The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below.

00:00:05:00 – 00:00:27:00

Richard Carthon: Tell everyone, welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon, and today I have special guest joining me to talk on something I think is highly, highly, highly favorable for everything that’s going on with bitcoin going on a tear. We have the world of DeFi. They found a way to merge the two. And we’re talking about Portal today. So we have the co-founders of Portal. We have George and Chandra. How are you all doing today?

00:00:28:29 – 00:00:34:00

George Burke: Great, thank you for having us on, Richard. It’s good to see. Excited to be here.

00:00:34:29 – 00:00:38:29

Richard Carthon: No doubt. Well, Sandra, we’ll start with you. Can you give us a little background on yourself?

00:00:42:03 – 00:01:12:04

Chandra Duggirala: Sure, I started fertile in 2018 after having spent two and a half exclusively studying Bitcoin ecosystem and also other things other projects that were going on at that time. And the reason I came to starting portal is that the glaring problem in the space is almost the entire problem in the space depends on bitcoin getting to its final destiny as money. And to do that, you have to have multiple speculative bubbles like we’ve seen in print world 2017, the wonder in the middle of 2021, etc.

00:01:13:24 – 00:01:19:09

George Burke: ending in the culmination call what we like to call hyperbolic ionization of.

00:01:21:07 – 00:02:01:24

Richard Carthon: Because a speculative attack on a fiat currency, the kind of mesosphere. But the biggest problem in that hypothesis is that the our part depends on. Trust minimized credibility between bitcoin and other assets, you can speculate bitcoin against bitcoin, it has to be something else. Right now, almost all of that volume goes through central instruments, which can be easily shut off, as you’ve seen with what you did, what Turkey was attempting to do in many other countries, including China, and maybe at some point government. So a peer to peer tor correlate trust minimized meaning non-custodial cross-chain system is essential for the space, and that’s what Paul is designed to do.

00:02:02:09 – 00:02:04:25

Richard Carthon: And here we are also.

00:02:05:18 – 00:02:06:21

Richard Carthon: And what about your background?

00:02:07:09 – 00:02:26:24

George Burke: Oh, well, before this, I’m a serial entrepreneur actually started out as a doctor. I went to medical school and I spent some time in grad school, but for years doing research in biophysics. So nothing to do with entrepreneurship. But I found my bearing in now in Silicon Valley as a serial entrepreneur, starting with all over the place.

00:02:29:00 – 00:02:45:28

George Burke: Vicki devices, Amy, personal attack and then Bitcoin rabbit hole. I got in because of the philosophical leanings towards being sovereignty, some sovereignty, sovereignty, money, censorship resistance as a core ideals and so on and so forth.

00:02:46:00 – 00:02:50:17

Richard Carthon: So if I remember back then you were afraid to even to hold bitcoin in the region,

00:02:52:19 – 00:02:53:15

George Burke: wasn’t afraid to hold

00:02:53:17 – 00:02:57:09

Richard Carthon: bitcoin or when you were afraid you were afraid to hold it because you were worried about government blowback.

00:02:58:27 – 00:03:20:14

George Burke: Yes. And the interesting thing is, am I some? I lost my private keys and I didn’t really care much about that. This was back in 2013 because I was pretty sure that if the governments of the world understood bitcoin as a to act on their monetary sovereignty, you were.

00:03:22:10 – 00:03:35:18

George Burke: Just to make it disappear, right? And I was pretty sure they’re going to do that very, very soon. And so I said, you know, this is going to be a failed experiment with high probability I had I was so wrong and I’m very happy to be wrong.

00:03:35:26 – 00:03:45:14

Richard Carthon: But yeah, not a bad thing to be wrong on. And here we are today. So, George, tell us, how did you get here today? So give us some background on yourself? And then how did you become part of the Portal team?

00:03:46:13 – 00:04:22:09

Richard Carthon: Sure. So I’ve actually been in crypto for quite some time. Back when it was really just called bitcoin, and that was that was early 2013. I was lucky enough to have a friend who really wanted to get me into the space. He was apparently running one of the earlier New York City bitcoin meet ups and was also mining out of his office using the free electricity that was in there. Just, you know, using the electricity for the server closet that he had and got me into it.

00:04:22:11 – 00:04:30:15

Richard Carthon: I didn’t understand that at first. But after I saw the price rise, I really started paying attention. That was like 2000

00:04:32:05 – 00:05:02:11

Richard Carthon: in 2013 March. Right. I’m seeing the price rise to like thirty five dollars. That’s when I pulled the trigger. And so with I basically spent the last $10000 that I had access to wasn’t even mine. It was the last amount of credit that I had to be able to get in on this. I was really worried about what my future would hold, and I wanted to have. The best of the most amazing thing about that, years later, is that that’s what ended up allowing me to pay back massive debt.

00:05:02:27 – 00:05:42:14

Richard Carthon: But I really got into this because once I sold, my holdings continued to go up like I wouldn’t support bitcoin. This is this is super cool. So my my co-founder and I back then created an exchange that allowed people one of the first non fiat exchanges as strangers out as friends, basically, but bitcoin to coin exchanges and then quickly sold that to an anonymous buyer. We still don’t know today we decided to buy it. That’s actually one of the beauties of Bitcoin in 2014 was around and my co-founder, a new co-founder, and I created the first word in Bitcoin debit card in the United States.

00:05:43:03 – 00:05:54:26

Richard Carthon: That was a way to support what was what we understood to be a spendable currency. That’s what we thought, right? But it turns out that.

00:05:56:23 – 00:05:58:07

Richard Carthon: The Irish senator, that

00:05:59:27 – 00:06:06:12

Richard Carthon: us it’s not a spendable currency, you have to keep track of your gains with every single and even

00:06:08:17 – 00:06:34:10

Richard Carthon: coffee, right? You have to keep track of your gains there. And so with government overreach and the ability for them to neuter it, such such waste. I met up with Chandra much later. We were working on other projects, but by the way, but we were looking at ways to protect the economy from our nation state attacks, and it was actually something that that we realized with coral we would be able to do.

00:06:36:05 – 00:06:49:27

Richard Carthon: And it first started with understanding what we can do to build on top of bitcoin as a way to bolster its security model. And I’ll try to give a little more information on that, no doubt.

00:06:50:00 – 00:07:23:13

Richard Carthon: So just to bring you both back, so you both get in pretty early. You first learn about bitcoin around 2013 2014 timeline, you see the potential in it and you slowly start to go down the rabbit hole and then you both come together because you see that bitcoin is a major solution that solves a lot, but to make sure that sovereignty is secured away from what potential government overreach can do. You decided to create a portal to build an ecosystem on top of bitcoin. So I think that’s where we presently are right now. Chandra, I’ll let you kind of take it from here. Keep telling us more about what is Portal.

00:07:23:15 – 00:07:26:24

Richard Carthon: How can potential people who are listening right now get involved and start using it?

00:07:28:18 – 00:07:32:00

George Burke: So Portal is a cross-chain

00:07:33:19 – 00:07:50:03

George Burke: communication protocol in the sense that you have, let’s say you wanted to trade your bitcoin against deteriorate. I thought you were going to acquire some Ethereum. Right now, the most of that volume happens to be an exchange of centralized exchanges that you need to send your coins someone

00:07:53:02 – 00:08:19:09

George Burke: and you trade against some other people. Most of these trades are basically increasingly decentralized exchange, which eventually at some point in fact just got settlements, free money, etc etc. Portal is a solution to a long standing problem, a sense that if you have your bitcoin, I have my theory. If we both agree on an exchange and exchange price, the exchange amount. But we want exchange. If I send you my coins first, there’s no guarantee that you will do the same.

00:08:21:16 – 00:08:30:01

George Burke: If you send your points first to me, there’s not going to I will send you to say this problem is called a fair exchange problem. There’s an informal group dating back to 1990s there.

00:08:31:17 – 00:08:51:09

George Burke: It’s impossible to participate in the same space with a reasonable amount of time in physical space, we take this for granted bird, you introduced all you give them your cash, they give you the good, you leave the physical constraints of the space guarantee to certain extent from the different chains that actually don’t communicate with each other, right? The legislative term is independent of bitcoin because

00:08:53:13 – 00:09:00:22

George Burke: it is independent of material. How do you actually untangle the do? How do you make the exchange? And that’s sort of the comics. What is

00:09:02:22 – 00:09:33:02

George Burke: the basically, it is a it is a solution of this for 20, 30, 40, 44 bitcoin platforms, but to something called a pure knowledge swap, which basically means you lock up your money. We both done this free of the brand right thing that we have agreed on a little bit in the amounts, cetera. And so we up coins in something called an HPLC, which would be DLC a hash time of contract, which basically means you could secret you lost three coins up to the cash register with the condition that you can take it out for a certain amount of time.

00:09:33:13 – 00:09:47:23

George Burke: Or I can take a different approach and you send me that. So that’s a good I do the same thing with these other coins on this other chain, assuming that they’re mirror images of each other. And so if I take your money, the secret is revealed and because of.

00:09:49:13 – 00:09:59:02

George Burke: The difference in payments, you got to take my money, right, that’s what I’m dynamic swap, is it and to two transactions in such a way that if you get my money, I could draw money and resources, something

00:09:59:04 – 00:10:02:05

Richard Carthon: that’s native to the point protocol. It’s what enables.

00:10:05:19 – 00:10:15:14

Richard Carthon: Smart contract to get to actually exist on top of a. But I bring it up because most people have never heard of the glasses, so that’s why I

00:10:15:18 – 00:10:41:27

George Burke: want functionality in the scriptures. These are things that go in. Yeah, and exactly like George has said. And so then the question becomes, how come people don’t use it right? And the reason is the layer one kernel and stomach swell protocol. The way I just described it to you is is messy. It assumes that people just meet each other, right? No mark. It’s become instantly liquid. They don’t materialize, right? There’s interim

00:10:43:17 – 00:11:20:12

George Burke: periods that intermediate the market. Liquidity, like a stock exchange rate, brings buyers and sellers together because of the depth and the volume and all of the rules they put in place and some security guarantees. Which was, I think, exists in the protocol. The second problem is layer one swaps take a lot of time. It takes one confirmation cycle and once you and on the other chain, which basically also means you have to bail out one transaction fees on both sides. And most people say, Oh, well, why bother? Why not just do it at Coinbase or Binance? So portals goal is to actually simplify this all the way from the protocol level to the UX level.

00:11:20:29 – 00:11:43:24

George Burke: So our goal is to the way it works is it’s a multi currency wallet interface. It all looks the same. All coins, whatever blockchain there are on that are supported. Look the same when you try to solve one to another, what the software does, it actually constructs these specific kinds of transactions broadcasts about one network. There’s anything

00:11:47:21 – 00:12:20:28

George Burke: it looks like a regular centralized exchange or a book, except that nobody’s in control or in anybody’s coins during this. However, there’s an incentive in band for an entity called a facilitator to actually facilitate intermediate in these markets, meaning you can be a facilitator, right? You’re bringing people together. You’re off the orders appropriately to each other. You set the premiums, you set the process, you broadcast the pricing information. And so why would you do that? Because you actually get paid when successful swaps happen or settle on cheap? So one of the operators, this is yours.

00:12:22:08 – 00:12:25:29

George Burke: So it’s also problems. One is it removes

00:12:27:20 – 00:12:36:17

George Burke: something called a free option problem, which is standard channel and swap. It removes the liquidity griefing attack. It mitigates the liquidity, giving it that for the other party.

00:12:39:08 – 00:12:48:13

George Burke: And then it is always a third party study. You know, the thing people throw up their hands in the air and just say, Oh, let’s just two

00:12:50:00 – 00:12:50:17

George Burke: people, really?

00:12:54:16 – 00:13:01:20

George Burke: You assume that there’s incentives for people to create the system. There are strong incentives. Nobody’s in control of the

00:13:03:06 – 00:13:07:18

George Burke: bureaucracy until these transactions happen. Nobody is a custodian.

00:13:09:03 – 00:13:14:14

George Burke: Plus, because this most of these transactions happen at layer two.

00:13:16:08 – 00:13:25:27

George Burke: The fees and transaction delays are minimal compared to settling all of these transactions on labor. So a good mental model, think about our analogy and allergy to.

00:13:27:21 – 00:14:08:17

George Burke: Think about is lightning is a peer to peer network for microtransactions, right? Basically, that means all the orders that are routed through the lightning nodes from not allowed to to etc., etc. they’re unsettled on broadcast transactions that the blockchain doesn’t know about until someone throws a channel, something here like news of something else other than DLC, but you could think about you can reason about in similar ways that are a little different the signature, you know, the sizes are a little bit smaller if you use hashes of secrets versus actual signatures from different properties and so on.

00:14:08:19 – 00:14:19:05

George Burke: But the model is the same. Think of it as a peer to peer network and near to network for intermediate intermediating cross-chain transactions, whether they are swaps that of their options.

00:14:21:20 – 00:14:27:24

George Burke: So on and so forth. Lightning is designed to do one thing, which is micropayments, so this is another different business.

00:14:28:15 – 00:14:51:01

Richard Carthon: So basically, you have found a way to build layer two on top of the bitcoin ecosystem and you still have everything very secure. You have it to where there’s still not a central authority that for everything it has to flow through and you still haven’t found a way to provide liquidity by having these facilitators that will go and technically liquidity to some of these bears, and they get some of the

00:14:51:18 – 00:14:52:26

George Burke: noise to actually

00:14:54:23 – 00:14:58:06

George Burke: begin to set their own fees. It’s a competitive free market figure to set their own fees

00:14:59:22 – 00:15:17:28

George Burke: initially, assuming that the fees wouldn’t be that competitive if there’s only one or two facilitators, but as the as the like in any other market, the profit is driven to be delivering to the cost. So marginal cost will tend towards marginal marginal profit and margin costs as more and more percentages do this.

00:15:19:20 – 00:15:25:14

George Burke: The liquidity will increase and your the user fees will come down.

00:15:26:14 – 00:16:05:24

Richard Carthon: Yeah. So with that and George, as you can kind of speak to that, so there’s a lot of moving elements of what makes Portal as great as it does, and we’re not going anywhere from literally creating layer two on top of bitcoin, which is amazing in itself without having to use lightning and everything else, highly secure facilitators who can provide liquidity and get profits on that. There’s a lot of it, and I’m sure there’s even more elements to this. But as you are continuing to build our portal, like what are some of the other things that you think as we get more people understanding how to use this, this user interface? Because, right, that’s that’s usually one of the biggest hurdles, just like you.

00:16:05:26 – 00:16:16:25

Richard Carthon: And now it’s like, why wouldn’t people come through Coinbase or why wouldn’t people come through some of these other exchanges and come directly to Portal to utilize these various services they all been able to put together?

00:16:17:00 – 00:16:48:21

Richard Carthon: So those are the gold standard, right? Like the centralized exchanges, the ease of usability, the frictionless those you have to beat, no matter how secure your processes, no matter how many additional benefits, such as a non-custodial, censorship resistant, et cetera you give them. I think the user experience the seamlessness. The ease of usability should be at least on par with centralized alternatives. And there are some natural reasons why there will be. For example, there’s not an account based system.

00:16:48:23 – 00:16:50:21

Richard Carthon: There’s no two factor. I said this, that and the other

00:16:52:24 – 00:16:54:26

Chandra Duggirala: that definitely is

00:16:56:14 – 00:17:10:02

Chandra Duggirala: required. I mean, we take that very seriously. Right from day one, we focused on not just the protocol level stuff engineering stuff, but the user experience as the driver of everything, but more importantly, our long saga.

00:17:10:18 – 00:17:13:02

Richard Carthon: Walter, I knew you were in the middle of it, please.

00:17:13:05 – 00:17:21:23

George Burke: Right. I was going to say long term Paul isn’t just about bitcoin versus A. More like one or some other chain, it’s also a cloud.

00:17:24:23 – 00:17:35:08

George Burke: Bringing the functionality of whatever it is that works on other blockchains to be built as either a mayor, meaning a sidechain or some other form of construction on top of just trying to

00:17:35:10 – 00:17:56:04

Richard Carthon: get you to get into that. Let me let me just interject here real quick. So I like to work with a couple of DeFi protocols. I play around with Uniswap, I play around with osmosis, which is a DeFi exchange or Dex for for Cosmo.

00:17:59:22 – 00:18:02:01

Richard Carthon: The yields are pretty wild. Now what have?

00:18:07:20 – 00:18:38:05

Richard Carthon: And of that particular protocol, because I really want to stack SATs, all right, I want to get back to bitcoin as much as possible. The problem is with Uniswap, right? The reason I’m using Uniswap, the reason I’m using osmosis is that it’s super quick to do this. I don’t log in to an actual exchange. I don’t have to use my two factor authentication when three wallets are really brilliant and the ability to quickly trade and get in and out of these five positions.

00:18:39:03 – 00:19:02:11

Richard Carthon: The problem is when I want to get to bitcoin, I want to trade for something that doesn’t exist on the chain that those DEXs have been built on. So, for instance, I was able to amass a lot of Cosmos Adams, and it was time for me to now get back into bitcoin. The only way I could really do that

00:19:04:16 – 00:19:20:15

Richard Carthon: was to open up Kraken, log in to this centralized exchange, send my coins. But that was first after having to use two factor authentication to log in. Then I had to place a whole bunch of orders using their order book

00:19:22:04 – 00:19:54:19

Richard Carthon: and pay a really significant fee if I didn’t want to place orders inside their order, but I wanted to swap directly. It’s like one percent or more. It’s kind of nuts. So I. See that there is so much usefulness with these DeFi swapping DEXs, but they don’t go far enough because they don’t actually cross chains if they do cross chains. It’s problematic because it’s not truly cross-chain.

00:19:55:02 – 00:19:58:19

Richard Carthon: It either means that there are wrapped assets that exist

00:20:00:08 – 00:20:41:04

Richard Carthon: on the original chain that are then wrapped onto the chain that the DEX is built on. The only way to make that compatible? There are some other ways where we’re once again bonding and can be used, but it may not be a wrapped asset. It may be a bit of a bridge where there’s a federation that will be the the party to issue you the correct asset onto the DEX or the chain that you’re looking to trade on, while while making sure that you’re able to get that back when you’re ready to trade back for the original asset you used.

00:20:41:18 – 00:20:54:21

Richard Carthon: Now that’s not guaranteed, either. So there are these these issues that Portal is tackling in order to make cross-chain trade actually cross-chain while being as trustless as we possibly can.

00:20:55:14 – 00:21:29:03

Richard Carthon: Yeah, I mean, you you just brought up so many things that I want to go back and unpack just for a second. So a lot of people don’t realize is that each of these chains, like a lot of people, use Uniswap. And what a lot of people don’t really realize is that the Ethereum blockchain is your core there, right? So basically, if you have anything that you’re trying to get into, typically you’ll go to like a metamask or some of these other wallets. And then when you get into some of these other types of tokens that have been made that usually ERC 20 tokens, and then they’ll be able to swap into others. But as soon as you start going into other DEXs, it breaks and you have to wrap it.

00:21:29:05 – 00:22:00:19

Richard Carthon: So if you get like you’ve ever seen BTC, that means it’s been wrapped so that bitcoin can fit onto a theory OMS blockchain. But what Portal is doing is saying that hey, whatever blockchain system you you use, come as you are, we can work with you and we can still be able to trade in pairs based on, I guess, how your liquidity providers or your facilitators are basically able to be there, provide these margins at which you can then go and trade without you ever having to switch in and out of these different types of blockchains.

00:22:03:02 – 00:22:05:22

George Burke: That’s what for. So I’ll say

00:22:08:01 – 00:22:19:10

George Burke: on that on that note, so where are you at currently with? So right now someone’s listening to this to sounds like, Man, this is amazing. This is awesome. I want to come use portal colors. Walk us through like, what are those steps look like?

00:22:20:27 – 00:22:36:26

George Burke: So is still in public beta, it will be in short order. So right now, I would say go to they’ll dot com, get on the waitlist would have been wiped, just test the software of the client. We would welcome as much feedback as we can get.

00:22:38:18 – 00:22:44:28

George Burke: We love that stuff. And in terms of the usability, you just download the software, create a wallet

00:22:46:23 – 00:22:58:09

George Burke: and that’s all you do. The software is marginal in the sense that you can be a facilitator. You don’t have to be by default, but you could unravel bitcoin and Ethereum node. You don’t have to.

00:23:01:21 – 00:23:09:04

George Burke: This is not just a wallet that trades on on hospitals decks. This is a wallet that we’ve created.

00:23:10:16 – 00:23:29:05

George Burke: Aided a not is actually integrated into the plant, so we don’t like to call it a wallet because the wallet, these not all of those things are integrated. It’s one client that that works seamlessly across. It has the security of having your own private key because your isn’t. You know, you get to store your own stuff.

00:23:31:00 – 00:23:47:13

George Burke: There’s a lot more indulgence in in the client, not just with respect to assessing your portfolio, but on the other side as well when it comes to swaps being broadcast around it with the appropriate facilitator.

00:23:49:07 – 00:23:55:07

George Burke: All that stuff, and there will be. The plan is to include more and more arbitrarily complex financial contracts, such as

00:23:56:24 – 00:24:12:05

George Burke: options in bitcoin, options against other stablecoins, etc., etc.. But it’s not the client is ours. The protocol is open source, anybody can build a competing plane with better features, more features, so we’re happy if that happens.

00:24:12:29 – 00:24:49:27

George Burke: Definitely. And I guess the the big question I have here, as we kind of like, you know, wrap this up is like, why did you choose bitcoin to try to build this protocol on? Because obviously, you know of the transactions, like as a base layer protocol, it’s the slowest. It’s definitely the most secure. It’s all of these things. So there’s definitely a lot of hurdles that you’re having to interact with. But what was it that made you say, like, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to figure this out, and we’re going to make sure that people are able to use the original blockchain that is cryptocurrency to like be able to facilitate all these different types of unique financial tools.

00:24:51:07 – 00:25:22:24

George Burke: So why did you choose bitcoin, so we believe the company in Holland, because everybody works for this, is that bitcoin is much like bitcoin, is the leading contender for an uncensored form of money. It is. It is trying to be a digital gold and nobody is even close to the ballpark in that competition. Other blockchains do other things, but. If you zoom out a little bit and think about it, you have, let’s say you’re in America, you use us dollars as your currency, it as a unit of account.

00:25:22:26 – 00:25:28:07

George Burke: It’s the medium of exchange. It is a store of value for the most part before they come completely basic.

00:25:30:24 – 00:26:05:18

George Burke: You would actually build all of your contracts, right? All your contracts are written in the underlying settlement denomination, which is the US dollar. All of the other complex instruments are actually referencing the unit of account, which is the United States dollar and so on. So do you have a money layer? It makes sense to build more functional layers on top of that money versus building another. Trying to build another money layer for each specific function makes no sense because you’re going back to the barter system in addition to.

00:26:07:09 – 00:26:14:12

George Burke: Getting adoption for those other things, you now have this insanely difficult problem of trying to create money, right?

00:26:15:29 – 00:26:21:25

George Burke: There have been so many attempts to build alternatives to bitcoin to replace its claim to being a non

00:26:23:15 – 00:26:38:17

George Burke: sovereign form of money. Well, then have succeeded. I don’t see anything else coming close anytime soon, if ever. So it makes total sense to block it, but it’s very restrictive. It is not doing completely. I know it’s a sexist language for a good reason. Those tradeoffs are made for a good reason.

00:26:40:09 – 00:26:46:18

George Burke: But you don’t have to build everything on layer one. You can build a layered functionality

00:26:48:03 – 00:26:50:21

George Burke: for other purposes. Lightning doesn’t settle all of its gender.

00:26:55:01 – 00:27:27:20

George Burke: And you don’t it could technically lock up a certain amount of bitcoin in a reserve contract issue, a sale chain for something else on the other side. The consensus you want or no consensus do whatever you want and then you should have seamless convertibility between those assets on that layer and block bitcoin and bitcoin in general. And that’s the atomic swap. So Paul, essentially our long term will be enable. Apart from the point of these swaps that we talked about, we enable building this many layered functionality with a standard library on bitcoin.

00:27:28:09 – 00:27:58:12

George Burke: And the reason it fits well into Portal is all of those assets need to be seamlessly swappable convertible into base layer bitcoin and back. That connective tissue is exactly what Portal is and why. And so far actually about what we’re doing and why it makes sense for us to do it. But why does bitcoin need this? If you think about the security model of bitcoin, it essentially comes down to what is the cost of repeated 51 percent attack on the network.

00:27:58:23 – 00:28:16:23

George Burke: If that happens, then confidence plummets. You know, one of its reasons to exist goes away and so on. You’re going to have the hash trois scenario. What prevents that is the cost strictly. The cost cost depends on only two things. One is the price of the coin today,

00:28:19:20 – 00:28:48:12

George Burke: which if it goes up infinitely, it’s too expensive to attack. But that is not true. $50 a coin The cost of a 51 percent attack on bitcoin is roughly $6 billion. Give or take 2000 fifty thousand fifty thousand dollars a coin. It’s about $6 trillion, which is nothing when you compare that to the national security budgets of the biggest nation states in the world. That’s practically nothing for them, even if it is something big of Bernardo. So,

00:28:50:02 – 00:29:28:16

George Burke: so the block space is limited. You can’t if you assume that you can’t increase the price of bitcoin because that depends on supply and demand. It’s not in anybody’s control. And you can’t increase the transaction fees to the miners per block because the block space is limited. What else can you do? You can actually increase the economic density of the transactions that go on layer one. And so that’s what layer functionality brings. But instead of one transaction representing me sending George one bitcoin, it represents an actual sidechain like a thousand bitcoins locked up in a reserve contract and these assets issued on the other side.

00:29:28:28 – 00:29:35:11

George Burke: If there’s a lot of economic value that is being created on the other side, which is that that layer that’s I

00:29:37:09 – 00:30:09:29

George Burke: think of a use case. You don’t use your imagination. And is it a decentralized communication system, social media system or data infrastructure, whatever it is, if that happens, if that creates a lot of economic value that actually gets captured in base layer bitcoin because of the convertibility right back into the locked assets back into question bitcoin. And that really ripples and flows back to sort of the base. And so now you have a way to increase demand and therefore the price of bitcoin that is independent of just speculation and sending money to each other.

00:30:10:26 – 00:30:12:12

George Burke: So that’s important for bitcoin.

00:30:13:29 – 00:30:17:09

George Burke: And obviously, if it is important, we want to be the ones in the middle of it.

00:30:18:11 – 00:30:35:22

George Burke: Yeah. And sounds like our putting all the plate, all the things in place to make that a reality. But you both have dropped a lot of knowledge on us as we kind of wrap up here. What is the final thought that you want to leave with all the listeners here today and we’ll go ahead and start with you, George. What do you want to leave everyone with here today

00:30:36:21 – 00:30:38:16

George Burke: to where do I get one of those sweatshirts

00:30:40:09 – 00:30:42:25

George Burke: on the website? I got you. Thanks.

00:30:44:11 – 00:30:49:19

George Burke: That’s a really good said. The one problem is that I’ve lived in Puerto Rico and

00:30:51:12 – 00:31:38:17

George Burke: I don’t know that I’d ever wear a sweatshirt. Puerto Rico is to transfer, but unless you’re inside. Yeah. So when I get back to the Moon about ultimately where one of us for sure about the other, the announcement that I think we want to make. So we are fresh off of a eight point five million dollar raise. Some of the big names that are in the round are from Coinbase Ventures, from OKEx Ventures, Arrington, Michael Arrington and our Intellectual Property Fund, the CEO of Bitcoin.com and the founder of Tether, founder of one of the founders of Defending.

00:31:38:26 – 00:32:12:11

George Burke: So there are some really heavy hitters that we have raised from, but we are opening this up to the public. So we’re doing a raise on Republic in just about two weeks. It’s going to be the final week of October, and we would like to open this up to democratize the ability to get into what we are building. So if you’d like to find out more about that public sale, you can go to Portal DeFi dot com.

00:32:12:24 – 00:32:28:01

George Burke: And there is a waitlist that’s there. You’ll need to be on that white list to be considered for the public sale. So I urge you to do that sooner rather than later, because it’s I mean, it’s very, very oversold for sure.

00:32:28:05 – 00:32:36:22

George Burke: No. Thank you for sharing that. And I know some people listening will probably go and check that out ASAP. So thank you for sharing that. And Chandra, what would you like to share?

00:32:38:22 – 00:32:48:27

George Burke: I’d like to just reiterate, thank you for having us. It’s been it’s been great fun to talk about things that we like to talk about, and you’ve been a great interviewer.

00:32:50:17 – 00:33:09:27

George Burke: I’d like to say, you know, when people say bitcoin is too restrictive, it doesn’t scale, et cetera, et cetera, that’s that’s ending. I’d like to remind people that now is just the beginning. It does scale in look very different and much more broader than what it is today, so. Definitely. And we’re doing our best to make it happen.

00:33:10:14 – 00:33:19:07

George Burke: Yeah. And the proof is there. So for everyone listening that wants to learn more about you, what are ways that people can connect and continue to follow y’all’s progress?

00:33:21:21 – 00:33:32:00

George Burke: We’ve got Portal Deth icon. From there, you’ll be able to get to all the different socials that we’ve got a bit too long to list them. So just basically Twitter

00:33:32:28 – 00:33:34:06

George Burke: Line Protocol, the

00:33:35:13 – 00:33:52:04

George Burke: Twitter Telegram, all the different communities you’ve got, the different communities, different language communities. I mean, there’s a lot, actually. But the attraction and desire for the community to build all of those things. So I’ll see you there, no doubt.

00:33:52:14 – 00:33:59:22

George Burke: Well, again, thank you so much for both of you have spent time with us, George Chandra. It’s been an absolute pleasure. And of course, for everyone listening. Stay. CryptoQuant.