Leemon Baird: An interview with the first HBARbarian

King Solomon interviews Dr Leemon Baird, Co-CEO of Swirlds Labs, Co-founder of Hedera and the inventor of Hashgraph. His ongoing efforts continue to shape the way we understand and implement decentralized solutions, paving the way for a more secure and scalable future.

Transcription

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
What is up, everybody? Please bear with us for a couple of minutes here while we, get sorted. Super excited to have the opportunity to interview Dr. Leemon Baird. Leemon is co-CEO at Swirlds Labs, co-founder of Hedera, inventor of the Hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm. This is going to be a massive one. Super thankful for, HashPack for the outreach and making the connection to allow us to do this. And also we've got Brandon up here today as well. Brandon has been a community contributor in the Hedera ecosystem for a long, long time. He does his own podcast every Sunday, the I guess, the Hashgraph News and Rumors podcast, and just does a super fantastic job at staying on top of the ecosystem as well. So, Brandon, how are you doing today?‍

Brandon Davenport
I've never been more excited for a Monday in my life. I feel like I've been preparing for this moment for years, so huge shout out to you, man, Genfinity, HashPack. Like, I'm just so excited. I'm really, really excited, so I think we got a lot of good stuff to talk about today. It's going to be a good one.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
100. I think, I guess we have Marc up here from HashPack, I'm assuming.‍

HashPack – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
Yeah, good morning, everyone. ‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Awesome. Well, I know that we have Leemon nailed down for noon here, but we always like to start these 10-15 minutes prior to, so we'll give him a second, while he hops in. But we're gonna run through a myriad of topics today. Recent milestones and achievements, governing board members, recent announcements, looking forward to new members, decentralized recovery, decentralized storage. I mean, we just put out a tweet, maybe two hours ago that kind of runs the gamut of those topics, but there's so much to get through. Just really, such an honor to be able to interview, a legend in this space and somebody that, you know, I think we all would love to be able to pick his brain on a consistent basis. So, now these opportunities don't come very often, so yeah, we'll be getting started here in a couple minutes, guys, so bear with us. Anything of note, Brandon recently? I know that you just hosted your, your news and rumors podcast yesterday as well. Maybe you walk us through a little bit about how that went. I know that I saw a tweet here today saying that it sounded like you were in an echo chamber for the first 10 minutes, but you always do such a fantastic job with those. Curious how yesterday's went.‍

Brandon Davenport
It was funny, so, I got a pair of AirPods that I was trying out as a microphone. Didn't go well, sounded like I was talking from the inside of a wormhole. But luckily, I recorded them. They go up on Apple Podcast and Spotify and all that, so the recordings are gonna be great. It was like the first 10 minutes that sounded weird. I listened back to it, and I was like, "Oh my god." But yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff that we talked about. I mean, the H-Bar Foundation had a really great space on May 30th. This, because I was covering kind of two weeks' worth of news. And this was really interesting because Brady from Swirlds Labs spoke pretty heavily about the need for kind of these dashboards and sources of truth for certain information. Kind of going across the NFT ecosystem, the DeFi ecosystem. But then also doing something similar to what Solana outlined in a blog post recently, which was kind of like how many actual projects or developers are leveraging the Hedera SDK, right? How many actual things are being built using Hedera? So, Brady was kind of making the impression that, like, "Hey, we want to develop some of these dashboards, surface some of these insights." That was something exciting that I highlighted on the show. Something else that was really interesting was the H-Bar Bull. He did his show on Friday, and he brought up a really interesting point, which was, and this will probably be brought up again when we get Leemon up here, is governing council member Aberdeen recently tokenized 20 billion dollars' worth of a money market fund of theirs on Hedera. And there was this conversation about kind of TVL, right? Total value locked versus TVR, total value represented. TVL being kind of more DeFi and TVR being kind of more traditional finance. And the fact that I don't think other networks measure TVR, but you could say, for example, USDT, you know, minted on Ethereum would count as, you know, tens of billions of dollars of TVR on Ethereum. And so there was just a conversation around how do you actually measure the success of the network, you know, in the phrase TVR. I'm pretty sure it was coined by Scott Thiel from DLA Piper a couple years ago. So that was a really interesting, conversation that was talked about. And kind of in that same line, talking about traditional assets being tokenized, there was like a three-quarter million dollar home, kind of, I assume, as a little bit of a trial project that was fractionally tokenized on Hedera by DLA Piper. That was really interesting. So that was a key takeaway from the show last night, was kind of like, "Whoa, we're talking billions of dollars of real-world assets being, you know, tokenized on Hedera." And then also, just another point on this is, Joshua Sydney from Swirlds Labs did a little personal project. It's called watch.whatisthatwebsite. Anyways, he made a little website where you can go and basically query the network to see transactions coming through, but see them based on the dollar amount of H-bar sent, which was really fascinating. You can kind of see, like, "Oh, in the past 10 minutes, you know, fifty thousand dollars worth of H-bar has been moved amongst the network." So it's really fascinating. Like, last night was really about realizing there's so many new ways that we're going to be able to measure the growth and success of a DLT in general and I think being in the Hedera ecosystem has kind of put a little bit of an extra spotlight, and very similar to what, you know, the situation is with TPS. I don't think a lot of people in the crypto ecosystem,  looked to TPS as a major driver of growth. And kind of now, that's very top of mind for a lot of people. So, yeah, TVR was a really interesting, topic to talk about. ‍

HashPack – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
Yeah, I think I think one quick note on the TVR and versus TVL and all this, I think that the good thing about TVR is that it's very tangible for, I guess, non-web three-native people. Whereas with TVL, it requires a little more, knowledge on the industry as a whole. So, I think it's definitely going to pick up some steam, and it's probably on, in terms of, like, the financial institutions, it's probably going to be something that a lot of people start keeping track of.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Yeah, and I think, I mean, this is a discussion that's been going on for a while, and I've only heard it being mentioned at first from individuals, within the Hedera ecosystem. You think about TVL, or Total Value Locked, how much of that is liquid, how much of that is lost, how much of that has gone into rug pools and all sorts of different things. Whereas, you know, total assets tokenized, real-world assets coming onto these ledgers is amazingly interesting to really think of. And I think I asked that to, I can't remember if it was Shayne or somebody else when I did an interview with the foundation and I asked, you know, was TVL going to be the metric used moving forward, or is it going to move into, like, total assets tokenized, total value represented? Is that kind of going to be the driver? And then, similar to what you were saying, Brandon, with TPS, I mean, we hear it thrown around a lot as kind of, like, a hype word with a lot of ecosystems. One of the things that's interesting that, you know, being in the Hedera community that we've seen is, you know, TPS is actual transactions that are occurring per second on the network, like actually flowing through, not the capabilities of the network, but what's actually flowing through it. I remember interviewing, I think the first interview I ever did was Christian Hasker. I think it was in 2020, maybe it was in 2019. And I asked about TPS, not real TPS, just the way that we all, you know, a lot of the ecosystems talk about TPS. And I think at one point in time on the Hedera website, it said something crazy like a billion transactions per second with sharding and everything else back in the day. And I asked him, like, "Is that going to be, you know, is that something you guys are working towards?" And his answer was really something that I've never heard in this space, and it's like, "Well, why would we scale to that unless we need to scale to that?" So, I think we've started to see the actual scaling and the step functionality and everything else coming in that represents real transactions per second, which is, which is a little bit enlightening to see where it's not just we talk about the capabilities, but we're actually seeing the scaling of actual transactions occurring on the network.‍

Brandon Davenport
Oh, it's huge. And I mean, very commonly pointed to is there is a 10,000, TPS limit, kind of a throttle on the network. You know, and it was kind of noted that it'll take us a bit of time to get there. I mean, even with Avery Dennison's IO use case, you know, it's, it's very rare that we breach a thousand TPS. But very recently, we saw the network hit that 10,000 TPS mark and go slightly above it. So that was something kind of exciting to see that for the first time. Well, I think we've done that before, but the first time recently, did that happen. So it does, it does feel like we're starting to get a little closer to some of these new, scaling initiatives like Community nodes, sharding, those different types of things. It's hard to gauge how far off we are and also, how much this space is accelerated. I'm curious from Leemon to kind of see, like, if you were to be in his shoes last year versus now, are things happening even faster than they envisioned, you know, like, is the pace picking up? Con, you know, again, on the backdrop of this crazy bear market, really, really fascinating stuff. ‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
100%. I mean, um, we're coming close to, the 12 o'clock mark, so, Leemon should be hopping in here. So if Leemon, if you are down in the audience right now, feel free to raise your hand, so we can get you up here. I know how limited his time is as well. And I have to think, too, like, you know, especially with all the, the regulatory stuff going on right now, are there things that are being kind of safeguarded back to make sure that everything's, you know, going to be clear from a regulatory purview? Kind of how does that operate? And with all of this, as well, we do have Leemon coming up right now, so we are going to,  get this kicked off. All right, well, if this is the first time you guys have joined one of Genfinity's spaces, we do Hedera Corner interviews pretty much every Monday. Um, last, I think, was two Mondays ago, we interviewed, Paolo Tasca. Paolo is obviously, leading the DLT Science Foundation. His track record and resume is overwhelming. And we do these consistently every Monday. Today, we've got the honor and pleasure to, have Dr. Leemon Baird up here with us today, as I stated previously. Author of The Hashgraph Distributed Consensus Algorithm, co-founder, and working right now with Swirlds Labs. So, Leemon, we normally kick these off, and thank you so much for joining us today. Normally kick these off with a little bit of an introduction. So if you could provide maybe for the audience down here that may be cross-chain and not know, about Hedera or the ecosystem, an introduction of yourself, overview, and background of launching the Hedera network, and maybe tell us a little bit about what you're doing with Swirlds Labs and Swirlds Inc. right now.‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Sure. Well, thanks. It's great to be here with you. I really appreciate the joining you. So in 2012, I started working on just a fun math problem, which is: Could you have computers be really secure ABFT, but also really fast when they come to consensus, both at the same time? And, you know, worked on it for years. It's just kind of a fun math problem. I do math problems for fun. Some of them I've worked on for decades and I'll probably never solve. And some of them I occasionally solve. It's just my hobby. But in 2015, I realized that if you just include two hashes in each message, you suddenly get to see the entire history of how we've talked, and you can run 30-year-old voting algorithms with no voting, just virtual voting. So that was the Hashgraph, and Mance and I had been working together since the early '90s. Wow, it's a lot of years. We said, "Hey, let's start a company for this." So we started Swirlds to sell this as a private ledger to prove out the technology so that people could see that it works. We got some traction with the credit union industry. And then after a year of that, in 2016, in the summer, we had just announced to the world Swirlds. But in a restaurant, we said, "You know what? We should do a public ledger, and we should do it with good governance. We should do it with the biggest companies in the world keeping tabs on each other, acting as checks and balances. We should create a council that runs it." And that was in 2016. We decided to do that. In 2017, we started Hedera, and in 2018, we announced Hedera to the world. This is the public ledger based on the Hashgraph, and we got our first five council members and announced them to the world. Big names like IBM that everybody knew about. And now we have 29, which is a lot of names that people know about. So then last year, about exactly a year ago now, we said, "You know what? We are now reaching the maturity level where we can start doing decentralization of the organization." So I think two years ago, we split off the HBAR Foundation, and then a year ago, we split off also the Hashgraph Association and the DLT Science Foundation. So those three are grant-giving organizations. Hedera then was the council, but it also had all the people doing the programming and doing the marketing and doing the legal and all the different things you need to do. The product team, all of those people, developer advocates. And we said, "Let's decentralize further by moving all of that, including Mance and me, to a separate company." And so that's Swirlds Labs. So Mance and I now are the co-CEOs of Swirlds Labs. We do a lot of the development and marketing and product and developer advocacy and those sorts of things. And then Hedera is just the council. It's just the 29 companies. And there's a little LLC whose sole job is basically to arrange meetings for the 29 council members. And we just had one recently. It was very exciting. This is only the second time since COVID that we've actually met together. It was a huge group, and they were really involved. So that's where we are right now.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Leemon, for the overview and intro and recently, you guys put out, well, it reminded me a lot, like, "The Office," the TV show, with kind of you crossing off like, milestones. So nine billion transactions, 10 billion transactions, and now recently, 11 billion transactions. And I think that's scaled all the way up to, I think, it was, like, a trillion transactions, which was amazing to see. And that video was very well put together, too. It was awesome. Can you touch base around some of these recent milestones and achievements, whether it be the transactions occurring on the network, the real TPS, which certainly plays a part in that, or any other recent milestones and achievements that you've got you really excited within the ecosystem?‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Absolutely. So this is real. We have a huge number of transactions being done every second. Just under a thousand, I... I just checked, and it said it was around 900. It goes up and down, and right now, it's... We have one main customer, I think, that is doing most of them, but that will be our user, but that will be changing over time. We have a number of big users in the pipeline that we think we'll be doing lots of transactions. This is something that we can do because it's very cheap to do them, and we can do them very fast. We can do 10,000 transactions per second on the current network. We've throttled it down to that speed. When we start getting close to 10,000, we'll raise the speed further than that. And we want to go to huge numbers, millions or billions or trillions. We will go to sharding, and we can do sharding. We're building these state proofs so that you do sharding really well. So we are fast, which then allows it to be cheap. And we are getting real traction of people doing huge numbers of transactions per second, and they're real transactions. These aren't transactions like when the nodes are talking to each other to reach consensus. They're actual user transactions. And we have, well, it's a little bit under a thousand right now, and it may go up over time. We've been doing this for months. And so, yes, we just... We made a video, and we crossed 10 billion. Now we've processed 11 billion, and it just keeps growing rapidly. We expect it to accelerate. I don't think it'll stay at this speed forever. I think it's going to get faster. We're also doing all sorts of interesting things to deal with the data storage, and so the mirror nodes are going to go to a hierarchical system. We're doing all sorts of things because we have more to store than the other ledger, and it's growing rapidly, and it'll continue to grow rapidly. I'm really excited about that. And so these are big milestones. And then also, the council, we're up to 29 members now. I told you we started with just five, but we just ended our 29th COFRA, which is an enormous conglomeration. They do all sorts of different things, lots of different companies under the COFRA umbrella owned by them. They do lots of different things, and they have a number of use cases. And so we're excited to see what they'll end up doing, and we have lots of council members doing use cases on it. So it's great to see the council growing.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Brandon, I'll turn it over to you and Leemon, we actually have an OG within the Hedera community up here with us today that's helping us co-host. Brandon does the Hashgraph News and Rumors podcast every Sunday. He does a fantastic job, and I know I think he was up on the Community Council as well. So, Brandon, I know you had a question around governing council members as well.‍

Brandon Davenport
Yeah, absolutely this is really interesting, and, I mean, Leemon, you brought up something, really fascinating, which is kind of the acceleration of the growth of the network. And kind of what you said
that kind of like this rate of growth could maybe start accelerating a little bit. And I mean, of course, like, this year, we saw two new members added, right? You mentioned COFRA, but then also Dell Technologies, which was huge. And we also see, like, use cases coming from governing council members live on the mainnet. Of course, you know, atma.io from Avery Dennison. And you've emphasized many times the importance of governance for DLTs, now especially in this climate. And I'm curious, last week during an interview, Eric Pascini, which is the CRO and COO of Swirlds Labs, said, "The goal for us is to move to 39 governing council members in the next few months." And as we look forward, do you see governing council members being added more quickly? And also, do you agree with Rob Allen from the Hashgraph Association that governing council members should be building multiple use cases?‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Yes, I certainly agree, and they are, which is... I'm really excited about that. It is incredibly important they build these good use cases. And we've raised the bar. Now, not only do you have to be a world-known university or company, but you also have to have a use case for us to add you now to the council. It's harder to reach the council. Eric is great. I love what Eric is doing in the company right now. When he said "few," he meant, like, you know, less than 30, not less than three. So that's... I do not think we're going to get nine more members in the next three months. But we are continuing to add members. We do have members in the pipeline. It's interesting. We slowed down adding members while we went through all the confusion that comes from decentralizing. So we went from one company to now six organizations. That was you know, took a lot of effort. And so that actually slowed down council recruitment. But now we're back into normal mode, and we have people entering the pipeline for council, joining the council, and we will announce them as they come. So when you said a few months, you know, he just meant it won't be 10 years. He didn't mean it'll be, you know, three months, right? ‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Okay, makes sense. I wanted to ask Leemon, on top of that, you know, if you look at the governing council members that are there right now, it's such a wide breadth of so many ecosystems, so many different use cases, so many different industries what are some, you know, maybe this is a two-part question, but what are some of the under-the-radar use cases that you see distributed ledger technology, something like Hashgraph, playing a role in in the future that might not be widely talked about right now? And do you envision the remaining governing council members, as they fill out, to kind of continue in the path of as many different industries and ecosystems that the Hashgraph and Hedera can reach out into? How do you envision that kind of playing out?‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Absolutely. So what impresses me is the breadth of the different applications that they're doing. So you have things like tokenization. People are talking about tokenization. It's big news. It also is going to change the world. And you have people like Tolo that are working on this and other groups that are working on tokenization. Ultimately, I think almost everything of value in the real world will also have a representation on a ledger so that you can buy and sell it more easily and you can track it more easily. So we are seeing that, which is not obscure. Everyone's talking about it. On the other hand, we're seeing recording of information that other ledgers do. You'll have an L2 that puts a hash into the L1 and it records it, but it's not a big part of what they're doing. They're not getting huge TPS from that. You talked about Avery Dennison. They're huge TPS we're getting from them is to record things. So if people don't know, Avery Dennison has these RFID chips that they sell, and they are currently tracking many, many billions of objects, with a "b," and they're moving them to Hedera and tracking them with Hedera. And they're using the HCS system, the Hedera Consensus Service. This is like a notary public. You can send data. It puts a timestamp on it. That is the consensus. It puts it in order, which is a consensus, and then stores it forever. And we just keep this forever. And as I said, we're building data systems to allow us to store petabytes forever. This is the goal. So we are seeing that. And you don't see that a lot on other ledgers. People occasionally put in a hash, but you don't see this huge throughput. But when it's cheap and it's fast, and you have true finality within a few seconds, why wouldn't you? It's only a hundredth of a cent to send one of these messages that gets recorded forever. Why wouldn't you do that? You could store a lot of data offline and just put in a single hash. But there are some advantages to having it be visible and having it be in real time. And so we're seeing a lot of that. We are seeing even... there are companies. Starlink is... I think Starlink is one that is recording information. So you have, say, Holocaust survivors that are recording their videos, and then they're storing the hashes into Hedera and storing information about it, metadata about it into Hedera so that in the future no one can say, "Well, that person recorded it 100 years ago, but they really probably didn't really exist. This is probably a modern thing, not 100 years ago." No, 100 years from now, people will know that it was created now. We'll have this guarantee. And so people are doing that, and they're using it also for showing that news is correct when they're warning people in war zones that they're about to be in danger, all sorts of interesting things like that. And then you've got provenance, which is really a whole separate thing, keeping track of the history of something. So, like in England, they're keeping track of virus vaccine vials. So you have these little glass vials of vaccine. They have to be kept cold throughout their whole life, and they are actually putting them in freezers as they go from place to place that have electronic thermometers in them that record the temperature and then report to Hedera and stores on Hedera what the temperature was at every spot along the way. And so you could look at the serial number on the vial right before you get your vaccine, and you could see, was it cold at every step along the way? And there's other things you might want to have. Food and know where the ingredients came from. You might want to be buying diamonds and other blood diamonds. There's all sorts of things where provenance is important. And there's another one, which is Guardian ESG things, carbon credits. This is interesting. We are seeing a huge uptick in interest in tracking your carbon emissions, buying carbon credits, making sure the two go together, even creating markets for bundling energy, like non-clean energy with the credits. The two together get bought together, and you have... You're making up for the carbon from the energy. We are the cleanest ledger to begin with, so the amount of kilowatt hours per transaction is lower for us than any others. There was this report done by UCL. Actually, they came up with an updated one. We looked even better in the updated one. But we were the lowest usage of energy per transaction of any ledger. And then we buy carbon credits so that we are carbon neutral and buy a few more. So we're actually carbon negative. So it is great that we're being carbon negative and buying these carbon credits. It's even better that we don't burn the electricity in the first place. You know, the greenest form of electricity is megawatts. It's the energy you don't use. So we have that. And then we have Guardian, which is a system that is helping companies to track their carbon footprint and their carbon emissions and to put that onto the ledger. And that is also being done. And then it interoperates with on-ledger stores or markets for carbon credits. And so these companies can keep track of their carbon footprint, and they can buy the appropriate carbon credits and all of that. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I've even talked about, you know, games like Ashfall that have NFTs on Hedera. There's just lots of fun things going on. ‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
I know Brandon, you have a question, but I remember this. There was an initial study about how green Hedera was, and I'm probably going to misquote it slightly, but still the point will echo. And I think to offset the carbon footprint of the network, this was maybe like a year, a year and a half ago, it basically said that it was, to offset it, there was carbon credits purchased. And in the way that was like, the network at an annual basis only, like, was pretty much like three vehicles' carbon emissions annually. And I'm like, that's such a ridiculous statistic. So, Brandon, go ahead. I know you have a question, though.‍

Brandon Davenport
Well, that's a great statistic. I mean, it's crazy how efficient the network is. I mean, even compared to something like Visa or something like that, it's nuts. When we talk about just on that kind of enterprise growth and adoption, I mean, Hedera is obviously an attractive option for enterprises, as we've mentioned: fixed low fees, carbon negative, it's fast and secure. Generally, enterprises, including governing council members, will try many different networks to see what fits their needs, right? Not putting kind of all their eggs in one basket. And I'm curious, like, is it the rule or the exception that an enterprise kind of comes to Hedera after trying other networks and not being satisfied? Or do you see many enterprises kind of taking their first shot on Hedera? Because I know companies, certain companies, have been kind of in the web three space for a while, trying different things, and some maybe are just jumping in for the first time. I was just kind of curious, like, what's more often the case? ‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
It's funny, we're seeing both. There's quite a few companies that say, "We want to get into this whole blockchain thing. We've never heard of it before." They do their due diligence. They say, "Wow, we're gonna go with Hedera." And we're seeing that a lot. But then there's also people that say, "Well, we started on someone else, and the prices and the speed and other problems are horrible, and then they move to Hedera." So we're seeing both. And as you said, we have interesting features that you just don't have elsewhere, such as the predictable pricing. So when I said that recording information is a hundredth of a cent, I mean it literally. It's denominated in US dollars. It's a ten thousandth of a US dollar. And as the price of HBAR goes up and down, it's still a ten thousandth of a US dollar, which means you can build a company on it and have predictable pricing. You are at the mercy of the volatility of the HBAR. Cryptocurrencies, of course, are always volatile. So by pricing it in dollars, you, of course, pay in HBARs, but the exchange rate between the two is updated once an hour. And so that's something that really attracts them. The fact that we have a council of people that have done due diligence on us and are trying to help us get the right pricing, that's really attractive to them. And the fact that we have a council of people that have done due diligence on us and are trying to help us get the right pricing, that's really attractive to them. And the fact that we have a council of people that have done due diligence on us and are trying to help us get the right pricing, that's really attractive to them. And the fact that we have a council of people that have done due diligence on us and are trying to help us get the right pricing, that's really attractive to them. And the fact that we have a council of people that have done due diligence on us and are trying to help us get the right pricing, that's really attractive to them. And the fact that we have a council of people that have done due diligence on us and are trying to make a squeaky clean and trying to make sure we do everything the right way that appeals to a lot of people. The pro, the fact that we are fast and that we are secure. We're abft, we have fairness. They like that, and so we're seeing a lot of people switching. But we're also seeing a lot of people just starting their first foray into the world of dots on Hedera. ‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Curious, Leemon, kind of in that regard as well. Like, you know, you mentioned fixed fees. If you're paying attention to where the world's kind of going, where the financial institutions are going from like an ESG standpoint and the green economy aspects, I mean, there's benchmarks set to 2025, 2030, 2050. How important is it going to be for networks to attain mass adoption, to have that ESG-friendly aspect at the forefront?‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
It is interesting. We get a number of companies now that are saying, and individuals and small startups, a number of people say they like Hedera because it is green, and that is something that we're hearing people say. You yourselves are carbon neutral or carbon negative, and we like that. But we're also getting a lot of people that want to come on to us because there are a lot of ESG things happening on Hedera. So if you are interested in trading carbon credits and tracking carbon emissions and so on, there is a good place to do it because everybody else is doing it on Hedera. And so we're starting to see network effects there where Hedera is the place to go for ESG things. So we're seeing both. ‍

Brandon Davenport
That's so exciting. I think the ESG stuff is so huge because I remember I had an interview with Rob Allen. He was at the HBAR Foundation at the time, and he was talking about how there's kind of that supply-demand mismatch and how technologies like Hedera are gonna help kind of find that price of a lot of these products. And then also, too, even, man, say, you know, the balance sheet of the planet on a DLT, it's like some very big vision stuff, but it's feeling more and more tangible as we get closer. But, of course, to participate in these spaces, there are definitely barriers. And part of that mass adoption is kind of taking down some of those barriers. And I think a big step forward that you've been doing at Swirlds Labs is the initiative surrounding decentralized recovery and decentralized custody. And with those, I mean, again, those have been really top of mind for you. And recently, you mentioned that a tech demo with source code would be made available. And I'm curious, are there any new updates regarding D-REC that the community would find useful? And also, what are some ways that you envision D-REC could be used that might not seem obvious but could be very useful? ‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Ah, great question. Without a question in my mind, the biggest problem our industry has, well, is probably regulatory clarity. The second biggest problem that our industry has is trying to reach out to ordinary people who are not, you know, crypto-savvy and don't understand all this DLT stuff and make it easy for them to use. And the easiest way to make it is if it's textually invisible to them. But the problem is you have a safety net in every area of your life, except in DLTs. So if you lose your password to your bank, you can always go into the bank. You'll somehow be able to get it back. Worst case, you can go to the courts, and they could force the bank to get it back. But if you lose your keys to your account, you're out of luck. You have lost your resources. No court can help you. There's no bank you can go in and show them your passport, and they can help you. You are just out of luck. And this is a new concept. In every other area of life, there's always a recovery. If you lose the keys to your car, there's someone who can come open the door for you or can make new keys for you. If you lose the keys to your house and you put a brick through the window and get in, you can always recover somehow. But with DLTs, they're so fast, they're so efficient, they're so eliminating the middleman, and that they give you great power. But with power comes danger, that you could lose everything. And so what are your choices? Well, you can give it all to a custody provider, someone you trust like FTX. Give them all your money. You can trust them, okay? And then that's a problem. Or you can keep it yourself, and then maybe you put your words into a bank vault, a safe deposit box. And maybe you would try to. I've heard of people physically cutting their list of words into pieces and giving them to different places, which is a horrible way to do it because each of those pieces still has information. But you can do these sorts of things. What you really want, though, is for it to be invisible. I want to just have helpers. I want to go to my friend and say, "I want you to be my helper. Our phones connect to each other, and now we're helpers for each other." And then just all of my secrets, if I get 10 helpers, every time I have a new secret, one-tenth of it goes to each of them. And it's Shamir secret sharing, so it doesn't reveal any information. And then any five of my helpers can help me recover it. What's important, though, with D-REC is that my phone will be calling them, not calling them, sending messages to them over the Internet invisibly behind the scenes once a day, saying, "Hey, do you still have that share of my secret? Can you prove to me you still have it? Are you still there?" And you have this conversation with all the other devices. They're all talking to each other once a day. And if there is a device that doesn't answer enough days in a row, your phone will warn the user, "Hey, Joe is no longer answering. Maybe he's dropped off, maybe he lost his phone. Maybe you need to go reconnect him as a helper." And if you go even more days and you still haven't brought Joe back online, then what your phone will do is it'll say, "Well, I had 10 helpers. I've lost Joe, so now I'm going to give my other nine helpers one-ninth of the secret. I'll tell them all to throw away their one-tenth share, and we'll just leave Joe out. And if he ever comes back, then we'll just do it again. We'll go back and give everybody a one-tenth, and they can throw away their one-ninths." So it's automatically self-healing, automatically restudying in the background. This is incredibly important. We wrote a demo program, made a video about that. We're in the process of building a website with this. We have the source code of the demo. We have an API for people to build libraries against. We have an RFC draft to make this an internet standard. Because, as I said, remember that they had to talk to each other every night, and we do it in a way that doesn't require TLS. Each message is independently encrypted and authenticated, and it's all very nice. You can do store and forward things. All of this, we are working on very hard, and we are right now putting together the big media splash where we'll announce it to the world. So I don't have a date yet on that, but that is the goal. We'll have a website, we'll have all these different files, all these different resources, all at once. In addition, behind the scenes, we are talking to other companies and even other ledgers that we can all do it together. This is not just a Hedera thing. This is something our entire industry desperately needs. And so it's not about getting a bigger piece of the pie. It's not making the pie grow. Right now, it's only the bleeding-edge enthusiasts who use these things. And let's be honest, the typical wallet is not easy to use. A hardware wallet is even more not easy to use. Everything we do is confusing. Go to CoinMarketCap or go to Hash.io, it doesn't matter or HashScan. They all are confusing, I think, to novices. And so as an industry, we need to come together and make this system where anyone can use it. It can also do decentralized customer, as you described. That's the next step that we'll do second, which is where they jointly sign a transaction for you. You asked what is unusual for uses of this. I've been talking about protecting the key to an account. Now, notice, this is a single key. You don't have to do multi-sig. This isn't like social recovery where maybe your account has 10 keys on it. The attackers now know how many helpers you have, and they know their keys. It's not like that. And they know their public keys. They might be able to figure out who they are. It's not like that. You have a single key on your account, and you're just sharing pieces of it with your helpers. Totally invisible. Who knows how many helpers you have? Even if you have helpers, but it's not just keys. You could also do things like passwords. I would love to see this built into not just all of our wallets, but into programs like OnePassword. Why shouldn't OnePassword take all your passwords and keep them secure, not putting them on a server anywhere, not requiring you to remember anything, just giving pieces of it to your helpers? And by a piece of it, one piece is a cryptographic piece that doesn't tell them anything until half of them get together. So that is a use case you might not think of. Another use case you might not think of is identity. And it is funny, I talk to people about this. There is this vision that our industry has had from the very beginning, I've had from the very beginning, of we will have your identity stored, say, in your phone, in a chip, where it can't be pulled back out, and it talks to websites and proves that you are you. And it does zero-knowledge proofs to prove that you are over 21 without saying your actual age or proving that you're a citizen of a certain country without saying who you are, all sorts of things like that. There is a very cool future that we're going to reach when we have this. No more passwords. It dramatically reduces hacking. The only problem is, what if I drop my phone accidentally in front of a steamroller that just squishes it? What do I do then? Every chip in my phone has been shattered. You need D-REC to store your identity. So that way, if you lose your phone eventually, you can go to your helpers, and half of them can get together and recreate your identity for you. So it's useful for crypto and for NFTs. It is useful for passwords. It is useful for identity. And it can be used for every other secret you have and the combo to your safe. You can store it in this. This is the goal. We are seeing huge interest from other companies, other ledgers, and I hope ultimately it ends up built into the operating systems of iOS and Android and Windows and Mac. This is where we need to go as a civilization. We need something like D-REC. And of course, we're doing it. We're spending actual money on this, but we're not making any money on it. We're just giving everything away for free, just encouraging it because this is what our industry really needs.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
I think Leemon, you also mentioned, first and foremost, with the biggest issues that this industry faces, is well, in certain areas and jurisdictions, a massive lack of regulatory clarity. I would love if you could maybe briefly touch base on your thoughts around the United States and the competitiveness of the US moving forward. And how is Hedera and Swirlds as a whole trying to help in that regard, to educate regulators in a way that makes sense, so that we can kind of move past this crazy kind of time that we're in, where nobody has any kind of operating efficiency in certain regards because they don't know what rules to follow and what rules, you know, what they need to facilitate. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Okay, so everyone listening probably knows we have a problem. We don't have clarity. We have craziness going on right now. Yeah, I think everybody's aware of that. However, the good news is that there is evidence that there are a number of people in Washington that want to keep the country competitive. They don't want to kill all of DLTs and blockchain because, you know, that's killing the golden goose. It's a good thing. You want to protect users. You've got to protect people. And it's kind of a wild west. You want to protect them, but you don't want to just destroy it. You don't just say, "Okay, it's all illegal." And so there are people in Washington that are very interested in trying to find the right balance so that we remain innovative and we don't crush this industry. And there are people that are trying to learn, and I've gone out to Washington and I've talked with various people. We have other people in our organization who have gone out to Washington and talked with various people. Nomee gave a talk before Congress that was really well-received. It was just very, very cool how that was received. And what we are seeing is that there are a lot of people there that honestly want to figure out the right path. They aren't just saying, "We hate it all. It threatens our banks. Let's get rid of it." They're saying, "No, no, we need to find the right path so that this can thrive, so that this can really be successful." And they need education, and that's going on. So, at the moment, yeah, I said that's probably the biggest problem in our industry. I do think we are going to get clarity, and it's going to be the regulators, it's going to be the courts, and it's going to be Congress, the legislators. All of them are going to end up eventually giving us clarity. So, we're going to get there, and we just keep plugging ahead, doing everything we can to be as clean and as good as possible.‍

Brandon Davenport
I love that. I mean, it is definitely something this year that it feels like, it feels like even just the last 72 hours has just been insane. But I want to step back for a minute, kind of to something that's really been on my mind. I mean, we talk about the network scaling, we talk about sharding and all these different types of things, and Hedera does seem to be kind of nipping at the heels of that growth. I mean, just recently we saw the mainnet hit a spike of over 10,000 transactions per second, just by a couple hundred, but again, that natural threshold is in place, but we've touched that, I think, a few times in the past, which is exciting. But this brings my mind to kind of that vision of shared worlds that you outlined really well last year in that presentation, detailing kind of again how sharding, state proofs, community nodes can unlock the next phase of the network and bring those new levels of interoperability. And I mean, you could have a whole group of banks that could share a private hashgraph or even like a group of friends playing a video game, and that hashgraph could kind of have its own rules. It's so compelling. And with all the recent changes in the technology space over the last year, because I mean, a ton has changed, has the shared worlds vision expanded or changed as well? Are there any new ideas that you've had recently about shared worlds that the community might find interesting?‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
I would say that it is expanding. This is the future. I think that in the future, we're going to see basically everything of value in the real world ends up getting tokenized, or at least a large fraction of it. Every industry will be touched by it. And then games, and maybe VR actually, is going to become useful. And you know, it has the fad cycle, so it was really a big deal, and now it's less so. But I do think it's going to be important. And then online games are already important, and they, you know, just on a flat screen. All of this is moving us towards the future. We really live online, and everything of value is online, and our friends are online, and we're communicating with other people online. And in order to do that, you need trust. With websites, you just have to trust whoever's running the website not to steal everything from you. But with ledgers, we now have the ability to build a world that is electronic and has trust and is more efficient because you get rid of the middleman. And so I can just directly interact with you. I may not know who you are, I may not trust you, but I can trust that the network itself is going to act like a middleman and that you can't steal from me and I can't steal from you. But we can still do useful trades or we can do useful collaboration. And you mentioned private networks. I still think this is going to be incredibly important. There will be a plethora of little ledgers, including ledgers that just get stood up while you're playing your video game. So the ten of you are playing, you know, five against five in a video game, and there's a little ledger being stood up just while you're playing. And then end of the game, it ends up recording its results into Hedera or, you know, some big public ledger. I think that you're going to find organizations want to have a community, you know, in their, like, all the banks get together and have ledgers or all the airlines get together and have a ledger. That kind of ledger. And then, of course, it needs to interoperate with the big ledgers. You may see CBDCs, which is another kind of sort of private ledger that will then interoperate with the public ledgers. And so, I think that's important. We're continuing to work on state proofs and have actually invented new cryptography. We'll be publishing it soon. We have some great cryptographers, and they have a proof of correctness for it, which is just very cool, or proof of security. It's going to be important that ledgers be able to send each other messages that say, "Hi, I'm Ledger X. Hello, Ledger Y. Let me tell you a message, and let me prove to you that this message really was the consensus of Ledger X. Once you have that ability, it becomes extremely easy to move assets between ledgers without bridges that you have to trust. I hate having to trust people in the bridge. You just move things back and forth. It's very easy. You can do things atomically. I not only can X prove to why this was a consensus of X, but you can even have guarantees that say if X tries to send Y a message, it will eventually get through. And when Y replies, that will eventually get through. Basically, you want to be ABFT. And if you're building on things like Hedera, an ABFT foundation, you can make the multi-ledger universe also be ABFT. And so, I think that we are going to be seeing this as the world more and more adopts ledgers for real-world uses. There'll be more and more importance. Some of my stuff's public, some of it's private, so if it's a hybrid, and they all talk to each other.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Thank you so much for that, Leemon. And I know recently, probably over the past week, there was a document that got put out that really kind of dove into the Ethereum Virtual Machine or EVM equivalents, and Hedera's strategy for enhanced programmability and network adoption. If you could maybe expand on what aspects of Hedera are going to tie into EVM in ways that make sense and how that kind of showcases the value and the utility of the ecosystem and tools and services, while also leveraging EVM in ways that do add to that vision of interoperability.‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Yeah, so from day one when we started in 2018, the ledger has had an EVM, an Ethereum Virtual Machine, that runs Solidity code, smart contracts. And it has been compatible with the EVM that is used on Ethereum and on other ledgers. So, you can write a program on the Ethereum ledger, you could port it over to this one, and it would work. So, if you have, say, an ERC20 or an ERC721, you could directly move the code to Hedera, and it works without any changes. This has been true from the beginning. So, you could say we have EVM compatibility, meaning your Solidity program will run on our system. Same thing, EVM equivalence is taking it to the next step. I said you could port your ERC20 or ERC721 code to a smart contract on Hedera, but that itself is flawed because the tokens that you're creating, your NFTs, your fungible tokens, only live inside of a smart contract, and anytime you want to send it to someone, you have to call a smart contract. Well, Hedera has its own native tokens. Why don't you just mint a token natively? Then you can send it back and forth, much cheaper, much faster, much easier. So, what we are doing with EVM equivalence is that we're making it easy for the two worlds to interoperate with each other. You can have a smart contract that reaches out. Instead of keeping track of the tokens inside of itself, it actually reaches out to the ledger and moves tokens that are native tokens. And so, if you want to do it yourself, the wallet on your phone can move your tokens around. It's very cheap, very fast, very easy. But in addition, when you need the extra logic of a smart contract, it can reach out and do that. This goes across the board. For example, we've added a lot in the last year. We are now one of the most EVM-equivalent ledgers out there. We've done things like accounts on Hedera have a name like 0.0.123, whereas on Ethereum, it's, you know, hash, it's a whole bunch of hex digits, it's this big long thing. We now have the ability that when you look at one of our accounts, you can have an EVM-type name for it. And so, to a smart contract, it looks like an Ethereum account. It doesn't look like a Hedera account. That sort of thing. And there's a whole bunch of little details like that that just make the two ecosystems work better together. And you can have external tools that are designed to work with Ethereum, and now they work with us too. And so, we've seen huge interest in this. This is something that people are always asking about, and we're always adding new features. You know, when we add these features, they're typically done through a HIP, Hedera Improvement Proposal process, and anyone on this call can write a new HIP and submit new HIPs. And we have HIPs on a wide range of subjects, but I would say a good fraction of them are on how do we become more and more interoperable with tools that were built for other ledgers or specifically Ethereum. And I'm really glad that we have made that an emphasis and made that a high priority. And now we have seen it paying off. Lots of people have moved to us, they build on us in the first place, or they move from somewhere else because they can do so easily and they get all the benefits.‍

Brandon Davenport
That's amazing! I love that. And I think that as we start to see Hedera getting more and more prominence, providing more ways for developers to kind of dip their toes and bring, you know, not needing to restart all their work and kind of just bring it over, the easier it is to do that, I think that's a really good approach. And this kind of ties into my next question, which is just the overall, really wide community-based ecosystem growth like, if you look at, for example, the Hedera ecosystem category and Coin Market Cap, and all those different types of things, we have so many incredible community builders, truly like being, you know, a lot of these, successes and milestones that they have, being celebrated by the likes of the HBAR Foundation, and Hedera. And I'm curious, one like, just your thoughts, seeing,  like if we take our Enterprise hat off and put kind of the community hat on, just, you know, your thoughts on the growth there. But then also, really, you know, the reality is, we are in a bear market. Things are very difficult right now for a lot of developers. And do you see an opportunity, in a more aggressive investment into some of these builders? Because really, some of these, like, some of these folks, it could just be a single developer that, if they had, you know, their rent taken care for six months, might have a huge impact on the network because of these initiatives that they're leading. I was just curious, like, um, you know, your take on the growth that you're seeing on the community side, but also maybe some kind of untapped potential in that community. That, you know, I see more investment needed. I was, I was interested to see if you share that sentiment as well. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Yes, which is why investment is happening. So, we didn't create one funding organization. We created three. So, Hedera spun off three different organizations to help small startups, including single-person startups, to do some of these things: the HBAR Foundation, the Hashgraph Association, and the DLT Science Foundation. These three give grants. The third one often gives grants for research as well, but the first two will give grants to actual companies. And then, the Hashgraph Association also does training and certification stuff, and they're doing a lot of things. But these are the ones that are funding this. They're investing in the community, and this community is amazing. I am always just blown away by the creativity of the people in this industry, in our community, the H-barbarians, and the vision that the H-barbarians have. People are starting all sorts of startups to do a wide range of different things. You see a need that no one else has thought of, and you jump in and you fix it. That's entrepreneurship at its best, and we see this in the community, and I love this. I also love the enthusiasm of the community, the positivity of the community. There are communities that all sit around and talk about how evil everyone else in the world is. We don't do that. We're not spending all of our time badmouthing other ledgers. We're being more positive. We're building each other up, and we're encouraging each other. I love that, and I love all of the things that I'm seeing this community building. And even things like some of the NFT pictures and things are just creative. The memes and so on are just fun. Videos and things that people make are just fun. So, we are in the middle of a bear market. Bears don't last forever, but bears are always painful, no matter how long they last. And we do have the three funding organizations, and we do have, everyone's helping each other on things like, well, how do I do this? We talk with each other, and I see that in the community, people helping other people to know how to solve problems that they have. But this is tough times in this bull mark, in this bear market, and we will help each other get through this.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
One of the questions or topics that you briefly touched on Leemon was,Central Bank digital currencies and, I think most of us know that they're certainly coming at this point in time, um, and I'm curious what your feelings are. We interviewed Paolo Tasca last week or two weeks ago, and he was talking about how these banks aren't necessarily developers and don't really run developer teams either to an extent. So, is there going to be kind of an, um, an interoperability aspect between, just curious thoughts between like public ledgers or banks going to operate their own ledgers? We know that there's been a bunch of work going on with emtech, for example, with Project New Dawn, Microsoft, the FED. We saw Olympus Advisors document come out probably six or seven months ago, which was, I think, co-supported by Ripple and Hedera, and I think there was one organization that I'm missing. But what are your thoughts around Central Bank digital currencies, public ledgers, and the way that cryptocurrency as a whole might interact with CBDCs as they start to go live in some more tier one type nations?‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Yeah, so no one knows that CBDCs will end up looking like, but I can speculate on what I think they're going to end up looking like. So, a company, a country like the United States, I'll just use that because I know this place more, has a Federal Reserve, which is a set of banks that together have databases, computers in those banks that hold almost all of the money in the country. So, your checking account at your local bank is not holding dollars. It's holding IOUs. The bank has reserve requirements. The reserve requirements are when your bank has an account at a Federal Reserve Bank, which has the real dollars. And as you may be aware, the reserve requirement right now is a whopping zero percent, and that happened in 2020. So, your bank may not have anything back in the IOU, but if it has anything back in the IOU, it can be things like it's a count with the Federal Reserve. So, there are people who have actually said, "Hey, what are you talking about? CBDC, America already has a CBDC. It's a small cluster of banks that are running a network, and their computers have databases, and those databases have the ones and zeros that are the actual dollars in the United States. The only other actual dollars are physical paper dollar bills and coins, but aside from the physical paper and coins, the only actual real dollars, the United States are in that network of computers in their databases. Hey, it's like a CBDC, except I think that an actual CBDC can have some advantages. So, right now it is incredibly painful to try to build on-ramps and off-ramps from crypto. If you want to buy Hbars or some other crypto with dollars, you have to find somebody willing to transfer one to the other. Once you're in the crypto world and you hold crypto, it's much easier to go from one crypto to another. Every exchange does that. That's what makes it an exchange, and DEXes do that. But you can't really have a DEX that automatically goes from dollars to crypto or from crypto to dollars. If the CBDC network at the Federal Reserve Banks were running a network that could interoperate with the public ledgers and transfer dollars, you know, so you have dollars in their bank and their ledger that become wrapped dollars on some other ledger, then the whole on-ramp/off-ramp becomes very, very easy, and that would be great. Also, I assume they have server technology that can handle if a few computers crash. Typical databases have that ability, but they probably don't have the ability to survive one of their computers being hacked and becoming malicious. If they were using a ledger, they would get that for free too, and so why not? Something like Hashgraph is very fast. You might as well do it. It doesn't cost you anything, and you get this additional security. So, there are people that say we already have a CBDC, and it's perfectly secure. Why do we tamper with success? But I would say no. What we really need is to be able to have the ability to go back and forth between ledgers, especially with State proofs as I was describing, and you get the additional security. So, you want ABFT. You want to be able to show that it's more secure than a typical database. Typical databases only handle failures, not malicious hackers. We want to, you know, make it even stronger. Why not? I mean, the current system seems to be safe enough, but why not make it safer? And then that changes the world. It makes ledgers really an extension. I do not think any country will build a CBDC on a public ledger. I think that would be still, you wouldn't just mint a token on Hedera and say, "This is the US dollar." But you absolutely want them to run their own private ledger at the Federal Reserve Banks that interoperate with the other public ledgers and going back and forth. If they build a Hedera, you get the speed and security. And as we roll out State proofs, you'll have this ability to go between ledgers without having a bridge with people in it, which is very important. And so, this is what I suspect in the long term all the countries on Earth will do. So, if they want to use Hashgraph, it's open source. They can just get it. And we could even talk about maybe it's Swirld's Labs about giving them advice and helping them and guiding them and doing some of the work for them to understand it. But it's interesting. I have these internal conversations and external conversations with people, and they just say, "Yeah, why don't you just run the US Dollar on AWS or something?" And that's just ludicrous. No one's going to give one company the ability to counterfeit unlimited amounts of dollars. That just isn't going to happen. But I do think we'll probably end up in the future that I just described, and it will have the advantages that I described.‍

Brandon Davenport
That's amazing. And just as kind of we enter in the last 10 minutes here, my last question, that I'm really curious about is, I mean, you don't spend a ton of time tweeting, which I mean, I don't really have a problem with. You're working on some pretty complex problems on the day-to-day, so I don't mind, a crypto founder that isn't tweeting constantly. But I will say we're at a really interesting time in technology right now, and the convergence of all these different technologies like, you know, crypto, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, biometrics, and digital identity, zero-knowledge proofs. I mean, so many things are bubbling to the surface. There's so many, you know, hot takes on Twitter and threads. And I was just kind of curious while we have you here, um, how do you envision these technologies will impact the world and how Hedera might fit into the picture? Kind of like, if you were to write one of these crazy Twitter threads kind of giving your take on all these different things, like, what is kind of your take on these things? What have you been thinking about seeing these headlines and advancements in technology and the convergence of everything?

‍Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Okay, this is great. I'd love to spend another hour on this. You're right. I don't tweet, but Mance and I are about to do a series of first principles broadcasts, and what we're going to do is just sit and talk for a half hour or an hour about some subject, like, what is the future of AI? And we'll release it, and we'll just have a whole series of videos that we're going to do, just talking about different subjects. And we'll talk about CBDCs, we'll talk about money, we'll talk about AI, we'll talk about robotics, we'll talk about, who knows what I'll talk about. So that's going to be coming soon. We're starting to set that up, so you get to hear us babble about unrelated topics to some degree. My background's in AI, so I'm very interested in this. I think that what we are seeing is a number of revolutions very close together, and this is going to make the Industrial Revolution look like it was in slow motion. With this, is going to radically change the world extremely quickly, and it's funny. It's not always the things that you think of LLMs, you know, like Chat GPT or all the rage right now, and they are significant. They may not have quite the impact people are describing or envisioning, except as a component in a bigger system. But there are fundamentally interesting things changing the world right now because of these LLMs, these large language models. However, what gets far less interest is the progress in humanoid robots. So, you know, Elon Musk is doing his robots, and Boston Dynamics is doing backflips and parkour or whatever with their robots, and that's all very cool. I think people don't understand the true impact that's going to have when these robots can then get into any vehicle, any car, any truck, any tractor, and start driving it. Or they can go into a worksite and start building a house, or they can work in the mining industry, which is going very much into robotics right now. We may get fairly soon to the place where robots can mine, refine, manufacture, transport, and do maintenance. At that point, they become self-replicating. Not like Terminator, where they're going to take over the world, but just the people who own them will be using them to build more robots faster and faster. The amount of resources you can get from automatic mining is unlimited. You can even go down below the ocean floor, across the entire world, and they could build themselves. Energy is going to be critical here, and there are all sorts of interesting things happening in the world of energy right now. Fission and fusion, and even geothermal, are getting less interest than they should. And we still have wind and solar continuing to improve. All of these are a big deal, and they will help this robotics revolution to just kind of do everything. This is going to make it trivial to colonize Mars. It's going to make it trivial to colonize the moon because you just send a seed ship with some robots, and then a decade later, you move into the giant mansions covering the entire planet, well underground. But huge underground cities of hundreds of square miles filled with gardens and zoos and everything you could want, and you just move in. This is the kind of thing we're looking at. I think we'll do a first principles on how to colonize Mars. This is all coming from this AI revolution, and it's not LLMs. It's good humanoid robots that can do something like picture a car engine or wash the dishes or build a house. This is where we're going now. 100 years from now, we won't have humanoid robots, but right now, we're going to use humanoid robots because they look like humans, which means they can fit through any door a human can go through. They can climb any ladder a human can climb. They can use all of the equipment in your kitchen to make dinner for you because all that equipment was designed to be held by a human hand. They can reach all your cabinets because they're a human height. In the short term, it's going to be these humanoid robots because they can just do everything we do. You don't have to build self-driving cars. It just goes and climbs into an existing car, and now that car is self-driving because there's a robot in it. So, that's AI. You mentioned biometrics. Biometrics are sort of cool and sort of scary. I think that we have good identity systems coming along, and Ledger is going to play a huge role. Hedera has a huge interest in identity. The Hedera community is going to play a big role in it. DREC will make that happen. Then, biometrics become a little bit less important, but you'll still use biometrics to get into your phone, just like you do now. That will continue. I don't even remember what all you said. Did you say IoT? Eventually, everything comes alive. Every device has brains in it. We're coming to that. Oh, zero knowledge. You said zero knowledge is very fun. Our cryptographers are inventing new things with zero knowledge right now, which is very cool. And it's what I talked about before. I want to prove to you that I'm over 21, but I don't want to tell you my age. I want to prove to you that I'm a citizen of this country, but I don't want to show you what my name is. Zero knowledge proofs allow you to do those sorts of things, and they're also used for state proofs. Our state proofs are based on zero knowledge proofs, which make them very small. Actually, we're probably going to have two versions of it. You can get a big one cheap, and then if you want to spin the computation, you can squish it down to a small one that uses state proofs. It's very cool. So, there are all these revolutions going on. Yeah, I'd like to talk more about the energy revolution, the AI revolution, the space revolution. Having satellites that can talk directly to your phone is a game changer anywhere in the world. Being able to go to the moon and Mars and build lots of space hotels and space stations and things is just laying the groundwork for mining the asteroids, and then you can build huge civilizations in space.‍

Brandon Davenport
Okay, that's amazing. I was gonna say, Ryan, I think we got to have a part two to this because, like, now I want to talk about so many other crazy things. So, yeah, I'll move it on to you, right? But, Leemon, incredible.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Yeah, I mean, to go on from there. I'm not sure where to go. All right, the the last question that I do have for you, Leemon, um, before we kind of wrap this up, is to maybe allow you to provide a forward-looking statement. You know, what are you most excited about within the Hedera ecosystem for the remainder of 2023? And then, looking a bit further out, what really excites you within what's being built, what's being facilitated, what's being integrated, and where you see us going here this year?‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
I am so excited about all the applications that are coming online. So, there's this community building applications, you have enterprise building applications. We have this pipeline of applications coming online. I am very excited about all the different things we're seeing happening on the Ledger right now. In the longer term, like next year, I'm excited about some of these features like state proofs and like inter-ledger communication and inter-shard communication. This is the D-REC, is really well. D-REC is this year, really allows our industry to go out and take its rightful place as part of everything on Earth, every industry, every part of society is going to have ledgers as part of it. And right now, we're laying the foundations for that with D-Rec and with adding more features and with people getting better software to allow the ordinary users to have NFTs and crypto and other things. This is where I see we're headed.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Well, thank you so much, Leemon, and I know that we tackled quite the wide gamut of questions and topics for you today. And I know how busy you are, so we wanted to just say thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come on and do this interview with us. Leemon, thank you so much. Brandon as well, I mean legend in the H-bar community. Again, Brandon does a podcast every Sunday, Hashgraph News and Rumors. I'd certainly recommend that you check that out. Also, a huge shout out to Marc and the entire HashPack team. Consistent builders, obviously the largest wallet on Hedera at this point in time. And Marc made the connection for us to be able to interview Leemon today as well. Carola, the entire Genfinity team, thank you guys so much. But Leemon, thank you so much. And my sentiments are the same as Brandon's. As you guys start rolling out the podcast that you guys are doing with the topics, we'll certainly support those. And we'd love to have you back in the future to kind of expand on some of these topics and maybe revisit where we're at here.‍

Swirlds Labs – Leemon Baird – Founder & Co-CEO
Great, well, thanks. It's been great talking with you, and I look forward to joining you again. Thank you.‍

Genfinity - King Solomon - CEO
Thanks everybody. Really appreciate it, guys. So, from Genfinity and all of us here, really appreciate the time, and thank you to Leemon again. We will talk to you guys next time.