Speaker 1: The news around they eat Hong Kong dollar. That's pretty big.
Speaker 1: How did that relationship come about to get a government
Speaker 1: to essentially issue a stable coin on app TOSK.
Speaker 2: A lot of hard work through our partners and our
Speaker 2: employees in Asia to work very closely with the government
Speaker 2: and with a lot of financial tech companies within that
Speaker 2: region of the world. And I think that just kind
Speaker 2: of shows the trust that those folks have on a
Speaker 2: network like ap toss and where the safety, the speed,
Speaker 2: and the through but really matter.
Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by Gemini, which is
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Speaker 1: So if you'd like to learn more about Gemini, visit
Speaker 1: the link in the description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Tony Edward, and my guest today is
Speaker 1: Avery Chang, who's the co founder and CTO at app
Speaker 1: Toss Labs. Avery, great to have you on.
Speaker 2: It's wonderful to be here with you, Tony.
Speaker 1: Avery. I'm really excited to speak with you because I've
Speaker 1: been hearing a lot about app Toss. I've been seeing
Speaker 1: a lot of user data and growth and adoption, and
Speaker 1: I want to learn about app toss and what you
Speaker 1: guys are up to there building some great Web three
Speaker 1: products and services and so forth. But before we get
Speaker 1: to all that, tell us about yourself, where you're from,
Speaker 1: and your professional background.
Speaker 2: Sure. I was born and raised in Halloo, Hawaii, a
Speaker 2: wonderful place by the way. For childhood. I went to
Speaker 2: Northwestern undergrad and graduate school. I did my PhD in
Speaker 2: high performance computing, especially in realizing in the area of
Speaker 2: paralle file systems. After that, I went to you Off
Speaker 2: for four years worked on web search. Then when joined
Speaker 2: Meta in two thousand and eleven, it was called Facebook
Speaker 2: back then. I was there for over a decade working
Speaker 2: on data infrastructure, things like do graft processing, large scale scheduling,
Speaker 2: and then ultimately the DM project. I was the Web
Speaker 2: three technical project and at the end of twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one I realized, and you know, it wasn't a big surprise,
Speaker 2: I guess that we were unable to launch the blockchain.
Speaker 2: We built amazing technology within Meta. We did all the
Speaker 2: things right, We open sourced it under the Apache two
Speaker 2: license any would use it, and then with my co
Speaker 2: found Remo, we'd launched aft toss Labs, designed to take
Speaker 2: a lot of the work that we had done within
Speaker 2: the DM project and bring it to a much larger audience,
Speaker 2: developed technology stack for a for all five billion interne
Speaker 2: users and support a much wider variety of use cases
Speaker 2: besides just remittances and payments.
Speaker 1: And was it at Facebook that you discovered blockchain and
Speaker 1: crypto or was it before that? And what was your
Speaker 1: aha moment?
Speaker 2: I think my aha moment was probably back when I
Speaker 2: was still at Meta. I've been working on data infrastructure,
Speaker 2: a lot of large scale systems, scaling out to exobyites
Speaker 2: and exobites of data infrastructure and processing that to support
Speaker 2: all of Meta's different products through analytics and drive data
Speaker 2: and I, you know, someone showed me the Bitcoin white paper.
Speaker 2: I read through it. You know, I had been a
Speaker 2: distributed systems junkie for a long time. That was also
Speaker 2: my heir of my PhD, and just kind of reading
Speaker 2: through and learning about the economics of what bitcoin was
Speaker 2: bringing to the world and how it could build a
Speaker 2: secure system through economics, I think was a very fascinating
Speaker 2: concept and also a product that instead of going kind
Speaker 2: of being something that embedded within a company like a
Speaker 2: Meta where I worked in data infrastructure, which was then
Speaker 2: kind of used as a back end service to power
Speaker 2: products in the front end. It was amazing to see
Speaker 2: a system that people would directly track with a database,
Speaker 2: anyone could use directly as opposed to something through an interface.
Speaker 2: Through an interface, it finally gets to kind of back
Speaker 2: an infrastructure. So that I think was what got me
Speaker 2: really excited about this space, about the possibilities of it,
Speaker 2: and then kind of thinking about how does that apply.
Speaker 2: You know, now that we have this public infrastructure, how
Speaker 2: do we kind of build it at scale to support
Speaker 2: the scale that Metage used to the billions of users
Speaker 2: and the you know, billions of transactions and dataflow that
Speaker 2: happened within an environment like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's amazing. And you know, I look at your background.
Speaker 1: I was looking at your LinkedIn profile. I mean spending
Speaker 1: time at Yahoo, which we would categorize as Web one
Speaker 1: point zero, then meta or Facebook Web two point oh,
Speaker 1: and now you're building in Web three point zero. You know,
Speaker 1: what's that journey been like for you? And is it
Speaker 1: you know, some people still don't see this as Web three,
Speaker 1: but is it clear for you that this is Web three.
Speaker 2: I think you're the first person characterized it that way,
Speaker 2: and I appreciate that, and you know, reflecting on it,
Speaker 2: I think, you know, definitely it's probably like more of
Speaker 2: an incremental change to me, just given like kind of
Speaker 2: lived a long time through it. But I think, you know,
Speaker 2: the way you characterize is pretty apt. You know, Yahoo,
Speaker 2: it was kind of the first iterations of kind of
Speaker 2: some might call that Web two point zero still but
Speaker 2: definitely early early days of what possibilis could be. They
Speaker 2: built out a search engine, they built a bunch of
Speaker 2: different products, explored the space deeply obviously meta now doubling
Speaker 2: down on social and taking it to kind of its
Speaker 2: ultimate destination. And then you know, with Web three you know,
Speaker 2: going breaking down those borders of a kind of a
Speaker 2: closed environment and saying, look, anybody can build, anybody can interact.
Speaker 2: You can build a protocol that does social. I can
Speaker 2: build a protocol that is financial, and someone can go
Speaker 2: ahead and build a protocol that links the two of
Speaker 2: us together and provides capabilities that no one thought was
Speaker 2: possible because it doesn't require, you know, you are to
Speaker 2: give consent for someone to do that. Everyone has access
Speaker 2: to it. All the codes open source, all the codes available,
Speaker 2: all the services that you and I build are available
Speaker 2: to anyone. And that's really, I think, just a novel
Speaker 2: thing that we've got to take more advantage within the
Speaker 2: web Web three.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure. Now, I'd love to get your thoughts
Speaker 1: on this. And this is probably a tough question. It's
Speaker 1: in itself, it's probably an entire podcast. But Web one
Speaker 1: point zero right search and so forth, Web two point
Speaker 1: zero social interactions and and these things. Do you feel
Speaker 1: these companies like Meta and Yahoo will be forced to
Speaker 1: adopt this technology of blockchain and make things a bit
Speaker 1: more decentralized or will they be disrupted by new players,
Speaker 1: you know, if they don't change in time? Kind of
Speaker 1: the blockbuster Netflix dynamic.
Speaker 2: It's a great question. I think a lot of times
Speaker 2: people web through are thinking about things, you know, the
Speaker 2: wrong ways, like how do I build you know, the
Speaker 2: you know, exactly equivalent product to what Instagram or Facebook
Speaker 2: have done. And I think that you can do, of course,
Speaker 2: and maybe maybe there's an audience for it, But I
Speaker 2: think by and large, the customer base that uses Instagram
Speaker 2: or Facebook, you know, they don't think about those things
Speaker 2: on daily basis. They're just thinking about how to connect
Speaker 2: to my friends? How do I keep on track on
Speaker 2: what they're doing. Are they focused on the fact that
Speaker 2: a lot of this data and you know, the interactions
Speaker 2: happen within a single company, Probably probably not as much.
Speaker 2: I think what we've got to do with web three
Speaker 2: instead is build new things, things that you couldn't do
Speaker 2: because of the kind of restrictions that that you might
Speaker 2: have at a place like Meta or or or other
Speaker 2: companies like that, like Google. We've got to build products
Speaker 2: that that are that are that are different, that take
Speaker 2: advantage of the capabilities of Web three. An example might be,
Speaker 2: you know, if we build a social product and you
Speaker 2: can actually support payments to every single person on the
Speaker 2: platform at any granularity. You know, that's something that can
Speaker 2: be done. Trees infrastructure, you know, today their rules come around.
Speaker 2: They may not ruled, but there's definitely limitations around something
Speaker 2: like you know, Visa will only support you know, transactions
Speaker 2: of a certain amount. There's definitely fees that come with it.
Speaker 2: If you want to pay out to these customers. You know,
Speaker 2: it's complications, there's KYC that needs to be done, there's
Speaker 2: bank accounts involved. You can only support so many different
Speaker 2: customers to pay out to. But in an infrastructure like blockchain,
Speaker 2: where anyone can have an address the transaction fees of
Speaker 2: something like aptos or deminimous maybe like eight thousands of
Speaker 2: a cent, you can actually have payments in many different granularities,
Speaker 2: even as low as a cent, and they can be
Speaker 2: very effective and efficient and settle immediately. And so taking
Speaker 2: advantage of infrastructure like that, I think is the key
Speaker 2: to really unlocking a lot of the value within the web. Three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great point that you brought up about
Speaker 1: creating new things versus trying to replicate Web two point
Speaker 1: or whatever it is, and trying to put blockchain in
Speaker 1: there somehow. But maybe, as we've seen historically, people who
Speaker 1: bring in new solutions, new ideas, new things that people
Speaker 1: can experience. Something has faster adoption versus being a carbon copy, right,
Speaker 1: the disruptors entering in with new ideas. So, yeah, how
Speaker 1: did you and mow meet and how did the idea
Speaker 1: to build app toss come about?
Speaker 2: A moment I met during our time when we were
Speaker 2: at Meta. We interacted through different projects. He was on
Speaker 2: the wallet side looking at different partnership opportunities for that
Speaker 2: that product. I was on the Web three side, on
Speaker 2: the on the DM tech stack building out the technology
Speaker 2: core along with side an amazing team, and so our
Speaker 2: past kind of intersected as we started to think about
Speaker 2: partnerships like we used for the blockchain, thinking about how
Speaker 2: the adoption could be even different ways in which the
Speaker 2: bloxing could be used outside of just the payments and
Speaker 2: MNTS infrastructure. And as we started to discuss that, it
Speaker 2: kind of became clear that this technology could serve a
Speaker 2: much larger purpose than just what DM was planned to do. Uh,
Speaker 2: And we would obviously have to make a lot of changes,
Speaker 2: we'd have to you know, develop technology a lot further.
Speaker 2: But it's something that I think really excited both of us.
Speaker 2: The idea that we could build a public, decentralized utility
Speaker 2: that anyone can use. If we think about it the
Speaker 2: same as water or roads or electricity, you know, it
Speaker 2: should be something that everyone has access to, everyone can
Speaker 2: can transact on, and can be a you know, a
Speaker 2: global settlement ledger for many different types of applications.
Speaker 1: And is app cause a layer one blockchain and what
Speaker 1: protocol does it use?
Speaker 2: Is a layer one blockchain. It's our own custom protocol
Speaker 2: apps protocol. Underninth of it, it uses the Move language
Speaker 2: as well. Kind of just for some background, Move is
Speaker 2: a language that was developed during our time back at
Speaker 2: DM under the Facebook umbrella. It was designed kind of
Speaker 2: specifically to support use cases of their mints and payments
Speaker 2: and a kind of libracurrency that at the time we
Speaker 2: thought was important. We've taken a move and really evolved
Speaker 2: a lot since then. We've added features like objects to it.
Speaker 2: We've had a kind of fuller support for the move prover.
Speaker 2: We actually have this new effort to call to build
Speaker 2: something we call move too, which is a new compiler,
Speaker 2: a new vm UH support for what we call block STM,
Speaker 2: a dynamic paralism, which is kind of the third iteration
Speaker 2: of paralism in the journey so far in this space
Speaker 2: and supports things like a chain randomness. It is, we think,
Speaker 2: going to be the ultimate vessel for any kind of
Speaker 2: web to be developer going forward into the future, and
Speaker 2: that's an area that definitely needs a technology chef.
Speaker 1: Mhm. Have you and Mo gone back to Facebook and
Speaker 1: you know, hit up Zuck and say, hey, man, what
Speaker 1: we build? You know, this is a blockchain you can
Speaker 1: integrate into Facebook.
Speaker 2: I think we've you know, I think Facebook has been
Speaker 2: very focused on a lot of other efforts at this time,
Speaker 2: and as as a shareholder, I'm pretty excited about what
Speaker 2: they're doing. AI also need to develop their product suite.
Speaker 2: I think. I think at the right time we'll we'll
Speaker 2: have a conversation about with three, but I think, you know,
Speaker 2: for now, there's a lot of other focuses at the
Speaker 2: company for sure.
Speaker 1: Now correct me if I'm wrong. Was it this week
Speaker 1: that it's the two year main neet anniversary for aptos?
Speaker 2: That's right, well previously previous week, but yes, it's been
Speaker 2: two years and two years since mean it has gone live.
Speaker 1: Wow, it's pretty amazing. And what use cases is apt
Speaker 1: toss targeting and I know it may be across the
Speaker 1: board because you're a layer one, but are there any
Speaker 1: particular you know use case your try like tokenization and
Speaker 1: a f tise whatever.
Speaker 2: Maybe. So atos's strengths really are in a couple of areas.
Speaker 2: Aptus is the largest scale support kind of within the
Speaker 2: web three industry. I think that's something that we felt
Speaker 2: was really important as infrastructure there. If we think back
Speaker 2: to Cloud, one of the things that Cloud people were
Speaker 2: really worried about for Cloud adoption was in the early
Speaker 2: days there wasn't ability to scale easily to large amounts
Speaker 2: of hardware. So if you're a large company trying to
Speaker 2: build on top of cloud, you're you're thinking like, if
Speaker 2: my user base grows substantially, you know, doesn't mean that
Speaker 2: now infrastructure is going to limit me and how much
Speaker 2: how many users I can onboard? Is it's going to
Speaker 2: give them time? And that's of course for any business
Speaker 2: a huge risk and consideration. I think in blockchain is
Speaker 2: the same thing, you know, thinking about for a large
Speaker 2: large company or someone who wants to build at scale,
Speaker 2: you know, support hundreds of millions of users, and they're
Speaker 2: thinking like, well, if I build this blockchain infrastructure is
Speaker 2: it going to you know, eventually hit a limit where
Speaker 2: I can't go any further. H that's going to hinder
Speaker 2: my product growth. We felt scalability was one of those
Speaker 2: important things to solve because if you don't have scalability,
Speaker 2: you see what happens on ethereum where demand based pricing
Speaker 2: drives up fees. You know, if you have high fees,
Speaker 2: transaction rates you know, can't be supported by an application
Speaker 2: because customers don't want to pay those fees. Applications can't
Speaker 2: internally handle those fees at certain scale, it's it's not
Speaker 2: going to work out. And so we we've worked really
Speaker 2: hard in the last couple of years and even before that.
Speaker 2: This project has been going on since twenty eighteen basically
Speaker 2: so to really build the scale that we thought could
Speaker 2: support you know, the five billion Internet users out there,
Speaker 2: and we've been really pleased to see our results. Last
Speaker 2: December we kind of announced our results of what we
Speaker 2: call premun it and preving it is a way to
Speaker 2: run kind of a mainit like environment with the same things.
Speaker 2: One hundred plus validators running our next iteration version of
Speaker 2: the software the code, and we are able to demonstrate
Speaker 2: with reproducer results if you want, you want to run
Speaker 2: them yourself. We have the configurations in GitHub with the
Speaker 2: same commands. You can go ahead and kind of repeat
Speaker 2: all this. That we could see more than two billion
Speaker 2: transactions occurrent day, two billion kind of transactions, and that's
Speaker 2: an average of more than twenty five thousand transactions per second.
Speaker 2: So just to put that at scale in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: I think Visa is something like seventy million transactions per
Speaker 2: day master guarded formge million transactions per day. Two billion
Speaker 2: transactions in a single day is actually more than every
Speaker 2: single credit card processor combined. Wow. And so this gave
Speaker 2: us a lot of comments to show and in a
Speaker 2: repeatable or producer environment that you know, aptos is able
Speaker 2: to support some of the largest workloads in the world
Speaker 2: in one industry at least, that's amazing. And then back
Speaker 2: in August, you know, there was a product called tap
Speaker 2: Us Cat, which is a very simple kind of click
Speaker 2: to top game, but underneath the cover is actually doing
Speaker 2: some pretty complicated things around voting, around points accumulation, and
Speaker 2: tap Us had kind of achieved a lot of traction
Speaker 2: and drove up the transactions on main net to three
Speaker 2: to twenty six million transactions in one day. Wow. And
Speaker 2: so app to us now holds the records for daily
Speaker 2: transactions in main nets. I think the top three records
Speaker 2: three to twenty six million, one hundred and fifty million,
Speaker 2: I think something like ninety six million, you know, demonstrating
Speaker 2: that not only this you know result can happen in
Speaker 2: the next version of code, but actually in the software
Speaker 2: that's deployed today. And so we felt that this kind
Speaker 2: of ability to show that you have amazing scalability, the
Speaker 2: fee stayed low the whole time. There were fractions of
Speaker 2: ascent are really important for developing infrastructure that anyone can
Speaker 2: build on and can not have to worry about their
Speaker 2: use case kind of getting hit by the ceiling of
Speaker 2: what the infrastructure can provide so cost scale. And then
Speaker 2: latency is something that we've also worked really hard on.
Speaker 2: Our infrastructure has evolved a lot. We've made improvements to consensus,
Speaker 2: made improvements to the pipelining aspects. Something that apps us
Speaker 2: does very uniquely here is it has a very pipeline design,
Speaker 2: more than five phases data dissemination, kind of consensus parle execution,
Speaker 2: parle of storage, and then finally kind of proof generation.
Speaker 2: And this to these five stages, we can generate both
Speaker 2: high through put and low latency and kind of drive
Speaker 2: each stage down in terms of the kind of cost
Speaker 2: to the users. We've seen that we put up a
Speaker 2: dashboard recently with the kind of US versus other networks
Speaker 2: and showing the app toss is the fastest for it
Speaker 2: typically around seventy eight indred milliseconds out of Asia for
Speaker 2: user in ten times. And then why that's important is
Speaker 2: because you have a website that takes about two and
Speaker 2: a f seconds load on average if it's a good website,
Speaker 2: and you know, being able to be kind of about
Speaker 2: seven or injurred milliseconds or in that range means that
Speaker 2: you can actually put a blockchain operation in the critical
Speaker 2: path of the website loading. So native integration into kind
Speaker 2: of web apps, into mobile applications, into anything you do
Speaker 2: on the internet today. And so the combination of these
Speaker 2: three things kind of you know, shows shows us where
Speaker 2: we think that the technology needs to be in order
Speaker 2: for that masculine adoption. So we work on things that
Speaker 2: you know, I really take advantage of this, I through
Speaker 2: pit applications, anything requires little latency, anything that kind of
Speaker 2: requires that low cost. I think a good example of
Speaker 2: that would be use cases around payments. So if you
Speaker 2: think about you know, for instance, I was going back
Speaker 2: to earlier kind of micropayments, small amounts of transactions, transacting ascent,
Speaker 2: transacting ten cents. That's not great for networks like ethereum.
Speaker 2: It's really great for things like aptos, right because you
Speaker 2: can actually move money at at high speed at very
Speaker 2: very low cost, and so be able to support micro
Speaker 2: payments or even streaming payments where you know, you are
Speaker 2: a content creator might have a have a stream and
Speaker 2: you want your users to be able to kind of
Speaker 2: you know, commentate you if they think they're doing a job,
Speaker 2: and they can actually just kind of stream the payments
Speaker 2: as they're watching your show, and and then that can
Speaker 2: you know, you can turn the stream off if they're dissatisfied.
Speaker 2: Those kinds of things enable new use cases that weren't
Speaker 2: possibly for new myth is a payment that weren't possible,
Speaker 2: or if you want to think about things like micro
Speaker 2: loans in emerging countries, those things are very hard to
Speaker 2: do in traditional world, but they're possible to do in
Speaker 2: products like optos. So focusing on those use cases, especially
Speaker 2: in the you know, finance low to commerce. We think
Speaker 2: that there's amazing innovation in that area that can leverage
Speaker 2: the APTOS technology staff to its fullest.
Speaker 1: That's amazing and incredible performance. That's and you know, as
Speaker 1: you're saying that, I think about like your competitors like Solana,
Speaker 1: who've had downtime kind of handle things like this. So
Speaker 1: you guys have not had that issue, and certainly that's
Speaker 1: a differentiator, right, you have the latency, you have the
Speaker 1: uptime and so forth. And I love the idea of
Speaker 1: the micro payments. That is something I've been following for years.
Speaker 1: I know the folks at Brave Browser are doing it
Speaker 1: in a different way, but they haven't really cracked a
Speaker 1: model of having the traditional publishers and so forth really
Speaker 1: buying in and having real time stream payments and things
Speaker 1: like that. Is that a use case that you guys
Speaker 1: are maybe working with different companies with FO.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we probably can't talk about too much right now,
Speaker 2: but we're working with a large number of companies to
Speaker 2: explore the space further. And I think especially emerging markets
Speaker 2: is the key here. That's where those smaller payment sizes
Speaker 2: are more important. Well, if you think about countries in
Speaker 2: India where has a very large population and lots of
Speaker 2: lots of folks that are cost conscious. Those transaction fees
Speaker 2: add up. Those amounts of transfers are important, and we
Speaker 2: can support the use cases better than anybody in the world.
Speaker 2: So that's the kind of area that I think we
Speaker 2: really are are are designed for solving. Oh for sure.
Speaker 1: Now, tell us about the APT token. If I'm saying that, right,
Speaker 1: is it.
Speaker 2: Apt you can call it? I think app is fine,
Speaker 2: apt is fine, whatever whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, APT token. Tell us a bit about the
Speaker 1: token and the tokenomics, you know, are their respective unlocks
Speaker 1: coming up and things like that.
Speaker 2: Sure, so apt is a is a pretty interesting token.
Speaker 2: I think when it was launched it had one of
Speaker 2: the largest, if not the largest community bucket available to it,
Speaker 2: I think, at fifty one percent. I think that's something
Speaker 2: that if you're trying to build at public decentralized utility,
Speaker 2: it's it's obvious to me. I think that the token's
Speaker 2: got to reflect that. And being able to support the
Speaker 2: community through the majority of the token, I think is
Speaker 2: a really important thing. In general. I think that the
Speaker 2: token un locks are are are probably industry leading most
Speaker 2: you know. I think the investors and the core contributors
Speaker 2: have a for the year unlock schedule, and the Foundation
Speaker 2: is a much larger ten lot on ten year unlock
Speaker 2: schedule for fridge tokens and for the community bucket and
Speaker 2: for those kind of things. I think, you know, you
Speaker 2: really want to take a long term perspective on building
Speaker 2: a network. It is not going to be something that
Speaker 2: happens quickly over time, and as we've seen in the space,
Speaker 2: finding actual product market fit is difficult. So designing something
Speaker 2: for the long term, I think, which is the way
Speaker 2: the tokenomics of aptoss is structured, is really important and
Speaker 2: I think it's you know, it's actually set up quite well.
Speaker 2: The other thing is, I would say when it comes
Speaker 2: to the the mechanisms around the token, they're extremely simple,
Speaker 2: and that's by design as well just being able to
Speaker 2: have anyone but understand there is a staking emission and
Speaker 2: there's also a burning for transaction fees, and that's pretty
Speaker 2: much for the most part. Yet when it comes to
Speaker 2: creation and deletion of tokens makes it easy for anyone
Speaker 2: to understand, where sometimes there's very complicated schemes of like
Speaker 2: some parts are burned, some parts are saved. You know,
Speaker 2: there's all this other stuff, and like you know, it's
Speaker 2: very hard for people to get the grasp of like
Speaker 2: what what's actually happening within the network. The simplicity is
Speaker 2: really really important.
Speaker 1: You mentioned staking? Is that available right now?
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyone can stay tap plus network, You can run
Speaker 2: a validator, you can directly stake, you can have delegated
Speaker 2: staking into your your validator. And I think this is
Speaker 2: also by design. You want a large amount of participants
Speaker 2: in the network. You want people to I think the
Speaker 2: low I think it's as low as eleven ap ty
Speaker 2: to stake into the network, So pretty it's accessible to
Speaker 2: large number of people. Uh, and the more participation the
Speaker 2: better obviously. Oh for sure.
Speaker 1: I saw on the website AI and blockchain, and there's
Speaker 1: other you know, use cases we want to call it that,
Speaker 1: like game fi and so forth. But tell us about
Speaker 1: what you guys are doing with AI and blockchain. We
Speaker 1: know there's like a symbiotic relationship where blockchain is being
Speaker 1: helped to police AI and AI is being used to
Speaker 1: enhance blockchain attributes.
Speaker 2: AI and blockchain is a space probably a bit closer
Speaker 2: to my heart. When I worked at Meta and Data Infrastructure,
Speaker 2: I worked on a lot of the I or mL
Speaker 2: type initiatives. Some of the things I worked on were
Speaker 2: collaborate filtering, which is a way to kind of help,
Speaker 2: you know, find recommendations for for for instance, users for groups.
Speaker 2: I think that's a very famous collaborate filtering challenge back
Speaker 2: maybe ten years ago. I also worked on some other
Speaker 2: kind of supervised learning algorithms gamins, clustering, waiting to scent,
Speaker 2: and so I think for those it's it's really interesting
Speaker 2: to see that intersection now of like the work I've
Speaker 2: done before in blockchain, now a lot of it is
Speaker 2: to be around the data preparation and the kind of
Speaker 2: data lineage, and that's something also in data infrastructure we
Speaker 2: spend a lot of time on. So thinking through that
Speaker 2: a bit and then kind of finding the right partners
Speaker 2: in the space has been key for us. We've announced
Speaker 2: our partnership with Overlay. Overlay is a group of content creators,
Speaker 2: some former naturally to fact photographers and others who are
Speaker 2: really concerned about the you know, how how their data
Speaker 2: is being used in l MS, how their DA is
Speaker 2: being just used elsewhere as well. Uh, and you know,
Speaker 2: one of the ways we want to solve this problem
Speaker 2: is through through tracking that data, creating controls around it,
Speaker 2: creating standards and how that data can be used with uh,
Speaker 2: you know, the creator, creator of permission and you know
Speaker 2: we're all creators. You're creating a podcast, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: working on a blockchain, and I think it's important for
Speaker 2: us to be able to kind of start to put
Speaker 2: a lot of that historical information on chain, you know,
Speaker 2: having that ability to kind of say, this is my content,
Speaker 2: I created it, I'm signing up with my private key,
Speaker 2: and you know everyone knows about it. And now going forward,
Speaker 2: because this is an immutable record of history of what
Speaker 2: I created, is something that is going to be I
Speaker 2: think really necessary in this world of data being used
Speaker 2: in different ways and kind of without you know, maybe
Speaker 2: without permission, without access. And so that's where I think
Speaker 2: blockchain can really really help with the I space. And
Speaker 2: I think we've seen a lot of concerns from you know,
Speaker 2: people looking at llms and saying like, did you know
Speaker 2: where'd you get the data source from? Yeah? Did you
Speaker 2: have permission access that? And you know, sometimes the answers
Speaker 2: are a little a little hazy. It's going to be
Speaker 2: a world where we need to have more attribution around
Speaker 2: what's being created and more controls around it. And we're
Speaker 2: very proud of work with companies like Overlay on this
Speaker 2: specific area. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will say there's a couple other use cases
Speaker 2: that are really exciting. I think it's pretty clear we'll
Speaker 2: start to see you know, trading happening on chain with
Speaker 2: more AI into it. It's not surprising that as you
Speaker 2: have also transaction fees lowering and if you have three
Speaker 2: point going up, what we've seen in systems like Nasdaq
Speaker 2: is I think sixty to eighty percent of that is automated,
Speaker 2: you know, algorithmic trading, kind of trading by bots, some
Speaker 2: sense program bots, and you'll start to see the same
Speaker 2: thing happening in a world of crypto where anything can
Speaker 2: be traded twenty four to seven without restriction and that
Speaker 2: is inevitable and so being able to kind of build
Speaker 2: out infrastructure that can support that at scale, I think
Speaker 2: is probably the next generation of where this technology is
Speaker 2: going to go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I've been talking a lot
Speaker 1: about that that the token economy, everything running on the
Speaker 1: blockchain and you can have truly global markets and no
Speaker 1: more holidays are opening and closing bill no more weekends
Speaker 1: twenty four to seven trading.
Speaker 2: Exactly and twenty four seven trading you know, happening with
Speaker 2: an algorithm behind it. That is, you know, got access
Speaker 2: to your funds that can trans act in financial protocols
Speaker 2: and with different financial assets. That is I think the
Speaker 2: future of where this heads and is our job to
Speaker 2: kind of make sure we build out infrastructure to support text.
Speaker 1: Going back to data, right, and I'm thinking, well, these
Speaker 1: are the things I've been noodling on. Do you envision
Speaker 1: in the future we're going to eat individually, you know,
Speaker 1: our data on Facebook, right, our activity where we live,
Speaker 1: our impersonal interests, what type of food, YadA yadae that
Speaker 1: we like. Right, that will be on the blockchain, and
Speaker 1: we can then monetize that and sell it to advertisers.
Speaker 1: Right Versus Facebook and these social platforms and web two
Speaker 1: they monetize it, but they keep the money, right, but
Speaker 1: you don't get a cut. They just monetize your activity.
Speaker 1: But in the future, because of data privacy but also blockchain,
Speaker 1: you can sell that to advertisers.
Speaker 2: I think there'll be a world where there'll be a
Speaker 2: much easier way for content creators and that could consider
Speaker 2: still content that we create to be compensated at least
Speaker 2: in part for their for their contributions. And the good
Speaker 2: news is I don't think that's that far away. We've
Speaker 2: actually working with a number of companies that are exploring
Speaker 2: that exact route. You know, if they if in today's actions,
Speaker 2: you know, if I watch an ad or if I
Speaker 2: you know, you said share my data for your usage,
Speaker 2: there's no reason why you can't give a cutback to me.
Speaker 2: And with blockchain you can have you know we're talking
Speaker 2: about earlier. It might be hard to traditional rails to
Speaker 2: do that, but it's actually quite easy within the blockchain space.
Speaker 2: You could even have like very low amounts of payments
Speaker 2: going out for for you know, less valuable data, yet
Speaker 2: make that extremely efficient with infrastructural like apt toss.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure. Now talk a bit about your guys
Speaker 1: approach to security, but also decentralization, right, and how those
Speaker 1: things go hand in hand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, I think some people think a lot about
Speaker 2: trade off of decentralization and security, and I don't think
Speaker 2: there's a trade off here all. You can actually shrink
Speaker 2: them both independently in some degrees. Right, I'll give you
Speaker 2: a couple of examples so we take security extremely seriously.
Speaker 2: Move was designed as a language built for security first,
Speaker 2: forget performance, you know, forget other aspects. It was really
Speaker 2: designed and even features. It was designed like, you know,
Speaker 2: what's the core we can build that actually prevents programmers
Speaker 2: from making mistakes and you know, allowing mismanagement of funds,
Speaker 2: those types of things. And so that's kind of one
Speaker 2: of the core tenets of what we're doing. That's important
Speaker 2: from a security aspect. The other thing is we we
Speaker 2: you know, security is also somewhat of a you know,
Speaker 2: I don't want our head of security outset, but you know,
Speaker 2: a little bit of a boring hard work in some sense,
Speaker 2: it requires us to be just very tedious around how
Speaker 2: does code get into the rebuk. How much testing is there.
Speaker 2: There's unit tests, there's aggression tests, there's cluster tests, there's
Speaker 2: security tests we add in. There's fuzzing that goes on
Speaker 2: as part of the process. There is a dev net,
Speaker 2: test net, then a main net. There's also something we
Speaker 2: call the prev net to test major features going out.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of factors here. Also auditing that
Speaker 2: happens at different levels of the stack, so it's it's
Speaker 2: not something that's like a one size fits all type thing.
Speaker 2: It's really about putting together a process from ideation all
Speaker 2: the wage production that kind of checks as many many
Speaker 2: different angles as possible and tries to prevent as many
Speaker 2: many issues as possible along that entire journey. And so
Speaker 2: it's something that you know, anticipated, really a mindset from
Speaker 2: an organizational viewpoint, something that everyone internalizes as important. And
Speaker 2: the trade off for security here is more about speed
Speaker 2: of time getting code into production, because if you're not
Speaker 2: doing those checks, you can actually push the code much faster.
Speaker 2: You kind of the features rolling out, but at a
Speaker 2: you know, at risk and our toilet risk tolerance is
Speaker 2: definitely going to be much more. You know, we want
Speaker 2: to push both the feature set moving out quickly and security,
Speaker 2: and we find a pretty good sweet spot you know,
Speaker 2: around like you know, doing a lot of these checks
Speaker 2: and balances as a first step and building really strong
Speaker 2: infrastructure to support that as much automation as possible, and
Speaker 2: then deploying uh, you know, through the IP process extremely quickly.
Speaker 2: For decentralization, we've taken a different perspective, I think than
Speaker 2: than others in the space. We really focus on like
Speaker 2: what is this centralation trying to accomplish here, and it's
Speaker 2: it's it's about kind of think a couple of different things.
Speaker 2: One is about the process itself. A desmilized process has
Speaker 2: a lot of different participants in it allows a lot
Speaker 2: of opportunities for participation as well. So going back to
Speaker 2: the idea of production concept I brought up earlier, and
Speaker 2: when someone has an idea in the aptos's blockchain, they
Speaker 2: kind of create an AIP, which is our process for
Speaker 2: like EPs. Essentially, they submit a proposal, they talk about
Speaker 2: what they want to do, they wishments, uh, there's community feedback.
Speaker 2: Then there's code that comes in. There's more community feedback
Speaker 2: on that as well kind of review around that, and
Speaker 2: then there's also that codet shipped validators valudors need to
Speaker 2: kind of accept that code or not. And then there's
Speaker 2: also another check which is on chain governance and tokenholders
Speaker 2: will then vote to make the actual change go live.
Speaker 2: And so this kind of plays into both security and decentralization.
Speaker 2: You have many opportunities participants to to give their feedback
Speaker 2: to voice support or you know, concerns, and you have
Speaker 2: a process that's very open and so this is all
Speaker 2: really important for the centralization. The other thing that is
Speaker 2: is about kind of the metrics of the centralization. And
Speaker 2: so for this, it's like, you know, how easily can
Speaker 2: your system be compromised? For a Byzantine fault tolerance system
Speaker 2: like ours, we support up to kind of one third
Speaker 2: of the stake being kind of malicious, uh. From guarantees
Speaker 2: of that, we can guarant you know, we can ensure
Speaker 2: safety and liveness of the protocol. And so there's something
Speaker 2: called the knockomotive coefficient. I don't know if you're familiar
Speaker 2: with that, but it's the idea like what's the minimum
Speaker 2: number of machines that you need to be compromised in
Speaker 2: the system in order for it to kind of fall apart,
Speaker 2: lose liveness or lose safety. And so for for aptos,
Speaker 2: I think ours is about twenty two right now, which
Speaker 2: puts us in very much one of the highest among
Speaker 2: major l ones. It's higher than Salana, for example. And
Speaker 2: we do that with about one hundred and fifty notes.
Speaker 2: And so it's less about the number of nodes and
Speaker 2: more about like how make these nodes can be compromised
Speaker 2: in order for the system kind of fallover. You could
Speaker 2: have thousands of nodes in the network. But you know,
Speaker 2: if you have all the stake in one node, those
Speaker 2: other nodes do nothing really right and you don't actually
Speaker 2: secure the network. They're great for a media sound bite,
Speaker 2: they're great for a slide deck, but in practice they
Speaker 2: do not actually help the network one bit. And so
Speaker 2: we really focus on the metrics that kind of matter
Speaker 2: for us. When you think about decentralization, it's really about
Speaker 2: kind of avoiding, you know, single sources of failure, even
Speaker 2: a couple of sources of failure. What's the right balance there,
Speaker 2: and then from the process standpoint, really making it as
Speaker 2: open and transparent as possible with as many participants as
Speaker 2: can be added to the process.
Speaker 1: We've seen the stable coin market is growing significantly, and
Speaker 1: it seems like stable coin legislations around the corner. Are
Speaker 1: there stable coin issuers on aptoles at USDC and all
Speaker 1: these other things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're really excited, I think. I think a couple
Speaker 2: of weeks ago we announced that USDT was coming to
Speaker 2: ap toss. It's coming very soon and there's a number
Speaker 2: of others to follow. Also, there was an announcement of aptus
Speaker 2: being i think the only chain kind of selected for
Speaker 2: the pilot of the e Hong Kong dollar that's coming soon.
Speaker 2: So we believe that the money movement is of course
Speaker 2: very important and having stables is a big part of that.
Speaker 2: Obviously we're going to be seeing more stables coming to
Speaker 2: abtass and amazing rails. But around them we have a
Speaker 2: funge Blassis token stand which is extremely powerful and rich
Speaker 2: to support these assets at high scale, very low fees,
Speaker 2: and very interoperability across the ecosystem.
Speaker 1: Wow, the news around they eat Hong Kong dollar, that's
Speaker 1: pretty big. How did that relationship come about to get
Speaker 1: a government to essentially issue a stable coin on app toss.
Speaker 2: A lot of hard work through our partners and our
Speaker 2: employees in Asia to work very closely with the government
Speaker 2: and with a lot of financial tech companies within that
Speaker 2: region of the world. And I think that just kind
Speaker 2: of shows the trust that those folks have on a
Speaker 2: network like apt toss and where the safety, the speed,
Speaker 2: and the through but really matter when evaluating a project
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 1: Now, what's on the roadmap for the reminder twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four and maybe early twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Five, Oh my gosh, so many things we've been teasing
Speaker 2: on aptos for a little while there's definitely some very
Speaker 2: very exciting infrastructure improvements that are going to come that
Speaker 2: we think are going to take us beyond what a
Speaker 2: traditional blockchain can do today. If you think about block
Speaker 2: that databases back in the traditional kind of web twscent,
Speaker 2: you have rocks dB, you have my sqel, your postgress.
Speaker 2: You know, people don't get so excited about the technologies
Speaker 2: I think as a broad population. Technologists do obviously because
Speaker 2: they power a lot of the back ends of the
Speaker 2: largest technicomies in the world. But there's a lot of
Speaker 2: function that goes above that stack before you build applications,
Speaker 2: and so we're pretty excited about some of the technology
Speaker 2: really on there alongside that. I think something we have
Speaker 2: announced in the past is apt us Build. Apt Us
Speaker 2: Build is a product from Aptos Labs to allow you
Speaker 2: to construct rich applications and be a one stop shop
Speaker 2: for you as a blockchain developer. Let me give you
Speaker 2: a little example. So again, if you're building directly on
Speaker 2: top of a database like my squel or Postgress, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of seacle course you have to write, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of infratructure, the kind of glue you have
Speaker 2: to glue together multiple databases or add layers on top
Speaker 2: layers of abstraction to get APIs that would make sense
Speaker 2: for your application. App to us build kind of does
Speaker 2: a lot of that hard kind of glue work for you.
Speaker 2: It provides APIs for directly minting NFTSD, APIs for acticing
Speaker 2: data on chain in different ways, kind of more in
Speaker 2: databasel like format or more kind of even like through
Speaker 2: the full note kind of APIs, if you will. And
Speaker 2: it's starting to add more infrastructure around gas station fee management,
Speaker 2: custody solutions. We have something called as to us connect
Speaker 2: which allows you to log in with your Google ID
Speaker 2: or your Apple IDA and have a wallet in the
Speaker 2: back end kind of secure with a zero knowledge proof
Speaker 2: between the two. So there's some anonymity and privacy for you.
Speaker 2: And this kind of infrastructure adds up into being like
Speaker 2: use application developer, really focus on your app. What are
Speaker 2: you trying to solve? Are you trying to make you know,
Speaker 2: videos more accessible in different parts of the world. Are
Speaker 2: you trying to build a new game that takes advantage
Speaker 2: of the dnamics of web three? Focus on those things
Speaker 2: and those user use cases, and you know the glue
Speaker 2: is going to all be there for you to just
Speaker 2: integrate a blockchain. You don't have to hire ten blockchain
Speaker 2: engineers and smart contract developers and all this other stuff.
Speaker 2: You can put a bulk or your resources into building
Speaker 2: out great engaging experiences for your audience as opposed to
Speaker 2: focus on the blockchain. And so I've talked Bill something
Speaker 2: we're extremely excited about. It's already kind of available in
Speaker 2: the early form. There's many functionalities, much of the functionalities there,
Speaker 2: but there'll be much more coming in the throughout the
Speaker 2: rest of the year and at beyond.
Speaker 1: That's great. I love that there's things that I want
Speaker 1: to test out and do, but I'm waiting for like
Speaker 1: a guy interface that I can easily do it because
Speaker 1: I'm not a coder or anything like they're or a developer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think that's that's the goal as well,
Speaker 2: So I make things much more accessible even to a
Speaker 2: wide range of people just wanting to play around the
Speaker 2: blockchain and try test things out. So you're definitely the
Speaker 2: target target audience. The other thing that's exciting about us
Speaker 2: that we're working on is kind of things we can
Speaker 2: talk about, of course, is we've announced that out to
Speaker 2: us experienced a couple of new technology efforts we're pumped about.
Speaker 2: We have Raptor, which is the new consensus protocol being
Speaker 2: rolled out throughout twenty four and beyond. Raptor is going
Speaker 2: maybe just a brief history of consensus protocols. There's PBFT
Speaker 2: that was kind of from nineteen ninety nine define kind
Speaker 2: of the optimal latency possible and consensus. We've achieved that
Speaker 2: earlier this year. We're really proud of that, obviously, but
Speaker 2: it's not just about achieving the optimal latency. It's about
Speaker 2: how do we now make sure we shrink that entire
Speaker 2: user latency too as close as we can to get
Speaker 2: the optimal liency as possible, and we're going to be
Speaker 2: using Raptor to do that. It's going to actually support
Speaker 2: a lot of the unstructured world of the Internet much
Speaker 2: better to handle kind of downtime from nodes while achieving
Speaker 2: those high high throughputs and extreme liancy. There's major roleout's
Speaker 2: going to take place with that. We expect to see
Speaker 2: aliency decrease, throughput go up and kind of pushing us
Speaker 2: even beyond where we are as class leading to the
Speaker 2: next stage of that. There's also the work on block
Speaker 2: stmv two blockasting kind of the original protocol is something
Speaker 2: that we're really proud launched with aptos from day one.
Speaker 2: It's something that really DEFINEDES and made us unique from
Speaker 2: other networks. It is a form of dynamic parlism. So
Speaker 2: if you have the history of paralism in the space,
Speaker 2: you have kind of the sequential execution executing transactions one
Speaker 2: by one with ethereum. You have the static paralism which
Speaker 2: networks like Salona do, which you can defend defined dependees
Speaker 2: up front and kind of put more owners on the programmer,
Speaker 2: and the system uses the dependencies to then schedule transactions
Speaker 2: as concurrently as it can. And you have kind of
Speaker 2: this third wave of parallelism, which we call dynamic paralism,
Speaker 2: which can use those techniques but additionally has a runtime component.
Speaker 2: That runtime component means that you don't have to specify
Speaker 2: anything well, system will try to figure out for you
Speaker 2: what's to run in parallel and take care of about
Speaker 2: on the back end. And the dynamic paraism allows more
Speaker 2: concurrency in many cases. Uh. And so what we've seen
Speaker 2: and we've been excited about is people have been kind
Speaker 2: of quick to adopt even the blockst TM and their
Speaker 2: their technology stacks. We've seen it with Polygon, with dark Net,
Speaker 2: with with say and even I think Monad and many others.
Speaker 2: And so block Test in v two is going to
Speaker 2: be the next duration of that solving the ability to
Speaker 2: salve to scale to many many cores and machine and
Speaker 2: we see the trend hardware trend is going to be
Speaker 2: many more cores on a validator. That's just the kind
Speaker 2: of way that More's law is progressing. And it's been
Speaker 2: going that way for a little while. So going from
Speaker 2: MADI machine having say thirty two cores today going into
Speaker 2: sixty four, one hundred twenty cores two and fifty six cores,
Speaker 2: we want to take advantage of all that hardware, and
Speaker 2: blockist v two is designed specifically to do that. The
Speaker 2: last area that we're really excited about from infrasturcer standpoints
Speaker 2: moved to I think I talked to us some of
Speaker 2: the high there, but we we we want to build
Speaker 2: something that is kind of almost the endgame for Web
Speaker 2: three developers. It's definitely a challenge for what three developers
Speaker 2: today compared to the traditional programming they're used to. And
Speaker 2: if you code in Rust or if you code in
Speaker 2: C PUS plus or C or Java, all these kind
Speaker 2: of traditional languages. You have so many tools available to you,
Speaker 2: you have so much functionality available to the language it
Speaker 2: self has evolved to support what programmers need in terms
Speaker 2: of data structures, in terms of program interfaces, and so
Speaker 2: move to is designed to kind of be that really
Speaker 2: accessible but yet safe and secure and performance what three
Speaker 2: development environment for you. It will include things like dynamic
Speaker 2: dispatch that is safe. It will make sure we support
Speaker 2: the form of verification that ensure the initial there of
Speaker 2: safety on top of your protocols. We're building out a
Speaker 2: VM that will rival you know, all the modern you
Speaker 2: know vms that exist in the in the current Internet world,
Speaker 2: and all these things will add up to something I
Speaker 2: think that's a true delight for web developed Web three
Speaker 2: developers to code with.
Speaker 1: Wow, every you guys got a lot of full plate
Speaker 1: on your road map, but it's exciting and I definitely
Speaker 1: want to have you back on as these things go
Speaker 1: to you know, live and production and so forth. Really
Speaker 1: excited about that e Hong Kong stable coin on apt toss.
Speaker 1: That really picks my interest. But I know we're running
Speaker 1: up on time, so let's hit some wrap up questions here. First,
Speaker 1: if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, honestly, I feel like Web three can be
Speaker 2: that next version of the metaverse, or like a very
Speaker 2: strong base for it. I would love to see. I
Speaker 2: would love to see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, aptosts become that m HM and rapid fire. Questions
Speaker 1: favorite free Oh Japanese, favorite musician or band.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'll just say nineties rap Favorite movie, Oh, tough
Speaker 2: fun right now? Interstellar? Probably favorite book? Oh, my gosh,
Speaker 2: I haven't read a book in a long time. I'll skipf.
Speaker 1: And when you're not working at aptoss, what are you
Speaker 1: doing for fun?
Speaker 2: Oh? As is the fun for me? Spoken like a.
Speaker 1: True entrepreneur and development.
Speaker 2: It's time with my kids and my wife for sure.
Speaker 1: Avery. Like I said, I gotta have you back on.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited about this stuff you guys are working on.
Speaker 1: But thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2: It's my pleasure. Tony