Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Jerry Lee. Jerry Lee is a seasoned tech executive with extensive experience in product innovation and general management.
He has worked with, you know, Apple as well as the Ant Group, that’s the Alibaba group. He’s worked extensively with Alipay and he was also the chief architect at Antchain, a part of the Ant Group, where he gained significant insights into the blockchain architecture and scalability. Now he’s, you know, working on his own blockchain.
It’s called Artela Network. It basically is a modular chain. It addresses the limitations of current blockchain technologies, particularly, you know, Ethereum.
They are calling themselves EVM++ and I will let you discover what he means by that and what is the plus plus in Artela Network and how you can be a part of this modular chain that is coming up and it’s already in its public test net by listening in on this conversation. I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in.
Hi Jerry, thank you so much for making the time to speak to us today. How are you doing? Good, thanks for having me, Tarusha. The pleasure is all mine.
Now for our listeners, can you tell us a little about, you know, your background and what led you into the blockchain industry? Yeah, first, a little bit about myself. I’m Jerry and I’m a veteran in the technology industry. I started my career in Silicon Valley about 20 years ago.
The majority of my career, I was with Apple. Then a few years ago, I joined Ant Financial at the time. Now it’s changed name to Ant Group.
I think it was 2017 and that’s when I got into the blockchain space. I was the general manager and the chief architect of Ant Chain. That’s the blockchain division of Ant Group.
So we spent, yeah, we spent a few years building a technology for blockchain and real world applications, just with the consortium chain with the Ant Financial. Mostly these are just enterprise business-facing applications like supply chain finance, trade finance, commodity trading platform, etc. Then I saw a lot of potential for blockchain technology to have a real impact in future finance.
So that and later on, I decided to, you know, branch out of Ant and take our learnings and experience to a bigger world. That’s how Artela came to be. Artela was founded about a year and a half ago and we are in public test net phase.
Wow, brilliant. So can you tell me a little about how your experience perhaps at Apple and the Ant Group influenced your approach to just the technology in general? Like were there certain learnings that you’re bringing to the table for Artela as well? Sure. I think for both Apple and Ant Group, these are like huge companies.
They have very popular products serving really, you know, billions of people, you know, not just millions of users, right? It started with Apple. I think when I joined, it was 2005, kind of early days. That was pre-iPhone.
Yeah. I started when Steve Jobs was around and he was very much involved in some of the product decision makings. I remember there’s one time I was working on the first generation for MacBook Air.
There’s this famous scene where he was on stage pulling out this very thin product, first generation MacBook Air out of that yellow envelope. I was right there with him on the backstage. So he was very much involved in that product.
Like one thing he really pushed the team was to make sure that the weight of the product could not be more than three pounds. So at the time, 2007, 2008, it was really a big challenge and we were able to pull it off. Yeah.
So there was Mac and then later on I switched to iPhone and worked on iPhone for a few generations, from iPhone 4 all the way to iPhone 10. That was the period where the mobile internet had huge growth all over the world. Yeah.
And then later on I joined Ant Financial. Ant Financial had this product. I’m not sure about your audience, if they’re familiar with Alipay, because that’s like the go-to.
Everybody’s heard about Alipay. Yeah. Okay.
All right. Yeah. So it’s like we call the citizens app in China.
Pretty much everyone has it. Yeah. And it started with the mobile.
It’s pretty much like a Paytm for China. Like what India has Paytm and I think Alipay perhaps is, if you just compare and draw an analogy so that people would understand better, I think Alipay is pretty much akin to what Paytm is to India. So I think just an example so that a lot more people would be able to understand.
Please go on. Right. Probably.
Yeah. Alipay started just as a payment platform. Then it evolved to be so much more.
It’s like a super app, right? It does so many things for you. But it really does the mobile payment that function really, really well in terms of the speed and the convenience. And it enables new forms of innovations, like new kind of location-based services and other forms of internet services that were not possible before.
So that’s kind of the parallel I see between the mobile payment and the future of the blockchain. Because we are building a new blockchain. Artela is about building this high performance in a modular blockchain for Web3 mass adoption.
But really, the blockchain is so early, people are still wondering, oh, how is it going to be useful? How does it help people? How is it going to help my life, right? If you look at the on-chain numbers, there are different statistics, right? But still, even today, the active users is still a very small number. I would say it’s much less than 1% of the world population. It does not really compare to Web2, right? Right.
Yeah, absolutely. The penetration is very little when it comes to Web3. Yeah, exactly.
So that’s where I see things that we are so early. You see the potential of having a professionalist, just a whole suite of new financial applications and other applications built on top of this blockchain, on top of the financial layer. It could be social, it could be gaming, there could be just the internet.
There can be a lot of examples and use cases, right? That can be built on top of it. Yeah, exactly. There are so many things people are talking about today, but just due to the foundation and the infrastructure level is still lacking.
It’s still slow and not very secure. The UI UX is confusing. There’s so many hurdles for people to really adopt and use in their life.
But I think we’re getting there. I like the name of your show, Living on Blockchain. In a way, that’s how I have been doing it for the last couple of years.
We got to practice what we preach, right? But we realize things are early. It’s just not very friendly for the general population to use, to really live their life on blockchain yet. Right.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. So, with all of this major learning that you had with your experience in Web2 and with such huge companies like Apple and Antobisay, now you’re building something very special and you’re building the Artelia network. Can you tell us a little about that? And if you had to perhaps surmise it in one line and you had to explain it to somebody who perhaps is not a blockchain native, how would you go about doing it? Yeah, if I explain to someone who does not really understand blockchain, we are building permissionless infrastructure for future finance.
And in a more technical term, we call ourselves EVM++ blockchain. What that means is actually three things. First, we are EVM compatible because most of the smart contract is written in solidity.
That’s just the industry standard. We do not want to create another silo. We want it to be compatible with that.
So that’s just the starting point, EVM compatible. Then we add two plus signs there. The first plus means scalability.
We want this blockchain to be really scalable. This pretty much means making it faster and cheaper. For example, when Bitcoin started, the TPS transaction per second was still today, right? Seven, eight.
It’s really low. And Ethereum is somewhere like 15, 16. Then you have the L2s or other new ones.
Everyone wants to scale their blockchain just faster to achieve higher TPS. Everybody wants to do that. Anybody building a chain is basically getting the TPS right there.
Right, right. It’s definitely needed, but it’s not the whole story. But we definitely want to do that.
One number I remember was Alipay. During some of the peak traffic, Alipay was able to support more than 500,000 transactions per second. So for Web3 to get to, for today’s blockchain to get to that level, it would still take years of research and implementation.
But now we’re looking at maybe not 15. We want to achieve to 10,000, that range. I think it’s definitely doable to scale the chain’s performance, right? But what’s unique about Artela is the second plus.
We call it EVM++, right? The second plus is about extensibility. Because we think scalability is one-dimensional. It’s about performance faster and cheaper.
But extensibility is what makes the chain versatile to be able to support new functions, new types of applications. So the definition of extensibility is that you don’t need to change the system itself. You can just keep adding new functions.
It’s really a modular approach. One good example is we talked about iPhone, right? iPhone is a good example. The phone itself does not change, but you can have different apps.
So when you install a new app, that extends the function of your phone in its whole dimension, right? Another good example is- The phone was started. There were not so many apps, right, initially. So now, obviously, there are thousands and thousands of apps that are available.
And that is exactly what you mean when you’re saying that, okay, it extends the functionality and the utility that the phone holds in the user’s lives, right? So that is the kind of analogy you’re getting for your chain. Exactly, exactly. A similar analogy would be from Alipay.
You can do payment so well, but now you can add new functions. You can add new trading functions. You can add other financial services.
And later on, it becomes like this app you use for so many other things to serve your life, right? The idea is to basically add more functionality and making it more useful, perhaps, in your day-to-day life. Exactly, exactly. Because that’s what we see where- No, no, please go ahead.
Yeah, that’s what we see where the future goes, is that the chain has to be really solid on a fundamental level to support the quick settlement, fast transaction, all that. But at the same time, it needs to be adaptive, needs to be flexible, and needs to be extensible to build new applications on top of it. Right.
Yeah, I think I totally see why you feel that this is the right way to perhaps look at the kind of penetration in terms of users Web3 has had and how to increase it, right? If you’re going to be able to create utility applications and applications that kind of become a part of day-to-day use for users or potential users, then that is the point. I think that’ll be the inflection point where there are so many more users in Web3. And perhaps utilizing that technology without even realizing that it is Web3.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Eventually, blockchain will become like TCP, IP, underlining the internet protocol. People just use their service on top of it, just don’t even notice what’s underlining.
Absolutely, yeah. That is going to be the future. And definitely, I think that will be very ideal, that people don’t really… Right now, so many people are online, and they’re using the internet, but not everybody understands how the internet works, as the example that you gave, right? But we are still online.
And I feel that that is exactly how it should be for Web3 as well, that a lot of these apps will be built on Web3. But unless you’re a techie or somebody who’s actually interested in the technical aspect, you wouldn’t really be aware that, okay, this is being built on Web3, but you’ll be utilizing it anyway. Yeah, yeah.
But unfortunately, that’s not the case today, right? Today, if you want to use some Web3 crypto native applications, the presence of blockchain is very much there, right? You connect your wallet, you do something there, and you sign your signature, you wait, and you just kind of feel that the blockchain is kind of crunching somewhere behind, but it’s such a slow and just ineffective experience. Yeah, that’s going to take many years to improve, eventually get to the web 2.0 level. Yeah.
Absolutely. And it’s not just slow, it’s just tedious, right? Like onboarding users. There’s so many steps before anybody can really onboard a user onto their own platform.
You’re expecting the user to have a wallet and to perhaps use logging in via MetaMask or something, unless your app is at the stage where you’re perhaps using social logins. But then all of this comes with, I think there is a lot of baggage when it comes to building in Web3, and especially just onboarding users. Obviously, now with wallet abstraction, being there, it has become better.
And there are a lot of more builders who are working on the user interface aspect, I think, which is very, very pertinent if we want to really onboard the next million users onto Web3. Right. Exactly.
I think there’s a lot Web3 industry can learn from Web2 in terms of building a product that’s not just for the idealist. I mean, not just being wholly decentralized and permissionless. I mean, these are good features, right? These are the killer features that Web3 offers.
But at the same time, we cannot forget everyday users, right? Some of them, they may not care as much as the idealist, and the hurdle is just too high for everyday people right now. Yeah, absolutely. So, you have mentioned how Adela has these modular functionality, right? These programmable modules.
Can you give us perhaps a few practical applications or use cases that you’ve seen being built currently? Sure. Sure, absolutely. One type of applications on blockchain is DeFi, decentralized finance, right? A lot of people are using it, and the more people want to use it, but people are just kind of afraid about… We talked about the tediousness of the UI, UX.
Another thing is security, right? Yeah, it keeps happening, right? Someone just loses their asset or they get hacked. How can we bring more security control, that risk control from Web2 into Web3? That’s one very useful type of applications. In fact, people already built with Adela.
One good example is we have a DeFi application. It could be lending, trading, just your typical Web3 applications that’s running within EVM. Our teleblockchain, we have the second VM that’s a Wasm-based WebAssembly.
That’s just more flexible and more Web2 developer-friendly. We can build a security control engine within the Wasm that works side-by-side with the EVM, the DeFi application. That provides another layer of security.
For things like Rockpool or a re-entrancy attack, we can have different security modules that work with the DeFi to provide much better security. That’s already been built. I think more applications like that will happen.
Can you tell us a little about how can developers get involved with Adela? I’m sure that they’re intrigued by now listening to all that we’ve spoken about and the functionality that this particular team brings to the table. How can developers get involved? Right. Yeah.
Our website, Adela.network, has a lot of documentations. Also, we are in public testnet phase. Adela testnet is alive.
There’s a developer portal on our website you can get into and start building. There are different use cases and tools, examples there already. For anyone interested, you can just come to our website and come to the developer portal and start building.
Brilliant. It’s pretty straightforward. You guys are in public testnet already.
Developers who are perhaps building and are intrigued by modular functionality, they should definitely sign up. I would encourage you to perhaps try it because this is sounding all very exciting. Now, Jerry, talking a little about the future, what is your vision for Adela Network, perhaps for the next five years or the next decade? How are you visualizing what is there for the future for this particular network? Considering we are already in that multi-chainverse where there are so many chains that are there and there are so many that are also coming up every few months that we hear about new chain that is being built.
What is the kind of future that you’re envisioning for Adela? Yeah. I see the future as a multi-chain world. Of course, there’s a competition in different protocols.
New chains keep coming because right now, it’s so early. Infrastructure is not there. Competition is a good thing.
I see the future as being multi-chain and eventually will be compatible, composable, interconnected as a global settlement network. Of course, from my standpoint, I want Adela to be a very significant part of it, but I see it will be multiple chains there, but they are compatible like different internet protocols, but they talk to each other. They form this global settlement network layer where you can use your services right on top of it as financial, like the payment, the trading, all that.
But above that, you have other applications. It just supports and enables new forms of innovations, permissionless, and to put the user in control of their data and in control, owning their identity. All these good things we’ve been talking about for Web3, I think eventually will become reality.
We definitely want to do that, so we’re on board and really feeling close to the system. That’s how I see it coming out. Right.
I think that’s a wonderful vision to hold and work on while your team gets ready for the mainnet launch as well. Do you have a particular timeline until the mainnet launch? Yes. We started the mainnet earlier this year.
We plan to launch the mainnet in Q3, probably around this timeframe. In fact, just this week, Monday, we launched our user incentive incentive campaign. We call it Artel Renaissance.
We already see very big inflow, big traffic jump a lot of new users coming to our testnet, different applications. Again, artel.network, it’s there. You can come through and try different applications and do some community tasks as well and have some fun for Artel’s incentive testnet.
Right. Wonderful. Now, I would really like to perhaps touch upon your take on the space in general, because we’ve touched upon the product, we’ve touched upon what you guys are building.
I would love to know from your experience, like you mentioned and I agree that there are a lot of good things and very basic things, I think that remain common across web 2 and web 3, while building a business and especially a consumer facing business that. Can you tell me what are the kind of trends that you feel are very, very promising at the moment when we’ve recently seen the Ethereum ETF get approval as well? So what do you think, what are the kind of niches that are going to do well in this particular phase of web 3? Yeah, I think in general, web 3 or blockchain technology is still an early phase. One comparison I would like to use is to compare with AI.
You know, AI is such a buzzword, right? Everyone’s talking about AI, the chatGTP has a new product. Some of the crypto people actually became an AI project now. But just look at what happened to AI.
AI just went through multiple cycles. I think famously, there were three AI winters in the past 50 years, right? These things would just take a lot of the time, the development and eventually become mature enough and ready for prime time. And even within AI, 10 years ago, if you ask people around Silicon Valley at the time, 2014, 2015, when people talk about AI, it was mostly a lot of them doing autonomous driving.
For example, that was the AI then. Now it’s a large language model, the new applications, AI agents in your firm. Yeah, it’s different, still pretty much the same in terms of the neural network, all the machine learning, that type of thing.
So for Web3, probably it would be a parallel path before it reaches the tipping point of mass adoption. And that’s the exciting part, there are unknowns, right? You kind of know, well, you see the potential where this permissionless internet is going to be really powerful for people, for different applications. But right now, we don’t know what’s going to turn out to be the big thing, right? So yeah, I think this stage is, for the most part, is still building on the infrastructure layer, just to make it better and yeah, just to be able to make it possible to support larger scale applications.
And maybe next cycle, we’ll see more innovations in applications. And then maybe the next one is something eventually will break out. So you are betting on the infra layer to do really big.
And I agree, I think we need to really get the infra aspect right and work on the UI aspect to onboard the next million users, like I keep saying on Web3. So now I would really like to understand from you, your perspective on, we’ve talked about the newer things and the shinier things that are being built. Do you have like any personal favorites, perhaps any projects that you are rooting for personally that you feel are doing a wonderful job? Yeah, I think we mentioned brings more security to DeFi.
I think that would be something short term, something that can be implemented on board a lot of users and bring a lot of value to Web3. So safe and secure DeFi is one area I see a lot of potential. And payment is still something that’s not quite there yet, but it’s almost there.
Yeah, safe and fast and secure payments, just anywhere you go. And maybe not quite there yet, but yeah, give it a couple of years. You can transact with anyone in the world with any currency you choose.
It could be crypto, could be stable coin, could be any other form of token. That would be a very powerful scenario. And a little longer term, I’m really bullish on social.
It’s just, yeah, maybe forecaster today gives you some early hint of what’s coming. But I think there are so many issues with these centralized social platforms. Could be Twitter, could be TikTok, Facebook, all these centralized social platforms have their share of the security data and user privacy.
And how do you moderate the content? There are just so many issues, maybe even too big of a responsibility for these platforms to continue to own all the data and be responsible for some of the content there. So definitely I see decentralized social applications as something that’s going to revolutionize and bring more usefulness and benefit, but that’s going to take longer time just because infrastructure is not quite ready. Yeah, yeah, we’re going to get there. But the kind of niches that you mentioned, I think I’m pretty bullish on those as well, like in terms of social especially.
And I just, I do think that there’s going to be, you know, right now the convergence between AI and Web3, I think it’s obviously very early days. But in the future, we’re going to, you know, we would need a Web3 or AI would actually need Web3 to, you know, keep in check the kind of veracity of the content that is being produced. I think that is the future, right? Right now, a lot of, you know, always, you know, some bad fish in the pond and they’ll be looking at perhaps creating disinformation and spreading disinformation using AI and we would be able to rein it in only with the use of Web3.
Yeah, yeah. I think blockchain helps, you know, keep it real, check the information when you see where the sources are, all that. But on the intersection of AI and crypto, I see one specific area that’s about that, that is creator economy.
Because what AI does the best is to generate all these new form of digital goods or services or things with value, but in a very efficient and easy way. So AI creates digital abundance. But what crypto does, blockchain does really well is to create digital scarcity.
Right. That’s a beautiful way to put it. Yeah, yeah.
I think it’s definitely possible something with an intersection of crypto and AI is going to have new, create new form of applications and new form of business models. Yeah, I think this is still evolving, right? So I do think there is a lot of potential there. And, you know, we have to wait and watch and see where the path entirely goes.
I am really curious about the community aspect, you know, for our network, because for any kind of any chain to take off, like there is a cold start problem there, right? You know, you need developers, you need users to be using those apps. Right. But initially, you know, you need to, it’s like the chicken and egg problem and you to kind of resolve that.
And people who are perhaps working on such solutions usually rely very heavily on the community. What are your thoughts there? And how are you guys doing it for Artelo? Right. Absolutely.
This is actually one of the key learnings that I had transitioning from Web2 to Web3. Because Web2 days, the focus was always on product and the later on users, right? The product users. But Web3 is narrative and community.
But I think narrative will eventually become product and the community will become the users or become the base of users. Right. So in a way, it’s actually the same thing.
We restarted the building, Artelo community, like since about a year ago, we were able to grow that to about a couple of hundred thousand community members in socials. And if you take a look into the analysis, break it down, Artelo community is mostly, I would say like 70% Asia and 30% rest of the world. And Asia is like East Asia, Southeast Asia.
And India is also among one of the top 10 countries. So I do see the future that Asia will be the biggest growth engine for Web3 just because of the population, the demographics, and it’s just a more interest for adoption for Web3. So we’ve been doing a lot and we are, I mentioned our Renaissance campaign started three, four years, three, sorry, three, four days ago.
I’m happy to report we’re getting close to close to a hundred thousand users. Wow. Already.
Yeah. Of course, we probably will cross that by the end of the day. So yeah, definitely community is important in Web3 and I do see that that’s going to be the base for our user base going forward.
Right. So can you tell us a little about the secret sauce perhaps that you guys are deploying in order to build on this community? Are there incentives involved? How are you doing? Yeah, it’s a multi-faceted effort. Of course, incentive alignment is important, particularly in our industry, right? Web3, there’s a lot of price movement, just things just happening so fast.
And so we do have incentive testnet campaign, for example, to get user rewards. When we do our mainnet launch, we do want to make sure our early contributors and early adopters will share the benefit of the growth of the Artela technology, the network, right? There’s that. And another thing is partnership.
We are building some very meaningful and important partnerships with some of the other projects in terms of product integration and community growth, co-growth together, some of the marketing effort together as well. So because really Web3 is about the ecosystem. It’s not just about one product, particularly for us being a layer one, we need a lot of partners to build with us to also grow the ecosystem together.
So we’re doing a lot of that in terms of partnership as well. Yeah, I think meaningful partnerships and collaboration is key here when it comes to Web3 to move forward. We don’t have to do it alone.
I think that is one of the more beautiful things about Web3, collaboration and partnership is key and we can work together as an ecosystem. So if you had to personally perhaps talk a little about some influencers or thought leaders, or even just point our listeners in the direction of certain resources, what would those be? Those resources for Artela? For Artela, I think you’ve already mentioned that you have a very nice community on the website and meant for Web3 in general, because you are somebody who’s moved from Web3 to Web3. I’m sure that you have some interesting resources that perhaps you can recommend to our listeners as well.
I listen to podcasts like yours. But yeah, it is true that personally I listen to four or five different podcasts to stay updated. Actually, I used to listen more, but now I’m so busy.
But it’s different from other industries where podcast or social form of learning is I find it more important in Web3 and blockchain. I guess there’s Twitter, there are different publications, but yeah, there’s no secret or structured course you can learn about this industry. Things just happen so fast, evolve so fast.
Yeah, that is good advice. And that is a good way to point people in the right direction. I think podcasts are obviously right now they’re all the rage because it’s easy to sort of consume this information while you’re on the go.
So definitely perhaps the right way for users who are looking to get more information and deep dive into Web3 to perhaps listen to some relevant Web3 podcasts, maybe this particular podcast or even the ACNZ podcast, I think they tend to provide a lot of relevant information. Right. And there’s a few like Bantle is and a couple others.
Absolutely. I think all of them are doing a wonderful job. So Jenny, I would love to understand again from your perspective, perhaps I would have to get your perspective on certain coming back to the macro ecosystem as a whole and the trends in the space.
I have seen NFTs kind of evolve since the very beginning, initially when it was all became a craze with crypto kitties and whatnot. Again, we are seeing something similar happen when we talk about AI and Web3. Do you have perhaps an opinion here? Has your opinion on any particular niche, not just these two, has it evolved over time? Like, can you see how it has grown or developed? Because I used to hold a very archaic sort of an opinion about NFTs.
I did not understand it. And over the years, I think my opinion has drasticated and I think the technology itself has found so many use cases and they are not just digital collectibles anymore. And I stand corrected.
So I would like to know, as an entrepreneur, as a builder, have you ever felt humbled, you know, in terms of your own opinion and seeing the kind of growth that any niche has seen? Yeah, so often, so many times. Like, I never get the meme coins. Right.
Yeah. And you mentioned NFT, that’s another, um, like the couple of years ago was really hot. Now we kind of died down.
But I think eventually, eventually for any technology, uh, or service, uh, to be widely adopted, uh, it really, it needs to provide, uh, more value than just, uh, uh, you know, the NFT just showed spinning up, you know, PFP. That’s just, the usefulness, the adoption is key, right? How can you, uh, take that, uh, digital piece and, uh, apply that to other aspects of your, uh, life. It could be a ticket to a show could be, you know, there, yeah, just let the use case, uh, needs to be enriched.
Um, otherwise it just be a, um, just, uh, people just speculate on it, then it will not last. Right. Unfortunately that, that has been the, um, phenomenon in our industry, um, again and again.
Yeah. Every couple of months, there’s something new. It could be just a fad.
They will go away. But, but I, I’m hopeful for, for the future. I think, uh, um, a lot of it is just people experimenting.
Right. Um, I think, yeah, I’m still, I’m still bullish on NFT, but, uh, uh, we just need to, um, just bring real use case around NFT, not, uh, just have a, a digital piece being there. That’s not enough.
Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, real use cases are, what are going to make that technology is sticky in nature.
Uh, and that is still, I think a lot these NFT projects are still looking for perhaps a good product market fit, uh, and I’m sure that they’ll find it as long as, you know, the use case is sticky enough for the end user. Right. Absolutely.
Yeah. So, you know, we are really, uh, you know, kind of at the end of the time that, you know, we’ve allotted for the recording, but, uh, I would like to ask you two more questions before we wrap this up. I would love to, you know, know from you and get your, um, perhaps just advice and suggestions that you might have for entrepreneurs and builders who are just stepping and getting their toes wet in the Web3 ecosystem.
Uh, I, I’m an entrepreneur myself. I’m building, uh, I’m not sure if I, I, I’m in the best position to give advice, uh, but I’ll, I’ll tell you what has worked for me and my learning. Um, I think it’s, uh, um, you don’t, there’s no best timing to start something new.
If you want to do something, you really believe it. Uh, you should just take action and just get started. Don’t, don’t wait for the best of time.
Um, because, um, in, in our tell us case, our talent was funded, uh, just about a year and a half ago. I remember it was a day that the price of Bitcoin actually went down to 15,000. Um, it wasn’t that long ago, but I was actually a multi-year that was a multi-year low.
Um, but we do not really care. We, we, we wanted, you know, uh, we believe that we can bring something valuable to this industry and start building, uh, something for long-term. Uh, so we, we got to choose that time to get bad timing, but, uh, um, it actually was pretty hard for us to raise, uh, you know, capital at the time, but we did it.
Um, you know, now looking back, it wasn’t, uh, the worst time, you know, if you want to do something, just, you know, get started, act on it. Um, yeah, that would be my, uh, my advice. That’s very sound advice.
I think, you know, a lot of us like, um, there’s analysis paralysis, right? So, you know, you start thinking too much. Yeah. Yeah.
You, you could feel like there’s going to be an imaginary hypothetical time, perhaps in the future where, you know, conditions would be perhaps more conducive for the idea that you have with the vision that you’re trying to build upon. Uh, and I, I, I totally agree with you. I think I’ve been on entrepreneur for more than 13, 14 years now, and I think it’s complete BS, right? It never happens.
You just have to do it because you can’t sit down and start, you know, really timing. I think you, you shouldn’t time two things. You shouldn’t time, try to time the market.
And, uh, if you’re, if you’re an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t try to time the kind of, you know, external variables that will be at play, uh, before you really put your product out there. Yep. Yep.
Just act, just do it. I think that is supremely good advice. Uh, now onto my last question, and this is something I ask everybody who comes on the show, uh, because you know, you are again, somebody who’s made a leap from web to the web tree and in a spectacular way, uh, so far and more part to you and kudos to you for building on your vision.
But if you had to perhaps again, give some advice to people who perhaps right now in web two, and they are intrigued by web three, what would be your advice to them, uh, to really, you know, get into web three, start perhaps not just building, but perhaps utilizing web three and start living on. Um, yeah, I, I see a lot of people like that. They are in web two, they work for some big tech company, um, but they are intrigued by what’s happening in blockchain and crypto.
Uh, there’s this mistake around this industry to a lot of outsiders. Um, but I would say maybe first thing, become a user, um, try to, you know, download MetaMask and get some coins, maybe, uh, get from some centralized exchange. Uh, then they get to use some of the applications, uh, from user standpoint, uh, you will learn so much, uh, then just reading, you know, or just doing, you know, it’s doing some research, right.
Um, that that’s one thing, just become a user. Uh, another thing is, uh, uh, I find the uniqueness of web three is the community learning, right? We talk about listening to podcasts and getting on Twitter. Crypto Twitter is very active, right? And how do you find the community that you can, um, learn and improve and maybe meet people.
That’s also important, right? You find people, maybe they can become your business partner eventually. Um, yeah, I would say that. I think that is like very sound advice.
And that is what I usually tell people that, you know, if you want to build in web three, or if you want to get into web three, become a user, get your hands dirty. There is no other way. Like there’s only so much or so far theory will take you and all the information that you’re gleaning off of resources will take you.
You really need to do it to be able to understand, uh, a, how the technology works and it doesn’t have to be like a deep dive into how the technology works. It’s just that, you know, you get to perhaps, um, experience it firsthand. And that itself would be like going down a rabbit hole and you know, you would get more curious and you would look up things and you would understand more.
And then I don’t, I feel that, you know, once people do go down this rabbit hole, there’s no coming back. Yeah. That’s been my experience as well.
Yeah. So, uh, thank you so much, Jerry, once again, for taking the time to speak to us about Attila and what you guys are building. It sounds wonderful.
And I think a lot of our listeners would be very intrigued, uh, by the modular functionality and they would love to perhaps sign up on your public test net, which is live right now. And I would encourage them to do that. And, uh, yeah, just, just, you know, before we wrap this up, any parting thoughts? Yeah.
Attila Network, uh, come to our website. Uh, also we have Attila Network, uh, Twitter. We have a lot of, uh, new documents, uh, new, uh, information coming out every day.
Um, I hope, uh, some of your audience can become part of our community as well. And I really enjoyed the conversation with you, uh, Teruja. Thank you so much, Jerry.
I think, uh, you’ll get quite a few listeners will be intrigued and would love to join your community. Thanks.