Full transcript: Toby Lewis on London Real
2:20 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Toby Lewis, the serial entrepreneur, blockchain analyst and venture capitalist. You are the co-founder of ordinals bot, the pioneering platform empowering creators and developers to explore the untapped potential of Bitcoin’s ordinals protocol. You provide tools for inscription, token creation, digital collectibles and more, fostering innovation, security and community growth within the Bitcoin ecosystem. In the last 12 months since your launch, you’ve raised over $4.5 million, establishing yourself as a leader in Bitcoin innovation. You’re also the founder and CEO of Novum Insights, which monitors and gathers intelligence in AI and the blockchain. You previously were a writer for The Wall Street Journal and have spoken at numerous conferences, including the World Economic Forum. You believe that ordinals bot is on the verge of creating unprecedented value for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem and will become a key building block in the next wave of web3 development.
3:31 Toby, welcome to London Real. Yeah. Well, fantastic to be here, Brian. So thanks for and the great interest. It’s great having you. You know, I just want to start by saying that ordinals bot is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures. It’s the world’s first media powered investment firm where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting edge web3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network. Toby, we are super excited to be part of this journey with you. So let’s jump in. What is ordinals bot? So ordinals bot was the first inscription service. So essentially, a bit more than a year ago, ordinals really took off, which is basically an ordinal is effectively an inscription onto the Bitcoin blockchain. So it provides a way for people to store data onto Bitcoin, which is an innovation that was only really possible at the scale that the ordinals have delivered in the last year and a bit through what’s known as the taproot upgrade to Bitcoin. And a bunch of very smart people led by a guy called Casey Rodimer basically came up with this concept of ordinals where you could store data onto an individual Satoshi, which is like the center of the Bitcoin.
5:19 And that has led to a whole host of different things being stored onto Bitcoin. And we got chatting about censorship beforehand. You’ve even had like a group storing quite controversially sort of Julian Assange’s raw records onto Bitcoin. But there’s also, we’ve been discussing a lot, it made fungible tokens possible on Bitcoin at scale as well. So there’s been this huge development of BRC20 and another claim to fame as well as being the first inscription service at ordinals bot. So when we came out, we made it possible for anyone that isn’t a programmer to create an ordinal. So our business was very, I’d say very key in helping ordinals kick off because when we launched, there were 5,000 ordinals created. A day later, there were 15,000 because you needed to run a Bitcoin node and sequence the ord client, which is basically mapping Bitcoin’s history, mapping ordinals history to be able to create an ordinal. And we just allow people to do that in a drag and drop click of a button kind of thing. Yeah, the SaaS user experience in UI is pretty amazing.
6:45 People go to your website, ordinals bot, it’s like right there, you can like drag and drop and create your own ordinals. And it’s like software as a service. And like you said, before that you would have to be kind of really deep in the weeds of Bitcoin to know how to do that. Yeah, no, we were essentially the first dappled ordinals or decentralized application. And we were super happy just to see like it just caught off instantly, basically.
7:16 We’ll talk about product market fit happening instantly, because that’s an entrepreneur’s dream. Talk to me about ordinals, because I think you also were part of the Orde token as well, which has gone now up to the multi billions of value. This is something that nobody really saw coming. And now ordinals, I don’t know if it’s true now, but at one point, they passed the total volume of NFTs, I think at one point, as far as traded in the marketplace out there, because they became so big. Can you talk a little bit more about the explosion of ordinals, why that maybe happened and, you know, what they’re being used for?
7:55 Yeah, so I think the big driver, and so I got into the Bitcoin DeFi space, which was a tiny cottage industry, really, like three years ago, just because I felt that there should be DeFi on Bitcoin. But I guess you need to go back in history and go almost to Vitalik and the founding of Ethereum. And that was 2015, 2016 era. And very few people know this, but Vitalik was actually the editor of Bitcoin Magazine at that time, right? So and what happened because the whole Ethereum ecosystem and then other blockchains allowed for people to do many more things on Bitcoin.
8:55 Then then on Bitcoin, I think there was an explosion of innovation across all these other new chains that developed and Bitcoin, for good and for bad, has a very careful development process. So which I think has been why when innovation on Bitcoin took off, which I’d say ordinals was the first time there was a real innovation ecosystem that had product market fit that just made it very easy for an intelligent programmer to deliver something to the man on the street, right? So that’s kind of the seed of condition, sort of what you need for an innovation ecosystem to take off is it needs to be easy for anyone with sort of an intelligent knowledge of crypto and DeFi to be able to use the thing quite quickly. And until last year, that hadn’t happened. I like to think ordinals bought played a part in that taking off because we developed an intuitive UI. I think like you say, at the same time, with BLC20, so we were kind of lucky that because we were one of the few tools around at the time, Domo, who’s a very, very visionary thinker, I’d say, came up and went, you can do this meta protocol that was BLC20 to create a fungible token on Bitcoin. And he came to our platform and effectively deployed the Audi token that now is worth billions of dollars on our platform.
11:02 So it’s a nice little segue of Bitcoin history that the most successful fungible token on Bitcoin at the moment has been created on our platform. And we like to think a number of others that have been created on our platform will be that as well. But he effectively deployed the contract, is now advising us. So we’re working hand in hand with him to kind of go, where does where the fungible tokens on Bitcoin go? And so we’re super excited about that development.
11:36 And I think, I guess, tying it back to that sort of little piece of history is kind of so many people have kind of loved Bitcoin. But there were concerns around like your ability to do so many things that I guess innovators want to do, right? Like a fungible token economy, NFTs, they allow any innovator to finance and create an ecosystem for things to happen. And I think until that was possible at scale on Bitcoin, a lot of the crypto innovators were doing things on other chains, because it was just much easier to grow an organization at scale.
12:25 Right. So your point is, is that the only reason Vitalik created Ethereum is because he wanted to do more on Bitcoin, but he couldn’t. Yeah, yeah. And now this is almost coming full circle to where it looks like now you can do things on Bitcoin. Exactly. So now the I guess we’ll jump in right away and say the Bitcoin maxis, you know, I’ve spoken to quite a few of them over the years. There’s a picture of one on the wall behind me, Mr. Max Kaiser, who’s probably a super maxi, who refuses to talk to me because I say words like stablecoins and Ethereum, but sending lots of love out to Max. But, you know, Michael Saylor was on my show twice and he said, Brian, I like Bitcoin because it has low aspirations. He likes the fact that it does one thing and one thing only, and it doesn’t try to do everything at once. And maybe that’s why it’s become the equivalent of digital gold. Maybe that’s why there are ETFs. I mean, it’s not a security. You might argue that it did do the right thing maybe for 10 years, but now we’re seeing a lot of other potential use on it. What has the reaction been to ordinals and inscriptions on Bitcoin? So obviously, I think the maxis, some of them have been quite negative towards it.
13:41 I think a lot of people have been, I’d say most Bitcoiners have actually been very positive because they’re like, now I can do something on Bitcoin. There’s obviously been the very famous CTO of Ocean Mining, Luke Nash Jr., who’s been extremely vocal and extremely critical of ordinals. There’s also Casey, who invented ordinals, found it very funny. He was like, actually, ordinals would never have been taken off if Adam back hadn’t gone on and spoken on Twitter spaces to 100,000 people going, you should not do an ordinal. And there’s an irony that every time, because the maxis, like Max and others, are very famous and have a voice. But generally, when you tell people not to do something, they get more curious. So ironically, I think because the great thing about Bitcoin is so stable and it’s very hard to make changes to Bitcoin core. Effectively, I think most people think that effectively the maxis, if they want Bitcoin without ordinals, would need to fork Bitcoin. So the irony is they need to create a new version of Bitcoin to have Bitcoin without ordinals. So I kind of think as long as, and the other thing is the fee market on Bitcoin really, really has taken off. So we’re working very hand in hand with Bitcoin miners like Marathon and others to take over particular blocks. And the fee market generated by ordinals has been very good for miners. And a lot of miners, especially come the next halving because their fees will halve effectively from each
15:56 Individual block they get. Many miners possibly, maybe not in a scenario where Bitcoin is at 70k, like we’ve had the whole time high today, but if Bitcoin were at 30k, a lot of miners would be underwater without ordinals and without the fee market. So there’s a, they literally, because a lot of them have a huge amount of debt. So the irony is kind of if you chat with the miners and the node operators, they’re in general very, very positive about this development because Bitcoin really needed a fee market. Right. Yeah, it’s really saved a lot of people because they’re able to make good amounts of money by basically mining and approving all these different ordinals blocks. Bitcoin is supposed to be for everybody and it’s decentralized for a reason because nobody can stand up and say you can’t do that. Right. I mean, that’s the whole point of this technology is that you can do whatever you want with it. Right. And so it’s a bit rich when maxis come in and say, you’re not supposed to do it this way because the point of Bitcoin is freedom at the end of the day. Is that the way you think about it? Completely. I honestly think most Bitcoin maxis are doing it for sure. There’s kind of a kind of match. It almost seems intellectually incoherent when I hear some of the views like, how can you think this thing? How can you think that thing?
17:26 And yeah, like you say, I think the whole ordinals movement, which is a lot of very smart coders and individuals are pushing this thing forward on Bitcoin. And I think it’s what’s nice about it as well is Bitcoin is actually probably a slightly safer market for the man in the street than like main net Ethereum because of smart contracts and because it’s kind of almost like a complete free for all is just a less safe environment. And some of the fixes that have been made by the people designing ordinals are actually just slightly a slightly smoother experience for retail. Right.
18:18 So making it harder to be scammed, making it harder to lose money in a smart contract, or whatever. So I think there’s a lot that’s very positive about ordinals and also the, like you say, the kind of freedom of speech sort of issues. Let people do what they want to if they can make it work on the protocol. Yeah, I’d love to dive in and maybe get a little more granular here because we so as of a few years ago, Bitcoin was Bitcoin. You would buy it with the idea it was digital golds. And over time, it would be money that didn’t get printed, that wasn’t inflated, that wasn’t controlled by a central bank and that it might appreciate over time.
19:06 And for that reason alone, it was good enough for Michael Saylor to put 10 billion in it and good enough for people to hold. And that’s amazing. But now through some of the work that you’ve done and everyone else, now you can do lots of things on the Bitcoin chain. You can inscribe a non-fungible piece of art, maybe call it an ordinal. You can create a fungible token with maybe a BRC-20 protocol. And I think that’s going to grow onto the room protocol and we can talk about that. You can also inscript data on there because censorship is real. We’ve been censored and Bitcoin is a blockchain that’s immutable. So imagine putting data in there. Imagine somebody in North Korea being able to send you a message that couldn’t be erased. And this is real. I mean, even the way back machine on the internet can be tempered by the CIA. All these things can be changed, but most people would probably argue you can’t really change that immutable chain on the Bitcoin. So you could literally have something that censorship proof. So I want to talk about all these things. First, just the non-fungible side of it. Ordinals have just blown up. They seem to be everywhere. There seem to be a huge demand in China as well. And when the NFT market on OpenSea volumes were down 98% and all the apes were in the toilet and everyone thought this was just a crazy tulip phase, at the same time, in a weird way, ordinals were then coming up.
20:30 And it was the story of 23. I was at the first ordinal summit in Singapore and the vibe there was wild. I mean, guys are walking around in capes and everybody said it reminded them of the early Bitcoin get-togethers where people were there just to develop something cool before all the booths came out and all the marketing dollars came out and all the brand sponsorships. It was like a real innovator’s kind of paradise. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the ordinals were and how it contrasted with, say, some of the NFTs in that movement.
21:04 Yeah. And I think you’ve nailed why ordinals are important, really. So essentially, an ordinal is stored into a taproot address. And like you say, it’s on Bitcoin. So probably the most uncensorable blockchain in the world, extremely decentralized, governed by a system that kind of a consensus mechanism that everyone understands. And really, the data will be on Bitcoin for all of time, right? Or as long as Bitcoin exists. And I think nearly everyone buys into Bitcoin, having made that stake into becoming digital gold, right? And I think, to my earlier point, it’s really important that that theme market exists to be able to keep Bitcoin as sort of keep Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism working really well.
22:19 I think the other thing, the NFTs, I think, really, really disappointed in some ways, just because when you buy an NFT on Ethereum, it’s typically a pointer to somewhere else. There’s a handful of projects like Artblocks or whatever that stored the data directly onto Ethereum. But because of some of the technical constraints on Ethereum, actually, typically, an Ethereum NFT was pointing to either something like IPFS or Arweave that the man on the street don’t really know, or even an AWS. So actually, they were being guaranteed by Amazon. So you could buy an NFT on Ethereum and think you’re using blockchain. But really, the image you were buying was stored on this thing that could, in theory, Amazon could censor it. And even more funnily, you had instances like the FTX NFTs where, effectively, suddenly, one day, all owners of the FTX NFTs got told, your NFT is now the property of the US government, which completely undermined the point of this non-fungible thing that would be on a blockchain forever.
23:51 So when you suddenly had ordinals and information, data could be stored onto Bitcoin, suddenly, this is something much more like in the public consciousness than going, hey, you’re things on the interplanetary file storage system, which no one other than the hardest core techies knows about. So I think that really resonated with people, that you had this native on-chain asset that you could trade. And I think we’ve already seen early use cases that are important. I think I referenced it earlier, but unpacking it, the Julian Assange war records, a group has decided, hey, the CIA and whoever might be wanting to take these down, but we’re going to keep this as part of history forever that people can’t tamper with and can’t censor. And I think we’ve brainstormed doing a web-free Huffington Post on ordinals, where you basically have a blogging tool scribe. And the thinking is we can partner with various media operations to create something, which is just literally free-form content that anyone can share with the world. So I think those kind of use cases, or property deeds or ownership, they actually lend themselves really well to ordinals and Bitcoin.
25:39 And you could imagine, especially, like you say, I mean, the North Korea example also does keep people up at night in terms of like, okay, we’ve created a system going literally, it’s kind of unstoppable, which is the nature of Bitcoin and blockchain. Yeah, it’s fascinating. And so then we saw the values, all these ordinals skyrocketing while nobody wanted to touch NFTs anymore. And so it was weird because people thought digital collectibles were over and it was a fad. But in fact, it wasn’t over. There was interest on them now that they were on this Bitcoin ecosystem, maybe because it was new, but also in so many ways, it was now guaranteed by the most robust network out there, your whatever collectible art was on chain, not subject to some Amazon web server going down. And all of a sudden, you had massive interest, which helped your business model, because then people came to you and use ordinals bot to start minting ordinals everywhere. And now they are everywhere. How big is this market now? So, I mean, it’s getting towards the hundreds of millions. So that’s pretty impressive in the space of a year and has been breathtaking for us to watch actually, like there’s a hot mint or a hot token project launching on our platform nearly every day, which is great for us to service and just astonishing to watch unfold.
27:17 Yeah. All right. So we’ve talked about the collectibles. Next, the BRC20 becomes interesting. So now, can you have a fungible token on the Bitcoin ecosystem? Now, I can hear Max rolling over in El Salvador right now, freaking out. But this becomes really interesting. If you can now have a token, you can trade on this most robust ecosystem. Now, I was in Dubai in January and I attended this Satoshi roundtable, which is like this invite only event with super OGs.
27:46 And there’s no media. We couldn’t even disclose the location. And it was just people at these roundtables where we would get together and BRC20 was one of the hottest thing there. Everybody was talking about it, what it was, its limitations. A lot of big players were there.
28:01 And I was learning and listening to these conversations. What is BRC20? Can you explain it? Obviously, it sounds a lot like ERC20, which I guess is intentional. Maybe walk people through like what the thoughts are. And maybe even quickly, what is ERC20? A lot of people might not even know. Okay, okay. So yes, like you say, BRC20 is designed to be a Bitcoin fungible token standard. So where people can have a set number of tokens with a particular ticker. And then in theory, what we’re really trying to push forward is so-called Bitcoin utility. I guess to your main question, ERC20 was a very famous token standard on Ethereum. BRC20 is now a growing in fame token standard on Bitcoin. And the reason why you want these
29:06 Standards is to be able to allow any individual ready to be able to create their own token economy easily on a particular blockchain. So ERC20 on Ethereum has almost suddenly been one of the killer features of Ethereum. The market cap of all the ERC20s from a financial perspective is greater than Ethereum in most markets. It can go up or down, but I think it’s been certainly the killer feature of Ethereum. Obviously, I think we’ve seen this huge interest in that ecosystem taking off on Bitcoin. And from sort of most people that I know in crypto think that the ordinals and BRC20 has been like the strongest narrative in all of crypto in the last year. And I think probably a large part of that, it’s always hard to know, but I personally think that any mature crypto ecosystem needs a non-fungible ecosystem where you’re storing individual bits of data and figuring out use cases for that. And then you need a token ecosystem. And the reason why that’s interesting is actually firstly, it just drives speculation.
30:48 The being able to have people come up with an idea and a concept and attach it to a token has proven, I think, over the last 15 years to be very, very powerful. And almost like the seed of Bitcoin was that there was this first kind of decentralized token at scale that lots of people could buy into. But an innovator wants a particular organization to be able to leverage a token economy. And the power of a token economy is that you can get in the hands of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of users and drive forward a particular thing or idea. And we’ve obviously seen the concept of DAOs, so decentralized autonomous organizations. But what’s great about these token economies, and I think Bitcoin is the best example of it, is that at scale, you can have millions of people who feel part of a thing and are able to make impact in how that thing is driven forward, either by communicating on channels like this one or at the core protocol level. So you can still impact Bitcoin. But in all these, when fungible tokens work well, they do pretty transformative things. I think on Ethereum is probably the best example of where hugely impactful companies and organizations have been created out of just releasing a fungible token and then adding features to it and making it something that the crowd can use. So you need to look at organizations like Compound, Aave, Uniswap. I personally think those businesses have really
33:20 Transformed crypto. And I think you’re going to see that in Bitcoin at scale in a big way over the next year to 10, 20 years. Yeah, great comparison. I was thinking of those companies in mind. And your point is that because of the creation of this ERC20 protocol, all these other companies were able to be created and then deliver massive amounts of value to the ecosystem, sometimes eclipsing the actual market capital ecosystem. I’m sure it’s true. I mean, if Ethereum is at $500 billion or $600 billion right now, whatever it is, the ecosystem of the ERC20s is easily probably so fast as it now. So it just shows you how much utility. If the same thing happens for Bitcoin by creating a standard of a token inside of a token, you might say, with Bitcoin or on that layer, you could empower, who knows, all these things that we never saw coming.
34:12 People talked a lot about financing on Bitcoin, but nobody really ever dreamed of the existence of a Uniswap or an Aave or a Compound. And look what happened because you created that standard. So now, BRC20 has been created. We are seeing that this could unlock massive use cases and could be bigger than the Bitcoin ecosystem easily. Where is BRC20 now? Because Orde is one of those important tokens. You guys helped create that. Domo is an advisor for you. That was one of his early pieces. But it’s not a utility token. Right now, it’s more like kind of a meme token. Now, it still works, which is great. But there haven’t been many utility tokens on BRC20, from what I understand. I think there’s one coming up, which I think is going to be your token as well from Ordinals Bot. But tell me, because this was the real contention at Satoshi Roundtable, is I couldn’t get anybody to show me a real utility token because there are some limitations on this chain. So can you talk about that? Yeah. I think that clearly there are some Bitcoin native features that make utility harder, perhaps. But we actually think it’s more that just there hasn’t been the conditions to channel that utility. So we’ve been developing our own token, Trio, and we can go into that in a bit more depth. But early examples of utility that we think that any token economy really needs include being able to just pay with that token. So we’re developing tooling that will allow people to pay with Trio when it launches.
36:10 Currently sitting in our company wallets, but effectively, allowing people to pay with that and use that as the economy of the ecosystem is the first actual utility. So the great thing about Bitcoin is you can go to El Salvador or a cafe in London that accepts Bitcoin and pay with Bitcoin. I think it’s never really caught on that much just because of the cost of transferring Bitcoin. Like you say, stablecoins and other things have actually been easier for people to do business with. But I think it’s the first utility of actually just being able, I can send something to you and get a good in service from it. Then you have token gating, and NFT gating as well possibly has also uses. But I think token gating is just an obvious thing where you have the token in your wallet, then you can use something. So those two things, when Trio goes live in a month or so, we want that to be live in our system day one.
37:41 And then we’re an infrastructure company for ordinals and Bitcoin. So any developer or enterprise or consumer can use our API or our portal. And effectively those users, especially the API users, will be able to also create a system where they’ll be able to pay with a BRC20 or token gate with a BRC20. Then just in any fungible token ecosystem, you then want the ability for any of the users to be able to make decisions for a protocol. So effectively, we’re looking at how you do staking, which then allows people to act as governors in a fungible token ecosystem. And all three of those things are totally possible on BRC20. Just because of how BRC20 was developed initially, it was very much like almost like a metaprotocol concept in the head of one engineer who’s sort of sketched out on the back of a napkin. It was kind of like a scientific proof kind of thing. It’s like, here’s how a fungible token and ecosystem might work. He came to our platform, deployed Audi, and then suddenly within months, it was a billion-dollar market cap thing. This is Domo. Yeah, this is Domo. And Domo’s actually got another job, right? So it’s kind of hilarious that he did this almost like a one-man band, and then he’s a true decentralist. So effectively, it’s like all open source programmers coming together and sort of debating in a GitHub where BRC20 goes next. But he’s literally a one-man band in a way, right? He’s got a whole ecosystem of people gravitating around him and supporting
39:50 Him. But he’s gone the most hardcore crypto decentralist, open source way of developing something, which means that it’s taken a lot of time for people to do things, and people deployed in the first year just a lot of BRC20 domains and seeing if they’ll stick. And then now, I think there’s various different build-up groups of which Ordinals bought is one that is going, yes, how do we make this a functional utility ecosystem? But I think if you look back to the early days of Ethereum in 2015, 2016, this has actually been rolling out faster than Ethereum did, right? Because we’ve learned all the lessons. So I think the contention that you can’t have utility on BRC20 or Bitcoin is just wrong. Wow. So I saw Domo talk in Singapore.
40:55 He wears a mask in public, which, again, added to the beauty of that one-day conference. And yeah, he’s well-respected in this industry. And he’s obviously at the forefront of this. Would you say at Ordinals Bot, you guys are probably on the cutting edge of BRC20? Yeah, 100%.
41:15 And the utility, because you see everything and you’re developing it, and you’re about to launch your own maybe one of the very first proper utility tokens? Yeah, exactly. I think we are, without a doubt, one of the major builder groups in this ecosystem. And I think a lot of people have built on our tooling, which is great. And there’s a lot of great projects. A lot of the early mints on Magic Eden have been done for our platform.
41:49 So that’s one of the biggest marketplaces, and they’ve been great partners of ours. Then famous DeFi apps like Alex have used our platform. And I think in terms of pushing out the future of BRC20, yeah, we’re definitely aiming to be one of the thought leaders and groups that are working in a decentralized fashion to make this work. Like some of those early DeFi platforms we mentioned on Ethereum, we’d like to think we’ll end up becoming one of those early BRC20-powered DeFi ecosystems that hopefully can operate at a similar sort of scale or maybe even bigger scale because Bitcoin, right?
42:44 So that’s exciting. You just said the D word, which is DeFi. Whereas before it wasn’t obvious your business model had any aspirations towards DeFi. You were a SaaS service where people could mint their own ORDIs or their own BRC20 tokens. So I guess that’s my next question is what is the future of Ordinals Bot? What are you going to morph into? DeFi on Bitcoin was another hot topic at Satoshi Roundtable, but I haven’t met anybody who’s actually figured it out.
43:12 The concept is incredible, especially if we talk about the ETF and we can get to that, but if you’ve got institutions holding Bitcoin, institutions love yield-bearing instruments. I worked in banking for 15 years. That’s why I’m very bullish on the Ethereum ETF, but that’s got its own issues. What is the future of Ordinals Bot? Are you going to become a DeFi platform? Are you going to become all these other things?
43:32 Yeah, 100. Firstly, I think what we’ve seen with Ordinals is the fact that it’s on Bitcoin layer one really resonates with people. And I think you see that in other blockchain ecosystems. In Ethereum, Ethereum layer one is still king, right? And even though one of the flip sides of that is the nature of layer one blockchains is they’re always very expensive. The fee market is always going to be worse than scaling solutions, the so-called layer two. So I think most of our next steps at Ordinals Bot are very much pushing forward all of the functionality you can do on layer one Bitcoin. But I think inevitably, what the success of Ordinals is turbocharged is actually all of the layer two solutions. And there’s any number of these groups looking at going, how do you do the things that make, I guess, true DeFi possible? Like the automated market makers that people have grown used to and other blockchain ecosystems, all these kind of things, they are accessible on Bitcoin layer twos, but it’s still very, very early stage for that. Our next strategic step on that is with the launch of our token Trio, we’re also launching our marketplace Trio as well. So like the marketplace will be the same as the token. And what’s cool about Bitcoin is although on layer one Bitcoin, there aren’t any smart contracts. So the smart contract makes some of the elements of DeFi easier. Bitcoin also has some very interesting traits that make another form of DeFi possible. So effectively, Bitcoin has an
45:49 Open order book. So what we’ve developed with our marketplace is anyone can spin up that marketplace and it can trade. And this is just natively to layer one. Like we’ve got various clients like our client Trevor Owens at Ninja Alerts, for instance, he wants to build a marketplace. And we can have our own web page marketplace. And he can build his own website marketplace.
46:23 But because of the nature of Bitcoin, one transaction over here will also have it, could have it fill on our marketplace over there. So you get you get effectively many, many sort of web pages interacting with Bitcoin all at once. And the transaction happens right away. So I think that that’s going to be quite a cool native Bitcoin thing that’s happening. Also, what I love about trading on Bitcoin and ordinals is you have the so-called partially signed Bitcoin transactions, PSBTs. And what’s really cool about that is in Ethereum, you can press a button and try and have your order go through, spend $100 on gas fees and not get your fill because the order failed. In Bitcoin, you basically, due to the way that partially signed Bitcoin transactions work, you can order something and only if you get your fill in trading terms or get the item,
47:40 Do you actually get charged any money at all, right? So there’s elements of DeFi already baked into Bitcoin layer one, and then you’ll have a war between these different scaling solutions. And all of the technologists will have to figure out how they get Bitcoin layer two to interact with ordinals, but that will come. So you’re super bullish. Do you think the tech is there to make this happen? 100%. Yeah, it’s inevitable, right? The tech isn’t necessarily built, but I think what we’ve seen very credibly with ordinals and very credibly with every crypto ecosystem is even though the tech isn’t always there day one to service something, it gets built. People find workarounds and there is kind of a protocol standard war coming up.
48:41 Like there’s a new protocol standard by runes by Casey Rodimer, who was the creator ordinals. And that’s coming out, but we don’t really mind, right? Because I think the end user, like the way I think the fungible token standards will work on Bitcoin is there will be ways to make these things interoperable in different ways, right? So you’ll have BRC20, which I kind of think has a lot of traction. It’s already on a lot of centralized exchanges. And so the way you often see innovation play out is that the first thing with product market fit and traction is very hard to dislodge. So I think it may play out like a VHS beta max market.
49:36 But at the end of the day, no one really cares, right? Like say runes takes over and BRC20 becomes less useful for different feature reasons or whatever. I don’t think it really matters because what people care about fungible tokens on Bitcoin and all the people who are able to build on BRC20 are also able to just switch and go, we can build on runes, or we can build here, or we can build that. So it’s, I think, super exciting. And what you just need is the ecosystem that gets anointed with traction.
50:15 And that will become the breakaway thing that everyone doubles down on. Okay, so this was a lot of the talk is that this room protocol was coming up next, that would solve a lot of the limitations of BRC20 that were made one on an all nighter with Domo on the back of an envelope. That was amazing innovation, but it never knew it was going to become so big. I always wondered, well, does that mean your BRC tokens are going to go to zero if rune becomes the protocol, but you’re saying not necessarily.
50:44 Yeah, I think there’s always ways to bridge them, right? And people are going to need to be careful about, I think it depends on how agile teams are and what workarounds get done. But I think almost suddenly no, right? Because we’ve seen it on Ethereum play out at scale, right? So you have the Ethereum virtual machine, and you’ve got Binance smart chain, you’ve got Avalanche, whatever, Matic, Polygon, all of these things. And it’s never meant that like your Ethereum tokens go to zero, it’s just like people gravitate around them and trade them for particular things. And things go into fashion, things go out of fashion, people find tech workarounds that are better. And then suddenly everyone goes, oh, yeah, we should have just stayed on Ethereum layer one because the staking has happened and the merge and it made things easier or whatever. And I think it’s always going to be a fashion led market. And I think it never goes to zero, but obviously there’s a bit of a pendulum in these things.
52:13 Okay, what do you think about layer twos like stacks? You know, I had Dr. Munee Bali on the show two years ago. It was in proper bear market. And I remember walking out of the studio thinking, he said to me, I’m the only person doing layer two on Bitcoin. And I thought, man, you’d think, man, you probably want to put some money on that because every other top 100 coin was a billion on pretty much the ERC 20 system. Fast forward, they’ve had a huge resurgence in their token.
52:40 He was there at the Satoshi roundtable. Everybody was waiting for that upgrade. But also people were also saying, you know, that’s a layer two. And it’s not necessarily what we’re doing on the Bitcoin chain. What do you make of stacks? Will it play an important part of the ecosystem? Or does it not change the way you’re developing? Yeah, no, no. So we’re always evaluating every scaling solution for Bitcoin, right? And I think, so a little part of our history is like all four of like the founders that Ordinals bought, the Go founding team, we started out in stacks, right? So about three years ago, I felt that like Bitcoin and DeFi needed to be a thing. So I spent a lot of time in the stacks ecosystem. And what Mooneeb and the rest of the stacks ecosystem have done is they built like a real like hardcore group of amazing engineers who were all and other layer twos have done so. But I think stacks has always been the one with most traction. And there are other kinds of different scaling solutions. But what was great about stacks is you gravitated with a lot of very smart engineers trying to think about the future of Bitcoin. And so ourselves and a number of the major builder teams that built a product on Ordinals actually came from the stacks ecosystem, right? So like, I think the crypto ecosystems and you could name like Polkadot or Cosmos or the ecosystems that attract a lot of very, very smart engineers. And you’d be insane
54:41 To write those kinds of things off, right? But it’s just a longer journey for a layer two to get usage. And so Ordinals was the missing piece. And now whatever stacks ends up properly helping Bitcoin scale for will probably be a big thing. But no one really knows whether it’s stacks or there’s other groups like Bob and a number of others, Udi, who’s quite a famous Ordinals personality is also doing his own layer two scaling solution. I think like how the layer twos pan out is not fully known yet. But it’s going to happen very far.
55:25 Okay, let me ask you a blunt question. I had Stanley Kulachev of Aave on the show in 21. And he’s obviously built something amazing. Aave’s been super successful. But it’s how you can lend assets via smart contract in a decentralized fashion. The dream of the Ethereum that became a reality kind of been DeFi summer of 2020. When am I going to be able to do that on Bitcoin?
55:48 When do you think I can go in, plug in my Bitcoin, lock it in, get some yield? Well, you can at the moment. Right. I mean, on the Bitcoin chain. Yeah, no, no, no. So there’s a group who we know well, and we collaborate with them called Liquidium, that allows lending on Bitcoin, right? So I think it’s like, essentially, like the difference is, if you’re doing it without smart contracts, is there is, there’s going to be a database element that’s kind of a workaround. But then I think you’ll get the layer two scalings that make that more efficient and better, right? But you are actually able to do some lending on Bitcoin right now. Aave Scale, hopefully next six months, one year. If we think of like, I think we’re in like, BitFi, we’re heading into BitFi summer at the moment.
56:53 Okay. And I think you’ll have Aave Scale lending. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have billions of dollars of lending by the end of this year on Bitcoin. In a robust way, because one thing, when people complained about the bear market, and they complained about the FTXs and the Lunas, a lot of people reminded them that DeFi never broke, like DeFi didn’t break. Celsius took your money. Celsius did not take your money from the DeFi protocols, because that was all locked up in smart contracts. So this new DeFi on Bitcoin, will it be robust? I think obviously, there will be learnings, right? So I think it’s the early days of stress testing the system. And hopefully, people have learned the lessons. Someone pointed out to me that one of the centralized exchanges, you can now earn a 50% yield on stablecoins. So sadly, I think some of the lessons haven’t been learned from that period. But I think the- 50? Yeah. It’s not a reputable one, whatever that means. Okay.
58:02 Well, they’re similarly a big one, right? You’ll know who they are. Okay. All right. So we have to keep an eye out.
58:09 Yeah, I think sadly, like in the nature of crypto is people don’t learn the lessons they perhaps should do. But I’m pretty sure that you’ll get proper early DeFi on Bitcoin this year. Okay. We’ve been talking for maybe a few months, and I think we might have originally talked and agreed to invest with you before the Bitcoin ETF approval. I think it’s very possible.
58:38 Now, that’s been approved. In your mind, how does that change the ecosystem? I mean, we’ve now seen billions and billions of dollars pouring into these Bitcoin ETFs. Some days, it’s 14 times the amount of supply being mined every single day. The word is that BlackRock now owns more Bitcoin than Michael Saylor, which is a lot. And that’s probably going to continue. How does that change your business, the future of what you’re building? The first thing I think about is institutions love a yield-bearing instrument. I worked in fixed income derivatives on Wall Street for a long time. People think Wall Streeters buy and sell stocks. I mean, most of Wall Street is in fixed income, which are government bonds and securities and things that pay yield because that’s what your pension fund wants. All these things want that. I would think they would want a yield on Bitcoin. And I’m curious, what are your thoughts on this development?
59:35 How does it affect your ecosystem? How does it affect the Bitcoin price as well? Yeah, well, clearly, I thought it was good luck to come into this interview today. And it was Bitcoin trading at an all-time high. Clearly, I mean, you only need to look at the evidence. I think we’re up probably 30K or so since the ETF was approved. So in a very short period of time, that ability for people to just buy an ETF and have exposure to Bitcoin, I think has proven strong. It’s not easy, actually, to self-custody your Bitcoin, right?
1:00:33 If you have even Coinbase that is relatively intuitive, your man on the street needs to figure out keywords and cryptography. And even though we think of the centralized crypto exchanges as quite intuitive in many ways, I think there’s still a relatively high technical and financial sophistication that you need to participate in that. Whereas now, anyone can call their broker and have exposure to Bitcoin. So I think that’s great because I think actually a lot of the scams originated because people couldn’t figure out how they could get exposure to Bitcoin.
1:01:23 But people should go, hey, smart digital money. I want some of that and be able to have your Bitcoin ETF. I think obviously, we’re on very much the on-chain area, on-chain experimentation.
1:01:47 But like you say, I think what we’ve seen in all of crypto is kind of institutional style investment vehicles have suddenly driven forward innovation in different ways, right? Because they come in and will really fund use cases at scale. And I think if it’s just the crypto hardcore, that’s great. And one of the great things about crypto, I think, is it’s been like a petri dish of experimentation without Wall Street and without institutions and it’s got to a certain scale. I think obviously those groups bring sophistication and have also had a chequered history. But I think it’s interesting that BlackRock or Fidelity or whoever are providing people with less technical sophistication access to the market.
1:02:58 Yeah, I saw an interview with Michael Saylor recently where he talked about having an ETF, a lot like having a website. That’s what I thought was really interesting. And nowadays, if you want to go to a restaurant or go to a hotel or whatever, you check the website first and find out where it is, what it does, etc. Imagine one of these things not having a website. You would probably never travel there. You would probably never eat there because for all intents and purposes, you don’t know anything about it and it might not even exist. He said, that’s a bit like Bitcoin. When you look at these institutions before, what do I get the Bitcoin? What is the Bitcoin? What’s the price history of the Bitcoin?
1:03:33 It’s like for them, you need a ticker. And now you can type in on your Bloomberg terminal. I used to use Bloomberg’s back in the day before we even had the internet and you type in the ticker and now you see price history. With price history means you can now maybe borrow against it. You can do margin things, all that stuff. So now that that’s there, it’s all of a sudden become visible to a whole new host of people. So it’s brought all those people in.
1:03:59 The other thing Michael said at a speech at a conference in Madera recently, I thought this was interesting. I want to get your take on it. As he told the whole audience there, he said, look, BlackRock is now in and Larry Fink has now become the chief marketing officer for Bitcoin. It still boggles my mind when he goes and does interviews and says, Bitcoin is the asset that keeps you safe, amazing things. But they’re unleashing their entire marketing machine and nobody markets better than Wall Street when it comes to putting these instruments in mom and pops pension funds in America and beyond. And he said, look, these are no longer our enemies. And like you said, traditionally Bitcoiners and crypto people look at banks as our enemies and maybe as fiat currencies and central banks as our enemies.
1:04:43 He says, that’s not true. These are our friends because the CTF, he said by grabbing 1% of the supply has just doubled and tripled everyone’s money. He said, imagine if more of these instances happened, like a country adopts it as a legal tender or an insurance decides to create a product on Bitcoin. He said, these are our friends. He said, there’s two types of people.
1:05:04 He says, there’s those of us that understand Bitcoin and then there’s those of us that don’t understand it yet. That’s what he said. And he actually told the whole audience, he said, your job is to go out there and speak to those people, not in a combative way, in a way that shows them the beauty of Bitcoin. What do you think about those comments? Yeah, I think it’s 100% right. I think the way I think about it is now it’s a golden opportunity to transform finance itself. Almost like the fact that a lot of these institutions are now allowing people to have Bitcoin at scale is just going to lead to more Bitcoin adoption.
1:06:01 I think that has to be a good thing. Obviously, we’ve got to be cautious. I was at the Wall Street Journal during 2007, 2008. I actually got into crypto because I was covering the intersection between structured credit and private equity and looking at how that interacted. I looked at the early days of Ethereum and went, this reminds me of the CDO era. It was a bunch of very, very smart technologists innovating where the future of finance, as we know, 2007, 2008, was one of the worst financial crashes in history. It’s something that is always a concern because Wall Street does magnify things and do it at scale where it does affect people’s pensions, it does affect people’s bank accounts. I think the great thing though about crypto and Bitcoin and this ETF join is you basically got the price of Bitcoin. It may go up, it may go down, whatever happens to it. I think most of us are probably listening to this. I think it will go up substantially, but it clearly has had volatility over time. The cool thing about that is just one asset. The banks know how to trade gold, they know how to trade oil, they know how to trade whatever, and it just becomes another thing that they treat a bit like a commodity. Generally, that ends up being something that isn’t systemic to the banking sector like the CDOs or whatever. Like you say, I think the DeFi on Bitcoin, DeFi on Ethereum, whatever, that can potentially build up more systemic risk if it ends up getting to scale.
1:08:24 But I think what’s really nice about the way crypto and Bitcoin have evolved is it’s been like a Petri dish area where you’ve just had the smart technologists being able to go away and tinker and do cool stuff and the experiments get to scale at a way that’s not systemic. Luna was not systemic. I think at least it’s getting battle tested and going through mini crises with like insider smart people who kind of go, oh yeah, this is happening, what should we be watching out for? And typically in financial innovation, no one really talks about the structured credit market and systemic risk in the structured credit market anymore.
1:09:22 I’m sure they will if it begins to build up again. But I think the thing about crypto stress testing is we might not necessarily need a Lehman Brothers because we’ve had a Celsius and FTX and whatever. So hopefully some of the lessons have been learned. Yeah, I hope. Although when I joined Wall Street in 93, I remember looking around the floor and they were like, this is the emerging markets desk and this is the Asian desk and this is the foreign currency desk. And then they would say, and this was the crisis that happened there six years. And this was the Latin American crisis. And this was the rural devaluation crisis. And I remember I said, this happens every four or five years. Like, don’t you guys ever learn? And they’re like, nope, we don’t learn. It’s just cycles.
1:10:09 So yeah, we did learn a lot from Celsius and FTX and Terra Luna, but there’s definitely more of those coming. It’s a human thing to an extent, but that is at least we have that in our past. So at least where we have a lot of people that know to be suspicious of these things, to know these things, although with this bull market, it’s going to bring in a whole lot of bunch of new actors, which is what I want to ask you next, Toby. How far, how big is this bull market? How far does this go? How high does Bitcoin go?
1:10:38 How big does the total market cap go? And how long does this last? I want to get your honest thoughts. Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next year or so Bitcoin went to 200K, right? Like, I mean, and then it’s kind of the sky. So what we’re seeing at the moment is like, I got up and listened to the Today program, the BBC, right? I’m here coming into the interview and there was like, Bitcoin’s at an all time high.
1:11:09 And that literally, when that happens, you have every media outlet in the world kind of magnifying this thing. And now you’ve got the ETF, so people can literally call up their stockbroker and get exposure to Bitcoin. And I think what’s been quite interesting, because this has been kind of an institutional driven rally. It hasn’t been a retail driven rally yet, right? Like, I think now, as of this week, you’re going to have your cab driver and whatever going, oh, you’re in crypto. Like, what’s going to happen with Bitcoin? Obviously, like, it could go down. And like, the thing is, even though it’s a scarce asset, the way Bitcoin moves is not totally rational, right? But I think I’d bet on 200K in the next year, basically.
1:12:27 Yeah, first of all, it’s not a rational asset. And I traded everything under the sun on Wall Street. I trade bonds and futures and commodities and stocks, and nothing compares to the volatility in crypto. I mean, it’ll literally make you want to cry and call your mama on those days. I mean, I don’t think the human brain will ever be able to comprehend the volatility of something like crypto. And the human brain is just not built to comprehend it or to even know how to trade it or position it correctly. You need high discipline, or you need some help with that, or you’ll make bad decisions. You make bad decisions when things are good and bad decisions when things are bad. I call it the get married in Vegas syndrome. When things are so good, you make bad decisions. But that being said, I agree, there’s a lot further this market can go.
1:13:20 The headline going around the world that Bitcoin is a new high means retail is now going to come in. The question is, how long does it take for that to hit the new high and then for us to come back down? I was interviewing the CEO of Rockaway X named Victor, and he has three tests to know when you’re at the high. Number one is old friends from high school text you and say, hey, tell me more about that Bitcoin thing. Or he said it’s even worse when they ask him about Ethereum Classic.
1:13:47 So somebody from high school knows the name of some random coin. That’s a bad sign. Sign number two, your taxi driver is talking about crypto. Sign number three is you go to Bitcoin Miami and you go out to the club and every single table is buying bottle services and they’re in crypto. So he said when they’re all in crypto, he said, that’s the other side of the top of the market.
1:14:10 Anyways, it’s a bit of a joke, but it kind of shows the top. Maybe it’s total market cap. Right now, we’re at about 2.6 trillion. Some people are saying when it gets up to between 5, 6, 7 trillion, it’s natural times for a sell-off. I guess we’re going to have to see what happens.
1:14:26 Yeah. It’s something like it’s a very cyclical asset class. One of the great things I think about ordinals is last year we were in a macroeconomic bear market and it was something that had caught the imagination and instant traction despite if you were reading the Financial Times or whatever. It wasn’t actually all rosy. There might have been the Nvidia AI chat GPT Spark, but it was still ordinals got hatched when Bitcoin was in 20K territory.
1:15:20 Everyone’s been building there and trying to figure out how to make it more robust. Now, I think it’s a great time to capitalize on that and hopefully learn enough of the risk management lessons that everyone gets taught every cycle in crypto, but it’s always different. What does ordinals bot look like in three years from now? What do you think you want to build it to? Do you have plans of exiting or does it turn into something owned by the community and run by a DAO? How big do you guys want to go?
1:15:51 Yeah. We’ve obviously been spending a lot of time working on our tokenomics and white paper of the trio token. I think we’ve been very much going, how do we effectively have the token recycling back to the community and effectively getting the early days of governance where
1:16:17 The token will essentially be the governor of some of the treasury and we’re trying to figure out the rule mechanism that makes it possible for us to be like, we really want to be like an intellectual developer led hub for pushing forward the future of ordinals and future of Bitcoin. But we do want the most successful crypto projects become where you hold a trio token, your friend buys into the trio token and can all create and participate in the destiny of this thing and make it a bigger thing. I think that still even you look at Uniswap or Ethereum or Bitcoin, none of those ecosystems end up being perfect, although they end up doing a lot.
1:17:19 But I think in three years time, we’d love to be the home of one of the biggest Bitcoin developer communities full stop. I think then we’ll have made an impact and hopefully our token has the early seeds of that utility because it’s a long road creating crypto utility. Bitcoin probably developed that in 2016 really and Ethereum more quickly because maybe it learned some fixes, but then now we’re seeing real Bitcoin utility. But your goal is to make trio like the most important, you know, BRC 20 utility token out there. We’d be absolutely delighted.
1:18:10 Do you see anything in your way? I mean, is there anybody that’s really going to compete for it right now? You guys are early movers. You also have this really fascinating way of attracting all the talent because of your SaaS capabilities. But I mean, I’m just trying to think of the ecosystem. There’s not a lot. Yeah, I mean, I think for a healthy ecosystem, we want there to be a number of players, right? But we’re very comfortable as an early builder group. We’re doing a token. We’ve seen how tokens charge, turbo charge crypto projects. And so we think we’re definitely going to be one of the ones out of the gate that we like to think will be more successful.
1:18:56 Tell me about you because you have a whole history with Novum insights of really looking at a lot of data, trying to understand what’s going on out there. You obviously wrote for the Wall Street Journal, watched the financial crisis. I was actually working in credit derivatives at the time here in London. So I got to I had a front row seat. My clients were Lehman. And so I had six of my clients were Lehman Brothers. And I watched the stock go to zero. And they said goodbye on the phone as they were escorted from the building to me. So I saw it all in real time. But from doing that to everything in your past, I’m just curious, what does this moment feel like to you compared to writing for the journal, all the work you’ve done with Novum? Is this just a natural progression for you? Because there’s very different things you’ve done over the years.
1:19:40 Yeah. So I think the at the time, so I was very lucky. I was like a cub reporter in 2007, ended up going to Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal. I kind of weirdly was like interviewing like the head of derivatives at City or Merrill or wherever, right? Like, like, on like, what the hell was going up. So I remember like in April, 2007, I’d even written about like, there were some best and CDOs that blew up at that time. And like, I remember writing like, like literally, I think it was one of the like, it was a structured credit team at City were basically going like telling me the canaries in the coal mine, this thing is going to get bad fast, right. And so like, you literally like, I remember writing an article then, like pretty much I’d become a financial journalist like two months before and then suddenly having that kind of download. So I was in a very privileged position where I just got to interview like private equity people and structured credit people at a very unique time of finances history. And so like, it was kind of like MBA, MBA meets technology combo. And the like, crypto evolves in a similar way, right? Like, like just because it’s tech meets finance.
1:21:20 And so just always, I guess I and then through through Novem Insights, and I found another I was like, helped create another great group called global corporate venturing, where we track like corporate venture capitalists, and data. So I think it like my view is, is you can always understand like things through tracking data, tracking inputs, talking with smart people. And so I founded Novem Insights in 2016, to look at the intersection of blockchain and crypto and AI through a big data lens. And I think like, the great thing about that is you just get a map of where to go and which directions to go if you if you look at the intersection of tech and finance, and like we kind of touched on, sadly, like the greed element sometimes overtakes and people do crazy things. But like, I think you learn a lot of lessons and the intersection of tech and finance, which is where I kind of spent most of my career for the last 15 years is very much like, it’s a beautiful way to see the world and generally positive, but but clearly speculation is kind of like one of the things you could say about cryptos is it does let like anyone play around with the sharp knives in the kitchen, right? Like, like, but I personally think that’s a very good thing as well, right? Like, I think you, you almost like let the more you let people learn for themselves and do what they need to and figure out their financial future, that’s much more empowering. And it’s why like, I’ve never known anyone to leave crypto,
1:23:31 Right? Like, like, like, even if they’ve got burn and lose everything and some derivatives trade, or some scam token or whatever. I think people figure out that actually they can, like, they can earn and they can, they can trade and they can, they can actually like, like, there’s more, like, self made millionaires that I’ve met in crypto, than ever in anywhere outside. So, so I think that’s very positive. It’s obviously very risky, but I think it’s much more healthy than if they take up gambling.
1:24:15 Yeah, you know, I teach in my crypto and DeFi Academy, I’ve been teaching for three years. And so I take people that maybe have never touched a Bitcoin before, and I try to walk them through all the basics from hot wallets to cold wallets, they use Uniswap, they’ll use Aave, and I just try to get them through the basics. And, you know, one thing, Toby, I realized is that most people, they don’t have a relationship with their own money. You know, they were never taught about money in schools. And again, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I leave that to my guests, but that’s a little weird. And so you’re right, they don’t actually understand money. They’ve been almost sleep, they’ve been taught most of their lives, that they’re not smart enough to understand their money. And you’ve got to trust the bankers. And we know how that ends up.
1:24:54 And so like you said, if people actually get in and get stuck in and Bitcoin or whatever, yeah, you can take a couple cuts and playing with those sharp knives. But more importantly, you learn about money really quickly. And what is it? And you’re like, okay, I get it, I can loan, I can lend it, I can swap it, I can move it, it’s actually mine, I can actually touch it and taste it. And by having that relationship, you can do a lot with that and create a lot of amazing wealth.
1:25:20 So in that sense, it’s a beautiful thing that is only really prevalent in the crypto ecosystem. And then the last really interesting part is this whole concept of digital property ownership. And what comes with that is freedoms. And I’m a huge fan of Yatsu of Animoco Brands. And every time he sits down with me, he keeps stressing digital property rights. If you don’t own your digital property, whether that’s your identity or your browsing data or your collectibles or anything, ultimately, you don’t have any freedom. And if you allow someone else to own that, like a YouTube or a Facebook or a government, ultimately, they’re going to be the ones in charge. And I guess, so my final question to you might be, how do you feel about this freedom aspect of crypto and the Bitcoin system as well? I mean, people are able to put things on there to fight back against censorship to, again, own assets that can’t be taken away from them, that can’t be debased through money printing. I mean, that’s a huge component for me of this system of the narrative. And you feel it in the crypto people. Crypto people don’t like being told what to do. They’re suspicious of any institutions. They’re suspicious of central institutions. How important is that for you? Incredibly important, right? Like, I think
1:26:43 One of the great things about crypto and Bitcoin as a kind of countercultural movement, you know, it’s a very, it’s very empowering and actually pretty scary, right? Because, like, I lived through a time where a lot of my friends, like, were doing tokens in 2017 and always very wary of it. And the way government reacted to technologists doing something pretty cool for themselves and clearly very innovative was to sort of almost go, you should not do this and, like, try and put some, like, people who are building, like, database companies in jail, you know? Like, that was the level of how bad things got in 2017 and 2018. So I think that just strengthened the resolve of people that, like, many of the smartest people, like, we know are working in crypto and blockchain and building cool stuff. And then you suddenly see how government bodies respond to that. And you sit there going, like, that’s not representing people or looking after them. So I think the, yeah, I think, I think crypto and blockchain as a movement, and it starts with, like, the Satoshi white paper, right? Like, almost like there’s a very strong DNA in that document that you could, like, almost compare to, like, Martin Luther, like, nailing on a church door kind of thing. Like, I think it’s a very powerful document that kind of goes, look, here are some things that are wrong with money. Here’s some things that are wrong with banking. Here are
1:28:34 Some things that are wrong with government. And I’m not a total anarchist. Like, I’m a big believer in, like, we’re here in London Real, which with the British flag behind us, right? Like, like, there are many positive things about modern society. But I think, like, like, the government and regulation and, and like, Molly coddling of people is absurd, right? Like, and, and, and it’s very hard, like, almost like, like, often, like, army, very intelligent people who are like, viscerally opposed to Bitcoin and crypto, almost because you kind of feel like they’re taught to think that way. Right. Yeah. No, that’s really well said. And what about you, Toby? Like, if you look back 10 years from now on the work you’re about to do, or maybe even, you know, on your, on your obituary, I hit go in there. But what will it say about what you accomplished?
1:29:33 Because you don’t seem like the guy to me that’s waiting to buy the 10 lambos or the private jet, you know, feels like you’re in this for more than just, you know, making a ton of money, not that there’s anything wrong with that, by the way. But what will be success for you when you look back on your journey here in crypto? Yeah. So I, I’d love to have been someone who’s helped drive forward Bitcoin innovation. I think I think like, like, luckily, like, like, almost, we’ve already helped create the two largest blocks ever on Bitcoin.
1:30:09 So we work with Marisone and one of our clients, the Runestone project. The, the, basically we’ve created the biggest block in Bitcoin history, right? Like, let’s say, like, which was astounding. And that was only a few weeks ago. So, so like, I kind of feel like what’s really cool is, is, yeah, like my, yeah, I’d love, I’d love to be thought of, like, as someone who’s helped drive forward, like, the future of ordinals, the future of Bitcoin, the future of tech innovation. I don’t know how that there’s a pithy way of saying that, but like, like, yeah, like, like, I, I, I just hope that myself and my colleagues are regarded as people who have dreamt for Bitcoin innovation. Yeah. Well, it looks like you are. We’re super excited to be partnered up with you at Ordinals Bot. I still remember you pitching our group a couple months ago and it was just like a yes, yes, yes, from everyone there. You guys have an amazing team, incredible product market fit, great advisors like Domo, big vision of the future.
1:31:19 And if, and if I’m, you know, if anybody’s going to come out with a great BRC 20 utility token, it’s you guys. Trio is coming up soon. How can people learn more about the company, the upcoming token, all that good stuff? Yeah. So, so ordinalsbot.com, you can play around with the front end and, and there’s, there’s also like our API docs for, if anyone’s ever wanting to really experiment with it at scale, then, but, but anyone can come on and drag and drop something or type in a keyword and feel what it feels like to do something natively on, on Bitcoin.
1:31:58 Then like we, we’ve had a lot of articles about us. I’m, I’m hoping this video will be really helpful for people understanding ordinals bot and Trio. Our white paper is coming very soon. So that will be on our webpage, ordinalsbot.com. Yeah. We’re doing a lot of media articles at the moment. And, and I think I think it will be something that, that really hits the mainstream as soon as possible. Super exciting, man. Again, really happy to be partnered up with you.
1:32:30 Can’t wait to see what you’re going to create. Excited to see how the Trio launches. And again, like your front end and user experience is crazy. I recommend everyone go to ordinalsbot.com and just start playing. You know, I almost went ahead and minted something the other day just for the hell of it. I mean, it’s that easy. People can drag and drop and start playing with it, which is amazing. So look, congrats to you and the team. We’re really excited for the future.
1:32:52 And just want to say thank you for letting us be a part of this. Yeah. And, and thanks to you and the London Real team, like, like you’ve been great partners and, and we’re really looking forward to seeing the show as well. It’s going to be a great, great year. All right. Thanks so much.
