Jesse, welcome to Newark State Podcast.
Thanks for having me. You and I have kind of had an
ongoing sort of philosophical discussion for many years on how
libertarians can learn from progressives and progressives
can learn from libertarians. And it's, it's funny because I
went so far libertarian that it became like a progressive and
I'm like, you know, I need to do community building.
I need to do community organizing.
Go ahead. No, yeah, it's exactly right.
I mean, this is when I think back to our time at Coinbase, I,
I feel like so much of the, the fun that we had was thinking
about how are all of these different political philosophy
is going to be kind of rewritten in this new world where the
Internet defines all of us. And we're actually all looking
for kind of new frameworks to think about how the world can
come together and how the world can can be better than it has
been in the past. So let's go through base.
It's it's really funny how Coinbase was so well named that
it managed to not just be like easy to pronounce and pass the
bar test, but it was also based later on, you know, like you
managed to launch base when based.
Go ahead. Yeah.
No, I mean, I think that one of the things I've always felt
about Base is that we just got incredibly lucky in having a
name that we could borrow from Coinbase that kind of brought
over the trust that had such a metaphorical meaning in terms of
being this platform that everyone can build on that was
associated with the cultural phenomenon.
Like based that was 4 letters, really easy to pronounce,
totally globally accessible. You know, I think I think
there's probably a lot of things we could have gone wrong and the
name still would have been really, really great.
But luckily over the last two years of building, I think we've
got a lot of things right. And today, for those who are
maybe listening to this for the first time, base is one of the
largest change in the world. It's an etherium layer 2.
There's thousands and thousands of builders all around the world
who are choosing to build on base to help us build this
global on chain economy that we think is going to massively
increase economic freedom, innovation and creativity around
the world. You know, one thing I think
about and let's go into details is base is interesting because
it's a coin less chain in the sense of there isn't a native
asset on the chain, but it is it is still useful.
And one way of thinking about it is that coin, the stock is like
sort of the quasi native asset of base.
So it's not, you know, directly there or another way of thinking
about it is it actually takes aspects of block chains that we
didn't think you could take. You know, you didn't think
people didn't think you could run a block chain without a
coin, but you can you can run as like an open state database,
right? Maybe you have some thoughts on
that and let's get into the details of how base works.
Yeah. I mean, from the beginning of
base, one of the theses that we had was if we just focused on
building a really great product that solved problems for
developers and creators and consumers, that was going to be
a way higher leverage way for us to bring this to market than
what we've kind of seen for the last few years in terms of
people really focusing on the coin and token side of things.
And I think that's proven out to be true.
It's been a really good forcing function for us, right?
You know, whereas I think a lot of folks who've been building
chains otherwise, they said, hey, we're going to have a coin
and then we're going to use that coin to pay people to come and
build with us. And we're going to kind of use
that as a shortcut to try and kind of jump start this the
network effects that that's required to be here.
We didn't have that luxury. Instead, we had to go and say,
hey, we're going to go fight for every single customer, every
single developer, every single creator, every single user.
We're going to go have to win them on the merits of using base
because it's faster, because it's cheaper, because it's
easier to build on, because it's, you know, more more
connected to create on, because you can do things that you
wouldn't be able to do anywhere else.
And I think that that's been a really good forcing function for
us to just make sure that we're always building the right
product. All right, so I want to go like
kind of top to bottom. So let's start with the
technical parts of base and then I want to get to why I think
base and, and tools like it are base for building new societies,
startup societies, network states.
And so it's OK, great. So what is the problem that base
was created to solve? I I know this is super basic but
you know, go a. 100%, I've been at Coinbase for five years,
Apology and I got to overlap when he was CTO, it was some of
the most powerful learning experiences I ever had getting
to watch him operate inside of the company.
And in those five years, I built the consumer business that coin,
so Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, Coinbase Wallet.
And then after doing that for five years, I had this idea of
if we wanted to accelerate global crypto adoption, Coinbase
was a crypto company, but it wasn't yet an on chain company.
It'd been started in 2012. It didn't know how to write
smart contracts there. There weren't engineers who were
kind of building on chain every day.
And it felt kind of like the early days of the Internet where
there were going to be companies that figured out, OK, how do we
do this transformation to really become an Internet company, to
be a native Internet company? And if a big company like
Coinbase could do that first, then other people could follow.
And so that was kind of the initial thesis behind the the
conception of base was how do we make Coinbase a truly on chain
company? And we went through a bunch of
different product iterations. We tried a bunch of things.
None of them worked. They all failed.
And all of the, the kind of learnings from that pointed us
to this idea, which was in order for Coinbase to be an on chain
company, we actually needed a platform where we could build
the on chain products and services that would help
Coinbase be more efficient, help Coinbase get more global scale,
help Coinbase leverage this technology to build a Better
Business. And so that was really the
initial conception of base. It was let's build the platform
that enables Coinbase to make this transition.
And then once we started doing that, we were like, OK, well, if
we're going to build this for Coinbase, Coinbase is going to
want the best platform in the world.
And the best platform in the world is actually going to be an
open platform where anyone else in the world can also benefit
from that technology stack and can also benefit from plugging
in, you know, as you like to say, to the open state database
and all of the APIs that Coinbase can kind of bring on
chain, whether that's on ramps or off ramps or payments or
whatever it is that that, you know, people need in order to
build. That's what base became.
It kind of became this platform built for builders by the
builders of Coinbase, originally to solve some of Coinbase's
problems and coming on chain, but now I think really to enable
and accelerate the rate at which the entire world can come on
chain. Awesome.
And I think actually in a sense, you can almost think of base as
like the next version of Coinbase's API's where you're
not just querying Coinbase's server for data.
You've got this open state database where you can write and
read to it and so on and so forth.
And in a sense, it's maintained by Coinbase, but it is also
something that is more open than a traditional API.
It's kind of the next iteration of it.
Would you agree with that or do you disagree with that?
Yeah, exactly. And I, I think back to, you
know, some of the presentations you gave when you were at
Coinbase where you were talking about, you know, how do we get
more verbs, crypto verbs for people to do?
And this was like a thing that Balaji says, we have a few verbs
buy and sell right now, but we need to expand to hundreds of
verbs. And one of the ways I like to
think about Base is it's almost the perfect platform for
enabling rapid expansion of verbs because rather than one
corporation maybe in a traditional API or serverless
environment, one corporation having to add every single new
API or every single new verb that you can do.
The really powerful thing about a chain like Base is that it's
an open platform where everyone can add new verbs.
Every smart contract that a developer deploys is a new verb
that some other developer can call.
And So what that enables is it enables very rapid expansion in
what's possible and what capabilities both builders and
consumers have on the chain. So I think when I was thinking
early on in the journey of base, I thought back a lot to those
conversations that we had where you were really just hammering
how do we get more verbs? Because verbs are how you expand
the GDP of the global on chain economy by giving people the
actual tools and capabilities to transact on chain, to buy, to
sell, to borrow, to lend, to do all of these things that have
historically been very complex, very expensive, and very kind of
locked out for a lot of people in the traditional world.
Yes, exactly. And just the nouns and the
verbs, right. So just for folks who know what
we're referring to, a noun was something like AI should have
published this at that time in 2018.
But basically nouns are like a minor, a holder, right?
A wallet, right? And verbs buy, sell, send,
receive, but then also stake, burn, mint, right?
All this kind of stuff, right? And you're exactly right that
essentially the innovation, one way of thinking about block
chains is, you know, Coinbase or any company, Twitter, for
example, it can't put its Postgres database in public.
It can't give everybody the root password to its Postgres, but it
can put a chain in public and everybody has read and write
access to that. And the consensus algorithm
ensures it's not corrupted, which would happen with just a
Postgres database that was naively, you know, open up to
the world. And so, so because everybody has
read and write access, they can add the smart contracts which as
you see have the verbs and actually also can also add the
NFTS which add new or help add new nouns.
And you know, different user types are also new nouns.
And in a sense like the smart contracts are on chain code and
the NFTS are on chain data, right?
So so now help me understand how does base work technically?
How does it work in terms of validation of blocks and so on
and so forth. Let me understand that.
Yeah, absolutely. And and before I jump to that,
one thing I do want to say is, you know you mentioned kind of
you can think about base as you know an extension of Coinbase or
an on chain open version of Coinbase where you have access
to these API's. And I think that was like almost
the initial conception of base. But one of the things that we
realized very early on is that the opportunity is actually much
bigger. It's much bigger than being a
single company where you can kind of have give everyone
access. It's it's really the opportunity
to build a global economy. And if we want to build a global
economy that everyone can participate in, one of the
things that we realized very early on is it can't be
controlled by one company. The only way to do that is to
build a decentralized platform. Because if you're not
decentralized, inevitably either a single corporation or a single
state will get into a place where it tries to Co opt that
platform for itself. And so from the beginning of
Base, and this gets into our technical architecture, we've
been very, very committed to decentralizing Base to make it
so that everyone can feel confident that they can build on
this global platform and trust that it's a neutral place for
them to contribute to the global economy.
So how do we do that? Base is built as an Ethereum
layer too. If you don't know what Ethereum
is, Ethereum is the most secure, decentralized, scalable L1
platform for writing smart contracts.
But one of the challenges with Ethereum is that that it's built
to be maximally decentralized, which meant that costs for doing
things kind of got higher and higher.
And so Ethereum took this, the scaling strategy, which was
let's expand the kind of surface area of Ethereum by letting
people build and enabling people to build layer twos on top,
which let you kind of bootstrap off of that decentralization of
Ethereum while bringing much more scalability and driving
down the costs of how much it actually costs to use choose the
chain. And So what we do is we
basically take transactions, we batch them, we publish them to
Ethereum, and that lets us get the best of both worlds.
And so today base is kind of processing, you know, every
second hundreds of transactions and bringing all of those to
Ethereum, letting us kind of bootstrap off of that
decentralization, provide those same decentralization guarantees
to customers, but get really, really great cost savings and
make it more accessible for more people to come on chain.
Interesting. SO you want to describe kind of
how you know optimistic roll ups work and sequencing.
And you know, one thing I was actually researching and I was
just thinking is like how many disputes have actually had?
Well, first why don't you describe how do optimistic roll
ups work for somebody who doesn't know?
Yeah. So base is an optimistic roll
up, which basically means that when we're doing this kind of
batching of transactions and submitting them to L1, we're
doing that optimistically. And so that basically means that
people are not trusting. But the way the mechanic works
is you assume that the batches are faithfully posted to
Ethereum and that's done in a way that kind of preserves the
mechanic. But there's a mechanism called a
fault proof or a challenge where someone could say, hey, the
sequencer, which is this kind of entity that's taking those
transactions and batching them and publishing them to Ethereum
did something malicious. Now we're going to challenge
that and there's going to be a game where there's kind of
economic incentives involved to kind of identify where that
malicious activity was and unwind it.
And So what that means is it means that rather than doing
computation on every single transaction, you actually get to
drive down the cost. So in 99.99% of the time, you're
actually not having to do anything because it's
optimistically accepted. And then in that point, OO 1% of
the time, there's a mechanism for making sure that there's
still safe for users. Another really important kind of
part of this design is that the way it's built is that there's
not just one way to transact on the chain.
If you were kind of just able to go through the sequencer, one of
the concerns would be, OK, you can only go through the
sequencer. What if the sequencer does
something malicious in terms of censoring your transaction?
And so the way these optimistic roles like base are built is
they're built to also enable people to submit transactions
through Ethereum. And what that means is it's kind
of like an escape hatch where you have this guarantee that
transactions can be forced into Ethereum, which gives you much
greater certainty that your transaction can't and won't be
censored. And so that's the construction
that base uses today. Now, one thing I will say about
base is that we've built it on something called the OP stack,
which is this open source kind of standard for for building
layer twos. And one of the really powerful
things about the OP stack is that it's designed such that the
proving mechanism, which is this optimistic roll up kind of
construction that we talked about is modular.
And so we've started with an optimistic roll up, but we
actually have in production right now, there's a team that
is proving every block on base with a ZK Prover as well, which
is kind of using ZK zero knowledge proofs to validate
that every block is there. We've also seen teams experiment
with what are called trusted execution environments where you
kind of have hardware devices that are kind of provable that
they're, they're signing the transactions and kind of
validating and they're using that to prove blocks.
And I think where we'll end up with base in the in the next
year or so is rather than having one mechanism that's securing
base, we'll actually have more knowledge.
Of TE you have some. Degree of you have optimistic,
you have 0 knowledge, they all sit on top of each other, and
then you can kind of have a game where if any one of them is
signaling, hey, there's something going wrong, there's
something malicious here. Then you kind of layer them on
top of each other. And that's one of the ways we're
going to be able to remove more and more trust out of the system
and make it kind of inherit even more of the decentralization and
security of Ethereum. Awesome.
SO well, now you also have a a goal for progressive
decentralization of like sequencing and and validation
and so on, right? Go ahead.
Yeah. And so, you know, there's this
framework that Vitalik who who created Ethereum uses to kind of
define the decentralization of these roll ups, Stage zero,
stage 1, stage two, kind of three levels of
decentralization. Base started as a stage 0 roll
up, which has training wheels. We are about to become a stage 1
roll up after a lot of hard work from the team.
I don't know exactly when this podcast is going to come out,
but it is either going to happen, you know, immediately
before this podcast comes out or immediately after.
And so that's a huge milestone that I'm super, super excited
about. And it's just one more step in
our kind of commitment to making Base this decentralized platform
that anyone can build on. And then from here, we're going
to be doing more work to get to Stage 2.
That involves kind of getting to this multi prover environment
where we have multiple ways of validating the chain.
It also involves increasing kind of the decentralization, the way
people submit transactions to base through the sequencer.
We actually have some really cool work that we're doing right
now with a team called Flash Blocks, which is helping us
start with what's called builder decentralization, where
basically there's going to be the opportunity for multiple
people to build blocks, which will make the kind of market
more efficient for base because you'll have some kind of
competition in how people are able to submit transactions and
look for MEV. And so that's a really good
first step. And then from there, we're gonna
kind of bring further decentralization to the
sequencer. Awesome.
Now what kinds of things can people do on base?
Can they do anything they can do on any L2?
Are there unique things like what you know, what kinds of
things do you think are? Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. I mean, I think at this point,
in terms of day-to-day usage of crypto, there's probably not
another chain in the world where you have more people doing kind
of everyday things and so you have people using payments.
In terms of social products though, this is really what's
shining on base right now. If you look at Farcaster, this
is the kind of fastest growing on chain social network.
The vast majority of mini apps built on Forecaster,
transactions happening on Forecaster are built on base.
And I think that that's like a daily habit that 10s of
thousands of people are doing right now.
It's still early in the grand scheme of things, but I'm super,
super excited about that. And you know, you're on
Forecaster, I'm on Forecaster. We also have creator social
products like Zora, where you have creators all around the
world who are starting to bring their creativity on chain, have
it more directly valued by the free market, and then actually
able to capture that value to to help fund future work and to to
live a better life. And so I think that social
domain is a really, really rich one on base and probably the
place where, you know, in terms of any other chain in the world,
I don't think there's anyone who has more social activity than
than what's happening on base. And then I'd say there's a long
tail of other use cases. You know, we have Blackbird,
which is building kind of restaurants on chain and
onboarded hundreds of restaurants in the United
States. We have, you know, people who
are building pretty much every part of the application spectrum
and we're just excited to see all of it happen faster and
faster. You know, a few years ago, Moxie
Marlinspike wrote this piece which said something like, oh,
you know, what's weird about these crypto apps is they have,
he's very good engineer. Obviously he built Signal and so
and so forth. But it's interesting.
His framework was these crypto apps have like the minimum level
of decentralization they need to kind of get out there.
And he's phrasing this as negative thing.
And I, I was surprised when he wrote this because my response
was that's because block space is a fundamental constraint of
crypto in the same way that bandwidth was a fundamental
constraint of the early web and everything on the web in the
90s. Like, you know, Amazon, Yahoo,
Google was constrained where, you know, I think Amazon's book
descriptions didn't even have images at 1st and Google was
just put in text, get out text, right images.
You know, digital cameras were only really widespread by the
mid 2000s and Facebook only worked because Harvard had T1
connections and so people could put digital camera images and
people had like one or two digital images of themselves.
They didn't have, you know, camera phones and so on and so
forth. So bandwidth is a constraint on
the Internet for a long time and block space was a constraint for
crypto apps for a long time. So that's one way of thinking
about like what base does, right?
It radically increases the amount of block spaces
available. That's what L twos do in general
and how much more block spaces are and what kinds of things can
go on chain. And what do you think is still
infeasible? For example, Forecaster still
has its own. You know Postgres, right?
That you can? Run separately.
So what what do you think is the right thing to put on Ethereum
versus on base versus on you know an app specific database
like Farcast or how do you think about the division of data
there? Yeah, it's a really good
question. And I, I think your point is
exactly right, which is that we need to increase the bandwidth
of block chains in order to enable more use cases.
And I think kind of L2's and in this recent adoption of, of more
scalable changes, kind of that broadband moment where we went
from dial up to having enough bandwidth to start to build,
build real applications in the early days of the Internet.
And really the way we think about that is driving down the
cost of most transactions to sub cent is really this kind of
shelling point where once you get sub cent, people stop
thinking about the costs and they start being able to build
really, really powerful things. And so, you know, right now on
base, you can send a payment to anyone for a fraction of a cent.
You can mint an NFT, you can buy a coin, you can trade, you can
post something on social media. And so I think that's this kind
of milestone that we just crossed in the last year or so
that's leading to a ton of economic activity and a ton of
growth. Now, in terms of how I think
this is all going to shake out, I've broadly started thinking
about this as kind of like tiers of applications or tiers of use
cases, kind of like the Internet.
You know, the Internet's actually architected in like 3
tiers. There's like Tier 1 ISPs, Tier 2
ISPs, tier 3 ISPs. And I think that what we'll see
as more and more of the world's kind of compute comes on chain
is the same rough architecture will happen in the on chain
world. And so that will look like L
ones that sit at the bottom that provide kind of maximal
decentralization. And this kind of scalable
platform that people can build on that they know is going to be
neutral kind of as a technology platform, almost like a pure
piece of infrastructure. So that's going to be layer one.
That's going to be things like Ethereum and Slana.
I think on top of that, we will see what I kind of think about
as economies start to shape up. And this is going to be base,
right? Base isn't just pure technology
like Ethereum, it's a technology plus culture, plus economic
activity, plus all of this infrastructure that lets kind of
global economy start to crop up. So one example of this is one of
the big priorities that we have for base right now is onboarding
local currency stable coins all around the world.
So right now we have about 15 local currency stable coins, the
Kenyan shilling, the Mexican peso, the Canadian dollar,
obviously the US dollar, the euro, the pound, the Singapore
dollar, you know, the list goes on and on and on.
And that is economic infrastructure that can enable
people to come on chain, to start to build, to start to
create. And that's not going to be
something that every application is able to build entirely
themselves, but it is going to be really, really important
infrastructure to enable an economy to start to flourish.
And so that's kind of the tier that base is working on.
It's like our mission is to build a global on chain economy
that increases innovation, creativity and freedom.
I think there will be a lot of other economies and I think
they'll kind of live side by side.
They'll have like trade that happens between them and and
they'll all be working together on top of these kind of
foundational L1 technology platforms to grow this.
Economy, obviously Coinbase itself uses base a lot.
Probably exchanges use base a lot.
So those are the unsurprising major use cases.
You know, forecasters use base. What are the things that you
consider, you know, big apps and what are the things you consider
like surprising apps, surprising use cases?
Yeah, I, I think obviously you talked about Coinbase, Coinbase
Wallet, other exchanges that are using base for, for payments and
transactions. I think Forecaster is the second
one. We've invested a lot in
Forecaster from a community perspective.
And we're actually in the process right now of integrating
A Forecaster feed and mini apps into Coinbase Wallet.
And so Coinbase Wallet is going to be evolving to, to have a
full social feed, to have mini apps built into it and really to
be a place where people can come on chain, get started, find
things to do, buy a coin, but then stick around to do a lot
more. Zora I think is another, you
know, pretty fast growing social network that's built on where if
you think about Forecaster kind of analogized to to Twitter,
Zora is much more analogized to Instagram where it's primarily
visual content. And Zora just went through a
change right now where every single piece of content is
actually a coin, and that's through a lot of iteration.
Originally, Zora was built as a one of one NFT and then it kind
of went to open edition NFTS. But after kind of experimenting
with those different economic models, I think they kind of
kind of went full circle and said, hey, the easiest way to
let content be valued is to just make each piece of content a
coin, let the market value it, and then create kind of market
structures that let you redirect that value back to creators.
I think the place that base is really winning right now is in
this kind of interconnected social economy that's being
built on top of things like Forecaster and Zora.
Base is interesting because it's a coin less coin, right?
Or it's a coin less chain, right.
Where do you think we're going to go with equity backed assets,
real world assets, other kinds of things on base or or in
general, right. Like I think the legal system is
moving quickly in a positive direction.
Maybe you have some thoughts on that and whether base supports
that, whether base will support that.
Go ahead. Yeah.
I do think that this is one of the biggest problems in crypto
is that because we've had a relative dearth of high quality
assets on chain, there's been a fair amount of confusion around
what's actually valuable and why is it valuable.
And that's led to astronomical valuations for things that don't
really make sense and aren't really driven by kind of market
fundamentals. And I think one of the things
I'm most excited about is everything coming on chain over
the next few years. And what's going to happen when
everything come on comes on chain is a all of those assets
are going to become a lot more powerful.
Because when you can do 24/7 fully global trading of equities
on chain, that's going to be a better product experience for
everyone everywhere in the world.
And so that's going to be a huge enabler.
But the second thing that I'm really excited about is I think
it's going to normalize a little bit on chain as a market where
instead of having this bifurcation where you have like
the on chain assets that are valued in a totally different
way and the off chain assets that are valued in another way,
you're just going to have one market and it's going to run on
a new technology platform. But we can look at all of them
as one holistic market and make value based judgements against
them. And one of the things I'm
actually expecting will be kind of a forerunner of this is, and
Brian talked about this and we talked about this, you know,
the, the the team has been exploring what does it look like
to bring coin on chain? And one of the things I'm really
curious about is if coin comes on chain, does it get massively
marked up like every other kind of token that lives on chain?
Or does it bring fundamentals into the on chain space and say
now every other token needs to be compared against coin?
Because I think right now people look at the tokens and the coins
that are on chain and then they look at stocks like coin off
chain and they're valuating the tokens at a much higher rate.
And I think that that actually has the opportunity to kind of
like re equilibrate us and really force the question of
like, why do you value this thing just because it's a token?
And is this kind of like emergence of these traditional
assets on chain going to fix that?
So I actually have, I, if I was, if I was still CTO or if I was,
you know, I would, I would put that as one of the top three
things to get done this year to get coin on chain.
And there's a reason for that, which is it's not so much about
just the assets, about the legal pathway, right?
Whether it's done as a Wyoming Dow, whether it's done as you
know, a Tennessee Dow, whether it's done in Dubai, whether it's
however it's done right. Building that legal pathway is a
tentative importance, not just for Coinbase, but actually for
the whole space, because as you say, it puts fundamentals on
chain. Number one, maybe it brings
marks down or what have you. And #2 is it's actually what the
future is for tech companies because I'm actually very
bearish on NYSE, NASDAQ, and generally the entire 20th
century I think is ending in terms of U.S. markets.
We can go into all that, but I think it's basically like the
entire quote, Western world, Anglo world, English speaking
world and so on. Everything will eventually just
go on chain. That's what the financial system
will be. That is the flipping, and it'll
be obviously the right way of doing it.
Just like, you know, everything that has not yet gone on the
Internet will go on the Internet.
You know, like any data structure that isn't yet there
will get there. And what puts it there is often
a very valuable thing. Let me pause there.
No, 100% agreed. In some ways, you can look at
what Coinbase has done with Base and the path we've been paving
for other businesses to come on chain.
And you can think about COIN as a similar kind of analogy where
it's like Base is putting our technology platform on chain and
enabling us to build the next generation of Coinbase products
on chain and bringing COIN onto Base or COIN on chain.
We'll put our governance platform on chain and will
require us to solve a bunch of the hard problems around, you
know, bringing governance on chain around figuring out that
legal pathway that I think can serve as kind of a beacon for
other companies around the world to see how much leverage they
can get when they use this new technology platform to transform
themselves and to provide greater access to operate more
efficiently and to participate in this new global market, this
new global economy that we're building.
You know, it's funny, I don't know if you remember there's
another diagram that I drew in 20/18/2018 when when we were
working together, which showed a bunch of boxes and it was like
Fiat currency to cryptocurrency was a much larger market than
most people expected it to be, right?
Like USDBTC is $100 billion. I mean, if you add Coinbase plus
finance plus all the exchanges and so on around the world and
say multi $100 billion market, right?
And that's just Fiat currency, cryptocurrency, right?
So then if you say what is Fiat equity to crypto equity look
like, that's what we're just talking about, right?
Taking right these stocks and putting them on chain.
What does Fiat real estate to crypto real estate look like?
What does Fiat identity to crypto identity look like?
What does Fiat X to crypto X look like?
I think each of those is like a gigantic business.
You know Fiat dollars to crypto dollars is stable coins.
Go ahead 100%. Yeah.
And I think this is, I mean, This is why I'm so excited about
the opportunity with Base and also why I think it's it's
heating up a little right now in the space in terms of building
the these technology platforms. Because people are starting to
realize, Oh my God, this isn't just going to be the speculative
use case. Like we're talking about the
technology and the technology platform that willpower the next
generation of the global economy.
And they'll be the place where every single asset in the world
is denominated and every single asset in the world trades and
makes markets and every single participant and every single
person in the world can access it if they have an Internet
connection. And that is a massive
opportunity both to obviously build great businesses that
aren't aren't possible today and expand businesses that exist
today, but I think also make a incredible positive impact on
the world because we're going to give everyone around the world
the the opportunity to participate and to, regardless
of where they're born, regardless of where they live,
join this new economy, get access to every single asset,
and then build whatever they want on top of it.
And that's just going to be an incredible way of making the
world better. Did you see the trailer that we?
Had for the network school fellowship where I said at the
end the only connection you need is an Internet connection.
Yes, yes. Yes, yeah, I mean, this is like
AII love saying this thing of like all you need is an Internet
connection because I think we've we've we've felt that or people
have said that for a while. But the reality is if you had an
Internet connection, you could do certain things, in particular
what the Internet enabled, it enabled you to transfer
information globally. So if you have an Internet
connection for the most part, although of course there's you
know, China and other parts of the the the world that have kind
of secluded themselves off. But for the most part, you could
participate in open and free and global transfer of information.
But what the Internet missed was open, free and global transfer
of value. And with crypto, with this
upgrade to the system, we're finally going to have that.
That actually means that when you have an Internet connection,
you have access to not just an open information economy, you
have access to an open financial economy and all of the stuff
that can be built on top of that.
And I think it's going to be way, way better.
We're doing something. Together, actually, let's talk
about that. We're doing base batches.
We're hosting folks at network school for upcoming event.
Why don't we talk about that? Tell me about that, Jesse.
Yeah, absolutely so. Our vision for bases to bring
the entire world on chain, a billion people all around the
world. And the way we think we do that
is by giving builders and creators the tools to build
incredible use cases, applications, incredible content
that actually bring all those people on chain.
It's going to be the builders that do it.
And so we've been thinking a lot about how do we build a scalable
kind of pipeline to enable people to build their first
applications, their first communities, their first content
on chain, and get distribution to the rest of the world.
And so we, we just started this thing called base batches and
we're running batch #1, which is kind of everything you need to
get started building on chain. It's build a thon and education,
it's mentorship. It's a demo day where you can
get more visibility and you can get more distribution.
And then it's kind of a pathway to incubation where you're
actually going to get, you know, hands on funding and support
from some of the best incubators in the world to help you take
your your product at that point, which you will have gone zero to
1 on and turn it into a business where you can actually be
working on it around the around the year full time focus.
And so when we were thinking about starting batches, we
wanted to make sure that we were working with the best people in
the world and the best communities in the world.
And at the absolute top of our list was the network school.
I got to actually go there in the fall, got to do a fireside
chat with Balaji and meet a ton of the incredible students that
were at the school. My big take away from that is I
don't think there's anything else like in the world really.
Thank you. There is there is no other place
in the world where you have incredibly high agency motivated
people who are making a life decision to oftentimes fly
around the world to go to someplace that's a little bit
off the beaten path and to be together and try and create
something beautiful. And to try and think about what
does the next ERA of our society look like?
And how do we start to break down some of these historical
borders and boundaries between US and build something new
that's connected by the Internet.
And so getting to be there this fall, getting to experience
that, getting to see how big a bet that Balaji was making on
this future and how unafraid he was and all these other people
that were there to try something new and to break out of the
mold. That to me and in conversations
was then like, that's exactly the kind of bold that BASE
aspires to. And that when we're thinking
about building batches and we're thinking about supporting
builders that we want to deliver to them.
And so it just made sense for us to reach out to biology to
figure out how could we do a collaboration to put together
this event to make it so that when folks go through batches,
they'll actually have an opportunity to then go to the
network school. Because there's all of that kind
of admiration and hopefully collaboration going forward
between BASE and the network school.
So that's that's my quick take if you are working.
On base you know apply to base batches come to network school
also apply for the network school fellowship because we'll
be funding things on many different spaces but in in
particular people building on base maybe this will help you
the backbone of network societies startup societies
network states I love it and. I want to just dig in a little
bit because I think some of the people who are watching this on
the base side, maybe this is the first time they're hearing about
the Network School and what you guys are doing with the Network
school scholarship. So can you just give me like a
high level overview, like what is the network school?
What is the network school scholarship?
Totally OK. So network school takes have you
heard the term founder market fit?
It's basically like the network school is the intersection of
about 20 different things I've done over my life, all in like 1
kind of thing, right? So first and foremost, it's for
the dark talent. So many people around the world,
whether in the US or outside, certainly outside the US, in
India and you know, Mongolia, all Africa, all kinds of space,
Latin America that now have an Android phone and they're
online, but they don't have resources or what have you,
right? So we've just rolled out our
first thing for them, the Network School fellowship Anyone
anywhere 100K, where they fill out the application on online.
And if I think they've got a good project, we bring them out,
level them up right. And we're going to roll out
other programs like that, probably an internship program
as well, which is folks who are more junior in their career.
They're not yet a tech founder, you know, which is a rare kind
of person, but they are, you know, so we'll do other kinds of
things. So the never still fellowship
Anyone Anywhere, 100K and one of the things about that is we're
in a place with an enlightened immigration policy.
So we can bring people from around the world, right?
It's internationalism and capitalism.
So that right then third is, you know, I taught at Stanford for a
long time and I, I, I love that environment, what it was, and it
isn't what it was for a variety of reasons, funding cuts, AI
fakery of grades and so on. So you have to re envision that.
So it's a school in that sense. Third is it's a startup society.
So this is something which, you know, is basically an embryonic
form of, you know, rather than arguing about politics
endlessly, what if we could do it from scratch?
What if we could do something new, right?
OK, and just do something all the way from others, you know,
let them do their thing. We do our thing, right?
4th, it is really, you know, it's funny as tech as I am, you
know, actually a good analogy is cars, right?
We're driving cars for it. We have, you know, literally, we
have electric cars. We have self driving cars, we
even now have flying cars and you know, if you saw the E hang
demo recently, and there's also American versions like Archer,
but we also have walkable societies, right?
So we're walkable places. So you pull cars back and you
also advance them. So we're pushing the frontiers
of tech with, you know, obviously AI and crypto and
social, all this stuff, right? But we're actually a big part of
network school is offline offices, right?
And basically, for example, we ran this thing recently.
I'm not sure I'll tell you about this.
A learn a Thon actually, you know what we could do a learn a
thon for base. You know why?
Let me, OK, let me tell you what a learn a Thon is.
We took like the fast AI course, which is like 10-11 hours,
right? And problem is people don't
complete these online courses. They they sign up for it
aspirationally. It's like signing up to go and
work out and not going and working out, right?
OK, so we did is we said OK, people signed up for the this,
this learn a thon. They come at 9:00 AM on Saturday
morning and basically they go through so it's like 11 hour
course or an 11 hour course, right.
So go through five hours of it on the first day and, like,
phones down. They're literally watching the
video. All 20 people, no distractions,
no phones, no notifications. They told their significant
other I'll be back Sunday evening.
OK. Like literally gone.
OK. Focus biology mode, right?
You remember this, right? What would we call it?
Yeah, I'd do at like. 1:00 AM in a conference room with the wall
just like covered in thoughts and be like, that's right.
So I'll just locked in. Yeah, we're locked in.
Right we're just we're we're doing this.
We're not leaving until it's done, right.
OK, so so 9:00 AM, you know, and so they go video.
Then when there's time to code, everybody would bring out their
laptops, they would work on them and there's like ATA who's
walking around just making sure no one's getting stuck and so
on. We have a timer boom next right?
And in this fashion it was like. It's like a personal trainer,
but for your brain. I call it a personal brainer,
right? So the personal brainer is that
fun, right? So the personal brainer ran this
learn a thon and we had we had, we had water, we had snacks and
so on and so forth. But the goal was just total
focus. So in two days, you know, we we
took also before and after videos.
When should you use a random? Forest, What is a confusion
matrix, Donna? What about collaborative
filtering, Donna, when should you use a random forest tabular
data? And if you have a lot of like
noisy features, what is the confusion matrix like a table of
actual answers against like the predicted answers and then
comparing, you know, like how often it gets it right and then
when and how much it gets it wrong.
What is collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm by
clustering people or items or things by similarity.
So actually we. Should do that with bass.
I love that it's. Like the instant, It's the
instant pill. It's like you get on chain
pilled in a weekend. Yes, exactly.
That's right. And it's, it's what it is.
It's the right combination in my view of offline and online,
right, Because what's what's scarce is like focus.
OK, so other piece of network tool, it's Internet 1st and it's
Asia. Asia as a peer, not a guest,
right? So Asia in the sense of China,
India is obviously a big part of tech, right?
And it's a big part of Silicon Valley.
And it's right. But for a variety of reasons,
people are like Wilding out in the US about that, which is all
unfairly unfortunate. And we'll open up other nodes
and other places. I want to do one maybe in Dubai
or, you know, maybe one in, in, in the Americas, depending on
what time zone. But we'll start start with this
one. And then finally, I think this
is the thing that makes and there's a lot of different
versions of it, I could say, but this is how the cloud takes
land, right? We're doing all this crazy stuff
in the cloud. Amazing insane amounts of money
moves in our on our coins. It's like actually crazy and
huge numbers of people. You know what a million people
is like online? It's just have you ever seen the
stadium? Like have you seen that the the
lime thing on crowd sizes? Have I shown you that, right?
It's like, here's what 50 people, 100 people, 204 hundred,
right? So like whenever I go to tweet
or render, you go to tweet. It's like, you know, the Star
Spangled Banner, they go up to the thing and they're like, oh,
you know, they looked at the whole stadium before they go
ahead. No.
Right. I just, it's timely.
I've been having that experience a lot the last week where I'm
just like, oh man, I it's easy sometimes to forget that when
you go on Twitter now, like with your audience or my audience, it
really is like 5. Stadiums.
Stadium. Yeah, the stadium or multiple
stadiums, right? But The funny thing is that's so
large. And then when you materialize
even a small fraction of that in person, it's like a packed hall,
right? So I think the numbers in the
cloud are so mind crushingly massive that when you start
materializing them into the physical world, right, you start
to realize how big it is. What we've built online is,
right? You start to actually perceive
that, you know, and I think that is sort of the missing piece.
You know, obviously tech guys have been wanting to build in
the physical world. And so so now we're actually
doing that, right? So there's a lot of different
things in network school, you know, scratches.
I love that. What you know we've talked a lot
about crypto. How do you think like crypto
fits into this vision of network States and the network school?
Like why do those two two things go hand in hand?
Very good question. So I.
Think there's the most unpopular word in the most unpopular but
most important word in the world, I would argue is re
centralization. OK, Why?
Basically centralization, decentralization,
recentralization. In many ways for crypto,
especially with Bitcoin, is it's like there's a burning building,
you hit the fire alarm, you get your Bitcoin and you get out,
right? And you get out.
But if everybody scrambles in every direction, that's crypto
anarchy. And I actually don't believe in
crypto anarchy. Crypto anarchy is better than
pure anarchy because at least there's digital order, but
there's physical disorder, right?
What I believe in is crypto civilization, right?
Ultimately, there's a rebundling, you know, you have
bundling, unbundling, rebundling.
There's a centralization, decentralization,
recentralization on the other side where we come back together
again in a new form. It's like you take ACD, you
unbundle it into MP3 as you rebundle to playlist, right?
You take a newspaper, you unbundle it into articles, and
you rebundle into Twitter feeds, for example, right?
So Western states are getting unbundled into digital tribes
organized by coins and stuff, social networks, other things
online. I think they're going to get
rebundled into startup societies and network seats.
And I think that's actually like what people aren't.
My view is people aren't really yet taking the Internet
seriously. You know, in a sense, by the
way, most people aren't. This is a both a play on words.
But second, it's also true most people aren't actually country
first, they're Internet first. Should I explain what I mean by
that? Like, like for example, when you
wake up in the morning, what's the first thing you do?
Internet first, right? You're checking your phone or
something like that. Or people, even if they're
working out, they're checking their, you know, watch their
Fitbit. Where are you finding your
friends? Internet first?
Because you're whatsapping them or you're messaging them.
They're on social networks or an e-mail.
How about your business? Internet first.
How about your transactions? Internet first.
How about your communications? Internet first, right?
Like basically an enormous swath of your existence is actually
spent on the Internet, right? To extend it truly wasn't in
1991. It's a completely different
life, but what hasn't yet gone there are some of the
institutions. Universities aren't Internet
first, right? Politicians aren't, they're on
social media, but the decision making is an Internet first,
right? Laws aren't Internet 1st and
that's what crypto represents, right?
Crypto represents property. So that that's answers your
question, right? How do you build an Internet for
society? It is going to start with, you
know, block chains give you monetary policy, they give you
property rights, they give you contracts, right?
And my view is like common law that worked for the British and
the Constitution, it only scaled up to the Americans.
But Bitcoin and blockchain, that's for everyone on the
Internet. I love that.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of overlap when we're talking about
building a global on chain economy.
It's almost the same thing where we're talking about, OK, we can
use this new technology platform to create an economy that of
course has property rights and has contracts that let people
organize in new ways. And I, I totally agree.
I feel like we are at the next turning point where we're going
to start to see how do people use this technology, not just to
do payments and play games and post on social media, but to
fundamentally reorganize the way that society works and that
humans connect and that we we work together.
That's right. And I think like.
In, you know, not to sound in the, let's call it time of
volatility. That, I think, is to ensue one
of the things, you know, the Internet was built to resist a
nuclear attack, right? So even in times of extreme
instability, the Internet is there.
It's funny, you know, remember people used to talk about the
digital divide and they feared that people would lack the
Internet. Or actually it's the opposite.
Often the Internet is the only thing they have, right?
Right. So, so essentially, can you, you
know, in a server, have you seen a server rack?
You can reboot a server from the Internet, right?
So the reboot will be from the Internet.
Yeah, and what? Network school is about is is
that it's like, I'll give one more analogy.
Have you seen, have you ever read Foundation by Isaac Asimov?
Yeah. Yeah.
So like Terminus is the school on the edge of the universe,
right? Which is set up so that when the
Galactic Empire collapses, it can be rebooted in a shorter
period of time than it was, you know, before.
Right. I love that.
So. OK.
Here here's here's maybe a last question for you.
You know, we're entering this world of obviously massive
change, the network States and and on chain economies, all this
starting to happen. What's your advice for like
young builders, people who are coming up right now?
Like how should they be thinking about this world?
How should they be thinking about making their mark, whether
that's on base or as part of the network school or in whatever
they want? They in whatever way they want
to. Great question first.
Oh. But there's tons of stuff.
First is apply to network school.
We're going to actually have an internship program.
So even if you have, you don't know what you're doing in life.
If you're smart and you want to work hard, we'll host you on
site, train you up, hire you out.
I'll, I'll talk about that soon. So that's my first thing.
Just go and apply. OK.
But then more specifically, I'd say A you.
So what should you learn? You should learn statistics and
computer science because from those two primitives, you can
rebuild almost everything else, right?
That's equivalent of like learning physics and math.
Obviously you should still learn math and physics, you know,
those are very good. But if you those come at the
right angle of attack from stats and computer science, you can
rebuild all of AI, all of machine learning and and so on
and so forth. From the computer science part,
you can get to cryptography and from computer science, you can
do simulations of mechanical engineering, electrical
engineering, and from both stats, computer science and AI,
you can get to actually the humanities, right, like AI art
and this and that. And of course, from crypto, you
can have the crypto angle on art with NFTS, right.
So, so from a foundational learning standpoint, from a
jurisdiction standpoint, I would reconsider being based in the
US. I'm I, I think it's like just
less friendly as an environment. I think lots of other countries,
lots of other places. There's dozens of countries with
digital nomad visas. If you come to network school,
we can upgrade to your, your crypto, your Fiat identity, like
help you get better residency is better.
You know, that's actually an important part of things.
You know, just like one of the reasons people buy
cryptocurrency is to upgrade their Fiat currency.
You know, they buy Bitcoin at $100 per coin and they sell it
at 100,000. They shouldn't sell, but if they
did, if they've made such a poor decision to ever sell their
Bitcoin, they right, so they use cryptocurrency to upgrade their
Fiat currency. And one of the things I think
about a lot is their crypto identity could upgrade their
Fiat identity, the crypto identity of their NS ID.
Then we can get them a better residency permit that we can get
them a better passport or something like that, right.
Few more things I would say they should think about things
Internet first, not country 1st. And by the there's a totally
different, I think if you're in China, there's a totally
different set of things one would do.
But if you're non China, then that's what you do.
And if you're in China, you can be both.
There's a whole China stack or the Internet stack.
If you're outside China, really the Internet stack, I would say
to be very, very concerned about doing anything in hardware if
you don't fully understand the Chinese hardware ecosystem.
This is something people don't yet fully understand.
But like basically Chinese hardware has gotten so good and
they're so much better than everybody else that if you are
even Elon is amazing and our greatest entrepreneur of all
time has BYD really giving him a run for his money abroad.
It's outselling him in many jurisdictions, right?
So Chinese hardware has gotten so good that basically competing
directly against Chinese hardware will be very difficult,
right? So at least be aware of that.
So if you're a young builder, but in software, you can be
competitive in creating content, you can be competitive, but
it'll be it'll be something where I can't give a specific,
you know, thing for any interest person.
Those are the general things. The last thing I'll say is not
everybody needs to be a founder. This is actually going to be one
of the messages in a coming post.
You ready for this one? Ready.
Did you know that it's actually by some measures, harder to
become a Unicorn founder than to become a pro athlete?
OK, there's only 1500 tech unicorns globally and there's
like several 1000 pro athletes, right?
If you add up NBANFL, European soccer, cricket, whatever,
there's like thousands of pro athletes.
There's like about 1000 to 2000 Unicorn founders, right?
So like to be a Unicorn founders like being a pro athlete.
Not everybody needs to be a founder.
You can 1000. In fact, they shouldn't be.
You know how hard it is. I know how hard it is.
Most people actually will do better as part of a larger
vehicle, right? And they don't have to figure
out everything for themselves. There's some degree, you know,
so we will have a program for the 1000 X, the 10,000 X number
of people who would be great tech employees, tech interns and
so and so forth. And then they do really well
there. And then maybe they can become a
founder or something later. Or they can realize if they if
they tell me how hard it is to be a founder, then I might
actually listen to them about why they want to be a founder,
Right. But only, only right.
So that's other thing I'd say for builders.
Builders includes founders and employees and, and, and execs
and so on. OK, let me pause there.
And open source developers. I was going to say that.
You know, not everyone needs to be founder, but I think everyone
can be a builder. And I think this is actually one
of the shared, this is one of the shared philosophies that the
networks school and base really has is that regardless of what
industry you're in, you know, regardless of what your skill
set is, you can bring this builder identity and mentality,
which is about showing up. It's about working hard.
It's about like not giving up. It's about being resourceful and
using all the tools that you have at your disposal in order
to get things done. It's about working together with
other people. And I think that mentality, it's
one of the great superpowers that people can have.
And I think it's one of the things that has again, brought
base to the network school because it feels like there's so
much shared alignment around this idea of everyone everywhere
in the world. If you have an Internet
connection, you can be a builder and you can make positive change
on the Internet and thereby make positive change on the world.
Awesome. OK.
With that, Jesse, let's wrap. And so I'll we're base for
builders in every school. Check out base APIs and and
apply for Nervous Hill Fellowship.
All right, thanks. And join base batches.
Number one, join base batches there.
OK, Thanks, everybody. Thanks guys.