 And we are live, hey Joey, how you doing? Good, how about you? I'm good, thanks for coming on the show. We're making a show quick and simple for everyone today. And I just wanna first jump on board and ask you a couple of questions. The first question is, what's going on with awkward these days? Yeah, so we entered security audits earlier this summer and we had the Serpent Compiler code reviewed. And basically what happened is people who audited it were sure Zeppelin found a bunch of vulnerabilities in the compiler. So what that means is we have to basically rewrite our contracts into Solidity, which is another language on Ethereum. Previously we were waiting until Ethereum supported more languages and gonna rewrite more regular language, but since this happened, we're just gonna go ahead and rewrite Solidity now. And so that started, you can check out the progress on our GitHub. As you know, I'd say it's about just over halfway done. Seems actually a little bit even ahead of the timeline we've been thinking, but see that should probably be done within about a month. And then we can resume security audits again. And that's kind of the main thing that's holding us back until launch is we need a clean set of audits that say, everything looks good and secure. So what's your initial roadmap? What would you like to accomplish, let's say about like next summer? Yes, that's a great question. So the idea would be first awkward launch with a set of bug bounty markets. So these would be markets on basically whether the money in the actual markets is also be stolen. So it's kind of using auger to basically predict whether auger is secure or not. So we would run those for a few months. If nothing is, money's not stolen, then what we would do is we'd open up the platform a bit more and have basically maximum trade limits. So you couldn't trade more than say $50 worth of ether or something like that. And after that runs for a few more months, then we need to basically open the platform up to allow the full set of market types. You can create markets on guess or no questions, categorical questions, and even things like scalers, like what will be the price of Bitcoin next year or the price of Apple or something like that. And that will kind of all be live at that point. This idea is to get through all the bug bounty kind of low level stuff this year and then have the full version out early next year. And then after that point, it's really kind of adding additional features for later releases. So later releases will have things like a project called ZeroX, which allows our trading system to be faster. So ZeroX is running on top of you guys? So we'll be running our, so auger has two pieces, right? One piece is the Oracle system, which is how do you get real world information into the blockchain securely? The other part is the trading part. Most of our focus has been on the Oracle system. And so for the trading part, we're gonna actually use ZeroX once that comes out. So that's potentially looking at around maybe what Christmas of next year? So the ZeroX stuff should happen before then. So the idea is get the early first version out without limits early next year. And then we should be able to integrate ZeroX within a couple of months that's it. The nice thing about ZeroX is it doesn't really require modifying our core protocol a whole lot. You can just kind of add it on as an additional contract. And then after that point, the main kind of features that Oracle really needs to be successful are it needs something like a stablecoin, so something like MakerDAO. And then of course it needs even faster. The two would kind of do that are Ethereum support starting initially. Or actually, I was gonna ask you, once Ethereum does switch over to proof of stake, with Sharding and Casper, does that affect anything with Oracle? That's a great question. You know, all it really does is makes scalability a bit better, because scalability will improve by the once proof of stake happens. And then it opens the door up for Sharding, which basically means you kind of making every node run everything, kind of split it up a bit. And that should allow more scale and more transactions per second. Okay. You mentioned earlier that everything's on Solidity. What were you ideally looking for as opposed to Solidity? Like what language would you like it to be instead? Yeah, so when, initially what we'd plan to do was, if the audits for Serpent actually went well, we would have launched with Serpent. And then once the Ethereum switched to this thing called WebAssembly, which is a more efficient virtual machine, then it would support regular programming languages. They could have written our contracts in a language called ADA, which is something that the United States Department of Defense has used for decades, and NASA uses it as well. And it's used to write very, very secure code and around it to help you by secure software. One benefit though, Solidity though, is that it is improving. Just last week, someone added a feature to the project called Oyente, which basically allows you to kind of automatic code review almost. And they added a feature that, say I write something in my code, that's like, assert that this contract thinks that it's not always the exact amount of ether that it thinks has. Yeah. If the contract thinks it has tenure, it should always actually have tenure. You can basically formally verify that that's actually the case. So that's actually pretty cool. That's one of the big features of ADA that we would have wanted to have, and now Solidity's going to have it. So what do you think one of the reasons why Serpent hasn't really been pushed out yet? You know, I think it's just because, so it was the first kind of language on Ethereum, other than some super low-level ones, but people just kind of started using Solidity because it's more like JavaScript, and that was kind of also what was marketed more. You know, I like Serpent because it's much simpler. Now there's a lot less features. The big negative with it is there's not a big community around it, and you know, as you got the compiler, it has a lot of errors. People didn't know that somebody used it anymore. So for that reason, that's why she did Solidity. Cool. So you mentioned once you guys are live, once the bug bounties are done, you guys are going to be working with ZeroX or hooking up with them. I'm curious, who are your ideal clients? Who would be using Augur on a day-to-day basis? Right, so you know, the ideal user of Augur is someone who, you know, one of two things. You know, if I want to speculate on something and they wanted it cheaper than they can today. So a great example of this is, you know, if you're betting on a stock match in the UK or in China, you're paying 10%, 15% in fees. On Augur, you can do that for, you know, a fraction of a percent. So it's taking things that are expensive and making them cheaper, which is just a more efficient economy. The other category is things where you want to speculate on something that you can't today for whatever reason. Perfect example of this is, say I'm a Chinese investor. I really want to buy Apple, but I'm actually forced to buy, you know, these stocks from the Chinese stock market. You know, a lot of which are much more volatile and a lot, not as good companies as, say, Apple or Google or something like that. And so you can't buy it in the US because you can't get your money out to US brokers because they won't take it. But what you could do is buy a steering deck and not change China or the future and then buy derivative banks to the price of Apple and Augur. So there's could be a market that says, what will the price of Apple be at the end of next year? And you can basically buy that. And it's effectively giving you the same profit and loss you get is if you actually bought Apple. That's pretty cool, I think. That is really cool. So switching gears, you recently just joined Pantera, is that correct? Yeah, that's right. So based on your new role over there, which by the way, congratulations. Thanks. Where do you currently see the cryptocurrency ecosystem at? What's your current take of it? Yeah, so I think right now we're in dial-up as the internet was in the very early 90s. And I think so what that means in blockchain speak is the stuff hasn't really scaled yet. So it goes seven transactions a second, Ethereum does maybe 10. For something like Augur to succeed, it needs to really do many thousands. Because if you're going to compete with, say a derivatives platform on Wall Street, they're doing tens of thousands of transactions a second. That said, I think that actually can happen. I think of all the scalability stuff people are working on, I think in the next three or four years, we're actually going to be very surprised at how scalable something like Ethereum is. And the reason is, yeah, people don't, people think it's going to be much harder than it actually is because if you look at Bitcoin, they're unwilling to implement radical changes of scale. Whereas the Ethereum developers are much more willing to do that. They're willing to have the risk of breaking something, but then go ahead and fix it and keep it ready. The space overall, I feel it's very exuberant right now. The markets are super high. I think that people are investing into a lot of the wrong projects. I mean, that they don't make technical sense or they don't make economic sense. Basically, it's just like the incentives don't add up. And I think once we see a bit of a correction, this happens in any new market, people lose their money and realize that, oh, you shouldn't have been investing in projects that are making rent seeking tokens that should just be removed because they're not adding any value. Then I think at that point, we'll see a much more sustainable, steady rate of growth. I'm pretty excited for that. So what's your prediction for that? You're thinking like two, three years from now? Yeah, so it's hard to know when we're going to see a correction. It's just something that you can, you can always bet on that markets never go straight up. They always bet on it. I wish there was a prediction market we can bet on this. Yeah, hopefully soon there will be. But yeah, I think, even though there's going to be a correction, as long as you're investing in stuff that's actually good projects, it affects you a bit less. Like if you bought Apple, Amazon, Google during the dot com mobile, yeah, it sucked because you lost some money in 2000, 2001. But five, 10 years later, you were pretty glad that you bought them then instead of waiting. That's right. Let me ask you this question though, because I think one of the biggest barriers to entry in this space is actual purchasing the crypto. Most people would have to go on exchange and do KYC, AML, which I get it. But what do you think our solutions for, because let's be honest, a lot of the people in the world, let's say if it's like Latin America or even Africa or even some remote place in Eastern Europe, they actually, it's quite difficult for them to purchase crypto. So what do you think are some solutions you can see in the future that can make it maybe easier for people to acquire cryptocurrencies? Right. So there's the short to midterm, there's the far off. In the short to midterm, I think as there start being more exchanges in more of these places, it increases access of it. So an exchange in country in Africa, like you say Kenya, looks pretty different than say Coinbase in the US. You're probably using something like M-Pesa to buy or a phone credit to something to buy crypto instead of hooking it up to your bank account. And so I think those things will help people get in. And then on that, I think we'll see some, governments actually start issuing cryptocurrencies peg to their fiat money. So that will be kind of another way for people to get in. The interesting part is- I always said crypto is a perfect government money because it's fully trackable. Yeah, so that's the things like you think about it. I even kind of had this idea where say 20 years from now, and there's something like, everyone's using say the case in our proofs to make it so you can't trace the money, right? And the government's losing a much tax revenue. If you're a government, the United States, the way the taxation works is you basically have to report what you earned. And if you don't do it, they can go after you but they don't really kind of know until quite a bit of an investigation. So there's a lot of money kind of left on the table. So it's a government issue to cryptocurrency and basically track everything that way. They could even have a program where they're like, we'll let you pay 25% less than taxes if you use this cryptocurrency instead of doing the thing where you report on your tax forms and we hope that you report it honestly. So I could definitely see something like that happening. The cool part of that is once you have cryptocurrency, it makes it very easy to exchange it for other cryptocurrency. And then you can get Bitcoin either, say you want maker instead of the USD coin. That gets pretty exciting. Awesome. Well, I think we'll wrap it up over there. Like I said, we'll keep this super short and I just want to congratulate you on all your success with Augur and with Pantera with the fund. If people want to get ahold of you or if they want to find out more of what you do, what's the best resource? So you can email me at joeykruge at email.com or really best places, if you ping me in the Augur Slack I'm almost guaranteed to respond to you there much better at Slack than emails. So it's open Slack too. If you just join it at Augur.net. Awesome. Well, thank you Joey and have a great day. Thanks. Cheers.