Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Ambre Soubiran, Jerome de Tychey & Mounir Benchemled: EthCC 4 – Liberté, Égalité, Décentralisé

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

EthCC is back and stronger than ever! Despite the pandemic, ongoing travel restrictions and sanitary passes, the Ethereum France team hosted the fourth edition of the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris. Over 1,000 people attended the week-long affair, which saw an impressive number of side events and, as always, legendary parties. For many attendees, it was their first conference since last year's edition, and the first time they were able to embrace their fellow Etherians since the beginning of the pandemic.For this EthCC recap panel, we're joined by Kaiko CEO Ambre Soubiran, Ethereum France President Jerome de Tychey, and ParaSwap Founder Mounir Benchemled. We discussed the conference, how the ecosystem has evolved this past year, the rapid growth of DeFi and NFTs, and what to look forward to as the community continues to grow.Episode links:KaikoParaSwapEthereum FranceSponsors:ParaSwap: ParaSwap aggregates all major DEXs and makes sure you beat the market price at every single swap and with the lowest slippage - http://paraswap.io/epicenterChorus One: Start earning rewards and contribute to network security by staking with Chorus One, a staking provider securing over $1bn in assets on over 25 decentralized networks. Head over now to chorus.one to start your staking journey. This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/401

Hi, I'm Sebastian Quichuil and you're listening to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders, and thought leaders. If you can't tell by the sound of my voice, this is the day after ECC. It was an amazing conference. And one of the things that I heard a lot from people and was certainly my feeling was that it was great to connect with everybody again. The last conference, last ECC was just before all the lockdowns happened in early March of 2020. And for a lot of people in the space, I think we had mostly seen each other on Zoom calls. And to be able to, you know, see each other again, I think it was one of the things that people loved the most about this conference. Of course, you know, there was many great talks and panels and, you know, the workshops and everything.

But getting to see everybody again was, I think, a major highlight here this week. I want to congratulate the Ethereum France team for putting on this event, given all the restrictions, and we're still in the pandemic. It was a really amazing feat to be able to put this on and bring in over a thousand people in Paris. There were, we couldn't count the number of side events. That's how big this conference was because a lot of people just couldn't get in given the restrictions. So it sort of overflowed into all these side events.

So it was great. and I'm really looking forward to next year's conference. Today we've got a sort of panel discussion with Om Sourion, the CEO of Caico, Jerome de Tichet, the president of Ethereum in France, and Mounier-Benzhim-led, CEO and founder of Paraswap. And, you know, we just talked about the conference and, you know, sort of like get their feeling on how things went and, you know, the ecosystem, how it's evolving.

And we talked about the future as well. So it was a lot of fun and I hope you'll enjoy it. If you're listening to this on the audio version of the podcast, We recorded this in the ECC podcast studio, and there's like cameras and everything. So it's also on YouTube if you want to watch the video. It's pretty cool. Before we go to the interview, though, I'd like to tell you about our sponsors for this week's episode, and Paraswap is a sponsor this week.

So with Paraswap, you can beat the market price every single block. It's fast and highly liquid. And they've just integrated with ledger. So if you're using a ledger device like me, you can now swap directly in the Ledger Life app. So it makes it really easy to do swaps without having to connect your ledger to your browser and everything. So check it out if you're using ledger and go to Paraswap.io to learn more. And course one, if you have crypto assets that are sitting idly in your wallet, you can start earning rewards and contributing to network security by staking with Course One. Course one is a staking provider with over a billion dollars in assets in over 25 decentralized networks, including Solana, Cosmos, and Ethereum.

If you're interested in running your own branded node, they have a white label, Node-as-a-service offering that leverages Chorus 1's highly available and proven infrastructure enabling you to participate directly in decentralized networks. So head over to Chorus.1 to start your staking journey. And with that, here's my conversation with Mounier-Benzhim Led, Gereme de Tichet, and Ambrose-Suber. So I'm here with Muniard Ben-Gimled, founder and CEO of Pereswap, Jerome de Tichet, president of Ethereum-Ferans, an organizer of this fine conference, and umpsvillon, who's CEO of Kaiko, my three compatriots, may I say. So thanks for joining me today on this little roundtable

as we find ourselves at the end of the conference. Everyone's a little tired, I think, but we'll get through it and have a cool conversation. So, yeah, thanks for joining me. So who went to the rave last night? I did. You did? I was there, yeah. I didn't. I saved my energy for today and tonight. Yeah, I didn't go. I also wanted to save my energy for tonight. And on the rooftop of the FM, it's going to be quite cool, I think.

It was an amazing lineup. I want to say, congratulations to Have for organizing this. We had the old headbanger crew plus breakboats, plus boys' noise. It reminded me of my 20s, like 10 years ago when we were going to clubs in Paris. This was the label to follow. And boom, suddenly reunited. Crypto makes all your dreams come true.

I couldn't have dreamt a better party, except that I had to work on the next day, so I didn't really party a lot. What's amazing is that this could actually even take place given the context and everything, so I think that's pretty cool. It ended up lining up quite well, I think, with the measures and everything, and things seem to have gone quite smoothly.

So, yeah, I mean, let's... There's a few things I want to talk about, There's a few things I want to talk about. I'd like to talk about, of course, the conference, but also looking at the ecosystem since we last chatted last year. And we also talked last year. We didn't talk last year. But I think your perspective on the Defi side

would be interesting. Last year, the name of this panel was Flash Lones and Alba Bumps. Alba Bumps are still here. Yeah. Fis bumps too. Fis bumps too. Now we have fist, but we've upgraded the fist bumps. Nobody does the feet bump.

No. It's not a thing. But we, but, you know, in terms of like, what are your takes on how the, how the Ethereum space has evolved in last year? And, like, do you think that the pandemic had a very sort of, like, specific, like, specific ways in which it affected the Ethereum ecosystem? And, like, what are your thoughts on, like, how things have grown? Why? Yeah. Left to right. Just thought.

Yeah. Let's start. Yeah. in terms of the category of users. A year ago, it was mostly driven by what you call Defi DGens or power users who are using DFI. And right now we start to see much more retail using Ethereum. And I think part of that is due to sidechings like Polygon and BSC

that have seen a big traction. And a year ago, if you would ask me if Polygon or BSC would succeed, I would say definitely not. But that was one of the biggest surprises. they definitely attracted new categories of users that you can see on any decks and including in Parasop. And that's probably also catalyzed by the fact that the market went up. So suddenly the focus on the blockchain space went crazy. And from the overall ambience that I kind of felt in the conference is a lot of confidence.

People feel confident, happy that we had market validation that what we were building was good. also traction in terms of users, and that's a very positive feedback loop that we can feel in the community right now. And from my perspective, so I address a B2B audience with KICO, so we work with institutions in the space. And for me, 2020 was really the year of institutional adoption and something that I've been hoping for very intensely, which is institution obviously still focusing on Bitcoin, but really trying for the first time to give Ethereum the attention it deserves. And obviously it kind of starts with the launch of derivative products on Ethereum. It's not necessarily the way you would want to see institutions adopting the space, but at least it's not like Bitcoin or nothing. Now Ethereum is definitely in the spotlight. We're starting

to see regulated entities and capital markets kind of giants look very seriously at Ethereum, not just from a price speculating like let's try this new asset class standpoint, but also from a how can we use this thing. How can we build? industrial applications on top of this thing. And I find that super interesting, and it really came out of 2020. I like what you see when you say, well, it's institutional acquisition. And from my perspective, Bitcoin is the gateway drug. Look at this and like, well, cool, now I have Bitcoin.

So sometimes because your bank and your private bank sector will tell you, like, hey, we need to have Bitcoin because all of my clients, they want to have Bitcoin. Okay, let's do it. Let's have some Bitcoin. I have some custody of Bitcoin. And companies in the field, there's like some of our sponsors, ledger are providing a B2B custody solution and they see traction on this and when they end up having Bitcoin on their account they're like well what can I do with this and now you

have companies like Ave we have launched Ave Pro and saying well you know you can have a yield on your Bitcoin if you wrap it into Rob Bitcoin and deposit on Ave and suddenly they kind of feel like okay it's just not a dead cat sitting on my account it's something that they can actually lend that they can actually apply some derivatives that come some financial primitives that I'm either aware of or that are like a little bit familiar, and after hearing again and again that you can use paraswap, that you can use uniswap, that you can use uniswap, that you can use suhup, that you can use liquidity and so on. They kind of get to this.

I would caveat that institutions, I don't think they're yet kind of trading on uniswap or going through power swap for executing trades, but at least they're looking at it and they know what it means, kind of. That's the major shift, is that they are considering now using those technologies. I think maybe you know better. They still see them as technologies, and maybe they're not looking to trade on DFI, but maybe use these technologies in their context? And I think that would be a blessing, actually, for the space, right?

It's not just like, honestly, if we have institutions buying ETH, that's great. It drives the price up, good. But what is really interesting is understanding that blockchain and Ethereum in particular as a technology can be used to actually implement financial contract, implements financial services, and it's not about

just trading ETH. It's about building on Ethereum, just like all of us here are building on Ethereum, right? I like this this sort of dichotomy between the institutional and the more end user side of things since since

the last conference there was of course like D-Fi summer and there's like all this kind of D-Gen activity just before we had this talk I was speaking with Italic that episode would be out next week on Epicenter and one of the things we talked about was what he discussed during his talk was this

you know where he's I don't want to maybe not lamented, but he was somewhat cautious about, you know, the fact that, like, Ethereum has become a platform for financial instruments, and you have, like, layers upon layers of derivatives, and at some point, you know, the thing can just collapse. And I, I, this resonates with me because I'm, you know, I sort of think that the entire world right now is, like, focused on prices and, you know, this, like, kind of idea of financial nihilism. And I hope that, you know, that there will be, like, actual, you know, you know, you.

utility built on Ethereum, but at the moment, it seems like the things are growing in full finance and like... But there's finance and finance, right? There's finance kind of degen, I agree, like super leveraged position on like you create value that literally doesn't exist. Like there's not enough ETH to fulfill all of the derivatives contract that have been issued. That's kind of, you know, literally taking the bad things of traditional finance and putting that on Ethereum, which is kind of, you know, a shame.

However, there's incredible things... With like a huge multiplier. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, I mean, it's like, you know, there's a... crime crisis is a very good example of like the things that can happen when you keep embedding and wrapping too many things into too many things and like you lose track of what was inside in the first place. However, I'm also kind of like I think it's important to realize that there are good things

in traditional finance and that we should think about bringing that on chain. I was talking to a guy who was building credit reputation, credit, kind of rating, credit scoring on chain to assign credit scoring to wallet so that you don't need to give your ID as long your wallet is reputable or deemed reputable, you can participate in two different types of on-chain applications. And that's why it's not just about finance in terms of APYs and all of that. It's also about having industrial applications, having real-life use cases.

And there could be financial. What's wrong with having everyone and their models setting tokens to each other's? There's just been a new thing. You're too smart to say things like that. No, but anyway, I agree. I didn't hear Vitalik's interview, but yeah, I completely copied that. There's a tendency to create new tokens with the name of any elements and say, hey, this is the cucumber token, and now bring all your things, and I'm going to give away.

So a cucumber and then the previous one, sell to the previous one. Yeah, there is a tendency to do that, to print super high API and trying to bring people. But on the plus side, like, having great reputation, It should be super cool. Also from a VC perspective, because we see, I mean, you're a better place to talk about this. But when you see 8 VC last year, and you were at 8 VC last year as someone looking for funding,

the VC crowd has evolved as well. How many VC were there last year? We had like 27, and this year we had about 50. Yeah, so doubled, right? And we had huge, like, awesome VCs this year. We also had amazing. VCs last year. So just ETHVC is a sort of sidetrack that's organized with KICO and

Yeah, exactly. And it really emanated. Yeah. And it emanated from when we raised KICO's seed. There was such a disconnect between like traditional fintech VCs and the blockchain founders that we thought it's good to just break that ice and get fintech VCs just more into the Ethereum ecosystem. And I wanted to do that thing inside at CC because they needed to see the energy, the

intelligence, the camaraderie that there is in that ecosystem and understand that if they a founder that kind of doesn't know how to play the VC game or the VC pitch whatever, but there is a different form of intelligence that I adore in this ecosystem. Because the credit score, tell us like this founder is worth 9 out of 10, or this one is worth 8 out of 10, and tell the VC is like, well, look, this is super credit score team and it should have more money. Because what I heard from VC this year is that, well, okay, this is complex, this is interesting, or we don't really know what the market is,

but we will do a team play. And then, okay, let's try to get validation. Early stage VC is a founder's bet, and the founder's bet in an ecosystem where you don't necessarily understand the tech and the founders are inherently not your traditional kind of, you know, fresh out of whatever college,

knowing the VC game type founder. It's harder for them to navigate. So my experience of pitching last year in a VC and meeting those VC in a different context when we're not like raising right now. I saw big shifts and do their approach. Last year, I felt like traditional VCs were not really in crypto.

We're kind of in a discovery phase, like trying to understand and careful a little bit on what has to be done. And only a few months later, maybe it coincides with Defi Summer, at some extent. Right now, they built a full teams and they have a very deep understanding

of what is Defi's. where is decentralization and so on and they are now ready to deploy significant capital and we're talking about tens of millions of dollars that is ready to be deployed right now and they're like looking for entrepreneurs so I think maybe 8VC is one of the biggest

contributors to this shift in fintech yeah I'm serious I mean I talk to them and many told me this yeah I saw you in EDVC at that time didn't really it was still new for us and we needed more time to understand this thing and right now they are like investing in DFI protocols and that's a good that's a great thing we're even starting to see traditional equity vCs

that are kind of you know now building token funds which sounded impossible a year ago yeah how i mean here in france we have the bpil france which is the sort of sovereign fund uh i know that they're like quite involved in the in yeah they were big big space yeah they were big supporters this year very present they've done kind of giant leaps into understanding the space and getting to know other space. I think they're still taking their time to actually deploy capital, but at least they're really now very much willing. Yeah, and supporting. Very supportive. They're very highly supportive. Many VCs also thanks to them to their encouragement that they are able to invest. And they invest in, I think, in some venture capital. Yeah, they invested in White Star.

In White Star. In White Star. So basically, White Star has a mandate to invest in French blockchain startups using kind of also that extra fuel from BP. Yeah, exactly. So one thing that I really want to talk about since I'm here with, you know, the creme de la creme of the French ecosystem is how the French ecosystem has grown. And specifically the DeFi ecosystem, I think like Paraswap is like one of the important players there. But, you know, like last year, like two years ago,

you know, there were a lot of crypto startups in France, but, you know, you had like Ledger and a lot of like smaller ones and not so much happening in Defi. But like in the last few months even, like we've just seen like tons of really high quality. quality defy products coming out of the French ecosystem and like teams based in France, starting companies in France and like gaining traction and you know exciting gathering excitement around their projects like where do you think this is coming from and you know are we going

to start seeing like a sort of shift towards more defy projects in France? Well we can only assume that each young friends is doing good. trying to promote the fact that Paris is a good place on the map to see things happening on Ethereum. And also it's like, I think in the financial space, in the financial industry, the French individuals have a good reputation because they do math and abstraction to a certain extent, and they like being a quant, like being a trader or whatever. And now they are applying their brain juice to, doing crypto stuff.

I'm very happy to see AP Wine here as a sponsor behind us, a very young company of two young out-of-school that just build a way to separate yield from a token and retokenize it and doing cool derivatives of them. Yep, we just talk about it, but the approach is very, very, very, very smart. I love it. And one of the things that I love also is Mangrove,

a project by academics in France from... Yeah, super interesting project. that try to address one of the problems we have with automated market maker and also defy projects where it's highly capital inefficient and yeah they're tackling this problem with a very nice approach as well so it's it's great it's great to see happening and I think also that the fact that we have a background of doing lots of public goods doing lots of research deep research and applying this to crypto is a it's only starting to happen, so very eager to see what it is. And I think a lot of these projects, if you look at the founders, I think many of them are probably like former consensus France, people that work at Consensus France, even though Consensus France doesn't really,

I mean, I think they probably have a few people still, but I think that was like a really good incubator, incubator for creating much of what's happening now in the French ecosystem. I think it's like a network effect. So you need to have one project that's going to attract another one. And once you reach a critical mass, then you create an ecosystem. I think Ethereum France contributed a lot.

We were also organized in Defi France, which we were very surprised to see how much traction and that was in 2019, in the middle of the bear markets. And we had like 100 people in a small room coming to listen to Defi. So that was also early signs that there is something happening and now we see the results of this top quality project that we're seeing.

I think we're going to see more in the near term. I think something very beautiful about the Ethereum, ecosystem in general, maybe in France in particular, because I just see it more, is that in bare markets, people get their head together and try to think kind of proactively around how they're going to build things versus kind of just being down and depressed. And why is that? It's just because Ethereum offers tools that enables you to build, right, versus, I guess, the biggest divide would be Bitcoin Ethereum, where, well, Bitcoin drops, you know, you're kind of like

looking at your screen and you can't do anything about it. With Ethereum, you can actually think, hey, you know, the ecosystem needs a Dex aggregator. The ecosystem needs a Fiat on ramp. You know, there's so many things that you can do to enable growth and application and collaboration between companies, and this is done thanks to organization like Ether in France or like bringing people together so that intelligence kind of is shared. And, yeah, education for sure.

Next time the price drop will spend some time breeding some Axi Infinity and playing some games. You know, we couldn't have an Ethereum ETC panel without talking about NFTs and what's been happening in the NFT space in the last few months. And I'm glad you're here because you're building a product that very much uses NFTs. Do you guys think that, you know, what's the real utility to come out of that? of that space and you know we were talking earlier with with with Sonny Metallic and you know I think NFT space is probably not the right way it's like there are several sort of use cases so like this the art use case there's a

collectibles use case there's like gaming and you know there's like finance kind of intermingled with all of that you know kind of interwoven into all these use cases what is the like what is the you think the use case that will be that will kind of pop out of this as is the most widely used? Well, well, where to start? Okay. From the beginning.

So this year we had a heart exhibit from NFT artist. Another bad name. I'm an NFT artist. Well, basically an artist that put a representation of their digital art into the blockchain, so as a form of an NFT. And I think we're only seeing the tip of the icebreak on this, because we still have to see artists trying to, use the blockchain medium to make them their art evolve.

We had one speaker in 2018 that came again and again to HCC, which is Kevin Abush, a photographer that is experimenting with the blockchain, with work like YLumbo or the D.C. the bank or his collaboration with I. I.WA.Way on using blockchain to do new kinds of arts. So that's super exciting to see. And we are only seeing the beginning of this. I think maybe the heart space will be super active

on doing blockchain stuff pretty soon. Now, when it comes to blockchain, I'm a deep believer of having gaming as a way to onboard people into blockchain because it gives them a reason to actually try to install a wallet. And if they don't succeed on trying to install a wallet, having another game, pushing a wallet to them in another way.

And suddenly solving the problem that you are actually playing when you are doing a video game or you are enjoying a video game. And at some point, the thing that you earn in the video game or the thing that represents, your character or the thing that your character has, you want to give them value, you want to have something outside of the game, or

eventually you have the thing that you have in the game being usable in another game. And that's what NFT is bringing to the table. And now, what can you do with this? Well, we can use the blockchain to do pairing of players. So instead of doing everybody to a server and play Fortnite,

eventually you can play on the blockchain, doing everybody together on a smart contract and have peer-to-peer rather than multiplayer, for example. And using the blockchain as a way to run a blockchain game engine can be something very exciting as well. So I'm really excited to see what is going. Yeah, and it's also kind of encouraging to see that like in France we have like Sore who's like one of the probably the biggest like NFT issuer and also like comets and sandbox as well.

Yeah, it's kind of cool to see like this kind of gaming, this kind of gaming ecosystem like French gaming users. I'm also moving to the blockchain space. Yeah, we have a big tradition in France to be known for finance, but also known for video games. Yeah, yeah. It's only natural to see and are very happy that it applies to blockchain. What in terms of everything that you've seen here this year,

like, what are you most hopeful in terms of, like, technology advancements or new types of applications being built on Ethereum? Like, what will we look back on next year and be like, oh, that was the thing that, you know, kind of blew up in 2021. Especially scaling solutions. I think there was a proof of concept with side chains that proved there is a big need and it works.

When we put more, I would say, resources and make this thing cheaper and faster, it definitely works, sorry. And like now we're entering the phase of layer two, like effective layer two is not independent side chains. And I think this will bring new possibilities. like we come back to finance, things like high frequency trading, that is not possible. Right now, today, it's going to be possible.

And I think the challenge right now is we are breaking what we know as composability in DFI. But we're entering this new phase, so new challenges are going to come in order to solve what we just broke. But that's going to take DFI and maybe other use cases to next stages. and maybe we will start getting closer to CFI or TreadFi. But I think you know better on how to take leverage with risk and how to use the derivatives in order to have best execution. And I think DFI would look like that in the future. It's going to be maybe better.

Maybe not. I'm not sure. But yeah, those are the new challenges that are coming with those new scaling solutions, in my opinion. I'm not sure I'm for high-frequency trading on the blockchain. It suits you because it generates fees on parasat. But no, but in general, again, I'm B2B, so I'm very close to what's going on on the enterprise institutions,

capital market side. Very, very excited about, like, Societ General Forge against, like, French version of kind of one of those institutions looking at using Ethereum in order to implement equity derivatives, traditional equity derivatives. So they're looking at kind of European indices derivatives that could be living on Ethereum where obviously we could play the role

of bringing the settlement data on chain. So what I'm looking at from, I guess, a more infrastructure perspective would be those on-ramp, off-ramps, bridging traditional finance and on-chain finance from my perspective, from a data perspective, but it could be custody,

it could be reputation, I think oracles are going to be extremely important in the future, having reliable information that is brought from outside the blockchain onto the blockchain, enabling the implementation and delivery of contracts that are tied to instruments that live outside of the blockchain. If you think about it, most financial contracts are signed on a piece of paper or docusine or whatever, and they represent code. If you think about it, code, like a legal agreement is code.

You define functions and then you implement functions, et cetera. So if you can translate a lot of those financial contracts or whatever type of contracts into code, what you need are the inputs. And those inputs will be provided by oracles. We believe this is going to be very important in the future. Also, the enforcement of those agreements can be automatic. Exactly.

No, that's the purpose of putting it into a smart contract. It's like automation of a legal agreement that can represent any type of contract. Absolutely. But what struck me this year is the humongous amounts of defy application that we had on the call for speaker. So when we were reviewing it, we were lucky to have lots of talks that were kind of similar. So we could have two different talks and do a selection and keep the defy track quite small, even if it was like 30% or 40% of the whole conference.

And at the same time, literally little to know each arm two talks. So maybe it means that Eterm 2 is on track and we are just like okay let's let's let's let it come and hopefully everything will be good and and it feels like Eterm 2 is a little bit

too far away or too virtual like not not concrete yet hence maybe why we have all of those layer 2 solutions or side chains that are thriving right now but in the end we will need both for sure

If you take, for example, let's say, we do proof of stake tomorrow, and all the chains runs three times faster than what ITERA main net is doing right now. And we have 64 chains. Well, that's three times 64 more blocks. So, like, lots of blocks. Yay. Maybe the prevalence of scaling solutions in, like, layer twos is taking the pressure off a little bit off of the E2 stuff. Because people can actually build things.

But let's say we have exponential adoption because suddenly, like, hey, We are mature for this market. We are mature to go retail. And we have lots of video games. We have lots of dexies. We have lots of defile projects. Like, I know the matrix from Kameh, for example. We've been live for six months on Polygon,

and we did 8 million transactions in six months. Eight million transactions of an average of 1 million gas per transaction, because we execute lots of things inside the blockchain. So that's, well, 8 trillion gas. consume. That's just huge. We need a LEDO2 solutions on top of the side chain or LED2 solution on top of the charts that you all

deployed in. So what I liked a lot is the talk about ZKEVM by Hermes and other people trying to go that direction like stockware and so on. So I'm very happy that people are already seeing the next step. What happened if

next year we have a successful video game, successful defy stuff, successful new things build on Ethereum, successful governance built on Ethereum and we are we have to deliver that to one billion people not only tens of million yeah I think what will be will be interesting to see is like how these different types of applications with very different sort of platform needs will coexist and you know we were also talking about this with with Sunni and Vitalik earlier is that you know that so I you know I you

know very close to the Cosmos community as well and the division in the Cosmos community is that you have like application specific chains and so you which is what I think has enabled a lot of non-financial applications to exist. So you have a chain that's like for VPN, like a chain that's for like, you know, building that sort of cloud. Because there's like a, you know, so in the theorem space, the analogy is like you need, you know, things that are good for finance, things that might be good for gaming, things that might be good for, I don't know, minting FTs or things like that. And, you know, perhaps that with, you know, scaling solutions,

we'll start to see like some sort of fragmentation in terms of the applications. because building a defy app and building a game necessitates quite different technical infrastructure and scaling. I can't disagree with that. Please, continue. No, I think it's a good approach from an engineering perspective. Oh, yeah, we want to make dedicated chain

with dedicated architecture and things. But the beauty of it is composability. I want to see a video game where you have an economic, economy inside this video game represented by E. SC20, E.C.721, and so on. And being able to have all the defy primitives to list those resources in game so that the economy of this video game can thrive with those primitives rather than have to go

to another chain or have to go to another shot. And maybe that can very well work without it. But I think we are, like we are, it's like having a good, a good thing to eat, but no sauce to pour on it. Like, well, what would you say? Hey, well, no, it also. also that's one of the books or the proof of concept that side change like Polygon has proven is that you can have video games and they are interoperable

with financial assets and at the end I mean you are creating a new virtual world that also has its economy like you can trade the NFTEs for instance and so on and having composability makes things much much easier it doesn't mean that this fragmentation will I mean will make it impossible but it's just would make it challenging and it's going to take some time to fix. The only thing is how to manage this transition phase. I don't see, like, there's no magic formula, but I think we're going to have to live with both and wait until we find those solutions and battle test them, and how long this will

take maybe one or two years, maybe more. It's hard to say. Yeah. I feel like perhaps the sort of fragmentation might come later when you have more real-world things that are on the blockchain. It's like when you have, like, the equity for your house, for example, on the blockchain. you know, perhaps it's not so useful to have, like, sitting, it's not so useful for that being sitting right next to, like, you know,

your, your, uh, your Shiba Inu NFTs or things like that. I'll counter that as well. I'm just, I'm just thinking, for example, like, uh, um, I just bought an apartment and we, congratulations. Thanks. And it was a loan that was collateralized by the actual house. So, um, basically instead of having an insurance where if I die, uh, the insurance pays the whatever is left of the loan, Here I have a credit-hypothecaire, so collateral.

A mortgage. It's very rare in France. Exactly. Exactly. And actually the mortgage is collateralized by the real estate. And so in some way, if I have a representation of my ownership of my house on a blockchain, maybe I want to use that as collateral, for example. So obviously there could be some rare cases where you don't necessarily need the ability to have that kind of different economics.

It's just like it's a shame to have a system that offers it, and then, not benefited by putting it in a corner. I mean, wait, wait, wait. That's awesome. It's a great idea. Let's have an NFT project where you take a loan to buy the NFT. And if you don't reimburse the loan, we take the NFT away. Yeah, the big problem here is the value, right? I mean...

Use your so rare cars, it's collateral for your house. Exactly. So that's a huge problem with collateralized loans in general is how do you monitor the loan to value and how do you pay margin calls, etc. And that's what you have when you borrow stable coins. against crypto, you have those margin calls, et cetera. So the liquidity of the underlying asset is important. In the case of a house, they basically take a discount,

and it's not a very volatile asset price. But if you start putting, you know, spaceships and sorari cards, and I'm not sure how I would trust the solidity of my collateral. Cool. So what's next for 8CC? I think this was, given the pandemic and, Given the context, I think it was such a fabulous contrast. Yeah, it was a boon.

You know, basically, you know, you've had two years of ECC during the pandemic, and I think it's like the two biggest ECCs have been during the pandemic. We'll see if there's like a Google spreadsheet with like, you know, deviant infections that'll come out in the next few years. I might actually, I was thinking of actually like creating the spreadsheet and like just putting it out there, like as a pin tweet so people can start, you know, if there are infections, they can at least, you know, list them. of 2020.

First, first Louisville cluster, first the Delta cluster. Yeah, yeah, let's be proactive here because it's probably going to happen, but yeah.

After the Delta cluster come the E-Clusters, so we'll be the E4 cluster. This will be the best advertisement possible. Like last year I was joking, saying that we kind of created the herd immunity

of the community. Yeah. So, so yeah, what did you learn this year? And what are your plans for next year? Oh, yeah.

Well, just a little remark about last year because maybe people are watching us, like, those careless people like holding conference in the middle of the pandemic. So, ACC happened last year the first week of March. And

the weekend before, the SEC, there was the Salon de L'Aiculture, the agriculture gathering, with 30,000 people going there. And the first day of HCC, we had our president, Macron, going to the theater, being interviewed, saying,

like, hey, guys, just enjoy Paris, go out, live as it was normal. Like, we have things are under control. By this time, we didn't know exactly what was coming. We were relying on the WHO recommendations and so on. And yeah, this was crazy, basically. And now we were thinking about how we're going to do it this year.

How are we going to be able to organize it or not? We were thinking about doing it March, and then May, and then June. And then we said, OK, we have one bullet left. Let's go for July. And if it doesn't happen in July, we'll see. The roles have changed during the preparation. Like the week before we were supposed to have at CC, we had the president coming to the TV and say,

okay, so starting this day, we were going to enforce this, which we had to enforce on the second day of the conference. It didn't change much. We didn't want it to enforce that initially and stick at 1,000 people. We maybe could have sold 3,000 tickets or so. But yeah, we stick to that and everything went fine. So now the question for us is to say,

well, are we going to host the conference in March 2022? It started to get ready for this. Or are we going to aim for May, June, July. Maybe it was too hot for Paris this summer. Maybe a little bit earlier would be better. People, I think, genuinely liked it. I got a lot of feedback from people that they liked that it was in the summer. Yeah, and we are very close with the Berlin community,

the German community in general, and we know that they were organizing a conference, DAPCon and everything around this in, in 8th, Berlin, in August. So we don't want to be in a position where we impose the competition, or we impose our agenda and so on. So we will synchronize with them to see what works best,

or even if we can have one thing here and one thing there, let's see what could work. And moreover, the big question for us is to know whether or not we are going to have a DEF CON this year, whether or not is going to happen this year in Bogota as planned in December. that's going to be also part of the decision. If nothing happened in December and we cannot party

because we just move to the next phase of interim two, or maybe we should do something about it. Maybe we should have half at C.C or something. Okay, well, hopefully we can have a full, instead of a half of a CCC, we can have a double CETC. And we can have like 3,000 people here at La Mitralite. How much can we fit here? How many people? Tubs?

The place is incredible. Yeah. I'm not entirely sure. I think if every room is filled of people and everything and everywhere I think it's close to 12,000. Okay, so we have room for

growing in here. Yeah, but I don't know if... I don't know. Let's discuss that. One thing that I'm happy about, and I didn't use it very much, but I'm very happy about the studio. Because last year I had my little

Rinky Nick podcast booth under the stairs, which was great. But, I mean, this is, I think, such a great thing to offer media and podcasters is to have like a proper studio and hats off to you guys for doing that.

We had two professional teams organizing a, well, shooting a documentary, two different teams. Let's see what comes out of this. Yeah, yeah, that's right. There's going to be like maybe a Netflix documentary film at ETC. So that's pretty cool too. All right. Well, it's late in the third day. I think everybody wants to go have a drink on the rooftop at the next to the send. So we'll end it here and see you guys next year.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to live. listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us, guests or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter. And please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show, and we're always happy to read them. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.