On The Brink with Castle Island - Joe Lallouz (Bison Trails) (EP.28)

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

Joe Lallouz, co-founder and CEO of Bison Trails joins the show. In this episode we discuss:  - Joe's career trajectory and the path that led him and his co-founder Aaron to launch Bison Trails - Joe and Aaron's initial mining project in the Pacific Northwest - How Joe thinks about the landscape for infrastructure services in the public blockchain industry - The Libra Association (Bison Trails is a founding member) - Raising capital in the blockchain industry in 2019 Learn more about Bison Trails at: https://bisontrails.co/  

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. This week, we sat down with Joe La Luz, the co-founder and CEO of Bison Trails. Bison Trails is an infrastructure company and they allow customers to engage with public blockchains. So this means things like staking, block production, or even participating with on-chain governance in some of these networks. Joe and his co-founder Aaron have been starting businesses together for the past 15 years, which is crazy.

That's longer than most marriages. So we talked at length about some of the ideas that they were pursuing before Bison Trails, some of the companies that they've started in the past, and really how they got their start in Bitcoin mining. They have a fascinating backstory there. And Joe goes into some detail around some of the experiments that they were doing on their way to starting Bison Trails. So we also talked about what it's like to start a company in a nascent industry and what the fundraising process looks like for an entrepreneur in the crypto asset space right now, both the good and the bad. And we talked about the Libra Association. Bison Trails is a founding member of that consortium, and that's still developing, and they're providing some infrastructure. So we talked about the technical side, and we also spoke briefly about the regulatory landscape. This episode was a lot

of fun. And without further ado, here's our conversation with Joe Loo's of Bison Trails. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, 85,000. billion dollars. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of constituted easy. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin.

Welcome to the On the Brink podcast. I'm Matt Walsh. I'm very lucky to have Joe Luluz, co-founder and CEO of Bison Trails joining the show. Thanks for joining the pod, Joe. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Matt. Really appreciate you having me on the show. Joe, so a lot is going on with Bison since the last time I was in your office. I think your headcount has quintupled here. You're grown like crazy. The website has a lot more going on in terms of the protocols you're working on. And so we want to talk about what Bison Trails is and what you're working on. But first, why don't we start about you and just talk about what was your career trajectory that led you to Bison Trails? Awesome. Yeah. Thanks. And really glad to have you back in

the office. It's cool to have you here. It's definitely changed a lot since the last time I think you were here. It was probably just Aaron, my co-founder and I that were in the office and we were kind of sharing the space with a bunch of other companies. And now I'm looking out into the room and seeing a huge swath of desks of people writing code. And you have a receptionist now? It's like a very robust office. Well, we had to like up our physical security too, make sure that like people can't just walk in. Probably a good idea. It's a work in progress. It's still a work in progress. And we're trying to make the office better and all that stuff. But anyways, I'm really glad to have you back and it's good to see you again. But yeah, obviously super happy to tell you and listeners about

bison trails and what we've been up to. But one of my favorite things is kind of the founder's story and sort of how we ended up where we are and why ended up where I am. So the background for me is my co-founder and I have been working together for many years. It's about 15 plus years now. We actually went to school together. We met in school and engineering school. And we're both technical. And We've been, for the most part of our careers, have been startup founders. We've built a number of venture-backed companies in the past. Mostly companies where we would build the first version of it ourselves and try and figure out whether it was something worth scaling or continuing to build on.

I like to joke because we built a few venture-backed companies in the past, but it's probably like we built the first part of 30 companies, but really only two or three made it out of that. Yeah. Yeah, a ton of ideas, naturally. a ton of bad ideas or ideas that you think are good and then you evaluate them and actually build something and it's like, ah, this isn't that great. But yeah, so I've been a startup founder for a long time, built a number of different companies. One of the most recent companies I worked

on was this company called Grand Street. It was Aaron and myself and we had another third co-founder. We exited the company in 2014 to Etsy. So we joined Etsy and I joined the leadership team at Etsy. I was working on some of the seller services tools, which are basically tools to help Etsy sellers scale their businesses. So a lot of really interesting technical tools to try and help Etsy sellers. Yeah, so from Etsy started doing some angel investing and exploring the crypto and blockchain space in kind of around 2016 from a more professional career perspective. But I like to talk about sort of like my early days in crypto, we're very nerdy and very technical. So was really into Bitcoin, kind of when it first came out.

I actually don't. I kind of hate when people say, in 2012, I was in Bitcoin. I actually don't remember when the date was. How about the people that say they were in it in 2007? That's how you know that they're really not in it. I've been in crypto since 20. I mean, unless you were. Hal Finney or Nick Zabo maybe.

Yeah, it's like if you're Nick Zabo or you were like one of like the Eagle or like, maybe you were, I guess technically you were like in the early stages or early versions. I wasn't one of those people. I'm not Satoshi. I was. Breaking news. Breaking news. I wasn't one of those people. I actually, funny enough, I found out about Bitcoin from a sysadmin at a company that I was working at ages ago. Oh man, I probably shouldn't tell the story, but this is a fun one. He was mining Bitcoin on company servers. He was running Bitcoin mining software and company servers. The company found out and we were like,

what the hell? You're using servers to do this. These are like servers we had racked in like data centers. This is like pre-even AWS time. I mean, we were probably late to move to AWS. AWS existed, but we weren't on it. And I remember being like, what is this Bitcoin thing this guy is doing and then digging in and realizing this is super cool. And that guy doesn't work anymore. Honestly, I haven't heard from him or talk to him. He's probably living on a beach in Nicaragua somewhere. That guy is well retired now.

Or he did the same thing that I did, which I also like to laugh about. He accumulated a bunch of Bitcoin and when it hit 600 was like, oh, my God, I'm a genius. I'm selling. This is incredible. And that also happened in my crypto career. There was definitely a bunch of times where I had accumulated some Bitcoin and was like, wow, this is so smart. It's $1,000. I should sell it.

But yeah. So what was it that originally piqued your interest about Bitcoin and crypto assets in general? And what was it that actually got you to start a company, your next company? You were obviously going to start another company. What made you decide on crypto? So there's two questions baked into one in there. And I can answer them independently. Also, the whole obviously going to start another company.

I like to pretend like that wasn't. true, but it's super, super true. In retrospect, it's like, this is what I love doing. This is what my happiest. So what originally peaked my interest in crypto and why I was starting a company in crypto are two separate kind of mini stories that are actually probably four or five years apart. What originally peaked my interest in crypto was it was this perfect intersection of incredibly technical, incredibly nerdy, new, nuanced technology combined with financial and economic. and socioeconomic behavior. When I was in college, I actually studied both engineering as well as economics.

And at the time, I studied social welfare economics, which wasn't a hot topic back then. It was like to the point where my thesis advisor was like, why are you doing this? I've always just been really interested in it. So this intersection of these two things for me was really cool. I remember a decade ago thinking about how cool it would be if you could build a product or service where a user owned their own data and they could sell access to their data and create ad revenue at an individual level on a platform like Facebook or Twitter. At the time, the sort of transfer value protocol to be able to do that did not exist. And I remember we were

like, we should build a company to do this. And, you know, that didn't go anywhere. That was one of those projects, one of the 20 ideas that never actually went anywhere. That's how I got involved in or interested in crypto at first. I would say that like I paid attention to it, but not that closely in between the years. And then as I was getting ready to leave Etsy, which was a great place. I was there for three years, loved everyone I worked with, but ultimately, like you said, kind of wanted to start another company. I had, at the time, it started investing in a number of crypto projects and founders, in a few new protocols. I kind of skipped the whole bull run, ICO, boom, bust scenario. I was actually doing a lot of angel investing the way very long-term

angel investors do, which was this is a founder or founding team. It's hyper-technical. It's spent a lot of time looking at code, looking at these open-source projects. I think this can be impactful over the next 15 years. So I've invested in a lot of projects, including like Ethereum and a whole bunch of the projects that are still coming out. I don't think I've ever sold a single token or single digital asset. Hold it on. Literally holding all. The only digital asset I've actually really ever sold was Bitcoin and like ages ago. And now I regret it at the time I thought I was super smart. Yeah. Yeah, I guess you'll hold it. You also don't get the tax hit. So that's added benefit. I wasn't even thinking about that then either. But yeah, so it was gearing up to leave Etsy.

And that's when I was like, I'm going to dig a little bit. I started investing as an angel investor. I'm going to dig a little bit further into this ecosystem. Long nights of reading white papers and completely, completely fell in love. Could not finally left, took some time off to figure out what I wanted to do next, and could not get away from this idea that blockchains and crypto were an inevitability. It was the future. This next wave of technology.

and I'd seen like inklings of the types of activity that we see today in like crypto and blockchain. I'd seen inklings of that in date myself early internet days. I was one of those kids that was like in the IRC channels like doing the nerdy stuff. And I was like, whoa, this is kind of like what that was like when I was young. This is real. These are some incredibly smart people that are trying to solve some very hard problems. And that to me is incredibly drawing. Like I just could not get away from it.

And so I was fortunate enough to be able to take a step back and say, what do I want to work on for the next 10, 20 years. What do I care about? What are the things that I think need to change in the world? And ultimately, blockchain and crypto was like the area where I thought I could have the most impact and that would have the most interest. Yeah. As you're saying that, that's one of the main reasons why I got so excited is just seeing all the talented people that are flowing into this industry. And it does remind you of the early internet days where people are just tinkering. And I think Chris Dixon has this quote around what the smartest people do on their nights and weekends is what most of us will be doing in 10 years. And that feels like what's kind of

happening now with the crypto asset space. So I've heard that that quote is attributed to Chris a couple times now. I actually think it's incredibly true. It is. I actually, I don't know if Chris did or didn't say that. I guess he probably did. I've heard it. You're not the first person to be like, I think Chris Dixon said this. He has a blog post from 2012 or 13 where it talks about it. Chris is right. Chris is right about that. I mean, he's probably wrong about it. Some of it, too, like some of the stuff that really smart, really nerdy people are doing on the nights and weekends, never see the light of day. But he's probably right about a lot of it. And this is totally one of those scenarios. Speaking of tinkering, one of the things that you had told me is that you and

Aaron maybe as a predecessor type of project to Bison Trails had started mining. So talk a little bit about how you got into mining and what you were actually doing. Where are you mining? What were you mining? Oh man. So fun. It's also kind of the story behind the name, the name Bison Trails. So yeah, really, really fun one. So that is right. Aaron, my co-founder and I, along with a small group of other folks that are involved. So Aaron and I built a proof of work mine. What would be considered a pretty sort of big proof of work mine for a two-person operation, but we didn't do it entirely by ourselves. So I should give credit where credit is due. We had a few individual angel investors that wanted to get involved and were curious about what mining was and how that worked. And then a

couple of other friends and other investors that we've known that got involved as well. The reason why we got into mining is because, and it's actually a lot of, like you said, as kind of a precursor to the company we're building today, was because I was looking at the blockchain space and I was saying to myself, the smartest and weirdest people that I know are building these new blockchains and protocols, but quite frankly, the sketchiest people I've ever met

were running a lot of the mining and security behind this transformative industry. And to me, that disconnect made no sense. I couldn't get it. It didn't make sense to me. I was like, this is so weird. Mining is an important part of the success of the protocols and securing these protocols

and securing these blockchains. But there's such a disconnect between the folks that are working on the chains themselves and the folks that are operating the infrastructure that secures the chains. Right. I guess that kind of sketchiness is bounded in a lot of different categories, but I agree that certainly in the mining space. What were some of the learnings that you had from the early days? And where were you mining? Yeah. So we built the whole thing from the ground up from scratch. The mini story that I don't really tell all that much is that before we actually built a proof of work mine, we built a very small version of a test proof of work mine. I had this industrial space in Brooklyn that had industrial power, power costs. And for folks that know anything about proof of work mining, power costs is an important part in the equation.

And we were really interested in mining because, like I said, like this sort of infrastructure piece was really esoteric and closed off and it felt this like this black box and didn't feel right. And we said, we should open that up. Let's be really transparent about it. Let's do this. But instead of being really cagey and not really sharing the information, let's tell everybody exactly how it works, what's going on and why.

So we built this a small test facility in Brooklyn. From there, we were like, okay, we can do it. We know what to do. From a scale perspective, it was like 200 kilowatts, which is maybe 20 or 30 miners or something along those lines. Nothing crazy. But just like understanding like the nuances and details, the math equations behind it. And from there, we've realized not to harp too much on what makes a mine a mine, but we realize there's kind of three things that matter to building and running a proof of work mine.

The first is access to incredibly inexpensive power. the second is an environment that is relatively cool because mining equipment puts off a lot of heat and you want to make sure you reduce the amount of cost that goes into making sure that they can operate at a reasonable temperature. And then the third is that you kind of want to be, well, the third is that you need equipment that's reasonably priced. So you need to get your CAPEX deployment needs to be like relatively low. And then really like the fourth, three and a half is that you kind of want to be like out of the way.

You don't really want to be doing it in like a place where there's a lot of people. walking around where there's a lot of people nearby. They can be noisy. They can be, you know, like it creates a lot of wind tunnels and stuff like that. So we actually went on a hunt. We spent six months traveling around the country, jumping on southwest flights and renting cars and flying into like Utah and Wyoming and really pushed by the two first like environmental factors, the inexpensive power and the climate that's conducive to this. So you like, you don't really want to be in like the bayou because it's like too hot. You don't really want to be places that's too hot. So we end up being somewhere like in the north, and we'd also heard that like a lot of really great or efficient mining companies were in the Pacific Northwest.

At the time, what we realized is that like a lot of mountainous regions are very sort of perfect for cheap power and for good climates. Mountains tend to have rivers. Rivers have hydro. Hydro is a very inexpensive form of energy. The last piece is that Aaron and I were both pretty adamant on only building something that was using renewables. So we didn't want to be burning off coal to power miners. It's not that this isn't like a political statement about like our views on energy. We were just like, look, if we're going to do this, let's use renewable energy to do it.

We actually spent a lot of time in Wyoming. So at the time, Wyoming was a really interesting spot. They had some wind. They had some interesting access to some renewables. And also the state was going through a shift in regulation around crypto. So I'm not 100% sure if this is right, but I believe it's right that crypto was illegal in Wyoming until it was not illegal. I don't really know what it means for something to be illegal in Wyoming. Yeah, they had very onerous, if I recall correctly, and you're right, it's on a 180 degree shift, but I think for their MSB licenses, they required a very high capital requirement. And so it was basically impossible to operate in the state.

Right. I wonder if they just didn't want that business activity in the state or there was other, I wish I knew more about why they did that. But I know that when we were there, we were there and what we had heard was that the regulators and the politicians were moving away from that and they were about to do. This was before they had done the 180. We were in, like, Wyoming meeting with municipalities, like these tiny self-run power companies, which are basically run by like these munis, muni power companies, and landlords looking at out of the way warehouses that we could build into this purpose-built mining data center. And they would ask us, like, what are you doing? And we're like, uh, we're in like cowboy country. Like cowboy boots and hats and pickup trucks. And we're like two city boys being like, I think we want to build an internet facility here.

Is you telling people at the data center? Yeah. For the folks that really kind of knew what a data center was, we'd be like, yeah, we're going to build like a data center. And they would look at us with these puzzled eyes, like, why are you building a data center here? There are areas in the country where Google and Amazon build data centers, and it wasn't where we were. And so it was actually really funny. We spent a lot of time with like a ton of these, like tiny little towns and mayors, shaking hands with mayors and like small towns. It was super fun. A really, really, really fun time in my crypto entrepreneurship career.

so wild. And ultimately, I won't tell you where our mine actually is. It's in the Pacific Northwest. The reason why I won't tell you specifically where it is is because, you know, whatever, security, yada, yada, yada. But we ended up in the Pacific Northwest. We sadly didn't end up in Wyoming. We had at one point worked on a deal with a landlord over there and the deal fell through. That happened like 10 times, by the way, before we actually landed on the place that we did. It was so common. We'd be like, yeah, we do. We have the money for a down payment. And then like we'd never hear from the landlord again. And we'd be like, what is going on? So we ended up in the Pacific Northwest, and we built from the ground up a 4.7 megawatt facility.

So significantly bigger than the test facility. We're not talking a bit-main-sized mining facility here. It's still relatively small, but pretty big for like a two-person operation. It's a few thousand A6. And that process involves negotiating power rates with the muni, making sure that you're literally cutting holes in the side of a building to put giant fans for passive cooling, buying and building and installing transformers and transformation and transmission and upgrading transmission lines from the actual power company and like paying for those things and then like building out like

racks and power delivery units, which are a fancy word for a giant power strip to be able to plug these things in and make sure that they can run efficiently. So incredibly fun experience learned so much about the nuances of how these networks are secured and how blocks are produced, how rewards are generated, who are the main. players, unpopular opinion, there's like not that many mining pools and the majority of miners connect to a handful of mining pools. I'll probably catch some flack for this. I don't know if that's unpopular. It's factual. There's only a handful of mining pools. I think the implication there is that Bitcoin's not that decentralized and people get mad about when you say like those kinds of words.

Yeah. And to be fair, the mining pools don't necessarily represent the level of centralization of the network in the sense that people are contributing to hash from all over into the mining pool. It's true. That is like 100% true that people are contributing. attributing hash to those pools, I think it's more like, well, if the pool decides it wants to be a bad actor, it could, because it has the power to write, rewrite parts of the chain. Totally. I'm not going to take us on a left turn here, but the better hash proposal by Matt Corallo at Chaincode Labs actually working to address some of this is really interesting. Yeah, yeah, I got a cursory look at that. Cool stuff.

Really, really cool stuff. So that was the foray into Prove of Work Mining. We still own and operated. It's up and running. It's super fun. I absolutely love it every once in a while. I fly out there and go visit, most of what we do is remotely controlled. We're in New York.

So it's remotely controlled from New York and really, really, really fun stuff. That's great. At the risk of taking us down another left turn, I'm always continually fascinated by how miners actually think about managing their inventory of coins and whether or not miners are cyclical in nature in sense of they're holding more crypto assets as the price is going up, but as the price is going down and they're paying U.S. dollar costs, they're kind of forced sellers. And so you have these crazy runs up and crazy runs down. and partially driven by the fact that the miners are cyclical.

Yeah, I'll try not to go too far down this left turn. But there's really different types of operations around mining. We took a coin or treasury management approach that's slightly less risky in that the way that we operate the mine in terms of like when we sell, how we sell, what cadence we do that in is a way to reduce our exposure to volatility in the market. So while some folks will mine a whole bunch of Bitcoin and then we'll hold it for as long as they possibly can, but they're still paying costs in USD. They want to see the upswings. We actually sell at a pretty regular interval. And so it's in a lot of ways, it kind of looks a little bit

like a dollar cost average out of Bitcoin. Now, what you want to do with that money and like the tax implication, et cetera. There's like some nuances there around like the taxes around it. You can always go back into Bitcoin, like almost immediately, which we do with some portion. Got it. That makes sense. So that's a great lead in to bison trails. So I'd imagine that as you're doing this mining experiment and we see new blockchains being launched, you start to see this opportunity to build this company. So let's get into that. What does Bison Trails do? Yeah. So Bison Trails is an infrastructure as a service company, specifically focused on blockchain participation. So what we've done is we've built a one-click platform for folks that

want to participate in new chains, predominantly proof of stake networks without having to build any of the engineering, protocol, DevOps, security competencies in-house. So we service some of the world's top custodians, exchanges, and funds that want to participate in these networks. We make it incredibly easy to run your own block production, validating, block signing nodes in these networks. It's traditionally kind of a pain in the butt to do and pretty hard to do, and you need to have a really strong technical background to do it. There's a couple of reasons why we ended up doing that.

So when we were building this proof of work mine, we learned a ton about like infrastructure behind these networks. At the exact same time, Aaron and I were also working on building a couple of different software proofs of concept on a few of these different protocols, so things like Tezos and Cosmos and Ethereum. And we were building a few, again, getting back to this whole like entrepreneurship journey. Like we were like, let's build a couple of things that are interesting. We built a wallet. At one point, we had built an exchange and a bot that traded assets on decentralized exchanges. None of those things were that interesting to us personally as like a business that we wanted to

build. But the thing that we realized is that we kept rebuilding some of the same infrastructure pieces to make sure that the services we were building could connect reliably and securely connect to these different protocols. So if you're building something on Ethereum, you want to make sure that you have, like, reliable and secure access, like, the Ethereum network. And same thing with like a Cosmos or a Tesos. The other thing that was happening with these new proof of stake protocols was that there was a shift happening in the way the networks are being secured. So if you move away from proof of work towards proof of stake, the networks are being secured by generally speaking commodity hardware that's acting differently. It's not about solving a hash. It's more about

being a good actor in the networks. So propagating messages, validating blocks, proposing blocks, et cetera. And that is also really hard to run, manage, date, manage forks, et cetera, et cetera. So we found ourselves kind of squarely in between these two scenarios that were happening. One, we had a tremendous amount of tacit knowledge about like how these networks were being built and run and operated on the proof of work side. And two, we were trying to build software in these new networks that were either just about to come out or just coming out and it was nuanced and a lot of the software was beta and it was really hard. And we took a step back and we said, whoa, this is crazy.

It needs to be easier for people to be able to participate in these networks. And this idea that you need to be both well-versed in like the economic theory of what it means to change the block reward and also be incredibly technical to be able to run voting nodes on a network. It didn't make sense to us. It was like, why do you have to do both? The person that knows how to do both of these things is do they exist? Is that like a thing that exists? So we said we can make the tech part much easier. Let's build a company that's focused on making it way easier for people to participate in these chains.

And that was the genesis of bison trails. The story behind the name. Yeah, let's get back to the name. Since you didn't ask, but it's a quick one, and it's kind of relevant to the proof of work story. When we were naming the company, we were like, well, we have an opportunity to, like, name it something that sounds very, like, technical and infrastructure sounding. Or we can kind of give, like, a little hat tip to some of our roots of some of the early work we did. and the state animal of Wyoming is the bison. And so we were like, we started looking at, we were like, why don't we name it something

that has to do with, like, Wyoming? And we're like, oh, the bison is actually a really interesting animal. If you dig into them, bison are incredibly powerful. They're really hard to tame. But they're also notorious for paving paths forward for pioneers in the early days of folks moving across the country. And they would create these paths and these trails for people to follow, for pioneers to follow.

And so we're like, this is really cool. It feels like it sends the right message. It's more our personalities, a little bit more our personalities and, like, a very tech-sounding company name. And so it was like a kind of a fun way for us to like be like, oh, like, you know what? Let's sort of kick it up to some of the early work we did. I love that story. And it's great that it's not a block or a chain or a coin in the name, like most of the

companies in the space. So talking about paving that path forward, we're definitely seeing a Cambrian explosion of innovation around new blockchains coming out in different categories. So you have the smart contract platform kind of category with tons of stuff going on there. You have utility networks, things that are trying to provision file storage. or digital compute, you have app-specific networks being launched. So maybe just what is the most interesting thing or categories for you going on?

Like, where are you seeing actual adoption and innovation happening in terms of these new blockchains being launched? Totally. So it's a very good question because it's a very hard question. And it's a hard question because we still believe that the ecosystem is incredibly young. The blockchain and crypto space has seen the majority. of its traction in the sort of financial services world, whether it's like lending or derivatives or trading and all of those types of products. And we've seen new protocols and platforms being

built in service of that pillar. What I think is incredibly interesting is actually the amalgamation of all of these different new protocols that you're describing. So the file storage, utility networks, decentralized compute, all of those things combining to create an ecosystem where people can build new decentralized services in areas that, are outside of specifically the financial services world. So not that the financial services world is saturated in, like, crypto, because it's not. It was still a baby, as far as I'm concerned. But I think we're going to start to see a lot more products and services that are built in the

social networking space, that are built in the ad tech space, in the marketplaces and e-commerce space that are going to leverage a lot of these smart contracting platforms, decentralized storage, decentralized compute. And we're really excited about that because the majority of these decentralized networks and protocols are going to have protocol participation baked into them. So if you're building a product or service in the space, you're going to want to serve the network that you're operating on. And you have an opportunity to serve the network that you're operating on.

So that to us is incredibly cool. Yeah, that makes sense. So let's get to that participation part. What are the categories of customers that are actually participating on these networks now? I mean, the average person who listens to this podcast probably is not actively participating yet on a blockchain network. Maybe they are. Well, they should.

Yeah, we'll see. Maybe they're mining. But what is the profile for a customer that is participating? So token distribution, I think, is an interesting, like, hot topic, right? Like, who is actually holding the tokens in these networks? And the majority of these networks require some kind of token ownership to be able to participate in them from a security block production validation standpoint. So if you really believe in Cosmos or Tezos, for instance, and you would like to help

secure that network, you can. delegate your Tessies or your Adams to someone who's helping secure that network. Or if you hold a lot of them, you can actually run a validator yourself using Bison Trails to be able to do that. Not that I'm chilling the company, but the idea is that you can help participate in that network. Different network, the more mature the network is. So a network like Ethereum has a much better token distribution than a really, really

young network that raised money and launched. A lot of times we're seeing a lot of those tokens being held by folks that work on the protocol. So, like, you know, a lot of the open source teams and the foundation teams. And then we're seeing it a lot of investors, outside investors, are holding those tokens. So right now, the folks, the majority of folks that are participating in the networks are folks like investors, early protocol developers and teams and companies that were really early in the development of that protocol.

And then we're starting to see some of the other players where those people that hold those assets basically hold their tokens. So like exchanges or custodians that are getting. involves. You mentioned the funds. And so there's been some conversation in the industry around if you're a crypto fund, do you need to be participating in these networks? Is this something that every fund should be trying to figure out how to stake their crypto assets? I mean, how do you think about this? I've always been a little bit perplexed about this because funds don't do securities lending on their own. They outsource that type of behavior. So maybe I'm teeing you up to say

everyone should just outsource it to bison trails. But what do you think of this idea that part of being an investor in the crypto space means that you need to participate on the networks. I think that every ecosystem is comprised of active and passive investors. And I think that's completely natural and completely fine. I do think that blockchains and crypto in particular are unique in that the proportion of folks that are investing in the space should be participating in the networks. There's a couple of reasons for that. Improved-of-stake networks. If you were to buy a thousand dollars worth of a network and that network is inflating over time, you want to make sure that the value of the $1,000 U.S. worth of that asset that you're holding doesn't deflate over time as the network inflates.

And so you'd want to participate in that inflation so that you're inflating with the network. So there's a bit of preservation of the investment that's – I'm not going to tell people how they should strategize their fund portfolio management. But there's that element. So there's a kind of like – I want to make sure my investment is worth at least as much as it was when I originally put it in. Hopefully that network scales up and gains a lot of traction. It's worth way, way, way more, right? Like that's the idea. And on that same note, really the thing that's more interesting, even more interesting to me is active participation in a network is a form of governance and a form of support that I believe that folks that are early stage investors should be doing.

And it's actually a kind of hard thing to do. It's easier now that Bison Trails is around for funds. But I think it's a really important part of the ecosystem. So you as an investor should invest in a protocol. you should help that protocol as much as you possibly can. One of the ways you uniquely can do that in holding that protocol's asset is helping secure the network to make it more stable, to make it easier for people to build on. So yes, I think that everyone who's buying digital assets in these protocols should be helping secure the networks. And so how do you see this market structure evolving?

Obviously, you're serving a lot of crypto funds right now that are enlarge asset holders on these networks and just making it very easy for them to participate and delegate and create blocks. there have also been some exchanges that have moved into the space and allowed people to stake Tesos recently with Benance and Cracken in, maybe custodians someday start to offer similar type of services. How do you think this will play out over the next few years in terms of the market landscape? I think we're seeing a lot of those financial services companies, so like the exchanges and the custodians and the prime brokerage firms and all these folks, they're doing two things. They're looking at the traditional finance markets and saying what are the products

and services that exist in traditional finance that we should probably replicate to create a robust ecosystem, which makes a ton of sense to me. And they're also asking themselves, what are the unique opportunities that crypto and blockchain presents? And so when you have like an exchange or a custodian or another service provider that gets into staking or voting on a network, to some extent, it's relatively unique to crypto. You could say being a shareholder or something and voting is like, you know, maybe some kind of analogy there, although I'm not saying digital assets or, or securities or not. I don't want to get into that. Breaking news. I don't want to get into that conversation either. But specifically staking, for instance, and securing the network is unique to crypto.

And so it doesn't surprise me at all that these folks are getting involved in the space. And it's great for us. It's great for Bison Trails because we can help some of these teams. There's lots of exchanges. Benance is doing some staking on Tezos. And there's lots of custodians and exchanges that are still trying to figure out how do they cover 40, 50 assets, 60 assets, 60 different protocols, which is a non-trivial amount of work. And us as a service provider can make it so they can integrate those assets incredibly easy. That makes sense. One of the interesting things about this industry over time that I've noticed, and I find it

kind of paradoxical, is that this is a technology that allows for kind of a level of decentralization that is self-sovereign. So it allows you to hold your own money as an individual, hold your own data, potentially. And what do we see? Of course, the breakout company, the kind of highest performing company in the whole industry is Cornbase and they aggregate and it's a great delightful product for most people. They hold a lot of Bitcoin though. So they've re-intermediated a layer there. And then you had the private blockchain movement, which was all about let's decentralize, but actually let's just re-intermediate using

company XYZ as an intermediary. That probably didn't go as well as the coin base example. Do you risk that with proof of stake networks, with some of the attributes about them, particularly around slashing and some of the penalties around non-participation or or not having your note up and running, that we actually might be in a similar situation where things start to centralize at the operations level for these networks. So that's a really good question.

And it also can be framed in the sort of landscape of bison trails as well, which is cool because it allows me to kind of step in and be like, hey, here's what we think, why we think we're doing the right thing here. So there's two things. One, I think it's completely natural that there's a tendency to sort of circle around

like a more centralized version, like a Coinbase or something. And that's really because, And I've said this, I've spoken about this with friends and folks in the industry, it's still really hard. Crypto and blockchain is still really hard. It's actually kind of hard to buy Bitcoin. If you ask someone who hasn't ever bought Bitcoin before, like go buy Bitcoin, like, it's not

that easy to do. And so these large companies, here we are, like you said, like these large companies are kind of emerging. They're making it easier. And I think that ultimately the way that we actually achieve some of these, the promise of an actual decentralized future is by making it easier over time and that decentralized steps or a necessary point in getting more adoption while we continue to decentralize these networks and make the experience easier around like buying and trading and selling and moving and certain

products and services that are built on these transfer of value protocols. At Bison Trails, we are acutely aware that we want to make sure that these networks are decentralized even at the operational level. So as an example, one of the things that's very unique about our platform is that we've built an abstraction layer across a whole number of compute service providers. So Amazon, AWS and Google Cloud and Azure to the point where we are helping these networks have coverage across a whole bunch of different independent service providers as well alongside some of the big ones. So we make sure that there's staking nodes that are in Southeast Asia, in multi zone, multi-region, multi-cloud provider, which is honestly kind of like on the cutting edge of even enterprise cloud computing. It's super, super cool stuff.

And we are constantly trying to strike this balance between like, okay, we want to make sure that we're. helping the networks so that like if you spin up a whole network all on Amazon, AWS East, and there's a problem there, like the network doesn't just go down. And Bison Trails is actually helping make sure that there's no distribution across a whole bunch of these different providers. That makes sense. So from your seat, you have a really interesting angle on some of the entrepreneurial journeys of some of these teams that are actually building the protocols. And so that are innovating around smart contract platforms and some of these utility networks. And so you're having these conversations with these people that are actually

building them. One, I'd be curious to get your perspective on just the regulatory landscape in the United States right now for those entrepreneurs. I mean, there's a big question around can these things actually convert from SAFs into main net and should you even be in the United States? How are your customers thinking about this? Yeah. So first of all, my favorite part of the whole job is getting to work closely with protocol teams. I'm, you know, I said this earlier in the podcast. Some of the smartest people I've ever met in my entire life are people that are left like really cushy, great jobs at a huge tech company and been like, you know what, I'm going to build this protocol because I think it can change the world. They're incredible people to be around,

and I feel fortunate to be able to have that opportunity. I also think people are, the folks that we engage with on a regular basis are pretty devoted to the ethos and pretty devoted to the promise of blockchain and decentralized ecosystem. And they're figuring out how they can both not break the law and be compliant, but also still move the entire industry for. forward. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for that work and the courage it takes to be able to do that. For someone to say, hey, this might be illegal, not this is illegal, but this might not be okay over here. And you just say, like, okay, well, I'm going to figure out how it's okay. And I'm going to help move that forward and have the conversations with the regulators and the folks

in government that are making those rules. I think it's incredibly courageous. And so I'm very, very proud of both the protocol founders, some of the investors that are involved in that. And then also our team as well, so we were pretty regularly engaged with a bunch of different regulatory bodies as well. All that being said, I want this innovation to happen here. I think it's incredibly important that this innovation does happen here. I'm a little known fact about Joe. I'm an immigrant. I'm not American. I came here from Canada. I love America. I made America my home. I'm very proud of being in this country. And I think it's one of the most incredibly innovative places in the world. The opportunity here is unrivaled anywhere else. in the world that I've been, and I wanted to continue down that path. So I'm very proud of these courageous people and really proud to be a part of that. I think that the regulatory landscape is, I view it as a challenge, a today challenge, but I do think that as some of the nuances and

details get worked out, everyone that I know is trying to do the right thing. Most of the folks that I think are really, really great are trying to figure out how to do the right thing, not skirt. And I think like it's really engaging in having the conversations is the only way to get that done. One of the tough things is that it's not immediately clear what the concrete ask ought to be out of the regulators. Depending on where you're sitting, I suppose if you're trying to do a security token, you just want clarity under the SEC's eyes around what a good control location is. And so that's a pretty specific ask that you just want them to opine on that. With a lot of these other protocols, you're kind of talking about how we test and is this security, is it not a security?

From the entrepreneurs that you're talking to, is there a concrete ask yet or is it just for flexibility? and kind of a sandbox type of environment. I would say that the majority, okay, so this is definitely an opinion and probably like an overgeneralization, but I would say like the majority of folks I talk to are asking for a bit of leeway considering how new and unique the industry is with like at least some kind of guidance in mind so they can move in the right direction. It's kind of like, like you said, if you're launching a security token, like you want to know specifically what the rules are and you want to not break those rules and that's like totally

fine. The other side is kind of like, look, we want to do this thing. we're not sure if it is X or Y or Z. We're not trying to break the law, but we think this is an incredibly important innovation. How do we keep you in the loop? And so that when it gets a little bit further along the innovation cycle, we can say, like, okay, here's how we should regulate it and make sure that it's safe, make sure that it's not being used for illicit activity in a way that's not

controllable and understandable and all those things. So I do think that that's the right approach. Naturally, it also does take regulators longer than technologists to move forward. and I think that that's okay because they're trying to be thoughtful and trying to be all-encompassing, and that's a really hard thing to do in a fast-paced industry. I'd say, like, I'm seeing, I think we're seeing people trying to do the right thing, which is very cool. And I guess part of the tension has also just been that there were a lot of bad actors during that ICU boom that we still haven't seen some of those enforcement actions.

So it just seems like there's a backlog. So hopefully it starts to get clearer. I've kind of learned over the course of my career that in any place where there's opportunity, there's always going to be bad actors. And that's just like how the world works. It's unfortunate, but like that is kind of how the world works. Oh, yeah. I mean, if you had a technology that was not being used by scammers and bad actors in its early days,

then it probably is not a disruptive technology. Well, you can really just look at the internet. Look at the telephone. Look at, I mean, it's every single breakthrough technology. You're going to find people, hucksters in the early days. I'm going to out myself here. My first usage of PayPal was I like to play backgammon, and I was gambling on the internet playing backgammon online.

That was like my first time. I ever used PayPal. I remember like I like I remember how young I was. I was still pretty young. I think I had to like use my parents money and like you know convince them to like give me some money on like the internet to like gamble on backgammon and like look at PayPal now. It's an amazing company and I was helped move the entire industry forward and you know the internet broadly has like helped the world tremendously. I feel like almost all transformative technologies kind of have some form of like weird like gray area to it that like eventually we mature out of. I think that's right. And it's you'd be surprised in all of the podcast that we've done, we've never had someone tell the story of the way that they got

into crypto was buying marijuana on the Silk Road. But I'm sure there's a lot of those stories out there in this industry. So maybe... No one, hold on a second. No one has admitted to buying pot on the Silk Road using Bitcoin as the first time they got into crypto. No, it's surprising. Actually, in all my years of talking to people in this whole industry, the Silk Road has never come up once, but we know factually that that was the number one kind of use case in the early days. So I'm surprised we don't hear more about that or maybe people using... offshore betting on sports. That was a big use case in the early days.

You should ask people to come on the show if they ever used the Silk Road. It's just like, I'm just right on the show. I feel like if you were someone who had Bitcoin in 2012, I don't hold me on the dates, but I think that's around Silk Road time. I don't know if it still exists or it was like maybe height of it. You were probably using the Silk Road.

It was the number one commercial enterprise built in the blockchain space. Or you were like just a huge nerd and you were like really interested in Bitcoin itself for the technology. But if you weren't that, what else did you have Bitcoin for? Yeah, I mean, there was faucets. I mean, there was little toys, right? They looked like toys at the time. Gavin Indriessen was running a giveaway faucet, giving away five bitcoins that are pop.

And those were the days. So I want to talk about Libra. So you guys are a founding member of the Libra Association. So talk a little bit about your involvement in this project, how you got to become part of it and what you're doing as part of the Libra. Awesome. Yeah. So first off, we're super excited and fortunate to be a part of the Libra Association.

One of the most interesting things about Libra is how contentious it is as like a concept or a project. Like people either really love it or really hate it. So we've built a protocol in blockchain agnostic platform, which means that we want to see the entire ecosystem thrive, whether that's Libra network or Ethereum or ETH2 in the beacon chain or NIR or Solana or I feel like I'm unjustly naming a handful. but there's a ton of networks that are coming out. We want to see them all thrive. We know that some of them will do incredibly well, and some won't do it as well, and that's the nature of new technology advancements.

So we're super excited to be involved in Libra, but really, Libra is another network for us. The way we got involved is they approached us. So over the last few years, we, Aaron and myself and the early team, had been working on some of the earliest proof-of-sake networks, so things like Life Here in Cosmos and Tezos, and we had been doing a lot of sort of unscalable, like, community type work.

We've open-source scripts. We've been heavily engaged in the communities. And we always took this, from early on, we took this approach that if this an ecosystem is going to work and any of these networks are going to work, there needs to be enterprise-grade, like really mature infrastructure to support this. It can't just be run on a couple of raspberry pies in someone's dorm room. And so we were pretty adamant on, like, building a very professional approach to supporting these networks.

we met the Libra team very early on in their journey, and they approached us, and they said, we've talked to a whole bunch of different protocols in the space. We've talked to a couple of teams in the space, and your name keeps coming up. Like, Bison Trails keeps coming up. What are you doing that people are talking about you all in being like really good actors in the ecosystem? We explained, hey, we're an infrastructure company. We want to help folks run nodes to secure the networks. And they said, we need your help.

We're trying to build this. Okay, backtrack. Actually, what happened was at the time, they were. still Facebook employees and they said we're working on a blockchain and I was super skeptical because to me I was like oh man Facebook I don't know like is this a right is this the thing I'm very very skeptical of this and I was kind of like I'm not sure if like this is something that we want to be doing because we've been so focused on like public open source chains then we got to know the team a little bit better we started to understand what they were trying

to do that that Facebook was actually taking this initiative in building the Libre Association and that they were moving it forward and the idea was to get an association of 100 entities together, so social impact partners, for-profit companies, universities, you name it, et cetera, through different industries to help govern this new blockchain that was going to have access to two and a half or three billion people through partners. And that's when we were like, whoa, this is super interesting. It's not just a Facebook thing. Facebook wants to be just one vote alongside Bison Trails and alongside Women's World Bank and alongside Kiva and alongside Andreson Horowitz to help govern this network.

And that's when we're like, oh, this is super interesting. And we are uniquely positioned to be able to help you. Like we know how to do this. We've been working on a lot of these early protocols from day zero. We're working with protocol founders from day zero, hearing their stories, helping them build, deploy, launch, manage these test nets. It's not uncommon for Bison and trails to run a test net with a protocol for nine months, 12 months before it goes live. We've been doing that for the last few years. And then like, you know, Maynet comes out and people like, oh, wow, like Cosmos launched. And we're like, we've been on Cosmos for a year on the test net of Cosmos for a year,

helping debug, helping solve some of the protocol problems. So they came to us. Our involvement early on was really about like helping provide guidance and feedback on like the white paper and how they were thinking about the technology. We got to meet a lot of the folks that were working on it inside Facebook and then help provide guidance on what it would actually mean to create this association and then work closely with eventually with the other association members to formalize the association. I would say that our, again, like just getting back to we're a tech company. So we are a tech company and our involvement

with Libra is mostly on the tech side. I'm on the council. So I vote on anything governance related with regards to Libra, which is great. And I vote on behalf of Bison Trails and our company. But we are really, really involved in the tech side. So we published a blog post recently about like how to run a validator node on Libra. We're actively involved in like the developer community and helping folks understand what it means to build something on Libra and trying to provide infrastructure tools for people to be able to do that as the network goes from TestNet to Mainnet. So on the tech side, we're very, very involved. And then I'd say like on the governance side, one of my favorite things about being in the Libra Association is that we get to be the crypto-native,

blockchain native company that's like, okay, we're trying to move the ecosystem forward and hold the mission near and dear to us. You know, like, let's actually decentralize this thing. Let's make sure we're doing the right thing by the promise of the ecosystem. So it's got to be hard enough on the tech side. And I'm sure that you're very comfortable on that front and working through the council. But the council also presumably is driving all of the regulatory discussions as well. How does that work at the council level?

Is it just a work stream on tech, work stream on regulatory? We're still kind of figuring some of this stuff out. So in October, the council officially, became a council. So we signed the papers joining the council. Officially, the 21 members joined. And then we, like, voted in a board for the council and started voting in some of the operational roles in the council. So we're still, one of the things that, like, I have a greater appreciation for is, like, how hard it is to organize 20 organizations. It takes a tremendous amount of work. So I think the announcement for Libra was in June, middle or end of June, sometime, sometime around

that, like, maybe beginning of July. It's really only been a few months since, like, we announced did and started getting involved. So it's still very, very early. As far as like the regulatory side is, like we're working really closely with regulators all around the world to make sure that they understand what the project is, what it's trying to achieve, and how we can move forward and make sure we're doing right by, you know, the regulators as well as the technology and the ecosystem. Well, it's definitely going to be an interesting one to keep an eye on. If you think about the distribution power, Facebook and some of those partners, we're talking about the ability to put public, private key cryptography into more hands than I've ever had it before. So

It's really exciting. I'm incredibly excited by that. And I've said a number of times in different forums that like the best way to get more people using blockchain and crypto is to kind of make it a little less obvious that they're using blockchain and crypto. And when I say less obvious, I don't mean dupe them. I mean, just make the U.X better so that it's not so you're not necessarily knowing that you're engaging like a blockchain protocol or in crypto asset, that you're transferring it

as easily as you would transfer on any other centralized service. You know, like I don't want to throw any of the bus. but using a centralized service to transfer money. But instead, this is like verifiable in public. Absolutely, absolutely. So transitioning a little bit here. So you recently raised $25.5 million in a series of congratulations, led by blockchain capital. We were talking a little bit before we started recording just around the fundraising process.

And so curious to get your perspective. I mean, probably some people listening to this who are trying to raise capital for their startups, maybe having some issues. Just what is that capital raising process like in this environment right now? Oh, Matt, you're going to make me be the bleeding heart on the podcast. It's hard. I think, look, like being an entrepreneur and being a founder is hard no matter what. I'm always surprised by we get a lot of Lori stories, sort of glorifying like entrepreneurship and startups, which is great.

I mean, it's great. I want more entrepreneurs. I like to invest in entrepreneurs. I like to help advise them and like working with them. So I'm all for it. And I think like founders are a really great way to move industries forward. But it is hard. It is super, super hard.

So first of all, thank you for the kind words. I'm super appreciative of the team at blockchain capital and the other folks that joined us in this financing. So I've always found that raising money in any environment is hard. I know people kind of talk of, they've sort of bucketed in like bear versus bull market. In a bull market, it's like super easy. I actually think that if you're finding it way easier, you're maybe being a little too loose as to who you're taking money from. This is my opinion, obviously. I've always viewed investors as joining the team in like really thinking of them as

long-term partners and not just capital. And I think, like, the best investors in the world can be way more impactful than just giving you dollars or money and try and build the world that you want to see. So I've always found fundraising incredibly grueling. I think it takes a lot of time and effort. You know, you're constantly trying to convince someone that, like, the way you see the world is the right way and that you're going to build it and you hear no, a hundred thousand times more than you hear yes. That's hard. It's psychologically difficult. It takes a lot of lot of time and effort and it really takes an insane amount of determination to like keep going and push through. And I also feel maybe next time we can get Aaron, my co-founder on the podcast as well,

I'm incredibly appreciative of him and the rest of our team here because everybody here has, you know, has had some say and some effort in the fundraising process, whether it's, you know, the engineers that are building the incredible product, the brand and designers and marketers that are like, you know, helping us tell the story and demystify the technology, or just like Aaron, my co-founder, who would happily sit in my office with me and I'd be like basically on the brink of tears being like, everything's falling apart. This sucks. I hate everything. And him being like, it's going to be fine. Don't worry about it. You know, like sometimes you just need like that shoulder to quote unquote cry on. But yeah, I think it's hard no matter what, honestly. Still, and obviously not impossible.

And I think like the most important thing is build something that people need and build something that people want. And I think we're, you know, we've been seeing a lot of folks that are very excited about the product that we're building. And we're continuing to really strive to be the absolute best in the industry of what we do. Well, it's got to be a lot harder in an industry where you're probably walking into some rooms where people are saying, well, what is proof of stake or tell me about money. This is a degree of difficulty here just on the subject matter. We have had, oh man, I walked into a room once where I sat down. So this person had seen our investment deck prior. I had sat down. First one minute, I'm like, hi, I'm Joe. And they're like, hi, I'm Dave.

Name's not Dave. Like, hi, I'm Dave. And the first thing they said to me was we haven't looked at the blockchain or crypto industry in two years as an investment fund. Why should we now? I literally just looked at him. I was like, this is going to be a really long hour. While that's kind of funny in retrospect at the time, I was like a little bit annoyed. But also, I think, that you have to have a little bit of humor and not take yourself too seriously either. Like, you know, I could have been like mad. I could have like ran out. I could have been like, what the hell? Instead, I was like, you know what? I'll spend the hour telling you about why proof of stake is awesome and why blockchains are amazing and that you've missed out on the coolest stuff

in the last two years. And I did that. Ultimately, they didn't invest in the company, which is fine. And they were probably a bad fit for us anyways. But I had a good time with it. It was super fun. And that person's super nice, too. They weren't being a jerk about it. They were just like, I think that maybe we shouldn't be really talking. Maybe they like blockchain. not crypto. Yeah. Who knows. But yes, lots and lots of people are skeptic. I think like the venture world in general does move in cycles. I think people get really excited about something and then they invest too easily also. The flip side of this is like for the founders out there, I'm sorry, for the VCs out there, you sometimes write too much, you write checks too easily in bull markets

because you're afraid that you're going to miss out on a deal. That's a real thing that actually happened. So it might be easier to raise money, but that doesn't mean it should be easier because you should be really doing the diligence on both sides. Like, who are the people you're going to get married to for the next at least 10 years? Very well said. So the closing question, so now that you've raised the capital, your team's growing like crazy, adding customers left and right here, what are you the most excited about both for the company and for the industry over the next 12 months?

Oh, man. So on the company side, I'm the type of person that really loves building teams. And I love assembling teams of, like, incredibly, incredibly smart people that are just love to work hard. Like I personally love working. I love working hard. I like challenging myself. I like challenging the people around me. And I love to build teams that thrive in that kind of environment. And so I'm super excited to continue to grow our team and super excited to be able to serve our customers with better products and better services in growing those teams. So bringing people on that like think about things that I didn't think about like, hey, we should do this. We should do this thing for

this protocol or we should do this thing for this fund or this custodian or this exchange. That like really, really excites me. And I think the next 12 months, there is just, for a little while, I was calling Q4 2019 the event horizon of like proof of stake because there was 15 protocols that were supposed to launch in Q4 of 2019. A lot of those protocols have been delayed and they are launching in Q1 of 2020. So there is a lot happening in the next 12 months in the proof of stake world and in generally speaking in the crypto world. And so that's kind of the answer to both questions. incredibly excited to serve this new market and really excited to see what happens with a lot of these networks that come out over the next 12 months that we've been working and supporting for

a year plus and that so, so, so pumped. I wake up every morning like jazz to come to work. I'm like, we got to keep going. It's so exciting. It definitely shows. And we're excited to keep an eye on it. So where can people find out more about Bison Trails? Yeah, awesome. So you can come to bisontrails.com. We are hiring for a whole slew of engineering jobs, product management, management, business development, marketing, infrastructure engineering, protocol engineering, really, really cross-bable. We're actually hiring like a ton, like a whole bunch of different roles still, even though last time you heard of the team was much smaller. We're still hiring more. And you can also find us on Twitter at Bison Trails. Feel free to email me, Joe at bisontrails.com at any time.

I'm happy to receive emails from people, even if you just want to know more about what we're doing. Yeah, that's where they can find us. That's great. Joe, thanks so much for joining the pod. Matt, thanks so much for having me. This has been another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island Ventures. To learn more or to subscribe to our newsletter, please visit castlelisland.VC. And a big thank you to all of our listeners, except those of you who believe in the underlying blockchain technology, but not cryptocurrency. You know who you are.