It's really incredible.

Yeah.

We got a couple other things we're cooking with Zebec in, uh, terms of, you know, potential agentic economy stuff, but I'll, I'll save that maybe for another time.

On Qi, you know, I, I think that's the most pressing really thing in crypto broadly because no one's really seen a flat coin and no one's really understood how stablecoins are bad for our ecosystems.

We got inspired to build Qi, this energy dollar, whenever SVB collapsed and we had money in the bank, and USDC depegged, and everyone was losing their minds.

You know, later on you get government regulation and you get all these other suits to kind of come in and shore a lot of it up, which is great, but those cracks in a lot of those underlying foundations still aren't the same as truly decentralized pristine crypto assets like Bitcoin, Monero, Zeno, Quai, et cetera.

And so Qi as a flat coin is essentially an alternative to stablecoins that is tied to electricity by being emission, by having a mission and being emitted through the difficulty controller in a proof of work blockchain.

What sort of privacy features does Qi use?

So someone listening for the first time that maybe has never heard about Kwai, how would you explain it? What does it do? How did you become involved, essentially?

Yeah, so Kwai started as an idea on how to scale a proof-of-work blockchain in 2018 out of the University of Texas at Austin.

And so the research paper was originally titled BlockReduce.

You can go to qu.ai.com and sort of read about the protocol.

But it's very grand in vision.

It's how do we create a blockchain with the lowest cost? amount of friction and the most amount of utility for the most amount of people.

And so to do that, we need to have a scalable proof of work system that is permissionless, censorship resistant, has low fees, has an EVM, has programmability, smart contracts, things that enable these types of financial transactions to happen on chain.

What's kind of the best in show? I know you don't want to give any favorites, but just curious if there's like one or two that you're like, hey, you should check these out.

Yeah

...

but it was kinda fun 'cause I got started with, you know, a few of the payment apps and a few of the, the crypto transaction apps.

And I was also very technical, so as a technical kind of person, always interested in programming.

I got started programming whenever I was 12, and so really went down the computer science rabbit hole and led me to really understand how crypto and blockchain technology worked.

So I wanted to understand it really from the base layer, how it operated, how we could improve it, because I remember kind of always thinking we could always make it better.

And it wasn't more so make it better from a community distribution and, and awareness, more so from a technological perspective, something is broken and can be improved.

Why, why do none of these blockchains solve the problem you just highlighted and, and you had to set out to build your own?

So I guess maybe with that picture painted, what are some of the reasons for hope that you have right now as a builder and a founder in the U.S.? And maybe what are some other ways that we can temper our expectations and prepare for some choppy waters yet?

Yeah.

So as we were just talking about, we've seen ETH at $80.

We've been around when these cryptocurrencies for Bitcoin were like $400.

And people around the industry have seen Bitcoin literally below a dollar.

So we know that it's a growing industry regardless of who is in the administration.

And that's kind of the whole point of crypto is every four years, we're going to get a new president, but you're not going to be able to change the code.

How is Quai positioning itself to gain market share for Qi?