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[00:00:10] Fergulati: Hey everybody. Welcome back. Welcome back to another amazing hashing it out interview. You know, they're amazing because you're tuning back in right now. We enjoy having you all here. Today we are joined with a glow evangelist, a glow developer all around. Amazing gentleman, if you will, Mr. David Vorick. Hello. How are you, Mr. Burg?

[00:00:32] David Vorick: How are you doing? Great. It's great to be here.

[00:00:34] Fergulati: Great to have you. I'd like to commend you on looking like your Twitter profile picture. That's good. That's always a thing, but some people don't. But you do anyways. Why don't why don't you give our audience a short introduction? Let let us know who you are. And then we'll just start to pick up the conversation from there.

[00:00:56] David Vorick: Sure thing. So I'm David Vorick. I've been in the crypto space since 2011. I got my first Bitcoin at a dollar and a half, so it's been a long,

[00:01:06] David Vorick: Wild ride. And when you know, when it comes to, like, remember to zoom out. When I think about where I began and how my life started it's very easy to, to, to zoom out. It's been a long road. Around 2014, I started working on Sia decentralized storage protocol. We ended up taking that up to a $3 billion market cap. Along the way, we made miners, we crossed swords with Bitmain, and ultimately, it kind of things kind of fizzled out. So I moved on. I looked for the next, started looking for the next great thing. And I found just like, the most unusual combination of interesting ideas in the glow protocol. And so, actually, a friend from Burning Man pulled me into glow. And so I've spent the past two years working almost entirely on deepen infrastructure, taking bitcoin mining incentives and applying them to the solar industry and kind of asking the question, what is the best way to transition the world from a dirty energy grid powered by coal and natural gas to a clean energy grid powered by entirely solar? And I think it was about maybe a year ago. I kind of had this oh crap moment where I started to fully believe I was like, wait, I actually think that this this could work. Like, we could actually convert the entire grid to solar using these incentives. And so things got very real very quick. And since then, I guess I've been running at 100%. And it's been it's been fantastic to watch kind of everything come together.

[00:02:48] Fergulati: Do you have like a bar story about that dollar 50 Bitcoin like. Jeez Louise. Make our make our audience jealous right now like.

[00:02:57] David Vorick: Is is maybe better than a bar story. I was just chilling in my dorm room, and I was I was 18, my friend who was a bio major, not even, like computer science or anything technical, poked his head into my dorm room and said, hey, David, you should check out Bitcoin. And then he poked his head out and that was it. And my whole life just, like, flipped upside down, like money without a bank. What is this? And Bitcoin was a dollar and a half and. Yeah. It's I've been basically full time crypto since that moment.

[00:03:31] Fergulati: Man. You should find that dude. Shake his hand.

[00:03:35] Fergulati: Well moving into glow, right? Like that's a very audacious goal. The whole energy grid being clean with using Bitcoin incentives. So how did you get to that moment? And, like, what has been done since?

[00:03:56] David Vorick: Yeah. So the original idea for glow was, like, super simple. It's just you give tokens to solar farms as they produce electricity, and You know, the thought was that if the block rewards are big, there will be tons of solar. But as we dived into it, we started to realize that there's a whole complicated ecosystem of things happening. And I think two, two major ones. One is that people really want climate change. So world governments are spending $1 trillion a year funding climate change, and they don't really believe anything they're funding. Everyone kind of knows that it's it's not working very well. And so if you can come forward with a story that makes sense that potentially trillion dollar, you know, pie is available for your project. So that's like one of the big. Unlocks. But then the other unlock was realizing that solar farms have. So so Bitcoin miners don't don't produce anything of value really. They produce hashing which secures the Bitcoin network. But like you can't sell the bitcoin mining hashing. And so you end up with a pretty simple economy where it's just like the number of hashes you make is the amount of rewards you get. And that's the most efficient way to structure things. But solar farms produce electricity and that has value. And so we realize that. If if the glow protocol is. Paying for solar farms, it makes sense that the Glow protocol would like extract all of the electricity revenue as well. And so we're like, what if we have every solar farm, contribute all of its electricity revenue back into the rewards pool, and you get this like almost leveraged multiplier on how far the dollars are going. And so the Glow protocol

[00:05:46] David Vorick: Today is operating at around a 20 x efficiency $1 of donations turns into about $20 of brand new solar. And you get that multiple because on average, the solar farms are producing electricity that covers around 95% of their costs. And so the protocol ends up actually only chipping in just a tiny bit for each solar farm. The solar farms don't need a ton of money. They need just enough that it makes financial sense for the bank or the underwriter or whoever, whoever's financing the project. They need just a little kicker, because the solar farms already pretty close to profitable. And so that and a bunch of other optimizations that we discovered that's where it really started to feel like, wait a minute. This is this is like, by far the most efficient way to instigate climate change. And so that's where we really started to lock in, is when we understood just the scope of, like, the need and how, how many people wanted it. And then also the scope of the capital efficiency.

[00:06:46] Jessie Broke: In terms of like

[00:06:48] Jessie Broke: Sunk costs, CapEx for starting out one of these farms. Like, what does that look like in terms of the amount of money that needs to be loaned from the bank?

[00:06:57] David Vorick: Yeah. So if you're putting solar on your roof under the Glo project, you're looking at, you know, for smaller homes or smaller roofs, something like 25 to $40,000. For bigger homes, it's more like 120 to $180,000. And so the Glo protocol has solar farms across the entire spectrum. And then at a larger scale, if you're putting up like a megawatt, which could power, say, 400, 500 homes that's going to be on the order of like one and a half to $2.5 million.

[00:07:31] Jessie Broke: So in terms of the, I guess due diligence that needs to be done on behalf of the banks, they have to ensure that you're in a region where you will be generating solar power. Right? You're in a sunny place. You're not in a place that's, you know, overcast all the time. And you probably need a, I would assume, a method of pushing that excess electricity back into the grid. So also, that might be a constraint as well. What are some other constraints that I might not be aware of?

[00:08:01] David Vorick: Yeah. So probably the biggest thing that the bank or they're called PPAs and the solar world looks for is like, what power bill are you currently paying? And if they know that you're already paying a power bill and you've been paying that power bill faithfully, you're actually not taking on a new expense. Normally you're replacing your power bill with solar farms. And so it's a lot easier for them to be comfortable with handing out a loan because they know they already know that you're good for the money. And you lose power if you stop making payments. So yeah, the big thing is like, how much, you know, is this solar farm going to generate enough electricity to offset the power bill? And

[00:08:45] David Vorick: Does the amount of value in the power bill offset the cost of installation? And so in

[00:08:52] David Vorick: Most parts of the United States, the answer is yes. All those numbers check out. And the bank is usually actually making like a decent amount of money on that trade.

[00:09:02] Jessie Broke: Horizon is. Oh, I was just going to say that the time horizon is how long typically for the offset of of CapEx.

[00:09:11] David Vorick: Yeah. So in most, you know, without glow in most solar

[00:09:17] David Vorick: Projects, the ROI is somewhere between 5 and 8 years. And these solar farms

[00:09:22] David Vorick: Produce electricity for anywhere from, like, 20 to 40 years. Is what you typically project. So it's not the fastest return, but once you have made ROI it continues producing value for quite some time.

[00:09:40] Fergulati: I would like to understand this efficiency number that you threw out and kind of like how it works. So you said every $1 equals $20 of solar like power that can be purchased

[00:09:55] David Vorick: So? On the glow protocol $1 of like donations or climate commitment. If you're like, I want to spend five bucks a month sponsoring Glow and like improving the climate, glow can take that $5 a month and turn it into $100 a month of brand new solar which means over 2 or 3 years, your $5 a month has paid for an entire solar installation on probably not your own roof, but on someone's roof in the world. And that's clean power. And that's you know, reducing the total carbon emissions of the of the human race. And the way that that works is essentially that $1 pays for a solar farm. That solar farm will generate $0.95 of electricity, that $0.95 of electricity goes back into the pool and pays for $0.95 of new solar, and that new solar will generate, you know, $0.93 of electricity. And so that, you know, you end up in this cycle, and when you take it out to the limit, you end up with about 20 x you know, 20 x overall multiplier on that first dollar that you spent.

[00:11:05] Fergulati: Yeah. Does he get bigger or is that like the. That's the cap.

[00:11:10] David Vorick: So I think as as glow grows and as economies of scale improve, I could see that number getting as high as, like 50 x.

[00:11:20] David Vorick: And basically the big factors come into how efficient the protocol is. And the miners on the protocol are at identifying that perfect opportunity. So miner miners on Glow make more money the closer to basically 100% that they get. And so a miner wants to build if you're on Glow, you want to find the solar farm that's going to return $0.99 on the dollar in its electricity value. And so as glow scales up and people get more sophisticated, and we're already seeing professional installers engaging with the glow protocol, they're buying like advanced analytic tools and they're scanning, you know, every zip code in the country to figure out which zip code can I go in and install solar and be right in that Goldilocks zone where the solar farm is

[00:12:05] David Vorick: Just barely not paying for itself, giving me tons of rewards? And so the better, you know, as as these machines get more sophisticated and people get better at finding the exactly right solar opportunity, that multiple should go up from 20 to, I think 50 is probably about where it tops out, but in theory it could go, you know, as to to infinity if people get infinitely good at at riding that line.

[00:12:32] Jessie Broke: A technical standpoint, is this a fork of Bitcoin with some modifications where rather than, you know, the useless kind of hashing function that's grinding out the nonce, is that just replaced with like what? What is, I guess, what is the pipeline from like a technical standpoint? How does that is there like an oracle involved that gets like the readout from like a utility meter somewhere? Like I don't know.

[00:12:59] David Vorick: Yeah. So it's just modeled after the Bitcoin incentive system. The similarities

[00:13:06] David Vorick: Pretty much stop there. So

[00:13:07] David Vorick: Glow is a set of Ethereum contracts. It's on the EVM.

[00:13:11] David Vorick: It's on Ethereum mainnet. And the glow token itself is an ERC 20. And

Episode hosts - Demetrick Ferguson & Jessie Santiago

Dee and Jessie speak with David Vorick, a Glow enthusiast and developer, about using incentive dollars to build, operate, and establish solar farms that will subsequently fund another solar farm in a DePIN cycle.

<p>Hashing It Out is a highly-technical bi-weekly show that brings you the pioneering developers driving the Cypherpunk movement. In each show we take a deep dive through privacy, sovereignty, and network state technology with some of web3's most influential innovators.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>

Hashing It Out is a highly-technical bi-weekly show that brings you the pioneering developers driving the Cypherpunk movement. In each show we take a deep dive through privacy, sovereignty, and network state technology with some of web3's most influential innovators.

Dr. Corey Petty

Jessie Santiago

Demetrick Ferguson

Hashing It Out

<p>Dee and Jessie speak with <a href="https://x.com/DavidVorick">David Vorick</a>, a <a href="https://glowlabs.org/">Glow</a> enthusiast and developer, about using incentive dollars to build, operate, and establish solar farms that will subsequently fund another solar farm in a DePIN cycle.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>