Participants: Alex Labs and Orange Crypto Recording
Link: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1PlJQDqpeAWGE
Topic: Introduction to Orange Crypto
Date: 01/10/2024
Length: 1:16:00
Summary: In this AMA session with ALEX Labs and the Orange team share their journey and the evolution of Orange into a comprehensive DeFi ecosystem centered around Bitcoin. Highlighting their extensive backgrounds in technology and blockchain, including significant stints at Microsoft and collaborations with entities like Binance, they detail their focus on building wallet technology, a DEX, and other tools to bolster Bitcoin’s infrastructure. The session also touches on the strategic partnerships and fundraising efforts that have positioned Orange for significant growth. With a commitment to enhancing the Bitcoin DeFi landscape, the Orange team’s share their vision to innovate and expand the utility of Bitcoin through user-friendly and interoperable solutions.
Transcript
Damon Nam: Thank you so much for having us. Just to do a quick audio check, can you hear us OK?
ALEX: Yes, I can hear you very well.
Damon Nam: Excellent. Super excited to be in front of your community and really just introduce ourselves as well as talk a little bit about Orange and what we’re building. So my name is Damon Nam, I’m the founder and CEO of Orange. My background, I’ve always been in tech following college. I worked at Microsoft for about 17 years on the business management side of the house, jumped into blockchain full time in 2017, recruited a really good friend of mine that also worked at Microsoft for 10 years, but more on the technical side. And from there, we’ve just been building solutions in the blockchain space for the past seven years. So that included some of our own projects. We’ve consulted for other companies as well, including Republic Crypto and even Binance. So we have quite a bit of experience in this space, particularly around infrastructure building, wallet technology, exchange technology, etcetera. More recently over the past year or so, we’ve been very focused on Orange and building a Defi ecosystem around just Bitcoin in the associated standards and protocols. So we’ve been working to build our own wallet and we’ll be releasing a DEX and a number of other tools as well that really just build into supporting our opinion the best blockchain in the world. I’ll let Kevin, our COO, jump in next here.
Kevin Huynh: Thanks, Damon. So I am the COO of Orange. I’m based out of Dallas, TX, but really started my career off in consulting, wanted to become a data scientist, got my master’s from Carnegie Mellon and IT to facilitate a lot of that. Then was working at Expedia helping lead a lot of user acquisition at the time as well in 2017. That’s where I linked up with Damon and really got into the crypto industry, doing a lot of the work that he mentioned previously just a second ago and did a lot of that. I did end up taking a step back from the space over. You know just the last couple of years had some projects I really wanted to work on leading some growth for a lot of different startups, but now recently rejoined Orange and doing a lot once again on the operation side, helping on the growth side and and really doing a lot just with the Jack of all trade skill set to to help facilitate you know whatever we need to be done right to to operate smoothly and and keep going from there. That’s it for me. I’ll pass it to Dmitriy on the Orange account.
Dmitriy Golovchenko: Hey, can you hear me well?
ALEX: There’s a little bit of an echo, but we can hear you.
Dmitriy Golovchenko: OK, Yeah. Sorry for that stuff. So my name is Dmitriy, I’m an architect, full stack web developer. We worked with Damon together really for a long period, about I believe eight years. We created a lot of different projects, interesting projects together. I also worked with a lot of the really pretty well known companies such as Warner Brothers, HE and Amazon in the same role like Architect, Full Stack as a web developer. Right now on this project I have the same position and yeah, just if you want to know I’m just going to leave in Turkey.
ALEX: OK guys.So any other speakers to introduce?
Damon Nam: Yeah, we also have, we also have our CTO on the line as well. Yiming, are you able to unmute?
ALEX: Right.
Yiming Liu: Oh, hi. Can you hear me?
Damon Nam: Yep.
Yiming Liu: Thank you. So yeah, my name is Yiming and I worked with Damon like since our last project I think a couple years ago. We worked on and rejoined the team for a couple of months. So before I have more than like for 15 years of software development and started jumping blockchain since 2013 for law is like maybe six years. Yeah, more than six years. Yeah, I worked before that. I worked for some, for Oracle and also Microsoft. It’s all about clouding architecture, something like that. So in blockchain, I worked on what it and what. So for Mev and there’s some. So for Mev and there’s some. Yeah, for myself.
ALEX: Well, well, thank you guys so much for introducing yourselves. How long have you been working together and and you know and what led to the sort of emergence of Orange? When did it begin and what’s a bit of the narrative behind getting from the beginning to to now?
Damon Nam: Yeah, great question, so I’ll give some insight on that. A number of us have been working together actually for quite some time. And so even before we started Orange, I had a relationship with a really good friend of mine that worked at Microsoft who then became our CTO, and that’s when we jumped into the blockchain space in 2017 as founders. From there, we worked on a number of different product solutions including some other projects and had the opportunity to be able to work with some great talented developers such as Yiming and Dmitriy over the years. As Dmitriy mentioned, we’ve worked together for I think 8 years. Kevin had helped us co-found the company back in 2017 as well. So he’s been part of that journey and then recently rejoined as we’ve, as we’ve you know, hit an area of time for growth now. So our team is around the size of 6, not including some of the folks that help us out on the community side and the team is mostly engineering resources. We are a global team, we work remotely. Three of our team members are in North America, one in the US, two in Canada and then I’m here in the Middle East. And then Dmitriy mentioned he was in Turkey and then we also have another developer in India. And so we’ve been working together specifically on Orange now for the past, I would say probably 8 months or so in which we’ve been primarily focused on our wallet technology, specifically to be able to support Bitcoin as well as stacks, ordinals, BRC, 20s, etcetera. We’re building in support for other standards and protocols as well. We also started building out our DEX as well as even some other products that we haven’t announced. Hopefully, that shed some more light just regarding the team, the team structure and how we’ve been working together.
ALEX: Oh, that’s great. Thank you so much for sharing. You know, I think one that’s, you know, that’s really notable that the team that you’re all, you know, doxxed and open with your identities. Of course that isn’t a prerequisite but I think when it comes to things like wallet technologies or defi that it can help in the sense it’s a policy that we’ve pursued here at Alex and it served us and it’s served us well. Yes, wallet technology is incredibly important. It’s a really key step in user onboarding, off boarding, it’s really central to mainstream adoption and yeah sort of regardless we look forward to incorporating further wallets such as Orange onto the Alex platform in the future. So I think you guys you know are really on to something really interesting with really great potential and that’s needed by the community to continue down the list of the application questions. Our users would like to know where you guys are currently in terms of a state of development?
Damon Nam: Yeah. Excellent question. We’re actually looking to do a soft release of our wallet here within the next two weeks. It’s been in development and test for quite some time and more recently in testing in the sense that it’s operating well both on testnet and mainnet. We’re looking to move forward into kind of a just smaller soft wallet release, keep that environment a little bit more low key and one that we can get user feedback on and so on, especially as we go through the process of even a major audit with one of the larger third party auditing firms. From there looking for a broader release in February. What we’d like to do is as we head into some of our launchpad offerings at the end of the month and then our broader token offering, we want folks to be able to test and play with the wallet itself, see the level of execution that our team has to be able to build trust before we even go through that process of you know, seeking funding and so on. What was really important to us because we come from old school traditional corporate backgrounds and similar to what you would normally do in kind of VC land as well is before you go through the fundraising process. We always think that it’s very important to be able to have at least some sort of MVP or demo or something of substance in order to be able to demonstrate to the market that you can actually execute and build upon the things that you’re communicating. Crypto tends to be a little bit backwards in that. A lot of founders and teams tend to market first, they have a very kind of robust road map, very ambitious roadmaps, then they raise funds and then they look to execute. We wanted to take the traditional approach and make sure that we have something of substance that we can bring to market very, very soon around the same time and we hold our offerings. That was our approach to it and you know one of our wallet is going to be released with a major, major release in February.
ALEX: Excellent. Thank you so much. For users who are listening, who might be curious or who are eager to be potential testers, where can they learn more? How can they just sort of keep up to date so they can be among the first to test?
Damon Nam: Yeah, if people want to keep in touch even, you know, join our community, reach out. We like to be pretty hands on and get to know the folks within our community as well. You feel free to follow us obviously on X you can join our Telegram and we’ll continue to keep you up to date. We have published a kind of a soft version of our wallet where you can kind of manually download it and install. We have a document section, We have our own Gitbook. It’s linked off of our website at orangecrypto.com so you can find out more information and how to install it there. In the coming weeks when we do our soft release that will actually be available on the Google Chrome App Store and you can download it directly. Similar experience if for those that are very familiar with Metamask on the Ethereum chain, you can simply install it there using one click. But for now, for those that want to jump in pretty early and just want to test the wallet, you could certainly do so as well through our documentation.
ALEX: Excellent. For those who are listening and might not be able to see the pin tweet, the information that we’re covering as well as the links to the orange social channels you can find at ballot.gg.alexlab.btc. That is a list of all of our community votes. All right. So guys let me continue on the application form and just some of the major points. We do have a question that our community often asks of projects, which is what has your past fundraising experience been, and who are some of them in the names that might be involved?
Damon Nam: Yeah, great question. I’ll answer that as well here. So we recently opened up a private seed round the week before Christmas and gratefully we are oversubscribed 5X and have some great names on board as well which include NxGen ventures, UXTO management. We have BRC20.com involved as well, even centralized exchange for those that are familiar. MEXC Global has recently joined as well. There’s a healthy list of folks that are involved and being that we are oversubscribed, it gives us the luxury to be able to strategically pick our partners. The ones that have or are involved offer some sort of strategic value to us in the sense that it could be advisory, it could be marketing or networking or those types of things. Really excited to have them on board and be a part of our journey. As you mentioned, you know we’re certainly a candidate for your launchpad here at the end of the month, which we hope to be selected for. Then we’re also working with some other partners in order to be able to, you know, bring the Orange Token to market as well.
ALEX: Excellent. Just to like in, in technical terms, well I guess just to put a number on it, what is the raise amount that you are targeting on the Alex Launchpad?
Damon Nam: So $100,000 with Alex?
ALEX: OK, great. Thank you. Our community also asks typically how will the funds be used by Orange?
Damon Nam: Yeah, this is always a great question. So for us, the reason why we are fundraising is primarily for operations, right. Obviously I wouldn’t go through this type of event. It’s for us to be able to continue operations for a long runway to be able to bring our products to market, acquire users, find products, market fit, etcetera. In total, we’re raising 2,000,000, yeah, through our private round and through our public rounds and that’ll give us a bit over a year and a half in terms of runway, and then from there you know where we’re looking to just continue to execute our journey based upon milestones that we hit. From a corporate perspective, the majority of those funds are always allocated for engineering. We have a pretty, I would say healthy pipeline of milestones that we have that we’re going to release from a product perspective, the first being our wallet, the second being a Dex. We’re also building our own data aggregator in the sense that we want to be and have our own kind of coin market cap version specifically for Bitcoin and the associated tokens and protocols there. We also have some things that we’re working on that we haven’t announced. So you know, five years from now, if we were to look back, success for us would look like users in our community being able to say consider Orange, the Metamask, the Uniswap and Coinmarketcap of of Bitcoin.
ALEX: Awesome. Well that sounds fantastic. Also to let you know our listeners know that a part of you knows doing a fundraise on Alex as much as it is in terms of financial, it’s also you know just an important exercise in community building. We love connecting our community of a long time, stacks and Bitcoin centric token holders with emerging projects. They’re eager and looking for new opportunities, for new projects that are launching and these spaces, these application forms you know are really great for them to get an initial gauge and really have an early preview to be these early joiners for these new up and coming potential starts. So again, guys, you know, we’re really happy to sort of have you on. Let me just continue down on just some of the questions we’ve gathered from our community.
Damon Nam: Yeah, Hadan, before you, before you proceed to the next question, something else I want to add to the last question just that you know what we’re planning to do with the funds as well. I think one of the important things to note especially for your community and all of the other participants on your Launchpad in the future is you know one of the great requirements about your launchpad is actually leveraging some of the raised funds and locking it into liquidity. So liquidity we certainly understand especially through our experience and being in this space for quite some time and for the performance of any token you have to have deep liquidity, right. And so part of the funds that are being raised are going to go straight into an AM pool on the Alex Labs DEX as well. And so that provides some additional liquidity for our token specifically for your ecosystem and on the Alex Labs platform. People can expect the funds that we’re raising in general the majority of it will be allocated for engineering and providing us with a runway. And that includes both on decentralized and centralized exchanges. We obviously have allocations dedicated for marketing liquidity as well, liquidity not only on Alex, but we are lining up centralized exchanges and so we want the Orange token to be accessible to multiple audiences including crypto enthusiast degens and ultimately this next wave of consumers that are adopting especially Bitcoin in in these type of tokens as they onboard in the next bull run.
ALEX: Absolutely. For those listening, a part of the terms of agreements that projects agreed to to launch on Alex is that 20% of the funds raised along plus 20% of the project token is used to open an AMM pool on the Alex DEX. So immediately after the IDO distribution concludes, the secondary market trading of Orange will also launch on Alex and that pool given the 100K raise 20 and 20 would be 40K of initial AMM liquidity so that you can begin trading. You know, typically these launchpads, they’re oversubscribed and those who aren’t able to win through lottery tickets can purchase them early when the AMM opens. So that opportunity is there and ingesting and absolutely agree that liquidity is really fundamental and defy And I think that’s part of the challenge where you not only have to be a strong technical builder but it takes a little bit of a financial savvy as well. Finding those initial liquidity providers and the Alex Launchpad and the Alex community assists projects and bootstrapping that way because we do have these very dedicated long term members who understand liquidity providing dynamics. Of course that’s something that you know I’m also happy to kind of discuss at any point with your community in the future about being a liquidity provider what might be a permanent loss yield farming and all those other defy insurance and outs. But yes, liquidity is the sort of lifeblood defi because there is no centralized authority. So all the funds that enable projects to go in and out are provided by the project. And that six month lock up also ensures that this is a project that has the sort of commitment and that longer term vision that they will see that liquidity pool and then be around for that amount of time as well as going forward. So, yes, thank you for bringing that up. Important points, a question that our community sort of brings up, especially with how quickly Bitcoin space and the Bitcoin ecosystem has been changing is, could you, could you share your thoughts on potential new token standards such as atomicals or possibly rooms that may gain in popularity? What do you think about those and would you plan to incorporate them?
Damon Nam: Yeah, great questions. So you know, for us, especially operating at the infrastructure level and considering, I mean if you look at the space right now, certainly there’s a lot of leaders already, right. We want to recognize them as well, including you know, Unisat etcetera, yourself, Alex’s OG builders in this space, despite a lot of the activity and momentum that has gone on in this space already, there’s still quite a bit of infrastructure and tooling that’s needed in, in order to support a lot of the new standards and experimentation that’s occurring right at, you know, we we recently saw just a few weeks ago, now there’s CBRC 20s and someone created the X20 standard. You know as these standards come out and it’ll continue right that and that’s not going to stop at all. As these standards are coming out, there’s hundreds of tokens, if not thousands being launched on each one of these particular standards as well. For us, it’s critical to be able to help the ecosystem be able to manage these assets right. This is where we think we could even have a potential competitive advantage in terms of being early in order to be able to adopt A lot of these newer standards because folks are going to need infrastructure such as wallet indexes to be able to not only store but maybe swap, swap assets between each other and and things of that nature.So I know we have some healthy items planned in our pipeline. We’ll also solicit feedback from our community as well as follow, you know, any type of emerging trends in order to really help support users in the space and especially to be able to just acquire and have more users on our own platform.
ALEX: Awesome. Well thank you very much for that answer. Then also we have the community question and you’ve covered it a bit but it’s always, it’s always worth reviewing what is the road map for Orange in 2024 and then beyond into the future.
Damon Nam: Got it, got it. So as it stands right now, what we have announced is our wallet, a DEX and what we’re calling kind of our data aggregator. And so if you were to look at that, it would be comparable to, let’s say, as I mentioned earlier, maybe like the equivalent of a Metamask and Uniswap and Coinmarketcap, just so it’s kind of easy to envision. We’ve already started working on a number of things and I’m wondering if we should kind of, yeah, why not, right. Let’s talk about it. We’ve already begun building a bridge. We want to be able to support interoperability. So we think obviously we love Bitcoin. It’s the gold standard. We think it’s typically the first asset that the average consumer generally adopts. We want to do all things Bitcoin, but we realize that interoperability and the ability for other tokens to interact with each other, particularly with Bitcoin is very important. So we want to be able to support that as well. In addition to just building on Bitcoin or defining the Bitcoin narrative, being able to have Bitcoin interact with ERC20 or ERC20 EVMs is certainly very important. We’re building, we have a bridge. In order to accommodate that we have already started building some technology, particularly with atomic swap technology within the wallet so that we can, by leveraging stuff like hash time locked contracts, be able to have Bitcoin natively swap with let’s say Ethereum. We’re building our own Launchpad, we’re leveraging our own bridge technology to be able to create some interesting use cases there. As we’ve gone through this launchpad process ourselves, we saw an opportunity and kind of a gap in the market, especially with legacy launchpads where they just don’t have the tooling to be able to help distribute tokens, particularly on the Bitcoin side since there’s no smart contracts. So with our own technology that we’re building in house, we saw that as an opportunity. So a launchpad is in the works as well. Then we have what we call our Orange Assistant and we’re doing some really interesting things on the natural language processing and AI side that we think are really going to have transformed the traditional wallet experience if you will. So we have this, well First off, one of our advisors and previously was AVP at API dot AI specifically focused on AI and they got acquired by Google and eventually created their Google Cloud AI group. She’s an advisor for us and and and so we have some great AI resources that have helped us shape and architect some of the solutions that we’re talking about now. But we have what we call the Orange Assistant where by integrating that with our wallet, it brings up some very interesting use cases that we think make the experience especially from a wallet perspective much more efficient. For example, you know when we think about operating a wallet, you can obviously send swap, do all these type of things, but finding information about your wallet or the industry tends to be a little bit challenging. Within our own Orange Assistant we’re using language models to train it specifically regarding crypto and finance. We think that it’s a much better experience if you’re able to ask your assistant and say let’s say you want to find out the 24 hour trading volume on finance today. You would have to open up a new browser window, maybe go to Coinmarketcap to really find that information. But things like that should be trivial to be grasped by at your fingertips. Another interesting use case is if you want to find out the last time you sent the transaction for how much. So instead of going through and thumbing through your transactions and you know, especially for the average consumer that doesn’t know how to read, perhaps a a Bitcoin explorer being able to ask the assistant, hey, when was the last time I sent a transaction to Aden and how much it was, you know, and being able to get the answer back and a matter of seconds versus you having to go out and find that is is much more efficient, right. And then the most powerful use case that we’re creating, especially with our assistant, is just being able to execute functions and features much more quickly. So you can, using the assistant, ask what your wallet balance is. You know, for any particular asset you’ll get it in seconds. Where it becomes very powerful is if you say something such as send $50 Bitcoin to Hadan.btc and from there it takes you to the confirmation screen. We envision a world where in the future you’re speaking with your appliances or you know that could include vehicles or your other assistant or appliances around your house and you’re not in front of your computer pointing and clicking. By using tools and technology to be able to help facilitate these types of experiences it is just much more trivial especially to the average consumer. We were doing things like this in order to just make in essence crypto a lot easier for a lot of folks. So hopefully that gives a bit more insight to some of the great things that we’re building and especially you know with the assistant.
ALEX: Awesome, excellent. Well, thank you so much for, for sharing that, Damon. And you know, really glad that our projects were able to touch base soon and I hope in the future there’s plenty of opportunity for collaboration. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Bitcoin is a big enough pie and particularly the potential for Bitcoin D5 is vast enough that you know, there’s there’s there’s plenty to go around and and projects really have so much to gain through collaborating and really creating a Bitcoin ecosystem in in the economy because no one project can do it alone. So it’ll take, you know, really a cohort and multiple projects and the work of, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals at all levels from people who just talk to their family and friends to people who are podcasting to those who are who are building to really bring about what we. I think what we both and the people listening feel is this is this inevitable future that we’re transitioning into. And I think you guys would agree and that was a sentiment that was shared by the Alex team ourselves that we got involved in building on Bitcoin because particularly as a team that also came from traditional finance. It’s clear that financial technology is undergoing the sea change that you know so much of legacy finance are systems that are in place because it’s the way it’s always been done since the 1920s. Nineteen 30s you know trade settlements with T + 2 T plus three. You know if people think of Bitcoin block times are relatively slow. The global economy is still operating on settlements that take days and you know with layer solutions on Bitcoin we’re likely to see that begin to speed up significantly on stacks. I think we’re all very excited for 2024 and the Nakamoto release which will bring stacks, blocks, times down to about 5 seconds and can be a real game changer as well as BTC so many innovations. And so yeah we’re really poised on a really exciting moment. And I’ll also open up the floor to anyone who might have any questions. I’ll be glad to pull you guys up. If not, let me just have a quick look from our tweets and Discord to see any other questions that our community has asked. OK, I guess this might be a relatively light hearted one, but we had a user who asked when did you guys first get first get turned on to either Bitcoin or to or to crypto? Damon Nam: Oh, I’ll speak from my personal experience here, started jumping in a little bit, just dabbling around and exploring, even mining back in I think 2013 or so, but nothing serious up until about 2017. You know just started seeing a lot of momentum and interest gaining in that space and that’s when we that’s when I personally decided to jump in and leave Microsoft and go full time into this space. As it pertains to Bitcoin, you know one of our thesis was we kind of expected everything that’s happening in the space. Now the energy, the excitement, the approvals around the ETFs, we actually forecasted about a year and a half ago after we started seeing more institutional adoption, after we started seeing more applications for ETFs and all of these things we that was a signal to us to say that OK this, this is going to happen soon and it’s going to happen within this upcoming bull market. We wanted to be the, we wanted to play at the infrastructure level for that and that’s how Orange started. Damon Nam: Kevin Dmitriy, you mean? I don’t know if you guys have other things to add to that as well, if you’d like. Yiming Liu: Yeah, for me personally, I started in 2017, 2016, by the end of 2016 and I started mining Bitcoin and other some coins. Yeah, kind of remember, can’t remember. It’s at that time, I think, lots of different coins. For different yeah, mining stuff and doing Bitcoin mining and also external mining. Well, I build some mining like infrastructure under some warehouse. Since that time that’s mining computers is when I start a service with Bitcoin on ether.
Kevin Huynh: I’m sorry. Yeah, I can just jump in with my experience just real quick. So started back in probably 20/15/2016, really didn’t take huge notice of it then but started dabbling like Yiming said and and to to mining and things like that just on my GPU at home. And didn’t really start getting into it more until 2017 with Damon where we started having more you know actual applications and use cases for it rather than just you know speculation and kind of seeing it as an asset go off and then things like that. So that’s when it really started peaking my interest once again when the actual use cases started coming out. And that’s when I wanted to be a part of it and build it, be part of something bigger. ALEX: Well, thank you very much for sharing. Voterius. Hi, Voterius, can you hear us? GL 1: Yes, I can hear you. Awesome. My question is, do you guys ever see real world assets being deployed on Bitcoin layer? Maybe just my stocks? And So what would be advantages or disadvantages of it being? Deployed there versus. Other chains that are much faster. ALEX: Sure. So to echo the question, the question is do you guys see real world assets being deployed on the Bitcoin chain you know in the future and also just I guess relative to the sort of block speeds when there are other chains that are a bit faster. So I’ll let you guys answer 1st and then maybe jump in myself. Go ahead. Damon Nam: Yeah. Great question by the way. I think it’s such an interesting category and I think we’re going to see it pick up a lot of steam especially because they are asset backed by physical assets and whatnot. So RWA is something that we believe is going to be a pretty big trend in this upcoming bull cycle that alongside some other interesting themes as well we. So what we’ve seen as a or what we believe as a team is everything that’s been built outside of Bitcoin was kind of an attempt to be able to really improve a lot of the issues or or maybe things that have kind of prevented the global adoption of Bitcoin. So when we look at it, you know a lot of these alternate block chains were built in order to try to improve the block speeds and the performance of Bitcoin or perhaps interoperability or scalability or extensibility and all these types of things. And so we saw obviously Ethereum and a lot of different all chains and block chains and even L2s and a lot of these other chains come about in order to to really solve some of these problems. And as a result we’ve seen a lot of different ecosystems and defi solutions built on top of these other all block chains. For us personally, we think all of that energy has been kind of a test net of what’s to come and be built on block and on Bitcoin. It’s our belief that everything that’s been built out there today, especially from the defi perspective is going to be brought on the Bitcoin And a lot of that is because of the tooling, the the solutions are becoming much more mature on Bitcoin itself. And then when you incorporate and think about L2s on Bitcoin including stacks and we’re familiar with the number of companies that are building new L2s that will be released this year. All of those things will improve. A lot of the issues that that Bitcoin has now into the to the point to where we believe even a lot of these alternate block chains will eventually become extinct. Because when you think about it especially from consumer behavior and global adoption. If we on board the next wave of consumers and institutions and and ETFs and and even banks are supporting the gold standard which is Bitcoin and pushing that global adoption and the average consumer will also adopt that as well, right. As I mentioned earlier, it’s typically the first asset that the average consumer has when they join this industry. There won’t be a need, especially from Defi perspective. There won’t be a need for the average consumer to go to an alternate blockchain such as Cosmos or Aptos or any of these others if the solution already exists, perhaps on the L2 on Bitcoin itself. So at Max they’ll be playing within the Bitcoin playground and at Max, if they decide to do anything on defi, it will more than likely just be on AL 2 on Bitcoin versus you know going out and you know swapping and going deeper in the crypto rabbit hole. So that’s kind of our thesis and why we wanted to go all in and just focus on the infrastructure layer here.
ALEX: Absolutely, yeah. GL 1: Yeah, I just want to chime in real quick. Thank you for that. That’s my thing, since Bitcoin is like the poster child of cryptocurrency itself. I was having a conversation with Grant Cardone on Sunday on spaces and and I was trying to rent the element, getting more into tokenizing assets, simply the real estate and things like that. This thing was there was no one doing it at scale and avoiding it being it has been having run into the SEC because of it being a securities offering. I mentioned to him lock the AI which is currently doing it. I think that actually we’re wanting to onboard like those next billion users as they use crypto currencies by building interoperability and platforms that they don’t even realize they’re using blockchain technology. You know where they’re able to adopt and use the full products and services that make their assets more liquid and create these secondary markets. They don’t even realize that it’s blockchain and crypto up under it and just letting them know eventually once they’re so layer out the platform and speed to use. I think Bitcoin is definitely going to be the gateway drug to get people really into the space. We want to learn more and I love what you guys are doing over there.
Damon Nam: Yeah. Thank you so much for the feedback as well. Vontarius, I completely agree with everything that you mentioned as well. That’s why we’re just so bullish in this space, not just for Bitcoin, but overall because we’ve seen some great builders in there. You know, one of the partners we’ve worked with in the past is Republic Crypto and they’re really pushing the needle when it comes to tokenization and assets. They’ve worked with the SEC as well as other jurisdictions in order to be able to come up with compliant frameworks so that they can tokenize and help issuers tokenize a number of different asset. It could be RWA, it could be actual, you know, shares on a cap table for more liquidity in those type of things. And so you know, I’m a fan of Grant as well. I think he’s probably overlooking the potential here. You know, once we see some general adoption, especially by a lot of these companies that you mentioned and that we just talked about actually getting this out to the masses, I think a lot of those opinions are going to change very quickly. ALEX: Absolutely, totally agree with what they even said. Vontarius, thank you for asking a great question. Just to quickly chime in with Alex’s perspective is that I think simply it’s a matter that blockchain is the superior technology for the settlement of wealth and progressively a superior technology is what comes to dominate the landscape. There’s going to be some institutional inertia a little bit of a resistance to the way things change but that doesn’t get into the way of inevitable progress. I mean when you think about the mortgage on your house you know it’s kind of wild to think that in 2024 that is you know stored on a sheet of paper and the town’s clerk office somewhere. You know when there’s a real estate deal you have to pay for this like title search so that someone looks through these old files and can dig that up and verify that that paper is there. I mean it seems you know, I guess for us who have been in kind of in crypto space with NFTS and all these other instruments, there is this immutable verifiable way for that data to be stored. You know when Alex started building you know defi on Bitcoin in 2021, our goal wasn’t to compete with liquidity on Ethereum or liquidity on Solana. Our goal is to compete with traditional finance itself and what we’ve seen especially in 2023 with the ordinals protocol as Bitcoin has transformed from being purely a money layer to being a data layer. So if we’re already seeing that happen with these cultural icons, it’s our view. There’s long been that there’s going to be a point in the future when these, these these major institutions who are trading billions of dollars of mortgages a day, they will pay a very expensive premium to settle that data on the Bitcoin launching because that is the most immutable, secure data layout in human history. That is what, you know, secures the security budget of Bitcoin going forward. Really the tools and infrastructure that Alex is building, that Orange is building, it’s going to find its full use case when we have 10s if not hundreds of trillions of dollars in real world assets, everything from real estate to to commodities and you know, cars, vehicles etcetera moving on chain to this faster, more efficient, more secure, more decentralized mode of operation and technology. Definitely continue to go out there, continue asking questions of these guys because little by little this is how you kind of chip through the armor. Like they say with advertising, it might take you 1012 times seeing an ad before it registers in your mind. Some of these old school players like Grant Cardone, that might be the 100th, 200th time that they have someone asked about Bitcoin until it kind of sinks in and then they actually do the homework. They just have their minds blown because they discover it’s so much more than the media might make it out to be on a number of layers. Thank you so much for the question. We have another, another request. Let me bring up Gray.
Damon Nam: My boy hadn’t spit fire right there. I appreciate that. Yeah, we’re going to have to have you come to some of our spaces in the future. ALEX: I would be glad to this is, this is, you know, my sort of hobby horse all day, all night. Let’s talk Bitcoin defi. All right, let me bring up Gray JVC connecting. Hi, Gray, can you hear us? Gray, you’re currently muted. GL 2: GMGM, can you guys hear me? Fantastic. ALEX: We can hear.
GL 2: Congratulations to the entire Alex team and what you guys have built is and it was literally unimaginable 2 years ago and now this is the reality. I’m enjoying using the platform, trying to bring swapping and all that. I just want to have your opinions. Or at least maybe What’s the plan? We’re hearing a lot about Stacks Nakamoto. How much difference? To make the entire Bitcoin on chain ecosystem, because I mean right now it’s almost it’s dysfunctional in a way as compared to like what other chains would offer but they’re not on Bitcoin obviously And is this going to be another Ethereum promise of like OK faster transactions are coming coming and then we never see them or have you run any of their beta versions of the chain perhaps or have you seen something to be like look after Nakamoto transaction time will be like 5-5 seconds and low fees and things like that. ALEX: Sure. So the Nakamoto test net is actually live and you might see some tweets from some projects that are posting and the test net is looking really strong. We’re seeing again we are seeing those like 5 second block time confirmations on the test net, how that will translate to the main net. We are we were optimistic it goes well but you know of course when there ever whenever there’s a new rollout you know I I just always want to just temper expectations that it might take you know there there there there there may be a BLOB a bug there may be some sorting. On the whole the Nakamoto release I think is absolutely central because you know this has long been our vision that user experience and user interface is so important to mass adoption on Bitcoin. Because when we think about mass adoption where we’re going to have so many users who come from other chains who come from Web 2 where the standard is one click and you know and then this sort of like instantaneous response or web page lives. I think you know to sort of for people to wait 5-10 thirty minutes for a block to confirm you know you’re sort of going to lose their attack their attention in a kind of a TikTok Instagram world. I think the Nakamoto release is really the architecture and design. Having that in mind is to make it a much smoother, more intuitive user experience. I think you know when users come from other chains and experience it will be a lot more familiar to what they have been used to on the theory of when people from the web to come. It’ll be something that’s much more usable and familiar to them. You know as far as you know, part of the reason for the current, you know the current congestion that we’re seeing on stacks is because we’re we’re we’re already seeing very strong traction. Even knowing that you have, if you know if you’re seeing those sorts of numbers and traction with the current block times and the current congestion, it’s pretty amazing to think what we’ll see with Nakamoto release in five second block times. It could really be transformational and you know and so you know so, so one I’m very, I’m very bullish and optimistic on it. You know the two I’m also kind of grounded in reality that you know in the real world new rollouts engineering, sorting out all the bugs and kings. I mean if you look at early Ethereum when it was released, it’s kind of forgotten now, but it was, it was really chaotic there and it’s kind of you know, amazing that it made it through a lot of those early chapters as well as it did. I wouldn’t so much pay attention to the sort of short term noise as, you know, Nakamoto is out. Does this mean, you know everything moves instantaneously? I would you know keep keep the eye on the long term goal, the long term perspective which is that over time you know these superior technologies on Bitcoin, these layer two solutions that bring Bitcoin programmability, scalability are inevitable. That they’ll continue being refined, that they’ll continue getting better and that and that again that that that is superior technology will sort of dominate and lead to this, to this growing presence. Not just in terms of media discussion or institutional adoption or mass adoption. This is really a tremendous force I think in shaping human culture overall. These will be one of the major moments highlighted likely in the year 2100 when they review what happened in the 21st century. Entire books and volumes will be written on on the on the on the crypto revolution and so and so yes I think I think it’s it’s something that’s everyone on the stacks ecosystem is tremendously exciting for and that you know we hope to support in any way that we can and when it’s released it requires a little bit of patience with it. We’ve proven we’ve got a lot of patience you know to have a transaction stock and then pool for a couple of hours. It kind of trains you well. So thank you for the question. GL 2: Awesome. So quick a quick one before I go. So I’ve been very obsessed with Bitcoin defi for a while and the first time I saw this happen was through 14 years ago and they did a very good job. But eventually obviously as the protocol developed and the man the TVL grew, we had exploits attempts and one of them worked. So it basically got hacked at some point. With Alex, I mean I’m looking at daily user numbers are growing really fast as well. You know, more money would definitely attract more hackers, which is good to make the system robust. What kind of systems you guys, oh, in terms of how you built this, what have you have, what do you have in place to make sure? That let’s say if. You had an attack, it won’t be severe. Next 1-2 is with your launchpad. What parameters do you have? Do you handpick these projects or what are? What do you look at to accept or deny projects? ALEX: Sure. So to cover those one, I’ll say that with an emerging technology such as crypto, there’s always going to be some degree of technology risk. We do everything possible to minimize that technology risk. It is there on Alex. We had the two security audits those are available on their website that we’re done on the bottom corner of our app. We continue to have a bug bouncy immune file to encourage you know any users who might notice something they can you know I guess profit from that in a white hat way. An important distinction that I would like to draw on this and this kind of gets you know just a little bit technical but you know I guess I’ll go for it is you know when when stacks it was very deliberately chosen to be coded in in clarity so so so clarity is what’s called a decidable language. Bitcoin script is notably Turing non complete. So just to be clear a Turing complete language can run every kind of computation. Often times some languages are done Turing incomplete, sometimes specifically for security reasons, because with Turing completeness you can have these sort of like infinite loops or these other avenues of exploit and that’s typically what you know. It can often be the cause of, say, issues that you might see on Solidity, which is what Ethereum is quoted on. SO clarity is it’s turning down complete. It’s a decidable language, which means it’s broadcast to the blockchain exactly as it’s written, so it’s human readable. Whereas with Solidity the code has to be compiled and then it’s broadcast to the blockchain as machine code. And so it’s notable that at least so far in the Internet stacks there hasn’t, you know that there hasn’t been a significant, you know number of exploit or exploit attempts. Of course, knock on wood, when there was one early on, maybe about two years ago actually the the protocol that it occurred to, they could see on the call contract the code that was used and they were able to take that same code and and basically do a reverse attack on the exploiter and recover 90% of the funds that were drained. And this isn’t something that would have been possible on Solidity because what would have been out code output would have been, you know basically like a machine code, these hexadecimal digits that would make it much more difficult to understand what happened and to respond to it quickly. And so on the Stacks website you can read more about Solidity and how it addresses a number of vulnerabilities with, without the other smart contract languages And so and then so I would say that you know all the functions whenever Alex watches something publicly, we do have it and have it code audited. So we do our best to minimize technology risk. You know clarity again assists us with that but you know technology risk is real So just to have that in mind when participating with something like a blockchain regardless of where you participate that is going to be a factor to some degree. As far as the Alex Launchpad the application is open to to to everyone and if you go to the to the pin tweet and you look at the orange application form at the bottom there’s a link to the application form, the application form. All the Alex Lab Foundation does is check those applications that they are filled in completely and that we can get in touch with whoever filled in the application. This is just as a sort of anti-spam measure, but we don’t, we don’t pick we we we we then take the applications, we make them public to our community of token holders and they do their own due diligence. We have spaces like these to talk to the projects so that our users can come to their own conclusions and then they vote using their Alex and not Alex tokens to approve or disapprove of a project logic. Then after approval we then schedule the IDO. so you know it’s very community led and community driven and the Alex Lab Foundation just takes the applications received checks that they’re filled in completely and presents them to our community and so and so that’s the role that we play. To let you know to let those asking on how to participate in the IDO. We’re currently in the project vote stage. The vote will close on January 13th. If the vote is approved then we will schedule the IDO with the Audrey Orange project with some time in January. So please continue following our social channels as well as Orange for those next steps and we’ll make clear as that approaches how to participate in the IDOs. ALEX: All right everyone. Well thank you so much for listening in. I think we’ll wrap up the spaces here. You know Orange team, thank you so much for joining us on the spaces today.
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