Participants: Wolf Finance, Orange Crypto, Brian D. Evans, Charlie Hu
Link: https://twitter.com/WOLF_Financial/status/1755614995440976181
Topic: Bitcoin Meets DeFi
Date: 02/08/2024
Length: 1:04:44
Summary: In this AMA with emerging crypto pioneers, they disciss Bitcoin’s role in the DeFi ecosystem and emerging technologies like AI. Damon Nam and Charlie Hu, alongside host Wolf Finance and Brian D. Evans, dive into Bitcoin’s evolving landscape, highlighting the significance of L2 solutions and the potential for Bitcoin-based applications. The conversation underscored the early stages of development and the broad potential for growth within the Bitcoin DeFi space, emphasizing the importance of building secure, user-friendly platforms for wider adoption.
Transcript
WOLF FINANCE: Anybody else needs to come up. If you’re a Co-host, you can feel free to bring them up if you like to get them on stage. But with that being said, let’s get a little bit into it. Brian, how’s everything going by you?
BRIAN: Yeah, thanks for having me again, doing really good. And yeah, I’m also excited to see the Bitcoin price action and ETH as well, by the way, doing pretty good. Everything is doing pretty good actually, today, even Solana. So yeah, not a not a bad day.
WOLF FINANCE: Do you know if we’re bringing up Volker Broker?Sounds good.
BRIAN: I don’t think so.
WOLF FINANCE: OK, no worries. All right. Orange How’s it going?
DAMON: What’s up, Wolf? What’s up, Brian? Good to see you as well, Charlie. Thanks for having us.
WOLF FINANCE: Perfect. Thanks, Damon. Charlie, how are you doing?
CHARLIE: Doing good. Thanks for the invitation. It’s a beautiful day, huh?
WOLF FINANCE: Yeah, yeah, I know this is a perfect day for it. So I’m excited that we are diving into this. For those that are unfamiliar orange, I mean, you guys have been all over spaces, the red, the blue or the orange pill. I know you’re doing some spaces as well with our Wolf Web 3 crew. So good to have you here on the Wolf Financial channel as well. With that being said, Damon, I think we’re going to kick into it with yourself. No better place to start than with some introductions and some overview of the company. So let’s get right into it. Let me turn it over to you.
DAMON: Cool, appreciate it. So a little background about myself after university a long long long time ago I worked at Microsoft for about 17 years, always on the business management side of the house, and decided to jump into blockchain full time in 2017. Recruited a really good friend of mine who was our CTO. He was technical at Microsoft for he worked there for 10 years. And so for the past seven years, we’ve just been building different solutions in this space, primarily infrastructure related products, wallet exchange technology. We’ve consulted for companies as well, including Republic in New York and have even built some technology for Binance. So we’re a small team, currently 7 individuals, mostly engineering focused. We’re trying to expand and grow as we just raised some seed funding as well as launched our Orange Token on the market. But effectively Orange is a DeFi ecosystem for Bitcoin. And so about a year and a half ago when we were observing the market, especially after the hype around DeFi Summer and all the solutions that were being built there, we were under the consensus that all of the solutions that were built on all these other chains that we’re trying to solve performance issues around Bitcoin would eventually come to Bitcoin, which we believe is the gold standard. So, you know, as the chain that matures, the technology matures as there’s more development happening on Bitcoin, especially with L2s and all this experimentation happening. You know, we thought that a lot of the current energy and excitement that’s going on in the industry now would eventually come. And so for us, we wanted to help support a lot of that building and primarily operate at the infrastructure layer for the industry. So we started building out our own tools including a wallet which is currently being audited by Hacken. And following that audit, we’re going to plan to release it here within either this month or early next month. And then from there other tooling and Dapps as well including a bridge as well as a decks and some other things to be able to help support users and builders in this space. I just continue upon you knowing this opportunity of really building on Bitcoin and this particular chain. So at high level that’s us and really glad to be here.
WOLF FINANCE: Perfect. Appreciate the intro there. Damon, do you want to have Charlie or any others jump in with some initial intros and items like that as well or you want to move into that’s the project?
DAMON: Oh, would love to introduce the rest of the crowd as well. And, you know, just dive into the conversation after that.
WOLF FINANCE: Perfect. Charlie, let’s turn the floor over to you if you want to give some background here as well as involvement.
CHARLIE: For sure, for sure. Thanks again host for the intro and and great to have Brian and Damon on the same 2D space. My name is Charlie, I’ve been in the Web 3 space since 2015. The first major movement I had was Polkadot early days from 2017 as an early investor and all the way to 2020. I was pretty active building the ecosystem for Polkadot in Asia, especially in China Web3 Foundation. When they came over to China’s Chinese community, I was kind of helping them liaison with a lot of the exchanges, VCs and developers we end up with, build up a ecosystem brand and incubated the seven projects. Two of them are just on Binance. Learned a lot from A-Z. What does it take to build a relationship with developers with the ecosystem? 2020 was a DeFi summer and Damon said the same thing. We were kind of doing a lot of the Yale farming early stage education research about what is D Fi on chain finance, all kinds of things. I was a kind of Degen, did a lot of yield farming, learned a lot of all kinds of protocols and then we had all the EVM crazy bull market, right? And 2021 was great. I got involved in Polygon, became head of China and head of AIPAC for them, and introduced over 650 projects across DeFi, NFT, gaming, social managers, all kinds of applications. And that was a really, really good experience. And I learned a lot about what it takes to really build our layer 2 ecosystem and what all kinds of asset class we’re bridging between Ethereum layer one and layer two and all kinds of primitives. And for the last two years I’ve been travelling around the world and being kind of a nomad, understanding the crypto world in all different regions across the United States, across South Asia, across Middle East and all that as well. Last year was an amazing journey with UTXO summer. All I was pretty early, inscribing sub 5K10K inscriptions to go with my friends, got involved with some kind of big crampon frogs, those communities. And then we had this all kinds of experimental exploration across recursive and inscription, BRC420, bitmap, friend, friend, child, parent, child, reinscription, a bunch of all the other interesting stuff. And I think one of the most exciting stuff that gets me excited and I want to start at this company called Bitlayer. It was the EVM and they essentially wanted to aim to build this computing layer on Bitcoin, allow state transition verification on layer one that inherits the Bitcoin layer one security. This is as big as high potential as exciting as ZK Roll up and ZK EVM back in the days in 2020. That’s kind of the reason we are working on this big quality of two solutions from two months ago. I’ve been, we’ve been doing a lot of the ecosystem talks and you know looking for collaborations. So definitely looking forward to the conversation today about Bitcoin and Bitcoin and DeFI. Thanks again.
WOLF FINANCE: Absolutely, Yeah. Behind the Orange account, You want to jump in here? OK, not sure if they were doing a speaking role? No problem. Brian, you want to throw in any thoughts before we dive a little deeper?
BRIAN: Yeah, I mean, look, I think this is a really exciting space, Charlie. Actually I give credit to turning me on to this whole kind of BRC ordinals, inscriptions kind of world. Not not that I was ever a maxi in any direction before but but it really opened my eyes to kind of you know the this the overall sort of Bitcoin side that you know I I was an ETH guy for sure and and definitely down the rabbit hole on DeFi in 2013 or after the you know basically got into theory really early and and just stayed with the ecosystem but was always interested in everything on the Bitcoin side, just never really dived in. But as I’ve seen more of this happen, it’s just it’s really exciting what’s kind of possible now.
WOLF FINANCE: Perfect. Appreciate that, Brian. People tried to call me during the day. I wish there was some way I could just make it where they couldn’t. But with that being said, let’s go a little bit further into this and talk about the actual depths of the project. So there’s a basic principle in development here of Bitcoin and DeFi. Damon, can you explain for the newcomers what these principles are?
DAMON: Well, effectively, I mean if we look at just the chain itself, there’s not much we can do in terms of extensibility, interoperability, etcetera, which also makes it one of the reasons why it’s the most secure blockchain out there, right. But there is now this notion for those that are or may not be aware of DeFi itself, the notion of being able to build on top of it so that there is more functionality from a blockchain perspective and a whole. So for example, the ability to be able to build smart contracts and additional tooling that just extend the capabilities and full potential to blockchain itself. And so this is one of the things that we’re certainly extremely excited about because we’ve seen a lot of energy just around the building of other block chains in order to kind of solve a lot of the problems that have existed on Bitcoin, especially from a performance perspective, right. But now we’re starting to see a lot of builders into this space in order to be able to solve it. So for example, even stacks and what they’re doing with their L2 obviously bit layer and you know a lot of their innovation that they’re bringing to the space as well. And so as more companies come into this space and offer solutions that are either side chains and allow people to be able to do really creative things and implement smart contracts on top of Bitcoin itself, then it becomes extremely interesting because the level of applications and the tools and the use cases just expand exponentially. So for us, you know we’re doing a little bit of building on Bitcoin itself, right, with our own decks, we have a bridge solution etcetera. But our core focus primarily at Orange is to be able to operate at the infrastructure layer and that first starts with our wallet and then we let other great builders, you know, build their solutions and then we support their solutions within our particular platforms. And so, you know, we’re keenly excited to really help expand the space and even work alongside folks such as Charlie and his team at BitLayer to really just maximize the potential of the chain.
WOLF FINANCE: Charlie, got thoughts on that?
CHARLIE: Absolutely. That’s exactly the thing we have. We’ve been putting a lot of efforts working almost 20 hours a day in the last couple weeks getting things going. The last time I’ve been so excited really wants to put my my own time to work not just wearing my analyst and investor or sometimes DJ had but more on the builder had was 2019 why is why really really deep start deep dive into you know polkadot substrate framework was in trouble network you know those kind of infrastructure primitive really can really push the boundary change the paradigm of web three and then make it making some meaningful solution on the infrastructure layer for the wide free space. Billy bid VM is is as much potential as that we can think about right So this really early stage we allow we we need we we’re building up the bid VM Asia community and we’re getting a lot of the Bitcoin layer to standard draft we’re drafting out So trying to make clarity what does it take and what what what what define a good Bitcoin to you too so to speak right because there’s a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty and things like that and the people kind of are generally interested to explore that kind of applications for multiple reasons one after Bitcoin ETF are approved right. The narrative of building things on Bitcoin and then using Bitcoin for all kind of things become relatively safe legally speaking but also narratively wise as well Hoover worker is almost the is always has always been and it will always be the most secure network as a consensus leader right I don’t want to be building the tribalism I was E guy because of polkadot and so Polygon but because after the E2.O merge, right. Unfortunately, a lot of people fade out of the east because of the proof of work to proof of stake, right. It’s it brings certain concern and a lot of elephants in the room kind of concerning ecosystem of it’s a Etherian ecosystem because of things like, you know, Lido I thinking it’s getting too much market share and there’s you know some kind of notes in the etherian network getting censored so on and so forth. I’m very aware of all kind of things on Bitcoin. It’s kind of Wild West in a good way because there’s so much excitement and real trading volume happening in Bitcoin layer one. I personally spent so much gas fees maintaining all the ordinals and also not also on the trade trading fees, right? I think people eventually will have the same complaint, just like 2020 on the DeFi Summer Ethereum become too expensive to really allow average retail users to play around. But the demand is big, right? So people want and desire a much lower gas fee multiple magnitudes more composable, more scalable solutions on Bitcoin layer one. So assets will be minted on layer one but they need layer two solutions to work around it play around it, the DeFi on Bitcoin layer one whatever. Well, how we want to technically play around with it even cutting corners to say oh that’s DeFi. I think it’s eventually we’ll hit some bottleneck and hurdle and so we will need a Bitcoin layer two to make it more or less mass adoption so to speak, right. So currently what do we believe the the things that are happening in all of those on all kinds of asset and protocol like ERC20 and a few others are amazing. I’m personally very looking forward to Cassie the lot of those creators pushing to the new standard room as well. We are very asset type agnostic, but are we basically trying to aggregate all the asset class on layer one use, building the same bridging system at which we’re working on with ADLC technology allow people to do restaking lending prop decks, option trading, all kinds of things, all kinds of primitive that they already have in Ethereum can do that in Bitcoin layer 2 that’s I think that’s ultimate big goal we want to achieve. It’s very early stage. We’re not saying this is ready, but I think it’s there’s there’s a, there’s a this kind of like light in the tunnel. The deep down we see that with the EVM solution and many other infrastructure solution. You know, we are building on a few other teams in the space, also building on that as well.
WOLF FINANCE: So it’s an interesting question there. I was like to ask, “What do you see as the main differences between yourselves and the other teams that are building in that area?
CHARLIE: You mean on the gas fee side or on the solution side?
WOLF FINANCE: I would say both.
CHARLIE: On the gas tree considering most of the layer twos are not launching the real mainnet version yet. Our our test net will launch next next month. We will sit at around you know 10 to you know $0.25 U.S dollar equal value of Bitcoin that kind of per row up kind of level. We’re we’re observing very actively some other Bitcoin layer two that are launching actually this week how their performance will look like as well. And I don’t think using gas fee as just single point of comparison parameter is is is how to say well thought out like the gas war between all kinds of ethereal layer two is already happened has been already happened for many years. We have to look at many other things as well like the level of security, the level of composability and also a few other parameter including confirmation time, the the variety and also robusted robustness right about the ecosystem on that layer too specifically right. I think those are all very important things to take into account in terms of solution. I’m not have, I don’t have to, I don’t, I don’t want to really sell too hard about that. I think really just depends on how we want to deliver. So after later after Q3, after Q2 this year we’re going to finish the you know the fraud, the fraud proof and with the roll up and the challenge game and the first version will be semi Wiz the BVM considering BVM is as a as a research topic is still relatively early stage but I think we are while the few team have been deep diving doing research with BVM and since pretty much very beginning and actually have started public chain you know engineering background. You know my CTO build head Co will be ecosystem chain and he was a list and fellow as well. He knows smart contract and you know the data availability and security layer on network all these kind of stuff. A lot of the layer two as what Damon said is quite on the side chain kind of approach. We don’t want to just end up like that. I think there’s a few other teams that want to do new things, not just side chain. On the other side, it’s a very important asset, kind of elephant in the room kind of question is how to safely bridge the asset from layer one to layer two, right. Currently we saw most of the solutions are just TSS multi signature kind of solution, meaning if the multi SEC are being managed by certain central groups, right? And that actually happened in multi chain companies before the multi signature are all managed by the CEO himself. So eventually become a single point of failure and all the assets actually getting confessed by you know certain local police and some non-technical reasons on a lot of the assets on the chains especially in phantom 300 million get it drained out. So multi technician TSS solution is not centralized, is not decentralized and we have to really keep that in mind. It’s not necessarily very safe in the long run. So we are not, we don’t want to end up like that and we want to we’re building this new asset bridging solution with DLC and lightning kind of you know solution type. So that’s kind of the two things we try to de-fresh ourselves compared to many other layer tools.
WOLF FINANCE
Perfect. I appreciate the insights there throughout. Damon, did you have any pieces you want to add on to that before we keep rolling along a little bit?
DAMON: Yeah. So the only thing I’d like to mention right, is really kind of just the magnitude of what we’re facing right now as a industry, so obviously there’s a lot of interest and energy and excitement coming back to Bitcoin, which is really ironic, right, because it’s obviously the first blockchain that was ever created and then you know, certainly was the the gold standard and or is the gold standard and has been kind of the leading blockchain ever since its inception. And then we kind of lost a lot of its glamor because of its performance issues which led to a lot of the creation of alternate block chains and all these other L2s and whatnot. And so when even when you look at the competitive landscape out there today, not only you know some of the other tools I mentioned, the space is actually still wide open. There’s not a lot of notable names, right? Like if you think of Ethereum and you think of wallet, you immediately think of Metamask or if you think of DEX on Ethereum, you think of Uniswap. And so surprisingly because of the secure nature of Bitcoin and you know the limited scalability and ability to be able to build on it in the past, there’s just not a lot of what we would consider market depth and a lot of large players. So we think the market still wide open not only just for us but any builders in this space and that’s why you see a lot of folks flocking towards it. And now we’re we believe that we’re at the stage if we look at this from a macro level, we’re obviously seeing a lot of institutional adoption, a lot of interest from corporations, companies investing even their treasuries in the Bitcoin etcetera especially to battle you know macroeconomic issues such as inflation etcetera. We’re seeing the ETFs getting approved not only in the US but we’re seeing applications happening in Hong Kong you know. So we anticipate that this is going to continue at the corporate, the institutional level and we’re going to see a new wave of consumers flock into the industry over the next couple years, especially since we’re on the cusp of the new bull run. And so for us we think it’s extremely exciting because when you couple the the macro and you combine that with all the building that’s happening on the chain itself, you know we think the next two to five years is going to to be really interesting in terms of the use cases and the things that we’re going to be able to do on this chain. And so for us you know we, we are certainly proud to be a part of what’s going on especially in this market cycle. But for those that may not be as deep into Bitcoin now, we highly recommend that you certainly get involved at some level in this space, this industry because our financial system is transforming and we believe that bitcoins going to be a huge proponent and and a key driver of that transformation especially with all this, this buildings happening. You know Bitcoin is bringing sexy back, right? And we’re happy to be a part of it.
WOLF FINANCE: I like that. I like that end piece right there. OK. So let’s go a little bit further into some of the pieces that we’re speaking to here. We’ve talked about Orange and what it is, but I want to go further into the road map, the team. There’s also an AI assistant that’s involved here and Damon, can you cover all that?
DAMON: Yeah. And I’ll try to do it as condensed as possible. So when we started our journey back about a year ago specifically focused on this, we started engineering our wallet. But meanwhile, you know, a lot of people don’t understand in this industry that you can actually build very, very quickly, right? You build fast, you break fast, you get feedback, and then you continue to iterate that process. And when you actually are in a testing cycle, you know, you lock the code. And so often times when we would go through that cycle and lock the code, our devs would start working on other products that were in our road map which include as I mentioned earlier, we have some cool things coming out such as a bridge that allow you to bridge any BRC20 over and get a wrapped version on the ERC20 chain just in case you want to be able to you know you know for any die hards on the Ethereum chain that want to be able to interact at faster perform speeds etcetera. We also have built an Orange Explorer, so it’s integrated to our wallet and allows anyone to be able to review transactions related towards Bitcoin. Specifically tied to our ecosystem, we have a version of what we call Orange Market Cap, which is just a dedicated portal to all things Bitcoin similar to Coinmarketcap. But you know one thing that we found within the industry is data which we believe rules the world and is a huge tenant of our business is lacking especially when it comes to Bitcoin and a lot of these new protocols such as BRC20s or Knowles CBRC20s etcetera. So we want to be a key proponent of that and be able to service and provide data across the entire industry when it comes to this particular category. And what we’re most excited about because we think this is a huge unique selling proposition for our wallet itself given that is our core product we’ve integrated. We have some great team members on our team as well as a great advisor who was AVP at API dot AI. They actually sold their company to Google and started their AI division for cloud services. They’re an advisor to us, but we’ve integrated using natural language processing and AI into the wallet to make the experience much more seamless. And so you know, if we look at traditional wallet experiences today, obviously you have your core features such as sending, receiving and stuff. You know, some wallets have integrated swapping and all like we have. But it’s a traditional kind of confusing experience where you don’t have information at your fingertips and it’s point and click. So by using some of this emerging technology we can transform that experience to make it much more easy, much more seamless and even focus towards onboarding the average consumer. So for example by having our assistant and feeding it specific language models towards finance and crypto, you know we have use cases where you can ask the assistant and say you know what’s the 24 hour market cap on finance and instead of having to open up a new browser window trying to research and find out where that’s at, you can have that information at your fingertips, right. Another use case would be, you know, tell me my last transaction I sent to Kevin.BTC and instead of thumbing through your transaction history or going to explore you have that information at your fingertips. But where it gets really exciting and what we’re most proud about is the ability to be able to text commands or or speak commands to the wallet and execute financial transactions. So you know envision being able to say send $50 Bitcoin to you know Charlie dot SATS and then it takes you to the confirmation screen, you know versus kind of going through that experience of clicking and anxiety, you know it’s sending the traditional send transaction. So these are just cool things that we think are going to help us kind of differentiate ourselves especially as new consumers get on board into the industry. And so we’re really excited to be able to leverage a lot of this emerging technology to make it happen.
WOLF FINANCE: Super cool. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of interesting pieces there, Brian. Where do you kind of find the most interesting stuff within this emerging technology?
BRIAN: I mean what Damon was just saying is quite interesting to me because I’m always thinking about how we onboard the masses, right. That’s where my head always goes. Same with you know, my Web 3 gaming kind of focus. But this, you know, being able to speak a transaction is makes it literally friendly to just about anyone that can speak, right in the simplest sense because the technology is confusing to many people that are down. You know we live in as big as we think the sort of crypto and Bitcoin world is. It’s still small on a grand scale of the world right in terms of people that actually know how to use the technology. So I’m always focused on anything that can make it simpler for people. You know, even though the people here can geek out and do complicated stuff and it seems super easy to us for everybody else, it’s just not. So. I’m always thinking about you know, onboarding hundreds of 1,000,000 billions of people. You know what kind of technology and you know services and tools, what they need and want to make it.
WOLF FINANCE: Super, super easy.
BRIAN: So that part’s really interesting to me and just the overall kind of Bitcoin side of having the tools, the DeFi type tools that we see in other parts of the ecosystems is also really compelling to me. And I think it kind of evens out the playing field and it just pushes the overall space that much further. And it potentially, yeah, when you know evening it out it also just you you don’t get confusion from outsiders as much as just oh you can do this and that and it’s not, you know we see a lot of infighting and Maxine kind of mentalities, but it it kind of just evens it out more where that doesn’t really exist hopefully in the future.
WOLF FINANCE: Yeah, good points there. OK, cool. So I know that, you know, we briefly touched on this AI piece as well. Damon, do you see a big integration happening between crypto and AI? It seems like there was a lot of waffling back and forth for a lot of companies between them, but you guys are kind of more focused on, OK, can we actually just get this done straight up?
DAMON: Yeah. And the natural answer is yes, right. Just because two emerging technologies and certainly one has a higher barrier to entry and being able to leverage AI just enables some new use cases to just make that experience much easier. So yeah, we certainly see a huge emergence that’s coming. Obviously there’s been a lot of momentum around just the AI space especially after GPT launched even to the extent to where there are tons of crypto companies kind of trying to build off of that momentum as well. So yeah, we think that there is just going to continue to be this intersection between both of these technologies that really kind of transform that experience no different from what we’re trying to do ourselves. So yeah, it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens and especially if we can get better standards and regulation even from a government perspective. I think you’ll see solutions coming in from even these larger players such as Google and the Apples of the world that are already deep down the path of AI. But certainly know that each one of these companies has a financial component to their business as well. And so being able to leverage AI in some capacity in order to transform that financial experiences, I’m I’m sure a priority for a lot of these companies. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that is the way it’s going, OK by the way, just for people that are kind of looking to get more information on the company as a whole, where do you recommend they go due to diligence, dig in, find materials, look at the team, all those items? Yeah. For us, you know, we try to streamline just the information that we present so that it’s easy for people to be able to access. And so from our website orangecrypto.com, if anyone wants to learn more, certainly go there. And we have links to all of our socials as well as we have some good robust documentation regarding our business, the products etcetera that people can learn more as well. And so you know, if you want to learn more, just certainly jump on Orange crypto.com. Also love to be able to connect with our community and and holders and whatnot and you know we have links to all of our socials and in our communities there as well.
WOLF FINANCE: Perfect. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think space is a good way to start out. You know, for those that have not been familiar with the company prior to the space, I think that obviously you’re learning a lot within here, but this is a good starting point, right? It pays to actually take it to the next level and dive into the actual nitty gritty talk in a discord, right. Different areas like that I think ultimately are really important. So let me flip one more back at you Damon, and then we’ll get Charlie’s thoughts on this too. Tell us about the different protocols on Bitcoin and how they compare to BRC 20. So you got stacks, stamps, atomicals, etcetera.
DAMON: Yeah, great question. And quite frankly, I mean. All of them are based upon, well, except for L2s, you know, the stamps, atomicals, BRC20s and a lot of these new protocols. I mean, I I saw someone launch X20s a few weeks ago and a lot of these things are on the basis of the same principles of just having inscriptions embedded into the chain itself, right? And so it allows developers to be able to just get a little bit more creative in terms of creating new tokens and standards that are attached to more metadata on top of the chain. But where it starts getting very interesting is especially where Charlie and his team and other L twos and things like that are starting to build and and even stacks with their upcoming Nakamoto releases. That’s where it starts to get much more complex in which people are building their own protocols on top of, of or alongside Bitcoin to be able to extend the functionality much, much deeper. So for those that aren’t aware, you know, when we look at the functionality that exists even with BRC 20s today, it’s fairly limited, right? There’s not much you can do outside of, you know, maybe some creative things here. But if we truly want to be able to extend the functionality of Bitcoin itself, then this is where a lot of the engineering power is going to have to come from. Companies such as Bit Layer and you know these other L2 stacks and and and what they’re doing themselves.
WOLF FINANCE: Charlie, got thoughts on that too.
CHARLIE: A lot, yes. I’ve been waiting for the chat, yeah, Damon said. A lot of amazing stuff. Yeah, thanks for that. And also great comments about what’s happening in the Bitcoin layer. One side. Yeah. So the asset protocol, you know all the inscription you know standards I ping kind of from almost from day one with BRC20 there was a lot of debate between all the standard protocols, right atomic codes, BRC420. I personally know a lot of those creators. Actually, they all have their pros and cons. But at the end of the day we have to keep in mind Damon mentioned that as well fundamentally the principle wise it’s all inscription standards, right. You’re putting some certain type of data onto Bitcoin, right? There’s a lot of UTXO getting created last year. So there was, you know, if we look at the game theory among all the stakeholders, you know, with all the UTXO summer, right, one type of people are definitely benefiting, which is the, you know, the miners, the Bitcoin miners getting way more additional block rewards than used to be good for them, right? But for the users for the people we wants to build mass adoption applications it would be hard really you know just getting the additional keep keep feeding the additional bark rewards for the miners and the the rest of people have to you know pay additional gas fee doing the gas war waiting for the 20 minutes of the confirmation time because that’s what Bitcoin designed for and many other things you can’t really build on because Bitcoin doesn’t have the logic of multiply you know division rights only do plus and miners and then you know putting ZK proof directly on Bitcoin layer one and all that is technically not possible right without the VIP you know improvements, all that kind of stuff. So for us from our standpoint Bitcoin layer layer two is one way or the other inevitable. We just need to build a more scalable one which is more engineering and developer friendly, engineer friendly and also user friendly right. So taking a lot of the good experience building Ether Layer 2 and migrate that with the new approach of BVM and understand the Bitcoin culture, the Bitcoin asset class and making a real product market fit to the developers to the user base is a scientific and also art challenge we’re facing considering we are building the big new Bitcoin layer to nobody else did kind of did that before. We can’t really just copy paste what happened with Arbitron optimism Polygon a bunch of the layer layer 2 on ethereum just exactly copy what they did and rinse the repeat it doesn’t work. We also could not really just copy paste the word lightning and of course stacks and many other you know previous attempt that we’re trying to scale Bitcoin in the past right Bitcoin has been there’s a lot of people has been trying to you know scale Bitcoin all the way from 2012 right. You know you know all the way from beginning there was color coin and a few other things right. That was before Ethereum. So I think the dilemma and trade off within Bitcoin is always there, right. People want to build a tooling compete chain but now you know in the past they were always just a side chain didn’t doesn’t really inherit the Bitcoin in security and security is by all means the most important parameter if we can consider all kinds of things right. If the asset is not secure, a lot of people will have any, you know, reasonable doubt should we enter any application stuff, right? Second is, does it really support complicated application logic, right? And in the lightning with state channels, the answer is no. You can only do simple payment, That’s it, right? And then some people argue OK because of the limitation of Bitcoin that doesn’t deserve any application. It’s just a digital gold we did Bitcoin was never designed to do any other complication and I think more and more people after the Ordinal summer start to challenge it, is it really so? Is it really that’s it, right This digital go that’s it. Nothing else right. I think a lot of the people you know, Taproots Wizard guys and you know you know great builders like Orange team and many others in the ordinal space in the last year has been really pushing the boundary saying OK there’s going to be some interesting application built on Bitcoin. You know why this only can happen in Solana is Syrian on budget of all the prover stake chains which is more centralized with all respect right And also less secure. Why can’t we build that on Bitcoin. So that’s the kind of the ongoing debate. I’m willing to debate that with a lot of my old prover stake friends because they’ve been saying no, why don’t you, why don’t you waste time, you know, building things on Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn’t, doesn’t deserve any applications. So that’s a very interesting debate. We need to really prove that with the solution we build and with the traction we eventually deliver to space. I think before that it’s always a very hypothetical superficial debate with naysayers saying Nah, it’s not going to happen and with people having to kind of head on building. So it’s a very interesting timing you got to say. Right. We are kind of right before the bull market. Everything is kind of pumping. I’m not sure everything will keep pumping like this. It’s going to be good, we hope. Actually we want to slow it down, right. So we have more time to build because of central engineering work. We can’t really cut corner, we’re busy hiring people. My CT was absolutely going crazy. So I’m taking most of the non-technical costs and all that. We are getting the research team on board with 20 people on the engineering side. We are trying to onboard a lot of researchers trying to deep dive on the ZK on a lot of other perimeter side about what it take right to verify the space transition machine on Bitcoin layer one which at the same time allowing all kinds of you know virtual machines, right. We can support. So we’re not just we don’t want to support EVM, we want to support ,and many other, you know, smart contract, you know logic as well. So that’s a very ambitious and technically ambitious goal we want to have. But I think if we push the boundary, it’s going to be very, very important to allow people to do build, build things on Bitcoin.
WOLF FINANCE: Good points there, Charlie. Yeah, I I think you hit it on the head with the safety and security part, right? If you don’t have those, at the end of the day it all kind of crumbles, right?
CHARLIE: Absolutely.
WOLF FINANCE: Yeah, yeah. No strong points. I guess we got another 10 to 15 ish minutes here that’s going to be going. So if anybody from the audience has anything specific they want me to ask, feel free to go ahead and shoot me. ADMI know that there’s several 100 of y’all in here with us, so feel free to hit me up. If not. I do of course have a few more items and questions that I want to continue touching on, but I did just want to make that offer available to the audience just so you know it’s there. Let’s talk a little bit more about layer twos. So what will L2’s bit layer on BRC20 enable? I’ll throw that over to you first, Damon.
CHARLIE: Sorry, can you repeat the question? Was that the sound or was that bit bumpy?
WOLF FINANCE: Yeah, sorry, what will L2’s bit layer on BRC20 enable?
CHARLIE: Yeah, so essentially layer two, right. So the user user flow and a user experience will be like SM maintained on all kinds you know with all kinds of you know asset protocols minted on Bitcoin layer one right. If they wanted to do lending you know you know option protocols, all kinds of things. The application will be deployed with smart country EVM compatible way on the layer. You know the other kind of Bitcoin layer to operate the same on that the only thing different is the existing layer we don’t call even we shouldn’t even call them layer two right. The existing side chains, Bitcoin side chains, don’t necessarily have the smart country and state chain to transition verification on that Bitcoin layer one. So the level of security is not inherent, it’s a stand alone chain. You know for example stacks in an old version, the stamp and a few others. So that’s something we don’t want to end up with right. You know it’s I think whatever Bitcoin layer two people trying to build it needs to have the you know it needs to inherit the Bitcoin layer one security right. So we principally can trust you know when the state transition is very verified and it’s secure because it’s the same level on with Bitcoin. So when people wants to use application Bitcoin layer 2, the first thing they need to have is they have certain Bitcoin assets, assets, right. So it could be USDT or USDT or USDC but on Bitcoin network, right? So use the same bridging solution and on and then after they migrate on the Bitcoin layer two, they can do all kinds of things right? You know they can enter certain lending protocols they can enter you know of course they can trade with the Dexis you know all the kind of DeFi primitives that already exist on the Ethereum essentially can we can do that the same right Of course the the cost structure the you know the technical integration will be slightly different the gas fee will be on in Bitcoin and some of the that’s kind of another design principle we want to we want to stick Bitcoin layer two should use Bitcoin as a gas fee not their governance token. I think that’s very important kind of principle as well and that’s we want we are following what else I think I think it’s it’s a very new creature that we and many of some other people in the some other teams kind of a building bring to the Web3 table that are actually interesting and also more functional right. Because I think for so many years people treat Bitcoin as this old boring you know, ultrasound money people don’t really expect you know think certain application is possible on that. So there might be some interesting completely new type of applications built on Bitcoin Layer 2 natively. So that’s that those are the early conversation we’re having with certain interesting team they’re brainstorming that might be very interesting. I think I do hope that certain new application completely doesn’t exist in Simulator 2.
WOLF FINANCE: Brian, do you got any thoughts on that area too with the L2’s?
BRIAN: I mean it’s just really exciting for me. Do you guys here obviously worry more about it than I do, but I just find it really exciting to see what’s possible and kind of what’s coming and looking forward to participating and you know, being involved in sort of what’s created.
WOLF FINANCE: Yeah, that makes sense. So obviously there’s, you know, Damon, there’s a lot of people here in the audience. A lot of people were retweeting stuff and excited about everything when I posted that I was going to do the space. How have you gone about building this community?
DAMON: You know, just to be very frank, right when we’ve started our journey, we’ve just focused on engineering to be very frank with you. And even early on as we kind of gone through this process and we certainly have experience in this industry and know the games that people play, a lot of people had encouraged us including you know even VCs and KOLS to to really add kind of a boost to our community in order to attract folks and whatnot. And we kind of stayed true to our core values and said you know what, let’s just build it. We’ve taken on the principle of if we build then they will come. And so you know we’ve just been focused on engineering to be very frank with you and just now we are starting with the help of you know some RVC network KOLS that have invested as well to be able to just gain exposure so that folks can really know more about Orange. And so for us, you know, we have some community initiatives that we’re going to be doing in order to make sure that we put focus on not only our users but holders and all of these other audiences that are inclusive of crypto as well. So we’re launching some cool community programs where not only will we have rewards, but we also want to be considered the greatest host of this party called Bitcoin, right. And so we’ve been able to develop a network of folks on the venture capital side as well as liquidity partners such as exchanges, market makers, etcetera. And even if a builder is trying to connect with any of these points, you know, if we can help actually make that connection and things of that nature and add value to be able to grow this industry, we want to be able to help facilitate that as well. So there’s some cool things that we have planned in order to make that happen. But I will say, just to be very frank with you, we hadn’t put a lot of focus on it until more recently just around, you know, the time of when we were launching our token.
WOLF FINANCE: Sounds good. Sounds good. OK, yeah. I think that’s important, right? How you go with building it And then within the community, I think you’ve mentioned there’s a place where people can integrate and interact. Are you often doing you know, other spaces where they can jump in and ask questions? There you know, Discord shots where they can do that?
DAMON: Yeah, well you know, we do the standard, you know, Telegram. That’s where especially for crypto tokens, a lot of folks like to be able to communicate, catch up, connect etcetera. We are planning to do a number of things to just make sure we have public visibility with not only our community but you know, potential new users and things of that nature. And that includes not just frequent spaces, but then also this concept of a show where we actually talk about the markets. We invite personalities such as folks like Brian yourself and you know other notable folks in this industry to really kind of get to know them, share their insights and collectively just really expand the space further. So we know how critical it is to not only build but then make sure that there is the appropriate exposure to get people interested and those are just one of the angles that we’re really taking upon to make that happen.
WOLF FINANCE: Got it. Charlie, you got any thoughts in that area too?
CHARLIE: Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy on community buildings, like I’ve been working on that with the current bit layer. But also previously I remember when I was working with Polka dot and my major job as a volunteer, as eco builder externally was building community. Community has multiple layers, right? The first layers, the ones actually builders, the smartest kind of group in the web trees, you know space, they’re pushing the boundary. They talk about hard questions. They’re asking philosophical questions, right? They enter into debate, they write a lot of real concrete content and proposals, even codes, right. So those are the people that are very, very important and getting those people on board, getting into the room kind of talk about it’s very important, you know questions and came up with interesting solutions and eventually iterate those are the people that very important to build ecosystem like including Bitcoin layer two. So that’s number one priority, at least on my side, 2, the 2nd tier is the people actually generally interest but more on the investor side that they’re curious to learn more all the kind of things they try to put in their money into what their mind is, right.
CHARLIE: And they believe the certain things and they will follow, they will invest, will use and they play around, they give feedback so that the very important kind of the user groups in the community and then those people actually care about the project on the fundamentals, right. Those are the important people to really ask them what they’re looking for, what’s their struggle, what’s their concern, what kind of complaint they have, right. Try to fix that and, you know, timely manner and all that. And then the third type of people, of course, that’s the nature of finance, right? You know, crypto is decentralized finance. So we call this DeFi. There’s people trying to dig into all kinds of things. They’re looking for alpha. They want to speculate, They want to play around certain things. They don’t necessarily use the product per SE but they like to enjoy the the momentum on the price and so on. Those are also actually important people. We cannot really just push them around, Oh you don’t belong with us because you’re the speculator. Obviously if everybody’s speculator, nobody care about the product, it’s not really good vibe for the community. But those people we have to kind of take along as well as this moment for Bill Layer, we are at a very early stage. We try to focus on research and you know getting the right developer, getting the right ecosystem partner on board. We are just setting up our Discord and and Telegram all the things we’re getting a lot of the interest on the, on the, on the social media, you know influencers, some of the big YouTube and content provider and also PO GS like Brian and a few other kind of all those kind of OG as well and paying interest on us, pay attention to us. But I think at this moment as I said right, it’s like multiple tiers of community. I want to focus on 1st, 2:00 first one and and and 1st and then second tier as well And then after those people really set the tone, set the culture about our ecosystem, our community, I think we can attract the right people. And eventually when the bull market go crazy, you know the party, you know the party really started then the moon boys will come which we can’t really stop and let them have fun with it right. We will have asset class and across NFTS, our own governance token later this year as well. And then of course people who like to speculate and just have fun with it, you know they’re going to come over, you know purchase such an asset class. Obviously those are things we cannot really give any financial advice. So sometimes actually will be risky, but it is what it is and that’s kind of the nature of web 3D community building.
WOLF FINANCE: Well put. All right, guys, we’re going to move into the wrap up stage here at the last few minutes. So I would say my last question to you, Damon, is what are the most exciting developments in the pipeline for Bitcoin within the DeFi space?
DAMON: Oh that’s such a good question. You know, I think some of the biggest trends and narratives just in crypto alone obviously are build on Bitcoin, DeFi and Bitcoin. We’re starting to see a lot of interest obviously in AI, real world assets and all of this exciting deep end and all of these things that are exciting and emerging trends that are happening in crypto. I’m actually in the camp that I believe all of these type of solutions and experimentation that’s also happening on these other chains will eventually come to Bitcoin especially as our L2s and all of this technology is maturing. So, I think I’m not sure of the exact timeline right. I mean it could be two, it could be five years, it could be six months, who knows how fast a lot of these builders are going to be bringing these type of things to market. But I’m in the camp that a lot of these and I’m actually curious, right. I’m going to throw this question Outback to to you an/d Brian because I love your perspective on this. We actually think that everything that’s been built on a lot of these chains that were created to solve the lot of issues related towards Bitcoin such as performance etcetera, they’re going to eventually come to Bitcoin, especially with you know a lot of the great work that the L2s are doing including Charlie and his team stacks etcetera. And when they do come, when we look at the average consumer, obviously grandma now has a place to be able to trade or speculate even on Bitcoin with the ETFs etcetera. But Gen XYZ, they’re going to want a sandbox to be able to play in when it comes to Bitcoin. And so when they do that, you know, we think that they’re going to play within the sandbox of Bitcoin and stay in that ecosystem. So the furthest that they’ll actually go outside of Bitcoin is maybe L2 and you know, doing some creative DeFi things, let’s say on stacks or on bit layer etcetera. We don’t even envision a world a few years down the line where a lot of these new block chains that have recently come out are even going to exist. So we actually think all of this building that’s happening on Bitcoin will make a lot of chains extinct in the future. Because if you’re already able to, let’s say, do lending on an L2 on Bitcoin, what are the chances that that average consumer is actually going to bridge or wrap their token in an alternate chain and go to, let’s say Avalanche or Cosmos so. You know, I’m really curious as to your thoughts as well, because we actually think Bitcoin’s the gold standard and if everything that could be accomplished on these other chains are being brought to Bitcoin, what’s the likelihood of these other chains being successful?
WOLF FINANCE: What do you think, Brian?
BRIAN: I mean, again, to me, it’s really just exciting. I think. I think everything that Damon and Charlie are saying makes a lot of sense and I can see a future aware. You know, I think someone pointed out like Bitcoin being the first kind of major, you know, crypto blockchain, it’s widely used and obviously the biggest. It just makes a lot of sense to have these tools here and I think people will logically trust it and want to get behind it and want to use those things. So to me it’s just a complete, duh, you know, this is, this is, this makes a lot of sense. I want to see it happen. I think a lot of people want to see all these tools be developed and I think we’re early still, but obviously there’s there’s really good, that’s the thing, it’s like the builders that I’ve seen. You know case in point, the people speaking here are really, really, really passionate about this. It’s not cash grabs or crazy schemes, you know it’s really people that truly want to build and like expand the ecosystem. So that’s also A+. But yeah, just excited to see all the tools that are coming and want to use them myself and I think they can be simpler and easier to use than other ecosystems. So yeah, they’re just excited in general.
WOLF FINANCE: I feel the same way, you know, I think that there’s. I’m not, I’m not like you said in the beginning, I’m not a maxi either in one way, but I see a lot of potential here. I own the crypto, I’d say Bitcoin theory. I’m in my largest position, so I’m excited to see where it happens. I’ve done a ton of DeFi spaces, so I always love seeing the integrations into both areas. I think that that makes a lot of sense for me as well. Good points. We did just hit 11:30 here Eastern, so I’m going to give a quick couple minutes for final comments. Charlie, anything else you want to share on this one?
CHARLIE: Yeah. First of all, it’s been a pleasure to share what we are working on and some of the thought process, the recent findings with you guys, with Damon, with Brian. And thanks a lot for the invitation I think. Yeah, I think for me, come final words, it’s a very exciting time just right before the bull market, right before the halving. There’s a lot of new primitives we can we can explore the space have had a waste and I I think, yeah, I experienced so much negativity last two years, but learning a hard way and a good ways as well, right. There’s a lot of, there was a lot of things people did in other ways and I think it was a certain waste, right. You know they did, but we learned, we explored. Now I think as what Damon said as well, there’s a lot of people and a lot of resources, a lot of application will move back to Bitcoin and Bitcoin ecosystem because they realized it’s it’s ultrasound money with the most secure, you know network and now with some new solutions coming along the ways what what doesn’t, what didn’t work or was not really feasible in the past. Should happen and back to the, you know, the most trusted, you know, decentralized network whatever happened two years, right, two years ago with all these drama and saga, I don’t think that will happen the same level because we all learn the industry become much more mature, much bigger as well, right in terms of liquidity and trading volume. So definitely very exciting to really keep building and keep showing and delivering. What do we have to build and what do we, what do we need to see in space? And that’s going to be a very exciting upcoming 12 and 18 months, yeah.
WOLF FINANCE: Super exciting stuff, Charlie. How about you, Damon?
DAMON: I share the same sentiment as well and thank you for thank you so much for having us on the call today. Certainly it’s been a pleasure. The only thing that I’ll end with is you know for everyone on this call, we are still extremely early, right. I mean if we look at it from a price perspective, most people might think, Oh well, you know we’re at 40K and we’ve been here before but from a building perspective, we’re super early from an adoption perspective. The global markets are still really early on this, especially from the average consumer. Institutional institutions are already starting to get pretty deep in, in, in terms of adoption for Bitcoin. That will continue to accelerate. And then obviously as the bull market returns, we’ll start seeing even more excitement than what we have today. So for all of you on the call now, even if you don’t rock with Orange or Bitlayer or anyone else, certainly stay in this space, learn as much as you can, get involved, get some sort of exposure. I assure you, especially two 5-10 years down the road, you certainly won’t regret it because what’s happening right now with the transformation of finance and with Bitcoin being a huge proponent of that, it’s going to be extremely rewarding.
WOLF FINANCE: Perfect. Thanks, Damon. Brian, do you want to give any final comments?
BRIAN: I think everything’s been said. I mean, this is an exciting space. So yeah, thanks for hosting and yeah, looking forward to see what, what, what everyone’s doing in this kind of world.
WOLF FINANCE: Perfect. Thank you so much to the Orange Crypto crew for being on with us today. Hope everybody learned a lot. I know that there was a lot of people in the audience here, so hopefully you are going straight to the website to learn more. Again, you can pull that up right at orangecrypto.com, easy to find and very well put together and hop in the beta right there. That’s going to do it. For this one, I’ll be back on Spaces in 25 minutes. I have my Ex Spaces crew, as we do weekly, hosted by NFT. God, Ryan, Carson and Penny. It’s going to be 12:00 PM Eastern, so jump in with us and then we’re going to talk about AI for about an hour after that. Thanks everybody. Hope you enjoyed this morning. See you all in 25 minutes.
CHARLIE: Thank you guys. Bye.
