Stacks 2.0 Launch Event Stream | STX

Hi there. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to the Stacks 2.0 launch event. I'm Peter Van Valkenburgh, and I'll be your guide through today's talks and festivities. So, aside from being virtual, there's something else non traditional about today's conference. The reason for the timing, We've a range of excellent guests giving presentations, but we're also waiting for a very special guest to arrive. And that guest is bitcoin block number 666050. Now, for the uninitiated, upon the arrival of that block in the Bitcoin blockchain, Stacks 2.0 will be live and running. Stacks, as you all know, is a set of tools and protocols to rebuild the Internet on top of of the Bitcoin blockchain. And the reason for that effort is all about giving up control. So, I live in Washington, D.C. i'm a lawyer. It's a city that prides itself on control. But if you've watched the news lately, you know that with great control comes great risk. The tyranny of an abuse of control and the anarchy of a sudden loss of control. And because of these risks, America has always aspired to be a nation of laws, not men. Because men are fickle and will abuse the things that they control. While Stacks, as an international technology project, aspires to be a global network of blocks, not men. Because you shouldn't have to trust a CEO of Facebook, a compliance lawyer at Google, or an engineer at Amazon to be sure your website will be available, your messages sent, or your smart car unlocked. These people should not be in control. You should be in control. And the only limits on your control should be the global rules of the Internet protocol enforced by the inexorable churning of a global consensus mechanism, the bitcoin blockchain. So just as a liberal society seeks to be a nation of laws, not men, a decentralized Internet must be a nation and a network of blocks, not men. And so, with me, we will all await Bitcoin block 666050. The first Bitcoin block to enable a stacks 2.0 decentralized Internet. We don't know exactly when that block will arrive. I was just looking at Blockchain.com's Blockchain Explorer. Explorer, and 29 minutes ago, we had 666041. But not knowing exactly when something's going to happen is part of of the nature of giving up control to something larger than yourself. That's what a decentralized Internet is all about. So welcome to the launch event Please participate. If you're watching us on Hopin, you'll find an event chat that goes to the entire group. You can take a break in the lounges. You can visit the Stacks booth to talk with the actual dev teams and learn more about specific tech. Meet someone new in a one to one video chat using the network area and enjoy the program here on the main stage. So now it is my great honor to introduce a friend of mine and our first speaker, co founder of Stacks and CEO of Hero, PBC Munib Ali. Hey everyone, Muneeb here. Today is a really special day in the history of this project. As Peter was talking, stacks 2.0 is going live today and the launch is happening by independent miners. This is also a historic moment where my company basically did the early R and D and protocol development and public infrastructure building. But now we are no longer in control. Independent Miners are launching this blockchain on top of Bitcoin. And today I'll walk you through more about our design. So let's bring up the slides. Stacks brings apps and smart contracts for Bitcoin. Let me first give you a disclaimer. We've been very careful with compliance and regulation. This disclaimer basically says that my company Hero is not doing any token offering, any securities offering at all. This is just a decentralized network that is being launched by independent miners. You might see some forward looking statements in my talk. We are all excited about a future decentralized next generation Internet. Some people call it Web3. There are basically two tracks to it. One track is about decentralized finance and we are seeing a lot of innovation here. People are building different types of smart contracts. They're trying to take away power from Wall street and give it to the hands of engineers and developers who can actually plug and play different components and build on top of an open book. The second track is more about decentralized applications where people are building more secure, more open versions of social networks, blogging platforms. And this topic is extremely relevant today with what we are seeing happen on the Internet that is increasingly in the hands of a few large tech monopolies. If you look at the landscape of these crypto networks, the there's Bitcoin that is becoming Gold 2.0. It is a store of value and people are accepting the dominance of Bitcoin in that domain. But there are also applications and smart contracts, especially on platforms like Ethereum and some next generation protocols that are coming up. The Stacks project is a little different. Our thesis is that these apps and smart contracts would just happen on top. Bitcoin. We think of Bitcoin as a foundational layer for this next generation Internet, much like TCP ip. TCP IP on the Internet is actually a very simple protocol. It just delivers packets from point A to point B. Bitcoin is a settlement layer. It can settle transactions between party A and party B. It actually doesn't care about what that transaction is. And that fundamental property could actually be used to build an entire Internet apps and smart contracts on top of Bitcoin in an extremely scalable and secure way. That's what the Stacks project is about. This is what is launching today when the right bitcoin block arrives. There's a very interesting quote by Satoshi Nakamoto where he talks about how new types of use cases and applications could be built as separate blockchains. But his wish really was that they can share the compute power of Bitcoin. Interestingly, if you look at how our industry emerged, we sometimes see this competition between blockchains or this tribal mentality. And one of the reasons for that is that everyone is fighting for these scarce resources. Everyone's fighting for hash power or more resources for their own network. Whereas if everyone could just share the computing power, the hash power of the bitcoin blockchain, then everyone would have a vested interest in the success of Bitcoin, in the success of a single foundational layer on top of which everything else could be built. And that is the vision that we are coming full circle on with the Design of stacks 2.0. So why Bitcoin? Bitcoin is by far the most battle tested, most secure, and has the highest amount of hash power there. Bitcoin has network effects. The more secure and established this network becomes, the more people start to trust it, the more people think that this is durable. And I would hold Bitcoin, I will use that as a store of value and I will add to the durability of Bitcoin. But it's not just hash power. Bitcoin has something like $700 billion of passive capital right now. It's basically sovereign money that's just sitting there passively in a lot of accounts. And the promise of smart contracts is that a lot of this passive capital could actually be converted into actively deployed capital, which is truly revolutionary. We are seeing smart contracts on other platforms, but Bitcoin by far is the biggest market and has the most amount of crypto capital. So what our design really does is that we don't compete with Bitcoin for, for being sovereign money. We Accept Bitcoin as a reserve currency. We accept the base Bitcoin blockchain as a source of ultimate truth. And Stacks is fuel for smart contracts. The stacks cryptocurrency gets consumed whenever you are executing smart contracts or processing any transactions on stacks. And this way our blockchain connects to Bitcoin, benefits from the security of Bitcoin, and can grow in harmony with Bitcoin. Let me walk you through some of the designs of the stacks 2.0 blockchain itself. So there are basically two fundamental limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain, and they're not even really limitations. They're there by design. Bitcoin was designed to be simple. It was designed to not have a full programming language with it. But what that translates into is that you cannot do a lot of transactions directly on Bitcoin and Bitcoin does not have a full smart contract language. Those are the two things that Stacks brings. So in many ways we extend the functionality of Bitcoin and while benefiting from the security of Bitcoin on the Stacks chain, you can actually do thousands of transactions that settle on Bitcoin on a per block basis. For people who might be familiar with lightning, this is a little bit like if a lightning channel is settling on Bitcoin automatically, every block. More importantly, stacks introduces smart contracts on the chain. So the stacks miners maintain that extra state that goes with smart contracts, and they have an incentive for doing so because they're mining the stack stick. The project started at Princeton University where I did my PhD, and the early team was really a bunch of computer scientists that were doing heavy R and D. And after years of work, like literally years of work in which we invented a new programming language, invented a new type of consensus, the first consensus that is between two blockchains and, and several other innovations in different parts of the stack, we're finally here today where sax 2.0 is actually live. Clarity, the smart contract language, is going live. And years and years of work will finally be in production. And we couldn't be more excited. Let me tell you a little bit about clarity. Clarity is a programming language that is decidable. What that means is that you can tell with exact precision with the mathematical proofs what a program can and cannot do before you execute it. And this is a really big deal. People who are familiar with solidity on Ethereum would know that there is a gas estimate on solidity. It's an estimate because you don't know what the program is actually going to do. Whereas in Clarity, there is a precise gas fee because you know exactly what this program is going to do when you execute it. And in terms of security, this is night and day, because developers can know what can go wrong in their program or have proofs that everything is going to go right before they execute it. And these smart contracts could have hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto assets on them. So security is the main thing to optimize. For the consensus algorithm called Proof of Transfer is a unique consensus algorithm that gives you consensus between the Bitcoin chain and the Stacks chain mining happens on Bitcoin and the the leader that wins leader election through the consensus process is writing new blocks on Stacks. For more details on the consensus algorithm, I highly recommend the Proof of Transfer white paper that has all of the details. Let me give you a brief overview of the Stacks ecosystem as it stands today. As I mentioned that the project started at Princeton University and it was in R and D phases early on. Over the years, my company raised around $70 million in terms of token offerings to build out the public infrastructure on the Stacks 1.0 chain. We got more than 400 applications, and Stacks 2.0 has always been our master design, the blockchain that we wished existed when we were starting off. And over time, the ecosystem has decentralized a lot and there are now several independent entities and developers working in the ecosystem. So with stacks 2.0, all of those 400 applications, the ones that upgrade to sax 2.0, will be available. But more interestingly, clarity smart contracts would go live for the first time. And these contracts include things like decentralized exchanges or new types of financial products and so on. Our project was the first one ever to get a SCC qualification for a token offering. Compliance and regulations has always been very important to us because we think that for the crypto industry to mature, you have to have clear legal and compliant paths available and you cannot live in this gray area. So we have actually done a lot of work on the regulation and compliance side, even though we are engineers at heart and most of our work has been on building these core technologies. So in the Stacks ecosystem now, there are several independent entities like the nonprofit Stacks foundation, like Freehold, that is a community focused entity or daemon that focuses on mining and is based out of Hong Kong. There are several wallets or new types of client interfaces that are being developed by new Internet labs, Secret Key Labs and so on. There are several people who participated over the years in the various offerings to purchase the Stacks cryptocurrency. They include Union Square, Ventures, Y Combinator, Winklevoss Capital. And frankly, at this point, more than 300,000 people hold the Stacks cryptocurrency. A very interesting thing that's happening with stacks 2.0 is that the holders of Stacks cryptocurrency that want to actively participate in consensus and lock up their stacks to help the consensus process would actually be able to earn Bitcoin as a reward directly from the protocol. And this is a fully decentralized process. Anyone, anyone can participate in it. It's completely open and for more details you can go to our website to see how the process works and what are the different types of Bitcoin rewards that people can get from the consensus output. Stacks 2.0 mainnet has been in progress for over a year. I think the first commit on the Rust Code was two years ago. And imagine the amount of work that went into this in developing a new consensus algorithm, building up a blockchain from scratch, testing it and making sure that it is ready to be launched by independent miners. That time has come and it's literally today that we will witness the launch of Stacks 2.0. Over the years the community around Stacks has grown a lot. I think now we have more than 33,000 people in various telegram groups around the world, globally. And that makes me really proud. Imagine one of the original reasons why I did not become a professor and actually came out of academia to build this technology out in the real world was to make a real impact. And seeing this enthusiastic community everywhere, people who are passionate about building a next Internet on Bitcoin and are spread across all over the world, really gives me a lot of energy to do this work day in and day out. Over the years we've been heads down on technology, but now we have reached a stage, we're trying to take the message to a broader audience. So stacks 2.0 is going live today. For more information you can go to Stacks co. Thank you so much. Sa. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Stacks 2.0 launch event. My name is Devakar. I'm the head of engineering here at Hero pbc. As Muneeb was just saying, today is a huge milestone for the entire stacks ecosystem. Stacks 2.0, if you look go back to the initial commits, has been two plus years in the making. But in many ways we are just getting started on this journey. In this talk, I want to talk briefly about our lessons, some of the lessons we learned along the way and looking ahead a little bit, what we can expect. But I want to first start with a quick review of what I'm calling the Stacks Stack over the last year. Plus there are a lot of things that have been built and that I'm really proud to share. We've talked about them in the past, but I wanted to take a moment to present everything together just to give you a sense of the breadth and the depth of the work that has happened. So first we have the Stacks Blockchain itself. Muneeb also talked about this. There are tons of resources available online, so I'm going to breeze through these a little bit. There's a lot of new ideas in this blockchain. It's a clean slate implementation. You can look at the lines of code to get a sense of the work that has gone into it. And a lot of these new ideas, they anchor us in Bitcoin and really give us the foundation to bring decentralized apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin. Muneeb talked about Clarity as well. We're really, really proud of the work and really excited about the possibilities that Clarity brings into the ecosystem and look forward to other platforms and projects supporting Clarity as well. On top of the Stacks blockchain proper, we have a set of suite of developer friendly APIs called the Stacks Blockchain API. So as you can imagine, a blockchain is only optimized for certain kinds of operations and certain kinds of queries. So if you're building a Wallet or an Explorer or some other decentralized application, you might want to access the data in the blockchain in different ways. And the SAX blockchain API makes that really, really easy. We're also one of the first projects to implement the full Rosetta specification. So if you're building a Rosetta compliant Wallet or Explorer or an application, you should be able to seamlessly integrate against the Stacks Blockchain API. This also uses a pretty interesting capability that is built into the blockchain. So there is an event streaming capability that feeds data into the Snacks Blockchain API. And we think that there are lots of other interesting use cases that this event stream mechanism can power. Next up we have Stacks JS and the Stacks CLI. Stacks JS is a modular set of JavaScript libraries that have everything you need to interact with the Stacks blockchain. You can pull in whatever packages you need. There is also a command line application, a Swiss Knife tool to interact with the platform in interesting ways. So very excited about this as well. We previously had different libraries, now we brought them all under this one Stacks JS umbrella and refactored them. So that they're much more usable and pluggable. We're also thrilled about a brand new beautiful explorer for the Stacks Blockchain. This is built on top of the Stacks Blockchain API and I encourage everyone to take a look at it once the mainnet Explorer goes live later today. It really leverages some of the capabilities that are available in our platform. On the Stacks Blockchain, for example, you can view the source code of the contract, and it's not that you have to verify it out of band because the blockchain is storing some other version. The source code is pulled directly from the blockchain itself. You can also look at the input parameters and results of contract calls. This is a built in sandbox for debugging and tons of other nifty features as well. Very excited about that. Then finally we have the Stacks Wallet. We have a desktop version cross platform that you can use to safely store, transfer and stack your sdx. There's also a Stacks Wallet for the web, which is a browser extension currently available for Firefox and Chrome in Developer Preview that we think can really become the gateway to defi and decentralized apps on top of Stacks. So we're really looking forward to where these go as well. So with that sort of quick overview, let me talk a little bit about some of our lessons learned. We're a little bit short on time, so I'll try to keep this brief. Feel free to follow up with me afterwards if you're curious or have more questions. The first thing that we really benefited from is approaching our maintenance launch via these phased testnets. We've had public testnets live since April of last year, and with each testnet phase there was a discrete set of functionalities, capabilities, constraints, requirements that we would introduce. And not only did that give us a lot of focus in development and testing, but as we opened these testnets up, as we had our community testing it out, it was really good for everyone to kind of be aligned on what are the things that are new, what are the things that need more attention, what are the things that we are testing? So taking this phased approach towards the mainnet launch has been very, very useful. Finally, next up, with a project of this magnitude, especially when you have a lot of open ended research problems, really green field effort, a lot of unknown unknowns, projecting and communicating accurate timelines is always challenging. We had ideas, some of which had very complex implementations, but then we also had shifting requirements situation where we are developing multiple products, every layer in the stack and they have intermingling dependencies. And I think it's a sort of natural tendency to crave certainty. So one of the things that we struggled with was to just figure out how do we create and set accurate timelines and communicate them. Because even if we choose not to communicate a specific date, you know, people will fill that void in with some dates regardless. And so some of the things that worked for us was to proactively fight optimism and availability bias in our own planning and estimation. And we've gotten much better at that over time, really working to chase down ambiguities. If you let sort of ambiguities linger on until the very last minute, or if you have some assumptions that are not made explicit, then different people are working with different assumptions. So making those very, very explicit, more tactical things like in our planning and estimation, just factoring in iteration time for pr. So we realized we're pretty good at estimating how much work implementing something would take. But then for the time for it to actually go through reviews, iteration and merge, that would make it the whole thing a lot longer then really just being very transparent and over communicating. I feel very proud of the way our ecosystem operates, the level of transparency and openness that we have. And even when we have delays or changes to the timelines, just being very open, very transparent and over communicative about it has really helped very quickly. A few other things. Investing in tooling and automation. This seems obvious and is as true as it sounds. Early on in our testnet, every time there was a problem to reset the testnet would require a manual process. Then over time, we automated it to a point where it was almost a push button reset of the testnet, which was very, very useful. Crypto moves very quickly, so just having flexibility and agility built into how we operate, how we think in the teams. One thing that I personally found very helpful was just to have a set of guiding principles that we could fall back on. We're often operating in an environment where you don't have perfect information and you need to make decisions. Conflict is inherent in some of these choices. So having some guiding principles that you can fall back on is very useful. So in our case can't be evil, both in terms of our design choices, our technical choices, but also other decisions is a good guiding principle that we often fall back on. Operating the open is another interesting one. We made the transition from having a lot of our communication in private slack channels to fully moving to discord. Over time. I realized that operating in the open is not something that you can just do Half heartedly, you really have to go all in and fully embrace feedback and input from the community, whether it's positive or it's critical. In fact, a lot of our some of the best ideas that we had and a lot of the features were inspired by community conversations. So in particular in Clarity, there's a feature to introduce new functionality in Clarity without requiring a hard fork of the chain and that was inspired by some of our community members. That's where the ideas came from. So really just embracing the community feedback and truly living operating in this open mindset. All right, looking ahead a little bit, as with a project of this magnitude and scale and complexity, we should expect some rough edges that we hope to polish off in the coming weeks and months. Then we are working on the porting over the BNS system. So this is the name registration mechanism, both the on chain names and the off chain names. So this work is nearly done. It's not available today, but will be coming live very soon thereafter. It'll be available as part of the Stacks Blockchain API. More work on the the wallet. There is a forum post about Stacks 2.1, so if you're not I haven't read that, please take a look at it. That's scheduled for maybe six to seven months from now. And for HERO pbc, really the focus is just going to be on developers. Developers, developers. I want to end with just recognizing the people behind the project. I personally want to thank everyone in the engineering, product and design team at HERO pbc. I won't go through all the names here, but thank you to each and every one of these people. They've put in a ton of work to bring the whole ecosystem to where we are. Thank you all. It's a pleasure to work with everyone here. And then finally I want to thank the entire Stacks community. Projects in crypto are really powered by their community, so we wouldn't be here without the whole community. Whether it is technical contributions or non technical contributions, the community is what keeps the project going. So thank you all. Sam.

Okay. All right. Hello, I'm Brittany, the executive director at the SACS foundation and I'm really excited about today's launch because I first met Maneb in 2014 when I was at Union Square Ventures and we funded this crazy idea called One Name Building a Better Internet. And here we are today, over six years later, finally being able to launch some of the tools that were in that first pitch meeting. So it's been quite a journey, but I think all of it's been worth it. And it wouldn't be possible without all the people that are presenting on stage today, but also the community. As Dewalkar said, blockchain projects are made by the community and this whole ecosystem continues to grow because people like you are getting involved. So today I want to share more about what we're doing at the Stacks foundation to help support you as builders and creators to make this user owned Internet possible. So as we've seen, the Internet today has some problems. It's not really user owned, it's more about owning the user. So seen things like privacy getting compromised, data breaches, deplatforming, I don't have to go into detail. If you've read the news, you know that a lot of this is happening and at a faster pace than we've ever seen, especially in the United States. So thinking about how we get to this new future is really about envisioning what that looks like. So what is the user owned Internet? It's a place where individuals have control over their data, they have the option of privacy and how they want to manage it, and they can capture the value that they help create. So these are part of what the future looks like. And I don't think we're quite there yet, but I do know that we've seen some positive signs that we're on the right path. We're still in the early days of crypto. I've given a lot of talks over the years about what's happening in crypto and blockchain and this still holds true. So through Bitcoin we've been able to see the viability of blockchains. But there's so much more that's possible beyond just financial assets that haven't been realized yet. This is where Stacks comes in. Now we need the new builders to, to come in and help shape what this future looks like and the pace at which we can get there. So as of today, we have all of these new tools with Stacks. This wouldn't have been possible without all of the work that has gone into it to date. But what Stacks is all about is giving tools to you, creators, builders, entrepreneurs to build things that weren't previously possible. It's especially exciting because Stacks blockchain built on Bitcoin means that you get all of this accumulated value built within the Bitcoin ecosystem, including hash rate and security and scalability. But the tools built on top that are the ones that are easier for everyone to use and really realize a stream of user owned Internet. So what do we do at the Stacks foundation well, we're here not to build the tools, but to support you in utilizing those tools to launch into new businesses, new ideas, new protocols, new paradigms of how we use the Internet. We have 100 million stacks token treasury that we're putting towards grants to fund the user owned Internet. And the key thing that we're missing at the Stacks foundation is people like you who believe in giving back to the user and giving back to creators. So today I'm going to explain more on how you can get involved, how you can find the funding that you need for your project or you can even join an idea that already exists. So the key program that we have now is the Stacks foundation grant program. You can find more@stacks.org grants but this program is designed to help fund early ideas that grow the ecosystem. Now we've seen not only in blockchain, but across the open web that grants can kickstart huge ideas. They can be a huge gateway into large commercial value. And it can all start with a small grant. I know that like venture funding and big announcements get a lot of hype, but I think grants are really the key seed that make new technology possible. And you can have a really big impact just by starting small. Because grants are this key building block we see in blockchain, that it means that ecosystems are able to build much faster when multiple people are building small pieces that add up together to a bigger whole instead of relying on a single company to build everything at once. And blockchains, especially decentralized tech, already require this type of collaboration and central versus centralized peers. So building in small pieces is what I hope to convince you guys to pick up and get started with. So I did want to zoom out and look at a power of collective building that maybe you're familiar with. It's about Linux. Linux is an open source protocol project where they are grant funding development. Now you can see in this big blue bubble here that Linux has been adopted more than anything else. This is a little outdated, this is from 2013, but it continues to be a core piece of infrastructure on the Internet. Big commercial businesses like Google and Facebook are using Linux underneath the work that they do, which has been great for the adoption of Linux and the improvement of the technology. But all of the funding to date has had this issue where it has to go through grants, it has to go through foundation sponsorships. It's hard to build a commercially viable Linux based business. The difference then is with blockchain is that we have those same components of open Source, but there are built in Economics that support the development, the growth and the business models of supporting those protocols. This means that you can have a new financial system of paying for open source that didn't previously exist. You can create marketplaces with no middlemen and the compute power is contributed from across different people and it's not centralized. So you get that value of having a lot of resiliency and collaborative effort to make things possible. So the token economics also play a key role. So crypto is not just about buying tokens, it's about funding new innovation. If Linux had a token where the use of Linux helped grow it, then maybe it would be sustainable without just donations and funding. So we've seen this be successful in the crypto world as well. So there is a dex on Ethereum called Uniswap, which actually started with a grant funding. They got initial funding from the Ethereum foundation as a way to get started, but over time they've been able to leverage the defi space in order to earn revenue that they can continue to build their business. And I think what makes this such an interesting case study is that they actually started with a grant and only later decided to fundraise for their business. And now they have some of the largest volume, even larger than Coinbase, which started out venture funded from the beginning and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. So instead thinking about what you concede with a little bit of money and turn into a bigger business over time, because these economics are native to protocols. So if you've been waiting as a to see where you should jump in, this is the sign to do that. So we want to make it as easy as possible for folks to come in, join a grant, build something using a grant, no matter how small or big, because I think now it's never been more important to build a new Internet. But also the tools have never been easier to use. With the launch of Stacks 2.0, what do you want to build? Well, we're looking for tools and services that are built on top of stacks, but we're also looking for resources like education, evangelism and collaboration and core protocol development. So whether you're a developer, a designer, we want you to contribute to the ecosystem because that's what helps everyone grow. To date, the three months that we've been running the grants program, We've already funded 18 contributors. We have $55,000 worth of grants awarded to really kick off those new ideas, those new experiments. And it's happened across 13 countries. So this is just the beginning. As part of our beta program and we've already seen some really interesting things come out of it. So I encourage you to check out all of these different apps. But I think what's great to see is that they kind of have served multiple different use cases. Rider ID is a really cool hardware device where the user can own their identity. Daemon has built a mining bot that is open to everyone in the community to use if they want to. Mine Resideo is doing some work with NFTs. Guidio is providing a user application around privacy preserving video. We've had Polish content created, educating individuals about what Stacks is and why it's important. And we've seen Clark develop developer tools built on top. So as you can see, there's quite a range. There's not just one idea that is going to get funded through grants, but if you don't have an idea yet, we are launching our newest grants portal which includes Wishlist ideas. So wishlist idea is an idea that has been submitted from different people across the community, different companies that work within the ecosystem of what they want to see built. So if you aren't sure what you want to build, you can check out our latest proposals and see where you can contribute value. So who is ripe for grants now? A lot of people think it's just for developers, but I want to emphasize that every type of talent is needed in this new Internet ecosystem. So no matter what your background is, if you're willing to come and build and work on an idea, we want you. We've seen everything from protocol developers to policymakers to soc makers come in and want to contribute. So whatever your talent is, we really hope to see you join our channels, join a project, brainstorm with us what grants you want to see. Because I think this is the only way we're going to build this future. Internet is piece by piece, grant by grant. So join us on the mission of a user owned Internet. You can find more@stacks.org grants. We're really excited to help fund this future and we know it's possible now that stacks 2.0 is here. So whatever way you want to get involved, join us on that journey. Thank you.

Sam. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining me. My name is Xan. I am the founder of Demon Technologies, joining you from Hong Kong. It's a little bit late for me tonight, but I'm pretty excited because it's still feeling a little surreal that Stacks 2.0 is actually launching. So thank you for joining me today. I'm going to give an overview of what we do at Demon Technologies and the Software we've been building to make stacks mining a lot easier for anyone who's interested in participating. So with that, let me apologies for the toolbar showing up. I know you all are not happy about that. Let me start by giving an overview of what Daemon Technologies is and where we came from. Demon Technologies is an independent company headquartered in Hong Kong. Our mission is to drive the adoption of Stacks technology in Asia. Daemon was founded by two former blockstack PBC core team members, myself and Gavin Gao. You can read a little bit about us there. But I joined the Blockstack core team back in 2017 and spent the first couple of years focused on growing the independent ecosystem of applications built on top of the stacks 1.0 architecture. Pretty proud of where we got that as a team. We took that from essentially zero independent applications built on top of to over 400 by the end of 2019. About a year and a half ago I started traveling out to Asia quite a bit and starting to spread blockstack technology out here. As many of you probably know, Asia is some of the most important markets for blockchain technology and the innovation going on. It was around the same time that I started to work with Gavin, who was the first technical lead and developer evangelist for Blockstack PBC in China. Him and I continue to work together and then last year I moved to Hong Kong full time and founded Demon Technologies along with Gavin in July. Again, our goal is really to drive the adoption of Stacks technology in Asia as a company that is actually based out here and has our team on the ground. The way that we have kind of taken that mission and our focus since incorporating for about the last six months has been on stacks mining and really lowering the barrier of entry for miners. You know, when I first joined Blockstack PBC back in 2017, one of the main reasons that I really liked what I was seeing and the technology and what Muneeb described at the time was how easy they made it to develop applications in this space, which was quite a stark contrast, especially to what we were seeing in the Ethereum ecosystem and others. And we're looking to do the same thing around Stacks consensus as well. And so what we've worked on for the last six months in that vein is what we call the mining bottom. Again, the goal of the mining bot is to drastically lower the barrier of entry for Stacks miners. PBC and the core team offer some great initial infrastructure for mining, but it is all command line based. As someone who is not an engineer by background, I had a very Big goal to get mining to the point where I felt I could be a sophisticated miner on the network without having to use the command line. We still have a little bit of a ways to go along that journey to fully accomplish that goal, but for now we're pretty proud of where we've gotten the mining bot. We just released the Beta 2.0 version for Mainnet. It provides a graphical interface with live data flows that gives miners the kind of information they need to execute and be more competitive in the mining market. You can see kind of a screenshot of part of it to the right there, but I'm going to be giving you a demo in about 30 seconds of it. The current version, as I mentioned, is in beta, so again, you know, use verify instead of trust when you go to use it. We still highly recommend that you test it on testnet before bringing it to mainnet and actually putting real funds through it. But it is open source and currently it is a local host application. We are pretty close to removing the command line fully from this, but you do still have to go through an installation process with the command line. With that, let's get to the demo. First and foremost, when you go to install the miningbot, we have our documentation site up on GitHub here. This documentation leads you very easily through the installation and build of the mining bot. Again, I'm not an engineer by background. I certainly have no capability to code on my own in the command line. The extent of my expertise is copying and pasting commands into the CLI and I can pretty easily install the mining by using this. It is quite good. I will caveat this with saying I've gone through already the installation process via command line just to save us the time, but it is pretty simple and we go through it right here. Once I've installed through the command line, what I will do is I'll just open up a new tab and go to localhost8000 and I'll be presented with an authentication screen for the mining bot. The first time you do this you will be asked to establish a password. I have already established a password here and you can think of this like metamask. The reason there is a password is so that if you are running even though it's a local host app, if you are running the mining bot on a VPS or a remote server, this makes it so that your private key is encrypted using that password. Otherwise big problems if your private key is exposed that way. Once you establish that password or re authenticate into the app, it will lead you to this public data module. This I really think of as the brain in terms of the strategy when it comes to stacks mining. This is pulling, pulling in all sorts of external data. We have secondary market data coming in both stacks price, Bitcoin price and the relation between the two. We also have specific information about what other miners around you are doing, how many blocks they've won, how many blocks they've competed for, how much they burned across all of those blocks. And you can also look up your address and kind of see your statistics here. We also have that info by stacks, chain height and for specific blocks where you can actually go in and see the details of those. One thing I will note is again, this mining bot, the beta 2.0 release works on the Krypton testnet, the Xenon testnet and mainnet and is easily configurable between all three. You'll notice in the top right, we are running the current, current demo of this on Xenon as mainnet hasn't quite launched yet, but it works easily on all three and is kind of configured to do so. One of the first things that you're going to want to do once installing the app and maybe taking a quick look at this data module is you're going to want to come into the wallet module. This is going to allow you to add a Bitcoin and Stacks wallet. I've already added a Bitcoin wallet in here, but actually for the purposes of the demo, I will delete this. I'll go to add. It's going to ask me to put in a mnemonic here. I already kind of have a Testnet Bitcoin wallet I've been using, so I'm just going to put my mnemonic in here for that I'm going to select Bitcoin. I'm going to hit submit. That's going to load my TBTC wallet or in the case of mainnet, my real wallet and it's going to show the balance there. So I already have some TBTC in this. We make it pretty easy for the Xenon Testnet. If you don't, you can kind of go right to the Xenon faucet, get some TBTC and be on your way. Once I've added my wallets for the purpose of this, I really just need to add a Bitcoin wallet so that I can start mining. I'm now going to go to the third module which is the mining client from here. This is going to allow me to do some pretty cool things. I've already pre downloaded the stacks node just to save us some time. When you log into this for the first time you go to get node status, the current status is going to be there's no node installed, there's no node running, there will be a click, one click download option right here to download and install the stacks node. You don't need to leave the bot or do anything else to do that, which is really nice. Once that is downloaded and is running locally, this is what you will see. Stacks known as downloaded but not running. Please start mining. Before I do this, I just want to take a quick check of my system configuration which is the fourth module. This is really important for Xenon and mainnet because for both as a miner I'm going to need to be running not only a stacks node but a bitcoin D node. This allows me to configure and load a local bitcoin denode or I can also use a remote one. I can also from here reset that lock password that you all saw. I've pre entered this with daemons, bitcoin D node information and so I'm going to go back to the mining client and I'm just going to hit start mining. Once I do that, I'm going to be prompted to select the bitcoin wallet that I use to commit my burn fee for mining. I'm then going to be prompted to set the burn fee. Now Hero Systems PVC and the core engineering team has a recommendation to commit at least 11,000 satoshis per block to mine. This is so that your transaction doesn't get processed as dust by the bitcoin network, but actually gets processed as a real transaction and makes it to the stacks network. For now we're just going to keep it on the default we have set for the bot, which is 20,000 satoshis we're going to hit next. It's going to ask me to confirm my local bitcoin node info. This all looks great. I'm going to finish and then lastly I am just going to enter the that password one more time. Authentication code is correct and the bot is now going to launch the node and then start mining. And so I have now started mining on the network. We could hang out here for about 10 minutes and you would start seeing some of my mining activity. Wouldn't necessarily win a block right away, but you could query that using my bitcoin address, which I've kind of put right right here, which obviously we just started mining. So there's no data, but you can use that to kind of easily take a look at your performance compared to those around you. So that is the mining bot. Thank you for bearing with me during the demo and to finish things up, I'd like to talk a little bit about what's next for the mining bottom again, myself and Gavin and we have one or two contractors that work with us as well. We're really proud of where we've got in the mining bot so far, but in no way, shape or form does this really meet my full goals for this. Again, I think some of the biggest things that we want to create to really improve the bot in the near future, probably the biggest one is dynamic dispatch reminder commits. What this means is right now if I want to change the burn fee per block, so let's say I want to change the 20,000 satoshis to 15 or to 35,000 per block, currently I have to stop the miner and restart it and set a new burn fee. Something that is really important for miners to not just be more competitive, but for the mining bot to enable miners to have algorithmic strategies, strategies that can adapt live to changes that they're seeing in the stacks mining market. We need the ability to dynamically change that burn commit block to block. That is probably the number one thing we're focused on working on at the moment. A very close second is the version of the mining bot as a desktop application. This will really allow it to kind of get my hit. My main goal of it being an application with no interaction with the command line. We also want to augment the data and mining modules, pull more secondary data in there from more exchanges, pull more data in from not just the stacks chain but also the bitcoin chain. We also want to make it easy to search and connect to public nodes, both stacks nodes and bitcoin nodes, for instance from third party service providers like blockdaemon. And then lastly, and I think we may need some help with this from the community, but to be able to have the mining bot easily configurable for folks to use it to run mining pools where you have a multi sig setup with the bitcoin wallet and multiple people mining using that kind of shared capital. I will say if you have any ideas for other things you'd love to see us add to the mining bot, we're all ears and would love to see you kind of contact us on some of those outlets there, please do kind of check us out on the website. We are sdxdemon on Twitter or you can reach out to us at miningemontechnologies. Co with that. Want to say kind of a hearty thank you again after all these years. It's kind of surreal to me that Stacks 2.0 is actually launching, but we're incredibly excited. Myself and the rest of the team at Daemon and this focus on mining is kind of just the start of what we're going to be building. So look forward to kind of moving forward with that and involving a lot of the community listening today in that process. So with. With that, we'd just like to say thank you and looking forward to seeing Larry present next. It doesn't feel the same without you. Hi everybody. Thanks Dan. Really enjoyed seeing your demo of the mining bot. Really exciting. My name is Larry Salibra. I'm the founder of New Internet Labs. I'm here to talk to you a little bit about the new web today. But first of all I want you to indulge me a little bit. It's really cool that I'm the one live on stream when we're one block away from mainnet launch. And it's been a really exciting journey to have the Bitcoin blockchain over here on Explore. Waiting for mainland stacks 2.0. I wanted to just show everybody how I found Stacks almost seven years ago today. I don't know if Maneve is watching, but if he was, this is a live in person event. I would imagine his face if I showed this on the screen. So I found Stacks back when it was one name in March of 2014 in Hacker News. And since day one the project has been sort of razor focused on Bitcoin. And it's just really exciting that after all of these years and all the hard work put in by all the team members and community, that we're finally launching mainnet on our sort of the next step on our journey toward delivering the type of Internet we think the world deserves. Congratulations to everybody in the Stacks community. Congratulations to Maneeeb, the Hero PBC team. I know everybody's worked very hard on getting all of us together and getting things ready for launch. So congratulations everybody. As part of the celebration, I'm happy to announce that Stacks app on iOS is now publicly available. Stacks app is a ticker for the Stacks ecosystem, a bitcoin first ticker and will evolve into a application to make it easy for you to measure the health of our ecosystem. You can get quotes of your favorite trading pairs and add your favorite Stacks pairs to your desktop. So scan the QR code and download it on the App Store. The app works on iOS, so iPhone, iPod and it will also work on your Apple Silicon Mac for those of you the early adopters. So today I want to quickly review what we've been working on the past year and then I want to talk about some new protocols. So in 2020, we shipped the new Internet extension with the Can't Be Evil Sandbox as part of the Stacks ecosystem app mining program version one. We had almost 200 apps that opted into the Camp Sandbox. For those of you that don't remember, the Campbell Sandbox is a new security model for the new Internet. One where you are sure that you're connecting to the server that you've chosen and third parties can't track you without you opting in. We also developed version two of the Campy Evil Sandbox in our native browser. Here's an example of Camp Evil Sandbox version 2 and the prototype of our browser. Here it is, using my decentralized blog app, asking for permission to talk to a third party server to load a post. This is something that will be available in upcoming public beta once we've got everything working on stacks 2.0 bns. So today we're going to talk about protocols for a new web. But first we should talk about the old protocols. The design of the old protocols is sort of what's gotten us into this situation where we have these giant tech platforms, people being deplatformed, and we have censorship and deplatforming in many countries around the world. The current web, when you load up a website, there are lots of third parties that are involved, all the way from the big tech companies that own the platforms, the Facebooks, the Twitters, the names, you know, all the way to the data centers. AWS companies you don't know, like Verisign that run run the.com domain and the company that manages the domain names. All of these. All of these companies not only can track you, they're also the place someone can go to if they want to get you kicked off of your account or close down your business. Today's defi makes it even worse. On top of trusting all these people, you're also trusting a bunch of infrastructure that other people are running to hold your money. So a lot of this came about because of this protocol called HTTP. It was a protocol that was built, it was created in the early days of the web. We were very naive and it was an academic project where everybody trusted everybody else. There's no encryption or authentication. You can't be sure that this website that you're loading is coming from the name that it says there's no privacy. Anybody between you and the server can see every single thing you do on the site and there's no redundancy. When the server that you're accessing goes down, the data is gone, you can't access the information anymore. And the names are controlled by a corporation based in the us it owns the whole naming system which can decide to increase prices or sell your name or Q off. So you don't want to use, you don't want to use HTTP. If you ever see HTTP on a website, just close the tab. Don't want to be using the site. Most sites have moved on today to HTTPs, which has a little bit more security. Security is all centralized so you can, you have a third party that, that vouches that the name that you're visiting is actually the site that you're trying to visit. You have some privacy. As long as you're not a nation state or a large company that can issue SSL certificates. Most people can't see what you're doing on the Internet, but you still have the redundancy problems if this, if the server disappears the information, the content is gone. So let's talk about some potential new protocols. These aren't set in stone. These are some things that we've been trying out and working on as part of our nil naming library. So I want to show you with you my ideas. I'm looking for feed from the community and hopefully pull requests once the library is put out in the open. So I like to think about new protocols and at least four different protocols. One is the service protocol and another is the app protocol, the person protocol and then the document protocol. So the service protocol is really just an upgraded version of the web that we use today. It's still your browser connecting to someone else's computer. Instead of the US corporate controlled domain name system we use today, it uses sovereign names, names that are owned by the user, owned by the service provider using the Stacks blockchain name service. BNS encryption is trustless. Instead of a certificate authority, some other company vouching for the keys that you're using. These are instead pinned in the BNS name. So you don't have to trust certificate authority. But it's still someone else's computer. So all the things that go with that are there. If the computer goes down, you can't access it anymore. If you store stuff on their computer, they can probably read it. So you can see it's A it's a marked improvement over HTTP or HTTPs. And also it makes it very clear when you're connecting to these services that you're connecting to a service. You're not using an app that runs on your computer, you're connecting to someone else's computer. Another protocol is the app protocol. So the app protocol, like the service protocol, uses bns, but instead it's content based networking. It's not one to one connecting to a server. When you load an app, you load a cryptographic hash of the app that you're looking for. And that app can come from come from Atlas in the stacks naming system, or it can come from a decentralized storage provider like BitTorrent or SIA or IPFS. You get cryptographic versioning and guarantees, which means you can always make sure that you got the version you were looking for. The version wasn't swapped out without you knowing it. You're getting the same code that other people are. These are still apps that are built with web technologies and they run on your computer, they don't run on other people's computers. So that means that if the developer disappears, you can still use the app. Document is very similar, but actually it's just a way to exchange documents in a way where you can version the documents and you can find them even if the original source disappears. The main difference between this and apps is that no code is allowed, so you don't have to worry about unsafe code running in your browser or anything like that. Finally, the person protocol. In the new Internet, people should be first class citizens. And so in the stacks ecosystem we have the Stacks id and this is the global unique name that you use, that you own and you can use to build your digital life on. You can send money with other people, you can interact with others using apps, and you can own your own social graph. So we're going to be publishing an open source library called Nil Naming Library in the coming weeks and we look forward to others working with us and collaborating and getting your feedback on what you think are the right protocols for the new Internet that we're building in the stacks ecosystem. I hope that through this work that we're doing that we can have a truly general purpose user owned computing platform. One that people will feel comfortable building their lives on, their digital lives on digital land that they own and on land they can't be kicked off or evicted on without somebody showing up physically into their apartment and hitting them over the head. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to me. Today, again, congratulations to everybody in the Stacks ecosystem. And please scan the QR code and sign up with your email for our updates and you'll be the first to know when we have new things to share. Just to let you know, the Stacks app was actually shared with people that signed up like we promised in advance of our announcement today. So you will be the first to know if you sign up. Thank you very much. It. It doesn't feel the same without you.

Ram. Ram.

Hello. Hey everyone. Really excited today, really, you know, we've been waiting a few years really for this moment where stacks 1.0 upgrades to stacks 2.0 and just really excited to be here presenting about Freehold. And so without further ado, I'll get started. Let me put it on play. Cool. So my name is Patrick Stanley, I'm the founder of Freehold and we are a community of high impact toddlers. So we'll get into what that all means and what we've done. The agenda for today, we're going to discuss what is Freehold, what we've done so far, the importance of having skin in the game and how Freehold uses that concept, what's ahead for Freehold in the Stacks community and also how you can get started. Cool. So first, let's start with what is Freehold? So in order to describe what Freehold is, I'm going to begin by describing what a freeholder is. A freeholder is someone who earns crypto for doing impactful work and holds that crypto. So they're kind of like the, they're kind of like the polar opposite of a free rider. A free rider would be someone who buys crypto but doesn't have a meaningful impact. They wait for sort of other people to provide the value or sort of kind of make the actual token more useful, more valuable, etc. With Freehold, a freeholder doesn't wait for other people to do work. They have an impact. The second thing about Freehold freeholders is when they unhodl, or if they unhodl, they are out of the Freehold. And this is sort of like a proof of HODL access control to a community of like minded people. And we'll, we'll discuss a little bit more of that. And then thirdly, freeholders, over time they build a reputation for their earnings, their impact and their conviction. So we'll discuss all three of these things throughout this presentation. So how do Freeholders know what to work on? Well, we have this challenge board you can kind of see as I scroll through it, there's different tasks people can do to earn, to earn. Right now they're earning bitcoin, but soon they'll be earning stacks. They can do all sorts of things as individuals or as a part of a community, leading up to just something that's more impactful overall than doing things as an individual. When I think about how founders of companies operate, typically they'll hire 10 people, five to 10 people in a startup, and those five to 10 people are doing all the work. So you can imagine one business development person has a lot of pressure on them to make something happen. In the freehold model there can be hundreds of people, you know, doing business development or writing, writing educational content or doing distribution, et cetera. And we'll provide some proving points for the freehold model. Working within the stacks community in the, in the coming slides we also have this thing called HODL Chat. Really what it is is just a discord that is gated for only folks who have earned their way into the freehold and continue. So if you unhodl, you're out of the HODL Chat. I'm not showing any of the messages in the HODL Chat because only freeholders can see the messages and we hold that fairly sacrosanct. So this is where we discuss taking over the world and working together and just having fun together as a community. Let's get into what we've done so far. So one of the first, one of the first major ways we worked together as a community is we had Stacks testnet mining challenge where we have a goal to attract as many would be miners to the testnet in hopes that these miners would be oriented to compete in mining when Mainnet arrives. So our sort of reach goal was 500 registrants. We thought this was something that was ambitious and if we hit that we'd be extremely happy. From a standing start. We actually blew past that maybe not a couple times, maybe like a handful of times over. And so what happened was we actually got a combined 3000 registrations and also a combined 1300 miners online during a two phase testnet challenge. So we have some specific videos that are from the freehold community. There's a couple of keychain videos which in aggregate had 5,600 views. And then we also did a pair mining video challenge where freeholders would pair up with other freeholders who hadn't learned how to mine and they teach each other how to do this. And then we distribute those videos all over the Internet. So that got nearly 2000 views. So we, you know, we Think that those video views are kind of like, sort of like an undeniable link to the registrations and the miners being online. So we were really excited that the, we had an impact just for the testnet mining challenge here. And recently we paid out the reward for this and that was one of the first big prizes that our community earned as a collective. So we were really fired up about what we accomplished there. So the other thing that freeholders do. Well, actually. Sorry, one sec. So here's just an example of one of the videos Jason made. He's a freeholder obviously, and this is just like a six minute video people use prior to entering into the contest. So another thing that freeholders do is they create content and media. This is just super, super low hanging fruit, high impact work that can spread, spread the message and educate people about stacks. And you know, we have the belief that we're moving into shifting media landscape. You know, people aren't just using PR firms to interact with legacy media to tell their stories. They're increasingly telling their own stories and building their own media companies and building their own distribution channels. Maneeb, for example, has like almost 50,000 followers on Twitter. Sometimes a single tweet from him is more valuable than an article from a traditional media source. So we're really kind of leaning into the fact that anyone can be effectively assistant journalist or a content creator and leveraging that fact with kind of giving folks skin in the game. So we think it's now wise to create media communities rather than just media companies of pro stacks people. And these people educate and they tell a consistent story, but it's always in their voice. And importantly, they have, importantly as differentiated by legacy media, they have skin in the game. They're, you know, you can trust them because they have skin in the game as opposed to not having skin in the game and maybe playing more status games rather than wealth games. So our thesis is that media communities are greater than media companies and we're looking to prove that out over 2021. But just kind of like, kind of, you know, just describing that as our thesis going in. And we think the reason being is that content creators, you know, say like freeholders, for example, they have, they have skin in the game. You know, there's this and I have a slide on kind of like these two different mindsets of west coast and east coast that I'll show in a sec. But as opposed to media companies, they don't necessarily have skin in the game. You could say they're a quote unquote neutral arbiter but we feel that we can actually grow more value in this category of just media creation by leveraging the fact that things like tokens do allow for payment and do allow for having some steak and some skin in the game. So some examples of some content that's been created so far. Friedger Muffke created this really good, really good children's story that describes stacks and stacking in a kind of like Hans Christian Andersen style fairy tale. This is really popular and I'm sure Frieder reads this every night to his genius children before they go to sleep. But you know, this is just the kind of like blog content we really love. It's really, you know, it's nice, nice anime, it has nice animations, good storytelling and most importantly is educational. So people are people going from a standing start to actually learning what it is that stacks does and how it makes bitcoin more valuable, etc. Another thing we do is video content. So you know, any video platform we will utilize to educate folks. This video in particular is by Andrev. He's from Poland. He's one of. He's one of the kind of most potent freeholders and he really kind of, he really is, he is super high impact and he's going to do really well in freehold. This video has like almost four. Excuse me. This video has almost 4,000 views. And he describes the white paper in very clear terms. He speaks in English and in Polish and he's built a community. Just recently he built a community of 200 people that were testing out mining just in the past week. I mean this is, this just goes to show you like your community can do a lot for you. You just have to do a lot for your community or even even just a little for the community. Just you know, paying them out, paying them out a little bit as, as they sort of deserve. Right? So that's video content is just, is. Is great and we're gonna, we're gonna grow both blog and video content 20, 21 and lastly content. So you know, I think Elon Musk famously said whoever controls the memes controls the universe. Well, memes actually can be very educational. You know, they can tell a story, they can be comical. They also signal community and like fun that's being had. I know like over the past year the stacks community has just gotten way more fun. It used to be very, very sort of like clinical engineering based, not a whole bunch of bunch of memes. And now we're really kind of like really kind of like signaling our own self esteem through and our own sense of humor and our sense of community through memes. And I think that's really important. You know, memes build community, but they're also designed to spread a message, you know, so we have like a handful of memes here that are kind of funny. I think our meme game is definitely getting better every week and our memes have probably, I think by this point we probably crossed like a million views in terms of people seeing our memes. And we want to increase that and use memes for good, not for evil. Another thing, just some like loose social engagement engagement metrics. I mean, there's been, as Lunar Crush indicated a couple weeks ago, there's been an increase in social contributors. I think part of this is from the Freehold community and also the second order effects of the Freehold community. People talk about stacks that aren't freeholders, who were introduced to stacks by freeholders. And we think that's just a really good sort of behavior. And then of course, search term history on Block Stack has gone up over time since October around the time when Freehold started. And we like to think we had an impact there as well. So I've been talking a lot about importance of skin in the game. I wanted to provide some visuals just to drive home the point. So before I was mentioning these stakeholder mindsets in west coast, on the west coast, the stakeholder mindset is, you can trust me because I have skin in the game. The east coast stakeholder mindset is I have a conflict of interest because I am part of this. And these are just two very different mental models. And I think as this next decade, as we go deeper and deeper into this next decade, everyone's going to become a stakeholder. Everyone, everyone's going to become an investor. And this west coast mindset is really something that we think is going to become the prevailing mindset. And we're essentially driving home this concept with Freehold by introducing, introducing some, some tools to, to allow that to be the case. Going back to the slide real quick, as mentioned before, content creators have skin in the game. You can trust them because they're not a no coiner. They're not, they're not putting up headlines like Bitcoin is dead. We all know Bitcoin isn't dead. That's, that is a, that is a clickbait article that is, you know, informationally not very nutritious. Whereas, you know, the Winkle, the Winklevoss, for example, the Winklevoss twins, you know, they're quote tweeting articles like that and saying bitcoin is obviously not dead. Those folks are actually stakeholders who have skin in the game. You can trust them because they own bitcoin and you know that they know their stuff. So there's a huge contrast between incentives and overall mindsets when, when you have skin in the game versus when you don't. And you should be able to signal that you have skin in the game without revealing how much skin in the game you have. And so that's part of the reason that we developed HODL score. So HODL score is a way of directionally knowing how much impact people have had and also how much conviction they have for a certain token. We're demoing this with the stacks token. So you can think of it as. The cousin of a credit score. So say a credit score assesses the liability side of the balance sheet. HODL score assesses the assets and earnings side of the balance sheet as measured in, as measured in, you know, cryptocurrency. So like, for example, we can, in that first, in the first row we can see, you know, amount earned, we can see how much is second row we can see a match amount that's continued to be hodled. Third row you can see, okay, how long since they began hodling. So you have some, like, some history. Fourth row you can see when was the last time they earned. So you can tell whether they've started to become a free rider and less of a freeholder. And lastly, something we'll introduce in the future is kind of like HODL mix. So all these different inputs are actually weighted in their own particular way and they sort of get combined into an algorithm that spits out HODL score, which I think is a very directionally useful score to use. So, you know, what we're trying to do is we're actually trying to as like a North Star at Freehold, we're trying to rapidly increase the number of people who have over a 750 hollow score, which would be like, you know, 750 above would be excellent. And that way we're growing the number of high impact freeholders and kind of ignoring the free riders. So if you hold stacks and you don't do any work, we're not interested in, we're not interested in you unless you have a change of mind and you'd like to have an impact. You know, if you want to go from a standing start to earning stacks right away, you can do so as well. And you can start building your HODL score eventually. We think if we can get enough people using HODL Score. We think a lot of other projects are going to use that. We've already, we've already been reached out to by about a half dozen projects that are wanting to use Freehold for this purpose. And we think we can actually grow new labor markets for people who earn in crypto where it previously didn't exist. So that's, that's major, major, major. So what's ahead, HODL Score is going to start getting delivered to freeholders privately Beginning in 2021. Sorry, beginning in. Yep, beginning in February 2021. And we're continuously onboarding more educators and builders. And you know, I, I'm, I'm interviewing them individually. I have 60 interviews next week alone. I blocked up my schedule this week and so next week I'm getting bombarded with new, new freeholders. Super excited about that. I just love growing this community, as mentioned, you know, getting a lot of demand from exchanges, projects, even companies to support them with Freehold and provide more opportunities for existing freeholders. So that's good, but we'll move there once we have like a fully, fully polished product and we feel that we've validated it with the Stacks Freehold first. And lastly, we're doing a referral program. This is for freeholders only, giving out 25 bucks in Bitcoin for each freeholder that gets newly onboarded. And so far we've gotten, we, we actually launched that a couple days ago and already have had 70 referrals from, from our gang. So how you can get started, very simple. Just go to join Freehold.com, fill out the survey and you'll get scheduled to speak with me. I'll speak with you very soon if you do so. So anyways, thanks so much. Really had a blast doing this and looking forward to the rest of the day's speakers. Appreciate it. All right, thanks, Patrick. So our bitcoin block arrived and because the Internet is powered by cats, it happened simultaneously with my cat arriving. She ignored me all morning and then appeared. So that's awesome news for the Stacks mainnet launch. It means we can announce the Stacks 2.0 Genesis block very soon. So stay tuned. Right now we're going to take a 10 minute break and when we'll return, we'll have a whole number of announcements that you won't want to miss. Announcements about the progress that Stacks has made in building a user focused Internet. So check your social medias, try to avoid the doom scrolling, grab a snack, pet your cat and stay tuned. After the break, we'll be back around 25 minutes after the hour. SA. La. Sam. Sa. Lamb. Lamb. Sam. La. Sam. There's no escape. You can't hide, they're following you. Your cravings for nacho fries will never.

Hi everyone, I'm Jenny, Digital community partner at Hero pbc and I'm here today to introduce a very special segment of this event. Over the past year we have made so much progress on developments like Clarity and Proof of Transfer that we can almost take for granted just how complicated these things actually are. Luckily for us, we have some amazing and brilliant community members who are constantly educating the rest of the world on all things Stacks. So with that, please enjoy this video of some very familiar faces breaking down the fundamentals of of Proof of transfer in SACS 2.0. Thank you.

My take on it is it's really a force multiplier for the user owned Internet backed by the security properties of Bitcoin. There's so many capabilities that are going to be unlocked when stacks 2.0 comes on. I really see it as it's tooling multiplied for developers and enabling developers to put better functionality in place for users. Yeah, stacks 2.0, the way I tend to describe it, and I'll just never be as technical as Dan is or many of the folks here in this community, but it's just, it's its own blockchain, but it's its own layer that sits on top of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin up to this point is really about all the financial freedom that you're getting in my mind. Like Bitcoin lets people take sovereignty over their financial future and there's just promises all around that. But there's this application layer that doesn't quite exist yet that stacks 2.0 lets you hook into. So the Block stack or Stacks blockchain sits on top of Bitcoin in a way that no other like app layer does today. There's a lot of cool stuff being done around Lightning, but there still isn't like a way to really kind of build your apps on top of Bitcoin's security. And I'm trying to blank almost as I'm saying that's kind of how I would describe it. So it's the app layer. Even if it's his own blockchain For Bitcoin, Stacks 2.0 is a blockchain that is novel in the sense that it is attached to Bitcoin, you could say, but it's not a side chain. So Stacks 2.0 has its own smart contract language called Clarity it has its own token called Stacks. And what is very interesting is that because it is using Bitcoin for finality, it anchors itself, which means that it can use Bitcoin's proof of work to still have the same safety guarantees as other blockchains without having to implement proof of work for itself. And I think that makes it very interesting. And Stacks, you could say, is kind of like the missing piece for Bitcoin because it allows you to write smart contracts on top of Bitcoin. You could say to me, Stacks 2.0 is this culmination of a whole ton of work done by the HERO PBC team and what's now becoming the Stacks Foundation. And it is this evolution of the network. We're seeing the introduction of this new consolidation census mechanism. We're seeing proof of transfer actually come to life and to be in use on the test net as it gets ready for mainnet. And we're seeing Clarity, a new smart contract language, start to really express itself and show some of the possibilities of what could be built on top of Stacks. And essentially on top of Bitcoin.

Proof of transfer is the novel consensus algorithm that backs up the Stacks 2.0 blockchain. It utilizes the most durable and secure Bitcoin blockchain to bootstrap the Stacks blockchain. In a way, it interconnects the Bitcoin and the stacks cryptocurrencies as well.

You have stacks miners, you have Stacks validators and or stackers, and the miners will commit Bitcoin in order to have the opportunity to build blocks and get Stacks rewards. In the stacks token. Those commitments from the miners are fed back to stacks token holders as part of the consensus mechanism, as part of proof of transfer. So no more staking in a coin that's just building off of itself and kind of making this little Ponzi scheme. You're actually staking Stacks tokens and receiving Bitcoin back, which is really novel. Miners are getting rewarded in stack tokens. So Clarity is actually the native smart contract language that will operate on top of stacks 2.0, and it will allow decentralized finance or defi gaming and all other use cases that in a need to use the smart contract capabilities to expand and to go to the mainstream for the cryptocurrency. Clarity is a language that was invented for the Stacks 2.0 blockchain. It's a bit of a different language from what other people are used to, and they're used to working with, say, solidity. So Clarity is a lisp like language that's decidable, which means that it solves a lot of the issues that people are having with developing smart contracts for different blockchains. So you can think about issues, reentrancy issues or having tokens locked up because of a programming error. Clarity is designed to tackle all these problems. The interesting thing about Clarity running on stacks as well is that clarity is interpreted, which means that it's not going to be compiled to bytecode, which is unreadable on the chain. So the Clarity smart contract that a developer writes is what you will see on the stacks chain. So it becomes a lot easier for third parties to verify that the contract is actually doing what people are promising it is doing. And I think that's a very important step because there have been incidents before on different chains where compiled contracts secretly have something else going on that is not apparent to the users interacting with the contract.

Since this contracts are predictable, the predictable.

Smart contracts helps app developers or the.

App founders to build numerous apps, be it defi or gaming or whatnot. We can build anything and everything on the Stacks blockchain that users love while minimizing the need for the trust. And this really helps to drive towards the user owned Internet.

So with stacks 1.0 we saw this rise in applications that were focused on privacy and focused on putting the user in control of their data. And this is a huge shift compared to a lot of what we see out there today, where data aggregation and data security are two kind of lost concepts on the Internet. Everything is copied everywhere, everything is accessible to the application creator. And Stacks 1.0 said, let's change that. Let's encrypt the user's data by default, let's introduce privacy by default. Let's create an Internet that can't be evil. Now we have stacks 2.0. With this coming out, the user owned Internet could really be built on top of this technology. The way that's going to work is we're seeing this novel new consensus mechanism that is going to allow the transfer of a reserve asset. In doing that, it makes it really easy to bootstrap your own blockchain. And I think this is a sort of under highlighted feature or something that's going to be coming up much more after initial mainnet launch. But we have this idea of app chains or taking proof of transfer to another level where you have your own token possibly that would link to the underlying Stacks chain that links to the underlying Bitcoin chain. And I just see a ton of possibility in determining your own rules. And basic structure around the blockchain and creating your own network where you kind of get to set your own terms. But at the core of it, the expansion of the technology behind what just started as identity management and data management is really going to progress into what we see as a new sector or a new section of technology. And that's why we commonly call it Web3. The key distinction that's lost in the current stacks 1.0 Dapps kind of hundreds are out there, is that users, you're told on those apps that you. You're logging in or signing in, but that's not really what you're doing today, right? Even on stacks 1.0, what really happens is you're authorizing an application to access your data. So we've taken that whole user login model that you see on the legacy Internet where you ask permission to access your data with a password, and we flipped it. Right now you're authorizing an application to access your data that exists today in Stacks 1.0. In reality, what Stacks 2.0 is going to be doing is taking that and just really kind of amplifying it right in this model with clarity, with the Stacks token, with the Stacks 2.0 blockchain, with future app chains. What we're really doing is kind of 10x in the capabilities that we already kind of built up, which are already pretty great, right? And so I like to think of it as you may have seen the memes about 10x developers out there. Well, with Stackstoke 2.0, like we're 10xing users. So I'm really excited about it. I think it's a combination of two things. So the first part is that stack 2.0 offers a solution to the question of identity. On stack 2.0, you can have a decentralized identity that is decidedly yours because it's secured by private key cryptography. And you can use this identity to sign into different applications and to interact with certain smart contracts. So the second part is then the smart contract, of course. And as we all know, these allow us to interact with applications in a way where we don't have to trust a third party. So if we look at many popular web applications today, they're owned by central entities, and these get to control the identity factor. So they sign you in and they keep some records of you, and they also store your data and they apply some logic on that with their application. On Stacks 2.0, you instead interact with smart contracts that you do with your own identities that are both in your Control and then any data that would be stored about you will be stored in again a different location, which means that no central entity has all the keys in hand so to speak.

I already feel the userwant Internet is starting to emerge. It has already emerged with the arrival of the Stacks 1.0 blockchain. There are numerous apps that are built on top of the Stacks 1.2 blockchain that puts users back in control of their data and identity using the decentralized identity management and the storage management system system powered by the Stacks ecosystem. With stacks 2.4 coming in picture with stacks 2.0 being live now, the users can even minimize the trust within the transactions and because of the powerful proof of transfer mechanism which we discussed earlier, they can even bootstrap their own blockchain. That in turn puts users to take control, truly control and secure the network. This definitely will drive the use of only Internet with combining the reliable smart contracts and building apps that can't be evil. Also putting the users back in control of their data is the dream tooling set for building a user on Internet and all of that is there in Stack Student.

I'm Mohammed Abdu, Founder and CEO of Pravica and Praeka actually is fully communication suite that utilizing blockchain technology and use with 3.2 standard and running on top of stacks 2.0. Praavica is playing a great role to the term of user owned Internet. We will empower our users with the functionality of the communication suite. We will be able to send emails and do all the communication activities like chat, video calls and voice codes. You will be sure that no one is using your data in the bad things or directing some advertisement or any marketing to your inbox. This is in brief what Praveka is doing and we succeeded to collect $500,000 investment from a prominent VCs like 500,000 Startups and we are working now to deliver that the full suite with the full functionality to the stacks to users. Hi everyone, I'm Harini Rajan.

I am a blockchain R and D engineer at Blocks Survey Technologies and also a Stacks evangelist. I have been with the stacks community close to two years now.

I am being a part of product.

Block survey blocksurvey.I we are built on top of the stacks on Derpo blockchain and we basically provide a privacy focused alternative to the existing surveys, polls and forms platforms. You know the data today online which is available in the platforms is not safe and secure. Various data leaks and data mining and data breaches are the proof of that. But at Block Survey, we believe we want to put users in control of of their own data. You own your data with Block Survey.

And all this is possible because of.

The stacks 1.0 ecosystem. With stacks 2.4 coming live, we are very much excited to try out the Clarity, Smart contracts and other novel consensus mechanisms. Being live, there are endless possibilities and.

We are excited to try out more. Hey, how's it going? My name is Leighton Diamond. This is Dan Trevino. I say your last name right? I don't think I've ever said it out loud. Trevino, right? Yeah.

Oh.

See, Dan and I don't work in the same city, so we only see each other occasionally anyway. We both represent Run Riot and all the many things that Run Riot does and builds. We've been members of the Sax community for a couple years, but I'll let Dan introduce himself and what he's been doing. So, Dan, why don't you start off with telling us a little bit about yourself and how long you've been in the Stacks community. Yeah, long time. Open source guy. Been part of the Stacks community since early 2017. Yeah, that's really all there is to know. I've been working on building apps on blockstack for past several years. I mean, I'm going to jump in. I'm not just a pure interviewer here because Dan and I work together. Dan's app, Run or Not Riot, is the reason that I really got interested in the community in the first place. So I've been involved since later 2017 and the first app that I went like, hey, I can use this and I want to contribute to this community was notewriot. Let's talk about what we're building, Dan. What have we been building besides Noteworth? Well, we built a couple of things we are building on Note Riot. So a better, faster, easier to use 2.0 version that hopefully makes it easier for everyone to onboard to get access to their data quickly. The second thing I'm really excited about, Webby. We've built Webby originally as a DAP Explorer on Blockstack for several hundred DApps that already exist. We're extending Webby to include wallet functionality and stacking and delegation functionality as well as the continuing to have the DAP pieces as well. So looking forward to that. And we've got a longer roadmap for Webby too. There's a whole class of applications that you've seen on other smart contracting platforms that will be available to us in the various applications you can Think about different incentive mechanisms within applications for community involvement or community participation or network involvement that we could enable within the applications based on clarity. So, I mean, it's smart contracts. Smart contracts.

Everything.

Everything you've heard about DEFI and all of those things are open to us. My name is Marvin and I've been involved in the crypto space since around 2014, initially, of course, because of Bitcoin. And I came across what was then called blockstack in around 2017. And what initially intrigued me was the problems of a decentralized browser. The idea that there is a browser that accesses something like a decentralized Internet. I've been following them ever since. And then once the platform matured, I got really interested in the technology and the promise of the steps Stacks chain. That's when I got more involved and I participated in some hackathons and I wrote some articles about different technologies and their possible issues. So what am I building on stacks 2.0? Well, I've built a few different applications using Stacks technologies before, but I would say the single most largest and my main project right now is called Rider. Rider is a decentralized identity storage device, much like the crypto Harwa wallets that exist out there. The reason I'm working on this is because I like and embrace the promise of a decentralized identity, an identity that is under complete control of its user instead of a third party. When I first started working with this, I first saw many issues with securely managing your decentralized identity. Of course it is bad if you lose your Bitcoin keys and your money gets stolen, but arguably it's an order of magnitude worse if your decentralized ID gets stolen, because that person will get access to a lot of different information. Or on the other hand, if you so happen to lose your keys, you lose your decentralized identity and access to a lot of things that you hold dear. What I think the best solution to that is to have a hardware device that is dedicated to just managing your decentralized identities. So I've been working on the rider for about six to 12 months now. And this is not just something that exists on paper. It's actually a working piece of technology right now. So we're in a prototype which just happens to still show the old Blockstack logo, but it's going to be upgraded very soon. And yeah, this works today. So very excited to keep working on this. I'm getting people involved and excited. So my name is Jason Schrader. I have actually been involved with Community for just about a year now. I started back in January. I started getting really involved in February when I applied to the evangelist program. And the story of how I found it is kind of interesting. I started out looking for, for open source accounting software and I stumbled across a DAP called dearray and it was like, hey, this is built on a technology I've never heard of. I started researching Stacks more. I got my ID I used with that, I looked at what other dapps and I just loved the concept from day one. So I jumped in to see where I could help. I've been a part of all three working groups based around business models, proof of trust transfer and governance. And I've really just tried to bring my skills to the community and see where I can best contribute. That being said, I actually have a project that I'm really excited about too. It's. It's called Unmutable. And this is going to be a publication that is centered around privacy, decentralization and sort of the impact of crypto on society today. So as we're building this web 3.0 or as we're, as we're building this user owned Internet, I really want to document that journey and see what it's like both for developers and for users and just to provide additional information around all of that. So overall I'm just really excited for this whole project coming up. And so again, the name was Unmutable and we chose that name because it was sort of a play on the immutability of a blockchain. So it's fun that way too. So I'm very excited about how Stacks 2.0 will utilize and use the power of Bitcoin to secure the network. As we all know, Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain infrastructure and the highest hashing power ever in the world. So to run your consensus algorithm based on the power of Bitcoin, it will give you a huge advantage of how the trust will be on your network. So I'm very, very excited about this launching and also to enable too much functionality on Tradica because of stacks to crypto.

I am very much excited and very proud to be part of the Stacks community, which I believe is a pioneer in building the user owned Internet. I'm so happy and waiting to see the proof of transfer or be it clarity, smart contracts, everything. Live and see the endless great apps which is going to be built on top of the stacks 2.1 network.

Super, super excited to be here ushering in the new era of stacks. The stacks 2.0, the stacks community 1.0 as well, is one of the best places to be on the Internet. These people, a large portion of this group, is kind of active every day. The key companies that are part of of the original vision are still active, you know, every day. So you see everyone from top leadership down to engineering having discussions, talking with users, users having discussions. Sometimes it's Stacks related, sometimes it's just blockchain related. But this is kind of, like I said, this is the best place to be on the Internet. The block Stack Stacks community community. Ra. Sa. Sa. Sam. Hey everyone, I'm Graham Jenkin, CEO of CoinList and excited to be a small part of the Stacks 2 launch event. Today I'll be talking about trends that we're seeing shaping 2021 and how they set the stage for stacks two. But first, I want to explain why I have an illustration of a mug of eggnog on the right. That's what that's meant to be. Around this time of year, I make eggnog for everyone at Coinless headquarters. I make it from scratch. It's fantastic. Obviously, this past holiday season, no one was in the office and no eggnog. But this is supposed to be a talk about trends and predictions, most of which will only be half right, I'm sure. But one prediction that will be 100% correct is that eggnog will be back at Coinlist by the end of this year. You're all welcome to come in and join with us in the San Francisco headquarters for an eggnog once we get through all this mess. Anyway, so getting onto the real trends for 2021, this is what I'll be talking about. But actually, before I do that, I do want to talk a little bit about why you should care about what Coinless has to say about trends in the first place, which is a good question. So let me try to answer that. So we view ourselves as a centralized bridge to the decentralized future. And our role is to help usher in that decentralized future by connecting the most promising projects in crypto with capital and community. We've done that since 2017, starting with Filecoin, right the way through to Dapper's Flow Sale in the last few months. And we dominate the space. Almost all of the major layer 1 protocol token sales run on us. This places us upstream of all of the major centralized crypto finance platforms that you all know. And by being upstream, by being earlier stage, we've got clearer visibility to the trends. So that's one reason why you may care about what we say. The other is that we don't just handle token sales. We distribute tokens to users in coinless wallets. You can trade on us. We have our own crypto spot exchange, Coinless Pro. We support lending for some assets, mainly Filecoin. Right now it's looking to expand that in 2021. We also have on ramps into DeFi mainly through WBTC. We are the world's leading WBTC merchant. So folks just aren't participating in token sales on us. They're also transacting related to tokens in lots of different ways. And all of this means that we have the global community of early adopters on Coinlist, not just US accredited. I think a lot of people, when they think about Coinlist, they think that's the platform for US accredited investors. But really, in fact actually most token sales, almost all token sales block US residents. So most of our activity is actually non us. We still have US accredited. We also have high net worth individuals on the platform, crypto funds, a lot of crypto institutional players like DeFi, market makers, miners, validators and of course the token issuers themselves and their teams are on the platform. So they come for the token sale, they stay, they engage in other transactions. And so we end up being informed in terms of talking about trends. We're informed by this cutting edge community, this early adopter community. Most of you are actually part of that community. How you transact what you tell us you want. And so that ends up informing a lot of the trends that we'll be talking about to jump into the trends. Trend number one is bitcoin everywhere. By this I mean the proliferation of tokenized bitcoin on Ethereum and other protocols. And I think this has definitely been a big story in 2020. You can see here the growth in supply of wrapped bitcoin over the course of the year. Wrapped bitcoin makes up 75% of the total tokenized bitcoin market. And Coinlist, we took a bet on wrapped bitcoin relatively early on, toward the end of 2019, early 2020. It's been a pretty wild ride. Over the course of this year we've minted I think something like 33%, 35% of the total wrapped bitcoin market. So we've learned a lot about this market. We've got relationships with many of the players in the space who are driving it. So we've got some sense of what the trends are here. You may be asking why all this growth? Well, obviously a lot of this maps to DeFi's growth over 2020. And then of course, almost all of or a good chunk of the world's crypto wealth is locked in Bitcoin and no one wants to sell their Bitcoin. So smart investors want to do more with the Bitcoin than just hold it. And doing more necessarily means moving your Bitcoin or converting it into a form that can be used on Ethereum or other protocols, where a lot of the financial innovation is happening, where yields available, et cetera. So looking into 2021, what we're seeing is we're actually receiving lots of requests from different communities, from most of the major layer one protocols out there to support their version of tokenized bitcoin. So in 2021, we're expecting to see a lot of horizontal growth. So tokenized Bitcoin, not just on Ethereum Tezos, but on every major layer one protocol, or most of them, other tokenized assets are going to come online. But Bitcoin tokenized Bitcoin is going to continue to dwarf all of them. And also, we're just at the start of this market. There's a lot of vertical growth. Only 2% of the world's Bitcoin's been tokenized. It's actually less than that. So we're expecting to see something around the 5% mark by the end of this year. There's going to be a lot of growth here over the course of the year. So what does this actually mean for stacks? Well, in a lot of ways, this has set the stage for stacks. All of this DAPP development, partly driven by tokenized Bitcoin, it's been happening off of Bitcoin. It really just begs for smart contracts and applications much more native or sitting on the Bitcoin protocol itself. And that's obviously what Stacks does. And so notably also Stacks supports fungible tokens. So the fact that Stacks is sitting on Bitcoin supports fungible tokens, it means that it's a much more natural home for tokenized Bitcoin. So we predict a tokenized Bitcoin variant for stacks in the near future, if it's not being worked on already for Stacks developers who are looking for ideas of what to build or how to take advantage of this. I mean, you could just look at the wrapped Bitcoin contract or TBTC contract or RenBTC contract on Etherscan, and immediately you get visibility into which accounts are holding the most wbtc and it's all the usual suspects in defi, lending applications, trading applications, liquidity pools, So a lot of the live product testing and validation has already been done for you, so you've already got a leg up there anyway. So we're expecting to see a lot of proliferation of tokenized Bitcoin in 2021 and stacks being much closer to Bitcoin. Natural home for it. Natural home for Defi applications. So excited to see this happen in 2021. So that's trend one, trend two small steps away from Ethereum. What I mean here is we're starting to see some small steps being taken away from Ethereum by some of the more successful protocols projects. Before I jump too far to this, do you want to say Ethereum's ecosystem is amazing? It's remarkable. No other platform has driven as much activity, innovation, et cetera, since Bitcoin, not by a long shot. But the big winners in Ethereum, especially in Defi, they're increasingly agitated with scaling issues, high fees. We've all heard about these complaints, but some of these teams are actually starting to take steps to address that and a few events that occurred in 2020. And based on what we're hearing, there's signs of what's to come. We believe in 2021. And some of those events were, and I'm sure you guys are familiar, Compound's announcement of its new chain compound chain FTX's choice of Solana for serum Cryptokitties creator Dapper Labs moving to its own chain. So I mean this isn't a mass exodus away from Ethereum, but we think these are more than just one offs. These are successful, legitimate projects and they're really showing the way for other projects in the space setting the patterns. In Compound's case, the pattern there is that you build, grow a successful project on Ethereum, eventually move off to your own protocol, you graduate to your own protocol. That's one pattern in FTX's case. Well, resourced team right out of the gate, sidestepping Ethereum from the get go, starting with another protocol, maybe for performance reasons, in their case going with Solana and in Dapper's case it's much more of a purpose specific chain need there. In their case, game development and doing that via their own chain. So we're going to see more of this. Again, it's not a mass exodus, but it will be a trend. We're definitely hearing about this. So all that said, given the resilience of the Ethereum ecosystem and its massive community, we're just as likely to see acceleration there. Whether it's Eth2 or other improvements that are going to address scaling fee issues. So all of that is great for the ecosystem in 2021. What does this actually mean for stacks? How does this set the stage for Stacks? Well, what it means is validation. There's an increasing acceptance of smart contract development off of Ethereum. It's been promised for years. We're now finally starting to see that promise be realized. We're going to see legitimate teams, successful teams, looking at Stacks and other protocols over the course of 2021. The stacks advantages being built on Bitcoin's blockchain as its backbone, legitimate option for development and excited to see that play out in 2021. So that's trend two, trend three more guardrails for Defi. I think we are all very aware of what's happened in Defi over the last 12 months. Lots of development, lots of innovation, lots of capital flowing in. And I think we're also well aware of some pretty high profile security issues that have spooked the broader community from participating in Defi. We're hearing about it. Lots of money being left on the sidelines because of these issues. And if I'm a mainstream Defi user or potential Defi user and there's all these potential exploitations happening, what hope is there for me if the CEO of a well known Defi platform gets scammed? Obviously not a security issue with protocol, but was scammed nonetheless, what hope is there for me as a mainstream potential Defi user? So it's really effectively leaving or resulting in lots of capital, lots of money sitting on the sidelines and no surprises there. In 2021. What we're going to see is much bigger focus on security. A lot of that's going to happen from the Defi community itself. A lot of that's also going to be driven by centralized platforms. Whether it's binance us really attempting to address the fears of these folks that are sitting on the sidelines. We saw evidence of this in 2020 where we launched a Uniswap liquidity pool on ramp. Got a lot of interest from our community and these are users that could have gone directly to Uniswap themselves and earned Uni rewards directly on their own. But instead, out of fear or what have you, they chose to trust us bringing more people into this Defi community. So there's a lot more to be done here. Expect more guardrails for DeFi in 2021. What does this mean for Stacks? Well, Stacks has an incredible advantage already. It's got a major guardrail built in and that's the fact that it's built on Bitcoin. By using Bitcoin's blockchain for settlement, it's using what's perceived to be the most secure blockchain to date, certainly by everyone's experience or evidence of experience. So I think that's going to go a long way to settling fears on the pot of users. It's going to be a big attractor for users, certainly those concerned about security, and then developers as well. So excited to see that play out in 2021. The last trend I'll talk about really quickly, almost out of time, is that we're going to continue to see evolution and mutations of token issuance over the course of 2021. A lot of folks have predicted the demise of token sales, but at Coinless we're continuing to see consistent levels of capital flowing in, more participants flowing in. It's going to accelerate over the course of 2021 with Bitcoin's price being where it's at now. We've seen lots of evolution in the space over the years, but in 2020 there was a market increase in different types of token issuance strategies. Stake drops like new cyphers, worklock, community sales like those of near and flow launch auctions. Great way to establish price so you don't have a centralized exchange telling you what your price is. The community decides Dex offerings fail, launches, regulators are going to weigh in there, but definitely more innovation happening there. Lots of new stuff happening in 2021 with Polkadot's ecosystem. Lots of excitement there. So what does this mean for Stacks? Well, this isn't so much about Stacks being influenced by trends, but setting the trend. 2017 or maybe earlier, the Blockstack team kind of set the stage for community sales and then didn't just innovate there, but also innovated from a compliance standpoint with reggae leading the way there. So this is really a thank you to the Stacks team for helping evolve the token issuance business. Really appreciate the work you all have done in pioneering the space and then thank you all for listening. Hope this was useful. You can find me at Coinless Co. And don't forget about the eggnog invitation and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. Sa. Sam. Hi everyone, my name is Mason. I'm the CEO of TokenSoft and we're one of the co creators of Rap.com and we're here to give a quick announcement about something that we're launching together with Stacks. And just really quickly, what is wrap.com so rap.com is a collaboration between Anchorage and Token Tokensoft and it's designed to bring layer one assets onto other blockchains. And I'll be going through a quick overview of what Rap.com is and we'll be going a little bit more in depth. And next I will talk about the announcement and we'll go do a deeper dive into the architecture of raft.com and what that looks like. Talk about some applications that will be possible with the announcement and then get into what it looks like to get early access. And so wrap.com is a one stop shop where institutional investors can wrap and unwrap assets or any blockchain asset. And today, right now, wrapped assets can operate on Ethereum, but they're also possible on Stacks or any other blockchain. And@colpped.com, these assets are administered by Tokensoft. So Tokensoft is doing the tokenization infrastructure and Anchorage is doing the custody of the underlying assets. And where is wrap.com today? So today we support or we formally launched a few assets. So one of those is wrappfilecoin. That's where you can bring filecoin from the filecoin blockchain and wrap it onto the Ethereum blockchain for use in the various Defi applications. And you can also do that with Rapsello, the Rapsello dollar, which we announced in December. And the first asset that we actually launched was Wrapped zcash, which enables people to bring zcash onto the Ethereum blockchain and to use it in different applications like Maker Balancer and AAVE and apps like that. And today we have a very exciting announcement. We're here to announce Bitcoin on Stacks and what that will look like. And so we'll be joined by Muneeb, who will also talk a little bit more about his vision, what he sees for Bitcoin on stacks. But very quickly, Bitcoin on Stacks or xBTC is a one to one equivalent of Bitcoin on the Stacks blockchain. And that means that Bitcoin can be wrapped one for one onto the stacks 2.0 blockchain and vice versa. So people can bring in their Bitcoin, wrap it onto stacks and use it on the various applications that exist on stacks. And this just allows for integration of Bitcoin and a Bitcoin denominated asset for the various applications on stacks. And, and I'll hand it off to Muneeb to talk a little bit more about his vision and why he thinks this is a big deal. For stacks. Hey, Mason. Glad to be here. This is super exciting. So, effectively, Anchorage and Tokensoft are joining together to launch XBDC on the stack chain. And. And one of the ways that this is really unique and different is that it's the first wrapped Bitcoin, which is secured by Bitcoin itself, which is really fascinating in the sense that there are a lot of people who want to use these wrapped assets to deploy them into smart contracts, but they hold Bitcoin and they don't feel really comfortable with the security of a separate blockchain. But XBDC is unique because it's literally secured by Bitcoin itself, itself. And in many ways, this is the fastest way for getting a bitcoin asset into the hands of developers of Clarity. So with the Sax 2.0 launch, there are different smart contracts that are already built that can use a wrapped Bitcoin and XBDC can fill that need straight away. And there might be more decentralized alternatives or available down the road, but I'm extremely excited about it, the work that Anchorage is doing with Tokensoft on getting this issue. Thank you so much, Mason. Awesome. Thanks. And yeah, I think that really just underscores it. So on Ethereum, you have Bitcoin sitting somewhere and now you have wrapped Bitcoin that's circulating, but there's no direct link. And as Muneeb laid out, this enables that directly, so you have that trust and that sort of integrity. And just really quickly, what is the wrapping and unwrapping flow look like here? So we have a user that has some Bitcoin here. The bitcoin holder comes to our platform, enters an order, they get an address to pay their Bitcoin to. When the Bitcoin goes in, it sits in custody at Anchorage. And once that bitcoin has settled, that's when the XBTC will be created. One for one. So if someone sends in 10 Bitcoin, we're going to go ahead and create 10 XBTC and that's going to be minted into the user wallet. And the unwrapping flow is literally just the reverse of this. And so what are some different types of use cases that are possible with this? So this bitcoin can now be used as collateral in the Defi apps on the stacks blockchain. So if there are any type of loan applications such as Maker or anything that's yield generating, Bitcoin can now be locked up to generate that yield. The other things that are now possible is just trading against a Bitcoin denominated asset as a trading pair on stacks. So for any peer to peer or AMM style trading applications, they now have access to a bitcoin denominated asset. And we've been saying this internally. It's really time to stack some stacks. And so we encourage everyone to get involved. And for institutions that are interested in getting access to Bitcoin on stacks, the sign up link for this is portal.wrap.com so this should be available as of now. And so this enables institutions to get access. And if you're not an institution but you're looking to stay in the loop or, or see how you can get access to XBTC or Bitcoin on stacks, please go to stacks rap.com and just go through the signup. We'll be giving away 10 t shirts that we designed to commemorate the launch of xbtc. So signing up there gets you enrolled in that raffle of sorts of. And that's it. Thanks so much. Thanks to the Stacks team and thanks to everyone. We're really excited about the launch and excited to support it. Hey everyone, Muneeb here. Today we have Mike, CEO of Foundry. They're one of the largest bitcoin miners in North America. And today we are sharing the news that they'll be mining and supporting stacking with the launch of sax 2.0 as well. Hey Mike, Thanks Maneeb. Super glad to be here working with you guys and to support Stacks. I love the idea that most people are spending all their time trading bitcoin and you guys have been heads down for three years building and super excited for your launch here on Thursday. Yeah. So I know that you have a commitment of almost like 100 million to go into mining and other than bitcoin, now you're looking into assets like stacks as well. So walk us through some of the thinking there. Yeah, so at Foundry we're focused on empowering decentralized infrastructure. And as you said, We've deployed $100 million into the North American mining space. Actually, well, more than that, we're one of the largest miners now and we love what you have done with introducing stacks and the whole ecosystem. It really provides the next level of value creation for Bitcoin. So for many years everyone's talked about bitcoin being able to transfer value and now you guys have empowered it to build apps, smart contracts. It's just a whole nother level of decentralization that is super powerful for developers around the world. Thank you. I'm super excited about smart contracture on Bitcoin and to have you as a miner on our live network this week. Absolutely not mining and stacking. So we're participating on both sides and we've been with you since the very beginning. So the team really has enjoyed working with your team and I think we've learned a lot through the process and believe very much in what this is going to do for the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. Awesome. Thank you so much and thanks for chatting. Thank you. Good luck.

Yep.

Bye. Bye. Hey everyone, my name is Ken. Today I'm going to talk about X Verse, the mobile stacks wallet that's being built by Secret Key Labs. First, let me give you a little bit of background on myself. I joined Blockstack in 2017 and since then I've worked on many different projects like the Blockstack browser, Stacks Wallet, developer tools like Blockstack JS and the new Stacks js. So I founded Secret Key Labs late last year with the same goal of enabling a user owned Internet and with the focus on user facing products. So today we're reviewing the first product that we've been working on, xverse. So for a long time there was no good mobile solution in the stacks ecosystem and today we're changing that. Xverse is a native mobile wallet built for stacks and more. It's available for both Android and iOS. The limited public beta invites are being sent out starting today. So let's talk a little bit about the features. First and foremost, XVRS is a wallet for stacks. You can easily send receive stacks tokens right from your phone. It utilizes the native encrypted storage features of Android and iOS to keep your private keys safe, a feature that we're hoping to enable soon. Related to transactions is the sending and receiving of stacks using decentralized blockchain IDs on BNS instead of long and readable addresses. So to do that, XVRS will let users register blockchain names. You might have noticed that Xvirce also has a built in Bitcoin wallet. So we decided to do this because the stacks blockchain is anchored to the Bitcoin chain and we recognize that Bitcoin is the reserve currency and it'll continue to be an important part of the stacks ecosystem. So we also want to make it make an easy on ramp for Bitcoin users to enter the stacks ecosystem. Additionally, the Bitcoin wallet makes it easy to receive stacking rewards in the same wallet accessed by the same seed phrase. In the future we plan to make it easy for users to swap their Bitcoin to stacks and vice versa. Another important feature of xverse is stacking. With xverse you can securely participate in stacking and earn Bitcoin. You'll be able to execute the stacking smart contract from your wallet and have the bitcoin rewards delivered right to the built in Bitcoin wallet. And to address the lack of support for international users and ecosystem, we will also be internationalizing the app, starting with simplified Chinese for the beta release. So so far everything I've talked about are features available in the beta. The long term goal of xverse is to build a gateway to the stacks ecosystem and there are a few features that we're working on that are yet to come. So let me talk about a few of these. So one constraint with stacking is that there is a minimum amount required to stack. We want to make it possible for holders of smaller amounts of stacks to participate in stacking. So we're working on building out a delegated pooled stacking service from the wallet. This means that you can safely stack from your mobile wallet without meeting the minimum threshold. And with delegation, your stacks tokens never actually leave the wallet so there's no risk of loss. Another feature that we're working on is the ability to sign into mobile and web apps built with stacks. So this will improve the user experience of native mobile apps, integrating stacks auth and improve the security of web apps. You'll also be able to safely authorize smart contract transactions from apps without exposing your private keys. This will be done either through an inter app communication protocol for native apps or via a built in app browser for web apps. And of course the ecosystem won't be complete without NFTs and FTs. So X first is planning to support management of all stacks, standard fungible and non fungible tokens once the standards are finalized. And that's all I have for you today. The beta invites for xverse will be starting to go out today in trenches. If you haven't signed up already, you can do so at xverse App. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter ecretkeylabs for further updates. Thank you. And we have a question period. So I'll just wait for any questions to roll in. Okay, first question. The minimum amount of stacks required for stacking. So that's dynamically calculated based on the participation rate of the total liquid stacks. I think we have a calculator somewhere that will provide an estimate for that. Okay, looks like no further questions.

Hey everyone, it's Brittany, the executive director at The Stacks Foundation. I'm joined by Dave from Flipside Crypto and I just want to say we love what Flipside Crypto has been able to do. They've been able to give well rounded research and data to our community about what's happening on the Stacks blockchain. Their data products provide more transparency, which everyone has always asked for, and easy to use information not only about the projects like stacks, but also for the whole community to see where the tokens are going to. Today we have some exciting news to share with you. I'd like to hand it over to Dave to tell you more.

Excellent. Thanks Brittany. Look, we're huge fans of stacks early on, watching what you've been building and have been super excited about. Everything you've been doing Right now with what you're about to launch today is just incredible. At Flipside, for those who don't know, we have solutions that allow us to decode blockchain behaviors and understand what certain stakeholders are doing within those ecosystems. And we work at about 50 different blockchains and we produce stacks as data inside of our data co op. That's co op.flipsidecrypto.com, where you can actually see the movement of behaviors within the ecosystem and what they're doing and their active supply. So helping drive that transparency for some of the launch that's coming up today.

Great. So for the community, what else does that mean? Right, so now there's a lot of data, we've had a lot of people ask about stacks rewards. We did a poll and that was something people wanted to see more about. So could you go in a little specifically about like what the co op can do?

Sure. So yeah, stacking rewards. Like the community seems to be interested, as many communities are. What's happening with stacks, stacking rewards, what type of DAPPS and DEFI activity are occurring? Mining, rewards, supply, distribution, things like that. So what the co op is able to see is in real time, 30 day active supply, where assets are moving. So are stacking rewards building up? Are they moving between different types of stakeholders? And you can really keep an eye on exactly the sort of health and the behavior of the overall ecosystem in real time inside of that product.

Yeah, what I love about the product is that it's very easy to see. The visuals are very clear. You're not digging just through a ton of numbers. They have some great ways that you can kind of see what's going on. So where can people find out more about stacks on the flipside co op.

Co op.flipsidecrypto.com and then I believe the forward slash is stacks, but you'll see the URL there. And when you get there, you'll see on the left. What Brittany's talking about is the box. We tried to kill the name Bubbles, but everyone loves it, the Bubbles chart. It's a little bit hypnotic. So be careful when you watch it because you're going to see all the movement happening in real time. You can also, by the way, while you're there, see benchmarks. So understand Stacks behavior next to other chains and all sorts of other information that might help you get a real feel for the health. Yeah, fun times.

Well, thanks, Dave. Thanks for joining us and thanks for supporting all the data about Stacks Blockchain on Flipside.

Thank you, Brittany Gostax. So thanks, Brittany and Dave. For the next hour of our program, we have a series of virtual Fireside Chats. And I just wanted to say a brief thing about Fireside Chats, because it's a term that you see a lot in crypto conferences and tech conferences, and it's kind of funny. The original Fireside Chat was a series of radio addresses that were given by FDR between 1933 and 1944. And they were meant to be a source of comfort for families in an otherwise increasingly disconcerting and alarming world. They were in response to a banking crisis, to a depression, to the complexities of new regulations, the New Deal initiatives, and of course, World War II, ultimately. And they were given by FDR to the country using a brand new technology, radio, the technology that FDR's press secretary, Stephen early said. It cannot misrepresent or misquote. It is far reaching and simultaneous in releasing messages given it for transmission to the nation or for international consumption. And we too are living through complicated events, and we too could use some stability from a technology that cannot misrepresent or misquote that is far reaching and simultaneous. Maybe not radio this time, maybe the Bitcoin blockchain. So sit back next to your glowing YouTube fireplace and, and enjoy. Please welcome back, Brittany to introduce the first of our Fireside Chat speakers.

Great. Thank you, Peter. That was a very interesting tidbit. Well, I know you guys won't be disappointed. I have two great guests coming on for our first Fireside Chat. Manibali, CEO of Hero and founder of Blockstack, as well as Peter from blockchain.com, which is the world's most popular way to buy, hold and use crypto. With over 64 million wallets, as well as $620 billion in transactions. So I'm excited to introduce the chat, and I think you should stay tuned because there's a special announcement in this chat you won't want to miss. So here's Peter and Manip.

Thank you. Brittany, welcome. Awesome. Thank you. Brittany, how's it going? Hey, it's great. You know, I think there's people that really love the new mandatory work from home era and people that don't, and I'm definitely in the love it category. I feel like I'm missing a little bit. Really? Yeah. Oh, man. You. You can't. You can't bring me back. Seriously. I'm in the office now. Right. I, I guess I don't miss the commute, but I, I, I miss the team and, like, being around them and, like, you know, just chatting versus video calls all the time. But let me start off by looking back into the early days of crypto. I feel like this is 2021 now. It's hard to imagine how many years So I entered 2013, but I think you're way more OG than that as well. Would love to kind of, for our audience, go back to the very beginning. When did you start? How did you start? How did you discover all of this? Yeah, so I'm, I'm class of late 2010, but really not actually, because I thought it was kind of a joke in 2010. So I don't deserve, you know, don't get any credit there. I really started playing around in a serious way in 2012, so early 2012. And, you know, the crypto world was very different back then. As you know, there was a lot of very small meetups. I remember the first conference I went to was in a hotel conference room. It was that small. And I think 80% of the conference was wearing Guy Fawkes masks or, you know, other kinds of, you know, people thought I was wild because I wasn't wearing a mask. And so it was a different crowd back then, and that crowd is still with us, but, you know, maybe a smaller portion. And it was a different vision in crypto as well. Bitcoin was very much going to be a one chain sort of ecosystem. Payments for the Internet, cash money for the Internet. And that vision has changed over time for bitcoin. What is this in bitcoin price terms? For reference, roughly what range was bitcoin in? Well under $100. I think you could still buy bitcoins for, like, 812 bucks or something like that. Okay. 2013 was 90 bucks when I got introduced. Yeah. You know, I remember bitcoin going into the sort of $20 range and thinking it was really odd. And actually, so I actually feel like the move from 10 to 100 was much stranger to me than the move from 1,000 to 10,000 or 10,000 to 40,000. As time's gone on, bitcoin has felt more and more inevitable, even though it's bigger and bigger and bigger versus the early days when it felt very unlikely and precarious. One of the things that I think is cool going on in the industry today is folks like yourselves who are looking to extend these ecosystems through parachains, or whatever your preferred term is. But back then it was really, the plan was everything was going to be right there on bitcoin. And I remember even you were originally exploring a lot of ideas when we met so many years ago that were really attached to the bitcoin blockchain and then another chain and so on and so forth. But the evolution of the protocols in the industry has really been the biggest change over the last probably three or four years. Yeah. And I feel like I would love to learn more about your initial thinking for blockchain.com because one thing that always stood out was you had a very clear vision for how you're not going to take custody of any private keys. This is a software, let people kind of like, you know, build it that way. And that was a camp that, you know, you've been in for a very long time. Yeah. So we've had a few product innovations or product insights at blockchain that have kind of led to the success that we've had to date. The first was that people would like to see data about cryptocurrency on a website. She seems like a very basic idea, but in 2011 was not. And so organizing all the information about the bitcoin blockchain and markets into one easy to use site was big innovation. Today that product still generates 100 million plus page views, sometimes in a day. So it's wild. It supports many, many blockchains. Now the second insight we had that was really important was that people wanted the convenience, convenience of a cloud wallet. So PayPal style wallet with the security of having their own private key. And that was a very controversial idea at the time. People thought no one, no normal people, would ever use. It turned out that the biggest boon for us was every time someone would get hacked. So people always think that that's Mount Gox. Actually, the first one was Bitcoin wallet.com which no one listening to this Remember numbers, but was sort of the original coinbase, actually. Not that coinbase is going to run away with your money, but they would sell you bitcoins in a brokerage experience and then hold them for you. And that guy exit scammed. It was like the first really big exit scam and it was our first big growth inflection moment on the hybrid wallet, which is really amazing and really great for the company. And then every single time there's been a hack or security incident twice affected us very positively. But that insight allowed us to scale globally and really allowed us to build a really significant user base in crypto. Today, we're probably responsible on any given day for about 33 to 36% of all Bitcoin transactions. The next nearest entity is probably at 12, 13%. So between that and how many bitcoins that we're storing for customers or helping customers customer store. We're definitely the biggest bitcoin company on earth by any sort of reasonable metric of actual bitcoin usage, which is always a little triggering for some people. That's amazing. I feel like blockchain, now it's hosted on blockchain.com, but blockchain.info back in the day, that would be the standard way for anyone to do their first transaction. If the transaction is not at. No, not on blockchain.info you're like, it hasn't happened. That was the default thing. And that's still the case for a lot of people. We did run the most popular dotinfo website in the world for several years, which is sort of a panic victory. And then we switched to the.com for a lot of reasons which are not that interesting. Today we actually support a full range of crypto experiences. So what's important to us is not that you never store your crypto with us, but that you always have the choice not to and that we make it really, really easy. This is kind of similar to Google, which says, like, we want to make it really easy for you to leave our products. Facebook makes it possible. Google makes it really easy. Well, because we want it to be a challenge for us to keep you. That's why you can set up Superhuman on top of your Google account in like two seconds, right? Because they want that pressure from other competitive products. So for us, we always want to make it easy for you to move your crypto out of us or for you to store your keys yourself. But we do store a very significant amount of crypto for consumers now in our custodial trading products, which has been both our wallet as well as our exchange. And then we store billions worth of, of crypto for institutions as well. And so in total, you know, we're storing probably also one of the largest custodians in the market now of sort of cold storage of crypto assets. Yep. I want to get into some of the lending and liquidity side in a little bit and really agree with your model of, like, the underlying network is open and anyone can use it, but even on the user interface side, you can. And like saying, like, you have the freedom to exit if you want to. Like, you have optionality, you want to use this version, you can if you don't want to. Here are alternatives available. But let me, let me move forward a little bit in the, in the timeline. Let's, let's go through the 2017 era. Right? Like, how is that for you? How did you see the industry change and kind of like, what happened? What are the main things that have changed from 2017 to say now? Oh, man, what a big question. What has changed from 2017 to now? Well, you know, look, we're all still struggling to keep our websites up, right? So that hasn't changed. You know, look, it's kind of funny. I was talking to someone actually from Google's, you know, their internal, like, team that keeps their internal data center traffic up. And he was like, well, how are you guys doing? Google's one of our major investors. And they're like, how are you guys doing? I was like, well, you know, we've gone down the least. And he was like, looking at your track record, he's like, you had some serious system degradation. It's like, well, we haven't gone down. And he's like, who are these other people going down? You're like, oh, but you know, in crypto, keeping your website up sometimes is a mission in and of itself. So that hasn't changed. I think the big change though, you know, to be honest, is the size and scale of a lot of our clients. You know, today, like, you know, 2017, if we got a client coming in for 100 mil order, it would have been like, you know, we better call, we should call the board. This is so exciting. And now, you know, I might get called, like, the team might call me about $100 million order, but they might not, you know. And so the size of the institution involved in the space has really escalated over the last three years, and I think that's really positive thing to see. And what about some of the new layer 1 blockchains that are coming up. I know you guys have done deep integrations with a bunch of them. Yeah. So look, Ethereum is the number one chain in crypto by any reasonable metric. The number one protocol in a crypto for sure, by any reasonable metric. And they're really the one to be. I think it's gonna be really, really hard to unseat Ethereum for all the reasons that people say, but also the simple reality that critical mass ensures that Ethereum gets a lot of attention and love from people like me who are leading product at big companies. Right. So, you know, like myself, you know, even for example, Coinbase, we're spending most of our time thinking about Ethereum. Not that we don't love Bitcoin, everyone loves Bitcoin. It's just there's not a lot of new things that you need to worry about there. It's very stable. So I think it's going to be hard to unseat Ethereum. Now, once you kind of go past Ethereum and you assume like there's something catastrophic in eth, I think there's probably like a top tier list of five contenders and I'm not smart enough on this base to distinguish between the top contenders. And then there's like 30 more that have like a very outside chance and I'm very much not smart enough to distinguish between those. I think some of the projects that I follow really closely and this is not investment advice is like some of them I don't own a position in at all. Some of you, one is for sure, Algorand, which I know you guys, you know those guys as well. But Steve and Myra and all those, they're doing amazing technical work. Near, I'm really interested in what the guys at NEAR are doing. I'm really interested in what the folks at DOT are doing. And I was incredibly excited about ton, which is now being canceled. But TON was really exciting as a project from a technical level. And then, you know, I'm clearly spending some time excited about the stuff Stacks ecosystem and I'm here today speaking with.

You guys about that.

Yeah, speaking of stacks, like, you know, what's the special announcement I'm hearing about? The announcement is we're going to add STX to the Exchange shortly and we'll also be providing a lot of credit and market services for our institutional desk to the Stacks ecosystem, which we're excited about doing. I think for me, the coolest part of Blackstack and Stacks as an ecosystem is actually the compatibility into bitcoin and the focus on coexisting with bitcoin rather than replacing bitcoin, which I think is a really smart strategy, honestly, in terms of looking for that edge to how you're going to win that layer two vertical. I think even if a lot of the bitcoin community community will perhaps not love it, I think give having that sort of bitcoin friendly mindset is really going to do you a lot of good in the consumer space. Like what I would call people who love crypto but aren't addicted to Twitter. I think that you're going to get a lot of value from there in a really good way. Yeah, I'm noticing the same thing. Obviously it's a spectrum of bitcoin community. The people who are really hard liners, they would, they would find one thing or the other that they don't like about the project. But a lot of the bitcoin community is actually pretty excited about it. And even, even to my surprise that they, they get the part that, yes, we are using bitcoin as a settlement layer. They want bitcoin to be used as a settlement layer. They like the fact that we don't modify bitcoin at all. So we're not saying bitcoin. You need to change this, you need to change that. Bitcoin remains exactly like how it is and our technology basically just, just simply works out of the box with it. But super, super excited to Hear about the blockchain.com exchange integration and some on the liquidity side. I feel like you've been watching this project for such a long time. The 2.0 was literally years and years of work. Like we, we invented a new programming language, we invented new consensus mechanisms that have been built, the public infrastructure. And I think today is the day when stacks 2.0 is going live. I'm so glad that I was able to host you and share this chat with our community and audience. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here and it's been fun watching you guys build it. You definitely built it as like R and D and almost like PhD process. Very intentional, very methodical. Whereas. And I think that's partly reflective of you as a founder. Whereas Blockchain is very much like a product hacker sort of situation. And so I think a lot of our conversations over the years have been really fun, which is basically this, for some sauce in the kitchen talk is basically me being like, ship, ship, ship. And you being like, but let's ship. Right, which has been a fun part of you. And I's friendship. And it's really great to see the 2.0 launch now for sure. Let me switch topics a little bit. I know you mentioned the telegram blockchain and how the project got shut down. And I know that you guys are actually based out of the U.S. mostly in England. Although you have so many subsidiaries it's hard to track, keep track of like which jurisdictions you actually hit. But what's your view on the US regulations with things happening with Ripple? The kind of approach that we took, which was people thought it was very contrarian like back then, but now it seems like all that overhead that we were kind of like working with might have actually paid off. I don't think any of us will understand that until the year 2025, maybe 2030. Like it's going to take a really long time for all this to play out. Really long time. And it kind of goes up and down. Right. And I've been involved in crypto a very long time. And so I've been here when everyone's saying that like doing the really well regulated things. A great idea. I've been here when everyone's like, wow, like you know, if only Muneeb had like done an offshore offering, you know, he'd now have the market cap of X Crypto. Sure. You know, and I've been through it myself where people are like, man, why are you getting regulated by the FCA when you could just jump jurisdictions every eight weeks and like never travel to America again? So it comes and goes and I think that we won't really know it and I think we don't really know what the best strategy is until 2025, 2030 when this all shakes out. Yeah, it's, I definitely think like the sentiment is changing. There's definitely the fluctuation. Right. Like two years ago everyone in the industry has made their mind that hey, here's a standard way of doing something. And then two years later like they would have, would have completely shifted their mind. But let's see. Like I think our, with our legal framework, the US trading markets are finally opening up. So I do see the point that some people bring up that it obviously took us much longer to open up these trading markets versus some of the other approaches that people are following in the, in the early days. So, so have you, have you been following the, the decentralized finance type of activity in the crypto space lately? Specifically, especially on the liquidity side. I know you play there. You know, we're actually, you know, I've just been hiding in a Little cave, ignoring all the defi stuff for the last two years now we're pretty active there, both from our venture fund as well as, you know, looking at the market pretty actively. I think a lot of it is. Anytime like a new thing develops in crypto, the first couple years are pretty, pretty shady. There's a lot of fast money versus slow money. And I'm kind of a slow money guy. I like to do things that are going to last a long time. And you know, the ideal thing for me is to never have to sell an investment defi that doesn't work very well. So we're not trying to be in huge size in defi right now until we feel like we're. Until we feel like defi is ready for slow money. Do you guys are, are you guys looking into like being a liquidity provider on any of the decentralized exchanges or, you know, we're not. Mostly because the volume is not that big once you strip out the like sort of wash. Second thing is at the moment we're really busy. Really, really, really busy. And so that's tough in terms of going into the defi space and just generally wanting to be sort of where the slow money is versus where the fast money is. Got it. So it looks like we have a question from the audience. The question is that for the blockchain.com exchange listing, would that be available to US people or it will be for non US people? I think we'll want to be expanding it to as many customers as we possibly can. Can. The US Is always a stay by state decision and slow. Everything in the US happens slowly. So it depends on the date. You know, I think over time eventually you'll see it in the US I see initially it will be more focused on the European markets or like broadly in the. In the world, but some jurisdictions might not be available. That's right. Yeah. We have a very sort of various jurisdiction by jurisdiction approach to launching new assets. That part of running an exchange is extremely complicated. So the, so the next question, Peter, for you is that what are some of your Slow money products? Well, so you know, the biggest thing that I work on is this little company called blockchain.com. i think that's a great slow money investment. We've been doing it a long time and we'll be here in 30, 40 years. I think Bitcoin is slow money. I think Ethereum is definitely slow money. I think the guy's working on remittances and stablecoins. Coins are definitely in the slow Money phase of market evolution. Now I think a lot of the shit coins and defi stuff is fast money. And what I mean by slow and fast money is like fast money is like fast money in, fast money out. So like you're just, you know, high velocity slow money is like, I'm not sure that I'll ever sell my Ethereum. Like I'm to buy other things, I might just always have them and use them. In the Internet economy I may never sell my Ethereum. Whereas like I buy the latest shitcoin, I'm probably gonna sell that thing. Right? So that's the difference between slow and fast money. Yep, that makes a lot of sense. By the way, the blockchain.com distribution that you did last year for stacks, you have no idea how many people every single day in our telegram ask us about that. Like I think half of our traffic is Basically users from blockchain.com asking the same question that when is that unlocking? So maybe you can address that. I believe it's unlocking later in January. You probably wouldn't know from the top of your head, but the next next question always is that are you going to enable people to earn Bitcoin for the distribution deliver? So this is a tough answer here, but the first thing is we never really announce when we're going to exactly add assets because we're concerned about market impact and we take that really seriously and carefully. It is in our roadmap and it is in our near term roadmap. I don't know if it'll initially launch with staking or without that kind of level of detail is a little. I'm not involved in the planning of that. Usually I'm just in the review of what the product team wants to do. So I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know it's in the roadmap and I do know we're excited about supporting it in the wallet. Awesome. Well, Peter, I'll throw one last question at you and that is that outside of work, like what. What are the things that are kind of keeping you busy or what are you interested in? I know that we have jammed over sleep optimizations and other geeky things like that, but what's keeping you busy outside of work? Yeah, I'm still on my sleep optimization kick because I haven't made a lot of progress. I'm a really bad sleeper. So if anyone has sleep ideas, you can find me on Twitter. One more, Peter, I think you know, and for what it's worth, I Go to bed when I'm tired. I just wake up at like 6 in the morning super stoked and like ready to, ready to go. I'm spending a lot of time actually learning about Buddhism right now.

Okay.

It's like a new random hobby. I was inspired by one of the guys on our team to learn about Buddhism. And so spending a lot of time there and then, you know, in somewhat related fashion in this whole work from home era, have started doing a lot of like mini yoga sessions throughout the day, you know, so we're just, we're just hanging out here doing, trying to figure out sleep, studying Buddhism and doing many yoga sessions in between. A lot of, a lot of crypto flow action. Well, that would definitely keep you calm and collected while, you know, the crypto markets are going crazy. Let me, let me share one Peter story. Right. So I was, I was struggling with sleep as well, and I was asking him about, you know, how do you regulate sleep, especially with travel. And Peter's answer was that he actually has the exact same sleeping setup in three different cities in the world. I won't name them. I don't want to disclose you because. But so it's effectively think of it like whatever optimizations you have, like cooling beds, noise machines, like, you know, dark curtains or I think one hack you told me was about not eating too much when getting on a plane and because that kind of like really helps your body self regulate. That one, that one actually worked pretty well for me. But so I'll give you the updates on that real quick. Quick. First of all, because of COVID I've actually been trying out new cities and a few things you can learn from that. One is if you own an iPad, a newer iPad. They are actually way better at playing sleep audio than sleep audio machines. So I now play the sleep audio from an iPad, not from an audio machine. Second is like a really good iMac. Solves 70% of your problems everywhere. Turns out you didn't need to put in blackout because curtains and all the expensive stuff, the mindfold eye mask from Amazon will take care of everything for you. And then the third thing is it's really more than anything else about how cold the room is. And so you just really need to crank the temperature in the room down. And then, yeah, last but not least, never eat the food on planes. It's terrible for you as way too much salt and preservatives. And if you arrive somewhere hungry and then eat the next meal at the right time of day, it helps reset your whole digestive system to that time zone. So that would be like a poor man's version of the same optimizations and maybe you can get better, better results. Well, actually I don't have any houses anymore. I'm living a homeless lifestyle this year. I wanted to have a life of less things and so I'm now optimizing with just an eye mask and a good air conditioner. Cool. Awesome. Well, Peter, I know I can chat with you all day. Hopefully after the virus is under control, we can hang out and continue our conversations. But until then, this was the best thing we could have done. Thanks so much. Really excited about the updates from blockchain.com and thanks again for coming here. Ciao. Take care.

Hi, it's Rachel with Cointelegraph and today I'm here with Muneeb. He is the co founder of Stacks and the CEO of Hero pbc. And today we're going to be discussing the official launch of the Mainnet. Hi Muneeb, how are you?

I'm good. Excited to be here. It looks like the genesis block of the Stacks 2.0 blockchain just launched and then miners are officially mining here. It's a really big moment for our community. Like, imagine that this design of building around bitcoin, people weren't even fully sure that is this even possible or not? There's a very famous quote from Satoshi himself on Bitcoin Talk where he talks about this vision of separate blockchains and use cases. But they share the compute power of bitcoin. And that was kind of like the original idea that bitcoin can be this base layer, this really secure base layer and all sorts of other use cases and applications are possible, but instead of disconnected separate blockchains, they all are benefiting from the security of Bitcoin. So the consensus mechanism that we launch is the first consensus mechanism between two blockchains, but not between two. Any blockchains, between Bitcoin and between Stacks. So all the data on the Stacks blockchain, all the transactions on the Stacks blockchain, they get secured by Bitcoin and mining actually happens on the bitcoin chain itself. So that's the process that actually started in many ways. Like I've been in the industry since 2013 and in many ways it feels like we are coming back full circle to that original design of building around bitcoin.

Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. How does this relate to secure smart contracts and btc? And apps on btc?

Yes. So there are two things there. One is that when we saw the potential of smart contracts, obviously they're a very, very powerful tool. Smart contracts weren't possible before blockchains, but at the same time, there are a lot of potential security problems as well because it's code that you just publish once and then it kind of like runs by itself and can have bugs or errors and people can lose hundreds of millions of dollars, as we have seen over the course of several years. So we've been developing a new programming language. It's called Clarity. And the main benefit of the programming language is the developers can have formal proofs of execution. Like basically that is this program correct? Is it going to do what you want it to do before executing the program? And that's almost like night and day difference. If you can do that before executing a program versus just waiting for a smart contract to execute and then, you know, hope that everything kind of like goes well. So Clarity was designed by scientists from Princeton and mit. It's been around in the process of development for two plus years now. And now finally, Clarity Language also went live with the launch of the mainnet. And the special thing about running Clarity in the stacks blockchain is that these smart contracts, they have full visibility into Bitcoin, meaning that for the first time, developers can actually start writing programs, computer programs, these smart contracts where they can look at the logic or state of Bitcoin and actually write code against that. And that's super exciting as well.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that is. That's really exciting. So with that in mind, how will this official mainnet launch affect the blockchain community as a whole?

Yeah. So I do think that one impact that we definitely hope that it has is that it encourages more innovation around Bitcoin. I think that Bitcoin is definitely kind of like the first thing that people discover, even developers or journal community members. And it is that secure base, kind of like the anchor of the entire crypto industry. But people currently soon discover that, hey, I can't really program bitcoin, I can't really write smart contracts or applications against it. And then they start looking for other solutions and discover other things. And our hope is that with this launch, that changes a little bit and it attracts more developers to Bitcoin. It basically opens the doors for smart contracts directly on Bitcoin or building all sorts of applications. For example, Bitcoin by far has the largest amount of crypto capital and this capital can be deployed in smart contracts. People are coming up with all sorts of innovative new products, new exchanges, new types of lending platforms and so on. And we're hoping that with this launch, some of that excitement and development activity can directly come to the system.

Yeah, definitely. Well, that's exciting. It sounds like it will have a huge impact and I can't wait to hear more. So congratulations and thank you again for taking the time to speak with me. Thanks.

Thanks for having me here.

Yeah, thank you.

Hello gang, this is Asif Herji of Figure and I'm joined by Albert Wagner of Union Square Ventures and we're meant to have a Fireside chat and timing is pretty good given that the Genesis block just went. So congratulations to Maneb and the entire team. This is super exciting. Indeed, indeed. Azif, it's good to see you and same here. Congratulations to the whole everybody who participates in the ecosystem on this momentous moment. So yeah, really, really, really amazing. It's been a long. Albert, you've been around this project for a long time. I've known Manip for a while. Maybe we start by just talking a little bit about how we got involved in blockstack and why we thought it was important at the time. Yeah, I think that's a great starting point. I actually first got to know Muneeb and also at the time Ryan when the project was called one name. And I sort of have had a long standing view that kind of one of the key things that we need to figure out on the Internet is sort of self sovereign identity. So you know, at the moment on the Internet we're largely Albert Wenger at Twitter or Albert Wengermail or some other such thing. So these identities are controlled by large corporations. In the real world, the physical world, we have identities that are controlled by governments passports. And I believe that we need something similar for the, for the online world. And, and I wrote a series of blog posts about that and that's how I met Moneep and, and Ryan at the time. And I really, it's been a really fascinating journey from there to kind of figure out what are the infrastructure pieces that are necessary for this. And, and it's maybe worth recalling that in the earliest days one of the very first versions of the system was built on a completely different chain which was called the Namecoin chain. And something that was discovered was that that change wasn't very secure. And I think one thing that we've learned as time has gone on is that there will only ever be very few truly secure chains because it's very, very difficult to get to security. But that's how long I've known the project. How about yourself? How did you first connect with. I met Monique back in early 2017 or mid-2017, I guess. I was running Coinbase at the time, and everyone and their dog was doing an ico and it was the start of the last bitcoin run. And here was this very earnest guy who was talking about a utility chain, sorry, a chain with real utility. And unlike everybody else, he'd taken the path of registering it as a security and going forward that way, which seemed a really hard way to do it. And I remember one being impressed with him, but also being impressed with the fact that they chose to do it the right way, which is the hard way and not the easy way, which everyone else was doing, which is just to launch as an ICO and hope for the best. And I think, honestly, with what's been happening recently with things like Ripple and so on, the NEEB and team have indicated that path. And so that's how I got to know him, because he was talking to Coinbase about the fact that we, at that time, were going to have an ATS to trade tokenized securities. So that's how I've got to stay in touch. And I've been impressed with the progress that he and the team have been making. Well, Coinbase, too, I mean, it's interesting because it took the regulated path. I mean, it's a regulated money services transmitter and so forth. How did that influence how you were able to run the business? No, it's a good question. Look, Coinbase, from the beginning, started as saying, look, we're gonna be the safest, easiest way to get exposure to crypto. And you cannot be that. You cannot have that value proposition without being regulated, without being on the right side of the regulator. If you touch the FIAT world, you have to be. You can't use the Silicon Valley aphorism of run fast and break things when you're talking about people's money, that just doesn't work. And so by taking the stance of being regulatory, being regulated, I think we did a lot to help expand the universe of people who were into crypto. I think it would be much. I think crypto would be much more industry if players like Coinbase and others hadn't taken the regulated path to allow people to go from fiat to crypto. And so we, you know, we were. We were instrumental in trying to get consensus around what it means to actually get a token listed. So we created. We helped create the entity that now, you know, looks at all these listings and opines and whether something's a security or not a security and it was again in that vein that I was really impressed with the way Munib and team were conducting themselves and stayed in touch with that project and have been helping him as an advisor now since it was quite the intense discussion between the team and the board and everybody else, but feels very much like an important path to be trailblazing because it has made it possible for people in the US to participate. Other projects have chosen other paths, such as creating the project entirely outside the US not having people in the US Easy access to a project. This, too now is an incredible moment in time because it's not just the launch of the mainnet, but it's also, you know, a sign that this project has really become very decentralized. I mean, there's lots of different miners, for example. I don't know that we know who all the miners are. And that's the beauty of these systems is, you know, anybody can participate in them. So that's, you know, it certainly wasn't the easiest route to go through because as you know, as if, I mean, you've been around the financial world for a long time that the filing requirements that you have to meet are pretty onerous in this type of process. On the other hand, they also provide a lot of transparency. And so people sometimes like, oh, it's only an onerous process, but it does produce transparency. People could see how the company was financed and how much money they were spending, how much money they had in some of these other processes. You know, nobody knew where the money had gone and who was using it and to what end. So, yeah, or where it went exactly. And I think that's. That's really important. Look, I. Ironically, there needs to be. There needs to be that level of trust through transparency around a lot of decentralized protocols. So if you come back to, you know, why was I, you know, excited about this? It's not just that Univ and team are doing it the right way, but now it's 2.0. I think they're tackling one of the most important challenges that we have, which is the dominant crypto asset, which is Bitcoin, which is the thing that most people are comfortable with, which is now getting institutional, where most of the value is tied up, unfortunately, isn't able to innovate as quickly as some of the others, like Ethereum. Look at all the defi progress on Ethereum, and that's all because of the fact that it has smart contracting ability. And so I don't know what your point of view is, Albert, but For me, the promise here was can you bring that level of innovation and programmability to Bitcoin without polluting the nature of bitcoin itself? Yeah, I think that, I think I was listening in a little bit earlier to Peter talking about slow money and fast money and, and I saw this. James Survicki, I'm sure butchering his last name, posted today that the dream of bitcoin is dead because, oh, bitcoin can never be as money because look at these great price fluctuations. And I think it's sort of funny because the contrast is so different. Right. I think people like Peter, who've been in the crypto system for a long time, there's a long term vision. This isn't about a month to month price fluctuation. This isn't even about a year to year price fluctuation. This is about trying to create whole new underpinnings for the financial system, whole new underpinnings for systems of trust, whole new underpinnings for systems of identity. And once you zoom out and you take that perspective, you don't want to have the foundation be iterated on at super high speed. You want the foundation to be rock solid and you want the foundation to be changed with extreme care and thoughtfulness because everything else will then rest on that foundation. So in many ways, the sort of slowness of the evolution of the bitcoin core itself, I think is very much a feature, not a bug. But the big unlock now is to create a new layer. And this is really how computer science and computer systems have advanced anywhere, basically is that you wind up with some kind of rock solid foundation on which you can then innovate. And so it's very exciting. No, I totally agree. And in fact, I got kidded for having a tweet recently where I said if you're checking the price of bitcoin daily, you're kind of missing the point because it's a long term inflation hedge. Completely missing the point. Yeah, you're missing the point. Yes, people do trade it, but that's not what it's for. But the point you make, I think is super important, which is that you want the foundation to be super solid. You want it something that is well known. You want it to be that store of value. But to unlock then the potential of that store of value, it needs to have some element of programmability. And I point to the amount of wrapped Bitcoin that is floating around on Defi exchanges right now and floating around on Defi products. And that just tells you how much pent up demand there is for this. And wrapped Bitcoin is actually not a great product. It suffers from a lot of defects. And so if you could create the programmability that you want out of like an Ethereum smart contract, but on Bitcoin itself without as you said, compromising the base layer, I mean that's the real breakthrough. And I think that is what, that's what Stacks 2.0 is trying to do. And so for me the excitement is how much innovation will we unleash over the next 12 to 18 to 24 months? Because we're bringing this kind of capability, which didn't exist before, to Bitcoin itself. And this is also where I think that the set of ideas behind proof of transfer are so exciting is because basically what people can earn from participating in this new consensus will increase with adoption. So it becomes a whole incentive effect for both fostering adoption and then as adoption happens, it will increase the to benefit from participating in the protocol. So this feels very promising because it mirrors some of why Bitcoin became large as a system in the first place, because participating in the consensus protocol was financially rewarding activity. I'm curious how you sort of see the institutional world. I remember when the sort of 2017 bubble burst and everybody's like, well it's not a problem because institutions around the corner, they're going to come in next year immediately. And I was just like, I don't think so, but it feels like that tide has changed. Is that your feeling as well? Yeah. So when we saw the run up in 2017, which was entirely retail led, right, let's be clear, the entire run up in 17 was retail. I and others argue that institutions will eventually come and for them to come there needs to be an easy on ramp for them, just in the same way as there was for consumers. And so that's why you saw the launch of custodians like Coinbase Custody, it's why you saw the launch of OTC desks. Like Circle had an OTC desk and a bunch of market makers had them. You were replicating the functionality that exists in the equities or fixed income world for institutions. You were replicating that for crypto. Right. And so those were the investments that were laid down in late 17, early 18. And I still think that had that rally continued for another, call it 3, 4, 5, 6 months, you may have had institutional adoption back then. But human nature being what it is, when bitcoin goes from 3,000 to 20,000, that's when institutions got interested and started talking and it crashes from 20,000 down to 10. And they're like, oh no, I don't want to touch it now it's that now it goes from 10,000 to 40 and suddenly they're super excited again. And you know what's going to happen, right? You know, it's just, it will correct at some point. But I think this time the rally has been strong enough and long enough that the institutions that were playing with it back in 17 are now, now adopting it for sure. And you've got something I've never seen before, which are corporates that are looking at it that are basically taking excess cash and sticking it into Bitcoin and some of them, frankly, that didn't have a robust business model to begin with. And so this was probably better than an M and A transaction, but I wouldn't have predicted that. But I'm really glad to see institutional adoption starting. It's starting. It's very nascent, it's starting. It's interesting, as a venture fund, we have our investors who are so called limited partners and they are very much. A lot of them are institutional capital. It's pension funds, university endowments, and we've had many of our LPs for long periods of time. And so we started talking to them about crypto when we made our first investment, which was Coinbase, incidentally. And so we're talking back in 2012 and we sort of survey them as to whether they have since then independently acquired any crypto assets.

And.

And so far, still nobody's done it. And as you mentioned, custody really weighs heavily on people's mind. I mean, nobody wants to be the one who has $240 million that they don't know how to get to. So, you know, and so it is. It takes very robust, robust offerings to get there. Yeah, maybe. Sorry, I joke, but again, the bitcoin maximal sort of get mad at me. But I think one of the breakthroughs of Coinbase, literally for crypto is the fact that you could do a password reset. I know that sounds trite, but it's true. It's like you never want to be that person that I can't remember my password and therefore there's some other coin tied up that I will never get access to again. Yeah. And I think that one of the interesting things, and this may actually provide a segue for us to talking a little bit about the future, is.

For.

Things to get really broad adoption, they need to be easily accessible to people. And I sometimes point out to folks that the web didn't really fully take off until Microsoft started bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. And so on the one hand you were sort of like, that's kind of an awful move. I mean, that's typically monopolist and so forth. And it was bad. And you. There was the whole cutoff Netscapes, air supply discussion and all that. But the reality is you can overlay that on a chart, you can look at the web's growth and it basically takes off. Why? Because previously people had to go download something in order to be on the web. But it's kind of a catch 22. It's like you tell me I have to go download. So I don't even know how to download something on my computer. Which is also why AOL was sending out all these disks. So I think people who, who. Yes, there's something beautiful about being able to self host. It is beautiful that you don't need an intermediary, but that doesn't mean that in order to get to adoption, you don't want to have a bunch of intermediaries that make it easy for lots of people who don't want that risk or who don't want that challenge. And so it's a good segue to maybe talk a little bit about what both you and I think the future here will hold in decentralized. And I would posit that, you know, building systems that are really easily accessible, have a good user experience and have, you know, don't require people to learn lots and lots of new terms. I mean, they may learn them along the way, they may learn along the way that they have a wallet, they may learn along the way that they have a key. But if you need to learn that up front, that feels very difficult. Just like if you needed to learn up front that you had to download a browser as opposed to just click here. That was a high hurdle for a lot of people. I agree. I look at all of the innovation that's happening on Ethereum with Defi, which is amazing and yet it's skewed to only the early adopters. Because it is hard. It is really hard, right? You need the wallet, you need to know how to actually move funds, you know how to stake them, you need to know how to actually price. And in some cases I think the pricing is off, but that's a different topic. But I look at that adoption and it is entirely at the early adopter phase and retail and it's a precursor to what I think is going to happen, which is you will eventually get the mass adopting some of those things, and you'll get institutions coming into that too, but not unless you have that on Bitcoin as well, because that's where the bulk of the value is stored. And so if you can't bring that functionality to where the bulk of the value is stored, then you're compromising the entire system. And so this, to me, is why the Stacks 2.0 launch is so interesting. And I think that that's what you'll see. And by the way, in the same way that Covid, I think, accelerated a lot of tech trends that were going on by Satya Nadella would say several years. So whether it was remote work or any of those things, I think that what we're seeing now with the President of the United States being kicked off of Twitter and other things, is accelerating the move to decentralized systems. Both because the consumers want that. Right? Because if you were president, you want a system that you could get kicked off, but also founders want. If you're a founder, why would you want to create a centralized system today and be in the crosshairs of government? I mean, I think it's insanity. Well, and that, by the way, is interesting with regard to Bitcoin. Right. Because one of the even most magic aspects of Bitcoin is that we don't really know who was the founder. So there isn't even anybody you can go talk to necessarily today. And in many ways, I hope that stays that way. And I think we're seeing that. I think Blockstack and the Stacks project and ecosystem has taken huge steps towards decentralization, but that's an actual journey that needs to happen. Totally. We're getting some questions here also. Yeah, go ahead, Asif. No, I'm just going to say that to me is the magic of Bitcoin is not just that it's a store of value, not just that it's inflation proof, but the fact that it showed you how to build a truly decentralized entity. And I think that's where we're going. I think in 20 years from now, we'll have a lot of daos that are doing very, very basic, primitive functions for us, and no one will know who created them or there's nobody to go call in front of the group. Sorry, you wanted to move to the questions. Yeah, I think we should take a couple of the questions that are in here. So one question here is that how much institutional funding is going to companies that are developing decentralized applications and projects? Well, let Me maybe kick this off and as if you should chime in here as well. But there's obviously Union Square Ventures. We are not a crypto only fund. We invest in lots of things, but we continue to fund the development of crypto projects. And then there are dedicated funds such as Placeholder and Polychain and many others. And there's a lot of institutional capital funding the development of new projects. I think what's interesting about that right now is that a lot more thought is being given early on to what the role and influence of those investors ought to be relative to the governance of the community. And I think one of the most exciting things is that much, much more attention is being given to the role of community. And I think the Blockstack team has done an amazing job listening to Community from early on in the project. But I think that was for some time that was more the exception in the rule. And it's great to see that that's becoming the norm now. I agree with that. There's another question here about will this launch help bring an end to the way exchanges are currently acting like casinos with investors and gamblers? My answer to that is human nature is human nature. People look for that kind of adrenaline rush. It used to be, I used to run Ameritrade in the past life and it used to be in the late 90s it was equities. Everyone in the dog was trading equities. Then it became options, then it came futures, then became Forex, then it became crypto. And if you look at what happened in Covid, a whole bunch of sports betting went away because sports went away. And what happened? These people flocked to guess where places like Robinhood and others. And now you had Tesla being worth more than every other car company on the planet put together times two and DoorDash being worth more than the entire sum of all restaurant chains in the United States put together. You have some things that just don't fundamentally make sense. But that's what happens with retail. You will never get rid of the retail consumers appetite for that kind of risk. Right. And in some ways it's better that they do that than go to the casino. Right. At least they have some chance to make some money. But. But it's not entirely rigged by the house. It's not entirely rigged by the house. Right. So I don't think you're going to get rid of that. I do think you will have a lot of really lower cost, better products being delivered. There's so much friction in financial services because of the things you need to do to secure the transaction and make it trustful. And by using blockchain, you don't need to do that. And so if you've got bitcoin coupled with smart contracts, I think you bring the DEFI ecosystem to more of the mass. And you can over time, like, not this year, it'll take several years to do this, but you can get, as you said, Albert, the ui. Right. And everything else. And you will bring a lot more people into being served by financial products than currently cannot be served. That's why I think that's the perfect point to wrap up on, which is the system's life. Go build great things on the things that make finance more accessible to everybody. Absolutely. That's great. Muniv and team, thanks for having us. Yes, indeed. Congratulations. Absolutely. Okay, take care, Sam. All right, guys. Bang bang. Got a very special guest, probably one of the earliest Internet entrepreneurs. Kevin Rose is with us. We are recording this as part of the Stacks Conference, which is Blockstacks virtual event. And so there's been a ton of great speakers and lots of great information. So highly recommend you go and check out the rest of them. But, Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I'm so glad to be here. I know we've traded emails over the last, like, six months or so or three months, whatever it is, and couldn't find a time. And it's awesome. As a. As a listener of your show, it's cool to actually be on, so thanks for having me. So I have to say that there was a moment where all of a sudden my phone started blowing up middle of last year, and I started looking and everyone was like, tim Ferriss and Kevin are talking about the Chamath episode of the podcast. And I was like, wait, what is going on? And so I went and I listened to the episode. And I guess you had listened to Chamath Palpitiya right in, like, the Heart of the pandemic and the economic crisis. Pretty much just say what he meant, and he really kind of went off. And so it was cool to kind of hear your thoughts about one of the episodes. But maybe let's start with your background. You've worked on so many important pieces of what I kind of consider the Internet economy. Maybe. Just how do you describe where you grew up and how you got into the technology industry? Yeah, well, of all places, I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada. I moved out there. My dad was in finance. He worked for a company called Principal Financial Group, and they had A good paying job and it was a chance for us to like have a little bit more money. We were like standard kind of middle class family. And so he moved out there. That put me in the middle of all things Las Vegas. Did not really enjoy that. But I got into tech and computers out there and desperately wanted to figure out a way to get to the Bay Area. Cause I just had been reading about how everything was going on, you know, especially in 99, 2000. And so I said, well, I gotta get to SF. Figured out a way to get kind of a low level job working in San Francisco, moved out there, fell in love with the city. Eventually it took me a little while to love that city. And then yeah, started my own thing in 2004 when the kind of web 2.0 was just getting started and I launched the first social news website called Digg. And so that happened in late 2004. And kind of to my surprise, just people like to vote on articles and tell you which ones are the best and have a say. And all this stuff was relatively new because there really wasn't a way to do this stuff in a real time fashion. That type of technology was just coming online. So like a great example is, you know, when we, if you were to dig something back then or eventually later, you know, about a year later when Facebook added likes or you upload something on Reddit, people used to forget it would actually have to take you to another page. Like when we first launched Digg, you would have to say like dig something would take you to another page and say thank you for your dig. Because there was no way to do it in line. And so when they came out with asynchronous JavaScript to make that happen, you could actually click something and see the page refresh with the number. And as silly as that sounds today, that was like bleeding edge back then. And so that's kind of some of those early kind of new versions of ways to manipulate JavaScript was what led us to creating some of this real time voting. And it was right place, right time, lots of luck. And it just took off from there. How did it feel to have built something that really became part of people's habits on the Internet? Right. Kind of the early users of Digg ended up a lot of them going to be very successful technology entrepreneurs as well. But just I'm sure people would tell you all the time like, oh, I use Digg every day. Or literally I remember using Digg so much. How does that feel today? Or even back then you Know, I think that anytime you can have a small little impact on the Internet and change, just a little tiny piece of it is. It's a beautiful thing. And I would say the biggest one was probably when Drew, the founder of Dropbox, came up to me and was like, we launched on Digg, and that's what really blew us up on that first day. And he's just like, thank me for that. And I'm like, wow, you, like, you created Dropbox. Like, thank you. Like, that's awesome. So it was. It was a cool. It was such a small community back then, though. Like, when Web 2.0 happened, it wasn't like, you know, in today with all the money in the Valley and all the startups and, you know, there being thousands and thousands of different startups kind of all competing for the same eyeballs and just a flood of money. Back then, it was a handful of folks. So you knew the Twitter folks. And Zuckerberg was really curious about Diggs before he added. So he came over to my office and just sat on the floor with his slippers and talked about how it worked. And there was all those early days, but no one was thinking it would be this big. It was just like, well, how can we make our websites better? There was still mobile. How can we just make our websites better? What features can we add to attract more users to watch and see how Twitter and Facebook and some of the other bigger platforms, Reddit and others, have changed the world. It's so cool. It was a great time and lots of mistakes made. I was in my early 20s. Definitely had no idea how to manage people, no idea how to properly hire or fire or prune or any of the things that a good founder and CEO should do. It just. I was just so immature. So, you know, I look back on those days and just see a lot of mistakes. But really, it's just lessons learned, you know, it's just I used to beat myself up about them. Now I just consider them, you know, really valuable lessons that I wouldn't make today and ones that I had to go through. Yeah, and obviously being a little bit older, having more experience helps in the hindsight there. Talk a little bit about the evolution of content moderation, you know, as you built that kind of first site and you had to break a lot of ground and kind of figure things out. I don't know how many really examples you could pull from. You know, even Zuck had you to go and talk about likes and digs and all of that. How have you seen some of the decisions that you guys made early on evolve into today's world. And how do you think about content moderation on the Internet today? Yeah, it's funny, I was talking to a friend of mine who, who was kind of our head of content moderation at Digg, and he's now been at Reddit for seven or eight years, something like that now, and does a bunch of moderation over there. And just seeing the, and hearing about this, the better, just the technology that they have today on the machine learning side and the things that they're doing to identify spam early on that we didn't have back then. But I look at what's happening on Twitter with the issues that they've had around moderation and I really feel it's when you've been behind the scenes and you see what happens, you realize the just how crazy it is. And the general public typically doesn't see this type of thing. And so like, for example, and I'm sure Reddit has to deal a lot with this is like when you want something on the front page of Reddit and you want to get it because you know there's millions of eyeballs there, right? If you can get a story on the front page of Reddit, that's worth a lot of money, right? So spammers are going to go and try every single angle of attack to try and get something on that front page. And oftentimes what happens is they'll go in, attack something, and then claim foul play and say you are suppressing the story. This is false moderation. And from just a standard consumer on the site, you're like, yeah, this thing had thousands of votes. Why is it not on the front page? But what you don't see is behind the scenes, 80% of those votes came in not a natural way, but a way that they've determined to be fraudulent. So that can be people going directly to the Permalink site without actually naturally discovering it through the upcoming section or any other page. It could be a bunch of new accounts all voting on the same thing. Could be a bunch of accounts from the same IP address. It can be a bunch of accounts or votes all happening with within a very short time window. There's just like a thousand different things to look at. And from just a consumer looking at the total number of votes, you would say, well, something is wrong, like Reddit suppressing this, or Dig is suppressing this or whoever it may be. But in reality there's just a whole mess that you have to and you can't come out and say. And call them out right publicly. That's just not a thing you do. So it just turns into, you know, scandal or quote unquote, deep state, trying to keep us down or whatever it may be behind the scenes. And in reality, there's a bunch of shady stuff going on. And so when I see that happening at Twitter and other places and just, you know, when we added like, you know, messaging or the ability to communicate behind the scenes, and you see people all getting together in big groups, like trying to all zero in on an article to try and promote, and it is, it makes me feel very fortunate that I'm no longer in that game because it's messy. It is really messy. It also feels like there's this constant healthy tension. If you're that person who wants traffic, you want to do everything you can to increase the probability of getting traffic, getting better placement, getting kind of up in the rankings on the various sites. But at the same time, people don't want you to do that, who run the site. And so, you know, there's always the trick of like, I love when a startup will email me and say, you know, product Hunt. Hey, don't click on this link, but go to the Product Hunt website. You know, scroll down. We're ranked about, you know, 30th right now. You'll find us on there, then upload us. And so it's funny to kind of see the constant cat and mouse game, I think. But what that does lead to though is you've mentioned a couple times like almost malicious actors or kind of bad actors. And so how did you guys previously deal with this at Digg or maybe some of the other companies that you've invested in? And then now we're seeing more of what I'll call just like de platforming or kind of completely taking people offline. Is that not really a new thing? And that's been going on for a long time. It just maybe people didn't talk about it as much, didn't have as much tension. Or is it something that maybe is a more aggressive response to kind of the ratcheting up of activity from users? How do you just think about the evolution of that? Yeah, it's tough because you have to put users like there's not one universal policy that'll just apply and work well to everyone. So there's different intentions behind each of these, different types of quote unquote fraud or manipulation of the system. And so sometimes we had like, to your point, like, there are people that Come in that have questions, great articles that just want to get more exposure. And so they tell their friends, go try and find this organically and vote it up and blah, blah, blah, and that there's not really a lot of harm in that. There's confusion in that. Like, I remember one time when CNET, they had probably 75 of their employees go and sign up for dig accounts and all dig the same article. And they were pissed that it didn't make the front page. And I'm looking at the data and it's all like, CNET email addresses. And it was all employees and they'd all created accounts within the last 20 minutes. And I'm like, you guys don't understand. Like, there's a whole karma system that you can't see behind the scenes that is attributed to each one of these accounts. We know these are new accounts and we're not going to give them the same weight as we say would someone that's been on the site for three years. So they just couldn't understand why their content wasn't making the homepage. And so it's frustrating for those people, especially when they believe they're trying to do something good. In this case, it wasn't, it wasn't a bad act. It was like the legitimate article. They were just trying to give it a little extra love. Now there's, there's the other side of things where, you know, you have a spammer, you know, you have someone that's just really trying to promote paid content or content that is just like, you know, the typical spam that you would see in your inbox, you know, stuff like that. So we would do all different types of things, including, we had a system where you could set a flag on someone's account or a series of accounts or hundreds of accounts and tell them they were called like silent accounts. And what that meant is they could come and dig all day long and they would actually see the numbers go up, but if they logged out or anyone else looked at them, the numbers would ever, never go up. So they actually were just spinning their wheels. They thought they were like actually positively voting on something. And so this was great because the second you bam. A spammer, they see that they've been banned and they go and create another dozen or five dozen or whatever new accounts. And so this just kept them believing that they were doing something when in reality they weren't. So there's just so many different tactics. And then of course, the kind of like actual physical banning of people. Like, we did that by the. You know, we probably. I don't know how many we had by the time that I left Digg, but it was in the hundreds of thousands, if not over a million accounts banned. You know, it's. It just. There are certain times where people are so malicious that you just can't. They can no longer be active on your platform, and you have to do everything you can, like, I mean, hate speech. Things that threats. Like, I had to have when I was doing a live podcast one time, 24 hours before we were going to go live, we had a bunch of emails that were sent to saying that someone was going to bring a gun and shoot me and kill me at the live podcast. And so we had to hire personal security to come out and, like, frisk everyone, checked their bags when they came in for the live show. And we talked to the FBI back then, and it was just stuff like that where you got to be careful. Yeah. And it feels like there's a difference between if I am maliciously, like you're trying to vote things up and almost not creating content, but more so trying to manipulate it. That's very different than if I'm the one who's actually creating the content. I'm saying things that are malicious, hurtful, kind of violent, whatever. And both from a moderation standpoint is a different. But also there seems to be more sensitivity and much more anger around I'm being silenced versus I can't take an action on a site. Right. To me, it's the silencing component seems to be where all of the focus goes. Really, what you're saying is, hey, for two decades, there's been all sorts of things that these platforms have been doing, not necessarily in a bad way. They're trying to make the experience and the product as good as possible for the people who are there for the right reasons. That's right. But the other thing, too is you have to realize is this is not a freedom of speech issue. It's not the government saying, I can't say something, which is what freedom of speech is. It's essentially a private company that's offering a free service to its users, saying, we don't want you in our store anymore. We don't want you in our house anymore. This is our private company, and it's completely within their rights to say that. I mean, that's the beautiful thing about America. We can say, I built this service. I don't. You're not. I have a series a set of rules and guidelines. You're not adhering to those. And so you are no longer welcome here. And I'm not directing that at Trump. I'm directing that. I mean this is all users. Like that's the beautiful thing about these private businesses is they have the ability to do that. I think it's a thing that we need to protect. It's very important. I think the vast majority. It's sad to see on Twitter that a lot of people believe freedom of speech means freedom of platform. If I'm on Facebook, I get to stay on Facebook no matter what I say or I get to stay on Twitter no matter what I say. And that's not the case. They're giving you a free service, you're not even paying for it and you just expect to be able to spout whatever you want and they have to keep you on. It's not the law. That's not the way it works. There's just a lot of confusion there. I tend to agree with you. Look, these are private companies and they're basically reminding us that they're private companies and they can do this. Right. And I think people may have forgotten that or be confused. Does the analysis change or kind of how do you see the difference when let's say it is a random 25 year old person in the United States who isn't well known by any measure and it's just kind of going about their day and want to interact with family and friends, let's say, versus the President of the United States or, or some other well known figure, especially if it's politically related. Sa. Today we have David, It doesn't feel the same without you. It doesn't feel the same without you. It's hard to say what you would do if you were sitting in that position. Right? Like I feel there's important importance that you want to allow the information to get out there and it's going to get out there one way or another. Whether it be like if someone gets cut off on Twitter, they can go to their private email newsletter, they can go to their website, they can go to a thousand other outlets. Most of them have large followings of people that they can text because they signed up for some type of text me of this number to join our group. So there's a lot of ways to spread this information. I think that Twitter is. It's tough because on one hand they realize that and I also think that if you cut off. The thing that I'm most concerned about, that I'm scared about is that when you kick people off of a platform, they will find an alternative. And we are very close technology wise to completely decentralized systems that will allow these to exist no matter what is set. Now they may not be in the app store because obviously Google, Facebook, Samsung, others, they control the content in their app stores, but the content could live in a decentralized fashion that cannot be censored. And that's a lot of people working towards building these systems. And there's a lot of good in those types of systems. But I can imagine there being in the next five years, you know, a Twitter like service that you just can't take down and you can't delete and everything stays up there forever. It's stored, information is stored on the blockchain and it just becomes a free for all, for misinformation, for spreading of hate speech, for a lot of, a lot of really bad things. So it's, you know, and then what happens? Do we try and block that or break it at the IP level? Like do we try and actually shut down, you know, our block when the traffic is encrypted? There's not really a way to do that, you know, so there's, it's, it's, it's a whole can of worms, you know, it's, there's no easy, elegant solution here. Yeah. And so you actually started to touch on what my last question was going to be just around, it feels like the more and more that decentralized companies, which by the way has been the default, it has led to incredible value creation and it's probably been, I think, pretty undeniably the best solution so far in terms of building a centralized corporation and that owns a product and monetizing it, the more that they kind of highlight or leverage the power and control that they have, and again in a positive way, the way that they think is the best way to run their service and they're legally entitled to do it. I do think that there's more and more interest in the youngest generations in decentralization. Right. And I think you're right in highlighting like, hey, that's not necessarily just a positive solution. Like there are downsides to it. How likely is it, do you think that we get what I'll call kind of mainstream decentralized, you know, whether it's a social network, a mobile app, a website. And really the perspective I've had on this is like, I don't know, maybe five years ago that definitely when you started Diggs, if anyone said, hey, I'm going to build a decentralized website, they Got put into the like, oh, you're just paranoid category. Why does it need to be decentralized? That seems to be changing now. And so is it something where it's like, yeah, actually maybe the default is going to switch to decentralization or is this just hey, we're human and we're having short term kind of overreaction and the truth somewhere in between. And maybe we have coexistence between centralized and decentralized systems moving forward. Yeah, I think there's going to be a little bit of a co existence between the two. Even today if you're running say something like the Brave browser, which is like a Chrome based browser that has privacy, first you go to the New York Times, it offers you with one click to open it in Tor and have it be a completely anonymous. Now granted, it's going to be much slower. Right. Like decentralized systems in general, they don't have the crazy edge servers and caching and all the other stuff that a centralized service will bring you that give you crazy response times that load the page in a quarter of a second. So some of these systems are going to be certainly slower. I certainly believe that you're going to have a lot of the types of users that were banned that are spreading certain types of information, whether it be the misinformation or some of the evil hate groups and things like that. They will move to decentralized solutions because there is not going to be any other home for, for them. And the tools, moderation tools will get better and better over time. Right. So if you know, today you can post something about the KKK and it'll last for three hours on Twitter, you're still pretty happy with that. But you know, as a. If that their moderation tools get better and that stuff is removed instantly, then you're going to move to something else. So it's, it's going to be a question of whether or not anyone like do people put this in the bucket of kind of dark web where only a certain subset of people that know what they're doing and know what they're getting into go to or will there be any legitimate users on there that kind of somewhat make the platform seem like it is a place to hang out for an everyday user, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean we would be doing everyone a disservice if we didn't talk about Bitcoin being kind of this really probably the most valuable, best example of these decentralized services that seems to not only be working, but also Getting mainstream adoption. Talk just a little bit in closing about your thoughts around Bitcoin and maybe the importance of that system in the world and how entrepreneurs are seeing that as an example of what they can aspire to build. Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin has been a fun one to watch and I think we're finally getting to the place where a few things are coming together that are giving it renewed life. Never a new life. It's always been alive. It's just the question of adoption. And so I think there's a few different levers that are happening all at the same time. One, it's just age is a big deal. Like every week, every month, every year that goes by where this thing has been hammered on and pounded on by everyone. And there is increased confidence in the technical feasibility, although that's been there from the get go for the geeks. The average consumer and institutional buyers get a lot more comfortable with placing bets in that arena. You'll see more funds on the institutional side moving in there as the confidence in the protocol grows on the more consumer side. We're just seeing the on ramp and ability to get into Bitcoin just being so easy. I mean, the fact that you can go into PayPal now and just buy it directly in your PayPal account, I mean, and that was square cash. And everyone's like, oh yeah, I've used square cash, maybe I'll use that as my. And then it was, you know, Robinhood and a few others. But now the big, big players, not the square isn't a big player, but you know, PayPal is much larger. They're going to get in the arena and say, there's money to be made here, let's go ahead and offer this to our consumers. And I would imagine we start seeing that. It wouldn't surprise me if major banks start doing the same thing. And when that happens, it's just really going to unlock a lot of demand. And I think that things continue to go higher. That coupled with the fact that the United States is just printing money, a lot of other governments are way worse than we are here in the states. And so it gives us something that we can all point to as a universal store of value. I think that becomes more and more true over time in terms of the actual utility of it day to day. Am I buying bread with bitcoin? No, and I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. But the same thing, you're not buying bread with your gold ETF either. So I'm pretty excited about the future of bitcoin. It's being extended blocks texting, some interesting stuff to extend it as well. Create smart contracts on top of it, things of that nature make it more ethereum. Like, I mean the industry is maturing quite a bit, so it's pretty exciting. And I think that if you're. This is the crazy uncle question I always get at Thanksgiving and now for zoom Thanksgivings is like, should I buy bitcoin? And the answer is really simple. If you're trying to flip it and you just want to double your money or triple your money, like stop, stop, you're putting in too much then because it means a lot to you and so you're better off putting in less money and forgetting about it for 10, 15, 20 years. Then you are putting in something where you just want to see it double. For me, that means 2% of my overall portfolio, maybe 3% of all of my different assets across all asset classes. If you can just put it in there and forget about it for the next 10, 15, 20 years. And then figure out has this grown to a point where it's 10, 15, 20% of my overall assets. And if so, consider doing some moving around and pruning to make sure that you, you have the allocation targets that you're looking to hit. But obviously if you are a brand new country getting started today, you're not going out and buying printers and printing money. Digital currency is here to stay. There's no doubt about that. It's been the case for a long time now. And with bitcoin you obviously have the leader and I can't see that changing anytime soon. I'm a fan and will continue to be a fan because it's, it's just the future. It's like electric vehicles. It's so obvious. I could not agree more. It's also funny to me because if you talk to young kids, people say, oh, that is the kind of Robinhood generation portfolio. It's like Tesla and bitcoin. It's like, well, yeah, because they understand maybe some trends that older folks aren't quite aware of yet. So we'll see how it all plays out. But I tend to think that your perspective is pretty accurate and spot on. Where can we send people to find you on the Internet and find out more about your work at true. Yeah, so TrueVentures.com is where I invest day to day. So I'm a partner over there. We invest in the very early seed stage, Series A. And that's kind of my day to day. I focus on consumer Internet cryptocurrency and a few other things. I also do a newsletter that I send out probably every other month or so, and you can just find that@KevinRose.com and it's just all of the crazy things that I'm investigating, new technologies, things I'm excited about, books I'm reading. And so it is a kind of crazy hodgepodge of all different types of links and fun stuff. But I try not to spam people. So every couple of months is about the right cadence for me. And you can sign up for that over@kenrose.com awesome, man. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. As I start off saying you literally built some of the coolest companies on the Internet and been a huge part of a lot of people kind of following your footsteps. So, you know, one, congratulations on all the success and two, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, dude, it's my pleasure. Keep doing the great shows because I will keep listening. You're definitely one of my default podcasts, so thank you for that. It. Sam. Hi everyone. Good to see you again. Sorry for the technical difficulties. Thanks for bearing with us. I'm going to take a brief break from my emcee role and give a talk. So for those of you who don't know me, my day job is not necessarily running online conferences or working with Stacks, a company that I think is doing great work building decentralized Internet tools. But my day job is actually at Coin center. And Coin center is a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. i'm trained as a lawyer. I speak with Congress. I speak with folks in the administrative agencies in Washington, D.C. about this technology every day. That's my job. So I wanted to say at the start, this is going to be a pretty short update on the work that Coin center has done and where we think there are risks and where there aren't risks as far as government policy towards cryptocurrencies and decentralized networks like Stacks. But it's not going to be too long of a talk and I do want to leave some time at the end for questions. So if you have any questions about what the US Government thinks of cryptocurrency, what we've heard from regulators or congresspeople, where we see threats and issues on the horizon, please put those questions in the comments. So what is Coincentre? Coincenter is an independent, which means we're not a trade association. We're not like a group of companies. We, we're just a nonprofit that's mission driven nonprofit. We are a 501c4. We rely on donations in order to do the work that we do. So if you like the work that we do, you're welcome to support us. And we're an advocacy group, which means we do education. If there's a member of Congress or their staff who want to learn about how Bitcoin works or how stacks can build Internet protocol tools on top of Bitcoin, for example, we would be the first call that that person might have. And then we would either explain the questions that they're asking, explain how the technology works, or we'd find somebody who could explain it, maybe bring Maneeb in to actually testify before Congress or something like that, for example. And we're here to defend people's freedom to innovate using cryptocurrencies and open blockchain networks. And we have a broad criteria. We by open blockchain networks, the tools we want to defend in D.C. and abroad, we mean any network that has a permissionless consensus mechanism. So if all that is required to partake in maintaining the blockchain is commonly available hardware and software that's open source and freely available, that's what we mean by an open blockchain network. These are the technologies which we want to educate people in government about and get them comfortable with. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stacks, zcash, all of these new pieces of the future decentralized Internet that we think are going to be critical to things like human rights and human dignity going forward. Either my boss Jerry Brito here or myself have testified in just about every hearing that Congress has had on the topic of cryptocurrencies going all the way back to 2014. And like I said, we deal with Congress, we deal with state governments in the US we deal internationally. So we've written comments in the UK proceedings about anti money laundering. We worked with the Financial Action Task Force which sets global anti money laundering policy. And we work with regulators, the US treasury, the sec, the CFTC and others abroad. And the reason we do what we do is we believe that these open protocols, Bitcoin, ethereum, now stacks 2.0, these tools are public goods, unlike Facebook, unlike Google. These are not platforms owned by a single company or corporation who could come to Washington D.C. and lobby for fair treatment or good treatment for from regulators. Bitcoin and Ethereum don't have that company. They're public goods. They're shared and unowned resources. And because of that, they need a nonprofit voice to speak for them in Washington. D.C. so that's rather like the Internet. And the Internet has benefited since the 90s from having independent nonprofit based advocacy on behalf of the rights of Internet users and on behalf of the Internet technology itself. Amazingly important and powerful organizations that still work today hand in hand with us, the Electronic Frontier foundation and the center for Democracy and Technology, while open blockchain networks are also public goods. And Coin center seeks to be and has been for five years now the number one voice to defend those public goods when conversations arise in government that deal with them. So the title of the talk was the View from the Wall. And I mentioned something called a midnight regulation. And I think it's a good way to just quickly give you a vibe of what it's like to work at Coin Center. We've been doing this for five years and usually it's like standing on the fantastical wall in Game of Thrones where everyone behind us is the people we want to protect. And they don't always get along. You know, Bitcoin and Ethereum people be fighting, it happens, we know, but they all deserve protection because they're all building public goods, even if they fight amongst themselves. So we need an independent nonprofit that stands up for everyone's right to build on top of every open technology. We're standing on the wall trying to keep everyone south of us safe. And this midnight ruling that I'm talking about is something that was a threat, threat to decentralization that happened just this past Christmas. So when I talk about policy threats to decentralization, it's usually one of two things. It's either ignorance. The policymakers, they don't have time always to fully understand the technology, and it's hard to understand the technology. And so they make policies that don't make sense or could be very bad simply because they're treating these things maybe as they would treat a traditional financial services corporation. And they don't understand the difference and they don't understand how you have to treat these things differently, or it's out of malice. And this is actually less often. It's less often that we go into a congressional office and someone says, hey, you're from that Bitcoin thing. I don't like it, I'm ending it. That doesn't happen. We've almost never met a hostile politician. We've often met regulators or politicians who simply didn't have good information about the tech. And once they learned about it, often felt that it could be reasonably regulated. And it could be in fact a very good thing for America or for the world. This midnight ruling is a combination of ignorance and malice, and it ate up our Christmas holidays. So I'll tell you about it real briefly right now. It was from FinCEN, the Department of treasury, and it's about how anti money laundering laws are applied to Bitcoin exchanges and other cryptocurrency exchanges. And it was rushed. So in similar proceedings where a bank was having its regulations for anti money laundering changed up by the government, they got sometimes like 6 years to offer input on the changes and to gradually onboard new compliance techniques. This rulemaking was announced the Friday before Christmas this past year, and we were given 15 days to actually offer feedback and comments on its proposals. Extremely rushed and fairly disrespectful of public feedback. Also, unlike past rulemakings, this rulemaking didn't seek equal treatment with traditional finance. It created stricter rules for cryptocurrency companies than traditional banks actually have to comply with, as far as knowing their customer. And those are the things that are somewhat out of malice. It seemed a little unfair. Deliberately so. And there were also things out of ignorance. So the rulemaking didn't understand certain limitations about the technology that when Coinbase receives, for example, incoming Bitcoin transaction to one of their customers account, it cannot immediately know who that transaction is coming from, because the Bitcoin protocol deals only in incoming Bitcoin address information, not the name and physical address of the person who's sending the transaction in. If that information was on the Bitcoin blockchain, it would be tragic for privacy, for obvious reasons. And finally, this rulemaking violated basic privacy rights. Anti money laundering laws are massive data collection laws. They sweep up tons of financial information that banks keep about their customers and they do it without a warrant. It's bulk warrantless surveillance. And this rulemaking in particular would have swept up even more information, including information about people who aren't even customers of the exchange. And we filed two comments. We filed a comment a couple days after the ruling was announced, right before Christmas. It was a fun holiday for all of us at Coincenter. And we filed another comment late in the process. And we also made our first comment an example that the community could follow in order to submit their own comments. And we were happy to see that 7,536 comments were actually submitted to FinCEN in this rulemaking. I don't know this for sure, but I'm fairly certain this is the most comments Finson has ever received from a particular rulemaking. So I was very proud of our community. And the good news of this story is as of this morning, literally, it's been a good day. Stacks launched and this happened as of this morning. FinCEN agreed to extend the comment period. It agreed to extend it a whole nother 45 days for the really contentious stuff that really would violate privacy. So we haven't won yet, but we push this into the next administration. The Biden administration is going to take over, and they may have a very different take on it. And we've at least managed to keep this from becoming a really onerous rule immediately in the next few days. So, good news all around. I just want to leave you with a quick quote from John Perry Barlow, who co founded the Electronic Frontier foundation and was a songwriter for the Grateful Dead. He said, a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted utopia, hoping to give liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls turnkey totalitarianism. This tech is very important cryptocurrency tech because it creates a vision of the future, a vision of the Internet that brings us back to the original roots, to the great ideas of John Perry Barlow. We need to fight for that, and we need to convince folks in government that that's important as well. And that's the job I'm privileged to do. And I hope you'll support us if you think our mission is important. So I've got a quick question here. I don't have too much time to answer them because I blabbed. Blab dominant on like I tend to. But the question is, do any of them. I'm assuming this means people in government see the actual benefits of it. Like, do they understand why people don't want all their information controlled by a few huge companies? Well, I tell you, the events of this past month have certainly made everyone think twice about corporate control. I don't think anyone has good answers yet. I don't have good answers yet. But the fact of the matter is that we've seen massive corporations have to block or censor many users, including the President of the United States. And I'm not saying those were bad choices, but they were powerful choices. So these people who used to be presenting themselves as. As neutral arbiters of public information are suddenly revealed to the world as really the new and very powerful gatekeepers of public information and of presenting information to the public. And I don't think anyone's comfortable with that. We've got a lot to work through as a society right now, but I think we can all agree that we don't want unelected people in charge of the entire media landscape. I think we can all agree that we need something better. And I think decentralized technologies, to the extent they break up, that coalesced power in the form of powerful media corporations might be the answer. And there are folks in Congress who we've spoken with about this, who believe it. The last thing I'll say, and then I'll hand it off to David Vorick, who's going to give the next talk, is about a year and a half ago, I think now, maybe even two years ago. I remember demoing PPath, the Ethereum based Twitter alternative, with Representative Tom Emmer, who's a Republican in the House of Representatives, and he thought it was really interesting. He tweeted out a message. It was not easy and it's got to get a lot easier before this kind of tech can replace the Twitters of the world, can replace the Facebooks of the world. But I think community control, user control, will ultimately be better for privacy, human dignity, and hopefully having a peaceful world going into the next few decades. So I'm very excited for the work that Muneeb and the Stacks team have all accomplished. It's really a great day. And that's it for me for now. I'll come back later with some concluding remarks. It's. Everyone, Muneeb here. Today we have David, founder of Skynet, and we're going to talk about the Stacks 2.0 launch and how with the launch our developers would be able to actually work with Skynet. Hey David. Hey, Great to be here. I'm super excited for our new partnership with Stacks. We've been working very hard to build a decentralized cloud and it's amazing to me to see that opening up the horizons and that we can bring this to more communities. So I'm really looking forward to what people build with Skynet Stacks and the new Clarity language. I think interestingly, this all started when some of the developers in your ecosystem were using storage, but they were using authentication toolkit. From our side, we just put two and two together and started chatting more about how we can do even deeper integrations, especially given smart contracts, clarity contracts that are launching with stacks 2.0. Yeah. One of our best contributors in the Skynet ecosystem is a huge fan of the Stacks ecosystem as well. So it's really cool to have something like this appear in such an organic way. Awesome. Well, we'll have more information in a blog post, but awesome to have you here. So that our community can directly hear from you. Thank you so much, Sam. Hello. Thank you for joining me. So my name is David Bork and I'm here today to talk about Skynet. And as a quick background on me, I'm a cryptocurrency developer. I've been active in the space since 2011. Back I believe that was pretty much pre Altcoin. I think it was just Bitcoin at the time. Then got started with SIA in 2014 and that has evolved over time to Skynet, what we call Skynet today. Quick overview of Skynet. It is a new platform for building decentralized web applications. You can think of a traditional web application as something like Twitter, Snapchat or Facebook, which is centralized. Skynet allows you to build the same things. In theory, you could make a perfect clone to Twitter, except have it be completely decentralized. On Skynet, we achieve decentralization with a new data model that is user oriented instead of corporation oriented. Basically, data is controlled and owned by the user and exists in user storage buckets rather than on corporate servers. Then we've developed an SDK to help developers build new applications. If, if you're looking to build something like an alternative to Twitter or an alternative to say, Snapchat, we have an SDK to help you and the platform's live today and all the fundamental features you need are ready to go. So before I get too much deeper into Skynet, I want to talk about some of the challenges that we see with the Internet today and what we've pointed Skynet, the problems that we pointed at Skynet at solving. So the biggest thing is just how much control corporations have over the modern Internet. Especially over the past five years, we've seen groups like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter increasingly do a power grab and grab, more and more control, more and more data, more and more hostile terms of, of service. And they start to build kind of like Instagram, these asymmetric power dynamics where Facebook, the owner of Instagram, holds all the cards. They control what users can see and how users access photos. And they really manage the entire ecosystem, which leaves content creators in a position of vulnerability. So a huge aspect of this for us is the managed feeds. So for example, like Twitter or YouTube or TikTok, users only have one option, there's one feed, and that's the feed that the corporation gave you. It's actually a common problem on YouTube where someone you're subscribed to and you've set up to receive notifications, they may publish videos that you Never see, because for whatever reason, the YouTube algorithm has decided not to present those videos to you as the user. You have no control over this. What you see is entirely managed by corporations. And these feeds are not designed for your well being. These feeds are designed for bottom lines of corporations. They want to improve engagement and they want to improve, I guess, vulnerability or malleability to marketing. They want, they want to drive ad dollars and clicks and spending behavior. And so these feeds are actively managed by the corporations, kind of against the user's well being. They're usually very addicting and very manipulative. And so that's another thing where we, you know, a decentralized world can improve on this sort of situation. Another big challenge that's been in the news a ton of with the recent events in US politics is deplatforming. While I don't want to get political, I can talk about a much more long standing issue, which is that of YouTube demonetization. So in the corporate Internet, a user can be kicked off a platform at any time for any reason. And oftentimes this reason is just an arbitrary change of terms of service. And so anyone who's deep into the YouTube world knows that it's a constant struggle for users, for especially content creators, to keep their videos monetized and making money. And you know, if there's a copyrighted soundtrack that played for too long in the background because, you know, someone walked by with a boombox or you know, even, even things like you swear too many times or you say the wrong words, I think for a while Anyone who mentioned COVID 19 had their video demonetized. And so you have these like arbitrary and oftentimes just stubborn rules that deplatform users. And so we want to build an Internet where someone with a content creator, with a willing and engaged audience can guarantee monetization. They can guarantee that they will continue to have access to again, their willing audience, the audience that wants to be hearing from, from them. Then finally, I kind of touched on this earlier, but corporations have arbitrary control over their terms of service and sometimes they make very broad, sweeping changes that can be very destructive. And so I think the biggest example of this in recent memory would be the Tumblr banning of NSFW content. There was a massive NSFW community on Tumblr and lots of different people who spent lots of time curating feeds for their users. And one day Tumblr was just like, okay, no more of that at all. And so even though users were given time to react and they weren't necessarily banned in some sense, their way of life just kind of disappeared under their feet again for no reason other than Tumblr decided their bottom line would be better with this rule change. And then the final thing I want to talk on is fragmentation. This is something I think we don't appreciate, how much damage it does to the Internet. But on the Internet today, data is stuck in one place. If you post something to Facebook, if you upload an image to Facebook Facebook, that image is only on Facebook. You can't transplant it to Snapchat easily or you can't use it in your blog. And so the Internet is broken up into a bunch of individual silos that are kind of at war with each other, that don't want to share data. They want to lock users to the platform. And they want to make sure that if you're part of a social network, say like a Facebook group, you are stuck on Facebook's platform. If you want to talk to your friends, your only option is Facebook. If you don't want to use Facebook, you can't be part of any of your groups anymore. We want to see data opened up. That's exactly what the user owned data model of Skynet gives us. If we project forward, the technology is ready today, and there are some applications today, but if we project the applications forward and see what can be built, we get to an Internet where the users have everything. If you upload data to a platform, you're not actually uploading it to a corporate server, you're putting it in a bucket that you control that says this is Facebook data or this is Twitter data. And that data can easily be transported between applications. You can pull it down at any time or make it available to another platform at any time, because again, it's not on Facebook servers, it's under your control. Similarly, a neat little side effect is that on Skynet, all the code is run client side, which means the user can choose any version of an application they want to use. If there's an update to an application that the user user doesn't like, they can just select to stay on the old application. And so Skynet is very much about giving power to the user. So when it comes to feeds, because the data is open and public and available to everyone, it's not only on Twitter servers. That means that anyone can come in and make a feed algorithm, anyone can come in and make a moderation algorithm, anyone can and determine what videos are suitable to present to a user or not. And users can select between all of these feed Algorithms. If you want a Twitter that's just purely timeline based, the people that you follow and it shows you the order of the tweets chronologically, that's something that you can build. Or if you have some other idea for how tweets should be presented, the data is all open and available. Anyone can build any feed algorithm they want and users can select different feed algorithms without having to completely move off of, say, the Twitter platform. It gives users significantly more flexibility. It also gives developers significantly more flexibility. Probably the biggest advantage that people talk about today of decentralization is the stable platform. You don't have this terms of service. You don't have arbitrary rules that can get you kicked off of, say, a decentralized Twitter. There's no like surprise bannings and no demonetization. If you have something that works and an audience that likes it, that thing can be depended on to continue existing into the future. And that's something that the centralized Internet just can't offer to content creators. And we see this as something which is very important because increasingly I think we're between 100,000 and a million people who make their entire income off of content creation. So stable platform is something that we think is very important but shouldn't be lost, or we don't want to lose everything else. So the final big thing is just the data collectivism. I think this is going to take a long time to explore. But on Skynet, all data is available to all applications. Data is stored in a global layer, and every application has both read access and write access to the raw data of every other application. What this means is that let's say you want to make an alternative to Facebook. Your Facebook alternative can write into the same data bucket that Facebook uses to manage Facebook groups, which means to all your friends who haven't switched platforms with you, they will still think that you're a part of their group. You will see their messages, they will see your messages, and you can continue to collaborate. Essentially what it means is if you're building a new application on Skynet, the default content I'll switch back to the centralized world. If you make a new application in the centralized world, let's say a competitor to YouTube. Day one, when you launch, you have zero videos, you have zero users, you have zero traction. It doesn't matter how amazing the application engine is, it doesn't matter how good the code is, because there's nothing interesting on your platform yet. You have to start completely from scratch and build a brand new ecosystem that's in the centralized world. In the Skynet world, you can launch a better application engine. And on day one, you have access to every single YouTube video that's ever been posted to Skynet. You have access to every single like you have access to all the history, you have access to the full set of comments and the list of which users are subscribed to other users. And that means that on day one, you can provide an enormous high depth ecosystem for your users. You don't have to build that from scratch anymore. And I think that this is a big deal, especially for startups and startup founders, because it means that you can bring your interesting idea to life without having to go through just the brutal struggle of building a network effect when the existing corporations are doing what they can to crush that network effect. Because of this, we think of Skynets as adding a new component to Metcalfe's law, which is that as you add more users, the value of a network grows with the square. But on Skynet, as you add more users, it grows with the square, not of the users on your app, it grows with the square of all the users. On Skynet. It's this much more powerful situation. So I'm out of time. I was going to go over the Skynet architecture, but instead I'm going to answer a few questions that have popped up. The first question is, do you think privacy is enough to motivate the masses to move platforms? I think the answer is no. I think that really what's going to drive adoption on Skynet is the more powerful data model for developers. I think developers are going to be very attracted to this, the idea that they can build their own version of YouTube and have all of YouTube's content without having to bootstrap from scratch. And I think that's going to make the ecosystem on Skynet a lot more just agile and flexible. And I think at scale it's going to run circles around any centralized attempt to control the data. It's just too powerful when the data is so open. So we have a quick question. What are the Rails that Skynet uses? In short, Skynet is built on top of the SIA blockchain. There's a very important primitive called a file contract that we make use of. And then we have two more architectures that I can't go into today, but one is called the igdl, which is kind of like ipfs but with a decentralized storage back end rather than user seeded backend. And then we have something called skydb, which is the igdl, but it has mutability and so the IGDL is all content addressed and immutable and skydb is pub key based and users can push out new updates under their public keys. So I think that's about all the time I have. I hope that you guys. Oh no. I have one more announcement that we have to make which is a developer bounty. Between this co sponsored by Skynet and Stacks, we want you guys to create a tutorial that shows developers how to use Skynet and use Clarity together to make an application that blends the two technologies. The grand prize for this tutorial is $2,000. The best tutorial that gets submitted gets $2,000 in cash. And then all tutorials that are good that you know if the grand prize winner hadn't been there, it would have been counted as good enough. They will receive a participation prize of $200. So you do not have to worry about walking home empty handed because someone else blew you out of the park. If you make a passable tutorial, you will get $200. So I believe that's all the time I have. Thank you so much for joining me. Hey everybody. Mitchell from Hero here. Really honored to be the one introducing our next guest. I'll try not to fanboy too hard, but we have Future Primitive, one of my absolute favorite artists. He's here to play a very special 10 minute set for you today. Can't thank him enough for being willing to come out and play for us today. And for those of you who don't know his music, you've actually been hearing it during the breaks, so look forward to more of the futuristic, energetic vibes that he brings. I've got my bed, my best, biggest headphones on, I'm really ready to rock. But before that, just on a personal note, I wanted to thank everyone that's joining us today and give a huge shout out to the Hero growth team and everyone else who's been a part of pulling this event together. It's really an honor to work in this community, this ecosystem. So thank you. A toast to you stackers. May our Primitives be the future. But our future is never primitive. Now Stan, don't sit and enjoy the sonic sensations of Future Primitive. Thanks. Running with the spirit.

Running my feet. From a distance.

I can see from a distance. That. I'd like to give a shout out to Blockstack for its main at launch. I'm Future Primitive. Thank you for joining me.

Sam.

Hello again. So I hope you enjoyed the music. I know you've enjoyed the conference so far. It's been really great to see so many people active in the comments asking questions. I'm sorry if we can't always get to all the questions, but it really is wonderful to have such an active community when you have to do your conference virtually. I don't usually like doing virtual talks, but this has been a lot of fun. Don't leave now because the talks we've got in the second half of our program are also excellent. You're going to get lots of interesting previews of apps that people are building on top of stacks. Just now, after a brief buffer slide, we're going to hear a fireside chat on Layer two protocols. So on scalability, on how we can bring these technologies to the mainstream and make them available and affordable to everyone. That talk is going to be moderated by a great journalist who's been writing about this stuff for at least as long as I've been working in Washington, D.C. laura Shinn, and she will be chatting with Nick Carter and Meltem Demirs, who probably don't need any introduction given the profile of their tweets on Twitter and their. Their work elsewhere. But I'll leave. I'll leave Laura to make those introductions, so stay tuned. Sam Foreign.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our panel. Layer Twos on Bitcoin. With Meltem Demirs, Chief Strategy Officer at Coinshares and Nick Carter, General Partner at Castle Island Ventures. Welcome Milton Minick. Hi, Laura. It's so exciting to be here. And I have to give a thanks to Nick in advance. I roped him into this. I texted him. I was like, nick, you're doing this. I want to have this conversation with you. So thanks, Nick.

No, I'm very glad to be here. And that was a really great remix of. Of Massive Attack just before this. So I was really enjoying that.

Yes, and so was I. All right, so let's start our discussion by just defining what layer one and layer two are for people who don't know, just to make sure we're all on the same page and also why multiple layers are necessary at all.

Sure.

Do you want to kick it off, Nick?

I can start. I can start. So, in virtually every payment system, they function in layers. So when we talk about layers in Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency, it's actually completely in line with how things work in the traditional payment space. So it's possible to send a wire. As a consumer, we have access to fedwire if we want, but for the most part, when you use dollars, you're transacting with credit systems. Or peer to peer payments like Venmo, PayPal, etc. Those would be considered second or even third layers on top of, you know, more fundamental clearing infrastructure where you have batched payments which happen less frequently and they're larger in size and those payments at the bottom of the stack have higher assurances. So. And they kind of settle immediately as opposed to the higher layered payments which settle on a deferred basis. You know, so credit card payments are not final immediately. So if you extend that analogy to cryptocurrency, just to sort of contextualize it a little bit, Bitcoin payments would be considered fast settling, high assurance payments. So those are in my mind kind of utility scale transactions. You can move huge amounts of value, you can have confidence they're going to settle immediately. Layer 2 in my view is more about deferring settlement, getting more scalability through trading off against those settlement assurances, getting faster finality by trading off again against the assurances. So basically opening up the design space and mirroring that layered model that we have in payments itself. And I think that's really how payment systems scale as far as we understand them. I think it's unlikely that you unite everybody on the bottom layer. That would be like if all we ever used for transactions was sending wires to each other. So that's kind of my view of it. Maltim, I don't know if you have a. A different diagnosis.

Yeah, no, I think the way you articulated Nick is a great starting point. You know, the analogy we use often is the Bitcoin blockchain is more akin to fedwire. And what we've seen, you know, a lot of other protocols have moved more quickly to adopt layer twos. I think Ethereum in particular is one that from the very early days had a mindset to sort of start moving towards layer two. And one of the interesting observations is over the last six months. Six months, Pardon? Really, as we've seen the explosion of DEFI and new financial primitives being implemented on top of Ethereum, obviously it's resulted in a lot of challenges in network availability, network throughput and rising price in sending transactions across the network, deploying smart contracts. Now, obviously Bitcoin doesn't function in the same way, but what I think is important to note is, you know, there is an important function here. Whereas Bitcoin's usage grows and the adoption of Bitcoin grows and number of use cases that people are utilizing for Bitcoin grows, we're going to need different layers that have these features that are optimized for the specificity of the use case. And that's something that's talked about maybe a bit more in other protocols that are newer. And I've had an opportunity to learn from watching what's happened in Bitcoin. But I think it's been interesting to observe in many people's minds, we really don't ever think about the amount of bandwidth we're consuming or the cost of connectivity to the core protocol with which we're interacting. And in many ways, the way I think about Bitcoin, for the first time in human history, we have a way to price compute and connectivity. There's a very real price that you have to pay to prioritize transactions in the mempool. In my view, it's actually really an Internet interesting crossover, pardon, between some of the concepts around compute and connectivity and how routing topologies work with money. Right. You're basically implementing a routing topology using transaction fees and money effectively that allow you to sort of create specificity in terms of what layer of the stack you want to operate without compromising the security guarantees of Bitcoin. And again, as Nick described, there are inevitably going to be trade offs. But what we've observed so so far as we look at the proliferation of Bitcoin as an asset across other chains, whether that's in the form of wrapped Bitcoin or other assets, is people really do want to have the security guarantees of Bitcoin as an asset, but they want to have the ability to adapt some of the parameters around how they're utilizing the network and some of the security guarantees of their transactions, particularly lower fee transactions or perhaps being able to deploy smart contracts or more complex sort of logic that maybe isn't as easy to deploy in Bitcoin script. So I think that's very important. The other piece I'll just quickly add that I think is really important since this conference is about developers, developers, developers. To borrow a line from Steve Ballmer, if you remember his famous developers, developers speech is electric Capital puts out this great report and it just came out. It's their state of the developer email ecosystem report. And one of the interesting observations they have is there are a lot more developers and other protocols than there are in Bitcoin because Bitcoin is notoriously hard to develop with. And building a robust grasp of Bitcoin core protocol takes much longer than perhaps some of these other protocols which are scripted in more familiar languages and have different types of logic that's more intuitive to say, like JavaScript developers or other developer Communities that are much larger. Larger. So what I think has also been interesting to observe, and we have this in the legacy financial system. The entire legacy financial system is built on something called cobal, right, which is like this archaic programming language. Like most people who know Cobalt really, really well are probably over the age of 60 because they were designing core banking systems in the 70s. So there's actually this really interesting technological risk that exists in our core financial system and our core financial applications, in that the group of people who know and really understand and are experts in COBOL are all going to be retiring in the next 10 years, right? So it's created this tremendous amount of pressure on the banking sector to replace some of these core banking systems that were built 50, 60 years ago, because there is a real risk of technological obsolescence and not having enough talented people to step into those roles. And I sort of see the same thing happening in crypto, right? There aren't necessarily tens of thousands of of Bitcoin developers out there who can build really robust, highly secure layers on top of Bitcoin. And so it's been really interesting to see what's been happening in the stacks ecosystem. And I'm really excited about the launch of Stacks mainnet because I think one of the really important design space constraints that we have to get through is the fact that the Bitcoin developer community is just inherently much smaller than other developer communities because the level of knowledge required is very specific. Specific. The amount of time it takes to become really proficient in Bitcoin and to understand all of the nuances of why Bitcoin core looks the way it does prior BIPs. The history of BIPs. Why certain things are good ideas or bad ideas takes a long time. Like, I'm seven years in and I still know nothing. Nick, I don't know how you feel about that, but that's where I think Layer twos can be helpful in improving extensibility because you don't necessarily require a bunch of people to be become incredibly proficient in Bitcoin core. Through Layer twos, you can now introduce other programming language that really broaden the developer ecosystem and allow people from other ecosystems to be able to build on top of Bitcoin without necessarily needing to go through that learning curve that you otherwise would. But again, it's just interesting to me that that's also mirrored in legacy finance where like, banks are shitting themselves because all their best Cobalt people are leaving and they don't have anyone to replace them. So it's sort of an interesting parallel at least for me, I think it's been an observation I've recently become much more aware of. Leave it to Meltem to swear in her first answer. I love it. I'm so sorry. No, don't be sorry. I think one of my favorite episodes is when you came on my show and you talked about the Shitcoin waterfall. But anyway, okay, so I did want to just get a few kind of like facts and about the different layers out of the way also because, you know, when you were talking about like the different types of, or the, the, the rate of transactions that we can have on the different layers. So the current throughput on Bitcoin is what it's. I think it's seven transactions a second. And then what would, what, what would a layer two enable? And then same. Why don't we just maybe for comparison talk about Ethereum as well?

Yeah, I don't know about the exact TPS, but Bitcoin does what, 350,000 transactions a day and Ethereum does north of a million. Right. If you compare the base layer to second layers, honestly it's sort of unbounded at the second layer. Like if we have a lightning channel open between us, we can send an arbitrary amount of transfers because we're just sort of keeping track of those between us. That information doesn't need to be be registered to the chain itself. And then you would eventually or periodically have a settlement that goes back down to the base layer. So in some cases, in my view, you win a completely arbitrary amount of scalability, but you are paying for that by changing the security model and the assurances of the transaction. Right.

And I think in the numbers you're using, Nick, Right, yes. There's an arbitrary amount of transactions they can push through the lightning network.

Network.

Really the only constraint at this stage on lightning is channel capacity. Right. So there is a liquidity constraint in terms of how many channels are open, how much liquidity is in those channels. But as like with anything else, the market is going to design solutions that make it profitable for people to open channels and maintain channels. And we're seeing those liquidity solutions coming to market. But again, the core, the reconciliation, back to the core Bitcoin blockchain still happens once every 10 minutes. So that is the natural constraint. At the end of the day, this is true of every layer two protocol. Right. Whether it's in Bitcoin or another blockchain, at the end of the day, the security guarantees only as good as the last block that was mined and the data that was hashed into that block. And the way, you know, Elizabeth Stark Lightning Labs uses this great analogy. Using Bitcoin is like using email and having to download every email that's ever been sent in order to use your email. That's not how email works for Nick and I to exchange messages with one another, we don't need to download the entire history of email ever. That's impractical. So lightning is basically an abstraction that allows you to avoid having to do that, but you are making certain trade offs. And again, there is still an inherent limitation, just as there is in our banking sector, an inherent limitation on the capacity of Fed Wire and how often reconciliation happens there. Right. It's not like you can achieve infinite scalability just because you're doing things higher up in the stack. Ultimately you are dependent on that base protocol and you are bound to the security guarantees of that base protocol. So if your protocol is not immutable, good luck. No amount of layer two or three or whatever you build on top of that is going to have security guarantees that are more robust than your base layer. Which is why I think layer two on Bitcoin to me is so interesting. Because if we look at where value is occurring in the ecosystem today, if we look at the asset people want to own, really Bitcoin exists in a universe of its own. And then it's not a judgment, it's an observation that's supported by evidence.

Yeah. The one thing I would add to that briefly would just be people are willing to accept inferior security models for second layer payments, which is why I happily accept the risk of reversal if I'm a merchant and I'm accepting a credit card payment that's actually more convenient. You don't always want strong finality. Bitcoin at the base layer offers you a very specific flavor of risk and very specific flavor of settlement assurance, which is not necessarily appropriate for every transaction. So you don't really compromise anything by building alternative trade offs and that kind of design design space at higher layers. You're just expanding sort of the nature of the asset. Whether that means transacting on Ethereum or in a Lightning channel, or on liquid or on a, you know, on a merged mine system.

And so you guys both mentioned the Lightning network and Milton briefly described this, but just for people who aren't familiar. So that's a type of payment channel system. And you did talk about how there needs to be money that that's put up front. Can you explain how that works? And then also, you know, one thing I actually feel Like I've never either understood or, or it's just that it, it's not well built at the moment. To me, the incentives for like locking up your capital in a lightning channel in order to enable those payments and then the amount that you'll earn in fees from it, it doesn't like economically make sense to me. So, you know, I don't know how incentivized people would be to do this. That. So can you talk about first how that works, but then also how the incentive system works?

Melton, you want to go first?

Yeah, I. I can kick it off. Yeah. So again, the way I would describe Lightning channels and Lightning Network is basically what we're doing is when I set up a lightning channel with someone. So let's say for example, that I want to set up a lightning channel with Nick, and Nick has a lightning channel with you and Laura. Now, because I'm connected to Nick and Nick's connected to you, I'm connected to you. Right. So what Lightning network basically does is by opening these channels between multiple actors on the network, you can start to route together the fastest, most optimal way to go from point A to point B. And what we're doing when we're creating a channel between me and Nick or Nick and you, is we're collateralizing the channel. Basically what we're attesting to is the fact that we have a certain amount of collateral or capital that we're willing to post to open and maintain liquidity in that channel. And whenever I utilize, it's basically creating a money tube, right? And saying, okay, this much money can go through this too. So hopefully that's a helpful analogy. I always think of like the little money tubes that you use to go to the drive through bank and you put your money in, it gets messed up and it goes to Heller. So that's what I'm doing, but I'm doing it in cyberspace. So there's now money tube between me and Nick. And let's say for example, I collateralize that channel to have a throughput of up to one bitcoin. Basically what that means is every 10 minute or roughly every bitcoin block I can send up to that capacity and it has to reconcile and that money tube has to sort of be recolateralized or cleared in order for it to reach full capacity again. So basically it kind of creates the limit as to how much transaction volume can go through that money tube based on the security guarantees and the collateral pledge that you're making. And so again, with Lightning Network. If there's a lot of one way activity. For example, if someone built a new product and they've only set up a small number of lightning channels to start with, there's going to be capacity constraints because those money tubes get full. And so it takes some time for those to clear in for more transactions to be able to flow through the network. But as there are more and more nodes in the network say that everyone who's at this conference joins Lightning Network and we're all connected to one another, all of a sudden we're able to leverage that network capacity and send much more throughput through the network. So it's sort of an interesting recursive challenge in a payment channel type of structure where you need a lot of money tubes filled with a lot of capacity in order to be able to facilitate money to flow from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible. So that's the way that Lightning works in my mind. It's like a very juvenile description, but I think it's a helpful way to understand it. The other thing I'll add is currently there are certain limitations on Lightning that were placed there because lightning is an experimental technology. And as many people know, I think the ethos of development in Bitcoin in many ways, you know, some people call it slow and some people call it boring. But inherently Bitcoin's much more risk averse than maybe some other protocols that don't have such a large market capitalization or maybe don't have, you know, such a strong commitment to add immutability and security. So there are some natural constraints that are baked into lightning while it is still in sort of its infancy that also limit capacity. And those constraints over time as the, as the network's more battle tested and more channels are established, will hopefully be lifted a bit to facilitate more transactions. But it's sort of like the limit you have on Venmo. I think on Venmo you can send what, like $2,000 a week. There's some sort of limit that's up to applied because it is, to Nick's point, a lower security platform. You can't send billions of dollars of money through Venmo or even as an individual user, you know, you have a natural limit on how much you can send. Likewise right now in Lightning, there are some capacity constraints that have been applied just in order to preserve security and to ensure if things do go wrong, the amount of capital and the amount of bitcoin collateral that's, that's lost is minimized and Then. But can you answer also about the incentives? Because when I, you know, I looked into this quite a while ago, but I remember somebody wrote about their experience holding or having a node on. On lightning. And when I realized the math, I was like, whoa, they earned so little money for all the capital they locked up. And it was something like they wouldn't, you know, break even for like, a really, really long time. And I was kind of like, okay, well then will people be incentivized to do this economically? Yeah, I think the transaction fee story and sort of the economics of lightning is something that's been discussed at great length. I think in order for the economics of maintaining liquidity and lightning channels to be there, usage of the network has to grow. Ultimately, the idea for lightning, the use case I think of, is not really human to human payments, but machine to machine payments. So the idea is, you know, if my phone was communicating with your phone, Laura. We were constantly sending transactions back and forth, there would be a lot more transaction fees that accrue. So if you're earning one satoshi per second every second of the day, that can very quickly become a lucrative activity. Especially if the value of bitcoin, it's much more lucrative when the value of Bitcoin's at $45,000 as opposed to the $10,000 it was at a year ago when everyone was trying to run lightning nodes. So I think it's a function of the network and the amount of throughput going through the lightning network as well. Okay, Yeah, I don't want to get too hung up on this, but it was something I had wondered about before. So one other thing that I wanted to ask about, you know, so obviously we've been talking about bitcoin layer twos, but then also, as you mentioned, we are seeing a lot of bitcoin being moved over to other chains, in particular Ethereum. So when that happens, you know, what do you think? Well, first of all, what are people. Why are people doing that? What are they doing over there? And. Well, let's just cover that and then I'll ask this follow up.

I'd be curious to hear Maltem's answer because I've sort of wondered this myself.

I participate in the Defi ecosystem. I dabble, as you know. So I'm happy to chat about this a bit. So look, when. When it comes to capital markets, in particular crypto capital markets, if we look at market microstructure, so the underlying sort of nature of the market, who the key players are, what the key venues are, the thing that's really fascinating is the majority of volume in the market is Bitcoin to USDT volume or Bitcoin to tether volume and Bitcoin to USD volume. So the asset that people really want to trade in the market that's the most liquid is the bitcoin market. And Bitcoin effectively is a liquidity sink in this ecosystem in the sense that whenever there's a market rally, typically it happens in bitcoin, Bitcoin first, and then it bleeds over into other chains and other assets. And whenever there's a drop, it typically happens in bitcoin first and then bleeds over into other assets. And that's really the nature of the structure of this market in the sense that the majority of the liquidity is still fairly isolated in bitcoin. When I look at bitcoin moving to other chains or migrating to other chains, there's two functions that I think we can ascribe this to. One is this boom in defi are building new capital markets and new market microstructure using Ethereum. And so what we see is people wanting to continue to trade Bitcoin, but wanting a way to do it natively on Ethereum in a way that's compatible with what they call these, these defi money Legos. So that's trend one, but trend two, the reason that's happening is when we talk about what people want as an asset, people want to be allocated to bitcoin. Bitcoin still has 70% market dominance. When it comes to measuring my market cap. I think that's a function of the fact that when people look at the universe of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin really stands in a domain of its own, which I think with Stack's main net launch and being able to earn bitcoin through merge mining, you know, that's something that'll be really attractive, I think, to people who are running infrastructure with the objective of earning yields. Like the prospect of earning bitcoin versus earning, you know, another coin is much more attractive. And so to me, the representation of bitcoin across other chains is something that, that will only continue to proliferate. And I wouldn't be surprised, you know, if other assets start to take that approach. This is really how Cosmos, I think, started. You know, they started with a bitcoin hub before anything else. Why? Because bitcoin has majority of the trading volume market structure is built around Bitcoin. And what people want to trade, what people want to hold is, is Bitcoin that's my view, Nick. I'd be curious to hear what you think, if you agree or disagree.

Yeah, no, I think it's very plausible. We see that the most liquid and actively traded defi assets, one of them is typically wrapped Bitcoin along with ether and stablecoins. I've also heard that people wanted to use wrapped Bitcoin for yield farming purposes so that they could retain exposure to bitcoin while engaging in yield farming. You know, it's interesting to look at the bitcoin migration to Ethereum. It really is very material. We're talking 150,000 units of Bitcoin are present on Ethereum, about $5.8 billion I think at current prices. However, there's many different types of wrapped bitcoin. The largest one is wbtc which is kind of custodial, which is a very different kind of trust model from owning bitcoin on the native chain. If you go down that list you find the more decentralized models like TBDC issued by keep that one is more decentralized, but there's only I believe a couple thousand BTC in that particular, you know, kind of cross chain model. So.

And, and the reason for that is Nick, that more decentralized model requires more collateral to be posted and staked to guarantee the security of the collateral. Right. If you don't have a central counterparty, who's going to create custody the bitcoin that you wrap and provide certain security guarantees. The only way you can provide those security guarantees is to over collateralize and to require people to post an amount of collateral equivalent to the bitcoin position they're creating and to potentially even over collateralize by a high margin. Just given how volatile bitcoin has been historically and how rapidly prices of bitcoin can fluctuate.

Yeah. And so you're right, you have a trade off between decentralization and sort of capital efficiency. There's also another popular way to create Bitcoin flavored risk, although it's not with Bitcoin would be through something like Synthetix where you can use. You can over collateralize another asset and create something that resembles Bitcoin in terms of its financial risk. Again, that bit more decentralized, bit less capital efficient. But it is fascinating to see the demand for bitcoin on third party chains.

I think it's so exciting. I'm like how to the.

Yes, well it's great because you're teasing apart the asset itself and then the protocol for conveying value. And Bitcoin refers to Both things, but they can be totally distinguished. And that's what we're seeing now.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so I was going to ask you, so do you think that. So do you think that using Bitcoin on layer two has a different effect on the asset itself? Like in terms of the price then using bitcoin on a different chain, or are they both accretive to the value? I think the key question there is how that Bitcoin is sort of stored and managed when bitcoin is represented on other chains. That bitcoin is effectively locked up and taken out of circulations in most model. Circulation in most models, pardon, Unless it's synthetic exposure, like Nick was mentioning with synthetics. But in most instances we see today with like WTBTC, TBTC, RenBTC, you're actually collateralizing the underlying, you're securitizing, I should say the underlying bitcoin and making it useful on other chains. So in that instance, you're taking bitcoin out of the market, which inherently has, you know, an impact on the market and that, you know, as demand increases, there's less supply in the market and, you know, everyone's on the Econ 101 graph where you, you have your line for supply, your line for demand. If supply is fixed and demand goes up, then obviously there will be price increase. So that's the effect that I think collateralized bitcoin on other chains has when it comes To Bitcoin on L2, I think Bitcoin moving into the lightning ecosystem, depending on how much of it is used, pardon, to seed liquidity on lightning channels, there could be some effect. But at the end of the day, moving the coin between lightning and bitcoin, like layer, base, layer network, is quite easy. I do it all the time using Blue Wallet, which is a great app that has HD Bitcoin wallet and a lightning bitcoin wallet, it's quite easy to do. So you can add liquidity, remove liquidity from channels fairly easily. And so I think in that instance it doesn't necessarily have the same effect because you're still talking about bitcoin being in circulation and people being able to move assets on the same chain. And so. So I think the effect of bitcoin moving to other chains, right, is certainly far more value creative to the underlying value story around bitcoin. I think the other piece is also a narrative thing, right? I think one thing that would be amazing to see, you know, if the price of bitcoin goes to $200,000, we could effectively See a higher volume of Bitcoin trading activity on DEFI than any other asset, which would be sort of like a crazy thing to conceptualize, but it's not inconsistent. Conceivable. And I think from a narrative perspective that really starts to prove out the point that Nick mentioned where the story here really is around the value of Bitcoin, the asset being separated from the value of the infrastructure that it's used to trade on. It's like, you know, CME and ICE and all these venues that people to trade have different types of functionality and are used in different ways. But the value of ICE isn't the value of the total market cap. All the assets that are traded on on ice. That's preposterous.

There's one other thing to mention, which is if you were moving Bitcoin entirely from the Bitcoin protocol and circulating on eth, I think there's a potential cannibalization effect on the fees that would otherwise be paid to miners to circulate that Bitcoin. Because now those are fees being paid to Ethereum miners. Right. So from a soundness of the protocol perspective, I would say you are actually reducing the fee revenue that's accreting to miners on Bitcoin. Whereas if you're doing L2, which is sort of nearer to Bitcoin like Liquid or Lightning or I would say Block Stack actually has the potential to accrete fees back to Bitcoin miners. You know, that is potentially better for the long term security of the protocol from a security spend perspective. So yeah, I think I might have a slight preference for The Bitcoin adjacent L2 as opposed to porting the asset to third party chains entirely.

So we only have another minute or two before we have to go. But I did want to. I mean, we've only really talked about Lightning as a Bitcoin layer two and I just wanted you to throw out some other of your favorite Bitcoin layer twos for people to check out. Yeah, so I can start. There are a lot of different ways that people are trying to build Bitcoin Layer two. Lightning obviously is focused on payment channels and creating a new type of channel driven topology to facilitate efficient routing from one node to another. There's merge mining protocols. One example is rootstock stacks is going to be merged mined as well, which is super cool. There are a number of instantiations like that. There are sidechains as well. So Liquid is an example of a sidechain. We're a participant in Coinshares in the Liquid Network, and that's really a side chain that's focused on facilitating clearing and settlement. And we're working on a bunch of really interesting new atomic swap settlement protocols built on top of Liquid that allow you to sort of settle funds at the same time, as opposed to having the problem of who goes first, which is still an interesting problem in the OTC space, since Bitcoin settles with finality, but cash doesn't necessarily. So those are some of the ones I've been looking at. I've also been looking at Software Sovereign, which is a project that's focused on bringing defi defi yields to the Bitcoin space by sort of decentralizing a lot of the centralized bitcoin lending platforms and their functionality. So I can pass it to you, Nick. I don't know if I've named all of your favorites as well, though. I've left you with nothing.

This is kind of a referendum on the state of Bitcoin L2 is that you just basically named all the major ones. But I like approach. I think merge mining is very elegant, very cool tool. And so I'm super excited to see what Blockstack does. And honestly, I know Liquid gets a lot of flack, but I think it's totally fine to have alternative security models. There's no deception there. And if as long as you're transparent with the security model, you know, and you have big scalability wins by creating federation, that's fine. So yeah, those are the key ones and I'm obviously monitoring all them close closely too.

All right, great. Well, this has been a super fun discussion. Thank you both so much for coming on the this fireside chat. I started to say on my podcast, anyway, Laura, you're just in podcast mode like you're. You've done it for so long. I know I could do it in my sleep anyway. All right, well everybody enjoy the rest of the Stacks Conference. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Laura.

Thanks. Hello everyone, this is Haider. I'm the Chief marketing officer at OkCoin. I'm really excited to be here. For one, I'm really excited because OkCoin.com is the official exchange to bring STX to US customers for trading and stacking and also STX2O to global customers for trading and stacking. This is a really exciting moment for us today to be partnering with Stack's team for today's session. However, we're going to talk about propelling adoption and exploring the future of cryptos and decentralized apps. So without further ado, let's get into it. So to explore this topic, we're going to cover this discussion in three key sections. Number one, we'll look at the current state of adoption of cryptos and dapps. Then we'll transition into what is missing and let's look at how we can think differently. So we're all enjoying the all time highs of bitcoin price since holiday season. What's interesting however, is if you look at the Glass node data, while the price has gone up, we don't see the active wallet addresses for bitcoin exceeding the levels we saw in 2017. But before we get deeper into the wallet addresses, I want to actually chat about, I want to chat about how the total addressable market, we should see the total addressable market. So what's interesting is there's about 4.6 billion people around the world who have Internet access at their disposal, but about 3.8 billion people actually have a mobile phone with an Internet connection. And you know, about one and a half to 2 billion people are reported to actually have a bank account globally. So there's a really big market out there for us folks in the crypto world. But if we look at the bitcoin wallets holding some value, it's argued that it's about 100 million. So there's a lot more room to grow here and we're going to talk about that. So if we look at number of active daily bitcoin wallets, it shows through coinmetrics data that we are averaging about 1 million daily active wallets. Number of wallets holding 10 million or more is about 4,500. Seems a little low. I think we could go bigger. And then number of wallets holding $1,000 or more is nearing about 6 million. So these are great numbers, but are they big enough? If we look at the DeFi ecosystem in 2020, while we all enjoyed wearing our shorts and attending virtual zoom meetings, we saw the rise of DeFi. So according to Dappradar, Dapp transaction volume surpassed 270 billion with 95% accounted for in the DEFI ecosystem. And then the total value locked. The TVL reached all time highs in 2020 of 13 billion. Overall, 1353 new apps Dapps were submitted to DAP Radar in 2020. So this is really significant growth. But are we moving fast enough? So one way to think about whether we're moving fast enough in the world of crypto and crypto adoption is to draw parallels to the Internet adoption. And according to a report from Deutsche bank, after less than A decade in existence, Internet adoption stood at around 500 million. Now, if you look at the same time frame, blockchain wallets are only used by were used by about 50 million people. So this is a 10 to 1 ratio, which is clearly visible. And now we're seeing new players come in. So it's not just about crypto firms offering great products to crypto users. There are now consumer fintech companies coming into the space Square. Cash app and PayPal both offer a very simple sort of buy and sell function within their apps. If you look at Cash App's Q3 earnings, almost 80% of their revenue actually came from bitcoin, which is just such a fascinatingly big number. So it begs a question, are we in the world of crypto, the crypto firms, are we growing fast enough and what are we missing? And if we're not growing fast enough, are other consumer fintech companies growing faster than the growth that we're seeing in the crypto world? So let's explore that topic at OkCoin. The way we think about this problem is through customer segmentation. So we believe internally that there are really three core segments that we want to optimize for. One is of course, the crypto natives. And crypto natives we have a lot to thank for because these are the folks who have are explorers, have experimented with the early technology and driven most of the adoption. These folks generally have an appetite for complex products. They know how to go in and out of between fiat and crypto worlds, and they can understand complexity really well. And they're not intimidated, typically by long strings of wallet addresses and defi protocols. And then you have the crypto curious. These are folks who perhaps have a little bit of FOMO and have been curious about crypto, have seen the price of bitcoin run up and they want to get in. But for folks in this category, what we notice is that oftentimes they get intimidated by the complexity that crypto exists under right now. And then of course, there's everyone else, which is a much bigger spectrum. So at OkCoin, the way we think about the opportunity of driving the next stage of crypto adoption is we have decided to not just focus on crypto natives and really put an effort in the way we deliver products for the crypto curious and the rest of the world. So what are we missing? This is a debate that we have internally quite a bit. We realize that in the current state, crypto firms and crypto experiences need to be simplified. We need to create easier and easier user experiences. We Also know there's a huge opportunity to do a better job at storytelling. Which goes back to the question of segmentation. Does the nomenclature that is akin to crypto natives useful for the crypto curious or everyone else? Would they even understand the very specific nomenclature we use in our world? And thirdly, looking at distribution channel from the lens of these customer segmentations. So for example, for reaching crypto natives, starting a telegram community or a discord community might be really effective. But to appeal to the crypto curious, perhaps they're not going to come into the telegram channels or discord channels and we need to explore other channels, other partnerships. And then for everyone else in the world, there's a much bigger opportunity. And lastly, this conversation around brand what almost often feels like a missed opportunity in the crypto world is none of us really, truly are investing or building a brand. We're not building a brand like Cash App. We're not audacious with our marketing. Perhaps we don't have the budgets, but perhaps we don't have the Appetite. And at OkCoin we these are some of the few things that we're discussing on how we can accelerate the adoption of crypto. So as you think about the future of OkCoin, what you can expect is we're going to deliver easier user experience, whether it comes to STX listing and stacking or other assets, whether it comes to storytelling and how we appeal to different segments of users, how we explore different distribution channels, and then how do we build a brand? And we're really early at this journey. There's a lot of work ahead of us. So let's talk about better user experience. Even though PayPal was the category creator, what we noticed is Venmo exploded after reducing the number of clicks necessary to complete a transaction. So earlier last year, what we ended up doing is looking at our clicks from creating an account all the way to KYC and deposit. And what our product team started to do was work really hard at minimizing and reducing the number of clicks it took for anyone coming in net new to our exchange and signing up for the account and ultimately getting to a portfolio with a balance, a crypto balance. So if you look at most of the exchanges out there today, we are one of the exchanges with the fewest amount of clicks to go from zero to having a crypto balance. I think currently we perhaps have 29 clicks from registration all the way to having a balance. So we're really proud of this work. This has been a lot of work on our side and we will continue to improve this. And this is one of the key metrics we make ourselves accountable for. So looking into the next year, you can expect us to continue to try and find these opportunities and minimize the amount of steps that it takes. Anyone, whether a crypto native or a crypto curious to hop onto our platform and start trading and start building their portfolio. And then we saw the rise of Defi. But frankly, defi was really, really complex. Even for crypto natives. It was really complex. Who has the time to go start an account in three or four different new exchanges where trust is still not established? You have to go in and out of stable coins and different assets just to participate in these high yield lending pools. So we observed the rise of Defi and we kept asking a question internally. How can we deliver the same product to our customers and into the industry and do it in a way that is really, really simplified? So if you visit okcoin.com earn you'll notice our version of simplifying Defi. Basically, what we do is curate some of the most popular defi lending pools into one single experience where you can now come in and participate in any of these high yield products in a matter of clicks. And we also knew that high gas fees was a big, big issue in the market. Now what we started to do was we started to think about what was the right thing to do for our customers and for the investors. And there's really no easy answer. What we decided to do was that it was important to get rid of this burden of high gas fees. So you can imagine how tough of an internal discussion or justification in it must be for us to completely take on the fees and remove that fees for our customers. So when you come to OkCoin and you participate in any of these protocols, you have no gas fees and right off the bat you're saving about 200, $200 per staking process, which is a huge, huge value. And then of course, with the simplified experience, we have a better chance of welcoming the crypto curious and and everyone else to take a look at these high yield products because their banks don't give them high APRs on their deposits. So how can they get access, especially in a down economy, to these high yield products? So that's our way of simplifying the user experience and doing better storytelling. But we have a lot of work ahead of us. And then again, going back to storytelling, some of the principles that we follow internally on how we do better storytelling is we always think about our messaging in the context of crypto Natives, the crypto curious, and everyone else. But the key framework that we apply when we talk about these things or our products is essentially, number one, focusing on the utility. And when we focus on the utility, we try really, really hard to message the way we want to message to the masses. We don't try and have any crypto speak, we try and remove that as much as possible. We try and remove all the jargon we can so that people are really clear on the utility and it's really easy for anyone to understand. And then another area of opportunity for us, I think all of us in the crypto world is exploring, exploring new distribution channels. So like I said, in the early days of crypto, or even leading up to 2017, 2018, the way we all build our audience on our platform was we started a community, whether it was on Telegram or Discord or otherwise, or on Twitter. And that worked really, really well and it was really effective and it was a low cost effort for attracting crypto natives. But with the rise of Cash app and PayPal, we've realized that we need to work really hard at other distribution channels. Otherwise what may happen is we've built all these great technologies and then the consumer fintech companies will come in and reap the benefits of all the hard work that our developers and engineers have done. So the marketing teams at OkCoin are working really hard on exploring and testing new distribution channels. This means we go after channels that help us attract and appeal to the crypto curious and everyone else in the world. And we try and do that with messaging that really resonates with them. So there's this sentiment in the crypto world or in the tech world that we must only deploy marketing dollars that are trackable. But we think differently at OkCoin about this problem. We think that 60% of our marketing dollars should go into stuff that's trackable. And then in 2021, what you can expect OkCoin to do is spend 40% of our ad dollars in pure awareness and brand building. Stuff that's hard to track, stuff that's really hard to quantify, but we believe it's really important to have a healthy distribution mix so we can ultimately make a dent in the, in the world of crypto adoption. So to wrap all this up, I have a question for everyone attending this presentation. In the world of marketing, one of the most renowned awards in the industry is getting a canned lion. This is something I became familiar with in my early days on Madison Avenue. It's interesting. There is not even one company so far in the crypto world that has won a crypto line. So I have a question for everyone attending and watching this stream. Who do you think will be the first crypto firm to bring home a Cannes Lion? Do you think it'll be ok? Coin, I'd love to hear your answer. Please respond to me at HYderSF and let's engage on this conversation. Thank you for attending and look forward to seeing you more. Hi everyone, this is Haider from OkCoin again. I'd like to share a few points about why today's launch is so exciting for us here. Number one, we are now officially the first exchange to list STX for customers in the United States and also globally. We want to play our part as an exchange to promote STX and ultimately their endeavor of bringing apps and smart, smart contracts to Bitcoin. This is really exciting because not only can customers now trade STX on okcoin, but they can also now stack STX and earn Bitcoin as rewards. This is really interesting because last year we launched our EARN product. Our EARN product allows anyone to come in and out of defi protocols to earn and get exposure to high yield products. STX will be the first non eth based product that anyone can stack and earn Bitcoin on, which is really unique. Ultimately we see a future in Dapps and STX ability to create this future. By listing stx, we allow investors to take that journey and ultimately help these networks that STX is building grow. Lastly, our brand philosophies align really well. We are a Bitcoin first exchange. Just last year we issued out a number of Bitcoin core dev grants. This is with the idea that there is a world that we can create that ultimately is powered by Bitcoin. We hope you can hop over to okcoin.com and start trading STX right away. Thank you. All right folks, so we're going to take a short break, but before you run away, you know, take some time in the chat to let us know how you're feeling, what ideas have been exciting to you, where you still have questions and we'll try and get answers for you. We've got a great program coming up later. As I said earlier, there'll be a number of talks about new apps built on top of stacks and let us know what you're thinking. Might also be a good time to stand up, walk around. You know, this is a virtual conference so we don't get the benefit of the food, we don't get the benefit of the random in person, meetings in the hallways. But we should at least get the benefit of moving our circulatory system so none of us have strokes. I just made that kind of dark, didn't I? But, yeah. So stand up, walk around, get a snack. Enjoy your time. We'll be back in 5, 5, 10 minutes for the program to continue. Sa. It doesn't feel the same without you. Sa. Ra.

Sa. Hello, my name is John. I am part of Floating Point Group. We build capital market systems for cryptocurrency. That means we build settlement systems, trading systems, occasionally a good smile and a good laugh as well. Thank you guys so much for the time. I'm very excited to talk to you guys about staking and stacking as a service. Today, I could not be more excited. I want to give a shout out to Neve and the whole Blockstack team for having us. And I'm very, very, very excited to go into it. The first thing I want to talk about is proof of transfer. But in order to talk about that a little bit, I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about block stack and why it needs proof of transfer in the first place. Now, Blockstack operates as part of a virtual chain. What this kind of means is that the reality is that the block stack creates information and then encodes those and embeds those in bitcoin blocks. That's really important, and it's important to point that out because it means that the chains are inherently linked. That's why it's so powerful, right? Because really what's happening is you're taking external code and you're being able to store that within the bitcoin blockchain. And that means that you can do things like have smart contracts, more complex systems, faster block times, more efficient systems, and generally a better structure. Now, importantly on that, it means that when you start to think about security, you want to find ways to link the two blockchains together in such a way that they can be reliable and consistent. And this is really where proof of transfer comes in. Now, proof of transfer can get a little bit difficult and a little bit complicated at times, so it's probably easiest to take a step back to explain it. Now, consider two different groups. Right? On the left we have Matt the miner, and on the right we have Sarah the stacker. Now, Matt the miner has some bitcoin and he takes that bitcoin and he sends it in to the block stack blockchain, and in return, he receives a little bit of STX or a Little bit of block stack, right? So he maybe sends in five or six bucks and, and he maybe gets six or seven bucks back out on the other side. That bitcoin then goes to Sarah and in return, Sarah's stacking, putting up some of her STX in actually a locked up account. And the cool part about that is you now have a kind of a system of checks and balances between these two, right. Sarah is voting on which chain is actually the right one and getting rewarded for doing that. And Matt the miner is actually doing the computational work of computing the mining. You can kind of think of this like if you took a dollar and then you burn the dollar and you show me that you burned the dollar, you prove to me that you did that, then I'll give you a reward on one side and on the other side, if you actually lock your currency up, then I'll give you a small reward for being a good actor as you kind of participate. Now that economics is super novel and it's super interesting and many of the team can talk about it and explain it at much greater detail than I can. But what's interesting and important to note about this is when you look at the actual economics modeling and kind of dive under the hood a little bit, you can actually see that it's estimated that the interest and the assets that the stacker puts up will gain between 7 to 20% per year. And that's pretty non trivial to talk about, but stacking requires setup and these are kind of a couple of funny logs and different things like that from actually our own and other teams investigations into building this up. Now both Damian Technologies and the Blockstab group done an amazing job of building wallets and mining bots and systems like that to help. But fundamentally speaking, it still takes work to do and it's also a risk, right? You're dealing with assets, you're moving things around, you don't want to make mistakes breaking that down a little bit more granular. There's really three different things that take a lot of effort. First, in order to be able to take advantage of that 70 to 20, you have to be able to mine, you have to build up a mining system, you have to build up low. It's relatively low complexity to do that, but it still takes time and effort to be able to do it. Next, you have to build systems to stack, make sure you're putting up the right amounts at the right intervals, not getting it locked up for too long and making sure that you're staying up to date. With ongoing support maintenance. Lastly is data analytics and trading. As we were talking about earlier. You need both Bitcoin and Block Stack to be able to make these mechanisms work. And so in order to take advantage of that, you need ways to be able to transact and trade between these two cryptocurrencies. And so at minimum, it requires quite a bit of time, quite a bit of effort to settle that up. And that's what we do at Floating Point Group. We make it our effort to build software to enable customers to participate in these types of consensus mechanisms. Right. And Block Stacks 1 is super unique and super interesting because it not only has economic factors at play, but it's a complex system at an actual modeling sense. And that's super interesting and that's super fascinating to us. Taking a look at that from a different angle, it's interesting that you can actually model kind of what are those estimated amounts of appreciation of those increase in Block Stack holdings versus actually what the price of STX is. And that's actually a very interesting model and you can kind of see that changing as the values go up. Now, I should really comment and caveat on this that this is all exploratory. None of this has actually been launched yet and it's still in the early phases. Right. With mainnet going live this afternoon, it's unclear how any of this will work out. But it's really interesting to actually be able to see that there are really these underlying economic factors that influence and drive these movements. Now, none of this would be possible without an amazing team and I wanted to shout out a couple people in particular. My partners, Kevin Van Rafiq and Turi. They come from a host of backgrounds and different experiences, From AWS to MIT to eToro to Graham Capital to Tower. They have a lot of experience in both trading, software, construction and blockchains themselves. There's John. I come from mit, studying computer science, electrical engineering, and I did a lot of work back in the day on photonic mining, but no one really cares about that unless you really do want to go with the speed of light. But lastly, what I want to talk about a little bit is the future, because a lot of this can get nebulous and a lot of it can get lost very quickly. In the beginning, commented that the holy grail is programmable smart contracts on Bitcoin. And that's cool words and that's nice and that sounds fancy and you can hear that from a lot of different perspectives, from Figure to Union Square ventures to many other groups. But what does that mean? What does that really drive at? I think there's two ways to see it. One is on the more ethos side, actually looking at what does this mean for a trustless system, what's the benefits of this? What does it give? But when you look at it from the actual number side, it's pretty striking. The entire blockchain and cryptocurrency EcoSystem is about 15,000 people right now. And we're powering decentralized finance, creating novel innovations, trading billions a day, and the entire ecosystem is thriving. One bank, say Fidelity, employs 50,000 people itself. That's the power of that holy grail. That's the power is that 15,000 people working with some experience in finance, but sometimes not that much, is being able to actually build systems that are complex and achieving amazing things that it takes 50,000 people at one bank to do. And that's why it's so inspiring to be in the system. That's why it's so inspiring for us to be able to do the things that we do. And that's why we're so excited to be a part. Because for us, it's not a matter of how do you take on one ecosystem or build it in one way. It's how do you build things that give people access to governance, give people access to modernizing that, and give people access to these underlying protocols. That's what we're doing. That's what we believe in. That's why we're so excited about it. And so I wanted to say thank you so much to the entire blockstack team. Thank you so much to both the host of this event and Putting it On. We could not be more excited about the future. Congratulations on the launch and by Golly, let's make 2021 the year for cryptocurrencies. Thanks, guys. From now, I will take questions. Okay, I think there is one good question. Is it wasteful to have double the work consensus work for Block Stack as well as consensus work for Bitcoin? So that's actually a good question. It's important to note, right, that when we were talking in the beginning, there's two different consensus mechanisms going on, right? Bitcoin as a blockchain is progressing itself, and Block Stack as well as progressing itself. Right. Block Stack notably, is storing the data within the bitcoin blocks, but it's operating as a separate chain, and that's why they're both typically considered layer one in some cases. The interesting comment on this is the reason why you need two different validators or you need two different systems of validation is Bitcoin is kind of working as a settlement layer, right? And Maneve, I think, explained this really well, where you can have these other items and you can have these items on the chain that are verified and go through very quickly. But at the end of the day, you want to settle to a more reliable and stable Bitcoin. And so in a lot of ways, you want these two different mechanisms. You want one kind of going a little bit faster, right? You want it going a little bit more able to actually do more things, more customizable, things like that. But you want it to settle back to bitcoin at the end of the day to be able to take advantage of that reliability and take advantage of that consistency. There is another question on is floating Point group designed more for institutional investors and stackers or individuals as well? You have an amazing question more on the institutional investors and stackers. This is mostly because regulation in the space is non trivial. There are things, obviously I think everyone is very aware of and so we very much focus on that side. I am more than happy to give resources in terms of individuals, so feel free to reach out. And I'm happy to, you know, recommend some colleagues or recommend different people in the space that you can maybe talk to, but we ourselves are focused on institutional investors. There's another question on the difficulty of stacking. I want to actually pull back for two seconds and actually go through that just a little bit more in detail and talk about that. So the economics of stacking are non trivial, right? If we actually pull back to this, I think it shows it really well. So consider Matt, right? When Matt's sending in bitcoin, it is profitable for him to send in bitcoin up to the point that he's not getting as much stacks out and he's putting bitcoin in, right? If he can send in 5 bitcoin and get 6. If he can send in $5 worth of bitcoin and get $6 worth of STX, it is worth it for him to repeatedly do that and repeatedly, repeatedly do that. And the reason this is so critical is that it means that opportunity in theory should be arbitraged out very quickly, right? Every $5 he sends in should be $6 coming out of $5 coming out of STX, right? Maybe insert a 5 or 10% kind of, you know, maybe split between those two. Because Matt wants to, in theory, provide a living for himself. And so the comment is that on the mining side, you have to play with some interesting Economics and game theory. Right. And on the other side for the actual stackers, okay, that's like pretty straightforward and trivial, right? If you own stx, it makes a lot of sense to be doing this, right? Like everyone can participate in this governance. One of the most amazing things about block stack is the decentralized nature of actually the way that they're doing that stacking and lockup. And so anyone can actually take STX and throw it in and then receive the bitcoin rewards. But again, you also have to play some games. You have to take that bitcoin and be able to sell it out at a time. You have to consider, okay, what are other ways that you could have made interest on the stx? Or what are other ways that you could have gotten benefits from your stx? And so again, it's kind of a game theory problem, right? How much Bitcoin are you sending in? How much STX do you want to come out? At what rates can you do that? And then on the other side, at what point do you want to keep giving STX in and at what point.

Do you want to get bitcoin out?

And that's hard. And so that's even kind of beyond. That's kind of a lot in this third category about data analytics and trading. The first two slides actually in the first two discussions around mining and stacking and each one of their own independent systems. And again, I have to give a lot of credence and please, please, please, more than happy to give resources at any time for this, but effectively a lot of the mining and stacking infrastructure has been built by the Blockstack team. What do I do? There's another question on what do I do if my bank is not listed? Is this an error or is there a way around this? So this is a great question mostly because I don't quite know where it's listed. There are many lists. I think it depends on the individual list, but I think if maybe I take this in a different way. Right. I think there's two different banks, maybe on an exchange that you're trying to deposit to other things like that. I think you probably have to contact the individuals for that. There's a question from Tony. It's the first name that we've gotten. Very excited. Tony, it is great to meet you, my friend. Can you give us your quick thoughts on photonics and optical proof of work? Oh, I absolutely can. So there's a really cool guy named Michael Grobsky working on an amazing project called PowEx, which is proof of optical work effectively. It's this comment where instead of doing bitcoin mining with machines or like, you know, with electronics, we can actually do with photonics and optics. It's like super cool. It's super awesome. The unfortunate reality, right, is that in the end state, everyone just starts using optical processors, right? Bitcoin mining is like very much an orange race. Can I build a faster computer or can you? And so the end state of this is like, let's just use lights and compute everything and do everything. And so anyways, the reason why that's concerning is because, okay, well, everyone's going to end up with that end state. The interesting thoughts on like optical proof of work and things like that are that it differs how much you have to pay on the miners versus how much you have to pay to upkeep them effectively. To build an optical miner takes a lot of money, but to actually run it takes very little. And so arguably the electrical consumption of like, you know, this would go down and, you know, bitcoin's consuming more in like New Zealand or things like that. That's obviously very costly. So anyways, it's a very interesting idea. There's like some interesting economics at play. Note also, you can't do nonlinear work in optical regimes. It's very difficult to do and very challenging. And so it's got a long way to go. You have to kind of see a hard work. Some various projects like Gran and stuff like that kind of took a look at it. They haven't really been able to successfully do it. But anyways, that's kind of my thoughts on that. Guys, I wanted to say the last one, thank you a million about all this. You guys are amazing in more ways than one. Have a great rest of the day and feel free to reach out at any time at Floating group on Twitter. Thanks, guys.

Hey, everyone.

Hey, Jupiter. Hey, Melody.

Hey.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. Yeah, so thanks for doing the agree to do this panel. Very excited to see everyone again. We're all in different places now and I really kick off this year with some really your insights on investment and where this year is going. So super excited to kick it off. So maybe before we. Yeah. So before we start, can you guys give a little bit of intro of who you are, where you work at and what are you doing these days?

Sure. Jupiter, you want to go ahead first? Okay, sure. Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Melody. Thanks for having us. And I'm Jubila from Hashi Capital. I'm responsible for research and reinvestment in this blockchain investment firm. So we've been established for two years, invested almost 50 projects in the blockchain space in the past two years. So it's quite a. Very excited to join the blood stack community and to welcome this new trend of blockchain application mass adoption in the future. I'm very excited to see the stack 2.0 mainnet be launched in the near future and it will be a very milestone for the whole blockchain spaces. Thank you.

All right, great. Thank you.

Yeah. And hi, I'm Kelvin Koh. I'm one of the co founders of the Sun Group which is a boutique advisory firm as well as an investment firm. On the advisory side, we help crypto startups with fundraising with M and A as well as with consulting. And on the investment side we currently have two funds. The first is a liquid strategy while the second is a defi focused venture strategy. So I'm the CIO for the asset management business and prior to that I worked at a traditional hedge fund called Indus Capital, which is based out of New York, around $7 billion. I was a partner there and prior to that I worked for 18 years at Goldman Sachs where I was part of the research team. Eventually became a director of research in Asia as well as a partner of the firm. And so today we're so very excited to be here to talk about crypto and the new economy.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Very impressive backgrounds, guys. Thanks. And my name is Melody. I am partner and co founder together with Calvin for the Spartan Group and I mostly focus on advisory side of our business. So Blocksack is really where us, Barton and Hashke, we started to collaborate. We both invest in the firm and as well as helping the previous Asia side of the fundraising. So we know the project and the team for a very long time. So very excited to see the stacks 2.0 launch finally this year and I think the timing has been fantastic. Blockstack is building solutions on building a layer, not a layer two, but really anchoring security and applications on the bitcoin blockchain. And 2020 has really been a fantastic year for Bitcoin to gain its mainstream awareness and adoption. So actually. So maybe Calvin, I'm curious your view. So you came into this space from a very traditional background and bitcoin at that time, I guess when we started the company three years ago really hasn't gotten any mainstream attention. So do you think this year's change in BTC's perception market and this runaway sort of performance in the last in the past six months has been something you're predicting. Did it come earlier? And also do you think it's going to continue? Yeah.

So when we got into the space actually more than three years ago now, we were quite excited about everything that was being built right in the blockchain crypto space. And obviously bitcoin is a big part of all of that activity, given its history, given its use case. And we were very convinced that it was only a matter of time before the technology itself gathered more broad based adoption. And eventually institutions, financial institutions will recognize the of these assets and what they bring to the sort of broad economy. And that was the underpinnings of what got us excited about the industry as well as the conviction to start up Spartan. And I think that view or that theory has proven to be correct. And we're now starting to see that broader based mainstream adoption. We have people like obviously BlackRock, people like DBS bank in Singapore and a number of funds as well as well known fund managers who are now coming into the space and endorsing assets. And even companies are now starting to think about how to diversify their treasury assets out of the US dollar and allocate some portion of that into BTC and other crypto assets. So all of that development has obviously been very exciting and something that we sort of foresaw would come even three years ago. And I would say that all of these developments have obviously accelerated the interest in the asset class and driven the price of bitcoin. And that started a few months ago. But we see in 2021, you know, that's going to get a momentum and we do see significant upside for the price of bitcoin and other crypto assets.