Institutional Yield on Bitcoin, Gold and Stablecoins is Here

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Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Pilio and I'm here today with Torab, who's the CEO of Move Industries. There was a question of should we do it or should we not do it? Do we start something new, start something fresh, or do we stick to it? And from our side, we saw that we had some momentum. We had real builders. We had buyin. I had relationship with investors. And I said, "Hey, we made it through the darkest hours." uh which you know it it was difficult but it almost felt like treason to just walk away. From our side we've been able to retain the overwhelming majority of our team. We've actually added more talent and so it's been really exciting to see everyone motivated on the same page and just

dedicated to to turning this around. And I I always talk about this move is for money. That is literally why Facebook spent you know billions of dollars in R&D brought the top researchers in the world together to build a language from the ground up. They could have just optimized solidity. um or used Rust you know SVM itself but they decided you know what we're going to build a new language the move VM and we believe that this is going to be the scalable solution for the future the last time we talked with someone from movement was with the previous team uh mo most of you will know of Rushi who was formerly the CEO uh but yeah I'm curious to talk to Torup today about what's changed since that leadership change uh came into place and what's

happening now with the movement ecosystem and the chain and also um what's in the road map and what's to come. S thanks for joining me. >> Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me and I think a better question is what hasn't changed but uh I'm happy to go through it and uh have that discussion but yeah it's it's been a roller coaster of a year you know in crypto we we age in dog years so excited to to share some of our updates. Let's walk through a little bit of like you know the you know people can go and and read about you know what what happened uh there's like lots of reporting and there was the Cornesk article which talked about uh what happened uh you know Rushi leaving and and also Cooper stepping back. One thing I should just point out as

disclaimer is uh my fund interventures is an investment in uh movement. walk us through sort of what has happened, you know, in the last year since your team took over so that people sort of get a sense of like where movement is today. >> Yeah. So maybe I'll I'll just start with instead of saving people a Google search uh for those that maybe they don't remember or maybe they never even knew about it is essentially I was one of the founding team members. So I was a founding team member but not a founder at Movement Labs. And essentially what happened uh is that I believe in March of last year or maybe even earlier than that, Binance saw some market maker irregularities, they froze the market maker funds. Uh I believe it was around $37 million something uh in that ballpark and they said, "Hey, you guys

essentially have 6 months to buy back Move token." And so once we did a little bit of investigation, you know, the board at that time, I was not on the board, uh made some leadership changes. And once some of that information came out, we believed it was best for us to start new with a fresh new company um that wasn't tied to Movement Labs, and that is Move Industries, where I serve as CEO. And so essentially what we did with those funds is we were able to buy back right around 2% of token supply. We actually call it the the move strategic reserve. It's onchain. You can take a look at it. We've only recently started using it uh for the ecosystem and for builders. And so that's what it's going to be used for. and uh it's fully publicly transparent. So uh no funny

business possible. So that is essentially what happened. And I would say that probably the the greatest part of my job is seeing the retention rate that we've had at movement. And so you know generally what hap just okay just in crypto in general it's very hard to keep talent right because there's always some new company that just raised 50 million 80 million 100 million. And so how do you keep the team motivated especially once the token is launched and then especially in this market as tokens aren't necessarily having the same rainbow and sunshines that they're used to. And so from our side we've been able to retain the overwhelming majority of our team. We've actually added more talent. And so it's been really exciting to see everyone motivated on the same page and just dedicated to to turning this around. This episode's brought to

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your agent operates in encrypted memory that even near AAI can't inspect. It's not a promise that they won't look. It's cryptographic guarantees that they can't. With OpenClaw on neari cloud, you get cloud convenience without data exposure. There's no hardware to manage and no trust assumptions required. You can learn more at near.ai. I've said this publicly and and also sort of amongst closed circles is I felt like you stepped up pretty significantly early early on and you know felt like I felt like you took on like this very important leadership role in a time of turmoil and in a time where I think a lot of people were you know looking

looking at this whole sort of fiasco is like here's yet another you know like shady thing that happens in crypto and I think it must have you know intimidating to sort of take on that role at that time but I think in the last year like at least like you know turn turned around I think sentiment uh around the around movement and the movement ecosystem and that's something that I think a lot of people don't talk about. So yeah I mean like I think you and the team have done like a very good job given the circumstances uh uh bring back bring back trust and confidence to the movement uh chain and ecosystem. >> Yeah I mean I think there's there's two things. Number one is I'm not going to lionize myself, but ultimately as a founding team member and I consider myself the architect of the ecosystem.

There was a question of should we do it or should we not do it? Do we start something new, start something fresh or do we stick to it? And from our side, we saw that we had some momentum. We had real builders. We had buy in. You know, I had relationship with investors and I said, "Hey, you know, it almost felt like treason to just walk away." And, you know, we made it through the darkest hours. uh which you know it it was difficult but you know what we knew that going into it and uh you're never going to attain anything great or be able to you know achieve anything worthwhile without some type of sacrifice and going through difficulty. Honestly it was probably more difficult on my family than it was for me. you know, I'm married with kids and so, uh, movement is my other child. Uh, that takes all my

love and attention. But, you know, we do our best to balance it. And from our side, we actually are, if you've ever met any of our team members, if you were at E Denver or anything of the sort, you'll see everyone is all smiles, ready to go, and we're not really phased at all by kind of what's going on in the market. If you've been, a lot of our team members are veterans, so this isn't their first rodeo. We've been through the one day 30 40% draw downs. So, this is nothing compared to that. And so, uh, yeah, it it's been honestly incredible. And then also, we've had a lot of investors, uh, such as yourself kind of step in and be really supportive. And so, I think having that support goes a long way. And, you know, now there's a certain point where we're almost an

underdog story and people generally like to root for the underdog. So, I like our chances. talk a little bit about some of the changes that have uh that you've implemented specifically I think you know in terms of transparency and governance that have kind of helped support uh building back trust uh within the community and the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think that generally speaking I'm talking about historically not any particular organization but there's a lot of incestuous relationship between the foundation and labs right. So what happens is um it's more of a formality but in our situation there actually are two complete independent organizations.

We have the foundation and then we have what we call the labs team which in this case is move industries and so the market makers anything token related that is all handled by the foundation and for us we're truly just the stewards of the ecosystem. Uh bringing in builders building cool things and making sure you know that we're providing the best experience for users and builders. And so that kind of leads into, you know, we transition from an L2 into an L1. And I'm happy to kind of walk through why we did that. But in terms of governance, you know, making sure that uh all the multi-IGs are in place, making sure that, you know, even if I wanted to, you know, I always joke that we need a system where if my evil twin took over my body, they wouldn't be able to wreak havoc. And so that's

essentially what we've done uh with the governance and only using tier one market makers. if I told you our market makers u they're all the ones that you know like there there's no uh uh name that you haven't heard before and so we've shared those with the exchanges they're happy and so that's kind of where we are today >> this kind of like foundation dev team relationship often gets overlooked like like what what are the kinds of shady things that you sort of see or have seen with regards to like foundations and dev teams that you are like committed to preventing wi with movement and maybe like you know as a general sort of rule for the industry like what kinds of things do you guys have in place that other teams should also perhaps follow to keep that neutrality between both

entities? >> Yeah, I mean look I can't speak to any particulars but generally speaking what happens is that certain people will get the market maker deal for the token that may or may not be affiliated with someone on the lab's team. And so in our situation that's basically impossible because we have no say. that's completely by independent directors at the foundation and honestly I think that's 99% of it it's you know anything related to token anything related to money and then everything else I think most teams are on the up and up but again I don't know what I don't know and this is and most of the things you hear are murmurss and whispers at conferences uh or in boardrooms but from our side that's obviously what most people care about is hey what happened with the market makers hey what happened with the

tokens and so we said hey we're just going to go to like radical transparenc arency and make sure it's 100% visible to the public uh or as much as possible. >> This uh shift from an L2 to an L1. So, you know, for for context, movement was an L2. There was this whole architecture where it utilized Ethereum uh as well as Celestia for DA. There was also like some complex zk uh in order to have transactions be sort of instant and atomic. And um one of the you know the things about about movement that I al always thought was interesting was that it was using an alt VM which is the move VM which has particular

properties in terms of security and uh preventing uh things like re-entry attacks and things like that that are possible on the EVM. And so that's that's all been essentially scrapped now for an L1. Can you talk about the reasoning for why you know this project that was initially an L2 and I think also like had an L1 I remember there was like L1 M2 it was like quite a complex architecture why shift to full-on L1. >> Yeah. Okay. So you know uh raising capital you have to be cognizant of the soup dour what is hot in that day and age right? So, you know, at one time the Atkins diet was hot. Now it's all about peptides, baby. You know, taking

peptides and taking all these different types of supplements. And so, similarly, in the VC space, if you want to be able to raise capital, you kind of have to ride the wave. At that time, the wave was being ETH aligned. Now, we kind of laugh at that term. What the hell does that even mean? Uh, and you saw Vitalik recently, you know, tweet, I think a few months ago about basically the the L2 thesis is somewhat dead because they want to scale the L1, Ethereum L1. And so, uh, we've se we saw that this architecture that we had set out to build just didn't make sense. Um, our latency was around 7 seconds. And so, if you're going to be at L2 and you're going to be slower, then why would anyone ever use you? So, essentially the easy way to visualize this or to

conceptualize it is we just wanted a better experience for builders and for users. And so, we said, okay, let's reverse engineer. How do we do that? Just be your own sovereign L1 with your own tech stack. you don't need to make this Frankenstein chain of because I'll be quite honest um again I wasn't part of the raising of the capital but it was you know you have Celestia for the DA which is the Cosmos ecosystem you have settlement on Ethereum which is of course the ETH ecosystem you have the move VM um we had raised some capital from avalanche so it it was just like how many different groups of crypto can we get as supporters but ultimately even if you have every single VC in the world pumping and saying this is the future.

It doesn't matter if it doesn't translate to an actual product that people want to use. So, and I think we see that right now in the market where, you know, people will say, "Oh, it was just a pump and dump or it was all just hype." You know, there's a million different projects that people talk about like this, but the reality is that they just haven't built a product that people want to use and they don't have PMF. And so, for us, that's what our number one focus is. And in order to get there, we had to essentially build a sovereign L1. And so, it's been amazing. every single metric up and to the right. Uh and our our builders are happy, our team is happy, it's much easier to maintain. Our AWS bills got cut in half essentially. Uh so it's, you know, from

every single perspective, it's been a win. And so that's essentially why we we decided to pivot into an L1. >> Can you talk a little bit about the L1 architecture? So um is it using an existing sort of stack or is this essentially sort of built from the ground up? And um and yeah, I mean are you still sort of sticking to move as the main VM? Do you still have this ETH to move translation layer? I mean there's all these sort of like technical things I'd like to get into. So maybe we can spend a little bit of time kind of dissecting the L1 like what what still remains from.

>> Yeah. So first and foremost we do use the move language which means we use the move VM. Uh again the move language was actually created by Facebook. If you remember, they had this project called DM or Libra and then uh Facebook Mark wanted to make Zuck bucks, right? He wanted to make his own stable coin. The Federal Reserve said the hell you are. They shut it down and they open sourced it. And so we actually used the DM uh virtual machine. Uh the move VM, which is very similar to what AppdOs uses. So that's our closest comp. And so we've actually had a lot of builders who are already building on the VM then transition over to movement. And so that's essentially it. Now we have our own validator set. So it's essentially being able to own some of the value capture as well by having your own

validators and having it settle on movement as opposed to Ethereum which is kind of the the defining characteristic of L2 versus L1. >> And can you talk a bit about the stack like the consensus mechanism like the different sort of like parts of the parts of the stack? Yeah, I I think the the most interesting part to kind of talk about so there was something interesting about movement because originally the vision was we would be able to have a transpiler that would be able to uh break down EVM bite code into move by code. And so essentially what that means is EVM teams would be able to deploy onto the MOVM. But as the the front-facing ecosystem architect what I you know within a few months found out was the people who are building like for example the aes and the curves of the world they're not going to use a

transpilot. they're going to actually just rewrite the code if they're going to do it and hire a move developer or a move uh team to help them build it out. And so uh from that side, you know, we we saw that there's just not enough demand. Um but ultimately you know um what really matters especially in the age of LLMs we actually are seeing now that we're getting a lot of developers who have zero move experience or very minimal move experience that are trying to build and with the proliferation of LLMs it actually helps them and claude of course being able to build uh projects without necessarily having all the knowhows or even knowing the ins and outs of the move language. Now that presents its own set of problems around security. You know recently we saw the

drift hack although that had nothing to do with uh the crypto side. That was a pure uh you know social engineering. Uh but you know we've seen a huge interest and so what we're trying to actually figure out now is how do we scale audits for teams that are using LLMs because it's very difficult um when you put real money at risk to be able to uh feel comfortable with money inside of it. And so with LLMs, we need to find a scalable solution to get audits. Uh and of course, if you've talked to any uh ecosystems, you know, it's really expensive and it is almost uh a prohibiting factor of teams launching is just being able to get enough money for audits. And if you talk to any L1, L2, the majority of their grants that they

give out, it actually all just goes to the auditors because people want to be safe obviously. >> Yeah. Yeah. And also increasingly auditors are relying on LLMs and uh and such systems to uh to perform their audits. And I mean this actually ties in well with some of the uh uh the news that came out I think today or yesterday. We're recording this on April 8th uh about the Mythos model and its ability to basically sniff out you know 30-year-old bugs in FreeBSD or uh or or you know other other Linux- based operating systems and it's a like sniffing out bugs that give you root access. I I feel like I think we're entering a world where you know security

audits are at least like there's going to be a lot less um money to be made as a security auditor in the you know tra traditional sense right where you have like an auditor looking at every line of code and most likely you models would be doing most of that work. How do you think that changes you know perhaps like the industry but also just ease of being able to write good secure applications and with and being able to ship much much more easily. >> Yeah. So we actually we uh turned our head of devil into our a mirror of AI um jokingly because you know there's the cryptosar uh David Sax and so his job was to essentially think about how we can use AI across the entire org. And

obviously one thing we've done is we essentially have agents who are constantly trying to hack movement. Um so they're 247 trying to find vulnerabilities uh both on movement the chain itself and then our top protocols. And so I think that this is where everyone is headed. And then you know, you just always want to have security top of mind. Then of course there's the whole fear of quantum computing. Is it going to be that, you know, but if if quantum computing happens, the first thing they're going to do is, you know, hack the banks and hack all like that's its own set of problems. But obviously every blockchain should be thinking about how we become quantum resistant.

And um that's but first and foremost, let's deal with today's problems before we deal with tomorrow's potential problems. And so, you know, we do have a white hacker policy where we we work with teams. If they say, "Hey, we think we found a vulnerability," we sit down with them. Why do you think so? And we've had a few of those and it's been great. And so, it's great to have community that supports. I do think that the shipping was never really the problem. There's always going to be some 20 to 22year-old college grad that will just slam some monsters and zins and just work for like a month straight. So, I don't think building the tech is actually ever been really the hiccup.

It's always been product market fit. It's been the product itself. Why would people use this? How is it better? Is it just a little bit better? Is it an order of magnitude better? Uh, and what is the actual use case? So, I do think this is one of those situations where originally crypto was this it's a new industry. You just throw a bunch of crap at a wall, see what sticks. Uh, and we have essentially gone past that phase. Now, we're much more mature. VCs are much more judicious in how they deploy their capital and so they want to see real PMF. They want to see real use cases and so that's kind of where movement is now focused on and I do believe that we're going to see the shift across the board for the teams that actually survive the next 12 months. They will my thesis is

that they're going to pivot very aggressively and go towards niches as opposed to being general purpose L1's or L2s. I think like one of the things we we talked about recently when we met in person was that you know the the edge is increasingly distribution and as the industry continues to consolidate around you know a handful of really powerful use cases distribution continues to be you know the thing that allows uh chains to continue to operate like you know will make the difference between those who survive and and those who don't. I think with with movement there is you know there there's sort of like two headwinds just of course like distribution and that's hard enough on on any chain like having the ability to be out there and be visible whether

that's in like in fintech or with any sort of like uh yield use case etc. And then you have also um the move language which um sort of on the back end makes it difficult to say attract developers that already know solidity. Of course you talked about LMS and how that makes it easier. How do you think nowadays about movement and like kind of core positioning as as a blockchain as an L1 um as having these differences that can be headwinds as I mentioned but can also be its strengths? Like how do you kind of position movement to users but also to developers? Well, first I I don't think the market gives a crap about whether EVM, SVM, MOVM, like no one cares, right? Like we we've realized

that leading with tech doesn't really matter. There's just a minim minimally viable product that you need that it's fast enough, it's not too slow, uh the latency is good and just, for example, if you're doing high frequency trading, that's like its own beast. But if you're not doing high frequency trading, most blockchains actually fulfill it. Now, it's a question of where do you fit into this? I call it the the global tapestry of business. Where do you fit into this? And so from our side, I truly do believe that there's going to be very few general purpose L1s. Uh I think Monat is probably the last one that's going to throw its hat into the ring in a meaningful way. And of course, they raised a lot of capital. Um and they have a great team. And so, you know, based on what I'm seeing just purely as

a general purpose L1, I think Monad, Salana, Ethereum are are going to be there. And what I mean by when I say general purpose, the way I define it is that most of the building will be done by outside teams aka outside builders. So one, if I if I were to reverse engineer like, you know, a blockchain that's a multi-billion dollar valuation and I reverse engineer how they got there, I don't see any timeline in which it was some team in the ecosystem, you know, some 22 23-y old builder from Indonesia that built this amazing app and then in and of itself, okay, they raised they they they do an amaz they build an amazing project, they they make a crap ton of money, but then the question is where's the value acrruel back to the actual blockchain itself,

Right. And the poster child of this is Poly Market and Polygon. Poly Market has a multiply I think a 20 25x larger valuation than Polygon. It's actually host chain. So from one perspective that's good. But if you are a supporter of Polygon that's not good because you're like wait a minute we we hit the home run but there's no points on the scoreboard for us. How did that happen? And so I do think that what we're going to see is a lot of teams either changing the value capture or building the products themselves, which is the path that we're going down. So in a nutshell, I do not think it makes sense for a multi-billion dollar enterprise to be fully at the mercy or uh of the builders in the ecosystem and just cross your

fingers and hope that one of them hits PMF. It's not scalable. And and even if they do, there's been so many cases where, you know, a project finds PMF and they go to a different chain. So you can't even lock them in. So it's a very difficult business problem to solve if you don't um take the reigns yourself. >> I guess what's interesting here is what you said about Monad being the last general purpose chain. Does that mean that you know the L1 premium no longer exists? And u like what is the kind of like narrow PMF that movement wants to operate uh as a as a chain in a broader ecosystem of L1's that may have very specific like you know private credit or uh tokenization etc. Like what what what are you guys focused on?

>> Sure. So I'm not going to be the one to say that the L1 premium is dead. Uh I'm just look at the charts. You tell me, you know, is there a premium that we're seeing for L1's versus L2s? Uh that that's probably one question and I think it's pretty obvious that whatever that premium was, it's not what it used to be. Let's say that's the safest comment I can make. Uh in terms of where we fit in, look, move was made for money. And I I always talk about this move is for money. That is literally why Facebook spent, you know, billions of dollars in R&D, brought the top researchers in the world together to build a language from the ground up. they could have just optimized solidity um or used rust you know SVM itself but they decided you know what we're going to build a new

language the move VM and we believe that this is going to be the scalable solution for the future and so that's exactly what we're using now the question to answer your question where does movement fit into this our number one focus is to be the global money layer and settlement layer for the global south um I'll be honest the western world is well served they are very well served I have 10 different ways is if you're an American where I can send you money, no problem, no fees. If you're not an immigrant, I'm shocked if you've ever remitted money. Unless you are, you know, you come from an immigrant background where you send money to your uncle or your auntie, you probably have never used Western Union, right? At worst, maybe you've done a a wire from your bank account. And even then, you're kind of annoyed. But if the

worst thing that an American has to deal with is a wire transfer and their bank calls them, are you sure you're not sending this to a Nigerian prince? Um, you know, they're pretty well served. they have access to a bunch of different assets. But when you travel, that's when you start realizing, wait a minute, there's a lot of use cases and a lot of underserved people. And for me, you know, we talk about movement as the people's chain. You know, Satoshi's original vision was how do we bank the unbanked? And so that is essentially what our focus is on is going to the places that are underserved and trying to provide them the value proposition of blockchain, of instant global settlement, and how we can essentially uh revolutionize certain businesses as well. So that's where I say movement will fit in. We have some things that

we're working on that I don't want to announce until it's finalized. But just understand that move is for money. We're fully, you know, pivoting into that and that uh we have a lot of interesting uh developments over the past few months. >> That whole Iran deal is going to need some currency to pay for passes through the straightfor. >> I I don't I don't know if Iron's going to accept move tokens, but uh we can try. Yeah. Um, no, just because I heard somewhere that they they're going to accept Bitcoin uh for payment or something something crazy. So, I want to like kind of dig into this a little bit because like, you know, a lot of teams over the years have like built applications that have been sort of targeted towards the global south,

targeted towards, you know, South America or like African markets or like parts of Southeast Asia. And I think those use case have those use cases have always been like very interesting on paper. You know, in the end, it's sort of like the people of those places that get to decide what they use. And it's never sort of like people in Silicon Valley or in Europe that kind of like come and push their their use cases on to them. That approach has seen its set of challenges, right? Like coming with this piece of technology and like what is your approach to sort of embedding movement into because again these are all different markets, right? every country, you know, whe in the global south has its own, you know, existing payment rails, political sort of monetary sovereignty issues, right? Uh

and then there's like other chains that are competing for that like uh you know Cosmos also right now is like going out trying to sell the Cosmos stack as like a way for governments to build uh their own sovereign sort of like central banks on a blockchain and it's like how do you think about positioning movement and what is your strategy for kind of like going into those markets or the markets that you're prioritizing first uh for any particular reason or yeah how do you see that? Yeah, I you know one thing I always say is I am not in the business of telling people this is what this is PMF for you. If you don't understand where people are there's no way that you can give them a product. And so for example myself I just traveled to East Africa. We met with some heads of state

uh cabinet members to try to understand what matters to them and then based on that you know provide them some insights as to what are the use case that blockchain unlock and uh so for us we are fully pivoting. I I just came back actually from traveling and so it was actually really if you were saw it on Twitter I was in Ethiopia um we were able to meet with the president we're able to meet with the cabinet members and try to understand hey what do you guys what do you guys care about what matters to you and you know there's we found a lot of really cool things. So first and foremost is every country wants to be able to compete globally like that's just 100% right. So if there's new technology if you look at their charters they talk about digitalizing do you know digitalizing

money and also AI how do we incorporate AI however the thing is when you are a nation state that's I'll say catching up assuming that let's say US and China are leading you don't have any room for error so once you allow like let's say crypto or blockchain or you let's say open the doors to AI you can never put that genie back in the bottle so they have to be very meticulous about how they roll it out, when they roll it out, and being able to tighten the straps if you know things start going off the rails. And so if you don't understand that, you can never essentially work with people because you don't understand their fears. And I mean this like basic sales stuff, right? I come from a sales

like you have to understand what they care about. And so a lot of teams, they live in this Silicon Valley SF silo thinking, "Oh yeah, the world is going to want A, B, and C." And they just have no idea. And that's why you act actually if you look at the founders some of the ones who find the best PMF are actually immigrants who they live the experience and they come where the talent is they get the resources and they start building for where they just came from. And so I do think that it's not coincidence that some of a lot of the best founders are the ones who are immigrants that recently you know came to America and they just essentially found the tools. Um, in terms of revolutionizing businesses, you know, DAS, uh, was recently in New York. I think it was like two weeks ago.

Shout out to Block Works. Uh, I heard it was amazing. I was not able to attend because again, I was in Ethiopia. Uh, but, you know, I I listened to one of the talks by the CEO of Western Union. And so, obviously, any business that relies on float will be revolutionized by digital dollars, aka blockchain, because they can settle instantly. So, Western Union actually has a billion dollars, one B with a B, $1 billion in preunding across all the different markets they serve. That is the most capitalally inefficient thing you can imagine, right? Instead of that money going into the business, they have to preund it. Why? Because if I send money to let's say Sagal, they take three to five business days for the money to

actually go from bank to there's actually three banks or four banks that get touched. my bank to the corresponding US bank to their corresponding US bank and then to the national bank. So it touches many hands which takes a lot of time and so they have to preund that money. Exactly. So they have to preund that money and they also have to take currency risk. Right. So what if the dollar goes down? What if the dollar goes up? And so these are all the different things that teams have to worry about. But with stable coins, you essentially can wipe all that away because within a few seconds, they get the USDT, the USDC, they redeem it, they do the FX, and now it's a completely revolutionized business. So that's essentially where Movement is focused and headed. And uh we've made a lot of significant progress. Again, I know this

is uh it's a little tacky to say it, but not give particular names, but when the when the ink is dried, I promise that we will announce it. >> Okay. So it sounds like a pretty significant pivot to building infrastructure for national economies or national banks etc to facilitate global payments like what where do you think lie the biggest opportunities? Is it is it South America? Is it sort of like West Africa or subsaharan Africa? You is it Southeast Asia? like where where are you seeing the biggest opportunities and what are the kind of particular pain points that you move can solve there?

Um, first of all, the names of countries that you've never heard of, that's generally good because that's where no one is. All right? So, I don't want to go where everyone is already focused. Uh, that's just personally from a business perspective. Uh, but secondly, any currency that has faced serious devaluation, those are generally the first adopters of blockchain in general. So, I'll use, you know, if you look at Kenya or Ethiopia, they had millions of holders of stable coins before the government actually approved it, right? And so the reason why the government approved is because they saw this overwhelming demand. So generally business people and young professionals are the ones that are at the forefront of technology because you know imagine like just imagine you are let's say a

Turkish uh business e-commerce uh businessman and you accept money in Turkish lera but you need to pay Facebook because you run Facebook ads in dollars. So how do you even hedge this right? So your only real option is I need to hold dollars because I need to have fixed costs. I can't have cost in dollars and then my LRA is getting you know debased. It it would be impossible to run a business and again we take these things for granted but at scale it's impossible to to do this unless you have access to the US dollar. You add the yield on the dollar now you're talking right? So not only do I get to save in dollars I get to earn in dollars. And so that's phase two for movement is we will essentially be the

yield backend for many fintech apps and for uh many national economies. So that's what we're focused on. It's a very big swing and uh we're just lucky to have a lot of traction already. So for us it's essentially being able to be the digital dollar rails and then also the yield back end for the global south. >> Yeah. Yeah, I guess that like there's a challenge there also which is that like historically like some countries in I'm not familiar with so the African economies but countries in South Africa in South America have like ban their their citizens from swapping in and out of dollars or holding dollars. So there's this like whole political pressure as well for countries to maintain sovereignty over over their currency and if like everyone is like selling their currency for the dollar

devalues the currency etc. How do you think that that looks in the future? like do we move towards a world where we have like just fewer currencies and a lot of the lower tier currencies just kind of default to using what's most liquid most available and sort of like get in line with you know sort of like US dollar denominated currencies and you know there's of course you the the other side of that which is like the growing uh importance of like the BRICS countries and and also this kind of like shifting hegemony of of the United States which I think you know most people agree agree there's a trend towards you know a multi-polar world where you have sort of like multiple countries sort of uh josing for um for power and and sort of economic

relevance. Do you think that there are barriers to having US dollar adoption in in some countries given the fact that you know China may be present there Russia may be present there in significant ways and like how do you think about that? >> Yeah so I'm very opinionated about this topic. uh anyone with a set of ears, I've probably talked to them about this and yapped their ears off. From my side, I believe that every single nation state like they have no choice but to use the US petro dollar, right? That is why the US has dominance is the petro dollar. And you could look into the history of, you know, the Britain. There's all these, you know, historical reasons as to as to why that happened. But ultimately, I do believe that every single nation state is going to have to nationalize their currency because as of

right now, it's unfair. So if I'm a Turkish business person, I have the US dollar or I have the LRA. Just in a vacuum, I'm always going to choose the dollar because look at the look at the performance of LRA against the dollar. Now on top of that, I have access to yield for USD whether it's USDT USD. You see, I can earn let's say another 4% 5%. Not only do I get the better currency, but I get to yield I get better yield. The only way the LRA can compete in a blockchain economy is they need to be able to digitize the LRA and then digitize their T bill yield whatever they're you know I think right now it's giving out 40%. So if I'm a if I'm a business person and I have access to the dollar and I can earn 5% or I have

access to a digital lera and I can earn 40%. Now it gets a little bit more interesting because now there's a lot of meat on the bone. I can essentially go delta neutral. I can you know buy the LRA then short it um and then I can you know even if there's like a pendle type product where I can sell it you know the so there's all these different types of things that are possible but the nation states have to adopt a actual currency I think that is step one and then step two is to provide yield in the native currency and that has that has been essentially the crux of the conversations that I've had with different nations is essentially how do we do that in a responsible way and if you do it it has to be very shortly after you allow stable coins because if

there's too much time in between, your currency can essentially get destroyed. Uh but if you take a look at Nigeria, they outlawed crypto and their spread was roughly 30%. And I know because I used to I was at a stable coin project before movement and we saw that they would essentially arb up to 30%. But once they allowed crypto that actually made it an open market and so yes the Nairo went down for a little bit of time but that that spread compressed and now the market spoke and you know and the spread is very small it's like I think 3% or 4% between the national bank rate and the street rate whereas before it was 30%. So I do see that there will be a little bit of short-term pain when they accept the the dollar but eventually it'll bottom out. So for

example in Ethiopia it's actually illegal to have stable coins. So what happens is it's also illegal to essentially have US dollars unless you have like a big business with a bank account. So for them, you actually are panicking to get the dollar. So the reason why the spread the premium exists for the dollar is because they have no choice. Like they're panicking, oh crap, like how can I get access to the dollar and the price just keeps going up and up and up. But if they actually created a free market, the premium would shrink u down to like maybe single digits, low single digits. Uh but again, it's very difficult. I don't hold anything against the government. I think most governments they they when it comes to money and fiscal policy they have to be very very stringent and careful because uh as you know it's all one hair away of you know

completely falling to the ground. >> Yeah that's interesting. So like let's let's um let's take a maybe more of a look at movement um and the movement ecosystem. What is happening in the movement ecosystem right now? I've been like sort of paying attention. We have we have some investments there and what are people building? There's this move alliance that you guys announced also in the last few months. Yeah. What are people excited about and sort of building it? >> Yeah. Look, uh the reality is that in any ecosystem, the people, the reason why people build anywhere is because they think there's some chance of financial mobility. They can make a lot of money. I always joke you need to buy mama a house, right? Everyone's goal is that I make enough money where you know I can buy my mom a house, buy my dad a

car, whatever it might be. So essentially, you need that financial mobility. And so it's very difficult in a cryptobear market to be able to build an ecosystem with not necess you're at the mercy kind of at of the market, right? Is the is the ecosystem going to start flourishing. So from our side, we've been working very intimately with the teams to explain to them what's on our road map, what's on the horizon so that they don't build in a silo. And so step one was how do we get everyone financially aligned? So I'm going to walk you through this. There are scenarios where the token of the chain goes up. Let's say Salana went from, you know, $10, $8 up to $200, right? So, it 20xed. In that instance where it 20xed, most protocols maybe got a 2x or a 3x.

So, they actually underperformed the blockchain by, you know what, 70%, 80%. And so, the question to ask is why? The reason why is because they don't have a financial alignment directly. It's indirect. So the thought process, oh Salana is going to be worth a lot more and so the top decks on Salana or the top lending pro on lending protocol should be at least 10%. But the market told us that's not true. And so the reason why we did the move alliance is we wanted to make sure that everyone is financially aligned with movement. And so essentially what the movers alliance is is they take a significant portion of their fees and they use it to buy move token. Why? Because everyone should have, you know, I call them moon bags that are aligned with movement. So if movement does go up, they actually write

up that appreciation in value. Because the reality is that if in this case, let's say movement dies, every project on movement is dead. So you have this asymmetric downside where not only does the project have to win, but then you also have to win. And so to me, that's that doesn't make sense because if I die, you're already dead. So this was a way for us to basically financialize um the alignment between teams. And so I do think that that's really important. I want them to like me but I don't want that to be the reason why they build on movement. I want it to be because they are actually rooting for the success uh of you know the economy let's call it of movement.

>> Why should people build on movement? You know like if you had to if you had like a room full of the developers right now and and you had their ear like what would be your pitch to them as to why they should build there? >> So I would first and foremost I wouldn't try to convince them. I would explain to them what we're building and understand if that's interesting to them. I never want to make someone love me. Genuine desire cannot be negotiated. It can never be negotiated. You can't talk to a girl as to why she should love you. She either loves you or she doesn't love you. She either respects you or she doesn't respect you. There's nothing you can say to make someone love you and respect you. And so I've learned that the hard way. You can give as many

grants. At the end of the day, it's like buying a box of chocolate and flowers. It's cool. it fizzles after an hour or two and that's the end of the conversation. And if anything, if you bring it up, you're kind of a corny loser. Oh, what about that grant I gave you? You know, that's not the way you you build business. So, to answer your question, I'm not in the business of convincing. I'm in the business of showing. This is what we're doing. This is what we're building. Does this speak to you? If it does, you know, my sword is yours. I will do everything I can to get you the resources and support you need. But if it doesn't speak to you, I'm not going to try to convince you.

Because at the end of the day, this is a tough industry. Being a founder is really, really hard. When you're laying down on your bed, staring at your ceiling thinking, "God, this is really tough." The thing that's going to get you through is not, "Oh, Terab told me that, you know, we're going to be successful." No, it's going to be because you have your own individual thesis and motivation, and it aligns with where we're headed, and that there's a 1 plus 1 equals 3, and there's a synergy uh where we can help each other. though I don't really do pitches like that cuz it doesn't work. >> All right.

But I mean like if you had I mean like let's put like this like if you had to put your best foot forward >> and someone were to ask you like hey uh I you know I've got this opportunity to build over here or I've got an opportunity to build over here. What are some of the things that people have the opportunity to build on movement let's say that maybe they don't have the opportunity to build somewhere else? How should people be thinking about what movement can offer them as an ecosystem, as a chain, as opportunities, etc. >> So maybe a better way to answer this is tell you why the teams we have have chosen to be on movement. So based on the conversations I've had, one of the main things that we do is we choose a handful of partners. We work very

closely with them, do everything we can to get them in front of investors. We give them access to our road map so they understand where we're headed so that they can understand where they fit into this story. And so from our side, if you are on movement, we will do everything in our power to support you and to help you grow. But right now, the main focus is on payments, yield, and providing this web 2.5 infrastructure where we don't have the full decentralization of an Ethereum, but we're also just not some corpo chain. So, finding that middle balance where we're able to meet people where they are. Um, it is impossible for me to go to one of the top, you know, let's say North uh, North African or South American fintech apps

and say, "Hey, yeah, we put your money in Drift. North Korea hacked it. I am so sorry you lost like a hund00 million, but it's okay because we're decentralized. They don't give a damn about decentralization. They are not going to lose the funds. So you have to realize that your romantic idealism is great for the romantics, but for the pragmatists and the realists, you have to meet them where they are. And they have very strong fiduciary duties to their depositors or to their users. And so if you can't answer those questions, you're essentially out of luck. And as we know, the insurance industry in crypto is basically zero, right? It's very difficult to get insured. And all the insurance companies that did insure, they all went bankrupt. And the second a

big hack happens, they're like, uhoh, we don't have money. So, it's just like Hurricane Katrina, every single month there's a hack. So, uh I think people realize that the insurance companies are not going to pay out. So, you have to take things into your own hands. And so, that's that's essentially if if those types of use cases are interesting to you, if you want to bank the unbanked, if you care about providing this value to the rest of the world, then movement is the place for you. if you want to work purely on Wall Street and stuff like that, I'm sure there's other places that uh are are focused on that uh more aggressively than we are. I >> I also want to talk a little bit about the the current state of the market um >> and and get your get your thoughts on

I've talked to a lot of people, you know, in the last few months um about, you know, kind of like where where they think we're at and like sharing sharing our thoughts in terms of like what this bare market represents. And one thing I've noticed and that other people have noticed as well is that like folks that have been in the space for a long time and I I kind of put myself in this category as well is like are kind of like checking out in this bare market. I mean, you know, we're still interested in the space but like not with the same amount of fervor and enthusiasm and excitement as we perhaps had in the in the past. And uh you know and for me what that what that looks like is it it feels like crypto is getting to this place where a lot of the ideals the

ethos the innovations that we saw in the last like 5 to seven years well it's not getting any funding. It's not getting people excited. You know we just saw like East Denver being pretty much you know like pretty much dead. Uh I wasn't at ECC but I've talked to a lot of people who were there and they said that like it was good but like the vibes were not there. There was not a lot of great events um or side events. a lot of the attention, a lot of the applications are stable coins, RWAs, and sort of like these very fintechy type products that a lot of the really cool infrastructure, the privacy, the decentralization, the uh you know, self self-s sovereignty, etc. uh is getting a lot less attention

and uh I think for for myself and a lot of people like me who've been in the space for a while, that's what got us interested in the space. And to see that not really making its way into this next sort of phase of crypto, this institutionalization of crypto feels a little bit like feels a bit disappointing. >> Yes. Um, >> so yeah, I'd like to get your your take if this resonates with you and if all that sort of like interesting kind of experimental researchy stuff that the space has been doing for the last decade really doesn't make its way into the next ph of crypto, which is like being able to use stable coins in your re Revolute app. Was that all for nothing? Um,

>> well, what comes out on the other side? You know, do we do we actually have any of the of the things that we set out to build that got us excited about the space in the first place? >> Well, it's better to have loved than lost than to have never loved at at all, right? Old Tennyson. So, you know, at least at least we tried, right? No, look, at the end of the day, technology goes where the talent goes, right? So, I think a lot of people think, oh, the talent goes where the tech is. No, it's the opposite. So obviously when you have freaking Facebook giving out LeBron James uh Leo Messi type contracts a billion dollars to come sign as opposed to in crypto where you know there's a quarter billion dollar hack on like the second biggest chain on Salana you know

the the decision isn't that difficult right and so there's always this hot ball of money it was crypto before now it's an AI and generally young smart kids from Stanford from Berkeley and from the top universities they go where the hot ball of money is because they want to buy mama a house Right. And so I do think that as VC dollars dry up in an industry that is like the canary in the coal mine. However, that should not dissuade those who are strongly ethos driven. But it is going to be true that it's more difficult. It it's easy to be an idealist when you have your stomach is full. It's much harder to be an idealist when you're living off scraps, right? The was it the starving musician.

So now it's the starving, you know, uh decentralized dev. So you know even Ethereum which everyone loved the fact that Ethereum was decentralized they felt that Salana was running laps around them because they had a little bit more of central leadership and even the biggest ETH bulls were kind of upset by uh the Ethereum Foundation's I'll call it malaise or idealism and so there is going to be a certain point where your idealism is great but what does that mean for me? We saw with tornado cash with Roman, you know, this man built an amazing protocol which was able to obiscate funds and make it so that the government over to to limit government overreach and this guy gets put into this long litigation and legal battle facing prison. Right? So there is a

certain point where if you're really about that life, as we say, then you're going to have to deal with the consequences. But most folks, you know, they're ideal uh they're idealists, but when when push comes to shove, they're they're gonna want to live under a roof and be warm at night. And so, I do think that's a real problem that we have to address. And so, if you if it doesn't translate into a real product that people will use, then what was the point, right? Like, I love tornado cash or the concept of tornado cache, but who are the main users? They're generally hackers, right? The first thing they do is they go to tornado cashache. That's not necessarily a bad thing, right? Um, cash is not intrinsically bad, but it is the medium of choice for drug deal. So, does that mean that cash is inherently

evil? No. Um, so to answer your question, I do think that we are straying from God's light every day, but uh the reality is that if decentralization doesn't meet people where they are, then it's it's just a cool uh passion project to have on the side. Now, personally, like I we need decentralized systems, but that doesn't mean that every single system has to be decentralized. And so, especially for, you know, the the L1's that don't necessarily have PMF, why are you doing decentralization theater? Who are you doing this for? To make yourself feel better, that doesn't matter. Create a product that people want to use. And so, that's the lesson that I've learned over the past, let's call it, year, is that you have to build something that people

want to use. Uh, and then you can, you know, have your ethos down the road. Well, I mean, it looks like the thing people want to use is yeah, stable coins and and uh and getting yield on RWAs, which like I think a lot of us saw this coming, right? We saw the moment where we wouldn't have Napster anymore, but we'd have Spotify, you know? Yeah. I sort of been using that analogy for years now. And everyone I like people would be like, "Yeah, but Spotify is not great cuz like artists are not making money either." It does feel like a lot of the talent that you know has been here for a while is you know this it's like it's a cycle right there like this new talent coming in now it's you know

people who are familiar with fintech and like want to see this getting to sort of like fintech and banking and traditional finance. So >> I actually think we're going to go back towards piracy. So you know originally all you had was like Netflix then you had HBO then you had Paramount then you have Hulu then you have Disney. You're like what the hell? So now they >> I don't have any of them. So >> just like it used to be with cable. So it's like we just reinvent the same wheel. So there's always going to be this constant expansion and contraction. I actually do believe that we're going to go back towards more decentralized services because of the US dollar's hegemony and nation states are going to want to limit it. So people will need a way to be able to circumvent government overreach. Um and as we know uh the

government's appetite is never satiated. It is never satiated. So, as it overreaches in certain countries, you will see people uh go towards these decentralized protocols. And it's really important that we have them. It's always like the free rider program or I'm happy to cash exists. Not that I would ever build it and I don't want to deal with all the that comes with it, but I'm sure someone else will. So, we have to as an industry think about how do we support uh these initiatives and not create this free writer problem. So as we wrap up here um what are the next priorities for the next you know six to 12 months and uh yeah where can people um sort of keep up to date on what's what's your call to action to our community where people

>> Yeah. Yeah. So I think the first thing is uh you know follow myself or um I kind of share all the updates. It's uh tarobu t o r a b y o. It's a joke like I'm going to rob you because my name is Tur Rob. Um not that great when there's lots of hacks but um that is how people remember it. uh or go to uh move industries uh we have our website as well follow us on Twitter we have a lot of really cool updates recently we integrated circle so as we go down this more institutional traditional pathfi path we have now USDC uh which is huge because this is going to be the crux of a lot of the the partnerships that we have lined up um of course now we have the L1 we're going to announce a new yield product that's coming to movement

uh I think tomorrow today's Wednesday uh April 8th It'll be announced tomorrow, April 9th. Uh, and >> by the time this is this comes out. Yeah, for sure. >> Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So, being able to provide institutional grade yield to everyday users. That is essentially again what we're focused on is access to the dollar or their currency of choice and then yield. Uh, so starts with USD, it'll go to BTC and then gold. Um, there's a lot of appetite for gold in these countries. And so, >> wait, this is this is going to go after after you've actually announced it. So you can say here and then when people listen to this, they'll actually know what they're looking at.

>> So So the USD one is the one that's being announced tomorrow. The the other ones are going to be announced afterwards. So I'm just giving you a glimpse of the road map because ultimately there's only a few things that people really want to hold. Uh gold is obviously battle tested. Nothing more lindy than gold. And so our goal is not only to give people access to gold, it's also to give them access to yield on gold. And so that is amazing cuz now they don't have to hide it under their mattress, you know, when they go on a vacation. They they just hold it in their wallets. Um so obviously a lot of them are inst custodial uh solutions. So there's no fear of oh no, you know, I lost my seat phrase and now I lost all my my life savings. So uh we're

essentially again meeting people where they are. >> Cool. Well th thanks for coming on sharing this update and uh come back anytime. >> Thank you Seb. Thank you brother. >> Cheers.