i actually don't think i think i've only seen this level of excitement in the crypto space twice before so once was the very very earliest days of bitcoin when also was excruciating to try and use bitcoin but it was kind of the best time to get in and then also the very very early days of ethereum when i remember you know vitalik was going from town to town in these meetups and just the level of excitement in the rooms was crazy for something that hadn't hadn't even launched and so i'm extremely optimistic about something because i've seen this happen twice before just the level of energy it's crazy hey welcome back everybody to altcoin daily my name is austin you are there and and very excited to speak to special guests today iago who is an early contributor to sovereign which is bringing d5 to bitcoin iago how's it going hey guys absolutely a pleasure to be with you guys looking forward to it for sure and i'm excited number one because we've seen all this all this d5 grow on the ethereum ecosystem and another you know cardano solano all that money flow into those ecosystems and you guys are spearheading the charge for building this defy infrastructure on bitcoin so i i want to get to that but first just big picture what's your background and how did you get involved with crypto yeah so my background sort of from an academic and business perspective is i was a neuroscientist i worked on neural networks and i read the satoshi white paper in 2011 because i was reading stuff in network science i came across it by mistake and it blew my mind so part of my background is i grew up in south africa uh which was you know apartheid south africa at the time part of my family were associated with nelson mandela's anc party and had been designated as terrorists um and so they had been forced to flee the country when i was a young kid i was smuggling gold out to them um in krugerrands that my mother would sew into my clothing uh so krugerrands are like these little gold coins and my family had you know survived the holocaust by smuggling jewels so for me this idea that um financial sovereignty was very important having the ability to have true ownership of something was critical to being able to preserve your freedoms and your sovereignty was something i had grown up with and um and i i you know had seen in many different examples in my life how when governments try to control you or become oppressive the first thing they go after is the money they go after your money because that's the best and easiest way for them to control a population so when i came across bitcoin i think i was already primed uh to to sort of see the value there and and so in 2011 i started getting into bitcoin and very very quickly uh i became all bitcoin all the time and i and i've been on a trying to build up the adoption of bitcoin ever since well i love that yeah bitcoin is probably my opinion the best way to you know take control your money and uh be able to you know transport it uh you know just hold on to it um my question is why defy on bitcoin why defy on bitcoin i mean isn't d5 on ethereum or solana isn't that working fine why defy on bitcoin well there are two reasons to have d5 on bitcoin the first reason is for bitcoin and the second reason is for d5 so for bitcoin there's a trillion dollars in assets um those are assets that people have uh value for right people hold bitcoin because they want to have an asset that they can use without intermediaries but today if you want to use bitcoin you pretty much always have to go through an intermediary if you want to lend if you want to borrow if you want to trade if you want to have a stable coin all of these things are sending you to a central intermediary and you can't even use uh ethereum for d5 because you know the way that bitcoin works on ethereum is through a centralized party right so wbdc is just bitco account right so you have to trust them so for bitcoin there's a huge sort of latent demand out there in fact i would say the biggest market by far 4d5 is bitcoin and until sovereign came around no one was really tapping that market and then from the defy side well i actually don't think you can build really good defy outside of bitcoin and the reason is simple um bitcoin is unique even after all of these years in the crypto space bitcoin is the only system that you know it's going to look the same way today as it's going to look tomorrow and in 10 years and for your children and your grandchildren it's a law of nature block after block after block the same rule set the same thing that is the kind of reliability that you need if you're trying to build a new financial system right because a new financial system means mortgages it means pensions it means long-term term lending it means people's savings right it needs to be iron-clad reliability like a law of nature and only bitcoin provides that so right now we're seeing a lot of experimentation eve from solana on avalanche and and and i think that's really great right there's a lot to learn from that experimentation but ultimately when we rebuild the financial infrastructure of the world that's going to be done on bitcoin because it's the only reliable system out there so talk to me about sovereign because i've personally seen you on the pomp podcast on bankless podcast but pretend for those people that have never heard of sovereign what is it and what do you provide so sovereign is an extension of bitcoin right it's a protocol that extends the the functionality of bitcoin i i sometimes call it the bitcoin with superpowers right so with sovereign you're able to build out all the key components of smart contracts decentralized finance and so um uh what bitcoin what what sovereign does is it uses all of the technologies of bitcoin layer 2 to create these tools so in a very short space of time sovereign has built out uh lending and trading uh the margin trading uh bitcoin back stable coins a launch pad and maybe most importantly a very very robust governance system that manages the protocol and on top of that there's a whole slew of things that are being built by people who are working on the sovereign protocol so sovereign is not a company it's not an application it's a protocol and it basically means that bitcoin can now do anything uh that you're seeing on the other chains and in particular sovereign right now is focused on building out the financial tools that extend people's sovereignty over their bitcoin and really over any type of money uh to never having to use an intermediary ever again so with sovereign you can do bitcoin back stable coins you can do lending and borrowing you can do spot and margin trading is that correct yes you can do yeah all of those things and uh you know there's work right now being done by one team who are working to bring perpetual swaps to sovereign there's a team who are bringing zero interest loans so you'll be able to borrow against your bitcoin and pay zero interest into perpetuity so you never have to sell your bitcoin again um there's a project that has already uh launched the system for uh doing for managing marriages and they're now working on divorces so you can um when you get married you can do it you know without a government without an intermediary you can just you know have a globally a global marriage which is protected by the most secure system in the world the most permanent system in the world bitcoin right and then if you ever get divorced instead of having to go through years and years of a court case you just have a smart contract that's able to manage that out there's a team working on mortgages there's a team working on systems with el salvador so that um uh people in el salvador can start uh borrowing against their bitcoin and using bitcoin back stablecoins uh with lightning network as their normal means of payment it's phenomenally uh exciting how much innovation is happening and what's cool about it also is in many ways it's different from sort of like the experiments in default that have been happening on other channels because bitcoin is so much more connected to real world uh economics right so like these things like pensions mortgages these things are happening on sovereign because bitcoins already deeply embedded into the world of remittance into el salvador into the way that nigerians save money so it's really exciting to see a different kind of d5 emerging very very quickly interesting i'd love for you to go further on that because for the average person they just they're just going to care about ease of use i would assume that they're not in a crypto so bitcoins are embedded in a lot of these places around the world could you just speak a little bit more on why somebody might choose lending and borrowing on sovereign as opposed to on an other protocol well i mean so for example with el salvador the reason is obvious right so el salvador have chosen bitcoin um as legal tender in their country and you know there's a reason they they chose uh bitcoin right they weren't going to choose ethereum they weren't going to choose seoul uh because ethereum is constantly changing um is actively managed by an unclear group of people and is about to go through this massive upgrade right so it's it's it it's a different it's a technology it's a very cool technological technological platform but as an institution right as a system for delivering sound money that's really not what ethereum has gone after and so you know large institutions companies when they put their treasury money and countries when they choose to be sovereign themselves or to enhance their own sovereignty they choose bitcoin so if you want to have a decentralized financial system where the people of el salvador can have access to you know you guys could be able to lend them money right or they could have access to a system which is going to allow them to get a mortgage on a house where usually they wouldn't be able to because they're unbanked you're going to need a system which is not only connected to bitcoin but it's also backed and based on the reliability of bitcoin and so i think for that reason it's something that really yeah only sovereign right now is providing and i always like to i would like to say you know bitcoin is our best shot to truly separate money from state just because it's the most censorship resistant it's the most decentralized obviously a critique from maybe an outsider would be it's slow but you guys are building on a side chain correct can you talk about the trade-offs or the side chain or you're playing so yes a sovereign basically is like an operating system for bitcoin layer two so it combines all of the different layers so um most of the smart projects um are going to be built and currently are built on rootstock which is a side chain of bitcoin it's got uh it it's kind of like if you took the technology of ethereum and ported it to bitcoin and you'd like get the best of both worlds that's what rootstock is so rootstock is evm compatible you can use and you can even port ethereum type contracts it's got a 30 second block speeds you can do roll ups you can do zero knowledge proofs um so that's rootstock and then also on the transaction side we're integrating lightning network right so you can use that for payments and that's basically going to infinite scale so people say that bitcoin isn't scalable or that it's slow but i think again that's looking at it through the wrong frame of reference it's looking at it through the reference of like as if the layer one was the technology and as if the technology was what was important so technology is always built out in layers and bitcoin is actually probably the most scalable blockchain because what it's done is it said we're going to be very very precise in the layers that we built right so the bitcoin layer 1 the bitcoin main chain is very very good at just acting as a settlement layer it's the best settlement there because it's so reliable lightning is really really good because it's got infinite scale rootstock is really really good because it's secured by bitcoin proof of work but can do smart contracts i think that's the way that you build technology uh which is scalable and bitcoin is also extremely scalable in another way which most people don't seem to talk about but i think is really important bitcoin scalability is not about technology it's about sovereignty right so bitcoin is scalable sovereignty individuals get bitcoin because they want to be suffering they want to have control over their own destiny and their finances companies get bitcoin because they want to be suffering they want to have control over the treasury and their financial future right so if you think about michael saylor that's what he keeps saying if you think about why tesla bought bitcoin it's exactly for that reason and now countries are buying bitcoin for exactly the same reason right it's so that they are less reliant on the dollar less reliant on the us uh can can less be pressured by the world bank so that's a phenomenal thing right there's this tool that provides sovereignty from the level of the individual all the way up to nation states that's scalability i love that um everybody in the audience i'm curious to know what you're thinking i think if you appreciate this kind of interview hit the like button uh because iago is certainly providing some some great alpha here this might go without saying but with um sovereign you keep control of your keys yes so you can't have d5 if you're not controlling your keys right so the so sovereign you never need to register like your name or anything it's not like an exchange well it feels like an exchange right so i think you know the devs who are working on the reference implementation the front end so if you go to sov ryn dot app sovereign dot app you can see the front end and you can click into the app and you can connect your wallet um and you know it's not perfect the system's only been out for about five months and there's constant duration but you'll see how much stuff is being built and that's all being built by different teams and by the core team and you'll you'll probably have an experience which is more similar to a centralized exchange than maybe any other defined system and that's on purpose because sovereign is not really competing with d5 and ethereum or solana sovereign is competing with centralized finance as a concept uh in just the same way that bitcoin is competing with centralized money as a concept and so the idea is to try and make this not but you know we're not quite there yet but to make this as approachable for ordinary people as a centralized service and in many ways it's better than a centralized service even for the average user because you don't have to register you don't have kyc you just click and you're you're in and you don't give up your funds you basically have the funds in your wallet and you you spend them or use them or transact with them as you want so i think it's it's it's ultimately going to be the most frictionless experience that users can have i like that i'm really excited to check it out and we will be leaving all links in the description so everybody can just click through down in the description you know you'll know it's the real link um i'm curious to hear about the actual sov token the sovereign token which has a fluctuating value what is the use case for the sub token so you never need to use solve to use the sovereign platform right the protocol is permissionless anyone can use it at any time and the base asset is bitcoin but you can have stable coins you can have e there's b and b even on the system so why is there another token and the reason there's another token is because when you are building a decentralized system you're building what you're really building is a rule set right you're building the rules of the road for the people who are going to be using the system now bitcoin has taken like bitcoin main chain has taken the approach of you are you're building a rule setting everyone in the world needs to be able to use and so uh and not only that it needs to be money it needs to be like the most reliable thing in the world like gold right so gold doesn't change and so bitcoin doesn't change and so you have this very very simple rule set now on top of gold uh hundreds of years ago people started building the financial system right the financial system has more rules has um more things that it needs to be able to do and so um sovereign which is building its financial system needs to have more rules and those need to be able to change more frequently so there needs to be a way of coming to consensus around how those rules are going to work and maybe i'll take a step back here for a second and say something about sort of i think maybe the biggest thing i think people are missing in the crypto space right so i think most people have been looking at the crypto space through the lens of technology right we've been trained over 20 years of tech investing right that you invest in tech net networks like like twitter or facebook and you make a lot of money and so that's the lens that people look at bitcoin and crypto is sort of like a continuation of the internet but the systems that we're building are not tech products they're social institutions money is a social institution finance is a social institution these are not technologies these are rule sets and i'll go a step further the key innovation in bitcoin and in the entire crypto space is actually really really simple um people say it's all kinds of things like ethereum we've talked about a world computer and bitcoiners i think are frequently just as confused they talk about like digital gold right use all of these metaphors but actually there's just one really basic thing which bitcoin invented which is digital property rights and that's really important to understand because up until now for the last 5 000 years of human history the only way that you could protect your property was through violence right either you had to have like a gun or a club or you had to rely on the police or a government and you kind of pay them protection money and so all law has relied on borders and violence but we're living in a digital age now borders don't make sense and violence can't be applied at a distance so what we need for a global digital world is a global digital type of law and that's what basically bitcoin invented the implications of changing our entire property rights legal structure are very very narrow right i mean it's not we're not building you know world computers here we're building institutions and so i think that's the lens that you have to look at the entire crypto space as even as an investor you have to invest saying what are the institutions that are going to last and stand the test of time and and that's really why bitcoin is so different from other things and why i think d5 built on bitcoin is different because it's designed to stand the test of time as an institution so yeah well i was just gonna and so it like and so the saab token is a governance token and what you're saying is allows the community then to set those guidelines instead of one centralized entity right but it's very careful about how it does it right so it's not just one token one vote and the reason is if you have one token one vote you expose the system to malicious manipulation so for example i could go and borrow a whole bunch of tokens vote on something vote on giving me a whole bunch of money return the tokens didn't cost me anything right i can manipulate the system the other thing that you have to pay attention to is the incentives right so for example uni token right people can vote all day long but they don't get anything for voting and so um participation is quite low the incentives to participate or to think carefully about how you're going to do it are quite low with sov token the way the system is designed is you kind of have to mine the right to vote what does that mean you have to lock up the sov token to be able to vote you give up liquidity but the longer you lock it up for the more voting power you get now this does two things first of all it means that even small token holders can have more power by locking their tokens up for longer second it forces everyone to have a very very long term view right so it forces long-term thinking for the entire system and three it protects the system from short-term attacks and then the incentive system is also aligned around long-term thinking because the longer you're locking your token up for the more revenue you earn from the system so it's sort of a way of instead of becoming a landlord right where you just you don't have to you know you just got a bunch of tokens and you can you can vote with them and you can decide things it's kind of like bitcoin mining you actually have to constantly work constantly spend in order to participate in the governance so you become a service provider instead of sort of like a land bearer interesting very interesting i like that i like that what is the uh i is the biggest challenge in the short term for sovereign is it onboarding users or what would you say is the biggest challenge yeah so i think right now sovereign is you know it's a new protocol um it's um it's got a lot of you know kinks to work out and so it's not the easiest thing to use um it's uh sometimes got you you know especially on the ui it's not always the easiest thing to understand and so i think it's going to be a little bit of time before it really becomes easy to onboard everyone but i the rate at which it's improving is remarkable i don't think i've ever seen anything certainly not in a decentralized space improve at this rate right so i i remember using it a few months ago like five months ago it was basically unusable and now you can go check it out for yourself it's like it's starting to feel like a like like a centralized service so that's definitely like the biggest challenge that said usage is constantly growing uh it turns out that it's a really really sticky protocol so we can see that addresses that interact with it um tend to continue interacting with it at very very high rates um and um and and there's growing traction around it and the developer community that's growing around it is growing at an astounding rate too i actually don't think i think i've only seen this level of excitement in the crypto space twice before so once was the very very earliest days of bitcoin when also was excruciating to try and use bitcoin but it was kind of the best time to get in and then also the very very early days of ethereum when i remember you know vitalik was going from town to town in these meetups and just the level of excitement in the rooms was crazy for something that hadn't hadn't even launched and so i'm extremely optimistic about something because i've seen this happen twice before just the level of energy uh it's crazy and let me ask you this what does success look like for sovereign then in five years you know the bull case what does that look like well i think the first thing that sovereign's going to probably be doing is um bringing that trillion dollars of assets which in five years i think is going to be like 10 trillion dollars of bitcoin assets uh in um you know we've been seeing the amount of bitcoin as a percentage on centralized exchanges dropping now for over a year and a half um we've seen celsius sort of get attacked by the sec coinbase get attacked by the sec uh you know um all of the big lending uh platforms are are are being forced to shut down and uh you know buy bit of pulled out of south korea i think what's going to happen is people um are going to realize that they can't use decentralized services with reliability and we're already starting to see that migration so like you know we've got a lot of people who are using sovereign who tell us you know yeah i was using bitmix right and like i just like then you know they they got indicted i don't know when i don't have my funds there anymore right um so i think that's going to be step one at the same time there's sort of like a current building out these tools which you really haven't seen defy tackle before so there's a project which i think maybe even within the coming year is going to start offering like long-term pensions for people in central america who can't rely on their government so they can't invest in a pension but now because it's controlled by a smart contract they can i think um very soon we're likely to start seeing things happening in el salvador uh i think uh you know we're starting to see you know there's a team from nigeria who are working on fiat off-ramps for africa for remittance so i think there's going to be a lot of like real world use cases that are also going to be happening and it's kind of going to be the same thing as what we saw with bitcoin's growth right so it's like a lot of like the bitcoin industry uh uh growing and at the same time you know remittance and other types of sort of uh use cases that are just real-world use cases growing in parallel very cool it's very exciting um again i encourage everybody to follow up with sovereign uh you know check the links in the description below follow yaga on twitter we'll leave links to all that stuff um i think you know you answered a lot of my questions we just have probably a few more big picture type questions um that i think a lot of people in our audience are curious about um the first one you kind of mentioned this the ussc seems to be circling cryptocurrency the sharks are circulating yeah um is regulation good for crypto do you think regulatory clarity would bring no massive amounts of institutional money into crypto or what do you think about regulations in general sometimes people say that countries will ban bitcoin i think what's really going to happen is that bitcoin is going to ban countries so i think that the current state in it the way it is now is basically a relic of the industrial age right and we feel it all the time right like what's happening with covert now right what happened in 2008 the lack of trust that everyone has in their government the polarization the fact that left and right wing politics just sounds so irrelevant to our lives right on every single level they're they're failing right our institutions are failing can't deal with covert can't deal with global warming can't deal with financial crises like what's going on and what's going on is that our institutions are just simply not designed for a digital digital globalized world and that's what we live in right now so i think it's inevitable that that entire system is going to be replaced uh or at least augmented by the new institutions that we're building in the crypto space institutions like big brand like sovereign and additional things that are being worked on uh and i think that we don't need to be scared about regulation uh because the harder they squeeze the faster this is going to happen and the reason is like let's say you know they put out um you know central bank digital currencies right cbdc's right and people are going to have this immediate thing where they'll be able to say oh wow like this is surveillance money and this is free money right right now they've got cash imagine they get rid of cash right everyone's going to need crypto and then if they try to get crypto it's only going to make people realize more that they need the crypto institutions institutions are all global right now if the u.s says you can't invest in i mean you know u.s corporations we know like the how much corporate tax do they pay zero right we all know that u.s corporations pay zero tax because they're just offshore if the regulations say that u.s corporations can't hold bitcoin they're just offshore the world doesn't work with borders anymore now every major significant player right the corporates the the ngos and ourselves just like now you know we can work remotely from wherever uh uh live in a post-border world so the harder they squeeze the faster it's going to accelerate the process and you know this process is you know it sounds like such a big thing like such a mad idea that we're going to replace big parts of our institutions right but think about it this way it took 12 years only 12 years for us to go from zero to nation state with bitcoin think about what the next 12 years are going to bring because the whole thing is accelerating and as this i totally agree with you that it's going to one it's inevitable especially if you're in the u.s and the harder they squeeze you know the faster this will get done but as they're augmenting this regulation or it's changing if you have like one message for gary gensler as somebody just somebody who's been in this space for a while what would you tell them i i think i have a very simple message for them which is this for the last 20 years we've had the internet everyone thought that the internet was going to create phenomenal productivity growth it was going to increase this rate at which the economy grew because every single corporation every single person was now connected to each other they had digital access and access to information and what did we see for the last 20 years we've seen stagnation this is really weird why did this happen and i think there's a really simple reason the reason is that we had 21st century technology the internet but it was married to iron age institutions there is no private property on the internet you are you are a surf in a feudal system right your emperor is mark zuckerberg or you know jeff bezos they control you the person who owns the servers owns everything you don't have private property now private property and any us uh citizen right knows private property is the source of prosperity it's what incentivizes people to work is what creates innovation um it's it's what drives people uh and and corporations to grow and and and it does that by giving people the assurance that what they create they'll get to keep right so we had this 21st century amazing technology the internet but we tied it to the economic policy of the soviet union and so instead of taking us forwards it took us backwards now now we have digital property rights on the internet right so we now have this 21st century technology which is an infinite frontier right and we have the property rights to go with it we've already seen what that does in just ten years we created a two trillion dollar industry out of nothing we are entering into the greatest period of wealth creation that human beings have ever seen the people who are watching you know altcoin daily are getting a once in a thousand lifetimes opportunity to invest in a point in time when you have an infinite frontier and a new type of protecting property these things don't happen ever right so we're going to see hundreds of millions of trillion hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of wealth created over the next 10 15 years right there's never been an opportunity like this so all i would say to gary is do you want to be part of this a lot it's inevitable i love that and i totally agree that long-term perspective this train is rolling it's happening just a fun question now that we like to ask all our guests but for the end of this year 2021 what's your uh bitcoin price prediction i mean i don't typically look at the price i i i bought my first bitcoins at you know when they were trading at 3.50 right i still haven't sold any uh and that's because i
see this as you know generational wealth you know and that's why i you know i have some ease and i have some of the other things and i use them to experiment and to play but it's not a way that i can save my money right it's not something that i know that my kids or my grandkids will be able to inherit um so i don't really care but uh whatever it is now 10 exit by the end of this year i mean by the end of this year i wouldn't be i mean i i wouldn't be surprised to see at a quarter million dollars by the end of the year damn i love it so you're telling me that you know you've been in bitcoin a long time and you've never sold any significant amount i've never sold no i mean like i've maybe sold a few hundred dollars worth of bitcoin i love that will you i mean i'm never going to have to sell like you gotta sovereign i'm not going to be able to borrow against my bitcoin at zero percent interest like true you never have to sell bitcoin that's like it that is the asset you know every generation has to make one good decision your grandparents had to decide to go to college they did that they could fudge up everything else they'd be fine your parents had to decide to buy a house didn't matter how much they were underwater on the mortgage if they bought a house in the 80s they're millionaires today our generation has an even bigger opportunity just by bitcoin right doesn't matter what you do you're going to end up with fudge you money i love that and that brings me to my final question if you're a new investor coming into this space today what's a piece of advice you would give that new investor be an investor not a speculator right so speculation is fun and it's cool but you have to remember it's a casino right so so so you only put casino money in right bitcoin is your savings account 80 or more should be in bitcoin the amount that you allocate to speculating on other things that's casino money when you get into this like most of people come in in bull markets there's a lot of excitement and everyone has fantasies of getting rich right there are very few ways to get ric to get poor quicker than trying to get rich quick right the people that i know and and have met along this journey that i've been on for the last 10 years who have really made it are the people who have taken a long-term view and have acted in the most boring way possible and not just with bitcoin but with the other assets as well you know people who have taken a long-term view on ethereum so don't be a speculator be an investor interesting i love that and not to put you on the spot but also just maybe to go a step further let's say you were talking with your buddy at the bar who's a more experienced investor someone closer to somebody who's been in the space for a long time what's a piece of advice you may give him are you someone who's been in the crypto space you meet yeah like this you know like a more experienced investor now because that was really good advice i think for a new uh you know person in cryptocurrency but like for a more experienced person yeah so what i would do for that person is i would go back to what i said earlier don't think of this as technology think about this as building institutions right the paradigm has changed we're not building the internet anymore we're building what comes after the internet right we're building the property rights for an internet age so when you're looking at opportunities to invest in space there are hidden gems right those are the things that are building fundamentally new institutions that are going to be valuable and reliable into the future i love that um iago thank you so much for joining us today i feel i have such a better understanding of sovereign and all the all the infrastructure that's being built would you just give final thoughts for the altcoin daily audience and final thoughts about sovereign yeah so i i would say this um the great thing about bitcoin the genie or one of the many genius things that satoshi did right is that it's a debt-free scheme dressed up as a get rich quick scheme right so get rich but the real thing here the real valuable thing is to is to become sovereign is to become the master of your own destiny to be able to help yourself your family and the people close to you achieve what they want to achieve so at the end of the day i think the real opportunity here is to stay sovereign hell yeah everybody needs to check out sovereign check out the user interface try it out for yourself um if you're if you wanna you know do that uh i think it's an awesome product follow yago on twitter and uh you know we'll be we'll be keeping our audience updated on sovereign for sure thanks for coming on today ago thanks for having me it's been awesome
2021-09-29