Building The Future Show - Radio / TV / Podcast

Welcome to Building the Future, hosted by Kevin Horrick. With millions of listeners a month, building the future has quickly become one of the fastest rising programs with a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more. The radio and TV show airs in 15 markets across the globe, including Silicon Valley. For full Showtimes, past episodes or to sponsor this show, please visit buildingthefutureshow.com. 

Welcome back to the show. Today we have Mike Cahill. He's the CEO of Dora Labs. Mike, welcome to the show. 

Thanks, Kevin. Excited to be here? 

Yeah, I'm excited to have you on the show. I think what you guys are doing is actually really innovative and cool. But maybe before we get into all that, let's get to know you a little bit better and start off with where you grew up. 

I grew up in Newburgh, New York, which is about 50 miles north of Manhattan. 

Very cool. So you went to university. What did you take and why? 

I went to Syracuse University, and I initially enrolled with a scholarship for mechanical engineering. And about two years into that, I realized, number one, I wasn't particularly good at engineering. Number two, it was definitely not something I really wanted to do. So I switched majors and I switched into business, which is something that I realized I was actually pretty good at. And I did really want to do. And it was a cool time because Syracuse had this really emerging field called the Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises degree, and it was highly regarded. It was very early in that degree's, I think, tenure. I think it's probably more common now, but it was a really cool experience. 

That's awesome. But what got you passionate about engineering at the beginning? Or is there something in your childhood? 

Probably just being like a Lego nut was the thing that drove me. 

No, that's cool. Okay, so you get out of school, walk us through your career up until what you're doing today.

So, my first job, well, while I was in school, I had a whole bunch of startups. I was the president of the Entrepreneurship Club. I really dove into that major, and I had done so many things that I hadn't assumed that I would be doing startups right out of college. I was kind of scrapping together lots of different jobs. I was doing some sales work for kind of a national company. I had started a marketing company. And then because I was this representative from sort of one of the prestigious majors within the school, I helped organize some of the career fairs, and I was recruited from Morgan Stanley. And I remember that's where I kind of shifted my mindset a little bit. And I sort of sold my soul. 

I felt like initially where I was like, oh, well, this is actually a really lucrative job. My parents were school teachers and I was like, wow, this is a step change for what I was expecting to make. And so I was really lured in by, let's see how this goes for a few years. So Morgan Stanley was my first job at a college, 2006. I lived through the financial crisis. There's a funny picture of me walking in Newsweek while people are packing up their boxes at Lehman across the street. And I was in foreign exchange sales and trading at a time where the market was transitioning from voice to electronic. Most of the other listed markets had already done this. The US equity markets, the futures markets had all kind of already gone through this transition. A lot of the pits had cleared out. 

FX is like, weird. It's all set of nuances. There's no central clearing counterparties necessarily. It trades bilaterally through a network of banks. But the writing was on the wall. So I realized that was going to become electronic as well. So I tried to gravitate as much as I could towards the electronic side of it, and that really shaped the next couple of years of my career, because once I learned and I got into electronic trading at Morgan, I realized, well, banks are not going to be the winners here. There's too much overhead. I'll give you an example. The things that were having to program for was like counting up sales. 

Credits. 

For salespeople when you're pricing stuff and it would add like seconds of latency. And that was just a huge disadvantage versus someone who didn't have to do this. And so the people that were going to kind of be eating our lunch were like hedge funds. So I was like, that's really where I want to go. And so I ended up gravitating towards that. I went to KCG, which was the largest US equity market making systematic trading firm, and then I moved over to jump when jump was getting into crypto. And then from there, that started my kind of career within crypto and started working on the pits network. And we formed Doral Labs earlier this year. 

Okay, so it's interesting how many people I've had. Obviously a few people in the crypto kind of blockchain space come from the traditional finance background. Right. I always found that kind of interesting just because it seems so polar. I own crypto, so I think it's kind of the future, or at least going to be around. I know a lot of people are all doom and gloom just because of what's been happening the last couple of years, but it seems like you either believe in it or you completely don't believe in it, and there's not a lot of people in the middle. Do you agree with that? 

I don't know. I think that there's certainly people that get it really easily and then other people where it takes a little bit of time. I think it's like the standard hype cycle and kind of adoption curve. And I think the reason why people within finance it feels a little bit more polarizing is because of where you are in your career and the perceived threat of it. If you're young in your career and it's a potential opportunity, you're like, oh, this is great. I don't have to work my way up and have somebody who's unwilling to leave their seat die in order for me to be successful versus somebody who's been there. This is going to be disruptive. I have a pretty healthy job. I'm making a lot of money. I don't want this to be successful. 

I think that's more of the razor with which I analyze. 

Okay, so you set up Doralabs. What exactly is it and how did you come up with the idea for it? 

So DoraLabs works on primarily a blockchain application called the Pith Network, which I've been working on since it was started. And so the Pith network fits into a blockchain category of infrastructure that's referred to as an Oracle network. So very simply put, a blockchain is a shared state system, right? So it's a ledger where the distributed nodes all know who owns what at any given point. That's what we refer to as the state. And anything outside of that state is not known. So it needs to be brought in. So you have to bring in any external data, like the weather in New York, the price of bitcoin, the price of Tesla shares. So all that stuff needs to come in a trustworthy way. And that's where oracles come in. So they really solve for trust to bring this exogenous data on chain. 

And pith is not the first Oracle network. There were previous ones, but what they did is they solved for trust, mostly at the expense of speed. And Pith was the first oracle to optimize for speed and to optimize for financial market data. And it does so in some creative ways. But the biggest is the fact that it has attracted over 90, about 100 today, big institutions, to publish their financial data directly on chain. That's very unusual when people talk about when the adoption of institutions will happen within crypto. This is an example, probably the biggest example, where you have kind of legacy institutions, trading firms and exchanges, who are actually integrated and transacting on a blockchain every single day. 

Okay, so for people that don't understand maybe how to leverage blockchain, can you maybe give us some examples of how people have used your technology in their companies organizations? 

Yeah, sure. PIF is a middleware, so it's an infrastructure that other companies or applications use. And it focuses on this decentralized finance or finance on blockchains kind of use case. And that one just for kind of the average listener to get their head around. Right. The first use cases for crypto is I want to send money from A to B. The second use case is to allow people anywhere around the world to get access to kind of financial markets or investable markets. And that could be that they want to access the lending markets. And so a very simple application would be, I would like to take my Ethereum and I would like to post as collateral and then take a loan out on, say, Solana. And they can do that in a blockchain application called compound or AAvE. Those are the two largest. 

Now, those types of applications need to know what the value of Ethereum is in order to be able to mark your collateral in dollar terms. And that's what an oracle will do. And so pith will update the price of Ethereum on chain so that these types of applications can use it to allow you to be able to take out a loan. It gets more complicated from there when you start to do more complex transactions. So you can envision an exchange fully on chain. So there's an example of that called synthetics, and that allows people to trade anonymously in a kind of broker style model that is a fully on chain application. And what that does is it uses the pricing that comes from pith to be able to give a price with which value can get exchanged. 

So that could work for, say, bitcoin versus dollar. People are speculating on it. They take leverage, people outside of the US, let's say, and they trade on chain, and that's really sort of powered by oracles. 

Okay, interesting. So how does it work then, if I want to leverage your technology? Like, how long does it kind of take me to get started and actually get something live on the Internet? 

I guess so the way that pith has been architected is we have a set of publishers that will publish their proprietary data on chain, and they do so to a particular blockchain called Pithnet, which is an application specific blockchain. It's built on an SVM architecture, Solana Virtual machine. So it's based off of another blockchain called Salana. And there are these 90 publishers, there's 350 symbols, they update a couple of times a second. So there's lots and lots of data that's being processed now it's on an island, and that island needs to connect to other blockchains. And so it uses a bridging technology called wormhole, which is anonymous decentralized bridging layer. And it uses that to distribute these 350 symbols to other chains through this wormhole network. Pith is available on 35 different blockchains where people build applications. 

So when you think about blockchains, you think about layer ones and layer ones like say Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, near. They all have basically like operating systems where people are building applications on top of them. And so within each one of those layer ones there's lots of applications, some of which I described before. So I described some lending protocols and also some trading ones. So the way that pith distributes that pricing is from this pithnet over to these various blockchains and then these applications are the users. So there's 220 applications that are using Pith and they can do so in a fully permissionless way. It's open sourced software and that's one of the beauties of crypto. It creates an incentive mechanism for contributors of open source software to earn something without having to first get into some sort of a legal agreement or legal arrangement. 

And I think that's one of the big breakthroughs, right? So if you had to have every bitcoin miner sign up to like an LLC or become an employment employee of a company, it wouldn't work and it wouldn't scale. And there's a million miners today and Ethereum the same thing, there's about a million validators. And these incentives are just there and you either come up and meet the requirements or you don't. It's great because it allows for these kind of public goods which people can use, pay a fair value or not use, and kind of walk away from. And that's in contrast to something like other open source software projects that have this tragedy of the commons where there's no explicit rewards for somebody to maintain it. 

The one exception, or one of the major exceptions is Linux, which powers all the back ends and has this huge network of kind of contributors, but they're not necessarily explicitly receiving rewards for it. And this blockchains really allow that to happen at a broader scale. 

Interesting. Okay, so then how do you monetize the platform, then? 

So the prices as they're delivered are able to capture kind of a micro fee. So it's a very simple kind of supply distribution model. So you think about like Pifnet and these 350 symbols as being the supply and then the distribution being to all these different blockchains. Every time a price is delivered, there's some micro fee that's paid for it. And that's an elegant way because everything is captured on chain. You can look at, well, who is the best contributor in this particular high demand symbol of the 90 that was most deserving of a percentage of the rewards? And you can come up with very fair and equitable ways to treat those actors. 

Interesting. That seems like a lot different than how a lot of blockchain technologies are doing it. Right, where obviously I can leverage your technology, but you integrate with so many others that I don't just have to pick yours. Right? Is that fair to say? 

Yeah. The crux here is that it is middleware, and so it powers so much of what's being built. So the customers of pith are generally builders, and there's like a couple of designs where they have to choose to buy or build. And so the first one is like, well, what layer one do I want to build on, or do I want to build my own? So pifnet is its own layer one, but it was forked from Solana. And so there was a combination of initially buying and then kind of modifying and kind of making it our own. But that's the first thing. Which ecosystem do I want to be deploying on? And then the second one is, well, how do I want to bring data in? And do I want to do it on my own? 

Do I want to try and convince people that I Have a trustworthy way to port data on chain? Or do I want to go with something that has a strong reputation? There's 220 other users of it. It's coming from these sources that may or may not be familiar with, but they're all big institutions, every trading firm, most of the large exchanges. So there's elements of trust that I can kind of borrow from, and then I can focus on areas where I really want to differentiate. And it could be that I want to differentiate around the types of symbols that are offered or the type of leverage that I have. 

And that's really where I think we've seen the most competitive elements of the features, is different applications tend to say, all right, I'm going to carve out one element that I think I could be really great at and then kind of use the rest of them from the best infrastructure out there. 

Interesting. So how did you partner with these organizations, then? Because that's the hardest part, right? Or doesn't matter. 

Yeah, for sure. 

Or like, what advice do you give to people to do that? Because, well, yeah. 

You know what I'm getting at 100%. Yeah. The PIF network was, as an idea, almost destined to fail. It was kind of like one of those things where if you're reading a science fiction book, you're like, oh, this is cool. This is definitely how it should work. And then you go and do it. You're like, well, first you need all these exchanges to be publishing their data. And there's that chicken and the egg problem. There is kind of an interesting nuance that we effectively exploited. So financial market data is a big business off chain. It's about a six and a half billion dollar a year revenue business, and it's mostly captured by the big exchanges, about 20% of the revenue of large exchanges. 

Now, financial market data, when you just kind of zoom out, it is the prices with which traders want to trade with one another, bids and offers, or the prices where they just traded. So the trade prints and all the big trading firms are the ones that are sending in the bids and offers or the ones that are executing these trades. But there's a big key difference here. They don't actually make any money from market data. So because there was this neglected kind of contributor, were able to use this kind of found resource and incentivize it to become a part of a new solution. And that's where it has elements that are similar to like an Airbnb, right? 

I have a bunch of people that have vacation houses, and all of a sudden you give them a platform where they're happy to rent them out. You've just increased the room supply that was limited to hotels by a large factor. And so that was really the ingenuity around PiP's design is it incentivized. These trading firms who are sitting on troves of data, never had a way to monetize it. Also, they're a little bitter about the fact that they're buying the market data back from the exchanges. And so were able to lean into some of that angst and say, you know what, look, we can't help you in the off chain world. That seems to be pretty well set. 

But in the on chain world, if we're building this world differently, what would you rather do from a first principles perspective, what if were to make this market data more equitable? And so that was the thing. And the first conversations, people would get it within ten minutes and the biggest trading firms would say, yeah, I'm in. 

Yeah, it's a no brainer for them. 

Exactly. 

It's like worst case, we still get no money from this, right? 

Worst case we still get nothing. 

Scenarios, they still get nothing. Best case, they make money. 

Exactly. 

Sorry to cut you off, but did you know that because of your financial background or did you figure that out once you started the platform? 

I knew that because of my financial background, yeah. Okay, interesting. Yeah. So I saw the emergence of this. The monetization of financial market data was almost a byproduct of the electronification of the markets. Because in the past you'd have traders that were clicking and market data was important, but it wasn't so important when the computers were clicking and doing all the trades. Then, number one, your business model changed because you no longer could sell terminals. People would actually literally sell how many terminals? You'd have to be able to log into something and you say, okay, I've got ten traders. Each terminal is going to be X $1,000 per year for them to trade. But now it's just like, well, there's only one terminal, it's my computer, and I've written all this software for it and it executes a million times a day. 

So the business model from the exchanges had to change. And so they ended up saying, well, you know what? We can price segment this market data such that if you want to be really competitive and really fast, and we know you're probably willing to pay a lot more versus somebody who wants just sort of the basic package. And that's really emerged over the course of the last 15 years. And it's gotten to now this. It's been steady around 20% for probably about ten years of the revenues of the exchanges. So it's mature. But for a period of time when I was at KCG, for instance, I remember NasdaQ was really mobilizing a force of lawyers calling up all the trading firms and saying, we know you're using our data, we're going to sue you if you don't pay us more money for it. 

And that's one of the ways with which the market data business became mature. It went through this kind of growing pains, adolescence, where there was just a lot of lawyers involved and a lot of people just almost like debt collectors, calling up constantly, trying to get trading firms to pay more. And it was successful. So I was aware of it then, and I was also aware of the gripes that traders had with it, because there was no avoiding it. You can't train a model without market data. It's so important. And so there was like the idea of, were you overpaying for it, or is that the value? And because the value was kind of consistent around 20%, you could almost argue that, okay, well, that probably is the fair value, probably undercharging for it before. 

And that was why I think I was most excited about this idea for pith is because if the value happens to be 20% of trading, and pith is going to be the way that all financial data gets on the blockchains, one way that you can carve out the market, the total addressable market for an oracle, is, well, maybe it's 20% of the revenues of the size of decentralized finance. And so that's where, when you start thinking about how big is this as an opportunity, is it going to be big enough for me to kind of maximize some sort of a large growth? That is how we came up with it. 

There's this line from the Michael Eisner book where he says, you could be the world's best producer of trombone oil, but there's only about two quarts of trombone oil in the world that's ever, you know, you need to go after an opportunity that is going to be big enough, and if you're early and really good, then you can potentially ride the wave. 

Yeah, interesting. But then I guess my head just goes to, a lot of your customers are probably just using then the data that they're pulling from all those different resources, and it's completely probably unsexy. But, like, dashboards are probably. A lot of people must be building dashboards with your data, even if it's just internally, do you know? 

Yeah, I mean, there's like a small cottage industry of people who are using pith prices off chain. So pith is one of the places where you'd be able to get live stock updates without having licensing concerns for free in real time. So you go to PIP network and people do, and they get our data, and that's fine. It's delayed about 400 milliseconds. Okay. And I say it's delayed because the most expensive data in the world is delayed, like sub microseconds. They're into the nanos, but that's like an interesting use case, but the way more interesting use case is the one I described before where it's being used on chain. And I'll describe why that's so important and why it's so valuable. Remember when I told you how a lending protocol will allow you to deposit a bunch of ether? 

It'll value that ether and let you take a loan out. So let's say that you've deposited about $1,000 worth of ether. You've taken a loan out of, let's say $800 worth of Salana. Now, both of those are going to be moving, right? Because they're live assets, they're not dollars. And you're going to be dollarizing everything as a protocol to determine whether or not your loan is still healthy. And so let's assume that the value of the Ethereum goes down from 1000 to 800, and the Salana doesn't move. You now have one to one, and then if it drops even lower, you're going to be under collateralized. And so what a protocol would do is they'd sell down your loan, set down your collateral to pay off your loan. 

The entire process of determining whether or not your collateral is within breach is fully dependent upon the oracle. So in this case would be PIP. And it needs that price to be very accurate. And there is potentially billions of dollars that will transact at the pith price. So right now, the total value secured by pith is over a billion dollars on chain, and that's these 200 different applications. So if pith were to screw up, then a lot of money would transact programmatically that shouldn't have. And so that's why it's so important for it to be so robust. So people are willing to pay a premium for that pricing to be accurate and also to be fast and have low latency characteristics. 

Interesting. Can you give us some other examples of how people are leveraging your technology. 

Right now? It's all within this kind of DeFi silo or vertical. So I would say the two major use cases would be kind of trading and lending. And then there's just various flavors of how people compete in kind of the features of those different applications. There are other things as well. People make prediction markets. They do structured products trading options, for instance. So it's something that tends to fit into this category, though, of kind of defi. 

Okay, well, I'm assuming then, and you would probably just leverage your data to build this, or you could correct me if I'm wrong, but the recommendation engines that you could potentially build with this are almost unlimited. Is that fair to say, or am I missing that? 

I don't know. I think you're directionally correct in going towards valuable data. But let me just paint a picture of what is available. Valuable data that can be brought on blockchains and kind of data that can't be brought on blockchains, because that's what pith specialized and focused on. So, broadly speaking, there are two types of valuable data. There's data that's designed to be publicly available at some point, and then there's data that's designed to be private forever. So the data that's designed to be private forever is usually the ones that are training AI models or creating recommendations for what know Kevin should see versus Mike, that sort of stuff. And that's what big tech companies know. Everyone knows about proprietary data sets and why they're useful and how you can monetize it. 

There is no application of making that data available on blockchains for one very simple reason. As soon as you update the state with a piece of data, every other person sees it. And that was the misconception that people had with Bitcoin initially, was it's a way for criminals to transact. And then that was debunked several years later when they realized that actually everything is fully traceable and public. All we need to know is what was your wallet address? And we can see everything you've ever done, because it's a fully mechanical system. So you have to limit yourself to data that's going to be available at some point publicly. And so I told you that financial market data is very valuable, six and a half billion dollars. However, all of that data is available publicly after about 15 minutes. 

So the value of the data exists between time of zero and decays as some function of time, to the point where it's free. So what PIF does is it incentivizes a network of people to make that data available as close to T zero as possiblE. And then it creates a monetization strategy for them to make money from it by effectively selling those price updates to other applications that are using them. That's why it is able to create this network that is kind of vertically integrated to its supply. And it's not dependent upon going out and buying the data, because a different strategy could be creating a network of nodes who don't have data themselves, but are just like watching the Internet. Like a website that is updating downstream. There's lots of these, right? Like there's Tradingview, Yahoo Finance, Coingecko, CoinMarketcap. 

In fact, that's actually what the first Oracle Networks did. They said, all right, well, all the world's data is on the Internet. We just need to go get people to publish it on chain in a trustworthy way. And so they would have like ten nodes all watching the coin gecko price, which is a website that aggregates the price of bitcoin from various exchanges. And they would all average them together and then publish it every hour. And it was very crude, but it was trustworthy, right? If you're solving for trust and you don't really think about speed as being an important thing, this is a very reasonable model to have. But that becomes limited because you're depending upon that data to be first made available on the Internet. 

And if you have to get equity data, you're going to be waiting 15 minutes, and 15 minutes for an application is going to be unusable data. Alternatively, you say, all right, well, maybe we'll go buy the data from Nasdaq. Nasdaq is going to say, we're going to charge you a fortune for it. And so then you're going to get into this kind of predicament where you're paying a lot of money in an assumption that you're going to be able to sell that on chain. The economics of it could become difficult. The reason why Pith is so elegant is because, number one, we've found a sort of found resource. So trading firms are kind of marking the value of their data at zero already. So as you mentioned before, it's all potentially upside. And so there's no high expectations on what that data is worth. 

And so as they sell it's all kind of now a new revenue source, and that new revenue source will incentivize other people to join. And then the network has this kind of nice two sided marketplace network effects where more people know about pith to get data from there it becomes more trustworthy, reliable, more publishers want to join the network because the fees are largest there. Similar to other types of marketplaces, like Spotify being a great marketplace for people to have to get music, and all the world's music sort of flows through there and Netflix for some period of time when they were the first streaming service. 

Yeah, interesting. Well, and then it almost markets itself then, right? Like your app's basically marketing itself as people are using it and seeing it. Is that fair to say? 

Yeah, again, because it's sort of a back end. It's a little bit complicated because we are incredibly popular with the two parts of the network that are within the ecosystem. So the publishers, everyone knows about pith. If you're a trading firm exchange, if you're building an application, you 100% know of pith. 

Okay. 

If you're the average person, you know about it as much as you knew about Nvidia before the stock was the thing that attracted you. So there are some sectors of people that have never heard of pith before, but they are using applications that are powered by Pith, and they just don't realize that yet. 

They don't know it. That's interesting. So I want to talk about if I'm a developer and want to start leveraging the SDK and the technology, how do I go about doing that? 

It's really easy, which is, it's really permissionless. So you'd go to the PIPS network website, you go to the documentation, and then you choose whichever ecosystem you're building in, and there'll be a variety of different languages that are available. So you can build on rust, say, for Solana, or the cosmos ecosystems, you can build an Ethereum or Ethereum virtual machine compatible blockchain. And that would be using solidity. There are some other ones that came out of Facebook, like namely Optos and SuI, and they use something called the Move programming language. So there's documentation, SDK for all of this stuff. And it's, again, as I mentioned, it's permissionless. So what's kind of funny about being in this position where we're kind of contributing to this network? We want to keep track of how many people are using Pith. 

As I mentioned, there's 220 protocols that use pith every day. But many times people will just integrate it and not tell us. And we only find out from another kind of tracking website or something. Or somebody asks a question, they tell us they've been using it for months, which is great. And I think that's cool because it creates a friction free area for people to build applications and not have to call a sales rep and reach out. The pricing is built in. So if you've integrated a pith and you don't need to call it very often, the pricing that your user would pay would be very low. If you're highly dependent upon it, your pricing would be based on your usage there. So these are the really nice and elegant things about blockchains that haven't been available before. 

No, that makes sense. So can people contribute back into the code base, or is it kind of. You mentioned open source, I think, earlier. 

Yeah, it's an open source project in the sense where you can go to the GitHub and you can kind of read all through the documentation. The actual process for which to do updates will be managed post the Pith mainnet launch and will be managed in a governance setting. Or it's. Yeah, right now it's kind of managed by the Pith Data association, which is a Swiss based nonprofit similar to Linux. They have like a nonprofit that kind of runs it. But there is another thing that blockchains have been very good at. It's, well, how do you determine which pull requests to implement? And there is a couple of different models, but all this kind of falls under the banner of governance. And so the first model was you have one token, you get one vote, and on the surface level you say, you know what? 

Oh, that sounds pretty fair. And then very quickly you start to think about it and you say, oh, you know what? Actually, this becomes a plutocracy. This is probably not fair. And there has been some weird ways with which this has evolved where some of the big venture capital funds have said, oh, you're right, this would be a plutocracy. We're actually going to donate all of our token voting power to these university student groups. And then it becomes kind of weird when it's like, well, that's interesting, they're not experts. So another model that I think has evolved that feels a lot better has been around creating. So basically you have a representative democracy and you can elect people that get into these councils, and the councils are responsible for maintaining things. 

So in the pith area, it could be like, have a council that manages which symbols get listed or which publishers get added to which symbols, and they'll have some sort of expertise around running the conformance testing to make sure that they're not adding people that shouldn't be added or could create unnecessary risks within the network. 

Yeah. Okay, well, that makes sense. That's interesting. I know so many people put crypto and blockchain together as one thing, and they're like, sure, they leverage each other, but they're completely separate from each other. But what are your thoughts and what are you seeing right now with kind of what's happening? Obviously, crypto is kind of down right now and a bit of doom and gloom, but has blockchain suffered that same kind of fate? Are people adopting it more or kind of, what's the state of blockchain and its technology these days, in your opinion? 

Yeah, I think that blockchain is a technology that's here to stay called Amara's law where people overestimate the effects of technology in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. And you have that hype cycle. So what tends to happen in these hype cycle downtimes is that there's a lot of boring building that gets done, usually with things like infrastructure, like what pith is doing. And because you don't have these overnight consumer successes, people are like, yeah, it's all dead, but that's not the case. So Pith has been cross chain for about ten months. Only before this, it was only available on a single chain. And this year there have been three applications per week that have integrated Pith. There have been three new publishers per month. That's since the conception of the project about three years ago. 

So there's like tremendous amount of growth that's been happening. And the thing that's the most amazing is as you get these infrastructure unlocks and faster blockchains is another one. There used to only have really kind of. Solana was sort of the initial fast blockchain, but now every ecosystem has its own version of faster blockchains. Like Ethereum has these layer two scaling ones, and another one is bridging. As I mentioned, pith kind of uses these bridges. About two years ago, it would be impossible for pith to have its own application chain, and then it would just be too expensive to be spending all the gas on all these updates. So we'd only be able to have like ten symbols and they'd be updating every hour. So these types of changes are so dramatic for people to build. 

It's not dissimilar to the advancement of an iPhone or having a GPS on the iPhone that enabled so many applications that felt like overnight successes, but really were so many years of infrastructure building in the making. And so I'm very encouraged by blockchains, and I think that we're setting ourselves up to have some huge overnight successes next year, particularly in the DeFi arena. I think that on chain trading will become a much more meaningful share of the overall trading, and I think that the technology will find other kinds of use cases that we haven't thought of once that infrastructure has been built. 

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense, but we're kind of coming to the end of the show. So how about we close with where people can get more information about yourself, the chain and any other links you want to mention? 

Sure. So I'm on Twitter MDom Cahill, and you can find more about the Pits network at Pits Network, Doralabs, XYZ and we are active in all the places where crypto community exists. So Telegram and Discord, but you can find links to those on the Twitter page or on the website. 

Perfect. Mike well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day, man. 

Thanks so much, Kevin. I enjoyed being here. 

Thank you. Okay, bye. 

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