Kostas Chalkias - Is Sui "The Apple Of Web3"? The Fastest, Most Scalable Blockchain Ever

Full transcript: Kostas Chalkias on London Real

3:29 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Kostas Chalkias, the web 3 expert, white hat hacker and blockchain engineer. You are the chief cryptographer and Co founder of Miston Labs, whose mission is to simplify blockchain, enhance security with AI and expand real world Web 3 applications beyond finance. Miston Labs is the team behind SUI, the world’s fastest blockchain, designed to deliver the benefits of Web three with the ease of Web two to be more accessible, secure and user friendly for everyone. Before Miston, you led cryptographic initiatives at Facebook, now Meta and R3, shaping the security foundations of many of the most influential blockchain projects today. You believe Web 3 shifts the power from platforms to people by eliminating untrustworthy intermediaries and safeguarding privacy.

4:18 You’ve said that direct digital ownership gives everyone greater control, unlocking the internet’s true value. Your vision is to empower individuals and creators to own their data and content by building a decentralized web stack that unlocks the full potential of Web 3. Kostas, welcome to London Real in Dubai.

4:36 Kostas Chalkias: Thank you and I’m very happy that I’m eventually I meet you in person and we’re staying in the same room together. I see you around in Dubai. I moved very recently in Dubai and now I have like friends here and I’m doing my passion innovation on the blockchain and happy to discuss about a few things here.

4:53 Brian Rose: Yeah, I can’t wait.

4:54 I really want to jump in. So I’m going to start with a quote from you where you said quote. Honestly, I won’t be surprised at all if missed in labs and anything that it touches surpasses the levels of what Apple is today. It’s a very rare combination even for Silicon Valley standards RE accumulated brain knowledge in one organization UN quote. So tell us, what is Mr. Labs, what is Suey and how are you guys different from all the other layer ones out there?

5:24 Kostas Chalkias: Amazing. By the way, imagine me as an expert living from the UK, originally in Greece, then France, then the UK eventually ended up into working for Mark, Mark Zuckerberg for, for an expert in Silicon Valley. You can you can realize you’re, you’re having to do with super brilliant people coming from Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, in all of the big universities in the world. And I noticed the difference by the time I arrived in the US that the team that we’ve built for Libra, maybe because Marg was generous enough to hire some of the biggest brains in the world, was so strong. And I was like an auditor for Ethereum for so many years. And I managed to crack smart contracts. I managed to find some like billion dollar attacks. The concentration of brain at Facebook at that time was definitely the biggest in the world. Do you know what what happened afterwards and why Suey and Mr. Labs is now the center?

6:16 All of the team left after the Libra collapse. And we got some of the people that were promoted like so frequent in a so frequent like fashion at Facebook that I was personally, I didn’t even believe that these people will live Facebook to go to a start up and imagine the concentration of brain power. Now it’s not only Facebook. There were people coming from Google, Netflix, Microsoft. We have about 60-70 folks with PhDs in, in the company.

6:43 Imagine like a set of 200 people working for Miston at the moment. And pretty much half of them are coming from either PhDs or big universities or they’re very successful in their life. So the concentration as a start up, I haven’t seen it in Silicon Valley. I have many friends working for like multi billion dollar companies. I worked at Facebook, I’m interacting with Google. You know, I had the project with AI vulnerabilities on the blockchain using Gemini.

7:09 I know how our team is superior. So the potential and the probability if you ask where would you bet your money now from all of the unicorns that you see around that will make it to be a a funk like a monk, as it called now, right. All of the five big companies in the world misting is probably, even if I tried to be unbiased, has the best potential to to make it. So that’s why I, I, I believe that the rate of innovation is so high that I cannot see if we don’t shoot ourselves in the food or the market collapses, why we cannot make it and be like the decentralized, you know, the, the brand.

7:43 Brian Rose: You know, so many founders talk about the tech and talk about the tech and obviously we’re going to talk about tech, of course, but I’ve also heard some very high level founders say it’s not the tech, it’s the team. And sometimes people forget or they can’t see the team, not beyond the, the, the blockchain.

8:01 Brian Rose: And but you’re telling me that’s a crucial factor and one of the big reasons that you’ve had the most.

8:07 Kostas Chalkias: Important one sometimes even when you’re hiring or when you’re acquiring a company like a smaller 1, you need to check the people’s profile and the people’s passion for something. Smart people imagine when we were taking interviews at Facebook, we didn’t even ask the developer to write in the language that he will use while he’s like joining us. Write up any language you want. I know if you are smart and you are like a person who is inspiring and can do like people’s very quickly, you will thrive.

8:37 So this is how we’re following this like property in our organization and we just hired like super smart people to work on the most difficult problems in the world. And then eventually, even if you don’t like something, because not every bet is working right, it’s very simple for them to people to something else, which is again, even better than the previous one. So having such a team to be able to think in this cycle of crypto that everything is changing.

9:02 It was the NFT and it was the Defy. It was the meme season. Tomorrow it might be the AI season, it might be IoT season. RWA’s. We have the team that is very quickly going into its direction and we have a new innovation literally every two weeks.

9:15 Every two weeks, if you ask me, there is a new white paper coming from Eastern Labs.

9:19 Brian Rose: Wow. How? How? I mean, this is not compared to Facebook and Google.

9:23 Kostas Chalkias: I was there. I know. OK, This is special.

9:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s special. It is special. So the first time I heard about SUE was when I met Sheikh Moala of Gaff Labs and Gaff Capital and that was in 23. And I actually was here I think for Token or some other event. And I met him and it was at some party they had and he came up and I think he knew who I was.

9:42 And then he said, would you like to meet CZ? And that’s a question you always say yes to. And so, yeah, I did. I introduced me to CZI, met him. We talked about the UFC and how many push ups he could do.

9:54 Is the coolest guy. And you know, I had a meeting with the Sheikh that next week and he started mentioning Suey, Suey, Suey. And they were the the team that was really mentioning you a lot. And I think they’d started talking to you. And I kept hearing him talk more about Suey. And then I came back last year and went to one of your Suey Connect events with Gaff and I met you and Christian and talked to you and I could see you guys were special.

10:19 Kostas Chalkias: Oh, we’re very passionate.

10:20 Very passionate, you know, You know my background. I named my son Kryptos. So how? I mean, what can you do better to actually devote your life for this? I literally do it.

10:29 Brian Rose: His name is Kryptos. His name is Kryptos. And then I went back home to London in October and a couple months later, you know, Sui just lit up and now you’re probably the 12th largest blockchain protocol by market cap. And now all of a sudden everyone knows Sui. But you know, that literally all happened from a price standpoint in the last three or four months.

10:48 Brian Rose: And I know that gets you a lot of tension, so and that’s always good, right?

10:52 Kostas Chalkias: It’s good. And you know sui, the definition of sui in Chinese, in Japanese. Do you know what it means?

10:58 Brian Rose: No, I don’t

10:59 Kostas Chalkias: water.

10:59 And that’s why you can see the drip as a, as the logo of Sui

11:03 Brian Rose: OK and. Bruce Lee flow like water.

11:06 Kostas Chalkias: Yeah. And you know all of the innovation is flowing. So technically the name was good, it inspired us and that’s the reason that Sui can innovate on all of the across every industry.

11:18 You can imagine that this attached to Web three at the moment.

11:22 Brian Rose: You know, I jumped into this market in 21 and I started going through all the Layer 1 heads from, you know, Emin at Avax. And I talked to Manset Hadera and I talked to Justin’s son at Tron. And I was just trying to get the lay of the land. And we all believed that a few years from then there would be fewer at once. And then we saw kind of the opposite happen and now maybe they were consolidating again.

11:44 And so I guess I’ll go back to my original question. When people come to you and say, why is Sui so special? Why do we need another layer one? How do you explain that to someone who’s not maybe deep inside the details of Watch?

11:56 Kostas Chalkias: It’s very simple.

11:57 So if you see now the current landscape of all of the L ones, I will talk only about L ones. For the for the temping, there is Solidity, There is Ethereum who had the new language, scripting language to write smart codecs and all of this stuff. The only other language that managed to meet to be better and safer than Solidity’s Move. And we created Move starting from Facebook. Imagine my CTO, he’s the creator of the Move language, the first one who put the first line of code in Move.

12:23 I created all of the cryptographic stack of Move and then all of these people coming from Facebook, obviously they knew how to handle billions of, of people, right? I mean, we need this. You cannot go and have a web three that is only defined and you only have the business. You need also the gamers, you need also the RW as you need people who know how to have a social network because eventually even all of this will come into the blockchain, right? You need it. So we have the background that if you see the potential, obviously, I mean we have the check mark, right? There is no way these people know how to run big infrastructures, web theories and started as transfer of money from Satoshi, but again, it evolved into a smart contract, fully programmable like space.

13:04 And now we have the opportunity to be the creators of this infrastructure. So SUE managed and the Mist and Labs managed to have some of the best talents to work on every aspect of the stack. And it’s not only SUE, I’m the chief cryptographer of Mist and Labs, but SUE is imagining as the CPU of the blockchain very quickly having transactions. We managed to have almost 300,000 transactions, probably the first blockchain that managed to have this on a test net phase. And we’re having all of the picks that we managed to surpass Solana and all of the rest on daily active users, transactions per second latency, half a second latency. Who could imagine it?

13:39 Imagine Bitcoin is 10 minutes at the moment. Half a second latency. Now you can even do AAA games on the blockchain. You can do arbitrage on chain. You can do stuff that wasn’t possible with the previous stack, right? Even Ethereum has a 1415 second finality now. So Sui is creating a new landscape where pretty much whatever you had on Web 2, it’s possible now on Web 3, even the transaction rate, every blockchain company is chasing Visa.

14:09 Visa has 20,000 transactions per second under the peaks, I don’t know, New Year’s Eve, it goes to 100 and K and all of this stuff. We managed to do it in a decentralized way. So these things were impossible before. What do you need for this, right? You need a team that is super innovative on consensus algorithm because consensus is defining the TPS and the latency. Some other L ones probably have some people who are very good at consensus, but this is like one founder and he doesn’t know about all of the rest because crypto is not only technology. And then you need the cryptographer. The cryptographer will create new systems. And myself coming from Facebook, I realized, oh, for everybody to onboard into a new system, you need to do it in 1-2 seconds maximum.

14:52 How can you do this now with mnemonics that people have to drive their passwords and then get a copy and they don’t have in their brain. Oh, there is no forgot password in the blog saying because 99% of the population is attached to social networks, right? They don’t know it. People are losing their money, the 12.

15:09 Brian Rose: Word Keep. Yes, terrible.

15:10 Kostas Chalkias: The 12 word mnemonic never scales exactly and we invented it was literally my baby ZK login and ZK login was the first zero knowledge proof. You know, it’s a privacy preserving algorithm that I managed to do login with Google or Facebook or Apple and automatically you have an address and Google doesn’t know your address, which was magic, right? And this is now the most used zero knowledge proof technology across any industry in the world. ZK login. ZK login. ZK login is the most used ZK technology in the world. Even if you Add all of them together, I.

15:45 Brian Rose: Don’t put a password in.

15:47 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, you don’t. You just need Google. And now we’re going to have also pass keys like with your Face ID and imagine for micro payments and all of these things. It’s amazing. Then you can have of course, a second factor for larger transactions.

16:00 But who are the people who are moving to the largest transactions? Only a small part of the population, but you help them on board very quickly. You can even hide the fact that there is a blockchain behind it. Imagine a game that now you start, you logged in with Google and you play the game. All of the Web 3 attempts to, to get the games into the like the ecosystem, they have to find a new way that the, the, the players do not see the difference. And we managed to do it.

16:24 That’s why Sri, by the way, was a sponsor at Red Bull. Red Bull had an NFT campaign and everybody logged in with Google. And in literally couple of days there were thousands, hundreds of thousands of users having an NFT on, on Red Bull. And then we realized, wow, this is amazing, right? We have the fastest network in the world.

16:43 We now have a way to onboard users. We know how to do it because we’re coming from Facebook. And then I covered now consensus and cryptography. And then our CTO is a creator of a new language, which is better than Solidity. So we also have the talent for a new language. And then Evan Tseng, the CEO of the company, he was the head of research at Facebook and at the same time he was leading teams in Apple.

17:04 You are running his operating system. He won one of the engineering awards from ACM, one of the biggest organizations in the next year, I believe, after addressing Horowitz from A16Z. So it’s this guy is also IQ 200. I don’t know. He’s super smart.

17:20 He’s leading a foundation. He managed to do Apple, Facebook, He managed to bring all of us next to him and we created this. And then we have the 5th Co founder, all of them directors or leads at Facebook. Who’s a digit? This guy was leading products for for Facebook before that on VM where he knows how to deliver. He had one of the biggest mining farms in in London, probably the first one.

17:42 You’re from London right. You know, so we managed to find a like a set of a group of different talents in the leadership level that I cannot see on any other one. Go to Solana. Solana has told it all is like, I respect him. He’s a very good engineer.

18:01 He did something that is probably if you see the innovations that he created personally as an individuals, it doesn’t even like compared to every single founder in in Mr. Lampson. Imagine we have 5. The fact that we’re 5 by the way, it helps a lot because you need to delegate. The space is so big at the moment that I moved to Dubai. My other Co founder is in the UK, he lives in London, He’s a professor at UCL, probably the best consensus expert in the world.

18:29 And then the other three people are in Palo Alto now, but they’re traveling a lot at the knee. He’s everywhere, right? I mean, he’s he’s a charisma. So in my opinion, this combination of having the founders being able to be magnets for talent to come to us. Check my recent tweet, my recent tweet, I’m creating a commander’s team.

18:47 This happened 10 minutes before I come to your room.

18:50 Brian Rose: A commander’s team commander. ‘S team. What is that?

18:53 Kostas Chalkias: It’s a special forces team that it’s a going to be a very, very strict interview.

18:58 I will cherry pick them from hackathons, but I will originally start from Asia. So I will go Vietnam, India, Pakistan. This is he Indonesia. I’m going to cherry pick super good people and on boarding will be have a tent. You have boots and you’re coming with me on hackathons. You’re coming with me in government. Let’s digitize the world.

19:20 Commandos is with double S at the end, open source in our systems.

19:23 Brian Rose: OK, and you’d literally drop into a city,

19:26 Kostas Chalkias: Yes. And on. Exactly. Imagine I could have a parachute as well I’m I’m crazy I will do I will do the parachute I will I will not give them a laptop OK, I’ll give them a parachute and then we have Christian. You met Christian right

19:37 Brian Rose: yes amazing

19:38 Kostas Chalkias: Christian is is also on the security front right he’s he’s amazed on what we can do now with a commander’s team across the world and even internally administered.

19:46 This is literally a friend who wants to invest in SUV ecosystem and he told me Kostas help me, I need to find the best people for special force for special projects across the world. And then we said we will do it. I know how to do it, but they have to follow my pace. Down the road. You’re going to ask me about some like things that I have on the spectrum. I’m not sleeping, for example, I I live with power naps. So the people who are joining commandments, they have to follow this pace.

20:16 No sleeping, just power naps.

20:18 Brian Rose: Power naps the Da Vinci mode, that’s what. Da Vinci did, yeah.

20:21 Kostas Chalkias: Yeah, you know, my wife, do you know how many times he has markers in, in her face? Because I have markers across my like back in in the wall. So when I wake up randomly at night and I have some idea that I couldn’t solve, I very quickly write it down to the wherever I find.

20:37 And sometimes I use my wife’s face.

20:39 Brian Rose: Really. You don’t see at that time, right? You’re you’re literally half sleeping. Man, she must love you, that’s for sure.

20:47 Kostas Chalkias: Yeah, but you see the the intellectual quality and the fact that we have also the didn’t think it’s not only a cryptographer who created a blockchain, a didn’t who created the blockchain.

20:58 It’s a combination. We have everything and that’s the reason that many talents followed us. They followed me, they followed Evan, they followed Adeni, they followed Sam and they followed George from the biggest universities in the world, they came to Mr. Labs. That’s why I believe it’s going to be, it has at the moment the best, the best odds for being the apple of web three.

21:17 Brian Rose: OK. It must be a very senior management team founding teams where five, you know, high level individuals can work together. And maybe you don’t see that in a lot of projects because maybe they never.

21:28 Kostas Chalkias: Yeah, it is. But fortunately, we’re all same people. Obviously when you’re taking decisions, it’s not that you agree on everything, but we’re, I mean, we’re trying to do it in a way that works for the company. Sometimes I disagree, but at the same time I I see the data that they’re providing me when we go into these debates. And almost always all of the decisions we took are actually for a good purpose, even for those who have personally disagreed.

21:54 And sometimes I win on these debates.

21:56 Brian Rose: But it’s always data-driven.

21:58 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, it’s data-driven and we’re always voting between each other. It’s it’s literally working really well as a Dow. We have a Dow between the leadership and it’s not only founders. We give also the power to our people to give us feedback. You know, feedback is a gift, something you’re learning in Silicon Valley.

22:14 It’s don’t be like someone who doesn’t accept like getting criticized and all of these things.

22:19 Brian Rose: Yeah, look, you have to understand, get the data and then you do whatever you want with this data. Don’t let the ego get in the middle.

22:27 Kostas Chalkias: Yes exactly. It’s hard because at first the immediate reaction is defense. We were trained to do that.

22:33 I believe the reason it works is because all of us have worked in these companies, which was part of the protocol. You cannot work at Facebook. If you don’t receive feedback, you will never be promoted.

22:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think that’s the difference with you guys. You have deep experience, decades and decades in these high tech startups in Silicon Valley, whereas some of these protocols are degenish or maybe they didn’t have that that layer.

22:54 Brian Rose: And I think over time that shows in how quickly.

22:57 Kostas Chalkias: 100% and don’t get me wrong, right I I always had Solana under my like portfolio either even companies or investments. I’m a Bitcoin maxi. There is a nice market for everybody, but I believe Miston is covering most of the space at the moment. We can win in almost every case.

23:14 Brian Rose: Let’s quickly talk about Libra because it’s part of the story, and then we can dive in more into Miston. Tell us about Libra. It was obviously killed in the end. I heard it was killed really for political reasons, but it also created Miston and everything you’re doing at Sui. And you said something earlier which was fascinating. When you’re working at Facebook, you’re thinking about 3 billion users from the beginning, and when you’re building in Defy, you’re thinking about a fraction of that and maybe helping them. Just thousands.

23:42 Yeah, thousands, I know, and maybe just thousands. So you’re not even thinking outside the box in some way, but you’re thinking, well, we, we could roll this out to WhatsApp. We could roll this out to everything. And you, you had to do that. You worked on cryptography, WhatsApp, so maybe just talk about that whole Facebook experience, Libra, how it started, how it ended.

23:58 Kostas Chalkias: So it was David Marcus. I respect this guy. He actually helped me to get into Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg gave him the the stamp go run Libra. David Marcus is coming from PayPal. He was at Messenger leading the messenger team.

24:13 He’s he’s a charismatic person. He created like an elite team where he had people across the world. Imagine he found someone Greek that worked for a UK company. Come on Facebook. We want you right.

24:27 You run R3, you designed everything on R3. We give you a better offer. Come to the US. When I joined, something that I personally realized at Facebook, which was probably something that I didn’t like, is I don’t believe Facebook had so many security and crypto talent compared to the Libra team. The Libra team was more talented on particular like parts of science, especially in cryptography and also creating new languages as well as I mean, for web three, there was not so much like vision culture at Facebook. We created David Marcus.

25:03 He’s a Bitcoin maxi. He created this culture. Then David hired Evan Chang. Evan is the CEO now of Mr. Labs.

25:09 Evan ran all of the research in the the number of people coming from the top universities with the best publications in the world that he hired was amazing. I haven’t seen, I didn’t expect this when I joined Facebook. I said, OK, I’m one of the first cryptographers we’re joining. We’re going to have a small team like in our three. I was alone, actually.

25:29 Now at least I have a few colleagues I can work together

25:32 Brian Rose: Did. You have any hesitancy to join Facebook or no?

25:35 Kostas Chalkias: No, just the opportunity of a lifetime. As well, apart from didn’t have an option I I interviewed with many fans actually and I literally auctioned my offer at Facebook. You don’t go directly right. I mean, this is a hint for everybody who’s looking for a job.

25:51 If you are good and you believe in yourself, get another offer as well. So you can play with the with the prices, right? And I did this. But the reality is Facebook was a better fit for me because I was coming from the blockchain world. And at that time Google, Apple and other like companies didn’t They did security, but nothing related to Web 3.

26:10 So for me it was a no brainer. After I was invited there, the CTO now of Sui of Mr. Labs, some some blacks here. I met him in a conference. Oh, it’s very interesting how I ended up at Facebook. This conference was when I invented an algorithm for post quantum signatures.

26:29 If the quantum computer comes, how we can protect ourselves against the power that this machine has. And some joined this session because I had work with the first developer of Satoshi for the Java library, the Bitcoin J Mike Han was my manager at R3. And some said how bad can this be presentation with Mike Han being in the co-authors. But he doesn’t see my crime. He sees me OK, which I was the late photographer of my crime. And then some goes back to Facebook and he writes a post that guys, I met the genius, we have to hide him. And then when I joined, nobody had deleted that comment, which was months before I joined, six months before I joined, and I realized that people were talking about getting all of the like big brains.

27:17 And I was considering myself. I was confident. I’m good at cryptography. I have a role at Facebook. And then I happily accepted. Of course, we joined.

27:27 Libra was moving very fast, especially at the very beginning. I will say that one of the problems eventually would personally see coming from this space, it was slightly slower on adoption of new techniques because there is bureaucracy. Even if Libra was operating as a start up inside Facebook, imagine we even had, I personally started being paid at Facebook, then being paid at Novi, then being paid at DM, you know, different start-ups inside where we try to keep our own culture as WhatsApp did by the way, at Facebook. But again, you still have the bureaucracy. And in this world where the cycle is very short, every few months I invented new algorithms and I was locked. I couldn’t do anything.

28:09 You know that during COVID I’ve implemented an algorithm to find attacks on proof of solvency algorithms in all of the big exchanges. I almost predicted what would happen with FTXI was presenting Luna and other things two days before Luna collapses in the financial crypto conference about something is not right in stable coins, algorithmic coins and exchanges because this was something that Mark, not Marcus, I’m sorry, David Marcus gave me as a role find all of the algorithms for proof solvency. What Facebook we have to fix the market, right? So believe me, Facebook did a lot of job to make good signs to to publish stuff to change the narrative and having all of this talent going into other chains afterwards. Now Libra, I don’t know if it’s political reasons. If it was COVID, you know, during COVID, you cannot even go to every country and say we’re going to launch Libra. You couldn’t even fly right.

29:02 It was very difficult times, right? And then there was a change of administration. It was as I told you, it was growing a bit like at the higher rate than I was expecting. Eventually indirectly 1000 people being involved into the project. And in this case is you need a commandos team to deliver, right? You cannot be slow.

29:20 I had 10 like piled papers in, in my desk that I knew this will change the, the world. But we couldn’t apply them because we were already ready for production. And believe me, we were launching every month. I lost my paternity leave when Kryptos was born in London. And then I have my second child, Philip in the US Philip was born during the time that Libra was launching and launching and launching and every month was launching.

29:48 And then for one year it was launching and I didn’t get my paternity leave because I said I cannot live. Now we’re launching next month. So it’s a combination, in my opinion, of bad timing, the fact that we could, I believe, do better job on not doing two things at the same time, both a stable coin, which was a basket, and a new blockchain. How do you advertise all of these two things to regulators? It’s very tough. If you are Facebook, they’re afraid as well. You had the Cambridge Analytica incident in the past. There were many things that they say, OK, you have all of our socials.

30:20 You cannot have all of our nutshells now in like talent wise. I don’t believe there is a comparison. It was the best thing in the world. So all of this after the collapse, 6 months before. I mean people who are in leadership, they understand it’s it’s collapsing.

30:37 So we left. Everybody wanted to leave. And then somehow we all met almost independently. We had Evan saying I’m going to do it. I said I’m going to do it by myself.

30:50 George said I’m going to do it. And then we said, guys, let’s do it together. So we created Suite and many people from the Facebook Libra team actually followed us. And this created the domino effect where people from Netflix, from Microsoft, from Apple, like former colleagues of us, also joined us. Even from R3 I got people from R3 as well.

31:08 Brian Rose: Wow.

31:08 Brian Rose: If if this had been the current Trump administration, you might have stayed with Facebook and Libra might have launched, perhaps.

31:15 Kostas Chalkias: There is a possibility. You never know because I’m telling you it’s multiple factors that affected this, right? Everybody was visioner. David Marcus was visioner, Mark Zuckerberg was visioner. We were super inspired by this.

31:27 I was working from my, from my closet when there was COVID for a moment in my life, I didn’t have a big like place to live. And I had two, one newborn and, and the baby like 2 years old. I was working from my closet all day because you couldn’t go out, you couldn’t go to the office. It was also very difficult for the employees to to to be this new type of engagement with the company. Working at Facebook is literally campus. We had pizza, burgers, you know, dry cleaning, anything. It was like a small village.

32:01 And I lost all of this. And suddenly I said, OK, you lose all of these parts that you’re getting from Facebook. It’s an important you’re in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, you have to take bets. Come on, you’re in the center of the world where you can create a new startup. You know, you’re confident about your your, your brain, your intellectual property that you have. You have to be surrounded by the most important people. This is spoiler but there was another block saying that they wanted me to be a Co founder also from Facebook.

32:30 Brian Rose: A current competitor, perhaps?

32:32 Kostas Chalkias: Yes. And I said no, I’m going with Evan because Evan is the brain. I cannot go to people that I didn’t believe they were special.

32:41 Brian Rose: Well, let’s talk about Aptos because this is the other faction of Facebook that’s come out and there was some healthy or unhealthy competition between the two of you guys. What is the story with Aptos and Aptos and Sui?

32:55 Kostas Chalkias: So at Facebook, after the collapse of Libre, before the collapse, everybody start thinking that OK, I can optimize by staying in the web 3 environment and I also have some cool ideas. So Aptos decided to do the following. Look, all of these guys cost us some. They’ve built Move because these are the Move language change, right? Aptos and Taz were using the Move language and Sui put a completely different path and we made many changes to the Move language compared to what we had at Facebook.

33:27 Aptos decided to clone it. In my opinion, it was already too old, as I told you, delays, bureaucracy and we had better ideas on how to scale Move in a different way. So Aptos decided to get a clone, create Aptos very quickly. They launched, even if they started the company later than us, while we implemented, we were in a stealth mode trying to build a better system, better than the move of Facebook. So imagine Aptos as being pretty much the clone of Libra and thus being the novelty part of Libra. It’s like you have two kids and one of them is saying I will take my own path because I know how to succeed better. And I believe the innovation rate in Sui was even at the time of hiring because I knew the people who were hiring that they were promoted last month, they were super good at what they’re doing.

34:15 While on the other side, I couldn’t see this, I could see more secrecy, more like we know that SWI is better and let’s find another way. Sometimes I see there’s a copy paste situation. If you’re asking me, I believe we’re by far most innovative anyway. Some of their people are OK. I don’t believe all of their team is as gifted as the as the SWI team, but they decided to get just the clone of Libra and then continue over this.

34:42 We decided to take another path, more innovative. That’s the main difference in the structure of the teams. Now. We’re also more decentralized, like they’re more Palo Alto like concentrated. We are having people across the world we build like offices here in Dubai, the UK, Greece. We have literally next to see that mount. We got a big building that will be announced in the next few weeks or months.

35:04 We were in Asia. We know how to because we’re even the founders are technical founders. I’m still coding 3 of the founders are still coding adapters. Nobody’s coding from now. It’s only one by the way one left.

35:18 There is a process of elimination there. So for many things that I believe didn’t fit to my appetite. Sometimes I consider them toxic as well. I couldn’t join actors. For me, it was a no brainer and you know, if you talk to either Adni, Evan, George and Sam, you will realize them the how charismatic they are on on on changing the landscape.

35:46 Like we have to make a leak like a leapfrog situation for for the blockchain to succeed. We cannot just have only defy users. We need to find another way. If you see how even the Aptos team were looking at my work and their leadership team were focusing on course, let’s work together and and all of these things, you will realize that in some sense at Facebook, they were jealous of what we were doing. So I consider them as like it’s good that the move language is also having another like place to to be alive and and evolve at the same time.

36:20 I consider us by far better either on community or innovation. I don’t believe there is anything else at the moment.

36:26 Brian Rose: Do you rate any other layer ones like when you better? Than us on innovation or. Just the top 25, No, Are there any that you look at and say they’re doing these things good? I mean you obviously said Solana, you know does some things or early innovation

36:38 Kostas Chalkias: I do.

36:38 Brian Rose: But is there anything you see in any of them or is it just are you guys superior? And everything.

36:44 Kostas Chalkias: I believe some of them are completely disorganized. Polygon for example, they’re going here and there. It cannot work. At the same time, some others are focusing on stealing from us like they’re late in the game.

36:57 Some others are like Solana. Look, Solana has a community. We believe we can go faster than anyone else on being the next thing after Solana. And I believe we’re doing like really good job here. It’s I mean, if you can see the numbers on how SUE grew and being the best blockchain, performing blockchain on 2024, not only on the pricing part, because pricing is another thing.

37:19 I’m a nerd, I don’t care about this. But on technology part, you see all of the biggest innovations in the world came from SUE. So this thing, I don’t see it on other blockchains. Maybe Avalanche has this like subnets and they can do they can get the niche market somewhere else. So then I believe that it will have competition. Beta chain is also joining for a community. We’re having a very, very strong defy, one of the strongest define defy ecosystems in the world. I believe we’re we’re approaching with a higher pace than anybody else.

37:48 So I don’t see the other things. I don’t even I don’t even know what they’re doing. I don’t even know if you ask me what near is doing with AI and all of this stuff. I believe we have a better AI team. We even hired someone who’s a very, very popular and an intelligent person publishing on Europe’s every year.

38:06 He’s he’s going to be a great addition for us. Even on the AI sector. I don’t believe we have a competitor. And I try to be unbiased. I’m telling you I like science. I would be honest.

38:15 I’m telling you I had Solana in the past. I even known a few now, but SUA has a better technology. We even created a decentralized storage network. Walrus. Yeah, wait for Walrus, right?

38:26 Because we had Filecoin, we had R Wave, we had a few others go and second tweet and how like it’s, it’s like a storage layer on steroids. It’s by far better on every aspect. So Shui, Walrus, we had Deepak, which is the NASDAQ of the blockchain, literally an order book. We have an S, which is the identity who has created all of this like 4 technologies in two years. The only team who can do it is us. All of the rest are focusing in One Direction. This cannot, I mean the blockchain is not only execution on transactions, you have to offer something else that the governments can come in that web two banks, the, the, the threat Phi, anything can go into the blockchain and don’t feel a difference between Web 2 and Web 3, just only more transparency and better ownership.

39:14 So that’s why I’m thinking sometimes,

39:16 Brian Rose: yes, of course, as if you were unbiased. Is there another blockchain that you work at the moment?

39:22 Kostas Chalkias: No, nothing 0.

39:23 Brian Rose: There’s a famous quote by the UFC fighter Conor McGregor, who says he says losers focus on winners, winners focus on winning.

39:30 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, this is happening, by the way, with some of the things that you mentioned.

39:35 Brian Rose: They’re looking at you. They’re looking at you and you’re looking into the future.

39:40 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, but there is always in this market. There is if you see in the in the McDonald’s Burger King, there is the high quality and there is also the very like fast food. But in some regions, people are poor and they’re getting McDonald’s right. But there is other high quality like burger places we can go now.

40:00 So in my opinion, we managed to actually bring everybody into the chain with this onboarding stuff that we build. Imagine that I’m doing even Internet, less transactions, crazy things that we can discuss as well. I don’t believe anyone else is looking at the full picture. Everybody’s looking at, I don’t know, optimizing on the pricing model or everything else. We optimize on the usability.

40:19 On on something that will change the narrative and like bring confidence even to the people who don’t know about Web 3. Imagine I’m personally talking to many governments and you know, the Greek stock market, for example, is coming on three big projects that you need to gain confidence. Forget Aptos for a while because they’re also coming from Facebook. It’s very difficult to go to a like a place which is more traditional and conservative if they don’t see a team that has succeeded in the past and it’s not a random team who created the blockchain.

40:51 They cannot easily move their like countries assets into that blockchain. It’s impossible. They need to see who is behind it. It’s literally KYC, a profile, a curriculum on who is going to build it for me and we’re winning there almost every case.

41:11 Brian Rose: I’ve heard people say Suey is Solana for institutions.

41:15 Kostas Chalkias: I would say that SUI is not only for institutions. If you see how many times SUI was down and more robust and how we can accommodate more users, I believe we’re going to win all of the meme Defy gaming institution space, All of them. And the only competitor would be the L2S and Ethereum probably. But the L2’s? I’m coming from a country that is like a Polynesia country, like Greece.

41:45 There’s so many islands. Go and live in the islands in the winter. Good luck. Too many islands. The liquidity is actually split between different places. You need this liquidity in the same place. Do you know why some countries are coming to SUI? Because of the potential of having the gamers the defy users.

42:05 We even have some successful memes on on Sui and institutional like RWS and all of this stuff because we need everybody to accommodate this liquidity. The gamer, especially with good things. Imagine even CZ, he personally invest now on education and financial literacy for poor people. All of these folks eventually due to CZ will come into the blockchain because he’s a public figure, right? And I believe we have to be the chain that will hug them.

42:38 Come with us. We know how to import you. We know how to to, to get you into a state where you’re going to make money from this. You’re going to also invest here. So if you don’t get the gamers and you have the real estate of Greece or some other country, UAE into the chain who is going to give you liquidity?

42:57 You need all of them. So for this to win, you need to have the most robust and fastest system and easy system to to be like easy for everybody who wants to understand something new. Very difficult people even at Facebook to make some changes very simple like moving 1 button from the left to the right, you’re losing users. Originally people are used to templates, even ourselves. Some people are somehow accepting the reality and they don’t try to make a change. They’re only very, very small, like portion of humanity who are taking bets and they’re they’re shifting very quickly. Most of them, they don’t want to change even if they know they’re not having the perfect life.

43:39 So for us, it’s let’s combine, let’s get these these two worlds get married together. And that’s why I believe we don’t have a competitor. And I don’t believe that Solana is is going to beat us down the road. We’re going to win even against Solana.

43:53 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about Web 2 social media companies because so far we haven’t seen any of them come on the blockchain or offer crypto services. Now, Facebook obviously abandoned Libra for whatever reason.

44:05 Elon Musk is always rumoured to be bringing crypto transactions on chain. But I’ve heard other people say then the app won’t be available in the App Store and there’s all sorts of other issues and it’s nowhere near happening. But do you see this happening because you used to work in one of those companies and is this? Are we talking about an? Opportunity for you.

44:21 Kostas Chalkias: Are you talking about the big companies or smaller companies who want to be the decentralized Facebook and TikTok? This exists.

44:27 Brian Rose: I’m talking about the bigger ones.

44:29 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, this exists. For example, Sui has fun TV record and some other big names are also coming. Now, what would it take for Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter to come into X coming into the blockchain? There are a few things that we have to consider that sometimes it’s a bit more complicated. Even if crypto is more like liberal and you know, people can come and, and, and do stuff that might not be censored, there is still some like regulations that for example, you need some of the stuff to be able to be deleted. Block saying doesn’t allow deletion. OK.

45:06 So how do you solve this problem? Right wanders. The storage layer that we’re doing will enable deletion. You cannot get this on file coordinator with. We know how to work even with regulators. This is another thing that I personally see that Sui will make probably a difference because if they have a request for privacy for fraud detection, because you know, this 2 regulation, 2 regulators are conflicting. It’s a paradox.

45:32 You have the fraud detection, the fraud like focused regulators, also the privacy regulators. How can you have privacy? And also these people have access to the data to be able to detect fraud? So there is a competition here. We’ve LED this game through Facebook. We know how to play this.

45:48 And every country around the world is different and you better comply exactly as their service and it’s just a reality. Exactly. So you have to build extra tools on top of the existing blockchains or you have to build the technology. 0 knowledge proofs is one of them. Fully homomorphic encryption, trust, executed environments, multi party computations. You will need more cryptographic tools than what we had before in the conventional blockchains.

46:11 That’s why we hired so many people to solve the identity problem. Identity is another issue. We have so many bots at the moment. How can you do social networks if Elon Musk doesn’t run some bots to detect bots every every few weeks, right? You need to create reputation systems and I believe it’s happening. They’re exploring it.

46:28 I also started personally to do some work on NFTS on Instagram, but then I left, right. Even before the collapse of Libra, we worked for a bit on with the Instagram team. I don’t know what they’re doing anymore. Google is running databases for analysis. They have the Big Query and some other tools for, and they’re also running some validators. They’re getting into the game, but slowly. If you’re asking me about the platform itself, to move the social network itself to run on the blockchain, we have to solve some of the problems that I mentioned before, the privacy sector.

47:02 You have to be compliant with GDPR in some particular cases. So probably you can create a silent particular countries, but you cannot make it global. OK. And there is also the the element of something changes in the country. They want to freeze accounts and all of these things the centralized network doesn’t hear of, doesn’t listen of any ruler or anybody, right?

47:22 It’s the world who decides. So it will take time. I believe it’s happening. I see some efforts. I believe Elon Musk will do it. I’m even tagging him sometimes on Twitter. Just do it because even if you don’t want to start from social networks, there are a few easy wins. For example, donations.

47:43 Come on, who is going to put 10,000 in Greenpeace at the moment? If you don’t know where your money is going, use the blockchain, Put super transparency at oracles, even cameras that you’re literally feeding the giant panda in China. And we know now I would probably have more liquidity into donations. And donations was also part of the social network. Facebook had the donation engine. So we can start with some of the features that these social networks are offering.

48:08 Maybe Twitter will do identity only and then X can move to a different like full stack into the blockchain. I believe we will go gradually. That’s the only way to to survive. And there is also another element if we move decentralized and I believe this is based on their financial like monetization plans. At the moment on Facebook, we are not getting any credits or any points or any financial incentives to like or what’s a post. They mostly use your data in the blockchain. We can create new systems that the users will be awarded something will be incentivized.

48:46 That’s why I believe it’s not only a matter of transparency, it’s a matter of the humanity will will drive us in the way that doing social networks, it’s like working for Uber. You’re making money and if they want more people to stay and not like discretize like splitting all of their infrastructure in different social networks that will exist here and there. They have to be the first on the blockchain space because otherwise they will face a competitor like Google did with open AI and now open AI is doing with deep seek.

49:17 Google almost lost a piece of the market from Google search because of ChatGPT now. Even like how how often are you using Google search compared to ChatGPT these days? You see why? I missed the first mover advantage exactly. And the brand, they have to do it. In my opinion, they have to do it. Yeah, not because it’s required today. For them, it’s probably a hassle. And they have to figure out how they can reformat the whole operation of the company to be in the centralized world. And some situations they have to talk with governments what’s happening here and there.

49:48 But if they don’t start, someone will steal their place in the podium. That’s the innovator’s dilemma, right? Apparently they had to tech years before ChatGPT but they weren’t ready to release it because of liability and then and then, whereas open AI had nothing to lose. Yes. And now other companies have less to lose and there it goes

50:07 Brian Rose: All right, we talked about social on the blockchain.

50:10 What about crypto payments on social is

50:12 Kostas Chalkias: it should happen it should happen. It should happen sooner than later this. Should happen, especially now with trauma administration. I believe many countries are starting thinking differently. OK.

50:22 Brian Rose: And even wants to make a super app. That’s his final goal.

50:26 Kostas Chalkias: 100% and also crypto is by far easier to also create incentive schemes, attract more like folks across the world. It’s not only dollarized, it might be like a different currency in China, different here, but also we have a Defy platform where people can trade their points. You can, you can gamify it as well, something that you cannot do with Fiat, right.

50:48 So in my opinion, it’s it’s also giving the incentive for for folks that they’re they’re they’re providing liquidity into crypto because they’re expecting they have an expectation they will be reached one day that they will help in liquidity. Imagine even like people, couples like partners, someone who is trading crypto at the moment, being able to buy stuff and give it as a gift to the, to her partner, to his or her partner. It should happen. Otherwise it’s like like you’re enclosing yourself into a trading betting mode. We have to do payments and the the reason for a currency as a crypto at the moment is mostly keeping kit as an investment. But we have now stables.

51:31 We have different RW as I have a very specific plan in my head. I’m writing a book by the way called Web 3 for governments and Web 3 for social networks. There are two and two books. Two books at the moment. I’m at the very beginning like 20% but I can see like a path on how we can do it fast.

51:54 In my opinion, it helped how the US is behaving at the moment because the mentality is changing even in Dubai. If they see people going to the US again, Dubai have to be more liberal on enabling payments faster than they used to do before. Otherwise they will lose the first their advantage and all of the money will go back to the US again. Right?

52:15 Brian Rose: So crypto is enabling this and you want the gamer in Mexico to be able to buy a land or something in Dubai?

52:22 Kostas Chalkias: As a tokenized piece, yes, yeah. So we have to move really fast here. Social networks is an easy win. I believe it requires someone who is reputable already to succeed because I’ve seen many attempts. All of them are failing unless you do a very interesting incentivization scheme and somehow you manage to have a community that is gradually thriving.

52:43 But if you want in one shot getting billions of users like TikTok, YouTube and Facebook, one of these 3-4 people have to say I’m going decentralized and then they win the market.

52:54 Brian Rose: OK. Can we build social networks in web three that actually go somewhere and get used? Because the Social 5 projects I’ve seen so far have gone nowhere because they can’t ever get that critical mass that you get in the top five social networks. Will that ever change?

53:10 Kostas Chalkias: That’s why you need one of these people to start it right.

53:14 Brian Rose: So we don’t think it can come from some organic web three base and create it from scratch.

53:19 Kostas Chalkias: It can, but you need a substantial investment. Like you need something very big behind it to create noise. And, you know, the social network behaviour is is unpredictable. You didn’t expect TikTok to win against Facebook, right? Even Mark was surprised, Right.

53:35 But eventually you realize that it’s a it’s a trend that people want very quickly to get instant dopamine and, like, they feel energized. So we switch to shorts, right? Everybody is looking at short videos now. Yeah. In this situation, we have to find the killer app, I believe. OK, there is sorts, there is something else that sweets like people from Facebook to TikTok.

53:59 Maybe we need to find something else and the new social network will have this thing that we haven’t found yet. It has to be really good. I don’t know what it is. OK.

54:07 Brian Rose: And we saw with Threads, I mean Facebook with many more users than Twitter had.

54:11 They tried to launch Threads and they didn’t go anywhere even though they had three billion users, amazing tech people. And that goes to show you that people are fixed in their ways and even a company like that can’t create a Twitter like network. So how would a startup decentralized do it?

54:25 Kostas Chalkias: Almost impossible. Google had the similar failure with Circle.

54:28 You know Google Circle where they tried to create the social network as well. It didn’t work.

54:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, I remember.

54:33 Kostas Chalkias: You don’t even remember it. I you.

54:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, I barely remember.

54:36 Brian Rose: Funny name.

54:37 Kostas Chalkias: Yeah, they tried to create it like 10 years ago, 12. So it’s not it’s not easy. We haven’t found still the this feature that will make the difference for people to move into crypto, maybe these payments and civilization. If everybody’s getting cleats in the new decentralized network, you will see Asia, Africa, Latin America jumping into this and then eventually all of the other parts of the world maybe. But I don’t know what is this feature at the moment. There is something I’m pretty sure I cannot imagine. We covered everything in social networks, but we haven’t found it.

55:08 So there are two two ways. One is one of the big names makes the move, and the other one is some feature that nobody has thought of that will make a difference, like a leapfrog situation like.

55:22 Brian Rose: OK. What are you doing in Dubai and what is Sui doing in the next 18 months? It’s a bold move for you to come here. Dubai is an amazing place.

55:32 It’s super forward thinking, but it doesn’t have a big talent base that you might find in university towns in America or Silicon Valley. And but it has a lot of other things going for it. I mean, you could be anywhere. Why? Why are you here?

55:46 Kostas Chalkias: There are many reasons for this. First we found partners in the region who know about the web 3 space better than us, especially in close proximity countries. From Asia. II is a evolving country. Dubai is next to India right?

56:02 Previously from Palo Alto I had to travel for a whole day to come here. Now I’m going very quickly there. Turkey is also a very like evolving market. Eastern Europe as well in my opinion has a very good Geo strategic like position. Not forget the the talent. I agree with you, but you can easily find use cases because the blockchain has more applications for developing countries and Dubai is developed countries but surrounded by developing countries right?

56:31 While in the US on the top has Canada, the US itself is a bit more difficult to take decisions. Here you can go and speak to people and there will be a decision that while changing the law or while changing something and you can make it faster. I cannot as a researcher being like with handcuffs because the government is slow on adapting new technology. Here I realized that people that respect technology, I even have some patterns from here like for other other things, for security.

57:03 And they helped me. So I realized, wow, look here I can get the resources I need to bring the talent into the region. There is no talent. I told you from the very beginning, the biggest difference shock for me is compared to Silicon Valley, that I was surrounded by some of the biggest brains in the world. Here I’m surrounded by people who know how to do deals, but they cannot code right, and I’m bringing the team.

57:27 I also realized that having a team here, it makes a big difference because I go to meetings with, I don’t know, D42 or all of the other things that are happening in the space. And there are other partners coming to Dubai because they’re looking for the same thing. And I go with my solution engineers and me as a cryptographer. And we have ad hoc on the spot delivering the smart contract. Nobody can compete with us. So I found a free space to to sign. So for me, it was super different. And if you ask around, I guess you are in the region, ask who is the most talented team in Dubai at the moment regarding innovation and considering forget the world, it’s

58:46 Brian Rose: And you just set up your SUI hub as well?

58:50 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, a few months ago.

58:52 Brian Rose: Sui Hub, what is that?

58:54 Kostas Chalkias: Sui Hub is an accelerator. Do you know that Sui Hub has a program now that is running for startups to come into the Sui ecosystem?

59:06 We had 631 applications if I remember correctly, which is probably the top in the world. And there will be a, an article by some of the one of the biggest news sites in the world, because this has never happened before. And there is another thing, you know that I’m also a professor in AUS, American University of Sarza with the best blockchain course in in GCC. And we want the global by big hackathon. Why?

59:32 Because we know how to create talents. There is another interesting stuff. There are some communities in the UAE region. I’m not saying goodbye necessarily. It might be Sarza that I found talent and I can make them leaders. In the US, it’s a bit more difficult because all of these people have opportunities here.

59:52 It’s sui. They know it’s the most innovative place to work. So if I manage to get them into our like type of working because something has a culture, they have to change. I told you I work with power naps. We want to buy big hackathon and in my house. There were two solution engineering engineers and like students visiting the mall working with me all day, we didn’t sleep.

1:00:16 All day, all night. All day two weeks we didn’t sleep, I was like a zombie, but we won. And the the only reason that you can make it is you have to be in an environment which is still immature and you are the 1st. I also have a first mover advantage here. Nobody can compete with me at the moment in the region.

1:00:37 And you have people like Ferras and Voila, who are doing like who are building the, the, the framework to help me find the correct people to talk about the innovations that we’re bringing. And this is a formula that it’s not possible elsewhere at the moment. Maybe Singapore, but still Dubai, I told you, has another another thing that you can also have access to to to talent in developing countries better than Singapore probably. And it moves faster than Singapore. Yes, it moves faster, right?

1:01:09 Brian Rose: It moves faster. Now your hub is in Dubai, but also there’s a lot happening in Abu Dhabi and there’s a lot of money in Abu Dhabi and there’s a lot of banks that are setting up offices in Abu Dhabi. How do those two cities work together?

1:01:22 Kostas Chalkias: By the way, Sui has office in ABGM but also in Dubai. So I personally move between the two cities and I’m also going to Salza for pitching.

1:01:30 OK, so I know all of the different like Emirates in the country. Abu Dhabi is for UAE is mostly the place where you can indeed go and seek funding, where Dubai is to seek community. This is how I have them in my brain. But now in Abu Dhabi, ADGM, especially this particular part of Abu Dhabi, I’m building talent. If you go with talent in the place where there is money, maybe you win cases.

1:02:02 That was impossible before. Most of the banquets I’ve seen, even the like people who are ruling the country, they’re not necessarily technical, so they can understand what I can get from this. I try to simplify. Being a professor helps a lot. A lot.

1:02:21 I can do LE5 explain like I’m 5 very complex like notations of crypto, you know this terms and all of this stuff. So you go there, you realize that some of the conferences there are mostly for doing either funding or partnerships, sometimes better success rate compared to to Dubai. But in Dubai there is some community element that you cannot find in Abu Dhabi today. So you have to be in both places. It’s one hour drive.

1:02:52 It’s fine. Yeah, right. For me there is no difference. As I told you, I sleep with naps, so whenever I’m in a taxi or with my driver, I’m just sleeping.

1:03:00 Brian Rose: This is how you might survive.

1:03:02 You use all of the commuting time to sleep.

1:03:04 Kostas Chalkias: I don’t drive. I don’t drive because I want to sleep.

1:03:07 Brian Rose: And you don’t sleep in your bed at night for extended periods of time.

1:03:11 Kostas Chalkias: No, I even have a driver who is getting me from my house for two hours. I tell him go around, get me to Jumeirah, then come back and I want to sleep for two hours.

1:03:20 In the car.

1:03:20 Brian Rose: Only for sleeping. Just in the car? Yes, you’re used to it now.

1:03:23 Kostas Chalkias: Hamala knows about this.

1:03:24 Brian Rose: You’d rather sleep.

1:03:25 Kostas Chalkias: In the car, say Hamala knows about this and he says this guy’s crazy sometimes. Yeah, sometimes he’s calling me. Oh, he’s probably sleeping somewhere in the car working around Dubai. Yes, this is this is my way of living. And probably the if I’m moving with a car somehow, I have better.

1:03:44 I convince myself that it’s like my dopamine, all right? This is the culture of Sui and this.

1:03:50 Brian Rose: Is the culture of Sui OK? It’s a hackathon culture. OK,

1:03:53 Kostas Chalkias: yes, hackathon culture with with seasoned management coming from a trillion dollar company before this, yes.

1:04:00 And we want to be the apple. We want to be the trillion dollar company, OK?

1:04:04 Brian Rose: 2025, we’re at the beginning of what people will believe will be the biggest bull market. We have an administration in the US that is pro crypto, a president that drops his own meme coin, etcetera, etcetera. What do we expect from the next two years and then how is Sui a part of that? Maybe first, what do you see?

1:04:22 Kostas Chalkias: I believe many of the real world assets will come into the blockchain period. Gold real estate stables will be a must in almost all of the developing countries and the developed countries USAI believe will lead the the round. Countries like Singapore and and Dubai will follow with faster pace I believe to surpass it. So this will create a competition and in my opinion it will work well. It it fits to my appetite of you need some boost even from the upper levels for this to succeed.

1:04:59 It’s the same thing as we discussed before for social networks. You need some big names to give you like the passion and the inspiration to lead it. The other thing I believe is it will make the crypto more a legitimate asset that previously in the past someone said I will not buy crypto because I don’t know how I will be taxed or if it’s even illegal. Now we’re getting into a state where if the like the governor of the biggest country financially in the world even has a min coin, this is demystified. Now everybody knows about crypto. It’s good for advertisement.

1:05:40 Even if this meme thing created a liquidity issue in in the market. At the same time, I believe long term because everybody knows now about crypto, it will help. So it’s a small like valley and let’s see bull market. Obviously nobody can predict because the seasonality on every financial asset, it’s not predictable. It’s typically a random work as every market.

1:06:02 Otherwise everybody would be reads. But I hope it will unlock many cases that previously were very, very conservative. Now I’m talking to many governments. I was literally 2 weeks ago in another government talking about how we can help them on the digitisation. And you know, when you’re going from paper into digital, typically you’re using the latest technology and the latest technology is block chains.

1:06:27 You’re not even going to regular databases. This is past. So whoever wants to, to do a step further for a modern society, more transparent, better ownership, less issues with capital controls that we had in Greece, you know, I had my money locked. I couldn’t do anything. Crypto is a, is a, is a place, it’s a machine that give you this hope.

1:06:51 I believe many things will be unlocked because of of the new administration. Perceptionally, you need it. Perceptionally, this is more important. You know, markets are driven by perception sometimes. Now you never know, right? Because we’ve seen also like many times, there is a resistance and someone might change the the narrative because they cannot, they cannot make it alone. You need also support.

1:07:16 Elon is doing, I believe, a good job at least to to create this like hype. I have a feeling that the the vision that we had that the crypto will be the next thing for humanity along with AI because it helps AI evolution is actually a driver for crypto adoption. You know why why? Because we need ways to have verifiable AI because otherwise we will not have good ways and blockchain has the tools to do it. We need ways to do payments with AI, bots and all of these agents that are now running and crypt is probably the best place because now they can just create a script and they can interact with custom logic. There is no programmable money on any other system. And the thing that humans and like bots and new new platforms are coming.

1:08:07 AI can help on vulnerability detection, on creating smarter wallets, like literally having your own tutor. It will even propose to you what you should buy. I don’t see why. By the way, the best wallet in the world is not an AI wallet. I don’t understand.

1:08:21 Not yet. Why? Right, you need you need it will tell you you have 3000 sitting there go stake the more do this it’s.

1:08:29 Brian Rose: The new Defy AI, right?

1:08:31 Kostas Chalkias: Defy AI So in my opinion, having better systems will also create new tools for the crypto community. So I see them going like hand in hand, literally they go together.

1:08:43 And I, I had the presentation about why it’s important because AI can be used to improve blockchains. Blockchains can be used to improve AI even on data setting, private data setting, but also getting incentivized to provide data to AI. There are many companies now that are going to do labeling of, of data for AI models. How do you pay the users? How do you create this new Uber economy? You now need to pay the users with crypto, probably because they live across the world.

1:09:13 Someone in India might not be able to get dollars or whatever with crypto now. You can probably change the narrative here. And it’s also cheaper than the current version. And if it’s micro payments, in some situations you can even avoid KYC which was only possible with cash in the past. There is also AI where you can profit from the blockchain because now you can build traders as we did in the stock market.

1:09:37 And there is also application, the 4th element that they want to use both AI and crypto because part of the company is doing AI, but they also want to monetize, incentivize their users. They have to use crypto as well. So these four different perspectives, in my opinion, help a lot along with the new administration for the crypto to flurries. AI is also helping on crypto. That’s my personal view.

1:10:00 Brian Rose: And you used AI for a bunch of your white hacks in the past and even recently.

1:10:05 Kostas Chalkias: And I found billion dollar attacks because of AI. And it would have been impossible for a human to find that. No, there is a reason why. The reason is AI is domain agnostic. The new AI models are domain agnostic.

1:10:18 There is no person when you have a very complex system who can read the back end, the front end, the database part, the UX part and everything. Put all of this into the AI model and it will do all of the inference. It will do all of the like connections and probably will find a very complex scenario where some attack is performed. The other thing is when you see a new open source software or some new code in general, it takes time for a human to understand what it’s doing. The AI can give you summary now, it can even run a like soft audit tool to give you templates of what can possibly go wrong based on all of the information I have about previous attacks. And then the human brain can move faster on analysing this data and go to the solution a lot like in a in a in a quicker mode than than in the past.

1:11:07 Because previously myself as white hat hacker, I had to read the documentation, go check if I can find the place where something is not implemented correctly. Now I’m using Baghdad, sui Baghdad, it’s called to go very quickly. Get hint on where should I look for vulnerabilities.

1:12:24 Brian Rose: And there’s quite a few of those out there. You said a lot of these new token launches, if they ran a simple AI tool, they would find out there’s issues with them. They’re inflationary. They didn’t know they were I. Found

1:12:37 Kostas Chalkias: I found one inflationary that the founder didn’t know it’s inflationary. OK, I called them 2:00 AM Go fix it. So they did.

1:12:44 OK, they owe me. They owe me. This is a multi 3 digit $1,000,000 project. It’s not a billion dollar project, it’s a 3 digit million project. And I saved them and AI, the bug. That system has also saved at least perceptionally some of the biggest exchanges in the world because we found some issues on the proof of solvency algorithms that it was buggy. It didn’t.

1:13:10 Someone could technically understate their liabilities, which means that if you understand liabilities, then you can say with less assets I can accommodate my customers, right? While you’re advertising that all of the liabilities are public and all of my assets are public, the algorithm was not correct.

1:13:29 Brian Rose: OK, got it. Downside of AI as it gets more and more powerful in the future. Do you do you see a dystopian future?

1:13:36 That that’s interesting. Look, there will be a few job markets that will be affected. Content creators, accounting, maybe there will be situations like. Coders. Lawyers, especially on junior levels. Lawyers.

1:13:56 Doctors. Yes, exactly. Look, we need to be a bit more like to work on the big experts on things, right? And even your expertise might be dwarfed eventually by the new AI that will come. So in my opinion, what I would suggest to people is learn to use these AI platforms so you’re always either a step ahead or at least you’re not below that. And we cannot predict what will be changed, right? I mean, it’s for junior developers. I have a small fear.

1:14:29 Even Mark Zuckerberg had mentioned. Did you see his talk? We might replace all of the junior and mid developers with AI gradually. OK, I think it was in the news. I don’t know if it was him or someone from Facebook, but it is a risk.

1:14:48 And that’s why I believe a nice thing that we’re doing in Sui is getting them work with the best people and probably they get an extra leapfrog in the mindset that will give them an advantage for the future. OK. Because if you work as a junior in a project that is doing just AI stuff that I mean, can replace you now, you will never learn. And you would be always below the AI because there would be a new AI model, the new LLM that is better than the previous one, but you stayed behind.

1:15:18 You need to be creative.

1:15:20 Brian Rose: Now, we’ve now seen AI agents that can raise their own money, launch their own meme coins. And like you said, AI goes with crypto, it empowers the AI. What happens when the AI starts to see, well, I can now put out news, information, disinformation to pump my meme coin. Maybe I could pay a human to go set off a bomb over here and pump my coin.

1:15:43 It could start to get pretty crazy. So you talked about replacing human workers, but what about when the AI starts doing some wild things? And when you look at the agent stuff, it’s already getting crazy. I don’t think many people are actually seeing what these agents are doing. But like, I had a scenario where this AI16 Zed raised so much money that it then it went out and just bought out a 16 Zed, You know? I mean, like, weirder things could happen, and if it’s optimizing for market cap, it could do some weird things and it could employ humans to do these things without them even knowing what’s going on.

1:16:14 Kostas Chalkias: I cannot agree more with you. You’re 100% right. I believe it’s like the blockchain here has to spend some more resources into identity solutions and like even technology for identifying bots. Always there will be a race, but we have to do something. I have a personal fear by the way. Can you imagine down the road that we might have created artificial life having a drone with AI that has a 3D printer inside it, It’s connected to the blockchain and it’s having commodity trading logic.

1:16:53 It can fly, it’s a drone. It can get energy from solar. It can 3D print itself, it can copy, it can clone itself. It can transact on the blockchain. It can do cryptography that humans can read it.

1:17:06 How do you control this artificial life? But this is 100 years ahead. 100 years. However. This is 10 years ahead.

1:17:15 Software agents. This is hardware agent. Right, OK. Software agent, hardware agents are coming. Believe me, what you see now with AI Bot, you will see this podcast in a few years and you will say, Oh my God, it’s coming.

1:17:30 It’s coming. Your fridge might be richer than you. It will order for you from Amazon and from other places. And you will pay.

1:17:36 Brian Rose: Your fridge. Yeah, your fridge.

1:17:38 Is day trading meme coins

1:17:39 Kostas Chalkias: Exactly. It’s richer than you. Yes, and it has ACPU inside, maybe it can do stuff. Maybe you’re serving the fridge? Every every day, right? I mean, while you’re sleeping, it makes money. I had the book actually with one of the guys from, Was it Bloomberg?

1:17:53 We never wrote it when I was in London, The man and the fridge, back then, we were thinking about this. There is a potential your fridge will make more money than the owner of the fridge. And we’re getting into this. This is hardware agents though, like robots. Yeah, robots are coming slightly slower pace than LLMS, but are coming right now. Software AI agents, they will dominate all the transaction as it’s happening now in the stock market. You know that 90, almost 9% of the, I don’t know, 95 to 99 are coming from bots.

1:18:22 It’s not humans. How can a human be 24/7? High speed trading, yes. Yeah, all of them even taking positions by editing tweets and you know, doing some analysis on the data and then taking positions, not necessarily high frequency trading. OK, blockchain is helping a lot by the way here. Even if it gives the element of like financial tool for them to transact, we can help with cryptography or some other mechanisms to identify which is bot and what is not bot for news misinformation.

1:18:57 For example, Sui has worked in a project where we have the identities of the users and then there is a reputation system and we can try to figure out as a DAO pretty much how some bots are behaving. So we can say we can tag them as being an AI compared to the other thing that is a human. Also, comparing this with news websites, there are algorithms now you can do it with privacy as well. OK. So even myself, as a personal goal, assuming SUEI goes well and people like SUE and they support it, I will invest personal time on solving these problems.

1:19:30 Brian Rose: OK, let’s talk about SUEI going well, because you can’t deny that a higher token price does a few things. And I’ll just say it.

1:19:38 First of all, it gets more eyeballs. And this is an attention economy, which makes it easier to hire. It also gets more money in the treasury, which means you can probably give more grants to people. And you guys experienced this like literally in the last few months, it’s gone, you know, pretty skyrocketty. That must change the way you guys do some business.

1:20:01 Kostas Chalkias: Something that changed perceptionally to our to our heads is people.

1:20:05 For the first time, they understood the innovation, leadership and flagship that Sui has to offer in the community. Because the reality is many new tools that change how people were interacting and faster was appreciative. Actually, this is what I believe is the main reason for all of this happening and the fact that we were also super robust so that people can operate their businesses without like your their money being posed or lost or something. I think it’s appreciated at least perceptionally.

1:20:44 I’m not saying that the traders, but on the developer side, because I’m the net of the company, I cannot talk about the price itself. I can see some like very good like perception of how we’re operating and they like it when they try others and then they come to us. So more developers and Sui, faster transactions, PVL that is flourishing, it plays a role. All of these, I believe they contributed into having a better hype for for SUAID technology. We have to continue this pace. If you want to see SUAI surpassing Solana and Ethereum, we have to be the most innovative for 2025 as we were in 2024, arguably, undeniably and 20262027 onwards. I believe it’s just a few years ahead that we will surpass, at least on people’s mind, the usability and the importance of SUI compared to the rest.

1:21:40 Is this reflecting to prices? Nobody can tell, but I believe if the technology is appreciated, yes.

1:21:45 Brian Rose: We’ve invested in a few projects that have launched on Sui and they said that your team is super accessible, like they want to contact you, they need help, you’re there to help them, you’re there to help them build. It’s like immediate, immediate, immediate and that you know. It plays a huge role.

1:22:01 Kostas Chalkias: Do you know why? Because we create it on purpose, a solution and link team. We scattered this team across the world and the solution and link team has a goal. Do not help SUI itself, help our partners because we’re not alone. We need other people to also build businesses on top of it where the operating system where the heart of their business. And now that’s why you see SUE creating infrastructure that is not easy to happen by someone else. And then other people can build businesses. SUE, as I told you before, the CPU Walrus, the hard disk, the book, the Excel seat, the NASDAQ of the blockchain and SUE and S the identity.

1:22:43 There’s a few more coming. There is a SEAL project, there is the Remora project. Now that we we said we’re going, we were the first blockchain with Ramora in the world that we advertised a system pilot fits 1st and then Ramora that the validator can have multiple machines. And if you have multiple machines per validator now you can do a lot better than anyone else. And Sui was the first. Many people are cloning now.

1:23:11 But as you can see in, in my opinion, the fact that we’re driving innovation, it’s OK for others to clone. But if it wasn’t for Sui, it would be a stagnant environment, at least in some of the places that I personally believe will help Web 2 folks to come into Web three. We cannot recycle users and say, oh, I want 20% of the Etherium users of Solana to come to us. So we have to build the infrastructure and then the companies now say, OK, I can do something on SUI but I have PDFs or I can use, but I have an order book, I have AI agent or I can use the the bat transactions on SUI where I can, I can solve the Expedia problem, right?

1:23:51 The Expedia problem is I want to go to a place, but I need my flight, my tourist agent, my train tickets, my hotel, Either they all succeed or they all fail. I cannot go there and I don’t have a connecting flight. And so Sui has innovation that sold this. We even had actually natively sponsoring transactions. The average user who is getting a wallet, they don’t know how to spend because they cannot. If you don’t get your first SUI, you cannot. But we have sponsoring.

1:24:17 So new businesses were created to say what’s a video for one second and you get your first. We are sponsoring your first Sui transaction. This is important. Super important.

1:24:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s an innovation because if you come into crypto right now, say you’re on the Ethereum chain, you need some ETH to do anything.

1:24:32 And how do you get ETH? Because a lot of times you need ETH to get ETH or you need. To set up. A Yeah, it is to a chicken and an egg. And so people, they just get stuck.

1:24:41 I’ve been stuck before where I can’t actually do anything and I don’t know how to get the ETH and the Central exchange is closed and my credit card got dinged. But with you guys, you’ve got sponsors, so someone can watch an ad and get a tiny bit and that’s all you need. So it becomes almost like and.

1:24:57 Kostas Chalkias: You can imagine other businesses using sponsorship and CK login, login with Google and sponsorship. You don’t feel you are on web three if you have an instant instruction 0.4 who at Facebook, I told you the minimum time you have to wait for UX, the maximum. Sorry, it’s 2 seconds.

1:25:11 OK. After that you’re losing users, right? Maybe 3 depending on if you are doing some UX crazy stuff. One of my managers at Facebook was at Netscape. I don’t know if you remember Netscape, the before Internet Explorer.

1:25:23 Yeah, so his innovation was when the bar was loading, people were waiting at the very first days of 2000. You know the boom, why it’s taking so long. So his trick was let’s create a a GIF that is doing the loading signal. And this arrow that is doing the loading signal somehow convinced people that they didn’t wait so much. Nothing changed from the on the experience. So you have to also work on some tricks to make people not getting bored when you’re using.

1:25:54 They’re using the blockchain. Yeah. We also found other ways not having the constant pop up. Imagine you’re playing a game. Let’s assume we’re playing chess here. Yeah.

1:26:01 And for every test move I have to do, pop up, sign this transaction. Pop up, sign this transaction. It doesn’t work. You cannot do training with pop ups. Right.

1:26:09 So we found ways to create ephemeral keys on the session. And very quickly you give them like the permission for this application for now that I’m here for one hour, you’re signing on behalf of me. OK, OK Bam, bam. You press the button and it executed in section 0.4 seconds. Done. OK, all right, all this is to to help the user perception and it make it just more user friendly.

1:26:32 The same thing you did with the tubes in London. If you ever see there’s the times for the next train they and there are digital now. They rarely actually correspond to how much time you’re waiting, but just seeing them makes you calm.

1:26:43 Brian Rose: Oh, it’s not reflecting the time.

1:26:45 Kostas Chalkias: Sometimes it’s not

1:26:46 Brian Rose: OK, Yeah, but but. It works for me though you.

1:26:48 Kostas Chalkias: See, I know and by having an exact number of three minutes, 2 minutes, 4 minutes, it just gets everybody at ease and now you just but without it, you would be stressing and checking your watch and 5 minutes would feel like 15 minutes. So another perception marketing.

1:27:02 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about cost us crazy ideas because at first you look at what you talk about with his like low bandwidth transactions, mouth based keyboards, quantum solutions for the future or solutions to battle quantum and crypto and you’re thinking, what is this guy doing?

1:27:17 Isn’t he busy with silly or is shouldn’t he get some more sleep? But now that I talked to you, the only reason Suey is what it is, is because everyone in your company is constantly. Not only me, right everybody? I know is everybody’s innovating, which means coming up with completely out of sight of the box ideas like ZK login was an outside of the box idea that you didn’t have to do. You could have right clicked and copied a blockchain, but that’s not what you guys do. So tell me about the crazy ideas and then how they are actually part of Suey or Miston.

1:27:45 Kostas Chalkias: So there are a few people in in the company who who used to have super high innovation rate from the past, from Stanford, from Facebook, from Google, from different places. Why? Because you cannot predict in this like constant cycles of crypto, what is the next thing you have to prepare yourself even before it happens. I had a discussion with my Co founders when we had Zeke login. Imagine we have the the P zeros P0 means that we have to deliver it 100%. But I told them look I need a team I need to work on something super cool.

1:28:26 I don’t know if it’s feasible and then Zeke login. Do you know how Zeke login became feasibility? I travelled to Mexico and then you will connect the dots. And while I was travelling eventually, because I’m Greek in the port in the, when when I arrived at the airport, the, the customs and everybody was taking me more than the Americans because I’m coming from Europe. And I said, OK, why there is no digital passport. I explained to them who I am and very quickly I pass through that.

1:28:58 So I said I have to find an identity solution that is not mnemonics anymore. It’s, it’s, it’s not something like that. And then I was super lucky because we got into a restaurant and the restaurant forgot to bring me to to serve salt, salt and pepper. And then I think for a while I have it, I found it. We need in the cookie in this thing that Google is returning back. I should use it as a passport and I need to embed inside the public key and the salt to hide your identity. So me going to Mexico and combining the passport issue I had along with someone didn’t serve me salt. I created a passport over Google with assault, which allowing you to sign again and again with your Google. Even after you lose your session again, you go back, log in with Google, you have the same account I can now send to an e-mail, I can send money to a passport and this change the narrative completely.

1:29:55 So sometimes I’m getting images from all of the experience I have in the world. Even after we leave this meeting, I will try to go back home, meditate and see. Let’s see what I can get from Brian. Maybe he can give me something that his background is not the same with me. I can go outside the box.

1:30:15 There are 2030 crazy people in the company like me. Then in the past at Facebook 2021, along with Sam the CEO and the CTO of the company, along with Evan the CEO and Sam the CTO of the company, I invented tooth board. So do you know that we have a keyboard embedded in our mouth AVCDESD? OK, we have a keyboard. OK. Then you just need sensors, very tiny sensors that with your tongue, you can actually control them. You can do this stuff and then you can talk and you have a secure enclave.

1:30:49 You can go to the ATM, Nobody can see your password. Go, go type the password. In Dubai, there are cameras everywhere. Your mobile’s password is everywhere. Go to 711 in the US, they have your password, the mobile passwords.

1:31:02 You have everybody who’s listening at this. Where’s the camera, Right? They’re already out, all of them. So I had this. Everybody’s already been breached.

1:31:13 Everybody, everybody. OK, There is no, I don’t believe there is any password. I mean, do you do all of this time like you put your password inside and nobody’s doing this. And people who are in the restaurant and there is a camera above you, if the camera focuses on your phone, they will find your password. They can even now people are are experts. They can even from your even from like they’re called solder attacks, solder surfing attacks, even by seeing your movement on your hand, they can even understand what what buttons you are pressing, right.

1:31:39 Really, it is possible I’ve done this. You know that we have this this 2006 past doodles where you’re you’re doing this stuff. Do you know who was one of the first who created this? It was me and my word 2006. I remember it was called graphical password something.

1:31:57 Then it was parted in by another company. I think it was Adobe, someone else an extension of it and they they refer to my work. But imagine if you’re in Greek, you don’t have the access to the money and be able to patent all of this stuff. I would be super rich even from the very beginning. So tooth Board allowed me to create a Morse code device because you cannot use all of your teeth easily. You have to train yourself.

1:32:20 But I could do Morse code, so left and right, if you said tooth board on LinkedIn Tooth board and Kostas or my last name, you will see all of the pictures of me being from the dentist trying to have an implant. I removed the tooth. I put the sensor inside and then I had the Bluetooth because I need to send the message. And then how do you receive the messages? You need a way to receive messages.

1:32:42 Do you know what I did? I said how is it possible? How is it? Have you ever tasted the 9 Volt battery? Yes.

1:32:48 Does it feel like electric? Like electricity? So with your saliva you can understand in your tongue left and right now. So that’s the feedback back to you, the. Feedback back to you.

1:32:57 So I had the fully communicating system fully fledged.

1:33:01 Brian Rose: Is it in your tooth now?

1:33:03 Kostas Chalkias: I removed it now and I’m going to put an AI. OK. So I’m going to have another implant anyway.

1:33:09 So anyway, we did this. Obviously this can be used for authentication now, even for people with disabilities and other stuff. Another company at MIT, by the way, made it a production base, but for disability purposes. But I can think that in the future, it’s not biometrics, it’s not passwords. It will be something embedded because it’s the only way to ensure that AI will not break it. OK, OK.

1:33:34 Brian Rose: Our iris, our fingerprints. How many years do you give for this to be taken your face?

1:33:40 Kostas Chalkias: Right. Just a few years. It’s smarter than the human.

1:33:44 Brian Rose: That can be copied.

1:33:45 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, can be copied. But this thing can’t. No, because it’s embedded they cannot get inside your right. And I used it because people are already familiar with feelings in the teeth, right?

1:33:54 And it’s easier to accept it. Anyway, it didn’t go anywhere because I left and then it stayed as an ID at Facebook and very simple like proof of concept. The other thing I do, these internetless transactions I sent in the old city of Dubai. How’s it called? There is a name. Oh yeah, the supermarket service, yeah, OK, yeah. Two days ago I’ve implemented this. By the way, a few months ago, but I didn’t have Internet, I had any situation with my roaming. I used the American number and then I said I need to send a transaction.

1:34:28 And then I remembered I implemented sending by SMS. So I connected my wallet to SMS and I sent it by SMS and I have a full note with accepting SMS payments OK and I could manage to send transaction. So now the base camp of Sui is companying in Dubai. I don’t know if you know it along with token 2049. Yeah, that’s May 1st and 2nd, yes, right. This year so.

1:34:51 At the same time, you’re going to see crazy stuff of me with linked with antennas and other things, being a Cyborg. Debuting a bunch of these projects and ideas. I’m going to present. I’m inviting you, by the way, and all of the audience here.

1:35:05 Brian Rose: I’d love to come.

1:35:06 Brian Rose: It’s a big hackathon or a presentation, or.

1:35:09 Kostas Chalkias: The base camp is presentations, proof of concepts, new announcements that you haven’t seen before, OK, and real demos. We’re going to have like crazy stuff. We’re doing hardware. By the way, I created the hacker team in the company. It’s called Hacker.

1:35:23 You remember I mentioned Commandos? Yeah, I also have a hacker team. The hacker team is doing hardware and AI. Hardware like your own phone. I’ll do crazy stuff here. I cannot reveal everything, but we can even use our phone to send transactions without even SMS with FM radio, right? We’re going to do stuff that is impossible to happen with other block chains because I have to work with some compression algorithms as well to fit them into the frequency, into the wavelength.

1:35:59 Brian Rose: Why are you going low bandwidth when it feels like everything around us is going to high bandwidth? Because star link etc.

1:36:05 Kostas Chalkias: Because you might be in the OR you might have a device that has access to the satellite. What do you do? Or you might be in a building here, how do you connect the satellite here?

1:36:14 There’s no way. OK, So you need also to solve this problem also, Lo, you’re right by the way, Laura, which is one of the protocols, one of the wavelengths range that we can use long grade is called. You can get it for free without licensing in many countries or you need a very simple license to use it. So it’s easy to apply it in your transactions, but I even did underwater. I used technology that is used for dolphins to be able to communicate. Sound waves.

1:36:44 Brian Rose: Sound waves, OK,

1:36:45 Kostas Chalkias: and you can do for fish farms on the blockchain, you can do also you can put drones there that can take information from the from the ocean and actually report it on the blockchain. You don’t have satellites under the underwater, OK. So you will see stuff coming from SUE that was not possible before,

1:37:02 Brian Rose: is there? Any other blockchain company out there that’s doing? This

1:37:05 Kostas Chalkias: No, because they don’t have the capacity to do it.

1:37:08 And they don’t think big is. Yes, I told who is going to create commandos and and fly to to Tibet or to the Himalayas and go solve a particular problem to save the leopard. But other block chains like Cardano has the resources. They could do that. Why don’t they?

1:37:23 They don’t have the culture. I I first is the culture. Also, I don’t believe they have because we’re five Co founders. We can use our resources by far better. We can delegate to one. I mean, we have a we have a group together were were saying people.

1:37:39 It’s not that we’re debating so often there are of course disagreements, but everybody’s super smart. I don’t believe there is any other team even even 5 find me 5 Co founders with such technical abilities, most of them with PhDs or super successful career. Cardano has a like one of the founders who was very popular and all of this stuff. But does he participate in hackathons or he goes there into the battle, boots on the ground, get into the dirt, put your hands there, head down, talk with the government alone, and you write the smart contract with the governor who is doing this. We do it.

1:38:21 So it’s also the passion thing that you see in US. Everybody’s an art. It’s an art. And we have Evan, of course, that somehow who’s the CEO who’s controlling all of the air.

1:38:33 Brian Rose: Do you put your talent pool up against web two companies as well?

1:38:38 Kostas Chalkias: Not just 100% better than Facebook, better than you. Better talent than any company. Concentrated talent, yes.

1:38:44 Brian Rose: OK, Obviously there are 100,000 people.

1:38:46 Kostas Chalkias: Yeah, but concentrated in in percentage numbers, yes.

1:38:49 Sometimes the SEAL team is better than an army you know. It is a lot of times small effective. Team, you have to move faster, Yeah, and the cycles here are by far shorter than the the web two cycle.

1:39:00 Brian Rose: OK, let’s talk about cycles because after I know it’s a random walk, but after this big bull market that everyone’s feeling is going to happen this year, who knows? There will almost always be a bear market.

1:39:12 Now you guys built Suey in a bear market. In fact the probably the worst bear market.

1:39:17 Kostas Chalkias: We were unlucky at the time of launch, we were unlucky. Unlucky.

1:39:20 Brian Rose: Or was that lucky in retrospect?

1:39:22 Kostas Chalkias: Maybe, maybe because we had the time to focus on the correct things and not just chasing prices as other people like paying money here and there. You know, Suey, even when we’re actually funding stuff, we have a committee that is like very good analysis on what this can bring to the community, how these people can make money. It’s it’s literally a ceremony for us. So even on the bear market, when it comes, you know what’s happening on the bear market, you’re building new infrastructure because you have the time now. But Sui is doing even on the bull market, imagine what it can do on the bear market.

1:40:01 But everybody’s going into crazy stuff that we have. I have a feeling that in the bear market, more governments and more big, big corporation will come to three if it ever happens because we know how to do it and we’ve done this work before it comes. OK, OK, it plays a role, right? As I tell you, first moving advantage on anything. Let’s win on anything. That’s my personal quote and I also have another quote. You will find it on my resume.

1:40:31 The ultimate inspiration is what? The deadline. It’s the deadline. People are procritinators. I don’t know.

1:40:41 They don’t do stuff. We do stuff. Deliver Bam, bam, bam. Whatever you want in two days. I can teach you, right? Move you Brian, you can write the smart contract. Stop the interview.

1:40:54 I will teach you to run how to create a smart contract now. And I’m a Co founder. I’m not giving you a solution engineer. I will do it for you. That’s what we. So that’s the difference that that we have in culture.

1:41:07 Brian Rose: OK, 2035 years from now, what does SUI look like in comparison with the rest of the the industry?

1:41:13 Kostas Chalkias: Quantum resistant.

1:41:14 Well, we have to be quantum resistant by 20-30. It doesn’t really matter, but I’ll tell you why. OK, There are a few countries that are setting some framework now on who is going to be allowed to transact with the US government or the Australian government or the German government. And they say by 20-30 you have to change your algorithms from the conventional ones into post quantum, secure post quantum. By the way, for our people, it’s not that I’m creating a quantum computer because we cannot have quantum computers. It’s a regular algorithm, but we know they can withstand attacks from quantum computers.

1:41:45 So we have to switch. I’m already working on this. I’m not waiting for the bear market. So there is also the quantum thing that you, even if you were in the roundtable, there’s a TOSI roundtable. What was the most the longest session and the most interesting session? My session on quantum and we had quantum physicists inside. We had people who created the first algorithm, top algorithms on post quantum.

1:42:07 And all of this SUV is going to lead this space because eventually the government want to switch gradually. And if you want to bring all of the real world assets, you have to comply. So it doesn’t really matter if it will be broken or not. I don’t believe it will. I believe we’re many years away. Some people, I think it was Algorand in the room, they said 5 to 17 years.

1:42:29 I don’t believe so. There is one small fear. The only fear is AI will be smarter than the people who are working on quantum that will have a leap frog on the quantum technology. This you cannot predict it. But in Sui, even the algorithm we selected, people don’t know it. EDDSA compared to the ECBSA of Bitcoin has a very, very small detail.

1:42:50 I will have a post now because you are challenging me about why we picked EADDSA among the others and why EADDSA can be converted with a simple ZK solution that we have into a post quantum secure protocol. So the money of people will be more secure in SUI compared to other block states. So this is one thing. The other thing I believe SUI is going to invest a lot on privacy and parallelization. I believe we’re going to reach very quickly millions transactions per second. We already have done it with Ramura, by the way, on the site, on the lab, very close to these numbers and with very, very expensive operations.

1:43:31 Now we can even run AI on the blockchain and very heavy 0 knowledge proofs on the blockchain because we’re the leaders. We know from Ziki login, we are the leaders on Ziki. Nobody has surpassed us at any time in the past, so we know how to do it. AI, there is already a team happening. I told you we’re hiring some of the biggest names in the space.

1:43:51 So you will see more AI stuff coming on. Swiss Quantum has already started and you will see also some very cool applications because where Swiss the first protocol that advertise we’re going to have secure randomness on saying so people can create new types of experiences from random sampling, from new games, from even randomized Defy, from randomized head drops, crazy things that all of them will be products I believe. So we build it on 2024-2025. A few others, Quantum AI and super fast parallelization is the three things that personally Sui will have, I believe in, in it’s tool set. But you see what is now.

1:44:36 So storage is taking a completely different route. I believe eventually it will be also the de facto place for the centralization even under regulation strict regulations to use it to store data. And if you have to store data there with privacy, because we’re building another project called seal like the animal, the marine animal that is going to be working on top of Sui and walrus to be able to also have encryption on say now. And now you can create different types of games from poker to, to to KYC identities where some of your data is public, some of it it’s not.

1:45:13 And then you can have the job market being with the curriculum market. You, you, you advertise only the things that are important for the employer. There is AI on saying that will run automatically. So this is my personal view and what I want to do and also build other tools next to Sui encryption, order books, features for gaming and like high frequency stuff, robustness and parallelization. And the machine itself will be by far more modern because we’re like my CTO.

1:45:50 In my opinion, he’s a lot better than Vitalik. He created move a better language than Solidity and go chat with Sam. This guy is a genius. I told you before, I’m in a group, right? But Sam is also genius and he created a better language than Solid. It’s like the COBOL.

1:46:12 And now we have the the new Rust of the world. Rust is one of the like good languages out there, new Java, whatever you call it, that is move at the moment. Swim Move is a better scripting language for block chains. There is no competitor. So I believe we’re going to make also some leapfrogs there as well.

1:46:32 Eventually you will what’s your screen and you will add smart contacts.

1:46:37 Brian Rose: And so that’s five years from now.

1:46:40 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, five years. Ten years, 15 years, everything in the world run on silly. Apple of Web 3.

1:46:46 Brian Rose: OK, multi trillion dollar protocol.

1:46:49 Kostas Chalkias: I believe, I believe we have if you’re asking me who has the best chances because

1:46:54 Brian Rose: what is the. Apple of Web three, what does that mean?

1:46:58 Kostas Chalkias: Trillion dollar company applications that are used on every, every mobile phone and

1:47:04 The innovation pace or even on the UX and even on the hardware that we’re going to invest might also be owned by users like Sui will be owned physically by users.

1:47:15 Brian Rose: OK, physically. Physically as.

1:47:17 Kostas Chalkias: Devices as devices. OK.

1:47:19 Kostas Chalkias: And. That’s created the first device for gaming, do you know that?

1:47:24 Brian Rose: No, I didn’t know.

1:47:25 Kostas Chalkias: Playtron like sui play there is a Game Boy but modern.

1:47:29 Brian Rose: Why hardware? Why is that important for you?

1:47:32 Kostas Chalkias: It’s super important because technically you need to find new experiences and in the hardware. At the moment, nobody’s getting incentivized. And these devices, imagine as a PlayStation Five with a crypto experience. It’s the first Web 3 device. And because we super fast, we couldn’t, especially for gaming, we couldn’t not be the leader of Web 3 gaming. We are the leader, so we had to invest or something. We make our gamers happy and our developers in gaming again even happier and with incentives and all of the cool tricks that I told you.

1:48:10 You hide completely the web. Nobody has done it in the past. You have randomness, you have sponsored transactions, you have batch transactions. Either everything succeeds or nothing succeeds. We have multi sig.

1:48:20 You can have the gaming company signing on behalf of your helping you to recover. We want to buy bit Hackathon with a new algorithm that is called Kelp Me Key Loss protection. Even if you lose your key, there is a way to recover your account. This was not even perceivable possible.

1:48:36 Brian Rose: That’s crazy.

1:48:36 Kostas Chalkias: And we found the front proof system that does.

1:48:39 Brian Rose: It you built it.

1:48:40 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, and we won the Bible Hackathon. Not only build it, it’s something that works.

1:48:47 Brian Rose: And that’s one of the biggest problems with Web 3. Yes. Why our generation who holds keys on saying some of us eventually might pass away.

1:48:58 How do you transfer the? Yeah, how? It’s a real problem. It’s a real problem. I know a lot of dead people in crypto.

1:49:04 Yes. What do you do? A friend of mine went over to the widow’s house and went through his stuff to try to find his pass keys. Yes, and that’ll. Insane.

1:49:12 Kostas Chalkias: It’s psychological issue as well. It’s not it’s not easy to to go through that. Yeah, but we found wage where the custodian is not the custodian anymore. It’s a there is a imagine some 0 knowledge proofs or some crypto proofs that can help you to recover even if you don’t have the key and nobody has a backup. And we found new businesses for custodians that are not custodians. They cannot cheat on you.

1:49:33 Only if you pass away they can transfer your money to your family. This is what we need. We need, yes. We need all of these things, right? Yeah.

1:49:41 So this is where Sui is. OK, go and check my name or Sui’s name and miss the names. How we’re serving these proofs of solvency across the world. Swissborg. I don’t know if you know Alex from Swissborg.

1:49:54 Do you know him? Yeah, yeah. They’re using my algorithm to prove that Swissborg is solvent. And if you’ve seen my report on Binance in the past, how I held them to build a better system, cracking or anything that Deloitte did, they didn’t do a good job back then because they didn’t know that the algorithm is broken. So we’re also helping outside Swiss, something that actually gives this element of Swiss being special.

1:50:19 We do even research on other ecosystem tools or businesses, not necessarily specific to SUV, because I don’t want Black Swan events. I want to protect you because if you lose your passion about crypto, SUV eventually will be a victim of this nose down situation. And it’s not the nose down if we are going to stop funding innovation. Do you know how many of the cryptography algorithms are now used on web 2? Because we have faster digital signatures, better hash functions, 0 knowledge proofs. All of this technology is given back to web 2 now. So if someone says anything that happened, trends means is it bad for the society?

1:51:09 No, my friend, the reason that you might have faster post quantum cryptography is because of crypto is because of CZ is because of Evan Cheng, it’s because of SUI, it’s because of italic. Don’t only be with blinders. And it’s like a place where we can do speculated betting and trading. No, there is infrastructure behind it. And this infrastructure is helping on many aspects in our society.

1:51:33 Transparency. We’ll see donations even. Even the Trump administration now I think Elon mentioned I want all of the government to go on the blockchain for transparency. Yeah, 2 days ago. Yeah. It’s a thing that is good for society. There is the side project, which is crypto for payments and trading.

1:51:55 There is a whole infrastructure thing that will change society completely. So that’s crypto and that’s why I’m passionate.

1:52:02 Brian Rose: OK, I’ve never heard anyone make that point, that crypto’s gonna bring things to Web 2, that Web 2 can never innovate on their own.

1:52:09 Kostas Chalkias: Go do AI verifiable AI without blockchain in a few years. Yeah yeah, and this AI will beat humanity.

1:52:14 Blockchain might be your friend here.

1:52:17 Brian Rose: Yeah, decentralized AI as.

1:52:20 Kostas Chalkias: Well, privacy, yeah. You know who is creating what marketplaces? You don’t. You don’t want your data to be given to anybody just for money. Now there is ownership of your data.

1:52:36 Brian Rose: How do people reach out to SUI?

1:52:39 What’s the best way to connect with you?

1:52:42 Kostas Chalkias: In the region, they can go to Sui hub, so they can set Sui hub. They can find me directly. I’m Kostas Krypto, Kostas with AK, Krypto with AC On Twitter. They can go to the Sui blog or to the Sui documentation.

1:52:59 If they want to learn how to write SUI, they can find me directly through you call Brian. Spam Brian.

1:53:06 Brian Rose: Spam me, thanks. It comes to me later on. You’ve got. Your event coming up May 1st and 2nd in Dubai, they can come to that and see all your crazy devices and meet the Soui community and see all the plans for the.

1:53:22 Kostas Chalkias: Future 100%.

1:53:23 Yes, exactly. Now in Dubai we have the base camp. Yes, you can see me like live. I’m not an avatar yet. All of them a side work.

1:53:32 Brian Rose: OK. And you have people all around the world as well.

1:53:35 Kostas Chalkias: You saw them. 200 people, yeah, everyone outside. Europe.

1:53:38 Korea, Japan. OK, I’m giving you some big centers, right? Los Angeles, New York, Texas. Denmark. UK, London, mostly.

1:53:49 Greece. Dubai. We’re getting another. Singapore. Where else are we now? India gradually everywhere.

1:54:01 Brian Rose: OK. Everywhere. And how does Brazil, Brazil as well, how does Kostas take a break from any of this stuff? How do you survive as a human being when you’re basically 24? Seven.

1:54:14 Kostas Chalkias: It feeds me. So this it feeds me. It’s my hobby, right? Who would name his son Kryptos? It feeds me and even my wife. Now even Kryptos feels proud.

1:54:23 Brian Rose: OK. Right, because do you know what Krypto means in ancient Greek?

1:54:27 Kostas Chalkias: No hidden secret. So when we say cryptography, the word graphy means, you know, as calligraphy means some writing, right? So cryptography means writing in secrecy, like writing with a hidden message with some key. So that’s why we call it crypto, cryptocurrency. So it’s a currency where there is cryptography behind it, where there is some secret keys where you can do transfers.

1:54:51 Brian Rose: Right, and your son is proud to be called crypto.

1:54:54 Kostas Chalkias: For at the moment, yes.

1:54:55 Brian Rose: Well, if the market collapses completely and then crypto is a bad thing, we can just say it’s an ancient Greek word. They say if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. Is that the story of you?

1:55:08 Kostas Chalkias: Yes, I don’t feel I’m working. I’m, I’m passionate about this.

1:55:12 Of course we’re taking breaks. We’re humans after all. I, I like, like spending time with my family. But there is a there is a passion that drives me. I can see why it contains society.

1:55:24 All of my life I was focusing on transparency. I won my first hackathon by creating the 1st transparent randomness in the world, and this was my ticket to go to the UK, among the others. This was my ticket for everybody in the Greek community to learn about me. And then I put it as a goal in my life. I want transparency, and I’m coming from a country where transparency was not the best thing.

1:55:50 Right, Right. There is corruption. Yeah. And I needed to solve it as a person. That’s why you see so many Greek people actually in the blockchain space.

1:55:58 Crisis and lack of transparency is a driving factor for them, right? And the country of 10 million people have 3-4 in the major block chains as lead cryptographers or founders. Cardano has lead cryptographer is Greek, right? On Ethereum Foundation. There were also a couple of Greeks involved.

1:56:17 Sui has two Greeks. And personally, I see education, financial literacy, also being able to be transformed by the blockchain because we need to give incentives. There is no other system now that can give incentives. People should be richer by using the blockchain, be wiser by using the blockchain and the government and everybody providing transparency and ownership to people. I haven’t seen such a platform, such a framework in my mind like in the past. There is AI who is advancing the knowledge of humanity and transparency and ownership and opportunities to build something new in the blockchain.

1:56:55 Give me any other industry that is doing better than this too. For humanity, there is physics. We’re doing space exploration, but this tool is going to change our everyday life.

1:57:10 You agree or you disagree?

1:57:11 Brian Rose: I do agree. I’m a visioner, but that’s one of the. Reasons I’m in this space. You know, in 2020, we were censored very heavily for putting out messages during COVID and lockdown. And the Web 2 organizations blocked that messages from being being heard.

1:57:24 And I had millions of people around the world that wanted to hear what I had to say, and I wanted them to hear it. And yet a centralized, you know, tech company stopped us from communicating with each other. Now we found other ways, but it just showed me how important freedom of speech is. And then I had an OG Bitcoiner on named Dan Held who’s who said Brian, freedom of speech is a luxury without freedom of finance because if you can’t eat, if you can’t get on their mobile, get on the Internet, put a roof over your head, speech is a luxury. And so freedom of finance became just as important and I ran to be Mayor of London actually on a pro crypto pro freedom of speech.

1:58:00 I wanted to put the voting on the blockchain and the and the budget on the blockchain as well. And so I’ve been on the tip of the spear of being censored, coming from a country in America.

1:58:09 Kostas Chalkias: Do they criticize you for all of this stuff?

1:58:11 Brian Rose: They, yes. And they took my content down and the BBC came after me. Oh, the whole thing.

1:58:15 Yeah. And so we really felt it. And that’s one of the reasons we’re here, because I believe crypto are instruments of freedom. And I think ultimately freedom will win. And. And so, yeah, it’s really important for me. That’s how I feel it.

1:58:28 Kostas Chalkias: Yeah. Agree with you?

1:58:29 Brian Rose: Yeah. Kostas, you’re a very unique guy and we’re we’re very happy to have you going hard every single day in this ecosystem. Congratulations to all your team and Suey. All the people I met are amazing Christian shout out to Sheikh Malla and the gaffe capital guys for making this happen and and putting the hub here and it’s incredible. And I’m just super bullish on what you guys are doing. Your passion is incredible and I’m going to go buy a big bag of Suey after this before it airs.

1:58:59 Kostas Chalkias: Not financial advice. I cannot, I cannot tell anything about pricing. I’m the nerd of the company, but I, I really appreciate this. I feel the same. I see that you’re very active in the community and I’m very happy that there are people now who are advocating that we need this technology, right? It’s it’s an important asset for humanity in my opinion. I think it’s very important and I’m also a big advocate of, of Dubai in the spirit of Dubai.

1:59:24 And I feel like it’s a bit of my duty to tell the stories of Dubai and communicate to the world all the amazing things people are doing here in blockchain and Dubai and. We can also work more together now that you can see I’m bringing some engineering and research capacity here. We can do events, right? We can, we have to inspire people. We have to inspire students in the universities, in in GCC, in general.

1:59:46 I’ve started with AUS and I know we can change the narrative that Dubai is only to make deals. Dubai can also be a hub of innovation. Yeah. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Yeah.

1:59:57 Wouldn’t that be amazing? Of course. 10s of thousands. That’s my dream now, that’s my dream now, that’s it. Somehow Goff Labs created this dream to me that we can change starting from UAE, the world. I hope I can do it.

2:00:11 Brian Rose: Look, if it can be done anywhere, it can be done in the Emirates.

2:00:14 Kostas Chalkias: True for sure. True.

2:00:15 Brian Rose: So we’re glad to have you here for sure.

2:00:17 Kostas Chalkias: Thank you.

2:00:17 Brian Rose: All right, well, we’ll have this conversation again in the future. Check in and see how she’s doing. And thanks so much. Let’s go higher.

2:00:24 Kostas Chalkias: Likewise.

2:00:24 Kostas Chalkias: Thank you, Sir.

2:00:28 Brian Rose: Thank you, Sir. All right, I want to thank the folks at Web Three TV. We will see you next time.