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In this episode of Edge of NFT, Richard Carthon interviews Jahan Tremback from Cosmos about blockchain interoperability and the innovative Gravity Bridge, as well as Piers Ridyard from Radix, who discusses their unique approach to decentralized finance and user onboarding through a new social wallet platform. The conversations highlight the importance of security, customization, and user experience in the evolving Web3 landscape.
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Key Topics Covered:
- Blockchain Interoperability and Connectivity: The discussion highlights the importance of bridging different blockchain ecosystems, particularly through solutions like Gravity Bridge and the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC), which enhance connectivity and security across chains.
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and User Experience: The episode emphasizes the need for improved user experiences in DeFi applications, addressing challenges such as usability and security to make decentralized finance more accessible to everyday users.
- Creator Economy and Monetization: The conversation explores how platforms like Calixi are redefining the creator economy by enabling creators to monetize their content and engage with fans through innovative tools, including wallet-to-wallet payment transfers and customizable experiences.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let us know in the comments on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@edgeofnft/
Episode Highlights:
- "I think, you know, the key thing with Cosmos is that it's probably, you know, I think it's, I'd say it's like probably the first and in my opinion, the best framework to build custom blockchains with." - Jahan Tremback (00:10:36)
- "The irony of crypto is that it's very difficult to translate those activities outside of just crypto assets. Because the regulation around like creating a real world asset and tokenizing on-chain or like creating, you know, taking securities from securities market and putting it on-chain is very difficult and very uncertain." - Piers Ridyard (00:24:55)
- "What we believe at Galaxy is that the wallet needs to be reinvented. It needs to be built with things that people care to do with money." - Solo Ceesay (00:43:34)
For the full transcript, see further below.
People and Resources Mentioned:
- Jehan Tremback Website
- Cosmos Website
- Piers Ridyard Webiste
- Radix Website
- Solo Ceesay LinkedIn
- Calaxy LinkedIn
- Spencer Dinwiddie Website
- @CosmosHub
- @Cosmos
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Full Episode Transcript:
Richard Carthon: Hey everyone, Richard Carthon here from Edge of NFT and we're here live at Consensus day two. Had a lot of really interesting conversations, but today I was introduced to Jahan Tremback who is with Cosmos, which I'm really excited to dive a little bit more into. A little bit about him. He's a trailblazer in the blockchain space, co-founding Athea to revolutionize the decentralized internet services, bridging the gap between Ethereum and Cosmos with the innovative GravityBridge. Known for his expertise in blockchain interoperability, Jahan is the At the forefront of creating secure, efficient cross-chain solutions, his work at Interchange Security within Cosmos Ecosystem showcases his commitment to enhancing blockchain connectivity. Khan, very happy to have you here with us. I know you've now been around a couple of days. How's your experience been at Consensus so far? It's been great.
Jehan Tremback: Yeah, it's a lot of interesting stuff. Saw a lot of stuff about, you know, regulatory, you know, stuff like, you know, FIT21 and stuff yesterday. So, yeah.
Richard Carthon: That's great, man. And, you know, you have a really extensive background. And right now in the Cosmos ecosystem, you're spending a lot of time around the decentralized piece and also doing stuff with the Gravity Bridge. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that?
Jehan Tremback: Yeah, so I was, I worked on, I helped build Gravity Bridge a couple of years ago. It's a Cosmos Ethereum bridge. I work on the Cosmos Hub now. So Gravity was a good, really good experience, though, like sort of thinking about how bridging works and how like, you know, validator sets work and also launching Cosmos chain.
Richard Carthon: That's great, man. There's been so many islands that are built, and the bridges, I think, are the most important piece to bring everything together. And I think probably your experience at Althea helped to formulate being able to help do that in everything that you're now doing with the Cosmos Hub. Can you kind of tell us about that experience and kind of how it brought you to where you are today?
Jehan Tremback: Yeah, with Althea, we were creating… Althea is still around, actually. They're here at this conference. We were creating a… an incentivized mesh network, so basically you have routers and radio antennas people can put on their houses and get high-speed internet service. And to back that, for several years it was running on xDai, now known as GnosisChain. And Althea has actually just launched a sidechain, I'm sorry, not a sidechain, xDai is a sidechain. Althea has launched an L1, Althea L1. And it's a Cosmos chain and it handles the transactions between the routers. But even when I was there a couple of years ago, we were already doing the testnets. So that kind of, you know, I guess there's a lot to Althea, but I guess in reference to the Cosmos hub, a lot of the experience I got there was launching, you know, launching a testnet for a chain, sort of building Cosmos chains.
Richard Carthon: That part, as far as expanding the Cosmos ecosystem, makes a lot of sense, but also just being able to bring in better internet and everything throughout Thea and the why behind what's going on, I think, kind of translates over to Cosmos of being that layer zero, of bridging and bringing everything into one place and helping to speed up a ton of processes instead of so many steps trying to make it happen in fewer steps. So going back to the bridge that you created, how has it evolved over the years? And how is that helping to continue to broaden the Cosmos ecosystem?
Jehan Tremback: Well, I think, you know, the key thing with Cosmos is that it's probably, you know, I think it's, I'd say it's probably the first and in my opinion, the best framework to build custom blockchains with. So what we built with Althea and then also with GravityBridge was that, you know, it was a matter of building, you know, a custom blockchain. So Cosmos SDK lets you do that. It's like, got all these modules and it's been copied a lot. You know, Polygon had this super nets thing. Also, you know, OP stack has some aspects of, you know, kind of an app chain like workflow. But Cosmos is kind of the best, Cosmos SDK is the most flexible and adaptable way to build a high performance blockchain. So I think, you know, a lot of my experience with building, you know, with Althea, we wanted something really fast. And so we chose Cosmos to, and also be able to have full control of everything to be able to customize it.
Richard Carthon: For sure, so that customizability is very important, but one of the things with bridges, usually that comes up is security. So tell me a little bit about the inter-chain security and how you're emphasizing safety. It's all these different things.
Jehan Tremback: Well, I can start with IBC, maybe. It's kind of the base layer. So IBC is an Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol. It's sort of Cosmos's, it's like a built-in bridging solution. Every Cosmos chain has it. And it's like and also there are projects bringing IBC to other ecosystems as well, like Avalanche and OP stack and Solana. There's several projects working on connecting them. But IBC is basically. You know, you know, the Internet runs on a protocol called TCP IP and IBC is basically that protocol before blockchain bridges. So a lot of other bridging solutions out there, they're kind of like these more, you know, like ad hoc kinds of things where, you know, this one, you know, somebody thought of them. you know, solving like one particular aspect of bridging, like by maybe token transfers or, or something, you know, and with IBC, it's like this base layer protocol. And it's very, very flexible. So there's a lot of stuff that's built on it. Obviously, token transfers are one of the biggest uses. But then also, there's ICA, which is Interchain Accounts, that allows one basically an account on one chain to control an account on another chain. There's really interesting things that can be done there. Like you have governance on one chain actually controlling just a user account on another chain. So it allows for a lot of integration that way. But then also interchain security, which is our product with the Cosmos Hub, is also built on top of IVC. And what it does is it allows, it basically allows one chain to get security from another chain. So it's, I think this is something we launched last year. But I would consider it like a restaking. So I think, you know, with the Eigen layer and many other projects that have, you know, restake have become big this year. This is one of the first restaking protocols. And it uses IBC as the transport layer to bring information about what the validator sets are supposed to be from the Cosmos hub to another chain.
Richard Carthon: I like the IBC just because there's so much emphasis on connectivity, security, and ease of use. And one of the other pieces of Cosmos that I think is important is cross-chain solutions, and you were starting to talk about being able to control chains through the IBC and through these other connectivity pieces. What are some of those other cross-chain solutions that you think sets Cosmos apart from some of the others?
Jehan Tremback: I think what sets Cosmos apart is two things. One is, like I was saying, Cosmos SDK, very flexible, very powerful. You can customize everything. I mean, that's also, it can be a little bit more complicated than a smart contract platform would be. That's actually something we're trying to change with the Cosmos Hub. I'll tell you more later. But then also just the deep integration of IVC with everything, which allows these kinds of things. And I think having a complete, thought-out, you know, heavily, you know, heavily tested, heavily engineered bridging solution from day one is very powerful in Cosmos. And it eliminates a lot of the decisions I think in a lot of other ecosystems projects have to make a lot of decisions about, you know, there's all these bridging protocols out there and they have like, you know, billions of dollars in VC funding, really nice websites, you got to decide which one to use. They work in different ways, maybe one does one thing, the other does another thing, you know, but both of them don't do exactly what you need. But in Cosmos, it's like you have IBC, it just does everything. And in the most secure way.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome, man. And I know you said you're going to get back into it. I want to go back straight to the SDK and how, although it adds a lot of choices, it can make things a little bit more complex. So what is Cosmos doing to help?
Jehan Tremback: Yeah. So the Cosmos SDK, I mean, it's an SDK, like I said, it's IBC built in, but
Essentially it's a developer kit to build an L1 blockchain. And so a lot of every Cosmos chain is built on obviously, there's also chains that are not even branded necessarily as, you know, Cosmos chains that are built using it. So for example, DY DX is on the Cosmos SDK. Polygon has a lot of stuff going on, of course, but one of their main things, their sidechain, is actually a modified sort of Cosmos chain. And so it generally gives you the power to make an L1 and have basically full control over it. But some of the difficult things there are there's You know, there's a little bit of a lift on the engineering front, you got to understand it. And then also, one of the things that's most challenging is you have to, it's not insurmountable, but you have to put together your own validator that says you are launching an L1. And so you need to get validators. You know, you need to find them. You gotta, you know, you gotta, you, you know, gotta find them on Telegram or like, you know, have, you know, maybe your investors or something connect you with somebody and you want to have like, you know, a bunch of small ones, a few big ones. And so it's kind of like, it's not necessarily impossible, but it's a little bit daunting. It's like, you have to, you have to sort of know how to navigate and how to talk to the right people and get these validators together and know how much, you know, you want to offer them in terms of like, Delegations and sometimes grants and stuff like that. There's no road map for it. And so the Cosmos Hub, we're trying to sort of fix that in Cosmos. and try to make the Cosmos Hub the best place to launch a chain. And so what we're doing with that is, first of all, we interchange security. It's kind of the basis of that. So that basically lets you build an L1 that's secured by a staked Atom. Atom is the token of the Cosmos Hub. So you can build this L1, and the security is taken care of. So you don't have to worry about having low security at first, because you're getting security right from Atom from day one. And then also, we're going to be coming out with this pretty soon, but we're launching basically a launchpad, a front end. And that's going to allow people creating chains to basically go through different phases, like the idea phase. I get a lot of help on tutorials on building it and stuff and working with Cosmos SDK. And then the pre-launch phase, and that's where it'll show up on a website and people can decide, do I want to delegate, validators decide, do I want to opt in to validate this chain? You can sort of build a validator set before you even launch. And then the front end is also going to take you through kind of the process of doing a test net with that validator set, and then doing it again to go to the main net. And so that's kind of, that's something we hope is going to make it a lot easier for people to get started. Like it's still, it's still completely, it's an L1. It's not like a, not like a rollup or a smart contract or something. It's a full L1. But this tool is going to guide you through the steps of building the validator set, putting together and launching.
Richard Carthon: And that's powerful. So I know you said one of the biggest challenges is setting a lot of that up. And most people don't necessarily know how to do that. But it sounds like Cosmos Hub is setting that up to have people ready, which is very helpful. And for a lot of people who are looking to launch, they're looking for places that can get that kind of assistance. And it sounds like you're providing those resources and tools through Cosmos Hub to do that. And I know you kind of laid out a little bit of the roadmap, but as you kind of look at the rest of 2024, what else is on the roadmap and what other things can people be excited about what's coming?
Jehan Tremback: Yeah, so one other thing we're working on is security aggregation. So we're looking at different ways to, you know, allow chains to be secured, not, you know, not just by Atom. The chains will launch on the Hub to be secured not just by Atom, but also by other tokens. So we've been working with Babylon. There's a Bitcoin restaking solution. to basically bring Bitcoin security to the hub. So then, you know, when you're launching a chain, you'll be able to select, hey, you know what, I want, I want this, you know, to have to be secured by Bitcoin as well. And so then validators running the chain, you know, the basis of proof of stake security is, you know, the stake. Getting slashed if they do something wrong. With Babylon's tools, we're going to be able to make it so that People can stake from Bitcoin to hub validators to run these chains. And then, you know, if the validators do something wrong, then the Bitcoin is slashed. That's what Babylon technology allows. So that's security aggregation. Right now, our main focus is Bitcoin staking in Babylon. We're also, you know, looking at other ways to do it as well.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome, man. Well, obviously a lot's going on over at the Cosmos Hub. For people that want to learn more and become involved, what can they do? What are those next steps?
Jehan Tremback: I think the best way is the website Cosmos.network. You can learn about building stuff there with the Cosmos SDK. I guess when we put out that front in the launchpad, I think that'll be linked from there. So I think that's the best way. There's also Twitter. It's at the Cosmos Hub Twitter account. And there's also an at Cosmos Twitter account, which is more about the general ecosystem around Cosmos.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, Jahan, thank you so much for sharing this information and hope you enjoy the rest of the Consensus Yeah. Thank you. What's up, everyone? Richard from Edge of NFT here lives at Consensus And today we've got another special guest that I'm excited to learn more about over at Radix. We have Piers Ridyard, who is the CEO of RDX Works, which started back in 2017, joining the founder, Dan Hughes, and growing the company to over 75 individuals worldwide. Prior to joining Radix, Pierce built Suremetics, a Y Combinator business that created decentralized deal room software for insurance firms before its acquisition in 2017. Congratulations. And you're fluent in both English and Chinese.
Piers Ridyard: I mean, I think fluent is probably pushing it when it comes to Chinese. I haven't spoken Chinese for a very long time. Technically, I lived there for a bit and I, yeah, I'm conversant.
Richard Carthon: Well, that is extremely awesome. Obviously, you have a really incredible background. So, how did you even get into the world of Web3? Let's start there.
Piers Ridyard: Yeah, I mean, it was basically Ethereum that got me into the world of Web3. In 2014, one of my friends messaged me. He was like, hey, there's this cryptocurrency called Ethereum. They're running a crowd sale. Can you have a look at it and tell me what you think? And I remember, I still have this vivid memory of pulling up this video of Stefan Thule, who is like the chief marketing officer of Ethereum at the time. And he's like this softly spoken French guy with this crazy background going on, talking about this idea of unstoppable programs and serverless applications. And I was like, this sounds like a scam. Don't, whatever you do, don't put money into it. Right. And then, like, he called me three months later or six months later and he was like, hey, it's going live on Tesna. Should we start mining? I was like, what's mining? He was like, he explained it to me and I was like, yeah, cool. So I looked and I sort of dived into the Dagger Hashimoto hashing algorithm, worked out what the right, like, mining hardware would be, built, like, consumer rigs, essentially, using just, like, graphics cards. when we started mining Ethereum. And we were mining on the test net of Ethereum, which had one-tenth mining rewards. And then we were mining from the Genesis block onwards. I think we mined about 10,000 E in like, I don't know, three months. And the irony is that the mining equipment was more expensive than the amount of eth that we got out. What would have been better is not to have mines, not to have bought the mining equipment, and just to have bought eth. And we would have probably made 3x more money that way. And so I got in basically because one of my friends was telling us we should mine. And from there I started to explore and understand what blockchains were and what smart contracts were. And I got hooked. by the space. Like the first ideas that were being put out then are the ideas that you're seeing around you now, but they were, they were, they felt delusional, but everyone felt like everyone had this vision of it being possible. So like decentralized autonomous organizations. So that was one of the earliest ideas that people got really excited about in Ethereum. And like, that was the original DAO. I was like an investor in the original DAO. I was like part of the conversations about whether or not Ethereum should fork or not, and like getting involved in the community then. going to the first meetups in London. And that got me hooked on this idea of what a smart contract could be and what smart contracts, what it meant that you now have programmable money and programmable ideas that you would like to enforce in unstoppable applications.
Richard Carthon: That is an incredible background. It's awesome. Shout out to the friend who helped to encourage you to learn about money. Yeah, man. Even with me, like how I first got into it, I had someone recommend that I learn about Ethereum first and so I did and then this now back in 2018 and I went out around the whole I haven't looked back since and so like just going back to you in 2017 you You have your acquisition of Shermatics, which is incredible and very hard for anyone who's been out there to go through an acquisition A true testament to work that goes into it But then you take that and then you fast forward into what you're now doing with Radix So talk about the lessons learned from there and how they're being applied it to what you're currently building Yeah, it's really interesting.
Piers Ridyard: So like The thing that is sort of interesting about crypto is that the business application of crypto, when applied in a Web2 setting, doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. A lot of the time, if you're creating a corporate application, it makes more sense just to put it on a database. You don't actually need a blockchain. The reason that you need a blockchain is because you need an ecosystem of users, assets, and applications that all interact with each other. The beauty, the genius of a public ledger is that if I create an application and you've created an application, we don't ever have to have actually communicated ourselves for our applications to be able to talk together. That's not true in Web 2.0. If I have an API and you have an API, I have to come to you and be like, hey, can I use your API? Get an account with you. And if it's a financial application, I have to go to the bank and prove that I'm also authorized to be able to use that by some regulatory means. Whereas on a public ledger, every application can talk to every application instantaneously. Every object, like a USDC, can be used universally. And so the lesson is that for public ledgers to work, you have to have that ecosystem. So what I built before was going into big companies and being like, this is how blockchain can work for you. And what we're doing now is going, how can you build an ecosystem of applications that together become more valuable than, you know, the sum of the parts, sorry, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, by the very fact that you have these network effects. The irony of crypto is that it's very difficult to translate those activities outside of just crypto assets. Because the regulation around things like creating a real world asset and tokenizing on-chain or like creating, you know, taking securities from the securities market and putting it on-chain is very difficult and very uncertain. So a lot of crypto ends up being just around cryptocurrencies begetting other cryptocurrencies and communities mainly speculating on how, you know, what ecosystem versus another is going to have the capital that's in crypto moved to that part of the ecosystem and then moved on to another part of the ecosystem. And that was a very, that was a very, that was a very different shift in mentality. Like in one mentality you're going, how am I solving a problem for a company that has a pain point. In another mentality you're saying how do I create enough collective excitement in the promise of something that could be, right? How do I create enough collective excitement around the promise of what DeFi could be or what this application could be to make the crypto capital go, this is where I want to be at this point. And then the whole crypto industry is trying to get to the point where there's enough capital in the crypto industry that the real financial industry or the external financial industry is going, I have to include crypto as part of my mix, right? I have to actually be buying Bitcoin now. I have to buy Ethereum now. And as soon as that's happening, you're now going, okay, well, if I have Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I'm getting all these benefits from being able to use all these decentralized applications and move these objects in common between all of these ecosystem applications, why can't I do that with the rest of my balance sheet? And then getting more of that, and you're seeing that now with things like treasury USDT, treasuries, sorry not USDC, but treasuries coming, being tokenized on Ledger by a variety of different applications. And treasuries is just the first liquid representative asset that's now being moved on Ledger that is now being used within DeFi. And so now we're starting to get to the point where practical use cases, real use cases in finance are coming. But there had to be this very long period of people just recreating financial marketplaces and financial applications using crypto assets, which in many cases were toys. And I think that's sort of the, there's a lot of echoes in the early delusion of the Ethereum ecosystem. And I say delusion with the most, with fondness. Like, I think that you have to be delusional to be an entrepreneur. I think you have to be delusional to build anything that is of import because you have to believe the world will change. And that you will be able to deny gravitational pulls until the point that the world changes, because your model of a different world is better than the existing world. But there has to be enough people, there has to be enough critical mass for it to get there. And so, yeah, I think the difference between building a SaaS business and building a crypto business is worlds apart.
Richard Carthon: Oh, extremely worlds apart. And to get it to a point of an end target, right, of building truly something that's either going to be acquired or something that's going to be here into perpetuity that's continuing to reach critical mass. For whatever reason in the world of crypto, they think it should happen in three to six months, maybe even 12, instead of, you know, building a company for, you know, the next decade and building for that future.
Piers Ridyard: And I think the next decade is still a short timeline. Yeah. Right. I think that ultimately, in the long term, crypto is going to change the very way in which we run countries right now and you will elect all like if you think about it, take a step back and squint a democracy. A representative democracy is essentially a DAO Right? So a country is a DAO. It's just we haven't got to the point in which that is now representative on Ledger. But, you know, that's 30 years, 40 years, 50 years.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, it takes a long time. I mean, when you think about LLCs as companies, they got introduced, I believe, in the 80s, and it took a long time before the rest of the world started to adapt to it. And now it's like the golden standard at which most companies are set up. DAOs, I think, are eventually going to take that over and do so much more. But I want to drill into Radix. So for those who are first listening, this is the first introduction to that. What is it? How can people get involved? And why did you choose ConsenSys to be able to come and share what you got going on?
Piers Ridyard: Sure. So Radix is a layer one protocol. So it's its own blockchain focusing specifically on decentralized finance. And it's its own technology stack. So Dan Hughes started the research in 2013. into how to make a technology stack that was actually suitable for the mainstream. And we think there's three key components to this. The first is usability. The second is developer experience. And the third is scalability. And like, those aren't narratives that would be unfamiliar to people in crypto. Like, crypto sucks as a user experience. Like, MetaMask sucks. Interacting with Dapsuck. You never know whether or not you're going to get hacked or exploited. You never know whether or not what you're signing is the right thing. Like, the number of people who have lost millions of dollars just by signing something that they didn't realize. You know, you see that every day on Twitter. It's terrifying that the idea that I have this seed phrase I have to write down, and that's all of my money, like, for the everyday person, like, for the libertarian, they're like, hell yeah! For the everyday person, they're like, no, I'm not organized for that shit. So, the developer experience, like the big reason that we see hacks happening in DeFi, like why you're getting exploits, why you're getting people getting millions of dollars run from them, is because it's really difficult to build smart contract applications right now, to build like an Aave, to build like a Uniswap, to build all these things really, really hard. And then the third thing is scalability, which is like, again, there's a narrative that's been encrypted for a very long time. How do you make it so scalable enough for everyone in the world to be able to use a thing? If the internet had a scalability gap, the world would look very different than it does today. And all of the solutions that we see at the moment are essentially trying to iterate on a starting point. The basic idea of Radix is if you want to end up here, then you don't want to start from there. And where we're starting from is we're going Ethereum, Ethereum consensus, the EVM, and Solidity. And while I'm a massive fan of Ethereum, their starting point was they didn't know what the application use cases for public ledgers were going to be. The reason that Solidity is the way it is, is because They wanted to make it as close to a popular programming language. So they chose JavaScript. Now, JavaScript is a terrible language to be building any financial application inside of. And what was worse is it's not really like JavaScript because it had to have had all of these specific Ethereum functions in it. So it's like bad JavaScript. And that's made even worse by the fact that it's really difficult to build financial applications well in JavaScript. And then you have a bad version of it and now it's even harder. But once you've created a public ledger, you can't change the model. You can't change the state model for the execution environment. You can't change the programming environment very easily. And so all of these things that people are now using public ledgers for, we're now getting these band-aids. One of the band-aids is layer twos. Oh, we don't have a way of linearly scaling this architecture? We're not going to do that. We're just going to have optimistic and ZK roll-ups. We're just going to have layer twos like optimism and opt. Problem with that is you're now sharding everything, but you're also sharing liquidity. You're also sharing usability. You're making it so that people now have to understand five different ledges and also have to balance their liquidity between the two and I can't just instantly transfer between them and all this kind of stuff. So you're making the user experience much worse than it already is. What Radix did is we went, let's start again from scratch. What do we want to achieve? We want to have linear scalability. And we want that to be true without there being an upper limit. We want to have a developer experience that understands what people are actually building on top of public ledger. So we want a developer experience that guarantees security around the applications that you build and deploy, and gets rid of lots of the issues that you see in Ethereum like re-entrancy, recursion, signature manipulation, all that kind of stuff. And we want a user experience that I would feel comfortable giving to my friends and family, to my mother to go and use. Well, that was the starting point of Radix. and we rebuilt the entire stack around those principles and that's what launched in September of last year.
Richard Carthon: Congratulations on that. And it addresses a lot of core challenges, especially as you said it's layer one focused on the world of DeFi. Although DeFi summer was fun, there were a lot of challenges that made it unsustainable and that made it to where we couldn't get to that next level of having this be an everyday tool that most people could use. And obviously Radix helps to address a lot of that. So when you look at 2024 and, you know, what's to come for Radix, what can people look forward to? Sure.
Piers Ridyard: So, I think there are two main things that are important around public ledgers. The first is user onboarding, and the second is capital onboarding, right? So, from the first point of view, user onboarding, your biggest challenge in onboarding users into true Web3, right? Not using an exchange, If you're using Exchange, you're investing in Web3, you're not using Web3. You need to educate people on the idea of a wallet. and then you need to get them comfortable connecting to Web3 applications directly to use the things that they typically use exchanges for at the moment. Like, you shouldn't be on Binance, you should be trading on one of the Radix DEXs. You shouldn't be keeping your crypto on an exchange, you should be keeping it in a non-custodial wallet. But, you want the user to be voting with their feet from the point of view of the number of active users on exchanges versus the number of active users on public ledgers is probably 10 to 1, maybe 100 to 1. So there has to be, yes, Radix has built this incredible user experience, but there has to be this educational point in which you can take users from, I like buying Bitcoin to, oh my god, decentralized exchanges are the best, right? So we've been working with an award-winning mobile game studio on how do you solve this problem? How do you make it so that you can make someone not into a grudging user of Web3, but like an excited, engaged user of Web3. It's launching later this year. And that's basically going to, this is about how do you onboard as many people as possible into a true Web3 crypto experience. The other side is capital onboarding. And like that starts with the kind of assets that capital cares about. So how do we get onto Radix more real-world assets? How do we make Radix integrate into the systems that sophisticated capital use to be able to deploy? And how do we make this ecosystem into something that that sophisticated capital is using as part of their back-end trade routing for the kind of things that they're doing every day. So a market maker will have liquidity across many, many venues and will be using money markets and prime brokerage at the same time. And what's really surprising about that is most market makers do that off ledger. They aren't using ledger systems, even crypto market makers aren't. And that's actually where the majority of the volume and the value that's being moved in crypto is. Like, yes, you need retail users to come in and play around with the applications and trade, but the majority of volume is coming via the sophisticated individual, the intermediates. So for us, there's a bunch of things coming out, which I can't talk about right now, that address those specific points. Like, how do you get more of what is already done in crypto on centralized exchanges into public ledgers.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, it's an important challenge that a lot of people in DeFi are excited to see. I know we have quite a strong DeFi community out there that's always looking for what's happening. That's why I want to make sure we had a conversation with Radix with what y'all have going on. It's really impressive. For all those that want to learn more and connect with you, what are ways that they can follow and also join your community?
Piers Ridyard: Sure, so if you go to Twitter, our handle is RadixDLT, that's R-A-D-I-X-D-L-T. On our website, RadixDLT.com, loads of material, loads of information, definitely recommend checking out the blog. You're a developer, developers.radixdlt.com is where you go. And our community channel in Telegram is at RadixDLT. I also highly recommend checking out some of our community projects. If you guys like DEXs, then there's Ossiswap, which is an implementation of Uniswap v4 that's already live on the Radix network. So, Uniswap v4 doesn't live on Ethereum. The developers behind Aussie looked at the Uniswap v4 spec and were like, yeah, we could do that in Scripto, no problem. And they've implemented that, that's already live. Caviar 9 is another DEX on Radix, which I highly recommend. DeFi Plaza is another one. I forgot to say this before, but there's a Perpetuals DEX launching on Radix in the next few months. That's called Surge. If you go to surge.trades, it's a really cool team behind it. Like super smart, super capable, proven track record in DeFi. I think Surge is going to be a really nice project coming out too.
Richard Carthon: So you've got a lot of exciting things going on. Everyone, make sure you go check that out. Pierce, I'm glad we were able to spend some time today and I look forward to learning more. Thank you very much. Hey everybody, Richard Carthon here at Consensus and we got another amazing guest with us today. We're talking about a really cool project, Calaxy. So we have Solo Ceesay, who is the dynamic co-founder of Calaxy, the groundbreaking social marketplace that's redefining the creator economy. With a sharp financial acumen honed in at Citigroup and a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, Solo's no stranger to innovation. He teams up with NBA star, Spencer DeWindy, who is leveraging blockchain technology to put power back into the hands of its creators. It's a pleasure to speak with you today. Pleasure to meet you, man. Yeah, man. Excited to be here. Hey, well, how has your Consensus experience been so far?
Solo Ceesay: Man, it's been exciting. It's crazy to see all the energy back in space. It's been a little bit of a drought over the last couple of years. You know, we've been building in space since 2020. And so it looks and transforms a lot. with some of the acknowledgement from the powers and the regulatory bodies around the world. It's super exciting to see the industry taking steps forward, and you can definitely see that here at Consensus
Richard Carthon: You can. We were talking before we were jumping on this, just like the energy is there too, and you can feel the excitement, and it's not just like hopium anymore, it's like actual steps towards the future that we've all been hoping for. But like you said, you've been building this for a while now, and you have a pretty extensive background, and a partner up with, you know, Dwindie from the NBA. So how does all of that background help get you over to web3 and build this platform?
Solo Ceesay: Yeah, I mean, it's funny. Our origin story is quite unique. So I'm Solo Ceesay the co-founder, Spencer Dinwiddie of the Los Angeles Lakers most recently. We came together nearly five years ago at this point to really explore what building and Web3 looked like. As you mentioned, I was an investment banker for a number of years. And so when Spencer originally came to me, and this is always the story because we were like, how'd you get involved? How'd you get Spencer to care about crypto? I was like, dude, it was the opposite. Like he came to me in 2018 and was like, Yeah, bro, because he's like my older brother. Him and my older brother are best friends. So depending on the day, they might be my younger brothers. But they're both like my older brothers. And he came to me one day and was like, yeah, everything you do at Citi is cool and all. Crypto is the future, bro. Like your Wharton degree doesn't matter. And I was just like, what are you talking about? So I was resistant at first, but then, you know, he made history being the first NBA player to securitize his NBA contract through blockchain technology. I used to be a securitization banker. And so our story was pretty, you know, just, you know, as romanticized as it can be. And so that's how we got started. And then, you know, Galaxy birthed into, you know, us taking that as a proof of concept is contract securitization and finding other ways to monetization for creators of all kinds. And that's what inspired us to develop Calatee.
Richard Carthon: That is an incredible origin story. And like the thing that I like about it the most, because I can relate to it, I come from traditional finance as well. And I learned about cryptocurrency in 2018 as well. And it was like my aha moment of like, well, you have all these advanced financial tools that are usually only for the elite. And now people have access to this. And so I was like, how can I educate other people and get involved, so I definitely relate with that, and it's awesome. But diving into the Galaxy, obviously it's a social place, but what differentiates it from some of the others that are out there?
Solo Ceesay: Yeah, so what we're most known for is our creator shop tools. And so on Galaxy, it's really easy, and we call them shops. So when you navigate to someone's profile, let me take a step back and explain the structure of the application. And so we are called what is a social wallet. We've coined that term. We're a non-custodial crypto wallet that does things. So the number one thing we wanted to solve was helping creators get paid originally on the onset of our journey. And so we used the idea of wallet-to-wallet payment transfer as a way to facilitate marketplace activity with a fan and a creator. And so you could sell something like a video call or a video message or anything like that, things you're familiar with Cameo. But what makes Galaxy super unique is that you can actually take any of the core features we built, video calls, video messages, exclusive content, NFTs, all these different things, but you can take something like the video message feature and brand it as a custom experience. So if you're a celebrity chef, you might offer cooking classes, right? You might offer personal training sessions and take that video ball product and market it as such. And your fans have a place to go, interact, and message. And so that's one use case. But another use case is obviously peer-to-peer payments. And so if I'm a user in Galaxy, why can't I use my crypto not to just buy an experience, but to pay you back for pizza? And that's what got us started. And so Galaxy's grown, you know, over many, many years. I'd like to say it's a lot like what you're seeing a lot of the traditional social platforms doing, like Elon trying to get closer to SocialFi, getting banks involved. But the obvious answer is a crypto wallet to enable that type of activity. And so that's what Galaxy does really well.
Richard Carthon: I think that's a really well way of putting it like putting all these different economic structures that people have to go to for different stuff like in here in the States we use Venmo to send each other stuff or if we want to be able to go out and you know do our rides or do whatever like you have to go to so many different places and so this wall it's allowing for all of that to happen in one place still have the social aspect but within your wallet as well, you have your own token, the Galaxy token. Can you kind of talk about the utility of how that's utilized?
Solo Ceesay: Yeah, and so our DAO launched a token and so we are decentralized. So Galaxy is the first application built in this ecosystem called the broader Creators Galaxy. The Creators Galaxy foundation is an independent DAO that is managed with some stewards, they manage the treasury. And the purpose of that was to really create an environment where it was a dedicated protocol to the next generation of NFT applications, social apps, and Galaxy is the first one in this ecosystem. But this DAO could grow to be an entity that manages that abundant treasury over time and gives out grants to incentivize building on the network and really create this interconnected world. And Kallax is really the first stop, our best shot at solving creator monetization and really, you know, be what we preach on the protocol. And that's the first application use case, but we hope to have many, many more. And so the token is really the vehicle that demonstrates all that value. And you can use it for governance votes and things like that. So people that are part of the broader community can change the fee structures or how the ecosystem works and all that. And so we wanted to decentralize what's been so classically owned by one person or one entity for so long and social media. And so we want to incentivize that growth and Galaxy's, you know, our shot at building on that protocol, but we hope to have many others in the future.
Richard Carthon: I like that you built it as a DAO and that you came in to decentralize. You know, decentralize is the most overused word in Web3, but putting in principles from the core of how it's structured, I think, is really critical to living that truth and providing that to your users. The fact that you said that they can go and structure their own fees and everything else. that is the centralization to me, right? Giving the power back to users so that they have the choice to do those types of options. So, I guess, secondarily, as people are coming into Galaxy and there's a lot of different ways they can utilize the various features that it has, what have been some of the first use cases that you see?
Solo Ceesay: Yeah, I think the one that was super exciting was sending crypto through the DM. And so that's our Venmo-like, you know, peer-to-peer payment transfer mechanism without the need for a public key. And so a user can easily go in there. I can go in there, at Richard, send you 500 USDC like a text. But what's beautiful about it is actually we've upgraded the feature since. And we've debuted it on CNBC Live, where I sent 500 USD to Spencer, which was super exciting. But we've also expanded the capability so that you can text somebody crypto that's not even a user on Galaxy yet. And because, you know, when you create an account, it's assigned to a phone number, you auth in, essentially that phone number, you could text it, kind of like inviting somebody to WhatsApp maybe or Telegram. And when they get that unique URL, they click it, they install Galaxy, they enter their phone credentials, their crypto will hit their wallet immediately. So, you know, you're solving not just, is it easy to transact, but you're also accounting for the fact that most people don't have wallets. And they don't have wallets that don't do these kinds of things for a reason. And so what was really exciting was people were happy to onboard their friends because they now had a mechanism and a tool to easily invite and send and persuade people to come to the ecosystem.
Richard Carthon: So you're finishing up your thoughts. So being able to send people that aren't structured.
Solo Ceesay: Yeah, people who don't have a wallet yet or anything like that, what we want to do is create an easy mechanism for them to, you know, when was the last time you paid a friend back with crypto?
Richard Carthon: Unless they're in crypto, I have no option.
Solo Ceesay: Isn't that weird to you? It's super weird. The number one use case for crypto is peer-to-peer payments, yet none of us are using it here. That's ludicrous to me. And we want to change that. And so what we believe at Galaxy is that the wallet needs to be reinvented. It needs to be built with things that people care to do with money. Like the crypto wallet was always in its prototypical stage when Satoshi invented it, right? Or not the wallet, but invented Bitcoin, founded Bitcoin. But we already had PayPal. We already had one-click payments to send money. Like this arduous system we use now was always prototypical. But we've gotten lazy as an industry. And we really need to push forward because if we want to bring the next hundred million, a billion users, their user journey is going to look different than ours.
Richard Carthon: It absolutely is, and that feature truly is the first I've heard where even if someone doesn't have a wallet, I can send this to them and now they have an easy way to onboard. That pain point that you just touched on is one that I want to just hammer down. We're all here, and what does onboarding the next… you know, million people look like, and it's being able to send them money seamlessly. And there's not really that way to do that yet until Galaxy's aiming to help aim with that. So for people listening to this, and they're like, okay, this sounds really cool, I want to onboard. So what are those like first steps people can do to come and be able to, you know, send grandma 500
Solo Ceesay: Yeah, I mean, we're super easy to find. We're actually not an iOS app or an Android app at all. We're not native to the app stores. We're a web app. So it's super easy for us to manage one code base, ship updates, and push and build really quickly. But also, we're accessible to virtually everybody around the globe. And so going to galaxy.com and hitting the install button, bookmarking it down to your home stream like a PWA is super nifty and quick. The install process of Galaxy is faster than any app you would ever use. And just like sending crypto to the person without a wallet, you can onboard them with their unique URL links too, which creates so many different mechanisms for gamification. You think about not just Galaxy, but like enterprises need a wallet that does stuff. Loyalty rewards probably need to look something like that. Rewarded in some NFT, when you go to Starbucks and you use it, you can pay with crypto for that. Do you get rewarded back in some crypto into your wallet? Can you send those rewards back and forth to people? You're creating a social graph and really, using the merits of Web3 technology just to create a collaborative world. Right. But the problem is the wallet today isn't collaborative. They're all closed silos. It's just like, you know, connect, you know, X wallet is like connecting with your bank account details. How often do you check your bank account unless you're a down bet? Right. Right. Really? And so it's just a different way of really thinking about it.
Richard Carthon: There's an analogy I like to use a lot that I think really correlates to this, which is there's way too many islands being built and not enough bridges, and this is trying to be that bridge over the web, too, to help bring them over and do it in a way that a lot of people already have the user experience of doing. So I think that's super unique. As you look at the rest of 2024, what can people expect from the Galaxy?
Solo Ceesay: Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point even on that last part, right? You're probably no stranger to all the meme coins that are happening, all the celebrities coming back to the ecosystem. But what I explained to you is something that's a ton of novel utility for digital assets. If you're an influencer, if you're Iggy Azalea, if you're any of these guys, why wouldn't you create a marketplace or a shop for people to actually use your token to buy things? manage your community in one place, where everybody already has a wallet, because you know, because they're on calix. Right. And so I think that's what we're super excited to really dive into, which is really creating that bridge, like, yes, financial freedom and, and, and, and asymmetric upside and trading your volatility is what draws people here. But in the future, we want to be that bridge, we want to be that connecting tissue so that the full machine can really work all the way from when a user comes in and buys a coin to actually spending and using and getting utility out of that, which is we know is going to be a lot more valuable over time, just given where the regulatory environment has been, that use case and that security framework is still going to be rigid. Just because Ethereum got through doesn't mean that any coin could just get launched now. Exactly. So utility is going to be really the key play. So for us, we want to really plug in and enhance those models that are starting to proliferate in the world of Web3 today.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome, man. Well, just one more time, as people are listening to this and they're fired up about Galaxy, how can they learn more? How can they follow on Twitter? How can they connect with you?
Solo Ceesay: Yeah, absolutely. We're findable. We're easily findable. You can find us on X at Galaxy app at Galaxy on Instagram. I'm at solo CSA on X as well. And then at solo dot CSA on Instagram. I write a lot, I chat a lot, pretty easily. So, you know, we're always happy and willing to talk to new partners, people that are interested in anyone that has a great idea. Because, you know, no idea is too small. No idea is too big. We really just want to make sure that we're actually using the technology that we preach about on a day to day basis and that's our mission.
Richard Carthon: Definitely. Well, it sounds like you're doing it and it sounds like a really amazing community to me joining. Sola, it was great speaking with you today. I hope you enjoy the rest of your consensus. Thank you for having me, Dalek.
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