The Wolf Of All Streets - Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond on the Future of Money and Reinventing the Internet

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Beniamin Mincu, CEO and Co-Founder of Elrond is tackling some of the biggest challenges in the cryptocurrency space. With Bitcoin and Ethereum only able to process a handful of transactions per second, Elrond is launching its product to handle a world's worth of transactions - over 10,000 per second. Scott Melker and Beniamin Mincu further discuss technologies that can be put on the scale of evolution and change the course of humanity, a potential influx of a billion users in the blockchain space, commonalities of the world’s greatest inventors, creators and artists, mental mapping and applied philosophy, the uselessness of conventional education, thinking big, Bitcoin reaching an inflection point, and more. --- ROUNDLYX RoundlyX allows you to dollar-cost-average into crypto with our spare change "Roundup" investing tool, manage multiple crypto exchange accounts in one dashboard and access curated digital asset content and services. Visit RoundlyX and use promo code "WOLF" to learn more about accumulating your favorite digital assets when making everyday purchases and earn $4 in free Bitcoin. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everybody? This is your host, Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Every week, I'm talking to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, and basically anyone else with an interesting story to tell. So sit down, strap in, and get ready, because we're going deep. I'd like to thank my sponsors, Round the X and Voyager, for making today's episode possible. Let's go. I-O. I promise you will not be disappointed. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of Elrond, an ambitious blockchain project that aims to solve some of the most pressing challenges in the space. His diverse background in state-of-the-art technology, applied philosophy, engineering, and blockchain has culminated in the creation of a company that could very well define the next wave of the internet. This is a project I've personally gotten behind and can't wait to see come to fruition and launch. So I'm particularly excited to welcome Benjamin Minkyu to the show today, man. Thank you so much for being here. Super, super excited to be here, Scott,

and have this conversation. Thank you. So I have to tell you, and I've mentioned this to you before, I was literally obsessed with the Lord of the Rings when I was a child. It was like, my parents bought me 10 different versions of the book. I had the hardcover ones and all ones and posters and Elrond was one of my favorite characters. So I'm going to assume that you named the project after Elrond from Lord of the Rings. I'd really like to know why. Yes, for sure. So Lord of the Rings is indeed, um, this type of book that can mark your life, leave a mark on your life

if you read it and understand it. And the idea behind the name for us was that Elrond is this guy who is immortal, super powerful, and then still bent on doing good. So we thought this would be a great aspiration to aim towards. So, yeah, especially in the blockchain space, especially with all this stuff happening that we've gone through. I think Elrond will bring a kind of light in this space as we launch and move forward toward bringing the technology to the market. I guess it's better than going with like Sauron or Saruman

or having your logo be a big flaming eyeball. Yeah, indeed. Indeed. That would make some interesting marketing stuff, but I would not want to have one of the most, let's say, ambitious companies be the Saruman. Yeah, probably makes sense. We've got a few of those in this space probably anyways. So listen, let's talk about what you're doing and if you were trying to explain it to a child, really, what is Elrond? Why is it important? For sure. Elrond is, I think, the creation of of the most useful version of money. And to do this, essentially, we are doing and building two things. First, we're building a network that can process transactions at the scale of the Internet.

And second, we're building an interface that we've only very, very briefly discussed about that will essentially allow anyone of the internet and you'll see that basically you had two important inflection points there. which essentially made the economics work for businesses and so forth. And then there was something even earlier than that, which opened the market to sort of anyone in the world without a technical background and so forth. And this was the browser moment. Right. So coming back to the blockchain space, we've seen a tremendous excitement with Bitcoin and Ethereum coming to life.

But it's been 10 years and we're still at 7 transactions per second and 15 transactions per second, which is a nice toy. I'm all for appreciating the innovation and the promise, but in order to really bring the next wave of adoption, we need to scale a lot higher than that. With Elrond, we are bringing this transition from dial-up to broadband in the blockchain space where we can process more than 10,000 transactions per second right now, not in the future, not promising this to happen in two or three years as some projects do, but we can do this right now. And then the second element is we believe that once we launch this, the most important and fierce battle will be fought

counterintuitively on the user experience side, not on the technical side. Once the technical side is solved, you'll discover that you can indeed take some people from the other projects and build a really great reputation and great brand but the problem is that we essentially have too few people in the space right now because everything is super technical and so with Elrond we want to really really change that so basically you're gonna build this insane tech as you said going i mean we're basically saying that bitcoin and ethereum are like the netscape and 14 for modem and now we're

moving to to google and uh and and broadband so yeah that's the underlying that's the underlying story but what you really care about is the user experience. They shouldn't have to care about any of that at all, right? It should just be easy and fast for them, and you're building an interface for them to interact with it in a manner where they don't really have to worry about the technology. Precisely. Precisely. The idea is that when you look at it, nobody actually cares or even discusses the fact that emails are sent through the SMTP protocol.

There are, of course, a few guys that discuss this and want to have a conversation around that. But those guys, you can count on one hand. On the other hand, everyone uses email. And there was this tremendous excitement with email, especially when you think that before email, you had posts going to the normal mail traveling in days to the places that you wanted to send something. It's the same with money, right?

We're moving to this space where with Elrond, you'll be able to send money anywhere in the world almost instantly with 100x less cost than you did before. And at that point, yeah, things will change very, very dramatically. So how, obviously we're seeing this tremendous rise in stable coins. Everybody knows about XRP. Everybody knows about JP Morgan building their own stable coin for transacting. How is Elrond different than sending Tether or sending one of these other things? For sure. The idea, again, I think that is that despite all these options

you have currently, you still have very, very few people using them because the problems are still there, right? They've not been solved. So bringing a few more features when the core elephant in the room has not been tackled. And it's like most of the people are engineers and engineers, when they try to build a product they build the product that doesn't look like let's say an apple product uh when you look at stuff always ugly and clunky yeah in in terms of ux right but uh the point is that everything you see in the space, whether it's stable coins, whether it's this kind of financial instruments, lending and so forth, all of this will be of millions of people will redefine the space. And you can offer all these features. It's just that you're not playing with 50 million people anymore.

You're playing with the whole world because anyone can use it. They don't have to learn anything they don't know yet. And yeah, we're super super super excited about this and actually can't wait to to launch things and move to market so when will people see this actual interface so that we can get an idea visually of what you're talking about and actually put our hands on it? I would say a couple of weeks. We're pushing as hard as humanly possible to get this out. And yeah, as soon as we have things, we'll announce them. Yeah, of course.

But I want people to know that we're talking about weeks not months not years i mean you're exactly and uh this is kind of your final push in this time what are you guys doing to get ready and have this out in a couple weeks i know that you've got some pretty exciting things you've had uh going on in the lead-up um the the idea as you said, is we've built this technology that enables us to build something very, very different on the blockchain right now, just as we were able to start building some cooler stuff on the broadband infrastructure once this was out. But we've been working on this for more than two and a half years. And now before launching the mainnet, although we had the full feature infrastructure ready,

there's actually no better way than testing this out than launching a sort of genesis simulation with people, real people involved from around the world in a decentralized setting, allow them to attack the network and move essentially from this fragile perspective where you sort of hope that no one will discover the bugs that you essentially have to this framework where you not only want to be robust, but you want to be anti-fragile. So you want to admit that any code written by humans will inevitably have bugs.

Of course. And then once you understand this, you say, let's not wait for someone else to discover it. Let's pay people to come and take down the network, stress test it, try to attack it from different angles. And the more bugs we discover, the sooner the network becomes super, super robust. So we are now at the point where we said we just launched a Battle of Nodes competition. We put a price of 60K, $60,000 in Elrond for people to come, register, put their nodes up,

and try to take down the network in any way possible. So we're super, super excited about that. We have more than 1,700 nodes from all over the world, more than 100 countries, actually. And yeah, I think the whole framework, the whole mindset of shifting from this point where you sit around and hope that you'll have the perfect architecture, and then when you launch, it will all work, which essentially never happens, to taking everything in,

admitting that there will be bugs, improving everything with maybe two releases a day, and pushing with the entire team like 24-7. Yeah, I know you guys don't sleep. Yeah, but it's super, super exciting. Because we finally can see the stuff we've been working on that's tested and so forth. And we're also testing a bit the limits to see how much pain we can take. And yeah, how much pain have have your nodes been able to inflict on you? I mean, have they been able to knock you out, you know, shut you down completely? Have they found small bugs?

What's the experience actually been like? So bugs we've discovered, and we discovered this sort of on a daily basis. It's mostly been minor bugs, though, and the kind of things that we're expecting to be found. We've not discovered yet critical bugs, and I'm still very curious to also see this play out. The process until now has been very engaging for the community. And I would expect that starting with Monday, it becomes a lot more of a war where people try to take each other down, try to attack their nodes and so forth.

So it's super, super interesting to see this play out. What is the role of a specific node with regard to Elrond once you do launch? So there are several types of nodes. There's validators. So let me go through a bit of the structure. So you have in Elrond the way we are able to scale transaction processing to move from seven or 15 transactions per second, which Bitcoin and Ethereum can process to Elrond where we can process 10,000 transactions per second. We do a parallelization of transaction processing. So whereas in Bitcoin or Ethereum, you have this workload that is processed by all nodes at the same time, in Elrond, you have this super smart mechanism

that essentially divides and conquers. It divides the workload, puts the workload to different shards so that we can parallelize transaction processing. And so you have shards in Elrond and under each shard, you have 500 nodes. And essentially, you also have some nodes that are in the waiting list to become eligible. And then an eligible node becomes a validator once it has the necessary stake, it has the necessary reputation, and it has gone through the process of qualifying. And there are some metrics

that the network takes into account. And so there are this type of nodes, then there are observer nodes that just sit around and look for what's happening in the network. But essentially, the most important at this point is to be a validated node and be able to stake and help process transactions. How do you eliminate bad actors or protect yourself from bad actors or nodes that perform poorly? We've been thinking a lot about this process and we've come up with a few proactive approaches and then reactive approaches. Proactive means that we've built a system with the consensus mechanism that is called

secure proof of stake because it, on the one hand, it eliminates proof of work, energy consumption, and so forth. On the other hand, it is really fast, but perhaps most important, it's super secure in the sense that we have a random sampling of the consensus group such that you never know out of the 500 nodes in each shard, you never know who will be in the consensus group because the nodes are randomly chosen. And then you only have five seconds to attack a consensus group if you are malicious, because then the consensus group is again, randomly reshuffled. Sounds like drug testing for athletes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is super, super important because if someone has the whole history, knows exactly what's happening, then they could always come up with ideas on how to attack the network and sort of plan some things. Now, when you add this level of randomness, it makes things super hard for attacks to be performed. Now, we have another layer of security proactively

where at the end of each epoch, which is defined as a day currently in Elrond, you have one-third of each, one-third of nodes in each shard which are randomly reshuffled to other shards so that you can, again, make things even more unpredictable on this layer. Now, on the other hand, reactively, we have a mechanism in the consensus through which you detect. The consensus basically happens through a proposal of a block, which is signed by the consensus group, and then validated. The idea is that whenever a block is signed, either double signed, or the signature, either the producer, the proposer of the block, is putting some false information there, or some of the block signers that are in the consensus group are not signing the block, this essentially results in a penalty for them.

Right. Such that when they stake stake they know that they have skin in the game if they try to attack the network they know they they have a penalty they can lose the whole stake if there if if the problem is super serious or they can use a part of the stake if the attack is much less offensive. Right. So there's different levels. But clearly, so the real answer is there's punishment, obviously, on the one side, but really there's tremendous incentive to be a good actor, correct? I mean, more Elrond, more becoming a validator, and really it incentivizes people to behave well and be a part of a very positive community and

build together. Yes, I think this is the fundamental role of a blockchain. So you have this in a very, very short description. Essentially, a blockchain is a database that is operated by a network of third-party independent participants, which are decentralized and are running the nodes self-interested. So they're not doing it out of benevolence, but rather because of their self-interest. And this is only possible through the economic incentive that is built in the blockchain. And this accounts essentially for most of the stuff that happens in a blockchain,

but then you also need to have a bit of a stick, not only the carrot, to make sure that if someone wants to attack the network, then they first need to make sure that they have skin in the game. Once they have skin in the game, then there's this type of mechanism that essentially prevents them having a clear idea of how they could perform the attack. Then there's this kind of economic disincentive where the more you have to invest to get the stake to perform the attack, at some point you'll start thinking, hey, if I need to pay 5 million or 10 million, why not help these guys and double that money and not waste my energy? Because at the end of the day, there are some psychological levels

which, when reached, will trigger you to start thinking the other way around. So this is very, very interesting to think about, but then also very well thought out so that whoever is interesting in doing good and has a strong self-interest can make a really interesting profit and be part and contribute and help the community grow, as you said. But then if there are bad actors, we need to make sure that at each filter level, very, very few and as few as possible go through it.

And then if they go through it, we have a way to get to them. So this is just an insanely ambitious project. I mean, I think your average person sees Bitcoin and Ethereum and thinks that they're probably extremely efficient. They're this huge step forward from, you know, fiat and PayPal and these other forms of money and ways of transacting that we've seen. So now you can do 10,000 instead of seven or 15. What gave you the sort of ambition to tackle a problem this massive? So I guess what I'm really asking is, what's your background? How did you get here?

How did you decide, yes, I'm going to change the future of money and transactions? I mean, it's just extremely, extremely impressive that you would tackle a problem this big. I would say that as with all projects, this generally starts from the point where you clearly see the solution, right? You don't initially say, okay this is super ambitious i i want to do this because it's ambitious but you generally say okay i've been in the space for a lot of time and this this was uh this was the case with with me i essentially stumbled into Bitcoin sometime in 2013, then joined the NEM core team in 2014. The reasoning here from the beginning was I had this fundamental insight about learning and about knowledge, where I continually ask myself how you could find a way

to learn the most interesting stuff that you could learn today without having this lag of knowledge that you really get with universities, you get with normal schools and so forth, where you're not at the cutting edge. Maybe you're 10 years behind. You just learned some stuff that has been processed, accepted, the consensus was there. And the more you learn, the more you discover that there's a lot of substance that has not reached you just because it's too new and too few people understand it, too few people judge it and so forth. So my question was then, how would you find a way to skip all of this and be at the cutting edge and learn whatever is the most interesting stuff, most up-to-date stuff right now? And after reading like tens and tens of books and searching for interesting answers, I came to this idea that if you look at history, I've done sort of research throughout history to look for scientists that have made a huge impact and left a mark on history and see a bit how they lived, how they thought,

what was the way they were viewed during their lifetime and how different was it to how we view them right now. And then I've looked at artists, at entrepreneurs and so forth. And with each of those, you generally saw something which was sometimes a bit sad in the sense that through their lifetimes, very, very few people got to see their work appreciated, understood. And the artists were the poorest, sort of less understood. And now you have this contrast, which is super sad in one sense that an artist would die of hunger, sort of super poor. And now his painting is sold with $200 million. Right.

So this doesn't make sense. So then after researching this, basically, I said, okay, people are not understood. This is sad. The way to solve this would be to basically be able to understand this really deep things without having to require validation. Because it's always that you don't get the consensus until after a few years when either the, you know, this joke that even physics doesn't move forward only. So physics only moves forward when the professors or the guys that currently hold the, let's say, current theories die out. Yep. Because then somebody else needs to come around and push the issue. Yeah. Yeah. And so, if physics works that way, then it's a lot maybe worse for the others. But then the conclusion to maybe resume was that if you could discover this type

of people in whatever field, then you could be 10, 20, 50 years before everything. Universities and whatever was taught and so forth. So then I made it my goal to first discover these people throughout history, because this was a lot easy, and say, who are those people today that nobody really understands yet? Because if you can find those, then you're basically, again, many, many years ahead of your time. Then the even more interesting thing is, and possibly the most difficult is, who are those people that are not yet at that point like they're they're Einstein while he was working as a patent clerk in Switzerland and if you could the question is if you could have a conversation with Einstein while he was working as a patent clerk would you be able to discover anything?

Would you be able to identify that genius before he even identified that genius to some degree? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so this is how I discovered Bitcoin, because I was looking for technologies that are at an inflection point that people don't really understand. But again, like with the scientists, they have this huge and interesting arc in the future. And once they get traction, they will really change the world. So Bitcoin was this perfectly hilarious idea. In one sense, it was super, super interesting from a technical and economic standpoint. In another sense, it was basically going against everything you knew in finance and

conventional economics. So I moved with that. And then the next step for me was basically the conclusion to what I've researched before, which was if you want to go even one step ahead of what these people, let's say the most advanced, tell you, the only way is to start building stuff. That's what happens at the cutting edge. So I said, then the best way to learn about this stuff is not only to read and discuss with people, but get involved. And so I got involved with NEM. And then after NEM, in 2016, I basically started a fund with my brother, again, to try to validate some of

this core hypothesis that we could identify, all the interesting architectures that were attempting to solve real problems, dissect the noise, and see what was really meaningful. And then after about one and a half years of seeing all of this, again, I noticed that this problem of scalability would become an inevitable bottleneck that nobody was tackling at the level that it was required to be tackled. So there were a lot of projects that just came with 3x improvement, 5x improvement compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum. But this essentially only delayed the problem. You got a solution for three to six months, but then you have the same problem.

So we said, unless you can come up with a solution that is something like three orders of magnitude and improvement, it's not even worth coming with a solution. So this is the background that led to Elrond. We've, of course, first tried to persuade some of the projects that we've invested in that they should change things, that there were solutions there that were 10x, 100x better than what they were trying, and they should just try that. But it was always problematic with this type of discussion. Some of the people came from the academia and while they understood

a few things, they were super risk averse, not necessarily interested in trying this out, but going the clear way where something was validated again and so forth. So at that point, we said we had enough money to not worry about money after the whole process. So we said, let's just build a team with which we can build rockets and solve this problem ourselves. This is essentially how Elrond started. Roundthex.com is one of my favorite companies in the entire crypto space. What they do is take all your small purchases and round them up to the nearest dollar and invest that spare change into any of over 30 crypto assets of your choice. They integrate with your favorite exchanges that you can view various exchange balances all in one dashboard and round up into different assets all at the same time.

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It was 1999 and they said, everything you've learned in the last four years is already irrelevant because of the velocity of information. And I think when universities hire learning, these other things you discussed, the way that we're educated, we're all developed in a time where information really was not received very quickly. You know, just there was not that much innovation, there was not that much tech. And so now, I think that your approach to learning is actually far better than probably any student is going to find in a university or any sort of higher learning, you really can learn anything you want to, if you dig deep enough without having a teacher, you just have to know where to look, I guess, and know how

to find it. But I've never really thought about it in the way that you just articulated it. So really, really, really interesting to me. So you raised money, you started, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, please. No, I, and this was again, always a process for me. So I, when I first discovered this, very few mind-blowing books, it sort of blew me away to how far some people were from other people. Like, I almost started asking myself, like, why are we leaving, why is life here like 200 years in the past? It really is. Yeah. And this was the process. Like this was the first level.

Then the second level is discovering the people that are alive and are doing this and not understood. And then the sort of final level, which you basically see implemented in many other people is understanding that the most interesting stuff that you could learn has not been discovered, has not been written yet, and is far outside the frontier of what we know, understand, and have accepted as truth. And if you can venture there and move, it will be difficult. It's hard to go through the stuff, but there's nothing like that. Like there's a world to be discovered.

So talk about, to that end, talk about what applied philosophy really is and how that, I mean, is that what we're talking about here to some degree? Is that the field of applied philosophy? Because it was a somewhat new term to me when I was introduced to it, when talking to you and figuring out what you were all about. So what is applied philosophy? The idea is that, indeed, at some point, I basically read a lot. I read like hundreds of books just to absorb the information and sort of create a kind of tree of knowledge through which you get a sense of what's

the state of the art in engineering? What's the state of the art in genetics? What's the state of the art in these different fields? And then at that point, you sort of understand that the fundamental principle is that the map is not the territory, that all these maps that we had throughout the time have proved false or incomplete. And so to treat something as final is a kind of sin in the sense that you will soon discover that it's not final, that it's incomplete. And the point is always what is basically every model is wrong, but some are useful, right? The idea is to make it less wrong. How do you make it such that with each new trial, you have something that is more accurate and less wrong, and it allows you to move forward. So philosophy tied into this, because it allows you to abstract things, to discuss about them, to see them in new perspectives.

Applied philosophy then is essentially just trying to make sense of the world a lot faster, creating this kind of mental models that allow you to navigate a field even before it's clear to the, let's say, the professors how this would pan out. Let's take, for instance, genetic engineering. Is this mental mapping? Is that the term is mental mapping, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is just one of the things. Applied philosophy is essentially this idea that you can construct mental tools which help you navigate the world a lot faster, whether it's engineering, whether it's science, whether it's real-world life and application. You can always see the world in many ways. And the idea is to understand that there's perception, there's processing, and there's reality.

You usually don't see reality. You see a kind of perception that is interpreted to all these mental models that even if you're not aware of them, you still have them. Right. All your biases, all the things that you've learned throughout your life, just basically the way that you are individually programmed. You were going to give an example, and I interrupted you about genetics, I believe. Yeah. I do think that, as I said before, there are very, very few technologies that are can be put at on the scale of evolution. So they have this, this potential to change things to such a degree that you will not recognize the world after doubt it. Right. And there are

very few of those. and one of this is essentially genetic engineering if even once you can edit genetic code as you write computer code to not only solve any illness, difficulty, problems like that, but improve different features to degrees that you've not seen before, the world will become super weird very, very fast. Right. And so people, I think, don't think sufficiently about this matters that will come and advance a lot faster than we expect. And mental models and having a kind of idea of engineering, but then also a bit of applied philosophy allows you to make sense of this, them allowed faster and also make some decisions in a timely manner. You're from the future. I'm convinced you were like sent back through some kind of portal on an Alon Musk rocket or something.

It's amazing though to hear it because it's such a fresh perspective. And when you apply the ideas back to the way you've learned things and the way that you've been taught, you really do realize how far generally each of us as individuals are behind. And that there's only a few people as I referenced, like the Elon Musks of the world who really get it and, and get ahead and make those kinds of changes that happen on an evolutionary scale, as you said. So, um,

going back to Elrod, I know that you guys have some really impressive partnerships and projects you've been working on. And every time I look up to you guys, I see Samsung, Samsung, Samsung. So what are you guys doing with Samsung? You know, how are they applying your technology? We, we indeed have, um, doing with Samsung? How are they applying your technology? We indeed have a lot of collaborations and partnerships. In fact, we've been announcing some collaboration the past few weeks almost daily. We are ramping up things and pushing

the acceleration pedal in preparation for the mainnet launch. Indeed, there are a few collaborations that stand out because they're huge. Samsung, for instance, has the revenue equal to the GDP of Romania, to put things in perspective. So it's an interesting perspective there. What we've done with Samsung is we've done two things. First, integrated the Elrond token in the Samsung wallet, which is already there. It happened.

And the second point is we've done an integration based on a game that we've built and shipped to the Samsung Dapp Store. It's already live. It's called Battle of Elrond. And people can basically fight a multiplayer deathmatch among friends on mobile. Deathmatch among friends. Yeah, yeah. And win some Elrond tokens.

This has been the starting point with Samsung. There's a lot more that can happen here, but we always take it step by step. We really like that they're very interested in the blockchain space and wanted to show them how fast we can execute, how fast we can move forward so that then a lot more doors open to collaborations among us. I would also add that there's the latest and probably again, one of the very, very interesting things that we've announced is collaboration with Binance,

where Binance is BUSD. Stablecoin will also be launched on Elrond as soon as the mainnet is out. Yeah, we have a few super exciting things that are not announced yet on this front, but maybe another 30 collaborations with different startups or companies from around the world. So what does it mean that you're with BUSD? That means that they're actually going to transact on your network?

That's the way? Yes. So infinitely faster than any other, right? Precisely. So the idea is with the stable coin, you have the smart contracts that essentially performs transactions. Everything else is super straightforward. You deposit money in a bank, you get this token. The only thing you can essentially optimize with the stable coin that is backed by fiat money is the speed of the transactions and

the cost of the transactions. Because the larger the adoption is, the more it makes sense for you to optimize because on volumes you can make or lose a lot of money actually so this is why we've already built the smart contract for Binance BUSD on Elrond this was this was very interesting, super hardcore. Again, as our team works, one of our guys took basically about two days to just prepare the smart contract for Binance on that front. And so that they can test it, play with it and prepare it so that once the mainnet launch is out, they can start using this. And there's been a lot of hype around Ethereum 2.0. How does that compare? I mean, is that considered a competitive product or technology, I would assume?

And why, I guess, is Elrond better? This is a good question. The problem that I see, so there are two points. The advantage of Ethereum is Ethereum has already a bull run behind it. And during the last bull run, people create some very sophisticated explanations of why Ethereum works, why it has all these network effects, and so forth. But this is only hindsight. With hindsight, you can always explain things in a super elegant way that satisfies whatever you want to prove. But essentially, Ethereum took off unexpectedly and very surprisingly during the last bull run with the ICO boom. It did not take off due to all these sophisticated

reasons that are applied right now. And on the other hand, as soon as it reached a certain point, Ethereum became super irreputable due to the value that it created and the people that it attracted and so forth. So as an effect, this large ecosystem of people grew and built a lot of interesting and cool things. Now, the problem is that when you start small and become super large, as Ethereum is right now, you lose one thing, and this is agility and flexibility. You cannot make decisions overnight. You cannot build stuff overnight. So as we've seen, Ethereum, despite a lot of efforts, has been discussing Ethereum 2.0 for how many years right now? For as long as I can remember. Right. is called the Brooks law, which says that if you add more developers to a late project, it will only become later. Meaning that it's super counterintuitive, but whatever you think you will gain, but

by adding more people when you already have a lot of people is just a super high overhead cost in communication and complexity management. And so to add something even more problematic on this, Ethereum has never had a definitive and clear spec for what they are building. So it's like you're driving a super fast, like an interesting car, but then you're trying to change the engine while the car is moving. And then also you're not sure if this is the engine or you want a different one. So it's super, super problematic if you think about the way they're trying to execute. So I would not think they will have anything ready in the next two years. This could change, of course, but I don't see it happening. And so Elrond, on the other hand, this is the most important advantage we have.

We are small, we're super, super focused, and we're hardcore. If we want to move some mountains, we'll not sleep a few nights and push things forward. And we have a clear, definitive idea of specification. And we're not going to launch in two years, but in a few weeks. So if you can process all of this with 10,000 transactions per second, then have the tools and so forth. If you can launch in weeks,

nobody will care if you can bring the same technology in two years, right? Right. So basically, Ethereum was a very cool idea, but very early. It exploded because of speculators, not because of the tech, because of traders, really, people buying it. And then through that, it gained such crazy name recognition and people building on it that it actually got too big for the existing technology. And now you have a situation where any even small change could potentially destroy everything that's already on the existing network in the first place. And so a huge mountain to move to get to the point where you can actually change anything significantly. I mean, is that that's the gist of it? Yes, I don't think so. I don't think they will disappear, to be precise. I don't think so, too. I mean, they're first to market to whatever degree. Exactly. It's the household name, you know. Exactly. I think they will have some value. I just think that the current blockchain space is not even 1% of what we could have as an

adoption curve. If you understand the potential, the market that we could target, that we could bring in and so forth, and the economics of it. And so I don't think, on the other hand, that Ethereum will lead the next wave just because Ethereum is sort of stuck in the past with this legacy technology that they need to manage. It's like...

I do think that if Italic would build Ethereum right now, he would probably go with what we have in Elrond. Yeah, you would do it very differently. I'm pretty confident. Yeah. Ethereum is like, when you look at the controls of the space shuttle, which are still like computers from the 1970s and 1980s, and you're like the Tesla, the SpaceX rocket that just went up with the flat screens. Yeah, they were still there. The crazy thing that, as I mean, it's a funny aside, but they were still sending, you know, space shuttles into into space with technology and computers from 10 to 1520 years before, because it's kind of a similar example, they were never

able to advance the technology without taking the entire thing apart, which they didn't have the funds or means to do. So it's, it's actually kind of a funny way to look at the two things. Yeah, I totally agree. I think in your analogy, the idea is that as long as you don't have an alternative and things work, okay, they're good enough. When you have an alternative or things don't work and you're constantly frustrated that they don't work and then an alternative comes along, at that point, a lot of interest will just move as fast as possible. Right. And I think right now is the perfect moment because of the macro landscape, then also the technology starting to be ready and just in time.

Well, sadly, a few space shuttles exploded as a result of the technology not being advanced. So there really was something that needed to change. And as we say in America, though, if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. It's kind of a classic saying here. So since you're from the future, can you tell us who's going to win the next presidential election here? I really need to know.

Or if Bitcoin is going to reach a million dollars, like all the megaballs tell us. No? Yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure. I think this will play out very, very interesting on both fronts. Yeah. It's super funny if you look at 2020 compared to all the other years.

It's almost like it's fictional. If you would write some fiction and would put all of this in it in 2019, you would have said, you know, this is super crazy. We've lived a complete lifetime in this year, really. It feels like, I mean, the news cycle happens so fast now that I can't even remember the insane things that happened like last week that would have been the biggest news event of an entire year of the last decade. It really is pretty astounding. So main net is coming. You guys are ready. You guys are ready to launch. What is the 10 year from now future of Elrond?

Or are you already ahead in your mind and trying to figure out what the next thing is once this is going and running? No, I do think Elrond will play a crucial role for the future because essentially, I think blockchain will be the most important global GDP multiplier since the internet. There will be no question about that. as soon as things start picking up people will will relive the internet days and start to understand what difference it actually made because everything we're discussing today as especially for for me without the internet would not have been possible everything Everything I read, everything I discovered by myself without the internet, I would have probably lived in a village. Go to the library.

Yeah. And so this, I think, will be the overarching theme for the next 10, 20 years. So throughout this, Elrond will specifically try to give anyone anywhere easy access to this digital economy by creating this underlying technology and then also by creating this user interface that makes it super easy and super compelling to use these things without learning about them. And then I also think that if I were to look to something more specific with the user interface, we'll probably reach 1 billion users in 10 years. So it will be so crazy compared to what we have right now that you'll almost, yeah, you just have to look at how crazy Uber looked when they were compared to the taxi business.

And nobody thought that Facebook was going to have billions of users, you know, and touch every corner of the world. I remember when it was just for college kids and I couldn't even start a profile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it was like a bad version of my space. You know, it's it's crazy how how things develop and advance. Yeah, I do think that having one billion users use blockchain is sort of inevitable. If you look the further you look in the future,

the clearer it becomes. The only thing I want to make sure is that we advance as fast as possible toward that. And with Elrond, this is what we're specifically targeting. And this is why we don't sleep at night and try to push things. And yeah, we cannot be more excited about this. I'm sure we'll build a lot more things, a lot more things, but they will have to do something with Elrond always. Yeah, that makes sense. You got me really, really, really, really excited. Again, because as I touched on in the beginning, I was already excited. So,

yeah, I'm really thrilled that you're pushing so hard because I think it's going to be huge. And it's funny, every time I interview any CEO in this space, the idea of inevitability comes up. And it's never a question that I ask. Everyone who's building in this space and the idea of inevitability comes up. And it's never a question that I ask. Everyone who's building in this space and has, I think, an inherent understanding of what's happening really, truly believes that blockchain is the future and that that is 100% inevitable. So it's great to always hear that consistently. It gives a lot of validation to all of the hard work that you and them are doing, certainly. Yeah, I would also add that there's always a cost of opportunity for the future. So you could improve things.

And even if you think that at some point they will become inevitable, I do think on the hand, that they're only inevitable if enough people are really pushing as hard as possible toward that. And since a lot of people are still unbanked, a lot of inefficiencies can be found in the economy. And with the current general macro landscape, it's super problematic. People like normal people, average people are starting to ask really interesting questions because you have to start asking them. Otherwise, you might be super sad that you did not do this. And the whole point for us is to try to make sure that we can win even one or two or three years in which we can accelerate this instead of letting it come later would actually translate into people that are still alive, because otherwise they might have died, either run out of resources, or not be able to move on with their life,

build a new life, and so forth. So for us, this is something which translates to real impact in the world. And the time is super valuable. Right now, time is of essence. I really never thought about it in that context. I mean, it's much like trying to find a cure for a disease or cancer. Yes, we can say that a cure for cancer is inevitable, but it would make a hell of a big difference if it happened next year instead of in 50 years, how many lives you would save. In your case, how many unbanked people could be banked, how many people could cross borders and really change their lives.

It's a really eloquent way to put it. I love that. So where can everybody follow you moving forward, make sure that they don't miss the main net, follow Elrond. What's the best way to keep up with you? Elrond.com. First, they can see all the information about the project there. We have a newsletter. We have Elrond Network on Twitter and myself on Twitter, Benjamin Minku. And we also have Telegram groups, a super excited community to just help with answering questions, with being there. I would also add that since the mainnet launch is

coming, it's super exciting to get involved right now. If people are developers, they can start playing with the technology. If they're just validators and so forth, they can start experimenting with the network that will prove some very, very interesting points during the next period. And then if they're just enthusiasts, again, they can engage with the community and become part of it.

So we'd love to hear any kind of feedback and have people come and start using Elrond. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. You definitely blew my mind. And I'm very impressed with the way that you think and I think it's going to give people a different perspective on not only what's possible with blockchain, but what's probably possible individually with them if they sort of break out of the

constraints of the way that they're expected to live their lives and sort of the path that we've all been put on. So I appreciate you sharing all of that. And I look forward to definitely doing this again in the future. Maybe you'll have to come back after the main nets running and you've changed the world. Yeah, for sure.

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for the conversation. Super, super great to, to be here. And I'd love to, to come back and continue. I think Elrond will,

will be here for the longterm and yeah, very, very happy to continue the conversation. Thank you. I believe you. Thanks.