The Wolf Of All Streets - How To Become A Blockchain Developer | Bartosz Lipinski, Solana

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Bartosz 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 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
Starting point is 00:00:48 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,
Starting point is 00:01:30 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.
Starting point is 00:02:10 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.
Starting point is 00:02:31 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.
Starting point is 00:02:58 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
Starting point is 00:03:25 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
Starting point is 00:03:41 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.
Starting point is 00:04:15 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.
Starting point is 00:04:45 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. 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
Starting point is 00:05:10 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. 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
Starting point is 00:05:32 saw the recent news, but they've also done a deal with Lionel Messi. Bitcoin, a perfect thing. 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 wolf of all streets dot info slash BitGet. Claim that huge reward and use the world's best trading platform. 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
Starting point is 00:06:18 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
Starting point is 00:06:44 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,
Starting point is 00:07:05 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
Starting point is 00:07:28 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
Starting point is 00:07:55 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
Starting point is 00:08:21 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.
Starting point is 00:08:43 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.
Starting point is 00:09:17 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
Starting point is 00:09:49 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
Starting point is 00:10:08 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?
Starting point is 00:10:38 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
Starting point is 00:11:12 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.
Starting point is 00:11:56 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
Starting point is 00:12:15 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
Starting point is 00:12:50 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,
Starting point is 00:13:13 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.
Starting point is 00:13:42 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
Starting point is 00:14:20 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,
Starting point is 00:14:55 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.
Starting point is 00:15:13 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
Starting point is 00:15:43 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,
Starting point is 00:16:01 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.
Starting point is 00:16:18 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
Starting point is 00:16:36 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
Starting point is 00:17:01 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.
Starting point is 00:17:29 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.
Starting point is 00:17:52 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.
Starting point is 00:18:11 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,
Starting point is 00:18:33 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.
Starting point is 00:18:51 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
Starting point is 00:19:30 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
Starting point is 00:20:10 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.
Starting point is 00:20:27 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
Starting point is 00:20:43 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
Starting point is 00:21:04 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?
Starting point is 00:21:36 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.
Starting point is 00:21:53 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.
Starting point is 00:22:12 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.
Starting point is 00:22:31 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
Starting point is 00:22:43 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?
Starting point is 00:23:12 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
Starting point is 00:23:27 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
Starting point is 00:23:43 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,
Starting point is 00:24:00 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,
Starting point is 00:24:28 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
Starting point is 00:24:46 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
Starting point is 00:25:04 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.
Starting point is 00:25:15 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
Starting point is 00:25:24 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
Starting point is 00:25:51 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
Starting point is 00:26:04 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.
Starting point is 00:26:21 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,
Starting point is 00:26:43 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.
Starting point is 00:27:03 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
Starting point is 00:27:22 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.
Starting point is 00:27:45 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
Starting point is 00:27:58 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.
Starting point is 00:28:17 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.
Starting point is 00:28:34 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.
Starting point is 00:28:56 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.
Starting point is 00:29:20 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.
Starting point is 00:29:38 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?
Starting point is 00:30:01 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?
Starting point is 00:30:22 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.
Starting point is 00:30:43 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.
Starting point is 00:31:00 I can't wait. Well, thank you everyone. Bartosz Lipinski. Thank you.

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