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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:13]
B
Welcome to the long awaited crypto episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of everything crypto. This is something a lot of you guys have been asking for. We get a lot of emails from people saying, can you get someone who actually knows what they're talking about to talk to us about crypto rather than just getting a bunch of snarkmongers to snark about NFTs? We have listened to you. So I am Felix Hammond of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck of Fundrise.
- [00:44]
C
Hello.
- [00:44]
D
Hello.
- [00:45]
B
I'm here with Stacey Marie Ishmael.
- [00:47]
C
Of no affiliation.
- [00:48]
B
Of no affiliation, but definitely crypto adjacent in some way. And most excitingly, we have Maya Sahavi, who's going to basically spend the next hour telling us everything that you ever need to know about crypto. Maya, welcome. And who are you?
- [01:07]
A
Thanks for having me. I'm crypto investor who's been in this space both on the Enterprise and the Wild west of Defi for the past seven years.
- [01:15]
B
And you're based where?
- [01:17]
A
Tel Aviv, Israel.
- [01:19]
B
This is the one great thing about Pandemic era podcasting is it's just as easy to get someone on the show from Tel Aviv. It used to be we used to insist on people coming into the studio in Brooklyn. I have no idea when that's going to happen again. Maya, you are going to tell us just an absolute smorgasbord of information about privacy, Defi, what that is, exchanges, regulation, the dream of where we can wind up in this brave new world of crypto. Who's doing it well, who's doing it badly, who's making money off it, what kind of ways the world will change. It's an absolutely wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And all of that is coming up on Slate Money. So let's start with the very, very big picture, Maya. The main thing everyone knows about crypto is that there's this thing called bitcoin and it goes up in value. And if you want to make lots of money, you can buy bitcoin and then get rich. And then if you worry that bitcoin has already gone up and isn't going to go up anymore, there are other coins you can buy instead, which you can buy and get rich. Of course, obviously, if you can get rich, you can lose money as well. Take us one step beyond that. Presumably there's something here beyond just a purely speculative gambling vehicle.
- [02:43]
A
Yeah. So in my view, that's the least interesting part. If you want to play that game, then just empirically speaking, buy your Bitcoin or Ether and forget about it. And it might go up and just consider yourselves as though you've already lost that money. But the interesting thing is what happens behind the scenes, specifically on Ethereum and crypto markets and what is being built and experimented with. And I think that is several light years ahead of anything going on in fintech right now.
- [03:14]
B
So when you say fintech, you mean basically I can venmo you money from my phone?
- [03:20]
A
Yes. Or you can log into Robinhood.
- [03:22]
B
Well, I can log into Robinhood and I can buy Bitcoin. But what's happening in crypto is beyond that. How what's the, what's this like utopian vision of crypto that is is driving so many people to become true believers?
- [03:38]
A
I think I would break that down into three different parts. One is the monetary part aspect of that, where people have hard coded monetary policy in a way that sometimes really fits in with their politics, meaning deflationary economy. And by doing so, choosing crypto is almost like a political choice. Libertarian went at that. The second one, which I think is probably more powerful, is that the entire concept of having programmable money is a novelty that despite 10,000 years of human civilization, we have never managed to create a form of value where we can program ahead of time. What happens without value? When is there going to be a payout, Interest payment, bond collection, different allocations of treasury funds, and so forth. And the third aspect is the permissionless one, which essentially strives to create an interoperable digital network where no one single player can shut it down. And that in practice sometimes means governments can't supervise it. But on the other hand, you're not beholden to any one party or corporation, and by virtue of that, anyone can build anything.
- [04:57]
C
Maya, do you have any examples right now? Because I think we want to talk, we want to spend a good amount of time on the governments can't shut you down angle. But do you have any examples that you find particularly interesting of those smart contracts?
- [05:08]
A
Yes. So for example, I think Uniswap is one of the most famous ones and the very basic and historically or evolutionary wise, it really changed the gambit of DeFi from being something theoretical to something accessible. And it's essentially.
- [05:26]
B
I'm going to stop you right there because we've already disappeared down the rabbit hole when you say permissionless, where you're not governed by any central government or central entity or corporation. That's what DEFI is. It stands for decentralized finance. And it's all distributed around a network of computers around the world. It can't shut down in any one spot. And then if once, once you've understood that concept, you can understand the concept of something like Uniswap, which is basically a mathematical algorithm that sets buy and sell prices for two different coins and creates like two way markets in those coins. Is that more or less it?
- [06:06]
A
Yes. And the provisional aspect means that anyone can list any one of those tokens or assets into that pair. No one can stop that trade. On the other hand, you can really trade anything, meaning you have a whole lot of worthless assets being traded. And on the other side of that, any one of the traders is unidentifiable. And you don't know whether or not they could even pass a KYC designation.
- [06:33]
B
In other words, we just don't know if they're a bunch of money launderers and criminals. And basically this entire edifice, I mean, this is definitely something we hear from the anti crypto crowd a lot, is that, well, who's most attracted to any kind of system that is outside the reach of any government? Obviously it's going to be criminals. Right. And we've seen this big uptick in ransomware, which would basically not be possible without cryptocurrency.
- [07:00]
A
So allow me to push back on that. I don't think. And you see a lot of different analysis. One of the most important attributes of blockchain is that everything's transparent. And as such, you have a lot of analytical firms that basically sit on all the data on the blockchain. Right. Every single participant of a blockchain holds all the historical data and can see what the transactions that just occurred on the network are. And by doing some historical analysis, you see that a very small silver of the transactions are actually criminally related. And even if you are able to identify them as somehow related to terrorist financing or criminal activity, the transparency allows people or enforcement agencies to trace back all those transactions and as such have a lot more information about the different participants in that audit trail.
- [07:51]
B
You're saying if I'm involved in ransomware, like eventually I'm going to feel that FBI's hand on my collar because they'll be able to trace the blockchains, the bitcoins that I was paid, even if I put them through mixers or whatever, and eventually they'll find me and arrest me?
- [08:06]
A
Yeah. And you. Yes. And more than that, if you. What we see right now in ransomware, ransomware, which I think is more a cybersecurity issue than A crypto issue. It's like saying ransomware is a crypto problem is very low hanging fruit. But a lot of the services that ransomware attackers use is ransomware as a service, basically kind of like the AWS for hackers. And part of those services is that they already have different bitcoin addresses and mixers and so forth. So when a federal agency, for example, is able to target one of those entities by simply tracing them back, they can also be able to locate all the other criminal activity. So in that sense, I think because criminals are rather stupid and they haven't gone into the privacy coins, I mean, let's, let's face it, they don't realize that Bitcoin makes it easier for law enforcement to find them. And you've seen a lot of different FBI seizures of cryptocurrencies. And when you talk to these agencies, they actually admit that the blockchain is a very helpful tool for them.
- [09:09]
C
So if any criminals are listening, do.
- [09:10]
A
Better, please come use Bitcoin. I'll send you.
- [09:15]
C
That's a lot of money right there. But there are people who are less dumb, let's say, for the sake of argument, not necessarily criminal elements who are attracted to that decentralized nature. And potentially even if the transparency comes back to you, making it harder to say you can or cannot do something. And you know, I know that's an area that you've talked a lot about, and I think both Emily and I are really interested in kind of hearing your perspective on what you've described as dissident technology.
- [09:42]
A
Yes. So I think we've seen, especially in Hong Kong, I think that was the first rise of organized protests that ended up being cracked down by closing down technologies, different location services or apps or telegram chats and so forth. And as the world is becoming a bit more authoritarian, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, dissidents would naturally flock to an infrastructure that allows them to continue to organize, be it messaging or get financing and share information across networks that are not closed down to them. And this is where crypto networks and blockchain can be a very powerful tool that will allow maybe a shadow economy or social network to evolve.
- [10:34]
D
Before we dig in more to dissonant tech, which I'm really interested in, can you maybe for like a kindergarten level of crypto, can you maybe like go back and explain to me the difference between coins and currencies and the blockchain and the, the technology? Because what I keep hearing from the crypto people is like this technology is the future. This is going to change and revolutionize everything. But then when I read all the news coverage, it's basically just like you said. Bitcoin prices are going up, Dogecoin prices are going up. They're going. Bitcoin isn't a currency, so the whole thing isn't real. But then I hear, don't pay attention to that. This is a technology that's going to change the world. But what I don't understand is what is the technology? It's just contracts. Don't we have technology that tracks contracts? I just don't understand what the new technology is that's changing the world.
- [11:26]
A
So the first blockchain, just to put it in context, was Bitcoin. And what Bitcoin revolutionized was a new form of a consensus mechanism. And without going into computer science, it basically allows an unlimited group of parties to agree on the state of the world without having to rely on another party to basically coordinate between them. And that is where the currency plays into, in terms of game theory, because it's able, it's a mechanism, a pricing mechanism that allows them to align all their incentives to make sure that the state that each entity is reporting back or seeing or sharing is the same one as any other party to that network. And when Bitcoin first came out, I think some people, some crazy financial geeks like myself got really excited because we said, okay, maybe we don't need the currency. But just having a bunch of banks agree what their liabilities are and what their swaps or overnight repo markets look like can be a really good solution to alleviate a lot of the concerns that we had back in 2008. And that was just the immediate use case that we saw along with instant real time Solomon system.
- [12:48]
B
So yeah, so I just, I want to jump in here and just sort of cast my mind back to the, you know, 48 hour long emergency meetings at the New York Fed in September 2008, when everyone was like, Is Lehman Brothers insolvent? Is AIG insolvent? What do we need to do? Who do we need to bail out? And one of the problems that we discovered was that these massive financial institutions, if you ask them like for their balance sheet, it could take them weeks to provide it to you. There was no way of just being able to look at what they owned and being able to tot up like, how much are the assets worth, how much of the liabilities worth, which number is bigger than the other number. And the idea that there could be a huge decentralized global network where everyone had access to all of that information because there's no reason, you know, why it shouldn't be public or even private for that matter, but just have something that automatically updates itself because that's how the contracts work. Would have been insanely valuable back in 2008.
- [13:51]
D
I think I'm beginning to understand. So basically it's like a level of transparency in finance that hadn't existed before is possible with this technology. No other could do it.
- [14:02]
C
Transparency.
- [14:03]
A
It was real time transparency where everyone sees everything and they're able to agree on what the balances of every single party is. And just said the concept of having a golden source for all those balances and debt agreements became so powerful to banks when they first saw bitcoin that they started to do what bankers do, drool out of greed. And they didn't want like the bitcoin or the prices or any of these currencies. Just like Emily got confused. We're just taking out the blockchain and we don't need the tokens on it. We don't care about Bitcoin, we don't care about Ethereum. We're going to have our own separate network of say the JP Morgans and Barclays and Sunshine Dares of the world. And we're going to use that for our consolidated debt obligations. So instead of that having to take three weeks in order to settle, we can now do that within 24 hours. And I had the pleasure and the experience of working with some of those banks trying to look at how blockchain can solve the really boring middle and back office issues that banks pay a lot of people a lot of money to deal with. And if I were to fast forward that about five years, what we found is that without the greed element of actual currencies and the price volatility, the incentives just aren't there. And you can see that the wild west of crypto with all these tokens and criminals and ICOs and NFTs managed to build a much more resilient infrastructure and innovate more effective tools and debt instruments than anything that happened in just blockchain and Bing.
- [15:46]
D
So it's kind of like the rise of the Internet when if you go back to the late 90s or mid-90s and people were like, I kind of.
- [15:54]
B
Hate this metaphor, like this. I mean, so this is, as someone who's been writing about bitcoin for almost 10 years now, the one thing you keep on hearing for the past decade is this is just like the early days of the Internet. And if you talk to people today, they're like, this is just like the early days of the Internet. And you're like, well dude, you've been saying that for 10 years. And the Internet actually managed to get somewhere in the first 10 years more than crypto has in terms of like real world applications. But I do think, I do see the, the parallel. I just don't necessarily buy yet. The question I have though, to Maya's point about the, about the unregulated kids rather than the big banks, like actually creating the applications because they have that kind of, you know, greed, you know, the ability to make a huge amount of money really kind of helps in terms of driving innovation. One of the things I want to ask about, about is stable coins. I'm completely fascinated by stablecoins. These are these coins which are worth exactly $1. You can buy as many as you like of them and you will never make any money because they are pegged to being exactly $1. And they have just come out of nowhere in the past couple of years to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
- [17:09]
C
And, and why.
- [17:11]
B
And yeah, and, and that really is the kind of deep sort of the payment rails, the infrastructure, that kind of thing. The, the, there's a, there is money to be made on them. If you run a stable coin, you can invest the collateral, the dollar collateral underpinning it in something which has a positive interest rate. And then you know, you can make that small positive interest rate while everyone else just is worth $1. But it does seem that's exactly the kind of innovation that you're talking about. Right? Is that it's not necessarily greed based, but it enables and provides like the lubrication that allows a lot of other things to happen.
- [17:49]
A
Yeah. So I think you, you brought up a great example. The fact that you can get about 6 to 8% annual interest on a stablecoin like USDC today makes it a lot more valuable and brings in more money into the defi space just for that. And that money can later be used to invest in other defi applications or bring liquidity to those markets. Stablecoins though, didn't start out as an investment. It actually became impairment for crypto markets to have a stablecoin in order to help lubricate the trade and doing business over the blockchain because of the volatility of tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Right. If you came in at 20,000 and raised a bunch of bitcoin and now the market tanked and you have to use those reserves or those tokens in order to fund your business. But right now the price of Bitcoin is 5,000. You don't have a way to gauge your Runway. And that's where stablecoins really came in. Because companies were able to divest a lot of their crypto holdings into stablecoins and by doing that, pay employees, fund their businesses and so forth.
- [19:02]
B
But why couldn't they just do that with dollars?
- [19:04]
A
Because banks wouldn't let them open bank accounts. A lot of times there were for many, many years, if you said that you dealt with crypto, you wouldn't be allowed access into the banking system. So it's kind of ironic that a lot of the teens or startups that wanted to get into crypto in order to build tools for the unbanked eventually found themselves being unbanked because of that business.
- [19:27]
B
One of the more interesting documents that I have open in the tab right now is page from Dapper Labs. These are the people who run NBA Top Shop, which is the most successful NFT site basically. And we've talked a little bit about NFTs on this show before. But yeah, you can trade these little basketball clips and they go up and they go down and you can make money. But then at some point you need to convert that money from their own cryptocurrency, which is called flow, into dollars. Otherwise it's just, you know, flow, who wants. You can't do anything with flow except convert it into dollars. So they have this way of saying, yeah, we will cash you out in dollars and transfer the money into your bank account. Unless you happen to be banking with obscure no name banks like JP Morgan or Wells Fargo, in which case we can't because they won't let us transfer money in. And I'm like, you know, NBA Top Shot is not like some obscure part of the money laundering verse. It's a place which is sponsored by the NBA and which is just a fun place to trade trading cards and even that the banks seem to be highly suspicious about.
- [20:39]
A
True. And just to add to that, NBA Topshops and Dapper Labs in general is a marketplace where they can track every single action that a user did because it's one of the more centralized blockchain companies, meaning they own every single validator or wallet and so forth. So it's still interesting how banks kind of freeze out crypto businesses and essentially push a lot of those users into stablecoins. But then again, stablecoins as just as a fintech evolution. They're a lot cheaper for cross border remittances these days, if you want to invest in a crypto company, instead of waiting 3, 4 days and paying about 7% in fees through banks, you can start using the USDC tokens. So I'm not so sure if there isn't an inadvertent effect of basically pushing crypto people into stablecoins. And right now it's coming back to bite some of these banks.
- [21:32]
B
So tell me about remittances, because this is again, one of the things which if you were talking to crypto people in 2012, they were like remittances. It's just the obvious use case and it never really took off. But let's say that I have a bunch of USDC and I send it to, you know, a friend in Nigeria because I want them to have my money. How did they then convert that USDC into local currency? Or if they send me usdc, how do I convert that into dollars?
- [22:02]
A
So first off, there's a lot. There's a global network of called local bitcoins, which is how you can meet up with someone in Nigeria or in Kenya or wherever, and essentially trade in person between your USDC or your bitcoin into the local fiat curr. I think a lot of countries right now have their own exchanges. Some of them, even if they have a regulated exchange on premise in that country and you want to trade your usdc, you're still blocked from the local bank. So it's, it doesn't eliminate the issue that we were trying to solve, I'll give you that. I do think, on the other hand, that if you're looking to cash out specifically in usdc, you can do that through exchanges directly, especially the global ones, say Kraken ftx. But you do. You won't necessarily want to do that to your local bank, but more international banks will allow you to take out your money.
- [22:55]
B
So that brings up one of the big questions that I wanted to ask you about, which is the way in which there seems to be increasingly US regulated cryptoverse and everybody else, everything else cryptoverse. And that there are companies like Circle, which runs USDC or FTX that you just mentioned, who very much embrace the idea of U.S. regulation. And we want U.S. regulators to give us lots of clarity. And Circle actually just came out and said they want to become an actual regulated bank. FTX has said they want to be an actual regulated securities exchange, stock exchange in the United States. And then on the other hand, you have companies that exist, you know, maybe in the Cayman Islands or no one really knows where? And really big companies like Binance, Finex and no one really knows. And a lot of what they do seems to be designed precisely to get around U.S. regulations and to be out of the reach of U.S. regulators. And they put up walls to make it incredibly difficult for U.S. residents to use those services. Are we building like a sort of two parallel cryptoverses here? What's going on here?
- [24:10]
A
Yeah, so yes, that's true. But I think there are two premises that we, that are pretty important to explore before we kind of go into that. The first one is the USD dominance within the crypto markets. And it's just very ironic how the US dollar has become a national security issue, especially with the rise of Chinese digital currencies and crypto and so forth. But crypto markets in general have actually kind of proven that the world is still dominated by the $A and B. Much more important I think is that the only regulator matters in this world if you're looking at the, the more regulated OECD countries is the U.S. and if we saw that in the past with what was the FACA regulations which the US basically lobbied all of Europe in order to pass, we're seeing that in crypto too. Every other regulator, be it the eu, Singapore, the FCA has been kind of dragging their heels and not saying anything and not doing anything on a national level waiting for the US to act. And even if we have seen different frameworks in the EU and in more regional meaning in the FCA and Singapore, there hasn't been one cohesive policy decision that you can say applies to all of crypto markets of hey, these are the best practices. And as such you saw two or three kinds of players. One, people who just said hey, we can't operate in the US right now, we're better off going to Hong Kong because they're much more supportive. We get banking, but we know that eventually we're going to be listening to whatever the SEC or the OCC tells us to. And in order to prepare for that we are already starting to engage with the regulators and that's ftx. Then you see smaller exchanges or sorry, not smaller, but US based exchanges who have been regularly trying to engage with regulators state by state, money transmitter license by money transmitter license like Coinbase or Crack, and working through the weeds of the entire process. And on the third bucket I put is Binance. It's those that are saying hey you know what, we don't need any law because the law just doesn't count in for us and we're going to be what initially they called a distributed company, meaning we're this octopus that's everywhere and nowhere and we're going to allow anything to happen as long as we're the ones creating the market. And it's not a coincidence that Binance rose to prominence right at the ICO bubble where any mean or pump and dump scheme just became too valuable to, to not list. Now the other aspect of that is the kind of going back, which is the stable coins. Right now, because everyone ended up using USD based stablecoins, the US is almost compelled to look at crypto markets as a narrow banking financial stability that the more entangled crypto markets become with the traditional finance market, it presents more of a risk to Wall Street. And we've seen for the past year, I think U.S. regulators, be it mnuchin with a stable act or different legislatory proposals coming in, trying to understand which regulator should actually take charge of stablecoins before they become an illegal banking system that really is designed for criminals. And all this is happening in parall to the national security threat that Facebook actually started the FOMO of both the US and the EU looking to understand how a digital dollar or digital euro looks like and how that fits into our system and the existing commercial bank system that we kind of rely on. And my theory of things is that while everyone is busy understanding these systems, the monetary implications, privacy, how does government identity look on the blockchain for stimulus money and so forth, the US is essentially doing what the US always done and that is rely on private enterprise to come in with private monies and build their own Rails. And that's how I see the US stablecoins like USDC or Paxos becoming a real digital dollar.
- [28:20]
D
Stacey sent around a podcast interview you did, I think before the pandemic started. And one thing I was thinking about, I think you just said, which is like when Facebook and social networks were coming up, they were very under regulated. Everyone kind of was like, this is amazing. And we see how that that wound up now is the same thing now happening with crypto? Is that what you're saying?
- [28:40]
A
Yeah, but it, it hasn't taken them 15 years to get to that point.
- [28:44]
D
It's happening faster.
- [28:45]
B
So it happened almost immediately, right?
- [28:47]
A
Yeah.
- [28:48]
B
We had Facebook come out and announce this thing called Libra in conjunction with a bunch of big names I can't remember, Visa and various other people were like involved. Shopify, Stripe, Massive Stripe was involved. And then a bunch of regulators both inside and outside the US kind of looked askance at this and said, you sure about this? And then immediately everyone, like rats left the sinking ship. And everyone, like, I'm not even sure.
- [29:14]
C
The ship had made it into the water by the time that folks were leaving.
- [29:17]
B
Exactly. Like it barely even existed at that point. It wasn't even really a white paper at that point. And everyone said, yeah, you know what, nevermind. Now it's transformed into something called dm, I think, which like I have even less concept of what DM is versus what Libra was. But the while there was maybe five minutes there that people thought that Facebook could become a major player in crypto, now it seems pretty obvious they're not. And that all of the big major players in crypto are not. Like, not only are they not big companies like Facebook or social media companies, they're really not big established companies at all.
- [29:53]
D
Right, that's what I'm saying. Like, like Facebook became a big established company and now can't do things like create its own money.
- [29:59]
B
Yeah, you kind of need to be a quasi outlaw company.
- [30:02]
D
Right, but that's the thing.
- [30:04]
A
Like wait, I resent the outlaw.
- [30:06]
D
The US government regulators will ignore the little guys as they get big and then they'll blink and they'll be too big and then we'll have a Facebook we didn't realize was coming again. Like the same thing will happen again. Like once upon a time Facebook was a little outlaw company, right. And now it's this monster.
- [30:21]
A
So Facebook never really broke the law when it started out. We just didn't understand the locations of it scaling into a global scale. Right. But by doing that leap into a mega corporation that is almost a government, they've re established themselves as the new gatekeeper. They can kick out Trump off their networks, they decide what the algorithm of content that people see, they can track you and so forth. So even if right now we're looking at a wild west of crypto and regulations are just coming in, the fact that these renegade maverick companies, most of them are not outlaws, they really do pay their taxes. Despite what Senator Warren thinks, we might just be replacing our old gatekeepers who are established financial institutions that despite the technology, still rely on legacy core systems and the financial intermediary fees haven't changed over the last hundred and so years with new gatekeepers that right now they're not benevolent, they're not nefarious, but they could end up in one of those two categories. And this is maybe where the timing of regulations coming in is pretty pitch perfect.
- [31:30]
C
And Maya, I think that's you've made A couple of really important points there. One, especially about the fact of the difference between legality and consequences, particularly when we're talking about social consequences. And one of the biggest criticisms that is regularly levied at regulation is it represents a kind of capture of what the companies that are being regulated are like, willing to concede, which is often less consequential than the big areas that go unregulated. And to your second point about we don't know whether folks will be benevolent or neutral, there is something quite scary about having, you know, identity and other elements of your ability to pay or just transact in the world being tied to something that is one, immutable and two, that everybody else potentially has the ability to be like, no, no, no. We can see that, you know, this is, this is the rule governing who you are as a person.
- [32:27]
A
Yeah. So if I were just to go back to Facebook, I think that was the biggest risk of Libra at the time. Facebook is an identity surveillance company. Right. But they don't necessarily have access to your financial data. And one of the really brilliant things about our existing financial infrastructure system is that even without the blockchain, it's pretty distributed, meaning there is no one party that sees your entire historical financial data. And even if you're looking at your FICO scores, they only see a sliver of, you know, just one screenshot of assets or income and so forth. On Facebook, getting into the financial transactional data would have been detrimental for social scoring almost on a Chinese CCP scale. And you're absolutely right. And one of the things that is going to be crucial going forward in terms of how blockchain networks or crypto evolves is going to be privacy tech, like what we call theory of knowledge proofs like multi party computations, basically technology that allows people to share information without revealing the underlying data. And as such, they might be able to use cryptography in order to block routing back a bundle of information to specifically to Stacy. And we're going to see more and more political and philosophical questions about identity being raised in relation to central bank, digital currencies, Facebook and what kind of information the government really needs in order to regulate. This is a very specific aspect of blockchain technology that I think is going to eventually be a very powerful tool for regulators, but it's also a risk for us essentially creating our own surveillance apparatus and foregoing a lot of our liberal right.
- [34:20]
B
Can I ask you, in terms of regulation, one of the problems we have in the United States is we have an insane Alphabet soup of financial regulators. There's more different financial regulators than I can probably count on all my fingers and toes. I know that the sec, especially under Gary Gensler, is being very aggressive and maximalist about saying they want to regulate crypto. The CFTC is saying similar things. The OCC certainly was trying to get involved. It's a bit unclear whether they still are. You know, presumably like the Financial Stability Oversight Council cares about this, treasury will care about this, probably State will care about this too. I mean this is a big like diplomatic thing. Is there any hope in hell that the US will be able to get its regulatory ducks in a row and coordinate all of these different regulators to be able to come up with a clearly comprehensible regulatory regime that everyone can just operate under?
- [35:17]
A
I don't know. I'm still very optimistic about the US even if seeing and that is not a rational opinion at this point because having witnessed the sausage making of the infrastructure bill last week, I think we got like a promo version of how, how cross regulatory agency legislation is going to look like. And a lot of it is a power grab instead of a very thoughtful process of what you need the technology for, who do you want to protect and what are the goals. So theoretically all the laws or regulations for crypto already exist, right? Security laws, commodities, consumer protection, yada yada yada, but de facto none of it does because Felix, you hit the point. It's so distributed and entangled across agencies.
- [36:11]
B
And not to mention among 50 different state attorneys general, all of whom can interpret those laws in however way they want.
- [36:18]
C
And to your earlier point, countries, because these are supposed to be borderless transactions ultimately true.
- [36:24]
A
And how are you going to be able, like if one country has one legislation, how are you going to have a cross border, cross jurisdictional decision whether or not you reach finality of that transaction? So there's going to be a lot of politics involved. But then again, I think every regulator on the face of the planet has an incentive to get involved in crypto because they're already thinking about their retirement plan. And God knows I think a lot of US regulators have put aside money for their kids college funds just you know, doing crypto.
- [36:54]
B
Okay, so let's talk about the revolving door a little bit because we've had two high profile resignations just in the past couple of weeks, including most high profile of all. Ryan Brooks used to run the OCC under Trump. He was always very crypto friendly. And then he goes off to join the regulated US arm of Binance, which is one of the More sort of outlaw crypto companies. And he lasts what, three months before.
- [37:21]
A
That's half of what he lasted at the occ. You know, it's almost like a half life because when you go back, he started as the general counsel at Coinbase, right. And from there he went into Trump's occasion. That's a very interesting one, I think, because I don't understand what he did at Binance. I think anyone either from the industry or looking out into the industry would have raised an eyebrow or two or even took out a crypto based loan for another eyebrow to raise. Why make that move?
- [37:50]
B
Why appoint him CEO of Binance US in the first place?
- [37:53]
A
Yeah. How much was he paid before he even took the job? Because Binance is not only a dodgy company, it's one of those actors that we might have mentioned earlier who operate outside the scale of any law in any jurisdiction and kind of decide that distribution is their corporate structure and obfuscation of regulation is their mo. And so even a regulated US entity for Binance was very easy to kind of circumvent through VPNs and geo blocks and so forth. And I don't think Binance took any, any real effort to prevent US people from trading on their platforms. And just, just for people to understand what kind of exchange we're talking about. This is an exchange that had a 200x margin. Trading markets listed anything you just wanted, sometimes you had to pay. And you could sign up for their accelerator, which almost guarantees listing liquidity and what might look like, like a pump and dump, but might, maybe it's not.
- [38:57]
D
Can we go back a little bit again? And can I ask you, if I had to write a listicle for Buzzfeed and the listicle was like 10 ways crypto and the blockchain is going to change the world in 10 years. What are the actual like? I'm sorry to go back to this again, but I still feel a little lost in the weeds. Is this a technology that's going to mean that in 20 years banks will be completely different than they are now? Or stock brokerage? Like what are the practical uses? Who's going to be obsolete?
- [39:26]
A
Right.
- [39:26]
D
Because the. I know Felix isn't like the analogy, but if you go back to the beginning of the Internet, people were like, selling pet food online, that's dumb. Selling books online, it's all dumb. I don't see what it matters. You know, even when Napster came out, no one saw. A lot of people said this will end the recording industry or change the way it works fundamentally and they were of course correct. Can you just tell me what is going to happen? What are the practical implications? Talk to me like I am in first grade, please.
- [39:55]
A
I'll give it my best. First off, I think the buzzfeed listicle has to have cryptokitties, hash masks, cryptopunks and penguins. Okay, sure, that's first. Second, the number one thing that you are going to use blockchain for in about 10 years is if you want to log into Buzzfeed or display money instead of using your email or your Gmail or using your Facebook identity to, you might be able to use your crypto wallet behind the scenes and basically sign with a cryptographic signature. You wouldn't even notice it. And by doing that, you would send a microtransaction to Slate Money specifically for this podcast and get access. So that would be a form of micropayments and identity. Another thing would be a creator's economy. For right now it's for the fat head and not for the fat tail, but for a different way for monetizing media content are what digital games in a much more interoperable way than what we've become accustomed through Patreon or Substack and or even within the Spotify market, right where we see the big Kanye's of the world taking in the lump sum of the money while more obscure artists still have to struggle for the pennies that they get on every listen. So those would be like, I think the very, very basic uses and I.
- [41:22]
B
Want to jump in here and say like all of those uses in one form or another. Payments.
- [41:27]
C
Is identity a payment?
- [41:28]
D
It's an exchange information, passwords.
- [41:30]
A
Identity is not a payment.
- [41:32]
B
Identity, it's not a payment. But the idea is that the reason why Slate wants to make this podcast available to me and not you is because I've paid for it and you haven't. It's connected to payments in a pretty sort of tight way. And it does strike me that payments is the one area where crypto has gone absolutely nowhere. Like, there has genuinely been a lot of really interesting development in cryptocurrencies and exchanges and finance and blockchain, but not in payments. And I mean, I do have a dog in this fight. I do have a bet with Ben Horowitz on this. I heard, you know, we will ever have, you know, crypto payments taking off. But are you with Ben on this one? Are you someone who thinks, thinks that, yeah, it's been 10 years and we haven't really got anywhere but yeah, give us another three years and we'll start seeing crypto payments all over the place.
- [42:22]
D
Maya said 10 years.
- [42:23]
A
I'm actually with you, Felix. I've thought about this a lot. I know about this. But I'm with you and I'll explain why. I think other than microtransactions, existing payments, like for example, I think the best payments network right now is faster. Payments in the UK are just by every single criteria better than anything we've seen in crypto. On the other hand, cross jurisdictional payments, crypto, it really is an alternative, but essentially payments are not the use case. Financial markets, digital assets. If it's gaming or content or so forth, it's not the payment element as much as the fact that the payment has a conditional as in and is incorporated into another programmable asset that makes it that powerful. But if it's just payment per se, crypto has you.
- [43:05]
D
Maya. Are you telling me that crypto will make it so that in a few years I won't have to re log into every site that I subscribe to on the Internet and things will make a lot more sense in terms of just like password hegemony?
- [43:18]
A
Yeah. Let me one up that the terrible.
- [43:21]
D
Paywall that we all. If that is the use of all the paywall, I might be coming around honestly.
- [43:26]
A
Wait, I got one better for you. This is like one of my favorite. Imagine you're on Slack and through your Slack identity you can use use WhatsApp or Telegram or Twitter DM to someone else and you don't have to log out and look for that messaging app in order to find that contact person.
- [43:44]
D
That's another use case.
- [43:46]
A
I think that's super powerful because that you're basically using the back end of crypto networks in order to create cross organizational sharing of data, be it DMS or logins or payments or just financial transfer.
- [44:00]
D
So making the online world as seamless as the real world, where I can just go up and say hi to Stacy and tell her something without having to like figure out a sign up with my password on it and check to see if we're speaking the same language first and you know, whatever else.
- [44:15]
A
Beep boop, beep boop. Yeah, that sounds way too pretentious for me to say that.
- [44:22]
D
Very pretentious language there.
- [44:26]
C
One of the biggest concerns that I have is exactly what you are describing, which is tying payments to identity. Right? Because for me I am just as a person who gets really annoyed whenever I see yet another retailer or the NYC Metro Underground subway. Gosh, I'VE lived in too many countries, say that we are no longer accepting cash in order for you to be able to buy a Metro card. And suddenly it's like your ability to. To move is tied to a payment mechanism that identifies you to one or more people with great ease. And is this a problem that, you know, crypto, blockchain, et cetera, is supposed to solve, or is this a problem that it can actually reinforce?
- [45:12]
A
I think you hit the nail because I don't know the answer to that. I think we've seen the surveillance capacity of digital payments in Hong Kong when different protesters were tracked. You see that in the UK on the tube, right? If you're using Apple Pay and sometimes, like, they can really see you're out and you can have access to that later on. It's not the surveillance data that kind of encompasses us or pings and traces people back together is not necessarily just financial transactions. A lot of it is geolocation or the fingerprinting that we leave. And that is. Is something that crypto has no aspiration to solve. And it's a much greater, I would say, even regulatory problem from all the Google logins and Androids and Facebook apps that we see. Right. But there is a second order effect where crypto is evolving a lot of privacy applications that can later be used to obfuscate our data in. In different settings that aren't necessarily financial, but are financial. And the incentive from crypto people to do that is they don't want other people to know what their trades were or what they hold or what their net worth is. And it's not necessarily criminal. It's just because if that information would be transparent, then you're allowing a new vector for market manipulation on the blockchain.
- [46:33]
C
Yeah.
- [46:33]
D
What Stacy was asking was sort of the question I had after listening to the podcast she sent around, which was, on the one hand, it was like blockchain could make it easier for dissidents to have privacy. And then on the other hand, blockchain's gonna make it easier for you never to have privacy and everyone to see everything you do. So I was just so confused by that contradiction because it's.
- [46:55]
A
I think we're just living in a very tumultuous time where we see that the end of what we thought was the tech that protected us and ensured our rights is not going to be enforceable in the future. So you look at blockchain tech, and I can very easily see it being used by some authoritarian regime in order to track everything and everyone. Right? Like what we're seeing coming out of China lately. But on the other hand, the second order effect as I was mentioning, or privacy technology that crypto markets are really pushing for could actually end up becoming a tool to better, maybe not surveillance, but obfuscate a lot of the transactions and our data in the real world. You know, this is where we have a conflict of interest between anti money laundering and financial terrorism, tracing and privacy. Because since the Patriot Act, a lot of the money laundering tools that national security apparatus has used to treat back terrorism has been surveilling the financial system. And as part of fatca, as I mentioned earlier, they've decided that they're much better having a purview that's hermetic to everything that's happening in the world rather than targeting the specific culprits and suspicious activities and saying that the financial intermediaries that we know today as I. E. The banks or the brokers and regulators, all they have to do, they, they see something suspicious is right on a piece of paper or a SARS report and say hey, this is suspicious. Give it to the regulator who already has stacks of paper that they overlook at and hey, we just covered our behind so no one can come back and point at us and tell us it's our fault. And we also saw that in the recent Senate legislation where they're basically saying hey, we don't know what we're doing, so give us all the information because everyone can be a suspect. But on the other hand we see that like in the past for example, the IRS has said, you know what you report to us voluntarily, all your data, what you think your tax liabilities are and we're going to assume you're telling the truth. But if you're not, we're going to come hard at you and it's going to really hurt. So it's more a question of what the government wants to see and what the technology allows them to see. And that balance act is still up in the air and I think it's very dependent on. On the political atmosphere.
- [49:23]
C
Absolutely.
- [49:24]
D
Yeah.
- [49:25]
B
I want to talk a little bit more about governments and specific specifically this whole issue of central bank digital currencies which everyone is talking about right now. Let's do that in the Slate plus though, because I feel like we need to have a numbers round because there's nothing more amenable to a numbers round than crypto or whatever you want. Stacy, do you have a number?
- [49:46]
C
Yes, it's 9.7% and shout out to NUMLOC the Best numbers newsletter in the game. But I was really interested by this. And it means only 9.7% of people in the largest 50 cities have an ability to charge an electric car within a five minute walk. And this settles for me along or I'm trying. I don't have bets with people at the scale that you do, Felix, but I have a very active conversation with folks about what are the infrastructural and environmental challenges of electric cars. Cars. And one of them is where do you charge it? If you don't work for a large tech company that subsidizes your charging in its parking lots, what are your options? But I didn't realize it was that low. And I haven't done the maths yet, but I'm going to see what that relates to compared to the percentage of the people in the 50 largest US cities who actually own one of these cars.
- [50:38]
B
This is definitely something that the infrastructure bill is trying to increase. But just logistically speaking, it stands to reason apartment living and parking spaces don't live well together. I actually have a crypto related number which is $611 million, which is the amount that the something called the Poly Network, which I have to admit I had never even heard of, hacked to the tune of $611 million, including 85 million of those stable coins, 273 million of Ethereum and various other things including Binance and it's what's known as a cross chain hack. And at this point my ability to understand what is going on here completely I go whoppingly out of my depth. So maybe Maya, you can just give us a very quick what is a cross chain hack? And should we still be worried about the same thing we were worried about 10 years ago, which is the big problem with crypto is that I don't understand how to keep this stuff safe and I can just have it all hacked one morning and lose everything.
- [51:48]
A
So anyone I've spoken to in the past two hours or three hours since this hack, no one has ever heard of the Poly Network. So it's one of those random things that happen even for crypto people. This is like the back alley cross chain exchange that's like, oh wait, that existed $600 million in a network no one heard of, of crypto. A cross chain swap essentially is like if you have two different networks and you want to move money from one network to the other without going through an exchange, that's a cross chain swap and that actually increases the amount of money on the line because then you have money in one chain, which was Ethereum in this case, and then another one that was Polygon and both got swiped in. But. And I saw that over the last hour, you can actually trace all the different swaps that the hacker did. He already holds about $80 million in US, which he's going to be blocked and he won't be able to use that. And there's a coordination effort to blacklist all those tokens so no other protocol or network will accept them.
- [52:49]
C
So they can't do anything with this money, really.
- [52:51]
A
They can send it to other criminals.
- [52:53]
C
Back to the criminal network. Here we go.
- [52:55]
D
So will the people who lost the money get it back?
- [52:57]
A
Some hacks do that. And there have been defi hacks that actually ended up negotiating compensation to the hackers in return for the money, which I just kind of love, where it's like I'll steal your money and then you get to pay me to give it back. So that does happen because it's so open. You have to understand that this is like the battle testing of money in crypto. And it's like everyone has an incentive to attack. And if you attack it and you take the money, that doesn't necessarily make you a bad guy if you return it.
- [53:26]
C
Let's call it adversarial testing for sure.
- [53:29]
B
Only in crypto. Emily, what's your number?
- [53:31]
D
My number is not related to crypto. I was. I just got back from vacation, so My number is 6. 6 is the number of episodes in the HBO series the White Lotus, which I am recommending. Everyone is Slate Money listeners. It is really good. And I know Slate Money listeners are big succession fans and we haven't had new episodes of that series in a while. So the White Lotus is similarly about the lives of rich people, but it all takes place at a resort in Hawaii. Looks really good. And it doesn't just focus on the rich people. It makes. It focuses also on several characters who work in the resort. And they are among the most delightful in the series. I will give away no spoilers. I think by the time you listen to this episode, it might be completely. All six episodes will be available for you to binge right away as soon as you stop listening to this. And so, yeah, you should go and watch that as soon as you stop listening to this.
- [54:24]
B
All right, Maya, your number.
- [54:26]
A
I have a crypto related one and a non crypto.
- [54:28]
B
Do the non crypto we've had. This is a very crypto heavy episode. So what's the Non crypto number?
- [54:33]
A
6%. Which is apparently the inflation in McDonald's prices since the pandemic started because apparently the supply chain crisis is so bad. I went on a Reddit rabbit hole on McDonald's after I saw this story in the Wall Street Journal where they basically ran out of wrapping paper. So now they're serving food on trays and the drive ins because they can't resupply straws or paper bags to McDonald's.
- [55:05]
C
Okay, that's a good number.
- [55:07]
B
I think that's probably it for the main show. We're going to keep on talking to Maya a bit about CBDCs in Slate Plus. But otherwise, thank you, Maya, for coming on this show, which was just absolutely illuminating. I feel like I learned so much. Thank you to Jess and Molly for producing. Thank you to all of you guys for emailing us on slate money, slate.com and we will be back next week with even more Slate Money. So obviously, folks, that Slate Money numbers round was recorded before Mr. White Hat decided to return that $611 million. We talked about that last week on Slate Plus. But Maya's point absolutely stands.