Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Anthony, aka Burnt Banksy. He really rose to fame when he actually bought a Banksy art piece and burnt it and converted it into an NFT.
Currently he is working on Zion Blockchain. The idea is to make crypto and Web3 accessible to the end user in the greatest way possible, the most beautiful way possible perhaps, wherein they don’t even need to really understand how the technology works. So this is something that’s very close to my heart as well.
This was a very interesting conversation. So let’s deep dive right in. Hi Anthony, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today.
How are you doing? I’m doing great, thank you so much for having me. You know the pleasure is all mine and I’m so glad we could schedule this considering we are in different, completely different time zones. But for our listeners, I’m sure that they know and they have a lot of context with your pseudonym BurntBanksy, but I would love for you to give a bit of a background about yourself and how you got into Web3, just to give this conversation a little more context.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, and so the background of my name, my name is BurntBanksy and the reason I got that name about three years ago, I bought a Banksy art piece from a gallery. I’m in New York, obviously, hence the large time zone difference.
And we lit it on fire and we sold the digital as an NFT, which ended up being the highest average price sale on OpenSea for most of 2021. Kind of gotten global recognition and then still in the Wikipedia for the word NFT to this day. Wow, that’s wonderful.
You know, I remember reading about this and I was thinking, you know, this is so such mad lad behavior, but I love it. But what led you? Like, what was the thinking behind that? Well, there’s two schools of thought here. One of them is like, this is fun.
I want to do this. So that’s one of them. And then the other one was like, you know, obviously, because who doesn’t want to light art on fire? I feel like that’s every child’s dream in some capacity.
That or I’m just a pyromaniac. But, you know, I think more deep and more kind of serious on that note. You know, I’ve been in crypto for many years before, you know, and this is at the point where you could have like many crypto punks and that really wasn’t that big of a deal.
You know, CryptoKitties was just kind of the biggest NFT collection, you know, and so I used to have a ton and all my friends outside of crypto and family always to me were saying, you know, they would always make fun of me if it wasn’t, you know, you’d always hear the same thing every time. If it’s not in my living room, if I can’t see it, you know, it’s not art. And I said, OK, well, you know, there’s no value to it.
So I said, all right, well, let me take something that quote unquote has value to it, which was this Banksy, sold the Sotheby’s auction, which is, you know, I would like to think a real auction house, and, you know, light it on fire and turn it into an NFT. And let’s see if it has value. And I think it will.
And it did. You know, suffice to say anyone wants to put a price tag on value. But, you know, what we kind of really wanted to get out of that was just kind of, you know, probably spark the conversation, you know, and so we did it.
And I think we had no expectations that NFTs would be where they are now. But how quickly that kind of concept really took over, because I think three weeks after we did it was the Beeple $69 million auction. And then everything really started steamrolling from there.
And it was the start of something awesome. Yeah, we’re still here. Yeah, absolutely.
I think that was it was probably an inflection point, you know, that the entire market saw in terms of art collectibles and how they perceived NFTs. So that kind of did change. And I think your reasoning for doing something like this is so apt, right? You know, you at times you really need to get people’s attention to make them understand something you need to do something a little outlandish.
And yeah, that’s what you did. And you kind of got and achieved what you perhaps had in mind. So tell us a little about perhaps before that incident, you know, you mentioned that you had been in crypto before.
So how did you get into Web3 and crypto? And what were you doing back then? Yeah, I mean, back then it was, I got into mining. And so I was here in New York during the time, you know, and I always say, especially if you look at it now, you really have this interesting break in America, which is SF and West Coast seems to be focused on AI, but New York is where crypto is. And it always has been.
And so being in New York in 2016, you had ConsenSys, you had Uniswap, you had pretty much like everything really, really starting here, you know, which was the most exciting thing, especially for someone to just kind of be learning about something new, right? You know, and so suffice to say, you know, suffice to say, it was impossible to not start getting into crypto. And I started by being just a miner back when Ethereum was proof of work. And one thing ended up leading to another.
And it was, I couldn’t, I couldn’t leave effectively what ended up happening. Right. Yeah, no, I get that.
It’s like a rabbit hole once you go down it. And you know, you mentioned that, you know, you started with mining, and that’s pretty much how I got into the space as well. And I started even earlier, and even Ethereum was not a thing.
So, you know, this is sometime in 2011, 12, and we were mining stuff like Zcash. Yep. Had ZayaCoin.
Yeah, yeah. So that was like those early days. And because I think, you know, you come in because you’re curious for the technology at that point.
Yes, it was curiosity. And, you know, just the allure of being able to mine some money on your own. That was crazy.
Yeah. Yeah. But then, you know, you, you kind of stay for the technology, I think, and just the ethos of the space.
I was gonna say, and the people too, I really, really, you know, this is one of those industries that’s just absolutely, I mean, it’s absolutely incredible, just where you have a really concentrated group of people with very similar ethoses, wanting to spread very similar messages and wanting to maintain, you know, specific values. And I think you can’t, there’s not a lot of places, you know, maybe it’s the size of the industry being what it is, but I think the capacity for everyone to be at least somewhat on the same page, you know, of course, you’re going to have some actors that are not great, you know, is beautiful. Right.
Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s no industry like Web3 because, as you mentioned, people become like the backbone. I think this is one of the more helpful industries that, you know, you can be a part of where, you know, if you reach out to somebody, they, you will hear back and, you know, they would be happy to, you know, lend you a hand and just, because everybody’s so excited.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, there’s just so excited to, it’s like we are running a cult, you know, we just get excited that somebody else wants to know about it and learn and join. It’s probably not the best analogy, but it feels a lot like that.
We actually call our community a cult. And so if you look at our Twitter, we’re hiring for two job positions right now. We’re hiring for a cult leader, you know, because it’s exhausting, quite frankly, and a propaganda specialist.
Wow. Very nice. Scandalous.
So I definitely agree with that logic that crypto is a cult because I love it. It’s quite a large degree, I think, and all of us just, you know, the builders in the space, I think we all love the technology, the ethos and everything. And we’re just more excited to have more people come along this journey, because somehow we truly do believe that this is going to be a major part of the future that we are heading towards.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and it’s nice to be able to like, you know, talk to people that you work with and understand the same goal. And I think you look at narratives in the space and you look at what a narrative is, you know, it kind of feels like a North Star effect.
But you definitely have different people looking at different opportunities to try to actually build towards that. And I think that’s something extremely exciting, too, because we’re so new into this that there are no right answers yet. And whatever is written ends up being what’s wrote.
I don’t mean, obviously, but. Yeah, no, I get what you’re saying. I totally get it.
I think the space is very, very dynamic. And this is exactly what I had tweeted yesterday or today, sometime or next, that there are no experts in the space. The space is way too dynamic for anybody to call themselves an expert.
You know, everything keeps changing. Every day you get up and there is like a ton of new things that have happened and that you have to catch up with. And that is what makes it even more exciting to be building in this space.
Yeah, no, I mean, there’s just so much innovation and things happen, you know, since it’s 24-7, you have lessons learned in the traditional markets that end up, that end up effectively happening at like 10x the speed. You have these high highs and these super lows, but it’s extremely interesting as we, you know, it’s extremely interesting as we kind of progress, where you see things rise and fall so quickly and lessons are learned even quicker. Right.
Yeah. So the people who do well here, I think they need to learn and unlearn very quickly. And that, I think, also keeps you a little young.
You need to be a little crazy. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That is one way of putting it. I agree.
I think, you know, you need to be a little bit of an adrenaline junkie and a little bit mad to stay in this space and, you know, cycle after cycle, heartbreak after heartbreak, but, you know, you just sort of come in and you stay for the day. So, you know, on that note, I would love to know a lot more about what you’re building currently. You know, you have a mission as well, you know, the Burnt mission as well as a chain.
So could you give us a little macro overview and then we can get into the details? Yeah, absolutely. You know, and so the idea kind of stemming off of the Burnt Banksy was normal people should be able to benefit with crypto. You know, and I think what we’re working on is, the easiest way to say our main goal is we’re trying to make crypto disappear.
Very short and sweet. We don’t believe that the barriers of entry need to be here. And I think they’re only hindering the industry.
And so we’re on a mission. We’ve been building for some odd two and a half years on Zion specifically in order to break down these barriers of entry. And so it’s actually really exciting.
You know, our testnet is live and we have it about three million accounts, three million unique users, I should say. And about 40 million transactions, you know, whether that be projects deployed with us or kind of what we’re pioneering with our chain abstraction. You know, I think it’s interesting as you look at our North Star being, you know, Web 2 should be synonymous with Web 3, you know, and there shouldn’t be this like other land.
Yeah, I think that kind of becomes very resistive, right? If you want to really onboard the next million users, you can’t say that, okay, this is like a huge, it is a paradigm shift, but the user doesn’t have to know. And frankly, user doesn’t really care, right? Yeah, exactly. They shouldn’t.
They shouldn’t need to. Yeah, exactly. You know, you’re online.
A lot of people are online or even people, you know, all of us are using electricity nowadays, at least the privileged ones are in several parts of the world. Then, you know, they don’t necessarily understand the ins and outs of everything, but you know, you are utilizing it because it’s solving a problem for you. And that is exactly how it should be with Web 3. Yeah, exactly.
Right. And it’s, you should be able to, we should be able to just have this conversation on Zoom and not need to know exactly everything that goes on. And imagine if it took me 25 minutes and I had to use four separate applications to log onto this call.
I, you know, that’s not fun. Yeah, nobody’s going to do it. I wouldn’t do it.
Nobody’s going to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Nobody has the kind of attention span anymore.
Moreover, nobody has the kind of time. So it needs to be easy and it needs to be convenient, I think. So let’s talk a little bit about, you know, you guys have been working on it for two odd years and now your testnet is live and kudos on the kind of traction that you’ve mentioned, but would love to perhaps, if you had to like say, explain this to somebody who is like a lay person, but that doesn’t understand different chains, what makes your chain stand apart? And is it, is it like an L2? Is it like an L1? Could you elaborate a little on that? Absolutely.
We are the first and only walletless L1. And so understandable, a big issue and one of the largest hurdles is this concept of wallets. And so when you can remove wallets and everything putting onto these, A, as a smart contract account, and then B, on the protocol level, getting into the technicals doesn’t really matter.
But you observe, as anyone who’s ever tried to onboard to crypto, that’s the main barrier. And so you actually get a lot of things that’s solved by removing all wallets. You can use crypto on any device.
I was actually just on a Stairmaster earlier today at the gym and I was on, I was interacting with this ion chain through the little interface. You know, people are doing it from their Apple Vision Pro or their Xbox. And so being able to kind of go on any device, not having to worry about this concept of gas fees, everything’s denominated in dollars.
Once you’re walletless, you actually expand to a level that’s unbeknownst to the industry, because obviously we’re the only ones kind of doing it. But you look at kind of where our attraction is and where I point the success of that traction to, it’s that no one knows that they’re interacting with crypto and it feels like just another website, as a matter of fact. Okay, wonderful.
So basically you’re making access very least resistive and easy for the end user. Yeah, exactly. So tell me a little about the kind of applications that are being, or the use cases for this particular chain that you’ve seen so far.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we always have like a small joke, which is, you know, we’ve built such great tools. You know, we built such great tools for onboarding and completely abstracting the crypto that anyone’s grandmother could use the chain, but not many people’s grandmothers are going to be slinging perpetuals all day.
Right. It’s just not what it is. But no, it’s a wonderful way of putting it.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
But, you know, kind of suffice to say it’s, you know, it’s obviously extremely exciting. And, you know, as it kind of relates, they’re not going to be slinging perpetuals. Right.
We’ve done such a great job at building great onboarding tools, not for people to trade dog with hat token. You know, not to say that I don’t, but that’s a crypto user. That’s not the user that we target.
And the user that we target is this kind of everyday user by actually saying, hey, we understand that there needs to be a reason why you use things. And we need to cross this chasm. We need to cross the chasm from this early tech adopter to this kind of mainstream user base.
And I believe that the way to do that is to go, A, go to them, but then B, be able to, like, give them a reason to be able to give them a reason to use something, not simply because it’s a narrative like crypto. Right. Absolutely.
I think, you know, the way you’ve kind of put it gives everybody building in this space something to think about and more power to you for being able to do this. So, you know, whenever anybody is building like one chain, they usually, it’s usually said in the industry that you need like a watch as to really go about doing it and be able to penetrate and get enough traction in the market. What is your take on that? How have you been able to build like an exciting community around your chain? Yeah, well, I mean, I think that also is kind of a sign of the times as well, because I think before, you know, when we talk about chain distraction, we, the first thing that when we set out on being kind of this layer one was refusing to be isolationist.
You know, and I think in that capacity, when you don’t have the network effects that come with crypto, then you need a war chest. You know, obviously, I think today we’ve raised $36 million with a very recent $25 million Series A. But suffice to say, we’re not trying to say, hey, let’s steal users from Solana, steal users from Aptos, where we kind of act and we’ve actually, we actually, you know, when I say going other chains, we’re pioneering a kind of an initiative called Chain Abstraction, which basically says, hey, it doesn’t matter what chain you’re on. We’re just going to work with the products.
And so we actually just had a live demo with a blockchain called Neutron yesterday, which had the most IBC channels ever created. We did this with Solana, BNB, Avalanche, Injective, Saga, you know, and more that we’ve done and more to come. But, you know, in that capacity, you know, we need to be collaborative as we go to the future.
And we can’t really be competitive. And I think if you want to try to be competitive, and you want to say, hey, we’re going to completely reinvent the wheel, and everyone needs to change all the user behaviors, then yes, I believe that you need a war chest. But I think when everyone benefits, which in my mind should be kind of the default, I think, you know, you’re playing in a different ballpark.
Right? Yeah, I agree. I think if you’re able to collaborate, and especially with what you’re doing, because I didn’t know you did a live demo, and you’re not competing with the chains, you’re just providing perhaps an additional layer, which makes it easier for the users. Obviously, there is a lot more going in the background.
But for the user, it’s more like, you know, an intermediary that kind of makes it easy for them to access different kinds of applications in the Web3 ecosystem. Yeah, exactly. Right.
And, you know, I think you have this large vision where I’m just using the internet, and I’m using applications, and I’m playing games, and I don’t have to change flows, right? I can go from YouTube to Google to TechCrunch, and I don’t have to know what chain I’m on, or Reop, or Bridge, or Send. We’re going to get to a future, and I think that future is actually very, very soon, where we’re just interacting, right? Like, we’re just using the tools, which is using applications, and not needing to know exactly where, you know, what chain we’re on, or what interoperability solutions we’re using. You know, and I think once you look at it into that perspective of, you know, layer one has a sour name, because I think, honestly, from what I remember, like, bridging was not really a thing up until 2021.
Yeah. So, like, when Solana came out the gates, it was, you know, it was one of those things that, it was one of those things that you needed to be, you know, you needed to redefine your industry. And I think we’re at a point within composability and interoperability where that’s not, that’s not really the case anymore.
Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, we’ve come so far in terms of where we used to be now, as you mentioned, that there is so much more conversation and action around interoperability.
I believe that is how, you know, a solution like yours is possible, right? This is, this is perhaps akin, a little akin to wallet abstraction, but obviously on a much larger scale. Exactly. So, you know, you guys have also had a recent, you know, exciting development with EarnOS partnership.
So can you tell us a little about that and what are the key benefits for users and brands involved in this collaboration? Yeah, absolutely. So for people who don’t know at home, EarnOS is a project that deployed on us. Very, very exciting project, I would say, which is, you know, they take this concept of questing that’s been very keen in the Web3 industry.
You know, companies like Galaxy or Zealy, there’s a lot of them. But they say, hey, you know, we could actually take this and apply this to Web2 and use the power of Zion to effectively remove all crypto away. And so what you also find out in events like this is, once you remove this kind of solutionism from crypto by removing the crypto, they answer the question of, wow, it’s actually impossible to send $5 to 2 million people.
You can’t do that without crypto. Especially globally, that’s impossible. It’s literally an unsolved problem that is solved by crypto.
And especially if, you know, working with Uber growth in Japan, this is something that if Uber wants to enter a Japanese market or any Southeast Asian market or something like that and want to be able to distribute, you know, like direct marketing to people so people can say, sign up for the email, watch an ad, here’s $5. That’s not possible. Right.
And it’s a win for the brands because there’s so, so, so much money burned in marketing. And so going directly to the source is incredible. And then as you, you know, then it’s a win for the users because I’m making money by just watching advertisements.
Right. Okay. This is a very interesting use case.
So what were the kind of, you know, perhaps, can you share like a key metric or some sort of anecdote or a success story? I think they had like, I think they personally, I mean, they launched maybe three weeks ago and I think had over 200,000 users. I think they had, I know they have multiple million dollars in committed spend from, you know, a bunch of these brands and the brands they’re working with are impressive. It’s Uber, it’s Lacoste, it’s Sunglass Hut, it’s the North Face, it’s brands that are household names.
And, you know, something like a Sunglass Hut, I believe, I don’t, I don’t remember the exact stat, but I think, I think they tripled their following and then had a 5,000% increase in their engagement in, I think a week, which is incredible, which is, it’s incredible. And it just shows you, you know, after that, it’s, and this was on testnet, the money wasn’t even real. This was on, on the Zion testnet.
And so when this actually, you know, becomes real money distributed, imagine, honestly imagine that. Yeah, that’s brilliant. Very exciting.
Yeah, it’s super exciting with, especially with, as you mentioned, these are all household, you know, very well-known brands, you know, in every house, everybody knows of these brands and that is super exciting. So what are your kind of strategies for expanding the ecosystem of projects on a Zion chain? Like how do you want to go about doing that? Obviously one way is through these very exciting collaborations, but what are the other key strategies that you guys have in your, Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is, is that, right? I think we offer, you know, a lot of incubation and a lot of help, whether it be working with companies who want fundraising, you know, the idea of building an ecosystem and, you know, you kind of see this a lot with crypto, unfortunately, which is you get like this grant meta, but it’s not really sustainable. And for those who don’t understand the concept of the grant meta, I’ll give you $50,000 you build on us, you know, whatever.
And it’s very short-sighted and it’s, you know, and it’s not, it’s not sustainable. You know, and so when we talk about something like an earnOS or an animation plus, every project that we work with, I would say we act like an incubation or like an accelerator more than anything, you know, because I think that’s what’s, what, what thrives the company. And, you know, once you’re in this industry for seven, eight, nine, 10, however many years, you understand that everything comes in cycles and yes, there’s going to be ups.
Yes, there’s going to be downs, but longevity is the only thing that is the main focus. Right. Absolutely.
I think what you’re saying in terms of, you know, how that is very short-sighted, these grant programs and asking, chains asking these startups to build on them. I agree. It’s very, again, very akin to perhaps airdrops and, you know, financially incentivizing users to utilize a certain product that, you know, you’re building.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there’s always going to be, you know, the proof will be seen long, long in the future.
Right. And it’s good and bad. Yeah.
But, you know, if you’re playing the long-term game, then these, it’ll just create a short-term spike. Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t matter.
And this, these will just create a short-term spike. So can you tell us a little about your team, you know, who’s behind this particular chain, who’s helped you? Yeah, absolutely. We have an incredible, incredible team.
Our CTO built the Gravity Bridge, which is the first ever bridge from Cosmos to Ethereum. Our head of DevOps comes from Terra, which obviously, if anyone has seen, had the largest transfer of money in the world. You know, as we kind of hit records on usage and block space, you know, getting someone to help, you know, obviously keep us afloat as we try to go on a volumetric-based KPI system.
Our engineering manager from Flow, I mean, the team is absolutely incredible. It’s very small. I mean, right now it is only about nine people.
You know, it is me, a BD person, a designer, and then everyone else is engineers. And, you know, obviously with, you know, an engineering-based company that that’s what you kind of come to expect, but, you know, it’s extremely, extremely interesting. You know, it’s extremely, extremely interesting.
And I love working with this team. They are some of the brightest people I know, the funniest people, and it is never a dull day. I promise you that.
Brilliant. So you guys are all working out of New York or is the team distributed? No, team is actually completely distributed. Okay.
Yeah. I think that is usually the case with all these great products that are being built. You know, it’s difficult to find all of that talent concentrated in one place.
It is. It is. All right.
Wonderful. So now that, you know, we kind of know what you’re building and your journey so far, I would love to know what is the next big milestone for you personally, as well as professionally that you’re looking forward to? I’m looking forward to our mainnet launch. I think that’s going to be the most exciting thing.
Ideally coming, you know, coming up soon, but, you know, we have a lot of great projects coming out the gate. Ready to kind of hit mainnet extremely, extremely hard with some great names like Uber, you know, Samsung, North Face, you know, some of them we’ve already kind of went over, but even more to kind of come. And, you know, it’s one of those things where always the, you know, it’s always a starting block, right? And it’s, you know, whenever mainnet comes live, it’s, you know, you have some teams who treat it like the end of the game, but really it’s the beginning.
And I think understanding that and saying, hey, this is where we’re able to hit our strides. This is where we’re able to, you know, this is where we’re able to actually really, really make a difference and a change and start really hyper growth and sprinting. It’s exciting.
It really is. And, you know, I’ve got the best team to do it with. Yeah, I think that’s wonderful.
So do you guys have like a timeline for your mainnet launch? We always say soon. Right. Yeah, I get that.
That’s the industry standard. You know, you’ve been in crypto, you know, yeah, you know, there’s always an answer to this. Yeah, yeah.
There is no good answer there. So it’s absolutely fine. And this is just for the folks who are perhaps waiting for, you know, your token to hit the market, but it’s okay.
We’re going to have people, you’re going to have like 40 wins in the comments. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, that’s going to be there.
But all right. So this is all wonderful. Yeah, absolutely.
Now, you know, just sort of zooming out a little bit and talking a little bit about the kind of challenges because I’m sure, you know, there are challenges in the spec. Really? No challenges while you were trying to democratize? Not a one challenge. It’s a streamlined process.
Just keep walking straight and you’ll get there. No, of course it’s, you know, of course it’s challenges. You know, it’s always hard to change, you know, when you have kind of dramatic shifts in an industry, it’s always going to be interesting.
And right now we feel like we’re at this crossing the chasm moment and there’s no clean connection. It is a jump. And whenever you have a jump, you always of course have the opportunity to fall.
And I think if we didn’t have such a great team, I would be worried. But, you know, there’s always going to be skeptics, there’s always going to be, you know, those kind of against. But I would say like challenges really is, I will say the challenge is that there’s no products in this industry, you know, and I wish there was.
And you have this kind of chicken and egg problem which effectively says, you know, there’s no users in this industry because there’s no products and there’s no products because there’s no users, you know. And one of these things needs to change. Obviously, you know, as we kind of say, we are trying to be this catalyst event by providing the users so that products have a total addressable market that’s larger than the total number of MetaMask downloads. And I think once we can get to this point of actual, A, differentiation, but B, A, differentiation, but B, hyperscale, I think the wheels really start turning. And once we can kind of hit this, this, this cliff effectively, which is mainnet, right? The easier, the faster it’ll be, you know, to kind of get things through.
So, I mean, to answer your question, I really, I really like, no, all jokes aside, there are not many challenges, because there’s nothing, you know, everything is, it’s a green open field and you, everything will be what you make of it. And you can always find a challenge in something, but you could also find solutions and you could also find, yeah, I’ll actually, I’ll give you a very, very good example. We, back in, back in July of last year, actually, we were, we were, this was like, actually probably more like, probably more like February of last year, actually.
We were not really considering, we were not really, the idea of having a count abstraction on a protocol level didn’t, didn’t hit us yet. We were, we were, but we did want to like make it easier for people. And so what happened was we were using an MPC provider, which for those who don’t know what an MPC is, it’s effectively like a multi-party way to create a wallet.
It’s an easy way to create a wallet so that you don’t actually need to, A, trust someone, so it’s not completely centralized and still non-custodial, but still have a very seamless, seamless flow. It’s like what you look at, like with a privy or something like that, the people who are trying to make wallets easier to create, that’s what we were trying to do. Early last year.
And we had opened up our testnet and we were absolutely decimating these guys. They, they ran, we were taking down their network every single time. And, you know, cause you need three parties, right? You want to do it in decentralized fashion.
I remember, I remember we’re sitting there and they’re running a hackathon in New York over a weekend and we take their testnet down and we ruined their hackathon. And I felt so bad, but it was, I didn’t really feel that, I didn’t feel that bad because you know, that’s, you know, that’s probably our problem. We have too many users.
Yeah. Oh no, I’m sorry. We have too many users.
But you know, suffice to say it really made us think and we’re like, we really hit this kind of first principles perspective. And then that rabbit hole ended up leading us down to our protocol level account abstraction. And then effectively saying, why, why are we using wallets at all? Like if we can make everything a smart contract account, we actually, you know, and that’s why I say, right, you look at how we introduced ourselves.
We were a walletless L1. And this was the impotence of that. Right.
And so you can look at something like this and say, this is a challenge. This is a problem. Or it was the greatest thing to ever happen to this company because it put us on a trajectory that we would have never imagined.
Yeah. I think that’s a wonderful way of putting it. And that’s, it’s just about perspective.
And I think this is good advice for business as well as life that, you know, at times your lowest moments and, you know, kind of problems that do arise, they give you that, that opportunity perhaps for growth and to get there, get where you were perhaps always meant to be. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, that’s, it’s also how you survive in this crazy, crazy markets.
Absolutely. I think, yeah, you need that kind of perspective and that kind of attitude to survive and to live to see another day. So, yeah, I totally agree with you.
So now, you know, again, I would like to perhaps double down a little bit on the user adoption question. Like, I would love to know your, what is your approach to ensure, like, obviously your USP is to make crypto perhaps disappear. But how are you reaching out to these end users, educating them about yourself and your platform? Well, we don’t really need to educate the end user too much, right? Like, I think you’ll always get, I think you’ll always get the crypto power user, which will, you know, be the kind of educator and the developer will be the educator.
But I don’t think that you, like, I don’t think it’s necessary anymore because we don’t have wallets because we don’t, we don’t have like any of the barriers to entry. We don’t actually need to educate users, right? And I think this is a flawed perspective of the industry, which is the way to reach users is to educate them and make education better. It’s like, no, the way to get users is to make it so that they don’t need to be educated and they can just use something.
And, you know, as it relates to that, I recommend you trying, you know, anyone at home as well, you can use your mobile phone and try EarnOS or any other of the products. And you won’t know that you’re interacting with crypto for one second. You don’t need to be educated.
I don’t need to, you know, you don’t need to do a Coinbase learn and earn program to understand how to onboard because, you know, direct everything’s denominated in dollars. You’re able to use credit card and debit card for most of it and able to withdraw into money. So the idea really is to build an ecosystem of projects that don’t require, that don’t require, you know, that really just don’t require education.
Right. Again, this is a wonderful perspective, I think, because we kind of, as builders, I have talked a lot about it, that, you know, there is usually a learning curve and maybe, obviously, you know, you need to make the experience better. But in the meantime, perhaps you need to educate the end user so that more people understand this.
So this is a very different, but I think a perspective that I would totally concur with that, you know, you need to make it so easy that nobody needs to be educated. So let me perhaps reframe my question. You mentioned that, you know, you will get the crypto power users and the developers and they would kind of be able to become that mechanism via which users kind of flock to you.
So how do you, how are you reaching out to these guys and building your initial system of early adopters? A lot of it, I mean, there was, there’s been about a year of this. And so it’s been about a year of this, I would say. So what was I going to say? I would say originally, especially when we were in the bear market, a lot of, a lot of the developers kind of came from like resignments in a way of, wow, I’ve built the product.
I want to build a product. And there’s three users in this industry. And because no one’s here and I need to increase my total addressable market.
So that was really like the impetus of most of these projects. And then you have something like an earnOS, which was actually quite organic. They just cold reached out to us because of just the content that we put out.
And, you know, I think it was our partnership with Circle for USDC. And they’re saying, you know, hey, we actually need this. And I think there is a quite nice organic aspect to the growth of the industry, especially when you see the projects and you see the brands, you know, and you see the potential, you know, but of course we have a community of over a million, you know, that is extremely, extremely strong.
I think we have like 700,000 followers on Twitter, 600,000 in the Discord, you know, really, really active, active community. That’s really exciting. You know, and of course just word of mouth is always going to be strong and, you know, we’re not even technically alive yet and we’re seeing so much growth.
And so it’s extremely, extremely exciting and we’re more than excited to then just hit midnight. Right. Yeah.
Well, this is wonderful. Like I mentioned before, Kudos on the kind of traction you have seen. Now, you know, I would love to, because you’ve not covered that so far and it just struck me that, you know, we haven’t really talked about chain abstraction.
Without going perhaps too technical, you know, would you like to shed some light on that for our listeners? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we touched on it a little bit with like the Solana and the AVAX, you know, kind of partnership and things that we had there, or I guess integration we had there, I should say. But if you, if you had to say, explain how it kind of works to a, you know, a user or just a builder, how would you do that? Yeah.
So since everything’s a smart contract, since everything’s a smart contract on Zion, we can have a smart contract deploy via, you know, whether it’s any bridging, if anyone’s not familiar with bridging, I won’t go into the specific names. For those of you who are familiar, whether it’s IBC or Hyperlane or Union, you know, utilizing some of these interoperability solutions to then deploy a smart contract on a neighboring chain. And so we have a smart contract on, let’s say, Zion and a smart contract on, say, Solana.
And they act as mirrors to each other, right? So, and they can communicate with each other, right? It’s general message passaging. And so, but with that being said, it’s now this way of being able to communicate. And since we don’t need a wallet, we actually don’t need to, we don’t need to be, you know, wallet-specific in signing because most chains have a different signature schema, which is one of the main reasons why it’s very difficult to go cross-chain.
And so you’re effectively within the usage or however you want to say it, using a product on Solana without even knowing it because we act like this kind of mirror. And now take that and then say, okay, well, we have one on Solana, we have a smart contract on Solana, we have one on Avalanche, we have one on Base. And now you’ve created this kind of omni-chain environment where every chain is connected via these smart contracts and all of them can communicate with each other extremely seamlessly because they’re a smart contract.
And you get this interesting, you get this interesting network effects of products being able to say, you know, transactions, users, TVL, and all of these things can flow very seamlessly without having to really, the only thing that you really have to probably change is the website handle. Right. I think that’s a wonderful way of putting it.
It’s very straightforward in the way you’ve explained it, the mirror and, you know, because there is no wallet, the kind of, that kind of complexity of getting the right schema that kind of goes away. And I think for perhaps people who are listening in, this will give them the right level of curiosity to look into this because again, very exciting technology. And I love how we’ve, you know, come such a long way from no smart contracts to smart contracts to several chains.
And now these chains, you know, talking to each other and effectively growing the ecosystem together. Yeah, that’s beautiful. I mean, it really is beautiful to see genuinely.
Yeah. It’s exciting as well. It’s very exciting.
So now as a leader in Web3 and, you know, now I’m completely zooming out because we are running out of time, even though I’m enjoying this conversation a lot, but perhaps the last three questions or two questions, I would love to know your perspective as somebody who’s been in this space for some time, what kind of personal principles or philosophies guide your own work and what keeps you in Web3 despite all the kind of small or niggling or bigger obstacles that you’ve seen in your journey? That’s a very good question, actually. And I think what keeps me in Web3 is that I think there’s always a group of people that are trying to do good. And I think like, when I always try, like, I mean, I normally just say, just don’t be a dick.
That’s always my, I always, that’s just for everyone that I meet. That is what it is. You know, I apologize for cursing, of course, but there’s so many, there’s so much going on.
There’s so much good being done. But, you know, you’re in an industry that can always, always, always be grifted, right? Once you involve a financial aspect into something, it’s hard not to. People have numbers, there will always be nefarious players, but, you know, just understanding the long term and understanding where we’re going and where we want to be, you know, it’s much more powerful than anything, really.
You know, and I think being able to kind of see through all of that is important. And it’s hard to do that on your first cycle, but, you know, it’s not all lost. Yeah, absolutely.
No, there’s always, like, I think, you know, when a conversation takes a turn in this direction, I usually go back to what I had heard Andres Antonopoulos say in one of his videos, and perhaps it was in the book Internet of Money, it said that, you know, all these, all new industries kind of see the bad elements arrive as well, you know, just when it’s taking off. But we should just remember that there is more good folks than them, you know, they’re more, they’re more, more solution builders than the problem creators. And you should take solace in the fact.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think, you know, kind of time and time again, you begin to see this more and more.
Yeah, which is awesome. Yeah. It’s nice.
It’s life affirming as well. I think it gives you hope that, you know, there’s more good in the world. Yeah.
And there are good people and people are trying to do good. And nobody’s not everybody is perhaps coming from a place of madness. And that is very life affirming.
Yeah, no, exactly. Genuinely, exactly. So now, just to, you know, this is this is something that I ask everyone who comes on the show.
And I would love to ask you as well, if you had to, you know, give advice to aspiring entrepreneurs or developers, or even just users who are perhaps, you know, sitting on the fence about getting in this in the web three space, just, you know, checking out the next DAP or something like that. What would be your advice to them for them to truly start living on blockchain? For users, you won’t have to do anything. You’ll, you’ll be interacting with blockchain, and you won’t even know it.
And that’s okay. It’s great. For people who want to start building, I would ask yourself why? I understand that you’re here for the right reasons, not the wrong reasons, naturally.
Which is it’s easier said than done. I will say, it’s easier to get it’s very easy to get caught up in everything that goes on. It’s very easy to get caught up in the money, the big numbers, some of the people in the lifestyles, but keep your head down.
Yeah, and I don’t know, don’t also, I would really be honest, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe stay in your job, like, you don’t have to quit for crypto. It’s a lot of people I know, the odds aren’t great. So, and it sucks.
You got it. You genuinely got to be crazy. So.
Yeah, it’s not for everyone. Yeah, it’s not for everyone. Yeah, you don’t have to do anything.
Not everything has to be built in web three. Not everybody has to really make that leap and come to and join the cult, as we’ve put. But it’s not for everyone.
But if you are really going to be building in the space, then I think in this cycle, and you know, in the past two cycles, I think a lot of people have given very similar suggestions that you really need to ask yourself, why are you doing this for the right reasons? Do you really like the technology? Or are you here just for the noise and the, you know, the trills and banners that come kind of with it? And if your answer is a resounding yes, that you know, you really like the ethos. Yeah, you really care. And you know, you’re curious.
And you want to build in the space because you like the technology then stay. And great. Yeah.
But there’s always a caveat. Not everything has to be, you know, built with keeping web three in mind. Of course.
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s just, you know, it’s similar to AI. Like, it’s always these are narratives sometimes.
And yeah, a lot of it, you know, a lot of the times, it’s just, it’s, it’s going to be a narrative. You know, and you can see this a lot. But, you know, unfortunately, not everything needs to be on chain either.
Like, yeah, no, that’s very true. You know, that kind of makes me a little curious about your opinion about this. And this is something I’ve been recently started asking guests on the show.
What is your take on all of these AI tokens? Do you have a date? You have an opinion there? Yeah, my mama said, if you have, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. That kind of says everything. That kind of says everything.
But yeah, I, I think, yeah, I get what you’re saying. And I feel, I’ll be honest about my opinion. I haven’t really seen a very good use case so far of these AI tokens.
I’m sure that there might be, you know, NFT, I used to have a very weird opinion of NFTs as well, initially, like, but just the crypto goodies aspect. And I didn’t understand digital collectibles at all. But you know, the technology itself, I think, has evolved so much, right? There’s so many use cases now, hasn’t, there’s been no particular product market fit, I think, even till date, but it’s a dynamic industry and the technology can be used to build really wonderful solutions.
So I think, even though I don’t have a very flattering opinion of these AI tokens currently, but I’m sure that, you know, that we might see a day when there is a particular use case that actually makes sense and makes life easy for people. Hope so. Yeah, let’s hope so.
All right. This has been really wonderful. Thank you so much, Anthony, for making the time to speak to me.
Before we wrap this up, any last thoughts, anything that you would like to share to our listeners and how to perhaps get involved with Zion? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first, first of all, thank you so much for having me. Obviously, it is a genuine pleasure.
And this is a great conversation. So I really appreciate it. You know, I think is it actually kind of relates to getting involved with Zion.
And if you’re a user, be using it someday and hopefully you won’t even know it. You know, but for others, right, like it is, you know, please come to the Discord, come to the Twitter. We have so much exciting stuff going on.
It’s not even funny. And, you know, I think that, you know, sentiment may be low right now also just kind of from a more macro level. But I think we’re at one of the most exciting inflection points that we’re going to see in a very long time.
And reminds me of kind of like the come off of DeFi summer, which is really, really exciting. Yeah, no, it’s an exciting time to be in this space. And I think with solutions like yours, things are just going to get better and better.
So I would. Yeah, no, I’m absolutely positive. I’m very, very bullish on especially solutions like yours when, you know, I think this is something that I’ve always said that, you know, you need to, your solution needs to work in a way that the user doesn’t even know that they, you know, it’s utilizing blockchain technology because it doesn’t matter to the user.
And that is not something that’s relevant. And you are doing exactly that. So I have only good wishes for you.
And thank you so much once again for making the time to speak to me. Thank you. Yeah, this is a lot of fun.
I appreciate it.