Fabian, co-founder of LUKSO welcome to the show. Hello, nice to be here. So Fabian, you have a really rich history in blockchain. You are credited as the author of the ERC20 standard, and you were an early developer at the Ethereum Foundation. Tell us about your history and how you ended up at the Ethereum Foundation and really in blockchain in general. And then I'd love to get into the ERC20 standard and your thoughts around standards. Yeah. I mean, I'm coming from a web developer background that I teach myself since I was pretty much, yeah, since I was 14, 15, I started building websites in the nineties. And um I worked for startups, wrote a book about some JavaScript library and knew how to build full stack applications. uh when Ethereum started or before it started, actually before they even made a fundraise, they decided that they also wanted to open an office in Berlin. um So I met these guys pretty much before they made the fundraise like a day before here in Berlin. um And I kind of knew that like the idea of Ethereum was like the idea of like creating this uh internet computer, decentralized backend, if you will, right? Like the server for the decentralized web and uh I also knew that, okay, you not only need to build a low level architecture of the network and then hope people come, but you need to kind of show them how this works. What applications can be built? How does it work? How does it look like? And so on. And because I built single page applications, so I was able to applications that only run in your browser using JavaScript. um I kind of knew that it could be helpful. So I reached out to them at some point and pretty quickly like, joined Ethereum in January 2015. That was six months before we started Mainnet and built the MIS browser. The MIS browser was the first web three browser um that was in, pretty much we started this when we started the network, we launched it. It was the Ethereum wallet also. It was official wallet. um And the idea or like the vision came from Alex van der Zande. He was the one who kind of like... mapped out this idea of what Ethereum could be used for. And he actually made a video that you can still find on YouTube. It's called Ethereum Mist. And that was created in uh 2014 November. So eight months before the Ethereum mainnet started. And in that video, he kind of laid out the interface, he laid out the vision of what could be built on blockchain. Not because he came up with all of this himself, but he basically took things that were around discussed at the time. and he just put them in a nice interface. um But he had no one really to fully build it out. And when I came along, I was just the perfect fit to be able to like build this out. So we built the Mist browser, which then inspired MetaMask. um During this time of me building the Mist browser, had to basically like build all the, or work on all the developing tools like that you need as a DApp developer. You know, how does your DApp talks to smart contracts and needed to work on Web3.js, for example, which was the most used JavaScript library at the time, or for the first four years of Ethereum. We had to figure everything out pretty much in this early days. like I helped standardize a lot of things. So I kind of like slipped this way into the standardization route. That is so exciting. So it's been ah roughly 10 years now since you proposed the ERC-20 standard. If you take a step back and you look at the last 10 years, oh Did you have any idea that it would become such a foundational piece of Web3 infrastructure? And what are your thoughts over the last 10 years? How do you think, uh has blockchain achieved everything that you hoped it would? And where are we in terms of its maturity? So, ah did I, you know, I mean, I knew Ethereum is going to be a game changer. I mean, I knew it the moment I heard about it, just because blockchain can be just so much more and can do so much more than just, you know, being like uh a token that you can move around like Bitcoin. um There were already other ideas before Ethereum, but it never in this comprehensive generic way. So, hmm, when we are looking back at Ethereum, I mean, we have now 10 years in blockchain, and this is actually the interesting thing. We have 10 years in blockchain, and we're still kind of stuck without really mainstream adoption. We have pretty much everything is just revolving around tokens. And because of tokens and because of the US of 20, everything is wallets, tokens and trading. That means, yes, it expanded the abilities you can do on blockchain in the finance sector, but the rest of the world is not using blockchain because not everybody's interested in buying and selling something and not everybody's just interested in trading and making money. And if we look at the 10 years that we have right now, and then we see meme coins as being the prevailing wave, the last wave that just pretty much ended, I would say. And before that was NFTs. It basically shows us that we came to the extreme of tokenization, like not because we moved tokenization beyond the trading, but we came to the end time of like what could be done with tokens and trading. um And it's kind of like a funny to see, but also a little sad to see because when, when, you know, when I told you about the miss browser, the idea is that Alex put in that video, which was, there was already like DAOs and, you know, family trust and voting things and uh creating communities and, uh, like he already mapped out so many things. And in the last 10 years of Ethereum, have barely achieved more than just the trading aspect of it. Yes, we build a lot of tools and protocols and DeFi and lending and God knows what, but it didn't really move beyond that. And actually there's a reason for that. And that's the reason that has been really like on my mind for the last seven years, know, rebuilding and rethinking the fundamentals that prevent us, you know, or which have prevented us, them missing have prevented us really from moving. beyond just the financial aspect of blockchain and preventing people from really getting into the space. And why is that? Why haven't we progressed very much in the last seven or so years? Yeah, in simple terms is if everything is a wallet, then everything is about money and trading. So if your blockchain core account is just a wallet, then this is a synonym with I hold assets in there. They have to do with value. I spent on something or I hope they go up in value and that's pretty much it. If we make a wallet a profile, And we make it humanly identifiable, meaning that now it's something that I care more about because I get followers and I use it as my social internet identity. Now that wallet becomes more than just a place to hold assets. This becomes now a place that could be my reputation, you know, that can be my, my website. This can be my dashboard for the public. That could be the beginning, beginning of a collective or of a community. And this could be a. decentralized organization, or this could be my brand that is able to transact globally, but also do normal products or whatever we do in web two. We need to make people first care about those decentralized accounts. That's step number one. And only then protocols will come and evolve that actually support that web three functionality. Because when you look currently into the DApp space, You have a few popular apps and this is the Uniswap. It's maybe some lending or staking protocol. Again, everything just revolves around making money. there's uh thousands of more decentralized applications. You can go to DappRadar, you can check them out. The problem is they're super hidden, so you barely see them. You barely find this. You only really know about the popular ones and that's what we use. All the rest get forgotten in the dustbin of like, you know, the Web3. deep space, let's call it. um And on top of this, they don't really have users because the top ones get all the users and the rest don't get any users. So the moment you want to build something social, the moment you want to build something that's just beyond um trading tokens, like you have a hard time getting any user because there are no real user that use blockchain on a day to day basis. If it's not about moving their token from an exchange to another place. and maybe swapping it somewhere or staking it or lending it somewhere. um Or we're buying meme coins, you know, as we have seen in the last few months. And that's because the fundamentals are just not, they're not user friendly, number one, and they are not made for something to care about. It's almost like on the one hand, the public key cryptography, the private and public key pair as your wallet, it really kind of carried us forward. mean, it was an innovation, really. It was huge innovation, I think. But at the same time, it also prevented us from moving forward because if everything is a wallet, as you say, then everything becomes a financial transaction. uh But it ignores all the other types of connections and types of interactions we could have on chain. Yeah, exactly. And so you've channeled your energies now um into LUKSO, the current project that you are leading. uh With LUKSO, is this the primary problem you're trying to solve? The problem of, I guess, digital identity and also um fixing kind of a piece of Web3 infrastructure that's kind of been missing? Yeah, absolutely. So it's really simple. When you look at Ethereum, ERC-20, which I proposed in 2015, which then kicked off ICOs, kicked off DeFi, kicked off everything literally we have today. And because ERC-20 was adopted everywhere, everything that we have right now is somewhat compatible to ERC-20. So everything kind of came out of that one single standard. The whole blockchain space today came out of this one single standard more or less, know, and plus blockchain itself. Ethereum was always meant for more. As you can see in this Miss Browser video, the ideas were many and they were far beyond like the finance part of it was actually a very small part of this Miss Browser vision. The bigger part was the social aspect, was the, you know, network states and these interest communities part. because we didn't have any kind of like Standards that really support this and there's one kind of problem once you have a network effect around something You know the network effect roles now everybody's build build stuff around tokens and God knows what um But it's really hard if you have a certain Standard to then go and change change it because if you want to come up with a new token standard if you want to come up radical new standards It's really hard to tell people on an existing network, can you just redeploy your tokens? Could you do a token migration or even Ethereum is trying to introduce a smart account or advocate for the development and the standardization of it and it barely has adoption yet. And then we see proposals in the forks that try to make it easier where you can convert an EOA into a smart account and even that is struggling. So sometimes what you need to do is you need to start from scratch. You need to go back to the fundamentals, evolve the fundamentals without necessarily trying to be backwards compatible so that you have the right foundations. Because on Ethereum, the only foundation we really have that is widely adopted is the ESC-20. Everything else is just systems on top. And that's pretty much it. Like many kind of like, you know, derivatives and evolutions of this, but it's the core foundation is still the same. But when you go and you start from scratch and you think, okay, if we want to make an Ethereum, but that's human friendly, like what's the most primary thing we need to solve? We need to first create an on-chain account. That's not just a wallet, but it's also a profile that can be properly managed from many different devices where security is not tied to a single private key, but it can be tied to your devices. It can be changed over time where you can have recovery options and people can build new kind of recovery options. Um, you need to also be able to store information at that account and not just in an external system like ENS, where you have an ENS registry and then you have your wallet, right? But those are only loosely connected because you could switch your ENS to another wallet. So your whole history on chain constantly changes while your identity metadata kind of stays here. You need to make sure these are hardwired. You need to make sure that the on-chain identity that acts holds the same metadata in the same place. in the same smart contract and it can't be decoupled because otherwise it's not a reliable identity for the long term. And then you need the ability that your account can react, that it can react automatically on incoming tokens, assets, a protocol following you or whatever, you know, people want to invent. They need to be able to interact with your account and your account should ideally be able to automatically act. So this were the fundamentals that I figured out would need to be in a proper account that can be used for things far beyond just the money part. So that's the fundamental. And then you also need to evolve the TOPA standards. You need to involve the standards that have been there because in the last 10 years of Ethereum, we had a lot of learnings and we saw we are missing the notifications thing I just talked about, that you can inform a recipient. uh We're missing the uh ability to be more flexible for metadata because maybe People want to attach an icon of their token. Maybe they want to change the text. Right now, if you have a token project and you want to tell something to your community, you have to go to MarketCap and update the text there. Or you have to go to Twitter and then it's really hard for the person even to find like, what's the official source of this token? But what about putting it right at the smart contract of the token? Which you definitely know would be the absolute truth, right? Because that is what the token contract itself. So if that can update the metadata, you know, that's definitely the project team who did it because no one else could do that. So we need, there's a lot more things we could do on these core standards. And basically in a nutshell, LUKSO is Ethereum because it uses the same chain technology, which is in my opinion, the most advanced uh consensus and most decentralized platform, including many different clients. So many different network node developers, many different groups. Groups work on the same protocol as the largest developer community in general. So it has the best tech on that front. But in order to really introduce new standards, you need to start a new network. You need to start it from scratch. You kind of need to start Ethereum again, if you will. Because then you can introduce all those standards and say, hey, you come to LUKSO, use the new token standards. You want to create an account? Create a universal profile, create a smart account. Don't just create like, don't just use MetaMask or whatever else there was the last 10 years. do it the new way, because then you get a chain where everybody's a profile, where everybody uses the new standards, and where different protocols can be built that just couldn't be built anywhere else right now because they're also limited, because everybody ran with ESC-20. um So in a way, LUKSO is a theorem with new standards, if you will. This is just like, start a theorem from scratch with a better foundation. um And that's what we basically did. Let's definitely get into LUKSO. I want to ask uh a question prior to us doing that. mean, everything you're sharing makes sense. Going back to fundamentals, starting over, if you want to build something with kind of new primitives um or new features, we need to look at kind of what we've built in last 10 years and see if we can improve upon it. I wonder uh what the reception has been like in the Ethereum community. um when you've spoken about this. Have you, you know, I'm sure some people revere you because of, you invented ERC-20, which is, you know, the most widely used smart contract token standard, right? um But I also wonder if there are some Ethereum's that are, you know, probably hear what you say and say, what are you saying, Fabian? Like you are, um it's anathema. Are you, do you hear I guess both sides of the story there? Or both reactions? this is really a tricky one, right? um So, and actually, you know, because I created the ESC20 or I proposed, you know, the specification, um I'm the best equipped to actually make a very radically different proposal. Because otherwise no one else has the balls to do that. No one else, I mean, it is the hardest part. The hard path is to literally go and try to change the fundamentals. mean, it's what Tesla did with cars, right? Like he literally said, oh, scrap all the old stuff. We build the car from scratch. It was a tough thing to do, but right now we can clearly see electric cars are the future. You know, it's the predominant car of the future. That's a certain. And it needs to be, sometimes it needs to be done that way. It's not the easiest path in fact. And you do get tribalism. Absolutely, get tribalism. This happened when Ethereum came because Bitcoin tribalism kicked in and people were like, why are you going to this new thing? But it's Bitcoin to rule them all. And there was in 2014 and 2015, I mean, we had exactly the same reaction. And the thing is, it's not LUKSO versus Ethereum, because we're using actually that full tech stack as well. But if you want to experiment on a whole new set of standards, you need a new frontier. So you can see Lux a little bit as like the frontier to experiment with these new standards. Should we be successful, which I believe we will, because there's nothing comparable, then eventually those standards will also come back. In fact, universal profiles are cross-chain. We will make it so that you can use the universal profile on any other EVM chain. You can use the same profile address. on base Ethereum, Polygon, Optimist, and wherever, but only on LUKSO, they are the most powerful because here all the other standards also exist that everybody's using that interact nicely with your profiles. So while you can get the benefits of having a proper smart contact account that you can properly manage through multiple devices and all of the bells and whistles I explained before, only on LUKSO, you get the automated notification of assets that come in. You get the ability to do. build protocols around the interaction between your profile and other things that you just don't get that easily on another chain. But when it comes to, you know, Ethereum developer and former Ethereum developers, I mean, the ones who were OG, there's actually two paths they took. Either they made some money and they decided, yeah, I'm good here. You know, I did a lot of work. uh I'm now doing chilling. uh Or there's the others who went head down and building their own project or work on other things that are so busy that they're not really like spending a lot of time, including myself, like spending a lot of time and like studying all these kinds of different other projects and things that come out. And specifically what we build is not like ESC 20. It's not just like six, seven functions and you read them, you know, makes sense, you know, like it's, it's a more complex system. It on the end allows for more things, but fundamentally, it's a little more complex to understand at first. So it's not that easy to digest, you know, just showing up and looking at it five minutes and you get it. You need to dive a little bit into it to understand that this is actually really a game changer. And that's kind of what prevents people. So, and then we have also this natural feeling that if there's something new, most of the time we think, okay, first this needs to... become big and popular. And when it does, then I will spend the time and look at it. You know, like we heard about AI for, you know, the last like 15 years at least. Um, and only when Chetjibiti then showed it what it can do, then people started paying attention. You know, it's not that there was no research before and people talked about it. They were. So in our case, it will be the same link only when people realize that this is actually the the crack that solves the onboarding for everyone and makes Web3 actually interesting to the rest of the world, which we call the new Web3, only then really they will start to pay attention more deeply. And this is just a human and it's a natural human behavior. Yeah, we all have that, right? You can only pay attention to it so and so much. Even if somebody says they have like the golden egg, uh that doesn't mean you instantly jumping and try to investigate. You rather think, I'll wait until I see it. Well, let's dive in and see it. You mentioned you wanted to show a little bit of LUKSO today. Let's go ahead and do that now. And if you could describe for the audience what they're looking at so that they can really experience kind of what kind of this vision that you have. Yeah. So, uh, there's a platform called universally everything. Think of it like a universal interface. Um, that, it's kind of like a right now, let's say the most elegant window into universal profiles and into LUKSO itself. So LUKSO is the blockchain behind it. And you see this transactions and people do stuff and so on. It's still a very technical looking, uh, currently. And you have. 30,800 profiles right now. And this is only profiles that actually have a name and profile pictures. This is people that created profiles and there's plenty of them. And you can basically go and check out, let's look for Ledfoot for example. He is a DJ. It's a little bit like a... It's a wallet on the end. It's a smart corner account. So it can do anything. Your MetaMask and your smart corner account can do that. Or like your EOA, know, your MetaMask could do on a blockchain. But it also holds information. In this case, profile information. He has also created its own NFT. He has a SoundCloud here. um Loaded a website and like a tool that I built. um A tool to create tokens and he has even universal swaps in here. So the idea is basically universal everything is a place where you have your profile and you can put stuff underneath a little bit like MySpace. But the things you load in here are actually other websites or could be even web three apps. Like for example, this is universal swaps and I could one click connect here and I could now instantly swap my locks to something else. And obviously because it's web three, can obviously. showcase your tokens and collectibles that you have. So this is just the whatever you can do right now in Web3 except that all of these use the new token standards. So they have a few more things. For example, the creator of this can be verified and the creator itself is a universal profile. And that universal profile basically says, I created this asset and the asset says, I created I'm being created by, or I was created by this person. And now you have a two way on-chain verification that says this is an authentic object. And the person who created this is actually uh Karol Avedis, Peter Sigali. And Peter Sigali is the lead Go Ethereum developer of the Go Ethereum client. I worked together with him, actually was hired after me. I was also part of the Go Ethereum team back in the day. And he had this idea of creating a uh on-chain fractal generator. And basically it uses a lot of gas to generate these images. And so this is the interesting thing is in order to create this NFT, you just mint it. And then you need to send transaction to generate and improve the fractal on-chain directly in the smart contract. And because he couldn't do this on Ethereum, because the gas is just too expensive. He chose to do this on LUKSO. Also because we have these new standards, they're more flexible, they allow you to do a lot more things. So you could really build this out. I think actually he came up with this implementation of this fracture algorithm when he joined Ethereum back in 2016 or 15 or 16. This was actually the reason why he got hired, I think. I think he made his master thesis for this. And what's happening right now actually, almost 50 % of the LUKSO network is used to just refine those fractals. Because the hope is if LUKSO becomes popular and the gas prices go up, it becomes extremely expensive. I mean, some of them have billions of gas use. This is the website that you built like two years ago. For example, this is the top one. This has currently... I think it's 2.5 trillion gas were used just to generate this image. I mean, at some point they don't change anymore and there's lots of them. So there's a whole community that does nothing else than do this. know, they generate these, they mint them and generate these burn pics. I'm also a big collector of it because in fact, this is probably the coolest and the most real on-chain NFT ever in existence. that's better than ordinals because it's literally a fractal that's fully on chain. And the image is actually generated on the fly the moment you call the smart contract. So it actually generates the image and returns you the image directly from the contract. Anyway, that's a little bit of a sidetrack. um Yeah, so on the end, like the idea is if we have... If we have uh profiles, right? This can not only be profiles for people, but this can be profiles for communities. For example, this is refraction DAO, which is an artist uh community. You could do anything here. You you could like, you could use this as a full on DAO. You could put like mini apps in here that can allow you to vote or see the members or see what this DAO did in the last few days. They can issue things together. They could manage things together. Like the sky's the limit. mean, it's all what people want to do, right? This is kind of what makes this so fascinating. It's this play. It's kind of this my space for crypto. And the thing is not only for crypto. That's just the point. It's like, how do we make web three interesting? Because on the end, web three can be used for so much more, right? You could be a DJ like Nexus here. And uh you have gigs, right? You have fans, you do things. So what about you create a fan token, for example, you sell it, or when the people come to your concert, they can scan a QR code, they can get like a proof of attendance. And then the moment, you know, you know, who has a proof of attendance, number one, you know, who attended your event, how often, and number two, you could now use that to give them a fan token, or you maybe sell it as a kind of donation, right? And now you have a direct way to engage with your fans. For example, next time they come to a concert, they can go backstage because they came really often, right? That's the stuff where Web3 starts to tie into the real world and do people outside of crypto. And it needs the identity first. You need an actual long lasting on-chain identity. That's stop number one. Then you need to have a way that you have ideal in universal interface, because if we have many different separate DApps, then we are in the same problem that we are today, right? Dapp radar, list of a hundred pages. You don't find anything, you can't explore. But when you make these profiles, and then you can basically see what profiles do, which is currently missing. We don't really have like a way to discover, so we currently just show the Luxor Twitter, because that's where pretty much everything happens. Luxor Twitter is where you find profiles, and right now there's the Luxor. bandit's baklava thing going on and people are going crazy on wearing these hoodies. That's the thing right now on Luxor. So as you can see, that's all about that. This is a community that just started with this and now they're going all bananas on it. So they're making these videos here where they do these crazy videos where they just like, I don't know, make videos. But the moment you have... a feed, right, which is something we're working on. And you can really see what's happening on chain and it's human understandable. So it's not like transaction XYZ and token move from A to B, but like, Hey, this guy, you know, voted in this DAO and these people are claiming this airdrop because there's an event going on or people are, uh I don't know, like, you know, becoming membership of this like living commune somewhere in Bali or whatever. Right. Now you can really see, okay. people are using blockchain for organizing their community, organizing their life, know, connecting with their fans or the artists or the people they like, you know, just whatever art or creative people want to do. And that's really like brings Web3 to everyone. And this is not like a one platform with five things where we build the five features. This is where it's a little... Trigger to explain, because it's the same way like when you explain Ethereum in the beginning, right? Like you can build anything on top of this. And just because I proposed the ESC20, now everybody thought, and in the early days, by the way, everybody thought, Ethereum is for tokens. That's where you can create tokens. That's what I thought Ethereum can be for, right? Because the Ethereum Foundation somehow magically made this token thing and now everything is tokens. But Ethereum is everything and LUKSO is Ethereum. So LUKSO is everything, but now has the right foundations. Now you have a social profile um and now you have ways that you can interact them in a human, know, visible form. You know, we have a browser extension, we a mobile app, we have all kinds of tools and it will only get better. um And you can obviously have more than one profile, right? So. um everything you're saying, by the way, is really interesting. We're almost going from blockchain right now, which is primarily transactional, to now with LUKSO, now we're adding this idea of maybe it could also be relational. We can share more than, yeah, and that's actually quite interesting. Maybe for the audience, what is it? right now that is preventing us from, if LUKSO did not exist, like you created LUKSO to enable kind of the relational aspects, the social aspects, it's a different type of coordination. What is it right now about, without LUKSO, why cannot we do that with the current kind of the infrastructure that we have? I mean, number one, because you're missing the digital identity, the actual long lasting on-chain digital identity, you know, that is the number one thing that is missing and that's missing since a long time. And people try to create digital identities, but they never tried to create it in a standardized, universal and uniform way that is extremely generically built. is the most important thing. needs to be built to encompass and allow anything. cannot be built just for use case ABC, right? And that's a hard thing to do. And it took seven years. So ERC725, which is the foundation of the universal profiles and also other things, I proposed that in 2017. That was, mean, I made basically first smart con account proposal back in the day. It was the early version of it. Over the last seven years, we built it out. So now it's this full thing that is a lot more. things. you need that. need to have, uh it looks on the end like technical, looks like smart contracts, you know, with a key manager and blah, blah. But um you need that on-chain identity because then you can not only make it your profile, like he, for example, he's like making this clothes and character design and whatnot. um You can not only use it as like something to showcase or even connect your Web2 social stuff, right? So it's not anymore like separating, this is my Web3 world and that's my Web2 world. You can all be putting it in one place because there shouldn't be a difference between the two. But the Web3 world allows you to do also transactions. It allows you to give things away and own things, which you can't do in the Web2. You don't own anything. on top of this, this is the first digital identity you will ever truly own for yourself because that sits on a decentralized network that is currently like run by I think 140,000 validator keys, which I guess is like five, 600 nodes fully decentralized. are, we never run a validator in the network and we don't run one night now it's fully just run by people. was also initiated by people. just gave them. the way to generate the initial genesis block and they just ran the network all on their own and it's literally decentralized run. That means that's an account no one can take away, not even us. All we, in this case, Univis everything is just the interface and there's many interfaces to your account already. ah In fact, there's an NFT marketplace. Your profile is everywhere at the same time. Like that's the difference of an on-chain account versus a web two account. Your profile exists on all platforms that want to display it. It's not confined to a single platform and this marketplace obviously is about NFTs, but it's the same profile. As you can see, it's the same person. That's the number one most fundamental thing that we were missing. And we built a lot of other things that will enable really good protocols down the road, which is the interaction between your tokens and profiles and all kinds of things. But that was missing. Number one, solves. Yeah, we have the better fundamental number two It solves the UX problem because now you can have an onboarding where the private keys don't matter anymore They could be they could be even you know owned by a third party then they give you control over the profile now You control with your own keys you throw the old keys out now that I control the profile anymore now You have only control you can have a profile basically that's that can be centralized started Move to fully centralized and move back again to centralized it can move any day any way because you can have many different systems controlling your profile. For example, if you look at my profile, each of these entries that you see here is its own private key. So I have an iPhone, for example, that holds a key. I have a ledger that works for recovery. Universal page, actually, the page you saw before has its own key as well to control my profile and there's a permission system so you can restrict things. This browser extension has its own key. There's a recovery system that has its own key and they all then have their own separate access to my profile and can do things on chain. So it's like solving that identity problem is the biggest piece because that really prevented us from having the good UX. But then also because you create a profile and people start to identify with it, you know, we have an on-chain follower system. That means you can follow addresses. And obviously they all need to be on chain. So all of these people who follow him in this case are profiles themselves. So this is kind of like the first followers that no one can ever cancel and that are fully transparent and definitely only done by the people who want to do them. ah It's like we couldn't really create this truly decentralized, you know, social web. If you will, that's only ruled by protocols and smart contracts. and uh this smart contract, for example, this follower system is so simple as a single is a simple smart contract that no one can ever change. And it just stores mappings from one address to another. And now you have a forever follower system on chain. um It's, it's those things that we need that people care about. Like this is the most important thing is people need to. care about. And if you have a profile that you have followers on, that you did work for, that you really spend time making pretty, that you hold your important assets on. So imagine you have not only meme coins, as you see on Luxor right now a lot, but imagine you have a token that says I'm the member of this DAO or I cleaned up the beach or I've been at those parties of this famous DJ or musician. Right. That's the collectibles that you care. We have that in Ethereum. The problem is it's on one of your 10 wallets that you probably the moment you need it, you don't remember which of the wallet it was. um And then on your phone, you didn't import the token. So you don't see them on your computer. You have it at home, but then you have not connected this to the POAP app. So you don't know exactly here. And then the moment you want to use it, it doesn't work. like, it's just a mess, you know, and because of this mess, even though they're good ideas and that where implementation is being built, it was just unusable for people. But if I have one or many Unifisit profiles, maybe I have two or three, I care about them. I definitely will use them to collect all my stuff. And if I want to showcase it to the public, I put it on my public profile that I want to show everybody. So now I will remember next time I go to this club, I just need to let my profile scan, the thing can check if I own a certain balance of a certain amount of tokens and I get in for free or I get, I don't know, like. discount or I get backstage because I'm, I have more than 100 of that artist token that is currently playing. And he said, Hey, everybody with more than a hundred gets backstage. Uh, because I know my fans, you know, and I love them. So this is, this is the social aspect of web three. have not even begin to explore because the foundations were not there. And it takes a long time to build the right foundations. Hence why Luxor is seven years in the making. but once you have them and once it comes together, it's like Ethereum again. You can build anything. Anything can become possible. And because we have the grid and because you can obviously connect to DApps, uh you can now do this in such a way that you can easily interact with apps. So app developers can just build little apps that sit under people's profiles and then they can... interact with him. Now I can, for example, message Griegel because that mini app can know I'm under his profile and I just one click connected and assign the message to proof that I'm controlling this profile action. I could send him a message in his chat box, um just on his profile. uh This is the kind of things that can be built right now. And everything is social by default because he is already a profile. He's not just a random wallet. And that really enables now DApp developers who wanted to build in social space to actually have a network on which every user is actually identifiable, which just makes it so much more interesting. Well, what I love about this is it's, uh you know, really the only the person that, you know, proposed the ERC 20 standard is probably the only person that can look at the system, criticize it, and then make improvements to it. And I think people will be on board. um That is, this is incredible. Tell us where LUKSO is right now. Can everyone use it? Yeah, everybody can go to universe everything, create a profile right now. em Also, the other thing is you don't need eluxe because these new standards allow transaction relay services. That means someone else can pay for the gas. And currently we have one running that pays for your gas. you don't like, you just need clicks to get the profile. There's also mobile app. can download the universal profiles mobile app and you have a profile. In this case, you still need to enter a password, which we will get rid of too. So that's even more seamless. But Web3 should be completely like barrierless, right? That's the idea. So where we are at right now, mainnet is live. We have built the standards and the foundations. It's all pretty much live. What we're working on is improving the tools. Obviously, it's stability. It's making more bug-free. It makes more performant, optimizing on that front. The biggest piece, as you see, is missing is discoverability. Like seeing really what everybody's doing. That's the thing we need to work on. We also want to work on a few mini apps that allow a full circle moment. Full circle means full circle, not just for the token trader, because that is what Web3 gives you as a full circle right now, like buy and sell something, but full circle for like an artist or for a collective or for a community or meetup, right? So soon you will be able to create your own tokens on Universal Everything just with a few clicks. You can create your own NFT, your own token, give it whatever purpose and meaning you want. Say if it's transferable or not transferable, if you can only own one per profile or many. And then we will create ways that you can distribute it. I there's already an AirTrop tool, so you can easily AirTrop to your followers. You can AirTrop to people that have a certain other asset. We will build a mini app that you can sell it. You know, you could literally run an ICO on universal everything. um And then there needs to be a verification app, a simple web app that can just verify in real life that someone holds a certain balance. And now you have a full circle for all the social use cases that go beyond just the trading aspect, because now this can be checking if you have a ticket to get in or checking if you have some tokens to be backstage or checking in a conference if you hold a certain NFT to get the free merge. or whatever the heck people come up with, you know, like a meetup or special members group or God knows what. In fact, there's actually already a chat app Common Ground that you can use that also has already token gating and you can log in with your user profile. So it's kind of like Discord for Web3 Common Ground. And so all of these are pieces of that new social decentralized web that's coming. And there's still a lot of work to be done. But it's already here. And if you're an early adopter, if you want to understand what's coming and what will be the new foundation of the Web3, then you know, everything is the place to go. And the Luxor Twitter, given that we have no discoverability, you need to go to the Luxor Twitter and figure out what people are talking about, or just type in the profile names and figure out if you find a good one. But we will build all of these things to make that more transparent. No, what's your plan for adoption? Because this is a clear unlock to the current state of Web3 infrastructure. But um we know that really great technology or new innovative technology sometimes doesn't always win because of the adoption problem, right? And people are very hesitant to change. So what are your plans around that? So on the end, when it comes to adoption or even AI or anything else, right? Like you need to provide something that you can do only here and nowhere else. That is a reason why people want to be at, you know, going somewhere. Like obviously people are not going to change to like X, right? That's why even like going from X to Fargasta, which pretty much looks the same is a hard sell, even though one is decentralized, the other is not. And that's exactly what happens when you provide those full circle moments because the users that I see for the new Web3, that's not the user that you have right now in Web3. It's not like the investor of like 2016. It's not that bro from next door that hurt his friend making money and bought an AminCon himself. It's not those kinds of people. That's the old Web3. That's the current Web3 that's going to be less important or interesting. It's the artist, it's the musician, it's the creative person, it's the people that want to be part of a community, the people who... who queue up on Supreme stores, know, the people who want to be part of like some cool event or party somewhere, the people who go to Burning Man. It's the people that, that want to create a different kind of uh way of engaging and being part of a community or maybe creating a new world, creating network states, whatever. They need this as a foundation. There's no other way. you, and, and it hasn't happened in Ethereum the last 10 years. Why will it happen now if the foundations are the same? And I strongly believe the foundations were the problem. Like we're not going to see that anytime soon. And even though you can hack something together that kind of feels similar, there's at some point a limit. Same like you can create a hybrid electric and it's going to be cool, but at some point people realize it's not exactly the same as an electric car. It doesn't drive the same and has a lot of like uh drawbacks to the full thing. um It's the same here. At some point, the protocols will come. That will only be possible on that new place. And then you have the human aspect. without engaging with the human aspect, without really making it interesting for normal people, without making it accessible, where the blockchain part actually disappears. Sure, there's still transactions. But ideally, we can make them look really seamless or make them look really human friendly. And then it's only about like... How does community and how people engage? And obviously this is a slow growth. This is not going to be an overnight, millions of people coming. I mean, it could be any mini-app on University of Everything could completely blow everything out of the water tomorrow. You never know. um But it's likely going to be this step-by-step adoption where the early adopters realized this is a tool for their community that they're using now in new ways and that no touchpoints were ever three before. And then the next group comes and the next uh person comes and then there's this artist who makes money or better engage with his community than some other adopts it and so on. It's going to be this word of mouth growth. uh And then there's obviously waves coming of attention and that brings them more in and so on so on. But there's no silver bullet when it comes to attention because we are in like, you know, the crypto space, which is this massive echo chamber of so many projects. Everybody says they have the super solution to everything while they just at best like made a website with some half baked something in the background, if at all, or sometimes just a website. fundamental tech is just harder to perceive why it's different if it looks in the front, the outside, same like an electric car looks like any other car. It's just different when you sit in it. Yeah. And it's harder to build because you really doing the fundamental work. So that took a long time. Hence why Luxor has been around for a long time and people wondered, okay, what are we doing? You know, why is this not like three months later already like this big Facebook replacement? Because the good stuff and the real stuff does take the time. But when the time comes, it's going to change everything. Yeah. Have you looked at, uh in terms of adoption and growth, have you looked at uh Kaito as a potential channel for, to reach new audiences for LUKSO? I haven't heard of Akaito, but is this like this kind of engagement tools where you do tasks and stuff? no, um it's not a questing platform. It's a, Kaido is, instead it looks at who has influence online within the crypto Twitter space. And then um it's actually been, that's right, it's actually quite effective. I recommend definitely looking at Kaido as a, People are calling it, know, attention is very, very hard to get. But once you have it, it's also really hard to keep. But Kaido is one of those channels that for some reason or another has been very, very helpful for projects. uh haven't integrated the LUKSO chain yet. That's why you wouldn't know what people do on LUKSO. Integrations on LUKSO, even though it's Ethereum, it's a little more challenging with platforms like these because they all are based on ESC-20, right? They just track ESC-20 transfers. It's not very hard to adopt the new TOPA standards that are called LSP-7 and LSP-8. It's very simple, but you still need to do that extra effort, which you wouldn't need to do for ESC-20. That's why... integrations like platform like these and actually we looked at this and it's definitely going to be useful Yeah, absolutely like especially because it also tracks socials and stuff like this Yeah, we actually have looked at this and it's definitely something we can have a look again Yeah, yeah, it's also usually I remember this is pretty cool. Yeah, there's there's a lot of like a useful things On the end, always a measure also of when. When do you want to have the real attention? If your bike is like pretty good, but you haven't fully like you screwed on that pedal, do you want now a lot of people to jump on it and go crazy riding and test it out to the max? Maybe not yet. So we're still like this year in this phase of like bringing out these tools and improving our tools. But if you're an early adopter, if you want to build something, if you want to discover the community, which we have a very strong community, sometimes complaining, uh sometimes super supportive and right now running around with uh pink bandit masks, it's probably one of the most active uh and more engaging crypto communities that I know of. Definitely, like, and it has been around for years. So many of those have been around for five plus years and they went through lots of things. And there's not many projects who have that. And maybe also as a side note, in our project, we don't fake things. We don't fake transactions. We don't make fake number growth. We don't make bots. We don't use bots. don't have, even though sometimes our community does look like a bot. When they write on people's comments, I think it looks literally like they're bots, but it's because they're so hyped and so crazy that they're actually really like a shill on everything. But it's all like, it's a real community. it's like we have on-chain transactions. So we have around 9,000 unique visitors, 10,000 unique visitors on Universal Everything per month. We have around one to 3000 active users. on chain and that's the only number that matters to me. If you have actually active users on chain, it's a people who make at least one transaction in the time period. These are real people that are on chain doing things. And that's the only metric that started that matters for web three, you know, everything else. If you don't do anything on chain or it's fake transactions and bots, um, then you have nothing. You just fake everything. But if you have real people making actually on chain things, Then even though the discovery is not there yet, just shows that this is probably one of the more busy places in web three, because many don't even have remotely anywhere between that. And, and even Farcaster, you know, I mean, ranges from 20 to 50, 80,000 active users a month. And that's a place with a million actually users subscribed, right? And, You know, our little blockchain super undervalued here has like 2000 a month, you know. It's still, um price not always reflects activity or what people are building. That sometimes it's just the core, decorelated given that everybody's just looking at the next 10X, pump coin or whatever, you know, and right now everybody's cautious anyway, and the space is completely saturated with. People have all bought and sold everything already and now they're just waiting and seeing if Trump doesn't kill the world and somehow economy gets stable or not. Nobody knows, you know? eh Well, Fabian, this has been super helpful and really, really interesting. Thanks for all your contribution to blockchain in general, but especially Ethereum. um And I will share in the show notes everything about LUKSO and how to find you. And hopefully people will jump in and start experiencing the LUKSO experience. Yeah, awesome. I mean, there's a lot of people to welcome you and show you around and educate what's possible. And developers, that would be the most interesting because they are the one who can build so much on these new fundamentals. And that's the most interesting. Thank you for having me on your show. Absolutely.