Hello, and welcome to another episode of CNBC Beyond the Valley. I'm Arjun Kharpal,
here in Guangzhou, China. And today we're going to be dealing with the topic of Bitcoin versus
Ethereum. And what's the differences between the two. And what really sparked this idea for me was
I remember covering the crypto space two or three years back, and one of the things you saw was
in terms of prices, if bitcoin went up, everything else went up, if bitcoin went down,
everything else went down. But nowadays, you're starting to see a divergence between some of these
different coins, especially with Ethereum at this point, as investors begin to look at this space
more closely and study the differences between these different cryptocurrencies. And to help me
out with the conversation today, we'll be hearing from two brilliant guests the first, the head of
research blockchain.com, also a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, the second
a top executive at Consensys, which is an entity that is building a theory and base apps. Now,
on the basic level, a theorem is a blockchain on which developers can build different apps.
Ether is the token or cryptocurrency that powers that. And I just want to spend a quick second
on blockchain. It's a topic we've dealt with on other episodes of Beyond the Valley. So I
urge you, listeners and viewers to go back and listen to that. But just very quickly,
it's effectively a distributed ledger of activity, in bitcoins case is a public ledger designed to
verify and record different transactions, and it's immutable, it can't be tampered with,
and depending if it is public, or private, depends on who has access to it. But that's the basic idea
of shared distributed ledger of activity. Now back to Ethereum. You can think of it almost as
an operating system of sorts. If you think about Apple's iOS for iPhones, or even Google's Android.
Those platforms, developers can come in and build apps on top of it's very similar
to the concept in any way of Ethereum. And this is very different from Bitcoin, because Bitcoin
is very much designed to be a means of transaction, a currency, some call it
digital gold, depending on your point of view. But that's very different to Ethereum. And it's worth
just spending a second talking about the original white paper for Ethereum, which was published
in 2013, by the founder, Vitalik Buterin, and eventually the project launched in 2015, six years
after Bitcoin and Vitalik did praise a Bitcoin, but said he wanted to Ethereum to be something
different. And in that white paper, he describes Ethereum as a next generation, smart contract,
and decentralized application platform. Two very key terms here, smart contract, decentralized
applications, and I'll add one more decentralized, finance or DeFi, and we're about to delve into all
these topics, so stick with us. And to help us out with the conversation. I want to introduce
my first guest Garrick Hileman, the head of research at blockchain.com, also a visiting fellow
at the London School of Economics. Now Garrick was on one of the very first episodes of Beyond
the Valley in which we spoke about Bitcoin. Garrett is great to have you back on the podcast.
Garrick. So good to have you back on beyond the valley podcast.
Thank you Arjun, it's a pleasure to be back on again.
So I just want to kick off really with it with a broad overview,
what are some of the big differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum?
Right. So it's always tricky to try to simplify this in just a few words. But Ethereum was
developed to allow for smart contracts in a way that are not as fully available on the Bitcoin
network. So oftentimes, you'll hear Ethereum described as having more room for expressive
and more capable, decentralized applications. And we'll get into maybe more what that means. But a
more advanced programming, more automation would be a way to maybe characterize it,
and also more capacity. So scalability is another big feature that Aetherium is very focused on. And
a lot of what people are excited about in terms of what's in the
pipeline for Aetherium have to do with that scalability, additional capacity.
So Ethereum, as you mentioned, there sort of talks about itself as as a blockchain platform
for smart contracts and decentralized applications. And I want to dig into
these terms, specifically for our listeners and our viewers as well. So
let's just start off with this term smart contract, what does it mean?
Right. So I always like to try to explain smart contracts with an example. You know, something
that is automated, that can verify this is took took place, and then say automate a payment. And
so imagine you were traveling, and you have flight insurance, your flights delayed or canceled.
If that that insurance policy was on a smart contract, the smart contract could in essence,
check automatically to see whether the flight was delayed or canceled and make a payment to you,
without you having to file a claim. And also, you wouldn't even have to trust that the insurance
company had the money, the money is held in escrow in the smart contract on the blockchain
network. So that's kind of the value proposition of a kind of a smart travel insurance contract.
So if you sort of extend that beyond sort of that application, which of course very useful,
and what are some of the sort of big things you see, in the world of smart contracts,
let's take it to say, sort of large financial institutions, for example, even governments?
Right. Yeah, this is where it gets really exciting. So, you know, things like,
you know, imagine the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ
can be, in essence, a smart contract. Meaning that basically an entire exchange can operate
in an automated way without people on top of a blockchain like, the Ethereum network. And we've
already seen some some very significant traction for these what are called decentralized exchanges,
which are basically just kind of a version of a smart contract, a money market protocol,
where borrowing and lending is fully automated, again, no people matchmaking or intermediating.
That's another advanced smart contract that's gained a lot of traction today.
And the reason we couldn't get a smart contract is effectively
we have a contract, but the rules of that contract are, are in code. Right? That's,
that's how this kind of works. And effectively, if one thing happens, you know, that code
is executed, right, and carries out the terms of the contract in a simple way.
I think that's correct. And I think the word smart can be a little misleading and might imply like an
artificial intelligence. But I think the the truth is closer to what you described, where the rules
are embedded in software code, and, and are executed automatically.
Now, some people may question whether that term smart is appropriate, given that sometimes people
intend one thing to happen with smart contracts, and something else happens. These are bugs. And
unfortunately, we've seen a lot of exploits of smart contracts. This year, hundreds of millions,
in fact, have been siphoned off due to various programming issues of these smart contracts.
Yeah, and that we'll certainly get into some of the challenges in a moment.
Just want to get into another term, and that is sort of decentralized applications. And we hear
the word decentralized a lot when it comes to Bitcoin, for example, decentralized currency,
you know, the idea that there's no sort of intermediaries, no middle people at
this point. But when we talk about decentralized applications, how, how would you describe that?
Yes, I think the most important thing to remember when you hear the word decentralization
is this is not an either or this is not binary, where you're either decentralized or you're
not you centralized, this is a spectrum. And you can exist at various points along
that decentralization spectrum. And so that's really important to keep in mind. So there's no
such thing as something that's completely decentralized. There's different degrees
of decentralization. And what we mean by that really, is, we are not having to trust a person
or an institution to keep their word. I often will, when I'm teaching this in classes put
up a picture of a handshake, you know, a very traditional way of achieving cooperation and
trust. But also some of that can be very easily broken. Rules that are automated in software,
are more trust minimized, arguably, then that handshake, and therefore harder to break.
So when we talk about that idea of, of permissionless, as well,
that's where this comes in. So I mean, it just described that term,
because again, it's something that we're going to come up against a lot.
Yeah, permissionlessness is a way of saying that this is open access to anyone with a computer
and an internet connection, you don't need to go apply to use the Ethereum blockchain or the
Bitcoin Blockchain, you just have to have a computing device and an internet connection.
And you can start using these blockchain networks. You know, that's not how traditional
finance is often worked, where you have to go into a bank, provide some identification,
and get approved. And there's a billion plus people who don't have bank accounts,
some of which, you know, hundreds of millions don't have ID, and, and blockchains, kind of
do away with all that and saying, hey, just get on the internet. And you can start transacting,
coding, building an application launching the next Alibaba on a decentralized network.
And yeah, you take that idea of decentralized now you take it to decentralized finance - DeFi - huge
buzzword again, you know, again, just just lay out what that means for us.
Yeah, so defy is is a is a buzzword that is typically associated with these daps decentralized
applications that are built on top of Ethereum. But really, we're talking about financial
blockchain, you know, networks. And even Bitcoin, for example, could arguably be classified as DeFi,
but most people wouldn't refer to Bitcoin as DeFi, they're talking about things like money market
protocols, that facilitate borrowing and lending in an automated fashion or decentralized exchanges
or, or things like even, you know, emerging forms of blockchain based insurance, you know,
kind of proto-deposit insurance, if you will, all this kind of falls under the heading of DeFi. And
many people are looking at this and saying, This is the new financial system that's being built,
and can replace our existing traditional financial plumbing with decentralized financial plumbing.
Now, I think one of the interesting parts of because this, you know, we're talking a
lot about Ethereum in here is the relationship between ether, the token, the digital currency,
and Ethereum, the blockchain network, you know, how do those two work together? And then I guess
the other question is, is ether necessary for the Ethereum blockchain to sort of work long term?
You ask all the easy questions Arjun. So yeah, this so
so it's important to think about these two things is kind of distinct, but also very integrated.
And, and you can think of Ethereum as kind of like the database or the ledger,
or the network. You know, sometimes you'll use the analogy of like, a train car, you know,
it's kind of like the currency or the asset that's traveling on top of the train tracks, those rails
you can think of as a theory of the network. And in in the case of ether, the train car
and Ethereum, the train tracks, these things are locked together, they can't be kind of separated.
Ether lives on those rails and cannot be taken off those rails. In the same way you can think
of like, well, I can take my US dollars and move them across Visa's rails and then I can
move them across PayPal's rails and kind of lift that train part up and off of different rails.
Ether is locked in fully integrated to Ethereum, the network, and that, that integration is partly
what allows for, the ease of programming smart contracts and decentralized applications and DeFi.
And, and then I just want to get on to get some of the challenges as well with Ethereum
and you mentioned one earlier, some of the bugs perhaps with the smart contracts and some of
the issues, in terms of people losing money that result from that as well. I mean, how are those
things solved? You know, and how big a problem is that as we look to the future of Ethereum?
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think the latest assessments are over a half a billion US
dollars has been lost through various exploits or bugs, flash loans, attacks, vampire texts,
there's all sorts of different names. It is a real issue. And it's important for people playing
in the DeFi space to understand this is still semi experimental, and even some of the oldest and most
battle-tested money market protocols. Compound, for example, recently had a bug that allowed for,
you know, kind of the treasury to be to be drained in the tens of millions of dollars. So,
you do need to be aware that this is new. But you know, at the same time,
the teams are iterating and learning. And, you know, we haven't seen anything, what I you know,
what I characterize is catastrophic happen. And the most important thing is that the underlying
blockchain networks, Ethereum, Bitcoin, others, those have continued to be secure.
And the other issue as well is, is one of this idea of scalability. And when we,
when we mentioned that word, we're really talking about
the network's ability to maintain sort of all these applications, but also do it in an efficient
and a low-cost manner as well. So, at the moment, Ethereum does have some scalability issues,
and there are concerns, you know, whether these are going to get resolved or not.
That's right. And, and there's already some serious competition. You know,
Selena, for example, is attracted a lot of interest this summer,
can process tens of thousands of transactions on their layer one, their base blockchain,
compared to the, you know, dozen or so you know, roughly that that Ethereum can do
on its base layer. So, what's interesting about the blockchain space is different blockchains are
experimenting in different ways with different approaches to scalability. Ethereum is kind of
throwing the kitchen sink out the problem with the hope that one of these things will
kind of stick in and I think there's a there's a, there's a general confidence that that it's
going to get sorted out positively. But the competition is breathing down Ethereum's neck.
Yeah, and certainly I want to dig into those things in a moment in terms of sort of upgrades
to the network and things that are happening in that space. But just one of the other issues,
because you mentioned sort of Solana there, and all these other challenges. You know, if we look
to the future, and you've got various different blockchain platforms operating, the other issue
is one of, of these being able to work together or interoperability. Do you see a world in which
these different platforms can work together? Do we get a world of sort of, frankly, fragmented
applications on various different blockchains? I mean, how do you see that playing out?
Yeah, no, that is, you know, the multi trillion-dollar question, actually. And
I think what we're seeing already, I think, is a clue as to what to expect. So,
we have, for example, coming back to Bitcoin, somebody called raft Bitcoin, which is a, a way
of tokenizing Bitcoin on top of Ethereum. And so you actually see a significant amount of bitcoin
moving on Ethereum, so to speak, and serving as collateral in these DeFi, borrowing and
lending protocols on exchanges. And so there are already bridges in various ways that we're
finding to make collateral assets and protocols more interoperable. But how that all plays out,
is a very hotly debated topic and worthy of its own hour plus long top podcast, frankly.
And one of the things we've seen with you know, the Bitcoin Blockchain,
but also Ethereum and other blockchains is, you know, upgrades to the network. It's almost as
if you know, you've got a you've got a an Android or an iOS system on your phone, and you download
the new update for that, obviously, not as simple as that. There's a lot more in it. But
effectively, that's the idea here. So when you think about
the Ethereum network at this point, what are some of the upgrades coming into the coming
through the pipeline? And what does that mean for the Ethereum blockchain going forward?
Right. Well, we've seen already some big changes around Ethereum’s monetary policy and the supply
of Eth, the currency and, you know, we've seen your transaction fees rather than going to
miners getting burnt. And so that's reducing the supply putting any kind of a, you know, a kind
of tightening of supplies, I guess, the way to think about it simply. You know,
that's one thing that's making Eth arguably scarce store and maybe a stronger store value,
putting it more directly in competition with Bitcoin, specifically as a scarce store value.
So that's, that's one thing certainly capacity. You know, we're looking at things like gaming
non fungible tokens. You know, collectibles, something you buy once maybe like a piece of art,
you may not be transacting regularly, but if you're gonna run something like a fortnight
or some kind of multiplayer game on top of the blockchain, there's gonna be a lot of
need for throughput and high transaction capacity. So I think scalability enables
some pretty incredible you know, kind of opportunities in gaming specifically.
So those are a couple couple things that highlight that I think are on the horizon.
You mentioned this scarcity one that's always an interesting one with Bitcoin in particular,
because, you know, we know they can only ever been 21 million Bitcoin
mined. How does that compare with ether?
Yeah, so there's a overall greater supply of Ethereum. I think that the important thing to
understand about Ethereum’s monetary policy and its supply, is it very much is kind of an open
question kind of what the, what the end monetary policy looks like, it's very less etched in stone
than Bitcoin's. I think the idea of ever changing the 21 million limit for Bitcoin is kind of just
out of the question, barring some kind of like existential crisis, like you'd have to change that
for Bitcoin to survive. Whereas Ethereum it's more about, well, how do we make this into the global
world computer? What kind of monetary policy supports that. If the supply needs to continue
increasing into perpetuity as it currently is scheduled to do, so there is no hard cap on
that. And that's probably what the monetary policy is going to be. However, I think there's always
the possibility that Ethereum does go with a hard cap like Bitcoin, if it needs to do that, to again
achieve this objective of becoming the world's largest, most decentralized computing platform.
And just on that point, when you find the one Garrick when you look at the
sort of cryptocurrency complex in the future, you know, people describe Bitcoin
as a currency as digital gold, you know, and many other things as well. What role
do you think Bitcoin has? And what role do you think Ethereum has in that future?
Yeah, this is another huge question. I mean, many people, you know, take the view, and maybe a
minority view right now that actually, all of this DeFi and decentralized applications are going to
collapse back on top of Bitcoin. And so you see, layer two networks, like stacks, for example,
enabling NFTs and what DeFi, on top of Bitcoin, and many people think that that's
kind of where this will go, because Bitcoin is the most decentralized network. That's an essence why
you would ever use a blockchain. And something that's more centralized, is going to always have
a hard time competing with the most decentralized network. Having said that, Ethereum is moving more
quickly in terms of innovation than Bitcoin has, I think, a pretty good competitive motive developers
and applications on it already. And it's going to be interesting. I mean, this is what keeps people
like you've been in this space for 10 years. Excited. How is this battle going to play out?
Certainly, I mean, it's one we're going to be watching very closely as well, Garrick,
but look, it was so good to have you back on the podcast. Thanks for that fantastic insight.
Thank you, Arjun, always a pleasure.
That's great insight. And that sets us up nicely for the next part of our conversation.
What is the future of Ethereum? And what are some of the apps
we can expect to see going forward to discuss that I'm joined now by Liz Mathew, the head of
strategic sales for the Americas at ConsenSys. Now, ConsenSys is building a some Ethereum based
application. So I'm very interested to hear her insight. Liz, great to have you on the podcast.
Now, we just heard from Garrick Hileman of LSE and blockchain.com. About,
you know, smart contracts the term decentralized finance or DeFi. Now,
you come from a traditional financial background, you're looking now into
DeFi based on Ethereum. And so what are some of the most promising applications?
Yeah, absolutely. So as someone who's been looking at capital markets for over 15 years now,
this is particularly interesting, because it really changes the dynamic of how you
think about the manufacture and distribution of financial risk profiles. So now, I mean, if you
look at what's happened over the last 12 months, you've gone from something as small as $2 billion
in assets under management, maybe 12 months back to now something like $100 billion in the last
12 months with almost a trillion dollars of volume turnover. And so we're seeing an explosive growth.
But even besides that price action, what's really cool is that you have now the ability
to use open source composable, permissionless, censor resistant software to essentially
create the ability to lend borrow, stake, swap, hedge. These are activities that were otherwise
extremely concentrated and accessible just to a very small number of institutional investors.
And then from a cost perspective, this improves access to financial engineering overall,
not only to the long tail of institutions, but also to the retail in a very disintermediated way.
And I used to sort of work in London, obviously, a massive financial center and talking to
a lot of the financial institutions there. It seemed like even years ago,
they were discussing blockchain technology, it felt like just a bit of a buzzword, really,
there wasn't really much happening in this space at that point. So where are we now? I mean,
how are large institutions such as banks or insurance companies approaching this technology?
Yeah, it's a really good point. So yes, a couple of years back,
I think we were still in the experimental stage. Banks and regulated capital, we're looking at
this purely from a from an experimentation point of view. Many of the experiments were really not
on the public main net, they were on a private permission network. And people were just trying
to understand the applicability of this protocol, if you will. Today, I think there's a far greater
understanding of the power of decentralization, some of the problems that have plagued
TradFi (Traditional Finance), as we call it, still exist, it's still very inaccessible. Players still
suffer from really bad cost structures. And the industry has collectively not solved for things
like identity and shared compliance. And I, you know, I'm sure your viewers will appreciate stock
markets and bond markets at a retail level. And I don't know if they fully appreciate how manual,
the issuance and lifecycle of these instruments are at the wholesale level. So how does a bond get
issued? How does it get sold. All of this is very manual today in TradFi. And so today, what we're
seeing happen is, you know, you have the most forward-thinking banks and custodians lean into
understanding the revolutionary nature of decentralized finance. They are looking at this,
obviously, because their clients are looking at this as an asset class that has given
uncorrelated outsized returns in the last few years. But what I would also like to highlight
is you are seeing an emergence of regulated institutions, so exchanges, regulated custodians,
and funds that are looking into this space from a real first principles
basis and are actually deploying real capital and at institutional levels.
One of the things I've seen over the years is proponents of this kind of technology will say,
well, you know, blockchain can solve this blockchain can solve that. And
oftentimes, there's absolutely no need for that technology.
Why, at this point, are some of these examples you're bringing up
requiring blockchain technology why? You know, for example, more efficient FX not be done without it?
Yeah, I mean, when you ask why blockchain? It's almost like asking me why internet 20 years back,
and sort of when web 2.0 Or even web point 1.0 was sort of emerging. I don't think people
fully understood the far-reaching consequences and applications that could have been built off of it.
Today, I mean, we've gone through a few cycles of things that have taken popular interest. The
summer of 2020, we sort of referred to as the DeFi summer, where you saw automated market makers, you
saw liquidity pools that you could lend and borrow to. These financial primitives just did not exist
and still do not exist in TradFi. Think of, you know, if you have the ability to programmatically
engineer, digital scarcity, non-fungibility and business logic, all on top of open-source software
that is composable, that can then create certain properties that that lend itself to a digital,
better quality. And that's just not something that we've seen using web 2.0 tools.
Now, you've been talking about sort of regulated institutions looking at this technology, and
regulation is going to be very key for the future of this technology, really. At the moment, the
regulators, particularly in the US, aren't wholly convinced by DeFi. I was reading a speech earlier
this year, from the commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, he was talking about
DeFi. And his argument was that intermediaries that currently exist in the financial system
play a key role. Stability is one of those roles that they play, and that that was his point. And
he ultimately said that at this point DeFi is a bad idea. For the system. Of course, decentralized
finance looks to get rid of those intermediaries. So when you think about the regulatory environment
right now, it doesn't seem as open at this point to DeFi. Do you think that's going to change?
Oh, absolutely. I think you know, we at ConsenSys, absolutely welcome further clarity around
regulations, we think that there should be rules in place that, first and foremost, improve access
to financial markets, especially among those groups that have traditionally been excluded.
We also welcome regulations that provide regulator regularity of sorry, clarity, regulatory clarity,
and, and really seek to protect consumers, as well as seek to establish a marketplace integrity. And
so, what we found is that, you know, if you look at episodes like post 2008, no one had a clear
visibility on where the systemic risks were, we didn't have a view of who were the beneficiaries
of certain derivative contracts. And so, I would argue that using Blockchain, having an
immutable record of transactions, real time should address some of the operational inefficiencies
that TradFi have, have suffered, you know, for over the years. That being said, I'd also say that
much of the regulation today has been designed for an intermediated ecosystem. And I think it's
worth looking at a framework that thinks about a disintermediated ecosystem.
So in your view, that would require some form of new regulation, the
existing framework doesn't work in your opinion.
Yeah, I mean, so you know, so. So? Yeah, without getting into specifics, I mean, the rules,
you know, some of the rules specifically in the US were designed in the 1930s,
at a time when really, we didn't have the benefit to a lot of the technology that we have today.
And so it's definitely worth, you know, taking a look of really what you could achieve with the
technology available today. I think it needs to be nuanced. Obviously, the principles of consumer
protection and marketplace integrity still hold. And we hope that this technology is used for
wider adoption and greater financial access, both at the retail and institutional level.
Now beyond sort of financial institutions beyond the financial system, one of the
big things we've seen recently is non fungible tokens or NFTs often
built on the Ethereum blockchain. You know, they've become very popular,
particularly for, you know, pieces of digital art, for example. But I guess one of the biggest
themes here is is the tokenization of things. You know, putting some of these what were
things you'd usually buy physically onto a digital ledger. So as you look at NFTs, what
kind of insight does that give us into the future of Ethereum and the broader blockchain technology.
Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. And I think the popularity of NFTS has really taken off
this year. It begun by, you know, cyber punks and board apes, which are really very rudimentary, but
as the technology improves, and as you think about really what are the attributes, the non-fungible
attributes that would benefit a particular asset class, really, you can think of applications that
go beyond collectibles or digital art, absolutely will power the Digital Goods economy. It is very
intuitive for the gaming economy to embrace this technology. I mean, if you look at something like
Axie Infinity, that's taken, popularity in the Philippines and other countries. I mean,
that in itself, is an economy, in itself of buyers and sellers of, of time and money. And so it's
really great to be able to see that non fungible token software being used to be able to replicate
what should actually be the functional economy in the first place. So you know, I'm super excited
to see, obviously, the popularity of digital collectibles than art. But I also think that
there's going to be an overall financialization of NFTs. There are certain assets in the world
like real estate that are non-fungible by nature. There's absolutely no reason why
that should be represented by a fungible token. Or something that was represented in legacy systems.
The other the other thing that always fascinates me about these different
platforms is the relationship between the underlying blockchain technology
and the token that the cryptocurrency that sort of powers it and in this case.
When it comes to Ethereum, that that token is Ether. Now, there's been a lot of criticism,
say of other platforms that actually, you know, the blockchain underlying blockchain is great,
but the token is unnecessary. Why do we have this? I mean, what's the relationship here between
Ether and Ethereum. Is Ether absolutely necessary for all of these applications to run?
It's a really interesting question and really tests my, my awareness levels of
blockchain as a science. But, I mean, I would like to separate out the price action of Ether
to the utility of how the blockchain works. You're absolutely right, that the validation of blocks at
the protocol layer doesn't need to be powered by a currency that is so volatile. We seek to have
this software eventually be used to be maximally decentralized and be maximally relevant globally,
and eventually be a public utility. So the price action of Eth, per se,
and the volatility around it really is immaterial. I would say that, you know, I think there's a lot
that can be done in improving sort of the variability of transaction fees in general.
And I think that the software is only going to get better. You know, the solutions around the
usability are only going to get better. I expect in the future you are going to see a world where,
really, all the complexity around gas fees and the volatility, and the fact that your transaction
might not get committed because of congestion in the network, all these issues are being looked
at very deeply, and trying to be solved. And the usability of any technology at the very
early stage isn't really the driving factor for adoption. But it will get better going forward.
And beyond the Ethereum platform, you know, there are a number of the
challenges around coming up. As you look to the future,
and you see applications being built on say, Ethereum, and you see applications being built
on another platform, for example, what does that mean for interoperability
systems being able to work together? And does that get us to a place where actually,
in looking to decentralize finance, we actually get into a sense of fragmentation of finance.
Yeah, that's a really good point. So, today, you know, Metamask, and
our suite of products are compatible with Ethereum and EVM compatible chains.
So there are many other chains that you will still have access to through Metamask,
the digital wallet, and our host of products. For the other chains, I think, absolutely,
you're right, like you do see arbitrage opportunities in other chains, vis-a-vis Ethereum
or EVM compatible. And some of that arbitrage opportunities, because access to those chains,
is difficult. And so it's something that we get asked a lot, especially, especially from our Smart
Money, clients, if you will, in solving for that. We are constantly working to
improve the interoperability of our platform with others, we absolutely think that we want to make
this software, you know, absolutely, you know, reach everyone globally. And so that would mean
an interoperability with other chains. And providing the software in order to do that.
Greatly is a fascinating conversation. Thanks for for that insight into the
world of DeFi at the moment. You know, we've got so much more to talk about,
and hopefully we can do it again on another occasion.
Absolutely, though, this has been great. Thanks for having me.
Hopefully that's given you viewers and listeners a sense of Ethereum versus Bitcoin there's so
much more in depth of course, we can go but we just wanted to lay a foundation
with this episode and we can certainly talk more about it in the future. Let us know your thoughts.
Are you invested in either Ethereum or Bitcoin? If so, why you can leave a comment below. Or you
can also hit me up directly on Twitter at Arjun Kharpal. Well, that's it for another episode of
CNBC beyond the valley. Thanks for watching and listening and I'll catch you next time.