Ep. 346 - Create Your Own Economy, w/ Fuse Network founder Mark Smargon

In this episode of CRYPTO 101, we talked to Mark Smargon, the founder of Fuse Network and learned about how micro-economies can still exist and thrive inside a greater global community. It is a completely fresh take on the idea of decentralized finance, from an angle we’re not used to looking at it. As Big Brother creeps into every aspect of our lives, the digital dollar threatens the existence of banking itself, Fuse is presenting a way to opt out of that dystopian communist future before it is too late.

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Episode Transcript:

Bryce: Alright everybody, it is time for another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. But before we dive in to our awesome guest in conversation today, I want to remind you guys of two things. And the first one is that if you go to crypto101insider.com, you can join our private community. Here’s where we have our model portfolio and all of our top picks.

We also have Crypto 101 University, where we have hours and hours and hours of written and video content that explains blockchain and explains cryptocurrency in a very bite-sized and easy to understand way. And we have a weekly newsletter that goes out in quarterly state of crypto addresses that go out. There’s just a ton of value packed into this every which way.

So I want you guys first to go to crypto101insider.com today, if you haven’t already. I also want to remind you guys that Pizza Mind and I recently just finished a book. It took 11 months of our lives to write and we’re calling it Crypto Revolution: Your Guide to the Future of Money.

We walk you through this fascinating world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain and its part history book, its part instructional guide, and it’s going to really show you guys why cryptocurrencies are globally disruptive and how they’re going to actually change in real life and in real terms, the way that we buy and sell and even live. We include a bunch of how-tos on getting started with your first exchanges.

We give you tips on how to safely buy and sell in store cryptocurrencies, as well as how do we evaluate potentially good cryptocurrencies. And the best part of the books is that we’re giving it away for free. All you have to do is pay for shipping and handling. So go to cryptorevolution.com and pick up your copy today.

All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode here of the Crypto 101 podcast with your hosts, Bryce and as always the notorious Pizza Mind, baby. What is up over there? I heard you’re been getting some really good night sleeps recently. What’s the deal?

Aaron: Well, I’ve had to, that’s the only thing that’s keeping me alive, Bryce. As a human bipedal, I require rest because I can’t just exist nonstop. But as we’re entering a bull market, I’m going to test that theory. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to try and sleep only maybe 15 minutes a day, but I’ve got these sleep patches, they’re going to give me the best freaking 15 minutes of my life. I lost my aura ring. So I’m just a complete mess. But that’s okay. I’ve always-.

Bryce: I’ve known you for a long time. I’ve known you for a long time. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sleep. You just are nonstop; you are literally just one of these guys that feel like he doesn’t need sleep. And I think there’s another guy in the world that probably doesn’t sleep just as much as you.

Aaron: Really?

Bryce: Somebody that is building applications and blockchain technology like you’ve never believed. And we’re joined by him today. So you’re in good company, Petes.

Aaron: Classic.

Bryce: Tell me about how you met Mr. Mark Smargon, the CEO of Fuse.

Aaron: But before we bring him on, I’ll tell you a quick back story. I followed Mark since all the way back in his days with Color Coin. It was like seven years ago. But now I just, you know, crypto is a small world. And when you’re up at three in the morning, you get to hang out with people from all over the world. So I ran into Mark over at Fuse Network. He’s running the show over there. So Mark, welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast. First of all, we will shut up for a second.

Mark Smargon: Thank you for having me.

Aaron: Our pleasure. So how did you wind up at Fuse Network? Tell us about your journey and where you are now and where you’re going.

Mark: So I actually started them something like exact, actually it’s more like eight years ago and when I bought my first Bitcoin, it was only one Bitcoin because I was interested in the technology. I was doing ecommerce for most of my life, and started my first company about 20 years ago with my brother. And then this company is an ecommerce provider so naturally as an Israeli ecommerce software company.

When I saw Bitcoin for the first time, it just intrigued me this idea that I can accept payments from basically anywhere. And even today you know, if you want to accept payments from a US citizen, you need to be based in the US unless you want to pay high fees like use PayPal and stuff like that. So Bitcoin really intrigued me and I’ve been doing this technology ever since. Fuse is actually my fourth company and all of them are dealing with payments and online shopping and trying to really see how we can bring a future where there’s no ecommerce and commerce, everything is just, you know, commerce.

Bryce: Everything just blends so seamlessly. Is that right?

Mark: Yeah, I think we’re going there. There are some places in the world, they’re already there like China, and there’s no cash anymore there. So there offline payments are nothing that it’s something they don’t really know about anymore.

Bryce: Awesome. So I really like your site. It’s one of these sites that just truly tell me, it’s a product for the people. It’s for communities. And in fact, one of the taglines that you guys have on the front of the site at Fuse.io is “Turning communities into thriving economies, allowing companies and communities to enable secure and frictionless mobile payments with ease”. So could you tell me a little bit about the mission statement? The thing that drives you and exactly the different products that you’re building over at Fuse?

Mark: Yeah, I think that Fuse is really focused on like several trends kind of converging into one point in time. I think the trend that we’re seeing is cryptocurrency, but that’s like the smaller trend. The bigger trend is open source tech. And really the fact that cash is disappearing, maybe that’s like really the strong driver behind a lot of the products, a lot of the new business models, a lot of problems that we enter, but a lot of opportunities also.

Most of the world almost instantly, kind of starting to move to online payments, and specifically mobile payments, we just see this as a consumer demand. And you know, the younger generation just sees this as a natural thing. And third world countries suddenly have access to information and knowledge and say, “Okay, we want to pay on the phone also”. So cash is kind of disappearing everywhere. And we don’t notice this until it’s gone and I think right now is the time to really offer new types of business models for payments, and offer new interfaces. And crypto is really a tool to reach this goal, not really the main story here.

Bryce: I want to comment on one thing real quick, because it just happened about 20 minutes ago. I went to the bank and you know, crazy, right? Who goes to banks anymore, but I needed quarters because I have, I needed quarters, right? And so I go and I’m like, “Hey, I need quarters” and the guy looks at me and he kind of like shakes his head. He’s like, “Man, you and the rest of the world, right?” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Well, you know, there’s this whole coin shortage thing”. He goes, “You’re not going to believe it. But we used to get $5,000 worth of quarters every week. Now, we only get $200 worth of quarters every week”.

And this is for like a big bank branch in San Diego. And I’m like, “What the heck, like that’s insane, what’s going on?” He’s like, “Well, with COVID people realized, A) Coins carry germs far more than cash and they carry germs far more than Bitcoin”. That’s for sure. But, you know, more importantly, he was like, in the Mint close down. The mint was closed, because, you know, cross contamination and workers and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, cash. I mean, again, I have a whole folder of pictures of everywhere I go since COVID happened and, you know, cash not accepted here, contactless payment only.

So now this whole trend is really accelerated. It’s really crazy to see. I mean, we’ve been calling for a cashless society for half a decade here over here in the crypto world. But yeah, it’s just crazy that now it’s all finally happening.

Aaron: I wouldn’t have believed that it was going to happen everywhere. But I was recently just in rural Texas. And before I went, I had no cash with me. And as I’m leaving my dad’s house, he says, “Wait, do you need some cash? You’re going to Texas?” I’m like, “No, I don’t. He’s like, well, you should have some anyway”. You know, he’s almost 70 years old. He keeps cash in a box somewhere. So he gives me $200 in cash and I said, “Okay, well, you know, better to be safe than sorry. I’ll take it with me”. Middle of rural Texas, heartland of America did not even need to use a single dollar, even tiny gas stations in the middle of nowhere, nothing around for another hundred miles. Sorry, please use a card or use exact change only.

Mark: I think now we’re realizing that the biggest people that were against adopting mobile payments is really like the people that own the companies, that own their credit card infrastructure, plastic cards, they were invested in one thing so they said, “Okay, it works perfectly”. And but now nobody really wants cash like it’s not regulators, not the consumers. You know, black economy and tax evasion, cash is a huge problem. Bitcoin is much more traceable. Like that’s an even better option for regulators. So that’s really not a tough sell, you know, selling people mobile payments, and pretty much everywhere.

Aaron: Well, here’s the real question. You know, one of the biggest complaints that we get from dorks looking at crypto through the lens of an empty toilet paper to or some, you know, really ignorant point of view is, we’ve only been building base layer protocols crypto’s unusable. There’s no end user applications. But that’s not true anymore. Like we have things like the brave browser with millions of users, we have props network with millions of users. And now we’ve got Fuse network. So is crypto ready for mainstream adoption, finally?

Mark: So I think it’s in the process, and definitely a much closer to mainstream adoption today than in the last rally three years ago, in 2017. I think back then the trade offs were really clear, like it’s either comfortable, or decentralized, or it’s cheap or decentralized, you couldn’t have like both: comfortable, fast and easy to use and decentralized. So I think decentralization kind of became a binary thing. People usually judge stuff like on the binary scenario, but that’s not really the reality. And today, we’re much closer to being fast, cheap and easy to use, but still can offer the benefits of being decentralized.

You know, sometimes, there’s no benefit for being decentralized what Fuse is trying to do is build non-custodial wallets, give them in the hands of local operators, and offer a Stripe alternative to them that is much, much cheaper. But they don’t need to be based in the US, they don’t need to have a management neutralizer, since they can’t touch any private information, they can’t touch any money. So they can really build a lot of things in fraction of the cost, and not be centralized and then be you know, dealing with GDPR dealing with their regulations with licenses.

So there’s a lot of pros that you need to evaluate very carefully. So today, it’s much closer to mainstream. And it’s a little bit like Linux, you know, it was 10 to 15 years ago, you would ask somebody about Linux, he would say the same, like Windows is much more comfortable, or Mac. Today, everybody use it and it kind of scales the internet. You know, when if I go to Facebook, there’s Linux service on the back end, if I use my mobile phone, there’s Linux underneath the surface. So people really use it without knowing there’s this open source software like this, which is very important underneath the surface.

It’s really transparent to them. And just like I don’t care if it’s Stripe or Square visa, behind the scenes, I don’t care how much fees the merchant pay as a consumer. Same goes for crypto. The crypto needs to replicate centralized experience, and make itself comfortable to consumers. And they will just get more services and more places. That’s the real important aim and impact. Bryce: Amazing, I really want to stop and focus on open source because that might be a common word to us. But to any person may be listening, they might not really understand that crypto is open source or even what open source means. So specifically, I’m curious, like, I want to know from your perspective, why is open source so positive? What is it about this sort of because, for instance, I was talking to one of my engineering friends and he was like, crypto’s open source like that seems like it would be bad like shouldn’t the better software be proprietary and closed source? Isn’t it easier to hack and all that kind of stuff? So can you kind of talk about the value add that open source really brings?

Mark: Yeah, so open source is not nothing new really. It’s not invented by crypto. It’s like 20-30 years ago, a Richard Stallman was the pioneer of the open source movement and people coined the name. And it kind of goes hand in hand with public standards. So how do we standardize code? With open source. That’s like really in a nutshell. How can we build infrastructure and or protocols or even stuff like SSL, how do we secure websites. It’s not advisable for every company to build it by their own.

If we want to keep stuff interoperable, like the internet is really based on those public standards being open. So naturally, a big piece of every infrastructure becomes open source. So a big portion of the internet today is open source. If you look at WordPress, one of the most popular software stacks for building the websites, but also the operating system Linux. I think with crypto, the real addition is how do we make an incentive for stuff to keep open source, to keep being open, to keep being public? You know, there’s a lot of projects that closed source or abandoned out, can we trust the project long term, and have a real, strong economic incentive for that to be to stay open. And I think Ethereum was what like one Bitcoin and Ethereum but mostly Ethereum in terms of developer adoption.

And that kind of was like, a signal, that kind of gave everybody else in the ecosystem, a very strong single, just seeing the share, you know, adoption of developers around their open source code base, and everything, almost everything built on top of Ethereum. And Etheruem itself has a very strong incentive to show that signal that there’s developer adoption. So once they close source, if they closed source, any part of it, it stops being an interesting product. The developer adoption in crypto is one of the main signals that the project will succeed. And then I’m oversimplifying, but that’s like in a nutshell.

Aaron: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let’s shift directions for just a minute. And let’s talk about some finance and stuff. Because what Bryce mentioned earlier, you know, you’re trying to turn communities into micro economies at Fuse, can you walk us through what that process is like? And then also, you know, we’re also moving as a world towards a more global economy with LinkedIn supply chains, you’ve got China’s Belt and Rroad initiative, 5G, IoT, Central Bank digital currencies, like everything in the world, is now going to link together somehow, is there still room in the global economy for micro economies? And can you break down you know, what really is a micro economy?

Mark: Yeah, so the three questions so start from the second one, but I think there is an easy explanation. So first of all, actually, since the Corona started, there’s much more emphasis on local economies, and much less emphasis on globalization. I think globalization was really the trend. Until you know, Corona gave us a big slap on the face. And suddenly people can’t fly. And I think, especially if you’re living in a small country like Israel, you suddenly get a lot of way of thoughts. Israelis like to fly. And I think, you know, if we’re looking at a global versus local, it’s really hard to notice, but they’re actually more countries over time. There’s more local authorities, there’s more authority to local entities. This is a trend that goes hand in hand with globalization.

So yeah, people are coming closer and you travel to the other part of the world and you travel more frequently. And suddenly everybody speaks English, and everybody has the same like Facebook and WhatsApp and use the same. Basically, our cultures are kind of blending but the way I see it that gives even like, that’s even more empowering to small economies and to places in the entire world in developing countries. There’s a famous economist Friedrich Hayek, the crypto community would absolutely love him, he was the rival of Keynes and got the Nobel Prize, but he was the father of like Austrian economy, he had a famous saying that was called the local knowledge problem.

And he basically wrote in this book that local entities will always make better decisions with money than centralized entities, because centralized always make decisions based on aggregated data and retroactive, you know, retroactively. If you want to allocate funds in the best way, you need local people to have the authority to do it.

Bryce: I subscribe to the same line of thinking. Absolutely.

Mark: Yeah. So really, if we’re thinking about stuff, you know, most of the world in a lot of places don’t have credit cards. And the banking is still being done, you know, with a piece of paper and somebody like agent banking, somebody writes down, who got what. Just want to give tools to people you want to improve trust, you want to basically scale this, you need to go to digital everywhere. And that’s really the only way. And also, if you want to regulate this paper is not really a good way to regulate anything, you know, faxes, and Excel spreadsheets and invoices and collecting, collecting taxes is very, there’s a lot of friction there also, like every part that is not digital has a lot of friction.

So I think, you know, it’s not competing with central banks or governments. If somebody wants to launch a loyalty program, that’s a micro economy, every voucher printed on a piece of paper, US that’s a micro economy, that’s basically like the very minimal definition and you know, 30% of the retail market is loyalty. So discounts and vouchers pretty much also universal. Every one of them even like Facebook groups is a tiny micro economy. A second hand marketplaces online or offline, they’re micro economies. And so we’re really looking into something like a very broad definition.

Bryce: Now that that’s extremely helpful. That might be the most helpful tidbit, in my mind, of this conversation is like, kind of understanding that the capital gets more efficiently allocated when it’s on smaller scales. And I think that’s really a cool idea. And I want to know about if there have been people or customers or communities that have used Fuse, and maybe some of the successes or some of the cool stories that you guys have heard that turned a local community kind of around or something like that.
Mark: Yeah. So first of all, we sing in the middle of Corona, a big push to build like those local vouchers, alternative means of payment, especially since what you said about the cash not being used anymore. In the middle of Corona, there was a very strong push for those local vouchers. China did something like that digital vouchers. But what if a city which is one of the poorest in Spain, and we’re working with the local charity organization there, and they want to do digital vouchers, and their only alternative is Visa, and or just print it on piece of paper, or just use a voucher that is a minted or issued by a big retail group, which is very popular everywhere, you know, you have those like money vouchers, you can go and shop in Big Gay retail shops.

And this is something we launched with them in the middle of Corona, in the marketplace, in Seville in Spain. Yeah, we have a really cool video of them actually using it. And it’s really early stage. But that is it’s not nonprofit, it’s a for profit enterprise. And the whole point is that any person there and doesn’t need to be a crypto person can deposit money into the wallet and get the cash back, every time he pays. So the real idea here is that we can launch really fast, we can offer a solution for a charity donations, for a payments that is much more transparent, so people can actually see where their money goes.

And you can kind of program this in a way that you can spend it in specific areas, or you have limitations on spending it, let’s say that you have a month to spend it. So you still do cash handouts, you know, with physical cash. So in Europe, they don’t have food stamps or something like that, in most places. So the real option is to launch something like this, and make it for profit and create sustainable business out of it. So this is all powered by Fuse and launched in a few days in Spain. That’s like one example there.

Bryce: It’s always good. It’s always helpful in my mind to have these sort of different analogies and kind of like what you said, an analogy is like, you know, instead of having the government issue food stamps, for instance, which is something that you know, a lot of people are familiar with, you could now have a platform like Fuse where you know, you and your friends or you and your local community can get together and you could issue these new sorts of currencies. I like those analogs.

Mark: You don’t even need to issue your own currency. Like that’s really the cool thing. You can decide to use dollars, you can decide to use something backed by Dai or USDC or Tether or European stable coins. And the whole point here is that you can decide what would be the fee structure, maybe we’ll cover all the transactions and show people ads. You can create your new business models because you remove a big part of the cost. You remove Visa out of the system out of the equation, you remove Stripe, you remove PayPal, you remove Blade, you remove Square. Those are all very expensive services. Suddenly, you don’t need to pay like 2.9% every time you’re moving money around. And this money can circulate. So not only to the business, but also p2p.

Let’s say you want to create a really cool use case that we recently seen a company built on Fuse’s, a football fan app, where they can actually support the players, buy stuff at the stadium, do a little bit more than yearly farming or staking. They’re actually supporting the players, especially in the Corona times people are looking for new business models. This is really the idea here. If you remove these very centralized, very expensive services from the equation, you certainly have room for a new business models that can really earn money. So it’s not non-profit or something like that.

Aaron: Wow that makes a lot of sense.

Bryce: It really does. And I was just going to ask, Pete’s you can go, but I was just going to ask, is there a fee for you know, I wanted to spin something up for crypt nation maybe, right? Like, is there a fee that I would have to pay for doing that? Or how do you guys make money? I guess it is the question.

Mark: Yeah. So the whole point was to build a network and start from the network at first, like bottom up, and the network charges, one cent per transaction. So and the costs are negligible, other than this one cent, you can use the entire software stack for free, front end, back end, iOS, Android, everything comes out of the box for free, and will remain free forever. And this is why basically, we tie the token into the system, because we want this to remain free forever. And so the network is operated by validators not by one entity. So the costs are like distributed. And we’re not the gatekeepers. And there’s not one company, you know, with services that deal with payments, you have also always the risk that one company will make all the money from the data or from the phase or from the selling the code, you know, the infrastructure.

But it’s not like that. You can have thousands of companies providing services on Fuse, the network will always charge one cent per transaction. So we plan to reach 1 million transactions today, three years from now. And we have scheduled plan on how to reach it by focusing on the long tail of communities, long tail of local economies. And we want to start it with you know, pilots that really bring out the advantages, like places like an island, an island is the best example for a micro economy. Like any island in the world, small island is a micro economy. So those are perfectly testbeds for products like Fuse. These are some of our go to market strategies is going to those places that can showcase what we’re doing. And then there they have a lot of transaction, they need to pay one cent per transaction to the network doesn’t matter if you’re moving 1 million or $1, always one cent.

Aaron: I had the pleasure of playing around with a few studio last night to try and build my own community and see just how it all worked, get some hands on. And I thought I’d have to have some kind of development experience. And I’m going through the docs. No, it’s all like a graphical interface like Wix. So there was no coding needed, it was really simple. I could change the colors around, I could put up my own logo, no big deal. I could mint my own tokens or import my own Ethereum tokens. It was a very familiar experience, if you’re familiar with Ethereum.

But without having to pay Ethereum gas fees, which are a huge problem right now. So we get finally the benefits of an Ethereum app without having to pay the gas fees and Eth over $20 at some point right now. So A) That’s amazing. And then B) I think it’s really cool that you have like a business directory, and who owns the business. And it allows people to see what services are in this community right off the bat. This is something that I tried to put together with several groups of friends of mine like several years ago, not even knowing you know, micro economies were a thing really, but I just thought it’d be really cool if someone I knew or someone you know, with a couple degrees of separation was a plumber or a contractor or a mechanic. I could just go to them and keep the money circulating in this little pool. So everyone else I knew could thrive and help each other out. There’s a degree of trust there. If you got a buddy of a buddy, you know, they’re probably going to do a better job and not screw you over, or whatever the case is. But there was no like centralized repository to keep track of that information. It fizzled out. But with Fuse, it’s all right there and everyone can very clearly see it and interact with it and pay for it. So it’s very, very interesting. I would say the closest thing to something like this would be Venmo.

But Venmo is only available in the United States and centralized and you can keep a bunch of stuff private. But Fuse has very similar kind of feel to it, I’d have to say. I liked it a lot.

Mark: Yeah, I like Venmo. Venmo is a really good example. Because it’s really not. Like, that’s the example of why payments are an unsolved business problem, because Venmo doesn’t really make money bought by PayPal. And they now it starts to work with merchants more and, you know, it kind of found the new goldmine for data, but without like a real way to make money from it, because people expect it to do payments for free.

And you can’t really innovate when you’re building something that’s, you know, that big on a country level. But on a local level, you want to do mutual credit, everybody knows everybody, you don’t need Equifax to hold your credit score. And if everybody knows everybody, somebody can, you know, deliver a product that would be much better than anything else that they would be offered by any national bank. Now, just one small example. So we think that the future financial services, is those open source platforms, not necessarily Bitcoin, not necessarily Ethereum. It’s really the infrastructure.

Bryce: Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, we have only five minutes left here. And we have a couple questions that we like to ask everybody who comes on the platform. But before I get to those two questions, I want to ask about the Fuse token, real quick, high level is there, I think I remember seeing that there’s going to be a Fuse token. And then just a quick recap about what the role of that token would be?

Mark: So we launched it last year, but we didn’t do a token sale, we raised in equity. And now we’re doing a token release. And we didn’t want to raise money on a white paper. So we tried to build the network.

Bryce: Smart man.

Mark: Bring adoption and then deal with the public sell because again, there’s really this vision of not holding every user that they then being the gatekeepers of this data. And that’s really the important part, this infrastructure will stay free. So we’re doing a public release in around October. So we’ll announce that soon. And, and then more details to come. But that’s really the vision to have a token, anybody in the world that wants to partner with Fuse, doesn’t need to sign any contracts. And we’re seeing people from, you know, friendly, and unfriendly countries buying the token, using it. They don’t need to deal with signing any contracts, you know, once they buy the token, there were aligning our interest in our long term vision, and also they own part of the infrastructure they’re building on. And they can anticipate the cost because it’s always one cent. So that those are things that are very important to explain to people that you use an infrastructure, it wouldn’t cost like 10 bucks in a year from now, it’s not an investment as it is in our partnership.

Bryce: Beautiful, very well said I’m excited to keep tabs on it. So October, I will be searching Twitter and Google and everything just to make sure I’m on top of it. But Mark real quick, one of the questions that we like to ask everybody is of all the companies in the crypto space apart from your own, what’s that one company that just continues to impress you, continues to inspire you and you think is going to have a tremendous impact on the world?

Mark: So, a lot of early stage companies come to my mind, but they’re not really relevant anymore. So I don’t think they deserve like, you know, you look at companies that are super impactful, like when I look at the MetaMask in Infura, to consensus companies and basically a lot of early stage consensus companies were really important in the fact that they also signaled this kind of like, mass adoption and usage and metrics.

And today, I would say that the one of the most impressive companies said that I think that will, you know, be a little bit more long term sustainable, because I don’t really think that Infura and MetaMask will be with us for that long. And I see as, like more of an infrastructure side, the graph, you know, this company, and doing really cool stuff for using their infrastructure. Also, they’re really amazing in the sense that they kind of build a piece of code that is being used by most projects. And it’s really not trivial. They really solve a big pain and often they say open source. And they have a really interesting model with how they build their network around that.

Argent is really cool. Uniswap is really cool. Uniswap I think, also will not be with us a long time. Because it reminds me of the Pirate Bay. But you can really stop it easily. Like I really love the approach, and I think it would be for millions of times and, and will you know, kind of disappear. I’m hoping not, but it’s really like doing a lot of work to like, if you remember EtherDelta.

Bryce: Yeah, EtherDelta got shut down by the FEDS. But what’s really cool.

Mark: Somehow beating, Binance beating, so far, it’s one of the best success stories. They took something really simple, basically one contract and into something amazing. So those are the examples I’m looking for. Argent, for instance, is a big inspiration for Ethereum wallet. And we really like the user experience, we’re actually using their contracts behind the scenes in our product to keep it interoperable. And they’re really living in terms of UI in crypto. I think, remember when they release their early beta people came to me and say, “Did you look at this?” Like so, again, bringing it closer to the first question about mainstream adoption, those are the big companies that help bring it.

Bryce: Wonderful. And I just wanted to comment on Uniswap. You know, I like to think of these protocols, all these different crypto protocols is unstoppable protocols, and it’s kind of a term that’s been getting passed around. And even though you know, the domain might be able to get sees the, like you said, the code is open source, people can fork the code and you know, to fork the code just means to copy and paste it, spin it up under a new URL or domain name, right? And you have unit stunt or whatever you want to call this.

Mark: Just want to call it Sushi.

Bryce: Sushi

Aaron: Unit switch.

Bryce: Unit switch that anything we can make millions. But I like to think in a really good idea, or good analogy for crypto in these uncoupled protocols is something that everybody’s familiar with. And it’s the Hydra, you cut off one head and seven heads grow in its place. Right? You guys saw it in Hercules, you guys saw in Captain America, it’s unstoppable. You cut off one head and seven grow in its place. So yeah, that’s an analogy I want everybody to as they turn the podcast off to think with that is why cryptocurrency is so powerful, because it cannot be stopped.

Mark: and resilient.

Aaron: I love that. If this was the first podcast that someone had heard, who was just getting into crypto, what would you want them to know Mark, and you been around? Like you said, you bought your first Bitcoin eight years ago. Give us some timeless lessons that you’ve learned since then.

Mark: I think it would be a really think long term, like, nothing will happen in the short term that has any real impact other than hype. And this thing will take no less than a few decades to implement. And it will happen in stages. We know right now the crypto space is super, super, super tiny, even if it will do 10 inches, it will still be very tiny. So people sometimes forget it. And you know, the ideas, they have a big, big, big impact, but the actual size of it right now is super small. So to take this into account, the twitching like replacing gold, that would mean that every Bitcoin in the world will be valued at like $100,000. So we’re not even close to that to being there.

So people need to realize that and you know, nothing will happen overnight. So I think the perspective of being 8 years in this space and realizing what you can do on Ethereum that took like a few months, when on Bitcoin, it took a few years, then you realize how much the space progressed. But you know, just investing in this and looking at this from the sidelines, there’s nothing to expect to happen, you know, in the year or two, and will not replace cash in the year will take longer than that.

Bryce: Love it. Very, very, very nice words of wisdom to leave us with guys. There’s no rush, right? You guys are early, be patient, take a long term outlook. And don’t get caught up in all the FOMO you’re going to see other people making more money. You’re going to see other people saying this is the next big thing. You got to buy this now, sell this, hear that? Guys, relax. Take a deep breath. You’re in the right place. We say wait every single day. Hold on. So you mean I actually can sleep at night and I don’t have to worry about missing out now. That’s exactly right, sweet little Pizza Mind. Why didn’t you tell me this before?

Aaron: Alright guys.

Bryce: Thank you so much.

Aaron: Guest Mark, thank you. Really appreciate. We look forward to having you back on some time very soon. But that’s it for this episode. I’m going to go get the best sleep of my life. Bryce, Pizza Mind, out.

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