One complaint that is often thrown against blockchain and crypto is its complexity and difficulty of use. With advances in the space, we now have people working on ways to make consumer accessible blockchains for everyone. Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger introduce us to one of the people helping make crypto and blockchains more accessible, Luke Stokes. Luke is the Managing Director of the Foundation for Interwallet Operability, and here he shares his vision and goals for the crypto industry. Help shape the future by tuning in and learning about what’s going on at the Edge of NFT.
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Luke Stokes Of Foundation For Interwallet Operability (FIO) Talks About Consumer Accessible Blockchain And How DACs Are Shaping The Future
This sponsored spotlight episode features Luke Stokes, the Managing Director for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability. FIO is to crypto, what HTTP is to the internet. FIO is the open-source and decentralized crypto usability layer that makes sending, receiving, and even requesting crypto easier than ever and dramatically less risky to use. Luke has been a consensus witness for the Hive previously Steem Blockchain since early 2018 and a custodian for eosDAC, a community-owned eos.io block producer and DAC enabler since its inception. He’s an awesome guy that we know well. Luke, welcome to the program.
Thanks so much for having me. That was a long-winded intro.
There’s always a lot of wonderful stuff to say about our guests. It’s always a privilege to have the folks on that we are able to talk to. I want to start with the basics with you. Tell us a little bit about what is FIO and how did it originally form?
We are trying to make crypto easier. Crypto is complicated. It’s hard to use and frustrating. I have been in blockchain since 2013. It was January 2013 when I’ve first got started. I’m a Science major guy, so I get tech but I also get how often it’s engineers building tools for other engineers. Those are super frustrating. FIO is a human-readable address. They exist as NFTs.
It’s a two-part NFT. Stokes is the domain part. Luke@Stokes would be the crypto handle that I use to send and, importantly, receive crypto. We have the ability to request funds from someone, including an encrypted memo. That’s a feature that people are used to in the traditional financial world, and they don’t have it in traditional crypto. It’s send-only. We have this usability layer sitting on top of your experience.
We're trying to make crypto easier. Click To Tweet
If you are in a wallet, you are an exchanger in some type of crypto-enabled experience, you can have that nice human-readable expression instead of these long, crazy public addresses that confuse everybody. That’s what we are building. I started as a consultant. I came in as a part-time consultant for the project. I found myself as the Managing Director, and it has been a few years now doing that.
Probably some folks that are reading are familiar with ENS and how that simplifies transactions on Ethereum. Maybe you can compare what you are doing to ENS to start as a point of relevancy to folks.
We have this little diagram that we use. It’s like a Venn Diagram of how these things got to overlap. There’s a concept of wallet naming like ENS and Unstoppable Domains. There’s a whole bunch of other ones like ADA Handle. There’s a new one on Solana. They all have these wallet naming solution providers, which we feel is pretty important. There are many of them. What we do a little differently than Unstoppable Domains and ENS is we are not doing decentralized DNS. We are not trying to solve that problem. That’s a big, great problem to solve but we are focused on usability.
We do the wallet naming, and that’s where we are similar. We do additional things such as NFT signatures, which we want to talk about on the show. We also do that FIO request functionality and the ability to add a memo. One of the challenges that we see with some of the existing solutions is that they are on a layer one that’s too expensive to use. That’s why Unstoppable moved to Polygon and other examples like that. It’s so expensive. People aren’t going to use it.
The other part about it is the ability to request funds and have a message or a memo and to be able to work in a permissionless way with every single chain. There’s no approval that you need if you are a new blockchain with a new token to be able to use the FIO Protocol. It’s an open and permissionless protocol that anyone can participate in. Prior to ENS having a token, we were the only tokenized decentralized business model, which they are exploring as well. It demonstrates that we had a good idea there.
Walk us through how this enhances the crypto experience for someone that loves NFTs and is starting to dabble in that space. Maybe they’ve got something a little bit crazy that they didn’t expect to put in their wallet, and it’s there. Now they want to protect it because it’s going up in value. How does FIO help?
I will caveat it with the entire industry is too early. What I mean by that is remember when the internet was first going. I built my first website in 1996. Things were frustrating and difficult. It takes time for usability to catch up and for people to prioritize usability. I will say that as a caveat. I read an article. It was one of these metaverse land NFT sale things, and it was a big critique about the project. As I read through the critique, I was chuckling because most of the critique was about the blockchain industry. It was like, “Metamask is too hard.”
Consumer Accessible Blockchain: If you’re in a wallet, exchange, or in some type of crypto enabled-experience, you can have that nice human-readable expression instead of these long, crazy public addresses that just confuse everybody. That’s what we’re building.
They were looking at a blockchain transaction on the Etherscan going, “This is my receipt? You’ve got to be shitting me. This is crazy.” The idea that this isn’t a human-readable receipt to know exactly what I bought and I spent a whole lot of money for it. Those are the type of things that we are trying to solve with the FIO Protocol. Instead of some random Ethereum address or an Ethereum contract address and you have seen hex data for metadata that you are supposed to interpret as this thing you bought, it’s not user-friendly at all.
What we are trying to bring is, for example, you could have the Spirit Seed NFT that could be signed by the Edge of NFT. That could be displayed right in the interface. Unique.One is the first integration of the NFT signatures by FIO, where you can go and say, “That’s a human-readable thing. I know that I’ve got something that is real. It’s not just a hash. It makes sense to me. It’s usable.”
It’s like the difference between typing in an IP address, and you are randomly trying to go to some website or having a way to go to the webpage directly, or as we say, HTTP for the blockchain. It’s the idea that you have a way to have these routing of images and text and eventually streaming media and all this stuff packaged in a web browser experience.
Is comparing what you guys are doing to Bitly a fair comparison?
Yes. That’s a good way to think about it. Instead of some big, long, gigantic address that you are not going to remember, it could be a super simple, user-friendly address. The nice thing about this is, it’s cryptographically improved in terms of you can have absolute certainty that the person who controls that NFT or the person who controls that address is the same person who sent you that request.
You are never going to send an NFT or tokens to the wrong account because you have absolute certainty that Luke@Stokes is me. Better yet, you are not going to buy an NFT on a marketplace that’s fraudulent. It’s not actually from people, for example. Instead of people or any other artists wanting to sign their NFT with FIO handle, they know, “I’m buying the original thing. I’m not buying a knockoff.”
This is great stuff. The interesting thing about the crew we have right here is we are all nerds. To some degree, we enjoy going to the transaction hash and being like, “I figured this out. I know what’s going on. It’s cool to be able to decode this cool new thing that’s going on.” I remember working with a solidity developer, working on a human-facing interface, and there would be error messages that get thrown up if they enter the wrong information. I said, “We’ve got to make that error message say something that the user understands.” He’s like, “They did the wrong thing.” I’m like, “They did the wrong thing. They need to know what it is that they did wrong.” You have so many technical people that they get it that way, and they don’t even get what it’s to not get it that way.
We can’t highlight that enough. There’s something about engineers, and I’m speaking as an engineer, a Computer Science major that we are like, “2 plus 2 equals 4. It’s 1s and 0s. What’s the problem?” We don’t realize that when everyone else is out at the party, hanging out and having a good time, these people are up until 2:00 AM or 2:30 AM reading white papers, and their brains work in different ways. They are like, “Gas fees and the Gwei were too high than the contract failure.” They expect that people understand what that is.
I’m an engineer. I want to say this to your audience. I’m a technical dude. I can’t figure out this stuff. It’s so complex and confusing that it’s important for this industry itself to level up, especially as you are bringing in the mass audience with NFTs. These are artists. These are not technical engineer people. They need to have their hands held, and error messages are a perfect example.
Before going to this next question, we talked about easy buttons a lot but I can’t help but recognize in this specific conversation, this analog with the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak thing. It’s like, “We are nerdy. We want to do it. We want to make it cool,” and have someone not only say, “We need to make this user-friendly.” Also, what’s cool about NFTs and this Apple ethos is we want to make it creative. We want to make it fun. We want it to have a personality and have an ethos behind it. It’s fascinating. In the light of telling us about things in a little bit more human-friendly way, Decentralized Autonomous Communities, DACs, tell us a little bit about them and how they relate to FIO.
I wanted to give a shout-out to everyone who has been doing DACs and DAOs. DAOs are probably the more common term, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. It’s one of the things that whichever term gets more popular, it gets used and that one is probably more commonly used. Essentially, I describe it as a group of people with a shared goal and come together and say, “How can we pool our resources, our time, attention, and energy to do something that we couldn’t do as individuals? Once we get into that situation, how do we have more of an autonomous process for that?”
It’s not a bunch of people being like, “How do we communicate? How do we talk through this? How do we decide financially where the funds go and everything?” The community part, the corporation, the company or their consortia like FIO, we run as a Decentralized Autonomous Consortia, or if it’s a DAO or an organization, what does that all look like? It’s a massive subject that is probably going to be a big deal. Everyone talks about NFTs as the big thing that happened in 2021. 2022 or 2023 is going to be huge for DAOs and DACs.
The existing financial systems and structures for human organizations are based on extrinsic motivations. We are not going to throw you in a cage because you broke some law, you smoke some plant you are not supposed to or whatever it might be, or we are going to pay you money, and if you don’t do it, we are going to take that money away from you. It’s threats and rewards. It’s an extrinsic motivation to do stuff. As I’m talking to a creative audience, you guys understand that there’s provable science that shows that destroys your creativity. It’s not a good way for humans to collaboratively do cool new stuff. Essentially, we want this intrinsic motivation.
Consumer Accessible Blockchain: We’re not doing decentralized DNS. We’re not trying to solve that problem. It’s a big, great problem to solve, but we’re focused on usability.
A DAO model or a DAC model is a group of people that come together and say, “We’ve got these processes like worker proposals and a mechanism where you can have people vote on what type of things they want their community treasury to go towards.” Also, for example, a way to do something called a multisig. A multisig is essentially a group of people that have the keys and permissions on a specific account, and the funds can go into the account. Unless they reach a certain level of consensus, the funds can’t leave that account.
We have a way with these different blockchain processes to coordinate voting, membership, and expenditures of the community treasury. This is a summary of what DACs and DAOs are in the nitty-gritty. Ultimately, it boils down to a group of people with a shared goal, coordinating the resources together, so they can agree and come to a consensus on how that money is going to be spent.
You could do some cool stuff, and it’s going to fundamentally change society. I have been to Honduras, Panama, and El Salvador, with these different delegations meeting with the governments. They are talking about blockchain technology, and I get brought into those by Brock Pierce and others because of me playing around with DACs and DAOs and being fascinated by this new model.
Can you imagine governments that were completely voluntary? Can you imagine governments that were service providers? Can you imagine nonprofits where everything is completely transparent in every single transaction they do? Can you imagine corporations like Apple, for example, if all that money didn’t go to a small portion of shareholders but went to everyone creating that value? The Facebook example is often used where the people creating value directly could participate in value creation is something that’s interesting.
That’s core to our ethos, Luke, and that’s why we like having you around. We use the word co-creation a lot. It involves doing things because you want to and not because someone has created leverage. To me, that’s the essence of what you are talking about. There are a lot of ways to do business, have success, and put wins on the board but the Web 3.0 world is one where you are living in abundance. You are creating something bigger than any one individual is capable of doing. You are willing to forego some of the need for rigidity on the front end in return for accelerating progress and knowing that things will work out. It’s a different mindset.
As you see, people come into this space, they like the energy. They want to be part of it but they have to adjust. Sometimes that takes a little while, and that’s a good segue to a little bit more of a philosophical question. I know you like to go deep. We talked about blockchain NFTs and their power to improve human lives. How do you see FIO contributing to this goal, and what else has to happen for this to happen on a macro scale?
The reason I’m involved in FIO is as I was building and working with FIO Stack, building DACs and DAOs, exploring this stuff in 2018 saying, “How can we redo governments, corporations, and nonprofits using these amazing blockchain tools?” I quickly ran into the reality that it was too complicated. It’s too confusing for everyday people to use these amazing tools.
We can have incredible solutions, supply chain management tools, and all these different things, DACs, DAOs, everything in between, incredible games, and all these things but if they are too complicated, people won’t use them. My passion with FIO is being able to say, “Can we make crypto simple, joyful, fun, and not stressful. You are not sitting there freaking out and going, ‘This immutable transaction. If I screwed up, everything is gone. My savings are gone.’”
I have heard those stories so many times in the last couple of years that I have been in the space. It was the pain of recognizing my industry is not ready for mass adoption and recognizing on that top, this Law of Diffusion of Innovation where there are these adoption curves are happening, whether we like it or not. It’s these doublings that have been happening for many years. If you look at these curves and the exponential growth that most people are not equipped to recognize that it’s happening, and this is definitely going to change the world.
In the next few years, you are probably going to have a billion users in crypto. How do we prepare this industry for that? For me, immediately, we are already saying that it’s the Steve Jobs of the world that are going to come to this blockchain crypto space and make it easier. I figured, “This is the most important thing to do. If we can make it fun and interesting, then we can bring freedom tools to more people.”
It can be accessible by the people I met in El Salvador and other countries where they don’t have the level of technical sophistication that a lot of us early innovators, the 2.5% or so. We are at about maybe 3.9% in the whole world using crypto on a regular basis. We’ve got a lot of growth, and it’s going to be people that aren’t at the same educational and technical know-how that your audience is and that we are mostly. It’s going to be a whole larger group of people. We’ve got to make it simple. I look at it as more of a prerequisite requirement to bring the freedom tools and the promises that this industry has made for over a decade.
My mom reads this, so I’m sure she appreciates being told that she’s among the technically literate. I’m sure she’s excited about that.
If she’s into crypto, she is. She’s an early innovator. Congratulations.
Could I get my mom to read this?
You’ve got to make it easy.
There are a couple of terms that are interesting to dive into that circle about what you are up to, Luke. Nonviolent consensus is one and voluntary hierarchy. Can you unpack those? There’s some self-explanatory in this but also something worth exploring there. Talk about, where’s this term nonviolent consensus come from? Why do we need a term like that?
Consumer Accessible Blockchain: Ultimately, it boils down to a group of people with a shared goal, coordinating the resources together so they can agree and come to a consensus on how that money is going to be spent.
For me, when I look at what’s wrong with the world, I look at a lot of people being pushed in a direction they don’t necessarily want to go. Maybe they are in a job they hate or in a system where a lot of people aren’t familiar with. The term democide, for example. When they have these causes, we are like, “We’ve got to do this cause or that cause to help humanity.” Democide demonstrates 260 million people have essentially died because of the government.
Even those who agree with the government won’t necessarily disagree with this definition but it’s essentially a monopoly on the initiation of violent force in a geographic region, and some people are okay with that. The Hobbes in Leviathan is like, “We need somebody in this area. They get to use violence but nobody else gets to.” That was important. I’m not frustrated with the history of how we’ve got here but it’s not going to serve us going forward. Humans do their best work when they aren’t forced to, when they love it, it’s fun and intrinsically motivated.
I look at blockchains as a tool for nonviolent global consensus, which our community or as a human species has never had before. It’s usually whoever’s got the biggest guns, the biggest Air Force, Navy or Army gets to define consensus for everyone else. If you disagree with them, you essentially face violence. I’m excited about a way for the whole world to say, “This is true.” Nobody with a gun had to convince you of it. It is immutably true on the blockchain. That is going to have amazing new opportunities for how we interact with each other.
As Michael Saylor and others talk about, “It’s the only money that you can take to the grave with you.” If you have your private key in your head and you don’t tell anybody about it, that money’s gone forever. It’s not like you are going to have it with you somewhere else but the idea is, you can’t force someone to participate or not participate in this ecosystem. It’s completely voluntary and done in such a way that there’s no force involved.
I get excited about that. The reason why that’s important is that we do our best work as a species when we are voluntarily coming to a consensus in a way and we go, “This person is not here because I’m forcing them to be here. They are here because they want to be here,” and that and we get to work together and do cool stuff.
The decentralized aspect is so important because if you do look at a site like Facebook, which we all have our own frustrations with, it is similar. People don’t have to be there. They can complain about how Facebook works but you don’t have to use Facebook. At the same time, there’s a centralized power behind it that can turn people’s accounts off and on at the will of whoever is in charge of things.
I love that example because a lot of people get frustrated with me. They were like, “Luke, you are a voluntarist or you are in this category of people to get labeled as anarchists.” Anarchy means without rulers, without archons but it doesn’t mean without rules. I love rules. I’m all about it but I don’t want these violent oppressors or authoritarians to become violent potentially in the future.
They get frustrated with me like, “How could you support something like Facebook. It’s so centrally controlled and all these things.” I say, “The day Facebook gets an Army, I will be more frustrated with them than I am with centralized governments.” At least they are not bombing people using, in some cases, my money without my consent. That’s where I’m like, “That’s where I draw the line when there’s physical violence.”
Not to say that these corporations don’t do that as well. There have been discussions about Evian and how they get water and extract water. These are a larger category of ways that our consent is not obtained from us prior to our wealth, value, energy, and time being put into something. Facebook and Twitter are perfect examples. You could go build a gigantic community, and they could remove you. You are like, “I created that value. You used that value to gain money for your shareholders and investors. I didn’t get to see any of that.”
That’s why I have been a part of Hive for a long time as well. The idea is that I can create posts on Hive, the blockchain itself, through voluntary inflation that I choose to participate in and can reward me with that. That type of stuff is exciting to me. When you get these centrally controlled systems, you don’t get to participate in the governance, and you don’t get to participate in any of the value creation.
Some of the critiques against nodes and in voluntary consensus are that ultimately, it does become about the biggest wallet holder that the folks with the budgets still get to call the shots. What’s your counterpoint to that?
It goes back to the different types of consensus algorithms. What you are mentioning, for example, would be proof of stake or delegated proof of stake. They drift towards plutocracy. Whoever has the most money, gets to make the rules. The gold ruler or has the gold makes the rules. You have, with proof of work, a similar dynamic where whoever has the hashing power, so either they have cheap inroads with the government power or they have men’s treasury to be able to purchase some mining ASICs and things of that nature, it still leans towards that
Consumer Accessible Blockchain: You’re probably going to have a billion users in crypto. How do we prepare this industry for that?
I’m super interested in other governance models. For example, Eden on EOS is a fascinating exploration of an individual human being who goes through an induction process on a Zoom call much like this and they say, “I agree to the peace treaty.” Members of that community validate that they know that person in real life, “I trust that they will follow the peace treaty.” That gets minted as an NFT, put on-chain immediately, and that person becomes part of the community, and they do governance. They call it an election. You can check out More Equal Animals Dan Larimer’s book on this. You can download it for free and read it.
The idea is that those committed members of the community all have an equal vote, and they go into a political playoff process where they vote to say, “I would like this person to be able to use the committee treasury in this way, so it’s not so much a plutocracy.” I’m excited about those explorations. They often get Civil Attacked. A Civil Attack is a term where you have a whole bunch of accounts that look like 1,000 people, for example, but they are controlled by one person. They are all sock puppets. That’s another governance challenge that you run into often with these systems.
How do you know you are connecting with conscious beings who are impacted by your decisions unless you know that those are individual human beings? Eden on EOS is an example of a way to do that without needing KYC but there are many others like that. I get excited about exploring the different ways, proof of time and participation. There are some interesting models that are being explored now.
To make sure we cover this voluntary hierarchy term as well, is that what you are explaining right now? Is it the fact that if you are in deep, you are in deep because you chose to be in deep? If you are not, if you are shallow, that’s because of your choice. Is that what that means?
Definitely. It relates to the idea that some people think DACs and DAOs in their first exposure to the idea, they imagined that it’s completely flat and that’s the only model there is. Meaning every single decision is a referendum where every single member who was participating has to vote on everything. I want to make it clear that that’s not at all the case. You can have a hierarchy in the situation as long as it’s voluntary. The distinction there is critically important because, in a volunteer hierarchy, you have the process.
We will use Eden on EOS as an example. You will need a 10% referendum to have a new election. It’s simple, and it’s a requirement every year to have a new election. It’s part of the peace treaty. It’s the idea being, you can have, for example, administrators, group admins and have people that you entrust to beyond, for example, the multisig of the treasury and you don’t have to be involved in the day-to-day politics and decision making of every little detail. You can proxy your vote. That’s another liquid democracy. It’s a mechanism where you proxy your vote based on categories.
This is an expert in that category. If there’s a vote that comes up based on that, I will let them make the decision. There are some interesting ways that we can structure hierarchy in a way that isn’t authoritarian or isn’t this way. You are locked into something, and they might use violence against you if you disagree. We remove that option from the table.
Hierarchies get much more palatable, and also too, we see them all throughout nature. We see them in our own bodies. Our body is a hierarchy with the head, the heart, and all these different things. I tend to get excited and geek out about anything that mimics what we see in biology and what we see working for millions of millions of years. It’s like, “We are probably pretty close to something feasible if it looks a little bit like that.”
A friend of ours putting out the term Edge Effect. It is pretty interesting because it’s the biological convergence of different biolandscapes. That’s a little bit of what we are talking about here. Looking at the broader lens, I know you are always on the cusp of the edge of NFTs beyond FIO. Is there one project that stands out to you that you are tracking that you think is doing something revolutionary that folks should know about?
There are quite a few. As I mentioned, some Metaverse stuff, this that and the other but one in particular and I mentioned to you as well, before Josh is the Diatom Fund. They did this innovative thing where they auctioned off 50 NFT whales. They are little pictures of these whales, and they tracked during the auction, how many pounds, how many kilograms of plastic is going to be removed from the ocean with the purchase of these NFTs.
They are building this DAO concept, where the community itself that participates can earn the Diatom token and also participate in the governance of who they hire to remove all this plastic and how do they deliver on these promises that they have made to remove all this plastic. It’s an example that I get excited about because we have these big problems in the world, and we generally rely on the government to solve some of these problems but one, they can’t solve, multinational problems.
The UN, good luck with that, and they can’t easily solve problems that aren’t a priority for that particular governance structure. When we have a situation like this where you have investors, they are buying NFTs, it’s almost like peacocking. They are all excited that they were the ones that purchased this NFT that’s removing plastic. What’s the point of these types of property anyways? It’s to show off a little bit, put it on your profile picture or whatever, and they are tapping into that.
They are saying, “Let’s do some good with that. Take that money, and instead of going to somebody’s pocket, let’s do some interesting stuff.” It gives some utility value to the NFT craze. I’m excited about that. I hope it works well. So far, it has. We have raised quite a few multiple millions of dollars already, and I’m curious to see if that model gets reproduced for other social good projects that people are passionate about. Back to that voluntary participation. It creates a lot of value for the people who matter most.
On to the segment which we call Edge Quick Hitters. It’s a fun, quick way to get to know you a little bit better. We have ten questions, and we are looking for short, single or a few word responses but we can feel free to expand a little bit if we get the urge. Are you ready to go?
Let’s do it.
Consumer Accessible Blockchain: We got a lot of growth, and it’s going to be people that aren’t at the same kind of educational and technical know-how that your audience is. It’s going to be a whole larger group of people. We just got to make it simple.
What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
It would have to be Legos. I was a geek about Legos. I had so many Legos.
What is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
I don’t know if it counts but I was selling newspapers. I had a paper route. That was my first job. I was on my roller skates flinging these newspapers.
That counts. I love picturing you on roller skates, too. Not rollerblades?
No, I did gravitate towards rollerblades eventually. I’ve got 2 plates and 11 screws in this arm because I used to do half pipes in skateparks and stuff. I had a bad spill in high school.
Next question. What is the most recent thing you purchased?
This is top of mind because I bought my wife a brand new wedding ring. As much as I’m against the whole ridiculous diamond fiasco that is this completely fake manufactured environment, my wife reminds me that women shiny, sparkly things. We were in California, and we’ve got back from visiting family for the holidays. I spent a significant amount of money on some sparkly shiny thing.
There’s a backstory to that, too. She was gardening and got a bad MRSA infection in her finger. She had to have a ring cut off to the point where they couldn’t fix it again. The ring was completely destroyed. Thankfully, it didn’t get serious but at one point, I was like, “Holy moly.” It was bad. It was touch and go there for a while. She went for months without a ring, so she was sad about, “Where’s my wedding ring.” We’ve got our super nice wedding ring. We’ve got three stones. She turned the old stone into earrings. It’s a wedding ring and earrings.
Unlike Brock Pierce, she wasn’t amenable to the wedding smart contract or wedding NFT.
I was joking with someone earlier, and we talked about how they have these new transistors that we can use. It’s carbon nano or whatever and a little bit of gold. You don’t need gold through the whole thing to do the transistors. I was like, “I don’t think that will work for wedding rings.” I have been married for over seventeen years, and she wants the sparkly thing.”
It definitely harkens back to the technical nerd versus the public. It’s a similar thing. You can’t ignore the perspective of a woman.
What is the most recent thing you sold?
I don’t have a huge materialism perspective on things. I’m not buying and selling. I was thinking of this question going, “What did I sell?” I was like, “If I’m fully thinking it through, I sold some FIO tokens.” It was like, “That’s a bummer thing to sell.” In my own project, I have a huge vested interest in the FIO token but there was a moment where it doubled in a day and I was like, “That’s not rational.” We have these pump and dump groups sometimes that come after and sell. I was a little bit into that irrational exuberance in order to diversify my holdings a little bit.
Also, it paid for that wedding ring.
They don’t take crypto yet. They don’t take FIO tokens yet but someday they will if we can make the process easy.
What is your most prized possession?
I have to say, it’s this little thing that I have in my hand, this little iPhone. I use this so ridiculously often that not having it would be a little crazy. I would say it’s my phone. It’s now an attachment of my life. I have outsourced part of my consciousness to this little device.
Consumer Accessible Blockchain: Our consent is not obtained from us prior to our wealth, value, energy, and time being put into something. Facebook is a perfect example.
We are definitely androids. We are the Borg here with our cell phones. It’s pretty clear. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service or experience that’s currently for sale, what would it be?
I don’t know if it fully exists but it would be gene therapy or something that makes my body not decay. I have some friends who are weighing the stem cell stuff and doing that. It’s something along those lines where I could be hooked into something and be like, “My body is tight and good to go forever.”
We will hook you up with Steve Aoki. It seems to be his direction as well.
If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
The number one thing would be personal responsibility. I have a high sense of personal responsibility, and I have noticed about DACs and DAOs in that world. It only functions well when people take on a lot of personal responsibility, and this is the whole, “Grab an ax and go cut down a tree.” No entitlement but build something yourself.
It’s different from integrity and keeping your promises. There’s an action component to personal responsibility that gets lost in the mix. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?
Probably insecurities or this sense of pride and or even sometimes called man-pleasing. Trying to make other people feel good about the things I do. Those all rolled together for me in my life, and they spun out into forms of avoidance and all these things. I’m big on the whole consciousness evolution thing. I’m analyzing all these little things and being like, “What can I improve better?” It’s being who you are, where you are supposed to be, and be in flow.
This is the second to the last question, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I was on our account management call for FIO Protocol talking through all our 30 or 40 different field integrated partners, exchanges, wallets, NFT platforms, and stuff. Which ones are stuck, which ones if we signed an MOU with but they haven’t delivered on, which ones are killing it and doing awesome and thinking through how we can promote it more and better, and let them know it even exists? People are like, “Crypto is too hard.” You haven’t used FIO yet.
Voluntary participation creates a lot of value for the people that matter most. Click To Tweet
Is there a cool new partnership that’s going well that you can mention?
There are a couple that isn’t officially public yet but we could mention them like Opera. For a lot of people, when you onboard with Opera in Android, you are getting an FIO crypto handle as part of that onboarding process but we haven’t publicly blogged about it and promoted it. There are tens of thousands of addresses that have been registered there, so that’s pretty cool.
The other one that we haven’t talked about yet is Alt-E.com. That was super cool. They’ve got an amazing experience where you can use a Telegram and WhatsApp bot, and they are integrated so you can do FIO requests and FIO send. They are still finalizing some things on their end. I’m giving you some sneak preview of stuff that I’m personally most excited about. Stay tuned for those announcements. They are going to be pretty exciting.
A huge shout out to the whole FIO community, specifically the block producers. We have block producers all over the world, the blockchain validators for the FIO Protocol. We are our own standalone chain, and we did a major deployment on the FIO main net for staking. We are going to be able to take the FIO tokens and stake them. There will be rewards for those who do that. It’s a way to reward those who spend the time and energy to vote for the block producers and participate in the DAO governance that we have on-chain. I’m very excited about that.
It was 7 or 8 different multisig that had to be approved and code reviews that had to be done. We had them all live on a Zoom call. It’s 20, 30 people on a call all at once, so we could deploy those in the right order. It was amazing to be a part of and to see that governance happening in real-time from people all over the world all participating voluntarily. It was amazing. It was a great example of what we talked about on this show.
Last but not least question, what are you going to do next after the show?
I’m going to go ahead and say hello to my wife and kids because I have been in meetings all day long. I have a couple of other meetings that I had to bump because of other meetings, so I might come back.
It sounds like my days. Luke, this has been amazing. Where can readers go to learn more about you, FIO, and all the other cool stuff you are working on?
I’m @Luke Stokes on Twitter, PeakD, Hive.blog, and on Telegram. As far as FIO, it’s @JoinFIO on Twitter. That’s our most active place for announcements and things of that nature. It’s also FIOProtocol.io. We would love to have you get involved, whether you’ve got NFTs you want to sign, secure and make sure that no fraud takes place with them or you want to experience FIO requests and request funds from someone in an easy and safe manner. We would love to have you check out FIO Protocol. You can ping me as well. If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer your questions.
Consumer Accessible Blockchain: We have these big problems in the world, and we generally rely on the government to solve some of these problems, but they can’t solve multinational problems.
We are going to cook up some cool giveaways for our readers, is that correct?
Yes, definitely. I was talking to Ash, our Head of Marketing. We are definitely going to come up with something, and we are going to work together. It’s going to be fun. It’s a combination of cool things you can do. We can send requests, for example. Send a certain FIO request to this FIO address, which of course, requires that you register an FIO handle and get onboarded. We’ve got great partners like Edge Wallet that make that easy. We can do some cool stuff with this from a marketing perspective so your audience can engage.
For example, maybe there’s a special code word. I could say, “Bananas,” on the show, so maybe that’s the code word. You have to send an FIO request with the code word or whatever it might be. That could be the thing that validates that you read this and that you participated in this conversation. We can pick winners from that. We are going to have some giveaways probably related to some FIO tokens. We might have some giveaways related to if you can demonstrate that you signed an NFT on perhaps Unique.One’s interface. We have so many cool things we can do but we are going to work together to make it a lot of fun.
I love bananas, and they are a great source of potassium.
We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. Go to iTunes, rate us, and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole.
Remember, we always invite you to co-create and build with us at Edge of NFT. We are unlocking a whole new way to connect and collaborate with us through our own NFT drop, Spirit Seed leading to Living Tree NFTs, which light the way to our event NFT LA. It’s a one-of-a-kind immersive experience at LA Live in Los Angeles from March 28th to 30th, 2022. Check it out at NFTLA.live. You pick your tickets up at early prices now. Move quickly though, those early bird tickets are going real quick. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links:
- Hive
- eosDAC
- eos.io
- ENS
- Unstoppable Domains
- ADA Handle
- Solana
- Spirit Seed NFT
- Unique.One
- Diatom Fund
- @Luke Stokes – Twitter
- PeakD – Luke Stokes
- Hive.Blog – Luke Stokes
- Telegram – Luke Stokes
- @JoinFIO – Twitter
- FIOProtocol.io
- Edge Wallet
- iTunes – Edge of NFT
- NFTLA.live
- Ash Howe – LinkedIn
- Eden on EOS
- More Equal Animals
- Alt-E.com
About Luke Stokes
Luke Stokes is the Managing Director for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability. He’s passionate about voluntary systems of governance and has been involved in bitcoin since early 2013. He’s been a consensus witness for the Steem blockchain since early 2018 and a custodian for eosDAC, a community-owned EOSIO Block Producer and DAC Enabler, since its inception.
With a computer science degree from UPENN, he built, bootstrapped and co-founded the shopping cart software company FoxyCart over a ten year period and is now focused on blockchain technology as a means to create a world we all want to live in. He currently lives in Puerto Rico with his wife and three children and enjoys discussing everything from philosophy, to consciousness, to voluntaryism, to love and awakening.
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