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Blockchain in 2024 Pioneering the Future of Decentralized Innovation
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00:00Hands up if you're feeling bullish this morning.
00:06Yeah, we'll get to that, don't worry.
00:10Welcome to Blockchain Innovation. My name's Mark.
00:13I am a creative Web3 and tech writer, and I host the Thinking on Paper podcast and book club.
00:19And today's very special guest needs no introduction, but deserves one.
00:24Kathleen Breitman is the co-founder of Tezos Instrumentl, not only in the strategy, evolution, and direction of Tezos,
00:35but a champion of the blockchain space in general to do good for the world.
00:41Kathleen, welcome, and how are you?
00:45I'm very well. Thank you for having me.
00:48Yeah, no, it feels a bit poetic to come and speak about Tezos in Paris
00:52because the first development shop that we contracted for to make a prototype was indeed based in the 16th.
00:59So it very much has some French origins, and a lot of interesting use cases have come out of the
01:06French ecosystem.
01:07Yeah, well, let's start.
01:09Nous sommes à Paris.
01:11Let's start with the French touch, the French innovation in blockchain.
01:16Anything that particularly stands out for you or that you think we're there leading the field in innovation?
01:23Yeah, I mean, France has a great engineering tradition, and so you could get really wonderful engineers very easily close
01:30to Paris.
01:31So Nomadic Labs, which is probably the biggest development hub in the Tezos ecosystem, is based in Paris indeed.
01:39And no shortage of great engineering talent, and you've seen that with other ventures in the cryptocurrency space.
01:46Ledger, which is probably the leading hardware wallet, is also a French origin.
01:49So there's good connections to the Parisian ecosystem.
01:54I know Binance also has a big outpost here.
01:56So Paris definitely punches above its weight.
01:58I like that. It definitely does punch above its weight.
02:01So we were going to start with something else, but then obviously yesterday we got the big news that the
02:07Ethereum Spot ETF has, well, stage one of the, it's not completely finalized yet, but the first stage has been.
02:16I put my money in the fact that it's going to be approved.
02:19So we're here to talk about innovation in blockchain.
02:22What does it mean for Tezos and the wider crypto blockchain community?
02:27Well, it certainly do risk the proposition of, you know, getting more into cryptocurrencies as we see more and more
02:33financial capital markets accept or approve cryptocurrency-related products.
02:39That's just a net good for the industry.
02:41Just to take it back a step, though, basically cryptocurrencies, what are they?
02:46You know, they're a way for you to have a peer-to-peer transaction with someone on the web without
02:50the use or risk of an intermediary.
02:53Ultimately, what I think this could do and what is, you know, fundamentally why I'm excited about it is lowering
02:59the ticket price for financial services.
03:01You know, basically obviating the need for clunky banks and, you know, obscure contracts written by lawyers you can't afford
03:09and making this more accessible for everyone.
03:11So in some ways, you could argue that ETFs, exchange-treated funds, basically baskets of cryptocurrencies that would, you know,
03:19trade on an exchange like the NYSE are a bit of an anathmia or even a little bit of a
03:25step back for the space because it's basically taking something that ought to be peer-to-peer and wrapping it
03:33in a financial institution.
03:34But I think it's a pretty important step in terms of creating the legitimacy of the industry.
03:41So not everyone is going to have the wherewithal to own and custody their own funds using a ledger, perhaps.
03:49But I think, you know, this does solve the problem of creating more mass distribution and accelerating something that I
03:56think will be more of a threshold effect once, you know, critical mass of people own cryptocurrencies.
04:00I hope that they'll be more normalized and more accepted.
04:03And I suppose in that sense, if, you know, you're maybe not super tech savvy, but you like want to
04:09support the cause, maybe, you know, buying a Bitcoin ETF or a Ethereum ETF is a good way to participate
04:15in the normalization of what is a very wonky experiment.
04:21A very wonky experiment, did you say?
04:24Yes.
04:28Legitimacy is a key word in this, I think, does give people the legitimate right, envie to come into the
04:37space.
04:37And that will heighten the innovation.
04:41So perhaps moving, people come for the DeFi, for the finance, but then they start investing and building elsewhere.
04:46elsewhere, but for people here, where might they be surprised to hear that blockchain is being innovated and being used
04:55for real life use cases beyond DeFi, beyond finance?
05:00Yeah, I mean, I've been calling DeFi Ouroboros finance for the last few years because it's supposed to be a
05:06portmanteau of decentralized finance.
05:08But in reality, a lot of the grandest experiments are basically projects that issue tokens that exist to be traded
05:15with tokens that exist to be traded.
05:17It's a lot of speculation.
05:19So I wouldn't really call that finance in the sense that finance is supposed to be an activity that goes
05:23towards facilitating something else other than being self-referential.
05:27So I've always found that like DeFi was a very bad portmanteau for what is basically like speculative tokens at
05:36the end of the day.
05:37Speculation isn't exactly like, you know, a naughty word all the time.
05:41It does help for price discovery and things like this.
05:43And certainly, you know, more people participating in the ecosystem isn't a bad thing.
05:47And if they want to get their jimmies out by, you know, trading kind of meme coins and things like
05:52this, who am I to besmirch them?
05:55But all it's to say, I think, you know, what could be more interesting is looking towards products and insurance.
06:00There's been some experiments in that side of the house.
06:03But at the end of the day, I think like it's just too much of an, it has been too
06:06much of a niche industry.
06:07And it's, I guess, secondly, just been grossly overcapitalized at the same time.
06:12And the confluence of that has created a pretty strong speculative bubble.
06:16But I think it's important to remember that with a speculative bubble, which we're not, like, cryptocurrencies aren't the only
06:22industry that's ever gone into a speculative bubble.
06:25AI, early dot com, you know, the remaining 5% of what usually gets taken out in the wash for
06:32that usually is where you find your Amazons in the dot com boom, for example.
06:36So it's not always entirely obvious when everything gets really frothy.
06:40But at the end of the day, like my North Star, what I think is the most effective application of
06:46this technology is what I said earlier, basically lowering the ticket price for financial services.
06:52So there's a number of different tools that banks and large institutions have available to them to finance and de
07:00-risk their lines of business that aren't available to just regular folks.
07:04And my hope is that eventually something like a cryptocurrency or a smart contract waste platform like a Tezos, of
07:13course, can help facilitate that.
07:16Excellent. Thank you.
07:17Thank you. You're renowned for your, as you said in the Green Union, your spicy hot takes.
07:25Can we have a spicy hot take on maybe the 80-20 principle, like for innovation in blockchain?
07:33I think most people get the impression that maybe funds and energy isn't best placed all the time.
07:41If you had to focus on a 20% to get the biggest return in innovation, where would you or
07:46where should other blockchains be focusing, do you think?
07:49Yeah. So a lot of, it's funny.
07:52So Tezos has been used by a number of different large companies.
07:56I think one of, some of them are even French ones.
08:00So I'll pick on Ubisoft.
08:01And a lot of the issues that folks have with the software is that fundamentally it's, it's really usually bad
08:12at scaling, meaning handing a lot of throughput.
08:15If you think about the technical challenge of having to create a single source of truth, which is hopefully what
08:22a blockchain is, amidst many potentially different parties that you might not trust,
08:28it kind of makes sense that one of the taxes on that would be throughput and efficiency, but with the
08:34payoff of having a very robust system.
08:36And so unsurprisingly, you know, early on in the pandemic, when everyone was buying their apes and their, you know,
08:44various different NFT crazes, a lot of pain for it.
08:48Yeah. And a lot of the problems with Ethereum, which was the network that most of these NFTs were traded
08:55on, was that it couldn't handle the throughput of the, of the demand.
09:00And so a lot of second scaling solutions, L2s, you know, raise their hand and they say, well, actually, you
09:07know, we can, we can solve this for Ethereum.
09:09Um, they all issued tokens, um, that we know would report to do this and, and, you know, targeted at
09:16the EVM.
09:17The problem is that these solutions were custodial, meaning like they would be controlled most of the time by a
09:23five out of eight multi-signature scheme,
09:25which in effect is like transferring, um, you know, a lot of power and liability to a handful of people
09:31that you may not know, um, and, you know, may not have the best security set up zone and so
09:36forth.
09:36So, um, basically all of the solutions that have been proposed as L2s to scale Ethereum have been custodial, um,
09:47on Tezos, we're launching Etherlink, which is a non-custodial L2, um, which targets, allows you to use the EVM,
09:57the Ethereum virtual machine, um, but doesn't give you the tax of having to trust five out of eight people.
10:03you may not, may not know. Um, and so I think Etherlink's probably the best solution in the space.
10:08I think it solves a lot of the problems of scaling, particularly on Ethereum, but also, um, you know, separate
10:14it aside, you get to have the benefits of Tezos, which is a wonderfully designed piece of software.
10:18Um, yeah. Um, you, so Ether scan, Ether, scan. Etherlink. Etherlink. So, interoperability across chains. So, we talk about interoperability
10:34between chains, but what about interoperability between the people running these blockchains? Is there open discourse? Are you discussing Etherlink
10:43with other chains? Are, is there a big flywheel of interoperability?
10:48communication? Yeah. I mean, uh, yeah, to your point, a lot of people have used this, you know, for speculative
10:54purposes and they, they, you know, one way to make a good arbitrage is of course to go like, um,
10:58cross chain and try to, you know, snipe things on that front. Uh, you know, I, one of the more
11:04recent, uh, innovations in Tezos, which just had a Paris upgrade, uh, is adaptive issuance, which, you know, hopefully makes,
11:11uh, things like, you know, pricing between cross chain interactions cheaper. Um, there's definitely a massive market demand for it.
11:17You know,
11:18spurred mostly by DeFi being so like multi-tokenate. Um, and the best part is like, you know, this, this
11:25stuff is at the end of the day, open source, meaning anyone can look into it and query and, and
11:28contribute ideally. And so it's, it's rather easy. Uh, it's not a walled garden. It's not like playing into an
11:34API for a bank. And so I think, you know, that's one of the strengths of the open source philosophy
11:39and the, the software overall is that it's, it is, you know, multi chain, multi hyphenate and, uh, competitive, right?
11:47Like it's,
11:47as I mentioned before, uh, as I mentioned before, an over capitalized industry, there's way, way too much money flowing
11:52into it for, um, you know, really the cost of maintenance, but, um, odds to say, like one of the
11:57benefits is that you get implicitly the very large bounties on security.
12:02Um, so Tezos, where does it fit in the blockchain ecosystem in 2024?
12:12and how, where would you like it to be in 2030, for example, in the, in the ecosystem?
12:21Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm very proud of, um, the number of institutions and people who've, um, adopted Tezos.
12:30So basically Tezos is main differentiator for the last few years is that it's the first, um, proof of stake
12:39cryptocurrency that really popularized, uh, completely decentralized upgrades.
12:43So it's done that 16 times. Um, uh, the way that it's structured is inspired by the Republic of Venice.
12:49So you have a two phase vote. Um, you need a very large majority of people to who own tokens
12:55to vote on a proposal for it to be ratified and instantiated in the network.
12:59There's no one person organizing it behind the scenes or, you know, signing off on it. Um, so I think
13:04that's really powerful.
13:05And I think the, the engagement that we have with the community is, um, unprecedented really.
13:11Um, I, I don't know of many democracies that have the same voting turnout as, as we do.
13:15And so that makes me very happy. Um, it also feels a little bit like Greenwich Village in the 1960s
13:22because, uh, it's, it's a wildly popular with a lot of artists.
13:26Um, and it's, um, also dirt cheap. Um, so it's a little bit like, I think Bob Dylan's hanging out
13:32in there somewhere.
13:33Um, yeah.
13:34That's one of the best analogies I've ever heard. Yeah. Greenwich Village in the 1960s.
13:38Um, I don't know who here, who, who here works in web three, who, who here works in web three,
13:46raise your hands.
13:49It's a group three people. So everyone else is working in web two. So for the people working web two,
13:56there's this integration of systems.
13:58There's like, we don't need this bipolar world of web three and web two. And how do we kind of
14:03cross the bridge?
14:04How do we integrate Tezos and blockchain technology into the existing stack so that these people in web two can
14:11kind of become web two, web three workers?
14:15Yeah, I think, uh, I think that's impossible.
14:18Well, I think web three is a very ill-defined term, but I think what a lot of people mean
14:23when they, they talk about it is basically using a token or a cryptocurrency to basically, um, pay for something
14:29that was more subtle, uh, in the sort of ad based model of, of the internet.
14:34Um, and so I think the hope with that moniker was that it would democratize access to things and that
14:41it wouldn't, you basically wouldn't be getting, um, click baited into a bunch of, um, you know, anger campaigns so
14:47that Google would make more money.
14:49Um, but, uh, but all it's to say, like, I think the, the moniker for, as far as I could
14:54tell is, is almost dead.
14:56Um, a lot of the corporates that had a web three person that's now their AI person or whatever.
15:02Um, so I think it was very much a fad in like 2021, 2022 to talk about crypto as web
15:08three, because it sounds much more innocuous than crypto.
15:11Um, but so who could blame them? Um, the industry is fraught with a branding problem, separate issue.
15:17Um, but all it's to say, like, uh, you know, I, I don't think there's any antagonism.
15:21I think that the notion of like web three, um, was just like a way to, uh, defang, uh, people
15:29who had already heard about crypto in the last cycle and decided it was crap.
15:33Well, yeah, web three has is every week a new technology comes into it.
15:39It's defined in a different way.
15:40Like VR, AR, AI is now part of web three or not part of web three, depending on your viewpoint
15:47on your marketing strategy, perhaps.
15:49Like, do they belong in web three? Is web three just crypto?
15:53Like how?
15:54I, I, I, I, I don't think I've ever described myself as working in web three.
16:00Um, so I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm loathe to take on the title, um, or, or indeed to try to
16:07define it.
16:07Um, but, uh, I think, you know, it's, it's telling, not surprising that, um, a lot of the sort of
16:15corporate innovation labs and things like this, that again, heavily funded, like, you know, exploring blockchain or now exploring AI,
16:21it makes sense.
16:22There's also a lot more tools now for people to interact with AI than there ever were before.
16:26Um, accessibility is being a main factor.
16:29Um, but yeah, you know, it's kind of funny that AI is, well, orders of magnitude easier to use than
16:34any cryptocurrency software that I've, I've, well, thinking of chat GPT versus like a Coinbase wallet.
16:39Um, so it makes sense.
16:41And yeah, I, I, you know, it's a fad that's, uh, I think gone away is the notion of web
16:47three as opposed to anything else.
16:48Yeah.
16:49That user experience, that UX is very interesting that AI has surpassed crypto already for ease of use and onboarding.
16:57Okay.
16:57So since we've only got a minute left and most people here are coming, maybe curious minds, interested in, in,
17:03in what you're doing with Tezos and crypto in general.
17:07So they leave here optimistic, positive, and they go and tell their friends and their family how great crypto is.
17:13Maybe go and check it out.
17:15What would you, what's your message for them to, you know, a bit of optimism?
17:21Oh, I mean, there's tons of smart people working, uh, in the cryptocurrency space.
17:25Um, it was relatively small when I quit my job and, and started to go full time.
17:30So it's only gotten easier and easier to navigate socially.
17:34Um, I think basically what, what had always been a little bit taxing was that it started off as a
17:38hobbyist project and it was a very political project, um, in a lot of ways.
17:43And sort of the more odious politics of that have, um, been replaced by more mainstream smart people.
17:50So it's gotten a lot more hospitable as a culture.
17:53Um, and you know, these things operate on like 18 month cycles, not, you know, history doesn't repeat, but it
17:59rhymes.
17:59And we're kind of getting into the beginning of a, a more positive, uh, trend, a lot more momentum.
18:05And obviously legitimacy of, of, of having, you know, Bitcoin ETF, uh, approved so on and so forth means the
18:11industry is probably there for the long run.
18:13Um, which is good.
18:14Excellent.
18:15Long may it continue.
18:16Um, thank you very much.
18:18We ran out of time.
18:18Big round of applause, please for Kathleen Brightman.
18:22Thank you.
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