This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, Around The Coin podcast. Special episode we're going into today. We talked to the CEO and co founder of Alex Dr. Chiente Hsu. And I think I got her name right. And she's just an amazing energy. She's talking all about quantitative economics. We talk about what happened with Alameda Research and FTX.

We go into how she's applying some of that knowledge to building DeFi on Bitcoin. Yeah, baby. DeFi is back on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is back and they're, you know, she's opening up the whole finance layer of Bitcoin, which is absolutely amazing. She talks about all the different use cases, including stablecoins and helping out moms in Nigeria and Africa.

Yeah. Send money around the world. This is truly an inspiring episode. We even talk about being a woman in a kind of crypto pro society from New York to Hong Kong. She talks about her amazing team and all the work they're doing. This is a really cool episode for anyone in the crypto payments tech space.

Or just the entrepreneurial space and she's even thinking about writing a book. That's how great this conversation was. I hope you tuned and let me know if you like it and reach out to Chiente and talk to her about it as well because this is a powerful episode on DeFi on Bitcoin.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant. This is a special episode of Around The Coin. We're going to be talking about a lot of interesting things, including things like quantitative strategies, which I do very little about. We have Dr. Chiente Hsu. I think I almost got it. She's the CEO and co founder of Alex.

com. Maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself, and what's Alex, because it's funny, I did all this research for the episode, and then I understood, I figured out what Alex stood for, because it wasn't, it wasn't obvious right there what Alex actually stood for, and then it made a lot of sense, so maybe tell us a little bit about yourself.

Chiente: Sure, so thank you for having me, Stephen. About myself, I was born in Taiwan, Taipei by Chinese parents. Then we moved to Vienna, Austria really very early on. So I was educated in Austria, Vienna. I got my PhD there as well. Then I was in academia. So I was two years professor at Duke University and also University of Vienna.

Then investment banking called, because of money, I joined investment banking. That was the interest term of I would say finance, quantitative finance. Because of my background, you know, I have a PhD in quantitative economics, econometrics. So people like to use my skill set to Forecast to predict.

That's how I joined investment banking. I started at the Credit Suisse, first Boston, then I was running the quant research there. And then I joined Morgan Stanley doing the same thing. And A little bit more than three years ago, I started with my two co founders, Rachel Wu and Chang Ang this DeFi project called Alex.

Stephen: That's super interesting, can I ask you about the transition from Vietnam to Austria? Because that seems like a huge culture shift, I could be wrong, but what was that like? Because it seems like you were a fairly young age when you made that transition. Was it like, oh my god, you're moving to this, you know, distant country, or was it a smooth transition for you?

Chiente: Oh, absolutely not. Number one, I was a teenager, so it doesn't matter. Motivation for the next block is challenging. This is moving from Taipei to Vienna, so the climate is very different. I remember when I moved there, it was deep winter, so it was really hard. But I think the second thing is also the language.

Because when I moved there I did not speak a word of German and that's really came to my passion about, you know, math, statistics is that I remember I had to learn German from the scratch and I went to school and when the professor was telling a joke in the auditorium, I had no clue why everybody was laughing around me.

But as soon as some equation was written on the paper, You know, whiteboard, my hands are shaking, so there's, you know, self enforcement about this, and I got more and more interested in I would say in

Stephen: So you just stayed on the math, right? You know, anytime I'm talking language, no, anything math, you just went to those classes. Was there a community for, you know, people, like, I know I live in Toronto, Canada, so we have these, like, little Portugal, you know, a little Chinatown, like, there's these areas where people from the same community from other countries tend to, you know, segregate, tend to aggregate.

Did you have that in Germany, or was it like, you were just kind of pushed into a completely different culture, or did you have a small community of other people from the same country?

Chiente: so Vienna is a very small city, relatively. I think it's you know, a little bit more than one million population at that time. So there was also a very small Chinese Taiwanese, obviously Chinese community, and definitely we tried to, you know, Be close together to each other as possible, but also because I went at a quite young age, and as soon as you got yourself immersed into schools and universities, suddenly, you know, your, I'll say your, your, your culture become less and less obvious. Right? You just, you just almost completely immerse, immerse into that, you know, that particular environment that you're growing up with.

Stephen: Are you fluent in German or did you

Chiente: Yes, sir!

Stephen: Yeah, that's super. Do you ever use that today? Does that like benefit you like reaching out to like maybe German investors when you can, you know, make a funny slang term or say something to them?

Chiente: People obviously, you know, with me, I look, I don't look like Austrian, by the way, I'm Austrian citizen. Sometimes when there is like investor or partner, they are German, and I suddenly speak German like, because? they are like, what?

Stephen: That's amazing. I always wish I could speak a different language, so when people were talking in their native language and they think I couldn't understand it, like, I could come in with a quick, with a, like, a witty comment. Like, obviously you're in computer science very early on, you're very math. When did, like, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, that usually hits the tech people a lot, way before it gets to the outside communities.

When did you first hear about, you know, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain, Ethereum? I don't know what was first for you. And then what context was it in? Was it like, hey, this is a new way we can send funds to, you know, another developer around the world? Or was it like, hey, look at this new technology.

It's going to change the world. Like, what was the context you first heard? About this technology.

Chiente: I heard about Bitcoin relatively late compared to other people. I think it's around, you know, late 2010, 11, 12 ish, I would say. So really,

Stephen: early. I thought you were going to say like 2017, 2018. You're like, yeah, like maybe a month or two after the white paper came out.

Chiente: yeah, but you know, you didn't, I didn't, I absolutely didn't appreciate it at that time, right? You just, okay, I heard about it, I think it's an interesting white paper, but then, you know, Then you look back and you think about what has happened to me in my particularly tragedy experience. And then a few things I remember really, really well.

And then you combine that with, oh, you know, Bitcoin or blockchain in general, right? What kind of, you know, problem it could solve if we had that at that time. So, for example, the 2008 financial crisis. I was on the trading floor of a Credit Suisse in New York in Madison near, near basically on Park Avenue, around 25th Street at that time, on the trading floor of BixinCon.

What happened at the time, I still remember the atmosphere there, and also almost like the smell of it, right? You sat there in the middle of the trading floor. And suddenly one bank after the other failed, right? You wouldn't know this particular bank, how much risk they have about all these things. You know, shitty credit derivatives.

Nobody could price it. Nobody knew how much, you know, how many dead bodies were in the cellar. So from one bank to the other, you hear that, okay, let's not trade with this bank. Let's not trade with other banks, right? So you start one after the other, and that's how the financial system grows. And then, so that was 2008.

And then afterwards, you look at this white paper, you look at the blockchain technology. At the end of the day, Bitcoin is really a completely decentralized, open source ledger,

Stephen: Right.

Chiente: where you can store information in the most decentralized way and also most immutable way, right. You think about, okay, if, you know, all this information about banks risk, about their holdings, and all this can be I know it's a very ambitious, and we are by far, far, far from it, right?

If this can be a way that we can build a bank on this public ledger, right, we won't freeze. We wouldn't have had this, you know, global financial, the great financial crisis. So that was the first time kind of link the trade fight, particularly in the information asymmetry and transparency part, linked with blockchain and linked with Bitcoin.

And really. You know, during the the ICO period, you know, this crazy Ethereum, was really about, almost a detest about that era. I remember my son at that time you know, a few years old, came back and said, Mommy, Mommy, you have this you know, this coin, that coin. It was like, son, put all your savings in S& P 500.

Stephen: want to interrupt, can I ask you back, you know, you said, it's so funny that you said you, you smelt that day, right? When it's, it's how I feel about 9 11, like everyone remembers where they were, and like this, the smell of that day, right? Because it was so devastating. Where people or organizations or you're looking at you like, Hey, how come you didn't call this?

This is what we, this is what we have you here for is to understand the economy and to know the numbers. Were they kind of looking at the quant teams? Like you couldn't predict any of this or were they like, Hey, we know we messed up. We, you predicted how the economy should have went. And we still over leveraged ourselves.

We, we got greedy. We went after something that looked good financially in the short term, but wasn't long term. I always wonder when they're looking at, when something goes bad in the economy, are they pointing fingers? Like, Hey, where, where were you in this? You took a, did you take a lunch break in 2008?

Like what happened?

Chiente: Okay, so it's a very fair question and I have two ways of answering it. Number one, quant is not magic. Right? Quant is not a crystal ball.

Stephen: Right.

Chiente: is the quant? That's came to your inherent curiosity about quant, right? So I will summarize in the way that, you know, the world is very complex. Every day we have all this, we generate all this data, this footprint, and every day there are certain things happen in world. What Quant does is to I would say particularly in the quant of prediction in the, in the world, in the jobs or work of prediction is that you summarize data as much as you can to filter out the noises and you establish causality. You know, A, B, C happen, then D happen, you establish the strong causality, and then when you see the same pattern happen again, so very likely you want more than 50 percent of the likelihood, right, that this happen again.

And you bet on it over and over and over again. So that's really what Quant is about. It's not a crystal ball. So that's number one. So,

Stephen: can I summarize that? It's recognizing patterns, history repeats itself, and when you see a similar pattern, taking advantage of it based on historical information, and the way you see kind of like the ecosystem as it is today. Is that a good summary? That's perfect. That makes, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, you're using big words. I gotta break it down to the words I know.

Chiente: Oh, I'm sorry.

Stephen: No, I'm

Chiente: at me if I use

Stephen: I'm joking. Okay.

Chiente: Causality basically means, you know, A happened, then B happened, and not because A and B at the same time correlation, not that they happened at the same time. Correlation doesn't help you, but causality helps you, because you see A happening, you are very sure that B will happen, so that's the causality.

Stephen: Make sense.

Chiente: So, so, so, number one, the Great Financial Crisis, we didn't have that in history. All these instruments, you know, credit derivative to the square, to the whatever power, they were all new. There were no proper pricing models for it because we didn't know how to price it, right? You only know how to price a risky asset if you know how to hedge it perfectly, right?

Because that's why we call it, that's another type of quant. We didn't know, right? There's no hedge. Because this is just. Brand new instrument, everybody was going after that, and then it blew up. So there was no history about that. Second thing is that there's no data or information about that either, right?

As I said, we wouldn't know what Bank A had really in their cellar, you know, the dead bodies. So nobody knew who is doing what, how much, right? So that's the second thing. But, so that's the way I would answer is that Kuang couldn't have predicted that because we never seen the history, we didn't have the proper data, we didn't have the proper information.

The second way I would answer is, is that Kuang are mainly for things that happen often and frequent, but those people who call it short, right, in the history, particularly in 2008, you have, you remember the film, The Big Short?

Stephen: yeah,

Chiente: All these heroes, they were heroes because they caught that in a certain very short period of time in that particular history.

The rest of the time when things are working really, really well, you don't hear from these people. They were not heroes. On the contrary, they lost money. Why? In order to short something, this is very, very expensive. Think about it. It's very easy to say, Oh, I want to short you know, Nigeria government bond.

But in order to short that, let's say Nigeria government bond, I'm just making up, give you, let's say, 10%. Yield, right? It means that you you have to pay this 10 percent yield, which means that you have to be sure that your bet is already above the 10%, right? So that's a cost you have to bear as a short.

person. So quant, you know, in order to have a quant system to call you short, you know, your signal has to be much, much stronger. So the conviction has to be much stronger. So most of the time, you know, people call you short, most of the time they are wrong, because most of the time we are not in crisis, right?

You only have those,

Stephen: that 10 percent example, you're betting it's going to go to like negative five. So you have to have that 15, you know, that 15 points. You have to get it down to zero. Yet that 10 percent has interest rate or whatever has to be erased. And then it has to drop, which is like a huge bet. So to your point, That only happens once in a lifetime that you're going to make those funds on a huge bet.

Now, now that I understand Quants so much more, how do you use it to something like the crypto market? You've been through, you know, several bull markets, several bear markets. Do you kind of see like the NFT trend look very similar to the ICO trend, right? Do you kind of see those same things that you were using in traditional finance?

You're like, Oh, I've seen this before. This looks very similar. 2021 looks good. And there's a bunch of money pouring in. But like, did you kind of think that it was going to kind of level off or at least get to the point? There's people that historically said, Hey, when there's all this money going into greed, which is what the NFT market is.

99 percent of those projects are going to go to zero or, you know, to your point, it's easy to short those products those projects. What are your thoughts with how you can apply Quant to the, or how you have applied Quant to the crypto market?

Chiente: Again, a good quant signal relies on, you know, enough historical data. Right? So I think crypto is still, particularly the crypto market, is still quite young and short, and volatility is still very, very high. So it's hard to apply systematic rules onto it but there are certain things that you could see from the traditional you know, you can kind of draw the, the, the analogy.

So, for example, arbitrage opportunities, right? That's very simple. You really don't need quant for that. You say, okay, if a certain, let's say Bitcoin was, you remember the kimchi trade? So, the Kimchi trade is how Alameda made money, right, in the very beginning between, I would say, 19 and 2020, there was some report, I'm not sure it's correct, so just take it with a grain of salt, it's that every day they were making 1 million US dollars of P& L, right, that's the story, right.

So, thinking about Kimchi trade, it's a pure arbitrage, the purest arbitrage lying in front of you. When the Korean market opens, the Bitcoin price will be just on the average 10 30 percent higher than, for example, the U. S. market. Right? And so what you could do, you know, let's say in a perfect world without any restricting, you just buy a hell of a lot of Bitcoin when the U.

S. market opens, and sell it when the Korean market opens. You make 30 percent of it, right? Now, there are a lot of Obviously, you know, friction around it. Number one is, you know, your, you know, your certain capital you have to put in in order to make sizable profit. And number two is also, you know, the alpha would die out because everybody know you can make the trade and everybody going to the trade.

So the trade will be, we call it crowded. So alpha will be crowded out. So this is a, you know, you don't need quant for that. This is just an arbitrage opportunity.

Stephen: And to your point about Quant, you know, like it's, it's so funny that Donald Trump's saying they're going to do something, Even though they don't have the power to do it is enough to kind of shift the market where, you know, that can't happen in traditional markets. Like you'd have to sign a bill, you have to go through a legislative process, but like Donald Trump can tweet that he's going to fire Gary Gensler.

And then all of a sudden, like the market will shift. There's still so much sentiment in the market versus to your point, actual, like, and then when you break it down, it's like, yeah, 15 years. Is it a lot of historical data? And it is quite volatile, even though it seems like it has cycles. It's still, you know, very volatile.

And I think to your point, that makes a lot more sense why we can't really predict the market because a simple tweet can skyrocket Dogecoin, but that can't really happen in the traditional markets. I have to, there's more guardrails. Like you can't just say something like that without implying, you know, without triggering, you without knocking at the door of the Securities Exchange Commission, basically, is what I'm trying to say.

Chiente: absolutely. I mean, in the TreFi, you know, news and whatever a CEO says is much more regulated. Remember what Elon Musk said about Twitter, you know, fun secured, right? Got into trouble with SEC, whereas in crypto, it's still Almost like a Wi Fi OS. Everybody can tweet something without any consequences. But also because of its decentralized aspect of it.

You know, obviously you can use models. You can, you can, you know, Twitter everything. You can use this API to extract the signals out of it. But right now, I think it's still very, very noisy, right? It's not just about, okay, bye. I think it's also about, you know, the timing of it, how fast this you know, rumor effect will go down and how to size it.

That's two very, very important questions in quant trading. So it's not just about, I'm going to buy this one. It's also about how much should I buy and when should I sell? And

Stephen: I think the crypto market is just worried about buying and that's how we got in trouble. We just bought thinking everything goes up, but when everything goes down, we're like, how come we're still holding it? Like,

Chiente: then you have

Stephen: yeah, we're like, hey, we didn't get that. We did, we did take, we kind of dropped out of that course.

You know, we took the course on how to buy, but how to sell at the right time. We kind of like, yeah, let's, let's drop out of high school at that point. I want to jump into Alex, because it's so interesting you've been coined, and you've coined yourself, like, the finance layer of Bitcoin. And that's such a, first of all, such a, whoever you're marketing team, or if that was you, that's such a powerful statement, the finance layer of Bitcoin.

I love that, when I saw that, I'm like, oh, where can I, I'm going to start just using that in sentences. Explain, Alex, to me, as if, you know, I'm new to crypto. I understand a little bit about how traditional markets work. We have a lot of payments, tech, and crypto people that listen to this podcast. But I think when we get into the nitty gritty of, like, protocols and layers, it gets a little confusing.

Can you explain what the fi what's the current layer of Bitcoin, and then what's the finance layer that you're bringing on top of it?

Chiente: Okay, I love that. Okay, when we say it's a finance layer on Bitcoin, what it really means is that, forgive me using Wall Street analogy, is that we try to build entity, or let's say, a bunch of activities on Bitcoin blockchain. And these activities are financial activities. Think about what a big bank like Goldman or Morgan Stanley do, right? And I think that's where we kind of differentiate ourselves from other developers. Look at the, so for example, Goldman, Morgan Stanley.

You have you have the primary market, that's IPO, right? So you, let's say Stephen has this great marketing firm, but you want to attract capital from the market, right? You go to Goldman, you say, I want to IPO it. So Goldman will help you to IPO, with a very hefty fee, obviously. Then, but after Goldman IPO, you approach Stephen's Web3 marketing.

You need to make sure that there's a sufficient secondary market with liquidity for Stephen's you know, equity to trade, right? So that's a secondary market. That's what we are talking about in decentralized finance, you know, decentralized exchange. We call it DEX or DEXs, right? That's really the secondary market.

Okay, so you have IPO is very similar to IDO, right? The secondary market, like trading, that's just like DEXs in a decentralized way. Now you think about it, but you know, I am a Goldman Sachs wealth management client, right? I want my savings to generate some yield, right? So you, Goldman Sachs, have to come up with certain I would say a product.

For me to, in order to get a yield, and other people say, yeah, but right now I need capital. So I want to borrow, right? So can Goldman Sachs lend me those money and I pay yield? So Goldman Sachs right in the middle creates certain financial I would say structure product to meet the need of both lenders and borrowers at the

Stephen: the matchmaker, right? People need money from them and people are like, Hey, I got money, but I need some, I need a little, a couple points on this. I need to make a little bit of yield some interest rates on this. And that's what they do best, right? They bring in the people that need the money.

They match them with the people that hold their money there for a number of different reasons. And then they take a small cut out of every transaction.

Chiente: Right. Okay. So now come back to what if you can build all this on Bitcoin or on the public blockchain? Wouldn't that be beautiful? Because it's decentralized, so it's also immutable. So why these are important characteristics, right, for financial services? Financial inclusion, right? I mean, if I want to be a Goldman Sachs wealth management client, I think at least 1 million you need to have it, or maybe now it's a bit lower.

If you want to IPO through Goldman's help, I mean, you know, the hurdle, right, of getting the IPO.

Stephen: There's a financial obligation. They're not doing it for free.

Chiente: That's right. Yeah. So, so, but, you know, with all this financial, I say FinTech, this evolution of FinTech, you think about the whole world. We are lucky. You're, you're there where you are. We are both in, you know, in North America space. We are, you know, it's very easy for us to open a bank account, to have our credit card, to really jump into this bandwagon of FinTech evolution.

Yeah. But if you think about, you know, where my husband come from in Africa, right? I mean, you can't, number one, you can't have U. S. dollar, number two, you, you know, to open a bank account, it's really, really difficult to think about for financial inclusion. You know, I'm not saying that blockchain is the only way, because fintech evolution is very fast as well.

But blockchain is one way, particularly for cross border transaction and payment, in order for people to utilize this technology. So blockchain can be an answer, right? So it's a very winded way of answering your question,

Stephen: No, I think that's great. I think it I'm a metaphor person. Give me all the metaphors you got. That's how I understand. I visualize the metaphors. But I think the question everyone's going to say is like, well, there's a bunch of DeFi protocols on Ethereum and Solana. Why Bitcoin? Bitcoin's had the biggest issues when it comes to scalability.

But we're seeing like Bitcoin's back, maybe. So why Bitcoin? Why decide to build on Bitcoin? And what are the gaps that you see maybe building in other, you know, EVMs or other, you know, environments that you think Bitcoin is, is the ideal place to build on top of?

Chiente: I think, you know, at that time when we three of us, the founders of Alexco technology decided to build a Goldman Sachs on chain, there were other chains that are trying to woo us to go to build on it. But think about, you know, putting the entrepreneur's head on it, right? You don't want to go where it's very crowded.

You want to travel the road which is less traveled by, right? So, Then if you, at that time, if you line up all the layer ones, right, Bitcoin, Ethereum, at the time, you know, you have Solana and others. You think about, okay, which one is most decentralized, which one is most immutable? And that's for sure, the answer is Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin has also the longest track record as a ledger, as a blockchain. So that's number one. Number two is you are absolutely right. Bitcoin, I think most people, you, you totally understand that by now. Most people still don't know the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, right? Ethereum itself is a global computer, it's a smart contract layer.

So it's very easy, you can build things on top of it. Bitcoin, It's very clunky, very rigid, but that's why people also love it. It's like you can't change it and you can't really build directly, you know, financial application DeFi on it. So you need a smart contract layer on top of it. And that's what, you know, we are talking about this, you know, layer two, etc.

So it really only happened the past few, I would say 18 months, right? So, so I would say two things. One is we chose Bitcoin because it's To build the DeFi because of its decentralizing immutability, but also we chose it as an entrepreneur, you know, we need to make it back. Where can we be most successful and really make a, make an impact on it?

I don't know. There's no point to build another DeFi on Ethereum. There are too many of them already. Build on Bitcoin. And grow with the technology evolution, but also learn from Ethereum what are the real use cases, right, that people really want to use. Filter out those that, you know, died already, not very successful, and build that on Bitcoin.

Stephen: What are some of the interesting characteristics where you're like, Oh, I'm going to borrow this from, you know, what is being built on Ethereum? Or what's some things you're like, we're definitely doing this differently because we don't like, whether it's successful or not, we just don't want to do it this way.

Whereas there are one or two things that you're like, Hey, I really want to adopt this onto Bitcoin. And hey, this is not going to work on what we're doing. Let's leave that out.

Chiente: Right. So if you look at what has been successful in crypto as a general, as a proven use case. So that's number one, proven use. And second is what kind of functionality you need to, to, to, you know, to, that the user really, really want to use, right? The proven use case is definitely a stablecoin. So at the moment, obviously, the biggest stablecoin are USDC, USDT, and then Binance has its own stablecoin.

You know, JP Morgan has

Stephen: PayPal's coming up there now. PayPal's getting a little bit of a market share now.

Chiente: Right, JP Morgan has its own, you know, coin for the cross border payment. People don't talk about it, but when, when, when JP Morgan CEO come out yell at us crypto again, I have only one sentence, JP Morgan has its own coin. That's the use case, right? So, so that's the use case.

We know for sure that it helps the financial system. Industry or the sector or services and that's a cross border payment via Stablecoin. So we are very focused on that. For example, if you can issue Stablecoin on Bitcoin itself directly, right, you have the beautiful chip which is completely decentralized, but you can issue assets, in particular Stablecoin on it.

So that's in our realm. But number two is also what are the functionality use cases that you need to have in order to You know, enable this Bitcoin economy. And that's really decentralized exchange, right? People like to talk about yield generation, DeFi farming. These are all good, all very exciting. But if you don't have a well functioning liquid exchanges, none of this will exist.

Correct? Right. So we very much focus on building cross, I would say, multi chain, including Bitcoin, all the Bitcoin L2s decentralized exchanges with all the, All the, you know, technology that other people really invented, you know, Uniswap. Right now, Uniswap has this Uniswap version 3, which is a combination of I don't know, we can talk about that more later, like all the AMM plus order board, and that's what we are trying to roll out very soon.

So I would say, assets issued on Bitcoin use case, because for cross border. Payment.

Stephen: You know, one thing, your core team is from the biggest banking institutions around the world, obviously in the US, but they're probably some of the biggest banking institutions, J. P. Morgan, you've already mentioned and others. One thing about them is like their transactions are private, right? You're not going to be able to see if, you know, you want to invest in another financial institution and you have to send funds, you're not going to see that they can do that transaction and announce it after.

Do you see institutions using, you know, the, the finance layer on Bitcoin because it is transparent and you see these watchdogs on crypto Twitter, they're watching every big transaction that moves on Ethereum or this place or other places. How do you balance that transparency that is, you know, locking in the security of Web3 with the like, hey, I'm running a business.

I don't want to see people seeing how much I'm receiving or how much I'm sending.

Chiente: So, number one is that you can build, definitely, if you are an institution, you can build your own chain. Right, on top of Bitcoin or Ethereum, right? That's, I think a lot of institutions are currently doing that, such as BlackRock. So there are certain things you want to be completely transparent, because it's for your users.

The investors, they want the full transparency. And certain things you want to have the privacy because you don't want people, for example, to frown around you, right? So the blockchain technology enables you both. You just have to choose, you know, for which particular use case you are looking for. For us, we try to build something that's really for users.

So for the full transparency, such as DEXs, that everything you can see, you can trace, you know, ancient data is the most transparency you can see.

Stephen: That's true. And yeah, for the average user, they, they want, they want to see that transparency. And I think this is where we kind of run into the industry with FTX and Alameda is like, when you don't see the full picture, there's way more carnage. And we saw that in the 2008 financial crisis. When you don't see it, there's way more carnage than someone just seeing that you sent funds to another business.

That's not as, I think we prefer a little bit more transparency than private transactions. And we don't know the risks. What are some of the big use cases that you're building on Alex, and how can users get, you know, involved in that?

Chiente: Right, so right now we probably are the biggest Bitcoin DeFi project, which means that all the transactions that Alex, you know, the protocol has, I settled on Bitcoin so people can trace that completely transparently, and also people know that that's immutable. How really our ultimate goal is really to build all this financial service on this particular chain, that's a, you know, Bitcoin chain.

Lots of hurdles, obviously, as you already say, so we have to grow together with all the smart contract capabilities, that's number one. Number two is Crypto itself, at the moment, it's just its own sector, right? So, you know, we're just in our own sector. The capital isn't, you know, because of the ETF, it has become a little bit better.

But the user friendliness compared with the TreadFast fintech survey, we are far from it. So that's another thing that, you know, we as a project need to pay more attention, put more resources on it, that my mom wouldn't use, Alex. And you start having a wallet with all these private keys, right? And then you have to wait.

Bitcoin's, you know, block time is very slow, right? All

Stephen: that the goal for someone like your mom to use Alex or someone like me that's in the space but not really 100 percent going on there, you know, in the order books? Is that the goal is to have everybody be able to kind of get in there?

Chiente: The goal definitely is that because, you know, because of the financial, but the first is first really ultimate task is that if you look at the Bitcoin, so many people are currently holding Bitcoin on centralized exchange, how can you? Number one, give them the user friendliness that they can, you can use, Stephen can use.

Number two, give you the use cases. Why do you want to move your Bitcoin from your central exchange to you know, on chain to a DeFi project, right? So you need to give the use cases. So I will say these are the two ultimate paths that we are racing towards to, to fulfill.

Stephen: Can you talk to me about like, Bitcoin ordinals have completely skyrocketed, that's what everyone's talking about. On your website, you have BRC20 tokens and people are used to ERC20 tokens. So can you kind of break down what those two things are and why they're very interesting on Bitcoin versus like a similar product that you see on Ethereum?

Chiente: So to go back to our discussion at the very beginning that Bitcoin is you know, the code is very rigid, and in order to change it, and also because of decentralization, whenever you want to change or upgrade, it takes years, right? You have all these developers and they have to roll, whatever, right? So it takes really, really long for any company.

Upgrade, improvement. I think with this BRC20 and the rules, I already know BRC20 and rules, that's the order of the, of the progress, suddenly opened people's eyes that you have a way, because of the last upgrade of Bitcoin, the, the, the top root upgrade, right? You suddenly, you have a way to issue assets. On Bitcoin, the chain itself, just like what you do on Ethereum, you know, the ordinal is like those digital art, right? And BRC20 and the rules are just different token standards, but you can issue assets on Bitcoin. It was not possible before. I think that was the excitement that, wow, you know, we can issue assets.

Of course, you know, all the DJs started issuing all these weird tokens with weird names. They get very excited. They gamble on it. It's like a big casino. But away from the noise, If we see that we can issue assets directly on Bitcoin, that's a very, very powerful event, or let's say, a very powerful progress that we have experienced over the past, what, 18 to 12 months.

Stephen: That's super interesting. One thing I did see is that a Bitcoin, you're building almost like a Bitcoin Oracle, which I think is very interesting especially with DeFi, right? DeFi needs, you know, Real world, you know, prices. They need real world data accuracy. Tell me a little bit about how a Bitcoin oracle differs from maybe what you see at Chainlink or maybe why it's the same and why it's a lot more interesting on Bitcoin.

Chiente: In order to transact accurately, you need accurate data. And that's what Oracle is about, it's about the accuracy of data. And the problem with Bitcoin, particularly if you look at like BRC20 and other token standards, is that the Bitcoin itself is very primitive. You can send and receive, that's it, right?

But it doesn't really have a pro you cannot really properly record in this ledger like what you do on Ethereum. So, so those token standards that we just discussed about BRC20 and others, they rely off chain index, off chain index. Could be somebody just with his Excel spreadsheet that's recording all the, all the transactions, right?

So, so, so it means that if you are here, you record your transaction, the other person is there recording her transaction, maybe they're off and there will be some conflict and then suddenly the bank account don't look right. So you do need a place where almost like a place where you can say, okay, this record, this record is correct, and this record is not.

And that's really what the Bitcoin Oracle is about, is a, is a, is a on chain I would say, data, as well as a messaging verification place where you can verify the correctness of the transactions on Bitcoin and other Bitcoin L2s.

Stephen: Is it hard to create an oracle? Because I think, you know, we had somebody on from Flare on another podcast They're building, you know, their oracles on EVM, but they were saying hey a lot of these, you know, oracle service providers They're only getting input from two or three data sources or data service providers That's not really decentralized, right?

When, like you have to have, you know, 50 or so, you have to have so much input and then take a consensus from all those inputs. Does that make it hard for you to be able to vet or figure out where you're pulling that data from and getting more people to contribute to that data so it can really be a decentralized data information?

Chiente: Yeah, so, you know, the decentralization doesn't happen from day zero, right? You need to start with a few really, you know, solid partners. And we were very lucky we're in this ecosystem that I think we grabbed in the very beginning. Five really, you know, reputable partners to start building with us and they are, they are the indexers and they will contribute.

And then, then you need to start decentralize. You need to give people the incentives so that they, they will contribute to you, their data to you. And then there are different ways how you can, you know, there's always a trade off between speed and the security. So I think we took a very pragmatic way is that You know, you have, you can choose, you know, what trade off you want to do, right?

You want to do ultimate security or you want speed. If you want speed, you know you're sacrificing some security that you just mentioned, right? Maybe you have only a few indexes that contribute to this particular data.

Stephen: It's so interesting, yeah. It's always like this triangle of like speed, security, and cost, right? If you want something fast, it's not going to be secure. If you want something, if you want something fast and fast and secure, it's not going to be cheap, right? So it's like, you're always trying to balance it.

Chiente: you've got to balance, I think the most important thing is also to you know, in a very transparent way to share that what are the things that you're sacrificing. You can't tell people you can have your cake and you also can eat that cake.

Stephen: I want to talk to you, you know, you have it. We talked before the show, a huge Asian presence in the APAC region. Talk to me about regulations. We've seen the EU come out with the, the MICA and, you know, significant and most comprehensive regulations, I think to date when it comes to digital assets. But we're also seeing places like Singapore and Hong Kong, and it seems like all regulators are trying to get crypto inside, but they're also sweeping in and, you know, DeFi under their umbrella, or they're going after developers and enforcement actions.

And we just saw, you know, the developer of Telegram get arrested. Talk to me about what your thoughts are on regulation.

Chiente: Right. Again, you know, I come from Chet Fai, same as my co founders, Rachel and Chang. Ultimately. There are two goals of any financial regulation. Number one is that those financial regulations try to prevent systemic risk, right? Number two is they want to protect the retail investors, moms and pops. So this really, I think, if you look at any financial regulation, you can't boil down to these two goals.

So now comes DeFi, right? Number one, systemic risk. You know, By definition is defi, right? So, if you look at FTX, not Defi, you look at Celsius, not Defi. If you look at Terra Luna, yes, defi, but it did not create systemic risk. So, so by Nature Defi and the big project, the way it's designed, that you won't create systemic risk.

So that's number one about the regulation. Number two is protect, you know, retail investors. I totally welcome those regulations. Our industry, our sector is so young, and I like to say it's wild, wild west. A lot of those, we depends on our own self regulation, where the team come from. We are very, very focused on this part, but, you know, there's just so many I don't know if you are aware of the FINRA, you know, this financial regulatory entity that TradFi has,

Stephen: Yep.

Chiente: It comes from the industry's own initiative. So all the, you know, banks and the financial institutions, they come together, they say, we create, we establish our own self regulatory entity. And then with the community's, you know, force, We can enforce certain good behavior and then, you know, filter out certain bad behavior.

And I really, really, really hope that the DeFi one day will have our own theme, right? Because we are all developers. You know, for moms and pop to understand, you know, this particular smart country like it to have a rock pool, they won't know. These people, they will just hire lots of marketers on Twitter, right?

Just pump those tokens, whereas ourselves, the builder in this industry, should call out each other. Right, this one is likely to have a rock proof because of this particular part of the smart contract. So, yeah, I think that's the way to go. It's instead of the big brother come to write a proper set of regulations that is completely adaptable to DeFi, it's going to take very, very long.

Stephen: Yeah, and they don't know the protocols. There's very few, there's very few private sector people. We were just speaking to somebody in Dubai that is now with a regulator who was in the private sector, but there's very few private sector that go into the public sector and then educate them on, you know, the protocols.

It's usually, you know, and when they do have smart people in the public sector. They're attracted to the money of the private sector because everyone, everyone wants a former regulator working on their global regulatory affairs, you know, and their protocol. But there's still about 3 billion in 2022 alone that was due to hacks and, you know, Oracle manipulations and flash loans and vulnerable contracts.

What do you think the industry needs to do? Or you can speak for yourself. What is Alex doing? Dude, as you said, you invite regulatory around consumer protection especially with retail customers. What are you doing to make sure you protect your funds? And what can the industry do better? Is it the audits?

Is it multiple audits? Is it, you know, you know, pen testing before you go live or simulate an environment? Where can the industry do better so we're not losing three billion dollars every year Due to what many are saying is a lot of negligence and the rush to get the product out first Versus to get the product out safe

Chiente: No, I totally welcome this question. And I think also, as again, it's a very young sector and full of entrepreneurs like us. Very often as a startup, you do need to push the limit, right? You need to push the boundary because you need to, you know, invent, invent, invent, grow our products. And sometimes you will sacrifice.

You know, part of the security. The way we do it on Alex, we learned a very big lesson. There are two, I would say there are a few type of hack, right? One is very traditional Web2 type of hack, like phishing attack, that we were a victim of it, right? So this, we just have to hire, we have to hire Web2. Experts that have experience in Web3, for example, we hire Kamal Security, making sure that everything we do is to the highest security standard in terms of deploying smart contracts, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

Number two is really on chain. On chain type of security, you need to monitor it. Again, you just got to put part of your resource, your money onto it. So we hire Ancelia, which is a quite famous. AnQiang Monetary Company. Monitor every AnQiang activities that we have, that Alex user are are deploying.

So that's number one. It's really Web2 plus Web AnQiang. Number two is about smart contracts. Smart contract design, right? This, we can learn a lot of from TradFi. For example, what you said about those flash loans, right? People manipulate the price and then go to do whatever, you know, very leveraged margin trade and then, and then boom, you know, hundreds of millions are lost.

These are risk management and smart contract design, right? So these are different type of type of risks. This, I thought that we are pretty good at it because we learned all this from the TREF file, and there's a lot of things you can adopt from TREF file. It's about risk management, it's about simulation, it's about, you know, sometimes maybe you do want to slow down a bit of your speed.

Sometimes you want to verify your pricing data much, much, much more rigorously. So this, I would say these are two different types of security issues. Now, hackers are always one step ahead of us, right? There's a, I mean, there's so much resource put in to hack. And I think, you know, after all these incidents, We also have learned to work with other people, right?

You do need to work. We work with all the centralized exchanges, right? Whenever there's some really weird transaction, we notify them right away. And most of them are very, very good at it, right? Number two, you do need to work with other DeFi projects because think about Hacker, once the, the fund is in the wallet, they go to other DeFi, you need to notify them very fast.

Yeah.

Stephen: exchanges,

Chiente: Yes, yes. Because they want to upgrade very quickly or they want to change into stable point very quickly. So you do need to work together and then not just very, you know, single dot, just doing your own thing. You do need to build your own network. Your protocol needs to talk to every other protocols.

Stephen: I love that. Even when I was an investigator doing blockchain investigations for a large exchange, you know, you would have some of these exchanges that don't, you know, there's groups where we exchange information and they don't participate and you're kind of like, okay, they care about compliance, but they don't want to participate.

But the second they get hacked, they're running to these groups. And asking for help. And we're like, Hey, well, you weren't participating when everyone else needed help, and now, you know, it's going to take a little bit longer. You don't have those strong connections. You can't just pick up the phone and then call another exchange because you don't have those relationships.

So it's important to build those relationships to your point before there's a problem, because when there's a problem, there's not enough time to kind of execute those relationships. We just had a webinar two days ago when Crypto ISAC is being formed and, you know, they're kind of opening up that communication link.

One thing that caught my attention was Bitcoin ETFs because you come from a traditional financial product background. What are your thoughts about the Bitcoin ETFs? You're working in a decentralized, you're promoting the ability for self custody and decentralization. Do you feel that Bitcoin ETFs gets us further away from your goal or from what you feel that the industry adoption to self custody looks like?

Chiente: No, absolutely not. I welcome so much Bitcoin ETL, but I have waited for so long because ultimately a lot, we have to be also honest with ourselves. You know, the mainstream adoption of DeFi is going to take very long. There will be just, you know, most people are happy holding their Bitcoin via a centralized entity.

You know, through ETF. And that's fine, but then the more and more they hold it, the more risk they have it towards it, the more, you know, heavier weight in their portfolio, in their 401k, they will be more curious about this technology. So I absolutely welcome this ETF. And I think, you know, for those pension funds or their corporate pension funds, or sovereign pension funds, or family offices, You do need to start learning about these particular asset classes such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and make sure you have the proper allocation to it through ETF.

Right now they can only do it through ETF. So that's good. You would, people would start having an interest. About DeFi, I think ultimately DeFi, needs to mature in the sense that philosophically, if from the outset, you are for permissionlessness, right? You don't want to be assumed as a criminal every time you, you scream about your privacy or your sovereignty, right?

DeFi attracts lots of users because of this. And it will, it has to mature just because of its you know, its characteristic of the permissionlessness. It's a cross border without all these inefficiencies, institutional inertia, etc., etc. Does that make sense?

Stephen: yeah, how is Alex going to help that maturity over the next five years? How do you think you can redefine maybe the landscape? It's your goal is to get more people, including your mom, including me and my friends, how do you get more, how do you redefine the landscape for DeFi? What are some of the characteristics or what are some of the levers that you're going to have to pull now in the next five years to get that kind of adoption?

Chiente: We need to, number one, improve our protocols user friendliness. Right now it's very, very clunky, right? You need to have a wallet, you need to sign in, and then, you know, people don't know what is. That's what DEX is about. So you need to, you know, almost as simple as I don't want to say, you know, E Trade or Charles Schwab, but almost like that, right?

Very, very easy to use. So that's number one. Number two is behind this user friendliness, there's a lot of Infrastructure needs to be built and need to mature. And that's what we really have been doing over the past three years, as you already mentioned. Oracle is a very important thing. We have, you know, cross chain bridges bridge called Xlink, now become the liquidity aggregator of all these different chains.

That's very important because you As a well functioning exchange on ALEC, you need liquidity. So you can't have very thin liquidity that won't run well. You won't execute your trade well. So how can you aggregate all this fragmented liquidity among this Bitcoin L2? That's very important. So that's another very, very important infra.

You know, so infra needs to mature, but infra very often is also teaming up with other partners in the ecosystem to build together. So I say, you know, user friendliness, security, in order for people to easily use a DeFi, that's number one. But underneath is really the maturity of infra, building with other people.

But ultimately, you want the financial service, full financial service on Bitcoin that you can transact. You can IDO, you can lend and borrow, you can issue your corporate bond, and you can tokenize your real world assets. The whole thing. That would be, in five years time, that would be our goal.

Stephen: I love it. Let me take it to the reverse. Three years ago, you start building on DeFi on Bitcoin, but within those three years, we've seen another hype cycle. Bitcoin's back, you know, Bitcoin ordinals are huge. How do you now stand out from all these other protocols that are running to Bitcoin to try and capture some of the attention, capture some of the capital?

You've raised a couple of rounds, I believe, or raised at least 10 million in the last, you know, how do you now stand out when everyone's running back to Bitcoin?

Chiente: I would say it's very hard for, especially for startups in this space. There's so much noise, as you pointed out before. I would say the way we stand out is true to our mission. And very lesser focus on what we want to build. I mean, I like to quote my co founder, Rachel, and my CTO. Every time somebody says, oh, this is interesting, why don't you build this?

And they always tell me, this is not our core mission, right? You can capture maybe two weeks of attention if you roll this out. But it's going to dilute our resources. Thanks! And the attention will be gone after two weeks or one month. So let's focus on what you want to build. And we want to build a Bitcoin economy that, you know, those Nigerian moms They save UA.

They save a dollar stablecoin because they want to send their kids to school

Stephen: Right.

Chiente: That's the biggest private usage of a dollar stablecoin private in Africa. Right? How, what do we do? How can we help them? We can issue now a Bitcoin L one stablecoin. That is yielding so that they can save. So, so, so there's real use cases of of a DeFi that that we try to be really true to our, our, our focus and our intention.

Stephen: I love that, because I think once you're building there, people are trying to come to you now and say, build this with us, build that with us. You're like, no, we've been building. You're not going to leverage what we've built. Lastly, let me go into something which I find very interesting. You have a, you're in New York, you have a huge presence in Asia and other places around the world.

Token2049 just happened, or is happening right now in Singapore, and it happens in Dubai as well. And everyone I know says, like, this is the crypto bro of all crypto bro conferences. And someone messaged me yesterday and said it was even more crypto bro than ever before. I'm like, how is that even possible?

What is your take as a woman? And I, you know, we talk a lot about diversity on this show, but What is your take? How, how would, what advice would you give to a woman that their first conference now is Token 2049 and they're looking around, it's intimidating. They're not getting very much, you know, they're new to the field.

What advice would you give them based on maybe some of the events you go to, or maybe just some of the communities you're a part of and like, Hey, this is a community you have to go to. This is where you'll see the real diversity in the industry versus this one conference.

Chiente: Well, that's a huge question. You, lots of the questions in this question.

Stephen: of questions in

Chiente: Lots of question. This

Stephen: would how would you help you when you just enter the industry and you're like, Whoa, there's a lot of crypto bros and tech bros here.

Chiente: Well, I, you know, when I first went to a QU conference, I was the only woman, right? So I'm quite used to being, you know, one of the few women in the room. And how did I, how did I survive that? I would say number one is that passion has no gender. you're really passionate about something, your surroundings, people around you will feel that, right?

Like when you talk to me right now, I think we're in the middle of, you know, Bitcoin L2s and this, you know. Gender is not the issue. It's really about The topics. So passion has no gender, I would say. Number two is, you know, crypto is an interesting industry because it's 24 7. I find it actually more suitable to women than the Trad5, for example. Because you, at any point of time, if you are free, you can just jump in to participate in this particular sector. So we have more freedom in how we want to design our, you know, daily lives, particularly for women. Rachel and myself, so Rachel is based in Hong Kong, that come to came to your question about we have a very big Asia presence.

I call her DeFi Queen. Okay, so in Asia, you know, they were the first adapters of DeFi, okay? So I learned a lot from her. My our CTO is also based in Hong Kong. We have developers in Korea, in you know, bigger Chinese speaking countries, and also in Europe as well in the U. S. So we are truly, I would say, global and also on chain and online.

That's the way we work. So we do have a big Asian market. Coming back to women again, I would say build your own alliances, right? Rachel and myself, I would say we understand each other's challenges more than the dudes, right? Your kids have fever, you just have to say, sorry, I'm offline, right? We understand each other better.

It was always my dream to share a work with a woman. You can, you can, again, design your day like that. So if you're a woman, You are interested about crypto, pick a topic you are most passionate about. It can be digital art, it can be DeFi, it can be RWA, it can be anything. Bring your own, you know, value add to the space and you will be welcome.

Doesn't matter if it's men or women or they, right? So passion and knowledge and build your alliances. Reach out to me and Rachel.

Stephen: I love that. Yeah, like, follow the people that have done it before you. I think people forget that there are people that have, you know, already carved the way, carved the path. You know, before we end, you've already talked about your roadmap, and I'm actually excited about the Bitcoin stablecoin. I think that one's interesting very interesting.

But you did write an article that says, Bitcoin doesn't need DeFi, but DeFi needs you. Bitcoin. I think that's such a, that's first of all, you guys must, whoever your marketing team is like, tell them like, if that's you and Rachel, like heads up, you guys are doing a great job. You guys come up with really powerful statements.

Even, you know, passion has no gender. Like those are, you guys are made for the punchlines, but tell me about that article, summarize that, like, why doesn't, you know, Bitcoin need DeFi? Why does DeFi need Bitcoin now more than ever?

Chiente: Because by definition, DeFi is decentralized finance. There's no point to build on the chain that is not truly decentralized. And that's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is truly decentralized. You can be a node operator of Bitcoin with a very, very small investment, you know, of certain CPUs. Truly decentralized. Nobody can shut down Bitcoin.

So DeFi, I would say DeFi definitely needs Bitcoin. However Since we wrote that article, since we published that article, things have changed a lot. Now I think I come to the conclusion that Bitcoin does need DeFi. Why? Because just hold that Bitcoin and hope the value will go up. That's gone. You need to make this chain useful.

There should be use cases so that the miner and node operator will continue to maintain the Bitcoin. So you need activity. It's like a beautiful house. There's no point to expect the housing price will go up. You need to make the house, the garden useful. That's why I think I have changed my mind. I think now Bitcoin also needs DeFi.

You need proper activities on this chain. Does that make sense?

Stephen: No, it makes a lot of sense because like, you know, I'm big on like, you know, flow. Energy is money, you know, money is energy and flow. And like, if you just have 60, 000 in your bank and it's not doing anything, it's not going to do anything. Like, okay, the value, the purchasing power might go up, which is definitely not happening.

But, you know, you invest it, you, you know, you use protocols, you lend it out. Like, you have to have that finance layer. On top of it in order for it to be useful and then like more opportunities come out. Right. And yeah, there is a small risk to that, but what's more risky than leaving your money there and not having it work for you?

I love that you said you switched your mind a little. 'cause you did write a book about rule-based investing in 2013 where you talked about emerging markets. What were some of those emerging markets? And, you know, a lot has changed in 10 years when you're talking about technology and investing. Has anything changed since you wrote that book where you're like, whoa, I think I might need to make a part two to this because some of these concepts have been turned upside down due to technology evolving so quickly.

Chiente: I would say, and thank you for reading my book, I would say that the, the concept hasn't changed, but technology has improved a lot, which make those rule based investment strategies now much more accessible. What it means is that there are certain, a lot of ETFs are based on those ideas, ETFs And then so if Stephen say today, I want to, I think the value investing is coming back to into a trend.

I want to invest in the value. Strategy. In the past, it was not possible for you as an individual, now you can just get an ETF, or multiple ETFs. So it become, I would say, factory. Much more accessible to the, to the, you know, mainstream, you know, us, mom and pop individuals. So that's number one. Number two is that applying this to crypto, Crypto need to mature a little bit more, but some concept is definitely applicable.

For example, carry strategy is very simple, right? Carry is just like a funding strategy. If you have more demand on Bitcoin or Ethereum, people are willing to borrow that. And then you get certain You know, you call it the funding or basis or that's just carry, right? So that's carry strategy. If you have a Bitcoin, that's what you could do.

And value is something that you can use certain matrices, for example, impact your DeFi strategy. You can go into the GitHub, right? To check, you know, how much developers has written, you know, this type of thing and to come up with your own value matrices. So all these are quite applicable, but Not yet into mass adoption.

It would still take some time. I am really thinking about, you know, after three and a half years, I do have, you know, in my mind, should I write another book? But not so much about rule based investing, but more about these three and a half years as an entrepreneur, as a startup co founder, what I have learned You know, good and bad, what can I share to, you know, the women or men that are, you know, having this mind of setting up their own you know, crypto project.

Stephen: I would love that.

Chiente: really,

Stephen: would,

Chiente: You think that's an interesting

Stephen: think entrepreneurs can always take from other industries too. It might be crypto, and crypto is a lot harder industry than I think most of the traditional or web 2 industries. So I think there's a lot to learn and a lot of people don't talk about it because they're trying to cover it up because they're still trying to build and make money.

So they don't want to show we have a weakness here. This is what the challenges were. And this is why I love this podcast because I get to ask people like, Hey, what's really happening behind the scenes? Like, what were some of the real challenges? Like, how are you dealing with regulations? So I think whether it's a short book, a long book, I think putting all your thoughts down or starting your own podcast might be the way to do it.

Chiente: you can start with me. But also, ultimately, I think the question about decentralization is not very well discussed. Because as we know, as a project, you cannot from, you know, from the get go be decentralized. And then how much it really means for users. Everybody will tell you we love decentralization. But as soon as there's something that's easier to use, Everybody just forget about that.

Behind it is a huge centralized institution. So that's another topic I think is quite interesting that maybe, you know, we can spend some time to address it. Yes!

Stephen: says they want privacy, but then they'll give all their information to save 10 percent off of Bed, Bath, and Beyond. They'll give all their information to get a discount code online, not even knowing what website they're on. So

Chiente: Your cell numbers! Oh,

Stephen: just so they can get like 20 percent off an Amazon book.

Like we don't care about privacy that much. It sounds good on paper. Where can people find you? Where can people interact with you? Are you crypto Twitter? Are you more of a LinkedIn person? Where can people find you after they listen to this amazing conversation?

Chiente: Thank you so much. So, I'm on Twitter a lot. My Twitter handle is @RuleBasedInvest and Alex is Alex. I think it's @ALEXLabBTC we use that as a public town hall, but particularly the foundation members, they share all the news, all the updates, all the new features with people and easily you can reply.

We are also on Discord and on Telegram.

Stephen: Awesome. And we'll include all those link in the show notes. Chiente, thank you so much. What an amazing conversation. And we look forward to have you back when you write your book.

Chiente: Thank you, Stephen. Really, thank you so much for having me. I'm very, very grateful to have this hour and talk about Alex and myself.

Stephen: We appreciate you.

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