The Wolf Of All Streets - How To Become A Blockchain Developer | Bartosz Lipinski, Solana
Episode Date: November 22, 2022Bartosz Lipinski, the head of product engineering at Solana, will guide you through the life of a blockchain developer, what skills you need, and what your career can look like. Bartosz Lipinski: h...ttps://twitter.com/baalazamon ►► 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 #Blockchain #Solana #Career 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.
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                                         There are a lot of ways to make money and be successful in the crypto space.
                                         
                                         Arguably none better than becoming a coder and a blockchain developer.
                                         
                                         I had the opportunity to sit down with one of the most prolific blockchain developers,
                                         
                                         Bartosz Lipinski, and we talked about why he decided to build on Solana and what he's
                                         
                                         building and what the prospects are for the blockchain in the future. what's up everybody welcome back i hope you enjoyed crypto burbs uh technical analysis
                                         
                                         master class uh should remind you all we're recording everything as you can see here so
                                         
                                         all of this will be reposted over the next couple weeks uh so that's evergreen and you can revisit
                                         
                                         anything that you might have missed i see a lot of people taking pictures of the slides and things like that, but this will all
                                         
    
                                         be available on my YouTube channel. So moving on, I'm really excited. We have a fireside chat today
                                         
                                         with Bartosz Lipinski, one of the masterminds behind everything that's been built on Solana,
                                         
                                         obviously one of the most popular blockchains and a million other probably credentials that we can certainly
                                         
                                         get into. And the topic is how to become a blockchain developer. You know, we can obviously
                                         
                                         get much deeper probably in the weeds on the topic, but I really want to start from the beginning
                                         
                                         because I know that a lot of people here and who will be listening are actually interested in where
                                         
                                         you get started and what the skill set required is. So I guess we start at the
                                         
                                         beginning with your story. How did you learn to become a blockchain developer? So for me,
                                         
    
                                         it was like a very strange story. I used to work for 10 years in traditional finance.
                                         
                                         Before the blockchain, I worked for like six years at Citadel Hedge Fund. Some people might
                                         
                                         hear of it. I ran a decently sized team that was responsible for building trading platforms for equities.
                                         
                                         So primarily research, back testing and then actual trading system.
                                         
                                         And when I left I was going to join Jump Trading,
                                         
                                         another prop trading slash hedge fund firm based in Chicago.
                                         
                                         But unfortunately in finance,
                                         
                                         people have this thing that's called non-compete.
                                         
    
                                         Pretty sad or like actually pretty happy.
                                         
                                         I was quite happy.
                                         
                                         I was like, oh, this is great.
                                         
                                         I will like sit 12 months at home, relax, you know, travel.
                                         
                                         But unfortunate thing happened, like this thing called COVID.
                                         
                                         And then I couldn't travel.
                                         
                                         So I started like baking bread and making kombucha.
                                         
                                         So that was pretty funny.
                                         
    
                                         So I was like, oh, this is great, like early retirement.
                                         
                                         Pretty sweet, but that lasted about like two weeks.
                                         
                                         So don't retire early.
                                         
                                         It's fake.
                                         
                                         It's completely fake.
                                         
                                         So then how did you pivot into actual blockchain development?
                                         
                                         Obviously, you had the background, but the technology was different.
                                         
                                         Yeah, so first I started like digging into like Twitter, like following number of people, figuring out what I actually want to do.
                                         
    
                                         And I started going like I didn't care really that much about the price action or the tokens or any of that.
                                         
                                         But I wanted to understand more the technology and how you can pick different blockchains.
                                         
                                         So I started researching more obscure ones.
                                         
                                         At the time Solana, when I was looking at it, was fairly obscure.
                                         
                                         It was like top 200 or something.
                                         
                                         I don't think many people even heard of it.
                                         
                                         It turned out I had a common friend with Anatoly.
                                         
                                         I reached out to him and said, hey, how
                                         
    
                                         about I start doing some things?
                                         
                                         And he was like, yeah, it's an open source project.
                                         
                                         You can just contribute a number of things.
                                         
                                         I cannot emphasize this more.
                                         
                                         From the becoming a
                                         
                                         blockchain developer engineer,
                                         
                                         one, you obviously need to be a
                                         
                                         developer first. So if you
                                         
    
                                         want to become a developer, not even just
                                         
                                         a blockchain developer,
                                         
                                         there's a number of resources online that are for free or paid that you can start researching like, hey, how do I learn to code? I would probably stay away from certain languages. So for example,
                                         
                                         I wouldn't touch Python. Like JavaScript might be better because it's much closer to like solidity.
                                         
                                         Or if you want to go a bit more hardcore,
                                         
                                         you can start looking at Rust or Move
                                         
                                         that some of the newer blockchains are starting to adopt.
                                         
                                         So first, learn the language.
                                         
    
                                         And then find, because it's all open source
                                         
                                         and you can actually see what people are doing,
                                         
                                         start engaging with the community.
                                         
                                         So join the Discord, join Twitter, start asking questions,
                                         
                                         like very fundamental ones. Why something works like that?
                                         
                                         Or
                                         
                                         why this like exploit happened? Like just like start following like exploits
                                         
                                         and how people are describing it. And there's like the thing that's amazing about this space, everything has happened in the open.
                                         
    
                                         So if you wanted to say, hey, how do I become finance engineer?
                                         
                                         That's much harder.
                                         
                                         There's like literally no resources on like how to do it.
                                         
                                         But with blockchain, it's actually fairly straightforward.
                                         
                                         And what's really good is like you will be actually paid the same amount of money, if not more, that you would get paid in finance.
                                         
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                                         Which is a nice bonus, certainly. So what then made you specifically choose Solana at that time still clearly Ethereum
                                         
                                         was the place to be that was where and still to some degree where the most developer activity was
                                         
                                         so it's kind of a gamble for you I think to go with a smaller nascent blockchain at that point
                                         
    
                                         yep 100% so in my defense I did a bunch of Solidity programs, like deployed them, like played with it,
                                         
                                         like looked at the existing contracts.
                                         
                                         So don't become like a maxi and like,
                                         
                                         hey, this is like my thing and like I'm just going into this.
                                         
                                         Try to learn, like ultimately you want to be,
                                         
                                         have intellectual curiosity and be able to switch
                                         
                                         between different blockchains if you need to,
                                         
                                         to make sure that you can actually scale your product
                                         
    
                                         when needed.
                                         
                                         For Solana specifically, I really like the design
                                         
                                         of the blockchain and how, like Anatoly and the team,
                                         
                                         solved certain technical challenges
                                         
                                         that other blockchains solve differently.
                                         
                                         So, you know, everyone is talking about like sharding
                                         
                                         and how it's solving the future.
                                         
                                         But from my experience in finance, at least, like sharding is how it's solving the future. But from my experience in finance, at least,
                                         
    
                                         like sharding is extremely tricky to pull off
                                         
                                         when you are trying to like trade, for example, global markets.
                                         
                                         And like having like the synchronization in finance
                                         
                                         of like the global state that you need to sync is very tricky.
                                         
                                         And the vision behind Solana was just much easier for me
                                         
                                         to comprehend coming from finance.
                                         
                                         And we kind of like met this bet later at Solana
                                         
                                         that we actually want to hire more people
                                         
    
                                         from finance in Chicago.
                                         
                                         So I started recruiting from firms locally
                                         
                                         from Citadel, DRW, Slash Cumberland, Optiver, or Jump.
                                         
                                         I spoke with Anatoly a few weeks ago,
                                         
                                         actually had him on the podcast.
                                         
                                         And I posed the question,
                                         
                                         how do we scale to mainstream adoption, a billion people on these blockchains when seemingly,
                                         
                                         you know, with a few million, we're already struggling? And does that mean we need to be
                                         
    
                                         interoperable and have multiple chains or can one chain win? And he actually gave me a surprising
                                         
                                         response, which was Solana can do everything. Yes. I mean, that's kind of expected.
                                         
                                         I wouldn't say it's a surprising answer.
                                         
                                         I mean, you know, there are limits to scalability.
                                         
                                         I wouldn't say like every single application
                                         
                                         will fit into a single state.
                                         
                                         It might, but you can hedge your bets,
                                         
                                         especially if you're an investor
                                         
    
                                         and you're trading,
                                         
                                         like don't be attached to the technology.
                                         
                                         But like as a technologist, you should explore everything.
                                         
                                         From the single state perspective, and I'm sure Anatoly talked about it
                                         
                                         on the podcast, one of the more interesting recent developments
                                         
                                         in Solana space is this thing called FireDancer.
                                         
                                         I don't know if you mentioned that.
                                         
                                         It's a project that's led by Jump Trading.
                                         
    
                                         It has 30 engineers involved for the past couple of months
                                         
                                         that are actually rebuilding Solana from grounds up
                                         
                                         like the whole validator client
                                         
                                         so this will be a second validator client similar to like
                                         
                                         Gev on Ethereum that will
                                         
                                         hopefully increase throughput of the blockchain and definitely
                                         
                                         optimize it further when we are innovating in like more research space.
                                         
                                         And it would be nice to see something like that considering the problems we've had with interoperability and the bridges.
                                         
    
                                         I mean, you alluded earlier to when you're starting looking at the exploits and the hacks.
                                         
                                         I mean, it seems like bridge has become a four letter word in the crypto space space now and anytime someone tries to deploy or use one eventually there's an exploit yeah the
                                         
                                         current design i guess be behind most of the bridges and again since this is a talk about
                                         
                                         the developers i encourage you to look at different designs and start thinking okay how would i design
                                         
                                         something like that differently what are the trade-offs because like one of the things that
                                         
                                         you learn across the whole blockchain space,
                                         
                                         it's common across engineering,
                                         
                                         there are always trade-offs. Do you want to be
                                         
    
                                         more composable or more restrictive?
                                         
                                         What are the benefits of that?
                                         
                                         Sometimes it comes with
                                         
                                         okay, you can enforce certain things
                                         
                                         or maybe it's more flexibility to the
                                         
                                         user, but it's less decentralized.
                                         
                                         But for bridges specifically, most of the
                                         
                                         existing design of the bridges is based on the escrow based design so you lock
                                         
    
                                         assets on one side and then some form of consensus mechanism bridges them on the
                                         
                                         other and that exposes you to the exploits like three different places
                                         
                                         which you know you can see throughout the space. One, let's say you are bridging
                                         
                                         something from Ethereum to Solana.
                                         
                                         You have Solidity contract that might have issues.
                                         
                                         You have Solana contract that might have issues.
                                         
                                         And then you have the actual settlement layer with the consensus in between that might have issues too.
                                         
                                         How can that be fixed?
                                         
    
                                         Because we're at a moment in history now
                                         
                                         where there's billions of dollars being transacted.
                                         
                                         There's a ton of total value locked,
                                         
                                         but clearly the system and infrastructure isn't ready to protect those assets.
                                         
                                         So I would look at the bridges from two angles.
                                         
                                         One, who is building the bridge and can they actually support the bridge in case of the hack?
                                         
                                         So for example, Wormhole that's bridging to multiple chains, right?
                                         
                                         It's supported by jump trading and if something happens, hopefully they will provide backstop liquidity like they did in the hack that happened
                                         
    
                                         I think like earlier this year or last year. So that was like for people that don't know that it's like roughly 300 million dollars
                                         
                                         lost. So then just like think like what's the entity that can actually backstop that. And realistically speaking, there's not many entities that could.
                                         
                                         And then you obviously want a very strong team that is building this and making it really hardened.
                                         
                                         So arguably some of the hacks are allowing the technology to be hardened in the battlefield.
                                         
                                         And then what's interesting also about some other bridges
                                         
                                         is just changing totally the design space.
                                         
                                         So going into zero knowledge bridges
                                         
                                         and just totally different designs with layer zero.
                                         
    
                                         And I think one of the things that I've commonly heard
                                         
                                         at the moment from developers and project heads
                                         
                                         is that they're actually enjoying this bear market
                                         
                                         because it's an opportunity to build things
                                         
                                         without all of the FOMO and concern for price
                                         
                                         and you can really do it, you know,
                                         
                                         before you have to operate at scale.
                                         
                                         What are you building now
                                         
    
                                         and do you think that that sentiment is accurate?
                                         
                                         Yeah, definitely.
                                         
                                         I think that the easiest barometer for that for me
                                         
                                         is like number of like daily telegram and Twitter messages
                                         
                                         that I would get about like number of different things so that definitely trended down quite a bit
                                         
                                         and I'm quite happy about that for my personal life like I always had this like stress like in
                                         
                                         2021 if I went on vacation like turn off the telegram for a day it was just like a mess and
                                         
                                         then I was like like at some point I think in 2021 I gave up for a month telegram I was like
                                         
    
                                         like I cannot handle it yeah it gives people anxiety to see all the missed messages but mine
                                         
                                         also would be like a thousand now it's like three and I so I think anecdotally that that is the case
                                         
                                         so now we're in the depths of this bear market, but obviously you're still building
                                         
                                         and you're still building on Solana.
                                         
                                         So talk specifically about what you're building.
                                         
                                         That's correct.
                                         
                                         So there's a bunch of interesting projects
                                         
                                         that are happening on Solana specifically,
                                         
    
                                         and I would classify them in like commonly
                                         
                                         four different like areas.
                                         
                                         So one, most of you might know Solana
                                         
                                         is fairly popular right now for NFTs.
                                         
                                         There's like NFT, like somewhat of a boom happening for past year.
                                         
                                         So for that specifically, we are building a couple of interesting projects,
                                         
                                         either in the NFT space or on top of it.
                                         
                                         So within NFT space, we are about to release this thing called compressed NFTs on Solana.
                                         
    
                                         This is specifically targeting the large deployments of
                                         
                                         NFTs in large enterprises or gaming space where the cost of NFTs will be lowered by 100x.
                                         
                                         So right now the Solana, one NFT costs around 30 cents. For some people that's not a lot of money,
                                         
                                         but in some use cases it's like a lot. Let's say you want to put an NFT on all the Pepsi cans.
                                         
                                         That might be too expensive because maybe the margin of the can is like 30 cents.
                                         
                                         So how can you lower that?
                                         
                                         So that's an interesting application, obviously, in the NFT space.
                                         
                                         And I think one of the reasons that a lot of people are focused on Solana
                                         
    
                                         is because of that much cheaper transaction cost, cheaper mints. Do you believe that Solana
                                         
                                         or any individual blockchain sort of wins one space? Like Solana becomes the metaverse blockchain
                                         
                                         and Ethereum is the DeFi chain and you name it becomes, or do you think that we're going to
                                         
                                         continue to see development in basically every facet of the crypto space on every single chain?
                                         
                                         So I think some chains might be very specific,
                                         
                                         like in the message that they are settling for.
                                         
                                         But other blockchains will be more generalized.
                                         
                                         Like Solana specifically at the beginning,
                                         
    
                                         when I was there, everyone was focusing,
                                         
                                         oh, this is just like a DeFi chain
                                         
                                         for like Jump and Alameda to trade on the order book.
                                         
                                         And nobody was really interested in that.
                                         
                                         When originally I wanted to build the NFT standard,
                                         
                                         everyone was like, oh, why would we build this?
                                         
                                         Like we are a DeFi chain.
                                         
                                         And we did.
                                         
    
                                         And it was like surprised to not like to everyone now,
                                         
                                         it's like mostly NFTs and not that much DeFi.
                                         
                                         But it's not really that surprising when you think about it,
                                         
                                         especially when we got into the bull market last year,
                                         
                                         there was this moment before NFTs blew up that it was actually somewhat cheap to mint an NFT
                                         
                                         on Ethereum, but then it became cost prohibitive completely. You obviously saw that vision in
                                         
                                         advance, but there was that moment where it cost, you know, $500 to mint a $50 NFT and it really
                                         
                                         didn't make sense. And it actually alienated the creators who were there to make money and opt out
                                         
    
                                         of the other systems.
                                         
                                         Yep, 100%. But that's totally not the reason
                                         
                                         why we built originally NFT standard on Solana.
                                         
                                         When I started thinking about it,
                                         
                                         why we are building it,
                                         
                                         I really wanted to enable individual creators.
                                         
                                         Because when I think about artists
                                         
                                         and how they build NFTs,
                                         
    
                                         there's something that's really missing
                                         
                                         in traditional world
                                         
                                         in terms of how they can monetize their work.
                                         
                                         Some artists cannot monetize their work almost at all.
                                         
                                         If you take like street artists,
                                         
                                         like it's very tricky for them to monetize like murals
                                         
                                         unless they take commission work
                                         
                                         and some of them don't want to take commission work.
                                         
    
                                         So how does NFT solve that?
                                         
                                         You talk about you effectively attach an NFT
                                         
                                         to the real world art, fractionalize it.
                                         
                                         What other ways are people able to make art
                                         
                                         on that real world?
                                         
                                         So one, you can try to attach to the physical,
                                         
                                         like for example, someone like that visits
                                         
                                         the physical mural could mint the NFT
                                         
    
                                         at that specific location.
                                         
                                         So that's like you are rewarding people
                                         
                                         that actually go to the places
                                         
                                         that are tricky to find maybe.
                                         
                                         Maybe you're on like a train
                                         
                                         train lot and you're like oh i went and visited that train and creates this interesting community
                                         
                                         of people that actually are passionate about the art and that gives the artist also the ability to
                                         
                                         interact now with people that actually saw the art because like in in traditional world like it's
                                         
    
                                         very tricky for someone to know like hey how many, how many people visited my mural? And how can I reach out to them without collecting email addresses and whatnot?
                                         
                                         And obviously most people wouldn't want that.
                                         
                                         So beyond the compressed NFTs and what you're working on in that facet,
                                         
                                         is there anything that's really exciting you that you're developing right now?
                                         
                                         Because it seems like we had sort of, as is the normal cycle,
                                         
                                         these hype, bubble, pop, hype, bubble, pop, right?
                                         
                                         DeFi summer, NFT summer, metaverse fall.
                                         
                                         Now that seems that hype is gone.
                                         
    
                                         Yeah, I'm still really excited about NFTs.
                                         
                                         So another project that we are building on is called Raindrops,
                                         
                                         which is enabling game developers
                                         
                                         to create structured constructs around their game mechanics.
                                         
                                         So when you talk with gaming companies,
                                         
                                         and I talked with quite a few of them,
                                         
                                         they all are interested in NFTs,
                                         
                                         but they don't know how to necessarily fit it into the game.
                                         
    
                                         Some approach it in a very basic level,
                                         
                                         like, hey, we'll just slap the NFT
                                         
                                         at the end of the production cycle.
                                         
                                         And that's like very tricky to do.
                                         
                                         Maybe some like gating for the community, some guilds,
                                         
                                         but like this is not like holistic view.
                                         
                                         So we build this like protocol that allows them to,
                                         
                                         in a holistic way, integrate it into the game.
                                         
    
                                         Is that primarily for crypto-based blockchain games
                                         
                                         or is that talking about going to the Epic Games
                                         
                                         and, you know, the huge companies
                                         
                                         and basically incorporating NFTs into their existing products?
                                         
                                         So both.
                                         
                                         I'm more excited about like indie games.
                                         
                                         I believe like at least with the nature
                                         
                                         of how NFT communities trade NFTs,
                                         
    
                                         they would be more excited about the games
                                         
                                         that are like somewhat similar to what's happening
                                         
                                         in the like Southeast Asia market
                                         
                                         where you have these games that people play for like a month
                                         
                                         and then they switch.
                                         
                                         Axie Infinity obviously being the first example
                                         
                                         and now it feels like there's hundreds of projects trying to recreate what Axie did
                                         
                                         even though Axie didn't really survive.
                                         
    
                                         Yeah, but simple games.
                                         
                                         So like effectively having a gaming studio that just spins up games all the time
                                         
                                         without thinking like if the game dies that's fine, we have another one.
                                         
                                         But doesn't mainstream adoption for gaming come with high quality games that are comparable to the ones that people actually want to play?
                                         
                                         Like, I haven't really seen anything compelling from blockchain gaming that would compete with a Call of Duty or a Fortnite or something like that.
                                         
                                         No, that's fair.
                                         
                                         But like, so this is debate fundamentally about like the games, which games are played by more people or who spends more i i think if we ask most of the
                                         
                                         people in the room they probably played some mobile games and they spent actual money on it
                                         
    
                                         but when they paid call of duty maybe they didn't inside the game uh so i'm actually more excited
                                         
                                         about like mobile game myself like like very simple games that makes sense because they're
                                         
                                         extremely addictive i think everybody has that game on their phone. And if you had a utility to that,
                                         
                                         where you could actually make real money to do it, as opposed to just spend real money,
                                         
                                         it is very compelling. And I think Axie was a great example of what's possible. Because,
                                         
                                         I mean, to me, Axie was interesting, but it wasn't a great game. It was really difficult
                                         
                                         to become a part of. But, you know, people with no crypto experience found a way to get a MetaMask and a Ronin wallet
                                         
                                         in the Philippines because they can make more money
                                         
    
                                         playing Axie Infinity than they could at their job.
                                         
                                         Yeah, no, that's true.
                                         
                                         At the same time, I personally felt sad about it.
                                         
                                         You felt sad about the game or about the fact that it's...
                                         
                                         No, like, that was their job.
                                         
                                         Like, we couldn't find anything better
                                         
                                         as a, like as humanity for people
                                         
                                         in Philippines to make money.
                                         
    
                                         It was like Tamagotchi.
                                         
                                         We've seen this for 30 years
                                         
                                         but the very fact that you can make a living
                                         
                                         in theory,
                                         
                                         gaming, is that why
                                         
                                         this is so compelling for the future?
                                         
                                         Yeah, I think so. I actually think
                                         
                                         gaming will be very big
                                         
    
                                         in the next cycle. I think this cycle was too early I actually think like gaming will be very big in like the next cycle.
                                         
                                         I think like this cycle was like very,
                                         
                                         like too early.
                                         
                                         The reality is like most of the like high quality games,
                                         
                                         they take like three years to develop even like smaller quality games,
                                         
                                         like studios.
                                         
                                         You need to build like this base that normally takes like a year and then you can spin up more games.
                                         
                                         So I think like now that we showed people that there is a lot of value
                                         
    
                                         trading NFTs, like, you know, like arguably like a few billion, like going through the NFT marketplaces.
                                         
                                         There is a compelling value for the gaming studios, smaller ones and some bigger ones to try to integrate it into the games and it will take time.
                                         
                                         So obviously one of the biggest topics in the space, certainly last year around this time was metaverses, right?
                                         
                                         Facebook rebranded to meta.
                                         
                                         Everything in the crypto space went absolutely nuts.
                                         
                                         What's your vision of what a realistic metaverse
                                         
                                         will look like in the coming years
                                         
                                         and what you would build for that on Solana?
                                         
    
                                         Simple games.
                                         
                                         Like, that's the metaverse.
                                         
                                         Like, if I have a character that can transfer
                                         
                                         across multiple games, that's, like, good enough.
                                         
                                         Like, I don't want to go to a party with a bunch of virtual dudes.
                                         
                                         With no legs.
                                         
                                         Correct.
                                         
                                         I don't want to go to a party with non-virtual dudes either.
                                         
    
                                         But the point being,
                                         
                                         you don't see a Ready Player One reality
                                         
                                         where people plug in and go live their lives,
                                         
                                         come out to eat a meal,
                                         
                                         maybe a pizza they ordered in the metaverse that arrives at the front door.
                                         
                                         You see it more as gaming.
                                         
                                         Yeah.
                                         
                                         At least in the like near future.
                                         
    
                                         Like I think the vision of like Ready Player One is like,
                                         
                                         like dozens years away.
                                         
                                         But is that something that you think that we will get to and that people will
                                         
                                         be interested in?
                                         
                                         I think that the key is really to have like, if, if that were to happen,
                                         
                                         you would have, you would need to have like all the kids
                                         
                                         grew up in that environment.
                                         
                                         So you think it's just a matter of time, basically.
                                         
    
                                         And we make the same argument, I think,
                                         
                                         for crypto adoption in general,
                                         
                                         even outside of the metaverse, right?
                                         
                                         We rail against, obviously,
                                         
                                         the people older than us that don't get it,
                                         
                                         but they're never going to.
                                         
                                         But inevitably with time,
                                         
                                         they'll be replaced by a younger generation
                                         
    
                                         that's crypto native and grew up. I mean, my kids are seven and three. They're never going to live in a world that
                                         
                                         didn't have Bitcoin. Yeah. Did they pray Axie? They did not play Axie because at the time when
                                         
                                         it was popular, they were like five and one. But but but yeah. And so I think that to your point,
                                         
                                         everybody is going to be exposed to this space over time. Do you think that that's going to be
                                         
                                         a huge boon for blockchain developers? Do you think that teenagers now are going to be exposed to this space over time. Do you think that that's going to be a huge boon for blockchain developers? Do you think that
                                         
                                         teenagers now are going to be more interested
                                         
                                         in learning to code and develop on a blockchain
                                         
                                         than head off to college?
                                         
    
                                         I think the
                                         
                                         transition will happen in a way where you will just
                                         
                                         stop calling it a blockchain developer.
                                         
                                         It will be just like an engineer that builds
                                         
                                         specific use case.
                                         
                                         Just like you don't think of
                                         
                                         people that are building websites, web developers anymore.
                                         
                                         Just hire a developer to build
                                         
    
                                         something, like a product.
                                         
                                         So then what's the next step? If they just become
                                         
                                         developers and you're no longer a blockchain developer,
                                         
                                         how far can this
                                         
                                         really push?
                                         
                                         In what sense?
                                         
                                         At scale, what can we build beyond
                                         
                                         sort of these initial
                                         
    
                                         iterations of the metaverse and NFTs and DeFi?
                                         
                                         Can we literally build a parallel legacy
                                         
                                         financial system on a blockchain?
                                         
                                         Yeah, 100%.
                                         
                                         I think like finances,
                                         
                                         they're like to disrupt like products
                                         
                                         like Piro from Gani,
                                         
                                         like they're a great example of like first step,
                                         
    
                                         which is like building product
                                         
                                         that really appeals to the people
                                         
                                         that are trading every day.
                                         
                                         Like if you can appeal to the trading firms in something that's like compliant with the regulation that's coming,
                                         
                                         I think the next step will be very interesting.
                                         
                                         I think so too, but it's interesting.
                                         
                                         It always comes back to the trading firms and the speculation and not to me the adoption, right?
                                         
                                         How do we get it to where, as I said before,
                                         
    
                                         and I asked Anatoly, we have a billion people
                                         
                                         that are using this as their bank every day,
                                         
                                         transacting back and forth.
                                         
                                         This is where they're storing their value.
                                         
                                         They're not taking on leverage and trading against Jump.
                                         
                                         Yeah, no, I think it will happen naturally, right?
                                         
                                         Like in some cases, you will not even think of this as a bank.
                                         
                                         The perfect example of something
                                         
    
                                         that people don't think in the US as a bank is Starbucks.
                                         
                                         Like Starbucks points arguably have more locked value
                                         
                                         than the fifth biggest US bank, right?
                                         
                                         Like because people are just like
                                         
                                         having points in their Starbucks app.
                                         
                                         That's crazy.
                                         
                                         I never even thought about that.
                                         
                                         And I think with more apps
                                         
    
                                         and enabling them
                                         
                                         to like actually use crypto
                                         
                                         as a settlement layer,
                                         
                                         you will see people
                                         
                                         start using this like
                                         
                                         interesting use cases
                                         
                                         and they might not think
                                         
                                         of it as a bank.
                                         
    
                                         Like, do you think of Venmo
                                         
                                         as a bank or your PayPal?
                                         
                                         You don't.
                                         
                                         And like,
                                         
                                         if there's a new use case
                                         
                                         that shows up,
                                         
                                         people might just switch
                                         
                                         and like suddenly it turns out
                                         
    
                                         maybe you don't need
                                         
                                         a Chase Bank. It's interesting that you bring up Starbucks because they've quietly been far ahead
                                         
                                         of the curve as far as crypto adoption. They were one of the first via Bakkt, I even remember, to
                                         
                                         talk about taking crypto payments. And they recently, within the last month or two, basically
                                         
                                         launched or announced an NFT program. But it seems like all of these things sort of fall flat.
                                         
                                         Do you think that's a function of the market?
                                         
                                         Do you think that we're too early?
                                         
                                         Do you think that it will pay off for them
                                         
    
                                         to have been that early?
                                         
                                         Or do you think they'll lose interest
                                         
                                         because there's no adoption?
                                         
                                         So I think it really depends
                                         
                                         like of the definition of fall flat.
                                         
                                         So I think because of the bear market,
                                         
                                         any type of announcement that you can have
                                         
                                         with bigger brand or smaller brand
                                         
    
                                         will not impact the price that much.
                                         
                                         Like negative announcements obviously will,
                                         
                                         but like positive announcements
                                         
                                         usually have very little effect in the current market.
                                         
                                         So think like Starbucks will take like multiple months
                                         
                                         and years to develop,
                                         
                                         but quietly you might not even know they are using it,
                                         
                                         like behind the scenes.
                                         
    
                                         And that should be the goal for almost any app.
                                         
                                         Like the perfect example of that is like StepN on Solana.
                                         
                                         I don't know if you used it.
                                         
                                         What was very interesting to me,
                                         
                                         so StepN was built originally on Solana
                                         
                                         and they had a couple of friends like in New Jersey
                                         
                                         run down the river
                                         
                                         and they met a bunch of people that were using like StepN,
                                         
    
                                         like an older lady.
                                         
                                         And he was like, oh, like, are you into Solana NFTs?
                                         
                                         And she's like, no, I'm just doing my steps.
                                         
                                         Like, what do you want?
                                         
                                         Like, I don't know what Solana.
                                         
                                         And that should be the ultimate goal of your app.
                                         
                                         Like, people should not care about blockchain or a database that you use behind
                                         
                                         and what kind of currency or token is attached to it.
                                         
    
                                         They just use it and they have fun with it
                                         
                                         and they find intrinsic utility
                                         
                                         with like the value that they have.
                                         
                                         Like I go to the Starbucks shop and it's a bit faster.
                                         
                                         I mean, Stepin is a great example because it's one of the few where
                                         
                                         an average person probably can interact with it and use it without
                                         
                                         understanding blockchain at all.
                                         
                                         I mean, I would argue that the reason that most of these things have fallen
                                         
    
                                         flat is UX, UI, and it's just too confusing for your average person.
                                         
                                         Like for us, it even can be difficult, and we're crypto native.
                                         
                                         It's scary, right?
                                         
                                         It's a very hard process.
                                         
                                         So what does it take to get to the point where it looks like PayPal or Venmo
                                         
                                         or any other app they're using on their phone and they don't have to think about it?
                                         
                                         Yeah, play with step.
                                         
                                         I think this is like what's required.
                                         
    
                                         Like they created both custodial
                                         
                                         and non-custodial solution of the wallet.
                                         
                                         They didn't ask you to,
                                         
                                         like, at least,
                                         
                                         it needs to be progressive.
                                         
                                         I think one thing,
                                         
                                         as the developers,
                                         
                                         that we are falling short on
                                         
    
                                         building applications for people
                                         
                                         is we try to teach them everything up front,
                                         
                                         which is very opposite
                                         
                                         of what would happen in Web2. When you go to Amazon, you don't explain to them, people is we try to teach them everything upfront, which is like very opposite of like
                                         
                                         what would happen in like Web 2.
                                         
                                         Like when you go to Amazon, you don't explain to them, hey, this is like your virtual checkout
                                         
                                         and you need to create an account and this.
                                         
                                         No, you start browsing, you start adding to your like basket.
                                         
    
                                         And at the end, they're like, hey, do you want to create an account or checkout as a
                                         
                                         guest?
                                         
                                         And then maybe you want to add your bank or something.
                                         
                                         So like reversing the learning curve, I think
                                         
                                         it's critical to wider
                                         
                                         adoption. So there are a lot of important lessons
                                         
                                         from Web 2 and what's been built there for
                                         
                                         how Web 3 should eventually look.
                                         
    
                                         People don't care about
                                         
                                         the technology, ultimately.
                                         
                                         If you're talking about billions of
                                         
                                         people, they just want to use
                                         
                                         things. And we don't want them to care about the
                                         
                                         technology, like your phone or the Internet.
                                         
                                         Somewhat, right? Like this is, I think, the push and pull in crypto because in some sense
                                         
                                         you want to know about the token that you have and you're like, hey, like buy my token.
                                         
    
                                         Yeah. And the interesting thing is that you can actually reach quite a bit of this
                                         
                                         adoption and it can, to your point earlier, not really affect the price.
                                         
                                         You can invest in one of these coins and the company could do well and the coin could fall
                                         
                                         completely flat.
                                         
                                         Yeah, that's correct.
                                         
                                         Which I think Stefan is kind of example of that.
                                         
                                         Well, and so I guess as an investable asset, it becomes more about the tokenomics and the
                                         
                                         way that it's structured than the actual adoption of the platform.
                                         
    
                                         And that's a hard disconnect, I think, for a lot of people to understand.
                                         
                                         Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, like don lot of people to understand. Yeah, 100%.
                                         
                                         Don't attach users to the value of the token.
                                         
                                         Right, so we talk about GameFi, obviously.
                                         
                                         We talk about move to earn.
                                         
                                         Seems like we're getting everything to earn.
                                         
                                         I literally saw there's a sex-to-earn platform that's being built.
                                         
                                         Not a lie.
                                         
    
                                         Welcome to crypto.
                                         
                                         Are there any other interesting use cases to earn that you guys are looking at?
                                         
                                         I don't know. I mean, you kind of covered the most interesting ones. Are there any other interesting use cases to earn that you guys are looking at?
                                         
                                         I don't know.
                                         
                                         I mean, like you kind of covered the most interesting ones.
                                         
                                         Breathe to earn, podcast to earn.
                                         
                                         I saw one that was volunteer to earn and I was like, I think that's just a job.
                                         
                                         Isn't that just work?
                                         
    
                                         Yeah, so work to earn has been there for quite a while.
                                         
                                         Work to earn may be the killer app for blockchains, guys.
                                         
                                         You heard it here first.
                                         
                                         It's very, very compelling, controversial ideas here.
                                         
                                         So I know we're coming to the end of our time here.
                                         
                                         Any final advice that you would offer to people who are looking to either become developers
                                         
                                         or to launch a project, to choose a blockchain,
                                         
                                         to do that on where they should build?
                                         
    
                                         So think of the community and just like if you're thinking of being a developer,
                                         
                                         going back to the original topic of the conversation is
                                         
                                         don't be afraid of this feeling
                                         
                                         that someone is smarter than you out there.
                                         
                                         Like that's not the case.
                                         
                                         Some people might try to appear be smarter than you.
                                         
                                         Like that usually means they are not.
                                         
                                         And just try to build something.
                                         
    
                                         Like if you solve the problem, you're
                                         
                                         80% more than
                                         
                                         the rest of the people on Twitter.
                                         
                                         Just try something.
                                         
                                         That makes perfect sense. I'm going to try very
                                         
                                         hard to
                                         
                                         experience this work to earn thing.
                                         
                                         Yes. It seems very compelling.
                                         
    
                                         I can't wait. Well, thank you everyone.
                                         
                                         Bartosz Lipinski. Thank you.
                                         
