The Pomp Podcast - 343: Joe Lallouz On Building Blockchain Infrastructure

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Joe Lallouz is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor in New York City. He is the CEO of Bison Trails, a leading blockchain infrastructure company helping democratize access to blockchain networks. Joe previously co-founded a business that was acquired by Etsy in 2014. In this conversation, we discuss having employees mine Bitcoin on company servers, modern crypto networks, decentralized infrastructure, ASW centralization risk for altcoins, and creating technical resilience.  =============================== LVL is a mobile banking app that provides an integrated Bitcoin and traditional bank account experience for a flat $9 monthly fee. They have no trading commission like Coinbase and no hidden spread like Robinhood. Your cash is held in a private, FDIC-insured checking account and you can buy and sell Bitcoin as many times as you want and only pay the monthly $9 flat fee. Legendary Bitcoiners Jimmy Song and Willy Woo are already advisors and we liked it so much that we invested in the company. This is a no brainer and it will save you an incredible amount of money, so go sign up at lvl.co/pomp or use promo code "pomp". =============================== The World Series of Trading (WSOT) is the first of its kind to bring the exhilaration of crypto trading competition to the global stage. WSOT believes in the importance of empowering traders who embody the passion and power for crypto trading. This bi-annual event aims to champion the spirit of competition, fair play, and cultivate camaraderie among crypto derivatives traders from around the world with the ultimate goal of creating positive change in the crypto space. This year’s prize pool is a whopping 200 BTC. Sign up here: http://www.bybit.com/wsot_warmup? =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Joe Lelouz is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor in New York City. He is the CEO of Bison Trails, a leading blockchain infrastructure company helping democratize access to blockchain networks. Joe previously co-founded a business that was acquired by Etsy in 2014. In this conversation, we discuss having past employees mine Bitcoin on company servers, modern crypto networks, decentralized infrastructure, AWS centralization risk for altcoins, and creating technical resilience. I really enjoyed this conversation with Joe, and I hope you do as well.

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think that you are a good crypto derivatives trader, you should go enter the World Series of Trading. The prize pool is a whopping 200 BTC. Go in the description of this podcast and click on the signup link there. 200 Bitcoin up for grabs in the World Series of Trading to determine who is the world's best crypto derivatives traders. Knock yourselves out. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry, you can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. Go download Level and use their monthly $9 flat fee app to buy Bitcoin and store your cash in an

FDIC insured checking account. If you think you're a good crypto derivatives trader, go enter the World Series of Trading and go sign up at pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Joe. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang super excited to have

joe here uh thanks so much for doing this man thanks so much for having me on the show pump i'm actually really excited i've obviously been a fan and watching your show for a long time and uh really honored to be part of the ranks absolutely so for those that are just listening and not getting the pleasure of watching joe uh he is currently um in a room where literally he's got a whiteboard behind him and he just wrote Bison Trails. So Joe gets the award for the best marketing to ever be on the show. But before we talk about Bison Trails, let's start with kind of, you've been an entrepreneur investor for quite a long time and have had a number of exits and kind of worked at Etsy and other places. So just walk us through kind of your background

and kind of everything you did pre-crypto. Definitely, definitely. And I like, it's funny, I kind of, whether I like it or not, I sort of think of my career as pre and post crypto, which is great because I can kind of talk a little bit pre crypto, post crypto. But then there's also that sort of messy middle where I was already into crypto, but not full time into crypto. And that's actually one of my favorite zones to talk about because it actually talks about that transition. But to get back to your question, that's right. So I'm Joe Laluz. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Bison Trails. And we're an infrastructure company in the blockchain space. And I've been a startup founder for a long time. My co-founder and I have been working together.

So this is the crazy part. This is really where things are kind of nuts. My co-founder and I have been working together for the better part of 17, almost 18 years, which is pretty insane as far as co-founders go. In fact, if you've ever followed any kind of startup or early stage company uh mantras or stories you it's not uncommon to hear that the biggest reason why companies fail is because partners that start a company don't work out in terms of relationships and friendships and stuff so i'm super proud of that and him and i've been working together for a really long time we're both technical so we both have technical backgrounds software engineering backgrounds have spent a lot of time building the first versions of everything we've

done. And this kind of becomes a little bit more relevant in particular with Bison Trails and what we're doing today. But I have spent a large part of my career as an entrepreneur in different stages of different companies. We joke that we've built three, technically three companies, venture-backed companies in the past. In reality, that probably looks more like 25 and 22 of them we never really talk about or really have an opportunity to talk about because they were you know, massive failures or never made it further than a month out from an idea board. And, and, and so, yeah, you know, spent, spent some time building a few different companies and, and spent some time doing some angel investing. So that, that's been, that's been

really great. A, the last company that I worked on was this company called Grand Street. We were an online marketplace specifically for new consumer devices. So new hardware. One of the Easiest ways to think about that is think of the sort of, you know, Kickstarter or Indiegogo type of folks, people that wanted to, you know, they were quitting their job at Apple or their job at Samsung. They had this really great idea for this new device, like Fitbit or, you know, Internet of Things scale or something along those lines. And they wanted to go and build this new product. And so we built this marketplace, this company that manifested as a marketplace specifically for these kinds of things. So bringing together buyers and sellers of these different products. What was really interesting about that company behind the scenes was we were actually building a whole suite of technology tools to make it easier for folks to build, design, build, ship, sell all of these new types of products, which was a new product category and, quite frankly, pretty difficult to do.

So we coined this concept of APIs for manufacturing, which is really connecting this world of software to this sort of world of hardware and using software to be able to, sorry, using this world of software and this world of manufacturing and using software to be able to bring the two sides together and creating efficiencies there. And if you know anything about the production world or the manufacturing world, you know, there's a huge amount of barriers to entry, a lot of walls to sort of climb over, and it's really, really hard to break into it. So it was a cool company. We spent a lot of time in Shenzhen in China, working with different contract manufacturers and different folks that were building electronics over there. And then a lot of time in the United States working with folks that were doing things like plastics, injection moldings and helping parallelize manufacturing runs. In 2014, we met the leadership team at Etsy. And Etsy, for those that don't know, is a publicly traded marketplace for crafts. And we met the leadership team and the leadership team was really interested in this idea of using software to help scale businesses and democratize access to these tools to make it easier for independents to participate in this idea, in this like sort of global economy, this idea of this global economy. And so after some sort of back and forth, we talked to the Etsy leadership team about joining the team and joining the leadership team there and joining the company and building out some of the businesses that help support Etsy seller scale. And one of those businesses was manufacturing, as well as a few other businesses, business lines while we were there. So super, super fun time in 2014 to join the leadership team there.

spent a few, spent almost exactly three years at Etsy, which was a great time, learned a ton. I like to sort of talk about there was, you know, two, you know, very, very unique experiences that as a software company founder, as a startup founder, you don't really get to do. One is, you know, scale and build a business that is a multi-billion dollar business. And I'm not sure what the, what Etsy is currently trading at today, but, you know, has grown tremendously over the last few years, which is fantastic. And the second thing is actually to take a company public. So while, well, obviously I wasn't on the executive team at Etsy while we were doing

that being involved in the company, as it makes this transition from a private company to a public company, as a startup founder, you don't really get to do unless you do it yourself and get lucky, or you end up joining a company and do it with them and get lucky. And so there's a lot of timing luck involved there. And I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to have done that. Um, so super, super fun time. Yeah. And as you were, uh, kind of at Etsy, you were there for

about three years. So kind of seven, 2017, give or take, uh, obviously the crypto world's going crazy. Kind of what was your, um, kind of balance between like what I'll call the day job, which was continuing to kind of fulfill the role and responsibility that you had at Etsy, which I'm assuming, you know, either before or during 2017, you start saying like, Oh, wait a second, there's this crypto blockchain thing going on like what was the first time you ever came across it and kind of what drove some of that interest yeah so um my my entrance into the crypto and blockchain space uh is is uh came came from two different angles the first is alongside studying uh software engineering and studying technology and being a technologist and a huge nerd i also actually

studied economics uh and and both my co-founder and i were dual majors in economics and technology um and you know and and um this this led for a very perfect storm of having very in-depth conversations about things like financial behavior financial economics economics in general and the intersection of technology and software um you know i think now it's a little bit more elemote or more popular to build like sort of consumer fintech companies um when you know earlier on in my career that was that was pretty on you know there's a lot less of them there was a few you know you obviously had your paypal and and and that you know and that sort of cohort but um you didn't have the challenger banks that you have today that are kind of coming out and

reassessing the entire sort of like financial institution space so um but uh but getting involved in crypto was one started with that deep interest from a technology perspective and just being a huge nerd and realizing there was something going on here. And two is having that economics and sort of financial behavior interest as well. My first time digging into crypto was Bitcoin. It wasn't anything else. And it actually wasn't in 2017. It was, I don't want to date it because I kind of, I actually have like a bit of a pet peeve when people are like, I was in crypto at like, you know, this moment. The truth is, I'm actually not sure exactly when it was. It was before we started building our previous company because we were working on another company. And this is a

funny story. One of the engineers on the team who had left, we were sort of doing an audit of the servers that we had for the company. And as we were doing an audit of these servers, we found these long running processes that were on these servers. And we're like, what is going on here? This is realistically, it was probably around 2011, I'd say, like maybe 2010, 2011. We're like, what is going on here this is so bizarre like these servers are being used but we're not using them like why is this happening this guy had left turns out he had been running bitcoin miners on these company servers for god knows how long maybe six months 12 months who knows um and uh and that was my first introduction to bitcoin i was like this is the coolest thing i've ever like you know

part of me is like that's terrible we shouldn't have been doing that the other part of me was like this is the coolest thing i've ever seen like you could wait hold on you can like create this asset and you know and then that's when i you know obviously the naive me was like how does this work what you know what's going on and i'm a huge nerd so um that was my first time getting involved with bitcoin in general um actually when we were at grand street the marketplace that we built um we were still very interested i say we because i speak a lot in we is because aaron and i uh my co-founder and i have spent a lot of time doing a lot of this work together we were still very interested in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general um and we integrated with this company

that at the time was doing Bitcoin payments. I think it was called Diwala. I believe it was called Diwala. They were one of the earlier sort of like payment processor providers. And we integrated them as a payment provider alongside Stripe on our marketplace. We did have to subsequently

unintegrate that product because there was a lot of fraud and it was kind of like hard to do, to properly balance between crypto and the volatility of crypto and dollars. And again, like I should reiterate, this is in 2012 or something. It was a long time ago and crypto has come a long way since then. So I would say that crypto and blockchains has kind of been weaved through bits and pieces of my career, both from an interest perspective as well as from an execution perspective for the last close to 10 years, which is super cool.

What did you do with the guy who was running the scripts on the servers? Did you guys go and kind of slap his wrist and say, hey, you should have done that? Or did you go, Tom, hey, man, you're pretty smart. Thanks for introducing us to it. We didn't know until he was gone. He had left the company already. I haven't talked to him since. He's probably sitting on a beach somewhere, not listening to this podcast.

Or even worse for you is he's listening and being like, damn, they know. I mean, look, those are his, right? Those are his keys. Those are his Bitcoin. I mean, it's unfortunate that that's that's the route. But in all fairness, I will say like there were servers that the company wasn't using. So it was sort of like this excess capacity. So this is back when you could mine Bitcoin on like a regular computer. You can't you can't do that stuff anymore. So that's a whole other world. But but but getting back to your original question in 2017, I should say really late 2016, early 2017.

2016 all of 2016 aaron and i were spending a lot of time thinking about sort of what we wanted to do next what was sort of on the horizon and we could not get away from this idea that crypto and blockchains and transfer value networks uh and modern crypto networks were going to be the future and that there was this was an inevitability uh that uh this technology was going to be baked into the products and services that we use on a daily basis new products and services that are to be built and designed uh and um and if you think very like you know i have a very technical mind you know very software engineering focused mind you think very sort of technical about this the idea of having computer systems that can speak to each other and transfer value automatically

seamlessly and trustlessly is so obvious to me like today it's like so obvious and the systems are being built and they're being tested and they're being broken and they're being refixed and they're being relaunched and new things are being built like that's how technology progresses but um that to me was so obvious in in even in 2016 and so the ico ico craze happened and um i will say that like i did you know i was around i definitely was doing some investments in the crypto space and i've never sold a single token that i've purchased i've never um you know that's not entirely true i did sell some bitcoin at some point and i deeply deeply regret it but uh um you know i never i was never really day trading any cryptos or anything like that it was kind of

of like mostly like looking at interesting projects and investing in them and saying like this could be this could be something that's come uh you know it is part of the future so balancing the day job was hard it's really hard as a founder at a company at a big company and things are there's a lot of moving parts it's really really hard because you constantly have that itch of i like i gotta go now there's no i can't wait like six months i can't wait a year Like I have to do this today, you know, and it's hard to truly explain that idea, but it was really, really hard. And so, you know, if anybody from Etsy is listening to this now, and I'm still quite close with a few of them, I feel bad. I probably wasn't 100% in on Etsy in the last like six months that I was there because I was already sort of thinking about like what I wanted to be working on next.

Very common when you acquire a company and the startup founders are there, you know that they're not going to be there for a decade, right? And so it's just a matter of when, when do they start looking at other things? But, but I guess the question then is just like, what was the impetus for what has now become Bison Trails? What was that original idea where you guys were like, all right, you know, we've kind of gone through all these ideas in this space. Like, here's what we should go do and spend our time and energy on. Yeah.

Um, this is, uh, honestly, quite frankly, like of all of the projects and companies that I've worked on in, in, in my career, I actually think Bison Trails has been the most organic progression of an idea and a concept of any of the other projects we've worked on um and and uh and i think it's super cool it's actually a really fun story for me to tell because of how sort of progressive it is it's kind of like it makes you think you know you hear stories of companies being built and you know in hindsight you realize like oh yeah like you know actually it was being used this way and that's where we started going then all of a sudden it's like you have this company that's scaling up and we've sort of been experiencing that over the last couple

years, which is, which is really quite cool. So I kind of mentioned before that, you know, Aaron and I wrote technical, we're both pretty big nerds. So when we finally decided, okay, it's time to jump and actually build something, build something, I should say, not build something in the crypto space, but build something. We took a year almost to sort of explore. And, you know, this is advice that I actually often give to early stage founders, which is work on things you care about because it's going to inevitably at some point it's going to be shitty and make sure that you care about it enough that when it's not going well you don't give up and so i think that you know we took that very very seriously in this and that we wanted to make sure we were working on

something we cared about and and so really took a time took the time to explain i should say we were already in crypto right we were already like i already had bitcoin i already had ethereum i was already you know investing in other projects but it wasn't like okay we've got to build a crypto company. What ended up happening was he took a year and basically read every white paper that existed under the sun, started to look beyond the hype cycles around crypto and look at some of the deeper research and applied technology that folks were working on and realizing that there was this crazy, crazy depth of some of the most intelligent, some of the weirdest and most intelligent people you've ever met in your entire life that are trying to solve these very serious problems in

you know trust the systems you send decentralized systems and um transfer value and store value networks and you know all the all the crypto and blockchain fun stuff um and uh that's when the the sort of you know the rabbit hole moment that's when like the the the interest graph just took over it was there was no other thing that i wanted to work on or cared about working on it was like even if i tried to explore another industry it was like always like how does like crypto affect this you know like how's blah how do blockchains affect this um and so that was um that's when the interest graph kind of kicked in and then and then it's like then founder moment starts then it's like okay now i'm interested in this and i can't whether i'm in the shower or whether i'm you know

i just woke up like whether i'm on a run it doesn't matter what i'm doing this is the only thing i'm thinking about and that's when that's when um you know founder kicks in and it's like like, great, do. How do I do? Not how do I learn more, but how do I do? And being that we're a technical team, the only thing we really know how to do is do really technical things and kick into gear. So first question we asked ourselves was, how does everything work? Read every white paper. How does this work? And we had just spent a large part of our careers exploring how do we democratize access to systems? And I kind of mentioned this earlier, like we were building APIs to manufacturing. It was like, how do you break down walls into this? And we're both very technical,

and we try to explore the blockchain space and realize that this is hard this is not simple technology it's not easy it is not at the point where if you're an entrepreneur and you want to build a new product or service that your mind immediately says like well i should be using crypto and blockchains because that's where this you know that's where uh the the future is because it was still very very difficult and so um that was kind of step one step two was how do we understand the infrastructure behind everything that's going on. So we just very simply like asked ourselves, okay, I understand Bitcoin, I understand how it works, but what's powering Bitcoin and why is it powering Bitcoin? And at the time, the only thing that was really powering

this network, the majority that was powering these networks was mining and mostly proof of work mining. And we don't have to get into the details of proof of work mining, but we did what every startup founder does which is try to figure out how mining works um and uh and so we built like a small uh mining test facility uh in in brooklyn new york and not not in in sort of commercial sense but just as an idea like to really understand how our blocks form how our messages propagated how does this system actually work how is it trustless what happens if you break it what happens if you know what are the right ways to do this realize that it was super interesting and got a really strong grasp of the infrastructure behind things like Bitcoin and other proof of work

networks and said, great, we get it in a nutshell. How does this work at scale? So we did the next thing a startup founder does is we scaled it. So a little fun fact about Aaron and I that most people don't know is we actually own a proof of work mine. We built from the ground up a proof of work mine. We spent a few months scouting different locations all around the country, actually all around the world settling eventually on the united states uh and and really uh figuring out how to optimize building a proof of work mine optimizing how to build out the space and how to where to position it how to negotiate power contracts and i'm sure you know your your audience probably knows enough about mining that we didn't we don't need to talk about mining but

there's a whole lot of things that go into that and part of the name is actually from is a hat tip to the time that we spent in in in in spots like wyoming and montana in the pacific northwest uh trying to build out this first version of like infrastructure in the space and so we ultimately did that and so we built up like what would be considered a pretty big for two people uh but small on you know bit main scale or whatever um proof of work mind and wrote a bunch of software to optimize it and automate a bunch of them we still own it we still own a proof of plan which is it's all a whole other independent fun can of worms um and so uh you know in this progression of in this learning progression as a founder it kind of started as like a deep interest

in understanding the white papers and the technology and then you get into this applied interest of understanding the infrastructure and how it works and what's powering it and that's when you start to unlock the the sort of the the openness of how you can innovate and build once Once you know what's there and you understand how the pieces are their work, then you start to envision a future where those things are easier and you can build the pieces to make it easier. So Aaron and I started working on a few different projects, not companies, but projects in the space. We had built a bot that was trading on exchanges for fun. We had built, you know, we started building this like a wallet app and we built a few other products and services. And every single time we built one of these different products or pieces of software, we realized we kept rebuilding this robust piece of infrastructure to participate in the blockchain itself.

So you're building connectivity into these networks that are by definition and by design, you know, decentralized, unreliable, because that creates the security and the resiliency. So we had spent a lot of time rebuilding these pieces. And ultimately, you know, at one point, there was an aha moment where we turned to each other and we're like, OK, so we built like three different things. But every time we build one of these things, we're rebuilding this like, you know, underlying infrastructure layer. And we're like scratching our heads and we're like, OK, well, so we understand infrastructure really well at scale in the space. We keep rebuilding this thing. Maybe we should ask other people if they're having the same problem. you know like it feels like silly but at the same time that's really how it went you know and so we um so i started asking a few other founders that i that i had met in the crypto space like hey what

does your engineering team look like what are some of your challenges uh and almost every single person we talked to was like well like 20 of our researchers are focused on like connecting to bitcoin or ethereum or or you know running nodes that are helping us read and write to the network or, you know, trying to fix unreliable services that, you know, APIs that we're trying to use to read from Ethereum or write to Bitcoin. And, you know, at that moment, Aaron and I were like, okay, so this is a problem we have. We're solving our own problem.

We talked to a few folks in the space, and clearly they have the problem. And this is very, very, very clearly something that will make it easier for folks to come into the space and build new products and services. So it aligns incredibly well with our interests, with our backgrounds, with our ability to solve infrastructure problems but also democratize access to blockchains and so like i wish that i had like a you know a moment where like i you know i turned on the light switch and all of a sudden i was like i should build an infrastructure company in the blockchain space but that's not at all what happened it was really like a series of events that kind of turn around and we

realize oh there's something here and then the next phase is building that company you know so this company is going to get built whether we build it or not so let's start building the an infrastructure platform to make it easier for people to do this and started building the first version of it and talking to early customers and kind of getting them on board a few years ago and from there that's that's really the the story and so when you talk about infrastructure and kind of your product offering maybe just you know dig a little deeper on just like what do you mean by infrastructure because i think when people hear that they think like pick shovels you know oil and gas and kind of bridges and toll booths and you know like that type of world so what does that

mean in the kind of Bitcoin and crypto world? And then in terms of how customers interface with you, what exactly are the products that you're offering them today? Yeah. And I love that. I love that the imagery that you're sort of putting out there, right? Picks, shovels, tollbooths, highways, those are the things that we are building for the blockchain space. We're building infrastructure for the blockchain space. For blockchains, what that means is generally speaking computing computing power storage power that provides access for people to read for companies or individuals to read and write or help secure or produce blocks so blockchains are really you know a protocol is really just a set of instructions and computers implement those

instructions and people companies people individuals need to run those computers to implement those instructions and we've built a platform that makes it so you don't need to be technical at all to run computers that implement those instructions. So with two clicks, you can run a node that is helping secure the Cosmos network. You can, you know, with two clicks, you can run a series of node clusters that are distributed all around the world that are using a whole variety of different cloud providers for resiliency and for resistance and for fault tolerance and run auto-skill Polkadot infrastructure, for instance. Similarly, if you had a business, if you were an exchange or a custodian or an asset

manager or a data company and you wanted to very regularly connect to the Bitcoin network, read from it, write to it on behalf of your customers, you actually need to support, build and deploy and manage node infrastructure to be able to do that, which is non-trivial task to do at scale securely and reliably and so our customers will use our platform to do that instead and so the products we offer right now we're focused on we really focus on newer proof-of-stake networks so networks that are using proof-of-stake as a consensus mechanism instead of proof-of-work and the reason for that is because proof-of-stake as opposed to using

mining and basic mining and sort of these very specific computers to secure the network. ProvenStake uses basically generalized computers and they use stake as a mechanism or asset value as a mechanism to secure the network. So you're incentivized to behave appropriately and disincentivized financially to behave poorly. And so you can do that running somewhat of a regular computer in like a cloud environment. However, it needs to be incredibly, incredibly secure because these are, you know, effectively giant honeypots. So we have this very, very, very huge, secure infrastructure platform. And we run nodes on all of these different networks, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos, Tezos, Algorand, you know, you name it. Polkadot just launched pretty

recently. And there's a whole bunch of new networks that are coming out as well. So that's basically um what our platform does and um and again just to reiterate what we say when we what we mean when we say infrastructures we literally mean computers and these computers are essentially tuned to do different things like read and write from a chain um you know i like the toll booth kind of uh analogy uh so you know also like potentially process transactions and take fees right so if you imagine like a message getting propagated through a blockchain uh and there's nodes that are propagating that and you know they will take uh transaction fees to propagate those messages um not all that dissimilar from like let's say a toll booth on a on a toll road um

and so we uh we run all these computers on our platform and we build a platform to do this and for customers basically what they're doing is the the interface with you is through apis and then you guys have all this infrastructure built out and so uh i'm envisioning um basically i'm building a company, let's say it's a consumer facing business. I want to support a bunch of different assets rather than me go and have to build out the actual infrastructure to support every single one of those assets. I can essentially come to your business and say, Hey, here's the four of the 12, 15 assets that you guys support today. I want to interface with these four. I hit some API and basically get kind of a robust set of tools and services that are specific to

that blockchain? Yep. That's, that's, that's, that's pretty, that's like pretty darn close to how things work and how the platform works. You know, a lot of a good analogy, and I don't want to, you know, I don't want to compare ourselves from a company perspective, obviously, because we're very young as a company, we're still getting getting started. And the space is nascent, and we're helping grow where, you know, our whole mission is to help grow the blockchain ecosystem. him. But a good analogy is, and I was a startup founder in this time, but in the early 2000s, if you wanted to start a software company, you bet you were signing data center contracts and putting servers in a data center all over the world. And if you were scaling, you were rushing

to do that all over the world in Europe, in Southeast Asia and Asia Pac. And then in 2000, don't date me on this, but 2005 or whatever, Amazon starts selling its excess capacity competency to its servers through its EC2 and S3 offering and launches AWS. And all of a sudden, it changes the game and provides access to folks that want to build new products and services to not have to raise 20 million bucks and deploy servers all over the world and instead can focus on the product and experience and their core competency. And so what we're doing is actually something very similar in a sense that we're enabling companies to focus on their core competency. So if your core competency is an exchange and the experience around exchanging

digital assets, there's no reason you should be focused on deploying, managing, and building computers that can actually support this. Similar if you're a wallet, if you're a custodian, if you're a data company, if you're trying to provide data and analytics, you shouldn't be focused on the nuances and headache that it takes to make sure that your Bitcoin nodes are syncing or Ethereum archival nodes are syncing, or that your Cosmos validators are running and safe and no one's trying to hack them. And so we think of ourselves in a very similar way. We take a piece of the stack, we've professionalized it, we've created enterprise grade infrastructure and security around it. And we sell peace of mind to companies that want to be able to build and

build new products and services. And part of that is adding new assets, but it's also even covering some of the assets they were previously doing before themselves in-house. And so one of the things that I immediately think of is, okay, so you've got a decentralized network, and then you've got a business on the other end of the spectrum. And that connectivity, the bridge, the infrastructure, whatever nomenclature you want to use, is run by one company. And so now all of a sudden, am I exposing myself to whether it's security or just kind of platform risk of when I sign up, Bison Trails loves me, all of a sudden, Bison Trails doesn't love me and like my business ends up kind of getting blown up, or something happens to Bison Trails in terms of a security breach or something like that, and then therefore my business suffers alongside that. How do you guys think about in this world of, I won't call it decentralization by default, but I think from an ethos perspective, like decentralization is kind of put on this pedestal, rightfully so in many cases. How do you think about building the infrastructure and is it centralized, decentralized and kind of just talk me through that? Yeah, absolutely. So first things first is decentralization.

It's funny because you kind of touched on this, is decentralization is a spectrum. And at least in my personal experience is people will draw the line in the sand around decentralization wherever it's most convenient for them, which I think is hilarious. And I think I'm very pragmatic about that. You know, it's kind of like, you know, we don't even need to get into examples, but Whether it's mining pools or it's equipment providers or it's location of network, there's a ton of reasons and areas where these decentralized networks are not perfect and none of them are perfect. And I think that if you take an absolute sort of spectrum and you say it can only either exist perfectly decentralized in a perfect equilibrium or it's centralized, I think it's a recipe for never innovating and never getting anywhere. So we think of it a little bit more pragmatically in that, yes, they're decentralized networks by default.

And this company, Bison Trails, was built with the ethos of decentralization in mind from day one. So internally, we think about this a lot as how do we continue to build technology to move the space forward, build new products and services that service these customers like you're describing, the ones that are coming and are really happy with Bison Trails, while at the same time, trying to move towards a better and more decentralized network and decentralized ecosystem. And we do a lot to support that. So some of the things people don't generally talk about is like, absolutely, that, you know, we're a company, we're, you know, we're a venture backed company, right? We're, we are a business, we're not, we're not a charity.

So we're, you know, building the company and growing it as a business. But the idea is we want to further the entire mission of the space. And we think of that as how can we, being focused specifically on solving this infrastructure problem, move the pieces forward that companies that have other focuses are not moving it forward in. So I would never throw any network or any company under the bus, but this is something we actually get to see is we can tell where these networks are being run. And it's not uncommon to see a huge portion of a network being run on like Amazon AWS on the East coast. And you can say like Bison Trails

could be a platform risk there, but the fact that we can tell that means we can help distribute nodes all over the world, you know, in, I don't want to quote the number of zones and regions we have, but it's in the multiple dozens. I think it's something like 25 or 26 zone, you know, cross section of providers, zones and regions. And we can actually reduce the risk on the protocol itself.

So on the network itself, as well as you as a customer of ours. So we can create the kind of redundancy that you probably couldn't have done yourself. So if you were building your exchange and you were using Amazon Web Services and all of a sudden there's a horrible outage in Amazon Web Services, your exchange goes down. You're using the Bison Trails platform. We can automatically switch you over to something like Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure or other cloud providers or data center providers. And part of what we do is adding in new data centers to create that variance and that variety to help decentralize the network and distribute the network. So there are ways that we are working on that.

The other thing that we're doing, and this is a little bit more ethos driven, is trying to create technology solutions and systems that provide provability around like ownership. So who actually has control? What happens if, you know, what happens if Bison Trails doesn't like us anymore? Which, you know, hopefully it wouldn't happen. But in a world where, you know, you try and create systems where you don't have to have trust, it's important to first have trust so you can then build up the systems and then you can kind of design it in a way to take away the trust, which is a really good way to do this. So we're working on technology to be able to do that. And then, you know, the third piece for us is really just about, you know, how do we essentially make these networks more mature? How do we make them more robust? How do we build the products and services that move them from being, you know, a couple of folks in like in a dorm room on a Raspberry Pi into, you know, highly available, highly redundant network systems that a bank like, you know, whatever the modern version of a bank system or bank company gets built can actually trust and use. And I think that that's really, really important. I'm not saying banks are definitely going to use them or they need to use them, but I'm saying if you're building a product and service and you want it to be able to scale and use blockchains, those blockchains need to be reliable. And right now, that's an area where we're really shining is we're creating reliability in an area where there's been unreliability and volatility. I joke all the time, some of it just literally the joke around and some of it being half serious that Jeff Bezos owns majority of these decentralized networks.

for the exact point that you described which is um they look decentralized on the surface but when you actually dig into the infrastructure itself and kind of what platforms and where's the risk uh it's just naturally there's three major providers you name three of them right google amazon and microsoft and so there's a good shot that uh some portion if not a majority of a portion of the networks and be running on those services even if you're running part of the network and i'm running part of the network but if we're both on amazon aws like is it really decentralized because you and I are quote-unquote not the same personal organization, but there's this common layer of risk, right? Yeah. And the answer to that question is,

yes, that's a problem, but also, yes, that can be much better than if that wasn't the case, right? And that's sort of our position here is, yeah, it would be terrible if we ran every single customer's infrastructure on one platform. That would be catastrophic if there was an issue. that'd be really bad which is why we spend so much time building out what is considered even an enterprise like a very very modern infrastructure platform there's a lot of companies that are you know you know fortune 100 companies that wish they could do the kinds of stuff that bison trails is doing from an infrastructure perspective because we create that resilience and redundancy so you know if pomp if you're running you know bitcoin node and that and you need that for your business

and it goes down and you're on bison trails it'll be up and running and available on google cloud or Azure, almost immediately, you won't even notice the blip. And that's a very powerful thing for the networks. Yeah, and I think that's a key piece, which is when people hear a lot of like infrastructure stuff, they immediately think it's everything but Bitcoin, right? Because, oh, I can run the Bitcoin node myself. But you guys actually have a number of pieces of infrastructure that can make the Bitcoin network more resilient, right? Even if it's not so much a decentralization thing it's you can help the individual uh node or the individual user at the bitcoin level um

you know kind of benefit or improve their position as well exactly uh and make that make that whole process easier so it's been um it's been super interesting and i will say this it's a it's a constant uh it's constantly on our company roadmap as well and this is this is the advantage of uh being a company that is designed and built around the ethos of the crypto space, we want to put this into perspective. We're a company that's entirely reliant on the success of the crypto and blockchain space. All our eggs are in blockchain and crypto baskets, so to speak. We want to see these protocols succeed, and we won't be successful if they're not successful, and they won't be successful if they're not properly distributed and resilient and redundant

so our interests are very much aligned here it's actually a very cool concept because we're not rewarded by being bad actors in that respect we're actually rewarded by being the best actors in that respect and so um we put a lot of time and effort and resources and research into uh building the best infrastructure platform so that big companies can trust and rely on us uh you know to service you know, millions, hundreds of millions of requests on a regular basis. Talk to me a little bit about the types of customers you guys work with. So you mentioned earlier, you know, somebody who might have a Bitcoin node or something like that, but obviously you serve all kinds of different customers. So you walk me through some of those

segments. Yeah. So we, it's funny, the one thing that's actually common around all of our customer segments, and they're actually pretty different in terms of makeup is that they have crypto assets. So they accumulate, you know, we call, we tend to refer them as tokens or coins or crypto assets, but they accumulate or aggregate tokens. So these can be funds, crypto funds, hedge funds, you know, asset managers, you know, you name it, anyone who's sort of like investing. And we see this a lot of our customer base on newer protocols where there hasn't been a ton of token distribution. So the protocol is relatively new, hasn't been used all that much. There's not like a robust DeFi ecosystem where people are buying and trading and leveraging and lending and all this stuff. So it tends to be a little bit more. The asset tends to be more concentrated around like folks like early investors and stuff. We see that. And then we have larger crypto native companies.

So companies that were built specifically to solve blockchain and crypto problems. These are the exchanges and custodians that exist in the world. So custody on an institutional basis, as well as custody on an individual or sort of more prosumer basis. And then exchanges. So a lot of tokens are aggregated on exchanges. People are trading in and out of positions. And they also want to do things like stake those assets. And we provide infrastructure to large scale exchanges to be able to stake assets. We, in March, announced a collaboration with Coinbase for Polkadot, for the Polkadot network. So that's a public announcement that we did, enabling folks that were using Coinbase custody to easily stake their Polkadots as the network was going live. So there's those segments. And then there's what we call the sort of like crypto newcomers. newcomers. So there's these financial institutions and products and services that existed before crypto or weren't necessarily built specifically on blockchains or crypto. And they enable things

like trading assets or savings accounts or other financial products. And they have a desire and interest to service their customer base that likes crypto. And so they want to be able to have their customers buy or sell Bitcoin or trade Bitcoin or transfer Bitcoin or do the same thing Ethereum, they tend to be a little bit more focused on networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum, being that they've been around a little bit longer. And so the segments that we have kind of fall into more or less those categories. And then I would say that the depth of interest in protocols and the sort of range of protocols really depends on how long they've been in the crypto space. And we're starting to see folks kind of like teeter more into like, okay, now we're interested

in like Tezos and Cosmos and Algorand and, you know, and Polkadot and Ethereum too, which is, you know, a huge, huge, huge shift in the market that the Ethereum network is planning as it shifts over from proof of work and to proof of stake as a consensus mechanism and participation in that network becomes key to being able to, you know, be part of the ecosystem. And that's what we do really, really well. So that's mostly what our makeup looks like. We don't specifically talk who our customers are both for for their security for our security and you know generally speaking um it's not no something that we do but um but that's that's what they look like and you know we've been a pretty uh uh outspoken um sort of uh proponent for decentralized systems but also

specifically for uh being blockchain and protocol agnostic so we don't you know personally as a crypto believer i you know i'm a huge believer in in bitcoin and in ethereum and in you know a whole bunch of these new networks of of you know for them to be uh super important for the ecosystem but as a company we service all of them um you know we joined we were asked to join the libra association last year we are we joined the libra association i'm a council member there i'm on the technical steering committee uh governing the open source project around libra we're on probably another dozen uh councils for protocol teams so we work really closely with blockchain protocols and the the the engineers and the sort of phds and cryptography that are building these new protocols

on one side and then we work really closely with these companies that are trying to engage with and build on top of these protocols on the other side got it and where is bison trails going right like let's look towards the future three to five years out what's kind of the goal and kind of any milestones along the way that you guys really focused on hitting? So right now, our biggest focus right now being in the short, short, medium term is, you know, right now, which is an ambiguous timeframe, but is very, very, very, very specifically unspecifically focused on like, say, the next 12 to 18 months is to make sure that these protocols that we're helping support that we've been helping support things like test nets and incentivize

test nets, making this transition towards main net, which is a pretty significant milestone for the protocols. So we view our role as a, like I said before, providing mature and robust infrastructure to enable lots of folks to build in this ecosystem. So for the next 12 to 18 months, there's probably about 30 protocols that we're working really closely with, that we have been working really closely with for the last two years. And they're in some transition stage of We're pretty close to launching. And you can actually think a lot of these were some of these, you know, 2016, 2017 ICOs that, you know, some of the early ICOs that, you know, raised a lot of capital and have been working for the last, like, diligently for the last three years to get these protocols built, tested, and scaled. So there's a lot of that, a lot, a lot of that. While we're focused on that, we're also focused on building some robustness around the products and services of what we would refer to internally

as more mature blockchain protocols. So Bitcoin being obviously one of the oldest and the most mature, and then things like Ethereum where we can provide some tooling to folks that are either already built on top of this or uh would like to start adding support for for the network and that can be something as simple as you know things like fast syncing nodes for ethereum archival nodes so if you're like doing your data company and you really want to you know get access to ethereum data you need to be able to connect to one of these notes i don't know if you know this but there's not a lot of people that run ethereum archival nodes they're kind of expensive they're clunky they're hard to sync they take you know can take weeks and we've built technology to do that

in very very very very short amount of time so if you're a company that wants to do it you're kind of thinking like this isn't something i want to do myself i'm going to work with bison trails to do it um i will say that if i think further out like five ten years down the road um you know we are the infrastructure company that if you're building a product and service you've integrated with in some way shape or form and that can be at the sort of you know simplest most raw unit uh in a blockchain which can be at that node level or it can be a product and service that's a little bit higher up the stack. And that can be things like indexing or data retrieval or APIs to produce content for blockchain or to consume content from a blockchain.

Got it. And what do you think the biggest obstacles are for you to accomplish some of that? I think this is where it gets into beliefs and beliefs around the blockchain space. I think that the world that we're in today has been, you know, the fact that we are all as humans have become a little bit more remote, become a little bit more distant, is actually almost cognitively more aligned with blockchain systems and crypto networks, which I'm finding very, very fascinating. And I think that the, I believe that one of the knock-on effects of this is this creativity that's going to spark from, you know, from the world that we're in today that will create a bloom of entrepreneurship around blockchains and transfer value networks. And this actually happened in the early internet days as well. Like post internet crash, there was like a pretty, it was, it was pretty bad. Like the world, the quote unquote world was in like, not a great, great spot in a sense, not, you know, there wasn't a pandemic around, but, um, you know, economically speaking,

the world was not a great spot. And a lot of times, uh, the best infrastructure companies are built in these sort of economic downturns, um, because that's when it's like time to sort of lay the groundwork. Um, and then you see this explosion of entrepreneurship on top of it. And so, you know, barriers to entry, sorry, barriers to success for us, not to entry, but barriers to success for us is going to be making sure that we do a good job helping these protocols scale and make them more accessible and democratize access to them. The crypto and blockchain ecosystem needs to continue to grow. That is like full stop what's the most important thing for us. And our company is tasked with helping that.

And we're doing it from a ease of use and ease of access perspective. And so if we can't achieve that goal, then that will be a challenge, you know, fundamentally a challenge for Bison Trails. But if we can continue to see some of these protocols grow and launch and new products and services happen, then we're in a great spot. And, you know, the truth is, I've never worked in an industry that had the pace of innovation that the crypto industry has. I mean, I know, two years ago, DeFi was just like, a word you would hear at a meetup once in a while, you know, it was not a thing. Now, you know, we're talking about like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, still small ecosystem, but from a crypto perspective and growth perspective, like, you know, multi billion dollar ecosystem, like that, that is incredible. And so we will continue to see innovation happen at that pace. And it'll be in finance, it'll be in decentralized finance, it'll be in things like payments and marketplaces and data transfer. And, you know, you're going to start to see all these verticals. And that's where I'm excited for the future of Bison Trails and that we're going to help support all these verticals as they continue to grow. Before we get into the rapid fire questions to end it, where can people find out more about Bison Trails on the internet and also find you? Yeah. So Bison Trails, you can email us high at bisontrails.co or visit us on the web at bisontrails.co. You can learn about the protocols we support. We also produce a ton of content on our blog explaining the really tough nuances of how these different protocols work. We do a ton

of research and produce it in a way that makes it consumable and easy for people to understand. So you can check that out at bisontrails.co. We're also on Twitter at Bison Trails. We tweet all this stuff out too, if you're on Twitter and you want to find us. And then me personally, I'm at Joe Laloos on Twitter. That's the place to get me. Awesome. First rapid fire question. What is the most important book that you've ever read? Oh man, I feel like I have recency bias here. I loved The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Why? It reminded me that, it reminded me of this idea that you can build the future, the technology future, and you could end up on either the good side

or the bad side of it. And that you should always remember to stay on the good side of it. Okay, that's fair. I haven't read it, so I'm gonna have to read that one. That sounds like something I would enjoy. It's a good book. And it actually has a lot, a lot to do with crypto

and blockchains in the sense that like, you could almost envision a future dystopian world where like a lot of the fundamentals around crypto have come true, which is cool. aliens believer or non-believer um believer that humans shouldn't be so self-centered that we think we can be the only life forms in the universe and that it's too big for it not to be possible so a believer in like the sort of for science perspective not because i've seen them i well actually i can't say i i've had i think two or three people come on and say they've seen

ufos no one claims to see an alien but ufos for sure uh it's impossible they don't exist i guess it's like my my perspective i'm with you it's always this weird thing but i also i joke with you all the time like we always think of space but i've seen some videos of stuff in the ocean and i'm like hey man i didn't learn about that in school like i don't know what that is but that does not look like anything i've ever heard of before the ocean if the ocean is telling enough about what could be in space it's like too dangerous absolutely uh to finish up you could ask me one question what is the one question you have for me who uh if hmm let's see if uh is there a world where blockchains and crypto succeed but bitcoin

does not exist yes but i'm going to caveat it with bitcoin to me is the only shot we have at separation of state and money and so you could see that fail but other types of decentralized networks whatever like that wins it's just uh two very separate problems right so like i always say bitcoin and crypto because crypto to me is like all the non-currency type applications where i think people are still kind of like sifting through the various opportunities and saying like what are the opportunities they're worth going after how much is that like how much market cap is available if you're the successful winner there uh who are the right teams like there's a lot of unknowns and that's where fortunes will get kind of made or lost on uh with

bitcoin i think i think we're at the point now where it's like at least in my opinion like it's either bitcoin or nothing right in terms of separating state and money um and so while yes it uses some of the same underlying technology yes it has a lot of the same ethos like it's a very very different type of problem um because a lot of the crypto problems are both technical and like user experience and all that kind of stuff yeah the money problem is more like belief system and uh game theory than let's say like uh you know traditional crypto network um and so it's by separating them it makes it i think a little bit more clear like you can get a world where bitcoin is the only successful thing and all the other crypto stuff fails or vice versa like

bitcoin could not separate state money and then you could get other things that uh end up using kind of triple entry accounting blockchain etc that are uh valuable that's awesome it's good it's good it's good oh man there's like i have like seven follow-ups but we're good trust me and every bitcoin maximus in the world probably gonna like come find me now but they know i listen i'm on board i'm on board more than probably anybody else no but this is uh this is great man uh we will send people bison trails.co um and just generally think what you guys are doing super important and anytime you can get people to uh to kind of democratize access access uh to something it ends up uh usually leading to

pretty good things so i just keep at it i appreciate it and and uh just before uh before we jump i just wanted to say thanks so much for having me and um like i said huge fan and uh love the work that you're doing and keep it up and you know really i think your fans appreciate you know folks watching and listening i really appreciate the work you do so thanks thanks again for having me here i'm having fun you're having fun let's just keep going yeah love it Thank you.