Latest / Monero Talk / Aaluxx of Maya Protocol on Decentralized Swaps & Untraceable Digital Cash | EPI 375

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Aaluxx of Maya Protocol on Decentralized Swaps & Untraceable Digital Cash | EPI 375 · Monero Talk

• Doug All right, hey Alex, what do I call you? How do you say this? Aaluxx It's a pseudonym. Anyone that knows how to pronounce it correctly is that. It's a Mayan Diti pseudonym thing. Doug Awesome, what's the story behind it? Aaluxx Oh, you know, all the team chose a pseudonym from what kind of like Maya legend and stuff like that. But yeah, the Aloosh or something like that, that's how they pronounce a cradle in south of Mexico, was just like a kind of like a spirit of the forest of the jungle kind of thing, and it's interesting, so. Doug Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Is that you, man? Are you a spirit from the jungle? What am I dealing with over here? Aaluxx Apparently, yeah. No, it's uh, I just found the ways written to be cool and very cool. Doug Yeah, very cool, man. Yeah. I love that you guys will be participating in Monero topia. Yeah, I'm excited for that. Because you're local, right? You're based out of Mexico City. From while Aaluxx So out west, but it bursted out in Mexico. Doug Yeah, close enough Guadalajara is beautiful, too. I've been there. It's beautiful Yeah, yeah for those tuning in I guess I'll let you introduce yourself. Why don't we start there? That would be that'd be good place to start Aaluxx For sure. I'm Alux, I'm the co-founder of Maya Protocol. Maya Protocol is a cross-chain DEX connecting a varied set of different chains like Bitcoin, ETH, Iritrum, Sun, Cardano. We have Zcash. We've got Dash. And yeah, a growing set of chains every year. We add a couple more. And yeah, it's permissionless as crypto should be. And yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Doug Yeah, for sure, man. And so how did how did Maya Protocol get started? I mean, obviously, we had Thorchain. My understanding, it's basically a fork of Thorchain. And then you guys started adding different coins that Thorchain didn't have. What was kind of the genesis of the project? Why did you guys even start Maya Protocol? Thorchain already existed. Aaluxx Yeah, so we're from the software background. I was already always interested in crypto, but didn't like kind of getting involved in smart contracts and stuff like that. But what wouldn't make sense to me is that you would use pizza here in Mexico for moving from Bitcoin to eat. That was for me like, why are we kind of trying to replace banks and then going back right at it? Didn't make sense to me. So that was kind of like a little bit disappointing. And then one day I just found out about 4 Chain, love what they were doing, LP kind of started supporting and researching. And yeah, one day I just heard that, you know, the protocol couldn't scale indefinitely and that eventually there will be a couple kind of covering more edges of the market and I thought, you know, I want to do that. So we got started right away. Doug What was the, what was the issue with Thor Chain? Aaluxx You can only have an indefinite amount of chains because you're running a decentralized network that are running nodes for each of the network we support. So if you have one validator on Torchain, it's running a node on Torchain, but also a node on every chain you support that can get expensive really quickly. And you start getting issues of bandwidth, of block space plugging of a whole lot of things. Plus, it's just very hard to maintain because when you're working on Maya, for example, another example, you don't only need to maintain Maya, you need to continue to upkeep every chain we support. If Bitcoin doesn't update, we need to do an update. If Ethereum doesn't update, we need to do an update. We need to be present any chain, any change or objective can have downstream effects for us. And it's just very difficult to maintain and stay on top of things. So you cannot have 100 chains on Torchain or Maya. You could have maybe 20 or 30 realistically in each. And just a market for chains is bigger out there. Every person has their own favorite chain. That's fair. But I'm working on the highways to connect them. And I think it can get behind having trustless highways between projects you like. So that's what we're working on. Doug Yeah, for sure. It's a major problem that needs to be solved. Like you said, I mean, we have these decentralized cryptocurrencies and most people are just keeping them on centralized exchanges, are swapping them on centralized exchanges, and we need on-ramps and off-ramps that are equally decentralized. So very, very, very cool that you guys are, you know, building Maya and it's getting popular. So when you guys first, when did you guys first launch? Aaluxx It's gonna be almost three years ago now. Yeah, okay almost two years Doug And so when you first launched, what coins did you initially have? Aaluxx Just Bitcoin and Ethereum chains plus floor chain itself. So it started pretty basic and we've added around three chains per year since then. Two or three chains per year. Doug Okay, and at that time Thorchain didn't have like aetherium or it also had Bitcoin and Aaluxx Bitcoin Ethereum are the only chains we share with our chain. From then on, it's separate. They have Doge, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Binance, Smart Chain, Avax, Tron, and Cosmos. And we did Dash, Zcash, Kujira, Ravix, iRitrum, and we're working on Cardano and Kasper this time. And Zcash. Zcash, I think we said. Doug Yeah. So what kind of is your, you know, when you guys add a new coin, what's your, what's your process? Like some of these I haven't even, I don't even know. Obviously the big ones I know some of them. Aaluxx With this interest from our community and their community to connect, and there's going to be some dev and liquidity resources available to get this off the ground, we're happy to collaborate. We do look for projects that bring something new to the table in some shape or form, and that are really having some use. For instance, we like a lot Dash regarding payments. We like IraChum because it's an EVM that's more similar to Ethereum and has also very cheap gas. We consider connecting different use cases to Bitcoin. Doug Got it, got it, got it, makes sense. Obviously the million Monero question, when Monero on Vaya Protocol, obviously there's a lot of people that would love to see that. There is yet to be a decentralized exchange, like the ones that you guys have. Obviously we have Bisk has Monero, Havana has Monero, but these function different. They're not large liquidity pools. What is the term that you use to describe Maya Protocol and ThorChain? Cross-chain AMM decks. Cross-chain AMM, yeah, there is no cross-chain AMM decks that has listed Monero yet. Obviously Sarai decks, we're waiting for that, but that would be the first. Any chance we see it on Maya? Aaluxx Yeah, well, I get along very well with Kayala, with Luke, rooting for their success. You know, I've covered a lot of topics on that project. I've advised a little bit, at least the opinions I can have and on the economic design. And yeah, Zerai has a brilliant cryptographer and dev at the helm, you know, with full Monero, he's done his own TSS algorithm for ECDSA. So definitely a brilliant person. And I think he has a very good shot at being the first with Monero. Maya and Thorchain currently have an architectonic issue when working with Monero, just because of how the signatures are different and all the chain bring signature stuff as well. So we currently only support plain ECDSA. We will need to have other cryptographic primitives of Thorchain and Maya to be able to support Monero. The good news is both Maya and Thorchain are now going to be launching EDDSA, which is another cryptographic primitive that will allow us to have things like Solana, Cardano and among others. And now that we're opening up that engine, we could start tinkering with it to start adding things like plain Schnorr signatures to be able to support CSS and Zcash or, you know, all the things we need in order to be able to sign on Monero. So it's just a very sensitive part of the code. And it's something that Maya itself currently doesn't have the capability to kind of like get beyond by ourselves. So it's something that we're, you know, talking with Thorchain, whether they do this or not and when and then we can see, you know, when Monero fits in. But that would be definitely in a like very unlikely to be 2026, unfortunately. So OK, let's let's let's hold it for for Zorai. Doug Oh, we're used to waiting in Monero a lot. I mean, we've become very patient. We've become very patient. It is unbelievable. I mean, we tried years ago to get Thorchain before Maya Protocol even existed. Yeah. We were advocating to get Thorchain to add Monero. And it felt like it was happening. And actually, that was the birth of Sarai actually came out of that, or the starting of Sarai came out of the fact that Thorchain never ended up adding it. It was actually at the first Monero topia we had in Miami. So this is, I don't know, four, almost five years ago at this point. Aaluxx Yeah, I mean, I remember the debate that was already part of the torch in ecosystem. We were already out to build Maya. And initially, there was some hunger for it. There's two issues, the technical one and the social one, you know, snow didn't want to get behind this and invest all that it needed to be invested as well as technical side. So it's the two things you have to check. The good thing with Sarai is that look clearly has a technical capability. But also all the Sarai participants, investors, nodes, everybody in that ecosystem is Monero native there, they want Sarai to happen because it's for Monero. So there's no little more politics to be played there of you know, whether or not to add it how Doug Exactly, exactly, exactly. And I do think my understanding is too, on a social level, at this point, Thorchain is amenable to it. I think you guys would be as well, considering you guys have Zcash, right? But it's still more of a technical hurdle, not so much a social issue at this point, right? Is that correct? Aaluxx The social one would still have to be had, I don't think it would be 100% support on both networks, definitely ours is a little bit more open to it, but it could also likely pass on Fortune. The thing is, it's a moving target, whoever is the nodes on Fortune and Maya keeps changing all the time, because it's from the solution list to be one. So what do you think? Doug I think that the issue, the social issue would be at this point, same issue, just like a concern with regulations or being a target from government. Aaluxx there's being a target for whoever is it that's coding it there's the nodes are running infrastructure and if there's you know there's concerns over illicit flows for example look honestly like torture my completely transparent you see everything that's going on and we kind of open things up so we're actually the opposite of like a mixer but still there's this understanding socially and enforcement can think that you know you're complicit and whoever's running the infrastructure then is also at risk so nodes you know they want to have a chill time they're happy with what we're doing that we're decentralized our permissionless they don't want to jeopardize that for one chain that would be the position somehow I'm obviously a permissionless maxi I'm a little bit more open but like I don't control Maya and I don't control you know I obviously carry a lot of weight and influence in both ecosystems but it's up to the nodes really and they're completely anonymous so it's a it's an issue understand but I do think there's some hunger on both networks for this we just have to see when we get there you know yeah cuz there Doug There would definitely be a lot of usage there for sure. I think overnight you would see a lot of usage. Tell us more about My Itself. I know it has like two coins associated with it, then there's cacao and there's the other one. I actually use some of our Monero Talk LLC funds to grab a little cacao, because I thought you guys were adding Monero, so I was like, you know what, let me support. But I guess I'll just have to hold tight for some time. Aaluxx We're finding the same fight just coming from different angles, you know, where we're trying to solve how to run sustainably decentralized permissionless network connecting different chains. You guys are doing a very good self-standing network oriented to privacy. Both are needed for freedom, you know, so we're on the same fight. It just takes time to meet in the middle sometimes. But going back to the topic on Maya, yes, Kakao is your native token. It's how you pay gas on Maya. It's also what we use to pair with every other token for the AMN pools. So we have a Bitcoin to ETH swap. Actually, in the background, what's happening is a Bitcoin to Kakao, Kakao to ETH double swap. So you don't notice it happens instantaneously, but that's actually what's going on. So no credit providers pair it with Kakao. And Maya token is a revenue sharing token. 10% of the swap fees are paid out to the Maya token holders. And this is because we launched Kakao entirely fairly. We gave out 100% of Kakao for free to the community. So people would add liquidity and they got the Kakao pair like the other half for free when we launched three years ago. So we kept zero. We started with zero money, zero equity in this. We're just earned as we go from being useful. The more swap volume Maya has, the more we earn. And I think that's fair. So we have an incentive aligned with the ecosystem of as much fee revenue and volume as possible, which is our reason to exist. And that is the right key type to what we perceive also in our target. Doug So, cacao is the fuel, is the gas that's what's actually used to do the swaps, and what's the other one called? It's called Maya? Yeah. So, and Maya, I'm a little, I'm still unclear on exactly what role Maya plays. It views less. Aaluxx So, except that it gets paid 10% of revenues. So, if I have, I have, I don't know, half of the Maya tokens, then I'm getting 55% of the protocol revenues paid out daily in Kakao to my wallet automatically. So, the changes automatically, it's to Doug How do people obtain, obviously you could trade and buy each, but how else are people obtaining each of those? Aaluxx So Kakao is insanely liquid, at least versus its market cap. It's got more liquidity than market cap. So it's, I think, the most liquid token in the market today. And it's very available because you can swap to it from Bitcoin, ETH, or whatever token Maya supports, or because we have run from any token fortune supports. So getting to Kakao is quite easy, and then just to Maya is one more step. So you can get a hand on them, and they're just each useful in their own right. They're not really kind of like IP tokens that they don't do anything. It's just one is used to power the swaps. The other one gets a share of the fee revenue, period. Doug So, as somebody looking to invest that sees a future Maya protocol that thinks it's going to be worth more, you know, a couple of years from now than it is today, would they obtain Maya protocol? Would they obtain Kakao or would they obtain Maya? Aaluxx Any which one is is good. It depends how over or on the price each is with relation to the other That's all Doug find that confusing that's good that's confused that's a it's fine if he's a Aaluxx What I was gonna say is if you are just getting involved lightly, get Kakao because it's very liquid. So if you end up regretting that decision, you can get out pretty easily. Whereas Maya is not as liquid and it's definitely a more leveraged bet on Maya. Kakao, simply if Maya is more used and useful and more velocity, then Kakao is worth more. Maya, it's a bet on the future fee revenue of Maya protocol. So it has kind of like a price to earnings ratio in a sense. If people expect Maya to grow, Maya token will grow, but it's more speculative than Kandao. Kakao is very kind of real book value of Maya. So yeah. Doug Now I forget the store chain have two coins too. No, right? Well and Aaluxx Now yes, it has Roon, Roon is the Kakao equivalent and then Fortune went through a debt restructuring. They went insolvent with one of their four or five products and through that we needed a way out of the insolvency and actually I wrote a proposal to take 10% of the swap fees from Fortune tokenize it into a token called TCY, which is like the Doug You're the guy that solved that the the quiddity Aaluxx Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the design for the Maya token was what we tropicalized for Chain. So we launched DCY. DCY was given to the effective parties of insolvency. And yeah, that's... So now I thought you know also those two tokens, yeah. Doug It confuses me. I'm just a simple digital cash guy. I got my Monero. Monero's Monero. There's no, you know, Monero and then sub-monero and then But I get it. It's different animal. Now it's it Aaluxx and Maya are not trying to be money. That's not what we are. We're a cross-running service and Kakao and Maya are just two different ways to get exposed to that crossing services success or failure. So yeah. Doug Now, Sarai obviously is going to have Sarai coin. Do you know if Sarai is also going to have a second coin as well? Aaluxx There's, I don't think there's a plan for it, so I don't think so, but that could do. Yeah, I don't think so, okay. Doug Yeah. Now that I- Hold on. Okay. How else would you kind of differentiate these projects, Maya, Thorchain, Sarai? Obviously, they're listing different coins, but are they also different in architecture, in kind of their end goal and- Thorchain. Aaluxx Torchi and Maya are architecturally very similar. Sera is radically different. Kayaba has been working from the ground up to we do more optimized and more efficiently every component of what Torchi and Maya have. And it just based off something completely different. It uses substrate as opposed to Cosmos SDK. And then for example, something that's very neat that Lukis doing is to make it as lightweight as possible and as efficient as possible. Torchi and Maya, we have several peer-to-peer gossip networks. You have the Bifrost peer-to-peer gossip, the Maya node peer-to-peer gossip, the Tendermint peer-to-peer gossip, and then also one for each of the nodes we run because you're running Bitcoin through you, but not. What Kayaba is doing is unifying those into just one communication channel that makes everything wildly more efficient. By the way, Kayaba, if you're listening and I'm saying it wrong, do let me know, but that's how I understand it. But he's working on doing things definitely more robust, more rigorous, but of course that also takes time. So there's this trade-off. Maya and Torchi in her life, our architecture is a little bit more clunky, but we're being able to serve the market today. I'm really looking forward to Luk launching as well because his product looks to be very robust and it's gonna be very nice to see it out chunking swaps as well. Doug very much looking forward to as well too, man. I don't know, I've been waiting for a while. We've been waiting for a long time. Have you been contributing to it as well, to Sarai? Aaluxx The thing is, I'm not a developer. Doug Okay. Aaluxx I don't code. Unfortunately, it's not my gift. I'm more on the business side of things. So that's where I could contribute a little bit with some advice. And I have spread the word of Sarai. I think a few of the Sarai investors, it's people I introduced cross-chain to. So I'm just happy with that. But now specifically on our devs, we have a lot to do. We have a mouthful operating Maya. So we really haven't contributed that much, but we're happy to run validators for it as well when the time comes as we have a couple bare metal sites for running infrastructure. So happy to be involved. I'm happy if just that cross-chain happens. I'm happy to run validators for chain flip as well and near and harbor. I think it's also coming out because I just believe this is something that should be possible. And we're going to do the most we can to facilitate it, even if it's a direct competitor to Maya. Doug So you're not you're not I thought you were a developer too. So When when you started Maya, so what basically you were you were the financier behind it as well Or you're the just the idea guy then you got the developers to start working on it. How did that all work? Aaluxx I have business partners for over a decade working in startups and software and stuff, one of which is a developer, the other one is also very tech savvy. So yeah, we have an existing software development firm for third parties, and we have all projects and startups. So when I just got this idea, they were on board and we started. So yeah. Doug How many how many people are like actively developing my Aaluxx Maya, it's probably like seven or eight. Doug Yeah. Okay, that's decent. That's decent sized team, for sure. How many people are coming to Moneratopia from the Maya team? Aaluxx Probably two, because one of the co-founders is there in Mexico City, a development-oriented one, so it's probably going to help if he's in the city. Doug Yeah, obviously the more the merrier, please do get the word out to to you know anybody in in the crypto community that you know That's in Mexico. I'm sure you have Aaluxx I don't know anybody. Oh yeah? I'm just focused working, you know? Okay. Doug You just slide, you just get your head down. Okay. Aaluxx Yeah like I know one guy but the rest I honestly I know more people in crypto on the internet that's here in Mexico. I also don't talk a lot about it here for a few reasons. Okay so yeah it's funny. Doug That makes sense. That makes sense. What's the one other? Have you worked on other crypto related projects? Aaluxx Yeah. I advise a couple. I collaborate and invest in others. Of course, I'm on my iron floor chain. I chose to survive as well when I'm asked. And yeah, I like the space. I like building here. So I'll keep doing it in my iron beyond. So that'll be fun. Awesome. Doug Um, yeah, any other projects you want to mention or nothing really, uh, there you are. Aaluxx That relevant to what we're talking now. Okay, and Doug Yeah, okay What's what's kind of your overall crypto? Like obviously so you're one of the you guys added Z cash relatively early and that was I think that was big That was that's I think that's really what put you guys on the on the map, right? Because it became a way for people to get in and out of Z cash with the decentralized exchange So what what kind of is your overall crypto take obviously you're interested in these decks is but what other aspects of crypto kind of Aaluxx I want it to be useful. I want it to be useful. I'm looking for uses, not hype, not bubbles and memes and all of that. I'm looking for how to help have it be used to pay, used to settle disputes, to generate actual value. So anything that's helped out early, I'm very interested in. Over time, crypto got corrupted a little bit with the complacency of high valuations and stupid amounts of money chasing impossible dreams. For sure. And we lost it. When I was more focused on getting listed on NASDAQ than actually being useful to pay up for coffee. Yeah, all that stuff. I don't like that. I want crypto to be useful, not to remain permissionless throughout the whole experience. So if it's useful to pay, but you're having to trust a centralized party, that doesn't count. That's a crutch. I want it to be useful end to end to really replace financial primitives, to really replace the use of fiat in a way that's easy, comfortable, straightforward, good UX, but also not sacrificing decentralization, permissionlessness, all of that. Doug I imagine you are a fan of Monero to some degree then, right? I mean, I think it checks a lot of those boxes. Yeah, for sure. For sure. What other cryptos interest you, given that you're interested in actually using this stuff, creating something that works? What are the ones that pique your interest? Well, we have. Okay. Aaluxx So, yeah, so like, if you see like CASPA, for example, I think it's interesting how they can maybe solve a little bit of the scaling issues with the, with the DAG. Carolina, I think, you know, could be interesting if they managed to pull off a lot of what they're doing in efficiency of smart contracts. I like what Zikash is doing, of course, I like what Dash is doing, being very useful for payments and available and easy to use. I like what many wallets that integrate Maya are doing because now that they can kind of swiftly move between coins, now they can make a wallet that actually starts kind of natively having a lot of functions that make it more useful as a wallet that just, you know, holding your coins. So now you can put more primitives. For example, for wallet shout out to Marcel and Tim, you know, you have this wallet, but also you can top up USDC in average room for your credit cards to pay in a restaurant, but through, you know, from Bitcoin directly, you know, or you can also, you know, invest in Avax and have like a savings account and you can also do this and that. I mean, it's all as trustless as possible and it will get more. I know what the roadmap is for the next couple of years and they have a lot of things to make you in more use cases, but it's possible because it uses Maya and Thorchain to flow to the chain that best fulfills that use case instead of trying to kind of force like, you know, like the guy's doing encryption on Bitcoin. That's not what it's for. You know, Bitcoin is not for NFTs. It's going to be clunky. It's going to be ugly. It's going to be, you know, not really what it's for. You just use an EVM for NFTs. You know, why are you trying to fit a circle in a square? So that's kind of fun as well. So I'm interested in all the wallets are looking to unlock new use cases to the advancements of individual chains, but also by composing them together. Doug You're very well spoken by the way, man. I assume English isn't your first language, it's Spanish. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's. Aaluxx Yeah, English is not, but I like talking, apparently. Doug Well, you're good at it. Thank you. Yeah, which will make for a good, you know, presentation at Venerotopia, I'm sure, too. Aaluxx Is it going to be in English and Spanish or both? I don't know. Doug Well, we do have a day dedicated, a half a day dedicated to Spanish talks on Saturday, but yeah, and I was hoping yours would be in English, because I think a lot of people would want to hear that. Obviously, you know, you could mix in Spanish wherever you feel necessary. Aaluxx No, I could just say cabranes every once in a while. Doug Maybe we get you on a panel too with some Spanish speakers as well. Yeah, that'd be fun. That'd be cool. That'd be funny. Aaluxx for sure. I was in Switzerland last year for a also like a DeFi conference and it was fun because we were in a panel with one inch but also another Mexican at me and the guys from Thor Wallet. So I found it so funny that we're like two Mexican dudes in Titsubotsu, like talking about DeFi. So yeah that was fun. Doug Small world small world. Yeah Yes, so let me think let me think what else actually let me let me go ahead and quickly play the Monero topia Promo video we have if you don't mind It's just a minute long and then we'll jump back into it. We have 140 live viewers guys like and share retweet Let's get some more people in here and we'll we'll finish up the interview after this video. Here we go. Here we go Speaker 2 Do you love coffee and Monero as much as we do? Consider making gratuitous.org your daily cup. Pay with Monero for premium fresh beans and if you like what you taste, send a digital cash tip directly to the farmers that made it possible. Proceeds help us grow this channel, gratuitous and Monero. Doug All right, that is that is Monerotopia man. You'll see you'll see it's a good time. Have you ever been to Huerta Roma in in Mexico City? Aaluxx I'm not sure, maybe, maybe, I don't know. It's really a separate to Mexico City for, you know, I, you got, I don't know. I go once or twice every year, at least. Okay. Doug Yeah, it's right in the center of the Roma district. It's a really cool venue because it's kind of you're like in the city. It's almost like you're in a public park in the city. Yeah, it's very nice, very nice. So we have a full bazaar that will be there, a marketplace. And we get a lot of them to accept Monero for the weekend. Aaluxx nice good well why only why only the weekend though it should be always Doug Well, some of them do continue to accept it. We do have some vendors. Obviously, that's a work in progress. But we do have some vendors that are there every weekend and they do, in fact, accept it for sure, for sure. Obviously, it'd be nice if all of them were there accepting it all the time, but that takes time, which leads me to a question I do want to ask you. I know you have your head down and you're more in the Internet world and the real world probably, but what is your sense in Mexico, Mexico City, Guadalajara in terms of crypto adoption? You think it's ripe for crypto adoption? Aaluxx It's definitely growing. Mexico has many unbanked. We also don't have the fictitious veil here that authorities are good. Doug Everybody know that's the scam. Aaluxx Yeah, like you see policemen, you don't feel safer here. So we don't have that bail covering reality that other more developed countries sometimes have. So like people clearly understand the benefits of crypto here. It's more of a UX problem, a fear as well of being scammed. There's a lot of scams in Mexico, of course. So it's just that's one line to the tiger, as we say here in Spanish. So I think adoption here is more about education than convincing people why it's useful. I think that part is very clear here. But yeah, it's an economy with a lot of velocities, something definitely interesting for crypto, but still with a lot of cash. So that is the way out for many people that distrust banks. Unfortunately, there's a lot of cash being paid and accepted. And not a lot of people save, so they don't have that big deal with inflation, as other more saving countries sometimes have. So people resent more inflation through wages than through their savings being eroded. So the problem there is people here would adopt crypto more if it was paid a salary than because they can take their savings and put it in crypto. They usually don't have savings. So it's just a different type of market to sell to or to bring adoption to, but it's definitely happening slowly and surely. Every year, I hear more and more people that use crypto in some shape or form. And I think as it gets more useful and easy to use and cheap, I think more people will come on. Doug As Mexicans, we can confirm the park vibes of Huerta Roma for sure. Yeah, I mean, I think I think the thing about we ended up in Mexico City because really because it was centrally located as a good hub for people around the world to come into. And there was a lot of people that didn't want to necessarily come into the United States. And so Mexico City close enough for us were coming in from New York and just a lot of people from around the world can get there relatively cheaply. The visa situation is pretty good. Pretty much wherever you're coming from, you can get in. I'm just sorry about that. Aaluxx I'm just sorry about the airport guys anybody listening Mexico City Airport is no good If you want a real airport use Guadalajara's and then take a bus to Mexico We have the nice airport out there of the country. So you have to Doug It's not it's not that bad. It doesn't trick. But yeah, and then in terms of crypto, obviously, I love the fact that there's, you know, a large marketplace vibe in Mexico, right? Like you walk around people are everybody's on the street selling things for cash, very cash based. Yeah, right, right, right. But it doesn't have it doesn't have like what Argentina has, right? The we're crazy inflation where everybody realizes that their money's becoming worthless, you know, by the day. So it's it's lacking that which is a good thing for the people, right? But it's also a, you know, perhaps a bad thing for for a crypto adoption, because it's not as obvious that is a scam. you Aaluxx The thing is that people are more sensitive to inflation the more they save but there's a point in with too high inflation that even if you don't save from the point that you get paid to you pay if there was inflation high inflation through that process now even you know the working class anybody will feel it. Here in Mexico you know inflation is high single digit maybe low double digits depends how you want to calculate it I mean what sources you want to trust for instance you can use like just real estate appreciation it was 10% in average in Jalisco west of Mexico so you know probably inflation was around that maybe 8 maybe 12 I don't know but that's low enough that you know it's less than 1% in a month so it's not really that these are a deal for most people and it's not like prices hike linearly you know 1% a month so it's just less noticeable but yeah in Argentina it was getting ridiculous with you know single to double digit inflation per day which is insane that means you know if you were able to afford 10 donuts today you can just afford nine tomorrow Doug That's crazy, crazy, crazy. That's insane. Or Venezuela, too, right? I mean, I mean. Aaluxx Oh, there you have to ask for permission to move anything, so that's another problem. So yeah, it's easier to get adopted when you have a broken economy. Mexico does have, we are a developing country, but we are a very extremely strong economy. It's funny, we're taking over Spain now. If you go to Spain, all the restaurants, all of the cool bars are filled with Mexicans, you know, buying and spending, because like, first, we don't save much, but second, when you adjust for disposable income, we spend the most per capita here in Mexico, as a percentage of per capita of disposable income in the world. So you go and see here the streets, restaurants are filled, bars are filled, bars are filled, like you were saying in Mexico City too. So it's crazy, we have a very strong, very fast moving economy. But yeah, thanks to that, the inflation is in that rampant, but yeah, it's still a problem. Doug Yeah. How about cash? I mean, like we were saying, it is a big cash economy. We talk about this a lot on MoneroTalk and MoneroTopia, this idea that the globalists are trying to eliminate cash. And we do see that. We see that here in the US. We see that all happening all around the world. Do you think that's a trend in Mexico or because of this, it's so rooted in society that it's not going to happen? Aaluxx It's hard to do. Half of the Mexican economy is informal. So if you want to eradicate cash, good luck. There's people here that don't have a bank, don't want to have a bank, don't know how to have a bank, don't know how to use the bank if they had it. There's a very close bank oligopoly here where we have less than 60 banks nationwide. All banks are national. There's no state banks or local banks. So that means there's no competition. Banks are very, very, very slow, very stupid. So the government will have to do many things first before they can go after cash very strongly. Of course, Doug I mean, my theory is that, you know, leapfrog, because I bet all those people that don't have banks, they still probably do have smartphones, right? They're out there with their smartphones. So like, you know, it's, do we get to the point where they leapfrog it and now it's like everybody is using apps on their phones to transact? Obviously, ideally, that becomes crypto. But as we know, it probably initially wouldn't be crypto, it would be some government backed application, big bank application that they would get everybody to use. Aaluxx I don't know. Many do use the banks, but people still use cash. I also use cash. Everybody I know uses cash in some shape or form. You cannot live just purely with the bank because you want to take some tackles on the street, you need to pay cash. Doug Do we wake up one day Mexico and the tackle stand with their smartphone instead of, you know, they're, they're accepting something else now, you know, they're whatever they're using their, whatever the I don't know, Mexico. Aaluxx Maybe, but I think it has an equal chance for crypto to succeed, I would say. Because, again, distrust of government here is big. So long as it's the same experience, I think people would prefer crypto. You know, we don't trust government here. But, yeah. Doug What do you think would be some good messaging way of communicating to the average person in Mexico to get them excited about crypto, to get them to want to use crypto, to understand the importance of crypto? In my view, Aaluxx the project that will succeed is the one that you can use that is easier to use and you want to use even if you didn't know it was crypto and you shouldn't even need to know it is so like that's the thing I think there were probably we want to like sell people on the idea and then have them use things but we have to make people want to use it first and then if they happen to know how it works they are like all this Doug cool. I always say I want to solve a problem for them. Aaluxx Yeah, and I always say like most people they want to get to the restaurant sit down and eat and you know They're about they're getting to the restaurant. They're about to sit down and we're like, where we don't sit down come see my kitchen It's an amazing kitchen. Let me tell you why this is the best most private, you know, most clean kitchen And the guy's like I just want to eat, you know Like I don't care So like we have to make the restaurant attractive make it comfortable make people feel at home It's easy to come sit eat. It's very easy to also stand up and leave And if you want to see the kitchen because you like the restaurant, that's fine. Come on over the kitchen is very nice but we need to make the restaurant the attraction because else you're just Attracting people that like kitchens and the rest of the people don't want to come to your restaurant So that's kind of for me my deal. How can we get to work on the product? It's very extremely easy to use and people want to use it because it's better And then the fact that it's crypto is just another thing, but they don't even need to know so like Doug what does that look like like something that makes it easy to go in and out of crypto to fiat or you know Aaluxx but somewhere I could send money to people very easily, get paid for my salary easily, pay for my coffee easily. It's always denominated in something I'm comfortable with. It's fast. I don't need to be holding gas tokens. I don't need to be worrying about confirmation times. I don't need to be worrying about a mnemonic or an address or making a mistake or an address. So there's ways to do this. I'm supporting teams that are behind these kinds of things. I want to kind of eliminate all of this friction, but it takes a lot of areas of work and many little details to really get the experience to a point where, you know, the platform is doing things for you. I don't know, maybe it's a, like a delivery, food delivery app, or maybe it's a chat app, or maybe it's a- Like a POS system or- A POS system. And it happens to use crypto and you don't even know, and it's better and it's good and it's useful and it's cheaper than the alternative. And it's, you know, more widely available than the alternative. And because it uses crypto, because else you would need to red tape and charge you 2% for a transaction like Visa does and do this and do that. And because we call the middleman, this is cheaper and this is better, this is faster. We have to get there. Else we're just gonna keep attracting the same guys over and over. And we're the same people that recycle, just exchanging money with one another, with some winners and losers. That's not fun. I will try to change the world here, not to reach a few. Doug Yeah, no, I agree. I agree with you. I mean, obviously, I think, yeah, I think people need to have a real, real need for it. And it's got, yeah, it's got to really serve a purpose for them, like, like, cross border payments, obviously, is a good, good example of something where crypto could really help people, or instances where people really do want to transact, private, privately and anonymously, right? Things like that. So Aaluxx Yeah, but honestly, there's such a big opportunity in Mexico. There's so many unbanked. If I tell them, look, you don't have to, you know, get the driver license you don't have and another second idea you don't have. And they, people ask a lot here for evidence of domicile. So like some proof of domicile that you live somewhere. Maybe you don't even live anywhere, you know, or you live in a commune or whatever. So, you know, and you don't longer need any of these. And I can get you an account that you can move money with. And it's, you know, it's more difficult to get stolen in your cash and you can use it to pay even in more places. Mexicans would leap to rat, but we still think. Doug Begging the unbanked without a bank, essentially. Aaluxx Yeah. I think there's a lot of opportunity. But yeah, thanks for having me, man. Looking forward to Mexico City. Doug Yeah, thanks for coming on. Greatly appreciate it. And we'll see you soon, man. We'll see you around February 12th to the 15th. This is the conference, so it's coming up at the month. Yeah, just a month. All right. Thank you, brother. Nice meeting you. It was done. See you this year and forward to meeting you in person. Aaluxx Likewise. And you can follow me at Alux Myth, how you see it here on text, on X or Maya underscore protocol. See you there guys. Doug Adios. Bye-bye. All right, later. Bye. Speaker 2 Hi, Monero Land. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to our show on YouTube, Odyssey, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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