cover of episode ICON Blockchain Just Said This ______? LIL UZI VERT RUG PULL?!

ICON Blockchain Just Said This ______? LIL UZI VERT RUG PULL?!

2021/9/29
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Episode Summary:

Guests:

Scott Smiley)

Meet The Hosts:

Brian Moir

Solidity and React Developer | Blockchain Enthusiast | Decentralized Internet Advocate | Crypto investor since 2012

https://twitter.com/moirbrian )

Logan Ross

Blockchain Analyst @ Benzinga | President @ Wolverine Blockchain | Crypto investor and educator since 2016

https://twitter.com/logannross)

Ryan McNamara

Bought sub $90 ETH during the bear market | Liquidated on ByBit | Was into DeFi before it was cool | Ran ASIC mining operation in 2016 (sorry planet Earth) | $UNI Bag Holder

https://twitter.com/ryan15mcnamara)

Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.

Unedited Transcript

Hello, zinger nation. My name is Logan Ross, and I'd like to welcome you to flight 51, aboard the moon or bust rocket. Ship your home for all things, altcoins and defy. I am joined today on this adventure by defy developer, Brian Moore and Ryan mutant, ape McNamara. How you guys doing today? Fantastic. All my friends got robbed, but I'm still here.

I'm happy. I'm doing well. How are you doing? Uh, I'm doing well. I'm doing well. We're doing a little bit of prerecorded interview today. So if you guys are watching this live, unfortunately we won't be able to hang out, uh, like usual. Um, but we enjoy and appreciate you guys coming in and checking it out as always.

Uh, so couple of things we got to get out of the way before we can get started first up most important safety procedures. Anyone who is willing and able and seated in any of the rows in existence, please activate your like button into the on position and we will be cleared for takeoff. Also, if you were here for crypto content, make sure you check out the Benzinga crypto YouTube channel.

It's a separate. Channel that we will be moving over to, uh, in a couple weeks here, we are pushing to a thousand subs. We going to do a giveaway when we hit it. So you gotta be there early. Uh, all right, let's see what else we got. We got some dope links, uh, in, in the description below, we have the Benzinga money site.

This is the team that Ryan and I work on. We spend all our time building these pages for. Uh, it's all about the education over there. So go check it out. Uh, we also have a mood, our bust game on the money site, uh, where you can go vote moon or bust on all of your favorite tokens. And you can see all of our favorite episodes as well.

So go check that out. Uh, also we have a telecom. Uh, and if you join it, we will throw you a 25% off discount code for the moon or bust Merck. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, uh, as always make sure to connect with us on Twitter. We'd love to hear from you, uh, feel free to hit us up. DMS are open if you have any crypto questions, uh, that we can't get to because today's episode is not live.

You can ask us there. All right. So without other way, let's get right into it. First topic of the day, a little Uzi vert was promoting this NFT project called the eternal beings. He had it as his PFP on Twitter. He was tweeting all about it. He said 6, 8, 4 minimum mint price was not six E six sole for.

The mid price was 2.5 Seoul, which is pretty expensive compared to the standard. And guess what happened, Ryan? What happened? Logan? Tell me what happened. Give us this vertical. Mr. Vertical himself deleted all of the content relating to the project from Twitter, basically disappeared, rugs the community, uh, and nothing has been heard from him about it since then.

Ain't nobody say. How's it supposed to go to a six soul floor. If he's just going to delete the tweets, that's obviously going to create. That's what I'm saying. Trust you gotta trust any celebrity that has NFT project, you know, it's legit and nothing wrong will ever happen to it usually may have a diamond forehead, but he definitely does not have diamond hands anymore.

Shapes and form. So about 20 minutes, sorry, Logan. I just got to get as many puns in there as a can I see what you did there? Nice one. Uh, yeah, so, I mean, he posted this, it was up for a couple of days, uh, and even Snoop dog gave it a little quote tweet with a shout out. Uh, and it looks like maybe Snoop, might've gotten a rug as well.

We'll have to check his Solano wallet. If he has one. Here is the projects page. It's a Salada NFT. So it's on this salon. Uh, marketplace and you can see the price floor is a whopping 1.7 soul that is down like a 25% from the mint price. That's an Oop. Yeah. Hopefully a Snoop dog dropped it. Like it's hot and didn't keep hold on to it because man, that's just ridiculously crazy just to hype it up, use all your followers and everything, hype it up and then just say, all right, see you like, he doesn't like he needs the money.

Like it. What the heck? Well, I think it's us too. I mean, it's 2.5 sold a Memphis $625. You rarely see NFTs that are that expensive to men. I mean, even for API club was 0.08 to mint, which at the time was probably like $200. Yeah. That's ridiculous. Woke up this morning at 7:00 AM, checked my phone, uh, and saw that that's just the way life goes.

I mean, Uzi must've been drinking and smoking a little bit too much. Uh, and he's a cool guy too. Like he's really down to earth. Have you seen any interviews? He does. I wouldn't expect someone to. You know, status to do it, but then that goes to show you any way it could happen to anyone. It could be from anyone.

Yeah. And I don't have a problem with celebrities sponsoring these NFTs either like, go and get your bag. But when it's a NFT project project surrounded by your brand, I mean, these NFTs look like Uzi. It had a play on words from maternal uptake. So like this was very deeply intertwined with easy, not only that.

But a winner is supposed to win backstage passes to a Lil Uzi vert concert. Is that even going to happen anymore? It probably not, but I'm not sure. It seems like he's totally not affiliated with this project whatsoever right after them. It's definitely not a good luck for the NFT community. And I think it's not a good look for solani either since this was one of the few projects that have really blown up on Solano's ecosystem.

When I saw the mint price, I was like, geez, that's a rack. Uh, I need to get my money longer. And then Uzi erased his social. And I was like, man, I got some PS and QS. Jeez. I was like, what? Eight pounds? And once this guys, we need some likes for that. I am on top with these puns man. Well, I've seen a lot of this stuff happened with the, uh, like BNB shit coins and all that kind of stuff.

I'd expect it to happen within a T projects, which has has, but it, it is a little, you know, take, it takes you back a little bit. Whenever you see someone of his status, he just straight rug, something like this. And S yeah, ma he was trying to buy a silly watch or a Canadian goose.

But now I got I'm sorry on repeat.

All right. That's enough Uzi puns for one day. Um, so next topic we have, uh, it is that El Salvador's volcano, Bitcoin mining farm. I'm sure you've guys have heard about it. Uh, they just dropped a dope promo video. Uh, and I want to share with you guys and show you the progress. On that. So here it is.

Have you guys seen, if they've released any specs on this. As far as how many miners, the hashing power or anything like that? No, I'm not sure. Not, they're pretty much experimenting with it right now, which is pretty cool to see like them using volcanic energy as a energy source to power all this stuff because of the amount of carbon.

Footprint that Bitcoin mining has in the, how detrimental it is to the environment when it gets to these levels, which they're, you know, utilizing a lot of power, especially from a volcano, but there's a little bit mixed reviews in this, uh, world bank does is says they're not impressed with the, uh, El Salvador move, but El Salvador has no.

Taken out, you know, capital gains tax on Bitcoin. And if you mine it, and you know, they are doing something that's positive for the environment. So it kind of can go either way. It's going to be kind of hard to tell when. So who's the winner in the outcome of this and a lot of El Salvadorians live outside of the borders.

So there was an economic report that estimated Western union will lose a hundred million dollars of profit each year, just from El Salvador, switching over to Bitcoin, which is pretty crazy. Yeah. It's kind of. I think this is a more sustainable strategy too, because as Bitcoin mining gets harder and harder to do your margins get less and less because you're spending so much more money on electricity.

It was something like this. Once it's set up, you're not really spending money on electricity, you don't have that overhead costs. So, I mean, over the longterm, I think this is a very solid play by them. Especially as the hashing power increases with Bitcoin's price. Once am I getting things for two, once somebody can create a, um, more.

Re-usable mining machine or just the hardware. I think that they are going to create a, you know, are going to be very, very rich, but also help the environment a whole lot more than what it is. Now. You only get a handful of amount of time that you can use a, a GPU or, you know, whatever you use to mine, the Bitcoin, because it's so much power that's going through those machines that they run out like that.

So someone can find a sustainable way to make them. Resilient. I think that they would definitely make the world a better place for Bitcoins is not going anywhere. You know, it's only going to become harder and harder, like you just said. Right? So the startup costs for this project are probably pretty huge.

Um, but once they ROI, they'll just be printing money from that volcano, which is really dope. I'd say quickly. Quite quickly. Yeah, I see. You mean, you saw the scale of that operation there in the video. Like they have huge, huge, uh, Rackspace. When we running a ton of hashing power. Yeah, I think this should honestly be a little bit bigger news because we saw the news broke when they bought 200 Bitcoin and then they bought another 200 Bitcoin.

But that's really not very much, especially for a government. Something like this is definitely much, much more costly in a much larger investment over the long run. Yeah, I agree. There should be bigger news. Uh, but instead the headline of this morning was your favorite person ever. I, in Elon Musk, you want to tell us about that story?

Elon Musk? Yeah. So Elon Musk was interviewing and he basically said that the United States should take a hands-off approach when it comes to cryptocurrency, he said they should do nothing. And. And this makes sense. I think a lot of people in crypto do agree with him. Uh, I'm not sure if legislators are going to listen at all.

I don't really think there will be, but I guess this does bring attention, uh, from the retail investors. And I think a lot of people agree with what Elon Musk has to say, even if they aren't very educated on the topic. So it's good to see that he supports a hands-off approach to cryptocurrency. I thought something else from the same interview is actually really.

I think he commented on China's mining regulation about how China banned Bitcoin mining earlier this summer. And he thinks it has something to do with their electricity generation issues. Because about 50% of, of the Bitcoin mining power came from China before it was banned, which is a huge amount. I mean, Bitcoin's network uses about the same amount of electricity as a small to mid-size country.

So it is an enormous. Electricity is super cheap in China. So that's why so many people were mining there, but if they have electricity shortages, so some people are going without power because there's simply just not enough electricity to go around. So that's really interesting. I never got that take before, but that definitely could play a role in it.

And I'm not really sure where it goes from here, but I don't think that that China's going to be introducing Bitcoin mining anytime soon. I think they're going to stick to their ban. And I mean, the innovation is just going to have to go somewhere else at the end of. Another thing I thought that was interesting from that interview was that he said, he thinks that crypto is basically unstoppable.

So, uh, you kind of have to embrace it or kick it out of your country and let the development happen elsewhere. So that's why he said that, that the us should take a hands-off approach to crypto regulation and quote, do nothing. All right next up. Uh, this has big, we've been waiting for this for a while, but it happened for the first time today who be global is offering USD, DC, uh, the salon, a version of it.

So USD C on Solano is now directly purchasable and, uh, and sellable on Hubie global. Um, I expect to see a lot more moves like this in the future where, you know, you can buy your layer. If like already, so you can buy Ethan polygon or you could buy Ethan arbitrage them, then you wouldn't have to pay the, the bridge fees.

The exchange will take care of that for you. Uh, I expect this to become more and more popular and the first big example of that happened today. So I thought that was another cool thing to share with. All right. That is our news segment for today. If you enjoyed it, especially that Lil Uzi vert segment, make sure you go ahead and smash the like button for us.

Uh, so other people who might enjoy this content can find it as well, and we can grow the moon or bust community to be one of the biggest on. Next up, we have an interview with Scott smiley from the icon project. Now, if you guys don't know, icon is in the top 100 market cap of all the crypto's it's available on Coinbase.

It's a super dope blockchain interoperability project. So, uh, without further ado, I'd like to welcome Scott to moon or bust. How are you doing today? Scott Logan. Thanks for having. Hey, the pleasure is all ours. Uh, so first question for you. How did you become interested in crypto to begin with? Sure. Yeah, it, uh, started back in early 2017.

I was working in investment banking and my roommate came home and he had downloaded the Coinbase app. And I didn't know a damn thing about Bitcoin Ethereum, light coin. Those were like the three that were listed on employment at the time. I was like, what the hell is the difference between. Um, and I took one look at the charts though.

And I was like, I need to find out what the differences I saw. I think at the time, like the theory was at like 75 bucks skyrocketed from 10. And I was like, you know, the fact that I could have participated in this and didn't, it's still something I need to learn. I want to understand what I'm doing before I just click.

And then from there, I just like started spending my nights and weekends and what little free time I had as a banker, just educating myself, reading white papers, talking in different chat rooms, talking to admins, talking to node operators and just like I had absolutely no software development or understanding at all at the time I was just pure finance and just really educated myself.

Um, and then started going to conferences and actually. Uh, Minkin, uh, the icon founder at a conference in DC, I believe. And, uh, just started talking to them, asking more questions and then April, 2018 is when I first started at icon. Awesome. That's a great story. So could you give us a high level overview of what I con is?

Sure. Yeah. So, so I kinda isn't always has been a interoperate interoperability protocol at, at heart. Um, when it first started, it was more focused on enterprise use-case. Where they were, um, the plans were to set up multiple enterprise versions of enterprise blockchains, and then use the icon public blockchain.

It's kind of like a communication layer between them. Um, but w what we've all seen, um, you know, over the last few years is that enterprise adoption is a bit slower than we all. So I'd say like about a year ago, we decided to pivot more introduced, uh, like broaden our scope, uh, stay to stay relevant in the, you know, uh, public blockchain industry and focus more on public to public blockchain, interoperability.

Um, so that's kind of what we're focusing on now. We're going to be launching our BTP protocol later this year with, um, let's see the polka dot Kusama ecosystem, finance, marching harmony. Uh, and near, I believe we're the first ones that we're working on, but once we have kind of all the, uh, all the foundation, like all the frameworks for these different smart contract languages, it'll be a lot easier to add, uh, other blockchains going forward.

Interesting. So I'm curious, how are you integrating with polka dine Kusama through moon river or something? Right? Yeah. Moon river, uh, had a good, uh, test net implementation setup. So it was the easiest to kind of integrate with them first. Um, so yeah. We're starting with moon river and also talking to a Cala plasm.

I think they rebranded as like, as star or something like that. And, um, yeah, the one is Edward as well that we've been in contact with all of those different pair chains in that. Interesting. So I'm curious, I don't know how, um, like technical, uh, you'll be able to answer this question, but, uh, moon river is like a it's EVM compatible.

Right? So could you, uh, kind of use the same tools to connect to with Ethereum as well? Yeah, that is true. Um, so there is one, like, uh, there's something that moon river did to bear EBM, uh, to help us that we needed, uh, to be able to integrate. So. We will be able to add Ethereum, it's just going to take, uh, some changes to the icon core blockchain, which we'll be planning, you know, after we do these initial implementations to be able to connect to Ethereum.

But you know, my logic is that important to connect to a theory and that we will do it, but there's plenty of bridges to Ethereum, like through these other networks that we're connected to. I don't think there's going to be any issue moving Ethereum assets around, but we also have the orbit bridge on the Eikon network, currently a direct connection to Ethereum.

Um, but the, the architecture is the same Logan. Can I put it in just for a second? I have a question for Scott. Uh, do you have any plans on implementing salon and especially after these past couple of months with all the hype around it? Oh yeah. A hundred percent. Um, so salon is also rust based smart contracts and near protocol is also rust based.

So we'll be able to use a lot of the work that we'd done in near protocol to integrate with Solana as well. Gotcha. Cool. Okay. Awesome. So if you had to pick like one thing or maybe a couple of things that separate icon as an interoperability project, what would you say that is? I think one of the things that I get most excited about is the security aspect of it.

So the way most of these interoperability solutions, where currently is some sort of proof of authority, Node system, uh, amongst the relays where there needs to be, needs to be some consensus amongst Greenlands, whether it's two thirds plus one consensus, or it's like a multisignature wallet in the end, the relays themselves control the minting and burning and locking and unlocking of assets that are being tracked.

Well, an icon, uh, in icons, BTP, the relays have absolutely no control over any of the smart contracts. They may not be malicious, even if they colluded, all they can do is fail to deliver messages to an icon. Relays are a source of liveliness while in most other interoperability solutions, relays are a source of security and a source of.

That's very interesting. So, uh, what utility does the icon token have and, um, what gives it its value? Sure. Yeah, pretty pretty, uh, pretty high level, broad stroke question there. The, uh, I see X is like, um, you know, icon is like a layer one blockchain as well. So it has, it's a delegated proof of stake network.

So you stake and lock your icon tokens and vote for a validator and you earn your share and block Blackboard. Similar to many other DPOs networks, cosmos, included plenty of them out there. Um, and then in terms of the, uh, how it fits into Beto ETP and accrues value from more usage of BTP, that was something that we tried to think a lot about, like being the interoperable interoperability protocol is great, but how does it help, uh, accrue value to this?

So what happens is there are fees generated from BTP when sending tokens between networks and sending cross chain messages. And those fees are aggregated into a smart contract on the icon network. And that contract will then auction the fees off at a discount to ICX holders and take the ICX proceeds that it earns and burns them.

So it creates like this token sync, the more fees that are generated through BTP, the more ICX has taken off the market to purchase these tokens. Gotcha. Interesting. So I'm sorry if I missed this, could you, could you tell me what BTBY right. Yeah. That's the blockchain transmission protocol. Uh, that's kind of like, yeah.

That's icons interoperability. Gotcha. Gotcha. Or unique. So, Scott, you mentioned earlier that icon's focus was primarily on private enterprises a few years back, and now you've shifted more towards public blockchains. Can you explain basically what your offering is for private enterprises? I know you kind of briefly went over it, but, uh, can you delineate the difference between your offerings for private blockchains and public blockchains and how that.

Yeah, absolutely. So the, the enterprise side actually comes from separate entity that, that works very closely with icon. Uh, it's called icon loop. They're based in they're based in Korea and they do, they have a lot of relationships with like the Seoul metropolitan government, for example, uh, you know, that's the, the city government, and then, uh, Jeju island is like a popular vacation spot in the area.

And they have a relationship with a Jaguar island government. Um, and then like some banking institutions, insurance companies, they have this thing called the . Which is a, you know, big, uh, cohort of enterprises and government entities looking to use enterprise blockchain for, um, are looking to use either enterprise or public blockchain for identification services.

So pretty much what it comes down to is icon loop had a ton of relationships with, um, you know, different enterprises and government entities in Korea. And the plan was to set up, uh, enterprise blockchains in a lab. For example, you could, you could understand. You know, maybe, uh, an enterprise blockchain that was being used by, uh, the banking industry would want to be able to communicate with perhaps, um, insurance company, uh, like in a blockchain run by insurance companies.

So the plan was you to communicate. And share proofs of information through the public blockchains. So that way they wouldn't need to be running nodes on each other's networks. But you know, these enterprise blockchains are just really slow to get adoption. It's like proof of concept after proof of concept.

And, you know, I do still personally believe that enterprise blockchain will have a place in the future of this industry, but, um, you know, for obvious reasons, just like a large regulated enterprise is going to be slower to. Um, you know, brand new technology then startups and, uh, you know, other folks in the public blockchain space.

Mm, okay. Yeah. That makes sense. So, for example, like you said, if a bank and an insurance company wanted to communicate with each other, instead of running on the same public blockchain, where that information would be public, they'd be able to keep their information private, but you'd be able to verify that information, right?

Yeah. So they could essentially provide proves through the public blockchain without actually sharing data. Gotcha. Gotcha. Very good. Did you have a quick question from quick? Follow-up good question. So I saw you guys are working with Samsung. Do they have their own blockchain and what are you guys doing with them?

So, yeah, this, this is more on the icon loop side of things. So like I actually don't work at icon loop and I don't have like, too much communication with them. These days. I'm much more focused on the public blockchain side. So I really can't comment, unfortunately, on the enterprise relationships and like, where are they?

Um, so yeah, so, sorry, I can't share more information on that guys, but more of a public blockchain guy. Yeah, no worries. My next question is actually about public blockchain and retail adoption. So how do you guys plan on onboarding new users? I know onboarding's a huge problem in cryptocurrency. A lot of things are really complicated right now.

So how are you going to streamline that process and make it easier? Yeah, I'm really glad you asked that question because that's a major focus and kind of a major theme that I heard that I was just having a sorry conference, like, you know, It sounds kind of cliche, but we're still very much early days, uh, in this industry, you know, a lot of people are kind of fighting over the existing cryptocurrency users, but you know, what I'm thinking about mostly is how do we grow the pie and get more people involved in this ecosystem.

And that really all comes down to user experience and onboarding just like you asked. Um, so I'm working on this product called, called bridge bridge, paid.money. It's it's a wallet that uses the magic SDK and the bank. Combined with a partner, uh, excess stable coin provider. So, you know, the user experience that we're going for, like we're not quite there yet is, you know, you sign up for bridge, you enter your email and, and w what happens in the background is a wallet is created for you and a private key stored and encrypted server.

So only you have access to it, but you don't even really know that you're using the private key, right? You don't even know you're using blockchain to the end user. They entered their email, they got a confirmation link. They clicked it, and they're logged in. But what really happened is we created them a blockchain wallet.

And then from there there'll be able to deposit deposit cash. Right. And what that is actually going to be as sensitive as signing up for an account at our trust partner. And then they deposit cash into the trust and the trust, mince them a stable coin and it gets sent to their bridge account. Right? So to the end user, all they've done is they've entered an email and they've deposited cash and the cash arrived in the bridge account.

So that's like extremely easy and familiar. To people who were not involved in the cryptocurrency industry, they didn't need to learn about purchasing cryptocurrency or a stable coin or this or that. You know, that's kind of the end goal of bridge to be able to onboard people that way, like directly into apps, like, uh, you know, balanced or OMM.

These are like, uh, icons byproducts are really, uh, you know, more broadly, uh, to be able to interact with, uh, the blockchain industry and. I think user experience is extremely important for every type of product in this space. And it really hasn't been a major focus for a lot of products. As you know, people are trying to get a token out and capitalize on a bull market and things like that, you know, it's, it's been more important to be fast rather than to be usable.

And, you know, I'm more focused on trying to grow that pie and, you know, have a good strategy to, to onboard people like, like my parents, you know, So even on the bridge, like using BTP, uh, moving assets between networks that needs to be really seamless and it's to be direct integration into apps and all that like good API documentation for developers for like directly integration and, and, you know, good, good wallet, a user experience like bridge and all around, like, uh, you know, simple to use and understand interfaces.

So you say you, uh, putting your email and then it sends you a confirmation link. You don't have like a password or anything. Nope. Nope. It's the magic. It's a passwordless authentication. And uh, because in the end, like to get into your email, you had to have a password. Right? So, um, the idea of that type of, uh, login service, how did they like use their public key?

Maybe even if they don't know it, how does the app retrieve it? Like don't you have to have a private key to decrypt. The information, sorry. I'm not a hundred percent sure how magic works because it is a third-party service in the end, but I'm pretty sure what, the way it works is like they have all of the private keys stored in an encrypted server.

And, um, when you click the confirmation link, that poles, uh, there, they know to send your specific, private key from their server to your local. And then it's stored and decrypted on your local device to be able to use, to be signed transact, to, to sign transactions. That's my understanding magic. I'm not on the magic team there.

They're great guys. I'm sure they could give a much better, more in depth explanation. That's a pretty good way to explain it through APIs and all that kind of stuff, but it's pretty easy. It's pretty straightforward. Private games. Yeah. I'm going on another high level question. Um, can you tell us what an economist and a public representative is and why they're important to the icon ecosystem?

Yeah, sure. I can break that down pretty easily. I mean, like we have this, uh, like back in 2019, uh, me and a couple of guys that icon wrote this. Just a black post or whatever, like a opinion piece on, on. And blockchain, sorry, blockchain and cryptocurrencies being considered like digital nations that we're building like financial infrastructure, rebuilding political infrastructure, there's governance and there's citizens, right?

Like all the cryptocurrency holders. And there really is a lot of overlap. I mean, you see some people are more excited and patriotic about the coins they hold versus the country that they live in. You know, it can get like pretty intense. Right. And, uh, I definitely still believe in that vision and, and definitely see that happening.

So we kind of. That direction with the naming conventions within our ecosystem. And I mean, the fact that you have to ask that question does kind of make me wish that we just went with more traditional names. I mean, a P rep is a block producer validator. It's a minor, whatever you want to call it. Right.

And an economist is just a, an ICU. And that's kind of like the naming convention we went with and, you know, it does confuse some people from the outside looking in, but I do think there is some value in it, like within our ecosystem where people feel and identify more with it for that reason. Yep. I actually do like those names.

I think that they're more obvious than like Staker and delegator or Validately to someone who's not in blockchain already. Right? Yeah. True. Exactly. And they're the exact same as those words. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't affect the, the roles they play and the public representative. It does have a little bit more of a focus on the governance side, which is important for the longevity of a blockchain network.

You know, you don't want it to stagnate and want those who are producing blocks and incentivize that you want them to want to grow the network and contribute to the core code and, you know, vote on changes and things like that. So it does give us. Uh, connotation that there's more to it, you know, uh, you know, mining.

Mm, definitely. And moving onto some applications on icons network, I saw that you worked for balanced out. I saw you worked for launching balanced out rather. Um, can you tell us a little bit about what that balanced out is and how it compares to say like, you know, swapper Ave? Because it looks kind of like it's maybe those two applications combined into one.

Right. Yeah. So, so balanced is essentially a platform to get leverage against your cryptocurrency. Um, right now it only supports ICX. Uh, but we do plan on adding many more collateral types. Once a BTP is live and, uh, you know, if someone's BTP is live and we have other assets within the icon ecosystem, we want to add more collateral types.

The balance does it allows you to deposit ICX and mint a BN USD against it, which is like very similar to die, but backed by ICX. And we do want to add, like I said, multiple collateral types. And from there, we want it to give people the opportunity to directly like, use that leverage. They got to purchase something.

Right. So, uh, that's why we also created like a unit swap silent. The balance is actually very similar to a maker down plus unit swap on the icon network with a, you know, a beautiful user interface. Sweet. So is that Dex operational yet? Or do we have to wait until more tokens are added to ecosystem? Yeah.

No, it's it's operational. So right now, uh, we have balanced tokens listed, um, ICX balanced hours. USB-C we have the, uh, our stable coin partner through bridge. Uh, it's called USDS, uh, stabilize the company. And, um, so we have their stable coin trading and OMM slogans, which is kind of like the Ave equivalent within the icon.

Um, so it's mostly, it's like all icon ecosystem right now for the most part, except for a USB-C, which is bridged over, um, from material. But besides that, it's kind of isolated to the icon ecosystem, but I am excited for the growth once we have BTP and other assets added as collateral, just kind of still in the development phase there kind of take, so those tokens you mentioned, are they only available on that deck?

Some of those smaller tokens within the ecosystem? Or can you get them other. They are only available on that Dex. Yeah. Okay. That's cool. Okay. Um, are there other icon apps that you're particularly excited about? And can you tell me more about maybe icon bat or project Nebula? I saw those too. Um, they seem particularly interesting to me.

I saw, I saw they have to do with NFTs and blockchain gaming. Um, so either of those two or if you're a particularly excited about any other blockchain protocol, um, that's coming out on. Yeah, I think I could give kind of a high level rundown. I will start with those two that you just mentioned. So combat is like a on chain fully, uh, like transparent provably fair.

Um, you know, they have casino games and I believe they're adding like sports betting as well and some other, uh, types of games, but, um, they've had a really strong, uh, community for a long time and they're, I believe they were the first application to launch on the icon network to kind of prove and show what the technology.

Um, and I think it really helped in, you know, building that community aspect on the icon network and, and they are still continuing to build and introduce new games. Um, so I definitely have, uh, been, been, uh, really interested in using icon requests. And then, uh, the other one is project Nebula is also really fun.

Um, it's like a space exploration game that uses NFTs. And you know, I'm not sure about you guys. Uh, I assume I see like an ape on, uh, on your back and Ryan, like I personally. Listen, I have nothing against NFTs. I just like, can't really get excited about them, the cage. And I see that there will be value and people are definitely going to get, there will be something to it.

It's just like, you know, not something that I'm personally into, but a project Nebula. Like I do like the idea and FTEs in games, right? Like they have planets and spaceships that have tangible value, like in the game. So people, if the game does become really popular and adds a ton more features about like what planets can do.

And what, uh, ships can do then, you know, I see kind of the tangible value there. So I'm pretty excited about a project Nebula and their growth, um, and what they can do, um, you know, on the gaming side. Um, you know, and then, and then more broadly icon is putting together, like all of the foundational components of a ecosystem, right?

Like sticking with a digital nations, um, metaphor. We need kind of all of these different services and these building blocks in place just to have like a functioning financial system within, uh, the Icahn ecosystem that we can then branch out to like international finance using PTP. So we have like a curve equivalent that's launching soon.

It's called equality dot. There's a year.finance equivalent, like a yield aggregator, which is, you know, for people who don't want to think too hard about earning extra yield deposit there. You know, I, I see that as an important service as well. It's called optimist.finance, and then currently live, we have balanced life network and omm.finance and omm.finance provides that money market, you know, similar to the compound and obey.

And then balanced as we were talking about earlier is like a, that leverage that leverage. Uh, like maker Dao and, and, and a trading platform like you as well. Awesome. Uh, so Scott, we talked to punk from the cosmos team a couple of months ago, and he told us that he doesn't see other blockchain interoperability projects as competition.

Uh, but that they're all working together. Do you share that view? I do. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, I live outside of New York city. There's like multiple ways to get into New York from New Jersey. Sometimes one has more traffic, sometimes one has bigger tolls, you know, sometimes we'd go to different places and it makes sense to use different bridges.

I mean, I definitely see room for multiple interoperability solutions that the more, the longer I'm in this industry, it's been like over three years now, the more I believe we're going to have a robust multi chain feature. I don't think it's going to be two or three blockchains. I don't think it's going to be.

I'm thinking 50, a hundred, even a thousand. When you look at the fact that like Axiom infinity is, is building their own blockchain, right? Like NBA, top shots has built their own blockchains. You know, like there's going to be a lot of applications, specific blockchains who have different needs in terms of different bridges.

There might be more direct or less direct ways to get to where you need to go. And I absolutely see there being multiple, uh, interoperability protocols and, and, and then ways to streamline that. Right. Cause you don't want like a, let's just use a very simple example. Like, let's say you were on the Eikon network and you had IDC from the cosmos ecosystem.

And then you had BCCE from using TCP bridge. They would be different tokens, digital nation. If you will, you can kind of have this like a currency, I think like curve or equality on icon to fill this role where you essentially wrap these tokens. And then there's like one version of each that's used in all.

But you can, uh, you know, swap for it for free, but like all these other versions of eats, as long as they are, uh, uh, you know, um, approved, if you will buy it by whatever product is doing that. Um, I absolutely think there's going to be many bridging solutions and many different. If I can just jump in here again, Logan.

So you mentioned there might be like a hundred or a thousand different blockchains running parallel to each other, say in 10 years from now, do you think there's any benefit of having a public blockchain that's not interoperable? Or do you think that in the future, all public blockchains will have some type of interoperability with the.

Um, that's a tough question. Like I have seen like, kind of just from my work, like doing business development for, uh, for, uh, BTP, like speaking to different networks with different ideologies. Um, you know, like you could think of like a. You know, the certain countries in the real world today that really don't like doing international trade and are completely siloed off.

I mean, they're, they do have their own benefits, I would assume, but, you know, um, I, I very much am a believer in like, uh, you know, open, you know, trade and finance between different continents in the real world and also, uh, also in the blockchain space. So I do think there could be some blockchains that ended up going that direction based on their communities, right?

Like if that's what the community. They want it to be siloed. They want to only use their own assets and things like that. I could see that happening and being relatively successful as well. That's a good question. Right? I hadn't thought of that before. So Scott, I really liked your metaphor about the different bridges.

Uh, some will be more busy on different days. And so there's a need for multiple, I, I totally agree with that. Um, I'm curious to hear, um, you talked about the importance of user experience and the future of blockchain interoperability and having all these different versions of wrap tokens, uh, can kind of become messy, uh, especially for users who don't really understand what's going on behind the scenes.

So. Uh, I, I agree like, like what you said, there'll be a pools where you'll be able to get the one version for the chain that you're currently on. Um, but I I'm, I'm guessing, or I guess I'm saying what type of UX experience or improvements, uh, do you see coming in that sector of the. Yeah. So I lightly touched on that earlier when it comes down to API documentation.

So I think what's really important is to not like, so I con we'll have this, there's like kind of this bridge portal, not sure if you use them, there's like plenty that are available through existing linking products that you go to this website specifically just to bridge and asset source, blockchain, destination blockchain, and the type of.

You send it and you wait for confirmation and your heart is racing. Is it going to get there and blah, blah, blah bridge experience right now? Right. And like, I think, uh, you know, I think we need to skip that step. Um, I think like a product like balance, if we're offering people, the ability to trade Ethereum to ICX, we need to have the user interface and backend of the product.

Take care of bridging the Ethereum over to icon. Maybe it'll certainly take a little longer than if it was already on icon. But through proper API documentation for BTP and good example, use cases are used. There's no reason to use, or shouldn't be able to click like a, you know, one or two clicks and then have their Ethereum bridged over to icon through BTP and then, and then swapped for ICX on the balance decks.

I don't see why that is impossible. It's certainly a. We'll be difficult from a D implementation standpoint, very complex project to handle there, but it's certainly within the realm of. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that's sticking in my mind is that, um, we talked to a tax expert who knows a lot about crypto as well, like, um, pretty recently.

And that would be considered like a taxable event, any type of swap or even a bridge. Money leaving your wallet. Definitely argue against, I mean, I'm no accountant, not a lawyer. No, I don't think it's, I don't think it makes sense by any means. Like they, they would say something from USBC to USD T is a taxable event.

It's like, yeah, actually it's like changing dollars out at the store. Like, I don't know if you would, but like say you have a $2 bill and you want it to, or like a $20 bill and you wanted 20 ones, exact same thing. You're not reading. It doesn't mean. Yeah, the way they're doing it now, it definitely doesn't make sense.

So it'll be interesting to see if they can figure it out. I mean, Gary Gensler taught at MIT course on blockchain. So you think he would know, but I guess not.

So Scott, where do you see icon looking? Maybe 10 years down the road. What do you see as icons and nature? It's like main draws to users. Yeah, I definitely think, you know, I w I would like to see icon focus on the bridging technology and be kind of one of the go-to solutions. That's integrated into applications across countless different black points.

Right? Like I spoke about how balanced could abstract away the breads and process through proper API documentation and integration. Um, and I would like to see, you know, as many apps as possible doing that. So kind of the, the, the road for icon is to build the bridges, uh, to these different digital nations and then work with like the, uh, the leaders of these digital nations and, and get introductions to their businesses that are built there to integrate directly into the business and show them how to give like the best user experience possible.

So he could prove and show how important that is within the icon ecosystem with our kind of handful of flagship. These are almost like good examples. If you will to show others what can be done and then get that bridge and get that technology integrated into, into many different apps for seamless communication between, uh, DFI apps, for example.

Very cool. So would you say that UX is the biggest hurdle left to get there? Oh, 100%. A hundred percent. I think that's where the competition is really gonna hit. Um, you know, I I'm, you know, like definitely within the space right now, like these incentive programs are exciting and it draws attention to you within the cryptocurrency space.

But, you know, walk down the street, the new York's like anywhere and ask like, oh, did you guys hear about like the avalanche 180 million incentive program? Do you use their apps? Like, Nope. That's not drawing in new users. That's fighting over the same pool of existing. So that's going to be important, but the bigger battle and bigger, bigger hurdle is getting is gets growing the pie for everybody.

And that's what we're focused on. Very cool. And I like that point about airdrops. I mean, there really are just fighting over everyone involved in the ecosystem. They're not really expanding the pie, like you said. Exactly, exactly. And I mean, they're definitely important. Like, I don't think, like I'm not going to like scoff at those programs and they definitely, you know, helped bring notoriety and publicity to your chain within this ecosystem.

But we do need to think bigger as an industry. Yeah. Very cool. Is there some sort of mainstream integration you see being like really key? Maybe it's like Robin hood and in crypto wallets or something completely different. Yeah, no, I think that's important. And I don't know if it's going to be, I could see whether it's Robin hood and getting their users to onboard, like into defy or could be just like a new startup that, uh, that rat, that arises with like a really great user experience that does, uh, you know, get some market share with higher yields, um, like higher yield accounts for less insurance, which could be interesting to a lot of people these days.

So I could see it going both ways. And why not both really. I could see like Robin hood or other major apps integrating directly. Major defy protocols with some disclaimers, but I could also see some startups arising that, that, that shows some competition. Definitely. So, Scott, let me ask you a little bit back to the technical side.

How are the blocks processed on icon? Uh, yeah, so I con is just a traditional PBX. Um, you know, DPOs networks. So there's currently 22 validator nodes. There's going to be one leader. Uh, every two seconds that leader is going to propose a block and then the other deaf validators vote on it that all occurs in around two seconds.

So we have two second finale on icon, um, and, and that's kind of how it works right now. We're migrating to a new core software icon, 2.0, it's happening very soon. Um, We're adding three more Brock block producer slots where it's more from 22 to 2025. With those three additional slots are filled with, um, randomly selected, uh, Val bench validators, if you will.

So there's a hundred total validators that are eligible. The top 22 will always produce blocks. And then, um, of the other 78, there'll be picked at random to fill those other three slots. Um, and then that rotation happens in one. Hmm, that's pretty cool. Two second block times. Uh, how big are these blocks and how do you manage storage?

Um, I'm not sure the actual block size that would require a little more conversation with the core development team. Um, yeah. And store storage. There's no, nothing fancy in terms of storage. Um, something that I've talked to. Uh, the icon team about that I believe is implemented on Ethereum that I'd like to see the core team implement at some point.

Certainly no major rush is adding incentives to remove storage from the blockchain. I think it's really interesting. You can actually save gas costs like a transaction, uh, like, you know, as you're going through a transaction, it's racking up gas costs and then. If you have within that transaction, something that removes data from the blockchain database, it kind of adds like, uh, as a negative value to your gas costs.

So it lowers your total gas costs for that transaction. I'd like to see that added to icon. It's just like a kind of an idea, but, but right now it's pretty straightforward. Just, uh, you know, whatever data people want to store on it, they're going to pay a certain amount and it's gonna. Yeah, that's interesting.

I've never heard of removing old blockchain data. Wouldn't that change like the previous block data and the therefore the hashes and everything. It's not quite like that. Like the way you're thinking of like changing previous blocks, it's more like changing the necessary storage for the current. So like within each smart contract there's databases, right.

And you can add or remove data from that database. And that'll be like the current state of the blockchain. So, you know, for most blockchains right now, there's no incentive to ever remove data from your smart contract is going to keep growing and growing and growing. You may want to save down like the history of ever every trade that ever happened on your decks.

Right. The only penalty for that currently is like a one-time guest fee. Every time you save that transaction. But then, uh, that history take that cloth, you know, adds bloat to the blockchain node and the node operators need to keep increasing their storage. So there is like some longterm kind of net negative effects of that you get really bloated.

So he wants some incentive for developers to like add to their transactions, like add, uh, methods that. You know, remove data from a dataset, not necessarily key data, but just a small, like some metadata that isn't really pertinent to after the transaction. It's only pertinent to making transaction right then.

Right. Like historical data is like a primary, like right now, you're not going to see people saving, like every, you know, some people may save every single trade that ever happened or like, you know, the balances of, uh, LP tokens, like snapshot at every single day for the, for the, you know, for the rest of history.

Right? Like you don't need to see. You can start removing that history and that should save you. Get that, that would, you know, what I was talking about that would save you money on the transaction to start removing a data from the database. Gotcha. Very cool. So I know you've talked a lot about, uh, some stuff in the future, but if you could outline maybe the roadmap, uh, from now to the, maybe the next year what's going on with icon.

So yeah, I'd say. Like short-term were going to be migrating to icon 2.0, uh, has like Jeff Java, virtual machine, um, you know, the smart contracts. Uh, there's a lot of features for, um, developers that are gonna enable more Dow functionality, which I'm really excited about as someone who's building an app in the ecosystem.

Um, and also like the most important thing enabled ETP. So I think like, uh, from short term, we're looking at, you know, more apps launching getting that define infrastructure by the end of the year. Along with a BTP, starting to pick up some, pick up the pace and get more assets within the icon ecosystem and get icon based assets added in other ecosystems.

So I'd say that's kind of like the short term and then like more next year I'm looking at. Making like optimizing BTP, ironing out, any kinks that we noticed, like the transaction fees, right. Um, you know, how many relays do we need? Like, what are the cost of the relays? Like really optimizing BTP and making it and getting more integrations.

I see that being a major focus, right. Awesome. Scott, thanks so much for your time today, coming on and sharing all this awesome info with us left to have you back on in the future. We have, uh, icon's website and their Twitter, as well as, uh, your Twitter Scott linked in the bio below. So if you guys want to find out more information about this project, go right down there.

Um, but Scott, I just want to give you, uh, one last opportunity. If you have any shout outs you want to make or any other, uh, ideas you got on your mind, uh, the floor is. Yeah. I mean, I would definitely just say, like right now it'd be, I definitely recommend checking out, you know, icons live apps O and m.finance balance.network, uh, icon bag, project Nebula.

There's a lot that craft.network, if you're really into NFTs, um, you know, there's a lot of great stuff going on in our ecosystem. So, uh, you know, follow me on Twitter and, and you'll, and you'll be sure to know, uh, all the most recent updates. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks guys. Really, really appreciate coming on the show.

Really good questions. Really good quality conversation, and really hope to do it again soon. Yeah, you we'd be happy to have you back. All right. Take these guys.

All right. Hope you guys enjoyed that interview. I thought it was pretty good. Uh, we got money mentioned the background. I'm curious to hear, uh, what he thought about it, but Brian, what did you think? Um, I, I liked it. I liked, uh, everything you're saying about icon. There's a lot of stuff that I didn't. It made me think about certain things that I haven't really.

Put into thought beforehand after he mentioned it. Like, even though the last conversation we were having about removing old data that is not needed anymore and, um, to, you know, de blow the whole entire blockchain, which is pretty cool. I, you know, there's a lot more that goes into it there because that could be kind of tricky, but I didn't really even think about, you know, utilizing something like that and just how I con does everything.

It's, it's very interesting. Ryan you got anything for us? I thought it was really cool. I like how we've had cosmos on and now icon. I mean, there's similar projects, but collaborative. So it's super cool to see them both. I really liked their ecosystem too. And I thought it was cool that we got to hear about balanced style and a few of the other applications on there.

And I mean, right now, the only way to access some of those tokens are actually through icon. So it'll be interesting, you know, if this gets really big, you know, who knows where these tokens could end up and a lot of people could have access to them eventually. Yeah, I'm going to have to reach out to the, uh, polka dot guys that we did on that Benzinga crypto festival panel.

Uh, and see if we can get them on to complete the, uh, interoperability, trifecta, uh, Kusama or the things whose Sama it is really cool that they both had the same idea. Where they want to work together, even though they're quote unquote competitors in a sense, but they don't view each other as competitors.

They view each other as working together to broaden the whole horizon. And I think that in the blockchain community and everything, we touched on a few times, I think that is one of the most important things for sustainability in this space. So I think that is awesome. I mean, nothing but respect for that, we should just have them on to fight who's better, but you know, that's, that's a different conversation.

I have a feeling it's not going to happen. No, it won't. They'll just call me an idiot cause I am, and then we'll just move on and be happy because everyone was working together. And that was my true purpose. When. Full circle. Uh, yeah, no, but I think what he said about the growing, the growing pie, uh, is really accurate because right now cryptocurrency has the same amount of users as the internet did in 1997.

And, uh, I wasn't around back. But I could imagine the internet was pretty small, uh, in its infancy stages back then. And now it's so much bigger. You can get on it instantly with a piece of metal in your pocket. You don't have to dial up. Uh, and that's basically where we are with blockchain painful too, and cryptocurrencies right now.

So, uh, if you're wondering whether or not it's too late to buy crypto, Probably not, they probably will never be. I mean, it, as long as we're older, cause there's going to be newer, this isn't going away. It really isn't. I'm glad that the internet isn't like how it was when I was, you know, seven to 10 years old.

But. It's kind of cool. I didn't know that fact that we have as much users now in the blockchain space as when the internet started. And like multiple guests have said blockchain is that is, you know, even better than how the internet was when it first came out. It's pioneering a whole new world for us.

So it was an exciting, special tree for you right now. Get ready. Hit it yet. Ready? Get ready. Get ready? Get ready. Sneak peak. Ah, shoot. I share the wrong screen. I still do though. It's a sneak peek of Twitter and Ft profile verification right there. So here's what that's cool. Let's go back a little bit. Uh, so you, uh, you go to change your profile picture, right?

And, uh, You pick your wallet. Okay. Um, that's really, really cool.

On a little side note, a friend of my Mo uh, someone post sick. So, and I know just asked me if I worked for Bitcoin because they want to talk about some of them. They said, I heard you worked for Bitcoin. Can we talk about it? You know, Bitcoin. That was the Toshi. Yeah. I don't know how old she is or anything, but I'm assuming that she might not know much about crypto, but that was really cute.

That was funny. I always forget. What's the CEO of Bitcoin's name again? Uh, Craig, right?

Steve flops. Okay. Rick Sanchez. Yeah. John jobs. Steve jobs is a cousin. It's definitely not Lil Uzi vert. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He's the CEO, those mixed nuts, uh, very easy to confuse them. Uh, although smart contracts and stuff, he was running a node in that diamond, in his head too.

Yeah, we'll have to clip that back into the beginning. Yeah, that's a good one. All right, we're coming up on an hour. So I think we will call it here. Thank you guys all so much for tuning into moon or bus today. If this is your first time on the show, welcome smash. The like if you enjoyed it and make sure to subscribe to the channel.

Also, if you're here for crypto hit up the Benzinga crypto YouTube channel, it's a separate channel. First link in the description below. We're going to be doing a giveaway to one of the first thousand subs. So get in early. Uh, that's all I got Brian or Ryan. You guys have anything else for today? Follow Ryan on Twitter.

Follow me. All right, guys. Good call. All right. Uh, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Lil Uzi vert signing off. I was going to come up with another pond. I couldn't go. No, it's done. Been off five seconds. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/moon-or-bust/donations)Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands)Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy)