Hello, again, my friends and welcome to Jorgensen. Soundbox. The sandbox of sounds is show is in part of channel for my curiosity. And today. We're going to explore a little bit deeper into web 3. We're going to find new ways to invest in the web three world and check out the exciting new ecosystem of polka dot today. My guest is Dan Reeser.
Dan joined the crypto World about three years ago instead of going to get his MBA and he's now the VP of growth for Okawa the D Phi Network launching soon on the podcast. The polkadot blockchain platform and don't worry. All of those words will get explained in this podcast shortly. It might sound a bit like I didn't do research, but what actually happened here.
Is I artfully. Preserved my ignorance. So as to more accurately represent an audience unfamiliar with polka dot. Yes. In these conversations. I try to bring all of us, myself included from Basics, through applications of the blockchain and help us all. See around the next few Corners that we're going to go through together over the next decade. So stay tuned and we're going to talk about Dan's path to working in crypto. What polkadot is
Where it came from, why it's different from Bitcoin and etherium, and we'll end with how crypto can get applied to benefiting normal. People just average internet users without having to learn a ton of new crazy things. Please enjoy this. Conversation arriving at your ears in 3 2 1.
You Dan. Thanks so much for taking the time. I'm very excited to have you here to teach me all the things about polkadot and you and just more about the blockchain in
general.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
I'm a little bummed. We had to reschedule this because I'm quite sure that after we talked, I will immediately go by Dot. And if we had would have done that a week or two ago, as originally planned. I'd have more money than I have now.
Yeah, there's it's still early. So we'll see. Yeah,
it's better. It's been a good few weeks and it would really exciting few weeks for polkadot, which we will we will Super get into hopefully in depth, but I want to start with your story into crypto. I got introduced to you through skyking. It was like the first episode on the podcast and he's like making great use of all of the technology that you're building, but I want to
See how you got here? Because I feel like everybody's got their own story.
Yeah, it's like crazy kind of path over the last. So the crypto part of my career has been three and a half years. I'm originally from Indiana and actually met Sky, who you just mentioned at my first company that I worked for, which was Eli Lilly. So I started out, I'm in Pharmaceuticals and was there doing mostly marketing brand marketing for four years total, but when I was at, I went to, Indiana.
University in Bloomington, and I did a one-year master's program and information systems. And I remember having this I had a class about, I think it was an information security class. And we went into this topic about like the tour Onion Browser and like the Deep Web and Bitcoin. And I was just kind of mind-blowing by everything and went home. I remember going into like into the the Deep Web and seeing all this crazy stuff in them.
I started doing a head like only I think three credit hours. So I started taking these Bitcoin courses with the Andreas Antonopoulos guy, who's one of the originals? And I didn't have any money back then to invest, unfortunately, but still, it was like just thought it was really cool. So kept following crypto as a kind of a hobby during that pharmaceutical work to learned a lot there, but it wasn't what I like super passionate about. So as cited in
And teen after taking the GMAT like three times was going to get my
MBA. Yeah,
and I had about six months off. So I left Eli Lilly. I traveled for a few months which included a trip to Miami to the North American Bitcoin conference. And my goal is like I just went there alone and I'm just like, I'm just going to go there and get thrown into this and try to find an internship before I went to the NBA.
So I did exactly that. I went and got an internship with one chain, which was a like an interoperability platform back in 2018. And that that's what took me from Indiana to Austin. So he drove to Austin was planning on. I rented this like long-term Airbnb and was planning on living there for two or three months and then going to school and a lot of stuff happened and I end up getting like, much more responsibility than I expected and that internship and
They gave me a job offer out of nowhere and we're like, we don't like, you don't need to get your MBA, stay in crypto. You won't regret it. So it was a very difficult after how much work I did to really get into these mbas. And yeah, it was unbelievable, but I ended up doing it was actually not that hard of a decision because I was taking out two hundred thousand dollars in loans to go to school. So it's like, do I do a job that I might want after school or do I just
I'll stay here. So yeah, and it long story short. I I went there did Led their marketing for a year and a half and then started looking elsewhere. As far as they were. I saw kind of the tech going and realizing more and more, just how important the quality of the tech was. So that's what got me looking at, how could a DOT, which we can go into a little bit and the organization behind polka dot was webs refoundation. So
I was looking at a couple other jobs ended up going to Berlin for web three Summit, which is this epic crypto conference in Berlin and went there met at the team, ended up finalizing that and went on their full-time. To do kind of growth and Community for web 3 Foundation / polka dot. So, we launched polka dot while I was there. We also launched another Network called kusama.
And that was another year and a half and then the way polka dots setup is polka dots like this base layer infrastructure. That connects a bunch of blockchains on top of
it. So yeah, we're going to go real deep into into into polkadot. Yeah. So what I want to do like to kind of quick checks on your on your story before we go in. So I think a lot of people who are kind of like hovering around crypto and watching it are still a little unsure of like how
Get in, you know, listen to podcast read blog post sign up for newsletters. It sounds like maybe your gateway was just like I just said you alone went to a conference and everything snowballed out of there. Like do you recommend that for people of just like to show up at a conference and the world will like suck you down the rabbit
hole?
Yeah, it's a combination of things. Conferences are Hit or Miss. If you want to work in crypto, there are so many ways to get to get involved like for example, even at a college where I am right now, which is built on polka dot get into that. We've hired at least we've hired one guy who I knew because he was a polkadot Ambassador, which is an unpaid kind of volunteer.
We just like, get involved in an offer whatever skills. You have another guy we hired Brett. First one is Josh, then we hire Brett and Brett did a polkadot hackathon and just killed it. But we just, we DM them on Discord. He was a, a non guy named bread. He had like a cat with a space suit on and we just that is the end of an ass. Like what a story was turns out. He was a 22 year old kid. Who just graduated from college and buffalo.
Low, and was looking for a job and just did this hackathon for the hell of it. And just, he was in the top 10 out of like, I think a thousand people, so we ended up hiring him and now, he's a critical member of our team. So, that's a couple examples. But what I'm trying to say is that you, you can go to just find something that interests you and go and just offer even free work or dislike getting involved in whatever way you can. And once you prove your value, then it's pretty easy to get.
Get hired. Once you once you do that, but yeah to your point conferences are a good way. There's a lot of good conferences in the u.s. There's definitely some money in Europe and in Asia to so good way to meet people in person. But nowadays you don't really need to meet people in person, but it always helps to just do that in
a huge variety of ways to contribute to definitely not. It's not like designer engineer get the fuck out. It's very there's a lot of work to do.
You in a lot of different disciplines at all skills are
necessary. Yeah, definitely not. I mean, Engineers are in high demand, but like I came from marketing and I still it's very hard to understand like the Deep technical stuff like
shakes and compare it. Yeah, like I,
it's, I compare it to my previous job, like, in Pharmaceuticals. I was marketing products that I had. Of course, no idea how the chemistry works in the back end with those. The Chemists in the
Who invented these molecules same thing and bartenders these brilliant Engineers building these blockchain protocols that I can't come close to fully grasping. But if you can understand how it works at the basic level, and then help communicate that in a way that people can understand. And you've done done most of the job.
Yeah. I think this is just a stage that we were at is like attracts the people who Talk technical details and talk. Jargon, and one of the things I really enjoy about that is, like, there's so much value to be
Dated just by understanding at a very high level. Like what does this technology make possible and like sharing that with people, it is helping them start to imagine the future. You know, this is one of those things in like technology. That's not go up on us, like nobody was thinking about like, oh, it'll be cool when that happens. It just happened. You know, there's always like we don't have a Sci-Fi about the blockchain. So it's just connecting all those dots.
Yeah exactly. It's it's just like the internet we're building or building protocols and
Base layer of platforms that are going to enable things that we can't even come close to predicting. So just gonna be fun to watch it.
Develop. Yeah, so, okay. So let's do, let's talk about the origin of polka dot and proud. Maybe start with Gavin wood.
Yeah. Yeah. And even going back a little further that the origin of the etherium, which led to the origin of polka dot. So I mean even yeah, so everyone I'm sure knows Bitcoin. That got
Everything started and then the theorem came along and added programmability or smart contracts. To be able to essentially program money or build applications on these decentralized systems. And by decentralized, we essentially mean that it's built on a tech on a technology stack that isn't owned by a company like Facebook or Apple or Google where you could just go to their servers and shut them down or they could go to your account and change your name on Facebook.
This is being built on a Global Network of servers or computers that are helping run this distributed Network. It's it's really fascinating. What's what's happening with? This
is a good analogy email like nobody can shut down email if they wanted to and in the same way, you know, etherium is like this open protocol for computing
well in a way, but yeah, so the email protocol that allows like Gmail to work.
Is like SMTP but Google owns our email account. So if they wanted to delete all the my emails, they can. Because they own, they own that server that it's stored on. I guess it would be like if as if imagine like an email server that you run yourself and your house and you're the only one who has access to those emails that's kind of more like what's being built now is because you actually own your your data and information on these
He's blockchains.
Okay. Okay. So so theorems Innovation on top of Bitcoin was to basically add a programming language so that it can facilitate all of these apps with smart contracts and do a lot more than just transfer value back and forth. So what is the, what is polkadot build on top of or adapt? The theory of it, too?
Yeah, so so vitalic uterine was the one who wrote the white paper originally for etherium. And then he found another guy named Gavin wood who was a coder. So Gavin actually coated etherium based on what vitalic had written up in the white paper. He actually said that he built in three weeks, which is pretty unbelievable. The first version be carryin. So Gavin and the team built and launched the etherium. He also created solidity.
Programming language, which is still used for building on these applications on a theorem but started to realize that there is going to be number one scalability issues. So this is back in like 2015, 2016 and being the kind of brilliant Visionary that he is looking forward to today where we are. And some people may have heard about these gas or transaction fee issues that he theorems. Having it's so expensive to do anything, but he predicted that back. Back in 2016.
In and kind of went his own way and built polkadot to help solve some of these problems including scalability. So the other the other major challenge at that polkadot is seeking to solve is you can kind of compare it to the Internet. So we have there's actually going back to that class. I had an in college. There's actually physical wires that go under the ocean that connects the u.s. To Europe for the internet and these
Internet systems in the US and Europe can obviously work together. You can send an email overseas and seconds. But what the where the blockchain ecosystem is still to a certain extent is all these networks are kind of these isolated regions or islands that aren't connected. So you can't send information or value between these chains or these block chains of these networks. We have to get to the point where we have the same thing as the global energy.
Net, where everything is completely connected and interoperable. And that's, that's one of the biggest things that polka-dots also seeking to to change where it's not just one network, or one blockchain. What polkadot is, is this whole universe of up to a hundred connected Block, Chain networks? So they're all kind of plugging into this core to the network and through that, they get kind of out-of-the-box, the ability to communicate with any other network. That's
To poke it up.
Okay, probably brief recap and then we'll continue. So, Gavin would incredibly instrumental in the founding of a theory. I'm basically built the whole first thing and the infinite machine is a book by Camilla Russo. There's like a hilarious account of this whole thing because it's an incredible drama with the early team and all of the innovations that went into creating etherium, like legal, and Technical and Community. And all of it is, it's truly an amazing story.
And Gavin features kind of prominently in that obviously, so I definitely see the hydrogen the problem because you should have seen my face the first time, I realize you can't swap Bitcoin for aetherium because those are two different chains and it just like, I'm just like sitting there trying to figure out how to do this and didn't even occur to me that this is a problem, which sounds dumb to anybody more than three months into really understanding crypto. But for most people who are new to the space, I think
You know, it's not obvious necessarily when you come from an internet that's already interoperable that these chains are actually distinct networks and you have to go through kind of clumsy Bridges to go from one network to the other. So the interoperability problem is, is I've definitely identify with and polka dots solution. At least as I understand it. And please, correct or expand me here, is that there's basically, they build a
All technology that they expect all other people to build their blockchains on top
of.
Exactly. Yeah, so just like, Gavin, build solidity for aetherium. He built this thing called substrate, which is like a blockchain development framework for polkadot. So it's basically like a framework for you to essentially choose from a menu of different components that you would want to build into a blockchain to customize it for a specific purpose. So, another thing about polkadot is it's kind of a bet on customization.
Of these networks instead of generalization, because right now you theorem got so big. There's so much great work that's been done there. But there's everything from nft use to finance to gaming Insurance. Everything's trying to be built in the same generic Block Chain, whereas with substrate, you can basically spin up your own chain and customize it for whatever you want to focus on. So, if you're a gaming company or gaming application, you could build a block.
Gene that is optimized. First. Let's say speed instead of optimizing for things like security because it's a game. Sure. So this this is kind of what substrate enabled is the ability to for people to spin up their own networks.
Okay. So
other
other approaches to solving that problem
are
something like Thor chain, right? Which is trying. So they are taking like existing blockchains like Bitcoin and aetherium.
Can trying to build a layer 0, I guess is, is that the term Port like below them to build almost a substrate, or a create interoperability between existing chains? Is that is that also polka-dots approach or these like separate approaches to the same problem. One is about polka dots, is about building a new set of blockchains around this, this new sort of central substrate versus coming and adding something.
Saying that has to work with everything, do the existing block
chains?
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not an expert in Thor chain, but even the way you described it. So, since it's working with existing Network. So, Bitcoin etherium. These are these are, these are previously existing networks that. It's trying to connect and some sort of defy decentralized, Finance set up with polka dot. It's more of these are, these are all block chains that are kind of natively built with similar technology, instead of completely different.
Tech and then for working with existing networks, like Bitcoin like etherium, there will be Bridges to those. So it's not only polka dot only isolated to that, but there will be the ability to bridge two things like Bitcoin, ethereum from polkadot as well. Okay,
so chains can like move on to polkadot. It's not like, they have to have been started there
already.
Through Bridges. You can if you were built with something besides substrate, but most of the teams that are going to be launching on on polkadot built with the framework, like, basically, for polkadot.
So castrate. Okay. Where did the name polkadot come from? It is by far the cutest blockchain name. I feel like everything else is like a valet Edge Tara
exactly. Yeah.
Actually, that's a story that even the name of polka dot me. Kusama. I don't know too. Well, part of it was probably like with polka dot. It's like connecting the dots and that's probably maybe part of where the name came from. Kusama is actually a good much cooler name that the like polka dots kind of sister Network because there's an artist named yayoi. Kusama from Japan. Super famous.
Emily. And all of her artwork is done with polka dots. So the name of that kind of inspired the naming for kusama Network, which is just kind of cool.
What is what is kusama do? What is this sister Network?
Yeah. This is actually a whole nother rabbit that
maybe I shouldn't have a sudden.
It's I can explain it in a simple way. From the traditional, the traditional path for these software developers is they build
Like let's say, an application on a test network, with no money. No value on it. They launched it on the main Network and there's a lot of times like unpredictable things that go wrong when it goes to the main Network. For when money is involved, sure. They could never have predicted on
the test. Net. Yeah, just the blockchain version of it worked on local, but now I have to push to production. Exactly. Yeah.
So kasama is a step in between test net and Main that it's like an experimental network with real value on it. So these, it's a, this
Model that Gavin and them created where you go from test that touka-sama and then kusama, there's real value there. So you can make sure things don't go wrong. But the value is about 10 times less than that of polka dot. So by the time, something makes it to the third step and on polkadot, it's nearly perfect. And then kind of battle tested quite a bit.
So yeah, non-catastrophic bugs uneconomic, but kusama is not something that necessarily like consumers need to know where interact with they would be
Some will be but polka dot will always be kind of the primary
Network. Okay. What is the what is the interface with polka dots like today? Where where are we at? And like people are starting to use it and apps are starting to launch on it.
Yeah, so polka dot has been launched enough for a little over a year and what has been live so far is, is mostly the there's governance. So the decision-making for the future of the network is actually all decided what we call on chain or it's voted on using an actually tracked like through the actual Block Chain instead of the different, the different method is off chain governance, which is
Essentially just people arguing in chat rooms and like three people who have access to the code can actually make the change. So on chain governance is definitely where the future is going to be. That's one thing polka dot also has something called staking so you can essentially like lock up your dot tokens and earn about 12 to 15 percent on yield on that because you're essentially helping to provide additional security to the
Work by blocking those, those dot tokens. So that's been going on for the past year or so, but polkadot on its own is nothing without these blockchains that it's connecting and we call these blockchains pair of chains, but these there has been no blockchain launched on polka dot yet. And that's what about to happen, actually on Thursday this week. So on November 11th, the auctions begin
And that is a whole the whole new kind of method for launching startups in my community. Backed launches for startups that are it's super interesting and maybe we can get into that.
Yeah. Yeah, that's well. What an amazing moment to be having this conversation like the soft launch of. So tell me about the yeah. What is the auction mechanism
for? Yeah. Yeah. So if people are aware of what,
Been with these initial coin offerings or icos that happened on ethereum and several other blockchains back mostly like 2017. 2018. It was an exchange of value. So I would send for example, ethereum to an address God knows where and then I would just pray that that team that actually send me something back in the term. Yeah. That was. That was a nice co and a lot of times, it ended poorly. A lot of times, the team could just get there, collect the eith and, you know, they had no
An ability for actually delivering on what they were promising.
And even even well, intentioned teams. There was just like, buggy clumsy implementations of icos and some of them were like, oh, we're going to collect ten million dollars, but didn't cap it. And so, they ended up collecting like, 80 million dollars of eith on accident. And I'm like, trying to figure out how to get it back and then, or their account got hacked right after they. Yeah, there's a ton of those stories in the infinite machine to and there are yeah, they're wild. So I definitely understand the need for an evolution in that.
That mechanism. Yeah,
so that context is important because that's kind of the learnings from, that are kind of what led to to these what are called pair of chain slot auctions. So, I mentioned that these block chains that are launching on polkadot or called pair of jeans and they each have a slot in the network. It's like a parking spot, and these roll out one at a time. So there will be up to a hundred, blockchains connecting the polkadot, but we're about to start this auction to
To basically earn the right to launch in slot. Number 1, on polka dot. So there's a bunch of teams lined up like ready to go and they want to launch on polkadot. And now it's just a matter of who can gather the most amount of dot because Dad is required. The polkadot token is required to bid. In the auction. Whoever has the highest bid and auction, number one, after seven days, when's the auction and then earns the right to launch on polka dot. So this is a kind of a take on ice.
He owes because it forces teams like us to first of all to there's a lot of skin in the game, a lot of work that's required to launch instead of an icy. Oh, it's it was very easy to just spin up a website and just and collect money. The other the other aspect is this is not just the team's bidding with their own dot. What happens is Imagine just to make a comparison to the Real World. Imagine in a
auction for a house, you go to the auction with your own checkbook. And if, if it reaches a point where you don't have the money to afford that then you're out of the auction as an individual, but imagine coming to the same option with crowdfunded funds, from your family, friends neighbors, who ever wanted to get involved. You have a way more competitive bid in that auction to win that house. The same thing happens in these auctions for these teams that when I launched on polka dot, they're not going to go to the auction with their own Dot.
You are going to do something called a crowd loan and they will get all this data from the community, all over the world who agreed to basically loan them there dot in return for that. Networks token. So, every pair of chain that's launching has their own cryptocurrency. That's required to, you know, do transaction fees on the network. In order to operate these applications that are being built and several other things, but just most basic is transactions. He's
okay. All right.
You either questions or clarifications on that one. I think dot is the native token for polkadot and, and the like sort of medium of exchange for all the stuff that goes on here. I think it's also I think we're saying. So your context in this ecosystem is as a comma, one of the companies bidding on that first spot. Exactly. So you are that, you are building a company essentially or a network or a like
I don't know how you would identify it, network-to-network. Okay. To build on polkadot. And so you're like trying to win this auction so that you can be the first to launch your network. I poke it up
exactly and how does okay. So how does
the network? I want to come back to the the auction because there's definitely some
Things that I want to explore there because it's a very interesting mechanism. But what is the, what is the difference in identification of you as a network versus you as a company?
Well, yeah, that's that's something that is the case, really in most crypto project. So a company is a centralized entity that maybe has to register and Delaware or
Anywhere, you know, in the world a network, there's a core team of four Founders. And then there's people like me who are kind of core contributors to the network. But as soon as we launch a Kala on polkadot, it will be just like you said, with you theorem and infinite machine. These are unstoppable, decentralized networks. That can't be shut down. This is so we it's not a company. It's it's a network. It's a platform that is open. The code is open source.
You can build applications on it. And there's no one place. It's not like it's registered in Delaware. It's a network operated by people all over the
world. Okay, and with varying degrees of involvement to, right? You'll remain a core contributor. There's people who are sort of, I don't know, freelance, or independent periodic contributors, and there's people who are extremely, what part-time probably or ambassadors or something like that.
Yeah, exactly as a wide range of
Of people contributing. Yeah.
Okay. Would you just sing wish this from a dow or do you think this is like Network and do a sort of someone this time in this context?
So just, I guess the confusing and more. There's a damage, Bring it on, Bring it on. So the colour has a dow built into the network. Okay, which is pretty, pretty fascinating. And that's already the Dow has already holding like now probably over 80 million.
Hours in Dot and that allows the network itself to fund development, Security, even marketing if it's voted on by all the ACA token, holders and governance decision. So it's essentially like a, I don't know, like a treasury for the network itself to fund its own growth. So, that's the Dow aspect and the governance is similar to dowse to,
okay, so the dial lives, within the network and supports its growth.
But you work for the network, not necessarily the Dow. So that was like a small, like, I don't know, counsel or something within, yeah. Okay. Okay. Alright. My brain is scrambled egg on this topic. Will, let's go back to the back to the auction. Yeah. So so how does a Kala function like approach, you know, you've got an auction in a week or in a few days. How long have you been preparing for this? Like, what is the Playbook look like, and what happens?
Ins sort of, if you win, are you just like, how was the auction mechanism work? What happens if you win, like, what are you giving and what are you getting, talk me through what happens.
This offense, the the idea around the crowd loan. So, to take it back to that example, I gave where you're basically crowdfunding money together the same thing happens. Here. We will be very soon. And I think when this when this podcast comes out, this will already have been open.
But it's the scroll down, we'll be open and we will basically be a caller will be able to accept dot contributions from anywhere. Anyone in the world. They're agreeing to lock their dot for two years, which is the duration of this lease to launch on polka dot. But in return they get a CA which is a columnist open. So that's like the, the trade-off. But then, the reason why this is a better take on ico's is that it's called a crowd loan because after two years.
All that original dot contribution is returned automatically. So you get your dog back and you keep whatever ACA or any other networks token that you got when they launched. So that's how the crowds on works and that's how we get enough dot to be competitive in that auction. So
interesting. So this is a, this is a popularity contest that you're in, or you're collecting your collecting Dot from the polkadot community. So if I own 10. You really want me to stay.
You so that I can lock us out and buy 10. With you for two years. You give me some ACA tokens for the privilege of me giving you my DOT and then in two years I get my DOT back and I get to keep the ACA that you gave me in my risk exposure. There is that is what the price of both of. Those things goes way down. What happens if somebody gives you their Dot and then you don't win. The, is it conditional on you winning the auction? Exactly? Okay,
if we don't you get, you actually get it.
They come out and bass is a five. So you get five chances to win an auction. If you don't win one of those. Then the dots automatically return to people
interesting that I can only take my $10 with one network. Yeah. Yeah, our auction. Okay. Yep.
There's nothing the other. So I mentioned earlier with the staking so that's taking is incredible like 12 15 %. You have to unstick your dot in order to contribute to these crawl zones. So that is the trade-off as you
You lose the staking rewards. So we USD price decide what the trade-off is is your you're actually betting on the value of the new token, you're getting from that pair of chain that you supported to be higher than the staking returns would have been on those dot. But like you said, you did, if the price of dot in the whole Market came down. You also wouldn't have the liquidity of that dot to, for example, cell if you wanted to, but
But a lot of people like to look at it on the flip side, it's like a forced hold. So you've forced long-term. Hold on a on such a new and high potential asset. So
yeah, I mean, I so I'm, you know, full disclosure and pretty obviously given I think this conversation like a fan of buying tokens and one has an investment opportunity I think and hashtag not Financial advice and be like staking them as just a really a long-term.
Is that a lot of assets that you can buy that, appreciate that then return on top of that appreciation? Yeah, it's a little bit of a double-dip that seems to be almost a given in web 3. That is not at all in, not at all. I given in sort of traditional Finance. Like, if you own an equity, you're not necessarily earning, there's only two steak like that Equity or double dip, it or turn on it.
On like it's either dividends her appreciation. Okay. So who else is bidding on these spots? Like, who are you competitive with these other
networks?
That's kind of, it's an interesting dynamic because we're like friends with a lot of these people, you know, like all these teams. All the early teams. We see each other at conferences in person now online, but at the same time, we all want to launch on polka dot. So there is a little bit of a friendly competition going on, but the cool part is there's there. Everyone's going to get a chance to launch, maybe not first, but everyone will. So we we want everyone to get
Launch. We want as many successful parent chain teams on polkadot as possible because that means will be more successful. But yeah, the the problem or the parroting auctions are, I mean, there's a competition element there. That's, that's kind of fun.
How often do they do
auctions? So these will be doing five in the batch of five and actually back to back to back. So there one week auctions. So, it'll be five weeks in a row. Oh! And then I believe the next five.
I've will potentially start even right after those. So it's going to go through Christmas through New Year and into January and then these things can be stopped and started through the governance system. So maybe they'll take after the first ten. Maybe it'll take a month and just like assess, like make sure everything is stable and then continue scaling up but
so,
So people are going to be locking up there down for two years at a time in these first auctions, but we're about to run two years of potentially, back-to-back-to-back-to-back auctions of a hundred, different pair of chain spots on polka dot. Yeah, if there's
enough teams ready at this point, there's definitely not a hundred teams that are ready to launch entire block chains. It's more like, I don't know, 15
Okay, but I think once that happens and like that is really the ultimate, you know, finish of the polkadot launch has been all these teams start to launch and there will be huge growth in the amount of developers and new interest. So I expect them to grow pretty quickly, over the next couple of years, but I'm sure, it'll take two to three years to scale up to a hundred.
So, are you, is the hundred arbitrary?
It's a theoretical Max based on, like, research from the web three.
One team that's based on the current Tech kind of architecture, that could always change polka dot can be upgraded fairly easily. So there's, there's already Concepts out there about how to scale past a
hundred. Okay. Um, this is a not Financial advice question, but should everybody just be like, buying dots like their lives depended on it.
Yeah. I don't know. I'm definitely very bullish on polkadot and
No one, I guess like a token Amex type of Phenomenon with polka dot. That's interesting is with these with these pair of chain auctions. When we, as a collar launch our entire crowd Zone that we raised is locked away and basically pulled out of the circulating supply of dot. So if we raise, I don't know, 500 million or a billion dollars in this car loan that will all be locked away in pulled out of the dots. Apply, but then every other
Other pair of chain team will be locking more and more that so that puts us apply pressure on on the the circulating Supply. I'm not a finance guy, but it's got to have some kind of an impact on on the token.
And I mean the market cap of polka dot today is we're talking is like fifty eight billion and
Is it? I don't know if it's game. Theoretically smart to name. Like, what is what do you think your bid size will come in at?
Well, the only data we have to make a guess this from kusama because as I mentioned, all this stuff that we're doing in polka-dots already been done once. So, we we actually won the first auction on kusama about three months ago. And in that one, we raised five percent of the entire KSM Supply in our one problem. So shit. If we do that on polkadot, it would be I think, over 2 or
Billion. Yeah, I don't I I personally don't think that that would be very difficult to do but there's a chance that it could be, it could be, you know, pretty high.
Yeah. Okay. So that seems like a appropriate segue to actually explain. What a Kala is.
Yeah, so I guess going back to the discussion around like customization instead of generalization.
On a Kala is a entire Block Chain built customized for decentralized finance. So we will have this whole kind of ecosystem. You can we sometimes sometimes refer to it as like the app store for finance. Imagine like you got the app store. You've got all these apps like building on this platform that Apple provided in that case. It's a it's a like a web to centralize thing. But in this case it's a it's a decentralized platform, but you'll have all these Finance applications.
Building in this ecosystem where this economy that all can work together and what they're building on the blockchain is able to be customized specifically for defy. So some of the more prominent products in these Dairy, mm ecosystem. You you have to have a stable coin for all these products to build around and with everything going on in like regulatory environment right now around US dollar back stable.
Coins. It's very risky because there's so much risk of, you know, Central authorities, you know, dabbling with your stable coin, which is very risky for building defy products around products that are centralized by Nature.
It is only funny to watch. Everybody. Yell about like inflation is coming. You have to buy crypto and then everybody in the crypto World, pegging the stable, they're stable coins to the u.s. Dollar exactly. It's like Okay.
So we've one of the products we built a similar to
But maker thou built for its area, which is called Dai Dai and we have built the ecology Feller a USD as a decentralized stable coin. So not backed by real dollars. It's back to collateralized by crypto assets like Bitcoin, etherium Dot and others. So this is what the whole ecosystem is going to build around and that that stable corn is built into our Block Chain itself. So anyone building applications on a colic and kind of natively out.
The Box leverage that we've also built a decent decentralized exchange into the chain. So imagine like, you know, swab being built into theorem is blockchain and then anyone building on the theorem being able to Leverage The liquidity of that, that exchange out of the box. And the last thing we mentioned earlier, we were talking about staking and when you stake dot, you have to lock the dot away and it's essentially useless besides the yield that it's getting the 12 to
Percent. But we've actually built a liquid staking derivative. So you can stake your Dot and get this l dot, which is a liquid dot that's liquid. And you can go use that for additional yield and you know, defy applications and what have you. So those are the three kind of core products built into a call and kind of what make it a decentralized finance focused blockchain. And then the other just key thing to mention is that there's any theorem virtual machine and evm, which is
essentially like a place for onboarding, etherium teams who have already built an application and spent all this time building for etherium. We give them kind of that same environment. So it's very easy to just take that and launch it on on a Kala and polka dot more. Broadly. So that's that's kind of a Colour in a
nutshell. Okay. That was, that was maybe a little too master's degree and not enough High School cafeteria for this particular podcast, so,
What is the is a colleague going to be used as the intent that I call is used directly by consumers or okay. Okay, so that's so there's all have like a wallet with a Colour or a wallet with polka dot or both
as a polka dot wallet. That works with every block chain that will connect to it. Got oh, it's like multi chain, but I think even I think even more, interestingly, you'll have consumers and these are defy users.
So they're pretty, you know, entrenched in crypto. If they using some of the stuff, especially like these staking things that I'm talking about, but the consumers that I'm most excited about interacting with are actually consumers in non crypto applications, that will be unknowingly benefiting from crypto. So when I give an example of that, there's a company in New York City called current who I didn't know about.
Until I started work, we started working with them current.com is a Neo bank or a fin tech company with about 3 million customers in the US. And they have this customer base of people who are kind of newer to the financial system and they're using current for pretty much just a basic savings account. So they are in like 0.5%, They have their app on their phone. They do. They contribute like 50 bucks a month and they're good, but current came to us and
Like hey, we've been watching everything in crypto for like six years. We've been watching the launch of a Kala and polkadot and we want to build a tool with you guys so that we can kind of connect our fintech application to your decentralized Finance, ecosystem, or economy and provide, the yield that you're able to generate in this crypto world to our users on current. So what it could look like in the details of what it's kind of called and branded haven't been finalized.
Just as an example. I could open up my current up one day and is the pop-up comes up and says, would you like to sign up for current yield? And maybe it's 3% or 4%, instead of 0.5 percent. But those dollars are actually flowing out of currents bank account into a, what we call an on off ramp, which basically converts US dollars to crypto, that will go into a Colour and earn yield and all these different things that probably too complicated to talk about. But we can earn like,
Twelve fifteen percent in some cases. This will then be able to be sold or liquidated and sent back through that on off ramp into u.s. Dollars and then distributed to current.com customers. So they're earning this, you know, three four percent yield from D5, but they don't have to use all these complicated tools and worry about all these passwords and stuff. So super exciting for me to bring, you know, crypto to the masses in a way. That's very user-friendly.
And something that they're already used to using.
Yeah, and so that's all built on Okawa, correct. Yeah, we'll be that. That's a super exciting vision and something that I'm really curious about seeing how this unfolds right? Like how much of web 3 is going to force is going to be like, you know, the strong form where everybody's got a wallet and everybody's got their private keys. And we all have to go through this painful like process of onboarding and understanding how all these new things work and waiting for.
Anne's actions to clear and it's just a whole new world of things to learn and how much will will like web to interfaces. I guess just kind of learn to build on top of web, three infrastructure and bring some of those like benefits to people without them even really realizing what's going on in the back, end deal, that those strong Vision on that.
I just think that. Yeah, this one example is a perfect, you know, example of where things are headed because for people like my parents and my family even like all of my friends who aren't crypto people. Like it's just way too difficult for people to wrap their head around how all this works. If you can just somehow bring the benefits of crypto which are for me better ways of earning more, more yield on things like,
A dollar and I have, I mean, to be honest, like very little and Banks anymore. Like, if I can hold a stable client in say, block five four, eight percent or anchor protocol on Terra for 20%, Why would I be holding money in the bank? So this is where it's really exciting to me to bring those benefits to existing platform. So, think about like these fintech companies Banks, you know, the websites and apps that everyone already
Eddie is used to using but being able to bring those benefits to those to those
applications. Yeah, I think that's super super exciting and I hope it can. I do hope it can happen without having on board the whole world into wallets and all of the confusing like micro tragedies that can happen when when everyone is like individually responsible for everything. Like there's a there's a good reason why we have some Central Authority around a lot of this stuff like
You know, how often I fucking have to reset my password? Like exactly. I don't know that. I want to be the only one with one key to my whole net worth like there's some some figure some stuff out there and I think we can get the best of both worlds. So there's a reason very cool.
Yeah. There's a reason why coinbase was the first huge crypto IPO because look at look what they do. You have a username and your password and people are much more comfortable.
Able trusting trusting coinbase for better or worse, but that's what people are used to. And that's what most people prefer inside with how many people
have lost their keys, you know, and like plenty of people, I know who are early to crypto, and just threw away a hard drive, or lost their private keys or whatever it like. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not as sure as some of the zealots that decentralization is like the killer app and value proposition of a lot of this stuff actually understand the benefits of
For sure. And you know the increasing the reason to pay attention to it, but I don't think it's obvious that like, that should be everyone's number one variable to consider when they're making a decision about an app or a purchase or currency or something. So, there's a little bit, a little bit back to polka dot. But what has to happen for polkadot to succeed in like the broader crypto ecosystem. Like, is it? How does it sit with respect to?
Like the ethereum ecosystem or the Bitcoin ecosystem. Like there's a lot of dogmatism around, you know, chains or networks. And it's really unclear to me how that all unfolds and I think polka dots really interesting kind of new newcomer to that space and just like, how do you see those all interacting? Yeah.
I just think that we're still pretty early on in the evolution of this new.
Industry. And what's happening now is there's just so much more openness to all these different teams and blockchains and ecosystems working together. So that's really what polka dots built for is to connect all these networks and we will like I mentioned be bridging to existing networks like Bitcoin etherium, even Tara Salon a lot of these up-and-coming blockchain. So I think if you fast-forward like two three years
We're all going to be around still. I think all this stuff will be growing, your own, your own Community, your own developer Community, your own kind of system, you know, ecosystem of applications and everyone benefits from being connected. So I think down the line, they're just going to be all these different teams building up their own operations, but being able to, you know, send information and value back and forth between a theorem and
Polka dots and connecting. Even when he's to comes out this whole new etherium world connecting ethereum to and polka dot, will be massively, valuable and is almost inevitable. It's going to happen. So I for polkadot to be successful, just going back to your question. A lot of it is around. Just general adoption of the technology. So we there needs to be a lot of focus on making the user experience with the developer experience.
It's very easy, doing things like hackathons is getting growing. The developer communities is probably the most important thing then on my aside I think education is extremely important because like I mentioned like this is all just so Technical and for people to really adopt this, you need to make it, you need to educate people in a way that they can
understand.
Where do you, where do you send people who want to kind of start to self-educate and play around with this kind of stuff?
Most of crypto kind of lives on Twitter. So that's a good place to start by just I mean for General crypto people you can kind of even Google that who to follow but yeah, getting involved in just discussions there. There's plenty of really good YouTube videos for some of these basic concepts if you get into defy, there's there's some really good YouTube channels on like defy decentralized Finance.
Subs. So, yeah, a lot of people use videos and then just kind of, you know, hanging out in these communities like on Twitter and on Discord. Sometimes there's a lot of chatter. So
yeah. Yeah, Discord seems to be the hub for a lot of this stuff too. Like a lot of things come together. Once you start poking around in some of the Discord communities, so and you'll find links to those on most projects Twitter accounts that tends to be my like kind of process.
Even the discords are like a little bit chaos, but you can only find links to all the way, all the docs and people answer your questions and stuff.
I still haven't figured out how to like how to really effectively use Discord because there's if you're in like 10 10 Discord servers, it's impossible to
follow. Yeah. Yeah, it's completely. I feel like I'm going to have a seizure. Every time I open it. Yeah, it's still keep adding different Discord servers and not being able to keep up with all them and I like a tab open with 4,500.
Two notifications or whatever the fuck. Yeah. It's insane. But I think it's it. Is it also really exciting because the stuff is available to everybody and for maybe the first time ever. I like instead of the startups that are going to change the world getting founded in 1845 specific cities and being funded by, you know, a few hundred people with access.
These companies are getting created in discords now by people all over the world and it is a much more meritocratic process of. Like if you can dig into these companies and find out what's going on and develop an opinion about the future and you know, put in ten bucks or a hundred bucks or a thousand bucks into the right projects early on and then and then put your money, your mouth, where your money is and start put it a push in the shoulder against these things and helping them and building them.
You know, almost everybody in the world can be a VC now and can ya, see I start up employee now at, you know, crypto, part of the part of it is Technical and new capabilities, but I think a lot of is also cultural about what's changing. It's really exciting to see
Yeah, there's there's
just I don't think there's ever been an industry that has been so accessible to the general public in terms of like you were mentioning these earlier rounds of funding normally everyone. Kind of you wait for the IPO you by the IPO, but by then you're already buying it, a hundred x what the guy in San Francisco was was investing in the series a for, you know, so it's really cool to see. Of course. There's always going to be Venture Capital Money flowing into these businesses, but
Every day people are now able to kind of you know back these companies right alongside the big BC of big Venture Capital firm. So yeah, it's a pretty interesting phenomenon. It's crypto
and we're still ahead of a lot of Institutions. Like I talked to friends who, you know, run private money and like because of their Charters are not allowed to invest in, you know, speculative assets or they don't know how to custody crypto or something like that. They can only buy, you know, stocks or private companies or equities. And so this is
something where I'm seeing individuals and especially family, offices, really? Like get a huge jump on institutions that's changing and definitely going to change over the next couple of years. I think? But yeah, it's, it is very, very, very exciting.
Sure.
What what I'm not sure is it I mean like there's downsides to all of that too. But I don't know. There's going to be it is a really exciting future and the fact that it's all kind of perfectly liquid and changing all the time. This is just going to be. I think it's easy to underestimate the impact of this. Like I we're coming were coming for a whole nother, new.
Evolution that may actually feel way way bigger impact than web to. So somebody's been in this space for a few years, like let's try to push the timeline of predictions as far out as you can like comfortably speculate and you don't have to be right. But like let's just let's just dream for a minute about what like 10 or 20 years in the future could look like
That's a really tough one at 10, 20 years.
Yeah,
I think it's the equivalent of like trying to predict in 2001, that Amazon will be a trillion dollar company that like search every company on Earth in in, you know, in 20 years, but I'd it's maybe the most fun question to me.
Yeah. I don't know. I actually probably should think about that question even after this, but I think we're the, some of these Trends are going, I guess on the finance and defy side.
I mean 20 years, there could be there could start putting pressure on the even the need for things like banks, with all the stuff being built on a decentralized blockchain or multiple blockchains.
Thanks for becoming irrelevant over time. The other thing that is happening now at which I don't necessarily like the whole metaverse and kind of like this living and living in this virtual world. There's so much money flowing into the metaverse. Now, if you think about like she's VR worlds, I was assigned to another podcast with the, the, the lady from a 16z. And she was talking all about
The metaverse and like just an example. She gave was really interesting. Just a small example of go in this virtual world and you're hanging out with your friends that you may be met on the internet and there is there could be a movie theater in the virtual world and you could actually go to a movie in, hey, you know, eight bucks or 10 bucks to watch that movie in the virtual world and somebody owns that theater in the virtual world. Like that, that one example,
Kind of open my eyes. Like wow, you can literally do almost anything and this met a person in charge for it. And those people will have revenue streams coming from these virtual worlds of people are going to in their living room through VR or through their computers or through their cell phones. So that the reason why I said I don't love it is, it's a little bit. It's just a little bit strange to think of like, hopefully not me but my kids or even their kids like living these lives that are
In, I don't know, and this virtual world. It's a little bit scary, to be honest, but that's definitely kind of where things are going and Tobin kind of sped that up, where everyone's so used to now living online and that not seeing people. But hopefully, there will always be that aspect of reality, which is why, I think AR is, is way cooler than VR because you can kind of blend the Two Worlds.
Yeah. If you want, mosque is right.
That we are living in a simulation. There would be nothing funnier than watching. Everybody's in a simulation, develop their own simulation to, then put themselves in inside the simulation that you created for them.
Exactly. That's 30 or 40 years.
All right. I know you got to go. You got auctions to win. You got networks to launch, treasuries to manage. So I appreciate you taking the time to do this. If you've got any less stuff you want to share with us?
I mean about how to support a Kala in the coming auction or get involved. I'd love to hear it, but I don't want to, I don't want to keep you too long. So I appreciate you taking the
time. Yeah, that's about it. If you, if you're interested in polkadot or Khalid getting involved, even there's the Ambassador programs that you could look into. Yeah, definitely definitely. Get on Twitter. You can follow polkadot and kala my handles stand researcher underscore.
Or I talk a lot about. I should talk about things other than polka dot, but I talked a lot about and yeah, thanks for having me on this has been a lot of fun and hopefully we can do it another time.
Yeah, I appreciate. I'm very excited to see where polkadot is in a year with all these pair of chains launching and, you know, everything that grows on from here. I came in with like extremely little knowledge and feel like I learned a lot today. So I really appreciate you.
Dumbing it down for us. Awesome. There's been talk to you later. Thank you.
I appreciate you hanging out with us today. As always. Thank you for listening today. I encourage you to go play around with some of these tools and Technologies things really start to click together when you actually use them and feel them work with your own hands and eyes and fingers. This is going to be a really important driver of change over the next 10 years or so. And those early to grasp it or at the very least respected will help us all move forward faster and reap the rewards themselves. So
Take a few Quiet Moments for yourself. Breathe the, and be well.
