Episode link:
https://www.citizencosmos.space/levana

Episode name:
Jonathan Caras, NFT's, money & stablecoins.

In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Jonathan Caras, dragon rider, proffessional magician and computer science prodigy. In this episode they cover a range of topics, including dragons on Mars, the Hostory of the Sheckle and the collapse of empires. Jonothan has some insights into stablecoins and why it is essential we wrest control of currency away from government. They also explore what could be the catalyst for broader user adoption and give some great reasons to buy NFT's.

Citizen Cosmos
Good space-time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Jonathan Caras, currently working on Levana, collateralized trading platform. We discuss inflation, stablecoins, NFT’s in gaming, collapse of empires and the history of the Shekel. We also talk about dragons on Mars, the life cycle of living organisms and trust in money.

Jonathan
I’ve worked for a company that built a fashion app called Screenshop for the Kardashians. It’s verifiable, you can store it in your head, it’s not sizeable by the government, it allows for arbitrage of electricity, it crosses borders. Do thought of it, like a year before me.

Citizen Cosmos
He was the better magician. He made it all disappear.

Jonathan
The hyperinflation is like a giant theft. It’s where government essentially just steals money from the people. When I look out my window, I see the remains of multiple fallen empires that lasted much longer and had much more influence than the United States. When you can control how labour happens and what the compensation of labour is, that is mass slavery.

Citizen Cosmos
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Citizen Cosmos
Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. I have with me today, Jonathan Caras, head of communications at Levana. Jonathan. Hi. Welcome.

Jonathan
Hi. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Citizen Cosmos
Yes, very glad. We met, if I'm not mistaken, I hope my memory hasn't died completely yet in this bear market. But we met in Atom Lisboa and yeah, it was fascinating. How was it for you, by the way, Atom Lisboa?

Jonathan
It was great. First of all, I think Portugal is my favourite destination. It’s just the weather, the people, just everything about it, the culture, and then the fact that it's such a crypto hub. So, I'll take any excuse to go to Lisboa and to get to talk to people from the Cosmos community is also particularly valuable because I think Cosmos in general is confusing to many people in crypto.

Jonathan
They don't get it. The idea of self-sovereign chains that all kind of share as part of a larger mesh is just such an obscure concept that, you know, if you come from the world of Solana or like I went to the Salona event, you come from any of these worlds, it's you're just like, I don't get it. Are you an app?

Jonathan
Are you a layer one? Are you like, what is how does all of this work and what am I supposed to do? And like, where's my USDC and what is Axelar? And you know, I have to deposit into the Osmosis AMM. Like there's so many paradigms that we, you take advantage of or that that are just a given when you come from the world of Ethereum defi that had been mimicked in every other ecosystem.

Jonathan
And what I love about Cosmos is that we're constantly trying to say, could it be done differently, and could it be done better?

Citizen Cosmos
I finally, finally understood why that design happened. It was just when you go to conferences and people ask you what you are just to say, I'm an L1. I’m Cosmos, you know, damn it, you don’t need to explain it finally. No, joking. That would be a good reason to do it right. I was actually at Break Point, not at the event itself, we did record with a few guys, and I did meet a few guys outside.

Citizen Cosmos
I didn't go in, but I must say we decentralization kind of maximalists and we support not just the Cosmos, Ethereum too, and projects from other ecosystems as well. We talk to and know we're out there, but I'm yeah, it's feels different. It's not like the people was different atmosphere different. I don't know. The whole thing feels very different, but happy to hear about Portugal.

Citizen Cosmos
Of course, living in partially in Portugal. So, I'm happy and glad you should come visit Madeira. It's a beautiful place.

Jonathan
I will. I will. I'll take you up on that. You have a comfortable couch I can crash on.

Citizen Cosmos
Yes. Well, a couch. Yes and no. I have a floor. A lot of space. I’m one of this, minimalist people. So, but we have a lot of space.

Jonathan
I'll bring a sleeping bag.

Citizen Cosmos
I have a airbed. So I can just. Jonathan, would you care to please to talk a little bit about yourself? What do you do? Of course, the typical question, how did you get pilled by blockchain? And a little bit about Levana as well maybe.

Jonathan
Oh gosh. Okay, let's do it. I was born, you know, David Copperfield. I'm about to turn 40 and which is a big number. It feels a lot older than I feel, but I've been building software since I was nine years old. I was writing basic on a 286, probably 386. With like Q Basic and TI-82 calculator. I knew I was going to be a game developer since I was probably ten and, you know, my mom sent me to like summer camps and stuff for web design and things like that in the early nineties.

Jonathan
And then I moved to Israel after high school. I went to Jewish seminary to learn to be a rabbi. I didn't become a rabbi. I was, you know, passionate about technology. And I started my first company in I went to, I formally trained as a computer engineer. I'm also you know, I was a professional magician in high school, and I did a lot of theater, you know, for like performance arts.

Jonathan
And I built a software house focused on mobile software development. In 2008, I had early access to the iPhone SDK. In 2007 from relationships that I had with Apple, and I built out a team. We were about a dozen engineers and we would do soup to nuts App development before app development was cool and we did a lot of like P2P and like early childhood education apps, about 60 apps in total from 2008 to 2012.

Jonathan
2012, I patented a video streaming protocol which had optimized nat traversal for 3G networks. I created a video streaming company called Glide Video Messaging. We took off in about 2014. We got about 26 million subscribers. I sold my portion of it in 2015. I did a Kickstarter for a camera. A wearable camera on your wrist. Did pretty well with that.

Jonathan
And then I actually I worked for a company that built a fashion app called Screenshop for the Kardashians. So, I worked with Kim and we designed a product that got a couple million users. It used AI to turn your Instagram feed into a shopping cart, and then we were acquired in 2018 by Snapchat and during that time period and Kim was actually a pleasure to work with.

Jonathan
I met Kanye once. He didn't say anything, but you know, he seems like a nice guy. So, I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2011. I helped one of my college mates set up a GPU mining rig, like at the end, the very end of GPU mining and I threw away like a Coinbase of Bitcoin. So, like I don't know whether it was 25 or whether it was 50 at that.

Jonathan
I mean, it was either one or two, but it was just it was valueless at the time, at least I thought it was. And then I never read the white paper. I just was interested in the application really around BitTorrent because I was really excited for reputation management and I thought that Bitcoin kind of combined with BitTorrent in order to create reputation management that was decentralized through how many tokens that you had so that you would know how to prioritize between seeders and leachers.

Jonathan
And then I was reintroduced to the White Paper in 2016. And, you know, my father's a libertarian and I was actually researching online like to buy gold, you know, and that's how I stumbled upon the Bitcoin white paper. And then I just fell down the rabbit hole and I was like, I was like, this is so much better than gold, from all of the attributes.

Jonathan
Like, instantly, you know, it's verifiable. You can store it in your head. It's non seasable by the government, it allows for arbitrage of electricity. It crosses borders, it can be used by anybody with a cell phone. It just did everything that I wanted gold to do but better. And so I just fell in love with it. And I actually sent half a Bitcoin to one of the investors in my streaming video company and said, like, you should just check this out.

Jonathan
It was, I think Bitcoin was trading at around $900 at the time, and we just kind of fell down the rabbit hole together and we he ended up creating a fund he put together like just small fund like 50 K.Then I just kept getting pinged about research, about different ICOs that were happening. And so I started falling down the rabbit hole.

Jonathan
That made me very anti Ethereum because I was like, none of these projects make any sense. None of them have any economic viability. I don't need hamster coin in order to buy your hamster or lemonade coin buy your lemonade or dentist coin or vegan coin or any of these. Like what the heck are people doing here? Like, that's not how money works.

Jonathan
And so, I spent a lot of time from the first bull run as a Bitcoin maximalist. And so, then we had a fund together and I'd say I was like head of research of this fund Lionchain Capital, and I fell in love with MakerDAO because I recognized that we needed stablecoins and we needed decentralized stablecoins. Then when MakerDAO switched the MakerDAO Foundation and then when they came out with Multi-Collateral Dai, I was just kind of like done with the project, like whatever.

Jonathan
And I actually went out to breakfast with Eyal Hertzog from Bancor, like before he launched Bancor and he explained to me how the AMM worked and like how it solved the liquidity problem and simplified market making. I was like, this is amazing. Why do you need your own token? What are you doing with your own token for this?

Jonathan
Just launch the product. And so then, you know, I saw like when he was forced to buy Uniswap, you know, with Hayden, and then that kind of opened up my eyes to what could be done with viable economic principles through smart contract platforms. And then I fell in love with the Ethereum. So, I realized it wasn't really a Ethereum that I hated.

Jonathan
It was really just all of that whole ICO bubble. Then I met Vitalik and the Starkware team then elements Ellie Bets’ son, who created Zcash and the father of zero knowledge proofs at the Scaling Bitcoin Conference in Tel Aviv University in 2018, I think. And then I ended up just falling in love with zero knowledge proofs. And all the while I was, you know, anytime that a new stablecoin came out, I tried to like, get in on that project.

Jonathan
So, like Ampleforth and Olympus, ESD, you know, all these things, but you know, none of them worked, I was really into Haven also. I don't know if you know Haven, it was merge mined with Monero and it was a two-coin system where there was a stablecoin and a speculative coin and it used a senioric based minting and burning. So, I saw that, and I thought like, Wow, wouldn't this be awesome if you could build smart contracts on top of this?

Jonathan
Because who's got time to merge mine Monero? And so, I thought like, okay, the best way to do it would be to take Haven, just rebuild it on Cosmos and then be able to build apps on top of it. And, you know, and then that's what made me fall down the rabbit hole of Terra, because that was basically the same idea.

Jonathan
So, I thought I was the first one that thought of it. But no Do thought of it like a year before me.

Citizen Cosmos
He was the better magician. He made it all disappear. I’m joking, go on please. Sorry.

Jonathan
So sure. And so, I worked for Starkware for about two years. I led business development there. We had two major projects that we brought on for StarkEx, which was the single sequencer, single operator, zero knowledge proof system. So, they've matured now to Starknet, which is much more decentralized and that was ImmutableX, which produced NFTs on Layer 2 for Gods Unchained, and then now is a platform with ImmutableX and then dydx.

Jonathan
So with both of these projects, I really got to see like I hung out with the head engineer at Immutable. I was big into NFTs at the time, you know, I remember like when the first Punks were minted and then when that 721 was standardized, I minted. I did a whole masterclass at Starkware like walking them through how NFTs work and going through the mint process.

Jonathan
I flew out to Berlin to meet some of the teams that were making like I met the Rarible team, and I flew to New York to meet Devin at Opensea. So, it was like really exciting to kind of see this concept of digital assets and the lifestyle and brand space really come to life. And then I did a lot of technical sales for Immutable to explain how zero knowledge proofs work.

Jonathan
I got to work with a bunch of gaming companies and that was like amazing. And then once the guy that sat next to me in the office at Starware was the guy that wrote, rewrote the contracts from Solidity to Cairo for dydx. And so I got to walk through how dydx worked And then I fell in love with perpetual swaps.

Jonathan
So then there was a team that was being formed and incubated, which later became Mars through Delphi labs, which they had created. And I, I worked with Delphi through my time at Starkware. I'd gotten to know the team pretty well. I had met Tom. I forget what country I met him in. Maybe he was in New York, maybe he's in Florida, maybe it was in Europe.

Jonathan
But I met Tom, and when we got to know each other, I joined the Lao, which was a DAO based investment firm, and then Flamingo, which became the largest investors in the crypto space and NFTs and then Delphi was putting together this like all-star team of suites of products on Terra, which I was like totally down the rabbit hole for Terra.

Jonathan
And so, I got an opportunity to kind of jump ship at Starkware and to join one of these teams. And so that ended up becoming Levana. And Lavanya is perpetual swaps. Today, it is the version two of Levana, which survived the Terra crash. It's called a well-funded perpetual swap, which means that it is fully collateralized, so it can't go insolvent even with strong market movements.

Jonathan
And if you're not familiar with insolvency like the reason that we're sitting at a $16,000 Bitcoin is basically because of insolvency, because of all this, like cooking the books of like, that I use debt that I have from another platform in order to collateralize a loan that I get from another platform and then people can't repay back their loans.

Jonathan
So, everything's under collateralized and then everything crashes and then we're in the situation that we're in with all this downward pressure. So, the idea of having an a fully collateralized leveraged platform is incredibly pertinent to the space today. I should also mention that, you know, I got to know Do. Do is a hurricane. I have the utmost respect for him.

Jonathan
I do not believe that he is a scammer. I think that he's brilliant. And I was invited to work with him on revamping UST from being fully algorithmic to being semi backed, under collateralized. And so that project was called LFG. So I worked with, you know, I was on there on the advisory board with about seven, six other people, five other people and Do.

Jonathan
And then that was our goal was to essentially to turn UST like into a form of, of like a MakerDAO or really like a FRAX, not a MakerDAO. And I also, you know, I got to work with Sam, and Sam is also brilliant from, from FRAX and I know the Orai team, and you know, the fee and whatever. There's the whole rabbit hole of, of struggle, of stablecoin like, but if you don't build like if we just pause for a second, if you don't have a real decentralized stablecoin then you just reinvented the like what did we really do in terms of censorship, resistance?

Jonathan
Like that's a whole other conversation and you know, we can have that or not have that. Then Terra crashed. But before Terra crashed, I'm a storyteller and like a big sci fi geek and very passionate about NFTs. And I wrote a story for Levana, which was about dragons on Mars, and that ended up taking up a life of its own.

Jonathan
And we did the Levana, the largest NFT mint. We built like eight different mini games, and we had a huge community and recently just because of, you know, I told you I had like this week was rough. I spent I hadn't slept in like three days straight and we basically were put in the situation where Levana doesn't have funding to support building gamefi while at the same time building perps and perps is a bear market product and can potentially keep the organization afloat.

Jonathan
And so, the tough call was made to wind down or to, you know, to stop effort on the gamefi, which really broke my heart. You know the that in the story of Levana, the main character's name is Zehava which is my daughter's name. And if you ever come to Jerusalem, you can come see my house.

Jonathan
You'll see how it's just decked out in purple dragons at this point. You know, from the just the influence like this whole gamefi approach and kind of like combining NFTs and Defi has been really like a life's work and something I've been very passionate about, but it's something that's going to just have to take the back burner, you know, as part of like bear market blues.

Jonathan
But I'm optimistic that there will be greener pastures moving forward. But you're kind of catching me at somewhat of an emotional point and kind of like a hard pivot as to what we're doing. But we've given over the gaming assets to the community, and I'm hopeful that the community will be able to accomplish what I wasn't able to accomplish or what the team wasn't able to accomplish.

Jonathan
So that's kind of my background and Levana’s background and what we're doing. So happy to unpack that and to talk about whatever it is that you'd like to talk about.

Citizen Cosmos
What I love the most is that you beat my record. I took me three years to read the Bitcoin whitepaper since I started using it since that first 2011, it was exactly as well. I was leaving Israel to Russia, and then I was in Ben Gurion Airport and I had a call from a friend who told me about it.

Citizen Cosmos
And then we did get into mining, but I did not bother to read the white paper until 2013. But and I felt I had the record. But to do it in 2016. Well done. Yeah. You mentioned a few things out of curiosity, considering I'll be honest with you, I love listening to people's stories, especially in blockchain and seeing, Oh, I was there too.

Citizen Cosmos
We probably met before, we probably met before there and there, and there. Out of curiosity, you said you had a fund, and you were looking at Ethereum. What was your worst buy?

Jonathan
My worst buy. Oh, well, I lost the most money on Luna.

Citizen Cosmos
Oh, no, no, no. Worse buy, worse buy, like, something really terrible. Like something. Oh, my God. I don't to talk about that, like I didn't touch that.

Jonathan
That. Oh, okay. XRP.

Citizen Cosmos
XRP.

Jonathan
Yeah, XRP.

Citizen Cosmos
Not that bad. I've done worse than that. Come on.

Jonathan
Like, you know, Look, I bought XRP with strong conviction.

Citizen Cosmos
Okay? That's better. That's better, I like that. Yeah. We did lose a lot of money on UST but it's funny, I've got several recordings this week and that the conversation of UST keeps on coming up more in the bear market. And I keep on saying that actually I think the Do Kwon unknowingly did everyone a favour and people are likr,.

Citizen Cosmos
What do you mean? I was like, well, for example, we had I don't know why, but so happened we had all of the projects, money a lot more than five or six years worth of money in UST. And having all that gone two or three months before the bull market is over or before the bear market really starts, did get us kick alive three months before.

Citizen Cosmos
So we were working already and you know, we're already been working half a year now since it happened. So. So it's all good.

Jonathan
There's, you know, sometimes you just have to… there's a phrase in Hebrew, Gam Zu L’Tova, like.

Citizen Cosmos
It’s also good.

Jonathan
Yeah. You know, everything has a good side to it.

Citizen Cosmos
Yeah, for sure. There's actually a lot of things I want to talk to you about, but I guess I'm going to try and pick at more the defi kind of and then gaming kind of style. First question first, you said you were interested in stablecoins and you were involved in several in one way or another. You know, you've spoke to several developers, a lot of developers out there, but by the sounds of it and a lot of founders, first question, why are we pegging stablecoins to fiat money and is it something we should be doing?

Citizen Cosmos
And what is the future going to look like for stablecoins? Are we still going to be paying them to USD and Euro or we should change that in your opinion? And if he yes, to when?

Jonathan
It is a good question. I think that there is potential for a Bitcoin standard. I think that what we would see is a hyperinflation like. It's actually interesting and I see this as a first-hand experience that the first Israelis that I ever met, which was in Baltimore, you know, where I was raised, had left Israel because of the collapse of the economy in the eighties around the first and maybe was the end of it.

Jonathan
But for those that don't know, the Shekel is called the new Shekel. And then actually the economy. There was hyperinflation twice in Israel. They launched the country with the Lira that hyper inflated. Then they had the Shekel that hyper inflated, then today there's the new Shekel. So the first the narrative that I had about hyperinflation, like actually meeting somebody that went through hyperinflation was, you know, talking to Israelis in Baltimore that left the country because essentially you wake up one day and all the money in your bank account is worth nothing.

Jonathan
The hyperinflation is like it's a giant theft. It's where the government essentially just steals money from the people. And then when I moved to Israel and they had the new Shekel was rather young, nothing large was priced in the new Shekel because there wasn't faith in it. So if you were to rent an apartment, you rent an apartment.

Jonathan
It was priced in dollars. If you were to buy a car, it was priced in dollars. If you were to like a long hotel stay, anything that was like a significant amount of cash, it was always priced in dollars. And then as the economy improved in kind of like the high-tech scene in Israel really took off and you had you know, you had economic stability, you had waves of peace and prosperity.

Jonathan
So then we saw a mind shift of the population that it became less reliant on pricing things in dollars and more reliant on pricing things in shekels. Now, that was a very interesting psychological, economic, eciopsychological. I'm not sure if that's a term change to to watch and to actually see it as a not going from a 19-year-old to a 40-year-old to watch that change happen.

Jonathan
So that's kind of what I see is the path of a Bitcoin standard and a hyper Bitcoin ization. I mean, it could be that it's Bitcoin, it could be that it's something else. But I do see that there's a path where we go from defining assets in what is felt like just economically as secure because of volatility index and because of reflexive nature, because of Lindy effect, because of multiple mass psychosis, psychological aspects that over time as the volatility of another storage of value, the volatility of a storage of value as it drops down, so then it becomes easier to use as a means of exchange in unit of account.

Jonathan
And I think that that's the transition that will have to happen. And again, we can get into proof of stake, we can get into proof of work, we can talk about the deflationary aspect of Ethereum and we can talk about minor extracted value of Ethereum or the Ofac compliance and what that means. And America having jurisdiction over validation and Coinbase’s, you know, headquarters in San Francisco over there and all of that impact and stuff.

Jonathan
I don't have a crystal ball as to what it looks like, but I do know that every Empire Falls, Rome wasn't built in a day, Rome didn't fall in a day. The Ottomans, they fell. I literally when I look out my window, I see the remains of multiple fallen empires that lasted much longer and had much more influence than the United States.

Jonathan
And so I know that if it's not during our lifetime, maybe not during our children's lifetime, maybe it's during our grandchildren's lifetime, but at some point America will fall. And I'm not wishing that on anybody because I think it's going to cause lots of pain. I think it's just the nature, you know, a nation, it's an organic living thing.

Jonathan
And no organic living thing lasts forever. And, you know, everything is born, grows, matures, becomes fat and lazy and dies. And so at some point we're going to see the collapse of America or and it probably will be like Texas secedes, you know, California secedes. And then, you know, and then other states, you know, I don't know what the collapse of America looks like, but I think that it will be largely driven by economic collapse.

Jonathan
And nobody would have believed this four years ago. But when you see that over the course of COVID, just first of all, the lack of let's call it faith in our supervisors and faith and trust of the what they tell us, and then the willy nilly printing of 40% of the volume of U.S. dollars, and then having that on the back of the of 2008’s, the economic collapse.

Jonathan
You know, we're seeing the cracks in the walls already. And I believe that there will be an opportunity and it's probably not going to come from China and it's for sure not coming from Europe. So there's an opportunity for there to be a new sovereign global currency. And then I think we'll have that same shift that I firsthand experienced in Israel of things going price from the dollar to the Shekel.

Jonathan
We'll see that on a global scale as things will be preferred to be priced in a new asset. And it's something that just naturally happens. But until then, we need stablecoins.

Citizen Cosmos
We can create Stablecoins today by not pegging them to. I mean, it's not very hard to I mean, we experimented with the first and created stablecoin, which was called the Gold Backed Golos, and it was backed by a token, but the stability was to one milligram of gold. So like, I mean, we don't have to wait till America falls down, Right.

Jonathan
Okay. But now you're just making it hard to have it as a unit of account. So do I really want to convert? Like, you're right, we could make it to the Peso, we could make it to whatever. But it's like most things in the world are priced in dollars. And so, if you're going to make a synthetic, you know, stable currency, make it stable to the thing that most things are priced in.

Citizen Cosmos
What would you say helps the general public? And I say it with a lot of respect right now, I don't mean it in a bad way. It is just what people call mass adoption. In my opinion. Mass adoption happened a long time ago with NFTs. But what helps everybody to start trusting money? You mentioned several times that trust is a very big thing for money.

Citizen Cosmos
Is that the, you know, the trade, the fact that a lot of things are being traded or services being sold or are there no great developers, great founders, great supervisors, what's in your opinion, helping people to trust money more?

Jonathan
Well, you asked one question and then you followed up with a different question.

Citizen Cosmos
I'm Israeli as well, so come on.

Jonathan
Exactly. So, you first asked about like what causes mass adoption and then you asked what causes trust of money? So, I can address those as two different questions. So, what causes mass adoption is drastic increase to UX to user experience with an emphasis on onboarding and then that and that's a prerequisite. And then the use case of mass adoption is through lifestyle brands and entertainment because most people don't feel a pain when it comes to their financial ecosystem.

Jonathan
We're very happy with Apple Pay. If you're not using Apple Pay at this point, you're a chump. It's amazing. And you know, credit cards are already digital currency, and you don't even have to swipe anymore. You just kind of like, you know, I like just hold my phone up and it just works. And so, we've got to have a wallet that just comes in our phone automatically and we don't even need to set it up.

Jonathan
We don't need to download an app. It's just there. And then there has to be mass adoption through the existing media outlets that we already use. That could be your annual subscription of Netflix is an NFT. I don't know. Like the I don't know how to say this Gucci, Gucci, Gucci, Jovana, Gucci. Your I don't know your Versace handbag comes with an NFT certificate like the Beanie Baby that you get.

Jonathan
We're already seeing the floodgates open in terms of use cases and understanding around Nfts. There's just this nasty association with like there's the whole woke culture apparently took an anti NFT approach. But I think in the next cycle we'll be smart enough to go against that. And you have to usually to battle woke, you have to be more woke than them.

Jonathan
You know it's like a it's a pissing contest almost. So we've got to be super eco friendly, super inclusive, you know, yada, yada, all that great stuff. And then NFTs, is a lifestyle product and then NFT as club membership because really what an NFT like the most successful case of NFT, like, like Bored Apes and Punks and stuff, it's a club membership.

Jonathan
And you know, we see that like Levana, that's very much a club membership, the Rekt Gang, it's club membership. You know, all this, Joe, is, you know, is showing that people want to be part of a club and they want to experience camaraderie. And it's also like for males in your adult life, it's very hard to make friends, you know, like you need a sports team that you're surrounded that like you both support.

Jonathan
And so NFTs is, I'm not into sports, but I feel a lot of like similarities when I own an NFT that somebody else owns and it makes me. It at least I suspect it's a similar feeling as if it's like the same sports team. If we liked same sports team and we could talk about that and like root for the same sports team or at least dunk on the same sports team that we don't like.

Jonathan
So, number one is we've got improved UX, especially around onboarding. Number two is we've got to get the haters on board to love NFT is and brands to embrace it and then to be integrated as utility NFTs through gaming and entertainment and now everybody's got a crypto wallet on their phone and then it's just natural that I will be able to just send you stablecoins through cryptocurrency.

Jonathan
The same way that I use the cash app to send you things. And then we'll also be able to actually use it at point of sale and essentially, it'll be invisible. Like crypto will succeed when the people that use it don't know that they're using crypto. The same way that cloud computing became the winner and like World Wide Web became the winner when people didn't even know that they were using it.

Jonathan
Like my mom doesn't realize that she's using World Wide Web when she watches Netflix, she just is using it and she doesn't care what chain that she's on, whether it's like the servers are on Azure or on Google Cloud Compute or on AWS, like that doesn't mean anything to her. She just wants to watch the Good Place or another season of the Office.

Jonathan
So, I think that's where adoption will come from and that's what it's going to look like.

Citizen Cosmos
I remember one book that made an impression on me. It is. I'm also a sci fi geek a little bit. And it is a Russian sci fi author, Sergei Lukyanenko. I don't remember the book specifically so many years ago, but one little passage made an impression on me. From what you say, I did remember now. And that's going to be the question from the passage.

Citizen Cosmos
But I have to say that first, in the book there was like a set in the distant future and one of the characters was being described as living in the city, and it's in the future. Humans don't have nails, hair or teeth. Well, they do, but they're not real, so not to waste time and all the money on that.

Jonathan
So just to pause you there. I've thought about that. It's like, why don't we just all get dentures? But it's such a like it's such a I hate going to the dentist. Like every time I go to the dentist, I'm like, there’s got to be something better than this.

Citizen Cosmos
I've been putting that off for so long. Like I need to know good again now. And I've don't get me started there. But anyways, you know, there is this belief that there's only one city left on earth, and that is. Well, the civilization was destroyed some thousands of years ago, whatever. Hundreds of years ago. There is like this dome around the city and blah, blah, blah.

Citizen Cosmos
Long story short, this guy, everything is in the city is seamless. It's like you described this very important. Everything. Like they don't know how things happen. And then long story short, he manages to realize that it's not the only city that's left. He manages to get out and the world is not destroyed. There is actually like a whole country village kind of out there, and he manages to find some small village or something like that where when he's talking to people and here is the question, sorry for the length.

Citizen Cosmos
They talk about a light bulb and then the light bulb stops working and they talk about how it's working. And his first reaction is, well, what the fuck do I know? You know, it's a light bulb. But then, you know, it's interesting because they get into this whole point and show you from the other side that the guy think that's a guy from the Village fixes the lights and what they kind of tried to show.

Citizen Cosmos
And then later on with the discussion, I'm not going to get into that. But the point was that when and I agree with you, but I will be devil's advocate here, because I agree to some extent. I have to be honest. If everything will be seamless, I hate that word. And we already have tracking devices in our pockets.

Citizen Cosmos
And if one company like Google, I hope they're not listening to this, installing phones, apps on everything now the mobile sorry wallets on every phone. And essentially what we're going to have is people not back to where why crypto was created. No like I mean the whole movement was partially created on philosophy and philosophy and blockchain ecology, separate things.

Citizen Cosmos
But if that will happen like that, you know, complete an understanding of what's going on. We don't know what we're using. We don't know what we're doing. Aren't we just going to go back to square zero where why we created crypto was in order for us to be more responsible for what we do and, you know, to understand the monetary system better and to be free from our supervisors, so to speak.

Jonathan
You make an interesting point, but I'm going to, partially disagree because I think at the end of the day, most people want to be supervised. Let's look at Web browsers. Okay. We'll take it from that point. With a Web browser, it comes on your phone and it's got lots of surveillance on it. But what it does is it enables access the World Wide Web, which is permissionless and gives access to everybody to be able to plug in.

Jonathan
And then that's and because of its ubiquitousness, it has it's powerful. And because it's open source and permissionless, it allows for anybody that wants to unplug from the surveillance part of it to get something like Brave or DuckDuckGo or some other type, you know, to connect through Tor or through use a VPN in order to be able to access this permissionless network without the surveillance that comes by default on your phone.

Jonathan
And I think that that's going to be the same path that we'll have with crypto. I think the path starts where most people don't own their own keys, but the fact that you can own your own keys makes all the difference. They're going to start with a custodial or even semi custodial using multipoint computational technology. You know what ZenGo is using and other services like Argent is using where you have a key recovery without managing a seed phrase because seed phrases suck.

Jonathan
So, I think that you'll end up with a point where it starts as a very Web 2 experience for everyone, but then those who choose to break out of it have the option to. And that's what makes all the difference. Today, when I use PayPal, there's no option for me to have self-sovereign, self-custodial PayPal, and that's where we need to get to.

Citizen Cosmos
I see your point here. I know also that you're short on time, so I'm going to get to the Blitz because I call it Blitz, but I know it takes 5 minutes and I know you have 5 minutes, so there's going to be three questions. Give me top three blockchain projects that you're curious in in terms of what they're working on right now.

Jonathan
Okay, I'll answer that. I actually have a list.

Citizen Cosmos
Well done. Prepared.

Jonathan
I didn't know that you're going to ask that.

Citizen Cosmos
Be woke. Be woke. I like it.

Jonathan
So I am, what am I interested in, LQTY with L,Q,T,Y.

Citizen Cosmos
I was going to talk to you about that, but yeah. Okay. LQTY. What else?

Jonathan
Okay. So interested in that. Also let's say no, I'm very interested in Kujira in Kuji. I think it's a great team and it just does, you know, is just the ability that they have to deliver so quickly. I've just never seen anything like it. So I think that that's interesting. And then let's see another one that's interesting.

Citizen Cosmos
Could be two. It can be two doesn't have to be three. Check out chicken bonds on LQTY when you're going to research it. So, second question, then Jonathan, two things that motivate you in your daily life and keep you to help build well, not just Levana, but whatever it is out there that strikes you day by day.

Jonathan
So things that motivate me. I believe that there's an opportunity for us working in the cryptocurrency world to prevent a seemingly inevitable dystopic future where it is impossible for economic wealth to be acquired by those that are not currently in power. And the main attack vector that the people that control economic wealth today is centred around being able to create a digital currency that has no mechanism storage.

Jonathan
Because if you can't store wealth, then you can't acquire. What is money? In a nutshell, money is being able to store work because you can deploy that work. The amount of labour that it takes to farm a field, there's no way to store that and then to store it during the Summer. So that that way I can have it during the Winter.

Jonathan
And so we use money as a derivative product to store work, and then we value different types of labour, sometimes incorrectly, by the amount of money that can be acquired in a certain geography for that labour. Now, if you could create a money that was impossible to save or was only possible for some people to save because, you know, and we're seeing this in China. Like money that if you don't spend it by the end of the month, it just gets pulled from your bank account, or money that can only be used at the grocery store but can't be used for buying liquor or whatever it is.

Jonathan
So, if the government can control money, then they can essentially control labour, they can control what labour can be stored and what labour can't be stored. And when you can control how labour happens and what the compensation of labour is, that is mass slavery. So, we're on a path, just the default path of society in humanity is for the current administrations to be able to enact a form of mass slavery on our children and grandchildren.

Jonathan
And we working in the crypto currency industry, are the only people that have an opportunity to be able to build the technology today, to be able to prevent that slavery from happening. And so that's one of the major things that makes me passionate about staying within this industry.

Citizen Cosmos
Last one, one person to follow doesn't have to be from crypto. Could be a book, could be a writer, a technologist, a magician, anyone, one person to follow.

Jonathan
I'm going to say. Elon Musk. But I will. Yeah. You know, I will say that, you know, somebody that you probably are not following, that you should be following is Tyler Reynolds. He is a big inspiration. He just all of his he's so on point. And also Jason Cho is also just so on point like everything that they say,

Jonathan
I just want to retweet. Both great guys.

Citizen Cosmos
Jonathan, I know you have to run, so I'm going to wrap it up and let you at least have a glass of water between your next call. So, thank you very, very much for joining. We must find a time to retake it, but we will for sure. Other than that, thank you very much for joining and find the time.

Jonathan
Thank you so much. It was great. And I look forward to seeing you again in person. Bye.

Citizen Cosmos
Bye.

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