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In this episode of Edge of NFT, hosts interview industry leaders at the Hack Seasons conference in Bangkok, discussing the evolving landscape of blockchain, investment strategies, and innovative solutions in Web3. Key insights include the importance of community building, the role of market makers, and advancements in blockchain security through tools like Veridice's Audit Hub.
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Key Topics Covered:
- The Importance of In-Person Events: The podcast emphasizes the value of offline interactions at conferences like Hack Seasons, highlighting how face-to-face meetings foster community and collaboration in the blockchain space.
- Innovations in Media and Content Creation: Vadim discusses the rapid growth of their media ventures, particularly the success of their Telegram channel, which combines quality journalism, humor, and engaging content to attract millions of subscribers.
- Blockchain Security and Auditing: Mikko from Veridice explains the critical role of security audits in the blockchain industry, detailing their unique approach with real-time collaboration tools that enhance transparency and efficiency in the auditing process.
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:
- "Our main goal is to become the best conference in a one-day niche conferences, because I think it's very good to bring a lot of people together to create a community." - Vadim (00:01:46)
- "We want to bring all programming languages to the Web3 space. No longer developers have to learn only Solidity or Rust." - Greg (00:12:56)
- "With Audit Hub, you can see real time when our auditors find the bugs. And you can start mitigating them already throughout the audit." - Mikko (00:32:44)
For the full transcript, see further below.
People and Resources Mentioned:
- Vadim Krekotin LinkedIn
- Cryptomeria Capital Website
- Cryptomeria Capital @CryptomeriaCap
- Metaverse Post Website
- Grigore Rosu LinkedIn
- Grigore Rosu @RosuGrigore
- Pi Squared @Pi_Squared_Pi2
- Pi Squared Website
- Yoann @YoannTurpin1
- Yoann LinkedIn
- Wintermute Website
- Mikko Ikola LinkedIn
- Veridise Website
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About Our Guest 1:
- Bio: Vadim has been involved in the crypto space for several years and is focused on building a media group that includes various companies, such as M-Post and Hack Seasons
- Website: Cryptomeria Capital
- Twitter: @KrekotinVadim, @CryptomeriaCap
- LinkedIn:Vadim Krekotin
About Our Guest 2:
- Bio: Greg is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has a strong background in blockchain security, having previously founded Runtime Verification, a major security auditor in the blockchain space.
- Website:Pi Squared
- Twitter: @RosuGrigore, @Pi_Squared_Pi2
- LinkedIn: Grigore Rosu
About Our Guest 3:
- Bio: Yoann has extensive experience in trading and venture capital, having spent 14 years in traditional finance and venture studio building. He moved to Singapore a year and a half ago and is focused on market making in the crypto space.
- Website: Wintermute
- Twitter:@YoannTurpin1
- LinkedIn: Yoann
About Our Guest 4:
- Bio: Mikko entered the Web3 space after reading the Bitcoin white paper in 2013 and has spent the last three years working in blockchain security. Veridice is a blockchain security company that conducts audits for smart contracts and blockchain implementations.
- Website: Veridise, Mikko
- Twitter: @MikkoIkola
- Instagram: @mikkoikola
- LinkedIn: Mikko Ikola
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Full Episode Transcript:
Josh Kriger: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Edge of NFT. This is live in Bangkok at hack season. This is our third time joining these guys as a media partner. And I'm here with the co-founder and CEO of Cryptomeria and Mpost, Vadim. It's great to have you on the show. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So full disclosure, CryptoMirror is also an investor and edge of the company. And we actually haven't done content together for I think that reason, you know, trying to create a little bit of a sort of firewall there. But you know, I really wanted to get your perspective on what's happening here in Bangkok. And you guys are doing a lot of different stuff. So what brought you guys to Asia first?
Vadim: Right, right, right. Thank you so much for having me today on your podcast. It's an honor. First time in like three years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should have done it earlier, but maybe we can do it more and more. Absolutely. So, yeah, what brought us here? First of all, Haxism is the conference that we're having this interview today. It's a series of interviews of the conferences that we're doing in our media group of companies. And we've already done feasts this year. First in Dubai, then Brussels, then Seoul, Korea. Singapore was the fourth one, and this one is the fifth. So I've been to four, so I missed Brussels. Yeah, you're gonna raffle. And yeah, I mean, Hack Seasons as a brand is evolving, and is getting more and more popular. So we put a lot of energy to build this conference, the brands to bring very high-level, top-notch speakers to create a good agenda. And actually, our main goal is to become the best conference in a one-day niche conference, because I think it's very good to bring a lot of people together to create a community. Because all of us, we're living online, we have all these messengers and this and that. But actually, to meet offline, nothing can be compared, right? So to meet, to shake hands, to talk privately about something is always, you know, creates a lot of value. And yeah, what's happening, we are a group of companies, right? So maybe I can give it. Yeah, yeah.
Josh Kriger: Break it down, because obviously we've done a lot of work with M-Post, which is editorial news. We feature some of your stories on occasion, had you guys on the show. But there's more to your portfolio of media than just M-Post, right?
Vadim: Right, right, right. Yeah. So I mean, basically, so we have two directions. One is investment direction as a crypto area. So we're an investment firm and we invest in early stage projects. This year, I would say we're mostly focused on the secondary market. That's why it's kind of boring, nothing to actually speak about because we just created very good baskets of projects that we pick up from the secondary market and we mostly like, you know, just let it be because it's like a long only strategy. Wait for the bull markets to come, for the price to go up and then we'll find the best way to exit, right? So that's an easy kind of strategy. But we put more of our time and energy into the second vertical of our business, which is the media group. which has four companies, four units. One of these is Hack Seasons. The second one is M-Post. It's exactly the news media you just mentioned. The third one, we have Popcorn Today, which is a telegram news media channel with more than 5 million subscribers.
Josh Kriger: That's like 5 million in record time. When did that start?
Vadim: We started just recently. It was like less than two months ago.
Josh Kriger: Yeah I'm blown away and and just to sort of verify for the skeptic These are real real folks not bots that have decided to join this news channel So a lot going on telegram it demonstrates but what's the magic sauce? How do you get five million users and right last 18 months?
Vadim: I mean first of all To get a huge traffic in Telegram, you need to create a good platform for people to join, right? So first of all, we do very good and interesting content. That's something that we've been trying for several months before we started, right? So, and what I used to call it, like we combine three major parts of this like a mixture. First is very good journalism, very good content. Second is a good and high quality sense of humor. And the third one, which is really like, I think, you know, the secret kind of, you know, the most important part of this secret sauce is a drop of autism on top of it. So that's exactly what people like in our industry. That's why it's very viral and people are sending it to each other. We call it edutainment. Yeah. But at the same time, we do a lot of learning content. Because in Telegram, you know, I'm more than eight years in this space. And I know all the majority of the ecosystems. And we're talking with different platforms. So we're always trying to find where all the traffic is, where the consolidation of the users is right now. And actually, for me, supporting Tone in Telegram was quite early. I mean, like, we started like two, three years ago. But it was like, you know, a very slow kind of curve. And then since last year and especially like the middle of this year, we see the boom or like the growth of Telegram mini apps. And a lot of people are doing like, you know, some kind of like raffles, giveaways and Telegram trading the communities. So we do believe that Telegram has a huge, huge potential. So when we start our media there, We're not only, of course, like doing good content, but of course, we've been cooperating with different Telegram mini apps, who've been promoting us, some QOLs. So that's why the traffic comes so quickly. That's why the traffic comes so quickly. And then there's a fourth division as well. The fourth, yes, is our products, which we are building right now. It's at a very early stage, but I like to do something, that's why I was talking about the Telegram. And we want to create a mini-app in Telegram. It's actually already working, so as a beta you can try it. It has very interesting swipe mechanics of swipe, the same as Tinder-like mechanics. But what do you actually swipe? You swipe the news and memes. So by swiping, you also do bets, because it's very important in the Web3 world to incentivize your user with airdrops, with the small incentives, with the potential to make some money, even though it could be some small money compared to like, you know, whatever, something else. But at the end of the day, I mean, when we're reading the news, when we're consuming the content, users don't get anything. But I think in the WebStreet world, the whole narrative will change. So we are trying with this hypothesis. We're at a quite early stage. I cannot say that we're already like, you know, super advanced products right now. But I do believe for the next several months, we will try to find the market fits. And as soon as we feel that this is a strong, strong, fundamental demand from the user about the product, we will start to bring more traffic, more attention, more users to make it. Yeah, it's merits. Monetizable, yeah.
Josh Kriger: I love it. It's very much a lean startup philosophy, which is sort of what we live by. We've had Trevor Owen, who's CEO of Pizza Ninjas and Ninja Alerts, and he used to actually teach lean. So I appreciate that approach to building business and just being humble and curious, right, about where the energy common goes. One last question as we round up. I know you have an event to run. There's some bells ringing. I think something's going on behind us. But as you sort of look more macro, you've been in this industry for a long time. What are, in your mind, the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge of this cycle that keeps you up at night?
Vadim: Right, it's a very interesting question. Here's the first bull market I joined… Hold on, let's redo that.
Josh Kriger: Once he's done ringing, I'll redo it. So, question again. I know you have a conference to attend to. One last question before we round things off. As we look ahead at the macro of the industry, what is the biggest challenge and opportunity in this? Let me redo it. When I get, like, when I get, it's just… The first time you asked a very good question, so now you can just cut there and then switch to me, so I can… So, I know we have a conference to run, just as we sort of finish things out, I'm really curious, so we look ahead, what's the biggest opportunity for the industry this year, and then what's the challenge that keeps you up at night?
Vadim: Right, right, right. Very good question, first of all. So my first bull run was the ICO boom. And the last bull run was about NFTs, about gaming, about DeFi. And these previous two bull runs were so different with the current one, because now we see the main narrative of memes, actually. So meme coins and Telegram, I think that's probably, you know, that's what we look at. And what we're trying to understand from one side, and from the second side, of course, we do believe in a lot of fundamentals. So we, from the investment side, as I mentioned in the beginning, we mostly invest in the infrastructure. Infrastructure, different layers, solutions, consumer applications. So that's definitely that we look at. And what's the biggest opportunity on the market? I think that's going to be the super cycle. So that's my personal belief. Of course, no financial advice or anything like that. You think it's coming? I feel it. I feel the power. It's a lot of institutional money. There's a lot of retail in it. And that's what I've been saying for many years, that all the technology should be under the foot. It should not be like, you know, For, like, you know, average users, it's very complicated to use the blockchain, to remember all these, like, acid phrases, etc, etc, many things which are really complex. So, as long as technology under the hood, very good user experience, a lot of institutional money, then we have this Telegram and we have Kakao in line. these kind of like a social applications which provide user to directly connect and link to this decentralized application that's definitely you know I think the opportunity of once in life so I definitely recommend everyone to build to try to do something during this bull market, to make as more money as possible, to try different hypothesis and definitely, you know, that's a very important time to work, to deliver, to, you know, build, to do something. And definitely good opportunities here, yeah.
Josh Kriger: All right, some hot takes from you, Vadim. And again, great to have you on the show. It's been a great partnership. Look forward to working with you more in the future. We'll see you over in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia next year, I hope, and join you on this world tour for the next hack season. Perfect. Thank you so much, Josh.
Vadim: Thank you.
Richard Carthon: Hey everybody, Richard from Edge of NFT here. We live at the Hack Seasons in Bangkok, Thailand. I have this incredible guest next to me. We have Greg with PiSquared. And Greg, the first thing I want to start off is with your background, because you have such a cool background. Tell us a little bit about that.
Grigore Rosu: Well, I'm actually a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which is close to Chicago. I also live in Chicago. And I founded PiSquare this year to solve a major problem that I find in the blockchain space, which is data correctness and security, and also, at the same time, universality. And previously, I founded another company called Runtime Verification, which is a major security auditor in the blockchain space. And not only, and we learned how things should be done in order to be done right. And with PiSquared, we want to do exactly that, to do things right.
Richard Carthon: So with doing things right, and like you identified some of these challenges, how is PiSquared going about solving those challenges?
Grigore Rosu: by putting together three orthogonal innovations. First, we want to bring all programming languages to the Web3 space. No longer do developers have to learn only Solidity or Rust. They can write programs in Python, in C, in Java, even PHP, God forbid. They can use any programming language they want to write the WebP contracts. So that's one. Second is what counts as a proof? Because we need to verify. That's the beauty of blockchain. Everything is verifiable. But what counts as a proof of something that verifiers have to verify? So we also offer universality with respect to proofs. Proofs can be mathematical proofs, cryptographic proof, even execution of programs on many platforms, and then achieving consensus. So everything can be a proof, and we support that notion of a proof. And three, the third component is a universal consensus protocol that allows us to do what I call Well, to avoid what we call the tyranny of sequentialities. Because when we use blockchains, we have to obey this total ordering of transactions, which is great because it solves many problems, like double spending, for example, but there are yet many, many applications that do not need all this very strict total ordering. For example, a voting application. In a voting operation, it doesn't matter if I voted before you or you voted before me. We just have to vote before the deadline. So, yes, so three components again. Universality with respect to programming languages, universality with respect to what counts as a proof that something was correct, and universality with respect to consensus, where we allow arbitrary universal consensus that nodes have to achieve consensus only on values, but not on a total order.
Richard Carthon: You're making things a lot easier for people to come into space, right? So you're trying to brace that gap with Web 2 to Web 3 and bring it in such a way that people can come in and immediately have an impact. So for people who are listening to this, you know, are these, is PSquare specifically, like, towards these devs that want to come build? Is it more towards, let's say I've already built a protocol and now I want to, like, become more interoperable with another, like, who is that profile that PaySquare helps?
Grigore Rosu: So first of all, everything we do now in blockchain will be done better. But in addition to that, it will bring a new wave of programmers. How many programmers, how many developers do you have in the blockchain space now? There are like 8,000 to 9,000 Solidity developers. For less than 10,000, people are writing Solidity code. And maybe we double that if we include Rust and what other blockchains use, Moon. Maybe we get up to 30,000 programmers in total. But now I'm exaggerating. I don't think there are 30,000. We have three developers, 30. But we have 30 million. developers in the web tour, in Java, C, C++. So all those now can deploy their application on Web3. For example, You want to prove to your mother that you are really good at Angry Birds, right? And you can prove that you got a score of 650. And now you can take that proof and show it to your friends, to your mother, to anybody. And yes, I have that score. And that verifiable, it's provable, you cannot cheat. So it will bring all the universe of developers of the Web 2.0 world and application to Web 3.0. And you may wonder who wants to come to Web 3.0 and why, right? So whenever you want to prove something permanently. And that may be required soon by clients to become more and more sophisticated, will be incentivized then to use that trick, right? For example, you store your data in Google Cloud. If Google Cloud wants to change your data, they can. and there's nothing you can do about it, right? So we put an end to that. Got it.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome. So you're really opening the door to these tens of millions of people that can come into this space and be able to immediately deploy it and create these applications on top of blockchain. So for people who are listening to this and this sounds like, yes, this is me. I've been waiting for this moment. I've been watching crypto for a while. I've been on the sidelines, but I'm ready now. I'm ready to jump in.
Grigore Rosu: How can people learn more about Pi Square? They can go to pi2.network. And go from there. We have lots of blog posts, documentation, papers. Being academics, we also have lots of scientific papers. You may want to skip those first. Yeah, so, and play with our… prototype. Actually right now we are going to have a workshop demo, we will demo our what we call the ULM, Universal Language Machine, which is like a blockchain in which you can plug and play your programming language. We are going to demonstrate right now how you can plant a new language and write smart contracts in that language and now how we can have a smart contract that uses four different programming languages at the same time. Same like in real life, in the web too, that's what we do, write programs in multiple languages. We'll demonstrate it right now. So watch this video because it will be on YouTube. And try to reproduce the results as a first step. And then contact us.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. And one final question is just, we're here at Hack Seasons. Why did you decide to come and be a part of this experience?
Grigore Rosu: The Hack Seasons? Because hackers are the first You know, the first front line in trying everything new and cool. So this is the perfect place to show the first demo. It's our first demo of our technology. So there is no better place than this. Absolutely.
Richard Carthon: Well, Greg, thank you so much for being part of the show. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your time here. Thank you so much. Hey, everyone, Richard Carthon here from the Edge of NFT. We're live
here at Hack Seasons in Bangkok, Thailand. And I have another incredible guest. We have Yon with Winter Mute. He actually just came off the stage from a really awesome panel talking about the future of VCs and what investments will look like. Pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Of course, man. Well, for some people, somehow, someway, this might be their first time learning a little bit more about you. So can you just give us a little bit of background on yourself and we'll kind of talk a little bit more about Winter Mute.
Yoann Turpin: Okay, so myself, I'm 41. I'm basically, I've been a trader and I've been, I was just in my fourth venture. So I've been a, and I've spent it for 14 years as such. Spent time on the trading side and more like the traditional finance side, but also been a VC and a, and essentially a venture studio builder and stuff. And did a bit of cross-border. I'm in China, Bhutan and Europe. I love learning languages. I like to do this as a first time essentially. Yeah, it turned out to be a nice addition to the trading and financial world and so on. To the point that I've moved to, there's a few Asian languages in there and basically to the point that I moved to Singapore a year and a half ago. Yeah, it's like building a lecture track for people and I spent time basically on the funding of this space and the hedge fund space and all the banking and what, 20 years ago, so not that much time. But I always found the crypto space to be much more open and energizing and so on. And people on the, yeah, some, some of it was in a very good way, not working as badly. Yeah. And I find this part of the way to deliver like
Richard Carthon: Yeah, your background is very interesting, especially I got to hear some of the various languages that you know, just hearing you speak to a couple of different people. But one of the things you brought up on stage that I thought was really cool is that you learned about this space all the way back in like 2012. You could have gotten involved, decided not to. But then with what you're doing with Tradfly, you eventually decided, hey, I'm going to really go and dive into Web3 and get into this. And so you eventually decide to create Wintremute. So for those who don't know about Wintremute, tell us a little bit about that.
Yoann Turpin: So Winterbeer is essentially a market maker. We consider ourselves a tech company first. So it's why the example I used in Abuse was essentially Google. So Google, you don't think of them as an advertising firm, you think of them as a tech company. Right. And obviously it's the same, you know, what we are doing and we want to be facilitated is essentially we're a tech company that happens to not even be traded. So we build near the well. So we're very active in DeFi. We actually do some block building as well for some jewelleries. We've done some conversion of incubation and stuff, but essentially what we do in the trading side is even our traders are not really full traders, they're essentially bond dev traders. You know, that's my bond. And it's very much like these sort of people are helping us to scale in a very small way. Probably explains why we have so few BDs, so you can be booming on the BD side, I don't know, or the diplomat side of the business, I don't know. But essentially, we've got a much smaller family from staff count wise than, let's say, GSR or Galaxy and so on. Yeah, but we've got a bigger scope in a way that we should be the largest crypto market maker in smart crypto. We're funding derivatives services and so on. So we trade 7, 28 or up to $23 billion a day. I haven't checked the recent numbers, but actually we may have had bigger days recently. Yeah. But essentially the market share is up to like 15% of the whole market, spot crypto. Especially if you ever traded on them, especially centralized exchanges on GFI, you'd probably trade it against us. Right. Same. It's just, just to wrap up, so you do some venture side as you do some venture investments as well. So we've made 120 investments over the last four years. We've plotted about $200 million. And we do some incubation, part sporadic, part more focused, but essentially, if you're intuitive on the, essentially things that we would have built if we were not building anything yet. And then we just find like the CEOs or we just find people who honestly always are going in and we just have them bootstrap and finance them to a degree and just have them order down different dimensions of the company. So it could be, if I started a business, a house, but it could be right, you started a business, a house, so. I'm not trying to have them, that's not my priority.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome, man. So between the market making and some of the venture capital that you put out, obviously the bread and butter has been on the market making. So for those who are listening, obviously when they're getting ready to deploy, one of the first things they need are market makers. So why would someone decide to come work with, and obviously the largest, but why would someone come work with Wintermeat as opposed to some of the other competitors that are out there?
Yoann Turpin: So my view is that too few people understand market making, so I spend a lot of time with incubators explaining why market making it. But essentially, market making is just being able to provide liquidity and be there so that, you know, when you say you want to sell your paper at $3 or $1, there's no one to sell it on the other side. But you have the market maker on the other side to make sure that there's fluidity in the flow. So you don't have to go through the room and just try to somehow find someone who wants to, you know, buy it from us. We're always there, always there on the other side. In the book, from the other book, essentially, to make sure that there's fluidity. That's literally what it means to add liquidity to the book. What should people look for? Integrity, the highest integrity possible. So, you know, delivering what you can do, like good practices. So, it's actually the only main, main things that we need to come straight past. So, Eugene and I used to trade in traditional finance. And then, you don't have to reject everything. It's really good to just create a new, that we are, we're very much there to create a new financial system, right? Our new economy of Nushkulot and this, to be honest. But I would say that it doesn't mean that you should reject everything. So no market manipulation, no fake valuing and so on. It was making sure that it's just the price. Market making is essentially the whole point, is to help price's colleagues, to help figure out what the true price of the token is. What people would come to us specifically, I think it's not as simple as that, but essentially my sentiment is very much that it's just people leverage our reputation essentially, so it's £10 a validation, so when you go and apply for an exchange listing and people see our name, it's more likely to be listed. and there's also there's a confidence on an exchange you know that we'll actually be in the order working you do you do what we say you're coming still which is just being present essentially being present in the order bro um we're just counting on capital so we just you know we really we need we need to make some money to provide at least the canto right on your cost i mean and it forces us to basically put as far as possible to be to be involved and and to you know at least make the capital cost fine Second thing is that we have access to like a few retail brokers. I found the same name, but it's got enrolled advisors or no banks and so on. And essentially that's part of unique access. So some of them, I mean, you can check my Twitter. Some of them are essentially, we do like 50, 60% of crypto votes. Right, and it just gives us, again, loss of ability doesn't mean that we're going to miss you tomorrow, but it's a good way to solve it nowadays. Depending on what you're doing, some people have a very, very specific understanding of what value we can bring. Sometimes it's a BFAB protocol and we'll just do the CS from what I call on-chain marketing. We'll just see that we do 30-40% of Ethereum on-chain values and in turn 30% of Sin Virus on-chain values. And it works on 10 chains, 28 protocols. And essentially, it's more the alignment between founders, between the philosophy of the firm. So if you're credible, you're likely to be able to defy. They're likely to be able to defy, and it's more efficient for us to get along nicely. But high integrity goes first, because you can trust people. And they're not going to run away. They're not going to put you in trouble, unwillingness, unbeknownst to yourself. So I think that. I think this is the case. Yeah, and the one downside we have is we sometimes are victims of our size So we tend to say no to a smaller project and stuff. But I would say like if you're if you're up to someone else and Yeah, just just really really bad for integrity. How can you bet on that? Yeah, there's a few models out there that I essentially want to be like the cop of market making you know, I don't necessarily think re-intermediation is this as opposed to disinclination. I don't think it's a good thing. So I think everyone, every conglomerate that wants to pick a lock and make an exchange certificate, can hire thousands of people who work at exchanges, and many of them actually understand lock and making. They go and find good firms that work at an exchange that understands lock and making. So just interact with locks and make firms that are owning a process. They'll do a lot better than going through a firm that may run like a beauty contest, but they're not really with the right KPIs.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, that's a lot of alpha and definitely appreciate you sharing that wisdom because a lot of people, no matter where they are in their process, this is essential. Market making is an important part of it and you want to make sure you have the right partners that have integrity and that are going to do right by you and also be able to give you the feedback you need to understand how to work with you and your project because it's different from project to project. So, definitely appreciate all that insight. For people who are also listening to this, you know, you could have gone to a lot of different places while out here at Dev Time, but you're here at Hax Seasons. Why did you decide to come be a part of this event?
Yoann Turpin: I mean, it's quite a good mix of people, and there's a lot of teams building here. There's some of it I haven't seen, no. Found, like, a few ecosystems that we either invested in or we just found in Plastic Witch. So I thought it would just be good, and we started the panel with basically a bunch of friends. Yeah, one of them is my neighbor, literally. So it's an easy conversation. So yeah, that's the POV. As you can see, we're just struggling to speak about the noise. That's good. It's good to know someone's here.
Richard Carthon: Definitely. Well, we're glad you're here. I know I got a lot of really good insights from y'all's conversation and even through this conversation. For those who are listening and they want to learn more about Winter Mute, how can they go do that?
Yoann Turpin: So, the website, they can reach out, but then I would say don't hesitate to reach out on Twitter. So, I'm YoungTurpin1. One, as a member. My DMs are open all the time, so I try to filter. It's sometimes very noisy, and then just often I'll be redirected to a team member. But I just don't hesitate to ask questions, and we answer pretty honestly. Yeah.
Richard Carthon: No, I like it. Well, Johan, definitely appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. Hey, everybody. Richard Carthon here. We live at Hack Seasons in Bangkok, Thailand. I have an incredible guest with me. We have Mikko with Veridice. Great to have you on the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Of course, man. So let's first just dive into, how did you get into Web 3? And then we can kind of dive into what Veridice is.
Mikko Ikola: How did I get into Web3? Well, I guess I read the Bitcoin white paper in 2013. So that was the first touch point. There were many years in between when I was working in other industries and then the last three years in the Web3 space.
Richard Carthon: Amazing. And so when you get into the Web3 space, you hear about Veritas. So what was that like and what is Veritas and what are you all doing at your company?
Mikko Ikola: Sure, so Veridize is a blockchain security company. We do blockchain security audits or smart contracts, blockchain implementation themselves and the zero knowledge circuits. And then we develop our in-house vulnerability detection tools as well, which we use in our audits. So yeah, blockchain security makes the space more secure.
Richard Carthon: Very important. As we know, there's been a lot of security exploits and other scams that have gone out there. How do you go about approaching your potential clients and providing these services to them to make sure that they stay secure?
Mikko Ikola: Yeah, so essentially the clients usually come to us right before they go to mainnet. So when they freeze their code and they've scoped the area which they would like to really harden the security. And yeah, based on the size of their code base, we make a quote, start the auditing process, which can last from one week to two months, typically. Yeah, and then our collaborators will have a look at the code. Our team comes from a pretty strong academic background, so we have a lot of people from this specific niche of computer science called formal methods, PhDs in program analysis. Essentially, they go through their phone line by line and then use our tools such as static analyzers, buzzing tools, and then our ZK tools to make sure we weed out the bugs. And yeah, that's essentially how the process works.
Richard Carthon: It's important, especially that target demographic of people getting ready to have their TG and get all these things going. The worst thing that can happen to them is having some sort of security exploit happen. And it's very important that they have a reduction role for that. Now, obviously, there's a lot of competition out there. Why would someone come to work with Veridice compared to some of your competitors?
Mikko Ikola: For sure. Yeah, there's a wide variety of auditors nowadays. I would say three things. I mentioned our strong team coming from academia. We've been doing blockchain security research much before Veritas was founded. Our in-house tools are quite exceptional, especially in the zero-knowledge domain. I would say we are the leader in ZK Audits. We've got a lot of audits in that space. We're auditing RISC-Zero, SacSync, SP1, Linea, Mina. Then one of the latest things that we've actually just released a couple of weeks ago is Audit Hub. So, so far we've used all these tools in-house. So essentially one third of our team, they're not doing audits. They are creating these tools for our auditors to use. But we've combined them all into a platform called Audit Hub. So, when the clients come to us for an audit, usually the challenge in this space is that, you know, it can take many weeks for the audit to complete and get the final report. But with Audit Hub, you can see real time when our auditors find the bugs. And you can start mitigating them already throughout the audit. So it can save a lot of critical time when your team is willing to go live as soon as possible, right? And on top of that, you can actually rerun our detection tools in an online platform. So you can fix the code, we'd rerun the tools and kind of get extra guarantees that the code is safe. And then also collaborate in a high context environment with our auditors. So that's something I believe as far as I know, we're the only security company offering that.
Richard Carthon: It's incredible, it's a great tool, and like you said, it helps save time, it gives confidence, and you know, when you have something that can take anywhere from two weeks to two months and people are ready to go right now, it's important to not rush that process, but if you can do things to be proactive and help move that process along, the better, so that sounds like a very helpful tool to do that. So, like we said earlier at the top of this, we're in Bangkok, Thailand, and we're at Hack Seasons. Why did Verdice decide to be part of this event?
Mikko Ikola: Well, we are deeply involved with different applications and blockchains building on Ethereum. You know, DEVCON is obviously the place where the entire industry, especially the Ethereum industry, but also other industries come together. So yeah, it feels like we've captured this city for a week. And yeah, you run into good old friends. So yeah, that's why we're here. That's why we are in hack seasons. And yeah, this is the way always to meet new people and old friends. Agreed.
Richard Carthon: It's been a great experience so far. I'm glad we ran into you, and got to learn more about you. For those who are listening, how can they learn more about Veridise?
Mikko Ikola: Yeah. Veridise can be found on Veridise.com website or Veridise Inc. on Twitter and you can take it from there. Okay.
Richard Carthon: Well, appreciate your time and thanks for being with us. Thanks, Richard. Pleasure. All right. Awesome, man. I want to say, like, having that tool is really powerful. You are the first that I've heard, because, like, we pass it on to a couple other, like, security companies. So, like, having something that can really accelerate that process is really crucial. So, that is definitely a unique feature that I don't think I've heard from, like, other security auditors.
Mikko Ikola: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, many people just delegate the report, but yeah, he tried to keep some more transparency in the process, which usually might look like a black pole for many of the clients. Awesome, man.
Josh Kriger: Well, can I get you on a telegram? Yeah, sure. That way, once this goes live on, like, CDC, we also have like a thing just so that's cool that we've, you know, published all this. So I'll, here, let me give you mine. And then… You're working for HFNFT full-time if it is your… Yeah, so I'm the co-host of the show. I'm the head of BizDev. And yeah. So we go all over, get to do these types of interviews and… we put on events and like we have a little bit later fun we're open to to do with a company called ape bond yeah um and yeah do some like investment stuff as well so d well thanks for having us of course man yeah i'm definitely appreciate it and uh one more thing do you
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