Unchained - Trump’s Crypto Project May Attract Hackers. That's Why This Security Expert Joined - Ep. 705

Starting point is 00:00:00 I think if this thing goes well, it's going to negatively impact my reputation because it's with someone who's divisive. And so there's going to be a lot of people who dislike me just because of that reason. If it goes poorly, it's going to negatively impact my reputation because it goes poorly. Like there's just, there's no way out of this. And so me just choosing to do it one way or the other is going to hurt me in some ways. But I think it will help the likelihood of this not hurting a lot of people. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're a no hype resource for all things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto nine years ago and as a senior editor, Forbes, was the first Maytremeater partner to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the September 17th, 2024 episode of Unchained. Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini, a U.S.-based crypto exchange built for new and advanced traders. Gemini is offering new customers $15 in BTC when they trade. Sign it today to earn your Bitcoin. If you're envisioning ways to make an impact on transforming global systems through blockchain,

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Starting point is 00:01:44 making it faster, more secure, and adaptable. Perfect for GameFi and Defi to build, grow, and scale. Join the community at Pocodot.network slash ecosystem slash community. Today's guest is Ogle, Cryptosecurity expert, founder of glue, and advisor to World Liberty Financial. Welcome, Ogle. Thank you. Thank you, Laura.

Starting point is 00:02:05 You have your hands in a lot of areas of the industry. The most newsworthy tidbit is that you're advising World Liberty Financial, the Defi Project by former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump's sons, that by the time this episode airs, will have just launched. You're also building a layer one called glue. However, you got your start in crypto as a security person who negotiates with hackers to get funds back. So let's start with your beginning.

Starting point is 00:02:30 How did you get into crypto security? So the way I got into crypto security was basically I was playing around on the Binus smart chain. And I had made a community there which allowed people basically to come and have a scam-free zone is the way I looked at it. Basically, it was good vibes, wasn't very PVP. For any project to be able to speak in my telegram group, you had to kind of pass like a check of vibes and also pass a check of audits in a lot of cases. And so I had built like a pretty positive atmosphere. and I really enjoyed that. And people look to myself and the other moderators and admins as sort of a gauge on

Starting point is 00:03:07 whether something was legitimate or likely to harm them, et cetera. And so I had put some money into a protocol called Stable Magnet. And other people had asked me, hey, does this look okay? And I said, yeah, it does. Because I had had my auditor look at it. I had had friends look at it. And everything looked okay from a code perspective. So people kind of followed in behind that and they put a few bucks in there.

Starting point is 00:03:27 And eventually, in all, the protocol. was able to get $22, $24 million, somewhere in there of stable deposits. Now, fast forward about a week, I got a call from one of my admins, and he said, hey, Ogle, bad news. Stable magnet rubbed. So a lot of the people who are in gyms, which is what the group was called, a lot of the people who are in gyms, they've got their money lost. You lost a little bit of money. And I just want to give you a heads up because you're going to need to figure out a way to talk to people and figure out how to see if there's a way to kind of calm people down. And so I thought to myself, I'm a little bit irritated about this because I know we've audited it.

Starting point is 00:04:04 And so it should be safe. I know people went in there because I had gone in there. So I felt some responsibility in that sense. And I just wondered for the first time. I was like, you know what? Maybe there's a way to get this money back. Like instead of just forgetting about it, which is usually what happens. People say, oh, I got rugged and they move on.

Starting point is 00:04:24 They live their lives. I said, maybe there's a way to do it. So I went and looked and kind of did some recon. And my background in the late 90s and early 2000s was as a what they call white hat hacker in like the Web 1 world. And I thought to myself, it may be the case that these guys have left some trails here that they that they didn't expect to. And TLDR here they did. And so I was able to figure out who they were, you know, where their family have property, where they, you know, who their girlfriends were, where they went to school, all this sort of things. most of that starting from just one picture that they messed up on.

Starting point is 00:04:58 There was some ex-f data that they had left behind. And so I let them know, I was in a WeChat group with victims, and I let the attackers know, hey, look, I know who you are. I'm not bluffing. These are your initials. You know, so like, I don't want to out you. I don't want to ruin your life. But you should see here.

Starting point is 00:05:15 I really do know who you are. As soon as they saw that, I found out that they left from where they were, which is Hong Kong. They flew to the UK. When they got to the UK, this was just. during the quarantine period. And so they had to stay for 10 days in quarantine in a hotel before they could leave. And so I got on the phone and called, there was a big list of hotels that participated in that. And I got on the phone and called hotel after hotel after hotel after hotel after hotel. And eventually came across one, every time I called, they would say, we don't have any there

Starting point is 00:05:43 by that person's name. We don't have any by that person's name. But eventually one of them, though, they said, well, if we did have someone by that name, we couldn't tell you. But I'm happy to write a message if we do. So I'm like, sure. So this one really, you know, I was like, okay, it sounds like this is probably the one. So I said, okay, can you please tell her? I was talking about the girlfriend. I said, can you please tell her to call her brother, you know, et cetera. A couple minutes later, I called back and I said, hey, you know what, don't worry about it. I've already got in touch with her. You don't need to leave a message. And the person on the other line said, oh, it was just about to go upstairs and leave a message. I said, don't you worry about it.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Don't worry. So now they've confirmed that the person's there. So in other words, after like about a month, trying to convince them to give the money back without involving law enforcement and that sort of thing. law enforcement was involved, they went, arrested them, and that was the first D-5 recovery of stolen funds that I'm aware of ever happening. And so that was the first time. That was not a negotiation so much, I mean, it wasn't a successful negotiation. It was failed. And so a few months later, I mean, it was successful in this sort of got the money back, but failed in the sense that we had to use sort of, you know, other tactics than just negotiations. So then a few months later,

Starting point is 00:06:48 there was another hack. And I had an idea. I was thinking, you know what, the people on the other side of the fence here. They're just regular people. Usually they're not like criminal gangs necessarily. They're just like people who come across a thing. They need some money. They don't have any. And they see a way to make five million bucks. And they just take the opportunity. In the real world, you know, if you think about what the motivations are behind these actions, it's not always because someone's evil. And so I thought, you know what? So I was talking to the project. And I said, project, would you be okay if we told them to keep 90% of the money or sorry, to keep 10% the money, send back 90%. So they have a great payday. You don't get your project ruined and

Starting point is 00:07:29 everyone's happy. The project said, yeah, you know what? We're happy to try this out. So I wrote an on-chain message, sent it out. We had some back and forth. And the attacker sent back 90% of the money. They had a great payday. The project didn't go under. It was a win-win. And from then out, that started to be sort of the way that these things were done. So for a number of protocols in the future, instead of just saying, hey, look, send it all back or we're going to arrest you, which was, you know, for the most part, it was kind of an empty threat. We'd say, look, be logical. Do you want to spend the rest of your life, like looking behind your shoulder? Do you want to worry about who you just screwed? Or do you want to take your payday, make $50,000, make $500,000, make $2 million, whatever it is,

Starting point is 00:08:10 just 10%. And then don't ruin everyone else's lives. And that, that method has worked pretty well, And I think because it treats people fairly. I mean, it's not like, well, it treats people more fairly than otherwise than like it could be. You know, there's arguments here. There are people who fuss at me and they say, what are you doing? Like, why would you negotiate with terrorists? You know, why would you even entertain them? And I say, look, I'll tell you why.

Starting point is 00:08:33 Because when you look at the situations, when you don't do this, how much money comes back? None. Never. It never comes back. So when you start to treat people like they're actually humans, you start to incentivize them. You start to talk to them in a way that they can rationalize. that this makes sense for them to make what you consider to be the best choice and what probably is the best choice, then they make the best choice. This is just basic, you know, a rational approach to problem solving as opposed to using emotions and make up set and all this.

Starting point is 00:08:59 So, yeah, I heard that when, so when you were on the chopping block last year, Robert's response to this was that in any other world, this would be bonkers and that he felt that someday when all of this gets more professionalized, then it won't be 10% that. that is the standard. I don't know if you have thoughts on that. Like his feeling was, you know, if you hack, you go to jail, basically. That's what his perception was. Yeah. And I think, I think that's a principled view of it. And I think that if everything was not anonymous, then yeah, that will actually be probably the case. You know, you're not going to have a situation where you go into a bank, like an actual physical bank and you, you know, take a million bucks. And the bank says, hey, hey, bring it back. We'll give you 100K of that. That doesn't happen. Why does it not happen? Because you know who stole it. You can see them. Right. But in the example that you gave, you did know the identities of those people.

Starting point is 00:09:56 In that case, but in that case, I didn't win the negotiation either. Like we lost the negotiation, but I just was able to find them physically. But in the next case, where it was a 10% return, I did not know that person. Oh, no, I got it. Yes, sometimes we do. Sometimes we don't. And that's the gamble the person has to take. And that's actually part of the game theory here is you don't know what we know. and we're not going to tell you what we know. And a lot of times we do know who you are. A lot of times we don't, but we'll give you the flat, we'll give you the offer that we give everyone else.

Starting point is 00:10:24 It's 10% or you can worry about what happens next week. You know, it's up to you really. Well, so something that was also interesting that I heard you say was you said frequently the hackers are Asian. Yeah. Like from Asian countries. Why do you think that is? Yeah, yeah. By Asian, I mean from like from Asia, exactly. I'm not, there's not like more Asian Americans, you know. It's like Asian countries that typically are. I mean, I'm not really sure. I've thought a lot about this. I've talked about this a lot. It's very specific Asian countries, too, generally. It's Hong Kong a lot of times, and it's Singapore a lot of times. Like, you don't see Koreans doing this very often. You don't see mainland Chinese doing this very often, not to

Starting point is 00:11:09 the Westerners anyway. It's usually Hong Kong and Singaporean. And, and, and, and, and, uh, Singaporean. My guess to this is because, you know, if you go to mainland China or if you go to Korea, if you go to Japan even, the amount of people who speak English is very low relative to if you go to Hong Kong or if you go to somewhere like Singapore. So I think that just the sort of Eastmease West there where you have understanding of nuance, you have the understanding of Western sort of ways of doing things, you know how to manipulate Western sort of psychology perhaps a little better because you're just more exposed to that. that is probably just makes it just like an easier place for people to play if they happen to be there. I don't think it's like something in the blood of Hong Kongers, you know, that's making them more likely to do this. I think it's just they just have a better skill set.

Starting point is 00:11:59 That's so interesting. And out of curiosity, I also heard you say that you speak Chinese and obviously appear to be American, seem to be American. So how did you come to speak Chinese? So I studied when I was in school, I studied as one of my, one of the, one of the, focuses of what I studied was Chinese history. And in studying Chinese history, you have to learn some Chinese language. And then there was a program, like a, what you call it, like an exchange kind of program with Qingwa in Beijing. And there was an opportunity for me to go there and study. And that's a university, I think. That's right. That's right. Yes, one of the, one of the oldest

Starting point is 00:12:41 universities in China that are still around. So, So there was an opportunity there, but that's not really, like I could have done that entire thing in English, to be honest with you. It was really after the fact that I learned most of the solid Chinese. I did an Asian language concentration, like a 13 hours a day thing for a while, learning just Chinese for several months. And then ever since then, I have a dual lingo right now that's got, you know, many hundreds of days of streak on it. So, yeah, I just like languages. It's not just Chinese. There are a lot of languages that I just enjoy generally speaking.

Starting point is 00:13:16 I like cultures. I like to understand them. I like to be able to speak to them in the way they speak to me. They speak to each other. So, that's really what it is. All right. Well, one other thing that I have to ask you about, and this just reminded me of when I wrote about the White Hat Hackers and the Dow incident,

Starting point is 00:13:33 that it was pretty much a parallel experience. But you told the topping block that a lot of the work you do on this is pro bono, and you often don't get paid. And frequently, the teams don't even thank you. And I wondered if is that still true or have you kind of like professionalized so now you can charge for it or how, yeah, how are you doing this work? I mean, it's actually a net loser for me because I've got to pay for security when I travel. You know, and I have to do a lot of like extra stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have to do.

Starting point is 00:14:01 And so they're very rarely there's a company that will, I've never asked for money. Very rarely there's a company that says, hey, look, we will help. We will take care of you if you do something. And then of the ones who say, hey, look, we'll take care of. of you could do something. Very rarely do they actually do that. And so, you know, it's, it's almost always either there's no discussion about it, which is fine. Like, I'm happy to do this stuff for bono. And then if there is a discussion, usually it's not all that much money. And if that even is an offer, generally speaking, it doesn't happen. It never comes to fruition on the other side.

Starting point is 00:14:33 The thanks have gone up more. And I'll tell you, there was a situation just today. This, you know, some, some random person I've never heard of online. He made like kind of a fud post about me because of the involvement with the world liberty financial. And it was like, this guy's, you know, whatever, all this, all this nonsense. And what I was very happy to say, because he said that I was larping and this stuff wasn't real, I've never helped anybody, yada yada, if you look in the comments, this actually was like, I was like, how sweet is this? This was so wonderful to see because project heads of projects that I've helped out replied in there. And they say, this is BS. He helped us in this situation without, without him coming in, we wouldn't have been able to do this.

Starting point is 00:15:11 he was instrumental in the return of our funds. Our company wouldn't be around anymore. These are people who replied without my solicitation. And I was like, okay, this is actually the thanks. This is all the thanks you could ever need. It's like someone comes at me for no reason. And then these guys unsolicited come in. Like that's awesome.

Starting point is 00:15:28 You know, that felt so good. Yeah. And wait, just I am so curious. So why don't you charge for it? It sounds like you could. It sounds like a project could come to you and you could say, hey, I'm happy to help you out. here's, you know, my fee.

Starting point is 00:15:41 Like, like, it sounds like it's your choice not to. Why, why is that? I think I've done, I've done, you know, I got into crypto in late 2012, right? And so like, I've done well with crypto. I've done well with. You don't need the money. Yeah. I mean, it's, it will be, it's not consequential, you know.

Starting point is 00:16:01 And so, and I think that it's, I think that it's much more like, it adds, it adds like this, this construct, this like social conversation. that's this complicated and confusing in a time of despair. I almost feel exploitative if I did that because you have someone who's, you know, it just doesn't feel right to me to do that. And I think that I'm not the only person who works in these cases a lot of times. There are several others. And most of them, they don't really have these conversations either.

Starting point is 00:16:27 Now, to be fair, most of them also represent companies. So they're like the head of research at Blar. You know, so they get sort of soft benefit from it. But yeah, I mean, yeah, if I'm being honest, Laura, like, it just, I don't really need it. And I would rather be helpful and get past all that stuff and just let the project know, like, look, you have a resource. I'm happy to help you. How can I help you? What do you need? Yeah, yeah. But that is one difference between you and the people who help with the Dow hack, because some of them were in financial strains and still didn't make any money from it. But anyway, so you mentioned World Liberty Financial, and that is the project that you were advising, that's affiliated with the Trump family.

Starting point is 00:17:05 By the time we published this episode, it will have launched. So just so the audience knows, we're recording the Friday before. But go ahead and tell us about World Liberty Financial. What kind of project is it? I can't say more than what's already public because I don't exactly know what they're going to say tomorrow. But what's been made public is that it's going to be basically either a product or a suite of products that are focused on things such as lending and borrowing, similar to like an Ave, you might think, where people can. could take their money, their digital money, and they can earn yield on that. They potentially could borrow against that to do other things that they please with it. So rather than taking

Starting point is 00:17:45 weeks to get through a process at the bank, potentially you could upload your money into digital form, via stable coin, you could deposit that, you could borrow against it and do something else if you wanted to. This is the most basic way of looking at it. It's not something that's reinventing the wheel necessarily if you look at it from that perspective. But I think that there are a lot of benefits potentially that could come from this, especially given who's backing it and who is running it, they could make it get to the next level in terms of new user adoption. Oh, interesting. Like, meaning you feel that they can onboard kind of like new crypto people.

Starting point is 00:18:22 Right. Right. And this is exactly why this is the reason that I agreed to come and help on this, is because I think there's going to be a lot of new people come in because of the people who are running it who have known for a while. And because of the people who are backing it, you know, such as the Trumps, for example, almost certainly this is going to bring in a whole new breed of people who are going to have no idea what they're doing. Right. And so onboarding, like from a UX perspective is like super complicated for most people. And it's really, you know, they're prone to make mistakes. And I think that one place where I was really hoping that I'll be able to be helpful with this is advising them on ways to make sure that the people who are coming on board,

Starting point is 00:19:02 the new people who have no idea what they're doing can do so as safely as they possibly can can be as not as confused as they possibly can and when the money's in there that it can be stored and managed in as safe as possible way what i would really hate to happen of course is people bring it on they you know they follow the president or whatever and they say you know what i don't know what this crap is but boy i'm excited and they they bring in 250 bucks or 500 bucks or whatever's important to them and then you know six weeks later it's gone like first off it's bad for them right but Secondly, it's awful for the industry. These are a lot of people who are their first impression

Starting point is 00:19:37 is going to be complete crap. And if I could help at all to stop that and we can actually build some believers out of these people, I think that's an awesome net win for crypto. And it sounded like from the way you worded one of your sentences earlier that they approached you about becoming an advisor. Is that the case?

Starting point is 00:19:54 That's correct. Okay. And so... Yeah. You're an interviewer. So when I start talking, you're like, who you start? Yeah, so basically the story is one of the other advisors called me. I was walking around and he called me and he said, hey, can I, or he messaged me and say,

Starting point is 00:20:15 can we do a quick call? Because I'm going to be announced soon for this thing. I said, whoa, holy smokes, really? That's incredible. Yeah, feel free to call me. He said, yeah, I just want to go over some details of how to keep myself safe, how to keep my family safe, because there's going to be some eyeballs on this, then, you know, some hate on this that maybe we don't want to be susceptible.

Starting point is 00:20:32 to it. I said, not a problem at all. Give me a ring. So we got on the phone like five minutes later and we talked for about 35 minutes and I just went through a list of like what you should do to keep your, you know, Twitter account save. How do you lock down your discord? You know, just basic stuff, but just making sure that everything's aligned. How do you use different phones to save, different phone numbers, two FAA, you know, all this other stuff. And I think it, and by the way, I didn't know who was involved at that point besides him. And I said, hey, look, if anybody else on the team, if they need some assistance on this, if they need input, I don't want to have 40, 30 minute calls, but I'm happy to like, if you get everyone on the call one time, give some, some input on

Starting point is 00:21:06 this, just because if you're telling me you're doing this and it's going to be a bunch of new users, now I'm starting to freak out, worry about new users are going to be. They're going to have vulnerability. So I said, look, if anybody else wants this, I'm happy to do like a group call and give us some input. He said, thanks so much. Well, fast forward a couple of days. And I saw that, I saw, I kind of heard through the grapevine that the people who were running the thing. So Chase Harrow and Zach Folkman that, well, I heard they were running it. And I was like, whoa, wait a minute. I've known these guys for over 10 years, like from a prior industry.

Starting point is 00:21:41 Like this is kind of crazy to hear. They had asked that advisor to bring me to talk to them but didn't know who I was because my name online is not my real name. And they know me as my real name. And so once we kind of got in the same group, we got on a call and they were like, wait, what? It's you? Whoa, what? And I'm like, yeah, it's my. me. And they're like, holy cow, we didn't realize you were that guy. Because, again, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:04 I turned for a long time. And so they were like, look, we were just going to call and try to get some feedback from you, but knowing who it is and knowing like, like, they knew my ethical background from a prior industry I was in. I was kind of known as like that guy there too. They were like, well, okay, let's, first off, let's have our call, but then we might want to talk about this in a more, in like a deeper way, given that we know who you are. We know we can trust what you're talking about. And so, you know, I guess they went and talked about it, and then they came to me and asked me if I'll be involved. Okay, okay.

Starting point is 00:22:32 Totally serendipitous. This is an amazing story. I have to ask you, though, because you've probably seen that crypto Twitter, which has largely embraced Trump's pro-crypto agenda, has not been very excited about World Liberty Financial, and Politico ran a headline that, to my mind, pretty much sums it up, and it says it has in quotes a huge mistake. It's quoting somebody from the article.

Starting point is 00:22:58 Trump's crypto allies cringe, over families startup. So what's your response to people who are wary of crypto people, to crypto people who are wary of World Liberty Financial? I think it would depend on why they're wary. Why they're wary. So some people are wary because they think it's a distraction to the campaign. Some people, which, I mean, there's an answer I can give. I think I could, I think I could probably agree with that, to be honest. Like, I think it probably is a distraction. I'm not sure if, like, the risks involved with that would necessarily be the strategic choice that I would propose if I were on the team that did that for the president, the former president.

Starting point is 00:23:35 I think there are people who, there are detractors who say, like, you know, this guy's a grifter. And so this is net negative because he's a grifter. That's a personal opinion. I can't, I can't really give a lot of arguments against her for that. You know, like, I've seen the past claims that people have made. I've never done business myself and with the person, with the president or his sons. And so I can't give any comments about that. And there are people who worry about just other other other facets of it like is it wise to get like people who are uneducated about technology generally is it wise to get them to spend what money they do have going into a space that's kind of known for scams and crooks and liars and all this and I think these are fair arguments

Starting point is 00:24:15 I mean what can I say like I'm doing what I can you know in the capacity that I can to make sure that if this happens which it looks like obviously it is that it's as safe as possible for as many people as it possibly can like that's really the best I can do but as far as far as like strategy for, you know, the election or strategy for general, I don't know. Like, again, I probably wouldn't do it, but it's being done. And so if it's going to get done, then I think it should be done as well as it can. And so I'm trying to help that. And, well, just out of curiosity, because so there's all those elements that you just mentioned, but then there already was a hack of Laura and Tiffany Trump's X accounts. And then Coindus reported

Starting point is 00:24:53 that these people, you mentioned, Zach Folkman and Chase Harrow, they previously, had been with Doe Finance, which itself was hacked. And then one of them, Folkman, was the founder of Date Hotter Girls LLC. So I just wondered, you know, when you put all this together, like, you have a very strong reputation in crypto. So how do you feel that joining this project might affect your reputation? I mean, I mean, this is genuinely as I possibly can, Laura. I'm truly not concerned about, I'm not, I didn't say yes to this because I was concerned positively or negatively about my reputation, I join this because I see a lot of new people who are likely to come into crypto, and I want those to be done as safely as possible. That's genuinely and

Starting point is 00:25:35 truly the extent of it. I think if this thing goes well, it's going to negatively impact my reputation because it's with someone who's divisive. And so there's going to be a lot of people who dislike me just because of that reason. If it goes poorly, it's going to negatively impact my reputation because it goes poorly. Like there's just, there's no way out of this. And so me just choosing to do it one way or the other is going to hurt me in some ways, but I think it will help the likelihood of this not hurting a lot of people. I know it sounds like BS probably to a lot of people out there who's like, oh, you can't possibly look at things in that light, but that's actually literally how I'm looking at this. The same reason that I do things like glue. I just, I think

Starting point is 00:26:15 maybe incorrectly, maybe correctly that my contributions here will help to keep it and make it a safer situation for a lot of people. And if I can do that, then I'll do it. I'll just eat the reputation. I'll eat these stupid posts like today came out with, you know, with some nobody who, who has a lot of things to say, but not a lot of things to back it up. I'll just eat it. It doesn't stress me out. It doesn't bother me. And, you know, the show must go on, I guess. Yeah. I've spoken like a true crypto believer, I guess I would say. It's like you sound very dedicated to just growing the crypto pie. I did want to ask though, you know, so as we mentioned, about Laura and Tiffany Trump's ex-accounts being hacked.

Starting point is 00:26:54 I imagine that this project just has so many more hackers and security attacks aimed at it than the normal project. So how do you think about security for something that has such a large target painted on its back? Yes, there's a few things. First off, I just want to be clear, I'm not like the head of security at this thing. You know, I'm not like, I'm not on the team. So I'm not the one making the decisions for security. I'm advising.

Starting point is 00:27:17 And, you know, I can give advice all day long. If it's followed, then that'd be great. If it's not, then that's just how life goes. And I think this is actually to the point that you make about risk. I think this is where my risk actually lies. Is if I make particular suggestions and they're not taken, then people are going to say, oh, but you're the security guy. Why not?

Starting point is 00:27:36 And they're going to sort of conflate head of security position with, like, security advisor. But, I mean, the way you would actually approach this is, first off, you would do something comprehensive, which I hope I'm able to do for these guys. I hope I'm able to come in and say, look, these are the 78 things. that you should be doing every single person on this team to make sure there are no weak links. That includes putting to a FA on your Twitter accounts, using all this stuff I would go into a big, long list about,

Starting point is 00:28:01 you know, for them to do. Hopefully everyone will do them. This would include doing other things. So, for example, one of the founders hit me up a couple days ago and he said, hey, Ogo, we've been thinking about it. We want to make sure this is as secure as it possibly can be. What can we do to make sure that a situation like Doe doesn't happen again? Because they had a hack before, right?

Starting point is 00:28:20 And they didn't know I was Ogle, so they didn't ever hit me off for help. But I guess they probably would have, if they had known that. But they said, what can we do? I said, okay, I'm glad you're asking that. That's a proactive question to ask. So what we need to do is do a run through, a dry run. And so basically we'll pretend like it happens, go through several different things that could pretend like they happen, set aside several hours on a Saturday.

Starting point is 00:28:41 And then we'll go through it. We'll make mistakes. We'll figure out who's going to be the person who does the communications, who's going to be the person who, you know, who carous all the helpers, who's going to be the person who's doing the blocking and sleuthing, who's going to be the person who locks down the tech, whatever. We'll figure that out during that process. And that way, this fire drill, as they call them,

Starting point is 00:29:00 you'll have a little bit of muscle memory there. So if something does happen, it can be closed down fast. Right. And so there's lots of these sorts of things that you can do proactively. Then there's other things, too. You can get audits, which they have, for my understanding, they've been audited four times now. The new code that they've done has got four audits,

Starting point is 00:29:17 which is great. But you can do continuous audits. you can do these companies, there are companies out there that actively look for, for exploits that are happening on chain on a per transaction basis. I know things like Ironblocks, aka Vin, has this sort of real-time monitoring of transactions. They call it like a firewall. So you can do, you can implement things like that. There's all sorts of different things we could do. I'm hoping their appetite is really large because I've got a lot of food to give them if it turns out that it is. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more

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Starting point is 00:32:35 convened to discuss the present and future of everything from tokenization to defy. Get $50 off your ticket now at meridian.stellar.org by using the code unchained pod. Back to my conversation with Ogle. CoinDesk reported that at least an early version of the project's code that later went offline, it did seem that that code had been lifted straight from Doe Finance, which, as we mentioned, had already been hacked. So I don't know what you can say about the current state of things. You know, apparently they're launching just in a few days.

Starting point is 00:33:10 What's your confidence level? I can't have a comment on the confidence level of the code because I haven't seen it. But I can say that something being forked from something else that was at once problematic is not an issue. Like, this is how everything works. You fork it and then you fix it. And then now you have a working product with a fixed bug. You don't need to reinvent everything and rewrite every line of code for it to be good. So if there was a dofine attack, which it was apparently, there was one thing that was wrong with it.

Starting point is 00:33:38 Fair enough. they fix that should be fine. I mean, this is theoretically how it works. That's what the audits are for, right? But how confident people should be coming into it is really a personal decision. It's not one that I haven't seen the code so I can't comment on it myself and I can't vouch for it. Okay. And can you give us a sense of the organizational structure behind World Liberty Financial?

Starting point is 00:34:01 Baron Trump is listed as the defy visionary. But apparently it's really more the other sons, Eric Trump and Donald Jr., who play a bigger role. But can you just give us a sense of how involved they all are and, you know, who else is part of this? Chase and Zach are pretty much the ones who are running it. They're quite successful in the past. I know you've mentioned some stuff, you know, some kind of more embarrassing, embarrassingly named businesses, like picking up Hot Girls LLC or whatever, some have run. But I know that Chase and Zach have both run very successful companies. They've done very, very well. Neither one of them. I can.

Starting point is 00:34:39 very confidently say are doing this for the, like to make cash. That's not the situation. I feel very confident about that, just knowing their backgrounds. But I think they're the business people here. That that's the way it feels to me. And then it comes with the support and ideation of the Trumps. This is what I understand. And so I wasn't involved in the early day, so I can't say like how everything happened. But what I do understand there to have been happening is a lot of conversations, a lot of buy-in over the course of a long period of time to make sure there was a lot of education on the part of the Trump side and there was a lot of alignment on the part of the guys who are running it. But what I've been told, the Trumps get it and they believe it. And it's

Starting point is 00:35:22 not BS. And because what I was worried about, I'll be honest. My concern is, okay, you know, here, same concern I think a lot of other people have is, okay, look, there's a quick way to make a few, you know, to get a few hundred million dollars of donations or whatever. And like, that's going to be, you know, that's just, that's just what it is. And they don't really care about crypto, like, you know, this sort of thing. This is kind of where I was, what I was worried about. But from having discussions with people who I've known for a long time, who I trust to tell me the truth, they said, Ogole, listen, like, these guys really believe in this. That we've talked to them over the course of a long time. We've sold them a vision of how

Starting point is 00:35:55 this could actually solidify and strengthen the United States dollar period, how this could solidify and strengthening the United States tech sector, period. They believe in it. And they see it as the future and they want to be a part of that process and that's why we are where we are. And when you talk about their quote-unquote belief, you know, this is a family that has made its money off of centralized ventures. And so are you talking about a belief in decentralization and in decentralized projects and decentralized finance? Is that what they're on board with? I believe they're on board with the idea. Okay. So I think there's personal frustration. on the part of at least a couple of the Trump sons with being debanked or unbanked,

Starting point is 00:36:42 you know, like they were made where they can't do banking in the traditional sense because of their ties to their dad. This is an understanding that I've gotten from some things I've read. And I think they like the idea that people can have in their own control the opportunity and the option to do as they wish with their money. And so they can lend or borrow with their own money, no matter if people like them or not. And I think that that's, this is just conjecture. I imagine that's probably what's most exciting.

Starting point is 00:37:14 I don't know if like decentralization per se is the most exciting thing. I don't know, you know, necessarily like exactly philosophically where they land on that from like a defy point of view. But I think they really believe in the fact that like you shouldn't be kept from doing something you want to and you should have a right to just because someone doesn't like you on a personal basis. which is a decentralization in a certain sense, right? It's like a less centralization. I don't know if it's like a totally decentralized. I don't know if we have we have two thousand nodes that are confirming things. You know, I don't know how decentralized they want to see it because I mean they are making a platform. So there's like a certain level of centralization by making your own platform, right? But you know, what what I said is is what I think is probably the case. The philosophy is in line. Right. I understand. Well, speaking of decentralization, the project also has a governance. token, WLFI, which is non-transferable, at least for launch.

Starting point is 00:38:10 Hilariously on the chopping block when they were discussing this, Tarun Chitra of Gauntlet said something like, oh, it should be tied to an Oracle that makes it transferable if Trump wins the election, which I got was a funny comment on, you know, obviously the issues that the crypto industry has with the SEC, under Biden. in the SEC under Biden, or under Gensler, I really should say. But anyway, can you talk a little bit about, you know, what they're planning in terms of governance, you know, why this is transferable, you know, what are their plans? So generally, you know, these types of projects start centralized and then become more decentralized over time. So can you talk a little bit about that.

Starting point is 00:38:52 I can't talk a whole lot about it. I mean, there is an NDA in place. And I've been told a little bit of how things will probably work or how they might work. I think, if I'm being honest, I think some of this is still TBD a little bit. Like, I mean, I know some of the, I saw Danny Nelson and the other authors. I thought it's all the article in Cueness. And I think that a lot of the, I think the draft that they got is, has a lot of TBD information in it. It was a very, is a very premature draft. I've asked specific questions like what you're asking me.

Starting point is 00:39:24 And I've asked specific questions around tokenomics, like, like you probably would ask me too. And the answers that I'm getting is like, what you've seen online is not. not correct completely. We're working through this. We're still pivoting. We're still pulling. We're still pushing. We're trying to figure out, you know, what levers need to go where and time will tell. So governance, I think, is exactly what the thing is meant to be for in the beginning. I don't know if that's a forever thing or if it's going to be just a short-term thing, but I do know that's the goal. I don't think that, you know, it's necessarily wise to pick a fight with Ginsler on things being securities, you know, so. So, I mean, if I were to look at this from, you know, from one angle,

Starting point is 00:40:05 I think that Turun has a fair point, you know, but that's just my own personal opinion here, you know, like maybe you're a little bit safer depending upon certain outcomes than others, you know, so. All right. And actually, just from the way you're answering these questions, it really does feel to me like your primary role has been advising them maybe on how to do security, but you're not necessarily advising them on like the nuts and bolts of the project. itself. Am I getting that correct? Yeah. I mean, if they had asked me to come and be an advisor for the project in general,

Starting point is 00:40:39 I would have said no, because I just don't have time. Because I have my own projects and I'm working on. I simply don't have time for that. I can't run another project, but I do have time to give advice a couple hours a week on security related topics. So yeah, you're correct. Okay. I'm sorry, because I know it's not quite as useful. It's not quite as interesting. You know, I get that. But that's all I got for you. All right. Well, one thing, that you might have gleaned, which I am also curious about, is whether or not it seems to you that the family expects that this crypto project will help Trump's presidential campaign, because they are launching it before the election. So I don't know if you have any insight into that.

Starting point is 00:41:18 My understanding is that former President Trump is extremely excited about this, like very excited about it. And I can tell you, I went to the NFT gala down in Mar-Lago the first time. The second time, The second time I was supposed to go, but I got sick. Wait, the first time, are you talking about the one last fall or the one this May? Yeah, the one last fall. Okay, got it. So I went to that one. I was supposed to go to the second one as well, but I did not make it because I was unwell.

Starting point is 00:41:46 But I went to it the first time, and I very briefly got to talk to President Trump. And I was surprised, you know, you never know what's BS and what's not, whatever you're talking to a politician. And so I was very surprised at. at what he seemed to understand about NFTs in general. Now, it could have been he was just memorizing things, but he doesn't seem like a memorizer. He seems like someone who just sort of BS is, or he actually knows something and, you know, sort of comes out.

Starting point is 00:42:13 And he didn't seem to memorize. He seemed like he actually knew what we were talking about. We were talking about NFT-related stuff. And I was like, wow, that's actually really surprising. And we left from there. I brought my grandpa with me and a friend of mine. And my grandpa, after we left her there, he got to meet President Trump to shake his hand.

Starting point is 00:42:31 and all that. And he goes, boy, that man's older than me. And he seems to know all this about technology. I should probably look into that. And I was like, God, man, that's, that's, that's incredible. Like this, like he, like Trump is a bridge to a whole group of people who otherwise, you know, would probably be like, oh, this is also complicated for me. Anyway, I'm not answering your question. I'm just telling you something else right now. So I, I was surprised at that point. And this was about a year ago almost now. And then evidently, in the one that happened in the spring, he was even more. more adept. And then at BTC Nashville, he seems even more adept and more understanding of this

Starting point is 00:43:08 stuff. And now, you know, he's, he's obviously, he's backing a project that's in it. And so, you know, if you look at me, only, only the person who has in their heart what their motivation is would know what their motivation is, right? But I think that you can see the amount of donations that are coming in from the crypto sector. What I read online was, was right now for Trump, it's the second biggest sector giving donations on a dollar per dollar basis. And so if that's true, then like, how do you ignore that? You're talking about like the new teachers union here. You have to pay attention. You have to at least pretend like you care. And if pretending like you care is enough to get people to come into crypto and actually give our whole slice of the world

Starting point is 00:43:47 a shot, then like that works for me. Yeah, honestly, I actually think this week I read that crypto is the biggest donor so far in the election. Whoa. I think I think it keeps flip-flop thing back and forth first and second. But the other thing that I thought was so funny was when you said he didn't seem like a memorizer because we're recording after the debate where that was the commentary that he probably practiced a lot of answers and didn't actually give them during the debate. Anyway, so, you know, as I mentioned, we are recording before the launch. But I did wonder, do you have any prediction for what the TVL of World Liberty Financial might be on the first day? If it's, if it's, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, you know, then, then sheba enu, then that'll be a weird thing.

Starting point is 00:44:37 Wait, less than sheba, you know, like at some, you know, not like like, like all time high, uh, sheba, you know, but I mean, shebu, you know, as it is today. Wow. Wow. Because I think, I think the height behind, I think people underestimate how much mobility of funds this is probably going to, probably going to, probably going to have. . offline. Like, like, when I talk to, like, when I talk to, you know, family members and so forth who have no idea what this is, they're like, I don't know what it is, but I heard he's going to do it. So I'm going to put 5,000 in. You know, everyone's like, there's people. Well, okay. So just, just for the audience at the time of recording, the sheep at Eno's market cap is $8 billion. So you're saying on day one, you think the TVL in this will be $8 billion.

Starting point is 00:45:27 If you mean day one in like the literal day, 24 hour period, I'm talking more biblical, you know, the biblical day one. But, but, um, okay, so like within the first month, is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like whenever, like when people have had time to get their money from the bank and put it into Coinbase and send it onto the chain, you know, do whatever they got to do, I think that that first flow, what, you know, like the first inflows, I think they're going to be significant probably.

Starting point is 00:45:53 Oh, wow. Okay. Which would put it on par with like, wrap, Bitcoin higher than like chain link uniswap, die near. Okay, interesting. Now, now, now this, by the way, is going to depend heavily, I think, on it getting a little more traction, because right now it's got a little bit less traction than I thought it would from being honest. And there has been some fud even in the cryptosphere, like you said. But I think in, you know, in a few days, like you were saying, so it will be a couple days ago once this

Starting point is 00:46:21 airs, President Trump will have said his piece. He'll have debuted it. And I think if that lands, it's going to super land. If it doesn't land, then I take back everything I've just said, and we'll figure out later. Okay. And actually, I realized one other thing I'd forgotten to ask you, so which chains will it be on? What I've read is it'll be Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:46:43 Okay. Okay. And do you know if it's on any L2s as well? I don't know anything else about that. I mean, I would love, there are specific places where I would love for it to be, but all I've heard about is Ethereum. Okay, yeah, it would probably help juice it if it was, you know, like on base, arbitram, optimism.

Starting point is 00:47:05 I think especially base, yeah, because they shoot from Coinbase and the base, boom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well, we'll have to see this is, yeah, it's going to be an interesting thing to watch. Well, at the same time, you are yourself working on your own layer one, which is glue. So just describe that for us. How is glue going to be different from other layer ones and why did you decide to launch it? Sure. So we've been building this for almost three years now, actually.

Starting point is 00:47:34 So it's been around, we've been building it for a while. We're just about to go live with our test net and the main net will be not too far from now. But it's an L1 with L2s, actually, and like non-adversarial L2s. And the idea basically was to try to accomplish some of the same things. And this is a little bit why there's an alignment with World Liberty. is try to figure out ways to onboard lots of new people, but keep them really safe whenever we do it. And so right now, the onboarding experience is complete trash in crypto.

Starting point is 00:48:06 User experience is complete trash in crypto. If you look back at projects that you interviewed six years ago and you look at the UX and you look at the UX of projects you interviewed two months ago, not a whole lot of difference, I mean, it's pretty much just as complicated as it has been, you know, the whole time. And that's a major barrier. It reminds me of in the 90s when you had to use consoles to use links to like do text-based browsing. You had to eventually, you know, someone, you know, Andreessen comes up with Netscape and you have nice visual ways of doing stuff. But we haven't got there yet.

Starting point is 00:48:40 And so the UX is complete trash in crypto almost across the board. Most of what's being done in my view in crypto is, how should I say it? is being done to show off how smart people are, basically. And so it's like, it's like a lot of like, oh, you have this particular algorithm with this particular way of blah, blah, blah, like re yada yada and this. Well, I have a separate way to do this and I can do it blindly, in fact, using zero knowledge. Oh, but I have a faster zero. Like, who freaking cares? Like, it just doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:49:11 Like, if you talk to like a regular person, no one cares about that. That's not how people are going to come into crypto. And so the way they're going to come into crypto is you say, hey, look, there's a place where you can put your money, you can make money on that, you can safely do that. And if you have a problem, there's somewhere to call. That's how people come under crypto. Simple as that. There's nothing more to it. And so we've designed a thing called glue. Glue.net is the URL. And the onboarding experience, like you can sign up with Google. You don't have to have a metamask wallet. You can sign up with Google SSO. It abstracts away. A lot of the complex. crap that goes on in crypto, and people can see their money, they can track their stuff. There's a coin market cap competitor inside of there. There's essentially a debank competitor, a portfolio viewer. There's a way for you to buy stuff, you can sell stuff. You can lend things, but you can't borrow things unless you go into advanced mode. So there's lots of these things that take away some of the choice for regular people, unless they go into

Starting point is 00:50:08 advanced mode, takes away some of the choice, but makes it simple. And so another example I'll give you on that is right now, let's say you own Apple stock and you want to own some Google stock. can you sell Apple for Google? It doesn't work like that. You go Apple to USB and then you go and you buy some Google with that, right? So these things are great if you really, really know what you're doing, if you can trade BTC to E. Like, it's fine because there's all these moving numbers and decimals everywhere. But for regular people, it's too complicated. They want to know, okay, I get $100 back. Great. Now I feel clean. What do I do with my $100? Okay. And so in our system, it's a lot more sort of familiar. to people who are just like regular folks. Last thing I'll say there is we built in a lot of security stuff for what I call the buns of the burger. So we have like institutional people and we have like regular folks coming in.

Starting point is 00:50:59 There's a lot of barriers there too. And so if you were to send me 500 bucks, which I hope you do, then nothing would get triggered. But on the other hand, if you were to send me $5 million, or if you were to send me all of your money at one time, you would require a 2FA.

Starting point is 00:51:15 And so I'll send you a text message and say, hey, did you mean to send every dollar of your money to Ogle? Did you mean to send $50,000? And these are parameters you can set that if it goes outside the parameters, if what your wallet does outside these parameters, you get double-checked. So now we get rid of rugs. We get rid of money being pulled from your account without you knowing it. We get rid of front-facing hacks that put a different version of PCS on top of PCS.

Starting point is 00:51:40 Now, a lot of these things are fixed by a lot of these sorts of things we put into the platform. This is super random, but as you've been talking, I just keep thinking about Taylor Monaghan. Have you chatted with her or worked with her? Because I feel like she's, I don't know, I feel like if you two got together, you could really jam on some idea. I've worked with Taylor 50 times on different hacks and stuff. We're in war rooms a lot of times together. We've never met in real life, which is too bad because I feel like we would be able to really riff through. Actually, you know, so I'm going to be speaking at Token 2049 years soon.

Starting point is 00:52:14 and I was talking to Alex Fiskin, and I said, hey, who do you think she should moderate me? And he said, have you ever met Taylor Monaghan? I think she'll be a great moderator for your panel. And it's not going to work out. I'm getting interviewed by someone else. But yeah, she had a similar thought to you, I think, in that. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:35 Well, so also as you were talking, you know, you described the Google sign-on and like all these different things. It does sound obviously like it, resolves a lot of the issues that we've seen over the years. But it also sounds more centralized in a way it reminded me kind of like a AOL, you know, back in the day. So, you know, what elements of this are centralized? Like, what are the tradeoffs that you're making? I love the analysis of AOL because that's exactly what I, that's exactly what I was thinking about from the get-go. I'm thinking in my childhood when I had that experience. And then you could also open up Internet Explorer and get

Starting point is 00:53:11 around all the parental controls. You have your way to go to advance. You have your way. to get to the advanced mode if you know how to, but if you don't, you stay in the side of this inside of the silo and you can't really do a whole lot that it's going to mess you up. The glue system itself is not centralized. And that's actually what makes it safer than something like Coinbase. What we're trying to shoot for is the Coinbase crowd and they don't know it, but it's safer. We want to prevent issues that came from Aschinsky and Celsius. We want to prevent FTCS issues.

Starting point is 00:53:39 We want to prevent your money being locked in the system because your money was taken in something else was done with. We don't prevent that stuff. And whether users know why or not, we just wanted to actually be safer. But we want the user experience to be good, better, the way that it is on Coinbase, the way that it is in a nice app. And so all of that I was describing to you, with the exception of the multifactor and stuff, all of this lives in what's called the hub. So it's hub.com.glu.net. It's live right now. Parts of it are anyway. But if you don't ever want to go to the hub and you just want to interact on our L2s and just do regular DFI stuff and trade on uniswap and like do all the other stuff outside of this, you're totally free to. And there's

Starting point is 00:54:19 a lot of benefit to it. We built this in a way that defy people should be super stoked. But our focus is not on that. Like that exists. That is decentralized. That is the way that everyone hopes it will be. That's like clicking in an explorer and getting out of the out of the silo. But for the people we're shooting for, it's the hub. That's that's our UX that we want them to experience. Okay, got it. So I'm assuming that when people create an account on glue, they don't need to write down a seed phrase? They don't need to. They will not be necessary to. Okay. Now, they don't have to create a hub account to begin with. You never have to interact with the hub. You go in there, just add our RPC, and you can interact with stuff just normal. You know, you don't ever have to even go to the hub. It's just, you know, that's really, I can't control the UX of other apps and the networks. So then what do I say is my differentiator there? Right? Why am I different than optimism or arbitrarum or whatever else?

Starting point is 00:55:13 There are reasons. I can give you tech reasons that I can give you, I can talk about our services layer and our security fund where I go chase down bad guys if they do stuff, which, by the way, is exactly what's going to happen. You come rug on glue. We will chase you down with every bit of, with every bit of effort as we possibly can because the idea is we can't make it foolproof, but we can make it where you'd rather go somewhere else. If you had two stores and one of the stores that's called Ethereum store, you can walk in and you can steal something and you can walk right back out and no one's going to do anything almost most of the time you can distill the food on the other side. You have the glue store, which has turrets and guns and bodyguards on the outside of it. Maybe they miss every shot they take. You never know, but is that really the risk you want to take? Just go somewhere where it's a little bit safer. So we want to make our place in general, even for the defy user, we want to make it a not fun place to be as a bad person. Now, does that result in the APRs being a little bit lower?

Starting point is 00:56:09 Maybe. It might be that case, right? Because maybe a little bit less risk is a little bit less reward. I don't know. But I think that there's a lot of people who if you said, hey, you might get half the returns on your D-Gen token staking, but you also pretty much are guaranteed not to have it rugged and is taken from you completely. Nine times out of 10, people are going to say, okay, I'll just go for that.

Starting point is 00:56:28 I'd rather take 50% APR instead of 100, but I don't have to worry about losing my lunch either. All right. I didn't need to ask because you made a reference to this that was pretty funny. Obviously, we're in this moment when there's a lot of conversation about how L2s on Ethereum are parasitic to the L1. And I notice you have these three specialized L2 chains. They're optimized for different use cases, defy gaming and asset transfer. And I wondered why you set that up that way. Was it specifically because so, you know, obviously in Ethereum we see a lot of these L2s are kind of duplicative of each other. Are you trying to make sure? that's not happening, but then also does that give you some control over whether or not the L2s are parasitic to the L1? So the L1 is only used to communicate with the L2s. And so the L1 has no scripting ability whatsoever. There's nothing you can do on the L1. You can't even do anything on there. Like it can hold tokens and that's it. There's nothing else. And you can do your own stuff. So it only communicates with these. And so right now, let's say you have optimism and have Arbitrum. Theoretically, these should be able to share a balance with each other. So if we've got 50 bucks in our operatim,

Starting point is 00:57:34 I should be able to communicate that to optimism. And optimist, yeah, he's got 50 bucks. That's okay. He's good for 50 bucks. But they won't do that because they're adversarial. They're not friends, right? They want all your TVL. They want all your TVL.

Starting point is 00:57:46 And so in our system, what we're trying to do is set up a situation where none of them are adversarial. And so we can communicate balances simultaneously across the different ones. And so you don't have to bridge your money over and over in different directions. You don't have to be on the game chain and send all your money to the game. chain before you do anything, that's not necessary. So you could be an app developer who has part of your process, perhaps like the deposit, can be on the chain that is, you know, it takes 50 confirmations and it costs $1.35 to submit it or whatever. But then when you want to pull the lever on the game, that needs to be fast and cheap. You don't need quite as many confirmations. And that can be 10 cents or

Starting point is 00:58:25 five cents or whatever the case is for guests. Right. And so we want to be able to be able to have a situation where we're not necessarily like solving the trilemma. You know, that's that's not solvable in like a single instance. But we think that if you have multiple instances that can communicate with each other, then you can sort of sort of hit that problem. Okay. And you also have this glue security fund, which apparently does continuous audits, there's bug bounties. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works and why you've built that in? Yeah. So, so a couple of things about that. So first off, part of the of that is what we'll use to go after people if they do bad things.

Starting point is 00:59:01 Right? So if they do bad stuff, we use some of that money to go and do whatever needs to happen there. But also, whenever projects come, so like, I've always found it odd. So I used to have a small auditing company as part of that Jim's group, and we did 25 or 30 audits, you know, they were fine. We did them at cost and they never made a penny on those. But we did them just because there was basically Sertic, which was a million dollars, you know, so to speak. And then there was like Joe, the auditor, who was 150 bucks and it wasn't any good. And there was nothing in between there. And projects that came. into the, in that case, the Barnett Smart Chain, they didn't have the money for the Sertic

Starting point is 00:59:34 and they didn't want to take the risk of the joke. And so I said, you know what, we can step in there. I know good people who do my own personal audits for me. We can step in. We'll pay them for their time, but it's minimal. It's 3K, 5K, whatever the case might be. And so I've been going, you know, I've been in that space for, or I was in that space for a while, not anymore. But I always found to odd that the projects were the ones who were paying for those audits and then choosing whether it goes public. That's just a screwed up situation because you're basically, like there were so many situations where there would be a project that say, okay, we'd like to buy an audit. Okay, you go through an audit. And it says, oh, there's all these issues. There's 16 different issues here.

Starting point is 01:00:12 And the project's like, yeah, you know what? Tell you what, we're going to, you guys keep that. We're going to go ahead and go live and we'll deal with it later. Or, yeah, you know, we're going to fix these two things and we're not going to sort the other ones out because you really don't know how to, and we're just going to go public. And so many projects would just go public with audited code, but not audited in the sense that, like, they actually fixed it. And this put people's money at harm. And in some cases, those things got exploited. And so I always thought it was really screwed that, like, these projects had to pay for it and then have the option of not publishing it. And so with glue, with one thing we're offering is that for projects who come on

Starting point is 01:00:48 to glue, if they're the type we're looking for and, you know, they're actually like solving a thing that we won't solve them. So maybe we don't have an NFT platform. We really won't one. Fine. Then we will say, look, if you bring a good NF2 platform onto our chain, we will pay for the audit.

Starting point is 01:01:02 We'll cover it. But just so, you know, it's going to go public, whatever happens. So this is great for the developer who believes in their product because they don't need to go find $50,000,

Starting point is 01:01:10 $100,000 to go pay for the audit. In our case, we will do it, but we're going to be honest with the users and make sure they have something safe when it comes live. So that's basically part of it. So we're just trying to take away the stuff

Starting point is 01:01:21 that's illogical. Generally speaking, I hope that if anyone listens at all is the whole point here is I'm trying to take the stuff that just, if you think about it from like six steps further back, it makes no sense in crypto. Like why is everybody fighting over this little circle here with tiny amount of TVL, which is basically the D5 space? When there's this is the centralized space, we should be pulling people from and then this is crypto. Why in the world? Is everyone focusing here? It just makes no sense at all. Like focusing, you know, just always talking about stuff that there are more acronyms than there are English words.

Starting point is 01:02:03 It just doesn't make sense. And so I'm trying in general just to kind of approach the whole entire sphere from the perspective of, does this make sense? Is this logical? And this is what both my partner and I in our previous companies, we both built big ad tech companies in the past for 14, 15 years now. And they've done well. And both of us came into those spaces too saying, okay, what are people doing? What are they doing wrong? What, how much of it is like inside baseball or sort of, you know, like language that no one's going to understand?

Starting point is 01:02:35 And how do we make that into something that's friendlier? And both of us have done that. Both of us have done well with that. And we're hoping we can duplicate that here. Yeah, yeah. This will be really interesting to watch when it launches. When do you expect it to launch? So today is mid-sept.

Starting point is 01:02:51 It's mid-September, it's mid-September 20-24 right now. If everything goes well, so we're going to be starting our, what is hopefully our last raise here soon. And if everything goes well with that process, then we should be able to have Main Net Live in the next month. Oh, wow. Yeah, the tech has been done for a long time. We're also not playing a lot of those games either.

Starting point is 01:03:11 We're not doing the, oh, we're going to incentivize developers to cut. Like, we're like, we'll get users in here first, and then you can come and build on us. We're not going to give you a million bucks and let people go sort of farm our, our grants and all that. We're not doing that stuff. So if we can raise properly and we can finish up some of the stuff that we've already got building, then we'll be live very soon.

Starting point is 01:03:32 I mean, TestNet is already live privately, and TestNet Public is being rolled out very slowly right now to people. Actually, just tonight, we're going to give our first 20 people access to the TestNet. And then we'll do another 50 or 100 tomorrow, another 50 or 100. The next day, we had a sign-up thing recently that we didn't tell people what it was for, but that's what they're signing up for. So they'll find out whatever they watch your show. what they're waiting on.

Starting point is 01:03:53 And like, will there be a token? Yes, the glue token is what powers all of this. Okay. And is that going to be a governance token? It will be a governance token. It is the gas token. It deals with our decks. It deals with our lending and borrowing platform.

Starting point is 01:04:10 It's the whole ecosystem token. It's all the big blockchain ecosystem. It's all powered by glue. All right. Well, we'll have to see. I'm excited to watch when that launches. There's been a lot of news recently. about crypto security generally, including the FBI's warning about North Korea. And I wondered,

Starting point is 01:04:28 I just was so curious, have you had experience with North Korean hackers? And if so, you know, or even if not, like what are some trends you've noticed and how they work? So the thing about North Korean hackers is you don't really know if you have experience with them or not. So, I mean, I was talking with, you were talking about Taylor Moynihan recently. I was talking to her a few months ago about this big wallet that was hacked. And there was just, So it was just so complicated and it's so good of a hack. Like in a certain way, these things are beautiful sometimes, you know, because it can't be one person.

Starting point is 01:05:03 It can't be five people. I guess it could be five, like five Vitalics maybe in one room could do this stuff. But it's just so complicated, the amount of reconnaissance that has to go into some of these attacks, just the orchestration, the execution is just so good sometimes that it has to be organized. And almost the buzzword for that is Lazarus. They say, you know what? It's so effing complicated. It's so good.

Starting point is 01:05:34 It probably is Lazarus. It's got to be North Korea. Now, whether or not that's true, I don't know. And I don't think a lot of people can know. I know the FBI put out a bulletin recently, and they said there's like specific targeting that's going on for certain ETF funds, certain crypto companies. I have seen a lot of this. People have come to me almost every day.

Starting point is 01:05:52 I get a message from someone saying, hey, look, I got a thing. I installed it. Now I'm screwed. I've seen this stuff over and over again. But whether I can distribute or whether anyone can reasonably attribute that for sure to Korea, I think it's tough to say. Okay. But do you have any, like, tips that you feel like people should be following to prevent

Starting point is 01:06:14 being hacked by them or, you know, those moments when you are suspicious that it is likely them, are there like new behaviors you're seeing from them or like new trends you're seeing and how they're trying to attack crypto projects? Yeah, they're just so clever now, like socially. They're so clever. You know, a lot of this is like they, they are doing basically to the attack what I tried to do to the recovery, which is to like humanize it and personalize it. Oh, wait. You're saying they do social engineering. Like where they, oh, wow. And that's why they're so good now because they're getting so good at that. Like that's actually what they're doing.

Starting point is 01:06:53 It's not like, oh, they send like a PDF for people. People are not opening PDFs as much as they used to. They're not opening EXE files and running them on their system with admin privileges. They're not doing that so much anymore. Most of the big companies have, you know, you're on a laptop that doesn't allow that kind of stuff. But what they're doing is they're spearfishing, they call it. And so they'll look for, you know, they're not going to target you, Laura. They're going to target your assistant, right?

Starting point is 01:07:18 And they're going to spend three weeks learning everything about your assistant. They're going to look at them on Facebook. They're going to look at their Instagram. They're going to memorize all the stuff. They're going to have a whole dossier about the assistant. Then they're going to hit up your assistant and say, hey, look, assistant, assistant A. I haven't talked to him forever. It's been so long.

Starting point is 01:07:34 But do you remember this is Zach from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We went and did this and this together. Was that crazy? Anyway, if you're still around, hit me up. I haven't talked to you forever. And if it's a person that that person, yeah, I remember Zach, but we weren't really close friends. but I do remember Zach, then they'll actually engage.

Starting point is 01:07:50 And when they engage, they spend weeks on building out a personal relationship. They'll bring in friendship. They'll even make sometimes videos or pictures that are fake a lot of times, but it's not very hard to do these deep fakes these days. And they'll build a whole relationship with this person. And they'll say, hey, look, I've actually got a job. I'm over here working at blah, blah, blah. And I'm sure Laura's great, but have you ever thought about working at Paradig?

Starting point is 01:08:15 you know and so I was like oh shoot freaking paradigm oh man I've always jimper working at paradigm and how do they know that because they've done all this research on this person this person followed paradigm from day one right and so they know they know they love paradigm and so they say oh yeah well you know what I'm going to get you an end on this I'm going to get I'm going to take care of you because you know we are our old classmates from 2003 or whatever um tell you what though my computer security doesn't allow me these guys are really really hardcore about security they don't let us use zoom and whatnot they have to we have to use Zencaster and this case. And so, and so what you want to do is you want to download Zincaster and then join me

Starting point is 01:08:52 and we'll talk about it tomorrow. So the person downloads it. Now they trust them. They go downloaded on the on the computer. Maybe the app actually works. They do have a conversation. They talk. The video doesn't work on the other side. Unfortunately, something's wrong. But now there's a virus in the system. Now there's a virus inside of the Larson network. So now they can read your emails that you send. Now they can send emails on your behalf. Now they can learn more about whoever else their next target is, then now they can do bad stuff. So if you're an ETF, that actually has to have assets. They're backing what it is your trading. That's access potentially to a lot of money. If you're a big crypto company that has users information that's

Starting point is 01:09:28 respect your viable, that's now there's access, right? And so this is how they do it. And they're really clever about it. They're really good at being patient and playing this long game. Okay. I think I, oh my God, I have so many questions. But one of the things that really surprises me is that their English is good enough to do all those things. Yeah. But the impression that I've had is their English tends not to be great, which is how a lot of people clue in that they're dealing with a North Green hacker. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, if you and I were talking right now on, on Telegram, then you send me some, you send me like kind of a broken English thing. I'm not saying you would.

Starting point is 01:10:08 I'm saying if you did. And then I copy that over to chat GPT. And I said, hey, can you, can you, can you make does not sound so bad English? And chat DPD shoots me out a good English version of it. What do I have? I have perfect English suddenly. And if I say, you know what I have? You put a little bit more slangy, if you don't mind. And then it's a little more slangy. And you know what I mean? It's not that. It's trivial to do these things if you really want to. And so, you know, we've reached a point where just like with the negotiations with money coming back, I think I think almost all this is going to rely on the actual weakest point, which is the people is the humans. It's things like greed, is things, you know, people are looking for a little more money.

Starting point is 01:10:47 They're looking for a little more recognition. I'm looking for, you know, whatever else. A lot of times these are like unsolicited, like investment offers. So if you have a company that's like maybe they're going through a round or maybe you're not, and X big, you know, Dragonfly comes and says, yeah, I'm so stoked. Actually, actually, that's so funny. I even came out of nowhere. I got a message from quote unquote Dragonfly recently.

Starting point is 01:11:08 And I happened to know the guys because I was on, I was on the show on your network. And I was like, wait a minute. Really? You're excited about glue? Okay, look, I'm excited about you being excited about glue. And then I thought to myself, this isn't real. Something just doesn't feel right. Let me forward this to him and see what he says.

Starting point is 01:11:26 And he said, yeah, now that ain't it. And so I was like, man, someone was trying to do it to me. I just remembered that as we're on this podcast right now. And so yeah, I mean, this is what they're doing. This is what they're doing. And had I said, okay, sure, they would have done exactly the process that we just did. They would have sent me some software or asked me for information or whatever. And then they would have had access early on to glue that they could hang out and not use for maybe a year,

Starting point is 01:11:51 two years, three years. And if we get big and it turns into something great, then they have, they have a good place to steal some money from. Wow. Wow. Yeah, I'm just realizing I, so I get a lot of similar messages, but I just never respond to them because I'm always, like, so they say like, oh, we're raising money, you know, we're looking for. for investors. And I'm like, don't, you know, I don't invest. So I just don't respond. I'm like, like, that's not my role. But I'm realizing now, yeah, some of them might be fishing things. I mean, you're sort of public, Laura. Like, you probably get fishing attempts every day, I would bet. You know, and there's ways, especially if someone pretends to, if someone seems like they're

Starting point is 01:12:32 your friend, but they're asking you a question that's, you know, one tip I would say is to have a way that you always do this. Right. So like, like, like if someone, like, so like, like, let's say that your old college friend messages you or your friend from childhood or whatever, always have like a thing that's in your head for something you're going to ask them that someone just couldn't possibly know or is contemporaneous. So like, hey, do you remember at, what was that book we talked about during dinner last week? Because this can't be online. It can't be online. No one could have possibly done that recon, right? And so if the person says, oh, you know, they don't have an answer, then you have a reason to believe they might be fake. But if they say, oh, we talked about, you know,

Starting point is 01:13:11 still magnolias or whatever, then now you know this is a real person on the other side. Yeah. I will say one thing, which is I get many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many hacking attempts near daily, definitely every week. Some of them are extremely sophisticated. I send them to, you know, the original source because they want to investigate. But, yeah, let's just say that you guys. You can try it, but it's not going to work because I have gotten so many of these and I've never fallen for a single one.

Starting point is 01:13:47 So, you know, give up. Guys, you're wasting your time. People are alone. Your time. But anyway, I did want to ask you, though, because in addition to the FBI's warning about North Korea, they also issued a crime report that said, quote, while the number of cryptocurrency-related complaints represents only about 10% of the total number of financial fraud complaints, the losses. the losses associated with these complaints account for almost 50% of total losses. So I just wanted to ask you, you know, you see all kinds of things. And I thought you probably have like a soapbox worth of tips that you'd like to give to the

Starting point is 01:14:25 crypto community. So, you know, just here's your, here's your opportunity. If you could save the crypto community from all these potential hacks, what are some of the tips you'd like to see them implement? Oh, gosh. So first off, do what I said a minute ago. if you're talking to someone and there's even a 0.1% chance that it might not be who you think it is, get on a video call or ask a question that there's no chance of them being able to answer

Starting point is 01:14:48 that they couldn't be online. To try your very best to not do anything without seeing someone in real life even is getting to a point where even video calls and stuff can be screwed with, there was a situation that I had a long time ago, well, six months ago with a port code where we thought we were talking to Binance, got on a video call with someone from Binance. I screenshoted the person on there just for future reference. I said, who knows? Maybe just who knows. A few weeks later, it seemed like a scam.

Starting point is 01:15:20 So I looked them up, found out who they are, went to the Binet's head of investigation. I said, hey, one of your guys inside is scamming. Here he is. I found him. This is him. He goes, that's not our guy. That was our guy. This is a deep fake.

Starting point is 01:15:31 This has been used now three or four times. We've heard about this. And someone's just deep faking this fella trying to get people to give money. So if you can get in real life with someone and give them a nice hug or something, make sure they're really a human, not like a robot walking, you know, like that'll actually be a good thing. Try, just use common sense. I mean, don't keep all of your money in a hot wallet, all the same things you've heard a million times. Whenever the FBI talks about the greatest, you know, this great amount of money being sent, although it's only 10% of hacks, that's because there's really no guardrails there. right and I hate to plug and like glue but this is exactly why we're making it like if you can't

Starting point is 01:16:10 possibly Laura send me a hundred thousand dollars without getting a text message saying did you mean to then you're not going to do it it can't but right now with crypto there's no guardrail so someone gets access to your wallet or even worse your pneumotic phrase so all of your wallets then all of your money's wiped out it's not like they get access to your checking account but they leave your stocks alone they leave your IRA alone that's not how it works with crypto you get access to the check account, you get access to your whole financial ecosystem, right? And so, so try not to keep your stuff on hot wallets. If you're going to have a lot of money on those, separate them out of the same mnemonic phrase. So in other words, use different instances. So use maybe, you know, metamask for one

Starting point is 01:16:52 wallet and say rabbi for another one and use different wallets. And these are those, you just got to be, I'm so sorry to say it. And like, it actually is extremely frustrating for me that 15 years later, this is still the kind of stuff we have to tell people because we haven't done a good enough job as developers in the crypto space to make this better. It's extremely irritating to me. We easily have the ability to make this stuff not too complicated, to make this stuff much, much, much safer for people, and we've done none of it. And they pay the price for it.

Starting point is 01:17:25 We pay the price as an industry, but the people pay the price for whatever it is that's kept people from doing this stuff. We need to do better. So until then, though, do all this complicated crap I just said. All right, Ogole. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I've absolutely loved every minute. Where can people learn more about you, Andrew Burke?

Starting point is 01:17:47 So I'm out of breath now. So on Twitter, you can find me. My username is at sign C-R-Y-B-T-O-G-L-E, so Crypt-O-G-G-L. and the website for my project is glue.net. Perfect. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on Unchained. Thank you so much, Laura. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Ogle, Cryptosecurity, Glue, and World Liberty Financial, check out the show notes for this episode.

Starting point is 01:18:19 Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Matt Pilcher, Juan Ivanovanovanovanovich, Megan Gavis, Pamma Jimdara, and Margaret Curia. Thanks for listening. Unchained is now a part. of the Coin Desk Podcast Network. For the latest in digital assets, check out markets daily, five days a week, with host Noel Atchison. Follow the Coin Desk Podcast Network

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