Crypto & DePIN

“I think 2018 is going to be the year of security tokens. You’re going to see a lot less utility tokens. I know folks that are getting investigated… My recommendation is folks should really explore more securities than utilities and do it the right way.” — 00:23:19

“I’m really excited about Loom. I mean, I think they’ve solved a lot of fundamental scalability and interoperability problems… the white paper is phenomenal, it just opens up a whole different way of how you think blockchain.” — 00:31:44

“We take time for granted and they embrace that and sort of built a highly scalable, about 700,000 transactions second… very fascinating, excited to be the investor… yeah, they take my money.” — 00:00:43

“We are in like the 98, I would think, of the .com era… or probably even 96. We still don’t have the killer app, except for Bitcoin. We still don’t have the browser for the blockchain, right? Browser being the killer app for the World Wide Web… We still are in the BBS level.” — 00:17:34

“Considering the rate at which these projects are being formed and evolving gives me the confidence that the rate at which blockchain will take on the world is going to be much faster than the worldwide web itself… I’m pretty confident within a year or two, we’re going to see a massive adoption of blockchain.” — 00:13:21

“One of the concepts we’re working is unstoppable web. Unstoppable web is censorship resistant web that cannot be taken down by any individual other than the beholder of a key. By combining other protocols such as Handshake or an Orchid and us together, we can create an infrastructure where the DNS discovery is decentralized, as well as the runtime is decentralized.” — 00:10:15

“Today, as it stands, it’s unaffordable… give an example: a one megabyte of smart contract on Ethereum network costs $13,000, when on Akash network costs about $25. Any programmer in the right mind wouldn’t deploy a smart contract expected to run… most of the [blockchains] happen to be a monolithic and homogenous architecture, so it’s a socialistic model — everybody shares the costs and somebody has to pay.” — 00:20:27

“You can have high margins, there’s nothing wrong with making money, but you have to be aligned with your core values. So I think we cracked the code when it comes to tokenized business models, and this is something I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time.” — 00:46:26

“My thesis was, in a two-sided marketplace, the first challenge the market has to solve is the demand supply paradox. What comes first?… when you bootstrap supply to a point that it’s extremely attractive to the demand — let’s say cost, for example — the demand side will catch up… really, you’re borrowing from the future to bootstrap the present.” — 00:30:22

“So far, the business models for open source software have been primarily subscription driven and open core driven. But now we’re experiencing the third business model, which is tokenized open source software, we call it, where it has this incredible incentive layer, the token layer on top of the open source platform… So how do you monetize? A lot of us are still trying to figure that out, to be honest with you. And our solution is [selling] hardware.” — 00:28:47

“The thing that excites me most about Solana is the throughput that allows developers to build applications that feel like a centralized application but actually it’s decentralized on the core — and it’s a very attractive property that allows real distributed systems engineers to actually consider building on a blockchain.” — 00:01:30

“In our roadmap we’re talking about supporting stablecoin payments for compute on the Akash network, and by far the easiest way for us to accomplish that is going to be to enable IBC in Akash.” — 00:24:20

“We believe Solana has incredible… high-performance smart contracts capability, because [their] throughput numbers are astronomical. So you should be, hopefully soon, run Solana smart contracts using Akash, pay using Akash tokens… it’s like using Solana’s software on Akash, which is hardware, paying to Solana using Akash tokens… a beautiful improbable love story there.” — 00:36:13

“For our developer incentives, we’re giving away five percent of the network — last testnet we did was two percent, this testnet is three percent — so we are very committed to ensuring the developers [are] incentivized early. That will be our bootstrapping mechanism before the value of the network actually occurs in the token.” — 00:29:41

“Very very soon we’re going to see a lot of these DeFi exchanges getting shut down because they’re facilitating money transactions without proper banking licenses. What Akash gives them is a way out… they can have users use Akash to launch their own dexes by themselves… they ship the liability to the user… Akash is primed as the only cloud for DeFi that can do this — no other cloud can do this in the world.” — 00:35:05

“Because Akash is a decentralized network you don’t really have sign-up, you don’t really have the concept of an owner… you earn income running the Solana node — that income can go directly from the node to Akash, paid in Solana tokens, when we interoperate. That’s the future vision… a very holistic frictionless experience, and this is impossible in the cloud… a fully interoperable cloud.” — 00:47:51

“It takes about twenty five thousand dollars to run Ethereum — twenty percent of that will go to Akash stakers… the industry being 300 billion dollars, do the math: 20% of that at 100% market penetration — that’s quite a lot of money.” — 00:51:21

“There will be some friction, I would imagine, for using Akash tokens to pay for compute. So to alleviate that friction, we wanted to introduce stable currencies… using USDX to pay for cloud compute is the first use case for IBC that we really want to, like, get out.” — 00:30:19

“Come mainnet 2, you’re going to be paying for infrastructure with digital currencies, and so it’s like a real-life physical thing. There will be websites that will be hosted by a blockchain network.” — 01:12:14

“Ideally you want to be able to pay for compute — staking is one thing, but actually paying for compute using Ethereum or an ERC-20 token, that means any stable currency… is the ideal scenario that we are all going to [want]. We’re going to do this in multiple stages: first we’re going to do a wrapped bridge that will eventually become a lot [more] native.” — 00:29:17

“Ideally you want to be able to pay for compute — staking is one thing, but actually paying for compute using Ethereum or an ERC-20 token, that means any stable currency on ERC, is the ideal scenario that we are all going towards… we’re going to do this in multiple stages: first we’re going to do a wrapped bridge that will eventually become a lot [more] native.” — 00:29:44

“What we really want to push further is ownerless web services, where say for example you’re hosting a Thor node and you’re a validator and you earn income as a validator — part of the commission can actually go to pay for compute itself from Akash without you touching an Akash wallet. That’s really putting our foundation for a larger vision of an interoperable cloud.” — 00:37:07

“We will be the first chain to connect to the Cosmos Hub as soon as Cosmos Hub goes live, right around mid-Feb.” — 00:55:25

“I think you’re going to see a convergence of a lot of these decentralized technologies all delivering to the goals of a better society. Akash provides infrastructure, Orchid provides routability, Handshake provides discovery, and something like Filecoin or Arweave or any others provide long-term storage.” — 00:36:22

“So blockchain alone, first thing we’re seeing is a Cambrian explosion of decentralized cloud. I think people should take NuCypher and Filecoin and like Sia and these projects a little more seriously… We are seeing the birth of a new cloud. And when Cosmos and IBC comes into fruition, when we have interoperability… it’s going to be phenomenal.” — 00:45:14

“There’s a fundamental difference between a company and a market. The mandate for a company is to become a monopoly. The mandate for a market is to have perfect competition, to have multiple providers. So blockchain networks are not companies. Blockchain networks are markets.” — 00:22:26

“I think there’s going to be a lot of exciting things that are going to come out in the next, this year, in 2021, with the decentralized cloud. I think they’re having the DeFi moment of 2018 at this stage.” — 00:45:55

“IBC is not token transfer, it’s data transfer. So we’re talking crazy use cases and… I can’t even imagine where it’s going to stop because I don’t think it’s ever going to stop.” — 00:48:09

“What Stargate brings to the table is the interoperability while having that highly decentralized and distributed security model, so I think this is a paradigm shift in how blockchains communicate today.” — 00:11:21

“I wrote a paper called Bootstrapping a Free Market by Borrowing from the Future… you have this inflation and you can use this inflation to subsidize some of the costs and that in turn can actually accelerate growth… using that we can actually reduce the cost even further to 10x… it’s of course an economic hack.” — 00:14:58

“I wrote a paper called Bootstrapping a Free Market by Borrowing from the Future… you have this inflation and you can use this inflation to subsidize some of the costs and that in turn can actually accelerate growth… using that we can actually reduce the cost even further to 10x… it’s of course an economic hack.” — 00:14:58

“The idea that I frame called ownerless services: there shouldn’t be a single owner, there shouldn’t be an identifiable person or a human being that is controlling the website. I think it should be on a threshold signature scheme; it could be… a DAO controlling the website.” — 01:00:38

“It’s only a matter of time — I would give it like maybe four months, maybe six months at tops — that you’re going to see incredible products built in Cosmos… you don’t have to pay like $1,000 in gas fees to do a lot of the operations.” — 00:41:40

“The way to scale massive systems is through interoperability… if you think about that, IBC is the TCP/IP of blockchains. It’s [an] interconnectivity system, and Akash now is the second chain to connect to IBC.” — 00:28:41

“You probably won’t see an impact in the next year or two, but three to four years down the line, when Akash becomes a network that powers 5G because of another decentralized network that’s inter[operating] with Akash — I think that’s [the] kind of stuff that I get super excited about.” — 00:51:02

“Если вы хорошо умеете работать с базами данных, вы можете предложить это в Акаш. Это своего рода святой грааль… Это то, к чему мы стремимся. Рынок децентрализованных услуг.” (“If you’re good at running databases, you can offer that on Akash. That’s a kind of holy grail… That’s what we’re striving for: a marketplace of decentralized services.”)” — 00:24:00

“I think a big transformation will be from like a password-based or account-based system to a wallet-first system.” — 00:34:52

“I think a big part of innovation is going to be in open marketplaces… exchanging goods and services in an open way, in a transparent way. I think that’s going to be the theme… I see no reason why any application — any marketplace today — should be closed. Marketplace by definition should be open and free.” — 00:33:29

“I see a lot of like nodes being deployed on Amazon. I think arguably about 70% of the nodes are running on Amazon today. And they all have their keys in Amazon itself. So if the server on the Amazon gets compromised, you’re screwed.” — 06:19:24

“The most exciting insight for me is a week over week growth — we saw about 17 [percent] week over week growth in total deployments. That’s humongous… we’re three months in and we’re still seeing that very heavy growth numbers. Hopefully this will last for a while and if that does happen we’ll be off to the races.” — 00:04:15

“Osmosis API servers and nodes are actually running on Akash, so it’s a self-serving ecosystem at this point… you can actually pay for your compute using OSMO tokens by exchanging them on the DEX to AKT and using their AKT to pay for your compute.” — 00:04:58

“None of the centralized exchanges could actually provide [that] kind of liquidity to us, and that’s a testament on why a decentralized exchange is the most efficient liquidity provisioning mechanism in crypto.” — 00:08:27

“Cosmos DeFi — interchain DeFi I want to call it… this is really, when you have USDC and all that come up, I think it’s just going to take off… it can be an explosion of the possibilities of… composability over sovereignty.” — 00:41:30

“Osmosis is a paradigm shift that the developers no longer need to make that trade-off… soon enough the bridge is going to get built between ERC20 and the Cosmos ecosystem… it’s very easy to see the Osmosis just becoming a massive liquidity provider very, very soon.” — 00:30:56

“That’d be great for [us] as well, because we want to enable stable currency payments for Akash — I think UST on Osmosis will put us there.” — 00:39:23

“The cognitive dissonance we have in crypto, especially DeFi, is adorable… Look at the Uniswap architecture: you have smart contracts running on Ethereum, the indexer running on Graph — where are these [Graph] servers running? Amazon. The JavaScript application — where is this running? Amazon. The DNS — probably Amazon or probably Cloudflare. You’re not decentralized — just own it… Unless three-fourths of your infrastructure is decentralized, you’re not DeFi.” — 00:18:29

“There’s a huge regulatory risk when you’re hosting your web UI on a domain name that’s registered under your name… the authorities could be like: no, you run uniswap.org, it’s registered [to] Hayden Adams… you’re facilitating exchange-type of relationship or money transfer on your domain, hosted in your name — hence you are responsible. Something is going to happen; I’m extremely scared of this notion… The solution to the problem is you should let your own clients, your own users, run their own UIs.” — 00:21:18

“I think we’re going to see Cosmos interoperability, or the IBC — inter-blockchain communication — be adopted way beyond just Cosmos… Once that happens, you’re going to create a very powerful ecosystem that’s built with utility at core, and with a growing adoption around that utility, all intercommunicating in a frictionless way.” — 00:21:50

“You don’t have to go give your credit card, name and your address to some Amazon or somebody to run a dVPN… rather just use your dVPN tokens that you gain to pay for the cloud computing service. That’s the ultimate sort of interoperable future that I envisioned.” — 00:11:59

“There’s monitoring evidence that most nodes in Ethereum are run on Amazon, and it’s Jeff [Bezos’] prerogative at this point… if he wants to shut down [the] Ethereum network, he can do that… most people in DeFi don’t care [that] the infrastructure is centralized, but they all want to be decentralized… the cognitive dissonance that we have is so bad.” — 00:26:24

“The goal for [the] Solana-Akash partnership is to decentralize Solana much further by reducing the cost of node infrastructure — and one-third is [an] amazing cost reduction — and hopefully help them to scale to about ten thousand validators from a one-thousand validator set right now.” — 01:04:06

“If you take our growth curve and take the decay curve of staking, there will come a point in the future where the network revenue exceeds [the] staking revenue — so till then it’s a comfortable hold.” — 00:57:40

“We just touched the surface when it comes to the possibilities with user experience. With the next three to four years, you’re just going to see a Cambrian explosion in types of experiences… looking from the trends of it is going to be amazing.” — 00:21:05

“I use a decentralized VPN and I use all my blogs, all my websites are on a decentralized cloud. I use Handshake. I use [Sia] to store my storage. A lot of my life is actually migrated pretty successfully to decentralized. And I think that’s going to be a trend.” — 00:16:44

“The entire stack is getting decentralized, right? So before it was just DNS, but now you have transport level and you have like the wire level… So Web3 is going to replace Web3 no matter what. I mean, it’s so fast that before we realize it’s going to be gone.” — 00:16:02

“Today a problem with DAOs is they got to elect a DAO member to represent them with Amazon… which presents a key man risk… Akash supports multisig, so you can actually have multiple people own a certain application, the hosting for it, actually controlled by a DAO… there’s no PII… and you pay using crypto.” — 00:34:06

“I didn’t really fully grasp the power of permissionless composability till I actually saw DeFi in action… now imagine applying that to computing, to what we’re doing with the Akash Network… my imagination now is running wild… applications we’re going to see that are just going to be so crazy that we can’t even comprehend.” — 00:24:08

“I agree — data services for DAOs, that’s the future.” — 00:48:56

“I think stable token is going to be very key for adoption, right — not only for Akash but for the Akash ecosystem… the Akash token will be used either as a collateral or either as a burn mechanism to generate these stable assets.” — 01:12:48

“I actually got a brilliant idea after listening here… you can create DAOs that will own infrastructure, that purchase infrastructure — actual hardware — using, let’s say you have AKT and you collateralize AKT in a self-paying loan using AKT. So you essentially get free infrastructure that [the DAO] now can own and will be paid off eventually, because [it’s] a loan, and then you’re just making profit running infrastructure.” — 00:17:46

“Decentralized finance needs decentralized infrastructure… The notion that you’re using a centralized infrastructure is just horrible… Today we have an uncertain regulatory climate that’s very hostile to anything DeFi and crypto, and the only way to really battle that is to offload liability from the protocol developers to the community — I call it offloading liability from the corporate to the common, because there is no escape from being a corporate: you will get approached, you will get censored, and you will get silenced. And it’s already starting to happen. I think we’re going to see quite a bit of that transition from the corporate to the common.” — 00:19:13

“One of the things that stands out about Cosmos is the sovereignty that we get, unlike other shared-state chains. Shared-state chains like Ethereum and Solana are phenomenal for developing rapidly, but once you reach a certain scalability threshold you certainly need that sovereignty that Cosmos provides.” — 00:06:57

“All the airdrops and all the fancy APRs are short-term… it’s really the tech and the community around tech… the reason why Akash chose Cosmos in the first place is because we looked at the GitHub and we saw progress… which is what I think is going to be the reason why we’re going to win eventually. Cosmos — we win slowly.” — 00:50:43

“Atom is the reserve currency of Cosmos… I’m not a big fan of shared security in general… really for me, liquidity and service discovery is probably one of the biggest things Cosmos Hub can bring to the ecosystem.” — 00:04:17

“Cloud computing market is going to be 1.1 trillion by 2027… if you get one percent market share, which is humongous, Akash token becoming the reserve currency for this global cloud economy is a bet that I’m willing to make.” — 00:24:58

“This also lets us do amazing things — like we can actually now implement amazing UIs where we can process payments using credit cards… the teams can still operate on the Akash network without having to deal with tokens.” — 00:10:39

“The only way to emit the stable coin is by burning AKT. So you burn AKT and you mint the stable coin and vice versa… burning AKT means taking AKT out of supply, which gives AKT value… the more demand for the cloud, the more AKT is burnt.” — 00:45:39

“Settlement will move to a stable coin, and when that happens the way you mint the stable coin is by burning AKT… the more usage, the more adoption Akash gets, the more burning of AKT happens.” — 00:29:58

“I’m almost certain in my own betting mind… the scaling that we see in terms of our adoption usage now is going to look flat in comparison to what it will be in a year’s time.” — 00:49:00

“We want to introduce an AKT stablecoin, but the stablecoin will be extremely limited to only pay for deployments… send functionality would not be enabled, so there is no incentive to hold the stablecoin except to deploy on Akash… we’re not taking shortcuts like Terra or any of the algorithmic stables.” — 00:21:58

“We have this enormous, much better user experience for [plotting] Chia on Akash, and cost is about 10 cents compared to 40 cents on the cloud. So it’s very competitive… the amount of AKT spent has doubled in the last seven days.” — 00:04:58

“I was one of the first LPs, probably the first LP on Osmosis… I’ve been accumulating Osmo token since the day one, and I haven’t sold a single Osmo token. And I’m very bullish on Osmosis — obviously, for those of you don’t know, [it] runs on Akash.” — 00:29:08

“What’s going to prevent a bad actor, let’s say Amazon, to buy up all the tokens and take over Akash Network? … proof of stake systems are inherently communal organisms… a bad actor trying to buy up all the tokens — that’s going to increase the price of the token, thereby further strengthening security… people can fork it and start a new one… the community will always come through before an attack can happen, and there are also preventive circuit breakers — we have like a 21-day unbonding period for that very reason.” — 00:24:57

“Proof of stake systems are inherently communal organisms. So there’s a bad actor that’s trying to, number one, buy up all the tokens — that’s going to increase the price of the token, thereby further strengthening security… people can fork it and start a new one… the community will always come through before an attack can happen, and there are also preventive circuit breakers — we have like a [21]-day unbonding period for that very reason.” — 00:24:58

“We predicted that in a bear market the costs are going to be an issue, especially for validators trying to scaffold, and Akash providing a cost-efficient solution that’s self-sovereign is a very attractive value proposition… really excited to see a majority penetration in a blockchain for the first time by a decentralized cloud.” — 00:04:19

“The one chain fits all is not a solution — we saw that with Ethereum, and other chains that are trying to have the shared state model are not scaling as they were expected, like Solana or Avalanche… there’s consensus that bridges are very insecure and interoperability is the way to go, like the IBC style.” — 00:24:22

“I think the next one to two years of a bear market is going to be tremendous progress with a lot of these problems, and that’s going to be exciting. I mean, we see the next bull cycle is just going to be a whole different mode when you see all these problems solved.” — 00:25:03

“A Juno user can deploy onto Akash without even realizing they’re deploying Akash. And that sort of usability is something that we have never experienced, be it in the centralized world or in the decentralized world.” — 00:33:31

“Even with current inflation, at 400 AKT, staking will get you a free server every month… we’re starting to see this interesting economics where you can get free compute just by staking Akash.” — 00:37:50

“I think the future is inter-chain. The idea of the inter-chain future is: instead of your protocol building everything you need, you can borrow, or you can use other protocols for what they specialize in, while you can focus on your application, your community. So this is gonna be a pattern we’re gonna see.” — 00:59:14

“One model we looked at seriously was a burn-mint model like Helium… the big challenge is reconciliation during a downturn. If you want to burn AKT you have to have enough AKT left so you can re-mint the stable. We’re trying to solve that problem — it’s not an easy problem to solve, no one has done that really well; of course UST collapsed because of that.” — 00:00:42

“The settlement could be just pegged to a currency of choice… the tenant could basically say I’m going to pay ten US dollars per month for this deployment and I’m going to use AKT to transact… and the rate is determined using a weighted average from validators — using validators as oracles.” — 00:01:24

“This is going to get solved, it’s not [just] a matter of time — if these things are solved, Cosmos would be like, number, way beyond Ethereum. I have no doubt. So it’s a great time to be in Cosmos.” — 00:47:09

“Osmosis tweeted out saying it’s one URL talking to 50 chains, and that’s something that really tells you the power of IBC. It’s very obvious that the interchain experience is going to be owned by Cosmos.” — 00:17:20

“You can see a future where Akash, Helium and Solana working in tandem to deliver the user experience on a mobile device that has never been done before… for this to happen we need to have IBC enabled on Helium and Solana… you can see in a year’s time all these protocols delivering these amazing use cases that haven’t been thought about before.” — 00:01:23

“Tokens don’t last forever and tokens usually need a cap, or else you end up in a Terra-like situation… it’s really good to see strong product market fit signaling before the incentives kick in, because that’ll allow us to grow faster and grow quickly.” — 00:09:18

“It’s very important for us to decouple finance from Web3 technologies and showcase these technologies like Akash and like storage technologies… and infrastructure technologies such as libp2p and whatnot.” — 00:13:36

“There’s no single party that makes money — everybody makes money… the value accrual comes to tokens, so more people use, the tokens [gain value]. Overclock Labs has tokens and all of us have tokens… and there’s another proposal for a take income — a percentage of the hosting fee to be paid to token holders for staking, similar to how Ethereum’s staking works.” — 00:00:00

“If you remember my thesis… during a bear market we get less noise and more signal, so real fundamentals are showing up… bull markets will come back. The question is what do we do during this bear market — we have a great opportunity to capture the mind share… the tourist class leave during this crash… the tourists left, the permanent stood, and those people need to recognize the importance of the decentralized compute.” — 00:10:47

“We’re going to see insecure bridges — the bridges have to burn… bridges are insecure, we’ve been talking about [it] a long time, and I think that’s where IBC is going to take the center stage when bridges are going to fail… yes, we’re going to see some exploits before we can see success.” — 00:34:20

“This is a classic example of a closed source system failing over open source system… Voyagers and the Celsiuses are essentially banks — they took the deposits and invested in heavily risky assets with leverage… people are going to realize the importance of open source systems and the importance of DeFi. I think DeFi is going to get very, very strong… I’m super bullish… DeFi withstood without regulation… we need regulation to protect people from these quasi-banks and not from DeFi.” — 00:37:11

“We feel like it’s risky to do a second token, so we’re going to keep AKT but we’re going to implement stable mechanism using dynamic pricing. So that big change is coming very soon — I would expect at least in the next three to four months.” — 00:50:03

“The take income could be considered as a security… we’re waiting for a little more clarity from regulators… The technical feature is not that complicated — it’s taking a percentage of hosting fees and giving back to stakers, it’s not a complicated piece of software to implement — but from a regulation standpoint it’s very unclear.” — 00:00:42

“A big thing — my bet would be privacy tech. I think next 18 months to two years we’re going to have heavy regulatory hammer throwing down on crypto. I think this is going to be the test of time. I think privacy tech will be the battleground… usable privacy… my bet is privacy-driven every other area — privacy-driven DAOs… I can see deployments being private… money markets being private.” — 00:46:41

“I’m particularly of a camp where I think it’s important for protocols to save incentives for growth and not incentivize product market fit, because then you lose the core sort of like weapon that you have in the journey to product market fit, which is data.” — 00:56:05

“I also think USDC will be KYC’d within the next two years. I think we’re going to see two clear paths in crypto: one, the KYC’d, heavily regulated side of things and a whole ecosystem on top of that… and then you have this super private, super anonymized crypto world that’s going to remain on this side. I think there’s going to be two cryptos in the next year to two — it’s my take.” — 00:47:23

“If the TVL is higher than market cap, that means theoretically someone can purchase all the tokens and gain a majority share on a blockchain and attack, and basically transfer all the tokens using this majority voting power… it’s only secure as much as its market cap, as much as the tokens are locked up.” — 00:02:07

“I feel a little safer with Akash because we don’t have third-party smart contract execution risk, we don’t secure any assets on chain, we are not a DeFi protocol. Akash really at the end of the day, it’s just a coordination protocol — it coordinates a tenant to a provider to transfer assets, so it’s a lot safer in terms of security profile.” — 00:03:35

“The assets are not actually secured by the bridge, but rather the bridge or the relayer just puts packets across. It doesn’t secure any of the assets — the security of the asset depends on the security of the blockchain that either sends the asset or receives the asset.” — 00:00:00

“We saw Defund Finance said they’re airdropping to AKT holders [and] stakers… highly suggest you stake your AKT if you have them lying around… I think we’re going to see quite a bit of these airdrops for infrastructure projects.” — 00:05:00

“We could improve on the Nakamoto coefficiency. I’d like to see a lot more smaller providers get a bigger share. There’s a huge gap between the top validator, which is Overclock Labs — I think they have like 15 million AKT delegated to them, that’s a lot… and the smaller guy has about 77,000 AKT. So I encourage people to go delegate to smaller [validators].” — 00:02:55

“We’re going to see a lot of proof of stake move this way as well… as we keep building through the bear market we’re going to see a ton of protocols that are going to use Akash as a launch partner and are banned in the web two.” — 00:15:18

“Akash is still like 95 percent cheaper than your traditional cloud. With current distribution of like 50 providers or so, it’s very very distributed across the globe, and with provider incentives that we’re working on, we’re going to expect at least 1000 to 1500 providers very soon.” — 00:42:22

“It’s very important to stay focused on achieving a strong product market fit before incentivizing adoption, because if you incentivize pre-product market fit, the data you’re going to get back is ruined… your incentives will eventually die, and once that happens you’re not going to be able to be in a position to sustain this growth.” — 00:52:27

“You’re not bringing fiat into the protocol — protocols cannot support fiat payments. The only way to use Akash deployment platform is to use AKT. Anything we do on top of AKT, even a multi-currency settlement mechanism, the stable settlement we’re talking about — even that really roots down to using AKT… AKT is the core native currency of Akash network.” — 00:02:53

“We made a lot of bets with a lot of really good tech: we made a bet on Cosmos really early, we made a bet on proof of stake very early, and we made a bet on Kubernetes really, really early. So all these bets are starting to show [fruition] and we start to see results.” — 00:32:14

“You’re seeing quite a lot of platforms today that incentivize early behaviors before product market fit. Product market fit is a long and slow road — it’s really something that has no shortcuts… if you incentivize pre-product market fit, the data you’re going to get back is ruined… your incentives will eventually die, and once that happens you’re not going to be able to sustain growth.” — 00:00:42

“On-chain incentives are coming, and once that happens we’re going to see a new era for Akash. But we’re not going to open them up until we absolutely are very confident in our product market [fit]… it’s a very slow and painful process, but once this process is complete the fruits are going to be worth the effort.” — 00:02:05

“We believe a base layer in web3 is under assault… we all know the kind of censorship attacks that are on crypto right now… there’s really no purely decentralized RPC infrastructure… we believe strongly that we need a super easy to use, fully self-sovereign and fully open RPC infrastructure.” — 00:36:35

“2027.” — 00:18:31

“AKT needs to have higher value in order for the blockchain to be secure. Without security there’s no functionality… the price of AKT is a direct function of the security and the functioning of the system, not as an investment asset.” — 00:36:54

“There’s also stats that 39 [percent] of Solana nodes are running out of… Amazon… well 69 [percent] of Ethereum nodes are running on the big cloud… it’s not that Amazon [is] good or bad, it’s just the fact that there’s such heavy concentration — it is a potential point of failure.” — 00:13:33

“The real challenge is really engaging with enterprise customers in a fully non-custodial way. In a non-custodial system you do not have the observability infrastructure, you do not have the engagement infrastructure… you don’t have notifications, for example — how do you really engage a user without an email? There’s just a lack of traditional on-ramp, off-ramp, notifications infrastructure to engage with the typical enterprise customer… most of the churn comes from this lack of web3-native infrastructure.” — 00:07:13

“Right now we have about 20% penetration in Cosmos, tracking to about 80% penetration in next 12 months. We’ve seen several use cases, [from] Department of Defense to drug design — so we have a wide variety of users right now using Akash.” — 00:03:41

“Walmart recently announced that they’re going to open 10,000 new data centers… because they want edge capability… ideally they should be able to sell web services [on] Akash.” — 00:09:15

“With interchain accounts, a DAO on Juno can own a deployment directly on Akash, and now you don’t need a human being in the middle… as long as there’s a human being, that human being becomes a weak link in the entire decentralization stack.” — 00:04:26

“I talked to several large Fortune 50 companies — all of them actually having dedicated web3 teams or are planning to have a dedicated web3 team. I think this bear market is going to be great for us overall, because it’s a lot less noise and a lot of the tourists left and it’s serious builders that have strong convictions stick, because there’s no more money.” — 00:38:41

“I think people are getting — this next bull run is going to be mainstream adoption, and we started to see that come about very quickly.” — 00:40:46

“The current plan is to enable a USDC payment on top of Akash that’ll convert to AKT and settle in AKT… if you are paying in anything that’s non-AKT currency you pay the tax, and the tax will be used to buy AKT off market and burn that AKT… we’re proposing about 20% tax… it improves user experience and at the same time it increases AKT value through burning.” — 00:42:09

“In theory it’s possible; in practicality you’re going to see a disruption — it’s going to be several days if not weeks levels of disruption with degraded services. The real question you should be asking is: is that the future we want, a disrupted blockchain?” — 00:02:52

“There’s so much demand for these chips that I can see a DAO funding these chips and building data centers and amortizing them within like six to eight months.” — 00:40:57

“The next phase of Akash adoption… if I were to attribute, I think the next bull run will be — the enterprise adoption will be one of the big catalysts for the next bull run.” — 00:56:48

“The node hosting is coming with a bang. I think the IP addresses will complete the solution we need… and GPUs are next — so if you have any GPU-style, proof-of-work-style workloads, I think that’s going to be supported as well very, very soon. So we’ll have a complete, full-fledged node hosting solution.” — 00:11:35

“We have other really big enterprises — I can’t discuss who they are because we’re in an NDA — but in the next six to 12 months you’ll be able to see these big enterprises actually giving us demand.” — 00:40:34

“With Cosmos IBC showing that yes, you can have a highly interoperable, high performance network that’s very very secure… we have hundreds of chains now that are interoperating on the IBC standard from Cosmos, that’s taking a center stage… I would keep an eye out for Cosmos and interoperability as a trend.” — 00:29:26

“Instead of Overclock Labs financing the development of Akash Network, I think it should be the chain and the token holders that finance the development and evolution of the network. That’s how we truly build a decentralized network that’s not reliant on a single company.” — 00:53:13

“I think end of the year composability will get solved, I want to see shared security get solved… it’ll also make Atom the center in terms of value accrual… none of this financial advice, but I think Atom is going to go top 10 easy.” — 00:41:49

“We’re going to settle using USDC, but you pay a tax to AKT holders in order to use USDC. That tax will be further used to fund the development of the platform… and part of that fees is going to be burned by actually purchasing AKT off market using Osmosis or whatnot.” — 00:53:55

“I think within a year or two years’ time you’re going to see a beautiful, interoperable — different protocols working with each other — fully verifiable, fully on-chain world. And that’s the world I can’t wait to experience.” — 00:39:32

“It’s not like a year from now — it’s literally like three weeks… Integrations will take a few more months, but I think in the next six months we’re going to see a cross-chain DAO deployment on Akash.” — 00:42:22

“Crypto is not a single monolithic layer, it’s actually multiple layers… even though the middle, the data layer, is decentralized, the access layer and base layer is clearly not decentralized.” — 00:03:45

“Smart contracts can own deployments on Akash — that means DAOs can now own deployments on Akash without a human involved… the human attack vector is eliminated… if you design your smart contract in a way it’s immutable, the deployment becomes immutable… stuff like that is going to push the boundaries of what censorship resistance is going to look like.” — 00:35:16

“On one hand you had the US Treasury that banned Tornado Cash, which is a privacy protocol; on the other hand we saw the US military, DOD, embrace Secret Network and Akash for enhancing their privacy… within 30 days of the ban.” — 00:10:56

“The bull market I believe will come in 2025. Again, this [is] my own prediction. I think it takes a year of building, solid building, before we can get the narratives in 2024.” — 01:03:50

“The new narrative is going to be — I mean, looks like it — it’s going to be real yield, I call it… because people are tired of this inflationary economics.” — 01:04:33

“There is no decentralization without open source. That is the foundation… open sourcing [is] the first step. If you can verify someone’s source code, you can be decentralized.” — 01:28:01

“He is the Stanford professor who helped Ethereum move from proof of work to proof of stake… his proposal essentially lets Akash borrow security from Bitcoin — that way we don’t need to allocate that many tokens for security, but rather actually borrow something from a better security, from proof-of-work model.” — 00:10:47

“I do have little concerns with Polygon sometimes… there is a chance the studio will go so big that they determine the protocol completely… I think there’s a heavy risk now that it may lose a decentralization nature… and if that model is going to be exported for the rest of the crypto ecosystem — which most likely it looks like it is — then we’re in big trouble.” — 00:41:00

“Proportionally there’s a lot more web3 companies, protocols, that use Akash — I think supposedly about 30% of Cosmos actually runs on Akash now… Osmosis, Mars Protocol… Stargaze… a lot of the Cosmos projects.” — 00:19:12

“One thing we did really well, which I’m very proud of… is not add incentives… our thesis was you’ve got to add incentives post product-market fit, not pre-product-market fit, or else you’ll end up in trouble… you don’t want incentives to go towards quote-unquote investors… investors should profit based on real usage, but not from mismanaged token treasuries.” — 00:30:36

“The world is kind of going to higher protectionism when it comes to GPUs… I would imagine some American GPU providers will have to know who the users are, so I don’t think there’s escape from verified users… but at a protocol level it will always be permissionless — that’s not going to change.” — 00:27:36

“I think for the next one to two years in AI, and all this excitement is going to excite people and AI is going to catch a rally.” — 00:36:31

“Crypto industry is very small… it’s not hard to see us going 100x and everything, in like a matter of, very quickly, we do this right.” — 00:57:13

“My entire career exists because of open source software, right? So, and if you were to add sustainability to open source software, you need networks. And the only data structure we found where you can have a highly sustainable networks were crypto, right? So, crypto gives sustainability to open source software.” — 00:11:06

“So I think crypto is going to play a critical role and people are going to realize that sooner than later. And now we have an incredible opportunity. AI is a new industry and a new industry that’s post crypto. So we have to bring AI to crypto. I don’t think it’s an option. It’s more imperative at this point.” — 00:30:37

“Crypto is really good at sourcing supply. Look at Helium, look at Filecoin, look at every deep [DePIN] network. Crypto is incredible at sourcing supply, not so in service demand… At tracking resources, crypto is phenomenal. At tracking demand, AI is phenomenal. So that’s where I see the marriage between crypto and AI is.” — 00:25:48

“For Akash, at the current linear modeling we did, [we] can support up to an excess of 1,000 or 1,500 A100s that’s unused at any given time.” — 00:33:10

“I believe in a world that, you know, the seamless crypto experience is a reality — and I’m not talking in just optimistic sense, but I’m actually talking based on historic evidence… TCP/IP became the most popular widely used networking protocol because, as decentralized as it is, the client experience got better and better over time.” — 00:59:12

“Is it as secure as Ethereum? Not yet. But given a chance, for next five, ten years, will [it] get better than Ethereum? Absolutely.” — 00:18:36

“We have to be honest to ourselves: is Ethereum going to be the future? Because it’s not. It is very insecure — EVM, and EVM insecurity is a root of all the exploits that we see today.” — 01:04:53

“I think that’s what we need to see: more non-crypto use cases for crypto… infrastructure. And if you don’t figure that out, I think we will not make it, to be honest with you — like, at all. It doesn’t mean the end; it means we just reverse to web2 models.” — 01:05:35

“If I were to do it again I would always use a shared service, like the Solanas of the world or the layer twos of the world today… the pattern should be using a shared service, hitting the limits of scale, and then moving to an app chain.” — 00:41:10

“Web3 and AI are a lot more related than we anticipate. I think the first thing we’re doing with crypto is we’re saving AI with chips, right? There’s really no other solution… I think Web3 will also… add the rails to AI that’s missing all the way from organization… human coordination, payments or value exchange.” — 01:12:38

“On Akash itself, [a] lease could be an NFT, right? A lease gets created every time we have an agreement… I can sell that lease in an open market, right? Now that lease becomes a tradable commodity because now I have access to H100s, right? So imagine the efficiency that brings a futures market to Akash itself.” — 01:40:01

“We already saw 250% cumulative monthly growth rate in the last 90 days since GPUs launched… we’re making a lot more in terms of revenue on demand-side fees than Helium and Livepeer and every other DePIN network out there. In fact, Akash right now makes more in fees than Ripple and Dogecoin, and Cardano I think as well.” — 01:08:21

“Looking at the demand side of DePIN networks I came to a conclusion — maybe I was wrong and maybe a lot of these DePINs are wrong — because you’re over-incentivizing to a point you’re under-optimizing for demand.” — 00:15:56

“Currently Akash makes more in revenue, or collects more in daily fees, than Graph Protocol, Helium, Livepeer combined — and all these networks are incentivized and Akash is not incentivized. This is pre-incentive… also zero ad spend.” — 00:21:42

“Progressive decentralization — it never works, not a single case, guarantee you that… You either decentralize or you’re not, from day one. Bitcoin was day-one decentralized, Ethereum was day-one decentralized.” — 00:55:43

“The whole thesis of like you need to bootstrap supply before you can validate demand is proving to be false. In fact, I’m to blame too, because I wrote a paper in 2019 titled ‘Bootstrapping a free market by borrowing from the future.’” — 00:20:58

“We believe Bitcoin is the most secure chain, hands down… my ultimate vision there is I want Bitcoin to secure Akash, because that gives Akash nation-state-level protection when it comes to security.” — 00:48:29

“We’re releasing a pilot in Q1 2024, ideally January… that’s going to massively bootstrap supply on Akash, and we have about $300 million in budget on chain for deploying these incentives.” — 00:32:24

“Learning from the mistakes of the previous generation DePIN projects, we learned that unless you validate demand, incentivizing supply will lead to wastage.” — 00:31:41

“Crypto is incentive on steroids, right? So that’s one key property of crypto that no other industry can give. And what can we do with the incentives in a supply constraint market? I think it’s going to be fascinating, right? It has never been done before for GPUs.” — 01:04:29

“So my prediction is with the Bitcoin ETF, you’re going to see more institutional adoption. What that means is more focus on fundamentals, more than speculation in terms of valuing an asset… if you have a capability to go long, you’ll also have a capability to go short… that is actually healthy in a way because it normalizes valuations.” — 00:46:08

“I looked at open core. Open core was not the solution. Token as open source software allows a sustainability model to open source that the world has never seen. So why? Because it moves the maintainability of a network away from a single corporation to the common… And for the first time we can have an open write database. Never before it was possible before crypto.” — 00:37:18

“One of the reasons why I’m doing crypto and blockchain is to have that legacy, like, to create something that will outlive me, the corporations that I built, or the people that I know.” — 00:18:08

“Semafor… wrote a piece on how crypto is saving AI. And they interviewed a lot of Akash’s users and providers… this was a college student from Columbia that got an A100 [on] Akash for like $1.10 or something like that… it just tells you that AI problems are solved with crypto. You know, the supply problems at least.” — 00:56:32

“In order to have pure open source software that’s sustainable, crypto is the answer. Right? Every other open source software [closes] at some point. If you do open core model, at some point it becomes closed because that’s the only way to make money… you cannot have closed source software and have verifiability.” — 00:58:04

“The moment you see a website geared towards investors, that’s generally a scam. Because you’re not focused on getting users… every time you see DePIN on a website, like front and center… DePIN didn’t exist six months ago… Close source is a scam, generally speaking. And when you have founders that come out of nowhere… generally [regard] them as a scam.” — 01:04:35

“I was the early Helium miner in 2019 — I bought a device for about $300 and I minted enough tokens to be worth about half a million dollars in about a year’s time. I’m the wrong type of person to be incentivized… that’s why it’s very challenging to design incentives. Akash is pre-incentives — the reason we have not launched incentives even though we have a huge budget is because incentive design is extremely, extremely hard.” — 00:21:28

“Crypto, if you think about it, it’s incredible at optimizing resources. It goes places where normal centralized software cannot… there’s a lot of GPUs that are just sitting idle in the world, so what better way for crypto to unlock that GPUs to come to the market — that’s what Akash is doing.” — 00:15:24

“We don’t need mergers… we build open systems, so we can build open systems on open systems. You don’t need a token merger or any other nonsense to work together… really open systems that are built to be open, permissionless, don’t need permission — you don’t need mergers, you don’t need partnerships.” — 00:45:47

“There are about a billion people in the world that don’t have credit cards, and that means they don’t have access to the cloud… it’s easy to see the future generation that’s unbanked, that’s getting used to using crypto as a primary way to pay for things, are going to be Akash users. It is the future, it is the next generation.” — 00:31:04

“I think IPs are more scarce than gold, think about it. It’d be cool to have an IP coin someday that’s backed by IP addresses… it’s a really scarce namespace, but Akash is a great place to get IP addresses.” — 00:10:49

“This space is so riddled with scams that we owe to ourselves to get rid of those scams. If we don’t self-regulate, the regulators will come and regulate us.” — 04:17:10

“If you want to create a truly decentralized system that’s extremely strong, can withstand state-level attacks… which is Bitcoin. So we’re actually looking at bringing Bitcoin security [to] Akash… I believe Bitcoin has to be the mother chain of the world.” — 01:00:16

“I think tokenized open [source] software, it’s going to be a third leg of open source business models… You have Red Hat which mastered the support model… then you have the open core model, which is Databricks being a popular one… but Akash is pure open source, there’s no commercial aspect… and I think the token [in] open source software, it’ll be a third leg in open source business models.” — 00:06:30

“I think AI is a killer use case for crypto. AI is the only one that could turn the press around from FTX. AI is the only one that’s turning the government around and embrace technology.” — 01:13:34

“I was on Capitol Hill earlier this week. I met with four senators, four congressmen on the AI caucus, and as well as the chair of the Financial Committee and the Commerce and Energy Committee… I was actually surprised that how many of them knew about [Akash]. One of the lead staffers of the Commerce Committee was like, yeah, [Akash] was like an intersection between [DePIN] and AI… We’re talking about the people that write policy.” — 00:45:42

“Does it need a token? I don’t think so, not yet… Bittensor is doing interesting work — Bittensor emissions are like billions of dollars per year, right? So those incentives are going to amazing folks that are doing open source AI and giving them a monetization mechanism.” — 00:15:09

“Akash is a radically new way to share compute. We wrote the white paper in 2018 — we talked about GPUs in 2018 but people didn’t pay attention. They think GPUs came in 2024.” — 00:10:45

“Akash doesn’t have verifiability, it has a reputation system, and Akash doesn’t have incentives because, well, we don’t have verification. What io.net did is they enabled incentives without verification — then you get Sybil attacks… that’s why we chose not to do incentives until we have verification.” — 00:19:41

“When we start doing block rewards, we’ll start incentivizing the properties that you want… you can create a configuration pool that says hey, we want a server in LA or New York… an incentivized pool to attract that particular compute… like Helium did it pretty well with network coverage. That way we can actually get the low-latency network.” — 00:33:58

“Traditional Web2 developers, AI developers that don’t interact with crypto are forced to buy crypto… we lose 95% of the users in that very step of getting AKT tokens. And thanks to the United States, zero regulation or lack of clarity with regulation, you cannot sell legally the tokens using a credit card on your website.” — 00:27:22

“I’m terrible at short-term predictions and usually good at long-term predictions… if the government continues to spend like a drunken sailor, I think scarce resources will definitely take like the center stage. Bitcoin is definitely turning out to be the hedge against this runaway inflation — considering that 30% of all the dollars in creation were done in the last three years.” — 00:03:41

“All these traditional systems that were very hard to disrupt are getting disrupted… this is only happening in crypto, and I think that is going to put us in a center stage when it comes to the mainstream audience, than DeFi.” — 00:44:01

“If Apple comes up and says we can leverage the secure enclave to store your private keys, and you can transfer those keys to other devices in an encrypted manner… and we let you use your credit card to onboard… I think that’ll change the game forever.” — 00:22:26

“I’m terrible at short-term predictions and usually good at long-term predictions… if the government continues to spend like a drunken sailor, I think scarce resources will definitely take like the center stage. Bitcoin is definitely turning out to be the hedge against this runaway inflation — considering that 30% of all the dollars in creation were done in the last three years.” — 00:03:41

“When you incentivize in the token that’s native to your platform, that token tends to be a volatile token, and then incentive distribution happens to be irregular and doesn’t really make sense, because you’re most probably likely incentivizing real-world assets like a GPU or a CPU, which are priced in US dollars and not priced in your token.” — 00:07:23

“Akash hasn’t enabled incentives on chain yet, and the reason for that is you do not want to have incentives without verification… we saw recently with another network that enabled incentives without verification — they got Sybil attacked to death. Sybil attacks are very, very real; every time there is money on the line, you want verification.” — 00:04:27

“We are at a product market fit stage for GPUs. And we have real usage. We have about, say, 50 [percent] overall utilization, and I believe 60 to 70 percent utilization for high density GPUs… a lot of the other networks that have launched just throw the towel and see what happens. But their utilizations are less than 1%.” — 00:08:45

“The current system… proof of stake… is heavily focused on capital as the stake, but I think we definitely need to rethink some of these systems where the stake is not necessarily capital but actual participation in the network… you could tokenize usage, you could tokenize attention… systems should be governed by the people that use it, and people that have significantly higher involvement by using the system should have a higher say.” — 00:23:41

“Cosmos is, in my opinion, the only layer one app chain framework that works without an issue. Akash is a prime example — we’ve been live for about four years and we haven’t had a single unplanned outage… we grew our usage maybe by order of magnitude every year.” — 00:02:53

“The challenge is how do you keep the weights private but keep the model open, and I think that’s being solved. And once you solve that, now you have an incentive mechanism to incentivize ownership of a model, and I think that’s going to kick-start a whole new revolution.” — 00:29:09

“Bitcoin has been primarily a money chain till now. But what Babylon is doing is transitioning Bitcoin from a money chain into a chain that can be a lot more useful for powering applications.” — 00:04:11

“If there’s a way to bridge the Bitcoin security or really bring Bitcoin security to Akash and even enable payments using Bitcoin for using machine learning on Akash, I think that will be an incredible milestone in improving… the security of Akash network to a level that can withstand a nation state attack. And that’s very important when you’re building an unstoppable cloud.” — 00:00:50

“Just from the introduction of GPUs — we introduced GPUs in last year August — and today our revenue on a year-over-year basis gained by 1700%… this month alone we grew 100% in terms of earnings compared to last month. So it’s very clear that there is product-market fit… and we did it without taking shortcuts, being open source, being decentralized.” — 00:34:36

“DePIN in a way is a savior to crypto… with DePIN [you] can be like, hey, you want GPUs? … you pay a dollar for [an] H100 where you pay $4 on Amazon — that’s very quantifiable… I think DePIN is a savior to crypto. We don’t talk much about it; it will be talked about more over the next year, I think, for sure.” — 00:36:49

“$200,000.” — 01:08:18

“That’s why you want open source as a foundation for decentralization, and I will reject any notion that a closed system is decentralized — it’s just not a reality. And it’s really sad what’s happening [in] DePIN today, that there are a lot of these networks just popping out of nowhere with fully closed source code bases, and the justification is ‘decentralization is a spectrum.’ Yes, decentralization is a spectrum, but the spectrum begins with the open source code base and ends with energy sourcing.” — 00:15:12

“Akash is the first one, so we set the standard. We also created this new category called DePIN — DePIN did not exist before Akash… we grew about 1700% year over year in user fees, we doubled our workloads in a year.” — 00:00:45

“Having to own a piece of… [an] actual model and getting royalties when people use it, I think, is going to be a big shared ownership model the world has never seen before.” — 00:40:34

“A person of his nature and stature helping Akash design economics is just the tip of the iceberg… his proposal essentially: let Akash borrow security from Bitcoin — that way we don’t need to allocate that many tokens for security, but rather actually borrow from a better security, from a proof-of-work model.” — 00:11:00

“There is a chance the studio will go so big that they determine the protocol completely… I think there’s a heavy risk now that it may lose its decentralization nature… and if that model is going to be exported for the rest of the crypto ecosystem — which most likely it looks like it is — then we’re in big trouble.” — 00:41:24

“We’re doing DeFi rails… we can decouple the ownership of the asset from the earnings… sell the ownership of the asset to someone that wants depreciation… crypto has got incredible primitives — the DePIN primitive and DeFi primitive, when you bring them together you can create amazing financial assets… you can purchase an asset that will give you like 15% return.” — 00:26:40

“The only way we will be able to get chips is through a peer-to-peer marketplace, and that’s really what Akash is building.” — 00:24:24

“Starbonds are designed to reward early participants up to 6.4 times return on investment in high demand scenarios, only 25% principal at risk in low demand cases. The internal rate of return increases with early tier discounts, from 36.7% to 44.8%… This isn’t speculative crypto. These are productive digital assets tied to real-world AI infrastructure powering actual AI workloads.” — 04:37:07

“Akash is permissionless, decentralized. It runs fully on-chain — every transaction, every lease happens on-chain — whereas Render is closed source and off-chain. [The] only thing that happens on-chain is payments and nothing else… one is permissionless, another one is not. And we emphasize quite heav[ily] on self-custody.” — 00:14:54

“We introduce the Starbonds, a digital asset that represents fractional ownership of compute… You reserve a Starbond. A node keeper provisions and operates the hardware. You receive a share of the revenue generated by the node. Transparent, on-chain, and aligned from day one. This isn’t just capital formation. It’s capital democratization.” — 00:10:34

“How do we fund and govern a cloud with no single entity controls? With Star Bonds, a new model of fractional on-chain ownership for compute infrastructure… Anyone can reserve a star bond, a node keeper provisions and operates the star node, AI workloads run, revenue is earned, payouts flow back to holders. It’s transparent, permissionless, aligned from day one.” — 00:00:01

“Starbonds are designed to reward early participants up to 6.4 times return on investment, or ROI, in high demand scenarios; only 25% principal at risk in low demand cases… And this isn’t speculative crypto. These are productive digital assets tied to real-world AI infrastructure powering actual AI workloads.” — 00:13:02

“Each Starbond is an NFT that represents ownership in a specific node. When you mint one, you’re backing the deployment of a real-world rack by a node keeper in a real facility serving real AI workloads. In return, you earn a pro-rata share of the node’s revenue automatically on chain without intermediaries. It’s like staking, but instead of securing a blockchain, you’re powering intelligence.” — 00:12:49

“Star Bonds are designed to reward early participants — up to 6.4 times return on investment in high demand scenarios, only 25% principal at risk in low demand cases. The internal rate of return increases with early tier discounts, from 36.7% to 44.8%… First issuance Star Cluster Alpha will release about 75,000 bonds, each with a par value of $1,000.” — 00:00:45

“The business model for distributed training — almost all of the models I’ve looked at — the common thing they have is you contribute compute, you get some representation of that contribution in form of a token, and that token will guarantee you future revenues from the model, from inference.” — 01:06:10

“I think there’s enormous money to be made in the next one to two years in the decentralized space… there’s zero hype on these protocols… [Gensyn] alone is right now training about 10,000 models concurrently. 10,000 models. Name a single AI lab that can do that.” — 01:08:18

“DePIN shines when it mirrors its own design — like countless small parts, like trees in a forest or neurons in a brain… fragmented assets like GPUs or rooftop solar or Wi-Fi routers or city sensors… the line is simple: decentralize what is abundant and idle, and centralize what is scarce and indivisible.” — 00:14:42

“Tokens are rocket fuel: they help you launch and bootstrap a network, but once you’re in orbit you have to run without the fuel, or like very less fuel… somehow we got to orbit using hot air balloons instead of rocket fuel.” — 00:31:23

“If you remove all the bells and whistles of decentralization, from a technology standpoint it’s just a really bad database — that’s what it is, end of the day. But decentralization on top of it makes it extremely powerful. It’s the only database where you do not need permission to write… In SQL you need permission to write, you need a password, username; in blockchains you don’t need permission to write. That’s the most attractive part of a blockchain, but that comes with a lot of trade-offs.” — 00:05:00

“Only way to offset this risk of unknown cost is have massive amounts of transactions being written. Well, it’s very unlikely to have that many amount of transactions for a non-financial product… you need a lot of volume to be profitable. So economics at a certain stage becomes unsustainable without the volume… To summarize: crypto-economic value was not justifiable in terms of security, and second, validator profitability cannot be sustained with the current economics… and the market conditions don’t seem to be that favorable considering what’s happening geopolitically.” — 00:07:06

“We’re looking at potentially giving direct exposure for stakers into the compute itself, instead of just security right now — because the stakers are staking for security but they’re not directly engaging with the AI compute, which is the bigger sort of opportunity… I’m particularly excited for staking on Akash evolving to a new paradigm.” — 00:23:41

“I think the Cosmos model in general has failed — this is coming from someone who’s been in the space for a long time, Akash being one of the first Cosmos chains. The model where it failed is sovereignty before product market fit. It should be flipped… You don’t go build your own data center when you’re shipping an app.” — 00:29:37

“Real world is AI and I think AI convergence with crypto is going to be incredible unlock for society. I think the energy crisis, the privacy crisis, all these are going to force people to use crypto a lot more.” — 01:04:16

“Memes being pure speculation, I think they’re done for. It’s going to be very hard to convince retail to go buy memes again… because this is very extractive behavior by a lot of these people.” — 01:10:39

“There’s a lot of, quote unquote, DePIN networks that came about and just incentivized left and right all kind of GPUs, and we noticed — according to them, talking to them — only about 1% to 2% were actually real… or with a degree of quality that’s acceptable.” — 00:19:35

“As much as I hate stable coins, I think stable coins are going to become de facto because stable coins import, export dollar without restrictions.” — 01:00:57