Burnt Banksy on burning a Banksy and onboarding a billion people

Transcript

is crypto broken we all dream about onboarding 1 billion users on chain but can we really achieve that when new users face endless technical barriers imagine your non- crypto friend wants to use an onchain app but first they have to set up a wallet manage their seed phrase securely custody their assets and purchase a token to pay gas not going to happen right we need blockchains which remove the messy Tech so non- crypto natives can join the party now this is exactly what today's guest is building in today's doer Spotlight we're joined by the infamous burnt Banky co-founder of Zion during this Frank and honest conversation we discussed the story of

why burnt Banky bought an original Banky for $90,000 and set it on fire we discussed Zion's novel generalized abstraction at the protocol level which creates frictionless experience AC across accounts signatures gas interoperability pricing payments and more and we also discussed the current state of l1s and l2s and the future that burnt Bank C sees that we need to achieve in order to reach Mass adoption this is web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet we are here to make sense of an onchain World in constant transformation I'm

jird your host for today's episode and I believe that crypto is going to change the world gmgm Anthony burnt Banky welcome to web3 Academy so excited to have you here today yeah it's great to be here man I'm glad we could um glad we could make this work definitely okay we gotta start with the burnt Banksy story elephant in the room of course of course I I'm sure you might be sick of telling the story because this event happened back in 2021 so we're we're re bringing back an old event but it's just such a great story and I'm sure many of our listeners probably haven't heard of it because a lot of our listeners came around only during the end of the last Bull Run not

the earlier part of the bull run which is when this event happened so tell us the burnt Banksy story definitely definitely well so let me I guess let me definitely take you back in time right this is February of 2021 so be hadn't done his auction yet the nian cat hadn't done an auction yet I think the highest price nft ever sold was $100,000 and like we were at the point in crypto where you were getting aird dropped crypto punks they were like it was nothing crypto kitties were cute and they were fun and it was like it was small it was experimental you never want to call it bad you always want to say it's experimental right but at the moment me and you know me and my buddies were in crypto obviously we've been in crypto for a while and we' been

collecting nfts and I loved crypto kitties right and I had a punk with you back in the day we lost like two and a hack though and then they would just I mean back in the day they were nothing right it was just and it was like seeing a random nft today you no one knew it would get here right I love them I love them I really did though right and you know I always kind of my family or my web to family right I always love saying that you know they would always be I think we saw very early on this kind of Promise of crypto right where you know you have the cess pool that is the internet and you have everyone's lives is effectively you know it's going to be on the internet right there's just no way around it the thing that we don't

have on the Internet is any way to really prove ownership because you know as I mentioned it's it's a Cess pool right and what you really get with crypto and that kind of trenches to nfts is this aspect of digital ownership right I can now own digital art and not just like right click and save like many people had kind of you know mentioned right but the logic of hey well you know even if you own it right like if I don't see it in my living room if I can't touch it or you know what is the value in that right there's definitely one argument of people are spending so much time chronically online that the you know like your Twitter profile picture effectively becomes your your living room right like that's what everyone sees but we wanted to take this experiment we we said you know let's

take something that has value right we took this Banky who's a very famous artist piece we bought for $990,000 and it was entitled morons it effectively was making fun of people who were buying art out of soube auction it was absolutely the perfect piece totally totally chosen for a very specific reason was called morons we lit it on fire got a professionally photographed by Vice and live stream the burning and sold it as an nft for at the time $400,000 which I think ethereum was maybe $800 at the time and it worked right and I think you know the thesis of will this hold value right like all right let's see it let something in value physical we bring it over to digital and we destroy the original what

happens right what does that look like and you know it was I'm still telling the story today right and and I think very shortly after it it was I mean we were picked up everywhere right whether forb CNN CB like every single news stylet from Shanghai to singap to San Francisco you know and then after that came the beatball after that came the Nan catch and you know a lot of really early nft if you look at the Wikipedia page for nfts were cited on it right and so we were very very early on in this kind of Evolution and a lot of it was just you know number one I like pissing people off you're going to get this a lot for me but I think the best way to proof points is by something spectacular and we knew it to be true and we still

of course are in the crypto space right so you bought the piece for $90,000 then you photographed yourself burning the piece turn that photograph into an nft well we actually we photographed the actual piece piece like we got it photograph the actual piece so someone bought the digital version of the actual piece okay so it was a digital version of the actual piece that they bought right okay so it wasn't a photo of you burning it there was you know there was a side kind of nft collection that was out of like 420 which was like the memory pieces which that was a very inexpensive like Memorial kind of thing of like the event right but the main one that sold for

400,000 was professionally Photograph by Ice I see okay so essentially somebody purchased this for much more more than about four times more than the original price that you bought it for yep because it had now been burnt and so there's this belief that it now has great we transfer it digitally yeah exactly right plus there was you know I mean we had a lot of conversations at the time which was I got a lot of calls hey I have this version of Banksy you want to burn it it's like that's not the point right and then we saw and something that did did bother me afterwards for quite some time was just people were just lighting [ __ ] on fire like really expensive artworks on fire and they were falling flat on their face and and I think like a big

part of it was just it was never about the fire it was never about anything else but like proving the point right and getting the conversation started of like I can't tell you I I was Anonymous for I mean technically I'm still Anonymous right but it's Anonymous for genuinely genuinely Anonymous for two years because of how much hate I got right of just especially in the beginning it was very scary I mean you look at the comment section it's not there's not a lot of nice ones let's just say that and I I've got to just go back because watching the live stream I remember oh no that it didn't go quite as planned y turns out burning a piece of art is not as easy as's the logic I'm like it's [ __ ] paper you obviously

kind of thought about lighter fuel but it was like I don't know there was a part of me that was I say like I didn't want to disrespect the piece right and I didn't really want to change the piece itself right and so I didn't want to like dou and lighter fluid right and it just go and right up in Flames but it was I mean it was paper right so my vision for it was I would light one end it would slowly start burning like paper and then you come to think like 10 minutes into Ting this thing it's like oh [ __ ] these things weren't meant to be flamable that makes a lot of sense and like I probably should have gotten a bigger [ __ ] lighter I remember we like we had a big lighter the reason I don't think I've ever said this part but

like we're in New York right and we lit it out in in Brooklyn and we're in Manhattan right now we left the letter at the office and I was like [ __ ] we just pulled over to a local Bodega and just got like three I'm like just give me the biggest looking lighters and like two of them were dead one of them actually died if you look at the video one of them died while I was lighting it I'm just like holy [ __ ] but I don't know what I'm going to do there is such a euphoric moment when I light one end on fire and then I go to the other end and then I start going into the middle and it like it finally starts going and there's just like this wave that w wases over me of like oh my God thank God I I

can't believe this is happening I I applaud myself of how remarkably calm I stayed doing that but I was panicking on the just like [ __ ] this is $9,000 right here I can't even burn $90,000 like how incompetent do you have to be to not be able to do this you know and it was scary right it's a lot of [ __ ] money yeah and no one I mean and we can go to this after but we didn't think that it would self for what did at all like we didn't think we were making our money back we thought we were taking a pretty heavy loss if you like I don't know if you can see it but if you can look there was a Min set which was $50,000 and that's all we thought we were [ __ ] getting I I wanted to have

fun like quite frankly I didn't do this to make money still haven't sold the E from it right and so it's just it was fun we got the point across and I did it with people that I loved right and we definely got the conversation started which was fun okay so you make this big spectacle you now become a well-known Aon in the space you adopt the handle burnt Banky you get a lot of attention both negative and positive which unfortunately is the the name of the game when you're in the spotlight yeah what did you do next I think I know you transitioned into building an nft Marketplace that became your focus and for everybody listening to this show this is going to be a story podcast there's Anthony's been around in the

space for a while we're gonna get to his current project Zion eventually but I think there's a lot of lessons you learned along the way that are really relevant for builders in the space and for everybody to understand because you've tried a lot of different things and it's gotten you to where you are today yeah I mean I I think the story Lads up to itself in a way it's not like we were like you know what let's PIV it to AI right like I I always think that that our message was always kind of the same and I don't think I've really ever straight away from my vision I guess right which was I love crypto say what you want like and I think there's a lot of negatives to it right right I think it's an inefficient slow way of doing a lot of things that if you're a solution

looking for a problem that's why you're going to fail right and it's I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem I think there's a lot of things that are solved by it right and I think you know democratizing ownership I'm going to talk about that right like there's currencies there's different sects of crypto right you can get currencies you can get this we have a specific sect which is democratizing ownership I always love giving the example of like a co-op building which being in New York seems like I'm the only one who ever understands that whenever I say it but Co-op building for those who kind of aren't really familiar with the concept is you know let's say you have a 10un building each one of those you know people who own the unit is part of a board that kind of votes

right and that vote is like if you want to buy a unit in the building the Board needs to approve right the board is running all of this stuff the board is running the decisions and for a couple reasons right like for some people they don't want loud neighbors some people they do want party neighbors right and it's about building this kind of community in this apartment complex that works for the people and is by the people and like people have property value right and so there's that ownership and it's like well if this place goes to [ __ ] I I lose my money so now let's like we have physical infrastructure there which is apartments right and you're bound by the limitations that are your unit but now let's bring that on to where everyone's going to be which is the internet and

which I I will say is a sess pool a lot and I think you look at like early complaints of the internet and it's always it's like there's too much information no one's going to know what's right or wrong especially like this kind of fake news era right you know and so then you get let's bring this idea of ownership to a digital world and let's bring this concept of aligning incentives and having people who have the most stake and the most gain gain from the decisions and be a part of the decisions like a like a commune or a co-op and I think a lot of that was kind of like late stage vision of wework as well if you want to kind of like look into that where was like very habes powerful as a group kind of messaging and without ownership right

without this Baseline of who owns what and being able to universally recognize that it's useless so with that out of the way I've been in crypto you know I mean we started probably 2015 2016 right and it was annoying as hell to Mint the burnt Banksy and and I'm very technical person right and it was terrible and the US the experience was terrible people would throw in bids and then cancel them because the block times were too long and then things above it would get canceled it was a miserable experience doing the burn Banky that caused me a lot of stress and I was very technical and it was this concept of like what the [ __ ] right like we want we we're saying that we want to find the next Picasso in Africa because we can be borderless and we can have this kind of

discoverability but this is [ __ ] like the barriers to entry are so freaking high and they're so Technical and I think I have this quote that I say which is like how in the world are we supposed to De like decentralize ownership when only the highly technical of access and I said that actually about what we're building now right so things haven't changed and we'll get to that right we wanted to kind of fulfill this message of anyone can do can be an artist right anyone can be an artist The Dream you don't have to be someone to be someone you can make what like make a living live off of and do what you love right that was the early message is live and do what you love unfortunately you know only highly technical got access right and it was very expensive I mean

eth is still expensive gas fees so we had built some of the early standards in salana the nft standards collection standards on salana built a decentralized nft Marketplace on salana and we can kind of talk about that but it's very much a head slamming story of just like okay well we have Afrojack who's a famous DJ who wants to do an nft collection or this guy and it's like oh okay well now the process takes five days to on board because you need to get him a phantom wallet you need to go to coinbase you need to do this he needs to know like we need to handhold everyone this is frankly impossible for people people to do by themselves and you got a transfer you got a kyc you can only send five like it was miserable and I think a lot of it is just the way blockchain's

old right like the way that decisions were made early on really weren't thought of you know I don't think anyone really thought we'd be at this level right especially this quickly right and so a lot of these decisions it's very evident like why and and we can get into this and and I will revert to not being extremely technical but I'll give you an example the concept of like a wallet the reason that exists is because of public private key you know encryption right you need to store your private key somewhere you can't store it on a browser because it's so unsafe right so you get a Chrome extension that effectively stores it for

you but it's such a hassle like it's still a hassle like and that's why mobile is terrible because you can't really do that on mobile that's why you go cross device it's still terrible that's why the exchanges and wallets activate as different things and it's hard to have an exchange and a wallet which started coming out later don't even get me started on bridging and then you you start seeing a lot of decisions made around these Legacy decisions right and you know I'll just kind of quickly go to Zion for a second of just like one of the one of the ways we kind of tackle this which is like well why like we don't need private public ke encryption because everything is a smart contract everything's run via a smart contract not via you signing something directly right and this is lessons that we could

learn after 10 years of an industry but for us kind of personally was three years of just head slamming using it of using it yeah right and it's like there's so many times in a lot of what we did which is just like why the [ __ ] are we doing this you look right and it's because he did it and then the reason they did it is because they did it and then that guy doesn't work in in crypto anymore and it's like there's a few different threads to pull on here one is time we're not talking about a lot of time here right like that's three years ago that you're saying the most expensive nft was yeah $100,000 people 69 million doll nft hadn't even sold yet that's only three years ago it was impossible to do all

this stuff no one even knew what nfts were like that's not a long time right but then the other the other thing is you can look at it and you can say back then we were building for the technical because it was the technical that we're building and you build for yourself and your own use case you don't build for you know somebody who's different than you who want you know like you don't build Jack because you're not AF why would you yeah and I think you see this with Innovation right where there's this Chasm that people need to jump which is now we're making decision now we're making scaling decisions based off of the people that we're building for who already know everything that is counterintuitive if we want to get other

99% of the population on board we should not expect them to go through the [ __ ] that we've done I've lost many thousands of dollars in a rug pole many rug polls like and you you haven't worked in crypto unless you've gotten rug pulled it's just it's a name of the game but why the [ __ ] is that the name of the game exactly won't that will not bring a billion people if everybody gets rug pulled like that won't work I was talking to my grandma the other day and she was like oh you do that crypto stuff so it's like I want to stop sending checks to pay my bills and I'm like holy [ __ ] like that's where we are like that's going like this is the jump you're making right and and you know of course it's going to be time and it's you know

not everyone's still on Facebook right but as it kind of relates to that we we got to make that next jump right when you're starting to see the market come back and I think it's funny when we spoke the market was not at all where it is now just hilarious how much things can change yeah because when we first spoke that was November so nov to two months ago and how much it changes sentiment different right because in the bare Market it's very ego os are shattered egos are shattered and hope is lost right and it's oh my God we're never going to go out to the real world and then someone says [ __ ] Bitcoin ETF and you're just like we got to build for the next billion users they're right here and it's like okay well we got to pick a lane but we can't continue this

direction of like building for ourselves and then expecting everyone to mimic us yeah totally okay so you built an nft Marketplace on salana in 2021 after you burnt the bank se you did decently like 30,000 monthly activ a pretty yeah we did like I think it was like five of the top nft projects in salana yeah so that it's it's not like that went poorly why did you just decide to Pivot and to shut that down and go a different direction and I also just got to ask like is part of it because Solana wasn't there yet as an ecosystem whereas it's sort of it's ironic you might have just been too early on salana I was definitely too early on salana

hilariously I was definitely too early on salana I have this sign right here that hangs above I have a little column right here on my office and I remember the first time first time we crashed Shana my cooworker bought me a bottle of champagne a little note that says congrats on crashing salana with a little smiley face on it so I have it hanging up right here because you guys your nft Marketplace was it was like one of the things that we did that I mean d this is 2021 it was very I got to say all love to salana they have the best developer Community I have taken I've learned so much from the people there they are absolutely incredible I don't think it was really anything to do with salana quite frankly I think it had to do with this concept of a generalized

ecosystem right that really screwed me over screwed me over is the wrong word sorry you know which was when you we in nft Marketplace and salana is optimizing for Speed and they're optimizing for cost and most of salana at that point was defi right most of crypto is still defi I actually tried to look yesterday to try to find non defi applications look tell me how hard it is you won't find there's like three three like genuinely three I think I could name you more than three but I I get the point there's not that many it's in the interest of these generalized chains to cater towards the defi crowd right which is you know especially with salana it was small transactions it was quicker transactions it was cheaper transactions that was Solana's main

thing but like for us to do list an nft in a decentralized fashion it was 14 transactions and if salana went down on any block there we would the nft forever which was like yeah it was not great it was not great there was like some cases we could get it back but there not a good user experience right or you could do a a centralized route which went against my ethos right so I'm like that's what magic Eden did and I love them I love those guys absolutely no hate to them I think marketplaces are great but it was like we wanted to query chain everything we didn't even want to have a single database right and that became increasingly more difficult right and also we were competing with the the generalized layer and I think for us the

the whole team's Engineers right and we're a bunch of nerds and you know I think a lot of design decisions were needed to be made and I think we actually started Zion as a consumer chain right and I think this was like June of 2022 we started Zion deep bare Market we were like running some nfts and stuff like that but it wasn't great right like I mean the whole Market sentiment wasn't great right and so that's where this idea started which is like no one's going to trust crypto no one's going through this onboarding process anymore we need to understand that we need to go to the users we need to mimic a web to experience we need to build and I call it consumer applications because I also don't think I think there's too much innovation in defi in proportion to how much Innovation is in the rest of the

industry I should say as you mentioned how I can name you 15 centralized exchanges 15 decentralized exchanges 15 nft marketplaces on every chain right but I can't name you like I can name you sound sound. XYZ I can name you fentech I can name you uh lens steing lens yeah there's not a lot there's not a lot right and it's a shame and from someone who tried to do that it's really [ __ ] hard because you have to put so much energy so much time into effectively going backwards on a lot of these decisions that were made which you know benefited defi which benefited a generalized environment and I think like not to get like too specific but I do think it's using a generalized environment is like using

Heroku right in kind of like the web 2 world where you're sharing resources and it's great I think my future vision for that is it's amazing for testing I say that all the time I do think that there's going to be so much on the testing environment but I do think everything is going to end up being you know specific right whether that be consumer applications app chain thesis if you want to call it you know Etc and so we started off as this consumer blockchain but the issue with being a new blockchain is that there are a million other layer one blockchains out there yeah right and all of them are so competitive with each other right because you have a bunch of islands and that's you can make a bridge to an island but it's still a bridge if you're one place you're not another place and I

think this was a fundamental I don't want to say hatred I had but a fundamental misunderstanding which is just like the new l1s would just pop up go down and the liquidity it was just this like train right it was you would go here here here here here and and you could see the movement going of hype and falling and it was the same people it's the same people a we need to we need to avoid that at all costs and then B it was let's not even avoid that let's we can do both of these things which is saying hey you know we talk I'm going to talk about this term generalized abstraction a lot which is a very umbrella term right and what it really means is that like as a user I want to abstract everything people know account

abstraction right but when we talk about like abstrac interoperability it's this concept where we sit above every chain and can effectively in in a in a a good imagination is like a hive mind right where accounts on Zion exist on every chain which means that I can mimic mimic transactions on every chain which means that we no longer have 10 users on Solano 10 users on Zion 10 users on AAC we now have 30 users using blockchain right and I think for us that's a very important part of our goal is to just be this ground for products to thrive it doesn't matter to change and we could talk about how we do this I don't think we will because it's very complicated but happy for anyone to read the white

paper but you know to be able to facilitate this kind of like I mean symbiotic whatever you want to call it symbiotic collaborative L1 that has this kind of abstraction on a protocol level is really where we are right and we could talk about the and that's the the how we're doing it right what we're doing is we're creating an environment for products to be able to reach users without a 95% fall off rate and to truly like I think it's funny you look at like some of my early PowerPoints of like when I'm talking internal to the team right it's like step one fix crypto right like let's just make a palatable environment right it's it takes that one quote that I said right and it's it splits it up into two which is Step One

is to provide access to all step two is to redefine ownership and you can't redefine ownership when not everyone has access yeah he said that so well okay so I want to make sure all our listeners we jumped right into Zion so sorry that's okay it's great I love the way your mind works so you started Zion June 2022 Zion is an L1 that you built with your team really with a focus on usability to the masses yeah you weren't going after the def applications you saw early on 2022 middle of the bare Market at that point there was only a few l1s that have had

achieved true adoption and true Network effects there was a lot more talk around the start of the L2 thesis and that the l2s would be the direction that we would go in but you really saw that if we were going to bring everybody on chain we needed to abstract a lot of the complexities so that it could be very simple I mean the best example of this the same thing happened in web to when you think about eCommerce in the beginning nobody was really capable of starting their own online store it wasn't until we had tools like Shopify that abstracted away all the challenges

of setting up credit card payment and setting up Inventory management and managing shipping and all these things that were just too difficult most you know it was a headache exactly so e-commerce didn't take off until we had Shopify and we had Amazon and we had these tools so it's the same thing to think about in web three totally These Chains won't take off until we have a much easier way to use the chains so I don't want to get into the how because as you said that's too technical for me you know like we don't need to go into that technical side I think what we should talk about is what are the use cases this this is going to enable and also maybe why let's start with why like why did you decide to build an L1 versus build an L2 you know I didn't even want

to and it's funny like most of the decisions that we made we didn't even want to build an L1 L1 L2 it's just marketing chargon I'll be honest at least in my opinion like you could use optimism you're using the optimism token does it matter to you that it settles on E no right probably not and maybe you could Bridge easier right maybe some of the things are more compatible but at the end of the day I don't want to say bearish but it's like I'm skeptical of the fragmentation that a lot of L2 causes right like polygon was originally like is polygon L2 or is it an L1 or is it yeah that's a tough one that yeah we could argue that and it's hard because I remember right like I remember when we first had our conversation the first time was like the the concept of a

blockchain the concept of a layer one is been marketed a lot and there's kind of ideas of what it should be should be generalized it should have while you know Etc it's hard to use the marketing language to describe what we are what I would say is an L1 because maybe we're probably 70% closest to that description and like 40% closest to an L2 right could we settle to ethereum yes it's not very difficult do we want to no I don't really care we talked briefly about this but I think there's to me there's three key things that stand out that we need to fix about the chains that we currently use gas fees are a problem and we've seen certain chains immutable is

the best example I have that's a chain that built that completely abstracted gas fees so that it would be a better experience for users so you can play games because that's a mut basically gaming chain and not have to pay gas fees awesome well done immutable clearly showed that's one thing that was a problem private Keys you mentioned that yourself we had the founder of web three o which is a wallet obstruction company on our podcast yeah you know them and he talked about the difference of conversion when you eliminated private keys and you're talking massive difference I can't remember the exact stat but I think it was like 20 to 40% difference in conversion rate when you

eliminated private keys because most people don't want to set up a private key or don't know how right it's too much and then they they bounce they're out right and then the third thing is this you often have a product token and a gas token yes and when you have two tokens things get now you're like well I don't have the right token so now I have to bridge and then once you involve bridging like good [ __ ] lck yeah it's done you're out right yeah are those the three main issues that you see they all stem from the same symptoms right you mentioned the two product or the product and and gas fee or the platform token right yeah that is a gas issue right and the gas issue is also a gas issue right

it's hard for us right because I think it's easier to look at a web 2 company and say we want to do that rather than look at a web 3 company and say we don't want to do this we don't want to do this we don't want to do this we don't want to do this we know the flows that work I don't want to build like a regular consumer application because it's such a saturated Market but we have so much learning from that market where that people are so used to that we know like I will know that you probably don't want to sign into something with your social security number maybe your phone number would be better and there's things that that I could tell you right but we could sit here all day and be like this is what's bad with crypto this is what's

bad with crypto this is what's bad with crypto but I'd rather rather than saying that I'd rather point to hey why isn't eBay Why doesn't an NFC Marketplace work like eBay right why can't I use my credit card right why do I have to buy this random token that I don't know the name of it and then it's like oh it went to zero oh okay what do you mean it went to zero is what what do you mean it's gone there's a lot there right so in instead of just taking that that approach of like this is what we saw this this is what we're building the easiest way to think about that is is web 2 right and I I think it's funny that you talk to different people I was on a podcast yesterday about this right and we got into a little bit of an

argument and the guy was like so happy he was like you know we're mirroring the adoption curves of the internet right do you know how [ __ ] hard it was to get on the internet everyone's already on the internet you know how easy it should be to onboard to crypto for us it's your email we send you an email that's your onboarding experience the fact that we're mimicking the internet is terrible you needed a [ __ ] computer there was an investment there I have to like inputting what should be an email or a phone number or Twitter or Facebook or even with us like face ID right and there's ways to think about this which is just like we're doing so great right I think as you said it before it's like this concept of time right which maybe I'm hard on myself where I'm like I want

to be here now you know that kind of comes with being building in the space of just like ESP space that I talked to a lot of my like web two friends and you do the innovation in this space because of how quickly something can fail go to zero The Innovation is is it's scary in a lot of ways that a lot of people it'll kill like I always say any new person who joins our company to not get caught up in all this because it will kill you if you let it for sure the pressure is immen enormous am not to mention that I I always love to say that if you in this space working in this space you actually have three jobs you are an investor because you can't be in crypto and not

be investing and you've as you said that investing is you've probably gotten rugged it's scary is great but it's also very very intimidating you also have your job so you're working in the space and you also have a full-time job to try to keep up with everything that's happening so you don't fall behind so you got to be like a news analyst it's a lot of pressure for sure yeah I've had to stay off Twitter just because of how addicting it gets of like you know even managing a crypto Twitter like being the personality being you know this side or the other and I think I burned Banksy I did that before but I took a year off of Silence like pretty much a year off of Twitter and it was the best thing that ever happened so

interesting okay we won't go we won't go down the path of managing mental health although that is a great conversation and one that's very important in our so important especially with the Cycles like especially with the the highs are high but the lows are [ __ ] low exactly yeah they can't have the highs without the lows and we're going into a lot of highs right now which creates a lot of hype and a lot of fomo anyways okay let's go back to where are you at right now with Zion and you know give us your road map three months six months what's to come we just finished our first test net we had about 450,000 wallets about I think was four million transactions and we just closed that down we released a white paper on December which kind of entails what we were talking about about General

substraction which we then started upgrading and getting the audit finalized for this next test net that'll be coming up and after this test net is done this is kind of everything that's included with generalized abstraction we have a hackathon yeah okay no this podcast won't be up by Monday but uh we're announcing a hackathon next week this podcast goes out next Tuesday great so so maybe it's that day maybe time it there yeah I'm just making sure I'm like ah my team's going to kill me um I think our main goal now is hey we built the infrastructure now let's number one let's get projects to build but it's like I want to get back to Building Products that's why I did this right like so that I could build the products that I want to do and and frankly have fun right like yeah you you're gonna see

this in kind of like q1 Q2 of just like I want to do the next burn Bank SE right like and there's going to be some planning for it and yeah it's going to operate with Zion right when you look at like this Narrative of three years ago what we expected with what we got it was you know did I think it would be derivative of a mon like a JPEG of a monkey no like I didn't but you involved money in this stuff right and there's real money you're gonna get grifters you're going to get scammers you're G to get rug pullers and it's nice to have the kind of shakedowns every once in a while I'm optimistic and maybe overly optimistic I think I'm just a positive guy so I keep waiting for what will be the point when we get a whole bunch of

people millions of people that that come into crypto that are not for the value abstraction they're not here to make M the gamble we haven't crossed that Chasm yet right so you know what I I had that argument with my team a lot though right which is let's try to take this value concept out of crypto yeah and it's really hard because it's ownership right it's ownership you really can't I think it's a conclusion that I came to because I was originally in that boat of like I don't want people to care about the money I don't want this but like back to the co-op it's going to be in your mind right you buy a board ape you're Shilling it you look at like Eminem or whatever they're Shilling it they want

to make more money they're having fun they like the community but you can't you really can't ignore it right like because it is right here are there more yeah of course right like I want to live in my building all right like I want when I'm talking about a co-op I want to live in a good environment and yeah I make money along the way right which is great but so it's funny that you say that because I definitely I wanted to avoid that with any bone in my body right because especially like as we kind of Hit the crypto low it was like do we got to stop gambling we can have a conversation about gambling right which I'm like that's a lot of crypto that's a you know you look at life and life is gambling you look at the literal fi like

financial industry as a whole it's gambling even sports like a lot of the reasons they exist is for gambling when it's hard it's like there's thing there's aspects of all of this that are very hard to take apart right I do think that to answer your question of like when we get the millions of users it's when there's a reason there's not going to be an nft Marketplace or like a amm that everyone's going to be like oh my God this is amazing if retail runs crypto they're gonna go to coinbase right and yeah you're not gonna go to Unis swap right why would they do that they're not GNA go to a right people aren't even buying bonds why are they going to stake this random token for some random AP y they don't know what

apy means right it it doesn't make sense but you give them something like a Facebook which gives them a reason you know I think when we look at Zion and we look at everything like denominated in US Dollars and being able to use your credit card and not really mentioning the Zion token we wanted to take this back seat like the internet so that something like a Facebook can imagine right something like a Google can kind of come to the Forefront and offer a product that people want and I think we're at an interesting inflection point of the industry where where're the infrastructure is not there and we're trying to build products on this shitty infrastructure yeah and and it's really hard for both infrastructure and products right because the products aren't good enough for the

infrastructure but the infrastructure is not good for the product so it's like as a Founder especially me building like when I was building the marketplace it was I'm going to build a shitty Marketplace because this [ __ ] doesn't work or I'm going to build an infrastructure that doesn't have a product right like it's and it's hard right it's I hope I hope your investors give you some Runway because holy [ __ ] if they expect this stuff tomorrow that would be so much pressure you can get right but like you're not R wasn't built in a day right like yeah it's an industry right and the industry is growing the industry is growing so rapidly and you're getting good examples right like frch came out and frch was miserable our main designers who's a [ __ ] genius right she's right next to me um but I would call her a genius if

she wasn't right next to me we were trying to do this design and we can kind of talk about the design of like how a user can operate friend through us so it took 30 minutes and three people and that is the best example of our industry pretty much of like when frch first came out because it didn't take me 30 minutes when I came you had to bridge didn't you yeah yeah yeah did you accidentally bridge to the network address not the you had bridge to the network yeah right yeah maybe yeah I guess you know what's funny is it just it seemed so easy because it was easier than what previously existed exactly what Zion is building is completely different that can you give us an example yeah so we'll do the example that I was making the

kind of the demo of right which was I won't go into the how too much right but I can if you want no try to stay out of the house I'll try to stay out but but I want to treat products like products right so the design that we were making was someone uses F tech oh co they made some money and now they want to use stepin on salana right so they just go to stepin they're loging with their email and they're able to just operate the application and press the buy button buy the shoes and start start walking or whatever right and you're like well that's on salana one's on FR Tech how are you doing all these swaps with credit card B base Bas Bas sorry Bas in salana how you you know we handle everything in the back end right and

like the gas fees the salana the base the bridging the purchasing right it's funny I was over the weekend I was like making doing like an illustration of myself and a lot of this like you know the the iceberg meme which is just like the little bit that's over the water and then just like the mega thing below that's what Zion is you shouldn't be exposed to the giant Iceberg when you don't care right like oh which wallet do I do which links do I click on right and so it's hard to give an example because it's just hey I want to use two applications like that's the example that are on different chains and it's the same money you don't have to like Bridge you don't have to add more money you can use the money that you have and keep this like kind of concept of

similar how you can use your metamask address on every appc on eth think about that but for any product anywhere right and I think when you see a little now some of these modern attempts is yeah the onboarding is very smooth but try doing anything else you bring to FR tacus to anything else it's like a blackbird right yeah that doesn't exist these are silid applications right and now we're losing this ethos of crypto which is everything is composable everything works together and it's super super siloed right and fragmented maybe we do need to get a little bit technical here to really understand this so excited oh

no so because I'm trying to understand where this goes does this get more into this thesis that we're going to have specialized layers that have a specific role so more like Celestia is focused on data availability is it more that type of thesis that you're targeting with Zion or because when you talk about this example of from using the frch app which is on base to going using the steppen app which is on salana like how does that happen how does zion participate in that yeah I think we're very like I mean I have my personal thesis right and we

can go into this where I think like I think ethereum will end up being Cosmos hilariously and Cosmos is kind of this end game of crypto which is hey let's have this really sluggish like this shell this cockroach if you would of like a like cockroach not in a bad way but like it'll survive a nuclear winter right it'll always be there it'll always be stable right right where everything kind of derives security from and consensus from and then we build like layers on top of that right yes and you're starting to see this a little bit with ethereum where ethereum started off as that like Central cockroach right and I think Anna toally called it this this is and then you start building roll UPS right and then you get oh here's a roll up for gaming right oh here's a roll up here's Z Marketplace is a roll up right

and you're slowly starting to see it's like oh these both you know they both started on like the the same end of the coin and like they're both just kind of reverting to each other so just kind of thinking about it in that aspect but it's no matter if I believe that the generalized thesis or the you know we still work with rollups right as I mentioned it's Bas right that's an optimism Fork it doesn't matter if we're right or wrong there I think it's pretty good right which is we'll work in a completely generalized environment we'll work in a completely specialized environment and both of those will interact in the very similar way if not the exact same way personally I do believe that the world will be going to specialize rollups or app chains right or rollups on app chains right but I I

think the the main important part there is for what we're building it doesn't matter well we're pretty like future proofed in that example yeah yeah the thing that we keep talking a lot about is we're certainly going to see more and more applications the app chain thesis that want to build ecosystems yep the best example of this recently was flip cart which is basically Amazon in India $ 38 billion company I think Walmart is their largest investor and they just launched an L2 using polygon cdk and we talked why why did they launch an L2 well why not just use an

existing L2 versus launch their own well they launch their own because they want control over the features in their ecosystem they want to control gas they want to control the way you set up a wallet they want to control the token that you use for purchasing they want to control the signup process email versus you know building a Wallet account abstraction all of that and I think we're going to see a lot more of that as these large entities come on chain that aren't just building one app they're building a full ecosystem is is that connect to where you see the future yeah I mean I think especially if you look at like even if you look at big companies

they want to dip their toen they don't want to Dive Right In and make you know Starbucks isn't making an amm anytime soon right in like a decentralized Marketplace they barely did anything with polygon right no shots there obviously but it's like the Loyalty Pro what whatever I just hard to not make shots oh go ahead no no no it's not it's it's not appropriate but I guess it's just more indicative of the industry as a whole right which is Starbucks isn't gonna come into a generalized layer one and play with us like that's the best way to much risk way too much would they yeah make so much money what the [ __ ] are they billion dollar company they don't need to risk for a couple degens right now now in the future they want to be here so they're building now they're

ready look at everyone who's hopping on the AI bandwagon I think that's the way to look at it right which is like it's funny right because it's like I'll be at the airport and be like IBM train your models with AI like who the [ __ ] are you advertising this to you have nothing to do with AI shut the [ __ ] up and it's but but it's GNA be like that with crypto right so no no one wants to do anything they just don't want to be the person not doing anything that's the best way to phrase it not everybody wants to burn a Banky is what you're saying yeah people are just [ __ ] weak and I don't respect it oh my gosh okay so before we wrap up here I want to leave our listeners with I know you mentioned a hackathon coming

up we we'll make sure we time the release of the show around that so we're not leaking anything before it happens how else can our users get involved in Zion what would you like to ask our listeners watch podcasts like this and just stay involved right I mean unfortunately maybe not unfortunately but I think our audience is very developer focused but I believe our message isn't and I think for the people listening out there it's awesome that you're staying educated I guess right and I would say continue staying educated continue being on everything right and understanding the cycle as it kind of goes because it's it's kind of our job to make sure it goes otherwise who else is there right who else is holding it up love for you to join the hackathon or the the test net you know

that we're going to have a couple projects where you're actually going to be able to interact and Visually see what we're doing and you know I think the more time that goes on the more you're going to be able to see right and I'm sure you'll hear about us a lot more kind of in in any capacity that you're operating in but we're very excited to be back kind of really loud and exciting and we will be setting more fires too so that'll be fun can't wait not to Art though well kind of to Art I love the tease we'll make sure whatever you set fire to that we highlight it here on web 3 Academy okay a couple fun questions speed round before we wrap here what's an nft you'll never sell o you know what you want to laugh I actually don't

really own any nft anymore why because you got rugged on them all or because you sold them all uh a couple of them I lost on a drainer which we don't want to talk about but um I mean I have The Avenge Sevenfold nfts because I just like Avenge Sevenfold okay okay that's a very interesting nft actually that one great they did real utility I went to their concert and they in the shirts they had a [ __ ] RFID tag I think it is that you would scan and it would you would get an nft like they are so [ __ ] awesome i' love the bandz is but yeah they are so ahead of it on the nft game you got like meet and greets you got like sign [ __ ] it was really awesome the main thing that really stuck to me

about this nft because all musicians have massive fan bases yeah so if you have a community in a fan base you had an N nft is incredible technology to be able to just reach them more directly ensure that they get better access to you things that you really can't do in web two I bought my tickets to the concert through my nft there you go see that's that's amazing I just I love that super excited to see I mean Taylor Swift would have had a way better experience in her most recent tour if she had used nfts buy the tickets but to give access to her biggest fans first so that you know Bots and all these scalpers weren't

able to buy the tickets exactly one prediction for 2024 I think you see one of the largest exploits that we've seen from an L2 o yeah that one hurts I could say exploit exploit or rug I think but it's G to be from an L2 and a prominent one like I think people are gonna know it I think you mean an exploit not a rug right I'm I'm gonna put both of those in I could see both of those damn that one makes me cringe I hope you're wrong on that oh my God like but dude you know what [ __ ] that I hope I'm not because we need to stop letting that be a [ __ ] possibility and if it's a possibility if that can happen then it should happen like quite frankly like obviously

there's people who get hurt and stuff like that but I'm put side that it shouldn't be a possibility then it should it's the only way you learn right like got you got talking someone who's been in this industry have been rugged I mean [ __ ] carpet over here okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it cool guy photo me two thumbs up I've actually thought about this that's the unfortunate situ there's like a billboard right outside the office and every day I walk past it I'm like God that would be so [ __ ] funny would it be a photo of actually you or be a photo of your nothing with the company just two thumbs up cool guy cool guy no other information just a cool guy QR code nope

no call to action it's just a cool guy you are an artist in another way you don't get many engineers and Technical nerds like yourself who are also very artsy and very creative it's where this [ __ ] started too right like I mean it's also I feel like it's why I I levitate towards the consumer application especially like the music side I'm wearing a Rage Against the Machine like t-shirt right now from from a concert that I was at last year with them it's something that I love right and being able to I think crypto is like this perfect combination of Art and Science that's yeah awesome I love it I love it it Anthony burnt Banky thank you so much for joining us today it's been an absolute pleasure excited to watch Zion in 2024 I think there's going to be

some exciting things coming out of you guys I hope all of our listeners check it out we'll make sure we link to your recent white paper in the show notes thanks so much for listening in everybody have a great day appreciate it thank you for listening to web through 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 our 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 web3 are risky and you should

never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one