203. Insights: Our crypto predictions for 2024

Speaker A: LFG people, Happy New Year and welcome to Blockchain Insider. I'm your host, Mauricio Magaudi, and this is episode 203. I'm joined as always by my co host, the amazing Catherine Gu, head of CBDC and protocols at Visa. Happy New Year, Catherine. How are you doing today?

Speaker B: Happy New Year to you too. Very good. Very excited for this, uh, New Year conversation.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's really good to have you with us. It's also our, uh, pleasure to be joined by the entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan. Welcome to the show, Balaji. Great to have you with us. Can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself?

Speaker C: Sure. Good to see all you guys. I'm the former CTO of Coinbase, former general partner at Anderson Horowitz, angel investor in a bunch of companies both in the space and in other spaces.

Speaker A: Awesome. Welcome to the show. So in this inside show, we want to kick off the new year by Talking about what 2024 might hold for us in the crypto space. A lot happened in 2023. Can we expect the same or even more for 2024? So join us while we recap the year there was and then talk through what we think will happen with blockchain. Real world use cases, decentralization, AI DeFi, NFTs and so much more. Will this be a pivotal year for blockchain? Let's speculate before we dive in. Just as a reminder to our listeners, the views or opinions of our panel are their own and don't necessarily reflect those of the companies that they are representing. And as always, nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial or legal advice. So do your own research. Let's get started. We want to take a look at what Kai and I predicted back in the year when what's going to happen in 2023, right at the start and look at whether we were right or wrong. Uh, and what else happened that we did not predict. So last year our biggest predictions were, number one, regulators will get involved with centralized crypto players. While US regulators did respond to FTX collapse and other, uh, crypto companies that uh, took a tumble. Regulators also became uh, more generally interested in stablecoin around the world or a version of the digital dollar or digital fiat. We went through this in the show a couple of times. There was another prediction which was the progressive regulators exploring, uh, defi more. Not to a big extent, I'd say. We saw more use cases for NFT, which was our prediction. Number three, there was more innovation and growth in CBDCs and stablecoins, look at them again. We also said that there was going to be more development coming out of Bitcoin, which kind of did and also uh, a big year for real world assets tokenization or asset tokenization. So to the panel, Balaji and Catherine. Um, this is me speaking on behalf of Kai. How wrong were we? What do you think? I'm going to go with you first Catherine.

Speaker B: How wrong were you? Um, I think given the predictions are pretty widespread, I think we've definitely touched on a few kind of major important things and I know the FTX stuff is sort of well reported and actually like biology have a recent blog post around it and I think that definitely pan out as we sort of most of us has predicted. I would say that what I see is um, I'm still not sure what's going on on nft, so that's kind of TBD for the upcoming year. I would actually emphasize that some of the areas that hasn't been mentioned but actually taken quite a bit of uh, momentum within the crypto ecosystem are things like account abstraction. Right? ERC 4337 has been a super popular thing uh, that has been sort of talked about, developed. I think there's a lot more focus by users on UI ux, you know the user experience of what it means to hold a digital wallet and how can I intact with the Web3 ecosystem. I would also say things like privacy, um, decentralized sequencer, uh, you know like block building and MEV and stuff like that. These are sort of the more technical sort of progress that has been made uh over this year which I think actually will be quite significant uh as uh, crypto is getting more sort of uh, adoption.

Speaker A: So yeah I was, I was actually proud of us picking that there was going to be more development coming out of Bitcoin because of taproot. What is your perception uh, of you know our previous predictions, biology and what maybe what do you think we missed that was important in the year?

Speaker C: Well on NFTs, uh, certainly we went from millions of dollars per NFT to millions of NFTs per a few dollars and that was a huge shift where now we have basically micro NFTs that you can issue for almost anything, especially on like solana or other L1 chains, but especially Solana you can now just blast NFTs on chain for uh, for low cost so people can give them out as sort of collectibles. And I think um, just like, you know the uh, the like button was actually a relatively late development in the Internet. Do you remember when the like button was invented or when it came out?

Speaker B: A long time ago.

Speaker C: Yeah. But not as long as you might think. 2009. Okay. That's five years after Facebook launched actually. Right. So the like button was not something for five years. Facebook got to hundreds of millions of people without the like button. Right. So um, it was actually something which has kind of only been a lot around for about 10 years. Ish, less than 15 years. That's like 15 years after the graphical web browser the like was introduced. And how useful is it? Well, people hit the like button a billion times a day, especially if you include faves on Twitter and everything else. Right. So now imagine all of those likes, all of those retweets, all of those favorites and follows all those are NFTs. And that's I think what uh, you get when NFTs become more, much more cheap to record all the social actions, Little social credits so to speak, can be digitized if you want, but it's decentralized rather than awarded by a central authority. So definitely more use case for NFTs. In terms of bitcoin development, you know, the rise of ordinals, the good of it is it's boosted interest in bitcoin development. Again, the bad or good of it, depending on how you see it, is boosted fees, which is good because it's fee revenue for the miners, but also prices at uh, low, low value transactions. I am neutral, negative on, you know, CBDCs. I think there are some utility in, you know, certainly faster payments and so on and so forth. But there's obviously privacy concerns on that. But I do agree that they've been growing and certainly stablecoin use has been growing. You know, the whole real world assets thing is fundamentally about redemption. Like that is to say, of course you can do things on chain, but, but uh, the ability to redeem uh, your, your token for let's say a barrel of oil or you know, a, a pork belly or if you actually were to get that, you know, in a physical sense, that is the discount rate for that, if it's 1.00, then you can trade the thing back and forth. If there's any probability whatsoever that you may not be able to redeem the thing physically, then it drops off and you have some discount on it. Right. So to me it's a redemption and making. Maybe you'd have some ports worldwide where you could obviously redeem it. And it was televised and everybody knew you could redeem it back and forth. But I think That's a problem to solve on real world assets, not really technical problems. So those are my thoughts on those.

Speaker B: I would say the real world assets is interesting because certainly I think there's a, uh, space which is to do with the physical goods and therefore the physical delivery of that. It's almost like the futures market and stuff down the road. Can you deliver? If not, then there's a risk to it.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: We're also seeing quite a bit on the um, tokenization of say money market funds. Right, Tokenization of US Treasuries. Precisely. Because right now we're living in a higher interest rates. Do you see that going to be keep on sort of being a popular uh, investment vehicle, especially for people outside of the United States who want to get access to these high yielding, uh, sort of investment.

Speaker C: Well, everything is just a function of both the legality and reliability of that custodian. For example, if you wanted to, there's so called, for example a contract for difference type stuff in the US which is heavily regulated. In theory, you could trade that on chain where you say, okay, you know, here's the delta in a stock price. That's just like a function, uh, that I'm trading on chain. In practice that's like a heavily regulated thing. So could you represent that on chain? I don't know. It's going to be jurisdiction specific and you'd have to have lawyers and all these incantations and so on around it. So that's another aspect. Even if it's not a barrel of oil, that's another aspect of redemption risk. You're fundamentally talking about an off chain asset of some kind. Uh, even if it's a digital thing like a bond or a security or something like that. And then you're going to need to figure out can you make that bridge legally, um, does it have risk or not?

Speaker B: Interesting. Marissa, I actually have a question because you likely touch on Bitcoin and I think this is actually a really interesting topic. Right, Because I would say that probably what I would not have predicted if I were you, but you probably did, is the fact that bitcoin actually touched, uh, sort of a year to date high very recently and I think it's still hovering around 47k and stuff. I would say that's something especially in the crypto winter period that people are not really expecting. And also to Balaji's point, you talked about ordinals and I was reading a news piece yesterday that, you know, the uses of it is so, so big that is starting to clog the blockchains because there's so much, let's say speculative frenzy around it. And I want to reel it back to probably, I think that was back in March. Now that biology. You made this famous bet right, against the US dollars, but in which you're looking at bitcoin would be reaching $1 million in 90 days. Of course you didn't win the bet, but I think you're trying to send a message to the public out there. I would say like here we are at the beginning of the year, right, Looking ahead of what uh, the future market would be. Would you put on a similar bet kind of to what you have done? And if so, what is the odds of you thinking about the USD versus the bitcoin?

Speaker C: Yeah. So take a look at this graph just to anchor the whole thing. So this is global currencies, 10 year returns versus the dollar. And over the last 10 years most fiat, uh, currencies have depreciated against the dollar. And that's because a lot of debt worldwide is dominating the dollar. A lot of transactions implicitly or explicitly are denominating the dollar. And so almost everybody's sort of using the dollar system directly or indirectly and they're kind of paying a, ah, inflationary tax to the US government in a sense when new dollars are inflated. And um, so over 10 years these have obviously been like, you know, the Bolivar or something like that. These have been terribly mismanaged. Currencies have just massively inflated against the dollar. These are well managed currencies that are only slightly inflated against the dollar, like the Singapore dollar or the Swiss franc are relatively well managed. But all of them have, you know, kind of depreciate against the dollar. However, bitcoin has massively appreciated against the dollar. So you have two things that are true at the same time. All of the fiats are getting weaker against the dollar and bitcoin is getting massively, massively stronger. And if you work this out, you know, like the normal benchmark for inflation is supposed to be like the 2% per year benchmark that came out of New Zealand. That's what central banks supposedly aim for. Arguably it should be zero percent. Let's say it's 2%, you know, per year. That's like on the order of, you know, 0.1, you know, something percent per, per month. Right. 0, 1.2% per month. Okay. Divide just the 2% into 12, uh, and you can do the, the 12th root of it if you want monthly compounding. But the, the thing that's interesting is on the other side you have, let's say hyperinflation. And hyperinflation would be like 50% inflation per month. Some people define it that way. Somewhere in between the normal rate of inflation of 0.1% per month and hyperinflation of 50% per month. Let's suppose you use the term super inflation of 5% per month. Okay. Between 0.1% and 50%. Okay. Well, the thing is that the appreciation of Bitcoin over the last 10 years has been so profound that it's not hyper bitcoinization yet, but it is super bitcoinization where it's like on the order of greater than 5% monthly appreciation of Bitcoin versus a dollar compounded for 10 years. Does that make sense? Right. So that's actually what's already been happening is not yet hyper bitcoinization of uh, 50% a month, but super bitcoinization of uh, 5% a month for 10 years. Right. So that's actually an interesting way of thinking about like this because otherwise people think either it's normal or it's already gone, but it's actually in a, uh, fairly interestingly abnormal state of affairs where the moment that Bitcoin was introduced, smart money started at least partially hedging into Bitcoin. And that's been going on for 10 years. And now some of the smartest money in the world is doing that. Larry Fink is not dumb money. Right? Like BlackRock is very, very smart money. And, and so are a bunch of other people who are rolling out these Bitcoin ETFs. So you know, people have gone into hard assets when there's various issues on the horizon. You know, right now, uh, you know, like, uh, we'll see what's happened at the time of this recording. But there's supply chain crises again. There's, you know, there's, there's uh, there's stuff going on with Suez, there's stuff with shipping, and uh, there's, there's a lot of uncertainty around uh, you know, supply chain shocks as well as uh, you know, all the, all the printed money out there. So I mean there's 50 things I can get into on this. But fundamentally I do think that um, Bitcoin is going up even if you only take the ETF into account. But if you take the ETF and the supply chain shocks and the long term trend and the fact that the Fed has been signaling now rate cuts, uh, again, all those things seem to me to be bullish. For Bitcoin. And then on top of that there is the underlying sovereign debt crisis. But that's a whole other podcast. So we can, we can talk about payments.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So just to wrap up this kind of past predictions, I think one thing that kind of went under the radar for us is that we kind of pinpointed probably these six things, but the combination of them actually made its way into 2023. So if I take for example the Electronic Trades Document act here in the UK that blends regulators or progressive regulators exploring decentralized finance, use cases for NFTs and tokenization of uh, real assets, that one act single handedly made these four things possible, uh, um, for 2023. So it's interesting to see next year, uh, what this act now being in full effect, meaning it's now English Common law, um, how the economy is going to benefit from it technically and in practice, uh, especially when it comes to things, as you said, uh, Balaji, the um, the whole thing about supply chains, that that is exactly what that act kind of came into play to benefit. So I'm interested in seeing how some of the combination of the things that we predicted that kind of ended up happening in 2023 will kind of take us forward uh, in 2024 to which I think we can get started in speculating.

Speaker C: So I agree with you that it was good that the UK had that legislation. I think that it wasn't that it signal handily created those things, it's more that those things are kind of happening on chain and, and the UK decided to sort of bless them within its jurisdiction.

Speaker A: Right, yeah, that's true. Catherine, I'm um, heading over to you.

Speaker B: Yeah, no that's, that's, that's a great segue actually as we're looking at per country sort of geography. What, what's the prediction for 2024? And I want to start with obviously in payments and that future of money. And I really want to sort of go deeper as we just touched on uh, at the beginning, which is all these differentials between crypto stablecoins, CBDCs, uh, and most recently the development around tokenized deposits. Because I think it's actually quite an important thing to watch out for. And I would say it's very hard to generalize how things are going across the globe just because you really do have a lot of idiosyncrasies across just sort of to kind of like name a few. Right. I think very recently we've seen a lot of um, development in, around the sort of development of Regulated assets, uh, to be used for payments down the road. You have regulated bank Stablecoin that is created uh, by the likes of the French bank called Societe General. You have a lot of development in Stablecoin regulations. Again this is in Europe and of course if we're looking at Singapore, um, during the mas, uh, the monetary authority of Singapore's Fintech Festival, there was a lot of really interesting experimentation led by banks of the J.P. morgan City of the world, which is actively looking at experimentation. It's called Project Guardian. And of course I think on the other hand we have other areas, say in Argentina that is, is going through high period of inflation. In fact the country is actually going through this new sort of dollarization instead of local currency. So I guess this is both sort of prediction but also trying to make sense of what's happening across all these very diverse geographies of the world. So maybe starting from a high level biology, do you see that there's going to be a divergence in the pace of development coming from emerging economies versus the developed world into uh, 2024?

Speaker C: So you know, I actually somewhat disagree with the framework of like uh, you know, developed world and developing world. I think of it now as the descending world and the ascending world. The reason being because there can be pockets of the ascending world and descending world even with the so called, within the so called developed world and vice versa. You know, and that also gets at, you know, developed versus developing implies developed is like fixed over here and developing is vectoring towards it. Whereas ascending and descending can happen kind of anywhere else. Right. And if you travel through Asia, if I travel through Bangalore Airport or something like that, it sure doesn't feel, it doesn't feel third world to me anymore. It's like actually ascending. Right? You go through places in Thailand, Southeast Asia, it's like really, really impressive. Right. So uh, my view is that broadly speaking DC and Beijing will seek to control cryptocurrency within their, the territory they control, where they regulate and everybody else will seek to adopt cryptocurrency. That is the high level view of kind of a not unipolar, not bipolar, but essentially tripolar world of something like USD, rmb, BTC in terms of the reserve currencies. And why do I say tripolar? Because you know, the USD and R and B economies have like on the order of a billion people, they have a lot of engineers, they have a lot of legal precedent, all these things sewn around those sort of cores. And then you have the crypto economy which when you add up everybody who's, you know, maybe an American that isn't totally fond of the dollar or they're like a Chinese liberal or they're Indian or they're, you know, like uh, ah, somebody somewhere else in the globe that isn't 100% wanting to be like, like for example people in India, they want their own sovereignty. They don't just want to be under D.C. or Beijing. And that's a reasonable goal. Right. So for all of these countries, all these places, including people within both the US and China, but certainly people outside, because 80% of the world is neither American nor Chinese, all of those are going to be places that I think crypto becomes the most popular. We're kind of already seeing that places like El Salvador and Bhutan and uh, Palau. Right? These small countries and then places like Dubai and Singapore that have adopted it to a greater or lesser extent for strategic reasons, like financial centers, you know, those are all places which I think are going to be the most crypto friendly. And the closer you are to D.C. and the closer out of Beijing, perhaps the less crypto friendly.

Speaker B: And let's maybe go into a few countries specifically because I know, you know, you've written extensively about India and you're very bullish in India. You wrote uh, a piece back in, I think that was 2021 now around the India stack, which is very influential. Right. The idea was very interesting, uh, when I, when I read it. Firstly, I guess I wonder if that view you had at the time still hold true. Because I think one important point you made was the fact that, you know, in India you can have this permissioned ledger in which you have a national digital currency, which is the digital rupee, that is the cbdc. But then that get connected to sort of a more permissionless world out there. Um, that is the crypto based ecosystem. Do you still hold that worldview, I guess, for India in its development? And if so, what does that look like?

Speaker C: Yeah, so India, you know, like there's a saying like India disappoints both the optimists and the pessimists. Right. So there's aspects of it which are kind of two steps forward, one step back, but overall it's moving forward. And uh, which is not the case when, you know, 40 years ago that was not the case. Today it is overall moving forward. And so crypto is legal there, there is a thriving crypto community there. And fundamentally the thing is their domestic upi, their domestic India stack for payments and identity and so on is actually quite good, especially coming up from, from nothing essentially like you know, 10, 15 years ago. Right. However, one can analogize that to uh, making domestic calls, right? Like on, you know, for example, WhatsApp, you transparently, you're not even thinking about whether you're using an Indian number or a global number or some combination of Indian and global numbers in a WhatsApp chat, right. It all just works and everybody can reply to each other and it seamlessly interleaves the domestic and the global into one kind of chat group, which is very useful when you have so called non resident Indians, overseas Indians, diasporic Indians talking to people in the motherland and vice versa. So uh, by analogy to that, where you want to have domestic communication and international communication, you also want to have domestic transaction and international transaction where UPI might be helpful domestically it certainly is. And there's some cross border stuff that they've set up India set up with Singapore and other places. Crypto is intrinsically global, right? So Bitcoin, Ethereum are neutral platforms that work across borders. You know, Stablecoins, you know, for their pros and cons, work across borders. And there's, it's just the fastest and most reliable way to call somebody, hit a button, you know, make some small talk, boom, they can see it on the blockchain and it's done, right. And we've probably all, everybody who's listening to this podcast has probably done that, which means that that's revolutionized international wires, right? They run 24 7, they run with arbitrary amounts of money. If you can access wallets on both sides, fully liquid, you can dispose of it again within seconds. All of that is actually very new. That's not how global business has actually operated before. It's changing the metabolism of business because much, much easier to do international wires. So just that alone makes India more accessible as a market. And so that's, I think the tension where India's domestic audience or uh, uh, like the Reserve bank of India was like the Fed of India, they are thinking about the domestic controlled, the rupee and sovereignty and so on. And I understand where they're coming from. We start thinking about India's sovereignty internationally, how does it protect its interests internationally? How do Indians protect their interest internationally? That's where crypto becomes interesting because the rupee can only get so much traction abroad. Crypto has more traction abroad, if that makes any sense.

Speaker B: That's great. And I actually want to then now compare that with Brazil, right? I'm Mauricio, you're a Brazilian and I'm sure you've you've used a lot of the sort of mobile applications from uh, Brazil and I mean you know there's so much like fintech developments out there and PIX is one of that golden standards together with UPI that many people like to talk about, you know, what payments, how easy it could be and stuff like that. So tell us like what sort of dynamic you've seen in Brazil relative to crypto, relative to a lot of the things that you probably have seen going on this year around CBDC and the likes.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think in the sense of payments Pix uh, uh, was very much instrumental in create, I wouldn't say the inclusion of people in finance but more access to banking services. So the fact that the central bank mandated PIX and made that ah, free for individuals by mandate was something that actually propelled adoption very rapidly. The numbers are really amazing coming out of Brazil. Brazilian central bank has a tradition of fostering the adoption by the market of particular technologies that are compelling to them and they're doing that with CBDCs. There's a Drex, Drex uh project uh in Brazil which intends to implement the digital real in a variety of ways. There is a uh, huge pilot already ongoing and there's a lot of promise especially when you think about the importance of giving liquidity to real world assets that's been tokenized. So that is pretty much where the central bank and most of the use cases uh, that are being piloted now are operating. But in terms of payment itself, it's interesting we bring that up because uh, earlier this year I co wrote a paper with the Whitechapel think tank about the importance of payments for countries in terms of the plumbing. Right. Currently if you want to disrupt the local economy, if you hack the payment system you stop the country. So it's very powerful in ways that uh, probably were not before because the timeliness of payments has changed so much. We're talking about instant payments everywhere now and the fact that it's uh, important to actually facilitate say automation for tax purposes, uh, for example. So it's interesting that uh, having a more resilient, more global uh, payments infrastructure that countries can also tap into to resolve some of that challenge, uh, even if it's for a uh, backup alternative payment system. It might be the case that we're seeing both more centralized payment infrastructure coming with the likes of UPI and Pix, then followed by CBDCs, uh, when it comes to giving assets liquidity and even public blockchains to serve as an ultimate backup for a country's Payment, um, system if all else fails. So in terms of uh, the ability of countries to tap into the technology, I think we're there already. As a friend of mine said, it's just not evenly distributed. So hopefully that becomes part of national strategies uh, to kind of lean into that technology to actually become as resilient as the infrastructure itself is. So uh, that is kind of where I see payments uh, potentially growing especially as financial authorities become more and more acquainted to the decentralized paradigm and make their inroads to understand how they can benefit from it as much as an average bgen. So I think that's one way for us to see more of the payment space touch uh, uh, on the blockchains. By and large, uh, I'm speaking to someone at Visa, so I'm pretty sure you're comfortable um, in that discussion as well and it would be interesting to hear from your perspective. Catherine Screen what's the thinking about that infrastructure making the inroads into traditional payment systems?

Speaker B: I would say that um, you know, it's good that there is a lot more choices and I think in the previous uh, episode with Haseeb we talked about, you know, tokenized deposits versus Stablecoins versus CBDC and the like. I think as a consumer it's very important that you have a selection of things that you can choose from and depends on the situation whether that's you know, I'm sending money across uh, a board to my friend or you know, if I'm just trying to get paid, uh, hopefully in the future in more real time rather than waiting every two weeks. I think there's a lot of payments, innovation could happen. I do think that there's likely going to be more fragmentation because of the fact that we have more choices, because of the fact that there's more ways to do payments and therefore new payment rails that you know, blockchain is one of the very good example in which it can be used for payment. So that being said therefore I think the focus should be around how do you make sure interoperability uh, will still retain to be true and also how do you ensure that there is a level of standardization. This is very much coming from our perspective of trying to make sense of what can we do in the world as ah, more options, more fragmentation therefore emerge. I also think that, that what's interesting to highlight is if you look at you know, uh, what's the focus by central banks and the BIS and the likes, there's a lot of discussion right now around this notion of a unified Ledger. So that's, you know, coming from the bank for International Settlements, talking about the future of financ, I think, I don't know if it's possible, but I think the goal is trying to, to ensure that there is some, um, way of uniformity to ensure payments and different forms of money can coexist in some shared infrastructure such that, you know, it can interoperate with one another. Which brings back to the point that blockchain can very well be that future of infrastructure. Of course, there's a lot of design choice embedded into it, so I think that's going to be, uh, interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, any, any other final words on this topic before we jump into the break?

Speaker C: No, I don't have any on payments, um, per se, other than, I would say, uh, you know, one thing I've said for actually 10 years, and I think it still holds up, is that blockchains are good for payments that are very large, very small, very fast, very international, very automated, very transparent, or very gray. And if you, if you take that universe of things, okay, you know, something like, for example, capital formation across borders, like what happened, for example, with the Brave ICO almost six, seven years ago, that was tens of millions of dollars where people were sending essentially wires or, uh, like Ethereum from Japan, from Turkey, all these different places, lots of large transactions happened very fast. They were in a smart contract where they got back the receipts in a very automated way. The result was very transparent. And it is also very, very programmatic. Uh, right, it's automated. That's something you can't do within the legacy system. And so the way I think about the kind of stuff which Visa, for example, is very good at is the complement of all of that. It's almost like, think about telephone lines versus the Internet, right? A telephone call, you can still make telephone calls over so called pots, right? Plain old telephone service, right? It took a while for Internet telephony to become as reliable as normal telephony. And even then it really only took off with Skype and international calling, which is very expensive to do with traditional telephony. And so I compare traditional payments to telephony, where when you're going and you're swiping your card at Starbucks, that's not a very big payment. It's not very small, it's not very international, it's not automated because both parties on both sides are there. It's not, doesn't have to be very transparent. You don't need to post it online. It's not very, you know, Any of those things that I, that I just mentioned. Right. It is a mezzanine scale payment. That's a human scale payment that two humans are doing to each other. So the Starbucks style payment is almost the exact complement of what crypto enables, where what it enables are transactions for the power list and the power user for the person who's just trying to hang on to a bank account and the person who's pushing the limits of what a bank account even is, it's like a U shaped coalition. So that's a total which is an opportunity for people like Visa, but it's also something which is sort of different than what you normally think of the universe's payments being. It's exactly what you can't do with legacy system that the blockchain lets you do.

Speaker A: Awesome. And with that, we wrap up the first half of the show. We're going to take a quick pause here and be back very shortly. This episode is brought to you by Visa, one of the world's leaders in digital payments. Crypto has opened up a new world of possibilities and Visa's helping everyone take part. Consumers can now enjoy the freedom and flexibility of using their Visa crypto link cards for everyday purchases at millions of Visa accepting merchant locations around the world. Join us in this new money movement. Learn more@visa.com Crypto welcome back to the show. So our next trend for 2024 is blockchain adoption beyond just crypto. And this is what we mean by that is, is it governance, it's uh, voting, it's data protection, it's identity, it's provenance. Now, uh, we spoke at length here in the show about the trade offs between public and permissioned, or permissionless and permissioned blockchains, or public and private blockchains. There's got to be a sweet spot in between these two points in the spectrum, right? So if we think about what we're seeing, uh, right now ramp up in the later part of 2023 is a lot of activity in the data protection space. There are a good, uh, number of newly launched or even on testnet data uh, protection blockchains trying to kind of make their inroads and providing a combination of different, uh, ways to handle public blockchains, meaning public infrastructure and data protection. There's uh, a new generation of tooling for DAOs that allow them to govern better with better voting participation. Voting itself is something that is, uh, being discussed in terms of how blockchains can actually help democracies in such a way. And obviously there is the Discussion about what are the identity standards. There's a, uh, good test bed on the MAS project guardian with the use of the W3C verifiable credentials and obviously the, the use cases on provenance where we're seeing, especially in, in industrial, in the, the real world, goods. Increasingly more and more companies, uh, tracking hearts or tracking goods across the supply chain using public blockchains to some extent, which was a big change between, uh, now and what happened in 2018, 2019, when private blockchains were all the rage. So what are your thoughts around some of these aspects? And there are any other aspects in terms of what blockchains might be, uh, able to unlock in 2024 that is just not the monetary or financial services related, um, conversation, which I understand might be related but not central to this. You know, beyond crypto adoption, uh, uh, Balaji, is there anything in your radar that you feel is like, worth mentioning in terms of. Yeah, this goes beyond just digital money.

Speaker C: Well, I mean, you get inherently political at a certain point, right? Like the. The thing is that, um, if you think about what is a market, what is an economy, there's often some state or some guarantor of property rights in the background that is a dispute resolver. This goes back to Locke's theory of what the state is. And there's various theorists on why does the state exist. And so one theory is the state exists to guarantee property rights and guys with guns or, you know, violence at some point is used to enforce that. And what the blockchain is a completely different theory of property rights. So it's not just about moving money back and forth. It's about the fact that bitcoin has, you know, the bitcoin blockchain is guarded on the order of a trillion dollars of property. Now globally across borders without violence for 10 years. And no matter what your political differences, you know, whether you're, you know, from tribe A or tribe B, you know, like, uh, if you're Chinese or Taiwanese, whatever it is, right, Whatever group that might have some conflict, they all agree on the state of the bitcoin blockchain. You know, and the thing is, people will fight over a thousand dollars. They'll fight over a million dollars. For people to agree globally on who has what money for a trillion dollars without any violence over 10 years is actually a remarkable breakthrough in human history. That, yes, you get payments out of that, but it's a little bit like, you know, GPS was initially invented to like, target missiles. Today we use it to tag cat photos. Right. The Internet was built to, you know, resist a nuclear attack. And today we use it to, you know, send, you know, funny, funny emails or whatever. Right. So in the same way, bitcoin was built for a very big purpose, and you can take that huge thing and you can take like one millionth of whatever of its power, and you can use it to send payments across borders. Uh, but it's much more powerful than that.

Speaker B: Maybe I can also just make a mention about a lot of the vision biology you've had, and especially you hosted the first network state conference this year. Right. And I think there's a lot of relatedness to your idea about what the future of a network or state could look like, as well as these new technologies, uh, such as blockchain, that it could potentially play an essential role in that. So maybe you can help us to expand a little bit about, you know, what do you mean as you're talking about the network state? Even the fact that I'm trying to make sense of what is the network versus the state, and therefore the role that crypto can play in that.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: So first, take the term nation state. You guys have heard the term nation state, right? What nation state actually translates to, if you, if you go back in history is it's more like the single tribe state. For example, the Japanese people, like, the word nation comes from natality, like common birth, you know, common descent. So Japanese people are related by ancestry and by language and by culture. And that's like almost a canonical nation state where there's a nation, the Japanese people, and they all speak the same language. For the most part, most Japanese speakers are there. It's very, very easy identified this group, this tribe, let's say, right? And then the state is like the governance layer that exists above them. Now, for example, right after World War II, the Japanese nation was governed by the American state because that was. They did not have their own governance layer. They were like a stateless nation in a sense. Okay. For a little while now they've got a, you know, Japanese state over the Japanese nation. It's a little bit like, uh, you know, within a company, the difference between labor and management is the difference between the nation and the state, between the people and the government. Okay? You know, so that term nation state, we use it without realizing what it is, but it's the people and the government, right? And the old concept of a nation state came, uh, where it's like, you know, for example, Irish people should have their own government, or, you know, Estonian people should have their own government. And so Then the question is, which tribes get their own governments? And that becomes a very controversial issue historically, who's a big enough and important enough tribe to actually get their own government? And not just their own government, but their own territory. Right. Because that also is implicit in the term of what nations is. And so when we think about the whole, you know, nation state system, the first thing you think about is the map of the world. And you think about the map of the world and you think about these artificial lines, these boundaries on the map, and that, uh, those are the territories that are controlled by these different states. But there's another map you can start uh, with. And it's not the map of the lands, but it's the map of the mines. It's not the earth, but the cloud. And so you start not with the, uh, square miles of earth, but the 8 billion nodes in the social network. Okay, you start with the social network, the globals. Imagine this. Imagine if Facebook plus Twitter plus every phone and so on. Imagine if everybody had a phone will eventually get there. It's like more than 50% of the world now. That is a different map to start with. And you've got different clusters there. Just like you have, you know, pockets of territory offline. You have clusters of people online. Right? And these are what I call, you know, obviously we all call them networks, but the concept is that those networks can themselves form states. Because networks are the new nations, they're the new tribes, right? The group of people who you connect to on social media and who your friends connect to and who your friends friends connect to is your de facto tribe. And you might be at the intersection of several tribes right now. What we don't have is great maps of the cloud. And the thing is, for until relatively recently, we didn't have great maps of land. If you go back to like 1300s, 1400s, you had maps which said, here be dragons. They didn't even know in Europe, for example, that North America, South America existed. That's why they called it the new world, right? They had weird squiggly lines for like, you know, things. So the advent of cartography is actually a, um, very abstract and new thing where you had to have surveyors, you know, to even know, okay, this is a straight line, uh, you know, here's the latitude, launch it. That's just not the way that you would think in the absence of this very non trivial abstraction of a map. Right. And so just like it took a while before we had to map the land. It's just taken a Little while before we have a map of the cloud. Blockchain actually has something to say about this as well, because it's with new protocols like Farcaster, where you can actually get a download of, or you can basically synchronize the Farcaster protocol and you pull every single node in the social network and you can see it in a way that you can't really do for Facebook or Twitter because it's all private data. All of Farcaster is public data. Everybody there has opted in to basically broadcasting their stuff publicly because Farcaster is like a crypto Twitter and Twitter is public, right? So you can actually pull the Farcaster network and then you can form this visualization of the tribes of the Internet. Just like, you know, the states of the world, right? And the whole concept network state is this is becoming primary and this is becoming secondary that people aren't actually taking the Internet seriously. One way of thinking about it is every transaction, every communication that you've done probably in the last 10 years has been where, for the most part on the Internet, I mean, like you may have sent a few physical mails, right? But relative, let's say 1980 versus 2020, in about 30 years, it went from 99% physical mail to 99% email, right? It went from, I don't know, 99% cash or I don't know what fraction it was. And you guys will know your visa, so you'll know the exact fraction of how much it was physical cash, right? But let's say it went from very large percentage physical cash to almost entirely electronic within one generation. So all communication and all transaction has flipped within human life spans from just physical to digital. And yet we still underestimate the Internet because what comes next is all governance becomes digital, right? All borders become, um, digitally enforced. What do I mean by that? Governance is like smart contracts, but you can scale that all the way up to the, to the, to a society with the social smart contract that you sign into, right? What is it, what do we mean by borders become digital? Well, NFTs give the borders of your community, just like your key card lets you into a building. That's like a digital border, right? So just like, you know, a system administrator determines whether somebody's de platformed or allowed into a digital community. That becomes like the fundamental border, right? So we still aren't taking the Internet

Speaker B: seriously just on that border thing you mentioned, because, uh, I just sort of think that I'm sort of making sense of that in relation to say, immigration, right? In the physical world.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker B: In the sense that, you know, if you're part of a Reddit community or if you're part of some community, it's very easily switchable as you want to join another community and such. And hence, I can imagine there's many networks that could exist, but it's very easily for them to switch or collapse because of the fact of that fluidity, if you will, which is very different from being, you know, a nation state in which you are part of this nation, you have the passport, you're part of that system, therefore. So it's both a good thing and a bad thing, if you will, if you agree with that view. And again, like, how could blockchain play a more specific role in the governance structure of how you can keep this cohesive? Like this idea of the network state, do you think?

Speaker C: Yeah, so. Well, basically what you have is you have bundling, you have unbundling, and then you have rebundling. So, for example, you have a bunch of, uh, songs bundled into a CD. They get unbundled into MP3s, you rebundle them into a playlist. Okay? You have a bunch of products that are sold at a store, they're unbundled into individual Amazon webpages, you rebundle them into shopping carts that group products in a useful way, and you sell them online, right? Or third example, you take a newspaper, you unbundle into articles, and you rebundle it into Twitter feeds that combine commentary and articles in a cross section of way. So what you're talking about is you're taking citizenship in these declining states. Not all states are declining, but many of them are. And people are becoming less patriotic or less bound to their country as a consequence, they feel less of a tie to that country. So you unbundle that into a bunch of Internet people who are finding their communities, and you rebundle that into netizens that are defined by essentially some combination of NFTs and digital passports. And just to talk about that for a second, what we've seen over the last 10 years is digital currencies. And so the concept of a payment, a, uh, stock, a bond, a dividend, a wire transfer, all of those kinds of things, all debits and credits can be represented online with digital currency, any scarce asset. Of course, it's a regulatory matter as to whether you represent a security on chain, all that kind of blah, blah, blah stuff, but in the grand soup of history, it's obviously better to put it on chain than to have it in 500 different databases and so on. It'll be like there's legacy regulations that are fighting it. But I think that in the, you know, broad scope of things to be able to. It's a difference between doing your calculations on a piece of paper versus in Excel, right? Why would you not want to have this on chain rather than in an uh, opaque thing like dtcc? Nothing against dcc, but it's obviously pre, pre blockchain technology, right? You don't have private keys, you don't have local custody, you can't transfer it easily, you can't transfer globally, all that stuff. Okay? So my point is if the last decade was digital currency, this decade and the, and the uh, time to come is about digital citizenship, digital passports, right? Uh, what does that mean? That means your passport, your driver's license, your nft, your login to a website, those all become the same thing. And one way of looking at that is if have you used SingPass, Singapore's government digital uh, id. I think that's what citizenship becomes, right? Citizenship becomes something like SyncPass, which is an app on your phone that you can also use to log into websites and then it's government attested identification, right? Now eventually I think what happens is you move to the subscription state where you just have to pay a monthly fee to keep your sync pass in good order. And that's how you log into websites with some sort of, you know, very hard to fake. Government attested, uh, cryptographic id, that's how people beat AI fakery and so on and so forth is you actually have private keys locally that some proctor like a state is actually proctoring that that person is real, right? So these are kind of certain trends that are crashing into each other. AI makes everything fake. Crypto makes it real again, okay? Because you have the local private keys. So that's why identity becomes cryptography. Digital citizenship, digital passports, all of there's a lot of forces pushing that together. There's also security where you don't want your accounts to be hacked, so you want like a security key or something like that locally you come back to actually a physical form factor that you don't lose that you can't just hack on the Internet. All those things together mean identity in uh, many sense of the term becomes cryptography and, and ah, and digital.

Speaker A: I love that so much. I think that's a good segue in our last prediction to be frank, because um, you mentioned something that we've been talking about in the show for a while. We did a quick run of episodes but I'm um, going to hand it over to you, Catherine. So we can get deep into that.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I love that because everything is related so much. Right. We talked about identity, we talked about governance. And in fact, the last prediction that we do want to center around is this relationship between AI, crypto, blockchain, and. I will start with decentralization. Right. Because I think, especially given, uh, the very recent drama that we've seen, ChatGPT. And by the way, ChatGPT is sort of. It's hard to believe that it's more than one years old. Like, it came out in November 2022. And I feel like even at Visa, we have a ChatGPT version. It's just how widespread and how quickly they spread to different organizations to use it. Now, I think with all the things that happened, uh, in the, in the boardroom, uh, to do with OpenAI, I think one thing is clear that, you know, it's not really just about the algorithms. It's not just about the computer. There's a lot of human factors around it. I think this is the point in which I think Balaji, you have mentioned many times around this notion of injecting decentralization into AI, into AI governance. And I also would quote something that I actually found from Peter Thiel back in the days that he said, you know, crypto is libertarian, AI is communist. Right. So I want to kind of like unpack that, what it actually means. And what is this ultimate value of decentralization, in your opinion? How do we actually define decentralization, uh, in the context of AI M On crypto?

Speaker C: Yeah. So what decentralization means. It's a. I actually have a paper on this from several years ago. It's called Quantifying Decentralization. And rather than decentralization being a 0 or 1, you define it in a sense as how many entities you need to compromise to compromise the system. So let's say you've got an overall system. Let's say it's a blockchain. Okay. It's composed of subsystems. Here's the miners, here's the exchanges, here's the developers, like the core developers and the exchanges and so on and so forth. How many miners would you need to compromise to compromise the system? Let's say it's five. Right. How many exchanges you need to compromise to compromise the system, meaning, you know, to. To block people from using it? Maybe it's 20. Okay. Because you have to shut down all the exchanges. If one of them is going, it's fine.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: How many core developers need to compromise to compromise system maybe it's 10 people. You capture them and you've knocked out the ability to develop that thing, and so on and so forth. And in a sense, each of these represents the bus number. How many people can get hit by a bus in that particular subsystem before it stops working. Okay? And the higher that number is across all the subsystems, the more decentralized it is. I think that captures our intuition for what it means for something to be decentralized, that there isn't a single point of control. If there was a single person that you could capture and it knocked out the whole system. That's a centralized system, right? Uh, the more people that exist, the more exchanges, the more miners that you'd have to capture at the same time. If there are a thousand miners you have to capture at the same time to knock up the system, the more decentralized it is. Right? And so that's a way of quantifying decentralization, because you don't just go from zero to one undecentralized to decentralized. This is a way of actually thinking about it mathematically. Then you can move, once you've got that, to optimizing decentralization, which says for a certain amount of resources, do I, let's say, increase the number of miners, or do I increase the number of exchanges in order to increase overall decentralization of the system? You see what I'm saying? It's like, which choke point do I expand the most in order to reduce the centralization pressure on the overall system? So that's how I think about centralization. Decentralization then to your thing, you know, like Thiel's comment. So it's a clever comment. I think that from today's vantage point, I would, you know, expand it as follows. The three social technologies are, uh, social media, cryptocurrency, and AI. Why not electric cars or spaceships, right? Those are awesome. Those are really important. But they're sort of fundamentally actuators that are kind of downstream of a human. Like a human pushes a button and drives around in a car. Whereas social media, cryptocurrency and AI. Social media is like online democracy. Cryptocurrency is like online markets, and AI is like online harmony, like the Chinese concept of harmony. Okay. Which is more foreign to, like a Western mindset. But basically, you know, social media is, uh, voting all the time, right? So that's recognizable to the west in terms of decision making from voting. It's one form of aggregation. Cryptocurrency is Internet markets. 24 7M Markets Buying capitalism that's also recognizable to the west in terms of markets. AI is like more like the Chinese concept of harmony than anything else, which is just like one super intelligence that aggregates all the knowledge and then everybody sort of folds into that. Right. That's kind of what AI is. I think it's like closest to that mindset, which is a third form of social aggregation. It's not democracy, it's not capitalism, it's harmony. Right. So the thing is that for those three kind of corners, you know, which again you could identify as USD, RMB and btc. For those three corners, going back to our earlier thing, uh, those three corners you can um, decentralize and centralized versions of each of them. So there's centralized social, social media that's like Facebook. Right. There's centralized uh, AI that's like, you know, chatgpt or, or open, I mean OpenAI. You know I, I love them, you know, for the technological breakthroughs and so on. But it's, it's not an open, you know, API, it's a closed API. Open AI is closed API, right. In that sense. And they, they'd admit that, I think. So that's centralized AI and then you have centralized cryptocurrency is cbdc, which you are the person at Visa, uh, on. Right. So there's centralized social media, centralized AI and centralized cryptocurrency. Then there's decentralized versions of each of these. Right. Obviously there's decentralized cryptocurrency. There's also decentralized AI in the sense of open source AI. And there's now decentralized social media in different forms. For example substack, when you can just export your email list. Farcaster has an open backend protocol. There's a push towards free speech and a push towards greater self sovereignty and being able to speak. End to end encryption is a move towards this. Right. And I think that the crypto side of things will push into the other two sectors. And that's actually the free world, right? The free world is the peer to peer, end to end, encrypted decentralized world. And the centralized world is, is to a lesser extent it's, it's, it is the unfree world in some sense because they're centralized choke points. And as more and more life becomes digital, that becomes more and more material. We're talking about that stuff in, in a somewhat abstract. We're in a transitional stage now, but in 10 or 20 years, I think what I'm saying there I think you may, you may agree with it.

Speaker B: I, I sort of, given this is prediction, I do want to go into the, the future use cases of how we can envision whether that's a decentralized version or centralized ve all these things that we just talked about because I think clearly AI is so powerful as algorithm, as machine. And blockchain on the other hand is also very powerful because it is a type of infrastructure that is immutable, that is, you know, sensor resistant in many different ways and, and it has a different way of essentially manage and store data and how you can leverage the usage of data. But I do think, you know, I'm uh, not a computer scientist per se, but I know that for example, that in today's world you can't really just take an AI algorithm directly to run it on the blockchain because it's just way too expensive. Right. Like blockchain is not really suited for these kind of mass level of computation. You have to still do it off chain. And this is why AI algorithm can get really big because they have really powerful server and machines to do. So now to really think about the usage of say blockchain inside AI, do you have any. And um, this is a question for both Balaji and Mauricio. I don't know if you guys have any questions, kind of crazy ideas or any suggestions about where could the entry points look like in terms of a true merge between the usage of blockchain and AI together.

Speaker C: Yeah. So you know, obviously this is the kind of thing that people have talked about in like a, like a cliche kind of way. Right. But AI makes everything easy to fake. Crypto makes it hard again. Right. So fake Trump arrest photos, how to spot an AI gener image, they're like look at the hands or whatever. But the actual way of doing it is how to verify a message signature in Ethereum. Because you know, generative AI will become indistrucable from reality pretty soon. But AI cannot fake digital signatures without solving thought to be unsolvable math problems. Right. And things like ENS allow for this, uh, to be a more programmatic kind of like a domain lookup where you go and type in, you know, your name.com and you can see the lock symbol appear. You could do something like that to see whether an image was real or signed by somebody. So that's the second part. AI. So AI makes it easy to fake, crypto makes it hard again. AI generates crypto authenticates.

Speaker B: Haha. Uh-huh.

Speaker C: Okay. Third, AI proselytizes crypto verifies it. Okay, so for example, AI will generate all this content over here and there'll be citations, but, but in this case the FTX hack, some of the citations will be on chain. And so you can actually verify again the cryptographic records of what happened. Right now that's financial data. And so something like the FTX hack, the text that the AI generates can be verified on chain. As more events come on chain. With things like Farcaster, where social data is coming on chain, a larger and larger set of events will be cryptographically verifiable. Does that make sense? Right, so AI says something, it proselytizes crypto, verifies it. Okay, AI breaks a public web, crypto builds a web three of trust. So AI is filling up the Internet with all these garbage spam sites, but these chains of digital signatures between identities, crypto can actually build not web of trust, but web3 of trust where every user has a public private key pair. What does that look like? Something like interface app or interface social rather where you can follow wallets and see their activity. It's basically like, like a, like a Twitter style interface, but for on chain data. And every action here is signed cryptographically. So uh, so you start getting a web three of trust. Okay, next concept, AI bus CAPTCHAs and crypto rebuilds them. So I'm not a robot, and a robot clicks, you know, I'm not a robot. Okay. Whereas sign in with Ethereum, um, the robot can't easily do that, that you require a deposit. I mean of course you could have a bottom that owns some cryptocurrency and that signs in with Ethereum. But it starts to get expensive because to have the Ethereum, to have the bitcoin, you have to, you have to have private keys that have a certain amount of money and so you can start making captchas that require a certain amount of money or micropayments or things like that. And so cryptographic scarcity is how you, uh, it's not the only part of the solution, but it's a big part of the solution for I think, you know, making captchas robust again. AI training is centralized, but crypto can decentralize it. This is a list of the highest funded crowdfunding projects I've highlighted in yellow. So this is from, you know, Wikipedia, so you can go and look at the list yourself. But all the yellow rows are those that were crypto related. Okay, so that means. Right, so the, some of the largest crowdfunding projects of all time, Crypto has transformed many industries. Obviously gold, obviously international wire transfers with stablecoins. But it's also transformed crowdfunding. I wrote an article five years ago, what has a blockchain done for us? That pointed out that those three industries alone, gold, international wires, and crowdfunding, are multi, multibillion dollar, really trillion dollar industries. And if crypto just disrupted those three, it would be worth trillions of dollars. Because crowdfunding's like capital formation in the limit. And so the point is, you can get massive amounts of money crowdfunded for crypto via crypto. And we could apply that to training AI models. So the huge pools of money that you need to train these AI models, you can pool the money online if you come with the right business model. So crypto can decentralize AI, uh, training. Also, AI evaluation is currently centralized, but we're starting to move towards being able to run models on individual, like Mac Studios. And I think crypto can decentralize model evaluation. Imagine running a node like a Bitcoin node or Ethereum node, uh, except it's more like maybe BitTorrent, and it's got like a huge AI model there that is updated every so often. And uh, it, it basically serves up requests in return for micropayments of cryptocurrency. Right. That is doable right now. Okay. No technical breakthroughs required. And you could do that with some model off hugging face just to prove the point. Okay. Finally, a few more things. AI creates new authorities. Crypto decentralizes them. So entire concept of AGI, like one sort of, you know, superhuman godlike intelligence, is kind of monotheistic AGI. But it was crypto, you'd get a bunch of them. You have something more like what I call polytheistic AGI. Everybody crowdfunds their own AI oracle, their own AI, you know, authority. Right. So putting that all together, that's how I think AI and crypto interrelate. And you, uh, know, AI creates certain problems and crypto fixes those problems. So, uh, thank you. AI makes everything easy to fake. Crypto makes it hard.

Speaker B: Again, that's a fantastic, uh, response to my question. I don't know if you prepare for this ahead of time, but this is fantastic and very, uh, very, very comprehensive. And I actually just, uh, want to round it off because I do want to make a plug to your newly announced biology fund. And I'm sure that many of the, uh, investment ideas you just shared with us, hopefully we'll see that coming through in your investment, which is very exciting.

Speaker C: It's@balaji.com that's all I can say about it. It's@biology.com so if you want to check it out.

Speaker B: Got it. Got it.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: Well, I love the list, to be frank, because one of the things that I'm a. Not as much as I should, but I'm a closeted drummer, and I have been in the music industry for almost 30 years now, and the value of music has suffered a lot from technology innovations. And I feel that AI feels like another threat because of faking my voice or faking my playstyle or the way I compose. And then I can't claim authorship for that. And that blockchain comes right on and brings that back. And I'm starting to dabble in the concept of every artist becoming a dao and its community is the fan. So I think I love that concept to protect IP and claim back some of the things that we kind of maybe even made it, you know, mundane in the world of the web two, if you want to call it. But I think the combinations are absolutely, uh, spot on. And I love, I love that. I wish we had more time, but we're at time right now. Before we wrap this episode entirely, I just want to let you know that today's episode also happens to be our last. For the time being, I will be stepping away from the hosting mic, and the show will be going on hiatus after this episode. But don't worry, this is just to see you later, not a goodbye. Thank you to everyone for listening and spending your time with us and the fantastic guests we've had along the way, too. Speaking of which, thank you also to today's fantastic panel for joining me. Where can people find out more about you and your companies? Balaji.

Speaker C: So I'm on twitter@twitter.com Balogs I have a fund at biology.com and I have a blog at biology s.com also I've got a book@thenetworkstate.com and I'll put them all in one kind of thing. But those are four things. So just go to my Twitter, twitter.com biologists you can find everything else from there.

Speaker A: Thank you, Katherine.

Speaker B: Not as active as Biology, but I'm also on X on LinkedIn as well as on, uh, visa.com and you can

Speaker A: find me at 0x Mauricio or lockdropspot on X or find me blabbering about blockchain on, um, the Blockdrops podcast. As always, if you want to join the conversation, find us on social media. Just search for ElevenFS or Blockchain Insider or email us at podcastslevenfs. Com. Don't forget to check out the other 200 episodes in our back catalog. Or take a look at the other podcasts in the 11FS network, including FinTech Insider and our, uh, 11FS Explorers video series or over on YouTube. This is all for today. Stay rare, stay weird. LFG.