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AroundBlock-Jefferson With Andrew Masanto And Conrad Whelan

Podcast
AroundBlock-Jefferson With Andrew Masanto And Conrad Whelan

In the newest edition of “Around the Block With Jefferson Nunn,” Jefferson interviews Andrew Masanto & Conrad Whelan of Nillion.

Hey guys, buckle up for a new edition of the Around the Block podcast, the only podcast to go behind the scenes to talk with the movers and shakers of the cryptocurrency world. Today we’re talking with Andrew Masanto & Conrad Whelan. Andrew Masanto is a co-founder of both Hedera Hashgraph and Reserve, two of the top 100 cryptocurrencies, and has recently co-founded NFT.com, a Web3, community-driven NFT marketplace that has many celebrity supporters behind it, along with co-founding Nillion, the first ever decentralized MPC network. Outside of web3, Andrew has also co-founded PetLabCo, the fastest growing pet health supplement company in America. Conrad Whelan is the former Founding Engineer of Uber and is now the Founding CTO of Nillion. Conrad Whelan grew up in Calgary, Canada before moving to San Francisco to start Uber. He now lives in Amsterdam.

To listen to the podcast, click on the link below.

Listen Here- Around the Block.

Jefferson Nunn  0:50 

Welcome to another edition of Around the Block with Jefferson, and I’m here today with Andrew and Conrad of Nillion. Welcome to the show.

Conrad Whelan  1:00 

Thanks, Jefferson.

Andrew Masanto  1:02 

Thanks, Jefferson.

Jefferson Nunn  1:03 

So we were just talking a little bit pre show about all things crypto, and it’s very exciting where we are today with the crypto space, we got web3.0 that’s at about the launch. We’ve got Metaverse going on everywhere. Tell me what do you think about where we are in the crypto space today? And how a Nillion might improve that?

Andrew Masanto  1:27 

You want to go you want me to go on?

Conrad Whelan  1:29 

You could start as you’re really good at this.

Andrew Masanto  1:31 

So, you know, I I’ve been around crypto since while I bought Bitcoin in 2012. But been around since while creating protocols since 2017. So, you know, I was part of the founding teams of Hedera Hashgraph, and the reserve protocol. And both of them went through a cycle a down cycle. And I feel like that’s currently where we are right now. But it is also the best time to actually build Firstly, it’s necessary to flush out all the projects that aren’t worthwhile. And secondly, it’s good to bring the cream to the top. And I feel like there are so many opportunities now in crypto for the, for the next phase, for the next wave or the next evolution, it’s almost as if a down cycle is like the spring that allows you to sort of build and then spring into the upcycle. From you know, from the depths of this crypto recession and the things that are being built here. In this in this winter similar to the winters of past were things like are they things like USDC, things like uniswap, etc were built is kind of what’s going to happen here. And that’s where Nillion comes in. You know, I’m no stranger to new technologies that could disrupt crypto, in this case, new cryptographic primitives, and I had met the inventor of Nillion in 2019, where he invented a variant of zero knowledge proofs. At that point in time, it wasn’t interesting to me I really wanted something game changing to work on after reserve and, and Hedera and a new crypto news was interesting, but I realized the innovate the brilliance of the innovation, so I kept in contact with him, and to help guide his thinking. And in 2021, he said to me, hey, look, I’ve got his name is Miguel de Vega, he said, Dr. Miguel de Vega, and he said, Hey, look, I’ve come up with a new innovation for multi party computation. I always knew multi party computation to be sort of a way for nodes to be able to work together the where the objective isn’t. It isn’t consensus, it’s it’s verifiable computations within a secure setting. So, it had a different flavor different outcome, and thus, you know, different use cases, but still within the context of a decentralized network. So whereas blockchain solves for order and value, those are the two things you need you need to order transaction needs to know what the value is, you know, Nillion or MPC really solves for value, the computation of value but within a highly secure what we call information theoretic secure setting. So, you know, with the breakthrough and million that the problem with MPC was that it is just way too slow in past actually MPC and blockchain are built from the same problem set of having nodes basic or node or rabbit, let’s talk non technical computer science it turns but computer is all communicating with each other to achieve a certain result, right. So in the 80s, they had 80s 90s, they had sort of multi-party computation, then blockchain came and headed stay, and multi party computation was left behind because there was so much messaging between the nodes that it was too slow. Now, well, the innovation that Nillion had, which I like to liken to sort of, you know, Satoshis sort of proof of work is what we call nill message computations or nill message compute, which is the foundational technology which allows nodes in an MPC network, not to have to communicate with each other in the in the key phase, which basically means that the computations can be faster students and still retain the characteristics of MPC. So in summary, it creates a decentralized, secure computation and storage network. If that makes sense. Conrad, feel free to jump in if I missed anything.

Conrad Whelan  6:20 

I mean, just yeah, just like to think about the context of Jefferson, your original question. I think, like why I’m not a crypto specialist. You know, I’m sort of late to the game as far as that’s concerned. But I’ve like, built and worked with a lot of technology. And from what I can say what I think is like, the most exciting thing in the crypto space right now is moving beyond we just have like a network of blockchains that are creating tokens, and people are trying to build these platforms on top of them. I think that’s going to continue going. But for me, what’s the most exciting thing is building a network, like Nillion, which is a new take on a decentralized network that’s not focused on order. But it’s focused on privacy, it’s focused on collaboration, it’s focused on computation, and combining that with, you know, a blockchain both to manage our token, but for other product ideas that we do have, but this concept of the tokens, orchestrating how these networks are going to be interacting with each other versus like the tokens just intended to be a currency, that’s a store of value or an exchange medium or whatnot. You know, as I’ve been saying, or thinking for quite a while, I think it’s entirely possible in the future, if you are building a new technology product, maybe consumer facing product or a business facing product. Instead of choosing you know, your programming language and your MySQL versus Postgres database, or your which gelato delay jobs you’re gonna use, it’s entirely possible, we’re going to move towards a world where there’s a whole bunch of these decentralized network resources available, and the tokens are going to be the things that are fully orchestrate you know, so in your one call or uses of an application, a token, moves through many different layers of like different stacks and backwards, and I think that’s, like, you know, the super exciting thing that we’re gonna start to see getting built right now.

Andrew Masanto  8:06 

By the way, to give you some background and context, Conrad and I shot that for a while we met a Breniman, we’re all we’re all good relationships come from, but he was a huge, yeah, he was a huge crypto skeptic. He did appreciate very deeply good technology. His background is in mathematics and, and the engineering. And so when I showed him Hedera hashgraph, he was like, This is amazing, but he’d just come off. So Conrad was the founding engineer at Uber, and he just come off the coming at Uber, but he said to me, this is one of the coolest algorithms I’ve seen. If this was any other time, I would definitely work on this. But a, I need a bit of a break after Uber and B. He was moving to the Netherlands and Uber and Hedera was being built in Texas. So the time zones weren’t gonna work out either. Right. But, you know, over the years, we, you know, we kept in contact, we became roommates and good friends. And then you know, we I actually think I introduced you was it No, actually didn’t know, Miguel from back in the day.

Conrad Whelan  9:12 

No, but I think I think when you were discussing when you were talking to City Chief of zero knowledge proof, I remember you had sent me a paper. But then a short while later, you were like, Ah, I think it’s still some problems. We’re still working on it. So. But it’s good to know that you were collaborating from such an early stage with these guys. It’s like, really? Yeah.

Andrew Masanto  9:31 

Well, it was, you know, I was really collaborating with Miguel. And that’s the thing, Jefferson, like, I get sent emails about, you know, I get so much deal flow and so many people showing me new technologies, and, you know, but, you know, very true to what Conrad said, I very rarely get impressed by anything. And I’m not at a point in my life where I need to work on things. So it has to be something I guess my mean Conrad are both at that point. So really makes a difference. When there is a genuine innovation in this case, you know, a new cryptographic primitive for us to look at. It’s exciting. It pulls together the right people like the PhDs and the math. I think you were saying that and you probably want to give that guy a shout out. But crypto PhD who told you about this right Jefferson? And that’s why your kind of going.

Jefferson Nunn  10:27 

Yes, it was. It was Braden Busau, who sent us my way and said, this is something that looks really incredible. And he’s the guy that introduced me, oddly, to Hedera. So it’s like, this is like the second time I’ve kind of come into your universe. Yeah, well, yeah, Hedera, I met both the CEO and CTO over there, and the CTO is legit, somebody that is brilliant. And now they’re like at the now look at hedera. And they’re already making some serious inroads. So to go back to the little bit to Nillion, and how that works. I I think I understand a little bit more about it. I mean, part of it is, this is something so new, I still have yet to wrap my head around it is like I’m reading all the words and the words make sense, but I can’t see the bigger picture further. The forest, right. So I see in there metaverse as an example. And believe me, I’ve talked with Adam Draper. I’ve talked with other people that are very heavy, very heavy into metaverse. Alright, so I think this is something that’s really interesting, something that’s Metaverse related that Nillion could do. And you mentioned the stacking just now, Andrew, where you can have a stack of perhaps different tokens come together within one particular transaction or process. So walk me through it. If I’ve got an avatar, the metaverse and I’m doing something I don’t even know what waving a lightsaber, walk me through it. What happens next with Nillion and how it works with everything else?

Andrew Masanto  12:13 

So I will so let me let me answer that question by going through some of the potential use cases that Nillion could what are the things that we’re actually looking at? So you’re walking through you got this lightsaber, right? But even before that, you have to access your metaverse personality via some means, right. And usually, that’s via a, assuming that we are in a web three Metaverse, it’s going to be public private key, right. Or it could be username, password. But in either case, both of those, well, in the web two version, you need authentication, probably to FA and on the web three version, you will have to input a private key, the issue with the web three version is that that private key, it constitutes a single point of failure, you have this whole decentralized network, and then the private key is the central point of failure. So, what one of the basic use cases of Nillion is sort of decentralized authentication as a service, where the authentication happens by a series of nodes, not one person has your identity or your to FA or whatever else, and you will have to corrupt the entire network. So it decentralizes The last bastion of centralization, which is where you store your private key, your private key, I mean, I’m assuming you have a ledger, but you’ll see phrase, it’s probably stored in a in a fire proof vault somewhere. Or if you were terrible, it’s stored on like one password or something like that, right. But in either case, it’s this like centralized point of failure. And so, you know, we have firstly the ability to create the sort of authentication as a service, which then when you interact with someone else, you can verify who they are. So it potentially leads to this decentralized network where you can verify that the person who you’re talking to is actually that person in a web three non-intrusive way, ie, you’re confirming that they’re a real person or who they say they are without them having to send you over their passport or send you over their driver’s license, etc. You know, so you have these situations where, again, you’re walking through web three, you’ve got the lifesaver, you want to go borrow from a bank, right? Firstly, you’ve got your KYC something like Nillion can provide decentralized KYC Secondly, but more or interestingly uncollateralized lending or credit scoring, which leads to sort of lower levels of collateralization. How do you do that? Well, you need to somehow get a network or a entity, ideally not centralized to verify the credit worthiness or the characteristics of that person. Now, this is way, you know, in future, but I’m extrapolating for you a future where, you know, you can utilize nearly and in its in its full capacity to do things like this. There are tons of others, we’ve had several other entrepreneurs say to us that they want to build on the network things like smart signatures, or you know, DocuSign, no, you but sometimes my PA will sign my DocuSign, right? That’s not really me by doing that, where you’d have a web three network being able to sign that would be interesting, or, or, you know, a decentralized, smart wallet or multi chain smart wallet. There are honestly so many applications that that I could go on and on about.

Conrad Whelan  16:12 

Yeah, yeah. Now outside of web three, I think there’s just like even there’s as well compelling, I always think scientific research collaboration between organizations that do not want to share their data, but they want to train machine learning models, this is going to be this is, you know, AI is not going away. I’ve heard that people I know who are into supply chain, say that there’s like opportunities for optimizing like supply chain processes between different companies who once again, do not want to share what’s going on with their supply chain with others, but they want to optimize the Shared Links that they’re all using to move their goods around. And as well, like legal discovery, there’s, you know, there’s opportunities for doing shared legal discovery, again, where nobody wants to give up, you know, the actual legal terms that are, you know, they sort of own right. So, yeah, the wealth of opportunities with this technology, I think, is pretty amazing.

Jefferson Nunn  17:04 

Yeah, this is really, really fascinating. And thanks for going over that. And it makes a lot more more sense. But turning our attention, I guess a little bit more into the how you even got there. You mentioned crypto winners and so forth. i It’s odd, but many of the people I’ve interviewed, most recently start got their start after the 2013. Boom. And then they developed during the winter, and then they had their release. Most recently, you mentioned even USDC there in that cycle as well. So but tell me a little bit more about let’s start with you, Conrad. How did you get your start? In crypto, what was your interest?

Conrad Whelan  17:47 

Well, I mean, my interest is, my history of background is electrical engineering and scientific computing. The company I was the startup I was at actually in Calgary a long time ago, we were one of the first commercially available GPU computing products. So you know, and then if at Uber, we obviously worked on like a consumer facing product with all sorts of scale things. But yeah, the big draw to me of the alien has been in the computation side of things and like a new paradigm for computation that’s like based on the network. You know, the crypto part of it to me, I think there’s some interesting crypto use cases. I’m more interested in using cryptocurrencies to orchestrate or coordinate the network. I think that’s like where the some of the most fascinating stuff is. Yeah, as I tell people, in you know, in the work that we’re doing it million I think the NMC algorithm, which is the core privacy preserving cryptographic primitive, is kind of like ordering the button and Uber, but it’s actual, the crypto tokens that we’re using to both pay for those computations as well for people providing computation to earn from the network. That’s like, being able to pay for the Uber with your credit card. It’s like the sneaky secret, awesome thing that I think has been really smart with how Andrew and Miguel and Alex and everyone else has has come up with our sort of product strategy. But as far as my general involvement with crypto, I’m relatively new to it. So I came in as a little bit of a little bit of a downer, Andrew did a really great job convincing me because he’s really good at talking about this stuff. And I think it’s just like a really fascinating time for the whole space. So I’m really excited to learn more about like the the technology, the applications, reading the news about like, the regulation that’s coming and like what’s next for the entire space. I just think it’s a very, very interesting time.

Andrew Masanto  19:40 

It’s been really healthy as well, to have that internal dialogue between, you know, real world product focus, people like Conrad, complete crypto de gens who are brilliant at the crypto so we have a guy, Christian literally, he was a CTO of that have actually wallet, he’s joined our founding team as well, that he built a crypto wallet, and he’s made millions of dollars in crypto DJing also runs a few Dao and well, is part of the leadership team of a few Dao, anonymously. And, you know, so and that having that tension there, and then myself and, you know, we’ve got, we’ve got just a good team that allows for very real conversations that lead to better product decisions, I think, for Nillion and, and that’s been extraordinary for us, we’ve really focused as a team, on just making sure internally that we are buttoned up and that, you know, the team, the product, the focus, etc, is right, before we, you know, come out into, you know, trying to build hype and community and things like that there have been a lot of requests, but mostly from the academic side, which is really good, like, guys, like, the guy that introduced us to you, you know, get really excited when they read the technology, the math, I mean, there’s no way Conrad would join a project that wasn’t interesting. Math, Math, or, or technology, you know, so. So, you know, that’s really been our focus. So yeah, congrats for getting onto this. We this is the I think the first podcast I mean; Conrad and I have done together. We’ve been a couple of other things, but we really haven’t done much reach out for, for this sort of thing.

Jefferson Nunn  21:38 

Awesome. Well, yeah, it’s interesting how a lot of folks get their start in crypto. I mean, since I started in 2010, a lot of it but more in 2011. With, with the original Bitcoin, back in the day, and then when I moved to Denver, I spaced out of that for a couple of years long story. But then when I moved to Denver, you know, Bitcoin, you hit 100, I started going through Aetherium, meetups and stuff like that. So that’s kind of the thing, I find that this space is just organically drawing in people, the more that the technology matures, which is fascinating. It’s a fascinating development, I didn’t even earlier we were talking about, you know, Wikipedia, and so forth, which is one of the reasons I started this podcast. And I’ll work on, you know, actually what other teams are going to be doing. It’s all of these podcast transcripts and so forth, will be stored on a web three website, we want the history of that to be almost immutable, you know, because it’s important, I think, to find out about the people that are involved in the development of this, you know, pioneering cutting edge technology, which which is great. So, speaking of the cutting edge, tell me what y’all think about, you know, what’s next for crypto? I mean, yes, say, Now, the unit’s installed in us by 10s of millions of people. What does that world look like?

Conrad Whelan  23:08 

So, you know, in 2000, and well, do you do you want that response from the Nillion perspective? Or do you..

Jefferson Nunn  23:18 

General, you know, but general future tech?

Andrew Masanto  23:22 

Well, you know, in 2017, I had this thesis that basically, there were going to be five significant sort of semi niches developed within crypto, he was Oracle’s which was correct my chainlink interoperability which was corrected by polka dot scalability issues correct via sort of Hadera Solana, etcetera. Privacy and privacy. And there was one more I can’t remember, but I made I made investments into each and every one of them and I obviously focus my time on Hadera. So now, as I look at the crypto space, I see, you know, especially now with the increasing regulation, etc. I see several realms of opportunity here. The first is, is, you know, looking at different infrastructure projects, and these are these are rare. This is why Nillion was so interesting to me, because infrastructure really enables what’s going to come next. So, you have this, if we have this computing this decentralized MPC solution, which creates secure computations, it opens up a world of completely new possibilities, right? Which I which I like because, you know, a lot of people now are looking at Oh, how do we scale Ethereum or how do we you know, create, you know, NFTs etc. are different types of NFTs I know but what Looking at with Nillion is sort of a 90 degree pivot from that, where we’re looking at things like you know, in the limit things like identity on the blockchain or decentralized uncollateralized lending or, or, you know, credit scoring or as Conrad said, machine learning and AI implications that can be sorry, functionalities that can be enabled by a decentralized network like Nillion. And then, you know, you have this, this world where so there are several worlds that can come off that right? If you look at a world for example, imagine that five blocks for everyone, right? You have a world or a decentralized last pass where you send your you store your passwords, so right now you have Bitcoins that millions of millions, billions of dollars basically are stored within Bitcoin people trust Bitcoin with that, well, why not trust a decentralized network? With your secrets, right already? That’s what you’re doing if you’re using fire blocks, or you’re using MPC just you’re trusting fire blocks nodes, while well why not trust a decentralized network? For you know, it’s almost like what the signal was, to WhatsApp, right, you have open source, you have a decentralized network where you can store your deepest secrets. That’s just one example of a world where one of the use cases that nearly that, you know, we that there is to discuss how that Nillion enables rather, actually works out. Another is, for example, like, you know, where we have KYC, where you don’t need to or what is KYC know, your client, your identity, where that identity is stored within a decentralized network, and it can be cross leveraged in many, many different places. I mean, we’re looking for something simpler than, you know, NFTs that that are, are that are private. So, you know, nearly in itself represents to some degree, a decentralized, Secure Enclave like a place where you can compute and store data in a decentralized way. That is yet that is private and secure. So you know, when you consider what happened, what you can do with that you can store your, your metadata for NFTs privately, you can do computations for Ethereum, or other networks, in a private Secure Enclave, which is decentralized. So, the current best in class solution for that is using SGS chips, right, which is the Intel chips, which are private, but you’re kind of centralizing the computation there. But be you have to trust Intel, and that’s actually been shown to be unsecure.

Conrad Whelan  28:20 

Yes, not even notice that you need to trust Intel, like you can hack what’s going on through those chips by looking at the wires, for example, like.

Andrew Masanto  28:28 

Yeah, so look, what I’m trying to say is, I’m painting a world where any one of these could be the next uniswap. Does that make sense? That’s why I was so excited about, well, not the next unit swap. But in the same way unit swap was with Ethereum, if Nillion is seen as kind of the theorem in the creation of these, these use cases offered is really interesting. And if I was to say the one mistake I made, as you know, we my role as the guy who’s died, had error in terms of, you know, being found the CMO. It was that I didn’t focus on use case in the beginning, and that’s no fault of mine. It was more because it was such it was so early, like, you know, early 2017. We weren’t thinking more, more as I wouldn’t say, you know, there is it’s is a stock success. But if I had my time again, I would have I would have focused on ecosystem and we focused on the use cases that came off it. This is exactly what we’re doing here. So, these aren’t just promises we have founding entrepreneurs behind these we have a lot of the compensation of the early team is based not on the development, the product call, but on the number of people that are going to be used using the product Call based on the apps that are provided, sorry, the apps that are the apps that are created. Yeah, on the protocol. So, you know, we want to deep focus on product and use case, not just on the creation of the actual protocol, despite the fact that the protocol is so cool and sexy, and, you know, is a new cryptographic primitive, etc.

Jefferson Nunn  30:38 

Yeah, it’s really interesting. You touched on one use case briefly a little bit earlier, and it’s something that I’m been following for quite some time through another company called Solve.care. I’m not sure if y’all heard of them. But they have a really incredible solution for addressing medical care, even if you’re in two different countries. I think if you’re in two different countries, you have two different sets of regulations that you have to follow. between doctor and patient, and they literally solve all of that. And they’re in use already in a couple of different countries already, I think South Korea being one of them. But you mentioned medical data, which is something else, I think that’s interesting. In that, you know, I would want my medical data, you’d have to be kept private. But just like on Apple Watch it, you know, they have a variety of research study that wants access to my medical data, to perhaps do some research with it, which I’m kind of okay with. But I would feel better if this data was more anonymized in some way. So do you think million might be able to bring to the forefront that ability to anonymize medical medical data, but allow, you know, research into trends and things that would make a difference in people’s health and lives?

Conrad Whelan 32:09

Yeah, I think, especially when we’re thinking about the research side of things, you know, if I think about computation, and its place in scientific research, we’re talking about very large datasets, sort of repeated calculations happening. And if I think about the way Nillion works, it’s sort of one set of blinding factors, which is part of the cryptographic primitives that we use to create the data that we then do the compute on, you know, one set of blinding factors to be used across a wide, like an entire big column of medical data and keeping that data then totally, totally private with respect to the other people doing the research. That being said, that’s in the research context. So there’s already somebody that has access to those sorts of pools of data, doing this on the consumer context, where you are the only person who has access to your medical record, and putting that into a privatized pool with other people. I’m not quite sure how that’s gonna work yet, I think Nillion could actually be useful for that. But I think there’s like a massive coordination problem that happens outside of the the private shared computation that needs to be solved, right. And that’s, I think, when you see all these different companies, there’s so many companies in the healthcare space, trying to do medical records. That’s that coordination problem, you know, being expressed in, you know, many different approaches to building businesses around that, I think.

Jefferson Nunn 33:33

Great point, great point that’ll solve.care is really trying to break down the barriers for that is founded by a guy that is extremely frustrated with the existing paradigm. So yeah, believe me, he’s really trying to make that happen. I’ve talked to him a few times and try to go out. Great guy. And so that’s where I think, you know, so I’m what I’m trying to bring up. It’s I think there’s gonna be a number of other products, projects, that will be interrupt that will feature interoperability with Million, much like many different companies use Twilio? It’s an API for voice, you know, basic example. I get it. But you know, that’s the whole feature tech to legacy tech that Twilio did, right. But here, it’d be, you know, basic tech data to more. Yeah, machine learning AI, decentralized privacy. Hack, I would love to, you know, the whole signing thing that we have to do with the ledger, I would love to get away from that and just go click. You know, I am me hack even the robot thing. Good. Y’all can fix that. I would love you dearly for that. I did say it’s, I think I am a robot. So I could I keep failing the test. Pick the six different cats. And they’re all like dogs. So yeah, so All right. Well, any final thoughts to share with our general listening audience? We’ve covered a lot of ground. I think it’s fascinating. I’d really love to have you on add on this show. I’d love to have you on a future show. But any final thoughts?

Andrew Masanto 35:19

I think on my side, you know, I’m just super excited to work. I mean, you guys are coming to this very, very early, you know, so I’m just personally super excited to see, you know, we’ve got Conrad Whelan from Uber, we’ve got Lindsey Cohen from Coinbase users as a general counsel there. Several of the top leading top academics who were all hyper skeptical about an alien have now joined the team in either full time or advisory capacity. Andre Lipschitz, who was a computer scientists from Harvard. I mean, it’s a cool team working on a new cryptographic primitives solving real world problems that that really expand the forefront of what distributed and decentralized computing can actually do and so for me, I just would want to like take a you know, just just make sure just just just keep keep people abreast of this when we’re trying to be very quiet about it right now. But keep abreast of what happens with Julian because the right people are getting interested in the right people are getting involved. And that’s all the smart people. It’s not the it’s not the Lambo boys, you know, those those people are not there. It’s really the the people who are they PhDs in the math people in the and more importantly, the product people. And so, you know, we are positioning ourselves, hopefully, to be the thing that brings the next bull wave. And that’s what I really hope, you know, we’re, we’re building in the perfect time, which is a down cycle. And I truly hope that from here, you know, nearly and is one of the, the, the bright lights that brings in the new Bull Run, and we all know there’s one coming we’ve been in risk you’ve been in, in this as long as I have your mountain Gox sent us to the stone age’s. Then the 2017 sent us, you know, to the 2017 boom in the Boston and now we’ve got the, you know, the Luna and the three eras capital crash, like, Yeah, but the builders, you know, have really cool stuff, the stuff which lacks is where it counts. And this is where I feel like that’s why you need strong math, you need strong product, you need a strong people to build this and people not interested in the hybrid we’re interested in, in actual math and science. So whether it’d be us or other people keep a lookout for, you know, the strong. You know, technologies and teams doing really cool things I have, I have great faith in the web three. Industry, because I see a lot of that happening. And I’m super, super happy and proud to be to be, you know, onboard the New Orleans train.

Jefferson Nunn 38:18

Yeah, best Ethereum Name Service are just some of the most recent ones, right? And there’s more, a whole lot more coming. For web three. I mean, if if Cloudflare adopts something like that, you know, it’s going somewhere. So I know they’re not, those are bright guys, too. And so that’s what I think is the out there, it’s gonna be probably within the next two years, another great bull run, I’m sure of it. But in the meantime, in the short run, I still think that this is this is where the rubber meets the road, wherever we are right now. And I think it’s just amazing to be fighting. And I look at it like this, you know, you look at the finance industry, all the bright guys are leaving in the traditional finance industry, the Merrill Lynch’s of the world. You know, they can’t find good stockbrokers because it’s all a scam over there anyway. So all those great people, that super bright ones, they’re all starting these incredible crypto companies, right here right now. And I see just dozens of a more than in the last, you know, 2013, and definitely a whole lot more than 2017. So we’re in 2017, there might have been 20 companies that were interesting. Now there are hundreds that are interesting. So I think yes, that next Bull Run is going to be wave five. And here we go. So thank you so much, Andrew, and Conrad for your time. I think it was an incredible interview. I hope our listeners find it fascinating follow Nillion on their website, million.com. The links will be at the top of the show page. If you want to reach out to Conrad and Andrew, what’s the best way that Twitter or what?

Andrew Masanto  40:08

Yep, I think Twitter is probably really good for me. My Twitter, Cornard & I know what the best way of us, but my Twitter is twitter.com/andrewmasanto. And that’s my full name.

Conrad Whelan   40:24

I do have a Twitter. I don’t check it that much. I’m like, I’m [email protected]. So I imagined that’s easiest one to guess. Right.

Andrew Masanto   40:30

I’m [email protected]

Jefferson Nunn  40:37

So, the link for both of those will be at the top of the show page if you want to reach out and find out more. And here we are. I said thank you very much for being on the show.

Conrad Whelan   40:45

Thanks, Jefferson.

This concludes today’s episode of the around the block podcast, the only podcast to go behind the scenes to talk with the movers and shakers of the cryptocurrency world.

This podcast is produced by crypto.news.

Our host is Jefferson Nunn.

Managed by Urooj Fatima.

Edited by Muhammad Wasay.

Voiceovers by Danny Rubin.

 Please follow us on any major podcasting platform. Thanks for listening.