The Future of Blockchain and NFTs

Transcript

that alone whenever i teach in any class half the class quits straight away it just doesn't they can't get it 2017 when i first started you had a dollar ethereum note entire class quiz people just can't do this right it's like at the past when you had to set up your home wi-fi landing remember the cisco spider right that transformed the internet because it was so much easier just take your lan cable tuck it in and then it runs right you need to get to that point where it's so much easier to create adoption by lowering all these barriers welcome to the brew i'm your host

falters alomaki and today i'm joined by two special guests all the way from singapore we got ryan and we got cuisine uh from tribe and tribe is a um accelerator oh they have a accelerator inside of it which they're focusing on blockchain technologies which we'll be talking about today the world of blockchain is quite complicated so before we start going into those more complicated things and trying to demystify a lot of things in the world of blockchain i'll give a chance to have you both introduce yourself so ryan how about you get started and give a little brief introduction about yourself cool thanks so much val hi everyone i'm ryan and i'm currently the ceo of tribe as a group so within tribe we actually have a couple of business units right

and accelerators one of them and the other one that we are focusing on right now is the academy to help groom the next generation of frontier tech talents think that is what i'm saying so bell just called me cues here i usually go by my initials these days um as a student i actually did some research on blockchain technology mostly from a security kind of perspective and that sort of brings you into all aspects of blockchain because when you talk about security you talk about how do you make sure things don't break or how do you understand why things broke so now i'm working at running the product side of the house right awesome so i mean we're talking about blockchain here so before we even go into blockchain we have to at least

explain what is blockchain as simply as possible so i i think qz if you you research this a little bit i'm wondering if you could try to explain to me what blockchain is as simply as possible like it's very complicated i think it goes over most people's heads but what is blockchain so i think this is sort of a trick question because blockchain itself is just a data structure so here's a fun fact that i'd like to like to explain when i talk about blockchain which is when you read bitcoin's first paper right the electronic peer-to-peer currency you will not find the word blockchain inside it every time you control f when you look at the pdf you will not find a word blockchain but you will find that very important picture where you have a data structure of a linked list where

it's essentially two blocks chained together by a single line right that pointer to the last block is what changed the blocks so the first explanation is quite simple basically blockchain is basically just uh data packaged into blocks which is just like say like a simple json file right and you have a pointer to the last pump so that data structure actually brings about a lot of properties right because what is kept in the next block is actually a hash of the last block and so very quickly one is a hash a hash is like a digital fingerprint right it's unique to a particular set of data which means that you cannot change it

without somebody else knowing because you can just match yourself and that affords immutability so that's one more aspect of blockchain technology the next thing is that it is run on a decentralized network and these two things are really what creates what we call distributed ledger technologies that use this data structure so that's where the more fun part comes in about blockchain technology which is you can actually create things on a decentralized network that is immutable and the way i like to explain it is that it gives rise to a new kind of asset so if i also send you an email right what happens is that you can just copy it right and you know simple economics if you have infinite supply there's no price

right so how do you create an actual asset you need to create some sort scarcity so in a distributed ledger every single person can only keep a copy or all changes to that particular asset is recorded across the entire network which gives it a sort of permanence like if i give you an apple you can't just split and have two apples right that's why there is some value to the apple when it comes to blockchain technology you can create an asset for example now it's quite popular maybe i'm giving you something to segue into but nfts right this non-fungible token kind of thing it's basically that right you have one single copy with one single owner and it's distributed across the entire ethereum network of like i think now

it's like 8 000 nodes so no one person can simply change it and that's the beauty of blockchain technology right i hope this sort of explains the dichotomy between the data structure and the technology itself and and that's really where you know the the the difference is where you can create something completely new that is sort of autonomous that runs by itself and then this brings me to the last bit of blockchain technology which is the idea of these autonomous agents that exist only on the blockchain and that's where the genius of ethereum started if you read the internet machine that tells you the whole story from 2016 and how it came about and discovered the limitations behind bitcoin

the ability to write smart contracts and that has now become quite synonymous with blockchain technology because simply recording data on a distributed ledger is not enough there's so much more you can do you can actually record code that self executes and that is where you know the entire decentralized dynamics well icos everything ieos liquidity party and yeah that's a very brief introduction to like 11 years of blockchain yeah no i think that that was very well put i mean overall like i think where the misconception comes when it comes to blockchain is uh people immediately will go to cryptos i i think there's just a it's automatic like blockchain equals

cryptocurrency when they're not really looking at blockchain it's it's a technology that enables cryptocurrencies but it's not that crypto like it's not directly they're not the same thing um i think well we had we had one guest on he was one of my information assistants professors that when during my mbas and as well he's uh he works for the account and he's working on how to implement blockchain into governmental kind of agencies and these things and one thing he brought up i thought was unique was the way he was explaining blockchain is that it's it's solving the issue of trust and everything nowadays has a problem with trust when it comes to you know getting things notarized getting legal paperwork for a business everything has this trust factor tied into it and that's what blockchain does it eliminates that of having people

involved and you create trust automatically through a network um but i mean you obviously broke down how that actually happens because what does it mean to have trust through online network uh we'll definitely talk about nfts i have a lot of questions tied into nfts i i think nfcs are just this huge buzz thing that has some applications i think the way that it's talked about right now is a little worrisome to me uh when it comes to the overall application of blockchain but i mean so we hear about this thing called blockchain but we hear cryptocurrency all the time what is blockchain really useful for right we we hear it for currency we hear it for finance and i think that's why it turns off a lot of people is because like i don't care about that world right but blockchain can be used for so

much more um can you provide some like use cases either of you gentlemen on where blockchain can go especially since you you'll have an accelerator program you're hearing these companies come in and pitch ideas that they have what are some applications that we can do with blockchain right um maybe let me just uh share a little bit faster the contextualized thing how i see blockchain being useful as you mentioned right to create trustless right but from a business perspective what does it actually help what's the benefit of averaging a blockchain technology to to you know um improve your processes right so i see it in kind of um two key factors the first one is to reduce costs right the reduced cost of number one uh

networking right that means you know you you don't have to blockchain is now relatively widely adopted right so you don't have to spend the additional cost to create a network infrastructure in order for something to work and the next one would be the cost of verification right so cost of verification can come in time form it can come in economic sense it can come in many many different kinds of uh uh so-called cost right as you mentioned you want to eradicate the need for trust right so to become trustless and what's the purpose of trust right is for me to when i want to verify something i need that level of trust right so if you are able to distill down to these two cost elements then you can see how

blockchain can be beneficial uh for your business right then you can weigh right whether the cost of verification at this moment outweighs whatever i can bring in and that you have a business case so one of the uh examples i think right now would be very relevant would be uh one of our startups are creatified that is actually building a digital health passport right so can you imagine traveling right now right it's gonna be it's it's it's difficult it's difficult right to travel and now you have to submit proof of uh that you have um taken the swap test and that you have been proven narrative or if you have taken a vaccine you need to be able to prove that right so you need to be able to verify that so from that perspective how do you

actually accurately verify if this person is telling the truth you need an authorized form that is endorsed you need to make sure that there are checks and balances in place there is there's a lengthy you know verification process of whether this particular document is accurate it's true it's not authorized and stuff like that so that involves a lot of man hours that involve a lot of so-called cost right so what blockchain is able to do is that if you are able to upload um to some extent your the proof that you have um taken a soap and you have been proven negative when it's the last time right date stamped um did and time stamped

uh the last time you have taken the sword test and you have been proven negative and you have taken vaccine when exactly have you been taken have you taken the vaccine right and that removes uh reduces the the the cost of verification um that is required in order for you to enter a particular country right so so that is one of the use cases that i mean be quite relevant this day and age yeah absolutely did you do you think as for like because i i studied abroad a couple of times and one of the the big issues was i i was actually pretty sick when i was studying abroad in hong kong um and when i was trying to go get um like certain medications and stuff like that it was kind of a pain in the ass because they

didn't have any of my medical you know documents records or anything like that it's part of that background or in another country so do you think that especially for international travelers or somebody who's moving right like through blockchain somebody can pull up my medical records in seconds know that it's accurate um and be able to use it that way do you think that's another use case for it i would say uh to some extent yes but um you don't really want anyone to be able to pull up your medical records right so um a way that a hype scene uh being done would be just to provide that binary answer so for example you need to be of a certain age before you can buy alcohol right so the answer is binary yes or no are you above or below that certain age

you don't need to know my birthday you don't need to know anything else about me you just need the binary answer so that can be uh done as well right i mean the how to you have to ask things uh yeah they ask you yeah absolutely so yeah so so pretty much what you're saying is like um as for it it's public record right like anybody can kind of pull this up and it's anonymous data but it's still it's public record i mean that's the one thing that it's great about it it's like it's out there but it's also out there so it's a bad problem at the same time so do you think as especially then for for data sets and stuff like that it's more important to have yeah like the binary yes or no uh and you only show what you want to show that you can

get that medical treatment right like um yes or no uh on like a blood type something that's like it's not not too specific but it can get you that medical treatment that can save your life in a matter of seconds uh in another country where you might not have access to your data records and all these kinds of things so do you think that's kind of the applications like quick administration on very functional things that are like very you know detrimental if you don't have that access yeah for sure right like like i mentioned the cost of verification so in this case the cost of verification is alive yeah so if you are if i mean if you delay that that that that ability for for someone to check on simple basic stuff um and that can be that is actually

verified by a a proven authority then then you die so in this case the cost of verification is extremely high yeah okay so as for creating a system like this right like this is this is where it gets it gets very technical very fast um but now there's more and more tools you know accessible for people to create these solutions so how would somebody go about let's say that they had this idea of like something that's at high risk how would they go even about like thinking conceptually like how this gets built out in a blockchain system right so i think uh you don't usually go from the build from scratch to approach anymore blockchain has been around for quite a

while off the top of my head because i was moderating at a conference i think on sunday and sovereign foundation was there so what the sovereign foundation does is and this is how the chairman explained it which was that they run the largest identification network so that they can give every item and identity not just carbon based life which i was a bit surprised because i think then he elaborated by saying even iot devices can also be given an identity like right now your computer probably has a magnificence right so that's my guess of where he's going with that so the first one is actually through the sovereign foundation where they try and provide what you call

decentralized identity or sovereign identity um for that you can look a bit deeper into the i think the w3c consortium for decentralized identifiers where they actually codify like exactly how this identifier will look like so that's one uh interestingly we had a chance to work on this with we bank as part of our student practicums to provide some sort of simple decentralized id uh for contextualizing so it was a very simple smart contract where every time you enter you actually record an event if you enter the building or you didn't and if you have an exposure event you just click and then you just put all the records and okay you know it's all there so that's one way right if you want to use a public

blockchain for a lot of these use cases actually you don't use public blockchains uh for the reasons that ryan is actually explaining privacy is quite important so the other side of the house i think is hyperledger indeed and this was really interesting because uh it's not just for medical records right it's about giving you an identity that's verifiable verifiable credentials right for hyperledger indeed i remember seeing somewhere where they used hyperledger indeed to verify the status of uh bankruptcy i think and that was in the netherlands right where you know if you have to do something you know you'll be able to check whether you are a discharge bankrupt before you know you're trying

to get a loan or something or to see your progress uh throughout this entire i'm not familiar with the bankruptcy proceedings but i think it's important to keep track of the person as you go along um this entire process so that's one way um when it comes to medical records it's actually quite sensitive i'll talk about the benefits of having a decentralized one and there's this very public i suppose scandal where actually in singapore i think our country nationalized our medical records from to a national system across singapore and i think it was 2019 where very publicly i really commend the government for

dealing with it very well everybody who had their medical records exposed got an sms to say that hey you know uh your your medical records were exposed i think our prime minister head is exposed uh two million records were lost and that's one of the issues of having a 100 centralized system right in a decentralized system the part where you can reveal what you want to show that's part of what you call privacy preserving mechanisms and that particular way is something called zero knowledge proofs where you can just essentially ask a question and all you will get is just the answer so an example that they tend to give is really when you buy alcohol i'm not sure why but it seems to be a national international problem right where buying alcohol is a problem

and so what happens is right now when you go to uh a convenience store right and you want to buy alcohol you have to give them your id right this could be your driver's license it could be all sorts of things but you're revealing way too much information to the cashier right your your for us you have your your housing address right on your national id that is that can end up very detrimental so instead if there was simply a verifiable credential and some implementations of that habit just as like some sort of digital wallet where you just show the person he checks your id and all he gets or he or she gets is just yes or no whether you're underage or overage nothing more right and that's also the benefit of

having a verifiable credential rather than just some sort of like paper based credential yeah so that's maybe a bit more into what are some of the key words in terms of implementation but there are many different types of implementation uh generally there are some principles here you know the right to privacy i think the right to forgot being forgotten like some of these digital rights um these are the guiding principles when uh people try to implement these sort of identity systems how did it i mean i i think one important thing that you just brought up which is how blockchain also leads to more privacy uh which i think is is has become a problem now with the way that online mediums can be tracked so easily like anywhere you go you they know all your

behavior so they know everything you're clicking on they know all your search history nothing that you get for free is free i mean someone that you get a gmail account all that is queryable i mean anything you do with your google account they can track back to you um so do you think that's the other part that blockchain is gonna be able to solve right is that that data privacy for the consumer um and also i guess the question also tied into that is being able to later monetize your own data because that's one thing i i do believe that we're eventually going to get to where it's like consumers will be willing to give their data out there but only to the companies they want to um and being able to be compensated for providing their data to create data sets it's a complication between marketers

i'm a marketer myself i want my data but at the same time i understand the consumer side i don't like to be tracked everywhere um so do you think blockchain is uh there's there's use cases of the technology to create this privacy network for the consumer end yeah i think we have had multiple use cases on this particular data marketplace right it's quite a common use case and it is to some extent valid right to to be able to um you know verify that your your your data has been used in this way and your data has been used in that way right and he has been exposed to this person or that he has been exposed to that person and um

and i want to get paid for it right because you know it's my data how are you using my data without without pay but um in terms of adoption uh i think there isn't one that is quite widely adopted as soft now i might be wrong right um but yeah so so it's definitely a valid use case it's just i think it could be a matter of time right and the right kind of execution in order for for these kind of solutions to be widely adopted and implemented yeah you got it my thoughts like i think uh i think the first question is why do you want to track data right so primarily i think targeted ads are very good

because it saves me search costs i don't like to be recommended random things like during the lockdown i got recommended like cocktails on delivery and that was a lifesaver man sure was so i think the difference here is that you no longer have to attract people that much i think just because you care doesn't mean you should right and google can and but they shouldn't do this they shouldn't check you across browsers and that's ridiculous right now they track you across devices they attract you across i don't know accounts right they can tie different accounts to it's ridiculous but the reason for this is because they have a business model right in

advertising and when you want to advertise uh with the power of machine learning you can do a collaborative filtering you can you know netflix is really good at this can recommend you things that you really want and that provides a good user experience but that's only if you have a vast data warehouse then you can verify you know because you're watching every single thing the person is doing that okay this person is really interested in that some other implementations that sort of solve this problem that i've come across is actually um one of our companies that we also work with uh silica where they actually came out of this thing called social pain right and this is interesting because when i first thought of it i was like why didn't i think of it

because it's so simple right like a lot of people have twitter accounts but twitter hasn't been able to really monetize it a lot maybe they have like feature feeds that kind of thing i think they have maybe jack gauzy didn't want to deliberately monetize all your most deepest thoughts on the internet but also what's interesting is that how the social paid mechanism works is you sign up for this so it's completely voluntary right you decide okay i want to be a part of this uh marketing uh campaign right so you put out your twitter handle i think it's going to handle right to the handle and your little wallet so what happens is say there's a marketing campaign and you repost or you post uh some some words or

a short banner with the hashtag like i think that time was copic heroes something right straight away the bot picks it up and pays you for helping people market and that's really very different right because not too long ago apparently uber spent i don't know it was 30 but i think 300 something more like it 300 million dollars on facebook ads and then they were like okay i need to cut because my cash flow isn't doing so well they cut to 150 but apparently they didn't really see any difference in performance of their ads which now begs the question what the heck is facebook doing how come my ad spend and i still have the same performance so you go back to what blockchain is good at right the whole uh immutability decentralization

permanence right verifiability now you can create verifiable ads because you see it you're paid for it and you don't have to rely on these centralized aggregators right you don't have to trust them so you go back to the whole trustlessness thing now i can do ads in a word-of-mouth way something we've been doing for like three thousand four thousand years in a very normal way rather than relying on this very large sort of monopolistic i can say it's not cause they're in suit right but very large sort of monopolistic at marketplaces that control the entire ad life cycle from not just like bidding for ads all the way to who actually gets to see the ads right now you can sort of decentralize that and create more automatic ad

marketplaces and you still see what you want so maybe that's a different sort of approach where the question is do you really need to attract anybody everybody now you don't have to do it anymore and also uh you can still sort of achieve what you wanted at the very beginning which is you know targeted ends i think that's not that's that's super super super fascinating like the whole constantly kind of brought up with being able to have people get paid to share a message or expand it out i think that's so powerful because in the world of marketing what creates social credibility creates any value behind it like you can run an ad in front of people right and it'd be a great ad um but it's not gonna make people click

because the the fundamental of human behavior comes from other people talk that's why word of mouth still is the dominant form of marketing is because if you can say somebody else speak on your behalf authentically about what you're doing you already get that barrier of i don't know this brand now let's give it a shot let's see what they can do and can they actually solve my problem and you can get through that barrier faster so i think that's actually really fascinating if you can enable people to get paid to do that on your behalf because influencer marketing is expanding really fast and it's becoming more and more dominant um versus any other mediums and then pay-per-click marketing is getting way more expensive and it's not yielding those results so it's kind of like this this fight of like what what is my next tool for a marketer and then on the

consumer end um if you can protect more of your data and get paid for more of your data and all these things i think that it'll it'll make more healthy of a advertising world and create more value for both parties involved so i think that's a very very fascinating concept when it comes to blockchain and the application of it but i i guess kind of tying into this is the before we go into nfts because i feel like that's gonna be like 45 minutes by itself but before we go into that uh as for blockchain as you brought up there there's the adoption right there's an adoption curve there like any anything you're doing and and i i was at the blockchain summit in la uh here in uh 2019 um and one thing that was really fascinating about everybody who's talking about blockchain there was the biggest fundamental

problem getting that adoption is education around the solutions it's solving and not talking about the technology because as it was entered into the market it was all technology driven so technical and everyday person has no idea what the hell you're talking about it's not going to create any adoption there because people don't know what it is so have you noticed that there's now more kind of adoptions growing because people are learning how to articulate the problem and how blockchain is solving it and do you think that's getting better overall i think uh it's very interesting that you pointed that out because if you notice uh uh i mean previously we we spoke about this right that you have watched some of the demo day videos that we have we focus very much on the problem that they're

trying to solve because at the end of the day that's what the technology is an enabler right that enables you to solve certain problems that you can't do otherwise right so that is actually the narrative that we are trying to to to educate as well right if you go um i mean one of the platforms that we have here called opennotes that is supported by uh imda in singapore which is the infocomm media authority of singapore uh so open notes is a platform that that is uh trying to bring up use cases from a problems perspective from a use case perspective right uh without diving too much into the technology because once you are sold on the use case you're sold on the problem it's big enough for you to pay

for it and then we get to the how-to right and the how-to more often than not is the incorporation of multi-um different kinds of technology right you have blockchain there could be also iot machine learning ai right all all um cooked in one pot right in order for for you to be able to come up with a solution so i think yeah i mean that's absolutely right and if that is the trajectory that a blockchain narrative is taking then of course we should be able to see a greater adoption because people now can understand and visualize how i can leverage on this technology to to solve certain problems that that i have right yeah another analogy that used is i'm old enough to remember dealing with

modems when you work with blockchain technology right um at the very beginning you have to connect to the network right you get a test either on your test whatever network reason then that alone whenever i teach in any class half the class quits straight away it just doesn't they can't get it 2017 when i first started you had a dollar ethereum node entire class quiz people just can't do this right it's like at the past when you had to set up your home wi-fi landing remember the cisco spider right that transformed the internet because it was so much easier just take your lan cable tuck it in and then it runs right you need to get to that point

where it's so much easier to create adoption by lowering all these barriers to entry that takes time so stuff like infuria api gateways right these gateways that make it easier for people to connect that helps a lot another example is mobile internet right i think internet adoption really exploded when mobile became a thing right because you don't have to do anything you just turn on mobile data and straight away you are connected all your apps are working apple's really good at this all your apps automatically update which is kind of creepy because sometimes the thing changes and i'm like hey whatever is this so that's the difference right when you first enter uh it usually starts with the technologists right and we are there

clearing all the weeds solving all the problems trying to make it so that next time when you connect to a blockchain uh it doesn't feel so difficult so like for example if you have used metamask right that really helped adoption because it's just this cute box you click it come down put in your password right login oh which network you want to connect to mainnet testnet one testnet to your own net right and that user experience benefit has made it so much easier for people to use blockchain technology because before that you've got a call command line and everyone just stops i mean at the end of the day you don't even know you don't even need to know how it works right just like how your like what uh

qc mentioned right on on your mobile phone i mean you don't even know how it's connected at this moment right like all you know is if there's no network you know you try to raise your hand as high as possible but yeah that is the extent of what layman would understand how the technology work but it works all right so we have to get to that that point that state and then you can start to see you know a wider wider adoption yeah that that's always been my fascination because i i always like reading the technical specs and how it's going but that that's not how more ever markets ever adopt anything because there was smartphones before with apple there was there's always been technology before somebody else but what tends to be that that click is when the the innovation can go at a certain pace and consumers can

understand the tangible aspect of it um and do you think based off that right like we're now in a huge no code movement as well do you think that that's another part is like once we figure out ways that we can create blockchain solutions um leveraging no code do you think that's also when there would be a more massive boom because that doesn't rely on technical skills of a student it requires just more innovation and ideas um and someone who can understand design and basics it doesn't need that technical lens do you think that's also going to be a huge kind of a boom aspect when it comes to world blockchain uh yeah i mean of course right but but i think it would be some time

before that can happen yeah right uh it's not straightforward you still do i have to understand certain elements of that networking in order for you to to to build something on the blockchain right um but yeah of course i mean if it's if you can get to the point where you can view application on the blockchain like how you build a website on rigs or or website on wordpress right or um what's the latest web flow maybe right then of course you can see more and more you know applications that are leveraging on the blockchain start to come up because then you kind of democratize the ability for people to build stuff on the blockchain right right now uh it's very technical right majority of the applications are built by technologists right um but if you're if you

combine this with the no code movement you allow you democratize the ability for people to build then you can see the message influx of ideas because you know the no one group of people have you know uh uh dominance over good ideas right yeah so so you know the ideas can come from anywhere now so of course then um we'll see a wider adoption but like i i said earlier i think it will take some time before we can actually uh get to that point yeah yeah that makes sense yeah exactly but to get to know code you need standardized libraries that take some time uh ethereum is infamous for being very not secure because of the whole curing completeness thing which means that your

entire attack surface is internet right so anybody can do anything there are all sorts of new vulnerabilities discovered uh some vulnerabilities are just like coding mishaps like people killing the wallet by accident that did happen and like i think a few million dollars were lost so that's going to take some time before you can get to no code right because no code when all the problems are solved already here are some use cases just take it and use it okay bye mix out of the box kind of stuff yeah yeah yeah we got we have we have a long long ways to go into that um what do you think then on um as for adoption as well we have to look at the threats of blockchain right and like restrictions that are kind of pushing it back so obviously we have

certain governmental regulations that are still kind of hindering on it we have the um the kind of worry of you know money laundering fraud criminal activities these kinds of things more anonymous the more it opens the door for criminal activities um do you think any of those are serious threats or they're more of just conversation because i personally think that this is the first technology that's out there and it doesn't matter what anybody says it's out there like it's not going to disappear right like nobody can technically regulate it because it came from deregulation so you can't just like now regulate and expect something to happen but do you think any of these are serious threats that will uh hinder the growth of blockchain and adoption of it um i don't think it will hinder the adoption and growth of blockchain just

like how when the i mean you have internet right you can do all sorts of shady stuff with the internet as well right that has not hindered the growth and adoption of the internet or applications for that matter right um but in terms of regulation i think uh uh you know you can't regulate something that hasn't happened so of course regulation is going to be a few steps behind but what is important is for government especially especially something like singapore government that is very proactive in not just uh trying to understand the industry but also taking a deep dive into what exactly are people trying to do with this technology how can it improve and then coming up with their own use cases like

uh for example gothic launched the open certs right which allows us to put our tertiary education certification on the blockchain so that people can verify that you know you actually come from this particular school yeah so so a very hands-on approach right to understanding the technology and then the next part of regulation is clarity because the greater you leave some stuff the more people will be afraid to try right the clearer the regulation can become then we can see you know the adoption uh can come back but before that can happen you know you really need to be understanding that and be proactive right in the industry from of course from a regulatory standpoint yeah i would totally agree actually in fact i

guess a good mantra is like seek first to understand but i mean you can't regulate something that you don't know right and then you just okay bend it like it's like approach very easy i think good regulation is actually quite healthy for society i think for singapore we are very pro on regulation and a good example is actually how we regulate the food industry so uh clean food healthy food is important right that means you have to regulate all aspects from the import to food handling right so if you want to start a shop in singapore you need to go for food handling course and there are multiple levels and only when you have a certificate

then we let you open the store right because people's health are at risk right so generally when it comes to a public good approach i think regulation is important so financial health is just important right that's why i actually if i remember correctly for mes we regulate digital assets like any other asset it's just like a capital market except why because it's very dangerous if you were to play the derivatives market when you were to do margins or you were to leverage right you somebody who doesn't understand who can't do that chart doesn't understand that there is unlimited upside unlimited downside and when we meet unlimited it's really unlimited you could lose your entire like net worth if someone plays a gm

right that's how risky it can be and this is exacerbated on uh decentralized finance because you don't have a clearinghouse to protect you anymore so in stock exchanges right remember correctly if the price drops by more than 15 they just help trading yeah because something is wrong right how can the price disappear in 15 in like an hour somebody's manipulating or there's some sort of error right in the blockchain or cryptocurrency world if you know what happened with the dao attack in 2016 uh there's no nothing stops you right now in fact because it's so immutable uh i think the hacker actually left a note that basically thanked the entire

organization for the free money and said since you said code is law i exploited the code uh it should be really exploited it is allowed because code is law thanks for 160 million dollars it's that difficult and so regulation is important because if not you end up with these bad actors right who are on the same playing field as you decentralization also means that everybody is now equal right and it's always a playing catch-up something right like police do say like body cameras then like i think the protesters will then do some sort of light thing so that the cameras don't work and then they move up to infrared it's always an arms race

right in a decentralized world this is like the ultimate evolutionary suit right everybody is just doing things on on a completely decentralized world this is the extent when many years ago there was cryptocurrency right with nft right it exists as a single digital asset on the blockchain people are trading it for ridiculous amounts but you don't know that you can actually create like a wrapper or some sort of smart contract that specially interacts just with cryptokitties so someone created crypto dragons where you're supposed to eat cryptokitties and everybody has learned zombies right when you eat cryptokitties too and you level up your cryptozorbies that is the level of interaction that you can have right in a typical finance world there are

standardized contracts right sports calls options like all these different uh derivatives remember correctly uh standardized right and so you can create a market it's predictable but nothing funny happens if you choose to go for bespoke derivatives the risk is on you you should go and study it but because it's so complex and the risks are all there right people are forewarned now you show up hey this white paper do you want to buy that's not very people cannot make good decisions also yeah so i think if regulation is going to happen it's going to go through this way so that's one approach right which is regulate the types of uh users use cases for

blockchain cryptocurrency digital assets the other approach which i'm finding quite interesting and a bit antithetical to the decentralized aspect of blockchain are governments springing up their own doctrine networks so one thing that i found quite surprising because i only discovered it i think last year is china is building its own blockchain service network so i think bitcoin jumped up i'm not sure why but when uh presidency right sid in his speech and i have a book in chinese about blockchain actually and says that we need to harness the power of blockchain technology for these i think four or five use cases right straight away everybody moves right okay we use it for this all right

what are the use cases okay presidency says this is fine let's do it and now china is using blockchain everywhere because we have a privilege of working in a wee bank so sometimes when they present and see what they do and it's ridiculous because you're like oh they're trying to get adoption material like oh yeah we got the whole city to use it for kobe uh 8 million for you you're like what right like 10 cent or is it by two the entire copyright of books in china is on us on the blockchain oh wow yeah it's it's amazing like you're like it's so mind-blowing right and then now they can also do micro loans because you know the regulatory landscape has clear yeah so once the sky is clear then you can

play in the field yeah so i think this is these are the top two approaches to regulation yeah if that makes sense yeah like like for me overall is i i get the appeal for most people where they don't want any regulation behind it because it's kind of that anarchist feel of why like you know cryptocurrency came about why blockchain was invented or found out through exactly kind of the push against the markets and these kinds of things but i do think that there's a lot of downside to that a lot of people don't talk about which is exactly what you talk about it's just i don't think the market is sophisticated enough and it's kind of messed up to say that like you're not sophisticated enough as a human being but if there's a lot there's a lack of education there which which causes bad ideas which causes massive

implications when it comes to like you know anything globally like people don't really rationalize it like nfts right now i think it's a great segue to nfts right now it's just so irrational which worries me it's the same thing with the entire kind of crypto boom that happened in 2018 2017 2018 and then now we have nfts once again in the spotlight um and people kind of peddling it um and people don't understand it at all like they have zero clue what's going on but then elon musk can sell its wheat for 1.1 million dollars he didn't do it because he felt unethical about it right but like can can you guys explain to me how like when it comes to world of like nfts and stuff like that is that something of

value or is that something of hype because i i do think it has applications um but as of right now i'm very troubled by it just because of how it's hit the limelight and how people are kind of perceiving nfts well i think in the long run the value of nfp will will be determined by willing buyer willing seller right like whoever is willing to buy at this particular price and whoever is willing to sell this particular price that is the price right um nft at its core has merits right to some extent um especially for digital artists or maybe digital songwriter where you don't want your work to necessarily be easily replicated and plagiarized

uh and and you should be able to track a particular work to the the origin all right who exactly created it first and then who has the right then to sell it because you spend so much effort so much time so much education in learning how to build that particular or create a particular art or the particular song you don't want someone to you know just plagiarize it and you know make money off your hard work right so that in itself has value right uh but the value in itself the the actual value amount that at this moment i think it's it might be a little bit over hype um simply because of its novelty simply because uh people don't really uh truly understand what it is

and therefore there is just this this huge gap in terms of informational gap and then therefore you know you you have people paying um insane amount for it right so so that is at least uh whatever i think one example could be the recent uh song the um we can achieve versus uh the account on me singapore i'm not sure if you're aware so basically kind of me singapore is actually a national day song that's written in um 1985 or is it 83 85 i think it's like yeah okay so 1985 and then someone in india uh with an almost identical song right uh so they just replaced the word count on

me singapore economy india right uh and then he said that he created his song in 1983 right so there was this suit uh i mean huge controversy that came out right on social media at least in this in this part of the world uh who who created what how do you prove it right the indian guy said that oh you know a lot of my my proof of work has been washed away by the flood uh in in mumbai and and and um yeah so so with nfts if it was then and then you created it and generated an nft to prove that hey this is the original song um that might you know kind of uh uh

you know reduce the cost of verification verifying a particular owner or origin of a particular song right so so yeah there is you know inherent value in in nfps i believe yeah just the quantum is the one that we have to you know be careful about like how much do you actually yeah is it supposed to be value got it i think uh so nft said it's called is this erc seven to one standard remember correctly uh it's nothing new and in fact every singaporean has one so the open search uh format is actually basically an nfp uh it's a bit different but it's on ethereum right uh i think that's the benefit of any keys

as brian mentioned right proving ownership right like doing ownership is a very difficult problem uh because of the global nature of things these days but you i mean how do you prove ownership of like a video or a picture i think there is irrational exuberance here but also i think it might be it might be misguided in a sense that people just see that prices and the headlines just report the prices but people aren't stupid there is a reason why the prices are so high um i think the best and i'm not sure if i'm getting this right but i remember

there's a people artwork and somebody don't know how many million this entrepreneur what they are actually doing is similar to what grayscale is doing with bitcoin so nfts are digital art right it's a it's no different from another company that we work with digix and digital gold right or any other sort of real life asset that is tokenized onto the blockchain right what this person is doing is he is just accumulating digital art and then creating his own digital art index and people can buy into the index and he's gaining back the 69 million in very very quickly so people don't realize this but actually uh it's not it's not a stupid move it's a

business move if i'm not sure which philosopher it was but remember the guy who bought up all of the olive presses before holiday season i think that's the same idea when you buy up all of the different digital art pieces suddenly your sort of bees again creates your marketplace your own marketplace and now you can buy and sell you should ask i'm not sure if this is going to be their play but it's not impossible either uh because there is the same thing has happened in cryptocurrencies right where you have massive centralization this coinbase gemini these large crypto exchanges where people you know put their money there and be like okay these companies are quite secure history tells me that i think

you know one or two of them are going to collapse uh what was it again empty cogs right that bitcoin price right that was like 2012 or something right where the whole exchange disappeared people until now are still getting for the sec to return their bitcoin that's not four thousand land or something right there's so much centralization and i think that's happening uh well that's a slight digression so back to nfps right um nfcs are a fun thing to play with right uh if they truly can be clearly represented with that store value so for open search right it's

backed by like you know the certificate the the id is backed by the singapore government server right when you go in you check the certificate is really there right there is a real use case for having all of our certificates to be on this this open search format in digital art there was one very simple example that tells you the risks of nfps even though they might say okay i use the erc seven one seven two one thing not a lot of people can read code right so they don't actually go in and check sometimes they change it they add a piece of code inside that you don't know you know they might include something that you you didn't check but you're not sure these nfp marketplaces you know people are just trying to chase the price you don't go and verify it yourself which defeats the whole purpose of like

decentralization and open sourcing right like this just doesn't make any sense and more importantly i think um when you look at nf keys what happens is that it's not implemented properly also i think there was an artist that pulled the rug on all of the people who bought his nfps by literally replacing the image with a luck so there is an entire collection of entities or just pictures of rocks and they're like hey this is what's gonna happen i'm gonna do a banksy on you and shred the artwork in front of you so i think you to be careful uh and until maybe a more conservative or something but maybe you know

until this can be better controlled or at least there are the easier ways for people to check what exactly you are buying and not just trust decentralized marketplaces like i don't know what's mintable then things will cool down a bit yeah i i it's fascinating that you brought up just kind of how easy it is to actually manipulate it there's the lack of information there there's there's just so many i think unknown factors which which is why i'm a little worried about it because i i do think the long-term value is there i'm uh work a lot with people in the music industry and one huge problem with musicians and content creators and all these is that it's very hard to authenticate and track your value across i mean it's funny because we went from an era of like limewire and napster and

all these things to illegally get stuff for free and now we're going towards the realm of like no let's track it from start to finish and prove that my content has value and if you're using it anywhere at a bar you're streaming or whatever it is i need to get my my cut for that um i think it's heading in the right directions giving value back to those that created because there's a huge gap between creatures and then those that consume i think people don't recognize that um and that's why a lot of musicians early stage are they struggle a lot is because unless you start having additional deals revenue on the side you don't make money for music almost ever um so it's just this gap but i i think it's just super fascinating just to see how um irrational we are about uh blockchain

and uh blockchain technologies and everything and we're just so driven by like the headlines and what they're stating and where things are going um which kind of brings me brings me to the main kind of closeout of this is the education of blockchain right so how should we go about educating you know the upcoming stars of the world of blockchain how do we get them to understand you know solutions they can like problems that they can solve via blockchain solutions the complications with blockchain and actually understand the research behind it because we we we're nowhere when it comes to the research of blockchain in my opinion i think weavers so early stages there's so much application to it that we're not even considering right now um so how do we

actually educate the next generation of those that are gonna go in the world of blockchain um well maybe let me just uh share a little bit of what we have done right uh our part right in trying to to educate next generation or in fact the current generation or the older generation right so we've conducted multiple workshops and talks right all in aim of helping people understand better what blockchain is what it can be used for and most importantly what it cannot or should not be used for what are the considerations behind leveraging on this technology like i mentioned the business case behind you know

blockchain you shouldn't i mean you shouldn't blockchain everything there is no need to because uh there are other ways you can you can meet your current solution uh um at that particular price point right so you know business owners business uh or potential entrepreneurs right we we try to help them understand the considerations right uh what are the pros and what are the concepts with most technology right there are pros and cons and what are the alternatives um so but that is from a very high touch perspective right because you know you have to conduct workshops there's only limit of hours a day that you can do such thing and i think that was also why we kind of conceptualized opennotes as well opennotes.com um for us to

create a more um i would say inclusive right uh ecosystem for people to be able to understand um blockchain from a more use case perspective right and of course you know content is crowdsourced anyone can actually you know put up content and but it is called what it's trying to do it's trying to make this information digestible and understandable from from for non-technical folks like myself right um what are considerations pros and cons what are the things that other people have explored tried doing um what's the output and stuff like that yeah so i guess from an education standpoint right it's about you know the beyond the technical knowledge and technical know-how

right it's also through the considerations behind the pros and cons the business value uh uh um helping peop you know business owners entrepreneurs or people who have ideas right the ideas man right to to see it yeah i think we need to have people with less vested interest in blockchain team blockchain so for track for example we are ecosystem builder it's a bit different from somebody who runs an exchange uh i think a lot of blockchain education is uh exchange driven i don't know how to put it

i mean when you see like gemini oh blockchain right there's always gemini educate like finance academy i don't know there's so many of these like academies that teach people cryptocurrency first and the other day i was looking at my my finance at course i was just curious what's happening right and like this is your daily challenge trade this much of usd tether uh leverage or margin for what i was like i was just thinking this is dangerous how is this my daily challenge it's a thousand bucks you're asking me to put in for a reward of two usd i was like what there's no return to this that is the challenge how do you not lose all your thousand dollars

how do you lose not lose your money that's the challenge because i think by today's session you can already know to get into blockchain you need to understand a lot of things right all the internet works a bit of economics a lot of incentives a bit of like networking a bit of like development tools trends history of technology like there's so much you got to do to go in which i think makes it really fun but not everybody he's here for fun or you know has the interest in all of this so maybe something more digestible will help actually there's a lot of these uh tools out there that help you learn uh people generally recommend mit's course blockchain networking course cryptozombies

i i think i even did one open notes it's a horrible name it's self dash paste course dot open house as an experiment right just teach people like how do you uh utilize blockchain technology and at the end of the course the challenge is for you to put your name on to a testnet and then send me your email and then i can get you to join the student club well just for fun right but i think in general we need more of these things that are not so technical right because it's yes you know it's important to know the technology side of things but the barrier to entry is so high and that defeats the whole democratization of technology part so what if there's internet all over if you don't have your phone

to connect to you right you cannot use you cannot harness the benefits of this technology then you might as well not have it when it comes to education uh i think it always starts from the intent right like why do you want to learn about this if you are learning about this to make a quick buck then that's not going to work if you're learning about this looking how the mediums of exchange are transforming right in this new world right i mean just following the different ethereum improvement proposals right erc20 created the ico boom erc721 created the nfp boom what are the some of the other ercs that exist right there's one more that's creating

subscription models on the blockchain right so many things that i think people can get educated about and they could give it a shot right i think for digital artists probably a subscription model thing might work consensus agents were using it for a couple of years really for their digital tools where you can use their security tool and you just pay i think for excess on a smart contract right i think that's that's something that will be quite important uh to do that whole technology translation part right so uh clean technology like who writes it down wins right like we get the right history so there the good thing about open source is that everybody likes to document or maybe not likes but we tend to document we write things down right and there's always proper formal

documents but they're not very accessible so i think something really good was like ethereum's yellow paper or something this is like a white paper there's a theorem yellow paper which i think strips it off it's technical terms it makes it very accessible to tell you like okay what exactly is a infinite wall stick machine like none of these things are non-technical rather than glow right so these little i guess micro optimizations will help make things a bit more digestible will really help but also from a curiosity perspective i think people need to be more curious about what you're doing i think this is also happening uh now like we are a bit more curious about hey what's the carbon footprint of this

where's my food coming from right now we have the luxury of asking these kind of questions i don't see why it shouldn't apply to the technology we use right like where is the search going what data are you collecting there's a general sort of awakening to the technology that we are using because it's becoming more and more insidious right things are not so obvious anymore i mean you want to end up like a new tokyo cyberpunk kind of wall where you know everything is like wow i don't want to be a netrunner so i guess a mixture of both both ends of the market have to work out curiosity and neutral educators i i think it's a an interesting point

that you brought up which is the concept of neutral educators and and having people like i i think the reason why blockchain is just so out of reach is the ones that are teaching it i think there's two fundamental problems the education of it one it's taught purely to computer science students there's no curiosity allows for like you know from different disciplines to even get immersed into it because if you get a taste to this of like a business student that's you know conceptualizing they might come with a great business model idea for it then they can work with engineers you know create it and make it actually come to life um i think that part's missing the ecosystem is it is and it's complicated i get it like that's why you have to start with cs programs i understand it's educated first but i think that's one it's like they

should give more like use case samples and teach this in business schools and all these i think that would help it and then ask for who is teaching it i do think that it should be those that are not so caught up in what exists today because the future is not today and like what we're creating out of this technology shouldn't be taught by those that think that they know it all because that's a very dangerous mindset that doesn't create any innovation or anything out of it so i think those that can understand the technology and talk about it but aren't tied into these industries that exist today i think that is a very important piece of that pie so that it's not biased of how we're educating the next generation of this technology and saying that this is the best way to do that i think

more curious minded individuals will create such great innovation as we head forward um it's always so fascinating to hear like like younger generations like even 13 to 14 year olds that are like even though they're doing nfts i'm like you know it's still a problem but aside from that at least they're getting curious about nfts and like trying it out and trying different things and learning about the world of it at a young age because then once they do get older they might want to make an innovation actual idea out of it overall um but yeah so i mean we dug into a lot of stuff around blockchain uh very complicated world um the way that we always end this show um it's up to you both of you if you want to share a different story but we always end with failure stories

reasoning for that is because one thing i really want to showcase to aspiring students is that if you want to make it in the real world it's not easy there's a lot of pitfalls there's a lot of mistakes that you make but you usually learn from those and that's how you end up prospering um so we always end with a failure story it's completely up to what you would like to share but the floor is yours either you gentlemen have any stories to share um yeah maybe i can go first uh so i i think that it's a very very good point that you're making right because the the path to success or success in relative right it's not always a straight line um so so personally i've encountered a lot of failures i don't even know where

to start from but since this topic is about blockchain there's one particular blockchain that i like a blockchain story that i like to share which was i think in about 2016 right um or basically quite early in the whole blockchain life cycle right my previous startup fixer which was actually uh working on you know how we can better prove uh a particular car part part right is you know original because you don't want a scenario where you're buying um car parts and then it's fake it's it's it's not original and then

it becomes dangerous right uh things can go wrong so so that particular startup is that was one of the piece that we are working on and we actually did explore uh using blockchain right um back then there wasn't so much of the cryptocurrency hype right it was purely from a necessity standpoint right how can we ensure that uh because there is multiple requirements right if you understand the car parts uh industry right you have the oem the makers right all the way down to the distributors there are many many you know stakeholders involved in this entire supply chain and how do we ensure that at every point of time the right parts the original part is the one being brought along all the way to the consumer so we're trying to explore that um and

and it didn't work we spent a lot of time on it and uh in the end the startup didn't take off right so i spent like good two years of my life i was trying to work on it a lot of time and and valiant income right but because of that right um when we first started tribe accelerator i had an understanding that the technology can be used for much more than cryptocurrency because of that particular instance right i knew hey there is a whole other world out there that we need to anchor on and that we need to help to build and that was kind of one of the the one of the key inspirations behind it so when you are you know at that point

right you may think that oh man i'm such a failure i wasted so much for my team's effort i wasted so much time and uh my investors money and stuff like that but retrospect without that touch point i wouldn't i might not have you know gotten this kind of uh uh appreciation for the technology yeah so yeah so don't do i guess the aim of the story is don't be afraid to try and don't be afraid to fail because you never know when this might become useful in the future yeah absolutely that's a that's a really great story that really kind of hits home on to the concept of um like if you don't put yourself out there you don't really know what exists and i i think that is a struggle for a lot of students they hold themselves

back because they're like i don't want to deal with that you know like that shame of failing whatever but it's like no if you don't put yourself out there you don't really know what your potential is and what you can potentially reach uh with your career uh qc you got a story for us yeah so i think here's my take on failure itself first yeah uh i think one of my favorite professors from douglas from satu told me because we were preparing for a competition and when you do something wrong when you're preparing when you have these little tweaks right don't take it personally it's just data that really stuck with me uh and so one of my failure stories in blockchain uh there are just so many um but i think the first time i was doing research

right we if you ever entered a room with six professors and just kept tongue twisted not sure what to do so this is a small type of failure right but because i i don't know why but i've always been fascinated with technology because of the benefits we can bring and throughout time every single time i try something you're going to fail once like every single thing you do i remember writing a paper a team of mine jin latasha shrine and my craft syndrome ivan's six people lenion all these folks came together to write a paper about bitcoin's vulnerabilities uh and we say three times nothing ever beats you when you get a

rejection and you get we reject we reject we accept all the way until you get accept we accept what you said and that's when you finally get your own paper published and that took a whole year a whole year of looking at the same eight pages right tiny font tweaking but it's just data right every single time i get feedback from these professors i learn how to write better i learn how to explain better and that's just one right um i remember once i was trying to apply for internship i think this is more relevant to students with uh consensus diligence right it wasn't anybody's fault we just couldn't go overseas there were just some issues uh couldn't get the pisa and all that and it didn't work out right but because

of that i stayed in singapore and because of being in singapore i met emailing from tribe just ryan's managing and that's the story of sort of how i i managed to get into trying because i failed to get into consensus so i think it's a bit interesting in a sense because when you look back you know steve jobs said like you know when you connect the dots backwards it always works right i see it a bit differently in a sense that of course it connects time is linear you live in a single threat there's no possible way that you could have any other connections right but what's most important is when you fail right don't think of it as a break in the chain

right it's just another stepping stone there's another place and just keep going i think as long as you keep going right then you will always fail more and because you do you learn the best lessons i think that's really my approach because uh i mean coming from singapore i think we tend to be very uh risk averse regret minimization right and failure or at least the possibility of failing is is it's always looming i mean even i mean i feel affected by it sometimes when i do my people are like how will four undergrads five undergrads manage to publish at international conference the chances of failure are very high in fact expect to fail then when it happens

oh that's just part of it okay what do we do next right and there's that fun right hang out late have a drink have some popcorn and move on the next day absolutely i i love that i mean it's it's so important to kind of as you brought up it's like you have to just keep pushing forward uh you're gonna deal with this anyways in life uh the faster you learn to deal with it the more happy you're gonna be as a person like we are gonna go through it um if you try to stay away from it it's still gonna eventually probably happen to you and then when it does you you don't know how to react to it because you've been you know staying away from it for so long um in the constant overall but i mean overall i appreciate both the stories it

really it kind of hits home to the point we're trying to get across here when it comes to failure stories and the importance of learning from those lessons how your mindset is in those moments and how you can think about it differently and it's really your perspective on the situation failure is not a permanent state it is a state that you're in at that moment it's up to you how you decide to react to it um you can either just you know be mad about it your entire life or you can just take it as a learning lesson and move on um and go on to the next great activity um but overall i've very much enjoyed this conversation about blockchain the world where it's going um in the future what we can have here uh with this great innovation the future bright minds that that are coming about

um is there any final closing thoughts of either you gentlemen you want to share before we end today's show um yeah i i think i think that the note to end is don't be afraid to try right like don't be afraid to explore be curious you know um and and and really yeah put yourself out there in order to experience things get your hands dirty so i think that would be at least for when we talk about nation technology that would be what i would like to you know and end this session i think my closing words will be aspire to do more i think uh blockchain is the current fair i think

there will be many more interesting technologies coming along the way and don't be afraid to really dive deep because i don't know i i dive recreationally and usually when you go deeper that's where you see the most interesting things like blue ring octopuses yeah that's it i think that's great i think that's something more ryan thank you so much for having us yeah no absolutely it's been a fantastic conversation great insights great great advice um hopefully we can have you on later down the line when it comes to maybe your next cohorts and talk about some great innovation coming out of tribe um but as for those tuning in especially luis who i purposely didn't have on the

show by the way i usually have a co-host but my co-host always gives me crap for talking about blockchain all the time because i'm so fascinated by it and he's he's uh he's the um he's the person that sees the value of it but he he he likes to really buy into the hype so he he like dogecoin and all these things but um i hope you tuned in and uh learned a little bit about blockchain in the future where it really can go uh but overall um hope those that two didn't learn something new today and if there is any questions um i'm happy please please put them in the you know during the chat and afterwards put them into the description because we can have a follow-up sometime in the future and go into those questions anybody might have about the world of blockchain but

thank you for tuning in to brew that's been a great episode for today you