The Breakdown - Will DeFi Even Matter In A Post-Corona World? Feat. Matt Luongo

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

Matt Luongo got his start in bitcoin in 2013. In 2016, he watched a pivotal moment where the sound money, digital gold narrative subsumed the payments use case for bitcoin. While he agreed, ultimately, with the important of bitcoin as a new reserve asset, he still wanted to build and found his way to Ethereum.  Now his company is launching tBTC, a trust-minimized bridge between bitcoin and ethereum. Among other uses, it is a new solution to enabling bitcoin to be used as collateral in DeFi applications.  In this conversation, Matt and @NLW discuss these narrative shifts, as well as what the role and narrative for DeFi might be in a post-Covid crisis world. 

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Friday, April 3rd, and today I am talking with Matt Luongo. Matt is the founder of Thesis, which is a company that has many companies underneath it. Fold, many of you may know, as the Bitcoin rewards. shopping app, keep, which is a solution for keeping anonymous private data available to public blockchains, and most recently TBTC, which is basically a bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum. I wanted to talk with Matt about a few different things. First, why Bitcoin on Ethereum? Why try to

connect these chains. Matt shares his journey from getting into Bitcoin in 2013, having a moment in 2016, where he was on the one hand really supportive of this narrative shift and focus on Bitcoin as the base asset for a new financial system, right, a competitor to central banks, while also understanding that for his payments-focused projects, there were going to be tradeoffs that maybe weren't the best for him. That led him to Ethereum. And so we get into the history of Bitcoin on Ethereum and things like that. So that's one part of our conversation. Another part of our conversation has to do with just how, Bitcoin as an asset and Ethereum as a technology can transform the entire financial system.

Matt uses this analogy of Bitcoin as attacking central banks and Ethereum as creating opportunities to go after retail banks, which is interesting. And finally, we talk about something that I've been thinking about a lot for anybody who listened to Monday's episode know what the narrative is for Defi in a post-coronavirus world, right? I think that the narrative for Bitcoin in some ways, in many ways will never have been stronger or clearer, right? The more that money printer go bore, the more that you look around and see what's not like that. And there's very few things with Bitcoin being perhaps the most diametrically opposed. But what is the narrative for Defi in that context? Is it just a plaything for developers? Or is there something more there? So that's our conversation.

I had a great time talking to Matt. I hope you enjoy it. And I'll be back in a little bit with the wrap up. All right. We are here with Matt. Matt, thank you so much for joining today. Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So lots of stuff to talk to you about. I was just kind of giving you the rundown. But before we dive in, you have a lot of Twitter handles and companies, it seems, that you are related to. Can you explain how thesis relates to Fold, relates to Keep relates to TBTC, for those who aren't familiar? Yeah, sure. Well, obviously, you know, I get tired of one brand and I got to switch a lot. So I got in the space in 2013 and I founded a payments company that eventually became Folt.

So Fold's actually quite old, though I think most people are more familiar with it as a more recent Bitcoin rewards company. So in 2016, I kind of felt the tides were shifting. Bitcoin as payments, that narrative was dying and we were really starting to focus on this store value narrative. And so, you know, I was looking at what what's the right angle for Fold and where are my interest as an engineer as well as a startup founder. And eventually early 2017, that led to a new project called Keep. Now, I knew what Ford was doing was incredible, but maybe I wasn't the right guy to run it. And so we found a new team to run Fold that took over in 2017. and we realized that we had these pretty disparate projects and stuck under one corporation.

So we created thesis because, you know, I think something that I learned about myself, but also about my team is we like to work on lots of interesting things. We want to ship software that people use, but then we also want to do it again, right? And so, so yeah, so Fold is now its own, its own company. Thesis is the parent, has a pretty helpful. healthy ownership in both Fold and Keep. And I think what we'll probably talk about today, TBTC is Keep's latest project. Awesome.

Okay. So let's talk about Keep because it feels to me like the part of Keep was also inspired by a need that spun out of Fold, right, that came from Fold. So maybe you can talk about Keep a little bit. I mean, you know, and I might lose the Bitcoin audience right here. But the need came from, as we were working on Fold, we were working heavily with secondary market gift cards, right? So gift cards that people didn't want anymore in that they sold. But it was a huge pain, right? And since then, they've done all sorts of things to, you know,

basically run operations better than I ever could. But for me, the problem was, well, I don't really want to deal with people. I'd like to have, you know, just sort of a decentralized market where I'm a participant, but I don't have to have all these relationships and I don't want to deal with all these jurisdictional differences. So I started working on a decentralized gift card marketplace. And, you know, as a as a Bitcoiner, I went to, I mean, over the years, I went to like Omni and I went to like sort of all the second layer stuff that happened on Bitcoin. I looked at models like OpenBazaar and more recent ones. And finally, I actually ended up playing with Ethereum.

And so by early 2017, I kind of thought like, you know, Ethereum's not ready for prime time. Actually, in some ways, I still question if it is. But so I started building on it. But the first thing that I ran into was that there was no way to actually custody private information. So when I heard about all these smart contract developers, I assumed that they had at least solve like some basics about like how can I interact with the system and, for example, include KYC information, but not share it on the public chain.

but it turned out that no, it was incredibly early days. And so as an engineer, I've got a pretty strong computer science background, as does my team, we started diving into how to solve that. And that's when my co-founder tapped me on the shoulder and he said, you know, this work you're doing on like private data and confidentiality, it's much more interesting than this market we're trying to build. Why don't we focus? And so that's what led to keep. It's a confidentiality data layer for Ethereum.

But what that really means is you can include basic references to private information and custody private information without exposing it to the whole chain. So give us an example. Maybe let's talk not at first, I guess, about TBTC because I know that's the first application of it. But like what's a big, dumb, not have a computer science background way out when you think about this in 10, 15 years? Yeah, that would make it clear for someone. Well, you know what? I'm going to make it clear a year ago rather than 10 or 15 years ago.

So let's say we wanted to replace something like Equifax. So let's do it, right? This is like something that's sort of this accidental institution in the U.S. credit scoring. It was cobbled together. Clearly, we've seen that they have all this power that makes no sense and the consumers haven't really given them. So we haven't really consented to this. So let's replace it, right?

So if you want to replace Equifax, you very quickly run into some simple things. So I'm interacting with this decentralized system. It's going to do credit scoring. But I need information. I need like private information. Where does my social get stored? It's very simple. So, you know, if you're using something like Ethereum, you can't put it in a contract

because the whole world will see it. Every node will see it. Or you can trust someone off chain to do it, in which case, you know, great, you've added this Rube Goldberg machine, but you haven't actually solved anyone's decentralization of power concern, right? Someone still has your information. So what keep lets you do, and this is just like the simplest use case, is take something like a social, have a user, enter it, shard it across many, many, many, custodians, and then govern them via smart contract. So like, let's say smart contract needs to know, well, this is a social,

it's a valid social. The user can shard that across many, many, many, people, those people can prove to the smart contract that that's true. And then you're off to the races. Obviously, now replacing Equifax is a lot more than storing social security numbers. I wrote a blog post about it way back when. But that's kind of what we're trying to do with Keep is like, what are the institutions like Bitcoin exists to replace central banks? What else can we replace with this tech? That's a perfect segue, I think, into TBTC. So let's start with first what it is. And then let's talk about why Bitcoin on Ethereum or Bitcoin or Ethereum as a Bitcoin side chain.

I mean, explain TBTC and then give me the motivation, I guess. Yeah, sure. Well, you know, the motivation, it's pretty like pedestrian. But so I moved from California to Atlanta not that long ago. And, you know, the houses are a lot cheaper in Atlanta. And so, you know, my wife was like, let's buy a house. We had our second kid on the way. And I was like, okay, cool.

We'll do it. We'll settle down. Let's do it. And she was like, okay, so time to sell your Bitcoin. And I was like, that doesn't feel right. I don't, I'm not. No, I don't want to do that. Please don't make me do that.

And so I said, I bet we can get alone with it as collateral. And look, I've been in the space a long time and there's lots of like clever things I can do. People love to be like, well, didn't you know about X? But, you know, so I was told there's a lender in town who's script. friendly. So I went to talk to this lender. And they said, yeah, we love crypto. Sell your Bitcoin and come back in 30 days. And we want to ask where the money came from. And I was like, no, dude, I'm not trying to like avoid the IRS or something. I just want to use this as collateral for a loan. It's hard money. Let me. It's super collateral, right? Let me use it. And so, and so now there's this

proliferation of loan desks. And especially if you're in the know or if you've been in the space for while. You can solve this problem. But at the time, it was still early days. And so, so yeah, so this has kind of got me thinking, one of my feces about crypto, mostly about Bitcoin, but it is about like the whole space and not just Bitcoin is that like in addition to needing hard money, crypto is also a chance to kind of have millennial money. Like, I don't want to talk to someone to get financial services. That's ridiculous. Like that doesn't feel right to me. me. And so in the same way, I don't want to talk to someone to get a loan against my Bitcoin. I should just be able to do it, especially because I've got the collateral, right? It doesn't require

reputation. So this, this led me to think, what if we had something like MakerDow, where you could take a stable coin loan against collateral, on chain, permissionless. You don't have to talk to anyone. And that's what got me working on TBTC. So this is really interesting. I was reading some of the things you've written. or rereading them, I guess, because I, you know, kind of my job is to follow everyone's everything in this space. But one of the things that I thought was really interesting is, I guess it brings this together. The idea that the conflict you felt of the shifting narrative and call it 2016 around Bitcoin, where although it might be worse in some ways for your,

for a business that was in the payments type space in that use case, the idea of Bitcoin as a hard money as a digital store of value as an alternative to fiat that was arising felt right and it also felt kind of inevitable in some ways like it based on just how it long how how it continued and so what i hear from you which is something that i've watched it's been interesting to watch defy totally take over the ethereum narrative from you know back when we were talking about world computer or decentralized apps and things like that because it is this dimensions of finance right you have the the the the the the the the the the the base of the financial system and is it you know non debasable is it fixed supply all these sort of things but then what can you do from like how do you redesign the

services that sit on top of that and interestingly that's really kind of where the break between bitcoin and ethereum has been bitcoin is focused on i think rightly from a development perspective making sure to protect that core foundational piece while ethereum has gone off and done all these experiments and what the what this new set of services looks like so it sounds like that was kind of that's what brought it together or that that that connection that confluence of two things is kind of what led you to tbTC yeah i mean it's it's even more than that right so we have a few really interesting kind of like social things going on so one is what is this tech good for right but already a lot of people would be like why are you even talking about tech right a lot of people

in our space would be like no no no this is about hard money and you know what it took me a few years but i agree i think that the biggest thing that we can do is take on central banking and change people's relationship to money. But the tech is still interesting. And so, you know, part of this Bitcoin Ethereum split is, on the one hand, it's conservative thinking about money, right? In terms of left-right conservative. But on the other hand, it's also, Bitcoin makes very conservative tech choices because

the idea is, well, you know, we need to exist and we're building the airplane while we're flying, and so we should be very, very careful. Ethereum has taken the large cap crypto version of move fast and break things. Now, compared to the rest of the space, I can actually say that's not true. They're starting to grow up. But still, you know, the engineering is of a just, they just, they do move fast. And I have seen things break. On the flip side, that's also where a lot of the tech optimism went, right?

So like a lot of us felt, I mean, briefly, you know, with the block size debate in Bitcoin, I almost felt expelled from the community. I eventually realized that it was much better for the chain for corporations to not be able to wag the dog. It's better for governance. It's better for the money. But it did really also feel like as an engineer and as someone who was a technical optimist that I was being pushed out. And so today, you know, this is kind of me being able to come full circle. Just because I think Ethereum as tech is an interesting place to play and an interesting place to develop new tools, I don't think it's necessarily the best asset. In fact, I said the other day, like our net worth is maybe 90, 95% Bitcoin.

I'm not big on diversification. And so, so, you know, my take is kind of like Bitcoin, the asset takes on central banks. Ethereum, the technology can take on maybe retail banking and maybe some kind of other. interesting use cases around privacy that we're still exploring. Okay, perfect, perfect segue. So talk about what exactly TBTC is and maybe also what makes it different than other projects like it. Yeah, sure.

So TBTC is a Bitcoin side chain on Ethereum. I think two projects that are interesting to compare to might be Liquid by Blockstream from the Bitcoin side and then WBTC from the Ethereum side. So if you're familiar with Liquid, the basic idea is that you take your Bitcoin and you put it into this 15 signer multisig. And the multi-sig participants are all, you know, there are folks in the space we know like Unicoin and a variety of exchanges. And then what they do is once the Bitcoin's in that multi-sig, they have this additional chain where they're notarizing back and forth. And you can kind of, you can move your money faster. There's a two-minute block time.

you get confidential transactions. You get some other nice things out of it. And then if you want, you can request to move your money back, back to the Bitcoin chain. So that's interesting. I mean, it lets you do more with your Bitcoin. But you're also sort of saying, like, I hope these 15 participants are honest. And at any time, you know, they could decide, like maybe for political reasons, not to give you your money back. But it was a good step in the right direction.

So it's not quite the 2014 side chain ideal, but it's an attempt. On the Ethereum side, you know, it's a, it's different. So on the Bitcoin side, we're like, how can we make Bitcoin move faster and do more things? And on the Ethereum side, they're just desperately looking for collateral. All these defy projects are minting stable coins and putting out loans, but most of it is over collateralized. And there's only so much ether, right? And so they're interested in bringing Bitcoin in or a representation of Bitcoin in onto the Ethereum chain. And so the first effort to do that that I'm familiar with was WBT.

And the basic idea is that you have, you know, I mean, there's a lot of white paper and words around it. But the reality is there's a single Bitcoin bank and the Bitcoin bank is Bitco. You put your Bitcoin in the Bitgo bank. And then they give you script on the Ethereum chain that hopefully you can redeem. for your Bitcoin. And so, like, maybe for traders, that's a good way to get some price action on the Ethereum chain. But, I mean, for me, like, I don't, I mean, that's, it's just the same as putting a whole

bunch of Bitcoin in an exchange. So in the same way that I'd rather not trust 15 signers with my Bitcoin and a promise, I'd rather not have to, like, you know, ask, like, Mother, may I when I want to withdraw from something like WBT. So what TBTC is, is it takes these two ideas. and it kind of tries to make them as trust minimized as possible. Sometimes we say trustless in marketing, but this is a very loaded term. So we'll say trust minimized.

The basic idea is that instead of having one 15 member multi-sick like liquid, we have many. So every single deposit into TBTC of Bitcoin has many signers that are randomly chosen. So that's another big difference. They're not people you know and trust in the community. they are randomly chosen from a pool of candidates. And that's each deposit. So instead of this single peg, you have many little pegs called a federation, called federations, plural, actually.

And then the second thing we do is like, on top of this mechanism, each member of a federation has actually put down collateral on the Ethereum chain. So they have put down ETH worth significantly more than the Bitcoin that they're custody. And the idea is that if they misbehavior, that can be taken from them, and it can be restitution to any depositors that have been harmed. And then the last step is we use, and this has been around since the Satoshi days, SPV proofs, to actually tell Ethereum, look, this Bitcoin deposit from the Bitcoin chain, it has actually happened and prove it to the chain.

So what's cool about this now is you can open, you can call it a DAP in your browser or like a program on your machine, whatever, and you can only talk to the Bitcoin and Ethereum chains. nothing else. You don't need to talk to me or my team or a Bitcoin bank. And you can actually deposit Bitcoin. You can mint TBTC on the Ethereum chain. And you can redeem from Ethereum back to Bitcoin. And you don't have to ask anyone. If anyone tries to block your withdrawal, you end up taking 150% of your attempted withdrawal from them. And so it's sort of like economically trust minimized. And I think it's the closest we're going to get. to a, I mean, to sort of the dream of side chains to this two-way peg between Bitcoin and

Ethereum until, you know, Bitcoin does decide to eventually soft work and make it easier to build trustless side chains. So tell me about the status of this now. You know, this project, you announced it, I think, last August, maybe. But it's now, it's now, there's a new milestone, right? Yeah. April 27th, we're going live. So we've been on. test net for a while. We've been on test net since December. We've actually been working on the project for about a year and a half now. And we've actually, I guess I don't want to scoot myself, but I'll say we've just passed audit. We'll be sharing audit results early next week. So we're doing this thing. We're taking it to market. And I hope people will be judicious and start

slow when they start to play with their Bitcoin. But I think they will. Most of us, don't want to lose it. So yeah, people will actually be able to do this on Mainnet and start using their Bitcoin via TBTC and things like Maker and compound, really just the whole Ethereum ecosystem. It's going to be really interesting to see folks that haven't, you know, on the Ethereum side, folks have not, are really not familiar with Bitcoin culture these days. And then on the Bitcoin side to sort of see what there is out there and what there is to

play with with this new tech. So I'm pretty excited. That's awesome. So I was telling you I wanted to ask you this before because I think it's an interesting way to come at it. So I've seen tons of excitement from people who kind of flip between these worlds and who are excited about, you know, kind of have a similar thesis to you in terms of this Bitcoin base and put interest in what you called kind of millennial finance, right, disrupting the other sets of layers. What are the best critiques, though, you've gotten? the things that are kind of, you know, maybe it reflects things that your team has already thought about or just, you know, has pushed you in new directions. I feel like that's a,

I'd love to hear that. Yeah. Well, so there are a couple pieces. And they're the things that like, I mean, I consider it, frankly, consider them awards. I've, I've welcomed hardcore Bitcoin or criticism of this project because I feel like if we can make it through the Bitcoin social immune system, that means we're doing our jobs. So, um, Yeah, so let's see. Let's list a couple. So one is one that's been really high on our team's mind, which is governance. So governance is like a fun thing that some Ethereum folks like to play with. And don't get me wrong, I do think it's interesting.

But coming from Bitcoin, for me, like governance is voice or exit, right? Either we all agree or we split up and anything else is, you know, not something I'm comfortable with with my money. So for me, I think governance is an attack vector. And we need to minimize governance as much as possible. So one of the things, you know, was people were poking at, well, do you have admin keys? What can you as your team do? So what our team has done is we have just whittled down all governance we possibly can while still trying to build a system that's safe. So like I think it's totally unacceptable that our team could have any sort of kill switch.

obviously we can't seize funds. That would be ridiculous. But on top of that, like, I'm like, well, what if there's a zero day? What if there's a huge hack and the team knows about it first? How are we going to let people know? And so we did add a, I call it a red lever, basically a lever or a button we can press that will pause the system for 10 days. It allows withdrawals, but it doesn't allow any new money in. And we can do that one time for 10 days. And that's it. So I think that's on the governance side. I've just like said, how can we make sure that we have no kill switches, no access to anyone's funds? You know, and so I thought that was not only was the focus on governance great, but it also just kind of gave me the extra backbone to really think about this and how to minimize it.

Another one that comes from, you know, this has come from Peter Todd and Dan Held. And we've been so upfront about it that no one would possibly miss this is there's a price. feed. So I'm talking about how these signers are bonded in ETH, but how do we know how much for them to bond? We have to use a price feed. So I have a pretty fancy decentralized, trustless even approach to this problem that I believe avoids most of the core issues around oracles and trusted price feeds. But there is no way that I'm going to feel comfortable putting that into production probably for another six to 12 months. It's interesting. I'd love to talk about it so outside the scope of our conversation. So what we've had to do, though, is say, okay, what is the best price feed mechanism and how can we make an attack on the price feed?

Like, how can we keep an attack on the price feed from having this all just fall back to a centralized system, which is like, why are we doing all this work if the price feed can just collapse the whole thing? So what we've done is we're using makers feeds. They've actually, we'll be announcing shortly, they've just deployed a BTC ETH feed for us. And we'll be publishing, you know, a rough idea of where those prices come from and whatnot. So people know that it's a good index. And then what we've done is we've designed the system so that basically, if someone messes with the price feed, they can start forcing signer liquidation.

And so signers might lose. lose a small bit on slippage for auctions, but it's designed in such a way that it doesn't impact depositors funds at all. So that's that's that's really been our response. It's still there though. It's still a significant risk for signers if they don't trust Maker's feed. And then the other thing that we've added, which is our which is our other little piece of governance is if Maker were to decide to just stop using the feed and just turn it off one day, people can people can all withdraw their Bitcoin, and that's not a problem. But in case there is community consent that the price feed is being attacked,

we can add a fallback feed where if the price feed starts erroring out or acting crazy, it'll switch over to the next one. So those are the two big approaches we've taken to mitigating that risk. And then I hope to ship a new version that will actually have no price feed and a new approach. And I'm just going to make, I got one more comment on this, which is, I say ship a new version. So if people are familiar with Ethereum, often ship a new version means the team upgrades their supposedly immutable smart contracts. TBTC has no upgradeability. Once the code's out there, we hope it doesn't have a bug.

We have no power to upgrade the system. So if we do ship a new version, it's going to be begging exchanges and key. community members to move over to the new one. Interesting. I do think there's a whole additional conversation we could have maybe a little bit down the line on that or come back to the first feed question. But I think it's super interesting. So I want to use the context of talking about Maker Dow to actually shift from maybe

some of the technical specifics of this new project to a narrative question. It's something that I've been thinking about a lot. So presumably one of the main functional. enabling opportunities of TBTC is for Bitcoin to provide the underlying collateral for defy applications, right? And so, you know, obviously we are now living in a very different world than we were living in even three months ago. And a lot of my time recently has been spent thinking about what happens on the other side of this, right? Assuming we can figure out the right combination of health systems to actually allow people to go back to work and return to

some normalcy and all this sort of stuff, which fortunately right now is looking bad. But Bitcoin has a pretty clear spot from a narrative perspective in this new world, right? I mean, we are now back full circle from a narrative perspective to Chancellor on the brink of a second bailout. It turns out that that bailout just never ended, right? And so you're already seeing these interesting signals that while Bitcoin, you're going to Bitcoin has been following from a price perspective, equities more than it ever has. You are also seeing anecdotal evidence of new people flooding into the system. And perhaps it's around that

clear contrast between MoneyPrinter Gober over here and the half inning, or, you know, as we're calling it now as of the last 24 hours, quantitative hardening or quantitative tightening, right? So Bitcoin, there's a clear story. I'm wondering what, one thing I'd think about is, what is the narrative for defy in a post-coronavirus? or a girl, right? Where, where does this idea of millennial finance fit in a, in a post-corona world? I'd love your thoughts on that. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, first, just, it's hard to not be a triumphalist right now as a bitcooner. Um, because whether or not the markets know it yet, we're having a moment. And when everyone wakes up from their QE hangover, Bitcoin will be the winner.

Uh, and I don't know quite how long it'll take, but I know it's happening. So, So I guess it's worth saying, you know, I'm obviously worried about people's health and safety. I have a family myself that I'm worried about. And I don't know what choices I would make if I were trying to deal with this as some sort of central planner of an economy, as we're kind of realizing that's the situation we're in. However, we're going to win. And the way that I see this is, first, if Bitcoin wins, the space wins. And if Bitcoin loses, we all lose, period. The ideas of a flippinging or of any other asset in the space becoming more relevant are ridiculous to me.

I think the only one that I'm actually worried about is fiat pegged stable coins like Tether. So that said, what is Defy's narrative? What I'd like Defy's narrative to be is things need to be different. We need to opt out of the system. here is how you can opt out of the rest. Like, great, you've opted out of USDA or whatever your local currency is by your local kind of regional controller. Now you need financial services.

Now you need liquidity. You need cash flow loans. You need, you know, kind of the various things that we've come to expect from banks. And I think that already there's this fintech trend of unbundling banks. And I think that all this sort of like the new systems win when old systems crumble if we can be resilient by the time we're necessary. So I think that for folks that aren't just Bitcoin holders, this is a chance to like basically build as fast as we can and then and then be prepared for this influx of new users. Now, that said, I still think that the defy narrative needs work. And the reason for that is that all of this, all of these, almost all of DFI is about over collateralized loans.

And the few places in DFIi where you see under collateralized loans are usually ended up getting attacked. And so I think that, I think that maybe the most difficult part about unbundling the banks about that narrative is the fact that we are still all hard money and none of us are putting our actual reputation. on the line. I don't think I have an answer for that yet. But if all, if defy's entire narrative is Bitcoin, but with access to your equity in USD, I think that's pretty powerful. It's super interesting. I mean, in some ways, you're, I would almost rephrase what you said. I think that the narrative is there, right? Like if you were, if this allowed you to opt out of fiat, defy, the, the version that you are intempting to build allows you to opt out. of these other parts of the system that are calcified in maybe similar or even different ways, right?

It's more, I think, what I'm hearing from you and something that I agree with is the challenge of making that real for a broader set of people, right? It does not do that much good to create a new financial system that can only be participated in by, you know, a certain percentage of wealth holders is not a new financial system at all. It's just a replay in different ways of, what we have in some ways. Yeah, I mean, I love Galtz Gulch, but that's not all I want to do with our new economy. Love it. All right. Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking some time today. Really exciting stuff to hear about TBTC and everything else you have going on. And I appreciate

your thoughts on the world as well. One of the things that I really appreciate about Matt's approach to building projects is his work to understand the context into which they are going to land. So often we have developers and teams and entrepreneurs who build things because they're interesting without consciously thinking about how the audience of early adopters is likely to receive it. You know, Matt's building in a contentious space where there is tribalism. We've talked about it on the show before. So I think that getting out in front of it and saying clearly, this is what I believe, this is why we've made these decisions, these are the things that I'm uncomfortable with

and what we're trying to do to solve them. I welcome your critiques and your feedback, I think is a powerful starting point. Now, some of those answers, of course, won't satisfy critics, but at least we're having the right conversation about the specifics. Anyways, guys, that's it for me today for this week. What do you think the narrative of Defi should be in a post-coronavirus world? Is there a place for it? Is it bigger than just Ethereum?

I mean, this is something I've been exploring for the last three months of whether DeFi is moving away from a narrative perspective of exclusively being. tethered to Ethereum. And I think that it probably is. And even the folks who are very invested in the Ethereum community have indicated something similar to. But I want to know what you think. Hit me up on Twitter at NLW or anywhere else you can find me. Thanks for listening, guys. I hope that you are headed into a weekend full of calm and the opposite of anxiety that I think so many of us are feeling. But I will be back on Monday with another brand new episode of the breakdown. Until then, stay safe and take care of each other. Peace, guys.