On The Brink with Castle Island - Nikos Andrikogiannopoulos (Metrika) on blockchain reliability (EP.256)

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Nikos Andrikogiannopoulos. the founder of Metrika joins the show. In this episode we discuss: Nikos' journey to the blockchain industry and how we came to see the opportunity to found Metrika How Metrika thinks about monitoring public blockchains for reliability and downtime Perspectives on the common reasons that blockchains go down Nikos's perspective on the use cases that are driving blockchain adoption How Metrika prioritizes the blockchain networks that it covers To learn more about Metrika visit their website.   Sponsor content:  This episode is brought to you by Withum, a top 25 accounting firm with a cutting-edge Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology practice. To learn more, visit  withum.com/crypto. This show is supported by OurCrowd. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community at OurCrowd.com/OTB

This episode is brought to you by Withem and Our Crowd. More on those companies later in the episode. Today on the podcast, I sat down with Nicos and Drico Giannopoulos. Nicos is the founder and CEO of Matrika, which is a blockchain monitoring and intelligence company. This was a great conversation. We talked on a number of issues, including recent blockchain outages, how Nicos and the team thinks about the various blockchain projects that they should be monitoring for

downtimes. And more broadly, how he thinks about the applications that are driving the build out of infrastructure in the blockchain. I think you'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Nikos from Matrika. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans, American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. 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 quantitative easing. 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. Nikos, well, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast.

Thank you, Matt. Thank you for having me on. You're in Cambridge right now, so it's great to see another Boston-slash-Cambridge-based company coming on the podcast. And congratulations on the recent fundraise. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, we've been enjoying some amazing days lately in Boston, so I hope we keep having them. I know. Well, you can be guaranteed that it's going to get colder. The fall is definitely the best time. Why don't we just start off with a little bit of background on you, tell people how you got into the crypto industry,

and what led you to founding Matrika. As you can tell by my very long last name, I grew up in Greece, but I came to MIT4 grad school. I've always been on the side of the technology, being an engineer myself. So I've always been kind of focusing on data networking and telecommunications. So that has been kind of a long-time passion. I think historically I've seen how kind of the data communications has transformed people's lives, enabling more and more applications and more use cases. When I graduated from MIT, I got into the data networking kind of industry, the telecom industry.

I started kind of getting more and more familiar with the kind of tools, what is happening in the background in the telecom, the kind of infrastructure that is being built. And I've been hugely fascinated by how sophisticated operations have become, tier one service providers, you know, companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, VT, and T-Mobile and so on, Deutsche Telecom and so on. So I think when Bitcoin came around, I started being fascinated by the fact that now we have a new application kind of on top of data networking that you can actually transfer not just information, but transfer value. And the questions that, you know, I started having in my mind is that what are kind of the operational requirements of a network like that? Is it good enough if kind of money just flows and is a little bit late or is it a little bit kind of earlier? Do people care about if some nodes go down, if some others don't, if some transactions get rejected? So we had got used to, I think, to a world, I had got used to kind of things that had very high operational requirements that had service layer agreements. And I started asking myself those questions and I got fascinated.

I thought, oh, now we're having like the highest dollar per bit traversing the network. What's the level of service assurance that requires? And that kind of drew me into a crypto space. It was basically those kind of fundamental questions of thinking at that level of sophistication that exists in the telecom industry in data networking, what are the parallels and what is there? And I was actually fascinated at the beginning that the answers I was getting was that it doesn't really matter. Those things don't exist. I kept digging and that kind of drew me more and more into the space. If I recall correctly, one of the projects that you were involved with in

the early days was Algarand. Was that one of the first networks that you dove into from a technical perspective. Algorand is a neighbor in Boston. That was one of the projects where I gave a presentation to Algorand, kind of at the beginning of 2019. I started, you know, asking those questions very early on about network resiliency and how that works. And it so happened that Algrant that time was launching their test net. I started running operational intelligence on their test net. And I started seeing things that together with the Algaran guys were fascinated. We could see when nodes were rebooting, we could time things, so we could basically see under the hood and get a very good view of that. So the very senior engineers at Algrant, who also had similar

background to me, were also asking the same questions at that time. They were saying, we need that same level of visibility that we have been used to the data communications world. We need that and we don't have time to create it now. The whole crypto space has been so fascinated with the use case of crypto that the infrastructure has been trying to follow out. Traditionally, that has happened in the telecom industry as well. The use case fascinates people. We all run with the use case and then we touch up with building infrastructure. I think that's Nick Grossman has a great blog post about this in the context of cryptocurrency

where you have infrastructure buildout that facilitates the growth of applications. And then you have applications that outpace the infrastructure that promotes the building of more infrastructure, which has this virtuous cycle around creating more applications. So it's definitely something that we've seen time and time again in the crypto industry. You can even point to Bitcoin as being an application that just pushed for more infrastructure around custody and key management and exchanges and things like that. So it's fascinating. It's a dynamic system, kind of adjust itself over time and keeps growing. And as it grows, new pains kind of appear and that you have to build new things to kind of address those issues.

When you think about Matrika, talk a little bit about what you guys do, what was the impetus for starting this as a business and maybe talk about some of the things you do for your customers. What Metrica does is basically what we add is we add trust to the blockchain operations. The way we do that is that we provide the tools to anyone who is running like blockchain operations so that we can add resiliency and improve the level of those operations. So for example, if you are a protocol team building your network, if you are a consortium running a blockchain network, if you are a node runner or an application running on top of a blockchain network, In all of those cases, you run some sort of blockchain operations. So you depend on the operational health of the blockchain network.

In all those cases, you need both the visibility, but you also need the tooling so that you can be aware of what is happening at any given moment in time so that you can decide what's the proper action that you should take. So, for example, if you're an application and you're running on a blockchain network and the network is being upgraded at that time, you probably need to take some action because your transactions might not go through. Your users will start asking the question what is going on. Similarly, if you're a node runner and you are either staking your node or you're making your API available to applications, you need to know at which level you are kind of operating. Metrica provides all these tools that basically add resiliency into the operations of anyone who's involved with blockchain networks. Would there be any kind of Web 1.0 or 2.0 analogous companies that would be doing this

outside of crypto? Web 1.0 was very early on, so I truly don't remember at that time what was the nature of those companies. I'm sure they were back then, but email, kind of basic web browsing was the case at that time. But then Web 2.0 came around. I think there were a number of companies that kind of went in that space. I think even Cisco acquired a number of companies in the past that were kind of focusing on monitoring operational intelligence, making sure that the applications run really well. There has been historically a number of companies, particularly with Web 2.0, right? Because that was the big step in requirements from the application side, right?

You have things like Zoom, you had things like Netflix, you had real-time communications and voiceover IP happening over networks. So the stakes got higher, and the applications that kind of appeared were not just satisfied with what existed before. So there was more infrastructure that needed to be built, faster networks, better protocols, better hardware, better routers, and everything got optimized. So there was a set of tooling that was always kind of created at that point. One of the things that's continually interesting to me about startups in the blockchain space

is how they think about customer acquisition from company side versus the protocol side. So you have a tool with Matrika that could be very well used on really any blockchain, but there's no centralized team behind Bitcoin. And so you're probably focusing on some of the service providers in that network. versus some of the new layer one protocols where I suspect you could actually go right to the team and start to get an engagement going with the protocol. How do you guys think about that dynamic?

It's a very interesting question. What happens is that there is exactly the mix that you mentioned. There is a mix where I think at the beginning there are kind of more entities that you can identify that you can work with. And these are the guys that are making progress on building those networks early on. But then I think we see the pattern that as those networks come closer

to evolve and be a little, more mature, there is a higher level of decentralization that happens. So I think at that point, you're dealing with the community and providing the tooling to the community. And in some cases, you can provide some of the large kind of community participants that exist there. So there are always kind of lead companies that are using kind of a blockchain network that have a significant application running on top of it. It might be node service providers that are kind of running a large number of nodes there. So there are always kind of large ecosystem participants that basically take the lead on developing a big part of the infrastructure or contributing significantly to the

protocols evolution. So I think it can go both ways. I think the important thing is how can we make available, you know, our tools to as many as we can in the ecosystem and help that ecosystem add resiliency to their operations. One of the main reasons why I was excited to have you on the podcast was to just talk about some of these blockchain outages that have been going on. And so obviously these have been going on for years, but there's been some high profile ones recently, Salana Arbitrum. What the hell is happening with these outages? As you said, this is not kind of a new type of issue, right? I mean, anyone in the data communications world has got used to outages. Like, these are the growing pains. Like, even back in the internet, we had lots of outages,

and any kind of data, any telecommunication network, as it grows, outages are expected. The thing is you need to either have some tooling to know before that is happening or have some signs that this is going to happen and be preventive. Or you need the tooling to quickly diagnose when it happens and then recover as fast as you can from those things. So I think what we are currently seeing is just growing pains of the blockchain networks evolving. And I think it's also a sign of that these networks are getting more and more mature. They're getting more applications, more demand. and that demand is driving that kind of pain. So it's never a pleasant thing having an outage,

but in retrospect, this is happening because this is evolving and because this is growing. And how do you guys think about that in terms of the opportunity for you as a corporate entity? Are you selling prevention of these or just real-time detection? How do you think about it? We're very happy in the sense, in quotes, that this is happening in the sense that, you know, it makes more and more people aware that resiliency is something

and more infrastructure that needs to be building those networks is something that I think everyone wants in the ecosystem. So as you know, people realize protocols themselves and everyone in the ecosystem that, oh, we are growing and now we need to have more infrastructure in place. We need to have more visibility. We need to have more tools in place. More and more people are asking for the tools that we're providing there. Although, again, it's not a pleasant thing and you could avoid it. Historically, it has never been avoided. So we have to live through it. And I think take the learnings and quickly go into the direction that we can eliminate those outages and prevent them. Back to your question, the way we think about our tools is that in a lot of cases,

having perfect visibility beforehand, you can see signs of the gradation of the operational health of the network. And by doing that, if you keep investigating that, you could be in a position to see that there is something happening. If you are quick enough to react, and if you are quick enough to find a bug and release a patch and things like that, maybe you can even prevent the outage. But if not, and it happens, then you can very quickly troubleshoot and recover the network in a very fast way. So I think it's all about kind of shortening the time from the moment you realize something is happening,

to troubleshooting, to issuing a fix and recovering the network. And having visibility across, I think is a major kind of requirement. Failure is kind of a different question depending on the application, I would say. And so if you have a blockchain that is being used as a store of value and that's sort of the primary, a use case, you could argue that having a network level failure that takes it off line is just devastating because trust in the network would be forever lost, that you cannot store your wealth in this thing anymore. Whereas if you're launching a blockchain that is just focused on enabling consumer applications or something like that, okay, if it goes down, that's fine.

The show goes on. You could have Twitter go down for two or three hours. The world wouldn't end. If you're a regular listener of this show, you know that we take accounting and auditing pretty seriously. And that might seem a little bit strange in an industry that prides itself on the removal of intermediaries, but we think when it comes to digital assets, trust relationships with counterparties like custodians and brokerages is critically important. Witham is a top 25 ranked accounting, tax, and advisory firm. They have a digital currency and blockchain group that's working with some of the highest profile companies in the industry on things like tax advisory, financial statements, token sales, stable coin audits, and much, much more. To contact their team,

go over to withem.com slash crypto. That's W-I-T-H-U-M-com slash crypto and get in touch with someone on their team. And this episode is also brought to you by Our Crowd. All around the world, tech companies are innovating and driving return for investors. Our Crowd analyzes companies across the global private market, selecting those with the greatest growth potential and they bring them to you, from personalized medicine to cybersecurity to robotics, quantum computing, and more. In state-of-the-art lab, startup garages, and everywhere in between, Our Crowd is identifying innovators so you can invest when their growth potential is the greatest, which is early. Our Crowds accredited investors have already invested over $1 billion in growing tech companies,

and many of their members have benefited from the 46 IPOs or sale exits of their investments. Now you can truly diversify your portfolio by investing early in innovative private market companies at Our Crowd. Join the fast-growing venture capital investment community at Our crowd.com slash OTB. That's our crowd.com slash OTB. So how do you think about some of the design decisions that go into building these blockchains as it relates to how important the application actually is that's running on it? I mean, it all depends because if the outage lasts for days, for example, even if the application is not that important, as you said, you lose trust. If the application is more real time and there are users waiting to transact or there is an application

getting stuck and they need to kind of release a new mobile app that accommodates that. I mean, in all cases, I think what happens is that the game needs to kind of go a step higher for everyone in the industry. I don't think you can get away even today with having something that is very low-performing. Like if you do something in Web 2.0, the tools that you're going to have, I think, and the infrastructure you're going to have are going to help you get to a much better place than the requirements of your application. The tools that exist out there will help teams even with use cases that are not that demanding

step up their game. And if you look at over a longer period of time, that might eliminate even the possibility of a small or a long outage happening at some point in time. For those blockchain networks that have even more demanding applications, that will definitely reduce the frequency and over time eliminate those outages. It needs to be kind of a uniform step up, I think, across the blockchain networks. and the tools that we have. I mean, today we're at the place where we don't have the visibility in the blockchain networks.

I mean, before us kind of going into a network, in most cases, what we find is that we find individual kind of monitoring tools on certain nodes running in the network, some of them being completely blind, some of them being kind of having some visibility within their domain, but overall, nobody has a really good view of what is going on. So there is a very kind of common pattern when, you know, a network goes down and you're note goes down, that everyone goes on the forums or on Discord or on blockchain explorers and tries to figure out what is going on. I think from that state, going to a state where you have some visibility or a lot of visibility, I think it's a big step across all blockchain

networks. I wonder if there's going to be different hazards depending on if you're a layer one or you're a layer two blockchain that goes down. And so if you're a layer one, you could argue, hey, that's devastating, but you have the ability to stop. You have the ability to maybe even roll back a little bit, whereas if you go down on a layer two, we might be dealing with some catastrophic loss of funds here because the layer one will continue to hum along and the layer two maybe has some sort of catastrophic failure. Do you think that some of these layer twos might actually be more devastating if they go down? On the one hand, I mean, there is the fact that some part of the stock is progressing if you're a layer two, but on the other hand, I think you have much more control

over kind of coordinating and fixing issuing patches on your platform that can accommodate for that. I also think you might have the luxury of finding a way to very quickly recover, aggregate and make up for those transactions. There is less coordination, I think, on layer two, which can make it faster, so it can minimize that. But in all cases, I think from an application's perspective, what you would probably want is someone to go back recursively and kind of fix the issue. And I think both layer two's, layer twos have that ability, I think. Layer one is also a kind of more philosophical thing where you would have to do some kind of fork

or where you would have to convince the community that this is for the better it serves everyone. So I think you have to go through that kind of argument. My feeling is that in both cases, I think there are kind of tools that can help you. There are ways to kind of mitigate those risks. I think we're going to see more in the future when these outages, I think, are going to happen. And even at layer two that are going to happen, possibly on layer two, you could build. redundancy as well, a lot of redundancy in that. So I think there is a different probably architecture and a different kind of design mechanism that can help you deal with those issues.

It feels like a different kind of game plan and a different kind of mitigation strategy between the two layers. So when you look at some of these recent outages, are there usually measures that these projects should have been taking ahead of time to prevent the downtimes? Or is it just, hey, we weren't paying attention to some routine maintenance thing and that sent it down. Is there a common thread there? I think the common thread is growing pains, I would say, that these networks have been growing. There is some very demanding application that is driving demand. There is a bug in the code that is surfacing through kind of increased demand and different profiles of demand. But there is also, I think, a very kind of consistent pattern where there is infrastructure that needs to be built in

those networks that they haven't yet had the time, put those things in place. I think, you know, as we discussed prior, the use cases and, you know, the enthusiasm around the networks and the growth that they're experiencing goes kind of before the development of the infrastructure that needs to be put in place. That's what we see in most of those networks. So adding resiliency and adding operational trust by building more infrastructure, I think is the way to kind of combat that. The higher we go and the more applications we have and the more demanding they become, the more infrastructure needs to be built. That's the common pattern. And all of the cases that you mentioned, the protocols are very much aware of the need to build infrastructure. It's just a matter of,

I think, prioritization and the crazy speed at which these networks are evolving. One of the infrastructure categories that's really emerged here is the node operators, the node service providers. What role do these folks play and how do you guys engage with them? They play a very critical role in the blockchain ecosystems. Node hosting providers have helped tremendously grow the ecosystems at a very fast pace. They've helped kind of the industry kind of quickly add nodes and kind of run it on behalf of many other parties. They fall into the same bucket, I think, of needing to build even more infrastructure, kind of get intelligence and monitoring on those networks. I think one of the common patterns that I see is that I think even node service providers have been used tools

for monitoring and intelligence from the web 2.0 kind of era. I think that comes down to the way of at the beginning when you try to kind of help a network and build a network up and quickly kind of add infrastructure, you use whatever tools you have available in the market. And I think what needs to happen there, and which is the case where a kind of metrica steps in and helps, is that we provide the next generation of tools built specifically for Web3.0 and blockchain networks that can provide you that level of operational intelligence and monitoring that you need in a blockchain network. I think a very common area as well there is that node hosting providers have visibility within their domain.

And I mean, we've seen cases in the past, for example, when the Infura outage happened, where the rest of the network was progressing and that it was really within the domain of infura that kind of the issues were constrained. So I think that opens everyone to the realization that we need to have visibility across the entire blockchain network and not just within the domain. It's not the equivalent of just AWUS here, but it's kind of the broader internet that we care about. One of the things that I'd be curious to get your point of view on is just how centralized some of these really back-end systems are.

And so are some of these blockchains being deployed on systems such that if one or two web 2.0 cloud providers were to go down, it would really impact the blockchain. Are there layers of centralization in terms of deployment of these systems that general public might not be aware of? There are many different types of diversity that these networks introduce. like there is geographical diversity, there is kind of some separation between the systems. But to your point, it comes down that there is indeed like a single entity that makes the decisions across that ecosystem. And I think that historically, when you look at the evolution of lots of kind of applications,

there have always been kind of lead developers, even in the open source world, right? I mean, what's the risk of a lead developer kind of not showing up the next day and the project not progressing? But I think the lead developers play kind of a very big role in kind of evolving the project. And I think similarly, the node hosting providers are adding a lot of those projects. I do expect that over time we will see, and I think we already see a number of other node hosting providers. I think we also see a number of enterprises and financial institutions running their own nodes in the networks.

So I think over time we will see more and more people adding operations there. And I think that will add more resiliency. and as more infrastructure is put in place, more and more people will run them. But I think there will be a balance of multiple node hosting providers, multiple big other ecosystem players running infrastructure. And I think that will add. I think the decentralization as well and the multiple entity thing.

But in the short term, I don't see it as negative somebody living the way and adding more infrastructure. Because as we discussed before, I think there is such a big deficit in infrastructure that somebody needs to kind of cover that gap and quickly have these networks. kind of pro. So I think they're playing a very critical role at this stage of the evolution of blockchain networks. Do you think it's important that that decentralization would need to go down

to the individual level, that it would be important for individuals to be able to run their own nodes on these systems as opposed to having to run them in data centers? Where do you fall on that argument? Whether you need to control that part of the stack as an individual, right? I mean, do you need to build your own website and host it on your own today? I think what we will see is that there will be an aggregation of a smaller demand under companies with hosting providers. But then I would see like some of the bigger players. They won't control a bigger part of the infrastructure. That might mean, you know, getting more control of tools that the node hosting providers

or running their own kind of nodes in their own data centers. And I suspect there will even be solutions at some point where you can run your nodes in a more orchestrated way on-prem or on the cloud of your choice. So you guys see a ton of just new blockchains being launched. obviously can't cover every single one of them. How do you prioritize what networks you're going to be focused on? We've got really good at kind of expanding across multiple protocols. So that's not a major concern on our end. But obviously there is a lot, as you said, going on. I think what is important to us is get involved in ecosystems that are evolving and have the right size that have

the right operational requirements and that there are applications that are driving a lot of demand. And I think as we see more demanding applications there, that's what kind of pushes the limits of the network. And that's what creates high operational requirements. We like to get involved with all protocol networks, but just talking about preferences, we always like the big challenge of something really, really demanding kind of hitting a blockchain network and having to provide infrastructure that adds resiliency in that context. That makes a lot of sense. So when you think about some of the applications that are actually getting people interested in this, obviously financial services. is a huge one. What are you the most focused on in terms of the applications driving demand for the blockchains themselves? There are certain types of use cases that have higher demand.

I think real-time trading is definitely kind of one of the use cases. I think gaming has historically, even when we look at kind of the telecom history and the data networking history, kind of driven demand. I remember the early days of Facebook where Zinga games were driving craze and driving demand on the platform. I know that GPUs were created for the sole purpose of gaming. So gaming has played a very interesting role in driving requirements. I would see, for example, gaming is one of the kind of use cases that excites us there. I expect over time there would be kind of more real-time applications that have to do with communication with live exchange of assets like chatting and communications between people that might be taking place on blockchain. These are some of the

areas that are fascinating. How about some of the Web 3 use cases, decentralized file storage, decentralized compute, where are we in the evolution of that category? I think we've started seeing some of the newer companies leveraging that kind of infrastructure, but I don't think we've seen yet that reaching a level of size and criticality where, you know, it has surfaced kind of in a big way on the radar. But I do expect that pretty soon, I think some of those applications will start getting more and more traction. And as they do, that level of trust in their operations will be very, very critical. At the POC stage, I think a lot of things work really well, and they prove the use case. But then, like, over the scaling part of that, I think that's where

you come up against those operational requirements. As we talk about, like, the application goes before, and I think people get excited about decentralized storage and the applications kind of start using it, and they prove they have a different architecture and the differentiated product in the market. But I think that the challenge there is, how do you scale that once you start getting users and once you start getting traction? One of the fascinating things here

is that you have a lot of layer ones that are ostensibly doing the same thing. They're sort of focused on the same addressable market. And if you use a internet analogy, you had TCPIP and OSI and eventually you had a convergence and there was sort of a network effect that built around one.

But with layer ones that have, tokens attached to them. There's actually no financial incentive for the team to just say, hey, we're throwing in the towel and we're going to start building on Eith or Solana if you're a rival layer one. So how do you see this L1 landscape evolving? And do you think that we'll see consolidation? I don't necessarily see the equivalent with DCIP. I think that's only the networking base that kind of applies to that. But I could also see that being more analogous to databases and data storage. And I'm saying that because in the database world, there is MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, there are a number of noSQL databases, and they all have a market, depending on the requirements of the application that wants to use them. In many cases, applications use multiple types of data stores. Metrica itself uses three or four different types of data stores. So the application here and the requirements they have can be addressed by different types of blockchain networks. And I think what we will see over time is that, and I think we've already started seeing some signs of that,

is that blockchain networks will start differentiating, at least from a go-to-market kind of strategy standpoint, and target specific verticals and specific types of requirements. I think this is happening today as part of adverse selection. Like, for example, you would see on Solana that there would be trading applications that would be far more real time and far kind of faster and offer things that match the requirements that they have on the Solana network. And similarly on Algrant and on Ethereum and so on. So I think it's happening as adverse selection today. But over time, I think as these ecosystems have the resources to target specific

kind of applications, they will consciously develop kind of that segment more. I love that analogy to databases that makes a lot of sense. You're trying to go out there and hire and grow a team. How would you handicap the talent that's in the blockchain space right now versus some of the other industries that you've worked in? I think it comes down to me to how people are excited about the problem that we are solving. So I think there are always, in our case, I think we kind of get to attract and kind of talk to people who realize that infrastructure plays a critical role. Through some experience in their life, through their prior work, through their kind of studies, when people resonate with that, and they understand that there is the evolution of internet happening and there is a completely new architecture.

and there is a need for additional infrastructure that metric is leading the way in building, I think that would get people excited. And I think at that time, you know, you're not having a discussion whether our protocol or some other protocol or there is a token or what that is. I think people need to resonate with the mission of the company. And if they do, I don't think there is a question between which place to go. Yeah, you definitely don't see a lot of really smart, talented, passionate people come into the blockchain space and then get in and decide to leave.

it seems like it's just an industry that is just capturing more and more talent. I think what is also happening is that we get a very big inflow of people who are crossing the blockchain space for the first time in their lives. Whereas I think what you see with a lot of the protocol projects is because of their condensed timelines and they need to kind of build up very, very fast what they need and get out, get the network up and running. I think there are a lot of people circulating within the industry, within that industry as well. That's also kind of probably aligned with like the token incentives that people can kind of

cash out a bit earlier from some project and jump onto another project. But I think in our case, we kind of generally get people who kind of jump into the industry, have been closed to the blockchain industry, but kind of take the step into that with the perspective, same perspective that we have about critical infrastructure. It makes a ton of science. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit Castle Island. to Castle Island.V.C. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink-Podcast.com

or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.