Alan Orwick, co-founder of Quai Network. Welcome. Thank you, Peter, excited to chat today. Awesome. Before we get into what you guys are doing at Quai and some of the kind of recent developments, especially the TGE coming up, we'd love to hear about your origin story. How'd you get into crypto? And more importantly, like, why do you stay? Yeah, great question. I think going back, I was always in person interested in technology. I was coding from a very young age and I wanted to dabble with software hardware and just find out how the world worked through these devices. So leading into crypto, I was really sort of trying to understand it from an engineering perspective. I was going to school at the University of Texas where I was studying computer science starting in 2016. And that actually led me to starting Texas blockchain. which is the undergraduate blockchain organization there. I was president of that for two years, grew it to 200 students. That was kind of in the 2017 bull run. And a lot of people were trying to figure out what crypto was for the first time. And that gave us the opportunity to start some of the first classes at UT and some of the first really educational materials for people at UT and in Austin as a whole. So I think we, we coordinated a lot of people that were crypto minded and then also began to continue to do research on campus, which is some of the origin. around Quai. Outside of that, I've gotten into crypto for a bunch of different reasons. I always thought the origin story of Bitcoin was very interesting. So Satoshi, seeing why traditional finance was breaking down, why the society that we lived in was structured the way it was in terms of a monetary system and how we've evolved from things like the gold standard into a fiat standard and what the fiat standard really means, what currencies look like over time and how they rise and fall. Also just in terms of the sort of concerns around the banking system, especially around 2008 and onward. So that was really my motivation for looking at crypto holistically. Of course, I'm interested in all of the technology and use cases and applications. So really trying to accommodate that into Quai network, things from NFTs to DeFi to D-PIN to decentralized AI. think everything that can be tokenized will be tokenized in the future and these systems will become global economic monetary layers for anything that wants to be traded. And I think we're going to see a future where more and more things do become traded. And ideally, they become traded on Quai. So that's kind of our ethos and motivation. And ultimately, keeping that true to the original values of decentralization, cypherpunks and people that can sort of relinquish control of systems and allow that to flourish in the open in a decentralized manner. Nice. Now you can't mention Texas without talking about Texas barbecue. So is that like a thing that you're into or? yeah, so the barbecue, Texas hands down the best. You I got some funny stories in barbecue. I was in Paris for Eith Paris at one point and you're walking around the streets of Paris and you see a Kansas City barbecue place in Paris and you're like, that probably has to be the worst barbecue of all time. But you know, in terms of the United States, you know, great barbecue in Texas. You know, there's a few in Austin if you're around. There's Terry Black's downtown, so just on the other side near Barton Springs, that's a famous one. If you go on a nice sunny day in Austin, you can go hit Barton Springs where It's spring fed water, so it's like 60 degrees cold. So it's like taking an ice plunge, but it's like a giant pool. So that's like the local draw there. And then just down the street, there's a great barbecue joint. If you want to go a little further, there's a place called Cooper's out in Lano. It's about an hour drive. Definitely worth it. Some of the best Texas barbecue you'll get. And then like Salt Lake is a great recommendation as well, but you can get a giant beef ribs that are like a few pounds and you know, you'll be, you'll be full for days. That's amazing. I'm on the carnivore diet and that's all I eat. eat bone broth every day, 95 % protein based diet, animal based. So you're talking my language. That's great. Let's get into what you guys are doing at Quai. So Quai is a proof of work blockchain, but it has lots of really unique properties. And we'd love for you to help kind of educate the audience on an audience that's mostly familiar with proof of stake blockchains that are mostly copypasta of each other using the tenorment consensus mechanism. You guys have really departed from that and it's quite unique in lots of different ways. And so that's good in that it's highly differentiated. But some of the challenges is, well, you got to educate the... the community on what the heck all of this is, what it means, why it's different, how it benefits the developers that build on you, and also the users that want to transact on Quai. So anyway, it creates a lot of extra good by good. And so we'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, so we've really thought about Quai from first principles and I think looking at how a blockchain should be designed, we've spent our time to re-architect and if we were to say, let's spend the time to make all the right decisions, let's do it. And we're not in a hurry to get a token out. We've literally been working on Quai since 2018. It started as a research paper, like I said, and so that first topic on how to scale a decentralized system brought in different ideas from things like Peter Todd's tree chains. If you look at the HBO documentary on who is Satoshi, HBO says it's Peter Todd. I disagree, but he's been an OG Bitcoiner that has described ways of scaling Bitcoin. If you look at even Satoshi's OG Bitcoin talk forum posts, they've used topics like merge mining. So applying merge mining to Bitcoin to increase scalability. And so we've assessed and looked at a lot of the original thought that said, if you were to redesign it and bringing these features into a proof of work blockchain, how would you make it faster? And sort of framing the context between proof of work and proof of stake. think that would be, you know, several hour long discussion, but at a high level, we see proof of work as remaining more decentralized and accessible. So if we want to start from that area and say, well, we want to achieve over time, something that looks like a commodity like Bitcoin and having that same addressable market, we think it has to be proof of work. And we found a way using those techniques and technologies to shard a blockchain, increase the throughput. allow for more transactions per second, do things like additional parallelization inside of a smart contracts designed land like an EVM, then we can keep these low and we can go step by step and sort of work from the ground up to build what we see as sort of a holistic blockchain that can accommodate all sorts of different use cases. So those were sort of the, you know, design choices in the life cycle of building Quai is just saying, you know, let's spend the time to research it. Let's do it correct. and let's not be in a hurry. And of course, you know, this is sort of pre TGE now. So people are going to watch this and be like, wait, these guys are launching a token. thought they said they wanted to, you know, wait and do everything correct, but we've actually gone through four test nets. We've done the, you know, our first fundraise in 2022. So it's been three years of consistent building to get to this point. And we've seen what we can accomplish in these test nets to, you know, sort of go on and take an approach that we're actually making proof of work faster. We're finding a way. to compete with the scalability of systems that we're seeing that are proof of stake. And we're actually going beyond that because again, not sure how technical everyone is, but if you look at proof of stake, there's a lot of voting that has to take place. So tracking how many consensus votes are actually taking place on chain. And if you look at Ethereum, you know, they run at the quote unquote 15 TPS, but if you count those consensus votes, it's actually closer to 200. So. the bandwidth and the latency that is taking place is hogging user transactions and similar for things like Solana. So if you look at Solana, I believe it's about 50 % user transactions compared to consensus voting transactions. And with Quai, we found that proof of work offloads that consensus to the GPU mining, that real world energy expenditure, which again does take energy, but we don't see it as a negative. We see it as a positive because you have to have that real cost of creating the tokens and validating the blockchain. And then we're opening up that bandwidth for user transactions alone, therefore lowering the cost for everyone that is doing things like swaps or trades or different types of use cases that we see. You said a lot there and just so much substance. want to maybe double click into a couple of things. You explained this idea of energy and forget the name of the macro economist. He translates every kind of piece of GDP output into like a unit of energy. I forget his name, but when he frames it like that, it obviously makes the the idea of like energy so much more important. And I'm curious about why Quai is doing that. And why is that important for us? Yeah, so we see energy as the blood of the economy, right? It's the thing that puts everything around us. It's the thing that coordinates our economic structures. And it's the thing that is, in most cases, the bottleneck for growth. And that's why you see Trump coming into office saying right now that we need to drill and that we need to frack and that we need to increase our energy expenditure. Because if you look at our, or the sort of, you know, hegemonies across the globe, you have something like China that is three X or energy production, and they're able to go and build cities and do all these things. and have essentially unbounded energy because they're making use of the resources available to them. And so you get into a trade-off between what do you need to spend in terms of fossil fuels and non-renewables to get to the point where renewables do make sense, but ultimately, we can hope for a future for electrifying everything that we have sustainable energy systems that are producing things to increase our GDP and increase the growth and prosperity for all humans. Because if you look at society, sort of high GDP nations, have to have high energy consumption. And that's actually a pretty linear trend. I could find the graph, but if you look at the sort of relative GDP to the relative energy consumption, it's a pretty much linear correlation. we see incentivizing systems with energy is the right way to optimize for efficiency. In Texas, we actually have great examples of that because you have things like Bitcoin miners that are going to the excess energy pockets. and going and flaring natural gas on top of oil wells or trapping landfills and changing that methane into CO2. So essentially reducing some of the economic or the environmental impact of that methane gas in the atmosphere and then also things like hydro, solar and others that are more sort of off-peak. So for that side, you we want to align the economy with energy because we see that as a cornerstone of it. And if we can actually find ways to ingrain that more into society, it might be more sort of optimized compared to something like a fiat standard that might perturb it more. Yeah. And tell us about the unit of energy in the Quai Network and how that is related to the token. Yeah. So in Quai, we actually have two tokens. So we'll start with like Bitcoin and Bitcoin essentially has one single token. It's the, it's BTC as an asset and the network serves BTC and BTC serves the network through security. So in terms of halvings, they're arbitrary. Satoshi directly said that halvings were kind of just pulled out of nowhere and that they happened on four year cycles. People thought it was very interesting that he did it similarly with the U S elections because that's kind of a marketing move. But ultimately over time, those halvings will run out. and they don't actually relate to the hash rate that is secured by the network. It's sort of more so that the hash rate follows the economic price of the halvings. So if the halvings continue to occur, then security will continue to go down unless the token price of Bitcoin goes up, which is sort of like the whole grand scheme of like why Michael Saylor has like $13 million Bitcoin predictions and the global adoption of Bitcoin will continue to go on is because Bitcoin as an asset must go up for it to continually have the same security. So if we were to say, how can we create a proof of work system that relates the emissions of the token to the stability and adoption of the network? Well, you actually have something that tells you the real world value or gives you a proxy or an insight into how much energy or consumption or value is securing that network. And that's the hash rate. So in Quai, we actually use that hash rate to inform something about the real world stability of the token and of the network and the relative growth of that. and we can manifest that and represent that in a token. So we call that token the Chi token or the Qi, and that token acts not as a stable coin, but as a stable coin like asset or stable coin alternative that is tied to electricity or the electricity consumed by GPU proof of work miners, which again is a proxy to that energy consumption. So again, that's kind of our downstream effects of how we can bring energy into the system. The Qui token is that store value like asset that's similarly emitted in a Bitcoin-like manner that's more kind of reflective of the store value type of emission and that Chi token is supposed to be used more like cash. got it. If you were to explain the Kwai network to your mom, how would you do it? Yeah, I mean with Quai, we really want to focus on an underserved market and that's payments. So we want to try to create Venmo-like experiences for people to use crypto every day. We want Quai to be available every time for everyone, every place, and ensuring that if you want to access your funds that are on a blockchain, you're able to do so and you're able to transfer them with extremely low fees. So that would be our hope and the goal for a sort of more, you know, fitting use case for that persona. Now, is it right to say that that payments will be... it's... Quai is a general purpose network, but payments is the first... is that one of the first applications that you're looking to grow on Quai? Absolutely. And I think that's, as I said, underserved. You we've seen that as one of the more emergent use cases for crypto as a whole. And I also think when I say goes back to the original vision, you know, things were meant to be electronic cash systems and we were supposed to find ways of transferring value globally at no cost with no intermediaries. And we've sort of found ways to accomplish more of a circular trade routine where we all just go when we trade value on systems and we're We're PVPing for meme coins, but we haven't found ways to essentially reduce friction in our economy, go out and compete against that one to 3 % fees and things like Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and reduce that drag in our economy. Stablecoins are addressing that right now. You look at things like Circle and USDT, which are killer businesses, by the way. I mean, if you look at what Tether is doing compared to things like BlackRock per employee, they're crushing BlackRock's profit. So it's clearly a winning use case. Heather and USDC can still have egregious fees up to a dollar or $15 if you transact USDC on base layer one Ethereum. So they're in the case right now where like we have ways of transferring stable coins. But if I want to go buy a coffee, it doesn't make sense for me to pay with a stable coin because my coffee might be two bucks and it costs me 30 cents to buy it with a stable coin. So we haven't created those systems that make stable coins work at scale and it's still one of the leading use cases in ways in which payments are being adopted on chain directly. So for us, I think we're seeing that as an area that no other blockchain can address. And with the technology that we've created, we can move into that market. But absolutely in terms of having an EVM, having smart contracts and having ways that people can deploy standard crypto applications, I think everything would benefit from that environment and benefit from the decentralization, security and speed that comes with it. I like the focus that you're looking at payments as the first primary use case for Quai. And how does that inform your approach to business development and partnerships and also in attracting developers to build on Quai? Are you initially looking for payment type applications or are you trying to maybe invite any type of application on Quai? Yeah, I mean, we're open to any type of application and that's because you want to build a base of people and you want to build engineers that are excited about what they're doing. So making QI a place that has tons of liquidity for people that want to deploy and having interest as a whole, because developers, if you're building one thing, you know, might not always be building that one thing forever and you can pivot into something else. And we want to make sure that people building on QI have a home there. And given that we have solidity compatibility and ways that we can attract developers from other ecosystems. We want that to be a relatively low barrier to entry. But in terms of finding different use cases, you know, for payments, I think there's a lot of things we're doing in house to push that forward. so building out ways that we can create the UX that really leads in this way, because building an ecosystem is challenging and takes a lot of time. You know, we're still a relatively new blockchain. And so we want a lot of the core primitives that our ecosystem can use. And I think we want to encourage people to get creative with the types of applications that they want to deploy. So. from in terms of the payment type architecture, if we see a vision for that, that might come more directly from us versus having that be more ecosystem led. But there are partners that we're working with on the payment side. There's a few particularly in the card space with technology that we want to leverage. So having things like self-custody cards that can be plugged into applications and different types of software. So where you're actually transacting with a physical card that is using blockchain rails and then also sort of disintermediating. this intermediating those types of systems. We're excited about that. But yeah, ultimately, like I said, we want to accommodate as many use cases as possible and just ensure that we have adequate liquidity to cover them all. As you build out the, as the foundation kind of builds out, I'm guessing it's the foundation that'll be building out these key kind of payment primitives for developers to use. How do you, I guess, what's the thought process on deciding what those features are, the kind of customer development, speaking with developers and getting feedback. What does that process look like at Quai? Yeah, I mean, it's very open and collaborative, right? Our Discord has like 200,000 people in it and the Developer Discord has several thousand. So we're always around and tracking what people want. And I think we're pretty responsive in terms of someone has a need, we're pretty quick to go and address it and build it. So I think it's a iterative process with everyone in the community to essentially build different tooling. And I'm always surprised every single day, just what people throw up and say, Hey, I built this tool and I built this thing that helps us accomplish this or XYZ. And that helps someone else get to their end goal faster than we would have been able to jump in and do. So I think right now we're at a really synergistic spot with everyone and there's a lot of excitement around what we're building. And so the more and more people can contribute and help each other, the better. I think like we're kind of going to get to in a bit. We do a lot in terms of education and prioritization around what we're doing. And so I think the vibe and the overall sort of way in which the community is structured is that people are willing to help each other. And they want to also educate each other and learn. And I think in a world in which people discover Quai for the first time and they're not as familiar with crypto, we want to give them the tools to discover blockchain and understand it. Of course, we might have our own sort of flavor on their learning, but we still want to be pretty, you know, not biased, unbiased or not biased against, you know, everything else. And we will still say, you know, pretty honest takes against other different systems and how they're used and how they're developed. But ultimately, I think, you know, the community is leading the effort and we're putting as much. kind of fuel on that fire as we can. You know, I think that's one of the strengths, one of the key kind of things that I really enjoy about builders in the blockchain space is, you know, they're opinionated, they have a strong opinions about things, but they're also really open and unbiased in a general, I think in most cases. And I think that's really admirable. If we were to think of blockchains as cities, you're familiar with this analogy, and that you need bridges across these cities and you need commerce in the cities. Like using that framework as a metaphor, tell us about your Quai Network's approach to kind of becoming part of, you know, the rest of the blockchain space, including interoperability and attracting applications that are already built on other chains to come over to Quai, including assets. What does that look like? Yeah, it's a very long game, right? And I think overall, all layer ones and layer twos are trying to figure this out. So they're looking at how can they optimize their city for everyone to come over and find ways to make it their home. And for us, I think it starts with that key infrastructure and differentiation. Or we could say, here's where you can establish yourself for a long term. You don't have to worry about jumping between layer twos or new systems that come out. This is the last blockchain that you will need. So let's get in and let's set up and let's bring everything in to ensure that we can support each other and build something here with adequate differentiation. So for us, that's kind of the angle we're taking. And then also having the right vibe and the right support from a team because developers can't come in and if they don't have anyone to answer their questions, then they're gonna just go back to somewhere else that does or does support them. So from our side, we're pretty selective with our grants. We wanna find the people that are committed to building on QI. and we want to make sure we give them the tools and the dedicated support that they need, but we find ways to make sure that they have adequate support long term, not just in terms of development costs, but marketing, fundraising, and other ways that they can go in and support their own business. from our standpoint, those are some of the things that we look to support for builders for the long term. And then also too, just bringing in those cornerstone applications that people can plug into. So you've got to have your primitives, you've got to have your swaps, you've got to have your NFT marketplaces, you've got to have your borrow lend. You gotta have all those different pieces that are more commoditized. But if we can find ways to make those better and have that compete against other layer one and layer two blockchains, then that's a win. And like it's simple things, right? Cause if you look at a DEX, the standard EVM DEX, when you go and you trade a token, you have to do like five clicks to like buy a token. You gotta sign, you gotta prove, you gotta sign again, you gotta broadcast. And if you go look at all the other EVM solutions, a lot of the things have been out of the box and copy paste and they don't really rethink about, how can we make a DEX better? and there are new primitives like permit2 where you can basically get that one click buy token like you do on Slana, which is a silly reason, but it might be one of the reasons why Phantom and things like Radium and Jupiter have eaten so much mind share in terms of dex volume. It's because, it's easy. You just go on Phantom, one click buy, one click sell, and that is possible in the EVM, but no one's really taking the effort to do it, at least not on the dexes that I've used. Maybe there's a few that have done it that are emerging, but they're on a few other different chains. For Quai, that's one of the simple things where we've looked at our ecosystem and we said, we should fix that. That, to us, is clearly something that users want, and it's clearly why Solana is winning in terms of some of those transaction volumes. And of course, there's many other reasons. But we decided to fix it. And we said, hey, let's make this a property that we decide to go and make sure is leading the way in terms of anyone that interacts with the decks on Quai. So that is one small example. But that is why, you know, And every little thing that we've done in terms of network architecture, DAP interaction, terms of economic policy, in terms of every interaction we have, we try to find a way to optimize and make it better. And so that's a very long-winded answer in terms of all of the different things. But I think that's a good anecdote and a use case that we found that helps make Quai more usable. You know, you said two things in there that I want to talk about. So the first one you just said, you called developers business owners. I think that kind of framing them as business owners is really, really important because they're entrepreneurs, they're developers, sure, but they're actually trying to build a business and they're using the, know, Quine network as the platform in which to build that business. so as the foundation that supports these developers, that's going to be really key. because they're going to have specific needs and they're going to look to you and the foundation and the rest of the team and the community for some help. I think in a lot of ways that's how Solana is actually winning because they are incredibly responsive to the needs of developers and you don't really see that on the Ethereum side right now, which is probably why there's a lot of animosity and drama in the Ethereum community because of that. You said another thing that is kind of a dichotomy. You said, you know, the Quai network is quite complex. Lots of kind of new terms, new technologies. You guys are highly differentiated. And then you describe the ease of use of the wallet on Quai. So the dichotomy is interesting because while the network is complex and it's new in a lot of ways, the user experience, you're trying to make that easier. Tell us like from first principle, you kind of explained it, but I'd love to hear more on from first principles, like what other things are you trying to abstract away from the user so that they don't have to deal with the complexity underneath? Because that's super important. Yeah, so there's a couple things. One that immediately comes to mind is sharding. So having a system that shards and can accommodate more scale. One of the unique things we've done is we've actually sharded the address space. So if you have an address, it maps to a shard. So if I have like OX00, that maps to shard one, OX01 maps to shard two. And that actually goes back to not just a fundamental improvement on how the blockchain can be designed, but now you can say, you can look at a wallet and you can say this is assigned to this shard and I don't have to worry about managing money and the wallet doesn't have to worry about managing money across those shards or wondering, like if I have one wallet, is my money on this L2 or is it on this other L1? And that's actually kind of what we see breaking in terms of design, in terms of, you if I load up a Metamask and it's like, here are all the different chains that your money's on. It's like, well, how do I track all of that? But now we've abstracted some of that to make it specific per shard, both in a benefit to the network throughput. but also a benefit to the user experience, because you can look at an address and say, if I'm sending money from A to B, I know that this is going from this place to that other place. And there's also ways with that construction that we can essentially make shards disappear entirely and just have that be one single aggregate layer that is sort of mapped per shard with things like DNS names or having sort of a label to that derivation. So from our standpoint, that's one of the ways that we've improved user experience. And then also, in terms of... yeah. like a mix of UTXO and account-based almost. It feels like. almost. Yeah, almost. You know, because you have sort of several addresses to manage and in the UTXO world, they kind of have it more one per and there's a derivation style there. Yep. And which is literally how we do things in the real world. mean, I have one physical wallet. I don't have like 50 wallets, you know, and then that one wallet and money comes out of it to different places. And so it really feels like the metaphor is like how we actually live our life. Yeah, and the unique thing too is we take that a next step further where we use a thing called payment codes when we interact with the Qi asset since Qi actually is UTXO based. so a payment code is one single address, but it's not an address. It's more of a derivation key that creates addresses for you. So if I have your payment code, I can create addresses and send assets, send Qi to those addresses with just having that payment code and that maps in a UTXO system. that adds sort of other benefits. It adds some semblance of privacy. I wouldn't say it's full privacy because it's not like dark coin style privacy. It's more so just a sort of entropic type of privacy. But that's another area that we've explored. And then in terms of other user benefits, we've done things for not just the front-facing, but in terms of developer benefits, we found ways to further decentralize RPCs so that people can connect to their nodes locally. and deploy applications that have trustless RPCs. We do that with a process called NEPO PALS. And then we've also found ways to keep hardware requirements low for nodes and make sure that they're freely accessible there. Suppose there's a killer app on Quai that just overloads these RPCs. Do you have a strategy for offloading all that traffic? And I asked this because I was part of a layer one and we had one application that literally shut down the entire network. There's billions of assets being bridged over and all these users wanted to gamble on this game. And the whole thing just shut down. And RPCs are one of those things that you don't think about until something doesn't work, then everyone's mad about it. And so a question that's unplanned, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, I mean, the goal would be for the blockchain to be the RPC. So traditionally in a network architecture design, when you run this sort of system, there's one big box that everyone connects to, or there's a series of big boxes that are sort of replicated with a load balancer. The performance of that load balancer can kind of depend on the network consensus of all the big boxes behind it. And so you're sort of always worried about the state based off that load balancer in terms of caching and availability and who's serving that data. But if you removed that and you just said any node in the network can now be an RPC, as long as those nodes are coming to consensus, then I will get valid data from any single one of them. So you can actually create what looks like a decentralized Infura just by serving data from the network itself with the non-interactive proofs of proof of work or NEPO PALs, as well as state proofs. So having a Merkle Tree state proof with a NEPO PAL gives you some validation around that data being valid. And then I can just ask any single node. And so if you create a sort of P2P layer that can serve that data, as well as some economic design and serving that data, then anyone can become an RPC versus just one big box that is at risk of falling over. And you know, that's kind of one of the dirty, dirty secrets that we don't talk about in blockchain. There's so many centralized pieces of the blockchain, especially on the Ethereum side that, you know, we kind of overlook. know, RPCs is one of those. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about the, you alluded to it earlier on the YouTube page, on the Quai network YouTube page, there are, I think, 247 videos. which points to how you guys are prioritizing content marketing, education. Tell us about that strategy and who are you trying to educate and coming up with the specific content pillars of what to talk about. Yeah, yeah, you're looking at the set behind me, right? know, here we are in the room. And I think one of the key differentiations is like, we're here in the office every day, know, Monday through Friday, nine to five, we've got the team here. We're working to build these systems. And I think we take that approach from a startup seriously. And we haven't won yet. And I think even then, if you look at some of the bigger layer one blockchains, there's still a lot of room. And so you were in this sort of design where We're a startup in a larger system that is still an emerging startup and a lot of people don't understand crypto. So you go back to all the things that we just talked about, that's foreign language. So there has to be ways for people to get to our level of understanding and see why we've made the decisions that we've made. Because historically crypto is very tribal. So if you look at a simple scenario like proof of work versus proof of stake, you're like, well, I hold all my assets in proof of stake systems. So I don't like proof of work because if proof of work succeeds, and we're in this PVP world, then that's bad for everything that I hold. And for us, it's like, well, there's actually a reasonable design language around these discussions and there's nuance to most things in life. There's nuance to pretty much everything. So if we can sit and have conversations and talk to people like you about what we've built, why we did it, and to show that, hey, we're real people making real trade-offs and we're not just sort of trying to pull hot air on what we've built. We've been doing this for some time, telling that story. and doing this founder led marketing approach where we're making ourselves visible, making ourselves available and telling people, like we've thought about this and we're trying to address these problems. We may not get to everything immediately, but we have this vision of where we want to go. And we see this point for crypto that we haven't really seen for crypto that is actually sort of putting a lot of people off or turning people off in crypto. And we need to find those ways to actually accomplish that vision of what crypto should be. And I think that's all through content. That's all through pounding the pavement every day. It's all about making sure that people see that we're visible, building these systems and trying to make it work. At the end of the day, it might not work. That's the whole point of startups. That's the whole point of this iterative process of building the systems. I'll be the first to say, that's one of the main things that we try to walk the line of. It's like, where are we? How can we educate? And what is this gonna look like in the upcoming years? And I just think that having this content, having that 240 videos, having these podcasts, having this way of telling people about Qui. is the way that we're going to get people to see what we're doing and hopefully resonate with it and join us on the journey. I think it's a smart approach. It's an approach that not a lot of projects take, especially not to... Yeah, it is hard, especially not to the level that Quai has with... It's consistent, it's over time, and it seems very intentional with some videos that are focused on what is Quai, other videos focused on as a developer, like here's how you get involved. So it feels like there's very specific content themes that you guys have come up with. What was the... the process in coming up with those and how's that going so far in attracting eyeballs and attention and developers? Yeah, I mean think a lot of it stems from what is the need, right? So when you look at developers, they're like, hey, if a developer is deploying a DAP, how do they do that? And most times they don't wanna sit and just go through a written document. They wanna go through a video, they wanna cut back and forth. They're like, hey, if I missed a step, they're gonna talk me through all of the things I just missed. So we create a lot of content to serve a lot of the fundamental things of just building on QI and then also educating on what QI is. So. It's a lot of kind of back and forth against the community and seeing what they want to learn on, what they want to go in and dive into. But I think a lot of it too is just talking about our beliefs and structures around the way the world works and what crypto is and how it should be utilized. So, you know, really I think it's just an iterative process. Our YouTube has sort of evolved over time into, you know, a more polished look. Our designer is amazing and everyone here in the office is really good. We have a pretty small team. you know, we accomplished a lot with a little, but I think that's been the main thing is just trying to put yourself out there. And of course, you know, you're in the content creation side as well. So it's about, you know, seeing what people want to talk about and then adjusting and then just being open to doing it. And at first, you know, you're going to be kind of hesitant because you're like, well, what if I talk about this or what are people going to say about that? But I think ultimately it's in the day we're all humans and we like having conversations around interesting topics. And with QI, we try to reflect that around what we're building as well and ensuring people that, you know, what we're building is for a purpose as a whole, as opposed to just. building a system in a city that remains empty. Yeah. Let's talk about the target audience real quick. So, Quai is unique in that I think Quai has miners, is that correct? So, proof of work miners versus on the proof of stake side, you've got stakers. You've got kind of big stakers and then everyone can be a staker kind of thing. And then you also have developers, of course. then, correct me if I'm wrong, but you also have community members that... are not tactical, but they just want to be part of the community. Any other target kind of audiences that you guys are serving that I haven't mentioned? Yeah, I mean, I institutions is one. So if you can find ways to get institutional capital on chain, doing things like RWAs, if you look at as well sort of manufacturers and things that are building more sort of robust and manufactured assets, plugging into things like Deepin and plugging into ways that you can utilize crypto in IoT, plugging it into different types of devices and tokenizing more of that infrastructure. You're also looking at this emerging class of sort of trad buy on chain, the real estate markets on chain. You know, we plug into the energy side as well. So how can we work with sort of municipalities to make sure that they can find ways to plug into crypto that way? And then, yeah, absolutely. For the miner side, you know, that's something that is more on the supply side because they are sort of responsive to the network demand. As I talked about earlier, sort of hashrate follows what the perceived value of the network is. So they're definitely community members and they're people that we want to support, but they're more of a sort of service to the network versus. a key demand side of the network. And with the service side of the network, you we want to make sure that all works. And that's kind of the key thing with proof of work is you're separating the token holders and the security of the network, which is a nice property if you want to maximize decentralization, because you sort of get this challenge and this lockstep approach where eventually we want to look like Bitcoin where there's no upgrades, everything works and it's pretty much impossible for everyone to come to agree because everything is so sort of spread out that you can't come to a decision. And then, yes, community members are definitely a key part of the stakeholders, people that hold the token, people that use the systems on the network. And then you sort of go down sort of the list and hopefully, you know, bring more people in that actually can use the token every day for different types of use cases. But I don't think we're at the point every day where it's like, you know, you walk down the street and someone's like, Hey, like I'm going to use crypto because I'm going to go buy an NFT or go buy a meme coin. And so I think there's this big push right now where meme coins are bringing retail in and they are bringing people in, but it's just so sort of, you know, put in a way that is manipulated and is a way that is not friendly as a whole that people are like, once they go try that they're like turned off from crypto. So I think it's a balance where you have to build a sustainable and long-term community, but also try to find different avenues to bring people in. Yeah. I like that approach in that you've segmented your audience and then each audience segment has specific needs and you guys try to meet those needs. I'm curious about the enterprise side. that an audience segment that you guys are focused on right now with real world assets and decentralized infrastructure, that type of thing? Nope, yeah I do, I think it's emerging and I still think, especially if you look at this cycle, it's a pretty institutional heavy cycle. You have things like the BlackRock Biddle Fund that's getting close to think half a billion in TVL there and you're seeing more and more types of tokenization of things like stocks on chain. And for us, given that we have this core centric idea around energy, I do think there is a really interesting use case in settling things like commodities on chain against. energy as a pairing mechanism and facilitating contracts around that. So essentially, imagine if you wanted to long oil against the key price of electricity like that, to me is an interesting use case and an interesting market, as well as the ability for just anyone to go public on chain. I think we're going to move from this future where people go to things like the New York Stock Exchange or go to the upcoming Texas Stock Exchange and they say, hi, hey, I'm just going to go take my company public on chain. So I think that the capital markets are changing that way. And I think that blockchains are going to continually to eat that market share and we want quite a bit part of that. I'm asking because I don't know but with the US dollar as the dominant currency and and stable coins are right now pegged against the dollar is there a world in which you know? Qui can be part of that world Given that everything is kind of pegged to the dollar and instead quite like a you know representation of a unit of energy Yeah, so Chi Chi kind of in the energy dollar sense. Yeah, so but yes, both are construed together and being part of this network. It's important to consider both. I think that yes, the dollar has been an asset since kind of the Bretton Woods agreement and moving off the gold standard, we sort of exported the dollar and it's been our main source of influence across the globe. And I think those are the conversations in the early days of crypto that people were really like critical of. And they're like, here's why we're building crypto is to challenge these notions of fiat and create something that is longer standing. And now whenever you have Trump come into office and say he's going to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, they're doing it because they're going to support and backstop the dollar with Bitcoin because they also see it as a competitor to that. So crypto, I think has a unique take in creating something that is digital like gold and digital commodities that can go and become these stores of value that do give either a backing or a competition to the US dollar as it sort of wanes in importance because you know, from the you know, US perspective, we're pretty crippled, riddled with debt. And we have a lot of debt problems from the United States side that we're trying to cut down, do things like Doge. But at the same time, stable coins and Bitcoin and these other areas are opportunities for people to continually look at how to support the dollar and ensure that it remains relevant for a long time. In terms of energy and Chi has an energy dollar playing into this, I do think there are ways to supplement that. And ultimately, we do want normal stable coins on Quai. I think if you look at Stablecoins as a whole, they're the 16th largest holder of US treasuries. that as a crypto market, that's a pretty big impact to the US. So if we can find ways to get stablecoins on Quai and also have alternatives that are more efficient and easier to use, think Qi is a useful mechanism for that. Because as I mentioned earlier, given that stablecoins have to rely on smart contracts, they will always have a higher fee. than transacting in that base asset directly because there is no tether chain. There may be, there is no USDC chain, there may be, but even then, you know, there's still more overhead because you're having to represent that off chain asset on chain, which takes more gas costs, costs more fees. But with Qi, and since we're doing it with energy, since it is that native asset, it will always be cheaper and easier to use in that regard. So I do think in some of those comparisons, you know, that that's how we would view Qi. as an energy dollar there and how it could be used and compete with things like the dollar. I think, you know, we've done other podcasts, we've done other talks as well. We talk about macro or thermoeconomics as a whole and like why energy is a better use of a unit of account across all parts of the economy and why that would optimize sort of our alignment with things. And you can have some wonky conversations about AI and maybe AI prefers to use energy versus cash and, and, and other pieces there. But ultimately I think, yeah, there's a world where both can coexist. And I do see ways in which that we can bring in things like stable coins and also have things like Chi. Yeah. So you guys mined the first Genesis block on the fifth, I believe, right? And then TGE is scheduled for the 19th. How are things going from, you know, mining the Genesis block to the 19th for your TGE, your token generation event? Yep. Yeah, I mean, we were pretty floored with the support and demand so far. I mean, we've seen three tera hash come on to main net in mine, which equates to roughly 120,000 GPUs, puts us in top 10 in terms of proof of work currencies in the first week and a half almost. So we got to that number. Yeah, it's really cool to see. I'm pretty excited that we got to this point. think, like I said, it's been a long time in the making. So to see everything come together, we're heads down right now and making sure the 19th goes well. and ensuring that we have proper distribution. I think it's going to be a pretty long road to just make sure a Quai is available and people are able to go in and get it. You know, we're still trying to figure out all of those different ways. And I don't want to disclose anything ahead of time to, you know, make people go, you know, buy a scam or do some other type of thing on a different network. We've, we've tried to mitigate that as much as possible. And you do see that with large launches where someone just deploys a token and it's a honeypot or something. So mitigating those types of scams and making sure that all the information is clear and straightforward. and making sure that TG is a success. I mean, it's the thing that we've been working up for for a long time, but ultimately it's one small stepping stone and this larger vision of all the other things that I talked about. And so I think it's going to become an interesting time. And you've caught us at a right time for this podcast to have this conversation and definitely interested to see where this ends up in a week. That's exciting. One final question. I thought about this as I did research on Quai. I'm curious about the response of the Bitcoin community, especially the Bitcoin miners, because this is potentially an opportunity for them to become involved. What's the response been so far from the Bitcoin community? You know, it's an interesting one because Bitcoiners are very maximalist, as you know, and they're always following from Michael Saylor, there is no second best. And I think that for Bitcoiners, they have to sort of come to their senses in a way in which that Bitcoin does fail to meet the needs of what people want it to be in many different use cases. And I think that has opened up the altcoin market to where people are experimenting. And I think, you you started with Bitcoin and then people moved into Ethereum and then they moved into other areas. So, You know, we found a way to sort of cultivate to a lot of the other altcoin market where we're like traditionally proof of stake and now we're reinventing proof of work. But also now we have to look at Bitcoiners and say, you know, we're actually are kind of optimizing a lot of things that Bitcoin has done. And I get it. You have your qualms with some of our approach. You if you don't have things like a hard cap 21 million Bitcoin or 21 million Quai, they won't like that. But I think a lot of it is around education, like we talked about and trying to find ways to relate. to Bitcoin while not criticizing it, because ultimately Bitcoin succeeding lifts the, know, rising tide lifts all boats for everyone. We don't want Bitcoin to fall over tomorrow. That would be very bad for Quai if like everything in crypto just went away. So I think it's a matter of sort of working within the bounds of how Bitcoiners could perceive something like this. But then also speaking to some of the pro Bitcoin types of things that we've done in Quai, like proof of work and like finding a way to incorporate smart contracts and like those sort of more original cypherpunk and crypto ethos that Bitcoin had. Yeah, it really feels like, you know, some of the ethos that I've seen, some of the language I've seen in the Quai network is very kind of early Bitcoin. Like, you know, some of the key values that are really important to Bitcoiners. And there's also a very large, excuse me, a large constituent inside the Bitcoin community of, especially with the advent of runes protocol or meta protocol. Yeah runes, ornals. Ordinals like they're looking for like programmability Excuse me and more things to do with their Bitcoin and so it feels like Qui could be could be a solution to what they're kind of looking for Because it meets the needs it's very Bitcoin aligned Yeah, I we've definitely had conversations where it's like how closely can we align with Bitcoin? Do we want to consider ourselves a Bitcoin layer too? We have aspects of merged mining. Does that make us a Bitcoin layer too? How will Bitcoiners perceive it in that regard? And so we have to try to find ways to stay true to what we're doing because if you're like let's just view Quai as we want to view it, it's like yeah, Bitcoin is a competitor. But we do see it as a way in which that we can tap into those types of sort of newer aspects that become very hard to deploy. I you look at things. like Odin Fund, and on the back end, Odin Fund is using ICP, although it's sort of finding ways to make runes more accessible and tradable. So I think people in Bitcoin world are open to plugging into new systems, as long as it can also tie in and benefit Bitcoin in some way, which I think on the Quai side we're open to as well. We want to find ways to get wrapped Bitcoin on Quai, make that tradable and more easy to use. We want to find ways for people to get yield that can be sort of derivative of DeFi in a Quai contract with Bitcoin. I think it's all very synergistic and I think the ethos is there and hopefully, you we can try to find those cypher punks and those people that are OG crypto people that are excited about a new chain and are excited about something that is more refreshing, differentiated, isn't a copy of something else and that's been done a few times. So it's definitely a competitive market whenever you have to go through the questions of why this layer one, why this, and I think that does reinforce a lot of the things that we've done for content is like a lot of times newer chains when you ask them why layer one, they're like, well, You know, we just have this one small thing, but if you ask us why Qua and why a new layer one, it's like we have 240 videos and hours long podcasts and research papers and community and all these things that do prove this to be different and interesting. And I hope that Bitcoiners and other people from ecosystems see that as well. I think so too. mean, that was my first reaction was, wow, these guys are doing something different. Like I have not seen this before. It looks really interesting. And I think people will be pleased with the fact that when you looked at the blockchain space, you guys decided to build it from first principles, from the ground up. That says a lot. It says a lot about your long-term approach and that you actually viewed it from the perspective of Okay, what are some problems that still exist that have not been solved? Let's see if we can do something different so we can solve those. I think that's really unique. You don't see that a lot, especially recently, where most of it has been kind of a meme coin casino. You guys have actually built something legitimate and real, and that's really admirable. and I'll talk bad on meme coins, but I still think they serve their purpose, right? Because people are always going to want to gamble. It's like, you gambling on sports betting? Are you gambling on meme coins? Or are you gambling on stocks? That is an innate human want that is a vice that people do. So that's not going to go away. And so I think we have to recognize that. But we also do have to create something that is more long-term oriented and something that is less in your face and directed to something that is more degenerate in that way. Well, you guys have seven days until TGE. Any final words you'd like to share before we end? People have seven days to kind of get involved. And of course, know, TGE is not the end. It's actually the beginning. So even though you guys have been building QI for a few years, TGE kind of marks another milestone of like, okay, what's next? Yeah. Yeah. Definitely encourage people to go on the YouTube, watch some videos. Our light paper has a lot of really good information, albeit it is more technical. So you can discover that at q.ai slash light paper L I T E and on our Twitter as well. I encourage people to follow us at quine network. have consistent updates. You're going to be able to see more ecosystem partners that we promote. So you're going to see not just things about quay, but things about what other people are building. So always looking to help those builders in our ecosystem. The Discord is vibrant and pretty active as well with more updates. So you're looking to reach the team directly there, we're always hanging out in the Discord chat to talk and just create a friendly environment around that. And then also just stay up to date on updates and just follow along with what we're doing. Seven days until DGE. It's a little surreal to say, so excited to circle back on this podcast and see where things up in the future. But yes, definitely the start of a long journey. Awesome. I just remembered something. So you have a bunch of questions. Let me just read it. I can't go through all of them. You have a lot of questions here, but let me just ask a couple from the community. Okay, so let's do it. Pavel asks, when will the strategic Kwai reserve will be the, yeah. man, he's already, you know, we look at other chains and US based teams like movement, you know, I'm inspired by those guys and I don't know how they pulled that off. ultimately, you know, I can't foreshadow anything, but I think Quai as a network is a US based team. And if we're making America the crypto capital of the world, maybe there's something in store for that. Okay, how does Qui Network contribute to financial inclusion, especially for unbanked populations worldwide? That's a big one. Yeah, I if you look at decentralization and the ability to spin up a crypto wallet with no KYC, no sort of bank account needed, no bank statement, no rent or any other history, that's a pretty powerful thing. So it's not quite uniquely, but anyone can just get an address and receive some funds, which is pretty cool. So for quite making sure that we can keep those fees low so that when you do receive money, you're not restricted by how much you can send is a pretty powerful feature. Okay, will Qui Network protect its community and miners from those who are greedy? I mean, who knows? I mean, yeah, I mean, think the community and the miners are one of the same, right? So like I mentioned, miners are somewhat a service provider and the community also has a relationship with those people. So I think it's a matter of, again, creating a long-term alignment between the people that are mining the network and the people that are doing things on chain and the people that are, you know, transacting and building and using the network there. So the miners are, again, a part of that process. Okay, final question. NRL asks, does the team, what is the team doing for adoption of this network? Yeah. So I think we covered a lot of that. I think if we look at the upcoming product launches, we're going to have some pretty great ways of showcasing Quai and creating differentiation there. So definitely encourage people to check out things like blip that's upcoming. Blip is going to be a payment application. We have things like lithium DeFi, one of our ecosystem partners that's creating DeFi solutions on Quai. Things like Quaymark for NFT exchanges, Quaswap for a Dex, Qfan for a Telegram game. So a lot of different options. for ways to get involved with Quai and looking to continue to build those partners. so we didn't get to any of that. That's pretty cool, all these applications that are building on Quai. The Telegram game, I'm curious, is there a bridge or how does that work with the integration with Quai? Okay. actually create your own wallet in the app and then it's a click to earn game with sports betting. So it's, it's a primarily a soccer driven game. And so you can kind of go and wager on quiet. can do things like coin flips. You can do things like buying jerseys and NFTs. So it's called Q fan FC, and they done a really good job at building a community. had like 60, 50,000 users on our last test net. And they'll be looking to be one of the main things that's live on mainnet day one. That's awesome. How did you find this team or how did they find you? How did that work? You know, I think it's one of those things where, you know, I believe they're based out of Vietnam. So they've, we have a pretty strong Vietnam presence and out of Thailand. So, global, right? If you look at like where our community is based out of, you know, we have people in Latin America, we have people in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, we have people out of places like Nigeria. So, in India, we have people out of Japan, China, it's everywhere. So, I think it's a unique blend of finding developers that are interested in these people. They saw the technology, they said, hey, this community is active, so we want to build our application here. I think we see a lot of that across the community. So they've been really good at creating a fun app that's on Telegram and easy to use. Have you received feedback in terms of how easy is it to build an application on Quai versus other networks? Because the competition is quite hard. It's very high. Layer ones are always competing for developers. Yeah, so Quai is still EVM compatible. So we have a solidity language that you can go and copy your app from layer 2s and layer 1s that are EVM. So from that standpoint, it is somewhat straightforward, although we have made changes to make the network faster and to actually support throughput that we're promising in the long term. So there is some sort of nuance and challenge with development, but that's why we're always around. That's why we want to support people. And deploying an application is also not a super easy task. The people that are really good builders, find a way to make it work, but it does take some cycles, and we're around to support them. And I do think with tools like AI and assisted development, things like Cursor, Cloud, OpenAid, or ChatGPT, it's more and more easy to build applications nowadays, especially in terms of the front end. So I think developers that are sort of AI skilled and AI equipped can throw up applications pretty easily. Awesome. Well, Alan Orwick, Qui Network, thank you so much and good luck the next seven days. We look forward to TGE and great job on what you and the team have built the last couple of years. This is exciting. it. Yeah. Thank you, Peter. Thanks for having me on. think this is one of my more favorite podcasts. So looking to see this one up and maybe we can chat again in the future. You got it. Thank you. Awesome.