SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. We got a great show for you today. Alchemy co-founder Nikhil Vishwanathan joins us to talk about the building of AWS for the blockchain. Alchemy is currently powering the Flow blockchain, NBA Top Shot, and many other popular crypto applications. Really interesting to talk to somebody who's building the picks, shovels, and infrastructure of the space. So we talk about NFTs, non-fungible tokens, crypto entry strategies, Ethereum versus Bitcoin, and of course, Tether and the ongoing Tether investigation. The CTO and CFO of Tether started engaging me on the Twitter, and they've been doing memes and dunking on me. But the CTO said he'd come on the podcast and Jeremy Allaire from Circle, the other stable coin has agreed to come on the podcast. So the next month is going to be very interesting. If you have questions or tips for me on how to handle those interviews, of course, DMS are wide open. And you know, my email because it's my Twitter handle Jason at Calacanis.com. And we've got two important news stories. I think we actually have a potential Bitcoin replacement coming from legendary entrepreneur Sam Altman and Facebook

SPEAKER_02: dodged a bullet with antitrust. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by

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SPEAKER_05: journey. Learn more at SVB.com slash twist. All right, Sam Altman, who I met back in 2007 or 8. So I've

SPEAKER_02: known him for about 15 years is launching a new cryptocurrency with two co founders called world coin. And they're going to scan your iris your eyeball to verify your identity to minimize fraud. And if you

SPEAKER_00: don't know, Sam, he is somebody who was a young entrepreneur went through YC, he did a company called loop that essentially failed and got sold to Google that went on to run Y Combinator and saw, you know, firsthand, hundreds and hundreds, perhaps 1000s of startups get created. And I noticed in Sam, he became much more ambitious over a period of time. And he of course launched open AI, the nonprofit, raised a bunch of money for that. And this project, I think, is brilliant. What he according to his Bloomberg story is doing is he has a couple of co founders who seem to be let's just say, have great track records and or pedigrees. They want to scan everybody's irises with a basketball sized device, they don't show it, but they've supposedly have already been testing this. And then you would be essentially on the blockchain with your iris, I'm guessing they didn't say this explicitly in the story. And they're going to give you some amount of world coins for free. In other words, everybody will get to participate in this cryptocurrency project. And since it's done with your iris, I think you're going to be able to join this crypto project at any point in time. Now, that leads to a couple complications. Let's say a million people join the crypto project, and they each get 100 coins worth a penny each. Let's say it's 10 years later, and each of those pennies is now worth $1,000. Does the person who joins in your 10 get those same 100 coins for, you know, essentially a penny each or do they have to pay $1,000 for them, right? Do they get $100,000? So they get 100. So I think what they're going to do here is probably have it the earlier you join, the lower the price you get for these coins, the strike price, if you will, the price of entry or how many coins you get now think about this right now, Bitcoin is so toxic and feels like a multi level scam, because you have FOMO the fear of missing out. Because you know, somebody like myself who bought in for under $100. And I had coins that were bought for under a dollar that got lost in one of the exchanges getting hacked. And there are people who bought it for a penny, there are people who bought a doge for a fraction of a penny. And everybody has to convince the next group of bag holders or participants, depending on how you want to frame the the crypto project, you have to convince them to buy in, and they have to take this leap of faith. And it starts to feel like a made off Ponzi scheme, where the new people coming in are doing it for the benefit of the people who got her in early and that is scary. And if you want to know how scary it is, there were people who bought in the first Bitcoin run up at 19 or $20,000 who had to watch it go down to $3,000. And they essentially lost 85% of their value. Now we see people who bought in over 60, watch their coins go down to 28 $29,000, lose half their money, and they're freaking out. And that makes all of this very toxic, doesn't it? Well, if in Sam's project, everybody got, you know, 10 coins, or the equivalent of $1,000 in coins, or what if they gave you 10 coins a year, the equivalent of $1,000 a year, this is pretty trippy stuff. And because you can't fake your iris, boy, is this interesting that will there be fraud? Will there be people lining up people with a gun to their head and saying, you know, get your coins in some, you know, authoritarian country and then taking the coins immediately from them? Of course,

SPEAKER_02: it could be all kinds of stealing and other things that occur. However, this seems to me to be a way to restart the entire crypto ecosystem with a level playing field, the game will be started a new, just like when a new social network comes out, there are a group of people who get to take the top slots in that social network. We saw this recently with Clubhouse, where there were people who just became fabulously good at moderating rooms on Clubhouse, and they became the folks who

SPEAKER_00: became popular there. The same thing happened on Snapchat, Instagram, OnlyFans, Facebook, LinkedIn, every time a new social network emerges, some group of popular people get some of the top slots, but some of the top slots open up for new inventory, podcasting was another one, we had

SPEAKER_02: blogging and then podcasting, every new medium gives a chance for the top 100, top 1000 to be resorted, if you will. And that is really exciting. The new medium here is a crypto currency,

SPEAKER_00: and they've raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase is venture arm and read Hoffman. So according to the Bloomberg story, world coin promises a new global digital currency that

SPEAKER_02: will launch by giving a share to every single person on Earth. According to an online job description that they found the goal is to help economies transition to crypto currencies through a

SPEAKER_00: novel approach, a dedicated hardware device ensuring both humanists and uniqueness of everybody signing up while maintain their privacy and overall transparency of the permissionless blockchain. Here's the quote from Sam, I've been very interested in things like universal basic income and what's going to happen to global wealth redistribution, how we can do that better? Is there a way we can use technology to do that at a global scale? In fact, I think Sam was part of a project to test universal basic income that occurred if I'm not used to have to fact check me on this, but I think it was in Oakland. So they've got this orb shaped device. It's a silver curled sphere, the size of a basketball, you can carry it around, scan people's irises and give them their unique identifiers. According to the world coin CEO, Alexander Blania, I hope I'm pronouncing that correct. And I would love to have you on the podcast and see this device as soon as possible. So somebody could email him Alex Wilhelm, who is a tech crunch who is frequently on the show friend of the pod. So Alex says I have met Sam Altman a few times if I remember correctly, and he seems perfectly nice, but I declined to give him my retina scans for crypto. Come back to me when it's worth $1,000 or $100,000 and you need a down payment for something. So this to me seems like a brilliant idea. And I will be watching this like a hawk. And we've always said that a better project will come along. That could challenge the other projects. This happens in every technology. For some reason, the Bitcoin people in their toxicity in their multi level marketing, you know, worst moments are saying they'll never be a replacement for Bitcoin. They booed Floyd Mayweather when he said he thinks there'll be another even better technology, there's always a better technology. And the fact that the Bitcoin people don't believe that they'll ever be one not in 100 years, not at 5920. Never Bitcoin is it Bitcoin maximalism to the moon. The fact that they don't believe there could ever be another one is proof of how they are part of this multi level marketing cult. I mean, it is really gnarly. And I think this has a chance, it might be a one in 1000 might be one in a million might be one in 100,000. But I think this has a chance to really take some of the the steam and the wind out of Bitcoin sales, it gives everybody a chance to participate. And there's another project called Stella that Jed, the former founder of Ripple created, that did something similar, they get their idea was to give

SPEAKER_16: away a lot of stellar's, but not in this kind of way where it was a specific, everybody gets a certain

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SPEAKER_16: that secure frame.com slash offer slash twist for $2,000 off. So Facebook had a big day yesterday on

SPEAKER_00: Monday, June 28, they became the fastest company to ever reach a trillion dollar market cap doing that in 17 years since inception. That's, you know, roughly adding $60 billion in value a year if you were to average today shares are down slightly, they lost about 8 billion market cap. So they're sitting at 995 billion. But Facebook is the fifth US company to reach this milestone after Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet aka Google. The Saudi Arabian oil company is the only other trillion dollar company with a $7 trillion market cap based on their oil reserves, obviously, and that's not a stock I would buy. I

SPEAKER_16: think that's going straight down as we have more nuclear and more solar and renewables. But to give

SPEAKER_00: you an idea of how long this takes, Eric, Eric, a I R I K broke this down on the Twitter took 17 years for Facebook to get there. And Google took 21 Amazon 24, Apple 42 and Microsoft 44 years. Now this isn't because Facebook is a better business than those other four. In fact, I would say it's definitely not as good of a business as those other four. The reason is because the economy is more global. Now the infrastructure has been built out. In other words, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft and Google did not have the benefit of all of the desktop computers and mobile devices that had been built out when their products came out. Google

SPEAKER_16: came out before mobile phones, as did obviously Amazon, Apple and Microsoft and obviously Apple and Google created the

SPEAKER_00: mobile device phenomenon that we're experiencing right now. So the next company to get to a trillion dollars might take 10 years, it is quite possible that we will see a company do that. Because everybody on the planet can find

SPEAKER_02: something or find out about something fairly quickly. This is why we're seeing an increase in valuation. So as an investor, when I see valuations increased radically, I'm thinking this isn't that they're overpriced in some cases, it's that the opportunity has

SPEAKER_00: gotten bigger, and the ability to scale has increased. So why did the shares jump 4% Monday afternoon? And close at $355 a share

SPEAKER_14: feeling like a dummy for selling my shares at 120. But really didn't want to own the company, I wanted to put it into other companies. So I'm sure I did just as well with the other investments. But they got a favorable favorable legal ruling that

SPEAKER_00: dismissed at FTC antitrust complaint. Federal Trade Commission. And a coalition of state attorneys, suffered two losses in their antitrust cases against Facebook, the cases sought to force Facebook to sell and spin out Instagram and WhatsApp. And on Monday, a

SPEAKER_02: federal judge threw out both lawsuits arguing that the FTC didn't offer enough details to prove Facebook had a social media

SPEAKER_00: monopoly. The US district court judge, Bosberg, James Bosberg, I hope I'm pronouncing that correct as well, ruled that the

SPEAKER_02: FTC needed more detailed allegations about Facebook's monopoly power, and that the states waited too long to

SPEAKER_00: challenge the deals. Instagram was acquired back in 2012. When Facebook was just worth $60 billion. And before it IPO'd in May of 2012. And WhatsApp was acquired in February of 2014. Remember, Facebook's market cap at the time was $160 billion. And I believe they

SPEAKER_16: paid $19 billion for that at the time. So that was a big, bold purchase. The FTC can still follow a new lawsuit with more

SPEAKER_00: details. But the state case is dead pending an appeal. According to CNBC, the FTC could still file an amended complaint against Facebook or bring its claims in house through a separate process. So the fight's not over. But according to the information, the FTC's case filed in December is the most high profile non merger case the agency has ever brought in decades. So the loss is a rebuke to the FTC's aggressive stance against tech companies and comes just two weeks after big tech hawk, Lena Khan took over as

SPEAKER_14: chair as we talked about in the all in podcast setting 36 or 37. Despite the big day and the antitrust wind

SPEAKER_00: Facebook's ad business still faces massive headwinds from Apple. As you know, Apple is not letting them track devices anymore, and is pitching themselves as the anti Facebook and your privacy is all stored on your local

SPEAKER_16: device. And they don't know who you are, or, you know, what you're doing with your phone is the basic idea. So if you

SPEAKER_00: compare these companies, and you just look at Facebook's market cap today, and their q one revenue, they did $26 billion in the first quarter, they're doing $100 billion a year. And this is, you know, somewhat

SPEAKER_16: profitable ads are 97% of the business. Apple's market cap today is twice as much. And they had 137 billion in iPhone revenue alone, and maybe 25 billion or so in all their services revenue if my numbers are

SPEAKER_29: correct, the really the big story here is the amount of users Facebook has 190 billion in the US but I

SPEAKER_02: think that's been flat. People are not using Facebook as much where they reach the natural audience. So why is this important the average revenue per user, which we call our poo in the business of iPhone users was

SPEAKER_16: three and a half times that of Android in 2015. So if Android, which is run by Google, obviously, is going to allow tracking because Google is also in the Android bit in the advertising business and Facebook and Facebook is not allowed and Google is not allowed to track users as well on iPhones, basically, you're losing the most coveted, elitist, high margin customers. So that's why people are pretty scared about what the iPhone is doing. And they're going to neuter all the different tracking, whether it's email newsletters, videos, blog, you know, web pages, etc. Alright, so let's get to the

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SPEAKER_35: Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of this week in startups. Our next guest is in the blockchain space and powers some of the most amazing NFT non fungible token offerings that you've seen recently. And we're going to talk today about why NFTs have become such a big thing, and why the

SPEAKER_34: blockchain is such an extraordinary innovation, and why people are so excited about it, and will not shut up about the immutable blockchain. Our guest today is Nicole Vishwanathan. Did I get it right?

SPEAKER_36: That was close enough. That was amazing. No, do it for us. Give us your last name.

SPEAKER_39: Nicole Vishwanathan. Nicole Vishwanathan. Yep. Oh, thank goodness I got there. Really hard with my dyslexia.

SPEAKER_34: Took me a while to learn my own last name, to be totally honest. So you're the co founder and CEO of

SPEAKER_46: Alchemy from 2017 till now. Before that, you did a dating social network, I believe wasn't dating, but it

SPEAKER_49: was a it was a social it was a social app. Down to lunch. Yes. Which was a very cool idea. And uh, Dapper Labs uses your blockchain software, if I understand correctly, to do Crypto Kitty's NBA Top Shot and the Flow blockchain. And we had Roham on the podcast recently. So that's a big deal. And you've raised a ton of money for your startup. Obviously, uh, you're in the right place at the right time. Having been working on the blockchain, I think since 2017. Is that when you started Alchemy?

SPEAKER_51: Yep. That's correct. And people can see Alchemy on the web at Alchemy.com or something. Alchemy.com.

SPEAKER_53: There you go. Great domain name. Well, after after many years of struggling with AlchemyAPI.io and

SPEAKER_39: everyone never getting my email address correctly. Alchemy.com is a $250,000 domain name. Am I in

SPEAKER_58: the ballpark? Uh, can't comment, but it's, I'll just say it's more than that. Oh, more than that.

SPEAKER_43: Yeah. It also happens to be my favorite Dire Straits album. If you haven't heard it before, go check out Alchemy, the live album by Dire Straits. Okay. So you're using blockchain.

SPEAKER_49: Um, and you, you're a provider of, I would say enterprise grade blockchain solutions. Am I correct?

SPEAKER_59: Yeah. Let me, maybe backing up. Let me give like a quick, just summary of what we do. So

SPEAKER_53: the simplest way you can think about this is Amazon actually has two businesses. They have their

SPEAKER_57: shopping business, which most of us know, you go and type on amazon.com and say, you know, I want a toothbrush. They also have this other business called AWS, which I'm guessing most of

SPEAKER_53: the people listening probably know about. AWS is actually two thirds of Amazon's revenue. Sorry, two thirds of Amazon's profits and powers pretty much every product in the world, Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, whatever. We are basically the AWS for blockchain. So we power about $30 billion in

SPEAKER_62: transactions annually, pretty much every NFT platform. If you are using a crypto product,

SPEAKER_64: it's probably using Alchemy under the hood. Now the, the Alchemy they're using is specifically

SPEAKER_35: blockchain solutions that you've created or in your AWS like platform, do you provide any number of

SPEAKER_66: different services? No, we're purely blockchain. And I think the simplest way to think about it is if you

SPEAKER_68: want to read or write data from the blockchain, Alchemy enables you to do that. Got it. So for people

SPEAKER_49: who don't know what the blockchain is, and they hear this term blockchain over and over again, the immutable blockchain. So the blockchains do not change. And they're not typically not owned by

SPEAKER_74: anybody. They're on distributed servers. Yep. Are yours on your servers or on some distributed servers?

SPEAKER_76: Yeah, so that's, that's a great question. And the answer is, it's a mix of both. We run

SPEAKER_53: a bunch of infrastructure, but it's also in a distributed sense. So we, the short non technical

SPEAKER_35: answer is yes, it's a combination of both. And is this your software? Or do you use some open source software or some solution that's out there? And then you're the hosting provider? Yeah, in the way

SPEAKER_53: Amazon hosts some open source software? That's also another great question, which is a distinction between us and AWS. As you said, Amazon started out running commodity software and hardware. Now they run their own custom stuff. But we built a new tech stack from the ground up. And that's kind of been

SPEAKER_57: our core, the core kind of product we offer. And so for people who don't know, why would

SPEAKER_49: it be important for someone to use? And what's the use case for a blockchain, which is basically a database versus say using MySQL, Oracle, Hadoop, or some other, you know, privately run database,

SPEAKER_53: I think kind of backing up, let me give a quick example of how blockchain and crypto kind of started. So right now, when you think about or maybe not right now, but you know, 10 years ago, let's say you live in the United States, your currency is the US dollar that's kind of printed and controlled by the US government. And it's one of these problems that I call the WhatsApp effect, where actually, I was hanging out with the founders of WhatsApp playing ultimate Frisbee, like in the I don't even remember, like 2009 2010. And they're telling me the app, and I just didn't get it. I was like, why? Like, why do people use WhatsApp? All my friends live in the US, I can text anyone for free, like, why would anyone use this? Right? And I think in the US, you have a similar thing where you live in the United States, your monetary supply is relatively stable, you don't have all these problems. And in other countries, that's not the case, right? And so Bitcoin, this concept came along that said, we're going to make money that's universally accessible by everyone. It's not controlled by one government, and it's, you know, power back to the people. So that was the original idea of crypto. And then on top of that, what happened was people said, Oh, wow, this Bitcoin technology is really amazing, where there's not this like one company or one government telling me how I can live my life. And let's take that and let's expand it to other types of applications. So when you look at why is blockchain actually useful? So let me give like one more concrete explanation where, you know, right now to send money across to a different country, if you actually want to you want to actually transfer money without paying a massive, like, you know, multi percent fee, and like days of travel and all these things, the fastest way is actually just get a suitcase of cash and take it on an airplane to another country, right? So blockchain, what it does is it eliminates a lot of these central structures, which I get that about, you know,

SPEAKER_92: cryptocurrency allows you to have cash that is not going to be devalued and is not pegged to what

SPEAKER_49: you're doing in Venezuela or wherever it happens to be that a currency gets depicted, but just the

SPEAKER_35: technology of blockchain itself. Why would somebody use a blockchain which is slow and public and immutable in terms of use case versus say just using a standard database that Amazon etc to solve a problem? In other

SPEAKER_49: words, why is Roham at NBA top shot using your software as opposed to just using an off the

SPEAKER_53: shelf database? Yep. So I think there's a distinction here like Roham uses the blockchain and he uses us to access the blockchain. We're not the blockchain. So that's, that's the first distinction. The second answer is, it's just short and simple. It lets you do things you couldn't do otherwise. And okay, plain and what's the number one thing? Number one thing? Well, it depends on the application, but there's kind of like two number one things in general. One is that you have this new building block of being able to write code that moves value around. And the internet enabled you to computers to exchange information, crypto says now you can exchange value. So you can build things on top of each other with money as a building block. The second application kind of core application is you don't

SPEAKER_62: need one centralized party that you trust and you can build products that are more peer to peer.

SPEAKER_34: Got it. So we all want to say, we're selling an NFT, we can put it on this blockchain. And we can all see that it exists there. And we can all participate in this ecosystem and know that nobody was screwing with the database or doing any shenanigans. Exactly right. So like the NFT is a great

SPEAKER_53: example, because before NFTs, you could not own something digital, right? Like, I could just copy it. Like, let's say you have an image. And I can just it's kind of like, you know, in the in the old, not old names, but you buy art, and I can just make a copy of it. But there's a there's a somebody who comes in and says, you have the original Mona Lisa, right? Pre crypto, there was no way for anyone to own an original on the internet. And now you can. And that's one example of things it lets you do.

SPEAKER_57: So how do you make money? How do we make like alchemy? Or how do I personally make money?

SPEAKER_105: No, alchemy. You make money because you're a CEO of a company that's raised 10s and

SPEAKER_111: millions of dollars. And I mean, I mean, yeah, actually, your company gets bought or sold or goes public. How do how does the company make money? Alchemy makes money. We're exactly similar

SPEAKER_53: to AWS. We're a SaaS business we charge based on how much compute usage you use without me.

SPEAKER_49: Got it. And why wouldn't Roham and like, you're again, assuming they're your biggest, they're your biggest customer? Why wouldn't they just build this themselves? I'm curious.

SPEAKER_116: Yeah, they actually did. And everyone else tried to in the beginning. Turns out, it's a really,

SPEAKER_53: really, really difficult, complex problem. And we spent years with people who have scaled Twitter's infrastructure and Facebook's infrastructure and built artificial intelligence algorithms. And we built a system that handles a lot of the problems that no one else was able to.

SPEAKER_119: And who are the biggest customers? Is it Roham and Topshop?

SPEAKER_53: We have a bunch of customers. I mean, Roham, Topshop is a sorry, the there's kind of two distinctions. There's there's a flow team. And then there's the Ethereum team. But that's they are a big customer. We have a lot. And we have everyone from you think the customer base is spanning, hey, I'm a hacker, and I'm a high school student in my room. And I want to play around with blockchain to I'm some of the fortune 50 companies, right? So we see a pretty broad range of things there.

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SPEAKER_35: we've heard about blockchain is because it's on distributed servers, it's slower. And because so many

SPEAKER_49: people are writing to it, it can be slower and that these things are getting very large. And that can cause sort of problems. Is that an actual concern now? Or has that been resolved?

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, I think the way you should think about this is this is the same with every industry, think about the computer, think about the internet, what did a computer do in the early days, it could add like single digit numbers, right? Then it could add double digit numbers, then it could multiply things. And if you looked at that, you're like, why the heck would you ever use a computer for anything? And I think one of the things you you bet on in any industry is the technology is going to get better and better. So the question is, you know, do you think blockchain

SPEAKER_131: technology will get better? And does it have utility? And if those two things are true,

SPEAKER_34: So it is still an issue that it's, you know, obviously much slower because it's public distributed system. And because these files are getting very large, that's still an issue for the industry.

SPEAKER_120: It depends what depends what you mean by issue? Like what can define issue for me?

SPEAKER_35: That the file sizes are getting so large, it's hard to read and write from the blockchain.

SPEAKER_57: I mean, I think the way I'd answer that is it works. And of course, we can make it smaller and better and faster. But it's not like broken right now. Got it. And is the Bitcoin blockchain specifically

SPEAKER_49: getting too large? And how are they resolving that? Because Bitcoin is getting more and more popular? Yeah. And then you have people doing all kinds of wash trading or tumblers. Yeah. Just it seems like it is so much is being written to it. Is that at some point, going to where would where does it wind up in terms of total size? And then what would the

SPEAKER_35: infrastructure need to be? You know, let's say 10 years from now, if it keeps growing at this pace,

SPEAKER_57: the short answer is there's multiple people working on different types of solutions. So one kind of conceptual solution is the blockchain is taking so much data, let's do and it's not even

SPEAKER_53: the data storage, it's more the speed of the transactions, right? And the capacity and number of transactions. So let's do them off in this little side thing. And then let's kind of bring the results back here. So these layer twos, you'll see that on Ethereum, you'll see that on Bitcoin, these kind of auxiliary chains. So that's kind of one solution. And I think, you know, Moore's Law is still in effect. So computing gets better and better and better. It's not like a showstopper for crypto right now, I think in sorry, it's not a showstopper for Bitcoin right now in other chains, that is a very challenging problem, like in what the way it actually manifests itself is not just size or speed, but actually the cost of doing a transaction. Because when you have a lot of transactions going in, whoever pays the most gets their transaction.

SPEAKER_141: And this has been another complaint about crypto, it was supposed to be really cheap to do. And now

SPEAKER_49: it's turned out to be kind of expensive and slow. So what are your thoughts about how expensive it's become to, you know, buy and sell and trade? I think this is exactly like every other industry,

SPEAKER_53: right? You know, we have an internal speaker series and Charles Schwab just came on yesterday and he was saying like, they adopted the computer in 1984 and the internet in 1994 for Schwab. The internet was like, in the early days, everyone was like, what can you do, you can just send this like electronic mail, which is slightly faster than a post office, but it's so slow. And it's hard to imagine Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, right? Sure. And same thing with blockchain, you look at this, you're like, it's so slow. But the idea is the technology is still in its infancy, we have decades to

SPEAKER_92: go and it will get better. Got it. When we look at these NFTs, how should we think about

SPEAKER_49: people buying them? Are they buying them because they want to own this object that they have an affinity towards and they get delight from? Or do you think people are buying these NFTs because

SPEAKER_53: they're going to appreciate in value? That's a that's a great question. Yeah, I'm actually gonna answer a slightly different question of why and then I'll answer this. What is

SPEAKER_57: what is what really is an NFT? Like conceptually? And is it a bubble or not? Which is kind of like

SPEAKER_64: what I'm hearing the implicit question in there? Well, no, I mean, it's clearly bubbly. I mean, buying a digital piece of art for 69 million is a bubble for sure. Right? Or a million dollars for

SPEAKER_53: something. Yeah, let me let me kind of like break down like what an actual NFT is. So when you think about it, it's pretty simple. It's just this idea if in the real world, you can collect things, I can collect a rock, I can collect the Mona Lisa, the digital world, you can't collect anything. Until now, you can say I own this, right? And when you look at the trend of, especially like, you know, the younger generations, virtual is reality to them, you, you go to Fortnite, billions of dollars of cosmetics have been bought in Fortnite, Kim Kardashian's app has sold hundreds of millions of dollars of bags and purses, digital bags and purses. So this, I think the first thing is, is the idea of collecting inbuilt into human nature? And will it stick around? Yes. Will any specific type of collecting stick around? Who knows, right? Like Beanie Babies, not still super popular, but people still collect things. So I think the concept of NFTs is definitely around to stay. Will any specific NFT be around? I'm not sure. And then the second to my point about what

SPEAKER_49: people why people are buying them? Why do you think people are buying? Do you think that they're

SPEAKER_34: buying them because they want the object, and they have an affinity for it, and they get joy from it? Or do you think they're buying it at these incredibly high prices, because they want to see it

SPEAKER_53: appreciate? I mean, I can only speculate on what other people are buying stuff. I'm guessing a lot of it is that people think it'll appreciate. And I think a lot of people are excited that this is a

SPEAKER_131: new wave of technology, and they want to play around with it. But I'm sure there's a lot of

SPEAKER_49: speculation. I mean, it would make sense that if people were buying something for a million dollars, they would want it to appreciate in value. It's like, it's not like they're buying it in Fortnite for $5. And it's, you know, just to make them, you know, a little accoutrement for the game. It gives you a little bit of joy. A million dollars is a serious investment, let alone 50 or 60 million dollars. So if they are buying it, how is that not make it a security in your mind?

SPEAKER_53: Well, I actually think kind of backing up to your previous point. I mean, a million dollars is a lot of money, but money is also relative, right? Like people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on art. And do they buy it for an investment or buy it because they enjoy it? 100% for an investment,

SPEAKER_57: if they're buying it at that level. I mean, I definitely know people who have tens of or hundreds of millions of dollars in their in their house, and they're not doing it for an investment.

SPEAKER_157: They're doing it for personal. They literally are just doing it to look at it. I don't buy it.

SPEAKER_49: When you're buying art at that level, I mean, you certainly at least believe it's not going to

SPEAKER_53: depreciate in value. That's true. But if you have billions, like, what's the point? Like you can spend 100 million dollars on art? I guess. Yeah. To be clear, I own zero art. So this is my speculation. But from what I observed, it does not seem like it's an investment investment. And when you

SPEAKER_49: look at the crypto space in general, I'm curious what your advice is to people who let's say were in your family or your friends circle, in terms of them investing in the space, not giving advice to everybody who's listening, but just in terms of your friends, and your loved ones. Do you think that there's this is a good place to invest money for the long term Bitcoin, Ethereum? Or do you

SPEAKER_119: think this is really overheating a little bit dangerous for people to be participating in this?

SPEAKER_57: Okay, so I have three answers to this. Number one, disclaimer is not financial advice. I don't know why everyone says that, but I just want to get in trouble. So that's why I framed it as I always

SPEAKER_85: frame it as here's what I would tell my mom. And you can decide what you want to do.

SPEAKER_155: Let me tell you what I tell advice to everyone. Then I'll tell you what I told my parents. And

SPEAKER_53: I'll tell you what I actually did. So perfect. I love it. That's great framing. It's everyone only everyone only listen to the first one and don't do the second two. Okay, so so the first one is what I tell people is, look, this is here to stay this is the future. This is actually exactly what I say to people. I say, take a tiny bit of money, money that you don't you're not worried about. Imagine you're ripping it up and throwing away you're never going to see it again in your life. Buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, I'd say usually 75% big 75 Bitcoin 25% Ethereum, just a little bit of money, don't touch it for the next five years, you're going to be very happy. I promise you that just don't touch it. Just forget about it. Second, what I told my parents do I made them put in 30% of their net worth in 2017 near the peak. And rough couple years, but they're very happy about it. Now. They've done a lot of very well on that. What I do I currently have. I actually checked this morning

SPEAKER_57: about $1200 in my bank account. And everything else is in crypto. So that's what I do personally.

SPEAKER_49: So you're a crypto maximalist 80 90% of your net worth besides your company is in crypto. Yeah,

SPEAKER_53: totally. Wow. Every like every I keep a little bit of cash that I need to like pay for like an Uber

SPEAKER_49: four. And then other than that, it's in isn't crypto. So tell me about tether and why people are

SPEAKER_53: so concerned about this. Yeah, I think so this is concept of like stable coins. So you do something that mimics the US dollar. And there's kind of like multiple types of stable coins. So stable coins that are, you know, algorithmic that say, Oh, we have these kind of math mechanisms that peg the price to $1. And then there's fiat back stable coins that that people are saying, Hey, I literally have this pile of cash. I'm just giving you a digital token of that. Right. And I think the question with tether has been basically, do they actually have the cash? And

SPEAKER_177: that's and that's what people are debating. Got it. And they have $60 billion in tethers.

SPEAKER_49: And they said 30 billion were in commercial paper, but nobody knows where that paper is. And then they were banned from doing any kind of business with residents of New York. So when you see the third largest crypto project, not disclose their holdings, and everybody seems to be using them as a stable

SPEAKER_35: coin to get money in and out of the ecosystem, and they've been banned in New York by a pretty

SPEAKER_34: serious attorney general. Does that make you concern that this is? You know, this kind of behavior shouldn't be in the industry while you're trying to build a professional company that's doing everything right by the books, you have this kind of shadiness that, you know, has resulted in them

SPEAKER_46: being banned from the state where Wall Street itself exists, and they still won't disclose what's going on. This seems to me if I was running a crypto company, I would be infuriated at these guys.

SPEAKER_113: Yeah, I think like, like, first off, like, I'm not God. So I don't really have control. Contrary

SPEAKER_57: to popular belief, like, I don't have control over any of this stuff. The, the way I think about this is this is an early industry. And there's a bunch of people doing a bunch of crazy stuff. And the only thing I can control is what I do and what our company does. And I don't even have control of what our company does. It's just really what I do. So that's number one, that's where it's tend to

SPEAKER_179: spend my mental focus and energy. Number two, I do. I mean, you're the CEO co founder, right? So that's true. You should be able to control your company. But anyway,

SPEAKER_53: but the the second part here is, I think there's this, I think the way to think about it is anytime you have a new industry, you'll have a bunch of this stuff happen, right? Like in the internet, it was like gambling and porn. Yeah, gambling, porn, fraud, like all these things happen. That doesn't mean the internet's a scam, right? And I think when you even when you look kind of more

SPEAKER_102: concretely at specific things, like take ICOs, there were a ton of scam ICOs, right? I would say the majority 90% scams, whatever your opinion is there, right? And I think and I think, but the thing is, ICOs were a totally novel form of fundraising that kind of you know, this that

SPEAKER_53: that basically right now. And so it's dispersed a little bit. But to raise money, you have Silicon Valley connections, and you have the ins with the Sandhill VCs. And you know, I've been lucky and able

SPEAKER_59: to do that. But there's a lot of people who can't. And now you have a way of doing that. And I think that's

SPEAKER_147: incredible. So well, you also have securities laws, where people have to register so people don't lose their money. And they don't have scone with it. And that's what what ICOs were breaking. And I think that was the big objection. But it did show that there was a global appetite to have no friction to invest in crazy projects, which, yeah, is kind of interesting in and of itself.

SPEAKER_53: And obviously, like, I probably have different view. But the securities laws just keep all the great

SPEAKER_169: investments for people who already have money. Like that's, I don't know, to me that that's pretty

SPEAKER_49: crazy. The accreditation laws certainly need to evolve so that everybody can participate. I mean, that is part of what we're probably seeing in crypto is that people who want to participate are not being allowed to get into legitimate companies. So therefore, they would bet on a white paper and buy somebody who disappears with all their later on. Why is Ethereum so popular on your platform? And for people building these apps, and Bitcoin isn't for people who don't understand the

SPEAKER_53: difference between those two platforms, Bitcoin primarily is digital currency, like you can send it to people, you can buy things with it, which is amazing, and such a great utility. Ethereum is more of a platform that you can build new types of money applications on, right. So it's just

SPEAKER_106: fundamentally very different things. And one thing that so that would mean, Ethereum is much better.

SPEAKER_108: It has much better. I mean, it's like we're saying in terms of functionality, it's much better.

SPEAKER_197: It has features, Bitcoin doesn't. It's just different, like Bitcoin, Bitcoin, it has more

SPEAKER_57: capabilities than Bitcoin, but Bitcoin. Yeah, that's my point. Yeah, sure. It has more capabilities, but it also doesn't do what Bitcoin does, right? It's doesn't have fixed supply. It's not. It's

SPEAKER_177: just, it's just different in that sense. And the fixed supply is important because of inflation.

SPEAKER_57: Yeah. And that's the whole premise of, of, of Bitcoin and crypto.

SPEAKER_64: Why, when people say Bitcoin is, you know, why do Bitcoin maximalists get upset when people say,

SPEAKER_49: I don't know if you saw Floyd Mayweather say like, you know, I think there'll be something that'll be even better than Bitcoin someday. And he got boot off stage, basically.

SPEAKER_67: Why, why do Bitcoin people act so toxic in your mind?

SPEAKER_53: Okay, this is just silly, because crypto is tiny, we need to expand the industry. And this is a chance for everyone to work together. So we ascribe to we will support every currency and every platform that is used. And we don't take opinions. And we're not like, this one's bad. This one's great. Like, so that's, that's my thought on that.

SPEAKER_35: Most of the interesting projects, though, are being built, the interesting new applications are being built on Ethereum, because you can build on Ethereum, and you really can't build on Bitcoin, correct?

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, so it's actually interesting up till up till maybe January, I'd say Ethereum had like 99% market share, maybe 95% market share. Now we're seeing explosion of new protocols, whether it's flow, or like all these other chains that that are building things. So that's why at Alchemy, you know, we were primarily focused on Ethereum. And now we've expanded very quickly to a bunch of other chains.

SPEAKER_35: Explain what flow is and why it's important, and why people are getting excited about it.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, absolutely. So flow built by Dapper Labs is a new blockchain. I think it's you kind of very high level layman, you would say it's like your Ethereum competitor. It does a lot of things well that Ethereum struggles with. And in in, you know, vice versa. But if your flow is built by Dapper Labs, and it's kind of a more centralized team, which is, you know, there's trade offs to that. And one of the things that's really incredible about this is they're able to move really quickly and build real applications that people are using. So NBA top shots, you know, a month or two ago, it sold like over half a billion dollars in games. And it's like my high school prom date from Lubbock, Texas, taught tells me about NBA top shot, it's like definitely reach mass market. So that's why

SPEAKER_62: that's why it's really exciting, because they have a product that people actually use.

SPEAKER_64: But flow is an open source project that just happens to have a bunch of Dapper Labs people

SPEAKER_49: working on it. So they can be the tip of the spear the organizers, because they're getting paid a salary by Dapper. Yep. But anybody that can take flow and create a competitor and Rohan mentioned this, that's that's his aspiration. Anybody can build anything with flow, anybody can contribute to the project. Yep. So if you want to make your own this new blockchain and make apps or digital assets or games, whatever it is, it's available to everybody. But what you're saying is that centralization actually is helping it go faster. Yeah, I think I mean, it's it's starting more

SPEAKER_53: centralized development team, but they're they are making it more decentralized. But I think I think it's great. I think it is completely open source and and anybody can build on it. I very strongly feel, you know, I have a lot of respect for Rohan and Dapper. I think they're incredible. We've been, you know, very close for the last three years. But I think they have a very strong shot at being the

SPEAKER_215: dominant, a dominant blockchain in the future. Oh, but you said the dominant perhaps was possible.

SPEAKER_53: I think it's possible. I think six months ago, I said, Ethereum has like 95% chance of being the 99% chance. I kind of think that's like 80 60 to 80% chance now. But I think I, the more and more I realize,

SPEAKER_62: I think it'll be a world where there's multiple dominant blockchains, not one single one, I used

SPEAKER_179: to think it would be one winner. You used to think it'd be one winner. Now you think there could be

SPEAKER_108: multiple in the same way there are multiple databases, multiple exactly operating systems,

David Friedberg: and they can all do different things, whether it's Android versus iOS or Windows versus Mac OS,

SPEAKER_49: etc. Exactly. And are the flow? I don't know if they call them tokens or coins. What do they call the flow tokens token? Yeah, they're tokens. Yeah, very creative. Now are those, you know, if they're a limited supply? And is that like, something people are starting to bet on? Because I'd seen that they had got they had appreciated massively in the March timeframe, because I guess that's when this NFT craze sort of went crazy, but they haven't existed for all that long, right?

SPEAKER_53: Flow tokens are a new phenomenon. They're new, they're new. And you actually can't buy them in the United States. I think once you once you're able to buy them in the US, like it's going to explode. And you know, I have nothing but the greatest things to say about the dapper and flow

SPEAKER_80: teams. We work very good. We actually just announced a big partnership with them. So we're going to be

SPEAKER_49: powering flow and all the applications on it. So why does XRP not have a lot of people building on it? And why do people why are they trying to pay people off to list them on exchanges?

SPEAKER_53: It's a great question. So XRP was Ripple. Yeah, Ripple. So Ripple is, is a blockchain that was meant to be used for interbank settlements between different countries. It's just like a different approach and flow and and Ethereum and Bitcoin are this kind of grassroots bottoms up anybody can build anything and Ripple took a different approach where we're going to make an interbank settlement layer and just went top down. And I think the crypto ecosystem by nature is just

SPEAKER_80: more excited about things that are open source. I think I think that's why flow and Ethereum and

SPEAKER_70: these other company projects get more excitement. Did you see that XRP was being sued by the SEC because they felt it was a security? I'm sure that's why flow and Dapper are not letting Americans

SPEAKER_49: buy into the tokens. Yeah. And what are your thoughts on that? Because it does seem like they

SPEAKER_35: were selling a ton of these and they were controlling the supply. Yeah. And if you control the supply

SPEAKER_49: and you have inside information, this to me feels exactly like the definition of security and flow.

SPEAKER_51: If there it's an open source project, they don't control it and they're not selling it to Americans.

SPEAKER_53: Well, that feels like it's not, I think kind of more broadly, I actually think the US lack of clarity and I think the biggest thing is lack of clarity around regulation and also the kind of strictness of regulation is really just, you know, the internet and computer industries were really took off in the United States. I actually think crypto is going to be biggest elsewhere because of the problems with the US government here. And I think they're like really significantly holding cryptocurrency back. And we're going to miss this big, this big trend. So I think it's

SPEAKER_226: actually a big problem. But you're based here in the US. Have you thought about redomiciling or is your corporation headquarters somewhere else? How do you think about it? Yeah, for yourself as a

SPEAKER_53: founder, we're very complicated question. But the the I mean, there's me as a founder and us as a company, we're a very unique company, because we're different from flow or Ethereum or XRP, where we don't touch the actual actual currency, we're just a software platform layer. So we don't have to deal with a lot of the securities laws and any of that kind of stuff. But if we were, we would totally not be in the United States because it's just a huge pain. If you look at like, FTX, finance, like a lot of these companies have moved outside the US. Because and it's interesting, Jason, it's not just the strict regulation, the bigger problem is the lack of clarity, every kind of CEO and founder I've talked to is like, it's just really tough, because like, you do something in the garments, like, well, you might go to jail, we don't know. It's like,

SPEAKER_147: we just need a yes or no. Can we do this or not? Yeah, it'd be good if people actually had some, I agree with you 100% on clarity. It would be really great to know that this project where

SPEAKER_49: the tokens were controlled by the company, it's not an open source project, and people are buying the tokens for the appreciation and not even using them versus something like Ethereum or flow, where it feels like people are using these tokens to achieve a certain goal. Am I correct?

SPEAKER_53: Exactly, right. And I think this goes back to a bigger question. It's like, why should securities only be for accredited investors, right? Like this whole,

SPEAKER_57: this whole concept. So again, I think this is kind of the core of crypto, right? If you live like we're talking to a friend, his, you know, grandmother lives in Pakistan, he can't, she can't buy US stocks, if she wants to invest in the stock market, right? Because it's just limited, you don't have access, our designers from Uruguay, he couldn't buy US stocks in Uruguay. So it was very just crazy when you think about it, crazy, right? But now crypto is offering a way that these people have access to the financial system of the world. And I think the US has kind of held people back in that way. Also,

SPEAKER_131: it's like only accredited investors can invest in startups and these other, these other companies. And I get it's like to protect people. But you know, I have a different opinion on that, obviously.

SPEAKER_70: When you look at all these crazy exchanges out there, my understanding is there's white label

SPEAKER_35: software and anybody who wants to create a crypto exchange can basically pop one up.

SPEAKER_245: I mean, I think it's a little more complicated than that.

SPEAKER_34: But okay, so let's say five developers with a little bit of capital can pop up an exchange.

SPEAKER_152: Sure. I mean, I've not built one. So I don't know. But it sounds it sounds reasonable. Yeah.

SPEAKER_49: So you know, this seems to be I guess one of the challenges here is that you do have people around the world creating offshore ones just like we had in the poker industry. When I say we poker players, there was a bunch of offshore folks doing this kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_34: And you had no regulation. And that just became super challenging because people would lose their accounts lose their deposits, high fees, etc. It seems to be happening in crypto a whole bunch now.

SPEAKER_113: Um, yeah, I think so. I haven't like followed every single

SPEAKER_49: How do you make sure you're not participating in that? Um, in terms of people hosting like do you have to know your customer and are people looking at you

SPEAKER_35: saying, Hey, you empowered this exchange that's on your service? Or Oh, how does the services? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_58: And sorry, I think you meant me as a user. And I think you as a user, you just take the risk

SPEAKER_53: safety trade off. Like I can go to Coinbase, I can pay 10x more and just be guaranteed that

SPEAKER_251: it's not it's gonna be fine.

SPEAKER_250: Yes, and you can't get 100% leverage, but Yeah, yeah, exactly. Probably shouldn't be doing that anyway. Exactly.

SPEAKER_106: That's super dangerous folks. Yeah. And again, Alchemy is in this really nice position where people give us data,

SPEAKER_53: it's encrypted, we hand it off to the blockchain and the blockchain broadcast it, we can't tamper with

SPEAKER_62: it even if we wanted to. And when they asked us for data, we give it back. So we just don't deal with any of those problems that other people deal with.

SPEAKER_51: In a way, you're the equivalent of a Volvo. And if people were to drive the Volvo, while they were intoxicated, that's not Volvo's fault. That's the fault of the person who gets to try your seat intoxicated. People do stupid stuff. You know, with your software, that's like somebody doing stupid stuff with their iPhone. It's not the fault of the platform. I'm 100% behind

SPEAKER_57: that. I love I love we've, we've gotten compared to AWS to stripe to Microsoft. First time we've

SPEAKER_24: gotten compared to Volvo, which I love it. I use that example a lot because sometimes people

SPEAKER_34: blame new technologies for bad behavior in the real world. Yeah. And then if you just took the technology from 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, you would never blame, you know, Verizon, or, you know, a telephone AT&T telephones for people committing a crime. Yeah, over the phone, you know, like,

SPEAKER_49: exactly be the fault of the criminal. Yeah. Why is nobody using, at least in the United States, or is the reason people are not using crypto applications in the United States outside of store of value and speculation, NFTs, and the wider adoption? Is it because it's still too

SPEAKER_35: complicated? And is there a path to making this less complicated for the average person? Obviously, Coinbase abstracts some of that. But I'm curious in terms of the software, in the interface, why this is so difficult for people to use.

SPEAKER_53: So you're absolutely right. It's just, I think it's, it's just very complicated to use. And I, again, because it's an early industry, this is normal and expected. Our whole mission as a company exists to solve this problem, which is, we want to make it easy for developers to build simple, easy to use products, right? Because it's so difficult to build in blockchain right now. And that's kind of our whole core focus. My kind of tagline on this is blockchain will become successful when no one knows it's blockchain. You didn't say, oh, I took a computer application on the internet and used it to go to dinner. And then I paid with an internet application. So like, no, I took an Uber to the restaurant, and then I did my Apple pay, right? So when you stop hearing the word blockchain, and you just you just talk about the utility you get from it, that's when it'll be

SPEAKER_49: really successful. What are the most interesting things you're seeing, you know, recently,

SPEAKER_272: people build with your software? Yeah, I think what would be the next NFT?

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, the next NFT. I think there's there's a wave that already happened a year ago, which is like the defy wave. But I think it's so interesting to people who don't know. Okay, actually, here's not analogy, which I really like. So think about the phone, the phone didn't change for 100 years, right? 19, you know, 19, early 1900s to like late mid 2000s, early 2000s. Nothing really changed. You had long distance calling, maybe it became a little cheaper, nothing changed. Because who could build on the phone? Only, only AT&T and the cell phone carriers, right? Then what happened? Internet comes along, anybody can build on the phone, like what is phone? It's Skype, it's Zoom, it's, you know, FaceTime, it's free, it's accessible to anywhere, and you can watch TV on it, you can do all these different things, right? And similar thing happened to finance banks have been around for 1000s of years, and nothing has changed. Okay, cool. Like, you know, now I have like a really crappy web interface, but nothing fundamentally has changed. And I think now, anybody can build a new type of bank, anybody can build new things with money. And we're just going to see an explosion of new types of financial systems that weren't possible before. So defy defy is the idea that instead of having a bank or institution, which is a centralized company that manages the money and man interacts government, anybody can build an application that interacts with someone's money, and you can get interest from it, you can lend it out to people, you can do all these other things, and it's built by software. So that's, and it's not run by a single bank. That's kind of the idea.

SPEAKER_49: Got it. What do you think is the most interesting decentralized finance defy idea?

SPEAKER_207: I think so kind of a meta idea on defy of why it's interesting is imagine if Facebook had an open

SPEAKER_53: API that anybody could read and write all of Facebook's data, right? It would be terrible for Facebook, but it'd be great for the ecosystem because anybody can build on it, right? Every single defy project, every single crypto product is completely open API, anybody can read or write from it. So it's called these like Legos, right? So somebody builds an app, and then someone builds another one on top of it. And someone builds another one on top of it. And the pace of innovation is just so fast, because you have this open API thing. That's the coolest feature

SPEAKER_276: about defy. Got it. What do you think would be the most interesting application people could build?

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, I think, I think, first, I think that's very hard to predict. It's like in 1991, can you predict Uber or DoorDash or whatever? The second thing? Okay, let me give you one example of something that

SPEAKER_92: I thought was really cool, right? What did you personally think is cool that you've seen or people super cool tell you about there? Because you must have people telling you what they're going to do

SPEAKER_280: without saying who they are? Yep. What are some of the interesting projects that come across your desk or people have to invest in, etc? Yeah, totally. So here's a really cool concept that

SPEAKER_53: was never possible before blockchain. So right now I go to the bank, I asked for a loan. And they, you know, they assess my risk, and maybe they'll give me a loan, right? There's a concept of flash loans. So basically, I can take out a loan on Ethereum, I can take as much money as I want, I don't need to be validated, like any like, I don't need to like give them my info, whatever. But here's here's the thing. In the same in the block, like you do transactions, you have to you can use the money, but you have to return the same amount of money in the same block of transactions. And if you don't, it automatically gets cancelled. So what happens is this no risk loan where you can you can make you can take as much money as you want, you can do other things with it and try to make money.

SPEAKER_62: But if you don't able to return it, the whole thing's cancelled. So it's just like totally new

SPEAKER_64: mechanism that was never possible before. So I take a Bitcoin. Yep.

SPEAKER_49: Are you doing it on Ethereum? But yeah, yeah, okay. Or so I yeah, so I take this, these tokens. And then I go want to do something with them. Yep. But it has to be on the same

SPEAKER_116: blockchain. So I'm sorry, the same same block. So within like 14 seconds, like you can do a

SPEAKER_53: transactions and you have this smart contract system where you can go interact with a bunch of other smart contracts, and Ethereum runs the calculation. And if it's like, oh, you know, you actually lost money, we're not going to let you do it. But if you actually made money, and you can return the money, we'll let you do that million dollar loan, right? So that's super cool. Yeah, super cool, right?

SPEAKER_49: Huh. So it's kind of like instead of a loan shark, I can borrow from somebody else, an individual or

SPEAKER_108: some pool of capital. And but I have to prove first that what I'm going to use it for makes sense,

SPEAKER_53: and I can return it. No, yes. And basically, it's a zero risk way of lending out money, I can lend out money and be guaranteed that there's no risk, I'm definitely going to get it back. Huh, interesting. Almost seems too good to be true. Yeah, it's super I mean, you can only you you have to use it in that timeframe and prove that you can you can return what would be an example of the use I would use? You could. So for example, um, let's say you want to there's a there's this this whole concept of smart contracts on Ethereum, where you say, I'm going to go and I'm going to invest in this other thing. And I know in this timeframe, I can look at the code and say, I'll,

SPEAKER_131: I'll take this money and I'll lend it out at a higher yield. And that person will return it back to me. And then I'll arbitrage that profit. And then I can pay it back.

SPEAKER_64: Got it. Fascinating. Yeah, it sounds incredibly interesting. And also phenomenally dangerous.

SPEAKER_34: Be careful with these. I had somebody tell me like, you should just buy all this. And then you can loan out your Bitcoin and get 2% a week on it or 5% a week on it. People are doing that right now.

SPEAKER_46: They're getting loans against Bitcoin and making 2%. Have you done that?

SPEAKER_53: Um, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of companies that do this. I've actually done a little bit of this. I did it differently where you lock up your stable coin, and then they give you interest on it or you lock

SPEAKER_113: up your crypto and do get interest on that. But the interest is otherworldly. It's not connected

SPEAKER_49: to what you see in the real world. What do you mean by real world? Fiat world. Oh, yeah, because

SPEAKER_53: the banks eat all that profit. Like they make eight, 9%. But they give you 0.01%, right? So like, so this is like, you're actually getting the full the full opportunity. Yeah, I find those kind of

SPEAKER_49: things super interesting. Yeah. Um, the, the ability to, I mean, it's almost like what we saw with, uh, micro loans and some of that other stuff, except you don't need to actually have, um, a defined process. You could, people could be loaning the money to people based on some other information

SPEAKER_67: on the web that could be put into a smart contract. Exactly. Right. And you're cutting out of the person, the age of the person, how much holdings they have, right? Exactly. And you're cutting out this big,

SPEAKER_53: fat middleman that that's taking all the fees that you, you should be getting as interest.

SPEAKER_215: All right. Listen, continued success. This has been amazing. Thank you.

SPEAKER_34: Uh, it's super, uh, inspiring and scary and, uh, all at the same time. Uh, and I think it's, it's great that you're building the AWS, uh, for blockchain. And I, I hope, uh, that all this craziness on the fringes gets sorted out so that people can feel safer. And I think, you know, building really great applications on stable infrastructure. That's a big part of this process. So, uh, thanks for coming on the pod and we'll talk to you soon. You're hiring. I saw on your LinkedIn for a gazillion positions. Cause you just, you've raised like a hundred million.

SPEAKER_57: So yeah. And we're only 25 people right now. So wow. And all, all basically all engineers,

SPEAKER_302: we have no kind of go to market stuff. So we're hiring people, $500 million valuation or so.

SPEAKER_113: Yeah. And we've grown very, we announced that for every injured, everybody on the team is worth,

SPEAKER_155: $10 million. And we've, uh, we've actually, we announced around, we've, we've announced around

SPEAKER_131: four weeks ago. We've grown very significantly. We've grown by an order of magnitude since then.

SPEAKER_79: So it's been very crazy. Are there enough crypto, uh, developers out there, or do you just hire great developers and then train them up on crypto? Actually, most of our engineering team is people

SPEAKER_53: who weren't in crypto. Um, but we're like the best of the best from like Stanford and Facebook and

SPEAKER_34: Google. And then how long does it take somebody who's a reasonably good developer? Let's say a seven or eight out of 10 in terms of experience, maybe four or five years experience coding to actually be a great country, a good solid contributor to crypto and be able to build crypto

SPEAKER_113: apps. Uh, I don't know. Cause everyone on our team is like 11 out of 10, but I don't say that,

SPEAKER_53: I don't say that in jest. It's literally like if their references aren't, this is one of the two best people I've ever met. That being said, I think, you know, if you want to build a crypto app, it's pretty easy to pick up. Um, you know, you could spend a week or two and be able to build

SPEAKER_49: something pretty reasonable. Oh, okay. Um, it does seem like crypto developers and that and blockchain developers plus AI, uh, developers, machine learning developers are the two just most sought after, but it's pretty crazy out there. Yeah, listen, continued success. If people want a job, go to

SPEAKER_51: alchemy.com slash jobs or jobs.alchemy.com or something careers. Where is it? Just go to alchemy.com.

SPEAKER_147: There's a link. Okay. Go to alchemy.com and look for the careers link. Yeah. Continued success. And we'll see you all next time on this week in service. Bye. Bye.