The Wolf Of All Streets - Thomas Bertani, President of Poseidon Group On The Past, Present and Future of Crypto

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Thomas Bertani, President of Poseidon Group, Founder of Eidoo and pNetwork, and CEO of Provable Things has been involved in nearly every facet of the blockchain space. What began as a curiosity in Bitcoin mining led to him controlling 5% of Bitcoin's hashrate. He has started several successful businesses that he still manages today with the intent of both expanding and connecting the blockchain space. His experiences as a developer, entrepreneur, consultant and educator culminated in him speaking at hundreds of conferences and teaching blockchain at some of the most prestigious institutions in the world. Thomas Bertani and Scott Melker further discuss Thomas's decision to drop out of college to become a lecturer, crypto currently being equivalent to Windows 95, the crypto community today versus in the past, yield farming and its inherent risk, voices calling for Bitcoin to go to zero, taking over 100+ flights in a year, Bitcoin dropping to $10 in 2012, and teaching blockchain all around the world. --- 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

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. 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. 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. I'm really excited to have today's conversation with today's guest because he's truly an innovator

and an expert in the blockchain space. He was here very early and his work has been recognized so much so that he's actually given hundreds and hundreds of lectures around the world about blockchain and is one of the leading educators in the space. Thomas Bertani is now the president of the Poseidon Group, the director of Edu and the founder of Provable Things. So Thomas, thank you so much for being here. Hi, hello, everyone. And thank you for having me. So obviously, as I mentioned, you were in Bitcoin very, very early. Can you tell us, I guess, your Bitcoin story,

how you found it, how you fell in love with it and how you just decided to work in this space? Yeah, sure. I mean, it was like 2012. And as you said, it was really early. So the community looked so different compared to today that I can barely recognize it. And yeah, I would say that, you know, there weren't really many, you know, professionals or, you know or companies that were doing it for making money. Most of them were just there because they wanted to experiment and they were interested in the technology or in trying some early positioning strategies or things like that. But the ecosystem had very few users and I guess most users were building something

there for expecting future waves of users that indeed came later. So yeah, I guess most of the conversations back then happened on very few platforms. So it was very easy to get started because you knew that everything was to be found on Bitcoin Talk pretty much. And that if you wanted to follow Bitcoin developments, there were some channels and Litecoin, there were other channels and there wasn't much more besides mining initiatives and exchanges. So this is how I got started as well. Back then, I was working, I have a technical background, and I was working on parallel computing for scientific applications.

And that's the same idea that basically gets used for mining on graphic cards, which was a thing back then. So this is how I got started, as I guess most people back then got started with mining or trying to trade Bitcoin. And that was the same for me. It was late 2012. I remember the price had just gone down significantly. And it was at around like 10, uh, 10 bucks back then. Um, and everyone was saying, okay, it's over guys. It was a 30. Now it went down to 10. So it's over. It's never going to go back up. That's funny. How many times since then have you heard people say it's dead? It's going to zero. It's finished. Yeah. I guess I guess. Yeah. I mean, even you heard people say, it's dead, it's going to zero, it's finished?

Yeah, I guess, at the very least, yeah. I mean, even myself, I mean, I wasn't really into trading. That was my first, you know, ecosystem where I was learning, and I was learning very quickly concepts around, you know, trading, how the market works. I had no idea, really. And it felt like, you know, trading, how the market works. I had no idea, really. And it felt like, you know, falling down the rabbit hole. It was like everything happened so quickly. And I remember just a few months later,

the price of Bitcoin started going up. And it was the time where, what he reach? Like 200 or something like that US dollars. And when he started falling again, the same voices came back saying, you know, it's over. It's never going to recover. It's going back to 10 or whatever or to zero. And we hear the same today, right? Yeah.

There are so many people that, you know, are pushing for that narrative of the Bitcoin bubble being about to pop anytime. Yeah. Yeah, it's the never-ending pop that doesn't come. And it seems that Bitcoin always bounces back and comes back stronger, no matter how bad it looks at those moments.

So you said something earlier, which is really interesting. You said that you started in 2012 and the community was very different that you wouldn't even recognize it anymore. How is it different? And I guess, what do you see now with the community? How is it better and worse? Well, I guess the community today is fighting around finding use cases and trying to get realistic expectations on what we can do with this technology.

Back then, it was much more idealistic. There were so many use cases people were discussing. And, you know, today I would say that most of them were just bullshit. Right, of course. But we didn't know back then. It was like super early. Everyone was just super eager to, you know, experiment and see what could be done with this technology. And it was the time when the only blockchains there

were really Bitcoin, Litecoin, and then there were a couple of experiments, like Namecoin, for instance, which basically today is what ENS does on Ethereum. And, you know, yeah, I think it was quite interesting in seeing that people had

many ideas, but many of them didn't have any, like, technical foundation. It was, like, super early. So most of the things we see today, we sort of, you know, thought of them back then, but we couldn't make them. It was just too early. There were many missing pieces, so it wasn't possible to implement them and

try them out. Some of them, as I said, were bad ideas, maybe, or something that turned out not to be that interesting after all. And other things, you know, turned out to actually be good ideas or things on which people even today are very interested to build on, such as, you know, smart contracts, for instance, which back then didn't really have the shape of... I mean, today, if you think of a smart contract, the first thing that comes to your mind is probably an Ethereum smart contract. Back then, Ethereum wasn't even idealized.

So it was just too early. But still, some concepts were already there. For example, I remember the one of the Oracle. I mean, the concept of the Oracle in the blockchain space that today is very discussed as a central potential point of failure for DeFi or something that we would rather avoid, but we sort of need in some circumstances. Those ones, even on Bitcoin, there were some attempts to build some oracles. And that's actually one of the

things that I got interested in later on. So even before smart contracts, you know, Oracle's were sort of interesting to do conditional payments, like in case it trains, please release this Bitcoin transaction or, you know, That's interesting. I didn't know that Oracle's were even a thought at that point. So you, you just touched on what was your involvement between obviously then and now in we know where you've landed, which we'll talk about later, but what did you do in between? You said you had something to do with developing oracles.

And I know that you've done quite a few things in that time. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I wanted to experiment, as I said, as most people in the space. So, um, I, um, I work on different things. Uh, the first thing that I got involved with was mining. As I said, this was very much in line with my previous background before Bitcoin, before blockchain in general. Back then, there was just Bitcoin. So really, there was no differentiation of the terms. It was just Bitcoin and there was the run for building as quickly as possible ASIC miners as they weren't really a thing back then. It was really early. The first ASIC miner that got released, I remember, was the Avalon in February or March 2013. And basically a few months later,

I got involved into a mining company. So I was one of the first employees there. And we started building our own ASIC miners. And that company today, probably very few people remember that company because it went bankrupt later. It was called Cointapper. And that company sold like tens of millions of dollars of like ASIC miners in a few weeks. We were like one of the fastest growing company startups in Austin, Texas.

So I was there like working on the engineering part. And just a few months later, the market changed really quickly. And what happened is that the price of Bitcoin started going down. So guess what happens? No one wants to buy miners anymore. Of course. Because when the price decreases, people are scared. So they don't invest in mining. So what we did was like doing our own mining operation later. And I was in charge of maintaining that operation.

And just to give you an idea, we had like thousands of miners across the US. And we had 5% of the hash rate of Bitcoin, uh, under our control. So that was a lot of pressure and it was really hard to sleep at night, you know, um, How you were basically supporting the entire networks. Yeah. 5%. But still it was a big chunk. Um, even back then. Um, and in, in parallel, something I had started before leaving for Texas was a platform to facilitate the purchase of your first Bitcoin. People were still buying a whole Bitcoin when they were just being onboarded because it was still relatively cheap. And so I made this platform called Bitbo, which was basically a cash-to-Bitcoin marketplace,

similar to local Bitcoins, but much more automated. And we processed tens of thousands of transactions. It was really interesting because most people I knew later in the space, even recently, like if I go around France or Italy, which are the countries where the platform was

mostly operating in, many people I find, when they discover I founded that project, they tell me, oh, wow, I bought my first Bitcoin there. That's so funny because I had Charlie Shrem on the show and he says basically the same thing about America. He's like, everybody that I meet says they bought their first Bitcoin on my exchange. Yeah. And something super interesting that happened just out of experimentation that today is like something

that would send you straight to jail, but that back then didn't because basically it was so small, nobody cared. It was like, you know, something you were doing as an amateur just to experiment was like what today we call, you know, tokenized businesses and, you know and tokens and ICOs. Back then, there was no Ethereum. So there were those virtual companies, they were called, which were technically the same thing. So BitBot was like a virtual company, and we were listed on stock exchanges that had virtual shares of the business

that were actively traded. So people could buy part of those shares and they were sort of becoming part of the activity of the company. So for example, in our case, we were distributing dividends in Bitcoin every week to those token holders. Yeah.

So those were very early days, but, uh, you know, many of those things just got better over time. Today we see what, how the ecosystem looks like. So it's very different. Um, but they were experimental and there was interest even back then, but at a much smaller scale. That's really interesting. That's kind of a part of the story that I never heard. I never really understood the pre-ICO, ICO boom, so to speak. And it's funny, as you said, those would be highly regulated, probably as securities. Now you're basically trading unregulated stocks on the stock market and getting away with it. Indeed, most exchanges that were supporting, you know, virtual stocks started, you know, closing down the section of the website in the following years. But back then, you know, the regulator didn't even know what Bitcoin was, let alone, you know, virtual companies or those kind of things.

Makes sense. So, as I mentioned in the introduction, now, at least I'm sure there's a lot more things you have your fingers in. But we have Poseidon Group, Edu, of course, Provable Things, and now the P-Network, PNT. Can you talk about what you're doing now, what each of those things are, and why you're focusing on them? Yeah, sure. All those things are actually interconnected. The way we started was with two independent companies. So one was like ProvableThings, which is a company based in the UK,

where I'm currently calling from. And ProvableThings initially was called Oracle Eyes. And Oracle Eyes is probably the longest-running Oracle on Ethereum that has some users. And we have hundreds of smart contracts on Ethereum that reach out to the Oracle every month to fetch data. And this was something on which I've worked on for several years,

six years now, actually, uh, since 2014. Um, and you know, we, we worked on several aspects of making the service provable. So back then, um, most services in the space weren't really decentralized because they were missing tools. So people were trying their best, but it was just too early to expect a project to be fully decentralized, which is sort of the expectation we have today with DeFi, for instance. At least as an aim for the medium term, if not for the short.

But back then, the Oracle was seen as something that couldn't really be decentralized. And I often refer to it as this weird beast that basically is a new intermediary in an ecosystem that is trying to get rid of intermediaries. Because you don't really want to, you know, to compromise the security of your decentralized app, but you sort of need someone to, you know, send the data, the blockchain. So today we see many examples of oracles that are trying their best to be as decentralized as possible, such as Chainlink, Band, and many others.

Provable has traditionally been centralized, so it's not decentralized at the moment. But it sends, along with the data, something to prove that it's behaving honestly. Initially, we called them actually honesty proofs. Why now we call them authenticity proofs because we cannot really prove, you know, it's not something it's not around honesty, it's around the data not being tampered with. So yeah. What happened is that basically in parallel another project was started, which was called

ADO. And ADO is like a non-custodian wallet, which started with an ICO in 2017 and with a token called the EDO. And ADO since then has basically finalized everything that was described in the initial white paper. So it built a decentralized exchange. It built many ways to simplify the interaction with a non-custodian wallet. It provides fiat on ramp, fiat off ramp. It has many different things, even a debit card, which is DeFi, meaning that you stay with your assets in a tokenized form as long as possible, till the very last mile. Just at the moment you want to tap your card for doing a payment or you want to withdraw a KTM just

at that moment, the tokens get converted and, uh, you know, they enter a centralized component. I personally use the wallet. I love it. Yeah. I mean the wallet is like a theorem. Um, it's supposed to be an Ethereum token, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Litecoin. And basically, what happened at some point is that we realized that the token economy of ADO was sort of old in the sense that, you know, token economies in 2017 were very similar one to the other. Everything was about burning some tokens or staking wasn't really very advanced at the time as a concept. It was still early. So since then, there has been a lot of development around token economies and many projects have reiterated and improved their token economies to make them work better.

So what we did recently with ADO was basically merging the token economy with something else, which we had within our portfolio of companies, which is the provable tax operations, which include the Oracle, we were earlier discussing about, and Pnetwork and Ptokens. And Ptokens is this new project that basically started from our experience building the Oracle,

but that aims differently than the Oracle. It aims to become decentralized as soon as possible. And it's all about cross-chain composability. So what we want to build is a system that enables tokens to freely move across blockchains

regardless of the original blockchain where they were created. Bitcoin is a very notable example of that and we know there are tens of projects now, well, not tens, but at least ten projects that are trying to tokenize

Bitcoin and Ethereum. But we believe it's much wider than that. So that's why we have decided to merge these two projects of A2 and Pnetworks so that we can benefit from the community of the ADO wallet, which is like we have tens of thousands of active users every month.

It's not huge, but it's an initial user space that we can leverage. And, you know, Ptokens and DPNetwork, which is this general purpose wrapper of any token on any blockchain. So we can, we believe basically that it's not important where a given token is because eventually it will not matter to the end user. They will just want to use a given DAP and they will go wherever there is a possibility to make money or wherever there are some use cases that get enabled. So they will just follow the use case. I don't think people will care in a few years

as much as today of the technical details or the underlying infrastructure. Of course. So PNT, P-Network is basically an evolution of all of these things that you've been working on merging together. And the EDO token, which I know was widely traded on Binance and everything, became PNT, correct? Yes, that's correct. Basically, we could have created a new token for the IP network

for managing the governance needs of the IP network. But we didn't really want to for several reasons. First is that we really didn't want to go through an initial coin offering or anything like that. Right. Second, it's really hard for a governance token to distribute it well across the community. We see some initiatives today of yield farming that basically try to invent new ways to fairly distribute the tokens. So what we decided to do instead is rebranding and updating the EBO token so that we could use the existing

token holders. When we did the transition, they were approximately 7.3 thousand token holders. So it's not huge, but it's still a relevant number. And the concentration of tokens that we initially had in the company, which sort of screwed everything because it implied, you know, we as a company would have been able to decide everything within the decision making of the company, of the DAO. We just decided to get rid of them. So we did, before the conversion of EDO to PNT, we decided to burn 28 million tokens, which was like approximately one third of the total supply. And it is the vast majority of the

tokens of the company, just to ensure the company will not be able in the P network to control everything. So that enables the EDO token to become PNT and to have a fair distribution, which is the current one, we believe. And I know that you have a pretty aggressive staking program from what I've seen coming for PNT. I can't, don't quote me on the numbers. It's in my head, but 42% first year or something like that. Is that correct? Yeah, I mean, that's not a random number.

It comes out from a very specific logic that is described in our paper. is that the companies that were previously allocated to the company that we have burned, which are 28 million, are the ones that could potentially now be redistributed as a reward with the inflation of the DAO. So if you do the math, you'll find out that basically, assuming the DAO is successful and most people stake tokens within the DAO, the 42% reward of the first year and 21% of the second year, basically, cumulatively, they sum up to approximately the amount we

have won. So this is like a fair treatment, let's say, for ADO token holders that don't see any change in the total supply before and after the conversion in a couple of years. The supply could be lower, but it will never go above the previous level. And it creates a very strong incentive for people to participate in the DAO. Actually, this reward is not just randomly given to people in the DAO. What happens is that people are required to vote vote and there will be a frequent voting. We have several proposals already in mind.

So the idea is that if people have tokens in the DAO but don't vote, they are not active participants. So they are not contributing to the project, hence they will not be rewarded. But people voting will be eligible and they will get this 42% reward within the P-Network DAO. And this is a way to basically create initial interest in making the project evolve in a way that basically makes sense while it's in its initial phases. So it's important to have something like this

for the first few months. So this runs for, especially 42% is for the first year. Second year, it goes down to 50%. So it's 21%. 21%. Yeah. And the third year, it's zero. So it basically lasts for a couple of years.

And we consider it enough to see if the project becomes successful as we expect. So yeah, it's a very strong incentive surely. The challenge here is making people understand that, you know, that's not a scam, but it's actually something that makes sense. Unfortunately, there is a lot to learn, you know In our paper actually describes the rationale and like the reasoning behind this People don't like to read in this space. Yeah, unfortunately to assume Yeah, we have actually prepared also, you know some decks so they can have a look Very quickly and briefly to the main, you know, points. Then if they want to dive into the details, of course,

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So you touched on a couple of things earlier that are super popular right now and are kind of the talk of the entire space. You talked about farming yield, which is something that maybe you're an expert in or at least understand better than probably the average person because I think it's a very confusing concept, but something that people are extremely excited about at the moment. Can you talk about yield farming? Yeah, sure. So yield farming, as you said, is something that everyone is currently discussing.

I think that's an interesting new concept that is being experimented. I see it's also very controversial. If you go outside of the Ethereum ecosystem, not everyone is positive. It seems like a bubble. It is reminiscent of ICO boom in 2017. It's really dangerous.

There could be a trend which isn't necessarily positive, but there are surely gains in the short term. The point is, do we get any benefit for the ecosystem in the medium to long term out of this? And that's not trivial to understand at this stage. I see that even people like Vitalik and others are not really supporters of this.

So let's see how it turns out. I guess it's about, you know, doing it in a balanced way so that it's, you know, it's not like, just doesn't go out of hands and it's sort of under control. But let's see how it turns out to, how it evolves in the next few weeks and months. Basically, the concept is around incentivizing the staking of liquidity, basically, within different platforms. Normally, they are typically liquidity pools that has some initiatives to incentivize this. There are also, like we see it in compound, everyone is discussing this nowadays.

And, you know, there are several initiatives connected to that. I feel like it's like a race where everyone is trying to, you know, offer the best deal so they can lock liquidity in You know, but it's sort of helping defy to grow exponentially But yeah, I feel like we need to do it in a bus way so let's see how it works yeah yeah when you look at it superficially from the outside you don't understand it it seems like people are just lending and borrowing money to lend and borrow the same money at a higher interest rate and then you know continue down the chain to keep lending and borrowing you know higher interest rate so it may it gives

it the the outside impression of sort of the Ponzi scheme, you know, the classic. But people are very excited about it. And I know there's more to it than that. It just, you know, seems like a very deep dive and very risky. So outside of that, which obviously you said is sort of driving the exponential growth of DeFi, what do you make of the overall DeFi boom in space now? Well, I think it's really interesting to see that DeFi today is mostly seen as the activity going on on Ethereum.

There are other chains that are trying to do their best to provide some alternatives. So in general, our approach is the one of staying agnostic to those chains and provide connections across the different chains. Right. We see some DeFi activity even on EOS, which I think is interesting for the flexibility it provides. It's less decentralized, but the critics we see around EOS being too much centralized or not decentralized enough from the Ethereum ecosystem are very similar to the same observations

that the Bitcoin community does to the Ethereum one. Right. So, I think, I mean, my point of view, my personal point of view, is that I don't really know if EOS is too centralized or not, but I think we will not be the ones defining that. It will be like users, once this ecosystem will grow enough and we'll get some actual users, not, I mean, today we are a really small community. Once this grows, fewer of the sub-magnitudes, we'll see how much decentralization is considered to be enough. Maybe people will not, you know, it's a spectrum, so we don't see, we don't know how much decentralization will be important. I mean, how much decentralized

a system needs to be in order to be considered safe enough, basically. Sensorship resistance and so on. As for Ethereum C5, I see many interesting projects that in the past maybe weren't very successful but now are.

Maybe mostly because of composability and the fact that it's possible to do much more now by having projects that interoperate. For example, something that I like a lot because I think it sort of provides paradigm shift for the user experience in DeFi is things like, you know, LoopRing that are working, you know, on ZK relapse and things like that, where basically, you know, the UX looks identical potentially to the one of a centralized exchange. Even if you are a trader, you can do I'm not saying high-frequency trading, but almost. You can do

market-making bots and things like that that are much more efficient than the one you will be doing on-chain. And the cost is just a fraction of it. Within A2, for instance, a tool we have that many users leverage is called ADO Swap, which is basically just a general-purpose interface

which, with a single tap, gives access to any liquidity pool like on Bancor, Uniswap, Kyber, and so on. We abstract out all the complexity. They just do a single tap. And they are complaining now because the transaction fees are so high that they don't understand why they need to spend

three or four bucks if they want to trade 20. So things like Loopring basically fix that. And I'm very optimistic. And I think those technologies will be increasingly important in the coming months. So I read that in 2018, you took over 100 flights. Yeah. What do you do?

Is that all for lectures? Is that for teaching? Is it just business? I mean, well, you know, what were you doing in 2018 that, that, that put you on a hundred different airplanes? Um, well, I, I've read recently, I think that was yesterday on somewhere in, uh, you know, on crypto Twitter, that people were saying that, um, now we have much more time to build because we are not constantly busy with crypto conferences. Right. And in 2018, there were definitely too many conferences in this space.

And I was, you know, often a speaker there around oracles. For instance, like DevCon, I've spoken at basically all DevCons from DevCon 2 on and at many other conferences in this space, mostly to educate the community, showing what we were doing to improve security of our course and things like that.

And more recently, to explain our work of Ptokens and DP Network, why it's important, how it works, etc. Now, due to coronavirus, those things are sort of on hold or they are not happening as much. But in 2018, there was literally a conference every two or three days, which was worth attending. Because, you know, maybe 80% of people you already knew and you had met a week before at another conference, but 20%, you know, was different and was maybe just going at sort of local conferences and things like that. So that was useful both for, you know, networking opportunity

and, you know, as an opportunity to educate the community and to get feedback about it. So you were giving lectures, meeting people, networking, but I know that you've also done a lot of actual teaching. Can you talk about where you've taught or what kind of classes you've taught? I know that some of them are very prestigious yeah um so recently in the in the last two years basically um i've been teaching at uh like the major universities in italy basically as you can easily guess from my accent i'm italian even if i i've not i've not been living in italy for no London accent for no London accent not not yet

well actually I moved to London in 2015 so five years ago as it was pretty much impossible to operate you know an actual crypto business in Italy so I moved here and I moved to Switzerland last year where the Poseidon Group is based. And, you know, so basically I spend my time between Switzerland and Italy. Sorry, between Switzerland and London. But from time to time, you know, I do some lectures at Italian universities, mostly around, you know, blockchain use cases or understanding the trust model of blockchain applications and things like that. And my, like, the narrative that I normally use

in those lectures and in my speeches is the one of you know trying to show that blockchain is like unnecessary for like 90% of the use cases but the 10% that are left you know is worth working on so because you know

right now if you go to universities or you know in the corporate world we used to do consultancy to banks and other corporates. That's really time-wasting. And 90% of the use cases they are investigating doesn't really need a blockchain, but the innovation department gets some budget allocated if they put those keywords in. So basically what they try to explain is like to students normally is like how not to waste their time later on on some use cases that have already been

tried several times and that are not good fit for blockchain. And what are the things that work well? For example, DeFi is an optimal example of those because before it was just something that you could explain as a concept, while now they can see it in action. So it's much more effective. That makes sense. So it's interesting. So you lecture at all the Italian universities, but you dropped out of on yourself, didn't you? Yeah, yeah, actually, I did to join this, you know, mining company. As you know, I felt like the university wasn't really, you know, giving me enough. I was actually doing quite good at

university. But, you know, I felt like the crypto ecosystem was something that, you know, was a huge opportunity, one in a lifetime. So I decided to dedicate, you know, all my time to, you know, to start building something. It's interesting. I mean, it's a completely new world in general with accessibility to information. And you always kind of joke that everything you learned in your freshman year is already invalid by your sophomore year. And by your senior year, you've learned nothing of any value because of the velocity, I guess, of information. And then you compound that with COVID now, where most students may not even go back to college. They're just going to be learning on their computer anyway. So do you see at this point, having dropped out that long ago and been successful,

do you think that that conventional educational system is the right path for someone who wants to be in blockchain? Or do you think that there are better ways for an 18-year-old to spend their time and money if this is what they want to do um well i guess if someone is interested to get started with you know um anything blockchain related um today it's both easier and harder than when i started because when i started there was just you know a couple of platforms so you knew you had to go there. You knew who the authorities were. And you knew you could ask them anything.

Because normally they would just answer to you personally. And you would be able to just understand how those things work and why it was done that way and so on. Today, it's easier because, you know, there are many streamlined, you know, processes you could use. So, for example, there are university courses, there are books, there are like podcasts, there are, you know, newsletters, influencers, people you can follow and you know you will learn everything around a given topic. So that's easier because it's easier to digest.

Everyone can spend just for fun, even half an hour per day and do something in the ecosystem that is sort of simplified to them by the experts while back then you have to do a lot of homework first at the same time it's like much wider so i don't think today you can be you know a blockchain expert or anything like that back then you could but you could know everything or almost everything um now it's pretty much impossible um so you you need to decide what you want to focus on and there are people that work on defy alone and that maybe don't even know much besides defy and they just focus on the financial aspect of it right and even there they may not know everything but maybe just be focused on something so so i guess uh today

it's like the it's much easier um yet wider so it's important to understand what you want to focus on and so it's no more you know blockchain uh blockchain courses in general could you know just explain you some the basics, give you the context, but then you still need to get out and work hard on the single topic you're interested to dive into and see what works, what doesn't. Also because, you know, as you know better than me, in the last year and a half, the DeFi system has changed so much that if you were to buy a book like one year ago,

DeFi, today it would be useless. Right? Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. So you said that you give lectures basically telling people what the good use cases are for blockchain and where they're wasting their time. So outside of DeFi, where we obviously see this huge boom, what are the best use cases moving forward for blockchain that you think people should focus on?

Yeah, so DeFi is actually one of the most interesting ones, in my opinion. Then there are other things. For example, well, something I will start first from the other question. So like what are useless bad cases? Yeah, I think that like some use cases that are like discussed way too much are are supply chain and things like that. Because all consultants will try to sell you supply chain solutions. You will not believe it. I don't know if you had a similar experience, but I've had discussions with

professionals telling me they could sell supply chain solutions on blockchain easily just because to their clients, it resulted obvious that supply chain must have had something to do with blockchain since it has the word chain. Yeah. Or he said that. Which is just ridiculous because in most cases, maybe on-chain, there is a good solution, but then the last mile

is always bullshit because it's, you know, it's maybe a sensor or something that could very easily be tampered with and that because of the rest of the components they put on the blockchain,

it could be unavalued. Like it could cause so many consequences that are unexpected that it becomes much worse than before. So that's something to avoid. Like, you know, timestamping or things like that

sound boring, but I still believe that's something important. Gambling, I personally like the industry a lot. So I'm happy to see that things like Put Together are innovating there and sort of merging it with DeFi or finding something in between the two ecosystems. Since Provable, the Oracle service, used to have

a significant chunk of users from the gambling space. I have spent a significant amount of time studying the use case of throwing a dice in a provably fair manner or things like that. So I still believe this is something on which blockchain can provide very important advancements on reducing costs and procedures that are pure nonsense. Like we made ourselves with our cryptographically secure random number generation. We did certifications.

And when you do that, I mean, you must do them because if you don't, then, you know, certify the casinos, we're not able to use it. But when you do it, I mean, it's mind blowing

because you clearly see that those processes were designed in the 90s and they don't make any sense. Like they just proved that the procedure is safe when it was audited, but they don't say anything of the security of the system

while it's running. So you can have the operator cheating with zero effort and it will basically be impossible to detect. And still you have the stamp of the government that says, don't worry, this is secure. So keep going, you can play safe. With blockchain this doesn't happen if you know what you're doing, of course, and in the future, hopefully, even to a much wider audience. That's interesting. Gambling is clearly a huge, huge space for blockchain to innovate. So do you think in general that we are still very early?

You hear that all the time. I mean, obviously, Bitcoin is over 10 years old, you know, and I think at least the public is becoming somewhat superficially interested or aware of it. But I believe we're still very, very early, even though we saw that 2017 crash, that's kind of got the world's attention. Do you think that that we're early and most of the innovation is still to come? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I've done that mistake myself for a very long time. But I remember thinking that it wasn't too early and that some things were ready to go to market when there was no market. Because maybe the entry barrier was so high that we couldn't clearly see it from inside the ecosystem,

but it's clearly there. And I think this was like the wake-up call of 2018 and 2019, where if I had to define those two years, I would say that the main topic before DeFi that to me was relevant was recognizing that our previous assumption was wrong in thinking that building something would have just led to adoption. So I remember starting many or closing many talks saying, let's build it, users will come, like, crossed, saying, that's wrong, guys. We assumed that building something would have meant users.

We are the only users here because it's so complex and it's so early that we need to provide some strong incentives. And that's what, I guess, yield farming, among other initiatives, is sort of doing. It's sort of cheating, right? Because if you create a situation where people earn money, you will gain their attention immediately. They will look at you, and they will be interested

in doing an extra step, and they will be interested in doing the extra step and they will be eager to learn and they will listen. So also somewhat guarantees that they don't act badly, right? I mean, it sort of eliminates the bad actors because your incentive is to make money. So you care about the community, but you also care about yourself. Right. make money so yeah yeah of course you care about the community but you also care about yourself right but if you don't have the like uh the the incentive those people those people will not even try that that's the problem so um so that's a nice trick because i think in the in this stage um dux is significantly getting better.

Um, we are not quite there yet. So I like this, you know, defy, uh, attitude of some projects,

uh, to look like windows 95, you know, or things like that. Um, because yeah,

we, we, we may be truly there now. Um, I don't think we are at a later stage, but we may be,

you know, around 95 or something like that. I'll take that. 95. It's still early in my opinion. If we're here and it's 95, I can't wait for 2010, 2020. So you have time to accumulate. We all have more time to accumulate. So, you know, assuming no friction and that things continue to advance at this rate, obviously, we all see tremendous potential and that we're really early.

What do you think are the biggest threats that could cause a failure? Is it, you know, regulation, hostile governments, a single tweet from the American president? You know, what are the things that could cause this in theory to, I guess, come tumbling down or fail? Or is it nothing? No, no, there are plenty. I'm just thinking what's the most interesting. I would have answered the regulator last year. Maybe this year I would say it's like stablecoins, maybe. So, I mean,

if you look at the use cases that are getting most traction, like, for example, in Ethereum, we can easily look at gas consumption, like what most transactions are used for. They are used to move around

a plethora of dollars, for example, and the other stablecoins. And those have been of tremendous help to make easy the movement of liquidity from exchanges to DeFi. Because normally the liquidity is trapped in centralized finance, So in normal exchanges, centralized exchanges. With stablecoins, it's easy to move those money out. And you're not subject to volatility, so there are different reasons why they're interesting. I'm not saying I'm scared any of those will fall anytime soon. I'm just saying that it's relatively risky to rely that much. Mostly not because I don't trust those payers at the moment, but because I don't trust the banks they rely on.

So I mean, those are, yeah. I mean, even MakerDAO is an example of something, you know, that was trying to basically fix that. But it's still early. I mean, in MakerDAO is an example of something, you know, that was trying to basically fix that. But it's still early. I mean, in order for people to have confidence in a tool like this, I think you need years, not few months. And MakerDAO has been around for a while, but with significant capital, I would say just for a very few months. So I think it will take longer. So you don't think the threat is, I mean, we've obviously heard about Tether for years. Are they back? Do they have the dollars in the bank? Where's the audits? All those things.

So you're not saying that's the threat, really. That's not your concern. It's that they'll be shut down in some way by regulators or that basically the platforms that you have to use them on would have issues? I mean, as for Tether, for several reasons, including the fact that I know them quite well, I don't think that's a major risk in the ecosystem. But that's what we heard about for years. Yeah, but that's the same thing as Bitcoin being a bubble and everything. I mean, we could list the number of times people have said that it was not backed by anything.

Right. That's a speculation, but at the end of the day, that's where most of the volumes are. So meaning that maybe there are a few people that are very loud and being scared but I believe the market prices in those dynamics and if people really didn't believe that there was you know back there for instance I don't think it would pray that one USD so you know I think the market is like very objective objective, like it's very objectively answers to that question. But the market may be wrong, right?

We don't know. Sometimes we find out later. Similarly to prediction markets. But in general, I think the danger is currently sitting in stablecoins in general. I'm not saying Tether, I'm saying stablecoins. So even if USDC, for instance, was to fall or anything like that, was to be shut down, even something like Coinbase. I mean, I think the impact in the ecosystem would be huge.

If the regulator was to take action, I mean, yeah, it's something bad. It could affect the ecosystem, but we are used to it, right? We have seen it several times in the past. Yeah, of course. China has come back several times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we are slowly becoming immune to it. And I think we are improving.

So I think one thing that could be attacked by the regulators going forward, maybe, uh, you know, Dallas, for instance. Um, but I think this would just, uh, result in Dallas improving and getting better and resistant to those kinds of attacks. That's great. So, uh, what's next for you when all of this is done? What do you see as your future, the next kind of project or a passion that you have that you still want to pursue? Well, as we have seen during the last hour, I spent the last eight years, basically all my twenties. I'm 28 now. So from 20 to 28. 28 unbelievable you're all children in this space I'm 43 it makes me feel so old

when I talk to you guys and so basically I spent the last 8 years in this ecosystem and I hope I will spend the next 8 so I'm not in a rush to move anywhere else because like I see many exciting things right I don't know like

VR or you know AR many exciting things, right? I don't know, like VR or AR, many other things. I mean, many things interest me. But at the end of the day, if you stay in the crypto space for so long, you get used to the level of excitement and the fast pace. So if you move elsewhere, everything seems extremely slow and boring.

And you say, okay, been there, done that. I mean, you know, the blockchain ecosystem was just much faster. So I don't think I will go anywhere else in the next future. And I mean, I have many personal, uh, uh, interests, uh, besides, uh, crypto for my free time, but you know, I'm having so much fun, um, during most of my day with crypto that, I mean, that's exactly the place where I wish, uh, um, I, I would be in the next

few years. Awesome. So where can people, uh, follow you, follow P network, follow Adu, keep up with what you guys are doing? Yeah. So our, uh, well, if to follow me, my handle on Twitter is my first and last name. So Thomas Bertani, while for following the P network and P tokens, um, we have a channel on, uh, Ptokens and one on Twitter called Ptokens.io. So it's easy to follow our development there. And then all our channels are basically interconnected.

So we are starting a Discord channel, for instance, with all the different information around DAO, around ADO, around the next B2Ks bridges, and so on. While if people are interested just to follow the high-level interface, which is ADO, so basically what we see as one of the main gateways for B2Ks, the B network, and this ecosystem, the ADO channel is Adu on Twitter. And yeah, I think that's it. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I know you're obviously exceptionally busy. Hopefully next time when COVID is over and we can get on planes again, you can take one of those hundred flights and we can meet up at again, you can take one of those hundred flights and we can meet up at one of these conferences in person and do this again. So thank you again so much. And I look forward to seeing what you guys have coming in the future. Thank you for your time. Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening. New episodes go live every Tuesday at 7am 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.