WholesomeCrypto
WholesomeCrypto Podcast
Max Lyman - Founder of Solon Labs
0:00
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Max Lyman - Founder of Solon Labs

Solon Labs pay less to securely use web3

Cryptocurrency has grown exponentially over the past decade and is now a major player in the financial sector. Max Lyman and his brother who started a cryptocurrency mining company in 2018, are prime examples of the advancements crypto has made. Although their mining business did not survive the crash of 2018, Max continued to explore the space, consulting for Ethereum protocols and eventually founding Solon Labs with his co-founder Ben in 2020.

Max was drawn to the Ethereum ecosystem because of its potential to create a system of decentralization that could protect people from corruption and inflation. Decentralization and blockchain technology enable people to be their own custodians and keep their assets in something stable, like US Dollar coin, without having to trust their local currency or any banks. As Max and Ben discussed on a recent podcast, “people are always doing what’s in their best interest. We would hope they act that they do things for the greater good so that everybody wins.”

Max’s goal with Solon Labs is to create a platform that simplifies the process of transacting on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing users to pay transaction fees in whatever asset they are trading and bringing them all into one central location. To do this, Max is developing an operating system for decentralization that will make interacting with decentralized applications more user friendly. This system will include a home screen of applications that represent individual companies or operations, as well as solutions such as bundling transactions together to reduce costs, social recovery instead of seed phrases for wallet creation, and a smart contract wallet with a time lock to protect users from losing their assets in case of a hack.

Max’s motivation for creating this system is rooted in his knowledge of the power of decentralization, but also in his own personal experience. As a student of electrical engineering at Northeastern University, Max was considering dropping out to focus on his business, but found a way to use his engineering mindset to benefit the cryptocurrency industry. And one story that really inspired him was when Bob Moore bought an NFT for someone who accidentally sold theirs and was unable to control his muscles due to a disease. This moment highlighted the positive impact that decentralization can have on people’s lives.

The cryptocurrency space has become increasingly competitive in recent years due to the influx of users. There were 5 million users in 2017, but by 2021 that number had grown to 105 million. This has led to new projects like Solon Labs, which Max and Ben are launching.

Max’s story is a testament to the potential of decentralization, and Solon Labs is his way of bringing that potential to life. As he says, “blockchain technology can create any sort of configuration we can dream of, including restrictions on who can interact or create proposals.” By using his engineering skills and his passion for decentralization, Max is working to make the world a better place, one blockchain-based application at a time.

Links:

https://twitter.com/Crypto__Jesus_

https://twitter.com/solonlabs


This following post was generated using AI via dubb.media 🤖

Transcript

[0:00:16] Rudy: Welcome, Max Lyman, to the wholesome Crypto podcast. Thank you so much for joining me here this morning. Thanks for having so I know that you're working on Stolen Labs. It's going to be an amazing platform to do everything on crypto. But before we get into what it is, what you're doing in the crypto space, I want to know more about where you were in life before ever hearing about cryptocurrencies.

[0:00:46] Max: I really got involved in the crypto space in 2016, but I first found out about crypto in 2013, and I was playing to you as go. I was 13 years old. I was playing to Go on my laptop, actually on my desktop, and some random dude hit me up, and he's like, Yo, I want your skin. Okay, what's a skid through the marketplace? Okay, so before NFTs, there are some cool niche games. Obviously, you could use, like, ingame currency or maybe some, like, the Next Evolution, US. Dollars to purchase in game assets. Right? And Valve kind of really revolutionized this. Before out of teas with the Steam Assets marketplace, where any users can actually own skins, which is just like art for your guns and knives and all these other things. And you could trade them for cash, and then you could actually use that cash to buy games or other things. But it would always stay as, like, Valve in the ecosystem credit. Because, yeah, sure, it was like US. Dollars, but you would have to use it on Steam within their platform. But it was cool.

[0:01:59] Max: It was a lot of fun at the time. So I was just playing. Soon as Ghost, some guy hit me up, and he's like, hey, I'll buy the skid for you. He's like, I'll give you ten bitcoin. I was like, at the time, I had no clue what bitcoin. So I'm 13 years old. I hit up Google. I'm looking up, like, woods bitcoin. I just find a bunch of random things. I still have no clue what bitcoin really is. But I see there's a price attached to it, has value. And I was just like, whatever. You know what? I'll do it. And I made a trade.

[0:02:33] Max: He actually ended just rugged. And then I sold it a few months later for, I think, like $6,000. And I was sold.

[0:02:44] Rudy: I mean, it's natural to be hyped for as a young kid too.

[0:02:49] Max: Oh, yeah. It was like the most money I'd ever seen in my life, and I just couldn't believe it. And obviously today I'd be with it. She'd spend more money. But I like to believe everything happens for you. You're a cooler person if you have to work for things, right? And then in 2016, my older brother I kind of completely forgot about bitcoin for a while. My older brother was like, Yo, I found this cool new thing. It's called bitcoin. I was like, okay, cool, cool. And he's like, I'm going to make a lot of money. I'm like, all right, cool. He's like, you want to make money too? So that's honestly how I really got involved with cryptos back then. He didn't really know anything technical, but he was very much a business guy, my older brother.

[0:03:35] Max: So we started a cryptocurrency money company, and I would just build out, assemble all the computers, nothing too complicated, with like, RX five, et cetera. And then we started moving into a six that we'd get from bitmain and other suppliers. And then we designed like, some of our own CPU, cooling hardware and a few other things, and we had our own warehouse space. And then 2018 happened. In 2018, everything was shit, and everyone wanted to liquidate everything. And the worst for the ASIC miners, because those are created specifically to form applications designed around mining bitcoin. Right. Improving consensus on the bitcoin blockchain. So they were like, absolutely worthless. So we paid probably like, I think it was like $2,000 per miner per ASIC, and they were selling in 2018 for like $50.

[0:04:29] Rudy: So you bought them on the hype and then.

[0:04:33] Max: Well, we bought them directly from the supplier. Not even on the recent yeah, I know, we bought them from BitMate. Once you paid for, like, you would have to pay to expedite the china, so it took a month to get them from china. Then you would have to pay all these custodial fees, and you would have to deal with any letters for seizures from the US. Government, all this other shit. And then when you finally paid the government off, then they would actually let you get your mind. But yeah, dude, these things were like they were definitely even the components on them. Like, if you just literally took a soldering iron and just scrapped it right? Were was worth more than $50, but that was going price for them. Is everyone lost fate in crypto. Like, that was the first real big bull run we ever had. And so much liquidity exited so quickly and just did not want anything to do with it after that.

[0:05:26] Rudy: Wow. At this point, you're really focused on just making a profit mining bitcoin. Is that kind of the extent of your technical knowledge of the cryptocurrency industry and blockchain technology? You just knew that if I mine, I generate bitcoin, and if my electricity expenses were enough to pay off by selling bitcoin, you'd just make money, then you'd be happy. But did you know anything about Aetherium or ICOs at that point?

[0:05:56] Max: No, not really. I saw some bitcoin ICOs, but I wasn't really paying attention to the whole ethereum ecosystem. I honestly didn't even know anything about it. Didn't really know anything about smart contracts. I just understood the blockchain and consensus. I understood consensus technology. And at the time we did a lot of operations where our non ASIC miners would mine alternate blockchains and then convert assets through pools or wherever else into bitcoin, but really I only knew about consensus. And then in the beginning of 2020, during the pandemic, I I got really just bored, and I kind of I kind of really jugged back into crypto, and I decided to give Aetherium, and the Ethereum Ecosystem was shot. And now I'm Aetherium back. Yeah. So I consulted for a little bit. In the Ethereum world, there are some protocols helping them to add value to the government tokens or just create new general valuable utility, and then worked for the government for a little bit, and I started Stolen with them.

[0:07:08] Rudy: Did you complete university or college?

[0:07:13] Max: So actually, I'm in school right now. I go to Northeastern University, and I actually literally just dropped a class. But it's hard to full class load and working full time at the same time.

[0:07:31] Rudy: Yeah, it's not easy.

[0:07:32] Max: And managing people at the same time. Right. It's just like when you factor in all the little details, like the legal structuring of foundations, hiring people onboarding, people, like document structure, getting audits done, coordinating between development partners and maybe 1099 employees, and all this other and then going to all these other events. I don't know.

[0:08:00] Rudy: Yeah, I'm surprised you're managing it all so well, because you look like it's all nonchalant. But I know running a business is not easy, let alone going to school. When I was going to school, I was like, I know. I want my life to be in crypto. I want to drop out because I don't want this, but I know it's nice to have a degree under my belt. That's about it.

[0:08:21] Max: Yeah, I would have dropped out, but honestly, my parents just really wanted me to get a degree, and I only had six classes.

[0:08:29] Rudy: Yeah, just get it over with. You'll be happy. I guess you'll fully regret it. Are you in CS or what are you studying?

[0:08:39] Max: No, it's electrical engineering.

[0:08:41] Rudy: Oh, nice. That's what I did.

[0:08:42] Max: Absolutely.

[0:08:43] Rudy: Will probably never do electrical engineer with an MBA.

[0:08:49] Max: Wow. Yeah, I'm just electrical engineering, and I'll probably never do anything.

[0:08:54] Rudy: Yeah, well, that's the thing. People just want the engineering mindset in their whatever infrastructure company. If you're working its own labs and you tell them you're an engineer, like, okay, great. But everything you learn is because you're working so hard to make a company, and you're going through all this experience of suffering and figuring it out on your own, that's where you're really learning everything.

[0:09:17] Max: That's where you really learn. It's the pain that really keeps you up at night. That's what the memory is.

[0:09:26] Rudy: So then how did you meet your co founder Ben, to start Stolen Labs?

[0:09:32] Max: So I worked at a military contractor called Viking Detection in Burlington, Mass. And while I was there, Ben was actually an intern originally. And I first met Ben when he was 15, maybe he was 16. I think it was 15. They were actually willing to pay for his college tuition, if you would say, work at so instead, I was like that. He was completely self taught, programmer. I kind of got him into the whole crypto world, sent him some white papers. He was hooked, and he taught himself solidity. And then I was like, hey, Ben, let's go. Let's leave. Let's start this. And he left. We started Stalin, and then he dropped out of high school.

[0:10:21] Rudy: Oh, wow. Dropped out of high school. Congrats, Ben.

[0:10:25] Max: Yeah.

[0:10:29] Rudy: I guess you said you kind of influenced Ben into the crypto ecosystem, but what really triggered you to owe them the money? And what about ethereum? Really triggered you to say, this is here to stay. This is something where I can build the future in and obviously your entire career paths. What really gave that? What was that moment where you were like, this is why I need to stay here.

[0:10:55] Max: So the money definitely brought me into the space in the first place. But what's kept me here has absolutely been the technology. I have never lost faith. And for me, for the first time in history, this is an actual system where we can rely on decentralization. We have all these proposed economic structures and systems like communism, socialism, blah, blah, blah, capitalism, whatever it is, right? But there's always corruption somewhere in every system. You can never trust the individual. Human beings are naturally selfish. And it's the idea of, hey, for the first time, we can actually design a system around the idea that people will always likely do what's in their best interest, always assume the worst case scenario. And that's why I love decentralization. Because for over a billion people all over the world who deal with insane levels of corruption, inflation, my favorite example to give is Nigeria, because over 200 million people live there. And the government said a snake ate $2 billion in taxpayer money. Obviously just happened. And a monkey stole another 1 billion. During COVID when people were protesting over SARS, which is kind of like their equivalent of police brutality, they would just freeze people's bank accounts, and they were just fucked, right?

[0:12:20] Max: Like, the average GDP per capita, there is only a few thousand dollars. You freeze their bank account, you have access to no money. Your inflation is 80% over a period of eight years. You can't even make money fast enough to keep up with the rate of inflation. And then your government free to sell your money, and you can't even afford to feed your families, right? So at the end of the day, this, for the first time in history, creates an alternate route for these people where they don't have to trust their governments. They can be their own custodians. They don't need to trust any bank. And on top of that, they can keep all their assets in something stable, like US. Dollar coin. They don't need to even trust their local currency, nor should they have to people should always do what's in their best interests. They should. People should do what's in their best interest. And systems should be designed to enable people to actually do what's in their best interest and not have these overhead restrictions just because of the area of the world they're located.

[0:13:19] Rudy: Exactly.

[0:13:20] Max: That's why I love decentralization and blockchain.

[0:13:23] Rudy: Exactly. That's like one thing I've learned about being in the blockchain industry is, like you said, people are always doing what's in their best interest. We would hope they act that they do things for the greater good so that everybody wins. But yeah, people are people. They're going to do what's best for themselves. And that's when the game theory comes in play where acting in your own best interest actually benefits everybody anyways. That's the incentive is to act in your own best interest and any interest that you have. That way everyone has a piece in the pie where they can actually win. So if you're an Ethereum for just money, you're going to promote Aetherium or any other cryptocurrency that you love to do well because you're invested in it, or for building a project in it, you want that to do well, you're going to build the best project you can. So people get onboarded and they talk well about your company. It's always like, in your own best interest, that's better for everyone else.

[0:14:18] Max: It's so cool to me too, that you can just create anything you can define by code. Yeah, I have this decentralized consensus layer, which means no matter what, I can run anything on top of this computer that no one can control, no one can shut down, no one can filter my content, right? So hey, anything I deploy on this is going to run indefinitely, right? No one will be able to screw around with it. It will do exactly what I have defined it to do. That might not be exactly what I have wished for it to do, but it'll do exactly what I defined it to do. Defined by code. But you can create all sorts of restrictions. If I wanted to create a community that was gated by, let's say, how often you trade, right, I could air job and NFP to everyone and enable that access and make a sold out token. Or I could create the structure of it down and make it so hey, I only want x people with y certain things in common to be able to interact or create proposals in the first place. Maybe as a way to filter out proposal content, right? Or they need to have at least y amount of our governance tokens. It's just like these are all very simple things and they're just editing small little features in current existing systems. But when people like to say words like dow, they think, oh, it's blah blah blah, decentralized organization, whatever. No, they don't really understand that you can really create any sort of configuration you could possibly dream of.

[0:15:54] Max: You can make it so every single person that holds has to 100% agree to everything. You can make it so only one person could ever create a proposal. You can make it so anyone can create a proposal, right? You can make it so everyone in the world is airdropped one share and it's diluted every day. You can do whatever you want.

[0:16:12] Rudy: It's a beautiful thing.

[0:16:14] Max: It is.

[0:16:15] Rudy: And I'm glad you're taking that. I'm glad you're seeing that creativity because it is as creative as you can get. There is no limit, and I'm glad you're experiencing that. And I wanted to go back a little bit on how you're referencing Nigeria as a country that you can't trust your own government to let you keep your funds no matter what. And especially when I explain cryptocurrencies and bitcoin and ethereum and blockchain to people in the States, it's kind of like, why my money is safe, my money is stable. Like, what do I need an unstable, volatile asset for? I don't really understand. And it's like, well, if you travel to different countries or just read about different countries and seeing the struggles they have with controlling their own money and transferring money even between each other.

[0:17:07] Max: For.

[0:17:08] Rudy: Us, we have like, venmo and PayPal and so many different ways to send dollars to each other. They don't have all those other options and let alone the inflation rates that's going on over there too. So it's like, yeah, it's hard to convince someone you should move your dollars somewhere else because you just want to have ownership of your own assets. But why can the bank gets FDIC insured? I don't have to worry about saving it somewhere. I have to worry about any private keys or ledgers or this and that. But this is the future. It's hard to explain to people in the States you're right. Why it's so important.

[0:17:44] Max: That's why it's very interesting to see. Like, there was a study by Nance published in Q three of 2017, or actually, maybe it was Q two of 2017, it doesn't matter. We had 5 million users of cryptocurrency and Q three of 2021. We added 105,000,000 users cryptocurrency. Now, the total market cap of the the crypto space went up, I don't know, like a 2.8 X from the all ten nine in 2017 versus 2021. But the number of users went up a 51 X.

[0:18:18] Rudy: Right.

[0:18:19] Max: So that should tell you right, the average GDP per capita of the crypto space has gone down dramatically. And to me, I think it's a really cool thing because it kind of goes to show that back in 2017, it was really your niche wealthy person who was kind of just trading crypto because it was this exciting new technology. But today we have people that are using the Blockchain fundamentally because it is a better financial system for them, even though they are forced to hold volatile assets than their existing financial system.

[0:18:56] Rudy: And while discovering all this at the same time, are you generating the idea of building Solen Labs or is this in line with it in parallel?

[0:19:10] Max: Yeah. So for us, we are the ultimate fantasy. Decentralization, we love the ethereum blockchain, we love all these things. But at the end of the day, the whole process of even downloading a MetaMask and connecting your wallet and 24 words each phrase, et cetera, et cetera, is a huge area to entry, obviously largely on the user friendliness side. But also there's a significant financial barrier to entry associated with decentralization. When you have an average transaction cost of a few dollars to 50 plus dollars, depending on the complexity of the transaction, or even on the L two s of few dollars, right. That's still a huge barrier when your average GP per capita for the majority of the world is only a few thousand dollars. Right? So, yes, decentralization is really important. And when we're talking about this group of now, you know, 105 plus billion people, the vast majority of them aren't transacting, they're storing their wealth. And the reason why is they would transact more often if they could. They would probably use it as facilitation for payment to every vendor, right? But they don't because of transaction fees. They do it one time, they group all their money, as much money as they can together, they send it in and they do that, let's say, once every few months, but they can't use it daily as a form of payment yet. So I'm a huge fan of technology that really pushes us forward in the direction of making it more friendly to use ethereum in the ethereum ecosystem much more simplified and also reducing the financial barrier entry associated with decentralization.

[0:20:45] Max: So that's really where Solen fits in. And Ben, my co founder, he came up with the idea to implement what's quite similar to account abstraction before the consensus layer of a transaction. And the way it works is it allows a smart contract to act as a top level count and a top level account is something like a wallet. And since it's also a smart contract, we can define all this by cut. So we can change the way transactions are executed. So users still have to sign in order to give approval, but a signature is free. Instead, the transaction is actually executed itself by a third party. In this third party, we like to call them bundlers, but they're really professional arbitrage trader. They're market makers. And market makers know how to most efficiently execute transactions in any economy. That's their job. Individuals are naturally inefficient. If I'm an individual, I'm going to hop on you, shop on your trade, get whatever that price is, whatever it is, I'm good with it. This way we can take change the way transactions are actually executed. And since the party that executes is the one that actually pays a gas fee, right?

[0:21:56] Max: They're the ones that are directly interacting with the smart contracts, et cetera. We can simplify the whole process of transacting on the ethereum, blockchain down into pressing a single button, into no longer having to hold the theorem in your wallet. You can just pay the fee in whatever acid you're trading, us, dollar, coin, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, doesn't matter. And bringing them all into one central location for users. So that's really how Solen came to be. We wanted to create a product that was going to be a theorem in one location, but a shit is uneasier for people to use and a shit's on cheaper for people to use.

[0:22:36] Rudy: So now I want to understand more of the technical aspect of Son Labs. So I as an individual, I guess I'm not going to break it down. So all of our listeners also understand exactly what's going on. So I, as individuals, log on to someone labs, connect my MetaMask wallet and I want so here, I'll walk you through the process.

[0:22:58] Max: I kind of just started with the technical background, like how all of this is possible, how are we reducing the cost, but still being a protocol on the theory, right? We're not an L. Two. We're not scaling the solution. We're a protocol on ethereum. We're also a protocol on L two. S, like arbitrary and optimism, zoo, K, sink, et cetera. We're not alive yet. We will be probably the end of this year Q one of next year. But anyway, what this process really looks like is the idea is to create the same level of user friendliness of Android or iOS, right, where you have a bunch of applications. When I unlock my iPhone, I am filled with a home screen of applications. These applications represent individual companies or operations that I want to execute. I have the applications that I personally want to interact with on my home screen. We're creating the same thing. Basically, we're creating the operating system for decentralization.

[0:23:55] Max: Where you'll have a home screen, we'll be an app on your phone, will also be on a web browser. But anyway, you'll have a home screen. This home screen will have applications and these applications will represent the major D apps. So you'll have a unispot app balancer bank or Openc, looks rare, whatever you want, you personally as an individual. And the benefit to interacting with these applications through our interface is not only is it a lot more user friendly, like by being represented as an application, but also when you're interacting with these applications through our interface, you get to use our smart contracts. So the whole process that was just explaining to you where bundlers execute transactions instead of users, what that process looks like on Solid versus just going through the protocol. I'll give you an example as uni swap is if I want to trade on a unisop today via. Let's say I'm like MetaMask for coinbase wallet, right? I go to Uniswap.org, I click launch. I'm now in their decentralized Exchange. Then I have to connect my wallet to the MetaMask or Coinbase wallet. The next thing I do is select the assets I want to swap. Let's say I'm swapping shiba in utoken for US dollar coin. I first select Shiva new Token type in the quantity. Then I select US dollar coin.

[0:25:10] Max: The second box will automatically populate with the amount of US dollar Coin I'll receive for swapping. I then press the button below. This first transaction will approve a token transfer from the Shiva and U Token smart contract. Then I have to do another one to interact with Unisop smart contract with their liquidity pool. And then finally I submit a transaction where I pay another fee in Ethereum to swap my Sheba in utoken for US dollar Coin. And now I've received US dollar coin. It's a complicated process. There's a lot of steps nowhere near user friendly. But Uniswap is the largest D five protocol because they are the most user friendly. That process is the most user friendly state. They didn't invest the decentralized Exchange bank or did, but Unisop made it the most user friendly. So what that process looks like and so on it said is I click the Uniswap application while it's already automatically connected. I then select whatever asset I want to swap. She didn't need token. I type in the quantity, it'll automatically then I select my next asset, US dollar Coin.

[0:26:19] Max: It'll automatically populate with the quantity unless I want to do a limit order. I can also do a limit order if I want. And then I edit the US dollar coin field anyway. And then I press swap and that's it. That's the whole process. And I just pay a fee in either US dollar Coin or Sheba in you token. I don't even need to hold the theory. And the transaction is cheaper because we bundled together transactions to reduce costs.

[0:26:43] Rudy: So then there has to be though a liquidity or our provider that would allow you to swap Shiba in you for whatever gas prices they need to pay for, right? I understand it's gas.

[0:26:57] Max: So the way it works is we're still going through Unisoft smart contracts, but we're also going through our smart contracts, right? So we're still using Unisop source of liquidity. When users select the Unisoft application, they're not using our liquidity pools, they're really using Unisop. They're using unisoft smart contracts. We've just changed the interface to make more sense because of all the steps we've eliminated. You're still interacting with Unison smart contracts. So when you use that Unisoft application and you submit an order, the bundler only has permission to execute it through Unisoft smart contracts. So you're getting uniswaps prices. But the actual transaction fee itself is cheaper because we're bundling together transactions with bundlers, these professional market makers. Because if I were to, let's say, send $10 to you versus sending a million dollars to you, I'd pay the same fee, right?

[0:27:53] Rudy: Yes.

[0:27:55] Max: So if we took all these like orders and bundled them together and executed them together, we're saving up fees and we're then distributing that across users, and then we can also execute a coincidence of wants as well. So we'll also have our own Exchange application. And the difference between our Exchange application and the uniswap one is on the uniswap one, ships are more user friendly than normal uniswap, but it is normal uniswap. It's just easier for people to use. And it's cheaper for people to use. Still, normally uniswap, our bundlers are forced to execute the transactions of unisop smart contracts. But on our Exchange application, our bundlers are free to execute it anywhere on the ethereum blockchain. They decide how they want to execute it so they can shop thousands of different decentralized exchanges to not only save you money on the cost of the transaction fee, but also get you the best price for the asset itself by shopping through all these liquidity sources. And they can also execute a coincidence salons. So if you're working with a pair that has a high enough trading volume, you could execute a coincidence once, which be, for example, if you had one e, then you want to swap for 1400 US dollar coin and I want to swap 1400 US dollar coin for 180. It'd be a coincidence salons and a transfer is a much cheaper, gas efficient, agency wise trade than a more complicated smart contract interaction like a swap through liquidity pool. So it's all about how can we make markets more efficient.

[0:29:19] Rudy: So then I guess you have bundlers signing up and ready to use your platform. So as a person, how do I become a bundler if I wanted to do that?

[0:29:30] Max: So anyone can become a bundler, but at the end of the day, technically users select bundlers. We'll have a default bundler to make it more user friendly, which will be like a professional market maker, like a winter. But anyone can be a bundler. And users can technically select their own bundlers. But at the end of the day, users only can select the bundlers that have the best returns. And since bundlers are professional arbitrage traders, right, they're only executing these transactions when they can make money. And that also means they can make a shit ton of money on some of these ARB opportunities between the users requested output and the market value they can get for their input. Right? So they're actually incentivized to share their profit with the user since the user selects the arbitrator they want to work with. So at the end of the day, there will probably be only be six that actually make money out of maybe hundreds. It'll be the ones that get the best returns for users.

[0:30:23] Rudy: Makes sense.

[0:30:24] Max: Yeah.

[0:30:24] Rudy: You're definitely making it so that everyone. Acts in their own best interest, but also in the greater good of the whole ecosystem.

[0:30:32] Max: Exactly. It's all about how you organize these things. Right. And we're really excited because you know what? At the end of the day, right. I gave you Unisoft as an example, but that's still a complicated example. It's a very niche audience that even swaps on unison. There's a lot of volume, but not many people at the end of the day. So yes, it makes the process of interacting with the blockchain period a lot more simple. But even at step one, which is where we lose most users, the wallet creation process needs to be a lot more simple. Right. So that's why we've implemented social recovery instead of using Seapraces. So the normal wall creation process systems for, you know, download a mask or front based wallet equivalent, you're given twelve to 24 words and then you have to confirm them in back order. You're asked to write them down. If you lose that piece of paper and you lose access, you're screwed.

[0:31:22] Max: And you lose all your money, you pass away. Your family doesn't know where it is, they're screwed. They lose all your money. Right. Not a very efficient system. It takes a while to set up. It's painting ass. It's kind of scary.

[0:31:33] Rudy: Definitely scary, yeah.

[0:31:35] Max: So instead we've implemented social recovery. So what that process looks like and so on. Instead is you download the app and then you just create a username and password and then you're prompted to further secure your account. So if you want to further secure your account, then you select what's known as guardian addresses. And guardian addresses searches other wallet addresses you trust, friends, family addresses you own. Anyway, those addresses can initiate what's known as the social recovery process. So let's say you lose access to your wallet. You don't have any words or receivers or anything. You don't need to know any of that. You lose access to your wallet, you call up mom, you call up dad, say, hey guys, I lost access. Do you just mind initiating the recovery process real quick? They just, they just click a button. Okay, yeah, no problem. Boom. You just regained access to your wallet.

[0:32:22] Rudy: How do you regain access? Is it just you get the recovery code?

[0:32:26] Max: The majority of guardians have to initiate the recovery process.

[0:32:29] Rudy: But how does that actually work? Do I get like the recovery phrase, the 24 seat phrase, does it pop up for them and just give it back to me?

[0:32:36] Max: Or is it so I would comment, but I'm not the technical person. Right on. The CEO and Ben can tell you exactly how it works, but there's like plenty of papers about social media. It's all like open source work at this point. We created some of our own contracts, but we're not making the social recovery process itself different. Safe processes, whatever is normal. But the really cool thing that Ben also implemented was obviously people get hacked in the space all the time, right. When people lose control over the wallets, they usually lose 100% of their assets. So Ben came up with this idea that every wallet that's created there's also a smart contract wallet called the bulk created with it. And this smart contract wallet has a well, the wallet, it sounds also a smart contract wallet, but another smart contract wallet, this wallet has a time lock, and we haven't decided if we want the users to decide if we're going to have the default one. But for this example, let's say it's three days. So the users have this wealth that come with their wealth that they're prompted to store the majority of their wealth in whatever they don't want to be liquid. Right? Whatever. I'm not using back and forth, back and forth volume.

[0:33:50] Max: So 95% of your wealth or 90 plus percent of your wealth should really be in there, stored in there. Let's say the time off for this is three days. So malicious party takes over my wallet. Somehow they drain everything in there instantly. They then try to drain what's in my fault. They initiate a transaction to drain what's in my fault, but it's going to take three days. But it's going to take three days for that transaction to actually go through. So in those three days, I can initiate the social recovery process, regain control of the wallet and cancel the transaction and create a new wallet and save the majority of my assets.

[0:34:32] Rudy: It's interesting because I'm wondering if there's going to be a battle for that wallet after you get that social recovery.

[0:34:38] Max: Oh, I'm sure there will be. I was thinking about that recently. I haven't asked Ben exactly how that's going to work. I'm sure Ben but yeah, in theory, right, the malicious party and you could just be going head to head for like weeks or months whenever they want to quit. But at the same time, you got to keep in mind most of these malicious actors are bots, and they're not going to be interacting with separate smart contracts. Right. It's only going to be the few individual malicious actors. No one's creating a custom bot for our interface, at least at this point in time. It could be in the future, obviously. But anyway, at this point in time, any malicious accurate that's going to be at the level where they're going to know how to drain your spark contract. Well, it's going to be an individual, and then I guess it'd be a battle of attrition. If you make your time periods as long, like, let's say a week, you only got to check on that once a week, see if they fought you back. But I don't know, to be honest with you, I definitely got to ask about that.

[0:35:42] Rudy: That's a good way. Yeah. I'm curious to see how it's going to work because I think you're also bringing new ideas of how to use, I guess, what innovation is using current technology with a little bit of a spin and creating a whole new path and flow of how to use an entire ecosystem. So that's exciting, and I'm excited for you guys.

[0:36:02] Max: It's all about how we structure these things.

[0:36:03] Rudy: Exactly. Now, as CEO and working someone labs, going to school and also making your own money somehow, how do you take time for yourself to just step away from crypto or just relax? Or do you even do that because you're so obsessed you don't even care? What do you do for your own mental health?

[0:36:28] Max: Actually, unfortunately, my little brother also goes to Narcissist, and he's a good friend of mine. Next week, I'm friends with all my clues. But anyway, we work out every other day. I wake up every day at 630. We work out every other day at 630. And he's like a five minute walk away. He'll come to my place, where King? And then on the weekends, college kid. I've got like, two other friends. We'll usually do, like, barbecue or something. Maybe we'll go out to Fenway. Because you got to take some time to yourself always, because if you don't, you're going to go crazy.

[0:37:09] Rudy: It's hard, man. It's a 24/7 industry. You can always go on your Twitter or Discord and just find a message to respond to. So how many more do you have? Six more classes up. So you graduated by next year, hopefully.

[0:37:26] Max: Actually, I have four classes.

[0:37:29] Rudy: Okay.

[0:37:31] Max: So I'll be graduated in sprint.

[0:37:33] Rudy: Awesome. That's exciting. I'm excited for you. So then hopefully by that time, solar Labs will be fully launched working. But do you have any roadmap plan of where to take it after this first step? Are you ready for the next steps already, or are you just like, let's get through this phase.

[0:38:02] Max: It's very much like, let's get this product to market. But we do kind of have the next phase in mind. And that's it. We plan on launching the product first and then really refining the product based on any analytics and user data we can pull for, like, probably a few months, I would say, at least. And then once we feel like we have an extremely high retention rate, then we'll finally deploy our Dow and do our public.

[0:38:30] Rudy: Got you. Nice. Yeah, it's a pretty popular move nowadays too, of how to actually start the Dow.

[0:38:41] Max: Yeah, you might think you know people, but at the end of the day, I might think I've created the world's most user friendly web three products, but it might not be.

[0:38:50] Rudy: Yeah, this industry moves so fast, tomorrow someone come out, just launch this thing out of nowhere.

[0:38:56] Max: Exactly.

[0:38:58] Rudy: Well, speaking about that, being in the industry for a few years now, what crypto pet peeve do you have?

[0:39:09] Max: So I kind of have become very involved in the crypto, Twitter, NFP search just because the normal crypto chat space mainly on Telegrams and things like that. Those people sometimes really get to me. Like, no one ever really gets to me, but I'm just like, bro, like, why are you talking like this? I don't really want to be in this chat right now. Well, like, NFC Twitter is all like, good vibes and GMs and Sunshine and Rainbows, which some people don't like that shit. At least everyone's nice, everyone's not a good vibe, everyone's excited about the space. But then you get into these crypto chats with Bitcoin Maxis and it's just like, if you don't believe in bitcoin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, bro, I don't need this shit. My life.

[0:39:57] Rudy: Yeah, it's so sad because, like, I love bitcoin as bitcoin, but there's then Maxis in every industry is Bitcoin Maxis, ETH Maxis, Cardano Maxis, like Salona Maxis. Any Maxi in my mind is like, just stop. You don't have to be so extreme. Extremism is what's turning this world upside down. Most people are on the same page where we're just trying to figure out this technology work with different blockchains because, yeah, obviously we think Ethereum is going to be the number one or bitcoin number one or whatever is going to be number one. But there's always going to be multiple blockchains. Human beings are not very good at agreeing on one protocol or agreeing on one blockchain. We're going to disagree and think, what's.

[0:40:41] Max: Better is yeah, even if it has one user, there will always be some.

[0:40:48] Rudy: It's like, how do we work together to make it most efficient for everybody? Because you can do that if we work together. But that's a tough part because extreme people are always the loudest. That's good.

[0:41:02] Max: But you know what? At the same time, right, we have to design a system so people will always do them. Extreme people will always want to do extreme. This is what it is, society.

[0:41:13] Rudy: Exactly. Yeah. So your hoodie has an address on it. So is this the community that you're representing and loving?

[0:41:22] Max: So this is the smart contract address for the Adidas nathan for their Minting contract. And then they partnered with this is she Money's logo. He's a famous crypto pump. This subordinate yacht club, punk's comics, and then obviously the Adidas logo.

[0:41:41] Rudy: Nice going off that route. I want to know also, what is your favorite wholesome crypto moment? Being in so many communities, bringing companies together, this industry, there's got to be some moment in your life where you're like, that felt good to be a part of or witness.

[0:41:58] Max: So I was in this discord one time for Deadheads, and this was an NFT project, which at the time really blew up. Didn't last very like the height didn't last very long, but it was pretty big. This was July or June of 2021. So this was very early on to the end of people. One of the very first people projects. It's like two months after 40, and I was in this discord, and Gary B had discovered it. I was a moderator in this court. I had known these guys from the last project. They did artificial intelligence art, and that's where I found them. And then I was like, hey, you guys should make a disco, blah, blah. And then they did another NFT project, and I volunteered too. Crush blew up. Gary Vee got involved, blah, blah, blah. People were pouring in. And there was this one guy who popped into the chat and was just like, hey, guys, I accidentally just sold my entity.

[0:42:53] Max: He sold it for like, 0.5 at the time. It was unrebaled at the time, the floor was zero five. So he fat fingered it. And I was like, well, he could have maybe sold it to himself. Maybe he's trying to you always have to assume the worst case scenario. There are all sorts of greasy. There was this one guy, this guy Bob, bob A. Moore. And he was like, you know what? I even talked to him about it. You know what? Yeah, he could have been a malicious whatever. It doesn't matter. But you know what? At the end of the day, I understand how bad that dude must feel if obviously there actually happened.

[0:43:35] Max: And then after this guy Bob, by the way, he bought him one, and he just sent it to him, no questions asked. And then the guy after was like, hey, I think it's multiple sclerosis or something. And he absolutely just figured it because of his disease, right? It's hard for him to control his muscles. So that was just like a really cool moment. It's been really cool to be in web three in general. Like, I've seen all sorts of cool moments. I've seen, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars since one items recovered. Scammers people are great. You see really cool things in this.

[0:44:11] Rudy: I know. I wish we talked more about that, right? Like, we see tons of scammers. The scammers are making headlines. But then I think one recent one that I saw that was kind of wholesome was the issue where bit boy was suing the YouTuber. I forgot his name. I know exactly what you're saying. He was suing a YouTuber for calling bit boy out.

[0:44:37] Max: I saw the guy's thread about the.

[0:44:39] Rudy: Lawsuit, his response, and then Kobe came in on nowhere, like, all right, here's my to help pay for your lawsuit. And then bit boy retracted his lawsuit because he even said because Kobe is giving him money now that he has support. That's like a system where the community really came in to support someone who's just using his platform to show what he's recognizing. That's what's happening in ecosystem, that someone's doing some kind of, I guess, trying just to make money in the ecosystem. I guess what bitcoin was doing is working for his advertisers.

[0:45:19] Max: Yeah, it's transparency, right? They're pushing this ethos, this envelope of decentralization. Exactly. It's cool that we do. Yeah. Twitter is obviously a centralized platform, right. But it's a good way to express free speech at the end of the day, at least for now. Maybe Lens one day will make it, if they ever want to make it free to tweet or the tweet equivalent. But it's just so cool to see people really speaking out, to have transparency, to be able to follow all these transactions along the Internet, like things like what Zack XBT does, for example. People like that amaze me.

[0:45:55] Rudy: Yeah. And that's the beautiful thing about this ecosystem, is that bad actors are shown, but also a lot of good actors are shown, too. We have good people in this world that really want to create a community just to better everyone's lives and not be so malicious. But it's just hard to break away from bad news because good news doesn't bring as many likes. Well, thank you again, Max, for being on the show. I'm super excited for you. I'm super excited for you and Ben to create So on labs and launch it. I'm in the Boston area, so we'll definitely see more of each other. But thanks again, man.

[0:46:34] Max: Thanks for having me ready. Have a great day, too. Bye.
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