Tokenization is not hard, though, I will say, right, so it's
not about the technology to be ready. It is about the money piece,
I would say. And so the thing about tokenization that you really want to
have happen is you want it to be an atomic swap with money so that
you know the thing trade, so that clearing equal settlement. This is the
thing about Web three clearing equal settlement. You have to wait for swift.
You don't have to you know, do all of this settle at the end
of the day or T plus two or whatever. It is like you we
have atomic swaps at the layer one layer. By the way, on algorithms
in the layer one atomic swaps. This content is brought to you by Uphold,
which is a great crypto platform that I've been using since twenty eighteen.
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to learn more about Uphold, please visit the link in the description. Welcome
to the Thinking Crypto Podcasts. You're home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With
me today is Stacy Warden, who's the CEO of the Algorand Foundation. Stacy,
great to have you on. Oh thanks, I'm so happy to be
here, Stacy. Where's your Algorand hat? Or do I know those falls
behind you are hats or what? Like? What's up with that? It's
like pillows. And when I had pillows years ago, they didn't have the
Algorand, so I will have to add one. But i am an Algo
token holder. So I've followed algran for years. I've interviewed Sean and a
bunch of other folks, you know, algrand and I'm excited to speak with
you to learn about all the latest developments. Okay, swag department of the
Algorand Foundation. If you are listening, get this man a pillow an al
Graham Pillow. Stacey. Before we talk all things al Grah, tell us
about yourself, where you're from, and what's your professional background. So I
am originally was born in New York City and I live in Washington, d
C. Now, and I am an economist by training, and I moved
and I've always worked in kind of developing countries and emerging markets and with small
enterprises and businesses, and I moved more and more from I guess my trajectory
is econ to finance to crypto. I'm getting kind of better all the time,
more cutting edge all the time as I go through my professional career,
I guess, yeah. And you know that fascinates me because we've seen quite
a few folks in trad FI leave the trad file industry and come work in
crypto. So tell us about that journey. What was your first encounter with
Bigcoy and what was your aha moment? And when did you say, you
know what, I want to go work in this industry. Yeah. So,
I'm have always been very interested in access to capital, and I have
always thought that access to capital means payments as a kind of a bedrock concept.
And I am familiar with working in Africa and also in some places in
Latin America where you know, somebody might have to spend a day walking just
to pay their electricity bill. And then back to their village because they can't
get a bank account. And so I was able very early in my career
to make a distinction between having a bank account and having access to finance.
And of course some of the countries that I worked in were really bleeding edge.
So Kenya, you know, had this safari calm. I always think
sab pay now, but their paces are there and pace offering was very much
ahead of kind of traditional finance back in the United States, and it was
so interesting to see, Wow, these developing countries are really kind of leap
frogging payments, payments that don't require you to have a bank account, born
out of necessity. And the other thing that Ampesa did was they allowed you
to make payments from a not a smartphone, like a regular like a flip
phone, and the idea and you know, sitting next to it at dinner,
I will never forget this. The Central Bank governor of the Central Bank
of Kenya, and he's explained to me how he can pay his workers back
in his farm in the villages he grew up in without ever leaving Kenya,
and it gets to them instantly. And I remember this is you know,
many years ago now, but thinking that's unbelievable, Like that's unbelievable, and
so I always sort of had my eye open for like, how is this
technology going to scale? How is it going to be, how's it going
to become globally widespread? And like if Kenya can do it, like why
can't this be everywhere else? Right? Sure? And so I but I
didn't have crypto on the brain then. And I was separately doing some training
with the National Press Institute to train the press in the United States about financial
markets topics. This was right after the global financial crisis, and it was
such a good gig because I would hire an expert. So it's like,
what's happening with GSE reform, the reform of Fanning and Freddy, Oh,
I'll hire I'll just get this like GSSE expert to come and do a lecture
this week, blah blah blah blah. And I had all these things,
and so they requested bitcoin. This is in twenty thirteen. I didn't have
a bitcoin expert, like, I hadn't nobody to call, like who's going
to give this lecture? But I was curious about it myself. And it
had been around a couple of years then, you know, for me,
it had been around a year maybe. So I decided to figure out what
it is. And I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what
it is. And I worked at a think tank, so it was possible
in a think tank to like shut your office door and like bury yourself in
a hole for four days, you know, And so I did that and
I kind of came out in love. I was like, this is unbelievable.
And I thought that bitcoin could do things at scale that it can't really
do at scale. And but then the more you learn about it, and
then this very young, you know, ittallic booterin comes in and he says,
oh, you know, money can be programmable. I was like,
oh, money can be programmable. That's unbelievable. Oh and you can build
anything you want on the top of this. Oh you know, Okay,
tough to look back after that, right, tough to look back. But
professionally I got a lot of fud and like what is this? And you
know, I worked for Mike Milkin at the time. Yeah, And of
course Mike Milkin is not interested in having his name all over the pay front
page of the newspaper, you know, millions of people lost money in fake
Internet money. Mike Milkin Institute is, you know, so he was super
super skeptical about me spending a lot of things going on there as well.
But we did a we did a I I wrote an article for the Milkan
Institute Review and it was downloaded like a gazillion times, and so the editor
of the review is like, Wow, people seem really interested in this topic.
And then this is in twenty thirteen, we had a global conference and
the panel there was this panel called like Things that will Blow your Mind.
That was the most downloaded panel of that conference. My bitcoin panel was the
second most downloaded panel of that conference. So it was like bitcoin and crypto.
And so then they started thinking, oh, you know, maybe there's
some interest in this, maybe this is a topic that we should be on
top of. And so then I started getting a bit more money and a
bit more you know, kind of time allotment that I could pay attention to
this, and then I just kept doing it. But it has got to
be. It started out as kind of a side hustle, and then I
started getting more and more intrint more and more, and then it's moving so
fast, right, And then DeFi summer came and you cannot do You cannot
do it halfway. You're either in or you're not in, and so I
got in. Wow. No, there's an interesting dynamic happening with, for
example, Jamie Diamond, who's the face of the banking industry, and comments
he's made despite what JP Morgan is actually doing. We've seen they've had a
bigcoin wealth fund, testing tokenization, testing different blockchains. I'd even invest it
in Consensus, which was working on etherorem Yet you have these statements that will
come from the likes of Jamie Diamond. And do you think it's because,
like you talked about payments and the movement of money, they're getting disrupted and
that's why they're having the knee jerk reaction. We don't like this. It's
going to take our lunch eventually, or we're gonna have to capitulate. What
are your thoughts on that? You know, I worked for Jamie Diamond for
you know, eight years, and I got to tell you they hate it
when he does stuff like that, you know, because they're like these bankers,
they are hustling, they're trying to do. Jpie Morgan Onyx is a
very good business. I mean they are, they're very very important player,
and I mean it's a permission chain, but they're they're really pushing the envelope
of stuff. And so I do know that it's there's some kind sometimes a
disconnect between what you know, we call it the front office says, versus
the business that's really going on. I don't think I don't know. Of
course, you know, Jamie down does not call me and like get my
views on things. But I don't think it's that. I think he as
a person doesn't really like he doesn't get it, Like he thinks this is
like ridiculous, and you're probably never going to persuade him that it's not ridiculous.
But that doesn't mean that he stands in the way of his business lines
pursuing things to make money. You know, he is gonna he will stand
in front of that if it really really if he thinks that it's going to
put the balance sheet of the bank at risk, right, or if it's
going to run them a foul of regulators in some way, right, or
something else. But he he is and he's allowed to speak, and he's
a very successful guy, so he's used to opining about what he thinks.
But I don't think that he thinks institutionally that this is a big existential threat
that he has to worry about. And I don't think that he issues directives
internally to make people stop working on it. Is that again is my is
my guess about what's going on there. Yeah, And we've seen that from
Warren Buffett and Rest in Peace, Charlie Munger. You know, guys like
similar to Jamie dimand they have been so uber successful in what they're doing with
tratfi assets that the concept of these things bitcoin or blockchains and so forth that
doesn't seem appealing. And I don't know, they just have a knee jerk
reaction like I don't talk to me about that. I don't care about it.
Yeah. But also, I mean, governments make money, but you
know, you grew up. If somebody my age are, especially if you're
like twenty thirty years older than I am, money comes from this is not
something that you in your head separate. I mean, I have a friend,
he's a very smart guy, very smart guy, and he's like,
I want you to explain this to me, and I want to exp and.
He was dropping his daughter off at college. They were spending the weekend
with me, so he got up early and he's like, okay, but
I don't understand. The thing is I just don't understand, like I don't
understand it, like it's money, money is I like, and I said,
if you would stop for a second and take a breath and stop saying
you don't understand it, and just listen to what I'm telling you about how
it works, like just open your mind a little, just open your But
the bedrock idea that money does not come from a government is very hard for
somebody to get over, you know, like how could that be? You
know, it's so it's it's it's like but a lot of things are like
that, right, like you can't. I mean, I remember videos when
videos were coming across like a web page and like you have, I'm like,
how does a video come on a web page? Web pages are static?
Like what is that? Like? How how come there's things moving on
what is obviously a static piece of technology? Like I remember speaking that to
myself. You know, but you're just got to get over that, you
know, you're kind of yeah, it's it's fascinating because there's, like you
said, there's this human element and change in itself is hard for human beings,
right, and you bring up very disruptive technology, and it's you have
people who just like they have this knee jerk reaction or what is this?
I hate it? Or I don't know what to feel about it, or
it scares me, so I'm not going to even bother to educate myself about
it. So it's just funny you get these mix of emotions. You know.
It's so with that said, you know, there's the s curve adoption,
right and Algoran obviously's building a lot of great technologies and doing a lot
of things. You know, when do you think we will hit that mass
adoption? Is it like ten years from now? It kind of like when
the internet from dial up to broadband and then you had tons of users come
on board because it was less friction, it was easy to use, it
was faster. And right now there's a lot of great wallets and technologies and
use cases being built that are going to be applied in a real world.
You know, what's your out This is a hard question, but what's your
outlook? You know, as far as timeline, when anybody can do something
with this and they don't even have to think about it. Yeah, I
mean timeline is, as you've intimated, a little tricky. But I do
think that we as an industry have some wood to chop, for sure.
I mean some of the stuff is just absolutely you know, existential, like
you can't. It's about self sovereignty. So self sovereignty comes with responsibility that
people don't really want. And you're talking about mass adoption, you know,
memorizing a twenty five word pneumonic or keeping it or or being not being able
to blame somebody if some bridge gets hacked, like the stuff that goes with
the territory. People do not understand that, you know. They don't like
maybe too much owned by the government. But I mean I actually see this
a little bit myself from the Foundation. They don't want people in the our
ecosystem. They don't want the Foundation doing too much, and the Foundation tries
to do too much. They don't like it when stuff goes wrong. They
want somebody to call, they want somebody to DM and you know, crypto
in its purest form, there's nobody to call, right And so I think
you have and of course the whole regulatory overlay also needs to I think everybody
now has come to a convergence of views where it's not so much about the
cipher punks and over you know, being completely stateless, right, but it
is much more about, Okay, how can we fit into a regulatory environment
that makes sense? And so I think the industry also was very surprised in
the same way that the normals were surprised at all the stuff that went wrong
in twenty two, twenty twenty one, twenty two, Right, we were
also caught caught by surprise, right, And so we all, I think
think now that there needs to be sensible regulation around this space, and it's
going to take stuff like that, how to make the customer onboarding experience easier,
right, like open your wallet and attach your wallet to like what No,
Like, I'm not going to I'm not going to do that. I
mean we were, you know, I mean it's it's it's it's hard.
And then the regulatory and then the kind of mass adoption comes because people you
know are doing it and you're feeling a little bit left behind. And then
also you have to see, like, what is the point of this,
How can it make me make my life easier? In addition to just being
an asset to hold, you know, number go up kind of not enough
for this to be really a widespread mainstream use case. And you know,
these guys did not help us, I will say, right like, they
really set it back. People are still head down and building. But this,
I mean my aunt for example, I hate to pick on my aunt,
and plus everybody always says my aunt, but this literally was my aunt.
She said, are you still in crypto? I thought they arrested that
guy, you know, like you know, I mean that stuff just does
not help, right, So do I have a time frame? No,
But I mean when I look at it as I just feel like we're like
going marching forward and it's inevitable. I mean, it's just too good of
a technology and Algorham blockchain in particular is going to be at the forefront of
this widespread adoption because we are just it's built in a way that can handle
these use cases at scale. Right, we are all about scale. If
you can do a really clever pilot, like who cares, Nobody cares about
your pilot, Nobody cares if you can't scale that thing. You know,
that's that's cute. And you know last year or two years ago you probably
got to get a little price bump out of something like that little vaporware announcement.
Tried and true method in crypto and great, but like, that's not
how you that's not how you survive for the next five years, ten years,
that's not how you succeed in the next one. That's not who's going
to be around in the next five and ten years, right, right,
So let's talk a bit about the algraand blockchain. You gave a bit of
a preview there. Tell us about what makes it unique from other blockchains for
folks who don't know. Obviously I know, but maybe some of my listeners,
but I'm thinking about the newbie who's coming in and like, what's Algorand
yeah, So Algrin is a second generation blockchain. It's very fast, it
has a tremendous transaction through boots at just ten thousand transactions per second. It
is a very light environmental footprint, and it has very low fees. So
this idea of gas fees doesn't really exist. It's point zero zero one algo
to do a transaction, and all of that comes from a consensus mechanism that
our founder, Sylvia McAuley, he's an MIT professor he won the Touring Award
in Computer Science, and he not for nothing, by the way, invented
a couple of primitives that are very important for in cryptography. So he did
not have the idea of attaching money to any of this, but a couple
of primitives that are very important in the crypto ecosystem. More broadly, zero
knowledge proofs, verifiable men functions, and you know, in a blockchain,
the juice all comes from the consensus mechanism, and he invented a very elegant
consensus mechanism, and that consensus mechanism it's called the Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanism.
Problem with those is typically is that they don't scale very well because everybody
has to come to an agreement, even if there's some The idea is that
everybody can come to an agreement, even if there's some bad actors. The
point is the everybody, though, can't be like a million everybody's They can't
be like a million nodes because it just doesn't work. It can't scale and
be fast if they all have to come to an agreement. So we have
this very clever idea, which is that you could have a lot of nodes
and sample among them in sort of a thousand person committees, a thousand you
know, kind of account committees, and those committees could come to an agreement,
and that way you could be very fast and scale. But you could
also have a decentralized approach. So it's like decentralized because you're picking for many
of them, and it's scalable because you're only picking a few to come to
this. And this approach means that when you make a transaction and the committee
kind of decides immediately, you are instantly final. You're instantly final. And
so as you know, this is maybe a little technical for some of some
in the audience perhaps, but blockchains typically they gather up transactions like in the
ether, and then they kind of fight to append the transactions, and if
there's a tie, it's possible for a number of minutes or even up to
an hour, two versions of the blockchain can exist, not forever, but
just for a little And these little softworks happen a lot, and then when
the winner is chosen, the other transactions kind of fall away, and so
you end up with one, you know, kind of very very pristine list
of transactions. Well, again, that works in most cases. But if
you're in a traditional financial thing, and imagine a stable coin which for even
a nanosecond exists on two different states of the world, even for a minute,
that can't exist. And so we built a chain. We you know,
the Royal We built a chain, and the most important thing about it
is that these transactions are final. But the fact that their final instantly comes
out of the things that I told you about before, this consensus mechanism that
we have. That consensus mechanism also drives the scalability and the low cost and
the kind of it's not a heavy it's not a heavy protocol. Other blockchains
can be very fast, but they're very heavy they require enterprise grade software.
We're a very light protocol, you know. So for example, when we
started, you could run a node with a Raspberry pot. Now you need
a more performance laptop, high en laptop because we're a very performant chain now.
But if I can just you know, just to summarize the picture of
it, is that the quality of our consensus mechanism enables us to make some
claims that other blockchains can't make. Yeah. Absolutely, And can you tell
us a bit about some of the use cases you're targeting. Is it like
tokenization and DeFi whatever it may be, and maybe highlights of some of the
things that our projects are being built. Hi, everyone part in the interruption.
I'm Tony Edward, the founder and host of the Thinking Crypto podcast.
I have a you favor to ask you. If you haven't subscribed as yet
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to you. Thank you for your support, and I'll let you get back
to the content. Yeah, I mean targeting is a little bit of a
strong word to use for what a foundation in a blockchain does. So we
don't get up in the morning, and you know, I mean it's not
like our community really listens to us, you know. Anyway, they do
what they want our community, right. Our job is to make it so
that anybody that wants to build anything has a good shot at it. So
we are much more of an enabler than we are a director of things,
you know. I think of us as like planet Algorth. Plan an Algorth
is not as big as planet Ethereum, but it is an awesome planet.
Like the airs clean, the lakes are good, the trains run really fast,
they run on time. You know when I don't know if I can
do an instant finality analogy, but you know when you go someplace, you're
instantly there, like it's an awesome planet. It's like the best planet.
And the job of the Foundation is to make sure that everybody that's building there
has could access to electricity and nicely paved roads and you know all of that.
So we are we are about embracing all of our builders and helping them
succeed, right, that's our job. However, our builders tend to pick
us because they want to build things at scale, and it's very interesting.
Now we make it super easy because in the beginning especially, it was not
a pleasant blockchain to build on until our CTO, John Woods came and he
was like, yeah, this technology is unbelievable, but nobody can use it.
It's a pain in the act us And he, you know, on
his very first agendity he's been working he and his team and his our head
of product Alessandro have been working very hard on this to bring a good developer
experience with an algo kit developer kind of environment and a fully Python environment build
together with our friends at maker x. But in the beginning, my point
is, in the beginning this thing was not fun to build on, not
fun, but still we got a lot of builders because those builders who looked
around and they said, you know, on other chains sort of your success
is your demise because when you start getting the scale, the blockchain kind of
can't handle it. And the Algoram blockchain said, look, you know,
you've got to be very efficient with your code and you have to let it
on. Made it in kind of like unfun in certain ways, but always
able to help you. You know, you can scale what you need to
what you need to do on algorand and so we tend to select self select,
I would say, companies that are trying to work on real world problems
at scale. Sure. Now, there have been reports over the years that
different countries have been testing Central Bank Digital currency CBDCs and algrad I know a
lot of these things are under NDAs and so forth, But what can you
tell us maybe number of countries or anybody who's looking to go into production soon.
What can you tell us there? Yeah, so I will say that
when I heard this rumor two when I came these are so I am in
charge, in charge of I'm associated with the public chain. You know that
Algorand findation is about the public chain. And if you're going to build a
central bank digital currency, you are not going to build that on a public
chain. So I can talk myself blue telling people this, It is not
about Algorand or Ethereum or whatever. No central bank is going to put their
national currency on a public blockchain. It's not going to happen. And so,
however, I heard that there were things happening at now they call themselves
now algran Technologies, with some side chains that they might have been talking to
some central banks about. I will say though that since I have been here,
I have not heard of any of that happening. So I think maybe
in the beginning, first couple of years, I'm a couple of years late,
first couple of years, I think they did have a number of different
conversations under NDAs. But as far as I know, and I do not
know everything, but as far as I know, nothing is really going on
over there in that regard. Now, there's a lot of stuff going on,
you know, with this incubator that the Bank Italia is having, but
that's not CBD stuff that's kind of atomic swaps for bond settlements on chain,
and there are a number of other things, but that's very much now in
a kind of an incubator process. So I know that's not a very satisfactory
answer, but I don't think there's anything happening. I don't think anything really
did happen that got too far. Nothing has happened since I've been here that
I know about, and certainly nothing has happened that the Foundation has ever been
involved with, because it's just not it's like it's just not going to happen.
It's not going to happen, right, No great point that they're not
going to put it on a public blockchain. If it is, it's going
to be some private side chain, right, Yeah, that absolutely makes sense.
Now, there was news of an investment in HASAPEI from saying that,
right, tell us that and how you're going to be working together. Oh
so saw pay is a you know, this is one that this is the
word that kept coming to my mind when I was trying to think of mpay
said earlier in the program. Esapey is a mobile payments platform that works now
in Afghanistan. So the founders in Afghani gentleman and he worked with a guy
who is I think he's a co founder actually is worked in Mercy Corps for
a long time on payments and fintech type issues. They founded this company together
and they are now doing all of the in it's like mobile money payment and
if you don't and if you have a if you don't have a smartphone,
you get a little card with a QR code and the the you can hold
up your card and then the merchant will scan it and then it sends you
a note on your flip phone to take money out of your account. And
so they are now doing I think they have banked eighty five percent of the
Afghan unbanked Afghanis. They have done one point two million I think electricity bill
payments since they've kind of gotten going. And they all of the record keeping
is done on the Algorand blockchain for this, for all of these payments,
and they have them. All of the NGOs use these guys. I mean,
they are just like everywhere in Afghanistan. So we made a half a
million dollar investment in them, and we are so excited about these guys.
Now here's a thing about this though. Okay, So anyway, so the
reason that they use Algoran that they like is that because they have customers,
especially these NGOs and especially because of the country that they work in. These
NGOs want to know where this money is going. And esabe, I mean,
they're a small organizations. They don't want to be like doing audits and
going through the books and you know, having to like take time and do
all that stuff. With these NGOs, what they do is they say,
look on the blockchain, it's right here. You can see every transaction,
everything that happened, everything that was made. It's all very here. Have
added to your audit. It's very easy, and they it saves them so
much time and it adds so much credibility to them because they are in a
region where credibility is very hard to come by, right, and so it's
a very impactful and very very meaningful partnership. So however, okay, so
would they want to expand? Okay, where do they want to expand?
They want to expand like Syria, refugee camps, like all of these,
like really hard hard Libya, I think is another one that they're looking at.
You look at their roadmap and you think, okay, all right.
You know, they're like picking the absolute hardest possible thing that you can possibly
do. And so I love them. I love them for that. I
love them for that. They are really. Yeah, they've got they've got
a pipeline of like the their next four countries are like the four hardest countries
you can possibly do business with, and they're ready to go in twenty twenty
four, and we're ready to We're right there with them. In fact,
our head of our head of impact, Matt Keller, sent me a note
just a couple of days ago saying, hey, I want to start up.
We're starting up a working group for with a bunch of NGOs and UN
agencies and you know, representatives working in these like four crazy ass countries.
And I was like, okay, go for knock yourself out. Good luck.
Guys, hard stuff hard hard, you know, but they're they're they're
yeah, those guys are unbelievable. You should have them on. You should
have them on. I mean they really, I mean, this is where
the rubber hits the road on this kind of stuff. They're very successful and
they have a very hard job ahead of them. Yeah, I would love
an introduction, get them on, that'd be great. Yeah. Now,
obviously you guys got a lot going on. Are there any Web three projects
you want to highlight or any partners you want to highlight that you know,
maybe you're doing something interesting or cool. Yeah. You know, you get
me in a lot of trouble by asking me questions like this, of course,
because you know the podcast is only an hour long, right, and
so you know, then I get like, d MS, how come you
don't you know? No, no, no. So so I have a
couple of my usual suspects, but maybe i'll highlight a couple that I don't
talk about as much. But you know, one is an organization called lab
Trace. They are I read a very scary article about I think it was
in the Boston Globe that about bring them in. I don't know which I
don't think. I think it was Brigham and Women's, but I apologize bringing
Women's if it was not you. But they were doctoring images to show differences
in like tumor size. On the research end. This is a very very
famous research hospital, and a couple of people were accused allegedly of doctoring these
images. Well, it turns out that when you do an MRI and you
are trying to do a trial of a drug, you do an MRI beforehand,
and you do an MRI after a couple of months to see if the
drug has worked on this like tumor. Say, but I am not a
medical professional, so this might not be like one hundred percent right what I'm
about to say, But the tumor will shrink immediately, typically with almost any
medication, because it's like getting in there. The question is, though,
does it last or does it immediately grow back big again. So the way
to fudge how well your medication is doing is if you take the MRI immediately
afterwards, where you know you get a pretty good reading, but claim that
the reading was a couple of months afterwards. So the guys at lab Trace
were like, I kind of feel like a blockchain, but the time stamp
on it might be a good way to approach this thing. So they went
to UH and of course they need the very best blockchain to do this,
so they are on Algorm. So they go they went to Siemens, who's
like the world's biggest maker of these MRI machines, and it is built into
the machine, so there's no way that anybody can do anything. This MRI
comes out, the Semens machine stamps it, they send it to the Algorim
blockchain. It's there, not the MRI. Don't anybody worry, like not
like the whole world cannot read your MRI. But the time stamp of this
thing is right there. And so this to me really shows a way of
the blockchain being able to like it is it is, you know, as
Michael Casey kind of famously said in his first book, it's the truth machine,
right like, this is the truth of what happened. This is where
the MRI took place, and nobody can dispute that now, right. So,
so those kinds of things were pretty excited. And Agrotoken is another another
company that I don't spend as much time. I haven't talked about very much
recently, but this is a commodities back token that enables a farmer to start
getting access to the liquidity around the harvest before the harvest takes place. And
so if they're so, if you you know, plant your seeds in May
and your harvest is in October. Why can't you? But you need to
invest in you know, irrigation system, you know ahead of time. You
don't want to wait till October because then it's winter and then like you don't
use your irrigation system as much anymore. So you can you can sell these
tokens now and be able to monetize your future. Now, of course you
can do that by selling futures, right, but then you have to take
a guess on the future price and you have to have well functioning market that
far out in advance. And this is just a much simpler way to to
to do that. Now, a couple that I talk about all the time,
which I will mention again travel X. I mean these guys, do
you know about travel X? Yeah? Yeah, So these guys they created
a market where one does not exist, secondary market for airline sales. Unbelievable,
unbelievable company. And we get this like huge spike in transaction every time
when they sign a new airline. So they signed their second airline in December,
and our transaction volume just like kind of went through the roof. So
we are really we're excited about those guys. We have we have one hundred
and sixty six million transactions this month. That is ahead of Near Ethereum,
Avalanche, Solana, everybody like we are cruising on transactions. World Chess also
giving us a lot of transactions. Aura the oor coin of course, giving
us a lot of transactions. Can't can't forget our or coin, which is
cool actually the aor coin, because it is a proof of it. You
have to you have to juice these oranges, and to do that you get
these coins. But it's like a kind of a proof of work mechanism on
a pure proof of stake blockchain. So I do think that's a very clever,
very clever thing that I that I that I think is cool. And
we have a lot in prop tech, a couple of different companies working in
prop tech so that you can you can invest in very fine amounts of alternative
assets, so control alt music, a note music, not registries, but
music catalogs, rental properties. This is all as you know, real world
asset tokenization, right, and we offer that in a number of different areas.
Slice those babies up, make a more liquid market, make it so
that households can invest in them, and you know, lofty AI. You
get paid daily because this is Web three, you have to wait till the
end of the month. They get your rental you know income. You get
your rental income every every day, and you you are as a part of
a dow. They have these dows, these uh you know, government organization's
property by property by property, and they're all like, I mean, they
all got together. Lofty just posted this on social like a week ago.
They want, they got together and like, didn't this woman had just I
think she just had a baby, or her pet had just died, or
something had happened to this woman, And so they all voted not to raise
this woman's rent because she had she was going through some financial hardship, right,
So like, yeah, it's very it's very power to the people's stuff,
you know. It's cool. Yeah, I mean it's exciting. And
you know what you were mentioning about the uh, the farmers and the harvest
and tokenizing that I was just thinking about, you know, Larry Fink,
you know recently saying tokenization is the future of finance and you're gonna have commodities
and securities and all types of assets tokenized on the blockchain. And as you
mentioned, fractionalization true glob global markets, secondary markets. What is your outlook
for tokenization and are you expecting that to ramp up now that the institutions are
paying attention and realize this is the future one hundred percent what it? Tokenization
is not hard, though, I will say, right, so, it's
not about the technology being ready. It is about the money piece, I
would say. And so you the thing about tokenization that you really want to
have happen is you want it to be an atomic swap with money, so
that you know the thing trad so that clearing equal settlement. This is the
thing about Web three clearing equal settlement. You have to wait for swift.
You don't have to you know, do all of this settle at the end
of the day or t plus two or whatever it is, like you we
have atomic swaps at the layer one layer. By the way, on algorithm,
it's in the layer one atomic swaps, which if you are geeky,
you care about that, and you're quite impressed by that, and weh but
it's the money piece that needs to kind of be solved. Now, if
there were central bank digital currencies, that money piece and that atomic swap could
happen no problem at all if there are stable coins, though there's always going
to be this kind of question about at the time of your swap, is
that stable coin is going to be worth the fiat that it's peg to or
not. There will always be a little bit of that question, so it's
a little trickier to do. So we uh, but we're pretty excited about
the idea of digital money digital euro, not a not a stable coin,
but digital money on the blockchain with Quantos, for example, has a digital
euro regulated by the Dutch Central mic on Algoran and so they can do you
know, atomic swaps to their hearts content with tokenized assets. And yeah,
we're we are expecting some big news out of that space for sure. For
sure, I want to talk about regulations, and I know algorand the algo
token has been mentioned in different lawsuits against the industry, like coin based bit
tricks and so forth, But you're not I not Yeah, yeah, I
mean obviously I'll go and a bunch of other tokens, right, it's not
just al Go, But we're in a battle right now with regulator, even
Chair Gencer who's once talked really highly of algorand, but now it seems to
be attacking the industry in a certain manner. What are your thoughts on that
and could we see crypto regulations this year? Well, my first thought is
like, why are we Why did we have to start our name with an
A, because we're always like listed first on these kinds of things. It's
like, you know, you know, the worst, honestly was when a
Tara Luna blew up because it was an algorithmic stable coin. I mean,
I must have spent six months explaining that Algorand was not an algorithmic stable coin.
You know, this was like a little bit of bud that I was
not expecting to have to have to kind of fight against. But yeah,
we do not appreciate the fact that, you know, we're just like walking
down the sidewalk mining your own business and we get shot with a stray bullet
and some kind of like gang street fight that not between us, has nothing
really to do with us, and like a stray bullet comes over and kind
of hits us. It's like, not not something that I appreciate. Honestly,
we you know, we do not believe that we're security and anyway,
we don't issue these tokens in the United States anyway, we never have,
so we stay we are a very we're Singapore based company. We stay very
clear of the US regulatory perimeter. But we think we're a utility token,
not a not a security and I think that that's pretty clear if you look
at kind of the stuff that we're involved in. Do I think we will
have a sensible regulation in twenty twenty four. Don't get too mad at me,
but no, I do not think so. I do not think not
in the United States. I think what will happen is that jurisdictions that are
really thinking hard about this will continue to make progress. In the UAE,
for example, in Japan they just passed stayble coin legislation. You know,
MICA in Europe has made some very important advances all of this stuff. Now.
I will say though, that there are probably some very good second mover
advantages to maybe waiting it out a little bit, and then if you do,
you can kind of see what's working other places. So what I'm hoping
is that that process is actually taking place behind closed doors, that there is
a little bit of a wait and let's see and let's cherry pick from the
best ideas. And I don't know if that's happening. But I hope that
it is happening. But do I really if I had tod, like if
you put a gun to my temple and said, are we going to sen
sensible crypto legislation? Now? One thing I will say, though, is
I think we will. I think the chances of having legislation are better than
the chances of having regulation. If I had to guess, Yeah, So
I think, And I think some of these court cases have made it clear
that the legislation is not clean enough for regulators to make decisions, and so
some legislative authority needs to take place. And I hope that does happen,
but I don't, you know, And you know, it goes back to
what we were talking about earlier in the interview of some of tradify and just
the way the world has worked. This technology is so disruptive we're seeing almost
an attack against it. And do you think there's a bit of that happening
where Look, the regulators are part of the government, obviously, and they're
going to support the Treasury and support the FED, and support the big bangs
that are working with them, and some of this is you know, we're
going to slow you guys down as much as possible until we're able to catch
up to it, because it almost seems that way. Maybe it isn't,
but it just seems like that from optically, from looking from the outside.
You know, I don't know. I mean, I do not know what
goes on in their heads necessarily at all. But I think it's just really
really hard. I think it's just really hard. Like is this money?
Is this an asset? Is this a commodity? Like, it's just hard
to think about it. It's a shape shifter crypto, right, Like the
thing is, it's the beauty of it is that it can be so many
different things. It's so it's so fit for purpose, right, and so
it's really hard. And you know the nineteen thirty three Act and the nineteen
thirty four Act, like nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty four, like well
didn't even have electronic exchanges at the time, right, Like it's hard,
it's really hard. And I also think that people are embarrassed by what happened,
you know, with everything starting with Tara lunat a three AC to of
course the FTX. Right, so you get a little PTSD if you're at
least if I was a regulator, I'd be a little I have a little
bit of PTSD about it. And I would also think, like if I
do a really good job and I and I do this, and I go
out on a limb and it works great, I'm gonna get a pat on
the back or whatever. But if I go out on a limb on this
and I do something wrong, you know, I'm gonna get my name on
the front page of the paper. It's going to be terrible for me.
I'll lose my job. So there's just like people are. They're risk averse,
they're regulators. I think they're like selling put options. They get a
little bit of upside when things go right, but if things go wrong,
they they have tremendous downside. And it's a risk profile that they that you
know, it's hard to it's hard to embrace. I would say, you
know, more than I think there's like some conspiracy going on to like keep
the industry down. I think I'm not. I'm not really a big conspiracy
person. I'm much more it's like hard and it's reputationally risky. With that
said, though, we see that there have been some victories in court.
Gray scale of course winning and that opened up the big one ETF floodgates.
What are your thoughts on the big one ETFs getting launch and how you know
things have been going in the impact on the industry. Yeah, I mean,
I think it's tremendously positive. Right. The people of prime investment years
now, they listen to what their registered and investment advisors tell them to do.
They're ri as, that's what they do. They have their money in
investment accounts and they tell and they listen to their ri as tell them how
to manage that money. And iri A ri i as buy ETFs. That's
what they do. They buy ETFs. And now of the nine trillion dollars
of money available of this type, they get maybe put a tiny little allocation
to a digital acid ETF. It's all you need, you know, and
you can see. And so I think structurally, I think it's a very
good idea and I think structurally it it is bodes well for the industry and
it bodes well for for retirement diversification, which is of course very important.
Right. So it's a win, it's a win win, And now you're
you're hearing more talk about in ethereum ETF. I don't know if that will
happen. And they're also this gets a bit technical, but they're not designed
quite optimally yet, and so I think the next generation of ETFs will require
a little bit more regular, a little more regulatory opening, I would say,
but we'll be a little bit even easier for investment managers to kind of
embrace and put together. But yeah, you know, well I'm waiting for
the Algoran ETF to go live. I know, I know, I mean
exactly exactly as Eth kicks off the all coins and yeah, yeah, yeah,
we have plenty to do from now until then. Anyway, that's so
we're we we have a lot to do and we're doing it for sure.
So actually, before we hit the wrap up questions, what's on your twenty
twenty four rold map I you talk a lot about what you guys will work
on, but anything else you want to highlight? Yeah, you know,
look, there are things and if you are a member of our community,
you are well aware of all of this stuff that we're doing. So first
and the most important thing is that we are paying for consensus, So we
are going to incentivize you for maintaining this network. You play your role in
maintaining the security of this network. By staking algos in a node, you
will be compensated for that. This is a game changer for us, and
this is going to go live Q two, Q three this year, so
everybody needs to strap in for that. I will want to participate in that
hundred percent. I mean one hundred percent. This is like you. I
love Sylvia McCauley dearly for the purest approach that he took, especially when it
just didn't because we're so lightweight, you know, good citizen should. But
but now we are going to start compensating you if you uphold this network.
Very important game changing kind of thing. Second, we have we have relay
nodes now that ferret these messages back and forth among the participation nodes. And
we are going to move from that kind of hub and spoke type model to
a peer to peer model, so like a gossip net model, which will
be more decentralized. And of course, like these things go together, right,
the more you can incentivize these nodes, the more you have in your
gossip network, and the more quickly they can talk to each other, and
the more the centralized you get. So these are these are like the big
things. But can I will you give me like two or three more minutes
to talk about like the totally non sexy, hard work stuff that we're doing.
Yeah, because I know like this stuff. Okay, So this is
stuff that you know, it's a pain in the ass, pain in the
next sorry for everybody to do. It matters so much though, right,
And we are just like banging our head against a wall trying to get this
stuff done with our community, and it would say requires a big ask from
our developers. But we had these cartographers. They're like the greatest, like
some of the best cryptographers in the world. We lost them all. Amazon
poached them all. So now they're working on like deep cryptography at Amazon.
But anyway, they standards would come along and they would be like, yeah,
not good enough for us. Right. So for example, like the
passphrase is twenty four words. Everywhere it's twenty four wards except in ALAGRAMZ twenty
five words, okay, because one more word is like makes it more secure,
Okay, stuff like this. In other blockchains, you have a passphrase,
a pneumonic and under that mnemonic you can have a number of accounts,
as you know, multiple accounts, and under each account you could have multiple
addresses. This is not a system that we have in Algorth. The system
in Algoran is like we conflate this idea of an address in an account,
and so this means that we can't participate in a lot of things easily.
So for example, somebody that has an account with a bunch of ethereum addresses
could add an Algorand address if we had the same twenty four words and we
had the same kind of account structure. But they don't do that. And
so we have been we as a community have been very inward looking, and
we work, we build things for each other, but we have got to
start building things according to the standards that everybody else is using so that we
can be you know that we can play across all this in a multi chairing
world, right. And this stuff is hard because making these changes is hard.
So if you're like Paraola, for example, and you're going to move
to this like more account based system, well then you've got to offer kind
of the transact the address based and the account based at the same time.
How are you going to do your ux. It's like this stuff is like
really tricky in the big getting, but it has to be. It has
to be done. The other thing that we have to do is tie real
world identity to unchained digital identity, right, and if you don't do that,
you can't get payments business. So we have people that we have payment
company that want to use algorand they're like, of course we want to use
you. Don't you have instant finality? You're fast, you do ten thousand
trans ask for a second. But like, you can't. I can't hive
off. I can't KYC at an account level. I can. I can
just get your addresses. Well, by the way, don't your addresses have
balances on them? I can't. My regulator is not going to let me
make a payment and reveal your balance to whoever you make a payment to,
Like, that's not a thing. I can't do that. I can't get
that done. So we need to be able to wrap in a privacy wrapper.
We have to be able to ky see you by attaching real world identity
to on Chan identity. And I got to be able to put you in
a little privacy bubble for my regulator so that I am not revealing information about
payments. And you know, you guys get that done, and then we
want to use algram but until we and I've got a list tony of like
five of these things that are just like not sexy, not fun. But
this is the job of the algor fination to fix these things. We are
we are in the excuse elimination business is what we're in, really, not
so much the picking sector's business. Right, it's hard to build on algorm
boom, Let's make it easy to build on a grand We can't talk to
other things, boom, Let's figure out why it is that we can't talk
to other things like this. This is the this is the kind of thing
we don't we're not listed on exchanges. We got to make sure we're listed
on every exchange like this is the kind of stuff that we spend our time
really really really focused on. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense, And I'm
excited for these updates, and I know it's a working progress. Things don't
happen overnight. It takes time. And it sounds like Amazon's still some of
here developers still some cryptographers are some braining at cryptographers. But our CTO is
pretty and our chief architect they or they are not without knowledge of cryptography.
So we're we're still in good shape, and of course we still have Solio,
you know, of course, right, but they were like safety over
everything, and oh, you know, we don't like it how they do
over there at Ethereum. It's like, well, you know, that's great,
except that you know, the Ethereum is setting the standard for the thing,
and so we have to kind of so there's a little bit there was
a little bit of that going going on. You know, I'm businesslike,
and I would say they were. The foundation was not very business like when
I when I got here, and so there was a lot of like purest
let's go slow, Let's make sure you know the cryptography, you know all
of this, and it's like hmmm, no, like, we gotta we
got to play. We got a plan in the world, and we got
to you know, people got to find plan an algorithm, and we gotta
start, you know, taking taking over the universe, you know what I
mean? Yeah, for sure, all right. I got some wrap up
questions here for you over time. First is, if you could create your
own metaverse, what would the theme be Kindness? If you want to come
into my metaverse, you better be kind, don't be loving. Accusations of
people like on social media don't you know, pick fights in front of a
million people. Be nice to people, Assume that they have good intent.
Assume maybe you don't have the full story of what's going on, and just
lead lead with being nice. It would be a very kind kind place out
you kick you right out if you if you started being meet people. I
got some rapid fire questions. Favorite food spot, a copy time that is
on Greek, and a copy down. I will stand by that as the
vet by my my my Desert Island food. Yeah. Favorite musician or band.
Favorite musician Bob Dylan and favorite band Yola Tengo. Favorite movie, Uh,
Laurence of Arabia. I think all time, But you know there's others
I like, like Rushmore, I like, I like a lot of movies,
but maybe I think Laurence of Arabia. I haven't seen that movie in
a while. It's a good movie. It holds up. Yeah. Favorite
book, favorite book. I guess anything by Faulkner for sure, But recently
if I go to like books that I start buying and I start giving my
friends, most recently it'd be James McBride books, Deacon King Kong, Good
Lord Bird, Great Books. If I go back a little bit further.
I was giving everybody the Martian Gentleman in Moscow. I was a little bit
further back. City of Thieves, The Wonder Boys. These are books that
i've just like, I've loved and but more recently read these These James McBride
books are so good. He's such a good writer. They're funny, they're
incredibly well written. That's awesome. And now I'll have to check some of
those out. When you're not working at the foundation, what are you doing
for fun as a hobby. You're past that. I am losing at tennis.
I'm getting I'm getting my ass kicked at tennis. That's That's what I'm
doing. Yeah, have my dogs and but yeah, mostly I'm failing at
my I'm failing to get better at tennis. Uh well, Stacey, absolute
pleasure of chatting with you. I am looking forward to the new updates around
al Grad and certainly I'll have to talk to you guys offline about the staking
component and earning off of that. Look you I'll hook you up, you
know, I'll awesome, Okay, al Grad Foundation. Get this man a
pillow, Get this man a pillow. Awesome. Thank you, Stacy,
Thank you so much, Johnny, I appreciate you. Things don't