Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Agentic AI Takes Crypto to the Next Level?

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

In this episode, host Friederike Ernst is joined by John Paller, founder of ETH Denver, to reflect on nine seasons of North America's largest Ethereum gathering and where the ecosystem goes next. John shares his "red pill" moment in 2016 and the subsequent realization that Ethereum was not just a corporate efficiency tool, but a way to rewire the global economic system. He discusses the evolution of the Biddle meme and how ETH Denver has become a market-driven aggregator for crypto's shifting narratives, from DeFi summer to the current era of institutional adoption.They delve into a candid critique of the Ethereum Foundation’s "Infinite Garden" philosophy, with John arguing for more "structural vision" and actionable roadmaps to compete with the aggressive narratives of chains like Solana. The conversation highlights Agentic AI as the ultimate "Trojan Horse" for mass adoption, enabling a future where users interact with sovereign bots rather than complex private keys. Finally, John explains his Regulation Membership proposal to the US Congress, aiming to provide a federal securities exemption for on-chain cooperatives and restore true economic agency to the "little man." Topics00:00 Intro & Context04:15 Recruitment Tech to Ethereum: John’s Genesis Story09:30 Inventing the "Biddle" Meme at Denver 201815:00 Is Ethereum a "Neo Casino" or a Settlement Layer?21:45 Critiquing Idealism: The Infinite Garden vs. Reality27:10 Why Solana is Not "Sufficiently Decentralized35:20 Agentic AI: The End of signing Transactions manually42:15 The Roman Catholic Church & Institutional Co-opting49:00 German Cooperative Culture & On-Chain Credit Unions 55:30 Regulation Membership & The SEC Challenge59:45 Zero Knowledge Identity & Privacy RightsLinksJohn Paller on X: https://x.com/PallerJohnETH Denver: https://www.ethdenver.com/Opolis: https://opolis.co/Lido: https://lido.fi/stvaults?mtm_campaign=epicenterNEAR: https://near.ai/ Sponsors: 1. Lido V3 introduces stVaults: modular staking infrastructure that lets builders and institutions deploy custom staking vaults, while staying anchored to stETH as a shared liquidity layer. Get started building with Lido V3 today: https://lido.fi/stvaults?mtm_campaign=epicenter2. NEAR AI Cloud now lets developers deploy OpenClaw—the rapidly growing open-source AI agent platform—inside Trusted Execution Environments, providing hardware-level encryption with cryptographic attestations. With OpenClaw on NEAR AI Cloud, you can run agents with cloud convenience, but without traditional cloud data exposure. No hardware to manage. No trust assumptions required. Learn more at near.ai.

Welcome to AppaCenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Anz, and today I'm speaking with John Palla, who is the founder and chief steward of East Denver. We're not crypto Denver. We're not blockchain Denver. We're not anything like that. We're very much Ethereum first. We were never propped up or supported by the Ethereum Foundation. We just did our thing, and they sort of just said, hey, that's part of a permissionless world, you know. Anybody can do an ETH event somewhere. I mean, as North America's largest event and probably the world's largest aggregator of Ethereum folks,

you know, we've done this for nine years. I think that Agentic AI and coming on chain is probably the biggest innovation that we've seen in the 12 years I've been in it. But it actually looks like increasingly traditional finance institutions are besting us at our own game. and they're executing extremely well. So the only reason why crypto didn't scale bigger than it is,

or didn't really make it in mainstream, because we didn't have distribution. Welcome to AppraCenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Anz, and today I'm speaking with John Palla, who is the founder and chief steward of East Denver.

East Denver just concluded the week before last, and it is typically one of the biggest crypto game. gatherings in the space. Before we talk with Don, let me tell you about our sponsors this week. This episode is brought to you by Lido. As Ethereum Staking continues to evolve, more teams building staking products are running into a familiar challenge. On one hand, pooled liquid staking gives you liquidity and access to DFI, but can

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It offers curated defy strategies built around SDEth. You deposit once, you choose a vault, and manage it. everything from a single interface. To learn more and start building with SDValtz, go to lydo.5.st slash SDValtz and get in touch with LiDR contributors today. John, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for having me.

Fantastic. Tell us about yourself. So before East Denver, what were you doing and what pulled you into Ethereum in the first days? I would say serendipity pulled me into the space,

but the actual story goes a little something like this. So I was in the Uber of era in startups, right? Where, you know, the Uber for laundry and the Uber for this and the Uber for that, right? So everybody was trying to build these marketplaces using apps to connect, you know, the bit and the ask on things. And I was involved in that. And I was working on, I've been employed. I've been in the employment in HR tech space for a very long time. And so I was working on a project that was building, you could say, like, the MLS system for recruiting.

What's an MLS system? So the MLS system is like the real estate system that we use here in the U.S. Where like the buyer's agent finds the seller's agent and they get together and then they sell a piece of property. Well, we try doing that with jobs. but some of the issues that we ran into were very challenging to scale it for lots of different reasons and I'm not going to get into that

but I started talking about the democratization of employment back in 2005 before I knew anything about blockchains or smart contracts or Web 3 or any of that stuff before that was even a thing before Bitcoin was even a thing I was thinking about these things

And I started studying economic models and social anthropology and incentive design, game theory. I started really digging into like, well, what makes things actually work the way that they work? Right. Like, I was curious to, you know, really think about how could we create better systems that actually create more sustainable outcomes. But then in building this sort of like platform for recruiters to like share information and share jobs or candidates or whatever, I mean, we really learned a lot about the game design of that industry. And in January 2014, I was at a technology conference in San Diego, California. And I happened to meet a guy by the name of Dimitri Boutterin who was also at the conference. And he and I became friends and stayed in touch on social media.

And then later in 2014, I started seeing about the Ethereum white paper. And I was curious about what all that was. And I read it. And I'm not sure that I understood it. Actually, I know that I didn't understand it. But I had some early ideas of how to use the technology. And I was really intrigued by some of the, like after they did the

the Ethereum pre-sale I was intrigued they like raised 15, 16 million dollars in like a matter of hours and I'm just like what's like tokens what is all this like so it started getting me curious and

you know but I still hadn't had my sort of conversion moment I guess you could say my red pill moment I hadn't had that yet that came in early 2016 and I was talking with, well, my CTO at the time for my startup, and he was like, no, blockchains, it's not going to be a thing and all this. And I'm just like, yeah, but we're in the middle of all of these issues as a company.

Like, wouldn't it be better if we just had code that sort of ran everything and that we could just not be in the middle? Like so behavior is organized based on the property designed incentives and he just was not having it. And I was speaking with another colleague of mine and he was big into Bitcoin and a few other things that were going on at the time. And, you know, he's he got kind of, I wouldn't say he got mad at me, but he, he kind of proverbially grabbed me by the ears and said, John, you're not paying attention. This isn't technology for corporations. this is going to rewire the entire system in a way that we're going to build all new things.

And like, you know, I'd always been thinking about blockchain tech as like an efficiency capture. I mean, technology has always been in terms of corporations, like, you know, let's make it cheaper, let's make it better, let's make it faster. So we have a market edge, right? We can build a moat of some sort. Well, it finally dawned on me.

I was like, oh, wait, this is going to change everything. Apes together A strong moment You had this like Whoa It's kind of like Neo coming out of the Matrix Yeah

Like you know You know I Well you know My whole life changed And you know Up to this point I had a recruiting business

That you know It was very nice business And I had a startup That you know Did pretty well And you know All of a sudden

I just like I just lost interest in all of that. So, and I couldn't change it. It was just like once you saw it, you couldn't unsee it. Well, then I was talking to Dima, Dmitri, and I was asking him, like, you know, about developers and like all this, because I had all these ideas. And I, you know, at the time, I didn't really understand how to code anything. And, you know, I was the entrepreneur guy. So I needed a, I need a few. devs to like but I didn't even know what I wanted to build yet so the only people I could get in

touch with were people that wanted like four or five hundred dollars an hour just to like you know build you some little prototype thing and like if you don't know what you want to build they don't know what to build you so you know it wasn't just like a hacking thing like hey let's practice try let's just figure some stuff out so that didn't exist uh you couldn't find anybody that knew solidity. So I found my way to the Ethereum Denver meetup that was started by a guy by the name Kent Barton. And Kent just had a passion for education and community. And, you know, I started going when it was pretty small. And then, you know, it grew in the spring of 2017, like exponentially. And it was one of those things where it went from like, you know, low double digits to like four or five hundred.

people every month wanting to come to this thing. And, you know, so I started getting more involved. And I was asking Kent and the guys that were running it. I was like, you know, have you guys thought about doing a hackathon? I mean, there's like all these people here that like don't know anything about Web3 or, you know, smart contracts or, but they're curious, right? Everybody wants to know about a theory. And it's like cambering explosion of interest. And so we asked a question one time at the meetups. It's like, you know, who would be interested in attending a hackathon and like, you know, half the room. or more, raise their hand. And I was like, well, we should do that.

And they're all like, well, you know, we tried a hackathon one time and didn't really go anywhere. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. It's just, I don't know. It was just not, they didn't want anything to do with it, really. Because they had said they had tried it and it didn't work. So then I thought, well, I would you sway them. But I didn't sway them. I just went and did it.

So I told them, I was like, well, I'm going to go do this. So, you know, and they're like, well, you know, all the reasons why. And I was like, look, we're going to make Colorado the epicenter of blockchain and whip three innovation. And we're going to, you know, why don't we get through 400 people together and like, what? You know, this is like, we got like 30 people last time. And it was sort of weak. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. And I'm talking about like, let's bring in the best educators, the people that know this.

Let's bring in Vitalik. Let's bring in all these people to do this. Why not? And so they're like, well, if you want to go for it. So I started reaching out to guys like Joe Lubin and Vignesh from Lendroyd and, you know, the guys from ZeroX and the clan from Newseifer. And I mean, just a whole bunch of people, right? that were early, you know, Joe Lubin from consensus, of course. And I just, I said, look, so I put together like a deck and I said, well, like, look, here's, here's what you would get.

And, you know, will you support this hackathon? Like, we want to, we want to build some debts. And at the time, like, there were no devs. So, like, everyone was like, yeah, we should build some devs. So what we thought was going to be, you know, three, 400 people ended up being 1,500 people the first year. and it just, you know, it kind of hit the right sort of notes, you know. The location was good because everybody could get to Denver from, you know, either coast pretty easily. You know, the airport's very easy to get to.

Cost of living's low. We used to do it over the President's Day weekend because, you know, we wanted to give people an extra day to travel, especially students. And we did it for free because we didn't want to. a paywall learning how to do this. Like, you're not going to get people who are curious about something to come spend $500 on an event. So, like, we just didn't like any of that model. So we said it's like, you know, community of communities and like, let's build some stuff, right? We invented the Biddle meme at ETH number 2018. So the whole hoddle for Bitcoin, we built our version of it for Ethereum, which was Biddle, which has now been,

mentioned on X like 90 million times or something like that. So, yeah, so that's how it kind of got started. I mean, it was out of the need for devs. Just nobody had any and I didn't have any and I wanted to build some. And then, you know, it just sort of took off. And then we're like, well, we should do it again. And then so we did it again in 2019. And then we did it again in 2020.

and there just was a lot of demand for it. And so it got a lot of recognition internationally. I mean, even the first year, we had people from 35 countries come in. And now, you know, I think this year there was 140 countries or something represented over, you know, 6,000 people or something that came in. So, you know, and this is significantly smaller than it has been. It's been about 20,000 people or more the last several years. so, you know, all the tourists are gone, right? So it's mostly just the core community people who really care about this

and decentralization and the kind of ethos and values of Web3. So that's how it got started. And, you know, nine years later, here we are. So we just finished our ninth season. Yeah, before we kind of get into how it's changed over the years, did you find your deaths for your project? Oh, yeah. And then so, yeah.

I can pretty much get anybody I can get anybody I need now. Yeah, I know a few people. Cool. Tell me how a kind of the format of East Denver kind of developed over the years and kind of how that corresponds with kind of the sort of people who attend. Yeah, well, there's narratives that form in the ecosystem. And I've been pretty good at seeing them before they happen. Like we predicted defy, you know, 18 months before D.5 summer happened.

You know, we saw it. We saw it early and we said, oh, you know, all this on-chain lending and derivatives and all that's going to be really big. And then, you know, DFI summer happened. And it was just like, whoa, you know. That was, you know, post-ICO boom, I was probably the big. biggest sort of driver of things but then it you know the narratives started shifting right so then it got into nfts and then it got into dows and then it got it and then it gets in all sorts of stuff right now

it's prediction markets and now it's you know perps and whatever but if you look at the undercurrent of all of it it's all financial use cases right it's all about well you could even argue that a lot of this is just neo casinos. Not that the stock market itself isn't really a giant casino because it is, but like, you know, we're kind of in the wild wild west and, you know, the asymmetric gains that people can get by playing the roulette of, well, meme coins is another one, right? You know, let's get in early and pump and then pump and then dump, right? So people don't really care about these projects. They don't. I mean, there's a few that they do. But like for the most part, these are vehicles for asymmetric upside.

So it's gambling. So what happened in terms of the event was, you know, we were never propped up or supported by the Ethereum Foundation. We just, we have a lot of friends there. But like, you know, we just did our thing and they sort of just said, hey, that's part of a permissionless world, you know. Anybody can do an ETH event somewhere. And the market physics are going to determine.

and who wins and who loses. And so we were just really good at sort of protecting the kind of what's next, right? So every time one of these cycles would come up, we would see it coming, right? And now we're in the institutional phase with stable coins and, you know, modernizing the current financial systems infrastructure and whatever. And we saw that coming, you know, with the President Trump's election, that was pretty much inevitable that was going to happen. and here we are. It's happening. So we pretty much let the market dictate what the kind of format was going to be. So as people became more interested in booths, for example, we figured out a way to cater to that.

Now, what was that really about? It was about the need for engagement. They want to talk to people. They want their brand to be seen. So we appropriated space for that. When Vitalik started talking about the scaling roadmap for Ethereum, and the need for L2s and

you know what that meant to the ecosystem what that was really saying to the market is hey we're kind of admitting that Ethereum by itself can't scale and so we're going to leave it to the market to figure out what the solutions for that are this is very on brand for Ethereum

they'll just kind of throw stuff out Vitalik will just throw stuff out and then people will just build things right and so L2 became prominent and then all L1s or EVML1s and like all this kind of stuff happened so the demand but the demand for the

same stuff was always there you know Booth's developers speaking opportunities to hackathon engaging developers hiring developers like all these things were very very hot topics and so we just happened to attract everybody that

wanted to be participating in that I mean as North America's largest event and probably the world's largest aggregator of Ethereum folks. You know, we've done this for nine years and like even I think we've even had a higher attendance than DevCon in aggregate.

You know, so it's been a big thing. But we've really kind of let the market dictate it. Because again, open, permission list decentralization sort of, we never really tried to fabricate much. Now, I would say today though

some of those choices, is Ethereum doesn't have as strong as a narrative I think is say Solana does

no one can really tell you what Ethereum's narrative is because it just is and just

does right and so those of us who are still very passionate about

Ethereum are passionate about Ethereum because it's really the only credibly

decentralized blockchain in my opinion there are some that are doing great

things like our friends that near are doing great things. The guys' base are doing great things is an L2. There's lots of interesting things happening around the space, but that doesn't mean necessarily anything to us. So we try to keep things as market base as possible, but then, you know, as Ethereum sort of just kind of took, you know, its own intentionally sort of quieter voice, you know, from especially the foundation's perspective. Other voices have tried to become more prominent, which, you know, has definitely made it a challenge for us to manage that being ETH Denver, right?

So we're not crypto Denver. We're not blockchain Denver. We're not anything like that. We're, we're very much Ethereum first. But managing that's been really interesting because the narratives have been tried to push here and there based on what other people's interests are. But we've tried to kind of manage it based on market kinetics and then also just what we feel like is, you know, at least net neutral to Ethereum or net positive for Ethereum. This episode is brought to you by Near AI Cloud. OpenClaw is one of the biggest stories in AI right now. Rapidly, it gained over 200,000 GitHub stars with adoption from Silicon Valley to Beijing. Why? Because OpenClaw makes it easy to create an AI agent that actually does stuff like manager emails, rounds the web, schedule appointments, and remember contacts across weeks of interaction.

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With OpenClaw on Near AI Cloud, you get cloud convenience without data exposure. There's no hardware to manage and no trust assumptions required. You can learn more at neer.a.I. What do you think the narrative should be and what do you kind of see as competition for that? What do I think that narrative should be?

Well, that's a good question. I think that Ethereum, like the foundation should take a more prominent role in discussing the roadmap of where the community should go. I think they should. That is not a position that they share, at least not up until this point. I think, you know, I've worked a lot with Tomash and he's done an excellent job. He's still executive director for three more days, I guess. but he's done an amazing job at sort of creating more, I guess you could say,

structural vision and just, you know, like intentionality around moving to where the puck is and like actually even guiding where the puck goes. No more of the Infinite Garden. Yeah. I mean, look, I was never, I'm a 25-year entrepreneur, okay?

The Infinite Garden always came. came off to me as a little naive and a little bit unrealistic. I think it's not uncommon for people younger, especially in their young 20s, to like have idealism as their sort of core philosophy. Like, look back in history, this is not the first time that youth have been idealistic about how things should be. We're just now sort of taking a technological viewpoint to it versus something that's a little bit more just, you know, analog. But like still, I think human behavior is a very complex thing. And you

can't assume that people are just going to behave in ways that on paper makes sense. Like, humans don't always follow what you think are good incentives or they might not always do what you feel like is the right thing. And because the right thing is somewhat dependent on who you ask, right? there's infinite amounts of like individual incentives and goals you know and then whoever gets to define what's best for the collective who gets to decide that right like i mean there's so many um variations of outcomes in other words that like designing a technological system for that is very hard where incentives are aligned at scale sustainably and so the infinite garden thing oh you know i don't I mean, I just, I just, I think it's a little too simplistic and I think it's a little too

idealistic. Now, do I, do I believe in positive sum games? Yes. Do I believe in moving from a scarcity-based mindset or economic model to one that's based in abundance design? Yes. Do I believe that technology and, you know, crypto-economics and the tokenization of all the things and, has the ability to drive those outcomes, I believe that. I'm still in the camp that I think Web3 is going to be a thing, especially with the advent of agentic AI on chain. I think if you expect human beings to use complex, you know, user interface to like sign a transaction

or manage a private key, if you think that's going to happen at scale, you're high. It's not going to happen. people aren't going to do it. But if agentic AI becomes a thing, does it matter what blockchain they're working on? Does it matter what token they move from here to there or whatever or how that money gets to you?

It doesn't. So I think that agentic AI and coming on chain is probably the biggest innovation that we've seen in the 12 years I've been in it. Yeah, the Infinite Garden, you know, I just, I don't know, it just, it's very, it's very complex and, you know, the notion of abundance at scale to where private property is not necessary and all these other things, I don't know, just, I just, I don't see it in my not infinite experience, but I've got enough to know a few things and I've got a few gray hairs to prove it. Like, you know, I just, I don't, I don't have the

comprehension of that in our lifetime. But I do still have lots of hope and there's a huge amount of opportunity now with a Gintic AI combined with the primitives that we've built already for a decade and building these now into really usable systems that could very well disrupt most of what we know in the financial system. And whether that's going to be dystopian or a super positive, thing. I don't know yet. But I think it's worth a try. But what does that mean in terms of kind of the global vision for Ethereum? Is it kind of is it the global financial settlement layer? Is it the world computer? Is it the anti-censorship layer? Kind of like any of these narratives in principle kind of work technically, right?

But kind of putting one front and center would would help. the story because people in here and you kind of they like stories right kind of if you say okay these are the docs that's not a very good story and if you say look this is this is credibly neutral and because it's very decentralized it is it's also extremely resilient um that also doesn't it doesn't move people right so kind of like why why would you care so what what do you the story should be here. To the average person? Yeah.

Or to whom? I mean, so I think, yeah, I think that's a fair question. So kind of both kind of to the people whom we want to build on this infrastructure, rather than say, Solano or Bay or near, and to the people kind of who end up using. And so kind of if you had to explain to your non-crypto friends, why Ethereum is better than Solano. what do you say? Well, I mean, that's an easy one. I mean, Solana isn't sufficiently decentralized, in my opinion,

and that's just a function of how many nodes they have, validating their blocks. Their uptime is questionable. Their downtime is unacceptable. And quite frankly, the only use case that they've demonstrated is meme coins at this point. So if they've got other things up their sleeve, that's fine. And I'm rooting for everybody more so in the space than I am for the space than I am for the banks.

Okay, so like, don't get me wrong. I'm not like anti-Salana. Like, I have my criticisms and I have, but it's based on just objective understanding of, you know, how these things work. Now, their design decisions, you know, they are going to argue one set of things that they made these choices about scaling

and getting product market fit and all that over pure decentralization. And then we'll decentralize later. Well, it doesn't always work that way. Right. Like, you know, people in power are very unlikely to give up power, right? So I don't know. I have my criticisms about it. I would say, D.Y, O R, do your own research. Figure out what you care about. And then align that with what you feel like the objective analysis is. Actually, chat GPT, Gemini, GROC, these are all good tools nowadays to actually, like, ask them. Like, what are the features of a good blockchain? Like, theoretically, what should it be? and do a comparison analysis against all of the major chains. And it'll tell you it's not hard to figure out, like, which ones are actually doing it.

Ethereum isn't impenetrable. Ethereum isn't the guaranteed winner. I think that Ethereum, what I said earlier about, Ethereum needs to take a more prominent role in figuring itself out as far as, like, what its actual stated goals are, versus these theoretical sort of pseudo-religious narratives, right? Whereas though, the infinite guard, it's like, yeah, okay, well, that's not really actionable.

Like, how are we actually getting there? And what should we be doing as, you know, people in the ecosystem? So what should the narrative be? My point of view is, I think the global settlement layer is probably the most likely. Everything gets built. Well, trustlessness is important, right? It's, you don't have to trust somebody on the other end of a smart contract transaction if we do this correctly, right? And I don't have to trust the people running the blockchain either because it just is and does, right? It just works. So however we get there, I think largely, well, there was a piece that I saw

somebody right that said, well, the non-financial use cases for blockchain. No, they're all financial uses. They're all financial uses. Dow's are all financial. And if T's are financial, you know, they're all financial in some way. Like, I think it's the world economic layer, right? So how do we actually engage in commerce with each other globally? I think it happens on Ethereum.

Now, why the institutional adoption makes a lot of sense is because, you know, quite frankly, it's going to be much easier to get people to. do things when they're already on chain. We were never able over 10 years to get people to come on chain in droves unless it was for a particular thing like buying an NFT, but they didn't want to do everything else in there. They didn't want to do social unchain. They didn't want to do all these other things because it's too complex. It's not cheaper, better, faster, which is kind of the rule of thumb.

So like, if you're not going to get to cheaper, better, faster, people aren't going to use it long term unless you're incentivizing them by a lie. Yeah. but it's not enough. But it actually looks like increasingly traditional finance institutions are besting us at our own game. And they're executing extremely well, right? So kind of if you look at kind of what Stripe is doing with integrating staples and crypto rails directly into global payments infrastructure.

And if you look at what kind of brings people on Shane or kind of what gets them tokens, it's the revolutions and binances of the web, the Robin Hoods, then Black Rock is tokenizing assets on Ethereum. So kind of in many ways, kind of these players are shipping faster user experience and reaching more users than native crypto teams. Well, yeah, they have natural distribution too. I mean, Stripe already has a huge distribution network for their analog products, right? So Web 2 is not an unfamiliar thing to any. of these guys. They already have...

So what does that say about us? That kind of like, we've been trying to do this for 10 years and kind of failing. Well, it says that we were trying to tackle too many things at once. I think we were trying to get... We were trying to innovate technology, right? We're trying to prove entirely new economic models. And we're trying to get users to opt in to using something that's more difficult than just signing into your bank.

All at the same time. and trying to get product market fit for completely new things. I mean, we're trying to bowl the ocean. And for trying to bowl the ocean, we did pretty damn good. But like what I'm saying is when everybody comes on chain, and look, I'm just going to say it. But like, it's kind of like when the Roman Catholic Church was formed, you know how it got formed?

I mean, the Emperor Constantine was basically faced with a situation in Rome where there was all of these sects of Christianity that had popped up. And they didn't even really call it Christianity back then. But there was all these various sort of things happening in Rome. And it was a lot. Okay. And they basically, TLDR, Constantine said, well, if you can't beat him, join him. He couldn't stop it.

He tried. He tried. Or even his predecessors tried. But he claimed that he had this big vision where the Roman army had this big cross on their shield. So he felt compelled to convert to Christianity. And then like, oh, well, we're just going to make it the state-based religion and all this. Well, what was that really? That was a co-opting of Christianity is what it was.

So the principles of Christianity were up for debate. you had dozens and dozens of various types of sex believing different things and he wanted to consolidate it to one thing and then he outlawed everything else right so the council of nysia and all the the kind of canonization of the bible and all of that became a thing so that was that was kind of like the institution is taking over crypto now fast forward you know 1800 years 1700 years and where are we now well christianity is all over the globe and it's not just the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church is a very small component of overall Christianity,

although there are a ton of Catholics. But generally Christianity is a worldview now more than it is just a religion. It is kind of how a lot of people operate from a principal's perspective. And it all started, you know, you can trace it all the way back, you know, and the real scaling of it happened with Rome. What's different? It's really not that different. It's just going to accelerate a lot faster because it's technology.

And it's not just, you know, I don't have to get on a horse and go travel somewhere or get on a boat and go travel somewhere to spread the good word. I can literally type it into a Reddit chat and I can do whatever I want. But if the banks are on chain and all the payment companies are on chain and everyone's on chain and everyone learns how to use these things. And Agenic AI is kind of running around doing things for you on chain. like what's to stop decentralized applications from then already having access to distribution? So kind of let me push back a little bit. So kind of if you kind of look at Jesus's

kind of kind of the statements that he actually made, kind of they are not very commensurate with kind of what Christian doctrine is today, right? And I did not see the podcast going this way. So kind of I'm a little, I'm a little rusty on my... I'm only using it as an example. It's not to be precise.

Yeah, I know. But, yeah, but in the same way, kind of that, kind of, Constantine kind of co-opted Christianity as a tool. Kind of banks and financial institutions are doing the same, right? Kind of like they're not using it as a paradigm shift, like kind of we thought should happen in the sense that kind of like this enables coordination at unprecedented scale and kind of it allows collective ownership of whatever and and kind of distributed reward systems and kind of just making everything fairer and better with a

little man kind of I mean even kind of the platformification argument that kind of you alluded to in the very beginning with kind of like the Uber of this and the Uber of that, kind of like if everyone kind of came onto the same platform, we wouldn't have this, we wouldn't have the problem and kind of like your HR, your HR problems would have gone away and so on. So kind of the idea that kind of this would be a paradigm shift in kind of how societies work, that is done away with by banks just using it as a backhand upgrade. Right, by kind of saying, okay, in principle, kind of we're now, we're kind of, we're, we're, we're, um, but what's the, what's the banks, what's the bank's mode though? So I agree with you that, that if that's where it ends, then we've completely and totally failed. Yeah. If that's where it ends. And I think for some people, the co-opting of crypto by the banks, by the financial institutions is failure. I think some people actually believe this. What I'm saying, though, is once the cat's out of the bag or the genies out of the bottle,

when it comes to, you know, the tools, the crypto tools, and making it easier for people to just function on chain, how do you stop any of these other things from resurging again? What's the bank's mode? Like, what's, if I can, if I can cut out, so let's put it this way. The bank's coming on chain isn't going to save me any money as a consumer. It's not going to save me a dime. They're not going to charge me less from my visa transactions that I swipe because they sell it on arbitram or whatever.

They're not going to charge me less. It's a way for them to automate and abstract complexities away on their end so they can charge me more probably. Okay. Yeah. When PayPal charges you, you know, or anybody charges you just to move crypto. around, well, we're charging you two and a half percent. It's like, why are you charging me two and a half percent? It's the same thing that we're already doing.

Why do I, why do I care about crypto? Because supposedly it's peer-to-peer cashless transactions. I pay a small fee. I send money to you. You receive it on chain. I can verify that you received it on chain because the blockchain said it happened. And all we're doing is moving the ledger numbers around, you know, at the end of the day. And cool.

It's great. But it's not funable. It doesn't compose. Right. Kind of like say you're on Revolut, kind of like your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your Eth on Revolut, you can't do anything with that, with, with, with it that they're not explicitly permitting you to do.

Right. Right. What, what I'm saying, though, is like once. So the only reason why crypto didn't scale bigger than it is or didn't really make it in mainstream is because we didn't have distribution. So if you look at the adoption curve of. things, you know, there's the typical adoption curve. We were down here in the early adopters, right? So those people are willing to do things that other people aren't to adopt things based on

philosophy. It's based on an ethos. And we got all those guys. Okay. So we started building things for those guys because they're willing to do all the things and sign all the transactions and degen all the things and whatever. But we could never get up into the steep, the steeper kind of pieces of the mid adoption and the later adoption and all that we could never get there and it's because again we're trying to do too many things at once and we just didn't have distribution because it's not easy to use so we never solved ux we never solved ui and we basically are now looking to solve it through institutional adoption but i don't think it stops there in the end what are the banks going to be able to do to protect their you know their their moat

Like, is it going to be possible that regulated, collectively owned, digital cooperatives, for example, exist on chain? Yeah, it's going to happen. So credit unions at scale, high frequency, ethereal network stake-based credit unions are going to eat the banks. Okay? So, but that's once everybody's on chain. We weren't able to do it because no one's on chain and nobody knows what it is. Nobody trusts it. It's like, oh, it's too spary.

Oh, Taraluna. Oh, SBF. Oh, ICOs. Oh, meme coins. Oh, Trump. You know, it's like, okay, let him go on chain. And then we're going to build around it. And we're going to basically build better products than what the banks have.

And we'll just, once the distribution networks are on chain, now we can actually do the things that we want to do. It was just, it was too ambitious to completely, without. simplicity and users in late four users, you can't get everybody to do it, even if it's the best thing ever. Now, I'll just use my own experience, okay? If I have a choice to take out an AVE loan against my assets or to deal with a bank forever and over and over and over again with my KYC and this and that and all this, I would even rather KYC with Avey just, you know, have my portable. I was talking to the SEC about this last week, you know, let's, let's have portable KYC. And there's companies working on

this, right? That, that actually, like, for example, if I had a company that I went to and got my identity verified, I could go get my KYC. It's on my wallet. It's a sole bound token. I could go to Have. I can automatically log in. It's verified that I'm good. And then I can put put up my assets and I can take out a loan. Why would I want to deal with the bank? Why would I ever go to a bank if I can just do that? Okay, the answer is I wouldn't. But we didn't do it because nobody knows about any of this.

And they don't trust it. But once it becomes normal, people are going to do it. And they're going to leave banks and droves because they don't really want to deal with banks, but they're necessary evils. I financed my house with a maker CDP years ago. So kind of it's a... There you go. But to be fair, I would have gotten a better rate with my local bank. But it doesn't matter.

Well, actually, I got a fantastic right because I borrowed U.S.D. and paid for my house in euros. So it's, yeah, anyways, I want to share your enthusiasm. But I don't, I don't for various reasons. So kind of this idea that kind of we just need to get people here and then we can get them to care about this. I think this is something. They don't care about it. So kind of exactly.

No, no, no, they don't care about it. Because I've actually, I've actually had my people, Paul, kind of pretty regular people about ownership. So kind of we kind of, my company knows this. So kind of we were going to start an on-shundity. chain neobank that's kind of like the modern version of a cooperative bank, right? Where basically everyone kind of

co-owns the bank and kind of that means and I mean cooperative banking, it used to be huge. It's still huge in some parts. It's still used in the U.S. regionally. It's not a national scale thing, but regionally it's very big here. It's actually,

this is funny because kind of it's kind of, it shows you that Germans are kind of the sort of people who kind of brings spreadsheets to the party. So kind of we have, we are on the UNESCO, um, uh, wild heritage, untangible, wild heritage list for cooperative banking. So kind of, and I mean, other other countries have like, um, Italy has, uh, pizza culture and, uh, Belgium has beer and Spain has flamenco and kind of we have cooperative banking. That's how cool we are. So, yeah, so kind of, and kind of, so we learned a lot of people.

Very German of us. Yeah. So kind of, so we point a lot of people about ownership and kind of show them pictures of, okay, this is, this is Revolut. It's a billion dollar company. You help build it. You own zero percent. The investors own 70 percent. The founders own 30 percent.

How does that make you feel? And people don't care. So the thing is, the sad thing is people don't care because. They're comfortable or not to care. Well, I think it's more, what am I going to do about it? Yeah, I don't know. Because kind of for other problems that kind of have a similar, have kind of a similar output matrix, kind of, we also don't care.

So kind of if you, for instance, look at privacy. So kind of everyone knows that kind of having a proton email is probably better than having a Gmail. It's also free. kind of, it's feature, kind of, it offers feature parity, but for some reason, still everyone has a Gmail address because people are lazy and they don't like to move, right? So kind of in green, but having you? Honestly, change is hard. Well, and I think, I think the reality is the worst that people have used our data for is to try to sell us more stuff. Yeah.

You know, if they started using it politically or to put you in jail, I think you'd care a lot more. But we are using it politically. Kind of they are. Yeah, they are starting to more. Yeah. They are definitely. Look, I agree with you that there is a possibility that regardless of how much good intention and good economic modeling and incentive structure that we build that humans

because of human frailty and laziness are just going to default to what's easiest. Now, if we can make it easiest to do the things that are, you know, better for them. That's how you win. You've got to make it cheaper, better, faster. If you can't make crypto cheaper, better faster, that's how market physics work. Cheaper, better, faster.

The reason why Google wins is because it's fully integrated into everything. It's oath into everything. Like, I can manage it. I can do it from my phone. They've made user experience so easy that, like, I'm literally willing to trade my privacy for it. No, it's terrible, isn't it? It is.

And I can't say that I'm completely innocent on that. Like, I probably am on a scale of one to a hundred in terms of like living all of the Web3 principles and probably 50-50. You know, like I'm 60-40 maybe if I'm generous to myself. So I don't know. I think that big organizations are not going to go down without a fight. I think they're going to try to protect or co-opt anything that gets in their way, even quietly if they can. Like the whole stable coin thing, the maker CDP,

we don't even really do make or die anymore. You know, like, it's still there. You can still do it. But like the collateral that we use was largely USDC. So it's like you're collateralizing with a counterpart. asset, you know, like, it's not a theory in a... Is it weird what assets now? It's T-bills and so on because kind of...

Yeah, yeah, it's going in more of that direction. Yeah, I was saying. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, and some of that's not all bad, but, like, I mean, at least the permission to use it is permissionless, right? So whether or not you've got counterparty risk, I mean, the U.S. financial system has a ton of counterparty risk.

So, I mean, the whole global economic system has a ton of counterparty risk. So, like, to say that, oh, well, die is not sufficiently deceptive. centralized. There's not like USDC doesn't have counterparty risk. Of course it does. So like, yeah, the volatility is probably the more the weapon or the, the, the, the enemy of decentralized stable coins. Because even 1% volatility seems like a lot when you're moving around a lot of USTC, right? So people don't like it. So they like the solid peg of $1.1. They like that. And that's how USDC got. it's market dominance in the U.S. And that's how, I mean, that's how USD got it internationally, you know. It's just parity. It's always a dollar. Anyways, I don't disagree with you.

I'm saying best case scenario, the way I see it, and the thing I'm working toward is, you know, look, I think the financial system coming on chain is inevitable. I think it makes sense for them. I think if I'm them, there's huge greenfield opportunities. market share and all sorts of revenue streams that can come from this. I mean, stable coins are probably the most profitable use cases that come out of crypto. So it's inevitable and natural that they would do that. It's very rational thinking on their behalf. So I'm not going to get in the way of that.

But I almost think, like, to an extent, it's like bringing the Trojan horse inside. you know because once everyone's using these things more commonly and if we legitimately figure out scaling issues where we're not paying two and three percent for where I can literally send you a wire transfer peer to peer with you know cost me 25 cents people are going to use it if it's easy to use for example easy to use to me would be imagine a future state where I have a self-sovereign AI agent bot, okay? And let's call him Buffy. Okay, so Buffy is my bot.

And I just, you know, one day, he's on my phone. He's in my telegram. I was like, oh, man, you know, I forgot to send Frédéric that 50 bucks that I owe her. Can you send that to her right now? Done. I don't need to sign anything. He's already got access to a wallet that has some discretionary. money, you know, he can go do it right now. He can even send me back if I want the

ether scan transaction receipt. And it's done. Open floor can already do that and it doesn't That's what I'm saying. It's like, but imagine it being so easy the average guy down the streets doing it. Okay. But open, I'm just saying, super easy to use. Have you? I know, but I'm of course I've tried it. Like we just had a huge component of Eat Denver that was all claws out AI open claw agents. We built literally Buffy bot the thing. I'm talking about to be the co-host of the opening ceremonies. We built an AI agent to do that. So like

it doesn't even have to be five years from now, but what I'm saying is it might take five years for your next door neighbor down the street who knows nothing about crypto to be doing this. But it will inevitably happen though because it's like, oh, well, crypto's not scary because it's now everyone uses it. Right now, nobody wants to touch it. It's just, it's an evolutionary thinking.

It's partially generational thinking, and it's part just evolutionary. thinking around what's acceptable, what's scary, what's risky. And once things are not seen as risky, people are just going to do it. So kind of when we zoom out, by what metric do you think we should monitor to see whether blockchain is actually making the world a better, fairer place? So kind of is it things like, I don't know, self-custody adoption or, um, cooperative models or censorship resistance or capital formation without intermediaries.

I mean, there's an endlessness, right? Oh, my goodness. What are the metrics? Sorry, it's just a little bit of kind of like, it's kind of like putting my finger on it, because I feel like it's sometimes where we idealists kind of we blank, right? You say, oh, but clearly this is better infrastructure. Clearly, this is fairer for people. Clearly, this is, but kind of like, how will people's lives actually improve?

Well, I think a common metric is GDP per capita. I think right now, for example, cooperatives contribute to about $600 billion in GDP for the U.S. I think it'll be really interesting to see, like, how are we going to measure the network state GDP? Not the U.S. GDP, not the German GDP, not the, not the, EU GDP, but like the GDP of the network state, meaning on chain, I think that's a really interesting metric to follow. I think that you're going to see active daily users balloon, but then we've got to know, like, what does that mean?

Like, how much, you know, what does that equate to in terms of transactions? So I think average transaction might be an interesting metric to see. And like geographically where are people using it? Like if the network state really takes hold, you're going to see people globally doing business with each other. And that's going to be pretty hard to get away from seeing it. And I don't think it's going to be easy to measure like India's GDP versus the US GDP. I think you're going to have to start measuring network state GDP. So and then what is that, how do we actually analyze that in the context of what we know is existing kind of metrics and fundamentals?

I don't know the exact metric that's going to nail it, nail it. Like the North Star metric that you might say in like a business pitch, like, well, here's our North Star metric, here's how we measure everything. I'd have to think on that for a little while. But like I think it's probably something around on-chain activity. Like look at ghost chains, right? They have all this activities, but then you look at it and there's no one really moving anything around. It's just nonsense. Ethereum is probably the best one because you can see the total active users or the monthly active users, you can

can see the transaction volume. And that's sort of a correlation to ecosystem health. Now, how do we see the difference between whether somebody at Black Rock is using Ethereum versus somebody who really needs it in Mexico or somewhere? Like, that's a good question because anonymity or pseudonymity is going to be a thing in the future, even more so than it is today. I don't know how you're going to measure that. But I think we're going to know.

But does it matter that it's used by people who really needed? Well, does it matter? I think it matters because if all we're doing is creating a better system for the banks to move stuff around between each other, then it's just a vanity project. That's totally, I mean, that's totally fair. And I conquer. But if you kind of say the average transaction size is kind of like what you're looking for. we'd have to have some way to delineate enterprise or institutional movement versus just average movement. I don't know that we're going to have that.

So I'll say what, I'm going to punt on this particular question because I think it's a good one. And the next time we talk, I'm going to have a better answer for this. But I think there's some economic measurement here that is going to. Look, we can't get away from the fundamentals that GDP is what drives. the world. We can't. We'd be foolish to say that we're going to get away from GDP in general. I just don't think that's going to happen.

I don't see how you... I mean, GDP is also somewhat misrepresentative, right? So kind of, for instance, Germany has a lower GDP per capita than West Virginia, which is the poorest state in the U.S. And kind of quality of living is much higher than it is in West Virginia. So kind of, it's kind of, it's an imperfect matter. Right. But kind of if you look at things like economic agency, for instance, kind of like how much, how much choice do I have in what I can do? How do you measure that?

If I want a loan, how hard pressed for choice am I? Kind of do I have one payday lender or kind of do I have variety of your exact? opportunities on Chan or whatever. Yeah. And then I think what also might be kind of, I know this is somewhat dystopian, but I fear that kind of censorship resistance might become much more important in the future. And I mean, you kind of, you can see how kind of large tech companies kind of, kind of lose their principles faster than you would like.

Well, you know, there was some censoring that happened recently with Tether. Did you see that? No. Where they froze the accounts of certain, they froze the assets of certain people in their USDT. Okay. I mean, it happens all the time. I mean, basically, it's fully permission to adjust as is USC and so on. So kind of, I mean, basically it's, yeah, it's.

Yeah, it's like it might as, you're on a blacklist. Yeah, yeah. You know, the, the libertarian to me doesn't like any of that stuff because it's like, you know, a lot of that's just subjective political warfare. And, you know, I don't know, not all of it, but a lot of it is. And, you know, you could say we're doing good work. all of this, but, you know, we all know that political pressure and political censoring is the oldest tool in the kit when it comes to, like, you know, tamping down the opposition or whatever from, you know, removing you from power or whatever. So, I don't know, it's a hard

problem. I think privacy is going to be, you know, the censorship resistance is really correlated to privacy. And if you've got privacy, then you don't have to worry about censorship resistance as much because I can do things privately. But then you've got all the worries about, I would. I was just meeting with the SEC last week. And, you know, there is a deep belief by Commissioner Purs that, who's the Crypto Task Force leader, that, you know, privacy is a fundamental human right. That's her personal view. And, and I mean, that's admirable.

I mean, too often elected to the person have that way. And well, and she's not elected. She's an appointed official. And she is, but she's very well respected inside her community and ours for these points of view. But what's sad is the U.S. Congress, there are people on both sides of the aisle that actually, you know, want the government to be able to see everything. And it's just like, yeah, it is. I mean, it really is. And, you know, I was a, I was a victim of the Operation Chokey.

point two point oh, I got debanked after 26 years of relationship with Wells Fargo. And no explanation, no nothing, just a letter in the mail saying, you're done. And the decision's final. And we can't tell you anything about it. Yeah. And it's happening systematically. So kind of the judges at the Hague were recently put under economic sanctions by the U.S. because of a judgment they had reached in relation to Benjamin Netanyahu.

And so basically, which meant that kind of all their banks debanked them, they kind of were deplatformed from tech platforms. They, their Google accounts were closed. And they're not even able to kind of book a flight anymore because kind of they can't have a visa or mastercard. because those are U.S. entities. And kind of like it's kind of the guy who gave the interview, he said, it's basically like being in the 90s again. If I want to go to a hotel, I have to call them and say,

look, I want to come day after tomorrow. Do you have a vacancy? Yeah, and it's crazy. I think kind of just the fact that, and I mean, this is not a terrorist, right? Kind of like these are the judges at the international. It depends on you ask, right? I mean, it sounds like, it sounds like the U.S. is treating them kind of like terrorists. Yeah, exactly, tooché.

Yeah, so, yeah, so maybe final question. So kind of when you kind of think about the next couple of years and kind of you say that you are very good at kind of predicting trends. So what do we absolutely need to get right for kind of this kind of entire ownership narrative? agency kind of paradigm shift to matter structurally. Do you think it's kind of like it's things like user experience or interop or governance or economic sustainability or where do you think kind of we should, what do you think we should pay most attention to? Well, I have a personal belief that we don't, especially in the U.S., we don't have

currently a legal framework that would actually support the network state appropriately. at the federal level. So if you look at the contortionist act that we've put together in terms of launching tokens and doing TGEs and things, we've done it basically around a very murky regulatory environment, and we've done it, you could say, with creative lawyering and using offshore entities to skirt the system. Right? So we've launched what would be in the U.S. essentially securities, but we do it offshore or we do it through cutesy ways, like governance

token. What do you mean? This is a governance token. Right. It's a governance token for AVE and like, yeah, but I mean, this goes against the entire principle of the number one coordination mechanism in the history of mankind is profit. Profit is a wonderful coordination mechanism because we can. profit, we can coordinate around profits much better that we can coordinate around decision

making, much better. But we don't have a way in the U.S., for example, to share profits. So with non-accredited investors, without a lot of complexities and without a bunch of crap, it just doesn't work. So we've created things like Dow LLCs and Dunas and all these things to, like, do that. Well, I've been working on a project that I think is probably one of the most, and of course I think my baby's cute, but like I think it's important. to get the legal stuff right. So what we did was we built a proposal for Congress to include in Clarity in the Clarity Act, which is currently in Congress, to basically give a federal exemption for cooperatives from securities registration. So it's like the reg D for co-ops. So we call it

regulation membership. So anybody who's curious about that can go to regulation membership.com and you can see what we're working on. So I think the legal framework has to be right. So if we're not going to get to the, if we can't get the legal framework right, I don't think any amount of, you know, cutely lawyering or engineering around, you know, trying to work around stuff

is going to actually get us where we want to go. I understand the reason why we don't want to be securities tokens. And I don't think that network state tokens should be securities. I think that if you're actively participating in a business or a protocol, then that should be exempt because it's my work, not somebody else's. It doesn't pass the Howie test, in other words. So that's why regulation membership is so important. Okay.

Now, other than that, I think the single most important proliferation in Web3 is Agentic AI by a landslide. So what do we need to get right with that? I think usability, yes, it's very easy to set up, open claw, I know. but I would say there are going to be optimizations and methodologies and security and making sure that you don't let your you know Austin Griffith was telling a story at Yt Denver the other day about how his open claw agent tried to export his private key and you know the you know so this is why you do it on a virtual machine right no I know and and it's But you think that's going to be the beginning and the end of it?

No, we're going to have a whole bunch of problems with this. So I think the smart maturation of self-sovereign agents where my agent isn't controlled by Google, my agent is running locally on my hardware, whether it's my phone or it's my machine or whatever, it works only for me. And that combining with the primitives that we've already built, call it the sort of agentic Legos. You know, how do we build, you know, the crypto economy with the primitives, the money Legos that we talked about, but building around it with agentic legos to interact with other agents that abstracts complexities from humans in a legitimate way, making it cheaper, better, faster because they don't have to spend time. It's just easier to do. I think those two things, getting the legalities right and getting the agentic AI right are the most important things, but then not too far behind is we really got to.

to get privacy right. We've got to get privacy right. And I think it has something to do with zero knowledge identity. So like how do I prove who I am without me having to tell every person that I interact with who I am? How can I with a zero knowledge proof, prove who I am on chain so that even if I've got some weird pseudonym like original bufficorn, right? Nobody needs to know who I am. and I can transact freely on the internet because there's a zero knowledge proof that I'd been verified. But how do you do that safely

without being censored in an inappropriate way? That's the question. That's the question. Same last words. Exactly. Fantastic. John, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. And where can people find out more about

your baby in East Denver? Well, eathenver.com is the, the most commonplace, if you're looking for content, go to our YouTube channel. So just look up Eat Denver or Ethereum Denver on YouTube. We also have presence on X. You know, it's quieting down quite a bit now because, you know, most of that's kind of over for a season. If you're interested in the legality side of things, go to Regulationmembership.com. That's my personal project.

And then my day job isopolis.co, op-o-l-l-is.co. That's the U.S.-based employment platform that we built for independent workers and, you know, digital nomads and, you know, solopreneurs and things that are Dow workers that don't have an employer to give them legitimacy, payroll, and benefits, including health insurance in the U.S. So that's where you go. Thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you.