The Wolf Of All Streets - We Will See Several Trillion Dollar Networks Beyond Bitcoin & Ethereum | Beniamin Mincu, Elrond

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Beniamin Mincu is building Elrond to serve a billion users and beyond, with plans to create an entire global financial system. It is Beniamin’s belief that crypto networks, and Elrond in particular, will have more influence on the lives of humans than countries over the next decade and that several networks will surpass a trillion dollars in value. Beniamin Mincu: https://twitter.com/beniaminmincu Elrond: https://twitter.com/ElrondNetwork -- Sorare: Where fantasy meets reality. Collect, trade and earn weekly prizes on https://thewolfofallstreets.link/sorare. #OwnYourGame ーーー If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWo...

This episode is brought to you by SoRare. Stay tuned for more information on them later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week, I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Back in 2019, a small company with an ambitious vision was launched. Elrond set out to build an internet economy for the world by bringing

a 1000x improvement or more in blockchain speed, scale, cost, and user experience. Excited to participate in the Elrond story, I and a lot of my followers actually bought some of the tokens and kept up with Benjamin and Elrond's journey. As of right now, Elrond has broken through all-time highs in price and there are a number of fundamental moves to discuss. As requested by a number of my listeners and for my own curiosity, I brought Benjamin Minku back onto the show for another deep dive into the Elrond project to learn about everything they have going on. So Benjamin, it's a pleasure to speak with you again, and thanks for coming back. Hey, Scott. It's really, really great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Of course. Always a pleasure. So as I mentioned in the intro, and the one thing I think got a lot of people's mind, obviously, the coin eGold has just gone on a huge run, broken through all-time highs. But can you talk about what you think is fueling the recent run? Obviously, what's happening fundamentally and why this could be happening? I think there are two things here. First of all, it seems to me that fundamentally, as we discussed last time, we're at the beginning of how the economy works. And especially for the blockchain and crypto space, I think the next period will be incredible in terms of opportunities and so forth. And especially the applications that we will see will open up new markets with a lot of opportunities

for people around the world. Now, more specifically to Elrond, we've made a huge amount of progress since our last conversation. We've had many, many launches, improvements, partnerships, collaborations, and so forth. And now we're at the point where the network is live, the Meyer application is live, smart contracts are live, and now we're just about to start a massive next growth cycle. Why? Well, the DeFi part is coming on Elrond. We have the Meyer Dex that we've been working on for months now, and it's finally ready to be battle tested. In fact, tomorrow we're starting the Battle of Yields competition with 100K for people that want to break the Meyer Dex or contribute to it. Then NFTs are coming live

on Elrond. The Meyer Launchpad, it's coming live on Elrond. The US can now buy E-Gold in the Meyer application and a lot more. So we're super, super excited for the next period to come. Can you talk more about what you touched on on a macro level? Why you believe this is such an integral point in time and what we can look for coming? Yeah. So if you look fundamentally at the macro level, I think most people are too close to what's happening right now to process the signals that we see in the market, to read them and then interpret them correctly. But if you look at it, the market is not behaving at all as we used to see it. The cycles do not go as they would normally. Now, the question is, why is this happening? Of course, there are several interpretations here. But one of the elements that I've been seeing over and

over again is that now we have, even if you look only at the crypto and blockchain space, a space that has grown from nothing to trillion dollars. And now we are all of a sudden here with millions of people making a living in this new industry, with millions of people leaving the most important, ambitious and lucrative industries around the world and moving to the crypto space? Why are they doing this? Well, it's clear that financially, there's a larger opportunity here than any other industry.

And perhaps even more important, I do believe that during the next period, we'll see perhaps the largest high impact societal opportunity here. So when you can build a new financial system to connect people around the world, to give them a different opportunity that they did not have access to until now. This is not only for the US, this is for many, many countries around the world. And it's this type of combination of both creativity and accessibility to new people around the world in developing countries that makes this space especially interesting. Now, in addition to this, I'm also looking very closely and have been researching and studying a few other fields

that I believe are at an inflection point. And during the next decade, we'll probably have some seemingly crazy things happening in those sectors. One is genetics and longevity. I do believe that it seems we're close to some very important breakthroughs here, and there are a number of those being discussed every day now. Secondly, of course, artificial intelligence with everything we're seeing with Tesla and some other companies, OpenAI and DeepMind and so forth. The rocket space and space industry, this is going to a crazy level. Again, if you look at what Musk is doing and then several other companies are attempting and also achieving, it's very, very remarkable. And then there are some other sectors as well where you see a lot of opportunity. But the interesting thing right now is that wherever you look, there's an opportunity. It's almost like we've never had

this type of time where whether you're in the stock market, whether you're in the crypto space, whether you're in the technology space, real estate space, and so forth, this is super, super surprising and remarkable. And so I do believe that this is just the beginning of a very, very significant shift. And it's a great time to be alive and be able to shape this opportunity, accelerate it. And the blockchain space is doing this very, very well. Often these changes take generations in the past, right? It takes a whole new thinking, a generation to die off and younger people who understand technology to replace them. But I've heard the argument that this time will be different because of the exponential speed with which technology is

increasing. So do you think that these huge changes are something that we see a generation later? Or do you really believe that five, 10 years, the world looks like a completely different place? I like trying to make this a bit even more specific. I think that one of the reasons why everything will accelerate tremendously is not only technology, but the fact that we are very likely going to reach a point where, especially in the blockchain space, we're going to see, for instance, several trillion dollar networks. This means that beyond Bitcoin, beyond Ethereum, we'll not see one winner and that winner takes it all. but rather we're going to see several networks that capture and onboard different parts of the world with different use cases. When this happens,

the implications are very hard to overstate, but it's like during the next decade, crypto networks will likely exert more influence on the lives of people than countries did. And when this happens, everything changes. I mean, the way you live your life, the way you earn your money, the way you build value and create things will rely much more on this space than the physical world, the geographical distribution of different resources and so forth. So this alone, with the fact that we will cross in several networks trillion dollar markets, I think will enable most of the people to finally ask the deeper questions. The interesting things that is often neglected

in the crypto space is we're basically discussing what's happening right now, always discussing what's happening today, tomorrow, one week, one month for now. But the question is, how will the world look in three years, in five years, in 10 years? It's super interesting to see, as I said, the DeFi part unfolding before our eyes and building this new product. Super interesting to see the NFT space with the creativity and artists joining and so forth. But going one step beyond this, I think most of the people, it's like,

never ask themselves what happens when you finally made enough money to not care about money anymore at all. Like when you could literally go in any country of this world, start businesses or solve different problems or spend your time however you want. And I do think that we've never lived a period where so many people around the world could be part of this opportunity because this is fundamentally not a zero-sum game. And this is also what ties Elrond together to everything we're seeing because we're not here, as I mentioned even last time, we're not the Bitcoin killer, the Ethereum killer, or whatever other project killer. We're not interested in that. That's a very small zero-sum game. If you understand that

the market capitalizations that we're seeing right now are a function of value and users inside this market, then the only question you need to ask, even for a network like Elrond, in order to reason what it would take for Elrond to exceed a trillion dollar market, as outrageous as it sounds right now, is how many users do you really need for this type of economics and so forth to really kick off this feedback loop? Is it 10 million users? Is it 20 million users?

It almost seems frightening to say this out loud, but if you look at the real fundamentals, the thing is that beyond 20 million users, you almost see very clearly that this type of $1 trillion threshold could be exceeded. And then the question is, what happens with the market once you bring hundreds of millions of users in, once the users can really join and do what they always wanted to do. So yeah, I'm almost convinced that during the next five to 10 years, we're going to leave a period that's unparalleled to anything that we've seen in history. And I do think that

in retrospect, we'll have to call it the roaring 20s. So quite, quite excited about this. I love that. What is Elrond's theoretical role in that new world? You're obviously building very quickly, as you said, you know, and for every project, I think, in this space, you start with one idea and then you evolve consistently with all the possibilities, NFTs, DeFi, DEX, all those things. What's the ideal role if that's what the world looks like for a platform like yours? So the basic and fundamental goal of Elrond is to basically build the backbone for a high bandwidth, low latency, transparent financial system and give anyone anywhere easy access to this financial system. elements is because it's precisely these two elements that we believe will accelerate and bring about this super cycle that we're discussing about. On the one hand, it's clear that blockchain is still here to stay and will open a tremendous space of opportunities. The question is

how fast can we move from dial-up to broadband? How fast can we have a network on top of which you can really build the, scalability, and transaction speed and transaction cost. And then more than that, once you've solved this, the question is, how do you enable a simplicity with which users from all over the world can interact with this technology? Suppose they want to just send money to friends around the world. How can you enable them to do this instantly at a trivial cost and anywhere in the world with a super simple user experience? And beyond Elrond, MyR is really taking this technology and repackaging it in a way to enable the simple users to interact

with it. On top of this, NFTs have a different meaning. They're not about the technology. They're about some cool thing that you as an artist or you as a creative person can share with your community, but it's super simple to do it. Even DeFi becomes a very different meaning. Like it's one thing to go about through this entire process and provide liquidity and then have slippage and have all this process. And then another thing to be able to have a savings product with underlying mechanics of DeFi. And then as a savings product, this is appealing for almost anyone in the world. Even our grandma can understand this.

Savings are savings. You just need to handle them in a smart way and risks should be managed and so forth. But these are the two elements that I believe will more than anything enable this opportunity to really happen beyond the hype and then accelerate it. Because at the end of the day, what I believe will be the sort of threshold for the end game to become obvious for most people is 1 billion people joining this space. Once you have crossed this element, that's the end game there. Beyond that point, nothing will really matter because at that point, this economy becomes the default economy. And the normal old

economy becomes the sort of strange thing you're looking at the way you're looking at the TV right now. So the idea is 20 million people is a tipping point for a single blockchain or platform and a billion for the entire ecosystem. So a billion people interacting with crypto, but if 20 million were interacting directly with Elrond, that would give you the chance for hyper growth and for a trillion market cap. Is that correct? Yeah. So this, of course, could happen a lot faster because this is not a fixed function there. It depends on how much and how much different users would like to own of the Elrond ecosystem and so forth. But it also gives you a rough ballpark of how immediate and close this change is. It's not something that we're discussing about like fictional elements, but something very, very specific based on numbers that you can calculate. And then this becomes just a question of

how fast can we really bring those users in? How fast can we solve them, these problems? And then for the ecosystem, this will seem like crazy, a crazy period to be part of and contribute to the ecosystem. At this point in time, who are you seeing as the early adopters? Who's willing to opt out of that system? It's not the grandmas yet, right?

The idea is that we get to the grandmas, we get to the average person. But in general, crypto is still complicated for most people. I think we can agree. Sure. So who are you seeing initially that's adopting and passionate about the platform and about crypto in general? I think we've seen a lot of different people gradually starting to play with this technology. Of course, some of the people that initially came in were, as we know, the cyber funks. Then it was developers. Then it was a lot of entrepreneurs and so forth. Then it was a lot of investors, especially retail investors. Now, recently, we've seen institutional investors coming in in hordes.

And then whenever such institutional investors come in, they're really elephants in the room. It's not like someone is coming in with a few thousand dollars and so forth. You almost every day start to see a billion dollars invested by this person and that person and this institution and that institution. So I generally think that it's almost like we have three phases here. There's a bootstrapping phase for this entire ecosystem where we're gradually with even a more rapid speed each passing day approaching this critical mass point where the space is growing. Of course, there's volatility, there's

uncertainty and change and so forth. But things as a trend are generally very, very clear. The more you zoom out, the clearer the fundamentals are and the trend is, irrespective of what's happening on the short term. Second, I think the really important thing is, again, what's happening once a critical mass is reached. So you have retail investors joining, but now there's a bigger and more significant trend starting with companies investing their corporate balances in crypto. Now, this again is something that seems small until you understand the significance of this element and until you see that here's where most of the money in the world really is. And so this is going to be super interesting to see both in the US and in Europe.

It's interesting that in the US, this is happening, but in Europe, it's not happening yet. Now, one of the elements that would be interesting to see is what happens when a fund similar to macro strategy is started for Elrond. Specifically, only long Elrond, giving the corporates a very simple vehicle to interact and gain some exposure and then build their portfolio on top and so forth. It's only a question of time until you can have a compelling enough story for most of the companies to start considering this as more lucrative, important and compelling than what they're doing as a core business. And this is also a bit scary because then what happens when investors that sit on the boards of these corporations start seeing that you can make 10X of what you would

with your normal company and then start pressuring the companies to move in this direction and so forth. So this is a trend that will be super interesting to watch. But then retail is in, corporates are coming in. The question is, at what point do you exceed the threshold, as I said, where you're sort of in this situation where you're in a post-scarcity world. You've solved the money problem.

Of course, you'll still do cool stuff that you enjoy, but not for the money per se. What happens to the world then? How will you live your day? I mean, this is super interesting even for the many people in the crypto space, for people that make their money until yesterday, they were doing their nine to five jobs and so forth. And now they have a tremendous opportunity. I think just yesterday, someone from the community

wrote a super long message about them doing the normal job a few years back and now just crossing the first million dollars in e-gold and so forth. And this is super remarkable because these people are not here for the short term. Their life has changed and they want to do something different with their lives. And this is a different story. Here, we need to have a lot of conversations of what's super useful to do once you have crossed that threshold. What are the interesting problems that you yourself want to solve, that you yourself want to tackle, maybe with your friends, maybe with your family, and so forth. fundamentally a 100 times more interesting world than the one we live today. It almost seems like if you could do one thing and one single thing, it should be accelerating the point at which most of the people in the world have an incomparably larger opportunity and don't really have to care about money.

At that point, you could accelerate arguably all the interesting sciences, all the interesting engineering projects, and then solve some fundamental problems just as an indirect consequence of enabling this new world that we live in. So it's super interesting. We're living a period at which I think many of the problems we worry about will not come to be. And some problems that we never worried about will perhaps be a bit more interesting and challenging to think about. You and I have talked about that very concept, both publicly and privately, a number of times that effectively the goal is to unlock time, right? Because time is the true currency. It's the thing that people lack the most. And it's the thing that's truly scarce and finite, right? So obviously, financial freedom gives you the freedom to use your time as you see fit,

and therefore unlocks innovation and entrepreneurship on a level that we've never seen. I'm actually interested to see if that happens, how many people would have something that they're so passionate about that they would actually pursue it? Yeah, I would say that a surprising amount of people would actually do something like this. But it also takes a bit of education and time to shift the mindset. Because there's a lot of baggage there that you are raised up with, that you're taught things should be a certain way. And then you have to sort of discover things for yourself. You have to hit your head against the wall many times until you

find this opportunity can go through with some thoughts that you have. And I think it's super interesting that this opportunity is now available for most people around the world to have something like this, not closed to the US, but open to any country in the world, as long as you can read and research and do stuff like that. That's a super, super interesting thing to say, to be able to say out loud. I mean, at this moment, the world seems to be going in the opposite direction. I think if you're in crypto, maybe you understand the potential. But I think if you're the average person working a job, you don't get a raise, you make the same amount of money, goods become more expensive. Obviously, inflation destroys savings.

How does your average person pivot from that system to this one? And how long does that take? Is that just a function of we get to enough people, enough of their friends are talking about it, they take the risk. It happens? Or is it a complete mindset shift? No, I would say that it's the first case. In fact, in the past, some interesting books have been written about the great stagnation, that for

tens of years after a kind of golden age that we've seen, despite tremendous progress in computer science, most of the other fields have not yielded important breakthroughs or significant improvements, and thus the economy has not seen a large enough growth to, let's say, spread the wealth to enough people. I don't think that argument stands. So it's an interesting argument to explore intellectually, but I don't think it stands. It has some merit to it because there are some fields like, for instance, space exploration that after the Apollo landing, for some strange reason, it seemed like we went 100 years back in time. Nothing was happening. In fact, everything was sort of decelerating instead of accelerating. But I think we're now at the point where more and more people are discovering

to their friends, just by trial and error, that this is an opportunity that's super interesting, and that they can explore it a bit. This doesn't need to be all at once. You don't need to go all in. This does need to be a shift like that from one day to another. But when the people discover this, I see this all the time. It's like, at first, it seems unreal. But then you're looking at things. There are, of course, challenges. I'm not saying everything is super well in the crypto space, that there are no challenges,

no scams and so forth. There will be always challenges. But the net positive is so large compared to the challenges that, as I said, for most of the people, people in India or in Eastern Europe can invest at better terms than Peter Thiel in startups around the world, provided they have the insight to validate those elements. And so, yeah, overall, I think accessibility is there. Everyone can have the opportunity. And it's up to them. It's still up to the people to seize the opportunity, move forward and make something of it.

Because, yeah, you can see everything, you can talk about it. But if you don't do something, 10 years from now, you'll still be in the same place. Do you love sports collectibles or fantasy sports as much as I do? SoRare is blending this together to create an entirely new gaming experience powered by its community. SoRare cards are officially licensed NFTs for over 160 clubs, including Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Liverpool, and all built on Ethereum. You truly own your collectibles. They are productive gaming assets that will generate rewards if you're a good fantasy player like me.

Join SoRare and connect with your favorite teams, live the game with passion and earn weekly prizes. You can do all of this at the wolfofallstreets.link slash SoRare. So a huge argument consistently through the crypto community, especially from Bitcoiners, obviously, is that security is paramount. Right. And that proof of work is the most secure network. I'm curious what you sacrifice, if anything, to lower latency and increase speed. What does that mean on the other side? Does that decrease security? Are there risks?

How do you mitigate that if there are? I do think that Bitcoiners, by and large, tend to distort the definitions a bit to make them basically seem like there's no way you about it, starting from first principles, irrespective of what projects you're looking at, fundamentally, we will reach a point where you can exchange money through space and time in an optimal way. Through space, it will mean that you'll be able to send money anywhere in the world instantly with the trivial cost. You'll not care about any of those elements. Once you can do that, the entire economy will essentially shift gear up because the entire financial system will flow a lot rapidly and you'll have everything you have now just working 100 times faster. This is one element. And then a second element is suppose you have solved this problem, but then now the question is, how can you conserve the value throughout time? It's not only exchanging the value and spreading it and buying different

things and so forth, but conserving the value over time in some particular currency is a very, very different problem than just exchanging value. And so then the question is, what's the ideal system through which you can solve this? The answer should be any system that can enable you to first exchange value, as I said, instantly with anyone in the world at a trivial cost with a very, very simple and compelling UX should be very, very near to the optimal point. The more nearer you are to having the optimal state there, that's great.

And then the second element is how do you conserve value? How do you conserve value? How do you conserve value? Especially the question is, let's say, very simple if you consider fiat and, for instance, Bitcoin, right? Fiat is a net negative. Understanding a bit of economics, understanding inflation, understanding what's happening, would lead you to conclude that it's not a very smart game to hold fiat, especially when so much fiat is printed, when fiat is devalued and so forth. Over time, you would not want to keep a large amount of money in fiat.

And then in comparison, Bitcoin would be a lot more valuable. But the question becomes a bit more nuanced and interesting when you have several systems that are deflationary. Suppose you have not only Bitcoin, but you have Ethereum, you have E-gold and some other currencies as well. All of them are capturing and conserving value in a significantly more robust way than the fiat currencies. But in this particular game, the question is, over time, which one will be able to not only conserve, but generate value in a faster and more robust way? Because if you would conclude that one of them would significantly outpace the other one, then you should probably take a look at that.

So coming back to your question, the thing is we've solved the money exchange value in a way that's fundamentally superior from an architectural standpoint than anything we have seen in the space until this point. So the throughput is more than 1000x an improvement compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum. It's essentially scalable beyond 100,000 transactions per second, at which you don't really care about the scalability anymore. Then there's the transaction cost, which is essentially super, super small and adjustable. So suppose Elrond goes 100x really fast from here, what happens to the transaction cost? Does it grow 100x? Of course, at first it grows, but this is why you have governance. And we've thought about the economic

policy that is upgradable so that it still maintains a level of sustainability that's interesting. Then coming back to the security problem, I think there are some very clear assumptions here. Just as you have some assumptions with Bitcoin, outside of which Bitcoin cannot hold as a network, in the same way you have some assumptions for Elrond. So those assumptions hold true. And once you have a certain level of adoption, this part becomes irrelevant as an argument, because at the end of the day, is it secure enough? And then beyond that point, is it scalable and efficient enough to really accommodate widespread global adoption? That's the really fundamental question. So we've discussed the fact that interoperability is somewhat the future, right? It doesn't have to

be one blockchain to rule them all. Everybody can succeed, find their user base and work together. That said, it feels like everybody's doing a different version of the same thing, right? They're all nuanced, of course. So when you're building a DEX, an AMM or something, what differentiates it from the existing platforms? Is it the very nature of Elrond itself that makes it superior or are there new features? When you're thinking about a new product that already exists, what are you trying to create? Sure. This is a great question because to the extent that everyone does essentially the same thing, it doesn't really add too much value. The answer to this is precisely what Elrond is focusing on. In fact, we have the properties of the network that, as I said,

are scalability and transaction costs and utility, and then UX. This, I believe, will redefine every project that we are now seeing in the crypto space. If we take DEXs, for instance, what's the breakthrough of a DEX? Well, this is clear. There's no question at this point that automated market makers and DeFi are sort of one of the first killer applications that validate what blockchain technology is doing and so forth. But what's the challenge? Well, first, it's not scalable. On Ethereum, these applications cannot scale. They literally have a limit beyond which they can really not move forward. And so solving this limit enables us to have a much larger opportunity. And then secondly, there are still a very, very limited number of people that are playing with these technologies.

Why? Because they're super complex. It's like even after months and after millions and billions of dollars in the DeFi space, the number of people that is playing with these technologies is super limited because it requires rocket science for most of the people to really look at things deeply. And so what's the MyRDX about? Well, first, it's about scaling things. Once you can really scale things, you have a much larger opportunity. And then secondly, it's about bringing more than 500,000 users that we have in Maya right now, but going to millions and tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people that can access these products in a very customized, personalized way that they can reason with, understand and benefit off. So that's for the DEX. Then for the NFTs, it's the same thing. What would it mean if you could, on your mobile phone, create an NFT, share it with your friends, go through the entire process without having to

think about private public keys and all of that and so forth. Well, it would change the experience. And with each new product, the same element applies. You just have to look at Apple, right? What did they do? Well, precisely this. They've taken some technology, put a lot of love into what they did, and then essentially created a market where the market was super small and people never thought it would exist to such a large extent. So we're just in the day one, people are super excited, overexcited. They would like everybody else to die and so forth just because of their excitement for their particular ecosystem. But the interesting things for all of these people is what will they do when their ecosystem becomes larger than everything they dreamed about. And then the other ecosystem becomes large, super large, crazy large as well. What then?

Who will you fight at that point? And so it's much more important to ask this type of question of what do you want to solve? And once this is solved, what's the end game? How will we be able to improve the world further, even beyond the DeFi space, beyond the NFT part and contribute to what's happening during the next decade? What will we do when there's nothing left to fight about, right? But so at the end of the day, it's about simplicity and scale. Every person needs to be able to use it, but you also need to know that you're at 500,000 now,

but at 50 million people, it works the same way, which has been largely a problem for Ethereum. Yes, yes. And it's not 50 million, it's 7 and 15 transactions per second.

So it's a very big difference between here and what we would require for 50 million. And we're going there very, very rapidly. This is why the excitement is in the air, why the funds are joining, why everyone is super, super thrilled, because we're not only inventing new tools, but improving the fundamentals by which we're doing everything we did before. Once you do it, once you can do it 100 times cheaper, 100 times faster, everything changes in scale, speed, and perception. I've always viewed you, obviously,

as a visionary, as one of those people who is willing to dream sort of bigger than bigger than most so I want to ask you, we discussed it briefly but if I'm a 10 a job, what does my life look like in eight years? Is it fully ready player one? Am I existing in the metaverse with my goggles on and I'm not in the real world? What does my life potentially really look like? Yeah, it's a super interesting question, just because there are so many things that right now I see at an inflection point. But going beyond those, if there's one thing that's perhaps clearer than anything else, it's that the metaverse will probably be a kind of paradigm shift for the world that will come faster than almost any other innovation. Just because of the speed with which we can iterate, the speed at which we can create value, the pleasure we get when we play all of this and can leave the entire world in this new universe. I do think that if you look at Axie and what they've been doing,

it's super intriguing to see how blockchain technology has essentially changed a lot of people's lives without having the need to understand how they do it. Like nobody cares if you understand the blockchain technology or not. At that point, when you and your family and your family's friends and so forth can all live day to day, earn their money and so forth by playing a game and earning 10 times what you would in your local economy, that's the point where the world changes in one month, 10 years, just like that. So I think there are many things that will be discussed and debated, whether it's about AI, where we are right now, whether it's about genetics and what we'll be able to do with CRISPR and all this super interesting technologies and space exploration and whether or not we'll reach Mars until that point and we'll have had at least the first contact with Mars. What's clear is that the metaverse will 100% be there and it will almost be dangerous because if this becomes super easy in the sense that you

can 10 times faster build your wealth, create a life that's more exciting and interesting and so forth, it will be super tricky to go out and visit friends and do something else, right? So interesting problems to have in any case. So maybe I'll be sitting on Mars with our AR, VR goggles on living on Earth in the metaverse and working in an art gallery selling my NFTs, right? Might be. Might be.

There are, of course, many things, but money will fundamentally change. In eight years, most of the peoples around the world will look very different at money, how they earn it, what they do with it, and what value it has. As I said, health will be a very different thing because I do think that it's almost super, super clear to me that during my lifetime, we're going to live beyond 100. We will have to fail in many things to not improve this part. And then the AI part, of course, this will be an open discussion that can accelerate health, that can accelerate all the other elements as well.

But the metaverse, yeah, there's very little discussion about this because it's here already. We just need to play a bit more with it and develop it further. And this will probably come faster than anything else. If you live past 100, 110, 120, 130, then 65 certainly isn't retirement. You need to make money and earn yield to survive in very different ways. So the money would have to evolve with those improvements. And I mean, we talk about immortality, obviously. I don't think anyone would ever be immortal,

but there's an idea that people could scientifically live forever if they weren't hit by a bus. Yeah. Which increases the challenges for actually being solvent that entire time and having money. Yeah, I don't think the money part is the most difficult challenge. Interestingly enough, at this point, from this part of history, it would seem like that just because of how stupid we were throughout history and recently and so forth. But it almost seems like we're super close to this fundamental shift, almost like a kind of Kardashev scale.

There's this scale created for civilizations that have learned to harness the energy on their planet. That's a level one civilization. Then learn to harness that energy in their solar system. That's level two civilization. And then learn to harness the energy in their galaxy and so forth. I do think that it's like we're on the cusp of creating a Dyson sphere for the economy. Once we have this, we'll probably be able to manage money faster, solve the distribution problem faster. And just, yeah, I don't think everything will be solved.

So I'm not saying all of a sudden all the problems disappear, but it will fundamentally raise the opportunity bar for everyone around the world and then leave open a space for the most ambitious people around the world to really break to a point where they create more value and wealth than anyone throughout history. So as we come to the unfortunate end of this conversation, what are the things that you're most excited about that you want to impart to the audience that maybe I would have missed asking about?

I think in the immediate future, the immediate period, the Elrond ecosystem has never been at a better point than where we are right now. We've exceeded some milestones and are preparing for some other milestones that will be far larger than anything we've had until now. Just as with the launch of MyAR, after one or two weeks after we launched the application, it almost seemed like the last six months we've done nothing because the adoption we had in one week was more than six months, six previous months. I think with the Maiar DEX, we're going to see so large a utility adoption and usage for the network that it will again seem that after one month, almost everything we had since the launch will be like us not doing anything. So we'll ask

what took us so long to actually bring this text live and harness the opportunities that come with it, then the NFTs again will open some super interesting opportunities. Then different adoption vectors in Europe and US will make things even more interesting. So the immediate period, I think, will just be pretty insane for most people. And we're pushing super hard on that. But I'm even more excited for the medium longer term. As I said,

once we cross some certain thresholds, we're playing a different game. And this will be super interesting for us as a space and also for us as humanity. So a pretty great time to be alive i'd say what a time to be alive so where can everybody follow you personally and then obviously check out everything that's happening on elrond um the elrond twitter elrond network and um my twitter

at benjamin minku and then um the elrond blog and Telegram are just great places and super, super curious to always hear feedback from the great community we have around the world. Thank you so much for taking the time. I always find your vision to be refreshing and inspiring, and it gives a lot of hope, you know, I believe for what can happen in the future, because it's a rough time for most people. Yeah, a really great conversation, Scott. I do think that things will get a lot better. So we do have to push. I'm not saying it's just getting automatically there. It's super challenging sometimes, but it does seem like there has never been a better time to have this type of conversations and put the effort in.

Well, to that end, we'll do it again soon. Round three. Well, really round four, since we did this on a live stream too, but yeah, this is round three. Thank you so much. Thank you, Scott.