Bitcoin and Crypto for Real Wolrd Use

Bitcoin and Crypto for Real Wolrd Use

all right everybody welcome back we’ve got another awesome guest joining us here at the crypto 101 podcast I’m your host Bryce as always joined by by uh my buddy my compadre Mr Brendan vman Brendan how are you doing today hey Bryce I am doing great at the time of recording this we are just days before the having so it’s only fitting that we talk a little bit more about Bitcoin and everything that’s happening in the ever expansive Bitcoin ecosystem so man I am hyped up for today’s episode yeah uh it’s funny you know uh Bitcoin has kind of taken a little bit of a backseat to some of the the memec coin craziness the altcoin the defi stuff really popped up here in q1 uh but as you mentioned the having uh is this once every four years event that constricts the supply of future Bitcoin um it’s something that really drives a lot of the price action in crypto and and people are really excited about it and so um we wanted to dive deeper into not just Bitcoin but what’s being built on top of Bitcoin there there’s an explosion of new innovation new technology um it’s kind of the you know the the web 3.0 version uh that that starts to meet Bitcoin because now Bitcoin is it’s got a stable base layer but now it’s starting to get programmability that’s easy uh not easy uh I’m not going to say that but uh more more advanced more flexible so anyhow we wanted to bring an expert on bitcoin on programming on it uh Professor David C uh sorry Professor David SE uh from Stanford University who is building Babylon um so uh David how are you doing today very good BR and Brandon so nice to be here today yeah we’re we’re gonna have a lot of fun um you know we we keep things um casual here I mean this is crypto 101 so I know you’re professor at Stanford you might teach 50501 or 601 level courses we keep things easy um and so the the easiest question I will ask you uh uh is to tell us a little bit about your background before we dive into Bitcoin and everything you guys are building on Babylon um tell us a little bit about who you are and how you came into this industry yeah so um uh so five years ago a friend of mine introduced me to this paper called the Nakamoto Bitcoin white paper and before that I was a doing research in a totally different area in actually my research contributes towards everybody’s daily life their cell phone so I was doing research on how to make cell phones communicate reliably and efficiently so that everyone in the world can have a cell phone so that was my research for many years and I’ve made contributions to uh prot protols in fact everybody is using my protocol whenever you use a cell phone now what’s it called it’s called the proportional Fair protocol so every time you use a cell phone you’re getting data from the base station and the base station has to figure out how to distribute the data to many many cell phones at the same time and have a protocol which helps them to do it efficiently that’s epic wow yeah that’s uh yeah that was my past life but then when when there are five billion or six billion cell phones out there then you know from a researcher point of view it’s time to move on it’s time to move on to something which is starting from zero or near zero and that’s when I met nakamoto’s white paper and I fell in love with it it’s such a beautiful white paper written only in nine pages but yet contains so many brilliant ideas and I got hooked onto it as a researcher as a researcher you see all the brilliant ideas in this night pages but you also see all the potential new innovations that you can build on top of those ideas and uh that’s how I got excited and I started a new research Direction at Stanford I built a completely new research group with new graduate students and new researchers focusing on essentially how to build secure and scalable protocol Beyond Bitcoin uh and that was our our Focus in the past few years and uh yeah so um one of the I just want to be brief but one of the contribution we made was on eum’s proof of State protocol so during the merge we find some attack vectors on the protocol and uh so we report to vitalic and his team and we started a very fruitful one year long collaboration to make the proof of Stak etherum proof of steak protocol more secure uh for the merch so that was one concrete contribution we made to the industry that’s incredible and would you in is it fair to say that your work at Babylon um grew out of that I know you guys are working on uh proof of stake for Bitcoin um is it was kind of all that research going on hand inand or were you kind of looking at this as a research project experimental for fun um and then you know when when you guys kind of hit that you know Big Moment you’re like hey let’s spin this into an entirely new project or company or whatever yeah so in our research Journey we started with Bitcoin we started with Bitcoin that was our first love that was our first love but then everybody’s first love right yeah but then Bitcoin kind of fell out of Vogue to some extent because it’s been sort of all the action excitement is on the new proof of steak protocols ethereum for example Avalanche Solana ET all proof of State protocol and uh so what we came up with the idea we came up with is actually well you know Bitcoin is kind of fell on vot but actually Bitcoin has a very strong property two very strong property one is is so secure is supported by all these miners working on the Bitcoin and two is it’s a largest asset largest asset by far by far crypto you know ethereum always talk about what do you call it the the um well we’re talking halfing in a few weeks but ethereum always have this uh what do you call it uh passing surpassing Bitcoin in value what was that ter flipping the flipping that’s right the halfing the fing H the flipping well it has not occurred yet in fact it seems to be further and further away from flipping now Bitcoin is 3x ethereum so so what we’re saying is okay all this security all this asset right now or at least when we start this research two years ago it’s like sitting idle nothing to do completely isolated from the rest of the web free web fre is marching on but Bitcoin is like left behind but yet it’s still a very large asset it’s still very secure and so our project fabulon is really the idea of trying to combine the best of both workes all the Innovations with proof of th but yet still leverage off all the security and huge asset of Bitcoin to make web free even better even more secure and and uh so that’s the thesis of the project yeah and you mentioned that you know you were building protocols for cell phones which was arguably one of the most impactful Technologies of all time and now five to six billion people are using them so my question is do you think that crypto can also reach five to six billion users and if so like how long would that take roughly yeah so in some sense my experience in uh research in cell phones gives me uh the inspiration and the uh long-term faith in crypto as well so when I started doing uh Bitcoin uh sorry start doing cell phone research I’m revealing my age but who cares it’s about year 2000 okay in those days it was called 3G now we have 5G and moving on to 6G but at that time it was 3G okay starting 3G and at that time there was no iPhone there was no iPhone and so this whole idea of our research which is to scale cell phones to make it reachable to many many people to carry a lot of data in fact we were kind of a bit blind because you know there were the applications the real scalable applications have not appeared yet but yet we already thinking about scaling cell phones okay and at that time it was just basically a a sort of a belief that hey you know what you we build it uh someone will come and indeed after about seven years of our effort the iPhone came and that was history so that’s the belief in crypto as well we’re in the early days of crypto uh relatively small fraction of the population uses crypto on a daily basis and what we’re doing is to prepare for that future for that iPhone moment for crypto at when we started doing research in 2000 you know we could not really Envision why people will use all this data that we were capacity that we’re providing them uh only when iPhone show up then we sort of understand aha so that’s it that’s what we’re working for and uh I cannot tell you when the iPhone of crypto will show up but I Fai that it will show up because I’ve seen one before H and so it’s fascinating just that you know you you’ve been um pioneering um in in technologies that really do um have Network effects and these are the fastest growing Technologies and we see um one of the big value propositions of Bitcoin is that um it’s got a network right and and over time as that Network grows um the price of that um asset also grows and so you’ve decided um you know and correct me if I’m wrong not to build the next iPhone of crypto You’re Building kind of supporting technology so that the next iPhone kind of can be built on crypto if you will yeah so I’m a basically infrastructure guy so my experience and my uh strength is in building infrastructure and so I’ll let someone else build the iPhone but I’ll build the infrastructure that supports an iPhone right and what is that infrastructure the infra okay so the infrastructure that we’re building in Babylon okay is basically this if you think about what distinguishes web 3 from web 2 is decentralization okay you want to decentralize the power away from Central Authority but the most important thing about decentralization is security because once you decentralize then the power is distributed and you don’t want people to take that power and attack the system so security is in my mind the central innovation of web3 and what we are doing is in some sense we’re making that security very scalable by allowing Bitcoin the 1.4 trillion asset to be to provide the security so let me just unpack this a little bit okay so the future is proof of stake right so all the new blockchains are proof of stake but how does proof of stake chains secure themselves they secure themselves through Capital so that distinguishes between proof of work and proof of stake proof of stake is secure by Capital well where does that Capital come from in the in the past few years all the proof of State chains the capital comes from the Native asset of that chain so typically when you build a new chain you would spin up a native asset Solana or eth or something like that and then you use that native asset to secure itself okay however one when when can take a step back is that well actually all we need is a crypto asset to secure the chain does that crypto asset needs to be a native asset which is highly volatile or can it be another asset which is much larger and so we came up this idea of using Bitcoin which is the largest asset as a staking asset that can be used to secure all these chains so that’s the essentially the protocol that we’re building we call it the Bitcoin staking protocol we love the name because Bitcoin and sticking doesn’t seem to go together at all but our protocol combines the two together wow I love it um it it sounds um it sounds incredible and I remember back in the day there were um there were things altcoins that would use merge Mining and so they would mine you know um you know on bitcoin and that would secure the network but it sounds like um this is a little bit different it sounds like you uh you could kind of stake your Bitcoin which is a very New Concept you could stake your Bitcoin and you can earn a yield for that um even though bitcoin’s not proof of stake it’s proof of work um so by staking that Bitcoin are you’re not actually participating in any consensus um you know for Bitcoin is that right for instance you can’t buy up um you know hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of bitcoin stake it and then have some say in uh in how the network operates is that right yes so let me unpack this a little bit more you you you you talk of a lot of Concepts here first let start with merch mining so yes that’s right so merch mining is actually concept invented by Nakamoto himself satosi Nakamoto himself and is a way for it to share secure the Bitcoin with another proof of work chain so in those days everyone just thinks about proof of work chain in 21 Z 20111 Now however in nowadays most new chains are pro of steti chain so merch mining is not applicable because merch mining is to share with another Pro of work chain so therefore we came up with this concept of Bitcoin sticking which you can think of as merge staking which is to take the asset instead of taking the work the energy behind the asset we take the asset itself and we use that asset to share security with proof of stick chains so that’s the one core concept now second is that Bitcoin is proof of work okay and our project fully respect Bitcoin as it is we are not thinking of changing Bitcoin protocol itself in any way so therefore we are not suggesting that the Bitcoin should be used to provide voting power to the Bitcoin chain itself the voting power is entirely reserved for the miners who are working very hard to Pro prot what we’re saying though is that this asset this huge asset 1.3 1.4 trillion asset can be used as a sticking asset remotely for proof of stick chains which is not Bitcoin for other chains in other words so that is the core concept so in other words any do and it does this by um you know if I understand correctly it does this trustless so I’m not lending you my tokens uh to a centralize sort of entity who takes that dollar value and then goes and buys tokens uh on a different chain to stake them it’s all done through smart contracts is that right because if it wasn’t done then that it would kind of have a lot of custodial risk correct nobody should let nobody should give Bitcoin to me I’m just a mad professor and if you give Bitcoin to me I’ll lose them I’ll lose all the keys so don’t give it to me don’t give any Bitcoin to me please thank you very much I’m just a researcher we’re just building a protocol now exactly the protocol is trustless it is self custodial so any Bitcoin holder can lock it in a contract on the Bitcoin chain on the Bitcoin chain and this is a sticking contract and the protocol is such that this asset can become a sticking asset that can secure another chain through the contractual agreement exactly now I do want to clarify one point you made which is smart contract okay smart contract now the unfortunate thing about Bitcoin or fortun thing it depends on your point of view is that it has no smart contract in fact one reason why people believe that Bitcoin has never been attack before is because there are no smart contracts so the attack vectors is much reduced however because of the lack of smart contract it’s also very hard to build stuff on bitcoin the beautiful thing about our protocol is that actually we do not need the smart contract capability we can build contracts even with the existing Bitcoin so called scripting language which has very limited expressibility in fact I was just writing this paper uh before meet meeting you and our paper title is remote sticking with dum contract so in fact we are very proud to be dumb I like that yeah Le less complexity less attack surface um and you know I think one of the things that I’ve seen in my you know eight odd years in uh in crypto is that all these smart contracts uh on ethereum or salana sometimes they just um kind of uh go Belly Up and for for reasons that can’t even be explained I mean somebody could just be auditing a GitHub repo and accidentally uh pull the plug on one I remember uh you know back you know when uh this happened to ethereum and some random Dev just accidentally killed a contract that had you know hundreds of millions of real world dollars locked up um in parody there was a hack and you know all sorts of different uh things along the way and so what what I’m hearing from you is that um you guys are using you know the the notoriously robust and strong uh resilient you know kind of language that Bitcoin is coded in um but somehow there there is some kind of Contracting capability there but it’s not as complex um but it still gets the job done I guess could you unpack that a little bit for us yeah yeah so uh ethereum smart contract uh has this a fancy name called touring complete sounds fancy doesn’t it who doesn’t want to be complete right who who wants to be incomplete but what touring complete really means is that you can essentially write any computer program okay on ethereum any computer program so that’s very powerful that’s a very powerful concept but the fact that you can write any program also means you can write buggy programs you can write buggy programs and the more complicated the program you can you can write the more chance you’re introducing bugs and that’s sort of account for many the reasons why so many attacks are on Smart contract it’s a smart contract layer attack okay so in Bitcoin however it Bitcoin is focused on actually not as a platform to write arbitrary applications it is only focused on one application which is payments so the Bitcoin language essentially only allows you to describe okay how a coin can be paid the so-call the spending conditions of the coin so you just tell you hey this coin can be paid if someone signs it with this particular signature okay now fortunate for us though it does have a few additional features few additional features very small number but one very important one is a so-called time lock okay so you can lock your Bitcoin still self custodial but you can lock your Bitcoin for say three months okay and you can take that bit Bitcoin no one else can take your Bitcoin but after 3 months the Bitcoin is automatically usable again okay so this is this contract is a very simple contract but it’s still self- custodial you are still sending that biton to your own address it’s just that you can’t have access to this coin for three months okay and this is this kind of in the original the original Bitcoin code since it started this feature has always been a piece of that is that right um okay so I do not believe so it’s uh I think it’s introduced in about 214 or5 if I remember correctly okay but maybe let me let me double check on that and I’ll get back to you offline after this so that I have a correct record of the statement it’s very important to make correct statement about Bitcoin uh because the reason why it’s a little bit complicated is because there are two or three uh different time locks and I know that one was introduced in 215 but I wasn’t sure whether all of them were introduced 215 but okay in any case right now in the existing Bitcoin script there is this time lock okay so this as you can see is this is a contract already right and you can see that if you want to do staking a Time log is kind of important because you know by staking you mean you’re locking your fund for a certain period of time if you have no capability and you can always take out your fund then this is not a security okay this is not providing security so the time lock is a basic primitive that we use uh to build this and luckily for us Bitcoin actually has this yeah you know one of the cool things that I saw Here recently is that you launched your BTC Signet and this brought in over a 100,000 users and what we’re seeing is that people are are constantly being more interested in using Bitcoin for other purposes you know we started off with traditional Bitcoin layer 2os and then we looked at ordinals and brc2 now there is you know almost the arrival of runes and then there’s the ETFs do you think that this proves that people are wanting to expand the Bitcoin ecosystem yeah you know the thing is that we a year or two ago we have this bit perhaps misconception that somehow Bitcoin holders are kind of a different aliens or something like that that somehow they have some very weird uh likes and dislike for example they don’t like to use the Bitcoin in any way they just want to put it in Cold Storage but actually you the reality in the past year has disproved that with all notes and also without protocol launching is that hey Bitcoin HS are just like any crypto crypto people there are many many Bitcoin holders out there and like them they they like to do do interesting things like buy nfts like sticking sticking is such a basic functionality for all proof of stake uh ethereum Solana it’s such a basic basic thing and now we’re telling people hey even you with a Bitcoin you don’t have to go and sell it to buy an altcoin to do saking you can stick it directly with your Bitcoin and after six months if you don’t want to unstick you can take back your Bitcoin again it’s the same old Bitcoin that you had six months ago so basically we are disproving I think as part of this Renaissance of Bitcoin disproving the fact that Bitcoin holders is any strange species they’re different from other token holders I love it and stakings really been on the rise for the last couple years too you kind of see staking slowly become the standard especially over the last like decade we start off with Bitcoin being you know the real set standard with proof of work and altcoins that were created afterwards um for the most part we focused on proof of work and now the longer that ethereum has been around the longer kind of that model has been here you know a lot of projects are navigating towards proof of stake and I think you’re kind of highlighting the properties and it was only a matter of time before someone like yourself came along and said how can we start looking at these features to integrate them with Bitcoin yeah because you know the thing is that sticking is kind of one of the lowest risk use of your token while still having yield earning opportunity so you know in in traditional Finance there this concept called risk-free investment which is not not exactly risk-free but very low risk like you know buying a government treasury for example uh staking is like the crypto analog of that to some extent and so what we’re saying is that hey how come Bitcoin with this 1.3 trillion asset doesn’t have this risk-free investment option A risk-free staking option and our protocol essentially endows Bitcoin with this option I love it and you know it’s it’s I like the idea of being able to kind of share bitcoin’s security um with other applications um as I understand um what is it a fair assessment to say this kind of exports a little bit of uh bitcoin’s security to other applications for instance aosh Network which leverages Babylon or the osmosis uh platform uh injective in you know maybe about a dozen others yeah so um so here’s yeah in fact the exporting of Bitcoin security other chains is kind of the starting point of our research two years ago as I mentioned so what we discover is the following right a token a native token of a chain can have many uses for example it can be governance it can be for the economy on top of that blockchain and it could be staking okay but we find that actually staking is kind of one of the not so good use cases of the token because you know staking is all about security right security is all about stability and the native token especially the early days of a native token typically is very volatile so using it as a stable base to secure your economy doesn’t seem like on hindsight a very good idea it was how proof of stake was started but on hindsight it doesn’t seem like a very good idea and what we’re saying is that hey with Bitcoin as a most stable crypto asset and with Bitcoin and such a large Supply why don’t you use Bitcoin to provide that stable base for you to build your economy on top of so that’s the that’s the that’s the kind of the thesis of a project and and kind of in followup am I you know if I go and stake through Babylon am I then earning BTC as my yield or am I earning tokens from injective or Cosmo or whichever token I’m staking or is it a blend how does that work yeah so uh so now it depends a lot on what do you what network are you securing using your Bitcoin so as as we build a protocol then users will stickers will have option okay they can decide on which network they want to use the Bitcoin to secure now the yield you get will depend on the economy of the chain or the network that you’re securing okay so if that Network decides to pay in the native token then you you get the deal a native token if that chain decides to pay in stable coin then you’ll get stable coin now if that chain happens to be a Bitcoin Layer Two For example all right or Bitcoin side chain then potentially you could get Bitcoin as the yield as well because if that economy is trading on bitcoin then it could potenti we provide Bitcoin yield so it depends very much on what you know economies you’re securing I love it is this I mean this is kind of very uh similar to enan layer um in the ethereum world is that correct yeah so let me uh clarify the differences and similarity with igen layer um so by the way the igen layer founder sham is my 15y old friend in fact we were doing research together when we were doing cell phones and so forth and in fact we move into the blockchain space together about 5 years ago when I talk about reading the Nakamoto white paper we were reading it together we each of us wrote our first paper together in in crypto so I know him very well so wow uh so to clarify uh one thing is the following right ethereum already has taken okay I layer built on top of that to provide resticking now Bitcoin does not have staking so our main contribution of our project is to provide the staking primitive so I think a rough analogy is like Bitcoin staking is like ethereum staking and of course you can build an igen layer Style reaking on top of our protocol Bitcoin staking and so we are doing that as well so in some sense you can think of Bitcoin staking is like ethereum staking plus I layer reaking on the ethereum side except with an asset three times the size you know there’s a lot of talk with the having rate around the corner and we kind of alluded to this earlier but it seems like the community is split there’s a lot of people who are like the four-year Market cycle that is paired with the having is still intact and then there’s people that are saying we’re starting to divert you know the Market’s maturing and and other stuff is happening like what are your thoughts on the matter cu I think in the past everyone’s looked at the having as this you know massive impactful event and it you know typically is followed by this historic bull market and the markets always moveed through this relatively stable fouryear Market cycle with parabolic upside and volatile downside but do you think that that four-year Market cycle is still like intact and paired to the having yeah so I have to say you’re asking the wrong guy you’re asking the wrong guy you know why you’re asking the wrong guy because I am at the heart of researcher okay so I believe in kind of longterm progress of technology so when we started the Babylon project it was the near the end of the previous bcycle okay and then everything got of went down there was FTX and there was uh Terror there all kinds of things happening around us it’s like news every day but we just keep on building because we believe in this long-term vision of Bitcoin and in fact when we built side Babylon people were laughing at us why are you building on bitcoin that’s like a stupid sounds like a stupid idea you should go with your friend shiram you should go and build on igen layer sorry build on ethereum but we never mind we just believed in Bitcoin we know that Bitcoin uh has very strong intrinsic properties and now Bitcoin has sort of revived so in my mind I just built the technology doesn’t matter it’s B pycho bow Market bare Market just keep on building so I cannot predict what happens after the happing um but anyway so that’s my answer no and I think that’s a good answer and it’s probably one that a lot of people need to hear because it’s so easy to get caught up and every little action that happens and every little piece of news every $10 that Bitcoin moves right it’s so easy to get caught up in the short term and with what’s happening and then you lose sight of the long term and the one thing that is proven you know up until like literally this month Bitcoin has just continued to appreciate and its user base has grown and its adoption has grown and just the whole ecosystem of cryptocurrency that is being led by Bitcoin continues to expand and so you know sometimes a lot of people need to hear that exact thing of like hey look at the big picture you know prices are going to go up they’re going to go down there’s going to be this having there’s going to be another having heck there’s going to be a lot more [Music] is the reduction of reward okay to the miners so halfing has a long-term threat to the security of the Bitcoin chain you may have heard this notion of the security budget of Bitcoin reducing through the halfing and in my in my mind that’s why it’s so important to build on bitcoin because you want to get more value to the Bitcoin so that the miners will not only need to get value from the reward they can get Val from the transaction fees they can get value from the increase in the price of Bitcoin and that’s why it’s really important for projects like us and not only us and or nodes and layer 2os and other things to build on bitcoin to give it additional value to keep the party going yeah absolutely um certainly uh for the price of uh of of basically basically for miners to keep mining um and have those incentives line up the price of Bitcoin needs to keep going up um or else they’re just going to shut their miners off because there’s no incentive to mine so um you get half the rewards but over time um you know hopefully half the rewards denominated in Bitcoin is actually the same or more um than half the rewards just denominated in uh dollars um so you know we’re we’re we’re pretty excited about what the Bitcoin having is going to be be able to do but like you said I’m I’m just as excited or even more excited about the the builders and the developers um like yourself who are building applications um and really building infrastructure that that aren’t possible to exist um today but you’re building infrastructure for them tomorrow and so I guess my my question to you is you know what sort of applications what sort of front-end applications um are going to be made possible by leveraging Babylon um that you know would be unable to be built um before Babylon existed yeah so as I mentioned a little earlier our technology is so Bas basic that is completely application agnostic actually right so anytime you want to build a new application in web fre if it’s a true application then it should be an application which is decentralized and essentially our technology allows you to do that using the cheapest cost in terms of security so if you think about sort of how to build applications every application you build you have to pay some security cost either directly by building your own L1 or you are on an or already on an existing chain which already have a security cost and you pay fees to that so any new new new applications you have to pay security cost and if you think about it what we as providing is that hey you can build any application but at the lowest security cost why because Bitcoin is the largest most abandoned abundant asset and therefore that would keep the cost of security the lowest because the supply is highest it’s just basic economics 101 since this uh podcast is crypto 101 so I bring up economics 101 economics 101 says what says that if the supply of a good is large then the cost is lower that’s that’s what it is so Bitcoin is a much larger Supply than any other crypto asset fair enough well hey you know one of the things that I noticed here recently is I saw that Babylon just wrapped up its phase one and this is pretty exciting because you gathered over 430,000 people on your weit list which is uh you know man that’s a feet in and of itself so you know first of all congratulations on that but it kind of begs the question what’s in store for phase two oh yeah so let me clarify a little bit so we re we we uh we have launched our test net we have launched our test net and even before the test net there were 400,000 people in the waight list trying to find more information about the project W in the testet as you mentioned we have 100,000 stickers that has uh appeared within the 48 Hours of the launch of the testnet so it’s very exciting uh the next step right now is we’ll launch the main net okay so the main net will be launch in two phases so in the first phase we will provide Bitcoin stickers to come and stick the Bitcoin okay we’ll start small with a slow small cap to make sure everything is secure and so forth and gradually increase the cap so this is a little bit like the IG layer launched last year uh second phase we will bring uh proof of stick chains that we use this Bitcoin sticking so we already have a bunch of chains we’re working with right now in the dev net and we’ll as they mature we’ll bring some of those onto the main net and then then the economy cycle closes where the stickers can now get yield uh from these chains so that’s phase two incredible that’s fantastic um certainly can’t wait to see that and um you know be be uh be really exciting to see about all the different Partnerships that you guys um spin out and that you could you know use your Bitcoin listeners at home could go um you know andan we’ll we’ll make sure the links are in the chat or sorry the links are in the uh the show notes um for everybody to to be go uh be sure to uh go find where you can stake your Bitcoin um I am curious though why we have you just a a couple more questions um you know I’m I’m just curious about how the Bitcoin ETF which was launched um earlier this year how that’s affected your work your life um maybe even the perception of your peers um other professors who you know when you’re talking hey I’m I’m researching on bitcoin and this is going to be a big part of the future I mean some of your peers um maybe even before the Bitcoin having I would imagine maybe this is not a legit technology that’s going to be here to stay and then after the ETF did like that Chang the perception of other Stanford and you know you know Elite college level uh perceptions of professors yeah so ETF is really a sign of crypto going mainstream um so I think it does lend a lay of legitimacy to the uh to Bitcoin in general to crypto asset in general uh but as as I said you know I believe in what I believe what other people believe or not believe is not really my issue uh but however one thing good about Bitcoin ETF is it does attract a lot of more attention to bitcoin itself and so it does give more momentum to this whole effort of building on bitcoin as I mentioned to you when we started this project two years ago really hardly anyone is building on bitcoin and people thought we were kind of weird to build on this aric technology from you know it’s actually from a decade ago it’s not that long time ago but people think you know in crypto in crypto time things move very fast though Bitcoin seems to be very archaic but I think the Bitcoin ETF um certainly brings a lot of attention and price action onto Bitcoin so I think that certainly helps our project uh in uh uh overall it helps the entire momentum to build on bitcoin so uh we ran an event uh we call Bitcoin rent in East Denver about two months ago and a few thousand people showed up it’s kind of oximoron because it was a Bitcoin event as part of a s event to e Denver which is the ethereum event uh but yet a lot of people showed up so um there you have it yeah I love it um I’ve got one more question I think Brendan might have one or two more before we let you go but I’m just curious um as as you know one of your big moments your aha moments was originally reading that Satoshi Nakamoto paper um you yourself have authored research papers um I’m curious what you think about satoshi’s move to remain anonymous um you know as a professor yourself you know what do you think his motives were do you do you admire this move um yeah how do you kind of think about his anonymity in in regards to this really groundbreaking technology yeah as a researcher I really admired this move and I’ll tell you why okay so humans are driven by a few very basic things fame fortune and uh what do you call it money okay and this guy doesn’t care right his Bitcoin is Frozen on this chain never touched and for a researcher why do you want to do research well to to be frank you want to be famous you want everyone to know you you want to why do people want to win the Nobel Prize because so that everyone knows about them if you ask the researcher and said do you care about winning Nobel Prize and they say no that’s probably lying to you okay so I really adire it’s not it’s not about changing the world it’s about getting it is about changing the world and getting the Nobel Prize they will tell you if they’re honest and uh so I know a lot of these people I am in acade Academia time I know how high how big ego uh academics have a research res archers have and so I really admire nikotto is really groundbreaking research groundbreaking research uh and uh he doesn’t care about claiming the fame that’s amazing pretty crazy pretty crazy it’s it’s crazy even after all these years I mean I’m sure there’s a lot of people that would have started Bitcoin in his or their shoes and started Anonymous and set it in the motion but I feel like a small fraction of those people would have remained Anonymous up until this point today because now you have an asset that’s worth over a trillion dollars in a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem and you can’t say that it’s a little bit tempting no matter who you are to be the creator of this thing that is literally like turning the world upside down the financial world upside down like you have the opportunity to be one of the richest people in the world now and yet you’re right like he he or or they or whoever they are they don’t care about it the Bitcoin and the initial wallet is untouched um and Satoshi has not come out and said listen I am Satoshi Nakamoto I’ve created bitcoin here’s proof I’m G to move funds around of the original wallet like none of that’s happened so it’s it’s just crazy it takes a special kind of person or group to do something like that and I think it was probably like the Satoshi Nakamoto characters got to be some uh group right and there was probably some kind of multi signature wallet that was set up to make sure that you know no one person uh who could have their ego take over become a villain and then hack the network it’s got to be uh you know some kind of Consortium but no I I don’t agree it has to it has to be one single it has to be one single individual because if it’s a group one of the person will be tempted to at least reveal and get their uh worth of ego boosting so it probably just one very strong minded very strong willed individual that’s my that’s my two cents on this issue wow I wonder you know I wonder if if satoshi’s gonna take it to the Grave like how crazy would it be if like right before he he he died he was and then prob unar gravestone in in classic Satoshi Style just some unmarked gravestone somewhere in in a cemetery but yeah crazy I I I think he will he or she um but but look hey David uh outside of Babylon outside of maybe um anything that you’re working on I just want to know you know what’s one one company that you’ve got on your radar that you think is just an outstanding crypto company that you really admire maybe their Founders or admire the the work that they’re doing in the space what’s somebody that you think that everybody at home looking uh listening right now should maybe go check out and keep on their radar so you know one thing about I don’t think I highlight one one company or one project because I have a lot of friends in this crypto space and uh so I don’t want to do that however I would like to highlight one thing right is that there are multiple projects which are really admir in the crypto space which are really driven from a long-term research vision and that’s kind of rare outside in the Web Two web one space because typically the researchers have a very peripheral role in in forming big [Music] companies whereas here in crypto you can think of projects like Abram or like igen layer that you mentioned or like Babylon they are really driven by researchers abrum for example right was founded by professor in Princeton at Felton and his two graduate students two PhD students um so it’s really started from a very long-term research vision driving this project abrum the technology is really interesting uh optim it started the whole this whole wave of optimistic protocol um layer optimistic Layer Two and Ian layer as well very research driven and I can name also many other projects like stockar also driven by very fundamental longterm research by Professor Eli Ben sessen so a lot of these projects not one not two not three but many of them are really driven in a lot of ZK zero knowledge projects some of them driven by my students at Stanford in fact uh I was teaching them one moment and then next time I know they were raising fun at 55 million from uh Paradigm um you know so so it’s kind of like pretty crazy and they just taking research like you know no one knew that could be practical a few years ago and then they make it work it’s just amazing energy to drive this whole industry forward absolutely um no we we love to see it we love to hear it um this has been an incredible conversation and uh David we got to leave it there but we want to know where can people uh find out more um where can people follow you on social or you have a newsletter you know how do people kind of stay in touch and learn more about yeah so I think you can go to our website Babylon chain. uh that website you have lot of information you can also go to our Twitter bonor chain uh that’s our Twitter handle and yeah there are a lot of information there perfect perfect well hey thank you so much for spending the hour here with us today on the crypto 101 podcast and to everyone at home listening thank you for joining us and uh come back same time same place next week and we’ll have another amazing guest uh with you so thank you guys for joining and we’ll we’ll talk to you soon

In this episode of Crypto 101 Bryce and Brendan explore the innovative intersections of Bitcoin and advanced blockchain technologies with Professor David Tse from Stanford University, who is leading the Babylon project. Professor David shares his transition from cellular communication research to blockchain technology, driven by the influential Bitcoin white paper. The discussion also dives into Babylon’s goal to leverage Bitcoin’s robust security attributes to bolster the Web3 space, making it more secure and efficient by integrating proof of stake mechanisms with Bitcoin’s infrastructure.

(00:26) Introduction to Bitcoin and Current Crypto Trends
(02:14) Professor David C.’s Background and Transition to Crypto
(10:00) The Concept and Development of Babylon
(16:19) Security Innovations in Web3 and Blockchain
(40:00) Future of Crypto Adoption and Impact of Bitcoin ETFs

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