Genfinity Spaces with Casper, Hedera, XRPL and more! (Part 1)

In this spaces hosted by King Solomon and Genfinity, leaders of the Hedera network, Casper, XRP and more chains talk about the necessary steps to break the silos that exist in web3.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you so much, Medha, for joining, and thank you, Cliff, for joining as well. Give you guys a little bit of a background. Obviously, within these Twitter spaces, through Genfinity, we try to create as much cross-chain synergy as possible. Really try to break down the silos that really exist throughout the Web 3 space. So, you know, if you look up at the panel right now, we have multiple ecosystems represented from Casper to Alliance Block to hbar to XRP to Vechain. I'll get, Cigtoshi back up here, surrender, do shield and search. It's a pleasure to have absolutely everybody here. I know the last time we did kind of a really big Twitter space, we did not get a chance to hear a lot from Casper. So, I definitely want to give Casper a little bit of a floor today but kind of also run the gamut throughout all of these ecosystems. So, I want to start with Medha. You guys were just at Davos, and I was watching your, thank you so much for joining by the way. So, Medha is the CTO of Casper. Maybe you want to give like a quick intro yourself, real quick. I've got a couple of pretty cool questions I think the community would love to hear.

Casper Labs – Medha Parlikar – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, I'm happy to give an intro. Yeah, so a Medha Parlikar. I'm the CTO and one of the co-founders of Casper Labs, and we're the company that built the technology that powers the Casper Network. The network is public and permissionless. It's owned and operated by the validators and the delegators in the network. They control the network, and the Casper Association is the steward that helps govern the network and helps get developers to adopt. They also sponsor Grant programs and the like. And Casper Labs is really focused on Enterprise adoption. And I myself, I come from 25 years in what is now called Web2 but large Enterprise SAAS companies is where I've worked as a, you know, engineering director. I've been, you know, building software since gosh, the, you know, mid-early 80s, early 90s. I'm dating myself as I say that, but yeah, really excited to, you know, be involved in crypto and blockchain. I fell into the rabbit hole in 2017, and haven't looked back since.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Well, I definitely, I kind of like last time, last week when we did this space, for those of you guys that listened. I kind of just ran through a bunch of intros with everybody. I do want to kind of take the first little portion of this Twitter space tonight to really dive deeper into some Casper questions. And I will say, meta, I watched the interview you did with CZ, and the first question that you asked was about his haircut. I'm not going to get into a haircut today because I'm bald, so I don't want to get into any bald shaming out there, power to all the bald men out there and bald women, hey, whoever you are, but, I wanted to get into some of the recent updates that Casper has been pushing out. The first thing that I saw coming out of Davos was IP. We essentially 25 million patent nfts on Casper, and then you guys expanded out into just kind of this really what to look forward to in 2023 initiative that you published on Twitter, expanded partnerships with Hyperledger and IBM, a new Fortune 100 partner, can you kind of dive into what are some of the most exciting achievements that Casper had in 2022? Not just getting through the depths of the bear market, and what are you most looking forward to in 2023 from Casper Labs and the Casper Network?

Casper Labs – Medha Parlikar – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, so like 2022 was really all about, setting up our business development process to go after enterprise. Right, so the company's been around for four years. Of that, we spent two and a half years completing the CBC Casper research and highway and launching mainnet. And then we spent probably about a good, you know, six to eight months after that working across the Devex DAO, and the Casper Association and the community to build out a lot of the infrastructure and struts, right? What it takes to build, basically a new L1 with its own VM. Right, we're not EVM compatible, and that was very it, still remains a strategic decision. It's a gamble that you know,  I think it's a hedge, definitely a hedge bet based on my experience, that Renault and I are making and the community has been so amazing in supporting us in that. But so that's what 2020 you know up to 2022 was really about a lot of the work in the background scenes was going on building all of the announcements that you saw take place, right? So the X Prize partnership is huge, it's a little hard to kind of overstate just how big it is to have Peter Diamandis and Anush Ansari up there on stage saying, "Hey, we're going to build our Global governance community governance model for X Prize starting with the Casper Network, because we have all the governance contracts and all the governance infrastructure built." That took a long time to build, right? That's what we were focused in 2022. Additionally, the Fortune 100 companies, there's a lot of back and forth, a lot of solution architecture, a lot of conversations, a lot of prototyping that was done in 2022 to bring, you know, to make that a reality. Enterprises move really slowly, and so there's been a lot of conversations happening with the enterprises in the background and that's what 2022 is really about. And so we're really excited, uh, to you know getting to a place where a lot of these things are coming to life, right? We've, we also launched you know, Chengdu Chain. That was a 2022 effort, and that's the open permissioned, uh, blockchain protocol which is you know, funnily enough, something that is really a lot of interest to governments. Governments really like this notion and given the, you know, I love what crypto can bring, but the reality is with the FTX debacle and other challenges that we're facing in the space, we've got a bad rap, right? And so we need to boil the frog slowly, we need enterprises and governments to adopt at a pace that they feel comfortable with and sometimes that's going to mean you know, tokenless blockchains, right? And so we provide them an option there which they can change later on with the configuration if they deem later on that hey, we're really familiar with Casper Network and we really like the technology, and now we want to, you know, move to a more you know, token-centric model. They can do that by just pushing an upgrade is out, so we've built the technology in a way that gives them the flexibility in the solution they can do with it what they want to do for the future. That's a little bit about 2022 and 2023. I'm really excited about being able to talk about some of these things, starting with some of the big announcements you made.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, and I mean, I know Sadaf's up here as a co-host right now. One of the things that Sadaf has always kind of said is, "it's not a bear market, they're considering it a build market," which I think is that's kind of really what we're seeing from these ecosystems that are really going to be built out providing real value within the web 3 space. And even watching your interview with CZ, talking about currency for the internet, I did see kind of one thing that I caught within the updates as well that I would love for you to touch on, and then I want to get to Rasheed here in a second too and ask him some questions. But you talk about SOC 2 type 2, which I don't believe any other blockchain ecosystem from what you guys have stated has attained that level of compliance. What does that represent for Casper, the network, and is this kind of the motto moving forward: "let's do things in a way where we're going to be that shining star in this space and just really trying to attain levels of compliance that we haven't seen yet?

Casper Labs – Medha Parlikar – Founder & CTO
‍Definitely, so a couple of initiatives on the compliance front. Number one, businesses do need to maintain regulatory compliance. Businesses, government, businesses, banks, financial institutions, they have to maintain regulatory compliance. And what's implicit in that is that they need to have some control over specific facets of the blockchain implementation. If you look in the enterprise, you're going to find big separations of concerns. When I say separations of concerns, I talk about the chief security officer (CSO) who needs to maintain SOC 2 compliance. Basically, it's a system security access control audit, also known as ssae. It's all about access to sensitive customer information. Within the enterprise, this is an extremely important thing. I maintain that in the blockchain space, we talk about governance, we talk about blockchain governance, but I've always maintained, and those of you that have followed me know that I say this all the time, is all software; all software is governed. Every single piece of software is governed. If you think it's easy to make an update to amazon.com, you got another thing coming, right? Those updates happen, they may happen through a lot. They happen through a lot of testing, there's a lot of controls, there's a lot of checks and balances, there's a lot of continuous integration, continuous deployment, there's a lot of people that sign off on go/no-go's. There's a very finite number of people that have access to their production systems, all of it is tracked, logged, and monitored, and it's all controlled by somebody that's called the Chief Security Officer (CSO). So, in the Enterprise, you know what we're seeing is IEEE is coming up with a blockchain governance model. Right, there isn't a cookie-cutter for it, but what you'll find is that there's a set of requirements where an Enterprise needs to be able to control who does what when and they need to know who did what when. And you need a blockchain and you need a system, all your systems need to be able to be logged and monitored and controlled in that way. And what I found in looking at a lot of the blockchain systems that are out there is they didn't have a very strong account model. So, what's interesting is not only is Casper Labs SOC 2 compliant, but Enterprises that implement the Casper Network can actually use the Casper account model even in mainnet to implement really complex and robust governance models for their on-chain contracts and their systems, right? And I think this is going to be really, really important. We have found that it's really valuable even on something as simple as robust custody models for on-chain assets all the way to who can actually, you know, how blockchain contracts are governed. But you can do it in the accounts, you don't have to encode it in your smart contracts, which allows you to separate who can change the contract from the contract code itself. When I believe that separation of concerns is really, really important in the Enterprise now.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍And when you said I believe, uh, that's, um, that's the Institute of Electro-electrical and electronics Engineers that we always see all the documentation coming out of, if you're like exactly, if you're a wild animal with research and you're looking at like crazy academic papers, you do stumble across IEEE quite a bit. I wanted to ask Kevin real quick because, Medha, I definitely want to ask you guys about 2.0, even like the NFT ecosystem. But I want to kind of uh go through the panel a little bit here. So, thank you so much for giving us so much valuable information. Kevin, I know that you, because I want to get CigToshi up here again as well from Vechain,  you've been a steward of the you know, multiple ecosystems forever, whether that be Casper or Alliance Block or XRP or you know, Algo, and you kind of have, like a, I don't want to say like, in the know, but you've been paying attention to Casper at a very definitive level, for a very long time, is there anything that you'd like to kind of mention up here?

Kevin Cage
‍Yeah, I'm just excited that you know, we're well over a year with mainnet being live and we're witnessing layer ones in the building phase. The infrastructure is getting there, whether it's you know, DEXes and NFT marketplaces, exchange listings are going to be coming later. I'm just excited because we've seen what other alts have done after a couple years of deployment, especially during a bull run. And yeah, I'm just excited long term.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, I know we don't really ever get into price in these things, but I saw a tweet that you put out where it's like, if Ethereum got to this you know, type of a market cap, who's saying that other layer ones building out with potentially more utility can't reach and surpass kind of the same, you know, I guess from a price standpoint from the same initiatives that you know, Ethereum was able to would she achieve, which I, you know, if you've been here long enough, you kind of know my position on that and I know you're so I totally agree with your tweet that you put out. So, I do know Kevin, I know you said that you, you know, you don't want to talk way too much during this, but can I get Cigtoshi back up here? Do you mind hopping down for a couple minutes, Kevin? And then I want to pivot to uh, yeah, if you want to come back up, dude, you know, I with you all the time for sure.

Kevin Cage
‍Yeah, one other thing I want to add is even during last cycle when the total market cap topped at 3 trillion during that time speculatively we still saw assets in the top 20, top 50 have you know, 20 billion dollar market caps, 50 billion dollar market caps, and this is still speculative. So, I can't imagine in the next decade where enterprises can take this.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I'll ask you real quick because I know a lot of people are always interested in and price and not talking about any individual asset, but you know, you pull FIBs, you do TA on a consistent basis, at a very conservative level, what's your opinion as far as you know, total market cap of crypto, let's say 2025. Where, where could we potentially get to?

Kevin Cage
‍I think we'll range within the channel, um, between 1 trillion to maybe five to eight if we're lucky. I would love to blast past three, but we'll see in the future.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thanks, Kevin, and I'll bring you back up, dude let me get Cigtoshi back up here, Kevin. I'm gonna hop you down for one second. Let me go to my Michael, can you still hear? Let me go to Michael real quick. So, one of the initiatives, obviously, with an Alliance Block has been the funders platform, taking on, I think, the first two projects within funders recently, one of those being Bonq DAO. Can you give us kind of an overview of all, you know, what, because I had the opportunity to meet with you and talk to you for about 45 minutes, an hour probably, a week or two ago,  I really love the due diligence aspect of what you guys are doing for who you want to be working with. Can you give us an overview of Bong DAO and the kind of the empowerment aspect from a liquidity management standpoint that you're offering to uh projects and ecosystems that are going to be working with you guys?

Bonq DAO – Michal Bacia - Founder
‍Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, yeah, I read the, you know, the title of the, the event, "Breaking Down Silos," and I love it because Bonq is on a mission to break down liquidity silos in the crypto space. So, we've built a platform that enables accessing self-sovereign liquidity. So, what it means is, every project that has their own native token can whitelist their token with Bonq and then use it in our platform as collateral and mint themselves Bonq Euro that is backed by this collateral at zero percent interest. So, protocols and webtry projects can utilize the liquidity that is trapped in their treasury without having to sell their token and they can create as deep liquidity for their own native token as they want and just pair it with the Bunkura without selling them. And let's say, by whitelisting their token, they are unlocking the same opportunities and deal strategies for their entire community of holders. So, this is "yes, go ahead."

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍What networks are you guys working with kind of natively right now,  if you can kind of let the community know and then can you talk about some of the requirements standpoint that you mentioned?

Bonq DAO – Michal Bacia - Founder
‍Absolutely so, our strategy is multi-chain, but we had to start somewhere and we launched on Polygon in December and this gives us access to all ERC20 tokens that are on Ethereum and on Polygon currently. But let's say on our roadmap, there is an actual pursuit of multi-chain strategy. We just, you know, we kind of didn't like the number one cause of losses was FTX last year and number two was Bridge hacks. So, we really want to make sure that we have safe solutions for our community. And as far as the listing requirements, so we have a formalized data-driven risk model. Our CEO Delia spent over 20 years managing hedge funds, including for BlackRock. So, she's let's say, quite strict on the requirements and the process and rightfully so. We take into account three major aspects of every token. So, number one is Fundamentals. We look at the team, we look at the longevity of the project, we look at the token economics, we look at the fundamental value proposition of the project and how the token plays into the solution. Number two is technical due diligence. We look at smart contracts, we look at smart contracts' code, we look at whether software is actually open source or not, if there are code repositories, what was the quality of this, has there been any major hacks or not. And finally, there is a market analysis. We just need to take at least six months of trading data of a token and we look at stuff like market cap, daily volume, what are the markets' tokens being traded and volatility. Let's say, when we plug this in into our model, then we know, first of all, whether the token qualifies to be whitelisted or not, and secondly, what are the borrowing criteria, in terms of like borrowing limits, or you know, LTV or collateralization ratio.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍This kind of stuff, yeah. In the the one thing I always try to do represent within these spaces is, you know, even if you're from a different ecosystem, network, ledger chain, whatever it may be, trying to create synergy between all the panelists up here. And if you hear something that somebody's doing that's interesting, I always try to recommend trying to follow across ecosystems because, contacts,  down the line, and networking, I think, is one of the one of the largest aspects that says that's really going to drive forward kind of this patchwork of solutions. It does create interoperability, kind of the internet of value aspects that we're all going to see as mainstream adoption does occur. And I will say also, Michael comes from, from Bonq DAO, a lot of experience in the web 3 space, working with Energy Web, for quite some time as well. I hope Rasheed, has a little bit of service that we can hop back up, but, before let's somebody else try to get Rasheed up here.

Bonq DAO – Michal Bacia - Founder
‍So, yeah. So, look, look, let me just briefly summarize. If, if anybody listening out there, if you have your own native token and you're wondering whether it can get listed, please contact me or contact any of the Bonq team members or any of our channels on Telegram or Discord. And you know, we have a winter special where her first projects, we basically wave the listing fee as long as the project qualifies. And, yeah, I haven't mentioned that five tokens are already listed. So we have Alliance Blog, that can be used as collateral, we have USDC, we have DIE, we have Ethereum, and we have Matic. So, if you have any of those five tokens, you can go on to app dot and actually start using it right away and start participating in our real strategies.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍One of the interesting things Michael, and hopefully Rasheed, you have, uh, service for, one of the interesting things Michael that you mentioned to me was really again going back to the due diligence aspect, like doing a deep dive into the tokenomics of projects before you onboard them into your platform. And I think that that is massively important to kind of avoid things like we've seen over the past year. So, kudos to you guys for the way that you guys are doing it as well, and again, I want to get back to, Medha with the NFT aspects, but I want to lead into, kind of Rasheed, do you have service now, Rasheed.

Alliance Block – Rachid Ajaja – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, oh, good, hopefully it will work, it will continue like this.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Did you, did you hear my, you want me to repeat? I can repeat the question again. Okay, so, outside of just making it through 2022 from a building standpoint, what are some of the most exciting aspects moving forward into 2023 for Alliance Block? Whether that be the DAO announcement that you guys just came out with over the past week, next era ID, which just came out over the past month, dealing in, you know, data custody and management, self-sovereign identity, zkps, or are there some things you know that you, that you may be excited about that may have not been even announced yet, if you kind of just want to walk us through, uh, what you guys were looking forward to in 2023.

Alliance Block – Rachid Ajaja – Founder & CEO
‍So, yeah, thank you, thank you very much, King. So indeed 2022 was a year for us to put the foundation in place. As Alliance Block, we wanted to build an ecosystem and bridge between traditional finance and centralized finance. However, since we are building everything ourselves and are multi-chain by construction, it takes time. In 2022, we focused on building the decentralized exchange and the decentralized funding platform, as well as trustless identity verification through authentication and encryption layers and role-based access control. We also developed middleware DeFi tooling, allowing any project to launch a white leverage platform without having to know about smart contracts. 2022 was also the year of sales mode. I spoke at the Blockchain HUB in Davos about dynamic NFTs and the mutability of NFTs. I presented our concepts of meta NFTs, which are mutable, composable, and extensible, and we continued to work on this through 2022. In 2023, we have released Nextera ID to the world, which is about self-sovereign identity and self-custody. This is particularly important in light of what happened with FTX. Furthermore, CBDC is an application of what we are doing with Nextera ID, plus regulatory compliance. We are working on regulatory compliance, including ISO 27001 and financial transaction compliance rules. Our goal is to have NFTs as data containers that can represent all the actions someone takes on chain, including investments, funding, and liquidity mining but also his introduction, like within like with the project, and then it can even be the foundation of its credit score reputation, like his inventory, basically. So it's the digital passport, and I would say this is exactly what is like what we are excited because we have released the first partnership among many that are coming. So the first partnership which were released last week is HardBanks. So we spoke a lot. So I remember in 2020 we spoke a lot about the SEOS, we spoke a lot about tokenization, but tokenization of real-world assets. But unfortunately, we didn't have like even if we had the technology to be able to do tokenization, but it was imposed, we didn't have the technology to have the liquidity, okay? So, and then we had like making unbankable as bankable. But at the end, we don't have any liquidity to make them bankable, so this was the funniest, the funny parts. But now, I think we have all the building blocks to be able to do the real-world asset tokenization and this is starting with us with these big partners which is Art Banks. It's based in Switzerland and is one of the biggest Hardback landing platforms. They have 1.5 billion assets under management, and for us, it's really important because it has two components. It has one tokenization and fractionalization components and it also has this, like bringing tokenizing this real-world assets. And this is where I see something that is really a perfect match with Bonq, because we are able actually, and this is what I said earlier, that it's not before we couldn't make the bankable assets bankable because of we have the tokens, but we couldn't have the liquidity. But now I think the combination about tokenization, fractionalization, and being able to borrow against them, which is mint in this view or stablecoin, it will make this liquidity a reality, and this is why I love the strategy from bulk because there it's not just having white-listed only one asset but you will be able actually to white-list mutual assets, given the token economics, and so on and so forth, the risk metrics like all the risk that they will be taking into account to be able to have the best quarter ratio, but this is only like digital assets. So it's the automatic ethereum, but then we can see that we can use this tokenized real-world assets so it could become actually like this talking raised Arts, which provide the liquidity for high net worth individuals, so without even being like a let's say the uh, how can I say that? They are need. They need to go to the banks, they need to wait, and you know that everything around insurance and all these things that is very, very hard so everyone will be able to borrow against their own assets. Now, something that is absolutely important is, we noticed lately that you have a lot of companies and funds from the traditional financial space that provide debt financing, that's bring, for example, everything around, like a total like a total return swaps, convertible bonds, and other actually like financial instrument to finance, private like non-listed equities. And these companies, I can share, there is LDA DWF, Abu Securities, Abu Digital. So, these guys actually that have been financing billions of billions in the traditional markets with non-non-listed equities, they are coming into the crypto space, and this is I would say, very, very bullish movement because there is this, like, there is even though that the market is low compared to what we are what we were two years ago, but there are multiple financial instruments that are coming into the crypto space to finance this company, multiple companies of course. We can see the positive side but, of course, and also negative side, but for me, I see more mainly the positive side of this because we are able actually to provide these financial instruments and we are able to tokenize them. So we will search and this is something that excites me a lot as well is the tokenization of, uh, convertible bonds as well that we will start working on actually super, super soon, and we will have announcements on this. So really, we are entering into the tokenization error where everyone speaks about it, but when we speak tokenization, we need to speak also compliance, regulatory compliance, rule engine who can do what given his jurisdiction, and this is where we have the nextera ID and which and any identity solution basically, which have the verifiable credential and something also I'm really excited about and I come back to Casper labs because Casper app. So, if I speak a lot with the teams as well, Medha, I remember when we were like running to validation, not we were always like on the on the Discord, and there is one amazing project which is run by Casper lab which is making this, smart financial contracts which is based on actus protocol and actually, this is really good because you can actually like model and like have all these financial instruments that are completely represented dynamically online and this is something that we can see the call like how we can leverage these NFTs as data container that are mutable, extensible with the new standard that Casper lab as are working on and this is all the things that are very exciting. So like to some sum it up, 2023 for me is really the year of tokenization of bring your reward assets into onchain, having everything around, like identity, self-servant identity, self-custody, and I would say all the years before it was really to be able to build this building blocks to finally come to a stage where we can see some kind of adoption and yeah, I'm very, very excited and bullish about 2023.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I definitely want to ask, matter about, dynamic NFTs and kind of everything the Casper was doing around that I did want to kind of I want to take this twofold because there's so many people up here I did want to kind of make an introduction Rasheed with Alliance block the nextera ID stuff that you guys are doing and allowed Dan from Serenity Shield to maybe just give a little bit of a breakdown about what Serenity Shield is facilitating and then I want to kind of get into after that. ot only liquidity but user experience and user engagement and kind of talk to you know, allow HashPack to talk about what they're doing from the Hedera ecosystem, it's certainly the Hedera ecosystem, not strangers whatsoever, it's an Enterprise grade usage of a network um and then kind of get into you know, astronaut with the gamified theme kind of pivoting from Ethereum into Hedera, and then Bread and Cigtoshi as well uh Building out on V-chain but Dan if you could give us like a brief breakdown on you know what's the Serenity Shield is doing from kind of that that data custody that Sovereign identity aspect that would be fantastic because again, I always do see some Synergy with some of the solutions being represented from across multiple ecosystems and multiple builders in this space.

Serenity Shield – Dan – Head Copywriter
‍So absolutely King and thanks for uh thanks for having us man, it's always great to be here with you guys. I'm gonna be coming at this from a little bit of a different perspective and a different angle because frankly I'm not a tech guy, all right, and I'll be the first person to say this, and I hope this doesn't come across as impertinent, but I'll be honest with you guys, I couldn't follow half of what y'all were talking about. Okay, so let me let me just say why that's an issue and I'll get into what we're doing in a minute but because it all wraps up into the same thing when we have these talks like this, and we've got people from the broader community in here, some of them are going to follow what we're talking about, most of them aren't, and that I think is look, it gets to exactly what the topic of this space is supposed to be about: breaking down silos. And we're talking about breaking down silos between projects, between blockchains, between that sort of thing, but we're really ignoring the most important silo of all and that's adoption, right? And Rasheed you were talking about the user experience and yet we're not even doing a very good job of making sure that the people who are coming to this space have a good experience so that they can even understand what the hell we're talking about. So to get back to answering your question King, here's what we're doing: sure, we've gotten the tech under control, we launched our MVP last year. We're super proud of that. It was awesome, and it's going to continue to improve. We're gonna be going B2B later on this year, that's big. But let me tell you the most important thing I'm proud of: we are starting to expand our educational offerings. So, what does that mean? We're already starting, we're already in talks with an organization that does professional education for B2B in such varied industries as finance, estates, trusts, property insurance, this sort of thing. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what we say to one another. Look, we're going to work with one another, we're the ones that are left in the middle of... I mean, whatever this shitstorm of a bear market has been, it is a building market, yes, but it's also been hell for a lot of people, all right? So, we're going to come together, we're going to build what we're going to build, and we're going to do what we're going to do, right? Because that's what we're here for: we're builders. The problem is that there's a lot of people out there that have no clue what's going on, and if we don't actively take the steps to reach out to those people and bring them in and make sure that they understand that we have their best interests at heart, we're going to lose them, and we're going to lose them to organizations and companies that we don't want to lose them to. It's that simple. We don't want to admit that to ourselves, it seems, but it's true. So, to get a little bit more in depth with that, we are actually creating an educational arm where we're going to start building up our own engineers. That's the other component of our educational vertical. But more than anything, our job is to reach out to the masses and educate them. Because it comes down to this: data sovereignty is not just important, it is ultimately the most important thing. Medha, you were a web 2 expert, and you've come to web3 as an expert. You're brilliant, there's no question about that, and I loved hearing everything you had to say. And we would love to talk with you in a more one-on-one sort of milieu, but the bottom line is, everybody who's had any sort of interaction with web 2 knows that their data is not theirs. They understand that their data gets stolen. They know that their data gets compromised, and it's not a good thing. But we haven't actually explained to anybody how the hell we're going to prevent them from having that happen moving forward. When they hear web3, they hear echoes of web 2. If they even know what web 2 is, they hear web and they already tune out. We need to start educating people, and we need to put boots on the ground and actually make that happen. And one of the first ways we have to do that is by dialing back just how technical we speak. Because if we're not speaking in such a way that people can understand what we're saying, I mean, look, I'm in this space and I lose half of what some of you guys talk about.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍It's a fine line to walk though, because I mean, what really incentivizes people to come into crypto is by saying, 'Hey, come buy this and make money,' and that is the exact opposite of what's going to potentially scale out the infrastructure for crypto to really survive with mass adoption. Whereas, if you really have to come up with that kind of fine middle ground, between education.

Serenity Shield – Dan – Head Copywriter
‍Well, look, it's coming one way or the other, right? Let's, let's not fool ourselves. It is tokenization, you know, a digitization of data. It's here, and it's just going to continue to get more and more penetration as we move forward. All right, totally. But what I'm saying is, if we have to take a much more hands-on approach and stop cloistering ourselves and talking to one another, I mean that's important. Don't get me wrong, that I mean that is absolutely critical, because if projects that have a, a higher calling, I hate to use that term, but a higher principled approach to how we're going to be doing this, don't come together, then we know we've lost the battle, it's that simple. But if we don't get the people who we're trying to help, in the first place, ourselves included, in on this conversation, we've lost as well. So all I'd say is, to boil it down to brass taxes, we definitely need to be collaborating with one another. We definitely need to be continuing to build throughout this bear market, but we also need to start thinking very, very concretely about how we're going to communicate to the masses, how we're going to start developing a rollout strategy, to bring them in, educate them, and make them comfortable with what we're doing, because ultimately that's, that's where we win. By doing the hard work, the hard work that other people aren't willing to do, so ultimately that's what we do, we're doing the hard work behind the scenes that are going to make this project work. We're going to continue reaching out to other projects to try to facilitate collaboration, because we do believe that cooperation is going to make us stronger for the future, and I think it's going to give us ultimately a much better ecosystem within which we can all operate. So,  hopefully, that kind of answers your question.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah. I mean, that was, uh, that was great. I mean, I think you, I think you're correct in the way that, obviously, most of us have been here, especially people that have been here building or paying attention for the past handful of years, I mean, we use terms that are very, even though they don't seem technical, because you've been here for a year, two years, three or four years, they're very technical to people just literally coming onto Twitter, being like, 'I want to learn about crypto,' and you start talking about web 3 or web 2 and you start talking about zero knowledge proofs and you start talking about IPFS and all these other aspects. Yeah, I mean, I certainly do. You know, I think that we really do need to kind of up the math adoption level of engagement. I want to get to HashPack real quick, just because I think that is one of the things that HashPack has been focusing on is really breaking down those barriers from a UX or a UI standpoint, like a user engagement standpoint. If you guys aren't aware for the panel up here, and for everybody else listening down there, HashPack is, you know, there's multiple wallets in Hedera, they're all great. HashPack kind of does have the line share from users right now. And they've been consistently trying to deliver, truly valuable kind of onboarding aspects within their platform to the point now that you can literally through magic link just go on and create a HashPack on Hedera Hashgraph with just an email. Maybe MarC can you talk just a little bit, and then I want to get then I want to touch back uh to Medha real quick and hear about kind of the Dynamic NFTs and then allow kind of some of the other projects, even like Astro Nova, coming up here from a gamification standpoint, talking about how long it really takes. Because we hear all these like catch phrases about gamifications going to take over and crypto, but their kind of road map and runway is built out on that like sustainability aspect where it's like hey, to build a triple a gaming experience you have to make it about gamers first and that's going to take a couple of years to do it and they're just starting to kind of roll out those initiatives right now. And have decided to pivot from Ethereum into Hedera. And I would assume that we're going to start seeing you know projects from Ethereum, or nothing against Ethereum, start pivoting into ecosystems like Hedera and Casper and all these other you know, network aspect. So Marc, I know that's really long-winded for me, but from a user experience standpoint, what are some of the initiatives that HashPack has been building, and what are the views that you guys have on cross chain engagement with HashPack as you guys kind of move forward, because I know May has said it's not just about it's obviously about Hedera, but it's about kind of expanding out and really kind of that mass adoption appeal.

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍Yeah, thank you so much, Ryan, hello everyone, yeah, and thank you again for putting this together. So yeah, I mean, in terms of the user experience at HashPack, one of the biggest things that we focus on is okay, so how do we make this as easy as us as possible. As Don was saying, or Dan sorry about that, education is a massive aspect, but we also believe that that goes hand in hand with user experience, and that up until now we really haven't had the best user experience to bring those web 2 users that maybe are not super techy into web3. So that the barrier that we're trying to break as of right now. Like you said recently, we released the new onboarding process. So for people that are not completely comfortable keeping their own key, while keeping their own keys, they all still own their own keys, but basically, custody their own private seed phrases now they can do it through magic link through the email onboarding, and it remains completely non-custodial. And if anyone wants to still log in and onboard through the traditional onboarding process, they can still do it through the advanced onboarding. On the education aspects, that's one of the things that we've been really working on, and we've been collaborating and well, through the partnership with Gennfinity, is to create a place where people can go and get resources and learn. Because one of the biggest things that we've identified is that, yes, crypto Twitter is great. There's a lot of interesting conversations, but there's so much and there's so much to go through, so we basically came together, grabbed a bunch of different projects from the community from the Hedera network and we basically are collaborating. I was doing the count earlier with around 80 projects, and we're basically just creating content to educate the people on okay, what is there to do. And then on the user experience, we believe that that ties in very well because, at the end of the day, web3 is a concept that came to be what, two or three years ago, and it's great. I think whoever came up with that, that was great, but at the same time.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍One thing we talked about too, Marc, like early on, and this is probably for any network out there. You don't even have to talk about web 2 or web3, but search engine optimization and really building in the backlinks, like so you know, as mass adoption really occurs, and these networks of utility really do start to scale and take the lion's share of this entire ecosystem, what is a normal user's experience going to be on Google whenever they type in Casper nft or whenever they type in Hedera nft, and not backlinks, and search engine optimization takes a long time to facilitate and in the most organic way possible. And I think that has been kind of the focus that we've been trying to drive home to where it's like we're not really necessarily even looking at right now. We're looking at five, six months, eight months, nine months down the road when people are going on and doing simple searches on Google and trying to take the line share within that SEO aspect. And I mean, I don't know anybody else that's really doing that.

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍So, a hundred percent, and that's really speaks to the long-term thinking. I mean, and also tying it to the whole gaming aspect, you know, happening architecture. I mean, massive shout out to Astronova I've been watching everything that you've been putting on Twitter and it looks truly incredible, so definitely go check it out. It looks amazing. And one of the biggest things is that we're here to stay. We're here for the long term, right? And I feel like, through the bull market, a lot of people were just making short-term decisionsbecause that was, you know, everything was going so fast that those were paid off. But really, if you're starting to think about the long term, like these SEO strategies that you can implement are very valuable. Because on the one side, yes, they require some time, some fine-tuning, optimization, and so on, but they're going to bring in so much more, right? And to that point, another thing that we're really thinking about is moving our way towards the whole, okay, yeah, this is built on this network or that network. And we're thinking more about, okay, how is it in web 2 right now? Do we really know where Facebook is hosted? Like, do you even care if it's hosted on Microsoft Azure or AWS? I think that probably most, I mean, I don't even care and you know, I'm a little, I have a little tech background, so I think that that's where we're thinking that the space is going to move. And I think that as more interoperability solutions come online, that's where it's going to go. And each chain will have their own things, and that's really where the most value will be at the end of the day. I don't think it's so much about putting one network against the other, but just, you know, tying it with the title of the space, breaking those silos and working together because there's so much to learn from other networks. There's things that you know we can learn from Ethereum because they've been going for such a long time in terms of security, in terms of DEFI, in terms of NFTs. There's things that we can learn from XRP. There's so many things to learn from every single network, and that's where, and these conversations are where you know those, where we can learn these things. So that's what one of the main things that we're really focusing on is engaging with people from other networks so we can learn from them and hopefully try to avoid mistakes or things that have happened to them in the past that if they would have known, they could have avoided it. So we're really focused on that. I guess on the topic of the Hedera network, I mean, it's been truly incredible over the past year, we speak a lot when we do spaces solely focused on Hedera, but 2022 felt strangely different in Hedera in the sense that NFT drops minted out in seconds lots of games were moving over from other chains to Hedera and exploring the new technology. And yeah, I mean, it's super interesting. We're working with so many games, so many NFT projects, and really, it's truly incredible what's happened in 2023 and 2022 is just getting started. So, yeah, I really can't wait.