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[00:00:09] Fergulati: Hey everybody, welcome back to another Hashing It Out interview. Today we are joined by Nathan Vandy from DappRadar. If you haven't heard of DappRadar, you should check it out. If I could put it shortly in ten words or less to be appropriate, it seems like you're trying to create like a decentralized DApp store, right? For different

[00:00:33] Fergulati: Dapps to launch, right? Like, think of it like an app store from, you know, your iOS as the App Store. We've got Google Play Store. This is decentralized and it's for DApps.

[00:00:42] Fergulati: But you guys, we're going to dig into that. Nathan, welcome to the show.

[00:00:47] Nathan Vandy: Thank you so much. Really appreciate the invitation. Glad to be

[00:00:50] Fergulati: Problem. So why don't you introduce yourself, man? Where are you? Where are you from? How did you get into crypto? How did you know? Like, yeah, I'm about to commit my life to crypto. No,

[00:01:01] Fergulati: But a lot of people do. They fall down the rabbit hole and they don't come back out. But. Yeah. Tell us who you are.

[00:01:08] Nathan Vandy: Exactly. Where do I start? I think the easiest way to start is When I finished my law degree all the way back in 2016, it was on the eve of Brexit and in the UK, and

[00:01:29] Nathan Vandy: I was really shocked how we'd decided to to leave the European Union as the UK. So I went to do my masters in law in Netherlands, in Maastricht. And as part of that process, I had to do a master thesis. And I don't know if you'll remember, but 2017 was when Bitcoin was reaching 20,000. And I was just confused why people were spending 20,000 on on bytes of code. It just made no sense to me. So I decided to use my master thesis as an excuse to study a blockchain technology. And my master thesis was looking at the data protection implications. So the GDPR law and apply that to public permissionless blockchains. And that's when the rabbit hole began. Because you have to understand the technology layer pretty deeply. And it's when I found out one of my first myths of crypto that Bitcoin was anonymous. It's far from anonymous. It's pseudonymous at most. And if you're if you've been quite frank, it's quite easy to de-anonymize a user if you actually want to using the correct data forensics. So it was interesting to understand like the privacy, financial privacy implications of, of what we were building here. But by that time I was hooked, like, like understanding how easy it was to send money from one individual to another. The fact that it could be traced, the fact that it was used in a decentralized network to be able to get this trust and finality and settlement rather than a centralized entity.

[00:03:32] Nathan Vandy: It completely blew my mind. And I decided to work with a different, a lot of different companies on consulting on a legal side. First worked for a blockchain identity company that was put in digital identities and verified credentials on chain, which was really fun. Then I worked with a consultancy where I was leading the legal team where we were doing a lot of audits and reviews on crypto projects and Dao specifically on how they were structured. And I then fell in love with DAOs like they are like startups on steroids. And they posed some really novel legal questions that needed answering. And that's when I had an opportunity to do a PhD at Paris University and Harvard, and I was lucky enough to be able to do a part time, whilst also currently transitioning to working part time at Dappradar, where I lead their decentralization efforts. So yeah, it's a bit of a story how I evolved from being very focused on like the legal side and helping companies from the outside in to now I'm helping that right on the inside out and whilst also helping policy on the through my PhD as well.

[00:05:07] Fergulati: You finally figure out why people were spending $20,000 on bits?

[00:05:12] Nathan Vandy: I do understand it a lot better now.

[00:05:22] Nathan Vandy: It still sometimes baffles me when you look at some of the valuations of other tokens. But I do think we're going through a process of taking some time to see what fundamentals are in a lot of the tokens we're investing into and what of it is

[00:05:43] Nathan Vandy: Actually pumping rentals. And a lot of that will come through when the fully diluted value of these entities come to with all the unlocks of a lot of these tokens. But that's another whole discussion right there.

[00:06:01] Fergulati: I'd never heard that word before. Pimental's.

[00:06:04] Dr. Corey Petty: Compliments, I like that. I don't

[00:06:06] Dr. Corey Petty: Know how. I haven't heard that.

[00:06:07] Fergulati: Yeah. Pompom rentals.

[00:06:10] Fergulati: Go ahead. Corey, you were going to ask a question. I think I interrupted you.

[00:06:13] Dr. Corey Petty: Yeah. The as you've gone through the arc of diving into Bitcoin and then expanding your understanding of the ecosystem away from Bitcoin, which then obviously quickly gets way different way quick. And now working part time for like in the decentralization efforts of, of a of a project like Dappradar

[00:06:37] Dr. Corey Petty: Like what is your how was your view changed of the purpose of blockchains. And then I guess secondarily, like, what do you see as the main legal challenge for the decentralization aspect of these things.

[00:06:55] Nathan Vandy: So despite me initially coming in as a researcher, like a legal researcher into the industry, like during that legal research, I remember there was a moment my dad, who I grew up in Sierra Leone, he wanted to send money back home to some of his family members. And I remember the whole process of connecting the compliance between the correspondent banks in the UK and Sierra Leone, taking the course of three weeks. And when you use crypto and you send crypto from one country to another, it's it's minutes. And then after that you just need to go to a physical crypto local exchange inside your area to be able to transfer that money from crypto into the local currency. And that finality and the ability to have faster settlement and be able to do cross-border transactions in a much more efficient way, was one of the things that really caught me by surprise. And

[00:08:10] Nathan Vandy: I saw that it was going to be a massive unlock for developing countries when it came to settlement, which we're now seeing with stablecoins. Right. It's one of the biggest volumes of crypto that we see being traded. So that was like one of the big eye openers for me that, that like that efficiency that it brought. So yeah. So like there's, there's on one side where I saw like the benefits of crypto on on like being able to do massive unlocks when it comes to remittance and just being able to transact currencies with each other. But the real big unlock for me was actually the ability to trust the Sgli own treasuries in communities online. And that's why DAOs are so exciting to me, because it just changed the way human and financial capital works online, where before you could do a lot when it came to organizing Human Capital online, you can think of the likes of Wikipedia, right, where anyone online can contribute to building up this digital encyclopedia. And it works so much faster than, like, one entity building up a digital encyclopedia. I don't know if you guys know Microsoft Encarta.

[00:09:36] Nathan Vandy: But Microsoft Encarta was started by Microsoft like years ago. And they had just one centralized team building up this encyclopedia, but they just couldn't compete with the scale of human capital that the internet unlocked. When Wikipedia was able to have a decentralized entity or decentralized organization, which was built in the encyclopedia. And so, like I already saw, the internet was great for that. But then you've also got the economic capital unlock where you've got this decentralized community that doesn't just build the product, but also owns the economic resources to incentivize even more contributions. And that for me was like amazing to see in DAOs. And we saw different permutations of this. For example, there was the constitutiondao. I'm not sure if you guys yet. So

[00:10:35] Nathan Vandy: There was the Constitutiondao, which was super exciting. The internet found out that the Constitution was about to go on sale in Sotheby's, and some people from crypto said, look, let's put money together and purchase it, and we can go into some of the legal details that they had to go through to be an internet community and purchase something physically, which is pretty interesting too. But for me, it was just like another moment that I had from the beginning when I just found out about that settlement and remittance in crypto being able to be a massive unlock there, and how DAOs can be a massive unlock in allocating human and financial capital. Through the internet, so it's pretty exciting.

[00:11:24] Dr. Corey Petty: One of the interesting things about the constitutiondao from a legal perspective, or like a well, eventual legal perspective. Is that the reason why? One of the reasons why it potentially didn't work is because the total amount of Allocatable capital within that Dao was known.

[00:11:39] Dr. Corey Petty: So if someone wanted to outbid them, they just outbid just as just a little bit more than what the, the Dow had.

[00:11:45] Dr. Corey Petty: In the, in the in the process of fixing that, you end up with having to obfuscate that number so that you can deploy capital in amongst businesses and not be taken advantage of. Right. That then introduces significant legal issues, I'd imagine.

[00:12:00] Nathan Vandy: Yeah. Definitely. So and it's interesting because this actually comes full circle to what I mentioned at the beginning with financial privacy and the fact that there's a lack of it in Bitcoin and how it's

[00:12:13] Nathan Vandy: A it's a two edged sword, where on one side, yes, you do get this decentralization, you do get this resilience. And being able to see who's the bad actors. But then also individually you do lose a level of financial privacy. And in this situation as well, with Constitutiondao, you had this ability for everyone to see that the Treasury wasn't being mishandled by the people that had the multi-signature wallets and that were distributing it. At the same time, you had this disadvantage of the then being able to be easily outbid. And one of the things that people are starting to work on is actually more financial privacy rules on on a blockchain and seeing whether we can create a situation where we can have certain individuals being able to see the contents of a wallet or the contents of a treasury and others don't. And this is by giving certain wallets roles where they're able to actually access that data. Maybe that's maybe off chain, so that you're able to have a little bit more financial privacy without everything being on chain, because you are going to need to have this spectrum of privacy for certain business matters that do need to be more confidential. And if we can integrate that on chain, then that is a win win for different organizations that want to utilize blockchain for a lot of its benefits without being hindered on the privacy side.

[00:13:51] Fergulati: What would be like the legal ramifications for those like few wallets that did have that read access to those accounts that, that did have the access to the, you know those treasuries like are they the only ones culpable of anything sour happens? Or is everyone involved in that Dao culpable? Right.

[00:14:12] Nathan Vandy: I mean, we're already seeing some

Episode hosts - Demetrick Ferguson & Corey Petty

Nathan Vandy from DappRadar discussed creating a decentralized Dapp store and recounted his journey into crypto, starting with a law degree and diving deep into blockchain research. He shared insights on transitioning DappRadar into a DAO and touched on the potential for DAOs to manage community resources and even city or country treasuries, aiming for increased transparency and efficiency. He emphasized the novelty and complexity of DAOs, labeling them as "startups on steroids," and highlighted their promise in redistributing economic and human capital through blockchain networks.

<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><a href="https://x.com/vandynathan">Nathan Vandy</a> from <a href="https://x.com/DappRadar">DappRadar</a> discussed creating a decentralized Dapp store and recounted his journey into crypto, starting with a law degree and diving deep into blockchain research. He shared insights on transitioning DappRadar into a DAO and touched on the potential for DAOs to manage community resources and even city or country treasuries, aiming for increased transparency and efficiency. He emphasized the novelty and complexity of DAOs, labeling them as "startups on steroids," and highlighted their promise in redistributing economic and human capital through blockchain networks.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>