Stephen: It's not very often we get the CEO of a major blockchain like Algorand here, but we have Staci Warden and we cover so much. We cover and talk about all the unique features of Algorand, the use cases from, payments in Afghanistan. We cover exactly what's happening in the U. S. and how we have to navigate this regulatory system so we can build, expand and innovate.

We dabbled in on stablecoins. We talked a lot about transactions per second and how important instant finality is for a blockchain like Algorand and for a lot of the real world token, real world asset tokenization that they are using within their applications. This is such a great episode with somebody that has a ton of traditional and a ton of Web3 experience.

You will definitely love this episode. Reach out to me or Staci after the episode. Let us know how you like it. Talk soon.  

This is your host Stephen Sargeant, Around the Coin Podcast. We are lucky enough to sneak the CEO away from ETH Denver. Stayed home, made sure she was available for this podcast. The CEO of Algorand, Staci Warden. Staci, tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm going to go into your background a little.

We're going to touch about what Algorand's all about and what you're working on and what you're excited about in the industry. But as we said before, the pre recording, it feels like there's not a day in crypto where it's the day crypto. Everything's always happening so fast. Tell me a little bit about yourself and then we'll jump into some questions.

Staci: All right. Well, you know, I was the main keynote at ETH Denver and I said, I can't do it. Vitalik wanted me to, you know, give my views on, on Ethereum. I said, I can't do it. I've got to do around the coin podcast. I don't know how much you want to actually really know about me, but I started in TradFi famously. And from TradFi to Crypto, it's kind of a one way street, you know, you get on it and you just never go back. Despite the potholes, despite the twists and turns, despite the on ramps to, off ramps to nowhere, sometimes you just don't get back in your car and go the opposite direction.

Stephen: I love it. I'm curious what like attracted you about TradFi? There's always like interesting stories. Usually a lot of the, you know, the bros I talked to like, Oh, finance, like, yeah, Porsches, Lamborghinis, other people are like, they're really, you know, enamorated by the mathematics of it all. What kind of captured you about, Hey, I want to get into this fast moving world of traditional finance.

Staci: You know, I was always interested in international affairs and foreign countries. When I was in second grade, I did a triptych essay called Iran to Iran. So from, I think

Stephen: That's a, first of all, that's a beautiful title, by the way. I don't think we, we can't let that go without saying like that, that was good.

Staci: Thank you. You know, it was like three part art project. But I always, I always wanted to travel and I always cared about other countries and I always cared about developing countries.

And that got, like, as I got older, more and more interesting to me. And I work for a professor at Harvard, who is a kind of a famous macro economist. And so I started off as an economist, actually. And so I was an economist for the first, you know, sort of decade of my professional career. I worked in the Treasury Department.

I worked for the Center for the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Center for Global Development, but the more I worked on the macro and the trade, you know, that you mentioned, the more I realized that like stuff doesn't work if financial markets don't work, if the financial markets are gummed up, nothing else works. And I developed this simple theory of the case, which is that. If households have a way to give their excess savings directly to the private sector. I believe in a private sector led model of growth, not a government led model of growth. And so if you can, you know, in these developing countries, households put their money in the bank and the bank doesn't do anything with it. It, you know, it buys government bonds and bankers go play golf at three o'clock in the afternoon. But if you, if the, if the private sector through well functioning capital markets can, can invest their household savings in the private sector, well, then the private sector will grow. It will hire more people.

Those people will have more savings and those savings will be rechanneled back into the economic growth engine of the country. That's a little bit. I would call it like my North Star of things. And, and and, you know, Bitcoin for me was a way when I first found out about it in 2013, yeah, 2013, I thought it was a really important part of that solution, especially in terms of FX flows. And I, and I wasn't. don't think I was quite right about that. I don't think Bitcoin's exactly fit for purpose in the way that I thought it would be like the peer to peer electronic money transfer. I don't think that's the Bitcoin Maxis out there. Don't get mad at me, but you know, it has its purpose. Of course, I hold a bunch of Bitcoin myself, but I, but I always thought that crypto could be this very direct way to help improve capital markets.

Stephen: Do you think, you know, looking back, you know, I started around 2017, just before maybe 2016, when I really started going to the conferences. And a lot of the chatter back there was like, help bank the underbank and unbanked. And you coming from this international lens, Hey, do you feel like we've done that?

Cause it feels like the amount of unbanked and underbanked hasn't changed much in the last 15 years that Bitcoin has been around and cryptocurrencies. In general, and then do you think stable coins have kind of replaced your ideology around what you thought Bitcoin could do in regards to this peer to peer transfer?

Staci: Yeah, a little bit. I think, yeah, I think you put your finger right on it. Stablecoins are going to be critical because you can't handle the volatility of cryptocurrencies often, right, for payments. So are, I think, the absolute bedrock primitive for our space. They have their own non purist kinds of issues, right?

So, so, you know, these are private sector companies that hold reserves and you're not, you're not always 100 percent sure where those reserves are in some cases more than in other cases. And, and I would say all of them have gotten better over time. You absolutely need some tag back to the dollar. And I think it's interesting, actually. Despite the best efforts of the Biden administration to kill this whole industry, stable coins are, you know, 98 percent US dollar based. There's something about a US ethos and the rule of law. And the democracy that comes with this country and the size and the economic prosperity that makes us dollar stable coins really just a giant among among the others. But I think there's a couple of other ways that and, you know, we were not there yet, of course, as an industry, but there's, in addition to stable coins, there's a couple of other reasons why crypto is quite good for financial inclusion. So I'll just give you 1 example. We there's a company called Hassan pay. That is built on Algorand. They are doing basically all of the philanthropic and charitable payment flows into Afghanistan. when the, when the Taliban took over the, of course, the international community said, you know, no money to the Taliban and the Taliban came in and said. Well, you know, we're going to have the central bank.

And so, you know, if you want to help this country, it's going to come through us. so the regulators said to anybody that wanted to help you save the children, world food program, all of these guys, need to be really, really audited because we need to make sure that money you can send can go to like women and children, but they can't go to the Taliban and Hassan Pace said, well, you know, if we put it on a blockchain, well, then you can see, and you can trace those flows.

Stephen: Right. And you can trace where it's being spent too, right? Which is what, what really people want to see is like, where's that money actually going to and what it's being spent on.

Staci: And as you and I both know, that's very easy to do on a blockchain. And so that's a really good example of they, they have a digital Afghani, you know, the money goes to this, to the to a sub count, a sub pays account at the central, at the, at a Afghani bank, the central bank can see that when you on and off ramp, the central bank can see that, but all of those transfers, right. That are digital that and, you know, Afghani women that can't read or write can have a card. If you have a smartphone, you can do it on your smartphone or even even a flip phone. They are making, you know, I think over 100, 000 electricity bills have been paid digitally this way. It gives dignity to to these people that are receiving funds.

It saves time and women that can't travel very easily in that country. They also now can make payments digitally. All well, you know, the benefits of digital payments, right? But the idea that and a blockchain can bring those same convenience and dignity benefits to a country like Afghanistan is pretty incredible. They're now in Syria talking about how they might, you know, do this in Syria to help. So like just the, the. Ability to see what's going on element of a blockchain also helps with financial inclusion. So you've got stable coins, you've got the ability to see what's going on. And just because I've been talking for a while, I'll give you just one more quick this ability for programmable money, right? If you are not somebody that. Other people trust the idea that you will only get paid when something happens and that, and that, that contract can be enforced by code can help you get credit. So just one example could be, this is not somebody, somebody didn't build this on Algorand like HasabPay, but it's just like an archetypal example. you have really bad credit, but you want to lease a car and you can have a smart contract talking to an internet of things. sensor on the car. You'll never get a car loan because nobody wants to hire a repo to go and get your car if you don't make a payment. But if you have this thing on your car, so the car won't start.

If you miss a payment. The car pings blockchain every day, every day, are they current on their payment? Yep, yep, yep, good, car starts. The minute that's not true, the smart contract won't release, won't, won't will, will not let the car turn on. And so, ironically, you could get, you could get the ability to lease a car because the, the lender knows that they can turn it off when,

Stephen: Right.

Staci: to, right?

And they can make life very hard for you.

Stephen: That's great for the private sector. I think those are also people, you'll probably also see the people that are like, Hey, that's why we don't want governments to create their own stable coins and CVDCs as well, because just as easily as the company could take off the car we saw I'm in Canada.

So we have the best use case for, I think this example that you're stating right now. I would love to know, like, you know, I ran in grade two is like, kind of like, you know, I don't even know when I was in grade two, if I even heard of Iran I guess, depending on where you are in the world, but, you know, you've done business in over 50 countries.

You probably traveled all around the world. What are some of the innovations you see? You just gave a really great example of what's being built on Algorand. What are some of the innovations you're seeing from a digital asset lens in some of your travels? Or even just the most unique use cases, like Afghan women being able to use their phone to receive and send payments.

Is there anything else that you've seen internationally?

Staci: Well, in my, you know, I think the most important thing that I have seen, it's not particularly crypto, but it is really the most important thing that I've seen in the, you know, decades that I've been doing it is the move from goods based aid to cash assistance. This was really, really hard to get done back in the day. Everybody thought, oh, there's a starving, you know, people are starving and say Ethiopia, right? What we should do is we should fly tons and tons of grain to Ethiopia. Now you may have to do that. In the first week, well, people really, really are on the ground. But the more you do that, the more you ruin the agricultural economy of Ethiopia, say, right?

Because you're, you're flooding the local farmers and you're making it so that they can't make a difference. So they can't make a living. But so if you can get money somehow to them and cash to people so that people with cash can be like, okay, where can I buy some grain? And then a farmer's like, Oh, you know, I have some grain.

I can sell you. This is. Yeah. was so it's kind of a bit more standard now, but it was so hard to get done back in the day. And then, of course, you can see where I'm going to go with this. That cash can be digital. If that cash can have all these other properties, if people can have wallets and you can get, And you can get people you can get financial inclusion associated with the idea of being able to make payments, with the idea of having a bank account.

Stephen: Right.

Staci: 1st thing was this move from move from goods to cash, then from cash to digital, then this idea that you don't actually need to have a bank account in a bank. I mean, there's some countries where you can't get a bank account unless you get a letter of reference from somebody else with a bank account, right?

Like, it's, it's completely preposterous, but if you can have. a wallet and you can receive money into that wallet and make payments out of that wallet without having to have a bank account. You have to be KYC'd. I mean, know, these village, some villages are, you know, a day's walk to the nearest bank

Stephen: Right.

Staci: People like, and this is not crypto, but like M Pesa in Kenya, absolutely transformative for that country, right? M Pesa is too siloed, the transaction costs are too high.

Stephen: Right.

Staci: It's the same you know, in the background, the same banking rails. So like crypto is even one better. Hassan pay is better than that.

Right. So that's the kind of stuff I get very

Stephen: I love it. And you know, I think people are saying like, Oh, those are kind of like far off examples or those on the fly, you know, to first world countries, but we had friends that got into crypto from the UK because they wanted to rent an apartment in Canada, but in order to get the bank account in Canada, they had to have, as you say, not even a letter of reference or somebody else, they have to have an address, but in order to get rented apartment, they needed money.

So they were caught in this like, Okay. Circle of, you know, no way to, to get the things that they needed. And they just use crypto rails in order to facilitate the transfer of funds. So these are use cases. We just, even for me, I know when the lottery that when you guys have the billion dollar lotteries in the U S I'm always like telling my friend, like, yeah, I put the 20 in there for me, but there's not an easy way for me to send somebody from Canada to us 20 or an inexpensive way.

And I think that's what people don't realize and why crypto is so important. I want to get in.

Staci: you can send a movie from Nigeria to Malaysia in a

Stephen: Right.

Staci: WhatsApp, a movie,

Stephen: Yeah.

Staci: but you can't send 10 from Nigeria to Malaysia without traveling through the correspondent banking system.

Stephen: Yeah.

Staci: the way to the Fed clearing at the Fed and three banks back on the way to to Malaysia.

It's ridiculous. 10 days later, and somebody's taking, you know, 4 percent or maybe 7 percent off the top, and then it got there, or maybe it didn't get there like

Stephen: I was going to say that, you know, you know, that's where I was going to go like, yeah, if it gets there, how it gets there, if you don't have to call the bank and explain why that funds were said. Everyone's had the wire transfer nightmare. I think

Staci: it's just incredible. But you can send an algo in, you know, a second, right? Okay,

Stephen: I love that Let's talk about Algorand because I think it's one of the brands and one of the blockchains that people know about But it's like if I said someone what does Algorand do what makes them, you know a competitive advantage over the other I don't think they'd be able to easily and answer it.

So it's great job. You've done a great job of branding You've done a great job branding Algorand, but I would love to, like, take this under the hood. What is Algorand and what does it mean to you? Like, what attracted you to Algorand versus maybe another organization or a similar company?

Staci: Right, well, if there's anybody out there who's not heard of us, then I want you to give me their phone number so I can scold them because that's ridiculous. They've been living under a rock as far as I'm concerned. I was headhunted to be on the board of the Algorand Foundation initially. And if you are going to be on the board, you are lending your reputation and your Rolodex to that organization.

That's, and your, and your guidance, of course, but really, when you want a board member, you're little bit, you're buying their, their, Credibility,

Stephen: Right.

Staci: so I did a fair amount of due diligence on Algorand. You can be assured before I took the board position, the board position, I liked everything about it.

I love the origin story. I loved the founder. I loved the technology. And I didn't, I won't, I won't say that I understood it nearly as well as I understand it now, but as I've. spent more and more time with this technology, with this ecosystem, with these builders, with the team. I know, I just, it's just gets better and better.

Right. And we are making it better and better. so that's how I, that's how I, I was in crypto for other reasons, I was actually, I was actually head hunted to be without, that's how I found out

Stephen: That's awesome. What is Algorand's main thing? Like, every blockchain, whether Layer 1, Layer 2, really stands for one feature that they're like, Hey, we're going to go all in on this. Maybe 70 percent is maybe similar to other projects or protocols, but we're going all in on this one feature, this one ethos.

What do you feel that ethos is for Algorand?

Staci: Steven. It's instant finality. If there is nothing else that your listeners understand about Algorand, it is the fact that transactions are instantly final. When a transaction is made in a block, the block you are, there's no soft fork. There's no period of time, like with other blockchains, that, you know, is six blocks famously on, on Bitcoin. I don't know what is 12 minutes, something like that on, on, on Ethereum. you're just not sure, right?

Stephen: Right.

Staci: your transaction is going to make it into the block with the most work associated to it, the branch with the most work associated with it in the Bitcoin example, or not, right? And then they kind of fall off into the ether if they're not picked and they get picked up again later, right? Okay, that's fine. But with Algorand, you are, you never are in that situation and I will and it's not, you know, 10 minutes later. It's not 2 minutes later. It's not 1 second later. It's not 10 milliseconds later. It's instantly final instantly. So you will never in a stable coin have to. Versions of your, and you know, with the technology coming, I would be very nervous to have a stable coin, frankly, on another chain where they can get picked off in two versions of the world, even if that version of the world just acts for a millisecond. So there's other great things about us, but where we are unique is that the, the consensus mechanism of Algorand brilliantly devised by our founder, Sylvio Macaulay does not allow for that kind of. Soft fork kind of competition

Stephen: Yeah, no, no orphan blocks. No, like it's, it's done. It's done. You know what?

Staci: have, of course, we're green. We have 10, 000 TPS. We have, you know, subpenny transaction fees. There's lots of. You know, we've not been down for a second since we went live, like there's lots of great things about our tech, but you kind of set me up for that because that is, that is like our thing.

Stephen: I was just like laughing in my head like shots fired Solana. No.

Staci: Well, you know, you know what I feel like sometimes it's like shots fired at God, you know, which is not a good thing to do ever. So I don't want to tempt the fates

Stephen: Yeah,

Staci: never been down for a second, but, but yeah, it's driven up and down for a second,

Stephen: with this instant finality with like, you know, I think he's at 10, 000 transactions per second, what are the use cases and our transactions per second still like, I remember that was like the main feature for a lot of the protocols that we saw, it seems now as we're adopting a lot of the traditional financial products that this, you know, transactions per second should be extremely important because we're competing with the, or collaborating.

With the visas and MasterCards of the world what are your thoughts about the main use cases where the finality and the transactions per second are vital to run some of the applications that are working with Algorand?

Staci: right? So, you know, I think finances, of course, the short answer, right? Like, you know, supply chain know, tokenization or tokenization, it's they can tolerate a little bit less than that. But for anything with finance, I mean, if you talk to a big. You know, training from and you want to talk to them about their back office operations.

We have a couple of these conversations going right now. They're like, well, we have to, you know, reconcile 500 gazillion trades between, you know, 3 minutes before the closing bell and the closing bell. Like, how many can you do right? Like, this is a this becomes a very. Critical. And you better not go down during those three minutes either.

And when's the last time you went down, by the way? You know, I mean, these things get, when there's lots of money on the line, these, these conversations get very serious, very quickly. But I will also say that kind of tying back to our first developing country or financial inclusion conversations. If you, so Visa does 7, 000 transactions per second, but Visa can handle 50, 000 transactions per second.

If it needs to, not

Stephen: Right.

Staci: every day, but it can spike that high. And if you have aspirations to do micro payments. very small payments that can create economic activity where economic activity does not exist right now. So a couple of cent, a couple of, you know, sub pennies to a web page or to have Wi Fi for a minute or like this kind of like very, very small things.

And you're going to need a blockchain that can do like 100, 000 transactions per second, right? Now, our tech guys say. Well, Staci, you know, well, foundation show us the TPS and we'll build it for you like we can do it, but we're not going to do it right now when you're not showing us anything close to 10, 000 transactions per second on a consistent basis, so we think we can get there.

But you made this point before. It's a little bit of a chicken and egg. You have to. You have to show the use case before the, you can get the tech guys interested in building it

Stephen: Interesting.

Staci: but, but we're, we have tested and we have on chain, we can demonstrate on chain over 10, 000 transactions per second now for sure.

Stephen: And I think, you know, people don't understand downtime until they see it in real life. Like, I think it was like CrowdStrike. You know, the planes went down, the POS systems went down, and billions of dollars were lost within a matter of hours. But now think of, you know, all the financial transactions that you're talking about.

Three minutes could have cost the same exact value that those hours costed. So, and these companies are run, those margins, those transaction fees is what they live and die by. But I also see that you have a whole ecosystem, like any good blockchain. You have NFT platforms, lending platforms, pay platforms.

What are some of the, what are some of the gems? What are the companies other than Hasampe that you like to bring up in conversations when you're maybe trying to woo a new developing class to build on Algorand?

Staci: now, you know, you get me in trouble when you ask me questions like that, because, you know,

Stephen: Who are your favorites? Which ones are your favorites? Awesome.

Staci: But there are, of course, some very big big protocols big companies building on Algorand.

And so our biggest lender is a DeFi protocol more broadly is called Folks Finance. And the CEO of Folks Finance is a very smart, very entrepreneurial and very strategically wise human being. He came out of an accelerator that we ran in Europe and he has built like this company. He never complains about anything.

You know, he just keeps his head down. He builds, he, he, we have an investment in his company, but he doesn't come cap in hand all the time. Like for, you know, and he's just. He's just really like that guy is not going to fail. You know what I mean? He's just not going to fail that. We have a great we have a bunch of sort of other defy protocols, a tiny man.

It's a trading platform, decentralized trading platform. A, bunch more in this category, of course, CompEx but we have also a, a number of different tokenization platforms, ArchX does tokenization. They are a an asset tokenization platform that is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK.

They spent a number of years making sure they were fully regulated. We have a Euro. programmable Euro, digital Euro, not a stable coin, but a programmable digital Euro built by a company called Quantos, also regulated. Of course, you're not gonna have a programmable digital Euro that's not regulated, but they are regulated the Dutch Central Bank.

Very very hard as well. Regulatory environment to get approved in and they so we're very excited about them. Prop tech a company called lofty AI. And what they do is they allow you to tokenize shares and rental property income.

Stephen: That's pretty

Staci: income is a very good source of income. Very rich people, accredited investors. They all have rental income, but what they do is they buy apartment buildings and you know, if you can't buy an apartment building, you can't have this source of stable income. But in web three, of course, with lofty, you can buy for as little as 50. Just a share of the share of a rental property and get a share of the income that comes from that rental property, and they're set up each one of those properties.

The investors are set up as Dow's, and they actually manage that property. They look at if you go to lofty website, you can see they are, you know, they give you information about the tax history and the rental history. And, you know, they all got together once and fired a property management company. They all got together once and gave.

I think a woman, she had some medical issues. They gave her a couple of months. Thanks. You know, break on her rent to like help her get back on her feet. Like it's very, very one that I like to talk about is a company. Cause I like, I like companies that are building markets that don't currently exist.

I

Stephen: right.

Staci: most interesting thing. And of course, real world asset tokenization is exactly that. It's bringing liquidity to markets, but another company in Argentinian company called Travelex. Created a secondary market in airline ticket sales. So instead of having to give your ticket back to the airline paying a penalty, you have to go in the same place within one year, same route, all that nonsense. You can, they started with a an Argentinian airline called Flybonding. You can go to the Flybonding website. You will not see Algorand. You will not see Travelex. You'll just see a bunch of people putting up their Airline tickets for sale.

Stephen: Interesting.

Staci: can, if you're a frequent flyer, you can give your like lounge pass with your ticket, if you want, for example, or, you know, some other perks that you might have, you can transfer those with your, with your NFT. so there's lots of others lots of other examples, of

Stephen: I love those.

Staci: of the, the big ones.

Stephen: Talk to me, you've been in trad5 for so long. You're obviously a staple in the web3 industry. We've seen the Bybit hack, obviously the FTX collapse. What are your trad5 friends, you know, saying about like you and web3? Do they understand like this just comes with the territory when you're having an emerging asset class?

Or are they looking at you like, Oh, aren't you tired of this? Like here's buy a bit again. Of course they lost 1. 5 billion. I'd love to know from you. Cause I feel like you are, you know, you're rubbing elbows with the tops of both those industries, both in the tribe and defy. What are some of the conversations you're having?

And maybe what are some of the defy people? Saying about the conversations that you're trying to have with the tribe five, when you're trying to get real world assets, tokenization, marketplaces to expand.

Staci: There's a little of both, I would say. I mean, for me, the funny, the funniest thing is more that. Like if I go away for the weekend with a bunch of friends, it is inevitable that they're going to say to me, I don't, I don't understand crypto. Will you explain crypto? I said, you don't want to dinner lecture surely on crypto.

Yeah, but I don't understand. And you know, you can have the same conversation kind of with somebody for five times and they'll be like, ah, you know, people, they have this mental idea that they're not going to understand it. Like it's like comes from Mars or something like that. And I'm like, it's not that complicated.

There's two really Really fundamental things you need to know and I launch into my blockchain 101. What are the like core core things, which I, which I will, I'm happy to elaborate on, but I don't think you need and the second thing I'd like to remind them is, I mean. You know, there's a lot of nonsense in crypto.

I'm not going to pretend that there's not. And so when they say things like this, and of course, everybody knows who Sandbank Manfred is, right?

Stephen: All right.

Staci: And I remind them that fraud is fraud is fraud, right? You know, and with this, this, this recent Bybit, you know, I like to remind them that Citibank. You know, was meant to send million dollar interest payment to Revlon creditors and instead sent them the whole 900 million debt that they held.

They repaid the debt of 900 million dollars and they're just trying to make a 78 million dollar interest payment. And there's a lot of checks at Citibank. There's a lot of people checking those things and so if it can happen there. For 900 million, it can happen at Bybit. You know, I'm sorry. The thing though, that makes Citibank different than Bybit is that crypto is not forgiving. You know, when you make a mistake banking. Or you make a purchase that you didn't want to make you got either somebody to call and you

Stephen: Right.

Staci: I didn't mean to my closest friend sent somebody scammed her on what's the word Venmo.

Stephen: Hmm.

Staci: somebody on Venmo, like 600 because he's he scammed her and she's like, I'm never using Venmo again.

I'm like, it's not Venmo's fault. The reason that payments go on Venmo is because. You can't, you can't get it back. Like, you have to be careful. It's a trade off. It's not Venmo's problem that you, that you, you know, that you did this. But in TradFi, you can get it back, and in, in Crypto, you can't. You know, you, there's lots of good, you know, sleuths out there to help you, but just like the stakes are higher. It's better, but the stakes are higher. You know,

Stephen: I love that. And you have to, we have to remember, like, the Lazarus group is involved in the Bybit hack, so it's not a bunch of amateurs that got a hold, like, these are the people that pretty much shut down Sony Productions so badly that they had to use a fax machine to communicate with a coffee shop down the road, like, these are, these are professionals at their core, and this is all they do is plan these attacks.

I

Staci: don't like to, I don't like to do this, but I will, since you set me up, I will make the point though, that complexity risk. You know, it's just a law of nature that the more complicated things are, the riskier they are. And on Algorand, on Ethereum, everything is smart contract based.

So you're always calling contracts to do things. But on Algorand, you know, things like re keying, things like multi sig, things like asset generation, token, you know, yeah, token generation. Those are all at the layer one. You don't call a smart contract to do that. It's built into the protocol on. Algorand. And so, you as a multi signer, I mean, you should always check the hash, right? Like if they had checked the hash against the hash, they would have known, but it's a very unfun UI, right? Like it's not, it's not clear a lot of times on your ledger device, like what you're doing. It's not a good encrypt. We don't have a good user experience anyway, but you would have been able to, I think see that something weird was going on because you're not, it's not like a contractor calling you would be able to tell more easily.

Stephen: Very interesting. I want to talk, now that we're on the subject of hacks, exploits, attacks, and vulnerabilities. On the website, I just read that, you know, you promote the fact that quantum, your post quantum computing. So basically, you know, we've heard a lot of chatter, especially with AI over the last year, that quantum computing is going to come and break the Bitcoin blockchain and all the other blockchains.

I've seen very few blockchains respond to this, actually. You know, a few people just say, Oh, it'll never happen, but it seems that you're very, you know, strategically showing like, this is why this doesn't impact Algorand. Can you kind of walk us through this? And how early did you have to start thinking about this to protect your, your organization, the foundation and the blockchain from something that probably wasn't that far along when the initial thought had to go into it?

I'm assuming.

Staci: Right. So, where to start? The most important thing is not to overstate our quantum security. That's the most important thing. So the real problem with quantum coming to cryptography in general is that the elliptic curves that the, the, the cryptography that is based on elliptic curves, which are on a kind of a 2 dimensional Cartesian plane, If you have a signature based on that, a signature scheme based on that, quantum computers can blow that to pieces. So you are really not, those signatures are not going to be safe. you know, you use signatures for, of course, you know, signing various different things and moving your money around. And if quantum computing can break that cryptography, then they can take your money. They can take your coins, right? So this is really. This is a very important threat. what we used is something called based on a falcon key signature, a signature scheme and, and falcon means, and I'll maybe I'll to, to, and before I explain what that is based on the signature scheme, these falcon signatures, we have signed the, on the blockchain that all of the history of transactions up until that point. And it happens every like 12 minutes. All of those. The record of the ledger is quantum secure for the history. So if the, if the blockchain was hacked, was, was attacked in a quant in a quantum way, it would be fine. The history of the chain would not be compromised. Now, where we are not quantum secure is. In the consensus mechanism for the accounts for the history of the things that are going on right now and you can be very sure that this is front and center in our road map but the history of the chain is secure and we can say that and other chains can't say that so that is very important it's a very important first step.

Stephen: Right.

Staci: The fact that we're doing this though is basically because we are really we are founded and we have had on our team some of the most Famous and important cryptographers in the world. You know, our first, our founder is a touring award-winning professor of cryptographer from MIT named Sylvia McCauley, like he's one of the most important cryptographers living today. is a a, a part of Falcon, which is based on the, something called the GPV framework the GPV framework is by, is created by these guys.

whose last names are Gentry, Park, Picard, and Vaikunthanathan, I think, Vaikunthanathan. both Gentry and Picard are cryptographers associated with Algorand. So it's like we have some very deep brains working on this. And, and shall I keep going about Falcon or is that kind of..

Stephen: I would love to know, like, why are you so, like, should, first of all, should other blockchains be as concerned, like, should they be focusing a lot of their attention? Because I don't hear, you know, you were the first website that I've, you know, perused from when it comes to blockchains and protocols that really address this, you know, quantum security issue or, you know, risk.

Do you think other blockchains should be paying more attention to this?

Staci: Yeah, we are, we're very concerned about this. I mean, we don't want people building on the Algorand blockchain or holding their money, their algos to be to have it taken away from them with quantum by quantum computers. Now, I, you know, I'm going to say a few more things about this. And then if you ask me a follow up question, I'm really not going to be able to, you know, answer it.

So I don't want to, I don't want to do two things. I don't want to, Pretend that we are more quantum secure than we are. And I don't want to pretend that I know more about this than I do, I will say that the, the Falcon signature scheme, which is what it, which, which is what we base this historical quantum security on is an, an acronym for fast Fourier lattice based compact signatures of NTRU and. It's the lattice base part, which is the most important. And so these elliptic curves, which are on a two dimensional Cartesian plane, are replaced with an n dimensional lattice. And you don't have to know very much math or very much cryptography to know, to just kind of intuit that an algorithm that is based on, you know, X and Y access is going to be a lot easier to break apart than an algorithm that is based on like an N dimensional lattice of all these different dimensions that you can't even imagine, right?

Like that's going to be harder to break.

Stephen: Right.

Staci: And so the quantum secure cryptography is based on this. Very elaborate kind of n dimensional lattice framework. The fast four year is it's based on fast four year sampling and that makes it very efficient and the signatures and enters the kind of lattice the signatures are compact and having signatures that are compact are very important for that for the usability of it.

Right? And so the, the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST sent out a global a global Call to see what kind of quantum secure cryptography they could you know, that the world could find. They ran this contest for 5 years and the falcon signature scheme is what 1 now. So if you ask me why I believe it. I mostly believe it because the National Institute of Standards and Technology ran a global.

Stephen: Right.

Staci: Contest and this one and hasn't been broken, you know, since so I think we're, we're, we're, we're looking very good so far and we just have to now apply this to the other elements of the blockchain and, and we are very focused on doing this in 2025.

That's a very important part of our overall roadmap.

Stephen: I love that. I love that. Talk to me about like, obviously having that security is peace of mind for a lot of the developers and, you know, protocols building on Algorand. How difficult is it to attract and keep protocols, developers building on your blockchain? One, because it seems like a lot of people are offering tokens and, you know, grants.

And it feels like people just jump from one blockchain to another, then another one has money that they're giving away. How do you, you know, obtain and maintain a healthy ecosystem of builders?

Staci: Yeah, you know, yeah. When I came, we gave a lot away, a lot of silly money. I mean, it was absolutely ridiculous how much money we gave and, and that's not sustainable. Right? And so we don't do that anymore. The community does have a grant program that it runs that we, I, we handed, I'm part of our decentralization.

We handed over a grant program to the community we were in beta for a while and we're we're going to roll it out fully this year. But. Yeah. You just have to have self discipline around that. Right. And if you have self discipline around that, you're not going to get the entrepreneurs. You're going to get the real builders the builders that are on Algorand.

When I got here, and we have many builders that are still here from when I got here. And when I got here, you know, when I got here, when I listening to her, what are the issues in every single person? I thought there'd be a range of issues, but really at the top of everybody's mind was this. is great tech, but it's impossible to build on.

It is not fun. The developer experience is not fun and it is, you know, terrible for all kinds of different reasons. So we, because we have the best tech in crypto, I said, you know, to the team, my CTO and I said, okay, we are in the excuse elimination game. This is what I'm, I'm always saying internally, we're in the excuse elimination game.

We just have to, we have the best tech, so we have to remove all the frictions to using it. So the most important thing to do, and this costs, you know, million dollars to do this was to have a coding environment that made sense. So now we have something called algo kit, which is very nice coding environment. And we introduced Python, not like a cousin of Python, not a special instance of Python, like absolute Python developer environments. We have a good developer environment. We have a good language. We're introducing TypeScript now. All of that stuff is makes it very easy now to develop on, on Algorand. So we sort of thought like. The hard part has been done for us because the brainiacs in Boston that built the underlying protocol, they built the best protocol. And so it is our job to make that protocol easy to use and easy to is easy to build on. And so we've been very focused on that, but I bring this up not so much to props to my CTO for for driving this forward, but to say to give props to the developers that have been around for so long because they were, they recognize the quality of the tech when it was not fun to build on. And I, and I, and I really think that's a, a tribute both to the underlying technology and to, and to them. And one developers, one builder said to me on another chain, big smart contract based OG chain. They said, you know, your success is your demise on that chain because it can't scale with you. We know, and we're gonna complain to complain to you every time we talk to you.

And this is. Terrible. This is terrible for us to go through right now, but we know once we get up the learning curve that this chain will be able to be with us for our on our quest of, you know, total world domination and whatever we can do, the chain can handle. And so that was the trade off they made, but but my job, our job at the foundation is to make that trade off go away. Right.

Stephen: And I think that's important because, you know, talking to a lot of founders that have layer twos or, you know, specific protocols, that was their concern with a lot of the bigger O. G. Changes that a wasn't specific. It did everything, which meant it didn't really do anything that they specific that they needed, right?

If you want to run, you know, gaming or gambling. Like, it wasn't great for that. It was great for just general use cases. And that was the trouble, but because it did everything and made doing specific things really, really hard. And then to scale those specific things to your point, even harder, I would love to know, you know, it's funny that you say like, we built the best tech, but nobody wanted to use, or it was like really difficult to use it.

Which, to your point, is a great problem to have. You just have to clean up, for the most part, the UI and add in the features that make things easier to use. How much are you leveraging AI? We're seeing so much use of AI and blockchain. And, hey, this AI can help you write a whole smart contract code and execute it and run it through a test environment and, you know, do a self audit.

Like, we're hearing AI do so many things. You're with the most technical people. Are you using AI? And maybe what are some of the limitations that people aren't talking about? For some of these blockchains are heavily using AI.

Staci: Can I just say, just so I don't get crucified by our engineering department, when I get off this podcast, that I don't think, I think they would be mad at me if I was to, if they were to think that I described all of the work that they did is cleaning up the UI. I mean, there was..

Stephen: We haven't made a lot of friends. Staci, we probably pissed off . We pissed off a lot of community Bitcoin Maxi. I think we took some shots at Solana and Tether, Ethereum.

Staci: Yeah.

Stephen: We're digging our own grave here. We might not be allowed to eat them for next year.

Staci: Right, it was a lot more evolved than that, but yes. So of course we are very, we try to be, and, you know, we're not the richest chain, right? So we are always looking for efficiency wherever we are. So our, our new head of Deverell actually, it's not so new anymore, but. He came in and he's like, our DevRel team needs to be able to scale. DevRel, this was in August. He said, DevRel is grounded for the rest of the year. Nobody's going, no, nobody in DevRel is going to any conferences. They're not doing anything. We need to update these developer docs. These developer docs are not in good shape. There's no zero to hero. They are not well organized and. It and they are not know, the examples are not identified properly. The versioning is not identified properly. There's old stuff out here out there for like previous things like this is not acceptable and that might not. That might be a a very important thing to have in a pre AI world, but in an AI world, it's critical because he needs to train those agents Transcribed On the developer docs, and he cannot have developer documentation that is out of date in any way, or examples that don't pertain anymore out there for it to be trained on.

So if you know, it's very much a matter of take, you know, measuring twice and cutting once, like making sure you have this, the groundwork for proper for, for the AI to help in the discord channels to have a much more AI driven. If you get the same. Question asked a million times, and the AI can answer the question.

Then our very smart DevRel guys can do more and more, you know, harder, harder to do. So that's an important way that we are, of course, using AI internally. I don't think that's exactly what your question is, though.

Stephen: That was the exact question is how are you? That's actually a really great use case and I'm very scenario based. I love, I love this like, Hey, we use it for this and that, but then that's exactly what I was trying to ask is like, what are you actually using it for versus a lot of people that say they're, they're using it in general circumstances, but it's like, okay.

They use AI to like clean up maybe their, their dev docs with chat GPT, with the wording. Right. But it's not like really to the core of their business.

Staci: Right, and I can be a bit, I can be a bit annoying talking about this. You know, we, you know, they come to me for Grammarly subscription. I'm like, everybody should know grammar. This is ridiculous. Like, well, I don't want to pay for Grammarly subscription. Everybody should know grammar. I mean, I didn't lose that fight actually, but. but I was looking, I was talking to the head of HR and we were trying to phrase this question for the annual reviews. was basically, what did you do that you, you know, like, as a, what did you try to do that you failed to do? But I was like, that's not exactly right because What if they tried to do something and they succeeded, but it was the wrong thing to do? Like, it has to capture both of these scenarios. And so we were talking about this, how to phrase this question, blah, blah, blah. And she goes, well, let's just ask, you know, ChatGPT, how they would phrase it. I'm like, we're not doing that. That's ridiculous. She's like, let me just, and so she's talking to me, but she's putting it on the side.

She's putting it in. And it did come up with a very nice way to phrase it was kind of okay. And then she wrote back. Could you say the same thing a little bit night, a little nicer, you know, maybe a little, and it came back again. I was like, okay, fine. I raised the white flag. It did a very

Stephen: yeah, yeah, it's useful. It's useful as a thinking partner before we, you know, end the conversation. It's been a great technical conversation. Talk to me about what keeps you up at night as a CEO of a blockchain. You know, I know there's obviously financial crime risk, exploit risk, DPRK risk. But what are some of the things, you know, when you have, you know, a large team, 80 people, a hundred people I'm assuming the, you know, people is very important.

It sounds like a lot of the conversations you've had today is how important and how technical the people that have been really driving some, not just your team, but the, the builders on the blockchain. So tell me about like, what's. Your concerns as you go through a day to day or start a new year.

Staci: Yeah. Thanks. Well, I, you know, just on the AI, just two quick things. Like we, we, we are very interested in the area of AI to agentic payments is one idea. Yeah. Another idea that we're thinking very hard about is of course, the, the validity of information. And so how to, how to, you know, make sure that you understand what's valid and what's not.

And so a blockchain can enable good AI. So it's not just about our back office is my point, but I, you know, I feel a certain responsibility to this ecosystem, right? I don't like it when we are, you know, we were in the, you know, we were not in the top 50 for a while. And this. It just drives me absolutely crazy and I feel very like person, kind of personally responsible for it.

Like I just absolutely hate it. Like we should not be in the top 50. I mean, we should not be out of the top 50. We need to be in the top 25. We need to be in the top five. And I said, you know, famously, we need to be in the top five by 25. And, you know, thankfully for me, we moved up a bunch of spaces. And, but our, but our strategic plan this year is top 25 by the end of 25. And we look very carefully at if we were going to do that, what did we need to do? And we have some very ambitious goals this year to very well research to look at the top 25 chains. What do they do? Like how many developers do they have? How many applications do they have building on there? What is the, you know, their user growth, blah, blah, blah. Where, what is the, what is the delta between where we are and what they need to get, where we need to be in order to have those same metrics. This is the kind of thing I'm like super focused on and I'm not focused on chasing this or doing that. And, you know, people can build whatever they want on Algorand.

This is like, let a thousand flowers bloom, but. I am relentlessly focused on, and so is the executive team, very relentlessly focused on what metrics do we need to move to make sure that we look like, and we, we, we compare ourselves very well in some things against those chains, but like across the board, we need to have the same, you know, transaction volume, we need to have the same active users, we need to have the same user growth, we need to have the same developer onboarding, we need to have share of voice, right? Solana for all of its technical flaws, if the share of voice is incredible on that chain. You know. In fact, when we're comparing ourselves to chain, we take Solana out and see how we do against everybody else, except for Solana, because they're just so, you know, how, how is it that we get there and how, how is it that we spend money properly and smartly, and you have to, to say no a lot, you have to get people, people are pissed off at you, but you have to, and You, we need to, we are not, we don't have the luxury of supporting, of keeping things on life support aren't going to make it on their own.

We, we need to support winners. We need to help companies that, that have product market fit and that can make it on their own and we're there to help them. That's what I spend a lot of sleepless nights worrying about.

Stephen: I love how transparent, like completely transparent you are. I think a lot of CEOs will have a tough time saying like, Hey, we're comparing ourselves here, we're measuring ourselves. But I'd love to know, like, you know, a lot of the traffic right now is being driven by this, like, token creation, meme coins, speculation, culture, which might skew some of those transaction value volumes, might skew some of the things that are in your metrics.

How do you be like, yes, we want to get a certain metric, but we also don't maybe want to do exactly what that chain is focusing on to get there. Is it a chicken and the egg? And then it's like, well, hey, if this is what customers want. Why aren't we doing it? That's why I think I have a tough time. You know, we always see when a new blockchain or a new crypto exchange launches, like a very speculative meme coin.

We're like, yeah, they're not really the judge and jury, but it's also is that, are they doing the, you know, the best due diligence for their customers? Not really a question, just kind of maybe your thought process of how do you balance like, hey, we want to be leading the board in some places, but we might not want to do exactly what it takes to lead that specific category.

Staci: Right. But you know, layer ones don't really launch meme coins, right. So

Stephen: Right.

Staci: if you want a meme coin culture, we have a, I think a pretty good meme coin. I mean, some of them drive me crazy. They at me all the time on Twitter. You know, every meme coin at me all the time. But you know, they, they, they are very entrepreneurial and fun and, you know, younger than I am, frankly, group, right?

So they, We have a good meme coin culture, but you know that that has nothing really to do with the, with the foundation. This blockchain has to deliver them the tech so that they can launch things very easily and quickly and without paying a lot of transaction fees. And then, then, you know, this blockchain can be really whatever it wants to be.

Stephen: I love it. Looking forward to 2025. You talked a little bit about your focus on quantum security. Is there anything else on the roadmap that you're excited about launching? Or just anything in the ecosystem that has you like, Oh, this is very interesting. I never, we haven't talked about this at the conference yet.

And that's coming up a lot more from what you can see already in 2025.

Staci: I think one thing I do want to say, because I I just had a demo of this last week. They gave me a demo of it. It's just so cool. So we have ex Govs, ex governors are so if you are, and we just launched staking rewards. So this was a really big deal for us. And so now. You will, if you are participating in the security of the network, you will be rewarded for doing that.

This was a long project, multi year project. Went live without a hitch. We have removed a couple of hundred million dollars of algos that the foundation had securing the network because the community has stepped up and you should run a node yourself. It's very easy, Stephen, to do this, I tell you. It's 30, 000 algo minimum balance, but if you don't, if you don't want to commit that much, you can join a ready pool. And just commit as what as you want, as much as you want, you'll be part of this pool and you will earn algos for doing so. So I. It's very, very easy to do. So that was a big deliverable this year. Very big deliverable. But if you do propose transactions to the network, you are then what we, you become an ex gov.

And we had different qualifications for it in the past. But right now, if you are participating in the security of the network, you're an ex gov, and as an ex gov, you are going to be increasingly responsible for things on Planet Algorand. One of the big ones is that you will, the entire grant program will rest with you, so you're going to have to turn yourselves into little VCs. and approve things and money to give, to give to projects. And we, we rolled out a pilot to do that last year, the tooling around it was terrible both to propose something if that, if you, if you, if you wanted money for what you were building and also to vote and to understand and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And so the, so we have a couple of guys. Building this thing for the last, you know, six, seven months, and it's not even going to be live until Q2, a tool where this voting will be on chain, completely on chain, everything about, because a lot of blockchains have this, but it's not on chain.

Stephen: Right.

Staci: so everything will be on chain. And this thing is gorgeous, and I cannot wait to I cannot wait to for it to launch in Q2. So that's something that I'm pretty excited about that. I'd mentioned the quantum security. We are also going to really start doubling down on privacy. Come up with some good privacy offerings will never be more narrow, but. We want to make

Stephen: That's probably a good thing.

Staci: Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully, you know, in the new environment in the United States, we'll be able to, know, offer the same things that we offer to the rest of the world to American citizens, right? I mean, it's a shame that American citizens can't participate in some of the things that folks can in the rest of the world.

So. So, yeah, we, we have a lot,

Stephen: And when you say that, are you focused? Like when you say that statement, is it more on like the private investment side? Like, Hey, a regular American can't invest in these. You know, private, you know, industries that..

Staci: Some of the, some of the things that are built on Algorand. You can't use if you're a, you're a us citizen. Right. some of the, some of the things on other chains too. I can't like, I can't try, you know, making a payment on telegram, for example. Right. Because like, I can't, I can't do that as a us citizen.

Right.

Stephen: right,

Staci: you know, I. You know, we just need a level global playing field for crypto and, and, you know, President Trump has said that he wants you know, the U. S. to be a leader, but I think most people in crypto are like, great if we're a leader, but please can we just, can we just like compete on a level playing field because we've been competing with a, you know, chain tied to our ankle for, for years now, right?

So, We don't need handouts so much. We just and I will give this administration some credit as well as well for moving very quickly on on some of the getting rid of some of the nonsense and and the SEC. I credit them because it's not always that easy to say. Yeah, we were wrong. And we're shifting course.

And they've dropping some of this more onerous. This more onerous litigation, so very, I'm quite hopeful, actually, but but busy. I mean, we're so busy.

Stephen: The SEC is in a tough situation, right? Everyone loses money in the industry. They're like, where was the SEC to protect us? As you see, it goes after what they think, or maybe a little bit, you know, overreaching and then everyone's like, Hey, back off a little, give us a chance to be innovative. And it's like, they're really in a tough bind as soon as somebody launches a meme coin that rug pulls, like everyone's calling on the SEC to get involved, but you know, they can't just be getting involved like that and not, you know, go after some of the things that, you know, people have used and like, and, you know, rely on, which is a tough position to be in.

But yeah, I think you're right, not that you said this, but I think clarity is what, you know, most people are asking for. We don't need to be the leader, just give us some clarity so that we can do something and not feel like, Oh, someone's going to come after me with a lawsuit in the next three years.

Staci: Right, exactly. Yeah,

Stephen: I love this. Staci, where can people find you? You're probably at every conference and every board meeting, but where do you like to interact with the general pop?

Staci: Mostly I, you can find me on Twitter on X. I, we are also Bluesky is very Web3 native. And so we are amping up our presence on Bluesky as well. And we I, I get yelled at by my marketing team all the time, because we're really expanding into Instagram and TikTok and all of these things.

And they would like to see me a little bit more out there, but my home is on X, I guess. Yeah. That's where you can always that's where you can find me and X and Bluesky, I think will be the, my main ones.

Stephen: I love that. I love that. Staci, thank you for spending so much time and giving us like, demystifying some of these complex things that Algorand is working on. And it does sound a lot more simplified than maybe a lot of other blockchains. And it's exciting to see you grow and scale to the top.

Staci: Thanks Stephen. I appreciate this so much and not just. You know, about Algorand, but just like what you do for the industry. And you, you're, you're a sane voice and you're calm and you're not like a hypester, but you're smart. And you're, you've got a great, you've got a following and a great niche you have for yourself.

And I, I'm honored to be, I'm honored to be on your podcast.

Stephen: I appreciate it. I don't think anyone would say I'm not a hypo. I'm hype, but I'm not like hyping up, maybe some of the things that people would expect me to hype up when I'm this loud and yelling I love talking to such fun people that I've seen both sides of the industry, because I feel like you come with so much perspective, but, and especially, you know, you know, times that by the international exposure you've had, this has been a really interesting conversation.

I really appreciate you.

Staci: you saying that.

Stephen: Thank you.