So Amazon and Alva Labs have a great partnership because we help them with emerging
crypto companies or developers that need compute power and storage for Amazon Web Services.
Amazon Web Services has a large swath of existing users, obviously one of the
largest cloud service providers, and they introduce us to traditional enterprises that I want
to deploy blockchain enable solutions. So it's a very synergistic relationship. This content
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link in the description. Welcome to the Thinking Crypto podcast. With me Today
is John wu who's the president of Able Labs. John, it's great to
have you on. Hey, it's great to be here. I love your
work. Thank you John, and John. I'm a big fan of Avalanche.
I'm an Avax tokenholder in full disclosure, so I'm excited to be speaking
with you today and learn about all the great things you guys are doing at
able Labs. Let's start with your background, though. Where are you from
and what's your professional background? Sure born and raised in the New York area.
I think something interesting about me growing up is well, I was one
of those kids that loved sports but was equally happy just you know, being
the first kid on the block to buy a laptop or a PC and do
very basic coding in my house. So I can go either way, and
I love both sides, you know. Literally, I loved playing sports.
I love the fact that it was community based and teamwork, but I loved
also innovation and coding, you know, in basic. Back then, I
was a very base It's a basic language, but it's also called basic and
professionally, you know, I was an economics major in college and I went
to Wall Street. I was at various hedge funds and private equity firms,
and I was a tech investor. So that was my first career studying emerging
trends in technology, and one thing that was pretty good was is identifying the
future technologies earlier than hopefully most people and getting in ahead of the wave,
similar to the way I saw the crypto and bitcoin world happening in the two
thousand and tens. And what was your first encounter with bigcoin and what was
your AHA moment? I think there were two aha moments. I first learned
about it roughly twenty eleven and twelve this time period, and I went to
a whole bunch of meetups. It was really bitcoin only back then, and
frankly, I wasn't convinced. There were a very interesting cast of characters at
all of these meetups that wasn't necessarily who I was. But and I frankly
did not know, you know, having a traditional finance background and learning how
to value companies and exploring the tam of a new technology, I couldn't figure
it out for bitcoin. Frankly, I couldn't do a DCF on it basically.
And then it was not until like twenty fourteen, after monk Ox,
when the thing crashed again. Bitcoin crashed again. I revisited, and at
that point I realized, you know what, stop looking at this like a
company, think about it as a commodity or maybe even a currency, and
then just do a supply and demand analysis like someone would do for commodities.
And back then there were like only fifteen million bitcoin in existence, so the
mining, you know, hasn't gone to where it is today. And I
did the incremental supply times the price at the time, and I also was
counting addresses on the demand side and making minimal assumptions for dollars per address,
and was so clear to me that with the most minimal assumptions, incremental demand
was far greater than the incremental supply being unearthed on a given any given day.
So I knew that this thing, whatever it is, is going higher.
That's when I really first got into it in twenty fourteen, and then
the next aha moment was actually twenty seventeen. You're an old hat, so
you probably remember the Ico boom, crypto kiddies breaking down, you know,
ethereum. So I had done my share of you know, as an investor,
IPOs fundraises and et cetera, et cetera. When I saw how eloquent
and how quick and how cost effective a global crowd fund could be in an
ico raise, I was those are the first time I realized what I can
actually use this technology for a use case. And I was then on a
mission. Basically my first gig in the space as an operator was at a
place called shares Post. We were trying to tokenize private securities and then we
mentioned crypto kiddies. But what I realized while we're doing even though we made
a regulatory compliant with the ATS and all that stuff and do a change of
membership of the ATS, working with SEC and FINRA, the problem was the
world wasn't ready for it, and the technology wasn't ready for it. And
I had known doctor Amon Gudnseer who was trying to solve a lot of the
technology scaling issues at the time. You know, he and his PHT students
at Cornell. I did my undergrad at Cornell, so we had known each
other for some time. And I realized that from a business perspective, the
technology in the space needed to get better. And he actually created an unbelievable
consensus protocol Avalanche that does scale, that is fast, and that is still
secure. The Trilemma if you will, And that's when I joined, and
it was about four plus years ago. Now ten of us in a room,
and I'm happy to report were a successful company at AVA Labs with over
two hundred and forty and working on changing the way the world works. And
what makes the Avalanche blockchain different from others? There are so many blockchains out
there right and many who are competing against each other. But what makes Avalanche
stand out? So let's separate. AVA Labs is the team and it's a
software services company helping others. Is built on top of Avalanche. Av A
Lanch was created by the aim and Good Seer or doctor aim and Goodcier or
good as I affectionately call him. But Avalanche today is a permissionless layer one
open source network or blockchain and that has its own it's a nonprofit governance board,
et cetera, et cetera. So what different av A Lanche? First,
before I talk about AVA Labs. What difference av A Lanche frankly,
very simply is it's damn fast and it's very scalable in plain English. So
the speed of it, because of the consensus protocol that GUN developed is basically
allows it to basically have instant finality, so settlement and payment happens at the
same time. Super valuable in so many different aspects. And then the architecture
of the chain is such that it scales what I call in a heart horizontal
manner. So we call it subnets, but think of them as networks on
top of other networks the Avalanche network. Using the aval Lanche consensus, you
can create your own custom blockchain. You can make it permissionless, or you
make it private if you need kycaml if it's a traditional finance related But they
are very interoperable with all the sub nets or networks with each other, and
they are interoperable with the main chain of Avalanche. I think those two distinct
characteristics really is what makes aval Lanche the blockchain phenomena and distinct. Now you
mentioned it's very scalable, and there was news that it was a proposal recently
to help the transactions per second reach one hundred thousand. Tell us about that
initiative. Wow, so you're up to speed on everything. This is part
of our ROMP and pipeline. Super excited for what we call of ricks and
between ris and what we call hyper stk. It will allow sub nets to
transact at one hundred thousand tps. So rix is a paralyzation if you think
about it. It eliminates a lot of valueless transactions, so it allows transactions
to go through in a better way. Hyper SDK allows you to create your
own virtual you know, a better virtual machine, a faster virtual machine.
The two of them in combo with a third thing called Firewood, which is
a storage a solution will allow these subnets to really really be fast. Like
I said, one hundred thousand tps. No, I'm glad you got to
that because that's going to happen very very shortly. Yeah, that's exciting.
And I don't know if there's any other blockchains that are on that level which
can maintain up time. But that caveat of I know, given what has
happened last night. But yes, totally, but not so just so people
will know there was a blockchain out there that went down last night, not
avalanched, to be clear. Yeah, and I'm sure many you'll see the
headlines. But tell us about the abax token and the staking capabilities there.
Okay, so first I want to take a step back because when people talk
about staking, it's almost like they only treat it as a financial services component.
It's actually when you're staking, you're validating, you're running infrastructure, whether
it's hardware or software or both. And what it really is is it's kind
of like in the old days in the Internet world and ISP. You're helping
secure and you're helping run the existing technology. So I want to make that
point clear because when people think about staking these days, all they think about
is the financial component of it. But what's staking a noval Lanche does.
That's interesting is that not not only are you staking to secure the Avalanche network,
but all of these call it subnets, subnets or app chains or you
know, network chains, whatever you want to call it. You can set
your own requirements for staking, your own gas fees, it's your own execution
environment. You can make it composable to the way your desire based on your
application. So what's interesting here again is you're not just helping out Avalanche making
Avalanche more secure, but when you're a developer on one of these app chains,
you can set your own staking for your own subnet rules. That is,
so it's a very flexible system and I think it benefits everyone. Yeah,
that's really great. And tell us a bit about the use cases that
you're targeting. And I know some of this is ongoing, right, every
business, every blockchain and so forth, is looking for additional adoption and used
to expand their footprints. But what are the core use cases that you're targeting.
Maybe it's working with institutions or whatever it may be. So earlier we
talked about the unique aspects of Avalanche, we didn't get to the team at
AVA Labs, the software services team that tries to build an avalanche. I
think one of the unique characteristics of AVA Labs is really the people. What
I mean by that is you have world class visionary technologists like Good and a
whole bunch of great technologists from Cornell University, and then you have people like
me who've built out the business side of it with you close to thirty years
of commercial experience, both investing in technology companies as well as working in technology
companies, and AVA labs mission has always been more than just create an unbelievable
crypto native ecosystem. That is very very important to us. But the other
mission, in my own personal mission, is to create use cases for traditional
Web two companies or Track five. So when you say, what is going
on on what will happen at Ava laps or Avalanche. There's two components to
it. On the crypt native side, the ecosystem is flourishing. We're talking
about last year in twenty twenty three, we had one hundred percent growth in
addresses. Right now, I think there are and this combines both, but
there are about, you know somewhere like twenty plus live subnets. There are
another eighty plus in the test net environment that will go live this year.
Developers now and even Elliptic Capital I think is the name of the company that
writes you know about developer counts. I've noted that aval developers on Avalanche I've
grown five hundred percent in the last three or four years. So a lot
of development happening, a lot of DAPs coming on, a lot of developers
coming on, and it's a thriving ecosystem that's on the crypto native side.
Then on the call it crossover side, Web two to Web three side or
tratified to DeFi side. So many exciting things happening. I think there are
three areas, if I can summarize it. One in the very short term,
there are a lot of triple A gaming type companies and gaming tooling like
Merit Circle creating subnets on Avalanche. These are companies that have raised these triple
A publishers, have raised seventy million plus to develop a game, and they're
going to launch a healthy component of that on a sub net, their own
sub net in Avalanche. So I think on that side, some point this
year you're going to see a big hit in one of these games, because
these are publishers who have had experienced with big hits and traditional and that'll be
driving a lot of usage into Avalanche. Another area we already talked about traditional
finance. Most recently we announced the Sandbox effort with JP Morgan Apollo in the
Sandbox of Montory Authoriti Singapore. So just to summarize that one, that is
really cool actually because what it's doing is it's creating interoperability between private chains and
permissionless chains, so and then tokenizing alternative assets. In this case it's the
helock loans on Figure Providence and making it interoperable. And I think Christy moy
from Apollo really said it well. And because you're doing it this way,
you're taking three thousand processes and reducing it to one automated one while you save
twenty percent on fees doing this, And what that ultimately means is rias will
be able to configure their portfolio in a way that's far more flexible and easy
and increase alternative assets like helocks or funds and provide access to individuals to things
that they never could have got access to if they want to invest in that.
So that's happening in the trap. Fine, There'll be many more similar
types of announcements coming down soon. And third, I think this is the
year and I wish I could name the names, but working some big brands
where people will no longer think about NFTs just as digital cartoons. You're going
to see functionality, whether it's five digital. In fact, we learn,
you know, the wallet with the block of right blockchain solution is actually a
great CRM tool. It is a way for brands to stay engaged with their
consumers. Literally, one brand that as soon as that doll leaves Walmart shelves,
I lose connection with that user. So having a five digital aspect to
it allows them to continue to engage and it saves them are in sales and
marketing. They don't have to reacquire that customer through Google or Facebook for advertising,
so instead they can manage to experience themselves. So those are three areas
in what I call the crossover side that are super exciting to me. You
know, talk a bit about that customer experience. So are you envisioning that.
Let's say walk into Walmart and there's a certain toy that I want to
get for my six year old. Maybe on that toy there's a QR code
that says can get additional experiences or unlock certain features with an NFT scan this
QR code to learn how is that kind of the start of the journey.
And then let's say it's running on Avalanche and absolutely you've nailed it. That'll
be the equivalent of like, Okay, you bought a Barbie doll and then
all of a sudden, the Barbie movie comes out and you are able to
engage with that you know user and say, hey, go to you know,
AMC or Regal or whatever cinema, and then once they're there, you
can create in movie experience and gamify the whole thing and make the whole experience
of owning that Barbie doll better. But at the same time you have their
information and You're able to customize solutions based on the age and age appropriate and
also interest appropriate type of experiences for that person. It's a win win for
everyone. And I'm assuming it would be the retailer that I go to their
app, but Avalanche is running in the back of that app powering the NFTs,
but also can be with all the retailers as well. Correct, there's
many ways to do this. In fact, you know, as that landscape
plays itself out, there is kind of a give take right now, whether
if it's the movie theaters app in this example, or whether it is Mattel
who does you know Barbie and they have the engagement or they have a partnership
and work together, so that is still playing itself out. But regardless of
a lab provides technology solutions on aval Lanche, so we will customize it to
anyway they want. Now, I did want to ask you about the JP
Morgan item that you brought up where they're testing the tokensation of assets an aval
lunch. You know, is that in the piloting testing phase and you know
what else can you share there as far as production, I don't know if
you can hi everyone part in the interruption. I'm Tony Edward, the founder
and host of the Thinking Crypto podcast. I have a YOUG favor to ask
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It allows me to bring great quality content to you. Thank you for your
support, and I'll let you get back to the content. It is in
the sandbox. Montor artis zero, so it is in the testing phase.
There are other things that we're doing with all of those constituents, more assets
and more players coming into that call it ecosystem, but that's in progress,
so it's slowly happening. In fact, it's very similar to how we have
created another functionality which is also a test net environment called Spruce. So Spruce
test net has Wellington, t Row and wisdom Tree and they are tokenizing assets.
And it's also other partnerships like with Ave, with uh ANAMM like Trader
Joe. So it provides defil like experience in an institutionally compliant way. So
it you know the it's a private chain only in the sense of ky C,
a m L and accreditation as opposed to private in the traditional technical sense.
Now speaking of toganization, and obviously this is a big use case.
Do you think moving forward, this is the killer use case for blockchains in
addition to other things, Right, there's other use cases, but this is
the major one where you know, you got black Rock Larry Fink talking about
this, and they're looking to put stocks, bonds, real estate on it
and create fractionalization and global markets and secondary markets and more DeFi capabilities. Yes,
and yes and yes. So let me start. Is this the killer
use case? You know, tokenization is not just tokenized existing assets. It
could be tokenizing new business models. Anything has a cash flower of value to
it, so you know the value of that data of that person with the
Barbie doll. That's a different type of example. But in terms of how
it relates to JP morgan financial situation and trafify, I think the first real
product market fit out there has been tokenizing stable coins or currency more money markets
if you will. So you know Brevin Howard this research. I think last
year there was more settlement on chain of tokens in stable coin format than there
is in the visa network over eleven trillion a year, so there is real
product market proof out there. In fact, in the US we are spoiled
because the financial systems and rails are pretty good. So when we're doing P
to P, we're venmoing each other. But there if you go to like
you know, Latin America, go to other places around the world, their
version of vemo is stable coins back and forth to each other, and it
is just a more elegant solution than a Vemo. In fact, Vemo owned
by PayPal. Actually it's funny because PayPal Corporation owns PayPal Wallet and the Vemo
wallet. If you, Anthony wanted to send money from one wallet memo into
your own PayPal wallet, they actually the corporation of PayPal has to actually go
outside of their own go through a third party because they bought in them all
the tech stacts are so different, and then charge themselves. So if you
move one hundred dollars back and forth, you see one hundred dollars back and
forth. But it really costs paypals out a penny two pennies to actually do
that whole thing. Maybe even more and they are eating the costs for you.
So part of the reason why PayPal is doing the PayPal USD is because
they want to solve some technology problems and create more efficiency. So that's a
perfect example of tokenization in stable coins already taking off. The next step is
what you just said about. You know, what we're working on were tokenizing
alternative assets of you know, helocks or you know, we tokenize part of
a KKR fund, and possibly the tokenization of more money market fronts. Not
just Blackrock, others have also done this, Franklin Templeton for example, so
tokenizing repos you know, broad Ridge has done this with you know, sock
gen and some other European banks where they've saved millions and millions dollars at one
point four trillion go through the broad Ridge system a month in terms of easier
settlement. So there is a ton of things happening in the tokenization of various
financial products. I think it's harder for the average person to see because it
is more of a B to B function and they haven't seen that chat GBC
generate AI aha moment to the individual. But B to B it's happening and
speaking of the B two C aspect of it right where consumers is it almost
like they don't need to know because they're so used to Hey, does it
work? I can one click right. It's kind of like going from dial
up to broadband. I just needed to work. I don't necessarily need to
know which blockchain, but at it's working. You know, that's a great
point. I think crypto native people think differently than the average consumer. And
if you want to call this annsumerfication of blockchain and crypto, but yeah,
that is the ultimate dream for a technology provider in the early stages to become
like the underlying rails and abstract everything away so things just run smoothly so that
the end user doesn't even think about it. I think one of the things
a theme that you'll probably see this year is better ui ux throughout the space,
because without that, you're not going to invite the new people who like
the quirkiness of us crypto native, who enjoy the crypto native quirkiness and hardness
to do things whereas they want ease they want to. This is why PayPal
subsidizes, you know, underneath the hood of a lot of things that happen
at PayPal. It's pretty messy, but to you the consumer, you have
no idea. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and you know it, there's
so many parallels to dial dase of the Internet and where we are a web
one point zero and and then where need to go. So it's kind of
you lose some of that sentimental aspect of it, right the early adopters.
But to get to the next billion users, you need to make it easy,
because that's such a great point. You know, the Internet Web one
point oh, if you call it the original Internet was supposed to be decentralized.
It was supposed to be you know, different service different places, and
you know, standards started being created. Maybe it wasn't the best standard,
but it was a standard that evolved because it was you know, there was
enough lift off, a network effect or power loss started taking effect, and
things started getting you know, built on TCP, IP or whatever around it.
What happened was though it was still quirky and for it to really really
take off to the masses and later part of the adoption cycle. What happened
in Web two point is these today bohemoths, but back then, centralize companies
like a Facebook or Amazon or Google started building functionality, and the user kind
of traded off privacy for and an ownership of their own data for convenience and
made it very useful. So I think of Web three the third generation,
almost bringing back some of the first generation Internet spirit, more decentralization. And
I'm not one of those people that say you need to like crush Amazon or
Facebook or Google because they're behemas and they're too big and they own your life.
So let's develop a solution that is as good or almost as good so
people have a choice. And then I think, you know, we talked
about, you know, the wallet and the blockchain is a great CRM tool.
Think about the the Web three wallet as the inverse of cookies on your
computer. It's a profile, it's data that you own, and you get
to opt in or choose and how that data gets moved around. You don't
have to opt into that movie with the Barbie five digital nft at that you
know, AMC Regal or whatever theater, a cinema theater or whatever it is.
You choose, and then you know, companies have been around a long
time, like Brave Browser, they allow you to choose, and if you
choose, they asked the advertisers effective pay you for your data, so but
you know, in fairness, it's still clunky. Hasn't taken off yet,
and I think one of the themes this year will be something's going to take
off, and it's going to be because not only is the underlying infrastructure like
an avalanche layer one is ready for it, but because people are creating great
ui ux so it's seamless to the end user. Now, on the note
of you know, you're controlling your data because of the blockchain and web three
setup, do you foresee in the future people being able to, like you
were saying, sell their information to businesses and earn off of that. In
addition, they're not only there, maybe their activity data as well, like
what they want to do digital fingerprint your digital fingerprint. Absolutely, I think
that will be in the future. But before we get there. The if
it's your social information and there are some social apps you know, launching this
year that may take off and do really well and have the network effects,
it has to get to the point where there is that network effect, there
is a you know enough people, critical massive people, and it's got to
be user friendly enough before it can compete. And then once that happens.
I think people will really enjoy how having sovereignty and self sovereignty and owning their
digital fingerprint and being able to use it as they choose. Now, there
was news I believe this from last year, the partnership between Ava Labs and
Amazon Web Services with plans to expand enterprise and government use of blockchain tech.
To us about that, yeah, so Amazon is a is a great partner
of ours. They you know, I just spoke at the Amazon Reinvent and
was fantastic because I got to meet all these Web two companies and their digital
heads trying to figure out how they can deploy various technology solutions using a Web
three constructs. It is a great, great conference. Obviously this year is
mostly about AI, but you know, the Web three stuff was really fantastic
as well. So Amazon and US Ava Labs have a great partnership because we
helped them with emerging you know, crypto companies or developers that need compute power
and storage for Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services has a large swath of
existing users, obviously one of the largest cloud service providers, and they introduced
us to call it traditional enterprises that want to deploy blockchain enable solutions, so
it's a very synergistic relationship. You're referring to the specific government stuff. So
a lot of government agencies and government related entities have their compute power and storage
in Amazon Web Services. And since we did something with Deloitte, basically with
Deloitte and customer, FEMA, an agency Disaster Recovery Agency of the United States,
has created an application on Avalanche to enable the workflow, efficiency and moving
of call it information in terms of claims during a disaster in real time.
So you know, victims need money in real time if a hurricane happens and
it's been very inefficient. De Lloyd thinks that you can literally save fifty percent
if you're deployed through their solution for FEMA. They cited Hurricane Trina and Katrina
in two thousand and five or six. You know, some agencies are still
paying some of these contractors that are not even doing anything anymore. It's kind
of like your subscription to an app that you forget and you just keep paying
two dollars a month for a long time. So same thing like that.
Whereas a blockchain solution encoded into the rules will end at at the right time.
So because of that experience. Amazon Web Services working with us to introduce
us to other government related agencies or companies to help create solutions for them as
well. That's great and I love that use case with Deloyde and FEMA because
there's so many aplications happening there, Like you're saying people not getting paid on
time, and then you have frauds sometimes and all kinds of things. But
with the blockchain, it will eliminate a lot of those pitfalls. I mean
with you know, government agencies, you know there there's natural upgrade cycles that
they need to do, so they are going to upgrade, might as well
upgrade to a web fee solution as opposed to some intermittent solution. So it's
kind of like emerging markets. Uh, penetration of mobile phones was far faster
than the US because US has such a great landline. So it's a great
way to work and help agencies in the US. Since we're talking about government,
are there any governments that are piloting or testing CBDCs or stable coins?
On Avalanche we talked about stable coins already a little bit. I think that
is clearly a product market fit type of situation. CBDCs are two types there's
the retail and there is the call it the B two B or the wholesale
kind. You know, I'm very torn on CBDC. You're taking the best
of blockchain technology, removing the sometimes removing the transparency, making it closed,
and enabling governments to leverage the technology, and making things more centralized in many
ways. So a lot of thought needs to be put into it. I
do think that there will be CBDCs at various countries that use the technology for
their benefit. I just hope that there's also a decentralized version. Maybe that
is bitcoin, maybe that is you know, stable coins, whatever it is
that allows individuals to maintain a good balance of help, privacy, and freedom
while not doing any illsted activity. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you,
and that's I know, a lot of debate happening here in the United States.
At least. I'm hoping it can align to the US Constitution where to
privacy and our rights are maintained. But you know, hard to tell what's
going to happen in other countries as these get rolled out, and hopefully the
US has a lot to lose with US if others to do things. And
you know, because the dollar is like the medium of exchange for sixty to
seventy percent of the trade in the US. You know, they need to
think about it. What happens if it becomes some sort of stable coin that
becomes the medium of exchange around the world. Yeah, that's and yeah,
there's so many complications there with the future of the US dollar and as a
reserve currency and so forth. Now, tell us about interoperability with other blockchains
and which you know, if you can tell us the top of your head,
because maybe it might be a lot, But tell us about that.
Well, you know, we believe in a multi chain world. We don't
think it's going to be a winner take all type of thing. It's going
to be a you know, not many many, but it will be a
select rout that are able to provide the functionality and have the technology innovation that's
necessary to carry on daily transactions at necessary speed or scale. But we're very
I mean, first of all, Avalanche is as an EVM, so it's
ethere incompatible assets can move back and forth. We've done three or four things
actually Alva lapse a company to help Avalanche be interoperable with other chains. One
is there are definitely bridges that connect Avalanche the blockchain to other chains. The
wallets that are being created are also interoperable, and the sub nets that we
talked about earlier, they are also interoperable with each other. So everything is
set up so that the sub nets can talk to each other, can talk
to the Avalanche seat chain, and then can also talk to if you will.
So I think ultimately this is also why JP Morgan and Apollo and Providence
or Figure want to figure out a way to do that project with Avalanche and
other players. With Layer zero was in there. I think ACCE law was
in there as well, because that's where you you know, in this world
of tokenized assets, you need liquidity, and if you have just the siloed
you know, ponds, if you will, you're not connecting them, you
won't have as much liquidity as you need. So I think it's super important
that you do have interoperability. Now, you've touched on quite a few things
that will be coming this year. Anything else you want to highlight that's on
your roadmap for twenty twenty four, right, So you know, there's two
ways I look at a roadmap. There's the technology roadmap and there is the
call it business collaboration partnerships, and there's also internal efforts as well. So
the technology room map we talked about a few of them already. There's a
thing called Teleporter that will enhance the interoperability of subnets to subnet that's super important.
Then there is we talked about bricks, bricks and hyper SDK and also
firewood that will allow the large scale transactions. And then there's also an effort
in place to minimize the validator requirements so that you know, more people can
validate at a cheaper costs. So those are three on the technology side down
I'm super excited about in the next quarter to two quarters. On the business
development side, number one thing is to get those eighty plus sub nets live.
Working with those developers, give them the solutions they need to take it
live. So there are some gaming companies we talked about earlier, Triple A
publishers like Gozilla, Shrapnel TSM is one of the largest esports wallet companies out
there. Those are things that we're very excited. Unfortunately, in Traffy I
can't talk about because they are very heavy on the NDAs, but there are
other called it Traffy type crossover solutions similar to what we did with Japan,
Morgan, Apollo and others that are super exciting, you know, big picture,
they all revolve around tokenization of alternative assets or making settlement much faster,
and they're using the benefits there to be able to provide services for more people.
And then lastly, again brands are also very specific with their NDAs.
But we talked about this a little bit. There are some creative ways where
people are going to use the NFT so that it's no longer just from a
web two perspective, negative connotation for some digital tun real utility and uh,
you know, engagement with their customers. Yeah, that's great, and I
think utility is a key there with the NFT market. Don't get me wrong.
There's a collectible aspect to it, but I have no problem with people
who want to collect I mean, back in the day, I'm sure people
thought collecting baseball cards were silly and and strange as well, and why should
it be value to baseball cards? Yeah, anyway, that's all. That's
a different philosophical debate. But I am excited for brands that will be using
this construct to create use cases. And lastly, we didn't get to finish
talking about what we're doing internally. You know, last year we created a
great dev rel team and we've seen developers come on hackathons. And there's a
program we're launching called Codebase, which is an accelerator program for developers to come
in and get help from all the LASS people and create. You know,
it's kind of like model it self, a little bit to Why Combinator,
and but it's going to be very very good for creating crypto data developers to
launch stuff on Avalanche. That's great, and I love that you seem very
organized and you broke it down where it's you know, easy to understand what
you guys doing internally versus just how I think about everything that's compartmentalized because we
are trying to attack two markets at once, if you will. For sure.
A question just came to mind, what are your thoughts on the conversions
of AI and blockchain, given that AI is on the rise, we're seeing
deep fakes and I think blockchain maybe a solution. There are you guys exploring
use cases solutions around that? So we are working with third parties that are
you know right now. I think reality is AI will help Web three first
before Web three can help AI. I think AI will enable faster and better
coding in smart contracts. It can do a lot of the security checks for
smart contracts that is necessary in the space, and it can also help analyze
on chain data much better and faster. I think that is really the first
step. Watching is even earlier first step. I mean even us internally we've
been using things like Dali and saving money to create you know, images and
logos, et ceteras, and there's other applications who've been using so that you
know, applying it to daily use cases. That's really the first step.
Second step is what we just talked about, helping create better con smart contracts,
secure smart contracts, analyzing on chain data. One of the problems with
AI going forward is what you talked about, and this is when Web three
will help AI in my opinion. You know, you need provenance of that
data set. You need providence of the language, large language models, and
a track record that can all be done through a blockchain enaval solution, and
that will help AI in the long run. People trust AI, so de
fakes and stuff like that will at least be known for the user. Great
point. I love how you phrase that that you know AI will have to
help web three and crypto initially, but then vice versa as as we progress.
I love that. Let's look call the crypto market at large with the
time we have left. What are your thoughts on the big Win's BODYTF launches
and what impact that we'll have on the future of this industry. Well,
I think it's a great success. You know, I'm an operator, but
I can tell you from operator's perspective. Just having Blackrock in their infidelity in
there, the tone of conversation for bizdev, the partnerships, whether the enterprises,
the traft five has already changed. There is a sense that there is
new leadership and there is a horseman from respective people in the space. So
it enables the call it adoption from a technology perspective, not just from an
asset perspective. And I think it's going to take time, but the early
numbers already showed some great success. And really I think what people will be
talking about in a few months on the asset side will be ethereum and other
alternative assets and when those will be available in a more easily usable form.
You know, that's form factor right there. The the you know, the
ETF or ETP. Frankly, it's ETP, not a ETF. It's a
big distinguish. It's important to distinguish that has already been helpful, and then
that creates adoption when those users first experience what that means, and then they
start researching and understanding what the technology is about. I would love for them
to go in and actually go into the ecosystem avoval engine, tried trader Joe,
or try avin for yield and and lend and borrow or one day by
a tokenized helock loan in a more efficient manner. So I think that's the
first step. And I think it's already great at creating called endorsement from trust
to figures so that you can cross over and grow the adoption cycle. M
And one of the things that we're still waiting for in the US is full
comprehensive crypto regulations and that is balanced. Of course, there's still a lot
of debate happening with the SEC. There's a couple of bills in the House
as well as Senate. What is your outlook as you know someone who's building
in the industry, and are you optimistic we may see something either this year
or next year. I'm optimistic we'll see something next year. I think there's
a lot of things going on this year. You know, until there's a
settled you know, less volatile in terms of like who's who's running the show,
it's going to be hard. There's a lot of other things on people's
minds in Congress. But I think if there's one area that may come sooner
than other areas, and we touched upon this, it'll be some sort of
stable coin legislation. I think there was, you know, I read the
headlines today. There was a senator or congressman somewhere today in the US I
mentioned, you know, they want to push along their stable coin regulation.
I think because it is an area that people realize is getting a huge adoption
around the world, the US may be forced to move faster. And also
we talked about this earlier, like the medium exchange is the dollar right now
for global trade. The US needs to be thinking about this and not fall
behind that in case something else comes up. Yeah, great, John,
final item here before we hit the wrap up questions. I'm still struggling with
DeFi. I believe in DeFi, but I'm seeing, you know, there's
still these exploits that are happening. Where we do you feel in the timeline
and you know what is it is? Help I phrasing this right? You
know what's the iteration? What's the timeline for? When we get past a
lot of these exploits happening in DeFi So I think if you look at dollars
and you look at exploits, they are decreasing over time. Ironically, when
you have these massive growth in twenty twenty twenty twenty one, security audits and
other things probably and the go to market of some of these DAPs were probably
rushed because so in a downturn actually allows a lot of the new developers to
take their time and you know, make sure their code is better and secure,
and the audit you know, firms out there, security audit firms out
there have fewer clients and are able to take more time. So it's already
decreasing. Like we said earlier, there will be very surely, I think
an AI enable solution to accelerate that even more so it's already happening. But
there's another path to this as well. And this is what we talked about
with the Spruce Network, with Wellington Trow and Wisdom Tree which is basically an
institutionalized version of DeFi, where if you can kyc AML, you can do
the same functionality as you would in a traditional DeFi, but with different types
of assets in a token ized form. So I think that's why it's so
important to continue to push on the crossover side, because that's another solution to
making this space really usable for people and not worry about these you know,
illicit issues and you know responses from bad actors. Yeah, I think to
your point, like patients, I think definitely need to hear and the builders
who are doing these things not rushing through and taking their time, and we'll
get there. I just we'll get there. I mean, you just don't
know when they're parallels with the original Internet too. I mean, in the
early days, the Internet itself was full of scams and frauds and illicit activity.
It was not until you know, Al Gore claims he invented the Internet.
He didn't really invent the Internet. What he did was he pushed the
bill through Congress that created standards on how commerce will happen on the Internet,
and that really led to legitimate players coming into the space and using the Internet
so to speak. Same is happening in Web three. Yeah, you're absolutely
right, because I remember certain things I did as a teenager Web one point
zero, which yeah, I can't stay, but it was. The point
is I was able to exploit certain things because it was in its early phases,
early iteration, but it improved over time. So maybe I helped to
improve the security on the Internet. I don't know. I'm sure he did,
all right, wrap up questions, If you could create your own metaverse,
what would the theme be? Okay, so I'm very focused on the
underlying technology and providing that. So I wouldn't create my own metaverse. We
want to invite other people to create metaverses, you know, working at companies
like Lamina one that are creating a great metaverse experience. On top of Avalanche,
we're working with other third parties that are creating metaverses. I can say
the one that would be interested in using would be the one that creates the
experience that is as most similar in a digital construct it is in your traditional
life. I don't know what that is, but once I see it,
i'll know. Wrapping Fire questions. Favorite food. You know, I'm a
very simple guy. I generally like just steaks, potatoes. I think when
I want to be healthy though, and I'm trying to become more and more
healthy, it's not the steaks. It's more of I wouldn't say vegan,
but like I will have avocado for protein and things like that. Favorite musician
or band ooh Pearl Jam. You know that's someone a group that I've liked
for a long long time. I don't even know if some of the younger
audience will know them, but there are legendary rockers. Oh yeah, favorite
movie huh, Well, it's changed over time, but you know, the
last one that I thought was incredible was, and it's the first time I
watched it in a movie theater in a long time, was Top Gun Maverick.
And I think it's great because very rarely do you see a sequel that
you can argue and say is better than the original, and a sequel that
comes out thirty plus years later. Yeah, it's very good. Favorite book,
well right now reading. A friend of mine wrote Web three, Alex
Tapscott, so I'm actually helping him on his web tour. Alex and his
father have done a lot of good writing and the space to help educate everyone
in the space. Way back when for ten plus years Alex in this book
really does a great job of talking about future uses of Web three and the
benefits of that. So I would encourage people to check that book out.
Another book that I'm reading right now is by a Stanford professor, Matt Abrams.
You know, Think Faster, Talk Smarter. It's basically a communications book.
And you know, as part of as a leader, as a as
a president of a company, you have to know how to communicate people and
understand other people. Especially if I'm trying to cross over two and Web three,
you need to understand the mindset of others. I will definitely check out
that book. That sounds pretty good. And finally, what do you do
for a hobby? Oh? I love sports, So, like I said
earlier, I still am very active in playing tennis, lifting, weights doing
I played a lot of golf in the summer when when it's warm, so
racquetball sports as well as weightlifting. And you know, during COVID, I
wrote a lot of peloton so I continued to ride you know, stationary bicycles.
John, absolute pleasure of chatting with you. I'm excited for the future
updates of Avalanche this year. Thank you for joining me, Thank you,