Live at BTC Nashville: NFTs, Ordinals, and Blockchain Innovation

At the BTC Nashville event, the hosts catch up with Scott Page and Chris Snook to discuss their exciting NFT project Synthopia, the launch of the biosynth token. The conversation dives deep into the origins and impact of Ordinals in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the synergy between art and blockchain. They are also joined by TJ Miller and Edan Yago from Sovryn, who share their insights on the evolving landscape of Bitcoin and Ordinals, from NFTs to zero-knowledge proofs, and the broader implications for decentralized finance.

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Key Topics Covered:

• Celebration of Artistic Achievement: The hosts commemorate Scott Page's unique project where 7,000 pieces of digital art were sent to the moon, emphasizing the intersection of art and technology in creating lasting legacies.
• Challenges in the NFT Market: Chris Snook discusses the difficulties artists face in the NFT space, particularly during market downturns, and the need for sustainable business models that can support creators and their fans.
• Innovative Economic Models: The introduction of "supercharged ordinals" is presented as a new approach to infusing Bitcoin yield into NFTs, aiming to create a more stable and rewarding ecosystem for artists and collectors alike.

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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 was picked as one of the 222 artists to put their works on this special hard drive that's designed to last a billion years." - Scott Page (5:30) 
• "Last night we did a thing where I'm a co-founder of a project, an NFT project called Synthopia... We're getting ready to launch the biosynth token." - Scott Page (8:30)
• "As we look at Bitcoin as the settlement layer... that's indisputable, that's bigger, that's unforgeable and all those benefits." - Chris Hook (20:15)

For the full transcript, see further below. 

People and Resources Mentioned: 

• Synthopia Website 
• Scott Page @iamscottpage
•  Chris Snook @DigitalSenseXYZ
• Chris J Snook Website
• Chris J S LinkedIn 
•  TJ Miller @nottjmiller
• Edan Yago @EdanYago
• Edan Yago LinkedIn 
•  Sovryn Website
• Ordinals Website

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About Our Guest 1:

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Bio: Scott Page is a musician and co-founder of the NFT project Synthopia. With a background in the music industry, having performed with iconic artists like Pink Floyd and Diana Ross, Page has transitioned into the blockchain space, focusing on creating unique digital art experiences. He is known for his ambitious projects, including sending digital art to the moon and launching innovative NFT initiatives.

Website: Synthopia

Twitter: @iamscottpage 

Instagram: @iamscottpage

About Our Guest 2:

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Bio: Chris Snook is a business partner of Scott Page and an advocate for developing new business models around fan experiences in the NFT space. He has experience in creating technical solutions that enhance artist-fan interactions, particularly through blockchain technology.

Website: Chris J Snook 

Twitter: @DigitalSenseXYZ

LinkedIn: Chris J S

About Our Guest 3:

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Bio: TJ Miller is a well-known American actor, comedian, and writer, recognized for his unique style of humor and engaging performances. He gained prominence through his role as Erlich Bachman in the HBO series Silicon Valley, where he showcased his comedic talent and improvisational skills.

Website: Sovryn 

Twitter: @nottjmiller

Instagram: @TeenageMillionaire

About Our Guest 4:

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Bio: Edan is a core contributor to Sovryn, the decentralised Layer 2 Bitcoin trading and lending and asset management platform. Sovryn allows users to trade, leverage, and earn yield by lending. Sovryn extends Bitcoin, building a full suite of decentralised tools and bridging Bitcoin with other aspects of both the traditional economy and DeFi. 

Website:  Sovryn 

Twitter: @EdanYago

LinkedIn: Edan Yago

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Disclaimer:

This is not financial or tax advice. Edge of NFT content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Whenever making financial decisions, we recommend doing your own research and talking to your accountant for financial advice. Disclosure: From time-to-time we may feature sponsored content for which we receive value and we may share links for which we receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. See our full Disclaimer (https://www.edgeofnft.com/disclaimer), Terms & Conditions (https://www.edgeofnft.com/terms-of-use), Privacy Policy (https://www.edgeofnft.com/privacy-policy), and Copyright Notice (https://www.edgeofnft.com/copyright-notice) for details. 

Full Episode Transcript:

Hi everyone, this is Josh Krueger, co host of Edge MNFT, live

at BTC Nashville. We're actually hanging out at the Hack House, where we're proud to be a media partner. A lot of fun going on here throughout the week.  Because, as everyone knows, the action when it comes to blockchain events is not always at the core conference.

It's at all those side events, and there's a lot of cool stuff happening. We had a chance last night to see the one and only Scott Page, who's here with us, as well as Chris Hook, Scott performed a really special set kicking off the next phase of Syn Toia

we'll talk a little bit, Scott, about one of your big projects. It's great to have you on the show again, man, it's been a minute.

Thank you very much, and I'm always happy to be with you by Fred. This is one of my heroes in this space, right? So the feeling's mutual, really, man, we've been doing this for a while, since NFT LA Man.

Yeah. Back in the day started the show March, 2021. I think you're one of the first guests on the show, maybe like April or May. It's

all a blur back then.  It's fun to be with the OGs. Yeah. Yeah, last night we did a thing where I'm a co founder of a project, an NFT project called Synthopia.

And it's actually been pretty successful so far. It's about a year old. We've lost sold three in the bear market, in the bear market. Yeah. Yeah. We've sold three collections out totally. And we're getting ready to launch the biosynth token. And that's coming up right away. So we're going to be launching that actually.

Did a prelaunch. It's just started on that. But last night we did a thing because we're honoring my moon project that I did, which is interesting. I was picked as one of the 222 artists to put their works on this special hard drive that's designed to last a billion years. How they figured that out.

I have no idea, but it's supposed to last a billion years, science, crazy stuff. And it actually went up on on a Falcon nine. It's called the Odyssey. This was about three months ago, something like that. It actually landed on the moon. So I put 7, 000 pieces on the moon. The part of those pieces on the moon were or digital twins.

Let me make that clear, because it's on hard drive was Syntopia. And last night, we're celebrating the moon and also Inside of my crazy piece that I put up there, I put up Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Toto Quincy Jones Lady Diana, Spinal Tap,  Monty Python, all these people, and they're all built into this piece, and last night we were celebrating, mashing the fact of our launch of our biosynth token, and also The golden mullet, which is the piece on the stage last night.

So a lot of the rest of the show is going to be framed around the mullet. And of course, if we're going to talk about mullets being the curious chap that I am, I want to do a little bit of research. So did you guys know that the mullet actually traces back to Greek warriors that wore their hair long?

In short in the front to keep the hair outta the face when they were having protection for the neck. So they're doing their fighting things.

That's a funny story because that was the same way I approached it with music. I was working with di You

were worried

stage. I was worried Stage.

Yeah. It was so funny because I, when I was playing with Diana Ross, I noticed her hair and I said, geez, I want hair like that. But I didn't want to have it in my eyes. So I ended up, did, did a mullet. And actually that was early mullet. That was actually.  Right around when what was it, Billy Ray Cyrus.

So I was one of the early guys. That was like prehistoric mullet.

Prehistoric mullet. So what are we talking? Cause apparently, Shots GPT is helping out here. It became more popular in the 70s and 80s. So David Bowie Beastie Boys. Yep. So 19 when were you like deep into the mullet thing?

My, my mullet was, I think I started that in 1980.

Oh my God. I think maybe 85, 86, 84 or something like that. Definitely a pioneer. Oh yeah. I was very early. Mine had been 83. Yeah, I think it might have been super tramp days is when I start. I can't remember.

So Chris, I know you had some inspiration behind this project and you're building the tech to support this ambitious sort of roadmap.

So how did you guys get together?

We actually, funny enough, we met at a family office conference about two, two February's ago and didn't know we were going to be there. Larry Nehmer, who's a business partner of mine and another venture. With the nifties had moderated a panel and invited me to come speak and said, Scott Page is going to be there.

So cool. And then Scott and I just hit it off. After the, after we do a panel, we just hit it off and then we ran into each other a couple more times. And and so as we got to know each other, he, I started to learn his story, which he talks a lot about. And and so as his story, and what he was trying to do, it became very, where he had big ideas for a new business model around fan experiences and fad them.

And like a lot of artists and like a lot of ones that maybe got buried in this last winter and and some of the things that happened in the NFT market it's quite frankly, just, it fell short, right? Like the business model that is right for people like Scott and their fans and the circular economies that could be created.

We haven't yet delivered on that promise from a technical standpoint and then we're not consistently And then what we have with the technical then we created a marketplace that violated that right? So we say we don't need you to pay the royalties anymore.

Yeah. Yeah that that was a great boom from NFTs And then it's gone like that And I think

you know and again if you're someone who's an artist and you think about it through that artists experience like that becomes a real fit and start, right?

You get going, you pour into it, you get excited. And then depending on where that curve you are, some of them monetized it and got lucky. Others came in late and then just got hammered. And then it's it destroys the confidence in it. So as we look at Bitcoin as the settlement layer a global sentiment layer, that's indisputable, that's bigger, that's unforgeable and all those benefits.

And now that Tapper has happened and you can do boardinals inscriptions on it. Quite frankly, Ordinals need to be better and they need to do more, right? They provide a lot of promise similarly, but we saw it as we have to be able to have these things do the things that will create No rugs, right?

No,

no rug being pulled And so well, I think the immutability of ordinals is one step in that direction

it is and then what we did was essentially with block city and now with partners like bit fans who sits on top of our integration and then scott as the publisher creator first use case, what we're bringing to market is what we call supercharged ordinals which will ultimately become a new standard of them.

And what powers that as a thing we call B pills and B pills are basically Bitcoin passive income layer specification. It sits between the L two and the platform or the interface with customers.

Okay.

And what it enables you to infuse a Bitcoin peg for lack of a better word, and then yields into the ordinal and how it works is instead of us taking Money in infusing Bitcoin yield and we're promising you yield and then giving you a alt coin in existence, right on top of it, the ordinal itself acts as the native token.

So if you can imagine, I inscribe Scott's mullet, which is what we're going to do. I inscribe Scott's golden mullet as a master work on Bitcoin layer one, right? It's an ordinal and now on stacks. In this case, what happens is B pills will infuse and inscribe a new inscription that has Bitcoin finality, but that is lower gas and is permanent.

And it points to that ordinal and says that ordinal has 10,000 BTC or 10 BTC or 20,000 satoshis, whatever the infusion is on it. And so now the floor price of that ordinal is no longer based on the extrinsic market value or premium asset backed it's asset back. That's so it becomes a macro asset versus a speculative gamble.

And when he's talking about something like, Scott, here's the business model. So he could sell tickets, he could sell access, he could do all kinds of things,  but what if. I owned a piece of his story, which is what this is. 7, 000 pieces on my moon, pictures I've never shared with anyone before, turned into collaborative pieces of art with other artists, and now I build this ecosystem of creation.

And then I mint those ordinals on layer one. So my asset is non custodial. I never have to worry about whether it's in my wallet or your wallet to earn that yield. So I buy the ordinal, in this case, the mullet. And that mullet will generate somewhere between, three to 9 percent yield on an ongoing basis through a mix of decentralized stacking pools on stacks and a decentralized lending pool that we're creating in our roadmap.

But the initial thing means, okay, so now when that yield is earned, it's being earned in my native wallet. I don't have to give it to anybody. I don't have to lose custody of it. And if I want to recharge it, I can treat it like a proxy savings account. So now I can take my, Digital twin of the golden mullet, and I can charge it up with however much Bitcoin I want and earn passive yield and stack sats.

So now in bear markets, it's stacking sats for me. So the Ordinal becomes a vehicle for proxy savings of Bitcoin. And remind me again,

how that,

where

that

yield comes from? So the initial yield comes from the Stacks decentralized mining. So there's a decentralized mining pool on Stacks. And we participate in that and then essentially the yield is generated from that and BlockCity takes a wholesale percentage of that and then the rest of it goes into the artist, the creator, and the platform to split.

So in a simple use case where the average is going to normalize out from what we anticipate is about 5 percent to the holder. So if I buy the asset and sitting in my wallet, I'm the bearer asset, I'm getting 5 percent yield on that peg, right? As that, as it just sits there every two weeks, because that's how the distribution works on that P.

O. X pool. And then Scott is getting about 1%.  And then the platform's getting the rest. And so now, if you think about it from, what if I sold tickets to an event? So now I could sell tickets to an event, and I could say, my superfans, there's a thousand seats. And I'm going to charge 500 of it, but I want to gamify it.

Out of that 500 that you pay to buy that ticket, I'm going to leave 250 on the asset,  in Bitcoin. So now he can start to gamify his whitelist and say I'm gonna throttle 70 percent IV, meaning I'm gonna leave 70 percent of the ticket price on the asset if you buy it before this date. I'm gonna say 50 percent on the asset if you buy it between this date and this date.

So for your conference, I'm gonna say 30 percent if you buy it a month out.  And so now you're gamifying it, but what happens is after I've used that stub, it still earns yield. Now if I sell my stub to someone else, if I flip it to you, you're gonna pay for whatever you think the collectible value is and all the earning power goes to you now.

Because I can't remove the peg. So once it's on there, it can't be removed.  Scott's getting his 1 percent regardless.  So if we can show him how to sell 2 million worth of anything,  and he's getting 1 percent yield on that, his TVL is now 2 million.  And then he can incentivize his fans. He can airdrop tokens to his fans.

He can give away free ordinals and say, here's your ordinal. It's part of my story. I'm going to be in Palm Springs. Anyone who has 500 TVL on their asset can show up and have beer with me, show up and come take a picture with me. And so now he's incentivizing his.  fans to save on their asset in Bitcoin.

Scott, that's really fascinating. So for you, obviously this is innovative but with any sort of new technology like this, there's risk.

Always risk.

What have you considered in terms of the challenges here and how are you thinking about how to address them?

If you're talking about the, are you talking about the the yielding or are you just talking about the challenge? They mean the whole thing's such

a new concept. Yeah. And look you've been pushing the boundaries of innovation. I love it. Technologists and futurists for as long as I've known you.

Yep. But this Where could things go wrong? And it never goes wrong with technology, right? Never. It's always perfect. And how are you thinking about this as your broader vision? And I look at this

especially at this, with this particular piece, I look at this as I'm looking for a business partner to talk about.

Creating this business, taking it to the next level, right? So we're still inventing. It's still that, but I, and you can, by infusing this in, I think we can start to show that there's ways that we can create circular economies like we never had before. That's the beautiful part. There's always risk.

And I don't know all the risk yet. If this coin goes down,

there's just so on the technical risk, cause there's different levels, right? So let's break that out. It's a really good question. So on the technical risk, what BPILS has done is taken the best aspects of stablecoin frameworks which is liquidity high volume, but remove the negative ones, which is lack of transparency and counterparty risk.

So why is how to remove like transparency, counterparty risk? Because The app, the only token involved in this is the native inscription on Bitcoin layer one. So there is no other token. You don't have to, you don't have to wonder about another token. There's no trade. Yeah. The inscription that's happening here.

So the inscription that's happening here on the L2 is just referencing the peg that has now been pointed and infused onto that token. And so as that grows, you're basically, you're creating what we believe will be a new way to, similar to how Polygon solves some of the gas price issues. Is there any potential that this can de peg?

No, once it's infused, it's still an inscription. So both are inscriptions with Bitcoin finality. So

fundamentally the risk, the biggest risk is that Bitcoin's price goes down, goes to zero. Yeah. Like it has to go to zero. Cause if you believe it's going to go to zero, then it could be the biggest risk.

For those of us in the industry, we feel like the chance of that is as high as the chances that gold's price goes to zero. And

also when it goes down,  If you're, if you understand, and if, again, the beauty of art, right? Is if I'm telling people to hodl a Bitcoin you have to be in the game a while to ride the waves of the rollercoaster, right?

We all know that now many of us have, or many people have.  But if you've given someone something they love, that's an access to an artist, they're not quitting on that. Yeah. So now that asset is solving the whole, I have to understand Bitcoin because I don't have to wonder if I like Scott. Yeah. It creates

some interesting stickiness that wasn't there before.

Yeah. That's the main thing. The stickiness, because we can create that, again, the circular economy aspect. I can, we can work and build together and

if Bitcoin's down now his story is, Hey guys, thanks for being here. And by the way, we're stacking SATs, baby, because the assets that each one of his fans have.

Or their assets. They're not his assets anymore. They're like

mullet sats. Mullet sats. I think that's what we're talking about. You're getting like a fragment of the hair of his mullet. All right. So tonight's tonight's one milestone in that journey. This is the beginning. Yes. So there's a performance.

You're doing a little intimate performance tonight. Oh yeah. So I brought my friend Thomas Glaxton over and who's an incredible violin player and we're going to do in our book, Nick, and we're going to do a little unplugged bunch of Rick

fans. It's like he's been rehearsing till four.

He's been working on the song. I've been having dreams of Pink Floyd because I hear this yeah, all of it. He's been, he's not ball hours of the day, making sure he's ready for tonight. It's really awesome.

Since this stuff was on the moon, we're again I got to be the guy that put Pink Floyd on the moon, which is interesting, right?

Especially with Darkseid. Yeah,

that wasn't on your bucket list, but it was pretty cool. It's pretty cool, right? It's an interesting thing.

So we're going to play tonight. We're going to do a bunch of Pink Floyd tunes unplugged in a very interesting way. So it should be fun.

About 50 people. And the point of tonight is to have conversations around the business model that people know that this mold is available.

You could bid on it. We're looking for someone who sees this not only as a collection, but also that, that, that  masterwork. So the masterwork's an interesting thing because that's the one piece in the entire collection, which there's 7, 000 pieces in that masterwork. That's the one piece that will earn a percentage of Scott's yield on all of it.

All of it. So think of it almost like a VC fund, but it's a piece of art, right? Yeah, so there's a carried interest that comes if you're the owner of that if you're the holder of that You're now getting a percentage of the yield of scott's yield as well as your own and also

the artists like partner

And all in every and every one of the artists that we do It's

I wouldn't mind investing in black rocks etf, right?

Yeah and having a little piece of all that action not financial advice, of course on the show at all but really an interesting advancement in this technology and super curious where things go from there. I know you're working on upcoming milestones towards the end of the year having this ready to go

yeah, this is like i've already have probably about eight artists that have created works great They're really cool.

There's some are big physical paintings. I'm doing a lot of fidgetal. So it's not just the online thing But so i'm building those out. So I have a whole series of those i'm planning on doing a show here of all the things and the people I put on the moon because a lot of my friends, all my rockstar buddies have no idea that I put them up there yet.

So I'm going to invite them all over to see what went down. And then what's nice is all these works. I've got games in there. I've got all my games that I still own from the back in the day, the historic games of the Monty Python stuff, all this. And so these are all part of the bundle. So people have, Be able to have access to this stuff.

All right,

we're going to dig up some archives of NFC LA one and like you performing and put that on the moon. I want to be with you in spirit on the moon.

The other thing that Scott and I are doing is we're taking a show on the road a little bit, a couple of ways.

So we're, we've launched a thing called space camp and. It's basically a workshop that we'll be doing in different markets. We're looking at doing something in Latin America. We're going to be doing some in Amsterdam and in following the conference circuit around, but literally doing similar things at hack house, but then having these space camps where we work with other creators and we help them figure out their business model.

We help them learn from the mistakes or the lessons of us. taking his thing to market. And then those will be also be billed. So those tickets, like when someone buys that ticket, then those workshop seats will also become an ordinal that has peg on it. And that becomes valuable as just to take away beyond that.

And so we're really going to push the envelope on testing how many different places where we could infuse.  into these tokenized real world assets and then create circular economies.

Yeah. Let me take space camp for a stance. Space stands for story plan, army conversion execution slash education.

So it's a business model. It's how, it's a business infrastructure for how to grow your business. I don't think any, I mean with space camp, the main thing for that is there's so many businesses now that are about to get disrupted, like they have no idea. And how do I already, how is it?

And so he's very heavy in the AI space. I've been focusing on this sort of the tokenomics area. And so together we're going in there to teach and we're also taking my collection. I'm going to be taking the whole collection of all the art, all the pieces, all this stuff that we put in the mullet will be part of our event.

And we're going, what we're doing is we're using the mullet.  business model as a way to use as a use case to teach what we're trying.

It's a mullet micro economy for the macro mullet use case. I love that society. Dude,

you're that was good. Yeah.

I've had a good, Hey, that coffee this morning, it helped.

But Scott Chris, this is great. We're gonna have to keep in touch Yep. On this journey, but where can folks go to learn more?

You'll be able to go, if you wanna learn about the mullet you go to, it's my, the name of my project is my Moon X exp, my moon exp dot.  So you can go to mymoondxp.

com

You can also, yeah, you can also find it on bitfans. vip  So if you go to bitfans. vip You'll see that's where we're Distributing, where we're doing all the social file layer And all the fan engagement If you're interested

in learning more about the tech Go to blockcity. fi Yep Well guys, this is fun Have a great show tonight And keep on innovating.

This stuff is what we love to talk about at Edge of NFT. Thanks for being on. No, thank you. Thanks for having us

on,

brother. Great

rest of the conference. What's up everyone? Richard from Edge of NFT here with TJ Miller. This is Richard from just beyond the Edge of NFT.  That's right, man. I'm here with comedian TJ Miller.

Thanks for being here, man. We're at Bitcoin Nashville. And we ran into each other actually at Centopia's event last night and you were on stage talking with crypto. Megan, about something that you just dropped on Ordinals with your comedy. Can you just

tell everybody a little bit more about that?

So what I'm finding out more and more is that within the scope of even this fairly niche conference because most people in the world don't really know what Bitcoin is, Ordinals themselves, which are inscriptions on Satoshis that aren't they're not NFTs, but they are they have the security and immutability.

That Bitcoin has but they have a lot of similarities to non fungible tokens are even more niche. So what I did just to test the market and the appetite was I dropped 300 additions of my three best tour posters. And those are live right now. And we want to see do people understand that there is a NFT artistic, creative.

Entertainment component of the Bitcoin network. And how present is that out front of mind? Is it for Bitcoiners? Cause we are surrounded by and living in a Bitcoin universe right now, which is awesome. The Ordinal's drop is me saying like  Bitcoiners, be aware this instead of feeling archaic as the Ethereum  blockchain has done what it's done in the NFT space.

It's here. It needs to be built awareness.  Anyone ever heard of this? We need massive option. That's in a way I didn't realize it, but that's what I'm here to do is be the face of ordinals at the conference.

And you're doing that a lot of ways. Like I saw you back in NFC NYC for the first time, and that's where I found that you were actually in this space and it was super interesting.

And obviously you're not here. Things are getting way more official with the Bitcoin ETF passing with Potential president.

The Ethereum ETF is everything follows Bitcoin. So what's bizarre is that ordinals are coming second and runes also, but ordinals are coming second to NFTs. So Ethereum sometimes says we have these use cases and I'm not dogging on Ethereum.

What I'm saying is  it says we have much more use case we're further along than the Bitcoin network. Okay. And then we find then lightning comes forth and now it's ordinals. It's it needs to be  Bitcoin. And this is what I was talking about with my wife, Kate today and yesterday. Bitcoin is cool.

Ethereum is really useful and there's a lot of use case to it,  but it's not as cool. And so ordinals have this great opportunity right now to swoop in and be cooler because of the scarcity.  

And I think that's why it's taken over. Ornells is coming in a big way. We went to an event in Hong Kong recently in Lipson.

Oh really? What'd you think of that city? Oh, bro. Awesome. Isn't it amazing? Yeah. I appreciate you being here at Bitcoin Nashville. What are you looking forward to for the rest of the weekend? And as we look into the rest of the year, what are you, what's your alpha, right? So I

went  so hard, so late last night that I am upset that I didn't get here to watch talks at the conference immediately.

But I was, I'm in my suite like just listening to, I immediately got on Mara's like live feed and I'm just listening to, I'm just excited. For me what's so interesting is to hear all these maxis because everybody hears a maxi whether they admit it or not.  It's so interesting to just hear what people have to say, the theoretical to everything, but it's also like the throttling that no one really is.

Interested in talking about  ordinals. Because the main use case for Bitcoin is this geopolitical  monetary revolution, this like empowerment of people, all those things that we love about it, right? That's why we're all here.  But I'm here to say there's where we have to build off of this blockchain.

Otherwise we're going to get labeled as a dinosaur. So I'm excited for the growth of ordinals. And inscription and what can be built on top of that. I'm excited to meet people that are excited about the space. I'm excited to make those those relationships and figure out how we can bring awareness and build.

And I'm excited to talk to people like you who are doing their part to expand awareness.  And I think it's like,  What I was saying, and I wanna hear, actually I'll ask you,  we need a balance here of mass adoption, which we all want,  and then keeping the spirit, the philosophy, the Bitcoin of it all alive.

Yeah.

And engendering and growing that. How do you think that balance is going right now? How do you think we're gonna make that work?

So El Salvador's one of the greatest use cases that's ever happened where they. Basically made the reserve currency into Bitcoin and now their GDP is almost doubled in a matter of years.

So in one asset of why do people get into Bitcoin is for the freedom. It's for  security of a monetary value and a potential appreciation versus what their own reserve currency could be and can be taken from them. So now you're saying, okay, cool I have this thing and now I can do all these cool community things too.

I have ordinals. I have this thing called runes. I have that extra community piece is gonna be Come even stronger. So like I think the initial buy in of what Bitcoin ultimately stood for already draws the people in and now you're adding all these cool things on top of it, I think it's just going to continue to snowball down and be this powerhouse that people want to be involved in.

Now I'm going to ask you a tough question  that unfortunately I have to be asking  to everyone except for the Winklevoss twins. Okay. Because I love them  and I respect them.  Do you believe in or care about democracy? Yeah.  

Do I believe in democracy? Yes. Do I care about it? Yes.  

So we already said, but in between those two things I'm not making the bread of the joke.

I am fascinated by  if people here are going to forego democracy  for Bitcoin and for the strong and beautiful philosophy that it is. Because that actually, even though no one's talking about it, that's going to be the real question. Of the weekend. Thank you for having me, man. Hey, appreciate it. Yeah, man.

What's up everyone. Josh Krieger, co host of edge of NFT live in Nashville. It's been a adventurous day. Trump just laid down some of his policy points to a pack crowd and now we're blowing off some steam and having some games, a game terminal. Thanks to Bittler who powered this amazing event and this podcast.

And we're having some great conversations right now. I'm here with Iago. Who is a core contributor to Sovereign. We'll talk a little bit about that. It's the biggest e buy platform on Bitcoin. And then he's also the CEO of Bitcoin OS and they just had some big breakthroughs. So lots to cover. Great to have you on the show.

Great to be here. Where are you based by the way? All over the place. You're a nomad. I'm trying to pick out where the accent's from. I'm originally from South Africa. Oh, cool. Right on. It's one of those places on my bucket list to visit. It is an amazing place to vacate.  We'll go by there, but also amazing place right now is the Bitcoin ecosystem.

There's so much happening. You've been in this space for a long time. What's your perspective on this year in Nashville in the current moment in time in the Bitcoin ecosystem?  My

view is that everyone is new to Bitcoin again. Like this is an opportunity for everyone to basically get in early. And what I mean by that is.

Bitcoin is transforming right now, becoming a totally new beast in two ways. First of all,  the fact that we have, on a macro level all the politicians talking about it. It's starting to become a credible asset. It's got the ETF. It has now become a mainstream asset for the first time.

And if, now, that means there's huge potential for growth because you're early to that. Then the second thing is, We're seeing a massive number of developers, projects, builders who are gearing up to turn Bitcoin into not just the largest chain and the largest asset and the largest brand, but also the largest ecosystem, because partly because of the technology that we're introducing and because of the amazing amounts of excitement and developers who are flooding into the Bitcoin space Bitcoin is getting roll ups, it's getting smart contracts, it's getting scalability, and it's going to be competing directly.

Ethereum and Solano.

Do you think there's a different energy at this Bitcoin conference, at this moment, with the elections looming? With the sort of Ordinal's movement, and there has been a previous Bitcoin conference since. Yeah, absolutely. The

Bitcoin culture right now is going through a massive change, right?

If, everyone who remembers Bitcoin from two years ago remembers being Boomer Coin, Toxic Maxis, all that nonsense.  That's not that's become like a niche within the Bitcoin space now. Bitcoin is about innovation. Bitcoin is about mass adoption. Bitcoin is about innovation and technology. And and we're seeing tokens in Bitcoin, we're seeing rollups in Bitcoin, we're seeing ordinals in Bitcoin, and, ordinals is a perfect example.

Bitcoin  went from zero to largest NFT chain and most valuable NFT ecosystem in the world in six months. That's the power of when new opportunities and technologies are added to the world's largest chain. And we're starting to see that happen in category to category after category.  

Yeah, I, Charlie had a keynote speech, the CEO of BitLair yesterday, where he flashed the ecosystem that they've built in just a so short amount of time.

And it covers the whole gambit where, it could have been the Polygon ecosystem for what it's worth because so many folks are hanging on for the ride and trying to be part of this movement. What was, yeah,

I think what's happening is, people who, like the insiders, people who have a little bit of foresight.

They look at Bitcoin, they realize that it's getting all of this new technological power, new innovation. And they say crap, this is the biggest opportunity in Bitcoin. This is going to be the narrative going forward because, even without smart contracts, without scalability, without ordinals, Bitcoin was, larger  than all of the tokens and all of the DeFi and all of the assets in Solana and Ethereum combined.

All right. I think Trump quoted the ninth largest asset in the world. Yes. And in crypto by far the largest test. So when you think about that, it's a massive blue ocean opportunity. It's just, it's like this huge space, massive potential resources. And right now almost no one's exploiting it. So people are rushing to be the first projects to exploit that because everyone wants to be the Uniswap, the Polygon, the whatever of

Bitcoin.

So with This type of environment, partnerships are critical. They're always critical in business, especially in the Virgin industry, but I think particularly at this moment I know Sovereign where you've been a core contributor for a long time, has a partnership with BitLayer. Maybe you can talk about that partnership the significance of it, and some of the other partnerships you're working on at Sovereign.

Sure, so maybe

I'll give a quick introduction to what Sovereign is. So Sovereign is was the first significant DeFi project on Bitcoin and has become the largest DeFi platform. And it's become an ecosystem of applications, including trading BTC backed stable coins, money markets, borrowing and lending with billions traded and lended.

And that was when That was all before sort of the explosion that we're starting to see in layer twos and overall projects in the Bitcoin space. So  what's been happening now is projects like BitLayer and other sort of significant players in the space have been reaching out to Sovereign to get Sovereign to deploy on their Bitcoin chains.

And and so that's how the partnership with BitLayer has emerged, right? They are seeking. To bring more significant user base DeFi to the TVL and they've reached out to Sovereign as the largest current community and ecosystem in the space for that.

That's great. And of course, you want to support all the different players that are trying to create more volume and space.

So it makes perfect sense. And what is the volume on Sovereign right now? And how has that sort of evolved over the past year? I actually

don't know right now what the volume is. I, over the last couple of years, there's been billions traded. And one of the reasons I don't know is because as Serpentine has expanded out to multiple different chains I'm getting out of date with my fetch.

Can't say it to me. It's being so felt. Yeah, it's being

felt.

That's crypto for you,

when things start moving they move faster than you can Round to the nearest billion in this flight.

Yeah. So Yeah, I think you know, this is also a really big moment and opportunity for sovereign was built  because the people were building sovereign had the foresight to realize that The biggest opportunities really lay in bitcoin because it was the biggest asset but also the least you know  And the bet that the Sorry community made was twofold.

One, that building out this ecosystem would pay massive dividends when Bitcoin started to grow an ecosystem. Two, that by building this out, we could accelerate the process of Bitcoin getting an ecosystem. We would be able to prove that it's,  that there's an audience for it. And that would start to galvanize more projects and more builders to come into the space.

And that's exactly how it's played out.

Makes sense. And of course like many folks in space, you wear multiple hats and you're wearing a big hat right now as CEO of Bitcoin OS. Tell us a little bit more about the genesis of that initiative and where you're going here. Yes. So  

several years ago, we started.

To realize that zero knowledge proofs, like a new form of cryptography, was getting much, much more sophisticated all the time. And that if you charted the trajectory of where that technology was going, it would allow us to do things on Bitcoin that we've never been able to do before.

Let's define a zero knowledge proof.

We've done it before, but I want to hear your definition. Sure. If you think about cryptography more

generally, cryptography is the mathematics of secrets.  And and so when you're using Bitcoin, for instance even the simplest thing just sending money, what you're actually doing is you're signing a transaction with your private key.

So what you're actually doing is you're showing that you have a secret key that no one else has. And by proving that you are the owner of the secret, the network understands that you have the right to move the asset. Now,  zero knowledge proofs are an additional layer of secrecy. They say, I can prove to you that I know something.

I can prove to you that I have a secret without revealing to you what that secret actually

is. The analogy that I use and, Chris, what you think is you right now in America, you go to a bar, you have to show your license and to verify your age. But they also get to find out your address, Your license number, your weight your eye color.

They should just be able to scan something, not know anything actually on there, but just get the, yes, this guy's or this female is old enough. They can come in and they don't have a criminal record. So yeah. Yeah. So

that's a great example, right? So instead of showing someone your card. You put it under a thing, it flashes green, they don't know your name, they don't know your age, they just know that you are valid.

They know enough to proceed with a degree of trust that's acceptable for that type of exchange.

So trust is perfect, it's just specific.  What does ZK do for Bitcoin? What does zero knowledge do for Bitcoin? What it does is, with zero knowledge, Bitcoin, for the first time, wakes up, it opens its eyes.

Because now, up until now, Bitcoin has moved lines to anything happening outside of the Bitcoin network. You can make a transaction in the Bitcoin network, but if wanted to tell Bitcoin the price of Bitcoin, Bitcoin wouldn't know its own price because there's no way to get that information trustlessly into Bitcoin.

That's what CK changes. CK is like giving Bitcoin eyes to the world,  a brain or just eyes. The brain is the miners. So now Bitcoin can start to see what's happening in other networks.  And so when, a lot of people have heard of rollups on

Ethereum,

that's basically what a rollup is. A rollup is a different chain that Ethereum can

see.

Nice. Okay. I might have to steal this analogy in the future because people ask this question all the time. You broke it down. So elegant woman. So I appreciate that.

So why is it important that Bitcoin can now see these things? Because what it means is that I can let's say I want to do scalability, right?

I can do a huge number of transactions and instead of putting them on Bitcoin, I just show them to Bitcoin and then they can get secured by the Bitcoin network because the Bitcoin network processes them, but it doesn't have to hold them, right? So now I can do huge numbers of transactions, not on Bitcoins, or it can fast, cheap, high throughput.

Same thing with privacy.  Let's say I want to do a private transaction. I can just tell Bitcoin that the transaction happens, but I don't need to say who it went, like your ID though. It's maybe the most amazing thing is I can have a new chain, which is has all the power of a theory, right?  It's a road up to Bitcoin.

It's a, it's an L2, right? But it's EVM compatible. So it's like a smart contract thing. And now I can show those smart contracts to Bitcoin in.  Because Bitcoin is a system designed to afford and secure information by showing it to Bitcoin, I'm actually securing those transactions as Bitcoin transactions.

So now Bitcoin gets scalability, it gets privacy, it gets smart contracts. And what that means is that builders in Ethereum ecosystem, Solana or Polygon or BSC or whatever,  they're building for a relatively small network. Now they can do the same thing, much bigger network, much bigger user base.

We're basically bringing

everything back to Bitcoin. Great. And so that sort of gave you the impetus to start Bitcoin OS? Yeah. But to make

so for example, like BitLayer as an involvement, so BitLayer is another chain, but right now  Bitcoin cannot see it. It's not actions secured by Bitcoin. It's its own thing, right?

So it wants to be, aspires to be Bitcoin, but it can't.  The breakthrough that we presented at Bitcoin Edge. is that we actually, for the first time ever, on mainnet, gave Bitcoin IDs. And we actually, for the first time, for these information, revealed to Bitcoin information that didn't happen on Bitcoin. And in order to do our case, what we did is we moved BTC and we moved an ordinal within, on the basis of things that were happening off of the Bitcoin chain.

Now, this technology is so valuable because There's so many projects. There's BitLayer, there's 80 other projects that wannabe Bitcoin loves. And what BitcoinOS can do is actually act as a platform that gives Bitcoin the eyes to turn all of those into from layer 2 wannabes into real layer 2s.

It's  pretty exciting. It's I think that, and I was saying, it's like we're all early to Bitcoin again. This is the second reason we're all early to Bitcoin again. It was Bitcoin as a beast. Has changed. I say the 900 pound gorilla, it's opened its eyes, it's awo. So in me a sense how many developers, how much time took to create that program took very few developers  about three years.

And the reason it takes very few developers was rarely to do cool,  groundbreaking work. You always never needed a lot of people. You just need few really strong people. You have to be a surgeon.

Yeah. It's if you're doing a really complex surgery. It's one or two searches in the ring, but that's right.

So what's next?  So what we now have is we have a definite where we're proving how this can be used to actually create a Bitcoin rollup and in a couple of months, we're going to release the first production ready testnet. And then soon after that, we're going to introduce to the world.

It's going to, we're going to give birth for the first time to a true Bitcoin rollup.  And then I think that's when things start to get really interesting. That's when the fireworks happen. Because that's when Bitcoin is going to start competing directly  to a degree with Solana, but more importantly

with Ethereum.

And what's the monetization model for Bitcoin  OS? How do you sustain what you're building? That's actually

a bit, there's several ways. The  most important is that by providing this technology, we're effectively able to borrow transaction fees off of all of the transactions. Is it open source or closed source?

Open source, of course. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. You, the transaction fees Yeah, so basically, now you're going to have a huge number, a whole ecosystem of roll ups. I think you can think of it like optimism for Ethereum or Polygon for Ethereum, right? They create a lot of roll ups, but they take transaction fees from all of them.

BitcoinOS is like the optimism of Polygon for BitcoinOS.  

Very cool. Congrats on the breakthrough and exciting what you're up to. Folks want to learn more and go down the rabbit hole. Where do you recommend that they go to check out more about Sovereign and BitcoinOS?

So Sovereign you go to Sovereign.

com. That's S O V E R Y N. com. For BitcoinOS, it's BitcoinOS. build.  And you can follow me on Twitter. I'm E T A N Y A G O. So you then, Iago on Twitter and I try to keep people who follow me up to date and all the stuff happening in Bitcoin.

I'm gonna follow you. Thanks, Iago, for your time.

Thank you very much. This was a great interview and really fascinating what you're up to. Hopefully educational for our audience. Talk soon. Thanks