Ethereum Co-Founder: Why Crypto Has Failed | Gavin Wood

Transcript

this episode is brought to you by ZKSYNC join the Elastic Network today at zksync.io/mpire thanks to zksync for making today's episode possible i wanted to take a moment to tell you about Focal by Falcon X the AI powered insights engine built for institutional crypto by leveraging AI Focal empowers institutional investors to streamline research anticipate market shifts and make sharper investment decisions you'll hear more about Focal later in the show all right everyone welcome back to Empire i'm kicking us off santi's joining in a few minutes but we're very lucky to be joined by uh Gavin Wood co-founder of Ethereum as well as co-founder of Polka Dot so Gav welcome to the show thanks

for having me are we Is this the Have we entered the Gav era or is it still Gavin uh I mean I'm easy with either um but yeah Gav is fine nice nice how's life man what's been going on i got back a few weeks ago from a a tour of India and China doing some university lecturing on jams that was fun um met a lot of people um saw a bunch of cities uh but at the moment I'm uh I'm just at home uh sort of resting after after the show nice all right well let's see if we can deliver some stuff on the podcast here i I uh I've got a million things I want to ask you one of them i mean maybe just on a very macro scale like you you helped

found Ethereum starting in 2014 you were you know kind of in the Ethereum world I guess left left for like an EF like an Ethereum Foundation like entity late I think it was 2015 and then I think left the Ethereum ecosystem full-time in 2017 for Polka Dot i think I'm getting those dates right i would love I mean TLDDR you've been in the industry for a very long time longer than most who are listening to the show i'd love to just get your macro view on like just crypto as an industry like are you happy with where we're at so far are you o like overwhelmed with oh my god pro crypto president right now stable coins are booming or you like underwhelmed and like damn like I really thought we'd be

much farther along than we are today the latter say more um uh I think it was Gandhi that said uh there's two types of people in the world those who do the work and those who take the credit and I think we see a a certain bifocation of crypto in this regard as well there's a lot of um there's a lot of hype driven projects out there in the crypto world in the crypto industry and not that many that are doing legit work i mean there's certainly some that are doing you know some proper software engineering but actually pushing the the original sort of web 3 crypto Bitcoin ideals forward really not that many um whereas there

are an awful lot of people trying to well you know so to speak take the credit which is to say you know try to find that buzz and that that that hype that that that that capital inflow to make their their token go up and um and I I you know this is I I mean it's not surprising really but it's uh yeah I mean it's not where I would have uh I would have hoped um hoped to be you so you put this underwhelmed feeling um in the hands of you think the industry has misallocated attention dramatically dramatically and I mean

there was an old cartoon uh in this uh this very ironic uh newspaper The Viz uh back in the '9s and it had an advert in an ironic advert right a comedy advert um no technological nonsense just marketing breakthrough right that was the advertising line and this I fear is is really where crypto an awful lot of crypto industry is at it's not about um it's not about delivering uh a new utility it's not about uh improving the technology to the degree that it becomes actually a viable social operating system right this is really just about trying to attract more money

um into their specific economies so maybe if I had to take the other side of it just to make this a a fun conversation here the other side of the argument is that all all technology industries have these boom and bust periods of like crazy attention but really like when the tide goes out you know maybe when the tide goes in everything feels like it has attention and hype when the tide goes out maybe one of the 10 things is left standing or you know three of the hundred things are left standing and actually hype is what ends up building all the companies and then you know most of them fail but the ones that stick around i mean the hype is actually warranted um and that's just part of the you there's two sides of building a

company there's the engineering and product and I know you're an engineers engineer but the other side is long you know sustained periods of hype and that would be bucketed as like marketing and sales I guess I'd say so is there I don't know i'm curious to just hear how you think about that so promotion is certainly an element of marketing um it is not all of marketing by a long shot and I would say hype is really just a form of promotion that tends to be chronically uh uh tends to chronically disregard the fundamentals now you're you're right

like hype can have a a collateral benefit right it can it can benefit um uh broad numbers of projects it can be the tide that lifts all boats to some extent sure but the problem is that um if only one or two boats are uh sort of deserving to be lifted um hype represents an incredibly inefficient capital allocation not one that um Adam Smith would be particularly impressed with right and that's the main problem here who's deserving of it like is um is Hyperlid deserving is Salana deserving

is WorldCoin I'm thinking of like very hyped projects who also have talented founders you know OB I think you and I would be in the same bucket that you know something like memecoins like a lot of hype maybe not a ton of talent behind a lot of these things but there are things that get a lot of hype but have uh you know actually very talented founders and you know re real users and stuff like that so how do you who's who's warranted of the hype real users i would um I would argue maybe not um and of course there are some founders that are talented um the question is are those talents um are those talents for the good in

whose interests are those talents working and I do not I believe there are certain memecoin um founders that are incredibly talented i mean you might argue they're quite lucky as well i would say like part of being talented is making your own luck salana right salana Hyperliquid or Worldcoin like I'm using three very hyped up projects uh who I think they also have talented teams how do you how do you think about those kind of folks i think they're very talented in making themselves money who's to say though

that so okay well I don't I don't know it's got Who's to say though that the the users on Salana are not doing things that are productive it's it's they're just choosing what to trade what basically what to do right and it's and it's kind of the free market that lets them do that yeah so I'm I would question the utility that is being provided now if the utility is unlicensed gambling if you consider that a utility that is actually not fair gambling either that's um mostly insider trading um and and just the appearance of gambling if we if we start thinking of like utility as

basically the ability for an an elite group of insiders to make themselves a lot of money then and I don't see this as a sensible form of utility but if you're going to argue that that that is then sure um then Salana is is giving utility um if we're talking about creating a social operating system the thing that sort of the original web 3 hype cycle started with um then no I do not see Salana as doing particularly substantial utility and I've written quite extensively about this and this is why um the J jam is a thing right it's because I see that the direction that Salana is going and I see that it's wrong and I I I've made clear arguments as to why it's wrong

this episode is brought to you by ZKYNC in 2024 ZKSync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an everexpanding network of ZK chains the elastic network to onboard the whole world into crypto many specialized chains must be able to coexist work together and share liquidity institutions and global financial leaders choose ZKSync for unmatched security scalable infrastructure better onboarding gasless transactions and privacy first design join over 20 chains including Abstract Sofon and Kronos in the elastic network today behind ZKSYNC is the ZK stack it is a one-stop platform for building

private blockchains on Ethereum the stack solves all the typical privacy regulatory user experience and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security join the Elastic Network today at zksync.io/mpire thanks to zksync for making today's episode possible i want to double click on obviously we talk about utility a lot in crypto and the common criticism that not not just Salana has but like from the outside in it's like it's all a casino and they I am curious to get your perspective on like where do you see the most amount of utility because you could argue someone from the outside said wait a minute like everything not just in Salana has been

pure speculation like recursive leveraging buying meme coins is not just a phenomenon that happens in Salana So so I'm curious to get your perspect like what is the most utility driving feature that you see in crypto because I think every network has this problem so Polka Dot has a number of uh parach chain projects that use Polka Dot's incredibly large amount of correctness finality basically the Polka Dot world computer to run their projects right and I can point at a few of these but I think probably the most interesting one is Mythos right mythical Games yeah I'm an investor and they're using this essentially to ensure

that users can have direct ownership of their in-game assets and this is something that I would argue is on a level of utility that's categorically higher than memecoin trading um because it brings in there's a very easy way of of sort of understanding this it's like if if Polka Dot weren't available um would Mythical do this functionality anyway do they consider the functionality itself useful enough for them to implement the answer is yes right they would be running this functionality as part of their game servers now the thing is why are they running on Polka Dot

well because their game servers are ultimately run by mythical mythical games right and that's that doesn't give the users sovereignty over those assets there are some um the ability to give users sovereignty over assets is an additional sort of feature that they want to provide um and that comes with an amount of interoperability those assets can in principle be moved around the Ethereum potentially into the Ethereum ecosystem moved around exchanges third party integrations can be licensed to other game developers for other games and we start to see how web 3 can actually benefit mythical games via mythos now the key point is though what they're

doing at the moment with blockchain disregarding all of this web 3 value ad is actually useful because it would be done under web two style technologies if it were not using web 3 would we see meme coins under web two style technologies oh we don't right indicating that it's probably something that is quite specific to web 3 a kind of very specific utility and if we dig deeper we can realize yes it's still an unlicensed casino with a very very opaque uh means of of determining whether the gambling is fair gavin I would actually love maybe taking us out of this you know Salana conversation and markets conversation i I would actually I've heard you talk

about this post Snowden uh internet and post Snowden world i'd love to hear your thoughts on like how you view the internet today and what is actually what is broken with it and how crypto can maybe be a solution to some of this i don't think crypto is much of a solution so I I I am in the crypto industry I suppose but I consider myself really um a a sort of web 3 uh practitioner um I don't consider myself a crypto guy basically because so much of crypto is is about sort of this Mickey Mouse finance you know um and it's it's really not my my thing the context for the question by the way

is like I I do sense like a bit of uh disgust is probably too strong of a word but maybe a little cynicism on what's happened in the last decade in this industry that you've worked in so I think I'm trying to answer the question of like man you are a phenomenal coder you could go build some great companies in AI or something else you probably don't have to work again for the rest of your life like why are you still working in the industry if there's still discuss i would say I think that's at the heart of the question so I think it's a very good question i think the industry is um while while yes I don't think that everyone's hearts are really in this industry are sort of in the right place necessarily I do think that some are i think there is still a sort of core that

is really trying to do something that's good for the world um that's not getting caught up too too much in the self-enrichment um and I think this is where this is this is what keeps me here like if I thought it was just a lot of people scrambling to try and make you know make their next whatever thousand dollars or whatever like I I it it would really turn me off and I would probably not be here but you know I I I I sense and I see and I talk to people in the industry that that see that this web 3 isn't this industry right it's a part of it but it's not all of it it doesn't the

industry as a as a character isn't the same sort of character as web 3 it's not the character that I wrote the web3 manifesto about and I do believe that this technology although it is facilitating Salana to run meme coins run and market meme coins you know um which is essentially unlicensed gambling i think it's can do so much more than that and I think this is actually one of the warts right now it may be a wart that delivers an amount of hype and some of that hype manage maybe lifts Polka Dot's boat boat a bit great but I think it's still at the end of the day a wart and I think we would be a lot better off probably without any of the hype because then the money that would

otherwise have gone into the hype some of it at least the more sensible portion of it might actually do a bit more digging and find the projects that actually have real um basis for social change behind them and what sort of social change am I thinking about well kind of self- sovereignty um um transparency um the ability to build for example voting systems and agile governance systems without the need for a you know a huge civil service and a uh an awful lot of of of um trust that that civil service you know in principle sort of bring or requires a population to take we already see you know in the US

in particular an an immense um reduction in the trust of the civil service over the last 50 or 60 years right um there's a feeling deep state there's a feeling that you know there's the these uh government taxes are not being used to pay for the public good and that's um that's unfortunate and it may very well you know part large in in part may very well be true um what we need are systems that can uh allocate common resources in a transparent and effective manner for the benefit of those that are paying into them and that is in part what this technology can facilitate it's not it's

not being used to facilitate it that much at the moment and there's certainly more development that needs to be done both in terms of scaling it out and in terms of the sophistication of the mechanisms but in principle it is my belief that social systems can be incredibly improved with this technology why do you think that hasn't happened because I think you're not the first person to believe this right i remember Blockworks hosted an event sometime in mid 2018 it was like supply chain on the blockchain and you probably remember these ads it was like Walmart was moving their supply chain onto the blockchain and uh Hernando Dodto wrote a piece about uh you know property rights and you know how moving on to uh emerging markets real estate would move you know

move onto blockchains and that would make the world a better place none of that has really happened instead we got you know 100 per dexes NFT marketplaces massive exchanges i would probably take the other side than you i actually think that has been decently productive to build a new industry but yeah none of the like you know good for soc good for society in the classical uh definition of it has has happened why is that why do we have a lack of major successful apps in short product the product which is to say the platforms that constitute web 3 have not been sufficiently good or s they have not

been a good enough product to allow these um uh use cases to be built on them effectively now I think there's some exceptions here right don't get me wrong i think that there are very particular sort of supply chain um provenence style exceptions i've seen a few in the real world um I think there are some exceptions to um you know some of these I mean there are a lot of them on polka dot right so the idea that that the social graph should be managed like transparently it should be held by the user not by the platform this is something that frequency is pioneering the Frank McCortz um sort of uh social web three social media um project and I think this

is uh and there's there's a few others like there's there's um you know this this deep uh this peak uh sort of trying to uh track um um information um also very interesting and we are starting to see truly scalable like useful because a lot of these these use cases they need scale or they're not going to be useful um and I think this is something that that has been difficult and that Polka Dot is pushing forward and I think the other one that's very important is economic sovereignty a lot of um a lot of uh application a lot of platforms web three platforms or web 3ish platforms um they require the projects that are

launched on them to not have economic sovereignty they require for example transaction fees to be paid in the platform economy right if you launch something on Ethereum your users are going to be paying Ether almost certainly and that's a that can be a problem that's a turnoff it's a turnoff both for the the team that is deploying but it's also a turnoff for the users of that use case they don't want to be buying some random crypto that they've never heard of before they don't want to have to hold particular special wallets they won't have to go to dexes or sec or centralized exchanges right it's this is the product that's that's the issue and I think I think we are starting to to see as real utility real use cases that

are not just web parasitic sort of crypto things crypto projects um real real use cases move into web 3 are seeing that they are choosing platforms like Polka Dot that provide economic independence for the project so they can they don't need an underlying token in order to though their users don't need an underlying token to use their product and scale like the ability to actually scale to hundreds of thousands of interactions on a on a second by- second basis this episode is brought to you by ZKYNC in 2024 ZKSync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an everexpanding

network of ZK chains the elastic network to onboard the whole world into crypto many specialized chains must be able to coexist work together and share liquidity institutions and global financial leaders choose ZKSync for unmatched security scalable infrastructure better onboarding gasless transactions and privacy first design join over 20 chains including Abstract Sofon and Kronos in the elastic network today behind ZKYNC is the ZK stack it is a one-stop platform for building private blockchains on Ethereum the stack solves all the typical privacy regulatory user experience and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising

performance or security join the Elastic Network today at zksync.io/mpire thanks to zksync for making today's episode possible so G I mean I agree with you on that point like uh you know today crypto has been mostly speculative activity now every technological revolution has relied on speculation but we can do better much much better i mean their core products that exist today in crypto they just have not gotten the same level of attention or traction um I find interesting what you guys built at Polka Dot uh through the vantage point of talking to the Mythos team and why they decided to migrate over the question is why haven't we seen more adoption the tech if the tech is truly superior truly

better not just within crypto but just web two versus web 3 why don't we have a billion users on chain today well we don't have a billion users on chain in part because it takes time to get a billion users to move over um uh users are quite sticky user acquisition can be quite stick user acquisition can be quite sticky especially when we're talking about e economies um there's a reason for this um and it's manifested essentially in in in money it costs money to move users over to one platform as opposed to another platform now we see some very obvious examples of this like for example um Polygon or Salana or these projects with fairly deep pockets just

paying projects paying like newbies who want to move their utility onto a onto a blockchain just pay them to put it on their blockchain and you know if they don't if they don't sort of if they're not really technologically if they don't have really great strong technological leadership they will choose a solution that you know that they they will lose lose the argument to their CFO right and they will take the money and and and then deploy it on this on this technology that could never deliver what they need can never deliver the scale or the economic independence that they need so the reality is that it's sticky it takes time it takes time for projects to realize there's a bit of trial and error

they might try one one thing i mean Mythos tried Ethereum they tried Ethereum in order to do this they realized it just wasn't going to work for them and so once once it became clear ah okay this platform does not support the need not in terms of scale not in terms of economic independence okay what platforms are there are there is this just a a a lost thing is is web 3 not going to happen for us no actually it turns out polka dot can do this now it takes time for people to understand this yeah humans don't move at the speed of light and there are all sorts of things that are slowing them down pulling at them right in existing investments fear of loss Yeah it takes time for these to to wash away now it will happen eventually you

always have to believe as a technologist I have to believe that building the best platform will ultimately garner the attention that it deserves but you know at the end of the day I also have to accept that money is a thing that conservatism is a thing that caution is a thing that uh there are cynics all over there who are willing to spend money in order to slow things down for slow the progress down and it's like okay but then it will take time and if it takes time I've got time I've been here 11 years I can be here 11 years more gavin what do you think you nailed with the polka dot early polka dot vision and what do you think you got wrong um so the thing I the thing that we

nailed and it's it wasn't a oneman effort right now the vision was the paper was pretty much written by me but like the the the overall protocol you know a lot of other people working on it but the um the thing that I think we got right uh was delivering um scale right beyond generality and resilience so Bitcoin pioneered resilience right still around still doing its thing right uh Ethereum um was took a huge step in from Bitcoin into a general generaliz generalizing this technology allowing you to write you know using a complete language um and Polka Dot took it one step further with

scale kept the generality kept the resilience delivered scale and I think this is really a really impressive feat it's not a feat that other other projects have been able to do um and I think one of the other interesting things that we delivered was um economic independence something that I talked about just now which is essentially the ability for projects to kind of purchase in bulk web 3 right purchase block space in bulk and then use whatever means that they will to dole it out to their users right without going the Ethereum route of their users actually having to pay their way pay as they go pay a pay pay per transaction and I think this was also something that

we we got we got right um so I think the product actually wasn't wasn't bad but what really held us back was the fact that there wasn't a sort of central crucible a sort of mixing pot where people could try it out before actually having to get their you know really dive in polka dot was a definitely Polka Dot one was definitely a divein kind of a a proposition it's like you know we had crowd loans we had slot auctions you know if you were going to deploy anything on Polka Dot it's it was going to take you it was going to take a team and you were going to have to do some marketing you're going to have to get some people aware of it you have to you know actually do some tokconomics and this this I think was the was the thing

that held us back the most and this is something that we are hastening to correct uh over the last year and this year and there's some very interesting very um uh very important alterations that we have been making uh over the last two or three year uh over the last year one or two years and that we will continue to make over the next year or two that will fix this that will keep allow us to keep all of that lovely scalability and economic independence as our product but also bring this much lower barrier to to just you know around on it that's what made Ethereum really great right because people could just mess around on this platform without really having to invest very much and it gave all of these this

this sort of large amount of sort of use cases in the end actually there's not that many sort of use cases that have been that successful on Ethereum no but it just made it really easy to get started and get going and deploy some code yeah okay so what are your thoughts then when you see like if I had to describe Polka Dot from an from I've never you know built on Polka Dot but from an outsers's point of view you had this idea for a native rollup host chain basically and this thing that would basically allow you to deploy your own chain um and build an interoperable world and I think uh it was probably you guys and Cosmos saw this vision and you guys maybe had this idea that look we can help you secure we're going to build this platform really that lets you

secure 100 chains for the price of securing one great great vision what do you think now that there are basically all the L2s you're kind of just watching them turn into the exact same pitch native rollup host chain right if you're arbitrum or optimism or polygon um it's less about building on optimism now it's like now the OP stack and what do you what are you offering what's the service you offer interoperability and the ability to go build your own chain using our stack what do you think uh and and actually they're gaining a lot of traction right like Bass and Zora and all these people are now building on their stack they didn't choose Polka Dot they didn't choose Cosmos they chose they chose them what do you what do you

make of this uh it's very um vindicating so I consider this this makes uh this makes me feel very uh very much as though the work that we've been doing and the product that we made this this early relatively high barrier to entry deploy your own blockchain product was was not wholly wrong um that it has its its value um now personally as I just said I think that this is we can do a lot better than this as a product and it's it's very it's very interesting to see that other

um other ecosystems and that other projects are viewing this as some sort of uh panacea right something to actually aim for some north northstar well we already got there and we can tell you point blank it's not a northstar this is where a jam comes from right so this is the basis of jam jam came from the realization that this sort of roll up uh you know deploy your own chain and we'll kind of secure it um and make it relatively you know relatively easy to deploy your chain um sure it's a reasonable product and sure we'd be able to find uh

particularly if interoperability is fairly decent and I think this is actually where probably the base and the arbitum and the OP stack guys sort of where a lot of their um kind of value uh came from was this at least appearance of Ethereum interoperability well I think it's often times overstated but um but yeah an appearance and I think Ethereum the the Ethereum Foundation are increasingly realizing that this is overstated uh and that is leading them to wanting to have their own native rollups right so they're kind of like actually we don't want to scale using OP stack or Polygon like we want our you know to some extent these guys are

cowboys have you seen how many validators are running on the average OP stack chain like what the hell you know and and therefore we want our own quality scaling solution and it turns out that Ethereum's idea of a quality scaling solution looks quite a lot like Polka Dot one um maybe if we're being nice to them Polka Dot 2 uh but it doesn't look like Jam and JAM is where you know my thoughts and my considerations of what it is that we've built and deployed looking at the market looking at the what how people are sort of using products looking at other ecosystems and trying to understand where you know how all of this fits into into into a potential vision for where we

could go and JAM is is is the outcome of that and it's essentially it boils down to coherence and inter in some sense interoperability and I I fear that the solution that that Ethereum Foundation are having with native roll-ups that we already had with like power chains uh and that of obviously all of the L2s that are trying to become their own L1s are having um they're all they're all suboptimal in the same way um they are trying to split apart the different avenues of of use cases um into their own chain and by by splitting them apart they're they're

keeping them apart indefinitely it's like what I call a partition a partitioning but a persistent partitioning one that you know is kind of permanent and this persistent partitioning is something that I've identified is is is not a good way of scaling i mean it's it's one thing that you can do in order to scale and it's something I said that polka dot do but it's a suboptimal way of scaling and JAM is here to fix that i wanted to take a moment to tell you about Focal by Falcon X the AI powered insights engine built for institutional crypto with Focal you can create charts and generate answers to questions in seconds used by over 80 funds with more than $10 billion in assets under management you'll feel like

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instead of a deep a deep read um but to me it basically seems like you're trying to take the best of both worlds you're saying uh Ethereum's got these universal smart contract this universal smart contract environment and it's gone really well some things on Ethereum haven't gone so well but that part's gone really well then you've got Polka Dot you've got the like scalable composable architecture boom we're trying to bring that together is that the is that a decent layman's understanding of this it is and I mean this isn't this is a good a good understanding of our intention and I think it actually boil it's both jam and it's with Polka Dot 2's intention as well so you got the idea of this like um Polka Dot cloud Polka Dot Hub concept that we're sort of rolling out Polka Dot Hub over the course of this year in the

next few months and it will be Ethereum compatible and you'll have smart contracts on Polka Dot and you'll be able to deploy smart contracts directly to Polka Dot for basically very little money right um high performance smart contract fully synchronous fully coherent environment the same sort of environment you're going to get from Salana you get from Ethereum L1 um and it's like this is it we really want to take the scale of Polka Dot the decentralization the resilience of Polka Dot and combine it with this very low barrier to entry easy to use highly compatible uh interoperable smart contract system now with JAM we're taking it to the next level and JAM is a really a um uh it's the same intention so you're absolutely right with with you

know what what it is that we're intending to do with JAM um but the means that we're going about it is is a sort of shift in the platform an alteration an alteration to the underlying sort of technology a relatively small alteration it's not sort of research level alteration it's a more of a product alteration um but it's an important one and with this alteration I believe that we're able to deliver something that not only gives you this sort of very low barrier to entry easy to get into smart contract very compatible interoperable environment um but also one that can scale like more or less indefinitely um without breaking it up right without

sort of having to say slice it and say "Well that's that's the the base uh chain right and then this is the arbitrum chain and then this is the first op stack chain and that's the second op right this I don't this isn't good this is we're just back to parach chains if we do this." And it's fine when you have a really really singular use case on a parach chain you don't need too much interoperability right that's fine you can use chains for this they may even be the optimal solution for this but when we're talking about delivering this like low barrier to entry let's all mess around in the same sand pit Ethereum style product then you need something a bit different okay Gavin how do you Let's bring all this together

um let's say you can really build what you're talking about building which I trust you you can good good engineer there there is another there is another angle to this right which is actually I think the part that I can tell just I don't know you very well but like in this conversation that you maybe don't like as much which is marketing and growth and ecosystem and and candidly playing the kind of crypto games the the backroom games like there there are the games that people play how do you um how do you think about this like how do you think about marketing and growth and jam goes live the tech works like how do you think about just the soft side of all of this no you're right it's not something that I'm I'm desperate to to get um it's not it's not a sort of swamp I'm

desperate to start swimming in um I think that there's a part of this which I would loosely call um sort of technical promotion or technical advocacy uh which is like which is sort of what I try to do and it's this this you know call is a good example uh but you know there are there's the touring around Asia um you know writing blog posts um this sort of thing and this this I think um this can be helpful and this is something that I I'm willing to sort of do my fair share more than my fair share at uh in order to try to bring about um visibility for what it is that Polka Dot

is is doing and why it's trying to do it you know why why why we're bothering putting all this effort in to build all this technology to what ends you know why why is it sensible why is it good why is it going to be valuable in the future um and I think uh but I think you know on a more daytoday basis of like well trying to sort of build hype right this is it's I I think there are people that are that are good at this and I think um I think they they deserve to be you know I think I think the polka dot treasury is capable of at least eventually finding them and incentivizing them and um and

getting them sort of on Polka Dot side uh but it's not something that um that I personally feel is my is a great value ad for me like that a great value that that I can add you know I think I think the value that I can add could be so much better if it's focused around um work basically around technology i'm a technologist i'm I'm pretty good at it but like and I I can explain myself i I'm a teacher as well like I've been I've been paid to for teaching in in a past life um and I I enjoy it so it's like and this can form an element of advocacy right this can form an element of marketing um but I

think um I think in terms of like reaching large crowds with messages of you know simple messages that are easily understood and may not be very nuanced not really it's not really my my gig will you hire Will you hire for that or will you some because you got to you got to do it even if you don't like doing it so do you do you outsource that do you hire do you what do you do there i mean I'm I'm not in an operational role uh for you in a managerial operational role so um there is a there is a a sort of uh executive director of the web 3 foundation not me there is a CEO of parity not me um and of course

there are lots of people that uh that have loud opinions on how polka dot treasury funds should be spent uh and I'm not generally one of them um only once or twice in the past have I have I chimed in um but yeah I mean I if you I think it is a not unreasonable spend the issue is not that I think that it's it's wrong or evil the issue is that I just lack the ability to understand what spends make what value like it's just not my expertise i um and so that's not that's something that I would indeed hire for um but I mean as I said it's not my it's not my hiring

decision it's um it's the guys that are running these organizations hiring decisions and I trust them to to do it now um in terms of the treasury of course it's a decentralized leadership and uh and so that's that's you know there isn't really any particular person who's going to make any particular hiring decision but I think to some extent we are seeing people come forward in the ecosystem saying you know really kind of bringing the goods and saying well look I I am going to do this anyway I'm going to get out there I'm going to sort of really pedal polka dot and really try to get people on board for Um and and maybe in the future I get some recognition of that i get some incentive or whatever um and I think

that's that's sort of I I think that's that's good yeah I think I think that's that's nice i think we already see this in certain other ecosystems particularly Bitcoin if you look to Bitcoin there was no one really that you know held I mean there's Satoshi Nakamoto notionally that held a lot of Bitcoin but in principle we saw people in the Bitcoin community stepping forward and sort of promoting to whatever extent advocating marketing um Bitcoin uh because they believed in it right not because they were being paid not because they were someone had hired them but because they believed in it it was grassroots and I think I think if you can make a strong enough mission statement and get people really on board for what it is that you want to achieve

with this then it's actually possible to kind of get people to do this advocacy this promotion this marketing sort of work this talent to do it for uh uh you know without having to make these difficult hiring decisions or difficult value uh u value judgments yeah absolutely i mean a lot of what you talk about here is like organic community building and the the power of crypto is running coordination scale and I think if you introduce the right incentives um I think you can achieve some things that are pretty powerful that you saw in the Bitcoin like Bitcoin is pretty impressive what it's pulled off ethereum

transitioning from proof of work to proof of stake I think was one of the more like fascinating things to pull off um but I I I guess more of a debate here is like I think it's not a eitheror it's not that speculation is dirty or that activity of that nature is dirty i mean you have capital markets like Wall Street and is is it's a it's an important piece of how you coordinate if you're not transacting value you can't coordinate is my point now of course we would all hope that we would have more like tangible real utility beyond just pure speculation and recursive leveraging by 10 people on chain but we'll get there so from your position what is it that excites you the

most and what is it that you're focused on if you think about like the next chapter you've contributed so much to the space what do you want to do next like how do you think that someone in your position wants to really continue to make a dent in the space um I I believe at the end of the day that um speculation although in part could be considered sort of utility this sort of yeah casino um is grounded in the idea that these systems provide substantial value to society um not to specific individuals to society

and although I think that the industry has taken a over the last few years taken a distinct turn away from this I think it still lurks there in in the heart of of it and I think I think that um as as you kind of said a while back um there will be you know kind of storms that are going to wash away a lot of the um a lot of the you know projects that are not producing value that are kind of the zombie projects that are sort of just have you know people speculated on them and now the money is kind of sticky and and so they're just retaining this kind of value but they're not able to um to improve because they don't have a significant value proposition um I think uh

we I think we will see I I would hope we kind of see a sort of flushing of of of these zombie projects um and I think um and I I I kind of hope that we will not get too far down this road of kind of um centralization and I see centralization happening like especially over the last couple of months um you know people clamoring for recognition by you know certain powerful people Um and I I fear that this is not really what it's I don't I don't

see this as being really in the best interests of of of crypto assuming crypto is is about delivering social value broad social value like not to one specific country but to the world um and so you know but I think overall um with enough time the product which is uh the best and the product which proves the most uh the project that which proves the most resilient most capable of of evolving of being agile of of of meeting and pivoting to meet market needs of changing as market needs change and market in this case is actually more

than a market really it's the will it's the socopolitical environment or the technological socopolitical environment that blockchain finds itself in blockchain is an interesting technology it's not uh it's not just another app on a phone right it's it's a technology that is a is a socopolitical technology um and therefore its market is is really its environment and its environment is one that is is not uh is multifaceted right um it will change and projects will need to change as it changes um it will and and at the moment we're seeing the world changing substantially well that's going to weed out some

projects uh but it's also going to um make others um alter and pivot yeah maybe just on the note of the world changing a lot right now we can start to think about wrapping this with a conversation around AI and just how the world is changing so so quickly right now ai I've heard you say is diametrically opposed to crypto um I'd love to just get your views on crypto and AI are they two P's of the same pod is uh AI gonna run on crypto is it uh these these agents are gonna all have tokens or are they are they working together are they fighting like tell

tell me your views on AI and crypto um again I'm not I I don't know you know crypto is a relatively um it's a it's a it's a not the term I'd use i mean for example central bank digital currencies could be considered cryptos they're heavily they're obviously central usdt is a crypto it's totally centralized right um it's not uh so crypto as a whole isn't necessarily going to be you know um isn't going to have a particular relationship to AI web three web 3 technologies like technologies broadly governed by the concept of less trust more truth um yes these are um

philosophically diametrically opposed to uh AI why well AI as a technology really is uh less truth more trust which is to say um that they're heavily centralized and what they the way that they work is they pull in um data from the world and they provide opinion opaque opinion generally um this means that we have to trust if we use AI we have to trust the organization behind the AI we trust them in a couple of ways we trust them that their data that they pulled was comprehensive that it wasn't Eclipse that they didn't run any kind of Eclipse

on it or they didn't like withhold some types of data um and push others that they didn't put just fake data in um but also that they haven't tampered with the model there's no reason there's no way to check that they've tampered with the model not really um and so what we end up with is a totally totally trusted data source a data source that is broader and more trusted than one one that humanity's ever known before this is the opposite of web 3 web 3 is about gathering your own data and evaluating it on a basis of first principles yourself right this is why we hate RPCs is the true web 3 people we hate this idea that Ethereum is served to us via

servers that other people run even though most of the time it's basically fine and basically transparent we don't like it because at the end of the day it's a trust basis well AI is a supercharged trust information system it gives it gives us the appearance or the feeling of getting information but on the basis that we have to trust the information the single solitary Samman information giver like and and this is this is kind of madness to me like it's it's dangerous like a world that trusts one individual for all of its information gathering is is a

world right and that's that's the world that these AI CEOs want to build make no mistake they want to be the dictator of truth and that's why they build these trustbased systems so yes web 3 is diametrically opposed crypto not so much web 3 is diametrically opposed to AI and it is my belief that we need web3 systems if we are to survive humanity is to survive a world um that has such um predominant uh use of AI in it gavin maybe we can wrap actually with a proof of personhood um I saw you tweet back in December uh saying this is precisely the reason we need a

solid web 3 proof of personhood and we need it now i would be curious a why proof of personhood is so important to you and b uh what you think of the world coin approach um the world coin approach is flawed uh it's trust based it's again it's the same thing as before using an RPC right it's like uh who issues who issues the who is the signer here who is the who is the organization that determines whether I am an individual whether it has seen my retina or not whether this device has seen my retina or not well that that is a single um there is a single key holder for that and actually that information

is controlled by a single authority as well so not only do we have an arbitrary key holder like an arbitrary authority that can determine who is an individual but we also have an arbitrary authority that sort of knows everyone's retinas um this is again this is just as as the AI system and it's not that surprising that it's the same person behind it um proof of personhood in a web 3 system needs to be made from first principles and it cannot have an arbitrary authority that controls who is and is not a person um I believe it's necessary because I

believe the basis of most human interactions uh are on and notionally interactions where we care about the interaction being with another human now there are some interactions where that's not so important markets for example it's not so important to know whether you're interacting whether you're buying or selling something from a human or from a bot and I think that's why crypto kind of works with this initial use case but there are lots of instances where we do care if it's a human that we're interacting with or not say I don't know personal ads well I want to know that it's a human that's put up the ad not a bot right uh communication systems i want to know that if I'm in a chat room that all the other 200 people in the chat room are actually humans not bots right because I use chat to order to get

my uh get opinions about the world get trust about the world get truth about the world i have a much I believe I have a much greater chance of getting truth about the world if I'm interacting with other humans not a single human that comes across as 200 bots right um there are numerous ways how AI because we haven't had proof of personhood there are numerous ways how AI has subverted the course of human consciousness of global consciousness and I think we're starting to sort of measure this stuff we had the Cambridge Analytica thing several years ago on a more recent basis we've got things like um this uh Romania thing uh where the

elections you know 60 or 70,000 Twitter accounts that were sort of big political tweeters were actually it turns out controlled by one Russia aligned entity yeah and it's like because they come across we we as humans are quite like we're driven by not entirely rational factors we seem to see that if there's different avatars on a screen saying using kind of different types of language but all saying the same rough opinion we might think that that opinion is a very popular opinion and we might change our own opinion according to it because we don't want to you know go against the flow too much um or because we believe other people might be just better informed than us there's all sorts of reasons why how our psychology causes us to do not terribly rational

things and there are people out there not great actors people who who act against our interests or against our broad interests that would use this against us um and AI is really facilitating it it's it's giving them huge new tools in their arsenal tools that we haven't yet found a way to work get you to use AI to work against there might be some possible usage of AI to work against but at the end of the day if AI is controlled by a single entity and that entity is someone that can be influenced themselves then we still have a problem um that's why proof of personhood um if we believe in enlightenment liberalism if we believe in democracy if we believe in self- sovereignty if we believe in our core

freedoms then we kind of need proof of personhood in order to ensure that these are respected ensure that we actually live in a digital world where you know we we that that that reflects these principles and if we do not then we risk well we already are really living in a digital world that is essentially um a dystopian uh um uh dictatorship um okay I was going to end the podcast there can't end it on a dystopian world uh comment gavin what are you most optimistic about as we look forward to the next couple of years I think what was in the past was

far from perfect if we look at the social systems that we had in the past they were not perfect you know as someone that grew up I've been alive 44 years um I grew up in the in the West right i grew up in the UK place with pretty strong civil service pretty strong social fabric i mean weakened but still reasonably strong social fabric um it's uh the systems that that we were that were sort of helping us live our lives these sort of so what I call social operating systems right um were uh you know took us to that point but I I you know they they were fast growing weary um and they were fast becoming

outpaced by technology and particularly by it by the internet um and This this becomes problematic this was this has become problematic dramatically problematic and I think that we are starting to see a shift not just in from technologists you know with Bitcoin and Bit Torrent and all the rest of these web three technologies but also from the view of those of leaders right of of whether they're politicians civil servants um but of leaders and I think there is some tumult happening in the world and I think there's a lot of not

so great things coming about from from that but I think there is an opportunity here for there to be some really important changes where technology can be can replace these rusty old oftent times unjust highly sub-optimal systems with kind of much better um much more transparent much more agile sort of social operating systems that's my hope that's what I'm optimistic about and I think in order to do that we need the right technologies and that's why I'm dedicating so much of my time to building this good gavin congrats on everything hell of a journey and uh yeah we're rooting for you see us thank you

thanks J [Music]