 And I'll let you guys introduce yourselves to everybody here. Sure. My name is Lillivue. Most recently, I was one of the founders of earn.com, which we sold to Coinbase earlier this year. I've been in the crypto space for a number of years now. And before that did completely different things. But now this is where I spend the majority of my time. Cool. I'm Eli Kudori, the founder of Intuition Machines. And we recently launched a project called Edge Capture, which actually tokenizes human labor for machine learning applications, which now has actually quite a lot of users. Hello, everyone. I'm Rune Christensen. And I am the co-founder and CEO of the Maker-style project. And basically, we are one of the oldest and also one of the most used Ethereum decentralized applications currently running. And we're doing, on one hand, a stable cryptocurrency that's decentralized, and also that is powered by a decentralized credit network all run on smart contracts on Ethereum. Thank you for the money programmable. Haven't we had digital cash before? Why is it different this time around? Eli, do you want to start? Sure. So cryptocurrencies are most often used as sort of an exchange for value. But what they enable that cash does not enable is to actually start moving portions of contract law into the exchange itself so that you now start to enforce programmatically these terms that otherwise would have to be litigated if there was a disagreement. Yeah, I think it's really critical also that this ability to program money and kind of like unlock advanced functionality is something that's available to everyone, right? It's like anyone with a computer, you can actually go on a code advanced smart contracts. OK, so accessibility is one. Moving between projects as well. Lily, what are your thoughts? Well, you know, when I initially heard about Bitcoin a number of years ago, I thought, oh, well, didn't PayPal kind of do that as well? But once you did go to the surface, the way it's implemented is actually really critical. Because even with something like PayPal, it seems like I'm just paying sooner. But in actuality, you essentially have a bank behind the scenes, which is providing that critical clearing settlement function. And what you have with digital currency is because it's truly peer-to-peer payments, you rely on this network of computers, this network, to sort of clear those transactions rather than centralized third party, right? So essentially what it does is it takes that sort of critical function of ensuring you're not double spending your money, which is the most important thing when it comes to money, and sort of redistributing that sort of power back to all of the nodes in a network rather than the center. And that's really what is so critical about blockchain. It really takes sort of the trust and the power that's formerly invested in, you know, typically some central or collection of central parties, redistributes that amongst the participants in a network. And that's really one of the most fundamental things that's happening in blockchain. Absolutely. I do think one of the biggest critical points was our ability to avoid double spending. Outside of the technicals, and I love that you brought up PayPal before, what do cryptocurrencies bring to this ecosystem that the existing financial systems don't already? So I think, again, it's like the really big difference is this accessibility, this equal playing field where everyone has access to the most advanced stuff. So it's like, I think in many cases, a lot of the stuff you do with blockchain is stuff you could do without it. It's just that you cut down the cost, you cut down the barriers to entry. And then there are also some situations where you open up completely novel use cases and completely new forms of transactions. And then just one example is with this, with our system, with the MakerDAO system, we enable anyone, regular people, to get access to essentially a repo desk service. So collateralized loans where you just directly pledge some collateral and then take a loan instantly, without a middleman, without some sort of advanced process. You just use a smart contract directly. So I think there's a number of really interesting new things you can do with it. If you talk about accessibility and inclusion, one of the less talked about features of cryptocurrencies is a very simple one is just that with an internet connection, you can instantly start to get paid. If you have an interconnection, a very simple computer could be a phone. And that's very powerful because when you think about the transactions on the internet, oftentimes we're putting money into services on the internet. It's actually very hard to get paid out, and particularly very hard if you're trying to pay out people in lots of different countries and potentially smaller amounts. And so by decreasing that barrier actually stimulates all sorts of new commerce, that's one. And then another is that it enables things like streaming micropayments. And so for a long time, we've been thinking, why can't a consumer of content pay directly the creator of that content? There have been all these potential solutions that people have thought about over the years in order to do that. And yet again and again, we fall back onto the modernization of the internet, which is really you give your attention in minutes of your time, and then someone pays for advertising and that's kind of the exchange that we've been doing for about 20 years. And so I think that with cryptocurrency, it's maybe a little bit more on the horizon, but we're starting to see some really interesting situations where a lot of interesting experiments where people are starting to find ways to sort of directly clear that commerce. And I think that's going to be pretty interesting. Yeah, I mean effectively what is blockchain, it's just an append-only database, right? So it enables things that reduce trust. It enables things that sort of increase verifiability. But fundamentally, the novel applications are often things that you could have built in some other way. And you're simply replacing a base layer to say, all right, we're going to get new abilities. We're going to get new certainty into the system. And that by itself will actually enable new applications. Got it. And so when you guys are thinking about the horizon 20 years out, are you thinking about cryptocurrencies as an asset class that replaces the existing fiat system? Do you see cryptocurrencies running in parallel with our existing system? Or what does the financial system 20 years out look like? So I think about I segment that by the different types of use cases that I think cryptocurrencies can potentially fall into, right? The original and one of the most popular ones is the sort of non-sovereign monetary story value. In other words, Bitcoin. And then there's been a whole lot of innovation around these distributed computing platforms, Ethereum being the first one, and a lot of work being done in that area. So ultimately, they do use a token. So I guess they all sort of fit into this class of cryptocurrencies, but they're actually wildly different in how they're going to be used, what their purposes are, a number of use cases, which can be built on top of them. And so I think that the case for a sort of non-sovereign monetary story value is a very strong one, right? The simple narrative is digital gold, and I think that's something that just broadly appeals. It makes a lot of sense to people. And in many ways, it's sort of even better at fulfilling the story value goal than even physical goal today. So I think that one is around to stay. And I think that there's probably going to be a number of other applications of cryptocurrency that's probably going to come closer into our everyday lives. But I actually personally think that digital fiat is probably going to be a dominant application, probably within three to five years and beyond then. And so for me personally, I think that as much as there's talk about Bitcoin replacing the international financial system, I think with countries having as strong distribution as they do, and now also the interest in leveraging some of these aspects of cryptocurrency, that that at the end of the day is going to be a dominant part of our experience with cryptocurrency. Yeah, I think it's much more likely that in the next five to 10 years, what you'll see is blockchain technology being deployed within the existing system to make things more efficient where it makes sense. I'm going to say that in 20 years, it's quite plausible that things will be fast enough that we can use these technologies for many more applications. But at least in the short term, what makes sense is typically sort of replacing inefficient processes rather than sort of genuine innovation in financial services. Yeah, I mean, what I found is typically the stuff you want to build with blockchain is very often what's already built. It's just something you can make better, right? Like so you just tag existing systems, existing services in the financial, traditional finance, and then you just create a new version that's built with blockchain that's faster and better and more easily accessible or something like that, right? So with that view, I really think that over 20 years or now what will happen is that to a certain extent, kind of the advanced part of finance and sort of the more centralized part of blockchain will have merged into this like single, just like technologically advanced finance, right? Like where you just use the tools available to make the best products. But I also still do believe that there will be this true crypto asset class forever, right? That will include these like the, just the most, like the biggest and most obvious coins, right? I mean, Bitcoin, obviously, Ethereum and kind of other systems that actually are real, like properly decentralized and properly have sort of a reason to exist as in this like, you know, none, like self-sovereign state, right? Or like purely decentralized blockchain. And ultimately it's probably a lesson like it's not gonna be everything that will be like that, right? And most of the traditional ICOs and all of this stuff we're seeing so much stuff being done right now. A lot of that would actually just fall under traditional finance, I think. And it was, in the end, it's mainly that that's kind of grow and benefit the most from blockchain and this new asset class kind of is just like a curious side effect in a way. I mean, of course, Bitcoin is the first one but it's still that most of what we're seeing being made is really just traditional finance and made better. You guys raised an excellent point that there are different use cases for each cryptocurrency and so they don't follow under one asset class per se because there are different use cases that are going into it. But then the broader question then is to the average non-technical user, how will they be interacting with it day to day? What are the implications of having these different use cases and having some of them fall under traditional finance and others have different use cases? Yeah, so I very strongly believe that as much as possible, blockchain should be made totally invisible, right? Like crypto and blockchain and nobody wants to actually know about like how it works or what it is. They just want their bank to be cheap and fast. And I think that's how it's gonna grow primarily, right? There is, of course, there is this kind of a growing movement of good UX crypto wallets and this kind of stuff and they will definitely, they will become the new type of offering, right? There's also this hybrid like Revolute, for instance. It's like an interesting example of something that's, I mean, I think actually that's a really good example of what the future looks like, right? There's like ultimately the idea of like putting users straight to the blockchain and kind of like have direct access into like unlimited potential of you can do whatever you want with smart contracts. That's like 99% of people are not gonna want that, right? They'll want some simplified, something where the complicated and kind of like the rough edges are hidden and it's really just like you don't even have to, something you don't have to think about, it just works. Yeah, I think as long as you have the requirement that everyone using the system needs to have the level of information security ability of a major bank, it is very difficult to drive adoption. And so the more we can do to make interfaces seamless, to make the on-ramp much simpler, the more adoption will occur. That's part of the reason why I think there's a greater role for actually digital fiat than those of us who've kind of grown up in the industry, you know, originally believed, because I think that stability right to your point is absolutely critical for folks. I think one of the features of cryptocurrency right now, which is really not great for consumption, very good for speculation, but not good for consumption, it's just extreme volatility, right? It makes it pretty unspendable because you don't want to get paid in something that can drop by 50% tomorrow and you don't want to spend something that might go up by 50% tomorrow. And so that's one thing which I think is a little bit problematic about cryptocurrencies today when you're talking about consumer adoption. And then, you know, over and above that, if you are trying to sort of buy and use on the internet at really any scale, it's actually sort of a very stressful consumer experience to think that this money could go up or down by 50% today or tomorrow, right? It actually makes it for a very bad consumer experience because people are inherently risk-averse and so people are going to feel, you know, sort of more strongly about losing the potential to lose money than gain money. And that means on balance, you're going to have kind of unhappy customers and consumers and I think that's actually problematic for sort of broader adoption in the space. Yeah, and this is not a new problem, right? This is why many contracts are dollarized even between nations that do not use dollars simply because they're pricing in a stable reserve currency. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I want to continue tugging on the thread of broader adoption. In like 2014, 2015, we increasingly heard, you know, bank the unbanked and now it's kind of, it seems to have dropped from the language and I'm curious, do we still believe in this financial inclusion that this financial revolution will increase that as well as privacy? And what's the road to total financial inclusion and better privacy? No? I think South America is a perfect example of how like this bank the unbanked or how like when there is a need for financial services that aren't being met by the traditional system, crypto kind of steps in naturally through its lower barrier to entry. And I mean, Venezuela is obviously the perfect example, right, of a country where people are just, I mean, they're buying and holding Bitcoin as like stable value, right? Because it's still better than their own currency. Argentina is another example of a country that has pretty severe inflation. And so we recently got our stablecoin die, which is packed to $1 integrated on the big exchanges in Argentina and South America. And it actually came, it was news in like the largest national newspaper there because it was like now you can get dollars like easily on the blockchain. And that's actually something everyone's like, they're waiting for that kind of stuff, right? Because they all try to get access to dollars and these services just weren't there before. And now we're actually seeing, I mean, so we're seeing great adoption because there's a gap that the technology fills. And I think there are many other places in addition to South America and around the world basically where those conditions are similar and where we can also see these kind of like where it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And as the momentum shows, more and more will just step in and actually provide services to these people. Yeah, well this is about trust, right? So if you have created a system by which you can actually guarantee that the person who owns this account is the person who controls the currency and they simply do not need to trust that a bank can get in their way or potentially a government can take their earnings from them, then it is enormously valuable in countries where there have been, there's been a history of currency controls or it's been history of asset seizures or all the things that you can in principle prevent by digitizing that asset. So I think crypto's gonna look pretty different in different economies and different political systems. In a country like the United States and a country like Finland our everyday lives work pretty well. We have money that works, it's pretty much gonna be worth the same tomorrow as it is today and we also have governments and rule of law and institutions at work, right? Work for us and work for society. And so I think in developed markets, the likely applications that are being built around blockchain are gonna be sort of the financialization of additional sort of, of, of, of insecuritization of existing asset classes, right? So a classic example people talk about is taking real estate, putting it on a blockchain. So, you know, you, there's less of a role for trust companies that, you know, take a pretty large fee in real estate transactions just as one example. I think that, you know, as Rune and Eli were talking about in developing countries, because, you know, cryptocurrency and blockchain it's not just sort of taking an economic system, putting it into a digital world. It's really a governance system as well. It has a bigger role in parts of the world where, you know, money doesn't work very well and governance doesn't work very well. So I think it's gonna look very different if you're sitting in Finland, if you're sitting in somewhere like Venezuela or, you know, somewhere in between. And that, when I think about blockchain sort of why it's so foundationally interesting it's because it's not just a financial system, right? It's not just an economic system but it's really sort of taking an economic system and really a political and a governance system and actually enabling that to be, you know, to really come to life in a digital form. The second part to that question is also the increase in privacy. Do you guys see that being a narrative that end users care for? And if not, what would it take, if anything, for them to begin caring? Is it even important to care about privacy? Yeah, my experience is that most people unfortunately don't care at all, right? And I mean, they just don't even, they just don't even care, right? Like even if you try to talk to, like, provide options, just like, I mean, if you're putting all this stuff, if you're putting all the info on Facebook anyway, like Twitter and so on, why does it really matter, right? But again, in some countries and also just there are some people they do care or they have to care, right? Because maybe the government could come after them for using like the type of money that they want to use or something like that, right? So I guess the good news is that what we, I mean, there is the technology that's able to actually meet this demand for privacy, right? There's just like zero knowledge proofs, kind of like the whole CK snarks and Starks and all of this stuff. And that's seeing a lot of traction and actually just interestingly enough, recently, so again, our stablecoin dies. So this cryptocurrency that's worth one dollar that's being adopted, for instance, in Venezuela and Argentina, that was actually made a version of that that's anonymous. So that uses CK Starks to create this like anonymous version of the currency. So the people who do want privacy or do need it actually have the ability through the blockchain to get a level of privacy that was impossible to avoid. Could you guys track how many people are actually using the anonymity feature? Or what does this is going on? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about anonymity features in blockchain is typically if you actually use them, that by itself becomes a red flag. But what I think can easily happen is that in certain areas where there is just a high-risk environment where you got to stay anonymous, entire sort of pockets of ecosystems will pop up where everyone is using the anonymous versions of the currencies. And then of course there'll be like, it does create fungibility issues and kind of like interoperability issues when you try to move from some regime like that into a KYC, it's more standard financial regime. And that's just like the inefficiency caused by I guess the repressive governments in the first place. I think we need to sort of broaden the narrative around privacy to really be an issue of just security. Because right now when people think about cryptocurrency, this is maybe from the origins of the industry when Bitcoin kind of, unfortunately this first use case is really a silk road and basically buying drugs on the internet and it's constantly had that power and shadow of privacy equals criminality. But that's not actually the case. We should think about privacy really as security and if you think about your bank account in the physical world, you have a default private situation. You don't have every transaction being broadcast. You don't have sort of like Venmo for your bank account. Most people don't want that. There's a reason why you don't want that and that's fine and that's okay. You want to have sort of selective information rights as to what you're doing with your money. And so I think that that's equally important in a cryptocurrency world because something like Bitcoin is synonymous but with the right data set, you can actually de-anonymize a lot of that and that's just not something that most people want to have with their wealth or bank account for obvious reasons. And so to me I really think about privacy as an important feature which is not just for people who want to do dark market and sort of bad things with cryptocurrency but just as a necessary sort of part of having a healthy financial system and sort of being a feature of security rather than just sort of a cover for things you don't want people to know about. The question is really privacy from whom, right? So we used to have private bank accounts not that long ago. The entire financial system was chained in circa 2000 to eliminate almost all forms of accounts opened without identification, right? So there used to be the old Swiss numbered accounts. There were all sorts of things where there was a cultural expectation of anonymity around the opening of the account and we eliminated almost all those from the electronic banking system. And the reason we did that is because the countries that had a strong interest in preventing illicit transfers more or less enforced these rules on the global exchange systems and they fell flat down to the local banks. So why do we have problems with Bitcoin? Well, it's just opening a bank account without a name associated. When you wire money from a regular bank account to another the bank is attesting that the owner of that account is the person whose name they're transmitting and we just don't have that now. So I think if you expect millions of people to use these systems for everyday purposes there will be a solution that is found because the existing over-stride infrastructure is very valuable to the countries that I created it and there's a very strong disincentive to just roll back the clock to 1985 for all these countries. Absolutely. I like the emphasis on changing the narrative so it's more focused around security and information security as opposed to strictly privacy which does have this shadow tethered to it. Kind of continuing along the same line we do know that people think cryptocurrencies are generally used by people that are doing drug deals or funding terrorist activities or other unsavory interests. So when you want to debunk that stereotype or you want to debunk that narrative what are exciting projects or use cases you guys specifically refer to that paint a different picture? I think one really obvious one. I mean, actually you came with an example earlier, right? Like people being paid micro payments and just like in general there's like more free access to transactions around smaller services. I think another really cool example of what's being done right now is remittance, right? So you're actually seeing startups utilizing crypto trading and arbitrage across different markets to disrupt remittance and actually end up as like the infrastructure and backbone for larger remittance companies to run on top of because it's just a really efficient way to move money. And then my favorite subject or like one of my favorite subjects of what's gonna be really like what crypto is really gonna improve is trade finance. There's already some projects, there's always some real world results being seen but it's still like the next wave that's coming with just like multiple projects across the world all trying to build trade finance solutions. And we have our own as well at Makers that we've partnered with TradeShift which is a major supply chain platform. And trade finance is just like it's a huge sort of it's not really well known but it's like a massive market and it's one of the places where if you just create better infrastructure we put more money into it, we will change the world economy for better for small businesses. And then of course there's the unbanked again, right? And that whole story but yeah, in the developed world there's certainly also a ton of use cases that I'm sure are already at this point way beyond anything we're seeing with the usage of dark markets. Yeah, I do think it's interesting though that when you create a mechanism by which you can potentially both pay and enforce the rules for that payment to anyone you are in theory creating a system by which you can circumvent weak jurisdictions or weak enforcement of contract law. So there are billions of people in the world who are almost unemployable in most circumstances because you simply cannot operate effectively in the country, right? I can't hire 100,000 people in North Korea or in Zimbabwe or in many other countries where I would have no mechanism by which I could enforce any disputes and they would equally have no mechanism by which they could pursue me effectively if we had a disagreement. But if we create systems by which we can transmit money and the description of what it is that you are doing and then have ideally mechanical enforcement of those rules or mechanical evaluation of the metrics by which the funds are being dispersed, in principle, you should be able to increase prosperity in countries where today there is no other option. Well, when I think about adoption, I think you've got to come up with first and foremost just experiences which are really compelling and substantially better than the current alternative. And so, you know, one of the probably most sort of widely adopted kind of crypto integrated applications out there is Brave, the browser, right? Now, when you download it, you don't have to know anything about crypto and completely ignore that element of it. First and foremost, it's just a really fantastic browser. Super fast, blocks all of your ads, doesn't suck up your bandwidth. And, you know, once that hooks a number of people, then they're gonna, you know, potentially figure out how to integrate cryptocurrency into the experience. But first and foremost, what we need to use every day is a really fantastic browser, both on your internet, on your computer, as well as your phone, and it accomplishes is that without sort of leading with cryptocurrency first, which I think is something that, you know, as cryptocurrency aficionados, we really like, but the majority of people actually would prefer not to have anything to do with. Absolutely. So. Thank you. Well, we're out of time. Thank you guys so much for this discussion. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks.