John Lilic - Is Your Crypto Safe? Quantum Computing Could Shatter Blockchain Security

Full transcript: John Lilic on London Real

4:05 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is John Lilic, the Ethereum pioneer, blockchain strategist and quantum security advocate. You were a core member at Consensus, the software company behind Metamask, which scaled Ethereum to global adoption. You later served as a strategic advisor during the early development of Polygon and today focus on preparing Web three systems for the disruptive impact of quantum computing. You’ve warned that much of our current cryptographic infrastructure, including Bitcoin and D5 protocols, is not equipped to survive Q day, the moment when quantum computers can break classical encryption.

4:41 Today, through your work with Telos and other 4 leaning projects, you’re helping to develop 0 knowledge, cryptography, decentralized governance and post quantum mountain frameworks to secure the future of digital assets and AI. John, welcome to London. Rail Oh, well, thank you for having me. That’s very kind. I think more than anything, I’m just a lucky guy who stumbled into Bitcoin and kind of like had a bit of an interesting journey over the last 1012 years. But it’s very nice to be here.

5:08 I have to say just real quick, while we’ve known each other for a little while, I’m a big fan of everything you’ve done over the years. A lot of my friends are very excited that I, I have the opportunity to be here with you as well. And I just want to, before we get started, I want to commend you because here’s the thing, at the margin in the moment, that’s when it counts. And that’s when it’s really hard to do what’s right because the consequences are very high, right?

5:36 That’s when it’s very costly. And so these days, there’s lots and lots of folks, media people and so on that are kind of backtracking a bit. And it’s a little bit of a reversal and, you know, obfuscating the truth and what actually happened. But, you know, I admire what you did, you know, obviously, with all this COVID stuff going back a few years. And yeah, it’s a it’s a great honor to talk to you. Thanks for that, John.

5:58 I appreciate it. You know, when all that was happening in 2020, I, Alex Jones, had me on the show remotely, of course, because nobody could travel. And he was like, Brian, you know, why did you fight back? Why did you find the strength to say, no, I’m going to keep broadcasting. And I was just like, it wasn’t a conscious decision that day when YouTube banned and deplatformed that video, I was so angry that my only reaction, John, was to re upload the video. And then when they broke, they re upload the video. And then when they took that down to upload a vlog about how they just taken on the video, it just, it just was so fundamentally wrong.

6:34 And I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in America or just because I’m a human that someone could stop free speech that I don’t know. What we did was just a reaction. And then in a weird way, I felt like I’ve been trained my whole life for that. And also that we were just privileged to be in a position where we could serve with that message. Here we were in London with a studio, with people that could function during lockdown with the broadcasting platforms in the audience.

7:03 And then David Icke was two hours away. And so we were in a great position where we could hold these live conversations that really changed a lot of people’s lives at a point where there was no other media offering any other alternative viewpoint except the one that they were portraying. So man, it was just a real honor to be, to be able to be of service at that. Yeah, I, I think, you know, going back to that time, you know, I’ve talked about this off camera, but it’s kind of like it’s fine to have different viewpoints.

7:37 There’s compelling data from both sides on, for example, vaccines and masks and things like that. OK. And, and I’m not going to give you an opinion either way. I’m just going to stick to the fact that the right to inform consent is enshrined in every single human rights document that every single Western democracy subscribes to. I mean, it’s a core tenant, right? It’s one of the things we learned from what the Nazis did in World War 2 to never infringe on that right and the right to bodily autonomy.

8:06 So, so, you know, you should have the right. And Novak Djokovic is a guy that admire very much. And this is the point that he made as well, the way he was treated obviously in a lot of countries and so on, But he wasn’t anti vaccine. He was pro-choice, pro informed consent. And I think that’s the the big message, you know, that kind of you were advocating for as well.

8:27 And, and you know, that is why today, I think, I mean, you’re kind of, I mean, you are an icon. A lot of people admire you. And I think those moments going back when it’s like hard and the truth matters, that’s what stands the test of time, you know, And I think that’s where things got a little bit, you know, it was kind of a tough time, but, but, but here we are now. So it’s all good. Yeah, no, I agree.

8:51 I just, we had the right to have those discussions. And the other thing which boggled my mind, is it you? Not only do you have the right to speak, you have the right to hear someone else speak. And here I was with 2.4 million subscribers in the world, and I wanted to talk to them and they wanted to listen to me. And it’s someone in the middle, in this case, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, later PayPal, LinkedIn said, no, you can’t talk to each other.

9:15 And it was like, well, there’s something fundamentally wrong with that. And they always say that, you know, the, the solution to bad information is, is more information, you know, or if you disagree, well, let’s have more of a discussion about it. And so we just knew there was something wrong and we were at the tip of the sphere. I mean, we were in March and April of 2020 when no one was really doing that. Now, a lot of people came later and they helped continue fight, which was great.

9:40 But yeah, it was an interesting time. And when you’re getting shut down by platform’s like 6 platforms in one day and everyone says and. You’re like this this. Can’t be coordinated. No, you’re, you’re just being a conspiracy theorist.

9:53 Of course it can’t be coordinated. And I didn’t actually believe that. And then later when you look at the Twitter Files, you’re like, oh, it’s all coming from DC and then the whole thing. But at the time we were just fighting and getting up every day. Brian Rose, a legend.

10:06 Outstanding. So look, I want to get back to your early days with Bitcoin and Ethereum back into New York City and hear about that whole journey because that’s incredible, especially compared to where we are today with Bitcoin and Etherium, these two massive chains doing massive things. But I’d love to start with quantum computing. And so maybe we jump in and talk about what is Q day? It’s a term I never heard before. And how close are we to it?

10:31 And why do people need to know what it is? Because I think your average person has heard of quantum computers. They’ve heard of some Dumor ISM around it, but they don’t know how it’s going to affect them. Even people in crypto probably don’t know how it’s going to affect them. Yeah.

10:43 Well, it’s a very good point you make around Dumerism, and I’ve given a couple talks and presentations. You know, quantum hopefulness is how I like to call it. And so there are risks and we have to understand those risks, but then there’s tremendous opportunity as well. And so for me, this started last summer roughly, and I basically was very fortunate to meet some interesting people, including a couple guys from Oxford, Stefano Gogioso and Fabrizio Genovese.

11:09 They are both, you know, pH DS and they, it’s a very interesting Venn diagram with, with these folks and similar folks. We were kind of talking about this earlier, but you’ve got the, you know, the quantum physicist computer engineers and they’re crypto native. So they understand the blockchain ecosystem. And, you know, I started talking to these guys and actually Stefano is a fellow at Oxford. So it’s like, you know, Rodger Penrose level. I mean, he’s a, he’s a brilliant mind. And Fabrizio as well, and they’ve been in the quantum computer space for more than a decade. And in my mind, it was like 40 years from now, the CIA or the US military is going to build this gigantic machine that looks like it’s something out of Star Trek. And, you know, it’s going to change the world. And we’ll have new material science and new chemistry and so on.

11:55 And it’s going to be one of the components that takes us to a Type 1, you know, civilization and so on. But I’ve got plenty of time and it’ll be a great thing, and I don’t really need to worry about it. And so that’s just how things were in the back of my mind until I started meeting these people. And that’s when I realized, in fact, I’ve got pretty much all of my wealth and most of my entire professional life anchored on the blockchain in one way, shape or form.

12:24 And as it turns out, quantum computers may not. And I want to be very clear, they’re not necessarily a silver magic bullet to just do all sorts of incredible things, certainly not in the near term. But one of the things that they do well is factoring large numbers, right? And so you look at not the consensus, you know, because that’s hashing based, but the accounts, the public private key pair infrastructure part of it. So if I know your public key, it’s going to take me an extremely long time with a classical computer, you know, billions of years to try and calculate your private key. An when you look at a classical computer, it’s sort of ones and zeros and it goes in a sequential way. And because you have so many combinations of possible scenarios, it’s just going to take a very long time to go through it all.

13:15 And that’s fundamentally the reason why you can go to sleep at night. And by the grace of God, if you wake up tomorrow, two things will be true, right? Like the sun will be shining and your Bitcoin is still going to be there, provided you have securely stored your private keys in a safe in a vault or really a brain wallet is the best way to secure them. But what happens when technology gets us to the point where somebody with your public key can actually determine what your private key is?

13:44 And that’s the risk. So I just want to be very clear. There’s a lot of confusion. Sometimes hashing is very different. I think the consensus, I mean, it’s much stronger. It’s not really the thing that’s under threat in the near term or possibly for a very, very long time. And so then you kind of start to look at these various block chains.

14:02 And this is one of the things we were talking about off camera as well. My view is everything is intertwined, OK. I started with Bitcoin and then I moved to Etherium and, you know, and I have investments in Solana and other ecosystems. I’m not a maximalist in that sense. I love Bitcoin, but you know, it’s kind of like these tokens are everywhere now.

14:22 And so the reason things are highly intertwined is because most Bitcoin trading today happens against stable coin pairs like USDT, for example. I think it’s it’s right around 80%. And so when you see a lot of the criticisms from hardcore Bitcoin maximalist about other networks, you know, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear or not, but but you know, they call them shit coins, right? And there might be merit to that claim very often when we see these scandalous, you know, pump and dump schemes and so on.

14:58 But at the same time, Bitcoin relies on stable coins in order for it to have price discovery and volume and liquidity. And the thing that makes Bitcoin king is liquidity, right? So it is intertwined. And so the problem is multi variable. It’s multifaceted and multi tiered. It’s not just Bitcoin, of course, it’s very important that we start with Bitcoin and we we take steps to secure Bitcoin and there’s people who are very active. There’s a guy named Hunter Beast. He put together the bit 360 great guy. I’ve talked to him a few times.

15:34 You see innovation with, you know, Mara, for example, I think they launched something called Enduro. Isabel, Isabel Foxon, I believe her last name is, she’s leading that effort. And there’s lots of great of dialogue and robust discussions. You see a guy like Alex Pruden and P11 and they’ve released some stuff in terms of trying to, you know, take early steps to protect Bitcoin and so on. So it’s it’s already starting to happen.

16:00 But then you also have to think about other networks too. And so when you go to the smart contract platforms, the problem is much worse. And this is, this is something that I think also has to factor into it. So with Bitcoin, you know, some of the old address types like Satoshi’s coins, I think it accounts for roughly 20% of all Bitcoin. The public keys are exposed.

16:25 OK. And so a sufficiently large quantum computer and whoever has that capabilities. And by the way, my view is, and I wrote an open letter to JD Vance. I mean, I’m sure he’s probably never going to see it, but you know, he was at the Bitcoin conference recently in Vegas and he said it’s a big strategic advantage that the United States is moving into Bitcoin and China is not. And so, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m Canadian, but I grew up in the States.

16:48 My father was an American, He became an American. And my brother and my kids, I love America. I just never became a citizen. I want to see America do very well. But you know, we have to also realize that when we lever trillions of dollars into our economy with Bitcoin, as the underlying Bitcoin becomes, in my opinion, a military target for the for the CCP or potentially as proxies like like North Korea, wherein you can do tremendous economic damage to an adversary by, yeah, taking Satoshi’s coins and moving them around and you know, it.

17:26 It’s less about cashing in those Bitcoin and more about causing chaos and panic and sending the price of everything maybe not to 0, but trending towards 0, triggering cascading waves of margin calls and liquidations and massive economic damage into the US economy as a result. Especially if you consider the trend we’re on, which is generally, I think a good trend. It’s good that we consider Bitcoin as hard money or an anchor for our financial system, but we have to understand this risk. OK.

17:58 And so, yeah, I wrote an open letter to JD Vance. And I think that, you know, and by the way, you know, you look at a lot of these quantum companies and I think a good analogue is AI. So China caught up very quickly. I mean, deep sea came out of nowhere. Another analogue I’d like to look at is, you know, for example, reusable rockets, like hard technologies.

18:21 And so they’re now landing reusable rockets. They just landed a reusable rocket in the sea like a couple weeks ago when under the radar. So their ability to scale up and other adversaries as well is should not be neglected. And so if we don’t take any action, Bitcoin sits there as, you know, potentially a multi trillion dollar opportunity. Aside from that, you know, a lot of these folks who have lost Bitcoin or other crypto, there’s a poor guy here in the UK threw his hard drive away and he’s a very famous story.

18:53 Yeah. Yeah, he’s still trying to find it. Yeah, in the dump. He’s trying to sue the dump and every His wife divorced him. He’s had a tough time and you know, people like that could go to a lot of these advanced R&D companies like a side Quantum, an Ion Q or Rigetti you can pick.

19:10 I mean, I’m not I’m not an opinion idiot about which companies, which startups are going to get there and what their Rd. maps are like. But you could go there and sign a perfectly legal contract and you can say I have a claim to this Bitcoin. It’s mine. If you recover it for me, I’ll give you a hefty finder’s fee.

19:24 And so even perfectly legal avenues where recovery of lost private keys for a lot of these companies, you know, this could be 10s of billions or more in potential revenue. And in that scenario, everybody is highly incentivized to be very quiet about it. So one of the other complex parts about all of this is like there’s no bat signal or obvious warning or indication that a quantum attack is underway. In fact, what you’re going to see is, and I’m not saying what we’ve seen recently is an example of quantum attacks, but you’re going to see threads on Twitter on X, oh, this giga chat held for 15 years and just, you know, moved his Bitcoin and or her Bitcoin and now they’re selling it for, you know, billions of dollars in profit. You’re going to see people celebrating that somebody was able to hold that long.

20:12 OK. So even like trying to understand what is actually going on will be very hard. So that’s kind of a little bit of the landscape with Bitcoin. Now with the other networks, you know, because they’re smart contract platforms. And so just going back to Bitcoin, most Bitcoin addresses are not public, right?

20:31 But a significant chunk of them are. And so Jameson Lopp proposed, for example, I’m not saying he proposed that, I’m saying he outlined options and one of them was effectively confiscating those coins. So the Bitcoin community agreeing to take Satoshi’s coins, that I think would break the social contract in many ways and would be very hard. So in other words, for every solution, when you dig into this stuff, it unfurls many other hard trade-offs that are like, not palatable and very difficult. OK, So for that chunk of Bitcoin, you know, it’s a hard problem and that’s currently being discussed as far as what to do.

21:16 But even if you can migrate all of Bitcoin, I mean, there’s a few papers out there and it’s sort of like if you imagine 100% of the block space available for post quantum migration. So you send your Bitcoin to some post quantum, you know, secure wallet or address or whatever. It would take I believe 77 or 78 days to migrate everything, assuming 100% of the block space was used for this purpose. If 10% of the block space was used in an orderly fashion, it would take like 3 years, right?

21:46 So, and in reality, if quantum chaos comes like the scenario I described with the CCP, or I think maybe even through their proxy, I could see them assigning this task to the Lazarus group, for example, in North Korea, very, very famous for hacking. Yeah, they even have their own name correct. Just fascinating to that we think they were behind the by bit hack and. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

22:08 Yeah. Very sophisticated actors. This is all they do. It’s military operation, you know, and the quantum chaos comes because it’s, it’s become clear that they’ve actually been responsible for this attack. Then you’ll see people panicking, trying to move their Bitcoin. So Memple will be super full.

22:26 The transaction fees will be very high. Imagine having $10,000 in Bitcoin, but the transaction fee is $30,000, right? You’ll be stuck and we start to get chaos. Okay, so we have to take it seriously. Even if you’re opinionated and you think that quantum computing is a scam and will never happen or won’t happen for another 40 years and we don’t need to worry about it, there’s still good reasons for Bitcoin to be ready.

22:49 In my opinion, quantum readiness in the context of Bitcoin very soon will become one of the bullet, one of the most bullish like impact or indicators of price. The price will reflect let’s say strong action take, correct? OK, got it. And just to reiterate what you said, the quantums can’t affect the hash rate, which means the mining itself or the verification of new blocks. That’s not an immediate threat with quantum, but it is it with any public key exposed. And that’s for anyone listening.

23:20 Was the reason not to get your public key out there because you can leave this trace behind that can be exploited later. Correct. You don’t want your public key known, right? And but The thing is, you look at, you know, tremendous innovation in the Bitcoin space, like the Lightning Network, for example. And Jack, you know, Bitcoin Twitter founder Jack got a lot of respect for that guy. But you know, Square just integrated Lightning with like 4 1/2

24:35 Half a million vendors, right? So the Lightning Network exposes public keys, OK? So as that grows, we have another issue and so on, right? So yeah, it’s very important that people understand that it’s your public key, and deriving the private key from your public key is the risk. OK, Now we go to the smart contract platforms like Aetherium and so on and so on. All the public keys are known by default. That’s how the system works, right? You can see everybody’s public key, you can see the amount of ETH and other whatever stable coins or other tokens. So that problem is even harder.

25:15 And then you have D5 and you have the smart contract capability and composability and so on. So it becomes very complicated now. I also wrote an article that basically talks about stable coins as the first, let’s say Exodus. In my opinion, where in what we see today is very quickly we’re heading towards trillion dollars of stable coins on chain. One of the use cases, I think probably the pre eminent use case of Ethereum in a lot of the smart contract platforms frankly, is that they have propagated dollar hegemony globally. I actually think it’s really good for the world if the US dollar is kind of the main currency. And so when you’re in a developing country and you know in that country, it might be difficult to get a use dollar bank account.

26:05 You can just download a wallet, Metamask, Phantom, whatever wallet you want and suddenly you have AUS dollar bank account because you can accept stable coins. And I think this is a fundamental good for the world. That’s just my opinion. And so as we head towards a trillion dollars of stable coins and again, we know that stable coins are the main trading pair gets Bitcoin. It’s actually very little USD. Well, think about who is deploying stable coins on chain at this point.

26:34 It’s quite institutional. So you’ve got smart capital, smart money allocators who do things like, you know, you see something like Morpho, for example, which is a lending protocol on Ethereum where you can create your own vault and curate risk and OfferUp that basically basket of lending services to the market. And so, you know, you can generate yield. Ave. is another example.

26:59 You can put your stable coins in Ave. and earn interest. OK. So these smart capital allocators are the ones who do things like, you know, send 100 million bucks to Tether or Circle and through a bank wire. And then they take the stable coins and deploy them on chain to earn yield in a variety of different strategies, OK.

27:21 So smart capital allocators are currently earning in most cases, if they’re doing a good job, more yield than they would just holding treasuries in a bank account. And that’s the reason why they use D5. And that’s one of the reasons why this institutional growth that we’re seeing now, particularly on Ethereum and starting on, on Solana as well, is so robust. However, if you’re a smart capital allocator, and I don’t know, Fast forward a couple few years and I tell people, you should look at all the road maps, not just one quantum company. So INQ recently put out their road map and they’re talking about 2500 logical cubits by 2028. That’s enough, OK, to create a scenario where this risk of factoring private keys from public keys becomes feasible. Look at DARPA, look at Google, look at IBM, look at all of them and overlay them.

28:12 And it seems to converge around 2030 based on the road maps. One of the things that’s accelerating the road maps is, you know, AI is driving tremendous algorithmic improvement, OK, Without good algorithms, it doesn’t mean any of the quantum computers don’t mean anything because qubits are inherently noisy. So you need good algorithms to cut through the noise. And so AI driving algorithmic improvements is sort of one of the vectors that’s materially improved and actually, in my opinion, accelerated some of the the road maps. OK, so now you’re a smart money allocator. You’re, you know, you’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars on chain.

28:51 You’re earning an extra 3% or 4% above what you would with the Fed. And you’re looking at this stuff and you’re like, wait a minute, Larry Page or Jensen Huang. And by the way, Jensen just did a conference and he had all the quantum computing startup CE OS on stage with him after the conference or maybe right before, I can’t remember, he was quite bearish and all the quantum stocks dumped. A couple weeks later, he changes his mind. And in fact, right now, Sai Quantum, which is one of the leading photonic wafer platforms, is doing a round.

29:23 They’re raising, I think, 708 hundred million at something like a 6 billion valuation. And NVIDIA is already publicly committed to taking half the round. So you see these tech luminaries, right? And they start talking about quantum and you’re a smart money allocator, you know, in the blockchain, defy space. And you’re like, wait a minute. This risk now is unknown to me.

29:44 I don’t know when Q day is going to come. And and I’ve got a tremendous amount of money fully on chain. So I’m exposed completely. Is it really worth and in fact, especially if these guys, you know, are public companies where they have fiduciary responsibilities, can we even take this risk Versus when you look at the Bank of International Settlements, when you look at a lot of the big banks, they’re well on their way to basically. And by the way, a lot of Internet browsers now or Post quantum and so on. I mean, other institutions where you know, they don’t have to deal with decentralized governance and consensus are already taking proactive measures. So I think by that time, maybe in a couple few years, if you’re a smart capital allocator, you’re going to say for an extra 3% on chain, potentially at the risk of 100% total loss. I think I’m going to take my stable coins off chain and just keep them in the in my quantum safe bank account at JP Morgan and ride this out until I have clarity on what’s going on. OK?

30:46 That I think is going to cause the first mass exodus of liquidity from blockchain systems, which goes back to my original point earlier, not just with Bitcoin, but with all blockchain networks. And I’ve publicly said this. I think having a strong quantum road map, OK, and demonstrating like measurable steps towards post quantum resistance or post quantum cryptography will be the most bullish indicator of price. It’ll be the biggest driver of price in my opinion, Maybe not today, but very soon. Because if you imagine Solana, for example, getting there before Etherium, well then all the smart capital allocators are going to just move their stable coins to Solana, right? So, and this is what I’ve said before, I think for these block chain networks, post quantum is the most important strategic priority for this reason.

31:38 Because when that time comes, that’s where the liquidity is going to go. And if none of them are ready, all the liquidity is just going to go in a post quantum bank accounts parked at the Fed. OK, so now here’s the other way to think about it. And and this will I think illustrate the point. Let’s say our crypto ecosystem is worth 3 trillion for the sake of argument, everything in aggregate, all the market caps added up.

32:02 And let’s say you assign a 1% chance that the ion Q road map of 2020820500 logical qubits is accurate. And if you assume if that’s the case and you know, somebody breaks elliptic curve cryptography and everyone finds out about it, that total loss is going to be close to 100%. OK, then we should be, you do the math 3 trillion * 1% * 100%. We should be spending 30 billion a year right now. Rationally OK on, you know, post quantum like migration efforts we currently spend. Fuck off.

32:38 Excuse my language. Like basically nothing in the blockchain ecosystem. Even a guy like Hunter Beast, you know, I would expect to see the entire institutional block chain ecosystem supporting people like him and others in this effort, but that’s not happening right now. So, you know, and, and, and really when you look at a lot of these, so there’s a guy named Antonio. He’s a lead post quantum researcher at Etherium.

33:04 Wonderful guy, absolutely incredible. First of all, he’s a great human being. He’s very smart. He just did a talk at SCC and Can and I and I was there. I was there with a friend of mine, Melody, and you know, he outlined all the different trade-offs and he said this is a hard problem and you know, it’s just him right now. I mean, I understand they’re talking about this, but you know, we need to think about this, let’s say from an Etherium standpoint.

33:29 Like we need like like an AWS level engineering team dedicated to this with tremendous resources where this is a priority. So does Solana. Solana as far as I understand is right now focused on BLS. BLS is a way of aggregating signature schemes, which you know would make Solana even more performant, which makes sense because right now they’re meme is kind of the capital markets and so on. But you know you and you look at a guy like Matt Sorg, he’s AVP of technologies Solana, great guy, very smart guy. You know, I’m just saying if you go in the BLS direction, I think in a couple years you have to change the plumbing and you have to restart.

34:07 So if these timelines continue to accelerate, and it doesn’t even need to be that, it just needs to be that people believe them and start to remove liquidity from, you know, stable coins, for example, in the first instance, it’s going to have a pretty devastating impact. So that’s kind of how I think about this stuff, you know, and, and, and, and, and, you know, you also look at, well, for example, Tron. Tron has a huge amount of USDT. And you know, I, I don’t mean to denigrate anyone. I’ve met Justin a couple times.

34:39 He was always very polite to me, but like I have not seen anything from Tron as far as any kind of focus on this area. Likewise, I also wrote another article talking about what I call the institutional force function. So this is another element that I think very soon will become critical. So you look at a BlackRock, OK. And BlackRock recently, and it kind of made a little bit of news, updated their post Quantum or their quantum risk disclosures for their Bitcoin ETF products in the theory of ETF products and so on. I tweeted at them in December and I sent them an e-mail because I own some of their products. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it or not. I like to think it did, but probably not. But their previous risk disclosure was like very small little blurb.

35:24 You know, you read the fine print on those big documents right now it’s much more substantial. OK. So you look at Sailor as an example, whom I have a tremendous amount of respect for, but I think he has basically not articulated the risk, OK. And so I believe very soon strategy will also be forced to update its post quantum risk disclosure or quantum risk disclosure in line with what BlackRock has done. And in fact even Blackrock’s risk disclosure, I think we’ll get much more in depth.

36:00 So you look at Circle and I, I, I, I was kind of talking about this with the Circle IPO and Jeremy Lehrer, another great guy. Circle doesn’t have any risk disclosure around this stuff. Really. Yeah. We had Jeremy on the show a few years ago, you know, and they just had a massive, you know, 6X10X tremendous described IPO. Amazing.

36:18 Yeah, but there’s nothing in there. As far as I know as of today, I mean, I, I didn’t check today, but as of like, I don’t know, I probably checked a week or two ago, there was nothing. And yeah, now there’s a fiduciary responsibility because they’re public. That’s also one of the changes, right? And so then you go down the line and you look at regulators.

36:36 So I’m very fond of ADGM, Abu Dhabi global markets. I think they’re one of the smartest in the world. And Abu Dhabi is going in a direction where, I mean, it’s the new global finance. It’s like the new Switzerland, you know, and everyone goes there and gets along. And the entire crypto ecosystem is basically in the UAE.

36:59 A big part of that was a guy named Ali Al Nuami, who’s a brilliant guy. He’s a nuclear engineer. You know, during COVID, for example, their border shut as well, closed as well. And they’ve got nuclear power. And so they actually had too much power in the grid, so they needed off takers of power. And he’s one of the guys that architected bringing all the mining to off take power, which I think in the context of proof of work block chains, ancillary services to the grid is the use case.

37:24 It’s tremendously important because if you have to shut down nuclear power plants is very expensive. Those turbines are designed to spin for 20 years. They shouldn’t stop because you get micro abrasion. Suddenly that thing, you know, becomes very expensive to maintain and fix. And likewise, if you have too much power in the grid substation start blowing up and so on, right? So you need off takers.

37:44 And that’s when, you know, the Bitcoin mining infrastructure came in and of course, but the rest of the block chain infrastructure. And and so you look at a guy like Doctor Marwan, for example, he’s a pioneer there. He’s a guy I’ve known since 2016, brilliant guy as well. And he brought in, you know, the block chain center and all the different companies and so on, the whole ecosystems there. OK, so then they innovate. Now the para license, you know, that full license is like the coveted license.

38:10 I think the regulator in the UAE, whether it’s a DGM or whoever, is going to start mandating soon, maybe not this year, maybe not next year. But as this risk becomes clear to the exchanges, if you want your license, then you have to make sure that the coins you list at least have, you know, some standard, right, like a road map, they’re beginning in this direction and so on. I think that’s going to be another institutional force function the exchanges. So the ETF and other institutional financial product, you know, issuers like BlackRock, Fidelity and so on, the stable coin issuers in particular.

38:53 You know, and, and I admire Paulo very much. And by the way, I think he’s right on the Mica stuff. He hasn’t been compliant with Mica and his argument is it introduces systemic risk and I think he’s absolutely right. It’s a tether. Tether but nonetheless and so he doesn’t have the same fiduciary because he’s not public but and by the way, it wouldn’t surprise me if he moves to American IP OS and the NASDAQ, but in any case. They are creating a new stable coin that’s genius compliant. Apparently Ted is.

39:20 Well, and, and that’s smart, by the way, I think the Genius Act is much better than the Mica stuff. But in any case, he’s a guy that also will have to start looking at this stuff, you know, And so you, you, you kind of start putting it all together. And this is the institutional force function. It’s the ETFs, it’s the public crypto companies, it’s the regulators, and it’s the stable coin issuers. They will force function block chains to move in this direction.

39:44 Again, it goes back to my thesis that having a strategy around post quantum is the most bullish thing you can do, frankly. Now I get their skepticism. And I think, you know, you look at a guy like Martin Shkreli, I think he’s a smart guy. You know, he says a lot of smart things. He’s very skeptical and fair enough.

40:05 And a lot of the points he makes are valid points. First of all, quantum computers. You know, they’re very limited in terms of what they can actually do. And certainly for the foreseeable future, that’s definitely true. However, even he admits that at some point they’re going to be able to, Yeah, break public keys by virtue of having access to public keys.

40:29 I’m sorry, break private keys. So it’s a matter of time now, even if you’re a skeptic, and that’s totally fine, there’s not really any good argument against block chains taking this seriously now, because in case the road maps are actually accurate and you know, one of the arguments is, well, you see these startups, these quantum startups and they have really good incentives to put out flashy headlines that are bullish and indicate that they’re moving along quickly because, you know, they’re raising money, right? And so, and I, I buy that. I think that’s a valid argument.

41:03 It’s one, let’s say, salient point where people should be skeptical of these startups for that reason. However, DARPA doesn’t do that, right? DARPA is one source of information. NIST is another one, OK? NIST is the US government standards body for, you know, basically cryptography standards, OK. And they release post quantum cryptography candidates, which then go into the market.

41:29 And by the way, 2 post quantum cryptography candidates have already been broken as well. Psych one of the isogeny approaches. And so even, and I do think

42:30 A lot of the candidates that we’re looking at right now, Sphinx and other lattice based, you know, some of some of these post cryptography standards that will become more common name in the future, but they’re pretty solid, although you need time to test these things in the real world. And so, you know, even if you’re a skeptic around all this stuff, which I think is totally fine, again, if there’s a 1% chance that these Rd. maps are accurate and we’re looking at 100% total loss, that should tell us rationally what we should be spending now given the size of this ecosystem, let alone. And I think we’re going to see like a major pump in this ecosystem over the next couple years. I mean, just my opinion, it’s not financial advice, but what if we become a $30 trillion ecosystem in the next few years? OK, All the incentives I laid out earlier, including, you know, folks going to these post quantum companies or these quantum Advanced Research labs with claims of lost private keys.

43:33 I know people who lost their private keys to the theory of my CEO. OK, there I, I don’t know, I guess there’s different claims out there, but maybe 10% of all crypto is lost, right? People accidentally sending to burn addresses, people doing this that the next thing, I mean, you won’t be able to recover a zero dress. But, you know, there’s lots of claims that people have. So even that segment of the market can go and engage in private commerce with these companies.

44:05 And imagine if that starts. So here’s another scenario. And this is kind of like an edge case, which might not be an edge case, But you know, you hear these stories of these guys in Miami and they’re at a party and they have some crypto and they’re showing girls on their phone and, you know, oh, look at my wallet and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, just, OK, loose lips, you know, talking about things they probably shouldn’t be talking about. OK, so let’s say you’re one of these guys who’s or one of these people, one of these folks who lost their crypto and you managed to recover it, you know, in this fashion that I’m describing by signing a contract one of these companies and somehow it works out and you have a super NDA and you’ve all agreed not to talk about it and nobody knows. And again, there’s no like bat signal, there’s no way to know a quantum attack has happened or, or a quantum enabled recovery has happened.

44:54 A legal 1. So now this guy’s super happy. He’s got his, you know, 10 million bucks, He’s on a yacht somewhere, he’s having drinks and he starts telling the story to another group of girls that he’s hanging out with. You know, this is what And suddenly these rumors start flying around on the Internet. OK, that will start to cause panic, right? There’s a lot of different scenarios where chaos can ensue if trust or the perception of trust has been broken as a result of this.

45:24 And that’s the point that I think a lot of people miss. Even if you’re a skeptic and even if you think this stuff is very, very far away, the perception is also a threat. And the only way to mitigate that is to take this stuff seriously now. And so even if that perception, you know, starts to permeate, it doesn’t matter because Bitcoin has taken steps to be quantum secure, Ethereum has taken steps and so on. So that’s kind of my take on it.

45:51 You know, we’ll see what happens. Personally, I can tell you I’ve for with respect, so I’ve been running my own fund for for about 5 years, just me. I don’t have any LP’s. I only use my money. The reason for that is because if I, if I fuck it up, I don’t have to answer anyone, you know, I just lose my own money.

46:09 So that’s fine. But I’ve stopped doing crypto deals. I stopped that late last year, because most of the time as a VC, you invest in these projects and you get your tokens over a long period of time, right? It’s easy to criticize VCs, but we have to wait, right? And very often and most of the time these things fail, right?

46:32 Like vast majority of the time you lose money. It’s just that the one or two times that you do hit, you want to hit big, right? That’s, that’s how the game works. OK, so if I start doing venture deals now, it could be four or five years before I get all my tokens between the vesting and so on. I, I, I can’t, I’m just not going to take that risk anymore.

46:51 So I, I, I pivoted now I do, you know, post quantum investment only more or less. I mean, I do other industries too, but as it relates to crypto, so never local was my first deal. That’s, you know, these two guys from Oxford, Stefano and for BTU announced a team of I think there’s seven and they all have the same pedigree or background. It’s that Venn diagram physicist, engineer and crypto native. And I think, you know, in this, one of the things you and I have talked about and maybe this initial part of the conversation was a bit of dumorism, but it’s not to be a Dumor, it’s to just articulate the risk and think about it. But then the other side of it is what I like to call again, quantum hopefulness, which is the opportunity. And just like when Bitcoin came and then later others, you know, a theory and so on, so much opportunity and wealth has been generated.

47:45 And I think we’re on the verge of quantum money and we’re on the verge of entirely new systems that don’t require this trust infrastructure, IE consensus. I’d like to say consensus is the last middle man remaining, whether it’s minors or validators, whatever the consensus mechanism is, that’s the last middle man remaining. And so thinking about entirely new systems and new paradigms without that is tremendously exciting. And I think it’s going to be a massive wealth generation effect that many entrepreneurs, particularly ones who are early will do very well. Just like how you know, we’re talking about Max Keiser earlier, you know, he’s he’s a great guy and obviously he was early to Bitcoin and he’s done tremendously well. I disagree with kind of you know, because again, it’s all intertwined.

48:36 The Bitcoin price is dependent on stable coin. So you kind of need those other networks as well, right? But but in any case, those people who do well early on, I think I think we’ll find a wealth of opportunity as as this technology, you know, nears right and gets and gets closer and closer. And that’s quantum money. And that’s better money because of quantum computing, where maybe you remove a consensus layer, which you call the last middleman or maybe the last attack vector on money.

49:09 Yeah, so, so correct. It’s kind of like in blockchain systems, finality is protocol defined. OK. So for example, in Ethereum, we had the Dow and we all agreed to unwind a transaction. So you can see how, you know, the protocol could be changed if there’s some consensus among humans.

49:31 Likewise, even with Bitcoin, you know, if the miners decide right and could kind of come together, how things could change, right? And so if you believe that AI or AGI will attack every probabilistic or game theoretic attack surface in the financial system, then finality being protocol defined is the target in my opinion. OK, so this concept of quantum money doesn’t have that attack vector. And quantum money is actually quite an old concept, brilliant physicist Stephen Weisner, I think in 1970s when he first came up with the concept, and then in 1982 or 83 published white paper. And so basically when you have a quantum state, OK, so you sort of had this like, you know, cute, you know, kind of like entangled qubits or entangled particles, measuring that state produces a very unique result, OK. And so you can’t clone that.

50:31 It’s impossible. And so this is called the no cloning theorem. So the the fact that you have this very unique footprint, if you will, which you can measure from a quantum state means that you can anchor the security of the system in a very unique measurement or output, if you will. OK. And so you anchor the financial system to the laws of quantum mechanics rather than the laws of the Federal Reserve or the laws of, you know, the block chain protocol.

51:06 And this is unbreakable. If you can break it, probably you can also, like create a portal or a wormhole into another dimension, which case, who cares about digital assets? Like, I want to come along for that ride instead. And so quantum money is digital assets that are based on this principle where just like with cash, so I give you $100 US bill, we don’t need a blockchain or any kind of registry to verify that bill. In fact, the bill has security built into it, the hologram, the material and so on.

51:46 And you can kind of check it, you know, you go to the store, they put the marker on the $100 bill and so on. And so we can transact cash and it’s totally private, it’s peer-to-peer. And we don’t need trust infrastructure. It kind of do because the security is baked into the bill. But aside from that, you don’t need some, you know, Ledger, for example, same thing with Quantum money. So you’ve got your wallet, your digital wallet, and by the fact that you know that digital asset appears in your wallet and the security baked into it that’s inherent to it, you have basically perfect cryptographic assurances that it’s real and hasn’t been forged.

52:31 OK. And so now you can transact without needing to verify on the blockchain. And I think this is going to be the future of stable coins. However, we have to be very clear in order for us to reach this point, we need technological dependencies like quantum memory, which doesn’t really exist right now or it doesn’t exist for more than brief instances in time. So this is like a significant dependency.

53:02 We need quantum Internet, telecommunications infrastructure, we need all sorts of other like complimentary technologies that I would say and I would encourage everyone to do their own research. When you look at the totality of all, let’s say the most relevant, biggest important tech companies, sovereign wealth funds, governments, anyone you can think of, smart money researchers, they are like well into developing this infrastructure. OK, so the quantum Internet and I would encourage people just go on YouTube and type in don’t go on YouTube, maybe go on Rumble or wherever Brian Rose is, but just go online and type in quantum Internet and you’ll see tons of information. And it’s something that you know, at an institutional level, a government level, a military level, corporate level, startup level, academic research level has been well under way for some time.

54:00 It might be new to the casual crypto person, but what I’m saying is the development of these dependent technologies is well under way. And when you look at all the largest sovereign wealth funds, and this is what happened to me last year when I started getting into this stuff, I was like, how is it that I have no idea what’s actually going on in the space? I had like, existential angst when, again, it’s the most salient, Let’s say, you know, it’s like the thing that threatens the blockchain. I mean, that’s one of the things quantum computers can’t actually do potentially.

54:36 You know, of all the things they can’t do that people think they can do, this particular thing they can do well. So the biggest risk that I face, I have no hedge against. I don’t even know about. You know, that’s kind of what caused me angst. But when you start digging into this stuff, you’ll see, for example, Global Foundries, we, you know, we actually met at the UAE through a, through a mutual friend, great guy named Ron. But it’s kind of like the UAE, Abu Dhabi, that’s very smart capital, right?

55:01 Very smart. Mubadala and others, you know, and they invested in Global Foundries a very long time ago. They’ve been investing TII, which is the Advanced Research lab there. They’ve been running their own quantum computers for a long time. They have a quantum cryptography department, etcetera.

55:18 They’ve invested many, many, many billions. And you’ll find every single sovereign wealth, every single big capital allocator for a long time has been investing in this space, Google, IBM, Microsoft, right, the CE OS of these major companies. We talked about Jensen earlier, the CEO of Microsoft Sundar. Yeah. I’ve drawn a blank here, I think.

55:43 Sundar, right? Is his name Sacha? Sacha Sacha, Yeah. And Sundar is a Google. Google. Yeah.

55:47 Correct. They’re on TV talking about this stuff. OK, so it’s moving and blockchain and in particular the fact that we can sleep good at night knowing our private keys are safe so long as we take care of them is a byproduct. It’s a it’s it’s, you know, a casualty along the way. There’s another thing I kind of wrote about, you know, when you look at the incentives for developing quantum computing and developing all these components that I mentioned, like quantum memory and quantum Internet and new types of infrastructure and so on, they’re extremely high, much, much higher than even the value of Bitcoin.

56:27 OK, So it’s a technological like progress, the road moving forward where elliptic curve cryptography and the basis of like this thing that allows us to sleep good at night is the lowest hanging fruit along the way and so. Are your assets secure now? Well, I don’t I, I, I, I don’t think like this isn’t something that I worry about today. Realistically, I, I, I have it in my mind that in, by 2028. So first of all, I monitor the road.

56:57 I, I, I’m into this stuff. Like, by the way, it’s also very fascinating because I’ll be perfectly honest with you, very often I felt a little bit bored with, with crypto, especially since like really when you look at Ethereum or Solana or whatever, it’s like, how do we re hypothecate this? You know, that’s kind of the innovation layer we’re at right now compared to 10 years ago where it was all new and interesting. But getting into the quantum stuff, every single day I learn something new and I don’t know anything. So it’s like mentally very stimulating. I don’t think this is a risk.

57:26 I still have my crypto assets and I will for for a number of years. I’m definitely not looking to sell now because I think the market is heading in the right direction. But 2028 is when I start to get, yeah, a little bit cautious and I try to follow the timelines. I try to learn as much as I can. And at that point, I may be one of those people that just decides, OK, I don’t know what the risk is anymore. I’m confident it’s not today.

57:58 So I’m fine with keeping my crypto assets. But at that point, yeah, I may just want to put them in a quantum safe bank account somewhere. One other point on this. And so again, you know, it’s kind of like it’s easy to say and dismiss someone as a conspiracy theorist until later, You know, it turns out they were 100% right. And I’m not saying I’m going to be 100% right on this, but I don’t think it’s a conspiracy to suggest that the first run of quantum capability will be for the military and intelligence services.

58:30 I don’t think that’s a conspiracy. I think that. They’re already thinking about this. They’ve been thinking about this for a long time, correct? The military.

58:36 Correct. And I don’t think public, you know, I don’t think the markets are going to get access before like the CIA, the NSA, the US military. Likewise, I don’t think Chinese companies are going to get access before the PLA and so on. Right. So then you kind of look at it and you say, well, and the, the, you know, the analog, I like to use the Sr. 71 Blackbird, they started that in like 1949, right?

59:03 That is an amazing piece of technology that you would look at today and think is ultra modern and was just built. And, you know, I mean, it’s it’s, it’s it’s very old. And so, yeah, once in a while we get a glimpse into the true state of military tech very, very rarely. And people are always shocked. So I think it’s reasonable to assume this category of technology falls under the same because it does have such tremendous application.

1:00:32 Asians in military context, if a military, you know, had such capability, they would be not incentivized at all to disclose it to their nemesis, you know, or the adversaries because, you know, they may be able to get tremendous information that otherwise wouldn’t be available. So 2028 is what the public road map say for these public companies like INQ, but let’s just say they coalesce around 20302031. I don’t know. Maybe the military and intelligence communities are ahead of that.

1:01:07 Maybe so I don’t actually know really when the do I think the NSA or the CIA is going to break Bitcoin? No, I don’t think so. I think it serves American interests. But like, you never know. You see, for example, yeah, I love the United States.

1:01:26 I think it’s greatest country in the world. Like I said, my kids are American. All my family is. I grew up there. But the reality is every once in a while, yeah, it’s not so great when, for example, those FBI agents with Ross and others steal the Bitcoin and then they end up going to jail.

1:01:42 OK. So even in even in a country as great as America, you get corruption from within. So I don’t know what’s going to happen. What if the intelligence services do have access to this type of technology way ahead of anyone else? And somebody there is opportunistic and thinks, hey, I can steal 100 million bucks for myself and nobody will know about it. We’ve already seen former federal employees attempting to do that.

1:02:06 So that’s another like leakage risk that is hard to account for. So, yeah, when you start to unfurl like all the different ways this could go squirrely, and then you’re just sitting there and really your entire life is just anchored on elliptic curve cryptography and and a lot of these attack vectors and risks you don’t even have visibility into. Yeah, I think as the market begins to process all of this, again, it goes back to what I was saying. Being ready for this stuff will be the most bullish catalyst for price for for Bitcoin and for Ethereum and for all these networks.

1:02:44 And they have to start taking it seriously now, in my opinion. Yeah. And I appreciate you calling that out and I hope we start to see it in, you know, like you said, the public companies in the ETF companies, the Black Rocks and then all these block chains. And I really appreciate the way you articulated all of that. John, I want to turn the switch it now and maybe go 180° to your background because you’re a pretty unique guy.

1:03:09 You alluded to little bits of this, but tell me how John Lilic in Chiang Mai decides to go to New York City at the Bitcoin Center, which strangely enough, was next to Wall Street in the Stock Exchange where the early mines were coming there, including the bankers. I’d love to get that thought. That later led to a group of people starting Etherium. What happened to Etherium, good or bad? And then what’s the current state of what you call Bitcoin?

1:03:35 Etherium parallel financial states. And they matter more today than they ever than they ever have before. And we’re seeing that today. I think the Etherium ETF outpaced the Bitcoin ETF last week. And now we’re seeing massive treasury companies in Ethereum, including Joe Lubin, who I’m sure you know from the beginning of Etherium, and now the Ether machine, which is funded by Pantera.

1:03:58 And then Tom Lee, famous Wall Street analyst, is starting his own, and this is becoming a big thing. And of course, we know Solana is going to follow your buddy Justin Son, who’s been a guest on the show, was just out of the New York Stock Exchange. I think they hit the gavel on his Tron Treasury company. Not to mention all the institutions are embracing these things, including stable coins, which Tom Lee reminds everybody are mostly run on Ethereum. I don’t know if that’s entirely true, but he says that and it’s a great talking point. So I know that’s a lot of questions in one, but you’re the guy to ask.

1:04:30 So take me all the way back. What, what? What year was this when you decide to move to New York City and why? Yeah, well, so, so we’re kind of talking about this off camera and I hope you don’t mind me seeing this. I mean, I guess it’s public that you had your ayahuasca and DMT experiences and, and I have as well. And yeah, so actually I was in Manila at the time and yeah, I I was exposed to DMT and I was going through a real tough personal, you know, break up at the time. And in the midst of the DMT experience, I could see my neural pathways shifting.

1:05:06 And for whatever reason, it became very clear that I had to go to New York City and get deep into Bitcoin. I think what happened was my subconscious just realized what I had been noticing online because I did get into Bitcoin in 2013, a little bit here and there. But you know, bit dev meetups were starting to pop off in New York and you could see that like New York was one of the hubs. Excuse me? So yeah, I got on a plane, went over there. My brother was living in New York at the time as well. It’s interesting though how that psychedelic can sometimes get you to see things you normally wouldn’t see. It’s like the frontal cortex blocked all that out because maybe people around everything.

1:05:46 It was like the wrong decision to make from society, but then deep down inside you knew it was the obvious decision, right? Yeah. I mean, I, I, yeah, I, I was very fortunate that that happened, basically. OK. And then I got to New York and I met a guy named Nick Spanos. Yes.

1:06:03 Big fat Greek guy. I interviewed him on stage at one of the conferences in Dubai, and he is, he’s old school crazy as you like. Yeah. And so he was there. He was my first mentor in all of this and he’s lost a lot of weight right now.

1:06:18 He’s doing great. By the way, Nick’s doing wonderful. And so he he started the Bitcoin Center. And my buddy Austin Alexander, who I think you also know, he was at Kraken for many years. So we all volunteered like it wasn’t a job.

1:06:34 I wasn’t paid anything. I was just volunteering and it was, you know, this incredible facility that Nick was able to commandeer, 40 Broad Street, right next to New York Stock Exchange. And it was just an open place for talking about Bitcoin, All the early pioneers. Jesse Powell from Kraken came there. The Winklevoss came there. I mean, so many people.

1:06:54 And I was just hanging around pretty much every single day helping run the place. I was cleaning up and just, you know, volunteering. And in the course of that, I met lots of Wall Street people, lots of them. They would just pop in and it would be. And you know, that’s when and it was a discovery process for me too. So getting in arguments with people and trying to argue for Bitcoin when really smart Wall Street people would make salient counter arguments that I couldn’t defend at the time. That was a tremendous learning curve for me. And yeah, along the way I met Joe Lubin as well, who later became my boss at Consensus.

1:07:28 I heard about Etherium and, you know, just kind of like so many things happened during that time. The Bitcoin Center ultimately I think was phenomenal for Bitcoin, particularly in those early days. We had a major moment with Morgan Spurlock, you know, rest in peace. He passed away not too long ago, but you know, he did a big feature on us at the time and that. Was a documentary film maker.

1:07:52 People know him from the Super size. Super size me guy. Where he ate McDonald’s every day for a month or two. And yeah, and so he did a mini doc on Bitcoin. Yeah, he came and it was probably one of the first major events.

1:08:05 And then this guy, Chris Knutsiari produced a, it’s on Netflix called Banking on Bitcoin, another great piece. And so, yeah, I think the Bitcoin Center, cuz people would come and trade Bitcoin and so the visuals and the aesthetics were phenomenal and Nick would spice things. But Nick was, he’s a genius. So he would have us go outside, stand right in front of the Stock Exchange on the street, trading Bitcoin for cash with each other. Just the aesthetics of that were in 2014, right?

1:08:35 I mean, the, the, the, the original exchange was under a tree on, on that same Rd. where they used to buy and sell I think the Commodity Futures or something like the AG futures. So I don’t know if that’s what Nick was thinking, but they used to do that in the open as well. We used to have a guy, Alan Stevo, wonderful guy, wore a bow tie, just incredible orator, like, I mean, he would stand, stand on a little pedestal with a gavel and, you know, and it was just like a show, you know, and it was great fun. But yeah, from there I I learned about Ethereum and I started basically volunteering at consensus, which I did for most of 2015.

1:09:14 OK. Until you were there at 13, originally at Bitcoin Center. Well, I got to the Bitcoin Center like February of 2014 maybe. OK. Yeah.

1:09:24 And the Ethereum ICO was in 14. Yeah, correct. OK, that was later. Yeah, actually I was in the Bitcoin Center January 20, 2014. OK, Yeah, then the Ethereum ICO.

1:09:35 Did you know that was happening? Were people excited about that? Or was it just like, we don’t know what’s going to? Happen. Well, I had I had already traded shit coins prior to that. So I got into Quark, which was Bill still, I don’t know if you remember Bill still, he used to be on on YouTube. And anyway, Quark.

1:09:54 So before Ethereum, you know, like in 2013 and even before then, people would fork Bitcoin, like Litecoin was the first one, right? Change a few parameters and launch a new coin. Problem with that was the network effects. You’d have to build network effects. And there was some innovation like feather coin came out, proof of stake early on, next, NXT and some others. So cork was one of the things I traded and I actually made some Bitcoin on that.

1:10:22 And then, yeah, I was really thinking about, OK, what’s the evolution of this going to be? Because you can’t keep starting new networks each time you make a coin. And so, excuse me, when Ethereum came along, it was kind of like, oh, this is a way to generalize it, right? Right. A network where other coins could launch on top of. It potentially, yeah, yeah.

1:10:42 And then and then later at consensus, one of my former colleagues, this guy named Simon Delaware Rouvier, he’s the one that basically created the token standard and and then, you know, things started rolling. But yeah, throughout 2015, volunteered at consensus. They had a Co working space in in in Brooklyn in Bushwick and then kind of moved into like where they continue to be to this day. This like kind of hipster warehouse thing 40 Bogart just off the Morgan stop. How does?

1:11:14 Consensus link to Ethereum is like Ethereum, the foundation and then some of the money went to create consensus. So these were just a separate company. The consensus is that just advances Ethereum. Oh dude, today consensus is not so critical for Ethereum, but back then it was everything. So Joe was one of the founders of Ethereum, and then he left Ethereum and found a consensus to start building applications for Ethereum.

1:11:40 But The thing is, early Ethereum, in my opinion, you know, the management structure at the time was like very dysfunctional. And so consensus ended up not only building applications, but a lot of infrastructure as well. And then Even so, Devcon 0, that was the first Devcon event I didn’t go to, but Devcon one in London, that was November 2015. That was a pretty Seminole event even I think, I think Joe pretty much paid for that or consensus did. So even like very early on, probably until 2018, maybe 2019, consensus was critical, built a lot of applications, built a lot of infrastructure developer tools.

1:12:18 There was something called Truffle and it had this integrated developer environment, which is really important. Obviously Metamask. When did Metamask start? I think like 2016, this guy Dan Finley and this other guy Aaron Davies, people know him as Kumavis. It’s kind of like a hackathon thing that they start hacking together.

1:12:35 Still the most popular hot wallet in the world. In terms in terms of number of users maybe. Probably still anyway. In the beginning days it was probably the only hot wallet. Yeah.

1:12:46 I mean, it was, well, you know, the wallets back then were a bit clunky and so the innovation was to have it as a in browser experience. And yeah, at the time it was quite innovative. And then it just sort of grew. And then really the other big catalyst was when they activated Metamask swaps, which happened in late 2020. So now within your Metamask wallet, you could swap and you got to realize even before then, of course, the automated market maker, you know, with Uniswap innovation was tremendous.

1:13:18 But before then we had such a clunky on chain experience like ether Delta and a lot of respect. I mean, very early it’s hard to build these things, but it was like a tough experience. So, but anyway, all of those early, so 2015, 16/17/2018 just so many things that consensus built so many things that funded it did so many different like spokes, if you will, like spin outs, most of them failed, but that’s how ventures, venture ventures go. And then yeah, that ecosystem started to, I mean Ethereum ecosystem started to stand up on it’s own feed and we started to see tremendous innovation elsewhere.

1:13:57 Obviously in in hindsight, I mean, the automated the Uniswap revolution was tremendous because it brought on chain decks experience to the masses in a way that was really great. And then Defy summer in 2020 and with compound and everything else and in Ave. and you know, and then and then things just started to RIP. And then 2021 we had, you know, pretty monster rally. Obviously money was real cheap back then. It was all the, all the COVID money and so on. But by then consensus was less important or critical to the theorem ecosystem, which was always the goal. Like we wanted to make Ethereum sustainable on its own. And yeah, so a lot of these folks, you know, you mentioned the ether machine, that’s Andrew Keys. Andrew was the first guy at consensus doing bizdev and, and, and then I and then I came and we worked closely, his buddy James Slazas and my brother at the time, couple others. So what Andrew did was phenomenal. In October 2015, Consensus signed a worldwide partnership with Microsoft, which was like the first big piece of news that everybody’s like, wow, this is happening. And Andrew was the guy who made that happen by himself, basically really hard working guy, tremendously dedicated. And you know, he bet the farm on Etherium, basically all of his everything he had everything he could borrow, everything he could put in, and he’s done very well. So Ether Machine is his play right now. And he just reminded someone on

1:15:25 CNBC that Ethereum since 2014 is the best performing asset. No, it’s not Bitcoin. Well, the so, so that, that’s an interesting point. And yeah, like I want to be clear, I love Bitcoin, but I really don’t like this. Yeah, toxic maximalism because I think these things are intertwined. And we talked about that, right?

1:15:46 It’s like the stable coins on Ethereum and Solana and Tron are traded on exchanges against Bitcoin. So they’re good for Bitcoin, but when you look at the price of ETH going back to the ICO over the last 10 years, it’s like the only asset in the world that’s like outperformed Bitcoin. That’s the thing. So, and that includes the last 3-4 years of, you know, the ETH BTC price taking a pretty big dump. And yet still, so it’s important to think about those things. Now, obviously, when you bought makes a big difference, right? If you bought in the ICO, then yes, you have outperformed. If you bought last year, then no, you have not outperformed. I mean, so it just depends on your temporal view. But yeah, we’re seeing definitely a big shift in Ethereum.

1:16:34 I think finally in this kind of one of the things we talked about off camera that I think is important to talk about, in my opinion, going back to the COVID stuff and seeing what people like you did in the moment, which was very brave. But I think one of the reasons Ethereum had a really tough last few years was because the social layer shifted. And one of the reasons it shifted was because during COVID and back then I had a big Twitter account. Eventually I got banned as well, But, and I might have been one of the first like big Ethereum people that was like taking an open stance against it. Again, not, not commenting on whether you should take vaccines or not, but advocating for bodily autonomy and informed consent and so on.

1:17:18 And, and, and none of this hurting people into, you know, open air prisons or, you know, locking them in their houses and so on. But I took a lot of heat for that. And there was a lot of prominent Etherium people who, yeah, the mask came off. You could tell they were like, advocating for tyranny, taking unbelievable positions that you would never think. And you’ve got to realize the genesis of Ethereum was very much rooted in the same, I would say, libertarian ideals as Bitcoin. And that’s how it was in the beginning. And suddenly it was like something flipped and we went into like, you know, draconian communism or something where like COVID was like the mechanism to enforce, you know, tyranny.

1:18:06 And a lot of people I know were put off by that. And so at the same time I give them credit, the Solana community for the most part was approaching it different in a different manner, more liberty minded and individual freedom minded. And I know personally several big Ethereum whales who shifted into Solana or people shifted back into Bitcoin because they wanted to identify like the way your community, you know, it’s like identifying with your community is a big part of which token you want to hold.

1:18:39 And I think for a number of years Ethereum went into like this ultra woke, you know, hellscape, which and I, I think I’m like a classic 1960s liberal, to be honest. Like I like free speech, I like less government. I don’t want any violence. I don’t want any war. Yeah, you can smoke pot if you want or whatever, like I don’t, you know, but I’m not into this like weird stuff, right, which the world is coming out of right now.

1:19:03 I think for the most part, I mean, it’s still a little bit there, but. There’s hints of it. There’s hints of it in the US and Europe. But it’s not like it was in in the peak of this stuff, right? Correct. And so Ethereum, of all the blockchains, embrace that stuff the most.

1:19:18 Frankly. And it hurt it, you think? 100% And I think part of what’s happening right now is there’s been a realignment in the community, which I think is great. Also part of it too is like Ethereum’s quite young. So when we’re young, we tend to be quite leftist, you know, when we’re not really thinking about things thoroughly and ideal should be quite simple.

1:19:39 And you know, the community’s grown up a bit, I think. And now I’m, I’m 43, I’m probably one of the older Ethereum people, but a lot of them are now in their kind of early mid 30s and they have more life experience and they’re more rational and more centrist. So I think as Ethereum goes back to the center, you know which which which is where it should be. It should be a place that’s home for everybody. And really it should be a place where what we care about is the technology.

1:20:04 And it’s always been a tech centric hub in my opinion, where the thing that you feel really good about is, wow, there’s a lot of really smart people here who are thinking about hard problems and the dynamism. I understand Bitcoin doesn’t want to change and I think that’s fine. That’s one of its appeals, but also Ethereum, you know, it hard forks all the time, it versions all the time and so on. And that’s it’s appeal. And there’s room for both.

1:20:31 When we focus on being that technology leader, that’s when people feel really good about Ethereum. And I think over the last particularly year and really over the last six months, there’s been changes at the foundation and different people have come in. And now it’s, it’s all shifted and it really feels a lot more centrist now. And it feels good for a lot of people. Like I can embrace this.

1:20:51 It’s just like a brand like, you know, you don’t want to wear certain things if like the people supporting that brand. Scary. That’s why you gotta turn the adjusted club. Hold the trigger. Let’s do this. They’re not aligned.

1:21:55 Like getting rid of their of their, of their tranny endorser. Yeah, we’re like, we don’t want to do that anymore. Everyone’s like, OK, we’ll buy your beer again. Yeah, exactly. Like there’s, there’s lots of examples of brands making certain decisions that may or may not alienate certain audiences.

1:22:08 And so I think that’s at the social layer of big shift that’s happening in Ethereum. And when it when when it’s in a good spot, in that sweet spot, man, that that thing can just RIP and go, you know, it, it can just absolutely fly. So we’ll see what happens. But that’s kind of my take on it. And I think when you see mature, intelligent, hard working people like Andrew Keys, for example, putting together a great product like the Ether Machine, it’s a signal that like things have changed a bit.

1:22:43 The narrative has changed a lot in the last six months because they were coming to the end of a four year cycle. I’ll ask you maybe later if you think we’re still going to have four year cycles, but Bitcoin has quite literally dominated this cycle much more than most people thought. Bitcoin dominance did come off at 66% and now it’s down at 61. But I mean, people were counting that Ethereum, maybe not you, but like a year ago. And now the new narrative is it’s, you know, the rails of stable coins and you know, it’s going to be the next big thing. You’ve got the treasury companies coming up. Other people say, well, you’ve got these all these other layer twos and it’s going to be a ghost chain. And the layer twos are riding for free on top of Ethereum. Tom Lee says Ethereum’s a new Bitcoin. And then he says most stable coins are actually on Ethereum, which I don’t know if if that’s true or if that will stay true. So what do you think the future looks like? I think that, you know, those are all very good points. I would say that.

1:23:42 So Bitcoin dominance indeed has been very strong over the last few years. And there’s, you know, Benjamin Cohen into the cryptoverse guy. Very smart guy. I like him a lot. I’m a fan.

1:23:52 Yeah, I’m a big fan. I subscribe to his thing and everything, but like, and he’s right very often. I mean, sometimes when he’s wrong, he takes a lot of heat. Usually when he’s wrong, he’s wrong about alt season and you know, like last December or November and things pumped like crazy. But I think Bitcoin dominance going up when the cost of capital is high, like we’re in quantitative easing. Honestly, I think the reason it does that is because Ben has created an incredible meme.

1:24:19 Like people believe it, frankly, because actually when you know, the cost of capital is high, when we’re in a quantitative tightening phase, the place where you can earn and maximize yield is on on Ethereum. And so to me, it’s a little bit like, I don’t, I don’t know, I get it. Bitcoin liquidity is king. And so, you know, there’s perception of its strength and so on. And people believe that. But yeah, definitely the last few years dominance has been really strong.

1:24:52 The thing is what happens with these four year cycles? And I still believe in the cycles. I think just like with war, typically war tends to last four years and then it kind of dissipates. One of the things that happens is people forget how reflexive and asymmetric this stuff. Like I’ll give you an example.

1:25:11 I was with Polygon for a couple years and the MATIC token, like, let’s say, I don’t know, March, April 2020 was like half a penny. A year later, it was like 3 bucks, right? It happened in no time. Or you see some of these other weird things like Shiba Inu or even Doge. Doge went up like 8X in one day.

1:25:33 So when when these things start to flip, yeah, we tend to forget how quickly that can that can really, really RIP and it tends to be right, kind of as people are forgetting, which somehow seems to be 4 years. Of course, the Bitcoin having plays a big part in that. But then at the same time, when you look at issuance, issuance on Ethereum now is actually lower because it’s a function of the utility of the network and how much gets burned and then that impacts the inflation rate and so on. And then to Tom Lee’s point, I agree with him in so far as when you look at all of the assets that are on Ethereum and you look at these companies that are putting more assets onto the chain.

1:26:18 And by the way, the same is going to start happening in Solana too. Solana doesn’t have anywhere near the number of stable coins, but it has much faster stable coin growth. Those companies in those institutions are going to want to own a piece of the infrastructure. They almost have. To they have to. Right, because if they’re using it, they have to have some skin in the game for actually verifying transactions, you would think, right?

1:26:38 Correct, 100%. And by the way, I think that’s going to translate into D5 protocols as well. I’m, I’m a seed investor in Morpho. I love those guys very much. I love Ave. too.

1:26:47 Stanny’s a friend of mine. But like you look at Morpho and now companies are using Morpho to deploy their own vaults. They’re going to have to own that token because they want participation in the governance as well. And so that theory, generally speaking, is going to apply broadly to a lot of things on Ethereum as well, in addition to Ether itself now. Yeah, the, the biggest catalyst though is definitely the stable coin growth.

1:27:11 And, and again, it’s sort of like what Ethereum does is it helps helps propagate U.S. dollar hegemony around the world, which is fundamentally good. And the demand for that is like insatiable. I I think that most people around the world, particularly in, you know, tough economies where they experience actual hyperinflation all the time. Yeah, strongly prefer U.S.

1:27:32 Dollars. Yeah, a lot of them try to keep it. I mean, in Russia you would keep the dollars under the mattress and you would do that in Latin America and when you could get them, correct. But if you’re in Zimbabwe, you might not be able to. But now you can. So, you know, that’s kind of the thing and and that use case seems like it’s going to have legs for a very long time. And so if you believe that’s true, then you have to also then look into, well, what is the composability of Defy mean for $3 trillion of stable coins on chain, right, For example, which I actually think, you know, at the rate things are going and and could potentially pick up as well could be, you know, if you and I having this conversation three years from now or less, maybe we’re at that point. 3 trillion in stables. Yeah, yeah, we’re well on our way to a trillion right now. It’s just going like crazy.

1:28:23 So you start to put these things together and it’s like what is the upper bound of ether? You know, And then you kind of start looking at the numbers and you’re like you don’t get to 10,000 OK, in my opinion, you get to like 7080 thousand 100,000 ether more. Now you look at that on the surface and you think that’s crazy, right? This guy what’s he talking about? But it’s. Currently around 4000 right?

1:28:48 And the all time high is just under 5. But but I remember people, yeah, maybe crazy people like Max Keiser at the time when Bitcoin was hundreds of dollars talking about, you know, 1,000,006 figure Bitcoin, $1,000,000 Bitcoin, right? And now it looks like he’s right and it’s not so shocking anymore. So one of the things Bitcoin has done has conditioned the market to accept the upper bound of this stuff is actually not so crazy, which I think is probably one of the things that’s also discounted in all of this, right?

1:29:17 Like, it’s not gonna be so crazy. So we’ll see what happens. But my biggest hope is that, yeah, we continue to move forward. Things continue to revert back to the center. Technological innovation on all networks continues to propagate and accelerate. And yeah, that all this crazy quantum stuff I’m talking about is really, you know, 1020 years away. Yeah.

1:29:46 Well, I’m glad you you preface it with all that. Let me ask you a couple more questions about blockchain. So again, we saw that Bitcoin dominance and I believe so. I had Michael Saylor on the show in 2021 and 2020, I think, and he had actually watched our old interviews with Andreas Antonopoulos in 2015 and 17 and 19. We had probably some of the few really in depth close interviews like in that chair where you could go inside his mind, whereas usually it would just be him presenting the conference.

1:30:14 And Michael has told me he watched all those when he did his deep dive in 2020. And I remember at one point he said, Brian, I like Bitcoin because it has low aspirations. He’s like, it’s not trying to do anything fancy. And that was the right asset for him to acquire because he could stay out of the way of the SEC, you know, during the the dark ages of the Biden administration. And I think obviously it was the first ETF and then the first one for other institutions to embrace like BlackRock, and then the first one for other Treasury companies to embrace like Metaplanet. I actually met Dylan at the Satoshi Roundtable a year and a half ago before he went off to Japan to do that or Metaplanet. And so I think what we saw maybe that dominant spike was maybe a hangover from that period.

1:30:53 Then obviously things have changed. Etherium now, I mean, these companies have huge chunks of it. They have, they own more Etherium than Etherium Foundation now with Joseph’s company. And then these other two are coming up fast behind it. I guess what’s next is the Solanas and the Tron’s potentially, I guess, 2 questions I want to ask you. First of all, what other layer ones do you have your eye on? I interviewed Costas Crypto from Sui when I was in Dubai recently, and he’s one of their lead developer guys. Very impressive what they’re building there. There’s obviously Justin’s son of Tron, who’s really owning that whole Asian audience in a way that only Justin can. And Justin’s, he’s a great, he uses media really well. He knows how to ride the headlines, whether it’s buying $70 million pieces of art or showing up to the Trump coin thing or buying, buying huge chunks of World Liberty Financial, the Trump defy thing.

1:31:48 So there’s that. I’m curious what you think of those are the layer ones. Will they become factors? And then I want to ask you about what everyone’s predicting is that treasury company defaults are going to, you know, make the crash in 26. You know, it’s going to be the FTX moment when we do have a bear market.

1:32:06 So there’s a bunch of questions. Maybe we’ll start by any of the block chains that you have your eye on. Obviously, Solana has a lot of transactions per second. The criticism is it’s been done in the past. There’s the Tri Lima and the Quadra Limas and all those things. Yeah, no, I mean, I, I try to keep an eye out as best as I can.

1:32:23 Sui is definitely and my buddy Ollie is a big guy in Sui and everything. And I think because it’s object oriented, right, they have a totally different approach. And so you can do some interesting things there. They’ve got a great community and so on. What I’m looking for. And of course, Solana, I think is going to keep doing what it’s doing.

1:32:44 My introduction to Solana was through Stream Flow, which is kind of like this big Solana app where you can lock tokens and manage the tokens and so on. And so I think continuing to move towards giving that incredible user experience that’s very fast on the L1 and cheap. And now their whole meme is Internet capital markets moving in that direction, I think is really interesting for them. And then of course, looking at all the meme coin stuff, bonk fun seems to be flipping pump fun.

1:33:13 And I think Jupe is also, they have their own launchpad. And so that speculative element will continue because I forgot who said this, but oh, maybe Anson said this. I met a really nice guy, tall guy. He said Solano meme coins are better odds than buying lottery tickets, right? You’re going to lose most of the time, but once in a while you’re hitting.

1:33:35 So that’s speculative element. I’m not, I’m not embracing. I mean, it’s not my thing, but it exists and it’s going to continue. Almost the reason capital markets exist across the board. Well, that’s The Dirty little secret no one wants to talk about exactly.

1:33:47 Just, you know, capital markets can be a little bit more sophisticated, but it’s still putting lipstick on a pig. But in terms of L1’s, what I’m really looking for now is innovation. So there’s two in particular and one of them is called Pangaea. And what these guys are doing is basically making data rich contextual data accessible where instead of relying on RPC providers and basically providing data that’s usable so that developers have a tremendous experience is quite centralized making that the network. So the nodes in the network serve up data. And so distributing in this way I think is quite an interesting innovation.

1:34:36 And then I also really like Noble Assets, which is a stable chain basically like Plasma, but they focus on composable yield. So how do you actually get yield just by holding the stablecoin? I think like pipping these stablecoin issuers by offering yield to the user is very compelling. And then how do you compose the yield into the stablecoin with different strategies and so on. So I think those kinds of innovations really specifically data and stablecoins.

1:35:08 There’s another great data company called Lists as well, but you know, and they’re focused on Solana. But making the data available in a decentralized way I think is the next big innovation in block chains. Frankly, it’s kind of like data availability was a big thing with Celestia and so on. But but the actual data making it usable and accessible is where I think, you know, the L1 ecosystem will go next. So I’m very curious to see how that, you know, sort of develops.

1:35:36 While we’re there, can you tell me about L twos because and specifically Ethereum L twos, I mean base has become probably one of the most popular ones. Like we have a whole portfolio of over 100 companies. And I would say for tokens being launched, it’s either base or Solana is probably the only choices right now going forward that we’re hearing. Although we have tokens on Arbitron and a few others that definitely have life. Just curious what you think of those L twos? And then being an old school Ethereum guy, at some point does Ethereum start charging those L twos for the use of them as a master layer?

1:36:09 How does that work? Well, so I agree with you, a base, I think Jesse Pollock’s amazing. I, I don’t know the guy personally, but I follow him. This Zora thing, I don’t know if you Zora’s like pumped like 8-9 X in the last week or something. It’s like where you get paid as a content creator. Oh yes, of course I saw that.

1:36:26 But but like they seem to have. Created like a little community inside the base app, Correct, Right. Yeah. OK. Yeah, it’s interesting. And they’ve integrated.

1:36:32 That because we’re we’re still censored in in community creation places in Web 2. So it’s interesting to see what they’re creating. Correct. So one guy, I forgot his name, he made like 50 grand just in the first hour of using the app. I mean, there’s like spectacular outcomes. Check it out.

1:36:49 Definitely. I mean, Jesse from base is like a source of major alpha. I think Coinbase is a phenomenal company. What they’ve done with base is incredible. They even have an L3 on base called D Gen. Yeah, Base 3.

1:37:01 Is there something? Oh the base 3 is a gaming layer I think and. All yeah, but the but D Gen. is kind of like this other layer. And then there’s token issuance frameworks there like Mint Club, which has this bonding curve.

1:37:14 They even have like Depay, which is like D Gen. Pepe. It’s like the original Pepe on on this D Gen. L3. And so the innovation is spectacular.

1:37:24 And I definitely agree with you. It’s either Solana or base in terms of like, you know, new tokens. We’ll see what happens. I just wouldn’t bet against Coinbase, frankly, ever. So, you know, that’s kind of gonna be the race with respect to Ethereum as an infrastructure layer. I think that the L2 narrative is a little bit misunderstood. You gotta go back to like let’s say in the beginning or even the first few years when usage would spike, gas would be totally out of control.

1:37:57 Yeah, remember. And it was like the biggest hurdle that we faced, right? Like how can I use Ethereum when it cost me 50 bucks to send a transaction? And from a scaling standpoint Now, initially when Ethereum came out, we had this world computer meme and we were going to Shard the L1. So the initial promise was 1024 shards, later that became 64. And then I think in 2018, Vitalik posted on his blog, OK, we’ll have like 1 Shard maybe.

1:38:22 I mean, it’s a hard thing to do, OK, very hard. So then the L2 approach begins. And I was very fortunate to come along for the Polygon ride when it transitioned to Matic. But you got to realize, and this is where it gets a little bit confused and I think especially with maximalist thinking, when they simplify and like they want to dunk on someone on Twitter. Like the way the L2 ecosystem developed is a response to market forces, right? It’s not like battalic waves is wand and this is how it’s going to be, no, because people have to choose to use it, right? So the cost of using Ethereum was very expensive and the scalability was a big challenge and other approaches like sharding were very hard.

1:39:09 So instead we had innovation, proof of work, side chains and later optimism and arbitrum and so on. And they’ve largely been adopted and now we have corporates using them. Sonium is another one. Obviously they’re censoring it, but again, you can customize it for your use case and that’s fine. And I think you’re gonna see every large institution consider coming on chain with it’s own L2, potentially financial institutions with their own D5 volts.

1:39:36 I can imagine them using Morpho as an example. And so now you have your own L2 and your own Morpho vaults or perhaps other services of a white labels and so on. And that’s the experience you create for your user, right? Like now Coinbase or Base I guess Coinbase we can say has tremendously benefited as a company from its L2 where the fees to Ethereum maybe have not. But that’s the point.

1:40:05 The point is from the scalability standpoint to enable these low cost, very fast transactions that increase user adoption. And then, you know, a future where the number of L2’s massively increases like this is another point that gets lost. The number of L2’s is so much higher today than it was last year, let alone a few years ago. So I think the model, generally speaking, is going in the right direction. When the price of a token is going down, it’s easier to accentuate and highlight certain arguments about why, such as the Etherium L2 parasitic argument.

1:40:42 But suddenly sentiment flips, the price starts pumping and so on. Tom Leo, it’s the stable chain, all the companies, you don’t it. Oh, maybe the L2 thing isn’t such a bad idea, right? So I just wouldn’t like anchor technical arguments on price sentiment, but it is going in the right direction in my opinion. It’s got and look, as a user, you have different flavors.

1:41:06 If you want a monolithic, you want everything within the L1, use Solana, right? It’s not like you’re forced to use anything. That’s the beauty of all this stuff. So we’ll see, but definitely going in the right direction in my opinion. I think some of the user experience can improve, like whether that’s a better wallet experience.

1:41:27 I mean like the phantom experience is really good as an example. Yeah, but maximally decentralized trust infrastructure for large blocks of capital. That seems to be the clear narrative for Ethereum right now.

1:42:31 You know, I mean, Apollo is using Ethereum, right? I mean, very large institutions are Black Rock and so on. So The thing is that doesn’t really have much of A ceiling. I mean the Sky’s the limit on that. So, you know, and really at the end of the day, the security side of it for issuance of tremendous amounts of assets is what wins the day in my opinion. And I think Ethereum has generally done a good job in that direction.

1:42:57 So when does Ethereum flip Bitcoin for market cap? Well, I don’t know that it’s going to flip Bitcoin because the Immaculate Conception of Bitcoin and Satoshi and everything is hard to, I mean, you have to love that, right? And it’s something you have to ascribe to. And you know, Andrew was on Squawk Box and he said I’d rather have a landline or a iPhone than a landline, right? That was this kind of argument. Comparison, yeah.

1:43:31 But you know, why not have both in my opinion? But if, if Ethereum goes to 100,000, which would be, you know what, 25 X from where it is now, you know, would Bitcoin go up that much 25X? Now that would keep the equal, but it would have to go up, I guess 5X only to get those market caps kind of on par. I guess your point is that Ethereum can really scale because it’s programmable and has all these other uses, but Bitcoin is still everybody’s favorite pep rock to a certain extent.

1:44:01 I don’t think we’re going to program anything on the Bitcoin ecosystem anytime soon. But but well so so fair enough. However, and this goes back to my quantum stuff, Bitcoin is a lot easier from a post quantum standpoint to mitigate and migrate than than Ethereum or any other smart contract platform. I think so. For Ethereum to overcome Bitcoin, the ETH BTC ratio would need to materially change, which means people will actually have to start selling Bitcoin for ETH.

1:44:31 I’m not sure that a lot of people are going to do that. I mean some people will, opportunistic people will, but other people will literally never sell their Bitcoin. Like the community is just very die hard. What if the institutions just come in and only buy Ethereum going for? That.

1:44:45 That becomes the new meta, the new narrative, the new media. Like you said, maybe Ben pushed the Bitcoin, but if everyone’s just it’s all about EE VTFEVTF. Well, the problem is liquidity is still king and Bitcoin still has all the liquidity. So, you know, there’s a lot of market forces. I definitely think Ethereum’s going to do very well.

1:45:06 I’m not sure it’s going to flip Bitcoin, at least not in this cycle. Maybe it might kind of have a chance, but I think by the time we get to that point where maybe it’s starting to flip and let’s see. We’ll we’ll see. I’m sure we’ll be buddies for a very long time, I hope, I’m sure. And so let’s talk about it next year or the year after.

1:45:26 We’ll see. But if this quantum thesis is right, there’s going to come a moment where, yeah, the flipping is almost there. And then the market realizes, wait a minute, Ethereum is much more vulnerable to this quantum stuff than Bitcoin. And in fact, nothing is easier to mitigate or migrate or manage than Bitcoin. And I think that’s going to be the biggest thing to pump the price. And and that’s kind of the thing where I vehemently disagree with, you know, like, you know, Adam Beck, for example, I think calling it a scam and all of this stuff and just being outright dismissive of it is like later going to be tremendously costly.

1:46:04 Right, right. These are the hardcore maxes, like Adam saying recently even that all whatever coins you call them or anything not Bitcoin is going to 0, right, Just like all Fiat systems are going to 0. My argument was, yeah, you’re going to 0 as well. What’s your point? You know, like, does that mean, you know, I don’t know.

1:46:22 I mean like, you know, the Earth is going to 0 at some point, so it’s a bit of a silly thing to say. I got to give him credit though on the quantum stuff. Just coming back to that, he he has put together some proposals and you know, he’s got really good takes on it. I think it’s from a technical standpoint, and I think, yeah, But historically, he’s been very wrong about Ethereum in the past in terms of price. And again, when this stuff starts to RIP, it’s very reflexive and very asymmetric.

1:46:52 And I think, yeah, just like with war, every four years we kind of forget how this stuff goes or we get, you know, and then it just absolutely rips. I think we forget how things do RIP. It’s funny, you know, I just had a flashback, John, that I got to Wall Street in 1993. I was 22 years old and I was on the 33rd floor of Bankers Trust Plaza where there was this massive 300 person trading floor. And I was on the derivatives desk, fixed income derivatives. And it was fucking nuts.

1:47:15 And it was amazing times and brutal times. Like people used to abuse you physically, mentally. There was no HR department to call people cutting off your tie and trying to break your fingers with phones. And it was good times. But I remember they would show me around the room be like, Oh yeah, that’s the Latin American desk. Of course, the Latin American crisis kind of thin that out. And there’s the Asian desk.

1:47:35 We remember the Asian crisis, and then that’s a Russian rule desk. Of course, the Russian crisis. Then this is the mortgage desk. You remember the mortgage crisis. And I remember thinking, doesn’t anybody ever learn? Like there’s the same crisis every four or five years on Wall Street, and you guys just go in a cycle. And I’m like, doesn’t anybody learn? And I think that was a reminder that as humans, we just don’t learn, right?

1:47:57 We forget the really bad times and then we forget those, you know, 8X moments in Doge and we just go back into this euphoria and then we get hurt and then we just repeat it again. And I think that’s just a human. And it’s amplified in crypto because you don’t see assets on Wall Street as big as like a Doge doing 8X in one day. Right. So yeah, it’s great that you bring that up.

1:48:20 I guess I’ll maybe I want to finish on this concept of the four year cycle. I had Michael Turpin in here who wrote Bitcoin Super Cycle and he was going down to the day before Thanksgiving of what Bitcoin hits an all time high. I think this cycle he was calling for 193,000 unless it’s a super cycle then it could go to 3 or 400,000. But what I didn’t understand about his super cycle is I thought that might extend the time but he said no, no Brian, it’s still going to come off. Lately, I think the Bitwise CEO and someone else came in and said the four year cycle is over. Look, it’s there’s there’s the problem is there’s only a few data points of the four year cycle. Obviously the halving becomes half as important every four years, but also it’s hard to argue with something that’s uncannily predictable in the four year cycle. But also some people say the four year cycle was, you know, dumping your all coins and on the all your new friends coming to crypto and now we got these institutions coming in. So what do you say about this four year cycle? Because if it’s true, 26 is a massive bear market. Ben Cowan has said it’s going to be. Michael Turpin has said it’s going to be, which means we don’t have much time left for this. Ether season, altcoin season, whatever. Before 26 is a correction.

1:49:32 Well, I’ll tell you one thing. So I, I definitely believe in the four year cycle. And I think that 2021 things absolutely ripped like crazy the first year of the Biden administration. And if you had asked me in 2020, OK, what would happen, you know, if, if, if Biden wins and we get all the things that I, I would say we got, which is like, you know, I mean, you know, I, I didn’t agree with a lot of his policy decisions. I, I would have said doom and gloom. I would say we’re toast.

1:50:05 But instead we just absolutely sky rocketed, right. And credit to the Biden administration, you know, so yeah, I think, and I’ve heard Ben say 2026 is looking pretty bad, but I. Typically that year in the four year cycle is bad. Potentially, but you know, at the same time, Ben also talks about altcoin season isn’t coming until interest rates start to go down, right? And so it looks like Mr. Powell might be out pretty soon.

1:50:35 I guess 20 would be March 2026 if I recall correctly. May, he’s out. May, OK. It’s the end of April, so May, yeah. You know, so there’s a lot of different scenarios that could play out. Again, I never would have imagined 2021 would have been so spectacular.

1:50:50 I would have thought it would have been doom and gloom. So it’s very difficult to predict. There’s one guy I really like. I think he’s Dutch. He’s he’s called the rational route.

1:50:59 He he draws that Bitcoin circle, you know, chart and it just shows the four year cycle, kind of like a lunar calendar rotation or something. I mean, it’s a really interesting approach. And so we’re due pretty soon for the next move. I think Bitcoin’s done a phenomenal job of ingratiating itself globally. And, you know, it just takes a little bit more.

1:51:25 I think we have to sustain, you know, the effort. I think we have to continue to grow the industry. But, you know, they still keep printing Fiat. And The thing is, in a lot of other countries, they’re printing more than ever even now. And I don’t think that’s going to stop anytime soon.

1:51:42 I’ve never it’s never going to stop. Be honest. And the quantity of money is sort of the last point I would leave this on. It’s changed. In other words, when you see open AI, Facebook, the tech companies battle for employees, kind of like, you know, professional sports, hiring a free agent or whatever. Yeah, people are getting hundreds of millions of dollars and billion dollars in some cases. I.

1:52:02 Used to think they paid us a lot on Wall Street. It’s crazy. It was a chump change compared to this the. Quantity of money has shifted, yeah. Or even look at professional sports, like I remember, you know, I like, I like watching basketball. I remember when guys would get, you know, a $60 million contractors big now like pretty good guys, not the superstars. They get $200 million contracts, $250 million contracts. The quantity of money has shifted. It’s changed.

1:52:29 I don’t think that part is realized yet in the crypto asset marketplace. Like $200 million is a lot of money, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as what $200 million meant even five years ago, let alone even two years ago. It shifted. And so yeah, I think the four year super cycle will play out again. I’m very optimistic. I mean, I’m betting on it, right? So we’ll see what happens, but I still think Bitcoin will lead this cycle, although the theory will do very well and I think Solana will do well, but I’m not yet prepared to say that, you know, the flipping will happen in this. Cycle it’s yeah it’s it’s far away yeah. Do you think we’re going to see some pretty crazy price action in the next 6-6 months?

1:53:15 I mean even Cowan is saying to expect that. He thinks honestly we need one more sell off back to Bitcoin before alts RIP. That’s what Ben thinks. He could be wrong, but do you think we’re going to see some some some pretty? I think, I think he’s right.

1:53:27 I think he’s right. He was right about Ethereum going home. He was wrong on the timing. I think he’s right. But you know, the alt bottom is not far off at this point and there’s already signs.

1:53:39 I mean, there’s certain things that have gone ballistic like this Pengu thing. It’s done like a 10X in the last month. Yeah, and other people are buying up old school NFTS, correct? We never saw that happening, correct? Yeah, and certain alts are screaming.

1:53:53 Just ripping this useless coin is up like 2200% in the last month. Let’s have you check that. Out, yeah, it’s like, it’s like the new fart coin, I guess I, I don’t know, it’s not financial advice, I’m just saying, but there’s already things that you can see are absolutely ripping. Those are kind of like I, I see, I think with a lot of the mean coins and a lot of these like unexpected things. As you said, they’re early indicators of something.

1:54:14 Yeah, it’s an early indicator that the narrative isn’t as obvious as we thought it was. Yes, because with with Ben, it’s like, OK, well the collectively this has to move and then they’re going to go. But we’re already seeing. Well, wait, there’s that and there’s that and there’s that. So. So yeah, it’s not that simple.

1:54:28 Yeah, and it shows how reflexive it is. It’s like to to go up 8X in a month is crazy on tremendous volume, right? It’s not like this, you know, Pingu has low volume, right? Yeah, it’s so that’s what I’m saying. Like when this stuff starts to kick off it, you know, we kind of forgotten a little bit what can happen. But there’s going to be some monster winners for sure, for sure.

1:54:55 And I don’t think by the way, the last point, you know, you mentioned earlier, will the treasuries be like FTX? No, because FTX was fraud based, right? And actually had FTX not committed for, I mean, obviously they wouldn’t have had the same position in the market and so on if they hadn’t used customer funds. By the way, his their investment in Anthropic today is worth what, like 15 billion? Really.

1:55:22 Yeah, they were forced to liquidate it at like a billion or whatever. Crazy. Crazy, right? So. It’s like if they could have held on and not gotten liquidated or found out they’d be back profitable again.

1:55:34 Yeah, 18 months was the window and Sam would be like, you know, an icon and. I had Scamucci in there and he was like, the exchange was a crazy, amazing cash cow business. Yeah, they just hadn’t fucked that up. It would have been great, but. Well, you know, a lot of people in the euphoria they get dislodged. You look at Genesis and Barry Silbert. I mean, I got a lot of respect for Barry. I’ve known him a very long time.

1:55:56 Genesis was his trading and lending business. At one point, I think Q 1/20/21, their lending book was 50 billion. And I know a lot of the traders at Genesis and many of them have moved on and Genesis of course went bankrupt. But now they’re at places like Wintermute and Galaxy and Flowdesk and so on, Really talented people. The, the, the traders weren’t the ones. It was like the upper management who made the decision to write, you know, billion dollar IOU’s, but you know, on by the way, the three arrows like widow maker trade. I mean, it was the right trade just as the timing was wrong and the whole thing was structured, you know, incorrectly. But in in any case, I guess the euphoria caused dislodgement which resulted in unbelievable risk which crushed their business.

1:56:45 But that business was printing money. It was a money printing business. It was tremendously successful. So to to your point, it’s like I OK, I don’t think the treasuries will be the same systemic risk with FTX as an analogue, but I do think there will definitely be people in groups that get dislodged in the euphoria and take some kind of risk. Whether that will cause contagion across the ecosystem, I’m not sure whether it’ll be more contained within their company, like people will blow up their companies. I’m certain of that.

1:57:18 You know, that’s kind of probably almost unavoidable, but I’m not so sure. Like the only. So the only big scandal I see potentially on the horizon is and people talk about this online, I’m not making this accusation, but that, you know, the big centralized exchanges trade against their customers. Yeah, right. If that proves to be true and they get, you know, in trouble with the authorities, like in a serious way, then that could be probably the only real systemic issue that I see potentially happening. OK, now again, I don’t want to speculate on that. I’m just saying I’m just reporting what people talk about on Twitter or whatever on X.

1:58:05 But you know, otherwise I don’t see like a big actor right now that’s, you know, causing enough clear fraud that, you know, systemic risk with their fraudulent behavior where FTX was kind of like, I mean, even Elon said, you know, these guys don’t have the money. I mean, he was very public about where’s the money, right? And so unless it came from customer funds. But yeah, that’s my only if I if there’s one parting shot as a worry. And again, I’m not saying this, but people talk about it on Twitter. If that proves to be true, then then yeah, we have a problem. Yeah, centralized exchanges, there are some just real big messes out there, not only your customers, but even your token issuers.

1:58:47 And we’ve had a lot of portfolio companies that have been jacked over by centralized exchanges. I always tell them be careful what you wish for because those top tier exchanges are going to dump all your marketing tokens on day one. And I’ve seen amazing projects with years behind them, with crazy founders get wrecked from what I believe was bad market makers and bad exchanges. So and none of them regulated. It’s a crazy business. So I don’t want that to happen.

1:59:14 But they’re going to need something to happen, probably because they’re going to need to be changed. Now. Luckily, I don’t. I think a coin base is really going to do it the right way. But you know, you got the finances and buy bits and all these other things in the world that don’t have to do it that way yet. Yeah, let’s see.

1:59:31 I mean, I, I, I know a lot of the folks at finance, I think CZ’s wonderful. I think, I think if somehow he could be the CEO, again, I think that would install that, that would, that would be a tremendous catalyst in the ecosystem. I’m not saying Richard is doing a poor job or anything. I’m just saying CZ’s the man. I don’t know which exchanges are potentially trading against their customers or if that’s even true at all.

1:59:53 But yeah, I agree. I mean, and by the way, to your point, it’s tough to get listed on exchanges. And for a while now listings have done very poorly. But that also speaks to why bunk fun and pump fun and these, you know, cuz you create an asset with equal distribution that everyone has a fair shot at. Yeah.

2:00:14 And you don’t get that same kind of manipulation, right? So yeah. Then you got to deal with snipers, right? That flip side, John, this is all extremely helpful and it’s great to talk to somebody like you OG in the space with all that. And then also thinking about quantum, I never thought that the potential flipping of Ethereum, Bitcoin would have a quantum element, but of course it does now because anything three years out has a quantum element.

2:00:37 So I don’t know, really fascinating stuff. And I like how you’re not dooming it as well, although you are telling people you better wake up. What’s the best way for people to learn more about this? Is following you on X also the best way to stay in touch with things that you talk about as far as quantum and and a bunch of your projects as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:00:56 Twitter X, I’m on LinkedIn. Never local. You should talk to these guys, by the way. They’re they’re based here in London. OK. Stefano and Fabrizio, you know, both quantum physicists from Oxford and you know, advanced R&D lab, definitely talk to them.

2:01:15 Take a look at P11 Alex Pruden. He was one of the one of the guys behind a Leo this big ZK project. He’s got a great team guy named Connor on his team and and some other really great folks there. There’s Quantum punks, Quantum punks.org, that kind of loose affiliation of interesting people and and you and then Hunter Beast, of course, the Bitcoin guy and and Duro and you know, you just kind of start digging into it, but there’s a lot of interesting people with great takes on this stuff. And I think it’s going to be the biggest meta in the space, you know, in the not too distant future. So let me ask you one final question, John. You know, a lot of people look at you and what you’ve done with your life in the last 10 years, 11 years. And they’re like, I want to grow up and be John Lewick one day. You know, here came a guy smoked a little DMT in Thailand. And then basically, you know, saw the future, got into Bitcoin, got into the Etherium ecosystem and you know, you did really well.

2:02:17 You’ve now been able to take some of that and invested in your projects. You can spend your brain working on cool, challenging stuff like Quantum because when blockchain got a little quiet, you can do all this stuff. And I’m just curious, you know, I don’t know, how does that make you feel? And what do you advise to the younger guys and girls getting into this space that think, OK, I really want to create wealth in this space, but also take this somewhere else to the next level because it feels like that’s what you’re doing. And I wonder if you can give us a little advice. I mean, a lot of it is luck, to be honest. People don’t want to admit that, but I just got lucky with being born at the right place, the right time and you know, and so on with the right set of confluence, you know, of events out of my control like Satoshi making Bitcoin and and so on. Yeah, but you still made the right decisions because there were 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people with those opportunities that to this day have nothing and are maybe even jaded.

2:03:16 Yeah. Well, I think so to to that point that’s true. When the opportunity presents itself or you believe it’s there, you really have to go for it. I mean, I work like crazy. I’ve been working like a maniac for more than a decade.

2:03:34 The concept of vacation is not something I understand. And so there is like a heavy, heavy work component to it. I think risk as well, you know, there’s been lots of times where I’ve, you know, had major ups and downs and so on. And you know, but when you find an asymmetric opportunity that you’re very passionate about, it’s going to require tremendous amount of work, sustained risk and application of like whatever aptitude you have towards, you know, helping develop that opportunity. Learning, constantly learning, like right now, today I’m probably like a reasonable, like junior developer, but I didn’t have any coding background in the past. So, you know, continuing to evolve your skill sets is also really important.

2:04:22 But yeah, I think getting a bit lucky also, but really finding, yeah, that asymmetric opportunity and just like, like going all in on it. And frankly, I think we’re in an age, a golden age of incredible technological evolution. The pace of everything is increasing. There’s just a wealth of opportunities out there. It’s unbelievable. And yeah, thinking about how to maximally apply yourself and take a lot of risk, I think is is kind of the key there. Sustained risk taking, yes, I like that. I like that.

2:05:02 Not financial advice, but you know, that’s that’s kind of like, yeah, I think it’s important part of the equation, yeah. Because, you know, there’s lots of times where years ago I could have just probably taken, taken everything off the table and I don’t know, bought an apartment and coasted along. And so, but then it’s like, you know, I risked all of that to keep going. And even now more recently, like with my fund, it’s like, I mean, I’ve deployed lots of capital into different things and some of those things have already failed and many more will fail.

2:05:38 But I could have put all that capital into, like, I don’t know, treasury bills and, and just chill out and, you know, just whatever. But then I wouldn’t be so deep into this quantum stuff or into this space right now as I am. Maybe, yeah, maybe it all fails. But you know, there’s no way to proceed without continuing to sustain the risk that you take, whether it’s your time or your capital or effort or whatever, especially when things move so quickly and they’re so dynamic.

2:06:07 Like the way the tech and, you know, the financial and tech and technology space like just fuses more and more with each passing day. It’s super dynamic. I mean, you know, let alone other technologies. Charlie Munger calls it the Lollapalooza effect where you have like multiple concurrent, like within a firm, if you have an engineering team, a chemistry team, a physics team, and you have all these like, you know, compelling technologists and they all work together in their own special way.

2:06:37 And the pieces start to come together, you get a Lollapalooza effect. It’s a mega multiplier on what the company can do. And so, yeah, I think learning new skills and taking advantage of the fact that I mean, dude, now you can like vibe code things or you can you can run your, I mean, you can have an AI copilot, right? You have a multitude of products and services available online for very little that can assist you in different things that you do and so on. You start putting those pieces together and you can become like much more productive, right?

2:07:10 So, but it’s a very exciting time. It’s, you know, tremendous opportunity, lots of competition, very good overall. I mean, have lots of competition, but it’s an exciting time for sure. I mean see what happens, but no shortage of action in this. Ecosystem, yeah, right. What what could you want, John?

2:07:33 Really appreciate this. Really been great getting to know you the last, you know, part of the year and yeah, let’s do this again in another year or two. Find out where we are for everybody else out there, go check out everything you’re talking about with Quantum. And then of course the Quantum money on on the back of that. If you’re in the Bitcoin ecosystem or Ethereum ecosystems or Solana ecosystems, it starts, it’s time to start talking about that and getting the people involved to thinking about that.

2:07:57 And also really love your thoughts on Ethereum. And look, it’s going to be an intense 612 months. It’s exciting time. So what do they say in China may live in interesting times. Well, thank you very much.

2:08:08 Super cool. And I really appreciate the opportunity. So thank you. Awesome. Thanks, John.

2:08:12 Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thanks.