Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, Around The Coin Podcast. We had Naveen Jain, who is a contributor to the Tari universe. Honestly, this is kind of amazing, everyone, you know, mining your own cryptocurrency using nothing but a laptop or a computer, he talks about why that's important, why confidentiality as a feature, and, you know, why is that important to us?

You know, when everyone's seeing your financial statements. On, you know, certain blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin and everything. And with the advent of blockchain investigations, you know, we're going to be able to trace those transactions 20 years from now, when we get more digital, this is all going to be very relevant and Naveen really breaks it down and so passionate, you know, But the first half of this episode to all my payment tech crypto entrepreneurs, I go deep about his serial entrepreneurship.

He's candid about what he's investing in, how much the checks he was cutting. He even goes into some of his, you know, angel investing as well as him being the entrepreneur and what he's working on back in Silicon Valley. And then the last half. What about 45 minutes we go deep into some fun things about what are they doing at Tari?

What is making this different from other protocols out there? And why on earth would they start out one layer one blockchain and he fills in all the gaps really great episode I really hope you guys sit through the whole thing. So I think you'll get some value out of And you get some, you know, he does share his screen and shows us how we could also, you know, mine our own, uh, cryptocurrency like Tari from their network.

It's about to go on, you know, main that they're still in test net. So this is kind of like an exclusive feature. We normally don't do this, but I had such a fun conversation. I, you know, I part of them to, to give us all the good stuff. So definitely listen to this episode and let me know what you think.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant. The Around The Coin podcast welcomes Naveen Jain. Now, there is some confusion about the name, but this is a different Naveen Jain. He is the contributor of Tari and Naveen. Why don't you just give a quick introduction of who you are. I'm not going to dive into your, you know, your vast amounts.

I think I spent seven minutes on LinkedIn scrolling through every single project that you've invested in, contributed to, or just, you know, advised. So I'm really interested to kind of go through some of those Pick out, you know, what were some of the winners, what were some of the losers? What did you miss out on?

But tell us a little bit quickly about, you know, who Naveen is and how you got here.

Naveen: Yeah. First of all Stephen, thank you so much for having me. Really honored to be here. Yeah, so, I have a background in, you know, computer engineering. I, I studied at Purdue for a year. I dropped out and then I bootstrapped my first company in the music space. And so I basically started from nothing and started building websites for artists.

And and running online stores for artists and built that to a pretty sizable business. Then I bootstrapped my second company in the logistics industry had an opportunity to put a non profit project I co founded through Y Combinator and then started angel investing in startups. So I've angel invested now in, I don't know, it's a lot, it's probably close to a hundred or more companies at this point or projects, companies and projects.

Companies like Flexport and Squire and, you know, Layer Zero and many other things. And then I got involved directly in the crypto space in 2016 as a Monero miner. And then I started contributing to the Tari project in around 2017.

Stephen: I think that's where we're, you know, this very conversation is, you know, PRI privacy coins is still a hot topic. I was at an event with KPMG Large Consultancy, Chainalysis, Blockchain Analyst Company, and the regulator in Canada was there, FinTrack, and they still have, like, privacy coins as, like, a huge concern for them.

Like, I want to ask them, like, how many instances do you see a report about suspicious activity, you know, in cryptocurrency involving privacy coins? I was a blockchain investigator. It doesn't come up as much as I think people Think it would because of the nature of it and we'll dive down deep into that.

And, you know, maybe play a little bit of a devil's advocate on both sides of the table. Now you're a serial entrepreneur. You were in YC in 2014. As an entrepreneur, we have a lot of entrepreneurs listening to this podcast. I'm an entrepreneur. When I think of, like, starting and building another business after, you know, dedicating my whole life, like, that's the last thing you think of while you're in the midst of a business.

Is that a different environment when you're in, you know, Silicon Valley and YC? Is it just like a natural state of mind? Is it a mindset like, hey, I'm going to build this hard. If it works out, it works. If it doesn't, pick myself up, take my learnings and build something else. And like, how did you manage, you know, maybe even failure or discouragement through that process?

Naveen: Yeah, 100%. So my view is that being a entrepreneur is a blessing. You know, it's really hard. I mean, you know, this as an entrepreneur yourself and anyone who's listening to this knows that being an entrepreneur is the way I kind of view it. It's sort of like getting punched in the face on the daily.

You know, however, it's an opportunity to build something that you're really passionate about, right? Like, it's an opportunity to do something, achieve greatness in, like, around something that you care about. And that's very different than being, like, you know, an employee or working for someone else. And, and entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, you know, I think that's one of the challenges is that there's a lot of like romanticism around being an entrepreneur, but it's, it's gritty, man.

It's really gritty. I mean, you got to get in there and you got to roll up your sleeves and you got to really want it. And there are days where you wake up and you're just like, today is going to suck. And you've got to kind of, you know, say whatever affirmations you say in the mirror, you know, in the morning.

You And, and just like kind of make it happen. And so I don't know, I, I love it. I mean, the last time I had a job was when I was, I think, 18 or 19. I was a bank teller for a summer. That was my last job. So I don't really know anything else. I just know that I feel really blessed to be able to build stuff.

And yeah, obviously I hope and pray people like the stuff that I get to work on. That's important for many reasons. So yeah, that's kind of how I see it.

Stephen: I love it. You know, you brought me back to 18 with that hat, Rage Against The Machine. Cause I remember that in high school, like Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against The Machine. I remember a lot of those bands on people's, you know, stick back in the day, stickers were huge in locker rooms, but take me back before 18.

There was any tendencies that you had? Like I remember in grade two, like going door to door and selling like fake, you know, diamond earrings with my friend or shoveling the driveway when everybody else was, you know, playing and I was shoveling the driveway to get 10. Was there some things that you realize now, like, Oh, I was kind of like, just wired a little bit differently than everybody else that, you know, at that age or maybe enjoying their childhood the right way.

Whereas I was always thinking from like a business or an entrepreneurial perspective.

Naveen: yeah, good question. Well, so before 18, you know, I was really, really involved in let's just say, like, alternative communities online related to crypto. Things like wares and other kinds of things. And so I definitely had, you know, I guess, tendencies around building my own thing and kind of like marching to my own drumbeat.

I mean, my, my parents are immigrants from India and there was a lot of expectation for me to become a doctor or become a lawyer or like some other form of. An engineer perhaps, you know, like some other professional thing. And so I, I remember, you know, the phone call with my parents where I told them that I'm dropping out of school and you can imagine that didn't, that didn't exactly go very well.

So, yeah, I, I think I've always had sort of a, a vibe of just being, You know, marching to my own drum beat and doing something different. And that's certainly started before 18 and is like carried all the way through to today with, with how I operate and what I get, what I, what I do.

Stephen: Do you feel like there's that, is there a lot of pressure? Like, you know, you hear the story, especially with, you know, Indian, you know, that, Doctor, lawyer, like, engineer. Is that like the real pressure? Like, is family members calling you from back home and saying, Naveen, what are you doing? Like, is it real, real pressure?

Or is it just kind of that like underlying expectation? And do your parents have a different view now that they've seen you successively navigate this world? Has that opened their eyes if they're still here with us? Has that opened their eyes or other people's eyes like, Hey, there's another way to do this.

There's another way other than school and, you know, you know, in a job that may not fulfill you to, you know, achieve the same type of happiness or success.

Naveen: Yeah. So I think the, the pressure is real. That being said, you know, my, my dad was also an entrepreneur. And so I think he had especially more of an appreciation and understanding of. Okay, you know, here's someone who wants to, you know, build their own thing, do their own thing. And I think it was more for him, you know, am I really willing to do the work?

You know, am I really willing to like, hustle? Because again, you know this, everyone who's listened to this knows this. If you aren't willing to do the work, if you aren't willing to hustle, and, and I think, you know, One of the things about being an entrepreneur is you have to be willing to do any job, right?

And, and, and do it with like gusto. Like you have to really, really, really want it. And so I think when he saw that in me that, okay, hey, he really wants this. He's willing to do the work. I think then the pressure was kind of off. I also think that starting, you know, my first, I started my first company when I was 19.

And I think that's a really good thing for people to consider is like when they're really young. Start something because you don't have other pressure, right? Like now I'm married, I have kids, you know, like there's all kinds of other pressures that come up as people kind of grow up and, and, you know, they're, you know, the, the, the numbers start to fly in terms of age and you get to different stages of life.

So I think, you know, again, I feel super blessed that I was able to like do that and, and someone out there gave me opportunity You know, was willing to give me a shot with regards to the first business I built. Otherwise I frankly wouldn't be here with you today.

Stephen: You famously, you know, were known for like cold calling Link Linkin Park with, you know, which is huge. I think they're, you know, their front person has passed since, but maybe just walk us through that, you know, that scrappiness and grittiness. Like what even, you know, how did you even get a number to get in contact with them?

Or did you go to like their old WhatsApp page? Like not even WhatsApp back then. Like did they have I forgot the name of the platform we used to use, like, MSN Messenger MyPage. Did you go to their MyPage site and, like, message them, like, how did you get in contact with Linkin Park?

Naveen: Yeah. So I had started a a web development company. The company is actually still around, although now it mostly focuses on e commerce. It's called SparkArt. And what happened is I, I'd started building websites for like local businesses in the San Francisco Bay area, which is where I'm from. And I went to go see an A Perfect Circle show at the Warfield in San Francisco.

And after the show, there was a gal out front what we call the street teamer in music business like Parlance. And she was handing out cassette tapes for new bands. And one of the tapes I happened to pick up was a sampler tape For Linkin Park. And I remember listening to the tape. I know for a fact, One Step Closer was on the tape.

I don't, I, it's probably One Step Closer, maybe Papercut. I don't remember like exactly which songs. It was like two or three songs on the tape. It's like a sampler tape. Right. And I remember just like thinking they were incredible, you know, there. I was like completely blown away. You know, I was really into, you know, heavier music at the time.

You know, I was listening to like lots of Korn and A Perfect Circle and Limp Bizkit at the time, you know, like that was sort of the era, right? Like that was the time for this kind of stuff. Like I was also listening to like Alice In Chains, Rage Against The Machine. And I visited their website and I, I just thought that I could probably help, you know, I just thought like, maybe I could, again, I was running a web development business, so I just thought like, maybe I can help these guys, you know, and, and.

and make an impact. And I did a who is on the domain and they actually had a real phone number registered, right? They actually had a real number registered at the time because the band wasn't big, right? This was like a baby band playing like clubs. And this was you know, before Hybrid Theory came out so they weren't, like, huge.

Like, everyone thinks about Linkin Park today, and they think about this, like, giant, super successful band, which, obviously, they are. Oh, incredible. And by the way, they just, they're back now. Like, they have a new lead singer, and they're touring again, which is incredible. And the new lead singer is amazing.

Her name is Emily, and she is, like, Seriously incredible. If you've not heard her sing, she is amazing. And anyway, so I cold called the number. That's where that story comes from. And Chester's brother, Brian Bennington picked up the phone and I kind of cold pitched him on the fly. I was like, look, you know, I'm a fan.

I would love to help with you know, the Linkin Park website. I think I could really, really help. I have a bunch of really creative ideas. And he said, you know, I think the band is playing a show in San Francisco. in the next whatever amount of time, why don't you meet up with them? And I was like, okay, let's go.

Let's do it. So the band opened for another band called Orgy. So it was Linkin Park, and it was a live 105 Halloween show at the oh, what was the name of the venue? It was the Maritime Hall. And Maritime Hall, I think, no longer exists. Like, I don't think this venue even exists anymore. And I remember pulling up.

It was a 21 and up show. I remember, like, calling Mike because I wasn't 21 yet. So Mike had to, like, kind of, like, say I was just, like, part of the band or whatever, like, helping the band and kind of, like, sneak me in. And I remember, I, what I really remember. is the band's performance because I remember two things.

I remember the band's performance because there was basically no one there because, you know, Hybrid Theory, I think at that point, had just come out. And so they were still like early in their rise, you know, and I was one of maybe like, I don't know, a couple dozen people there, maybe getting to listen to Linkin Park play Hybrid Theory front to back which is crazy to think about, right?

Because they're so huge. You just can't imagine that. And and then the other thing I remember about them was they stayed after that show to sign every autograph. Like any fan that wanted to stay after, it didn't matter how tired they were. Didn't matter what was going on. Like they stayed after to sign every last autograph.

And that just made a huge impact on me. Cause I was like, these guys really care. Like they care about their craft. They're incredible musicians. The music is off the charts. Hybrid Theory is like all hits. It's like one of the most iconic records of all time. And they are willing to do anything and everything for their fans.

And that carries through to this day, you know, like to this day, that's just how they operate. And so, so yeah, I had an opportunity to work with them. You know, for many years, you know, Hybrid Theory through like minutes to midnight, I ran linkinpark. com. I, you know, built the first Linkin Park Underground,

Stephen: What were you helping with? Was it like, patching in, you know, paying for merch? Like, what were you helping with back at that time? Was it just like, hey, we just did a song, taking clips, putting them on the website.

Naveen: No, I ran the, I built the website. Like we built, we designed, developed, hosted, this is pre AWS. So LinkedPark. com was hosted on servers that I owned and were like racked and stacked in a data center because there was no AWS. And I remember the website traffic was so nuts. We just had to keep adding servers.

Because it was Linkin Park, right? The Linkin Park forums had their own server because like that we had over, we had like over a million registered users on the message board at peak, right? This is like peak hybrid theory, right? I remember launching the first Linkin Park underground. I mean, it was insane.

I mean, you know, it was like a fan club for the biggest band in the world, right? At the time. And so yeah, I mean, all their digital marketing stuff I was involved with. Be They gave me the opportunity to be involved with everything. And so that was, I mean, I'm very, very lucky that I had the opportunity to work with them in that capacity because they're superstars.

Who am I? I'm just a dude, you know, who's like building websites, right? I'm, I'm a nobody. And I..

Stephen: That open up other opportunities? Maybe, obviously, you have lots of artists. G Eazy, I think Hootie and the Blowfish, I remember from back in the days. Little Wayne. Do you have an opportunity to have the same relationship with other artists where you're meeting them and, you know, organizing or is it more back end?

Naveen: Yeah. No, I mean, I think when you're in the music business and, you know, obviously we had a lot of success with, Linkin Park, I had an opportunity to do similar work for, for Korn and Slipknot, Carrie Underwood, The Killers you know, had an opportunity to work a little bit with Lil Wayne, many others.

You know, when you're in the music business and you're working directly with artists, you know, the artists really care. Like the artists. are, you know, they're masters of their craft. They really understand culture. Like every single one of these artists are literally defining culture and, you know, how a fan interacts with them deeply matters, right?

So they do care about their websites and they care about, you know, ticket prices and how fans are able to engage with them around merchandise or other, other sorts of you know, sort of like mediums. And so, yeah, I've had plenty of opportunity to spend time with artists that I'm a huge fan of, or that I think are, you know, rock stars, and yeah, that's definitely part of the gig.

Stephen: That's awesome. And then you go on like an investing, what some would call bootstrapping marathons, I think, what I wrote down here, where you take several companies for seven to eight figures. Walk us through the process. We have so many people from payment, tech, crypto, entrepreneurs listening to this podcast.

Walk us through the process of decision making of what looked like a good opportunity for you to start a business versus what looked like a shiny ball syndrome where you're like, Hey, this is popular. And how did you keep from like jumping over to something else? Or maybe you did that during the time where you're jumping over to something else, did you put someone that you're like, Hey, that's an operator, they can handle this while I'm, you know, start, you know, spending a little bit of time building up something else.

Walk us through that process. Cause when we hear it, it's your entrepreneur. It sounds good on paper. But like, as an operator, it sounds like extremely stressful to be managing, or at least have your, you know, headspace involved with so many different projects.

Naveen: Yeah, so, at the beginning I definitely had a lot of shiny object syndrome, for sure. I would definitely, you know, I built a pretty successful Facebook game, you know, when Facebook first launched their platform. You know, I built a analytics product that was really successful in the music business for several years.

You know, I build a lot of different things and but didn't necessarily put all of my energy into any one of those things, right? And it took me several years to really learn that if you really want something to be massively successful, you, you have to focus, like focus is. And so, you know, what I ended up doing is saying, okay, I'm going to have a world where I have several business units.

I'm going to hire people like if, if it's not going to be my focus, it has to be someone's focus. And that's totally cool. So I'm going to, I'm going to work with other people who can make it their focus. And like really work closely with them as much as I need to so that I can have the opportunity to do what I want to do in terms of where I want to focus my energy.

And then as it relates to investing in other entrepreneurs, to me, it's always about the people, right? So over time, I've learned a lot about, you know, I've refined my filter, if you will, in terms of, you know, what is the right kind of person, what is, You know, maybe not as not the right kind of person in terms of someone that I'm willing to back.

And it really comes down to how much does the person want it? Like, are they, do they have that fire in the belly? Are they willing? Cause look, reality is vast majority of startups and companies fail. Right. But most failure is essentially suicide, not homicide. You know, people basically giving up because they weren't able to raise the capital or they weren't able to make it, you know, figure out how to get product market fit or whatever the challenge was that, you know, came, came up in their business.

And the best entrepreneurs are willing to just find a way, right? They're just willing to, they're willing to like dig really, really deep and find a way. And those are the entrepreneurs that are, end up being like the best people to back, right? So, you know, I had a couple early wins as a angel investor, which again, very lucky.

Actually the very first check I wrote is a company that got sold to Square or sorry, Block, Block Inc, whatever Jack Dorsey's company is called..

Stephen: Whatever he calls it now.

Naveen: Yeah, whatever he calls it now. So, which doesn't really happen. You know, what I did before I started angel investing is. I met with some other famous angel investors and got their advice.

So one of the key pieces of advice I got was if you're going to start angel investing, you have to write at least 20 checks. Like don't, don't write like one check and expect, Oh my God, I'm an angel investor now. And I'm going to like make all this money because it's kind of a numbers game. You kind of have to look at it as, okay, I'm going to invest in some things.

There's definitely going to be things that fail. You're never going to have 100 percent hit rate. And every, every investor loves to talk about their wins. They don't really talk about their losses, right? They, you know, that's just also natural. And so, so that, that's what I committed to. I was like, all right, I've got a pool of capital.

I can, can, I can commit to writing at least 20 checks. And let's just see what happens. Let's see if I can figure it out on my own. So I started meeting with tons of entrepreneurs in the Bay Area. And again, got some really, really good opportunities. In terms of getting in, you know, relatively early rounds of, of great startups.

And, and that's how I started my sort of angel investing part of my journey.

Stephen: And what was the you know, you don't have to go into specific details, but what was the average check do you think you're writing? Are we talking 25, 000 a check? A 100, 000 check? Or did it vary depending on, you know, how close you were to the project or to the entrepreneur?

Naveen: Yeah. I mean, so today my check sizes range from like, I don't know, 20 grand on the low end to, you know, 150, 200 grand on the high end. It just sort of depends on you know, my level of conviction, frankly, and the opportunity. You know, earlier on I was writing smaller checks, 10 grand, 15 grand, 20 grand, because that's all I had.

I'm not a venture capital firm, right? It's just, I'm just investing personal capital, right? So today, you know, I can invest more because, you know, I, I have, you know, made some money so I can, you know, invest more in things that I have conviction in. But that, that's my general sort of check size range.

Stephen: And do you have a rolling fund or is it just kind of you investing your personal money?

Naveen: It's me. I don't a rolling fund.

Stephen: 'Cause I'm assuming if friends you doing well they're like, hey, What if I gave you some money to go along with your money and we both invest in these businesses?

Naveen: I mean, I have done things where I've set up like SPVs with around certain deals, but generally speaking, I just I'm a builder, right? I'm, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm so focused on doing the thing that I'm doing that investing is sort of more of a hobby, right? It's not, it's not really like my number one thing.

And so I just don't feel like it's the right thing for me to go and say, Oh, I'm going to set up a fund because then I have a responsibility to these people that are, you know, trusting me to make good decisions in terms of their capital. So I've just decided not to do that. Maybe in a future phase, like maybe, you know, down the road, I'll say, all right, you know what?

Now my focus is just investing. I'm not going to focus on building anything. The thing that I'm building is an investment company, and I'm going to focus on that. I'm going to be, be a venture capitalist or whatever. And that's, that's a great choice. Like, That's something that maybe I will do in the future.

But right now I am really focused on building stuff and I, I don't want to divert my attention and focus on being responsible now for other people's capital.

Stephen: I love it. That's a really great approach. You say that not many, you know, angel investors talk about their losses. What were some losses or even misses where you're like, you know, I had a feeling about this company. Wasn't, you know, 100 percent convinced or I was focused on something else. I didn't cut that, you know, average check that I usually do.

And then it blows up and you're like, yeah, I could see how that could happen. It was a good company. I just missed the boat there.

Naveen: Yeah, I think you know, I obviously like, look, there's companies that fail all the time, you know, so we've definitely had our fair share of companies that. Just didn't work out. And that's again, totally natural. I've definitely had companies where I had an opportunity to invest. And I passed.

And those really sting, right? Like it really stings when it's a winner, right? Like, you know, I, I, there was a biotech company that ended up going public at like a crazy 8 billion valuation or something like that. And I had an opportunity to invest at a, on a 20 mil, you know, a post money cap safe.

And and at the time, when I go back and look back at that, the lesson that I learned there was. At the time, I thought the valuation was too high. And and, and instead of listening to my instincts, which were, this founder is a beast. And their business is remarkable. And what I always try to do when I'm investing is really try to understand the entrepreneur's vision and project like, okay, if I was in the shoes of this entrepreneur and I understood the technology they're building or whatever they're bringing to market, what could the world look like five years from now?

Or 10 years from now, assuming all the success in the world, assuming They meet every objective that they have set for themselves. What does the world look like? And this is one of those scenarios where I could totally see it. I was like, Oh my gosh, I could totally see it. I could totally see the world.

Being a completely different place with this company being wildly successful. But for whatever reason, I had this thing where I was like, gosh, I'm going to invest, I don't know, 20, 000 or whatever it was, some relatively modest sum at the time. And I just thought the price was too high and fast forward today.

Now my policy is if I really, really can see it, if I really, truly can like close my eyes. And imagine this business at like massive scale, like massive, massive scale, as long as the price is not completely crazy, right? Like as long, I mean, there's definitely still a boundary there, right? There's some bound..

Stephen: When you say crazy is it like you try to avoid the hype cycles like AI you're like hey this is a good company but everyone's overpaying you can't even I can see it as a non you know serious angel investor I can see what when there's a hype cycle and what buzzwords are being used and like hey whatever the valuation is it's a little too high no matter what the company is.

Naveen: Well, the, the, the problem is when you're investing early in things, you're investing in future value, right? You're investing in the promise of something you're not investing. It's. If you invest in some startup in the first round and it's like a 10 million valuation, there's no way they could sell the company at that moment for 10 million, right?

Like there's no buyer at that price because they've not built anything yet. If you're, especially if you're like first check you're, you're investing in the promise, like the promise of future value creation. And so what I always try to think about is now what I do, I guess sort of a refined filter is.

I look at, I try my best to imagine what it could be, and then I try to, try my best to imagine how the, the sort of value will evolve over time. Because at some point, someone is going to start valuing the business on fundamentals, right? Someone is going to say, well, You know, how profitable are they?

And, you know, all the different metrics related to a business. You know, what is their balance sheet going to look like? What is their cost of cost to acquire a customer? What's their lifetime value of a customer? What's their average revenue per user or whatever, you know, whatever the metrics are for this particular business, maybe it's a hardware business.

What's their landed bill of materials? What's their landed bill of materials? To MSRP ratio, or whatever the metrics are that.

Stephen: The metrics are coming out that they have to hit in order for them yeah.

Naveen: I'll give you an example. So it was a hardware business. So I have a general policy that I usually don't invest in physical product companies unless the landed bomb to MSRP multiple is at least 5x. So why is that? Why is that? Well, if you're making a physical product, so landed bill of materials is like the fully loaded cost to make the thing and ship the thing into the United States, into a warehouse to, for ready, to be ready to sell to somebody else.

Right. Like that's what landed bill of materials means. Right. So, And that includes taxes, duties, manufacturing costs, like all of it. Packaging costs, like the whole thing is landed bill of materials. So then you say, okay, so say it's some hardware product or whatever, and say the, the landed bill of materials is 20.

Okay. And, and they call you and they say, We're going to sell this thing for 40, okay? So that's a 2x multiple. But then you say to yourself, okay, well, gosh, what are all the other costs for running this business? You know, what is their, what are they spending on advertising? You know, what are they spending to acquire customers?

What are they spending if they're putting it into a retail location? What kind of a retail markup are they having to pay? You know, all of the expenses to run a business, like, It's just not enough. Like they don't have enough margin to pay for everything else that it takes to run a business.

Stephen: And they don't have enough buffer. Like we saw during the pandemic, supply chain, you know, to, you know, to bring in anything was like 3, 000. All of a sudden the supply chain companies are like, Hey, to get a crate over there, it's 9, 000. So to your point, if something like that happens, you're out of business.

There's no like room to wiggle. You're out of business. So I can..

Naveen: So, so, so what's better is, so if it costs you 20 to make the thing, well then sell it for 100. Now you've got plenty of room, right? So let's pretend like you want to put in a retail location and they're going to charge a 50% markup. So that means you're going to, your, your wholesale price going into the retailer is going to be 50.

They're going to sell it for 100. Well, even if you're selling it into the retailer at 50, you still have 30. So, so that, that's an example of, you know, just sort of like refining the filter over time, learning, you know, kind of school of hard knock style, right? Because what do I have? I, all I have is a high school diploma, right?

Like, I don't know anything. I'm just like a dude. And so, so, but you learn through school of hard knocks, like, okay, well, gosh, you know, I bet on this one company and their margin was terrible and they make a physical product and then it died. And then you look at the wreckage, you look at like, why did it die?

You go, oh yeah, they just didn't have enough margin. Oh, the other thing that's kind of a slippery slope is sometimes you've got on the phone with an entrepreneur and they'll say so another common, like, physical product thing is MOQ, Minimum Order Quantity. So they'll say you'll, you'll say, okay, what's your landed bomb to MSRP multiple?

And they'll say, oh, it's 3X. It's not quite 5X, right? And then, and then you'll say, well, how many do you have to make? What's your minimum order quantity in order to actually make your first run? And then what is the minimum order quantity to actually get the margin to where you want it to be, right?

And, and understanding that, because obviously in many industries, the more of something you make, the lower the cost is to make the thing or to make the widget, whatever the widget is. And, you know, so understanding that as well is very interesting because sometimes you can bet on a business that doesn't quite have the margin that you want.

But if they scale, it could have the margin. And so these are all the kind of really interesting variables that come up that are, that are super fun, you know, to sit down and talk to an entrepreneur about that really cares about their business and has a mastery of their, of the math, you know, mastery of the numbers behind their business and, you know, kind of, kind of pick through and then it helps you decide whether or not it's like a good investment or not.

Stephen: I love it. And this is, you know, Around The Coin, so I really want to get into your project, Tari. But, you know, you know, but it's still, I feel like sometimes, like, we have to hear these, these are the stories, I think, that help entrepreneurs is hearing what other entrepreneurs that are successful, what they're going through, what's the thought process.

Because now that you talk about Atari, I think it'll help people understand like, Oh, I understand his thought process about investment and entrepreneurship. This is how he's applying it to what he's built. So tell us, what are you building at Atari? Like I could read the website says open source decentralized protocol that reimagines the future of digital assets.

But like most websites, that's not gonna, you know, a string of really great words. Individually, I think people understand what that means. But when you put them all together maybe give us the five year old version of exactly what Tari, or at least the problem Tari is trying to solve.

Naveen: Yeah, sure. So Tari is a new layer one blockchain protocol. The way to think about it is it's sort of a next generation Ethereum or Solana with very unique and different design decisions that open up a new world of possibilities when compared to those other legacy projects. The things that make Tari very, very unique compared to anything else.

are are threefold. So the first thing that's really unique about Tari is Tari is a dual layer system. So there's sort of a layer one, and then there's also a native layer two. And the layer one for Tari is proof of work. And the reason why that's important is because when you think about these other systems they're pretty exclusive, right?

Like if you're a net new person, if you don't own any crypto today if you don't have a wallet, if you don't have an exchange account, like, imagine you know nothing about this industry and you want to get into, say, the Ethereum space or the Solana space. It's really hard. I mean, it's really, really, really difficult.

You know, just even setting up an account with an exchange is non trivial. You have to like provide your government issued ID. You have to set up a bank account. You have to move your money over. You have to buy the coin. You have to, I mean, it's like a lot. It's just a lot. And the average person. So one of the things I believe firmly, and I forgot where I heard this, is I didn't coin this.

I can't take any credit for it. But I believe it, and it's so true, is whenever you're designing a consumer product, every click that a user makes is a miracle. Every click is a miracle. So, when you have, when you create a process that has like 10 steps for someone to do a thing, you're asking for 10 miracles.

And the crypto industry is notorious for this, right? It's notorious. Everything takes way too many clicks. You have all these people out there who are focused on building protocols that have faster transactions per second, but no one is focused on reducing the number of clicks to do the thing. And so when you talk about on ramping, on boarding a new user, to go from zero to doing the first on chain transaction on Ethereum is in many cases, north of 10 steps.

That's 10 miracles that you're asking for. So, so what we did with

Stephen: In a pretty complex scenario too, right? It's a complex environment. It's not like clicking a form. These are very, hugely very complex processes that you're asking people to do. Some of those steps you have to go research exactly how you're doing them because you're scared that hey if I do it wrong I may lose my crypto or somebody may hack my account So I think that's important to know as well

Naveen: Yeah, 100%. And so one of the things we did with Tari you know, as a contributor is, you know, Tari is using what's called an ASIC resistant hashing algorithm which means that you can mine Tari on your existing Mac or PC. And that's really important because. It means that anyone can participate, you know, when Tari is actually live.

Tari is not live yet. It's just in testnet. But what that means is anyone could download software from the internet for free, install it on their computer, and then start to mine Tari. So what we then focused on is we focused on optimizing that user experience. So we built this incredible application called Tari Universe, and I'm going to see if I can share, can I share my screen here? Let's see. Let's see if this will work. Oh yeah, cool.

So, this is what Tari Universe looks like. And so this application is really kind of remarkable. This is the actual live application running on my, on my laptop right now. I have, I have a Mac. And all you have to do is download the software for free from the internet, install it on your Mac or PC, And open it up.

And instantly what it does is it creates a wallet for you in the background, doesn't prompt you with seed phrases or any other crazy stuff. And it instantly drops you into this experience where you are literally mining the Tari test net in this case. And what we've done is we've, we visualized the Tari blockchain as a tower.

And you're competing with all the other people who are mining at this moment to build the next floor of the tower. And when you are successful at building a floor, then you earn some Tari as a reward. And what's again, remarkable about this is it's literally like a couple steps. So you down, you download the application for free, you install it and you run it and that's it.

That's all, literally all you have to do. And so we..

Stephen: Who do you think your your target market would be for something like this? Is it just newcomers to the space or if it's like hey people are tired of trying to you know mine Bitcoin or Ethereum or contribute to these Huge mining pools, and they want to feel like they're contributing to something that's their own that they can control.

Naveen: so we actually have a hypothesis That blockchain protocols may be generational, like social networks. So if you think about social networks, you know, you start off with the Friendster era, then Myspace, then Facebook, then Instagram, then Snapchat, then TikTok, and each one of those social networks appeals to a different generation of person.

And what if blockchains are similar? So if you look at it from that point of view, you'd say, okay, well, what is the blockchain for Gen Z? What's the blockchain for Gen Alpha? Do we really think that a Gen Z person is going to go through those 10 steps? To onboard onto Solana or Ethereum, or is Gen Z going to be really hyped about the world's easiest side hustle, which is downloading Tari universe from, from the internet, installing it on their existing Mac or PC and letting it run while they're in class or they're working their job or doing whatever they're doing and earning Tari rewards.

Because this kind of inexperience doesn't exist for any other protocol. There is no other protocol that has an experience that is this easy. This is so easy that my mother, who's almost 80 years old, is able to run this on her laptops. When you ask who's the audience, the audience is anyone who is an early adopter, regardless of their age, regardless of their demographic, regardless of where they are in the world.

Anyone who believes that there should be a new financial system out there in the world and anyone who believes that the fiat system is not in service to them, right? So think about it this way. If you had a hundred thousand dollars in 2020 to have the same spending power. Now in 2024, you need 185, 000, right?

So we're all getting poorer by the moment, right? Like Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis. We are still in a financial crisis. All anyone has to do is go to the grocery store and look at the cost of like fruits or vegetables or eggs.

Stephen: Grapes are the killer. Grapes humble you. Grapes are like, yeah, I don't need those fruit. We'll go with whatever's a little bit cheaper, like apples.

Naveen: Totally. It's crazy. You, you go to like, you know, I have, I have three kids. So it's a busy house and we shop at Costco like many American families do. And when I, when we go to Costco and we look at the, there are two things that happen, which are crazy. So one is the cost of things, but then the other thing is shrinkflation.

Like when you buy a box of something, like it's a box of cereal or a box of crackers or whatever it is. And, and, you know, especially the boxes of cereal are notorious for this, where the box is a big box, right? It's like a, it's a Costco box. It's a giant box. But then you open the box and you're like, this is like 50 percent air, man.

Where's the cereal? It's 50 percent air. And then what, you know, there, there's tons of content on the internet about this, where what they do is they change the net weight. So you look at the box and it shows the weight and they say, it's the same box, same size box, but they change the weight of what's that's called shrinkflation.

Right. So what ends up happening is. You know, people out there don't feel wealthy. They don't feel financially secure. You gotta, you gotta remember in America, we have 90 million Americans that have an hourly job. The average hourly worker in America is working 2.1 jobs. So we're a nation of gig workers.

Okay. So the way we think about something like Tarih Universe is this is a product for everyone because this is the world's easiest side hustle. If you've got a Mac or PC, you can install Tarih Universe, and you can earn Tarih rewards, and anybody can do it. You don't need to be have a PhD in blockchains, you don't need to know what ZK rollups are, or zero knowledge proofs are, you don't need to know what stealth addresses are, or what MimbleWimble is.

You don't have to know about any of that stuff. You can download this beautiful application and you can install it yourself. So that's..

Stephen: I'm curious about, Naveen, is that if it's easy, that means everyone can do it. It's like creating content. It's like saying, well, everyone can create content, but now there's more content because the, you know, the barrier to access. Similar to the barriers of buying Bitcoin is extremely high due to complexities, cost, investment, and machinery.

If this is so easy, doesn't that also increase the difficulty if everybody's online trying to compete for Tari?

Naveen: Yes, but there's a deep connection between the number of humans who care about a network and the ultimate usefulness of the network. Right? So let's pretend success. And let's pretend that one day there's many, many, many, many, many people, whatever number you want to put on it. Thousands, millions. I don't care.

Whatever number it is. A lot. And there are a lot of people doing this. And imagine that that number is known out there in the world. Like, oh, did you know that there's a million people out there who are mining Tarih using Tarih Universe? That's really interesting. That's an interesting thing because now there's a million people who care about Tarih, who have conviction in Tari.

They're using their computational power of their computer to mine Tarih. They're helping to secure the network. The network is wildly secure. And that means the network is that much more useful, right? At the end of the day, something like this is intended to be a new value layer of the Internet. So I, I, I think that trade off, that idea of like, well, Naveen, what if there was only five people who were mining it and they got all the tokens, they got all the rewards?

Well, then I would argue, I don't know that those rewards are very useful to those people because there's only a couple people who care. Whereas if you knew there's a million people who care, Well, now it's really useful. Now you can really do something with it. Right.

Stephen: What are some of those use cases? So for someone watching this, they're like, Cool, let me, you know, send me that software, let me make some extra money. But what do they do? They have Tari. Like you mentioned the L1, N2, L2 aspect of it. So maybe just kind of walk us through the use case that you see in your head.

Like someone's mining this or is the use case is like, Hey, once we have enough people in the system, they can also build on top of it as easily as they can mine.

Naveen: Yeah. So, so the, there, as I mentioned, there were three key things that are unique about Tari. So I'll break down the other two things, cause I think they'll help answer your question. So the, the second thing about Tari that's really unique is is confidentiality. So, it's very interesting how in this industry, there's We call things privacy coins, but then we don't call everything else surveillance coins, which is peculiar because if you think about it, I don't know, Steven, there's no online tool that I can use to see your bank balance is there?

Stephen: No, the online, the transparency is I have two kids, so you know it's going to be low. No,

Naveen: that I can use to like see your credit card transactions in real time? Okay. So why do we think the future of finance? should be one where everything is out in the open for every single participant. I don't know if you know this, but you can Google an Ethereum wallet address and get the balance.

That's weird. That's not normal. As a consumer product person, one of the other belief systems that I have is that it's really important to meet users where they are. So if you really believe that and you go, okay, I want to meet users where they are. Well, users already have pretty significant financial privacy, right?

Like. There's no online tool I can use to see your bank balance. There's no online tool I can use to see your credit card transactions in real time. Know, if you think about it from a business point of view there's no business in the world that wants every employee to know how much other employees are being paid or how much customer A is paid versus customer, customer B or C.

Could you imagine if you're, if you're running a business, it's more like a consumer business. If anybody could see like a stack rank list of your top customers by revenue in real time. Nobody would use the system. Like, no, businesses wouldn't be successful. Like, I'll give you a real example. Imagine it's Delta Airlines.

And you could go on Doon Analytics, Delta Airlines was using, like, Ethereum for SkyMiles or something. And you could go on Doon Analytics and literally stack rank all of their frequent flyers by, like, revenue. And and that data was available for American and United Airlines. What, what would happen?

Those guys would be calling non stop. Non stop. They'd be poaching those people all the time. All the time. So, the idea that we've created these blockchain systems that are fully transparent, as what I would say is they're surveillance systems, we actually think that those systems are incompatible with the real world.

Capitalism. They're just not compatible with capitalism. You can't build a business that way. So, so why would anyone choose to build a business on Ethereum or on Solana? If you really zoom out and think about it. And so, so the way Tari works is Tari is default confidential. We understand in the Tari community that there's like really, it's really important to pay attention to compliance and regulatory matters as well.

So the way that Tari is engineered is any developer on Tari has a token or design some sort of a system on Tari, can design their smart contracts in a manner where they, as the developer, have full visibility into the transaction graph for their token. They can burn tokens, mint tokens, freeze funds.

They can have allow lists. They can do not have deny lists. They can report to regulators, you know, whatever they need to report to be fully compliant with, you know, whatever is required in their respective jurisdiction. And that's also very important, by the way, we live in a world that is a patchwork well.

Right. What is legal here in America may not be legal in Singapore,

Stephen: That was going to be my question. Obviously is that, you know, someone with a compliance background, a lot of listeners are going to be from a compliance background as well. The first thing is like, Hey, I understand it's a surveillance coin, but we have no other choice in order for us to interact with Tari or any other blockchain for that matter, we need to check off certain requirements and we don't lie.

We want to get into web three. We want to get into DeFi, but we still need to check certain requirements off in

Naveen: Yeah. So, so, so the goal of Tari is to enable you to have your cake and eat it too. Right. It's to say, Hey, look, you as the issuer, you as the developer have full visibility into your transaction graph. You can comply with. You know, maybe you need to fill out suspicious activity reports in the U. S. You need to comply with some money transmission license requirement in the United States or whatever, whatever the requirements are.

And you can do that on Tari. At the same time, the protocols default confidential peer to peer, which by the way, Kind of matches how the traditional finance system works, right? Like, again, I can't see your bank balance, but the bank can, right? Like, and the bank can report on whatever they need to report.

Or I can't see your credit card transactions, but the credit card issuer can, right? So, so to us, that is kind of like the right way to design the system. And also the other way to think about it is, You know, Tari is a protocol, right? So Tari itself as a protocol is not really focused on compliance because Tari itself isn't like an application that exists on top of the protocol, similar to the World Wide Web, right?

Like HTTP is a protocol that you use on the World Wide Web to like build websites. And the rules and regulations around websites are different in different countries. That's why when you're in Europe And you visit a website, you all see all those crazy privacy pop ups, cookie permissions and stuff.

And you don't really see that in the U S that's because Europe has different rules and regulations that we have in the United States, but the protocol doesn't care, like HTTP doesn't care about Europe's rules versus America's rules, right? It's, it's incumbent on the website developer to comply with whatever the rules and regulations are.

So that's kind of how we see the world from a confidentiality standpoint. And then the final thing about Tari that's very unique.

Stephen: Sorry, just to interrupt. Do you mind stop sharing? Unless there's something else that you want to

Naveen: Oh, yeah. No, sorry. I'll

Stephen: No, no, no worries.

Naveen: Yeah. So the other,

Stephen: they'll remove that part of the

Naveen: yeah, no problem. So then the other, the other thing about Tari that's really important to note is how we think about the developer experience. So again, Tari is like a layer one blockchain protocol. The primary audience for Tari is developers, right? Like you want developers to build really amazing applications.

The future of ticketing, the future of payments, the future of finance, you know, lending, like all these kinds of things are the kinds of applications you can imagine people building on Tari. Just like people imagine building those things on Ethereum or Solana. Those protocols have an Achilles heel.

And the Achilles heel is that they don't actually give developers what they want. What do developers want? That's the million dollar question, right?

Stephen: More tokens. More tokens is

Naveen: no. No, no, no. What developers want, more than anything in the world, is distribution. So, when you think about it if I'm a developer and I'm building say some sort of application, Why do you think developers are okay paying Apple an annual fee to be a developer AND 30 percent of gross revenue for every dollar over a million dollars?

Why do you think people are willing to pay so much to Apple? Similar amount to Google, similar amount to Nintendo, similar amount to Sony, similar amount to Steam or Roblox or any other platform that has tons of users. Why do you think The reason why is because they want the users. They want the distribution.

Stephen: Yeah, because 30 percent of a lot is way better than 100 percent of very little.

Naveen: Exactly. Okay. So now I want you to think about it. If you build an application for Ethereum or Solana, how do you get distribution? Right. And it's really hard. It's really, really, really difficult because the protocols themselves don't do anything for you. The best case outcome for you is a tweet.

Stephen: Yeah, so,

Naveen: the best case outcome for you.

Stephen: but they also have a lot of attention within communities within those, like, there is that sort of virality, maybe not directly from the platform, but from communities built within that platform and project. There's still that kind of virality that a lot of, you know, opaque blockchains don't get that same conversation, right?

Like people just say Solana and meme coins. The first thing you're going to do is run to Solana and see what meme coins are available, which opens you up a little bit to more distribution. Do you not think that way or no?

Naveen: I mean, devil's advocate, how do you discover a new thing on Solana? Where's the discovery?

Stephen: for someone to tweet.

Naveen: Okay. Right? So, so in order, in order for you to discover a new meme coin or discover a new Dapp, what do you have to do? Just have your eyes peeled to Elon's algorithm? Or do you have to be in the right group chats with other random crypto people?

Right? There's no app store for Solana. There's no place to actually go to discover. There's no place to search, right? So, and so, and this is like two sides of the same coin, right? So, and this is a critical problem, right? It's a critical problem. And there, there is no solution for Solana or Ethereum because there's no way for them to actually, at least I've not thought of a way You know, for them to actually solve this problem.

So we're solving this problem for Tari. So the way we're going to do it is Tari Universe, which is, you know, the thing I was showing you before, I'll show one more time briefly just for context.

So this product this is phase one of this product. Okay. This is version 1. 0 of this product. Version 2.0 of this product, when the Tari layer two launches is going to look more like this. So imagine that same exact concept. This is free software. You download it from the internet. Install it. It's crazy easy to use. Like my mom can use it. Anybody can use it. This isn't about like only crypto natives can do the thing.

There's a mining button. You can mine Tari right here. You have your wallet right here. And then you have something over here that looks a lot like an app store. And now all of a sudden you have the power of Tari at your fingertips. Any application, you can search for it, you can use it, you can imagine we can have latest dApps, top 10 dApps, different categories of dApps, like all the things that you can imagine in sort of like an App Store experience, we can actually, like, implement in this kind of a play, in this kind of way.

And what's crazy about that is that solves two problems. It solves discovery, so now you aren't having to hunt on Twitter or hunt in like random Telegram chats or WhatsApp chats. To hunt for the new thing, the hot new thing on Tari. It's right here at your fingertips. And then if you're a developer, this is huge.

Because maybe, maybe we do have a million people mining Tari using Tari Universe someday. Now you imagine that. Oh, wow. I have two choices as a developer. I can develop something on Solana and the best thing I'm going to get is a tweet. Or I can develop something on Tari And oh my gosh, they're going to, they're going to somehow, the community is going to give me this top banner for weeks.

And now I'm going to onboard all a million Tarih miners to use my application. Which one are you going to choose? And we think that we think the choice is obvious. We think that any developer given those two choices is going to choose to build on Tariq. So we think that,

Stephen: you've basically taken the OpenSea kind of UX and applied it directly to Ethereum for Ethereum projects. Is that a good assessment?

Naveen: well, but the problem is, is Ethereum doesn't have the distribution, right? So, so you can't, you won't have an application like this that exists for Ethereum. It'll never have the same number of users because there's no economic incentive to install it. See, Tari leverages proof of work mining to create the economic incentive.

So the reason why we have a chance of getting a million people to install Tari Universe, for example, is because they can mine Tari. There's no way to mine Ethereum, because Ethereum is now proof of stake. If you don't have at least 32 ETH, you're not actually like a real node on the network. You know, so, so you need to be rich already in order to play the rich person's game, which is an Ethereum game.

Same with Solana. If you want to run a validator node on Solana, you need to have a hyper powerful computer. Oh my God, crazy power. You know, like it's like a 300 megabit internet connection and like an insane amount of RAM. I mean, you have like, it's like nuts. So the idea here is to say, let's bring this back to earth.

Let's make it permissionless. Let's make it what Bitcoin was. Early on, like early on in Bitcoin, you could download free software from the internet. You can install it on your computer and you can mine Bitcoin on your PC. That's what Bitcoin was back when Bitcoin launched. There is no protocol that exists that is like that now, really, truly.

Tari wants to run it back and bring that concept back and modernize it and say, okay, let's, let's, that was the right idea, but let's implement it in a way that it actually works because Bitcoin doesn't work in that way. You need to have, you know, Really expensive hardware now to mine Bitcoin. You need to have ASICs, custom hardware.

And then let's augment the functionality of the mining software to solve multiple problems at once. We're solving a distribution problem, we're solving an accessibility problem, and we're solving a distribution problem and discovery problem all within a single application. And that is not something that is easy for other protocols to replicate.

Stephen: And how are you, you know, how do you solve for some of the missteps that other, you know, when we think about Solana, everyone talks about the downtime. It's not. Deal breaker, but something that conversation, you know, you hear in every conversation we talk about, you know, Bitcoin scalability issue, although we're seeing a little bit of a revival this year with L2 projects and people using Bitcoin to stake on you know, proof of stake blockchains, like, how do you avoid some of the missteps of the other blockchains?

Naveen: Yeah. I mean, look the best way to avoid the missteps is to learn from their mistakes. So, Tari has a native L2 that's very high performance, sub one second finality you know, very, very scalable. And, you know, we're paying very close attention to the challenges that other protocols have had.

And, and we're not saying that Tari is perfect. It's like. Tari is, you know, is early software. It's like in development. You know, who knows what challenges may arise. Tari in the future but you know, the contributors to Tari are a really smart group. They're really talented. They're paying very close attention to challenges that other protocols have faced.

And you know, I think the contributors have a really strong track record. You know, they have a really strong track record of building things that are, that, you know, have scaled to millions and millions of users. You know, we understand the trade off in sort of the design decisions that are being made, right?

So we know that proof of work systems know, can be hyper decentralized and you know, really permissionless and, you know, really, really interesting from a security model point of view, but we know that they're not very high performance, right? That's why, for example, with Ethereum, you have, you know, this like proliferation of L2s, but we know that the proliferation, the proliferation of L2s on Ethereum is also a problem.

It makes Ethereum really hard to use. You know what, you know, it's like, oh, someone's gonna send you Eth. Are they sending you ar? Arbitrary Eth, optimism Eth, zk sink Eth, scroll Eth. What flavor of Eth are you getting? You know, one, one time I was staking some Eth somewhere and I got paid in USDC.e I was like what the heck is that?

Stephen: where can I use that? Where can I catch

Naveen: Yeah. What does that even mean? USDC E and it's USDC E on an L two. So I think there's like a very serious kind of Rube Goldberg machine problem with Ethereum that a lot of Ethereum people are just not willing to talk about. And reason why the Tariq community has decided to have a native L2, a canonical L2, is because it, it makes it less interesting for other people to then spin up their own L2s on top of Tari when they're sort of a native one that everyone knows exists.

And there's like a, there's a singular token economy around it. So, so again, there's lots of thought, lots of you know, concepts and ideas and philosophies that have gone into the development of Tari over a very long period of time. Tari's been in development for seven plus years. So it takes a lot of effort to engineer something like this.

And you know, we're really excited because I think those three differentiating factors that I laid out for you, I think have the potential to make Tari a truly next generation protocol when compared to the competition.

Stephen: And what's the main use case? Because you said like, hey, you want developers in there to build. What, what are they looking to build? Has there been any like front runners? It's like, hey, a lot of people want to build. Whether it's, you know, maybe a DeFi application or like, Hey, we want strictly gambling. We don't want any of the other, you know, nonsense or, you know, disruptions that Ethereum has.

We want to do specific things, which is what we saw. A lot of L2s come into Ethereum for was just like, Hey, we just want to do a specific thing. Ethereum's too broad. We need to kind of narrow it down. What are some of the things that people are eyeing on the Tari note?

Naveen: I actually think that general purpose systems are okay. Right. I think like that specialization you're talking about, I think is happening because there's so many L2s. They're sort of like, well, We're going to be the DeFi L2. And then someone else is like, well, we're going to be the gaming L2.

So, hey, DeFi guy, we should be friends. Cause we don't really compete even though we kind of do, you know? I think that's like baloney, right? I think it's basically baloney. And so our view is that, Hey, these systems are really compelling because you can create really unique kinds of digital assets on them, right?

Like a digital asset created on something like Tari. It's kind of like a skeleton key, right? Can be something that can be used to unlock anything else on the system, right? You can have massive amounts of composability. You can do all kinds of really interesting things with these digital assets. , and those, those core primitives are applicable in the world of DeFi, collectibles payments you know, gaming, you know, all the same.

So, so the idea that I'm going to say, oh, You know what, Tari is limited to just like this one vertical. I think that's actually like an Ethereum invention in terms of that, like line of thinking. I think, and I think it's dumb. So the idea that we have for Tari is like, look, let's make Tari the best developer platform in the world.

And by best in the world, meaning we really solve the core problem that developers care about more than anything, which is distribution. And then let's enable those developers to build really cool things on Tari that range from payments. So for example, there's already a stablecoin issuer that is planning on issuing a US dollar Tari.

So why is that interesting? You know, there's a lot of stablecoins. Like, why, why do we need another stablecoin? Well, there isn't a stablecoin that is actually private, right? Like, by default, private, right? But still fully regulated. And that's valuable, right? Like, when you think about the front running stablecoins out there, they don't have meaningful confidentiality features.

So that reduces their usefulness. You can't really use them for business payments or other kinds of things at the level that you would want. So that's really interesting because Tari has confidentiality features. Now, Delta Airlines could use Tari for something like SkyMiles. You would never be able to do that on Ethereum because there's no confidentiality.

So why would they do it? Right? So Tari has unique primitives. Think about DeFi, you know, one of the biggest problems with DeFi is front running. Right. We call it MEV, right. You know, front running the whole idea that, Oh, I can look at the mem pool. I can see that you're about to do a transaction and I can eat your lunch.

I can front run you. I can sandwich attack you. I can front run you in other ways. And therefore you think you're going to get a hundred tokens out of the transaction. You really got 94 tokens out of the transaction because I, you know, arbed.

Stephen: think what was new to me and why that didn't make a lot of sense is like, especially when you're buying an NFT, if you know, if these miners in the mempool see that you're, a lot of people are buying a specific NFT, they can go front run your transaction by the NFT. Now you're out the gas, plus you're out the token.

And I think that's what we saw a lot during the 2021 craze. And

Naveen: It's crazy.

Stephen: hit people's, the average user's radar until much later. We're running low on time, but I want to just ask a couple of questions. I'm going to

Naveen: Well, one thing, let me just point out that the reason why I brought that up is because Tari is default confidential, which means that front running transactions is much harder. It's much harder on Tari because you have less available information to front run. So these are the kinds of things to think about when you think about Tari and you say, well, what kind of applications?

It's like, well, there's a lot of really unique things you can do with Tari that you just really can't do anywhere else. So, sorry. I'd be happy to answer

Stephen: I just wanted to ask you, because I think we've had a lot of, you know, whether it's this show or other shows we've produced. There's a lot of, you know, I think people may box you or misrepresent you with other things. So I want to go through maybe some of those other things. If you know about it, you can just say a quick one sentence of what differs you.

Like Ironfish is a big one. It's, you know, privacy, L1 blockchain, I believe. You know, how do you differ from, you know, Ironfish?

Naveen: Yeah, I mean, again, so, you know, one of the things I mentioned this to you before we started recording there, there are two ways to sell a knife, right? So one way to sell a knife is this is a steak knife and I'm going to use it to cut steak. The other way to sell a knife is this is a murder weapon.

Same exact product, right? One of the really interesting things about Tari is even though Tari is default confidential, we do not promote Tari as a privacy product. Like if you visit the Tari website, you actually don't see the word privacy really anywhere or confidentiality. Because what we realized is that it's a feature, it's a feature of the system.

It doesn't need to be like the, the headliner. Right. It's not like this is the headlining act at Coachella. So I think a lot of these systems, I mean, whether it's the one you mentioned, Ironfish, or, you know, there's others out there that are, you know, purporting to be like privacy things is I think they make this like critical mistake in terms of how they communicate what the heck they do.

And then the other problem is the user experience. Go try doing something on one of these other systems.

Stephen: I was going to ask you about Monero, but I know Monero is, I haven't done too much on Monero, but I know it's clunky. So that was going to be my next question. Thank you.

Naveen: yeah, so Monero is really interesting because like, look, I started my your career, if you want to call it that. Mining Monero. Know, one of the other core contributors to Tari is Fluffy Pony, who's the former lead maintainer of Monero. So we love Monero. You know, I think Monero is incredible.

And what I love about Monero is that Monero has a very crisp and concrete mission, which is privacy over all else. That is Monero's mission, and Monero achieves that mission with aplomb. I think that our hope and dream is for something like Tari to learn a lot from Monero. But it's a different, it's a different type of thing, right?

So Monero is more private. You have to imagine confidentiality as a spectrum. It's not binary. So Monero is definitely more confidential. Then Tari is, right? It has more confidentiality features than Tari does. Tari makes different trade offs. So the trade offs with Tari are focused more on user experience, focused more on building, you know, supporting developers need for distribution and building decentralized applications.

You know, those are not things that Monero is focused on, but that doesn't mean that Monero is like, you know, old or wrong or bad or any of that. It's

Stephen: It's just, it's focused on that, which has

Naveen: Yeah, it's a different, it's a different focus. And so, so we actually think that Monero and Tari are like complimentary, right?

Like we think they're, they're complimentary, like Tari, just a different kind of animal, a different focus. , and so that, that's how I'd respond regarding Monero.

Stephen: I think I like the aspect that, especially even the start, when I asked you about Tariq, I thought you were going to go straight into the privacy, but you're talking about confidentiality as a feature, which I think is different than like really focusing on privacy, privacy, privacy, because you realize that there are use cases where you're going to have to flip off that switch in order to bring in more users, as you said, in order to bring in a better user experience.

Naveen: Yeah. The, the first thing I started with when I started talking about Tari, well, it started with this. I started about user experience and how easy it is. Right? That is our focus. That is the, that is the headline for Tari. That is the, that, that is the headliner for Tari. If this was a Coachella, you know, poster, you'd put user experience at the top.

Stephen: You'd be day one, right?

Naveen: that's number one.

Stephen: the, you're Beyonce.

Naveen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's our Beyoncé. Our Beyoncé is user experience. It's not, it's not confidentiality. That's just a feature.

Stephen: And what happens to people that see this, they listen to this podcast, they're like, yo, I want to do that. I got a Mac studio here that I use for designing. I want to get in on Tari, but you're still in testnet. So, you know, maybe what, when can people start mining for real, for real, or could they be a part of the testnet?

And then what do they do? Like, just like you said, you received. You know, usdc. eth, you're like, hey, what am I going to do with this? That might be for other people that are like, hey, send me some crypto. And you're like, yeah, I have this tario, like, I'm all down to. They're like, well, I can't really do anything with that.

What are your thoughts around those two concepts?

Naveen: So, so, anyone who's interested can visit universe. tari. com and sign up for our waitlist for Tari Universe, which is the product I just showed you. That's our beautiful interface. Launched our signup, I think maybe like three, three, four weeks ago, kind of like mid August timeframe. And we already have over 220, 000 people on the waitlist totally organically.

So it's definitely resonating out there. People, I think. Both in crypto and outside of crypto are really excited about this idea of being able to participate in something from the ground floor without having to farm, without having to like put money into the till, you know, I think that's exciting for a lot of people.

So, would love for people to participate in the testnet. Will be onboarding those users that are on our waitlist over the coming like month or so. And then, you know, our plan is to launch the Atari mainnet at some point later this year. That's our hope. In terms of your question about like, well, oh, I have a bunch of Tari, now what?

Well, that goes back to the original point that I made, which is the more people that are mining Tari, and like, the more distribution there is for Tari Universe, The more useful Tari is, right? Because then, then all of a sudden you ask that same exact question and people are like, Oh, Tari? Totally. What do you want to do with your Tari?

Right? Whereas if there's only five people mining Tari, then people will be like, Oh, you have Tari? Yeah, I don't accept that. Or I don't, I don't care about that because no one cares about that. So, so the more people that are invested, that like care, that have conviction in a thing, the more useful the thing is.

And I think that's really ultimately the answer to that kind of a question.

Stephen: I love it. This was a great conversation. Any last parting statements for the audience other than to sign up, get on that waitlist, and at least take it, at least this is an actual application that they can try, right? All these other things like, yeah, it's a lot on my mind. You're like, okay, I have to wait until someone, either I have to buy it or they send it to me because I can't really participate, where you're kind of like participation day one is, you know, an important aspect for what

Naveen: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's crazy today. We we just opened up like the first 1000 people on the wait list and the response was wild, people are like hyped because to your point, it's an actual product, it's an actual thing I can download and use and try and experiment with, like most of these other protocol projects, it's like, It's in the cloud somewhere.

You're like, I don't even know what this means. Like, what the hell does this thing mean? Right. So anyway, parting words is thanks for having me, you know, thank you so much for having me on your show. Really enjoyed the conversation. excited. If anyone is curious about Tari, you can follow me on Twitter if you want.

I'm Naveen Spark, I think on Twitter. I don't even remember. What is

Stephen: we'll have all your, you left it with us. So we'll make sure everything is in

Naveen: Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm Naveen Spark on Twitter.

Stephen: on there. Naveen, it was great talk. Thanks for like really being candid about the whole experience of being an entrepreneur. It really seems like you're really passionate about this project and the use case, I was going to ask you, you know, in the, in the middle of this conversation, do people really care about privacy, but I think you answered it with a bunch of really relevant use cases.

Know, business transactions.

Naveen: Look,

Stephen: Canada, so we all remember the Freedom Convoy when people wanted to donate to that using GoFundMe. Then they were using crypto and how fast the government started contacting the crypto exchanges. So we see, and even in donating to Ukraine, you couldn't do so through GoFundMe because it was being used for military equipment.

We saw that, you know, this decentralized fundraising the ways to kind of own your own, even if you're not spending a hundred percent of time on it, it's nice. As you said, I don't know if you use the word side hustle. I think you did, but it's nice to have something where you can operate on your own and have yourself in your own space and where you control what's happening versus, you know, as you say, the, the crypto Twitter people telling you what's good and what's not good, you can actually go find out for yourself for one.

Naveen: Yeah. I'll leave you this one thing. Okay. We're all human beings. Human beings throughout their life evolve and change. We're not static, right? I'm a different person after this conversation than I, than I, you know, I was before the conversation, right? That's just natural. That's part of how being, that's part of the human experience.

And part of being a human being is that we make mistakes. Transcribed That's just how human, every human being makes mistakes, right? And I think it's anti human to build systems where every single financial transaction you make is a scarlet letter. I think that is crazy. And I think anyone who is a proponent of that is anti human.

Because that's not what a human, could you imagine a world where maybe it's like a dating service, a dating app or something, and the dating app has all of your financial transaction history from the beginning of time, that is the future that the Ethereum people are promoting. It's crazy. It's absolutely batshit crazy.

That's not the world that anyone should want to live in. Or imagine you're applying for a job and the person who's reviewing your resume. Can pull up a system and see all of your financial transactions at the beginning of time and they start asking you weird questions Like well, you know you go to the bars a lot, you know, like does that mean you're irresponsible?

It's like dude, none of your fucking business. What are you talking about?

Stephen: and that sounds like a weird concept until you see we're only getting more digital. So those transactions are, you know, when we get to a little more conversion to, you know, everyone's dealing with digital assets, they're going to be able to go back and look. You can't go erase that transaction, you know, buying that degen coin back in 2022, to..

Naveen: no, totally

Stephen: as we get more digital, this will become more relevant, similar to like having a Myspace and social media back in the day. You can't erase those pictures for the most part, you know, of you and the club harassing girl or doing whatever, and I think I see your point there.

Naveen: Let's focus on building pro human technology. I am NOT a pro bot person I'm literally wearing a shirt That talks about robots destroying people's jobs, right? That's literally the shirt I'm wearing. I'm wearing a Rage Against The Machine hat. Now what's the machine? There are many types of machines to rage against them, rage against.

One of the machines to rage against is bots. And like, I think there's a fetish in the Ethereum community for like AI agents and bots, and oh my God, people are going to be like operating for me. That's cool. But dude, let's focus on making the human experience better. Let's enable humans to participate in the future economy.

I am pro human and I think we should all be pro human together.

Stephen: And we're gonna have to come back for a part two and the testnet. Launches, and we'll talk about the other aspects of, you know, completely transparent transactions, including, to your point, if marketers know how much, you know, is going to your Ethereum address, don't get started with the airdrops and the phishing scams and, you know, the, the crypto dra We haven't even got into wallet drainers and all those other aspects.

We'll probably save that for version 2 of this conversation.

Naveen: Anytime. Thanks for having me, man. I

Stephen: Appreciate it, Naveen.