Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Dr. Chandra Duggirala. He is the CEO of Tides Network.
He is also the co-contributor to Portal to Bitcoin. Basically, they are building a decentralized finance infrastructure focused on custody-less cross-chain solution. Prior to Portal, he founded Fuel which pioneers AI-driven personalized nutrition and Novobionics as well, where he invented a minimally invasive medical device for treating diabetes.
He is a physician by training who has turned into a technocrat. Chandra combines deep technical expertise with a vision for eliminating friction in the blockchain infrastructure. This is a very interesting conversation because he comes from deep experience and knowledge which is very diversified.
What they are building is definitely very pertinent and required. I think anybody who is getting in this space, starting off in Web3, trying to build in terms of infra, especially should listen to this particular conversation. I can’t wait for you guys to hear this.
Let’s deep dive right in. Hi Chandra, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? Doing great.
Thank you for having me. Awesome. For our listeners, can you tell us a little about yourself and how you got into Web3 and then perhaps post that we can talk a little about what you’re doing currently.
Sure. So my background is a little atypical for a Web3 founder. So I went to medical school and after medical school I was, after residency training, I was in grad school doing PhD in biophysics and I decided that the academic track, initially I was going to be an MD-PhD doing, you know, running some sort of an academic research program at a university.
But that didn’t fit my style so I moved to Silicon Valley from the Northeast and started doing, started my first medical technology company. And then after a couple of software companies, I was actually the first AI nutrition co-pilot. This was back in 2017 when we exited the company and was basically looking for things to do or, you know, kind of take a sabbatical and learn what to do next.
That was when Ethereum came out and a lot of Ethereum projects, you know, ERC20 projects, another layer one started coming out and so took six months to kind of learn the basics which I first got acquainted with in 2011 with Bitcoin. I mined Bitcoin in 2011 out of interest. Never thought I would have any interest in business in that space or that Bitcoin would go anywhere because it was, we were all at that time pretty confident that the governments are going to react very adversely to this concept of stateless money.
But in 2017 with all of these ICS and stuff, I actually spent the full year re-familiarizing myself with the Bitcoin network, the architecture, all of the different, you know, trade-offs that were made and all the other new things that were, you know, coming out including ZK-SNARKs and all the interesting stuff at that time. Towards the end of that, I was interested to see that there’s a lot of demand for this speculation or exchange in this space, right? Like Binance got started that year, if I remember correctly. Right, yes.
And almost every day you could get news of an exchange being hacked or, you know, some exchange rug-pulling their users or some form of a custodial loss. So at the end of, maybe mid 2018, end of 2018, me and my co-founders from a previous startup said, you know, we know how to build software. And this complete experience of the term Web3 wasn’t there then.
It was crypto altcoins and Bitcoin and, you know, alts. This entire experience from how you own to how you purchase to how you trade is completely fundamentally broken. And so why don’t we just build good software to fix these problems? And that’s how the Portal project started.
And then we further identified that the biggest problem in the space happens to be custodial risk. And, you know, I can go into a little bit of that if you want me to. Yeah, please go ahead.
Yeah. So, yeah, the conclusion at the end was that the toughest problem was that when you want to trade your coins, right? Let’s say you have Bitcoin and I have Ethereum and we want to trade. There was this old problem with an informal proof in computer science called the fair exchange problem dating back to 1996, where if two parties are separated in time and space, there’s no way to guarantee a fair exchange, which means within a defined period of time, if I send you my coins first, there’s no guarantee that I get that I will get your coins.
And the same thing happens in reverse. And that remained an unsolved problem until 2011, when an anonymous poster by the name of T.R. Nolan created this unique way of after the blockchains and Bitcoin, you know, now we have these systems that have self-enforcing contracts based on pre-existing logic. And now you have a way of ensuring a fair exchange between two different blockchains.
And that’s called an atomic swap. And so a lot of our research from 2019 to 2023 focused on that, how to make sure that the centralized exchange or the bridge or the vault or multi-sig problem is solved forever, because all of these different techniques people use are forms of custody. The era of 2010 to 2019 was the era of centralized exchanges, right? That started with Mt.
Gox and ended badly with FTX. Of course, there are some still going. In 2019, people invented the concept of a bridge, where instead of custodying somebody else’s coins at a centralized exchange, a bunch of validators will custody some coins and then issue these IOUs on the other blockchain called, you know, by different names, right? There are wrapped assets, there are, you know, you could call them derivatives.
You know, some form of this form of custody is called bridging. And so 2019 to 2024 was the era of custody. And even that was, most people don’t know, has ended in a lot of loss for users.
You know, about eight billion dollars was lost in bridge hacks in the last year alone. So it’s pretty bad. So the technology that we’ve built actually make cross-chain DeFi completely custodialist and it is consumer grade.
So it’s fast, it’s cheap, it is seamless user experience. So we’re bringing the ideal user experience, which is a centralized exchange user experience to a consumer grade product where there is absolutely no custodian in the middle. So you don’t have to play these shenanigans where you say, oh, it’s non custodial because 17 validators signed for it.
You know, there’s no, none of those, none of those things. And as far as we’re aware, it’s the only truly non-custodial cross-chain infrastructure in the world that works with Bitcoin. OK, that’s very interesting.
So this is a portal to Bitcoin that, you know, you guys have created. Can you tell me a little more about the team behind this? Yeah. So, well, the team is about 43 people large now.
So me, I’m the CEO of the development lab that is the core contributor to the portal project. Our CTO is an engineer with, you know, more than 15 years experience, Stanford in, you know, doing this engineering at Stanford, then worked at InvenSense designing the M2 coprocessor that was actually the motion coprocessor Apple put in its first watch in an iPhone 5, I believe. He was the leader of the design team there, wrote the, you know, pioneering work on that, on that chip design.
Yeah. The rest of our engineering team is, most of them are on our website. But, but, you know, our roots go back to building like real deep tech in the Bay Area.
And we take the exact same approach when it comes to whether it’s Web3 or whatever, software, good software development practice, or good software development practice. You may have to learn new domains, but that’s just, that’s just the way it is. Right.
Yeah. No, this is super exciting that, you know, you have created something, which is one of a kind for Bitcoin, a fully custodial cross-chain infrastructure. And I think you recently launched your testnet or, and what is like, what has been the response so far? Can you tell us a little about that? Oh, absolutely.
I mean, so we launched our private testnet only for our community, meaning the members of our community about two weeks ago, we were expecting, or actually we kind of restricted the use to only users who attained a certain status of a Galactic Jellyfish. Jellyfish is our mascot and there’s levels of these jellies that we give people based on their contribution in the community. And we initially restricted it to a few thousand.
And then before we know it, in 10 days, it ends up getting like 130,000, you know, users have 160,000 different wallets, you know, 1.9 billion transactions, the whole thing blows up. And it basically challenged every single infrastructure bottleneck that we expected and didn’t expect. For example, it broke, you know, the Sepolia testnet on Ethereum, gas fees went up by 5% because of just the amount of transactions happening on our testnet.
MutinyNet, which runs the BTC testnet, actually stopped working because they thought they were under DDoS. And so we ended up having to fork and run our own BT testnet. So yeah, it was overwhelming, but in a good way.
And with that, we actually accelerated the development. And, you know, a lot of things that would have been fixed in the future got ended up being fixed now, because they had to be good. And now we’re, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Not fun, but good problem. Yeah, the end result of that is we decided that we kind of maxed out the capacity of all these testnets. I mean, these testnets were never built for scale, right? And they were never tested or stress tested at the level that we did to them.
So, you know, we made the decision to just accelerate the timeline to mainnet, because everything works better on mainnet, across the infrastructure, like out. Okay, so this is all sounding very exciting that, you know, your testnet has had such a rave response. When are you, like, what is the timeline for mainnet? When are you looking to go live for everyone at large so that we can try it out as well? Yeah, so that’s a great question.
Of course, it depends on value for consensus and a couple of factors, but the target is January. Okay, it’s anyways, testnet will continue to run as promised, and we’re doing a light node drop. So portal network has different levels of nodes.
There’s the validator nodes that, you know, are auctioned off every epoch, and people have to participate in the auction to win that. But apart from that, there are validator nodes that are not hardware and software intensive, that just keep, you can think of them as a full node equivalent of Bitcoin on the portal network, but they get token emission, 5% of the emission for it. And so there are good rewards, and those are limited in number, and they’ll continue to have these emissions for throughout the lifetime of the emissions of the network.
So they’re being given over the mainnet, otherwise testnet now will continue to run its course. And then we will hopefully be mainnet by January. Okay, awesome.
And if somebody doesn’t want to, like, give your testnet, take it out for a run, can they do that? Or is it still… Absolutely. It’s open to public. We just opened it yesterday.
And so it’s open to public now, which basically means that anybody can go to nodes.bitcoin.com and participate in, download the Chrome extension or the iOS version of the, of the Dex app, and then just participate in Senua’s testnet. Okay, awesome, awesome. So we’ll surely put in that particular link, nodes.portal to bitcoin.com in our description of this particular episode so that more people can participate in your incentivized testnet.
Now, I would love to sort of talk a little about the community, because you know, you’ve mentioned such a rave response, and we have a lot of entrepreneurs tuning in as well. You are somebody who is, who has, as you mentioned, a bit of a native background, but not necessarily from a marketing and community side. Can you tell us a little about how you manage to create such a supportive community for your product? Obviously, the product itself has to be good for the community to be that excited.
But you know, there is a little bit of groundwork that has to be laid so that the community is as engaged as yours. So can you tell us a little about that? Absolutely. So obviously, we have to do learning ourselves.
In the community, it’s part of product development, it’s part of marketing, it’s a part of every function. And that’s kind of a hard lesson and transition for many entrepreneurs who come from traditional startup backgrounds. But the philosophy behind making community a part of it, every part of your every function, if you start with the community, you can test the value proposition, they will give you the feedback, they will actually be happy and involved that their feedback is incorporated in the product.
So it makes their ideas, their creativity, and their ideas are actually built in, in collaboration with them. And then that extends to every part of it, right? Like we need to go down the path of customer support. You know, there are people who have identified the problems, got the problems fixed, created these user guides, error guides, all that stuff.
And there’s a structure that we have there. Right. Yeah, I think that you have to make marketing a part of every aspect, perhaps of every activity that is there in the company.
So yeah, I think that Chandra, I have to interrupt. I can’t hear you all that well. I feel like your voice is coming and going.
In your last answer, I didn’t want to interrupt. But perhaps, you know, you can, I don’t know what exactly is the issue. Maybe it’s the headphones issue.
Can you hear me okay now? No, it is fine. Because it seemed like it was loud, and then it was a little low. So perhaps, you know, you can just say whatever you’re saying again, not the whole answer.
Just you were replying to what I had said, and we can take it from here. Okay. Yeah, can you repeat the question, if you don’t mind? Sure.
So, you know, I think what you said about how marketing needs to become like a core activity and should be enshrined in every aspect of what a company does is very, very important. That becomes like the foundation. Right.
So what I was saying was that community becomes essentially the core aspect of marketing. Content and community become the core functions of marketing. So instead of you trying out what are the new ideas that will resonate with people, you put out your ideas, and you let them run with it.
And you let them add their own unique versions of it to your marketing message. And so again, you mix community’s work with your own work, right? That travels a lot faster, that scales a lot better than, you know, just completely vertically integrated teams building and then trying to get connected. Yeah, man, I think we’re at a time where almost everything that can be imagined can be built fast, especially with advances in large language models and stuff.
Network effects and community will remain the core differentiators for whether you’re a company or you’re a decentralized project. So it better be a core competence or at least a core focus area of yours. Absolutely.
Okay, this is all very exciting. Now, you know, I would love to understand from you because you’re somebody who has been around for a while. You’ve been around since nearly the same time as I’ve been there.
You mentioned that, you know, you mined Bitcoin in 2011. And I’ve been in crypto since the time. What are the kind of changes that you’ve noticed? And I know that there are some very obvious ones that have happened over the years.
But what are the kind of systemic changes that you’ve seen in the way of entrepreneurs are dealing with this tech and how users are responding to it over the years? Okay, so I would actually say that not much has changed. Right from the beginning, there were many forks of Bitcoin with different value propositions. Right.
After that, we entered the Turing Complete smart contract competition, which is like who wants to be the world computer, which Ethereum pioneered. And there’s a bunch of Ethereum killers that came out of that. After that, now we’re in this weird meme coin phase or non fungible token slash meme coin phase.
So the Bitcoin stands apart from all of these different altcoins in my mind. It has a unique use case. It has unique value proposition.
And in its value proposition, there’s no competition. There’s no second chain that can actually claim to become the stateless money like Bitcoin. So it’s unique.
It’s UBP secure. Except everybody else is actually trying to play the game of what can become the better speculative asset for my users or the short to me intermediate term. Because none of these blockchains other than DEX coins and some centralized exchange coins actually can be considered assets in any sort of way.
A meme is not a financial asset. It’s a speculative asset. And so the ease with which people can create them, you just need to create an idea, assemble a community around it.
I’m just saying it as if it’s easy, but that’s just and it appreciates in value and eventually crashes until there’s more people willing to buy it. Those are the fundamental economics of this meme. The fact that it’s so easy means that the marginal cost of production will equal the marginal risk, which is why you see the explosion in these meme coins.
And so it becomes harder and harder to identify the outliers. And you’ll have these huge higher order distribution functions. Instead of, hey, we have 100 coins, 10 of them will be like the nice little distribution that people are used to.
Instead, you have like maybe five or six of them like WIF or like SHIBA or like DOGE will have long life cycle and multi-billion dollar market caps. The rest of them will become increasingly hard to kind of separate from each other. That’s kind of my observation.
It’s like the more things kind of change, the more they remain the same, because essentially what has remained and what will remain is Bitcoin. These other kind of tokens, they might change in technicality at that bit, but the essence remains the same. That’s right.
That’s right. I mean, initially it was like, oh, I have another L1. Then it’s I have another L2.
Then it’s I can mint NFTs. And then now it’s I can create a meme coin. So it’s like the vehicles change, but the underlying dynamics are essentially the same.
Yeah, that’s an interesting way to look at it, I think. And I think really true as well. So that gives you something to think over and cure.
Yeah, but the thing is that the markets do want these things. I mean, people do want to speculate and entertain themselves with these things. And so the demand definitely exists for building the rails to make this seamless, non-custodial, et cetera, et cetera.
So from a project perspective, that’s what we look at. It’s like we don’t actually think about whether these meme coins make any sense or not. We don’t spend any time on that.
We just like, OK, let’s build the best rails because the demand is full. Yeah, that is there. The market does demand stuff like this, even though at times, you know, you really think it’s futile.
But markets are rational. People are driven by emotion. So, yeah, I understand where you’re coming from, however frustrating it might be.
Yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m frustrated, but these are inherently part of human nature, right? Like, you know, before the tulip bubble, there were the soap bubble and so on and so forth. So, you know, these manias come and go, especially in times when there’s lots of money printing, they tend to accelerate. Yeah, you’re right.
Now, I want to talk a little about Types Network as well. You are the CEO there. Can you tell us a little about that? Yeah, so Types is the development company.
It’s a, we build products in basically cutting-edge markets, right? Like, it’s as generic as that sounds. It almost sounds like it was workshopped by a PR firm in Madison Avenue, right? But that’s exactly what we are. We build cutting-edge products in hottest tech markets.
We’ve talked so far about portal, you know, there’s another product, same company, it’s called Rafa.ai. It’s the world’s best investing co-pilot. It’s, you know, your users can check out Rafa.ai as well. And that’s also a product built by a team of ex-NVIDIA engineers.
You know, it’s simply like having an entire team of asset managers, like a portfolio manager, a risk analyst, a CFA, a financial planner, a tax planner, you know, all of those in your pocket. And there are all these different agents that specialize in different areas. And depending on your preferences, they can help you invest better in traditional financial markets, as well as in crypto.
So we’re starting to incorporate a lot of crypto. Eventually, maybe, eventually, the goal is to incorporate like the higher risk curve as well, including, you know, the meme coin, stuff like that. That’s interesting, I’m sure we’ll check it out.
And so primarily, you are like a studio, like a venture studio, or are you taking on other projects as well and building? We are not a studio. We’re not a studio. We are a company with product lines, because a venture studio comes up with an idea.
It then takes it to a certain, you know, stage and then hires other people and then kind of recycles that capital into other projects. We’re not like that. We actually own the entire lifecycle of all of the products that we build.
Okay, all right. Okay, thank you for clarifying that. Now I want to, again, go back to some, you know, macro part of the market.
I would love to understand from you about blocking just interoperability. And especially, you know, it has always been a little bit of a hot topic. Obviously, it comes, like you’ve mentioned earlier, it comes with its own security concerns.
How do you see this kind of evolving further? You know, we had the bridges and you have created a product which is solely for Bitcoin. But do you see- It’s not solely for Bitcoin though. So it’s for, see, it’s an interoperability protocol.
So right now it works with Bitcoin and ETH, ETL2s, EVM compatible chains. Soon it’ll have Solana. So our goal is to actually have all of the top blockchains compatible with Bitcoin.
Okay, awesome. That’s wonderful. I think it’s great to create ecosystem around your product and that is essentially what you’re doing.
So what are the kind of key vulnerabilities perhaps that you feel right now that kind of plague our ecosystem at large, especially when it comes to interoperability, DeFi, or just, you know, these tokens that keep coming up, the newer tokens, newer L2s. If you could tell us a little in some broad strokes, what do you feel are the key vulnerabilities plaguing the market currently? Vulnerabilities meaning like for the users or like just the market sentiment? I feel that, you know, it’d be better if you answered it from both perspectives, from the market perspective as well as from the user perspective. Sure.
So from a user perspective, anytime you’re dealing with these DeFi interoperability protocols, there’s three types of these, right? Like one we discussed, which is called bridging. The other one is the protocols that do message passing between different blockchains and that provides no additional security than, you know, any other bridge or wrapper. Making, see, security always comes at the cost of convenience.
So hidden custodial risk is the biggest concern, I would say, as it should be for any user. The second thing I would say is, you know, I mean, custody has always proven to be risky for anyone. So, you know, self-custody is the way to go, whether you’re just storing your coins or trading, I would recommend non-custodial, fully secure trusted system.
Okay. Because the biggest risk that can happen is like a repeat of FTX, a repeat of, you know, USD Luna or, you know, any of the other things that we’ve seen, right? WBTC de-packing could happen. I mean, all of these toys come with hidden risks.
So anything could have a systemic effect. And then you’re back into the deep long bear market again. Right, yeah.
That’s true. So, and what about like from the perspective of the ecosystem of the market in general, what are the kind of vulnerabilities that you foresee and that you feel of, you know, that are plaguing currently the market at large? I think a lot of regulatory clarity, especially in the US has been very positive. The ETF inflows into Bitcoin don’t directly affect the alt markets, but indirectly the profits taken from the price appreciation in Bitcoin usually tends to bleed off into alt coins.
And so that’s a positive. I don’t actually see any short-term risks. I think we are still in phase three, beginning of phase four of the market.
Bitcoin is going to go a lot higher and the volatility in the short term in the alt coin markets will become more, but I think generally the markets will go higher in the rest of 2024. And if not beginning of 2025 and well into March. Okay, awesome.
What are the kind of bigger challenges that do come to your mind while building a trust-minimized cost-sharing solution and how have you addressed them when you are like, you know, creating portals? Right, so, well, like you said, when you claim to do something that hasn’t been done before and when you claim that security is non-negotiable and we will never compromise on that, you better be sure that your claims are true, right? So it all comes down to security, making sure, triple-checking everything, thinking about all the edge cases, having a lot of different eyes, not just one, you know, checkbox. All right, you know, making sure that the architecture is super well thought out. There’s a lot of research and engineering that goes into designing these things.
And, you know, that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of patient investors who are willing to wait for a long period of time. So that’s the biggest challenge. I mean, it’s easy to copy-paste to something and say, hey, we’re gonna just do another aggregator for perps, right? How many hidden layers of risk are in there? Nobody knows, no one knows.
No one can know. So when you make strong claims like this, the toughest part is actually delivering what we promised. And not compromising or trying to, you know, somehow obscure a lack of security with a lot of technical jargon, as a lot of projects tend to do.
Right, yeah, just, I think it’s important to deliver on what you’re promising. I think that is the most important part of when, especially when you’re creating something which is completely consumer-facing because they tend to be more impatient as a user segment with your product. So looking ahead a little bit, how do you see the adoption of custody-less cross-chain solutions evolving in the next five years, perhaps? Because I, maybe not five years, maybe in two years, but five years is a really long time in Web3.
Right, right, like, I mean, okay, so five years seems like a long time, but Uniswap wasn’t there in 2019, right? So these things have been growing quite rapidly. You know, if you look at Dex volumes from just two to three years ago to now, you know, last I checked, Dex volume, weekly volume was around 60 billion or something, now it’s 80. So it’s, these things have taken over very rapidly, even though you don’t have a native Bitcoin Dex.
So with the native Bitcoin Dex, I think centralized exchanges will start to face a lot of competition, and Dexs will do very well. I think, if I’m not wrong, in five years’ time, they will be at least as big as the centralized exchanges, at least by trading wall. Because it makes no sense to, for any project to have to pay and deal with these, you know, the amount of money it costs, the, you know, this is a public, this is a public information, right? Like, this is not some secret information that I’m giving out.
It’s, you know, openly verifiable that share of the market has rapidly decreased, and it’ll continue to. Right. So you feel that it’s only gonna obviously grow in the, you know, next five years, and especially because there have been some bad cases of the centralized entities, so Dexes, et cetera, and should grow more.
You feel that the users are becoming more aware, and there are more people, because we do want to create solutions for everybody, or at least every entrepreneur wants to do that in Web3, for mass adoption, getting more people involved in Web3. At times, centralized solutions are easier, you know, for newer users. Keeping that in mind, do you still feel that, you know, decentralized exchanges and other such solutions would potentially grow more? You feel that the user would be open to using such solutions, where the onus is more on them? Absolutely.
Absolutely. Because if you remember, like the first Dex was EtherDelta. I don’t know if you’ve ever used it.
It was horrible, horrible experience. Yeah. Very, very bad.
Yeah. And so compare that to how Uniswap or Radium work now. They’re single-chain Dexes still, and then we are bringing that to a cross-chain Dex.
So whatever chain you’re on, you’re gonna get the same experience as a centralized exchange, maybe a little slow, but the sex demands that you deposit your stuff there. And, you know, when you ask for your token back, you may not get it. That risk doesn’t exist.
And I think a lot of the user base doesn’t want that, which is reflected in the Dex volumes being like absolute bonkers. It’ll only continue to grow. I mean, you know, this is not a question where I have to guess whether people will adopt a Dex.
They’ve already shown that they’re rapidly adopting Dex. In the face of centralized exchanges providing cheaper fee and more liquidity, they’re still adopting Dexes that are much faster. So yeah, I think it’ll continue.
Okay. Yeah, that’s a very positive outlook to have. Are there any emerging technologies or trends that you believe will have a deeper impact on the future of the Web3 ecosystem as a whole? Are there any trends that, you know, you feel are here to stay and they would really change the narrative perhaps in the coming few years? Yes.
A lot of the deep-fighting work on… Would you like to give any examples like of… Yeah. So, token issuance on like stable coins, real world assets, derivative products like perps, they will all be built on Bitcoin. I mean, we’re already doing that work.
You know, you’ll see all of those on 4Gold Dex. So, you know, most of the… And there are other developers picking up where, you know, you’ve created the primitives and working on some of these projects. You know, we’ll highlight some of them.
But yeah, almost everything that succeeds from BeamCoins to DeFi will be rebuilt on Bitcoin. That is a good way to look at it. Do you have a perspective on Willow that has been recently launched by Alphabet? There’s a lot of chatter on Twitter about that as well.
About what? I’m sorry, what was that that was recently launched? Alphabet has recently announced Willow, right? Their quantum computing, the newest thing they have launched. Okay, okay. Oh, Willow, their 105-qubit quantum computer.
Well, I mean, I’m not a quantum computing expert, so I won’t find expertise there. But what I understand, really, including Righetti, you know, which is another supercompany along with DeFi, is that, you know, after they published their first quantum supremacist paper, very quickly, everybody thought within almost time. So, and they admit, the authors admit that, that happens to them as well.
So it sounds like it’s an interesting thing if you’re deep into that space from a research perspective. I don’t see that’s relevant to Bitcoin anymore. Even if you do, you have to understand that the signature algorithms that we use, the elliptic errors, et cetera, are all relevant to quantum.
But the hash functions are not. Right, yeah, there’s a lot of misinformation, I think, on Twitter. A lot of people are heralding the end of the encryption on Bitcoin.
And just, it’s so frustrating to read it because then, you know, you’re thinking that’s just not how it works. Right. And, but- I mean, these are things that have been discussed.
Sorry, go on. It’s also not easy to explain it to these people who are, you know, perhaps writing these long threads about how, you know, kind of threaten- Well, most of them are probably written by NLMN. And, you know, these are topics that are discussed on Bitcoin.org forums, I don’t know, all the way- Exactly, yeah.
For 10 years, so nothing new. Yeah, that is absolutely true. This is not new, but, you know, you do feel like a lot of people are giving importance and then it kind of frustrates you.
But what you’re saying is right. I think I should take it with a little bit of, you know, a pinch of salt. They’re okay, it’s fine.
Whoever’s- Sure, because people want attention and sensationalism creates attention. Sensational, new, scary, and some outracing on Twitter may even say, hey, I’ve invented quantum, you know. So, give me money, right? Like, there’s all sorts of things.
At the end of the day, I don’t know if you have a cure-all quantum system, of which there are some already. Or you can rely on information theory. So there’s many, many topics for a year.
Yeah, that’s true. Nothing new. Yeah, thank you for saying that, I think.
And I think it is a good perspective to have that people just like sensationalism nowadays and they will say anything for attention. Even though it’s completely, factually incorrect, it hardly matters. But yeah, I’m glad that we touched upon that as well.
And now we are kind of running short on time. So I’ll ask you my two last questions before we wrap this up. You mentioned how your background has been very atypical, but you were a physician and now you are a builder, you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve built a robust technology which has seen rave reviews from your community.
If you had to give the advice to a builder or a new entrepreneur entering the space right now, what would it be? Any advice to a new entrepreneur entering Web3 space specifically? Yeah. I would say find a real problem to solve. I would say there are markets that are super interesting to us, and I’ll name one.
Obviously, nobody has to list it, they’ll find their own niche. But the most interesting markets to us are where the demand has proven it already. Look at in-games, right? Every Web3 gaming company, first of all, they say, oh, we’re going to build a blockchain on which games can be built, and let’s sell tokens.
Instead of saying, we’re going to build the absolute best gaming experience, no matter how long it takes, and get a lot of users interested, build these games, create a culture and a culture around it, and then we’re going to introduce mechanisms to create those in-game assets. So, you know, that’d be my advice. Go about things the right way, even if it takes time, because that’s the only way we’re doing things.
I think that’s good advice. That’s really good advice. Find a real problem to solve, and really just go about it in the right way.
I think a lot of builders just sort of latch onto whatever is trending currently, and they start building in that direction. Like you said, every day there is a new L2, and, you know, that has to stop. Some rationality has to enter the space as well, specifically when it comes to use cases.
Right. And then the incentives of investors. So investors, they want to pump it.
You know, there’s all sorts of misaligned incentives, but, you know, you won’t get your time back. So you better focus on something that is going to be valuable in the long term. Things that don’t change are actually more powerful than things that are constantly changing.
Well, that’s a quotable quote. Lovely. So, Chandra, again, this has been a very wonderful conversation, very insightful.
I can’t wait to try the portal myself. I have it saved and bookmarked right after this conversation. I’m going to try to see how I can get in.
And thank you for making the time. But, you know, this is one question that I do ask everybody who comes on the show, even though you’ve kind of covered it in the other answers that you’ve given. If you had to give suggestions to somebody who is still looking at this particular space with a little bit of skepticism, Web3 in general, what would be your suggestions to them for them to start living on blockchain? Start with Bitcoin.
Yeah, I thought that you would say that. Easy to predict. Yeah, no, I think that is something that I have said a lot as well, that, you know, you just stick to, don’t play around with altcoins when you’re just starting off, right? It doesn’t make sense to do that.
Start with something robust. Otherwise, yeah, they will lose their trust, right? As soon as they’re entering. Right, right.
Your first taste can be terrible. So start with the best. Understand Bitcoin as deeply as you can and then branch off into other stuff that interests you.
Okay, lovely. Any resources or any kind of books or courses that you want to recommend to our users? Listeners, I’m sorry. I would love to.
There’s actually a great resource. Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm, had this CryptoCannon. I don’t know if it’s still available online.
That’d be actually a pretty good resource. It takes you all the way back to, you know, the invention of SharminiCash, way down to all of that. So that’s something I would strongly recommend.
If someone’s entering this space and has a long-term interest, yeah, that’s a great resource. Yeah, I think it is. I haven’t visited this particular page.
I just looked it up in a long time, but yeah, it’s still there. I’ll definitely put this in the description as well. So thank you for reminding me as well of this particular resource.
I think it’s a great resource and not a lot of people actually talk about this, strangely, because perhaps it’s older and off late I’ve never heard anybody recommend it. So thank you for that. Thank you once again, Chandra, for this very insightful conversation.
All the best for your mainnet and I’ll sure to test out their testnet and send you some feedback. Absolutely. Thank you very much, again, for your listeners.
Nodes.modeltobitcoin.com. That’s where our Encinoise testnet is if you’re interested in earning a light node. And thank you for being a gracious host and I’ve enjoyed this conversation very much. Likewise.
Thank you so much.