When it comes to blockchain technology, 'Sustainability' has become the new mantra. Leveraging carbon credits is leading the solutions menu to making the tech greener. But how do you buy carbon credits or even know that the cred is actually sourced the way its said it is? Answering these questions and more is Nick Edmonds the Head of Developer Ecosystem at TOPL protocol. From tokenizing your data that you can monetize to building a system that 'rewards the truth' this interesting conversation switches form Finance, to tech stock to blockchain in the same time it takes to validates notes.. PS: There a story gem in that too🙂... Tune in for more.

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TOPL

Participants:

• JP (CMO of AdLunam)

• Nick Edmonds (Head of Developer Ecosystem at TOPL protocol)

00:22

JP

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Welcome to this episode of Diving into Crypto. This is JP from AdLunam Inc. Bringing you everything about web3. AdLunam is the world's first NFT integrated IDO platform where we use an Engage to Earn mechanism where you are awarded for the attention that you put into the projects that you want to invest in the show today. On the show today, we have Topl protocol, and representing Topl is Nick Edmonds, who is the head of the developer ecosystem. They're doing some fantastic work, and I'm going to let them tell you all about the wonderful stuff that they're doing in the spaces that they're doing that in. And before we begin, I'd like to remind everybody views expressed on this program belonging to that of the speaker and is meant for educational purposes only, not to be considered financial advice. If we get cut off, please jump back into or search for the AdLunam Twitter handle and you'll find yourself a new link to jump back onto the show.

01:24

JP

At the end of the show, we have a segment for question and answers for our audience. If you'd like to ask the speaker a question or if you find something that they have said that you want to get more information about, you can go to AdLunam Inc. And ask a question, or you can ask a question to the speaker directly. That being said, ladies and gentlemen, strap in and let's get ready to take off on this episode of Diving into Crypto. Nick, thank you so much for being here. Understand that you're based out of Houston. Welcome to the show and thank you for accepting our invitation.

02:03

Nick

Yeah, of course. Thank you. Yeah. Originally from Houston, now currently living in, you know, getting a little hot, but it's fun.

02:11

JP

All right, summer's kicking in. Nick, tell us a little about what got you into the Web3 space. I mean, a little about your background and what got you into the Web3 space.

02:26

Nick

03:34

Nick

It was a little esoteric for me at the time, so my dad actually ended up getting set up on his computer and ran it for a couple of weeks. We still have the hard drive somewhere, we have no idea if how much Bitcoin might actually be on there, but I was a busy high school and then college student working full time most way through high school all the way through college, so didn't have a lot of free time to continue doing crypto on the side. I was focused entirely on my studies. So once I got towards the end of college, that's where I actually ended up co-founding a VR startup coming right out of college. And then Chris Georgian, our co-founders, actually, I met him at a career fair and I was learning a programming language called Scala at the time. And he was surprised because it's not a very well used, I shouldn't say well known, it's not a widely used language, but it's a great language for distributed systems.

04:42

Nick

05:31

JP

Awesome. Okay, and I'm curious to understand, was there a specific point at which you decided that Web3 is a space to be for me? I know that you found an initial interest, but then you also have the VR startup then juggling it, but there must have been a tipping point, right? There must have been a tipping point. What was it like?

05:56

Nick

Yeah, so I'm glad you asked that because this has often been a thing I've thought back on because the VR startup was focused on gamifying physical therapy. So we're trying to build a better experience for people going through physical therapy to get them to want to do their exercises and actually see some real results. And this was a big point. And the reason I joined Topl in the first place was I was seeing a lot of people being left out of being able to actively participate. Like were creating this thing and it was going through classifying a VR device as a Class B medical device and all the regulations and stuff that comes along with that. On the one hand, great to have those. On the other hand, if there's something that could be immediately helping somebody. I want to make sure that gets into their hands as quickly as possible and as safely as possible without having to go through these slower processes.

07:05

Nick

08:36

Nick

One of the things that surprised me, which is a very small and simple thing, is everybody's credit cards in Europe had chips. Like, that was the normal thing and I was the weird one for having a credit card without a chip. And so that was the first time I was really introduced to this idea of, wow, there's a technology that's widely available in other countries that is better than what the US Has, and it's because they were slower to adopt credit cards in Europe, but they leapfrogged over the US. Because they had the better technology to implement it at the end. And that's what we're seeing now is all these other countries are leapfrogging because they're able to implement better financial systems because they just need to use it now. They don't need to wait.

09:30

JP

Yeah, it's ironic even.

09:34

Nick

Yeah. But I'm definitely excited to see where this takes us because I really believe that there's a lot of people that are doing a lot of good things with it right now. And I continually have these conversations with people in the US. They're like, Well, I don't use crypto. I don't know anybody that does. I'm like, Well, I know tons of people use crypto. You just don't interact with them because you live in the US.

10:02

JP

Okay, yeah. I'd imagine that would be something common. It's only 5% of the world that's really into crypto, right. In some way, shape or form, whether it's in every way, it's like just 5% of the world's really adopted it. So you're bound to find people that are not familiar with. How does it work, what you should look for. There'll be tons of friends, and I'm certain that this is something that resonates with everybody. There'll be tons of friends that tell you, oh no, invest in real estate, go ahead, invest in your mainstream financial products. Don't look at crypto, it's too risky. I've just had a friend last night tell me it's so risky and aggressive. If that's okay with your investment profile, then go ahead and invest in crypto. And I was just talking to him about, hey, this is the work. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're bound to get a lot of people tell you that, but what is it that you say to them, Nick?

11:10

Nick

So I would say there's also two different paths to go down there, depending on who I'm talking to. Sorry. The first one is on the direct investment side, but more so because we've gotten that question for years of like anytime crypto crashes and everybody comes to us and they're like, oh, are you going to make it? Are you guys going to be okay? And it's like, well, yeah, because we've been building an entire blockchain from scratch around Impact Finance. So in building a blockchain we work at typically a lower level than building a DeFi application or an NFT platform or something like that. We're building the entire underlying layer that's supporting all of those projects. But what that also means is when it comes to volatility in the markets, we've primarily only been working with companies that aren't in web3 in the first place.

12:12

Nick

So when the global markets take a hit, yes, that is a concern. But when the crypto markets take a hit, it's generally not as much of a concern for us, because we're so focused on more so like data. Acquisition collection and incentivization. And we're focused on the actual data and what people are putting into the system and how they can use it more so than just the investment side of it. So that's the first piece of it. The second piece is for the investment side. This is part of the reason we've been working so hard on creating our own versions of stablecoins and creating stability in the system itself is to make sure that price shocks like that don't affect the people on our system. But for the actual investment side, the biggest thing there that I see is increasing liquidity is tokenizing data and tokenizing money is at the end of the day, you're increasing liquidity.

13:17

Nick

And what that liquidity is doing is you're creating better risk pools where people can pool their money together and minimize the risk across the board for everybody involved. So it's easier to make investments, it's easier to invest in things because it's a lower risk for everybody involved in larger and more liquid pools because the problem that you run into, and if you're in the startup space, this is one of the main things they always say is why do startups fail? Because they run out of money. Yeah. So that goes hand in hand with the idea of a startup is you're continually trying to iterate improve and pivot on your core idea to better serve your customers. So as long as you're following that track and as long as you have money, you're going to eventually reach that endpoint where you've created a product or a company or a goal that you are actually serving your customers to the best of your abilities and you're making money doing that.

14:21

Nick

The only thing stopping you is you need enough money to get there.

14:26

JP

Indeed. Indeed. That's the right focus. Most startups have to really understand between your development, between your acquisition, and then also understanding at the same time that finance is something that you have to watch out for, which is not always common with most startups. Do you see that happening?

15:02

Nick

Yeah, especially in the crypto space. It's been hard to kind of tamp down or keep people focused on the goals of it's fun to buy in the hype, it's fun to buy into the bull market, but at the end of the day, like you're trying to build something real. So it's definitely been challenging at times to see go to crypto events, go to meetups, go to conferences and everybody's so excited and it's like how do we keep that energy going through times now, which I have actually seen this time around has been great, is that energy has really stuck around of everybody knows they need to build now.

15:53

JP

16:42

Nick

Yeah, I think you're right. That because people have been through the cycles and stuck through them and we still see the same faces that have been through multiple cycles. That it's one of those things that trust just has to be built up over time. There's no other way around it. The longer you see the same people sticking around the space that are doing good things, that are building the technology and making sure that people are actually able to use it's just going to take time. And I constantly hear people make that comparison to the Internet. The early days, the Internet, where we had ARPANET starting in like 69, and it didn't take until 92 before we had the World Wide Web. And then that was basically Web1 until it started Web2 in the late 90s and then really started taking off. And then you had boom bus cycles.

17:49

Nick

18:39

JP

19:50

JP

Earlier it was just the principles, the facets that make something web3 have changed the game and have changed the perspective so drastically from what it was before and we're playing with that system now, right? So in this particular space, rather through that particular trend, there's a whole new track that's opened up, there's a whole new blue ocean that's opened up.

20:22

Nick

I like that term, blue Ocean. Yeah, I wanted to bring up because this has been from my perspective, this is one of my favorite things being a developer, first and foremost is what it's been doing for the open source software space. So this idea of public goods that we have these walled gardens, we have these closed off communities, these closed off software ecosystems that back in the 90s it was normal that if you wanted to use a compiler to compile code for your desktop, you had to buy a compiler, you had to pay money to compile your own code. And that's still a thing in some respect today. But we're quickly getting a space where it's becoming more and more common, that almost everything you use is open source software. But with that comes its own inherent challenges that when you say open source software, typically it's a lot of people, developers that are building things and most likely not being compensated for that or not being compensated fairly.

21:40

Nick

So this has been something especially being in the crypto space that both at Topple but also in my personal life been following very closely, is things like Gitcoin and retroactive funding as of late, where you have people that can build tools that millions of people rely on every day. And they may have not seen a dime for that, but there's groups out there that are now saying, well, what if we just retroactively? What if we just went back and gave them funding for building that tool because they did really good work and they deserve to be compensated for it. And this is something completely new. This is something that doesn't happen normally. And there's this idea of when it comes to public goods that things like Ethereum are being built out in the open by people that are both compensated, not that are building this system that now exists outside of anybody.

22:45

Nick

So it's just a thing that exists that anybody has access to and truly is a public good. The public is investing their time and money to keeping this thing going and it's in the interest of the public. You can have selfish reasons for using something like Ethereum. Whether you want to make money, you want to get clout, you want to show off. But at the end of the day, it's out in public and anything you're doing to support it is supporting it for the rest of the public.

23:26

JP

Yeah, that's the downside, I suppose, to the cost, right? But again, if there is a system of this really is able to take off like it should, I'm certain you'll have a lot more interest, you'll have a lot more people who will apply their time because they feel valued for it to develop things that they actually have a passion for. And you know that the best stuff comes out only when people do that.

23:52

Nick

Right? I'm really hoping that I'm still finding the ways to contribute more to things like retroactive funding because it really is going to create this flywheel of if people have that expectation of, oh, if I create a new library for code and I contribute to open source projects, is that it may come back to me. All that work that I did for free is not just going to be thrown away, that it may be worth something someday. Typically for developers, you're doing a lot of work for free in your spare time to get a better job or because you're curious or you're building something with friends or you're an academic researcher. And a lot of that code is just sitting out there, and it could be useful to somebody, but it's hard to tell if it's useful. And if somebody starts paying money for it or retroactively funding it, then it's an easier signal to other people that code is useful and important to use.

24:58

JP

Yeah, I think we onto something here. And I really should really look at some ways in which that can get out to be more mainstream. Though, that being said, when you have these communities, especially communities of developers, communities of people who have an interest, communities of maybe people who just have a base interest because of academics, right, or just want to sharpen some skills, Topl's orientation is, of course, in many ways to reach out to these groups. How do the two mix?

25:37

Nick

Right? Thank you for asking. So to kind of put a different spin on this, we view, or at least I view through topple, that data should be treated almost the same way that you have so much data that's streaming through right now. It's one of the quickly, if not the largest thing that's being sold on the Internet right now is your data. And I think people are not being fairly compensated for that. There's plenty of businesses, especially out there, that have data locked up in databases that could really be made more public and for better reasons. So one of the things that we focused on over the years is basically making it easier for people to collect and structure their data and then be able to publicly commit that data and say something about that data in public. So taking this idea of open source software, open source data is really taking tokenizing data and treating it as a commodity that makes for better marketplaces when it comes to that data.

26:58

Nick

So if we take like, carbon credits as an example, I like it because carbon credits are in a lot of people's heads, something that's pretty tokenizable anyways, and that's how a lot of people treat it. But carbon credits, I think, are a great example for this, where you have essentially a large problem with trust, where, for instance, I find it hard to buy carbon credits. I go look on websites, I go look for resources on how do I actually accurately evaluate if a carbon credit is legitimate or not. If I want to offset my own carbon, how do I actually go do that and make sure I'm actually doing something? And it's not just I'm giving money to some company. That's all hype and marketing. And the best thing that I could find is I have to be able to see the data, but more importantly, be able to interpret that data for myself.

28:02

Nick

So there's two problems. There is I need to know that the data itself is legitimate in the first case, and then I still need to be able to say, okay, well, there's a lot of data here, but it doesn't mean anything if I don't know how to interpret it in a way that makes sense to me. And so that's what I mean by both. The data collection part needs to improve, but also the data structuring. So creating a more intuitive data layer for people to read. And the way I see us achieving that is through better open marketplaces where you can actually make determinations on the data itself and the quality of the data based on price data. So what I mean is, if you have, let's say, two carbon credits, one is talking about basically, let's say you have 2 trees, 1 ha, where you are sequestering both you're sequestering carbon and you're saying x amount of carbon credits are being sequestered over the next five years through this hectare of land.

29:17

Nick

And then you're selling those carbon credits to people and saying, well, I'm going to collect this amount of data about those trees over time. But really what they're telling you is they're telling you the type of tree, they're telling you when they planted it and maybe some geographical data.

29:41

JP

Right.

29:42

Nick

Then you have the second Hector, which an entirely different company is doing the same exact thing, but they're scanning the trees with LiDAR, with drones that they're capturing the exact height of those trees and being able to calculate exactly how large those trees are to better figure out exactly how much carbon is being captured by all of those trees in that hectare. Now, much more expensive for the second one. Flying drones with LiDAR around, not cheap. So this is the problem that we ran to, though, is if you want to do the second case, it's not cheap. And the company that wants to do this really wants to do this, but they have to pay for it. And so they're going to need some sort of upfront capital expenditure to even get started with that. So how do we provide the resources to that group to start doing that now, rather than doing it the first way, hoping they get enough money from the first way with the less data to then do the second way?

30:55

JP

Yeah.

30:57

Nick

So if they can basically make commits that they will take this money and do it. And this is where the risk part comes into play. And this is also something with hyperserts. And what they're doing with Gitcoin's current round of funding with their grant program right now is basically you're making claims that you're going to do something, it's very clear what you're going to do and why you need that money. So it's still a bet that people are making that you're going to take that money and do something with it. But what you're getting return is you're getting more clarity and more insight into what those groups are actually doing.

31:44

JP

Yeah.

31:45

Nick

And this is the difference, this reduces the risk for both parties, is if you make it easier to get funding and see where that funding is coming from, companies are more comfortable to do the thing that they want to do. And then on the other side, if the people can see what the company wants to do before they start doing it and decide if they want to invest or not, it makes it a lot easier to invest.

32:14

JP

True, indeed. Yeah.

32:17

Nick

And if you can spread it across larger groups of people, you really reduce the risk. If I'm donating $5 here, $5 there to different projects, I'm not as worried if one fails versus if I put $500 in a project and completely goes bust. So if I create a better incentivization program to kind of spread the wealth and give it to multiple different projects, especially in the impact space, because you have so many different projects that are doing so many good things, and you're not going to solve it by doing just one thing. We're not going to solve climate change by just doing carbon sequestration. There's so many other things we need to do. And so it aligns very well with this incentivization of create better liquidity for the companies that need it to do the impact that they actually want to do and then create an easier way for them to essentially give you a return on that investment in the form of we can show you that your money actually is having this impact, and then possibly an actual monetary return at the end, too, depending on what you're actually investing in.

33:35

JP

You've piqued my curiosity about something. I mean, obviously, like you said before, right, going back to the first part of it, finding a way in which you can buy carbon credits, there is no Amazon.com for carbon credits, is there?

33:54

Nick

There's claims.

33:57

JP

All right.

33:58

Nick

Yeah.

34:00

JP

Okay. So then I guess the second part is, and this is interesting that you mentioned, right? How do you validate in a space like this where you have effectively and I'm using this term very loosely, zero trust, where it comes to you actually have to have a sort of system where people can understand that there is some validation to the claims being made. How does that due diligence process go about? I mean, how do you know for a fact that somebody's actually doing that? Or even if they look, is there some data points that we have to watch out for? Because I'm certain everybody in this room understands about climate change, and in many ways they want to contribute to it. And to those listeners out there who really feel strongly about this would want to know if I'm going to spend even a dollar on a company that says that they are going to reduce my carbon footprint in some way, shape or form, I want to know that what they're saying is actually what's happening.

35:12

JP

Is there some way to do that Nick?

35:13

Nick

Right, so I actually asked this question, I feel like, a fair amount because being a developer, this has often been a thing where I understand. How hard it is to build a blockchain because I've built one. And I know all of the hard cryptography and how easily it is to slip up and create a gaping security hole just in the blockchain. And smart. Contract side of things, let alone when you build up that stack and you get all the way to the point of something like a carbon credit, there's all these other factors under the surface. And so this is a question I've asked people on my team, other people that are I would say not nontechnical, I say, but less than technical of like if you're not a developer, what attracted you to the crypto space? Or I shouldn't say what attracted you.

36:17

Nick

But this is the question I ask people is how do you evaluate what is a legitimate project, what's not? And the answer across the board is just really hard and you just don't really know because a lot of these tools and a lot of things are being built by and for programmers, which makes sense. But the language used and the way to interact with it can be very esoteric or be very unintuitive because of the way that the underlying system itself works.

36:50

JP

Right?

36:51

Nick

And just trying to explain how a hierarchical deterministic wallet works is fun. But what I'd say is this is where we've really tried to expose things using our blockchain. We really tried to expose a lot of that kind of in a different way. We've taken different architectural approaches to kind of make that part. The focus is less based on users and accounts and more based on the data itself and the integrity of the data. Now, the follow up from that is when I say integrity of data, you still suffer from the trash in, trash out problem. If people put trash data in, you're going to get trash data coming out. So blockchains are not something that you can use to solve for fraud. They are something that are fantastic at reducing fraud.

37:51

JP

Right?

37:52

Nick

This isn't a problem that I think blockchains are suited for and I think we've often been accused of trying to solve that problem in the past when we aren't. But because of if you have a system, somebody's going to try and game the system and there's always going to be inefficiencies there that people can take advantage of. Now, the best things you can do to combat that are both make it more efficient, but also align incentives to reduce both the chances and the need for people to lie. So when people are trying to game the system, they're trying to gain an edge, they're trying to do something usually to make money. Now, if you create better incentives where you either heavily, directly disincentivize people from lying or from committing fraud or it's a carrot and stick thing, you can either whack them with the stick and say bad, you shouldn't do that.

38:57

Nick

Like slashing for Ethereum's proof of stake, or you can offer the carrot instead and say, well, you have no reason to. Like, sure, you can lie as much as you want, but it's not going to make you any more money, and it's really not going to make you money. But if you tell people the truth, you can continue making money. And that's really the direction we've taken, is less the stick and more the carrot is, sure, you can do that once, you can lie once, and then you have to keep up that lie forever, because that is the part where blockchains are useful, is the data is there and you can't get rid of it. So as soon as you lie, you now have to keep up and commit to that lie. But if you just don't lie in the first place, you can continue making money in the system.

39:44

Nick

And so it's less about disincentivizing people from lying and saying there's really no use for it. You're going to run into trouble down the road and you're going to get caught. And that's really where we tried to focus, is the getting caught part. It goes hand in hand with that intuitive notion of if I can see the data, if I can interpret and understand that data much more clearly easily, then I know what I'm working with. I don't have to be standing there feeling like I'm looking at the matrix with all these numbers flying by and go, yeah, I think I understand what's going on.

40:31

JP

That's quite a picture right there.

40:35

Nick

Yeah, this is why we've taken some different decisions as far as the underlying architecture when it comes to where UTXO based blockchain versus account based, where UTXO being unspent transaction outputs similar to Bitcoin, where every transaction you make has a certain set of inputs and certain set of outputs. And when you go to create a transaction on our chain, you always understand your outputs. You see them before you even give it to the nodes to validate. So you always know what the end result looks like. You always know who's going to get the money or who's going to get the tokens. Whereas in something like EVM Smart contracts, you're running a virtual machine where you don't know the outputs until you run it. This is a problem when it comes to things like MEV, maximal or minor extractable value, where if you're working with a decentralized exchange, people are doing this gaming the system, they're scraping money off the top or skimming money from you because you can't see the outputs until after you submit the order, after you submit the transaction.

41:52

Nick

And we've tried very hard over the years to say, how do we create a system where it's very clear? Like, sure, for somebody that has 100 ETH, losing 0.1 ETH is not a big deal on every single transaction. But for somebody in sub Saharan Africa where even losing a couple of cents every transaction destroys your business. It's huge. Yeah.

42:21

JP

Indeed.

42:23

Nick

That's really where it comes down to, is making it clear inputs and outputs and then being able to see that data through the lifecycle of the data.

42:30

JP

Okay. It's interesting that's the orientation that Topl has, the entire team seems to be so focused on let me see if I can find the right phrase here. Effectively, what I'm trying to say is that there's a large orientation when it comes to, of course, data. The second part also, I see in some of the literature that you have on each side also, where you say that the blockchain consumes 10 million times less energy than the earlier blockchains. And you're able to track I love how you say this, right? You're able to track cocoa from a farm to a chocolate bar and diamonds from mine to marriage. And of course, these are two separate tracks. One is, of course, focusing on energy efficiency, and the second one is the efficiency of how the blockchain works. I guess one of the points that I'm curious about is, of course, the energy reduction.

43:38

JP

What are some of broadly, I mean, you don't have to share your secret sauce per se, but what are some of the things that you're doing that should set the industry standard to make blockchain more efficient.

43:55

Nick

So everything is open source that we do. So we actually don't have secret sauce, which I love, other than you might not be able to understand some of the technical papers, but that's fine. I don't understand some of it either, but yeah. So one of the main things that we focus on is creating what we call regularized proof of stake. So creating a proof of stake system that has no lower bounds. So you can stake as much or as little as you want. So disincentivizing staking pools, but also regularizing it in the sense of being able to handle high latency situations and a lot of people around basically a large set of nodes, thousands of nodes around the world, being able to fully sync up to the chain very quickly. And then the electricity and the power part of it comes into we've been able to get it down to a Raspberry Pi.

45:11

Nick

So we had one of our engineers, or blockchain engineer, Sean, he built his own van to live in. And while he's building his van, he has a solar panel and Raspberry Pi and was like, hey, what if I just did like a live stream where I had a node running on this Raspberry Pi and just set out in a field. He also has Starlink for Internet for his van. So he's like, what if I just have this Raspberry Pi hooked up to Starlink running off a solar panel and a battery and I could just set it out in a field and it can just sync up with the chain. And so he did this on a live stream months ago and now he's gotten it to the point where he's like, I wonder if I could fit this inside of a Chrome extension inside of a web browser.

45:59

Nick

So we're testing that out and we might be able to get it to fit a full node into a web browser. And so this is think Ethereum full node where because of some of the other scalability things we've done like off chain smart contracts, you don't need terabytes of data on your laptop to run this node in your web browser. You just need your web browser and a decent I shouldn't even say a decent laptop because it can run Raspberry Pi. Then any laptop should be able to run, no problem. But we really focused on that from the beginning because were like, we want people running nodes everywhere. We want not just from being able to participate in the staking process, but also be able to participate in the data process is you need easy access to nodes because if you're in places with intermittent Internet connectivity, this is the other thing too.

46:56

Nick

That's why we have off chain smart contracts and UTXO based transactions is I can create those transactions entirely without Internet. Typically you're going to want Internet at some point to submit the transaction to the rest of the chain. But theoretically I can create side channels, state channels and stuff like that off to the side using off chain smart contracts, run a bunch of transactions, make a single commit at the end, take that commit, once I get Internet again, pop it onto the chain and now it's all there. And so that's been the focus the entire time is how do we create this that actually is accessible to everybody and not just have all these nodes running a data center that you need $100,000 of minimum stake just to run? Anybody can run this.

47:50

JP

Well, it does seem you've made it simpler for larger communities to buy into the program or not necessarily buy into the program to get with it, at least. At the very least, right? And maybe there's some of these programs that when I say program, I mean of course, like an outreach kind of way where you can invite more people to be part of that. Is that something that you'll do on a regular basis? Is that something you'll consider doing?

48:23

Nick

49:13

Nick

And then once we're finally feeling comfortable, which you're never going to be comfortable, you'll finally get to that point, you can maybe release it. And so we're finally decentralizing at the end of this year and over the summer, that's where we're going to be running workshops, we're going to be running incentivized test nets. We're really going to start building that up right now, actually leading up to this decentralization event where now we're asking the community to come help us and build with us from the Web3 side of things. We've worked all this time with web2 and non web companies. Now we're really reaching out in the Web3 space saying, all right, now we feel comfortable enough that we can take care of the people we've been working with. Let's invite everybody else in.

50:06

JP

Okay, fair enough. I think that's going to be an exciting shift. And considering that you'll have been so contrary to other have a contrarian approach to some of the other protocols that are out there, that's certainly something that is exciting. I think a lot of people would look forward to that.

50:32

Nick

Right.

50:32

JP

It also works its way, I believe, in many ways into mass adoption, and this could be one of the easiest ways to do that because that's of course, one of the challenges in Web3. How do you look at to be honest, it's cumbersome for newcomers to jump in, to understand how it works, to get onto, even set up a new wallet. Right. It's not the same across the world. In some places it's so easy, and in many other places it's just not there. So this does seem to be a great way to get people into the mass adoption idea.

51:10

Nick

Yeah, I mean, we really have a long way to go on that still not just Topl, but I think the rest of the space there's really a lot more user experience, a lot more things we can build, just make this whole process easier for people to interact with. But we're getting there. I'm optimistic.

51:28

JP

Well, it seems you're on the right track. That's good. Coming back to one of the things that you said earlier, when it comes to impact technology, right. I know that this is a very broad term, but specifically at Topple, what do you guys focus on when it comes to impact technology? Are there certain spaces that you are in, certain spaces that you'll stay away from or that you are best suited for? Broadly, just broadly.

52:01

Nick

53:14

Nick

We're the experts on the blockchain side of things, but we need people that are carbon credit experts or experts on sustainable regenerative farming practices or everything. But that really is the thing is I'm glad you asked the question of industries we stay away from because it goes back to that earlier point of we've been careful to kind of work with the companies that we want to work with and not just invite anybody and everybody. Because at first it started with well, we don't have the resources to help you all figure this out because we don't think it's a good use case in the first place, right? Or it doesn't really hit what we're trying to accomplish here. In fact, this is detrimental to the impact space, it's not helpful. But once we get to decentralization, we can't even ask that question anymore. We can't say is there an industry or is something that exists, something we can't allow on our chain.

54:30

Nick

And outside of any of the technical implications of building a blockchain, that's something we can't say no to. And so that's been a key focus for us over the years is how do we actually build something? I mean, we've at times talked about entirely cutting out DeFi and a lot of the financial side of it, because we're like, let's focus on the data. Let's focus on better data collection, better tokenization, and cut out a lot of this decentralized finance because of all of the scams we've been singing over the years, all of the technical hacks and challenges. And that's where we looked at different solutions of why went with DAML. So digital asset modeling language is a smart contract. Programming language. We've been integrating into our blockchain. And this is when I say off chain smart contracts, that's one of it is we've been looking at different solutions for creating better smart contracts, for more secure smart contracts, for things that are easier to understand and to it for people, but also to kind of give more control to the user directly.

55:49

Nick

So things like native tokens. So off chain smart contracts, native tokens, things that exist where you wholly own these things like nobody else owns it but you. I don't have to go to a smart contract and query for the tokens I own. The blockchain itself is holding all the tokens I own in my wallet. So if I open up my wallet, I immediately see every single token that's in my wallet versus something like if I go to MetaMask, I have to import my tokens because it has no real knowledge of all of the different smart contracts and all the queries it has to make and all the data has to go all the computation has to run just to go find all the tokens I might own. It kind of flips it on its head and says, well, here's the set of all tokens in the system, and here's your subset of those, and you have the lock on those boxes.

56:52

Nick

So we've been working on ways to create because extols are great for essentially you have a box and you put a lock on it, and that lock usually is just your public private key pair. Right, right. Same thing in Ethereum, but only for Ether. This extends to all tokens. So if I create a token through a smart contract and it ends up in my wallet, depending on how that token was created, it could still end up with just my public key attached to that box. And so even though it was created through a smart contract, I have free rein to transfer it to anybody I want to do anything I want with it because it's my token, it's nobody else's.

57:36

JP

Right.

57:37

Nick

So that's where we tried to focus when it comes to some of the security aspects and giving people more ownership over what they actually have, what they own on chain.

57:48

JP

Fair enough, fair enough. Okay, well, there are so many more questions that I do have, but we are at the end of the show, so I guess the last one that I have to ask you is what is your personal philosophy? What gets you out of bed every morning and says, this is what I want to do today? What's your personal philosophy?

58:16

Nick

I mean, really having that feedback loop of feeling like I'm making a difference in helping people is the best way that I feel like I can maximize my time to help as many people as possible. That's what gets me out of bed every morning.

58:32

JP

Awesome. Nick, thank you so much for being on the show. And thank you to your team at Know more power to you guys, and I'm looking forward to the stuff that you guys are going to launch and do this coming summer.

58:45

Nick

Yeah, thank you very much, JP, for having me on.

58:48

JP

Glad to have you here. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being on the show. We'll be back next week at the same time in the same space to bring you another episode of Diving into Crypto. Thank you so much. Have a great day wherever you are. This is JP from AdLunam Inc. bringing you everything about web3. Have a good one.

59:06

Nick

Cheers.

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