Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Matt Luongo: tBTC – Bringing Trustless Bitcoin to Ethereum

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

The ability to move Bitcoin on other chains isn't a new idea, and many are trying to overcome the technical limitations which make this a technically challenging feat. The latest representation of Bitcoin on Ethereum is tBTC, a fully-backed ERC-20 token representing bitcoin collateral. tBTC is fully decentralized and relies on Keep Network, a decentralized multi-party computation which enables cross-chain bridging. We were joined by Matt Luongo, CEO of Thesis (the team behind tBTC and Keep Network) to chat about the tBTC technology, his vision for the future of interoperability and value propositions of different chains.Topics covered in this episode:- Matt's background - how he got into crypto and his experience in the space- The Keep Network - dencetralized multi-party computations- Why trustless minting of tBTC is important- tBTC and its security model- Dark DAOs and vote buying- The merge between Keep Network and NuCypher- What other mergers are being looked at for the future- Matt's views on the idea of BTC existing as tokenized asset on Ethereum and other chainsEpisode links: - [Thesis](https://thesis.co/)- [Keep](https://keep.network/)- [tBTC](https://tbtc.network/)- [Keep Discord](https://discord.com/invite/wYezN7v)- [Thesis on Twitter](https://twitter.com/thesis_co)- [Keep on Twitter](https://twitter.com/keep_project)Sponsors: - ParaSwap: Give ParaSwap a try at paraswap.io/epicenter. This URL will allow you to claim a 50% refund on gas fees for your first swap of at least 1 Eth. This offer is available until May 1st 2021 and refunds will be made every Friday starting April 9th, 2021 - Terms and conditions apply. - Solana: Solana is the high performance blockchain supporting over 50k transactions per second to power the next generation of decentralized applications. - https://solana.com/epicenter- Exodus: Exodus the easy-to-use crypto wallet available on all platforms and supporting over 100 different assets. - https://exodus.com/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/387](https://epicenter.tv/387)

Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Kuitio. And my name is Federica Ernst. Today we're speaking with Matt Luongo. He's the CEO of Thesis. Thesis is a crypto production studio. And they've been working on several projects and products over the years. Keep is one of their products, Fold, which is a Bitcoin cashback product. And today we're going to be talking about TBTC, which is a wrapped Bitcoin, I guess, or like a version of Bitcoin that exists on the Ethereum blockchain.

And so we're excited to talk to Matt about TBTC today. But before we talk with Matt, we'll just like to tell you about our sponsors this week. Paraswap is the fastest and most liquid decks aggregator on Ethereum. It's got a state-of-the-art algorithm that beats the market price across all major dexes and brings you the most optimized swaps with the best prices and with low slippage. Check out pariswop.io slash epicenter and claim 50% gas refunds for a swap of at least one eith traded. We're also brought you by Solana, which is a fully capable smart contract chain with lightning fast blocks and that supports over 50,000 transactions per second. Scalability is perhaps the single biggest challenge facing the shift to using blockchain technology as a backbone for the world's financial system.

And today, Solana may be the best solutions we have. So go to Solana.com slash Epicenter to learn more. And we're also brought you by Exodus. It's an easy to use wallet that supports hundreds of assets and has native apps for all platforms. including iOS and Android. And as a fully non-consular wallet, there are firm believers of the not your keys, not your coins mantra.

So go to exodus.com to give it a try. Matt, thanks for joining us. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got involved in the crypto space. Thanks for having me. I first got into crypto because I was buying, selling gift cards as a side hustle, working on another startup.

So it turns out that there was a period of time where people had tons and tons of Starbucks cards and I realized that you could buy them for like 50 or 60 cents on the dollar. You could resell them, make a nice tidy profit. And that's what helped fund my first startup was schemes like that. So eventually I tried to scale that into a startup. And when I launched it, the idea was you could go to the site, you could put in your gift card info, we'd pay you in PayPal.

PayPal didn't like that. So at the time, I didn't know much about gray finance and kind of all these like new instruments. but apparently, you know, buying and selling gift cards were against PayPal's terms of service. And so my introduction to Bitcoin actually was just looking for censorship resistance and some sort of alternative to PayPal. So I relaunched the site, Cardforcoin.com. This was like the end of 2013, early 2014. And in the first week, it did $50,000 in sales, which was more than I had in my bank account.

So I was like having to hustle to keep the Bitcoin going in circles, money orders, all sorts of like early coin-based shenanigans. And yeah, that was my introduction to the space. And you started a Bitcoin cashback company pretty soon after that, right? Yeah. So originally, like, we had all this gift cards and we started kind of actually understanding crypto a little bit more and getting more into Bitcoin. And that's what led to full. And at the time, it was, it was straight up a payments product, right? So all the things we used to laugh about when the block size debates came on, like buy your coffee, with Bitcoin. But as the market started to move, and it kind of became clear, like, actually,

you know, block space is scarce, and we probably shouldn't use it for every coffee purchase. That's when Fold pivoted to this rewards model. So now, if you want to get Bitcoin back on every purchase, you can go to foldap.com and you can check out their card. Their growth has been incredible, frankly. The new CEO, Will, is just a much better consumer CEO than I think I'll ever be. I'm sort of jealous when I see the numbers they pull and check it out. People seem to love it. Fold kind of was being folded into this portfolio company thesis, right? I mean, the one that's still around today. But it actually predated thesis, right? We're running our production studio, but that wasn't the plan, right? The plan was just to launch a startup and, you know, I don't know. What is the plan

after that to, like, profit, I guess. Like, we were growing this thing. And I think when we started, we were really focused on application layer work. So let's help you buy, spend, use Bitcoin. But then as I got deeper and deeper into the space and more engaged on the tech side, that eventually led to us starting a new project, which was Keep and on top of that, TBT. And we knew Fold was a great idea,

and it had a strong team, and it needed a little bit longer to really get to market. And so that's when we decided to launch as a studio. So, yeah, Fold is its own. independent entity now. Keep and TBTC have their own team. We actually have another project called Saddle, which launched in January as well, and a few more that will be launching. Hopefully I'll share with you guys later this quarter. So, cool. Tell us about Keep. What does Keep set out to do? The basic idea, because I came from Bitcoin, when I started playing with Ethereum stuff, I was

surprised by a lot of things. So you'll hear like I get all up in arms about things that I think a lot of Ethereum developers consider basic, I'm surprised by, but one of the ones when I first got into just Solidity Dev was like, where does all the private data go? And, you know, obviously, I understood how the chain worked, but I just thought with my own background that there would sort of be a lot of options for developers who wanted to keep data off chain and then interact. And the reason I thought that is because there's a lot of cryptographic tricks to do that, right? So we have all sorts of provable mechanisms where you can keep data off-chain. And so I went after the problem using multi-party computation.

And the idea was that if you wanted to keep, say, your social and you actually wanted that to be tied to some on-chain information, but obviously you don't want to put your social security number or another personally identifying piece of information directly on Ethereum, you could use this tech. And if you kind of think of MPC as like a generalized Shamir split. So, like, you know, choose a computation, and now imagine you could do it over a threshold of parties. And that's the basic idea behind multi-party computation. So anyway, we dug in, we started working on this.

We launched a random beacon. We launched a random beacon on ETH one that's BLS-based. And then we started saying, okay, like, we have this very general purpose technique. And at this point, we're in, like, end of 2018, early 2019, when we're wondering, like, where are all the developers? And one of the things that became clear to me is like, if you went from JavaScript to solidity, you probably don't even understand the problem we're trying to solve, right? And so instead of attracting devs, we said, well, let's build it ourselves. So the first application built on top of Keep is TBTC.

And the idea is that the private information that you're trying to custody is Bitcoin KeyPair and that you're using MPC instead of the usual Bitcoin multi-sig to actually custody of the coins. What the KEEP network does for TBTC in a nutshell is that it gives you a trustless representation of Bitcoin on Ethereum, right? I'd say what KEEP does is the decentralized custody component. So like TBTC still needs SPV proofs and kind of some other cross-chain stuff to actually like make the experience for users reasonable. But the part where you need a whole bunch of key material that's not on the Ethereum chain, absolutely, that's key. We'll go into how that works in a bit. Tell us why you would want that first, why you would

want to have wrap Bitcoin on Ethereum. I mean, everyone has their own reasons, but for me, I went to buy a house. And so I have two kids. And when we hit Kid 2, we realized we should probably leave California. It was a little It was before that became super trendy, right? It's just a little too hard to do the Bay Area with two kids. So we went back to Atlanta, and when I went to buy a house, I, you know, I kind of looked at our finances and I said, well, you know, most of our personal wealth is crypto, so I'm sure we'll find a lender, right, who will accept it.

So this was 2018 and 2019. So this was kind of before BlockFi had become what it has now. So I wasn't immediately going to say, oh, retail lender, let's go to BlockFi like a lot people would today. So I talked to some local mortgage lenders, and my favorite conversation was the one where they said, oh yeah, no, we love Bitcoin. And it's so great that you're involved. Sell your Bitcoin. Come back to us in 30 days. We'll pretend like we didn't have this conversation and we'll lend you. And I don't know, that really bugged me, right? Like, the whole reason I'm interested in Bitcoin, the whole reason I got involved was to avoid, in my case, PayPal and

centralized payment processors. But really, the entire. hire like, why am I talking to anyone? If I'm good for it, if I'm good for this mortgage, why do I have to talk to anyone to get permission? And that really kind of bugged me. So what got me into TBDC was really that I wanted to use my Bitcoin as collateral to buy a house. And since then, like this was all before Defy Summer, right? So since then, the use cases have exploded. And I think that in a lot of ways, collateral is king. And so people talk on the Bitcoin side, people say Bitcoin is super liquid. Well, it's super liquid if you make it super liquid, right? It's super liquid if you hook it up to everything else. So that's kind of what we're trying to do with TBTC.

There's a bunch of different ways of getting Bitcoin to Ethereum, right? So basically there's different trustless alternatives like RenBTC, but then there's also trusted alternatives like Rub Bitcoin that's backed by like a consortium of Coinbase and Bitcoin and others, right? So why do you think the trustless route is interesting and necessary? That's like a two-part question. Like, why do I think it's interesting and what's my evidence that the market cares? Because if I found anything in this space, it's like just because something is interesting or even ideologically satisfying doesn't necessarily me in the market will care about it.

Why I think it's interesting is I don't want to ask permission. By the way, I'm going to sound super negative about WBTC, but I actually, I think what they've done for the space has been great. So just there's the preface. But if I use something like WBTC and I say, okay, I'm going to put my Bitcoin down as collateral, let's say I'm finished with that and I go to withdraw, WBTC can block my withdrawal back to Bitcoin. And it's actually, it's good marketing that you think it's a consortium. But it is just BitGo. BitGo is the sole custodian. So even though there's this idea of like a community multi-sig and they have partners who have come in, the only people holding the Bitcoin ultimately are BitGo.

So look, I don't think that BitGo tomorrow is going to target Matt Luongo, but I think BitGo tomorrow might target anyone who's been in a particular jurisdiction that threatens their business. And, you know, I don't blame them for it. They're a regulated business, but that does mean that I'm pretty uncomfortable putting most of my personal wealth in a system like that. Let's maybe turn the question around then. What are some of the caveats or to using a trustless system

as opposed to using something like rap Bitcoin. Let's say Rap Bitcoin was, you know, had better multi-sig and maybe better key. Yeah, like Steelman, Wrap Bitcoin. Sure. Right. Yeah. So some downsides to, so first it's hard to call anything trustless, right? So the way that the Bitcoin L1 works,

it was not built for interoperability with other chains. that were not other chains to interoperate with when the bulk that was designed. So when you look at Bitcoin's L1, you realize it's very easy to prove what's happening on Bitcoin's L1 to other chains, but it's very difficult to prove what's happening on other chains to Bitcoin's L1. Most of the op codes and script that you would need for that, there's a whole slew of different ways to do it, but most of them are politically unsavory. It's kind of the same, why aren't there more trust-minimized side chains on Bitcoin?

and it's well because we as a community of Bitcoin who haven't decided that it's worth the risk to the L1 to actually make the change. So if you look into the history of things like drive chain and some of Paul Stork's work, you'll see kind of goes right to the debate on the Bitcoin side. But that means that anything that claims it's trustless or trust minimized that's bringing Bitcoin to Ethereum has to be making a compromise

because there is not a technical way to do this perfectly. So in the case of TBTC, the Comprime, TBCC V1, the compromise that we're making is in capital efficiency. So the idea is that, okay, basically Bitcoin cannot validate Ethereum consensus, and I don't ever expect that that'll change. So what we do instead is we say, you know, if we want to ensure that your Bitcoin is safe and you want to be able to use it from Ethereum's L1, we ask that each custodian on Ethereum's L1 put down ether.

And then basically there are fraud proofs where if you go to withdrawals, draw your Bitcoin from TBTC back to your keys or back to Bitcoin's L1, and you don't get your money back. You can prove it. And then you get the back in collateral and ether. It's sort of the best you can do, right? Like, I wish we could say we could do better than that. It would be fantastic. If we could say, well, no, like, you know, the Bitcoin chain will somehow slash these people and you'll get your money back. That's just outside of the technology today. You know, most people book flights on travel aggregators to get more options and the best prices. for the travel plans. So when you're making defy swaps, use pariswap. It beats market prices across

all major dexes, and thanks to their network of professional market makers, you'll get zero slippage on your trades. They just pushed a huge update that's even faster and more liquid thanks to a brand new algorithm. It's cheaper than uniswap, and it comes with a new gas token that cuts your gas fees by up the 50%. It's no wonder metamask, Argent, and monolith all rely on the paraswap API. So give Paraswap a try. try at pariswop.io slash epicenter. This URL allows you to claim a 50% refund on gas fees for your first swap of at least one eth. This offer is available until May 1st, 2021, and refunds will be made every Friday starting April 9. We'd like to thank Paraswap for their support of Epicenter.

Maybe that's go into a little bit more detail here, just to make this more tangible. So basically, say, I have Bitcoin and I want them to have them on the Ethereum chain. So basically, I want to turn them into TBTC. How would I go about that? Yeah, so today, what you would do is you would let the Ethereum chain know. So you just sort of say, hey, I want to meant 10 TBTC, for example. I guess that number sounds bigger and bigger. It used to be a perfectly reasonable demo number, but we'll stick with 10. So you say, look, I want to meant 10 TBTC. And so on the Ethereum side, what happens is a random beacon chooses is three custodians. They come together and they set up a three of three threshold ECDSA setup, which is kind of like

a somewhat fancier Bitcoin multi-sig. And they say, okay, cool, here's this three of three. Here's the address. And we have required ETH from each of these three custodians that is worth, I believe, the current government says 200% of the Bitcoin they're going to put down. And then once that happens, you say, fantastic, I'm going to send my Bitcoin. And then you send a, with your Bitcoin, you send a proof. once you've got enough work.

So once you've hit around six confirmations. And that proof goes to the Ethereum chain and it says, look, I sent Bitcoin, I sent it where you told me to, give me my TBTC. There are a lot of other little options and fiddly things you can do at this point, but most people just take their TBTC and are sort of free to use it in DeFi or wherever. And then whenever they like, they can turn that TBTC in, either for their exact same UTXO that they put in in the first place, or some other Bitcoin that'll come out the other side.

It's a bearer asset, right? The TBTC. So basically, if I give it to someone else, they can redeem the Bitcoin on the other side. So by just specifying a payout address that the three trusted community members send the Bitcoin to? That's right. And to be clear, that three of three is chosen from currently. We have 200 separate stakers and we're working on 10xing that number. What's the benefit of being a staker?

So what's in it for them? you earn fees, right? So obviously there's a bunch of economic activity that Bitcoiners would love to take advantage of on Ethereum right now. And, you know, it's not just 2017's latest shit coin. It's also, you know, let's lend and take EFBTC positions and kind of do some pretty complicated financial maneuvering. So moving your Bitcoin over has value. Now, right now, TBTC's fees are cranked all the way down by governance. And instead, stakers are earning primarily a subsidy in the backing work token, Keep. And the idea is that three-bip fee right now can be cranked up to between 30 and 60

bibs and start to really generate some revenue. And there's another thing that I was interested about in the mechanics of how it actually works. So as I understand, there's actually two separate tokens. So there's the fungible ERC-20 TBTC token. But then there's also a non-fungible token. I mean, it's an ERC 721, and it's called TDT. So what's that?

And what do I do with them the TDT token? So most people don't know they exist and do nothing with them, frankly. So but some very fancy users do some kind of cool stuff. So the idea is that when you deposit your Bitcoin, you're actually getting this non-fungible, bearer asset for your particular deposit. And if you want, you can turn that. in for fungible TBDC and it'll be minted. But if there's a reason that you want to hold on to your particular UTXO and make sure that you can redeem just that one, then you hold onto that

NFT and you can trade it, you can loan against it. So there's a lot of interesting things depending on your belief around all of the taxes of this situation where some people really want to say, no, no, I never disposed. In fact, this is the exact same Bitcoin, like, you know, with air quotes that I put in, right? But then there's also some really kind of advanced interop stuff you can do where when you get UTXO level control, you can really get wild. But what we've seen since TBTV1 launching is, you know, a few of us take advantage of that sort of stuff.

But the actual infrastructure for NFTs on Ethereum right now is very much focused on like dancing cats and not really on the financial use cases that we've been considering. So for example, discussing NFTs with Maker. It's been for a long time, they've talked about bringing in NFTs into basically the collateral class that Maker accepts for loans. But at the end of the day, they have to have a price feed and who's going to provide that price feed. So even though we love the UTXO NFT idea, and I personally play with it a lot, most users have

just found that it's, it doesn't really mesh with the rest of Ethereum yet. You can just pretend that you never left, basically, you've always retained control of your Bitcoin so no taxable event has happened. Yeah, that's the idea. That's the idea is if you're taking a loan directly against a particular UTXO. I mean, a lot of people would take that argument at all, moving Bitcoin into TBTC, it'd say, well, I'm rapping and so I haven't disposed. I'm not an accountant, you know, but it's obviously, it's a really complicated topic. Yeah, I think also like depends on the jurisdiction and where taxable events occur. Very much, yeah. Germany does not screw around with any of this stuff, the U.S. is a little bit more flexible around some of it.

In France, for instance, like, Crypto to Crypto is now a taxable event. That sounds nice. In the documentation, I was reading that it was 150% collateral, and you mentioned, like, 200% collateral. And I believe that is one of the parameters that where you currently, like, where the team currently has control over. It's not the team anymore. It's been given over to a five of eight community multi-sig that was community elected.

Eventually, I expect that'll get replaced by a Dow. Okay, yeah, we can maybe talk a little bit more about those parameters and which one of those parameters are, or maybe given authority or buy a doubt. But why 150%, why 200%, like who decides this number and why is relevant? No, it's a great question. So there's a short term and a long-term answer here, which is what, how do you feel about the ETHBTC price? And I think, you know, everyone kind of has a different, different thought like, oh, wow, ETH is underperforming or, oh, no, this is where it should be. And there's lots of discussion to be had. But when you build a system like this, we're asking stakers to do.

And what we're guaranteeing to users that we do is that stakers have to hold your Bitcoin and they have to give it back to you when you ask. And the only way that we can guarantee that is by holding stakers, ether, and escrow. Now, if the value of their ether goes down too much, it can't possibly safely back Bitcoin anymore. So a key part of TBCV1 is that. this price feed, which is a maker price feed, and I'd probably say this is the most centralized part of TBTC one. There's this maker price feed that gives us the ETHBTC price. And what it says is, if ETHBTC drops too far, some of these particular deposits might have to be liquidated.

And there's a time window where stakers can return funds and can avoid any negative liquidation stuff. But it's pretty unfortunate, frankly, because I'm a staker myself. And it sucks to actually enter into this like kind of awkward ETH BTC position where on the one hand, maybe you're backing TBTC because you're a Bitcoin bowl. But on the other hand, you're getting punished if Bitcoin does too well relative to ether. And so there's this option that you're opening up. And so what the community has decided to do while we add a little bit more tooling is they've actually increased that 150 starting collateral to 200%, which is very high. And they've done that because a lot of the Stakers are just tired. They're tired of managing an EPDC position. So we have kind of an upgrade

mechanism. So TV1 is absolutely immutable to the point where we're constantly struggling with our past selves at that decision. It's difficult to work with sometimes. Ideologically satisfying, but difficult. So what we've done is we've started looking at how can we make this easier on stakers. Basically, we're bringing outside capital into a system called coverage pools to actually allow that collateral ratio to go a lot lower. But until then the communities decided, let's keep it at 200, let's get coverage pools out, and then we can drop it to more like 130. What do coverage pools perform here? Yeah, so the basic idea is they're a backstop. So right now, if you go into liquidation as a staker, so as a user, this is what's interesting,

as a user, none of this matters to you. You just kind of like float along and you have this great experience, but that's kind of on the backs of these stakers, right? They're the labor in this particular system. So what the coverage pool does is if you go into liquidation, basically the coverage pool will always be the buyer of last resort and will always act as a backstop for auctions. So you can just put a whole bunch of collateral in it. But what's great is that it's a fund that's socialized across all of these deposits. So instead of asking a particular staker to put down more and more more and more ether, you can say, okay, well, there's a, there's a whole passive bunch of capitalists who are going to put down capital and back your deposits, and then they're going to earn fees on that.

So it's an insurance? It's a, it's a backstop. There are a lot of different ways to look at it. But yeah, so the idea is like it allows passive capital to be passive, and active capital would not have to put down quite so much and manage quite so tightly. Okay. And these coverage pools are are sort of separate from the system, they've kind of come up organically as a way to mitigate for this. It's funny that you say organic because I'm like, well, it's not organic. We're, we're writing it. But actually, yes, people have basically built their own in-house coverage pools. So like staking services and whatnot are already having to do this and having to manage these collateral ratios in a socialized way because it's more capital efficient. And so we're

launching a way to do that on chain where anyone can participate rather than working with a particular staking provider. Let's get to our sponsor, Solana. Now, this is a special ad for me to read because I've been a deep supporter of this project since meeting the Solana team back in 2018. I invested personally in the project and my company, Course 1 is super deeply involved in the Solana ecosystem, including running the biggest validator. So what's so cool about Solana?

We all know that scalability is a single most important issue facing the blockchain industry today. and the Solana blockchain is an amazing solution for it. They support up to 50,000 transactions per second with 400 milliseconds block times and over 500 different validators. The special thing about Solana is also that it's not a charter blockchain. It's a single blockchain hyper optimized for performance. So that makes it really easy to maintain composability and for all the apps on Solana to work together seamlessly like we know it from Ethereum.

The Solana ecosystem is growing at a rapid pace and it's a great place to build your project and just get involved and be a part of it. So go to slana.com slash epicenter to learn more about it and get involved. Let's talk about the capital efficiency or inefficiency. So basically in order for people to actually use their Bitcoin on Ethereum and yield farm with it or do whatever, other people actually have to deposit their ETH into these companies. contracts and basically incur the opportunity costs that come with that, right? So basically, is there a plan of alleviating that burden on stakers? Is there ever? Yeah. So when we first

design the system, there wasn't a lot of yield to be had on EVE. And now, I mean, it's still one of the lower yielding assets in D5, but now, you know, people are talking about 20 to 100% everywhere. And it's crazy to have to compete with returns like that. And so it's really important to us that we find a way to really minimize the use of additional collateral outside Bitcoin. So there are a few ways to do that. There's, you know, if you look at the space today, one, there's just like sort of the YOLO trusted way. So if you look at Liquid, for example, by Blockstream, you say, look, you guys know, don't worry about it. You can sue us if something goes wrong. And there's this rough consortium. If you look at something like WBTC, it's both better and worse. Like, on the one hand, it's worse because

it's just Bicco as a custodian versus these, I believe it's 15 in liquid. But on the flip side, it's Bicco and they're professional custodians. So there's some comfort you can get to that. So one is just this trusted like YOLO, everything will be fine. And it's where you kind of have given up on a technical solution a little bit. Another way to go after it would be to say something like, well, we're still decentralized. But instead of requiring people to put down capital, we'll require them to use say trusted hardware. I mean, if you talk to a cryptographer, trusted hardware, it's kind of a joke

in the sense that you've given up. You've given up on cryptography, and you're instead going to rely on someone else's supply chain being strong. So it's kind of like if we assumed, well, instead of using Shaw and Bitcoin, let's just have everyone use a super secret hardware that has an attestation key, and we'll just trust that that key is good. So it's really disappointing to me as a system designer to see when people go that route. So there are two approaches that can improve capital efficiency, both of which are pretty distasteful. So another way to do it, which leans a little bit more into the math, is to say, there's also the defy way, which I'll touch it at the end. But you can also say, okay, well, if you have enough people, so 1,000, 2,000 people, and you make your wallet's

large enough, you can start to see that, okay, well, how many people have to be malicious for this Bitcoin to actually be at risk, if you're going to custody it. There's a reason we launched TBTCV1 first with ETH, and it was really to like steelman this entire idea of putting Bitcoin on Ethereum in the first place. But if you really want to get capital efficiency, you have to remove the ether. And if you want to remove the ether and you want to do that without falling back on a small consortium or trusted hardware, you have to make all of the other numbers go up. So our plan for TBTCV2, which will be a separate token. As I said, V1 is immutable.

We don't have any like cool upgrade buttons or anything. Is that we'll be picking from over 2,000 nodes. Each wallet will be 100 plus signers. I expect it will probably land somewhere between 55 and 75 of 100 signers required to move your Bitcoin. And the idea is, okay, what percent of stakers do we think are malicious? and if we believe that the number is less than a majority, then we can remove the additional collateral and instead move to an explicit insurance mechanism

in case something goes wrong, which is you'll notice the coverage pool of the piece that we're taking from V1 and also using in V2. It's pretty out there. It makes many of us uncomfortable, right? Like, if you do the math and you say, and I'm just going to like throw it out

in case anyone wants to wiki real quick, for every wallet that you open, the chance of picking a malicious wallet, It basically follows a hypergeometric distribution. So you say, okay, if two-thirds that I'm picking from are honest and I'm now picking a wallet and, you know, 60 of 100 needs to be honest, what's the likelihood? And it turns out that if you do that 52 times a year, the likelihood of getting a malicious wallet is vanishingly small.

I would be uncomfortable saying all the zeros on this podcast. If you lower it to 51 of 100, the likelihood is 0.04% that that would happen in a given year. So I think, you know, you start leaning into the probability and you say, okay, how can I make sure that we have as many honest players as possible? And then how can I make sure that we require as many signers as possible? And suddenly it's a tech problem. Networking, networking, networking, and pure cryptography. And you can get the numbers to do what you want. At least that's the hope. The V2 will no longer be so capital intensive, but we'll therefore rely more on placid insurance. What's that transition going to look like is going to be sort of like hard-coated. to the V2 or is this something that is where the construction of the V2 allows for that to eventually like transition to happen? So with V1 we went governance minimized because frankly for me governance is an attack surface. I wish that I were more progressive on this because it'd make my life easier.

But the idea is that V1 will sort of continue running as long as people want to use it. And so V2 is going to exist not in a vacuum, but with V1 next to it. we're launching this coverage pool in V1, and part of the reason that we're doing that, obviously, is to backstop V1, but the other reason is we're building up TVL so we can apply it to V2. So as V2 launches, there will be a governing body that can basically say, okay, how much insurance do we have? Is it 40%? Is it 10%? Is it 1%? What are we comfortable with relative to the stakers that we have? And then it can actually devert fees from stakers to insurance and back and forth until it finds a balance that it's happy with. Matt, are you familiar with the arguments surrounding dark dows and vote buying and so on? Because I feel like this would be applicable here.

Yeah, very familiar. So actually, zooming back, way back to talking about Keith, one of the things that you find in multi-party computation is that every single MPC setup that you ever use has a corresponding dark doubt that can break it 100%. And you hit this point where this problem is intractable, if you believe, like, this problem is mathematically interactable. There will always be a dark doubt that can break it. And in practice, like, that hasn't happened, right?

So I expect we'll get there eventually and we'll get really fancy. And the numbers will have to get pushed higher and higher and higher. Okay, now it takes a thousand signers. Are there a thousand? And this is kind of where the keep token gets involved, right? So we need a civil resistance mechanism. And if you have a work token and the work token, there's only so much of it to go round and there's a min stake, you have this built in civil resistance. And so if it takes

a thousand minstakes for a dark doubt to attack the system, you know, you start doing some math and it's like, oh, it costs you $60 million to do this. So it starts to become more and more difficult, but there will always be a cryptographic way to break an honesty threshold. I find it super interesting to talk about this. I mean, not because I wanted to happen, but just because, you know, it's really fascinating. Yeah. It's fascinating. This is the sort of stuff that really kept me up at night, especially with a lot of our V1 work with Keep. And what I've realized is that you can take advantage of the fact that what all of us sort of like sickly want as cypherpunks to see happen,

you can sort of take advantage of the fact that the delta between kind of this apocalypse that we all kind of want to see and then like reality is not zero, right? And whatever that delta is, that's what the system has to take advantage. of. So that was a pretty big mindset shift for me. I think some people are going to see this new design and they're going to be like, oh, Matt, trust people now. It's like, I don't, I don't at all. What I trust is that a whole bunch of people are sort of just like disinterested participants. Like most people are not actively looking for the best way to destroy a system. Now, if you make it really, really, really easy for them, they might click yes, but they're not going to design a novel Dark Dow. And so that's kind of the balance that we're trying to strike with the system

design is as long as there are levers, governance can actually respond to any Darkdow situation. And the way that they do it, this just gets really gross, but I'll say it out loud. The way that they do it is they say, okay, well, if we assume that two-thirds was honest at the beginning, as more and more stakers come online, we can actually increase these thresholds higher and higher and higher. Now, the system's liveliness will suffer, but the trade-off is that Like, if there's a whole slew of new nodes coming in and you suspect that they're all part of, you know, an attacking force, you can actually have some resilience. But if enough people with enough money want to break it, like, that's the case with TBTC V2 or V1, right? And it's just this scale of money that you put in.

It's scary and also really exciting. Let's get to our sponsor, Exodus. Exodus is a fantastic cryptocurrency wallet that strikes a right balance between ease of use, security, and great features. can get Exodus on the iPhone, desktop app, web app, Android, whatever platform you use. It's a non-custodial wallet and that is so critical because what's the point of crypto if you don't control your own assets? With Exodus, you always do. They're old school and they've been around since 2015. Over 1.2 million users rely on Exodus so you know that they've stood the test of time. They have support for over 100 different crypto assets.

assets and from within Exodus, you can easily change one different asset to the other. They also allow you to buy crypto with Fiat and they even have a great offer where you can buy up to $500 worth of crypto through their iOS app and pay just $1 in fee. So go to exodus.com slash Epicenter and check out their wallet. We want to thank Exodus for their amazing support of Epicenter. So Keep Network is merging with new sites. Can you talk about this? What's the rationale behind this and how will it improve the system as a whole? This is weird because I don't think this has been done before. If we were to look at two chains rather than two projects on Ethereum, this kind of looks like a hard double spoon.

You're taking state from these two projects and you're trying to shove it into one new project. It's an opt-in. So it's not a hard fork in the sense that you're not forced to do anything or you're not going to lose money. if you don't, but probably you want to be on the new system rather than the old over the long term because that's where most of the people and integrations are going to happen. But here's the idea. NewCyfer is another threshold cryptography project that we have gone back and forth between competing with and collaborating with over the years. And they're great cryptographers.

And they're attacking a pretty different use case. They're really focused on just straight up being able to actually move files privately. The tech that they use is called proxy re-encription. And behind the scenes, some of our community members pointed out to both of us that the new cipher team was considering like maybe they would do a Bitcoin tag. They were kind of experimenting. And so they got us on a call and we started talking about a roadmaps and a roadmaps just looked remarkably similar.

And so the idea here was why rewrite each other's work when we can just combine into one network? So we proposed this to the community and this was actually suspect. Like I'm like uncomfortable to even say this. there was a unanimous vote from both groups of stakers to merge. So I believe that was two or three hundred thirty stakers across both. We have way fewer stakers and they have around 2,200 and we have around 200. But yeah, so the community is really about it.

But the actual difficulty, of course, of the details. So the community likes the idea of merging. Yeah, how does it work? Please explain. I mean, everyone's favorite question is, is there a new token? And it's like, probably, there will probably end up being a new token. But first, like, how do the networks even do anything together? So we've started us back for a shared staking contract where stakers on either side can opt in to this new network,

which is codenamed Kianu because I swear to God we are not going to stick with that name forever. Definitely codename. But this new network, you can stake keep or you can stake new cipher. And then you'll be able to participate and actually run TBTCV2 and earn fees from it. So the idea is that that is a 50-50 stake weight split. So half of the work will go to the Keep Network and half of the work will go to New Cypher. What the new network benefits from here is, if we were just doing this on Keep, we only have 200 stakers. And getting to 1,000 or 2,000 is a pretty heavy lift.

It's hard to get a whole bunch of new stakers. It's fairly technically involved. On New Cyfer's side, they have 2,000 stakers. So they've got better distribution on the staking side and we have better distribution on the app side. So what we're trying to do is take both those things and put them together and say, okay, like this is basically the best outcome that we could get for TBTCV2, which was a ton of economically independent stakers. Both sides are going to have to give up half of the pie as far as fees, but the idea is that we think that by putting networks together, we'll make more in the long run. And what about the teams?

Oh, yeah, we're definitely staying independent. This isn't like the companies are not involved. In fact, we do not have a single signed piece of paperwork between any participants. As far as I know, unless someone's done something I haven't been involved with. So you'll both be contributing to the code as independent teams. So is it like a Dow merger? Yeah, basically. So the expectation is that there will be a new Dow on this new network.

And it's a Dow merger where one side only has a community multi-sig, the other side had us a Dow. And technically, this is the funny thing. neither community needs to agree. Like if both communities said they didn't want to do this, any developer could put this together. So what's interesting is like we're kind of exploring the social consensus aspect here, where neither team wanted to build it if the community wasn't behind it, but no one can stop us from writing code we want to write. Weird space.

Maybe just stepping back a little bit. So Keep Network, like currently like the, I guess the only sort of killer app on Keep Network is TBTC. I'm not super familiar what's going on on the New Cypher side, but what other types of applications will this sort of like merger allow to emerge and what things are you anticipating to come about on this Keanu network, you know, post merger? So a lot of our original plans for Keep are also already things that New Cypher has started to work on. So what New Cypher can do today, you can do decentralized key management. you can do a sort of file sharing and file marketplaces. I know at least one project called MasterFile is working on an NFT. Basically, the idea is you can buy the NFT,

and then there's actually an offline master file that you can also get access to if you're the NFT holder. So what this will eventually let us do is actually open up the network to all threshold cryptography. So right now, Keep Does BLS, which is the Random Beacon and ECDSA for TBDC. A new cipher does PRE proxy re-encryption. What we'd like to do is RSA, BLS on different curves. Sort of like, you know, AES and DES, the whole gamut of symmetric and asymmetric crypto, but threshold.

We have the infrastructure. And I think if we can bring all of us together, we should be able to ship the thing. But what's funny about that is, you know, it's not an obvious killer app. You're still waiting, right? So is the killer app going to be encrypted files on Filecoin? where we've got all of the interop components and we have the file encryption component, our DAO is going to start, you know,

sitting around secret files. I don't know. It's going to be interesting. But I do know that right now there's a really clear interop use case. And so like, let's run with it. How strong do you think the network effect is here? I mean, if there's a killer use case,

how easy would it be to just copy it? I mean, your technology. I mean, this is like right at the heart of, A lot of the debates I think we're seeing crop up right now around licensing and stuff where Uniswap, for example, just announced V3 and it doesn't actually become a free and open source license for two years. And until then, it's a business license. So dealing with this a couple different ways. One brand becomes much more important, like where everything is open source, and this is kind of backwards, but brand and trust become much more important in a trustless world. you know, like the brand of Bitcoin, for example, is the strongest brand in the space.

And that's why something like Bitcoin Cash is such an affront, right, is you can't dilute Bitcoin the brand. So for us, I can speak to maybe five or six different chains that are inactive discussions about porting TBDC over to the chain. And most of them would much prefer to just work with us and kind of keep one set of custodians across these chains, rather than splinter. But yeah, I mean, anyone can copy anything. And I got to say, like, if you can do it, it's good for the market. It's good for consumers to see all of these choices pop up. But I think that as a consumer, you have to be really, the hard thing is just figuring out, like, is this legitimate?

We recently had another token with the name TBTC pop up on Binance Smart Chain. It is not associated with us. But I'm currently stuck doing support for it in our Discord, I guess. And so, yeah, so this sort of stuff happens because, you know, we're not all using trademarks against each other. We're all in different jurisdictions and we're all just sort of falling back to the chain. So, yeah, if you want to be the sushi swap of TBDC, I welcome you. Please do maybe push your stuff upstream, too, if you fix any bugs. But ultimately, I think that the team that moves the fastest and gives the market what they want, they're going to win.

I want to bring this conversation back to the broader context of defy. I want to ask you what you think is the interplay between BTC on Ethereum and some of the projects that have aimed to bring defy to Bitcoin. So we've had stacks on the show recently. We're releasing an episode with RSC soon. Is there any interplay there? And if so, what is it? Because I'm not necessarily seeing it. I have a lot of respect for folks who are sort of trying to be Bitcoin native.

I think the label is maybe wrong, but a lot of them want it to be the label. Because you want to be like Satoshi's son or whatever. You want to be like the blessed, you know. So, but when you look at, for example, something like RSK, they are following a similar or worse security model to what we're following today with Ethereum. What's interesting to me, though, about RSK is that the mindset is a Bitcoin mindset. And I think that that's really important. So even though the tech stack is both similar and different rate, so they have an EVM fork. That part is very similar.

But the way that it is secured is different. Yeah, they rely on hardware to some extent. Yeah. And to be clear, I'm like for me, that's anathema. Like if you rely on trusted hardware, I kind of feel like you built a castle on sand. a lot of people use it as a step toward like a more robust solution, which I'm sympathetic to, especially since we arrogantly launched an immutable project thinking everything would be fine. Actually, it's really hard.

So I understand people who are doing this a step in the middle. But I would say like RSK stacks, we're all working together. I've talked to both those teams about like literally about bringing TBT to both RSK and stacks. But I don't really think that's probably, maybe that's not really the question. And our relationship with TBTC to these sort of like Bitcoin native projects is going to be positive. Because at the end of the day, we're all going to be writing code that's very similar, even though the underlying layer is different. Like we have lots of tips that we can share and mutual respect and whatnot. But I think what's really interesting is, will there be users on their chains?

And I don't claim to know. You guys might know. I don't know, but I think that that's an accurate representation of what's at stake here. It's like will RSC or Stacks or some of these other chains like bring in a significant amount of users and build a defy ecosystem there? I think what I find really interesting there is the potential for those platforms to become areas where innovation can occur that's sort of like natively on Bitcoin. Because like as someone who's been in Bitcoin since 2013, like I would really like to see that happen for like the broader ecosystem. I'm also perfectly fine with Bitcoin funding projects and funding. liquidity and infrastructure and consumer projects on Ethereum. But there's like, there's so much

capital in Bitcoin that's just sitting there, not doing very much. And like, I don't care what it does. I don't care where it happens. But as long as it happens somewhere or in places, I think that's like a net gain for the ecosystem. So like how important do you think Bitcoin plays in providing funding and liquidity like, you know, for crypto as a whole, whether that's like on Ethereum or any other chain or on Bitcoin? I like both sides. If this is a side thing, both sides don't like me. The best way to get a bunch of Bitcoin first technologist Matt is to talk about the brain drain that's happened.

There are things built in the Ethereum space right now that don't have good analogs anymore in the Bitcoin space. And it's because there are new ideas that are genuinely, they genuinely cropped up in Ethereum. And I know that that sounds obvious. like, okay, people go different places and they come up with different ideas. But if you say this to a lot of, to the technologists who have stayed Bitcoin only, makes them pretty mad because it's like, no, no, no, no. This ZK roll-up is actually this thing we talked about on Bitcoin Talk in 2013. And it's just a repack.

Well, no, no, it's actually not. It's genuinely a new thing. And so as far as where users go and where innovation happens, there is a serious catching up where if you are trying to be a Bitcoin native technology, which really means if you are trying to not build on Ethereum with Bitcoin, you have to find a way to catch up. And it's not just dev-mind share because there are a lot of, there's plenty of dumb devs. You know, it's not just like are there developers here, but it's also like, is the new stuff happening and how do we catch up our ecosystem? That is the hurdle that, for example, Stax is going to run against or anyone, even someone like Tesla's who's not Bitcoin native, they've run into how can we possibly get over this mode.

of the ecosystem. But setting aside the mode for a second, I want Bitcoin to remain the collateral in the space. I want Bitcoin to remain the collateral in the world. And so for me, I think that there's always going to be an argument on something like Ethereum for the native asset. And that pisses me off because they don't like the native asset. It doesn't follow. It's not because I'm like, you should have just used Bitcoin. I'm not one of those people who's frustrated that someone launch their own asset. It bothers me because what I like about Bitcoin is the certainty, you know, and it's the certainty of the emissions schedule. It's the, it's the, the certainty that even if the tech breaks, the social consensus is so strong that it will get back on track. And so

I'm told things like, ETH is ultrasound money. And I'm like, well, that's not what it was last year. So clearly it's not. You can't both tell me that this is our new meme and also tell me that this new means that we're never going to change because you just anyway. So I think for me, what I want to do is I want to make sure that we can get Bitcoin as close to a native asset on these other chains as possible so that it's not constantly at a disadvantage relative to the native asset. Because I think the strength of Bitcoin is the certainty. And that's what I want for my life savings. You know, like, okay, maybe if I'm like aping in to the next thing in Defi, that's not what I want. But if I want collateral that's going to back my house or kind of like longer term, longer term wealth,

than I'd rather be Bitcoin. So I guess all that to say, it's going to be Bitcoin. We're going to make sure it is. So Matt, how do you see the long-term security guarantees of Bitcoin then? Oh, yeah, let's do it. Yeah. So I'm one of those people who's like, yeah, it might not work. So to catch up, like, listeners with this particular debate, and I got in a lot of trouble with Bitcoin friends for saying out loud that maybe we would need to eventually have a tail emission. There's a security idea where there's a security budget, right? And this is mostly in the Ethereum idea. But the budget is how much are you paying the people who are securing the network. And in Bitcoin, you're paying people who secure the network through a block subsidy.

Notice often it's called a reward, but in this context, you want to call it a subsidy. And you're also paying them through transaction fees. So as time goes on and the block reward goes down, The idea is that transaction fees have to go up. It is core to the design to continue to maintain security of the chain. But what's interesting about that is there's actually some assumptions in there that we need to maintain the security of the chain. So once you've hit a certain point in Bitcoin, where maybe if, let's say, transaction fees aren't high enough to cover security, that doesn't make the security of past transactions less. It means the security of future transactions is less. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Right. Again, not for you guys, but for everyone else, right? So if that's the case, like, you get to this point where people theorize, well, maybe there will not be enough mining power backing Bitcoin anymore to actually securely transact. And it won't be six confirmations. It'll be 300 confirmations if you ever want to move money on Bitcoin. And so now what you have is you have a system that can't clear the amount that Bitcoin can clear safely and quickly today. However, the supply guarantees have been maintained, which I think is really an interesting. idea. So I am not saying this will happen. A lot of people will take the counter and they'll say, well, actually, and sometimes they won't even tell you how much, but they'll basically claim that Bitcoin will go up so much that it doesn't matter, which that might be true, or that there's going to be so much demand for block space regardless that it won't matter. Also might be true. I don't know. But for me, I do know that in the bad security case or in the good security case, my existing Bitcoin is still really strong collateral, which I think is interesting. I don't need the Bitcoin L1 to be the best settlement network to still get the same

collateral requirements out of my Bitcoin. So I'm happy if this happens on another network and Bitcoin is just the thing that we hold. I'm perfectly happy with all that. Now, obviously there's going to be a counter which is like, do you really think Bitcoin's going to hold its value if the network stops working? Yes, because we saw that happen. We've seen that happen multiple times every time there's a fee event that we weren't prepared for. Has Bitcoin gone down? No. That's not been the thing so far. So for me, I just,

I challenge the idea that this is ultimately going to impact, please. Yeah, but that's different because, I mean, we're talking about specific events that are like constrained in time, but if the long-term prognosis is that like Bitcoin is no longer a settlement layer, I think that's a fairly different. Like, yeah, I agree with all of what you're saying here, but I think that it's not so obvious that Bitcoin would, can, you know, you're not. continue to be valuable. For me, I didn't think it would continue to be valuable when it wasn't useful for coffee anymore. Seriously, that's why I got in the space originally.

It took me a long time to understand the story value argument. So I guess I'm just saying I don't know how worse is better might continue forever. By virtue of all that you're saying that you could actually see the future of Bitcoin in a tokenized form on Ethereum instead of as basically you think the value. proposition of Bitcoin is the 21 million meme. That's basically what it is and it doesn't matter whether it works on the Bitcoin blockchain or whether it's actually spooned to anywhere else. I'll actually go stronger and say that, yeah, I believe that the Bitcoin blockchain is a broken vessel, but I don't think that that matters. If the thing inside is precious, you can get a new vessel. So maybe it's a spoon to somewhere else. Maybe it's a whole group of

people coming together and saying, okay, now that we've seen all of the alt-coiners do all the research for us, we are going to switch to this perfect, new, succinct, 22-kilabyte blockchain design. There's a lot of ways I can see it going. I do, here's one thing, though, that I will say that the Dan Heltz of the world won't agree with. I do think that there will at one point need to be serious action on the Bitcoin L1 to address security concerns. I think that it might be toward the latter end of my career. I do think it's going to be a while, but I do think there will eventually need to be a strong response. Personally, I don't think that it's just hard spoon it to Ethereum. And the reason is, and I say this is an Ethereum div, I still don't trust Ethereum. I like it a lot,

and I work with it a lot, but I have had our nodes get hit by a surprise chain split due to what I believe was a borderline irresponsible decision on the Geth side. The Geth team lead blocked me actually when I shared how I really felt about the decisions they've made around that, there are still like the chance for significant consensus bugs is not gone. I mean, it's never gone in a sense, but like, you know, we're moving pretty fast and this stuff still happens. So I don't think that we're going to see a spoon to Ethereum tomorrow or anything, but I do think that it's perfectly fine to replace Bitcoin's L1 as long as there's continuity and

consensus. Now, if that's possible, it's separate. We were talking about this earlier before the show, but you kind of touched on it earlier. It's like, you know, it's important to you for Bitcoin. I think you said it's important for Bitcoin to be as close as a first class asset on other chains as possible. Like currently, you need all these kind of technical loopholes to make that happen. Like TBTC is taking one approach, other protocols like Wren are taking other approaches.

But essentially, you kind of set it up very well in the beginning is that Bitcoin can't validate other chains and Bitcoin can't validate. the transactions on other chains. Now, like, suppose in an unlikely event where Bitcoin can parse other chains, I'm not saying that they can, it would be able to parse like Ethereum S could be proofs directly, but you were talking earlier about, you know, ZK proofs or something like that, then do all these rap Bitcoin protocols then become obsolete? And then what does that look like, really? Like, then how is Bitcoin represented out on the chains? Because I'm not sure I really sort of visualize what that looks like. I think I like, Blythele said yes, or like, yes.

they're all obsolete, but it's actually a little bit more complicated, right? So let's set it up, though. Obviously, maybe it's not obvious, but knowing Bitcoin devs, I do not expect that a big breaking change that is specific to Ethereum would ever be introduced in Bitcoin's L1. What I thought was really interesting was when Zcash launched. That was the first alt that I'd ever seen launch where Bitcoin devs were like, oh, that tech is kind of, I mean, there was still like, oh, I didn't just use Bitcoin, but at least there was like, well, you're actually adding something that maybe we could one day think is

reasonable in 10 years. I think probably the most likely would be adding some sort of more general purpose prover op code, validate a snark, et cetera, et cetera. I think that it's good that we don't have it in Bitcoin yet because already we've moved from like basic snarks to recursive snarks to all sorts of, we're still changing curves and it's very good. None of that's made it into Bitcoin. But if it did, so if Bitcoin could now validate other chains and their consensus, the question will then become, where is the economic activity happening? So if people use that to basically create a smart contract expressive roll-up on Bitcoin, then it's a race because Ethereum and other chains will have had these things happening for years.

And you have to ask, has the market moved on from using Bitcoin as the settlement for those activity versus primarily as the asset? So I think the theme we keep seeing is like asset versus tech. And I'm very much a Bitcoin maximalist around the asset. And for the tech, I'm like, it's in a rough spot. if you want to compete on technological innovation. That's anathema to the chain. So I guess what I'm saying is it depends. I suspect that most economic activity,

at least at the beginning, would be on these other chains, in which case the rappers still have a long and fruitful life. If the economic activity moves back to just Bitcoin's L1 with some sort of really clever roll-up or roll-up of roll-ups, then it could hurt this chains eventually. This was super fascinating. unfortunately we're kind of running out of time.

So if people want to learn more about Keep and thesis, where should they go look? Probably the best would be come check out our Discord at chat.compe. Network. We're a lively bunch. And if you think that if you're mad at anything that I've said today, maybe come talk to me there or Twitter. M.H. Longgo on Twitter. And happy to talk to you guys about the future Bitcoin and Defi. Cool. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Matt.

Thanks a lot, guys. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen.

And while you're there, be sure to sign that for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us, guests or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter. And please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show, and we're always happy to read them.

So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.