The Wolf Of All Streets - How Secret Network Helped Quentin Tarantino Sell Pulp Fiction NFTs | Guy Zyskind

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

I sat down with Guy Zyskind, the founder of Secret Network (SCRT Labs) to discuss all things privacy and how Guy’s Secret Network is helping to bring privacy back to the people. Guy has been in the crypto space for almost ten years and believes that mass adoption will happen within the next 10-20 years. He is working with the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith to help speed up the process. How? Check it out in this latest episode of The Wolf Of All Streets podcast. Guy Zyskind: https://twitter.com/GuyZys ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND TRADE ALL SPOT PAIRS ON BITGET FOR ZERO FEES! ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #PulpFiction #NFT #crypto 0:00 Intro 1:07 Why privacy? 4:50 What is Secret Network? 5:20 Working with Quentin Tarantino 7:15 Bitget ad 8:12 Application of privacy 12:50 The tech behind Secret Network 14:00 How to make people care about privacy 15:30 Interoperability 18:20 No one can stop crypto The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

The general public has become increasingly aware of the violations of our privacy by big tech companies, particularly in Web 2. Well, Web 3 can solve a lot of the major problems that we have with privacy and not just the sharing of our data. I talked to Guy Ziskin, the CEO of Secret Network, about how this is changing and how they can fix this problem. So the people who are watching this will be able to see that you're wearing a hat that says privacy. The people who are listening won't be able to see it, but he's wearing a hat that says privacy. Why? Why?

Well, I've been pro privacy since forever and what we're doing is basically bringing privacy to Web3. Okay, so talk about how you're bringing privacy to Web3 and why that matters. Blockchains are interesting because it lowers the trust you have. You need to have a system, right? You can now have money that's decentralized. You can now have DeFi applications where you don't really have to trust anyone. With NFTs, you can now have data ownership. But the problem with blockchains is that they have no privacy. They're actually even worse than Web2, right? Like, we're all concerned that, like,

the Facebooks and the Google of the world are, like, hoarding our data. But in the blockchain, it's all out there. I go to Starbucks one time, pay with my wallet address, that database leaks, everyone knows my entire financial history. That's crazy, that's not how a system, especially if it's trying to improve the internet, it's not how it should work. The irony of that is thick though, because if you ask a government, a regulator, legislators, they'll say that everybody's using crypto to hide their transactions and it's perfect for criminals and sanctions and laundering. We do a really bad job at educating people. That's, I guess, problem number one.

The other problem is, and I don't know how to solve that, but crypto is, I think, the biggest social experiment of this century, of our lifetime. And that does attract bad actors. That does make a lot of mistakes happen because when you're innovating, you're breaking things. And if you're a government and even if you're a well-intentioned government, you're like, okay, we need to protect everyone. This isn't moving too fast. And I think that combination gives the wrong message. But in general, my firm belief is that in like 10 years from now, even governments and everyone will understand that this is a better technology. And there can be a balance between compliance and privacy.

You don't have to give up one for the other. But it's optimistic. I think we all agree on that. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But it's optimistic to think that governments will allow you to keep that privacy. I think everybody fears a central bank digital currency where all of our transactions are on a ledger. We see what China is doing with it. Maybe the United States would protect our privacy in doing that.

But I think there's a lot of fear that blockchain can be used to violate our privacy. Pardon my French, but that scares the hell out of me. I was going to say something even worse. And you can. You can say whatever you want. So that scares the fuck out of me. I'm a researcher in my previous life.

I did a lot of cryptography and stuff like that. And the technologies to solve that exist. So from my same lab at MIT, there has been research on privacy preserving CBDCs. So you can actually have your cake and eat it too. Of course. There's no reason not to. Now my hope is that, I don't know about China and like let's say less friendly regimes,

but at least in the US, I am somewhat still hopeful and maybe I'm too optimistic that if they adopt the CBDC model, which I'm not even sure is needed, but if they do adopt it, then you can use things like what we're doing, what others are doing, to actually keep it private. So the government can know that it's running a CBDC that's fast, scalable, compliant, and they can make sure that there's no bad actors on their watch, but they will not be able to see your particular transactions. So for context, tell us exactly what Secret does.

So Secret is actually broader than the private transactions. What Secret is saying is that blockchain is a new kind of trusted programmable layer where you can build all kinds of applications where you don't have to trust any middlemen. It doesn't have to be financial. And what we're saying is that when you're building these, in many cases, even if you don't care about privacy, you need privacy for it to operate. And it's easier to explain with examples. So last year, we did a few interesting collaborations. One of them was with Quentin Tarantino. So with Tarantino, what we did was we took the original manuscript of Pulp Fiction. Everyone knows Pulp Fiction. My favorite movie of all time. Amazing. Everyone knows Tarantino.

And he was like, I don't understand NFTs. Like we Everyone knows Tarantino. And he was like, I don't understand NFTs. Like we sat with him in our office and he was like, don't talk to me about NFTs. I don't get it. I don't see why. Like, why would I mean, if I sell something physical, I get it. But if I sell a copy online and everyone can copy it, what's the point? And we told him, look, we have a technology that allows you to get an NFT and make sure that only the person who buys the NFT gets to see the content. So people don't have to care about privacy. Tarantino cared about privacy in the sense that he said, I'm giving out some piece of

my art. The only person who should see the piece of my art that I'm giving him is the person who bought it. And when we explained that to him, he was like, okay, I have this unique piece of history, the original manuscripts of Paul Fichet. No one ever saw it. I want to do this.

Another example was with Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith said, I don't want to put it on Netflix. I don't want to put it on the movie theater. But if I put it on Netflix or the movie theater, which is a centralized model, I need to subscribe to Netflix or I need to buy a movie ticket. And he asked us, how can I replicate that experience with NFTs? And here again, privacy was crucial. Privacy was crucial because now you can make sure that only if you bought and owned the NFT, you actually get access to the new movie.

So those are kind of the things that we're trying to push to kind of show that you need privacy for blockchain to be useful. If you've been following me for the last few months, then you definitely know that I've been trading and investing on BitGet. Now, listen, it took me six months to decide that they were going to be the sponsor for the last few months, then you definitely know that I've been trading and investing on BitGet. Now listen, it took me six months to decide that they were going to be the sponsor for the newsletter. But once I saw their partnership with Juventus, that they were the world's leading copy trading platform in crypto,

and also that they're a top five exchange by volume, well, I was sold and I was convinced. And I've been using it ever since to dollar cost average and to invest in Bitcoin. You can also trade there with leverage, but of course, be careful if you're going to do that. And I don't know if you saw the recent news, but they've also done a deal with Lionel Messi. Now you can get up to an $8,000 bonus using my link below and you can trade spot with absolutely no fees. You also get a 15% discount on trading leverage. Go ahead and sign up right now

using the wolfofallstreets.info slash BitGet. Claim that huge reward and use the world's best trading platform. So it's not just about me hiding my personal transactions or my personal data. It's also about making sure that when there's a transaction or something sold that only the person who actually purchased it has access, which people don't think

about as much. I don't think they don't think about that as privacy. Exactly, which is even as an internal messaging, it's a question because what we're trying to explain is stop thinking of privacy just as private transactions, which is important. Think about it in a more broader sense. A lot of things in our life require privacy just to function, and we take it from granted. If you go to Vegas and you play a poker game, the underlying assumption is that you can't see my cards and I can't see yours until the right time.

This is privacy, You need it. There's no game without it. That makes perfect sense. That's a really good analogy for it that I've never thought about. So then you've presented a few examples of where it's important in this perfect world where secret takes over and everybody's using the technology. What other places where we need that privacy? Where else is this particularly

applicable? So, I mean, there's a lot of areas, a couple of more, let's say moonshot areas that we're looking into that aren't just NFTs, gaming, DeFi, all of which I can... Actually, DeFi, I will say something. So, MEV, is that okay to talk about? So, MEV is like a big issue, right? Like billions are being extracted from Ethereum, from other chains right now using MEV. And why does that happen? Because everyone, definitely the miners, but everyone can just look at the mempool,

what's going on in the chain, and then front run everyone else. But what if the mempool, everything that goes in the mempool is encrypted and you can't see it? That's a form of privacy. And you can only see it after the transaction has been put inside of the blockchain. So with privacy, you can actually solve front-run in an MEV.

And that's actually something that we've done and shown. And other use cases I'm really, really excited about, which people don't think about when they think of privacy. One of them is safer cost. So if we want everyone to use cryptocurrencies, what we don't want is we don't want them to keep their cryptocurrencies on exchanges that get hacked and don't really give you your, I mean, not your keys. Not your phone, of course. But it's easy, right? It's easy to use. At the same time, we don't, I mean, if I give you a private key and you're an average user,

where do you store your seed? Where do you store your private key? Like, come on, that's not scalable. Right. People are their own main point of failure. We tell everybody to be your own bank, but people are idiots or they just bump their head. Exactly. So things that we're working on, on on Secret right now, which can be done.

And this isn't just for Secret, this is for all blockchain is because Secret, unlike other blockchains, can actually store private information, but it does it in a decentralized way. Like it can go offline, it can be hacked, I mean, it can be hacked as any other blockchain, but not more, but it can store private information, then Secret Network can store your keys and kind of help you sign transactions. It can kind of even do interesting things like making sure that, you know, maybe it stores half of the the key it's a multi-sig it stores half of the key and you store half of the key but you define a policy that you can't spend more than a thousand dollars a day and now if something happens and probably someone took your key they're gonna only get a thousand dollars a day before you figure it out and are able to reconcile

it and move your coins so it's a bank, but it's a friendly bank that you don't have to trust because it's on a blockchain. So those kind of things are really useful and are going to help improve Crypto UX. The other one, and that's even more of a moonshot, is I don't like the situation where Apple, Google, Facebook, they collect all of our data and they own it, and that's worth a lot of money.

Can we create a system where we can all contribute data in and then you can run machine learning on-chain to train like models to do like, you know, for healthcare applications, for even maybe privacy preserving, advertisement, I mean, the sky's the limit. But that data gets stored encrypted, so you don't compromise on your privacy, but you get paid for your data. And then other applications can subscribe and utilize it.

And you can probably opt in or opt out of how your data is used and whether you're choosing to monetize it or just keep it completely private. Exactly. How does the technology actually work? What have you built? Yeah, how it's built. So it's a mix of right now, I mean, there's a lot.

But right now, it's a mix of something called secure enclaves. And for people who don't know that, if you've ever used a ledger device or a Teresa device, it's the same principle. A ledger device, for example, a hardware wallet, basically hides your private key. Even if someone takes that device, they can extract the private key. That's what you want. But it can run a computation, one computation, signed transactions. So our network basically expands on that. And it basically says you can put all data,

all data privately inside of a very similar chip, inside of a processor. So it's private. And then the validators, the miners in our network, they run that hardware, and even they cannot see what they're computing over. So it's the same principle, but instead of just signing transactions,

you can run any smart contract, any application. Wow, it's really brilliant. So do you think that we will actually get to a world where people care enough about their privacy to utilize all these technologies? Because I think that people say they care about their privacy while using their smartphone to check their GPS

and their direction and uploading a photo to TikTok that's going to the CCP. Two things are going to happen. Actually, regulation is helpful here. So the same thing happened with sustainability 20 years ago. And it's starting to happen with GDPR and all that. People are going to be, people, organizations, even blockchains are going to be penalized if they don't actually support or promote privacy-enhancing technology.

So I think users are going to get it. Now, us as technologists and as builders, our job is to make it so there's no cost for privacy. Like, if I can give you the same level of experience and even better with privacy... Then you'll care. You'll care if you don't have to pay $6 a month for it. So that's our goal. And then the other aspect is, Right. With privacy, you're going to take... Then you'll care. You'll care if you don't have to pay $6 a month for it. Exactly.

So that's our goal. And then the other aspect is I'm actually showing you that in many cases you can get better services, better experience with privacy, even if you don't care about privacy. Can this be deployed, utilized on any blockchain? We're not trying to be the Bitcoin or Ethereum of the world. We're trying to provide privacy as a service, something that any chain can use. Yeah, literally any. Literally any chain. Cool. Because obviously interoperability is

sort of this major challenge that the space has, but also has seemed to be the main attack vector. It's the main attack vector but in my opinion this is just... you know there are great niche products that are building the right technology just taking time but there was such a big market opportunity for interoperability that... It'll get fixed. Yeah people built like the faster thing they could and those break. But like this is going to be resolved in two years. You sort of hinted before, touched on UX UI.

I would argue that UX UI is probably the biggest barrier right now to mainstream adoption. How do we get to a point where literally anyone who's not crypto native, grandma, can use this thing. We always use grandma as the example, right? Grandma's never going to use it by the way. But in theory, if grandma wanted to use it. But you know, my non-turkey uncle maybe. Right. Yeah. So how do we get to the point where the UX UI is familiar enough, comparable to web two,

where we're not talking about hardware devices and private keys and writing it down on a piece of paper and putting it in a safe and you can just go use all of this in a private secure manner so i i do think what we're building would help do that on a more centralized front you're somewhat seeing that like with companies like fireblocks like fireblocks for example uses very similar technology like ours and you don't care about what they're on i care but you don't you shouldn't care about what their underlying, I care, but you don't, you shouldn't care about what their underlying technology is. But so many institutions can now hold crypto because they have an easier solution like that to use. So I do think we're putting the plumbing in,

and that's, again, something that's going to be resolved in a few years, in a couple of years. That's number one. And number two, and that may not be resolved so quickly and might not be an unpopular opinion. But there's still a lot of people like you and me in crypto. And there's so much money in crypto right now that companies and builders,

they don't have the right incentive yet to improve UX. Because we'll hear spent the money. Because they're getting rich anyways. Exactly. This is an unpopular opinion. It is unpopular. So does that mean we need a more aggressive bear market to flush them all out and get them hungry and desperate again?

Well, either a bear market or maybe more money in such that that would come from like people. Not more money in. Maybe you need to have enough money left on the table by the mainstream such that people would start caring. So we basically need to be incentivized again with more money. Unpopular, I said, right? But I think it's accurate.

If you don't need to fix it and you're doing well, why would you fix it? Exactly. I never really thought of it that way. Is there anything in your mind right now that can stand in the way of what you're building or adoption? Is it regulators, legislators? I always say, and I tell it to my team and to everyone, we are our biggest competition.

Like we're either going to win or lose because people care about what we're building. We're fast enough to change, and people need this. So that's the only thing that matters for us. For the Web3 crypto space as a whole, I've been doing this since 2013, and I had no idea if this is going to pan out. I think now the ship has sailed. This is going to be here. This is going to succeed.

I am concerned about regulators slowing things down, which is unproductive. But I don't think anyone like the genie is out of the vault. No one can stop it. No more bitcoins going to zero. Do you think that we get to the point where blockchain is the underlying technology of things that you don't think about in the same way as how your phone works or how the internet works and it's just powering most things and we don't use the term nft anymore right it's just the way that you transact 100 but is but that would take longer than i originally thought how long do you think man i hate it, but 10 to 20 years. Yeah. I don't think that's a long time. I'll be 65 if it takes 20 years. So I guess it's a pretty long time, but all right. So make a deal

in 10 years, we'll sit back down. We'll have the conversation again and see where we're at. That's, that's, that's a plan. Thank you so much. Thank you.