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#43 - Decentralization, Polkadot & AI: How Switzerland’s Crypto Valley Shapes Web3’s Future
29 Plays22 days ago
Bill is the Director of Education and Governance Initiatives at the Web3 Foundation. Kori is the Chief of Staff & Strategic Growth Advisor at Parity Technologies, driving strategic initiatives for Polkadot’s ecosystem growth.
Switzerland’s Decentralized Governance Model
Bill highlighted Zug (or “Crypto Valley”) as a hub for blockchain projects like Ethereum and Web3 Foundation, attributing its appeal to flexible local regulations and a culture of direct democracy. Switzerland’s cantonal system allows cities and states to set their own laws, creating an environment where experimentation thrives. Kori noted Zug’s emergence as a crypto epicenter since 2017, hosting conferences and startups that leverage Switzerland’s decentralized ethos.
This model mirrors blockchain principles: decision-making through referenda ensures transparency, contrasting sharply with centralized systems. Bill drew parallels to Polkadot’s on-chain governance, emphasizing accountability and community input.
Polkadot’s Vision and Governance
Polkadot’s architecture took center stage, with Bill explaining its relay chain and parachain structure. Unlike monolithic blockchains, Polkadot enables interoperable, specialized chains secured by a shared network. This design, he noted, solves scalability and fragmentation issues plaguing ecosystems like Ethereum.
Kori emphasized Polkadot’s use-case agnosticism, supporting applications from DeFi to gaming. Bill highlighted governance innovations like proxy accounts and time-delayed transactions, which mitigate risks like hacks or errors. Both stressed Polkadot’s open-source ethos.
Challenges in Blockchain Accessibility
The conversation shifted to onboarding challenges. Bill acknowledged the overwhelming complexity for newcomers, urging curiosity and vertical-specific exploration (e.g., DeFi, gaming). Kori advocated focusing on Web3’s broader vision—decentralizing power and ownership—rather than technical minutiae.
User experience remains a hurdle. Bill cited Polkadot’s social recovery systems and proxies as steps toward user-friendly solutions. Both agreed that abstracting technical complexity (e.g., account abstraction) is critical for mass adoption.
AI and Web3: Opportunities and Risks
Kori raised concerns about AI centralization, advocating for Web3’s decentralized frameworks to ensure transparency and accountability. Bill contrasted AI’s “hallucinations” with blockchain’s immutability, proposing hybrid use cases (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs to verify training data).
The pair critiqued AI’s ethical pitfalls, such as biased algorithms and data monopolies. Kori stressed cross-industry collaboration, while Bill envisioned blockchain as a counterbalance to centralized AI control, ensuring verifiable processes.
Innovative Projects
Bill spotlighted Acurast, a decentralized compute network repurposing idle mobile devices for efficient, low-cost processing. Kori highlighted Mythical Games, a Web3 gaming leader migrating to Polkadot, citing its NFL Rivals and FIFA partnerships as proof of scalable blockchain gaming.
Upcoming Polkadot upgrades were also discussed. Bill teased Polkadot 2.0, featuring elastic scaling and faster block times.
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This podcast is fuelled by Algorithmic Cryptocurrency Trading Platform Aesir. Use code AESIRPOT20 at checkout for 20% off on all subscription plans, forever at aesircrypto.com
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Transcript
Zug: The Crypto Hub
00:00:08
Speaker
Yeah, so you were saying that it's like Web3 Foundation, ah Ethereum Foundation foundation are all are both based in in the city for that specific reason. Zug, you call it?
00:00:19
Speaker
Yeah, Zug. Z-U-G. It's actually the German word for train, which is always fun. When I'm on the train, it's like, you dieser Zug goes to Zug. Yeah, it's like... Yeah.
00:00:30
Speaker
Yeah. So just, I mean, it's a coincidence that it means train. It's like from an older, older word, but yeah. yeah i was also going to say there are a lot of conferences also that take place in ZOOC. I know the CV Labs is also down there. So it's like, i think for years, ZOOC has been a real, um real hub of innovation within crypto.
00:00:46
Speaker
ah They were quite early on that, early on that train, you know, not to come back from to your train comment, Bill, but yeah, Bill, do you know when, when, when ZOOC became ZOOC in terms of Crypto Valley ZOOC?
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, so so really like, you know, ah Ethereum Foundation ah started up here in 2014, 2014 or early 2015. And ah Bitcoin Suisse actually before that.
00:01:09
Speaker
ah And really like in 2017, I would say is really when it came into its own. Like when we had that, that lat what was that, day I guess two cycles ago at this point. um The 2017 cycle, ah things were really starting to happen here in Zug.
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah. So, yeah I'm happy, like, you I know i can start discussing this when we're doing the actual
Switzerland's Decentralization and Web3
00:01:30
Speaker
podcast. I have lots to say about the history of Zug and Web3 Foundation being here and and and everything.
00:01:37
Speaker
Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, the floor is all yours if you want to take it. um'm um this is This is super interesting. Like I was saying before, I didn't realize that Switzerland had different laws depending on the town or the territory. And I just think that's that's so cool that it kind of allowed for this aggregation of of like real decentralized web-free companies to start operating in Sook because of it.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the amazing things about, you know, like Zug is a confederacy, you know so basically like, you know, I think of it as like the US under the Articles of Confederation, where each individual state and each individual city has a lot of power ah to to make the rules. that they Actually, i find it really interesting that there is a president that most people don't know who the president is.
00:02:20
Speaker
ah You know, it's... ah If you're not really paying attention to politics, you don't know the president because there's essentially a council that runs the country. They have limited power and the presidency just just rotates amongst the people in the council every year.
00:02:35
Speaker
Right. So is presidency more like a former role rather than an actual role with with any authoritative power? Like, would would you say it's the same as, i guess, in the UK? Obviously, we have the royal family and we have, you know, ah kings and queens and all that.
00:02:47
Speaker
But the like they don't really have any executive power over the state. So so there is there is some power. you know they do there is You know, there is a president, but essentially the president is a first among equals. so ah So you know he he or she is still in charge of the... the the things that she used to be here, or she used to be in charge of, ah but also has this sort of ceremonial role because, you know most countries, they want to say like, are who's the president of this country? I want to meet with the president.
00:03:16
Speaker
Well, we have a president, but, you know, it's not exactly a figurehead. you know they're still part of this federal council, but they don't really have much additional power.
00:03:27
Speaker
same yo z z has a fed excuse me ah Switzerland has a federal city. It does not have a capital city. So like you know people talk about Bern as the capital city, but really it's technically not a capital city. It's just where the federal ah government offices are.
00:03:43
Speaker
they they Switzerland has really taken decentralization to as much of a degree you can, I think, in ah in the modern age. And I think that just fits so well with with crypto. Oh, yeah, 100%. I was just going there. I was just going to say that how I like the fact how much I like the fact that the president, you know, that the the role of the president exists, but you don't really know who the person is. Similar to, oh, we know, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto existed, but we don't know who the person is, right?
00:04:10
Speaker
Yeah, you don't but you don't need to know, right? You don't need to know. Honestly, you know i understand you know in in some countries that i bet I won't name, like the president is a very loud presence and you know know a lot about their personal life.
00:04:22
Speaker
um But you don't really need to know. I don't need to know you if Satoshi Nakamoto was married. He made Bitcoin. He set stuff up. you know And it's similar here. It's like the ah yeah The president is doing doing the work, ah but on a day-to-day basis, I don't need to know about that.
Blockchain Governance Models
00:04:39
Speaker
And I think, again, thiss there's a lot of like corollaries with blockchain about your work can be done without having specific entities not needing to know who the person is behind a specific account, et cetera.
00:04:50
Speaker
You know, not not wanting to hijack the conversation here or any of the questions here, but Bill, you know, I've never had a chance to ask you. You work so closely with polka dot governance. I wonder what that's like living in such a decentralized place on such a decentralized protocol and what that's like just like as just living amongst that. Like was that when when it coming to ZOOC, was that like like what what's that like living living between those, you know?
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm only half living in that. I'm not yet a so Swiss citizen. um So I'm still an American citizen, so I can't vote, but i you know I'm very ah aware of what's happening. ah One thing that i think is very interesting, and that's a great parallel with Polkadot, is the the referenda.
00:05:28
Speaker
So Switzerland is very famously, has direct ah direct democracy. So most major decisions are made just a direct vote. Just, all right, what percentage of people want to do X and what percentage of people want to do not X?
00:05:43
Speaker
And so you see you all the time, ads for specific referenda, for specific things, which I think is actually incredibly interesting. You know when i go back to the US, I see lots of ah so you know political signs. And I assume it's like this the UK. know. I've never lived there, so I've never noticed.
00:06:03
Speaker
um But like, vote for this person. Vote for that person. This person is great. That person is great. And here you see like Here is a um a law we want to pass.
00:06:14
Speaker
so So right now, Dzog is a small town. There's a lot of discussion on whether or not there should be this this new huge building, this 80-meter-high skyscraper. And so you see signs saying, all right, you ah no to having you this huge huge building overshadowing the rest of our small places versus like, yo yes, we need more living space.
00:06:36
Speaker
I think it's just such a better way doing of of living, right? Of like saying, all right, here's a particular decision that needs to be made. Not, oh, I trust this person or someone from this party versus that person or someone from that party. I think it'ss i think it's healthier and it's it's better for democracy. and 100% yeah and it promotes like the what the actual regulation is what the actual law is what you stand to gain or lose if you vote for or against it rather than for a person I haven't really like I live in London and I haven't really seen too many billboard ads you know promoting a member of a certain party over another but I think and I could be dead wrong but I think because London's such a like ah busy town where everyone's just so busy you know in their own little bubble
00:07:21
Speaker
I don't think too many Londoners care deeply about about this kind of issue. So therefore, we don't really see too many political ads and stuff. On the other side, I'm originally from Romania, and I can tell you that's a whole different story, right? Like Romanian politics and and passing laws, like you've gave me the example in Switzerland.
00:07:39
Speaker
I feel like Romania has taken that that idea and just flipped it completely around. So... instead of informing citizens about, hey, there's this new law that we're looking to pass.
00:07:50
Speaker
We need your guys' feedback. um There's been more than one, on more than one occasion, the Romanian government passed bills at like 3 a.m. at night, right? When no one's awake or like on a Sunday at 3 a.m. So like you wake up and like nothing's changed. It's not being reported anywhere. Nobody knows about it.
00:08:07
Speaker
But like they're literally working in the dark to make sure that they pass laws that are advantageous to the current government or to the current people in the government without the general public knowing about it. um And obviously, that's a huge issue.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah. and you know another you know another great thing about you know on-chain governance right is that it's all very open, very visible. You can see what's happening. you know ah you know with With Polkadot governance, there's you know periods of time you can't do things quickly. You have to announce it before it it comes it into comes into effect and before people can vote on it.
00:08:39
Speaker
ah So this is one of the things I think, you know, like blockchain governance, and your blockchains in general are so much more useful than just what they're being used for now. Like I see so many opportunities in governments. You know, again, I'm not familiar with Romanian government. government but based Oh, I can tell you more about it.
00:08:56
Speaker
yeah we can discover Based on what you said, right, like I can totally see like being able to. See ahead of time, all right, what are the possible conflicts of interest? What are the benefits and drawbacks of this? Having time to discuss it, not having a past at 3 a.m. without anybody knowing about it.
00:09:13
Speaker
Like blockchains are amazing at this stuff.
00:09:17
Speaker
there are so many examples to draw from, from the real world in terms of different governance examples. I think, Bill, you're you're much more, ah you know, you know much more about this this than I do based on how closely you were with polka dot governance. But I'm thinking, as we've been talking about that, I was thinking about the U.S. also as an American. But even in the U.S., s we have some really bespoke and different models and thinking about New York City recently went towards things like ranked choice voting for local elections or when we do things like the caucus system. Before I worked in blockchain companies,
00:09:43
Speaker
I had a brief period of time in politics where worked on one of the US presidential elections and learning about the Iowa caucus system and how intricate it is as a system, how mathematical in terms of how many votes are going to come out of a particular, ah you know, voting establishment, how many people go in, how many, you know, just a whole, all the dynamics around that. It's quite intricate and quite complex. And that's really neat to be working in a field. I think with Web3 in general, we can think critically about governance systems and really take from these like real life examples.
00:10:12
Speaker
Oh, yeah. and And I feel like it also gives you the speed that we just simply didn't have, that the speed of iteration that we didn't have as ah you know as a society before. like It used to take us how long? like One generation, two generations before to figure out, is this governance system? Does this work?
00:10:29
Speaker
like You look at that that piece of paper, right you look at communism on paper, Fantastic, guys. Let's get after it. 1930s. We all want to jump on that train, right? And then communism comes and it's an absolute shit show all over the world. it will Most parts of the world. China's apparently been able to kind of make it work, but not at some you know cost of of freedom and you know privacy and all that stuff.
00:10:49
Speaker
But it doesn't work. But it took us like a really long time. And he's really he's brought like a almost like a modern dark age for a little while in Eastern Europe, right? Like you can actually test governance on chain. We've got so many chains and so many projects that are doing an amazing job. We've got obviously Polkadot. You've got um all these projects that have already proven that new forms of of governance exist and they are efficient.
00:11:15
Speaker
And they also have the underlining technology to back it up. And I've said this before, but I don't see any reason why voting shouldn't be on chain. Like it's such an important thing that you want to make sure we use the best systems possible to record and store that information. And it is not corruptible by by anyone. And I don't see a better way of doing that. Like the technology is there.
00:11:38
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think the the problem with voting on chain is not so much the the technology itself, because that is an amazing thing, especially, and you know, if you have zero knowledge proofs or, you know, other ways of you really hiding your vote, um then because there there are reasons, you know,
00:11:54
Speaker
I will say in polka dot governance, you know people being able to see what I voted on, sometimes it can be a little bit you know challenging, right? Because i do have you know one i do have an identity tied to my account. People say, well, why do you vote this? I think you should vote yes on this.
00:12:08
Speaker
So I can totally see why you know we're still working on the user experience to you know develop develop that. ah But yeah, I think there are a lot of benefits to having you provable votes, right?
00:12:20
Speaker
ah you know it instead of just you know like you know papers or you know closed source systems that people you know tap buttons on. Yeah, PayPal has always been a weird one because like what what's there to stop me? And and I didn't know this since seeing as you're both from the US, s I didn't know this up until recently that not all states require an ID to vote. And I'm like, so so so like how does that work then?
00:12:43
Speaker
like do can i Can I literally go behind the wheels of a car, drive to another state and vote again? And the answer is probably yes, because no one cares and no one checks. And if they don't take my ID...
00:12:54
Speaker
So I can say coming from Pennsylvania, which is one of those states that an ID was ah not required, you know at least it was not when I when i left six years ago. um But essentially you say you have to go to your specific ah voting ah area. It was called a war in Pittsburgh and give them your address of of where you live.
00:13:13
Speaker
And they can say, okay, well, this person who has lived there ah yeah has has voted or not. So while ah theoretically, like there are some, and you know usually I know the person who's behind, you know its these these wards are relatively small. It's a few hundred people. right And so there there is there I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm not saying there's no room for improvement, but it's not just like, hey, yeah, i'm ah I live here. Let me vote. like there There are some ah checks involved.
00:13:41
Speaker
yeah And that's part of the initial voter registration as well, right? Like sending in the documentation when you move to a place to say that I'm part of, to to Bill's point, like, you know, I am part of this area in which I will be voting. You go, it's checked up against the list.
00:13:52
Speaker
um I think, yeah, but yeah I've lived in in, when I was in the States, same same kind of situation. Okay, yeah, because we didn't have it up until relatively recently as well in in the UK either. and I think it's only been a short amount of time where that's become a requirement now.
00:14:09
Speaker
um Which means that it's it is improving as a system. And I'm sure that in time it will get to a point where everything will be on the blockchain. I think maybe people need to...
Navigating the Crypto Space
00:14:19
Speaker
become a bit more comfortable with it as a technology and it's become like a day-to-day thing as mundane as the internet or the phone or like something that you don't really think about and that's I think well where chain abstraction is going to come and and do a lot of great work there because I think I also said this before, so I apologize to anyone listening if if you hear me saying it again, but being a new a new like crypto enthusiast and trying to enter this space, I feel like it's it's quite complicated to figure out where like where do I want to spend my time? What do I want to learn about? There are hundreds of choices, even hundreds of centralized exchanges, like how the hell am I going to navigate this this really complex space, right?
00:15:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, i you know i've I've been involved in the blockchain world for for quite a while, you know, back when it was basically, okay, you know, Bitcoin or or Bitcoin. And
00:15:14
Speaker
and ah I do think it's it's gotten more challenging, right? Because there's tons of different blockchains out there, tons of different ecosystems, tons of different trade-offs. ah that that that all of these make.
00:15:26
Speaker
And so the only, i mean, I think this is just a hard problem, right? Like that when you go into it, like I can't say like, okay, you as much as I want to say like, yeah, you know, Polkadot is the greatest blockchain because I work on it. Everyone should just look at Polkadot and that's it.
00:15:39
Speaker
um There's, I think really the thing that I would recommend for people that are coming into the space is just to be curious and be ready, right? You know, for for that. that there are going to be and there are going to be a lot of different chains, a lot of different verticals.
00:15:55
Speaker
you know I would recommend if you're interested in in something, you know if you're interested in finance, right there's DeFi. If you're interested in ai there's lots of AI stuff happening. umchains If you're interested in gaming, there's lots of like no blockchain games out there.
00:16:08
Speaker
And you know the particular ecosystem as well, you know you should be curious and see like, you know, Hey, all right. What is, what are the the trade-offs and advantages of Solana versus Ethereum versus various L2s on Ethereum? Like it is, it is a huge world, but I would say just, you know be open to and and curious and like, you're be willing to try things out and sort of realize it is this huge world. And just because you're your first experience, because the first,
00:16:36
Speaker
You know alphabetically, the first letter you saw when you went to an exchange and first decided to try stuff out, you just say, all right, well, this is me. ah you You really should, you know, check things out and figure out like, you know what works for you and what for whatever you're trying to do, what are the advantages and disadvantages of it.
00:16:52
Speaker
I think also zooming out a little bit. One thing i always find when I'm talking to folks who are very like not within blockchain or not within Web3 is how how easy it is for folks who are uninitiated to start asking questions really early about how it technically works.
00:17:07
Speaker
When it's like i always try to really reroute people to what is it trying to do? Because you can sit down and you can really talk about how these blockchains operate off the bat. And I feel like you lose your audience so quickly and it just feels so overwhelming um because those are very natural questions to ask. What is blockchain? How does it work? And they're great questions too. But I find for the for the folks in mind mostly talk to, it's thinking, out what what are we trying to build? We're trying to build a more democratic internet. We're trying to you know enable systems to work better in these ways. Like here's the big vision of what we're trying to do and then talk about the how.
00:17:37
Speaker
um Because I think it's so easy to get lost in that. and i think we also have some, ah you know, it's it's I think again about that how we also have opportunities when we have things like the current market environment or we have things like when meme coins,
Blockchain's Societal Impact
00:17:48
Speaker
you know, explode. And those it can be great on ramps to be like, yes, I, you know, this is a I understand why this is the entry point, but let's really concentrate on the long term vision of what we're really trying to build, because it's it is it is an ambitious vision.
00:17:59
Speaker
um And it's one that I think people get really excited about. But that's often not the first interaction with that technology. Yeah, and very well said. I think the moment you start asking how it works, you need to be prepared for a really complicated answer.
00:18:13
Speaker
And it doesn't just stop with crypto, right? It goes anywhere. because Because I work i work in in engineering. I've done it for a while. And i can tell you on a high level how a laptop works. Like, okay, it's got a CPU and it's got a GPU and it's got a RAM. it Okay, but like if you're trying... if you're If I'm going to think through that question as to how a CPU works, I can tell you about the transistors, but I can't tell you how the transistors are put together or the machine that builds these transistors and how the hell are we getting to like three nanometers in size between those transistors.
00:18:44
Speaker
It's mad. Like I can't process any of that. Like if I go to the lowest level, right? um and and And I think operating on the assumption that there is some... information that you won't be aware of or that you won't know, it's fine. You should just be comfortable, you know, not knowing for a while because you can't know everything at once. It doesn't mean you should stop asking the question though.
00:19:07
Speaker
Absolutely. I think that's absolutely correct. And also it's like, I think because of the older reputation that blockchain, I think used to have, especially a couple of years ago, there's the idea that the more I understand about the technology, um the more comfortable i'm going to be, which in some ways is is really true. Like once you, once you take the time to truly understand it, I think there's a lot of security that comes from that.
00:19:25
Speaker
um because you're able to answer some pretty so some questions which, um you know, when when we talk about things like attacks, we talk about security, or we talk about like, is this a scam? It's like, once you really start learning how some of these work, I think it's like it's a huge, it can be make you feel really secure.
00:19:38
Speaker
But unless you're going to do that work, I don't know if that actually gets rid of the underlying hesitation you might have, which again, I think is why we have to talk in terms of more of what what is it What are we trying to do? What are we trying to build? What's the vision? And then also, of course, tailoring that to an audience. If you're talking to a gamer, it's really exciting to talk about the applications of blockchain technology to the to like the gaming vertical. Or we're talking we talk about, you know, the friend friends of mine who come from finance.
00:20:01
Speaker
easy to talk about how blockchain can really help with with payments infrastructures or friends of mine in medicine talking about things like how this can help with supply chain around things like vaccines. Like there's so many, like the the the what we're trying to do is so interesting.
00:20:14
Speaker
and It's really important, i think, to to really orient strongly towards that to make that case for that vision. um So yeah, it's it's it's it's rich it's really rich it's a really rich question, I think, of like how we get more people kind of interested and engaged and really can see the relevance of it because it is so broadly relevant to so many parts of society.
00:20:31
Speaker
And just because you understand it, just because you may understand it doesn't mean that you still can't be taken advantage of. like and Very true. you you're prop You're probably aware of it recently because it was a huge a huge article that was written just a few days ago on...
00:20:46
Speaker
right, Russell Brick got out of jail, he got a pardon. And and I think, you know, but maybe the the opinion there is is a bit mixed, but I think it's a good thing because I don't think you can write illegal code. I don't think your point, you point you know, show me the file, show me the line of code that is illegal there, right? I feel it's, but it's a complex conversation, which we can also get into. But what I wanted to to mention is that Within a week or so of him getting out, I think he had a few exchanges, donated some crypto to him to kind of help him get back on his feet.
00:21:19
Speaker
um And he started with probably someone's help, um a a pool for a ROS coin on a Solana or a Solana aggregate. Right.
00:21:30
Speaker
And. While initializing the pool, he put the wrong amount in and a meth bot instantly saw that and virtually caused Ross a loss of $12 million. dollars um And that's the guy that built Silk Road. That is the guy that built the world's first, let's call it what it is, drug marketplace.
00:21:53
Speaker
um right like It was at the time where people didn't really know what to do with crypto. It was at the time where everyone was looking, okay, what can we do with this? Oh, it's anonymized and secure. Let us buy drugs online then. Let's bring this whole business into the 21st century. was, I think...
00:22:08
Speaker
it was i think whether you agree or you accept ah you know what what is built or not, I think that kind of the the use case was absolutely monumental at the time because he was working with technology where the infrastructure was not nowhere near as the point where we have it today. it's It's much easier to scale and build stuff today than it was back in the day.
00:22:28
Speaker
So this guy is, for all intents and purposes, an old timer. he got scammed due to a mistake of his own in in in crypto in 2025. and And that's kind of hilarious, but also scary at the same time.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's i mean that's a that's a great story that brings up sort of two points of crypto is, you know, one, just how absolutely unforgiving it is when they're when you do make a mistake like this, you know, when there's a bug or a misclick or something like it there is no going back. so you have to be very, very careful.
00:23:01
Speaker
um But what I think actually, you know, what what you mentioned is like, you know, all right so so Silk Road in 2011, 2012, you know, that was like essentially, you know, the pinnacle of commerce with Bitcoin, right? yeah That was the most advanced stuff out there.
00:23:18
Speaker
and What I love about this industry is how fast it evolves, right? Is that, you MevBots, like I was trying to like imagine like, you know, someone even thinking about this and in 2011 or 2012, like,
00:23:33
Speaker
ah yeah someone that's been out of the game for whatever, 10, 10 years, so ah you know, this, this is an entirely new world. It's like, you know, ah you know, again, I'm not saying this, at anything bad to to Ross. I'm saying this is just about how fast, you know, everything has evolved in our ecosystem. It's like, you know, someone from the 1800s, you know, ah trying to start up a newspaper business in 2005, right.
00:23:57
Speaker
You know, they, they come out and they're like, Oh, and then, you know, wait Wait a second, people are are reading this you know online for free? like he and where where I need to go kill some whales to get more ink. i don't know I don't know. 100%. Yeah, you're working there with a carburetor engine and then someone else is just putting rockets on a car. I'm like, what the hell, man? Yeah, exactly. so it's a Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's the but this goes back like at what we were talking about before about like the user experience of of crypto, ah the the absolute, what's what's the word? Yeah.
00:24:31
Speaker
no to intolerance for for for mistakes. And it's very easy to make mistakes by the end user, even experienced end users. um you I think this is something that you we're working on, that you know account abstraction. you know like We have various abstraction tools in Polkadot. you know Ethereum is is coming up with it. with I don't think they've they've done their, I forget what which yeah EIP it is, for their account abstraction.
00:24:53
Speaker
um but built in. But you and I know other other ah teams like like Lexo are also working on this. like I think we're like ah're we're working on figuring out ways to solve this, but we definitely have a ways to go in terms of you know user interaction and ensuring that pressing the wrong button doesn't wipe out your net worth.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah, that'd be nice.
00:25:16
Speaker
Or like a having a reverse button. And that'd be great on some of this stuff. Yeah. Go back in time. Yeah. But mean, this is of things that that that can happen, right? You like I think of like, there there are ways to prevent this. Like, you i think in Polkadot, we have time delay proxies so that anytime you issue a transaction that you can say, okay, well, it actually isn't going to happen for however many blocks, right? So maybe you have set something up so that you get an email every time this is going to happen. And then if, you know, like whoa whoa i didn't i didn't do a transfer or like this isn't what i meant to do you can cancel it like you know this is something that that exists we have these these these sort of things or or social recovery is another sort of you know concept of abstraction where like if i lose my private key i could have set up basically have like you know three out of five of my friends verify that like yes this is this is bill and give me a new account and have it automatically transfer uh the dot over
00:26:07
Speaker
So like all of these exists, but it's sort of like yeah there's that famous, I think it's Bruce Sterling or William Gibson quote. like the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. Right. You know there's right.
00:26:18
Speaker
This does exist. Not a lot of people are are using it yet. It's not quite as user friendly as we'd like it to be. But there definitely are. You know, there are solutions to it ah
Polkadot's Evolution
00:26:28
Speaker
out there. It's just really, know, getting people to use them.
00:26:33
Speaker
One of the things that I loved about, well, still do, about Polkadot was last cycle when I was looking into Polkadot, when I really got into Polkadot, which was about 2020, 2021, I looked at the entire ecosystem and I thought, wow, this is such a cool idea that no one gets.
00:26:54
Speaker
like It's fantastic, but the wider audience doesn't understand it. It's too far it is too far ahead of it for its time. Now, five years later, i no longer think that Polkadot, it's a concept that is too far ahead of its time. I think it's actually at the right time now.
00:27:10
Speaker
I think people understand the value proposition. I think people understand the offering. And I think it's had enough time to mature and to educate at least a subset of users into its um into its actual use cases.
00:27:25
Speaker
Which i think is fantastic. Yeah. Do you mind if I just spend a second just for your listeners to like sort of understand ah yeah the the basics of Polkadot? ah Yeah, i go for it. Yeah. so So the basic idea is that there is a relay chain, which is essentially a a layer zero, that users can then build their own blockchains that are built on top of this blockchain. So similar to L2s on Ethereum.
00:27:46
Speaker
The big difference is is that this chain was originally meant for L2s. You can't run smart contracts on the relay chain. It's not what it was meant for. It's just meant for these other chains. And we have this Polkadot SDK that allows you to build these.
00:27:59
Speaker
But the big difference is that they're automatically secured. There's no centralized sequencers. the it's It's all built in and decentralized. And you can interact across chains, you know calling smart contracts from one to another, sending assets from one to another you very easily and in a built-in way. So developers don't have to think about how to do this on their own or you know go through the the the you know the beacon chain or relay chain ah you know first and have the assets go. it's It's all built in to be a whole network of connected blockchains.
00:28:29
Speaker
And this this is the vision I sort of fell fell in love with and you know why I ended up working at Web3 Foundation. When I saw this, they' like, wow, it's like anyone can build their own chain. ah you know There's the famous ah talk by gav Gavin Wood, our founder, one of our founders, yeah he pulled out a a laptop and then by the end of the talk, he had a brand new blockchain running.
00:28:50
Speaker
you know Just do it. A new laptop out of the cellophane, out of the box. And then yeah by the end of the talk, boom, there's a new blockchain that could be connected to Polkadot. And so I think, ah yeah, we see like you other chains are moving toward this, right? you Ethereum has, you know for a while, their roadmap has been, let's get L2s, but it's very fragmented. There's lots of different L2s that aren't very compatible. they aren't compatible with each other, often have centralized sequencers, et yeah your know Cosmos has been moving more towards the Polkadot system. you know They have their own blockchains, but they're saying, all we can have some sort of shared security.
00:29:22
Speaker
so So I think you're right is that you know like this Polkadot vision was very far ahead of its time. And now yeah the the general idea, Polkadot obviously has evolved, but this general idea ah has has continued. I think it was very far-reaching.
00:29:38
Speaker
you know Back when the Polkadot paper was published in 2016, we have continued to sort you know you know evolve this vision, but others are now seeing this vision right and and say, oh, right, yes, this is now what we need to do in order to scale and do so in a decentralized way.
00:29:56
Speaker
I think also the fact that it's open source and that people can contribute and people can can use this technology as and when they like, ah you know, without restrictions is super important.
00:30:08
Speaker
um Because it also positions, you know, obviously someone like Polkadot in a very advantageous spot where you can act as this infrastructure layer for anyone that might want to, you know, build a blockchain.
00:30:18
Speaker
um And that's kind of what you get out of being an open source organization, which, you know, I do think there's there's a significant amount of of advantage in doing that. I'm surprised that no many or other industries approach it in this way. A lot of them are like profit first, money first, quick, you know, as much as possible, as quick as possible, and then forget about the long term in this case.
00:30:40
Speaker
like And Just to have a product that is at the base, at the like low infrastructure layer for all the other chains, that's massive value in there. like You've already tipped the scale and gained more advantages by being an open source organization than not.
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah, and this substrate, the Polkadot SDK is you know is open source and it is used by you have the dozens of parachains, these rollups on the and on the Polkadot system, but also used for lots of other systems out there.
00:31:13
Speaker
um you know Like ah Midnight, which is one of the, I forget what they call them, ah but subnets, I guess, like these these these side chains on Cardano ah built with substrate. There are ah projects built on Near with substrate. Avail is built with substrate.
00:31:28
Speaker
And you know the nice thing is when those, there's several nice things about that, you know that these other teams are using this SDK, that means there are more people that understand the Polkadot SDK. Those chains can also very easily become part of the Polkadot ecosystem.
00:31:42
Speaker
you know ah If they're built with substrate, they're it's sort of you know ready-made. They can just sort of you know plug and play, go in. you know BitTensor, another big one ah built with with the Polkadot SDK substrate.
00:31:53
Speaker
so there's lots, I think, you're by us being open source and not saying like, okay, you ah you're getting locked in ah to Polkadot if you use this. you know We've said, right, anyone can build build their own chain with this.
00:32:04
Speaker
But they then when they see the benefits of Polkadot, they can join. i think that is that's a very useful thing, right? We also have you know many more developers now available. ah Because lots of people are learning how to use substrate. They're learning how to build essentially on Polkadot, even if they're not directly building on Polkadot.
00:32:21
Speaker
um But the more of those that we can you know get in, obviously, make it easier for them, you the better it is for the Polkadot ecosystem as a whole. And that's how you get that's how you you make sure you future-proof the solution for all new clients and new businesses looking to you know create a blockchain of their own.
00:32:38
Speaker
um But I guess the limitation remains for the existing, already established, big blockchains. um What are Polkadot's plans to increase you know interaction between chains that are not natively um
00:32:54
Speaker
integrated with Polkadot? Yeah, so so there are a couple of things that that we do. So one is we have several bridges. So for instance, you know Interlay is essentially a bridge to Bitcoin. It doesn't act exactly like a bridge, ah but essentially it's a bridge. You can get Bitcoin on and off the yeah on Polkadot in a decentralized way.
00:33:12
Speaker
Snow Bridge also for Ethereum, for getting assets you know on and off Ethereum, again, in a decentralized way. ah We have a Hyper Bridge, which is a a multi-chain bridge. It works for lots of different ah ecosystems.
00:33:25
Speaker
Again, in you know a very decentralized way, we do have a couple of centralized bridges, but you know our focus has always been on decentralization. So you know I mentioned Web3 Foundation based here in Switzerland.
00:33:37
Speaker
yeah We are, in German, we're a Stiftung. Like we have a specific goal and, you know, like, you know our business, you know, we're not like a business, you know, your goal is to make a profit. Our goal is to bring about the decentralized Internet.
00:33:49
Speaker
So when I look at like, all right, what am I supposed to do? you know, me, Bill Laboon, as an employee of Web3 Foundation or or Corey Higgins, we are supposed to bring about the decentralized Internet. And so this is what we're doing. This is what we're focusing on is helping to build a system, Polkadot, that is decentralized. You know, huge, you know ah incredibly high Nakamoto coefficient, know which means essentially a lot of different entities would have to coordinate to try to bring down Polkadot.
00:34:16
Speaker
um Everything we do when we're building it, we want to make sure that it's decentralized. It's super easy to just say, like, all I'm going to have a database. Right. And then, you know, I've got a computer back here. OK, that's where that's running. It's super, super fast because everything's on one computer.
00:34:31
Speaker
Right. that But yes, that's that's super easy. But that's not what we're here for. Right. yeah We are here to build something decentralized. So our interactions with other chains, as well as you know everything else we do in terms of governance, in terms of open sourcing, ah in terms of education you know and and reaching out.
00:34:48
Speaker
is meant to help further decentralization of the internet. so So in terms of like you know how we're doing it with bridges, like I said, yeah I gave you a few examples, but this is sort of our guiding philosophy is decentralization.
Web3 Vision and Decentralization
00:35:02
Speaker
That is very well put. um I like that. and And I feel, yeah, 100% that is true. that Is that at all related to... of the the name Web3 Foundation, is it at all related to the original idea of Web3? I think it's called the Web3 is being referred to as the semantic web.
00:35:20
Speaker
But then i always I always had a bit of a like difficulty grasping what the guy meant by that, if you know what I'm saying. So it's the semantic web was was sometimes referred to as Web3.
00:35:32
Speaker
But Web3 actually refers to what Gavin Wood, one of our founders, said previously, define how he defined web three, which is essentially a an internet where people, you know, can own their own data.
00:35:45
Speaker
ah So this, so actually, yeah you know, this term web three, like it know was first, actually, if you look up the, you know, do a quick Google for web three, Gavin Wood, ah you can see the original article, but basically, you know, an internet that, you know,
00:36:00
Speaker
Users control their own data. They decide who or what they're going to share things with, you know to to share things that they, you know provably share things that are that are that are true. They can verify that this user did it or conversely hide what they want to do.
00:36:13
Speaker
um To have applications that you know the code is not just open source, but even um you're openly executed. that you can see like, you know, this is the code that I'm running. you know, even if your bank is open source, you don't really know that it's running the code that you you saw on GitHub, right? Oh yeah. You're approving it. But when you call an Ethereum smart contract or you interact with a Polkadot parachain, you can look and see, oh yes, this is the code that will execute when when I do X, Y, and Z.
00:36:41
Speaker
And you other there's there's broader aspects to to this, you know things like cryptography and being able to communicate privately with each other and ah ah you know and doing other things you know privately.
00:36:53
Speaker
being able to you know like prove that you own something, you all this is part of this broader Web3 mandate. ah yeah So Chris Dixon actually, i think, you'll put it really well where Web1 was read, Web2 was read-write, and Web3 is read-write-own.
00:37:08
Speaker
um I mean, if if you have to put things into six words, then I think that's a really good, I think it's a little more nuanced than that, but I think that's a really good explanation of where we are with Web3, and I think a really good explanation of what we're trying to do at Web3 Foundation.
00:37:22
Speaker
What was really interesting to me was that ah so the creator of you know the World Wide Web Protocol, Tim Berners-Lee, he referred to it as the semantic web in Web3. But then since since he's done that, he hasn't really explored or wrote about or or kind of engaged in blockchain or decentralization.
00:37:44
Speaker
And it's obvious to me because ah I've been in this space for a while. so it's obvious to me that it's closer to a vision like Gavin Wood describes and like you described that it's about decentralization, about owning that data.
00:37:57
Speaker
And I was kind of surprised to see the guy that built the very protocol, which we all use today, like being completely kind of like hands off crypto and blockchain. And I'm like, How are you ignoring this, my guy? This is like so relevant to the thing that you did.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I can't i can't speak for for him specifically. um you know i mean this is But this is pretty common, right? ah That you you look back, this is like you know famously like you know like Albert Einstein, you know even though he like laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics, like never really believed in it.
00:38:27
Speaker
um you know It's like it was the next generation comes up. um So actually, i met with with Phil Zimmerman, who did PGP. ah um you know, like, you know absolutely, you know incredibly famous amongst cypherpunks. And, you know, was aware of blockchain, but he was not really digging into it on on a dangerous basis.
00:38:44
Speaker
And um yeah, but I think, so that's interesting, right You like people do this, they like sort of lay the foundations for for something new to come up. um And, you know I am sure that 20 or 30 years from now, there's going to be some new technology that's going to be absolutely amazing. And I just won't understand it.
00:39:02
Speaker
like just know i um I'm sure that's that's going to happen. you know My son already is, you know he's he says like memes and stuff that I don't understand. So I'm sure.
00:39:12
Speaker
This happens to all of us, right? it's And this is not to say anything bad about them. I'm not trying to be self-deprecating to myself. This is just you the way things are. It's like you know every generation is going to like you know produce something new, but that doesn't mean that that generation, like they have the final word on what it means to be a cypher pump, what it means to you know but build the internet.
Centralization Issues in Tech
00:39:35
Speaker
you know We're constantly building on it. And like I said, we're but when when i'm you know ah When I'm dead and gone, there's going to be you know like people are going to keep building on top of hopefully you like what we've created here as well.
00:39:46
Speaker
And like that's what I think is like actually really exciting about the future is that we're continuing to to build. Yeah, and enough in a way that we own the the data, our data and and the internet itself. And i feel to me that was always one of the important things about decentralization was this ownership aspect because yeah the internet, as is described in the 90s or the early 2000s, was a very different internet than the one we have today and the one we've had for about 20 years from now, right? Yeah.
00:40:19
Speaker
It's an internet that's owned by a handful of organizations and you can name them within a minute, right? Google owns 99% of the world's search traffic. AWS owns 50% plus of the world's computing traffic.
00:40:31
Speaker
um And a couple of other big media organizations throw them in. That's it. That is the internet. If those organizations go down, social media, it's gone. It's done. It's nowhere near the idea of I can exchange info with you.
00:40:44
Speaker
You're with me. And we create this cool place for ourselves to enjoy the freedom of information, freedom of expression, and all the cool things that tech can let us build. um I feel that we've seen social media, since web too, people have been trapped into these huge issues echo chambers that basically tell you how you should behave on the internet and what the internet is and isn't. And if you don't like it, well, fuck you, because all your friends are there. so what are you going to do?
00:41:11
Speaker
Where are you going to go? Right? All your content creators are on YouTube and all your favorite friends are on Facebook and Instagram and well, no favorite, even the ones you don't like are on there So, like, you've got nowhere to go. And and i don't I don't really use i don't use Facebook. I don't use Instagram. I do use Twitter. But I feel like we just need to own the the the footprint of of the internet. And we don't and we haven't for a long time.
00:41:40
Speaker
Well, I would say also, I mean, I would take that example and even just take it a little further. And this is both about um ownership, but also back to the idea of transparency and decentralization. So Bill and I were in Davos, um ah gosh, a couple of weeks ago around some of the conversations around the World Economic Forum.
00:41:55
Speaker
And chief among of the conversations that we were seeing was AI, you know, which is there's so much money, there's so much attention, so much work happening in the area, but that's still an industry that is incredibly centralized.
00:42:06
Speaker
And like oh you know I think social media is a great example of, and we've all seen ways in which um this centralization has ended up hurting individuals will so with social media and also things like financial data. But I think we have a whole new world of possible risk here if we keep so much of the power that we're seeing around a i in centralized hands. So Web3 has, like I think, ah an even new new and increased importance. And I just walked around you know Davos thinking, like my gosh, like i I can't wait to see more communication and more collaboration between our industries because this is going to be absolutely pivotal to making sure um we we are living in an innovative but a safe world as well um through and safety through decentralization.
00:42:44
Speaker
I couldn't agree more. I feel like AI is is such a weird industry because it literally started out of seemingly out of thin air a few years ago. You know, we've had some models and some AI, ah I don't think they were even products. Like products did not exist five years ago.
00:43:00
Speaker
It's literally all like after 2021 where they started being rolled into products with OpenAI. And OpenAI being closed source and looking to find a reason to sue DeepSeek, which is open source, for stealing the very same information that they themselves stole from the web. They hovered it all up into this, you know, amalgamous mass of just, you know, things that just spats out randomly.
00:43:24
Speaker
So I feel like it... it like Don't you feel that it's a little bit hypocritical to try to sue a company the for accusing them ah by accusing them of doing the very thing that you've done, gotten away with?
00:43:37
Speaker
And not only that, but you're also trying to lobby politicians and government officials to make laws which prohibit this very same behavior. So the only companies that are going going to continue to exist are the ones that have already broken the law, right which would have been illegal going forward, would be illegal going forward.
00:43:55
Speaker
And they've taken they've they've trained their models and they've they've created such a high barrier to entry that it's already a monopoly. So yeah, I think AI industry is wild to think of ah being so centralized so quickly.
00:44:10
Speaker
Yeah, there are a lot of lessons you can get from Web3, I think, to your point also around you have concept that there's such a competitive atmosphere. I think things like, you know, I think at Polkadot, we're really also interested, as we talked about before, in like interoperability. Like, how can we work together to create kind of a better future? And how can we leverage all of the different assets um that we have across across different ecosystems? And how can we do that to build a better future? Right? It's like, I do think like there are some real lessons there that are quite positive in terms of how in innovative industries she should be thinking about ah the ways in which they can kind of carry it forward.
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah, and just I wanted to to add something you know onto that, like you know but concerns about a AI. And yeah I think, Corey, actually I mentioned this to you when we were talking at Davos, that Web3 is in some ways almost the opposite of AI.
00:44:57
Speaker
Like you know ai you know very famously is... perfectly okay with lying to you. It will just hallucinate. It doesn't know that it's lying to you. It's perfectly okay with just saying whatever, you're making up citations as long as it's, you like you think that would be it would that would be the the next word.
00:45:13
Speaker
Whereas, you know like blockchains are exactly the opposite. It is ah very truthful, very, yeah in some ways, limited in what it can do compared to to AI. it's you know It's very focused. But it is very good at determining, all this happened or there's been proof that this happened at at this point in time on the blockchain.
00:45:29
Speaker
And so you i can see that being really useful to help limit some of these things that you were mentioning, ah that, you know hey, this you know these these companies hoovered up all of this data, as you mentioned. Well, if you can prove that, all right, you have, like you put this...
00:45:44
Speaker
this data on the web, you put a you know, there's easy ways of proving this using, know, put a hash or a ZK proof or something on on a chain and you can prove and it will be in that chain and essentially impossible to to change that if some, you know, AI model later says like, no, no, no, I have this data well ahead of time, no you can prove that it happened ah that you had it before they they they did and they took they took it off you.
00:46:05
Speaker
um so So I do think there's a lot of potential room for collaboration between AI and Web3 and help solve these problems. Because we do see a lot of problems with having, especially with how much computational resources it takes right now to create these models, we do see a lot of centralization.
Blockchain's Role in AI Transparency
00:46:22
Speaker
um And, you know, as as Corey said, there's a lot of lessons to be learned. We see this also in Bitcoin world, right, where there's a lot of centralization of miners because there's a one scale in mining.
00:46:33
Speaker
And so, all right, what happens with these solver, right? So I do think there's there's some ah parallels here ah between yeah the the crypto world and the AI world. A lot of room for bloom for opportunity for collaboration, I think. A lot of good space there.
00:46:48
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, I think information, you know, ah training an AI based on data on the web, I don't think it's an inherently bad. I just think it is really important, ah the spirit and in and in way which it is done.
00:47:02
Speaker
If it's ah a, you know, decentralized organization working in in in the open and the open source as a public good, I think you just go go nuts, man. I don't care. Go and scrape everything, right? Scrape Twitter, scrape Wikipedia,
00:47:15
Speaker
and, you know, have this product be for for the the better of of humanity. But to do it for profit, i just there's something really shady going on, like, you know, scraping Shutterstock images that creators are are putting together and then using that to generate images off the back of that, and then charging per call, per API call and making a profit off that.
00:47:37
Speaker
Nah, man, that that's bit weird. Yeah, the the problem there is, you know, like, How do you limit it to the actors that you want to use it or that you like you think would be you know good users of this data? ah right Like saying, okay, well, it's okay for these people to do it, but not these. right you know and you know Going back to the old cypherpunks, information wants to be free.
00:47:55
Speaker
ah right yeah Once you put it out there, there's going to be you know not just, okay, like you know like you know the... very you upright and upstanding nonprofits and also the for-profits. But you know also also i'm i am sure you know like organized crime and you know others are are using AI and all sorts of scammers are using it all kinds of bad ways.
00:48:15
Speaker
ah The problem is you know anytime you have a new technology like this, anytime you put information out there, both you the the good guys, the neutral guys and the bad guys are are going to be are going to be using it.
00:48:28
Speaker
Yeah. And I think there's also, it's like, I mean, and not not to be too doomsday over here, but I think with with also things like a like AGI and and looking at the future of AI, it's like, there are some pretty big risks that we we could be facing if this is developed in an atmosphere that's a little bit more competitive and maybe inspired by things like by greed or by, you know, real ah kind of unhealthy competition, I think in a way Versus that kind of collaborative, transparent energy. and Yeah. And I think there's, yeah, like i'm I'm somebody who's really, I really enjoy some of the conversations that we're all had having globally around things like existential risk threats and things like that. And again, like we really have to be careful about the development and the innovation that
00:49:09
Speaker
ethos and environments that we have we're creating these tools, which have such incredible upside, but also you know risks around things like cybersecurity, data privacy, environmental harm, like job loss. like There's so many things societally that we need to really think through with with AI specifically.
00:49:24
Speaker
um where it's it's it like I think right now right now we're talking about things like copyright and and intellectual property, but like i think bigger, there's, there's some bigger picture issues here that we really need to be careful that we're really creating a good environment for. And I do think again, like what the web three movement and vision can contribute positively to a lot of those. And that's not to say that we've gotten everything perfect either.
00:49:46
Speaker
You know, I think we all have worked in this for long enough where we know there certainly been, there's a lot of lessons learned there, but I, I do hope other industries take those lessons and, and can kind of move forward with that. when before i Before I knew about JIGPT and OpenAI, I was thinking, um like how cool would it be to have a ah device, but even similar to a Neuralink, or something along this this kind of like a neural interface, where I can think of of of a question, of of a piece of information. I can request that piece of information using my brain and then have this interface.
00:50:19
Speaker
go look it up on the web and then present me with that information in a way that I can decode it with my thoughts without any like audio or or visual input. So it would effectively mean that you don't have to learn anything anymore because you have all the human knowledge available, you know, at your, at your, you know, in your head, like you just need to think about it and you will be, it will be there available for you to consume.
00:50:42
Speaker
um But now knowing like all I know about how insidious some of these companies are and how some of them are also biased, right? Like it's been proven that a lot of these AIs have a political bias.
00:50:54
Speaker
Like imagine having someone that gives you the truth, but it is always filtered through its own bias, whether it's, you know, ah motivated by money or by politics or by a combination of both.
00:51:07
Speaker
and That's a scary world to live in. Yeah, I'm just thinking with your Neuralink idea, it's like, you know, an obvious example. So, you being in a non, you I'm a native English speaker and I live in a non-English speaking place.
00:51:21
Speaker
um You know, it's like, wow, that'd be great if i just if I didn't know a word and I could just think like, all right what's the word for, you know, whatever soda. And then, all right, my neural link would tell me. um But I was just thinking like, you the problems with this is like, imagine, you know, like there's a bias and I think like, wow, I want a soda.
00:51:38
Speaker
And then, so I say like, all right, how do I say, you know, I want, I would like a soda in German. And it's like, yeah, it's like Coca-Cola. And it's like, oh, okay. It's, know what I mean? Like it, and you say it and you're not, you know,
00:51:51
Speaker
There's these subtle biases that can that can that can creep in or not so subtle biases. there's ah And there's a lot of, ah what's the word? A a lot of motivation for for for companies, for teams, for people to to put put in these biases. I mean, there's always going to be some bias, right? But ah yeah know having these like youre really... ah There's some dangerous biases. Like, and that's sort of a real money example, or, you know, all right, so coke Coca-Cola company made a few more dollars or, but you can imagine this being really, ah yeah, really dangerous, these but these biases.
00:52:24
Speaker
yeah Yeah, you get an Unilink. I was just going to say- for it, go for it. No, no, no. I was literally just going to say, get your Neuralink sponsored by Coca-Cola. It's all going to give you like Coca-Cola. It's going to translate only Coca-Cola. You get it sponsored by Pepsi.
00:52:37
Speaker
It's going to just give you Pepsi translations instead or something. so Yeah. Or I think what happens in this bill becomes a Coca-Cola spokesman in and Sweden because he now has a translation filter, but he's paying on a subscription plan to the Neuralink folks. And then all of a sudden, like they cut off his access one day.
00:52:52
Speaker
you know And then all of a sudden we become dependent on this. I think there's the relationship that we have and they do your to to these companies, especially as we become more and more dependent upon them for these kinds of things. It's like the power imbalance just becomes even more extreme.
00:53:05
Speaker
yeah I can't wait for the day when they're just going to paint the sky with advertising. Yes, give me those eyeglasses and just just put put the ads everywhere. that's That's the only place where we don't have ads. like It's crazy.
00:53:16
Speaker
When's the last time either of you browsed the web without an ad blocker? My God, what a dumpster fire. I can't even imagine doing that. i can't either. Sounds terrifying. It is. it genuinely is.
00:53:32
Speaker
Now, were you going to say something, Bill? Um... Oh, ah yeah. So so like to to Corey's point about you know depending on on things, it really is
Restoring Data Ownership with Web3
00:53:42
Speaker
interesting. like I remember, i forget if you know Aristotle's or you know some some Greek philosopher complaining that our you kids today, they they they read too much and so they don't have to think about you know memorize this stuff. They depend much on books.
00:53:55
Speaker
um But there really is there's a very big difference between depending on like you a book, something you you you buy and it's yours and it lasts for 50 years or whatever, versus depending upon you know, ah whatever, ah yeah the Neuralink company or Twitter, Facebook, any of these, know, we're depending on a sort of, you know a very ongoing basis. And it's very hard for me to say like, okay, I want access forever to Twitter.
00:54:21
Speaker
Okay. yeah Or whatever. There's no way to guarantee that. It's by by nature, it's ephemeral. And you have these companies, uh, that you're you're paying a subscription fee to. It's an ongoing thing. It's almost like, I think of math, right? It's almost like yeah this this continuous function. It's this thing that just, yeah there's there's there's no quantum reason. Okay, now I have it. I have this one specific thing. It's always this continuous aspect.
00:54:44
Speaker
um so So I do think there's like a lot of danger and that. i think that's something like Web3 and I know like we're helping you know try to do with Polkadot is take that and put it one step closer to people going almost in what some way going back to that, you're being able to own and say, this is my data. And you know as long as this blockchain exists um and these blockchains should continue to to operate, then yeah as long as someone has access to that, I will have access and prove that I have access to to this data.
00:55:13
Speaker
I was actually talking to someone about IPFS and I was just trying to explain to them how IPFS works. And um their their conclusion was like, oh, so if everyone shuts their computers down, then my data is gone. I'm like, that's still like ah less ephemeral than you putting your data probably anywhere else on YouTube servers or Facebook servers or anything like that.
00:55:35
Speaker
Yeah, i mean there's I mean, there's always going to be these like absolute force majeure you know ah issues. i Someone asked me if Polkadot could still operate if every computer in the world stopped working. You got me there. there were no more computers, you can't operate Polkadot. Yeah. yeah Yeah. So there is I mean, there's always...
00:55:55
Speaker
Yeah, go going to be these possibilities. the we If we all die, will Polkadot still run? If all 7 billion people in the world die because of a massive sun flare, will Polkadot still work though, Bill?
00:56:07
Speaker
Yeah, so but probably not. It will eventually yeah yeah stop working. Although the validators, if it's just people dead, then the validators will still go for Why do you mean you don't have servers on Mars yet? Your guys are falling behind.
00:56:19
Speaker
That would be wild though. the Latency would be crazy, I bet. yeah theyre actually somebody did a um ah so so Paul Krugman did it actually an interesting thing about like you know and interstellar economies and like being able to transmit. And someone did like ah an updated analysis cryptocurrency of like you know how could you have cryptocurrency on an interplanetary or interstellar basis.
00:56:45
Speaker
Uh, unfortunately I can't remember the author of that paper. Uh, but someone took like this, that people have thought about this already. so like, you know, what are we going to do when we are a multi-planetary
Journey into Crypto and Polkadot
00:56:55
Speaker
species?
00:56:55
Speaker
That is fantastic. I would love, I would love, if you, if you remember the name, I would love to hear who it is. Cause that sounds like a fantastic concept. I wonder it must be radio waves. Cause I don't know you can transmit things in in a different way. It must be radio waves.
00:57:07
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, some, some sort of, some sort of ah of of of radiation. um but, uh, and you know radio or light, I don't know. But I mean, that they still got these these speed of light limitations, right? And right you know especially like you once you start going to Pluto, when it's like you know any message out to there is 20 hours or more and then 20 hours back, um you know you're you're definitely not going to have mine you know like Bitcoin miners on Pluto, right? By the time yeah you know transactions are out there and it has a block, by the time it sends it back to Earth, it's not going to work.
00:57:41
Speaker
Pluto's quite small, though. If you had too many of those miners, I'm sure you'd be warming it up. You'd be terraforming it at the same time. Yes. All right. So maybe, yes, that's that's the... Not bad plan itself.
00:57:52
Speaker
yeah we can find it yeah Yeah, we can fund terraforming just by... Sounds great....mending a bunch of Bitcoin miners to Mars. like Yeah, sounds good. I meant to ask you, but I completely forgot when we were talking about the the kind of how people find it relatively difficult now to to onboard themselves on on crypto because there's so many choices.
00:58:12
Speaker
how How was the ecosystem like when you first joined? What was your like initial kind of contact with ah with crypto and blockchain?
00:58:22
Speaker
um so So I guess ah i'll I'll take that first. um and So I actually was doing, I had actually heard about Bitcoin relatively early on, but I didn't actually do much with it. I was doing hash algorithm analysis ah for for my work.
00:58:37
Speaker
And someone said, hey, you know, there's a way to like, you know make money using hashing. And I said, what are you, so hashing for people that aren't familiar, that's basically what ah Bitcoin miners are doing. they're running this function over and over again, but this function has other other uses that I was using it for.
00:58:52
Speaker
So I actually read the paper very early. I said, okay, that's that's that's interesting. um And then left for a while. And then I really, you I came back a few years later and and then got into it. But um so so when I, but even then that really it was just Bitcoin. yeah I think, you know, Litecoin was around starting in 2011. These are all really variations on a theme.
00:59:12
Speaker
um I think the big jump was with Ethereum, you know, being able to have smart contracts and, you know a turret complete contract. programming language. I mean, technically you can do smart contracts on Bitcoin, but um like something that's actually easy to do it.
00:59:26
Speaker
And so so this is really like what I saw when I first got in. It's like what got what got me excited is just the ability to do any of this stuff. Right. But ah you then you know I was working in academia. I was used to work a teach at the University of Pittsburgh.
00:59:42
Speaker
I was getting more and more involved in blockchain. And actually, once I saw Polkadot, once I saw you know Gav's talk where he pulled out the the laptop and then had his own blockchain running and it was able you could then later add it to you to the Polkadot network, I said, I have to be a part of this.
00:59:57
Speaker
And that's really when I went full time, moved from the US to Switzerland ah you know to to be a part of Web3 Foundation. i just sort of realized like, OK, this solves a lot of the problems that we're having and lets user like lets us actually move towards this Web3 world because we don't have these scalability challenges that we had like with with a monolithic blockchain.
01:00:20
Speaker
That's sort of like my my my journey in a nutshell. I had a very different one to Bill's, but I had actually got it a bit later because my background was way less technical. And I was actually coming from hedge fund finance. So i was working in the financial financial markets.
01:00:33
Speaker
And we had a um venture capital portfolio. And I remember one of the companies we looked at, I think, was in the space, which is really kind of the first time i really engaged with it. and you know And I'm almost embarrassed to say it but the things that really the thing that onboarded me, the thing that radicalized me in the Web3 direction was CryptoKitties.
01:00:48
Speaker
Remember that game? That like creating thing? And I remember doing that and I was just like, it was like, it was an aha moment. i was like, oh my, like this is going to change everything. Like the amount of ownership, the amount of of interaction. Like I totally, I totally got it that moment. Like the idea of like NFTs and all of these new ecosystems that could come up. And I just, I just, I saw the light, right? And I started getting into the environment, the community at that point in New York. This is around like 2018. Yeah.
01:01:12
Speaker
um And it's like there are some really cool conversations going on. The energy was phenomenal. It was like i'd going to Crypto Mondays and people were talking about like factualizing real estate and all these cool new just new applications for this. And it was still very playful and very fun. Yeah.
01:01:24
Speaker
yeah And so I got into that a bit. And then I i ended up going from hedge fund finance. I joined the Stellar Development Foundation. ah Because coming from a background in finance and payments, that made a lot of sense to me. And that also again just broke open the idea of like, let's really question how these incumbent models of sending money, especially cross-border, which is a huge, huge benefit to like the stellar ah the just dis Stellar protocol, and like understanding, really getting behind how can we use this this technology to liberate people.
01:01:52
Speaker
and to liberate them from the, and for a seller, like the economic environment that they find themselves in and really take advantage of the technical tools that we have available, um you know, to to really make their lives easier. So we did that. And then I moved from there over to Polkadot, which was really interesting. and that was a huge shift as well, because Polkadot's use case agnosticism, I think was really interesting for me. And I just found continually through my years in this this industry, some of the most interesting, some of the smartest people who are challenging all of these incumbent ideas. I just love the ethos. I love the philosophy in it.
Blockchain's Playful and Serious Sides
01:02:22
Speaker
And again, we don't get everything right. I don't agree with everybody, and what everybody's doing, but I love that we're all thinking creatively in the same direction about how we can make a better future using the technology we have at our fingertips. I think it's great. So that's but that's what keeps me here. And that was kind of my way in.
01:02:36
Speaker
<unk> That's a fantastic way of putting it. I feel like the the optimism that this industry has is probably unparalleled. And even if you don't agree with someone in this industry, you still respect them for the work that they do and the fact that they're in this industry at all. And I think that's quite cool. You don't see a lot of spaces like this. And I love to see that.
01:02:54
Speaker
And I love to hear it. I agree. I agree. And I also also why I'm so I'm so bullish on I think even certain certain kinds of like games or memes or whatnot in this industry as onboarding because again, like I was I was a CryptoKitties person that came on. So I'm pretty, I'm pretty yeah i'm i'm pretty ah'm optimistic, I think about making this stuff playful and fun. And that's that's a great way to get more people into the space.
01:03:15
Speaker
To be fair, though, there's just so many great use cases. um Sorry, Bill? i just want to say I still have seven CryptoKitties. Do you really? listen, you don't want to make any trades. Let me tell you, I got a nice lineup. All right. Great, great, great.
01:03:30
Speaker
and I don't have any crypto keys, but I was just going to say there's so many like amazing use cases in gaming. there there's a I've spoken to to various people that have they've built or or um worked on building Web3 games and like the technology is just fantastic for that. Like NFTs for gaming.
01:03:46
Speaker
amazing. But again, it really matters the spirit in which you approach this technology. Because if you're a hungry company like Ubisoft, and you try to jam NFTs into your game just to squeeze more money out of the product, that's no good, right? But but if you build and an experience that creates, um there was some guy, um I forget his name now, but I'll send you guys the the name of the um of the person when I remember.
01:04:10
Speaker
um He spoke about creating, building, um oh, it was It was a guy from horizon.io building a layer of ah agnostic kind of NFTs across different games. So in an ecosystem where you could have a sword in one game and then import it into another game because they're all compatible because they follow the same principles.
01:04:33
Speaker
um I thought just that's mind blowing. Like I could get this item in that game and play it and have like a interconnected metaverse like world, like sign me up. That's epic.
01:04:45
Speaker
So there's there's there's fantastic use cases in there. Absolutely. And I think in this space, too. And it's like we see that one thing I do i do love about like ah kind of the diversity of these use cases within Polkadot. One thing I find really interesting about our ecosystem is like you do have the good you have the they serious like you know transparency into into into finance or like or or supply chain. It's really high utility kinds of use cases.
01:05:08
Speaker
But you can't forget the fun. You really can't. You know, I mean, I think, again, good to your point about gaming, entertainment, like sports, like there's so many fun ways you can engage with these things. NFTs, like theres there's there's ah ultimate there's so much possibility in that. And it's just, it's nice, I think, to be able to appreciate kind of both sides of that. And also as we talk about it, I think it's really easy sometimes to try to make the case for Web3 and for for blockchain in terms of like, yes, like this is life changing, you know world changing, very serious, very very serious problems we serious problems. It's like, yeah.
01:05:37
Speaker
And also there's lot silliness. And I think there's ah there's a tremendous amount of value in that. Agreed. Yeah, there there is value in that. For sure there is. um you can You can see that the how retail reacts anytime there's like ah new meme coin or something just just that that comes up and takes the world by storm. It gets reported everywhere. And that's good because it gets people you know gets people interested.
01:05:58
Speaker
um Some people are going to, yeah, I guess, go down the weird rabbit hole and just start buying like dubious coins and whatnot. But I do think there is space to have fun here. And I think people should have, you should have fun with it, man. Like you shouldn't feel guilty because you own an NFT because all the crypto elitists look down on you you're like, oh so whatever, you own an NFT, just be proud of your crypto kitties. They're fantastic.
01:06:22
Speaker
I'm extremely proud of them. um How many do you have? I have about six. I've given a number away or sold them. I've also been, especially years ago, and I'd have friends ask any question about it. They'd like, okay, you have to open up a Meta Mouse wallet and I'm to you how to do this. I've paid so much gas fees just in an opportunistic moment trying to onboard somebody else to blockchain being like, here's my cat. I have fewer now than I used to, but they're great ones. So Bill, we'll have to talk about trades. We can talk about trading. I have some rare characteristics on some my kitties. Oh, wow. Nice. Yeah, I know.
01:06:58
Speaker
I remember my my son, was he was five at the time and was extremely excited about like owning CryptoKitties. So like some are actually I'd give him some and then he was so excited like, oh, I want that one to be the mommy and the daddy because you can you make baby CryptoKitties, yeah which also has a great you know introduction when you need to talk about the birds and the bees.
01:07:18
Speaker
So another benefit of CryptoKitties. Awesome. Side benefits, so many benefits, so much utility. So much utility. and it exactly yeah Yeah, exactly. Utility, yeah. Right, right.
01:07:31
Speaker
Just onboard your kids early so they know the game. Yeah, 100%.
01:07:36
Speaker
Your kid's practically a crypto native at this point. Five years old and knows more than probably a lot of people out there. Yeah, he he really he really ah grew grew up with
Future of Polkadot and Innovations
01:07:45
Speaker
crypto. Yeah. and Yeah, that's so cool.
01:07:48
Speaker
um So I meant to ask you both, um ah are there any cool projects that have recently come out of the Polkadot ecosystem? Because working with something that that can be used as an infrastructure layer, youre you're in a unique position where you can kind of understand what are the cooler things that people are building.
01:08:06
Speaker
And is there anything that you guys feel like it's underrated and should get more attention and people are not giving it?
01:08:14
Speaker
So for me, well, I can see Corey is is is thinking right now. Yeah. A big thing that I think is is super interesting coming to the Polkadot ecosystem is AccuRast. um So this is using old phones or new phones, if you want, as basically distributed computing and getting reimbursed for doing this.
01:08:31
Speaker
So that, ah because it turns out like, you know, phones are, you know, they're extremely efficient computers. And so for certain mathematical operations, it's like extremely efficient to use these and um you know extremely cheap compared to using a traditional um ah like AWS, like a elastic computing server or whatever.
01:08:50
Speaker
And so Acura asks is being built on Polkadot so that you can both, you know the the users who need this computation can program for it. And you know those who want to you know ah get tokens for running, you know like using your own phone or using another phone, ah to to to compute in its off time can do so. So I think this is like extremely interesting. you know it's It's coming out on Polkadot um very very soon.
01:09:17
Speaker
Acuras, so what's that? A-C-C-U-R-A-S? A-C-U-R-A-S-T. A-C-U-R-A-S-T, awesome. Also based here in Zug, so. so Nice.
01:09:28
Speaker
Oh, I'm really due a visit there. Yeah, you really ah please feel free to stop by. It's a beautiful beautiful place. I was going say there are so many great companies that are building on Polkadot. I think personally, i have um i really find fractionalized real estate really interesting. And so I think Excavate is doing a great job with that.
01:09:45
Speaker
But one thing I also want to point to is one thing that I find I'm particularly excited about. This is a little bit more well-known, of course, is Mythical, which is like a leading innovator in Web3 gaming, which transitioned from Ethereum to Polkadot last summer. And they've done they've just they've been a great leader in, again, Web3 Gaming. And I think we're really seeing a little bit more attention on Polkadot for its utility around that gaming sector.
01:10:05
Speaker
So I'm really excited to see what's going to come out of that. They've done ah NFL Rivals. I think they've got a game with FIFA now. It's really just continued to expand. And also it was lovely to see their transition to Polkadot and how smooth that went and and and how successful that's been.
01:10:20
Speaker
um but So I think when we look at, ah we if when we start looking at how Polkadot's going to get kind of expand and go forward in 2025 and beyond, it's like I love looking at that kind of as it as it as a success case.
01:10:31
Speaker
um But I think actually some of the most exciting things for me, and actually Bill, I'm going to point this to you in just a second, which is to say, I think Polkadot itself is going to go through some really interesting changes over the next 2025. Some of the things that we have coming up um over the summer and also Jam, I think is going to be really exciting. And so I think Polkadot itself and how Polkadot becomes a place that ah it provides more optionality for for developers to come over starting in the summer, i think is going to be great. So um Yeah, I think that the expert to explain some of that is probably Bill, actually, out of the two of us. But again, I think i think the thing that that's the thing that gets me the most up.
01:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, so so I think that ah there's a couple of different things, as Corey mentioned. So first off is the completion of Polkadot 2.0, which is we're sort of in the process. It's a multi-stage process that makes it you know easier for parachains to onboard, ah go faster, have more computational resources ah using this latest ah technology that's coming, elastic scaling, getting block times down to two seconds and you know finalization only a little bit longer than that.
01:11:30
Speaker
um And then moving to this hub and cloud model. So essentially adding ah essentially native smart contracts to Polkadot. So instead of having to build out your own parachain, you can also get a lot of the benefits of Polkadot, including interacting with these parachains, but from traditional EVM compatible smart contracts, which you know allows for you know very easily to build things up and you have things from other ecosystems to also work together.
01:11:55
Speaker
ah here And then then Jam is really a major shift in how things work. a little bit further out, um it's already been well-defined. There's, I think, 45 teams working on implementations and ah of Jam.
01:12:10
Speaker
And the first the first one actually just started saying that they were they were producing blocks a few days ago. But this essentially allows a couple of different things. One, from a programming perspective, it allows you to, I'm to elide over some details here, but essentially work in a sharded environment in a way that's very similar you and and easier like you would on a monolithic blockchain.
01:12:32
Speaker
you So it's just like you know being able to run any and being able to run any sort of code doesn't even have to be blockchain related. Have it interact with blockchains, have it ah do what you need to do have it done in a distributed way, allow different chains and different services to interact with each other very easily.
01:12:48
Speaker
and they can sort of pretend they're they're operating together. It's going to be an incredible advancement for your people looking to to to program and develop things. This is one of the problems, right? It's hard to program sometimes ah yeah yeah a blockchain entirely from scratch, even with the Polkadot SDK, which makes it a lot easier.
01:13:07
Speaker
But this would allow you to be, you much more easily develop things and have them interact with other ah other items in the ecosystem without dealing with things like you know asynchronous programming and all these like you know much more difficult concepts.
01:13:20
Speaker
ah So Jam also ah little bit further in the future, but really looking forward to it. Awesome. Awesome. That's fantastic. Well, thank you both. I think this has been a ah fantastic conversation. Thank you for joining. And um i would i would love to have you guys again um at some point when you launch Polkadot 2.0. I think that'll
Conclusion and Contact Information
01:13:40
Speaker
make a fantastic conversation as well.
01:13:42
Speaker
um Do you have anything that you wanted to, or anything I wanted to mention or anything at all that you wanted to add? um Socials or anything? Uh, sure. So, uh, yeah, I'm, uh, at Bill Laboon on Twitter or X as they call it, or just, you know, Google my name, Bill Laboon. It's pretty rare. So probably find me wherever, uh, wherever I am.
01:14:02
Speaker
Um, and, and also, you know, it's, it's, it's been a while now, but I have to shout out my book, Strength in Numbers, uh, which is ah it's a science fiction novel, but as you read it, you get to learn how Bitcoin works as, as the story progresses.
01:14:14
Speaker
Wow. So very interesting. If you want to learn a little more about how, how, uh, Bitcoin and blockchain's work while also reading a book, Strength in Numbers by Bill Laboon. And and i'm'm I'm at Corey Higgins on X. And I also just wanted to say, of course, that like, you know, we are all so excited about Web3 and we're so excited about the future and some of the things that are happening Polkadot, but also just in general, some of what we've talked about on, you know, over the last hour and change.
01:14:39
Speaker
So it's like, if anybody listening wants to get in touch and learn more about Polkadot, what we're building, what's coming up, um feel free to, say you know, Bill, throw you in there to throw to reach out to either of us, I think, for any... any you know conversations, whether it's on what we think the future of AI will be. I can talk about existential risk threats for way too long if anybody wants to talk about that. Or you know some would think some of the great teams that are building on Polkadot, because I think we you know there are we we' we're so lucky to have such a great community and and and ecosystem.
01:15:04
Speaker
um But yeah, there's there's a lot to chat about. So really would welcome anybody who's interested to get in touch. Epic. Well, thank you both so much. And um I shall speak to you both soon.
01:15:15
Speaker
Sounds great. Thanks for having us. Oh, no, my pleasure. Have a lovely rest of your day. Yeah, thanks. You too. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.