Ep.110 [EN]对话Algorand基金会首席执行官Staci Warden：我要让Algorand重返主流
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Hello everyone, welcome back to Cryptoria. This is another English episode for our podcast. And you know, every time we have the English episodes, which means we are very honored and we are invited a very great guest to join our podcast. Yeah, so you know, this protocol is one of the few protocols I know when I get into crypto in

2019 and when we started to do the layer one series, you know this name come back and I said, okay We need to invite the one who take in charge to talk about how this protocol going and what are the updates? Especially we know that they are doing a lot of things in the Chinese community So that's exactly I think our audience want to know so it's a great honor to have

Stacey Walden, the CEO of Algorand Foundation with us today. So Stacey, could you please briefly introduce yourself to our audience? Yes, I have the honor to be the CEO of the Algorand Foundation. I have been CEO for four years. It seems like 40 years and four lifetimes maybe. But I came from traditional finance and in particular, I came from working on issues related to developing countries and emerging markets. And

So I try to bring that sensibility and those issues as well to some of the things that we're working on with Algorand. I was headhunted to be on the board

And when you are joining a board of directors, you are lending your name and your reputation to that board. And so I did a very big deep dive into Algorand and I was so excited by it. I didn't know much about it before so that I agreed to be on the board and then they made me the CEO a few months later. Great. So actually, Algorand is the first meetup gathering I attended in Sydney.

Amazing. Yeah, you know, from that time, everybody just talking about all the blockchains and their ones is back to 2020, I think just middle of the pandemic. And but Sydney is okay. And everybody's still hosting all the meetups.

And there has the Ethereum meetups, has the Orgram meetups. And Orgram is really the first one. You know why I joined? It's because someone had, hey, you have to go because Orgram ecosystem, they have somebody there. And you can talk directly to the ecosystem and you will know what's your grant working, you will know how their community working. So that is the first time I know Orgram and that is also the first time I learned a lot of the ecosystem

you know, basic blockchain knowledge. That's amazing. Yeah. So you just mentioned that you, your experiences came from traditional finance. Do you have any aha moments or does any mentors or somebody's guide you from to shift your career focus from the traditional finance move to the blockchain ecosystem?

You know, I have a story I think that's a little bit different from most people's. I mean, most people, they go to a meetup or they learn somehow or they buy some Bitcoin. I was doing an educational series for the press with the National Institute for the Press. So I would, you know, once a month I would get...

I was at the Milken Institute, which is a policy think tank. And we would meet, the National Institute for the Press would gather press together in Washington, and I would provide the content on housing finance reform, what's happening in the global financial crisis, what are bond markets doing, that kind of thing. And the head of the National Press Institute said, could you do something on Bitcoin? They're interested. This was in 2013.

And so I had a very easy life doing this because I would bring these experts, you know, but there was no expert on Bitcoin. I couldn't find an expert. So I had to learn Bitcoin myself just to teach it. So I think my story is a little different that I had to learn and I was only interested to learn it

in order to run this session. But then, of course, once I learned about it, I learned about the consensus mechanism, and I was very interested in financial inclusion in developing countries. And I thought, this could be a solution for that. This could be a really important tool. And so that's when I fell down the rabbit hole. And I brought it to the Milken Institute, and I said, I want to do a panel on this.

And they said, no, no, no, no, no, no. I said, I want a big room. They said, small room. I said, I want, you know, good time. They said, not a good time. And that panel ended up being the second most downloaded panel of the 2014 Global Conference. I mean, it had 100,000 views, probably. You know, and I had some real OG, like I had Gavin Andreessen on this panel, right? Like real Bitcoin OGs.

And then I decided that I wanted to write an article explaining Bitcoin to everybody in a way that was not dumbed down, but it was kind of easy to read. But I wanted to take people through how proof of work works, why this is so revolutionary. And that article was downloaded like a gazillion times.

And so then the Milken Institute had to start paying attention to me because they had these data points. So that's how I got a little bit more budget and some people to work on it. And then over the years, I was working on it, but it was kind of one of many things that I was working on. And then, you know, by 2018, 19, it was getting too big. And so that's when I decided I either want to do this full time or not. And so that's when I left.

Yeah, that is really like what we are doing right now. We let people know what's happening in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and everything is just moving on. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah, it sucks you in. I like to say it's a one-way street from traditional finance to crypto. You never go back the other direction. You only go one way. Sometimes there's some potholes. Sometimes you might take a wrong turn. Sometimes you might get off the exit a little early, but you never go backwards. Yeah.

Exactly. And so you just described the blockchain as a tool for financial inclusion. So how did you work in this emerging market? And about the SDGs, how this shapes these perspectives? Okay, well, I have a theory of economic growth, which is that household savings put their savings in banks and banks

It kind of just sits there because banks don't make enough loans, frankly, in many countries. They buy government bonds. They pay out 2% on deposits and earn 10% on government bonds. And they're off on the golf course by 3 p.m. every day.

And so what I've always been more generally interested in is how to get this money to entrepreneurs. And that requires well-functioning capital markets. And so that theory, that it's not my theory, of course, this is economics, but

If household savings can be channeled effectively to entrepreneurs, then the entrepreneurs can grow their businesses. They grow their businesses. They hire more people. The workers have more savings. Households have more savings. So you get this kind of virtuous circle to prosperity. That's been my like bedrock North Star.

And the problem with traditional finance is that it's very slow moving and it's very exclusionary. I mean, there are countries in Africa where you cannot get a bank account unless you get a letter of reference from somebody else who has a bank account at that bank. There are countries where people are walking for a day to make a deposit in a bank. And this idea that you can separate finance from banking

has been very, very important to me. And so, you know, the first was of course, M-PACE in Kenya. And then if you look at like Ant Financial, of course, right? Like this idea of making direct digital payments. But the problems there are that, you know, somebody very centralized owns that database, right?

And so it gets you, I think, sort of 75% of the way there. But to be really, really sure that you can have financial inclusion that won't go away, you need to be on a decentralized public ledger, I think.

So if you look at PIX in Brazil, incredible progress that the Central Bank of Brazil has made in direct payments in Brazil. I mean, just incredible progress. Hats off. But at the end of the day, the Central Bank owns the database of all of those transactions. So you have to ask yourself, do you want the Central Bank?

to have the database of all the transactions or is it better to be held on a public blockchain that's being upheld by computers all over the world? In my estimation, the latter is better. We're not quite there yet, but I think we'll get there. And to me, and I'll stop after this, it's just crazy that you can send a movie over WhatsApp from Nigeria to Malaysia, a movie

in one minute, but you can't send $10 from Nigeria to Malaysia without traveling through the correspondent banking system, clearing at the Fed, traveling back down. It's nonsense. And so if you're on a public ledger, all the transactions are on the ledger. It's instantaneous. It's final. And for me, this is just, especially with stablecoins, it's just very meaningful tool for prosperity in developing and emerging markets, I think.

Yeah, we just did two episodes to talk about PayFi. So the PayFi, all the stablecoins and the transaction fees, you know, currently is really huge. And we are the overseas students. So when we started aboard, our parents sent us our tuition fees and, you know, the living fees. Every time we have to wait. If there is public holiday, we have to wait longer.

Yeah, so we know and we know how those transactions are working, especially how the SWIFT is working and how software it is. Right, I mean, but you too, you complain about it now, but you might not like it going forward when crypto payments are widespread because then you know what your parents can do. Right now, they have to send you money. And of course, you wait a few days, but

If there was really crypto everywhere, they could send you programmable money. And you know what that means for you? That means they could send you money that you could only use in the bookstore. You couldn't use in the bar or the cafe. They could send you money that only worked at the grocery store. Yeah, but it didn't work at the movie theater because they want you to be studying. So it could be a bit more difficult for you in the future.

Southside, that's not good news for the future overseas students. Exactly, exactly. Be careful what you wish for is what I say. By then, I'm going to be the parent. No shoe stores. It won't work in shoe stores, maybe. You don't know. Hey, Stacey, you are the woman leader we interviewed.

And, you know, in blockchain, I really experienced that the blockchain is still the male dominated industry. So how are you feeling being the female leaders? And what lessons have you learned in this male dominated industry? It is a male dominated industry. I don't think and I know that there is probably there's there is sexism in this industry, of course. I have not experienced very much of that personally, though.

So when my community gets mad at me, for example, they never say, you know, a woman shouldn't be running this or you're just a woman or, you know, we need a guy. Mostly they say when they're mad at me, they call me a banker. That's the worst insult that they give me. But I think, you know, it's good and bad, right? I mean, I have been able to hire a number of senior executives because they are tired of working for men in a male-dominated workplace.

And it's very much a cabal sometimes with men, not all the time, of course. So I have been lucky to have that as a tool for hiring. And we also...

we tried to convene women together. So whenever we go to, you know, a conference, ETH Denver or, you know, Token 2049, anything like that, we do a women's breakfast. And sometimes these women breakfasts are, we're talking about being a female in the industry. And sometimes these women breakfasts are, we're just talking about crypto and it, you know, it's just a normal breakfast. So it kind of, it depends a little bit, you know, the mood, um,

And being female is helpful in some ways also because, you know, women are less afraid to sort of ask questions and to say, I don't know. And so sometimes when I'm in a room with a bunch of men, I say, I didn't understand that. Can you say that again? And all the guys are like, phew, thank God she asked. It's like, we didn't understand it either, but we're not going to say anything. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I think it's, you just have to be authentic. I am who I am, you know, and I try to stay true to who I am.

Because they told us it would be, you know, sometimes it feels unequal. They need to work much harder and contribute more to prove or, you know, to convince their colleagues that they can actually, you know, do the jobs. So that's the reason why we asked this. And, you know, the reason why I asked Vivian to ask you is, you know, it seems not appropriate way for me to ask you.

Yeah, because I've never experienced some bad things from the male-dominated, especially in the blockchain industry. But every time for the big events like the Token 2049, like the DEVCONS, you always see there has some events called Web3 Women or Web3, or it's everybody, the women working in this blockchain. And so they're always gathering some meetups.

And so that is back to a lot of the questions is for me is I personally, I never experiencing any bad things, but in this industry, there still have the group of women or the girls and they are working very closely and they looks like they working exclusive and they want to get rid more girl powers together in this industry. And it seems in the blockchain it's working.

And everybody can contribute to their powers, their strengths. And I think that is one of the incredible things in the blockchain. Yeah, there's some very powerful, very smart, very early OG women. I mean, if you look at Caitlin Long, who's CEO of Custodia Bank, I mean, she's really melt-endemorous, right? There are a few really incredibly powerful women in this industry. It's good to see.

Yes. So let's talk about the connection between you and Algorand. So Algorand is a carbon negative and built for institutional great certainty. So how does your traditional finance background influence Algorand's focus? Well, as much as I would like to take credit for the design of the Algorand blockchain, I cannot do that. That is the brilliance of our founder, Silvio Macaulay.

And he came up with a very lightweight performant consensus mechanism. And in a blockchain, all the juice is in the consensus mechanism. And he developed a very elegant consensus mechanism. And that consensus mechanism is very lightweight. So it has a very low carbon footprint.

And when I was checking out Algorand to be on the board, this is something that I liked about it. And I think if it was using a lot of energy and not very environmentally sustainable, I wouldn't have been interested in it. But it's always been like that. And I will say that

This was really a competitive advantage for us in the beginning. But now the proof of stake blockchains are all pretty environmentally friendly now. And that's a good thing, you know. So I don't think we're no longer unique in that. We used to have also the lowest fees in the industry, but now a lot of blockchains also have low fees. So we're still proud of it, but we're not unique anymore.

So you are the advisor of UN and EU on blockchain policies as you already mentioned that. So how do these experiences inform Augurans partnership especially for instance like UNDP Blockchain Academy?

So does it have an influence on, you know, all those partnership with Agaran? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think what I was able to do, first of all, is hire people that were very, were luminaries in impact. So I hired our head of impact as a guy named Matt Keller and I knew him from before. So that helped me, my background helped me convince him to come and convince him that this was worthwhile for him to do for the things that he cares about. He knows everything.

everybody in the impact space as well, right? And so when we had this idea to do training for the UNDP, we just did the graduation. Your question is well-timed because they just had their graduation yesterday. 250 people from 90 countries did this course.

And it was really incredible. And of course, they know that we are legitimate. And I think that helps us because they know that I come from a development background. They know that Matt comes from a development background. We are a very important payments company is built on Algorand named Hussab Pay.

And we also hired part-time a very senior person from Mercy Corps. He was the number two at Mercy Corps to manage that project with Hissabpe. He also knows everybody. So when we are talking to like UNHCR, High Commission for Refugees, they have said to him, I see Algorand is legit because you are there.

You know, they give a stamp of approval that we are real because these guys are very, they're already known and impacted. I'm myself also already known in that developing country space. And so that's been helpful for us for sure, because we're not, you know, crypto bros or whatever, right? Like they know that we're serious and we care and down to the individual, we understand their issues and what they need to get done.

And so for the UNDP, we're not teaching them cryptography or anything like that. We just want them to understand that blockchain is a tool for certain situations and that they can call on that solution if they need it for certain situations. And they just need to be comfortable with understanding where it's applicable and where it might not be applicable, et cetera. So that's the kind of thing that we try to get done with these partnerships.

So back to the Ogram itself and Ogram TVL, you know, everybody focuses on TVL. We have to talk about TVL, right? So it's a really important stack. Ogram's TVL grows 200% year over year and it's driving a lot of the protocols, just like the folks finance and tiny man.

So my question is, you know, for the TVL is more like the native part. So everybody, so who's have the money and they can use it to do the, all the trainings, but how does Algram can balance the defy innovation with the real world adoption? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think of the world as divided into two broad areas.

In one area, it matters how big the community is. So DeFi is a great example of that. Gaming, right? Like you...

those companies are going to build on a chain that has a big enough community. And they're not going to build on a chain that doesn't have a big enough community. And there's another world, which is like, let's call it payments, a partnership with MasterCard, say. MasterCard doesn't really care how big the Algorand community is. They just care how good the tech is, right? So this is how we balance it. And from the very beginning, I have understood that

Your question was on my mind from the day I walked in. How do you balance these two things? And the way that I did this organizationally is I put one senior executive in charge of each one of these. So one senior executive is in charge of going out and getting these partnerships and doing, you know, so HACCP that I mentioned before is a very good example of that. They are working with these UN agencies. They are trying to work with governments. They are doing that. And he looks after that effort.

Another woman, her name is Min Wei, she runs our ecosystem. And so she's in charge of getting startups through the ecosystem, cultivating entrepreneurs, matching them with developers, helping, you know, folks finance and tiny man, as you mentioned, be as strong as they possibly could be. And so, yeah.

They talk to each other at the executive level, but they are equally important to me. So they are run equally by very senior people.

So, you know, the shift to consensus rewards, you know, saw stake algorithm drop 20% year-on-year initially. So how did you navigate these transitions while also maintain the trust from the community? Because I think, you know, when the community look at this number, it's definitely not a number that can satisfy them. So I would say at the beginning, I already mentioned, did they complain about your leadership because of these not quite happy stats?

You know what you're talking about. Before we had staking, our total algo stake were 1.3 billion and now it's 1.95 billion.

So it's only grown incredibly. And when it was about 1.3 billion, the Algorand Foundation staked a lot of it. We staked like 70, 75% of it. That is not very good. It's not very decentralized. So we, and we never rewarded node operators. We have a sort of 6,000 node operators now. We never rewarded them for staking algos. And so we went through a two-year process of

We had to think this through. We had to build it out. We had to test it. It took a long time. But as of January this year, we went live with rewarding people that stake algos. And so we, as I said, we're at 1.95 billion. My goal is 2 billion. And the foundation keeps withdrawing its stake from it.

And so now we are, I think we're at about 30 or 35%. We want to get down to 10 or 20% only. So there's still more work to do. But this is an unmitigated positive for the community because now they're earning algos every time. And, you know, can I say a couple of things about our staking reward program? So everybody listening, please participate. It's the best staking.

But it really is the best one because you get it started at 10 algos per block and now and every million block, it goes down by once 1%. So it's now in the high nines, but a block goes by every like 2.5 seconds. Right. So every 2.5 seconds, somebody is getting 10 algos and there's no slashing and there's no lockup.

So it's not like you have to lock up 32 ETH. If you have your algos staked, you're participating, you can withdraw them whenever you want, and then you're just not participating in those particular rounds. And you get paid immediately. So every time you win that little lottery and you're picked, you get the 9.8 algos and you get one half of the transaction fees from that block. And you can stake a number of different ways.

You can stake directly, but you have to have 30,000 algo to do that. You can participate through folks finance, or you can participate through a staking pool called ready pools. Now, one thing you might be, I'm trying to figure out where that stat came from. One thing that it might be is that

Before, you could only participate in governance through, not only, but you participated in governance through folks finance and you got kind of a liquid token. The TVL in folks finance has gone down a bit because people can stake their algos directly now. Boy, they've been after us for a long time to do this, but it took a while to do properly. So we're happy to have that behind us. That was our biggest project last year. Yeah.

Right. So you already mentioned that one of your executives is responsible for cultivating the community, right? So we all know that every single protocol, the developer, the community is key to succeed. So how do you attract those developers? And do you have any grants or any plans, especially in 2025, to attract them and to keep them in our community to contribute more? Yeah.

That's such a good question as well. So we have, I didn't know what this word was before I came, but we have a funnel, you know, so that we trap them at the top and then we shoot them down into different categories depending on how. So marketing, it has a big campaign towards development. I'll tell you about the catching part, then I'll tell you about the tech part.

So so we marketing targets developers and then we kind of segment them. What who are they? Junior? Do they not know very much about coding in Web3 or are they already pretty good? And if they're pretty good, we shut them off to DevRel to our developer. And then they.

They take them and they help them and they do all kinds of things with them. Or they might be just entrepreneurs that don't know that much at all. And so in those, we teach them and we teach kind of teach everybody how to run a business, how to get product market fit, how to do that. We tried to match developers with entrepreneurs as well. And then we just look after them all throughout their life cycle until they are on main net, in which case they go over to two different people who look after all the main net companies.

Now, in terms of funding, when I got here, we wasted a bunch of money because we didn't know how to evaluate projects very well. And we were just kind of putting money out the door. So I put a stop to that over time. But it took me about a year to do this, but I put a stop to this and I.

I realized that we are not a VC firm. We don't have expertise in this. The community should be responsible for its own grant making. So we have turned over our grant making portfolio to the community. Now, we rolled that out last year and it was a bit of a mess, honestly, if I'm speaking frankly to you and all of you. Just between me and all of your followers on this channel, I will say confidentially, it was a bit of a mess.

So, you know, it was hard for people to give, they had to make grant proposals through GitHub. It was hard to vote, all of this, you know, there was, so we have done a couple of things that we're rolling out next quarter. So we will have a tool, a voting tool and a submission tool, which is very nice. We took a long time to build this because it will be completely on chain. These are not typically on chain in other ecosystems. And then we are now accepting applications for a committee,

And so that committee is going to vet the projects first and reject the ones that are not good enough. Because if you're just a governor in Algorand, you don't have, you know, five hours a week to go reading through every single proposal. But you want to read through the top ones. So this committee can't vote something in, but it can vote something out.

And we will pay them as well to be on this committee. And then they will hand a nice and they will the committee will also go back to the projects and say, you need this, you need this. I need to see this, et cetera. And then they'll have that shortlist. And then the then the foundation will provide funds. But the community will decide where those funds go. And that's quite important to me because I want to get out of the grant making business at the foundation just because we're not particularly good at it.

And the community is money at the end of the day, so they should support projects that they think are worth supporting. We have a lot of developers in our audience. Which is a follow-up question I must ask, because they asked us to ask you: What's your strategy in building the Chinese-speaking community?

That's a good question. Let me give you some background information. Algorand got the Chinese Twitter, which already set up, but it stopped updating, I think, on January this year. So some of them are following this Twitter account and then suddenly just like nothing happens. So that's the reason why they are curious about all the updates you have. And that's the reason why I asked this question. So what's your strategy in building the Chinese speaking community?

That's a good question. I don't have any Chinese speaking employees anymore at the foundation. So I guess we need to fix that. I think I just have to admit that we don't have a good strategy for a Chinese speaking community. Do you have thoughts about that? Ideas for this? Definitely. We can talk, we can discuss about that after the interview. Let's discuss it after the interview because I'm feeling quite ashamed now.

Actually, we talk with a lot of the leaders of the different ecosystem and some of them, they're focused in Chinese speaking communities. So they are working very, very harsh

and very aggressively, and they know all the policies within the mainland China or other Chinese-speaking communities. They know everything. But other ecosystem, because all the policies and the regulation things, they decide to sell. Okay, I'll leave that market for a while and we'll wait.

And we just wait until we are growing, we are mature enough and those reputations will attract the good developers, the Chinese developers come to our ecosystem. So that is totally different strategies. So don't be, don't be, no worries at all. It's true that the regulatory environment does push us off.

But I think you're right to say we can't have zero outreach to a Chinese speaking audience. I mean, that's a bit crazy. So I guess my short answer is we don't really have a good strategy, but I'd be open to ideas. I don't think we can have boots on the ground in the regulatory environment in China because we have to focus where the possibilities are. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have

native language speaking outreach. And so I take your point on that for sure. Great. So let's back to the Orgram. You know, Jian and I, both of us, we are really interested in the real world things. You know, before we started this podcast and we were on the project and we would try a lot of things within the real world assets, you know, from the collectible wine,

to collectible art and we even tried the real estate. But it's pretty sensitive in the Australian regulation so we didn't do it at the end. But it's all RWA and we are really fascinated about it when we get into the crypto. For the algorithms I know there are a lot of the airline tickets

and that were resold as NFTs on Algram. So I just want to know how Algram is going to validate the blockchain's role in these mainstream industries.

How is the algorithm going to validate the blockchain roles in those mainstream industries? Just like how you're adopting those mainstream into the blockchain. Well, have you tried to buy any rental property on Lofty AI? Oh, we know the project. We know the project. They are like case studies. The case studies we learned is a lot.

Yeah, but you should go to the website. I mean, you have no idea that you're on a blockchain. This is one of our goals, right? That you hide the tech behind it and just have a really good user experience. But if you go to Lofty AI website, there's properties all over the US, right? And you can buy anything.

into that property for as little as $50 and they're all rental income generating properties, right? And so, and each property is set up as a DAO. And so you are really an owner of that property. You make decisions on that property. You, the owners will decide, do we fire the property manager? Is it a good property manager? Do we maybe give the tenant one month break on the rent because they've been having some hard times that happened once?

or and you have all of the documents on the way you go to that website you have all the documents the tax history the rental history everything and you so that you can make an informed decision and you get

whatever percentage of the equity that you own, you get that rental income. And for people like us, we can't have rental income. I'm not going to go out and buy an apartment building, you know, and even though that would be a good rental income for me, I can't afford to do that. Right. So this idea of this is one of the things that I love about real world assets is that it takes tokenized real world assets. I mean, is it takes illiquid things that only rich people can buy and

And it makes them liquid so that middle class people can buy them, can invest in them. And this to me is very important component of financial inclusion. When we talk about financial inclusion, typically we're talking about people that live on $2 a day and how can you have them, you know, but financial inclusion also exists for the middle class.

that doesn't have the opportunity to invest in things that rich people can invest in. And prop tech, RWA around property is one of the most important elements of this, I think. Is Algram going to adopt those RWA projects into Algram ecosystem? We have several. Another one that's really interesting is, so Lofty AI is built on Algram.

Another really interesting partnership we have is with Enel, which is the Italian utility company. They're one of the biggest utility companies in the world. So you guys are familiar with this. If you put a solar in many, many locations globally, if you put a solar panel on your roof and you generate electricity, you can sell it back to the grid and you can you get your electricity bill reduced. So Enel said, OK.

seems good, but it doesn't seem that efficient. What about the guys that live on the fourth floor of a 10-floor apartment building? How are they going to do that? What about the people that live in a very cloudy area, like in Ireland or something, right? Like, how are they going to do that? Do I have to send people out, like, to put a solar panel on, like, every single person's roof? It seems very time-consuming. So they called Algorand, and they said, couldn't it be that we buy

solar panels in 10 acres of field and we sell the tokenized equity into those solar panels to our customers. So I can have a solar panel

That can offset my electricity bill bill, but the solar panel is not on my roof. It's in a sunny field over there somewhere. And I buy one panel or two panels or two and a half panels or whatever it is tokenized. And that's how I get this rebate. So, so again, it's like markets that are making things that were so illiquid and like.

Lumpy. That's not a technical term, but, you know, lumpy and smooths them out, smooths out the income stream, breaks down geographic barriers. That's cool stuff in Web3, for example. And the travel airlines is another example that you that you mentioned. You know, everybody hates their relationship with their travel company. You know, if you don't want to take the trip that you booked, you know, you're stuck. Right. You're going to pay a fine or you have to do the same trip within a year, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so, Travelex went to the airlines and said, what if we created a market by tokenizing those tickets that you could sell your ticket to somebody else? So, that was kind of round one of how they tried to figure this out. Now, it turns out, though, and entrepreneurs, you know, whenever they have a setback, they pivot to something better. This is the mark of a true entrepreneur. Turns out, though,

You know, if I want to go to like Missouri for the weekend, it's going to be hard for me to find somebody who wants to buy a ticket to Missouri the exact weekend that I bought. So the market was not very liquid. It was a good example of RWA, but not very liquid. So Travel X was talking to the airlines and the airlines said, yeah, but still RWA.

This is a good idea because I could buy that ticket back from them, maybe even at a higher price if this was just tokenized. So in that example, I'm going to Missouri for the weekend. I decide I don't want to go at the same time. And so instead of fining me, the airline now has a very nice way of buying that ticket back for me, that token back for me.

and reselling it if they want. So say Taylor Swift is doing a concert in Missouri that weekend. I bought my ticket a year ago. I don't want it. They buy it back for me for more than I paid for it. And they sell it to 5X for some Swifty that needs to go to this Taylor Swift concert. So

What the tokenization does is allow a marketplace to exist that the airlines participate in and the customers participate in to make sure that there's no empty seats on any plane anywhere. That's the idea, right? Yeah.

Wow. So that is all the entrepreneurs who's building the things on the org ramp. Yeah. All right. Exactly. We are like a field that they can build on. You know, there's others in carbon credit trading. We did more traditional RWA with Aberdeen Money Market Fund. That's the biggest. That's one of the biggest in the UK. And we did

ArchX, which is a company that's building on Algorand, they tokenized Aberdeen Money Market Fund. Quantos is another company that issues a digital euro on Algorand. That's not a stable coin. That's the euro. They are regulated by the Dutch Central Bank. It's programmable money on chain, on Algorand.

And so lots of times you have this tokenized money market fund and like it's cool, it's a cool pilot, whatever, you know. But this troika of Aberdeen and Quantos, now you can do an atomic swap immediately for euros. So you can sell your slice of the Aberdeen money market fund and get euros immediately, not in T plus two, not in T plus one, immediately. And both sides of the trade need to happen or the trade will fail. So there's no counterparty risk.

There's none of this. It's just instantaneously. This is the promise of financial market token. One of the promises of financial market tokenization that you can have these atomic swaps right away from, from,

From assets to cash. And I'll stop with this. If that becomes widespread enough and seamless enough, then there's no difference really between holding cash and holding an Aberdeen money market fund. I could, if imagine it was all accepted everywhere, I could take the tiniest little sliver of my Aberdeen money market fund, which is easy because it's tokenized and I could buy a cup of coffee with it.

and I would be earning yield on my little piece of the albertine money market and then the instant in an atomic swap that I have a coffee and starbucks has the has the albertine money mark fund starbucks is earning yield on that on that money market fund instantaneous it's a little futuristic but this is like why we're on the game right because we believe that stuff like this can happen eventually right I think there's one more like big punish you haven't told us is the algorithm with mastercard right

So I'm really curious about that because since you already mentioned that PayFi is becoming one of the super hot narratives, not just in 2025 but also in the next four years' time span. So how do you see this partnership to compete with Ethereum and Solana? Because we can also see that they work really hard.

in the institutional adoption and then partner with different car issuer. So what's your take on this?

So we are launching tomorrow. So you're getting a little bit of an alpha scoop here on your podcast, a partnership with Immersive and MasterCard so that you can do spending from your wallet. And it will immediately take USDC and make it into dollar at the point of sale. So you use your card, the Starbucks gets dollars, but you're holding USDC in your wallet, in a little immersive part of your wallet. Now, they started on Ethereum, actually.

And I'm not throwing shade. I'm not throwing shade on Ethereum. I have very deep respect for Ethereum. But the problem with Ethereum is that settlement is not instant. Settlement is not instant on NIR. Settlement is not instant on Solana. Settlement is not instant on Aptos. You know, they brag about, you know, two second settlement, three second settlement. But when it comes to money and institutions, it's

Settlement needs to be instant, immediate. And Algorand's unique feature is that as soon as you hit the return key, you're done. There's no sense in which that transaction will be questioned. It's instantly final. And so what that allows Immersive to do is, you know, if you're not instantly final,

You can't check the chain for the latest to make sure about the customer's balance on the card. You have to keep track of it yourself too, because if I make a payment to you on Ethereum for say a hundred bucks,

That might not show up on chain for 17 or 20 minutes later. And immersive cannot take that risk. So immersive has to, they look at the chain, but they also keep their own database of all of the transactions in your, you know, but on Algorand, they don't have to do that. They're so excited about this. They can just look on chain because the chain is the record.

So for them, they're very excited about this partnership. So are we, of course. And that's why we think we're going to win in this space, because when finance gets very serious, you cannot have uncertainty, even for a nanosecond.

Also, the chain has never gone down. I mean, I shouldn't say that out loud because it tempts the gods, you know, but we have never been down for a second. So that's also quite helpful when you're talking to institutions, right? Yeah, indeed. I'm not mentioning names. We know, everybody knows.

Everybody knows that. Let's back to the Algram token price. So we know there are some people or a lot of people want to invest in the Algram token. And currently, especially in this current market conditions, every token is volatile. And Algram is still volatile as well. But we know that Algram, like you just said, you have the very great technical strengths.

So how do you communicate those long-term values to the investor and to mitigate current market fluctuations?

Well, you know, we are very focused on that long-term value proposition for the chain in general. And I won't speak about the algo specifically because, you know, lawyers and regulation and all that sort of thing. Don't get me in trouble, you guys. You know, I got up early to do this podcast for you. Don't try to get me in trouble. But I will say it is shocking to me how little...

understood it is what drives token prices in general. I mean, it seems like the only thing that matters really is Bitcoin. And, you know, if Bitcoin is going up, we're going up with a bit more volatility, as you very rightly pointed out. And if Bitcoin goes down, we all go down. We could have the best announcements, the best things happening. If Bitcoin goes down, though, it's very hard to hold your... But, you know, I have to believe that

everything that we are doing is going to be a differentiator, right? So we're very focused on, it's like your mama told you, right? You know, focus on things you can control and don't worry about the things you can't control, right?

So just we're very focused on being the best blockchain with the best ecosystem, with the best developers. I'm focused on running the best foundation with the best people in it and happy people and just letting, you know, we have a, you know, where our community is not as large as say Solana's, but we have a mighty community. They're very engaged. They're very good developers. The best developers in our community are just like, I mean, scary how smart they are.

And, you know, we are now a fully Python and fully TypeScript coding environment. But for the first three years, we weren't. We had this like not very fun developer environment. We've invested a ton of millions and millions of dollars into the developer environment. But the perverse irony is that developers knew it's easy to build on, say, Ethereum.

But if you succeed, if you want to scale, your success can be your demise a little bit. And they looked at Algorand and they said, it's hard to learn how to build on Algorand because it's machine level language. But no matter how big you get, this chain can grow with you. This chain can scale with you. And so we have these developers from the beginning that

were willing to take that pain. They were so good that they weren't scared by the developer environment. And so we have these fantastic developers. Now though, anybody that knows Python can build an algorithm. So it's really a question of getting the message out. So I will say to all those Chinese developers out there, all you've got to do, if you know Python, you're good to go. You're totally good to go. We have revamped the developer portal. It's beautiful learning. All of the resources are now completely up to date. All the examples are up to date.

We've done a really, our head of DevRel has done a super nice job driving that effort. Or if you like TypeScript, you can come and develop in TypeScript too. And the Algo kit, the developer model is also very strong. So we think it's quite easy now, but yeah, but it wasn't so easy in the beginning for that. Yeah. Okay. Let's keep you out of the trouble. Okay.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, you know, the next question I want to ask is because we were told by several friends, there are OGs in the field, and also we can see that a lot of articles talking about Algorand, they call Algorand a sleeping giant.

So back to my first questions, what are the milestones you want to achieve as the CEO of the foundations, let's say in 2025 and also in the next five years? I like a good rhyme. So top 25 and 25. That is our goal. That is what our strategic plan is focused on, being the top 25 and 25. And so there's a couple of different ways that you can put your

the OKRs around the strategic plan for that. One way is to set goals for, and so that means we have goals for monthly active users, developer onboarding, user onboarding, growth in wallets, how many companies we get through the pipeline, how many of those companies get funding, et cetera, et cetera. We have 10 of these OKRs. And you can set those numbers, like what is the number that we're going to try to hit by the end of the year?

to something that is reasonable but stretches you a little bit. That's one approach. The other approach is, and this is the approach that we took, is to look at those top 25 coins and say, what do they have for active users? What do they have for developers? What's going on there? Because those are the numbers that we're going to have to meet. And even if they're like wildly unrealistic in some cases, and so that is...

There is just no reason why we shouldn't be a top 25 coin by the end of this year. No reason at all. So we get up every morning and we're not sleeping. I'll tell you that right now. We are not sleeping. We are working very hard because we think it's attainable. Like we think it's just and so.

Having the right people. We have a chief marketing officer now who really understands this and knows how to get into the zeitgeist and knows how to position us. That's going to be really important. And that's our goal. And then for the five-year goal, I think in five years,

you know, half of these layer ones are going to go away. And so we need to, yeah, you know, and so we need to just stay there, stay in the top 25 as, as, you know, kind of one goal. But the, the second quarter of, I would call it more like real world goal is that I want to be part of the tech stack where you don't know that we're there.

It's like, you don't know how a microchip works. You have no idea. And you don't care. You're going to die, both of you and me, without knowing how a microchip works. And that's okay. And so when you need blockchain functionality, you have a nice front end. You don't really care or know that it is powered by the blockchain or even Algorand, right? I mean, if you go to the Fly Bondi website at TravelX's first airline website,

there's no travel, like there's no Algorand there. It's just tickets for sale. You know, that's the kind of, that's the kind of thing to aspire for. Right. And,

And I think the next question would be about mass adoption. So mass adoption is basically one of the hot topics that many founders talk about, for instance, like Bayes, for instance, like Vitalik. So what's your take on this mass adoption and how algorithms embrace mass adoption? So, I mean, not just like technically, but also in the community side. So what's your strategies or your strengths?

to achieve mass adoption. I love our community. Don't, as I say, don't get, you guys, you're so tricky, the two of you. Don't get me in trouble with my community. But I will say that for mass adoption, the crypto community does not matter that much, right? It just doesn't. It's just not big enough. All of us together, we're like less than 1% of total financial assets, right? So if you want mass consumer, mass financial adoption,

It is not about talking to the D gents. It's just not. I love you guys though. I really do. I love all of you. It's not that we're ignoring you. I promise we're not ignoring you, but mass adoption has to be like that. My uncle,

or my father, everybody always uses females for this, so I'm very careful always to use men, that my uncle or my father can even understand this, you know, that they care about the customer experience and they don't know about the blockchain, or that it is in the back office of big financial institutions and they don't, all they know is that their cost per transaction went down, their record keeping costs went down. They were able to squeeze efficiencies out of

the fact that they need less intermediaries all of that stuff if we are everywhere ubiquitous everywhere and nobody knows it's called algorand that's totally fine with us so we need to just push hard on you know in hasab pay they get little cards these women do not know what a blockchain is all they know is that they can pay their electricity bill online now and not have to wait in line for you know four hours covered and be scared because they're not allowed to go outside

right? That's all they know. We just finished a partnership with Chess and Identity. We did this promotional video together with the Chess Federation. The word blockchain was not in this video anywhere. What they talked about was if you win in a tournament,

no longer when you go to the next tournament will nobody know that. Now you will have a wallet that shows this is who I beat, this is my ranking, this is I won, and then you go to a next tournament, they will log it on the same thing. This is why I da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da.

It's easy for them because it's one blockchain keeping that information. So it's impossible without a blockchain, especially if there's different people, right? But you don't need to know. We do disaster relief payments, disaster relief in the United States with a care wallet.

You know, you now, you know, disaster relief is in the United States is just absolutely appalling. There are people, disaster relief workers that fly on site with tens of thousands of dollars in prepaid debit cards in a money belt to hand them out to disaster relief sites. It's crazy.

So now with the care wallet you take and then there's also a lot of fraud, right? You try to double dip, you try to do that. Now it's all on Algorand. Your house is flooded. You take a picture of yourself, take a picture of your ID, take a picture of your flooded living room.

The caseworker sees it immediately. Then they download, they send to your wallet a list of prepaid items at Home Depot, a list of prepaid items on Amazon that you can buy. You go, da, da, da, da, da. They send it to you. You don't know that anything like that took place on a blockchain, but then you try again. Oh, that was pretty neat. I got some money from FEMA. Now I'll try to get some money from the Red Cross. Red Cross is also on this system. They say, no, no, no, no, no. We know you're logged on this common database. That's

That's why it works because it used to be that FEMA would have a database and Red Cross has a database. And when they get fully integrated, it'll be just easier for them

to manage these constituents, not to be so worried about fraud that you don't get money for four months, but not to be so giving out money that you open yourself to fraud, right? None of these examples need to know that the blockchain has anything to do with this, but they're all enabled by blockchain technology. Right. Yeah. You know, last time in the DEF CON in Bangkok,

And that is the first time I saw the mass adoptions, you know, that is the mass adoptions, you know, being adopted by all those DJs. So that time I told GI that, okay, that is the time. Because when we enter into blockchain industries and we start in the RWAs, and you know, a lot of people just say, you guys are not working.

Because all of those, the DJs don't like those things. We are looking for something new and we are looking for something that is decentralized. But what you guys are bringing on chain is not decentralized. You guys are not contributing to the DJs.

But three or four years later to today, and I saw the people were changing our minds because we know a lot of the DGENs, at least they admitted that the DGENs community is quite small and we need the bigger strength. We need another peoples or outsiders to join in these industries and we can make the cake bigger.

A hundred percent, but you need the DJs to start. You need the early adopters, of course. Yeah. The DJ is a core. The DJ is always the core. Yeah. So, but yeah, yeah.

But I'll tell you something, you know, the Milken Institute has a big global conference every year. They also publish an economic policy journal. I have been writing for the Milken Institute policy journals called the Milken Review for 10 years. I've probably published seven articles there. They're all on financial inclusion, crypto, fintech, stuff like that. This year, I made the cover of the Milken Institute Review.

And of course, I'm proud of myself for that. But it's more to your point, the point that you just made, is that this is traditional old school finance. Mike Milken, the Milken Institute, to put crypto on the cover of their policy magazine is not something that I would have predicted even three years ago. But it is now starting. It's becoming mass adoption, becoming he they now think it's an important enough topic to put on the cover of their policy journal.

Right. Wow, amazing. It's cool. The timing is coming. You should read it. It's really good. Yes, indeed. Okay, so there are two more questions I would like to ask.

And the first one, actually, those two questions are related together. So first one, I'd like to, would you mind give us some advice for the next generations or the newcomers or the newbies in the blockchains? And what advice you'd like to them and how the Algram going to embrace those newbies and those new builders and to the Algram ecosystem?

Okay, is that the first question or is there two? Tell me the second question and I'll answer them maybe together if they're related. The second question is more on your perspective. So we'd like to know what lexis you want to leave in the blockchain.

Oh, I see. Okay. All right. So I think the answer to the first question is we are really, we have not always been so good at this, but now we are really good at onboarding new users. We have put so much work and effort and hiring into this last year. So if any of you have tried to check out the Algorand blockchain in the past and found it a bit frustrating to navigate where to go, that's all basically fixed. So we just finished

a big workshop program that had 4,200 registrants for it. It was, I think, three weeks long, six workshops, two times a week. They're all recorded, but we had an average of 300 people per workshop. And we had something like 1,700 people engaged in some way with these workshops.

And the gal that the gal and the guy that run these are very good. They're very they're young like you, you know, both of them. And they're very clear and they're very technical, but they're very and we're getting very good reviews and we'll keep holding these workshops. So that's a really good way to come in.

As I said before, the developer portal has now many more worked examples and a good library of examples. So that we're building all the time. And then we have for entrepreneurs accelerator program that it's a little hard to get into this program. We have to think that you're serious and you have a chance, but we will then help you with everything, finding product market fit, marketing, legal and regulatory advice. We call it our bridge services program. So we will...

You know, sometimes necessity is the mother of invention, right? Since we're not like oozing with money, like some other, like XRP is or Solana is, we have to offer other, we can't throw money around because we don't have that kind of money. So we have to offer like really handholding support. And so we really, we've really focused on that to attract and keep developers.

So that's the set. So come and check it out. I mean, it's where we've made a lot of progress in the last year. And then I forgot this. Yeah. Yeah. You just mentioned the workshop link and the workshop you guys are recorded. Does any links there? Is that online?

Yeah, totally. Well, I'll send you the links. You might just send us the link and I'll put it on the show notes if anyone is interested. Okay, great. Yeah. Yeah, they can just... Yeah, yeah, 100%. That will be the last question. Yeah, the last question. What legacy do you want to leave in blockchain? So for instance, like in 50 years later, when we talk about Stacey Worden, how will you think about the people talking about you?

Total world domination by the Algorand blockchain. Wow. Very punchy. No, I think two things. I think, you know, Algorand deserves to be, you know, a top 10 blockchain and I want to help get it there. And I hope that my successors will continue that march to get it there. That's the first thing. And second thing, I hope that

my, you know, my family and my friends and the people that know me continue to associate me with the things that I've already always cared about. And I've always cared about impact. I've always cared about financial inclusion. I've always cared about access to capital. I've always thought that this is the key to prosperity. And I want people to say, yes, this, the thing she did with Algorand was one more piece of that puzzle. And that she continued to care about these things and she continued to

to work hard to get them and blockchain is just was a very good tool for helping you know helping drive that as she always has. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Thank you so much, guys. Except for your two gotcha questions. I had a really good time. Thank you so much, Stacey. And I hope our audience enjoy our talk. And we believe this is the episodes we can bring our ground back to the Chinese people's version. And I love a lot of our audience can start go back.

to check what Ogram's doing. And yeah, just follow the Ogram.