[gentle music]

[gentle music] I woke up one morning, April 15th, and I sat down at my computer, and there's a big seal of the Department of Justice, the DOJ, on the website.

And what had happened was overnight they had banned all online poker within the United States.

All of the websites are down.

You can no longer play online poker in the United States.

All of the payment processors are down, so you can no longer move money between or do anything, and it was just like overnight, like [snaps fingers] that, the industry was just gone.

And I think those were the first times where you said, "Okay." You saw the reach of, of sort of policy and government sort of impacting you in your real life.

And so Web3, for the first time to me, is real.

Like, are there areas to improve? Or is it like we're on the blockchain where we're focused on our settlement product now?

Yeah.

So for us, it's actually we're like totally agnostic as a technology.

Ethereum transactions can take one second to complete, but you're taking some finality risk.

And so it's very easy to integrate.

Like every asset issuer basically defines this for themselves.

And you'll see some asset issuers when you're leaving certain chains.

Why build your own?

Like, why are they doing this?

Yeah.

So I think there's, there's two sides why institutions are actually like care.

So there's a couple of things.

One, why do institutions care? Institutions only care for one of two reasons.

One is like a fear of being disrupted and wanting to be in front of it, right? Which is like a, a very like real thing for a bunch of them, is just like wanting...

Like if everything's going to get disrupted, how can we be best positioned to actually capture like more of what that...

What do you think?"

But talk a little bit about how you managed to resolve all those issues without compromising on something like decentralization.

Yeah, definitely.

So again, core problem with any system, the main primary problem is this cost of replication, right? You run into two things, having every node download all of the transactions and all the data and needing to reproduce the compute across all of things.

So the four breakthroughs that we solved along the way, the first was QMDB, which is actually a paper we published a year ago.

It's now being rolled out like through Commonware and to Tempo and some of other chains that are launching now.

which is basically a change from MPT structure to a log-based database.

It is 100x more performant than state-of-the-art for database structure for verifiable database.

And of course, feel free to mention anybody I didn't.

but are less familiar.

Sure.

Yep, DAO is sort of, uh, fascinating, uh, idiosyncrasy within crypto itself, right? So, uh, DAO is Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

We built this protocol, we launched it, and then we basically said, "Hey, governance is going to be left up to all the people who hold the token," right? So there's a bunch of people who hold the token, they have the ability to stake and, and actively vote on all kinds of things; how things get priced, how the dollars that the protocol owns or the protocol had accrued about $95 million worth of, worth of assets itself internally, like all kinds of things within it.

Uh, and it was just running, and naturally as you can imagine, something that gets run by, you know, 50,000 people as opposed to, uh, a small group of very agile fast-moving, uh, entrepreneurs runs very differently, right? And so what this meant is a, a lot of things are slower than you would like them to.

Innovation is sort of like slow in that side, so I mean, it was very dominant from a bridge perspective, that's what Stargate does is move assets around.

It's done about $80 billion of assets transferred, so-

Um, what i- what i- what, uh, what should we be looking out for in the back half of this year? I mean, uh, uh, four months I guess at this point, but in, in terms of, uh, uh, assets coming, coming on chain and tokenization broadly?