← CRYPTO 101
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- [00:00]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
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- [00:53]
Sponsor/Ad Voice (Gemini/Webroot)
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
- [01:07]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
All right, everyone, welcome back to the Crypto 101 podcast. And man, do we have a special episode in store for all of you here today. We have Jeff Garzick. He is the co founder, one of the co founders of Hemi Labs. He's also one of the earliest and most influential developers in bitcoin's history. He's been around for a long time. He's a legend in the space. And man, Jeff, we're excited to talk to you and talk to you not only about Hemi, but just about your long history with bitcoin. You're kind of a legend in this space.
- [01:40]
Jeff Garzik
Hey, thanks for having me. It'll be a lot of fun to chat.
- [01:43]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Absolutely. So welcome back, everyone. It's good to have you. We hope everyone had a fantastic new year as we are chugging our way into 2026, the crypto space. It doesn't sleep, it doesn't stop. There's no holidays, there's no breaks. And you know, the first instance of crypto doing this all started with bitcoin. And so, Jeff, I mean, you've been around again. You're one of the original architects of bitcoin itself. You know, you've been around for a while working with the thing. Give us some backstory here. What does that mean?
- [02:15]
Jeff Garzik
Sure. So let's go all the way Back to year 2010. Satoshi, still anonymous inventor of bitcoin, had been mining just about solo. There were one or two other people, but just about solo for a year. He started mining January of 2009. And then what I call the great slash dotting happened. Someone I would love to credit them, their name is Forever lost in history, posted to a news4nerds website.
- [02:47]
Sponsor/Ad Voice (Gemini/Webroot)
Org.
- [02:48]
Jeff Garzik
It was a very popular website. 10, 15 years ago, if you were mentioned on Slashdot, your website went down because you got so much traffic. It was the slash dot effect. And Bitcoin got the slash dot effect. Someone posted about Bitcoin, the decentralized currency, and I was a skeptic. I was a no. This is five servers in an Amazon data center owned by Jeff Bezos somewhere. Surely it is, because in my ego, my big computer science brain, I thought, oh, no, there's no way it's truly decentralized. But it was open source. So July of 2010, I saw that post, I clicked, I downloaded the source code, and as any engineer can do, because it's open source. You look under the hood, you look at the code. You don't trust who this anonymous satoshi person is and what they said you trust by verifying. And that's the whole crypto ethos. You get proof. You know, it's not about words. You look at the source code, I looked at the source code. I proved myself wrong. I was blown away. This is a brand new invention. And since I'd already been working on Linux, the open source that powers Android and all the computers in all the data centers, I knew open source. I knew it very well. I've been working under inventor Linus Torvalds for many years. So I just jumped right in. I started making changes, started making changes to bitcoin. Some of them were accepted, but my very first change, rejected. Rejected by Satoshi. He gave me the big reject stamp.
- [04:31]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Can we ask.
- [04:33]
Jeff Garzik
I tried to increase the block size such that we had bitcoin to the level of PayPal, which was 4,000 transactions second. And I was gently explained that, no, this will break consensus. And I was, you know, new and learning all this stuff. But Satoshi kind of explained bitcoin to me in public. You know, you got to swallow your ego and be humble there. But that was, that was a funny intro. But I continued to send patches. It was the open source process of sending, send a patch, get some feedback. If it's good, it goes into bitcoin. If it's not, it gets rejected, it gets revised. That's the standard engineering process. So Satoshi was very welcoming. Satoshi wasn't like, oh, God, Jeff, that was such a crap piece of software that you just submitted. Why are you even on this planet? No, just the total opposite. Very welcoming to myself and many of the other folks because this was brand new. Nobody ever heard of Blockchain before. So he had to explain blockchain to us.
- [05:45]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
So when you say that he said this and that he talked to you or converse with you, how does that happen? How is that possible? Was it over a, you know, one.
- [05:55]
Jeff Garzik
Of these websites or it was all via public forums. A little bit later I did. Now, you know, in hindsight in history have the fortune to converse privately with Satoshi over email. But nobody's heard Satoshi's voice. Nobody knows what Satoshi looks like. It was all public forums back in those days.
- [06:18]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
That's crazy. I mean it's. When you, when you think about the number of people who have spoken to Satoshi in regards to the crypto related things I'm saying, you know, over the course of his life, obviously he's anonymous. You know, millions or thousands of people spoke with him not knowing it. But of the people who know that he was Satoshi, even though you don't know who he was, I mean you can probably think that it's limited to amount of people on one or two, on like one or two hands. I mean that's what I'm thinking. Like it's probably single digits. How long were you able to, to talk to him for? I mean, has he gone dark and you guys don't really talk anymore? Tell us about that. Because everyone thinks, you know, he launched bitcoin and then he just disappeared.
- [07:03]
Jeff Garzik
It was a slow fade is kind of how it happened. But towards the end of 2010 it was clear that bitcoin had momentum. But at the same time it was a little bit of a scary time for software developers. This is a super obscure reference. But in 2010, developers such as myself didn't know whether we were violating United States laws simply by writing software. There's something called the Stamp act and we didn't know that by issuing virtual currency were we violating the Stamp act or some of these other obscure laws that nobody's ever heard of? And so a lot more attention was coming in. There was a WikiLeaks controversy where WikiLeaks famous leak website, they were soliciting donations. Visa, MasterCard, Visa, MasterCard cut them off. And someone on the bitcoin forum was, oh boy, let's you know, use bitcoin for this. And it was right at the moment where WikiLeaks, just to insert a little bit of politics, culture, etc. They revealed a lot of diplomatic secrets of the United States. And so the United States as a government, like the biggest world governments were angry about this thing. And so someone on the bitcoin forum said, let's do bitcoin. Satoshi stepped in and said, no, don't bring it on. Bitcoin is still young. If you invite the attention of Russia, the United States, in very high stakes type of scenarios, they'll just kill bitcoin outright. And so bitcoin's in beta. Bitcoin needs time to grow. Bitcoin needs time to get its feet. That was kind of Satoshi's reaction to the WikiLeaks controversy.
- [08:52]
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- [11:17]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
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- [11:19]
Sponsor/Ad Voice (Gemini/Webroot)
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- [11:23]
Jeff Garzik
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- [11:53]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
I'd have to agree with him. I mean, he's probably right in the sense that this needed to mature and grow and do all the things that it kind of naturally did over the last 15 or so years. So I mean, let's fast forward now. I mean, what's it like been watching crypto, not only bitcoin, but like the entire crypto industry kind of mature over the last 15 years? I mean, there's been lots of upgrades, lots of additions, lots of industries and businesses and all these things. I want to look at both sides. You know, can you give me probably some of the things that you're the most proud of and excited of that have popped up and then maybe some of the things that you've disagreed with that have come out or come up through crypto?
- [12:33]
Jeff Garzik
Sure. I like to make the analogy. I call it Darwin's trowel by fire. Crypto has gone through a number of cycles, and each one of these cycles you have what the economists call the irrational exuberance of we're gonna do back in 2011, 2012. I think that's when litecoin a bitcoin photocopy, one of the first photocopies of bitcoin was launched. That kind of launched the first generation one of Launch youh Token. And looking back, it's hilariously expensive. You had to spin up an entire mining network just to launch a token. Kind of the same thing you do ON Ethereum today. 60,000 Solana coins are launched every day. You had to spin up an entire hash power mining network just to launch a token. That all it did was photocopy Bitcoin. And so that was stepping back. That was the first ICO era was late 2010, 2011. When you go through a cycle of experimentation, people are like, how do I do this? What do I do this? Scammers are like, how do I scam? Moneymakers are like, how do I make money? And there's the hype cycle, the bubble. And then it comes down to Earth. The come down to Earth part is where the survivors are the gems. The survivors are the ones that, you know, that actually makes sense. So there were so many tokens that everyone's forgotten, like cat coin from 2011, things of that nature. But we have to go through these innovation cycles. And I'm a developer, I'm a builder, I'm a dreamer, right? And so we've got to go through a cycle of see what happens, experiment, innovate. And here's venture capital, power law. 95% of those will fail. Maybe 98% of those will fail, but that's okay. That's the process. That 1 or 2% are the gems. They're survivors. So that's where Ethereum came out. Kind of answering your question is like the first cycle, there's like chaos, bs, bs. And then what came out of it was lessons learned. Oh, let's build Ethereum. And Vitalik and the other co founders built Ethereum. And then you had the ICO cycle. Lessons learned. What came out of that defi is defi lending. It actually works. Dexs uniswap. People are bored with dex swapping. I did a dex swap. Yes, I would. That was huge for people in 2014, 2015, 2016. That was the new new. You didn't have to go to a regulated exchange. You didn't have to KYC or go to some scammy Russian exchange. You can just do it transparently on the blockchain. And so the gems of each cycle kind of feed. The next cycle is kind of, you know, the decade plus.
- [15:40]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Look back, I mean, it's true. And we've said this a couple of times on the pod, but people have come in and they always say, oh, if I was around, if I would have known About Bitcoin in 2010, 2011, I would have just gone and bought some. Some. And what they fail to understand is that it's not as easy as it is today to get a hold of. For the people who were around back then, you would remember, you don't just go on the coinbase or open up your brokerage account and buy some. It was a lot harder to get your hands on than it is today, especially if you weren't tech savvy and if you weren't careful because then you go to the wrong place and you try to get some and you get yourself in trouble and, you know, there's just a lot that was going on back then and it was definitely a different landscape.
- [16:25]
Jeff Garzik
But, you know, I'll give you two quick anecdotes. Number one, I know a gentleman. I don't want to name his name, but, well, first name, William. William rented like 40,000 PCs@Amazon.com to mine Bitcoin on CPU, which is like literally the most inefficient, slowest way to mine bitcoin. But he was still making so much bitcoin that he's a billionaire today.
- [16:55]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Holy cow, that's.
- [16:57]
Jeff Garzik
So it's like, you know, think about the time differential, right? Is he was losing massive amounts of money with these four. You know, it was like back then, it was like, I don't know, $5 an hour times 40,000.
- [17:11]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Is that just because he didn't know that GPUs were better at mining than CPUs? Because it was.
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Jeff Garzik
So that was before the GPU era. That's how ancient it was.
- [17:21]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
That is wild. But I guess you're right. When it appreciates that much, it doesn't really matter.
- [17:25]
Jeff Garzik
That's right. And the other is, you know, I am, I am not. I, I tell people I'm not a bitcoin billionaire. You know, the other thing that people don't understand about the early days is at least I, I had a little bit of personal. A son with some medical issues stuff. So I had to sell, sell my bitcoin and spend it and use it on real life stuff. And so factoid, I've given away 15,000 bitcoin in developer bounties back in 2010.
- [17:57]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
It's a lot. I'm not going to ask you how much it's worth today, but we'll just, we'll put that thought aside.
- [18:04]
Jeff Garzik
My wife reminds me every year how much it's worth.
- [18:07]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
It's like the pizza story.
- [18:09]
Jeff Garzik
That's right.
- [18:10]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Oh, man. Well, it's it's hard. I mean, you can't. It's. It's easy in hindsight to look back at it and be like, oh, it was obvious when it's like, okay, holding for 15 years after. I mean, imagine if you had a stock, right? Imagine you had a stock and you held it and it was up ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. At some point you're taking profits if you're up a thousand times and then you have bitcoin, which is up, you know, I don't know what, since 2010, like hundreds of thousands probably times of what it was worth or whatever. And yeah, I mean, it's easier said than done.
- [18:47]
Jeff Garzik
So, you know, again, has that discipline to hold for 15 years and not take profit.
- [18:53]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Yeah, exactly. Think about, I want all of you listeners who are giving them a hard time, giving us a hard time. Just think about yourself, how, how little the price might have moved when something two X's or three X's or it falls by 15% and you're like, oh, maybe I should sell. Well, now you can understand what it's like, you know, multiplying that by a thousand or a hundred thousand.
- [19:12]
Jeff Garzik
But yeah, you get, you get it at a dollar, it's at a hundred.
- [19:16]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Yeah, right.
- [19:17]
Jeff Garzik
Are you gonna sell or are you gonna hold? It's already 100x.
- [19:20]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
You know, I remember this, and I don't want to side notice too much, but in the early days, I was still in, in high school at the time and I did a report on bitcoin. And you know, long story short, I'm presenting this report in high school and it was at like several dollars and it was this big deal. And I was like, look at what it's done. It's worth multiple times more than what a US dollar is worth. And it was this amazing thing. And of course that train never stopped. But you know, to bring us back to that kind of the core of the conversation and where we're at in the current day, you know, 2026. So there's billions of dollars in bitcoin that's sitting idle. Right? And that's kind of where hem.
- [20:04]
Jeff Garzik
Yeah, absolutely. Hemi is a L2 that's connected to both of the hemispheres of crypto, as we like to call it, the king and queen of crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum. It sits at the center of both of those. It's a bitcoin enhanced evm and we're generating bitcoin yield. Kind of coming back to my bitcoin roots in A lot of ways with Hemi, it's very exciting. We have a number of different initiatives going on on chain and across the chains, and I'd love to talk about them.
- [20:43]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Yeah, I mean, let's dive right on into it because for people who maybe are newer to crypto and you don't know, you can stake a lot of cryptos out there, you can earn yields on them, you can generate yield. But bitcoin is a little bit different. Bitcoin is under a consensus mechanism or the thing that kind of runs the back end of bitcoin called proof of work, whereas Ethereum and Solana are proof of stake. So you can earn a yield on them by staking. But that's not something that you can do on bitcoin. But what you're saying here is you want to make it or you've already made it so that you can earn a yield on bitcoin. How does that work?
- [21:17]
Jeff Garzik
That's exactly right. And you summarize it very well. As many of the other protocols, they came a little bit later, they have a little bit of a different design, proof of stake versus proof of work. And so bitcoin natively doesn't have a just hold it, help secure the network and you automatically get yield. Now at this point, if there's any bitcoin miners in your audience, they're probably saying, hey, wait, I'm getting yield. And that's one way to look at it. And one way we're looking at it, we have something called Minerfi that I would love to talk about as well. But ultimately the market is turning back to bitcoin. The market is coming back to bitcoin, the kind of the root of the crypto tree. And without a built in native yield source, you need to design it in. And there are a number of different options for people who are into markets and trading, that sort of thing. Lending markets is one area that people source yield on. Trading fees is another popular one that can bolt on some other bitcoin related ventures. They actually pipe the mining revenue that I just mentioned back into holders and that's a form of yield. So there, there are a number of different. If you're. I call myself on Twitter a network plumber. If you're a network plumber, you know where the yield is, but it's not packaged for users in a nice easy, just put your bitcoin here, earn yield and be safe kind of way. And that was the user experience that we really wanted to design and build.
- [23:00]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Yeah, I mean, it's been Cool to see bitcoin's ecosystem kind of evolve over the last several years. You've seen people try and people have not even try. You've seen the ecosystem around bitcoin get built up so that people can build things on it or create products out of it. When it comes to Hemi, do you view this as a place where people can come and earn a yield on just like their spot, Bitcoin? So like holding the actual bitcoin coins themselves? Or have you ever thought about trying to expand this to the ETF offerings as well? Because obviously those have kind of ballooned in their size and now they have these just billions and billions of dollars inside of them.
- [23:42]
Jeff Garzik
Definitely the latter. We're stepping from here's if you're a defi expert, here's the plumbing that you can use for yield. That's kind of level zero. That's not very approachable. That's why I call it plumbing. But if you're an expert, you know how to use it. The next level up is okay, we've orchestrated a lot of that plumbing, made it easier. Now there's a safe path for your Bitcoin. If you're a crypto native, you can come here and earn yield. Now the next level in getting to your question is Wall street is starting to hold billions in Bitcoin. These digital asset treasury companies, these DATs, ETFs, they are the prime candidate for the next evolution of Hemi. And the reason is all of that bitcoin is idle. It's both the era of the bitcoin maximalist, the holding in a cold wallet, we argue is over. And the bitcoin pragmatist era of you want to hold your, you want to hodl your bitcoin and earn yield on it. And also the institutional era of these institutions, they're regulated by Wall Street. They got to have things like qualified custodians and audits and due diligence and all of the checks and balances that you would want to have for someone managing multiple billions of dollars in bitcoin. It's a sign that we've matured that these folks are playing in the crypto industry. And so it's fantastic that these folks even exist and much less they're diving in with both feed into bitcoin deep waters. So that's where Hemi really shines is those institutions that are looking for not just kind of yolo, gamble your bitcoin type of yield, but a very well apportioned, well engineered, audited, battle tested, code Flows that qualified custodians and institutions can actually trust. So that's where Hemi is looking for the dat.
- [25:57]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
And this is you're able to do this in self custody? I believe so, right?
- [26:02]
Jeff Garzik
That's right. That's exactly right.
- [26:04]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Which I think a lot of people are happy about because I don't know, there's been so many burns in the past where you put your custody with someone else and then God forbid something outside of your control happens. And with self custody, for the most part it's about as safe as you make it. If you store your password and you post it online, not going to be very safe. If you lock it in a safe on a piece of paper, a whole lot more safe.
- [26:28]
Jeff Garzik
Exactly. And these institutions, they have some pretty insane levels of security. Just to give your listeners a quick glimpse, you have, I won't name the company, but they're one of the largest bitcoin holders. They have red, green and blue teams, geographically separated. And then at each site they have this like CIA man trap secure facility, a skiff s CIF that you go in and there's a not Internet connected computer with keys and you do these key ceremonies and stuff like that. And there are armed guards outside that room. So that, that is institutional grade bitcoin security right there.
- [27:19]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
That is scary and crazy, but also a little bit cool. There's like a part of me that's like man, that is pretty cool when it comes. Well, I mean what are some of Hemi's other notable products? You know there is Yield but there's a lot more going on that you all have been building.
- [27:36]
Jeff Garzik
So from a. I'll start with a quick technology standpoint. Hemi is an L2A layer 2. It executes all the familiar Ethereum EVM smart contracts. But since our team is very deep tech, we did something that almost no one else has done. We extended that EVM in a compatible way to talk to Bitcoin L1. And so everyone else on the planet, they're writing smart contracts. They're writing smart contracts for Ethereum smart contracts. On Hemi they can talk to two blockchains, number one Hemi and then number two Bitcoin. And that's new and different for developers. Developers can actually wait for Bitcoin payments on this Ethereum EVM chain. So you got kind of for non developers, I'd say Bitcoin programming is now on steroids. You can do a whole lot more with the smart contracts on the Bitcoin L1 chain using this new Hemi chain. We have Ethereum and Bitcoin tunnels. That's what everyone else calls bridges. Those are very secure. They are bringing zero knowledge proofs as well as an upgrade to that in 2026. And then we have what we call an HVM, the EVM. That's the Ethereum virtual machine. It has a node. We again did something no one else has done. We took a real bitcoin node and embedded it inside the Ethereum node. And so you have again, real live Bitcoin L1 capability that you can program your smart contracts with. So that's what I mean by Bitcoin programming on steroids. And that enables all sorts of kind of cross chain applications like a Thor chain, cross chain dex, far greater security of tunnels than most of the other cross chains and ultimately high speed ZK L3 transactions for everyone.
- [29:51]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Well, that kind of begs the question, what do you think about the altcoin market? Because we've had people who have been around in bitcoin for a long time and some of the time they come on and they say, I think bitcoin's the only way and everything else is a scam and they're bitcoin maximal. So then we have other people come on who say, hey, bitcoin is great and they still love bitcoin, but they say it's been cool to see altcoins be able to come up and grow and flourish and take the original technology that was behind Bitcoin and kind of add to it and modify it into what altcoins are now today. I mean, it sounds like you're pretty open to altcoins coins.
- [30:27]
Jeff Garzik
Absolutely. And there are a couple ways to think about this. Rewinding back to 2010, you're in a bitcoin only landscape. Where are you going to get the venture capital to start that business? You don't have a magic bean to give away, an altcoin to give away for incentives or anything like that. So it makes building businesses a lot harder. So first, first pass. It's just a lot harder to build a bitcoin native business. And God bless us, I tried. A lot of other people tried in 2010. You know, a few succeeded, many failed. But that is tough without altcoins. The second thing is just building TVL liquidity interest. How do you kind of cut through all the noise and if you don't have a way to bring people in and that's one of the tools in the toolbox, you're kind of handicapping yourself. And so. But the third one is Third point is Darwin's trial by fire that I mentioned earlier is we got to innovate, we got to try. We got to assume that again, venture capitalists, when they make an investment, they assume 90% of their investments will fail, will return nothing, another 5% will make back their money. And the last 5% is going to, you know, that's where all the money is made. That's where you get the thousand X, you know, returns and stuff like that. That's, that's called power law, distribution. And you see the same thing with all coins is that, you know, just looking at, I'm a macroeconomist, amateur Supply and demand. We have so many tokens, so 99.9% of them will be worthless supply and demand. But the other 0.1%, those are going to be with us, those are going to be gems, those are going to be useful, those are going to sustain us into the next cycle.
- [32:32]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
I think that is so incredibly true and it's a hard pill for people to swallow. And listen, you know, if you're a listener, it should be obvious we love crypto, we're huge fans of crypto, but most altcoins aren't going to make it. There's going to be a lot that do, but what people fail to understand is that there's still going to be a lot that don't. And back in like I would say the 2017, 2018 run was like profound for me because everything went up. There was hundreds, if not maybe thousands of altcoins and pretty much everything went up. Well, fast forward to the current day. I was just looking at the number. There is, there's 29.9 million cryptos publicly listed on CoinMarketCap. I can promise you there's more than that that aren't listed. There are recorded, there's almost 30 million of them. So you make a good point. How many of those 30, almost 30 million can actually blow up and be something big and long lasting overall over an extended period of time? Most of them can't, but it's not about most of them, it's about the few. You don't need everything to succeed, but you, what you need are things to actually build something that matters. And I think that's what we're still seeing. We're seeing a lot of cryptos, a lot of, you know, obviously bitcoin, but a lot of altcoins as well and projects just using blockchain tech that are building something that is shaping the future of finance. And I think that's why we see these big asset managers like BlackRock, like JP Morgan, like, like Citibank, like Bank of America, talking about things like stablecoins and tokenization and all these different areas that they're interested in using. And they're talking about this like it's the future. So I, I, when you were saying that, I was like, I wonder how many cryptos are in existence? And I had to check and go on my little rant.
- [34:19]
Jeff Garzik
But, yeah, build that matters. That's, that's kind of an unintended encapsulation of why I get up in the morning is that there are all these experiments, there's all this kind of noise out in the world. And this goes back to one of your earliest questions. Why get up in the morning? Why do this is crypto brings freedom to people. Crypto brings options to people, wealth to people. And it's an alternative to many of the existing systems that do have existing problems. And so there's a lot of kind of cultural hedging that goes on by holding crypto. And I think that if we look back over 15 years, there's kind of three killer apps that have emerged. Bitcoin, I'm gonna say, is a killer app in and of itself. People on, you know, outside of crypto, Twitter, forget about crypto industry. People in the mainstream have heard of bitcoin. They talk about bitcoin on cnbc. It's broken through. That's kind of my litmus, Litmus test. Bitcoin number one killer app. What's the number two killer app? Stablecoins. Stablecoins have broken through. They talk about stablecoins on CNBC and mainstream, and you got stablecoins in your Robinhood app and things like that. So it's becoming the new ach, the new payment rail. And so stablecoin is the number 2 killer app. Number 3 Poly Market Prediction markets have broken through from crypto to the mainstream. And so crypto is changing. You know, just the look back on my career. Crypto is changing culture, it's changing the world. It's, you know, you kind of get lost in the 60,000 tokens a day on Solana noise that the look back of crypto is. It is getting into every corner of financial life. People are bringing more and more things on chain. I remember 10 years ago was super silly when Walmart wanted to bring lettuce on the blockchain. And I'm like, what does that even mean, lettuce on the blockchain? And you had so many silly pitches in that kind of Vein. But it's the real, real is crypto has broken through to the mainstream.
- [36:53]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
No, it has and I'm so glad. That was a lost memory that I had. I remember that headline and I remember talking about it. And back in the day, I don't know, I was doing some, some sort of report on it before I was even here with the team. So funny. I, I look back on that and at times I've thought I'm like, whatever happened with that? Like, where did, what were we doing? What happened? But no, I mean, you know, now fast forward to the, to the current day and it's, it's come so far and it's, it's great to see. I, I guess that kind of begs the question though, like, what do you think is next for bitcoin? We've gone through this period where you're right, it's being talked about. On tv, it's being talked about. But in, on cnbc, it's being talked about at the top of the United States government's level. I mean the President talks about it, the Secretary treasury talks about it. Everyone's talking. We have these ETFs, we have asset managers and banks who want to get involved. Where do we go from here? From. For people who are asking what are the next catalysts to maybe push us forward? Like, is there one?
- [38:01]
Jeff Garzik
Well, you know, very selfishly, my answer is we already covered it. Bitcoin yield on Hemi. That's, that's my very selfish, selfish answer. Yeah. More broadly, I think people are coming back to bitcoin, I think, but bitcoin is maybe I'll be a little bit controversial here and piss off half your audience. It's a little bit of a steam engine. It's a little bit of, you know, it's kind of stuck in federated multi sig type security land. It's a little bit harder to custody. But all of those problems are getting solved by firms like Hemi, other firms. And so now that that's getting solved again, people are coming back to bitcoin and they're looking for financial products related to bitcoin, institutional grade financial products. So it's not gonna be, I think the sexy era, but it's gonna be the boring, due diligence institutional era where people are far more comfortable holding bitcoin. There's kind of the fourth turning Google that out in the world and the folks are kind of coming back to gold, kind of coming back to bitcoin with a lot of the chaos out in the world. It's kind of a hyperinflation hedge for currencies undergoing hyperinflation. So there's a lot of kind of forces pulling people back to the OG crypto, Bitcoin itself.
- [39:37]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
And when it comes to yield, I want to go back to that because we get to talk to a lot of the different ETF providers and different asset managers and stuff over here. And that's something that they really want for all of their products. Right. The more yield that they can get, the better. Because you have to imagine that now with them having hundreds of millions or some of them billions and billions of dollars in these ETFs sitting there, they can earn a yield on it passively. They can sit on it, charge a little bit of a fee. And even, even if they're taking 1% of the staking that's earned, right, you know, say, you know, you make 100 bucks, they take $1 of that 100 bucks that you made on staking. Even if they're taking 1% on billions of dollars every single year for them, that, that they're, that's free money. They're sitting on money. They need very little to do beyond getting the technology there and then getting regulatory approval. And then that's it in perpetuity. They are just making passive money. And we, we have seen the desire for that in Ethereum. We've seen the desire that in Solana. Those are now growing. And, you know, you're able to. I know. I think Bitwise has one now that's a staking ETF for Solana. But the Bitcoin ETFs are the ones that have the most assets under management. So you'd think that there's the most incentive to get something like that. And again, that's immediately where my brain goes, is that there's all these companies out there, they like making money. That's their whole purpose in the first place. And so I think Hemi is really cool and it kind of fits.
- [41:10]
Jeff Garzik
Absolutely. It's. There's a hunger for that. Hemi is perfectly positioned for that. It's mainly a matter of all these big dogs move slow, and so they gotta pass their due diligence checks, et cetera, et cetera. And so you, you kind of see things happen in waves. You saw like five Bitcoin ETFs happen within a week once the regulatory approval happened. And once bitcoin staking finds its format, you're gonna find all these DATs and ETFs within a week, two weeks, they're all staking so they're all hyper competitive. They just got to check those regulator checkboxes.
- [41:51]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
That is true and luckily it's a little bit easier for them now to do that. But for people who want to get involved with Hemi, you know, let's go back to this. You know, if there's institutions watching, if there are individuals watching, is is Hemi for everyone. So if you're an individual person with a wallet, you can do it. Or is it only for the institutional side?
- [42:11]
Jeff Garzik
Absolutely, it's him. He's definitely for everyone. We have an institutional focused BD team. We also have a open source community segment. And so whatever level you're entering in the Hemi community, you're absolutely welcome. Hemi XYZ on the web is not only a portal, also has plenty of documentation for developers looking for technical information, links to our GitHub. It's all open source. That's how we roll. And fundamentally these are open permissionless networks. You never do closed source on an open permissionless network. If you want people to trust you.
- [42:54]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
Absolutely. And where can people find you? If they're trying to come in, they want to go to your website, maybe your X account, something else. Where can people follow both you and Hemi?
- [43:03]
Jeff Garzik
Well, you can follow me at jaygarzik J G A R Z I K on Twitter. I am a frequent poster of non crypto stuff, so you got to deal with that. Hemixy is the official Hemi X account. Follow us on there, go to Hemi XYZ, add us in your MetaMask wallet and visit our app portal. Get some great bitcoin, yield and explore.
- [43:33]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
What's your favorite non crypto things to talk about?
- [43:38]
Jeff Garzik
Non crypto is probably space. I just love science fiction becoming science fact. We're talking about space based data centers, cities on the moon. I read about all that when I was a kid going to Cape Canaveral watching space shuttle launches. Now it's coming true. We're really going to have cities on the moon. We're really going to have people on the moon by the end of this century or this decade. Excuse me.
- [44:09]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
That it is. I find space fascinating as well. And so I think we can both agree that we are going to do cool things in space and bitcoins going to space as well. Because we're sending it to the moon.
- [44:19]
Jeff Garzik
Absolutely.
- [44:21]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
But you know, all jokes aside and everything, you know, Jeff, thank you for coming on. We appreciate your time and you being with us us. And we're definitely going to have to get an update with you as all this stuff matures and the industry grows. Appreciate your time with us.
- [44:36]
Jeff Garzik
Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening. Always a good time.
- [44:39]
Host (Crypto 101 Podcast)
100%. And that's going to bring us to a wrap in today's episode. Everyone, thank you all for listening. This has truly been a one of a kind episode and we'll see all of you at the same time, same place next week. Take care.
- [45:03]
Ali Jackson
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