Stephen: This is Stephen Sargeant, Around The Coin Podcast. This episode, I speak to Barney Mannerings. He's the co-founder of the Vega Protocol, which is a Web3 decentralized derivatives layer on the Web3 platform. He's backed by Coinbase, Pantera, and other prominent VCs. Barney sits at the intersection of like institutional finance.

And Crypto, and he's founded Vega and after years, almost decades, working with the London Stock Exchange. We're going to talk a lot about decentralized exchanges, derivative products, which are very complex. We dap into DeFi, as well as, you know, the balance between privacy, compliance, as well as decentralization.

And he even shares a little bit about his 43 million dollar fundraise through coinless, which is a community token sale platform stick around. This is going to be an amazing episode for those that are interested in web three, especially in the decentralized finance space. Hope you enjoy.

Stephen: Stephen Sargeant here, host of Around The Coin podcast for an amazing episode with Barney, the co founder of Vega Protocol.

Stephen: Barney, tell us a little bit about the protocol, a little bit about yourself, and then we're going to jump right into your background.

Barney: Yeah, just a little bit about me. I'm a computer scientist originally spent much of my early career working kind of traditional finance, where I sort of saw a lot of trading systems being built and a lot of trading systems being used by traders.

I started to understand how that works, and then I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin and Ethereum and crypto and DeFi. And I sort of saw the opportunity to Build something for these sort of complex derivative products that would enable a high quality kind of production quality, if you like, professional quality on chain trading with derivatives.

And that's really what we've dedicated the last four or five years to building.

Stephen: It sounds crazy. When you think four or five years in like crypto and DeFi terminology, it's like dog years, right? It feels like 20 years. Four or five years just seems like forever ago to start any project in crypto, right?

Stephen: They usually pop up within months and You know, your background, you went to school for computer science and one of your, you know, your dissertation was on autonomous Robotics. We just saw Elon Musk talk about, you know, optimists, which is pretty much the robots of the future. Did you think this was gonna come already?

This was back in 2004 when you were in school. Do you think we're a few years too late? Or did you feel like over the next 20 years we would see things like this?

Barney: Yeah, I mean, it was pretty sort of. You know, I was working a lot on sort of moving cars around, like sort of radio controlled cars, but like getting them to drive themselves.

And it was pretty clear that we didn't have the computational capability or the sensors, like there was a lot still to do. You know, we could kind of get them to drive around the computer science department sort of on their own, if you squint, but really there was a lot of work to do. And I think, you know, you needed the sensors, you need the computational power, the high resolution cameras, all of that.

And then Even then, you probably still needed, you know, a good few years of work on the sort of AI systems to really get it good. So, yeah, it was always quite a long way off and that's probably why I didn't sort of go on into academia to continue the work on that because it didn't feel quite like it was going to have.

You know, an amazing outcome, you know, in society for a while.

Stephen: Can you see crypto being used? I know a lot of people talk about autonomous payments and micropayments and crypto used to kind of funnel this autonomous driving ecosystem. Do you see things like micropayments and using crypto as the future of all these small things, whether you're, you know, renting a vehicle or whether you're renting a scooter in the middle of LA?

What are your thoughts on crypto as a micropayment?

Barney: Yeah, I mean, I do see crypto being used.

Barney: I think the big elephant in the room, well maybe it's pretty obvious now, is sort of the regulation and institutional acceptance, because most people and most businesses are not going to play with a thing where like, their tax accountant is scared of it, their lawyer is scared of it, their, you know, local congressman is scared of it.

Like, you know, the point where everyone's kind of asking if it's a scam and if it's legal, like, it's really hard to see the mass adoption coming. So I think you kind of have to get past that. You have to get to a point where there's a version of crypto that's kind of acceptable. And they're sort of accepted and they're secure as well.

You know, the security hacks and everything don't, don't help either. And you kind of got to get to that point for it to really hit mainstream adoption.

Barney: But look, you know, the internet was invented in like the sixties or seventies and basically didn't, didn't exist for most normal people for a huge amount of time.

And it was only after a lot of additional innovations and a lot of stuff happened. Did it suddenly sort of break out and become a mainstream consumer thing? Kind of much to the surprise of all the nerds who'd been using it for decades already. Like, you know, they didn't. necessarily all recognize that was going to happen.

So, and the crypto is kind of in this weird state where everyone sort of says we're early, but on the other hand we've been around for A decade plus, and it's kind of like, what has to happen next? So yeah, I do see it getting adopted. I think it's got many good use cases. You know, the micropayments is a great one, but there's, there's a bit still to do and you know, how, whether or not we can build an industry in crypto of people who aren't like just in it for the, like, number go up, next bull run, and whether or not we can get past the sort of security and regulatory challenges is still there.

Still a big question mark, but I'm really hopeful because I think the technology is great.

Barney: I think the alternative where everything you do is kind of under surveillance and lock and key of governments and corporations is really scary to think about. And so I really hope we can get through all of that and get some adoption.

Stephen: And we've seen that a lot recently, right? Whether it's, you know, central, centralized fundraising, GoFundMe doesn't allow you to Contribute To Military Efforts To Support Ukraine, You Know, I'm In Canada, We Have The Freedom Convoy, Where You Know, The Government Starts Tapping On The Shoulders Of All The Crypto Exchanges After Ignoring Them Pretty Much For A Lifetime, Now They Want To Know Whose Accounts Are Being Used, By Which Addresses Are Supporting The Freedom Convoy, I think the internet really went mainstream when you could use it and your mom could be on the phone at the same time.

I think that's who is mainstream. And when you're using the internet and nobody else could be on the phone, that was the real, that was the real friction point, I think...

Barney: And actually what happened was kind of like, people started using it and realizing they couldn't use the phone anymore. And that's what started the push for like, you know, actually getting the connection sorted.

But, you know, you're right, like all of those things like, you know, donating to certain causes or, you know, you have people who might be like, you know, I know OnlyFans or whatever they're doing where they're like doing something perfectly legal. You know, but Visa or Mastercard or whoever decide they don't want to deal with that.

And so they get shut out of the payment system and they get shut out of the banking system. Same with like, I think, you know, marijuana and like probably Canada and the US. If you start a shop selling those things, which are now legal, like how many banks will bank with you? You know, and you sort of have this ridiculous situation where these companies are not even like enforcing actual laws, they're enforcing their own like moral standards or risk tolerance.

And that to me is crazy because like we all need money to live and, you know, be ourselves and express our other freedoms and rights. So like, I know it's pretty scary to me if we can't do that. And so it seems to me really essential that we, You know, get through this stuff with crypto and get to the adoption where you know, money is sort of available to everyone freely and equally.

Stephen: Yeah. It's funny about cannabis in Canada, right? Like five years, six years ago, police would be chasing you down in the park if they saw you smoking, you know, a blunt. And now it's an essential service during the pandemic, all the weed shops are now open while the gyms were closed. So it's funny of the dichotomy we've seen the progression of cannabis in places like Canada.

Stephen: But in 2009, you know, when that first Bitcoin transaction was being conducted, you were working in electronic markets and trading platform strategy. Was there any talk amongst, you know, developers of these platforms of crypto? We feel like the early stages of, you know, crypto adopted. Adoption was for, like, computer science nerds, as they'd call themselves, that were just mucking about on their computer.

Barney: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, like, you know, a good portion of computer scientists are pretty into, like, cryptography and privacy and, like, you know, partly, I think, because we're sort of used to being able to make our computer do whatever we want and not have to tell anyone. So, like, the idea of. Privacy and cryptography has always been pretty ingrained, but also I think, you know, it's just interesting tech and it's just fascinating.

So when, you know, Bitcoin was invented, it was very, you know, interesting to the kind of, the computer nerd side in us all. And then what effectively happened then was You know, it went from that to being this asset, which, you know, these sort of computer nerds have been talking about, and suddenly that was worth something and going up in value.

And so what you found in finance was that traders are just always looking for a good trade. Like they don't necessarily care where it is, right? And you, you see this with things like FTX and you know, lots of what goes on. There's a lot of people in crypto who are kind of like looking for a good trade, looking for a good business in trading.

And you know, so once Us nerds started talking about it and explaining this thing and then the traders started seeing this asset going up. They suddenly wanted to learn more and learn about it. A lot of traders are also like gold bugs or, you know, hoarding gold or silver and, you know, preparing for the collapse of the world or whatever with their purchases.

And so you end up with these traders kind of Getting into that mindset, you know, sort of almost the Bitcoin maximalist mindset and being like, Oh yeah, I've got to acquire this asset. It's going to go up. This is great. So that sort of was a really early thing was kind of the nerdy computer scientists and the privacy geeks and the, you know, cypherpugs and the kind of traders and the gold bugs also getting together and talking about this thing.

That's probably one of the earliest things I saw. Yeah.

Stephen: And you know, what's interesting, you know, Vega Protocol, you just said, started about five years ago. And even then we're talking about regulation now. Five years ago, I think we were in a worse spot when it came to regulation, the Wild West, but you not only decided to go centralize exchange, you kind of announced this decentralized exchange.

Stephen: Can you talk about a little bit about the differences for the audience members that don't know what's the difference between a decentralized exchange or what I refer to as a DEX and a centralized exchange, like maybe a Coinbase or a Binance?

Barney: Yeah, sure. So yeah, I think the main thing that we sort of get in crypto early on all the exchanges were centralized, right? So like, even though crypto is this kind of Utopian, democratizing thing where everyone runs a node and everyone has equal access and anyone can access and no one can stop it and it's sensitive, resistant, all that. Most exchanges, in fact, all the exchanges early on were centralized.

They were basically just the same as any exchange that exists today in finance. That means there's a company that runs it, there's a company that can shut it down, that can decide if you can trade, it's going to do KYC and all of that. And, you know, what we sort of thought was Yeah, the financial system is mostly just not a pile of dollars doing nothing and being moved between people.

Financial system is actually based on financial products like loans and derivatives and, you know, stocks and shares and all these other things. And it's based on those products and the contracts and other things that make those products work. And so when I sort of got excited about crypto and Bitcoin and others as a sort of alternative financial system, as a way of decentralizing money and giving people more democratized access and control of finance.

What I realized was that if you just, you know, if you just democratize the money bit and then you leave everything else centralized, you basically, it doesn't help because there's still all these control points and surveillance points. And, you know, we started with things like, you know, EtherDelta and then Uniswap, decentralizing the base level of exchanges, but now it's time to decentralize all the other kinds of product, you know, the loans, the derivatives and everything else.

You know, when we came to look at derivatives, which is sort of an area I have some experience and specialty in, and it's a kind of relatively complex area that was a bit harder to, to get done than say, you know, you know, straight spot swaps. We started to realize that it was really important to have all this infrastructure that enabled each part of the financial system to be centralized, decentralized, so that we could build this kind of alternative financial system.

So yeah, we came in and said, yeah, let's try and build the equivalent of. You know, BitMEX or any of these derivatives exchanges that's kind of centralized. Well, let's build a version of that where it's completely decentralized, where all of the users control it, where the users are the ones who even decide what's listed.

You know, it's not like there's a company deciding to list something. It's not like there's a company setting fees and receiving the revenue. Just like with Bitcoin, just like with Ethereum. Users are running the node. Users are creating their markets, deploying the contracts. Users are the ones therefore also gaining the revenue from the fees.

And so, you know, we decided to go all in on, on that, building that sort of decentralized future for derivatives.

Stephen: That's interesting. And, but it seems like a very complex market, but you know, I think many people look at, well, you know, a DEX is basically a bunch of smart contracts. You don't need a ton of people.

You can kind of spin one up pretty easily. what makes Vega a little bit different. Everyone has a competitive edge.

Stephen: Even when you get into the centralized spaces, whether it's features like derivatives, whether it's things like safety or you know, you know, alt coins that other exchanges don't have, what do you think your competitive advantage is for Vega as you, you know, over the last five years, and maybe that's changed

Barney: over the last five years?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know that one of the things that we have as a competitive advantage, I guess, is that we sort of have this, appChain that we've built that is designed exclusively for trading. And that means things like you don't have gas fees to pay when you place an order. So, you know, you use Binance, you place an order, it's free.

You use Uniswap, you place the equivalent of an order, it costs you gas, right? So, you know, when you have something on like Ethereum or one of these other chains, you end up paying gas even when you're not actually doing anything, even just to place an order. And that kind of sucks from a user point of view.

It sucks from a cost of trading point of view. It sucks from a platform point of view because If the platform doesn't get your order because it's expensive to place that order, then the platform doesn't get the information that your order provides about the price. And that's important information.

So, you know, we built this AppChain which gives it the ability to have things like free orders. And you'll see also, you know, people like dydx have also recently moved to a similar kind of AppChain model, I think probably for roughly the same reasons. It's not just the order pricing, there's lots of other things you can optimize.

And then the other thing I think we do that's maybe pretty unique is Anyone in our community can go and propose and create markets on the Vega protocol. At the moment that's done through like, you know, writing some JSON code, connecting, you know, defining the oracle yourself and all of that. In the next couple of months, we'll be launching some sort of front ends where you can literally kind of select the oracles and just kind of click, click, click, and just launch the market.

But anyone can launch that market. And that's kind of super exciting because it means that You're not waiting for a listing team. There's no, you know, company or team or group of people in the way of you trading what you want to trade. It's just like, you want to trade this? Go for it. So I think that's really exciting as well.

And then the, the thing that we're coming out with soon, which I'm also very excited about is I think we're going to be the first that I know of to do this, certainly in derivatives. We're going to have true hybrid order books where there's like an AMM curve like Uniswap. And also. An order book on the same order book.

So, you're literally going to have the ability to place AMM style liquidity, to place order liquidity, and traders will automatically be routed to the best price of those. And I think that's pretty much a first, as far as I'm aware.

Barney: So all of those things together, I think, give us this kind of really great sort of ability to have an optimized platform with the lowest trade cost of trading, highest performance, with This amazing, you know, user experience in the future, and even now the users can do it, where users can create their own markets.

And then with this kind of great solution for liquidity, where there's both the AMM and the Audible site working together to provide the most liquid market. So, those are kind of the, the key things I think, make Vegas stand out.

Stephen: That's, that's really interesting. And you talked about gas fees, you know, as an NFT purchaser myself, like there's nothing worse than competing for an NFT, losing the gas fees and not getting the NFT as well.

I can only imagine something that's trading, you know, hundreds of tokens a week or a day, how frustrating that could be and how expensive it could be and not even getting a position at the table to kind of play the

Barney: game. Think about it like this, like, you know, when you use Uniswap, right, you know, you make an order, you want to buy like 200 or 500 worth of something.

And you're looking at it, it's like 1. 3 percent slippage. You're like, okay, cool. That means I lose like 6 on slippage. And then you look at the gas and it's going to cost you like 28 in gas. And so you're like, you know, the market slippage is not your problem. It's the Ethereum gas, right? And so that's kind of, to me, that's like not a sustainable way for trading to continue because.

Like, if we're thinking about that future adoption, the world of real trading that happens in New York and London and Chicago and Hong Kong, that's not going to move on chain if those kind of fees continue, right? And if, in fact, if it moved on chain, those fees would go up probably like two orders of magnitude, right?

So like, that's just not a viable way to move trading on chain. So it's really important to solve those problems at the kind of infrastructure layer so that we can actually think about building You know, useful dex protocols and useful crypto.

Stephen: And one of the problems I know that Ethereum has, and maybe other chains have, is this kind of MEV, or, you know, what we call, basically what looks like legalized front running, where miners are going to pick up the, you know, expensive fees, or they might even try to manipulate the purchases.

Depending on NFTs, maybe just go through because you have an anti front running coming soon to your platform. So maybe you can talk a little bit about MEV, what's the issue it has and how you're going to combat it using some of the solutions

Barney: that you're bringing up. Yeah, definitely. I mean, and just like the thing with fees, it's kind of like this is to me, make or break.

It's like. You do not want to be involved in a situation where, like, every time you want to do something, people who are richer than you with computers that are, like, closer to the network than you get to jump in front of you and, like, make your life worse. Like, you know, you'd rather not have that. So, you know, the reality is there's a kind of, like, the simple front running MEV, which is just, like, I can see what you're going to do and I'm going to do it.

And then there's, like, the crazy MEV craziness that can happen on Ethereum where it's, like, you have bots that literally try Simulating what would happen if they ran your transaction, sometimes with different parameters too. And if, if them running your transaction would be kind of profitable, even if it's like a You know, purchasing A NFT or anything else, they're gonna like run it instead of you or like do something else.

So you have these like crazily complex algorithms, like literally just looking at the men, like hunting the men for things that you are doing that let them exploit you. And that to me is like just a big no go for like, what, what do we not want in our trading systems? What do we not want? Our financial infrastructure?

It's like everyone talks about how modern finance is rigged and you know, it's rigged against the consumer, rigged against the individual and. Then you build a thing where it's like designed from the get go to be rigged. So, you know, we don't want that. So, we're doing two things. We have a protocol called Wendy, which is basically a sort of fair ordering protocol that means that if the validators are honest, then, you know, if they see your order before mine, then they'll get sequenced first in the block.

And then we also have the concept of what's kind of commonly known as like a sort of commit and reveal, like a threshold cryptography version of that. And the idea there is that At the time when you place your order in the block, no one can see what it is. So basically, you place an encrypted order and each of the validators actually has, you know, their share of the ability to decrypt it, but only when, like, two thirds of those validators, say, have actually decided to sequence that in the block and already committed to where it's going to be.

Does that, is there then enough information in the block to actually decrypt it says? So by the time anyone could take an action to, like, Screw you, they've already committed and so that they have no way to do it. I mean, obviously if they can like denial of service type the whole thing and just stop everyone from trading until they trade, they can still get an advantage and that's a different type of attack.

But, you know, the key thing we want to do is make sure that like, orders, orders are sequenced in blocks in the order that they're actually seen by the network and The content of your order and the things you're trying to do are not seen until it's too late for anyone to try and screw you with that information.

Stephen: And how can you do this? Do you have your own blockchain? Are you just running an application on top of the blockchain? Because I think it, you know, people have been trying to solve that. I know Flashbots is trying to solve this. For Ethereum, it's not as easy as done because you have to get all the buy in from the consensus of the community.

Barney: I mean the problem with Ethereum is twofold. Firstly Solving it for like Ethereum is a general purpose chain. It's like, it's like a computer, right? And they can do anything. So solving these problems for general purpose chain is super hard because The problem can come in many forms, because the computer can do anything. So, it's really hard to do for Ethereum.

The other reason it's hard to do is because Ethereum is live, has a lot of adoption, and already works a certain way, right? And so changing it to work a different way has all kinds of other, you know, negative externalities, other costs, and other stakeholders who might be against that. So, you know, it's very, very hard to solve for Ethereum, and I don't really think it will ever be solved for a general purpose chain like Ethereum completely.

But that's where our AppChain comes in, you know, we're built on top of Tendermint, which is a well known consensus layer. But we're like, you know, looking inside Tendermint, looking at how to basically build our chain so that it works in this way. But because our chain only does trading, it's pretty, a lot easier to say, well, it should work like this.

And that's the way to solve this problem. And that comes up a lot, you know, with the same sort of thing comes up with scaling, right? So people often used to talk about sharding Ethereum. Problem with sharding the Ethereum chain is every contract might want to talk to every other contract. And they're all on different, potentially on different shards or chains.

That gives you this like. Explosion of complexity if contracts want to talk to each other. The nice thing about markets is like, your order goes in market A, it doesn't care about the state of market B. So I can run market A on one shard, and market B on another shard, and they don't have to interact, and they don't need to talk.

So suddenly that communication complexity goes away. So By narrowing the scope and saying this is an application specific chain, there's like 99 percent of applications it can't do, but the 1 percent it can do is like trading and there's a huge amount of value there and it can do it way better and be optimized for it.

I think that's the reason for doing this kind of, you know, AppChain.

Stephen: And I think that's important, it's like specializing just for trading. You see a lot of

Barney: centralized exchanges. This is exactly how centralized exchanges work, where you know, the London Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange don't run on WordPress, right?

You know, they build, they build a matching engine just for trading. You know, many applications do run on WordPress or Squarespace or whatever, but trading systems don't because there's a huge amount of money and value in them because fairness and getting pricing right and fees right and everything is super important in trading.

Performance is important. And so they don't just run on WordPress. They actually build custom solutions. And I think that's going to always be true with trading because there's so much money in getting it

Stephen: right. And they're not doing a hundred other things, right? They're really focused on trading or like really closely related.

Buy products of trading, not doing trading and then on the, you know, on the site, they have recruitment and other things. Exactly, yeah. The Ethereum network. Exactly, that's exactly right. One thing you did mention was FTX, so we're not going to go down the hole on FTX. But we are going to talk about, you know, there was a push after FTX to DeFi, to DEXs.

There was a real push where people were like, I don't really trust exchanges. There was talk about other crypto exchanges and who had what advertisement with what arena, and does that mean that, you know, they're, they're not solvent. One of the things is that, you know, defi 2022, they received tax worth almost $4 billion.

Our users' concern that come onto your platform of what happened with these hacks are the concern, you know, is Vega or related platforms. Able to protect our funds. What's your concern that you're receiving from

Barney: consumers? They, they should be concerned, right? Like, I mean, you know, the right thing is to be concerned to be blunt, like, and, and that's true with both centralized exchanges and defi for different reasons, right?

The centralized exchanges. You actually want them to be regulated, right? Because they're like a black box, you can't see inside, right? If someone's like, yeah, we're based in the Seychelles and we have no accounts and, like, no leader, then you have no comeback if it goes wrong, right? No one is looking in to check it's okay, no one is auditing it.

So, like, in that case, you would almost rather be using, like, Coinbase, which is like, you know, public company in the US, definitely audited, most likely not going to go wrong, right? So, I would say, in that case, you almost want the regulation because you can't check it. On the other side, you have DeFi, where it's like, well, instead of the regulation, you actually have code and you have transparency.

Now, the problem with that is getting code right is hard, finding bugs is hard. And so, you know, early on in the life of these things, people love to like, you know, move fast and break things, test in prod, you know, DGN, DeFi, throw it out there. And that, you know how that goes, right? It goes with people losing lots of money to a hack.

That's kind of, in some ways, inevitable. I think what's Not good is when people overplay, you know, when you get someone who's got this new platform and they go it's safer than your bank You know, it's kind of like is it how do we know that right? And you know Vega's been live in mainnet with trading for like six months and I'm kind of still like this is like the alpha We actually have a this is a thing where the system when it was deployed It was kind of set up with it like a limit was like you can only deposit like I think it's like 10k I'm USD equivalent to the chain, and if you try and do more, the contract rejects you.

Now you can go into the contract manually through like Etherscan or whatever, and you can remove that rejection, so you can deposit as much as you want, but kind of only if you know you can do that. And the whole point was to say, This is like not production ready yet. This is like new. We've done our testing.

We've got some auditing. We're not fully there yet. We keep, you know, improving it. So every time we need to put a new improvement out, that's suddenly a new bit of code with less testing. So like, you know, we're kind of like, be careful. It's new. We want people to try it. We want them to get excited by it.

But we also want them to understand this early and, you know, to be cautious and to put in what they can afford to lose early on. Over time, as we have more and more users, as we have more and more institutions use it, more and more audits, more and more bug bounties, and all of those things happen, just like with Bitcoin, over time we'll gain more and more certainty.

And more and more comfort. But you know, six months in, I don't think anyone should think, I want to put my life savings in this, or I want to run my business on it. They should think, this is an interesting thing I want to try out. And I want to have a go and maybe put a little bit of my allocation if I'm someone like a market maker or a fund to like integrating and having a go.

But like, that should be a small percentage because you've got to understand these new things have that risk. So we're very much like, we're very much trying to be honest about that risk early on and say like, You know, we'll work together on getting this right over time. We know that it's going to have things that go wrong and hopefully they'll go wrong in ways we can manage.

You know, we have withdraw delay of 24 hours. So if someone manages to start stealing money, we have loads of alerts and monitoring that us in the community do. If we see something happen, we can like appeal to the validators and say, Hey, we've seen this bad stuff. We think you guys should like. You know, start a motion to like stop the bridge or whatever to try and stop the money being hacked.

We can't do that ourselves because it's decentralized but we can kind of push in that direction if we see something bad happening. So we're doing everything we can but it's still kind of early and we know that, you know, things will go wrong. I just hopefully they'll go wrong in small ways that are recovering.

Stephen: It's great to have that kind of community support where, you know, people are able to pick apart a little bit about FTX just based on that transparency but like you can't pick apart Santander Bank or JP Morgan.

You have no way of knowing what they really have, what they're doing, how much the flow of funds moving in and out. I think that's the beauty of kind of decentralization. Although the hackers can see what you're doing, your community can also see what you're doing. And they're usually the first ones to be like, hey, something's wrong here.

As we saw, you know, last week with Ledger. You know, by the time we air this, it'll be a few weeks now, but people in the community were kind of like ringing the bell and like you had these blockchain analytics companies like Blockade are like, Hey, this seems like a malicious transaction. Be careful, you know, connecting your wallet.

Barney: Yeah, absolutely.

Barney: I mean, and you saw that with the stuff like the financial crisis 2008 2009. Where it was like a big game of poker where suddenly no one trusts anyone because everyone thinks that every other bank is possibly bankrupt and possibly screwed. And actually, you know, that took the government to sort it out because no one had any trust that anyone else had any money left.

And, you know, with crypto and with Decentralized stuff, at least on the, on the blockchain, you can actually check that out. You can see the transparency, see what's going on and make up your own mind, which is, I think, a good move

Stephen: forward. You talked a little bit about the Stock Exchange. That's your background, you know, doing trading or matching platforms to the London Stock Exchange.

Stephen: What do DEXs need to do to get maybe institutional adoption? Is there any way that institutions can, you know, get their foot in or, you know, dabble in what you're doing at the DEX without there being that full KYC requirement and the compliance usually necessary for institutional adopters?

Barney: Yeah, it depends on the institution, but I mean, you know, obviously institutions that want to get in.

Early on this stuff, they're kind of doing things like creating, you know, creating funds that sit in the appropriate jurisdiction or whatever they need to do to do that. So some jurisdictions are, some institutions are.

Barney: I think reality is for real institutional adoption, you've got to get to the point where there are platforms or protocols for those kind of KYC and AML type things and sanctions and whatever else, you know, you're going to end up with DEXs that have a protocol where someone can plug in an order and say, well, you know, here are my like compliance requirements.

And that doesn't mean like the whole DEX will have to KYC everyone. What it means is like, if, you know, Goldman Sachs puts an order into a DEX, that order is only going to be matched against people who've done KYC. That's interesting. I've never heard of that before. That's very interesting. Everyone's going to have their own compliance rules.

US citizens might say, well, actually, I need to do my taxes, so I need to have these conditions met. We kind of have a roadmap and a design for, although we haven't started building it yet, for That kind of sort of combined matching engine where effectively everyone gets to state their conditions. You know, like I need to, I need to obey these rules.

I need to obey these conditions. Everyone gets to do that and come with their, you know, proof of KYC if you like. And then effectively everyone's trading can then be matched to only people who they're compliant with. And so you end up with a situation where the platform itself doesn't prevent anyone from, you know, placing orders and placing liquidity, but everyone's trading.

Barney: Everyone meets their own compliance requirements, and I think, you know, to me that's the most sensible way to do this decentralized stuff in the long run because Decentralized systems cannot be like a centralized system that like knows every rule in the world and updates because there is no one to do that update.

So, I think you need something a little

Stephen: different. I think that's interesting. I felt like this, you know, the industry has this all or nothing, either fully decentralized or fully centralized. Where you're almost playing in that kind of web 2. 5, where decentralized if you need to be, but hey, if you want to dabble in this market, but still maintain, you know, your bank accounts for

Barney: lack of a better word.

Your execution will still be decentralized. Everything will be on chain, but like, you're basically going to like, you know, sub out to this entity and say, hey, look, these guys have signed and proved that I'm a good guy. I've done my KYC. And so you're going to end up with a situation where the execution is decentralized, but like.

You actually still apply some rules to it that come from your local jurisdiction, your government, you know, your auditor, whatever it needs to be. But I think, you know, the reality is you can't do anything else because we all live in a world where we're surrounded by rules and laws and regulations and We all need to be able to meet those rules.

You know, if you got in your car and there was no speedo and you couldn't tell how fast you were going, like, you couldn't just drive down the road and say, I'm sorry, officer, I don't have a speedo, so I didn't know I was speeding, right? And this is the same sort of thing. Like if, you know, if there are these laws and you're an institution You can't just go, well, this DEX doesn't have a way to know if I'm breaking the law or not, so I just did it anyway.

In the end, you're going to have to obey the laws of the jurisdiction you're in. So, you know, we need to build tools on top of these DEXs that enable those institutions to obey those rules, even though everyone is going to have different rules they need to obey. And that's the challenge is building that in a decentralized way that doesn't, like, doesn't close off the permissionless innovation, doesn't close off the platform to anyone, but also enables people to sort of Have that sort of the equivalent of the digital speedo so that they know that they are, you know, obeying the laws of that particular jurisdiction.

Stephen: I'm laughing extra hard because I'm looking at the ticket that I got from like an electronic, I guess, vTrap, like they don't even have to catch you now in person, they just mail it out to you like three weeks later. So that my wife can now see that I went 25 over in the 50 road.

Stephen: But let's talk about privacy, because I think that's the question that comes up.

And that's probably a lot of, I've heard you talk about it on podcasts and other panels. There's still need for privacy. And, you know, as a compliance professional with my background, it's that balance between privacy and compliance. I know we touched on it. But where do you see the privacy conversation fitting in, especially in places like Europe, right, with GDPR and other privacy regulations that seem to set the tone for the rest of the world?

Barney: Yeah, I mean, privacy is one of the hardest things because it's, it's extremely easy to build, comparatively easy to build a blockchain that's not at all private. Which is what we have now. We kind of have pseudonymity, which is like, I can create as many new IDs as I want. And like assuming you don't know who created them, then they're totally like.

Anonymous, but actually, you know, governments, anyone who's got access to chain analysis, whatever, they can all connect those things together and work it all out and, you know, ask Coinbase who, who paid this money out to this key or whatever. So, yeah, the reality is that those only give a sort of superficial layer of privacy.

It's really hard to get right, like I've been sort of Reading a little bit recently about what people like Penumbra are doing and stuff like that, it seems pretty interesting. I think we need to find some good privacy solutions to enable, like, trading that's private from each other. Like, you know, just because if Trader A and Trader B Know everything about each other but those solutions, like you say, will probably need, you know if you've seen this in, you know, Monero and others, you kind of have this, like, view key, where, like, if you give someone that key, they can, they're not, it can't be you, but they can read a transaction, and so you end up with that situation where perhaps you could, like, have a sort of view key where you can give that, that information to a regulator or whoever you need to, if you want to share with them.

But yeah, I think privacy is going to be really important because, like, completely transparent trading, Probably doesn't scale up to the level of adoption we want.

Stephen: I think that's a new thing about privacy pools. And I think Tornado Cash had that privacy element. I believe that they had view keys. The problem is criminals aren't going to give you those view keys.

Barney: So it kind of negates kind of the information you're going to get from criminals, especially around Tornado

Cash are in a difficult place right now. Firstly, they're sort of enabling a thing which it kind of goes the other way around. Like, I don't think the U. S. government look around for like Are you breaking the rules?

They basically go, is someone doing this? Yeah. Like this money laundering who we really hate, you know, terrorists or whatever. And if they are, we are going to do everything we can to stop that. So there's a very difficult place to be where Tornado Cash are enabling that. But then I think also there's kind of the accusation, I guess, from the government side that like, effectively, they're kind of accusing them of knowingly.

Building a system where they profit and people use it and then like practically marketing that system to the, to the bad guys. Now, I don't know if they did that, like, not for me to say, but like, you know, obviously there's kind of a difference between building a thing and building a thing, profiting from it and marketing it to the bad guys.

So, you know, I think it's going to get very nuanced in the space of privacy and like, depending on how your system is used and how much of that usage is. is bad and exactly how bad, you know, it's going to be probably pretty scary to be working on certain types of privacy systems in the next few years because I don't think, you know, the people who care about this stuff are not going to go away lightly to if, you know, if they think that this privacy is getting in the way of, of their goals.

Yeah.

Stephen: Stay away from ransomware and anything that's state sponsored hacking. Those are the two areas that the U. S. is probably going to be on you. What are your thoughts about them going after the developer, arresting the developer? It's just like, you have a platform, you know, you're building it for traders, but, you know, maybe there's a loophole where somebody can get in and exploit it, where it's like, hey, we're just focusing on traders.

That's all we're focused in, but now a bad actor, because they live in a certain country, used our platform. Now we're the target of sanctions, as well as other things. What are your thoughts about does the SEC

Barney: really have a case here? Yeah, I really don't like that they went after developers. I think it's a bad precedent to set.

I mean, you know, even if you think about it, it's kind of like going after the, you know, the mint, the people who print the banknotes. Because, you know, some criminals You know, jumped across the border with 10 million in, you know, in banknotes in a briefcase. It's kind of like, well, people who created the banknotes did not enable that crime.

They just created a tool that can be used for good or bad, you know, going after somebody who creates a crowbar because someone uses it to break into a house. So I think, you know, yeah, I mean, I don't think going after the developers is good. I don't know whether there's more to the story of how the developers were profiting and what they were actually doing, but like the optics on it for me of kind of like someone who's just building code and deploying that code and doing so.

You know, within the laws of, you know, things like the First Amendment and whatever else that you guys have. Like, when you see that, it's kind of like, it's very scary to see someone go after developers. I know, like, I don't feel good about that. I think it's it's something that'll be interesting to see where they get to with that, whether they're able to pin something on them or whether they have to kind of stop doing it.

I guess if it's if it turns out to not have been okay to go after developers, they probably won't be able to do that in future. But

Stephen: it still buys them some time, right? Buys them at least three or four years of lawsuits and court dates. And if you're a developer kind of in that area, you're now taking that extra caution until there's like a, as you said, a prison that has been set.

Stephen: Talk to me a little bit about liquidity. Cause we talked a little bit about slippage. There's this concept with liquidity providers of impertinent loss. When the temporary, by the time you facilitate the liquidity, there might be a reduction of the crystal crypto asset values. Can you explain a little bit about what impermanent loss is and, you know, what are some of the challenges dealing with the liquidity providers on your platform?

Barney: Yeah, so impermanent loss kind of, it's not all that impermanent, but it kind of relates to the fact, to the way that when you place liquidity, particularly at an AMM curve, like a constant function market maker effectively when you place liquidity in, in that way. You're going to be kind of on the losing side, you know, if the market's going up and people are buying from you, then you're effectively selling.

So it kind of, you're sort of, sort of stuck on the losing side, which is what market makers do. And market makers who market make on order books, you know, like even the Vega decentralized order books, you know, obviously. They make a spread, they make, you know, potentially it's a share of the fees and the idea is that your spread and your share of the fees and your trading capability, your trading prowess if you like, mean you're going to make money on those things and then lose money basically because you have to be buying when everyone's selling and selling when everyone's buying.

And if you're good at this job of being a market maker, you know, hedging, setting the spread right, setting your pricing right, then you're going to make money over time. But it is. You know, in traditional finance, it's an incredibly difficult, nuanced, and high volume business with very difficult margins.

So being a market maker is quite hard. And, and liquidity is an important part of like any trading platform. So yeah, I mean, it is, it's tough to be a market maker. I think the, you know, the way that AMMs work obviously makes it harder again because you're kind of expecting someone with less experience to do that.

And you really do need to actively manage your liquidity to make money. I think, you know, things like sharing fees with the liquidity providers and things like that can help. And obviously, you know, how well a protocol does or an exchange does at setting those fees, sharing those fees and incentivizing good liquidity will probably affect how, how attractive it is for liquidity providers.

Stephen: That makes a lot of sense. We talked a little bit about the challenges with Ethereum, not necessarily focusing. On trading, which your platform does. Do you still run into any problems of like speed or downtime or is like speed the kind of place people come to your platform? For right, the trades are focused on trading.

They know when they conduct the trade, all the resources are being kind of pulled into that transaction versus a hundred other places that Ethereum has.

Barney: Yeah, we haven't seen any speed issues yet. We're kind of like a sub second block time, usually like between 0. seconds per block. So like it's pretty, pretty snappy, pretty quick.

The, there is the like slight thing, you know, when the validators decide to upgrade the network to a new version. There is a point in time where the network has to kind of stop, stop producing blocks on the old version and make them on the new version. So you have these like, you know, small periods of time, which are announced ahead of time by the, the validators on the network.

You have, you have those times where the network won't be producing blocks. And so a trader will have to take account of that where in a normal exchange, they probably do that, you know, after the market closes or something. So there was a few things like that. But otherwise, you know, speed wise.

Performance wise, we haven't had issues yet. We will do at some point. You know, obviously, it's not infinitely scalable. We have plans, like I said, I mentioned earlier, this ability to kind of scale markets onto different shards. So we have plans to address that with a future version, but at the moment you know, if people launch many markets and many traders came onto those markets you could possibly end up at the point where the network starts to get full and there's like some kind of either speed or availability issue, you know, either, either it gets slower or it becomes the case that some of the, some percentage of people, you know, ones maybe making smaller transactions or smaller orders can't always get an order into every block, they might have to wait.

So, you know, those things can, can happen in future. As we, as we get more successful but we do have some plans in the works to hopefully address them before they become a big issue. I love the,

Stephen: I love the transparency. This is a great opportunity to talk about purpose built blockchain. You know, this is something that you did five years ago.

Do you see that coming out more often? Where organizations, protocols are focused on one thing and doing that well versus kind of offering the full range of services that

Barney: maybe some of us don't want. Partly because of the success of things like, you know, Cosmos and others you know, you look at obviously DYDX v4 is a, is a purpose built blockchain for trading.

Then look at things like Pyth, the Oracle their network, Pythnet is actually a fork of Solana, but it's a You know, blockchain that exists only for being an oracle, you know, so you sort of get getting these specialized blockchains coming up, you know, you have things like IBC you know, Axelar, Wormhole, allowing cross chain communication to be better.

So you sort of have this situation where moving money and funds and messages between chains is getting easier. You've got these kind of high performance use cases where actually it makes sense to, to do things on a, on a purpose built chain. And then you have. You know, Celestia, Cosmos, et cetera, which are helping build the sort of building blocks that make it easier to do purposeful chains.

So I do think the sort of AppChain narrative will become very important for particularly hyper high performance and performance sensitive things like trading maybe gaming will have similar things. I don't know. But then you also have some incredible technology and things like SUI where they have this amazing scaling technology within one chain where a single validator can end up being like a whole data center.

And those ways will also enable a lot of scaling. So. I do think you'll have kind of a mix of both, you'll have sort of scaled general purpose chains as well as these like app specific chains where they make sense.

Stephen: Can you talk a little bit about Oracle? I think some people understand on the call and some people, you know, their, their minds going to 300 and the magical Oracles that you had to climb to go visit.

So maybe you could tell me a little bit about the Oracle and how does that, like, how did, what is the connection between an Oracle and, you know, the trading platform that you have?

Barney: Yeah, so, I mean, with spot markets, obviously you just trade two things, right, so you have some USDT ETH, so you just have a price, you exchange one for the other, your trade is done.

With derivatives, what happens is you put up autonomous margin, you have leverage, and over time as the trade evolves, you make money or lose money. On that trade, the way you make money or lose money is basically due to, some information about the world that comes in. This sort of changes the, the settlement changes, the price changes, how money moves.

So like if you've gone long and I've gone short and the price moves up, then some of my money becomes some of your money. And usually the way that that settlement, that movement of the money between the two happens is because there's some external data that drives it. You know, if you have a dated future, then that's like.

At the maturity, you know, it's the 31st of December at midnight, you take a price, if you have perpetuals, which are like the most common in crypto, that happens maybe once every eight hours. So like, you take a bit of data every eight hours and you use that to move money between me and you, between the longs and the shorts and make sure that everyone is kind of good and that the money moves correctly.

So, it's obviously a very important thing in derivatives to have that oracle be there, because that's what makes everyone, you know, make the correct profit or loss. That means it's very important for two things. One is like getting Fresh, you know, low latency data when you need it to make sure that the you know, the settlement is accurate.

And the second one is like the security of oracles, you know, so if you just have like a guy sat there with MetaMask just signing messages going the Bitcoin price is 43k, the Bitcoin price is 20k. Then obviously, you know, if they go rogue or if they fall asleep the market's going to stop working, right?

You know, they're going to take a short position and then send a rogue message that says the price is 5k in profit. Or they're going to fall asleep and there's just going to be no message for like a week. Both of those are bad. So what you tend to have is these like complex Oracle solutions like Chainlink and Pyth and others where you take data from multiple sources, you have multiple signers proving it, you have different ways to kind of Allow people to verify the data is correct and get that data on chain.

So yeah, that's basically the whole Oracle thing. There's a whole bunch of projects doing it. They all have different pros and cons. But from our perspective, what's important is enabling connections to the best quality sources so that people who want to come and create markets on Vega can connect up those sources of data in as good a way as possible and create markets that work well.

Stephen: That's awesome. That's all I was going to say. Chainlink is really the only one. I know I'm not big on the technical standpoints. Of Oracles. But is it, like you just said, like somebody whipping up a a a new application on your blockchain or platform? Do you have like a, like a venue would have, do you have a preferred list of Oracles that you would use?

Or is it just kind of like they kind of choose to own that they want to represent on that new project?

Barney: Yeah, it's a bit of both actually. So, you know, at the moment we have, like, you know, we do have a sort of semi-pro preferred list of, of known. Oracle providers will be building, as I said, some UIs to make it easier to create markets, and those will lean quite heavily on, you know, sort of partners and preferred Oracle providers that enable people to kind of Go in with a bit of trust, you know, it's like you don't have to kind of work out what a good oracle is, you can kind of look at this list and go, okay, this is a good one.

But underneath that in the platform is always the ability for anyone to connect effectively any oracle, you know. This platform can read any oracle on the Ethereum blockchain, it can read any kind of signed message and a bunch of other things. So, you know, we keep that openness and enable people to really code up their own.

But also, you know, work with partners and preferred providers to kind of give people some guidance of like, here's a way to get this done in a way that's going to kind of work.

Stephen: I love it.

Stephen: You know, lastly, I want to talk about the recent raise you had, 43 million dollars, but you did it in a different way.

You did it through Coinless token sales back in July of 2021. We have a lot of founders and people in payments and crypto that listen to this podcast, wondering how they can figure out how to raise 43 million in the market that we're currently in. At this point, it appears that you've already received venture funding, maybe to get the, you know, the process started.

Is there a reason why you decided to kind of go the community token sale route? Was it something that your community was asking you to be a part of, or was this the wrong way to go?

Barney: you know, you, like, on the one hand, you sort of, you know, want to see the community, the crypto community. The blockchain community able to like get into something you don't really, you know, the whole sort of open source, you know, everything's done out in the open.

Everyone can look at the code, everyone can access it. So it's nice if everyone can also Get a hold of the token you know, and they're going to need the token if they want to stake it, if they want to create markets and do things. So, you know, providing people with a way to do that, like pre launch rather than waiting for it to launch and potentially have to pay much more or whatever.

So that was one thing. The other side was that, you know, people want to invest, they want to put money in, they sort of have that demand to do it. And then the other side of it from, you know, why CoinList is like, when you look at like, how can we sell these things to people, there's all these rules, like, oh, you got to do KYC and they can't be American because the SEC probably thinks it's security.

And so, you know, really we sort of got to the point where the only real way to do it. Was to use a platform like CoinList and have that sort of be the intermediary that makes sure that KYC is done and the rules are, rules are sort of adhered to.

Stephen: And that 21, 000 unique participants really shows maybe the, you know, the way, the diversity of your community.

If it's like a hundred people investing, you're like, Hmm, you know, there's a lot of people that could probably have some influence in what's going on. 21, 000 people really shows A, how many people really believe in what you're doing. And B is like all these different people. Was there any challenges other than using CoinList, because I know, you know, CoinList doesn't allow people like myself in Canada, North America, pretty much with the United States.

Did you feel like there was a chance you were going to be missing out on a market that could have been a key contributor or key contributor to raising those funds?

Barney: Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things there. One is obviously like it would be really nice if, if you could just have anyone in the community who wants to participate from anywhere in the world.

You know, having to exclude some places sucks and is not what we would have liked, but There's just no way around it to stay compliant. And then the other thing is like, platforms like CoinList are interesting beasts because they both enable your community to get in, but they have huge communities of their own.

So, you know, what ends up happening is like some percentage of the people who buy the token are in your community and they, you know, come in and join your Discord and they're already in your Discord quite likely and you know, they, they really want you to be successful and they're really helpful. Then some other percentage don't know that much about what you're doing and have come in via the like, CoinList or whatever platform you use.

This is not, you know, not to diss CoinList or anything. It's going to happen on any such platform, but they come in because you're on that platform, because they're on that platform and they're part of that platforms community. And so, you know, they're probably just thinking, you know, like on average, when I invest in one of these things, it goes up by this much.

And really they just want to see that. And so they tend to be the ones who come into the Discord and they kind of make annoying noises or whatever. You know, just only want to talk about the price of the token, but you're sort of like, well, we've always said this is not about, it's not about that. It's about being part of the journey of building this thing and everything.

So, you know, I think that's the, one of the challenges that exists there. It's, it, it is what it is. And you sort of, you get through it and you, you just have reasonable moderation on your community. And you, we did actually do some stuff like we tried to have people, we did a sort of snapshot of our community.

channels before we announced the sale. And basically anyone who was in that snapshot got a kind of like special pass where they could get in so that we made sure that anyone who was part of our community before we sort of joined forces with the Coinless community actually definitely got in because we wanted to make sure they weren't pushed out.

So we did that and yeah, we did that sort of White list process, even though it was a hell of a lot of effort, but it was very, very important to us to enable that community to kind of come in and, and state their claim before it was announced, sort of, and get, get what was fair. So we did a few things like that, but, you know, ultimately you do that and then you do the sale and then, you know, hopefully some of those people who, you know, initially are just really there for the CoinList community.

Hopefully they then learn about the project and learn about the team, join the channels and, and also decide to become supporters and advocates for the project as well.

Stephen: Do you feel less stressed doing it that way versus VC funding where, you know, those few annoying people in Discord are kind of like, in VC funding, they're like, the people that gave you the money, all the money, and they're kind of like, well, we want to see returns now.

Do you feel like you can build? With a little bit more, you know, confidence because the people want to see you building in the community versus like VCs were like, Hey, we need a quick turnaround or we need to get this money by this quarter.

Barney: To be honest, we've been very lucky with VCs. I mean, you know, the VCs we have have been incredibly supportive and helpful.

So I wouldn't say less stress. I mean, I think it's. It's really important to have a community of users and a community of token holders and stuff with a local protocol like this. So I think it's valuable to us to have done that and it gives us, you know, options to do things where we kind of, you know, Vega's very reliant on the community for governance of the network and for making stuff happen and building on the network.

So, you know, the worry VCs is they're kind of too busy to do anything substantial. You know, they might vote on the odd governance proposal, but they're maybe not going to get so stuck in. You know, once you've got a community of token holders, you find people who get really into it and you start writing code or start, you know, getting involved in governance.

So I think you get that benefit, but on the other hand, you know, the VCs have been incredibly helpful in terms of connections and in terms of like. Feedback and everything. So I would say it's really, really actually valuable to have both. I think with VCs, the key thing is probably being a little bit picky and not just taking money from anyone and, trying to avoid the situation where you do have a adversarial relationship with VCs or a relationship where they are too controlling or something.

So, you know, but I think we've avoided that and we have great. Great VC partners as well as, you know, token backers.

Stephen: Awesome. What is the future of Vega? What, I know you guys are unrolling tons of new suites of products, tools, and applications. What's one thing that you're really excited to hit, you know, store shelves in 2024?

Barney: You know, I think, you know, I mentioned that the sort of, you know, the market creation UI, I'm making that super easy. I'm very excited about that. The other thing I'm super excited about that'll follow on from that is, you know, this kind of The more programmable version of the Vega chain, so you know, at the moment we kind of have products like Perps and Futures that are available.

Next year we'll open up the SDK on the chain to enable the community to actually build their own derivative products and their own risk models, which will really like open up kind of any kind of product, much more like, you know, writing a smart contract in Ethereum, but like a smart product, if you will.

That's super exciting to me because that's actually where you get to enable, you know, kind of real innovation in, in the derivative product layer. I'm super excited to see that happen, you know, perhaps towards the middle or end of next year.

Stephen: Now you travel a lot. It looks like you go to conferences, you're a staple on, you know, the biggest panels around DEXs privacy and decentralization.

Where are some of the places that you love to go? Like where's there great food, great community for those that are looking to travel or attend the conference, where are some of those personal places that you're just like, Oh, I can't wait to go back there.

Barney: So Japan I've only been to Tokyo and only for like, I think three or four days and it was super busy and it was an amazing place, I loved it and I would love to go back and maybe visit some other cities or the countryside, but just spend more time in Japan, I didn't spend enough time there and believe it or not, I've actually never been to South America which is, it's amazing.

It's absolutely on the bucket list and I would love to spend a huge bunch of time there, both professionally and just personally, just to see it. It looks like an amazing place, so, both of those two. But I actually love to travel and, you know, since starting, the project, it's really been primarily going to cities where There are events and investors and people.

And I think, you know, the one thing that I'm missing from travel is actually that kind of like hiking through the middle of nowhere, because it turns out there aren't that many crypto conferences in the middle of nowhere. So yeah, that's the one where I'm looking for the next, next time I'll get to do that, but certainly yeah, Japan and South America are two that are high up the list.

Stephen: And then lastly, you know, you're building a huge platform, a huge protocol. But there's also a lot of competitive networks, maybe not even competitors of yours, but there's a lot of people building blockchain, AI, decentralized protocols, DeFi you know, one pops up every day. How do you maintain and retain top talent like the best solidity engineers and the best, you know, blockchain builders?

Find and maintain that, that top level talent.

Barney: I mean, you try and make it a really rewarding place to work, I think, you know, and then can be like the personal relationships, the way the teams work, the ways of working kind of, you know, respecting and giving people freedom and listening to them. And then obviously, you know, trying to Create an environment where people have fun challenges to work on that really engage them.

That can be hard. Like, you know, when you've just got features you need not all of those features are fun to build. And, you know, sometimes things are, you know, high stress environment like any startup. But, you know, we really try and keep it a place where on, you know, on average people are having, you know, good challenging work with, with good people and, and a great environment.

But, you know, I think yeah, it is, it is difficult always to retain and to attract the best talent because Developers and researchers in these areas are super in demand, so we just try and be a good place to work and if it's not right, the other thing is it doesn't have to be, you know, like you want to keep the people who want to stay, but if someone doesn't really want to stay and it's not right for them, like trying super hard to keep them and just keep giving them more money and keep like Pandering to their needs when actually they're just not very happy is actually the wrong way to go about it.

Better to just say, actually, if it's not right for someone, like, let them go.

Stephen: Do you find a lot of people that you've hired into your core team from the community? You know, they've been busy working on projects, moderating maybe some of your channels, and you're like, hey, this person's working. Just as hard as the people we're paying.

We need more people like this. I've heard stories of people hiring from their community. How about yourself?

Barney: There have been one or two, yeah, there have been one or two. You know, we've, we've kind of got a sort of, we've got a kind of, a sort of community network of sort of projects here in London and people that we know who are kind of in the blockchain space.

We've hired extremely successfully out of those networks and communities who've kind of been adjacent to our project and kind of following along. And then from within that kind of. You know, newer, more token holder community. We've hired a few. There've been a couple of those as well. I think, I think the bigger we get and the more successful and the more people sort of take notice and start using Vega I expect to kind of see more of that, I think.

Stephen: I love it. Barney, this has been great. Where can people find you? Where do you want to drive them to? What part, what part of your website, what's. What's a place where people can explore more about you as an amazing professional and speaker and Vega as a new up and coming decentralized derivatives prouct.

Barney: So, our website is Vega xyz you can get to lots of information about the protocol from there and you can get to the Vega console, like, you know, sort of front end for the DAX from there and take a look and, you know, download the wallet extension for the browser and, and have a go and see if it's something that's interesting to you.

And then linked from there, there's the Vega Twitter, and my personal Twitter is at Barnabee, B A R N A B E E. Feel free to follow me if you like that sort of thing.

Stephen: Love it. Thank you so much for this conversation. We can't wait to have you back and hear about your progress maybe at the end of 2024.

We can do what worked, what didn't work, and what you want to continue doing going throughout the year.

Barney: Awesome. Yeah, I'd love to come back on and talk about some of the Next innovation is as they come out next year.

I love it. Thank you so much, brother.

Barney: Thanks, Stephen

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