Building a Multichain Digital Asset World with Steve Kokinos, Chief Executive Officer, Algorand. Jeff Schumacher, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, NAX Group. Anthony Scaramucci, Founder & Managing Partner, SkyBridge.
Moderated by Sarah Kunst, Managing Director, Cleo Capital.
SPEAKERS
Steve Kokinos
Chief Executive Officer
Algorand
Jeff Schumacher
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
NAX Group
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
MODERATOR
Sarah Kunst
Managing Director
Cleo Capital
TIMESTAMPS
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Sarah Kunst: (00:07)
Awesome. I am so excited to chat about this, because there's some fun stuff happening that you guys have announced this week, and we're going to dive in. So Steve, why don't you tell us a little bit about what Algorand is?
Steve Kokinos: (00:20)
Sure. So Algorand is a developer of public blockchain protocols and technology. And I think if you take a step back, what blockchains really represent is a shift where the world can transact with people that ordinarily would have no reason to trust each other. And I think in the world that we know, you really need to understand who the person is on the other side of the table, who the firm is, and whether that's acceptable to you. And I think what that really means is there's a broader shift from a world where we're trusting people to one where we're trusting code.
Steve Kokinos: (00:58)
And I think the reality of that is it opens up all sorts of fascinating possibilities for new markets and new opportunities. But it also means that you really need to trust the underlying technology and code and understand that security. And at Algorand we have some of the most interesting researchers in the world, led by Silvio Micali, and have really thought through how you scale these networks from relatively small networks to billions of users around the world. And I think that's something that we've been focused on from day one and are really excited to see the evolution of.
Sarah Kunst: (01:44)
I'm excited too. I think we all are. Jeff, tell us about NAX group.
Jeff Schumacher: (01:45)
NAX stands for New Asset Exchange. And basically what it does is it works with corporate partners and takes assets that they have that are at scale and transforms them into new digital assets or alternative assets. It's like we're building the NASDAQ with the exception of everything that goes on our exchange we've built. So we have a development arm that mines the corporate assets, a technology arm that helps us transform them, a securitization arm that allows us to create liquidity and then a DeFi platform which we depend heavily on Algorand for. So that's the connection.
Sarah Kunst: (02:23)
I love it. The young man on the end, do you mind introducing yourself?
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:25)
Sarah Kunst: (02:31)
I think everybody knows you. So guys, this is an interesting point in time, right? What's happening in the market? Why now? Why have you been making, one, tell us about your big announcement and why this week, why now?
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:44)
Well, there's many different reasons, but I think the number one reason after doing extensive research on tier one protocols, it became clear to SkyBridge and the research team that Algorand is going to have a very big future in DeFi. Will there be a hundred? I can say that, likely not. Will there be three to five that will say that? Well, we believe that there will. And when you think of Algorand's interoperability and you think of the anti fragility of Algorand's technical properties in terms of the way you can lay out transactions.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:20)
And I'm going to quote Gary Gensler for a second. For those of you that remember this, Gary was on the faculty with Silvio Micali who created Algorand. And Gary said prior to entering his posts, his political post at the SEC, that this was going to be the big backbone, the big DeFi engine, the big blockchain. And he said that as an example, he actually used this and I put it up on Twitter about a week ago, the exact quote was, as an example, you could build all of Uber on the back of an Algorand. And I think what Steve and Jeff recognize is that combining their forces and having us have institutions take a look at it alongside of us, this is going to be a very powerful trinity or trifecta that will start laying out lots and lots of great applications and great, great ideas.
Sarah Kunst: (04:11)
I love it. So that, I mean, what... This is the time, right? And what better place than SALT to how have this conversation about why now. So tell me more about unlock, right. What does this mean, particularly for the institutional space?
Jeff Schumacher: (04:30)
Well, I think it means, if you look at what Anthony just shared and what he can bring is this institutional infrastructure to this. And if you look at the NAX, what we're bringing is we're bringing at scale corporate infrastructure to this. And then you take in what Steve has and what Algorand has is the DeFi infrastructure. And you put that together and we're capable of unlocking completely new different business models. And where I see it as like the Dutch Indie company in 1670 created stocks. And what grew into that is the current financial infrastructure we see today. Well, what we have at the NAX and these new assets doesn't require all of that infrastructure. So you can create entirely new businesses. You can go a lot quicker. You're not necessarily going around regulation. NAX, we embrace it because regulation walks you back, but you do not need this massive infrastructure that exists today. And I think this is the time.
Steve Kokinos: (05:30)
One thing I'd add is that what we're starting to see are scaled applications like you're building at NAX but also we're seeing scaled user bases show up. One of the things that we focus on at Algorand or we're seeing a lot of adoption are national projects. One example of how these things are crossing over already is the Italian music right system deployed about four and a half million NFTs onto Algorand to represent the rights of a hundred thousand Italian artists. And now we're seeing DeFi applications like Opulus, where now those artists can unlock value that they've created in the form of borrowing and lending against those music rights, selling partial royalties, and ultimately being able to create more music and art. And I think that's sort of a simple example of some of the power of how you combine these technologies, because now you have applications that never could have or would have existed in a traditional setting starting to empower people in new ways. And we think that that's pretty exciting.
Sarah Kunst: (06:36)
That's really exciting. That's, awesome. So piggybacking on that, is this a transition, or like you said, just a completely new way to get things, new things into fruition? What is not existed in traditional settings that you're able to unlock now?
Steve Kokinos: (06:56)
Well, I think it's a follow up to what I just said, which is if you put the example of the creator economy and also you bring the example of expanding audiences, we think that's a fundamental piece. And again, it goes back to this trust of code versus trust of people. But you may be an artist and have fans that would be interested in participating all over the world. We're seeing this in more traditional settings too, example would be residential real estate. We see applications on chain for that where people can invest in residential or commercial real estate in increments of as little as $50.
Steve Kokinos: (07:34)
And so now another project for the national blockchain for El Salvador, there's people there that don't typically have enough money to invest in large real estate projects. But now they can put relatively few dollars in and the universe is, or the liquidity and universe of participants is expanded in such a way that now you can reframe things and you end up with a better outcome for the investor who had no access in the past. You also end up with a better outcome for people creating assets because now they can have different forms of price discovery and liquidity than previously.
Sarah Kunst: (08:15)
More access and more assets, I love it. That's perfect. So what about you guys?
Jeff Schumacher: (08:20)
I think we have a number of, this initiative unlock has got earmarked about a handful of projects that are coming out right now. So we have a, the first one that's coming out is around consumer finance. And this craze around buy now pay later, you saw Square acquire Afterpay for 29 billion or so. And so there's this opportunity here and we're taking one that's in the consumer product space where large ticket purchase. So we're bringing that out. It'll have millions of customers that's going to launch just around black Friday and will do about 500,000 loans or so right then and there. And then we're capable of putting that on Algorand and then at the same time capable of securitizing it on the back. So it creates an entirely new financial instrument. We call it Caddy.
Jeff Schumacher: (09:09)
We have another one that's coming that's in the art space. That's again, going to come out on this unlock initiative on Algorand. And we have one of the world's largest underwriter of art. And if I just simplify this for the room, it's like, just look at the data, right, the data. And so we're all data. So if I look at the data of underwriting, there's about 25 attributes that requires you to underwrite art. But if you look inside that there's a subset of attributes, about 12 that's required to lend. So we take those 12, we stick it in a new instrument, we call the instrument watercolor. And we put a couple of our banking partners together, and we've just, bam, created the world's largest art lending platform. So if you think about it today, you can walk out of here and go into a Ferrari dealership and buy a Ferrari and get a loan right then and there for it, car financing. But you can't walk into a gallery and get art financing. It doesn't exist. So this product does exist.
Jeff Schumacher: (10:07)
If you think of even further with the COVID discussions that have been going on here at SALT, you have museums out there that have been just pummeled by COVID. Well, now we have a means to give them working capital. If you have people that are asset rich with art, you now have a means to give you working capital. And then on the backside, we're also our securities business and our trading partners, the exchanges, we're able to package that up. So you have mortgage back securities, and now you'll have art back securities. So these are just two examples, but these cannot exist without the environment we have today.
Sarah Kunst: (10:40)
I mean, I'm hearing art, I'm hearing Lamborghinis, I'm hearing black Fridays. Sign me up, you're speaking my language. So I love it. This is awesome. So what role does interoperability play in all of this?
Steve Kokinos: (10:54)
Well, if you think about the, I think the early days of the internet would be the best example I can come up with. There was AOL and computers, those platforms all largely lived on their own. And I think the early internet was seen as a strange wild place. I think the reality is that what it ultimately created though was a place where information largely flows freely anywhere that it wants to, and it's given rise to a whole variety of applications that couldn't really have been imagined in the early days. And I think that that's blockchain interoperability is of similar importance.
Steve Kokinos: (11:35)
And I think Anthony is right, we'll see a handful of scaled winning protocols that people use, but ultimately they're going to have to talk to each other because assets need to move wherever people want to use them. Users need to be able to move back and forth. And so that's something that we've done a lot of work on at Algorand, in particular, this idea of being able to capture state and cryptographically guarantee it on other platforms is something we've done a lot of work around. And so I think it's critically important. And just one last point on this is that we also believe that decentralization gives, again, people ways to transact that needs to carry through to interoperability as well. And so I think right now the first early attempts have largely been centralized. And we think that needs to shift over time as well.
Sarah Kunst: (12:28)
Awesome. What about you Jeff?
Jeff Schumacher: (12:30)
Well, I think interoperability is key. We have, and I'm trying to, I think projects make it the most relevant. Otherwise, it's a little bit esoteric what you're talking about. And Anthony and I were talking about the SALT conferences family offices, right, and institutional investors. And again, if you think about these digital assets that are getting created, they don't require that financial infrastructure that exists. So you can create these entirely new ways. So we have a product coming out that's a secondary exchange for digital assets. That doesn't work if you can't have interoperability of these assets across which again, we're going to put on the Algorand platform.
Jeff Schumacher: (13:08)
And then we've even pulling in a business that'll help the family offices plug in. It's a current venture that we're invested in. It's called iPaladin, that basically connects all of the family offices activities, the trust, the assets that they hold because if you're going to start to trade between, you have to have a way to normalize it. And that for me is that interoperability and then putting it in a decentralized environment so you can trust the data, allows for this idea of commerce to happen so.
Sarah Kunst: (13:41)
You have the best product names for, that I've ever heard from a crypto company, watercolor, iPaladin. It's like everybody else is like, magnesium train or whatever. So I like it. I like it. Shout out to the product people at NAX. They're doing-
Jeff Schumacher: (13:54)
It's just the names of Anthony before we actually roll them out.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:57)
It's not true, but they also have the greatest peril, trust me. My wife dear just wearing that NAX hat. So that's a good sign, okay. From, she doesn't like any hats, but.
Sarah Kunst: (14:06)
There you go.
Anthony Scaramucci: (14:07)
I want to say something because I think this is all about relationships, building relationships, expanding relationships. So 20 years ago, my old boss, Rob [Nats 00:14:18] had bought my first company. He was the President Chief Operating Officer at Neuberger Berman. We stayed close. I think Bob's been to every SALT conference since inception, probably sponsored the first one when less than 300 people were in the room. And he came to me and he said, listen, I like what you're doing with Bitcoin. I like what you're doing with Ethereum. But I want you to look at Algorand. It's faster, it's got better technology. My former team at Golden Tree has looked at it, likes it. It's got a negative carbon footprint, which Steve could take you through. And I think it's very, very important for you if you're going into this space to understand that there's going to be a few next generation leaders, tier one leaders. And I want you to go take a look at it. I'm going to introduce you to Sean who works with Steve and spend some time looking at it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:09)
Now this is the of human relationships. Jeff and I have been friends, I don't know, at least a decade. We sponsor a wine party in Davos Switzerland together, which the minute you tell people they can't go to the party, everyone wants to show up. Right, Jeff. And so we've got this world class VIP list, but we're also serving very expensive wine. But I go to lunch or breakfast, go to breakfast with Jeff at Beverly Hills hotel. I'm on his Advisory Board at the NAX. We start talking and I say, "Jeff, what do you think of Algorand? Have you done any work on Algorand?" He drops, I mean, look how thin he is. He like eats chicken sausage and some food, LA stuff. And looking at him, he drops the chicken sausage in the plate. He looks at me he's like, "Okay, you're not going to believe this. I flew back from the Bitcoin conference. I went up to Boston and I met with the Algorand team yesterday." I think it was on a Monday. You and I were having breakfast on a Tuesday.
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:09)
That was several months ago and then I said, "Okay, let's see if we can put these pieces together." So one of the reasons why we love doing this conference is the relationships. So we want people to meet each other, have fun with each other, but we want them to connect commercially to see if they can find some universal qualities about each other that they like, but also can they put a business together that could be a next generation exponential business.
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:37)
So I just wanted to lay that out for people. It's important for us to explain the story. It's important for us to break it down, which Steve and Jeff are obviously great at. And so if you have an interest in this, you could reach out to me, any of us. And we'll sit down, we're going to do a ton of one on one meetings. Steve and I are going to have a six city roadshow going to our relationships around the country. And we're going to cap the first fund to 250 million because there's no need to do more than that in this space at this time. But it will be a series of funds. And this is a long-term committed five to 10 year strategy of working together. And I think it's important for people to at least have the intellectual curiosity to understand why. Go ahead, Sarah.
Sarah Kunst: (17:25)
I love that. There's a lot of intellectual curiosity about what you guys are doing in this room I think. What are the macro trends, right? What's driving this overall because you're talking a lot about some awesome stuff that's happening in the blockchain. You're talking about some great real world applications. What are the big trends driving this?
Jeff Schumacher: (17:44)
Well, we see digital assets now there, we see a couple of big trends. First, the amount of money that is moving into this new value that's being created, I mean, it's gone up exponentially. I think digital assets get about a five trillion dollar market cap. It used to be just Bitcoin, it's now diversifying. So you're seeing that. You're also seeing the participation in these markets of these different, you see NFTs and some of the things that have been talked about. So around that you need infrastructure to support that and Algorand and what it's doing is quite capable of it. And then the unlock initiative that we put together is very much there.
Jeff Schumacher: (18:23)
There's another big trend if you look at what we're dealing with, which is around ESG. And we're at Davos and the Paris Accords, are a big thing. I fundamentally do not believe we will meet the Paris Accords. It just won't happen. We're not going to get there. And the reason for it is you can't get there with corporate responsibility capital and social impact capital. It can't be just throw away money. It's got to be, there's got to be new financial instruments that get created. And this type of platform allows for that. And you can get in, we have an entire ESG initiative that's led by Juan Bruce, who's somewhere sitting in here. And our partner AXA on that, which has pivoted their entire organization around this.
Jeff Schumacher: (19:05)
And the instruments that we can create that can attract new capital that this fund will actually put in money into, it's a game changer to what currently there. So you can create these new green bonds that then they attract capital. You can tokenize different activities that allow for investment in new buildings to pour the capital in to make sure that they're sustainable. And then the idea of decentralized by itself goes after not just the E but also the S and the G, the social and the governance. And you're basically democratizing markets. And so I think this ESG trend is significant. I think unlock will participate pretty heavily in that. The digital asset trend is significant. The follow the money analogy is moving that way. So these things are helping, and it's pretty exciting for what I see.
Steve Kokinos: (19:56)
Well, and just to add on the sustainability front, we agree that's hugely important. And I think somewhat overlooked in a way in this area. Algorand in particular as a network uses about, don't hold me for the exact number, around 10 homes worth of electricity. And we have seen several [crosstalk 00:20:18] what's come on chain with really novel applications. Climate trade is one example of that, where they work with the UN to source sustainable carbon credits. And they bring those into a marketplace that's on chain, on Algorand that anybody can use. One of the consumers of that is the network itself which automatically looks how much carbon is being consumed and then uses transaction fees to, in effect, purchase carbon credits that more than offset the amount of carbon being consumed by the servers that are supporting the network around the world. And I think that that's a really interesting way or use of the technology to sustain itself. But also do it in a way that isn't consuming huge amounts of power and huge amounts of computational resources that aren't needed.
Steve Kokinos: (21:06)
And I think one thing further is if you look at a simpler example, that climate trade is enabling, there're a Spanish company. If you take a flight on a Iberia during the checkout process, they enable people to click a button to buy the carbon offsets for that flight and to offset their seat. And we think that things like that lead to sustainability in different ways, because it gives people an opportunity to take responsibility for that.
Steve Kokinos: (21:32)
And I think a different side of the same coin, we, there's a project called PlanetWatch, they deploy air sensor, air quality sensors in different cities around the world. And especially in Europe where air quality problems lead to carbon tax. Sometimes it can be questioned whether the right information is making it into the logs. So now they have people walking around, they're deployed to all different places. All that data is stored imutably on the blockchain, and so now it can never be changed and they know exactly where the air quality looks like. And that's leading to better outcomes in cities around the world. And so I think you're right, for sure. There's not only examples of, or there's not only the case that technology needs to be sustainable, but we also need real world examples of how technology is empowering people to make the world a more sustainable place. And we're excited to be contributing to that.
Sarah Kunst: (22:23)
And I love that. Anthony, what do you... How does the ESG piece fit into all of this for you?
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:30)
Couldn't hear I'm...
Sarah Kunst: (22:30)
How does the ESG piece fit into all of this for you? How do you guys think about the sustainability?
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:37)
I love Jeff's vision because it's sort of like, it's Steve on technological properties, the integrity of system. NAX on vision and the exponential growth of taking those properties. And it's me on access and creating a bridge to the institutional investor. We had a couple of ESG panels on yesterday, and I think what Jeff is basically saying is that we can create a financial product, a financial token, a protocol that's designed to incentivize people to be more ESG friendly. And it'll have certain properties related to it that you'll have a financial incentive and now, economic incentive to do that.
Anthony Scaramucci: (23:19)
And so, remember, we have this big debate going on in the crypto community about whether something is green or something isn't green. Steve took that off the equation with this team by making this carbon negative. But just stop and think about the Petro dollar, or stop and think about the banking system, or think about all the ESG unfriendly things related to our current financial system. And then think about this backbone and the fact that this backbone will take out so many different intermediaries.
Anthony Scaramucci: (23:53)
Last night, we had dinner, I think Sam Bankman-Fried was there. And I think we were discussing the, a stock transaction. There are seven layers of different people and I was very impressed with Sam Bankman-fRIED because he actually listed all seven of them off the top of his head. Before you buy apple, before it gets you, it goes through seven different intermediaries before it ends up with you. So just think about all of the carbon that's used as a result of that process. And I think what NAX is going to do with the help of Algorand is going to take all of that out of the equation. So even if it isn't just ESG incentivizing when we created tokens related to that, just the fact that it's going to take all those intermediaries out of the system, it's going to make it very economically friendly.
Sarah Kunst: (24:40)
Yeah, absolutely. So we get it, you guys get it, right. You've gotten it. I think this room gets it. But what does it take to drive global adoption? How do we get everybody else to get it? And to take up the mantle of what you're doing?
Jeff Schumacher: (24:55)
Well, I think three guys in a garage and a vision is a pretty hard way to get adoption, right? One in 5,000 startups get to a hundred million dollar valuation, that doesn't even mean they work. So there's a lot of failure in here. And if you looked at it, I wrote a piece a while back of what makes something investible. And so our, we have a method that we look to uncover these ventures and there's 13 components in there. But if you look at it, most fail for three reasons. One, product market fit was wrong. Two, the team was wrong. Or three, capital. And capital is a key reason.
Jeff Schumacher: (25:33)
And if you look at capital, what we learn from is most of the money is spent on growth. You have to get the people into it. So we start with the volume and this is why corporates are very important to us. And if you think about it, data is the most valuable commodity in the world now, right? It's more valuable than oil. But if you figured out oil is the most valuable commodity and nobody knew it, what would you do? You would go buy all the land. So what we do is we secure long-term contracts with corporations, to mine their assets, to find volume assets that we can put onto this market. And then if you have volume, you create scale. You create scale, you create change. And that's the key here. And in order for that to work, you have to have a protocol that can handle the volume. And this is why the Algorand and, put that together with unlock and you bring the institutional capital support and you got the source.
Sarah Kunst: (26:24)
I love it.
Steve Kokinos: (26:24)
I, go ahead Anthony.
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:25)
I just wanted to ask him a question. I'm going to cross-
Sarah Kunst: (26:28)
Hey, it's your world Anthony. We just live in it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:30)
What was the eureka moment for you with Algorand and your team?
Jeff Schumacher: (26:40)
We were looking for a protocol that could handle the volume that we're putting on. And at the same time, technically, it's not proof of work it's proof of stake. And because if you-
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:53)
I'm going to stop you because there's a lot of people out here that actually still don't know the difference between proof of work and proof of stake. So just quick climber on that.
Jeff Schumacher: (27:01)
Proof of work, you got to do something thing to get something. That's like, you solve a puzzle and they give you a token, now that's Bitcoin, Ethereum, and such. Proof of stake, you have to stake something and they reward you for that. Proof of stake has far less carbon impact. Algorand with their carbon negative aspects are even better. So that was the eureka moment on that. And then the eureka moment on, well, we're not just trying to take something that exists fine today and make a ww.blockchain to, or .blockchain something. We're actually creating entirely new businesses that wouldn't otherwise exist without this infrastructure.
Jeff Schumacher: (27:38)
And then the third point was if you're going to do that, do it at scale. So we've launched ventures that, in the past, that didn't have scale and it required hundreds of millions of capital. You're not going to decentralize Uber. They spend 6 billion a year in marketing, right? So it's a really hard thing to do. But if you start with all the customers or the volume or what have you, and many of our ventures are starting with that volume, that's where this starts the change. And that's where this gets really exciting for the people in this room. And for that all to work, we had to bring these three parties together, which you did Anthony. And for this to get enabled, we need a protocol that can handle it.
Sarah Kunst: (28:19)
That's awesome. Steve, tell us, where do you see global adoption coming from? What's it going to take?
Steve Kokinos: (28:26)
Well, I think it comes from a few different places. I think the work that Jeff and NAX are doing is certainly a good place to start. And I think coming from organizations that have in some cases, hundreds of millions of users already gives you a way to launch things at scale that I don't think you see very often. So I think that's certainly very exciting. We do see other sources of demand though. I think one of the things that's interesting about any new technology is you don't know how people are going to use it. And so we do think, we see a lot of really cool work happening on De apps, so DeFi applications. NFTs, the creator economy, pursuing big shifts in really quickly. And then as I mentioned a couple times earlier, the other area that we see a lot of demand coming from are national projects where large portions of a country's population just get brought online into blockchain applications very quickly.
Steve Kokinos: (29:23)
We actually just, Columbia just announced last week that they have turned on their COVID-19 vaccine passport. And so a big chunk of their population will be on chain. And what we're excited about there is we think that that's a great application, but we also think that'll lead to more applications. And even in a number of those users being able to take advantage of applications like NAX i creating. And so again, I think in new application platforms, new protocols, it's not any one application itself that creates an ecosystem. It's when different applications within that ecosystem end up using each other. And that makes for really strong communities. So I think that's what we're really most excited about. And again, the more you can bring users at scale, they may come for one application or for one reason, but once they're using the network, they can use it for many other reasons too. So I think that's a really powerful effect that we're looking forward to seeing more of.
Jeff Schumacher: (30:27)
And I would say just his point on ecosystem is critical, right. So unlock in itself as an ecosystem, institutional corporate DeFi, right. So putting that together creates this peril, first of its kind ecosystem. If you think about the NAX, we've created an ecosystem over the last number of years now around to make this stuff work. You need an underwriting partner, you need a banking partner, you need a trading partner and you need a DeFi partner. So we built that on one side and then we built our platform. And then as we think about, I don't have COVID, by the way, I got my shot and everything. So every time I cough now I freak out. I'm like, no, I'm okay
Anthony Scaramucci: (31:07)
No, I trust you.
Jeff Schumacher: (31:11)
But we actually call, everything that comes out of our NAX platform, whether it's the green NAX on ESG, we call them scale ups because they're not startups. They start with the volume and that's, and I don't think it's an or you can only do it this way. You can do it both ways. But this gives us an advantage, a leg up as we get going.
Sarah Kunst: (31:33)
Awesome. And then to really look at the future, right, what does 2025 look like? What does 2030 look like for investment, for access? Where does this go in the near term?
Jeff Schumacher: (31:45)
I mean, from our perspective, we're seeing exponential growth. So it's not, it's exponentially, it's compounding. You take 30 meter linear steps, you've gone 30 meters. You take 30 exponential steps you've circumnavigated the earth a couple of times. So I think you're going to see just an explosion of growth now. And now that we have at scale protocols in ways to fundamentally create them at scale, that this is far different than it was a couple years ago. So I see it to be exponential growth over the number of years here.
Anthony Scaramucci: (32:17)
Just want to say something quickly. We made the announcement through $100 million, we're going to raise another 150, then we're going to cap it and we'll deploy it. And then we'll think about what we're going to do on our next round. But the very cool thing about this is to open up your eyes and to understand it, take the time to understand what is going on. Dan Lok was up here this morning, I don't know if you guys had a chance to see him. But he was a [inaudible 00:32:46] investor and he was a immediate naysayer on Bitcoin crypto and the blockchain.
Anthony Scaramucci: (32:53)
And then he did the work. He did a substantial amount of work, and now he's in the coin space. He owns crypto currencies including Ethereum. I've asked him to look at Algorand, and he's he's backed FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried was up here speaking before. He's one of the smartest investors I know. And he took the time and the energy and deployed his intellectual curiosity in his team, and to understanding it. And that's my message. Everybody here take the time to understand it. And then you can make an informed decision whether you want to be an investor or not.
Sarah Kunst: (33:27)
I love it. Steve, where does this go in the next five, 10 years?
Steve Kokinos: (33:32)
Well if maybe if, I'm not sure the exact time horizon, but I think if you look back, say 20 years ago, there were a lot of people questioning why anyone should care about the internet or why you wouldn't just go to the store or why would you shop online. What do you use this thing for? I think you fast forward to today, obviously it's changed the way people communicate and shop and consume media in ways that probably were maybe expected by a few, but not by many.
Steve Kokinos: (33:59)
I think when we look back from where we are now in the future, I think people will be using blockchain networks every day, using apps that folks like NAX created. And I think victory here from our perspective is that protocols like Algorand become part of the infrastructure that's used. We don't really care that much if people know that they're using Algorand. And I think when you fire up Netflix today, they use Amazon web services, but nobody needs to care about that. And so I think that really what, in a way, what we're building is the next major public utility like the internet or the phone network or electricity or wear wolves before them.
Anthony Scaramucci: (34:39)
It's a really good metaphor. It's really true.
Sarah Kunst: (34:42)
I love it. Well, thank you guys. Steve, Jeff, Anthony, thank you. And thank you all guys for being here.