The Pomp Podcast - #540: Chad Barraford on Cross-Chain Swaps

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Chad Barofford is a software engineer and technical lead for ThorChain. In this conversation, we discuss ThorChain, how it works, why cross-chain swaps are important, how Shapeshift adopted the system, and what the impact on DeFi will be. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Circle.

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Starting point is 00:04:30 this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang i've got chad here with me thank you so much for doing this thanks for having me absolutely so you were the technical lead for thor chain let's just jump right in what is the problem that thor chain is trying to solve well i think the problem that fortune is trying to solve is that it's kind of funny this this this ecosystem has built this decentralized idea of not requiring any centralized energy to to be able to conduct but yet we require sometimes any to conduct ourselves from you know bitcoin to ethereum or ethereum to bitcoin cash or whatever it might be we we go through some centralized entity with the finance or crack and your coinbase or whatever uh but we much better i think from

Starting point is 00:05:14 from almost every perspective if we can move through one chain to another chain without being censored without being kyc without being asking for permission in fact when you want to say you want to send some bitcoin and and transfer it into ethereum on the other side the only actual requirement of threat chain is that you can make a bitcoin signature that's literally the only thing you don't have to do anything else you don't have to download this thing you have to sign up for this thing you don't do anything else just can you make a bitcoin signature you can you got it so when you think through um kind of both problem tricks i think one of this is a centralized entity meaning uh the platforms uh and then the second thing is what i'll just call kind of a common

Starting point is 00:05:55 unit of account right so you're selling bitcoin to go to a stable coin and then you're buying ethereum um as an example uh let's start with the centralized entity what are the big problems there uh as to why uh people should not uh want to or or should be looking for decentralized solutions uh that's a great question and i don't even know where to start because there's so many places i could talk about to be honest so you can talk about the whole black box element to it not really knowing how much they have how much do they are they actually solvent are they not solvent uh you can talk about the complexities of it takes weeks to sign up for one of these things which is ludicrous my my uh father-in-law just signed up for one of these services i'm not gonna name

Starting point is 00:06:36 which one and he bought some ethereum and said like oh you can't take this off the system off the network for nine days he was just like wait well why can't i get my own ethereum i just bought it why can't i take it off to my wallet and it's just like wait what is this what are we doing here this just makes no sense whatsoever uh not to mention the exchange have been hacked more than one time let's say uh it's just it's been a calamity almost from the beginning starting from mount gox and we're still reliant on these systems and i don't think anybody just like loves them in a sense everybody's like we use them because it's the thing we have to use now but like i think we're all looking for something that's more instantaneous that's more readily

Starting point is 00:07:15 available. You can just use it right out of your wallet if you want to use it. It's just that simple. Yeah. And so then when you think about the unit of account, right, that idea that you've got to go from Bitcoin into a stable coin, as an example, before you buy another asset, what's the issue there? Is it just an efficiency thing? Is there a cost element to it? How do you think about that? Well, it's not just efficiency is one part of it, right? It takes more time. If you want swap from Bitcoin to Ethereum, it actually takes more time to do that on some such exchange than it would on ThorChain, for example. But the problem is that you're giving somebody else your Bitcoin, which is theirs at that point, and they're giving you an IOU that you're holding on

Starting point is 00:07:57 to because you want to hold on to their IOU for whatever reason. And then you're going through a process in their UI to swap from that to this to this, paying fees along the way, and then at some point in the future requesting your ethereum out whatever that might be that's just not a system that makes sense in the greater scheme of like how crypto works or how crypto was born out of it's like i want 100 accountability i want to be able to 100 verify that everything is legitimate everything's like real and that's true with fortune you can actually look at the wallets know exactly how much money it has how much it claims to have and you see they're always the same like that's a really important concept that that we just don't have in a cross-chain perspective

Starting point is 00:08:36 We have it within like, you know, DEXs within Ethereum, like that worked extremely well, right? It was a great platform. But we're missing that core component, like let's move Bitcoin to Ethereum, to Litecoin, to finance, to whatever else. There's no complete neutrality. The network doesn't really care. It's completely agnostic about what chain or asset you're talking about. It's just going to treat everybody identically the same. For sure.

Starting point is 00:09:01 When somebody asks you, what is ThorChain, how do you describe it? Well, the most simple and succinct way of describing ThorChain is it's like a cross-chain unit as well. That's the simplest way you could put it. That's kind of oversimplification in many respects. In a larger sense, I see it as the highways between blockchains, because every blockchain today is a completely separated island onto itself and has very little relationship or connection to any other blockchain in the world for the most part. And so ThorChain is creating decentralized highways that you can move from blockchain A to blockchain B, and it can theoretically connect with any blockchain, not only in any blockchain, but any layer one or layer

Starting point is 00:09:42 two solution, theoretically, it can do pretty much anything you want with it. And so when you talk about these highways, really what's happening here is it allows you for the ability to swap directly Bitcoin for Ethereum, right? So one, you don't have to use a centralized entity in terms of those exchanges we talked about. But also two is I don't have to sell an asset into that common unit of account. I can literally do an asset swap between these various blockchains.

Starting point is 00:10:10 And so how does that technically work? Like what are you guys doing under the hood to make this possible? Yeah, sure. So effectively, the ThorChain network has a whole host of different like Bitcoin wallets that it kind of manages, if you want to call it that. And so whenever you send in a Bitcoin transaction into our Bitcoin wallet that's managed by the network, all the different validators have their own copy of the Bitcoin full node they're running individually.

Starting point is 00:10:37 And they're all looking at the Bitcoin blockchain. They're all saying, OK, I saw Pomp send one Bitcoin into our Asgard vault address on the 4Chain network. And this is how much it was. And this is all the details. And then once a super majority of the nodes kind of all agree upon each other, like, oh, we all saw the same thing. Pomp sent one Bitcoin to us and he sent an op return or like a memo with an intention of like, I want to swap Bitcoin for Ethereum or for USDT or for whatever else. And so that they all kind of make that consensus that that transaction actually occurred. And then the network says, okay, Pomp sent us one Bitcoin. He wants to get some Ethereum out. We do a calculation of how much Ethereum that would be, one of the continuous liquidity pools of the network. And then it sends out that ethereum to whatever eth address that you requested it on uh you know ox something

Starting point is 00:11:28 something something something something right and so is this all being built by a single team uh is this a distributed thing where there's just a bunch of kind of teams working on open source software like how exactly uh was this originally built and then how are you guys pushing forward um you know and kind of continue to improve or innovate uh around this yeah i mean started with an initial team for sure um it's very small team i think it's only like nine-ish people 10-ish people on it for that matter but it's very quickly much beyond that so there's actually like well over a dozen different teams building different aspects of the of the ecosystem in fact like more of the treasury that the team has is being spent to fund ex like other projects

Starting point is 00:12:12 and other groups of people to build block explorers and to build dashboards and uis and, you know, data science and analytics about this, that, and the other thing, whatever it might be. So the vast majority of access funds are actually going out to other people or other teams other than the team that they originated it from. And so when you think about why this is better, we talked a little bit about the lack of centralization. We talked a little bit about the lack of need for that common unit of account. What else is better about this, right? Is this something that it's such a superior product that everyone's going to go and adopt it? Is this going to coexist with existing models. Just talk a little bit about how you see the advantages of

Starting point is 00:12:53 ThorChain with some of the other players in the space. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big things here that is quite innovative is that the ThorChain network allows people to earn yield on whatever assets they hold, right? So you can earn yield, you can supply Bitcoin to the network, just Bitcoin by itself, supply Bitcoin to the network, and then you can earn yield on that Bitcoin and then come back later and pull out more Bitcoin than you put in the system. How does that work? Well, it's effectively when you put just Bitcoin into, let's say, the Bitcoin pool on ThorChain, every time somebody swaps in and out of Bitcoin going one direction or the other, a little bit of the fee is kind of left behind in the pool.

Starting point is 00:13:34 And you're effectively buying a percentage of that pool when you put your Bitcoin into it. It's like, oh, I'm going to take on, since 10% of the pool is my Bitcoin, so to speak, I own 10% of the pool. So whenever there's a swap of like $100 fee came through, let's just say for REM number, 10% of the $100 is mine. And I made $10 in value from that, in my case, in Bitcoin. And so you can actually like put in a bunch of Bitcoin and then come back later and have more Bitcoin than you had before. And that's just not just Bitcoin. That can be Ethereum, that can be Litecoin, that can be Tether, Ripple. I mean, whatever it is, you're kind of cup of tea. It doesn't really matter. And that's a first in this industry. And what is the average yield right now across those assets? Are we talking

Starting point is 00:14:16 about like 1% or 2%? Or are we talking about like 50%? It's certainly closer to the 50%. You can look at the data. It's freely available. Anybody can check and verify. You're welcome to. It ranges from some assets. Some pools are much higher. Like I've seen some that are like 100 and something 20% or something like this. That's not typical, but it can happen. And the majority are going to be around 30, 40, maybe 50%. Got it. And I'm assuming that that's a function of how much is in the pool and then how popular the swaps are, right? So if you have very few people have contributed to a pool and it's a very popular kind of asset to swap in and out of, then obviously that would lead to a higher, you know, kind of yield. And then the idea would be that's an

Starting point is 00:14:59 incentive for more and more people to join that pool, provide more liquidity, and therefore that return that gets commoditized down over time right right even even the the amount of fee that you pay when you make a swap through a thought chain pool is actually based upon the depth of the pool and the size of your trade so if you're doing like if the pool's like you know 100 units and you're doing a 50 unit trade so to speak that's like a massive you know you're going to pay a huge slip fee in that scenario but so for smaller cap pools they're going to have a lower depth to it so people are going to pay more on the swaps and they do that we already see that happening uh over the last 10 months of economic activity, people are willing to pay higher amounts of fees for this

Starting point is 00:15:39 smaller cap pool. That's how the economics are actually functioning today. But for pools like the Bitcoin pool or the Ethereum pool, which is going to be a lot deeper, the fees that people will pay will be far less than you would see on, say, a Uniswap. Yeah. And when you think of Uniswap as the market leader, let's say, for decentralized exchanges, do you view them as just kind of another player in the crypto ecosystem? Do you view them as, you know, quote unquote competition? Are people making a direct choice between do I go and actually trade this asset on Uniswap versus use ThorChain? Just how do you see the relationship there? Yeah, that's a good question. So we're all fans of Uniswap. They really do some really great

Starting point is 00:16:20 stuff over there for sure. I don't see them as direct competition per se. For one, I see ThorChain as being more of a short tail asset than a long tail asset, meaning that you're not to have every asset across the entire crypto space on third chain you're going to have the most economically significant ones and if you want some sort of small cap illiquid edge coin you can probably do that on uniswap or sushi swap or one of these guys the difference is that third chain whenever it manages a new asset it has additional cost to the network whereas with uniswap it doesn't have significantly more cost to network so they can have as many assets that they want on on the, on that smart contract. And it does, it scales just fine.

Starting point is 00:17:01 Whereas Thor chain has more and more cost for every asset that you add, you get the signed transactions and all these things that just kind of increase the amount of load on the network from that. So you're not going to see a bazillion assets on Thor chain, but even with the five chains that are currently supported now, it's already supporting like, you know, 92% of the entire, you know, cryptocurrency, you know, industry, right. So it's already, I mean, Even right now, the multi-chain KSN that we launched a few days ago, a week ago, already has access to more funds than Uniswap or SluiceSwap because you have Bitcoin, which is the biggest, most important thing that has to be supported, but it has been largely forgotten and just left out for whatever reasons.

Starting point is 00:17:45 And this is the first time like Bitcoin's being like brought into the fold of like, okay, Bitcoiners, you actually have access to real DeFi with layer one real Bitcoin, no pegged assets, no wrap, any of this stuff, like legitimately layer one Bitcoin. Yeah. When you think about the recent ShapeShift announcement, that was really fascinating to me. So Eric Voorhees, it sounds like they decided to take the Thor chain kind of technology and infrastructure, and that's now what is powering their exchange. So in effect, what they've done is they've basically put a front end on top of Thor chain, and that's where their users are going and using that. One, is that correct? And then two, talk a little bit about kind of the importance of somebody like Shapeshift adopting this. Yeah, sure. I mean, Shapeshift is like one of the oldest and most respected, you know, cross-chain swaps in the industry, at least in my opinion, that's true. and like and they've done an excellent job over the last you know few years and their original vision was to be able to facilitate trades or swaps without using requiring kyc and unfortunately that didn't work out so well because the technology wasn't there at the time and they got you know

Starting point is 00:18:58 pressure from regulators to start doing kyc and all these things we know the story and so when 14 came around and effectively was kind of fulfilling the original vision of shapeshift they like saw that and they were like oh this is something we have to get on board with And so now they have the ability to be able to swap between chains without requiring KYC at all. And if they wanted to, they're not doing this yet, but they might do it in the future. They can actually have ThorChain charge a fee on their behalf back to them if they want to using affiliate fees. So you can actually create wallets that have interface with ThorChain to do some swaps, whatever. And you can actually, the wallet manufacturers can make money by integrating with ThorChain by using affiliate fees,

Starting point is 00:19:38 It's like, you know, one basis point or 10 basis points or whatever the wallet wants to charge per swap. Yeah. What's really fascinating is basically because you've built that piece of infrastructure, you now can have these front ends plug into the system. Right. And those front ends have a way to monetize, but also they're essentially bringing you customers to do a customer acquisition. They're bringing you liquidity. And so it's a really fascinating model. And ultimately, it goes back to this thesis of like open systems are going to beat the closed systems. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Naturally, you guys have built this open system that anyone can plug into. Yeah, it's an open protocol, right?

Starting point is 00:20:15 No one controls the gates. They're wide open for anybody who wants to use them. If ShapeShift wants to integrate with them, more power to them. If TrustWallet or Exodus or Coinbase, if they want to integrate, hey, go at it. You know, it's a freely available network for anybody to use, however they see fit. That's how it should be. Yeah, absolutely. We talked a little bit about various ways people can participate.

Starting point is 00:20:40 So they can go ahead and they can swap assets using ThorChain. They can provide assets to the liquidity pools. Another element is they can basically provide a node. And I think that you guys have a very unique kind of mechanism around the nodes and they can be swapped out with each other. And just talk a little bit about what that means for somebody to participate as a node and then how that entire system works. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:02 So in order to participate with the node, you have a there's a capitalistic kind of race, so to speak, to who gets added into the system. So you can you can walk up and say, hey, I'm ready to become a node. And then we'll say, OK, let me see you there. But every time it turns, which happens every three days or so, the network will say, all right, who are the most valuable people to turn in relative to the highest bond? right so right now on on single chain chaos net that's about uh about 13 million dollars like in room that you have to have in order to become a validator on on the network not because like that's that we as the team had said that's just literally what the capitalistic markets dictate that it that you make so much revenue running a node that it's worthwhile to spend 13 million dollars buying enough room to run to run one that's literally what the like the capitalistic

Starting point is 00:21:54 markets dictate. And so the network is designed that every three days it churns and some people get kicked out and some people get pulled in. And that's to ensure that everybody gets kicked out at some point in time. There's a continuous churn happening and there's nobody that stays in there forever. And over time, every time the network churns, all the funds need to be migrated because every time the network churns, new threshold signature like vaults are created and the old ones are being retired so all the bitcoin and all the finance and all the all the assets have to be migrated programmatically to the new vault and it happens just every three days and it proves that the network actually has access to all these funds right like if nobody signed transactions

Starting point is 00:22:37 maybe you lost the keys right we we've seen this where like you know certain exchanges you know the head honcho got arrested and then like all the funds were locked up and you're like well i guess you have it but you can't sign anything so do you really have it you know what i mean and so like thor chain proves that every three days by moving every coin every satoshi every every asset across to a new vault every three days just approved that has access to every single asset that it holds i love it uh you mentioned rune which is the token within the thor chain system describe why you need that yeah you actually require room like it's kind of it's counterintuitive to some degree, but I'll explain why. If you would use something that wasn't

Starting point is 00:23:21 ruined, like let's say you use Bitcoin as the base asset of the network, which from a technological perspective is a little bit impractical due to the slow block times, but it is feasible. It is possible. But the problem with that is if you secure the assets with an external asset like Bitcoin or Ethereum or Tether or whatever, the economic incentives are incorrect in the network and then somebody will attack the network and steal all the funds and make a huge amount of profit right so say like for for for kind of game theory this out say there's like 75 million dollars of bond that the validators are running with and then the pools have about 30 million dollars of uh of assets right uh and say we're doing bitcoin first so it's like 75 million

Starting point is 00:24:05 dollars of bitcoin and then uh 25 million dollars i'm sorry 15 million dollars of bitcoin and 15 million of other various assets of because every pool is comprised of bitcoin and something else in this scenario so if i were to get enough bitcoin to a cyber attack the network and get like a super majority society i bought 50 million dollars with the bitcoin to attack the side of it out of the 75 million that are used i can go ahead and take ownership of everything and have complete access to everything and do whatever the hell i want because i have a super majority notes right i can do the hell i want to do so i can go ahead and seal the 75 million including the 50 million that i put from the beginning plus the 30 million over here so that's 105 million

Starting point is 00:24:43 so i spent 50 million dollars to steal 105 million dollars worth of assets i'm great i'm doing i'm on cloud nine i just double my money i scan the hell out of this network i sell all the money i'm like great you know right but if it was ruined it's very different it's actually a very different behavior so if it's 75 million dollars to the room and then 15 million dollars a room here and the 50 million dollars of bitcoin ethereum and various other assets and say i spent 50 million dollars a room to cyber attack the network so in the end i have the 75 million room here the 15 million room that's about 90 million dollars and then i have 15 million dollars of various assets but that 90 million dollars i spent that i have a room is worth nothing because the value of room

Starting point is 00:25:21 is derived from the value of the network and the network's hacked and all the funds are gone who the hell is going to want to buy room nobody it destroys the capitalistic system like of that token instantaneously so i spent 50 million dollars to get 90 million dollars a room then all that goes to zero and i actually walk away with all the bitcoin and ethereum and everything else which is with 15 million dollars so great i spent 50 million dollars to steal 15 million dollars i just lost 35 million dollars in that transaction you literally cannot secure these assets with another asset like as great as bitcoin i'm not even on bitcoin right now Bitcoin's amazing, but you cannot use it for this application purpose.

Starting point is 00:26:04 You have to have a token that its value is solely derived from the value of the network itself. Do token holders get a percentage of those transaction fees in the liquidity pool as well? Or does all of those transaction fees go into the liquidity pool and for whoever's participating? That's actually a really great question. So anytime the system makes income, right, other than black rewards, other than LP, you know, swapping, all this kind of thing downstream, we're talking about lending and borrowing to increase revenue for the network. But anytime that happens, that is considered to be a system income. And that gets divvied up between the liquidity providers and the node operators in a way relative to the difference between the Bitcoin, the ruin on one side and the ruin on the other. The network has what's called an incentive pendulum to say that, okay, if it's even what it's supposed to be, which is two-thirds on the node side and one-third on the pool side, they'll get a 50-50 split between the two of them.

Starting point is 00:27:05 But if the bond gets too high and it gets overbonded, then the bonders make less money and more money goes to the liquidity providers on this side. So that incentivize people to pump more money on this side or take money out of this side and move it to this side to go back to that kind of equal, like equilateral, like pendulum swing of the middle to ensure that. So everybody profits from the system, no matter what role you're taking into it. And it ensures everybody profits in an equal way relative to the economics of the situation at that moment. And is it possible for somebody to own Rune without participating in the liquidity pool or being a node operator? Correct. Yeah, you can hodl it in your wallet if you really want to, you know, more power to you. I think most people aren't going to do that because you can just turn it into, instead of just being dead capitalist sitting in a wallet, not really doing much for you, why not make it work for you and actually generate a yield from that? if you want to do that have at it you know go nuts if you don't hold in your wallet that's fine

Starting point is 00:28:09 too up to you yeah what's been the biggest surprise for you working on this oh the biggest surprise um this thing it just felt like this thing blew up so fast so quick like when i first started working on the project in mid-2019 and you know committing the first line to code and everything like even at that time we knew that this was something interesting something special but you you just can't fathom like how far it will go like it's almost ridiculous like i remember we were like just joking around like like imagine if ruin hit like 10 cents like would that be like insane and now it's at like 15 or whatever the price is right now like it was just like it was to see it kind of go from that kind of initial vision that the team had and then grow

Starting point is 00:28:56 into this like gargantuan thing that actually launched and actually supports cross-chain swaps in a way that's permissionless and censorship resistant is absolutely remarkable. I can't get over it. I love it. What's the impact on decentralized finance, regardless of where it happens, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever, when you have this kind of cross-chain swap, does that just provide a foundation for more faster and kind of better innovation and adoption, or how do you think about that yeah like up until this point ethereum has been kind of a defy king right like that's pretty inarguable in a sense and that's largely because ethereum's programming language was much more flexible and powerful than bitcoin was like very

Starting point is 00:29:47 kind of weak not much you can really do it for the most part and then ethereum came along and said hey you can do some really you know you have a turning complete language called solidity and you can do all these kind of interesting things which is great but once you have something like a Thor chain that's written on top of the Cosmos network, you have a much more powerful and much more flexible system that you can build and construct. You literally cannot build Thor chain on top of the Ethereum system. It just like fundamentally just won't even come out the door, right? Why not? And so, well, because you need value, the security of your own network to secure external assets. You can't rely on Ethereum security to secure an unknown amount of assets

Starting point is 00:30:26 on bitcoin and litecoin and all these other things you need uh you need validator nodes your own validator nodes that are incentivized to be observing transactions on bitcoin in ethereum and all these other other blockchains in order to make that viable or possible furthermore like even you know an ethereum um transaction its cost is like goes up remarkably high the more complicated a computation is or the more data intensive it is and that's not going to be economically feasible on Ethereum. You have to do it on your own kind of native sovereign chain, which is what ThorChain is. I think that Ethereum will still have a place in the future, but any DeFi application that wants to be worth its salt will have to support the entirety of the crypto sphere,

Starting point is 00:31:14 not just the Ethereum people or these people over here, but just say you can walk up with your Bitcoin, with your this, with your that, with whatever, and you get treated with the same exact access as anybody else so 13 has access to like over two trillion dollars with the liquidity around like the crypto sphere and you know uh uh uniswap has access to like i think it's like 450 billion dollars to do all the years c20s and ethereum together that's like you know a sliver relative to what thor chain has access to so the liquidity will end up being on a chain like thor chain for sure because that's where you can actually swap from one place to another in a way that actually makes like real sense yeah it's fascinating uh before i let you go i've got three

Starting point is 00:31:55 questions to ask everyone then you'll get to ask me one to finish up uh first is what is the most important book that you've ever read uh most important book i read is a is a it's a boring thing it's a coding book but i'm not gonna say this that's gonna be too boring for people i think more a more fun answer is um uh neil grass tyson wrote a book called uh astrophysics for people in hurry. It's a great book. It really gives you a great understanding of astrophysics if you're like I am. Second question comes from our friends over at Eight Sleep. I used to sleep like five or six hours. And then I got this thermoregulated bed. Basically, I make it super cold and sleep like a baby now and have become a full convert to the sleep religion. What's your sleep schedule

Starting point is 00:32:40 like? Do you sleep a lot? And how has that changed over time? Well, we just launched mobile chain a week ago. So it's not, it's not quite like well rested. I'll say that. And also as I mentioned, my wife is about to give birth in like a week, literally. So I'm sure my sleep is going to be even worse, you know, in the coming few months after my baby girl gets here. That's going to be, you know, a venture onto its own for sure. Those are two acceptable answers as to why to not get some sleep. Last question for you, then you get to ask me one is aliens. Are you a believer or non-believer? Oh, well, definitely a believer for sure. I mean, if you think about it, like what are the most common elements in the universe, the most like plentiful elements?

Starting point is 00:33:29 It's helium in this water, helium, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. Those are the most common in that order, most common elements in the universe. What are the most common elements in the human body right or this life itself well hydrogen what is interesting not helium helium is a noble gas doesn't combine with anything so it's like a block you can't build anything with but oxygen and nitrogen carbon all these things we are comprised of the same things of the most plentiful resource on the entire universe so it makes no sense if we were the only ones right even even carbon carbon we are carbon based because uh the you can make more molecules of carbon, then you came with every other element combined. It's an extraordinarily powerful

Starting point is 00:34:14 molecule, which is why we're made of it. And it's also five times more common than another element like silicon, which is conceptually obsessed in similarity to it. So are we around other aliens? Absolutely sure. I mean, if you were going to make the statement, if you can make the reverse statement, so I'm going to go a little tangent here, but if you're going to make the reverse statement that we are the only thing in the universe, then you have to come up with a reason of how what infinitesimally small pot like thing that happened to us on this little blue a pale blue dot uh as as carl sagan once called it and that'd be that's a hard like that's a hard idea like nobody has actually yet come up with an idea of how that was feasible especially when you

Starting point is 00:34:53 consider that like there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the entire planet earth so you it has to be so rare that you have to win the lottery every day for a few years sequentially that's how like rare would be that we survive and we are the ones that exist and nobody else exists in the entire universe i have a hard time believing that it makes much much more logical sense that the most abundant resource created more of us more like carbon-based life forms than this infinitesimally small thing we're talking about where this one little pale blue dot got something for some reason it makes no sense to me i think that may be one of the best answers we've ever had. That was awesome. I'm sorry, I went a little bit of a science rant

Starting point is 00:35:38 there. I'm a little bit of a nerd, my people tell me. What one question do you have for me to wrap us up? My question for you is like, what are your feelings on tribalism? Like people are, you have some, you know, Bitcoin maxis, ETH maxis, even RUNE maxis. Like, how do you feel? Is this a good thing for the space? Is it a bad thing for the space? Are we heading in the right direction or the wrong direction? Like, how do you feel about that? I don't think the world's binary. So, I don't think that it's all good or all bad. I actually think the truth is somewhere in between. When you think about the good sides of it,

Starting point is 00:36:11 there's definitely, you know, like kind of like the hardcore Bitcoin argument would be like, oh, it's the immune system, right? It's the people who don't take anyone else's shit and they kind of, you know, really adhere to truth and kind of keep people focused and all of that. So there's definitely truth in that. The bad side is you can turn away people

Starting point is 00:36:30 who may actually be, you know, genuine actors and interested and and uh i always say that you can um you can be a maximalist without being an asshole as well right like that is a possible thing wait what did you say and and and that is uh across the spectrum right i think that like uh every single community every single tribe has uh extremes to it and also people who are more centrist right it's basically just like politics Right. You can have multiple political parties and then you'll have the extremists in every political party and you have people who are more centrist in those political parties. And so I think that just we all have to realize that, like in many cases, we all actually have the same goal, the same finish line in mind. It's simply that the path to get there. Sometimes there's disagreement and sometimes it's actually just people want to work on different things or interested in different things.

Starting point is 00:37:21 And that's all OK. Yeah. No, that's a great answer. It's a great answer. yeah uh where uh where can we send people to find you on the internet or find more about thor chain well don't find me i'm not i'm not that important but you can find uh thor chain at thor chain um there's lots of people you can follow within the community uh like bitcoin sage and miho brains and all these great people that are in this community you can go ahead and follow them don't follow me i'm useless is there a website uh where people can go as well absolutely yeah thorchain.org is one of our sites you can check it out read the docs um there's some great explainers on rebase as well if you want to get to the nitty-gritty of it all it is a very complicated system

Starting point is 00:38:01 it does take a while to learn um it takes a while to learn bitcoin in its true form at least so i encourage people to look and to read to understand the more you read about it the more you realize something really significantly happening here yeah uh awesome man well listen thank you so much for taking the time to do this uh it's very cool to see people adopting uh something that you guys have built. So we'll have to do it again in the future. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Bob. Appreciate it.

The Pomp Podcast - #540: Chad Barraford on Cross-Chain Swaps

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