Ep. 355 - Deep Dive on Crypto Oracles w/ Band Protocol founder Soravis Srinawakoon

Ep. 355 - Deep Dive on Crypto Oracles w/ Band Protocol founder Soravis Srinawakoon
December 17, 2020 #CRYPTO101
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In this episode of CRYPTO 101, brought to you by pNetwork and pTokens, we got some great insight into the future of DeFi with Band Protocol Co-Founder Soravis Srinawakoon. Soravis is our very first guest from Thailand and he gives us the insider scoop on the crypto landscape thriving in the land of Boon-nam. As an early investor in crypto oracle technology, Soravis is an expert and gives us the 101 on why this is such a critical piece of infrastructure.

The main topic we kept returning to is the real potential of DeFi; would it remain a growing niche, or perhaps replace the entire financial system? On one hand, you have all of the power built on smoke and mirrors on a hidden over leveraged balance sheet that has been compounding for hundreds of years. On the other hand, DeFi brings fundamentally pure value on transparent blockchain, that can decide for itself what rules to comply with and what rules to disregard. At some point, the threat of DeFi becomes a promise, but it has a long way still to go.

Lastly, we got his thoughts on the Kucoin hack, and the collaboration of many other exchanges to help out. There is a long ongoing debate on immutability vs intervention when these enormous security breaches take place. While Kucoin has mostly recovered at the time this podcast airs, the actions and inactions that took place industry wide will be felt forever.

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Episode Transcript

Bryce: All right, everybody. Welcome back to another awesome episode of the Crypto 101 podcast where we speak to founders, CEOs and the smartest people building up the Bitcoin, blockchain and crypto industry. Today’s episode is brought to you by our sponsor, pTokens, and pNetwork. And if you’ve been listening to crypto 101, for any amount of time, you’ve heard us call 2020, the year of interoperability over and over again, we’re talking about this concept. And that’s because the smartest teams in crypto are all focused on bridging the divide between the many different cryptocurrencies.

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Before we dive in to our awesome, awesome guest and conversation today, I want to remind you guys have two things. And then 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 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 it’s part history book, it’s 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 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, all you good wonderful citizens of crypt nation. Welcome to the earliest recording of crypto 101 podcast in history. Pizza Mind, we’re recording. It’s 8am but for most of you guys, Pizza Mind is nocturnal. So this is actually his bedtime. And he is up but just barely. Peter, how are you doing over there man?

Aaron: You know, there’s not many things in life that are worth getting up for. But our guest today is absolutely worth it. We are blessed with the presence all the way from Thailand by Soravis, the CEO and co founder of Band Protocol. Welcome to crypto 101. Okay, good night. I did my part.

Soravis: Hey, guys, a pleasure for me to be here as well. And sorry for the timezone difference.

Aaron: Was time is it for you?

Soravis: Well, it’s 10pm but you know.

Aaron: Fair compromise.

Bryce: So it is simultaneously our earliest recording and the latest recording for our guests. We’ve never had anybody come on so we I know you’ve had a full workday, building Band Protocol and the future of decentralized finance. And so we want to you know, upfront thank you for staying up late and recording this but let’s just dive straight in. You know, before we get started with your background, and you know how you kind of think about the space. I just want to hear from boots on the ground in Bangkok. We’ve never had a guest from Bangkok either. So what’s the crypto community like over there? And how do you see things progressing for the rest of the rest of the year?

Soravis: Yeah, for sure. I call this actually surprisingly good for developers, as well as the crypto scene, right? From a regulatory perspective, you know, the government is really friendly. We have a full legal framework in terms of you know, how to operate exchanges, crypto exchanges have licenses, you know, there are over five, six, fully licensed crypto shares here in Thailand is fully legal to trade cryptocurrency. So, you know, they’re quite friendly. And even in terms of the private companies, including the bank, they are really interested in the space and one of the largest commercial bank here in Thailand, is looking really deeply into DeFy, trying to find where they can play into space, to sort of future prove themselves. And then when I was if I did business, as well. So it’s really friendly here. From a startup perspective, you know, not only a standard protocol, we also have, when we say go, I’m actually in Bangkok. And actually a few developers from different projects, I do that here as well. So I would say is, I will leave my brand seen a lot of traders, as well, we have a really, really active trading communities, similar to everywhere else around the world.

Aaron: That’s really cool. I’ll definitely have to make my way out there sometime. I’ve got a good friend out there that says they have round table pizza, in Bangkok. And that’s like the place to go. So I guess like, I guess I’ll be okay out there.

Soravis: We have a really good one here. And in fact, I think, you know, in the past three or four years, right, one of the biggest conferences of crypto usually in Bangkok, as well. It’s going to be on blog, and then it was actually quite big concerned that the guests are going to come over.
Bryce: Wow. Yeah, I mean, side note, for anybody that cares about my personal life. I was supposed to be in Thailand, in April, I bought my girlfriend and I some tickets to go over there. And COVID happened. And you know, back in February, we realized, yeah, this probably this trip probably is not going to happen. And I just recently got my refund for that trip. You know, six months later. So, fun fact, there. But so, let’s dive straight in. I want to hear a little bit about your background, you’ve got a really fascinating background, you’ve been an investor in the crypto space for a long time. Now you’re building Band. So tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today?

Soravis: Yeah, my background is mixed background. So I’m engineer by training. I did a computer science for my undergrad at Stanford. And then I did the mass management, also at Stanford, in the US, okay. And that’s when I stumble on Bitcoin in 2013 because I took a cryptographic class with that body. That’s when I was really fascinated by the concept of Bitcoin, the concept of decentralization, because me myself, actually was a really political person, in the sense that, you know, a champion, of course, democracy, you know, and then it may seem to rule, but there’s not really in this part of the world, right. And so, you know, I’m always really advocate of that, of decentralization, and reducing public government, especially dictator dictatorship that we see around the world, including Thailand.

And that’s a lot of what really clicked with me, the concept of Bitcoin, the concept of this whole decentralized applications really clicked with me, and that’s why I really want to pursue it full time. And then fast forward after 2013. You know, I was working at BCG, Boston Consulting Group, as a management consultant for two years. On the side, I continued to invest in cryptos, continue to study, you know, what are some of the promising areas that can be worked on while being a consultant for two years, then I quit my job in around early 2017 decided that, you know, this is really something I really need to go full time on because I was sleeping three hours a day. And it wasn’t really healthy, you know, consultant, there’s not an easy job. And on top of that, you don’t have to do this whole industry. You know, and when I said follow it, as many people will realize, you know, it’s become almost impossible to do that. And it was just too fascinating for me, too, life changing for me. And that’s why I decided to, you know, jump in on after consultant and invented Band Protocol in around mid 2017.

Aaron: That’s an awesome journey. I’m not sure if you’re getting any more sleep being here full time or not. I know, I’m certainly not. But one thing you mentioned that really stuck out to me is being a champion of democracy. And I really like that. So let’s focus on DeFy for just a minute. Do you think decentralized finance, will always exist as a small alternative, an outlier to centralized traditional finance? Or can you see a future where maybe it’s equally as big? Or can you see a future where DeFy literally makes the whole system as we know it obsolete and takes over? What’s your vision for it?

Soravis: I think my view is not as radical, as you know, some other people I believe in, in a world where D is both decentralized finance and centralized finance, continue to coexist, just simply because, again, decent PlayStation has a lot of benefits. But it’s not for everyone, right? The UX and UI, right, it’s just almost impossible for me to imagine, my dad and my mom to hold it on private key, there has to be some sort of middleman solution eventually, where, you know, they will hold some sort of key for them, just like you know how most people still hold their token on Coinbase on buying it, right. But then it’ll be some sort of middle ground there, where, you know, some users or most of the user will sacrifice some of these decentralization, but still have access to decentralized finance as a back end, right. So what I imagine is, decentralized finance will become a gatekeepers, or have, you know, good ways to access this services for normal people for mass adoption, right.

But that also means reduced fee, that mean higher efficiencies. That means, you know, the ability for users to switch between different providers easily and seamlessly, as opposed to being locked out to one, you know, providers, you know, act like a windseeker, just like how we see it with the bank right now, right. So I do think that these intellect right now is going to really shift the world, in a sense of, you know, providing greater access and equal access to more people around the world. And not just the DeFy as we see it. Now, I mean, DeFy, as we see it, right now, mostly, is around lending, right is around money market, you have some sort of asset, which is sitting in your wallet, that doesn’t provide any value. So now people provide you to that to those assets by doing borrowing and lending, right. This is basic primitive of finance. But if we look at the world right now, in terms of centralized finance, it’s much more beyond that, right.

We talk about deliverative, we talk about options. We talk about insurances, we talk about stock trading, and I’m really bullish on doors, bringing, you know, categories coming into cryptos, coming into decentralized finance. And that’s when you know, a lot of these will actually have a much, I guess, more uses than what we see now.

Bryce: It’s really fascinating. And I kind of want to dive straight into the mindset of a founder. So tell us why you started Band Protocol. And I recall, when I first met you, you told me, you know, you’ve been an early investor in different Oracle solutions and different crypto projects. So did you see a particular problem that needed a solution? Did you see a booming business opportunity? What was really going through your head?

Soravis: Yeah, so into that [unintelligible]17, right, we saw a lot of experimentation, as well as a lot of white people. Me and my team were, you know, tinkering around with like, with my contract, tried to build many applications, right Maker Dao came out, we tried to you know, see what, you know, the architecture is like, has it been stable coin, being serious, right? How to design this decentralized, stable coin? We also try building applications, how do we bring, let’s say, you know, Powerball, or mega ball to everyone around the world, right? I mean, Thailand, I want to play a mega ball, powerball as well, it is impossible for me to do that, right.

And so, you know, we try to be honest infrastructures, is really fascinating. And, and the thing is, every time we try to build these applications, this decentralized application, we always ran into the same problems, which is what we known as the Oracle problem check. What does Oracle problem is essentially, when you build my contract, this application, you can think of it as a machine, right? It is like a vending machine, as a vending machine, you know, it has no way to access information outside of that particular machine itself is a machine where people can press button, right? And that makes the use case fairly limited, right? We cannot do something really flexible, just simply because the fact that machine has no knowledge of the world outside of it. Makes sense, right?

Same thing with smart contract. If you want to build something like these implies by then, most likely, you will need access to information outside of the blockchain itself. For example, betting application, right? If I want to want to create an application that bet between you know, whether she’ll see when the match on the machine has no way to know that she’ll see actually win the match. Somebody has to tell that information to Dao and that’s a role of an Oracle to provide information ranging from real world UN to financial data that we see in a lot of these DeFy. And that’s why we decided to focus on this Oracle problems. And like you said, Yes, we realize is a really, really big problems of the industry.
Back then, you know, there were some emerging solution like simmering, as well as a few others. Augur can be considered as an Oracle as well. So, yes, I do invest in a lot of these projects. There’s because simply because, obviously, I’m really long this industry. And I think somebody’s going to solve this key piece of the infrastructure.

Aaron: What makes Band a different protocol from some of the others? Is there any technical detail or a different approach? What makes you guys slightly different?

Soravis: I think a lot of this protocol, and solutions have different design decisions and trade off for us, right? We actually differentiate many, many other Oracle by the fact that we leave on our own blockchain. So we built our own blockchain from the cosmos SDK. Just think of it as a blockchain whenever we build our own blockchain, to make sure we address the scalability issues, because one of the things that we observe is that when we launched on Ethereum, it was really difficult. It wasn’t really flexible, right? Because you have to rely on Ethereum as an underlying protocol. It was really expensive. It was really expensive. I think anyone knows that right now.

And to query data from, let’s say, 20, data providers that become prohibitively expensive for us and for many other Oracle solution as well. And also the block time itself, is also really slow. And let’s say when we observe is there a trend emerging from differently, you’re one way you have to learn, being really fast and of cosmos and polka dot did a while and a lot of this different blockchain coming to market. And if we rely on infrastructure on top of Ethereum’s with so is slower than them, it becomes almost impossible for us to serve that data to them blockchain, given the time limit country, and as we build our own blockchain, for that performance, make sure it’s really optimized just for Oracle computation, make sure it’s fast matrices are economically viable to serve this data across different blockchain to different applications. And I think that’s probably one of the one of the biggest advantage right now, for that.

Bryce: That makes a ton of sense. So you know, just for people out there who are listening, you know, Band Protocol is providing all sorts of different off chain data to a lot of these different layer one solutions like Ethereum, and cosmos. So that’s when we talk about interoperability here on crypto 101. That’s exactly the idea here is that you have one blockchain that’s kind of facilitating communications between the others. So that’s really cool. And it’s a really, really necessary piece of the puzzle that the industry is really still trying to figure out. But beyond that piece of the puzzle, tell us another piece of the puzzle that DeFy is currently lacking in is who’s building it. In your opinion, you know, what, what do we still need?

Soravis: I think DeFy right as it is right now, we still lack a really easy on boarding, or a really intuitive UX UI, right? It’d be talking about how to bring that to mass adoption. I said before, it’s almost impossible to imagine my grandma or my parents, putting all their savings into meta masks, and then turn that into, you know, interact with all this protocol. I think that’s a really key piece of infrastructure for sure. All these aggregators on this front end interfaces, lot of people are building that tool and start to make sure is become much easier, right? You see sapper to have a file, you see a lobbyist, other applications, like wallet as well, that tried to abstract away all this concept and interfaces, so users can use it.

But again, it’s still far from that. I think, in my opinion, before a lot of the maths can actually interact and understand that right. And another thing, I would say its scalability, right? Again, just simply the fact that if you want to interact with some of this money market protocol, you’re spending $10 per transaction, right? That’s just that’s, that’s impossible for a lot of these smaller retail mass users to interact with. It says impossible is the name right now is a game of the waves, right? Only rich people able to access this there without having to worry about that 10-20 or even $100. Right. And I think that scalability to actually bring as much easier for the masses actually adopted.

Aaron: Yeah, and to touch on that point. This is right around the first of October when we’re recording this Ethereum 2.0 is test net just failed again, and is going to experience more launch delays. As this continues. I think that more and more DeFy projects are going to migrate away and the top contenders from my vantage point for this value to flow out of Ehereum is the cosmos ecosystem, the polka dot ecosystem, and the Binance smart chain ecosystem. I know you’re familiar with all three, you decided to build on top of cosmos, what other DeFy projects are you watching out or integrating within that Cosmos ecosystem that we should probably take some more research into?

Soravis: Sure. In that Cosmos ecosystem, right. For me, what I’m quite excited about is actually a project called Terra. And this is not an investment advice. But Terra is a stable coin project in Korea, relatively famous as well, because they actually processing you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, right now in stable coin, in payment, through a lot of retail e commerce in Korea, and they’re expanding beyond Korea right now. And the father is actually found like, you know, one of the biggest e commerce companies in Korea before, so they are quite, quite famous. And the fact that they use this table query to increase efficiencies and reduce costs to other than motion, as well as the actual users who pay the money.

While those users do not have to understand cryptocurrency at all, right? This transaction, just like how to use credit card without knowing that the payment real behind that the technology behind that is actually powered by blockchain. Terra is actually a really powerful concept for me. And that’s one of the example that I’m bringing before in terms of how to bring mass adoption, we actually abstracted away from the users, but they enjoy the same benefit of reduced cost and greater efficiencies. And so yeah, I would probably look into that for sure. They’re expanding beyond just being a steam table called for payment. They’re bringing more smart contract capabilities. They’re bringing more projects like synthetics tokens, derivative tokens, they’re going to be launched soon. Actually, I think I believe in October, and I think it’s off, you know, and I’m actually quite excited for that.

Bryce: Wow. Yeah. So we’re definitely going to look into Terra (LUNA) into that entire system. Yeah, forming around there we are, we’re privy to that. But everybody here listening on crypto 101. Check it out, not financial advice. But there’s a ton of really exciting stuff. And that’s something that I didn’t know, actually the founder of that project was a big e-commerce guy in South Korea. Really cool to hear. One of the other aspects of crypto outside of DeFy? Well, there’s many different aspects of crypto outside of defy.

We see some supply chain stuff. We see some IoT stuff. We see some store like pure store value and you know, medium of exchange, how do you kind of think about this entire world of crypto outside of just the decentralized finance movement? That may be you’re very, very deep in but have you ever think that there’s, you know, value outside of the DeFy space?

Soravis: Right. So yeah, I guess to the industry outside of the fight, right. For me, the question I ask myself is, you know, what type of application that, you know, people will rally, because they are censorship resistant, or the fact that they are decentralized, right. One of the areas that I hope will happen, I’m actually quite bullish on is social media as a platform to share information. Because that’s probably one of the most powerful tool that that has been invented recently, people, a rich people are spending a lot of time on Facebook, on Twitter, to share content, but the fact that they are really centralized, they can take out all the content, they can censor all the content is actually really dangerous. You see that with election in 2016? You’re seeing that right now in 2020. And not only that, they’re also subjected to a lot of these authorities coming in to censor content, right.

One example, in fact, in Thailand, the Thai authorities tried to sue Facebook and Twitter, because there were some inappropriate content about the government about something bad in Thailand. That’s Thailand, right? I mean, that’s happened to China, for sure. I’m sure. Okay, that’s why they blocked Facebook and all that, right. And I think that’s a really dangerous territory. The fact that a lot of this government would be, you know, in democracy, trying to censor this content, even suing Facebook and Twitter to take that content, which they ultimately need to comply, because they would threaten to put people into the jail because of that. They actually read the affairs of Facebook before.

And so you know, this is another thing that I’m personally quite bullish, and then hope that in the next few years, somebody can come along. And yeah, beyond that, social media, I think gaming, many applications, some of the areas that I’m also quite interested in, we’ll see a lot, a number of projects are working on that. That should come to production in the next few months.

Aaron: Very, very interesting. I want to talk more about decentralization in just a second. But let’s wrap up the whole Oracle thing real quick before we do, will there always be a need for Oracle’s as standalone entities as these bridges? Or can some of these next gen blockchains that are being built? And new smart contracts, be able to read the outside role on their own? Is this a stopgap measure? Or are Oracle’s here to stay?

Soravis: Great, I’m pretty sure Oracle is here to stay, I do not think it makes sense. And Vitalik, he has said this before as well, that Oracle should be baked into the layer one solution. Because simply, you know, if you do that you complicate a lot of this layer one logic you want, like you want layer one, to basically be deterministic, right? When we say deterministic, that means everything can be verifiable. And everyone can agree on what is the version of truth, right? And that’s easy to do in a deterministic machine, like Ethereum, like Bitcoin, the problem with Oracle is that it cannot be 100 prints off.

What I mean by that is, you know, if I ask you, what’s the price of bitcoin right now, even you and me cannot agree on the truth, right? Is Bitcoin quite 1201 or 1105? You know, is not an exact truth, per se, here, and that’s why Oracle is 100% off, it’s 100% deterministic, you want to be able to get close to 100%, negative 99%, due to you know, using a crypto economic incentive to make sure that happened, but there’s not going to be 100%. And that’s why baking that into layer one just simply does not make sense. From that perspective, as well as the fact that again, because it’s not 100%, solvable, there are different decide trade off. And I think it makes them a lot for this project to innovate and, you know, come up with their own decide trade off, come up with their own design decisions. And then different project can choose which one they want to use, based on preference and trade off.

Bryce: I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, before we actually move on to Pizza Mind’s, decentralization, the comment that he wanted to make on decentralization, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about like your stance on Bitcoin, because a lot of people that are in Ethereum, and building these new next gen blockchains. They all just shit talk Bitcoin, they say, slow, doesn’t adapt. Old, not worth it. There’s better stuff. What do you think?

Soravis: So for context, I’m not a maximalist, and I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s healthy to do that. So I mean, for me, I still do believe quite a lot in Bitcoin, not saying it’s going to be you know, in all in all, it’s going to be the final solution. By right now, for me, I think it’s still stand a chance to become the best, I guess, store digital store value in the future, just simply due to invoke effect, simply due to the simple nature of it. Right, again, simply because there is no complication, there’s no risk of smart contract breaking down. There is no risk of all this money, Lego, you know, falling off the cliff is a stable store value. If you are a big fan, of course, you don’t want to risk all your money, because somebody has tried to write a piece of code on top of whatever money you have. And so for me, I used to think Bitcoin with best network effect right now, said the biggest chance to conquer that software. And I also think Ethereum going to capture a lot of value as well, simply because the damping did well, computers, and a lot of battles, valuable services, like DeFy, have been doing.

Aaron: Very well said, we’re definitely big believers in Bitcoin over here as the hardest money there is. But wallet is arguably the beginning, not technically the beginning. But arguably the beginning of all this crypto movements. It’s only the first step, and there’s many, many more on the bridge. And as I always say, you can’t have a sports league if the only team you have is the Yankees, you need several winners and several contenders to have an industry. And that’s okay.

And decentralizing the winners and the value that’s being brought into this industry. We’ve seen decentralization take the forefront of the topics of debate following the COOcoin hack recently, some teams that have control over their smart contracts, were able to issue freezes on stolen tokens. And that stirred up a lot of debate about are these systems actually decentralized or not. And then other teams didn’t make that decision.You know, they just let it go. So there’s a lot of debate as to who can do what and for what reasons it’s a slippery slope.

If team decides to circumvent their decentralized nature and do something without a governance vote. But there is over $130 million at stake. That’s a lot of money. And you don’t want to reward bad behavior. But where should the industry intervene in these matters? Where should it start? Where should it stop? What’s your stance on this issue?

Soravis: Yeah, I do think is a really tricky position. And I mean, for us, obviously, as a project, that issue token as well. I do sympathize with a lot of these founders, especially the early projects, rather than newer projects that are just starting to come into the market starting to develop man and issued tokens. I do sympathize with them. Now, where do I stand? I think it’s a spectrum, where a decent allocation is a spectrum. And that’s why I mentioned that for the younger, you know, earlier, just recently started projects, obviously, they’re not going to be these two parties in life on day one, right? They’re always going to be leaning more towards centralization. And then try to decentralize that over time. And I mean, that’s, that’s the same with Ethereum. Right. You know, you see that with the Dao, where a lot of money would be hacked.

And that’s why they roll back that decisions, just to save the project, and to make sure it can continue.. And I think we see, we see exactly that for a lot of these projects, right? Some of these money, like 130 million is a lot to a lot of this project. And if they do not roll that back, you know, I mean, some of them will, basically your the project can collapse, right? And their token holders may potentially, you know, go away from them, right? Even though it’s not their fault from that happening. So I do sympathize with that decision.

Aaron: We’ve seen some a couple tokens have over half their circulating supply, get drained, because COOcoin was their main exchange, and to have half your circulating supply in the hands of some hacker who only wants to dump it for any price is extremely dangerous. So some of them have stepped in some of them didn’t. It’s a very, very fascinating financial experiment, that no one intended to take place. But it’s going to be very interesting watching the fallout from this stuff happen.

Soravis: I was going to say, you know, it’s ultimately then you know, as an audience, right? We actually look at audience you have different projects, it up to you to decide, you know, which button is trustworthy with project is not right. And this trustworthy is, is funny, because, again, if you want to be truly decentralized, you don’t have to trust anyone. But as it stands, yes, you do need to track this project to execute the project well, to actually deliver on the roadmap. And so yes, that that degree of trust, degree of centralization from the start from the get go, right. And so, you know, I think it’s up to the readers of the viewer to really decide, you know, where do you sit on the spectrum? What are they comfortable with? In terms of investing or, you know, putting their money into this project?

Bryce: I couldn’t have said it better myself, man. It’s one of those things. Yeah. Like, you know, just to reiterate, decentralization is a gradient, right. It’s, there’s 50 shades of decentralization, maybe more. But is this sort of what I want to know, before we let you go? We’ve got a couple closing questions. But I want to know, what’s next up on the roadmap for Band? What are you really excited about? You guys have coming up within the next couple quarters?

Soravis: Yeah, I think I think two things. One is adoption. For sure. You know, now that Oracle is up and running, and, you know, has been battle tested quite a while, on Main net, you know, we are really excited to integrate with a lot of these partners that we’ve been working with for the past couple months. I think you’re seeing a lot of that, you know, partnership announcement from us. Recently, we have a lot more in the pipeline that we have been working in testing environment, and a lot of that going to be moving toward production level in the next few months. And I’m really excited for that, to see that adoption in the on chain matrices on chain revenue, that flow through the network, and for the decentralized network, just like what we discussed, right?

Admittedly, of course, we are, you know, centralizing in terms of the woman in the past one year. Now, of course, we want to decentralize that program process, whether having more decentralized governance process to make that make sure that’s in place is something I’m really excited about. That’s the first part. The second part is working more with enterprises. So before we’ve been working more closely in the crypto ecosystem. But right now, there are a surging interest and a lot of enterprises around the world to deal with Oracle, either being a data provider, so we get data and commercializing that to a lot of these emerging decentralized application, as well as some of the other financial institutions that want to jump into DeFy. We’re really excited to work with them and see how we can push the two worlds and drive these two were more mass adoption, you know, so? Yeah, super excited about that.

Aaron: Very cool. All right. This is a question that we ask everyone that comes on the show. And it’s so interesting all the different answers we get, what company sites Band, besides Cosmos or anything that you’re directly involved in? What is one company you think’s going to have the greatest impact on the crypto space?

Soravis: Oh, that’s a really tough question. Let me think.
Aaron: There’s no wrong answer. So that’s a good thing.

Soravis: One crypto project that’s going to change the space. I would say that right now. And again, project that I’m clearly not related to ask us, again, we have a lot of projects that are really related to us. So I’m just going to pick someone outside of the project that we have integrated with, because obviously, we have interesting that I would pick up the missive. So you know, I’m sure you heard the mystic roll up, been falling, the team been falling the technology. And the fact that as you mentioned, e 2.0. is going to be it’s going to shift for a while. I do think that layer two solution like optimism can potentially change the industry in the sense that we are bringing that short term and long term solution to the scalability issues. And you already see a lot of different projects starting to migrate to that our engineering team has been looking into that solution as well.

Bryce: Yeah, it’s funny, I was just having a conversation yesterday with somebody about optimism. And I say roll ups that they’re doing. So we have we’re big fans of that layer two solution. We’re cool. In before we let you go again. Last question. We’re going to ask you this is the first podcast that somebody is listening to regarding cryptocurrency, right? They’re just getting into the space, they turn on crypto 101. And they’re listening to sort of it’s what do you want them to know before you close out here?

Soravis: As they like, want to know anything about crypto?

Bryce: Just a word of wisdom? You know, you’ve been in the industry for a long time, what can they expect? What are some words of admonishment or encouragement or anything?

Soravis: I think for me, crypto is the most fascinating industry in the world, right? I think the best decision in my life, so far, has been to interpret the industry full time. And we need more builders, and we need more people who are more educated and smart people to enter the space to innovate on this. If you are on the fence, I would strongly encourage you to study a lot, do your own research a try out the product yourself. Don’t even have to think about investment perspective because for me, those are more of a distraction. Even for me, I try not to shake crisis, you know, every other day, or not as frequent, simply because it’s just a distraction. And I would focus more on the development side of things, right?

If you’re not technical, that’s okay. You can look at the business perspective, trying to find a problem that we’re solving for. And I think there’s a lot of that we are just in a really beginning and early stages of the industry. And I would strongly encourage anyone to, to dig deeper, and verify that concept fascinating. Spending is actually weird, considering you’re spending a few years of full time here, because you’ve mentioned your life, just like how to change mine.

Bryce: Perfect, beautiful, Soravis. Couldn’t thank you enough for joining us today. We will put your Twitter in the show notes along with you know, your Band Protocol website. And we just hope you have a great rest of your evening there. Get some rest, got a lot of building to do my friend.

Soravis: Yes. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure.

Bryce: Take care.

Soravis: All right. Cheers.

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All Episodes

In this episode of CRYPTO 101, brought to you by pNetwork and pTokens, we got some great insight into the future of DeFi with Band Protocol Co-Founder Soravis Srinawakoon. Soravis is our very first guest from Thailand and he gives us the insider scoop on the crypto landscape thriving in the land of Boon-nam. As an early investor in crypto oracle technology, Soravis is an expert and gives us the 101 on why this is such a critical piece of infrastructure.

The main topic we kept returning to is the real potential of DeFi; would it remain a growing niche, or perhaps replace the entire financial system? On one hand, you have all of the power built on smoke and mirrors on a hidden over leveraged balance sheet that has been compounding for hundreds of years. On the other hand, DeFi brings fundamentally pure value on transparent blockchain, that can decide for itself what rules to comply with and what rules to disregard. At some point, the threat of DeFi becomes a promise, but it has a long way still to go.

Lastly, we got his thoughts on the Kucoin hack, and the collaboration of many other exchanges to help out. There is a long ongoing debate on immutability vs intervention when these enormous security breaches take place. While Kucoin has mostly recovered at the time this podcast airs, the actions and inactions that took place industry wide will be felt forever.

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Episode Transcript

Bryce: All right, everybody. Welcome back to another awesome episode of the Crypto 101 podcast where we speak to founders, CEOs and the smartest people building up the Bitcoin, blockchain and crypto industry. Today’s episode is brought to you by our sponsor, pTokens, and pNetwork. And if you’ve been listening to crypto 101, for any amount of time, you’ve heard us call 2020, the year of interoperability over and over again, we’re talking about this concept. And that’s because the smartest teams in crypto are all focused on bridging the divide between the many different cryptocurrencies.

So imagine in the future, you won’t have to worry about managing a million different addresses for your Bitcoin and your Ethereum and Litecoin and Tezos, and EOS and all that stuff, right? Rather, you’ll be able to send any crypto to any address at any time. Well, that future is here. And it’s made possible by pNetworks, pTokens, and the ticker symbol for that is P and T. So beyond that, pTokens are able to be staked with a 42% annual yield. Wow. So that means if you stake 1000 tokens, by the end of the year, you would have earned an additional 420 tokens. I mean, that is serious business. And it’s a great way to be earning passive income. So if you want to learn more about the pNetwork, the leading protocol enabling interoperability, or how you can earn 42% annual yield on your pTokens, click the link in our show notes or go to www.p.network. Again, that’s www.p as in the letter P dot network.

Before we dive in to our awesome, awesome guest and conversation today, I want to remind you guys have two things. And then 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 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 it’s part history book, it’s 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 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, all you good wonderful citizens of crypt nation. Welcome to the earliest recording of crypto 101 podcast in history. Pizza Mind, we’re recording. It’s 8am but for most of you guys, Pizza Mind is nocturnal. So this is actually his bedtime. And he is up but just barely. Peter, how are you doing over there man?

Aaron: You know, there’s not many things in life that are worth getting up for. But our guest today is absolutely worth it. We are blessed with the presence all the way from Thailand by Soravis, the CEO and co founder of Band Protocol. Welcome to crypto 101. Okay, good night. I did my part.

Soravis: Hey, guys, a pleasure for me to be here as well. And sorry for the timezone difference.

Aaron: Was time is it for you?

Soravis: Well, it’s 10pm but you know.

Aaron: Fair compromise.

Bryce: So it is simultaneously our earliest recording and the latest recording for our guests. We’ve never had anybody come on so we I know you’ve had a full workday, building Band Protocol and the future of decentralized finance. And so we want to you know, upfront thank you for staying up late and recording this but let’s just dive straight in. You know, before we get started with your background, and you know how you kind of think about the space. I just want to hear from boots on the ground in Bangkok. We’ve never had a guest from Bangkok either. So what’s the crypto community like over there? And how do you see things progressing for the rest of the rest of the year?

Soravis: Yeah, for sure. I call this actually surprisingly good for developers, as well as the crypto scene, right? From a regulatory perspective, you know, the government is really friendly. We have a full legal framework in terms of you know, how to operate exchanges, crypto exchanges have licenses, you know, there are over five, six, fully licensed crypto shares here in Thailand is fully legal to trade cryptocurrency. So, you know, they’re quite friendly. And even in terms of the private companies, including the bank, they are really interested in the space and one of the largest commercial bank here in Thailand, is looking really deeply into DeFy, trying to find where they can play into space, to sort of future prove themselves. And then when I was if I did business, as well. So it’s really friendly here. From a startup perspective, you know, not only a standard protocol, we also have, when we say go, I’m actually in Bangkok. And actually a few developers from different projects, I do that here as well. So I would say is, I will leave my brand seen a lot of traders, as well, we have a really, really active trading communities, similar to everywhere else around the world.

Aaron: That’s really cool. I’ll definitely have to make my way out there sometime. I’ve got a good friend out there that says they have round table pizza, in Bangkok. And that’s like the place to go. So I guess like, I guess I’ll be okay out there.

Soravis: We have a really good one here. And in fact, I think, you know, in the past three or four years, right, one of the biggest conferences of crypto usually in Bangkok, as well. It’s going to be on blog, and then it was actually quite big concerned that the guests are going to come over.
Bryce: Wow. Yeah, I mean, side note, for anybody that cares about my personal life. I was supposed to be in Thailand, in April, I bought my girlfriend and I some tickets to go over there. And COVID happened. And you know, back in February, we realized, yeah, this probably this trip probably is not going to happen. And I just recently got my refund for that trip. You know, six months later. So, fun fact, there. But so, let’s dive straight in. I want to hear a little bit about your background, you’ve got a really fascinating background, you’ve been an investor in the crypto space for a long time. Now you’re building Band. So tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today?

Soravis: Yeah, my background is mixed background. So I’m engineer by training. I did a computer science for my undergrad at Stanford. And then I did the mass management, also at Stanford, in the US, okay. And that’s when I stumble on Bitcoin in 2013 because I took a cryptographic class with that body. That’s when I was really fascinated by the concept of Bitcoin, the concept of decentralization, because me myself, actually was a really political person, in the sense that, you know, a champion, of course, democracy, you know, and then it may seem to rule, but there’s not really in this part of the world, right. And so, you know, I’m always really advocate of that, of decentralization, and reducing public government, especially dictator dictatorship that we see around the world, including Thailand.

And that’s a lot of what really clicked with me, the concept of Bitcoin, the concept of this whole decentralized applications really clicked with me, and that’s why I really want to pursue it full time. And then fast forward after 2013. You know, I was working at BCG, Boston Consulting Group, as a management consultant for two years. On the side, I continued to invest in cryptos, continue to study, you know, what are some of the promising areas that can be worked on while being a consultant for two years, then I quit my job in around early 2017 decided that, you know, this is really something I really need to go full time on because I was sleeping three hours a day. And it wasn’t really healthy, you know, consultant, there’s not an easy job. And on top of that, you don’t have to do this whole industry. You know, and when I said follow it, as many people will realize, you know, it’s become almost impossible to do that. And it was just too fascinating for me, too, life changing for me. And that’s why I decided to, you know, jump in on after consultant and invented Band Protocol in around mid 2017.

Aaron: That’s an awesome journey. I’m not sure if you’re getting any more sleep being here full time or not. I know, I’m certainly not. But one thing you mentioned that really stuck out to me is being a champion of democracy. And I really like that. So let’s focus on DeFy for just a minute. Do you think decentralized finance, will always exist as a small alternative, an outlier to centralized traditional finance? Or can you see a future where maybe it’s equally as big? Or can you see a future where DeFy literally makes the whole system as we know it obsolete and takes over? What’s your vision for it?

Soravis: I think my view is not as radical, as you know, some other people I believe in, in a world where D is both decentralized finance and centralized finance, continue to coexist, just simply because, again, decent PlayStation has a lot of benefits. But it’s not for everyone, right? The UX and UI, right, it’s just almost impossible for me to imagine, my dad and my mom to hold it on private key, there has to be some sort of middleman solution eventually, where, you know, they will hold some sort of key for them, just like you know how most people still hold their token on Coinbase on buying it, right. But then it’ll be some sort of middle ground there, where, you know, some users or most of the user will sacrifice some of these decentralization, but still have access to decentralized finance as a back end, right. So what I imagine is, decentralized finance will become a gatekeepers, or have, you know, good ways to access this services for normal people for mass adoption, right.

But that also means reduced fee, that mean higher efficiencies. That means, you know, the ability for users to switch between different providers easily and seamlessly, as opposed to being locked out to one, you know, providers, you know, act like a windseeker, just like how we see it with the bank right now, right. So I do think that these intellect right now is going to really shift the world, in a sense of, you know, providing greater access and equal access to more people around the world. And not just the DeFy as we see it. Now, I mean, DeFy, as we see it, right now, mostly, is around lending, right is around money market, you have some sort of asset, which is sitting in your wallet, that doesn’t provide any value. So now people provide you to that to those assets by doing borrowing and lending, right. This is basic primitive of finance. But if we look at the world right now, in terms of centralized finance, it’s much more beyond that, right.

We talk about deliverative, we talk about options. We talk about insurances, we talk about stock trading, and I’m really bullish on doors, bringing, you know, categories coming into cryptos, coming into decentralized finance. And that’s when you know, a lot of these will actually have a much, I guess, more uses than what we see now.

Bryce: It’s really fascinating. And I kind of want to dive straight into the mindset of a founder. So tell us why you started Band Protocol. And I recall, when I first met you, you told me, you know, you’ve been an early investor in different Oracle solutions and different crypto projects. So did you see a particular problem that needed a solution? Did you see a booming business opportunity? What was really going through your head?

Soravis: Yeah, so into that [unintelligible]17, right, we saw a lot of experimentation, as well as a lot of white people. Me and my team were, you know, tinkering around with like, with my contract, tried to build many applications, right Maker Dao came out, we tried to you know, see what, you know, the architecture is like, has it been stable coin, being serious, right? How to design this decentralized, stable coin? We also try building applications, how do we bring, let’s say, you know, Powerball, or mega ball to everyone around the world, right? I mean, Thailand, I want to play a mega ball, powerball as well, it is impossible for me to do that, right.

And so, you know, we try to be honest infrastructures, is really fascinating. And, and the thing is, every time we try to build these applications, this decentralized application, we always ran into the same problems, which is what we known as the Oracle problem check. What does Oracle problem is essentially, when you build my contract, this application, you can think of it as a machine, right? It is like a vending machine, as a vending machine, you know, it has no way to access information outside of that particular machine itself is a machine where people can press button, right? And that makes the use case fairly limited, right? We cannot do something really flexible, just simply because the fact that machine has no knowledge of the world outside of it. Makes sense, right?

Same thing with smart contract. If you want to build something like these implies by then, most likely, you will need access to information outside of the blockchain itself. For example, betting application, right? If I want to want to create an application that bet between you know, whether she’ll see when the match on the machine has no way to know that she’ll see actually win the match. Somebody has to tell that information to Dao and that’s a role of an Oracle to provide information ranging from real world UN to financial data that we see in a lot of these DeFy. And that’s why we decided to focus on this Oracle problems. And like you said, Yes, we realize is a really, really big problems of the industry.
Back then, you know, there were some emerging solution like simmering, as well as a few others. Augur can be considered as an Oracle as well. So, yes, I do invest in a lot of these projects. There’s because simply because, obviously, I’m really long this industry. And I think somebody’s going to solve this key piece of the infrastructure.

Aaron: What makes Band a different protocol from some of the others? Is there any technical detail or a different approach? What makes you guys slightly different?

Soravis: I think a lot of this protocol, and solutions have different design decisions and trade off for us, right? We actually differentiate many, many other Oracle by the fact that we leave on our own blockchain. So we built our own blockchain from the cosmos SDK. Just think of it as a blockchain whenever we build our own blockchain, to make sure we address the scalability issues, because one of the things that we observe is that when we launched on Ethereum, it was really difficult. It wasn’t really flexible, right? Because you have to rely on Ethereum as an underlying protocol. It was really expensive. It was really expensive. I think anyone knows that right now.

And to query data from, let’s say, 20, data providers that become prohibitively expensive for us and for many other Oracle solution as well. And also the block time itself, is also really slow. And let’s say when we observe is there a trend emerging from differently, you’re one way you have to learn, being really fast and of cosmos and polka dot did a while and a lot of this different blockchain coming to market. And if we rely on infrastructure on top of Ethereum’s with so is slower than them, it becomes almost impossible for us to serve that data to them blockchain, given the time limit country, and as we build our own blockchain, for that performance, make sure it’s really optimized just for Oracle computation, make sure it’s fast matrices are economically viable to serve this data across different blockchain to different applications. And I think that’s probably one of the one of the biggest advantage right now, for that.

Bryce: That makes a ton of sense. So you know, just for people out there who are listening, you know, Band Protocol is providing all sorts of different off chain data to a lot of these different layer one solutions like Ethereum, and cosmos. So that’s when we talk about interoperability here on crypto 101. That’s exactly the idea here is that you have one blockchain that’s kind of facilitating communications between the others. So that’s really cool. And it’s a really, really necessary piece of the puzzle that the industry is really still trying to figure out. But beyond that piece of the puzzle, tell us another piece of the puzzle that DeFy is currently lacking in is who’s building it. In your opinion, you know, what, what do we still need?

Soravis: I think DeFy right as it is right now, we still lack a really easy on boarding, or a really intuitive UX UI, right? It’d be talking about how to bring that to mass adoption. I said before, it’s almost impossible to imagine my grandma or my parents, putting all their savings into meta masks, and then turn that into, you know, interact with all this protocol. I think that’s a really key piece of infrastructure for sure. All these aggregators on this front end interfaces, lot of people are building that tool and start to make sure is become much easier, right? You see sapper to have a file, you see a lobbyist, other applications, like wallet as well, that tried to abstract away all this concept and interfaces, so users can use it.

But again, it’s still far from that. I think, in my opinion, before a lot of the maths can actually interact and understand that right. And another thing, I would say its scalability, right? Again, just simply the fact that if you want to interact with some of this money market protocol, you’re spending $10 per transaction, right? That’s just that’s, that’s impossible for a lot of these smaller retail mass users to interact with. It says impossible is the name right now is a game of the waves, right? Only rich people able to access this there without having to worry about that 10-20 or even $100. Right. And I think that scalability to actually bring as much easier for the masses actually adopted.

Aaron: Yeah, and to touch on that point. This is right around the first of October when we’re recording this Ethereum 2.0 is test net just failed again, and is going to experience more launch delays. As this continues. I think that more and more DeFy projects are going to migrate away and the top contenders from my vantage point for this value to flow out of Ehereum is the cosmos ecosystem, the polka dot ecosystem, and the Binance smart chain ecosystem. I know you’re familiar with all three, you decided to build on top of cosmos, what other DeFy projects are you watching out or integrating within that Cosmos ecosystem that we should probably take some more research into?

Soravis: Sure. In that Cosmos ecosystem, right. For me, what I’m quite excited about is actually a project called Terra. And this is not an investment advice. But Terra is a stable coin project in Korea, relatively famous as well, because they actually processing you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, right now in stable coin, in payment, through a lot of retail e commerce in Korea, and they’re expanding beyond Korea right now. And the father is actually found like, you know, one of the biggest e commerce companies in Korea before, so they are quite, quite famous. And the fact that they use this table query to increase efficiencies and reduce costs to other than motion, as well as the actual users who pay the money.

While those users do not have to understand cryptocurrency at all, right? This transaction, just like how to use credit card without knowing that the payment real behind that the technology behind that is actually powered by blockchain. Terra is actually a really powerful concept for me. And that’s one of the example that I’m bringing before in terms of how to bring mass adoption, we actually abstracted away from the users, but they enjoy the same benefit of reduced cost and greater efficiencies. And so yeah, I would probably look into that for sure. They’re expanding beyond just being a steam table called for payment. They’re bringing more smart contract capabilities. They’re bringing more projects like synthetics tokens, derivative tokens, they’re going to be launched soon. Actually, I think I believe in October, and I think it’s off, you know, and I’m actually quite excited for that.

Bryce: Wow. Yeah. So we’re definitely going to look into Terra (LUNA) into that entire system. Yeah, forming around there we are, we’re privy to that. But everybody here listening on crypto 101. Check it out, not financial advice. But there’s a ton of really exciting stuff. And that’s something that I didn’t know, actually the founder of that project was a big e-commerce guy in South Korea. Really cool to hear. One of the other aspects of crypto outside of DeFy? Well, there’s many different aspects of crypto outside of defy.

We see some supply chain stuff. We see some IoT stuff. We see some store like pure store value and you know, medium of exchange, how do you kind of think about this entire world of crypto outside of just the decentralized finance movement? That may be you’re very, very deep in but have you ever think that there’s, you know, value outside of the DeFy space?

Soravis: Right. So yeah, I guess to the industry outside of the fight, right. For me, the question I ask myself is, you know, what type of application that, you know, people will rally, because they are censorship resistant, or the fact that they are decentralized, right. One of the areas that I hope will happen, I’m actually quite bullish on is social media as a platform to share information. Because that’s probably one of the most powerful tool that that has been invented recently, people, a rich people are spending a lot of time on Facebook, on Twitter, to share content, but the fact that they are really centralized, they can take out all the content, they can censor all the content is actually really dangerous. You see that with election in 2016? You’re seeing that right now in 2020. And not only that, they’re also subjected to a lot of these authorities coming in to censor content, right.

One example, in fact, in Thailand, the Thai authorities tried to sue Facebook and Twitter, because there were some inappropriate content about the government about something bad in Thailand. That’s Thailand, right? I mean, that’s happened to China, for sure. I’m sure. Okay, that’s why they blocked Facebook and all that, right. And I think that’s a really dangerous territory. The fact that a lot of this government would be, you know, in democracy, trying to censor this content, even suing Facebook and Twitter to take that content, which they ultimately need to comply, because they would threaten to put people into the jail because of that. They actually read the affairs of Facebook before.

And so you know, this is another thing that I’m personally quite bullish, and then hope that in the next few years, somebody can come along. And yeah, beyond that, social media, I think gaming, many applications, some of the areas that I’m also quite interested in, we’ll see a lot, a number of projects are working on that. That should come to production in the next few months.

Aaron: Very, very interesting. I want to talk more about decentralization in just a second. But let’s wrap up the whole Oracle thing real quick before we do, will there always be a need for Oracle’s as standalone entities as these bridges? Or can some of these next gen blockchains that are being built? And new smart contracts, be able to read the outside role on their own? Is this a stopgap measure? Or are Oracle’s here to stay?

Soravis: Great, I’m pretty sure Oracle is here to stay, I do not think it makes sense. And Vitalik, he has said this before as well, that Oracle should be baked into the layer one solution. Because simply, you know, if you do that you complicate a lot of this layer one logic you want, like you want layer one, to basically be deterministic, right? When we say deterministic, that means everything can be verifiable. And everyone can agree on what is the version of truth, right? And that’s easy to do in a deterministic machine, like Ethereum, like Bitcoin, the problem with Oracle is that it cannot be 100 prints off.

What I mean by that is, you know, if I ask you, what’s the price of bitcoin right now, even you and me cannot agree on the truth, right? Is Bitcoin quite 1201 or 1105? You know, is not an exact truth, per se, here, and that’s why Oracle is 100% off, it’s 100% deterministic, you want to be able to get close to 100%, negative 99%, due to you know, using a crypto economic incentive to make sure that happened, but there’s not going to be 100%. And that’s why baking that into layer one just simply does not make sense. From that perspective, as well as the fact that again, because it’s not 100%, solvable, there are different decide trade off. And I think it makes them a lot for this project to innovate and, you know, come up with their own decide trade off, come up with their own design decisions. And then different project can choose which one they want to use, based on preference and trade off.

Bryce: I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, before we actually move on to Pizza Mind’s, decentralization, the comment that he wanted to make on decentralization, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about like your stance on Bitcoin, because a lot of people that are in Ethereum, and building these new next gen blockchains. They all just shit talk Bitcoin, they say, slow, doesn’t adapt. Old, not worth it. There’s better stuff. What do you think?

Soravis: So for context, I’m not a maximalist, and I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s healthy to do that. So I mean, for me, I still do believe quite a lot in Bitcoin, not saying it’s going to be you know, in all in all, it’s going to be the final solution. By right now, for me, I think it’s still stand a chance to become the best, I guess, store digital store value in the future, just simply due to invoke effect, simply due to the simple nature of it. Right, again, simply because there is no complication, there’s no risk of smart contract breaking down. There is no risk of all this money, Lego, you know, falling off the cliff is a stable store value. If you are a big fan, of course, you don’t want to risk all your money, because somebody has tried to write a piece of code on top of whatever money you have. And so for me, I used to think Bitcoin with best network effect right now, said the biggest chance to conquer that software. And I also think Ethereum going to capture a lot of value as well, simply because the damping did well, computers, and a lot of battles, valuable services, like DeFy, have been doing.

Aaron: Very well said, we’re definitely big believers in Bitcoin over here as the hardest money there is. But wallet is arguably the beginning, not technically the beginning. But arguably the beginning of all this crypto movements. It’s only the first step, and there’s many, many more on the bridge. And as I always say, you can’t have a sports league if the only team you have is the Yankees, you need several winners and several contenders to have an industry. And that’s okay.

And decentralizing the winners and the value that’s being brought into this industry. We’ve seen decentralization take the forefront of the topics of debate following the COOcoin hack recently, some teams that have control over their smart contracts, were able to issue freezes on stolen tokens. And that stirred up a lot of debate about are these systems actually decentralized or not. And then other teams didn’t make that decision.You know, they just let it go. So there’s a lot of debate as to who can do what and for what reasons it’s a slippery slope.

If team decides to circumvent their decentralized nature and do something without a governance vote. But there is over $130 million at stake. That’s a lot of money. And you don’t want to reward bad behavior. But where should the industry intervene in these matters? Where should it start? Where should it stop? What’s your stance on this issue?

Soravis: Yeah, I do think is a really tricky position. And I mean, for us, obviously, as a project, that issue token as well. I do sympathize with a lot of these founders, especially the early projects, rather than newer projects that are just starting to come into the market starting to develop man and issued tokens. I do sympathize with them. Now, where do I stand? I think it’s a spectrum, where a decent allocation is a spectrum. And that’s why I mentioned that for the younger, you know, earlier, just recently started projects, obviously, they’re not going to be these two parties in life on day one, right? They’re always going to be leaning more towards centralization. And then try to decentralize that over time. And I mean, that’s, that’s the same with Ethereum. Right. You know, you see that with the Dao, where a lot of money would be hacked.

And that’s why they roll back that decisions, just to save the project, and to make sure it can continue.. And I think we see, we see exactly that for a lot of these projects, right? Some of these money, like 130 million is a lot to a lot of this project. And if they do not roll that back, you know, I mean, some of them will, basically your the project can collapse, right? And their token holders may potentially, you know, go away from them, right? Even though it’s not their fault from that happening. So I do sympathize with that decision.

Aaron: We’ve seen some a couple tokens have over half their circulating supply, get drained, because COOcoin was their main exchange, and to have half your circulating supply in the hands of some hacker who only wants to dump it for any price is extremely dangerous. So some of them have stepped in some of them didn’t. It’s a very, very fascinating financial experiment, that no one intended to take place. But it’s going to be very interesting watching the fallout from this stuff happen.

Soravis: I was going to say, you know, it’s ultimately then you know, as an audience, right? We actually look at audience you have different projects, it up to you to decide, you know, which button is trustworthy with project is not right. And this trustworthy is, is funny, because, again, if you want to be truly decentralized, you don’t have to trust anyone. But as it stands, yes, you do need to track this project to execute the project well, to actually deliver on the roadmap. And so yes, that that degree of trust, degree of centralization from the start from the get go, right. And so, you know, I think it’s up to the readers of the viewer to really decide, you know, where do you sit on the spectrum? What are they comfortable with? In terms of investing or, you know, putting their money into this project?

Bryce: I couldn’t have said it better myself, man. It’s one of those things. Yeah. Like, you know, just to reiterate, decentralization is a gradient, right. It’s, there’s 50 shades of decentralization, maybe more. But is this sort of what I want to know, before we let you go? We’ve got a couple closing questions. But I want to know, what’s next up on the roadmap for Band? What are you really excited about? You guys have coming up within the next couple quarters?

Soravis: Yeah, I think I think two things. One is adoption. For sure. You know, now that Oracle is up and running, and, you know, has been battle tested quite a while, on Main net, you know, we are really excited to integrate with a lot of these partners that we’ve been working with for the past couple months. I think you’re seeing a lot of that, you know, partnership announcement from us. Recently, we have a lot more in the pipeline that we have been working in testing environment, and a lot of that going to be moving toward production level in the next few months. And I’m really excited for that, to see that adoption in the on chain matrices on chain revenue, that flow through the network, and for the decentralized network, just like what we discussed, right?

Admittedly, of course, we are, you know, centralizing in terms of the woman in the past one year. Now, of course, we want to decentralize that program process, whether having more decentralized governance process to make that make sure that’s in place is something I’m really excited about. That’s the first part. The second part is working more with enterprises. So before we’ve been working more closely in the crypto ecosystem. But right now, there are a surging interest and a lot of enterprises around the world to deal with Oracle, either being a data provider, so we get data and commercializing that to a lot of these emerging decentralized application, as well as some of the other financial institutions that want to jump into DeFy. We’re really excited to work with them and see how we can push the two worlds and drive these two were more mass adoption, you know, so? Yeah, super excited about that.

Aaron: Very cool. All right. This is a question that we ask everyone that comes on the show. And it’s so interesting all the different answers we get, what company sites Band, besides Cosmos or anything that you’re directly involved in? What is one company you think’s going to have the greatest impact on the crypto space?

Soravis: Oh, that’s a really tough question. Let me think.
Aaron: There’s no wrong answer. So that’s a good thing.

Soravis: One crypto project that’s going to change the space. I would say that right now. And again, project that I’m clearly not related to ask us, again, we have a lot of projects that are really related to us. So I’m just going to pick someone outside of the project that we have integrated with, because obviously, we have interesting that I would pick up the missive. So you know, I’m sure you heard the mystic roll up, been falling, the team been falling the technology. And the fact that as you mentioned, e 2.0. is going to be it’s going to shift for a while. I do think that layer two solution like optimism can potentially change the industry in the sense that we are bringing that short term and long term solution to the scalability issues. And you already see a lot of different projects starting to migrate to that our engineering team has been looking into that solution as well.

Bryce: Yeah, it’s funny, I was just having a conversation yesterday with somebody about optimism. And I say roll ups that they’re doing. So we have we’re big fans of that layer two solution. We’re cool. In before we let you go again. Last question. We’re going to ask you this is the first podcast that somebody is listening to regarding cryptocurrency, right? They’re just getting into the space, they turn on crypto 101. And they’re listening to sort of it’s what do you want them to know before you close out here?

Soravis: As they like, want to know anything about crypto?

Bryce: Just a word of wisdom? You know, you’ve been in the industry for a long time, what can they expect? What are some words of admonishment or encouragement or anything?

Soravis: I think for me, crypto is the most fascinating industry in the world, right? I think the best decision in my life, so far, has been to interpret the industry full time. And we need more builders, and we need more people who are more educated and smart people to enter the space to innovate on this. If you are on the fence, I would strongly encourage you to study a lot, do your own research a try out the product yourself. Don’t even have to think about investment perspective because for me, those are more of a distraction. Even for me, I try not to shake crisis, you know, every other day, or not as frequent, simply because it’s just a distraction. And I would focus more on the development side of things, right?

If you’re not technical, that’s okay. You can look at the business perspective, trying to find a problem that we’re solving for. And I think there’s a lot of that we are just in a really beginning and early stages of the industry. And I would strongly encourage anyone to, to dig deeper, and verify that concept fascinating. Spending is actually weird, considering you’re spending a few years of full time here, because you’ve mentioned your life, just like how to change mine.

Bryce: Perfect, beautiful, Soravis. Couldn’t thank you enough for joining us today. We will put your Twitter in the show notes along with you know, your Band Protocol website. And we just hope you have a great rest of your evening there. Get some rest, got a lot of building to do my friend.

Soravis: Yes. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure.

Bryce: Take care.

Soravis: All right. Cheers.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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