the different systems that like a Microsoft

would have and so in particular Microsoft has been a great partner because of their Enterprise access and we're partnering with their clients they're introducing us to what companies we would never really have access to outside of that partnership and then with 10 cent in particular 10 cent is like a very is really big in Southeast Asia in China with gaming so with our gaming sdks and whatnot tencent is really a leading force and I don't think Austin North America realize like how big gaming is in China and how big tense that is like it is the leader in Southeast Asia in that sense and in the Chinese community so you know that partnership is very much in the same where we're working with them to get

those gaming companies into the web 3 space and with you know web3 infrastructure so the reality is is that they've already done the hard work of getting companies onto their platforms and so by us being making our services available it lowers the barrier of entry for those you know for those companies makes it faster for them to get into web 3 which ultimately helps with mass adoption and you know onboarding literally billions of users so there are companies you know I will say like anchor we don't have access to a billion users yet but there's companies that we can work with with tencent and Microsoft that do have access to literally a billion users that we're currently in talks with right now so it's a great Point that's really exciting and an important thing and I think you know

when we first announced this I think there was a little bit of skepticism I saw some like thought on Twitter about it but like what does mass adoption means it means you're going to be part of it with these companies like they're not going anywhere like yeah that was what it means and that's why like there needs to be this balance between the decentralization Maxis and we all want to get to a better internet we value open source we value all these things we also we need to be realistic in the manner in which we get there and the phased approach that's going to need to happen you mentioned National app chains and working with governments what does that mean can you frame that for us yeah so without saying too much have a lot of you know ndas in places right now we are

exploring with several governments what national app chains look right now and some of them are interested in launching a stable coin in their country as a regularly stable coin there's other mechanisms to bring like a regulated defy into certain countries as well using a national app chain we definitely feel like app chains are the future so we're going into a world where inevitably we're probably only have there'll be hundreds of layer ones but the layer ones of consequence in the space like the ethereums the world polygon more or less still layer one in my my mind probably have dozens of those that really take the majority of the market share and then everything else is you know living kind of this layer two

in this app chain world so I think we're going into a world where we'll see thousands if not tens of thousands maybe even someday hundreds of thousands of application chains be run and so anchor really is the leader in the application chain and you know we're seeing great success with that around the world I think you were very accurate in that that is the way it will go as governments want to build on blockchain make having their own chain that they can control an environment around makes a lot of sense and then companies doing the same thing I can definitely see that okay I want to get to a speed round but before we do anything else you want to share about anchor floors yours to show also where can people find you I know you're going to be at ECC but where can

people find you online where they can connect with you guys I love to connect with people on my Twitter which is at joshurath my DMs are open you know people can send me a DM there I don't you know leak alpha or things like that but I love to have conversations around you know Technologies where things are going so very approachable love to use that as a resource probably won't be using threads anytime soon still will stick to Twitter for now okay all right we'll include your Twitter handle in the show notes for those who want to find you okay speed round got three questions for you Josh first one what's one prediction you have for the rest of this year yeah so probably a generic prediction but I do think the market

will continually head up this year obviously my own personal opinion I think the Bitcoin happening hanging out there in early 2024 has a lot to do with that and we've had like six months of like the markets like well which what direction are we gonna go the rate at which the institutions are coming back into this space right now is really unprecedented so pending any world apocalypse events like I think the market will definitely be increasing that is a great positive outlook and thank you for that we completely agree one thing you've bought recently for under 100 that brings you Joy does not have to be a digital yeah you know what working in web3 is like an Around the Clock thing I whenever I talk to my

friends that aren't in this space they're like shocked by you know how many times there's calls at like four in the morning one in the morning and things like that and I found a lot of joy in doing some offline like Builder projects like with my hands lately I recently bought a brad nailer that shoots these little pin Nails in it yeah I got a brad nailer nice yeah it's just made my life great so women's building yeah well I built uh basically a tiny house in my backyard as my office I'm not currently in it I don't have my AC hooked up and it's like 90 degrees Fahrenheit here in New York right now where I don't know what that is in Celsius but it's really hot so yeah as soon as I get the AC hooked up I'll be back out there but Brad Miller was

definitely helpful in that project amazing I am in my tiny house right now in my backyard and I don't have AC in here it's not I don't think it's hotter here on the West Coast but the sun is currently coming in and I'm cooking in here it's a bit of a greenhouse so I should probably get AC okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it it's gonna be a little controversial but something not associated with web3 there's this really interesting Theory I've been researching around this is going to sound crazy to some people you'll think I'm a lunatic for saying this which is why I think you should be on a billboard but how the Great Pyramids of Egypt were used as a power plant and I would say something like there's so many great YouTube

videos that have really done their research and there's people that are starting to really take this Theory seriously so I think the more people should see that that's a really interesting thing that's out there so probably something about the Great Pyramid Power Plant Theory can you explain that theory in the yeah so there's something about how there's like water erosion under the Great Pyramids where at one point people know that you know scientists or geologists I should say archaeologists know that there was water running under them and obviously the Precision of how these things were built there's nothing parallel to it today and so the top was gold which is a conductor if you remember some of the

stuff that you know Tesla the inventor invented with his DC current where the effectively the atmosphere could be charged to bring electricity to people people think that the great pyramids were used to do that and there's hieroglyphics in Egypt of people holding what look to be light bulbs not torches so it's too easy for us to assume that we the Technologies we have today have never been used in the past and you look at this Precision where we can't really even replicate it today with a great pyramid and you have to wonder you know was it used for something else so I enjoy as a side hobby researching that kind of stuff seeing what people have to say about it there's some really interesting theories out there you're a multi-rabbit hole guy you just you just said half of our

listeners down the most random YouTube rabbit hole though Great Pyramids well the thing is is like all the people in Academia hate these theories which makes me love it more I'm kind of a rebel at hearts that's why you're in web three oh yeah exactly yeah awesome Josh this has been just a pleasure to have you on the show thank you for sharing all your thoughts thank you for everything you're building an anchor we need that infrastructure as you said we need better user experience if we're gonna get to billion users in the space and beyond that and I know that that is a big focus of you guys so deep bow I will definitely have to get you back on the show again in the future I think uh yeah you've got a great

outlook on the space awesome well thank you so much for having me thanks for listening in everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and website are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one