Latest / Leaders In Payments / Will Martino, President & Co-Founder of Kadena | Episode 386

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Will Martino, President & Co-Founder of Kadena | Episode 386 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, will Martino, the president and co-founder of Cadena.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: So Will, welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, greg.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: So let's dive in.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: If you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you're from, where you grew up, where you went to school, a few things like that.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: Sure, will Martino.
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: Co-founder and president of Cadena.
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: We started about 10 years ago.
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: My co-founder and I met at JP Morgan's blockchain lab Before that went to school in Connecticut, then went to college at Yale, was doing mathematics and economics there with kind of a weird interest in researching fractal geometry for a bit and wrote a bunch of papers in that and then after that got into tech, ended up at JP Morgan back when they were starting to do their first kind of experiments with blockchain and built their first blockchain payment system called Juno.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: This is JP Morgan coin version zero, rolled it out.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: It was my co-founder's second hire there on the research desk and since then it's been about 10 years of doing the whole startup thing.
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: Mostly I had focused on distributed systems.
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: I ended up writing a couple of papers in that.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: Outside of that, where I live now, I'm actually out in Sweden.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: My wife's at Spotify.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: She's one of the architects there, so we moved out here a few years ago and I'm working remote.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: Okay, great, so tell the audience what Kadena does.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: So Kadena is a blockchain for business, or at least that's the way we like to describe it to people who aren't too familiar with blockchain.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: I think the origin story helps to motivate what Kadena does a bit more, which is that when my co-founder and I started PokeTroy when we were at JPMorgan, we were tasked with doing the due diligence section, or research for JPMorgan for blockchain integration.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: Initially we were on this research R&D desk or in this research R&D group and then, pretty quickly, ethereum was getting ready to launch about a year after that desk had started up.
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: Then Hyperledger and everyone else was coming through and talking to JP Morgan and we were the tech team that would dive in and actually try to figure out.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: okay, what are?
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: these things, what's real, what's not, what are the limitations?
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: And pretty quickly we figured out, well, two things.
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: One is the best way to learn about a protocol or technology is to go and build one yourself, because that's how you really learn about it.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: But also that, based on our experience working in finance Stuart has a lot more experience working in finance, about 15 years my senior.
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: At this point he did some equity trading algorithms for Jake Morgan before actually getting on this research desk.
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: But when we were going through these different protocols that were coming through for Jake Morgan, we were trying to figure out, okay, how would we use these?
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: We ended up just getting a host of questions that we knew needed to get answered for long-term industrial adoption, and it wasn't too many.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: It was a lot around security of the protocol, around the security of the smart contract language, about interop with other systems.
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: How do you bridge data in out, how do you secure it?
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: How do you do really good authentication roles that type of thing actually inside the system?
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: How do you formally verify that these contracts, which are basically living bug bounties, are provably safe?
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: So things like that, and we decided to leave and build a system that we knew would have the parts needed for long-term industrial adoption.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: Our view of it was this is back in 2015.
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: At this point, our view of it was that by 2030, crypto is going to be adopted.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: Based on that assumption, okay, what parts are we going to need?
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: What systems are we going to need?
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: What features are we going to need to help to make that a reality?
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: So we're designed around business, but business doesn't have to be just institutional, just big finance.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: It can also be DeFi.
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of different parts to what Cadena does, but the main one is that we figured out how to horizontally scale a traditional proof-of-work consensus, very similar to how, in Web2, you would be able to throw more servers at a Hadoop cluster.
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: Should people heard these words, we haven't heard this stuff for five or ten years, but this used to be a big thing of horizontal scaling, hadoop, all of that stuff where you're going to throw more servers at it and you can have.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: Right now, we have 20 chains that are all in a single network, that all are braided together using proof of work.
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: Soon, I believe by the end of the year, we're planning on actually upgrading it to 40 chains and adding 20 new chains that are running the Ethereum virtual machine.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: The original 20 run our smart contract language packs.
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: That is designed for really robust institutional usage.
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: I think that's the main differentiator is that we're actually just a traditional proof of work, with block times that are sub second and they're second and a half now and they'll be about 0.75 once the expansion goes out.
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: And the other big thing is that it fixes the efficiency issues that people have talked about blockchains being plagued with for a long time, which is that are using all of this energy for securing Bitcoin.
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: It's just a waste of energy.
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: I could break with that and disagree, just like the amount of energy that gets used by Bitcoin is less than that giant sphere in Vegas.
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: It's a bit different and there's a bunch of other points on it, but the main thing for us is that we can scale up how much throughput, because every chain that we add adds more throughput.
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: So right now we're at 20.
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: When we go to 40, we'll double our throughput, but the energy usage stays the same because the 95% 99% of the energy for a proof of work consensus protocol sort of blockchain is used for the security aspect of the mining.
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: But the mining we figured out how to expand the amount of throughput while keeping the mining resources the same.
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: So when we go from 20 to 40, we actually increase our efficiency by 2x for basically no cost, because the security needed for the network itself is always going to be the dominant factor.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: Who are your typical customers?
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: They're all over the place.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: For people who aren't familiar with blockchain and crypto, there is the more decentralized finance side.
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: So right now you had initially your Bitcoin and then you had Ethereum, which is programmable money, I suppose, the Bitcoin, which is kind of decentralized money, and then the problem is that you've been hitting scaling capacity issues with the Ethereum approach and there have been a bunch of other layer one chains.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: We're a layer one chain, but Solana is probably the main winner from the last six years, that's five.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: Six years ago a bunch of new ones launched.
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: They're probably the main winner and they have a higher throughput of around 10,000 transactions a second that they can consistently do under real-world loads Up from Ethereum.
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: I think it was 15 transactions a second.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: So from the DeFi side, we have people who are interested in using us because we have this horizontally scalable architecture.
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: So as more people start to use the platform, the only thing standing between us and having more chains running on the network.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: So having more throughput is literally just an option, because the miners want more adoption, because that means that the coin is more valuable and their investment is more valuable.
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: We just want more throughput because if there's more adoption, then throughput can get maxed out.
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: So instead we would increase the network size, and then we of course, just want more adoption.
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: So everyone is in favor of having more throughput, as needed People who are interested in having the low gas fees, or projects that are interested in having like the low gas fees, like kind of a layer two or more centralized thing that has more throughput, but on a layer one that is actually properly decentralized.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: So from the DeFi side, it's mostly about okay, you're actually a proof of work, security, but you have the throughput that we need and it can expand even if you get widespread global adoption long term.
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: And then from the institutional side, it's people that have run into the issues that you run into with using Ethereum's approach to smart contracts, which is just that it's really hard to write safe smart contracts.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: We've written some ourselves.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: We've had to run them through bounty projects and had them go get pedophilation tested and things like that and even audited, and then even then it's very hard for people, even for us, to be really sure that the Ethereum contracts we write are going to be secure.
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: There are some big Ethereum projects that have managed to do this, but the amount of effort needed for having anything more complicated than a simple token is a lot.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: So when we talk to institutions, there's been a big shift recently.
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: This is really in the last, I would say, year and a half, but even more so now that the Trump administration has changed the SEC's approach to crypto, in that large financial institutions until about two years ago wanted to have private blockchains, so these would be kind of like locally hosted blockchain databases that would run behind firewalls and that was largely for security concerns, but also just it's easier to be cautious with a private blockchain.
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: And recently and this is again my last year or two, really, ever since BlackRock rolled out their public chain protocol and actually got it through the SEC, large institutions have been very interested in actually working on public blockchains, which has been fantastic and that's really always been one of the gating factors to big industrial adoption.
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: So when we go and we talk to institutions, they like a lot that we're proof of work we're talking to I mean I can't say names, of course, but we're talking to institutions all over the place Banks, funds, payment rails, that type of thing.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: A lot of them are now very interested in the public blockchain and they really like the idea of having a more traditional, secure proof of work blockchain, that they don't have to worry about the scalability and the throughput issues that they would have if they had gone with one of the previous generation systems.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Is there a specific use case that you could mention, maybe in the payments or fintech space?
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think in the past people have talked about cross-border payments, but maybe there's something other than that that you could talk about.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: So cross-border payments has always been one of the big ones for crypto, and that's one of the.
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: I remember when I got married.
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: I think it was eight years ago.
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: Now my anniversary is coming up, so I should be really certain on this number.
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: I think it was about eight years ago and we actually ended up instead of using a wire for doing the cross-border because we got married in Mexico instead of using a wire, we ended up just using Bitcoin, just because it was so much easier than getting the Swift codes to match up between my bank and their bank.
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: We give up like we'll just use Bitcoin, it'll be fine, and it took one tenth the time and it had all the security.
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: So cross-border has always been a thing, but you see it more in places like Turkey, south America, that type of thing, where the local currency is a bit of an issue and also getting payments in and out can be a bit of an issue.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: I think that the main thing that we're focusing on right now is our real world asset program, which is tokenization of funds everything from tokenization of funds to trying to tokenize real estate things like that that have always been in the conversation when it comes to blockchain and when it comes to crypto, but now we're finally really picking up steam again.
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: Like BlackRock, leading the way helped massively in this, where all the other institutions could look at it and say, okay, well, they did it.
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: So actually I think it's time for us to actually go get involved with this, but also just getting access to the sort of trapped liquidity or the trapped capital that's on these chains where people would actually like to diversify.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: People who are running large Ethereum wallets Some of them would like to be able to diversify a bit, and if you can go and actually approach them on the Ethereum network, like BlackRock did, you can see some pretty large returns.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: Outside of that, there's just a big element of process automation efficiency gains that you get from just having a blockchain-based infrastructure.
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: Those are more longer term things.
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: I see that being more of like a 2030 thing, where people are finally like okay, this is the next gen version of a database.
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: We don't have to worry about all of these issues that we've had before.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: The robustness is always there.
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: It comes distributed by default.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: You have really clear ways of doing authorization, of tracking how data's been flowing, things like that.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: Okay, do you see a challenge in sort of the big financial institutions and companies that have these legacy technology platforms?
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Is that something that's easy to overcome, hard to overcome?
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: Do you find more startups who kind of have this different mentality or a better fit or kind of?
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: What's your view on that?
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: private blockchains were the go-to for so long because politically it was easier to say yes, you can do this thing.
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: This private thing in this firewall that can never touch anything else and it's outside of JP Morgan Klein and a couple other things really hasn't gone anywhere.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: Once you're on the public chain and once people are interested in the public chain, it's much harder to kind of go and put that research into a little bucket, into a little corner where politics can keep it from actually taking off.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: So I would say more political.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the legacy tech is a problem, but it's not a huge problem and a lot of this is just process documentation and actually figuring out what's going into it.
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: Previous jobs I have run into very old mainframes where no one actually knew how the logic worked.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: But it ran core backbone parts of payment rails and I once had a very senior executive at a company ask if we could wrap it in AI so that the AI could learn how the black box that was the mainframe function that was written in COBOL and they had one COBOL programmer in the company at this point and she was getting ready to retire and we're just like guys, that's not how AI works.
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: It'll get like 80% of it right and then 20% of it won't be right and we're not going to be able to tell which is which until everything blows up.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the legacy is a bit of an issue, but it's more just once there is the interest, once there's the profit motive, the case studies of, okay, if we actually build out these technologies, like do our payment systems be a both either return on investment but also just cheaper cost of running the infrastructure long term, like once those case studies are, in which I believe that they are now, now that some of the institutions are really getting into public blockchains, they're starting to see what the benefits are, especially having open, decentralized infrastructure that you just deploy directly to and you don't have to maintain.
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: It just runs globally because other people are running it.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: Now that that's happened, the pushback that we've seen before has been pretty much more addressed.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: And then again you add the change in the administration and, as I've been saying internally and also on some other podcasts, it's not really a question of if crypto is going to be adopted, because for a long time, we've all been hearing oh, it's coming, oh, it's still early, yeah, but when is it going to be?
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: It's like okay, it's actually now.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: It's already getting some serious adoption and with the change in the SEC's approach to how it thinks about crypto and how it regulates crypto, by the time that the SEC could see another sea change from an administrator perspective, it's going to be adopted and then at that point, the bell can't be unrung and crypto will just be here to stay.
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: So the projection that my co-founder and I had by 2030, this thing will be, for real, adopted.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: It looks very positive on that front Because up until now it's been a little bit iffy.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: There's been some use cases.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: There haven't been other ones.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: It's still been a little bit sketchy.
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: Everyone hears about all the big hacks and the big failures, but there has been some real, actual global adoption of the technology and at this point it's just ramping up and up and up.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it just on a small scale in my podcast a couple years ago, a lot of conversation around crypto and blockchain.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: Then it kind of went away for a while and now it's back in full force.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: I get pitched two or three times a day with people that have some crypto-related-to-payments kind of solution that they want to get on the show.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: So definitely seeing that kind of wave come back.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: So, beyond sort of the new administration, what other trends do you see in the industry that either positively or negatively affect your business?
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: For a long time there's been a push for this thing called Layer 2.
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: Layer 1 blockchains like Cadena and like Solana and Ethereum and Bitcoin.
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: They're the base layer infrastructure that everything kind of settles to longer term and are holding the value.
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: And then there are these things called Layer 2s, which are more like a centralized you can almost think of them like an AWS that kind of attaches to the base layer currency or currencies.
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: And for the last several years there's been a big push to layer twos, believing that, okay, you couldn't actually take liquidity and TVL locked up value, you couldn't really take it out of Ethereum.
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: But Solana has kind of disproven that and that, yes, like a sufficiently well-designed layer one actually can capture value from one chain and bring it over to its other.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: The movement to layer two protocols is starting to recede, which is helpful to us, because we've always been of the opinion that we don't need a layer two.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: We need a layer one that actually can scale, and that's what we went out and built.
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: But it's easier to roll out a centralized layer two than it is to roll out a properly scaled layer one and get the adoption that it needs.
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: So the market has been very helpful to us in that respect the movement towards layer one, especially with financial institutions becoming much more interested in public blockchains.
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: They tend to be much more interested in proof of work chains than proof of stake chains.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: They tend to be much more interested in proof-of-work chains than proof-of-stake chains, and this is just because of a centralization of capital and authority.
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: The way the proof-of-stake works is that the people who have the biggest wallets are the ones that have the most votes, and it gives you some efficiency gains, but at the cost of okay, you have kind of these unknown entities that have majority votes all the time on the network and what it's going to be doing, whereas a proof-of-work chain is a much more decentralized and much more secure approach to the system.
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: I think the market has shifted in that respect as well, with people being much more interested in actually having a proof-of-work chain at the bottom.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: That's been great for us because we've always been sitting there.
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: That's always been our belief of you shouldn't need a layer two.
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: If you layer one can scale.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's switch gears you.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: So maybe walk us through your professional journey.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: You've talked a little bit about it, but maybe kind of walk us through professional journey and then how you started the company and why.
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: So professional journey, I guess I can start it with first job I got.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: I was working at Ion Trading on like a tech support role, ended up learning programming because I was just getting really bored with that job and figured out that if I learned some Python I could actually automate 80% of my job, which is when I discovered that when you learn programming in a non-programming role and then write a program to automate your job, you don't tell your boss, because I got fired three months later and they brought in new people at two thirds the pay and they used my program, which is fun.
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: So anytime I've taught non-programmers how to program since I've given them this warning of like, yeah, when you actually learn, don't do that Learn, but then don't make a big show of it.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: This is going to be a secret advantage type of thing.
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: After that I went to the SEC a big, important part of the journey.
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: I was there basically as their young hacker for their high frequency trading analytics program.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: I helped to design and build their supercomputing cluster that's based out of regional office, and we revamped the way that the SEC was going through the data from high-frequency trading funds, because at the time they couldn't go through more than about a million lines of an Excel sheet of a trade blotter because they just didn't have the technology to be able to ingest it and ended up writing the national exam analytics tool, neet, and deploying it to most of the regional offices.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: We deployed it out to about 1,000, 2,000 users and that's been wildly successful.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: One of my old coworkers is now kind of the boss of that group and he's been there ever since, but it was at the SEC for a couple of years when Valor started the cryptocurrency working group and they needed someone with the clearance who didn't own any coin but understood the tech.
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: So I raised my hand to be kind of the technical co-founder of that group, ended that for about six months, did some investigations, but just was in the room really early when the SEC was thinking about okay, what is crypto, how do we think about this?
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: Working in the government is especially when I was 24, 25 at the time is a bit stifling.
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: So ended up leaving and went to hacker school for a bit, but that was mostly like a writer's retreat for programmers for a few months, just to learn this weird programming language called Haskell that I've been using ever since and then ended up at JP Morgan on this research desk One of my friends from college.
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: He was actually the first hire on this research desk.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: So after he came in he was like oh, let me introduce you to my boss.
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: We're actually looking for people to work in the Brooklyn office.
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: I was living in Brooklyn at the time and so it was a 15-minute commute for me, which I was over the moon with because I've been optimizing my commute to minimize it for as long as I can remember, ever since my first commute was got an hour and a half by train and bus.
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: Then after that we were at JPMorgan for a few years and built the first version of JPMorgan clean called Juno, and deployed it out.
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: It was in DevNet and it was running a payments rail between London, new York and, I think, tokyo at the time.
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: And then, about a year after that, my co-founder and I were talking and I'm like, hey, I think we got something here.
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: We had open source, all about technology.
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: It was part of when JP Morgan was working with the Hyperledger Foundation.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: They had open source, a bunch of tech.
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: So I was talking to my that we knew we wouldn't be able to do elsewhere, we wouldn't be able to do without just leaving.
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: After that, we left and spent about a year heads down just building up tech and then went to the first Stanford blockchain conference and presented it there and then did fundraising rounds.
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: And it's been 10 years since About five years after we founded, we launched the public chain.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: We didn't start as a public blockchain.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: We actually started as a private enterprise blockchain because we've had more belief in that approach.
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: But after a couple of years it became very obvious that it was much easier to raise money, but also it was much more dynamic and much easier to accelerate and innovate if we embrace the public blockchain side.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: And that's around when we figured out how to scale proof of work and went and raised around it and rolled it out.
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: Now we're about, I think, 75 people globally, mostly based out of From a personal perspective.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: What are you passionate about?
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: So maybe a couple examples of what you're passionate about from work perspective and a couple from, maybe, your personal life.
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: Sure, One of the things, as I said before I moved to Sweden in the last few years they have this amazing thing called Bank ID.
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: And Bank ID is when I have friends here who are more older and they ask me, okay, what is crypto for?
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: I basically tell them look, the world doesn't have Bank ID.
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: But when they say Web3, you can basically just assume bank ID, except that it's not run by a centralized server.
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: So bank ID is this amazing thing that allows you to authenticate yourself.
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: I don't have like logins and passwords with most websites here, but even with the healthcare systems or the banking systems or basically anything.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: So everything from signing for buying a house to setting up a doctor's appointment, to just sending my friend $10 to split a meal or something, all of that gets done by this kind of centralized authentication system that is BankID that other things can plug into through APIs.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: So after moving here, like the entire country uses it Largely.
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: This is because during COVID they kind of got everyone to move over to it and they also basically like I don't really carry Swedish currency on me.
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: I usually just have euros in my pocket, even though you can't use them here, because it is too American to not have currency in my pocket.
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: But almost no one here actually has currency.
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: I've actually seen a couple times when, at the grocery store, there's a failure of the payment system, where the only people who can actually buy groceries are the expats, because they're the only ones who have any Swedish currency on them, because all the locals are like, why would we carry currency?
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: We never use it.
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: So BankID was this amazing thing that I ran into and we spent about a year cloning it.
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: We built this thing called SpireKey which allows you to use.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: We've seen things like KeePass I think that one's for Apple.
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: There's an equivalent one for, I think, amazon and Google as well but this is basically using the hardware security modules that are in your phones to produce key pairs so that you can do kind of passwordless authentication and login, and it's much safer than using a username and password.
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: And we figured out a way to use that protocol to actually be able to sign for payments and authentication and things on our blockchain and went and actually implemented it.
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: It's still pretty early days.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: It's one of the things we're working with the Croatian national football team and it's actually one of the things that we're planning on implementing over the next year of having a wallet that basically takes your phone and turns it into a hardware wallet to really get over the UX problem of, okay, how am I storing my keys, how am I doing the signing for everything?
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: Because crypto traditionally it's a pain in the butt.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: Almost everyone who's been in crypto for a while will tell you about the time that they lost the keys for their wallet.
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: That is now worth many thousands of dollars, sadly, and they can't get it back.
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: Everyone has this experience.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: You have it exactly once, and then you won't have to back everything up correctly, but the UX has gotten a lot better.
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: So that's one of the things that I've been really passionate about is actually like all right, we have an example in production of a centralized version of what authentication should look like for Web3.
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: It's just not Web3.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: Let's make our version and make it decentralized.
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: When it can run on our chain that doesn't require a centralized service provider for it.
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: It's literally just a website and otherwise it just runs as contracts in the chain and doesn't cost anything to use that one I've been pretty passionate about.
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: I've always been a pretty big nerd on consensus protocols.
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: I was a designer of ChainWeb, which is the way that we figured out how to horizontally scale proof of work, so I was always really interested in that.
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: On the private side or on the personal side, I like to cook a lot.
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: One of the few things that my wife let me get when we renovated the apartment, I got a big old pizza oven Nice.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: I like to make pizza from scratch.
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: I make a lot of stuff from scratch at this point.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: So I do a lot of cooking and I've been working on recipes to death for period of time.
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: The latest one I did was Al Pastor egg rolls, which everyone said was good.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: I won't do it again.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: I don't think it was a bit much.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: In my opinion, it was a bit too much work for what I got out of it.
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: It was pretty good, but I'm just going to go with the taco next time.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: Okay, so the pizza.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: Is there a Swedish pizza?
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: Oh?
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: Lord.
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: No, I mean, yes, there is.
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: So there's like the curry pizza, which is like gyro meat and then kind of curry sauce on top, and that one is sort of manageable.
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: I have experienced getting a pizza from like just a regular place you're not one of the fancier ones that care more about their pizza where, like you get it and you think that, oh, that's really nice, they put a big lump of burrata right on the middle of the pizza.
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: No, it's mayonnaise, actually.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: It's actually it's just a big lump of mayonnaise and it's like, what on earth is this doing here?
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: And I was recently at a party where someone was going around asking like what type of pizza should we order?
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: And I'm just like you know, get some normal ones, it'll be fine.
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: I didn't really want to have a big opinion.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: Like I was invited to the party.
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: These are like absolutely not.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: So now I know why you got your own pizza oven.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: One final question.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: So if someone comes to you Will and says, hey, I'm interested in building a career in payments, fintech, crypto, blockchain, kind of that whole aspect and maybe they're right out of college or university and they ask you what do I need to do to be successful, what kind of advice would you give them?
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: One general thing, which is especially what I did early on in my career, is if you feel like you're the dumbest person in the room, you're probably in a good place.
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: Just try to be helpful and be nice and like people will teach you.
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: That was especially when I was surrounded by pretty much everyone except for me had a PhD.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: I had to earn the respect of a number of the people because a number of them were like why on earth is this kid here?
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: Because everyone else was in their mid to late 40s and had a PhD and 20 years of experience.
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: And it's this weird political thing of why I was, technically speaking, at the same level of rank as them.
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: So that's always a good place to be is when you feel like you're helpful but the people around you are smarter is like a pretty great place to be learning, especially early on.
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: But then, for payments and crypto in general, get low level is my opinion.
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: Try to build these things by hand.
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: Should you roll your own crypto?
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: No, but should you fail at rolling your own crypto and figure out why it was a bad idea?
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, probably.
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: Actually, building the raw transactions, getting low level, getting close to where the payment rail is getting close to where the money is going in and out will just be especially early on, phenomenal experience that'll be serving you for the rest of your career.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: Well Will.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: We've covered a lot of ground, obviously, about you, the industry, the company.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: My marketing, I'll probably be like you should say the website name, so it's kadenaio K-A-D-E-N-A.
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: If anything that we've been talking about is interesting to anyone listening, swing by the website and you can get in touch with us there.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: Otherwise, thanks for having me.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: No, thank you.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for being on the show.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much, greg, it's been great.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: And to all you listeners out there.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.