The Wolf Of All Streets - Soravis Srinawakoon, CEO of Band Protocol on the Pursuit for Truth in the World of Crypto

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

Soravis Srinawakoon, CEO of Band Protocol has recognized a missing link in the connection of real-world data and blockchain applications. His goal is to ensure the accessibility to the truth for everyone from the largest financial players to people fleeing dangerous governments by solving "The Oracle Problem."  Scott Melker and Soravis Srinawakoon further discuss the fear of watching the price of Ethereum go from $10 to $5, an incentivized economy for good behavior, early ICO investing, what it's like to secure millions in funding, growing a company through a crypto winter and the pursuit to restore the crypto community to what it once was. --- CHOICE IRA by KINGDOM TRUST Don’t be part of the 7.1M Bitcoiners who have bitcoin and a retirement account but don’t have bitcoin in their retirement account. With Choice IRA by Kingdom Trust you can hold bitcoin in your retirement account. The first 1,000 users to open a Choice IRA will receive $62.50 in free BTC - visit RetireWithChoice.com/WOLF to join the waitlist and secure free BTC. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everybody? This is your host, Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Every week, I'm talking to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, and basically anyone else with an interesting story to tell. So sit down, strap in, and get ready, because we're going deep. Let's go. Today's episode is brought to you by Choice, by Kingdom Trust, and Voyager. We'll learn more about them later on in the episode.

This podcast is powered by BlockWorks Group, the only events and podcast production company I trust. For access to the premier digital asset conferences and in-depth podcast content, visit them at blockworksgroup.io. I promise you will not be disappointed. Today's guest is tackling one of the most complicated yet widespread problems that exists between major retailers in the crypto space. Sorvis Rinoakun is the CEO and co-founder of Band Protocol, and his work is advancing the way data is understood, verified, stored, and received. Sorvis, man, thank you so much for being here today.

I know it's late your time and early my time, so I appreciate you staying up. No worries. Thanks for having me here. Really a pleasure. So how rare is it to have a blockchain project in Bangkok? Actually, this is a funny story. I think people think it's rare, but a lot of the people don't realize, for example, Omisego is based in Thailand, Bangkok. We have Loom Network, also based in Bangkok, as well as some of the core developers in the big major blockchain in Bangkok, actually. So there's actually quite a few compared to the size of our country. That's interesting. It's not the first place that I think a lot of people think of for the space.

So you actually went to school in the United States, right? You graduated from Stanford, is that correct? So you came here and then you obviously you went back. What was your path like after graduating Stanford? What did you do and how did it lead you to where you are now? Right, right. Sure. So I'm actually an engineer by training, even though I'm the CEO. So I did computer science at Sanford as an undergrad. That's when I actually came across cryptographies, came across Bitcoin back in 2013. And that's why I became quite passionate about it, started investing on the side. And after I graduated, I sort of came back to Bangkok, because I always knew I want to start something, right? I want to contribute something meaningful to this world. And while investing, I guess I went into management consultant at Boston Consulting

Group, which is like a top three management consultant for two years while still investing in a lot of these crypto businesses, as well as starting my own mobile games that relate to crypto as well. So my own mobile games that relate to crypto as well. So people play my games and then they get free Bitcoin and Ethereum. That was back in the days, 2015, nobody really did that. So we grew that to over 800,000 users before we sort of sold that business and then started Band Protocol in 2017. That's awesome. But you were a trader for a while too, not just an investor, right? Well, actually, I'm more of a hodler. So I do hold a lot of my tokens for quite a long,

long time. And when I say long, I mean years. Yeah. Well, I think that's the definition of a real investor. It's funny. In other, in any other market or community, when someone thinks of investment, they think of decades or a lifetime of holding things. You mentioned investing to a crypto person and they're like, yeah, man, I held it for like six months. The entire space has only existed for just over, over 10 years. So it is a pretty funny. So that led you to band Protocol. What is the major problem that you're solving with Band and how are you solving it? Right. So I think we always come to this, right? What we call the Oracle problems.

This Oracle problem is essentially the fact that smart contract and blockchain applications have no easy access to real worldworld information, real-world data, and API. Think of it as this piece of code that lives within its own ecosystem. As simple as things on Ethereum cannot access information on Bitcoin blockchain, let alone the rest of the information in the real world. So they need someone to actually fetch that data into the blockchain. And that is essentially the job of Oracle.

That's what BAM tried to solve. Essentially tried to figure out what is the best way, the most decentralized way possible to bring their data, the data outside of blockchain into smart contracts so that they can consume it in the most reliable and secure manner. And it's a really important problem because if you think about the smart contract, they are deterministic, right? In the sense that whatever input you feed, it will always give the same output, right?

So you need to be able to keep reliable input, for example, price of Ethereum so that a lot of this lending protocol, a lot of this stable coin, a lot of these DeFi projects will be able to run in the most decentralized manner possible. Right. So that makes sense. So I'm assuming that to some degree that touches on the widespread issue way beyond the crypto community that we see with fake news and false data.

Is that really what you're getting at here? Is that you're verifying that news is actually real? Right. So I think when we talk about data, there are data that is subjective, as you mentioned, in terms of if the news is real or not. It's actually much more subjective than most people realize. And then there are objective data, such as, let's say, Bitcoin price. I think you and me and anyone around the world can generally agree what is the current price of Bitcoin, for example. And so with that, originally when we started Band Protocol, we were focusing more on the subjective data, as our partners, a lot of our clients that we're going to use our solutions, we quickly realized that the better product market fit is actually on the more objective data, which is the Oracle problem tray.

How do we bring this objective data into blockchain in a more decentralized manner? And that's why we sort of, I guess, I wouldn't call it pivot, but refocus in terms of what we do to focus much more on the Oracle problems. Um, since you know, last year, um, can you like give a very basic rundown of what an Oracle is sort of the,

uh, Oracle for dummies? Because I think we have a very diverse, uh, listeners and, uh, some of them may be in it for the tech. Some may just be traders.

Some may be superficially interested in the lifestyle of, of people who are in this space. So can you define Oracle and tell us what it is? Right. I think the best way is to give example, right? So one example is, you know, with smart contract, right? You can write a piece of code between two people, for example, betting applications, right? For example, you and me want to bet if Chelsea is going to win a Premier League

tomorrow or win a match tomorrow. It's going to be hard if they're not playing. That's right. Over this time. But let's assume they are playing in a regular time. You and me cannot trust each other because if you lose, you may run away from me. That's why casino exists. That's why middleman exists.

Now, with smart contract and blockchain application, you can actually write a piece of code that say, if Chelsea wins, transfer my money, the money from me to you, right? Otherwise, transfer money from you to me. That's in a trustless way. I don't have to trust you. You don't have to trust me. And everything

is self-enforceable. Sounds pretty cool, right? Yeah, it's amazing. The problem is, the problem is, as a piece of code, right, it doesn't know whether Chelsea actually win or lose. Right? That's the information

that live in the real world, not inside blockchain. So somebody has to tell that piece of code, somebody has to tell this smart contract that, hey, Chelsea actually win or Chelsea actually lose.

Right? That's the job of Oracle such as Band Border Call and Chainlink to actually pull data from the real world hey, Chelsea actually win or Chelsea actually lose. That's the job of Oracle, Success Band Protocol, and Chainlink to actually pull data from the real world API into smart contracts so that they can consume this data and use them within their logic. And this applies from betting application, as I mentioned, it applies to financial application that people are building that, right? Lending protocol, stable coin, because of a lot of these, we rely on financial data. What is the current price of Bitcoin? What's the current price of Ethereum?

And that's really critical in the smart contract. I mean, you look at the betting application, right? If Oracle is compromised like us, and we actually lie, false information got in and say, you know, instead of Chelsea win, we say Chelsea lose, The smart contract would automatically do something wrong, right? And that's a really bad thing to happen, right? So we don't want that to happen. And that's why Oracle is such an important factor in this ecosystem. So that makes perfect sense. So it sounds like you have two issues. You need to bring the data in, but you also need to verify that it's true. So obviously there needs to be a reward for

proper data and a penalty for improper data. So how does that work exactly? How do you know that Chelsea won? How do you know that you didn't scrape the internet and get a false story on the winner of that game? Right, right. So I think there are two things there. One is that when you fetch this data, right, when you ask these data providers on our network to go get the data, you want to build redundancies when it comes to the data source, right? So essentially, if you want, let's say,

price of, let's continue example of a sport event, right? If you want data whether Chelsea wins or not, you want to build redundancy at a data source. So you say, oh, get data from ESPN, get data from sports that get data from, you know, whatever data providers that provide those stats, right? So you build redundancies. Even if ESPN is down, data provider can still go fetch from the rest of the data sources. So that's number one. Number two is that at the data validators level, essentially people will bring the data sources. So that's number one. Number two is that at the data validators level,

essentially people will bring the data. You don't want one person to report that, right? You want multiple people to report the same data in order to build that redundancies and make sure nobody can game the system. And that means, that's why we have in band chain, we have hundreds of data validators who perform this job, right? And as a data validator, you need to stake the band token in order to become a validator. And what that means is, similar to how to prove of stake blockchain, they have a lot of costs at stake.

They have millions of dollars being at stake at that moment. That means in order to ensure that they don't want to act maliciously, and this is similar to a Bitcoin, Ethereum, in a sense that you want the economic incentive of being a good person to be better to ensure that they don't want to act maliciously. And this is similar to a Bitcoin Ethereum trade, in a sense that you want the economic incentive of being a good person to be better than being a malicious actor. And that's how we engineer it such that at a protocol level, a lot of our

validators have a lot of money and skin in the game to ensure that they act honestly. And they receive additional incentive for acting honestly. So it's not even what they're holding. You actually get more coins to stake. That's right. That's right. That's right. So actually there are three factors. One is the money that they stake, right? So again, they stake BAN token. If they act maliciously, nobody use BAN, the BAN will go down, then they stand to lose a lot of money. Number two, they stand to lose future revenue, as you mentioned, because they get curie fee from people who ask for the data.

And then number three, if you look at our band chain, you see a lot of enterprise grade level validators. And these people actually stake for multiple blockchain. So if they actually cheat on band chain, people will lose trust and they will not stake for them

on other blockchain as well. And these other blockchain are traditionally even bigger than us, like Cosmos, like, you know, other bigger blockchains. So that give us a lot of insurance in terms of why they would not cheat. And there's a lot of costs for them to do that. So how will retail companies use BAND? What is the use case for a large brand? Right. Retail companies, you mean like a traditional companies? Yeah, I guess like a traditional retail company.

Right. So I guess you look at this two ways. The first part is people who are traditional market data providers. So people who actually provide data already. Right. This includes, for example, Bloomberg, right. Or Nasdaq, companies that have financial data or ESPN, for example. What they can do is they basically, they can use BAM to commercialize their data, right? They can sell their data traditionally to like traditional companies

into, I guess, blockchain applications. So the more blockchain applications used, they get more revenue from that, right? Just like how they sell B2B already. So that's the first part. The second part is around more of people who use the data, right? This includes, for example, companies like people that do in the supply chain, for example. They want to do conditional payment, right?

Conditional payment, say, if I receive an invoice from company A, process payment from me to that company, right? In order to automate that in a smart contract, the smart contract need to know whether the receipt actually got received. Right. And again, Oracle will be used to connect those data in the real world into a smart contract so that it's able to compute on that logic. Okay. So how will a crypto project use BAND? If not the ESPNs and Bluebirds and Nasdaq world, but the exchanges and the DeFi, you know, and all of these other companies in the crypto space. Right. I think when you look at DeFi, I think that's a really clear, easiest example, right?

You look at DeFi like stable coin, like MakerDAO, for example. Maker relies on the fact that people deposit Ethereum as a collateral, right? Or as an asset now, and then they mint new stable coin, right? Right. The reason why they are always collateralized is the fact that whatever they loan out, lend out the money, right? Has to be less than the money that is being put as a collateral, right? So meaning the system is always over collateralized. That means the smart contract may too always know what is the price of Ethereum right now, right? What's the price of the collateral? And that's the job of Oracle to tell them.

Ethereum is $200 now. Ethereum is $300 now. And that's why it's really critical. Oracle is not compromised. If you look at incidents like B0X, for example, now one of the attacks relate directly to Oracle Plummo because B0X relies on on-chain price,

which is the price on one particular exchange, just one exchange, right? No redundancies, one exchange. Right. So that allows somebody, attacker, to manipulate the price on that particular exchange, which is a decentralized exchange, to give the system to think that they're a pool, basically the system to think, oh, this stable coins were $2. So then it lent out money more than it actually has, right? Right. Yeah, that makes sense. So I watched a past interview actually, and you spoke, it was really interesting about how, I guess, specifically in 2017, the crypto community grew, but the quality went down primarily because the people who are joining the community were

all speculators. So basically everyone was spec speculating on price. It sort of transitioned from, I guess, the tech and the blockchain to strictly, I want to buy this and sell it for more. And therefore, the community became, I guess, more negative, trollish, and just the things that happen, I guess, when a community expands. So how does a band or what you're doing improve the quality of the community and sort of bring it back to the original intention? Right. So I think, you know, communities is always tricky, right? How do we build a non-toxic communities in the crypto space? And I think that's really important for us. We always make sure that, you know, we always make sure that our communities are always trying to be non-toxic, doesn't attack other

people. Of course, we cannot control them 100%. But at least that's some of the... We've seen that. Yeah. That's right. I think at least we try our best to send that message across that the team try to just convey this culture. And I think over time, I do hope that past the toxic in 2017 when there's a lot of scams, when there are lots of vaporwares, now in 2020, people will start to pay more attention to fundamental. People will start to pay much more attention to projects that have adoptions and actually solve real-world problems. And that's why we started to notice a lot of our company members actually are

much more sophisticated, understand DeFi, understand adoptions. And I hope that, you know, as we grow over the next few years, we can remain the, I guess, the DNA of how we start this and make sure, you know, we don't get to that point. Do you still experience sort of headwinds from the larger community or I guess even the world in general as a result of the way it was in 2017, the ICO craze? I mean, basically any project that starts in this space is immediately labeled a scam until proven otherwise.

I guess that's what I'm saying is that I know you've experienced it. I've seen it. But like the minute you start something in crypto, it's not innocent until proven guilty. It's you're a scam until you tell me otherwise. Do you still experience that because there were all these scams in the space before? Right. I think there's always prejudice for that for sure, right? But I think the fact that we went after

a lot of the more traditional VCs, Winter Capital and investors really helped a lot with us. We have Sequoia Capital, one of the biggest traditional VC. We have Binance as the biggest cryptocurrency exchange to support us. I think that speaks a lot about the project because this traditional VC like Sequoia conducted, I can say, extensive due diligence on projects. Of course. Yeah. That did help a lot. But of course, as you know, there's a lot of tribalisms in the industry. When people invest in somebody like companies, I think not just in the old-school space. You have Bitcoin maximalists that talk bad about everyone else.

You have Ethereum maximalists that talk bad about every other, you know, layer one solutions. And of course you have, you know, Oracle and all of this, right? I mean,

it's always going to happen. You want to say, you want to say link Marines, but you won't. So I'll say it for you. I'm always trying to be careful. I know, of course. But you didn't say it I'll say it for you. I'm always trying to be careful. I know, of course. You didn't say it.

Yeah, I think, you know, I don't like that toxicities. I don't like the tribalisms. I think, you know, all of us are trying to innovate. We all of us are trying to contribute positively to this industry. And we are still a really, really small industry by all measurement. So, no, I think the better way to do this is to think positive and try to help each other to grow adoption and to bring this mainstream instead of having this all in fighting between each

other. Right. So you touched on this just now, obviously you, you gain a level of credibility when you get legitimate venture capital behind a pro project. Can you talk more broadly, I guess, about the process of going to someone like Sequoia and securing capital from them, but also the effect, I guess, in general on venture capital in the crypto space and how projects develop? Yeah, for sure. I think in terms of process, like I said, it's like a traditional investing, right? Even though it's a token use, right? It's still really traditional in the sense that when they invest in early stage company

like us back then, they look at the ideas, they look at the problems as number one, right? Is this problem worth solving? Is this problem worth billions of dollars, right? I mean, they are a billion dollar fund, so they're not going to look at a million dollars opportunity. Yeah, they don't care. So they look at whether this is a big problem worth solving. Of course, Oracle, like I said, is one of the big fundamental missing piece in the crypto industry. So that's important,

number one. Number two is the team, right? Again, as an early stage companies, I think Sequoia as well as other investors understand that people will always pivot. You can start with a bad idea, but with a good team, you can always pivot to something good. So team is actually really important. And they look at us and they look at obviously with our team, even though we are young, we have been in the crypto space for a long, long time. As well as, like I said, I'm a major investor in a lot of the crypto projects. I understand

a lot of this crypto landscape. Obviously, I want solutions, the DeFi, and all that. So I think that was really critical that they saw that the team is really hardworking, really talented, and have the abilities to piece of gear and sort of pivot whenever

we need to. Right. And that's really important. I mean, as I said, crypto is really early. We are experimenting with all this crypto economics. We are experimenting with all this protocol. And you know, if you have the right team, you can always pivot and try something that would work.

Right. It's just interesting because in 2016, 17, the ICO craze, even in the United States, where clearly it should not have been allowed to happen. But I mean, companies could raise hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars for a problem that mean that venture capital is now necessary to grow projects in this space? Do you really need outside institutional money to make it happen? Yeah, I think there is always capital around, whether that be from crypto VCs or from traditional VCs, there's always a lot of abandoned capital around. The thing is, and I think this touched on the second part of your questions, why we pursue traditional VCs, is that they are much more long-term, much longer term than crypto VCs. I think a lot of crypto VCs call themselves VCs, but they are more like hedge funds in a sense that they're trading in and out and they are like two

or three years at maximum. Whereas a traditional VC like Sequoia, a 10 years fund or longer. And that means they are here for the long term. They're not going to sell. They're not going to, I guess, unlike crypto VC, they don't have the pressure from investors to sell and liquidate the fund in a fast manner. So they stay here for the long term as well as I think they are really helpful not just in terms of bouncing idea, but they're helpful in terms of, you know, giving support when it comes to operation, legal marketing and all of this. So, you know, it's, um, I think we are really fortunate. And I think that's,

that's something that we have been always grateful about their support. It's interesting. Cause it sounds like, uh, obviously crypto has its own venture capital. Their structure is not actually the kind of venture capital that most projects that are serious and want to be around for a long time need in the space. You have to go to traditional venture capital. I never really thought about that. That's really interesting.

So you've touched on the fact that you yourself are a big investor in a number of crypto projects outside of band, obviously. Would you mind sharing what your worst and best investments have been thus far? Right. That's a really tricky question. That's why I asked it. In terms of the best investment, actually, I did actually have quite a few good investments. Obviously, Ethereum was one of the best investment, actually, I did actually have quite a few good investments. Obviously, Ethereum was one of the best. You know, my friends started to... Actually, my friends were asking me to invest in the Ethereum ICO back then.

You know, at 50 cents. I needed to be your friend. I had the wrong friends. Yeah, but I actually missed that. And then I started buying more in the one or $2 range and then up to even $10. But you know, back then it was, it was actually quite scary. A lot of up and downs. Of course. Yeah. $10 to $5 is the same as a thousand to 500. So yeah.

That's right. That's right. So I think, I think that was obviously Ethereum was one of the best for sure. You know, I, we were, me and my friend were one of the biggest, we actually one of the biggest investors, sorry, not one. We had the biggest investor in Enjin. Oh, wow. Enjin Coin. So, you know, we actually made substantial investment into the team. You know, I flew to Singapore to see, you know, the CEOs and co-founders back then.

We were also a big investor in Kyber. So these are one of the bigger investors in there. So that was good. We were one of the biggest investors in Icon back in the days. So again, it went up quite high. So those are some of the biggest investors. Wow, that's amazing. So how about the worst? I guess the worst, of course, there's always the worst. Let me think. I think the worst one, I'm not going to name the names.

So obviously, you know, I don't want to name the bad one. But we were really interested in the ideas of, I guess, automatic payment. So there was this one company that were trying to do, you know, a scheduled payment ahead of time. In a sense that, as I said, smart contract is the deterministic. So it's really difficult to do, for example, recurring payment, pay every single day on that. Huge problem. Yep. So there was one company that was trying to solve this. They even partnered with mycrypto.com, my wallet to bring that solution. So we were really quite bullish as well. But, you know, obviously the investment didn't turn out as well as other investment. But that's fine. I mean, you know, you miss some, you hit some, and I think that's

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you buying the ICO or going on an exchange and buying the entire order book? How did that work? Right. We were actually not a structured VC fund. We were more like syndicates of people in Southeast Asia. We were one of the biggest in South Asia. Like an ICO pool type thing. That's right. That's right. Back in the day, that's right. My friends organized that and ran it. And so, yeah, we would try to identify high potential projects, actually look into the fundamentals. And then went big in terms of either ICO as a pre-sale or whatnot, right? We made Jera do that. Actually, Zero X was one of the you know, either ICO as a pre-sale or whatnot, right? And we made Jaron do that.

Actually, ZeroX was one of the best as well. I was quite big on them. So yeah, I was more in charge of looking at the token economics. I was in charge of looking at the areas that we want to invest in. And that's why I became really fascinated. And it was on the side when I was at BCT, right? Right. I was really fascinated with token economics,

with, you know, a lot of these different solutions that are coming to market. And that led me down this rapid horse of, I guess, realizing that Oracle problem is a big problem. Right. That makes sense. Actually, sorry, I missed Ling. Ling is actually one of my best performing investment. That's funny. I mean, would you consider Chainlink to be your main, I guess, competitor or someone who's trying to solve almost the same problem, correct? Right. I do think that there,

again, I invested in Link a long time ago since ICOs, you know, I think Oracle Formula is big. I am a firm believer of a non-monopoly world. I don't believe in a winner takes all, right? I believe that a lot of these projects, not just Oracle, but Layer 1 solution, for example, or even digital money, there are always trade-offs, right? In everything, there's always trade-offs. And that means there will be solutions that, you know, to make different trade-offs, make different decisions, decide decisions. And so that's why I'm really bullish and still am really bullish,

of course, on Oracle. And that's why we decide ourselves to be obviously different to Chainlink. And we also think that, again, I admire Sergey. I think Chainlink team is really good, really solid, really smart team. And I think, I guess, we don't look at them as competitors, the way that we don't look at Cosmos as a competitor of changing, I'm sorry, a competitor of Ethereum. Yeah. I believe in people having different design, answering different niche.

And that's what I believe. So I think the more solutions, the more diverse, the better for the industry. I would have to imagine also like at the moment we're talking about a very small space um so yes to some degree now you're people could view it as competitive but if we reach mainstream adoption there's going to be more business and more applications for these things than one company could could ever ever uh surf service i would. So let's talk about the idea of mainstream adoption. How, I mean, obviously people talk about it in terms of Bitcoin all the time or Ethereum and all this

thing, but blockchain in general, how does it get to the point where it's the underlying tech behind everything? It's the internet, it's email, it's cell phones. Nobody's worried about what it's doing. It is just mainstream adopted as the thing that's running most of the major business in the world. Right. I think we are still quite a long way into mass adoption, that's for sure. But I do think it's inevitable in the sense that you look at the adoption curve, you look at the infrastructure that are being built with major companies, you look at the adoption curve, you look at the infrastructure that are being built with major companies, traditional companies in the past few years, it has been amazing, right? You have players like Facebook trying to come in with Libra. You have, you know,

the eyes within their own cryptocurrency exchanges. Even in Asia, you know, we have one of the largest bank here trying to enter into crypto space. A lot of these traditional players are coming in. You have Robinhood. You have in the US. You have a lot of these traditional players coming in. So I think over time, as we, the younger generation, the crypto native, I guess digital native generation grew up, it will become part of our life. And it will become part of the, again, mass adoption will come.

It's just a matter of time. And it's just a matter of a lot of these players coming in. I do also believe that the tech has to get much better, you know, scalability as, you know, a lot of people talk about, you know, E2POIO is coming, a lot of layer two solutions are coming. I'm really bullish on that. Other layer ones, I'm also really bullish on that, you know, Nier Protocol, Solana, Cosmos, Polkadot, Zillow, all of these companies are trying to bring it to mass adoption. And I do think that over time the UX UI will be much better along with traditional players coming in. And that will truly lead us to much more mass adoption in the coming years. And I think we're going to

be surprised how fast that comes. I think anyone who probably was in the space in 2010, 11, 12, would already say they're surprised at the velocity of how fast it's gone and where we are now. So I would expect that, like any technology and data, that would only get faster

and we will see that adoption much sooner than probably people believe. You touched on Libra. What do you think the place is for, I guess, you know, national digital currencies, Libra, all of these things are in a, I guess, a decentralized world that we're trying to build. These are obviously highly centralized currencies and concepts. So where do Libra and digital yuan, digital euro, those things, where do they fit?

And are they, I guess, a threat to what you're building and others are building? Right. I think two parts to that. The first part is, yes, it is ironic. A lot of these projects are trying to call themselves cryptocurrencies or using blockchain applications. I do believe that they are more like an e-wallet than decentralized applications, right? As you touched on. So I'm not really bullish on them overtaking

or stealing the power from the actual DApps or the decentralized applications, or like Bitcoin, things like that. I don't think that would be the case. I don't view them as any credible threat, much more than PayPal or other centralized solutions. What I do believe though, which is the second part, is that they will actually hope to bring more adoption to blockchain.

Because obviously, even though they are centralized, they will rely on some of these infrastructures of blockchain. It will get people more familiar with it. It will bring more credibility with it. And that, in itself, will provide almost like an on-ramp for normal people to set up, oh, I understand blockchain now. I now understand how to hold my keys. I understand how to hold this wallet, how to send money. And now I can now hold Bitcoin. Now I can hold to hold my keys, I understand how to hold his wallet, how to send money. And now I can now hold Bitcoin, now I can hold Ethereum by myself. And that's a really important thing to happen. Right.

Even their very basic level understanding of how to send and receive or use a wallet, all those things, I think obviously would be huge for that future mass adoption we talked about. Pivoting, I guess, off of like the Libra and national currencies, we've seen this humongous rise in stable coins. I mean, billions and billions and billions, almost parabolic in the amount of them being printed and used. I was thinking about this recently, and Ari Paul on Twitter had written a bit of a thread about it, that basically this huge rise in stable coins has eliminated the currency use case of Bitcoin and other

cryptocurrencies. Basically, calling Bitcoin money is sort of a misnomer now because you can use a stable coin, it's faster, it's not volatile. You don't buy a cup of coffee for a dollar and by the time it's transacted, you paid $1.30 for it because prices changed by 30 points. Do you think that stable coins are the future of actual money and transacting in cryptocurrency? Right. No, for sure. I don't disagree with that. And I don't think that most people in cryptos believe that Bitcoin is supposed to be money. I think in the past few years, a lot of people have started to realize, and of course, the narrative has always been Bitcoin is a stock value. Similar ways to how Ethereum was trying to be a stock value now by introducing all this DeFi concept.

And that's right. I think the word cryptocurrencies does more confusion than it helps. Because it's volatile right now at this moment. I do think that a lot of these crypto assets will become more of a stock value. So digital gold, as opposed to digital money. And yes, stablecoin will play a major role as a money, as a medium of exchange, as a money transfer around the world. And it's good. I mean, people can change money around the world in a really efficient manner. It's already happening.

And I do think this adoption will grow. And in any case, it will also help Bitcoin and other crypto assets that are trying to be digital store values in the end. So I don't think they are competing. It's a really different use case, right? It is. It's just that there have been a lot of companies, you know, you always, we always heard about Bakkt

and you'd be able to buy a Starbucks coffee with Bitcoin. But in reality, anyone who's passionate about Bitcoin doesn't want to spend it on coffee, I think, you know, because you always have that fear that the price is going to be double when you get home. So it is interesting to see the rise of stable points. So what are your thoughts in general on the global economy right now, with regard, obviously, to COVID and the supply chains breaking down and all the things that are happening. And then I guess where cryptos falls in context with all those things that

are happening. Yeah. And that's a really tough question. I think it's really, really unfortunate of course, where we are now due to COVID, due to all these riots and all this, right. I mean, you know, I'm not going to comment on that, but I think when we got to COVID and of course, you know, Fed printing a lot of monies right now, right? It's not going to end well, right?

I mean, I'm really, I'm quite bearish in terms of the economics right now. And by that, I mean, of course, then I'm bullish on cryptocurrencies because obviously it's always a hedge against the world, right? I do think Bitcoin is a protection against that inflation. And I do think we're going to see inflation in the coming years, not in the short term, but it's going to come in the long term, right? And now, I mean, if you look at, I guess my view is this, right? In 2008, when we have the financial crisis, right?

Where did the money go, right? People print a lot of money. And the money goes to the rich people, right? It helped to bail out the bank. It helped to bail out the big institutions, corporate social. Exactly. And, and, and I think, um, you know, in the, over the past 12 years, I guess people argue that there's no inflation, but that's not the case because inflation actually happened,

but it happened in the rich asset, meaning real estate, meaning stock. You have equities reaching all time high. You have the bond and all of this, right? Because why? Because the money goes to the rich people, right? And that's why you see inflation in the rich asset instead of general commodities or price level that people experience. But in the case of now, 2020, it's a really different story, right? Because now it hit hard across all different sectors, the rich and the poor. And of course, in particular, the poor people, right? And now with this money printing, going to more general people and populations, you know, we're going to start seeing much more inflations across the board, you know, not just rich asset anymore, but commodities and all this other asset class.

And I do think that people will start to realize and start to question, I guess, money. People will start to question what is the way. I think we're seeing that already. I think actually like your average person now is actually had their eyes open to some degree to this and are like, what is happening? Like this doesn't make sense. You know, it really doesn't. And then you also see the stock market going parabolic while we know that the economy is contracting and jobs are down. So it's like you have this glaring siren that's drawing attention to this problem. But the question is, how does, I guess, a poor person, especially not in the United States where they might send you a stimulus check or,

how do you navigate this? Is the answer really, I go all in on crypto and I start transacting in Bitcoin like people do in Venezuela or Lebanon or these other places that have seen hyperinflation? Or is there some more balanced approach? I mean, is it time for people really to go all in if they're desperate? Right. Well, to begin, I don't think I'm an extremist in the sense that, of course, I don't believe that anyone should put anything in one basket. People should always diversify. And that leads to this, of course. I mean, if you look at the money, you look at cryptocurrencies, it's a way to diversify your asset. It's a way to, I think this is the quote from Chamath, right?

1% everybody should have, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly, right? I mean, you think of it as a hedge against the world. You think of it as an insurance, right? If the 99% fail, then at least this 1% may save you, right? If it doesn't work out on this 1%, it's fine because your 99% is still there, right?

So it's a hedge. It's just like you're buying an insurance, right? If you don't experience an accident, it's fine, you lose that money. But if you did, this will save you. So I generally view it as that as well. And now it will depend on your risk appetite. If you're a younger generation, obviously you're much more risky than older generations. So you may want to put more percent into that. I mean, if you're older generation, fine, you're comfortable with what you're holding, you may want to put more percent into that. I mean, if you're an older generation, fine.

You're comfortable with what you're holding. You may want to diversify into this. I mean, I think it depends on people's belief and how much they want to diversify. But the most important thing is at least they do their own research, right? Always. They understand what give these values and what give the money values, what give the goal values, right?

A lot of these people don't really question. And I think I hope people start to question more of that. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And that's absolutely my approach to investing in general. And when I would talk to people, I guess what I was getting at more is if you live in one of these places where hyperinflation actually becomes a problem and isn't theoretical, I guess that's the point where you have to actually question what, if you have other assets you can even invest in. For sure. That's why I guess.

Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, sorry. No, please. No, I was going to say, that's why I guess you see a lot more country like Iran, Iran, right? Most recently where, you know, people started to fork to Bitcoin and the price jumped up like almost two, three hex than other exchanges. Yeah.

I mean, that really demonstrated the use case of Bitcoin. It's essentially a self-awareness of values. Nobody can confiscate you and it's actually belong to you. I think that's fundamentally is truly revolutionary and what actually draw me to Bitcoin to begin with. It's the first time in human history that you are able to hold your own values. And that's really powerful. Think of it like if you're in those type of countries where your money, your piece of paper doesn't work anything, you cannot buy USD, you cannot buy

any other currencies because of the government sanction, you cannot buy gold, you cannot buy anything else. What are you going to do? You actually die, right? You actually cannot escape that. But with Bitcoin, you just remember the password. With cryptocurrencies in general, you can remember the password. You can walk across the border without anything else, and you can start a new life, right? And that is truly game-changing for me, and that's truly revolutionary for me for me and that truly revolutionary for me you know we may not see that right now of course in Thailand in you know us and our Europe's and all we recall I guess developed countries but you never

know right you never know I think you know you see country like Venezuela which used to be a really rich country in a couple of decade back and now you know you see what you're seeing what happening. So I don't think there's such thing as 100% safe. And that's why having this as another alternative that is truly self-sabotage, truly censorship resistant, that is the number one poverty of this whole blockchain application. It's the only true hard asset and hard money, I guess, in that regard that can't be confiscated. But with that comes a tremendous amount of responsibility that I think your average person is not willing to assume. Like to become your own bank and worry about your own security and prevent the hackings and not be insured and all those things are obviously huge barriers to mainstream adoption. So to a degree, people have to trust someone like you, if they're going to

buy your token or something, maybe people just want, they don't want the responsibility of holding their private keys. How do you address that? I mean, you make it obviously much easier for people to invest in these things and not have all of the responsibility and weight on their shoulders. Is that right? Yep. Yep. That's for sure. And I think, like I said, a lot of more, I guess, ironically, more trusted institutions are going to come in into play, but that's still fine. I think it's also good. I think the properties of censorship resistance doesn't apply to the majority of the people right now. Right. And, and that's fine. I mean, again, I'm not a, I'm not an extremist to be unrealistic, right.

I do believe this to play an important roles and it will be good for people that are not familiar with this to start to bring more adoption into it. And I think generally we're going to, we're going to start to move away from that. Right. Totally a separate question. How did you connect with Binance and end up being listed there? It's funny. It's like one of the mythical things in this space is how does someone end up on Binance?

How does it actually happen? Could you talk about the process of connecting with them and getting listed and becoming, I guess, a partner with them? Right. This is on a high level, I guess, you know, obviously it's quite confidential, you know, just like, and not, I guess, a partner with them. Right. Um, this is on a high level, I guess, you know, obviously it was quite confidential, um, you know, just like, and not just my dad, but I think to every other investor. You can tell me it's fine.

Yeah. But I think in general, like I said, I started off in this industry as an investors. Um, so, you know, I, I, I did get a lot of, uh, I guess connection and got connected into a lot of the VC fund, a lot of the people in the industry already. Right. And of course, I attended a lot of most of the conferences, talking to people, talking to industry insider, you know, the founders, the builders, everyone in this industry. And that's sort of how I guess I got to, I know the team, you know, know other people, not just we see, but they change his wallet and all this ecosystem players. And I can say that Binance is one of the more professional players in this industry, you

know, and that's why we really like them. And that's why we want to work with them. Makes sense. Has COVID and the shutdowns and all these things affected your internal operations as it slowed your progress? Has it really had any effect on your business? Right. Actually, it's the opposite. I think we've become much more efficient. A lot of it. That's so funny because that seems to be the case. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We started working from home three months ago,

actually. I mean, we're not back in office, but we were working from home for two months. But, you know, we were, obviously, we always defy our best on output, right? So it doesn't really impact a lot of these efficiencies or productivities of our companies. Yeah, so I think it has been fine. But in any case, I think a lot more people start to realize that, you know,

it is more efficient to sort of work from home, doesn't have to go through this transportation and all this, you know, hectic things that are going on. And that's why we are quite okay. And luckily, a lot of our partners are, you know, overseas, a lot of, most of our partners are crypto, you know, companies that are not related to financial traditional players. And that's why they're not affect too much by, by COVID. Can you talk about who your, uh,

your biggest partners are? Is that something that you can share or is it private information? Um, unfortunately a lot of these are private. Um, you know, I, I think we are, we are working quite hard, um, you know, in terms of integration with a lot of these big private. I think we are working quite hard in terms of integration with a lot of these big partnerships that are coming up. And unfortunately, I guess we are moving away from the model where we try to announce something first before we build to the model where we build before we announce, right? The announcements of an announcement of an announcement.

Come on, we all know about that in this space. No naming names. That's right. I think, you know, we, we, we saw that in 2017. And that's why when we started in 2018 and 19, and we always affirmably were that we should build first over marketing. And that will come eventually. So again, we are here for the longterm.

We are here for many years. So we're not in a rush to sort of do all this, I guess, borderline, sketchy, gray line areas. Yeah. What was it like building a blockchain-based company through the crypto winter? Oh, yeah. Two things. I think number one is actually good because we can concentrate, right? We can concentrate, right? We can concentrate on actually building meaningful product. We can actually concentrate on listening to the partners, listening to investors, feedback from users, and actually ship a meaningful, useful product to the end users, right? So that's number one.

I think it's actually really helpful. It's how to break down all the noises from others. And of course, as I said, because of this winter, a lot of the scam projects are gone. Of course, you still have some, but most of them are gone. And that's good because you feel the audit noises are out. And then at the same time, yes, number two is obviously you have to be aware. You need to have a good runway and manage your startup as a startup and not as a rich blockchain companies. And that's what we have been always doing, right?

We always prudent about our runway. We is always prudent about hiring, about spending money. And that's a really unique properties of us. Yeah, not something that is shared by some of your contemporaries from the earlier ages of this. It's funny to say that a lot of these companies were weeded out by the crypto winter, but I think a lot of them still have tokens that are probably trading on major exchanges and bag holders that are still trying to find a seller or there's actually buyers. It's something really unique to this. Well, I guess it's not so unique since we have zombie companies

like Hertz pumping 800% on the stock exchange, but it really is something. I think it's a pretty big problem probably in this space because of the tokenization, people are actually trading companies that probably are never going to have a product. Do you think that?

That's right. Yeah. Well, I mean, as you can, I mean, it's not just in crypto anymore, right? You apply to a penny stock and other stock around the world. It's unfortunate, but that's why we have this podcast. That's why we have this educational material that hopefully more people are doing. And I really admire what you guys are doing, what other people are doing because,

because it's really helped the industry to make it better. So what can we look forward to in the future from you and from Band? What are the next big landmarks that we'll see from you? Big, big, big moments and events. I know you don't like to make huge announcements, but what are the things that are coming in the future that everyone knows about? Right, right. So again, I think number one thing is, of course, we are, like you said, we don't like

to hype around any particular date or UN because I think obviously this is a really long continuous journey, right? There's no such thing as the ending. But for me, number one important thing that we are always focused on is adoption, right? And actually creating meaningful real-world usages. So I'm really excited in the next few years that we're going to be able to drive, you know, meaningful, meaningful adoptions for our Oracle solutions. We are really excited in the next few years to secure, you know, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in DeFi as well as smart contract across different layer one solutions. It's going to happen

gradually. It's going to happen over time. It's not going to be one night and, oh, we went from zero to one billion. It's going to take time. But personally, I'm really interested and excited about this journey that we are taking. I think we are in a place where we can say we start to see much more product market fit with our partners. So now it's all about scaling. It's about actually scaling our team, integrating our solutions and make sure we can deliver the best value to this whole industry. And what's the best place for people to follow both you and Band Protocol?

Keep up with what you're doing. If they want to become an oracle, how do they get in touch with you? What's the best way for people to interact with you after this podcast? Sure. I think our website, bandprotocol.com, obviously the best place to study the first material. In there, you can always find a link to somewhere else. Our Twitters, our mediums, our telegrams,

and our Discord are our official channels. So we always have our official team members there. Our mediums are always up to date. So you can get all the information there. And like I said, I'm always there on Telegram, always happy to answer any questions. And I'm looking forward to growing these communities, looking forward to growing meaningful adoptions in the next few years with all of you. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much again for the time. I definitely learned a lot and I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys have for us in the future. We'll have to have you back on for an update a couple of months down the road. For sure. I'm happy and my pleasure as well for having,

thanks a lot for having me here. Always a pleasure to share a lot of this information. Of course. Now I'll go start the rest of my day and you'll go to sleep. All right. Have a good one. Bye. Cheers.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening. New episodes go live every Tuesday at 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Links to our Apple and Spotify channels are in the show notes. You can also follow me on Twitter at Scott Melker to continue the conversation. See you next week.