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Kostas Chalkias - Is Sui "The Apple Of Web3"? The Fastest, Most Scalable Blockchain Ever
02:01:28
Kostas Chalkias Interview
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- [00:02]
Costas Halkias
Ask who is the most talented team in Dubai at the moment regarding innovation and engineering. It's Shui. We are creating a new landscape where whatever you had on web two, it's possible. Now on web three we have the fastest network in the world. We now have a way to onboard users. We know how to do it because we're coming from Facebook. That's why I believe it's going to be the Apple of web3.
- [00:23]
Brian Rose
It's not the tech, it's the team. That's the difference with you guys. You have deep experience and over time.
- [00:28]
Costas Halkias
That shows in this cycle of crypto that everything is changing. We have the team that is very quickly going into its direction and we have a new innovation literally every two weeks. There is a nice market for everybody. But I believe we're covering most of the space. We can win in almost every case.
- [00:43]
Brian Rose
What are you doing in Dubai? I mean you could be anywhere here.
- [00:46]
Costas Halkias
I realized that people respect technology. You can easily find use cases because the blockchain has more applications for developing countries and Dubai is a developed country but surrounded by developing countries. And I go with my solution engineers and me as a cryptographer and we have ad hoc on the spot delivering the smart contract. Nobody can compete with us.
- [01:06]
Brian Rose
They say if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. Is that the story of you?
- [01:10]
Costas Halkias
Yes. I don't feel I'm working. I'm passionate about this. I'm not sleeping, for example. I live with power naps. There is a passion that drives me. I can see why blockchain can change society. This too is going to change our everyday life. And that's why I'm passionate foreign.
- [01:34]
Brian Rose
Hey, I know investing in crypto is scary. It takes a real leap of faith because there are so many scams, rug pulls and bad actors out there. It's a dangerous business. Which is why 95% of people lose all their money. Well, that's why I created the London Real Investment club. So you can access the hottest deals on the planet and use the crypto bull market to create the generational we that you deserve. Join my team of over 100 people from around the world that are making millions of dollars behind the scenes investing in blockchain, AI, web3games, DeFi, Bitcoin and more. Don't miss out. Click the link below to book a call with one of my team now. But hurry, this bull market will end soon. I know investing crypto can be scary. That's why you gotta join the investor club, pull the trigger. Let's do this. The world is changing. Inspiration is everywhere. It has never been so easy to connect, share and bring people together. We're learning from others and finding the best in ourselves. Challenging our beliefs, sharing our vulnerability, overcoming our fears. Transforming ourselves so we can transform the world. How far can we go? This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is this is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Costas Halkias, the Web3 expert, white hat hacker and blockchain engineer. You are the chief cryptographer and co founder of Mistin Labs whose mission is to simplify blockchain, enhance security with AI and expand real world web3 applications beyond finance. Miston Labs is the team behind SUI, the world's fastest blockchain, designed to deliver the benefits of Web3 with the ease of Web2 to be more accessible, secure and user friendly for everyone. Before Miston, you led cryptographic initiatives at Facebook, now meta and R3, shaping the security foundations of many of the most influential blockchain projects today. You believe web3 shifts the power from platforms to people by eliminating untrustworthy intermediaries and safeguarding privacy. You have said that direct digital ownership gives everyone greater control, unlocking the Internet's true value. Your vision is to empower individuals and creators to own their data and content by building a decentralized web stack that unlocks the full potential of web3. Costas, welcome to London Real in Dubai.
- [04:37]
Costas Halkias
Thank you. And I'm very happy that eventually I meet you in person and we're staying in the same room together. I see you around in Dubai. I moved very recently in Dubai and now I have friends here and I'm doing my passion innovation on the blockchain and happy to discuss about a few things here.
- [04:53]
Brian Rose
Yeah, I can't wait. I really want to jump in. So I'm going to start with a quote from you where you said, quote, Honestly, I won't be surprised at all if Miston Labs and anything that it touches surpasses the levels of what Apple is today. It's a very rare combination even for Silicon Valley standards. Re accumulated brain knowledge in one organization, unquote. So tell us, what is Mystin Labs, what is sui? And how are you guys different from all the other layer ones out there?
- [05:24]
Costas Halkias
Amazing. By the way, imagine me as an expat living from the uk, originally in Greece, then France, then the uk. Eventually I ended up into working for Mark Zuckerberg. For an expert in Silicon Valley, you can realize you're having to do with super brilliant people coming from Harvard Stanford, Berkeley, all of the big universities in the world. And I noticed the difference by the time I arrived in the US that the team that we've built for Libra, maybe because Mark was generous enough to hire some of the biggest brands in the world, was so strong and I was like an auditor for Ethereum for so many years and I managed to crack smart contracts, I managed to find some billion dollar attacks. The concentration of brain at Facebook at that time was definitely the biggest in the world. Do you know what happened afterwards and why Sui and Mystin Labs is now the center? All of the team left after the Libra collapse and we got some of the people that were promoted like so frequent, in a so frequent like fashion at Facebook that I was personally I didn't even believe that these people will leave Facebook to go to a startup. And imagine the concentration of brain power. Now it's not only Facebook, there were people coming from Google, Netflix, Microsoft. We have about 60, 70 folks with PhDs in the company. Imagine like a set of 200 people working for Miston at the moment and pretty much half of them are coming from either PhDs or big universities or they're very successful in their life. So the concentration as a startup, I haven't seen it in Silicon Valley. I have many friends working for like multibillion dollar companies. I worked at Facebook, I'm interacting with Google. You know, I had the project with AI vulnerabilities on the blockchain using Gemini. I know how our team is superior. So the potential and the probability if you ask where would you bet your money now from all of the unicorns that you see around that will make it to be a funk like a monk as it's called now, all of the five big companies in the world, Mistin is probably, even if I try to be unbiased, has the best potential to make it. So that's why I believe that the rate of innovation is so high that I cannot see if we don't shoot ourselves in the foot or the market collapses, why we cannot make it and be like the decentralized the brand.
- [07:48]
Brian Rose
So many founders talk about the tech and talk about the tech and obviously we're going to talk about tech, of course. But I've also heard some very high level founders say it's not the tech, it's the team. And sometimes people forget or they can't see the team beyond the blockchain. But you're telling me that's a crucial factor and one of the big reasons.
- [08:05]
Costas Halkias
That you've the most Important one. Sometimes, even when you're hiring or when you are acquiring a company like a smaller one, you need to check the people's profile and the people's passion for something. Smart people. Imagine when we were taking interviews at Facebook, we didn't even ask the developer to write in the language that he will use while he's joining us. Write at any language you want. I know if you are smart and you are like a person who is inspiring and can do pivots very quickly, you will thrive. So this is how we're following this property in our organization. And we just hire super smart people to work on the most difficult problems in the world. And then eventually, even if you don't like something, because not every bet is working right, it's very simple for them to pivot to something else, which is again, even better than the previous one. So having such a team to be able to think in this cycle of crypto that everything is changing. It was the NFT and it was the defi. It was the meme season. Tomorrow it might be the AI season. It might be IOT season. RWAs, we have the team that is very quickly going into its direction, and we have a new innovation literally every two weeks. Every two weeks, if you ask me. There is a new white paper coming from Mistin Labs. Wow. I mean, this is not compared to Facebook and Google. I was there. I know.
- [09:24]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [09:25]
Costas Halkias
This is huge. It's special. It is special.
- [09:27]
Brian Rose
So the first time I heard about Sui was when I met Sheikh Moala of Gaff Labs and Gaff Capital. And that was in 23. And I actually was here, I think, for Token or some other event. And I met him and it was at some party they had. And he came up and I think he knew who I was. And then he said, would you like to meet cz? And that's a question you always say yes to. And so did you? Yeah, I did. I had introduced me to cz, I met him, we talked about the UFC and how many push ups he could do. He was the coolest guy. And, you know, I had a meeting with the Sheik that next week, and he started mentioning Sui, Sui, Sui. And they were the team that was really mentioning you a lot. And I think they'd started talking to you. And I kept hearing them talk more about Sui. And then I came back last year and went to one of your Sui Connect events with Gaff, and I met you and Christian and talked to you, and I could see you guys were special.
- [10:19]
Costas Halkias
Oh, we're very passionate Very passionate. You know, my background. I named my son Crypto. So, I mean, what can you do better to actually devote your life for this? I literally do it.
- [10:29]
Brian Rose
His name is Kryptos.
- [10:30]
Costas Halkias
His name is Kryptos.
- [10:31]
Brian Rose
And then I went back home to London in October, and a couple months later, you know, SUI just lit up. And now you're probably the 12th largest blockchain protocol by market cap. And now all of a sudden, everyone knows sui. But, you know, that literally all happened from a price standpoint in the last three or four months. And I know that gets you a lot of tension, so. And that's always good, right?
- [10:53]
Costas Halkias
It's good. And, you know, Sui, the definition of Sui in Chinese and Japanese, do you know what it means?
- [10:57]
Brian Rose
No, I don't.
- [10:58]
Costas Halkias
Water. And that's why you can see the drip as the logo of sui. Bruce Lee. Flow like water. Yeah. And, you know, all of the innovation is flowing. So technically, the name was good, it inspired us. And that's the reason that Sui can innovate on all of the. Across every industry you can imagine that is attached to Web3 at the moment.
- [11:21]
Brian Rose
You know, I jumped into this market in 21, and I started going through all the layer one heads from, you know, Emin at Avax, and I talked to Mancet Hedera, and I talked to Justin's son at Tron, and I was just trying to get the lay of the land. And we all believed that a few years from then there would be fewer L1s, and then we saw kind of the opposite happen. And now maybe we're consolidating again. And so I guess I'll go back to my original question. When people come to you and say, why is Sui so special? Why do we need another layer one? How do you explain that to someone who's not maybe deep inside the details of Blockchain?
- [11:56]
Costas Halkias
It's very simple. So if you see now the current landscape of all of the L1s, I will talk only about L1s for the time being. There is Solidity, there is Ethereum, who had the new language, scripting language, right? Smart codecs, all of this stuff. The only other language that managed to be better and safer than Solidity is Move. And we created Move starting from Facebook. Imagine my cto, he is the creator of the Move language, the first one who put the first line of code in Move. I created all of the cryptographic stack of movements, and then all of these people coming from Facebook, obviously they knew how to handle billions of people. Right? I mean, we need this. You cannot go and have a web3 that is only defi and you only have the digns. You need also the gamers, you need also the RWAs. You need people who know how to have a social network because eventually even all of this will come into the blockchain. You need it. So we have the background that if you see the potential, obviously, I mean we have this check mark. There is no way these people know how to run big infrastructures. Web 3.0 originally started as just transfer of money from Satoshi, but again it evolved into a smart contract, fully programmable like space. And now we have the opportunity to be the creators of this infrastructure. So Sui managed and Mystin Labs managed to hire some of the best talents to work on every aspect of the stack. And it's not only Sui, I'm the chief cryptographer of Mystin Labs, but Sui is imagined as the CPU of the blockchain. Very quickly having transactions. We managed to have almost 300,000 transactions, probably the first blockchain that managed to have this on a testnet phase. And we're having all of the peaks that we managed to surpass Solana and all of the rest on daily active users. Transactions per second latency, half a second latency. Who could imagine it? Imagine Bitcoin is 10 minutes at the moment, half a second latency. Now you can even do AAA games on the blockchain, you can do arbitrage on chain, you can do stuff that it wasn't possible with the previous stack. Even ethereum has a 14, 15 second finality now. So Sui is creating a new landscape where pretty much whatever you had on web 2, it's possible now on web 3 even the transaction rate every blockchain company is chasing. Visa, visa has 20,000 transactions per second under the peaks, I don't know UERC if it goes to 100k and all of this stuff, we managed to do it in a decentralized way. So these things were impossible before. What do you need for this? Right? You need a team that is super innovative on consensus algorithm because consensus is defining the TPS and the latency. Some other L1s probably have some people who are very good at consensus, but this is like one founder and he doesn't know about all of the rest because crypto is not only technology and then you need the cryptographer. The cryptographer will create new systems and, and myself coming from Facebook I realized oh, for everybody to onboard into a new system, you need to do it in 12 seconds maximum. How can you do this now? With mnemonics that people have to write their passwords and then get the copy and they don't have in their brain. Oh, there is no forgot password in the blockchain because 99% of the population is attached to social networks. They don't know it. People are losing their money.
- [15:09]
Brian Rose
The 12 word key phrase is terrible.
- [15:10]
Costas Halkias
The 12 word doesn't work. Mnemonic never scales. Exactly. And we invented, it was literally my baby zklogin. And zklogin was the first zero knowledge proof. You know, it's a privacy preserving algorithm that I managed to do login with Google or Facebook or Apple and automatically you have an address and Google doesn't know your address, which was magic, right? And this is now the most used zero knowledge proof technology across any industry in the world.
- [15:40]
Brian Rose
ZKlogin.
- [15:41]
Costas Halkias
ZKlogin. ZKLogin is the most used ZK technology in the world. Even if you add all of them together.
- [15:46]
Brian Rose
Okay, I don't put a password in.
- [15:48]
Costas Halkias
Yes, you don't. You just need Google. And now we're going to have also passkeys like with your face ID and imagine for micropayments and all of these things. It's amazing. Then you can have of course a second factor for larger transactions. But who are the people who are moving to the largest transactions? Only a small part of the population, but you help them on board very quickly. You can even hide the fact that there is a blockchain behind it. Imagine a game that now you start, you logged in with Google and you play the game. All of the web, three attempts to get the games into the ecosystem. They have to find a new way that the players do not see the difference. And we managed to do it. That's why Sui, by the way, was a sponsor at Red Bull. Red Bull had an NFT campaign and everybody logged in with Google and in literally a couple of days there were thousands, hundreds of thousands of users having an NFT on Red Bull. And then we realized, wow, this is amazing. We have the fastest network in the world. We now have a way to onboard users. We know how to do it because we're coming from Facebook. And then I covered now consensus and cryptography. And then our CTO is a creator of a new language which is better than solidity. So we also have the talent for a new language. And then Evan Cenk, the CEO of the company, he was the head of research at Facebook and at the same time he was leading teams in Apple. You are running his operating system. He won one of the engineering awards from acm, one of the biggest organizations in the next year, I believe, after adrisin Horovitz from a 16Z. So this guy is also IQ 200. I don't know. He's super smart. He's leading a foundation. He managed to do Apple, Facebook. He managed to bring all of us next to him and we created this. And then we have the fifth co founder, all of them directors or leads at Facebook, who is a degen. This guy was leading products for Facebook before that on VMware. He knows how to deliver. He had one of the biggest mining farms in London, probably the first one. You are from London, right? You know, so we managed to find like a set of a group of different talents in the leadership level that I cannot see on any other L1. Go to Solana. Solana has Tolle. Tolle is like, I respect him. He's a very good engineer. He did something. There is probably. If you see the innovations that he created personally as an individual, it doesn't even like compare to every single founder in Mr. Lamps. Imagine we have five. The fact that we're five, by the way, it helps a lot because you need to delegate. The space is so big at the moment that I moved to Dubai. My other co founder is in the uk. He lives in London. He's a professor at ucl. Probably the best consensus expert in the world. And then the other three people are in Palo Alto now, but they're traveling a lot at the knee. He's everywhere, right? I mean, he has a charisma. So in my opinion, this combination of having the founders being able to be magnets for talent to come to us. Check my recent tweet. My recent tweet. I'm creating a commandos team. This happened 10 minutes before I come to your room.
- [18:50]
Brian Rose
A commando.
- [18:51]
Costas Halkias
Commando's team.
- [18:52]
Brian Rose
What is that?
- [18:53]
Costas Halkias
It's a special forces team that it's going to be a very, very strict interview. I will cherry pick them from hackathons, but I will originally start from Asia. So I will go Vietnam, India, Pakistan, gcc, Indonesia. I'm going to cherry pick super good people and onboarding will be. You have a tent, you have boots, and you're coming with me on hackathons, you're coming with me in governments. Let's digitize the world. Commandos is with double S at the end. Open source systems.
- [19:23]
Brian Rose
Okay. And you'd literally drop into a city.
- [19:26]
Costas Halkias
Yes.
- [19:26]
Brian Rose
And on a mission.
- [19:27]
Costas Halkias
Exactly. Imagine I could have a parachute as well. I'm crazy. I will do I will do the parachute. I will not give them a laptop.
- [19:34]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [19:34]
Costas Halkias
I'll give them a parachute. And then we have Christian. You met Christian, right?
- [19:38]
Brian Rose
Yes. Amazing.
- [19:38]
Costas Halkias
Christian is also on the security front. Right. He's amazed on what we can do now with a commandos team across the world and Even internally at Mr. This is literally a friend who wants to invest in SUI ecosystem. And he told me, Costas helped me, I need to find the best people for special force, for special projects across the world. And then we said, we will do it. I know how to do it. But they have to follow my pace down the road. You're going to ask me about some things that I have on the spectrum. I'm not sleeping. For example, I live with power naps. So the people who are joining commanders, they have to follow this pace.
- [20:16]
Brian Rose
No sleeping, just power naps.
- [20:18]
Costas Halkias
Power naps. The Da Vinci mode.
- [20:20]
Brian Rose
That's what DaVinci did.
- [20:22]
Costas Halkias
Yeah. You know my wife, do you know how many times she has markers in her face? Because I have markers across my. Like back in the wall. So when I wake up randomly at night and I have some idea that I couldn't solve, I very quickly write it down to the wherever I find. And sometimes I use my wife's face because really you don't see at that time. Right. You're literally half sleeping.
- [20:44]
Brian Rose
Man, she must love you. That's for sure.
- [20:46]
Costas Halkias
Yeah. But you see the intellectual quality and the fact that we have also the degen thing. It's not only a cryptographer who created a blockchain, a degen who created the blockchain. It's the combination. We have everything. And that's the reason that many talents followed us. They followed me, they followed Evan, they followed Adenee, they followed Sam and they followed George. From the biggest universities in the world, they came to Mystin Labs. That's why I believe it's going to be. It has at the moment the best odds for being the Apple of Web3.
- [21:18]
Brian Rose
Okay. Must be a very senior management team, founding team, where five high level individuals can work together. And maybe you don't see that in a lot of projects because maybe they never.
- [21:28]
Costas Halkias
It's very rare.
- [21:28]
Brian Rose
Yeah, it is very rare.
- [21:30]
Costas Halkias
But fortunately we're all sane people. Obviously, when you're taking decisions, it's not that you agree on everything, but we are. I mean, we're trying to do it in a way that works for the company. Sometimes I disagree, but at the same time, I see the data that they're providing me. When we go into these debates and Almost always. All of the decisions we took are actually for a good purpose, even for those I personally disagreed and sometimes I.
- [21:56]
Brian Rose
Win on these debates, but it's always data driven.
- [21:58]
Costas Halkias
Yes, it's data driven and we're always voting between each other. It's literally working really well as a dao. Whether I have a dao between the leadership. And it's not only founders. We give also the power to our people to give us feedback. You know, feedback is a gift, something you are learning in Silicon Valley. It's. Don't be like someone who doesn't accept getting criticized and all of these things. Yeah, look, you have to understand, get the data and then you do whatever you want with this data.
- [22:27]
Brian Rose
Don't let the ego get in the middle.
- [22:28]
Costas Halkias
Yes, exactly.
- [22:29]
Brian Rose
It's hard because at first the immediate reaction is defense.
- [22:32]
Costas Halkias
We were trained to do that. I believe the reason it works is because all of us have worked in these companies, which was part of the protocol. You cannot work at Facebook if you don't receive feedback. You will never be promoted.
- [22:42]
Brian Rose
Yeah, I think that's the difference with you guys. You have deep experience, decades and decades in these high tech startups in Silicon Valley. Whereas some of these protocols are degenish, where maybe they didn't have that layer. And I think over time that shows in how quickly they do it 100%.
- [22:58]
Costas Halkias
And don't get me wrong, right, I always had Solana under my portfolio, even companies or investments. I'm a bitcoin maxi. There is a nice market for everybody, but I believe Mistin is covering most of the space at the moment. We can win in almost every case.
- [23:14]
Brian Rose
Let's quickly talk about Libra because it's part of the story and then we can dive in more into Mistin. Tell us about Libra. It was obviously killed in the end. I heard it was killed really for political reasons, but it also created Mistin and everything you're doing at sui. And you said something earlier which was fascinating. When you're working at Facebook, you're thinking about 3 billion users from the beginning. And when you're building in Defi, you're thinking about a fraction of that and maybe helping them.
- [23:41]
Costas Halkias
Just thousands.
- [23:42]
Brian Rose
Yeah, thousands. I know. And maybe just thousands. So you're not even thinking outside the box in some way, but you're thinking, well, we could roll this out to WhatsApp. We could roll this out to everything. And you, you had to do that. You worked on cryptography, WhatsApp. So maybe just talk about that whole Facebook experience, Libra, how it started how it ended.
- [23:58]
Costas Halkias
So it was David Marcus. I respect this guy. He actually helped me to get into Facebook. That Mark Zuckerberg gave him the stamp, go run Libra. David Marcus is coming from PayPal. He was at messenger leading the messenger team. He's, he's a charismatic person. He created an allied team where he hired people across the world. Imagine he found someone Greek that worked for a UK company. Come on Facebook, we want you. You run R3. You designed everything on R3. We give you a better offer. Come to the US when I joined, something that I personally realized at Facebook, which was probably something that I didn't like, is I don't believe Facebook had so many security and crypto talent compared to the Libra team. The Libra team was more talented on particular parts of science, especially in cryptography and also creating new languages as well. For Web3, there was not so much digital culture at Facebook. We created David Marcus. He's a bitcoin maxi. He created this culture. Then David hired Evan Cheng. Evan is a CEO now of Mystin Labs. Evan ran all of the research. The number of people coming from the top universities with the best publications in the world that he hired was amazing. I haven't seen. I didn't expect this. When I joined Facebook I said, okay, I'm one of the first cryptographers who are joining. We're going to have a small team like in R3. I was alone actually. Now at least I have a few colleagues I can work together.
- [25:32]
Brian Rose
Did you have any hesitancy to join Facebook?
- [25:34]
Costas Halkias
No.
- [25:34]
Brian Rose
Which is the opportunity of a lifetime.
- [25:36]
Costas Halkias
Being in the no 3 was collapsing as well that time apart from didn't have an option. I interviewed with many fans actually and I literally auctioned my offer. At Facebook you don't go directly, right? I mean this is a hint for everybody who's looking for a job. If you are good and you believe in yourself, get another offer as well so you can play with the prices. And I did this. But the reality is Facebook was a better fit for me because I was coming from the blockchain world and at that time Google, Apple and other companies didn't. They did security but Nothing related to Web3. So for me it was a no brainer. After I was invited there the CTO now of Sui of Mistralabs Sam, Sam Blacks here. I met him in a conference. It's very interesting how I ended up at Facebook. This conference was when I invented an algorithm for post quantum signatures. If the quantum computer comes, how we can protect ourselves against the power that this machine has. And Sam joined this session because I had work with the first developer of Satoshi for the Java library, the bitcoin. J. Mike Hahn was my manager at R3 and Sam said how bad can this be? Presentation with Mike Hahn being the co authors. But he doesn't see Mike Kahn, he sees me, okay. Which I was the lead cartographer of Mike Kahn. And then Sam goes back to Facebook and he writes a post that guys, I met a genius, we have to hire him. And then when I joined, nobody had deleted that comment, which was months before I joined, six months before I joined. And I realized that people were talking about getting all of the like big brains and I was considering myself, I was confident. I'm good at cryptography, I have a role at Facebook. And then I happily accepted. Of course we joined. Libra was moving very fast, especially at the very beginning. I will say that one of the problems eventually we personally see coming from this space, it was slightly slower on adoption of new techniques because there is bureaucracy. Even if Libra was operating as a startup inside Facebook, imagine we even had. I personally started being paid at Facebook, then being paid at Novi, then being paid at Diem. You know, different startups inside where we try to keep our own culture, as WhatsApp did, by the way, at Facebook. But again, you still have the bureaucracy. And in this world where the cycle is very short, every few months I invented new algorithms and I was locked. I couldn't do anything. You know that during COVID I've implemented an algorithm to find attacks on proof of solvency algorithms in all of the big exchanges. I almost predicted what would happen with ftx. I was presenting Luna and other things two days before Luna collapses in the financial crypto conference about something is not right in stable coins, algorithmic coins and exchanges. Because this was something that Mark, not Marcus, I'm sorry, David Marcus, gave me as a rule, find all of the arguments for proof of solvency. What Facebook, we have to fix the market, right? So believe me, Facebook did a lot of job to make good signs, to publish stuff, to change the narrative and having all of this talent going into other chains afterwards. Now Libra, I don't know if it's political reasons, if it was Covid, you know, during COVID you cannot even go to every country and say we're going to launch Libra. You couldn't even fly. It was very difficult times, right? And then there was a change of administration. It was as I told you, it was growing a bit like at a higher rate. Than I was expecting. Eventually, indirectly, 1,000 people being involved into the project. And in these cases you need a commandos team to deliver. You cannot be slow. I had 10 piled papers in my desk that I knew this will change the world. But we couldn't apply them because we were already ready for production. And believe me, we were launching every month. I lost my paternity leave when Kryptos was born in London and then I have my second child Philip in the us. Philip was born during the time that Libre was launching and launching and launching and every month was launching. And then for one year it was launching and I didn't get my paternity leave because I said, I cannot live now. We're launching next month. So it's a combination, in my opinion of bad timing, the fact that we could, I believe, do better job on not doing two things at the same time, both a stable coin, which was a basket, and a new blockchain. How do you advertise all of these two things to regulators? It's very tough if you are Facebook, they're afraid as well. You had the Cambridge Analytica incident in the past. There were many things that they say, okay, you have all of our socials, you cannot have all of our naturals. Now, talent wise, I don't believe there is a comparison. It was the best thing in the world. So all of this after the collapse six months before, I mean, people who are in leadership, they understand it's collapsing. So we left. Everybody wanted to leave. And then somehow we all met almost independently. We had Evan saying, I'm going to do it. I said, I'm going to do it by myself. George said, I'm going to do it. And then we said, guys, let's do it together. So we created sui and many people from the Facebook Libra team actually followed us. And this created the domino effect where people from Netflix, from Microsoft, from Apple, like former colleagues of us, also joined us. Even from R3, I got people from R3 as well.
- [31:08]
Brian Rose
Wow. If this had been the current Trump administration, you might have stayed with Facebook and Libra might have launched.
- [31:15]
Costas Halkias
Perhaps there is a possibility. You never know because I'm telling you, it's multiple factors that affected this, right? Everybody was visionary. David Marcus was visionary, Mark Zuckerberg was visionary. We were super inspired by this. I was working from my closet when there was Covid. For a moment in my life, I didn't have a big place to live And I had one newborn and a baby at 2 years old. I was working from my closet all day because you couldn't go out, you couldn't go to the office. It was also very difficult for the employees to be this new type of engagement with the company. Working at Facebook is literally campus. We had pizza, burgers, dry cleaning, anything. It was like a small village. And I lost all of this. And suddenly I said, okay, you lose all of these perks that you are getting from Facebook. You are in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. You have to take bets. Come on, you're in the center of the world where you can create a new startup. You know, you're confident about your brain, your intellectual property that you have. You have to be surrounded by the most important people. This is spoiler, but there was another blockchain that they wanted me to be a co founder, also from Facebook.
- [32:31]
Brian Rose
A current competitor perhaps?
- [32:33]
Costas Halkias
Yes. And I said, no, I'm going with Evan, okay? Because Evan is the brain. I cannot go to people that I didn't believe they were special.
- [32:43]
Brian Rose
Well, let's talk about Aptos because this is the other faction of Facebook that's come out and there was some healthy or unhealthy competition between the two of you guys. What is the story with Aptos and Aptos and sui?
- [32:56]
Costas Halkias
So at Facebook, after the collapse of Libreo, before the collapse, everybody start thinking that, okay, I can optimize by staying in the Web3 environment. And I also have some cool ideas. So Aptos decided to do the following. Look, all of these guys cost us some. They've built Moov because these are the move language chains, right? Aptos and TAS were using the move language and SUI put a completely different path. And we made many changes to the move language compared to what we had at Facebook. Aptos decided to clone it. In my opinion, it was already too old, as I told you, delays, bureaucracy. And we had better ideas on how to scale MOVE in a different way. So Aptos decided to get a clone create Aptos very quickly. They launched even if they started the company later than us. While we implement it, we were in a stealth mode trying to build a better system, better than the MOVE of Facebook. So imagine Aptos as being pretty much the clone of Libra and as being the innovative part of Libra. It's like you have two kids and one of them is saying, I will take my own path because I know how to succeed better. And I believe the innovation rate in SUI was even at the time of hiring because I knew the people who were hiring that they were promoted last month. They were super good at what they are doing while on the Other side. I couldn't see this. I could see more secrecy, more like we know that SU is better and let's find another way. Sometimes I see it as a copy paste situation. If you're asking me, I believe we're by far most innovative anyway. Some of their people are okay. I don't believe all of their team is as gifted as the SUI team, but they decided to get just a clone of Libra and then continue over this. We decided to take another path more innovative. That's the main difference in the structure of the teams now. We're also more decentralized, like they're more Palo Alto concentrated. We are having people across the world. We build offices here in Dubai, the uk, Greece. We have literally next to Sydac MAU. We got a big building that will be announced in the next few weeks or months. We were in Asia. We know how to. Because even the founders are technical founders. I'm still coding. Three of the founders are still coding adaptors. Nobody's coding from now. It's only one, by the way, one left.
- [35:18]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [35:18]
Costas Halkias
There is a process of elimination there. So for many things that I believe didn't fit to my appetite, sometimes I consider them toxic as well. I couldn't join up to okay. For me it was a no brainer. And you know, if you talk to either Adeni, Evan, George and Sam, you will realize the how charismatic they are on changing the landscape. We have to make a leapfrog situation for the blockchain to succeed. We cannot just have only DEFI users. We need to find another way. If you see how even the Aptos team were looking at my work and their leadership team were focusing on let's work together and all of these things, you will realize that in some sense at Facebook they were jealous of what we were doing. So I consider them as like, it's good that the MOVE language is also having another place to be alive and evolve at the same time. I consider us by far better either on community or innovation. I don't believe there is anything else at the moment.
- [36:26]
Brian Rose
Do you rate any other layer ones better than us?
- [36:30]
Costas Halkias
Innovation? Yeah.
- [36:30]
Brian Rose
Or just the top 25?
- [36:32]
Costas Halkias
No.
- [36:32]
Brian Rose
Are there any that you look at and say they're doing these things good? I mean, you obviously said Solana, you know, does some things early innovations.
- [36:38]
Costas Halkias
I do.
- [36:39]
Brian Rose
But is there anything you see in any of them or is it just are you guys superior in everything?
- [36:43]
Costas Halkias
I believe some of them are completely disorganized. Polygon, for example, they're going here and there. It cannot Work at the same time. Some others are focusing on stealing from us like they're late in the game. Some others are like Solana, look, Solana has a community. We believe we can go faster than anyone else on like being the next thing after Solana. And I believe we're doing a really good job here. I mean if you can see the numbers on how Sui grew and being the best blockchain performing blockchain on 2024. Not only on the pricing part, because pricing is another thing. I'm a nerd, I don't care about this. But on technology part, you see all of the biggest innovations in the world came from sui. So this thing, I don't see it on other blockchains. Maybe Avalanche has this subnets and they can do, they can get the NIST market somewhere else. Solana, I believe that it will have competition. Beta Chain is also joining for community. We're having a very, very strong defi, one of the strongest defi ecosystems in the world. I believe we're approaching with a higher pace than anybody else. So I don't see the other things. I don't even know what they're doing. I don't even know if you ask me what near is doing with AI and all of this stuff. I believe we have a better AI team. We even hired someone who is a very, very popular and intelligent person publishing on urips every year. He's going to be a great addition for us even on the AI sector. I don't believe we have a competitor and I try to be unbiased. I'm telling you, I like science. I would be honest. I'm telling you, I had Solana in the past. I even own a few now. But Sui has a better technology. We even created a decentralized storage network. Walrus. Wait for Walrus, right? Because we had filecoin, we had Arweave, we had a few others. Go and check on Twitter how like it's like a storage layer on steroids. It's by far better on every aspect. So Sui Walrus, we had Deepak, which is the NASDAQ of the blockchain, literally an order book. We have ns, which is the identity. Who has created all of this, like four technologies in two years. The only team who can do it is us. All of the rest are focusing in one direction. This cannot. I mean the blockchain is not only execution on transactions. You have to offer something else that governments can come in that web. Two banks, the ThreadFi, anything can go onto the blockchain and don't feel a difference between Web two and Web three, just only more transparency and better ownership. So that's why I'm thinking sometimes, yes, Kost, as if you were unbiased. Is there another blockchain that you work at the moment? No, nothing. Zero.
- [39:23]
Brian Rose
There's a famous quote by the UFC fighter Conor McGregor who says, he says losers focus on winners, winners focus on winning.
- [39:30]
Costas Halkias
Yes. This is happening, by the way, with some of the teams that you mentioned.
- [39:36]
Brian Rose
They're looking at you and you're looking into the future.
- [39:38]
Costas Halkias
Yes, but there is always a Nismark. If you see in the McDonald Burger King, there is a high quality and there is also the very fast food. But in some regions people are poor and they're getting McDonald's. But there is other high quality burger places we can go now. So in my opinion, we managed to actually bring everybody into the chain with this onboarding stuff that we built. Imagine that I'm doing even internetless transactions. Crazy things that we can discuss as well. I don't believe anyone else is looking at the full picture. Everybody's looking at, I don't know, optimizing on their pricing model or everything else. We optimize on the usability, on something that will change the narrative and bring confidence even to the people who don't know about Web3. Imagine I'm personally talking to many governments and the Greek stock market, for example, is coming on sui. Big projects that you need to gain confidence. Forget Aptos for a while because they're also coming from Facebook. It's very difficult to go to a place which is more traditional and conservative. If they don't see a team that has succeeded in the past, and it's not a random team who created the blockchain, they cannot easily move their country's assets into that blockchain. It's impossible. They need to see who is behind it. It's literally kyc a profile, a curriculum on who is going to build it for me and we're winning there. Almost every case I've heard people say.
- [41:11]
Brian Rose
SUI is solana for institutions.
- [41:15]
Costas Halkias
I would say that SUI is not only for institutions. If you see how many times SUI was down and more robust and how we can accommodate more users, I believe we're going to win all of the meme defi gaming institution space, all of them. And the only competitor would be the L2s on Ethereum, probably, but the L2s. I'm coming from a country that is like a Polynesia country, Greece. There are so many islands. Go and live in the islands in the winter. Good luck. Too many islands. The liquidity is actually split between different places. You need this liquidity in the same place. Do you know why some countries are coming to sui? Because of the potential of having the gamers, the defi users. We even have some successful memes on Sui and Institutional like RWAs and all of this stuff. Because we need everybody to accommodate this liquidity, the gamer, especially with good things. Imagine even cz, he personally invests now on education and financial literacy for poor people. All of these folks eventually due to cz, will come into the blockchain because he's a public figure, right? And I believe we have to be the chain that will hug them. Come with us. We know how to onboard you. We know how to get you into a state where you're going to make money from this. You're going to also invest here. So if you don't get the gamers and you have the real estate of Greece or some other country UAE into the chain, who is going to give you liquidity? You need all of them. So for this to win, you need to have the most robust and fastest system and easy system to be like easy for everybody who wants to understand something new. Very difficult people, even at Facebook to make some changes. Very simple, like moving one button from the left to the right. You're losing users. Originally, people are used to templates, even ourselves. Some people are somehow accepting the reality and they don't try to make a change. They're only very, very small like portion of humanity who are taking bets and they're shifting very quickly. Most of them, they don't want to change even if they know they're not having the perfect life. So for us it's let's combine, let's get these two worlds, get married together. And that's why I believe we don't have a competitor and I don't believe that Solana is going to beat us down the road. We're going to win even against Solana.
- [43:54]
Brian Rose
Let's talk about Web2Social media companies because so far we haven't seen any of them come on the blockchain or offer crypto services. Now, Facebook obviously abandoned Libra for whatever reason. Elon Musk is always rumored to be bringing crypto transactions on chain. But I've heard other people say then the app won't be available in the app Store and there's all sorts of other issues and it's nowhere near happening. But do you see this happening because you used to work in one of those Companies and is this a threat to you or an opportunity for you?
- [44:22]
Costas Halkias
Are you talking about the big companies or smaller companies who want to be the decentralized Facebook and TikTok?
- [44:27]
Brian Rose
This exists. I'm talking about the bigger ones.
- [44:29]
Costas Halkias
Yes, this exists. For example, Sui has fantvrecord and some other big names are also coming now. What would it take for Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter to come into X? Coming into the blockchain, there are a few things that we have to consider that sometimes it's a bit more complicated. Even if crypto is more like liberal and you know, people can comment and do stuff that might not be censored, there is still some like regulations that for example, you need some of the stuff to be able to be deleted. Blockchain doesn't allow deletion. Okay, so how do you solve this problem? Right. Walrus, the storage layer that we're doing will enable deletion. You cannot get this on filecoin. In arweave, we know how to work even with regulators. This is another thing that I personally see that Sui will make probably a difference because if they have a request for privacy for fraud detection, because you know these two regulators are conflicting. It's a paradox. You have the fraud detection, the fraud like focused regulators, also the privacy regulators. How can you have privacy? And also these people have access to the data to be able to detect fraud. So there is a competition here. We've learned this game through Facebook. We know how to play this and.
- [45:49]
Brian Rose
Every country around the world is different and you better comply or you can't use their service and it's just a reality.
- [45:54]
Costas Halkias
Exactly. So you have to build extra tools on top of the existing blockchain. So you have to build the technology. Zero knowledge proofs is one of them. Fully homomorphic encryption, trust executed environments, multiparty computations. You will need more cryptographic tools than what we had before in the conventional blockchains. That's why we hired so many people to solve the identity problem. Identity is another issue. We have so many bots at the moment. How can you do social networks if Elon Musk doesn't run some bots? To detect bots every few weeks you need to create reputation systems. And I believe it's happening. They're exploring it. I also started personally to do some work on NFTs on Instagram, but then I left. Right. Even before the collapse of Libra, we worked for a bit with the Instagram team. I don't know what they're doing anymore. Google is running databases for analysis. They have the bigquery and some other tools for. And they're also running some validators. They're getting into the game, but slowly. If you're asking me about the platform itself to move the social network itself to run on the blockchain, we have to solve some of the problems that I mentioned before. The privacy sector, you have to be compliant with GDPR in some particular cases. So probably you can create a silo in particular countries, but you cannot make it global. And there is also the element of something changes in the country. They want to freeze accounts and all of these things. The centralized network doesn't hear of, doesn't listen of any ruler or any party. Right. It's the world who decides. So it will take time. I believe it's happening. I see some efforts. I believe Elon Musk will do it. I'm even tagging him sometimes on Twitter. Just do it. Because even if you don't want to start from social networks, there are a few easy wins. For example, donations. Come on. Who is going to put 10,000 in Greenpeace at the moment? If you don't know where your money is going, use the blockchain. Put super transparency at Oracles, even cameras that you're literally feeding the giant panda in China. And we know now I would probably have more liquidity into donations. And donations was also part of the social network. Facebook had a donation engine. So we can start with some of the features that these social networks are offering. Maybe Twitter will do identity only and then X can move to a different like full stuck into the blockchain. I believe we will go gradually. That's the only way to survive. And there is also another element if we move decentralized. And I believe this is based on their financial monetization plans at the moment on Facebook you're not getting any credits or any points or any financial incentives to like or watch a post. They mostly use your data in the blockchain. We can create new systems that the users will be awarded something will be incentivized. That's why I believe it's not only a matter of transparency. It's a matter of the humanity will drive us in a way that doing social networks, it's like working for Uber. You're making money. And if they want more people to stay and not like discretize, like splitting all of their infrastructure in different social networks that will exist here and there, they have to be the first on the blockchain space because otherwise they will face a competitive visitor like Google did. With OpenAI and now OpenAI is doing with DipSync. Google almost lost a piece of the market from Google search because of ChatGPT.
- [49:22]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [49:23]
Costas Halkias
Now even my. How. How often are you using Google search compared to ChatGPT these days?
- [49:28]
Brian Rose
Not. You see why I missed the first mover advantage.
- [49:32]
Costas Halkias
Exactly. And the brand, they have to do it. In my opinion. They have to do it.
- [49:34]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [49:35]
Costas Halkias
Not because it's required today for them it's probably a hassle. And they have to figure out how they can reformat the whole operation of the company to be in the centralized world. In some situations they have to talk with governments, what's happening here and there. But if they don't start, someone will steal their place in the podium.
- [49:53]
Brian Rose
That's innovator's dilemma. Right. Apparently they had detect years before ChatGPT but they weren't ready to release it because of liability. And then. And then. Whereas OpenAI had nothing to lose.
- [50:03]
Costas Halkias
Yes.
- [50:05]
Brian Rose
And now other companies have less to lose. And there it goes. All right, we talked about social on the blockchain. What about crypto payments on social?
- [50:13]
Costas Halkias
This should happen.
- [50:14]
Brian Rose
It should happen. I think sooner than later.
- [50:16]
Costas Halkias
It should happen. Especially now with Trump administration. I believe many countries are talking, thinking differently. Okay.
- [50:22]
Brian Rose
And Elon wants to make a super app.
- [50:24]
Costas Halkias
That's his final goal, 100%. And also crypto is by far easier to also create incentive schemes attract more like folks across the world. It's not only dollarized, it might be like different currency in China, different here. But also you have a defi platform where people can trade their points. You can gamify it as well. Something that you cannot do with fiat. So in my opinion it's also giving the incentive for folks that they're providing liquidity into crypto because they're expecting, they have an expectation that will be rich one day, that they will help in liquidity. Imagine even like people, couples like partners, someone who is trading crypto at the moment being able to buy stuff and give it as a gift to his or her partner. It should happen. Otherwise it's like, like you're enclosing yourself into a trading betting mode. We have to do payments. And the reason for a currency as a crypto at the moment is mostly keeping it as an investment. But we have now stables, we have different RWAs. I have a very specific plan in my head. I'm writing a book by the way called Web3 for governments and Web3 for social networks. There are two. Two books. Two books. At the moment I'm at the very beginning like 20%. But I can see a path on how we can do it fast. In my opinion, it helped how the US is behaving at the moment, because the mentality is changing even in Dubai. If they see people going to the US again, Dubai have to be more liberal on enabling payments faster than they used to do before. Otherwise they will lose the first waiver advantage and all of the money will go back to the US again. So crypto is enabling this and you want the gamer in Mexico to be able to buy land or something in.
- [52:21]
Brian Rose
Dubai as a tokenized piece.
- [52:24]
Costas Halkias
Yes. So we have to move really fast here. Social networks is an easy win. I believe it requires someone who is reputable already to succeed because I've seen many attempts. All of them are failing unless you do very interesting incentivization scheme and somehow you manage to have a community that is gradually thriving. But if you want in one shot getting billions of users like TikTok, YouTube and Facebook, one of these three, four people have to say, I'm going decentralized and then they win the market.
- [52:55]
Brian Rose
Okay, can we build social networks in Web3 that actually go somewhere and get used? Because the social five projects I've seen so far have gone nowhere because they can't ever get that critical mass that you get in the top five social networks. Will that ever change?
- [53:13]
Costas Halkias
That's why you need one of these people to start it.
- [53:14]
Brian Rose
Right. So you don't think it can come from some organic web3 base and create it from scratch.
- [53:19]
Costas Halkias
It can, but you need a substantial investment. Like you need something very big behind it to create noise. And you know, the social network behavior is unpredictable. You didn't expect TikTok to win against Facebook. Right. Even Mark was surprised.
- [53:34]
Brian Rose
Right.
- [53:35]
Costas Halkias
But eventually you realize that it's a trend that people want very quickly to get instant dopamine and like they feel energized. So we switched to shorts. Right. Everybody is looking at short videos now.
- [53:49]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [53:50]
Costas Halkias
In this situation we have to find the killer app, I believe.
- [53:54]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [53:55]
Costas Halkias
There is swords. There is something else that sweets like people from Facebook to Tick tock. Maybe we need to find something else. And the new social network will have this thing that we haven't found yet.
- [54:03]
Brian Rose
It has to be really good.
- [54:04]
Costas Halkias
I don't know what it is.
- [54:05]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [54:06]
Costas Halkias
Yeah.
- [54:06]
Brian Rose
And we saw with threads, I mean Facebook with many more users than Twitter had, they tried to launch threads and they didn't go anywhere even though they had 3 billion users. Amazing tech people. And that goes to show you that people are fixed in their Ways and even a company like that can't create a Twitter like network. So how would a startup decentralized do it? Almost impossible.
- [54:26]
Costas Halkias
Google had the similar failure with Circle. You know Google Circle where they tried to create a social network as well. It didn't work.
- [54:33]
Brian Rose
Yeah, I remember.
- [54:34]
Costas Halkias
You don't even remember it.
- [54:35]
Brian Rose
Yeah, that's a funny name. Yeah, they tried to create it like 10 years ago.
- [54:39]
Costas Halkias
So it's not easy. We haven't found still this feature that will make the difference for people to move into crypto. Maybe this payments incentivization. If everybody's getting crits in the new decentralized network, you will see Asia, Africa, Latin America jumping into this and then eventually all of the other parts of the world. Okay, maybe, but I don't know what is this feature at the moment? There is something I'm pretty sure I cannot imagine. We covered everything in social networks but we haven't found it. So there are two, two ways. One is one of the big names makes the move and the other one is some feature that nobody has thought of that will make a difference like a leapfrog situation.
- [55:22]
Brian Rose
Like okay, what are you doing in Dubai and what is Sui doing in the next 18 months? It's a bold move for you to come here. Dubai is an amazing place. It's super forward thinking. But it doesn't have a big talent base that you might find in university towns in America or Silicon Valley. But it has a lot of other things going for it. I mean you could be anywhere. Why are you here?
- [55:46]
Costas Halkias
There are many reasons for this. First we found partners in the region who know about the web 3 space better than us, especially in close proximity countries from Asia, India. India is an evolving country. Dubai is next to India, right? Previously from Palo Alto. I had to travel for a whole day to come here. Now I'm going very quickly there. Turkey is also a very like evolving market. Eastern Europe as well in my opinion has a very good geostrategic like position. Not forget the talent. I agree with you. But you can easily find use cases because the blockchain has more applications for developing countries countries and Dubai is a developed countries but surrounded by developing countries. Right? While in the US on the top has Canada. The US itself is a bit more difficult to take decisions here you can go and speak to people and there will be a decision that we are changing the law or we're changing something and you can make it faster. I cannot as a researcher being like with handcuffs because the government is slow on adapting new technology Here I Realized that people respect technology. I even have some patents from here, like for other things, for security. And they helped me. So I realized, wow, look here I can get the resources I need to bring the talent into the region. There is no talent. I told you from the very beginning. The biggest difference shock for me is compared to Silicon Valley, that I was surrounded by some of the biggest brains in the world. Here I'm surrounded by people who know how to do deals, but they cannot code right. And I'm bringing the team. I also realized that having a team here, it makes a big difference because I go to meetings with G42 or all of the other things that are happening in the space. And there are other partners coming to Dubai because they're looking for the same thing. And I go with my solution engineers and me as a cryptographer. And we have ad hoc on the spot delivering the smart contract. Nobody can compete with us. So I found a free space to sign. So for me it was super different. And if you ask around, I guess you are in the region. Ask who is the most talented team in Dubai at the moment Regarding innovation and engineering. Forget the world, it's SUI investment club.
- [58:09]
London Real Investment Club Member
Today I consider it the best investment that I've ever made. We get four projects presented a week by their associated CEOs. Personally, I'm completely blown away by the quality of these projects. And I know of nowhere else where I would be given the same opportunity. Each week that passes, I feel more appreciative of the fact that I'm a member of this group. The vibe was just tremendous. Everybody's on the same wavelength. We just clicked, everybody listened to each other, enjoyed their company. It was just magical. Magical. Take action. Don't take my word for it. Due diligence you need to do. And I really hope that someday down the road I see you in the club. It far exceeded expectations without questions.
- [58:55]
Brian Rose
And you just set up your SUI Hub as well? Yes, a few months ago.
- [58:58]
Costas Halkias
SUI Hub, what is that? Sui Hub is an accelerator. Do you know that SUI Hub has a program now that is running for startups to come into the SUI ecosystem? We had 631 applications if I remember correctly, which probably the top in the world. And there will be an article by one of the biggest news sites in the world because this has never happened before. And there is another thing. You know that I'm also a professor in Aus American University of Sharjah with the best blockchain course in gcc and we won the Global Bybit Hackathon. Why? Because we know how to create talents. There is another interesting stuff. There are some communities in the UAE region. I'm not saying Dubai necessarily. It might be Sarza that I found talent and I can make them leaders. In the US it's a bit more difficult because all of these people have opportunities here. It's sui, they know it's the most innovative place to work. So if I manage to get them into our type of working, because it's something as a culture, they have to change. I told you, I work with power naps. We won the Bybit Hackathon and in my house there were two solution engineering engineers and like students visiting the mall, working with me all day. We didn't sleep.
- [60:17]
Brian Rose
All day, all night, all day.
- [60:18]
Costas Halkias
Two weeks we didn't sleep. I was like a zombie. But we won. And the, the only reason that you can make it is you have to be in an environment which is still immature. And you are the first. I also have a first mover advantage here. Nobody can compete with me at the moment in the region. And you have people like Feras and Mwala who are doing like, who are building the framework to help me find the correct people to talk about the innovations that we're bringing. And this is a formula that it's not possible elsewhere at the moment. Maybe Singapore, but still Dubai, I told you, has another thing, that you can also have access to talent in developing countries. Better than Singapore, probably.
- [61:06]
Brian Rose
And it moves faster than Singapore.
- [61:08]
Costas Halkias
Yes, it moves faster.
- [61:09]
Brian Rose
Right?
- [61:09]
Costas Halkias
It moves faster.
- [61:10]
Brian Rose
Now your hub is in Dubai, but also there's a lot happening in Abu Dhabi and there's a lot of money in Abu Dhabi and there's a lot of banks that are setting up offices in Abu Dhabi. How do those two cities work together, by the way?
- [61:22]
Costas Halkias
SUI has office in adgm, but also in Dubai. So I personally move between the two cities and I'm also going to Sarza for pitching. So I know all of the different like Emirates in the country Abu Dhabi is for UAE is mostly the place where you can indeed go and seek funding. Well, Dubai is to seek community. This is how I have them in my brain. But now in Abu Dhabi and adgm, especially this particular part of Abu Dhabi, I'm building talent. If you go with talent in the place where there is money, maybe you win cases. That was impossible before. Most of the bankers I've seen, even the people who are ruling the country, they're not necessarily technical. So they can understand what I can get from this. I try to simplify it. Being a professor helps a Lot, A lot I can do. Le5 explain like I'm 5 very complex, like notations of crypto, you know, these terms and all of this stuff. So you go there, you realize that some of the confidence is there and mostly for doing either funding or partnerships. Sometimes better success rate compared to Dubai. But in Dubai, there is some community element that you cannot find in Abu Dhabi today. So you have to be in both places. It's one hour drive. It's fine. Yeah, right. For me, there is no difference. As I told you, I sleep with naps. So whenever I'm in a taxi or with my driver, I'm just sleeping. This is how humans survive. You use all of the commuting time to sleep. I don't drive. I don't drive because I want to sleep.
- [63:07]
Brian Rose
And you don't sleep in your bed at night for extended periods of time?
- [63:11]
Costas Halkias
No. I even have a driver who is getting me from my house for two hours. I tell him, go around, get me to Jumeirah, then come back and I want to sleep for two hours in the car. Only for sleeping just in the car? Yes.
- [63:23]
Brian Rose
You're used to it now.
- [63:24]
Costas Halkias
Ala knows about this.
- [63:25]
Brian Rose
You'd rather sleep in the.
- [63:25]
Costas Halkias
Carla knows about this and he says, this guy's crazy. Yeah, Sometimes he's calling me, oh, he's probably sleeping somewhere in the A car. Like walking around Dubai. Yes. This is, this is my way of living. And probably if I'm moving with the car, somehow I have better. I convince myself that it's like my dopamine and I have better ideas.
- [63:47]
Brian Rose
This is the culture of Sui. And this is a culture of Sui. Okay.
- [63:50]
Costas Halkias
It's a hackathon culture.
- [63:51]
Brian Rose
Okay. Yes, Hackathon culture with. With seasoned management coming from a trillion dollar company before this.
- [64:00]
Costas Halkias
Yes.
- [64:00]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [64:00]
Costas Halkias
And we want to be the apple. We want to be the trillion dollar company.
- [64:03]
Brian Rose
Okay. 2025, we're at the beginning of what people will believe will be the biggest bull market. We have an administration in the US I.e. pro crypto, a president that drops his own meme coin, etc. Etc. What do we expect from the next two years? And then how is Sui a part of that? Maybe first, what do you see?
- [64:22]
Costas Halkias
I believe many of the real world assets will come into the blockchain period. Gold real estate stables will be a must in almost all of the developing countries and the developed countries. USA I believe will lead the round. Countries like Singapore and Dubai will follow with faster pace, I believe to surpass it. So this will create a competition and in my opinion, it will work well. It fits to my appetite of you need some boost even from the upper levels for this to succeed. It's the same thing as we discussed before for social networks. You need some big names to give you the passion and the inspiration to lead it. The other thing I believe is it will make the crypto more a legitimate asset that previously in the past someone said I will not buy crypto because I don't know how it will be taxed or if it's even illegal. Now we're getting into a state where if the like the governor of the biggest country financially in the world even has a meme coin. This is demystified. Now everybody knows about crypto. It's good for advertisement. Even if this meme thing created a liquidity issue in the market at the same time, I believe long term because everybody does knows now about crypto, it will help. So it's a small like valley and let's see, bull market. Obviously nobody can predict because the seasonality on every financial asset, it's not predictable. It's typically a random walk as every market. Otherwise everybody would be rich. But I hope it will unlock many cases that previously were very, very conservative. Now I'm talking to many governments. I was literally two weeks ago in another government talking about how we can help them on their digitization. And you know, when you're going from paper into digital, typically you're using the latest technology and the latest technology is blockchains. You're not even going to regular databases. This is past. So whoever wants to do a step further for a modern society, more transparent, better ownership, less issues with capital controls that we had in Greece, you know, I had my money locked. I couldn't do anything. Crypto is a place, it's a machine that gives you this hope. I believe many things will be unlocked because of the new administration. Perceptionally, you need it. Perceptionally this is more important. Markets are driven by perception. Sometimes now you never know, right? Because we've seen also many times there is a resistance and someone might change the narrative because they cannot make it alone. You need also support. Elon is doing, I believe a good job at least to create this hype. I have a feeling that the vision that we had that the crypto will be the next thing for humanity along with AI because it helps AI Evolution is actually a driver for crypto adoption. You know why?
- [67:36]
Brian Rose
Why?
- [67:37]
Costas Halkias
Because we need ways to have verifiable AI because otherwise we will not have good ways. And blockchain has the tools to do it. We need ways to do payments with AI bots. And all of these agents that are now running and crypto is probably the best place because now they can just create a script and they can interact with custom logic. There is no programmable money on any other system. And the thing that humans and bots and new, new, new platforms are coming. AI can help on vulnerability detection, on creating smarter wallets. Like literally having your own tutor. It will even propose to you what you should buy. I don't see why. By the way, the best wallet in the world is not an AI wallet. I don't understand, not yet.
- [68:22]
Brian Rose
Why, right?
- [68:23]
Costas Halkias
You need, you need. It will tell you you have 3003 sitting there, go stake them or do this.
- [68:30]
Brian Rose
It's the new Defi AI, right?
- [68:32]
Costas Halkias
Unify AI. So in my opinion, having better systems will also create new tools for the crypto community. So I see them going like hand in hand, literally they go together. And I had the presentation about why it's important. Because AI can be used to improve blockchains. Blockchains can be used to improve AI even on data setting, private data setting, but also getting incentivized to provide data to AI. There are many companies now that are going to do labeling of data for AI models. How do you pay the users? How do you create this new uber economy? You now need to pay the users with crypto, probably because they live across the world. Someone in India might not be able to get dollars or whatever with crypto. Now you can probably change the narrative here. And it's also cheaper than the current version. And if it's micropayments in some situation you can even avoid kyc, which was only possible with cash in the past. There is also AI where you can profit from the blockchain because now you can build traders as we did in the stock market. And there is also application, the fourth element that they want to use both AI and crypto because part of the company is doing AI, but they also want to monetize, incentivize their user. They have to use crypto as well. So these four different perspectives in my opinion help a lot along with the new administration for the crypto to flourish. AI is also helping on crypto. That's my personal view.
- [70:01]
Brian Rose
And you used AI for a bunch of your white hacks in the past and even recently.
- [70:05]
Costas Halkias
And I found billion dollar attacks because.
- [70:07]
Brian Rose
Of AI and it would have been impossible for a human to find that.
- [70:10]
Costas Halkias
No, there is a reason why. The reason is AI is domain agnostic. The new AI models are domain agnostic There is no person when you have a very complex system who can read the backend, the front end, the database part, the UX part and everything. Put all of this into the AI model and it will do all of the inference, it will do all of the connections and probably will find a very complex scenario where some attack is performed. The other thing is when you see a new open source software or some new code in general, it takes time for a human to understand what is doing. The AI can give you summary now it can even run a like soft audit tool to give you templates of what can possibly go wrong. Based on all of the information I have about previous attacks and then the human brain can move faster on analyzing this data and go to the solution. A lot like in a, in a, in a quicker mode than in the past because previously myself as white hat hacker I had to read the documentation, go check if I can find a place where something is not implemented correctly. Now I'm using Baghdad Shui Baghdad it's called to go very quickly get hints on where should I look for vulnerabilities.
- [71:28]
London Real Investment Club Member
What the London Real Investment club actually does for you, it gives you the keys to open that door to the inside deals. In the last three weeks I've participated in three incredible deals.
- [71:38]
Brian Rose
Deals.
- [71:38]
London Real Investment Club Member
A layer two Bitcoin protocol, an incredible AI protocol. The deal flow is beyond what I expected. I don't think I've ever seen a model like this that just gives average folks the opportunity to be behind the deals. And that's exactly what we've done. Not only that, you get to hang out with Brian Rose every week and for me that was huge because I look at Brian as somebody who's not only an expert in the space and I think is on the leading edge, but just a leading edge of thought with London Real and the work he's doing there. To anyone who's taking a serious look at this, I know it's a big decision. It was a big decision for me and my family and it is one of the best decisions I've ever made. So I wish you all the best and hope you come join us.
- [72:25]
Brian Rose
And there's quite a few of those out there. You said a lot of these new token launches, if they ran a simple AI tool they would find out there's issues with them. They're inflationary. They didn't know they were.
- [72:34]
Costas Halkias
I found one inflationary that the founders didn't know. It's inflationary. I called them 2am Go fix it. So they did.
- [72:44]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [72:44]
Costas Halkias
They owe Me, they owe me. This is a multi three digit billion dollar project. It's not a billion dollar project, it's a three digit million project. And I saved them. And AI, the bugdad system has also saved, at least perceptionally, some of the biggest exchanges in the world because we found some issues on the proof of solvency algorithms that it was buggy. Someone could technically understate their liabilities. Which means that if you understand liabilities, then you can say, oh, with less assets I can accommodate my customers.
- [73:22]
Brian Rose
Right.
- [73:23]
Costas Halkias
While you're advertising that all of the liabilities are public and all of my assets are public, the algorithm was not correct.
- [73:28]
Brian Rose
Okay, got it. Downside of AI as it gets more and more powerful in the future, do you see a dystopian future?
- [73:37]
Costas Halkias
That's interesting. Look, there will be a few job markets that will be affected. Content creators, accounting, maybe there will be situations like coders, Coders, lawyers, especially on junior levels.
- [73:56]
Brian Rose
Lawyers, doctors.
- [73:57]
Costas Halkias
Yes, exactly. We need to be a bit more like to work on being experts on things. And even your expertise might be dwarfed eventually by the new AI that will come. So in my opinion, what I would suggest to people is learn to use these AI platforms so you're always either a step ahead or at least you're not below that. We cannot predict what will be changed for junior developers. I have a small fear even Mark Zuckerberg had the mention. Did you see his talk? We might replace all of the junior and mid developers with AI gradually.
- [74:40]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [74:40]
Costas Halkias
I think it was in the news. I don't know if it was him or someone from Facebook, but it is a risk. And that's why I believe a nice thing that we're doing in SUI is getting them work with the best people and probably they get an extra, you know, leapfrog in their mindset that will give them an advantage for the future.
- [75:01]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [75:02]
Costas Halkias
Because if you work as a junior in a project that is doing just AI stuff, I mean ChatGPT can replace you now. You will never learn. You will be always below the AI because there will be a new AI model, the new LLM that is better than the previous one. But you stayed behind. You need to be creative.
- [75:22]
Brian Rose
Now. We've now seen AI agents that raise their own money, that launch their own meme coins. And like you said, AI goes with crypto. It empowers the AI. What happens when the AI starts to see, well, I can now put out news, information, disinformation to pump my meme coin. Maybe I could pay a human to go set off a Bomb over here and pump my coin. It could start to get pretty crazy. So you talked about replacing human workers, but what about when the AI starts doing some wild things and when you look at the agent stuff, it's already getting crazy. I don't think many people are actually seeing what these agents are doing. But like, I had a scenario where this AI16Z raised so much money that then it went out and just bought out a 16Z, you know, I mean, like, weirder things could happen. And if it's optimizing for market cap, it could do some weird things and it could employ humans to do these things without them even knowing what's going on.
- [76:14]
Costas Halkias
I cannot agree more with you. You're 100% right. I believe it's like the blockchain here has to spend some more resources into identity solutions and live event technology for identifying bots. Always. There will be a race, but we have to do something. I have a personal fear, by the way, can you imagine down the road that we might have created artificial life having a drone with AI that has a 3D printer inside it? It's connected to the blockchain and is having commodity trading logic. It can fly, it's a drone, can get energy from Solar, it can 3D print itself, it can copy, it can clone itself, it can transact on the blockchain, it can do cryptography that humans cannot read it. How do you control this artificial life? But this is 100 years ahead.
- [77:12]
Brian Rose
100 years. However, this is 10 years ahead.
- [77:16]
Costas Halkias
Software agents. This is hardware agents, right? Okay. Software agent. Hardware agents are coming. Believe me, what you see now with AI bots, you will see this podcast in a few years and you will say, oh my God, it's coming, it's coming. Your fridge might be richer than you. It will order for you from Amazon and from other places and you will pay.
- [77:36]
Brian Rose
Your fridge, your fridge is day trading. Meme coins.
- [77:39]
Costas Halkias
Exactly.
- [77:40]
Brian Rose
Is richer than you.
- [77:40]
Costas Halkias
Yes. And it has a CPU inside. Maybe it can do stuff.
- [77:43]
Brian Rose
Maybe. You're serving the fridge every day, right?
- [77:45]
Costas Halkias
I mean, while you're sleeping, it makes money. I had the book actually, with one of the guys from. Was it Bloomberg? We never wrote it. When I was in R3 in London, the man and the fridge. Back then, we were thinking about this. There is a potential your fridge will make more money than the owner of the fridge. And we're getting into this. This is hardware agents, though, like robots. Robots are coming slightly slower pace than LLMs, but are coming now. Software AI agents, they will dominate all of the Transaction as it's happening now during the stock market. You know that 90, almost 9% of the, I don't know, 95 to 99 are coming from bots. It's not humans. How can a human be 24? 7?
- [78:25]
Brian Rose
It's high speed trading bots, all of.
- [78:28]
Costas Halkias
Them even taking positions by editing tweets and doing some analysis on the data and then taking positions. Not necessarily high frequency trading.
- [78:38]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [78:40]
Costas Halkias
Blockchain is helping a lot, by the way here. Even if it gives the element of like financial tool for them to transact. We can help with cryptography or some other mechanisms to identify which is bought and what is not bought. For news misinformation, for example, Sui has worked in a project where we have the identities of the users and then there is a reputation system and we can try to figure out as a dao, pretty much how some bots are behaving. So we can say we can tag them as being an AI compared to the other thing that is a human. Also comparing this with news websites, there are algorithms now you can do it with privacy as well. So even myself, as a personal goal, assuming Sui goes well and people like Sui and they support it, I will invest personal time on solving this problem.
- [79:30]
Brian Rose
Okay, let's talk about Sui going well because you can't deny that a higher token price does a few things. And I'll just say it. First of all, it gets more eyeballs and this is an attention economy, which makes it easier to hire. It also gets more money in the treasury, which means you can probably give more grants to people. And you guys experienced this like literally in the last few months, it's gone, you know, pretty skyrockety. That must change the way you guys do some business.
- [80:02]
Costas Halkias
Something that changed perception to our heads is people. For the first time they understood the innovation, leadership and flagship that Sui has to offer in the community. Because the reality is many new tools that changed how people were interacting and faster was appreciated eventually. This is what I believe is the main reason for all of this happening and the fact that we were also super robust that people can operate their businesses without their money being paused or lost or something. I think it's appreciated, at least perceptionally. I'm not saying that the traders, but on the developer side, because I'm the nerd of the company, I cannot talk about the price itself. I can see some very good perception of how we're operating and they like it when they try others and then they come to us. So more developers on Sui, faster transactions, tvl, that is Flourishing, it plays a role. All of these, I believe they contributed into having a better hype for SUI technology. We have to continue this space. If you want to see SUI surpassing Solana and Ethereum, we have to be the most innovative for 2025, as we were in 2024, arguably, undeniably, and 2026, 2027 onwards. I believe it's just a few years ahead that we will surpass, at least on people's mind, the usability and the importance of SUI compared to the rest of the. Is this reflecting to prices? Nobody can tell. But I believe if the technology is appreciated.
- [81:46]
Brian Rose
Yes, We've invested in a few projects that have launched on sui and they said that your team is super accessible. Like they want to contact you, they need help, you're there to help them, you're there to help them build. It's like immediate, immediate, immediate.
- [82:00]
Costas Halkias
And it plays a huge role. Do you know why? Because we created on purpose a solution engineering team. We scatter this team across the world and the solution engineering team has a goal. Do not help SUI itself, help our partners. Because we're not alone. We need other people to also build businesses on top of it, where the operating system, we're the heart of their business. And now that's why you see SUI creating infrastructure that is not easy to happen by someone else. And then other people can build businesses. Sui, as I told you before, the CPU Walrus, the hard disk tbook, the Excel sheet, the NASDAQ of the blockchain, NSU ens, the identity. There is a few more coming. There is a SEAL project, there is the Remora project that we said we're going. We were the first blockchain with Remora in the world that we advertised a system, pilot fish first and then Remora that the validator can have multiple machines. And if you have multiple machines per validator now, you can do a lot better than anyone else. And SUI was the first. Many people are cloning now, but as you can see, in my opinion, the fact that we're driving innovation. It's okay for others to clone, but if it wasn't for sui, it will be a stagnant environment, at least in some of the places that I personally believe will help Web2 folks to come into Web3. We cannot recycle users and say, oh, I want 20% of the Ethereum users or Solana to come to us, so we have to build the infrastructure. And then the companies now say, okay, I can do something on Sui, but I have PDFs, oh, I can Use Walrus. But I have an order book. I have AI agents. Oh, I can use the batch transactions on Sui, where I can solve the Expedia problem. Right? The Expedia problem is I want to go to a place, but I need my flight, my tourist agent, my train tickets, my hotel. Either they all succeed or they all fail. I cannot go there and I don't have a connecting flight. So SUI has innovation that solves this. We even had actually natively sponsoring transactions. The average user who is getting a wallet, they don't know how to spend because they cannot. If you don't get your first Sui, you cannot. But we have sponsoring. So new businesses were created to say, watch the video for one second and you get your first. We are sponsoring your first retransaction.
- [84:24]
Brian Rose
This is important.
- [84:25]
Costas Halkias
Super important.
- [84:26]
Brian Rose
Yeah, it's an innovation because if you come into crypto right now, say you're on the Ethereum chain, you need some ETH to do anything. And how do you get eth? Because a lot of times you need ETH to get eth or you need to set up a central exchange.
- [84:37]
Costas Halkias
Yeah, it's a chicken and an egg problem, right?
- [84:38]
Brian Rose
Yeah, it is to a chicken and egg. And so people, they just get stuck. I've been stuck before where I can't actually do anything and I don't know how to get the eth and the central exchange is closed and my credit card got dinged. But with you guys, you've got sponsors, so someone can watch an ad and get a tiny bit and that's all you need. So it becomes almost.
- [84:55]
Costas Halkias
Can you imagine other businesses using sponsorship and CK login? Login with Google and sponsorship, you don't feel you are on web. 3 if you have an instant transaction. 0.4. Who at Facebook, I told you the minimum time you have to wait for ux. The maximum, Sorry, it's two seconds.
- [85:11]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [85:12]
Costas Halkias
After that you're losing users, right? Maybe three, depending on if you're doing some UX crazy stuff. One of my managers at Facebook was at Netscape. I don't know if you remember Netscape before Internet Explorer. So his innovation was when the bar was loading, people were waiting at the very first days of 2000, you know, the boom, why it's taking so long? So his trick was, let's create a GIF that is doing the loading signal, right? And this arrow that is doing the loading signal somehow convinced people that they didn't wait so much. Nothing changed on the. On the experience, Right. So you have to also work on some Tricks to make people not getting bored using, they're using the blockchain. We also found other ways not having the constant pop up. Imagine you're playing a game. Let's assume we're playing chess here. And for every chess move I have to do pop up, sign this transaction. Pop up, sign this transaction. It doesn't work. You cannot do trading with pop ups. So we found ways to create ephemeral keys on the session and very quickly you give them the permission for this application for now that I'm here for one hour, you're signing on behalf of me.
- [86:20]
Brian Rose
Okay? Okay.
- [86:21]
Costas Halkias
Bam, bam. You press the button and it executes a transaction. 0.4 seconds. Done.
- [86:27]
Brian Rose
Okay. All right. All this is to help the user perception and to make it just more user friendly. The same thing they did with the tubes in London. If you ever see, there's the times for the next train, they and there are digital now. They rarely actually correspond to how much time you're waiting. But just seeing them makes you calm.
- [86:43]
Costas Halkias
Oh, it's not reflecting the time.
- [86:45]
Brian Rose
Sometimes it's not.
- [86:46]
Costas Halkias
Okay, yeah, but it works for me.
- [86:48]
Brian Rose
Though, you see, I know. And by having an exact number, three minutes, two minutes, four minutes, it just gets everybody at ease. And now you just wait. But without it, you would be stressing and checking your watch and five minutes would feel like 15 minutes. So another perception, marketing. Let's talk about Costa's crazy ideas. Because at first you look at what you talk about with his, like low bandwidth transactions, mouth based keyboards, quantum solutions for the future, or solutions to battle quantum and crypto, and you're thinking, what is this guy doing? Isn't he busy with Sui or shouldn't he get some more sleep? But now that I talk to you, the only reason SUI is what it is is because everyone in your company is constantly innovating. Me, right, Everybody I know is everybody's innovating, which means coming up with completely outside of the box ideas. Like zklogan was an outside of the box idea that you didn't have to do. You could have, right, clicked and copied a blockchain, but that's not what you guys do. So tell me about the crazy ideas and then how they are actually part of SUI or Miston.
- [87:46]
Costas Halkias
So there are a few people in the company who used to have a super like high innovation rate from the past with cherry pickton from Stanford, from Facebook, from Google, from different places. Why? Because you cannot predict in this, like constant cycles of crypto what is the next thing. You have to prepare yourself even before it happens, I had a discussion with my co founders when we had zklogin. Imagine we have the p zeros. P zero means that we have to deliver it 100%. But I told them, look, I need a team. I need to work on something super cool. I don't know if it's feasible. And then zklogin. Do you know how zikilogin became feasibility? I traveled to Mexico. And then you will connect the dots. And while I was traveling, eventually, because I'm Greek in the port, in the. When I arrived at the airport, the customs and everybody was checking me more than the Americans because I'm coming from Europe. And I said, okay, why there is no digital passport. I explained to them who I am. And very quickly I passed through that. So I said, I have to find an identity solution that is not mnemonics anymore. It's not something like that. And then I was super lucky because we got into a restaurant and the restaurant forgot to bring me to serve salt, Salt and pepper. And then I think for a while I have it. I found it. We need in the cookie in this thing that Google is returning back. I should use it as a passport. And I need to embed inside the public key and the salt to hide your identity. So me going to Mexico and combining the passport issue I had along with someone didn't serve me salt. I created a passport over Google with a salt which allowing you to sign again and again with your Google even after you lose your session again, you go back login with Google. You have the same account. I can now send to an email. I can send money to a passport. And this changed the narrative completely. So sometimes I'm getting images from all of the experience I have in the world. Even after we leave this meeting, I will try to get go back home, meditate and see. Let's see what I can get from Brian. Maybe he can give me something that his background is not the same with me. I can go outside the box. There are 20, 30 crazy people in the company like me. Then in the past at Facebook 2021, along with Sam the CEO and the CTO of the company, along with Evan the CEO and Sam the CTO of the company. I invented toothbrush. So do you know that we have a keyboard embedded in our mouth? A V, C, D, E, A Z.
- [90:37]
Brian Rose
Okay, we have a keyboard. Okay.
- [90:39]
Costas Halkias
Then you just need sensors, very tiny sensors that with your tongue you can actually control them, can do this stuff. And then you can talk and you have a secure enclave. You can go to the atm. Nobody can see your password. Go type the password. In Dubai, there are cameras everywhere.
- [90:56]
Brian Rose
Your.
- [90:56]
Costas Halkias
Your mobile's password is everywhere. Go to 711 in the US they have your password, the mobile passwords. You have everybody who's listening at this. Where's the camera? They're already out, all of them. So I had this.
- [91:12]
Brian Rose
Everybody's already been breached.
- [91:14]
Costas Halkias
Everybody. Everybody.
- [91:15]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [91:15]
Costas Halkias
There is no. I don't believe there is any password. I mean, do you do all of this time like you put your password inside and nobody's doing this and people have. You are in the restaurant and there is a camera above you. If the camera focuses on your phone, they will find your password. They can even now people are experts. They can even from your. Even from like they're called solder attacks. Solder surfing attacks. Even by seeing your movement on your hand, they can even understand what buttons you are pressing. Right. Really it is possible. I've done this. You know that we have this 2006 past Doodles where your dig Vista. Do you know who was one of the first who created this? It was me and my work 2006. I remember it was called graphical password something. Then it was patented by another company. I think it was Adobe, someone else an extension of it. And they referred to my work. But imagine if you're in Greek, you don't have the access to the money and be able to patent all of this stuff. I would be super rich even from the very beginning. So Toothpoard allowed me to create a Morse code device. But because you cannot use all of your teeth easily, you have to train yourself. But I could do Morse code. So left and right, if you search toothboard on LinkedIn, Toothpoard and Costas or Salkias, my last name, you will see all of the pictures of me being in the dentist trying to have an implant. I removed the tooth, I put the sensor inside and then I had the Bluetooth because I needed to send the message. And then how do you receive the messages? You need a way to receive messages. Do you know what I did right? I said, how is it possible? How's it possible? Have you ever tasted the 9 volt battery?
- [92:48]
Brian Rose
Yes.
- [92:49]
Costas Halkias
Does it feel like electric, like electricity?
- [92:51]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [92:52]
Costas Halkias
So with your saliva you can understand in your tongue. Left and right now.
- [92:55]
Brian Rose
Oh. So that's the feedback back to you.
- [92:57]
Costas Halkias
The feedback back to you. So I had the fully communicating system fully fledged.
- [93:01]
Brian Rose
Is it in your tooth now?
- [93:03]
Costas Halkias
I removed it now and I'm going to put an AI.
- [93:05]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [93:07]
Costas Halkias
So I'm going to have Another implant. Anyway, so anyway, we did this. Obviously this can be used for authentication now, even for people with disabilities and other stuff. Another company at mit, by the way, made it production based, but for disability purposes. But I can think that in the future it's not biometrics, it's not passwords, it will be something embedded because it's the only way to ensure that AI will not break it.
- [93:33]
Brian Rose
Okay, okay.
- [93:35]
Costas Halkias
Our iris, our fingerprints. How much. How many years do you give for this to be taken your face, right? Just a few years. It's smarter than the human.
- [93:44]
Brian Rose
That can be copied. Yes, can be copied, but this thing can't.
- [93:47]
Costas Halkias
No, because it's embedded. They cannot get inside your.
- [93:49]
Brian Rose
Right.
- [93:50]
Costas Halkias
And I used it because people are already familiar with feelings in the teeth. Right. And it's easier to accept it. Anyway, it didn't go anywhere because I left and then it stayed as an idea at Facebook and very simple, like proof of concept. The other thing I do is internetless transactions. I sent in the old city of Dubai. How is it called? There is a name.
- [94:12]
Brian Rose
Oh yeah, the soup market. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
- [94:16]
Costas Halkias
Two days ago. I've implemented this, by the way, a few months ago, but I didn't have Internet, I had any situation with my roaming. I used the American number and then I said I need to send a transaction. And then I remembered I implemented sending by sms. So I connected my wallet to SMS and I send it by sms and I have a full node who is accepting SMS payments and I could manage to send the transaction. So now the base camp of SUI is happening in Dubai. I don't know if you know it along with token 2049.
- [94:49]
Brian Rose
Yeah, that's May 1st and 2nd. Yes, right. This year.
- [94:52]
Costas Halkias
So at the same time you're going to see crazy stuff of me with Linked, with antennas and other things, being.
- [94:59]
Brian Rose
A cyborg, debuting a bunch of these projects and ideas.
- [95:02]
Costas Halkias
I'm inviting you, by the way, and all of the audience here.
- [95:05]
Brian Rose
I'd love to come. It's a big hackathon or a presentation or a.
- [95:09]
Costas Halkias
The base camp is presentations, proof of concepts, new announcements that you haven't seen before. Okay. And real demos. We are going to have like crazy stuff. We're doing hardware. By the way, I created the hacker team in the company. It's called Hacker. You remember I mentioned commandos?
- [95:25]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [95:25]
Costas Halkias
I also have a hacker team. The hacker team is doing hardware and.
- [95:29]
Brian Rose
AI hardware, like your own phone.
- [95:32]
Costas Halkias
I'll do crazy stuff here. I cannot reveal everything, but we can even use our phone to send transactions without even sms. With FM radio, right. We are going to do stuff that is impossible to happen with other blockchains because I had to work on some compression algorithms as well to fit them into the frequency, into the wavelength.
- [96:00]
Brian Rose
Why are you going low bandwidth when it feels like everything around us is going to high bandwidth? Because Starlink, etc.
- [96:05]
Costas Halkias
Because you might be in the jungle or you might have a device that has access to the satellite. What do you do? Or you might be in a building here. How do you connect the satellite here? There's no way. So you need also to solve this problem. Also. You're right. By the way, Lora, which is one of the protocols, one of the wavelengths range that we can use, long range is called. You can get it for free without licensing in many countries or you need a very simple license to use it. So it's easy to apply it in your transactions. But I even did underwater. I used technology that is used for dolphins to be able to communicate sound waves. Sound waves, okay. And you can do for fish farms on the blockchain, you can do also you can put drones there that can take information from the, from the ocean and actually report it on the blockchain. You don't have satellites under the underwater.
- [96:58]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [96:59]
Costas Halkias
So you will see stuff coming from SUI that was not possible before.
- [97:03]
Brian Rose
Is there any other blockchain company out there that's doing this?
- [97:06]
Costas Halkias
No, because they don't have the capacity to do it.
- [97:08]
Brian Rose
And they don't think big is.
- [97:10]
Costas Halkias
Yes, I told you. Who is going to create commandos and fly to Tibet or to the Himalayas and go solve a particular problem to save the leopard.
- [97:18]
Brian Rose
But other blockchains like Cardano has the resources. They could do that. Why don't they?
- [97:23]
Costas Halkias
They don't have the culture first is the culture also. I don't believe they have. Because we're five co founders. We can use our resources by far better. We can delegate to one. I mean we have a group together. We're saying people. It's not that we're debating so often. There are of course disagreements, but everybody's super smart. I don't believe there is any other team, even five. Find me five co founders with such technical abilities, most of them with PhDs or super successful career. Cardano has one of the founders who is very popular and all of this stuff. Does he participate in hackathons or he goes there into the battle boots on the ground, get into the dirt, put your hands there, head down. Talk with the government alone and you write a smart contract with the governor who is doing this. We do it. So it's also the passion thing that you see in Assam. Everybody's a nerd. It's a nerd. And we have Evan, of course, that somehow who's a CEO, who's controlling all of the speaks.
- [98:35]
Brian Rose
Do you put your talent pool up against Web2 companies as well? Not just 100.
- [98:40]
Costas Halkias
Better than Facebook.
- [98:41]
Brian Rose
Better talent than any company.
- [98:43]
Costas Halkias
Yes. Okay. Obviously there are 100,000 people.
- [98:46]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [98:46]
Costas Halkias
But concentrated in. In percentage numbers. Yes.
- [98:50]
Brian Rose
Sometimes a seal team's better than an army. You know, it is a lot of times small effective team.
- [98:55]
Costas Halkias
You have to move faster.
- [98:56]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [98:57]
Costas Halkias
And the cycles here are by far shorter than the. The web two cycle.
- [99:01]
Brian Rose
Okay, let's talk about cycles because after, I know it's a random walk, but after this big bull market that everyone's feeling is going to happen this year, who knows? There will almost always be a bear market. Now, you guys built Sui in a bear market. In fact, the probably the worst bear market.
- [99:17]
Costas Halkias
We were unlucky at the time of launch. We were unlucky.
- [99:20]
Brian Rose
Unlucky or was that lucky in retrospect?
- [99:22]
Costas Halkias
Maybe. Maybe because we had the time to focus on the correct things, not just chasing prices as other people like paying money here and there. You know, Sui, even when we're actually funding stuff, we have a committee. There is like very good analysis on what this can bring to the community, how these people can make money. It's literally a ceremony for us. So even on the bear market, when it comes to, you know, what's happening on the bear market, you are building new infrastructure because you have the time now. But Sui is doing, even on the bull market, imagine what it can do on the bear market. But everybody is going into crazy stuff that we have. I have a feeling that in the bear market, more governments and more big, big corporations will come to Sui if it ever happens. Because we know how to do it and we've done this work before it comes. It plays a role. Right. As I tell you, first mover advantage on anything. Let's win on anything. That's my personal quote. And I also have another quote. You will find it on my resume. The ultimate inspiration is what? The deadline. It's the deadline. People are procrastinators. I don't know. They don't do stuff. We do stuff, deliver. Bam, bam, bam. Whatever you want in two days. I can teach you. Right move you, Brian, you can write a smart contract. Stop the interview. Let's. I will teach you to run how to create a smart contract now. And I'm a co Founder, I'm not giving you a solution, engineer, I will do it for you.
- [101:02]
Brian Rose
That's what makes sense.
- [101:03]
Costas Halkias
So that's the difference that we have in culture.
- [101:05]
Brian Rose
Okay, 20, 30, five years from now, what does SUI look like in comparison with the rest of the industry?
- [101:12]
Costas Halkias
Quantum resistant.
- [101:14]
Brian Rose
Will we have to be Quantum resistant by 2030?
- [101:16]
Costas Halkias
It doesn't really matter, but I'll tell you why. There are a few countries that are setting some framework now on who is going to be allowed to transact with the US government or the Australian government or the German government. And they say by 2030 you have to change your algorithms from the conventional ones into post quantum secure. Post quantum, by the way, for our people. It's not that I'm creating a quantum computer because we cannot have quantum computers, it's regular algorithms. But we know they can withstand attacks from quantum computers. So I have to switch. I'm already working on this. I'm not waiting for the bear market. So there is also the quantum thing that even if you were in the round table, the Satoshi Roundtable, what was the longest session and the most interesting session? My session on quantum. And we had quantum physicists inside. We had people who created the first algorithm, the top algorithms on post quantum and all of this. SUI is going to lead this space because eventually the governments want to switch gradually. And if you want to bring all of the real world assets, you have to comply. So it doesn't really matter if it will be broken or not. I don't believe it will. I believe we're many years away. Some people, I think it was Algorand in the room, they said 5 to 7 billion years. I don't believe so. There is one small fear, the only fear is AI will be smarter than the people who are working on quantum that will have a leapfrog on the quantum technology. This you cannot predict it. But in sui, even the algorithm we selected, people don't know it. EDDSA compared to the ECDSA of Bitcoin has a very, very small detail. I will have a post now because you are challenging me about why we picked EDDSA among the others and why the DDSA can be converted with a simple ZK solution that we have into a post quantum secure protocol. So the money of people will be more secure in SUI compared to other blockchains. So this is one thing. The other thing, I believe SUI is going to invest a lot on privacy and parallelization. I believe we're going to reach very quickly, millions transactions per second. We already have done it. With Remora, by the way, on the site, on the lab, very close to these numbers and with very, very expensive operations. Now we can even run AI on the blockchain and very heavy zero knowledge proofs on the blockchain. Because we are the leaders. We know from zklogin. We are the leaders on zk. Nobody has surpassed us at any time in the past. So we know how to do it. AI, there is already a team happening. I told you, we're hiring some of the biggest names in the space. So you will see more AI stuff coming on Sui Quantum has already started and you will see also some very cool applications. Because SUI is the first protocol that advertised were going to have secure randomness on chain. So people can create new types of experiences from random sampling, from new games, from even randomized defy, from randomized airdrops, crazy things that all of them will be products, I believe. So we built it on 2024, 2025, a few others. Quantum, AI and super fast parallelization is the three things that personally SUI will have. I believe in its toolset. But you see Walrus now. So storage is taking a completely different route. I believe eventually it will be also the de facto place for decentralization. Even under regulation, strict regulations to use it to store data. And if you have to store data there with privacy. Because we're building another project called seal, like the animal, the marine animal that is going to be working on top of Sui and Walrus to be able to also have encryption on chain now. And now you can create different types of games from poker to to KYC Identities where some of your data is public, some of it it's not. And then you can have the job market being with the curriculum market, you advertise only the things that are important for the employer. There is AI on chain that will run automatically. So this is my personal view and what I want to do. And also build other tools next to Sui encryption, order books, features for gaming and like high frequency stuff, robustness and parallelization. And the machine itself will be by far more modern. Because where like my cto. In my opinion he's a lot better than Vitalik. He created Move a better language than Solidity and go chat with Sam. This guy is a genius. I told you before, I'm in a group, right? But Sam is also a genius and he created a better language than Solid. It's like the cobol. And now we have the new Rust of the world. Rust is one of the good languages out there. New Java, whatever you call it. That is MOVE at the moment. Sui MOVE is a better scripting language for blockchains. There is no competitor. So I believe we're going to make also some leapfrogs there as well. Eventually you will watch your screen and you will write smart contracts.
- [106:37]
Brian Rose
So that's five years from now. Yes, five years, 10 years, 15 years. Everything in the world is run on SUI.
- [106:44]
Costas Halkias
Apple of Web 3.
- [106:45]
Brian Rose
Okay. Multi trillion dollar protocol I believe we have.
- [106:49]
Costas Halkias
If you're asking me who has the best chances because what is the Apple of Web3?
- [106:53]
Brian Rose
What does that mean?
- [106:53]
Costas Halkias
Trillion dollar company applications that are used on every every mobile phone and the innovation pace or even on the UX and even on the hardware that we're going to invest might also be owned by users. Like SUI will be owned physically by users.
- [107:15]
Brian Rose
Okay. Physically.
- [107:16]
Costas Halkias
Oh, physically. Devices.
- [107:18]
Brian Rose
The devices. Okay.
- [107:19]
Costas Halkias
And that's already created the first device for gaming. You know that?
- [107:22]
Brian Rose
No, I didn't know.
- [107:23]
Costas Halkias
Playtron, like Sweetplay.
- [107:25]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [107:26]
Costas Halkias
There is a Game Boy, but modern. Why hardware?
- [107:30]
Brian Rose
Why is that important for you?
- [107:32]
Costas Halkias
It's super important. Because technically you need to find new experiences and in the hardware at the moment nobody's getting incentivized and these devices. Imagine as a PlayStation 5 with a crypto experience is the first Web3 device. And because SUI is super fast, we couldn't, especially for gaming, we couldn't not be the leader of Web3 Gaming. We are the leader. So we had to invest on something that will make our gamers happy and our developers on gaming again even happier. And with incentives and all of the cool tricks that I told you zklogin. You hide completely the web. Nobody has done it in the past. You have randomness, you have sponsored transactions, you have batch transactions. Either everything succeeds or nothing succeeds. We have multisig. You can have the gaming company signing on behalf of your helping you to recover. We won the Bybit hackathon with a new algorithm that is called Kelp Me key loss protection. Even if you lose your key, there is a way to recover your account. This was not even perceivable possible.
- [108:37]
Brian Rose
That's crazy.
- [108:38]
Costas Halkias
And we found a fraud proof system that does it.
- [108:40]
Brian Rose
You built it?
- [108:41]
Costas Halkias
Yes. And we won the pipe it hackathon. Not only build it, it's. It's something that works.
- [108:46]
Brian Rose
And that's one of the biggest problems with Web3.
- [108:48]
Costas Halkias
Yes.
- [108:49]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [108:49]
Costas Halkias
Why our generation who holds keys on chain? Some of us eventually might pass away. How do you transfer the.
- [109:00]
Brian Rose
Yeah, how do. It's a real problem. I know a lot of dead people in crypto yes.
- [109:05]
Costas Halkias
What do you do?
- [109:05]
Brian Rose
A friend of mine went over to the widow's house and went through his stuff to try to find his pass keys.
- [109:10]
Costas Halkias
Yes. And I don't think he's saying it's psychological issue as well. It's not easy to go through that. Yeah, but we found ways where the custodian is not a custodian anymore. It's a. There is a. Imagine some zero knowledge proofs or some crypto proofs that can help you to recover even if you don't have the key and nobody has a backup. And we found new businesses for custodians that are not custodians. They cannot sit on you. Only if you pass away, they can transfer your money to your family.
- [109:38]
Brian Rose
This is what we need. We need.
- [109:40]
Costas Halkias
Yes. We need all of these things. Right. So this is where SUI is.
- [109:43]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [109:43]
Costas Halkias
Go and check my. My name or su's name and Mr. Names how we're serving this proofs of solvency across the world. Swissborg. I don't know if you know Alex from Swissborg. Do you know him? Yeah.
- [109:56]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [109:56]
Costas Halkias
They're using my algorithm to prove that Swissborg is solvent. And if you've seen my report on Binance in the past, how I help them to build a better system. Kraken or anything that Deloitte did, they didn't do a good job back then because they didn't know that the algorithm is broken. So we're also helping outside sui, something that actually gives this element of Sui being special. We do even research on other ecosystem tools or businesses not necessarily specific to sui. Because I don't want black swan events, I want to protect you because if you lose your passion about crypto, Sui eventually will be a victim of this nose down situation. And it's not the nose down, it's the we're going to stop funding innovation. Do you know how many of the cryptography algorithms are now used on web 2 because we have faster digital signatures, better hash functions, zero knowledge proofs. All of this technology is given back to web two now. So if someone says anything that happened trends, memes, is it bad for the society? No, my friend, the reason that you might have faster post quantum cryptography is because of crypto is because of CZ is because of Evansenk, it's because of sui, it's because of italic. Don't only be with blinders. And it's like a place where we can do speculated betting and trading. No, there is infrastructure behind it and this infrastructure is helping on many aspects in our society. Transparency. You will see donations, even the Trump administration. Now, I think Elon mentioned I want all of the government to go on the blockchain for transparency two days ago. It's. It's a thing that is good for society. There is the side project, which is crypto for payments and trading. There is a whole infrastructure thing that will change society completely. So that's crypto, and that's why I'm passionate.
- [112:01]
Brian Rose
Okay. I've never heard anyone make that point, that crypto is going to bring things to web2 that web2 could never innovate on their own.
- [112:07]
Costas Halkias
Go do AI verifiable AI without blockchain in a few years.
- [112:11]
Brian Rose
Yeah, yeah.
- [112:12]
Costas Halkias
And this AI will beat humanity. Blockchain might be your friend here. Yeah.
- [112:19]
Brian Rose
Decentralized AI as well.
- [112:20]
Costas Halkias
Privacy.
- [112:21]
Brian Rose
Yeah.
- [112:23]
Costas Halkias
You know who is creating what marketplaces? You don't. You don't want your data to be given to anybody just for money. Now there is ownership of your data.
- [112:37]
Brian Rose
How do people reach out to sui? What's the best way to connect with.
- [112:41]
Costas Halkias
You in the region? They can go to SUI Hub so they can search wehub. They can find me directly. I'm Kostas, crypto, Kostas with a K. Crypto with a C. On Twitter, they can go to the SUI blog or to the SUI documentation. If they want to learn how to write sui, they can find me directly through you. Call Brian Spam.
- [113:08]
Brian Rose
Brian Spam me. Thanks.
- [113:11]
Costas Halkias
It comes to me later on.
- [113:14]
Brian Rose
You've got your event coming up May 1st and 2nd in Dubai. You can come to that and see all your crazy devices and meet the SUI community and see all the plans for the future.
- [113:22]
Costas Halkias
100. Yes, exactly. Now in Dubai, we have the base camp. Yes. You can see me, like, live. I'm not an avatar yet, although I'm a cyborg.
- [113:33]
Brian Rose
Okay. And you have people all around the world as well.
- [113:35]
Costas Halkias
You saw 200 people. Europe, Korea, Japan. I'm giving you some big centers, right? Los Angeles, New York, Texas, Denmark, uk, London, mostly Greece, Dubai. We're getting another Singapore. Where else are we now? India, Gradually. Everywhere.
- [114:01]
Brian Rose
Okay.
- [114:02]
Costas Halkias
Everywhere.
- [114:03]
Brian Rose
And how does Brazil. Brazil as well. How does Costas take a break from any of this stuff? How do you survive as a human being when you're basically 24? Seven?
- [114:14]
Costas Halkias
It feeds me. It feeds me.
- [114:15]
Brian Rose
So this.
- [114:15]
Costas Halkias
It feeds me. It's my hobby.
- [114:16]
Brian Rose
Right.
- [114:17]
Costas Halkias
Who would name his own Kryptos? It feeds me. And even my wife. Now even Kryptos feels proud. Okay, right. Because do you know what crypto means in ancient Greek?
- [114:28]
Brian Rose
No.
- [114:28]
Costas Halkias
Hidden secret. So when we say cryptography, the word graphy means, you know, as calligraphy means I'm writing.
- [114:36]
Brian Rose
Right.
- [114:36]
Costas Halkias
So cryptography means writing in secrecy, writing with a hidden message, with some key. So that's why we call it crypto, cryptocurrency. So it's a currency where there is cryptography behind it, where there is some secret keys where you can do transfers.
- [114:51]
Brian Rose
Right. And your son is proud to be.
- [114:53]
Costas Halkias
Called crypto for at the moment, yes. Well, if the market collapses completely and then crypto is a bad thing, we can just say it's an ancient Greek word.
- [115:04]
Brian Rose
They say if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. Is that the story of you?
- [115:09]
Costas Halkias
Yes. I don't feel I'm working. I'm passionate about this. Of course we're taking breaks. We're humans, after all. I like spending time with my family. But there is a passion that drives me. I can see why it can change society. All of my life I was focusing on transparency. I won my first hackathon by creating the first transparent randomness in the world. And this was my ticket to go to the uk among the others. This was my ticket for everybody in the Greek community to learn about me. And then I put it as a goal in my life. I want transparency. And I'm coming from a country where transparency was not the best thing. Right. There is corruption and I needed to solve it as a person. That's why you see so many Greek people actually in the blockchain space crisis. And lack of transparency is a driving factor for them. And the country of 10 million people have 3, 4 in the major blockchains as lead cryptographers or founders. Cardano has elite cryptographer, is Greek on Ethereum Foundation. There were also a couple of Greeks involved. Sui has two Greeks. And personally I see education, financial literacy also being able to be transformed by the blockchain because we need to give incentives. There is no other system now that can give incentives. People should be richer by using the blockchain, be wiser by using the blockchain and the governments and everybody providing transparency and ownership to people. I haven't seen such a platform, such a framework in my mind like in the past. There is AI, who is advancing the knowledge of humanity and transparency and ownership and opportunities to build something new in the blockchain. Give me any other industry that is doing better than these two. For humanity, there is physics, we're doing space exploration. But this too is going to change our everyday life. You agree or you disagree? I do Agree, I'm a visionary, but.
- [117:13]
Brian Rose
That'S one of the reasons I'm in this space. You know, in 2020, we were censored very heavily for putting out messages during COVID and lockdown. And the web, two organizations blocked that messages from being being heard. And I had millions of people around the world that wanted to hear what I had to say, and I wanted them to hear, hear it. And yet a centralized, you know, tech company stopped us from communicating with each other. Now, we found other ways, but it just showed me how important freedom of speech is. And then I had an OG bitcoiner on named Dan Held who said, brian, freedom of speech is a luxury without freedom of finance, because if you can't eat, if you can't get on your mobile, get on the Internet, put a roof over your head, speech is a luxury. And so freedom of finance became just as important. And I ran to be mayor of London, actually, on a pro crypto, pro freedom of speech. I wanted to put the voting on the blockchain and the. And the budget on the blockchain as well. And so I've been on the tip of the spear of being censored coming from a country in America.
- [118:09]
Costas Halkias
Did they criticize you for all of this stuff?
- [118:11]
Brian Rose
They. Yes. And they took my content down, and the BBC came after me. Oh, the whole thing. Yeah. And so we really felt it, and that's one of the reasons we're here, because I believe crypto are instruments of freedom, and I think ultimately freedom will win. And so, yeah, it's really important for me.
- [118:27]
Costas Halkias
That's how I feel it. Yeah, I agree with you.
- [118:30]
Brian Rose
Yeah. Costas, you're a very unique guy, and we're very happy to have you going hard every single day in this ecosystem. Congratulations to all your team and Sui. All the people I met are amazing. Christian, shout out to Sheikh Moala and the Gaff Capital guys for making this happen and. And putting the hub here. And it's incredible. And I'm just super bullish on what you guys are doing. Your passion is incredible, and I'm going to go buy a big bag of suey after this before it airs. Not financial advice.
- [119:01]
Costas Halkias
I cannot tell anything about pricing. I'm the nerd of the company. But I really appreciate this. I feel the same. I see that you're very active in the community, and I'm very happy that there are people now who are advocating that we need this technology. Right. It's an important asset for humanity, in my opinion.
- [119:19]
Brian Rose
I think it's very important, and I'm also a big advocate of Dubai and the spirit of Dubai. And I feel like it's a bit of my duty to tell the stories of Dubai and communicate to the world all the amazing things people are doing here in Blockchain and Dubai.
- [119:32]
Costas Halkias
We can also work more together now that you can see I'm bringing some engineering and research capacity here. We can do events right? We can. We have to inspire people. We have to inspire students in the universities, in GCC in general. I've started with aus and I know we can change the narrative that Dubai is only to make deals. Dubai can also be a hub of innovation.
- [119:56]
Brian Rose
Yeah, wouldn't that be amazing? Yeah, wouldn't that be amazing?
- [119:59]
Costas Halkias
Of course.
- [119:59]
Brian Rose
Tens of thousands.
- [120:00]
Costas Halkias
That's my dream now. That's my dream now. Somehow Gough Labs created this dream to me that we can change, starting from uae, the world. And I hope I. I can do it.
- [120:11]
Brian Rose
Look, if it can be done anywhere, it can be done in the Emirates. That's for sure.
- [120:15]
Costas Halkias
True.
- [120:15]
Brian Rose
So we're glad to have you here. For sure.
- [120:17]
Costas Halkias
Thank you.
- [120:18]
Brian Rose
All right, well, we'll have this conversation again in the future. Check in and see. And thanks so much. Let's go higher.
- [120:23]
Costas Halkias
Likewise. Thank you so much.
- [120:24]
Brian Rose
Thank you, sir. All right, I want to thank the folks at Web3TV. We will see you next time.
- [120:33]
Costas Halkias
Hey.
- [120:34]
Brian Rose
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