The Wolf Of All Streets - The Internet Of Tomorrow With Jonas Simanavicius, Founder of NOIA

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Jonas Simanavicius is the Co-founder and CTO of NOIA Network, a company bringing modern technology to an outdated and flawed internet. Jonas developed his skills in software development for traditional banking and then began his entrepreneurial journey. His discovery of blockchain mixed with his passion for improving the outdated, day to day technology we take for granted, resulted in the creation of NOIA. Now he sees the company and its role at a major inflection point, poised to make vast improvements to the internet in the near future. Scott Melker and Jonas Simanavicius further discuss, the private vs. the public internet, a new 2.0 layer of the internet, NOIA token economics, Ethereum 2.0 gas fees, smart contracts and the world computer, the DeFi craze vs. the ICO craze, virtual reality vs. quantum computing, the dot-com boom, Bitcoin as the only true decentralized model, DeFi disruption and more. --- ROUNDLYX RoundlyX allows you to dollar-cost-average into crypto with our spare change "Roundup" investing tool, manage multiple crypto exchange accounts in one dashboard and access curated digital asset content and services. Visit RoundlyX and use promo code "WOLF" to learn more about accumulating your favorite digital assets when making everyday purchases and earn $4 in free Bitcoin. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

I'd like to thank my sponsors, Round the X and Voyager, for making today's episode possible. We'll hear much more about them later on in the episode. What is up, everybody? This is Scott Melker, the host of the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where two times every single week, we talk to your favorite personalities in Bitcoin, crypto, finance, art, sports, technology, politics, basically anyone we find with a good story to tell. The show is powered by BlockWorks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworksgroup.io. If you like the podcast and follow me on Twitter, you absolutely need to check out my website and join my newsletter where I share all my trades,

charts, analysis, market thoughts, and lessons on improving your trading and investing. And you can check that out at thewolfofallstreets.io. So, today's guest began his career in the investment banking industry but decided to become an entrepreneur after developing a passion for emerging technologies. He went on to co-found NOIA to challenge and improve the way the internet works. Jonas Siminovicius, is that correct? Did I get it yeah that's that's as close as people get you know i tried my best is now working to improve the internet's capabilities for consumers at a mass scale jonas man thank you so much for for being here no problem happy to be here so what is the exact pronunciation because i tried i've listened it's jonas simonavichus see i thought it might be jonas but I heard you pronounce it as Jonas before.

Yeah, it's just easier for people normally. So you're a man of many names, I guess. So let's start from the beginning. As I mentioned, I know that you were in investment banking and kind of led to tech. What was your path like? When did you start getting into this? Sure. So I guess everything started when I started doing a software engineering degree at

University of Edinburgh and then did computer science and then switched to computer science with management. So we used to did internships at investment banking areas. And then I did several internships and then stayed with one of the investment banks for several years working as an application developer in a trading team. And then, as you said, later on, went to entrepreneurship and had another startup in London before starting Noya a couple years ago. And so ever since we started Noya, I've been there as a CTO and a co-founder, leading the technology team and the innovation on the tech side for the last two years.

So you weren't actually an investment banker. You were working on the tech side of investment banking. So you weren't actually an investment banker. You were working on the tech side of investment banking. So you were always in the software side. Yeah. So I had a software engineering background, but I was always interested in finance. I used to also, you know, trade, et cetera. And I had a lot of background in finance as a hobby on the side.

That's why I went into investment banking, even though as a role in technology and software engineering. But for those roles, you had to understand finance products because we used to build platforms to trade exotic derivatives, equity derivatives, asset-backed securities, things like that. So I also have a CFA level one exam passed as well, just to get more background on the finance side. So I had to know enough about finance to do my roles on the engineering side.

So do you still trade? No, not professionally, no. So let's just say i manage my own investment portfolio that's all yeah well i think that's what most people arrive at so let's talk about uh what you're doing now obviously at noia so maybe we should start with what are the problems with the internet now because i think your average person just uses the internet they don't think about it you type in a web address it happens so what what are the issues that we have now and what are you looking to solve? Sure. So, I guess, you know, what was showed recently with the COVID pandemic and everything, that was one of the first times where regular people saw that internet

sometimes stopped working. Because we used to also hear about is that everything's fine, internet works. But if you actually dig deeper, companies are paying huge sums of money to have private internet lines bought and connected for them. So they don't have to use just the public internet you and I are using every day. And for software applications, CDNs, et cetera, content providers, they spend a lot of money and effort so that everything works for you and I. But one of the core problems of internet is that the protocols are actually quite old. So the main protocols doing the routing is called BGP,

and it still controls most of the internet routing across the world. It's pretty old. I believe it started since 1994 or something like that and hasn't changed largely. So it's really hard to change the Internet for a protocol because then everyone needs to adopt it. So there was some evolution and different layers and products created to solve those problems, but no one really had a solution to have a new layer of internet which is automatically

optimized, secure, and really made for the users, as opposed to letting the currently run infrastructure by internet service providers, data centers, etc, control the routing and capacities and everything. And they do it not in a most optimized, most efficient way for the user. They do it for, you know, sometimes business reasons, for cost optimization reasons, et cetera. They often don't do it in the most optimal way. So does that mean that the internet could be much faster? Does it mean that the internet is at risk of completely collapsing? I mean, it seems very strange that the thing we use the most often

is basically built in 1994 with the velocity of technology and how much new technology we have. That seems somewhat absurd. Yes, so the internet could be both much faster and much more reliable. So the problems companies, applications, and users face every day is these networks are extremely diverse. And then the internet is extremely distributed. That means everyone's controlling their own bit, and it just somehow somewhat works. So it's often referred to as a best effort basis, and that's what internet is,

unless we're talking about private infrastructure, which is worth billions. So what NOI is trying to do is to take that public internet and then treat it really as a layer of cables and not a working product. So we're using internet as our transport layer and then we will use hundreds of thousands of cops on this current internet and when we put the optimization and security layer on top so everyone can use an optimized and secure internet but we use the current internet as a one massive, you know, dump of cables, which we can use more efficiently than it, you know, it can be used on its own.

It's interesting. So, and I've heard, you know, I've talked to a lot of people who talk about the problems with the internet and all the different potential solutions, I guess. You're not trying to reinvent it. You're just trying to basically improve it with a second layer. I mean, is that an accurate assumption? And why not just try to reinvent it completely if it's 1994 technology? In a way, that's accurate. And we think that's the best way because you cannot just, you know, replace internet while still keeping it online

and without zero active and downtime. And if you think about internet, it's an extremely large distributed thing, and there's a lot of technologies and companies involved. So if you were to agree on a completely new protocol in a day, that just would be extremely unlikely and a hard endeavor. That's why we have seen evolution on the Internet, such as IPv6 is still gaining adoption. And there's other technologies trying to basically glue the holes

and make it work as best as it can. But we are trying to do one step further and not just glue a patch, but really build a complete new layer which can be used by everyone and optimize it, make it secure, but utilize everything we've got working well, right? So BGP itself, even built,

the roots coming from 94, it's a working technology which finds any address on the internet. So if you have an IP address, BGP will find a way how to get to you, but not necessarily in the most efficient way. It just does not account latency information into those calculations, but it will find you. So it's working pretty well as a transport layer. And if we can put, you know, hundreds of thousands of nodes on various different places on this internet already working and then optimize that, and during that, you know, we both encrypt it, secure, and send it via a better path,

you know, it's just a better layer so you would be able to use noia as a you know you turn on noia on your internet and then you're using better internet but you still need to have internet right so it's basically too big to fix no matter is it so the internet the base of it is a layer that we're basically stuck with indefinitely, it sounds like. I think it will change. It will not change overnight drastically because it's just too hard. But it will definitely evolve. As I said, technologies like segment routing, which we adopted very early on, IPv6.

This is a super powerful combination because you can put so much more information into each data packet and then the routers understand what to do with those data packets. It gives so much more abilities for technologies like ours and others to make more and better solutions even on the internet we have currently so it will evolve it will get better but you know it needs uh it needs uh big drastic uh innovative solutions like ours to to have you know to have significant change so who are your customers like what's your customer look like is it the internet as a whole or private companies individuals? What does that look like? So our initial goal and target market is companies and also software developers, users,

but basically internet connectivity between machines, machine-to-machine communication. So the target market is IoT, connecting thousands of devices to cloud, then software deployments connecting different servers in different cloud regions or private infrastructure. So imagine any application like, you know, whatever, Uber. They deploy thousands of servers across, you know, many data centers.

Any large application uses automated deployments and uses hundreds of servers connecting databases with their backend applications, frontend applications. So all of those deployments, they use machine-to-machine connections, and we need to be secured, and we need to be optimized. So we're launching with a product for software developers, DevOps engineers, CTOs, you know, to using their companies or personally to connect any amount of servers and devices in a secure and optimized way. And this way we will bring

first traffic onto this network and start this business. But eventually, our goal is to let every person which has internet participate. That means share their internet connectivity if it can be used to make someone else's connection better, as well as use NOE, this new additional layer or better layer of internet, and then have their connections also secured and optimized for everyday use as well. So that's the eventual goal. But we took a very gradual approach to actually do what's possible and gain traction, bring traffic to the network, get operational experience, and then grow.

Yeah, it seems like scale would be such a major issue. It would be somewhat easy to start these things small, but then when you start talking about everyone, everywhere, that it would become a major issue. How do you consider scale when you're planning now and slowly expanding? So there's a couple elements to scale. Software engineering-wise, we're confident you can make builds to scale. I think it's really about growing the network. So we already have 2,000 nodes run by our community members, supported by our token. So we already

support, with the current market capitalization and the token, we support more than 2,000 nodes daily to give their resources to us, right? So we're building an incentivized-based system to grow the network. And while you're growing the network, the token economy makes it also brings incentives for more people to join the network and this way

we can grow the network to tens of thousands of nodes and by that time it starts to provide a huge utility you will start to have and we already have you know evidence of how many nodes and where do you need to have to have a lot of optimization opportunities. So, you know, once you have a mechanism, a digital asset-based mechanism to incentivize growth of, you know, hundreds of thousands of nodes to enable you this amazing utility, and then you just need to bring enough traffic

into this network to make this, the whole thing sustainable and self-run by the digital asset so the scaling problem is really based on trust and growing the network and if you succeed there you know you can solve the software engineering challenges but the core logic premise which just helps to be true is the more available segments you have to construct paths from, the more optimization opportunities you can provide.

So it's a true network effect. So you say it's based on trust, but really the idea is that it's structured so that it's trustless. Correct? I mean, you incentivize your nodes, you incentivize everyone in the network not to behave badly, and therefore they don't really require trust. the trust nodes and the incentivization mechanism is designed to have as stable and as good as possible nodes, both in terms of trust on the network. That means they have incentive to stay and be reputable,

and both in terms of being a good node network-wise. So if you have a node, a bare metal node in a data center, which has huge collocation opportunities and different internet connections to it, it can serve way more optimization opportunities than a node, which does not have very good internet connectivity. So that naturally draws more traffic into better connectivity. So those data centers or nodes which will have poor internet connectivity, they will earn less. And those which will attract most traffic will be the best performing. So they will have incentives to stay on a network and then relay this traffic.

And so this way, they bring trust. But by doing that, we can make the system trustless from the centralization perspective. We can have everyone join in the system based on the real demand we need in the network in certain areas. So at the end of the day, you kind of then have a decentralized bandwidth exchange where everyone can participate with what they have and everyone can buy a certain capacity from it. Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, I love the structure in general that has been developed because it really just

incentivizes people to behave well. On the flip side of that, what's the punishment for behaving poorly? What's the punishment for being a bad actor, for being a poor node? Yeah. So it's pretty standard, the punishment is, you know, it will be based on a, you know, monetary incentive as well. So if you want to earn your reward, you need to stay at a certain level of reputation, or you get your rewards periodically, and that doesn't give you incentive to cheat, or you can lose some amount of what you accumulated already if you cheat. So there's really no way for you to just come and cheat because it costs you money to try to hurt the system.

But, you know, you will only earn rewards after some delay if you don't cheat. So it's really, you know, your own self-disincentive. Now, from a client perspective, you are already paying for the traffic, you know, if it makes your data flows more optimized. So you're not going to put your own node and then pay yourself to then get your own money and then still pay a fee to the system. So there's really no logical, a lot of logical basis to do that, to harm the system this way. In a fully decentralized model, of course, there will be a consensus mechanism to ensure the cheating, basically,

of two things, which is bandwidth being sent and performance. There's only two things you need a consensus on. And with a certain level of control or trusted partners, you can achieve that gradually. So there will be mechanisms to basically prevent bad actors to misbehave as in any system. And it will be, I guess, still some sort of a fight. And it will work in most cases mechanism where the system finds bad actors itself and then just does not

send traffic. You know, the nodes get penalized, they stop participating, so we don't have incentive and it costs money to run the node. So, you know, you can't do that. And this is all based on the NOIA token, right? I mean, when you talk about incentives and talk about people getting paid, they're getting paid in your token, correct? Yes. So the tokenomics and the model will be based on the token. But not to say that any user will need to use the token, to use the system, right? So we will try to have a frictionless experience for everyday users,

but the system and for the node operators that will be run by the token as a, as a, you know, as a, as a trust-based system. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. It's so cool. So did you always intend when you started it from the very beginning to basically leverage, you know, a cryptocurrency and to do it, uh, you know, blockchain cryptocurrency and to do it, you know, blockchain based as opposed to doing it another way? Because, I mean, there's other people trying to obviously solve the problems of the internet that have nothing to do with blockchain or the crypto space, correct? Yeah, so we always had the idea. And once we started the company, actually, we started as a distributed CDN. You know, we just saw distributed things as fundamentally better. But of course, the world has not solved all the problems of decentralization and distribution.

And in some scenarios and in some technologies, centralized technologies still take the lead, even though it's obvious that, you know, fundamentally distributed things will be better. So it's one of those things. It's like, you know, when Tesla started electric cars, you know, people said, look, you know, there's all the petrol stations and everything. You can't just like, you know, you can't just change that. But at the same time, by now, everyone already knows that the future is electric, right? Like there's very few people who would argue that fundamentally the future is not.

You know, people can say that it will take time, it will take, you know, market forces, whatever. But, you know, it's true, you know, it's the next level of the evolution. So similarly, we always knew distributed things are better. And we tried to find ways where we can leverage blockchain and the ability to make systems incentivized by themselves or fully decentralized. And so once we started with CDN, we found more problems in the data routing

and then moved towards the routing space. And then we created this concept of programmable internet. We really saw that it's possible to achieve that if we combine blockchain technologies, you know, the new segment routing, IPv6 and other routing network technologies now available to us, and also open source protocols like WireGuard, which we use for encryption layer. It's the combination and the timing of technologies. I just clicked that it's possible to do. And now we're confident we know the way.

It will take time and effort to grow the nodes, obtain enough information about the optimization opportunities, deploy the software, keep the nodes running, keep the trust, and all those things. How much of an issue is security when you're building something like this? I mean, I'm certainly not a tech guy and hacking beyond its existence, I don't understand how it's done or what the fundamentals of it are, but you know, how hackable is a system like this? How much does it put, you know, people's data at risk and the network itself? So there's a couple sides of security in our project because it's just so wide. So from a platform

perspective and people using it, the user encrypts data end-to-end. That means the user owns both endpoints, both servers or device and the server. And, you know, not like in the traditional VPN system where you connect a server and then go somewhere else. In this system, your endpoints exchange the keys and encrypt data end-to-end. So we as a network never actually get to see your data. Even NOIA itself will not be able to see what you're sending

between those endpoints. So you encrypt them end-to-end and that's what the protocol WireGuard allows us to do. But because the data is encrypted, we can then forward it through all of those nodes without security issues because data is encrypted and the nodes don't get to see it. So there is no so-called VPN exit node problem where you need to trust the exit node

which still needs to decipher your information and then pass it on to the internet. So from that point of view, it's the opposite. It's an easy way to encrypt your data. It's an easy way to create a secure tunnel. And then optimization happens when data travels through the nodes nodes and what the nodes see is just like what your internet provider would see on a cable it's an encrypted data packet right so and because we because we use open source encryption protocol you know we largely benefit you know we're wisdom of a crowd because you really don't want to invent your own encryption protocol that makes sense in terms of in terms of security from the system

and hacking the whole, bringing the system down. So of course, for that, we will leverage the consensus protocols, which are proven to be trustworthy and the smart contract systems, which are proven to be trustworthy. So for that, we have partners working on the blockchain side. And when we still use smart contracts of Ethereum, obviously you need to have smart contract

audits, et cetera, but you trust Ethereum smart contract layer. And once we, and if we transition to a fully own blockchain ledger with our own consensus mechanism. That's where, you know, you'll need to make sure the consensus, you know, works as well. Is that in the plans that you would basically create your own blockchain, separate from Ethereum, have your own oracles, you know, verify all of your own information and basically internalize everything? So we have possible architecture plans, and we have plans how things could be possible to do it now. But we know it will evolve,

and we already have our own blockchain team working on it. So we're pretty sure we'll use Ethereum to begin with because it's enough to start the system and allow thousands of nodes to join the network. It's enough to authenticate nodes to the network and pay them rewards to bring the network. but once the system runs our own DAR protocol, we have a distributed autonomous routing protocol once we move towards this decentralization and open access, there might be

a pivotal point where it's inevitable to have your own consensus and validators as well so at that point we will be either moving to another blockchain or launching our own ledger. But we don't want to speculate or commit on a particular implementation because we know it will evolve once we get the first answers from launching the network. Roundthex.com is one of my favorite

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promo code Scott25 for $25 in free Bitcoin and start trading today. It's interesting because I've actually heard people sort of make the comparison of early internet like 1990s internet to Ethereum, you know, relative to other blockchains that are faster. Ethereum is sort of this world computer and it, you know, it's amazing, but it's an old technology now in this space. It's relatively slow. It doesn't confirm particularly a lot of transactions in a short period of time. And now, I guess this could be another topic. We see this huge DeFi boom, right? Which then increases Ethereum gas fees tremendously.

Anyone who's been on Uniswap or has tried to send Ethereum around has noticed that things are a bit slower and a bit more expensive. So does any of that concern you when you're building on Ethereum? And then I guess, how does Ethereum 2.0 play into your plans? Yeah. how does Ethereum 2.0 play into your plans? Yeah, so, you know, one thing, yeah, I also wanted to mention the Ethereum 2.0 and all the other, you know, initiatives, it's evolving as well.

So we believe they're also working on these issues and Ethereum, you know, currently is still, you know, a most trusted smart contract platform for sure. So, and once when you're designing the system, if trust is a huge element and then, you know, the ease of use is great, then you choose a balance how you design your system. So, it's possible to design a system over the first stages of it where you don't need microtransactions or a lot of them so ethereum becomes not a problem by an architectural decision especially if you're planning later stages where you can always move to another blockchain if you hit those barriers

but for us it didn't make sense to start with an untrusted you know system uh which might have fantastic scaling opportunities, but it's still not yet proven before we need those scaling opportunities. But what we need to start with is the trust already. So for us, it just makes sense. And we took inspiration from other blockchain products and projects, for example, for our tokenomics model as well. But unlike other blockchains, when people created new blockchains, for them, they had to commit on an implementation

and the consensus mechanism and everything, and then implement it, and then prove it's trustworthy, and then get the and then prove it's trustworthy and then get the use cases on it we have a pleasure of uh you know building it lean and really build up the company build up the product which will bring true network uh true traffic you know and usage to this network and uh and and then you know uh do that in stages when we are ready and actually have traffic. So for us, it makes more sense to develop and launch a working stages of a network as opposed to commit to a design and then face problems later.

That makes sense. So what do you make of this huge DeFi boom now? It's all obviously primarily on Ethereum. Totally switching gears here. Sure. Sure. I think it's in a way, and I really don't want people to understand it in a bad way. In a way, I compare it to the first, you know, a bunch of the ICO projects, which raised capital for fantastic ideas and really pushed the envelope of innovation really far. But just so it happened, then a lot of these ideas later on struggled either to get traction or get executed.

And what we see now in the market is some of those projects really actually gain traction, build their technologies, you know, found real use cases. And they are partly also driving this comeback in the markets. At the same time, DeFi is something new, which, you know, the ICO and blockchain was before that. So there is now so much new ideas in decentralized finance, which are all fascinating and truly innovative and fueling this boom. I believe some of them will turn out to be the new norm projects, like from the first wave, now we have some fantastic projects in the crypto market and it will serve a purpose. So this boom of funding new innovative ideas is absolutely required just for the innovation

because again, so much capital flows into people who try to build stuff. So I really look at it as fundamentally not a bad thing, if anything. I encourage new innovation ideas. People look at them, make comments, critique the ideas to try and make, especially those ideas, trying to make the world more futuristic, deploying best technologies to the good of the public. Are there specific projects or at least general ideas that really excite you in that arena?

Not specific projects. I don't want to name the projects, but I think fundamentally there's a huge challenge for the existing finance sectors, both on the retail trading, investment, etc., where this new model of decentralized finance can challenge them fundamentally. And it will be a time frame before the quality of the systems, the trust, the volumes, all those details, which will keep the existing markets running the way they do now.

It will take time for all those things to get perfected. But if you think about it, like really logically, what will happen? There are certain areas where it does not make sense to have a company in between, or it just does not make sense to have software which can fail, or it just does not make sense to have, you know, other points of failure where, you know, projects which tackle those areas, I believe some of them, which will make the execution perfect, will turn out to be the new takers of that market. Yeah, that's a good approach. I think that makes sense.

So that actually kind of reminds me that we didn't even discuss how you got into crypto in the first place. So I know that you were obviously in banking and you were doing software, but like what's your bitcoin journey when did you discover it you know how early were you yeah so my bitcoin journey was ethereum and by and back was uh back uh back in the time when i was jp morgan chase uh we used to you know have a group of friends which were you know talking about technologies all the time and what's new what what's latest. We were young and hungry. And Ethereum, I saw Ethereum and it did its ICO, I believe. And we looked at it as this new

supercomputer made from millions of computers. Right, the world computer. Yeah, the world computer which executes code. And at the time even cloud wasn't as you know nor you know everyday thing as it is now so cloud was cool already at the time and ethereum just you know look something which is too big to even understand at the time but it's big so i started in ethereum and i actually started mining ethereum on amazon's uh computer and a web server i wanted to launch a miner and at that time you know it would have mined like you know a couple hundred ethers a minute or something like that it was the first person

you know miners uh and i had some errors some, even the miner software wasn't that good. And I gave up. So I didn't solve that. I didn't launch it. You've been mining millions of dollars an hour of Ethereum, basically. Yeah. And, you know, but I always, you know, kept a look and sort of an industry. And then during my entrepreneurial time after investment banking, I started trading crypto as a hobby on the side. But really, just from trying to understand how to use wallets, trading, the new concept of doing things, because I knew it's going to grow and I just need to be familiar with it. So obviously, anyone who's been here for a few years has ridden the roller coaster

of the crypto space, you know, from all time highs and all the way down to huge lows, even as recently, obviously, as March. Did you ever lose your faith in that? I mean, you just said, you know, you wanted to be here, you believed in it. Did you ever kind of lose faith and say, maybe this is garbage, and it's going going to zero and I need to move on with my life? Yeah. So, you know, during the boom, I was, you know, well involved in both the altcoin market and the main crypto markets. And I sort of saw the projects, you know, and I learned the lesson that when the market conditions are favorable, you know, everything goes. But at the end of the day, you know, real ideas, real fundamental ideas, they do have a basis for value. And when it converges to, you know, so it will always have at least the fundamental value and then anything on top.

So, you know, so what I think is really important is to try and find real, you know, logical use cases and things how can you know how things can work so I never lost faith in that I know you know by reading white papers and tokenomics models that these models can work you know it's proven by the you know the modeling statistics you know simulations yeah sure it's just the way of adoption and and having more and more of these projects. And then, you know, I think there's always going to be an element of speculation, but that gives this new way of, you know, funding projects and innovation and technology. So I really never lost faith in the concept itself. I knew people will find how to use it to bring massive ideas,

you know, to scale adoption and everything. So, you know, even, even back when Bitcoin was, you know, $2,000,

Ether was, you know, something as well. Yeah. I, I, I never lost faith that Bitcoin is not going away. Ethereum and blockchain as a concept is not going away.

And then the markets will do their thing. But as industries, they're not going away. And then if you think, if they're not going away, what are we doing? Are we staying? Unlikely. It's very unlikely an industry just, you know, just stays. Yeah. So there really is the only way is more opportunities, more ideas, more innovation, more everything, and more means growth of the common industry. So like you have kind of the builders and then you have the people who are

just trying to like make their money around it, obviously. And I mean, I think that's, you know, that any small company has its investors or its venture capital. And at the end of the day, they just are speculators, right? They just care about making money, putting money into something and making it. So starting a company in this space, what was it like, you know, acquiring financing and dealing with those speculators and figuring out how you could actually make it happen, but still do it in the manner that you wanted to? A roller coaster.

So it was a true roller coaster. But I think what we understood is that the key is resiliency. Just resiliency, resiliency, resiliency. And then if you just don't give up and if you truly believe that what you're doing is fundamentally, logically right, then everything else is a matter of finding ways to do it and then finding the energy to do it.

So if you have the energy, you'll find the ways. If you find the ways, you'll do it if it's possible to be done. So for us, we just decided to not give up, and that was all. And there was better times, and there was worse times, where you just need to get inventive, get creative, and be resilient. So it was a true roller coaster, but, you know, we have a amazing community of supporters, which are actually, you know, reading about the internet, following our tech updates, which are, you know, extremely detailed. They actually, you know, understand what they do.

So, so we really hope, you know, thankful for that. And then they helped us to, to live through the hard times. Did you have to raise any venture capital or were you basically able to do most of it through the community and through the growth of the token and such? No, so we raised private money from venture capital and angel investors in the industry.

We did, like at the beginning, we did a small public sale in the South Korean market, but it was mainly token distribution for our foundational node program, for our nodes and through private investors and funds and a small public sale. So yeah, we raised capital and then, you know, we used it to build the technology. We, you know, we and we successfully, you know, raised enough capital to continue operations, to go to market with our platform, the product, you know, get those partnerships with the enterprises we want to deal with. And then basically make this whole circle close and work, right? Because there's a lot of elements to it.

You know, it's not only blockchain or only business. If you really want to make a new layer of internet, you need to solve a chicken-egg problem of demand and supply. So that's why, you know, if you want to launch the network, you need people who will use it. For you if you want to launch the network you need people who will use it for that you want you need to launch the product and that's hard as a business on its own uh so so we had to learn a lot we had to do a lot of homework and it took us time but we believe now we will have elements uh where we just need to grow, execute, and then launch the ecosystem.

So if it's a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Jonas sitting in a room, I have an idea, and 10 being everyone in the world is using Noia Network and doesn't even know about it, where are you now? Yeah, good question. And I guess there's no good answer, right? Any number will be sort of just an interpretation. But let me tell you this. You're the best person to give that interpretation. Yeah.

So, you know, then there's, you know, exponential growth graphs and like everything in life. Right. It's not linear. So, yeah. Yeah. So you do a lot of homework and every small bit you do in life compounds. And then, you know, your target audience knows compound interest too well. I hope they do by now.

Oh, my gosh. So that works in life as well or building a company or everything. So we're at the point where, you know, we're entering the rocket. You know, we believe we're at the point where everything we do now will compound much faster. We're growing the rocket. We believe we're at the point where everything we do now will compound much faster. We're growing the team. The technology is near the launch. You know, everything just keeps aligning. And we believe it's the result of the two years of compounding work we've done with our partners, technology, you know, community, everything.

There's really no way to cheat around it. You need to compound enough knowledge, you know, everything there's really no way to cheat around it uh you need to compound enough knowledge you know and and actions uh to do that so we believe we are at an inflection point uh where you know things will start to accelerate much faster like every project i talk to right now like everybody and i think it's actually true but i think everybody feels like right now, like everybody, and I think it's actually true, but I think everybody feels like right now, 2020, like this is the inflection point of all these companies that have been working for two or three years and went through the crypto winter and did everything. It seems like it's just this explosion coming, right? I mean, do you feel that in the industry as a whole?

Yeah. I mean, it just feels like everyone I talk to is like, you see, finally, we're seeing main nets. Finally, we're seeing like the actual products that people have been talking about for two or three years. It just really feels like everything's about to go parabolic, sort of as you say. And it makes sense, right? And that's exactly what I talked about the first, you know, bunch of ICO products where, you know, some really did find great use cases and uses and everything.

So, and it takes about two to three years, if you really think about it. It takes three years to build a startup, no matter what you do, you know, with certain exceptions. But really, it takes time to build something great. So, and it is right about, you know, this time. And then what happens is when more capital flows into the markets, because we see opportunities now, which are more real because some of the projects are showing real traction. And that just ignites the loop, right?

Because new, you know, new money coming into the market funds, even more of those opportunities or the current ones makes them faster. Yeah. And that just fuels the growth. So I guess that's just the way, you know, the cycles of innovation work. You know, even from the dot-com boom, you know, there was all sorts of craziness. But during that time, you know, there was the birth of all the tech giants. So I'm really happy about the influx of capital coming into basically into the development of new technologies, into the computer science, into distributed technologies. So I

take it as a super positive effect in general. If you think 20 years from now, a lot of the answers would be different if you think two months from now. Two months from now, anything can happen, right? Any project can go up and down or whatever. But if you think 10, 15 years in the future, what makes sense, what doesn't? So crypto in general, really, you know, fits the narrative of where the world is going and what problems it's trying to solve. So how much does like the global economic situation right now, disregarding the stock market, because it's completely in its own world,

but the actual global economic situation, money printing and depressionary scenarios, GDP shrinking, how much does all of that do you think affect or potentially slow all of the pace of innovation? I know we're at this inflection point, but could that actually somewhat stop or stifle it, at least temporarily? So, I actually believe the world's, you know, the finance world is even more distributed and decentralized. You know, maybe decentralized is a discussable term, depends what do you mean, but it's more distributed as even as internet, you know, so finance is the most distributed thing. You know, from what we learned in, you know, so finance is the most distributed thing. You know, from what we learned in, you know, 2008 and stuff, like no one knew what's going on truly.

There was no person on earth who understand the whole complexity of things. Yeah. And, you know, there was some bad intentions, good intentions, but really what happened is it just happened. You know, it's this spider web of things happened. So the world economics is just such a complex thing that no one can really with a certainty say, oh, this will happen this way or this will happen this way. But if we talk again, like narratives, if someone like something like Bitcoin currently is the only truly decentralized concept in the world, right?

There's nothing else as decentralized as Bitcoin. At least I don't know and feel free to argue. I would not argue that. Yeah, I agree. So can it serve as money? Yes and no. In some situations can, in some no. Can it just become a reserve currency there's

a gazillion issues with that so i believe anyone saying a particular scenario is also just you know you know giving an opinion no one knows because it will happen uh you know sort of with noise of the world you know with geopolitical events happening you know covid proved us that anything can happen any day you know you know god forbid asteroid can hit us tomorrow yeah but well apparently that's a possibility now because it's 2020 so yeah but but fundamentally you know if you compare things if you compare a scarce asset like bitcoin which you know does not inflate if it will you know if if if people will need its utility uh more people will want to have some to use for you know for something that means some people will buy a lot of it as an investment

some people will buy you know three dollars to make a transaction which you know can only be made in a digital way some people just like the utility of you money in a USB stick or having a backup password as your own store of value. So there's many utilities to it. And with that comes logical conclusions. Again, if you do the modeling, if more people use it, there's some velocity measures which makes it, you know, makes the price do one thing or another. So I think, you know, in general, no one's sure how the economy or monetary, you know,

things will change into crypto. But fundamentally, digital assets will bring more utility, better utility. And if they will be used, they will have certain share of money. So I wouldn't speculate of what will happen, but I'm for sure guaranteed the growth of digital asset concept in general. This train cannot be stopped, basically. Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. Might take a detour here and there, but it's pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point. So going back to the internet, I guess just like sort of a bigger question is, if everything you do succeeds, if all these improvements are made,

what is, for an average person like me, what's my experience on the internet 10 years from now? What's the perfect picture there? Yeah. 10 years is huge. 10 years is so much from now. Five years from now. Yeah. No, but, you know, we can stay at 10 and I'm just like, you know, magnifying the point. 10 years is so huge. So, you know, the favorite article I read a couple of days ago, uh, was, uh, researchers sent, uh, some data through, you know, a single link, uh, with an incredible speed. I don't want to quote the numbers. They want to be wrong, but it would be equivalent of like sending almost all internet traffic and, you know, a blink or a short period of time, basically,

you know, many, many times over these times of speeds. So that will happen. You know, technologies like 5G, you know, will bring you, you know, whatever, 10x, then 100x. New technologies will bring better speeds. It will just keep increasing. Then that will allow new opportunities from the business side to create new products. So edge is a new trend. More and more computation goes into edge.

Edge connects to 5G well and has incredible speeds. So more and more computation can be done in the cities, in the small devices, instead of going to the data centers for computing. So there's these fundamental shifts, which will allow devices to communicate much better with, you know, almost zero latency way more computation to be done. And that will, you know,

that will create things like you know, you know, not only things like, you know, 16 K video streams or something that would be the, you know, obvious thing, which will happen. The quality of things will improve,

but it will enable breakthrough ideas, breakthrough concepts, which will emerge. And we're super happy to see that. So there's technologies where with 100 gigabits a second throughput become possible. So like virtual reality, I mean, we're going to have artificial intelligence and virtual reality and things like this. Everything is going to become automated. We'll be able to create other worlds, virtual reality and things like that, I imagine. So virtual reality is a great example. You know, so volumetric video, for example, you can scan, you know, 80 gigabytes of data a second

or a frame with a 3D scanner in the room, right? So that not only doesn't scan the video, but also the volumetric information of things. And that is like thousands of gigabytes of data per, you know, minutes, you know, you want to store. So if you want to have a video of that, that's thousands, you know, terabytes of data being transferred. Now, if you want to have it real time, well, good luck with that.

Then you need, you know, hundreds of gigabits a second of throughput between your device and your router. But if the computation doesn't happen on your router, you need the same throughput to the server, which does the computation. For that, you need both the computation and incredible throughput and zero latency. You know, not zero latency, but low latency. I mean, at a very basic level, it's a matter of speed and processing power, I mean, power to some degree.

I mean, quantum computers and instantaneous data transfers and all these things, right? I mean, so we're just talking about basically everything happens in real time. Yeah, so quantum is a different beast. It's funny you mentioned that because, you know, I read some stuff in the last couple of days. So, you know, standard computers, you know, have a limit of what they can do in certain kind of problems.

So once quantum computers get to certain, you know, availability and certain speed, they will start to crack problems which are now impossible for the current computers. Then you have two types of computing for two types of problems. One, which we can't solve now, and we even treat it as a feature of what we can't do, such as cryptography is based on things you can't compute out of. So quantum will be not a linear change and better, faster, more, you know,

even things like virtual reality, I still call them incremental technologies because they're still based on things like, you know, monitors, you know, things we make incrementally better with technology. Quantum is a different beast. And, you know, what we joke about is once we start, once we finish creating, you know, reinventing this new internet, you know, we'll do a quantum internet where information, you know, is being sent, you know, immediately, instantaneously.

Before you even know that you want it, it's arrived. Yeah. So, you know, if, you know, if bits can change information across the universe, it doesn't matter the distance with zero latency, that's the internet you want. Right. Well, I mean, I mean, mean yeah that's above my pay that's above my pay grade but certainly so i mean it sounds like the future becomes i mean where your people are i mean it's kind of like the matrix but you're you're plugged in and everything you want to do or everything you need kind of happens in real time you know you know or you never know, or you'll plug out and you understand.

Yeah. Which pill to choose. So you also own another company, right? I guess we've got your cloud, Noya in the cloud, and then you have the other cloud, you own a vaping company, right? Yeah, that was my previous startup. So we started that several years ago, as I said, then I quit banking. I went and traveled around the world. And then during that time, we started that startup. So I built as a CTO of an e-commerce platform where we had more than 40

shops running the dashboards, exchanging goods and doing the service. That's cool. So not your first entrepreneurial venture. Yeah. So, you know, you know, it's it was it was it was a great it was a great venture. As I was more involved, more heavily in technologies, I sort of just grew out of that role. And then we successfully launched that company and had people maintain the technology and run the service. Whereas I moved to more deep tech space, which is the the internet and the routing technologies and been doing that ever since. So what should people be looking for from Noya in the coming six months, a year? How can people get involved? If they become passionate about the project, run a node,

become an investor, you know, buy the coin, any of those things. Yeah. So what they can expect from us is progress, for sure. And so, you know, being more specific, we're definitely launching the platform. The product is a self-service platform for every developer, DevOps, or tech guy to use and start creating networks. We're definitely launching the network. You know, the thousands of nodes relaying the traffic,

we'll see the thousands of optimization opportunities available on this new layer of internet. So there's exciting stuff to come definitely, because we spend so much time building the technology and doing the homework. You know, on the token side, we're working heavily on the new tokenomics model. We're taking time with that because the numbers need to make sense

in the real business world because what we do is related to real servers, real data being sent through. So we need some answers from the industry and the network before we can get some answers. And that's why we're taking time to get those answers and push out the new model system for our token, which will be an incentive-based system

to grow the network and make it self-sustainable at certain size of market capitalization and size of the network nodes which needs to be there to enable this internet layer. So there's in the next half a year, there's for sure

exciting news coming out. And then we expect to grow the company a lot, the team size. So we're heavily hiring now the tech team, the product team to work on those streams. And we're publicly tradable on KuCoin and some decentralized exchanges. So there's definitely ways people can get involved and support us.

In the Telegram community channels, we have an ambassador program, which is, I believe, paused at the moment. But, you know, you can always reach out if you want to get involved at some point. You know, we're always happy to learn feedback, you know, get comments, discuss with us on Telegram. So there's many ways to, you know, to get involved. And where can people follow you personally after this? Yes. So, you know, you can find me on Twitter and on Telegram and our channels where, you know, we can ask questions. You know, I try to find time and come and respond. You know, it's always hard, but we do amazing AMAs. We definitely do enough AMAs where people can join the next AMA happening in either our own Telegram channels or some

of the other influencer or Telegram group channels. We do Ask Me Anything sessions where you can ask questions and get more information about NOAA. Ask things personally. Ask me or Bill Norton, our co-founder. You can ask questions about DARP, our routing protocol. We sometimes get really technical if you're into that kind of stuff.

So, you know, feel free to reach out. We're always happy to, you know, share. I wish I was more into the technical stuff. I just want faster internet that doesn't go down. So if you can do that for me, I'm really happy. I'll always be a fan. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it.

It's exciting to hear about what your guys are doing. And like I said, since you say you're at this inflection point, it's kind of exciting because I know in six months, this would be a very, very different conversation. So I look forward to, I believe so. You know, I believe so. And I hope so. I look forward to seeing the product. Well, thank you again so much. Sure. No problem. Thanks.