Charlie Hu - Bitcoin’s Next Leap: How Bitlayer Is Building A Faster, More Scalable Blockchain

Full transcript: Charlie Hu on London Real

3:15 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is… This is London Real. I am Brian Rose.

3:27 My guest today is Charlie Hu, the Web3 pioneer, decentralized technology expert, and entrepreneur. You have deep experience in the blockchain industry, having first invested in Polkadot in 2017 and later joining Polygon in 2021 to lead development for their Asia Pacific ecosystem. In 2023, you co-founded Bitlayer, the pioneering Bitcoin Layer 2 solution that is revolutionizing the Bitcoin ecosystem by providing security and scalability. Bitlayer uses the BitVM paradigm with zero-knowledge proofs to process transactions efficiently and securely without compromising on decentralization.

4:05 You aim to promote innovation and asset diversity to create a faster, more flexible, and safer user experience. Ultimately, you believe Bitlayer is making history by transforming the Bitcoin ecosystem and providing a platform for a new wave of innovation. Charlie, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much, Brian. Great to be here.

4:26 Great having you here. I want to start by saying that Bitlayer is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media-powered investment firm where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting-edge web 3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network.

4:49 Charlie, we are beyond excited to be part of this journey with you. So let’s just jump in. What is Bitlayer? First of all, thank you very much to having me here. Great to be in London.

5:00 Great studio. Great to talk with you in person again. So, Bitlayer, Bitlayer journey started from last year, right in the wave of the inscription all in the summer. We never see such a big, interesting community and the builder vibe back to Bitcoin. And it gets me excited now.

5:16 So there was a lot of, you know, issues with, you know, Bitcoin getting very congested, people paying crazy amount of gas fees, doing those crazy meat, and a lot of garbage you take so of being generated, right? So it gets me thinking, is this the future of Bitcoin we want to enter into, right? And now, so we see some interesting proposal being came up by some researchers in the Bitcoin community, including BVM. So BVM is a very interesting way to open up this potential for Bitcoin verification.

5:44 So that’s kind of our vision. We want to provide a new feature to Bitcoin. Bitcoin was digital gold. It’s a store of value. And now we are potentially entering into the second phase of Bitcoin.

5:55 We call this Bitcoin finality. So basically transactions, you know, with all kinds of D5, you know, protocols, all things, the transaction can be settled back to Bitcoin. So in the history of Bitcoin, there was multiple tempt companies like Lightning, Stacks, Roostock, all tried to scale or bring the programmability on Bitcoin. They didn’t really hit too much, you know, traction in the past, right? And I think key reason was there was, they didn’t have the Bitcoin finality.

6:24 The transaction happening on all those like old attempt only settled on the sidechain. So BVM vision, build layer vision, is we want to build the first true native Bitcoin layer 2 and, you know, to achieve the Bitcoin finality. So how to, you know, achieve the Bitcoin verification is the engineering challenge we’re working on. So yeah, I think right now up to this moment, we have a lot of traction on the mainnet V1. We are about one or two months away from our V2 launch that we can actually achieve the Bitcoin verification, Bitcoin finality.

6:56 That’s the key first principle importance for, you know, to bring this new feature to Bitcoin ecosystem. We are very excited to launch that and then, you know, bring that to the community. And that Bitcoin finality was never really achieved in these other attempts that you mentioned, Lightning and Stacks, and that’s the ultimate holy grail. It’s the important thing to move the needle to achieve this trustless programmable environment for Bitcoin, right? So we can really unlock a lot of TV out of Bitcoin assets from like non-year bearing assets, just like a gold to year bearing real financial assets that can tap into all kinds of DeFi protocol, like lending, stablecoin, you know, all kinds of primitives.

7:37 You’ve said that the Bitcoin OGs are kind of suspicious of some of these plays because they don’t know if they can trust the bridges and if there’s finality and some of those guys are thinking, okay, it’s always going to be a separate side chain. It’s never going to be really settled on Bitcoin. Is that, that’s the ultimate problem to solve and also to convince them that it can be done? Yeah, I think the OGs want things in the trustless environment, right?

8:01 They don’t want to socially have to trust the multi-signature, which is like they have like two or third, two thirds on a majority of the signage. That’s the trust assumption. It’s difficult to really get the needle, right? And I think there was a lot of people kind of trying to say, oh, Bitcoin never have, should have any use cases, which was actually not the case after all those came out, right? People really came up with a lot of interesting solutions and we see the demand from the community from last year.

8:29 So there’s like product market fit there from the retail communities. And now OGs now exploring how we can do, you know, without sacrificing, you know, giving away their keys, their assets to other third parties, to access to native Bitcoin yield and access to like trustless environment of Bitcoin and sticking, you know, Bitcoin DeFi protocols and so on. So to achieve that, Bitcoin verification is very important, right? So settle back to Bitcoin layer one is a key difference.

8:57 Side chains is just side chain. We have to trust the side chain, which is difficult, you know, assumption, right? But people trust Bitcoin, people trust Bitcoin security. Bitcoin is still the ultimate, most decentralized, highest level of security network in the world. So transactions eventually settle back to Bitcoin is a key thing we need.

9:16 And you’re convinced you can pull that off. We are, we’re committing a lot of SHA-256 kind of commits on the big VN community. We have quite a lot of interesting architects and then, you know, prototype codes already delivered. And we’ve been talking to a lot of the ZQ researchers. And I think we have, we found a very exciting solution, which is pretty innovative without actually the, you know, Bitcoin app creation of Opcat deliver this Bitcoin-friendly stock to prove.

9:44 And actually it’s cost benefiting. It’s not that expensive compared to another approach to deliver this Bitcoin finality. Okay. There was an article that just recently came out in the Defiant that said Bitcoin layer two, Bitlayer overtakes Merlin is scaling battle heats up and it showed you with this majority market share of like 31% on these layer twos compared with some of these other attempts. How’d that make you feel?

10:10 Yeah, we, we’re getting quite a lot of support from the retail community and also some of the institutional wells. Recent updates we had was we get a Franklin Templeton, one of the major Bitcoin ETF licensed firm from United States lead it all around on series A, which is quite a big signal in the trade fight space. So Bitcoin Nashville was certainly very great, you know, two days before the conference we announced it. So a lot of people will start talking to us.

10:37 Yeah, we had the number one and the total lock the value, you know, among all the Bitcoin infrastructure projects based on the default on my data. So, but I think still we are early stage compared to all the Ethereum Defiant layer two like Arbitron, they are a couple of billion. We’re still kind of early stage. You’re like half a billion right now, something like that. Yeah, we have around a half billion.

10:58 Okay, let’s talk about Franklin Templeton because you kind of hinted it to me when we were hanging out in Austin, Texas and I was like, what? I said, I couldn’t believe that a big traditional financial institution was savvy enough to invest in a Bitcoin layer two and I was pretty surprised and they’re obviously big players in the Bitcoin ETF. They got a trillion and a half of assets. It’s a big player, they’re West Coast. Can you talk about how that happened and maybe explain why that’s such a big important move?

11:27 I mean, to me, that’s like JP Morgan investing in you. I mean, that’s a huge sign and it also means they might even be using your layer two, which is even bigger. We’ve been chatting to their partner. They actually really exploring that to reuse that, not just like a passive investor, right? So, I mean, my journey with Franklin Templeton and stuff on last year, in Dubai Fintech Summit, I saw the chairman and CEO Jenny Johnson was on stage on the Dubai Fintech Summit.

11:54 They expanded their chapter in Dubai and talking about the potential ETF. So that was like, all the way from that, I kind of know they were applying for the Bitcoin ETF. Obviously, the whole industry moved to the next chapter in the beginning of this year. I think I won 13 firms, right? Really properly get the license issued by SEC and the Bitcoin ETF.

12:14 And then we had this rally, right? The Bitcoin pumped quite a bit and it majorly actually pushed about institutional purchasing, right? So I think we could argue this cycle is quite different compared to 2021 cycle. That last cycle was very driven by retail. This cycle, heavily driven by institution right now, right?

12:32 I think the reason Franklin Templeton was interesting to invest us and also a few other Bitcoin ecosystem projects is because they wanted to be their position. They actually understand the industry. They actually know the additional yield opportunity without setting their clients’ Bitcoin exposure to tap into a new yield opportunity. As we said, as a Bitcoin holder in the past, you don’t have yield opportunity, right? You’re just putting your code of what it’s doing nothing.

13:00 There’s no interest opportunity. The only way you get access to some yield is like giving away access to third parties as a centralized kind of CFI, we call this, right? And then we all know what happened two years ago with all the major institution breakout and it crashed. So that was there. I think Franklin Templeton definitely wants to explore the new paradigm, right?

13:19 With a new Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin DeFi, and Bitcoin ecosystem. So what I heard from the partners, they established this Web3 investment arm two years ago called Franklin Templeton Digital Assets. And that’s the focus purely on Web3, which was, I think they kind of made a history two years ago already, right? It was quite a bold move and they tried to be pioneering and progressive. And then they really struggling to looking at it, good projects to invest, especially in the Bitcoin space because they want to be Bitcoin first because they know they’re most likely going to get a Bitcoin ETF, which they got this year, right?

13:56 There was not too many projects they couldn’t invest. So from my knowledge, they only invest within a smart check into a Bitcoin wallet company called Xverse. And that was 2023, that’s it. And then they’re looking at a few other Web3 infrastructure, but this year they’re getting really active. So the conversation with them getting pretty productive when we actually growing pretty fast, we grow our community and also traction from like a hundred million TVL to 400 during the time we were talking to them.

14:24 The community would grow from 100K to 500K during the time. And obviously that was the time we got a lot of partnership announcement with a lot of interesting DeFi builders and consumer facing applications as well. So obviously this all-nose and the BRC20 and the Bitcoin layer two kind of narrative rally is pretty helpful and they kind of been educating themselves quite a lot and they wants to take some bets on the Bitcoin ecosystem. Actually more than I thought they’ve been pretty active last couple of months.

14:55 After investing us, they also invest a few other projects that are our partners in the ecosystem, which it’s great to know. And I think based on their feedback, they really want to explore how to explore yield opportunity with different risk appetite for their clients. Because at the end of the day, for them it’s like AUM business as well. They hold their clients assets and money and they’re tapping into Bitcoin exposure now and they don’t want to sell the Bitcoin exposure.

15:26 They want to tap into new yield. So they want to be the position they have a high return for their clients rather than just charge less fee for the clients, right? Because it’s kind of like similar commodity, right? They have the Bitcoin ETF, the others 12 firms also have Bitcoin ETF. So it’s essentially the same, but why people wants to work with them, right?

15:46 I think that’s kind of how they want to differentiate themselves. Instead of being just the cheapest ETF because of fee, they want to be the highest yield of being a sophisticated Bitcoin ETF firm. I think that makes a lot of sense strategically and they probably can sell another one or two billion Bitcoin exposure in the upcoming months. So when I started on Wall Street, it was 1993 and I worked for a fixed income derivatives trading shop called Bankers Trust.

16:12 And so you start to learn that Wall Street firms, I mean, they live and die by yield. It’s all about yield and there’s a yield curve and fixed income is funny. I used to go out in Manhattan at night and people would say, are you a stockbroker? And then we used to laugh at stockbrokers because stockbrokers were these little punks. We were moving billions of dollars of government debt and swaps and 30 year trades and that’s where the big money was.

16:34 So it’s weird to have this asset, this Bitcoin, this digital gold that just sits around and doesn’t have a yield. Ethereum has kind of a staking element now and potentially a future yield curve, but Bitcoin doesn’t and it’s just screaming out for a solution, right? And Franklin Templeton realizes this. I think the industry just grow to this threshold, like we are such a big market cap assets now, we have to have yield, right? I think 10 years ago in the cyberpunk era of Bitcoin community, you don’t necessarily have that, right?

17:05 You only care about how to mine more Bitcoin and now because of this is the third half in cycle, you know, every single 20 minutes the block which can mine out is getting less and less. So people wants to get into the yield opportunity, right? And then people needs to figure out what are gonna use cases on Bitcoin network that can generating fees, right? The fees can repay the back to the miners and so on. That happened last year in all of those.

17:31 So that’s kind of the interesting paradigm shift. In the beginning, people don’t like DRC 20, all those even the miner including Bitcoin call, they think it’s all garbage UTXO. It’s actually even like an attack for Bitcoin network, right? It’s bullshit. Some people can say that.

17:47 But eventually miners realize, oh my God, there’s like interesting additional block rewards they have which is economically great way for them and they don’t even know what happened. And then they just start realize, okay, there’s a lot of interesting network happening in the Bitcoin space. People minting, you know, Bitcoin, all those assets, BRC 20, and that was like real community like from retail, from artists, from builders, talking about Bitcoin more and more.

18:11 So Bitcoin instead of just being traded heavily on the centralized exchanges, right? Which is off-chain and a lot of on-chain activities in Bitcoin happening. That is very new. It didn’t really happen before Ordinals, right? And then really kind of, I would say flip a bit on the paradigm, right?

18:29 The people realize, okay, we should do something on Bitcoin. We should even build things on Bitcoin. That’s all this came from last year. Right. And that all kind of kicked off at the very first Ordinals Summit, which was in Singapore right before token 2049 conference.

18:43 I was actually at that event because I was there a day earlier and I know some guys building on the Bitcoin ecosystem, the Opal Network guys and Ben Charbet who were kind of associated with Animoca and they said, Brian, you want to come? And I was like, yeah, and I went there and there were guys walking around in capes and stuff and they were like, Brian, this is like the early Bitcoin builder vibe here where people just want to build because it’s cool and they love it. And there was a good vibe.

19:05 Domo was on stage who I know as an advisor investor in your company. And Casey was there and they had come up with these kind of BRC-20 protocols and all the stuff was exploding. It was really exciting. That was less than a year ago that that happened. It’s kind of amazing how fast the market is.

19:23 And that protocol kicked off the fact you could have like a token on the Bitcoin chain, right? It was very important historically this moment. It was part of history, which was remembering, right? It was mentioned even a couple of years later because that was the tipping point that bring a lot of builders’ attention, at least my attention. I was never a Bitcoin maxi or laser eye.

19:47 I never did anything for Bitcoin community all the way from like 2010 or whatever, right? It was different. I was the east builder, right? And it evolved with Polkadot and Polygon and a few other layer one and layer twos, which is all programmable, right? Bitcoin never had this programmability capability in the past.

20:04 And with all of those, I think the reason getting a lot of people’s attention and excitement is they have this new asset protocol. So you can generate in your fungible assets, the BRC-20, even the ARC-20, and now it’s ruined, right? On top of Bitcoin and network. It happened in Ethereum in 2017 on ICO era, right? So that was cool.

20:25 Once you have on-chain synthetic assets owned by the project, by the builders, people wants to bring use cases on top of that. So literally, I think last year from, you know, 2023 February till now, we experienced the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, the same as Ethereum in the last eight years. All the way from 2016, people were talking about generating assets on Ethereum, and then we have ICOs, then we have DeFi summer in 2020, we have NFT summer in 2021 with gaming metaverse.

20:56 All these had a crash course of the compact version, more compact version, shorter version in Bitcoin. I remember very vividly, we were inscribing all the Bitcoin map, bitmap. So basically like a native Bitcoin version of metaverse. One, each of the Bitcoin block equals to one land. So altogether we have over 850 piece of lands now, but that’s like interesting idea bring this dimension of time into metaverse.

21:25 Because if you think about it, each land equals a period of time. It’s one block time, right? Bitcoin block time is around 10 to 15 or 20 minutes. So you can bring the time dimension on the lands. So that’s part of the history.

21:39 So when we say billionaire trying to make history, because Bitcoin is the web3 infrastructure, really worth mentioning about history. It was 15 years history, a lot of things happened, and Bitcoin, all the things on the Bitcoin chain, it’s there, it’s there forever. It’s tamper proof, right? It’s immutable, which is great. So I think that’s kind of really brings this special vibe and a special energy back to Bitcoin community, right?

22:05 Yeah, so that’s something for me, it’s super exciting. So whatever we do for Bitcoin, even we have some, you know, trial and error, it’s part of history. I don’t really have that, I don’t really get that vibe from Polkadot, from like Ethereum community. And do the Bitcoiners embrace you, even though you’re not the old school OG Bitcoiner? I think some people like us in a way, we bring new users back to Bitcoin and we bring builders back, right?

22:31 Let’s face it, Bitcoin in the past was all minor focus. Miners think about how much electricity they pay, how many Bitcoins you can mine. That’s it, right? They go to Bitcoin events, I own Bitcoin, you own Bitcoin, you talk about this miner, that’s it. There’s no other topics.

22:46 So miners and then they talk about financial, you know, fiat currencies and inflation. So maybe talk about OTC, talk about how fiat is broken, right? That’s it, right? I know. Yeah.

22:55 And maybe talk about maybe payment, you know, solutions. Right. That’s pretty much it. They say lightning is going to work one day. One day, right?

23:01 And I think, you know, compared to USDT, USDC, we have way less payment, you know, adoption and lightning than the others, right? Way less. So I think that’s that. But in front of all those last year, we got so much new things coming along, right? We got so many new people in the space.

23:19 I mean, some of them may not be the same people as Bitcoin OGs, but at the end of the day, we’re trying to create the pie bigger. We’re trying to make the party bigger, right? When we talk about mass adoption, you can’t just keep the elites, sort of the cyber punks, stay there and everybody have to listen to them. That’s it. It needs to be a free market with new people, with new supply and new idea in a very welcoming way to join the party, right?

23:45 Otherwise, it’s become like kind of hypocrite, right? When we talk about mass adoption, and the old people just hate all the new ones to come over, which is kind of contradictory, right? I think all those really opened up these gates, right? To allow the builders to think about what you can do on Bitcoin. But now with Bitcoin layer 2, and we have all these programmable layer, it’s even more, right?

24:07 Some people could argue that’s a Pandora box, but I think history kind of makes the point, like people want it. There’s a demand there, and there’s a reason we should have the adoption of Bitcoin ecosystem because of the miner with additional rewards, with less and less block rewards every single block. Miner is one of getting the yield from the additional block rewards because of transaction happening in Bitcoin rather than just the miner with the new ones.

24:32 Because at the end of the day, we have the cap, 21 million in Bitcoin. That’s it, right? So the miners are paying a lot of electricity fee just earning less and less Bitcoin rewards. Are ordinals still hot, or have they quieted down a little bit? Do you think they’ll continue to be?

24:47 Is runes also going to bring some new life into this BRC-20 protocol? It’s a good question. I think compared to last year, especially certain period, especially, let’s say, November, we could argue it was overheating a bit. Now, quiet down a bit, but I still quite a lot of transaction going on. There’s a lot of new ordinals assets, like some new mint, some new collections, which has interesting community support.

25:13 I think BRC-20 is still there and have interesting tickers being minted out, people trying to figure out how to explore use cases for BRC-20 assets. Some of them are exploring with bill layer, with some bridges to bridge to layer two, and they can tap into all kinds of DeFi protocols, they can follow against it, they can become part of liquidity as collateral and things like that. So, all these are kind of happening. In terms of runes, I think it was definitely a bit hyped, overhyped during this halving season.

25:45 Rune is a bit different, it’s more fungible, it’s more memetic, it feels like a meme coin protocol on Bitcoin. A few of the rune protocol have interesting threshold, they hit interesting market cap, like dark to the moon, for example, but I think it’s still very early for rune assets. But at the end of the day, for us, we are very neutral, we don’t just sit on one asset protocol. Whatever asset protocol Bitcoin layer one, as long as they have interesting transaction, interesting momentum, if they need cheaper gas fee, more programmability, tap into the real DeFi use cases, which you can do them Bitcoin layer one.

26:23 We welcome them, right? So, we are kind of in the process, kicking up another ecosystem campaign to embrace all the NFT collections, all the BRC-20 communities, like we’re talking to the stats, big communities, we’re talking to the rats communities, we’re trying to figure out how to work with like Pizza Ninja, Entre Monkey, a lot of interesting, good vibe NFT collections as well. Okay. Yeah, we’re invested in Meta Good, we know Danny from Entre Monkeys. So, I got my first BRC-20 tokens the other day, because we invested in Ordinal Spot, which is a great company, Toby.

26:55 Love it. So, I finally got them, and they showed up my experts wallet, and I was like, okay, Toby, I got to go do something with these. I was like, I’m not, I’m going to hold your tokens, but I want to see what I can do with them. And, needless to say, it was a pretty painful experience, trying to go in, I mean, there’s not a DEX per se, but there is kind of a marketplace where I could try to convert them to some fiat or some Bitcoin, but man, you realize how spoiled you are in the Ethereum ecosystem, because this was a difficult process.

27:28 A lot of things you think for granted in Ethereum, doesn’t really happen in Bitcoin later on. Right, you have to go through two processes to inscribe and mint, and then you have to put it into like a floor price, like say NFT, which they have very little liquidity sometimes, right? The user experience was kind of broken, and a lot of what its company, including OKX, wallet in Xverse, and Unisense, they tried their best, but still, because of the lack of programmability on Bitcoin later on, you can’t really do that.

27:57 And I’m curious, from your perspective, how much gas fee you paid? I mean, it wasn’t just that. I mean, first of all, understanding it was a challenge, and I mean, I can get my way around most ecosystems, but I could finally figure it out after a couple of tutorial videos, but then the weirdest thing happened, I could have swore, I’m pretty sure, that the asset traded at a higher price than I was selling it for, and I wasn’t trying to sell some big size. It was a smaller size, but it looked like there was a price discrepancy where it traded at a higher price than I was selling, and I sat there looking at my block thinking, what the hell just happened?

28:32 It took 20-30 minutes to get the trade done to be longer, and at that point, I think I was just shocked that it actually transacted, and I don’t even know what the gas I paid, but I was just, I was really taken aback by how much this needs were. And you get a front-runner sometimes, right? You know, doing some crazy mint, usually a lot of the mints get failed because other people read front-running you, right? Well, my order was just sitting out there for like a long time, so it would have been really easy to front-run me or do whatever.

29:02 True. They pay higher gas fees on that. Yeah, so I was just, it was just a reality to me. I should have known better, but I was like, wow, this really needs some help. I’m guessing you guys will solve a lot of those problems.

29:14 Yeah, a lot of those transactions, like you get a front-runner, it was MEV, that kind of things. If it’s on our layer two, one, it’s much cheaper. It’s like multiple hundreds of times cheaper and much faster in terms of the confirmation time, finality time. And, you know, we have more use cases you can be able to do. You can’t really do AMM on Bitcoin layer one.

29:36 You can’t. You cannot. Right, right. So there’s no liquidity there. Yeah.

29:39 There’s no pools. There’s no market makers. There’s no smart contract. You can’t really do prep decks. You cannot do a prediction market, all these kind of, a bit more complicated use cases.

29:49 I think a lot of people don’t realize all the liquidity behind the scenes that allows them to do the things that they want to do. And this was, I mean, I do, I teach this to some of my students, like what is liquidity, but when you’re faced with a lack of liquidity, you really understand the limitations of the layer one. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So we need you to build this.

30:07 Yeah, a lot of BRC20 assets now kind of sitting on in no-man land because they can’t sell. There’s no liquidity, right? You have to, you put a sell order kind of in the floor price, you know, area. Nobody just, nobody buys. So essentially a lot of assets goes to zero immediately because of the liquidity pulled up, pulled out, right?

30:26 Right. Yeah. So that’s the problem. When will your mainnet be live for things like that or do you still need people to build on it and build taxes? We live three months ago already on the V1.

30:36 We have around 200 projects already deployed our chain. Right. The active ones, around 60 of them are very active with like a lot of transactions, user base using that and some of them have a very big amount of liquidity already, a TBL. So… They’re like the BRC20 DEX.

30:53 BRC20 DEX, some normal DEX as well, like with intent based, some like landing protocol, you know, getting some interesting traction like Avalon Finex, for example, they have over 350 mil TBL already. We have some exciting new prep DEX like Role DEX. Now, it’s probably working with us, trying to be like the Abitron, you know, GMX kind of relationship. You know, in Bitcoin, you would never imagine there’s like GMX kind of, you know, prep DEX on that. Right now, it’s all possible.

31:22 So I could go in and maybe sell my BRC20 tokens on Bitlayer, on some of the DEXs on Bitlayer now. Yeah. I could. Yes. Okay.

31:30 Yeah. We are, we’re compatible to BRC20, wooden assets and also normal program of Bitcoin. Right. Yeah. And then what’s the future?

31:39 I guess what you’re really trying to do is that finality. Yeah. But you know, what is it, what is your ecosystem like and what do you think the whole ecosystem looks like 12 months from now, 24 months from now? Great question. I think, yeah, well, so first of all, our V2 mainnet is like one or two months away.

31:53 We are, our engineering team is actually working on that, test out, you know, engaging the security auditing firm as well. You know, it’s going to still be a testnet, but I will engage all the developers to try it out. Right. And then I think the mainnet mainnet of the V2 version will be launched Q4 this year. With that, we can achieve Bitcoin finality.

32:12 Right. Transaction proof will be batched, eventually being settled back to Bitcoin layer 1. Right. That’s basically give us the security level of Bitcoin layer 1 security. That’s very different.

32:24 Compared to a sidechain, which your security level is maintained by your own validator sets. Right. It’s very different trust assumption, very different level of security. Obviously, you know, we have to pay certain amount of fees for the photo security cost. Right.

32:38 But because of the level of security upgrade so much, we are able to maybe engage a lot of the Bitcoin whales, Bitcoin OGs, to open up and explore, and let them explore this new programmability layer. Right. Because we could argue a lot of OGs don’t want to try any Bitcoin layer 2 at this moment because of different trust assumption. Right. And I think the market going to become better and later Q4.

33:03 And if we hit some interesting use cases, like when you bridging your assets, when they actually tap into the layer 2, there’s some interesting use case people really want to use. Right. And I think that will be important because at the end of the day, no matter how infrastructure technology upgraded, you need to use cases to allow users, either it’s B2B or B2C users, to really use a piece of infrastructure. Right. So that’s very key.

33:27 When people just keep bragging about how cool the technology is on the infrastructure layer, how to bring use cases? That’s even more important question for me, I think. What are use cases besides just DeFi, besides me getting yield? DeFi is a key use cases, right? Like stable coins, all these are very important building blocks for DeFi primitive.

33:47 We are exploring something interesting with AI as well in a different approach. So it’s more like on the content generation side. We all know AI can create interesting content like video, graphics, right? Some crazy good ones, right? High quality.

34:02 But at the end of the day, that AI processing, it’s off-chain, right? The content is off-chain, but the prompt words, it’s just like 20 words or something, right? We can’t even put into recursive inscription, make it very, very low cost, like very low small file, but it’s on Bitcoin, it’s inscribed on Bitcoin. So imagine our video today, eventually can recursive back to like 20 words of prompt, like, you know, just put, you know, describe like Brian Rose, Charlie Hu, and on this day and something like that.

34:29 And that’s like, it’s like a proof, like an inscription in that specific block. It’s part of the history. So imagine we think about all kinds of things which needs to be written in the history, but instead of written in the Alexander Library or whatever, like, you know, physical books or history books, it’s on Bitcoin. Bitcoin becomes one of the biggest history books which people pay for that. You can see it.

34:54 And the heavy content, the high quality content is recursive back with AI engine. So we could take this episode and with 20 keywords, it could be reproducible by an AI engine. Yeah. Okay. But that proof, that specific keywords is on Bitcoin.

35:09 Right. Well, I mean, I have a huge interest in that because I literally had content that was deleted from the internet because of my censorship issues. And we also know that this way back machine that used to be, we thought this immutable record of what the internet was in the past, we know it’s been tampered with, with governments and things like that. And so now more than ever, it’s so important to have this immutable layer. And I think we all agree, it’s definitely Bitcoin.

35:36 Yeah. If I could put my stuff on Bitcoin, it means it could be there forever. So Bitcoin is still there. It’s tampered proof as always, right? It’s immutable as always.

35:45 But the problem is, Bitcoin’s block space is very expensive. Yeah. We can’t really put a 4 megabytes of video file on Bitcoin. You can’t. It’s not possible.

35:54 It’s 4 megabytes each block right now. So AI come in place on that part. And it can tap into a set of keywords that would then output that video. Yes. I think that’s part of what would be very exciting.

36:06 I’m personally very pretty interested. Obviously, all these are very new, right? You know, people talk about dipping as well, right? I think it’s going to be interesting, but I think Bitcoin has a long way to go for that. We need like multiple layer of infrastructure, even like layer 3, like dipping layer 3, you know, to settle, right?

36:23 And then like multiple layers to settle back because at the end of the day right now, we look at Bitcoin ecosystem, the cost for security is higher than the others, right? You need to pay for the cost. Bitcoin has highest level of security, but you need to pay for that economically. So which leads to the infrastructure cost is slightly higher than a lot of Ethereum layer 2 on a salon and a few other kind of semi-centralized infrastructure. Why are people waiting to pay for that?

36:47 Because it’s on Bitcoin. Because of the high cost, the high level of security, you know, it’s ultimate decentralization. So we need to, looking for a high level of value use cases, which eventually hit the product market fit. The user is willing to pay that amount of fee, right, to tap into that. Right.

37:06 So that’s kind of a new frontier we have to explore in the use cases. Identity will be a big part of that. Identity will be potentially some kind of SPT as well, like high valued one. SPT is? Soulbound tokens.

37:20 Okay. Yeah, like all these are already in Ethereum. Right. But some of them doesn’t really have big traction due to various reasons. Right.

37:27 I think for me is like, let’s take an NFT example. A lot of NFT really become not valuable after a while. Right. After the high price gone. Because one, lack of use cases.

37:38 Two, people really don’t think it’s precious. There’s no like sense of precious on a lot of Ethereum NFT after a while. Right. Whereas Bitcoin, it really have that. Right.

37:49 It’s tamper proof. It’s natively minted inscribed on Bitcoin, you know, and it’s there forever. And some of them have a very low supply. They give you this Bitcoin culture, Bitcoin scarcity, you know, this Bitcoin precious there. Right.

38:04 That’s very important. And that’s kind of the reason retail or even some institution, we need to pay higher fee for that. And I think that’s kind of the product market fee that we need to explore in Bitcoin ecosystem. We instead of just copy paste of what worked, what it was already there in Ethereum, make a slight twist and then make it high end. I think that’s kind of what we call this high-end.

38:25 Yeah. When do you think I’ll be able to plug in my Bitcoin and get a yield with finality and then when we might see some? We’re going to see that maybe within the next six months. As like an early version, like if we talk about like big traction, you know, hitting the critical mass, yeah, within the next 12 months. I bet you’ll see some whale OGs you dip their toe because they sit on a lot of Bitcoin.

38:51 Yes. And even a few percent can move the needle. Yeah, and I would think they would try it at the small piece and see what happens. Yeah, that’s what happened with Ethereum. When Ethereum layer 2 came out, the Ethereum whales tried that.

39:04 And now like multiple Ethereum layer 2 have multiple billion of TDL, right? One thing about Bitlayer is you are also building an EVM chain as well. Yeah, so our layer 2 is EVM compatible, right? For the sake of developer friendly, we need to be. And compared to UTXO chain, which require developers to really rebuild a lot of things from scratch.

39:27 I think that’s the very important thing. But in the future, we’re exploring multiple VM. So we have this solution called a layered virtual machine we’re going to deliver, which is going to support even Solana VM, Cairo VM, and so on. Because we all know EVM is a technology being proven. It worked.

39:42 A lot of, you know, still the majority of the developers in the Web3 world use EVM for all kinds of applications. So it’s important, right, to have that. But we also know that EVM is our technology. It’s been like seven years not being updated too much. Originally come from the parody team from Ethereum, right?

40:01 Gavin Nood was one of the key inventor of that. EVM is important, but EVM is not the optimal solution. We are looking at new virtual machine for programmability, right? Which is important. So bring the high performance, multiple VM compatible programmability layer for Bitcoin is the vision we want to have.

40:21 Okay. What happens to Bitcoin and the crypto market in your opinion over the next 12 months? We’ve got the Bitcoin ETF. We got the Ethereum ETF. We just had Bitcoin Nashville.

40:32 You know, former president spoke, most likely the next president, Bobby Kennedy’s there. Senator Loomis proposes a million Bitcoin strategic reserves. I mean, you’re there in the middle of it, the biggest one ever. How are you feeling? Like, what do you think happens next?

40:47 And how was the vibe? And then how does that relate back to Bitlayer? Yeah, great question. Thanks for asking. I was personally there.

40:54 I really, really enjoyed the conference. We had the booth. Bitlayer, I was on the stage, really, you know, great honor to speak with a lot of Bitcoin OGs, you know, meet people in person. Obviously, that was part of history. You know, we really, we literally was witnessing history and maybe contributing a part of the history on that by seeing like, you know, potential future president in the United States, you know, have given a big speech about all this announcement in the future reserve for the United States.

41:22 So instead of getting rid of all the $200,000 Bitcoin, they probably should hold it for long term, even purchase more, which is a massive bull signal. And even the senators, you know, the congressmen, the U.S. House representative, a lot of key political figures were kind of promoting Bitcoin. So the people on the stage are all talking about the good things of Bitcoin, right? So that was like really, really interesting vibe.

41:45 And I think in general, we can summarize in a way, Bitcoin hitting to this level, the industry growth to this level that even the major political figures needs Bitcoin into part of that strategy, no matter its election or business and so on, right? I was also in the enterprise stage seeing a lot of major S&P, like Fortune 500 companies, like the CFO, the CEOs, talking about their upcoming Bitcoin strategy. You know, either it’s Bitcoin mining or treating Bitcoin assets as part of their treasury management as alternative assets, all the other things.

42:18 Or accepting Bitcoin from the customers. Customers for payments and so on, right? So I gave me this vibe of 2021 while all the major companies, including Facebook, in changing their name to Meta, everybody talk about Metaverse strategy. This cycle, everybody start talking about Bitcoin strategy. It’s very important and it’s not just politically, right?

42:37 It’s just business important, right? For business side, in the business side, you need to figure out the Bitcoin strategy one way or the other. Don’t miss the trend, right? Treating Bitcoin as an important asset, potentially even more important than the gold, right? And then you maybe put some of that into your balance sheet, categorize it into your payment gateway, or maybe tap into the ecosystem, building things up with Bitcoin.

43:01 Michael said I said that, like Frank Contemplate investing us and also tapping into this field. All these are kind of happening. So I would say two years ago, I would never imagine that. It was all just in front of me doing Bitcoin natural, which was great. And I think more importantly it was just, as I said, the builder culture back.

43:18 There were so many developers and technical savvy engineers, like having all these events, like side events, sharing what they’ve been doing, building on stage. That’s very important because we only saw that in Ethereum community. Ethereum, DevCon, maybe on Solana, some of the hacker houses stuff. It didn’t really happen in Bitcoin. It was essentially just miners talking about how much Bitcoin you can mine, why your miners actually have the cost-benefiting aspects, and how many megawatts.

43:49 That was their topic. That’s it. We still have a very big portion of the miners in their booth. Like we had a good conversation with McMarathon, which is a huge company, one of the biggest ones in the Bitcoin space in the United States. They are a publicist company.

44:05 They even think about trying to build a Bitcoin sidechain. They had a VIP dinner with us. We co-host together. We’ve been generally talking to them. And also Foundry and a few others as well.

44:16 They are looking at the Bitcoin programmability layer as an interesting way for them to tap into new futures. So I think that’s important for them even to consider their Bitcoin strategy, the new way of Bitcoin strategy, not just Bitcoin mining. Would you make a Michael Saylor speech and his strategy to just keep amassing Bitcoin and his concept that this is the only digital asset and it outlasts every other asset by, you know, multiple orders of magnitude. Also, you saw Dylan Leclerc, who I met at the Satoshi Roundtable.

44:46 I think you were there as well. And he’s now working with the Japanese company and they’re doing a similar strategy at a smaller scale, buying up Bitcoin and watching the price go up of the equity. What do you make of, are there more companies out there that are just going to start loading it up on their balance sheet? That’s a good question. Well, first of all, from the government side, what I heard, Korean government is working on that for Korean ETF.

45:09 And Australia already have that. Hong Kong already have that approved, right? So I think the rest of the world outside of the United States actually kind of following up on that. We probably will see some ETF approved from Middle East countries, like Saudi Arabia, maybe Bahrain, or maybe Abu Dhabi, right in the UAE as well. So that’s pretty exciting.

45:26 And I had a good conversation with Dr. Mawan, right? They kind of see something kind of working on that with some lobby and so on. With companies, I think it’s going to be just more and more. As I said, Bitcoin strategy is going to be the strategy for them to figure out in one-three space.

45:42 Michael Sutter is definitely leading that as a huge leader, right? With Michael’s strategy buying more and more Bitcoin. She just keeps sizing up. I think he had one of the best speech talking about Bitcoin in terms of history and the future, right? He is definitely super bullish still.

45:58 What did you make of his speech and the way he looks at it as an asset that has a 10,000-year life, you know, and the way that he compares it to alternative assets like property and stocks and how those are really nothing. That’s a good comment. There’s another person I want to mention. It’s, you know, it probably you know him as well. His name is Grant Cardell.

46:19 He was a very famous, he’s a famous YouTuber with two million user followers, right? He was selling property for many years, right? Made a big business on that and an investment. He was on the stage in a well session. He mentioned, I don’t know if that’s true or not because, you know, we can’t really verify.

46:35 He said almost 80% of his personal wealth are in Bitcoin right now. That’s Gary Cardell, which is Grant’s twin brother. Gary Cardell, yeah. So his twin brother is Grant Cardell that owns the billions of real estate, but that’s Gary, his twin brother. He doesn’t own real estate.

46:50 He doesn’t own the real estate that his brother Grant does, but he does have a lot of assets in crypto. Yeah, that’s pretty surprising, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we talk about real estate being business people or trade-ified people, like a lot of them actually own the majority of crypto now. Yeah, yeah.

47:06 Yeah, well, Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, he’s a good friend of mine. He was there in that chair about three weeks ago and he’s a huge fan of real estate, gold, silver, and Bitcoin and Ethereum because he just doesn’t trust any asset that he considers fake and he’s been talking about these assets for quite some time. I think the real estate guys get it better because they get real assets. Yes. And I think they’ve always been suspicious of Wall Street for sure.

47:30 They’ve always been suspicious of free out currency and so when they see something real, I think they gravitate towards it. For sure. So, yeah, more and more people are getting it. I think ETF is really helpful on that because they can really have the exposure in the compliance way, right? And it’s actually big scale, yeah.

47:46 What about price? Because the Bitcoin community jokes about this term, number go up, NGU, and that this asset is only as interesting as when the number goes up and the price goes up on Bitcoin. We had an interesting correction recently after the employment number in America. Yeah. How much longer is this bull run going to last?

48:06 Is that going to make a difference for Bitcoin or do you just look at it in a 10-year horizon and you don’t care? You’re just building. Well, as a builder, we’re definitely very long-term, like long, long-term bullish in the industry. That’s why we wouldn’t build that much. Building an infrastructure, building an ecosystem takes time, right?

48:24 And across multiple cycles, right? It’s not like just one cycle. But if we’re wearing kind of the investor or trader perspective, I think definitely this short-term pullback is, first of all, it’s actually expected. It’s like post-hacking, normally you have a pullback. And normally in the summer, the price is not as much excited as later analysis.

48:47 So it’s there, right? If we look back at the chart in 2021, 2020, that was similar, right? Obviously, we have some major factors coming, like the German government was selling and also the macro has been pretty bad, right, in terms of economy and so on. It’s kind of affecting the price in a way. But I think we are still very bullish on the Bitcoin movement with a lot of buy pressure coming around from institutions and potentially with an interesting use case being built, a lot of retail can come back, right?

49:18 I would argue a lot of retail compared to last cycle in 2021, a lot of them still haven’t come back in one free space yet. When are they coming back, Charlie? It’s normally the case when the Bitcoin price comes back, right? Is it to have to cross $100,000 and become a headline event for your Uber driver to buy Bitcoin and grandma to buy Bitcoin? I wouldn’t really comment too much on a specific number, like when those people will come back, but it will come back going away when major announcement, you know, major media, you know, have headlines, talk about that, right?

49:49 We definitely will hit a new all-time high for that. And this all-time high can go really high, right, multiple cycles. We are still, I would say, in the beginning of the bull market in terms of a lot of things, there’s still a lot of new innovation that really needs to be launched, properly test out, getting the new users coming over, right? You know, I think more and more people really can use and really have a good experience of what we compared to last cycle.

50:15 There’s so much being built already, right, infrastructure, but in Bitcoin space, it’s still very early, right? And I think next six months will be a very important period of time to really launch all this ecosystem and then we have other users, you know, can be used by other users. And then along with the price of Bitcoin go up, we’re going to see much more transaction on chain, you know, being transacted, you know, a lot of new application being launched and the users doing this and that.

50:42 I think those activities will be more and more upcoming. Yeah, I say a hundred thousand because it’s that number that might be the media event itself, the six figures that gets people’s attention and maybe gets retail back in. Yes, it’s like too big to ignore, right? Yeah, you know, 70 wasn’t enough or 75 and will 80 or 90 be probably not, but the hundred seems like it will, I don’t know. Do you think this bull market goes into 26 or no?

51:07 That depends on how we play around some major factors, right? You know, some even that national level policies, we talk about interest rate because if we normally the bull market last like one and a half year and then we need to see some interesting phenomena happen, right, we can move the needle for the industry for we could start argue the industry has less than 3% of the entire population of the world actively using, you know, Web3 for all kind of things. If we hit like say 6% this time and then we can really see some interesting, you know, a momentum.

51:42 If we hit like 10%, let’s say we 3x the entire user base for Web3, maybe we get into some interesting local top, right? And I think that’s important. For us building ecosystem, we want to see new users coming to space. We want to see more transaction happening on chain. We want to see new interesting use case being built.

52:01 That’s even more important than Bitcoin as an asset hit like 100k or 150 or 160 or 200. Like after a certain point, it’s really about why Bitcoin or why Web3 infrastructure being useful. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s going to be interesting.

52:20 That would be a long bull market, wouldn’t it? I mean, because it technically kicked it off in January. Yeah, you said they typically last a year and a half. Is that what you said or half year and a half? Year and a half.

52:28 Right. So yeah, during the year half, there’s local bottom, local bottom. Talk to me about Asia. You know, I went to Singapore for my first time last year for token and I loved it. I mean, first of all, the story of Singapore is fascinating and really inspiring.

52:45 And when I told my students about it here, a lot of people never heard of that story and just what they created since the 60s. It’s incredible. I also saw a bull market in September of 23 when the rest. I mean, I just come back from consensus where everybody was licking their wounds and here in London, nobody wanted to smile about crypto and token was sold out 10,000 people. Yeah, it was on great energy.

53:11 Yes. And meanwhile, you’ve got the ordinals kicking off and there was a lot of Asian buyers, a lot of Chinese buyers there. Absolutely. And I started to be hearing, everyone was like Vietnam’s doing this, Thailand’s doing this, Philippines are doing this, everybody’s breaking down all these countries in Asia, how they were all taking a slightly different spin on it. And I was kind of introduced to Asia in crypto, which is arguably the driving force in crypto.

53:37 What can you tell people that they don’t understand? Because a lot of people from North America and Europe, they look at the world from that viewpoint because typically for the last 50, 100 years, those areas have dominated a lot of tech but they haven’t done it now. What do we need to understand about different areas of Asia, even the way Asia looks at these assets? I was talking, weirdly, I was in Dubai Jan Fed March and I met a lot of Chinese women at centralized exchanges and these senior positions and one of them pulled me aside and she said, Brian, she said, gambling’s in our culture and I’d never heard that before and I was just like, okay, I’d never heard that before and so I’m just this kind of naive person that doesn’t really understand all of that.

54:18 Let me share my perspective. First of all, we can take a systemic, systematic approach to analyze it. We have East, we have West, we have institution, we have retail. What drive Bitcoin ecosystem, especially autonomous to this level, was definitely the Eastern retail. And the narrative I remember very vividly was a lot of institutional VC-backed heavy projects, mostly on Ethereum, the Asia community have very little access in the early rounds and then all of a sudden, BRC-20 came out and everybody know Bitcoin in Asia and then you can mint all these fair launch public mint, which nobody can front run you, there was no pre-mark.

55:01 It was the narrative. It hit the home run. Everybody loved it. It was like such a long, very soul sucking bear market. All of a sudden, this new thing came out and it’s minted on Bitcoin network.

55:15 As a new asset, people potentially have a fair access to it. So that was kind of hit the home run a little bit. You said everybody knows Bitcoin in Asia. A lot of people know Bitcoin. Yeah, almost everybody now.

55:25 How is that? And in China, a lot of people own Bitcoin. I’m not sure a lot of people own Bitcoin, but they know Bitcoin. It’s been very heavily educated. They know the name, they know the term, they know its digital assets.

55:38 Some people actually hold it. Some people actually secretly own it because some other friends hold it. Oh, they bought for OTC. Oh, they actually have like mining machine and stuff, right? Like if we remember from before 2021, China and a few other Asian countries own over 80% of the computation power Bitcoin network, right?

55:59 Government’s policy and all that shut down a lot of them and then relocated to a lot of the mining computation power to the United States, Iceland, and different countries in the world, right? That’s that. Singapore? Singapore, it’s difficult. It’s almost impossible to really mine Bitcoin because the electricity is high level.

56:15 Okay, Singapore is important. I’m glad they actually liked Singapore. Singapore being a very important crypto hub in South Asia because one, they have the best infrastructure. They have a lot of high-educated fintech people who understand digital assets, like the basics. And there was a lot of very important companies.

56:34 They have the Asia chapter here and they have like zero capital gain taxes, which is very crypto-friendly. They also have some multiple licensed exchanges, right, in Singapore and so on. A lot of the market makers, including Mintermute, I had to call it. I just went there a couple hours ago. They’re based in London.

56:52 They all have their trading desk in Singapore. Drum Crypto, GSR, all these major United States, like crypto market maker and major liquor funds have their trading firm in Singapore. So Singapore is a very important place in Asia. Like if you go to only one country, if you pick one country, you want to go in Asia as a Westerner, you go to Singapore. That’s that.

57:12 And that’s the reason token 2049 as a conference brand and it was smart, right? You know, locate themselves in Singapore right before the F1, right? So at the Grand Prix, at the Merino base end, what could you want? Yeah, there’s a lot of surprises. There’s a lot of crypto people love F1, including myself.

57:28 I’m a huge fan of F1. That’s why we have this F1 branding, you know, in build layer, we call this like helmet and driving safe and be faster, right? So, but I want to try to revisit the topic, right? Yes. Why Asia have so many momentum, had so much momentum in Bitcoin.

57:45 It was because of that, the fair mint, the open access, and people understand Bitcoin. I think Western people, especially in the United States, they understand a lot, quite a lot. Whereas Asia, Bitcoin was the one, right? We even have multiple attempts, like BSV, Bitcoin, you know, BSV, Bitcoin Cash, different kind of hard fork version here on there. Proof of work was a very adapted, accepted concept in the Asia community, right?

58:13 And I want to try to comment on some of the Chinese lady, you said like the Chinese people, some Asian people like to gamble, which I think culturally is true. I wouldn’t try to be like the whole cultural experts to comment that we see a lot of people wants to gamble, even with the foreign Western community as well. But it’s about, I think the whole hardworking and trying to change their social status and access to this free market in crypto space is very attractive for the Asia community, right?

58:46 If we culturally argue, a lot of Asian countries has been very difficult to really become successful in certain industry, right? We talk about education industry, energy, health care. It’s just really difficult to climb up there in Korea later in a very short period of time. And Asia has sort of hardworking kind of culture really is very important to be kind of one element, right? To really drive in.

59:12 If you want to be successful in crypto, you need to work hard. You need to grind, you need to really like no holiday, no weekend, the kind of stuff, right? Which in Asia, in a lot of countries, it’s just nature, right? It’s normal. If there’s a good opportunity, you just grind out.

59:27 You don’t really chill, like taking your one-month-long vacation for that. We are kind of saying that one day in crypto sometimes, like one year outside of crypto, right? So it’s very energy consuming. I think last year, if you want to tap into all the old notes, all these like early mint, you need to do proof of work. Like you literally have to be in front of a laptop, understand this and that, you know, maybe do a lot of grinding, right?

59:54 So that was pretty exciting period. And everybody kind of have this fear excess. There’s no like privilege. There’s no, quote-unquote, royal family, whatever. There’s no centralization authority.

1:00:06 Bitcoin space has no like Vitalik, right? With all due respect, Vitalik is a great founder. You know, he definitely moved the industry forward. I have a mega respect to him. But there’s like in Bitcoin space, Satoshi has disappeared.

1:00:19 There’s no people like kind of finger-pointing which we go this and that. It’s like a, it’s a very free market kind of approach. There’s a supply, there’s a demand, people like it, off you go, right? We don’t have to listen certain people’s comment and they have like a collective agenda. Bitcoin foundation doesn’t really exist anymore.

1:00:37 Whereas Ethereum, there’s a lot of things that means it’s in the agenda. It’s more like a controlled economy, quote-unquote, with a leader, with agenda, with a plan and with like a centralization entity called the Ethereum Foundation. Some people like it, some people don’t like it, but it’s just different. Whereas Bitcoin, it’s quite free market, right? While you have a free market, you don’t have to be entitled with, like you’re a big title, you have a major company, you have to be a big OG, otherwise you’re nobody.

1:01:05 In Bitcoin, everybody has free access. All in all, it was like that. It was a bunch of nobody came up with just an interesting concept. Now people have access to this new asset minting protocol and then people have found minting it and some people start interesting buying it. So Asia have the interesting access on that.

1:01:23 We don’t actually require big VC on that. So that’s interesting, right? When all the assets have been created and when certain traction been hit and then all the institutions, including VCs, start paying attention. So that was kind of the reason we have the history last year. Okay.

1:01:38 And then what happens going forward, do you think? And what are the countries to watch? You’ve talked about Vietnam’s really interesting with the adoption that’s going on there. I think you’ve also said to people before that in these countries, it doesn’t take too much success in crypto for you to be wealthy in these countries. Like you said, you have access to these markets and the amount of money you can make, it can move the needle in some way.

1:02:01 Some generational wealth can be generated if you’re really being smart and working hard and understand this first principle and being early, contributing your value to the community and I actually can’t get a reward. So here we have been getting quite a lot of momentum and support from Vietnamese community, for example. Korea is another one. We’ve been learning a lot from other APAC, South Asia community, including Thailand and including Indonesia. It’s all very interesting and a very high population communities.

1:02:33 They all have a fair amount of Web3 crypto knowledge already. They all know how to use Web3 wallets. A lot of them. It’s actually very high crypto penetration. But I think as I would just describe, the whole fairness, open access to Bitcoin ecosystem and they actually already know Bitcoin for many years.

1:02:51 That’s kind of the reason a lot of Asia users, especially in the retail, are tapping into the space more and more. Even at this moment right now, in Bitlayer, I think on the retail side, over 60% are coming from the APAC region. But I think moving next, what’s next is Western community, Western builders, but more importantly Western institutions. So we really want to really get close and engaging and working with all the Western, especially American Bitcoin institutions.

1:03:23 Frank Contemplate and a bunch of others is very important because at the end of the day, money talks, liquidity talks, who owns a lot of Bitcoin? A lot of institutions in the United States. But they haven’t really been moved the needle because one, they take the time to make a decision in that the industry is too early. A lot of cutting corners. Two, still a big gap of infrastructure.

1:03:44 We still need to deliver and improve to them with all the battle tests and attraction. Three, I think they’re still making their mind around, wrapping their head around what we should do on Bitcoin strategy. But those guys, once they make their mind, it’s powerful. Right. While we’re on this topic, what about the Middle East?

1:04:02 Because you look at Saudi, you look at Kuwait, look at Qatari, look at Abu Dhabi. I mean, as far as we know, their sovereign wealth funds have not entered into the Bitcoin ETFs, but they have a lot of money. Obviously, I spent a lot of time in Dubai. I know Dr. Marwan.

1:04:17 I would say if there’s one city in the world that’s the most important city in crypto, it’s probably Dubai. It’s Dubai, yeah. And so, yeah, how do you see that coming into play? They don’t have the retail base, but they have the per capita developers there, right? There’s a lot of wealth there, and there’s a lot of people looking at Bitcoin mining.

1:04:34 I’ve been, you know, for a couple of years. I think they’re fairly well educated about what is Bitcoin. They don’t need to educate them further on that part, but they don’t actually, they probably don’t know too much about all of those, Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitcoin DeFi, so to speak, right? I’m very, I’m actually have not too much, I don’t have too much to comment about this. I need to spend more time to jam with all the local Middle East friends who have been building things on the web space.

1:05:02 I think Bitcoin Minna in December this year will be interesting to go and to learn what’s going on. And also kind of just jam ideas with local people. We’ve been talking about Bitcoin strategy with some major family office from Bahrain, from Saudi, from Abu Dhabi. And I know a lot of, you know, crypto builders and investors based in Dubai, but some are actually not like local Emiratis, like global people, right? But leaving Dubai, it’s a bit different.

1:05:26 Dubai is like a global citizen already, global village, right? I think Middle East, the key things can move the needle for them is certain country really approve the Bitcoin ETF. And then we can talk about institution, royal family, major family office can tap into the Bitcoin exposure in a big scale, right? I think that something needs to happen and after that, a lot of builders, a lot of even the government will really seriously think, consider about Bitcoin strategy.

1:05:59 And I think right now, because I know family, I’ve been to Dubai many times. I know Dr. Marwan and many other people in Dubai as well. They’ve been talking a lot about AI. At least in the last 18 months, a lot of the discussion they’ve been prioritizing is AI, right?

1:06:17 That’s something which is really want to try to leapfrog. They even try to even be beyond Silicon Valley, which I think it’s going to be challenging. Bitcoin strategy or the whole one free strategy in the government level is not being that much emphasized yet. That’s definitely under discovered at the topic. But if there’s a way we hit a threshold, Bitcoin ecosystem has, let’s say hit flipped it even the layer two in terms of TVL, we have some very huge phenomenal, major use cases being built on Bitcoin ecosystem with strong access to Middle East, Arabic community, right?

1:06:56 And then maybe one of the Middle East country officially approved Bitcoin ETF. Then we talk about very different, Bitcoin in MENA region. Like Saudi, maybe. I’m not sure which country specifically, we’ll see how it goes, yeah. Yeah, no, I love the area.

1:07:12 I’ll be there January, February, March. We took our studio there. I love everything about that area. I just love the mindset. I love the way that- The potential is huge.

1:07:21 The potential is huge. And also it’s London and the UK, I mean, they’re not being proactive. They’re not embracing this. They’re not being helpful. Europe’s not at all.

1:07:33 So there’s no reason to be here, I think. But there, it’s exciting. But AI is tricky right now because it does trump crypto to a certain extent because there’s a lot of potential, a lot of money, a lot of things that move the markets. So sometimes Andreessen Horowitz maybe looks at the AI investments first. Maybe they look at the blockchain next.

1:07:51 But they still do look at blockchains. Yeah, they put a major deal on Eigenlayer. They probably consider the next move will be Bitcoin. We’ll see, we’ll see. Tell me about you as a leader.

1:08:01 You’ve got 70 people now in your company. How do you lead a company like this? I guess you have people probably all over the world. That’s a pretty big company for Web3. Yeah.

1:08:12 And what’s it like to be an entrepreneur and a leader? Yeah, well, I’ve been kind of an entrepreneur before crypto as well. I’ve been learning about a lean startup, how to do a startup. I watched a lot of the books. I’ve read a lot of books.

1:08:24 I’ve watched a lot of the entrepreneur movies in the past. Being a founder in Web3 is a different level, right? It’s very stressful and high pressure. It’s very demanding and a lot of people need the attention, right, and a lot of people need the input. I think the best way for me, some humble wisdom is try to delegate, right?

1:08:46 Not trying to do everything by yourself and do not micromanage. You need to trust your partners. So in my company, we have majority of them are engineers. So I have a great co-founder, by the way. Kevin is absolutely one of the best engineer and a technical leader I can find in my network.

1:09:05 It’s great to have him in our entrepreneurship journey. I don’t think we could grow that fast without him, right? He really the brain of the product. We kind of work hand in hand, back to back, right? We really trust each other.

1:09:19 So I think I’ve been looking at so many startups. One major reason startup fail is the founders don’t get along with each other. We really start debating, even fight, even trying to separate the company, right? That happens with some major company in the space as well. Even like Bitmain, right?

1:09:37 They had like two CEO fail apart and so on and so on. So we get it on very well. We have amazing collaborative working mode. So I think that’s the reason we functioned pretty well and we grow so fast. Five months ago, we only have like around 18 people.

1:09:54 Now we have over 70, 50 of them are engineers. We have one of the biggest engineering tech team in the Bitcoin layer two, Bitcoin infrastructure space. We’ve been doing a lot of real engineering work. Instead of just saying, we actually doing a lot of codes. Over 400,000 line of codes being written already.

1:10:13 A lot of commits being shared, being contributed to community. And on the non-technical and R&D side, we have people from Poland, from India, from the United States, from Vietnam, from Korea, of course, from Hong Kong, from China, from Singapore there. We’ve kind of been all over the place in an effective way, right? We need to get our branding out. We need to build awareness.

1:10:35 We need to gain people’s mind share from the developers’ mind share, retails’ mind share, institutional’s mind share, investor’s mind share. It’s all very important. So it’s kind of like around the clock, 24 seven, right? So we try to learn to use all kinds of important tooling, including AI tooling as well. Like in terms of CIM system, how to record a lot of important messages, taking meetings with recording and so on.

1:10:59 And also try to move the needle, right? See all these metrics being very data driven. Certain events, certain campaigns. Why is this effective? Why is this work?

1:11:11 And then we double down. Why is this not effective? We try to avoid that, right? And then try to be very agile, very iterative. We have weekly meeting about a lot of things.

1:11:22 It’s really just reflection. Reflecting a lot of things. Work worked, what didn’t work. And then we do that almost the small one every week, big one every month. So for example, right after Bitcoin Nashville, we had a big reflection kind of meeting among the partners, among the senior managers as well.

1:11:41 To really try to revisit a lot of things. Because we don’t want to be just keep doing things and something just not really actually makes sense, right? So we want to be very agile in a way. That really can make the company very lean, but grow very fast. And I think we also have access to really great talents.

1:11:59 And we try to really work with the best of the best people. We somehow are so lucky. I think we have a lot of great team members drawing. They’ve been contributing quite a lot. They’re very hardworking.

1:12:12 And we try to have really good culture in terms of hardworking. It’s not just ourselves. It’s definitely not just me as well. It’s really for the sake of making contributions and potentially make history for Bitcoin. It’s a higher level beyond us as a vision and mission.

1:12:28 So I think that’s the reason we’re not the highest salary paying company in the space. I’m pretty sure there’s other company paying higher salary than us for the employees and for the team members. But we get a lot of things done in a very short period of time. They say the customer experience is a lagging indicator of the company culture, what they say. So if you have people that love doing what they’re doing and they’re being listened to, then that creates the customer experience.

1:12:53 Even some people who are not getting paid, it’s like just ambassador. Some people like to work with us. They feel it’s part of the interesting mission. Yeah, I could see that. What about the token?

1:13:04 That’s a crucial part. And how do you give the token utility? Is this a major cornerstone of Bitlayer? Yes. We’re launching, we’re planning for TGQ for this year, October, November.

1:13:17 We’re talking to all the major exchanges already. We have seven market maker investors. We have active conversation with a lot of them and potentially work with some of them multiple, I will say at least two. I haven’t decided who specifically yet. We have a lot of campaign, a lot of announcement needs to be made next upcoming month.

1:13:36 A lot of interesting news and a major announcement in early September before token 2049. Stay tuned on that. Obviously tech is kind of getting ready. We’re going to ship it. We want to grow the traction.

1:13:48 Hopefully hit a 1 billion TVL before the launch with really solid use cases and having some interesting traction as well. So we need to really help our ecosystem project become bigger, better, more successful. So kind of collectively move mountain together. So that’s there. The BTR token, BTR is our ticker.

1:14:08 BTR token will be used as a governance token, a staking token. Validator, we want to open up the validator program. Those validator who hold token staking become like node, a validator program, have access to the revenue share on the gas fees. That’s essentially the key token number use cases of our token. Of course, BTR token will be used on all kinds of liquidity pools, as like trading pair and so on into like across all the stable coin collateral, AMM DEXs, prep DEXs and so on.

1:14:38 So it will become like assets but also a utility token in our ecosystem. Yeah. Okay. All right. TGEs are stressful, right?

1:14:49 Because you want to get them right. I personally helped a lot of project in the past as an investor advisor for TGE. I wouldn’t say it’s new for me. I mean, obviously being a founder, doing TGE is always new, right? It’s kind of new.

1:15:03 I wouldn’t think it’s something I will be very, very stressful, but I wanted to get it right. So we try to be very careful making decisions, right? I think making right decisions is even more important than just hardworking, right? So upcoming months will be very important to make certain important decisions in terms of who we want to work with, when we want to launch it and what’s the plan, right? So I think hopefully we’re going to have a very good market condition.

1:15:32 It’s always good to have a market condition to launch a token together with all the other campaigns you want to run, all the other good news you want to announce and so on. Is this the most fun you’ve ever had? I think we had a lot of fun in the past by working with others but this is something unique for sure. Because it’s yours. Yeah, it’s a team collective efforts.

1:15:52 But I think the most fun is because it’s for Bitcoin. It’s nothing else more proud by building things, contributing for Bitcoin. I never had that. And with Polkadot, with Polygon, with all the other non-Bitcoin ecosystem, respectfully, it didn’t have that vibe. It didn’t have that mission.

1:16:10 In Bitcoin, this time, it’s just unique. The Cadillac of blockchains. What’s your advice to someone who’s listening to us? Maybe somebody who’s young out there in their early 20s and they’re thinking about getting into blockchain as a career path. Do you think they should go for it?

1:16:25 You said something interesting, Charlie. You said entrepreneurship’s hard but Web3 entrepreneurship is probably the hardest of the hard. And maybe you could speak on why that is but would you still recommend somebody, a young man or young woman, graduating from college with an engineering degree to go into blockchain? First of all, why Web3, and entrepreneurship in Web3 is so hard because there’s so much uncertainty. You never know what’s gonna happen in the market in terms of certain price and certain movements and certain news or bad things happen, right?

1:16:58 It’s just so difficult to predict. And there’s no moats and it’s all open source. Yeah, a lot of open source stuff. So everything can just move quickly. And it’s just so much dynamic stuff.

1:17:06 For newbies who actually haven’t been in this space forever, like many years, it’s very easy to make mistakes. Mistakes in the retail level in terms of where you send your private key to other people, you get hacked, you get scammed, all the way to you work with the wrong people and this product goes to zero and your reputation can be ruined and all kinds of stuff, right? It’s kind of a very fragile, right? So for young people, I think the good thing for young people is that it’s okay to make certain mistakes when you’re young, right?

1:17:38 And then you learn from that. I think normally, statistically, that’s actually the case. For new people enter the space, their first cycle, they don’t make a lot of money in the first cycle. It’s just statistically because of all kinds of reason you need to learn from that. The way to learn in a harder way is unfortunately paying some tuition fee, right?

1:18:00 That’s that, that’s the nature of that. So I have to manage the expectation for the people in the audience. You want to really become successful of being an important builder or an important investor in this space, but you are just new, be careful and maybe you are not gonna be very successful in this cycle, maybe, right? So manage your expectation, but you might be very successful next cycle. That’s kind of we see.

1:18:23 I’ve been a space three cycle now. Even up to this moment, I wouldn’t really call myself major, major successful. I didn’t have some successful things. I made some mistake and failed as well, right? It’s all part of the journey.

1:18:36 But I think you need to really understand this is a very hardworking, very fast paced industry. So for the people who are not mentally prepared, maybe that’s not for you, right? So I tried to push away from that. But if the people who really wanna work hard to really grow in a very exciting, maybe history making industry, this is a challenge you should pick up, right? For the people who wants to grind, who wants to build in meaningful stuff, maybe can really push the boundary for modern finance, for the modern technology era.

1:19:09 This is probably the most exciting, but of course, most challenging industry. Yeah, you’ll tell your grandkids about this one day. They’ll say, what, you used to carry around a whole wallet? What, you used to do this and that? And they’ll be like, can’t believe this will sound like the old days.

1:19:24 But I think you are making history. I spoke with someone at this Toshi round table and he said, making money in crypto is not about timing the market. He said, it’s about time in the market. And that’s what you just said. And I agree.

1:19:38 It’s like, you kind of have to put time in this market. You have to. You do. And that’s the wisdom comes, everything comes, but you have to put the time in. Yeah, that’s what I love so much about Michael Siller’s speech this time.

1:19:52 He said, people spend majority of their life trying to make money, right? But in Bitcoin or in crypto space, it’s very important that it’s like, this is a new ultrasound money. And if you tap into space and you spend money in the industry, you probably can learn how to hold your money. Self custody, digital asset, ultrasound money on that. Because whatever fiat you are making in other industry, people are busy making money.

1:20:21 But if you don’t really spend time properly to manage it, you don’t really do wealth management, you lose it very fast, right? So instead of just spending over 10, 100,000 hours just trying to busy making money, people need to spend at least like 5,000 hours to figure out a way to manage it money. So that’s very important. In the web space, if you wanna be a builder, putting money to learn and then trying to arrow is very important. It’s getting, get your hands dirty, getting practical, really learn how to use all the wallets, tap into all the protocols, really gets practical and operational, is very important for the new members.

1:21:05 Yeah, I love this market because it’s always on. It moves so fast. The things that happen in this market in two years, they’re like stories of biblical proportions. Like I really think I’m looking at the Bible. You know, it’s a flood, it’s a famine and the locusts come and it’s like, what?

1:21:21 And that happens in like two years. I mean, if you’re in this market for two or three years, like you’re really a veteran, you’ve seen a lot of stuff. And yeah, I like it because if you’re tuned in and you like to tinker and grind and put in the work, then you can go really far. And I always encourage people to do that if that’s what they wanna do. This space has a lot of interesting, legendary history, but also some bizarre history, right?

1:21:45 People get hacked millions of dollars, you know? Two years ago, we probably won the biggest crypto leader in the world, right? Now he’s in jail, unfortunately. I think we all know which his name is, some other big company as well. We saw a lot of interesting young people become all of a sudden very successful, right?

1:22:04 And now they’re pretty rich and successful, but after certain mistakes they made, they’re back to square one. You know, things like that, crazy things happen. So it’s a very volatile industry, require people to learn how to be anti-faija, you know? To stick to the first principle, be robust and stick to some certain practice and also be humble all the time. Yeah, you got that one down, that’s good.

1:22:28 It’s hard to be humble when you’re being successful. And I agree, people should go watch that talk by Michael Saylor at the latest Bitcoin conference because I don’t think people understand how low the half-life is of the assets they hold. You know, you think you own gold or your own property or some stock and it’s gonna be there forever. I mean, watch Michael’s speech and you realize it’s got a half-life much shorter than you think it is. It’s weird, I’m watching this show right now on TV.

1:22:54 It’s called Yellowstone and it’s about this guy with this ranch in Montana. And it’s been passed down from his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather and he’s got this ranch and all of his life every day is fighting to keep his ranch. Oh, wow. And I just thought of Michael Saylor’s talk because the state wants to take a piece of it and they wanna put an airport here and the reservation wants a piece and they wanna take property tax and he literally can’t hold on to this asset that his family spent hundreds of years holding on.

1:23:23 The legacy, huh? And he won’t be able to hold on to it and it’s this fleeting moment and it’s a lot like what Michael Saylor said. You think you have an asset that you’ll have forever like a piece of property but you don’t realize with property taxes and a changing political landscape that can be chipped away to where it becomes worth nothing. And so- Unfortunately, those are not ultrasound assets. Exactly.

1:23:44 And so it starts making Bitcoin look really attractive. So I agree with what you say. We all spend so much time making money but actually you should really spend some time managing and holding that money. And Michael made a great point that Bitcoin is a crazy long-term asset. Charlie, how do people learn more about Bitlayer, start using Bitlayer, get involved with the token, build on Bitlayer?

1:24:07 What’s the best way for them to do that? Thanks for asking. So Bitlayer.org is our website. It’s the best way to tap into our documentation for the builders who want to build on top of us. I think our documentation on technical details is pretty self-explanatory.

1:24:25 We’re EV and compatible. It’s pretty easy to build on. And feel free to reach out to us on our website and we have email there and we try to be pretty responsive. And for the average investor and people just generally interested about our project, follow us on Twitter, Bitlayer Labs. And we try to share all kinds of updates, technical updates, community updates, ecosystem updates, and partnership all there.

1:24:48 We got a lot of things going on every day in Bitlayer. Over a half million followers already. Yeah, I think for me, Charlie Who Sets, I try to share something with interesting wisdom insights about what’s happening in the space. Obviously now I’m so in the Bitlayer stuff. There’s barely any other personal stuff now, but I try to share something interesting on a personal career journey as well.

1:25:14 Yeah, okay, good. So follow you on all those platforms. Yeah, you guys are super busy, big community. Big announcement coming up for Singapore. You should probably come to Token in Singapore.

1:25:24 Yeah, welcome. And come check it out and hang out. Charlie, I’m super excited to be on this journey with you. I met you literally in passing at Token in Dubai, I think, as we first met. And then we talked a little bit more and you came on and presented to the team and I always like your energy, I like your vibe.

1:25:41 I think the biggest thing I noticed about you, to be honest, Charlie, is I asked you a question about your competition and I tried to get you to bad mouth your competition and you wouldn’t. And I think that says a lot about someone’s character. You said, look, they’re building great stuff too, I like what they’re doing, but this is what we’re doing and this is why we think this is gonna be great. Focusing on building value, instead of sabotage others, it’s important.

1:26:05 Yeah, that and your enthusiasm and we’re excited, man. So please, please build these tools because if I have to go back to that damn BRC-20 hacked together, wanna be Dex again, I’m gonna literally wanna jump off a building. So we really need these tools. And again, I love Bitcoin, the Cadillac of blockchains. I really wanna be on that chain for so many reasons, but we need the tools.

1:26:27 So yeah, can’t wait for you to build them. Can’t wait for everybody to know more about Bitlayer and super excited to support you all the way, man. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it, man, let’s do this.

1:26:36 Appreciate it, yeah.