Lyron, co-founder and CEO of Seismic Systems. Welcome to the show. Hey, pleasure to pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Let's get right into it. guys have, so Seismic Systems has made some waves recently with the funding announcement and maybe we can start there and then backtrack into maybe how you got into crypto. We typically start this with like your origin story, but that's kind of, maybe we can start with Seismic Systems. So I'm curious, so the A16Z is the... um led the round. I believe you guys raised eight million, is that right? Okay. And so from their perspective, why would they invest in seismic systems? What do you think is going on in their head? I guess it's tough to know exactly what's going on in their head. I would say A16Z has a reputation for going into projects with a good long-term oriented uh goal and demonstrated uh track record and towards working towards it. And specifically for seismic in general with our target market uh being a lot of traditional FinTech use cases and the architectural decisions we've had until then. the go-to-market decisions we've had towards then, it really fit the type of profile that Andreessen really likes going after. I like that. And the long-term view is we definitely need more of that in crypto. There's a lot of kind of short-term thinking in crypto. So tell us what you're building at Seismic. What is Seismic and why is now the right time for it? Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to frame it a bit in what's happened before Seismic. I think the history of attempts in the space that your company is sitting in is just as important as the company itself. So Seismic at its core, we're targeting sensitive payment volume. These are all the transactions that go through the traditional financial system that carry sensitive information. This can be things like commercial revenue, payroll distributions, housing payments. Couple other verticals like healthcare, insurance, treasury management. If you take all the volume that goes through, that has sensitive data on it and look at what happens in the traditional financial system, ends up being quite a large sum. So there's about a hundred trillion in sensitive payment volume that goes through the traditional financial system every year. And so we've known this for a long time in crypto. And this is why I think it's really important to dig into the history here where... For the last 10 years, I'd say since the original Zcash paper in 2014, people have looked at the sensitive payment volume and said, this is a very important thing in the traditional world. Let's bring it on chain and bring all of the efficiencies that being on chain has with it. And we can provide a lot of value and capture a lot of value in return. It'd be very good to get all of this on chain. This part has been tried over and over again. And usually it's been tried in the sense of, hey, this payment volume can't be on chain without encrypted payments. So the natural thing to do is say you make encrypted stable coins. We've seen so many variants of this where you hide the sender, you hide the recipient, hide the amounts and balances and encrypt all of it. And then suddenly now the system is viable to supporting this volume. We did all this for the last 10 years and all of the efforts thus far have struggled to reach mass market audiences. They've done very well in small niche audiences, but really hasn't made the big jump uh towards getting to people paying for their rent through crypto or getting their salary in crypto or paying for their local credit card transactions on it. None of this has happened before. And this is because in all of the contexts where sensitive payment volume is relevant, the traditional financial system is already good enough. So if you're talking, thinking about your salary and you're in the US, ACH is already good enough. You don't really need to go onto crypto rails to make that experience better. If you're trying to pay for something like pay for your rent, again, ACH or maybe some other alternative rails, maybe some card networks. are already good enough. So the delta between what encrypted payments and what is already existing is not large enough to swing people off of the legacy, the financial, the network effects of the legacy rails. And so overall encrypted payments, we want to do it, but encrypted stable coins itself is not the answer. At Seismic, we believe that the answer to getting all of this volume on chain is a is financial services and using financial services as a wedge. So the way that I view it is if you're looking at the fintech adoption curve and you're too far on the left, i.e. going into something like payments processing, then the traditional system is already good enough, your value proposition is not an order of magnitude difference. But if you go even a little further up into the adoption curve, into financial services, something as simple as providing credit for small businesses, Then you get into some areas where even the traditional system in well-developed underserves large market segments. So for example, the top line number that every fintech person talks your ear off about is there's greater than 50 % of small businesses in the US don't have access to credit. And so the intention with all the core insight here is if you go further up here and uh provide for these underserved use cases, then you can use that as a wedge to go into all the payments that drive a lot of the value of with the high volumes. So all that is to say, sensitive financial services are the key. And specifically, offering financial services on chain in a way where encryption doesn't happen just around payments but into the core DeFi protocols themselves is the answer in our observation. Seismic is an L1 blockchain for encrypted DeFi. What that means is you can take an EVM contract, let's say you take Morpho, you make a few Solidity Native changes to it, you deploy it to Seismic, and then suddenly now you have Morpho, but it's Morpho that's fit for a business to put their books on. simple as that, that's what Seismic is. Got it. So the way I'm thinking about it is it's kind of like an HTTPS except for blockchains. Is that a decent analogy or is that totally off? I would say that is the perfect analogy if you're thinking about where blockchains were to where blockchains should be. I think a step further, an even better one could be where the financial system currently is and where it could be. So the way I usually talk about seismic is that we're a bank with an app store on top. Hmm. bank with an app store. think that applies to a lot of blockchains, but the reason that we think it's particularly fitting for Seismic is because if the ledger is encrypted, then we have the opportunity to become the primary depository account, i.e. the center of people's financial lives. This is the checking account that gets your salary and pays your expenses. This is a checking account that gets business revenue and pays their employees. So really becoming the bank there and then adding financial services in the form of apps on top. I think it's the most appropriate way to uh think about this from a product perspective. So Seismic, so you've positioned Seismic as the encrypted blockchain. And from the example you shared with Morpho, and it could be any application, they could deploy on Seismic even though they're on another chain. It sounds like an EVM chain. And they just have to make a couple of changes and they can deploy it on Seismic and it'll be encrypted. Is that correct? Okay. um Now, from the applications perspective, they've already built a community on whatever EVM chain or L2 or whatever. They've already built a community there. They've built some level of network effects. What's the value proposition to them as you do your kind business development work um to get them to either create an instance or move their application entirely? on seismic. We've had many conversations over the past few weeks especially on other protocols that already exist in chains. And the conversation always turns out similarly, where I say it's not a focus right now of seismic to get existing applications onto us. We are 100 % committed to doing incubations that are native to our ecosystem. And that's strategic for two reasons. Reason number one is if something already exists on an existing blockchain, and they redeploy to Seismic where their only edge on redeploying to Seismic is now they get encryption, but they're targeting the same market segment, then there is no reason for them to come on Seismic. It is a marginal improvement and in most cases, it's even a bug. It's bad for you. And then reason number two is because we believe where encryption needs to go towards, encryption technologies on open permissionless blockchains needs to go towards, is accessing these new market segments. people haven't gone after at all, very little, very little slash is very under explored in public chains. And both of these reasons have a bigger underlying, underlie some bigger implication here where the reason, like we've had encryption in blockchains for a very long time. And the number one reason why encryption just has not worked in crypto is because it's been applied to existing volume. So existing volume on the stablecoin side being cross border payments and dollar denominated bank accounts. And on the financial market side, then you're looking at meme coin trading, NFT trading, uh now new internet capital markets trading, all of this. In both of these cases, if you apply encryption to it, at best it's a marginal feature. At worst, it's probably a bug. Where it's worse if my meme coin trades. uh visible to everyone, because then I can't show my PNL and things to less of an extent. so, Seidberg wants to take all of this and say, we're ignoring this completely. If you're on just another chain, you are not our target market. Instead, we're incubating, we're doing all of this. So that's really the perspective. we're going into here. And I think that makes a ton of sense. I've been part of projects where one of the goals was to attract existing applications from other chains. And it almost never turns out very well because the application is either trying to get a grant, but once they deploy on the new chain or the non-home chain, ah they don't build a community there and it ends up dying. And so I think your approach makes a ton of sense. And incubating homegrown ones. Yep, absolutely. always get the best kind long-term network effects by doing that. um On the homegrown applications, what types of uh applications or problem areas are you, or opportunity sets are you going after? In our first round of incubations, we are putting our full support between two apps. The first is going to be a B2B app, and the second is going to be a B2C app. The first is going to be an open credit protocol for small businesses. And the second is going to be a high yields checking account for uh consumers. Those are, from a lot of the conversations that we've had and discussions we've had internally, these two have the strongest wedges for attracting initial user bases that we have good access to. So in short, a lot of uh the perspective that we're taking here is why would the average US person be on chain outside from high uh volatility trading? And we're trying to find an answer right now. And these are the two most promising directions. And you know what's crazy about that is that it's so simple. I mean, it's hard to do, but the way you speak about it, it's like a checking account with a high yield. And then the B2B piece is like a credit score. It's just like, that's like how a real economy works. And the amounts in both of those markets are massive. Absolutely, absolutely massive. We are more boring than almost every other chain out there because we are very traditional in the sense that we view blockchains as a significant fintech innovation, but it is a fintech innovation where if you are an entrepreneur in fintech, your goal is to do one of two things. You are increasing access of financial services or you are decreasing costs. All of the optimization needs to go around these two and only one of these two mind you for each application can't be both. But the absolute focus is going to be both is very bad for us, at least in generating a lot of uh attention short term, but it's going to be the right move for us long term on uh providing sustained value in the world. And I think the focus is really, uh really great. It's uh refreshing here, such a specific focus on like who the target audience is and the market and the opportunity. And you're aligned and trying to build something for a real need. um Tell us like from your background, how did you get into crypto? And what led you down this specific kind of application of blockchain? So I'm a computer scientist by training. I studied it while I was an undergrad at Stanford and then into my master's there. I mostly applied it to AI, in fact, where I worked at a lot of these bigger firms like Google X and Facebook AI, where I got to learn lot about deploying a lot of large scale systems to solve real technology problems. At some point during this process, found that the best career path for me was in starting companies. And for something like this, many people have different opinions on like, what should you start? What domains should you start businesses in? How should you think? And people say a lot of things like you follow your passion, you think of what's fun and never work for you, a lot of these vague things. uh What I really narrowed down on at the beginning of Seismic is you start a company in the one vertical thrust industry where you and your friends can build a world class team. And for people that are computer science and distributed systems slash mathematically inclined and open to going into nascent fields where if you look, go into the field and do deep work for a year and you become an expert, that is really where you're trying to go to. And if I'm looking, when I was looking at uh surveying what would fit this. Cryptography plus blockchains was the number one industry plus domain where this was absolutely the case. Just because crypto was young, crypto needed a lot of technical work, all of it lined up. So from there, dropped AI completely and then went and learned everything I could about crypto. So that's how I got generally got into crypto. And you, as you started to develop Seismic Systems, um tell us about the, I guess, the user research that you guys did to find out kind of the needs to identify exactly the problems that Seismic Systems is designed to solve. Like, what is that process? What did that process look like for you and the team? Yeah, man, we're boring here yet again, where we did a standard need finding process. We went to all of our friends and they said, hey, you all run protocols. You have things coming up in your roadmap that are undoubtedly too high technical risk for you to focus on right now. We will do it for you just for free because we want to figure out where the limits of infrastructure is today. We did this 10 times, working on everything from DeFi apps to social apps to gaming apps. And at some point along the 10 times, we kept running into the same set of problems, specifically around applying encryption to public chains. And there are these fundamental properties that we could not get that blocked us from developing all of these mechanisms that we knew we needed. And when we ran into this the nth time, we sat down and we said, let's make a few observations here. Observation number one, this is an important problem, commercially viable problem where if you solve this problem then you get all these mechanisms that will lead to better products in the future. Check. Two, we found this problem conceivably a bit earlier than everyone else just because we were looking for it and we were looking at it, looking for it full time. Also check. And then number three, if we were to solve this set of problems with one unified architecture, could this be a very valuable company? check again and then from there it was clear that there was some signal here and it was worth going down. So pretty soon after we raised the seed round from Andreessen, Lettit, and with a lot of great backers too like Pauli Chain uh in the mix. So the the customer development that you guys did and kind of coming upon this insight that The struggle that all of these these projects were having like was in a very specific area in in in encrypting blockchains um I imagine you price shared that in your investor pitch and that's kind of what led them to think. Okay, these guys have something um Did you did you have a hunch before you started talking with customers what? the potential problems were, or were you just went into it totally blind? Let's just see where we go and you just kind of followed the data from there. It was completely blind. All of the problems that you get to are so subtle that I would never have guessed that these are issues. The problems that we found that ended up being huge were things that were incredibly niche where it'd be something like, I put encrypted state on chain, you put encrypted state on chain. And then suddenly you can't compute a function between these two because there's some fragmentation going on. There was no world, no matter how much brain power we had, we would have thought of a limitation like this, much less had a concrete example and concrete reasons for why they're hard. A lot of why we really had a lot of conviction was because we tried solving them ourselves and we were surprised that we couldn't within. a few weeks of trying each one, of going at each one of these properties. It was a genuine surprise. was like this, like we're missing something super dumb. And it turns out it was not dumb. It was actually a problem here, but it was just really subtle. uh It was really subtle that people don't talk about it as much and that it just hasn't come up. I love that story and there's a key lesson here for listeners that whatever you think, whatever your initial hypothesis is, is going to be likely wrong or needs to be modified. And that's why it's so important to talk with customers or potential target customers and really understand the problem from their perspective. Because just like Lyron said, you guys stumbled upon a really, really important insight. that you wouldn't have gotten to had you not talked to customers and actually spent time at their level. And that's such an important thing that is almost obvious in hindsight, but almost no one does in crypto. Like in crypto, we kind of create a solution and then we find the problem later. You guys actually took it from, think, like a proper product perspective of like, what is the problem and let's solve for that. um And I mean, kudos to you and the team for doing that. And that is so interesting that the problem is so subtle and like most people just miss this, but you guys kind of took the time and you guys figured it out and you created a company out of it. Yeah, I mean, thanks for all that. Yeah, I was very surprised when these ended up being big problems. I can't emphasize enough that it didn't seem big enough until it was. It was really the big thing there. And on your earlier point on type feedback loops, especially when building an infrastructure in crypto, I would say we did a good job with this, especially with identifying a really strong set of problems. man, we struggle with this so much. Like the feedback loops in crypto infrastructure are incredibly tough and we struggle with this every day, especially because of things like if you're spinning up new infrastructure that is going to carry all this TVL, then right off the gate, your audits are going to increase your time to market by months. If you're doing something that is more deep tech where you need to get a particular skill set, a set of skills on your team for then recruiting people with these niche skill sets is going to take a long time. Like we, I like I say very often that some of the hardest things about seismic is that uh getting feedback from the market is just so difficult. Like right now we are not in maintenance. There are not dollars that are going through seismic right now that can tell us whether our initial validation m in our initial product is dumb or not. We're taking as many small insights here from, say, testnet users and making proxy comparisons between some things that are working live and not working live. The big learning for me in all of this is you really have to get creative about figuring out how to interpret signals when you yourself are just not in the market. then obviously you just have to get to the market. But interpreting signals so you can learn as you do it, especially for more deep tech, longer iteration products, is a high art form that I think we're getting better at every month. Yeah, I read the, so on the website you have the seismic book and maybe I could just double check to see if I'm understanding something correctly. um In the introduction of the why, and this is also my experience, each application on a chain, any chain, will have their level of uh some type of encryption, whether it be ZK or multi-party computation or um trusted execution environment, some kind of privacy thing. um And the fragmentation happens when each of these applications have their own type of privacy, and so you have to interact with it in a specific way. You take the other position of why not just encrypt the entire chain so that each of these applications, they don't need to worry about that part. but they can have something on top of it if they want also. Is that uh a decent understanding of the why? Or I guess the current state of privacy and encryption in blockchain? This is cool because I think you ran into almost the exact same subtlety that we got wrong early days. The fragmentation we also thought was inter applications going between a DEX and the lending protocol. Turns out the more important fragmentation is actually intra application fragmentation where you're sitting in some lending protocol or some DEX and state cannot interact between different people. People cannot interact through your protocol. So if we're talking about fragmentation here, if I put in a bid and you put in an ask, fragmentation in encrypted state means that it is very difficult to execute an order, execute a swap, even if we cross. So the fragmentation problem, this is one of the exact points that I was talking about earlier where we thought it was kind of there, but it turns out, oh man, it's actually everywhere and it's actually way bigger and way harder. It is cool because you just ran. directly into it. Yeah, uh maybe fragmentation is probably the, maybe miscommunication or something like that. I've interviewed. is a great word for it, actually. It's exactly it. it's, no, this is really interesting. I hadn't thought about this, but as I reflect on all the interviews I've done, um each of these projects takes a, especially the applications, they take a different approach to privacy and encryption and um to their application. And they're often very different, right? Different kind of like privacy enhancing kind of technologies. um And they don't talk to each other very well. And so the intra kind of the intra communication, there could be issues there. And, and especially on this at the state level that you just described, like, like they, they cannot communicate in some cases. And so what do you do in that sense? What do do? And so, but that this describing that problem is so difficult. And you guys stumbled upon that and created seismic out of it. think that's awesome. Forgive me if I'm mischaracterizing this, but from what I understand, seismic as you are focused right now on the B2B kind of use case with credit scoring and also with um on-chain high-yield checking account, um which is a B2C, and then the B2B is the credit scoring piece. Mm-hmm. Yep. How does uh like a most most crypto projects have a community and so how tell us how you're thinking about community building in given these two specific use cases right now? A quick clarification, it's actually where we're providing credit, not credit scoring. mean, credit scoring, actually don't have any edge in. ah We don't have like super easy credit scoring, compute, put data on chain. It is literally like giving out loans. Yeah, so it's a lending service. Got it. Well, let's talk about that then. I misunderstood then. it's essentially a money market where you're providing credit to borrowers. Tell us more about that because that sounds very interesting. yeah, I think this is, these are one of the problems where crypto is a structural benefit over the traditional system. In particular, if you're looking at the small business lending landscape right now, you'd notice that every big, every semi-big lending desk is hyper specialized and has trouble growing their books past say a hundred million or a billion dollar loan books. And this is really surprising because if you're looking in consumer lending, the loan books that you see there are on the order of, uh I might be getting this quote wrong, but on the tens of billions and hundreds of billions. And that shows some structural dissimilarity between SMB lending and consumer lending. Because in consumer lending, you can look at the entire FICO score chart. And for every single band, you can apply your own credit scoring algorithm to it. with each single band, you have a massive, massive user base. For SMB lending, it is very different. And for SMB lending, you cannot have the same underwriting model that is under underwriting, say, a telehealth business as the one that as the one that's underwriting a restaurant business. And as one that's underwriting, say, a medical business, a traditional brick and mortar medical business. And because of that, the SMB lending space is so much more fragmented than what consumer lending. And so let me let me back up here a bit. The big problem that comes out with SMB landing is a lot of SMBs are excluded from getting credit from the traditional system because if your if your only options are big banks and big fintechs that are worried about developing these big general models that can support as wide a range of businesses as possible then by definition you're going to leave out a large portion of businesses that are specialized. Like if you're a creator led business, there is no way that a Bank of America is looking at your followers and saying this person is credit worthy. Let's give them a loan. There's no way they're looking at the sentiment analysis in your comment history and saying this person has a loyal following. Let's give them credit. And because of that, all of these businesses that are highly specialized just do not have access to loans. The cool thing that you can do with crypto is I think one of the big innovations in crypto is One is disintermediation where like you don't need these big banks as much and these big fintechs as much to do what you need to. But more importantly, it's having a permissionless operator set where operators can come in and say, hey, now I want to be the institution. So me as Lyron, I can come into this protocol and say, I have some insights on underwriting creator led businesses. I'm very good at that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a funding pool. pool just like it's a more global team in a few years. at a uh hazy mapping of it. I'm going to create this new funding pool and say, hey, this is the creator, this is the funding pool specifically for creator businesses. And because I have all these insights in my risk model that is openly auditable, this funding pool is going to be able to extend loans to businesses that are completely ignored by other lenders. And because of that, these businesses get loans. And on the other end, accredited investors can come in and supply capital to getting some share of the interest from this pool. there's some structural benefit of crypto here, where uh crypto really excels where One, the people that participate should be permissioned, but two, in something that I think is incredibly underexplored, where there is local alpha, where you should launch something that you have edge in, that you will know better than any big system in the world. And the fact that now with crypto, the barrier to entry to launching a financial product is so low is a complete game changer to it. So if you're looking at the SMB lending market, a long-term thing that could happen if the SMB lending market was addressed by crypto is instead of having all of these small little players, sorry, these small like medium-sized players that are only focusing on verticals, SMB verticals that are big enough to underwrite and create profitable venture scale businesses in, you get thousands of lenders that say, I'm really good at underwriting my specific niche of businesses and we are going to outpace anything a single bank can do with a single underwriting model. I think that's really powerful. think that's this permissionless operating capability for something that's incredibly under explored and traditional. both in crypto too. And something I missed, the checking piece, so the deposits, can those be used as a lending, for the lending also, the lending side? I guess I'm missing the... Yeah, because I think earlier you said seismic will be the bank, which means that you do need to have some deposits that you can lend out, or is it peer-to-peer? It's peer to peer. It's the rails. I say bank because it's a what financial institution do does everybody know about it is bank. is a bank. Yeah, bank means finance in the and to be clear the this checking account and this lending business are two completely separate businesses. At some point they might converge just because uh there are cool things you can do with cross selling and increasing. bettering your unit economics, but these are completely separate to start. Yeah, the so the customers on the the the credit lending side, these could these could be just local businesses. Is that correct? Like. So like non crypto even, right? So if I wanted to open a restaurant, um how would you market to that to like the web? Is the Web to audience like a primary target of yours or or no? OK. that is the only target of ours. The products that we're doing will not work if there isn't consistent cash flow on the other end. If you have cyclical cash flow, it is bad. We can't lend to crypto native businesses because their cash flow goes up and down. How are you going to do, especially if unsecured loans in the way that we're looking to you, if you're looking at credit and not just over-clarified lending, then crypto is not even an option. How do you deal with the due diligence and looking at their balance sheet and all of that? Do you have a, I guess you would need people internally to do that, right? Yeah, this one, it is separation between the protocol and the operators that are on the protocol, the originators, so to say. The operators would be doing the due diligence and making sure everything's done properly. So the application, so okay, got it, it. So Seismic, the protocol, those are the rails that these applications are sitting on. And if I am a lending business on top of Seismic, I will have people there to help with the due diligence to make sure the balance sheet is okay and they tick all the right boxes and that they are credit, they are worthy to be lent to. Okay. mean, seismics can be the first five examples of this. We're doing all of these internally. This is a radical enough model that there's no way, if we just put it out there, people are gonna start spinning up their own funding pools with good models. Yeah. You know, I met with a project recently that, um, they were looking at the, the deep end. the decentralized physical infrastructure market and what are the insights they came up with was, you know, almost every piece of infrastructure is, is acquired through borrowed money, except for in crypto in crypto. Like you actually need the capital to buy the thing. It's like, why, why in web two space, like you can, you can borrow money to buy the capital and the capital if it has cashflow to pay the service, the debt service. Like we need the same kind of model in crypto. And so that's the exact problem that they're targeting. And I wonder if that's something Seismic could also look into because that seems like a very healthy market. em Some of the physical infrastructure has cashflow like data centers, et cetera. Very healthy cashflow in fact. Absolutely. That's exactly it. mean, that's the dream. Specifically, you wouldn't need to go after these businesses that are underserved already by banks. Like if you're running a data center, I've literally never looked at this before, but I would say the underwriting models and the ability for big fintechs and big banks to be able to serve them is already pretty high. Like data centers are established businesses. And can get collateral off the real estate that these data centers live on, the big hardware that these data centers have. I think for that specific one, it's a lower, it is harder because you're going to have to compete on, instead of increasing access, you're competing on decreasing costs. And competing on decreasing costs is very difficult. The finance people are very good. Financial innovation is a no joke topic. Yeah. Tell us about the roadmap for Seismic, maybe like for the rest of 2025. Like what were you hoping to accomplish? So for 2025, Q1 was all of our beta testing with a small set of developers where we got to iterate with a lot of our features. And we got uh some pretty interesting results there. Q2, we opened the setup to say all the developers can come in. Let's see what people build, see how people get excited. That generated a good bit of buzz. We were pretty satisfied with the outcome. Q3 is where seismic focus comes in. hey, we're hosting a residency. We are incubating these two apps. We have two to three EIRs that are coming in that are going to be working on these specific two apps. And very little of our focus is going to be devoted elsewhere. And by Q4, these apps are going to come together. They're going to be ready to support users. We have the flow for this all planned out. And then Q4, we're going to go to mainnet. So the next six months are going to be Every month in the past few has been increasing in speed and momentum in seismic. Where we're getting closer and closer, things are getting more well formed. It's getting easier to ship products and talk to people and get people working on things. Now it gets even faster. So it's an exciting next few months. That's cool. The, you know, one, one really important characteristic of all blockchains, right, is that there's a kind of an incentive mechanism that helps kind of coordinate behavior. What, I guess, maybe me talk to us about that, like what type of coordination are you trying to incentivize in seismic? We don't have to get into the token at all, but just, just, just around the coordination piece. On the coordination piece at least, I mean, we're looking at it from two sides. I really view the users of Seismic, I use that term very broadly, to bucket segment into three categories, where one, you're looking at developers, one, you're looking at end users that using your product, and three, you're looking at evangelists that are talking about your protocol all day on Twitter. The incentive alignment model is incredibly different for all three. For the developers, all the incentive alignment comes from being able to work directly in the seismic office with us day in, day out, where we are talking to your users, we are helping you build your core products, we're devoting a significant amount of resources to making sure that you succeed. And at some point, there could be some type of structure where the success of seismic is legally tied to the success of the apps on it, where there's upside for both parties. That one is very bespoke with a very small set of people, and we're making sure everybody is very well rewarded in this process. So that's the developers. For end users, there's very few incentives. uh End users that we're able talk about at the other side are like, the products are great. You're going to use them because you need them. That's very simple. For the evangelists and the community members, these people are also very important because as an L1 blockchain, no matter how good your ideas are and how strong your traction is, if people are not talking about you that developers can look at and say, hey, these people have a loyal following, you are not going to get developers. So they are equally as important in this puzzle as any other piece. So the incentivization from there comes in the form of uh ongoing incentives during the testnet and beta phases, where you're making sure you're treating them properly. Because there are evangelists, but they did take snake in just talking in time to reputation for their project. They deserve to get some piece, some upside, as you start taking them. so strong incentives on all end that are planned for these different segments we're to just view everyone as one bucket Yeah. And I imagine too, there's a funnel where some of the retail folks that are crypto, that are active and supportive and evangelists, you know, could also become customers of the high yield checking product also. yeah. The conversion there is something that I think would be very cool. haven't done enough studies into our, we, seismic community as far as the evangelist community uh is already doing absurd things for us on Twitter to really get our name out there. We're incredibly thankful for that. I haven't done deep studies to see how many are going to convert into these users. I'd assume. a decent portion, especially because as far as uh sticking, like turn in the community, it's very low, where people are highly engaged for and stay engaged for a long time. And we've planned this very, we have a very particular way to making sure that everyone gets value as the process goes along. So I'd say that the conversion rate from evangelists to user of especially our B2C product is going to be higher than than most because we do put lot of time into it. I think so too. em You know, one of my controversial takes is that, you know, testnet users are not going to be your actual users, except for a product that actually serves the needs of testnet users, which is like a checking account. em But for most layer ones, I mean, it's really just lots of farmers, right? But if the product is something that actual like humans can use that are at the retail level, that's actually a retail product. um that speaks to kind of a need that they have. And so it makes sense. And I'm curious to see, in crypto, it's always difficult to talk about, know, funnels and like conversion, but I imagine there's gonna be some level of conversion there that's meaningful. I appreciate that. I'll let you know what the final numbers are at the end. Amazing. Well, Lyron, um what I guess maybe a couple of final questions if that's okay. um Okay, so looking at the crypto space right now. ah So these are kind of like rapid fire questions. What are some like two communities that you admire and tell us why? Number one, I'd say, I'm very biased because a lot of these are communities that my friends have spun up. So I'd say my two favorite ones are story and succinct. I really like the way that they're very transparent about everything that they do with their community and uh they get everyone involved, not for the sake of like posting a hundred different variants of their logo and like doing crazy things to it. but actually using their product and communicating it properly. That's something that I am very much deriving inspiration from in seismic. Like within the seismic evangelism community, they are all clear that the number one goal there is not to produce metrics. It's not to produce a high volume of things. Their goal is to make sure everyone knows how important encrypted blockchains are because that is really the superpower of it. And around IP and ZK for those two projects, they've been hyper-focused on that too. It's a no-frills approach to community where you're not saying community is like, is all of these things where it's not, where really like you're all evangelists, we're in this together because we wanna spread the word. Yeah, it's just very straight into the point. No, I agree. I'm very active in the Sysync community and I interviewed Uma a couple of weeks ago and they're doing such a great job, I think, with making ZK relatable and easy to understand. yet staying very focused on the technical aspect for developers, that not every developer can use ZK and not have to build their own circuits and just make it easy, and that everything can be proved, which is really cool. um What is one source of inspiration that's not crypto-related that has helped you as an entrepreneur? AI is definitely, the AI companies, especially because a lot of them are good friends that have come out of the very similar programs and tracks as me, has specifically inspired me on pace, where it's clear that the speed limit to how quickly you can build a very big business does not exist anymore in today's age. And that always continues to push me and my team because it's so hard to keep up a good pace when it's longer dev cycles and you're really building like financial infrastructure that takes a long time to do. these finding a source of, we need to hurry up and move faster is so critical. And then that's been big for me. It is inspiring and it's so blisteringly fast. It's really, really insane. Well, Learone, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. You guys are killing it. Asseismic and super excited for what you guys are building and looking forward to hearing more from you and the team. Absolutely, thanks so much. I'd love to keep everyone updated here. Thank you.