Erik Voorhees: ShapeShift – There's a New Fox in Town (#300)

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 300 with guest Erik Voorhees this episode of epicenter is brought to you by trail of bits don't leave your project security audience of just any firm trust a team with decades of experience at the forefront of blockchain security research go to trail of bits calm to learn more and by Microsoft Azure do you have an idea for a blockchain app but are worried about the time and cost it will take to develop the new Azure

blockchain dev kit is a free download that brings together the tools you need to get your first app running in less than 30 minutes learn more at aka OMS slash epicenter and by star core sessions happening in Tel Aviv on September 16 broaden your knowledge of ceará knowledge proofs with highly technical sessions from some of the industry's leading experts register at epicenter rocks slash start where and receive 20% off the regular ticket price with the code epicenter hi welcome to epicenter my name is sebastian Kujo today is episode 301 can attach whatever significance they like to an episode

with a few zeros on it but if anything I think we can use these milestones to stop and take a step back and look at our trajectory through a more mindful lens it's astonishing that we've been doing epicenter for five and a half years now it started as an experiment in late 2013 early 2014 and I don't think that neither of us Brian or I thought that it would become one of the most recognized and certainly one of the longest-running podcasts in the space we've recorded 300 episodes with guests who come on the show to share their stories their ideas and their vision for

where the space is going and through that we've just learned so much and our audience also has learned so much with us it's it's been really a journey and with the audience also learning as the space is evolving and that's been just incredible I want to take a minute to acknowledge our team and the incredible talent that makes epicenter possible may her sunny and fredericka they have a passion for learning and a desire to spread knowledge with the community and these are really some of the founding principles that Brian and I found that the show on in 2014 we started this show because we wanted to learn about the space and we thought that sharing that

knowledge with the space was a great way to learn and Mayor sunny and fedka they share this vision there's also a production team which we rarely get a chance to mention on the show but they also play a huge role in making this show possible and putting out the episodes every week so Vedran or audio engineer who's been with us since the very beginning Sheena's our cover designer he makes those great low-poly images that a lot of you praise us for Peeta our production manager who makes sure that everything is running smoothly from scheduling all the way to putting out the episodes every week Anna our accountant who makes sure that all our books are in order and

the company is running smoothly and amp our marketing intern who is on social media sharing the episodes every week and creating content on medium the podcast wouldn't really not be what it is today without them and without their dedication it's incredible that tens of thousands of you listen to the show every week and many of you have been for several years just last week I was in Berlin and as always when I'm hanging out a full node I met some new listeners and then one guy who told me that we were a major part of his early education when he first started getting interested in blockchain and we hear these stories all the time from people whenever we're in a place where there's a concentration

of blockchain people we meet listeners and we hear their stories and it's just so be gratifying because we never set out to really make a change in people's lives but it's sort of a secondary effect that we really didn't anticipate so we meet people who tell us that they found their first job because of what they learned on epicenter or through the connections they made from listening to epicenter Brian was telling you the guy he met recently who told him that he made a lot of money from the investments that he made from listening to epicenter so that's always great to hear every time I meet a listener internally I kind of bow with humility from hearing their

stories so thank you for listening thank you for being with us and for continuing to be with us throughout the years I've learned so much from doing this podcast I've met so many incredible people traveled all around the world and I think it's a trip man that my job is to run a podcast company with amazing co-hosts with an amazing team in a fascinating industry and we're gonna keep doing it as long as there's a blockchain space and as long as we're interested in it and as long as there's a good business model to run around it we'll keep doing the podcast so we hope to see you see you here for episode 400 500 600 and so on on the heels of that

I've got an announcement about an important change that's coming to epicenter starting today epicenter will continue as an audio only podcast and the video version that we've been putting out to YouTube for the last several years will cease to exist will still post episodes to YouTube so you can continue to listen to the episodes there only you won't see our faces anymore this is a decision that we've taken a lot of time and care to consider and I want to share some of the reasons why we decide to do this the main reason we're doing this is to remove a lot of the overhead that producing video puts on the production process it might not seem like a lot when you're

watching the show but producing video is time and resource intensive it puts a strain on scheduling primarily because it imposes our hosts and our guests to use certain types of equipment to record the show from a setting that is appropriate for video recording to have proper lighting etc there's also the production overhead and time required to create those videos and push them to YouTube and finally producing video ads is incredibly time consuming so when we looked at all that and then dug deeper into the actual analytics on YouTube and compared those to the engagement rates that we see with audio we thought that

it didn't make sense to continue so I really hope that for the few of you who really watched the show on YouTube and expect the video on YouTube that you'll continue to follow the podcast as I said we'll continue to post the audio to YouTube you just want to see your faces anymore and you can also follow us on all the other great platforms where you publish whether it's iTunes Spotify stitcher or any other podcast app you can find us there and we hope you'll continue to follow the podcast if you want to learn more about this and the reasons behind this change I put a post up on medium medium comm slash the episode of podcast you can go there and read more about this change and why we're doing this our last announcement before today's guests DAP Khan is coming next week it

is on August 21st and 23rd at the Technical University in Berlin you can still get tickets and get 20% off with the discount code epicenter Khan 2019 at kaneo on the 22nd 10:00 a.m. in the main chain the main room will be recording the second edition of epicenter live sunny Frederica and myself I'll be moderating a panel on user experience and UX on the 21st I know sunny is also moderating a panel on governance and Fidesz also on a panel you can get more details at dot Conda IO and actually I just found out about this there's actually a DAP Khan podcast so you can go to DEFCON dot io / podcast to

hear those episodes and then on the Thursday at the 22nd will be doing a drinks meet up at a bar next to the university you can go to epicenter dot rocks / Berlin meetup to register and get more information as it comes out so come have a drink with us it'd be fun our guest today is Erik Voorhees many of you will recognize Erik as the founder and CEO of shape-shift and we had Eric on the podcast a number of times in the past today and I interviewed Erik and we spoke about a number of things our main focus for this discussion was shape-shifts brand new product release which some are calling shape-shift 2.0 it includes a number of interesting new features including a portfolio management platform that allows you to

manage all your assets in one place they also have hard work wallet support and are built on an entirely new infrastructure one important distinction with this new product is the fact that users are now obligated to create an account and perform kyc if you've been following shape-shift for a while you know that it's hallmark has always been its simplicity the ability to send tokens to an address and receive an exchange for other tokens on another address without having to create an account well this has changed recently and we talked to Eric about this change and why they decided to start doing kyc as always it's great to get people like Eric to open up about where they think the ecosystem is heading and so we

talked about whether or not he thinks bitcoin is still fulfilling its initial vision we talked about aetherium as well and we also got into the future of money a little bit and one can't bring out the topic these days without mentioning Libra and so we talked about Libra and got his thoughts on where he thinks that currency could take us and what it represents for the future of money we did disagree a little bit on that topic where Eric's very US libertarian views did clash with my somewhat more European liberal views but it was all in good fun and it's always great to get Eric's insights from that perspective so without further delay here is our interview with Erik Voorhees hi so we're

here with Eric Gauri's Eric is the CEO of shape-shift and a third time coming to the podcast has been on I was just checking before the show and actually it's been two years last time was in July of 2017 so hi Eric thanks for coming back on the show yeah thanks for having me on and so we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff today including shape-shifts brand new platform but also as always I think it's interesting to get your your thoughts and sort of your views on where the ecosystem is that moment and how things are progressing since you've been in this in the space for quite a while and so I'd love to get your thoughts on on that stuff as well yeah first let's talk about shape chip so you guys celebrated your fifth anniversary this month congratulations

yeah yesterday yesterday okay so as we're recording this shape ship is just over five years old let's talk about a little bit about the journey how did you get here and how do you feel about the last five years generally yeah well when when we started I didn't set about to create a company that would you know have 75 employees and be you know be doing something important five years later it was just really a simple tool that I felt needed to be built and so you know in the same way that that Satoshi dice back in the day got started as a side project shape shift started as a side project something that just seemed seemed useful and interesting to

build and so we built it and then yeah it was a July 29th of 2014 that the first transaction occurred and ever since then it you know it's just been growing organically and we we've gone through all you know ups and downs of multiple crypto cycles and through many different products and you know we've we've now attached ourselves to the crazy rocket ship of the crypto industry and somewhere along the way it became a real business and so now I I run every day as my as my job and looking back what is it that you know has surprised you the most about how the company has Eve all over how the product has evolved since the that first transaction on July

29th I think like what was the big eye opening thing for me was really that once you get past you know 10 or 15 or 20 employees the company is really about building an organization of people and I you know kind of naively thought of it as product first like I see products I build products I like products and but to do that at scale requires that the actual building of an organization of people not a a product built on technology and so that transition I think for me was very difficult and one that I've I've been learning and trying to grow into and I I've never done this before at this scale and so just a lot of a lot of stressful learning of how to do these kind of things and we have all

the chaos of the crypto industry and also all the chaos of a normal startup kind of tied into one into one beast so it's been extremely fulfilling but you know a huge challenge any interesting anecdotes to share here about this journey of learning lessons yeah like when you start a new project you you surround yourself with people who are you know your friends or who are people that you know and you can sort of implicitly trust them because you know them well and then as you grow you you have this sense that like the people around you are always going to be trustworthy and good um and they're not you you get to a certain size and you will inevitably bring into your

organization people that are not good and this you know this can range from just someone who's incompetent to someone who is who is a thief which we dealt with that you know in 2016 when we had our internal guy steal a bunch of money from us and that you know that's been a challenge to realize that a lot of people it sucks to have to put your guard up like that but after you get to a certain point in a business it happens kind of naturally I understand what is you just launched shape-shift 2.0 what is it and what excites you most about this release I've kind of avoided calling a shape-shift 2.0 because that's so cliche but really that is a good description of it it is a

brand-new version of our product and the good way to describe it is that the the shape-shift 1.0 was a tool to convert one cryptocurrency into another and to make that fast and easy for people and to do so in a noncustodial way the new shape-shift allows that same thing so people can still use the new shape-shift to convert one crypto into another but it also brings that kind of self custody principle to the rest of someone's crypto management so it is a wallet it is a fiat on an off ramp you can buy and sell Bitcoin from your bank you can store all your various crypto safely it integrates with hardware wallets so you

can keep them safely stored offline but still use a normal web browser to interact with your portfolio and so basically it's meant to be you know a self custody alternative to something like coinbase a really simple and good UX that normal people can use to interact with crypto technologies but done without us having control of users keys so that's kind of the the theme that that I've always wanted this company to build on was one in which people are sovereign over their own wealth and I think if if the crypto revolution happens and it just ends up with a bunch of custodians new custodians you know the coin basis instead of PayPal's and banks before it then not really much has changed at all

and so we're trying to take a you know a more difficult approach but one that I think is more valuable over the long term which is to build a highly performance great UX crypto platform in a way that people maintain control of their keys so that's the idea so we'll talk a bit about the features of this new shape shift let's not call it shape free for 20 let's just call it the new shape shift I guess you know one of the things I think that people will notice and have been noticing for some how many views this has been the case for as far as I know at least a year I think is that in the beginning you would go to shape shift you would put an address and you would send money to the address that was provided by shape-shift and that was it

in a few minutes you you had your current you know the currency was exchanged now you have to register and you have to do kyc in fact I registered for put the new shape-shift today and did the KYC and the process is great it's like really easy took five minutes and I was approved in like no time then talk about this this shift from a service which in when shape-shift used to be a sponsor of the saw we used to say was as easy as putting on your slippers and now there you need to tie the shoes laces as well which is a little bit harder why why did you go from a product where you didn't have to register it for now a product where we have to register and do kyc and all this

yeah it's a great question it's obviously not because we wanted to so let's start by saying that shape-shift was built really to to protect customers and you know in the beginning that meant to me two really important tenants one was not having any custody at all and allowing the user to hold their own keys and the second was was not having personal information of the user and allowing people to keep that to themselves I don't want to know who someone is I don't need to know who someone is in order to process a transaction for them and they don't want me to have that information either so that should be the end of it and when you take people's information you are inevitably endangering them because now you're warehousing information that can

be hacked and lost and companies large and small governments large and small all have problems with these kind of hacks where you know millions of Records get lost and stolen it's a huge problem and so I never wanted to deal with that and when we started shapeshift it was comfortably enough in the gray area that it wasn't clear whether whether certain financial regulators would require us to do that there were arguments sort of on all sides of that question and we we just figured we would continue forward and keep analyzing it as we grew and basically you know in the 2017 bubble shapeshift grew massively and we you know we got to the size where we decided to invest

you know I you know literally millions of dollars in further legal work to analyze every contour of these complicated financial regulations and basically from that what came out of it was that we felt it was too risky to continue that model without taking kyc from users this was really like the most existential struggle I've ever dealt with in my life it was probably six months of agony and and stress trying to figure out what were the rules exactly what were the risks how were they different in various places if we needed to collect information what would it need to be and and among all users are just certain ones and you know every every aspect of this question we examined and ultimately came to the

decision that we had to collect Kay oh I see information on on all users that were trading one crypto for another this was dismal news for me and you know a dismal realization and conclusion to come to because we knew that it would be bad for our customers we knew it would be bad for us as a business but we felt that we had to do it so that we wouldn't get thrown in a cage and the whole company shut down and that wouldn't be good for customers or employees or anyone and then the story would be over so that was kind of the existential problem we faced and you it was rough ultimately I decided we should play the long game and if I'm going to fight for financial privacy I need to be able to do it from a company that is big and powerful and

strong and has that voice rather than trying to do it you know shut down and thrown in a cage somewhere whether that strategy is the right one or not we will see you know check back in with us in five years or ten years see what we're doing and see what we're advocating but that principle of of encouraging and enabling people to be private and their finances I think is an important one and the fact that we can't allow that on our platform anymore is really unfortunate and we understand why I'm why customers don't like that we don't like it either for now we have to do it so can you look beyond the regulation that you're complying with and do you see any good and doing hey YC or is it to you just is it literally just a nuisance it's not a nuisance it's

worse than a nuisance I think it's unethical I think it's unethical to force people to give their personal information when they don't want to so I have a moral problem with it and does good come of it maybe I mean yeah once in a once in a while by companies spying on everyone they can sometimes catch a bad guy a little more easily but to do that you basically endanger you know all the innocent people and you can go down a very Orwellian road of trying to catch bad guys and always then interfering and impeding on the freedoms of good people this is kind of the lesson of of tyranny broadly in history so I don't I don't support that I think I think most people

are good I think people have a default right to privacy and I think they should be left alone if there is suspicion of a crime then trying to get information about that person is one thing but forcing you to get information about those people when there's not even suspicion of a crime I think is highly unethical yeah this is a position that I wholeheartedly agree with and and have been become more and more aware of obviously like since being in the crypto space and I finally highly highly frustrating as well that you know it seems to be that society is moving in this direction more generally I mean we had Jerry Brita on a few weeks ago who wrote this paper defending defending cash and the need for cash great yeah and you know they're doing great work in

this field and you know his position is trying to educate lawmakers and and law enforcement officers who you know he feels are mostly patriots and and would defend the right to privacy and sort of freedom I guess in the American context makes a lot of sense but also you know I said outside the American context where we're recording is from Germany at the moment where most places at least here in Berlin you can only pay in cash but I I think that even though you know there's this nice idea that you people should be free and have right the privacy that that is not the direction in which the world is going definitely not we look at international regulation

financial regulation is not going in this direction payment systems are not going in this direction do you feel that the future is a little bleak are you lost hope for a future in which people continue to have some form of financial financial freedom and and and more specifically privacy in their transactions yeah I think the world without cryptocurrencies would be very bleak and getting worse and worse I mean certainly all governments around the world are unanimously in favor of greater surveillance and control of their people that's kind of a truism and in a world where all money is controlled

by central banks and the banking system which extends from it really the world's financial system is simply a branch or a tentacle of the government itself and I think that's that's pretty frightening and dystopian and getting worse and then along comes this crazy crypto phenomenon which it which does two things one it provides technology that allows privacy so there are certain certain cryptos that are encrypted and even something like Bitcoin well it's not perfectly private brings privacy in in ways that credit cards certainly do not have but more than that it also provides complete sovereignty over your assets meaning meaning control over them so when you

can self custody your own assets you are not dependent on anyone else to be able to send or receive that and regardless of whether you can do that privately those are kind of separate questions but you always have the power to send Bitcoin you always have the power to receive the coin and that's incredibly inspiring and hopeful so I think the future of humanity is a good one but as the world struggles with this question of moving from a fiat and Bank based financial system to a blockchain and crypto based financial system which i think is inevitable there's going to be a lot of struggle along the way because that really changes how the world works and a lot of people are not going to be very happy about that so there's an easy way to go about this in terms of shape-shift I mean easy in a

theoretical sense not in a practical sense and so shape-shift is half way decentralized in the way that the settlement layer is decentralized but the architecture on on top isn't how was this design decision made do you think if you had gone all the way towards the centralization even for the architecture on top you could have forgone the KYC that you find so repugnant yeah great question yes a decentralization exists on a gradient it's not a binary thing where you're either decentralized or not there are degrees of decentralization shapeshift is more decentralized and something like coinbase but it's not it's less decentralized than a true Dex obviously and even among Dex is you have

degrees of of decentralization so yeah in the theoretically most decentralized design of a Dex where the individual contributors themselves are decentralized there's no corporate entity there's no central party whatsoever yeah I mean that software it doesn't comply with anything because it can't so that's that's cool and I'm very glad that there are projects like that out there that are working toward that end and then on the full opposite side of the spectrum are centralized companies that especially once they grow past a certain scale have to be very careful about complying with laws because ultimately they can get shut down and thrown in cages and there's

there exists you know kind of middle ground between those things where it's a question of how much risk people want to take over the last year we saw one or two or three Dex's implement kyc and accounts on themselves which people didn't think would happen because the creators of the Dex's were known some of them are actual corporate entities themselves so even though the technology and the the exchange was decentralized it was it was operated by a central company so these are all these are all questions that I think every every entity and the crypto ecosystem struggles with and frankly I'm just glad that there are different models for people to try that's one of the strengths of the crypto industry is that people can try every model from

from the coinbase model all the way to the most decentralized thing like a like a Bitcoin itself and everything in between that's what makes this so strong is that there's no single there's no single model no single weakness because it's diverse let's talk about security you know gaps are pretty unique because unlike other types of software they can hold astronomical amounts of value that's why getting systems audited creating robust security processes and fostering a culture of security in your organization is so important and to do this you should only trust experts with real security expertise there are a lot of security firms in the blockchain space but few have the experience and track record of trail fits and they've

been in business since 2012 long before things like the Dow hack were even imaginable trail of bits works with your team to audit every aspect of your project and smart contract code is just the beginning they'll help you implement best practices around things like DevOps key storage and user facing applications and once your software has been rigorously tested and reviewed by trail of bits they'll provide the tools you need to make sure that your code remains safe over every new commit they can even put a software security expert at your team's disposal will give you advice and answer your questions when you need them it's like having your own security engineer on staff but don't take my word for it go to their publications repo on github to read their papers presentations and security reviews it's no wonder teams like parody status new

cipher and organizations like Facebook and DARPA trust Trello bits for those security audits to learn more go to trail viscom and if you decide to reach out make sure you let them know you heard about them on epicenter we'd like to thank chillip it's for their support do you have plans in the future to further decentralize the underlying layers and the stack I mean one thing that I think is an interesting thought experiment is to say that shape-shift would integrate with with something like you know swap or compound or or some of these decentralized equity pools that are you know fairly fairly easy to I suppose I mean from a technical perspective fairly fairly easy to integrate with is this something that you feel will be valuable to your users

or could be offered as a you know a secondary product where mu kyc would be not as relevant or useful yeah it's certainly something that we're considering in the new shapeshift platform koe C is actually not required for everything you can use it without QIA but to trade through our market making you need a KY seed account we need to do some further legal review on if and to what extent allowing users to directly interact with Dex's through the platform would have kyc requirements that is unclear at this point it might be a question of risk tolerance so yeah it's absolutely absolutely worth considering it's gonna be a constant

struggle you know for the coming years and it's gonna be hard for any company to allow people to be totally anonymous and so you're going to get this trade-off between companies that can build software that's very useful and easy and convenience and can help grow and bring more people into the industry but that may not themselves be able to be the ones who advance privacy that might need to be done more on the on the protocol level ok so let's talk about the product a little bit because we haven't really touched on that so far can you talk about what's new in this new version of shapeshift and what people can expect when when they've created the account and passed this as kyc yeah so again you don't need to do

that in order to use it you only need to use duty oh I see if you want to be trading obviously a lot of people want to trade so they need to do the KYC then but a good way to think about it for people who haven't tried it before is right now it supports two different key storage mechanisms either a keep key or a treasure later on we'll add others like ledger will add a software-only version will add a mobile version so we'll keep adding more ways for users to hold their own keys but we wanted to start with Hardware both because that's the best practice I think for people who want to get something that's very easy to use and also very safe man also it just seemed like a more stable foundation for us to build the first version of this platform so right now if you have a key

key or a treasure you can use the shape shift platform and it basically becomes a much better interface for your Hardware wallet holdings so you can see your entire portfolio together you can why you know the real-time data of the various coins you can send and receive the various Kryptos you can trade them you know any crypto for any other crypto directly so you know thousands of pairs in that sense you can buy and sell Bitcoin with fiat if you're in the US right now from a bank account and we'll add options for Europeans and other regions later on so really you know kind of think about what a coin base does trying to be a one-stop shop for all all basic crypto but to do it in a way that

allows you to retain custody over your assets that was really the key for us and then one you know one important distinction is that there are a lot of a lot of wallets out there that are multi asset but generally they are like only aetherium and etherium tokens so there are tons of those kind of wallets the crypto platform works across most of the major block chains and will continue adding more into the future so that's kind of the the current version v1 of this platform and then over time will add new coins will add things like staking obviously will add different key storage mechanisms will add other ways to interact with with the decentralized financial systems you know lending markets and money markets as those develop and so really this is meant to

be like a b2c way for people to interact with the crypto world and to store their assets safely and retain self custody over them that's also a token the fux token what is that used for yes so this has been like a two-year project at this point and we've had to be extremely careful about the phox token for all the obvious regulatory reasons so we've been taking baby steps with that but we continues to move it forward right now that token exists it's an actual year c20 token but it's not released yet and it's not integrated into the platform yet that will happen later this year and basically what the fox token does is anyone who holds them will get better rates on the traits that they have so

you can think of it sort of like a loyalty program or a reward system where simply by possessing those tokens you get better and better rates on the traits that'll kind of be the v1 of the Fox token and people can earn that token on the traits they're doing and and basically it's it's just a good way if you're actually doing trades to get better and better rates by holding that token you don't have to burn it or spend it to get those rates okay cool and the way I see this if you just think of the this new platform as like a place where one can manage here's a report folio and set aside the trading aspect for a moment it's it's like a great self custodial multi currency wallet where

one can manage their portfolio see how their portfolios doing and to me it feels like kind of an improvement on what like a ledger live could be like the ledger life product is great but I feel like it's lacking a lot of the portfolio management features that I'd like to see in it and this is where I see this new shape shift product positioning itself and then in addition to that then you like you know you have all the trading aspect also which is like really nice to have like within your within your wallet yeah so I'm really looking forward to the ledger integration because I use a ledger and yeah being able to use it with with my ledger but kanau so it works with with treasurer and and kiki president kiki

yeah and you know over time the experience on the kiki will probably be the best one because we have full UX control over every layer of that stack from the hardware because we own keep key to the to the wallet and interface which is the platform to the exchange so we we run all of that and so we can make the UX between those things very very good I think we're the only company that sort of has kind of those three layers all under one house so over time you'll see that experience with the keep keep getting better and better better but we're obviously going to support you know all the major key storage mechanisms that customers want and are there any criteria that you use to evaluate which tokens get listed yeah I

mean I know there's some considerations I know that like in the in the last version shape shift there was a bunch of tokens that were delisted for various reasons you can walk us through some of this reasoning yeah I mean they're delisted for one reason and one reason only which is because we felt that they were too close to the line from a Security's perspective I have my own history with the SEC and I've been watching them very closely about how they've interacted with the crypto world so ever since the start of shape-shift we've been very careful about which assets we would add and as the SEC has issued guidance we continually revise our own policies on this ultimately it's it's a bad situation because all we have are a bunch of tea leaves and we have to try to interpret things there's there is

ZERO clear guidance from the SEC on which tokens they deem securities in which they do not they believe that it's clear but it is it is not they have not released any list of the tokens that they think are securities and the tokens that are not so we continue in this gray area and we simply look at the various candidate tokens on it on a number of metrics we have a very thorough process for this and any token that we think is too close to that line we won't add and in the case of the the tokens we delisted we that happened after there was guidance from the SEC that that made us change our assessment of those things so something we constantly watch now that is for the tokens that are available for trading tokens that are just held in a wallet we can list

anything because it has nothing to do with with the SEC or securities rules at that point not listing securities is a prevalent problem for all crypto exchanges do you collaborate with other crypto exchanges on which tokens you're going to delist on the legal groundwork that goes into this we don't we we have an internal process that we use ourselves we don't talk about it with other exchanges cool thanks and so what's the business motive of shapeshift yeah it's quite simple I mean we're a market maker for the trading so unlike most exchanges where you know buyers and

sellers are putting up VIN tasks and then wherever those prices meet a trade happens and the exchange takes a commission from those two parties that traded together we're a market maker so we are always the counterparty so when someone sells Bitcoin for like coin they're selling the Bitcoin to us as shapeshift and we're selling them the light coin to them and so in the pricing that we offer to people we build in a spread there so we make roughly half a percent on the trades that go through us and that's that's the business model interestingly while we've never really competed on price before as the shape shift from the past we're releasing new pricing engine in several weeks that ultimately we'll be able to

beat most exchanges much of the time especially for larger orders because we are a market maker and we're not limited to any specific order book so that's something that our platform users will be able to enjoy down the road a little bit but you know at that point there really we're trying to like pull people out of these centralized exchanges because they're so dangerous for all the obvious reasons that people in crypt understand but they leave their assets at these exchanges because it's convenient and ultimately because they get decent pricing on the trades if we can make it as convenient to self custody and if we can even get you know relatively competitive on the pricing we think not only can we grow our business to be a huge size but we also will do a big service to the industry by pulling

custody away from centralized places and allowing that to remain decentralized in the keys of actual users so because you're not bound to order books but because you can pull the liquidity of the different order books together with that in order ring trade so how do you how do you create better the quiddity so yeah we watch all the order books of five different exchanges right now and over time you know we'll add more and you know let's say someone is trying to sell $20,000 of Bitcoin into dogecoin on any specific exchange you know there's gonna be an order book that might you know the price may move by X percent on an order that size but if you spread that order out across all the exchanges

the price would move less than that and so because we can theoretically do that by being the market maker ourselves we can give better pricing to users than they would get on any particular exchange and and they never have to worry about the custody when do you quote the customer the price is it before you've actually done the price or is it after is there an element of risk analysis involved for you guys yes there is shapeshifters always had to order types ones called quick and one's called precise basically with a quick we show the user a price that's updating all the time and whenever they actually do the trade they'll get the price that's offered at the time of that trade the other way is

that they can lock in a price for a window of time and so in that case they might be getting a slightly worse rate but but at least they know what the price is you know exactly on both of those we as shapeshift bear some risk and we certainly lose money on some trades some of the time so we build that into our modeling and you know the better we get it out you know the lower we can tighten the spreads and that's that's sort of part of the business is is that is doing that intelligently have people try to exploit that oh yeah how the algorithm is built you can always try to game it right for sure yeah and it's always a game of black amol and there have been people who have you know successfully traded through us and made a bunch of

money and we lost the money and we see what they do and we learn from it and so yeah you know markets are can be thought of as everyone trying to game everyone else and in that sense you just have to be careful and prudent in what you're offering to people this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and the azure blockchain workbench getting your block team from the white board to production can be a big undertaking and something as simple as connecting your blockchain to IOT devices or existing ERP systems is a project in itself well the folks at Microsoft have you covered you already know about the Azure blockchain workbench and how easy it makes bootstrapping your blockchain network pre-configured with all the cloud services you need for your enterprise app their new development kit is the

IFTTT for block teens suppose you want to collect data from someone in a remote location via SMS and have that data packaged in a transaction for your hyper ledger fabric block team the development kit allows you to build this integration in just a few steps in a simple drag-and-drop interface here's another great example perhaps you're an institution working with aetherium and rely on CSV files sent by email one click in the deaf kit and you can parse these files and have two data embed it in transactions whatever you're working with the dev kit can read transform and act on the data to learn more and to build your first application in less than 30 minutes visit a kms / epicenter and be sure to follow them on

twitter at MSFT blockchain we'd like to thank Microsoft and Azure for their support of epicenter can you give us a sense of the the volume today on shape-shift today's volume like ever since we implemented kose last fall volumes have been pretty dismal and so we've been in this this phase of rebuilding the new shape shift and then kind of rebuilding a whole new business on that new platform so today I think we do an average of like two hundred thousand dollars a day in trades which you know get for a year or two ago is is really low and that was like the thing that we knew would be really painful when we implemented kyc is because we essentially gutted the entire customer base that we've been building for for

several years all the wallet partners that used us dropped us because they didn't want their customers to have to deal with kyc so yeah that that's been that's been difficult and we just have to rebuild a new company with the new model with a half a percent margin that that's obviously not enough to support a company how are you planning on getting that up in the near future how is this going to improve yeah by bringing customers into the platform and with enough customers comes enough trade volume and with enough trade volume we get back to profitability so it's really just a question of trade volumes and to do that we need to build a product that people like using that they feel safe using and that is distinct from obviously the other competitors in the

market do you see yourself trying to attract larger players or institutional investors maybe we're the only company in the world right now that's not trying to go after institutional investors I'm sure a lot of companies will make a lot of money with that but our expertise is in B to C and actually catering to end-users of crypto and I think our role will be to help the world you know of actual end users transition from a fiat and Bank system into a a blockchain crypto system and so we're building a product that will be useful for for normal people you know everyone is just getting into crypto to people who have a lot of crypto but themselves are are individuals so we're not going after businesses really we're definitely not

going after institutions and I think there'd be kind of a culture mismatch if if we as shape-shift went after Wall Street institutions that would be just wouldn't fit so it's not us will we'll leave that feel to other companies I can't see you going down a path now you know since the the volume has gone down quite dramatically and as you mentioned that has the fact of your revenues are there other business models that you're pursuing even even then those sort of b2c of a market nothing that that we're trying to replace our core business model with I mean ultimately we make money as a market maker for people that are trading between digital assets and so that

fundamental premise hasn't changed we've just had to change the product that we offer that service through so yeah it's gonna take time to rebuild a customer base and get those volumes back up but we're a business and so that's what we do one last thing that we want to ask is so the last time you were on two years ago was to talk about prism which was a portfolio management portfolio management platform yes you shut that project that part down recently or in October of last year yeah why why why you shut that down and what was the experience there prison was supercool but it was basically a way it was built on aetherium and it was one of if not the first commercially available smart contract financial applications

built on aetherium and basically what it did is allow people to put up collateral in aetherium and then create a portfolio essentially a derivative portfolio of various assets it was all held in a smart contract so it was trustless and then the performance of the portfolio you know you'd make money or lose money over time and then when you closed the portfolio you you either get back less or more collateral than you put in based on the performance of that it was very cool because it was essentially an easy way to get exposure to digital assets without having to set up a whole bunch of different key storage it had one significant problem sort of that didn't exist when we first fathomed it because

it was all on chain the etherium gas costs became prohibitive so that it only made sense to create fairly large portfolios which was a little different than its target market that you know over time we could have solved and there were some ways and I think etherium has to figure that challenge out in other ways already but also we have been working on this new shape shift platform for about a year and a half and it became clear to us that the overlap between the two products was too great and so it didn't make sense to be building both of them and so even though we didn't mention this at the time that we closed prism part of the reason that we closed it was that a lot of its features will end up being built into the new the new shape

shift platform and we felt we needed to focus on that so yeah it was uh it was certainly sad to sunset that product a year ago it was uh it was very interesting kind of pioneering project to build financial derivatives in a trustless way we thought there was some real real value and interest there but we just had to make a difficult decision to not continue that at this time no super interesting let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the ecosystem a little bit more so you've been in this ecosystem a very long time you spend a lot of time in Bitcoin and sometime in the theorem how do you see both of them from the outside from the perspective of the others and how do you see this in the face of challenges change and it

changed since protocols so cosmos affinity polka dot and so on well so when I got into crypto it was May of 2011 Bitcoin is really the only thing there and the entire crypto community was the Bitcoin community they were synonymous as this technology grew and as people started building different kinds of block chains and experimenting with different ways of using this technology different use cases different types of assets the community has obviously fragmented and split into many different pieces I see myself as part of the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem not just the Bitcoin ecosystem and and not

just the etherium ecosystem but really a holistic approach to realize that this is an entirely new set of technologies and asset classes I think they are mutually beneficial to each other I think aetherium strength helps Bitcoin and vice-versa and it's been really tragic for me to see that there are a lot of people that don't that way that they are very tribalist and this is particularly this particularly apparent within the Bitcoin community there are a lot of bitcoiners who have utter hatred for every other crypto project out there I think it's really sad and unfortunate and a lot of them spend their time on Twitter you know kind of [ __ ] on every other project and finding problems with every

other project because they want to just protect the coin or it's very troubling it's the same kind of thing you see among you know fans of sports teams it's the same kind of thing you see among political parties or religions it's kind of a phenomenon of humans that they will fall into this tribalism sometimes and it's been sad to see that in the crypto world but you know maybe that was maybe that was inevitable as you you moved from a community that was you know ten or twenty thousand people around the world to one that is now 10 or 20 million so look looking at both the the tribalism in Bitcoin and etherium and I mean even like there's tribalism even between like within those communities not only like between themselves do you

think there's a way out of this what will be the great unifier I was like you know it caused some of the tribalism to go away I mean one potential unifier is when there is a common enemy and so that would generally be fiat currencies and banks and governments fiat currencies and banks and governments have not taken a hard-line antagonistic approach to crypto so that so it's not a clear and present danger in a clear enemy I think if like the g20 nations started trying to outright banned crypto currency some of the tribalism might go away because then at that point the tribe is all of crypto versus you know the Fiat world but I that's not a guarantee that that would would solve it either I don't know I mean maybe it

doesn't get solved maybe it just kind of withers away ten or twenty or thirty years from now when we when this technology isn't new anymore and people see what bitcoins places and they see what if your imps places and they see how these things interact in the use cases that they all fill I think some some of it results from bitcoiners being unable to realize that there are more use cases than just money they seem stuck in this idea that like cryptocurrency digital blockchain assets can only be used as money and because Bitcoin is the most popular and because they believe it's the most secure and the most decentralized etc that it should be the only one and that any other competing money you know will ultimately fail just based on the laws of economics I would tend to agree with that in some ways if

the only use case was money but even in that case there is value in the experimentation on other blockchains it is not clear that bitcoins blockchain and its structure is the optimal way to do money the world deserves a period of experimentation of ten or twenty or thirty years to vet that out but more importantly money is only one of the use cases of digital assets and I think digital assets there will be millions of them I think there will be one to a hundred major block chains something like that there's not going to be a million popular block chains because that doesn't make sense but there's definitely gonna be millions of different digital assets on these major block chains and they they optimize for different things you know aetherium has

features that Bitcoin can't do today and Bitcoin has structural reasons why it is more secure and safe than aetherium right now both of those are useful and I think the market is better off by having both of them at the same time you have new coins like you know the e OSes and the cosmoses of the world that are operating on a proof of stake model and those have advantages they're extremely fast very high throughput that doesn't mean that they should replace Bitcoin or that they would be a better form of money but they are certainly better in some use cases than Bitcoin is and certainly better in some use cases than aetherium is and I think that's okay I think it's a healthier industry when you have multiple technologies providing multiple products for people and so you know I just see all that is good stuff

at the same time there's a lot of total crap projects that are either scams or totally pointless so this doesn't mean that every crypto project deserves recognition or respect but I think a lot of them do and so um I don't know how the tribalism ends but it's been it's been kind of disappointing we often talk about aetherium than Bitcoin this is why I'm asking for Bitcoin this time what's your vision for Bitcoin at this point and why do you think it's going and has this changed over the last couple of years so my fundamental view of Bitcoin has not changed ever since I got involved many years ago and that is that I believe it has a good chance of ultimately replacing by out competing fiat currencies around the world and becoming

a new monetary standard for the whole world I think that that was its initial promise and I think it is with each day that goes by it gets closer and closer to that I am one of the people that believes that fiat currencies will go away I think that over time when people realize they can have money that cannot be created out of thin air or they can have money that can be created out of thin air by politicians over time they will they will choose the former but it's gonna take a long time and and at least a generational shift if not two so one one thing that has changed though with Bitcoin is also early on it was seen as a really good payment system like a very easy quick way to pay people around the world that was fast and cheap it's still quite fast obviously it's the

same speed it used to be and for international transfers or for anything that is you know call it high value which means you know a few hundred dollars or more it's still a great payment system but obviously as it gets bigger and bigger the fees are gonna get worse and worse and it's gonna be useful for fewer and fewer payment use cases maybe that's okay or maybe things like lightning at work will really take off and handle those smaller transactions and that would be okay too but that's that's something that's definitely different from when I first got involved to see kind of something that used to be you know send money for essentially nothing to now you know it doesn't make sense to send a ten dollar Bitcoin transaction ever and at the worst case you know back in the last bubble the

average fee on Bitcoin transactions was $50 we had we had customers sending us $100 trade you know of the flight clean into Bitcoin and they would end up with with $50 on the other side and think that we scammed them and you know someone who's new and is like why that why in the world did you take $50 of my transaction that was an uncomfortable conversation to have with thousands of different people so that's certainly not ideal for payments but payments is just one of many things that crypto can be used for and if Bitcoin does not become the widespread payment network that people thought at first that might be okay too my view is that if Bitcoin is money and there's meant to be money that the ecosystem like should should really be working hard to make it money and I

think like lightning Network is a good step in this direction but do you see anything that the Bitcoin ecosystem specifically could be doing better to move closer to this goal of being a replacement for Fiat I think you have to separate the the money from the payment system obviously a money that has easy payment systems attached to it is better than one that doesn't but it's not clear that if Bitcoin is going to be money it needs to be able to have cheap $5 transactions maybe it does not that's that's unclear it is also very possible that a different crypto starts emerging that is simply because it is faster and

cheaper it ultimately takes more economic activity and it becomes money and it's totally possible that Bitcoin fails because it did not optimized for speed and transaction throughput I don't know I don't know where that will come out but again that's why all this experimentation is really important starke where is organizing the stock where sessions conference during the Tel Aviv blockchain week in September and you should definitely consider going in case you don't know about Starke where their product izing zero knowledge proof to solve two of the blockchain ecosystems most pressing issues scalability and privacy and stark whereas co-founded by Eli Ben Sassoon who is previously on the show the conference will cover some of the most cutting-edge research and applications in the field of zero knowledge groups

and you can expect only the brightest minds in the space to discuss things like self custodial trading starts for lower one stark friendly hash functions and other cool things you can do with start proofs many of the speakers are epicenter alumni including aetherium researchers Vitalik butyrin Alexia kunafa and Justin Drake Martin Kopelman of gnosis will also be speaking as well as Arthur Brightman of Tasos so if you're interested in broadening the understanding of these cutting-edge technologies there's no better place to do it in stock or sessions join the conference in Tel Aviv on September 16th or come a day early for the Starck 101 workshop where you'll build a start prove our from scratch tickets are on sale now and you can find the registration page at epicenter rock / stark where that's sta RK w ar e the first 50 people to use the code

epicenter will get 20% off the regular ticket price we'd like to thank Stark we're sessions for their support of epicenter why don't you I thought Sun Deborah so you had a tweet storm in which you welcome keep up my first tweet storm yeah I know can you explain your reasoning behind why do you why you think is good for the ecosystem so I've been interested in this mysterious Facebook cryptocurrency you know it kind of ever since the news about it started leaking kind of mid late last year I assumed that it would be kind of some watered-down centralized coin that was not very interesting really just like a dollar pegged centralized you know quote-unquote digital currency that's

what I assumed would happen but when the actual details of Libre were revealed I was quite enthusiastic about it certainly it is not a censorship resistant self sovereign crypto currency like Bitcoin but it's also something that is much more interesting much more decentralized and much less you know tied to government policy than Fiat so they did to kind of really important design decisions one was that it is actually built on a blockchain sort of you know an open-source permissionless ledger that people can be building on that was a big design decision that was important and then two is it's backed by not it's not a one to one peg with the

dollar which would have been their easy way to do it it's actually backed by a basket of a fiat and bonds and what that means is that it is sort of above or greater than any specific national currency and because Facebook has two billion users it's really the first credible near-term competitor to something like the US dollar I found that to be extremely exciting I think a world based on you know large companies issuing their own currencies would be much better than one where governments are issuing their own currencies and something even better than that is where is a purely decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin I see Libra has a really good stepping stone between those two worlds and then I was pleased to see but maybe pleased

is the wrong word entertained to see how quickly the governments of the world came out against Libra they were very uncomfortable about what Libra was doing and this was largely because they saw it as a threat to their monopoly over money creation and now we have hearings in the major you know major branches of government in the US and elsewhere where they're actually talking publicly about the qualities of money the attributes of money and whether you know central banks to create money or private markets to create money these kind of discussions never happened ten years ago they haven't even really happened within the Bitcoin world

because the politicians haven't taken Bitcoin seriously as an existential threat to dollars I'm glad they're not taking it as a threat and even though it absolutely is that threat but when Facebook comes out and does it they see that immediately as a existential threat to dollars in another fiat and that's that's just fascinating I mean at this point Facebook has become the lightning rod to which all the ire of these various politicians is going to be drawn I don't know that Libra will ever actually launch because I think the government is gonna be so upset with them that they can't actually get it out the door that demonstrates yet again why decentralization is so valuable and ultimately I think that's good for Bitcoin and I think if Libra launches it's good for Bitcoin because it pulls

people further out of the fiat world and into a more digital currency world so I'm excited about the whole thing I applaud Facebook for making some design decisions that would be obviously controversial and really push the envelope I think you know whenever I see bravery from a company that large I think that's very respectable so yeah we'll see how this goes I think I agree with you on the the interesting design aspects of Libra I think that you we probably weren't expecting that to emerge out of this project and and it has been entertaining as well to see regulators and lawmakers and politicians throw their arms up at this project

and and it's it's sort of like you know we're scoring points like cryptocurrency of the currency Regas ism is scoring some good points in this in this fight on the other hand fervent critic of a Facebook or its numerous privacy transgressions over the years and you know we're learning more details now about some of the things that are to come and like sort of like its messaging app sweet etc I think it's absolutely an inevitable that if Libra ever launches the Facebook would use the data to fulfill its mission which is to sell advertising to its advertisers and exploit people's financial data what are

your thoughts on that like where do you sit in between these sort of you know this is great because it goes against government and national currencies and on the other hand you know the the risk to users yeah other privacy I'm not one of most people who thinks Facebook is evil because they use people's data I think people that use Facebook as customers and they want a free service and then expect the company to just build them a free service without taking their data and selling it are naive and frankly frankly unfair I think any private business that you can opt out from you can opt out from so if you don't like what Facebook does with privacy don't use it if you don't like what Libre does with privacy don't use

it and that's the marketplace at work I would much rather have a world where Facebook has the predominant currency and takes information from it to sell you advertising versus a world in which the Federal Reserve issues the main currency and they're able to debase it and print it at the whim of politicians which impoverishes the entire world slowly over time I think that's a huge improvement over the status quo better than both of those of course would be a world in which a properly decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin exists and is is the dominant money but it really kind of depends on what you're comparing it to so in fact Libre is a currency that's that's issued by a non-state actor that is nevertheless extremely powerful in

the legacy world so something that can't be said of bitcoins and the like so even if you just look at the total market cap of Bitcoin and aetherium that is completely dwarfed by Facebook and all the other companies that are attached to Libre now do you think this is going to change how we think about state and non-state actors and do you think this is going to blur the line because in effect so far money issuance has been a monopoly for you know nation states in it I mean discounting Bitcoin but I mean basically in in the grand scheme of things Bitcoin and if you remember they they're really small phenomena so they're not going to throw off entire governments yet but do

you think in in hindsight we'll see this as a pivot or a moment yes I think it's definitely a pivotal moment um I think there is generally an impression that governments have always managed money and thus the fact that Bitcoin is this new thing and or libros this new thing is something entirely different from history the reality is that governments have only really been issuing money at the base layer for a few decades I mean basically since 1971 when the dollar went off the gold standard we've had a purely fiat system prior to that it was really a gold and in commodity money system and in an imperfect one but one that was still at the foundational layer built on on gold so this isn't

something entirely new at all it's really a return or let's say it's really the world leaving the context of governments being responsible for money and going back to something that is that is outside of the control of any politician or any government now obviously something like Bitcoin is far more powerful than gold because it can move around the world so easily and it works in a digital economy gold doesn't really work that way unless you centralize it and issue electronic notes for that which has its own problems so there's definitely like newness to this whole phenomenon but I think the world where government wasn't behind money would actually be back to normal it would not be something you interesting I think that

there's a contextual aspect that comes to play here that needs to be considered as well is that the world of 100 or 200 years ago and the economy of iron 300 years ago it was far less complex than what we have today in terms of activity market activity population means supply chains etc do you feel that it makes sense in today's massively complex economy to go back to a fully unregulated money system as was the case maybe like 200 years ago or yeah I think the more complex a system the less able

to properly handle it a centralized structure becomes so in a simpler system centralization can work really well as you add complexity centralization causes all sorts of all sorts of problems a great example of this is politics and governance the biggest problems in politics are the ones in which you have the most people involved so a town council never commits like genocide or or you know crazy global issues and most people feel reasonably ok about their town council when you get up to like a city or a state level there's more controversy and more problems but but still nothing like what you get at national governments especially when it comes to markets which are incredibly

complicated and there are no people on earth who are smart enough to really understand them that that kind of that humility is completely lost within politicians they all believe that if you get a few economists in the room you can understand something as complex as the global economy I think because something is that complex it has to have a decentralized structure and when you have central banking where they are literally controlling the price of money they are essentially planning the price of money for the entire world that is the same kind of central planning that took down Soviet Russia the same kind of central planning that's taken down Venezuela that kind of thing is really dangerous and so I think the world would be much better off to to the degree this complex it is much better off with a

decentralized system in which no central party is trying to have all the information because it certainly cannot have it even if it wants to I mean I'd like to touch on something you said their word I think it's relevant here and obviously I agree that central panic planning to the extent that you know we saw in Soviet Russia or that we see in Venezuela is an extreme that at some point does collapse and you know we we can see what's going on in Venezuela right now and we've seen this in the last 50 years in many places but you said something about you know people not being smart enough to understand what's going on and they're in their own market and you know I'd like to tie that back to Facebook and the sort of unchecked aggressions and transgressions on

people's privacy and the fact that sure like people can use Facebook if they like or they can stop using it but I think that in the aggregate people don't really understand or appreciate the the risks of such a such an unchecked power that is governed only by markets such as Facebook and you know we've seen that in the last couple years with what happened in the US elections and I think that is just that the tip of the iceberg because in reality I think we you know there wasn't really that much AI or machine learning behind that you know you you think that companies like Facebook should be and off topic do you think that companies like Facebook should be

allowed to you just do as they please and grow to near like too big to fail size and not be regulated at all I mean my general moral philosophy is that anything peaceful should be permitted and I can always walk away from Facebook I cannot walk away from the US federal government I am taxed and stolen from by them regardless of what I want to do I I just see them as completely different threats in in their character I mean I don't I don't see Facebook as a problem because people can stop they can opt out of that if I could turn off my support to the federal government that would that would

be incredible you know but but I can't I'm trapped and I'm the the federal government and not only that but Facebook does not have a military that goes around the world killing hundreds of thousands of people so yeah is it bad that they use your data to sell to advertisers sure I guess that that's bad and people should certainly be more cognizant that that's happening I agree with that but they're not killing people Facebook isn't killing people the US federal government is literally killing hundreds of thousands of people to even put them in the same boat I think is is unfair and I would much rather have large peaceful corporations like Facebook that are market-based and regulated by markets running money systems versus the large governments that literally kill people and have the

the legal protection of theft and murder I think that is that is the great injustice of the world and so the more that the control over money moves out of that world and into into the private marketplace the better well I would say that once Facebook has its own money and control over money it can definitely at that point start going around and killing people or in my opinion will change I mean if you but the private companies don't the Facebook it you know doesn't it's not an elected body of people totally disagree so you have more control in your election of Facebook than you do in the election of of US politicians if you don't like Facebook you can sell their shares

well not American close your again well the price but but users users of Facebook they can sell their shares they can close our account that that is democracy that is opting out of something and that is much more powerful than me than this the charade of political votes that elects the stupidest people among the population to lead them I mean I don't understand how anyone can possibly advocate for a system like democracy when it leads to people like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump being the two greatest candidates that the country is able to choose from I mean that that's just totally preposterous that whole system is I think worthy of being shut down immediately totally agree I I completely agree with that with that premise so what do you think about the

future of money Eric so basically in principle blockchains enable tokenization so basically assets become the transferrable do you think we will actually still need fiat money or even company-issued money in the future no we don't need fiat money now fiat money is a scam it's the greatest scam ever perpetrated on mankind the sooner people abandon it and move to private market based money that the better Bitcoin obviously kicked off a phenomenon that I think is unstoppable at this point it is a phenomenon of this decentralized trustless technology which is really well suited for something like money that needs to be global and which no one should have the power to control I think

it's inevitable at this point and that you know I don't know if it takes five years or 50 years for this all play out but I think you know to two generations for now people will look back and see how obvious it was that a a group calling themselves the Federal Reserve should not have been trying to control the price of money for God's sakes like that that'll be something that's laughed at by people in the future as something preposterous just like bleeding people to rid them of the plague was preposterous and we see that now so this this will take some time to change but I think a a seismic shift in how money works has occurred and we're all just while we might be participating in this we're all just kind of along for the ride at this point I think this is this

kind of leads us to an ask question so looking back at the last five years that shape shift has has existed is anything that he would have done differently in hindsight yeah I mean there's always a million mistakes that any entrepreneur makes and I and I I'm certainly of that probably our biggest strategic mistake was simply building too many different products at the same time we we've seen so many opportunities in crypto that we kind of pursued too many of them too early on instead of focusing just on our core business so that was a lesson I've learned and you know we've corrected that now by by building this platform that is the entire company all of our energy now goes into this platform so that's something that I've I've learned

and something I would change you know regarding the the whole kyc question I think that was the right decision for us to take it's been immensely painful in the short and medium term but I think it was the only way for us to keep building a company over the long term so I will have to you know assess whether that was really the right decision ten five or ten years from now but right now it's I think too early to say great well I would love to be able to talk more and debate more I agree with you on some on some levels but I also think that like you know Soviet Russia or Venezuela and all the transgressions there and the extremes they're the sort of extreme libertarian viewpoint also has has its flaws and so

certainly not perfect certainly not perfect but we'll have to leave it there because we're running out of time here but thank you so much for coming on the show again Eric and look forward having you back on again in the future yeah great discussion really really enjoyed it and for anyone that wants to check out the new shape-shift it's at shape-shifts comm and we look forward to working with you so thanks a lot thanks Eric thank you Eric thank you for joining us on this week's episode we released new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicentre podcast go to epicenter TV

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