Lots of laughter and learning on this episode of W3B’D! Who are the people educating underserved communities that are slower to learn Web3? What are the latest projects in the Metaverse that connect these audiences? Crypto-curious, filmmaker, host and radio personality, Chuey Martinez joins Web3 innovator and CEO of Avalanche, John Wu to discuss everything from access, education and the creative applications of the Metaverse.
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INTRO
Welcome to the W3B'd podcast, the newest source for the crypto curious that unblocks the mystery of blockchain and teaches you the A to Z of NFT's. I'm your host, Sheila Lirio Marcelo, an entrepreneur, educator, founder of Care.com, and CEO of ProofOfLearn. My first venture disrupted Web1 and grew with Web2. Now I'm out with another mission-driven adventure of learning and growing in Web3. Crypto is a big, exciting, and, to many of us, a bewildering world. Let's explore it together. We created this podcast to simplify and celebrate the ins and outs of the new economy, and decentralized web. On each episode of W3B'd, I'll guide a conversation between someone who's been to crypto land and someone interested in going there. You can think of me as your bridge to the metaverse. I know you'll enjoy the ride. And yes, we'll explain what the metaverse is too.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 00:00
Welcome to this episode of W3B'd where we bring you insights and perspectives of the crypto curious and the crypto confident. I'm your host, Sheila Lirio Marcelo, and I'm delighted to be joined by two incredible guests who I'm so excited to speak with. One is a Web3 crypto confident entrepreneur and investor and the other is a crypto curious producer and TV radio personality. We've got John Wu and Chuey Martinez. Welcome, gentlemen.
Chuey Martinez 01:34
(Horn sound effect) Eehhhhhhh fr fr fr fr fr sorry had to hit you with the air drums.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 01:38
I want to start by introducing John Wu, president of Ava Labs, an Andresseen Horowitz backed technology company building the next generation blockchain platform, Avalanche, a blockchain platform with a focus on speed and low transaction costs. Previously to that John was a CEO of the SharesPost Digital Assets Group enabling compliant token trading of private shares and funds. Prior to that, he was a technology investor and the founder of Sureview Capital. John is clearly very crypto confident
John Wu 02:13
Sheila, so nice to see you.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 02:15
I know it was so nice to have dinner last night.
Chuey Martinez 02:17
That was an awesome Chuey should have been here.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 02:19
I know.
Chuey Martinez 02:21
That was an awesome intro, Brother. You've done a lot in your life, man. Wow.
John Wu 02:25
Thank you. So have you. I'll admit, I didn't know much about you till today and I looked it up but what a great journey you've had and all the cool things that you've done.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 02:33
Okay, Chuey, Chuey is next. I'd also like to welcome my friend Chuey Martinez, who I just had dinner with last week, who you probably know from the Chuey Martinez show on Prime Video, of which he is the host and executive producer. On top of that, he's the founder of Chu Mungus productions. Growing up in East LA Martinez launched his career at the age of 16. And then just nine years later joined LA's number one hit music station. I am gonna enjoy saying this 102.7 Kiss FM. An on air talent on iHeartRadio and Sirius XM. With his multicultural background, he has been making major moves by entertaining people from everywhere. Chuey is joining us as a crypto curious guest today. Welcome my friend to W3B'd Chuey.
Chuey Martinez 03:26
Hey, thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. (sound effect) Frrr Frrr Frrr Frrr. Here we go.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 03:32
I'd like to start this conversation first with Chuey. So if any do you have in the crypto world any experience and what sparked your curiosity and interest in this area? Do you own any crypto or NFTs? You know...
Chuey Martinez 03:47
I own some crypto, I do own crypto, I own some bitcoins. I have some ethereum I have I think I want to say 80,000 dogecoins. I'm gonna hold on to those. I'm gonna hold on to those. But yeah, I became crypto curious years and years and years ago when a buddy of mine told me like dude, this is the future. This is going to take over the game. And you need to buy bitcoins now, I believe this was six or seven years ago. And he was very,very, very early in the game. And I told him like, dude, like stop that. What do you what are you trying to sell me man? Come on, come on. So he had a very large amount of bitcoins and he is 35 years old and retired now. So he is living it up in Mexico. And yeah, I'm still chugging along. So yeah, he, he made me curious. He may be curious back then. Yeah.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 04:49
So you obviously got in given the return on investment, which similarly attracted me at first but one of the things I have enjoyed discussing with you is what where we bonded as our immigrant journey?
Chuey Martinez 05:02
Yes.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 05:02
..and wanting to give people in our communities access and opportunity.
Chuey Martinez 05:06
Absolutely.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 05:06
You spoke to me, you spoke to me brother on this, you've talked about how radio was a way out of poverty for you. You've always used your voice to give access. So when it comes to web3, the crypto world and NFTs, how do you think we're gonna go do that you just shared that with me last week, and I want to have you share it with the audience.
Chuey Martinez 05:24
That's what I that's what I want to do. I don't want to make I don't want cryptocurrencies and I don't want the web3 and I don't want all this that we're working on to be not attainable for our people. You know, I come from the inner city, I come from nothing. And you know, our people need resources. And if I can be a part of all of that, to be able to provide that for my community, and my people, I'm going to do it. So I'm, I'm here learning everything I can to kind of pass along this knowledge. Because I do speak to elementary school kids, I speak to middle school kids, college students, high school kids in the inner cities. And I think they're, they're savvy, and they're interested in this kind of stuff. And they just need to know where they could learn more and possibly be a part of all this. And that's why I worked so hard. And that's why I have like 30 jobs. So I can just have the resources to really help my people in my community and, and me meeting people like yourself, and you opening up so many doors with knowledge and just, you know, meeting people, it's just been, it's been an awesome journey, knowing you and I'm just I'm here for the ride. And I just want to help my people. That's really it. I just, I tell that I tell you, I tell people that all the time, I just want to, I want there's no reason why folks that look like me shouldn't have the resources or the access to awesome things like this, you know, I think everybody deserves this, and I don't want it, I don't want it to just be something that's not attainable.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 06:48
I love it. I love that you're speaking from the heart, John and I just attended a dinner last night for the Asian American foundation, John and I also share this passion as immigrants, having come to this country and worked hard. And what I love is John has really evolved himself in multiple careers. And in your heart to is it's about increasing access to financial services and products for everyone. So John, tell us a little bit about what Ava Labs/ Avalanche like what you know, the mission that's in your heart and giving access to people?
John Wu 07:24
Well, first of all, it's so cool to be here with both of you.
Chuey Martinez 07:27
Likewise man
John Wu 07:27
I do have to admit, though, my ah, my journey is slightly different from both of yours. I'm born and raised here. And even though yesterday, we were at the Asian American foundation dinner, I've always considered myself American Asian, as opposed to Asian American. And maybe that's a slight distinction, because when you're born and raised here you just have a slight different perspective on things. But the goals and objectives laid out yesterday, as well as what Chuey just said, providing bridges and access to certain communities. That's all the same. And Ava Labs is the team behind Avalanche. Avalanche is a permissionless protocol. It's in one of the fastest blockchains out there, as measured by time to finality. And it's also has his mission of tokenizing the world's assets. And we want to do that because we think you can once you tokenize things, it's an easier way to issue, own and transfer assets and value. And we can go into later how that helps the NFT world and how that helps the creator world and all the things that we're working on with those communities. But it's a great mechanism to do all that. So let's unpack that you got Chuey here as part of the audience who is crypto curious, walk us through a lesson of tokenizing the world to assets? Well, I want to make one more distinction.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 08:50
Sure.
John Wu 08:51
You mentioned there's crypto confident Yes. In the industry. Crypto curious.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 08:55
Yeah.
John Wu 08:56
I also think there's a large majority of the world is actually crypto uninitiated.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 09:00
Yeah.
John Wu 09:01
So I consider crypto confident people probably like just millions, not into 10s of millions even who are actually working and developing things on chain through native call it wallets or browsers. Then there's the crypto curious, which is more of like the 90 million coin base type customers where they own assets, but they're actually using it for utility. The uninitiated are literally the haters or the people who just do not do anything in the space. And we have to work on getting them into crypto curious world and then crypto curious world into the crypto confident.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 09:42
Do you think they're really haters or just sort of uneducated that they have biases or believe in the myths that like crypto is only for illicit purposes, and they don't understand the power of the technology?
John Wu 09:55
I think it's both. It really is both, you know, in fairness to them. The whole crypto ecosystem is a petri dish of genius experimentation. And yes, there's fraud and then more experimentation. So while a part of innovation is experimentation, and with experimentation, sometimes unfortunately, there is fraud in it and scams. So we have to get through that. And hopefully, at some point, we'll get past that part and people really accept the technology for what it can potentially can do.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 10:25
Sooo love the optimism. So let's do just a little lesson on tokenizing assets, if you don't mind.
John Wu 10:25
Yep, tokenizing assets is transferring the right of ownership of something into a in my opinion, onto a permissionless, open blockchain. And when you do that, you transfer that right of ownership from either paper or traditional digital to a permissionless, you get certain benefits like transparency, and provenance that allow the rights of that ownership of that asset, or value to be moved around in a in a more efficient manner. It's a more eloquent solution.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 11:02
So let's unpack that permissionless, that's what's making it efficient, you want to kind of define that...
John Wu 11:07
That's an open community where any developer can come on to the operating system, and then just develop, users can actually own their own identity and move it around. So let me give you some hard examples: You know, if it's an iOS system, it's a closed system, you have to get Apple's permission to be a developer on and then they charge you 30% of VIC for that. If you're a user in a social media, if it's Facebook, or whatever, you can't just take your identity and move it around into other things. And then even financial services we saw with Robinhood, just about a year ago with a meme stock suddenly, because they're centralized platform did not have enough collateral to support the activity, a certain activity, you wake up one day, and you're not allowed to trade those stocks anymore.
Chuey Martinez 11:55
Yeah that happened to me, that happened to me, I wasn't allowed to trade any of my stuff. I was like, yo.....
John Wu 12:02
That is so unfortunate, because in a permissionless world, conceptually, you have your own, you know, you are custodians of your assets, you can say, fine. First of all, you should, in theory, vote on whether you want to halt the platform or not. So you have advanced warning. And then if you decide that you don't want to halt, but enough for the community wants to halt the platform, A you have a warning, and B you can take your assets to a different platform. And hopefully, you know, invest and trade it or in social media. It's well known that, you know, some people just stuck on Facebook, because that's where the network effects are. But if you can take your followers and your users and people look after you and move it to a different platform easily, that gives you more freedom as a user. So that's the power behind permissionless, where it gives self sovereign identity and it gives the individual more control of their own assets. And today, assets are data, your own data, your digital fingerprint, you get to, you know, a good example would be brave browser, brave browser is a browser that that doesn't allow your traversing of the internet to be taken and sold to a third party for advertising dollars, unless you opt in for that. And if you decide to opt in for that, you get a percentage of that pay to you directly, right. So now you own your digital fingerprint. And if you decide to let people use that digital fingerprint, you get paid for it. So this is what the power, ultimately of tokenization is about. It's not just about assets. It's like creating new ways of taking value, and then putting it on the blockchain and allowing the user himself or herself to be able to reap the benefits.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 13:49
That's probably one of the simplest way I've heard somebody explain it right without all that mumbo jumbo. Huh Chuey? What do you think of that?
Chuey Martinez 13:57
I was about to ask you. Like if, if, if, you know, for the, for the novices out there, like if they're not going to use Robinhood, what are some of those go to platforms you'd like to use to either purchase crypto or you know, trade crypto.
John Wu 14:12
So, again, the crypto curious
Chuey Martinez 14:14
Yeah
John Wu 14:15
Roobinhood's got a decent platform and Coinbase frankly, has made it very easy in an compliant way to get into trade crypto. What we need to do going forward is to get those users into what I call crypto confidence state which is actually transacting on chain you know, certain wallets out there like Metamask are very native to crypto native people repetitive but it's not the easiest thing to use. It's not like a coin base wallet and definitely not like a Schwab or Fidelity wallet when bought for buying stocks or Robinhood wallet. And, you know Ava Labs the team behind the Avalanche is working to try to create user interfaces and user experiences through a protocol core wallet which is giving them a web 2.0 type feel but a a web3 experience of being able to own and Caci their own data, see their own NFTs all in one place, and move around the web3 ecosystem in a much easier fashion than you do on Coinbase.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 15:18
Chuey you have a Metamask, right? Like, what wallets do you use?
Chuey Martinez 15:23
I just have Robinhood. That's all I have.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 15:29
Right, so you went through a custodial wallet centralized platform managed wallet. Metamask is a non custodial.
Chuey Martinez 15:38
Okay.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 15:38
Right. And but they're difficulty and user experiences. And that's what John is highlighting that they're soon to be other options directly on chain. That makes it super easy.
Chuey Martinez 15:48
Yeah. So John, so John when your interface is done, John, and you guys are all good to go. Me and you? Can we take a tour of high schools to explain this to kids?
John Wu 15:59
Absolutely and that will be a lot of fun.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 16:01
Amazing. Okay, so Chuey, actually, it's a great segway And I love that you're already headed in that direction, which is, you know, you have an incredible voice, incredible following. Like, what do you want to do with this knowledge that you're gaining in web three around and crypto? Like, what's your dream here?
Chuey Martinez 16:22
My dream, I think my dream is, I know, of course, we all have bills, and we all love money and love making money. But you know, I just I to be honest with you full transparency. For me, it's just about paying it forward. I really, I've been blessed by this universe tremendously. And I've been in the radio industry for 20 plus years, been doing TV for 15 years as a host and as a as an executive producer. And now I'm kind of pivoting into film. And I'm writing and producing films, I just sold the film to HBO last year called Para Rosa.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 17:00
Congrats.
Chuey Martinez 17:01
Thank you so much. And I'm really and it's I'm really moving forward with all my films and TV projects right now. And I just want to create opportunities for people, and I just want people to have resources, that's all I want. That's seriously all I want. Because there's not a lack of creativity, there aren't a lack of idea. There isn't a lack of people wanting opportunities. It's just a lack of resources. And that chance, like I got a chance when I was 16 years old and I was terrorizing the receptionist at the radio station telling them they better hire me hire me, hire me hire me and I went every I went every week until they hired me, you know, so I just persistence. You know, when I just want to create opportunities for my community and my people. That's all I wanted to ask them. Where did you... Sheila and I were talking about this a little bit or someone else at the table. Where did you learn to get that grit and to be persistent? And how do you transfer that same energy to other people in the community? I think I got that grit from my great grandparents. And my grandmother and my mother, my mother, at one point worked four jobs, you know, just to provide everything that we needed, it was just me and her. So I get that grit from her. And I get that grit from my great grandparents who were immigrants from Mexico, and who were field workers in Arizona and California. Like they they would wake up at three in the morning, and be on those fields at five in the morning. And their their days would end at seven 8pm. So I don't know, man, I think it's just a it's just an ancestral thing where that's just in my blood man like I, I can't complain, because my great grandparents kind of laid down that foundation for me. And just they...
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 18:51
They paid it forward to you. Yeah, they paid it forward and if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be here, period. So let's talk about you being here in this this massive success in entertainment, especially such an incredible role model for the Latin American community. So let's... I want to segway into entertainment because of crypto and entertainment are becoming more and more integrated. But before we have that conversation, could you share your journey?
Chuey Martinez 19:21
Oh my god The short condensed version... 16 started radio 19 got my first radio job like DJing decided when I was 18/19 years old that I was gonna move back to Los Angeles because I was in Phoenix, Arizona at the time. This was around 911, 911 kind of changed my life, you know, and kind of shifted my way of thinking. And I moved back to Los Angeles without a gig without a place to stay, slept in my car in Burbank, for five, six months. I would I would I would sleep right next to the WarnerBrothers lot, and I just created opportunities for myself in Los Angeles. Got on Kiss FM, then got a radio show on Latino 96.3 got the morning show did that for three years, went back to Kiss FM. Now whith iHeartMedia have been there for 13 years have the number one MC show in Los Angeles. I've had talk shows I've had shows on ESPN, I was the first Latino to have his very own show on the Travel Channel. You know, it's it's it's been a crazy journey did a talk show did a game show with Ryan Seacrest on Fox. You know, but I think I think the best thing is this, like being able to help my mother and help my help my family being able to pay off my mother's home when I was 24 years old. That was like the biggest reward of my life.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 20:45
So you have this thing in your heart to help your parents help your mom help others the fact that you're inviting John to just talk to kids in school, probably in the inner city of LA I can already imagine. So this voice that you have also, what are you seeing and wat are you hearing from your audience? And why I remember when I first met you, at a premiere for movie, you said to me, I just got to learn more about this web3 so that I can have kids learn about it. So what is it that's making you super curious about this.
Chuey Martinez 21:22
I just because I know, it's the next wave. And I know, I know, like, a lot of times, you know, people that look like me, or just, we're late to the party a lot of the times, and, you know, we, we want we want our we want our place at the table. And I think everyone deserves their place at the table. And I if if I can be kind of that branch or that bridge, to more folks learning, and gaining resources and monies and just knowledge, I'm gonna I'm gonna be that I'm gonna be that hub, you know, so I'm just kind of like a sponge right now and just soaking it all in. So I could just relay that off to my people. You know, that's, that's it. That's it.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 22:02
So John, you're hearing this from Chuey's heart. And I, you know, one of the things that I love about what Avalanche recently announced this year is that you want to provide more access to tools for creatives, like Chuey. Talk to us about the culture catalyst initiative with Open
John Wu 22:22
Yeah great. I mean, I think one of the benefits of what three chewy, is that it's a mechanism that allows you to achieve all your goals that you just said, it's a mechanism that allows you to bridge different communities, and then educate and teach young kids how to participate in a community. And for creators, you know, what's great about this culture catalyst that avalanche is doing in order to get this crypto uninitiated or crypto, curious into crypto confidence, you're gonna need three things, you're gonna need great creators with great content, the applications from that need to be developed. And then you need an easy interface, what we were talking about earlier, so that easy, easily accessible for other people. And part of what culture catalyst. And there was a partnership with Open, Jason Ma, who's from LA as well, I don't know if you know him. He has a lot of connections to creators, such as Grimes and other well known creators. We want that culture, great content, to be encoded, so to speak onto a smart contract into a super app like open so that it's easy to create an meant and then have a community of distribution for that. To get that adoption, you need to make it seamless and you make content that is so good that it doesn't really matter if it was on web 2 or web 3 and that's what the super bat is supposed to do. And get creators like you to easily put your content into a web 3 environment, so that your community can have easy access to it and feel like they're part of the voice that you represent.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 24:07
So we've got this dream of creators like Chuey, we've got great applications, we've improved the user experience. But now there's there's this whole thing going on the macro environment of the bear market, it's a really tough time to go into crypto. What's your perspective on that, John?
John Wu 24:27
So obviously, when it's a bull market, it's easier to get people into the crypto curious bucket and start owning assets when they go up. But with that said, even if that pocket of users is not growing as much right now, it's important that creators continue to build and take the existing crypto curious into crypto confidence. And that is literally coming up with great content and then putting it onto applications that's easily accessible. And the benefit of this and Chuey, Sheila and I talked about it yesterday as well at dinner. It's about a community. And that community has a thing called a token that makes them part of the community in a different way. They feel like, you know, in the perfect scenario, by holding this token, you have some governance rights, you get to vote, maybe you say, okay, Chuey, you're the content creator, you've done all these great things, and you're a filmmaker, I want to support you there. But I want to vote for this type of film, or that type of film or this type of music. And you and you take that feedback from your community, and you have better fan engagement. It's being done right now, by sports teams. And you know, we call them soccer, but football teams in Europe, they're creating fan engagement. PGA golf is trying to do this in order to have more direct fan engagement. So it's a mechanism that allows Chuey to hear more directly from his community, and allows the community to be a part of the decision making. And that's what makes it so powerful. So everyone is tighter in that community. I think one of the things I've heard in the background of what Chuey said, and what you told me, Sheila is certain communities feel like they're disenfranchised, because they don't have a voice. Having a token, gives them a voice in that community, because they get to vote on certain things. Not necessarily everything, as of right now, but they have a vote on certain things in the in the case of the football, soccer teams, sometimes it's about the wear of the dark uniforms, and the light uniforms. And, and that makes them feel like they're part of that sports community.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 26:32
I really like that Chuey what do you think?
Chuey Martinez 26:35
I'm listening. Like I said, a couple minutes ago. I'm like, I'm like a sponge. But I'm like listening to everything he's saying, and you guys are saying, and you guys, I'm excited to see what Avalanche is going to create and creating, like, I'm, I've been a creator for a very long time. And, you know, I think, you know, it's, it's always the creators that kind of get in first, the ones that are kind of the ones that really benefit from, from, from the technology. Like if you were one of the first creators to hop on TikTok, like you are having massive success. If you're one of the first creators to hop on YouTube, those guys have like 3,4,5, 10 million YouTube subscribers. So it's all about getting in early. And if you can, like teach and spread the knowledge of these new platforms, to other folks, I just think it's a win win.
John Wu 27:28
It's also about a mechanism that allows you to have more, capture the value chain, if you will,
Chuey Martinez 27:35
Right!
John Wu 27:36
Whether you're on YouTube or TikTok, there's third parties, intermediaries that take a piece of it, suddenly, you're directly connecting with your users. And by doing that, you're able to capture far more value than giving away 30, 40, 50% sometimes
Chuey Martinez 27:49
That part!
John Wu 27:49
Or a lot more than that.
Chuey Martinez 27:51
Yeah.
John Wu 27:51
And that gives you more creative mobility to do various things so that you don't have to do something that is gigantic, maybe you have a target audience, that's a smaller community that you want to help whether it's children in East LA, or certain parts of East LA, it's not economical for you to do it in a traditional way but now here's a way to build a smaller community. But it makes sense for everyone from an economic perspective, that's the beauty of tokenizing and in web3. It's eloquent. And it's efficient, because it removes a lot of intermediaries that take their little piece of the pie, and allows you to be more creative in certain ways, right?
Chuey Martinez 28:32
And I think I think this is perfect for the up and coming artist or singer or art like, because they really don't have the resources to be given away, like you said, 30, 40, 50% of their work, you know, so if they can take control of that, that really empowers artists, and that really empowers creatives,
John Wu 28:51
Like absolutely, I mean, I think the independent films used to be far bigger in the 90s and, and that's partially because they had distribution and VHS and other things to support that. But now, it's kind of like if you're not a mega hit, like Jurassic Park or Top Gun, it's really hard to get those funded. So one of the things that Avalanche and Ava Labs is doing is working on film financing offerings with individual independent filmmakers, who have niche audiences, but they can't get the support of the mega producers of the mega studios in Hollywood, but yet they have very worthy and important films with good content they want to get across. So this could be a way for a community funded type of opportunity to produce something that may be neglected because that's not the scale, but yet, it's very important to certain community and creators.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 29:43
That's why I wanted to introduce the two of you. Live on my podcast.
Chuey Martinez 29:52
I see right through you, Sheila I see you girl. I see you.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 29:57
Okay, okay, so let me jump into getting a little techie here. Another big thing, John, if you can just kind of define for the audience that's all over the process this Ethereum forking merge, yeah. Could you just unpack. The Chuey's are great here listening and wanting to learn, and he owns Ethereum.
John Wu 30:20
So, the more um..well first of all I hope he starts owning AVAX.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 30:24
Yeah. No, I want it to come from you.
Chuey Martinez 30:26
I did hear that in the portfolio earlier. Bitcoin and Ethereum and Avalanche should be part of that portfolio. Okay. Okay. I'm gonna go on right now.
John Wu 30:36
It's on Robinhood. Anyway, I'm not giving you know, I'm not giving the disclaimer out now ....I'm not providing any financial advice these are soley own views.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 30:54
Exactly, right.
Chuey Martinez 30:56
So hilarious.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 30:57
All right. So merging forking all that..
John Wu 31:00
The big event Ethereum did what they call a merge, it's actually part like a five series things merge, splurge, purge everything. It's like, you know, a whole bunch of things. But what the merge did was, it went from what they call proof of work to proof of stake. Proof of work as a way to create more security by using hardware to do math problems in order to secure the Ethereum chain. Proof of stake is a slightly different way, it's more software based, and you put up your Ethereum as collateral. And then you help run software in nodes, to validate that security. So you are actually part of that Etherum community and helping create, you know, validation of each transaction that makes makes it real and secure. The benefit, I think why that's important is it's going to invite more people in because when you do this, you get rewarded for that, I don't know, if you want to call it dividends, or you want to call it labor, it's a combination of both is probably because you are putting your collateral, so it could be dividends, but you're also running software. So it's actually labor as well, in my opinion, at least. And so suddenly you get yield, just like you would with owning treasuries in the US, but you're also getting paid for the labor of running that software. So if you can do that, as a user, my bet is to invite more people into that crypto curious crowd because you're actually getting paid for your work. In some sense.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 32:26
That's great. So what makes Avalanche such a cool special technology in light of what you just defined and described around the merge?
John Wu 32:36
So the merge is just going from proof of work to proof of stake. Avalanche, and some of the other layered ones. Bottom layer chains are already proof of stake, they started out at proof of stake. So they have the energy consumption efficiencies that Ethereum is getting to now. But they all Avalanche and others already have more scale and speed than Ethereum relies on layer twos or other you know this is for the future upgrades that are coming in 2023 and 2024 to get to the level of low costs and speed and capacity that a lot of layer ones already have the newer technologies.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 33:16
Amazing. So John, what made you decide to jump into web3 actually want to close on that question for you.
John Wu 33:24
So I was a professional technology investor I always love exciting new technologies I kind of just jump into new things and want to learn all about I'm very intellectually curious. But first I got into it little before Chuey did as purely as an investor I just saw Bitcoin and I just a simple maths, incremental supply and demand, I thought it was a good investment. This isn't 1415. But I really jumped all in, in 2017 when I saw utility, and I thought I can now provide access to hard to find financial securities to to more people. So John, the professional investor had access to private securities, private debt, and all these real estate stuff that your average person doesn't get access to. And when I saw the ICO boom happened in 2017, I thought I saw global crowdfunding and funding for companies in such a rapid and efficient manner. I thought that'll be a mechanism that can be used to also tokenize value that's in private shares back then that was Airbnb and Uber. And hopefully use that and in a compliant construct with the SEC and FINRA, let individuals by Uber and Airbnb before they go IPO. Because what we're seeing was, you know, the VCs got in early, they got a lot of value in the growth and all of a sudden they IPO and then Chuey and myself get to buy it. After a lot of value is created. Why not give people and this is a different type content that instead of entertainment, this is financial content. If there are people who are initiated and want to learn about and source these private securities, whether it's debt or equity, or derivatives, they should have the opportunity to learn if they want to and participate earlier before all the value capture is happening at an institutional level. So I really want to create a mechanism to rewire the financial services to allow individuals to get closer to those hard to find assets. I love that.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 35:30
This has been incredible. You both come from very different backgrounds. That thing that you all share, and I get emotional talking about this is that John just defined his journey for access and his dream, to give people opportunity, Chuey, you shared the same thing at the beginning. And we're coming to this close. And the fact that you both are in it now, whether you're curious or confident, because what you share is you want to pay it forward for others. And that's huge to me, you know, and then the third thing is that, look, we got to unleash the power of creators to give them value, because of what they do and share with everything that's in their heart for people. And so how do we give them more value? And I think web3 is the huge opportunity so that if we can take all these curious people or even the uninitiated and get confident, I think that means we're sharing more with everybody. So thank you both very, very much for being on the show. Sheila, thank you and thank you for always paying it forward. Thank you.
Chuey Martinez 36:34
Yes, yes. Sheila being that beacon always man, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
OUTRO
This podcast is being provided for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice.