3522: Building the Future of Money at Gnosis With Dr. Friederike Ernst

[00:00:04] - [Speaker 0]
Welcome back to another episode of the Tech Talks Daily podcast. Quick question for you all. Have you ever arrived in a city that doesn't try to impress you with postcard beauty, yet somehow feels alive with ideas, energy, and possibility? Well, that is where this conversation will begin today. Yeah.

[00:00:25] - [Speaker 0]
We're talking live in Berlin, a city that feels like a fitting backdrop for a discussion about power, ownership, and the future of the Internet. Because my guest is the cofounder of a company called Gnosis, spelled g n o s I s, and she has been building at the foundations of blockchain since the early days of Ethereum. And I wanna talk about today why blockchain feels like we're sitting at almost a fork in the road. And also, I think it's important to dig into our past a little bit and understand how finance and the Internet quietly became so centralized and in the hands of a very few number of companies. I would say three to five to be exact.

[00:01:07] - [Speaker 0]
And what would it take to build systems that work for real people, people like you and I, without forcing them to understand all the plumbing that goes on underneath or what goes on under the hood? So if you're curious about where Web three goes next and why values matter more than hype, I'm hopeful you're gonna enjoy this one. But before I get my guest on today, I wanna give a quick thank you to my friends at Denodo who are playing a big part in support in this show. Because one of the questions I hear more and more from listeners on this podcast is, why does AI succeed or why does it fail? Because let's be honest, AI is moving fast, but success is often still elusive.

[00:01:53] - [Speaker 0]
Now most projects fail not because of the AI, but because the data foundation isn't ready. This is why organizations are increasingly turning to Denodo. Denodo delivers trustworthy and AI ready data without the need to copy it everywhere. Essentially, you can optimize your lake house, accelerate Agentic AI, and build data products that finally make self-service real and achievable. And with a powerful partner ecosystem, teams get to value even faster.

[00:02:28] - [Speaker 0]
So if you're ready to understand why your AI projects fail and how to succeed with AI, simply visit denodo.com and take control of your data world. But enough from me. Let me get her onto the show right now. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:02:52] - [Speaker 1]
Absolutely. My name is Frederica Ernst. I am a cofounder of the blockchain company, Gnosis. We have built a lot of the foundational infrastructure that powers the Ethereum ecosystem and have recently moved into consumer applications that bring the values of blockchain to real people, to normies as we like to call them. And I don't I mean that with absolutely no disrespect in the form of applications that that rely on blockchain technology to power genuinely better user experiences than what people are currently currently than what people are currently used to.

[00:03:31] - [Speaker 0]
Also, it's a pleasure to have you join me today. And one of the things I love doing on this podcast is learning more about my guest's origin story. We'll talk about the state of blockchain, where we've been, where we're going to, all that cool stuff. But I'd love to take you back in time for a moment because when I was doing a little research on you, I was reading how your father handed you a copy of, I think it was theoretical physicist Simon Singh's The Code Book. That was kind of the spark that would develop this lifelong interest in cryptography.

[00:04:03] - [Speaker 0]
But let's go back in time. Tell me more about that moment and what would pave the way for what you're doing now.

[00:04:09] - [Speaker 1]
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I was a desperately uncool kid. Kind of I I was the computer nerd. I was the little girl with her Linux server.

[00:04:18] - [Speaker 1]
My dad gave me this book, the code book about cryptography, and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. So kind of like this was just after the first privacy was with PGP had come to a close, and it immediately spoke to me. And I actually I left it for a while because I actually trained as a physicist. So I was I was a I was an academic physicist for the first half of my career.

[00:04:46] - [Speaker 1]
So kind of I got a PhD in in complex quantum systems, and then I worked at worked at Columbia University in New York and Stanford in California as a as a scientist. And I love that. I always love building stuff. But somehow, I knew that the academy was too constructive in some sense. So kind of it's very it was almost like a game.

[00:05:12] - [Speaker 1]
I was good at playing the game, but I I thought kind of the game ultimately sucked. So so I got out and cofounded Gnosis with two friends, Martin and Stefan. Both of them are also German. Both of them also have a heavy tech background. Both of them are IT system engineers.

[00:05:32] - [Speaker 1]
So that's kind of the DNA that underlies Gnosis as a company. It's it's very much a company founded by three German engineers. And, yeah, that's me.

[00:05:43] - [Speaker 0]
I love it. And such a great story. And you are officially cool now, as you said. You're cofounder of Web three company, Knosis, there in Berlin, of all places, which is another incredibly cool city. And looking back, I think it was ingrained in a distrust of authority and the idea of empowering people with agency and this mission almost to create an infrastructure that gives power and autonomy back to the people rather than to huge corporations.

[00:06:11] - [Speaker 0]
Extremely mission driven there. But for anyone that's hearing about the company for the first time and the mission that you set out on, tell me a little bit more about that.

[00:06:20] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Absolutely. So so we actually started more or less together with Ethereum. Kind of Ethereum is the first smart contracting blockchain. So kind of Bitcoin obviously was the first blockchain that was out there, and Bitcoin helped you have a shared understanding of what the status of a fairly simple system is.

[00:06:44] - [Speaker 1]
And the system kind of had different addresses, and these addresses have balances. Kind of we we can think of it as as money in some sense, kind of like an Excel spreadsheet. Okay? And then the idea was that in principle, you could actually build a distributed system that wouldn't just have kind of this single variable or this kind of this this balance, it could actually do much more. It could almost be Turing complete.

[00:07:09] - [Speaker 1]
So kind of it could execute arbitrary code, and that is how the idea of Ethereum was born. And, obviously, Wittelig Buterin and came up with it and wrote the white paper, and a couple of people done it together to start building it. And we were there from the get go. So, actually, we heard about this before it launched, and we started we thought it was tremendously cool. So kind of we started playing with it and building applications for it.

[00:07:34] - [Speaker 1]
The blockchain itself was incredibly bare bones when it launched. It's still pretty bare bones. There's more infrastructure now, but kind of there was an entire stack of middleware that was that was missing. It was kind of like you had the protocol to power this new Internet, but you had none of the tooling and none of the none of the prerequisites for kind of just running with it and building applications. So we actually did a lot of that.

[00:08:02] - [Speaker 1]
So kind of we build a lot of the foundational infrastructure. So we build the largest smart wallet on Ethereum quite safe. We build the largest tax aggregator. So that's an sort of exchange that kind of allows you to swap things with with others called Cowswap. We also build a sister chain to Ethereum, Gnosis chain that's very much still around.

[00:08:23] - [Speaker 1]
It's got 300,000 validators, so it's really decentralized. Kind of it's it's kind of the little sister that kind of you go to for running applications that are too it kind of that are too involved or too expensive to run on Ethereum mainnet. And yeah. So and then kind of we branched out and started building applications in the financial sector. The reason for that was pretty simple, and maybe maybe I'll zoom out a little So kind of why build on blockchain infrastructure at all?

[00:08:55] - [Speaker 1]
Right? Kind of like that's the big question here. It's building on blockchains is is making, in some ways, making your life deliberately very difficult. Right? So if you wanted to build a simple application, going to AWS or Google Cloud and just hosting it there on a regular website and so on, that's really what you want to do.

[00:09:18] - [Speaker 1]
So if you look at what blocks can power, then that's what what kind of sets them apart. That kind of informs kind of, like, the sort of application you kind of want built on blockchains. Right? So kind of if you look at the Internet today, and I think all of us probably spend way too much time there, you can't do anything online without accruing value to the same five companies. Right?

[00:09:43] - [Speaker 1]
Kind of even if you really try to, kind of even if you kind of forsook your your your Google account and your Google Drive and your Dropbox and you deleted your Facebook and Snapchat and Twitter profiles, LinkedIn, whatnot, you you you still couldn't do it because all the websites you're you're you're navigating to, most of them are actually hosted on AWS or Google Cloud or Hetzner or kind of like other tech giants. Right? So anything you do online kind of accrues value to the same five companies. There's nothing you can do about it. And this was very much not how the Internet was meant to be.

[00:10:24] - [Speaker 1]
And it wasn't how the Internet was when I was a kid. Right? So kind of we've seen this centralization of power on the Internet. And I would argue it's made the Internet more convenient in many ways, and kind of convenience is kind of the thing that has driven this. But on the other hand, it's also made the Internet less of a great place.

[00:10:49] - [Speaker 1]
It's kind of made it less equitable. It's made it it's made it less attractive to a lot of the people. Right? And what blockchain really is here for is saying, okay. We can actually rebuild this in a truly communal fashion in a way that kind of we build on infrastructure that belongs to no one.

[00:11:10] - [Speaker 1]
And because it belongs to no one, belongs to everyone. And then we can kind of rebuild these systems, and we will no longer automatically accrue value to the tech giants who just extract from us. Kind of like the other value will flow back to the community. And that was the founding vision of blockchain, kind of power to the people. And kind of this power to the people, this is the this is what has always driven us.

[00:11:39] - [Speaker 1]
And kind of now that we've built all of this technology to kind of make the developer experience much better than it used to be, what we can actually now do is we can look at what kind of applications would benefit most from running on this credibly neutral substrate. Right? And kind of we ourselves looked at this. And we're as I explained earlier, we're engineers. Right?

[00:12:04] - [Speaker 1]
Kind of like so we're pretty sober people. And kind of we looked at kind of like the verticals of the Internet that would benefit most from from disruption through block blockchains. And kind of two things kind of came up as front runners. One was social media. And I don't think I need to explain this.

[00:12:22] - [Speaker 1]
So kind of if you if you kind of if you look at Facebook and Twitter and and kind of all the other platforms that you you use, and all of us use it. Right? Kind of like we cannot use it because it's where community forms. All of these shouldn't really belong to anyone Mhmm. Because there is a naturally emergent monopoly in any of these networks.

[00:12:48] - [Speaker 1]
You can't do it the way that kind of like you would you would handle antitrust issues otherwise. So kind of like if there's one company that's too dominant, you just say, okay, you just divvy it up. You take you take area a and you take area b, and then kind of you none of you is kind of as dominant. A social network that you kind of divide with people who are in social network a or social network b will automatically form into one big network again because you wanna be where all the other people are. And this is something that shouldn't be owned by any one company.

[00:13:24] - [Speaker 1]
And if you kind of look at how much data these companies have about you, it is so frightening. And it kind of gives them power over you in terms of targeting you for very specific with very specific messaging that will work on a person like you specifically. It's really kind of the level of granularity that these networks have about you and that kind of they know kind of, like, what will work on you. It's crazy. It's really frightening.

[00:13:56] - [Speaker 1]
It's kind of it's and we are willfully blind to it because we think of ourselves as people with agency, and we think ourselves as people who cannot be influenced this way. So I think there's some natural reservation to kind of acknowledging how susceptible we are. So that was the one thing that kind of we thought should really happen on Web three. But social media is incredibly kind of what we would call the business logic behind it is really involved. Kind of like there's layers and layers and layers, and it's very complex.

[00:14:32] - [Speaker 1]
And as I said, blockchain technology is early. So kind of we we save this up for later. The thing that is not as obvious, but probably as pervasive and as bad is the financial infrastructure. So we don't notice this so much every day because finance actually largely works for us in Europe. Right?

[00:14:55] - [Speaker 1]
Kind of like, we all have bank accounts. We can all do same day payments for free. We all have credit cards in our pockets. We sometimes, there are banking experiences where kind of it frays at the edges, and you can see that kind of like it's not like this for all people. So for instance, when you send money abroad I recently had to send money to The United States on the legacy banking system, and it cost me an inordinate amount of money to actually just send money to The States.

[00:15:24] - [Speaker 1]
And when I used when I used to live in in The US, and I I had I was in part paid by the German Academy of Sciences, and they would send me money to my German account. And the easiest and cheapest way of actually transferring that money to to California was by having my bank send a check, like a physical check to to a correspondence bank in in Florida, and that that bank would then send it on to me. It took two weeks, cost $6. So kind of not not not that bad, but two weeks. I mean, that's that's ridiculous.

[00:16:00] - [Speaker 1]
And I mean, I'm not sure whether this is with video, but I'm not that old. Right? Kind of like this is not from the seventies. This is a story from ten or fifteen years ago. Right?

[00:16:11] - [Speaker 1]
And it's not changed. It's not changed much. So someone recently told me they moved from Singapore to The US, and that's exactly what they had to do. So kind of they actually they had to close their account and send a check from Singapore to The US to kind of transfer their money. So there's clearly disruption potential there.

[00:16:28] - [Speaker 1]
We don't recognize it so much as Europeans because our banking infrastructure is actually pretty great. It's great because the people who pay for it are actually the merchants. Right? And I think most of us don't think about this enough. Every time we kind of pay somewhere with our credit card, the merchant doesn't actually get the full amount.

[00:16:50] - [Speaker 1]
The merchant gets the amount minus the credit card fee. Kind of that that fee kind of it varies from credit card to credit card. It's kept in Europe. So kind of in Europe, the problem is relatively minor. It's one of the reasons why sometimes you can't pay with a credit card, and they ask you for a debit card.

[00:17:07] - [Speaker 1]
The the problem is way bigger in other parts of the world. So for instance, across if you if you look at the global situation, credit card payments average 1.3% cost for the merchant. So kind of if you go somewhere and you you buy something for a £100, they'll only end up getting £98.7, and kind of all the rest of the money goes to the so called banking stock. In some situations, it can be even more. So kind of American Express, of it's a very popular credit card that gives you lots of points and advantages, access to airport lounges and so on, which is why people like it, charges merchants up to four and a half percent.

[00:17:49] - [Speaker 0]
Wow.

[00:17:50] - [Speaker 1]
Which is how they finance kind of the airport lounges for you. Right? And the the merchants don't really have any say in this other than saying I don't accept American Express. They can do nothing. Yeah.

[00:18:00] - [Speaker 1]
So kind of this is this is this is one of the problems with the banking stack. Cross border payments is another that I alluded to earlier. Kind of in principle on blockchain, we can do the sub second, sub cent for any amount. There's no reason why a transaction across border should take a couple of days and cost you a couple of $100. Right?

[00:18:21] - [Speaker 1]
And the third one is in is is access to to investments. So if if you look at I mean, I think in Europe, people have caught on to the fact that they probably shouldn't rely on the pension funds. So at least in Germany, I think the same is true in The UK. People have been investing into ETFs like crazy. And that's also something that that works well for them, but there are many other investment vehicles that are inaccessible to them.

[00:18:51] - [Speaker 1]
So even if you just wanted to say, okay, I want exposure to a US treasury bill, which kind of gives you eight percent or so on US dollars, this is impossible for most people to buy. And in principle, it's it should be there. It should be there at the tap of a button, but it's not. So if you look at the entire financial stack, there are a lot of inefficiencies. And a lot of them can be solved by rebuilding this on chain.

[00:19:21] - [Speaker 1]
It's not that the the it's not that the old stack was was built shoddily by design. Right? Kind of it's just a stack that's grown historically over the last forty years or so, forty, fifty, sixty years. And if you build systems on systems, you you get enormous efficiency gains if you kind of just raise if you just clear everything once and kind of rebuild the system from scratch. And now kind of the the question is, how do you get people from the old system to the new system?

[00:19:56] - [Speaker 1]
Right? Because I think what this is something that that we in the blockchain industries have not been very smart about so far, and this is kind of what we're changing right now. So if you look at if you look at how technologies are adopted, it's not it's not enough to build something that's better. And then when you're done, tell people, oh, now I I I actually have a much better framework. You can all move over now.

[00:20:23] - [Speaker 1]
You kind of you need to build systems such that they interlink with what's already there, carve out pockets that can give people a better user experience than they previously had, while not actually requiring them to kind of shift wholesale and in one go. So I can give an example of this from twenty years ago. Do you remember when Skype came out?

[00:20:47] - [Speaker 0]
Yes. I do. In fact, when this podcast first started, the first couple of years, everything was recorded on Skype way before Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

[00:20:56] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. And kind of the Skype, they kind of they launched with a very simple value proposition. It was called Skype Out, and you could call any landline phone number for the local tariff. Yeah. Right?

[00:21:09] - [Speaker 1]
And kind of like how did they do that? Kind of they routed the first 98% of the call over the Internet and then kind of for the last mile to your to to your friend's landline phone, they used kind of the copper cable that kind of we always had. So it was immediately composable with what people already had. You didn't have to go to your friend and say, look, mate, I wanna call you, but I don't wanna pay all this money. So kind of you have to install this new program.

[00:21:36] - [Speaker 1]
You you and then we can speak for free. You could just kind of install Skype on your computer and call your friend's phone, and they would never know that you actually called them from a computer. And then, obviously, kind of the more and more people installed Skype, and then kind of Skyping from Skype to Skype became more of a thing, and very few people actually ended up using it for the landline phones. But the fact that you could use it seamlessly with the system that was already there, that that that was really what Skype did incredibly smartly. And if you I mean, we're on Zoom now.

[00:22:17] - [Speaker 1]
But even if you still had a landline phone and I called you from I don't actually have a landline phone, but let's pretend I have a landline. Even if I called you from my landline phone to your landline phone, it would still all be voice over IP in the background. Right? There's no copper cable connections anymore. And all of this happened while people literally, while people were on the phone.

[00:22:38] - [Speaker 1]
Right? Kind of so the entire back end of kind of this communication system was switched out while people were literally talking to each other. And I think exactly the same is going to happen in the financial industry. So kind of other other rails that kind of banks and other financial providers currently use, they will be switched out for blockchain rails, and it will all happen while people are sending money and receiving money and and so on. And the one thing that I am I so this I am 100% certain about.

[00:23:11] - [Speaker 1]
But the one thing that I feel people don't appreciate enough, and I think we have ourselves to blame for that to a certain extent, blockchain is blockchain in the mainstream is often not seen as a force for good. Right? Kind of it's seen as something that's speculative. It's seen as something that, you know, are these pump and dump schemes and, you know, the CD underbelly and so on. But at its heart, it's actually a very equalizing technology, and it it is something that kind of can give power back to the people, back to the regular users.

[00:23:49] - [Speaker 1]
It can put you and me and everyone else back in charge of their financial agency that's kind of currently not theirs because they're renting their account from a neobank or a regular bank because kind of they're renting their payments just like they're renting their their audience on Twitter and and Facebook and so on. And I think this is something that we as an ecosystem need to make absolutely sure happens the right way in a way that that actually sees power sees power go to the people, not from the people.

[00:24:24] - [Speaker 0]
Wow. Just so much to unpack there, and I completely agree with you. And I suspect people will be nodding their head in agreement around the world that are listening to this. And I always think that anything that is sold for your convenience is usually something underhand happening or as the magician so you used to say, if the magician's showing his left hand, what is he doing in the right hand? And it almost feels like we're given an illusion of choice.

[00:24:50] - [Speaker 0]
And if you look at how most of us communicate with one another, there's WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram owned by one company, email, mostly Gmail. So there's that's just two tech companies that are owning how we entirely communicate. So I love this idea of shared ownership and communities, not corporations holding value that they help create and how it can be applied to money and finance. So tell me more about that and that accessibility of Visa payments that we all take for granted with the ownership of blockchain tech and almost invisible and working in the background. Tell me more about that and how that works.

[00:25:28] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Absolutely. So kind of we build the ownership into the foundations of the infrastructure. It's not a feature. It's kind of baked into it.

[00:25:36] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. So that kind of leads to the core of a safer, more transparent, more equitable ecosystem driven by the idea of ownership for the many, not just the few. And that's kind of how we set up our systems. It's based on shared ownership. Anyone can become an owner.

[00:25:56] - [Speaker 1]
We don't call our customers users because kind of we we we call them owners because they can be owners. They should be owners. By becoming an early owner, we give you rewards in our own token so that kind of you you can run this thing alongside us. It's a community play. And that sets us apart from banks who are also adopting blockchain.

[00:26:23] - [Speaker 1]
Right? Kind of they're adopting blockchain rails because they are more efficient and more resilient than what they currently have. But banks adopting blockchain isn't innovation. It's a power play. So when banks integrate blockchain technology, they're basically cherry picking the technical capabilities, but they're throwing away the overall intention.

[00:26:46] - [Speaker 1]
Okay? So the the blockchain is designed to decentralize power and reduce the control that a few big players hold over regular humans. And that's that's something that we heed when we build applications for actual people. For the longest time, using blockchain applications was difficult to say the least. I don't know whether you have a blockchain wallet, but kind of until recently, and many of them still do, it kind of starts onboarding you by saying, look, the these are your 24 words, your seed phrase.

[00:27:24] - [Speaker 1]
Write it down somewhere very securely. If you lose it, everything is gone. But if anyone else sees it, everything is gone too. And that's objectively a terrible user experience. Right?

[00:27:35] - [Speaker 1]
Kind of like, this is not something that kind of that barely works for us, that shouldn't work for the next millions of people to kind of onboard into this technology. But we've actually built the technological capabilities to abstract all of this away from people. Just like just like you have probably no offense, but you probably have no idea how TCPIP works, but you use the Internet every day. Right? Kind of and you don't have to understand how TCP IP works, how kind of, like, packages send in the background of your browser, kind of, like, how your browser kind of rearranges them, kind of where they are encrypted and how and and so on, that that shouldn't matter for your usage of the product.

[00:28:19] - [Speaker 1]
And it's the same with blockchain technology. Kind of we aspire to build applications that have this level of trust business that we can't control where you are in control, but where you don't actually have to understand how it works under the hood. It just magically happens. And that I mean, there's there's a lot of crazy cryptography that goes into it. There's there's a quote by a famous sci fi author.

[00:28:49] - [Speaker 1]
I now for forget which one, but every sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic, and it's very much like that. So kind of we we can abstract your seed phrase away from you so that that kind of it's held by a passkey that you can unlock with your thumb or your your face scan. And you don't actually have to remember kind of your seed phrase or your private key or or anything. And if you switch it out, we can replace it or you can replace it yourself through social recovery or through institutional recovery. And it all it all happens without compromising on the actual values that underlie that underlie the tech so that we don't actually have to resort to the incumbents just because you're there for the convenience.

[00:29:44] - [Speaker 1]
It's just as convenient to use as what you already have. Just it's truly yours.

[00:29:51] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. And listening to you there, it reminded me there's a comedian I saw once, Dara O'Brien, here in The UK, and he he was talking about electricity and how we're the first generation really to have no understanding of how everything works. And if an alien was to land in our back garden and say, wow, this is great. That TV, how how does this TV and the computer, how does it all work? Where do you get power?

[00:30:15] - [Speaker 0]
And we would just point to a socket in the wall without without any understanding of electricity, where it comes from, how it works. And as you said, with your analogy there, the technology almost becomes invisible. But I think at its foundation, Web three is essentially a series of neutral technologies that could be steered in vastly different directions. For example, web three is a base technology, an infrastructure that could be used to create a utopia for the many, not just a few, as you said a few moments ago, but also in the wrong hands, it could be used to build an extremely effective surveillance state. If we zoom out again for a moment, almost feels like we're a fork in the road, and with the global politics being just insane at the moment, it could quite easily go down a much darker path.

[00:31:04] - [Speaker 0]
But where do you see us at the moment in this this fork?

[00:31:08] - [Speaker 1]
It could very well go down a much darker path, a 100%. And we already see some states resorting to blockchain technology for these users. Kind of like, for instance, social scores in China and other countries, kind of like they now use elements of blockchain. That's terrifying. Yeah.

[00:31:31] - [Speaker 1]
Kind of this is not something that that and and that I or most other people in this space endorse. But as you say, it's a base technology. Right? Kind of like it's it's kind of like in in inventing the knife. You can use it for cooking and you can use it for making making clothes and defending yourself.

[00:31:55] - [Speaker 1]
You can also use it for in in very dangerous ways of attack. Right? We have to make sure that we are 100% clear on the value. So I think kind of the tech, it's totally fine if it recedes into the background, into the periphery, and you don't think about it on a daily basis. The thing that we should think about on a daily basis is what are the values we stand for?

[00:32:24] - [Speaker 1]
So with respect to free speech, with respect to ownership versus extraction by by by big companies, with respect to many other rights as well. Right? And this is something I mean, privacy. Just look at I mean, I I know kind of we we in the EU had this chat control vote recently. I know that you guys have something similar kind of yeah.

[00:32:50] - [Speaker 1]
So it's I do believe that kind of we are very much at a fork in the road. And I think we as the public have to make sure we stand up for the right values, And we don't let ourselves be coward into into agreeing to something that we think may not be right. And often, it's kind of packaged packaged such that it's difficult to say no to. Right? Because no one wants to be seen as standing com coming out for kiddie porn or kind of terrorism financing or whatever else kind of the the whatever else kind of is usually put front and center when it when it comes to surveillance tech.

[00:33:37] - [Speaker 1]
Right? No one wants to be seen to kind of stand up against this, but I am 100% adamant kind of we need privacy. We need free speech. We need individual agency. And that's a cultural war.

[00:33:51] - [Speaker 1]
It's not a technology war. Because if you look at if you look at different technologies, yes, you can do a lot of this very efficiently using blockchain tech. You don't necessarily need blockchain tech, and blockchain tech on its own is not enough. I think this is a this is something that's kind of currently going on in a fairly covert fashion, And I think we kind of have to bring it to the surface. We have to make it overt.

[00:34:19] - [Speaker 1]
We kind of have to we have to say, I stand for privacy. I stand for free speech and mean it. Right? Even if if people say things that you personally may find abhorrent, kind of, I still believe that they should be able to say them. And, yeah, this is kind of I kind of as and I think in some way kind of like this.

[00:34:37] - [Speaker 1]
As a technology as a technologist, maybe this kind of hits deeper for me. But the technology itself, in the end, doesn't matter. It's kind of the values that it that it enables and that it drives home and that kind of we as populace kind of need to come to consensus over.

[00:34:57] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. And I think traditionally, yes, banks have held all the power. They've held all the cards. But thanks to technologies like blockchain, this secure shared digital ledger, money can now move efficiently and directly between people without needing that central authority to oversee it. That will scare some people.

[00:35:16] - [Speaker 0]
It will excite others. But I think the focus on value creation that you've got here rather than value extraction is so incredible to hear. So what kind of shifts are you seeing, and what excites you about the future? Because we're on the cusp of entering 2026. Blockchain and crypto, the space has been up and down this year as it has been for the last five, six years or much longer, many will argue as well.

[00:35:43] - [Speaker 0]
But what excites you about the future? And, also, are there any teasers or anything for your community that might be tuning in hoping for an update on some of your work or anything. What can we expect next year, do you think?

[00:35:56] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. So next year, I am all here for apps that abstract all the blockchain stuff into the background for you, where you don't have to understand that you are building on really shiny rails. I like taking I like talking about the rails, but that's just me. You don't you shouldn't have to worry about the rails. Kind of apps that enable shared ownership like we haven't seen it on the Internet in the past twenty five years.

[00:36:26] - [Speaker 1]
This is what I look forward to. And if if you're if you're interested in what we're building, we're building a new app called Gnosis app. It'll launch soon. And it's the idea that it's it's kind of it's got feature parity with neo banks. So kind of you have an iBAN, you have, like, you have a debit card.

[00:36:47] - [Speaker 1]
You can do all your transactions from there. You can invest into things and so on. But it's built completely different. It's built such that you can become a co owner of the stack. It's built such that it doesn't extract from you.

[00:37:00] - [Speaker 1]
All the profits flow back to the users. Almost like in the nineteenth century in Germany, kind of we saw the rise of communal banking. And it's like that, but in an extremely tech forward way that gives all the cards back to you.

[00:37:15] - [Speaker 0]
And I think that is a powerful moment to end on. And I would implore everybody listening to, just take a moment, I mean, listen to this podcast and think about how you communicate online. Maybe it is owned by two people, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Gmail, just two companies involved there. And as you said, so many different apps and websites and everything that we use on a daily basis, have a look at that front page of your smartphone. I suspect that nearly everybody listening have got a handful of the same apps on that that home screen, but most of them are extracting value from you.

[00:37:51] - [Speaker 0]
So the fact that you're building digital tools and systems needed to make financial services more accessible, fair, and decentralized, kudos to you for doing that. But I would urge everyone listening to maybe think about your own actions and some of the options that you might have next year. And for everybody listening that wants to check out everything that you're doing, the work you're doing, join your community, have conversations with people that with a similar mindset that are starting to question their allegiance to big tech or their reliance on big tech, where should they go?

[00:38:24] - [Speaker 1]
Come to our website, gnosis.io. That's dnosis.io. And you can also find us on all the big social media that I just dunked on. Under at Gnosis, you'll find us.

[00:38:37] - [Speaker 0]
Awesome. Well, I'll have links to absolutely everything there. And I do urge everyone to join the community, have some conversations, because they really just feel like there's some kind of paradigm shift at the moment and a shift in the building of new ecosystems. So please check that out and let me know your thoughts too. But more than anything, just thank you for starting this conversation today.

[00:38:58] - [Speaker 0]
A real breath of fresh air. Thank you.

[00:39:00] - [Speaker 1]
Thank you for having me.

[00:39:02] - [Speaker 0]
Wow. I I generally hope that that conversation today gave you a pause in the best possible way from invisible infrastructure and shared ownership to the quiet power shifts happening beneath our everyday apps. And my guest, I think, offered a calm and much needed grounded take on where blockchain can still go and still go right if we choose to build it that way. So I'll include links to their website, their community, and so you can explore everything we discussed today and join the conversation yourself. And as always, this episode was not about convincing anyone.

[00:39:40] - [Speaker 0]
I don't think that's almost impossible, Especially in the world of politics, you can't convince anybody left or right or to think a certain way. But what we can do is sit down together and talk openly about creating a space that allows us all to think differently about the systems that we rely on every single day. So over to you. Has this sparked a few questions or challenged an assumption in you or your own life? Please let me know.

[00:40:07] - [Speaker 0]
Pop over to techtalksnetwork.com. You'll find nearly 4,000 interviews over there, and you can also record me a quick audio message. But more than anything, thank you for listening, and I will speak with you all again very soon. Bye for now.