REPLACE PROOF OF WORK

“We actually see it used, you know, from at the very smallest end, like someone who's paying, you know, 25¢ for a digital object in a digital game that's built on a blockchain. Or even now, we're starting to see, AI agents that are paying for, the output of essentially the AI tokens of another AI agent, and they're, you know, spending, again, just, you know, a dollar 50¢, 20¢, etcetera. So super tiny transactions at one end all the way to the largest electronic trading firms in the world that do huge amounts of of capital markets activity who are, you know, settling multi $100,000,000 transactions. And the powerful thing is it's all the same.”

“The other piece is that it's sort of designed with real money, as the foundation. So there's not like a volatile gas token. USDC is actually the default native token, which is now, under the law, essentially, like a legal form of electronic money. So you have real dollars as the way that people understand. And so to a company that's, like, doing this, it's like, I pay AWS credits. I understand how to budget for that, my treasury, my operations, my compliance, etcetera.”

“It does feel like, we have the potential for double digit GDP numbers in the 2030s. Like, that's that seems not unrealistic to me. Not that that's gonna be uniform all around the world, but certainly, in large large parts of the world, that seems very, achievable, based on what I see. The risk here is that GDP, effectively, like, the GDP growth is a sort of capital capturing more capital at the at the expense of of humans. Like, that's the real risk.”

“I'm very proud because, there there are tokenized, stocks that are out there, and the most, active tokenized stock today is not Tesla. It's it's not the S and P index. It's actually Circle. So that was cool to see. We also, you know, have seen this growth in, like, tokenized money markets. So basically, like, on chain treasury bills, we actually operate the largest tokenized treasury, product called USYC.”

“Blockchains are operating systems, and they have compute engines. They have virtual machines, and you can write Turing complete code. You can write software that runs on these, but there's some really key attributes that make them different. So the the first is that the code is is sort of tamper resistant. The second is it's perfectly auditable. You can audit every single input and output of that machine, of that code in real time.”

“In the 1930s, there was a really big debate about, like, what's the right construct for the banking system and the financial system. And, there was a a proposal from a group of economists, called the Chicago Plan, and, the kind of ringleader was a Chicago economist. Actually, it might have been a Yale economist or Princeton at the time, but, Irving Fisher, who wrote a book called A Hundred Percent Money. And that idea was that full reserve money was essentially, you know, government obligation money. So you have kind of a full reserve, and you can only lend full reserve money.”

“In that world, we need a different infrastructure for the financial intermediation layers. Why? Well, we don't have an infrastructure that can support that. We don't have an infrastructure that can, work globally, interoperably, instantly, that can be, programmed, through software layers by arbitrary pieces of software that doesn't exist. We need an infrastructure where the agents themselves can, dynamically create and spin up, different kind of financial endpoints themselves. We need transactions that can scale potentially into the, you know, billions or trillions of transactions.”

“If I use as a reference point, like, you know, I spent a long time building on the early Internet and the early nineties and the early web and, like, all this stuff all the way up until, like, 2001 for, like, you know, for me, it was, like, ten years. And it was still it was, like, awful still. Like, it just like kept grinding and it was like, how do we make this useful? And then you had, you know, a whole bunch of things happen that were in the background, like, you know, Wi Fi, broadband, you know, you finally got like usable, other Internet connected devices, and you could actually really start to do stuff. But it was, like, ten years in the desert or longer before you could even get there. And I kinda feel that way about the blockchain space.”

“Proof of work, obviously, it was itself an innovation and and sort of, essentially, like, the exhaust of the proof of work of Bitcoin is is just, like, the exhaust of energy consumption. And so it doesn't actually in some ways, it's waste in in a sense. The the energy is is waste. And and so I think the idea of, essentially, like, inference compute, as GPU, inference compute as proof of work. And so the work itself is the inference, and, that as the underlying basis for proof of work, cryptocurrency is pretty interesting, and would would be, you know, potentially something that could align with the kind of monetary principles of something like Bitcoin but actually, be productive, productive proof of work.”