The Pomp Podcast - 356: LIVE Camila Russo and Catherine Coley on Defi and Ethereum

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Camila Russo is a financial journalist with experience across continents and asset classes. She is the author of a new book, The Infinite Machine, and the founder of The Defiant. Catherine Coley is the CEO of Binance US and previously the Head of Institutional Liquidity at Ripple. In this conversation, we discuss Ethereum, DeFi, ETH 2.0, Camila's new book, the cost of gas, NFT's, early stories around the launch of Ethereum, and digital art. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. https://www.blockfi.com/pomp  =============================== The BTSE exchange allows you to trade confidently. They are the leader in futures, which means they are pioneering Futures 2.0. With BTSE, you can trade next-level futures: freely choose and combine your margin and settlement assets and trade with up to 100x leverage. You can also sign up for a BTSE Elite membership that gives you unbeatable discounts and bonuses across the BTSE Exchange, OTC platform, and more. Go to BTSE.com/pomp to get a 10% discount on your BTSE Elite membership. =============================== 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. Camilla Russo is a financial journalist with experience across continents and asset classes. She's the author of a new book, The Infinite Machine, and the founder of The Defiant. Catherine Coley is the CEO of FinanceUS and previously served as the head of institutional liquidity at Ripple. In this conversation, we discuss Ethereum, DeFi, ETH 2.0, Camilla's new book, the cost of gas, NFTs, early stories around the launch of Ethereum, and digital art. I really enjoyed this live stream with both Camilla and Catherine. I hope you enjoy it as well.

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discount on your Bitsy Elite membership. Again, Bitsy, btse.com slash Pomp, btse.com slash Pomp, 10% off the Bitsy Elite membership. Go check out their pioneering futures product. 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. All right, let's get into this episode with Camilla and Catherine. 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. Right. I think that we are live. How are both of you? I'm good. Awesome. How are you? Where, uh, Kim, let's start with you. Where, where are you physically in the world right now? I'm in Brooklyn at my apartment. Awesome. And Catherine? I'm in a bunker and I'm doing awesome. In a bunker? Hey, I like to keep safe. All right, that's fair. If you're watching the live stream, we will take questions here in a little bit. We're going to have a bunch

of questions in a conversation with uh camilla about her book about ethereum um and d5 much other things but uh leave your questions in the live chat and we will do our best to get all of them answered um katherine maybe you start what questions do you have about all of this you are the ceo of finance us and uh are very close to all this so what uh what questions you got yeah well the best part is so ethereum just celebrated its fifth birthday and finance just celebrated its third birthday and finance us is about to celebrate almost its first birthday so it really shows that people have been in this space a lot longer than finance us as a platform though we're seeing a ton of new users come in i'm curious about things going so i really want to learn about

the early days of when ethereum was beginning and kind of what drove the origins of batalic and the ethereum teams to kind of build this out the ground so getting people that are new to this space familiar with the old origins of how things got started yeah you were there yeah yeah um so the theorem story is a fascinating story like it's um a lot of people have told me the book reads like a fiction novel and that's because it's it's really you know a roller coaster ride full of like really interesting characters um so the the early days of of ethereum really started with i i think just you know a love of bitcoin um you know in 2012 2013 when vitalik uh started you know thinking about all this stuff um it was like mostly or only bitcoin that was around then

um so vitalik went from you know he was 18 or so when he when his dad told him about bitcoin for the first time and at first he was like what this is like digital currency not backed by anything how can it ever have any value but then he quickly kind of you know started researching more and and went like oh okay like i get it now and became a really like full-on diehard bitcoiner and founded bitcoin magazine with mihailisi and then took a break from computer science uh and went all over the world visiting the different bitcoin projects at the time it was called bitcoin 2.0 like all these projects trying to bring more functionality to bitcoin um so he went to you know um amsterdam Israel different places like following these projects and so it was in Israel

when he was working with colored coins and master coin that he said you know instead of like trying to build specific like features on top of Bitcoin why don't we build a more generalized platform that can allow developers to build anything like whatever they dream up and we just give them these Lego pieces instead of like what looks like a swiss army knife um and so the the guys at master coin and and colored coins were like no like this is too complicated we are we're already kind of focusing our resources elsewhere we're not you know so we're not really interested in doing this so that's when vitalik said screw it i'll do it myself and went off and you know wrote the

ethereum white paper so that's kind of the very early beginnings of it yeah i i often explain ethereum because i i dumb things down because uh it's it's hard for me to understand a lot of these concepts and so i oftentimes call ethereum like the play-doh like you can you can mold it into whatever you want and then that thing can become whatever you need um so i like the lego box as well as something that's useful um and is that is that really where um vitalik from day one do you think he saw the things that the projects were later on to be built i mean we talk about the concepts that came right out of it, getting kind of the early adoption. And those didn't necessarily seem like his true plans. Yet, here we've got other things down the road. We'll talk

about DeFi, we'll talk about stable coins, we'll talk about this other adoption cases. But did he have a list of every single possible thing you could build with this Play-Doh in mind? He actually did. I wrote about it recently. So in the white paper, he said, well, first of all, this is a platform for developers to build whatever they want. But here are some examples of the things I think would be useful to build on this distributed network. and he listed stuff like um he said sub-currencies so you know like currencies issued on top of ethereum um then he said uh financial derivatives uh identity and reputation decentralized autonomous organizations insurance um prediction markets and on-chain stock markets he it was what he called them. So he had like this list of applications and they're all actually live today. So it's pretty amazing, you know, in five years, what Vitalik had dreamed of in

his white paper is already alive and working. It's true that like, you know, a lot of the like applications developers were thinking on in the very early days uh probably you know never had to have blockchain uh you know like weren't weren't this didn't necessarily need uh blockchain you know like in 2013 20 like uh 20 in the 2017 ico hype we saw like developers try to do like put blockchain on on top of everything and that of course um doesn't work and it's not very useful but you know things like um financial applications i think is where where these distributed networks can really add value so one of the things that i think most technologists uh experience but they don't like to admit is that whatever they build if it becomes successful ends up being massively

massively more successful than they ever imagined is that kind of the feeling you get from the early ethereum team which was we saw a problem we built something to address that problem we thought that it could could be valuable uh but even already how far ethereum or the d5 space has gotten has kind of surprised them oh yeah um for sure i think you know that there were in the very early days there it wasn't a sure thing that ethereum would would succeed you know even even after the pre-sale even after the launch um i i write in the book how in uh 2015 when the bitcoin price had you know really slumped they were you know really strapped for cash uh they they didn't have much uh funding to to keep going you know to to kind of pay developers to keep working on

on ethereum uh so there were definitely moments when people working on ethereum you know they weren't sure whether the project would succeed um i think that that was another important moment in ethereum's history where you know people in the project kind of doubted whether it could be able to go on both from like technically because this hacker was draining a project that held a big piece of ETH at the time and also because you know kind of the core values of Ethereum were being questioned so I think you know Ethereum was able to kind of overcome those huge hurdles you know almost going bankrupt or I guess like the Ethereum foundation being so short on cash early on the DAO hack there was like another period when Ethereum was being constantly attacked like

for a full month called the Shanghai attacks in like 2016 so after like overcoming all of these hurdles i think was that people realize okay like this thing is actually strong enough like if it can survive this i feel more comfortable um you know developing on this platform putting money on this platform so it was like after the shanghai attacks after the dao that the that we saw like more people building on ethereum and then like icos taking off um yeah but it was like in the early days nobody was like 100 sure that the serum would survive so and then tell us about the process for writing the book before we started the live streaming here we were uh talking about your experience like going into the bookstore and seeing the book on on the shelves for the first

time uh maybe just talk a little bit about the book itself and kind of the process you went through to actually learn all of this and eventually write a book about it sure um so So I guess, you know, the whole thing started with the idea of writing a book on Ethereum. And this was in 2017 after covering the crypto boom with Bloomberg. I was a market reporter there. So I was like covering it from a market perspective and had seen like huge price increases, billions flowing into ICOs. And I thought, you know, really the most interesting story in the space that hasn't been told is the Ethereum story. it's the second biggest cryptocurrency it fueled a lot of this rally and nobody really knows exactly

you know how how this thing started so i thought you know it's a great opportunity for me to tell this story um and so yeah i mean i had never written a book before it had always been my dream and it was just like a jump in in into this um idea uh i i was able to you know get an agent sent this proposal to a bunch of publishers and was lucky that one editor at HarperCollins like really believed in in the idea and I remember I was you know just looking through my emails for for another presentation to like the moment that my agent told me that you know HarperCollins was interested in the book it was like an all caps email being like she loves it for for the editor um so so from then on it was just you know trying to talk to absolutely everyone involved so um i

started with like the like chronologically uh the very core early team um and then went on from there like kind of compiled what the biggest events were and try to talk to all of the main people involved in each major ethereum like milestone and event um to spend like the first like six months just like full-on researching interviewing i talked with like over 100 people have many many hours of interviews and transcripts it was like a big mess kind of going going through all of that um and then i just you know i had my outline and i started you know tackling chapter by chapter um but it was a really a fascinating process you know talking with all all the people who were there uh you know seeing this project unfold firsthand and then i tried to really

immerse myself in the ethereum community so i went with them wherever they went so if there was a hackathon in denver i went there um the hackathon in waterloo um san francisco um i went to DEF CON in Prague, DEF CON in Osaka, meetups. So I really tried to get a good sense of the community of like what they were like, what music they listened to, like what they talk about, how they party, just like, you know, just like the color and get a sense of what they were building

and getting excited about. And I guess like, that's how I learned about DeFi. All right. And then my last question, and then Catherine fire away is the terminology decentralized finance. It's somehow like become this like controversial thing that everyone like wants to fight over who owns that word. In your opinion, like, what is decentralized finance or what is DeFi? And is that specific to one blockchain? Is that kind of a bunch of blockchains? Like, how do you just think about decentralized finance and then how it actually gets implemented in the coming years? Sure. So decentralized finance is the ecosystem of financial applications that's being built with blockchain technology, basically, and without banks. So it's an entirely new financial system that is stripping away intermediaries and opening access to anyone who wants to use these applications. It's really lowering barriers of entry and creating an open financial system for the first time. I think it's incredibly exciting. It's, you know, the cypherpunk dream come to life.

And, you know, it's incredible that this thing is actually working, you know, like it has real users, real value. It's not just some like dreams in a white paper. um and i think you know i don't think defy is specific to one blockchain i it's kind of a fact that most of it is happening right now on ethereum um but i don't think that it has to be necessarily the case going forward um i think you know right now ethereum has kind of like the the is the best positioned to be the blockchain to support DeFi applications, but it'll have to keep winning, you know, winning developers and bringing users. It's not like, I don't think you can become too conformist and be like, okay, Ethereum won. It needs to keep winning

people over in the future. That's awesome. You mentioned something that is really quite near and dear to the Ethereum community, which is all of the ETH global events and how amazing it is to hear about literally flocks of people congregating to Denver, Waterloo, Amsterdam, South Africa, you name it. Now that we're in kind of what feels to be quite a lockdown in terms of travel, How has this impacted the Ethereum community and how do they keep the community strong and ideas continuing to generate? I mean, I think it's amazing to see DeFi basically blossom, even though we've not been able to have these groups of kind of Ethereum Congress coming together around the world. yeah um so i think the impact has been that you know these hackathons and and conferences were like the moment where um team members saw each other because so many of these teams are are

decentralized and it was like you know this like family gathering kind of atmosphere of like oh we're together um but in terms of development like some someone was joking the other day on twitter that they're getting more done now that they they're not flying around to different conferences there's no beanbag room in the work from home right um and yeah i i don't think it's it's uh it's limited development at all i mean you see it in the blossoming of defy um and but there's still uh hackathons and conferences happening online uh obviously it's not the same but um for example if global had its first first defy focused hackathon recently hack money and and there were tons of projects that um that participated so you know there's still

hackathons going on and and um you know people participating in in this event so at least you know that the spirit hasn't completely been lost because of because of corona yeah where do you find the the most vibrant communities to be able to talk about ethereum and chat is it telegram discord um you know where where can new folks that are so passionate about ethereum plug in to learn more um i think twitter is the place where most people are and and i find find conversations they're really interesting um i many use telegram but i i personally don't don't like it very much like it's just too much i can't keep track of everything um and lots of teams have their own discord where they they make announcements and and you have kind of the

the very like hardcore community members engaging there so if you're very interested in like one specific project um i really recommend checking out uh like specific teams discord channels too so cammy one of the things that before i forget everyone keep hitting the like button that's how yeah i see you guys all in the comments that's how people find this on youtube you hit the like button um in terms of uh writing the defiant and really spending a lot of time i think like in the weeds um trying things uh using these products what has been maybe the the biggest surprise um or the thing that you've learned uh in actually being a user of a lot of these products right you've done everything from create the the cami tokens to use a whole bunch of

various applications here like what's been the biggest surprise or lesson learned um oh that's a tough one I let's see well I've been I've been surprised um by different things I think a positive surprise very early on when I was just you know starting to to use this stuff was how easy it was um because you know reporting for for the book what I kept hearing was oh like dApps UX is horrible. This is why nobody's using this stuff. Nobody can figure out how to use a DEX. But then in 2019, when I started looking into DeFi and experimenting with all these apps for the DeFi end, I was so surprised to see how easy this stuff really was and how advanced the UX was. like um i think the first defy app i probably tried was uniswap and just like seeing this like

very clean interface with like you know like the unicorn and just like two things to do like what token do you want to buy what token do you want to sell and that's it and just be really quick um and the idea of like you really just need your ethereum address and like your metamask plugin to access all of these applications like you you don't need to give out any piece of data you don't need to create a separate account it's really truly permissionless and i think that's what kind of like made the light bulb go off in my head like oh this is what permissionless really means it's but i can just go and use any of this stuff um from wherever i am like all i need is like an internet connection and an ethereum address um that was pretty mind-blowing to me

um and then recently uh i i guess like just the the growth um the recent growth i i hadn't uh expected this at all like i you know like defi had been growing uh pretty pretty fast um in the past year but what we've seen these you know past you know month or so has i mean i don't think anyone expected this like i remember um you know the day that comp was uh about to launch that compound was about to launch the comp token um i was like preparing to cover it for for the defiant but i didn't like expect it to be like such a huge deal it was like okay like compound finance is distributing its governance token let's write a couple of lines on that but then i was like oh like this thing is blowing up like people are like depositing hundreds of millions of

dollars in compound like it's suddenly the most valuable DeFi token ahead of like MakerDAO's Maker um and just like the the amount of activity and growth that uh like liquidity mining has unleashed was has been a huge surprise like I definitely didn't didn't expect um token incentives to to have such a huge impact well why do you think people are flocking to this uh you know new craze well i won't call it a craze because it's an actual way of um finding finance going forward but um why do you why do you think people are finding this so attractive i think i think like the fact that compound was um the first to well it wasn't the first to to use token incentives because other projects had done it before but um it was uh the first to like

really increase like offer significant returns with its token um and the fact that it was compound finance like a really established uh project in DeFi that people were already using and finding valuable and that's uh you know so many so many people um since so many people were already using it and finding valuable they they already they already knew that like the the token itself uh would be valuable even if it was you know just a governance token um and so because there were so many people involved from like day one the token like really skyrocketed and and uh like more money flowed in and so that really set the stage for all of the other tokens so when compound was so successful that because the project itself

is valuable it really i think like opened the floodgates for the other tokens and people were like oh like a comp was the first governance tokens and it did well so i'm gonna get into the next one like i'm gonna get a balancer token i'm gonna get um mta wi-fi like all of the next ones that came um and yeah and i think you know besides just like phone phone mowing on like oh the next governance token i think the the concept that they're um allowing this concept of like an ownership economy and like people being able to own a piece of the protocol and not just use it i think you know has really inspired uh people as well like i i of course i a big part of it is just speculation but i think another part of it is this this new concept in of of um

of using of using finance and actually being able to participate So one of the questions that came from the audience, and I forget who already, so I apologize that I'm not going to remember your name, was Ethereum is a applications platform and obviously has seen a lot of successful people building on top of it. there's a new meme or narrative around ETH being money how do you think about is ETH money is it not money is Ethereum you know they say quote unquote only an applications platform but like how do you see those two narratives playing out and are they contradictory to each other or are they actually kind of coexist? Yeah, I mean, I don't think, I mean, definitely not contradictory to each other,

Ethereum being a platform for applications and ETH being money. I think the question of ETH's money can be answered by, be answered by, you know, seeing what people are actually doing with ETH. So, you know, people are paying for Ethereum transactions with ETH. People are using ETH as collateral to back a stablecoin, which is also being used to buy stuff. So I think ETH does fulfill the main requirements for money except that it's very volatile so that doesn't make it a very good money but it it kind of um complements that by being collateral for a stable coin that that isn't

volatile and and and that can be a better a better means of exchange so um i think if is money um It's arguable whether it's the best kind of money. I think it is collateral for something that is a better money. And I think the fact that it's money and it's used to pay for transactions in the Ethereum platform allows for Ethereum itself to exist and for it to be a good layer for applications being built on top. Catherine, what other questions do you have before we start taking questions from the audience? Leave your question in the live chat and we'll get to them all. But Catherine, what questions do you have?

Yeah. We've got one question that says, do you see ERC-20 reigning for much longer or do you think we'll see other standards adopted or innovated? That's an interesting one. You could break down a little bit of kind of how ERC-20 versus the other variants came out. That'd be interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, so for now, ERC-20 is definitely kind of the reigning standard. I think, you know, there are other standards that have other use cases, right? Like the NFT, the ERC-21 standard that's used for kind of to represent assets instead of currency. um so i think uh right now those two are the main ones used on ethereum and there have been other variants that try to improve on on erc20 but they haven't really picked picked off or taken off and um i think there you know there's a reason why erc20 is is the main one and it's because it's been tried and tested for a long time and it's what works with every Ethereum application.

So I think it'll be really hard to replace that, like something a lot better would need to come along. And there have been like bad experiences with the new standards. Like recently Balancer, This Ethereum DAB balancer added other types of tokens to its platform, but they had this bug that opened it up to an attack. So that's always kind of the danger with new token standards, that they haven't been as tested as ERC-20s. But obviously, I mean, this space is full of innovation and evolves so quickly.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a different token like challenging ERC20s. Catherine, maybe just give us a quick update in terms of Binance US. Are you guys doing anything with DeFi, you know, in any form or fashion? How do you guys think about intersecting or interacting with all of this innovation that's happening? Yeah, great question. We're definitely the easiest on-ramp from the fiat world into the digital world. And that's one of the trickier spots, as Amy was mentioning, of getting into DeFi. It's kind of going, OK, I know I can get into Unisoc pretty quickly, either through Wallet

Connect and Trust Wallet, but how did I get my original Ethereum? How do I get into this space from day one? So we still offer kind of the lowest fees in America to get into Ethereum. And we're going to continue, take a look next week. We're going to continue on what we can punch into the DeFi space going forward, because I think the easier on ramps we get, the more this becomes an accessible way for people to get involved. And we're still such a big believer in educating people, not intimidating them. And this place is plenty intimidating. So courtesy of Kami's book, she'll be able to kind of lower people's barriers to entry, having them understand the full story of Ethereum.

And hopefully we can offer a full suite of DeFi opportunities for folks coming soon. Awesome. We also have gotten on the bandwagon with Ethereum offering staking, which was one of my first forays into really enjoying the variety of consensus mechanisms for digital assets. Recognizing that proof of stake allowed me to just park it and then continue to earn the rewards on it. So we offer four staking coins and are going to continue to add those out as we bring them onto our platform.

So those are kind of our two forays down the path, but stay tuned. Awesome. teasing an announcement is uh is always good uh cammy one of the uh one of the questions or a lot of the questions are revolving around eth 2.0 um obviously we all see uh kind of that continue to get pushed out further and further i guess let's just start with one do you think that there will be an upgrade to eth 2.0 to uh transition from proof of work to proof of stake and kind of how do you just look at this whole ETH 2.0 from where we are today? Yeah well I mean the question is I mean if if there will be ETH 2.0 and I think definitely yes like there is very tangible

progress on that being made right now. I think it was yesterday or the day before the the testnet for EVE 2.0 was launched with thousands of validators and five different clients so it's a really kind of in a robust place to move forward it's definitely been pushed out and who knows you know phase zero was supposed to launch early or like in January and you know we're in july so um but i mean whether it's coming or not it's definitely coming um i think the the the most interesting thing to me will be how eth1 can um continue to support all the development that's happening in on ethereum until if two launches and i'm i'm seeing really encouraging progress on this front with layer two solutions. So the difference with what was

happening with ICOs and Ethereum clogging up with CryptoKitties and all that stuff in 2017 is that scaling solutions were still in the research phase back then. Today, ahead of this a potential new bull market layer two solutions are actually live and working um like secret roll-ups and different optimistic roll-ups and um that that kind of stuff that that's already live uh so there's um an ethereum dex called loop ring already working uh supporting thousands of transactions per second um and the idea is that more and more of ethereum dApps will uh go to to layer twos um and improve the horrible uh gas costs that that we're seeing today um and so i'm you know i'm really optimistic with layer two solutions kind of bridging that that gap between

each one and each two launching all right and then a second question is around uh the recent OCC decision. So basically the regulatory body or the oversight body for federal banks came out with an approval or a really clarification that banks are able to hold crypto assets just like they can hold other valuable assets. Do you see that changing anything in this DeFi space? Is that a threat to the DeFi space and anything or any thoughts there? No, I think it's great news for crypto in general uh because you know if if banks can can hold crypto that means that more people will be able to be comfortable coming into this space and having people um participate with crypto through centralized solutions i think is the first step before getting them into decentralized

solutions. I think maybe eventually all of finance will be decentralized and running on distributed networks. But in the meantime, I think definitely centralized finance and DeFi will coexist. And so I think it's a great step forward that banks will now be able to custody crypto and get more people comfortable with getting involved in the space. catherine what else you got oh you're on me pulling up pulling up my questions here um so another one was uh this is an interesting question when writing your book how did you stay productive and on top of the next things happening in this space while things were moving so quickly

um well i mean my book definitely helped in in staying on top of things because um i was i was like talking with like ethereum community members all the time for for my book and and just like researching reading about everything that was going on in ethereum so i think it was thanks to my book that i i realized oh my god like defy is really you know it's real you know this this is the next big thing um and that's why i started the defiant in you know more than a year ago um so yeah i think i have my book to to thank for that um it really kind of made me stay on top of things did you try to cut it off and publish it at a certain amount of chapters and then be like hold on write it write another 10 chapters based on combat yeah oh my yeah that was like

always the challenge like where to where to stop um writing it i i didn't i i i didn't want it to seem dated so for me you know it was always clear starting out that this was gonna be the story of the early days and how ethereum was created and then um the 2017 boom and bust because you know that thing like that part of history happened like it's not gonna change so people will be able to read it 20 years from now and it will still hold true um so i i knew that at least i wanted to cover that but then like in in the final chapters it was um like it was a difficult decision to make like how much will i get into talking about defy um so you know i i did kind of um go over it um in you know obviously not not got like so much in the weeds but

the final chapters were about you know after the this like really long bear market and everyone thinking ethereum was dead developers were building all through all through it and um and like the most exciting ethereum applications were were born out of this so yeah i did have to kind of like cut it off at a certain point and be like okay i'm i'm done like this is where the story ends um hopefully there will be a sequel what will you name the sequel um how how many hackers built the new finance or something like that all right i was thinking i was thinking it'd be more like a another defy word that would be in there kind of like um i don't know the hunger game series names or something like that uh also

see so one of the questions uh i have is um you mentioned earlier uh whether eth as money was kind of better money right or or not how do you kind of see that playing out really the thought process or the or the framework i've used previously is like i think most people would agree bitcoin is decentralized digital currency and it's got sound money principles and kind of all that kind of stuff. But most of the infrastructure so far around Bitcoin has been centralized. If you then flip over to the Ethereum side, you've got ETH, which I think generally a lot of people say, hey, this might not be the best type of money, but all of the infrastructure is decentralized. And so do you see kind of a merger of a decentralized digital

currency like Bitcoin with decentralized infrastructure for kind of a full stack of decentralization uh and then if so does the infrastructure come to bitcoin does the bitcoin come to you know eth and wrapped bitcoin or tbtc or something like that like just how do you think through that sure so on the question of like is eth better money than bitcoin i i find them like very similar in in terms of of being money uh because for me the thing that makes eth not as good money than other alternatives is its volatility and and bitcoin is the same way like it's as volatile um as ethereum so in in that way like i don't see bitcoin as having an advantage over ethereum in in like being money um in terms of like where the infrastructure is

right now it's definitely mostly on ethereum and there's already this really interesting trend of people bringing their bitcoin over to ethereum to take advantage of all these different applications so um you know this trend has really been taking off this year and i i see it continuing you know more and more people tokenizing their Bitcoin into ERC-20 tokens to use on Ethereum. Of course, if it were to happen that Ethereum Layer 2 solutions don't work out and one of these emerging new Layer 1s are the ones who start to capture all of DeFi development, then it could happen that Bitcoin goes there. But I see Bitcoin as really like digital gold in cryptocurrency.

It's obviously the biggest digital asset. It's the first thing that people will buy when they get into crypto. It's what many people will just choose as a hedge against the traditional financial system. So I don't think people will stop holding Bitcoin. And I think it's a great investment to have if you believe, you know, centralized currencies or central bank based currencies are unstable or will continue devaluing or just don't want to be dependent on government issued currencies. I think Bitcoin is great. But then that doesn't mean that you can't have like a derivative of Bitcoin that you can use in these decentralized finance financial applications. All right. And then one more question for me is gas cost. You mentioned that earlier as something that is rising and not in the best situation at the moment. It seems like whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, you know, many of these networks are just not as scalable as they will be one day and you get high cost as transactions fill up the blockchain. Talk a little bit just about, you know, one, your perspective on the gas costs today, but also then to, you know, kind of is ETH2O the scaling solution? Are there others, you know, and kind of where does the relief come from those gas costs in the future?

um yeah so right now uh gas costs are are rising um but it's still it's still really cheap to to just uh do like very basic uh transactions on ethereum so if you just want to send cryptocurrency on ethereum it's still going to be a few cents um if you want to do more complicated transactions like i don't know like yield uh mining or um i i wanted to i'm uh issuing nfts for a proof of pre-order of my book and um issuing those nfts is costing me like three bucks or like between three and five bucks and it was a one like one dollar when i first started um doing it so it's it's um it's a lot and i see that the relief happening um not with i don't think we need to wait for eth2 for for for for that to get better um like i said i think it will be layer two scaling solutions

that will alleviate this and that they're working right now so i think you know they they are all like pretty recently launched so right now there aren't many ethereum applications on them um and there's a problem of like chicken and egg like you need to have many applications on them for for them to be actually useful um because it it's it's like a ux problem of like people not on these layer twos can't really interact very well with people off them so you need to have like a critical mass going to them um but i think you know as gas costs keep rising people will find it useful to migrate. So I think this, I mean, this will be like very effective in alleviating this issue, hopefully. Awesome. I have a couple questions that came to mind. One of them, what's one story

of you interacting with either a community member, a developer, or Vitalik that didn't make it in the book that you can share with us today? The most vivid one. uh let's see um so so one one uh one story that i i cut from the book um because it was just like too too many characters was peter mccormick believe it or not so i had interviewed peter mccormick uh for the book because i i wanted like a really interesting characters to walk me through their experiences in the 2017 boom and so i don't remember if you i don't know if you remember how peter made this like incredible thread detailing what his experience was with the ico boom and how he invested as a bunch of money and then lost it all um so as as soon as i saw that that thread

um I reached out and was like I want to interview you for my book like this is an amazing story so it was like on the very first draft of the book it was going in but then my editor was like you're like 100 pages over you have like 30 different characters you need to you need to cut some um so I already had like other stories uh about like people like heroes for my like ICO part of the book so peter had to go but he's i mean he's an amazing dude and um and i still love his story captain you got any more all right i was waiting for someone to finish washing a dish um the it just didn't sound too good having the water running all of a sudden and he's just sitting here so um the other question i have is what are some of the uh diehard developers in

ethereum that you think we should be paying attention to um and following their story as they take ethereum to the next level um so uh danny ryan is is like oh so sorry about my dog um uh yeah danny ryan is has been kind of spearheading the uh development of eth2 um preston van loon is uh spearheading like one of the the main clients for eth2 um ben edgington as well um yeah these are all people kind of leading uh ethereum forward so i i would i would watch what they're doing. Awesome. Are there any other things you hope people read your book

and walk away with? Kind of the ultimate catchphrase for your book that can get people that have never heard of Ethereum interested in it? Yeah, that's a good point. I should think of a good catchphrase, but I don't think I'm coming up with a good one right now. i think like there are two main things that i want people to to walk away with from my book like

one i just really wanted to write a fun interesting story to read like honestly i want people who have never heard of blockchain or crypto be able to pick up the book and just you know go through a fun story about a crazy group of people who made this idealistic project um had a bunch of challenges to overcome and how they they went about kind of overcoming them um and then second it's this idea of there there's an alternative to the way the world works right now so we are very used to ceding control over um of our you know assets and our data and our information to big corporations and financial institutions and I think you know what I want this book to do is present a different a different concept where

you're actually able to keep control over your your stuff over your your assets and your data and and your information um and and just uh be part of a more open uh way uh and like um just yeah like be be more in control and also uh be able to to access uh applications more more freely just um so people can walk away with the idea that there's a there's a different better way of doing things and it's coming and developers are working on it like it's not like a dream like it's it's actually there and so hopefully you know people will at least feel the curiosity to to take a look and and see what's going on yeah being self-sufficient is freedom so yeah i co-sign with you on that

guys before uh we've only got uh about eight or nine more minutes left so if you're watching right now please hit the like button so more people can find this on youtube and learn about all this content uh camilla you mentioned nfts a few times digital art uh domain names all these things that i think people are starting to experiment with what's um kind of your analysis on is that all still experimentation and not yet ready for prime time is that going to be where maybe mainstream adoption actually comes from how do you see that stuff um well i think it definitely is ready for for prime time i think um you know maybe not that many people know about this stuff and that's why it's not uh like hit the mainstream but um i think just the idea of

being able to own digital assets it's really powerful and it's part of the theme that I was talking about earlier you know this new ownership economy where where you are in control and and NFTs are a huge part of it I mean right now in the same way that you have your bank trusting your money when when you're interacting with a lot of the you know stuff you use online you have companies uh you're trusting companies with your digital assets and like a great example is um games and in-game items uh so gaming is like i i i'm not like into it but i know it's a huge industry um there's like many billions of dollars transacted in in-game items right now um and what nfts uh can do is allow people to actually own these items so if the like one day the game that

you're playing on uh goes bankrupt or dies or leaves or or whatever or like decides to to censor you and kick you out of the game you're you're still you can still own those those items and they're yours to trade on a decentralized exchange or wherever. So I think that's a really interesting use case. And then like another use case that's also already happening is NFTs for art and for objects like, I don't know, like clothing items um uh and you know like tokenized um items like assets and i think you know this is really interesting because it it allows creators to to um actually realize the the full value of of their of their creation you know they they tokenize their say a work of art um they they

put the token on on a decentralized exchange and now they have access to earnings on like the primary market which they they usually do but also at the secondary market so when when people start trading that token and the value goes up um the artist can can actually gain from from that well right now uh you know like all these like like collector items they start trading on the secondary market but like creators never see a piece of that so that's like another really interesting use case for for nfts um and then just like fun stuff like uh my proof of pre-order tokens and just like more experimental uh things like that um nfts they're fun yeah yeah uh crypto kitties you know like collectibles um yeah there's so many use cases

popping up it's definitely like the crazier side of of ethereum all right before we uh we wrap up here um katherine if i see one more question about an update on the states for binance us i'm gonna you know i had to create a i had to create a web page just dedicated to all the people asking when florida when connecticut when texas when new york when north carolina when georgia when louisiana when alabama i memorized them guys don't you worry um we've got a website i'll i'll shoot it out follow on this link please sign up and we'll let you know when your state is live for finance us um but it's safe to say that finance us is trying to get into every state correct oh absolutely and since day one um we're just

going through the state regulations required state by state um it's like trying to get into college in every single state you know you let you in the last ones you got to fill out different essays and uh you know get those grades up so we're uh we're working on our way through those states and my goodness we're all gonna have a celebration when that happens i love that and what for those that uh are interested in binance us where can they go to uh to sign up for an account yeah sign up it's binance.us uh that's the easiest way and we've also got an app in the app store both google play and ios apple store and you can follow us on twitter at at binance us or at crypto coley and we've also got a telegram community which is quite lively um i'm

in it every saturday morning and well every morning um so you can always hear from us and ask us questions and if you ask when your state will give you the website for the answer too i love that and then uh camilla you've got a whole bunch of stuff going on from uh the newsletter that you write every day to the book where can people go find both of those yeah so my newsletter the defiant is the defined.substack.com um the book is on amazon and and really any any bookseller out there uh so yeah just uh go on amazon type the infinite machine and click buy um and yeah you can find me on twitter at camille russo as well the buy button is really important for uh for a book i'm glad you put that part in there it's a key it's a key piece you need a summer

reading book uh book list kind of like oprah's book list and uh make make everyone do a bit of summer reading there's some good books coming out so appreciate the work awesome guys listen go uh go use finance us go and uh get camilla's new book uh the infinite machine and uh make sure that before you leave you're not allowed to leave this live stream unless you click on the like button because that's how more people will find out about the book find out about finance us and find about bitcoin and crypto so smash the like button and we will see you guys next time