Open Source and Building on Solana with Mert Mumtaz, Co-founder & CEO of Helius

0:04 Welcome to the Index Podcast hosted by Alex Kahaya. Plug in as we explore new frontiers with Web 3 and the decentralized future. Hey everyone and welcome to the Index brought to you by the Graph, where we talk with the entrepreneurs building the next wave of the internet. I'm your host, alex Kahaya, and today we have Mert Muntaz, founder and CEO of Helius, the leading developer platform building on Solana. Thanks so much for being here. Super excited to have you and following you for a while on Twitter and just love the impact that you've been having on the space. Maybe just jump right in and tell me a little bit about your background and, for people who don't know you, how you got to Helius and what you were doing before that.

0:51 Sure, first of all, thanks for having me, in terms of my background relatively boring, I would say. I was born and raised in Istanbul, turkey, and moved to Canada around grade seven, grade eight, right before high school. I was always super interested in math and engineering. Actually, at one point I wanted to be a garbage man when I was a kid. Like riding on the back of those garbage trucks seemed fun to me. So definitely some interesting career aspirations. Early on I went to Queens University to do engineering. I did a double degree in applied math and communications engineering communications being satellite signals, computing systems, stuff like that.

1:31 I initially wanted to do a PhD in physics or math and just go the super theoretical route. I did a internship at Blackberry. So when Blackberry was a thing, I worked there. I was on the cloud team managing the cloud that manages BBM or that BBM uses, and I really fell in love with the entire process of building these infrastructure pillars that benefit other developers and they can build other structures on top of. And that was super fun for me and I was kind of red-pilled. I guess I did a complete 180 from pure theoretical math and physics to pure practice and pragmatism and right after graduating I worked at a few banks, so Canada was run by like an oligopoly of five banks.

2:15 I worked at three of them building financial infrastructure, trading, desk infrastructure, low latency stuff, atm withdrawal systems, payments cybersecurity even. And then I worked at a startup that got acquired by Shutterstock. And then I worked at a startup called ClearCo, which became one of the only unicorns in Canada, and right around that time, when I was building payment systems for entrepreneurs at ClearCo, I noticed a lot of inefficiencies between sending payments internationally and the systems that we were using. They actually take multiple hops in jurisdictions if I wanted to send money from here to Australia, here being in Toronto and I suggested because I was also from there with crypto at the time in Salam, hopefully.

3:04 I'd say you're pretty familiar with crypto. So I suggested using USDC and people were kind of like, well, crypto is kind of a scam. And whenever I talk to people about crypto, it's essentially like can I mine what? Can I mine some free money using crypto and stuff like that? So you just have this. I think the asymmetry between truth of what these systems enable and what was realized by the public was quite significant still is, anyway. So I didn't like the answer that we're not using a better tech just because people perceive it to be a scam. So a few weeks after I got a job at Coinbase this is before they went public, so they were still kind of a startup at that point so got to work on a lot of cool things at Coinbase platform APIs, payment systems, transaction histories, balances, npc wallets, stuff like that and I was there for slightly over a year and by that time I was also doing a lot of research into different blockchains, whether it be Avalanche, polygon, cosmo, solana, and Solana I think mostly due to my signals and communications background really resonated with me.

4:08 It seemed to be my mental model around. This was essentially, maybe Ethereum and Bitcoin are more proof of concepts, where it's super theoretical and research driven and the core team has PhDs and Vitalik is a super smart theoretical dude. But then you see Solana it's like these hardcore Qualcomm engineers and people who used to work at Bell Labs really optimizing the living shit out of the hardware that they're working on and really squeezing the juice out of these machines and pushing the frontier of distributed systems, and that really resonated with me how practical it is. And people say Bitcoin is like immutable money and Ethereum is maybe immutable, programmable ultrasound money, and Solana is more like censorship resistant radio.

4:54 It's kind of a different thing. It's like it optimizes for real time peer to peer communication speeds essentially, and that's something that, with my background, I just really appreciated. And obviously the developer community and stuff kind of added that flywheel effect, like when I used to build on Solana, I used to build some boss or threads. People within the ecosystem would kind of hype me up or chat about it and there'd be hackrouses and the community was super solid. It still is super solid and so if you take kind of the pure rock, performance oriented engineering culture a super solid community and you combine those things, that's really what attracted me to Solana and obviously, being an engineer myself, I noticed a lot of inefficiencies with the current system of reading data on slanted, say so, rpcs, api's, indexes, etc.

5:48 And I said I decided, okay, well, you know that this is a pretty big problem and I believe the market will get bigger for this as crypto takes off, so this is a good time to start a company around it. At first, we just shipped human readable API's, so the goal was to make everything human readable. We did a pretty good chunk of that. We have like pretty much 100% coverage for NFTs right now and SPL programs and Jupyter Swaps etc. But then along the line, like, we noticed customers complaining about a lot of things like their RPCs and maybe their data lakes and stuff like that, and so we started really focusing really hard on the lower level of the infrastructure stack, on Solana, and basically now we're on a mission to accelerate the adoption of crypto power software and products at Helios.

6:36 So we want to build tools such that developers, if they're considering building in crypto, you know they look at Solana and Helios like, okay, wow, that's great developer experience. This is the chain I'm going to use. This is a product I'm going to use to build the applications that will get me users so I can focus on my product. So, and here we are- you tapped into a lot of things that I find interesting. One I totally agree with the direction you guys are taking, like the high level. There's a huge need there. There will probably be several developer platform firms that become multi-billion dollar businesses because the need is going to be so huge, just to make it easier to build, and this speaks to just where the space is today. Right, it's still super early. I mean, even two years ago, when we started Olaplex, there were no indexers.

7:20 Like there's not a single way to index NFT data. We built something from scratch that was open source, but, man, I wish we hadn't had to do that. Like we invested a ton of resources in that and we only built it because we had to. We weren't trying to build a business offering indexing as a service to customers. It's a very specialized tool that needed to be built. And the other thing is like, what attracted you to Solana? It's this very close to the same reason. I mean, articulated a little differently that I joined. I started in crypto in 2016 and I saw the same thing like really research, heavy academic feeling projects that were really not building open source either.

8:00 They were more doing things. They would open source it later they weren't like building in the open and when I met Toley for the first time, he was shipping day one like testnet open source, and that was really inspiring. Most people were afraid to do that back in 2017, 2018 because they're all worried about competition and so they had this real practical approach of just shipping high quality product and developing a business and not just sitting around researching it in a closed firm. Basically, I would love to hear your opinion on open source in general, on Solana and in crypto. What are your thoughts on building open source business models? And I consider Healy is to be primarily a business built on open source software, offering indexing, rpc services, and I think people kind of don't understand that how you can build a business using open source software.

8:47 A lot of people keep their stuff closed source for that reason, so I would love to hear your thoughts, just in general, on that. So it's a good question and there's actually a prime example of something that's open source and we're working on right now, which is compression right. So for those who don't know, there's something called compression on Solana now which lets you essentially mint a lot of NFTs for cheaper than before, so more technically, but you get to trade off state space or account space and you get to put it on the ledger and then you get to link those. We have a miracle tree with the root hash to guarantee the integrity of data and the way it works is so.

9:27 Solana labs had the the white paper on on how this would work and then I think they gave a request for comment or a proposal to Metaplex and Austin there built a lot of the early parts of the system and this was all done open source and us being Healy is an untried and also really collaborated with them very heavily and we still do and just tackling different parts of the systems and really kind of collaborating as as an ecosystem to push the system forward. I think that's probably one of the best examples of open source that I'm aware on Solana, because now we have this thing called digital asset standard API. It's the digital asset DAS that's API is what we call it and now it's like developers now, instead of having to use API's that give them, for example, vendor risk or, you know, centralization risks, closed source, etc.

10:19 You now have this DAS API system, which is open source, and you know we have our own fork of it at Healy is, and I'm sure Triton does as well, and then Metaplex has their own version. But there's things that are similar between them we collaborate on and people say, okay, you can't build a business on top of that. But it's not true. The compression stuff, for example, I've done a lot of work with. We provide extremely solid support around compression, right. It's a very difficult system, right? Just just just because the code is there doesn't mean you're going to be able to understand how to run it. For example, if I told you exactly how a Ferrari is constructed and gave you all the names of the pieces, are you going to be able to put it together? It's like you know it's going to take some work for you to do that. It's not that easy, and so the source being there is super crucial, especially in a field like crypto, where you want to minimize trust.

11:08 The business models around that in crypto are actually, like I would say, relatively unexplored, especially with the rest of protocols. Like if you put it on chain and then maybe there's fees. I don't have the answer there. But for an infrastructure company like us it's actually quite easy because there's open source and then you just provide white glove service around it, right, you really understand the system, you do the work. Right, you do the work, you chew the glass and, for example, we actually had an incident this morning where some team had an issue with compression. We had so much experience working with it that we were able to essentially give them Time in exchange for money, right, like. They also could have done this, but they want to save time and ship products and so we help them with support.

11:48 And then, obviously, like marketing and stuff and Building other integrations on top of that that that feed off the open source engine are all good and well. You know, my thoughts on open source for infrastructure are pretty clearly like it's a super solid thing to do, like, for example, mongo, does this red hat you go by? Those business models I think are pretty great. I'm not like an open source maxi, because I just don't know enough about it to be a maxi about it, right, like, I think like. So in the context I'm coming at this from is more the protocol level. So with infrastructure stuff, I think open source makes a ton of sense. With DeFi protocols and just protocols in general, like maybe Metaflex and Revenue generating operations on chain, it seems this open source which is not open source discussion is relatively unsettled, like some people say.

12:40 For example, metaflex right Like Metaflex has this license such that you can fork it but you can't change the fees. And so is that really open source? Technically, not by definition, it's not open source. It is source available was better than nothing. But I don't know the answers there, if that makes sense, because I haven't built a protocol myself. I have some pretty strong opinions about this, as you're aware. Number one I think the examples you gave for infrastructure is just. It's not a new Thing, but not a lot of people realize that right like a huge part of the internet runs on open source software and the infrastructure Providers are providing services that use it, and there's a multi-billion dollar business opportunity there, I think. For for protocols it is. It is a bit different, and there's got to be a lot of experimentation.

13:22 For me, though, with the Metaflex issue, it was more about Transparency around the license and the fact that it was. It was a GPL license and then they changed it without Notifying customers, and for a developer like somebody building a business on top of a software that you think is open source and forkable, to have that change is a big problem, introduces risk. When there's a fee structure that you don't know what the fees are going to be later on. They can change it kind of Whenever, and what's that going to do to my business? You know you have to trust that whoever's in control of those smart contracts is gonna, you know, not introduce a fee structure, that that that breaks the business model for you. That's a real issue, I think, and I think there are always ways to monetize the like layer one, and then I would say, like Metaplex, which is smart contract on top of Solana.

14:08 You know, you can probably Find ways to monetize that that aren't a fee in the contract. If that's what you want to do, it's fine to do that. As long as you're transparent about that from from the start, you know, and then if people can choose to use it or not, that's great. I think that's one of the biggest issues is we need diversity of protocols that are usable on Solana, so that some you know, and I know that, like Genesis go released one recently and there's a couple other ones being worked on. But the flip side of it, the big, other big issues I love that you guys are collaborating with them and others on like compression, for example, and I wish that we could, that we just didn't have to have multiple standards, like it would be nice to the power of many people working on the same protocol and Ensuring it's secure, ensuring there's the know-how to use it, and like offering the services that you guys offer to the ecosystem and that other people are also competing against you to offer.

14:58 I think that's important. That creates a safe, competitive Marketplace and it's a great example of how open source can work really really well. So you know I would like to see that continue and it will. I mean, the reality is it's gonna take a while to replace something like Metaplex. They have a lot of a pretty big moat around the infrastructure required to even use their tools. Those are kind of my thoughts. I don't know if you have other ones related to that. I certainly empathize and Mirror your sentiments on the license being changed kind of maybe none the most transparent way. I wasn't aware of it and in fact totally wasn't aware of it. If people followed you know, people listening followed along on Twitter, I think. Not sure who first posted it it might have been Mike or Tracy from Genesis and Totally saw it and he didn't know and he said he was pissed.

15:46 And I don't think I've ever heard totally said he was pissed about anything ever and and I don't know ever, and that's the that's the CEO of Solana, by the way like guy goes to a lot of fun and so it's definitely a very nuanced and interesting topic. And so, like I don't know if I were to sum up my thoughts on this and you're much more of an expert on open source, I would say, for infrastructure plays, like, like, like Helios databases you know stuff like that in general. Totally like, open source is a great way to collaborate and build and collaborate and and push what's possible on these systems, and then you can, you can definitely monetize it properly, like you don't have to add a tax to the protocol, which is kind of where it gets interesting right.

16:29 Like there was the uniswap versus sushi swap thing that happened some time ago. There was, you know, a curve and then saber, and then curve was like throwing shit a saber, and obviously saber turned out to be other Things as well. I don't think there's clear consensus on this and I think it's gonna be like a fighting topic for some time and we need people who advocate for open source To be more vocal, to be more articulate and to really push their message and say like, hey, this is why it's better, like one corporate example we can, we can kind of look to is Microsoft right? Microsoft was traditionally Extremely close source, like giant evil Corp kind of type, and then now, more recently, with their acquisitions over the past you know, I don't know how long, but let's say five, six years at least, seven years at least they've been more and more friendly to open source and They've been much more successful as a result of that.

17:20 And so you know People listening this if you're concerned that, like you're gonna be successful because you're open source and maybe your comparison will steal stuff, I think that's especially in a space like crypto, where the market is super small. I think that's mistaken. Personally, for infrastructure plays, at least For protocols since I haven't built a protocol myself, I don't feel qualified to comment on that. I think at the protocol level it's all about adoption and the best way to get adoption is to build something that's easy for developers to contribute to and to use, and I think that that means you need to be open source. And because in our space, trust and transparency is so important, like it's about a value system, it's like, hey, do I have control of my destiny?

18:03 That's number one when I'm building in Web3, for me, if I don't have control over my destiny, that's a problem, because then we're getting into centralization and kind of going back to the model that I think all of us are trying to dig ourselves out of. It's really about a value system. Now, what kind of businesses can you build? There have been some successful businesses that are protocols, that have introduced fees, like yearn, like yearn finance, I think did a really interesting job doing that. I think a lot of DeFi actually has figured out how to capture some value from their protocols and leave them open source. The Uniswap and SushiSwap case is pretty interesting for people who don't know. Uniswap was open source I can't remember the license that they had and then they got forked by SushiSwap.

18:46 They got copied and SushiSwap took a lot of volume and became quite big and it was literally just a clone, an exact clone of Uniswap. It was my understanding. I might be getting some stuff wrong, so just cut me off if I am. And then I think that Uniswap after this updated their license to be something that's like source available and not open source for a period of time, like two years, and then their whole plan was to release better things in that timeframe and then anybody can copy their old stuff, but they wouldn't be able to copy the new stuff. I was kind of like anti that in the beginning, but I think it's worked. They've created the value you want to see created and they're still source available so you can trust the code and look at it.

19:26 I'm kind of coming around to it. Everything I've built has been GPL license, like all of Olaplex's technology is GPL license, and that's because I'm very interested to see if we can successfully build a business that is full stack, open source and forkable, and so it's a big kind of experiment for me. We've seen that. I mean WordPress is an example of a full stack, open source piece of software. That's been huge and it powers like 30% of the internet. So I think it's possible. But TBD with all these new paradigms that we have in crypto. It is something I spend a lot of time thinking about in my job just because I'm passionate about it. I recognize that I am a bit of a zealot, so I try to keep an open mind.

20:10 It's definitely an interesting conversation. This is probably one of my weakest areas in terms of just having clear values to articulate. I can see both sides of this argument and there's an argument to be made for crypto, and actually this brings up a good point, which is that I would bet that Solana would have taken off more if the culture was a bit more oriented towards open source. I've seen a non-trivial amount of people from Ethereum not being a fan of Solana purely due to the code being proprietary. I don't know if I remember correctly, but something about phantom being closed source versus MetaMask being open source, and that was actually a big deal for some people.

20:54 And MetaMask is way worse UX. But when you have an ideologically driven movement, it's not clear if the better UX wins, which is super different to web 2, which you obviously need the best product, the best street cards. I wonder how much damages cost. And it's interesting because, totally like you said, he's a massive open source maxi, probably more so than anybody else I know. I'm encrypted. To be honest, I think his bio is even wartime open source software. I love that. So maybe there's an argument to be made for similar to a real world analogy of governments and corporations where all the public stuff needs to be public.

21:36 I'm using these roads to understand that these roads will be always available to me, which is kind of why the MetaFlex situation was so annoying, because it's like maybe a corporation gets a subsidy from the government to build roads that everybody uses, but then now the roads have taxes and I'm like, wait a minute, this isn't a public good then. So I kind of don't understand what's happening, and so in that case I think open source clearly should win and needs to win for public goods. Then there's the argument to be made for these corporations and capitalism and you want to monetize your knowledge and secrets and you can do it in infrastructure super clearly, like I said with Healy, it's because the knowledge is your expertise in how to use that system and the integrations around that and we can give people advice on how to use it and set it up and maintain for them, because cloud and maintaining hardware is just difficult work.

22:28 But if it's something like Uniswap and SushiSwap, where somebody literally just clicks the fork button, the plaza's different front end and makes a lot of money from that. I can kind of see Haydn's point of view in that too, where it's like wait a minute, I did all this work, but now I'm getting vampire attacks with crypto incentives and tokens. I don't think there's a clear answer there. It's super obvious. Ok, so you're talking something really important. When I talk to founders and I'm afraid to open source like explain this to me. The biggest thing that they're afraid of is competition and I think nine times out of 10, it's really hard for somebody to out execute you. It's really about execution and not about how fast can they copy your code, and we've seen this in the traditional closed source SaaS world.

23:11 You'll see competitors pop up all around a successful software as a service business and they don't have access to the source code. That doesn't stop them from copying the entire business. However, crypto is a little bit different in that the liquidity like especially in DeFi and the example that you just made like liquidity can move permissionlessly very fast from one platform to another and that those vampire attacks like I mean it is crazy how fast like you can go to zero liquidity from one platform to another. It's like how do you build a moat and protect against that? And it's not easy. So I want to switch gears a little bit, because you talked about this a lot and I want to hear your opinion, at least on Twitter.

23:51 I've seen it the future of adoption in our space and building applications at scale that real people want to use. I think that's a really big problem that still needs to be solved. We've been talking about it since I joined crypto in 2016. And a lot of I think what's prevented us from achieving that Product Market Fit has been the infrastructure piece. But I think we're almost through there on the infrastructure side of things, where people can actually quickly build applications. So what's your opinion? Like, where are we? Can people build apps that are going to get Product Market Fit and cross the chasm into massive adoption? What ideas do you see out there that might actually work? Or like how are we as a group going to achieve that?

24:31 Because I feel like we haven't quite yet. You know there's been some breakout use cases, but nothing that's going to get us yet where we want to be, which is like billions of users. Right. So there's an interesting story here and I've been thinking about this specific problem quite frequently. So when crypto first released and when I say crypto I mean Ethereum in this context, smart contracts it wasn't super clear what you would be able to do with blockchains. And then certain memes came out, like a blockchain is just a slow database, like you don't need to use a blockchain for that, right.

25:11 There was a pretty long period of time and it's still kind of pervasive today, which is that why do you need a blockchain for building that app? Right? Like blockchains are useless, maybe you don't need them to just slow computers, inefficient, et cetera. Why would you want this? And so then NFTs came around and some other use cases came around where, okay, these are actually being used and there's demand from real people. They're using it for their daily life and for whatever it might be trading, community forming, p2p payments, et cetera. And then we ran into the issue because Ethereum wasn't ready of scalability right Now you was getting these crypto chattis happened and you had very high gas fees pricing people out, and then you had clunky UX and all this stuff.

26:01 Yeah, and just to quantify high gas fees, we're talking like thousands of dollars sometimes, like I remember back in the DeFi summer period and like when NFTs on ETH were exploding, just doing some insanely expensive trades. Exactly, and so we had this phase transition from blockchains are useless and they're just slow. Databases to blockchains are useful, but the infrastructure is not there. Okay, now, with the advent of Solana and even some of these L2s, the infrastructure isn't the bottleneck anymore not in my view. Okay, I think you can build a visa scale payments network on Solana right now.

26:41 I'm actually quite confident of that. If a team got together to build this global settlement network, let's say that is gonna take on visa and this is just coming from a purely technical perspective, not a political or product and stuff like that the network itself is technically capable of handling that. Okay, and I'm super confident of that. Okay, so what's the issue then? Right, because so now we've we went from phase transition from blockchains are maybe not useful to blockchains don't scale to blockchains scale, but there's no useful apps. Okay, and then now a lot of people have it's updated, their mental model for that. In my view, they still think and this is especially prominent with VCs they still think that the infrastructure is holding us back.

27:25 Right, they think, oh well, there's not useful apps because Ethereum gas fees or because you need rollups to have better UX, direct off-ramps from Coinbase and stuff like that and it's like no, no, no, no, you can scale. You can build scalable blockchain based or blockchain based consumer apps or whatever on Solana or even on some of these L2s right now. Like it can happen. I mean, you can look at Steppen, right, steppen's built on Solana. It works pretty well. I never heard anyone complain. I mean, obviously, the tokenomics might be a little interesting there, let's say, for legal reasons, okay, like there's things like Drip House, there's like dialect, there's all these other things. There's Helium, high Map right, teleport. The scale is not the problem anymore.

28:07 The problem now is it's a very sneaky and sinister problem, my view, and it's one that I'm super focused on solving, or at least trying to make a dent in. Which is that? Not the scalability is there, but people, for ideological reasons now either, don't know this, because maybe they think that Ethereum is the only true way to build crypto applications, which obviously I feel like that just holds back the entire space. Like, sure, you can build good stuff on Ethereum, 100% and even with L2s, but if you want something with true scale, like world scale, you can do that on Solana right now and to vilify and say, like Solana is centralized because maybe it has a few thousand less nodes in Ethereum, it does not mean it's centralized, it just means it's not as decentralized.

28:57 A different trade off. The problem right now, or what people think is scalability, is actually pretty close to being solved. I mean, I don't want to say solved, because engineering is never solved, but you can build scalable things on Solana right now and it's like okay, why don't people do it? Well, one crypto has a bad rep, okay, it's full of Ponzi's, it's full of scams, it's full of bad actors that have given this space a horrible name, and so there's a clear narrative and branding and messaging problem within crypto. And, of course, now AI has also taken off and AR and VR, and so if you're a talented entrepreneur or a young, ambitious founder, let's say it's gonna be difficult for you to be able to cut through the noise and say, hey, crypto is actually legit when AI is obviously already useful, and so is AR and VR, whereas crypto, there's that friction, there's that step they need to get over to see through the noise, okay, so that's number one.

29:57 At the end of the day, venture is a numbers game, and if you're not getting as many talented founders as you can into the space then product market fit is just gonna suffer. Okay, like it's a probabilities game. Well, and that's also like where do you deploy your capital? You know, it's like half the amount of people are building now than they were in the bull market, like new teams getting funded. It's not just that there's not money out there, it's also there's not as many people actually building companies. Yes, agreed. So to circle about the original question, it's like okay, well, what's the state of crypto? And is infrastructure the bottleneck? Like, infrastructure right now is not the bottleneck. It might not be perfect and it's for sure not perfect, but it does work Like it does scale.

30:40 And so the first problem we need to get over is this messaging stuff. That's gonna be difficult. It's fair game to think that might take years, because you're gonna need to look at this breakout app. Essentially, you're gonna need this breakout experience, something like a clubhouse, for example, or a Venmo or Snapchat, like something that a lot of people use and that is clearly uniquely enabled by blockchains. And maybe that's a game. But we just need that part first to break through. We need to permeate the messaging barrier. And then number two is crypto is just full of noise. So there's kind of two perspectives I see here.

31:21 One is if you're outside of crypto, it's already full of so much noise. Like you don't know. Okay, nfts are scams. Why would I want a picture of a JPEG? Why is that the future of finance? Right? Like I don't know any of these things? Okay, let's say you now understand that. Okay, crypto actually gives you the right to own your digital identity and digital finances, and it's a new way of thinking about the digital world. Okay, let's say you're now convinced of that. Okay, now you have to get through another barrier of noise, which is what is the pros and cons of each different chains, okay, so now it's like okay, am I gonna build on Ethereum? Am I gonna build on Bitcoin? Am I gonna build on Salon? Am I gonna build on Cosmos? Am I gonna build on Roll-Ups? Cause you know, the CT influencer told me that Salon is a scam, but then the other one told me that Ethereum is a scam and that Bitcoin is the only true religion, and so there's just so many layers of noise and bullshit that somebody needs to get through that.

32:16 It all cascades up into this numbers game, which is that people aren't coming into crypto for the right reasons, and if they are, they need to shuffle through so much noise to actually get to the signal. Okay, and there's an argument to be made there about is this a fundamental problem, right? Is the combination of financial incentives in tech and this hyper-financialization liquidity actually a fatal flaw, right? Like, if everything is this financialized, are the incentives gonna get so blurry that we never get anything done? Or is it that it's just gonna be very noisy at first and then we'll clear it up? Okay, I don't think that's clear right now because with AI, like you go into AI as a builder, you're like I just want to build cool shit.

33:01 Okay, I want to build super solid tech that I want to build Jarvis from Iron man. I want to build, like, cool image generators. I want to build automations, I want to build sentines, ai in crypto or an AR. You it's like, okay, well, I want to build, like ready player number one, right. Or I want to build, trying, I'm gonna build these crazy special computing experiences in crypto. That's not really the case, right, like I mean, it is sometimes the case like, hey, I want to build, you know, immutable, sensory-resistant money. I want to build these super hyper structures. But then there's also a lot of people that are like I want to come here to make money and get rich. And then those people what ends up happening is maybe one of them gets lucky, maybe they were early in, I don't know some scam coin X, and then now Other people that see that person get rich now start following the leader, that person, and then now they Think he is the correct one.

33:55 And then now they're spreading his bullshit. And then now you have the blind leading the blind and the real builders are like wait a minute, why is that guy successful from just scanning people? Maybe I should do the same. And then now you get all these network effects of people Getting their incentives and vision so blurred. It's just full of noise, right, it's like a company going public, but everybody's a shareholder in your company and it's as a builder. It's super difficult. You need to have an extremely solid belief system and you need to have extremely high conviction To actually see through the noise and get to your signal and execute on your vision. So you're touching on some, really some things that are really important to me personally.

34:36 It's kind of gets to the why behind why I do this show, and it's because I believe that I believe that people are worth knowing, like, specifically, the people who are building Web 3, our space, and have those value systems in place. Things like caring about open source software, caring about censorship, resistance, decentralization, access to the, to permissionless protocols on the internet. These are things that are really important to me and I've and I've Learned about these things from other people in this space and those people some of those people are, like the most connected people in Crypto, but some of them are totally new as well, who are coming into the space for the first time, but they have the right values, and so for me, this show is about Telling their stories and connecting it with a broader audience.

35:24 Like I really want to break through that noise that you're talking about in the media and get to like a broader audience to show them. Hey, yeah, there are all of these problems of weird scammy type things that we see, but there are also real people who care about the world, who think the internet needs to be better than it was, and that's what we're all kind of working towards. And so by telling their stories, like hopefully educate a massive Audience, especially as we build it through this bear market and get towards the next cycle, and then hopefully attract those real builders who want to build impactful products that change the world. That's why I do the show. And then the second piece of it for me is connecting those people together, because I think that, like it's really easy, especially cross ecosystems, to get isolated from each other and not like know that these people, the other people, exist Right, and so can we connect them together.

36:12 And then I'm kind of a connector, like I see opportunities, like you'll tell me. After that we get up the show, I'll be like, hey, what do you, what's the biggest challenge you're facing? And then you'll have something that I might know, the guy or the gal that's like got that solution and I try to connect them from my network. I think that people matter a lot and telling their stories matter, and that's something that we have to Especially like break out of crypto. Twitter it's such an echo chamber Like I'm starting to really start posting content on on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and just trying to like see if I can reach people outside of the echo chamber that we live in. You're such a good communicator, you know you do. You do a great job on Twitter, communicating with people, and I think that we need more people that have that skill, that are saying these things.

36:52 We're getting towards the top of the show. I always ask us at the end what if I not asked you that I should have asked. One question that might be useful for people Listening to this. The way I approach stuff like this is like if it helps just one person, then it's time well spent and Like the question probably would be something along the lines of okay, so, given that there's this much noise, what's the solution? What do we do? What? What should I do as a builder, as a developer, as a community manager, whatever role I play in this, in this crypto world? What should I do? What can I do to help with with this problem? So, if that's the question and you actually already tackle this Pretty much, but I just want to make sure it's super clear you can't fight Lies with truth, like there's, there's a saying by teleb, I kind of forget it but you can't fact check like lies.

37:50 You must tell a better story. If there's a story going around that crypto is a scam or slums a scam or whatever, something that's just untrue. This is super, super important, right, it has to be untrue. If it is true and you're telling a story to Falsify it, then you're kind of the problem. That's propaganda. But if it's something true, like okay, slums a scam, okay, no, it's not. Okay, it's just not a scam, crypto scam. It's like no, it's not, it's not a scam, that's just stupid. There are scammers, but it's not a scam, the entire field. And so, okay, what do you do? Well, you tell a better story than the people saying that's this like, surely there's a better story to be told than Crypto's a scam? Obviously, people feel comfortable in their Whatever daily lives.

38:30 Oh, there's, this is one less thing I have to worry about, it's a scam, I don't need to worry about it. But then there's a better story to be told there, which is that you know, there's this Uncensored global computer that anybody from the world can connect to, whether you're from India, whether you're from Bangladesh, uk, you know Alaska, whatever. And you can connect to this computer and you can build things without anybody telling you what you can or can't do, and you can send money from two farthest points in the world in Seconds at most, with no fees, or little fees, depending on what network you use, and you can deploy applications and code that can run forever on these networks and your, your communication, your messages will never be censored and you don't have to play by the rules of these big corporations.

39:25 You can help decentralize the world, such that sense of you know the outcomes are better distributed rather than extremely parallel distributed, which you'll never get around that some people will always be more competent than others and people who deserve you know the money that they deserve will get it. Okay. There's surely a better story in there and people can tell the story much better than me. But what I want to highlight is Tell your story right, like you're not gonna like if somebody says, for example, solana's a centralized chain, okay. Let's say somebody says that. You can't just say Solana is not a centralized chain, okay. Like that's not gonna permeate anything. You're not gonna change anybody's mind with that. You must tell a better story like why should they use Solana?

40:06 Why should they use crypto? Right, and a lot of people in crypto, especially the Because there's a lot of people who are like super smart and maybe in D5 or MEV and and low level info stuff, these guys are super, super intelligent. They're very smart, but they're super smart in talking to machines, which is valuable skill set. But we also need the people who can talk to humans, and a lot of people are. You know I made a tweet about this the other day, which is that a lot of technical people are scared of speaking up on Twitter or whatever written or verbal Medium because they think they'll look stupid, they'll make a mistake. Right, and that's totally the wrong way to think about it.

40:48 Like people care too much about what. Like nobody really cares that much about what you have to say. If it's false, right Like, for example, in this podcast, I'm sure I messed up a technical detail somewhere, I don't care right Like we somebody can correct that it's not, unless I say something completely like a blatantly lie, which which is a problem. But if it's something like slightly off, like as a technical person, I said like if I said, for example, slant of block times are 400 ms instead of like 450 ms, that's fine. Okay, that's not something. What matters is the content of what I'm saying, that the story that I'm telling, and I Don't know. I think we need to do more of that and basically, my advice would be to anybody who's listening Start writing stories, start talking about what you're doing and just be an advocate.

41:32 Just tell your story. If you're a builder out there and you're listening to this and you, you need help telling your story. Hitmer and I, up DMs, are open Happy to get you on my podcast and talk about it and help translate that into something, a message that people will listen to. And you now it's recently right, you're doing that, that new podcast you want to talk about that real quick before we wrap up. Oh sure, thanks. So block works, a crypto publication media network, is releasing a new podcast called light speeds, of which I will co-host. It's going to focus on some of the things we tackle in this podcast, actually, which is the the consumer facing side of things users, products and going back to the earlier days of Silicon Valley of like being an outlaw, iterating shipping stuff, getting users and We'll be bringing out people who are interested and and similarly aligned in our vision of that and we hope to Really kind of talk about what crypto can enable in terms of use cases and how can impact these products.

42:27 Awesome. I can't wait to see that ship. What's it going to be called? Yes, it's gonna be called light speed. I speed. You said that cool light speed you guys can follow, I think the Twitter handle is light speed pod HQ on Twitter. We haven't released his first episode yet, but our first few guests will be quite, quite fun to listen to, I think awesome, can't wait. Well, hey, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show and hope to have you back on sometime soon. Maybe maybe in a couple months, after you've had some more of those episodes under your belt for your show, we can talk about some of the stuff you've learned. I found that I've learned a ton from Interviewing people and connected with them on mine, so we'd love to have you back sometime soon. Yeah, absolutely, that'd be awesome. Thanks for having me.

43:08 You just heard the index podcast with your host, alex Kahaya. If you enjoyed this episode, please give the show a five star rating and subscribe on Apple, spotify, google or your favorite streaming platform. New episodes available every other Wednesday. Thanks for tuning in.