Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Epicenter Hosts – The Bear Is Back: Recollections From 2022

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

This year has been quite a rollercoaster for the crypto industry. From the long-awaited success of the Ethereum Merge to the spectacular collapse of FTX, this year has been full of lessons, resilience, and insights. This is also one of a few bear markets where activities and developments continue to feel vibrant across the board, while long-term adoption and regulations seem evermore uncertain. With that backdrop, our hosts sit down for a conversation on the current state of crypto and look back on 2022. The topics range from the general public sentiment to key developments within the industry, as well as exciting themes that the hosts are looking forward to in the upcoming future. Throughout the conversation, the hosts also express concerns over the issues with privacy and regulations, and how the ecosystems can resiliently move forward.Topics covered in this episode:General public sentiment heading into the new year, after Luna and FTX collapseCeFi versus DeFiCrypto Regulations and adoption trendsThe Ethereum Merge, MEV, and OFAC-sanctionRoadmap and community development for censorship resistancezkEVM and Eigen LayerThe future of Cosmos Ecosystem and Cosmos HubThe state of UrbitUrbit and cryptoThoughts on the Solana community and ecosystemEpisode links: Brian on TwitterSebastien on TwitterFelix on TwitterSponsors: Tally Ho: Tally Ho is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycashThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/473

Welcome to Epicenter. This is episode 473. This is the show that talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian I'm here with my co-host, Brian Crane, and Felix Luce. How's it going, Guy? Very good. Pretty good. A little tired, but looking forward to this. I think we're all a little bit tired. We all have little eyes, I can see. It is early, though. But we are today going to discuss, you know, this is kind of our year-end wrap-up episode. It's coming towards the end of the year.

And well, I guess it's safe to say lots has happened this year. And we're going to go over all of that and hopefully make some sense of it. And hopefully makes some sense of what's coming in the future. That is if there is a future to be had. But before we do that, I'd like to first talk about our sponsor this week, Tally Ho. Tally Ho is an open source wallet, redefining the wallet as a public good. With Talley Ho, you can safely connect to DFI and Web 3, plus a lot more.

You can view your NFTs in their wallet across Ethereum, Polygon, optimism, and Arbitrum, and they have really great ledger support. You can also swap between assets and view all of your account balances across their portfolio tab. Currently, they're running a layer two adventure that rewards users for exploring the Arbitrum ecosystem with Tally Ho. You can get a space dog NFT when you participate, and you'll be entered to went into a give away for another NFD. So head over to the website tally.cash to check it out. I think Federi had told me that tally is a type of dog that hunts foxes, which is kind of

clever branding when you think about it. Yeah, head over tally. That cache to check it out. So guys, there's another really great product that I've been using over the last couple of weeks and it's like this really great resume builder. And it's going to come in handy when we're all looking for new jobs in January. I wonder if you are also like, you know, sprucing after the resume. for when you're out of work in a couple of months.

Well, actually, I've been trying to open a bank account, and then they were like required a resume. So I actually did have a resume. Yes. What kind of KYC is going on these days? Seriously, you had to. Oh, my God. That's pretty good.

That's pretty good. Wow. Well, so, you know, we came here to talk about like, you know, kind of look back on the last year and you make some sense of what's going on now and what the sentiment is and how that might affect the future for the industry. And so, yeah, I think I'm not really sure where to start. I mean, like lots of great things happened this year, you know, like the merge happened, which which was huge. I feel like it was eclipsed by a whole bunch of other stuff, but at least in like the ecosystem that I'm, that I, I roll in. But then, of course, there was like the Luna collapse, which was a huge blow to the

ecosystem and like, I think just like general confidence in the space. It affected lots of teams, also like tangibly. And then, you know, we thought we were kind of out of the woods and then, well, this happens, like the FTX fraud, debacle, whatever you want to call it. And now like Luna just, you know, pales in comparison, I feel like. I feel like Luna was like, minor events compared to what what this will provoke in terms of potential like backlash on the ecosystem and just like regulation and just overall trust being degraded in the technology and also just like the space generally. Do you guys sort of agree with that thesis? Yeah, I'm not sure. Like one of the things that's like so I've had a financial time subscription

for the last maybe three years or something. I don't know. And I tend to sort of check out the crypto articles a little bit in there, and especially the comment section. And it was always pretty skeptical. I would say there was a time maybe last year where there was a little bit more balanced. You know, there was like some people who were like,

yeah, no, it's actually some interesting stuff happening. There was a little bit of that. But then I feel like this year, you know, earlier this year, it just changed to, I mean, one is the articles are mostly negative, but the comment section is basically just, this is a complete scam. Like, this is all a gigantic scam. It has to like die. There was an interesting article I read like some months ago where, I mean, maybe like a month ago, something like that. But it was basically like, hey, really should stop trying to regulate this crypto thing because this crypto thing is just a scam and by like

regulating it you're giving it some sort of legitimacy that it doesn't deserve but as we've seen now with ftx collapse and stuff like that it's kind of isolated it doesn't sort of affect you know the real economy and the real bank so like let's just you know segregate it say that like none of the financial institutions are allowed to touch this sort of dumpster fire and then he will just sort of die its own death there and that's sort of the way to go. And, you know, all of the comments were like, that makes so much sense. Finally someone is saying, finally someone is like singing out loud. And like so, and I saw this threat from Zuzu, which is another bizarre thing, no, because

the guy is basically also seems like a bit of a scammer, no, with his three arrows, capital where they were, you know, trying to borrow money, like when they were already insolvent. And like, I guess it looks like lying about their assets by making stuff up. And so it was interesting, you know, how they're like briefly disappeared and then, you know, come back like a month later, two months later, like giving, sharing wisdom about the other scammers and stuff like that. But I think I read somewhere he's trying to raise another fund. I heard that. I heard that this was read that somewhere too yeah i don't know if that's true but one of the things he did say that i actually felt was quite accurate which was basically that and then i feel i see very much

reflected in this kind of financial times you know type commentary that i think for a lot of people like outside of crypto and you know let's say in the traditional financial system or it this crypto thing it's just like one huge scam right like like Like it's all and so then F.TX and like S, you know, Sandbanking Fried and stuff doesn't look any worse than any of the rest, right? And if anything, maybe it's slightly better because he was at least like giving some money away to even if it wasn't his money to some kind of causes. So I feel like it also explains a little bit maybe that, you know, to people in the crypto thing, there's like big difference, right? there's like a lot of great things. And then there are like someone like SBF who's like complete fraud and we're all like find it bizarre that they sort of, that he doesn't get treated like this complete fraud in the mainstream media.

But I think if you look at it kind of through that lens, kind of makes sense. Yeah. I don't know what that all means. I would say in the times, you know, that I've been in crypto, which is now, I guess, nine and a half years. or something like that. This is the most negative. I think that the opinions that I feel like you see about crypto in the wider media and world, I feel like the most negative that they've ever been.

Yeah. I was just going to say I was reading a tweet this morning. Yeah, because there was this, I think, this confusion or people were somewhat surprised that the people in the audience went, so SBF did this interview at this New York Times event and, you know, people were applauding him. And but what, what this tweet was was like a screenshot of some article, but were basically that was claiming that the people were applauding him for, for essentially like having destroyed crypto.

It was, you know, they weren't applauding him to congratulate him or, you know, to, to like, uphold him as like some sort of. of a good person, but it was in fact because, you know, because like he was, he was in fact, like sort of destroying this dumpster fire, like finally destroying this dumpster fire. And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, like that kind of makes sense. I wish I could find the tweet, but I can't find it anymore. Anyway, but yeah, I mean, Felix, what do you think? Yeah, I guess I actually like related to the Financial Times thing, I've followed a little bit the Reddit communities over time and they've also been switching a lot into more, yeah,

the solid scam, you know, like it's pretty negative sentiment for sure. I think overall though, I guess you know, the killer use case for crypto is finance or defy and I think that propped up a lot of the market, create a lot of leverage, right? And then these these people like like actually Luna is full of leverage, right? SBF is full of leverage, Zuzu, every one of those. And they're like the loud voices, I guess. And obviously when the market as a whole changes, bear market comes, they get washed out, which should actually be a good thing.

But in this case, I guess it takes with it a bunch of innocent people. But I guess that's, that's kind of what happened. And it's not super surprising if you look at it in hindsight, because I guess SVF was actually his first. cycle, basically. He came in in 2019. It was the bear market. And I think he said somewhere in interview, the maximum he expected was a 30% drawdown or something, which is obviously not what happened. He should have looked at the crypto charts, you know. Yeah. So, so, but yeah, I guess, you know, then these are the things that people see, right?

The big high is the big lows. But I guess in parallel, we have all these technology, being built, but that's not really being talked about in the mainstream media or because I guess the use cases are just also very limited to the finance thing. And so I'm not super surprised that this is the sentiment in the wider sense. But I guess, yeah, to me, still nothing much has changed about the fundamentals. I think, I think we all underestimate the amount of understanding that people outside or bubble have about this stuff. And like even people who are kind of informed about finance. So I'll give an example.

I was in Dubai last week. And we were at this alternative investment manager summit. And, you know, a lot of the folks here are obviously like smart and like educated about finance and about markets and about, yeah, like the whole space of finance, like tri-fi, but also FinTech. And overwhelmingly, the people I spoke with had like no notion or like very fuzzy notions about the distinction between, you know, C-Fi, FTX-type platforms like Binance, etc. Binance was a sponsor there also, by the way. And like Defi. You know, I had to have several conversations where, you know, really coming back to first principles and like explaining what the

differences between like a decentralized finance platform and like an FTCX type platform. And it was kind of surprising, you know, I would talk to people and like start and I felt I was kind of losing them. It's like, no, wait, like, I need to come back and kind of explain things from first principles. And so it's kind of like not surprising that like the media, I mean, like the media is even less informed. Yeah, like I think that's one of the biggest challenges here is the crafting narratives that are accurate that makes sense and that uh that differentiate between like what what ftx is and what defy is yeah i mean the maybe a little bit to i guess with felix and what you said now the was the interesting thing is that in defy there's basically like no

leverage if anything i think luna was like a one system where you could say there was a kind of like leverage mechanism or you have this kind of feedback mechanism that kind of was like leverage like and and I guess what we did see is that low Luna grew so much because of that right it because it just allows a kind of explosive growth that is really hard when you don't have that and then but in defy you basically almost don't have that at this point maybe it's going to come probably it's going to come at least increasingly so. But then you've had people build these systems on top, which were all centralized and off-chain. And then they were basically, you know, running kind of high-deverage fractional reserve system, all like lending money to each other

and using it as collateral to lend more money and buy more. And in the end, right, for the most part, this was really like a big de-leveraging. Now, big de-leveraging with also, a big amount of fraud mixed in there, right? Because I think there was a lot of lying about, oh, we're not leveraged when they were or lying about how much leverage there was. But yeah, I think in the long run, of course, there isn't a healthy aspect to it. I think Block 5 was especially a good example of that, right? where when they put out these financial results of BlockFi at some point they were like published

and they lost like I think it was like 200 million in you know 20 20 20 21 like the two years or something like that and they had like a thousand people in this company all doing this interest account so it's just like and even in the bull market right they lost so much money and you know you can also that's just a really bad business, right? That was, you know, I don't think there was like fraud there as much as crappy business that then relied on like, you know, lots of venture funding, lots of risk, but kind of being in denial about the risks they were actually having and then, you know, their market and it gets wiped out.

And of course, that's a good thing in some level too, right? because it, I think what remains is going to be much healthier, but pretty painful in the process. Yeah, I mean, but BlockFi was like this, you know, respected company, you know, I mean, like to some extent, FTCS as well. But I think even more, I mean, from my, my perspective, like, even more so BlockFi in terms of its reputation. You know, it's been in this space for a long time. I mean, like at some point, even we were like, hey, BlockFi would be a good sponsor for Epicenter. know. I mean, I was a user of Blockfire and I did recommend it sometimes. I mean, I felt like when Celsius went down, it was like kind of very clear of like, yeah, no, you don't want to be in this thing. And so, you know, I guess I didn't end up, you know, managed to get out. And I think

I'm also tweeted at some point like, hey, if you're in one of these centralized lending things, like, get out. If anyone still is, right? I think there's some sort of standing, highly, highly recommend taking money out of that. Yeah. I mean, like, again, I think it comes down to a lot of, like, understanding of what these things are in education. And like, I'll give you an example, like, like Zengo, for instance, as a wallet that I recommend to a lot of people and that I use, you know, on my phone and stuff, like great, you know, MPC wallet. But then in Zengo, it's like, hey, earn interest on your crypto. And then you just like move your crypto over to this line. But like, people,

I think like most people don't know where they're putting their money. They just have like some application. They've downloaded. They've bought some crypto. Someone told them about it. And then they end up using some service that like is centralized, maybe doing leveraging, isn't regulated. I mean, I think the really the issue here, it comes down to like we need to regulate, like we need to regulate centralized crypto actors in the same way that we financial institutions.

Like that seems like the only solution that makes sense. Like a crypto lending platform or a crypto exchange is just a traditional finance business running on like a new asset class. Right. Yeah, I think it's ironic that like SBF was trying to get the defy frontends regulated, but actually the centralized actors are the ones that need the regulation. And the defy system kind of works the way it is and doesn't need separate regulation. in my opinion too because obviously everything is transparent and you can check how these the systems work,

how solvent they are and there cannot be any extra liabilities off-chain for a for a defi system. So I think yeah, definitely agree to that. What's your sense that because my biggest fear here and I think we'll certainly see some of that is this lack of separation in the narrative, right? between C5 platforms and DFI platforms will end up hurting DFI because it will also get regulated. Or it will, like regulations will apply to it that don't make sense for it. I haven't kept up on Mika so much in the last like six months. I probably should. But, you know, from like some conversations I've had with people who are close to that issue,

you know, there's a desire to accelerate passing of Mika probably apply pretty strict regulation to stable coins and and I think probably like defy some parts of defy will end up having some of the same constraints as c5 even though it doesn't make sense for them from like a practical or operational perspective yeah I mean of course there's also the big question of like why you know why do they regulate in the first place right is it to actually you know reduce risk for people yeah maybe a little bit but you know I think mostly it's because they are regulators, governments, central banks are just worried about losing control. And the defy thing is more threatening than, you know, some centralized platform that you can more regulate. So I think if they can like try to crack down on that, then, you know, they're, they'll try. Now, maybe one thing where I'm, I have sort of like a question mark of I'm not sure about which way it's going to go or like the events of this year like what do they make more likely because

I think on on one level it's also ties into my earlier point right I think for many people crypto looks a lot less threatening now you know because that the asset size is like much smaller you know a bunch of people lost money but it's you know it's these crypto people anyway right And if you don't like crypto and a bunch of crypto, people lose money and they're like, well, you know, bad luck, who do I care? And it didn't really affect the normal financial system, right? It didn't, there was no kind of contagion. So then it's like, okay, are you really going to spend all of this time diving into this complex thing to try to regulate it? Or are you just going to like be whatever?

Now, of course, if there's like, I guess it's not going to be like one or the other. But I do think the kind of market contraction bear market is on balance going to make regulation like less likely. But yeah, if of course, let's say Mika, things that are in work over years, it's not like they're going to stop that. And it's not like more regulation isn't still coming. But the thing that was also, I feel which is something that I did not expect and that was interesting this year. I would say most people in crypto that I spoke to in the last years, they were more of the opinion that, you know, we had these early crypto adopters and they're more technically savvy and they're more interested in the technology

and they would be more likely to use, you know, hardware wallet or like self-custodial wallets. And then, you know, you're going to have all these new. people coming in and they're much more going to be on, you know, coin waste or Binance and they use some centralized product. But of course, this year we've seen, we have seen the risk of that and the pains of that, right? And, you know, we see more people, I think, moving towards custodial or, you know, where people do self-custody. And then I think when you think of the regulation, that's also something where it's probably going to be way easier. If you do self-custody, you can have more control and maybe you could use stuff that you

wouldn't be able to use otherwise. So I do feel hopeful that that sort of trend is there, where actually a lot more crypto is, it goes back to like, why was this in the first place where people actually control their own assets, they control their own private keys, they, you know, initiate their own transactions. And that's, of course, really good. Yeah. Yeah. I think I follow Oriol, again, just talking about Zengo here. They're not a sponsor, but I just do love that wallet. In the days after FTX, like their installs just like went up like crazy. I think also Ledger probably had a lot of, you know, orders right after after the FTCS thing. I mean, let's hope so, right?

Right, let's talk about other stuff. What else? Yeah, let's talk about what else did you guys think was most important this year? Or like, what did you feel is when we look back in the future on 2022, what will people kind of think, oh, that that happened and that ended up having a big impact or was the beginning of something significant? Yeah, I guess the obvious one. that we kind of already mentioned is probably the Ethereum merge. So I guess it's like the huge event of like kind of finally moving to proof of stake for Ethereum. And it also like going that smoothly that it kind of didn't make the news.

I guess that's also the new thing that the new cycle, you need like something to go wrong to be on people's minds. And, but overall, right, it's, it's impressive how that went down and now how it's all working because it's, I guess, the first, we weren't really sure, right, proof of sake was running. The PCHA was running quite a while, almost two years now without any, like, actual transactions. And it wasn't really clear how it would look if this entire defy ecosystem of like billions of dollars would move across and just seeing that that worked and that's such a big. transition can work in a distributed system, I think is something that is very impressive. And probably, I don't know if something like this will happen again in the future or maybe

it also proves that like we can do these kind of decentralized upgrades to our systems at such a big scale. So I think that's kind of my main one. I'm not sure if you guys, yeah, probably hopefully agree. Definitely. I think that was a huge, huge, huge event. and yeah congratulations to everyone involved i guess that's like an endless amount of organization and people involved i guess you know we at course one are also working on that and like i mean we

of course uh this was already right in the theorem white paper at the end of 2013 is like oh it's going to move to proof a stake and i remember i think we did like podcast with vitalik in i think maybe 2015 or something he's like uh it's like six months or something or five months episode 58 yeah yeah Yeah, yeah. So, maybe it was 24. Did he say six months back then? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but we also did like, I remember most we did like lightning episodes in like 2015 and

they were like, yeah, three months, lightning is alive. And it'll take like six years or whatever, five years. But yeah, no, they had this. But in the end, it succeeded. I mean, it was very successful in many aspects. I guess there is a sort of lingering question, probably mostly around, you know, this flashbots, MEP censorship, you know, like obviously it's way better in terms of the economics of Ethereum have improved, right? So it's good for ether holders, you know, because there's less dilution

and that's a great thing. And the energy impact has gone down like dramatically and and sort of game theoretically, the security has gone up. I think it's going to be very positive for Ethereum when more kind of institutional interest comes back because the whole of like energy efficiency, green blockchain is going to be huge, right? I think that would be a massive, massive advantage that Ethereum is going to have over Bitcoin.

And but at the same time, right, this whole, also the separation of proposals, builders, and now we have, we have that I think a huge percentage of Ethereum validators are following this OFAC sanctions list. I guess that's another thing we didn't add it to the topics, but I think the tornado cash thing is actually a significant event of this year as well. Yeah. So that does raise the question of, yeah, like the censorship resistance is, I think, a big, big question

and challenge for Ethereum that is ahead. Is the Ethereum community trying to remedy this? Yeah, I think they do have now as a sort of on the Ethereum roadmap, like censorship resistance. So I think it's very, at least there is a, I think, consensus that this is something that's necessary and that, you know, they're going to work towards and it's an explicit goal. So that like something like, okay, the tornado cash smart contract transactions are being censored to that or something like that, that's not possible. So I think at least as a goal, I think there's consensus on that and there's like research towards that. I'm not sure. I think there are like ideas for how to address it.

I'm not super up to date with like what the ideas are and how long it's going to take and how well they're going to work and what are the other side effects of those ideas. I think at a high level, right, I guess you know this MEV topic came up pretty late, right? basically defy summer 2021, maybe even or 2020. And then FlashBots already building this tool to democratize it. And then as a side effect, because they are building this tool and running it themselves, they get a lot of traction with it and kind of centralized this RPC layer to some degree that everyone is using MF Boost. And then, yeah, this tornado cache thing happens in parallel, which probably also no one

really saw coming like this. And it somehow ended up with them obviously having to make the choice that they will include the sanctionals because they're a US company. And I guess it's just kind of a matter of time though because the goals, like you said, Brian, they are there and many people are working towards it. I think even the flashboard team themselves, right, allow others to run relayers. It's just that their relayer has been dominating based on kind of the traction it already had with with searchers and validators beforehand. So it's just generating more income. So, but, but I, you can already see it going down a little bit with like other relays coming in and some of them not following this the sanction list.

And I guess with when the full proposal build a separation is there, I, I feel like it would be addressed. So it's just a matter of time in some degree. And yeah, good to see that, you know, people realize the importance of it. Yeah, I really enjoyed this, this panel from DevCon that we released a couple of weeks ago, that Frederica moderated and there was a pretty, I was like not heated, but someone somewhat disagreeing conversation between Shriram from Eugenlair and Phil Dian of flashbats. And I really like the way that Triram framed it, which was essentially, you know, the validators

beyond the obvious like validating blocks and making sure blocks are like technically valid. they're simply they should simply you know be attesting transactions and and and notarizing those transactions basically they're just like a test of like the state of a block and like published that block to the chain and um i thought that was like an interesting way to frame the the topic of credible neutrality in the context of validators yeah i think like the ecosystem should do everything it can to arrive at that goal where a validator is simply just like testing transactions and is not doing any sort of censorship or like choosing what transactions should make it in the block or not. Yeah.

I guess in the end, the thing is like who chooses it then? You know, I guess you need someone to build a block or somehow to have this order. I guess in proposal of build a separation, you just have this builder role and then it's kind of like outsource to them. to do this, which I don't know if it changed much, just shifts the responsibility, I guess. Yeah, I might end up being more centralized too, right? Because I think at least it seems like a high likelihood if you're going to have some specialized builder, which may be a pretty complex role that then you end up having, you know, two, three parties that are like making all the blocks.

Right. Like, yeah, validators are already have quite a few in a sense, right? Like companies that do it. A builder is definitely, I don't see how it, how it can be, probably is going to be less companies, yeah, I agree. How are you guys thinking about this at KORUS? What's your, your philosophy around this? I mean, maybe Felix, you wrote our, yeah, we can't give away our competitive advantage.

I mean, yeah, I think, I guess, I think also one thing that definitely happened is that it's kind of like over-compliance, I would say, in, for some of the people that they, like, just kind of put the censorship list in practice, even though like no one really asked them maybe. And I think that is probably too much. I think we definitely chorus, right? Our philosophy is that we need the censorship resistance. We need a decentralized ecosystem. And I guess we would support that.

But obviously if like there's like super clear regulatory guidance, you can't do this, then we probably wouldn't do it. But I guess, or maybe at least then we would try to like engage with the regulators to the extent. possible for us and convince them of the need of this. I guess it's already what we would support now. But yeah, I do feel that some of the organizations, maybe overcomplied to this. And yeah, so I think we would avoid this. I mean, that's also my personal view of how we internally operate.

Yeah, and including of course, right, OFAC is a US thing, right? This really applies to US person so that then you have like non-EUU. US organizations kind of complying to that is, I think. I, sorry, but I think the FATF guidelines probably include OFAC sanctions lists, and therefore anyone who wants to comply with FATF guidelines probably will. No, but FATF is like not a regulatory thing, right? They basically... It's not, but they do have tremendous influence on the way banks

and other institutions and anyone who interacts with financial system works. I mean, maybe in the context of blockbilleders. It does not apply. Sure, no, it is. Yeah. But I think FATF in their guidelines probably includes OFAC or like the OFAC sanctions list. No, no, no. I'm not sure about this, but.

I mean, I think if you're the, I mean, I think FATF, I mean, again, also I'm not an expert on this at all, so maybe I'm wrong. But I think FATF definitely has like guidance that, you know, different countries have to do some sort of money, you know, money laundering, controls and whatnot. But then, but yeah, the OFAT thing is like UFAC thing is like U.S. Treasury Department, you know, declaring some countries being like, you know, I mean, mostly around countries, right, the OFAC thing, right? It's mostly like, oh, you can't deal with Iran because the U.S. doesn't like Iran. But for example, that doesn't apply to European companies. They can deal with Iran. I guess where it becomes tricky is, let's say, if you're a European bank, but you're sort of relying on, you know, access to, like, or connections with the U.S.

financial institutions, then you're like, okay, maybe we also have to comply with this, even though technically doesn't apply because we're worried about, like, our U.S. counterparties then saying, like, well, we don't deal with you or, like, losing access to some kind of, you know, U.S. financial services that they need. So I think in the traditional financial industry, I think definitely this kind of OFAC stuff ends up getting adopted by non-U.S. organizations just because they're scared of losing access to the U.S. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you're right.

I mean, if ATF does have, I'm looking here, like countries that they monitor And also the EU publishes a list of either blacklisted or they don't call it blacklist, but essentially it's like blacklisted countries. So what, yeah, with regards to like Ethereum and I think like in the continuation of our conversation here with regards to Ethereum, you guys had written here ZKVM and EigenLair, why are you so excited about these two things? I think these were like for my perspective. I was on a bunch of Ethereum conferences this year too. And I guess I'm following it quite closely. So I feel like these are the two big innovative or like interesting things that happened in the Ethereum ecosystem this year.

I mean, CKVM, I guess it's just like a very technological advance and quite advanced in that space, it seems, so that, you know, you can. fully basically write normal EVM solidity code and in ZK. So I guess that might like change the way we see decentralized applications or how they work and how they scale and privacy components of it. So I think that could be just a big game changer in that sense. And I mean, yeah, just impressive how fast this ZK space is also moving, I guess, which we all saw over the last two years.

years, right? I guess it has been really like a Cambrian explosion of all these cryptographic advances. And I think it's like slowly moving into, yeah, practice in the crypto networks with with actual applications around it. And yeah, I guess that's exciting. I mean, I am personally not even, you know, you don't know what to expect, right? It's, I think some of the killer apps will come from this, from ZK stuff in general, right? That, because there you actually can do things that you couldn't do really before in the in the in the cfi or off chain world and um so i'm quite excited about that i don't know yeah what do you guys think about like zero knowledge in general maybe or i guess zkvm specific yeah i think it's i mean like i think it's super

cool i mean i think one thing that crypto has accelerated zk research in a way that no other technology or industry has in the last years and and then there's all these really interesting and cool use cases. So like I was talking with like panumbra a couple weeks ago and you know, it just like blew my mind that, you know, in the, you know, more like in the IBC ecosystem, you could use panumbra to execute transactions in IBC, you know, in like non-ZK zones, but you're sort of executing those transactions from the literal panumbra, right? Like you are in the shadows and you're executing your transactions and like things like that, like it's super excited about crypto. Yeah, where where I have doubts is about like usability and this is always a challenge.

And, you know, for a lot of privacy preserving technologies and applications, it's often the case that they're used by like a small niche of people who are, you know, very, very passionate about the stuff. And it rarely makes its way into like I think the mainstream. At least I don't have any good examples of that. So yeah, I hope that. SSL. SISL. Yeah, SSL is one example. SISL is one a good example, but like things like signal and stuff like that. But SSL was implemented as a kind of infrastructure layer. And, you know, in that sense, you know, SSL was implemented to protect payment information, you know, in the early days of the web in the 90s, like they build HTTPSSSL to protect credit

card data. And, you know, this could be where also where ZK plays a huge role is like protecting people's financial information. And for that, though, you need like a massive kind of adoption of crypto as a starting point. And then an implementation that would allow people to remain private in their transactions. I mean, I guess the ZK thing, right, has like several dimensions. I'm, you know, there is the kind of scalability aspect, which I guess is probably where like most of the activity is at the moment. And I think that seems pretty promising.

I guess there seem to be like issues. There's a lot of complexity there, right? And I think a lot of open questions still are like, you know, how well is that going to work? I am personally especially excited. I think kind of Sebastian, what you brought up is the whole privacy thing. Because I think this is like a huge, huge, huge issue. It's really the biggest issue. I think in crypto today is like a lack of privacy.

And I think it's going to, it's very scary, right? because all of this information is here and you will be able to go back in time and it will all still be here. And now if you see like AI and all of the progress here, like I think you can kind of have to assume that everything will be fully known about, you know, what are all your wallet addresses? What is everything that you were doing? And probably kind of soon. And that's just like, hmm, you know, really not great, right? Because I think that's, I mean, from a private security perspective, right? Like, makes it one role to being like robbed and attacked.

From a perspective of the government cracking down on stuff, it makes it, you know, if you know, there's some dull and you can just figure out who are all the token holders and like pretty easy to shut down the doll. And I'm definitely worried that the problem, I mean, from a tax perspective. Yeah, taxes. No, for sure. I mean, I still think this is going to be the main way that governments are going to like crack down on crypto.

I think it's going to be through taxation, you know, that they're basically going to be like. You've been saying this for years. Yeah. I think it's going to. I feel like pretty confident on that. Because it's just going to be so easy, you know, like you're going to have all of the data, given the tax rules and given how crypto works, it's basically inevitable that almost everyone didn't pay the taxes correctly.

And then you can go after them and you don't even have to invent any new rules, regulations. You can find them. You can make, make their lives a pain. And I am worried that the progress when it comes to privacy tech, in crypto is very slow. It's not great. Like, we are nowhere near having kind of privacy preserving crypto. I think that's like how far is that away? Five years more, right? Like, it's far away. Like scalability we're kind of solving, right? But privacy, not at all. And I think that is- Yeah, I mean, there is like a linear growth of these technologies and like people building use cases and like people trying to adopt them and stuff. But then they're like you're,

you're mentioning SSL up until like the early 2010s. I think it was like 2011 or 2012 or maybe even earlier. Most websites did use SSL. You use SSL when you interacted with your bank to do when you went to the payment portal. But when you were just like logging in and whatever, you weren't using SSL. And then Google decided that it was a good idea for everyone to start using SSL. And since Chrome was one of the major browsers and most used browsers on the internet, they basically like force everyone to start using SSL because if you didn't use SSL, one, your website would be not ranked so well in SEO. And the other reason was that you would get like this big kind of like red warning,

this website is not secure, et cetera. And so like that forced the whole industry to move to SSL. And it would be great if we had like some sort of forcing event in crypto where like some, you know, application that was used by like, you know, lots and lots of people would sort impose privacy on on users but like we're not at a scale yet where like enough people are using crypto and also crypto is super fragmented where you know there's like tons of wallets nothing is you know very few standards across different ecosystems I mean like you have standards in Ethereum you don't have the same standards in Cosmos or in Solana or anything else and it's hard like

I was talking to those most about this yesterday and it's like the fragmentation at the at the wallet layer and also at the infrastructure there makes very difficult to create like industry-wide standards. Yeah, well, I mean, do the issue is like you, I mean, someone creates an application that's like private. I don't know. Let's say someone creates a private deck. It's like, okay, that's nice.

But now if all of my addresses are like de-anonymized and I'm like moving something in there and then like taking something out, like how much does it really help, right? Like not that much. maybe it helps with some things, but maybe it helps with like, I don't know, funds are more comfortable to trade because maybe you can't like link some trades. So maybe there are like some things like that, right? But I think the, you know, like the fundamental privacy super hard, right? I mean, I guess private transact, like this sort of private payments like Zcash, Monera habit, you know, that, that I guess seems like, you know, achievable and maybe the technology is kind of there for that. And smart contract interactions and like defy and like cross chain and I mean, so hard or

NFT stuff. Secret network. They're already doing it. Well, see if your network was just like kind of fell apart, no? It's just like a SGX. I mean, they, I guess, okay, I don't know exactly, but I guess some of the history was you can now. all of the history.

I think all of the history. I mean, I'm, I also have not, so I have not super closely read about this. So I may be wrong, but what I did kind of read was basically there's some like, there was some SGX vulnerability that basically allows anyone to go back through like all of the history of the secret blockchain and like the anonymized like everything. You could like decrypt, yeah, sure. Yeah, I think something like this, I'm not sure if that's still possible or definitely, I think there is like a new architecture where I guess they mitigated it. And from now going forward, it would not be like that.

Until the next thing happens. Would be a big event. Yeah, I mean, for now, I guess that's also the issue with this technology, right? It will not be in production for long before you. Yeah, you need to have like a certain time. it's running to understand if it's really like non-exploitable or like I guess the kind of Lindy effect. So I do agree that everything would be like five plus years out. I think though, right, if you can have private computation or like on the smart,

then then it doesn't really matter. Then you can do private NFTs and you can do whatever, right? It doesn't really limit you if you can do it like generalized. And I guess that's what ZK EVM and these kind of things are trying to do. Right. Here is a. you can use of the screen yacht features here. It's like SJX.

It's like SJX. Fail and, you know, one of the, like the top thing is secret network. And then I guess like some DVD technology that got, they got poned. But yeah, this is, this just came out like a couple days ago. Okay. Well, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my Mataats, NFTs are now doxed. Exactly. It won't be that. Um, yeah, horrible.

How about, yeah, how about the cosmos ecosystem? Let's, uh, yeah, maybe some of the interesting things here. I think, you know, obviously, well, I mean, there, I think like there's been some progress, but it's also been, I feel like it's, it's, it's been a little sluggish. The whole like Adam 2.0 thing over the last couple of, well, I guess like two months, uh, has been a little bit draining, I feel like on the, on the community. And, um, I'm not really. sure like where things go from here. It's it's unclear to me now. I feel like there's a lot of

questions around what is the future of the hub like more so than than like when we were having these debates. And yeah, like I guess interchained security is going to get implemented fairly soon. But as for all of the other, you know, features that that were included in this in this white paper, you know, the MEV stuff, the, the allocator, all these other things, I feel like we're a long time away from seeing these things being implemented or like at least some progress being made on this front. What are your thoughts on where the Cosmos hub is heading? I mean, not that this is like the entire Cosmos ecosystem, but how did you come out of that whole debate? Yeah. I mean, I guess first of all, yeah, I mean, cosmos, I feel like Cosmos ecosystem is doing

super well, like lots of new chains and like lots of activity. The interest from VCs has increased a lot this year. So there was like funding. I think it's up like I don't know how much, but like by a huge amount. So I think Cosmos ecosystem, you know, it looks super bullish. Now when it comes to the Cosmos Hub, on some level, there was always this question, right? For a long time there's been this question of like, what's the Cosmos Hop for? I mean, there was this kind of idea. back in the white paper of this IBC routing hub, but people didn't really seem to believe in that so much. And that hasn't happened.

And I guess it doesn't, you know, IBC at this point is much more like point-to-point connections, which of course has like big advantages too. And so I think it's unlikely that this whole routing hub thing comes. And of course that has kind of been, I think, abandoned more or less. And then, yeah, but then it was like, okay, what's the hub for? Indigent security, right, is obviously coming,

or it seems to be coming, right? Progressing well and stuff and there's like demand. So I think this is pretty good, right? Like that's something that I think was way less certain before and now seems like, you know, very likely, including like a whole bunch of like solid things that want to deploy on it. So I think from that point of view, like the hub looks like better than a year ago, right? Now, there is, of course, a question of like, how much value does interchained security bring?

And, you know, does it kind of justify, like, the market cap of atoms? Because I think to some extent, Adam has been treated as this, you buy atoms and you have some kind of, you know, exposure to the cosmos ecosystem. Even though that's not really true. Or maybe it's true to some extent, but, you know, it doesn't like someone builds a chain on cosmos. it succeeds doesn't necessarily mean any value cruiser atoms. I think the whole item 2.0 thing, yeah, I'm not sure exactly how things are going to progress further. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the discussion was very vibrant and vigorous and very engaged.

And I think that was good. You know, I did have a lot of reservations around, I think the way the proposal was done, which I guess was shared by others, so it kind of got rejected. in the end of it was like close. Yeah. And I do feel like coming back with more, you know, more actually concrete, limited, clear proposals, you know, is the right way.

So let's see. Let's see. But I would say overall, I feel the Cosmos Hub has progressed in the last year, although maybe not as much and as fast as one would have hoped. Yeah, Felix. Yeah, I would agree to all this. I think it's also kind of what's not too surprising, right? Because it's such a decentralized system and they're so hard to convince everyone of something.

And I mean, a lot of the things in the past, even before all this, have struggled to gain the right traction that other ecosystems or other like centralized, more centralized layer ones or ecosystems have. have less problems with because there is, I guess, just one united company organization that kind of pushes forward with a certain direction. So yeah, I think in this case, I do agree that interchained security seems to at least have that traction. I think the issue then is right. Interchain security can be implemented by every Cosmos zone. And a lot of the zones also are a change plan to kind of offer security to some other

chains like I think Fmos, for example, or I actually probably almost everyone, osmosis, wanting to also interchange secure chains. So I do kind of believe that there will also be this, this mesh security system in the long run that like, you know, chains provide security to each other, both being a provider and the kind of consumer. So in that sense, I guess it again, questions a little bit what that means for the Cosmos hub if that's the future. But yeah, overall, I think the ecosystem is developing very fast.

A lot of people entering the cosmos ecosystem, like almost everyone we speak to, or like, I guess we're also pretty heavy in the in the cosmos ecosystem, but still, you know, you see a lot of teams coming in that weren't really native or new to crypto from other Web 2 or ThratFi and they start building in Cosmos. So I think that's extremely bullish. And we've really seen a lot of new teams like that emerge. And yeah, I'm super excited for that. I guess, you know, I don't know what your guys' thoughts are on that traction that the Cosmos has.

And I think also that application-specific, I guess, story overall seems to be adopted even by other ecosystems like Ethereum with L2 stuff. So I do think Cosmos is on the right path. And first is the long in that sense. I think I think I echo your sentiment about the, you know, like just. tons of people coming into the ecosystem. What I think is it's really excited me about that is we have all these people who are coming into the ecosystem that weren't in cosmos before. These are like new people.

They just like found out about it on their own. And now they're using the technology and they're using it to build things that they think are interesting or valuable. And it's bringing all these new ideas and this kind of like diversity of like people and backgrounds to the space that, you know, makes for like really good innovation. and like, like, good, like lots of great ideas coming into the space, just generally. And, yeah, like, the app chain thesis seems to be also picking up in other spaces as well. I wonder, like, the thing that I'm struggling to, to, like, wrap my head around right now is how the app chain thesis and the modular thesis sort of come together, you know, do they start overlapping at some point? do app chains merge or slowly become, you know, more modular, either through shared security by outsourcing maybe like parts of the settlement or data availability to other,

to other kind of infrastructure layers. And yeah, I think like this whole space is super interesting to me. And I find that any innovation and like any kind of new design patterns happening in this space is, you know, is great. Like, we get to see, we get to figure out which, which is the best way to build the stuff such that scales and it could be usable and like it, you know, remains secure. And maybe also by scaling it and by modularizing it at some point, we can start putting in more like ZK and privacy layers that that spread out across the whole ecosystem. I totally think, right, that this experimentation is, yeah, what makes Cosmos so strong, right? And then you can have like one chain do like a certain thing a little different way.

And if it works out right, others will adopt it. So I guess this emergent properties is a very strong setting point. And yeah, then let's see when Celestia comes along and all these things, how that will change the space. I am definitely excited for that. I think also, you know, like from some of the new teams like say and there's also like talks of layer two on cosmos, you know, So basically that kind of this structure also being adopted in cosmos and maybe other VMs. So that seems super interesting. Brian, I know you want to talk about orbit.

Yeah, you can talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely one of the things I've been most excited about this year. And yeah, I mean, we've done some podcasts about it too. And you know, it was at the conference in Miami in September, I think, which was pretty great. And, you know, there's, I mean, this is like an old project, right, that's been kind of developing for a long time, but I think has evolved into more of like a vibrant ecosystem with other companies. And I think there is, you know, the crypto synergies are also becoming coming more up. You know, some examples of that include, you know, Uqbar, where, you know, building basically a ZK roll-up blockchain on orbit. It's kind of like an theorem roll-up, but like on orbit and using like, you know, smart

contracts are written in the kind of orbit language. So it's pretty powerful, right? Because you could write like your application in this as long with your smart contracts. And of course the way urban applications work is that they're running on people's servers. So you and that becomes, I think, quite relevant when you tie it in with some of the things we talked about before around, you know, trying to crack down on front. and regulating DFI and there was, I think, just, I don't know, two weeks ago, a few weeks ago, I saw someone show like a demo of, you know, them having the uniswap front end running on orbit,

right? Because, you know, that's pretty powerful, right? Because you could just take the front end, deploy in an orbit, and then people can sort of run their own front ends, and they defraised with that. And then you don't really have that ability to regulate front ends anymore. So I do think that it's a more resilient way of addressing some of these issues around, you know, also privacy, right? Like you can have a lot more privacy this way too. And you can have more control.

It can be more censorship resistant. So I do expect that, you know, we're going to see a lot more of that. Now, Urban is still kind of early as an ecosystem. So it's probably a number. another year or more until that kind of stuff really starts working. But, you know, I think it's coming. And I think it could end up becoming like, you know, very powerful, where it becomes kind of this like operating system layer for crypto.

There's also one thing. Actually, there's a very, in a way, one of the best arguments, I think, for urban in crypto is ironically this, you know, big criticism. of crypto where, you know, the signal founder, Moxie Marlin Spike, wrote this article. It was a few months ago and it was very widely shared. My first impressions of Web 3, we can put a link in the show notes. But it's basically he, you know, he was like, okay, this crypto thing is nice. Well, he's like, well, to talk about all this decentralization and maybe there is that

kind of decentralization, like, you know, on the blockchain level. But then when people actually interface with this stuff, right, it's you're using some RPC node that like you kind of trust or at the very least they're like tracking all your data and you don't have any privacy. And he's like, what is this bullshit? And he talks a lot about like, you know, here, people don't want to run their own servers and never will. And so he's basically says like, hey, crypto, we're going. without people running their own servers, like, doesn't make sense because you're still trusting others. And of course, that's exactly what Erbit is addressing, right, to make it really easy for people to run their own server. Yeah, I think it's going to become very important.

And, you know, a tremendous area of, like, innovation and growth and sort of merging of, I think, orbit and crypto that's going to happen in the next, you know, year, two years, three years. Not to dive deep into, make this an orbit dive deep dive, but can you run like an orbit server on your phone or something like that? Or is it something that's possible to do on this sort of device? Or does it have to be like an always on kind of thing or that, you know, where you're either running out on a computer in your house or like on a Raspberry Pi or server or VN somewhere? It has to be on when you use it, right? or when you rely on it. So you could have it run on your computer.

I mean, you can do that, right? And then you could just, I mean, it definitely works in terms of, you know, the amount of resources needs totally, totally suitable to run on someone's computer. Maybe you could run in on a phone. I don't think that is possible today, but maybe you could. The issue with that, though, is if you're using like a SaaS product, Are you using some application and then it interfaces with like a server? Right?

Then maybe the application is on your phone or on your computer or somewhere else. Then you need that server to be running. And you know, that server is maybe on AWS and by some company. So like you can rely on that that works. So when you're in an orbit world, let's say now you have a smart contract app it and you want it to use on your phone and other times you're using on your computer and stuff you will want to speak like you basically want to make API calls to your server and if the server like let's say if you have it on your computer and then your computer's not running and now you have

an urban app on your phone you can't use the app anymore because it can't talk to the server right because the computer's not running so i think it's going to depend on like what are you using it for I think if you like, let's say you're using it for like, I'm just, I'm doing crypto transactions with orbit, right? And I have it on my home computer and I'm just putting it up when I'm doing crypto transactions and otherwise, like, I think that should actually work fine. But if you use it, if you want to use it as a more, I mean, the ambition of verb is much larger, right, to do a lot more things.

Then I think you do need to have the always on thing. Could you just have the state be synced? Like, couldn't you say, like, have the state, like the encrypted state, just sync to say like an iCloud, and then your phone just is always kind of syncing in the same way that you use like a Google drive scene. You're syncing your orbit server to the iCloud and then you're syncing the phone from there? Yeah. I don't know.

Like, I don't know what like, I mean, I suppose there's data in there and there must be like some package. But if you are sinking, like if you have your orbit node on your phone and then you're sinking into the cloud and then you're like sinking like you communicate with that from your phone then why not just run it in the cloud right like what's the point of your i i think there's like two i think there's like basically two paths right one is that you you're having you hosting it with a third party in the cloud or you're hosting it with a third party who guarantees reliability and stuff so So we have been actually working on that, of course, one, right, to, like, build this stuff.

And I think the other option is that you're going to have, like, a device, like a hardware device that's, like, on, you know, and there's also a company working on this. There's one called Native Planet. It looks really cool. But, you know, we basically have something. You can just plug in at home, and then there's your orbit thing. And, you know, you'll be able to connect with it and it can always be on. Or there could be more limited use case, right?

If you say like, oh, I'm going to use it for crypto and, you know, I just use it when I use it. And then it runs on my computer and otherwise it's off. And I think that actually makes a lot of sense also because maybe you want to segregate it. Maybe you'd have like one orbit where like you're doing the communication stuff. Maybe you have another one where it's like crypto transactions and that you run on your own computer at home and it just runs sometimes. So maybe something like that could make sense. Overall, though, it's easier to run, like if you would say just compare like a orbit node or ship or whatever it's called with with a with a Ethereum validator or

something you think yeah, it would be easier to run it. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And even if you go down right, you don't really have immediate like financial penalty. No, there's no financial penalty of going down at all. Yeah. Right. So also you don't have to see if you put up again, there's nothing.

sync, right? There's no, like, state. Yeah, state to see. Yeah. Do you have upgrades or something for the Erbilts software on this? Yeah, but they're all automated. Like, you don't have to do anything. And then who decides what's the upgrade or how does this? Well, I think depends on the kind of upgrade, right? But I think the apps can upgrade themselves, right? Or, um, um, you know, if you have a more like, if it's like a whole network level upgrade. And I think that, you know, there's kind of like a governance body that would have to vote on, you know, if there's like some very low level upgrade. But that those are, I mean, the whole design of it is that this is like, those would be

extremely rare events or like you get to the point where it like that never happens. I think that's going to be my Christmas vacation project. I'm going to install an Erbit server on my... I've got a little server here in the house. Sounds great. Try to set that up. Is there anything else we want to talk about here? I think we covered most of it, yeah?

I mean, there was Solana. Yeah, Solana fell short. And maybe just your thoughts on what's going on with Solana and what is the future of this ecosystem, given the pain they're suffering? Yeah, I think it's like a big trial by fire, right, of the whole community and the resilience of the ecosystem. I do think there's a lot of like developers on there, right? There's daps.

There is teams that are doing interesting work and I do think will come out stronger from it. Funnily enough, right, there was the breakpoint conference, the second one this year just before they whole FDX collapse. I felt, you know, there's stuff going on. there are even like one of the first ecosystems or I think actually maybe the first outside of Ethereum that is working on client diversity in a serious way, right, with jump building this fire dancer client that will essentially also improve the performance of Solana even more and kind of finally even like create a spec for what Solana is and I guess also improve the actual Solana labs client itself. So I think that that's a very mature sign of maturity. And yeah, so overall

I think quite exciting here to stay and keep building. Keep building. I think that's probably a good note to end on. And certainly the sentiment that a lot of people who are building have right now, you know, beyond the fud and everything, I think the overwhelming narrative that I see on like crypto Twitter and, you know, people who are coming on the podcast and everything is like, just got to keep building. And I mean, like, we've been through this before. already. And we built, and we built a bunch of stuff during those bear markets.

And out of all that work and innovation and came new applications. So, yeah, I think just keep on biddling. Yeah, absolutely. I think nothing really has changed, right? Like, it's just, I mean, a lot of it's changed and nothing has changed. I feel like when it comes to like the why and where is it all going and stuff. It's, I think it's the same. And it's, it's just a long journey, right?

Like, I mean, we are still, I mean, we talked about the privacy thing. Like, okay. And I think everyone was always aligned that, okay, privacy is essential. There needs to be privacy or pretty much everyone. But then also like, oh, it's like five years off, 10 years off, right? So I think for crypto to really like realize its potential, you know, it's another, you know, it's 10, 20, 30, 40 years ahead still, right? It's a long, long time.

But still so exciting, so much happening and so cool to work on it. Yeah. I mean, I think like we're still super early and I keep telling us the people, you know, like look at 15 years ago where the web was. And like 15 years ago, we didn't have, you know, secure websites. We were still using Flash to do video. You know, there was like no unified experience between browsers and certainly not between mobile and desktop.

Yeah, like it was like a mess. I mean, I was building on the web 15 years ago and like, it was really hard. And there were all these problems that we didn't know how to solve. And we solved them in the last 15 years. And, you know, we think that like we've always had, you know, flashy mobile phones. Like we forget that 15 years ago, like building on the web was a shit show. And it didn't scale very well. And then, yeah, massive investments in infrastructure and tooling and standards allowed us to get to where we are now.

And we're still at only 60% of the population using the web. of the world's population, you know. So yeah, it's a long game. Yeah, guys, this has been great. And I wish you both happy year and holidays. And also to all our listeners, thanks for tuning in. And thanks for being here with us for yet another year. And we'll do this again next year.

Yeah, thanks so much. Looking forward to episode 500. Yeah, it's coming soon. All right. Bye-bye. Yeah, cool. Thanks so much everyone and enjoy your holidays. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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