Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Joe Lallouz: Bison Trails – Building a Better Proof of Stake Ecosystem for Everyone

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

Joe Lallouz is the CEO of Bison Trails, who provide staking infrastructure for a variety of PoS blockchains. They have built a really impressive system for deploying nodes across multiple cloud services. In light of the $25m recently raised by Bison Trails, Joe shares their vision to build a better PoS ecosystem for everyone, the types of customer they run validators for, and the cutting edge stuff they're working on in terms of deployment, redundancy and key storage. We also hear their view on infrastructure centralization in PoS, protocol improvements, and Bison Trails' role with Libra Association.Topics covered in this episode:How Bison Trails got started and their vision to build a better proof of stake ecosystem for everyoneThe types of customer they run validators for and their approach to improving the productThe networks they support and their approach to adding new networksBison Trail’s technical infrastructure design and the cutting edge stuff they're working on in terms of deployment, redundancy and key storageHow the company thinks about infrastructure centralization in PoSThe company’s involvement in different crypto communities and discussions around protocol improvementsBison Trail’s role with Libra Association and how they are participating in the technical design of the protocolEpisode links: Bison Trails WebsiteBison Trails Raises $25M in Funding Round Led by Blockchain CapitalBison Trails - LibraBison Trails - Blockchain Capital BlogBison Trails TwitterJoe Lallous TwitterSponsors: ShapeShift: ShapeShift is the leading crypto platform offering zero-commission trading - https://shapeshift.com/Status: A multi-purpose communication tool that combines a peer-to-peer messenger, secure crypto wallet, and web3 browser - https://status.im/This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/329

This is Epicenter, Episode 329 with guest Joe LaLuse. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Kutu. Today our guest is Joe LaLuz. Joe is the CEO of Bison Trails. They're a company which provides staking infrastructure for a variety of proof of stake blockchains including Cosmos, Tazos, Algaran, and many others. And they're testing and adding several new chains on an ongoing basis, like E2.0, of course. That'll be supported when it comes out.

Bison Trails focuses on providing enterprise-grade infrastructure, and they've built a really impressive system for deploying nodes across multiple cloud services, spreading microservices across several clouds and over different geographies, and they recently raised $25 million, so it will be really interesting to see where this company goes because I think it holds a lot of promise. So here's what you'll learn in the interview. How Bison Trails got started and their vision to build a better proof-of-stake ecosystem for everyone. the types of customers they run validators for and their approach to improving the product,

the networks they support and their approach to adding new networks, their technical infrastructure design and all the cutting edge stuff they're working on in terms of deployment, redundancy, and key storage, how the company thinks about infrastructure centralization and proof of stake. Of course, the question is here. If most validers on our network are using the same infrastructure service provider, does that mean the blockchain is centralized? They're involvement in different crypto communities and discussions around protocol improvements.

And this is really interesting, their role in the Libre Association and the work they're doing in the technical steering committee. Sunny and Mayher did this episode. Of course, they both run validators. They're both highly technical. So it was only logical that they would interview Joe. I thought they asked all the right questions and produced an excellent interview. So hats off to them. And I really hope you'll like it. Now, you might have noticed a bonus episode in your feed last Friday, and I wanted to address this briefly because it's the first time we published a sponsored interview. Now, we get a lot of requests to be on the podcast, and we can't honor all of these requests. For one, there's just

not enough weeks in the year to run episodes with every company who reaches out to us. And two, sometimes companies have very specific marketing goals that they're trying to achieve. And so we see an opportunity here to enable these companies to sponsor their appearance on the podcast. Now, I've done a lot of thinking about this because our reputation is so important to us. And what it comes down to is making sure that we have a high degree of due diligence for sponsors, for sponsored episodes, and for any project that we have on the podcast for that matter. So this basically sums up my thinking around this. Of course, if there's anything that you want to share with me, you can always reach out to me on Twitter

or directly by email at Sebastian.com. Now, I do want to talk about this episode briefly because many of you are concerned by this. I interviewed Clinton Donnelly. He is a crypto tax expert and he's helped hundreds of U.S. crypto holders file their taxes. This episode is chock full of excellent practical advice on how to prepare a rock solid tax return. He shares the most common mistakes that people make and he talks about two very important anti-money laundering forms that if filed incorrectly could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in fines. He has excellent insights and helps us. us understand how to get inside the head of an IRS auditor. So if you have crypto and you're a U.S.

taxpayer, this is a must listen episode. You'll find it in your podcast feed just before this one. Of course, you already know this, but this week is ECC in Paris, and I am so excited to be going. We have a podcast studio booth up on the third floor. You can't miss us. Come check us out. And if you can't be in Paris this week, you can follow all the action from ECC on Peppo. I'll go to pepo.com to download the app. And I just want to thank Pepo for making this happen. I think it's so freaking cool that we have a podcast booth. And hopefully I can get rid of this cold so that my voice holds up for all these interviews

that I've got planned this week. Anyway, it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm very happy to welcome back to the show as a sponsor, ShapeShift. Now let me tell you something. The ShapeShift you grew up with is nothing like the ShapeShift of today. Of course, you know Shapeshift as the Crypto to Crypto Trading Platform. But now you can also. buy crypto with fiat, you can trade, you can track, and you can secure all your digital assets

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I.O for all the latest updates as the company continues to build out its robust crypto ecosystem. Status is here. The status secure messaging app is out of beta and available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Status is a private secure communication tool that combines a decentralized messenger, a Web3 browser, and a crypto wallet. With status, your messaging, your messaging, and your identity belong to you. It leverages state-of-the-art protocols to protect your data and never require a third-party validation to create your account. There's no phone number, there's no email address, there's no bank account. You know what there is? There's a private key. That's it. Plan and simple. It's crypto. One of the things I like about status is that you can easily access

the entire DAP ecosystem. And I think that the release of status is an important milestone because it demonstrates that crypto can address a use case that can potentially reach billions of people. So download status in the Apple or Google app stores, and be sure to join the public channel, hashtag Epicenter. Come and say hi, and we'll give you some free SNT tokens to help you get started. And with that, here is our interview with Joe LaLose. So we're on here today with Joe LaLose, who is the CEO of Bison Trails. Nice to have you on, Joe. Thanks so much for having you guys.

Really excited to be here and real excited for the conversation today. Yes. I mean, really happy to have you on. I think you are the, you know, you're the first proof of stake infrastructure related person that we've had on the show. I don't know if it's partially because, you know, three of the hosts are like running proof of stake infrastructure. So we've always felt a bit weird having another proof of stake infrastructure person on. but, you know, glad to see you on to finally, you know, it's been something that's been, people have been calling it the year of staking.

So it's good to finally have someone actually running staking on as a guest. So before we jump into the staking stuff, could you tell us a little bit about what your background is? And I know you are, you've done a number of startups in the past and, you know, you were a partner at some venture funds. How did you get involved with startups and entrepreneurship? Yeah, absolutely. So again, thanks for having me on the show, even though I know you all have a lot of experience

in the infrastructure space in Proof-Stake, which hopefully I think will make for like a really great conversation because it's relatively rare that I get to have, you know, interview-type conversations with folks that, you know, have maybe like deeper or more nuanced understanding of like what we're doing and why we're doing it. So definitely looking forward to that. As far as my background goes, and I'm, you know, obviously very happy to share this as well. So I've been a startup founder for the majority of my career. So I've been a, my co-founder and I have been working together for close to 17 years.

We built a few venture-backed companies together. Venture-backed being that, you know, they were software companies financed by venture capitalists. We worked on probably 20 or 30 different projects that never really made it into sort of company state or company stage, you know, a couple proof of concepts or, you know, MVPs that ultimately we either decided weren't, wasn't really worth pursuing or didn't sort of, didn't pan out, our hypothesis didn't pan out

the way we thought it would. And, uh, however, we've, you know, also had a couple that, um, did make it into the sort of like company phase, company stage and we, you know, put together some financing and built a team and built a really great product. So, you know, a couple of what I would say like to sort of successful outcomes and then a whole bunch of failure outcomes, which is all part of the process. And, uh, yeah, you know, so we're both technical. I'm the CEO of Bison and Trails. I'm a software engineer. I've been a software engineer my whole life. My co-founder is also, he's the CTO of Weiss and Trails and also a software engineer and really have been focused our whole careers on building software services and products, in particular in sort of emerging

spaces and emerging technology spaces. People kind of ask like the, I've gotten the question, I shouldn't say people ask, but I've gotten the question a couple of times, you know, why crypto or how blockchain or how or why are you involved in this space. And funny enough, like I tend to skip the when blockchain or when crypto question, because the truth is that we've actually been pretty involved in some way, shape, or form in the blockchain and crypto space since like really, really early days, but not because we were building in the space or because we were fortune tellers and could tell the future, but really because we're just huge nerds. You know, my first, my first interaction with Bitcoin, which was my first interaction with crypto, was a,

a colleague of mine who was infrastructure engineer at a company that we were working on together was running Bitcoin mining on my company infrastructure. And we were like, hey, what are these long running processes that are running on these servers out in our data center? I actually don't even want to call out a date, but I think it was probably somewhere like 2011-ish, you know, like I'm not sure exactly when it was. But that was like one of my first experiences and then realizing like, oh, holy smokes, this is really cool.

this is really interesting. And that was kind of like when we first started getting interested in the space. And so we've been working on Bison Trails for about three years now. We've only really been building in the space for about three or so years. I've been definitely interested and a participant in the space for many, many years. And so, you know, really excited about where the space is going and kind of being able to finally, from a professional perspective, work day to day on blockchain. crypto. But yeah, you know, like you mentioned, worked on a few different projects, have been the

CEO and founder of a few different startups. The most recent one was a company called Grand Street. It was an online marketplace specifically focused on folks that were building new hardware devices, which is interesting when I was one of the first projects I looked at at infrastructure in the blockchain space was actually looking at trying to demystify or create transparency around the mining processes in proof of work networks and had spent a lot of time in China where most of the hardware manufacturing was happening around these, you know, A6s around specific devices and was a really good springboard for me because our previous company, which was a marketplace focus on hardware development, had put us in contact with a lot of folks in Shenzhen and

in sort of southern China, where a lot of electronics manufacturing actually happens. You know, kind of interesting, interesting little tidbit there about, you know, some of the first projects. And then similarly, like you said, have been an investor, but actually an angel investor. So I run a very small angel fund with my co-founder and another one of our partners. We're three of us. And we invest in founders. So we don't run like a venture or venture capital fund. I'm not really affiliated with any venture capitalists.

But we, you know, as entrepreneurs sort of said, you know, one of the things we'd always like to do is be able to give back to other entrepreneurs. We know how hard it is to start companies and how hard it is to get off the ground. And so for the last five or six years, we've been investing in entrepreneurs. is sort of the angel stage out of this quote unquote fund. But it's really just our own money. We spent a lot of time working with and advising early stage founders, helping them kind of get off the ground and understand the nuances of building a new product

and getting people excited about it and iterating on it and all that stuff. And as a participant in the blockchain and crypto space, one of the first things I actually did was really, quite frankly, like was more from an investor perspective, right? Like, you know, either mining or buying Bitcoin or other crypto assets like Ethereum or, you know, any of the other ones. So that's a little bit of my background. You know, currently 100% focused on Bison Trails and 100% of my time, I want to say every day, all day, every weekend, every night. All the time I'm not sleeping.

I'm spending, focused on building a really great team of super technical folks to help make it easier for folks that participate in blockchain networks. One of my curiosities has been, Bison Trails has been in operation for something like 20 months or 21 months, correct? Well, it's actually a little bit longer than that. It's actually closer to three years. It's like officially about 20 months or so. I think like if you look at like our company formation documentation and stuff like that. It's like about 20 months. But before we even went through any of that stuff, we spent a lot of time building out like MVP products. Essentially the product is you allow

any party that wants to run infrastructure, be it nodes or validators for proof of stake networks. My curiosity is, I mean, I've been in the proof of stake space myself for two and a half years. and I can confidently assert that maybe two years back, there weren't any people looking to run validators for proof of state networks. So given the customer demand wasn't there, why did you get into this vertical of having people run validators? Because I came across no customers at that point. It's a really great question.

And it actually allows me to kind of sidestep into a little bit of the backstory around Bison Trails. you know, it really is like why I build this product and why build this product now. So I'd mentioned quickly that really early on in sort of my building phase of my crypto and blockchain experience that we were looking, my co-founder and I were looking at creating transparency around this concept of securing a blockchain and infrastructure around a blockchain. And so, you know, really this came out of founder and software engineer and technical person's mindset of, you know, you want to engage in something. that you need to understand exactly how it works.

How do you take it apart? How do you break it into pieces? How do you understand all the different pieces? And one of the things that we had found when we were looking at the blockchain space, and this was, you know, call it three, four years ago, was that there was probably some of the most interesting and smartest people that I had ever met were working on designing, building, pushing, you know, code to these open source protocols.

And they were working on existing blockchains, not even like new ones, but like existing blockchains and protocols and some of the new blockchains and protocols that were sort of in development. And these people were some of the smartest people I'd ever met and ever had a chance to interact with, which is very cool. However, if you actually looked at what was powering the chains themselves and what was securing the chains themselves, and at the time in proof of work, it was mostly, you know, mining. And you started talking to folks that were doing mining, not everybody, because I don't overgeneralized, but a lot of the folks were incredibly cagey, very closed off, didn't want to actually talk about what they were doing and why they were doing

that. And for me, it felt like there's this crazy dissonance in a market that I felt very passionate about, which was, you know, really open, really collaborative protocol blockchain development and then really closed off, really cagey, sort of closed-minded, like mining and security and infrastructure. And to me, that didn't make any sense. And so really early on, we were like, let's actually just open this up. You know, one of the one of our first sort of initiatives, it wasn't like, let's go build a mine or let's go build a company that focuses on proof of state. or let's go do X, Y, and Z. It was actually like, how would one open this up?

How would one look at the space and say, okay, I want to create more transparency here. I want to make it easier for people to understand how this works. I want to make it easier for people to truly understand, like, how a business works here. And so we did that the only way we know how as founders, which is like, let's build, let's build it. Let's build it. So one of the first things we did was actually built a proof of work mine.

So my co-founder and I own and operate an automated a proof of work mine in the Pacific Northwest. We built that from the ground up. and, you know, not because we wanted to specifically get into mining, but because we really wanted to have a deep understanding of how blockchain infrastructure works and how securing network works. And at the time, that was mostly proof of work. Really quick, can you explain what an automated mine is? Yeah, it's, you know, so when you look at, I can't.

Also, I should like probably characterize that a little bit better. It's not an automated mine. We automated a lot of the processes around mining. Things like, you know, how do you operational, a mine. So we write like custom software to do things that normally were done in a mine that were done manually. So we have very little staff that actually run the mine. There's almost nobody there ever. Things like, you know, diagnostics or identifying portions of the mine that are off or not working well or temperature control. So like the things that matter in a proof of work mine

are what your electricity costs are, how your hardware is running, and then generally speaking, temperature and cooling. So in a normal scenario or in a lot of proof of work minds, if you've ever been to one. I don't know if you have been to one, there's often a lot of staff that are kind of like, you know, running around doing stuff and measuring things. And we said to ourselves, like, hey, we can operationalize the hell out of this by writing software, which is something that we're uniquely positioned to do being software engineers. And so we did a lot of that. So we still have some folks that help us out, but it's like, you know, pretty ad hoc. And a lot of the things that you would sort of do on a day-to-day basis to diagnose an issue with something like a minor or a

network we bring software to automatically do. Even as simple as like, hey, this thing's not working, we automatically restart it. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and in doing that, we actually talked a lot about some of the issues. So when we built this mine, we actually did it with some friends, some other angel investors, some other folks in the space and said, like, hey, we're building a mine, like, this is what we're doing. And we were pretty public and vocal about the process. I've actually been thinking about maybe like publishing some of our, some of our investor updates. It's unfortunately, it's something I don't I'd have to get everybody kind of on board with, but I don't think anybody would really be

against it. Maybe I'll do that. So is this mine operated by Bison Trails or is it something that you guys did separately before Bison Trails? Yeah, completely separate is something we did before Bison Trails. I would say it's like one of the first projects we did before starting to really work on. We were kind of like in tandem working on Bison Trails while we were building this thing out. And it's actually the name Bison Trails comes from that project. The very, very short version is that while we were building out this mine, we'd spend a lot of time in places where building out of proof of work mine is a favorable place to be.

Generally, you're looking for cheap power. We were specifically focused on renewables because we only wanted to use wind and water. The places where you find those things are kind of like in mountainous regions in the middle of the country or in the Pacific Northwest in the United States, I should say, in the middle of the United States. And we had at the time spent a lot of time in Wyoming. And the state animal of Wyoming is the bison. And when we were naming the company, we were like, why don't we name it something,

instead of naming it something that sounds like very sort of infrastructure, why don't we name it something that gives a little bit of a hat tip to some of the early work that like sort of led us here. And if you don't know anything about bison, they're actually really interesting animals in the early pioneer days, in the sort of gold rush days. Pioneers would follow paths that bison had paved across the country, these bison trails.

And so they were sort of like a leader in showing people the path forward. And we thought that was like a really cool, interesting piece of imagery. And that's where they came from. That's a cool story. It's definitely a welcome change from like, you know, like the 20 or 30 different validator companies that have the word stake somewhere in their name. So definitely. Yeah, exactly. And honestly, naming a company is always really hard. So you sort of have two options, like make it really literal or make it something that's like, you know, just interesting and something relevant to you. And we

opted for the latter, which I'm very happy though, because I actually like the name a lot. I think it's, it has like some fun imagery and some fun branding to it. But yeah, So that's what I mean by automated mine. It's not really automated, right? We've automated some of the operational processes around it to that make running a mine a little bit cumbersome or have a lot of overhead and costs. And so I should also note that in doing that,

you actually reduce your cost significantly. So independently mine a few different networks. And we do that in a pretty, pretty low cost relative to the rest of the hash rate on the network. So anyways, I was kind of saying like why, why build a platform to help folks deploy validators? And really what I was kind of getting at was we really wanted to open up the whole process and make it a lot easier. And starting to understand proof of work and understanding how these networks were secured and how blocks are formed and how mining works.

We actually started realizing that one, if you want to be a miner or you want to get involved in the space, like you're basically connecting to one of four or five major mining pools, which kind of sucks because you have like centralization around decision making, whether you like it or not. otherwise it's so un-economical to be a part of it that people just don't do it. So that didn't really make sense. And two, we found ourselves in this position where operationally running a mind is fine, but it doesn't really play to our strengths all that much. Like I said, early on, we're software engineers. My co-founder and are both software engineers. We've built, you know, large-scale software projects for many, many years.

And so we were, you know, paying really close attention to the sort of protocol space and realizing that there was a shift happening towards using alternative consensus mechanisms to secure networks, in particular things like proof of stake where you move away from like hardware-specific or ASIC-based models to secure a network, and you move more towards a model where superior infrastructure can support both the security as well as message propagation, reading and writing from a protocol. And so we were really intrigued by that and, you know, things like infrastructure's code and like understanding how we can make it way easier for more people to participate in these blockchains.

And I think, like, you know, at the time, like, kind of Tezos was still sort of, you know, hadn't really launched yet, and Cosmos was still pre-game of stakes. And so, you know, this was, I want to say probably about two years ago, ish. You know, and we were looking at the space and saying, like, okay, if this is a successful space, the way this is going to be successful is if there is much easier ways for folks to run validators and run infrastructure on these networks, not just to secure the network,

but also to make it a more healthier ecosystem for people to interact with the protocols themselves. And so to answer the question, like the reason why we were doing it is we weren't looking at this and saying like, oh, there's customer demand for this today. We're looking at it and saying like, what do we want the world to look like? I want the world to look like massive distribution of token so that lots of folks are using these protocols, developers are using them. And really, as a core tenant or ethos of the space, like if you are interacting with a network like Cosmos or a Tesos, it should be part of your duty to help secure the network and run validation on that network and run nodes on that network. And that's kind of the gist of why we started

doing that and why we started building this platform. It was really to sort of support this thesis that if any of these protocols and if the entire proof of stake protocol space was going to be successful. There needed to be a lot of people that could do it. We needed to have networks that could support, you know, not just the protocols themselves and consensus and, you know, BFT protocols in particular, being able to support hundreds or thousands of nodes. But it needs to be possible for people to do it. And it actually needs to be secure and incredibly well orchestrated and run. And so that's kind of like the sort of impetus behind the company and why we think it's important what we're doing and why we're excited about what we're doing. Does that answer the question? Yes, sure. Thank you.

Yeah, for sure. It's a long-winded way of saying we wanted to build it for something that we wanted to see as opposed to the thing we were seeing today. I guess one of the questions I have in my mind is, where do you see the proof of stake validation ecosystem go in the next five or ten years? Like, which parties are going to be the major validators? That's a good question. By parties, do you mean like what types of companies or like who or what groups? So maybe for the listeners, so proof of stake validators today are what, like exchanges, then you have custodians, then you have some hobbyists, right? Then you have some professional validation companies that just do validation. You have some, you know, funds, crypto funds, venture capitalists doing validation.

And those are, I think, the major parties today. And then you could add a few putative potential parties to this list. they would be a firm like fidelity, traditional finance entity running validators, very much possible. Hope so, right? And all of these parties come to the validation game with very different strengths and very different focus areas. And some of them are well equipped for the validation game, others are not.

And so my curiosity is, what do you think happens in five or ten years when all of these different kinds of players interact in a competitive market and how does the market shape up? That's a great question. So I could walk you through how I think that sort of works in the next few years and then how it hopefully will work later down the road. I'd say the first and foremost, most important thing is that competition is actually a really good thing for everybody because it sort of makes everybody need to do a better job. And ultimately, that's better for the protocols themselves. So if we're all doing a better job validating these networks and the protocols, is going to be in much better shape. If it's easier for more folks to do this at a hobbyist level

or at a professional level, then we're all in much better shape as well because there'll be more folks doing it. And the more folks doing it, the more robust and the more resilient these protocols and networks are. And ultimately, that's what we want to see long term in 10 years, right? I want to see a network where it's actually quite hard to stall a network because, you know, you need to have thousands of validators drop out for that to actually happen. There are tens of thousands of validators to drop out for that to happen. And ultimately, that's like a world that I want to see. I think that we can kind of look to a few other ecosystems. I'm not going to point out any specific ones because I know, I feel like it's not maybe the right way to do it. But, you know, it's not

uncommon for a market to start with like a hobbyist market and then some sort of professionalism kind of, you know, start to form around it. And the markets start to form around it. So, you know, I'd say like, obviously there's, I think we're already seeing signals of this where something that maybe was kind of hobbyist-ish, you're starting to see a little bit more professionalism, like you said. There's like, so, you know, specific companies focus on validation and, and then some of the more dominant or more incumbent players in the crypto space like custodians and exchanges are starting to get involved in validation and staking and proof of stake. So I think that, you know, those are all really good things too. I actually think that, you know,

this is maybe an unpopular opinion. I think the majority of people, the majority of companies, individuals, even the existing staking as a service for staking, you know, validation, companies are not that well equipped to scale and run a network at, you know, a trillion dollar network at, you know, lots and lots and lots of transactions per second and lots of transactions in a year. And I think that we're still sort of early on in the adoption curve of a lot of these different protocols. And, you know, this is kind of getting back to, not to shill bison trails because it's not why I'm here, but getting a little bit back to sort of why we think what we're doing is important

and why we think what we're doing is interesting, is we actually think that being a company that's uniquely focused on solving this exact problem, we can make everybody better and give the power to some of the smaller folks that maybe only some of the bigger folks have resources to invest in. So as a company and as a service provider, that can do things that are incredibly professional, that are focused entirely on infrastructure, security, and securing and validating networks,

we can actually put tools in the hands of an independent hobbyist or an independent company or a smaller company that, say, for instance, a large exchange or a fidelity, like you mentioned, could normally only afford and spend, you know, two, three years researching and building. And so ultimately, the goal long term is to make it so that lots of people can to participate and compete. And the only way you can compete is if, you know, you're actually providing value and services that are equal to everyone else in the ecosystem. And that's why I think what we're doing is really interesting.

And I'm hoping that more folks will push us to do better than we can make it so we're pushing other folks to do better as well. Down the road, like 10 years down the road, I think that hopefully we'll have a really healthy ecosystem where any, like I said before, anyone who's building a product or service that uses a proof of stake network in any way, shape, or form, part of like your, I don't want to call it civic duty, but part of your. you know, crypto ecosystem duty is to help secure the network. And, you know, ideally incentivize networks design it so that it's actually just part of your business as well. And that, you know, maybe it's not your core business and you work with a service provider or you partner with a small company, you partner with a validation company, but you are validating the network. So would it be correct to extend your answer to say that your target market is the, sort of hobbies today that can that can run a validator that can run a decent service but you

foresee this hobbyist getting outpaced by the professional validators like exchanges and by with bison trails you want to give this hobbyist and somebody who just has maybe a few hours a week to dedicate to validation and equal opportunities of the exchanges and and custodians your target market is not to, for example, go to the Fidelity of the world or the custodians of the world and offer to run their infrastructure for them. It's more a business to consumer startup rather than a business to business startup. Is that right? No, it's actually not. So our target market right now and what we

currently are working with some of the world's top custodians and exchanges to power their validation on our platform currently today. We're trusted by some of the world's top custodians and exchanges as a security and infrastructure provider to be able to do this. So more so is that we think that we can build products and services that are enterprise grade such that a large-scale custodian or exchange is happy using our products and services and similarly provide that access to the hobbyists and the smaller companies. So it's not, it's less about the target market.

Our target market is still pushing the whole ecosystem. forward. So we are setting the pace for what it means to securely and successfully run infrastructure on these different networks. And by setting the pace, we're an appealing partner for custodians and exchanges in the space. We're currently seeing that, which is great. We're also an appealing partner for smaller companies that want to be able to, you know, run nodes on these networks or validation companies that want to run nodes on these networks. And I can talk a little bit about the sort of success case. So one of the things we don't do is we don't talk about, really talk about our customers too much because it's, you know, for their privacy, we can't

really talk about them. And as part of, you know, how we work with our customers. But there's a couple that have called us out publicly that they use us. And so we're, you know, happy to talk about those. And I can talk a little bit about like a couple success cases that have been quite cool to see how bison trails gives the power to a small company that only a large company normally would have. Could you talk a little bit about some of these public ones? The one that I know is my friend Anna at Zero Knowledge Validator, but others who are also very public about working

with you guys? So we are in the process of making a couple more public. And it's kind of partially part of our ask as a company is like we're sort of talking to some of our customers and saying, you know, we generally have that conversation pretty regularly like, hey, how would you

feel about talking about this? Mostly for the benefit of the ecosystem. But I can speak specifically to Anna and the Zero Knowledge podcast. And you know, they have, if you go to ZKvalidator.com, they have on their website, they talk about like what they're doing and why they're doing what they're doing and that they use our platform to support their validation in Cosmos and in Kusama, which, you know, obviously will eventually be Pocod and host of other protocols that we support on the platform. And to me, that's like

a really, really great success case. You know, it's a podcast that, you know, that actually stemmed from, I was on the podcast with Anna and she was asking us about what we do. And I was explaining this is what we do. And I was like, you know, you could run a zero knowledge podcast validator. And she was like, well, we don't really have like, you know, the skill set and engineering ability and, you know, the time to put into this. While we could probably figure it out, it's actually quite hard to do really well. And I was like, well, that's the whole point of our platform.

And so we, you know, they became a customer of ours and they've been, you know, running their validators on our infrastructure platform, which is really cool. And to me, it's like exactly why we're here, right? Like the more ZK validators, the more zero knowledge, you know, folks, types of folks like the zero knowledge team that want to run infrastructure on these networks, the better it is. And in their particular case, they're really focused on ZK and really focused on privacy, and they're sort of a mission-driven validator. And I think that's great.

I think it's fantastic. You know, I think being able to support all the different players in the space is a really big piece here. And so I'm really happy to sort of share the work that they've been doing that. Out of the customers that, without mentioning any names per se, but could you give us like some sort of sense of what makeup, like, you know, what percent? of them are funds, what percentage are exchanges, what percentage are like, you know, things like the podcast, like the ZK Validator and more like hobbyist style ones? Yeah. I know the truth is I actually don't know those numbers off the top of my head. Otherwise, I would. I can give you like ballpark

just like from what I do know. And this is totally shooting from the hip. So we work with, really what happens is that we work with a lot of folks where tokens are aggregated. And in more mature networks, we see broader token distribution. So a network like Ethereum, for instance, as like a much broader token distribution than a network like even Cosmos, while Cosmos actually isn't that bad or Teslos isn't that bad. I think like over the next five to 10 years, we'll see much broader token distribution as more user, developer usage and products and services are built on these protocols. So we tend to work with folks that have, you know, that are sort of in possession of lot of tokens. And a lot of these newer networks that does tend to be investors. So

either traditional venture capitalists or, you know, the somewhat less traditional, you know, crypto focused or blockchain focused venture capitalists. So we work really closely with those folks. And I would say that, you know, probably a big chunk, maybe like halfish of our current partners are in that category. And then the other half are a mix of large-scale custodians, large-scale exchanges and hobbyists as well. And sort of independence like the ZK folks. So it kind of looks like that. It does depend protocol to protocol. So a protocol that has broader distribution,

we'll see more folks less on the investor side, and a protocol that is like really young that hasn't even launched yet, it tends to like skew a little bit more towards like, hey, these are our investors and they're holding these tokens. They want to help participate in scale and they want to help secure the network early on. Yesterday, in prepping for the episode, I went on the website and tried to make an account just to, you know, try out the product, play with the dashboard.

But it turns out actually at the moment, it's signups are, you guys are not accepting open signups. And it just has a pop up that says to like contact at this email. So what's like the roadmap towards making it so it, you know, it's open sign up. Anyone can just go make a account as easily as I make an email account and just start validating. Yeah. So there's two questions baked into that one that I'll answer simultaneously because I think it's an important one. The first is kind of like strategically when we would want to do that or the timing around that. And then the second is can you actually do that?

And can we actually do that? So I'll answer the second question first. So currently, once you've been onboarded onto the platform, it's essentially a, we call it a one click. It's actually more like two to three clicks and fill out a couple pieces of information to deploy a validator into any network. In some networks, we can actually deploy validators automatically and auto-scale them. So like, for instance, in something like Kusama, where, you know, you want to optimize your infrastructure based off your stake and based off the ecosystem, we can optimize things like that automatically, which is quite cool and very unique of an automatic,

an auto-scaling platform that we have. So once you've been onboarded onto the platform, you can actually go through that process independently by yourself and sort of, you know, I'll just call it click a couple buttons to get a validator up on Cosmos or get a validator up on Tesos or Algorithm or Decred or LivePier or any of the protocols that we support. We currently aren't open for open signups, and there's actually a couple reasons for that. The first is we still think it's kind of early in the ecosystem, and we like to talk to folks about what their goals are and why they're trying to do what they're trying to do.

And just get a much better understanding, both to help our product and our services and also to help them make the right decision. So what we found is that not everybody really understands exactly what they should be doing and why. And we don't tell people what to do, but we help guide them sometimes. You know, and you know, if someone comes to me and says, like, hey, I have 500 atoms or, you know, 500 Tessies, I want to run a baker. I want to run a validator. I will tell them, like, you probably shouldn't. It's not going to make sense for you to do that. You should probably delegate to one. You know, and here's how you would delegate to one. And here's a whole bunch of them. And so it's really more about, like, getting to know the folks that want to be involved in the space than it is about, you know, being restrictive or stopping people from being able to do what they want to do. It's really just like understanding what their intents are and what. what they're looking for in a product and service. Most our onboarding process actually takes like, you know, a couple minutes.

It's not very, it's not particularly long. And, you know, if you, Sunny, if you came to me and you said, like, hey, like, I want to run a cosmos validator on bison trails. It'd be a pretty, pretty seamless process. So it's more just about like us getting to know the folks that want to be involved in the space than anything else. And then also, you know, like any product and service that is still quite young, which, you know, I think 20 months or 24 months is still quite young.

It's a way for us to always get better and ask people the questions that, we want to ask. Could you talk through a little bit about the how the pricing works? Let's say I do want to run a Cosmos validator on Bison Trails. Is it a sort of fixed fee or is it taking a percentage of the revenues that the validator makes? How does that work? Yeah.

So generally speaking, it's a fixed fee. We also take a small percentage of whatever you want to call it, inflationary rewards, participatory rewards that a validator makes as well. It generally is quite low, and we think of that as a way to both incentivize and align interests between us, our customers, and the protocols. So, you know, we're in it for the long haul. We're the protocols that we're on. We want to see them succeed long term.

And so we want to make sure that we can be, you know, really aligned alongside our customers and the protocols themselves. But generally speaking, it's a fixed fee on a monthly basis. So people pay us a monthly fixed fee to run a validator on our platform. And that is really dependent on the protocol itself and dependent on how the protocol is set up and what those validators or those nodes need to be able to do. So we have built pretty what I would consider cutting edge technology around cloud orchestration, computing, infrastructure, deployment, management platform. That's by default, multi-cloud, multi-vPS, multi-zone, multi-region with redundancy built into it. and scaling built into it.

And so that's a pretty professional type service that, you know, even some of the best enterprise companies in the world that aren't in the blockchain space aren't even doing. And we've done that in a way for an ecosystem where, let's be real, a lot of the software is still beta software. So we're actually quite proud of the platform that we've built. And so it really depends on like the protocol itself. Like what does that need to do?

And, you know, what kind of security do we need to be able to support here? What does our HSM setup look like? What does that redundancy look like? Stuff like that. Right. So maybe we can jump into that a little bit. So when I use Bison Trail, what exactly am I getting? I'm assuming I'm getting something a little bit more than just some like terraform scripts that you guys wrote and I just go deploy them.

So what exactly goes into designing of your orchestrator system and like do you guys handle the monitoring? Do you guys handle, do you guys have physical nodes somewhere? or is it all cloud-based? Yeah, could you walk us a little bit through the technical design? I can. I'm going to very deliberately walk through the technical design, but kind of in an abstract fashion, but still technically.

Just because, like, you know, part of what we do is, you know, the stuff that we do is, you know, part of like the, what I would call, like, you know, really exciting secret sauce of vice and trails and why we're going to what we do. So the first thing is, is that it's entirely interface-based interaction with our customers. So we don't ship you Terraform scripts, for instance, you know, but we're built on top of modern technologies like Helm and Terraform and Kubernetes. And we're built in multi-cloud, multi-zone, multi-region fashion. So we can actually move, easily move nodes and portions of nodes

or microservices around nodes around the world very, very quickly and very easily. And so that can be like, you know, century, for instance, or a query and transaction portion of a node. And node cluster. And so what we do is we build security and we build monitoring and we build redundancy and scaling into our node clusters automatically for our customers. So you don't actually have to go and deploy anything. You come on, you become a customer, you click a button. And we make sure that everything is working perfectly and well and in the right place and communicating well and signing blocks and producing blocks, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what it's like to use us as far as how technical you want to get into that.

It's actually like we work with our customers. Some of our customers, we have like things like secure API, either RPC or API access to node infrastructure themselves. We will do combination of cloud and bare metal deployments, depending on the protocol itself as well. So we do a lot of cloud work, but we also in some instances do have bare metal deployments for portions of node clusters that are distributed all around the world, secure data centers all around the world as well,

that interact with our infrastructure platform to make sure that we can securely sign blocks using the right like hardware security modules and making sure that, you know, we're not at risk of leaking any keys, like stuff like that. And so from a technology standpoint, it's super, super modern and super cutting edge and can auto scale and has really great failover processes. the thing that isn't the technology platform, which is really great, is we actually offer support and services around what we do as well.

So if there are issues, we have communication channels with our customers. If you have questions about how protocol works or what's going on, you can call someone and ask them about what's going on and why it's working that way. We're constantly monitoring. So we obviously have things like enterprise grade DevOps teams as well. They're monitoring 24-7 with things like response teams

and catastrophe. for your response teams and incident reporting and paid your duty in the event that, you know, things do go wrong. You can kind of sleep well knowing that you never really have to worry about this and someone else is on it. So is it correct to imagine that like my imagination of what's really happening behind the scene. So I go to Bicentrails and I click a bunch of buttons.

And what's really happening on the Bicentrails infrastructure is essentially like a bunch of Docker containers are probably spinning up specific to me. And these containers are spread across, let's say, two or three different cloud vendors, AWS Google Cloud. Maybe one of these containers is signing on my behalf. And then there's failover. So if this particular container dies, there's some other system that will activate one of the other containers to sign on my behalf. and in this entire process, my validation keys are somehow treated in a way that only I know my validation keys by Sentryl's doesn't.

Is that the right imagination? So it's definitely a lot more complicated than that in that. Imagine you were to do that. So there's a couple things I won't talk about mostly because of security. I won't talk about specifically how we do things like deployment and orchestration. But just imagine you were to take what you just described, break it down. into much, much smaller pieces and then distribute those all over through a distributed system. We have, in some instances, designed and developed, you know, pretty unique containerization

processes as well. So it's not just like a Docker container that's deployed to like AWS or a Docker container that's deployed to like Azure or something like that. It's actually a good amount more broken down into pieces than that. But some of the fundamentals you're describing is right. So yes, that's right. Your like validation keys are not accessible except for by you. And actually, in most cases, they're not accessible really by you either. They're not accessible by anybody.

And so, you know, they can be destroyed by you, for instance, but that's about it. But yeah, that's, uh, in, in a lot of ways, there's pretty close to, to a lot of what we do. And then manage, monitor, upgrade, update, and make sure that failover processes are working well and signing processes you're working well. And that message propagation is optimized. So imagine a world where you have part of your clusters that are moving to optimize for receiving and sending messages in the protocol itself. Spending time thinking through, you know, one of the things that we've noticed is that like an overwhelming number of proof of stick protocol infrastructure is run on AWS East. So spending a lot of time making sure that the protocol itself at a protocol level is decentralized is something that we're really excited and focused on in that there's sort of,

much broader VPS participation in the protocol itself. So if we see that, you know, half a protocol is running on AWS East, we'll probably not be putting nodes on AWS East, but being able to do things like that, which is really interesting. What pieces get reused across participation clusters? So, you know, let's say you have like five customers all running Cosmos nodes.

What pieces are, are they going to be like sharing century nodes? Or are they like all of these values are completely independent from each other? Yeah, sure. Good question. So one, I'm actually the wrong person to ask about that question because I personally didn't design it. And two, I actually don't think that we would say, just from a security perspective,

it's a little bit dangerous to speak specifically to that. What I will say is that we building an enterprise grade platform means that you 100% need to create delineation between customers. And so we generally treat customers infrastructure independently of anybody else. So there's very little shared resources, if any at all. But I don't want to confirm or deny either of them just from a security perspective. It's a little too dangerous. What about within a customer?

So let's say, you know, Cosmos, for example, I can run a validator with different weights. But on some networks like Kusama, each validator has a fixed weight. And so if I want to, if I have more stake than the fixed weight, I have to run multiple validators. would I have to run a new participation cluster for each of these validators, or could I have it so I'm running using one cluster and just putting a bunch of keys on one node? Yeah, so we will both optimize for, try to optimize for security and infrastructure reliability in those cases. So it really kind of depends on the protocol itself and how the protocol is, in particular like for Kusama, for instance, like it depends like how the protocol is working. And so I don't think we actually generalize it all that well. In some instances in particular with those different protocols,

we will design that in a way that's optimized for both. We can optimize your node infrastructure, your validator infrastructure in the network itself based off of network conditions and your stake, which is really quite cool. And that's something we can do automatically if you want us to. Do you guys ever end up modifying node software to increase security? So, for example, you know,

myself and chorus have been like walking through some ideas of how to modify tenement core in order to allow better like failover system. So do you guys ever end up doing any like software development work to help improve the node infrastructure in that way? Yeah, it really depends on the protocol. We have in some ways that would be something that we would most likely open source if we were going to do. So we're not, we're not if we are going to go through the process of modifying note

software itself to help for whatever it is. Like I can give you an example right now. We're actually talking to one of a protocol team about making small changes to help with sort of key management on the nodes themselves. And, you know, we'll sort of take it a few different avenues there. Sometimes we'll talk, we'll work directly with the protocol team themselves and help them understand why it matters and let them make those changes. Sometimes we will propose or try to make pushes upstream to a protocol.

But that's, that type of thing is the kind of thing that we believe should be. open and public and open source and part of our community development should be, you know, helping the protocols get better and making folks understand why those things are important. And so, you know, and also quite frankly, like, should be up to the community. So the answer to your question is like, no, we're not really. And if we do, it's normally out in the open, open source. So as a protocol developer, one of the things I think about a lot is about some of the centralization risks of the network and, you know, putting a lot of effort into helping

encourage decentralization. Yeah. How do you guys think about some of the centralization risks you may pose by having everyone depending on, or not everyone, of course, but a large number of people depending on your guys' infrastructure? First off, I appreciate the vote of confidence, Sonny. I think that we would love if a lot of people were depending on our infrastructure. structure. We're, you know, obviously still, we're still growing and we're excited about our

position in the market. And we think we're helping a lot of folks in a lot of different ways. I think it's a very good question, but I also think, quite frankly, that a lot of the sort conversations that I've had around decentralization are basically drying arbitrary lines in the sand around whatever is. This doesn't, I don't mean this to come out like combative, because I actually don't mean it in a combative way, but it's like sort of often for convenience for whoever you're talking to. They sort of like draw a line in the sand. It's like, well, here's my line in the sand, but don't, you know, this is, it's on this side of me. You know, like, there's, there's, there's, pieces of that that I think that, so there's, there's two things that are important to me. One is that

from an ethos perspective and an emission perspective, decentralization is a path that we are constantly working on is a product and technology path that has constant staffing against. So, we want to end up in a world where we can be a force for health. We're helping decentralize the networks without posing additional risk to the protocols themselves. And we've been put in positions where at some point we would be running to what, specifically in a BFT network where we would be running too much of a network and potentially cause, not even like necessarily cause, but potentially cause issues with that network. And we've opted to not bring on new customers in that network because of that.

And so just from like a mission perspective, we're pretty aligned with making sure that we're doing the right thing for the protocols themselves. So that's the first thing. the second thing is is that we do a lot of work to help decentralized networks. And so, yeah, sure, you could have folks that are depending on Bison Trail's infrastructure platform. But if we build it in a way where ownership and we move towards a world where ownership of keys or ability to move things around or outside of our control and potentially verifiably outside of our control, that's actually a really interesting way to help combat some of those issues as well. And then the last thing I would say is kind of something

I mentioned before, which is like, we make it easier for people to run nodes and validators around the world in different zones and different regions on different BPSs. That's actually something that is really hard to do. And when left to their own devices, most protocols don't see that independently. So if you mentioned this earlier, like there's plenty of protocols where we see like a huge portion of that network run on AWS East. That's not because people think it's the right thing to do. It's because people know and do what they know best.

And what people do and know best is AWS East. East. And that's unfortunate for the protocol. And so there's actually a very, very strong case where we are creating enterprise grade redundancy and infrastructure deployments that are geographically distributed, that are VPS distributed, that have independent geographic failovers that doesn't exist in the ecosystem without us, which is really quite cool. And that's something I'm really excited about. And then, you know, the last thing I would say is like every computer on the internet runs Linux and no one's asking about that. Do you guys think that you have an obligation to disclose your, how many customers you have on a particular network?

So like, because I think it at least helps without disclosing who they are, but at least giving a ballpark of like, do 1% of the validators users, do 5% to 51%? How do you guys think about that? That's actually a really good question too. Do I think we have an obligation? No, I don't think we have an obligation. We're privately owned and operated companies. so I don't think we're obliged to. Do I think that like ethically and sort of from a mission perspective, should we? I meant like moral obligation. Yeah, like morally. Or civic obligation.

I think that that's right. I think that there's like a right way to do that and a wrong way to do that. And there's also like the right time to do that and the wrong time to do that. Right now we operate that way internally where we're paying close attention to those things and we're sort of making internal company decisions based off of our penetration or our ability to do a really good job of solving the problems or do a better jobs than the market. And so we're being careful. Something I could see us doing down the road is sort of like that makes a lot of sense, right? Like we want to protect the privacy of our customers and we want to protect the security of our customers and security of our systems. But also, like I said before, like we're incentive aligned to see these networks be successful, which means that if we put

ourselves in a position to be detrimental to the network, we're not helping anybody, including ourselves. I can see a world down the road where we're a little bit more public about our position in network itself and also like being public about like parts of our roadmap about how we're trying to help solve those problems and what are the issues and what are the things that we're doing way better you know kind of like what I'm describing now like how are we making that better and how are we more dangerous earlier you mentioned that you've turned away some customers one if when you felt that it would imply a lot a large percentage of the stake was running on your infrastructure do you give us a sense of what's the line in your mind when you

would turn away customers for a particular network? So that's a good question. There's like the very obvious BFT lines, right? If you're 3F over M plus one of the network, then you can actually help the network. So there's that, right? If you're running more than a third of the network and a BFT network, you can hold the network. That's no good. And if you're running two thirds of the network, you can actually alter the chain.

And that's also no good. So in our head, until we have solved a lot of the, using technology to solve a lot of the decentralization issues that we think we might be bringing from a risk perspective, we would most likely never run more than 30% of a network, or whatever, 33% of a network. Could you give us a sense, just out of my personal curiosity, what magnitude of the Cosmos Hub network you guys are operating? Out of my own curiosity, what magnitude of the Cosmos Hub do you think we're operating? Somewhere between 10 to 20% would be my personal guess. I love it. That's fantastic. We're not of the Cosmos hub.

We're not as big as that. I actually don't know, but it's not even like 10 to 20%. That would be phenomenal. If we're running 10 to 20% of the Cosmosub, that would be amazing because we'd be doing phenomenal job orchestrating validators on that network. On Cosmos, I actually wrote a proposal hasn't been pushed to the chain yet, but called proportional slashing. And you guys actually wrote a pretty good response to it.

It's the idea that we should punt only in the case. case of slashing, should we punish validators more heavily the larger they are? So if a validator of 5% of the stake gets double signs, you'll get slashed much more heavily than someone who's 1% of the network. As part of that proposal to stop civil attacks, where that one validator of 5% is splits into 5 validators, we do have to account for correlation, where we basically say, okay, look, if five of these validators all go down at roughly the same time, we can kind of punish that as well as like one validator, five percent going down. And that has this sort of side effect of heavily harming your architecture where, like, I know you guys spent a lot

of time on decorulating a lot of your architecture, but let's say there's something that goes wrong with the, like, I don't know your exact infrastructure, but let's say like there is some sort of central point of failure in your orchestration system. It does. People who are using your infrastructure are probably more correlated than people who are not, assuming they're not all running on AWS East. So what are some of your thoughts on proportional slashing? First off, thanks for the work that you've been doing in Cosmos on that. I think, like, having focusing through this problem is an important part of community development and maturation of the network itself. I do remember sort of seeing that, and I do remember us sort of writing our thoughts on proportional slashing.

I think ultimately where we netted out, and obviously we're totally open to interpretation and to conversation and debate about this, is that platform like Bison Trail is because of the amount of work that we do to decorrelate our infrastructure deployments sort of puts us an advantage over a smaller validator in the ecosystem. I think where we netted out is like, we're not sure if this is the right answer, but it's probably the right questions to ask. Like you said, if they're not using AWS East and they're not doing XYZ and they're not using Docker and they're not using Linux and they're not doing everything things, then like, you know, they'll be more correlated if they're using vice and trails. And I actually think that that's not necessarily true.

I don't think you would be surprised since you guys are infrastructure operators and validator operators. Like a lot of folks are using Docker, a lot of folks are using Linux, a lot of folks are using AWS. Having a sort of enterprise grade platform that is multi zone, multi region, multi cloud and then has like infrastructure setups that are deconturettes. correlated can be super helpful to the protocol. And someone who is using by the drills might actually be less likely to be proportionally slashed in a correlated fashion. One of the things that you guys wrote was that you guys think it's probably a bit too early for proportional slashing on the Cosmos Network.

And so I actually wrote a response to that kind of saying that in respect, thanks to you guys post there, I actually went ahead and modified the spec because I think you guys made a valid point. And so I actually altered the spec so we can actually make it more gradual over time. So we can start in the original design, I had it so it always uses a one of the parameters was a two. And I was kind of hard coded in there. I made it so that's actually a dynamic value. So if we start from zero, it kind of slashing stays exactly how it is today.

And then over time, governance can kind of increase it. So we could go from zero to point five to one to one point five to two, maybe even, higher. I don't know if we'd ever want to go higher than two, really, but by the two, I mean, like, it's sort of quadratic. So if it's one, it's linear in regards to correlation. If zero, it doesn't care about correlation at all. So do you think that this is something that's, like, a reasonable approach to take? I don't think I know our position was that it's a little bit early. And the reason why our position was a little bit early is because a lot of, you know, like, not to pick on Cosmos, but Cosmos still has plenty of professional validation services,

but also, like, has plenty of hobbyists. And it would put hobbyists at it. a disadvantage. To think of a world where someone who's like running a hobby validator on Cosmos can recover from an outage faster than a platform that's designed to be VPS independent and geography independent seems kind of crazy to me. Do you think it's an issue on other protocols like Pocod? Because I know they're starting with proportional slashing as well. I think it's an issue on every protocol and I think it's completely fine. We mentioned this in our response like this would actually be good for our business, but it might hurt the ecosystem and discourage independent folks from being involved early on because of the risks.

We don't want to see that either. You know, like, we're sort of looking at it as like, how do we get more people, not how do we make it so people are afraid and less people do this? I like the idea of having governance parameters to help decide what the proportional slashing should be. So that to me makes a lot of sense, right? It's like, okay, this is still kind of an experiment and we are agreeing or acknowledging that it's, we don't know the perfect answer here and that like set ourselves up to be able

to change it if we're wrong. I think we also have to recognize the magnitude of what slashing is. There's a loss of funds in slashing. It's very, very real. A mistake with decisions around proportional slashing could be pretty detrimental to an independent validator or an independent staking company, not necessarily an independent one, but just like a smaller one. Let's say it's not finance, right? It's like, you know, a smaller company that's doing this. Like, that's pretty bad. Finance loses a couple million bucks. They probably don't care. You lose a couple million bucks. Like, you're probably pretty mad about it. We're generally in agreement with a lot of this.

And I like that we have a nice iteration process going back and forth here and trying to figure out what's the best way to help the network, really. I didn't know that the spec was changed in part or partially because of some of the stuff that we did. I'm actually really happy about that. Thanks for listening, I guess. Thanks for hearing us out. I appreciate that. Like I said, part of what we're trying to do as a company is just move the whole ecosystem forward, make everybody better, make all the networks better. And so that's really great.

I'm super happy to hear that. So talking of ecosystems, we'd like to move to a different ecosystem, which is Libra. Libra is always an attractive topic to talk about because it's unlike so many of the other networks, right? It has a different scale. It has a different approach. It frankly has completely different regulatory challenges to other crypto networks. And Bison Trails has been one of the few blockchain companies that are part of the Libra Association.

And so we'd like to hear your thinking on why you joined the Libra Association and how it came to be. So you're right. Libra is a hot topic to say the least for us. Folks ask us a lot of questions about Libra. And we are in a somewhat unique position. We're one of the few blockchain companies that's involved in the Libra Association. Last month, I was actually elected to the technical steering committee of Libra. So elected to the technical committee that's governing. overseeing the open source project, which I'm also very proud of. So heavily involved in the

technical roadmap and maintenance and commitments to that project itself and super excited to be involved there. I didn't really get a chance to talk about this. I sort of talked a lot about like bison trails and the infrastructure and kind of why we think what we're doing is important for the ecosystem. But I didn't really talk at all about our view generally speaking on the ecosystem. So as a company, bison trails, and this actually extends myself and my co-founder and our company is really what we would call protocol agnostic or blockchain agnostic in that we think that the space, the technology that's being built and the sort of moral and ethical changes that are happening are an important part of the sort of technical advancement of the world as a whole.

And I know that sounds like kind of very fluffy and big and grandiose. The company was designed to do that. So I believe we support eight protocols and maintenance right now. And then we're in the process of either some form of test phase or test net or pre-mainnet or whatever, adversarial test net with another 20 plus protocols. We're not a platform that's designed and built to support one protocol. We're actually designed and built to support many protocols. And the whole idea here is that we think that the world will be made up of many different blockchains and protocols. Some of them will be generalists.

Some of them will be currency. Some of them will be application specific. Some of them will be smart contracting platforms. Some of them will be video transcoding platforms, whatever it is. There's plenty that haven't been built or designed yet that we haven't seen. And that if we make it easier to build on top of and orchestrate and participate in these protocols,

that we will all be very successful and that the space will be successful. Libra represents different type of protocol than we've normally worked with in the past. It's different in a lot of different ways in what they're trying to do, what we are trying to do, I should say, what they were trying to do originally, before we got involved. Obviously, we're involved now. So it's different in what we're trying to do. But also, like, just generally speaking, the magnitude and scale of the project is pretty different than any other protocol we've worked on. It's really interesting to be sort of involved in the room

from a governance perspective with the Libra Association alongside, having one vote alongside Facebook's one vote, alongside Uber's one vote. We have a voice in the room that I like to believe is the crypto-native blockchain voice, the sort of keeping in mind morals and ethics of the space. And I'm obviously very excited about that and very proud of that work that we're doing. The story about how we got involved is actually pretty straightforward. We for, like you said, 20 or 24 months ago or, you know, two and a half years ago have been working very closely with a lot of different protocol teams and working in different communities and being involved from the early stages in different communities and have been building some really robust enterprise-grade infrastructure to help support the deployment and orchestration of pretty large-scale protocols. I want to say it was about a year ago. I was at a conference, and a mutual friend of mine introduced me to one of the people that was working on building Libra that was at the time a Facebook employee, but was planning to join the Libra Association.

And we had a kind of, you know, they said, hey, like we've talked to lots of folks in the ecosystem. We've heard that you guys are an incredibly technical team that's helping build infrastructure, building robust infrastructure in a way that's, you know, geography distributed. We also had done stuff like open source some code that we've done for a couple protocols. And they were sort of like, hey, like we have looked at the space a lot. And we've looked at a few of the other companies that are kind of in this space a little bit. And we've seen and heard that like, you know, you guys are doing some of the best work. So then they did some diligence on a few other folks in the space as well and asked us if we were interested in joining the Libra Association alongside the 99 other partners to help govern this blockchain

and help provide crypto-native expertise and blockchain-native expertise. I would say the biggest difference for Bison Trails within Libra is that we're probably a little bit more involved in governance with Libra than we are with a lot of other protocols. We are still involved in some governance. We're pretty involved in the communities and most protocols we engage with. And we work with a lot of these protocol development teams pretty closely. Sonny, I'm sure you've talked to other folks as well on our team.

But generally speaking, we work pretty close. with a bunch of different protocol teams. I'd say like we're a little bit more involved on the governance side with Libra. And then we're also, obviously, like I said before, I was elected to the technical steering committee. So we're involved in the technical governance as well, which is a little bit atypical for us as well.

We're not really involved in the technical governance on most protocols. We sort of contribute and we have opinions and we talk about proportional slashing publicly and we have engaged in discourse, but we don't necessarily aren't crazy involved in the technical side. Generally speaking,

that's kind of how we got involved. with Libra. Over the last year, we've been working really closely with the team building the protocol, the Libra core team building the protocol itself, and we've been working really closely with the association. That's how we got involved. That is kind of our state of our current involvement. When they asked us to join the Libra Association and get involved, I'd say like we were naturally skeptical at first, kind of like asking a lot of questions, what are you trying to do and what's the purpose and what is all this? How is this helpful for the ecosystem? And that ultimately came to this conclusion ourselves in asking these questions.

that this really was about creating an independent association that could govern this blockchain and really help move the entire ecosystem forward. And this idea of having access to literally billions of people and putting crypto and blockchain technology in the hands of billions of people is incredibly appealing to us as a company. We think it helps move all of our mission forward, ours, yours, the work that you're doing, the different protocols. We're all here to help move forward the ecosystem. and to help drive more mainstream

technological adoption. And we think that this helps that significantly. So we're pretty excited about it. When I first saw a bison getting involved in Libra, it didn't make sense at all. Because on the one hand, the business model of bison is to help people run validators. And on the other side,

to run a validator on Libra is $10 million. So what's bison really doing there? It doesn't make any sense. I think that that's maybe like a nuance in this idea of like $10 million and what that actually does. Running a validator and orchestrating a network that secures trillions of dollars of assets and transfers billions or tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets has nothing to do with investing in or giving money to or helping support the treasury of or whatever you want to describe like $10 million. They're kind of independent of each other. For us, this was entirely about, like you said, right, Bison Trails is a company and a platform that's designed to help run infrastructure on protocols.

In the Libra network, there's 100 independent association members that are going to help secure and validate that network. And we have domain expertise that a lot of these non-crypto-native companies don't have. And we have domain expertise that even folks in the crypto space aren't really doing or thinking about. And so this is really about being able to help orchestrate and build a network that can support the scale that we is trying to build. And that's why we're involved more than anything else. It really has nothing to do with anything else. So when I think ultimately about the success of Libra, I think about how can Bison Trails help make sure that Libra is safe, secure, orchestrated well, geographically distributed, and has run using everything from best practices to sort of cutting edge technology to make sure

it's amazing. The idea of being involved in the project and, you know, the original idea of the $10 million is really making sure that everybody in the association is involved in the project and sort of has alignment in the project as well. It's not like a pay to join situation. It's really about impact. How can you provide impact to the association? What is the current state of the Libra project? So a lot of people are aware that like earlier on or a couple months ago,

a bunch of teams started leaving. But then it seems that there's a lot of people who are actually joining. So I was scrolling through your Twitter before this episode. And I saw that Shopify actually just joined the Libre Association. So could you give us some sense of like, what is the current state and the progress of the Libra project? And when can we expect to see something live? The thing about the Libra in general and being a part of the Libra Association is that it's actually, you know, we're an association of equal members and it's unfair for me to speak out of turn on behalf of the association.

So I generally try not to. There's sort of bits and pieces about like my involvement that I'm happy to speak about things like the technical steering committee and the technical pieces of the project. So I'm not going to tell you sort of when you should expect things to go live or anything. like that. It's not entirely in my control, and it's also just not fair for me to speak on behalf of the entire association. So I won't do that. From the technology perspective, it's moving along incredibly well. Obviously, the product is open source. You can see it on GitHub slash Libra. You can see the entire roadmap is public. You can see all the commits to the project

itself and sort of what's going on there. And from a technology perspective, it's coming along super, super well. And as a language, move is pretty incredible. I'm excited about it, at least. There's plenty of reasons why it could be very, very cool. From, you know, an association perspective, I would say that over the last few months, we've hit some pretty great milestones, including, you know, officially forming the association in October, which the association talked about. We talked about publicly. So that was like, you know, hey, we're actually going to officially create this association. Sort of sign the paperwork, like saying, yeah, like, we're an association now. So we did that in October. And then creating the technical steering committee as well. We did that sort of

in the late fall before the holidays. We've had new folks, really impactful folks like Shopify join the association. And we're in talks with lots of really great folks that want to be a part of this. Impactful companies that have not just reach, but have really great reputations and are really great technology contributors to the world. So we're super excited about all those things. And in terms of like folks leaving the association, I think like any project, as like, you know, you kind of get involved in the project, you start to ask questions and stuff

It starts to get real. Different people for different reasons at different times decide that it's not right for them at that moment. And the way I see that and sort of the way that my personal opinion on that is that's a very fair, level-headed way to approach it. Maybe this isn't right for me today. It's not about do I think this is going to be successful or not? Or do I want to be involved ever? It's really like, you know what? Right now I can't contribute the type of time and effort and resources it might take to make this successful. So maybe I should be involved. So you guys recently raised around $25 million in your Series A. Could you tell us a little bit about, you know, what was that process like and what was sort of the main pitch that you guys gave to investors? And where I'm kind of looking at this as well from is there was a proof of stake web conference about two or three weeks ago. Victor spoke on that. And one of the general themes that we noticed throughout the conference is that a lot of validators were kind of of saying that, like, you know, running validos on their own isn't profitable enough. You know, maybe it's validation is often just a lost leader in something else.

So how does your guys' valuation reconcile with that where like, you know, most validos seem to be struggling while you guys aren't a validator. You're an infrastructure company, but you guys have reached this like great valuation. And like valuation isn't the end goal, of course. But like, how did that come about? So that's right. In the fall, we raised $25.5 million from some really great investors, including blockchain capital, Kleiner Perkins, sound ventures, and our existing cap table also all participated as well. I'm forgetting some folks in there. There's a couple other really great investors that are involved. I always forget whenever I talk about our investors, I always forget to mention them. But they all know I love them. A little bit about the process and why and sort of like how we're seeing the world differently and what the pitch looks like. And I think you sort of hit the nail on the head yourself, actually, as you were sort of introducing the topic. We're not a validator company.

Our entire mission is about democratizing access, making it easier to run infrastructure on these protocols. We have seen some traction in particular in a highly secure, a highly important part of the ecosystem, which is staking and participating in these networks, something that we do incredibly well, and we support the sort of deployment, orchestration, and management of lots of different folks' participation in these blockchains. And so for us, it's really about, like, we are poised for long-term success. in the ecosystem and less about independent by protocol extraction. Unfortunately, there's some folks

that are looking at validation and they're like incredibly aligned and they're amazing and I'm super excited that they exist. And there's some folks that are looking at validation as like, how do we extract as much money as possible from a protocol? And so we look at this much, much longer term than the dominance or the sort of penetration of proof of stake in the blockchain ecosystem today. If you look at proof of stake in general, it's actually still quite small. The amount of staking that's happening is in some networks is like kind of high, but in a lot of networks, it's still not high at all. We're seeing new types of products and services that are being built either on or adjacent to some of these new protocols. So for us, it's like really how do we support the

entire ecosystem? And that really is like the gist of it. It's just staying true to our mission and our vision. It's like we want to make it easier for people to participate. We're seeing traction in staking. We're a pure play technology provider. So we don't package assets. We're not trying to build a financial services company. We're not doing lending or. trading or anything like that. We're really just making it easier for companies, for developers, for entrepreneurs to build and deploy infrastructure in these different protocols. That's kind of like, you know, there's not really much to it more than that. That's like, that's like, that's our pitch and that's what the company is doing. And it's, you know,

publicly stated in our website. The process itself is not easy, I would say still. I mean, like, you know, crypto is still kind of, I mean, obviously like the last few months have been not too bad from a market perspective. But I think investors are still like a little afraid. about blockchain and crypto in general. I think 2017 scarred a lot of investors. They thought that a lot of these projects were going to shift and they were going to be transformative. And there's a lot left to be desired

from a lot of the different blockchains and protocols that have even launched. And like anyone building in a nascent industry, it's always hard to convince people that what you're doing is super important. And so we went through that as well too. It's not an easy thing for me. And I spent a lot of time trying to convince people

that what we're trying to do is super impactful. And that's really the gist of it. And we're obviously really excited about the position that we're in and the protocols we can help support. And if we make it easier for more people to participate and more people to build in the space, then that's a win. That's what we're trying to see. And that's why we're sort of at the stage that we're at. What can we expect to see next in the next few months?

Like what kind of new networks are you supporting? And what are you excited for? We are incredibly excited about more than 20 protocols that we are supporting that are in some form of, pre-mainnet or late-stage test net. And we're excited, very excited for those things all to go live. Things like Pocod and Scale and New Cypher and, you know, NIR and Mobilecoin and Solana and Selo and Koda. There's some really incredible projects that are coming out that we've been supporting for more than a year, if not almost two years. And we're super excited for all those to come up. So over the next like, you know, a few months expect to see us continue to support

these protocol teams that continue to support their launches. Hopefully we'll continue to onboard new folks onto the platform. So new entrepreneurs, independent validators, staking as service companies, custodians, exchanges, just generally speaking community members that want to help support and validate these networks. So, you know, that's kind of like major focus for us over the next, you know, three to six months. And then continuing to move the ecosystem forward and move the technology forward. So we're also trying to consistently ship code that helps move our vision and mission forward and, you know, engage with the community is kind of like we did, when we talk to you all about proportional slashing our thoughts and trying to help make the entire

ecosystem better. So you expect a lot more of that. You can see a lot of those announcements and sort of conversations are happening on our Twitter at Bison Trails. And also you can see kind of like the protocols we're supporting and the ones we're excited about and any news on our website, BisonTrells.com. It was great to catch up with you, Joe. I'm always impressed by Bison because I think it's one of the companies that took a different look at the proof of stake ecosystem. really early compared to all of the other players, and you've been one of the most successful with your fresh approach. So congratulations on that, and I look forward to how the future unfolds for Bison and the proof of stake ecosystem in general. Thanks so much, and honestly,

we feel the same way. We really appreciate all of the work that the different ecosystem players are putting in and the community development that's happening, and we're really excited to help support everyone in the space. So really excited to have been on the show, and I really appreciate you guys having me here and continue to ask us the hard questions and continue to have us help push everybody forward. Awesome. Thanks. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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