Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Stephan Tual: Building a Universal Sharing Network on Ethereum and a $150M DAO

Episode Date: May 23, 2016

In this episode we welcome back Stephan Tual, the COO of Slock.It, a German startup working at the intersection of the Internet of Things and the Ethereum blockchain. Slock.It’s small team also wrote the smart contracts that power ‘The DAO’, a decentralized capital management entity that recently raised north of $160 million for investing into Ethereum based projects. ‘The DAO’ has been featured in many mainstream news outlets, such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Economist. The interview explores the vision, motivation and challenges behind both ‘The DAO’ and Slock.It. Topics covered in this episode: Stephan’s background and role as CCO at Ethereum Foundation. What is ‘The DAO’ and how it relates to Slock.It. DAOlink and the business opportunity of enabling interactions between DAOs and traditional firms. Opportunities, assumptions and challenges for ‘The DAO’. Vision and products of Slock It – Univeral Sharing Network and the Ethereum computer. Episode links: Slock It Website The DAO The DAO on Github The DAO Whitepaper Why I’ve Resigned as a Curator of the DAO Is The DAO going to be DOA? This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/132

This is Epicenter Bitcoin, episode 132 with guest, Stefan Truel. This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought you by high.com. Protect yourself against hackers and safeguard your identity online with a first-class VPN. Go to high.com slash epicenter and sign up for a free account today. And by Ledger, makers of the best hardware security devices. Half peace of mind in knowing your private keys are protected by industry standard physical security. Go to ledgerwalt.com to see the full range of products and use the code Epicenter at checkout to get 10% off your first order.

Hi, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin. The show it talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. My name is Sibati Kwejou. And I'm Meheroy. Today we have a very special guest for you, Stefan Tuol, who is the chief operating officer of Slokit, and one of the people who kind of triggered the Dow. So before we start, let's have an intro from Stefan.

Stefan, a bit about your background and how you got interested in this space. Sure, hey guys. Hello everyone. So a bit of background. Well, I got interested in the space because I was sick and tired of working for my previous employer. Simple as that. Where some of the best minds in their generation were working to sell 2% more shampoo on some shelf in White Rose or Asda or Walmart. And I thought it was really depressing. I had an interest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. I was really enticed by the Mike Hearn speech at the Venice, I think it was, during Complete Festival. And I highly recommend you guys watch this. And it was all about autonomous cars and things of nature, cars that buy cars. And I thought, that sounds crazy.

I need to get into this. It sounds like the future. So I got into it a little bit. I started a crypto consulting company. Heard about Ethereum and the White Paper around Christmas 2013. Like everyone else, my mind was just blown by how smart Vitalik was and by how interesting this project was. And I did everything I could to join. So that's how I joined Ethereum two and a half years ago.

Then I left Ethereum to start Slucket. And that's what we're here to talk about today. It's funny you mentioned that my current talk and how it's become such an iconic talk. When people talk about smart contracts and they sort of describe it to a, a person who doesn't really know anything about it, how that talk gets brought up over and over and over. And I've certainly spoken to people and like, you sort of re-gave that talk to people,

trying to explain what a smart contract would be. Right. And, yeah, so, I mean, you were actually, one of our first guests, you were on episode 16, which was... Was I? Wow. Ages ago.

And back then you were working at Ethereum as the chief communications officer. this is now your new gig, but yeah, welcome back. Thank you. And thank you for paying attention to Ethereum back then. Not many people did, you know. Well, I mean, I remember when we first heard about it, I mean, Brian had told me about it. It's like, yeah, there's this kid and he wrote this paper,

and like he's 19. And then, you know, we read the papers. The first thing I came to my mind was, what the hell was I doing when I was 19? Cool. Well, let's maybe talk about, well, Slocut, obviously. I mean, that's what you're here to talk about. Tell us what is Slocut.

And, well, first of all, so there are multiple things we want to talk about, but we don't want to talk about, we want to talk about Slocut, and we want to talk about the DIAO as well. So giving us a broad introduction to those two concepts, those two different entities. Sure. Well, Sloket is a company. which purpose is to create autonomous objects in order to reduce operating cost for corporate. So, for example, if you had 10,000 objects talking to each other, to scale to 100,000 objects

talking to each other via a centralized server, you wouldn't just need to buy 10 times more servers. You need exponential cost increase in terms of your DevOps, in terms of the infrastructure that's required to maintain all this. And then scaling to a billion object is just pure and possible. today, well, at least as of today. So with blockchain technology and in Parker, Ethereum, what we're capable of is having all those objects synchronize around a shared blockchain state, so to speak, and considerably reduce operating costs, throw away centralized servers in certain cases for clients.

And that's what slack it is in a nutshell. It's a company that's registered in Germany, currently a small business. We've got five people as part of the team right now. And as part of the project, we thought about, hey, you know this technology would be awesome for the sharing economy and we could have objects that rent themselves and pass on the cost savings if you will to the people renting these places and that opened all sorts of ideas around decentralized insurance and decentralized cleaning services and things of that nature so in order to fund this project we thought about starting a

deo and christoph yance the ctio of slokit devised this thing that became a framework. And the next thing you know is we're spending quite a bit of time on the framework. And on our Slack channel, you had 4,000 people interested in the framework and 100 people interested in what Slacket had to offer as a corporate company. So the deal really took a life on its own. So what we did is we created this framework and we made it available to everyone to use and deploy. And a group of people from the community deployed a bunch of these.

One of them had some ideal optimal parameters for us because it corresponded exactly to a framework, which meant entirely fair. And we decided to make an offer to build this sharing economy network, if you will, that we call the universal sharing network for the Dell as a product, as a service, both, really. And that's how it all started. And as you can tell, the deal worked out really well. Okay. So to recap, there are two main entities, which is one is Sloket. So Slokit, as I understand it, is Gayembaer registered in Germany, right?

Yeah, GMBH, yeah. Yeah. So that is like part, like its own structure is part of the legacy legal system, right? It is governed by... Completely is. Yeah, especially in Germany, very strict laws and regulations. Very strict laws and regulations. And people who don't know GameBIA is like one of the forms that you could register

a company in Germany, there's the other form called the AGE. And the DAO is a separate entity. Completely, yeah. Completely, which lives entirely on the Ethereum blockchain, right? Correct. And both of these entities, like both of these companies, were triggered by people, were triggered by people in your team. But your team...

No, that's not, no, no. No, only the GMBH was built by us and the DAO was built, because I heard you referenced that early on in the... in the show, you mentioned, you know, I was one of the people starting the DAI. Actually, I wasn't, you know, we rewrote the code that powers the DAL in the sense that we wrote a framework that anyone can spawn. So in our minds, what we would see would be a car DAW and a rental agency DAW and whatever, farming equipment DAW, and in this case, a sharing economy DAW,

and that's what we hope to form, is a network constellation of, if you will, of Dell, that people spawned. And the reason why we thought that was important is because a lot of people talk about DALs. If you look at the Wikipedia page, the place where we did their initial research, I mean, the whole thing is just pure nonsense. I mean, it just doesn't describe at all principles of a DAO that would actually be functional in the real world.

And that's why we put a lot of research into it, how to protect people from the minority from the majority, for example, so-called 51% attacks, and all sorts of security and social attacks that we had to bake into the framework, or at least bake protections from these attacks into the framework, and then make it available. And then the community spawned this DAO, but we'll spawn many others, I'm sure, after the success of this first one. Okay, so I get that the DAO is something completely different from SLOCHIT, and it was triggered by community members, like it was deployed by community members. Part of the code was written by one, Christoph Yench, who is also part of the co-founding team of Sloket, right?

But the deployment and the management of the Dow is entirely a separate entity from Sloket. Imagine if somebody was pissed off at Kickstarter and wanted to do their own Kickstarter. And I think quite a few people did actually build alternative crowdfunding platform. And then they go and they deploy it on their websites. And one of them might realize, hey, you know, this is actually a really good. good framework. I think it happened. I think the guys from Space Citizen did that and then make it available as a framework for others. So in this case, what we did is we build the Dow and we make it available as a framework for others. But we were also interested in benefiting from the existence

of Adele because we think it's a superior model to the Kickstarter model or the VC model in order to start a project with whether if the entity purchased product and services from us and have that client supplier relationship, but also give, you know, the leeway for people to write their own proposals to a DAO that may include other things than just products and services. It could include, I don't know, providing maybe equity in exchange of ether or things of that nature. Okay. So perhaps like we like to explore the relationship between Slocut, the DAO and this other third

company that I keep hearing about, which is DAO link. Yeah. Later on in the show. But let's just start first with the DAO itself because it's a new concept and our listeners who like to learn more about. it and then it's perhaps easier to fit slot it and Dow link later on. Exactly. Step at a time, you know? Yeah, step at a time.

So, like, what would you say, can you describe the DAO and what would be the vision of the DAO itself? Well, I mean, what's interesting about the DAO and the DAF framework in particular is that the code has been audited by the company that audited the Ethereum code base, called DejaVoo, one of the best, if not the best, in my opinion, auditing company for a smart contract in the world at the code. at this present moment. It's been audited by the community. It's been, you know, 3,000 pairs of eyes, or at least, at the very least, I think there's 5,000 people on Slack now. And it's been audited by some of the best people in crypto, including Vitalik Buterin, so the inventor of Ethereum, and of course, our advisor, Gavin Wood, the former CTO of Ethereum and current founder of Edkore, as well as the so-called father of Solidity, Christian Wrights Vistner, who basically wrote the language that makes the smart contracts even possible. So the first thing I would say

that makes the Dow very different is that its code is well understood by a large group of people that are trustworthy and in that sense it becomes trustless, right? And that's really what makes this whole thing different. It's the trustlessness aspect. You don't have to trust me that the Dow does this, this, this and that you can go and read the code. And if you don't trust the code, you can go and get the opinion of other people. If you can't read you can maybe get the opinion of a professional advisor or just, you know, maybe you're happy with the opinion that you find on certain forums. It's up to you, really, the level of trust that you want to have with that organization,

but it's the most trustless one out there. So that's the first thing. And the second thing, I would say that makes it interesting, is that it's completely entirely fair. So 100% of the tokens, and the tokens, by the way, give its brains, right? Its voting power is driven by those tokens. 100% of the tokens belong to the people that make it. the DAO possible, right? Not me, not Vitalik Buterin, not anyone else. If we wanted ourselves as individuals to own DAO token, we would have to go and purchase them with their own, you know,

Bitcoins or ether or whatever. I think that's really important to understand because there's a lot of projects I'm seeing out there that call themselves DAOs and actually are just centralized things where people think, hey, you know, free money because right now there's a bit of excitement around the field of crypto. So the fact that it's fair. and the fact that it's trustless makes it unique. And so the DAO itself, so you mentioned that Slocut had sort of initialized development on this framework and then it was just taken over by the community and the community deployed. Are there any other DAWS right now other than the DAO that have been deployed?

There's a bunch of tests Dow that were deployed, some of them on the main net, some of them on a live net. You know, the way things work, everything in life is on a parato curve, right? those curves that go a bit boomerang shape, if you will, on the xy axis. And so obviously the main one, the VDAL, as it's called, is the one that received all the attention. And because there's value in having this DAO holding a lot of ether, and the more ether it holds, the stronger it gets, actually became sort of V1, right? I actually lived up to its name. because the more Ether is inside this DAO,

the more projects the Dow can invest into or purchase or obtain services from or donate to if they're charity services, maybe to donate to the further development of the Ethereum network, its underlying network, which obviously has indirect benefits to it. It can do a lot of things. And the more money, if you will, it has, the more powerful it gets. So there's an advantage to always go and, put your ether into the biggest one. So you get this sort of noble effect going on.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned that this one was sort of geared towards the sharing economy. Yes. Do you anticipate that, you know, maybe there's a Dow for like farming or there's a Dow for some other niche where you may see that same amount of traction or, like, because, I mean, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this 50 million dollars, I think, which is a substantial amount of dollars in ether, which is a substantial amount of money, do you think that the amount of success that this initial DAO had, the DAO, can also see the same sort of success in other areas? Yeah, definitely. So I think what's going to happen is that at the moment, a lot of people, at the very, at the beginning of the project, actually, people describe Vidal as being this

a Niba-like shape. So having no shape. And I think a lot of people had a problem with that. And rightly so. In a company like Apple, you know that tomorrow they're not going to produce farming tools because it's shareholders. In this case, the Dow token holders. Well, you know, they know that the brand for Apple is iPads and things of that nature.

So yeah, you'll have the eyewatch and whatnot, but you won't have, you know, the I-farming tool. So a lot of people were worried that the Dowel having no share. shape at the beginning and no real cohesiveness, if you will, made it too vague. And what they're starting to find is that the proposals that are submitted to the DAO are very much in line with the SLUCCI proposal. And, you know, ideally, there's no guarantee of it, but ideally the SLWKET proposal would pass in order to deliver this universal sharing network. And some people are submitting proposals for insurance, for example, insurance over the

EU Neurosso Sharing Network or USN for short. Other people are talking about, hey, you know, we need light clients for this little Ethereum computers to exist. So give me money so that I can go and develop that. So we're seeing that actually it's starting to take shape into this sharing economy related doubt because people understand that there are network effects and synergies between this project. Just like any VC will have synergies between its different sort of projects and its table of projects if you will. So I think it's going to get a shape, and I think, yes, there will be all the Dow. You bet there will be. I think this year, you know, people were surprised to hear about $150 million

plus dollar. I think we're well on our way for next year to see a billion dollar project in crypto. I wouldn't be surprised at all. Really? That's an ambitious objective, a billion dollar down. I mean, I don't think it's necessarily unlikely that it'll happen. But I think that there needs to be some company backing it to get to a billion dollars. There needs to be some investment in marketing. And I wanted to ask you about that. So how much, what do you attribute the success of this campaign?

Because there was sort of a campaign around it. There was a lot of, I mean, not only from the community's point of view, but, you know, Slokit went out and spoke a. conferences and things like that. How much of the success of this Dow would you attribute to slock it, sort of pushing it as an initial Dow project and the communities work in trying to raise awareness about this Dow? Not that much actually.

I mean, certainly not to the 150 million plus that it currently has collected. I mean, if you were to ask a traditional company, hey, how do we raise 150 million bucks, they would tell you, we need to go see a PR company and pay two or three million dollars at the very least, maybe probably even a lot more than that. I know very little about PR. So I imagine they would need maybe $10 million for a campaign where they would have ads on the Super Bowl and whatnot. You know, clearly that didn't happen here. I think there are two factors that are linked to the success of this project. So the first one is people can see that it's fair. and it's secure. These are the two major advantage, as I said earlier, in terms of its code.

The second thing is I think a lot of people have been quite vested in ether. And as the price of ether went up, they thought, well, you know, I could always put 10% of my ether holdings into this project or other projects, like, you know, there's plenty others out there. And they felt more comfortable with that, which helped with the amount of ether injected into the Dow. The other thing I think is, so there's the snowballed effect that we touched on earlier, but also in terms of the project itself, we're seeing a lot of community support for it. So when you have 4,000 people, 5,000 people, 6,000 people all promoting this to their friends and their families, that really, really helps the project.

And we're going to see this translated to the companies, the startup that the Dow will support. because obviously these guys will be A, early adopters, B, they'll have the back of the DAO and of its project through social media, understanding the local culture and so on. I think there's 11,000 account holders now. I mean, I could be wrong. I mean, 11,000, even if they were only 10,000, that's insane. In terms of how big of a social media team you need to beat that,

it's unbeatable. And that's why I think the DAO is very good prospects going forward. Let's take a short break and talk about high debt. HiDot Me is a VPN provider. And if you don't know yet why you should need a VPN provider, let us help you. I'm sure you were like me and when all the crazy revelations came out during the Snowden time of all the spying that is being done by the NSA and other government agencies, you were shocked and you said, not with me, not with my own rights.

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for their support of Epicenter Bitcoin. So let us kind of describe the different roles people could take in the Dow. So as I see it, there's like investors slash Dow token holders, right? People who own tokens of the Dow. Then there's this thing called the Curator. right and and then and then there are the proposal makers when slocut is just one of them so describe to us roughly who what do the token holders do what do the curators do and what do the proposal makers do

yeah sure so the deal token holders what they do is that they vote right um the way to think about the dal is it's this um sort of very weak AI that incentivize humans to go and find the best projects out there for it to put its ether into okay so that's how it's a doubt and today we don't have strong a eyes that can go and make investment decisions in companies so what it does is it harness if you will the the wisdom of the crowds the doubt token holders so the doubt token holders kind of like tools for the doubt actually really for for it to to be able to succeed by giving their opinion by promoting it like I said earlier by being early adopters for

project and by lending it their brains to go and find interesting projects to vote on. So that's what the doubt token holders do. They vote and then obviously they hope, I imagine, to see some benefit out of this whole venture. It's a for-profit doubt this one. I mean, they don't all have to be for-profit, but this one is. So imagine they want to see some ether back, right? So that's what they do. The second role would be the proposers, if you will, right? The guys that submit proposals. So in a client-supplier relationship, ship there would be the supplier. They build products, they build services, they offer stuff to the Dow for profit, not for profit, it could be anything, right? Each proposal is defined into a smart

contract itself and it's the smart contract that gets signed by the Dow and defines the rules of engagement, if you will, with the contractors. And so that can vary dramatically. In our case, we have an interesting model of monthly payments, so if we don't do our job, we can get fired. someone could have another model where they say, just trust us because we're well-known in the community and give us a big fat paycheck and we promise we'll deliver a product. If the Dow wants to engage in that, the Kickstarter model, they can. You could have a completely simulated Kickstarter model.

I don't think it's a very good idea, but it's possible where the people voting would get early rewards or things like that. Or you could have people voting on a proposal that give them equity into a real-life startup once we established that bridge between the two worlds, right? That's the role of the DAO token holders and of the people submitting proposals. And then your third group is the curator. Now, the curator tends to be, and it doesn't have to be, but probably is going to be in each case, a multi-sig of people.

And it gives the DAO a bit of a shape. I imagine if you have a DAO around racing cars, you would have a famous driver. You would have somebody from one of the Formula One stables or at the helm of one of them, you know, being a curator, lending its name to the Dow. But really, the job that they do is very limited. It's a bit of a crappy job, actually, to be honest, they don't get paid, so the Dow doesn't pay them.

What they do is they look at proposals and they say, right, the code is, the code's okay. It is what it is in the blockchain. So they validate that the bytecode matches the source code. That's the first step. That's the first thing they do. And the second thing they do is they establish that this is an obvious rip-off. So, for example, it's not a project that's going to take 51% of the

fund to then send 100% of the money to something else. It needs to be serious proposals that are passed in front of the DOT token holders. And they add the address of the proposers, the Ethereum address or the proposer, to a white list that can receive money for this DAO. And it's implemented that way because at the moment, as of DEO version 1.1, it's the ultimate fail-sale. in terms of security versus social attacks, which are very, very hard to predict. And we have some very smart people on our team, but they can't predict everything. Unfortunately, they left their crystal balls at home. So we had to have this mechanism of creators to be able to back the down, if you will,

in case of social attacks that couldn't be defined code. In this case, the initial curators that are listed on the Dow website, Who picks them? Who decides, is it the people who initially deploy the Dow? Or do they just, how does that work? Yeah. So ideally, in an ideal world where you don't have chicken and egg situation, it's the people that, well, it self-forms, if you will.

So people raise their hand and say, oh, I want to be a, I want to be a creator. So it goes to the person who's already a curator, and the creator adds them to the multisig. And somebody who was already a creator can say, you know what, I'm not getting paid. It's getting a lot of attention on me that I don't need. I'm busy. I have a work to do. And it can leave. It's harmless. I mean, it's normal, in fact, for people to come and go as part of the curator list. Now, as I said, chicken and egg problem, the deal didn't have anything. So what we did is that because of our contacts in the industry, you know, with some of the best people in the field that were kind enough to accept to be curators before they realized this thing would be as large as it got, right? kindly agreed to become the first initial set of creators for this one Dow. So you got Vittetic Buterin in there. You had recently Gavin Wood.

You have Christian Rice Vistner. You have all sorts of very smart people like Vlad Zamfir and Victor Tron. People are really into this stuff. And they did it because they felt, you know, this is an interesting project. I think ultimately, though, and sorry, guys, but I think ultimately I personally see them disintermediated. I mean, the only role they serve is to act as a failsafe for something that one day will be able to be achievable with code, with pure code. So my hope is that we're going to fire these guys as part of a DEO 2.0 framework that will be entirely run by computers.

But keep in mind that they themselves don't have much of power right now. If they were to become evil and somehow collude with a proposal supplier, they could get fired by the people, the DEO token holders that would immediately recognize them as a threat. So they can be fired easily. They don't get paid much. Their role is limited to something that one day computers will be able to be. My gut fail, one day they're going to end up like Uber drivers, you know. So you mentioned Gavin Wood. He recently wrote a medium post in which he says that he resigns this curator and sort of urges those who place Easter to look under the DAO look at the face and the research structure, etc. And And warns people that perhaps, you know, in putting money in this deal,

wasn't such a good place to put your ether. Can you comment on that? That's actually not what he said. I mean, Gavin told us two days. Did I get that wrong then? You definitely read the blog post. So two days before he left as a curator, Gavin kindly contacted us to say, hey guys you know I'm getting people telling me hey you know did you buy a yacht

recently or do you have a plane now you know and I'm getting myself and Christian and all these guys are getting the same sort of crap by people who do not understand that actually what's holding the ether is the Dow code and I think that's a lot of people having a mental block with this a computer program that holds 160 million dollars it doesn't quite register so immediately they think now it's not possible Gavin Wood is holding all the money and he's probably buying himself nice Armani suits. Fact is, as I said earlier, he's not getting

paid. He was getting a lot of flak because he's quite well-recognized in the community for being a curator because people thought he was rich somehow. So he said, you know what? That's as much as I love the project, I'm out because I had enough

of this. And if you read the code, well, if you read the blog post that he wrote, he's actually very supportive of the project. He's supportive of Slackett in general and he continues to be, in fact, of our advisors at Slacket. Is he right to say to people, hey, go and read that source code. Hell yeah. Go and read the source code. I have the same warning, if you want to call it that to people. Never trust others. Always check out the buy code. Always do your homework.

Always ask people, hey, is this valid code or is this taking some of the tokens and putting them in someone's pocket? If you go and check out the dial, you'll see that actually it's 100% fair, and Gavin would be the first one to agree with that. Okay, that's very interesting, right? Like it's probably the first time that we have a governance mechanism that that mediates how a lot of people collaborate with each other. And that governance, usually we have had governance mechanisms, but we used to have another human to govern other humans or a set of humans to govern other humans. It's the first time we have a piece of code or a software program that serves as a governance mechanism for humans.

So it is something that is truly groundbreaking as a conceptual idea itself. Today's magic word is token. T-O-K-E-N. Head over let's talkbidcoin.com to sign in, enter the magic word, and claim your part of the listener award. Now, like one of the interesting questions that comes to my mind is the Tao itself is decentralized and autonomous. But it interacts with,

with services in the world that are inevitably centralized and I'm wondering how how this interface works So let's take a simple example Twitter accounts now the Dow quote unquote has a Twitter account the Dow quote unquote has a slack Has has a slack so who is the administrator of the slack account who is the administrator of the Twitter account how do these How did these like you know they're really assets of the the Dow right that's something that's It wants to be decentralized and the Twitter account though needs to have one particular owner, right? So how does this interface get made and who picked them? Yeah, chicken and egg again. So once the DAL is deployed, they will be, I mean, in fact, there already are multiple numerous proposals, some good, some bad,

to go and provide the services that you describe to the DAO. So there's a proposal right now of a group of people that are, admin on the Slack because they were part of the community early on. And I'm saying, hey, you know, we might as well get paid to do this job. So they're bending together and they will submit a proposal to the DAO to maintain a media presence. You know, it would be nice for the DAO to be able to reply to journalists, but it can't because it's a computer program. So what it needs to do is to hire people to do that on its behalf.

So it will sign off on proposals that will include media, PR, community, social, you name it. And that's how it does it. At the moment, it's entirely run by volunteers, just like any other. You know, Slack is free. Actually, the Slack that belongs to the Dow is old Slack. We just gave it away. We changed the name from Slack to the Dow. That was it.

And I was it. Yep, that's it. It's the communities. Off you go. In terms of those interactions, you raise a very good point, though, which is, well, you know, it works for maybe small things like, hey, make me a logo. Or, hey, we need some press because, New York Times said something bad about us or something like that.

But what about the big proposals, right? What about the legal-related proposals? What about the Sucket proposal itself? You know, the big stuff that will run potentially into the millions of pounds. That's obviously where we can introduce this concept of Dowling that we're talking about earlier. So Dowlink exists because we ourselves as Slucket. We immediately recognize that we wanted to make a serious proposal to the Dow. a proposal that would last two, three years long, right, in terms of the amount of work that needs to be delivered.

We're at GMBH, as I said earlier, we live in a country where the regulations are super tight, and it's the German administration. You know, they are pretty serious about their regulations. And so we had to build this bridge because we ourselves cannot issue an invoice to something that doesn't have an address, right? Yeah, as in meaning like you want to be a contractor to the doubt, you want to be a service provider, right? So in your income statement, you're going to get some ether. So that has to show as revenue in your income statement. So the German tax authorities or some authorities are going to ask, where did you get this revenue from? Exactly.

The way I think of it is, as per German law, you aren't allowed to get revenue from an entity that doesn't have real world postal residential address or let's say headquartered or something like that. It's not exactly that. No, I mean, it's more of a case of you can't receive money from people you don't know. know. It's just common sense, I suppose. It's how the world works, right? So that's why we created this organization called DEOLink. And DioLink is residents in Switzerland. And in Switzerland, they have a much more interesting set of flow for the people who are into crypto. My gut feel is that Switzerland is going to get all the entrepreneurs for crypto for the next, say, two to three years and it's going to start a brain drain, if you will, from France, Germany, Britain,

the United States, wherever else, people moving to Switzerland in order to operate those companies because at the moment it's the only country that has a very friendly set of regulations around the AOs, as they are, and crypto in general. I mean, you know that Ethereum was, it continues to be actually based out of Switzerland and the Zuc Canton to be specific. Plenty of other projects are located there, including DOLINK. So what DAO link offers is a bridge between this world of DAO and the world of regulation that I live in. So what we'll do is we'll invoice DEO Link, which has a physical address, and DAO link

will engage into a smart contract with the people in the DAO. Because in Switzerland, you do not need a written paper that says that you're engaging with someone into a contract, just the intent of having a contract which can be demonstrated in code. sufficient to establish a legal relationship. So in Switzerland, for example, if you receive £3,000 a month in your bank account from the same company over a year, then you can totally go to court and say, I was employed with these people, even though you never signed a physical contract. Now, that's very, very unique to Switzerland. You can't do that in Britain. You certainly

can't do that in Britain. You can't do that in Germany, or as far as I know pretty much everywhere else. I could be wrong about the everywhere else part, but I know Switzerland is the game. it you know they understand this is the future and they're willing to adapt so so then DAL link is a company that was started by you sort of the SLocket team it was started by so it's a joint venture between SLKET G and BH and an exchange called B-T-B-I-T-Y.com who have a very solid legal understanding of the local regulation very good contacts with people that are actually helping shape this jurisdictional environment, if that's a word.

I'm not sure. I'm not a lawyer, as you can probably tell. And they've done their homework because they're already in exchange. They're audited by KPMG and so on. So that's a match made in heaven. You know, the people that have built the DA framework and the people that understand how to apply this stuff in the physical world and have the right contacts and have done the right groundwork in order to make it possible,

I think, DEOLink, we're going to hear a lot. more from in the coming six months, 12 months, something like that. Okay, so the DOLINK, for you as SLOCITs only serves the purpose of sort of being the intermediary between the DO and your company. If the DO accept your proposal, you'll be invoicing the O link and the EU will be accepting money from the DEO. That is correct. Okay, that's interesting that you'd have to, well, I mean, it's interesting that it's set up that way, but that you need that sort of intermediary to do that.

And so, I guess, why did you create Slocket in Germany then and not in Switzerland? Wouldn't that be easier? No, because it's a completely different business. I believe, you know, DioLink will be a successful company of its own. I believe that it's going to look into a lot of things. So one of the things it's going to look into is how can a doubt, take actually real equity into a company. That's what people really want.

If you read the forums, they're saying, hey, why can't we take a stake in Slok at GmbH? Why do we have to buy a product or a service? Well, because for now, that's how the world works. Ether, as you know, is a fuel, and it was purchased as a product under the Swiss export laws. So I believe Dalink has a lot more to offer than just being a bridge between us and the DAO token holders

and the future proposers, if you will, and the doubt token holders. I think it's going to play a very important role in the crypto space, but it's a separate business from what we do at Sloket, which is relating, as I said earlier, to autonomous machines, smart blocks, things of that nature. So the two have to be separate. And plus, you know, my two co-founders are German and live near Berlin. So it makes no sense. They have plenty of children.

I also have kids. They're big now, though. And, you know, it makes sense to be based where we want to live. Dowling seems really interesting. Let's just drill down into this a bit. So the first thought that came into my mind when you described it is Dowling could conceivably take, not just lock it as a customer, but other companies in other jurisdictions around the world that want to make proposals to the Tao as customers.

So it becomes sort of, let's say like you had bid pay, right? Whenever a merchant wanted to accept Bitcoin, Bitpay would make sure that they got fiat and the customer could pay in Bitcoin. Dowlink is something similar. It's like the, let's say, the bid pay of DAOs where anybody who wants to get money from the Dow or other DAOs could just go to them, sign a contract with them and then receive money from Dowlink if their proposal gets passed. Yeah, that sounds about right. I think you're starting to see where this is going. It's very, very exciting. There's already people that intend to submit proposal to the DAO that have contacted

that link and say, hey, you know, we want to work with you because we want to do things by the book. Help us with VAT. Help us with regulation. Help us with import, export laws. Help us with all the legal framework. What comes with this stuff, which has held back. This is what's holding back the ecosystem, by the way. What's holding back the – well, there's two things that hold back the ecosystem.

The first one is this stuff is pretty damn complicated. And so in order to be a coder, you have to learn solidity and all that. It's not really user-friendly just yet. That's the first thing, not enough developers. The second thing is the jurisdictional aspect of this stuff, which is holding entrepreneurs back from getting into this. They think, yeah, I could do the DA way, fine. But it looks exciting, this crypto stuff,

but I don't want to spend all this money building a legal framework just for this one project. You know what? I'll just go on Kickstarter. Let's go. Oh, I'll just go get VC money. Let's go. It's what's holding people back, and we want to fix that.

And that's what the Ealing, which doesn't even have a website yet. By the way, enough marketing on it, but we're about to start in the coming month, as I said, is trying to resolve. As an aside, I was at the French National Assembly three months ago, two and a half month ago, I believe. Yeah, we're on the same panel. So you remember then how receptive the audience was. I mean, this was the French National Assembly. That's as high as it gets in the pecking order of legal aspect in France, right? This is where laws are made.

And these guys were very receptive. And at the end of the little talk, you know, I was walking around the little reception they were having. And people, including some French deputy, approached me and said, you know what? Absolutely right. people left France 20 years ago because we were stuck up with a mini-tail and we didn't make it easy for these guys to to work on the web we don't want to miss the blockchain revolution we need to go and make good regulations for these for these entities so they can be based in France and why why simple because they're going to pay tax and that's going to go into the French bank vault if you will so

they they would love that and unfortunately or fortunately depending how you look at it right now Switzerland has the lead so I look at forward to France, the UK, Germany to start waking up and say we need to make it easier for blockchain entrepreneurs to work. No, so regarding France, I mean, there is sort of a double discourse there, I think, anyway, being in France and having a blockchain startup there is that on the one's hand, I think that the French government is very much interested in learning more about how blockchains can sort of shape the French economy in the coming years. But, you know, as well, as well as, you know,

as we know in France, things do take a long time to implement and for laws to change. And for anybody who is interested in knowing what a Minitel is, you should definitely check it out. It's an interesting piece of Internet history that I didn't live, but that Stefan definitely probably did. So let's talk about the proposal process coming back to the DO. Can you walk us through how a project would make a proposal to the DO and a different steps and voting and all that stuff? Yeah, definitely. So, well, now's the right time to, I mean, if you guys have projects, the guys watching us have projects and you were thinking of doing a crowd funder of some sort, or if you were thinking of getting a VC, now's the time to actually look into the Dow and think, hey, maybe that's an option. So how do you do this? Well, the first step is you contact the curators. There's going to be a form on the DO Hub website that's going to be created to make that process a lot easier. But right now, you know who they are. I just go on the website. You'll have their Twitter handles. Just send them a message and say, I want to make a proposal. right and send them a proposal send them the by code address or see send them the source code on GitHub I imagine or whatever service you like or you on a text file doesn't really matter really

and so they can verify you and once they verify you they'll add you to the white list well that's that's easy because you know we assume that that's just a step to avoid obvious cameras from get going in right so once that's done the real work starts the real work is you're going to have to convince people that your project is worth something any any amount right the amount that you ask for, the amount that's asked for in your proposal under the conditions that are defined in your proposal. And that's really much like any other projects. You need to pitch, right?

So suck it to a certain extent. You know, what we've done on a six month is we've pitched. We went to conferences. We went to, we build a website. We, you know, explain what we wanted to do. We wrote a proposal in plain English, an overview, if you will, of what we intend to deliver, when we intend to deliver. It's 29 pages long, which I think is probably too long for most people.

we would have maybe preferred in this case a one pager from the Kickstarter environment. But here it is, 29 pages of what we intend to do. And then you just supply the code. And once the data is deployed in when is it eight days now, I think maybe less, it's next Saturday. You just push it to the chain and you advertise it. And people can go and vote on it immediately. There's a little voting interface that they'll pop up in mist or into various websites, including Deo Hub, my ether wallet and others. Even exchanges are working on voting interface for the DAB, by the way, which is kind of cool.

So that's it. You go and people will vote and they'll vote yes. Well, they'll vote no. If it vote yes, congratulations. Your proposal went through. If they vote no, better luck next time. Submit a new proposal. Let's take a quick break so I can take it to Paris.

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We'd like to thank Ledger for their support of Epicenter Bitcoin. So, Stefan, the Dow looks really great, but the first question that came to my mind was, if I'm building a product, right, and I have now many options to raise funds. I have friends and family, first of all. I have angel investors. If I need more funds, I have VCs, I have a crowdfunding, the option, and finally I have the DAO, right? Yeah, you're lucky, though,

if you have all the five. Yeah, all five. Now, what kind of, what is me a bit about the DAO is, let's say with an angel investor, let's say there's a famous angel investor in my city. The route to getting money is to just convince this one guy or just these two or three people.

Yeah. But the route to getting, say, $500,000 out of the Dow is to perhaps convince like a thousand people that are stakeholders in the Dow. More. More, right? So it's like I have to convince maybe 100 times more people to get the same money out of the Tao

as compared to a traditional source of venture funding. Yes. And convincing people takes time, right? It distracts me from building the thing. That is my job as an entrepreneur. Don't you think this is a problem? No, I don't see it as a problem. You go see a VC, there'll be some set of problems.

You know, VCs, let's name common issues with VCs in 2016, they claim to understand blockchain. All they hear is a buzzword, right? So they're putting their money into whatever. They hope something sticks to the wall, right? to pardon my French. So that's the first problem with this. Kickstarter?

Yeah, there's a few problems with Kickstarter. If you go and look at the horror stories of what can happen with Kickstarter, you'll very quickly understand what the downsides are. You also see that Kickstarter takes a fairly chunky bit of money out of the project to do that. Friends and families, you know,

friends and families, seriously, is bad. I mean, I personally wouldn't touch it with a 20-foot pole. It's one thing that, you know, that nine projects out of 10, probably more in the crypto space, are failures. For some people, it can create and I've read some really, really grim stories about people who lost their family's money because they got very excited about this project and they couldn't deliver, unfortunately. Not because they were malicious, just because that's how the market works. I mean, that has a big downside, especially if you're a very family-focused sort of guy. I don't know. Maybe you don't care. It's up to you.

but it's your options. You have options and the DAI is just one more option. Absolutely right. It's going to be hard to pass something through a set of, you know, 10,000 pairs of eyes. That's a good thing. That means the stuff that's going to actually make it through, it's going to kick serious ass. And these guys that are in the DAO, the Dow token holders, as the Dow that we're talking about now, right? They're the early adopters of Bitcoin. They understand this space. They know what's good. They know what's bad. they don't take any, I can't swear on this show, can I? But they're very astute, let's put it that way. And that's a good thing.

I think it's awesome. I think that's how I think should be, in my opinion. Okay, so let's have a follow-on question to this one. What according to you is the thing that you worry about in the Tao? Like any venture, right, it has a lot of underlying assumptions that are baked into it, right? Big time. Big time, right?

What assumption about human behavior or crowd behavior or etc.? or legal system behavior? What is you the most about the Dow? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's any particular worry. Everybody's aware that when we started this thing, did anybody raise their hand and say $165 million equivalent will go into that smart contract code? I can't remember anyone saying that.

do remember one person in particular shooting for $130 million, but I think he was being just maybe cheeky or facetious. So let's put it that way. Nobody expected this. I think Christoph Yance, who is the inventor of this thing, after all, let's not forget that. If he was in this room, he would say what he often told me, which is, you know, it would have been ideal if we started of a model that maybe receives 10 million, right? Because then we can start looking at what works, what doesn't work, et cetera, and nobody gets too excited. 150 million there's a danger that there's too much hype, you know? And if you look at the mainstream media, it's just a big hype train. They don't understand this technology. They write things.

They don't particularly, I think, even grasp. I had one particular journalist who was just completely obsessed about numbers. They just wanted me to say, numbers so give me numbers numbers numbers and they don't care about the underlying technology or why this is important so that creates a lot of you know invalid sort of expectations about the project and one of these invalid expectations is that tomorrow on the 29th well maybe tomorrow depending what time this is released but at some point right after the creation of the DAL that's it proposals are getting passed and everybody is putting a proposal and it's always very well organized and

there are governance tools and no that's not that's not at all how it's going to happen, guys. So we need to be very clear about this. You know, in terms of expectations for me would be we're going to start seeing proposals around governance models. We're going to see proposals around forums that are backed by the ownership of tokens. We're going to see voting mechanisms like Lumio style voting mechanisms being put in place. Existing companies are going to submit things.

New companies are going to submit things. that's not going to happen overnight. That's going to take, I would say, a good three to six months, at the very least, to go and put in place this governance model. So I wouldn't expect that many proposals to be passed at the beginning. I wouldn't expect the Dow to, stupidly, if you will, if you can call it that, sort of take all of its ether and, boom, stick it into something or six different proposals. That's not how it's going to happen. It's going to take time.

The people that are vested in the Dow are smart people. I think a lot of people look at this stuff and, you know, it's almost patronizing sometimes. I read some comments about how it's going to be a big shouting match and people can't coordinate because there's too many people, et cetera, extra. They're just, you know, these are smart people. These are people that bet on Ethereum, you know, and if you look at some of the people who are vested in there for, you know, $10 million in some cases, if you believe the statistics, these are not idiots. They know exactly what they're getting into.

They're going to want to see the right governance tools. they're going to want to see the right legal frameworks put in place, and that could be include the O-link, and they're going to want to see serious proposals. So to me, these are all good things, but it's not overnight. The DAO could take several years to grow, and that's a good thing, before it even hits Dow 2.0. Some people are excited about Dow 2.0 before Dow 1.0 is even launched.

I mean, that's a little bit. It's hypeish, isn't it? Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, so that was a really great answer, and kind of it clarifies the expectations. And the way our listeners can think about it is when you own, when you are a Dow token holder, because the Dow is holding ether,

you are indirectly also benefiting if the value of ether rises. So as long as the Dow doesn't spend a big chunk of its funds in some bad proposal, your ETHERS, your Dow is holding the ethers and you'll still get the benefit of that appreciation. And on the other side, the upside is if these governance issues can be solved and a good process made to fund great projects and they start producing a return, then you have your upside, right? So your downside is, your floor of your investment is what happens to ether, which probably the token holders would have held anyway. And the upside might be something,

something even better. So they can weather through the, this adjustment process. At least that's how I think about it. I think a lot of people share that opinion. I'm not an investor. I can't give investment advice, things like that. But that sounds about right. There's a few limits to that model.

Keep in mind that once the ether that the DA holds has been committed to a proposal, it's no longer something that you can take out, right? It's locked into that proposal smart contract that neither the DAL nor the supplier have control over, it's the proposal that mediates between the two parties so that ether is locked in, if you will. So the only ether you can take out of the DAL is the ether that hasn't been locked in a proposal. And you alluded to this, you say, as long as they don't spend it all in one place, which would be a silly thing to do. But I guess an interesting art project, whatever. But yeah, so that's one thing. The other thing to remember

is that this is still a technical process to be able to extract your ether out of the doubt. It takes about, I think, 21, 30 days, something like that. So it's not immediate. You know, it's not a sure guarantee of anything. Plus, you know, we touched on that briefly, but there's also the risk element around the newness of this platform, but also the newness of the underlying Ethereum platform. I mean, Ethereum, you know, it's brand new in terms of grand scheme of things.

it's what, six months, seven months old, more. Not that much older. So I would, you know, for people who are risk averse, this may not be a very good place to be for people who enjoy risk and think, hey, you know, this is an interesting experiment. I want to be part of it. I think it could lead to some interesting governance model and could lead to some great projects that otherwise wouldn't receive attention

and go for it. Okay. So one of the other challenges that I kind of, So I read through the code of the DAO and I was like I was thinking of as an investor, right? Like should I buy the Dow token or not? And I read through the code of the Dow. And one of the questions that came to my mind is if I had, if I had say, let's say, I don't know, 10 million Dow tokens or whatever, whatever big amount. and let's say Sebastian had the same big amount, right?

And you had the same big amount. All three of us in the room, we had the same amount of doubt tokens. Now, all three of us are kind of expected to vote and contribute our knowledge into evaluating proposals. Now, let's say like Sebastian works a lot, right? You know, 10 or 20 hours a week and evaluates the proposal and votes. and the Tao makes a good decision based on his vote. Let's say,

Stefan, you are somebody who has the nature of, okay, you know Sebastian is good, therefore you will vote wherever Sebastian vote or something like that. So you are evaluating at least who is good. Don't do that, by the way.

And then there might be somebody like me who will be like, okay, I don't care. I'm just going to buy it and forget it. right yeah right now the problem i had like is like the pay off the pay off for all three of us is the same yeah if the doubt tokens go up five times sebastian stephan and meher will make the same money even though maher contributed nothing to it right yeah so i i kind of i kind of had the feeling that this is like a tragedy of the commons problem right because Everybody's incentivize, kind of not, not like the optimal strategy for everybody is to not do any thinking, any thought process or any voting and just benefit from the appreciation of the doubt open in the hopes that other people will do the work for you.

Yeah, I see what you mean. Wow. That's a very interesting thing. If you draw parallels to the real world, what happens when people do that? usually very, very, very bad things happen in terms of governments being elected that probably don't have the people best interest at heart. So lazy voters are probably not welcome in this project. And you're right. Some people might be lazy and say, yeah, I trust that the other voters are very smart. Well, that's a lot of trust to put in. I mean, I personally think, you know, that they're going

be more vested than what you describe. I mean, you yourself, you said, we all hold a large amount, right, and you say you don't really want to vote because you see me voting and you think, okay, he's a good guy, whatever. Okay, well, I mean, it's the same reasoning as, you know, who votes for the president. I don't really care about who the president is because they're left, right, same, same, you know, Pepsi and Coke. A lot of people think that, you know, that it's all the one and the same, one-party sort of world that we live in. So there's no point voting. This is different, though, you're vested. I mean, you have a hundred bucks into it. And in your case, it's only like you had 10 million bucks vested into it. I mean, if you had 10 million

box vested into something, wouldn't you do the least bit of due diligence at the very least? And to me, that sounds like common sense. If you don't, I expect bad things to happen. Yeah, but I mean, I haven't looked at the amount of ether that people are investing in, or have put into the DAO to purchase tokens. But I, but I, I suppose it's not tens of thousands of dollars. And to Maraura's point, I think that that freeloader problem may be an issue in the long term. And maybe it'll iron itself out in a few years if this deal is successful. But if you look at something like Bitcoin, if you look at all of the other cryptocurrencies that have come after it,

a lot of people have their money in there and are not using it. They're waiting for something to happen in order for them to make it some more value. I forgot with the guys Chris Dixon or something like that on Twitter. And he wrote, you know, the Dow is like for Ethereum. If Ethereum was a company, the Dow is its R&D department, right? And somebody else said, oh, well, it would be nice to have this for Bitcoin. So, you know, you don't have it for Bitcoin. When you put your money in Bitcoin and you hold it, you hold Bitcoin.

You hold a currency. It's like holding dollars or holding pounds, right? In the context of the Dell, you know, there's projects coming in that you have to vote on. Now, you're right that a lot of people might say, hey, I think to your point, the point you're trying to make is the long tail isn't going to vote, right, because they got 10 bucks into this thing. Sure, maybe they don't. But I think the short top, whatever they're called, the people at the top,

the people that just happened, again, distributed on the parito curve. If you look at the stats, I think 80 accounts on about 50% of the Dow, these guys are going to vote, and they're going to vote right. They're going to vote the right decision. In the future, it's also possible to imagine a context where you would have delegate voting. That reminds me a bit of proof of stake to a certain extent, where people could delegate their vote to someone else going to say, yeah, well, you know, IBM has just announced that they're going to be, they have a lot of those tokens. And we think IBM is a very good deal, token holders because they have the means of doing due diligence. So we'll roll with that.

Or maybe this very famous guy in the crypto space that I'd love to follow. I listen to all the podcast, you know, he said he had a lot of their token and he gave it. the address. So what I'll do is I'll set it so that automatically my vote goes to whatever he does. I think that's kind of cool, actually. That would be a really cool experiment to see what happens. And I wouldn't see that as a tragedy of the commons at all. I would see that as common due diligence and good common sense. Okay. So before we wrap up, let's come back to Slokit and the Ethereum computer that you guys have proposed to build for the Dow. Can you tell us about the Ethereum computer and what it's trying to achieve?

Yeah, so the Ethereum computer is part of the set of deliverables that we have in mind for a proposal, which is really to deploy this thing called the Universal Sharing Network. So the Universal Sharing Network, the vision is you have a car, you can share it. You have a house, you can share it. You have an office. You can share it without third party, without middlemen. If, on the other hand, somebody wants to rent something, you have an app, you look at the app and it says, right, two kilometers to your left, there's a 3D printer where you can go and print whatever.

you know, maybe you're an artist and you want to use that, or there's a laser cutter, which would be kind of nice for the maker space and decentralize the maker space itself. You know, that kind of stuff. So the idea is to share everything and anything. And as part of that, we have this Ethereum computer, which is this little piece of consumer electronics, which mediates, if you will, objects that don't yet support the blockchain,

but one they will, and helps them interact with people that are using the blockchain to rent, sell, or share stuff. So, for example, it could be a door lock. Now, as you know, there's hundreds, I wouldn't say 1,000, but definitely hundreds of types of smart door locks out there. There's hundreds, if definitely maybe 1,000 in this case, of initiatives but large companies like Samsung and so on, to build smart objects or the Samsung smart things,

the Logitech Harmony Hub, you know, things like that. So the idea is to help these guys onboard the blockchain technology by having this piece of consumer electronics that mediate those transactions in someone's home or someone's office, right? It's one part of the big picture because the big picture is really to have this stuff running on apps

and have an app running on a router and the router speaks Wi-Fi and so it can operate an August lock at the door, for example, and maybe that's sufficient. Or maybe there's a Samsung SmartThings Hub and that thing speaks Zadwave and Zigby. So now of a sudden, the Slucket app, if you will,

the Universal Sharing Network app, would be able to mediate all those objects without the need for an Etheran computer. So the idea is to have the Ethern computer as a sort of vanguard into this space. A bit of technology that would really be groundbreaking and demonstrate how useful this technology is. So this piece of consumer electronics sits in your home,

talks blockchain, and allows people to come in and out by renting and rent your stuff, rent and sell, share your stuff. What is the barrier to entry for someone who were to acquire an Ethereum computer to have the devices set up on this system. Yeah, so that's exactly where we're trying to lower. So that's part of the proposal.

To lower the barrier of entry by making objects automatically discover the Ethern computer or vice versa, probably more like the Ethereum discovering objects. So we're working with partners, like Nokey, for example, which does bike locks, and they do little padlocks as well. And the idea is you have on your Ethereum computer display, if you will, whether that's HDMIRAT or a display panel on the Ethereum computer itself, a view of the state of those objects and be able to rent sale or share them and control, obviously, access, control permission, how much you're going to charge for use this stuff, if anything at all?

Because you might just want to make it available to anyone. That's okay too. Just have this sort of governance in place still. So that's the barrier of entry would be to have access. to objects that recognize it, and that's exactly what we're trying to lower. What we're building, really, isn't an Ethereum computer or an app. What we're building is a network, and that's really important to understand. Building a network means everything we do is open source.

The Ethern computer itself, we're going to give away all the designs, everything. Anyone can rebuild one at home if they have the means to, and we're going to try to make it simple. We're going to try to make simple versions that run on a pie. For those, we just want a simple version. And we're also going to let the Chinese clone go and clone that stuff as well. That's cool too. Because the more the merrier, because everything ultimately is mediated by this USN.

And ultimately, the DAO benefits from all those transactions that are mediated by these applications, these devices, these routers, whatever they might be. So do you think that people that would rent things on the Ethereum computer or on the Universal Sharing Network, what are some of the sort of first things you think people will? put on the Universal Shiren Network? Door locks. Door locks. Yeah, 100% sure. That's the first thing everyone looks at.

I don't know what it is with door locks. That's so exciting. Because I can think of a lot of exciting stuff. But everyone that's from maybe mainstream sort of point of view rather than crypto point of view, say, oh, that's great because then I can continue using Airbnb. But at the same time, I get this sort of sidetrack, if you will, where I can actually rent things directly.

on top of my existing Airbnb or whatever other app they may be using, right? And that sort of gives them a way out. That gives them that sort of opening of the door. And the next time somebody comes into their house, they'll use the USN rather than use the Airbnb approach. I mean, the universal sharing network is like a brilliant vision. And I like to actually describe this vision a bit differently. And like talk about.

like a different way of seeing it and I like your opinion on it right because this is what I've been using when people ask me about Slocut and out here in some of the meetups in Switzerland so so the way I tend to think of it is the you the what's locket's core technology is a way of mapping physical objects mapping the ownership of physical objects in the real world to smart contracts on Ethereum so As a first approximation, you start to think that a physical object, let's define that a particular smart contract on Ethereum is the owner of the physical object. And then once that smart contract is the owner, it can sell it, sell, rent, or do anything with that physical object. It can rent it to other people so that other people can use it for the time being.

So you're mapping all of the objects in the world to smart contracts on Ethereum that can kind of interact with each other at one level. And then also the brilliant part about this idea seems to be to me that if you look at DAOs, right, DEOs, if you think of their organizations, today they can own Ether. They might be able to own other kinds of currencies if they issue them on Ethereum blockchain. But today DAOs find it very hard to own physical assets. If I think of a company, like a pharmaceutical company like no artist, it has a lot of physical assets. It has laptops, it has tables, it has bed, it has bed, it has bed, it has ben, it has. It has land, etc. So today DAOs have no way of owning physical assets.

But once you start to map the ownership of physical objects as smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, then DAOs as a whole can own these physical objects or rent these physical objects. So you can have these virtual corporations interact with physical capital. That's a mind-blowing way to describe it. You know, we have some openings at Slucket for marketing positions. We want to welcome to join. That's how you would describe it to a crypto audience. Yes.

You know, what I'm trying to do, and I think this is going to be a very, very, very ambitious goal, very tough proposition, is I'm going to try to explain what you just said to people who've never heard about blockchain. And one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people, in fact, the vast majority of the world guys, don't care about blockchain. They don't care about what's powering Facebook. Facebook works. Why do I need to know about it's using Hadoop? I mean, Hadoop is an amazing technology I hear. So what?

Does Facebook work? Yeah, it works. Okay, so I'll use that. Does it bring me value? Does it make me money? These are the questions that the non-blockchain people are going to be very interested in. And in fact, the only questions that people that don't know about blockchain are going to be interested in. So our job is going to be to explain to these guys.

But the way you've described it is just absolutely spot on in terms of vision for the U.S. and long term from a crypto vision. And so then tell us about some of the maybe some of the initial pox that you have been working on with some of your initial partners or at least what you can talk about. Yeah. So, and again, this is important to understand, just for this, because I'm used to the questions nowadays, it's important to understand that what I'm about to describe is very much separate from the business that we would have with the DAO, with our proposal, right? These are existing clients, just like the DAI is a client, these are other clients. So one client in particular that is very candid with information is a company called RWE.

They're based out of Germany. They have about 30 million customers, so they're an established. billion dollar player in the nuclear energy. They operate nuclear power plants and they're hurting. You know, they're hurting because this stuff is getting disintermediated, just like the phone companies got disintermediated this 10 years ago in most countries in Europe. So they're being pulled apart and they're thinking we still need to maintain our profit. We need to find a way to make more money. We need to find a way to lower our costs. We need to stop this bleeding, so to speak. And so they see blockchain as a way to incorporate things like faster payments, make it easier for people to have access to things like

charging your electric car. You know, they look about at the future five years down the line and they think a lot of people will have Teslas. There'll be lots and lots of charging stations out there, but they all speak different protocols. They're all different. So you have a card and maybe you can tap on one charging station or insert your car or whatever, but it won't work in the next one. And then when you travel to France, when you bought the car in Germany, and that won't work.

So basically, the experience will be rotten and rubbish. So they're trying to simplify that experience by having a blockchain-based layer to simplify all this accounting and obviously gain more customer that way and maintain their market shares that way. So it's pretty clever. And they are very, very candid, as I said, and forthcoming with information. So if you go online, you'll see there's a chap called Kast and Sturker, who's their, I believe, head of blockchain innovation,

who's doing a lot of meetups with Ethereum, was explaining a lot of the things they do in a completely transparent way. And to me, that's really exciting because that's the first time I see a billion-dollar company that's not a bank looking into this stuff. I like that a lot. Yeah, I mean, so they sponsored a couple of episodes a while back because they had this contest. Oh, did they're your show. Yeah, for they had this sort of contest where you know, you could submit ideas for blockchain

startups and they would fund you. You could win some prize money. Okay, so then in that sense, Slokit, if you don't win the proposal, which obviously we all hope you do, then Slokit is sort of consulting with existing players on blockchain and IoT. Is that where you're positioning us? Oh, I mean, whatever happens, we will continue to provide consulting services and extend our offerings to, you know, companies that are interested in this technology. But with the focus, I think, on blockchain plus IoT, because that's where our heart and the passion is, if you will.

I'll leave private blockchains for banks for other companies. We're not really into that. Okay. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Stefan. It's definitely a very interesting and fascinating topic. And obviously, one of the most established projects in, in the, in the, you know, the smart contract space in terms of mine share and now money since it's raised, since the

DAO has raised quite a bit of money. And, you know, we definitely wish Slok it a lot of well, a lot of, well, to be prosperous in this space. Well, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Great questions as usual. Thank you. Well, thank you very much for coming on. And again, thanks to our listeners for tuning in. Epiton of Bitcoin is part of the last Bitcoin Network, you can go to Let's TalkBitcoin.com to find all kinds of great shows about blockchains, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, et cetera. We release episodes of Epicenter Bitcoin every Monday, and you can find those on iTunes, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And of course, if you're a loyal listener, you can leave us a review on iTunes and send us an

email at show at Epicenterbidcoin.com and we will send you a t-shirt. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week. I don't know.