Surviving and Growing Through Bear Markets with Ja

What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. And today I am joined by Jag and he is the president of the CISCoin Foundation. How's it going, Jag? Hey Steve, thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to dig in here, excited to dig in. Before we get into CISCoin and you know everything that you're working on, let's talk about your background. What's

the origin story of how you got into Crypto and Web 3? Yeah, I mean I've always been interested in client-server and distributed computing, also game development and image processing. So a lot of the software, technical stuff, been doing for many years, programming in the industry for many years, doing a lot of different things. And then in Crypto I kind of saw the cyberpunk movement, the anarchist

computer scientist coming out with solutions that solve the BFT problem in the unique economic models using software. And that was really interesting. And as I dug more into the concepts of Bitcoin, we aligned more philosophically with what I was looking for in my day-to-day life. You know, being a software developer, you always try to think about building things. And I felt like I was stuck a

little bit in a rut, you know, just programming day-to-day, not really doing something that I felt like it was going to help change the world. You know, we're all about value as software engineers. How can we provide the most value to ourselves or families or societies or communities? So, I think I introduced to the concept of Bitcoin, I kind of fell in love with the philosophy

behind it. And that's where I kind of started digging into, well, you know, this could be something. It may not end up being anything, but chances are time spent here is better off than time spent elsewhere. And the risk reward is skewed towards print time. Time into something like this. So the more I dug into it, you know, as everyone falls into the black hole of

crypto and the coin and the philosophies and all the stuff behind it, you get carried into it a little bit. And I definitely jumped in with both feet and never looked back since then. So it's been around nine years now since I started digging in heavily. And it's been a lot of fun. It's been awesome. It's only been more and more exciting on a daily basis.

Nice. And let's kind of transition into Cisco. Because you mentioned, you know, that you kind of had the aha moment with Bitcoin. And I really like the concept of Cisco and everything like that. I've known about it for a long time. I think a lot of people listening, I've probably heard of it for quite some time. But for those new to it, could you give us

kind of a rundown as to, you know, what it is and what the example and use case of it is? Yeah, I mean, there's the high level. You know, as I, in any industry, the longer time you spend in the industry, the more philosophical you end up getting and more abstract you end up getting. So the elevator pitch for us, you know, when we maybe in

2013 was just do more than Bitcoin, you know, business processes on the blockchain. So sorry, I mean, I've a blockchain being able to do marketplaces, identities, these are like hardens, my contracts. We built on before Ethereum came around. And then Ethereum came around, did that in a generalized way. We also realized the direction we were headed towards of putting stuff on the blockchain was not as

on the blockchain? What needs to be off the blockchain? What is the ultimate design? Where are we going with this layer one? And we ended up, you know, at a base of just having assets similar to like Bitcoin being money or Bitcoin being an asset, we can create assets in a secure way. And set up infrastructures to make real-time payments possible with that using payment channels

and all sorts of different cool stuff we did. And then in 2019, we sort of realized that the zero-knowledge proofs, maths and ZK tech is going to help scale blockchain in a meaningful way in the near future. So at that point, we thought, okay, well, how can we scale Bitcoin? Can we go back to Bitcoin and use ZK to scale Bitcoin? We've been thinking about this

for a while and we realized you definitely need some sort of base layer that's flexible. That's a touring complete, meaning you can do general programming on that base layer to be able to serve these highly scalable, flexible layer two designs that will open up payments, Web 3, DeFi, NFT, GameFi, anything we could think of off of the blockchain, but still secure. And then we started using

ultimately like Bitcoin. We're always coming from Bitcoin. So when we saw that vision in 2019 to 2020, we kind of went all in. So we attached an EVM to our chain thinking about designing that around being flexible to the roll-up design. You know, as, you know, Vitalik and Ethereum put out there, they had the modular roadmap of Ethereum. We follow that path as well. So now

our elevator pitch is, you know, going even more philosophical, I would say we are a distributed global financial computer. And my latest meeting article or blog post I talked about the John Vann Newman, the Von Newman architecture, which is the computer to be, we used today our built on that architecture, you know, having CPU, disk memory, all separate. Then we contextualized blockchain in the same way

to help scale us up. And thinking about the modular design that we've come up with with the Ethereum and us, we both come up with. We can start to make similarities back to even the original pioneers of computers themselves. Take the local computer and extend it to a global supercomputer. And that's going to have vast implications we can cover. But that's how, you know, now what

we are is a global financial supercomputer secured through Bitcoin. Yeah, and I think before we shift gears a little bit into the blockchain boundary, I really wanted to talk about 2014. So you guys launched in 2014. And that was around the time, I got in in 2013, and really saw that run into 2014. And everybody was just kind of going, going bookers. And I remember like

the vertical coins of the world and the, you know, this is a global financial and the pink coins and silk coins and all these different forks came out. And that was when I first heard about about Cisco, which I wanted to just mention because I think that's special. You've been around for so long that you've seen a lot come and go, you know, you've been through

multiple cycles. You've survived. And often in this space, credibility is ultimately like who can hold their breath the longest? You know, like who can, you can survive and continue to innovate and not just vanish. So I wanted to just first of all congratulate you on that because I think it is very difficult to withstand the pressure of these up and down cycles because it's just people

have this, this kind of short attention span now where they, they just think once it goes up, it's always going to always going to go up. And it's very distracting as a builder, like yourself, you know, when that number changes and all of a sudden everything in the world and the business is like, oh, that number. And it can be totally distracting. So I wanted to

just touch on that of how you felt, you know, you guys have made it through these kind of chaotic times. And now that we're in another downturn. I'd love to get just your take on it as somebody who's got, got the scars to prove it. We, I think this is our fourth kind of little bear market that we've been in. You know, they're always just lower

highs, but we call them bear markets. But this is the fourth time and we've grown every time. It feel like we've been tiptoeing around the landmines of the industry since the beginning. And we've always had forks in the road. We've always decided on a direction. And for some reason, it's really uncanny that we've seen, we seem to be able to get around these situations without having

a war chest of engineers doing research telling us, this is the direction. We're relying on our intuitions here. Interintuitions told us big blocks are not better because that's going to affect scalability of full notes, right? Intuitions told us, don't put everything on the blockchain. You know, don't do your eBay on the blockchain because A, you likely get thrown in jail because you're going to be creating

dark markets for people in the world. And B, like the market for that is going to be, there's going to be only a ceiling there. And it's not going to be a ceiling there. We're not going to scale at some point. And then we also saw forks as in, how are we going to actually scale this tech now that we decided that we can't just scale

blocks arbitrarily. Like the Bitcoin cash ecosystem where we just said, let's do gigabyte blocks and throw everything on the chain and hopefully sticks. We instead took a stand where, so no, the block space should be precious. It needs to be preserved. Bitcoin is at a pretty good spot with this block space. But how can we take that? Advantage and leverage and make that block space more

efficient to push the scale boundaries up without affecting the decentralization of the system. So the tip towing around all these things, we've had to use our intuition a lot. And it feels like it's been many forks on the road every kind of bear market we've hit a fork. When we've always came out surviving, not reimagining herself. We've been building our vision the whole time. Almost feels

like a movie where it's a logical flow to the climax of where we are now, which is like the ultimate layer one, ideal layer one, we figured everything out. We're laying down the roads and the infrastructure. The next step is to build on top. We've never been in a position really to say we're done. Right. It's been so many years ever since you've known us. We've

been building, we've been secretly building this stuff. And we've ripped out stuff. We're like, no, no, that's the wrong way. We've got to take a step back without actually saying the project's dead. We're just, we just say, no, we're just going to take out these three things. We're going to keep this thing. And we're going to take one big step forward with that thing in the

future. And that's kind of what we've been doing, kind of in private. Because we know that we're not finished with that with the roads. The roads aren't paved yet. We've laid the foundations and we haven't the cars can't drive on it yet. We have to wait. We have to wait till we scale. We were not willing to go onto the market and say, this is the

solution. Let's pump this to a billion dollars in the last bull run and hope that we can solve the problems and we have more money. Is at that point, you're at a dead end. Because you have all the network effects, you have all the services, exchanges of VCs, everyone to report to. Right. And you can't change directions at that point because these people will leave. Once

they leave, you're in a death spiral. So instead chose the road as that building this thing properly and hit the market once we hit it properly. And that's kind of the we're in the climax right now. We've tipped it around all these problems and we realize the solutions to the problems are right front of us now. And we're just putting all those pieces together like a

painting. We're about to put the frame on. We're supposed to say, okay, here's our solution. Now let's figure out ecosystem. Let's figure out incentives. Let's figure out DAPs all this stuff on top. And we not only were in a position to leverage the Ethereum ecosystem growth because they're focused on roll ups and ZK. And optimistic roll ups and all that stuff. But also Bitcoin, right. Bitcoin

is doing mass, taproot, uh, covenants, a whole bunch of cool stuff in that ecosystem. And there's like, uh, Jack Dorsey saying there's Web 5 coming and Bitcoin, all of that stuff the Bitcoin's doing. We've we also follow that evolutionary track as well. So if that one takes off and Web 5 actually becomes something, we're not only are we well positioned to leverage that because we're we're

merged mind with Bitcoin. So we share Bitcoin miners, but also the the tech stack is identical. And we actually can add on assets. So if you're doing mass, taproot and covenants with Bitcoin, you could do all that with assets in that ecosystem natively as well. USDT or, you know, other colored coins. So that's how we see ourselves as like a dual ecosystem. Kind of both Bitcoin

and Ethereum put together, but in a blanket keeping security intact. And it's the devils and the details very subtle on the points of how all that happens, but high level. It's just a big coin. Ethereum ecosystem is put together. Got it. Got it. And you you said something very briefly there. And only the OGs listing this would have heard you mentioned color coins. I think that

that was you skimmed over that in many, many people listening do not know what what that means when that happened. But that is a near and dear statement once upon a time for sure. Well, I mean, you're see 20s or just colored coins as well. Right. Yeah. Contracts are created on the chain and it made sense of and colored coins a Bitcoin or just let's take

Bitcoin's block space or some block space and fit in a logical limitation of a coin and make sense of it as a coin in the code base. We took it a step further though. And we actually made first, it's like a first class representation of a coin just like how and Bitcoin there's a UTXO set. We actually put the coins in the UTXO representation. So it's

a lot stronger than taking blocks base and logically representing it as a coin on your blockchain. We actually built it right into the base. So it follows like how Bitcoin has a UTXO set. These other coins would have their own UTXO sets. So it's it's in doing so. You leverage all of the tech stack of Bitcoin, but now we process the other coin in the same

way. So it's it's easier, easier technically and and much better and more scalable. Long run, it will serve, you know, payment channels, all stuff was just natively work with it. So it's a con iteration on top of colored coins, I would say. Got it. Got it. And somebody that's been in the space for so long, like yourself, I'm always curious to get your take on what

you're excited about. And everybody, you know, is different right now. You know, there's NFTs or ZFi, all this stuff. But I'm always really curious as somebody that's been around for so long, what gets you excited? Right when you get up in the morning, you check your phone. What is it that just gets you? Get you hyped. So I mean, I thought when ZK paper came out,

that was an eye opening experience because that got me excited. Like not many people understood why those so excited that there's this thing. Here, but it was more about because you see that this is how you're going to scale EVM. This is how Ethereum is going to scale. And if you can get there in a way that shows the world that Ethereum doesn't need to go

proof of stake. It doesn't need to shard its blockchain. It doesn't need all of this crazy complicated stuff to reimagine the wheel. We have what it takes already to scale up to 10s or hundreds of millions of transactions a second. And that was a realization that what we have is actually is diamond, right? It's something that is important to the world. And then going down further,

once you go, once you have that mindset, okay, technically we've got the solution. It's fine. What does it mean to the world? That's the next step. But what keeps me up is philosophically, how's... Let's put this, let's paint the picture of we somehow have solved all the problems in the industry. We've kept Bitcoin security. We've scaled up EVM. We got payment channels there to solve. And

we have compliant solutions built on our blockchain to solve regulation. Then it starts to be used. Where are we taking this? Is it just for defying of teas and gamefying? Then we're done. Or is there more to this that we don't see? So this is where we start... I start to get into the philosophy of what we're doing is a global supercomputer. And potentially this means

interplanetary. This means AI. This means IoT. It means a lot more than what we think. This really could be like the vanguard of the next... Assuring the next generation of how we process value, process information, how even agents will process or even interact with us. In this case we're an agent. But if humans are removed from the financial picture, an AI can come in and interact

with the system without any intervention. It could be the birth of a human. So we're not just trading bots or something like that. So I think the start of something bigger. We don't... If it's not Cisco, it's whatever. It's Bitcoin or Ethereum. All of this stuff is the start of something much bigger. Something that we can't imagine yet. But we know there's something there. Just like

how touring and on new menu, there's something there is much bigger than just processing numbers for the guy. So it's like a government. It was something that's going to create interactivity and connection between people and profound way. This is kind of taking the next step and saying, what you've done with the localized computing was great. And let's take that global. And let's make that a global

phenomenon. Maybe forget global. Let's take that interplanetary. Let's think about what happens when we start to think about Mars and how financial value will work there and how intersect with VAT. How will we value here and how we can secure that system? Because you're not going to create separate systems because those won't be secure. So are you going to stand up as centralized government? And we've

already seen that system fails. If it's failing in front of our eyes, this is the replacement. And how is that replacement going to be any better? And less... holistically it all makes sense. So this is the stuff that's kind of keeping me out of this. Like, okay, the next steps for us using this tech that we have to keep going, pushing the boundaries. Yeah, anybody that

mentions interplanetary, I get pretty excited about. I mean, that's some next level thinking, very sure. Well, let's shift into blockchain boundary. I mean, this was sort of the project or firm that was started originally. And then that's what released his coin. And then it's still... I think it's publicly traded. Right now, I mean, it's a big organization. So he could just tell us a little bit

about that and what the status blockchain is. Yeah, it's about 40, 50 people. Very excited engineers and execs that are working towards a future where right now the revenue generation is mostly NFTs. So NFTs are a very big component of growth in the blockchain space because not only just doing digital collections but attaching utility to those. And it's going to be like the crossroads between the

digital and the physical realm because you grab represent objects in the digital world using an NFT. We had the first concept of NFT. We actually coded that. And this is quite blockchain back in 2014. Those were call certificates. Right. A certificate was an object that you can attach from the real world and give it association in the digital world. It just didn't... it wasn't a standard

form of what we call NFTs now. But it was the first... ...increasing of something like that. And so we're always big on that concept and the different use cases. So blockchain foundries is focusing on a lot of the use cases around that using multiple blockchains. And then as we learn of both these use cases, we're building them into the Cisco and TechStack. Now remember, Cisco is

a general computer. So it's not like we have to make special changes for this. But if the products are wildly successful, they'll be launched on Ethereum and Cisco and take advantage of all that stuff. So that's... we've done a lot of work in NFT space obviously, but we've done wallet infrastructure. And we've done digital identity as well. And I'm really excited about the... the people we

have working on digital identity. We worked for a large bank in Canada and... or a financial institution. And they rolled out the solution we've created for them. Countrywide or the ruling that out now. Countrywide on a DID solution, like wallet with DID attaching to passports and driver licenses and all that stuff. And a testing through government level accreditation. DID is going to be the way that

people enter this space. They're going to have their digital footprint. And it's going to be, you know, blockchain-based. And there's going to be accreditation or checks or attestations from people. Either that's social or that's government. So if it's social, it's like... Like your social media is saying, yep, that's this person that's Joe. And I can attest to that. And a group of people saying that's Joe.

So it must be Joe. If it's a government, it's like, nope. That's not Joe. This is Joe. And there's only one Joe in the world and that's him. So those are the two models. But the solutions and the tech is kind of agnostic of any of that. So I think we're really bullish on DIDs. We're really bullish on the... the intersection between zero knowledge and proofs

and DIDs because as soon as you get into a world where you're providing an openness to identity, you get into the honeypots of information that could potentially stolen. And especially one that information is shared. GDPR is coming at this saying, no, you can't... You can't store information or you have to have a way to delete the information. And digital identity sometimes harder, right? Because that data

stored in the cloud, how can you remove it? So there's different ways to solve those problems. The intersection with ZK and DID means that we can privately hold what's near and dear to our heart, like our credit scores. What we did yesterday, you know, how much money I own, whereas my spending habits. And I can share that information as needed at a hot basis in this

private way. In a way where you cannot reproduce it without my consent. So I can give you my credit score in a way where I can prove it's over 800. But you will never know what the actual credit score is. Just to prove that it's over some threshold. The intersection between the math and the business concepts here are going to open up these... the barrier of

entry for average people. For like what SEC calls consumer protection. We'll be all to offer that consumer protection. Not only for the security-minded people, but for average people that don't end up causing the honeypots of that. So that's exciting. You guys rolled that out on a nationwide scale. That's impressive. It's really quite the feat. Was it a mobile application? How was it? Yeah, it's a mobile.

It's still kind of like we were not really allowed to mention the name. It's like a financial institution and under NDA and all that stuff. But definitely the last word we had was it was being rolled out and it was being pushed nationwide. And that's validation that we're doing something of values. That's cool. But we can take that knowledge and think about it. Okay. Well, if

this works, then let's think about that direction and add on to that concept and build unique things that way. Nice. Nice. Well, those are all the questions I have for you. We covered a ton on this episode between Cisco and blockchain founder. Like literally a time all the way back to 2014. But where can people go and learn more? Yeah. So I mean, Cisco and we

have a discord. We have Telegram. So if you just go to Cisco.org and there's links there. Just find us. We're always there chatting. So open to talking with people, DJs or just financial institutions or the builders of tomorrow. Love to just chat and talk and start building together. Very cool. Very cool. Well, those are all the questions I have for you. Wherever you guys are listening

on iTunes or Spotify, all the links the Jag mentioned will be in these show notes. But thank you so much for coming on the show, Jag. Thanks, Steve. Look forward to doing this again once we have, you know, once we have the lead to infrastructure going and we got an ecosystem kind of building and going nuts. We can jump on again and kind of give an

update of what we're up to and, you know, the next iteration of Cisco, the next chapter of Cisco. Sounds great. Sounds great. Thanks.