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

00:00:02:29 – 00:00:19:19

Richard Carthon: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current your host here Richard Carthon. And today I have a very special guest working on a really cool project that I’m excited to learn more about. We have Tief , who is a senior brand ambassador with Solar Network out in near Tucson, Arizona. How are you doing today?

00:00:20:01 – 00:00:22:05

Tief: I’m doing great, Richard. Thanks for having me, man.

00:00:22:28 – 00:00:32:04

Richard Carthon: Of course. Well, I’m really excited to dive into Solar Network again. Want to learn a little bit more about you have a really interesting background. Can you give us a little bit of information on that?

00:00:32:17 – 00:01:05:29

Tief: Oh, for sure. So I come from a corporate background at Microsoft, where I worked at Xbox since 2013. And also on the side was a full time trader building algorithmic trading software programs that integrated with online broker retail APIs. And so I have a mixed background in marketing and fintech, and I kind of went down the crypto rabbit trail in about 2017 and now I’m fully immersed 100%.

00:01:06:28 – 00:01:31:24

Richard Carthon: Yeah. So you learned about crypto back in 17 and first of all, just your background in marketing in FinTech, two really essential pieces that you need entering into the crypto world, especially as you launch a product, build community, get it out to the world, etc.. What was it about crypto that made you want to leave the corporate world and really start to focus eventually full time in this space?

00:01:32:21 – 00:02:04:08

Tief: That’s a great question. So as a trader, I always had sort of a short term mentality when it came to stocks. I never really could find a long term stock investment that worked for me. And part of the frustration was just the opaqueness of Wall Street. There’s not a lot of transparency, as you know, when it comes to traditional financial markets. They close at a certain time during the day. There’s a settlement period that can be a couple of days.

00:02:05:05 – 00:02:50:24

Tief: There’s no open ledger that you can query to see where transactions came from and where they went. And it just felt like a really strange investment environment after the 2008 global financial crisis and quantitative easing, because everything was just up all the time, it didn’t seem natural and stocks was extremely high. PE ratios just kept leading the way, although they weren’t earning money. And so it just begs the question, what is money and what can I invest in to preserve my wealth? And then, you know, in 2007, I knew about Bitcoin and quite early 2013 I started learning a little bit about it, but I really didn’t go down the rabbit trail until 2017.

00:02:51:01 – 00:03:26:03

Tief: When I saw that price spike from 1000 to 20000, I said, Whoa, I got to I got to check this thing out. I got to learn a little bit more about that. And so I went down the rabbit trail learning about proof of work and then also learning a little bit about Ethereum and proof of stake and just understanding the transparent nature of Bitcoin and the fact that it truly is the best form of money that has ever been created started the transition for me, and at that point I dove head first just learning about blockchain and learning about different cryptos.

00:03:26:05 – 00:03:35:08

Tief: And now at solar, I’m very happy to be here and help usher in this new financial revolution with Webb. Webb three.

00:03:36:17 – 00:04:11:00

Richard Carthon: Absolutely men. And it’s really cool seeing like someone who comes from traditional finance saying like all the shortcomings that unfortunately there is in that and then seeing what the future is as you look into cryptocurrency, web3 and everything else. And that kind of brings us to current day with everything that you have going on with, with solar networks. So, so what is it? What were you ultimately trying to resolve as you were going deeper into Web3 and you were looking back at, you know, the traditional finance world? Like how what is your approach to trying to solve some of these fundamental, fundamental issues that you noticed?

00:04:11:19 – 00:04:13:09

Richard Carthon: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think

00:04:15:04 – 00:04:51:07

Tief: newer generations, right? Not boomer generation, but newer generations want to be involved in their investments. And when you look at a stock, you’re not really involved in that company as a shareholder. So at Solar we’re a community driven blockchain project and there there’s a lot I could talk about with regard to how that works. But the blockchain, the solar blockchain is maintained and secured by 53 delegates, and we use what’s called a delegate proof of stake model.

00:04:51:25 – 00:05:23:27

Tief: So as an IP holder, which is our native crypto token and I’ll just kind of say S’s and Sam X’s and xylophone. He is in person because sometimes they always comes out wrong. SB If you’re an S sex beholder, you can vote for your delegate or multiple delegates through your soul or wallet. And so it’s a great governance system. It’s community driven, it’s decentralized, it’s secured. Solar is a fork from the ARC code base.

00:05:23:29 – 00:05:45:27

Tief: I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ark, but they had a code base that the solar team forked from and since then we’ve made about 2000 updates to that code base and 32,000 changes to that code base to improve security and to add functionality for the solar blockchain.

00:05:47:03 – 00:06:19:19

Tief: So that’s quite a bit of updates and making it a lot more refined, especially as it relates to security because as you know, security is of the utmost importance with a lot of these blockchains where you’re starting to see things like Solana constantly having to go down for network issues and everything else. And I kind of just want to stay there for a second because, you know, one of the things on solar and sustainable decentralized payments on blockchain, so the ability to do transactions and have it be decentralized and have it be done in a way that is safe and secure.

00:06:19:21 – 00:06:21:12

Tief: Can you kind of talk through that a little bit?

00:06:21:29 – 00:06:57:19

Tief: Yeah, sure. So on the security aspect, you can go into the solar, solar talk and you can evaluate all the delegates and you can see with which delegates are running, forging nodes and relay nodes and backup nodes and test nodes. My point there is that if a delegate is only running one node, there’s a vulnerability that that node goes down. And so that that that’s a security risk. But all of our delegates are running backup nodes, backup relay nodes, and they’re on the TESTNET, which is helping the growth of our network.

00:06:57:24 – 00:07:31:07

Tief: So that’s sort of the security aspect when it comes to transaction throughput, our blocks are 8/2 blocks. So every 8 seconds, one of the 53 delegates is forging a new block. And at this point the transaction throughput is about 150 per 8 seconds and that can be expanded on, you know, and that can be increased. But it’s enough at this point. And then the decentralized aspect is just the fact that there are 53 delegates all around the world using advanced servers to secure and maintain the blockchain.

00:07:32:12 – 00:07:47:09

Tief: Awesome. And with what’s going with this approach versus some of the other approaches that are out in the market with how this has been set up, what do you think is the, the, why did you particularly pick this approach.

00:07:48:05 – 00:08:24:02

Tief: Mm that’s good. I think this approach allows for the community to really drive the, the decisions that are made on the network. So if there’s ever a delegate that you see contributing to the network, you can stake here as XP and vote for that delegate and make sure that their ranking stays high. Because if you if a delegate falls out of the top 53, then they’re no longer forging the new blocks in the network. So I think it’s all community driven and we just want to make sure that there’s no high barrier to entry.

00:08:24:06 – 00:08:58:24

Tief: If you have one as XP, you can participate in our network. So it’s a truly flat system. It’s not hierarchical in any way, which I think is a great approach because it’s going to benefit the early adopters to our network in the sense that we’re sort of like a startup company. And, you know, from my experience in traditional markets, once a company goes public, all the value has already been extracted by VCs and institutional owners who are accredited investors. They have early access, it’s closed gate, it’s not open to everybody.

00:08:58:26 – 00:09:16:05

Tief: You have to be of a certain stature to participate in the early seed rounds and investment opportunities with a startup company. That’s not the case with solar. It’s open, it’s permissionless, and anybody can participate and grow with us, which I think is such an important thing. And this is in this environment.

00:09:17:02 – 00:09:41:12

Tief: Absolutely the power to the community, power to everyone being involved and not having to be hierarchical, like you said, is definitely providing that access and that community aspect to it. Now on this, you’re able to do quite a few things on here so you can build your own dapps, which has to do with nfts tokens, games, etc.. Can you kind of talk, walk through some of the ways that the community is starting utilize this?

00:09:41:29 – 00:10:24:14

Tief: Yeah, definitely. So I think it starts with the solar wallet when when you put your when you hold your XP in one of the solar wallets, which by the way, at this point is just a desktop option, it’s a desktop app, but we are building a mobile solution. We’re building a web solution, and we’re also integrating with ledger. So from your wallet you’re able to integrate and access things like the metaverse in a tease. And this is going to be sort of our launch pad. So we are going to look at allowing and giving options through SD cards to different developers and builders to create their own non-fungible non-fungible tokens to create their identities.

00:10:24:20 – 00:10:59:22

Tief: Our metaverse is really a proof of concept here, where if you enter the metaverse, you can start building and creating. We’re going to have NFT land sales. So once we launch before the end of this year, our metaverse is going to offer, I think, 44,000 different land plots. And they’re going to be different values depending on how close they are to our our our main center area. But those land sales are going to be purchased by people who may not have experience building in our metaverse, which I could kind of speak to a little bit as a minecraft based metaverse.

00:10:59:29 – 00:11:30:06

Tief: So if you’re let’s say you’re a really good architect building Minecraft buildings and different architectural structures, you might find a good business opportunity in our metaverse by building some fantastic structures on top of these NFT land plots who are purchased by people who may not have the same experience as you. So that’s just one example. That’s, you know, when it comes to the metaverse and nfts, the opportunities are really limitless.

00:11:30:13 – 00:12:11:10

Tief: I don’t see why the creator economy needs to be capped in any means. I mean, for me, one of the coolest ideas would be to, like, create your own tattoo parlor inside the metaverse. Right, and give tattoos to all the avatars that come your way. How sweet would that be? Or who knows? Like, maybe you want to create your own, like, theme park, go kart track and have some play to earn gaming going in there. So there’s going to be a lot of ways to, you know, play to earn, like I said, player versus environment experiences where there may be like mobs coming at you or, you know, different scenarios that you need to conquer and and earn XP after that.

00:12:11:22 – 00:12:22:07

Tief: But we’re also offering business solutions. So, you know, at this point, it’s so early that we don’t have a limit on what we’re going to be able to build and do, which is really exciting.

00:12:23:01 – 00:12:53:21

Richard Carthon: It is. And it allows for newer types of economies that you wouldn’t even consider before, because one of the places my mind went was in this metaverse that’s, you know, similar to like a minecraft. You could literally have a niche where if you’re really good as an architect and you just have this plot of land, you can hire an architect to come build on your land for the vision that you would want them to have. And they could potentially come in, like start charting that. And like, could you imagine you’re you’re a metaverse architect, right? Like, that’s your specialty. You go in on these different environments and go build these things.

00:12:53:23 – 00:12:55:28

Richard Carthon: And that’s that’s that in itself. Sounds really cool.

00:12:59:12 – 00:13:15:16

Richard Carthon: Yeah, man. And and with that, you know, I think that outside of the game that just went on, you also you also have a native token. So can you tell us a little bit more about that, where people can find it? And I believe you also just did an upgrade to make that correct.

00:13:15:18 – 00:13:46:03

Richard Carthon: So our our native token is XP and a bit of history. So as XP was a older token operated by a different group and what happened in December of 2020 was that Binance acquired Swype. And so at that point, Solar became its own separate entity, and solar is not owned or maintained or operated by any single individual or any single group. We’re our own decentralized, community driven blockchain.

00:13:46:11 – 00:14:04:06

Richard Carthon: And in March of this year, March 28th of this year, we launched our main net. So then the new standard token is our main. That standard token, it’s the same symbol as XP. But if you owned a previous XP token prior to our main net launch,

00:14:06:03 – 00:14:41:01

Richard Carthon: which would be like a new RC 20 token or a P20 token, if you have one of those tokens, you can go to our website, solar dot org, and there’s an internal slopping tool that’s been audited and verified to work and function to allow you to swap your old ERC 20 ARB 20 s XP token for the new main NAT token. So right now at this point, about 30% of all old or previous s XP tokens has have been swapped on the main net, which is actually very high for for our industry.

00:14:42:23 – 00:15:13:01

Tief: If you don’t have any S XP and you want to go get some, you can go to get they just launched and I went recently and purchased some s XP from Big Cat B I tgt and that exchange offers pretty good liquidity, tight bit spreads. I felt like the experience was flawless. I was able to get my KYC information up there and get my token pretty quickly, but gate IO is another exchange where you can get our main net token.

00:15:13:08 – 00:15:19:17

Tief: You can also go to Upbit and zig zag. X is also a good option.

00:15:20:18 – 00:15:25:15

Richard Carthon: Excellent. So plenty of places to to go and get x XP and

00:15:27:04 – 00:15:58:15

Richard Carthon: it’s really cool that you’re you know when before going to main at that your investors who got some of the tokens can now go on to you know Sola dot org and like make that conversion. I know that I have had tokens in the past that I had to basically go and upgrade and it was not a seamless process. It was not easy. And it was it does prevent you from wanting to like go and like make that update. So it sounds like you all have resolve that, which is, I think, very crucial and important. So so for the person listening to this right now, they’re like, man, that sounds really cool.

00:15:58:17 – 00:16:09:08

Richard Carthon: Like I, I want to explore more about this or I want to essentially start building like, what are some things that they, what are some next steps that someone can do by coming in, joining the solar network community?

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00:16:10:01 – 00:16:43:19

Richard Carthon: Definitely check out our discord. We have a very active discord. The Mod, the mods on our discord are there to answer any questions that you have about our metaverse, about the token, anything really. We also have a very active telegram group. I would check that out. We’re on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter at Jeffrey Teeth and I’d be happy to answer any questions that you might have. The other thing you can do is go to District 53 dot IO and you can download the open beta for our District 53 metaverse and you can jump right in and start playing that.

00:16:44:25 – 00:17:17:09

Richard Carthon: And also, I would definitely encourage everyone to go check out the solar desktop app wallet. Once you download that wallet to your desktop, you can start to participate in our governance system. You can start to vote on your favorite delegates. You know, in fact, the whole voting governance system, in my experience, has been pretty fun. It’s sort of like fantasy football where you’re, you know, looking for your top players and you’re trying to pick the best ones who are going to make the network grow and who are going to secure it. And it’s really cool experience because you can actually see the delegate ranking.

00:17:17:11 – 00:17:53:28

Richard Carthon: You can see when a delegate falls out of the top 53 and you can try to upvote that delegate if that falls out of the top 53, you can evaluate what they’re doing to help contribute to the network. You can evaluate the the forging rewards that they share. So I’ll just briefly mentioned most, not all, but most of the delegates, they share a very high percentage of their foraging rewards with the voters, which which means I’m actually able to earn voter commission by voting for my favorite delegates.

00:17:54:00 – 00:18:24:03

Richard Carthon: So it’s a very circular incentive based process for. Our our our solar blockchain, where if I want to, you know, earn voter commission in the form of SSP, I go and vote for my delegate. Some delegates offer like 98% voter commission rewards. Some delegates offer 50. So you got to kind of evaluate, well, what’s this delegate offering 54 and this other ones offering 98 for? Oh, well, this guy’s offering 50 because look at what he contributes to the network is contributing X, Y and Z.

00:18:24:10 – 00:19:02:06

Richard Carthon: And this is really going to help grow the network. This is really going to help secure the networks is adding to the decentralized aspect of it. So I value that. So even though I may not be, you know, participating as many voter commission rewards and earning as much back, I’m still voting for a delegate that is helping support the network. And the cool thing about it is you can vote for as many delegates as you want. So if you had, let’s say, 53 XP, you can you can essentially stake or vote one SSP for each delegate. And then if a delegate ever sort of breaks your trust or doesn’t follow through on their promises or does something that’s sort of against the ethos, then you can invoke that and they won’t be a forging delegate anymore.

00:19:02:16 – 00:19:30:20

Richard Carthon: So at this point, I would say 70 across all 53 delegates, about 71% of the newly forged SSP gets shared with the community. And that’s going back to what I was saying earlier, is if you’re early into SSP, you’re going to benefit the most. Because at this point, just a quick break down there, there are about

00:19:33:06 – 00:20:11:16

there’s about 108,000 SSP that gets created per day, but it’s a fixed amount. So as the supply of their sex Pete increases, the amount of newly forged SSP that comes into the environment is going to be a smaller percentage of the total. So at this point, our inflation rate is as high as it will ever be and it will just go down. But a couple of things that we’re doing to mitigate that and introduce some deflationary aspects into our ecosystem is one, we’re sharing approximately 71% of the newly forged SSP with our community.

00:20:11:22 – 00:20:41:27

That’s a huge amount. So it’s very circular. There’s no incentive necessarily for those recipients of their sex Pete to go and dump it on the market. Rather, they’re going to be incentivized to maybe start their own business in our metaverse or vote for a delegate to help secure and maintain the network. So in essence, if you’re early, you’re going to be participating and benefiting from our circular environment much more than you would perhaps if you come in later down the road.

00:20:41:29 – 00:21:14:03

And that goes back to what I was saying earlier. We are an open, open permissioned list network. We’re not closing this to a select group of venture capitalists. This is open to everybody. The other deflationary aspect, I’ll just add really quick, is that our our metaverse, the land, the NFT land plots that gets that get purchased in our metaverse, 90% of those sales are going to be burned. So let’s just say an NFT costs on average 100 SSP.

00:21:14:18 – 00:21:49:05

Well, 90 of that SSP is going to get burned. And if I don’t, I’m just throwing out scenarios here. I don’t know what the exact number would that the exact cost will be for the NFT land purchase sale. But let’s just say it is 100 SSP on average with 44,000 NFT plots. If 44,000 NFT plots get purchased within one year at an average price of 100 SSP, that’s 10% of the next 12 months inflation.

00:21:49:17 – 00:22:19:24

So that’s a huge take. Let’s just say an average NFT land purchase sale is 500 SSP if that’s the cost and 50% of our inflation rate is going to get burned in the next 12 months, that’s huge. So we’re we’re introducing other deflationary aspects that are going to benefit early adopters. And again, the way I look at it is like a small startup company that’s open to everybody for sure.

00:22:19:26 – 00:22:57:03

Richard Carthon: And thank you for all of those different reasons, ways that you can reach out, join in the community and get more of this information. And kind of just a couple of highlights bringing that back up. It sounds like there are a lot of ways solar is putting deflationary things in place so that early adopters benefit. So this is something that interests you. Find a way to get involved and see how you can participate in this community based, decentralized ecosystem. And then the other piece of this as well is that you have the ability to participate and vote and truly engage with what’s being built here in.

00:22:57:13 – 00:23:26:12

Richard Carthon: And be rewarded within this community for taking part in that participation. And so, again, I appreciate that information. And it kind of goes back to something that we talked about before coming on the show, which I think is near and dear to you, which is the importance of just education in moving into the world of Web three. So for people who are just getting in this space and who have never experienced a bear market in the past and have a what market conditions going on right now as we’re going through this bearish trend,

00:23:27:27 – 00:23:41:26

Richard Carthon: what would you say is important to keep in mind for all these people as they are either entering the space or have been in the space for a while, going through the first bear market and are trying to learn like, okay, well what should I be doing next, etc.. What do you think are are some essential things to keep in mind?

00:23:42:24 – 00:23:59:01

Tief: That’s a good question. A couple things come to mind right away. One is do your own research. I don’t don’t just take my word for it. Don’t take anyone’s word for it. That’s that’s one of the most important things you can do is do your own research. Number two, embrace the volatility

00:24:01:06 – 00:24:33:16

Tief: in this ecosystem with crypto, and that is web3. Volatility is your friend in the sense that in the law, if you have a long term perspective, you’re going to be much better off than if you’re trying to flip something overnight because the volatility can really hurt you in the short term, but it will benefit you in the long term. So I would just say embrace the volatility, do your own research, have a long term mindset, and those three things will benefit you.

00:24:34:17 – 00:24:46:13

Richard Carthon: Excellent. And then just wrapping up with a fun question, with all the information you have right now, if you go in part one, the two pieces of wisdom to yourself, when you first started building out solar, what would you go impart to yourself?

00:24:47:03 – 00:24:48:29

Tief: Hmm, that’s a good question.

00:24:52:03 – 00:25:21:02

Tief: I would you know, there’s not much I would change. I think what the solar team is doing and the core developers, they’re doing it right. And everything that I mentioned earlier is what I would do. If there’s one thing that I would I would change, I would try to encourage teams to get along. And, you know, it can be kind of cutthroat sometimes

00:25:23:07 – 00:25:58:02

Tief: when someone sees what you’re doing and they see that you’re having some success, there can be a little bit of jealousy, I guess. And so if there’s if there’s ever an opportunity to build a bridge, I would with other teams and groups, I would say do that rather than burn the bridge. Build the bridge. And if you see someone that’s doing something better than you learn from them and, you know, be humble, I that’s.

00:25:58:24 – 00:26:08:28

Richard Carthon: Yeah, that’s a great piece of wisdom. And I appreciate you sharing that sentiment with us. But as we wrap up here today, what are what is the final thought that you want to leave with everyone listening today?

00:26:10:03 – 00:26:40:13

Tief: I just want to encourage you to check out our discord, check out our Twitter or check out our telegram group. Follow me at Jeffree teeth on Twitter because I want you to do your own research and learn about XP. And I want you to figure out what our community is about and then make the decision whether or not you want to jump in. I can reiterate, we have an open governance system. This is new. This is unprecedented. This gives you the opportunity to participate and then earn voter commissions.

00:26:40:15 – 00:26:43:15

Tief: So I just encourage everyone to check us out.

00:26:44:26 – 00:26:54:12

Richard Carthon: Excellent. Well, everyone, make sure you go and do that. Chief, I really appreciate all the time and the knowledge that you shared with us today. And of course, for everyone listening, stay crypto current.