Todd Merrill:

Hi, welcome to Tales from the SkyLounge. It’s a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world, we talk to people who are making it happen, and we get their stories. If you can like and subscribe, it makes James super happy. 

Today’s guest in the SkyLounge, John Church. Hi, John.

John Church:

Hey Todd, happy to be here.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, it’s good seeing you again. So, John, who are you and what are you working on?

John Church:

I’m John Church, and I’m a lead product manager for Nethermind, which is a research and engineering company focused on blockchain and general deep tech. So, we have research and focus on cryptography, AI, and generally attempting to be on the cutting edge of technology. We focus very heavily, though, on blockchain and AI.

Todd Merrill:

Very cool. So, you and I met, we were working on a real-world asset tokenization project together, which was pretty cool, maybe a little ahead of its time. How did you come to get into the whole crypto space? And crypto is not just Bitcoin, right? It’s a whole lot of other interesting things.

John Church:

Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, so initially, I got involved in crypto in about 2017, from just a speculative standpoint. I got involved. Additionally, I have my story of my friend telling me about it in 2013, talking about Bitcoin, this thing, and I go, that’s a scam. Don’t worry about, like now I won’t, and he says just buy a little bit. I was like no. And I regret those moments when times are frustrating.

Got involved in 2017 just from a speculative standpoint. Got involved in the ICOs, and okay, that’s interesting. Value is starting to be accrued to tokens. Around 2020, though, I got deeply involved. I saw use cases start coming online, like swaps starting to be done on the blockchain. I’ll go high-level just a little bit. I won’t go into too many details, but I started seeing swaps and money markets and new financial primitives showing up on the chain. And at the time, yields and involvement in those things were crazy. You could get extremely high yields on tokens that were debatably liquid. So, I got involved and went deeper, then got involved in something called the DAO space, which is Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, a.k.a., how do we make a company on chain or how do we make groups on chain with different equity arrangements or ownership arrangements. And so we tried these very democratized organizations on chains called DAOs. And it was very viral because if we gave equity to everybody, lots of people were suddenly very incentivized to work very, very hard. And so at the top of our DAO or at BanklessDAO, we had 20,000 people working on a number of things, and I was part of a group of leaders. I was part of the engineering and Dev Guild, and I also worked in the Treasury Management, where we managed the monetary policy of the DAO because we had our own token, and how do we incentivize people, and so I was part of all these conversations. The DAOs had a life cycle, we learned a lot, had a lot of fun, also learned how not to do things. 

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha! Yeah.

John Church:

And then, out of the DAO, we formed a consultancy, and the consultancy is where I worked with you, and now, I find myself at both Nethermind, and I teach as an adjunct professor at Duke University.

Todd Merrill:

Professor Church or Professor Icedcool.

John Church:

That’s right, one of those is, right, yeah. My pseudonym was Icedcool. And it was really funny, actually, because for the longest time, it was really interesting in the Dao space. I’d work with people, you know, my name was Icedcool, or my pseudonym, and pseudonymity, it was a meritocracy. What happened was that I measured people more on the output that they did versus their history. And so a lot of people found that as exciting ways to reinvent themselves and like come into the space and be measured not on their pedigree, but on the output. And it was really cool because it created this really interesting labor arbitrage because like we were in the United States or at least I was in a large chunk of our DAO, but we’d have people, workers in India or Africa and we had a group that created a newsletter that had a number of viewers and they would pay those people $200 to do an article and for them $200 was quite a large amount of money in US dollars, anyway.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s cool. Economic professor’s brain is looking at all these economic primitives that we don’t think about because they’re up in a bank somewhere or they’re, you know, at some Fed meeting or we’re kind of able to recreate those things. And you’re talking about staking tokens on a chain. Maybe, you know, a lot of listeners aren’t super familiar with what that is. Everybody knows what Bitcoin is, but what’s a Solana token or an Ethereum token? How do you stake it? And then what is that?

John Church:

Yeah, sure, sure. So, I’ll just give some high levels. I’ll exercise my capacity as a professor a little bit. Yeah, importantly, money is a social technology. So, what blockchain does is it allows you to innovate and create new functions and stores of value via the technical underpinnings of the blockchain. And so that’s allowed, you know, in 2020, people to speed run because initially there weren’t money markets or different things on the blockchain, but they kind of speed run finance and go from how do we do a swap, great, we’ve got swaps. Well, what if people have large chunks of value? 

What other people want to borrow that value? Oh, okay, they borrow it and they pay a fee back to this pool, which generates yield if people put money in this pot, called staking and so I might pool some of my funds in a smart contract which is a component on chain and some people may pool collateral and take a loan out against this larger pool and pay me for offering my assets in generating yield, and this yield is distributed to anybody that that does this. That’s just one primitive. This gets much more complicated. 

You know, we could talk about creating the economic security for a chain to make sure it’s safe, like how Bitcoin does that, how Ethereum or Solana does that? But ultimately, the thing that I find most interesting about all this is that it enables innovation because people can jump on the chain and mint a token right now and interact with people and do things that would otherwise be very difficult. Positive and negative, you know, fully got to acknowledge, like people have used this very illicitly and negatively in some cases, but I think there’s a lot of positive innovations coming out of this name, one of the number ones that has great product market fit, being stablecoins.

Todd Merrill:

Mm-hmm. Let’s talk about stablecoin. Yeah, so we talked about the swaps, right? So, like a dollar yen swap, you know, has a float rate. So, if you can go, and we talked about that yen carry trade, you know, becoming unglued because reasons, right? Japan is doing things with its interest rates, and it’s better to have dollars than yen now. But people could go buy or borrow yen for nothing, like zero interest rate. Right?

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And then swap it to dollars, and then go buy something interesting.

John Church:

Yeah, I mean, doing 4x arbitrage, right? Yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, and then so you can now do the same kinds of things in a virtual world, but you’re the bank, and the lender, and you don’t even have to know who you’re lending to anymore because it’s all math, right?

John Church:

Yeah, that’s right. And again, I think that’s the problem. This is all getting speed run by builders and technologists and engineers, both institutions and people building in the Web3 space, which is the crypto space. For those that don’t know, Web3 is read-write-own, being the blockchain-enabled component. There are a number of teams that are working on either being service providers to institutions for KYC, AML, and know all these people that are providing assets. Institutions are working on it as well. And then there are DeFi actors that are trying to ensure, like one of the things I’m excited about, is enabling privacy in DeFi while still adhering to regulatory requirements. You know, making sure that the funds you’re deposited with, like there might be a number of funds, none of them are OFAC-sanctioned or North Korea funds or what have you. 

Todd Merrill:

Right. Yeah, you don’t want to enable drug smuggling or money laundering or any of that stuff, right? 

John Church:

Yeah. That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

That’s kind of where it unzips, right? And then, I remember a couple years ago, going to permissionless, which is an Ethereum-centric conference out there in Texas, and the whole shop floor of DeFi degens, you know. There’s money, and it’s really interesting and really cool, but it was kind of academic, right? Where people were just kind of forcing the issue to loan each other money. And yeah, you’re getting interest, and it was cool, but at some point, you pay taxes, right? 

John Church:

Yeah. That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And at some point, there’s a bank involved, and then I got to move 50 grand from Fidelity to Coinbase, or to what? And then those are registered entities. And then like, there’s just no way, unless you’re just going to be purely out there in the blockchain. 

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And I think you guys learned that, you know, in your DAO, right? So, everybody had to pay you in crypto, which was really cool in theory …

John Church:

Yep, that’s right. Yes.

Todd Merrill:

But boy, what a pain in the butt. It’s a barrier to commerce at some point.

John Church:

It’s a tremendous barrier to commerce. Yeah. It was very difficult, especially with Silver Bank and some of the targeted impact that happened even while we were working together. You know, it’s people getting, for whatever reason, different heads of government or SEC rotations. It’s been a road for sure.

Todd Merrill:

Talk about Silver Bank. They were important because they were the one bank that you could bank or put into custody your digital assets, your Bitcoin, your Ethereum, whatever. That’s important because if you have large amounts of money as a hedge fund or whatever, and you can asset allocate, you have to do it professionally, which means there are certain rules. Right? Then we can’t be sketchy about this; we have to know. Then it has to be in a custodial account.

John Church:

Right

Todd Merrill:

They were like the only game in town for a minute, right? Because they …

John Church:

Yeah, for a good long minute, yeah. Because they were willing to be risk on and so, they took on that risk, which ultimately bit them. But yeah, for a time, they were the only bank in town. And ultimately, we’ve got to play by the rules at some point. And there’s this ethos, I think, crypto sometimes of like this, like, buck the system, cypherpunk. And I do think that’s important because DeFi, if anything, the current conversation in the Clarity Act around stablecoins, I think, is really positive because banks are having to compete with a new financial product. And it’s forcing a conversation about should depositors get yield on their deposits? 

Todd Merrill:

Yes

John Church:

Yes, exactly. I think yes, that’s right.

Todd Merrill:

Yes. But they don’t.

John Church:

No, that’s right. They don’t. And incumbents have a kind of privileged position that DeFi is forcing a conversation around, which is great. So now, you know, we have a saying in crypto called, not your keys, not your crypto. And so I’ll say, you know, my assets, my yield too, please and thank you.

Todd Merrill:

Yep, yep.

John Church:

So, I’m happy to see discussions in this happening in this regulatory environment. 

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well, yeah. And then, so let’s talk about stablecoins, right? So, they were kind of boring for a minute. I think, you know, we haven’t … there’s a lot of disruption for a couple of years there. It was like, hey, you really need to not leave stuff on an exchange because they’ll rug pull you. And it was like, kind of this, like every six months, something weird would happen.

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

It feels a lot has stabilized in the last couple of years, maybe two years, a year and a half.

John Church:

Yeah, no, no, no, yeah. So, I think, you know, so along those lines of like, not your keys, not your crypto. One of the problems, historically in blockchain and just sharing, and generally, was that exchanges may become insolvent. They may be operated illicitly because they sat at a place between traditional rails and new rails. FTX was an example of this. 

Todd Merrill:

Mm-hmm. And they had the yen carry trade going on in the background, right?

John Church:

That’s right, yeah. That’s right. And it was so interesting because SBF was considered one of the smartest guys in the room, and lots of like just had this aura of smart. And then you peeked at his accounts, and it was a big mess.

So, for a long time, self-sovereignty, which is one of the core kinds of ethos of crypto, is like you own your assets, you keep them, heavily prioritized, don’t store your stuff on an exchange, it’s not safe, it could be rugged, could have them stolen, the exchange could go down. Very, very true for a long time. Honestly, up till like you said, maybe a year, two years ago.

Now, with the regulatory environment we’re in now, and I still think there’s some risk, but if my grandma had crypto, don’t keep it on yourself, don’t keep it, especially if it’s a material amount. Some of my crypto friends might shun me for saying this, but when you keep crypto on you, you take on the security risks of a bank, and this is some of the positives that a bank has is that I don’t have to worry about the gold bars in my vault down in the basement because I don’t have one. 

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha. Yeah.

John Church:

I don’t have to worry about the security. Making sure my security guards are paid; the bank takes care of all that. And this has unfortunately actually been kind of a trend lately in the crypto world, is that there’s yield, there’s innovation, there’s opportunities both speculatively and otherwise, but also there’s a lot of risk. And there’s been a rise in something called wrench attacks where people find out someone has some amount of crypto and they go visit them locally and encourage them to share those things with them in a friendly way. 

Todd Merrill:

River hose crypt analysis, right? 

John Church:

That’s right. That’s right. 

Todd Merrill:

Give me your password. 

John Church:

Yeah. That’s right. 

Todd Merrill:

Well, so like going back to that, that permissionless conference, the, DeFi Degen floor, you know, as long as there’s tiny amounts, there’s lots of interesting academic things going on, but I felt like it didn’t really kind of rise and it’s like just too decentralized, but then you go in the back room in the professional, you know, institutional rooms where everybody that was, there was major Wall Street banks was talking, holy heck. I mean, they had it ironed out. And I thought, how interesting were the banks themselves? So, you have a New York office and a London office as an example, but it’s the same bank, Bank A, right? But they had to settle intra-bank. So, there are technically two different profit losses.

John Church:

Yeah, two different ledgers and yeah. 

Todd Merrill:

But they were doing it on their own blockchain, so they were cloning public blockchains and then running them for themselves. And that turned out to be way more secure, way faster, way everything. And then so like the math’s there, right? And the primitives are there. And I think it’s how do you marry all this stuff with the real world? You still have to be a person, right? And you still have to have an identity. You still have to, you know?

John Church:

That’s right. That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

There’s security, auditability, and all that stuff; it has to be a corporation.

John Church:

Right. And this kind of edges into because, you know, I think there’s like, because there’s stablecoins and how that’s really nailed the use case because that’s usage in like Africa and especially in countries where the rule of law is less strong or the monetary infrastructure is rough. But then, like this new thing, so there’s one of the things I focus on is zero-knowledge proofs, and our products associated that in Nethermind. And so like, right, we have to enable identity. The problem is that now, okay, I’m sending my identity to all these different people, and data, like hacks happen, data loss happens.

I’m kind of focusing on ZK, as zero-knowledge proofs are a type of cryptography where I could share this is my identity, and I could prove it to you. I am 18 without sharing my address, height, weight, all that extra stuff, but I would just prove to you this one component via cryptography. And so then you only know that bit and say you do get hacked, I’m not exposed with all these other components. Like, it’s still privacy-preserving. And so that’s one of the things I’m kind of focused on in the cryptography space or in the blockchain space. And how do we implement products like that to support institutions? And AML, KYC would be, this person is indeed a citizen of this country, without exposing all this other stuff to third parties, governments, of course, is fine, but you get the idea.

Todd Merrill:

We are old crypto nerds, right? There’s the certificate, like, you know, we all trust Amazon or whoever this year, and they issue a certificate authority and they issue certificates which sign things, which sign other things. And, you know, we all agree that there’s a root of trust versus the, you know, the PGP, like I met you and I’m going to sign your thing, you’re going to sign my thing. And then, you know, I only trust people, like if you can sign somebody else’s thing. Okay, I know Icedcool, so you must be okay. 

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

You know, so it’s kind of this weird, just kind of different ways to skin the cat. 

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, so it’s, you know, too much decentralization is good. It’s good mathematically in theory, but it’s a pain in the butt factor, so there are practical things.

John Church:

Decentralization is overhead, and it slows things down, and it’s just additional. But again, it’s like how do we, in a digital space, create ownership that isn’t just stored on one person’s like, on a server that could go down, like an S2 on Amazon? And that’s in some ways what trust, value, and ownership are in some ways what a lot of blockchain enables.

Todd Merrill:

So, stablecoins. I think there’s some news, like I saw Circle, right, was maybe selling out to somebody, or there’s some transaction maybe. Have you been following all that or?

John Church:

Honestly, no, tell me. I’ve been paying close attention. AI agents and stuff like that have been… What’s the latest with Circle?

Todd Merrill:

No, no, well, so it’s, you know, who owns it and then, you know, stablecoin is like, tries to become the same value every day. Right? But then they have to have some kind of underlying asset, gold or U.S. treasuries or whatever. You know, it ultimately can’t be stable for every swap on the market. Right? And then you’re talking about Africa, where, you know, in the United States, a stablecoin is worth 1 US dollar, and that’s the peg. But in Africa, it could go all over the place a lot of times because they have depreciating local currency, you know, how fast can I get it into the stablecoin?

John Church:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was wondering if there was some controversy or something. Every time I turn around, I’m like, no.

Todd Merrill:

Well, yeah, maybe I’m speaking with Icedcool, but like, I was hoping you could tell me, but the XRP crowds are kind of getting excited, and you know, what happens if Coinbase buys them? What happens if somebody else buys them?

John Church:

Yeah, so I know XRP has their stable that they’re working on and then, I mean just highly like I think one of the really interesting things about stables is how much adaption it had and especially like, and I’ve really been excited about how in this regulatory environment how much the United States has gotten on board with some of it because it is an extension of whatever monetary policy that pushes it.

One USD always has to equal one dollar in the company that issues the USDC as a stablecoin, always has to be able to redeem usually more, like over, what they call being over-collateralized, i.e. it’s like they’ve got more assets in the bank than they have USDC issued so that if there’s a run on the bank, they still, you know, they can make everyone whole. 

Todd Merrill:

Liquid, yeah.

John Church:

Yeah, totally liquid, that’s right. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of interesting movements in the stablecoin, but just a tremendous amount of adaptation all over the world for… I was spending time with the gentleman from EY, and he was pointing out that like USD stablecoins are used, like in the total stablecoin market, like 99.99% of all stablecoins used and issued. I’m seeing some inroads from Europe to start issuing a Euro stablecoin. I think they’re getting the memo actually. I hope to see competition there, too. I’m very pro-capitalism and enjoy competition.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah. And when it all kind of collapses into one big thing, and you know, it’s good, but it makes you nervous, right? 

John Church:

Yes, right.

Todd Merrill:

Cause then what happens if that all ends up, you have nowhere else to go.

John Church:

That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Todd Merrill:

You talked about AI and agents and where all that’s going. I had an interesting conversation last night with a venture guy. He’s concerned with the future of commerce. And I showed him, hey, you know, like I was doing a little research on my Claude desktop and found the best little mini PC to buy, hang on the wall to do certain things. 

John Church:

Mm-hmm

Todd Merrill:

And I found it, and then it said, hey, do you want me to pull up the Amazon link? It went shopping for me on a bunch of websites.

John Church:

Yeah, it’s crazy.

Todd Merrill:

And it was just like, right there. It’s like, how do we get agents like that? That’s a trivial example. But I always talk about like, you know, two Teslas going down the road, and they want to negotiate, hey man, I’m in a hurry, can I bribe you to pass? You know, what’s the future of all that look like, the payments? Surely, it’s not Bitcoin, we have 60 bucks to give you a nickel to be able to pass, right? 

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

What do you have your eye on, you know, where’s that light going?

John Church:

Yeah, so I’m going to give you my biased opinion. I’m going to share directionally, and then I’ll share my biased take on some of this. I think the biggest thing is I see markets getting extremely, extremely efficient and just increasing in speed. And I think that’ll be a byproduct of both blockchain markets, which include prediction markets, where you say people are based on their prediction markets, really briefly, are places where people can bet on the outcomes of different things but when they reach a certain size, they start to generate information on because of people’s profit motives and so you can see like maybe somebody has some inside information and they’re betting on something and you see a strong bet in one direction that starts to give off information on say, you know, whether, I don’t know, what the temperature’s going to be tomorrow or whether some coach on a basketball team is going to be hired or not. And so these things happen. Anyway, so this is giving off lots of information, and then agents, I think, as they aggregate all of this from just a purely speculative viewpoint, start to buy and sell from a profit motive component. And I’m not even going to talk about the, you know, I guess we could talk about lightly the general AGI…

Todd Merrill:

AGI?

John Church:

Yeah. Some of those fears. But yeah, I think categorically what I see is that previously everything programmatically things had to be deterministic, which means it was like a clear outcome, and now we’ve got non-deterministic actors, which are agents acting and so what they can do is they can take on an aggregate of information and have different outputs at different times versus deterministic it’s always the same output. And so now you’ve basically got qualitative activity happening via agents, and so right, they can act on like a car, but you start being able to have like variable outputs. The clearest thing I think is that markets are becoming very, very efficient. I see lots and lots of people basically building their own Bloomberg terminals and then setting their agents to act on behalf of those terminals. I’m forecasting that, you know, I don’t know, market movements will become more stable, I hope. I’m not sure. 

Todd Merrill:

Smoother, information, less choppy.

John Church:

That’s what I’m assuming. This is my take. And then of course, what is all this going to occur? And my bias take is that, and I believe this will all occur on Ethereum, although Solana is an excellent platform, very high speed with their architecture decisions. There are a number of them. There’s just like, yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well, I went to the Bitcoin conference out in Prague a year or two ago. And then, everybody wanted to do everything in Bitcoin because reasons. Right? And then I was like, all right, I got my Lightning wallet, and then let’s go buy beer in Prague, you know? 

John Church:

That’s right, yeah, of course you got to.

Todd Merrill:

It took five minutes for a hot sausage and a beer. 

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And it was like, it was fun. But like, yeah, we’re not just not ready. Right? So, are we getting closer on any of the stuff? You know, Solana, the answer. There are other things out there that you haven’t tried.

John Church:

Yeah, so I’ll speak to some of the scaling approaches, and I’ll dig into just a little bit on some of them. Solana is very fast, but Solana’s architecture is very, very heavy. So, making sure Solana functions, like you need enough validators with enough hardware, which is like petabytes worth of storage, a tremendous amount of RAM, their validator set makes them, to some degree, centralized. They would probably chase after me with pitchforks and say, no, no, Solana is definitely decentralized, you know? And then I would look at that in comparison to Ethereum, where Ethereum has hundreds of thousands of validators and is truly decentralized.

I think the big thing is just the difference between these two is that Solana is pushed really hard for, like, if you tried to pay with Solana, it would have settled immediately, versus Bitcoin, five minutes, because of Bitcoin’s block time is every 10 minutes. 

So, the database for Bitcoin updates every 10 minutes. Ethereum has 12 seconds going down to 6, but the important bit for blockchains is, speed is important, very much, very, very true, but security is staying up and online is critically important. And so when you get to a blockchain holding the finances of the world, you need to make sure that the distributed validator set is very, very, very, very distributed. And I critique Solana and say you know their current validator set is not distributed enough, and this is why I’m a big fan of Ethereum, but design decisions, ZK stuff, lots of technology implementations, and different things. 

The TLDR, though, is that Ethereum has a lean roadmap that they’re pushing that I’m really excited for. But I imagine for many of your listeners, what’s like the cutting-edge thing is in some ways it’s really important that blockchains become kind of boring because it’s important that they stay up, they’re online like a bank. A bank doesn’t close, and blockchain needs to stay up, online, and be a trustworthy store of value. And so that’s why I’m really excited for a lot of the innovations. Solana has a lot of really cool stuff coming, too.

Todd Merrill:

And there are a lot of spears that get thrown your way when you say, well, you know, it wouldn’t hurt us to be a little bit more corporate about all this stuff, you know, not so much anarchy in the weeds.

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

Maybe we got to grow up a little bit and then, you know, it’s a fine line, right? There’s a lot of really strong emotional deep roots, no, we can’t trust the man, you know?

John Church:

That’s right. 

Todd Merrill:

The system is the problem, you know, and that’s why we did Bitcoin in the first place. There are some benefits. I don’t know. It’s just a hard thing, right? Yeah. Because you see the benefit.

John Church:

Yep, I mean, I think that this is the problem, that there were no alternatives. You accepted the monetary policies and the decisions of these centralized groups. And with Bitcoin, Brian Armstrong said it so well at Davos a few weeks back, because he said that Bitcoin is programmatically defined as its monetary policy. So, if you don’t like any one nation state’s monetary policy, you’ve got an option now. And that’s great, and that’s why people like gold too, and that’s why gold’s so well, is that no one group or entity can decide to print more gold. There is only as much gold as there ever will be. Satoshi, in his wisdom, said, hey, let’s make a digital version of that.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, I mean, it’s brilliant. Then one of the things that kind of, I think about from time to time, it didn’t keep me up at night, but it’s like, dang, you know, it was made to be money, a great medium for exchange between us. It’s not that anymore. It’s like hoarders, you know…

John Church:

Store value. That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

Treasure. Right?

John Church:

That’s right. That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And it’s like, oh, man, you know, so close, but now we have, you know…

John Church:

Stablecoins

Todd Merrill:

Yes, stablecoins, you so maybe it’s not the end of the world. I don’t know.

John Church:

Yeah, and that conversation. So, there’s this economic idea, it’s like when there’s really good money, people hoard it, and they use the bad money, and so the good money becomes bad because it’s nice.  You hoard it as a store of value and that’s essentially, to some degree, was having with Bitcoin is that people hoard it because tomorrow it’s going to be 60, 100, you know, whatever some odd wild valuation. And not to mention that user experience problems, like it takes 10 minutes for your transaction to settle, or whatnot. Yeah, but right, we’ve got alternatives, and I think that’s all engine. From an engineering perspective, that’s all the opportunities.

Todd Merrill:

Do you think my desktop agent is going to pay for my next computer in stablecoins at some point from a wallet somewhere? Do you think we’re far from something like that?

John Church:

No, no, it’s here. It’s already here. One of my buddies, he got something called OpenClaw. He tasked it with generating a trading strategy, and it automatically built him a low-grade wallet for it to work with. It built it for him, and he just set it loose. And it asked him to fund it for him, and he funded it, and so it’s off and running, and so he’s good.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, God. 

John Church:

Yeah, and so he’s going to check in on it, you know, and see how it’s doing, and this is … I’ll be real, I get kind of nervous when I see some of that stuff cause it…

Todd Merrill:

I mean, for a thousand bucks or 500 bucks, you know, it’s fun. 

John Church:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

But like, my God.

John Church:

Right

Todd Merrill:

Like, what happens when it gets a futures license. 

John Church:

And the opportunity to blow money. The implications for me. It’s like, wait, why did it build a wallet? Like, why did it do these things? What’s the trading on? And I think, you know, I see reports sometimes where it’s like when you tell something to be like profit maximalism, it’s like, what if it goes off and does something illegal? And it’s like, its job is to just make money like, whoa.

Todd Merrill:

Well, we set the goals to be fair…

John Church:

Yeah, right.

Todd Merrill:

And it is goal seeking technology. 

John Church:

Yeah. Right, that’s right.

Todd Merrill:

So, if you tell it to be a dirtbag and go make a bunch of money, it’s going to come up with some really strange things, but…

John Church:

That’s exactly right.

Todd Merrill:

Perfectly in line with what the human told it, the goal was. 

John Church:

That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. So, it’s on the person to define the, you know, we call it a prompt, but like the context within which it should work, and it seems to just go ham on that context.

Todd Merrill:

So, you mentioned Claudebot. So, we ran it across, ran a human.ai. Have you seen that one yet? 

John Church:

No, no.

Todd Merrill:

All these Claudebots are doing all kinds of fancy things, and I’m convinced there’s a scam here somewhere, but there’s just too much press behind it. They’re doing social, they’ve got a religion or something. I haven’t seen that one, but you know, the hype rate is real. But one of the things is, hey, I need a human to go do something.

John Church:

Yeah, that’s right. It’s called like rent a human or something like that. 

Todd Merrill:

So yeah. Rentahuman.ai.

John Church:

Yeah, right.

Todd Merrill:

So, I registered this morning, and then I thought about, okay, what’s the most kind of controversial things I could throw in there. Like, I start fires, you know, and then, it was stripe, and there was a theorem in Bitcoin, you know, how do you want to get paid? So, I don’t know. What should I put in the Rentahuman, or what do you think would be the most interesting skills or most unexpected things that are going to come out of that?

John Church:

Yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, so…

Todd Merrill:

Fund my account.

John Church:

Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. And this is where it’s, I think like, you know, the ideas and your exposure to different technologies and your ability to be creative start becoming really, like, you know, cause it’s like, off the top of my head, I don’t know. I’m like, throw off, I’d say, ask it to pay you in stables, because that’s the easiest and some of the most liquid in the blockchain market. But I think what it really seems like is that as agents come online and low-effort, mind-numbing tasks become automated, it seems like the opportunity is that people get to exercise their creativity and… it’s multiple contexts.

I mean, to answer your question though, I think… Yeah, I thought all that was wild, especially with there’s something called Moltbook, which was a, like, the AI Reddit where they could post. Turns out there are a lot of people posting because it was just like an open, unauthenticated thing, but there’s a period of time there where people are freaking out.

Todd Merrill:

It smells a little scammy, like the early days of crypto, NFT, you know?

John Church:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

Kind of brings us to what’s the future, you know, your professor Icedcool. And then you know, talk about your favorite NFT in your Discord. You want to talk about what your Icedcool? How’d you get Icedcool?

John Church:

Yeah, yeah, so Icedcool. Honestly, it’s an old gaming nickname, and in the DAO days, you know? Again, we’d be pseudo-anonymous. And I’d have times where I’d interact with, in the early days, you know, BanklessDAO was really prominent. And sometimes from Bankless Consulting, we’d talk with a politician or something, and someone would be referring to us, hey, Icedcool, how are you doing? Or talking with some of my pseudo-anonymous friends. And it reached the point, though, where I had to become professional and start referring to myself as John Church. But yeah, I registered Icedcool as my … There’s an art community, and some of the things that I really like about NFTs is that it allows people to organize around art and support their art with finance. And so one of my artist buddies made these funny stick figure profile pictures called PFPs. And in BanklessDAO, they became very popular, and if anybody was an OG or a long-term contributor, they’d have one. And so we all had one. What I really liked is that it allowed me to fund my friend’s art, and I’m part of their community. They’re called Chippies, anybody’s so inclined. So, I’m still part of their Discord and chat with them. They’re all good friends now. 

Todd Merrill:

And yours had the toothpick.

John Church:

Yeah, that’s right. Mine has the toothpick. That’s exactly right.

Todd Merrill:

Cool, Mr. Icedcool.

John Church:

Yeah. Just try to be, try to be. And I think for the future, again, categorically, like crypto, I see a lot of synergies between crypto and AI because it’s like, AI is very digital, and so crypto allows for trust and value on the digital layer. And we focus too much on the speculation when really the cryptography is really novel.

And so I think one thing for sure is that, despite the ups and downs, like I was just at a conference, the Digital Assets at Duke Conference, and spoke there. Institutions clearly see the value, very clearly. And they are undeterred by the ups and downs. They move slowly, and we’re in crypto, like we’re up, everybody’s euphoric; we’re down, everybody feels bad. And institutions have a steady maturity to them that they’re bringing to the space that I’m really appreciating. And two, they get it. There are deeply sophisticated actors that really are starting, like I’m hearing very sophisticated thoughts both on regulators, innovation, infrastructure, and engagement on the institution side, and I see just doing amazing jobs. Fidelity is just an example, is creating really interesting and exciting things in the crypto space amongst others. There are lots of institutions. 

Todd Merrill:

So, in your professorship, you know, you get to talk to a lot of young folks. You know, a lot of people, particularly in AI, particularly in the coding space, everybody’s a little bit panicked about, my God, all the entry-level jobs are going to go away. I argue that what you need to know going out in the world changes, right? You don’t need this tactical grindy stuff anymore. You need some kind of higher-level human functioning, which is probably a better use of your brain anyway. How are you teaching people to get ready for what’s next for the coming world?

John Church:

Yeah, I think critical fundamentals, like first principles, understanding of different things is still critical. Understanding, just as an example, computer science, my engineers at Nethermind who have adapted AI and are really skilled are now amazing. 

Todd Merrill:

Coding tools, that kind of thing?

John Church:

Yeah, coding tools, Claude, Codex, etc. They’re going from like, their output went from, as just an example, they would spec out some feature set, and it’d be like, oh, two to three weeks’ worth of work. They’d get it done in a day. 

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

John Church:

Yeah. And so it’s like our timelines are compressing really, really, really hard. And we’re discovering. So one, fundamental understanding is still required. You can’t just go, hey, AI, build it for me. Make no mistakes. Make a million billion dollars. It doesn’t work. 

You’re setting that context, and from that wide open context, it’ll build anything in any direction, and it makes mistakes. There are hallucinations, just like any junior or mid-tier dev would make mistakes or have a misunderstanding on what to build. So, like we’re still, it’s not a general intelligence where it’s like this is the way I should go and this is what I should do. It’s still waiting for us to nudge it and give it direction, like an employee or anything, and so fundamental understanding and also creativity, exercising your creativity and your excitement about things, and seeing what could be, exercising your vision.

So, a fundamental understanding of things. But I think we’re moving into a world where entrepreneurship is going to be widely distributed. Lots of people are going to be a lot more involved in entrepreneurship because I was reading just this morning that a plumber built for himself a finance tracking tool and a distribution, like a task distribution engine that he would have otherwise paid $10,000 a month. He built it for himself and is hosting it for 50 bucks a month. And I think that a massive amount of disruption is going to happen for kind of the monolithic internet, and it’s going to become much more distributed. And so, my advice to students is, you know, you can’t be a cog. You must be an individual with ideas, a vision, and excitement. And you might work as part of a company, but you must understand the technology from a fundamental perspective and then use AI to accentuate yourself and move much, much faster.  And I think that right now, we’re seeing, like my best coders still produce code that’s better than Claude, but within a year to two years, that may not be the case maybe even six months if it’s, I don’t know, it makes me nervous sometimes.

Todd Merrill:

Well, you know, and I wrestled with this, too. I am pretty bullish on Claude and others. It’s getting really good, really fast. And then, you know, do you need to know what a class is in software anymore? Probably not, right? You should never write another router, is what I told a younger engineer a month ago. You know, React Router on the web.

John Church:

Yeah, sure.

Todd Merrill:

You should not be worried about that kind of code. You should be worried about, like, okay, the big picture, why are we doing this? And then if you think about it, that’s kind of more human, and that’s really the fun part of creativity. You know, you can create a lot more stuff in a hurry. And then to the extent that you’ve done this before and you know what you’re doing and you have really good judgment, it only gets better and magnified from there.

John Church:

Yep, I agree with that.

Todd Merrill:

I love your focus on fundamentals. We’re always going to have to exchange value for money. That doesn’t change the way, you know, the token that we exchange, whether it’s a dollar or a yen or a Bitcoin or Satoshi or whatever, that might change. That will change, right? We’ll cycle through seashells or whatever next, and then, how do we give it to each other in person on electronic, you know, rails somewhere through, you know, God knows what computer or directly electronically just distributed like that. We still got to exchange the money and be confident in it. We may or may not want to know each other, you know?

John Church:

That’s right. 

Todd Merrill:

Depending on the kind of exchange rate?

John Church:

Yeah, yes.

Todd Merrill:

If I’m buying a car from you, I probably kind of want to know who you are. 

John Church:

Yeah. I think that it’s like blockchain can provide certain assurances via the tech. All the infrastructure’s got to catch up with some of the things and meet the regulatory environment. I think just understanding systems architecture in computer science and the like, and some of the different, like, those are still important. It’s just that, yeah, it’s like use higher minded thinking and allow yourself to have fun with it.

Todd Merrill:

All right, going back to the rentahuman.com, one of the things it says is, I can’t touch grass, so I need a human. 

John Church:

That’s right. That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

So, you’re an outdoor guy, right? And then we kind of share that background. So, what is your favorite water filter and why is it a Sawyer?

John Church:

Oh, gosh. My favorite water filter, probably iodine.

Todd Merrill:

Okay. So, you’re an iodine guy.

John Church:

I’m an iodine guy. I just drank it enough that whenever I taste it, I know that I’m camping and it means I’m on vacation, so it’s good.

Todd Merrill:

Okay, and is that like a multi-use minimalism? Yeah.

John Church:

Just the tablets, you know. I’ve done some survival scenarios, and I’ve 28 days on the App Trail via Outward Bound, and we used iodine. In the survival scenario, we actually used this other thing, this chemical, which I’m not sure how good for me it was, but I like the iodine, so check the box. 

Todd Merrill:

Chlorine or something, yeah.

John Church:

Something like that, yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah, iodine, you can always put on a wound and nobody’s allergic to iodine. So, yeah.

John Church:

That’s right, yeah, it’s good for my thyroid and stuff, you know?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well, and then so why is that important? After, I want to say after COVID, we have a bunch of little two-year-olds running around the neighborhood, and there’s there was always a thriving little kid soccer thing. After COVID, we seem to have lost that, or there’s less kids playing T-ball and soccer and swimming and like…

John Church:

…shame

Todd Merrill:

And then people kind of focus inward or on their screens. Talk about why that’s important to get outside and out or bound, and you know, those are huge deals to keep going. 

John Church:

That’s right. Yeah. Tremendously. I think, you know, what’s lost, and it’s so important to have community and interpersonal connections.

Todd Merrill:

Well, and then you’re three days into a seven-day trek over a hill somewhere, right? Things get real focused real quick. 

John Church:

That’s right. 

Todd Merrill:

Like, I’m tired. 

John Church:

Yep, that’s right.

Todd Merrill:

It’s raining. My feet hurt, and I want something to eat. And that’s about it, right? And that’s all you think about. 

John Church:

Yeah. And I love that about that. Cause it’s like, God, you know, I’m like, you know, my day to day is like, is AI going to take over the world? Oh, what’s the politics looking like? Oh, this is like, my house, you know, but right, you know. And when you’re out on the trail, it’s a what am I eating? What am I drinking? Where am I sleeping? And do I have to go to the bathroom right now or later? 

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha! Yeah, I started running in a hammock, so I didn’t have to worry about wear. I just kind of like, oh, there’s a tree, let’s just sit down.

John Church:

A number of my friends love hammocks. I haven’t tried them yet, so that’s on my to-do.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, for sure. Well, it’s about getting out there in the world and seeing stuff. You got any great travel stories other than the AT that you want to share with us?

John Church:

So, I think hmmm…

Todd Merrill:

Are you getting any cool bear stories about the Appalachian Trail or coyotes or turkeys?

John Church:

Well, so I did 20 days in the App Trail and then 28 days in the Utah desert, which had me absolutely fall in love with the desert. Halfway through, we found… this is a short story because I’ve done a lot of travel too with crypto conferences, etc., but I think you’ll find this one funny. We had a solo hike, so four of us were hiking. And at some point through the trip, we were going to cross a highway. And our guide told us that if you’re in trouble, you can go down here. There’s a coffee shop. They’ve got plenty of food and a place for you all to stay. So, as we’re hiking, we’re like, plenty of food, place to stay. Maybe we can go ask them for some food.

And so we get to the highway. And in this part of Utah is Provo, Utah. You can hitchhike, and it’s fairly common. There’s lot of hikers going around. So, my buddy and I, before we got up, had to hike a thousand feet up. This is 20 days in. I have layers of dirt on me that are multi-layered. So, me and my buddy, we splashed ourselves, we were coming off a small river. We scrubbed some dirt off. I combed my hair, and we hiked up out, and we hitchhiked. 

So, as we hitchhike, car passes, car passes, car passes, one pulls over, and we go rushing. Okay, we’re going to rush over there. And we talked to the person, and we say, oh yeah, we just need to ride up to this place right up here. And they go, are you from the group? We were with BOSS (Boulder Outdoor Survival School). And they say, are you with BOSS? So, I freak. My partner starts lying up a storm, and he hops in the front, and she’s like, oh no, no, we’re not with BOSS, da da da da da da. He hops in the front, and she’s like, okay, well, hop in.

She starts asking these like really pointed questions about, like, you know, is this with your, do you know this guy? Like, what were you doing out there? Did you check in with the way station? And he’s earning his Emmy. He’s like, he’s lined up. So, we ride up, she gives us a, you know, it was called the Kiva coffee shop, which was really nice. She gives us some bread. Some macaroni casserole. He has himself an espresso, and just a ton of food, which, for us, I currently weigh about 190 pounds. I was 130 pounds. 

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

John Church:

So, I was really thin. So, she gives us all this, and she drives us back. And I’m looking at this bounty of food with extreme excitement. And she drops us off, and then we meet up with our friends, and we eat. My buddy ended up getting sick, and that was his whole own story, but just to wrap this whole thing up, the end of the course is coming, and we have to hike out of the desert. And the place we hike to is the Kiva coffee shop. And so as we roll up, there’s actually a little poster that says wanted two liars, and it was a picture of my buddy and me. 

And so we sat down, and they’re like, yeah, and when you get to the Kiva coffee shop, we’re going to have this huge feast, and you are going to be great. And so you sat down, and everybody started getting these meals that were like meat and potatoes, which were amazing. You know, you can’t understand when you’re starving for 20 days, and you suddenly have like real food. You’re blown out of the water. But they put in front of us, I’d eaten for breakfast every day, condensed milk and oats, and so they put that in front of us. It was this moment of like, you know, we looked at each other as a… so that was the one thing, but tremendous time.

I have other travel stories, you know? I’ve been all over the world, but I think that’s one that stands out.

Todd Merrill:

What’s the craziest thing you’ve bought for any kind of crypto?

John Church:

Craziest thing I’ve bought for any kind of crypto? 

Shoot, honestly, probably some NFTs. So, there was an NFT that was a picture of numbers, and I spent probably $7,000 on the picture of numbers. At the time, it seemed like a smart idea because people are paying $50,000 for these things, so I thought for $7,000, I had a deal. It was not a deal. It is currently probably not even worth a penny.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha! You still have it? I still have an NFT that was an entry ticket for the Formula One in Miami for FTX. 

John Church:

Wow, that’s classic.

Todd Merrill:

So, yeah, I don’t think I paid anything for it. I think I got it for opening an account, but it was kind of funny.

John Church:

That’s so cool.

Todd Merrill:

Well, Icedcool, John Church. Professor Church. It’s been great having you here today. How can people follow up with you on the internet if they want to get a hold of you?

John Church:

Well, on the more crypto native, I’m on Twitter, on icedcool_eth. Although if you search for John Church, you can probably reach me there. And then on LinkedIn, you can find me as John Church.

Todd Merrill:

Well, it’s been great having you.

John Church:

Yeah. It’s super fun to chat and love talking about all these things.

Todd Merrill:

Bye for now.