E137: Ava Labs CEO: Crypto's Next Boom Will Happen Within 5 Years!

29:51And now that the technology is real and here, we realized we were wrong. We were led to a blind alley. And Ethereum was doing this again and again and again. And I watched this happen. I watched a whole bunch of other chains bring absolutely nothing to the space. Ethereum at least tried to bring some stuff. And as a technologist, it really irked me that there was a big group of people essentially in the business of selling hopes and dreams, but not really materializing them. So I thought, hey we we know how to build stuff we know the best of technology we have a pragmatist side to us we know which technologies are are essentially and not quite here and we'll have huge drawbacks and which technologies will really move the needle and so i thought hey let me bring this new sensibility into crypto why do you think that there was that these people were doing these things that way is it because i mean straight scams is it because oh now we raised the money but the actual thing is hard to do is build right but we don't need to build because we have the money um is it because they tried but it failed it's all of those you know there's a multitude of people um some people are in it for just scams you know you hear about some chain that comes out of nowhere, brings nothing to the space.

31:13You don't know why it's supposed to be good. Or a new asset shows up. There's a guy behind it, especially if the guy's quirky, right? He's acting like he's, you know, it's a dumb person's idea of what the genius looks like, right? So, you know, curly hair, can't tie his shoes, right? I'm referring to SPF here, of course. Never understood what he brought to the space. I was like, I'm just some rando dude. I have a lot of rando dudes in space and uh and so people go hey okay so that's uh that's easy to identify scams they're also um so hopeful optimists they're like hey you know i don't really know much about this technology but it sounds like it could fix some problem i have and then they go following uh that path i think a lot of people in ethereum followed uh verifiable delay functions vdf's we're going to you know for a long time that was going to be the scalability approach for ethereum all of us knew in academia that was a dead end.

32:08So it was VDFs, that didn't pan out for them. VRFs, verifiable random functions, were going to be key to scaling Ethereum. That didn't work out. And then accumulators were going to help, and that didn't work out. SNARCs, and that didn't work out. And then ZKE VMs, and that didn't work out. So there was that shiny object phenomena that was just plaguing that community. And that's definitely not scams. Those people really genuinely thought, hey, these technologies will fix it. But it got to a caricaturized version of itself towards the end where essentially what they were doing is looking at the cryptography journals and picking the latest, shiniest object and holding that up in front of their audiences as opposed to actually getting into the weeds and solving actual scalability problems.

32:52So it was against that backdrop that we did the avalanche work and thought, hey, we really need to show the world how this is done. It sounds like the people who make the most noise don't know how to get us to the destination. So you launched avalanche because crypto was full of idiots who make wrong decisions. Has this changed? Yeah, I think it has. I think it has. A lot of things have changed. I think the days of constantly selling dreams are over. The days of technical influencers directing huge money flows are over. The days of selfies are over. You take a selfie with Vitalik and you're like, hey, I'm Ethereum aligned.

33:36No, dude, you just copied some code. You're running it on your laptop. There's nothing crypto about what you're doing. It's just essentially a scam at that point. So I think those days are gone. We just went through the phase of proximity to politicians, right? We went through the selfies with Trump era, and I think that's done as well. I think we're getting to the show me era, where people will demand to see actual proof of working systems, and selling dreams is going to be harder and harder. And so I can't wait, because that's when we shine, because we've been building quietly in the background these large systems with large partners that really change the way things work we really proud pride ourselves on building things that actually work that are actually usable and um and i'm really excited about what's to come what did you do differently when you launched avalanche that helped you stand out in a sea of layer ones and helped you become one of the biggest projects by market cap worth more than 60 billion dollars in 2021 yeah so what did we We do right.

34:41We did a lot of things right. I think we brought to the space the biggest breakthrough in the most important area that limited scalability, and that was consensus protocols. So for those of you in the audience who are following sort of the technical evolution of these systems, there are only three different approaches to consensus. A lot of people will say, oh, we have a novel consensus mechanism. No, they don't. They're like, you know, it's like there's a hat, you know, a hat is a way to keep the rain out. And they're putting feathers on it. It's like, hey, mine is novel. No, dude, it's just a basic hat.

35:14You put a feather, you put two feathers, 15 feathers, whatever the hell you put in. Maybe you put, you know, whatever, stringers on it. But it's still a hat at the end of the day. So umbrellas are a different technology, right? So we brought the new technology into the space. There are only three ways of doing consensus. The Bitcoin way, the classical consensus way, which is what I was using in Karma, which is what Ethereum and Solana and others are using, and then the Avalanche way. So that was one of the main technical, and it's probably the biggest technical breakthrough in the space of consensus protocols in the last 50 years, the entire time that this area has been around.

35:48That was one. Number two, we did our launch in a way that is absolutely the most conducive to participation. We always worked to make sure that crowds could participate in our success. We offered the same terms to everybody. We allowed everyone to get in on the ground floor and build large systems with us. Number three is relentless dedication by our community to essentially pushing Avalanche to wherever it will go. And that's how we were able to get cutting-edge partnerships. We were able to get absolute users who came to us and said, hey, without announcing to anyone, we've been using our system because it's one of the few systems that actually work and handles the load that we have.

36:36So those are things that really helped us. And it's hard to pinpoint any one thing, but in combination, they brought us to where we are. Why did you do wrong? What did I do wrong? It cost so many things. I think one of my greatest problems has always been the difficulty of getting the word out. I think my marketing has always been weak. And so if you look at Avalanche and if I had to identify the thing that I'm the weakest at, that would be by far the area where I need the most help. So when you have a chain, that's got nothing to it, right? There's no new technology. It's just a chain where it's running on your laptop or it's running on your laptop and five of your friends' laptops, right?

37:22So then you have all the time in the world to push that thing. You have all the time to think about how you're going to market that thing. And there are many chains like this. And the people behind them, you know, they're fantastic at marketing that. That's what they do, right? That's like, you know, all day long, every day, that's what they think about. And in contrast, we are constantly pushing the boundaries of the technology. We're constantly bringing the best of tech, best of science into Avalanche. I'm running a fairly big show with hundreds of people, hundreds of devs, developing new technologies, new things on top of Avalanche.

37:56And so that didn't leave me as much time to get the word out. And I think to this day, I would say that that's the part where I'm weakest. And from my own community, that's one of the things that I need the most of, the help with getting the word out. I had Gavin Wood from Polkadot on this podcast, and he firmly believes that the best tech must win and will win. What do you think about that? Best tech doesn't always win, doesn't have to win. But in the long term, the chain that will come out ahead will be that which can absorb the enormous growth we're going to have in this space. That I firmly believe in.

38:37And if we think about sort of the systems out there, you know, let me characterize them, right? So you have very early systems of generation one chains like Bitcoin, where you have a single asset, BTC, and a single chain. Then you have generation two, which is Ethereum, Solana, and others, which are multi-asset, but single chain. There's a single chain. Everybody must use that one chain. But you can have multiple assets on that chain. So that's okay. But those things conk out. When somebody is doing an NFT release, when someone's doing an airdrop, Ethereum becomes unusable. Solana becomes unusual.

39:14Solana stops. It used to stop a couple of times a month. So then the third generation, the latest generation of systems out there, and there are only a few of these, are the systems that are multi-asset, multi-chain. Avalanche is at the forefront of these. Gavin's system, Polkadot, is another one of them, and Cosmos is another one of them. So the three of us are the multi-chain systems. And the multi-chain thesis has been borne out. That is to say, our approach to scalability is the one that can absorb the growth. As new applications develop their own chains on top of us, that adds to our performance.

39:50We don't have to compete for performance. And we can absorb the growth that is to come from all sorts of industry, all sorts of governments building their own systems on the blockchain. You call Avalanche the home of layer ones. Yes, it is. What does that mean? Explain simply, no jargon. No jargon. Avalanche is not a single chain. It allows anyone to build their own blockchain on top. It's a network of networks. So it's very different from Ethereum, very different from Solana, very different from Bitcoin and others. It's essentially a network of networks where anyone can start their own chain according to their own rules, digitize their own assets, use their assets as gas, use their assets as collateral, use their assets for staking, use it for whatever they might want to use their asset for on their own terms.

40:42This enables us, this enables our users rather, to build custom application-specific chains. They can build a chain for use by Europeans according to European rules, GDPR rules, etc. They can create a chain for use by people on Wall Street, by people who are doing games, who are doing whatever else that they might want to do. And these things can then communicate with each other in a seamless fashion. We bring to the space what Ethernet brought to computer networking back in the 80s. Can you give me an example of what Ethernet brought back into the 80s, but in the Ethernet and Internet era so people can understand better?

41:21Sure. Yeah. So what happened back then was essentially a transformation from single mainframes, from single servers, to multiple servers that interoperate with each other. It enabled campuses to connect to each other, to send messages, emails from one campus to another, and that gave us the birth of the internet. The internet got created by people connecting campuses to each other via these network connections. In a similar fashion, Avalanche allows you to create a chain, me to create a chain, and these chains to interoperate by sending messages back and forth. These chains to send assets from one chain to another, whenever that makes sense, and facilitates the interoperable collection of these chains that operate together.

42:10I had a conversation with Anatoly from Solana, Gavin Wood from Polkadot, Stephen from Arbitrum, Jesse Pollack from Bayes, a bunch of other people. Each one has a different approach to scaling. How does Avalanche scale? You said before, the ones that will be at the forefront are the ones that are going to be able to scale when we hit this moment of mass adoption. Yeah. So the Avalanche approach to scaling is to allow multiple chains to coexist under the same rubric, under the same umbrella. That's very different from every single person that you mentioned in that list. So all of these people are going to try to jam-pack all users onto a single chain.

42:57Base, Solana, and everything else that you just mentioned. These are all single chains at the end of the day. And every user, in effect, competes with every other user for blockchain space on that chain. The Avalanche approach is different. When you have a use case, then you can start your own chain that operates according to its own rules on its own terms with its own validators, with its own resources. And that chain can interoperate and communicate with other users that have built different chains. We don't have to jam-pack them onto the same infrastructure, onto the same set of limited resources.

43:33That is the biggest difference between us and everyone else that you just mentioned. You talked about gaming before when you talked about each asset or each thing that has value today will be on a blockchain, right? Avalanche is pretty focused on a bunch of things. One of them is gaming. Why do some people call Avalanche the gaming blockchain? So some people do call it that. I never do. We work really hard to make sure that we have built a platform that's usable for anything and everything under the sky. There are many, many, many other use cases besides gaming. But a lot of games come to us because they have really stringent requirements.

44:19The gameplay has to be fantastic. The gameplay has to be super fast. It has to be seamless. And the system overall has to be reliable. Imagine you turn on your PS, whatever it is, 5 today, 15 tomorrow, and you can't connect or whatever. the performance is not good enough or you kill somebody but you can't collect their resources because you lack enough coins for gas. Like that's just not a usable platform. So gaming developers have been coming to us saying we've studied what's happening in the space. Yours and yours alone is the only system that we trust for our demanding users. And I'm really proud of our track record in this case.

44:58Off the Grid is a huge game that launched on top of us. I believe they have more More than 15 million users. So in the last bull cycle of crypto, there were these chains that made a crap ton of noise. In fact, a bunch of the people that you just mentioned, you sum up all the users for quite a few of them, sum up every single one of their users and they still wouldn't approach this one game, the number of users this one game brought to Avalanche. So when you have such a big load, when you have such high reliability requirements, speed requirements, then you know where to go. And that's Avalanche.

45:32That's what people have been doing to us. What's the right way to do crypto gaming? So, and that's, this is going to sound super obvious. So, but it wasn't obvious a few years ago. So a few years ago, everybody thought Web3 gaming was, you know, Axie Infinity, Ponzi-esque games. You know, I take your coin, I sit on it, and I don't know what you pay me or I pay you, but new users pay old users, something like that. It creates just very Ponzi-like behaviors. and people thought it was all about that kind of terrible financial transactions. We had the world's simplest thesis, which was build a game that's compelling to play.

46:09Build a AAA game that's compelling to play and put it on a blockchain infrastructure so that it has the ability for the gamers to participate in running the game, in enforcing the rules that allows people to create third-party value-added services. And the first exemplar of this was Godzilla's off the grid. I mentioned this already. It's set on an island. You're what's called a zero, like a mercenary who's got nothing to lose. You cut your arms off. You cut your legs off. You put these mechanical arms and legs. And then you jetpack onto the island. You start killing people in that game. But then more recently, we've had MapleStory come in.

46:49And MapleStory is exactly the opposite. it. It's many, many, many millions of users, especially in Southeast Asia, who love the game. They have tens of millions of users. And it's a very much different universe, gentler universe. But again, all the game interactions are happening on a blockchain so that they're open, auditable, and so on. In these games, often the game designers will say, hey, here's a new weapon. We're going to sell it for this much, and there'll be only so many of them. And to this day, you couldn't really audit that. Do you really know how many, you know, whatever it is, World of Warcraft, whatever swords of death there were?

47:27No one knows these things. But with off the grid, that's easily auditable. With MapleStory, that's this new version of it that's on Avalanche now, everything is auditable and transparent. What is MapleStory Universe and what's the relationship with Avalanche? MapleStory Universe is an independent company. It's a gaming company based in Korea, I believe, with a huge installed user base with a huge set of people who grew up playing these games. It's really hard to explain this, but I think your audience will immediately recognize the artistic style of the MapleStore universe. It's a lovely game with a large number of people who grew up playing it.

48:07And that game was recently, by the creators of the game, moved to a blockchain foundation as an Avalanche L1. So they're building on Avalanche, they're using Avalanche, and they built their own chain on top of this. You see RWA, Real World Assets, as a foundational layer enabling future DeFi applications. Absolutely. Can you explain what that means? Sure. So, what are RWA? That's an acronym, Real World Assets. We firmly believe that everything of value should be on a blockchain. That's the best way to maximize its value. Its reach should not be limited by technological means. If I want to sell something, I should be able to sell it to anybody on earth and transfer ownership immediately to anyone.

48:53So that was the core vision. And when we were starting out, our byline was digitize all of the world's assets. So Avalanche's mission initially was essentially this. And so why is this important? Well, for example, recently Bergen County in New Jersey announced that they would be putting about$200 billion worth of land records on Avalanche. And they came to this conclusion after doing a thorough study of the technological offerings provided by different chains and thought Avalanche is the foundation that we're going to be building on. When you have that much, so let's actually roll back a little bit.

49:37Those of the people in your audience who ever did a title transfer will know that when you do a title transfer, it's actually a complicated process. You typically need title insurance. You need to make sure that you are not being scammed, that the person selling the title to you indeed has it and so forth. So putting those assets on chain immediately fixes all of the uncertainty with ownership. Transfers are very, very easy to audit. Competing claims are easy to ascertain, et cetera. And in addition, once those assets are on chain, then they become the foundational pieces of value on which you can do decentralized finance.

50:15When you have your deed in your hand, you can simply put that up as collateral and borrow against it. And that need not be a weeks long process with a bank, but instead it's essentially a fairly, it can be an automated process that's done on chain within a few minutes. How big is this RWA thing? Trillions and trillions of dollars. So I think there's about 700 trillion in assets in the world. And real estate alone is about 200 trillion of it. There are many other assets that are real world besides real estate, of course. So many hundreds of trillions worth of assets will be digitized in the next decade.

50:57if blockchain fixes this there's the meme bitcoin fixes this why is it so slow the the process of transformation because because of regulatory lack of clarity so i think for well actually that's not true um why is it so slow i think for the first decade for decade and a half is spent solely on education as as was the case with with the internet the internet started becoming a real thing in the 80s. People were using email in the 80s. It's only in the mid-90s that people realized, hey, this thing can do more than email. This thing can do all sorts of other things. And then it started with the dot-com thing, and then we got differentiation within dot-com.

51:38So that first decade and a half just got absorbed. You saw no progress. In the 80s, people would be like, why is the internet not exploding? Well, because not enough people understand how it works, what it could do. So there is that. The initial part is just education. The secondary part is regulatory clarity. And the third one is essentially differentiation, market forming, double-sided market formation, et cetera. Many of these processes are human processes that take time. And humans are slow. Oh, sure. They are. The technology is now here. The technology goes fast, but people, yeah. If you look at, and this is blockchain, which is like very intimidating for a lot of people.

52:19But if you just look at data, right? Data is the same problem. There was all this big data thing, whatever, 10 years ago. Then AI, everything is so slow because humans are slow. The technology is going fast, but the people are slow.

52:36Another big one building the layer one blockchain on the top of Avalanche is FIFA. Yeah, they are, yeah. Why did FIFA choose Avalanche and why now? I think that's the question best directed to them. So FIFA was a fantastic partner. You know that they have requirements that are very demanding. So many of the chains that make a lot of noise out there just lack the underlying capacity to support what FIFA needs. One of the key differentiators for us, I'm going to repeat what I said earlier, but that's the answer to the question. FIFA needs its own chain that operates according to its own rules, and that chain needs to be fast and reliable.

53:23And Avalanche is the only system that had those characteristics for them. What's the end game for Avalanche? The end game is to dominate the world and provide the rails for everybody to digitize all of the valuable things that they have. you're saying that that's not the end that's I think the beginning a new beginning you're saying that the avalanche approach is multi-chain right but ultimately does the end game for avalanche mean that everyone is in your ecosystem everyone is building on avalanche or is there a world where we have this kind of multi-chain approach with other ecosystems other of these other ecosystems that have a very different way of thinking that new?

54:07Yeah, that's an interesting question, right? So if you fast forward a couple decades, is it gonna be a single system to rule them all or is it gonna be a multitude of systems that interoperate with each other? So if you look at what's happened on the internet, the technologies disappear, they get commoditized, they get hidden behind layers, but usually what happens is one technology dominates. So I do believe that it's going to be a winner-takes-all environment. That winner has got to be technologically, foundationally, and fundamentally able to absorb multiple different use cases. And so that's, I think, the end world that we're moving to.

54:52Bitcoin, even Bitcoin, I see a couple of decades from now needing the kinds of fast transfers at the settlement layer that Avalanche offers. So I can see actual ways in which Bitcoin would be married, so to speak, with Avalanche. Bitcoin would always have its own proof of work mining foundation. But I can see approaches where you put Avalanche in front of Bitcoin, and then the Bitcoin mining comes in and sort of double stitches, right? It adds proof of work to decisions that have already been made by an avalanche L1 that's sitting in front of Bitcoin. So I think the universe is one where we go to a fast, fast, fast foundation and there's going to be a winner-takes-all kind of a dynamic there.

55:39And I'm really excited about how flexible Avalanche is in that it can absorb these other chains and allow them to keep on doing their core operation on top of Avalanche and tie into Avalanche's interoperability, its low latency, and its high capacity. I recorded recently with Lily from Solana Foundation. She says Bitcoin is the asset. Solana is the infrastructure. Okay. I don't know what those means. So for you, it's not Bitcoin is the asset? Bitcoin is an asset, of course. And Avalanche is the infrastructure. Right. Lily would say that, and it's a great soundbite. Solana is an infrastructure for one chain, and there is absolutely nothing that's compatible between Solana and Bitcoin.

56:30Whereas Avalanche is really a network of networks, and it's very different from Solana and Ethereum. So we are the technology, we are the rails for other assets to flourish on. And I'm really excited about that future. You share with me some very difficult moments that many people are not aware of. While many only saw the man behind the blockchain valued at tens of billions of dollars, you spent three years managing a family health crisis with cancer affecting two of your family members. Oh, right. That's right. All while running the most successful, one of the most successful companies in crypto and all during COVID.

57:11Yeah, that was a rough time. So I can tell you what happened. You know, it's not something I've shared much before. But let's see, 2019, well, 2018 or so, my father got diagnosed with cancer and I had a family member taking care of him. and I was going back to visit him regularly. But then that family member also got sick, also got diagnosed with cancer. And so that was actually very rough. And then COVID came along just all at about the same time. And so I spent a couple of years flying back and forth, trying to take care of my ailing father. And all the while, you know, with essentially other family, also suffering from a pretty awful disease.

58:01and dealing with the difficulty of traveling during COVID and essentially trying to help people or even a compromise during COVID. So I would travel, I'd be in quarantine, I'd be living in Airbnbs because you can't just go to the regular house. I'd be in quarantine in the Airbnb and spend the requisite number of days and go to the hospital and I've got two people in the same hospital at the same time sometimes. It was a very, very rough time. What did you learn about life and the fragility of our existence? And even a lot of money involved in your business, but you realized that probably it's just money and it doesn't help much.

58:40That's just money. I was never motivated by money when I got into this space. So the things I learned, I learned quite a lot about family, about values, about what is important to people, what ought to be important to people, how resilient people are and how much strength anyone can have, anyone can muster up under duress. So yeah, it was an eye-opening time. What did you change in your life after that? Through that, it's a slow process of transformation. It wasn't a flip or anything. But before then, I was more sort of a standard kind of person. people would ask me like hey what do you do for fun and i would have an answer to what i did for fun and then there was this long period where i just couldn't like what what do i do for fun i don't know um right uh who am i i don't know i cut away a large portion of how i defined myself because i just didn't have time to to dedicate to it and uh and uh and i suddenly found a new a new identity a new set of things that really deeply mattered to me not a new one but you know I realized what set of things actually matter to me, what really makes me me.

59:55And it's not the hobbies, it's not what I do. And that really, that was eye-opening. That was really eye-opening. And what's really important just comes to the surface when you're under stress. That's when everything comes to the surface. What's the most important thing to you in life? These days, it is being able to change the world. It's showing the world how it can be much, much better. And I want to prove to all of the crypto naysayers that crypto is not this evil thing, that the things that they hate about big tech, especially the progressives out there with whom I identify, they have this hatred.

1:00:39A lot of Democrats, especially, they demonstrated that they hate big tech and they hate crypto. and I want to prove to them that crypto is the solution to a lot of the problems that they perceive with big tech. The concentration of wealth that big tech creates that they really rebel against is something that crypto can address. The data management problems, the fact that these titans collect our information and sell it and monetize it, that is something that crypto can fix. And I want to show everybody on earth how much better our lives can be if value is stored on a chain, can be transferred, sold, etc.

1:01:15If we can create new economies for people, the world will be a better place. So that's something that drives me. That's something that I'm super passionate about. We're recording this conversation from New York. On a very hot day. Very hot. During a heat wave.

1:01:35You live here. I do. Why? Why does anyone live in New York? It's a great question. This is the The area with the most regulatory scrutiny. This is the area with probably one of the highest taxation rates, right? So why would anyone choose to come here and domicile here and live day and night here? And if you look at blockchain projects, I think you can categorize them into a couple of groups, three groups. You've got those people who start their project and go to Silicon Valley. Those are the people who think that what they have is a tech play. They see blockchain as a tech idea, and they go to where big tech is, and they want to sidle up to big tech and tie into the tech community.

1:02:21These people usually base their entire existence and their entire chain around a singular, simple tech idea. They have a one-trick pony, and they want to hire the kind of talent that can sort of ride that pony as far as it will go, and they'll push their thing. These projects are never successful. They never succeed because this is not a tech play. This is a societal transformation play. You've got those people who start their project and they go to a tax haven. They go to Dubai. They go to, I don't know where else, but they go to Austin. They go to a place with low taxation. They're going to sell their tokens and they're going to get out.

1:02:56Those people have no staying power. They're not ideologically driven. They're just there to sell things. And then there's the kind of people that are kind of like us. I came to New York because this is where the world's value is. This is where the assets are. The financial assets are right here. We're not afraid of the regulatory scrutiny. We welcome it. We do everything by the book, right by the book. And we take a lot of technological risk by advancing tech, by bringing science into the space. And we necessarily don't take any other risk on any other front. So I'm really proud to be here. I'm really proud to be a New Yorker.

1:03:32I'm really proud that we have the connections that we do to big institutions that we've built so far over the years. You left Turkey to come here to the U.S. where nothing was working as we talked about before. Back then, no. And you moved to the U.S. which was supposed to be where freedom exists and anything is possible and everything works. Well, I wouldn't say that, but things do work better here. And you ended up being debanked. I did. Can you explain what happened? Oh God, yes, I can explain what happened. So let's see, this is not something that I've touched upon in public too, too much, but yeah, I was debanked.

1:04:10I was debanked by the Biden administration. I did not know this at the time. I'll tell you what happened. It's the same day that the family member got diagnosed with cancer. My second family member got diagnosed with cancer. on the eve of that day, some guy rang the door, my open door, some messenger dude handed me something, made me sign it. I got it. I opened it up. And there was a nondescript little letter from my bank that I had used for maybe a decade and a half. And I had a mortgage with him with that bank. And in fact, the bank's regional manager had called me up maybe two months ago and said, you're one of our top clients and anything you want, let me know, we'll do anything, da, da, da.

1:04:53He was being so nice to me because I had raised some funding for Ava Labs and I was keeping all of those funds in the most secure, most conservative investment vehicle, which meant that we didn't really get much interest on that money. They collected a lot of value off of that. So I was doing things very conservatively. They loved me for it. And so it's that same bank. sent me a letter that said, you are no longer going to be our customer. Please come to the bank to collect a cashier's check for the remaining balance and go somewhere else. And I didn't understand what was happening. I was like, why?

1:05:31Why would I suddenly and out of the blue be losing my banking access? And so I didn't understand the system so well back then either. And so my first thought was, hey, I got placed on the OFAC list. The OFAC list, for those of you in the audience who might not know, is this list that the United States maintains of people who should not have access to the financial system. So I went to start Googling for OFAC. And it turns out there's a governmental website and you can query the OFAC list. I started querying for variants of my name. and it turns out, you know, the OFAC list is just like a bunch of names like, you know, I don't know, Abu al-Bakir, this, all that.

1:06:15It's just ISIS. So it's like a bunch of ISIS operatives and I'm looking at this and I'm like, what the hell could have happened? I'm a respectable professor at an Ivy League institution, one of the top few in the world. And how would I end up on this list? Did I end up on this list? I don't see my name on the list, but maybe this is not the most current version. Maybe there's a different version that the bank is going to... Anyway, I was losing my mind. I didn't get an answer. I called the bank. The bank is like, we don't know why you're being debanked. It's happening at a very high level. And so long story short, today we know what happened.

1:06:51Behind the scenes, the Biden administration decided to enact a policy of harassment for crypto. They didn't like crypto. And instead of being mensch about it, instead of coming up and saying, hey, we don't like this, change it. don't do these things, do these things instead. Instead of setting guidelines, they decided to harass people in this area and they decided to put pressure on the banks to push crypto people out. So this was really, really terrible. The amount of stress that these guys created is something that I will never forgive them for. Absolutely the worst days of my life were those days.

1:07:30And I know exactly who was involved and I cannot wait to primary those individuals. I cannot wait to... Essentially, the best revenge is going to be to watch them use Avalanche as they buy cars, sell cars, buy property, sell property, buy stocks, and all so on. Why would they do that? Why would they do what? Debank crypto people. It's a bunch of things. I think, surely, it came out that some of these people were getting funding from American Banking Association. So basically you have the loop, right? Because the bank is saying we don't know. Yeah. And basically we cut you out or cut you off, but we are actually the ones who are kind of lobbying.

1:08:17Yeah. Yeah, that was happening. There's also hatred of tech and hatred of crypto, which are two separate things, by the way. And I alluded to this before. Crypto is a solution to the problems that people perceive with tech, but somehow it got lumped together. and just lack of understanding and a whole bunch of other things. I'm not going to say that all crypto is good. That is not the case. There are a lot of scams in crypto, a lot. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater is the worst thing you could be doing. And then these blanket statements about, oh, you know, like whatever, all of crypto is this, that, and the other.

1:08:47That's just absolutely horrible and usually comes from this Luddite camp in certain circles, in democratic circles. They just want to go back to a simpler time. And they just don't understand the value that technology brings to them. What needs to happen for crypto to go fully mainstream? There are a couple of things. So at the moment, I think we have the right architecture for being able to absorb the growth. What we don't have is the front end. Your interface, my interface to services is absolutely abysmal and fraught with difficulty. using DeFi is very, very tough. So one of the things that we're doing on Avalanche that I'm really excited about are chains powered by AI.

1:09:33So instead of chains where the chain has a virtual machine in it, you interact with the chain by issuing instructions, written opcodes and so forth, like essentially writing Excel programs. Instead of that, we are building a chain where you interact with the chain by specifying something in your natural language. You say it in French, You say it in Tagalog, you say it in Mandarin, whatever your natural language might be. You dictate it to the chain and the chain embodies in it multiple AI agents that interpret your intent based on what you said and carry it out if there's a clear intent that they can discern.

1:10:08So I'm really excited about this because it cuts away a lot of the difficulty of smart contract programming. And wallets have to change. Wallets are very difficult to use. the way we interact with services by going from one website to another, that has to change. There's a lot that has to change, and we're at the forefront of it. We built this wallet called Core that is designed to address this difficulty. It's improving every day, and I'm really excited about where Core will take us, how it will allow regular people to use chain services. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months?

1:10:44The next 12 months are going to see a complete reversal, I hope, of Trump's policies. I think there are a bunch of things that he did initially to get people to the table, to try to strike deals with various adversaries. And the normalization from that should happen in the next several months. As we normalize and go back to a fully functioning global economy, it's going to be time again for people to realize, hey, blockchain brings a lot of good. The new, again, next 12 months, the new regulations related to both stable coins and the market structure bill are going to allow people to say, hey, I now understand the foundations.

1:11:26I can build my services on the blockchain and I can digitize my assets. So those will make a huge dent. The days of Vitalik selfies Selfies are over. That's good to have. The days of Trump selfies will come to an end in about 12 months, in about a year or so. And it's going to be a do or die. Show us. Show us how you can actually function. No more promises. No more dangling technological solutions to this and that. Just show us what you've built. Show us what you've built. Thank you so much, Amin. Thank you for having me. This was great fun. As you probably know by now, I host some of the biggest names in Bitcoin and crypto on my podcast.

1:12:07But a lot of the best stuff never makes it on air. The Shift newsletter is where I share that raw behind the scene alpha, the insights, stories, and lessons straight from my guests that you won't hear anywhere else. If you want the real insight take on Bitcoin and crypto, join my newsletter, The Shift, in the description down below.

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