Brendan Sedo, welcome. How's it going, Peter? It was really nice to meet you and just kind of do the meet and greet before. Good to know you a bit. for sure. You're an initial contributor to CoreDAO and we'd love to definitely get into CoreDAO and what you guys are up to. Before we do, we'd love to hear your background, how you got into crypto. Yeah, happy to go into this and each time I'll try and put a different flavor. So if folks see me on multiple things that they'll maybe learn a little tidbit about me and then the core project. But yeah, first of all, thanks for having us on. Always excited to talk core Bitcoin and hopefully just have a good back forth here. But yeah, we can talk a bit about how I got into working in crypto. basically, been in that background has been in technology. for about 15 years or so. After, actually in university started a tech company called Joyce, that was a software platform in the construction industry. So it helped like residential contractors run their business on iPads and eventually desktop and mobile phones. So think of it as someone who wants to renovate a kitchen, bathroom. We basically empowered them with software to run their entire business. And then kind of layered in a financial business. So processed over a billion in payments, had a financing business as well. And it kind of built to be the biggest contractor platform in the world. So did a couple rounds of BC, sold it after nine years, lots of ups and downs along the way, but sold it to a group that was backed by Silver Lake and then went public a year later. So that was a super cool experience. then, and then, you know, kind of shot. Chopped my teeth from idea to exit and learned a lot. But if you were in technology in the early 2010s in the Bay Area, et cetera, everyone was talking about Bitcoin. You had to get exposed to it basically if you were working in that industry. So that's what kind of initially piqued my interest. Obviously, I was always focused on my startup and there wasn't a ton to build per se in terms of startups. but got involved, heard about it. And then when Ethereum came, was also super interested in just kind of playing around with it in my spare time. And then, yeah, after this startup, after I eventually left, after transitioning, decided to go really deep and trial the new DeFi protocols, which had kind of launched with DeFi Summer. So it was just playing around, really kind of blew my mind as to what you could do, how permissionless it was. without having to deal with gatekeepers, et cetera. And then was kind of thinking about what I want to do next. I played around, I'd launched a couple of products actually, just tinkering with the dev and then eventually was looking at new ideas and connected with some folks who were building core. Those conversations led me to the guys building at core who I knew from my previous startup and just really liked what they were doing. They had this mission vision of expanding Bitcoin. You know, in that time, I'd kind of become a digital nomad, saw the value of non-sovereign store value and obviously just using crypto and financial primitives without gatekeepers. So I was super excited to join. So joined as the first business guy. It seemed was about five people pre-lunch and joined as the first business guy as an initial contributor. And here I am a couple of years later. I think we're coming up almost on three years. That's awesome. I want to go back to your experience at Joist. I think there's a couple of things I want to kind of dive into. One question is, when you're developing a product that I'm assuming you were not personally in the construction space or unless were you, did you work in construction prior or no? Yeah. So funny enough, you know, I, uh, I skipped the first part, which is running, you know, we were running a during the university. ran another co a company before this that was like a drive up windshield repair service company. So it was in, in using your hand service style companies is what we call it. And then as a teenager worked with my uncle who is a large home builder. So I have exposure, but I didn't. really run a construction company for a decade. I was indirectly involved through jobs and then my first company that I built. Yeah. Now building software for the construction industry, did you have, I guess you had to speak to your customers to learn about like what their needs were. Maybe walk us through what that was like. You know, that's typically known as customer development. Some people call it market research and like what that experience maybe taught you as you, you know, continue to become an entrepreneur. And now that you're at, at CoreDow, like what I guess what were some of the learnings as you developed this product for a very specific need and what that taught you as an entrepreneur even now. Yeah, it's a great question. Honestly, haven't been asked that question in a long time, especially in terms of web three. So appreciate it. But yeah, early on the way that my co-founder, I had two co-founders, right? And it was actually myself who was doing most of the customer development and exploration with customers. And we took a really hands-on approach. So funny enough, contractors, construction people, they were adopting smartphones actually faster than the consumer. This is before everyone had iPhones, I'm dating myself here. But they were actually using smartphones sooner than most people because they saw the value of email. They were always working the field, working from their truck, et cetera. So what we did, but at the same time, the idea of using apps, et cetera, was very foreign, especially on your phone. At the time it was like, App Store was relegated to basic calculators and like Angry Birds games, right? Now we have like tons of apps, anything you think of, but 13 years ago, it wasn't quite like that. There wasn't even a subscription system. So, so yeah, we were kind of fighting with that. So what we typically did was we would do everything we could to. So, so I did ride alongs. Like I literally would go with a contractor, some of which were friends. That was part of the benefit of where I grew up where I'd sit in their truck, watch them, see what kind of calls they made, watch them do an actual estimate for talk to a customer. How did they talk to them? What notes were they taking? How did they calculate it in the truck after? And took a ton of notes and asked a ton of questions. And then from there, we were prototyping. We'd make prototypes, get guys in our office and actually have them bang on the buttons and record them and ask questions and try not to. guide them, right? Just see what they would do, see if they thought it was valuable and take notes. And that kind of really led to product market fit very fast, honestly, because we basically, but when the first product came out, knew it was, we knew guys knew how to use it and it was solving a real problem because we had done a lot of the work beforehand without spending a year building an app. So yeah, we did a lot of things. Funny story, I actually even put up a ton of flyers in, in Porto potties on like construction sites, just with our number, with, you know, advertising iPad software to estimate and, uh, we'd get a ton of calls. Like we were just doing everything we could to talk to people in person and ask them questions. So what that taught me, um, is that, you know, it's, it's, you know, building a product, generally you need to talk to your customers, pontificating in an office kind of leads you to just wasting. took tons of time. And it's a lot, you can, if you could pick up the phone and ask people, it's a lot faster. I love that. The ride along experience, know, selling through, you know, putting your ads up in porta potties, talking to customers. Like we don't hear enough of that kind of hustle. You know, we hear a lot of hustle and kind of, you know, pontificating on crypto Twitter, but actual like talking to humans, like that will eventually be using your product so that you could develop this product to meet their needs. I love that. And we don't hear enough of that in crypto. And I'm curious why you think that is. Like why, you know, we have, you know, many developers and builders within the, you know, the blockchain space, but I don't hear enough people actually talking to their potential users. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I think it's a great question. I have some thoughts, you maybe we could do some spicy takes. you know, you know, I think, I think the part of the reason is, you know, the industry is still like very tech focused. It's like, and, attracts tech builders and tech problems, right. As opposed to user problems. And I think there's actually something core has done a little differently. We're not trying to get into intellectual, um, All these intellectual software architecture debates on every minute thing will adopt the best technology when it comes, for example, with Bitcoin bridging tech in the future. So I think there's a lot of debates focused on these like incremental technology improvements that really no one really cares about. But I think that's that might just be because of the dev crowd, et cetera. The incentives are as such that they reward these larger platform plays with tokens, right? So I think there's a bit of incentive misalignment there a little bit. And frankly, just a highly technical crowd that is trying to build very technical products. It hasn't quite shifted to retail and user products. So I'm pretty confident it will pretty soon. think the economics of endless infrastructure is probably coming closer to an end and we're going to be focusing more on the DApp level. things that really help users and I'm pretty excited about that. At Core, we try to do our best to do that. We obviously serve multiple customers, also an open blockchain. So obviously the developers, constantly talking to them, what do we need? What kind of tooling, what can we help for them to deliver products to end users? We don't actually build many products for the end user themselves, other than Core Scan and a few of these pieces. But we just launched an institutional product called LST Bitcoin. And that came directly through a lot of conversations with institutions and custodians and what they wanted. They want to earn yield. How do they want to earn yield? How should this product be structured? And I know we can maybe get into that product itself later, but this is something that the core team tries to do in most products that it launches, right? Which I think is pretty unique. Yeah, let's definitely get into that. Maybe we can take an approach of like, did we get here? Because maybe we can go back in time to what first led to kind of the inspiration to develop CoreDAO, the initial kind of customer. And then maybe take us through, now there's this liquid staking product and like what target audiences that serves. But let me as a... As a segue into that, I want to read the homepage because I think the homepage is pretty revealing for it reveals what's top of mind for a lot of these projects. And it also points to who the initial target audience is. You hope, I hope. All right, you ready? Okay. So on coredow.org, the headline says, stake Bitcoin and explore Bitcoin DeFi. Sub headline is the core blockchain. is where Bitcoin meets yield, DeFi and high TPS. Live now as the proof of stake layer for Bitcoin. Okay, so what's your initial reaction to the headline and sub headline and who is that really speaking to or who are you trying to speak to? Still out there, but at the end of the day, we're trying to talk to all Bitcoiners. So I think maybe this is a good tee up, right? So think the thinking is you have Bitcoin that initially launched. When it initially launched, it was meant to be more than a store of value asset. It's great that it is, and we all see the value in this non-sovereign store of value, and it's hit home, and we're now seeing governments buy it, et cetera. But the vision was to be more. to be a new financial system. And so when, you know, when looking back at when Core was conceptualized, we had this like growing demand and adoption of Bitcoin. You had the rise of EVM and smart contracts and products where you could actually do things with some of these assets. The thinking was to combine these, but at the end of the day, the mission was to extend the utility of Bitcoin. And we do that in many ways. We have a blockchain called Core that is a Bitcoin side chain that brings in the different participants of Bitcoin, specifically miners who help secure the network with hash, Bitcoin holders who can stake Bitcoin, and then Core stakers. And that's what secures the network. this network will eventually be the chain where all Bitcoin activity will happen. If you want to do a land borrow market or you want to do things with your Bitcoin, You're not able to do that on the Bitcoin network itself. And at the moment, not only there's no smart contracts, no native yield, there's also just heavily limited transactions that you can do on the network. So the thing is that will all happen on a side chain, eventually a layer two, and that becomes possible. But for now, a side chain core and all that economic activity will happen there. And then the other key piece was for miner sustainability. You've got Bitcoin miners who are the backbone of the Bitcoin blockchain. Their rewards are being halved every four years. It was really important to have a blockchain that aligned with these miners and provided them a second subsidy as their block rewards on Bitcoin are being cut in half every four years. So yeah, we basically tied all those Bitcoin participants together, launched the chain. And the thinking is this is going to be an extension of all Bitcoin utilities. there's Bitcoin yield, native staking, and a blockchain where folks can do things with their Bitcoin through apps. Gotcha. it's the maybe maybe help the audience in terms of nomenclature. I think most of the audience is familiar with the layer two. And how is that different from a side chain? And when it comes to the Bitcoin network, we've also heard the phrase, meta protocol. And so maybe help us kind of understand the differences there and where core fits. Sure, so I'll do my best. Meta protocols are the one I'm least familiar with, frankly. So I guess a lot of this just comes down to semantics, right? Because I think we're anchored and we're anchored toward a there too is based on Ethereum, right? Which is like an optimistic or ZK roll-up thing that the technology has advanced for quite a few years. If you look at it, if you look at that apples to apples, that is just simply not possible right now. There's no smart contract functionality or way, trustless means of bridging and actually having a layer two solution on Bitcoin in that context. Some people would call it layer two, anything that's extending the functionality of Bitcoin or a trust-minimized bridge. Honestly, don't care all that much. It's just different than what you kind of anchor to when thinking about an Ethereum all to. So most, or in fact, all of these products today, Stacks, et cetera, are core. You know, Bob, they're all side chains, right? They're being secured by Bitcoin in some way, but they have their own validator set, their own consensus operating as their own layer one blockchain. There's movements in the Bitcoin community to make some advancements like an OPCAD upgrade or et cetera that may make it easier to have a proper L2 on Bitcoin through different opcodes. And we're all waiting to see what happens and preparing for that. You just never know how long that's going to take. But I'm very optimistic that'll happen in the future. But for now, the real value is coming through these side chains and you can't really wait for the technology. You're not going to sit around and wait five, six years. Who knows how long for these things to happen. The time is right to build now and start extending the utility of Bitcoin today. Yeah. You know, on the opcat topic, I'm curious, do you own a quantum cat by chance? I don't, but I've been looking very closely for quite some time. Do you? I don't, I don't. I'm very active in the runes community, but I have not taken the plunge and bought a Quantum Cat just yet, but I want to. So, well, let's talk about core. You guys had a big announcement last week. Maybe take us through that and what that enables your target audience to be able to do. I think there was a couple of big announcements, pretty exciting things happening. Yeah, appreciate that. we can maybe just kind of, there's probably some preface thing to do before. So we have this function called Bitcoin staking as part of our consensus. And when we say Bitcoin staking, a lot of people will use that as a blanket term for Bitcoin yield, which kind of makes Bitcoiners, you know, doesn't give them a ton of confidence, right? But when we say staking, this is like an actual trustless way to earn yield on Bitcoin and help stake. and secure the core network. So how it works is basically we've, we leverage hash time locks, which is a native opcode on Bitcoin, where you can connect a Bitcoin wallet and actually time lock your Bitcoin using a hash time lock to yourself for a specific period of time. So for, you know, it be a day, could be six months. For example, let's say you do so for 10 days, right? So you issued the time lock. You issue a Bitcoin transaction, your Bitcoin is locked, so you can't spend, use it, et cetera, but you haven't wrapped a bridge or given up custody of your asset. You have this peace of mind of knowing that it's still under your private key. And basically you can think of it as you're using Bitcoin to vote for a validator on core. It's delegated proof of stake, right? So, you you really trust the figment validator. They're to be a great steward on the core chain. You delegate one Bitcoin. to help them get elected, right? And in response for doing that, you earn a percentage of core's block rewards, similar to any staking function. If you're staking core or staking a native token, you earn a percentage of block rewards and transaction fees, you get that as a Bitcoin staker. So what's awesome about that is it's kind of brought risk-free yield to Bitcoin for the first time, no need to give up custody or have this crazy like... risk that came from some of these folks in the last cycle like Celsius and BlockFi. And then what we did shortly after that is we did this upgrade called dual staking. So what happened is you can get this native yield with Bitcoin, but if you also stake Core, you get higher Bitcoin yields. And the reason we did that was to tie the two communities together and also provide more utility for the Core token. Right? So you can now dual stake. can still, to be clear, stake just Bitcoin, but if you stake both, you get higher Bitcoin yields, right? Sometimes like 10 times higher. And so what we did was this is integrated in many custodians like Bitgo, Copper, HexTrust, a bunch of others being announced soon. And the thinking was, you know, we could build a new product out of this for these institutional clients. So what we found was a lot of instos are looking for Bitcoin yield. They don't want to do risky lending activities. They want to do something like a core solution and help bring back value to the Bitcoin blockchain. But they have a ton of Bitcoin, they're unsure. It's kind of like a few steps to go buy core and then dual stake it and manage all that. So you could think of this new product, LST Bitcoin, what you do is in the custodian, you say you have a Bitcoin in your custodian, you can just one click. convert it into what's called LSD Bitcoin and you're earning a native yield. And basically what that product's done is it's abstracted a lot of the complexity away where you can collateralize Bitcoin, buy some Bicor or DualStake. It's managed by Maple Finance and your custodian and your Bitcoin's staying in your custodian account. And so all that complexity is abstracted away for institutions to get a very low risk, awesome yield on Bitcoin. And we launched that in conjunction with Maple Finance, Bitco, Hextrust, Hopper. We were at Consensus last week. People loved it. Super exciting and it's gaining a lot of traction. To be clear, the product's not live yet, but we expect it to be live in like one or two months. That's exciting. Let's talk about the, I guess, the conversations you had with institutions, because having spoken to a couple of Bitcoin projects or projects around Bitcoin programmability and kind of yield, the common kind of refrain from them is that institutions want more exposure to Bitcoin. They want Bitcoin yield. and they're looking actively looking for projects to help them. And so this definitely fits that kind of that model. When you speak with these institutions, like I guess what kind of feedback are you hearing from them as you, before you develop the LST product, I guess what did they tell you they wanted? Sir, so first of all, everyone's looking for yield. The killer product on Bitcoin right now is yield. The problem is it's just very difficult to get and or it requires different levels of risk. So Core Envision is a world where there'll be tons, there's this whole platter of yield options, right, depending on your risk tolerance. Non-custodial Bitcoin staking being at the absolute lowest, right? Risk-free. yield and then you can come on chain and do a variety of other things. Depends on your appetite. So what we learned from institutions are there's a whole range of their risk tolerance. you know, again, Core is kind of serving up the platter to serve them. But a few things kind of stood out, the first of which is most larger Bitcoin holders or funds, et cetera, are trusting custodians to custody their Bitcoin or Fireblocks. By the way, Fireblocks supports some dual staking as well. So I mean, they're relying on a custodian just due to risk or outside LP risk. They're not cussing the funds themselves like a retail user. The second thing is there's a million of these Bitcoin derivatives launching, right? Like RAP Bitcoin. I think you just talked to Lombard, know, FBTC. Institutions are a lot more comfortable with custodian backed products as opposed to multiple. like a threshold signature scheme or a multi-sig on some of the other approaches. No, I don't have an opinion on which is better, right? But all I'm saying is institutions generally, they're not going to take the risk of a multi-signature on-chain product today until it's more trustless or trust minimized. So that was the other piece of feedback. Again, that kind of led to the strategy of launching this institutional focused LSD Bitcoin product. They earn yield, they're minting LSD Bitcoin. They can also bring that on chain and do more with it. Right. That'll be the next step, depending on risk appetite and a great way to get these folks and liquidity to flow on chain and be put to use with a base yield. You know, I, your explanation, I've heard that a couple of times, but what I haven't seen, and I think this would be a good kind of content marketing exercise for your team. think this, if you created a piece of content like this, I think it would kill, I think you would kill it. Well, the whole idea is, I mean, the way you explained it was that, you you've got all these institutions with different risk appetites. And so I imagine a spectrum. And it would be great to actually visually see what that spectrum looks like and where Cordao fits and where the other competitors fit. That way the institution can just look at this and make a decision. Okay, you know, our risk appetite is here. These three are probably the ones we ought to talk to. That way it's almost self-serve in that way. And it becomes an inbound kind of an inbound funnel at that point. And anyway, because I've heard that explanation, but I haven't visually seen it. But that would be super helpful, I think, would be for really anyone, but I think especially institutions. going to see some people tackling it. And I agree. think your intuitions bang on, which is pretty amazing because I don't know how deep you've gone in this Bitcoin space. But I think there's some folks kind of building almost like staking rewards, but for Bitcoin yield and more so for staking products. And they're kind of going through explaining how things work so folks can make decisions. Also, I totally agree. I there'll be a world where the custodians have some sort of yield options page where things are very clearly explained and they're kind of serving that up. I don't think they're going to have the full spectrum like Core has because they're not going to list every on-chain thing that could be done. But maybe it's Core staking, then LST Bitcoin, and then something else. And I think they'll have like a very curated list for their clients because the signal that they're getting is that folks want yield. Yeah. but they're not willing to take crazy risk to do so. To get it. And these institutions are obviously, they have fiduciary due to their customers. And so it's important that they're very careful and they are wise in how they manage their risks. For core, and correct me if I'm wrong, I imagine it's a two-sided market, right? You've got, on the one hand, you've got institutions that are looking to do something and get exposure to Bitcoin. And then on the other hand, or on the other side would be, you know, these partners that that core has, or core core has these partners in which these institutions could then kind of get exposure to to get additional yield. Is that right? Kind of? Yeah. serve just institutions, although like the LSD Bitcoin product is very much an institutional focused product, right? You can only mint redeem with copper, Bitco and HexTrust. And it was very much designed for that segment of customer. When it comes to on-chain, again, you nailed it, right? Like there's this great Bitcoin staking product, right? It's part of our consensus. that frankly many retail Bitcoin holders are participating in. There's about 6,000 Bitcoins stake today, a lot of which being dual-staked and anyone can do so, a lot of which is retail Bitcoin holders. But to make that the core token and make that valuable, we need to have a thriving blockchain and ecosystem and dapps and usage that eventually translate into fees that help with... with the stakers, right? So I'm pretty proud to say that like Core right now is the leading Bitcoin side chain in terms of TVL and usage. We've been live in market for just over two years now. And that's super important, right? You basically want a blockchain, mainly that's Bitcoin focused, but there's also games and different things that drives value and the two things kind of work in tandem together. And I will say, it's punchy, there's a lot of institutions. have tried to, or like not tried, are putting their Bitcoin on chain, taking out loans, doing things with Bitcoin derivatives. And then our audience is actually more retail focused. We built up this huge consumer, know, retail community and, course, kind of become the Bitcoin consumer chain in many ways. Like we're talking, you know, I think 800,000 unique actives a week. you know, using the chain that it's almost basically a top 10 chain in terms of usage. So that's super exciting. That's incredible. And I know the LST product is institution focused and quite new. And would love to hear on the retail side, because I think this will be news to a lot of folks. And the way you've explained it, it almost sounds like you mentioned games. it almost like a, even though it's kind of underwritten by kind of Bitcoin security and it's a side chain of Bitcoin. as far as applications are on it, like you mentioned games. That's interesting. We'd love to hear about the apps. Yeah. kind of like based on the consumer community we built. And again, I think what was cool about Core is, obviously you have a lot of just general blockchain users, but what you see is most blockchains are just fighting over the same cohort of users, right? As opposed to expanding the pie. Core when launched actually expanded the pie. There was like a 2 million person airdrop. A lot of those folks were net new crypto users. through the strategy we did in partnership with Satoshi App, I should also say we did a fair launch. So there was no VC money, free mining tokens, any of that bullshit, you know, just kind of launched in two years ago in February and did a very large airdrop to, and it's basically a community owned chain. So we brought in a lot of net new folks into blockchain and into this community. And you still see that persistent today in our socials and on chain usage. And I think what you find is obviously it's a Bitcoin focused chain. That's we want to expand, extend the utility of Bitcoin. So the biggest killer apps are like Bitcoin money markets, right? CDP protocols, Bitcoin yield vaults. But because you have this initial cohort in this kind of growing community, you've kind of referred their friends, et cetera, of consumer folks, they just love games. And a lot of those are finding PMF on the chain and being used, which has been pretty awesome to see. And obviously Core is just an open blockchain so people can build whatever they want. That's pretty amazing. Do you have a favorite game on Core? So I'm not a huge gamer, but the biggest hit is this game, Pixudy. I think it's got the highest numbers on DappRadar. But there's been a couple, a couple winners like that that are doing well. I probably haven't games since for like 15 years, which I shouldn't be in a very like nerdy community. I should not be saying this, but it's been a while since I fired up the Xbox. But when I started my last company, you know, I just basically couldn't, couldn't game anymore. I gave it up, but you you've got guys like Elon, apparently that are. like crazy so there's really no excuses. Everyone can find the time. No, I hear you. I'm not a huge gamer either. I'll open up Clash of Clans once in a while, but that's about it. I'm curious about the, it is a proof of work side chain. And how does that, there's some limitations and trade-offs with proof of stake. So that's why I was curious about games in that, know, games have to be incredibly responsive and fast and... and have quick user feedback. I wonder what the impact is on games and other apps that require really quick user feedback on a proof of stake chain. Yeah. core. Yeah. So quick distinction. We've got this really cool hybrid. It's basically like a hybrid chain. It's called like a hybrid proof of work or delegated proof of work, delegated proof of stake. I'll jump into the details there, but basically, you know, at this point core is very highly performant. I it's like well over a thousand plus transactions per second. We were getting spam. I don't know if you were remembering like, was it a year ago when I mean, you said you're into runes, right? So if you remember ordinals before that, there was all these like, like inscription attacks on all these EVM chains. And the core network was one of the chains that got completely spammed by these, these inscription services, right? Every chain, some went down. performed like incredibly well and did great. So in terms of like your average game, it's going to do absolutely amazing, no trade-offs whatsoever and very performant. Why that is, is basically you think of it as this hybrid system, right? We have a limited set of validators today, 27 or so. By the way, block times are like three seconds, which is extremely fast. Again, a lot of TPS. So how this system actually works is we have validators, a limited set that get elected every day, right? The top 27. And how they get elected is they're basically ranked based on how much ash has been delegated to them, how much Bitcoin has been delegated and how much core. So there's like these three very difficult things to get. And there's a hybrid score based on how much of each of those has been delegated to them that we run every day. And then that's what elects the validators. So it's actually this hybrid system and you think of it more as delegated proof of stake. It's a hybrid of both, which I don't think has been done before. So it's not purely a proof of work. No, that's really unique. Switching topics really quick, content marketing and educating your audience is pretty important. And I noticed that the core YouTube page, there's like 360 videos, which tells me two things, that education is really, important to core. And the quality of these videos are very, it's like really, really high. And so I'm curious kind of the thinking that went into, okay, content marketing is important and we need to kind of lead with these videos. I guess what was the thinking behind that? And what's the impact so far? Because it's quite impressive. Yeah. is cracked. No, they're cooking. I also noticed, I think the YouTube was started maybe a year ago. The actual channel was started literally like a year ago, I think. So it's a lot of content. So a couple of thoughts there. First of all, I'll say I'm not completely embedded in the marketing team. So sorry to the core marketing team if I absolutely butcher this, but generally, I think... Web3, most things, and especially Web3 is an attention economy, right? And it's something that I think is annoying, but needed in this industry. think again, like kind of to our first point, we try to not play narratives and jump on the next thing and change our strategy. We're here for this long-term mission of extending the utility of Bitcoin. Right. And that's probably going to take a decade and that is not going to move. We're not going to jump on the thing that's cool for two months, but then today it is an attention economy. So we are trying to, and we realized that try to produce, you know, as much helpful content that's aligned with that long-term mission as we possibly can, that can help our existing community, help them share it with others to continue to grow it. think core has 9 million. holders today. Again, most of those being consumers against like the consumer Bitcoin chain. you know, tactics like that are really helping us grow the base and the community here without having to, you know, jump on type narratives that you'd see on Twitter, you know, every, every week. So I think the team's doing great, really trying to, trying to produce as much content as possible to help with the community. I think it's admirable and you're exactly right. mean, a lot of projects are kind of schizophrenic in terms of their positioning and identity. know, if AI has kind of been at the top of mind in terms of like mind share for the last six months. And so a lot of projects are trying to find their angle to AI, kind of be part of that narrative. But a lot of people can kind of see through that. And I appreciate that, know, Core is not doing that and that you have a long term vision, you have a North Star and you guys are, you know, working towards that. From a content marketing perspective, the YouTube channel is very impressive. I mean, it's, you know, not only will it show up in like organic search, but, you know, we know that a lot of these, you know, Grok and other other chat GPTs, they they crawl and they use kind of search as YouTube as training. And so it'll come up. And so it's a great way to get inbound interest. When you mentioned that my buddy is like one of the top SEO folks, you know, past decade. And that's kind of the newest budding area of his consulting agency is, is. A search optimization for these LLMs, which I thought was fascinating. Like obviously it's, reminds me of the app stores back in the day. That was a big catalyst for Joyce. You know, we, we were like amazing at app store optimization before, before it kind of matured and it. It left a lot of opportunities, think. So super cool. And it, in the YouTube channel, as well as your other content, I mean, it meets a user need, you know, it's you're answering questions, you're, you're, you're kind of going back to first principles. You're not like making any assumptions in terms of kind of people's backgrounds. You're really kind of speaking to the newest member, the newest person. And that's, that's really cool because it helps people feel kind of accepted and welcomed. and less intimidating because Bitcoin and really crypto in general could be super intimidating. And these videos that are helpful and educational kind of slowly walks them kind of, you it's warm. The water's warm. Come on in. You're welcome. And it's pretty cool. And it shows. I your community is thriving. It's growing. I was looking on your ex account. And apparently there's a hackathon coming up. We'd love to hear about that and the types of developers you're speaking to and maybe any challenges you guys are presenting to the developers. Yeah, tell us about the hackathon. Sure. So, yeah, I actually tweeted about that today. So, I mean, super relevant. yeah, I think there's a lot of hackathons actually. So we're trying to do it pretty hyper localized and curated and not have a hackathon for the sake of hackathon for the marketing stuff we just talked about. But generally, I mean, we're still trying to attract the best Bitcoin developers. right on core. We're actually doing a program now called core commit, which is like your YC accelerator. So we've got 10 really cool companies. Um, some of which we've are like four of five we've already invested in from on the core venture side. So, so for context, I, I drive core ventures, which is our strategic ventures arm. So we're always looking for ways to attract the best builders and you think of it as a pipeline, right? Try and extend the reach as much as you can. And then. have different products for different builders based on where they're at in their journey. Hackathons are generally like educational opportunities or top of funnel for devs. Expose them, educate them on core or give them an idea, which is the spark to go after something bigger and build a vision. So a of a ramble there, but that's how we think of it, right? Where core commits like, hey, you've got the idea, you got your co-founders, you're now looking to launch a product and raise funding. right? And you're ready for a Ventures check. then, so we're kind of trying to think about what, what these developers need. So going back to the hackathon, it's, it's going to be launching soon. actually being run by the dev rel teams. I don't have the exact details in front of me, but we're, putting it live, I think next month. We're going to be putting up, like almost like a, a list, like a curated list of things, the foundation and the community would like to see built. A lot of those are Bitcoin specific. So. Rich has publicly talked about a Bitcoin video bank he'd like to see. There's a lot of things that we think can be built on top of LSD Bitcoin and dual staking. There's some other DeFi derivatives we'd like to see. We're going to be launching the full list this week, so I don't want to give it all away here. But yeah, super excited to get some killer teams and inspire them with these ideas. Because what's cool, I'll give you an anecdote. We did a hackathon last summer. There was maybe, I think there was 100 projects or so there's maybe 80 actually. And you know, lot of them were really early in their journey all over the world. None of them were really ready for ventures funding yet, which is okay. Right. It's like a long-term approach. One of those companies is now in core commit and raised money from ventures. And it's going to be one of the leading protocols like DeFi protocols on core. So that's pretty awesome to see that, that, you know, that strategy is kind of working and you just never know. what kind of hit you're going to get out of the hackathon. So it's super cool. That's really cool. I love the perspective that it is top of funnel. It's to get developers in. What comes out at the bottom of the funnel, it's going to be very few projects that actually are investment worthy. But the ones that make it there have definitely earned their spot. So that's really cool to hear from the hackathon last summer. Yeah, it's just fun and it gives you the spark. I remember we did these hackathons in web two, even internal hackathons at Joyce and they're just super fun. And sometimes you actually built the product internally or got folks, got them a spark to build something cool. So I think this is kind of the great first step. It's why you see hackathons pretty often. It's a good way to spark creativity or what can be built on Bitcoin. Yeah. I want to talk about something that's been labeled as the Bitcoin Renaissance. I forget who coined the term, but I first heard about it about a year and a maybe a year and a half ago that, you know, there's just this strong kind of urge and interest to make Bitcoin programmable, participate in DeFi. And there was just a sudden surge, maybe not sudden, but there was a surge of projects that enter the Bitcoin space to make Bitcoin programmable. Core is one of those, but there's many others. And I'm curious about who you consider as competitors and maybe give us a sense of how Core differentiates itself from its competitors. Sure. So happy to share that. to kind of like set the context here, a huge opportunity, right? I think you've got two trillion in market cap. I think the market's down. I don't typically look at prices every day, but I mean, let's say it's roughly two trillion, right? In Bitcoin market cap that historically sat around, done nothing, right? So if you think about this, the legitimacy of the asset class and where it's going, You can see that it's a huge opportunity to unlock that liquidity and bring it on chain or offer yield products to this huge base of worldwide users, right? To hopefully get to a vision that's closer to the initial new financial network in addition to the store value, right? So first of all, think like the big problems and opportunities attract people, right? Core being one of them. We were really early, I think, before this whole trend came. had been working, know, launched two years ago and had been working on the project before that, but you're seeing other folks come in, which I think is awesome. I think a lot of them will not be around in the next year or two because what you also see in crypto is folks just kind of pour into like the hottest thing and then their heart's not necessarily in it. So are they going to stick around for 10 years? Probably not. But I think you have a lot of folks that are genuinely trying to tackle this. So I think, you know, you've got Core. I think other folks to look at on the, know, the mezzo threshold guys have been working in Bitcoin with, you know, fold app for almost a decade now. I think they're, really long-term thinking. Stacks has kind of been the original Bitcoin side chain and doing some really interesting things. And then on the staking side, you obviously have Babylon kind of like an eigen layer for Bitcoin, which is kind of also brought awareness to this whole Bitcoin. yield Bitcoin staking. So I think you've got a ton of folks putting their own layer on things and it would take me a long time. Obviously, this is my world, so could easily walk you through everything's really different. guess our approach is to just offer this vertical product offering. We've got a staking product, native staking to the protocol. It's also a vertical blockchain products like LSTBTC for institutional clients. and maybe more products will be launched over time. But there's kind of this vertical strategy to basically bring all these components together and be number one in every category. Got it. And I think that's good that you know kind of, you know who you are. Record knows who it is and it sticks to, it stays in its lane and tries to be the best in what its capabilities are and that's I think pretty admirable. Yeah, I think overall there's some really good talent in the space. And I think there's also the market's so big that there will be a couple of winners in this space. Yeah. one trend I'm seeing, and I don't know if you see this, but I'm seeing wallets having kind of vertically integrating with bridges as well as with swaps. And I'm curious if you've seen that and if there is a strategy for core to be, you know, maybe embedded in some of these wallets that are very Bitcoin kind of focused. and kind of power it almost like a white label. The credit really goes to the wallet, but what's powering kind of the bridge and the swap underneath is core. Is that something that that you guys have thought about or have seen? Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts. I feel like I keep going on tangents. So you can just let it kind of like knock me when I'm like deferring or talking about something different, but definitely we think that's a huge piece to the strategy. also, know, native staking, core chain, you know, where you can dual stake, you can one stake, one click stake Bitcoin in your favorite Bitcoin wallet. I think what you've seen, and again, it's kind of informed our institutional success is the instos and custodians are moving a lot faster than retail Bitcoin wallets. lot of, because Bitcoin has kind of been this hold asset, a lot of these legacy Bitcoin wallets have really done nothing for many years and are super behind. Like you're a big runes guy. They don't support runes natively, right? I don't think ledger supports runes or organs yet. The signature schemes. Example. Right. And they have 20 % of the Bitcoin. So it's like mind blowing. Right. What the hell. But they're so entrenched in the community that obviously they still have like a ton of Bitcoin and a lot of users. And I think they'll get there over time. They just have a ton of competing priorities. So absolutely, it's an area of focus. And I think what you're also going to see is the utility grows for Bitcoin. You're going to see these wallet providers expand their utility as well. whether it's bridging, one-click staking, supporting side chains like Core. I think that's all coming and like a big push for us for sure. Yeah, I'm definitely seeing that now in at least in Ethereum and Solana space. It's almost like a category that they've dubbed themselves as like the super apps. But what it really is, just they're vertically integrating a bunch of things into the wallet. And I think it's an interesting trend that we're seeing. And I think we're going to see more and more of that. I think so too. have this killer wallet called Element Wallet. That's kind of like the core focused vertical wallet. And a lot of the community loves it, uses it so you can stake Bitcoin. You can get access to the coolest core DeFi protocols. And definitely a trend, but that's core specific. I think you're right in that. We're definitely seeing that trend and wallets are trying to expand utility because just being a wallet is tough to monetize, I think, even at scale. So they're kind of creating these abstracted, they're abstracting some of the complexity away, which I think is good because it's an easier user experience. think a lot of that was dictated by Coinbase Wallet too, trying to push that and push these easier user experiences that are embedded in your wallet. Yeah. You've said this phrase a few times and I appreciate you saying this, like abstracting complexity from the user is definitely what we need to be doing more of in crypto because I've worked with lots of founders and they almost lean in the opposite way where, you know, they prefer to use like buzzwords and they love complexity because it kind of feeds their ego almost. Whereas like normal people, like we actually want to abstract complexity so it's easier for people to use. That's how you get kind of product market fit. And I appreciate you saying that because what it shows is that, you know, as a principle to follow, you know, that's something that Core is doing. And that's just how we get kind of crypto back, you know, to the masses and makes it more welcoming. I think so. And I think you're seeing that with wallets. Obviously, we tried to do that with the launch of LSD Bitcoin with the custodians. Again, just make it what's the simplest way possible to earn institutional yield and then get a derivative on chain. So yeah, trying to keep that frame of mind with most things that are being built in the core blockchain. Yeah. Well, Brendan, this has been really, really fun. Before we get off, what are some final, I guess, words you have for the audience? Maybe kind of, guess, what's next for Core? And for those that are interested, let us know how they can get involved. Sure. So, I mean, there's so much happening in core right now. I mean, this is going to be the biggest year ever. And we obviously say that every year. obviously, the LSP Bitcoin launch was huge. The demand so far has been really high. We're to be adding custodians. So stay tuned for more announcements on that. More custodians will be supporting it and supporting the strategy. And it'll go live probably end of this quarter, early Q2. So that's obviously a big focus. There's a million other things we're at Bitcoin investor week this week, and there will be another large announcement that coming from Rich will be on the main stage with a pump. So stay tuned for that. We're super excited. The other big one that we've already launched is this public company called Corify. So we're basically, it's not our company, it's being run by our partners at DeFi Technologies. But they launched an entity up in Canada called CoreFi and it's kind of marled after strategy where they're just going to be buying core open market. The core foundation has seeded this company with core and made an investment. And they're basically just going to be deploying core strategies into the market, which is going to be amazing. So super excited to see that go live. And then on top of that, we've got like our hackathon, we've got core commit. and many other big announcements coming soon to keep up to speed on all this. I think the best is X or YouTube as Peter mentioned. So we're just at coredow underscore org on X. We're also on YouTube. think coredow underscore org or coredow org. And you can kind of keep up to speed there. There's also a discord. So, you know, choose your own adventure and you can stay in touch with us. Depends how involved you want to get. So you explaining all that brought up one more question. Maybe this could be our last question, but I found it really interesting. So for core, the last 24 hour volume, 56 million volume. And I'm curious, what do you think is driving that interest? I was training my. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't look at the trading lines every day, but sometimes I have a few times, especially certain days where you're like, whoa, that's hundreds of millions of dollars. So why? think if I had to guess, think it's because, know, core has, the team has been executing. There's been a lot of TVL and actual usage and active wallets driven on chain. I think they look at the tokenomics and this isn't some VC pump and dump chain. This is like community run fair launched. Then you can see the teams here for the long term as a long-term vision. So I think there's a lot to get excited about. I think the name core is pretty dope too. So, who knows? Maybe they just find the ticker interesting. But I think if you're looking to make bets in the Bitcoin space, scaling space, At this point, Core is one of the most reputable projects there. And I think that's becoming more clear as the months go by. Yeah, and I think the longevity definitely points to not only is Core's been kind of tried and tested over the last two plus years, you guys have a long-term vision and it really shows. so kudos to you and the team. And this has been really, really great to talk. Thank you so much, Brendan. thanks Peter. I know it took a while to get it all scheduled. So super pumped to come on and chat. Nice. Well, pleasure and hopefully we can do it again in some time. You got it.