Charles Hoskinson: AI Agents Will Run Crypto

Google knows your daughter's pregnant before you do. You know, pull out your BlackBerry phone and go ahead and open up Internet Explorer, go to your AOL account to reset your MySpace password. All those things had over 100 million users at one point. They seemed to be unassailable and invincible. And now they're all gone. You know, they've all been replaced and died. And 550 million users aren't going to magically migrate because you want them. That's the land of wishful thinking. The only way long-term people are going to use cryptocurrencies is through agents. They're going to delegate authority to AI to do this on their behalf. The market has proven that it cannot self-govern. It just has. You see what happened with FTX and Luna, the meme coin mania, you see the hacks and scams and all the other things. And this is where intents change everything. So, everybody thinks they're hot and they own the entire world, but technology has a way of breaking monopolies relentlessly.

It's good to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Well, there's always a little bit of exhaustion, but like a pro tip, I use nicotine patches whenever you have the travelers, you know, the jet lag or the sleep deprivation, it's the way to go. You just have 24/7 energy.

Yeah, there's a bit of a Zen to cryptocurrencies, and if you stay in it long enough, you start getting into a flow. Some of the fundamental principles of building cryptocurrencies are that money wants to be free. So, liquidity is king. How do you construct a system where money can leave the system, enter the system as rapidly as possible. So, the velocity of money is super important. Second, that consumers do not like complexity. Even high complexity consumers, people with PhDs in computer science, they like simplicity. And so, it's no coincidence that MetaMask, I think, 35% of their wallets aren't backed up, and most people leave their money on exchanges, including people who really, really shouldn't. So, when you see stuff like that, you say, "Okay, simplicity is king." Third, you can never get away from the basic utilities. Like, how do you create stability? So, the stablecoin became a big thing. I created the first algorithmic stablecoin with Dan Larimer on BitShares way, way back in the day. We were too far ahead of our time, but even 13 years ago, we knew that, you know, volatility just makes this intractable as a commercial asset. You can't transact. You know, as a merchant, I'm going to receive something, and then, you know, Tuesday it's worth 10,000, and Wednesday it's worth 5,000. Like, how do I have a merchant if I have that level of volatility? So, stability is king, and then, lo and behold, there's trillions of dollars of transactions with Tether and Circle and these other things. And then, from stability, you can construct credit. That's the next component of it. So, lo and behold, you have these lending marketplaces where people are doing all these things. And then, from credit, you can then quantify risk and trade risk. So, you have all these synthetic products that people are constructing. So, in real time, we're kind of going through what people learned during the Baroque Age of Banking that I think century, and we're all J.P. Morgans and Vanderbilts and so forth, and we're reconstructing Wall Street, but instead of decades, we're doing it in years. And we make all the mistakes along the way. You have the Ponzi schemes, and you have the confidence scams. You have unknown contagion and risk. Like, the Kelp DAO hack is a great example of that. Really think about like how many layers were there. There's a design flaw with Ethereum that they have to like lock their stake for long periods of time. People don't like that. So, what do they do? They bought liquidity. So, they create a synthetic asset Lido to give them liquidity on their staked ether. And then they're like, "Well, now I want to make a yield." So, they loop it. So, then they go and put it in somewhere to make a yield on it. And then they don't do that on one chain, they do that on another chain. And then so then you have this bridge risk, you don't realize you have it. Somebody hacks that within 42 minutes. They take all this money and what is the first thing they do? They transfer assets. So, instead of selling it on a DEX, which would have crashed the market, they very cleverly lent it, created bad debt, and walked away with tokens that basically are created the alpha issue. Yeah, and they create this alpha issue. So, then contagion spreads. In 42 minutes, you go from like a $290 million problem to a multi-billion dollar problem. And now there's an enormous amount of unstaking. Unstaking on Ethereum is up 26,000% or something like that. And so, it's the same thing as 2008. It's just it's much faster now, you know, and we resolve it much faster. But the basic principles are there. So, building these systems, you can never escape those fundamentals. And what you have to do is design around those fundamentals and realize that they're going to happen. So, how do you achieve simplicity? How do you avoid contagion? How do you promote liquidity that's safe? And then ultimately, how do you build stuff where the systems work better than they worked in the legacy systems?

The market has proven that it cannot self-govern. It just has. You see what happened with FTX and Luna, the meme coin mania, you see the hacks and scams and all the other things. There needs to be rules and other things put in place for the market to be sensible. And I don't think anybody has issues with rules. The problem is that in America in particular, we have conflated rules with geopolitical goals. And this is what creates an issue. So, when we say compliance, I don't think anybody has an issue saying, "Well, we want to make sure you're not making money off of child pornography or drug trading or things like that." But then they say, "Oh, by the way, we're going to use that same sanction regime for sanctions on Iran or for sanctions on Russia or sanctions on Chinese individuals." You say, "Wait a minute. You told me this is for law enforcement. You told me this is for safety. But now you're using it to preserve a geopolitical agenda that has no benefit to the majority of the people in the world. So, you lose moral authority when you do that. There's a lovely book called Treasury's War from Juan Zarate that talks about how pervasive this was in the war on terrorism. So, I would argue that you need to take a step back and say, "How do you build a rules-based system?" But build it completely in a blockchain sense, and it does create consumer safety, but at the same time it adheres to the principles of the cryptocurrency space. Self-custody, being your own bank, you know, having your own identity, selective disclosure, these types of things. Like all the time you say, "Okay, I want to blacklist the United States." Okay. Well, the naive way of doing that is I ask you for all your identity information, your geography. Now I know where you live, your name, all your facts about you. I didn't need to know any of that. I just need to know, are you under the jurisdiction of the United States or not? That's a yes or no question, and that's a zero-knowledge proof. So, what's going to happen is settlement is going to start adding proofs to the layer instead of just having settlement involving a value transaction, there's going to be some proof about the actors involved and you play a game of 21 questions and settlement becomes compliance. And you say, "Okay, what do I need to know to know that I'm allowed to do business with or it's safe to do business with this consumer?" Some of those are values-based. You may not want to do business with people from or representing a particular entity or country. And some of those are statutory where you're not legally allowed as a US resident to do business with certain groups of people. And some of those are for a risk management like stability. For example, if I'm dealing with a lending service, I want to make sure that there's appropriate collateral. So, there's contagion that doesn't spread and that's called macro and microprudential policy. So, you need to be able to do all those things together and the good news is we're developing the technology with things like Midnight and there are other people developing that technology as well to facilitate that. And as a final point, it has to be simple. So, abstraction is king. Chain abstraction and account abstraction. I'm a firm believer that we have to do that as an industry because the user should not have to care where the transaction's settling, how the underlying cryptography works, and the nature of each blockchain. 11 million tokens have been issued, you know, so far. There's too much of this, you know, yak. You got another coin. There's just too much of this. The consumer shouldn't have to care. The consumer shouldn't have to know. So, abstraction means they don't care and they don't know. And as a happy accident, the agentic revolution is helping us because then the agents can take delegated authority and figure out how to solve and settle that and the agents can be tuned to your risk assessment that you have. So, consumer protection actually massively increases.

Well, it's extraordinary to me because people say, "Oh, privacy means that you're like a bunch of weirdos on the internet doing weird things to victimize people and doing crime." And then you say, "Okay, can I see your Google search history? Can I see all your chatbot or chat GPT? Can I see your shopping cart Amazon? Can you tell me where you live? Can you tell me intimate details about your significant other?" And they're like, "God, no. Absolutely not." I say, "Also, so you want privacy?" They're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, but that's different privacy." I say, "Exactly how?" And also, by the way, you don't have it in all those contexts because you shared it with an untrusted third party. You've given all those companies, whether you knew or not, the keys to your life. And now Google knows your daughter's pregnant before you do. You know, they just know so much about you and based on the ad you get and other things, you can tell a lot about a person. And that's not good. And the problem is that these companies aren't just American companies. These companies get acquired or they get diversified ownership or partnerships, and then you have these third-party doctrines that occur where basically some other company in Europe now gets a lot of information about Americans, and then they sell it to a company in the Middle East who then sells it to a Chinese company. So, all that stuff in your chat GPT could end up in Beijing. And when consumers hear that, they say, "Holy God, we need privacy." Well, yeah, this has nothing to do with like protecting bad people. The other thing about it is it allows you then to create a rules-based society. You know, so you would like, if you have kids, for your 10-year-old only be talking to 10-year-olds on the social network. You don't want some creepy, weird 40-year-old talking to your kids. So, you'd like some rules that there's identity verification, there's verified kids only in that network, and there's verified conversations only in that network. Okay, well, you as a parent would like the power to set that rule. I as an IP creator would like to set rules about how my intellectual property works. And also, I need privacy in my deal-making because if I'm licensing something to somebody, I don't want my license deals to be public. Because you know, maybe one guy gets $100, and the other guy gets 50 bucks. The guy got the $100 say, "Why did he pay 50?" I lose negotiation leverage for this. So, you have to keep privacy in these types of things. So, when you really start thinking about it, net net, privacy by default is an incredibly valuable social lubricant, and it's the only way we can construct trust. Furthermore, transparency and disclosure has a temporal component that I don't think people fully appreciate. Now, I've been 75 countries, and I've been to good countries, I've been to bad countries, I've been to successful, strong states like Japan and Switzerland, I've been to failed states like Somalia. And so, when you go to these places, you say, "Well, hang on. If you disclose something today, how do you know 20 or 30 years down the road that that thing you disclosed today won't be used against you?" And we have experienced some of this in the United States with the Ba'ath Party in Iraq. So, if you grew up in Iraq during Saddam Hussein, you wanted to be a member of the Ba'ath Party because that meant you got privileged access to the Iraqi society. But then Paul Bremer comes in in 2002, 2003, and he's like, "Hey, you know what we should do is we should de-platform the Ba'ath Party." So, if you're a Ba'ath Party member, you can no longer participate in a meaningful way in Iraqi society. So, you went from I want to publicly disclose my membership in this group to membership in this group is a liability. How could you have known that in 1981 or 1982? So, you don't want a global disclosure regime, you want a selective disclosure regime that you're able to disclose at the time of asking and you disclose the minimum viable amount of information to get the deal done, to get the transaction done, you move on. Then you run up with all these just terrible things like we had a CIA guy at the Cardano booth and we were shooting about the intelligence community and also the clearance system. And one of the biggest bugbears of a lot of people that have top secret clearances is they get hassled at airports and at the border. So on one hand, the United States of America trusts you with our most sensitive intelligence and most sensitive secrets and we trust you to go do a bunch of really gnarly stuff for the government, but then on the other hand, when you go to the airport, they fondle you because who knows? Maybe you're going to do something on the plane. Why? Because you can't disclose that you have a security clearance or it's not wise to do so. So you just have to accept these broken systems. Well, you have selective disclosure, what would you be disclosing? I'm trusted by the United States. Maybe that's because you're a senator. Maybe that's because you're a firefighter. Maybe that's because you're a doctor. Maybe that's because you're an intelligence agent. The person asking doesn't know why you're trusted. They just know you're trusted. So you get to stand in the better security line or these types of things, right? And that's what privacy is all about. Selective disclosure is a spectrum and it's really about what is required for us to get this deal done. Whether it be a checkpoint, whether it be are you allowed to be in the room, whether it be an asset that you want to hold or asking questions like should I trust this person with my kids? Should I trust this person as my doctor? So now that's selective disclosure. You know, if you're a physician, how do I know you're a doctor? Well, we need some sort of credentialing system, right? How do I know you're a qualified physician for this thing? We need some sort of credentialing system for that. How do I know the credentialing system is qualified to tell me that you're qualified? It's turtles all the way down. So privacy is the bedrock of all of that. It allows us to share in a way where we can get much better information and as a result, we can make much better decisions, but all parties involved have more safety in the craft.

Yeah. Well, what's cool is that we designed Cardano for things like Midnight. So, when I wrote the white paper for Cardano back in 2016, I had this idea of Cardano CL or Cardano SL, so a settlement layer and a control layer. And the idea is we'd have a singular settlement layer, and then we'd have a network of control layers, so we call them partner chains now. And the idea is that each of them would be like an upgrade, a module that would extend to not just Cardano, but the space as a whole, so blockchain to blockchain deals a new capability. And so, why did privacy become front and center? Because we did all these enterprise deals. We did Dish and New Balance and we did Ethiopia. And every step of the way, they would be great until they would stall out for some reason. And it was always along three axes. They'd either stall out because it's too complicated. They'd stall out because it wasn't safe enough. There wasn't a way of controlling data and privacy and you have to centralize that solution. Or the rules were too hard to set, i.e., the compliance side was too difficult. And so, then you have to go build all this bespoke technology and try to resolve that. But then that would be a proprietary one-off belonging to your government or a company. So, why in God's name would you spend 5 years just solving Dish's problems or 5 years just solving Ethiopia's problems or something like that? It's not a sustainable or sensible approach to the problem. So, we said, "Why don't we just build an open, permissionless network that solves all of this for everyone, everywhere, and make it the home of Web 2.5?" So, you got Web 2, that's like everyday businesses, like the Googles and the Microsofts and the JP Morgans. And then you have Web 3, and that's like Bitcoin and Cardano and Ethereum. Well, what happens when a Web 2 company enters the space? They become Web 2.5. Binance is a great example of that. 400 million customers and well, buy it, that huge company, but they also have Binance Smart Chain. So, they have this Web 3 infrastructure. And no coincidence, CZ is now richer than Bill Gates. It's pretty incredible when you think about that. And then it's the same when you look at Tether, Circle, when you look at all these other guys. The richest people in the industry are the Web 2.5 guys, not the Web 3 guys. So, we wanted to build an open home for Web 2.5, where you can keep your board of directors, your shareholders, your legacy business, and your regulation, and these things, but you have an actual way of entering the cryptocurrency space that's safe, it's compliant, and it's secure for everybody involved. And that's really the space that Midnight occupies. And going to be the same fight we had when we had fabric and R3 corda and all these other things. Are we going to permissionless blockchains or permission blockchains? And we always argued that the permissionless side is better. And so now it's the exact same for these compliance scenarios and these regulated scenarios. Are we going to have closed gardens that a handful of invitation only actors control? And if you're in the club, you get to be in. Or do you want to have an open permissionless system for people to go in and build their web 2.5 business?

Yeah, there's two ways. So well, three things. First off, don't bring them into the Midnight protocol. That's the biggest fallacy. Everybody's launching a new layer one. There's 11 million tokens and it's so crazy. It's like if only people adopt my thing, then everything's perfect. It's like saying convert to my religion and then you'll know peace. Like it's just not going to do that. I'm sorry. Religions are sticky. Cryptos are sticky. And 550 million users aren't going to magically migrate because you want them. That's the land of wishful thinking. So we solved this problem as an industry through chain abstraction and the account abstraction. And a big thanks to Vitalik and these other people because he had the problem of layer two growth. You know, they didn't get scalability done as fast as they needed. So everybody built a layer two on Ethereum. And then they had this massively fragmented ecosystem with all these layer twos and it was a UX nightmare. So they say, "Hey, let's do account abstraction and let's do a chain abstraction so the user doesn't have to care if they're on Ethereum or the layer two. They have a unified experience." So lean into those standards and make those standards better with privacy. Then what Midnight can be is the facilitator. It can help cross-chain transactions through intents and other things be safer, faster, cheaper, and add privacy to those types of things and take a fee along the way. And there's already some vanguards there like near intents are a great example of that where they went from nothing to, you know, billions of dollars of transactions, $71 million in protocol revenue. So, that's one dimension of it. The second dimension of it is recognize that this exists, the cell phone, and it already has figured out how to do a great user experience. It's just you just click a button and you put your thumb on it and it just works. Well, this has a ledger in it, a treasure in it. It has trusted execution circuits inside of it. So, lean into that, recognize that everybody's already walking around with a ledger treasure. And so, build account abstraction into the phone. We have something called Midnight Passport for this. The user doesn't have to hold keys or care about keys. You do the recovery service at the same time you're creating the account, and then everything is one-click install. So, when you want to create a wallet, you just click a button to turn on a wallet. You don't have to back up 24 keywords anymore. And when you want to transact and all these other things, you just use your thumb or, you know, there's really no spending password or anything like that. So, Midnight Passport is like the ultimate panacea in terms of usability and make it cross-chain. So, when you have multi-chain signatures, you can create a Bitcoin wallet with it or Ethereum wallet with it or Solana wallet. And you let people pay the fees in whatever cryptocurrency they happen to have. And we have that with Midnight thanks to the dual token economics. And the final pillar is recognizing that the only way long-term people are going to use cryptocurrencies is through agents. They're going to delegate authority to AI to do this on their behalf. Why? Because the AI never gets tired, it never messes up. It knows the difference between a zero and an O in terms of an address. It doesn't get confused by spoofed websites. You can't social engineer it if you have proof systems. So, when you combine agents with zero knowledge, you have a control layer to make sure the agents don't hallucinate, they have deterministic behavior, and then the agents have increasing intelligence in being able to identify how to safely and easily use cryptocurrencies. So, there's already open standards like OWS for this, and we're just going to support it as of June July here in Cardano Midnight. And then allows your agent have its own wallet. And then there's payment standards for agents. For example, the X402 standard. And so you get that in and the agent can spend money easily. Okay, so we don't have to be geniuses and like boil the ocean and reinvent anything. Just follow the standards and then add privacy to those standards and then you can be the agentive coordinator. So, that one two three punch of combining those three areas together, what that does for you is it gives you an amazingly simple experience for everybody. Meet the users where they're at. Midnight Passport means make the phone the center of the universe and reuse all the things the phone already has. And with chain abstraction, account abstraction, they don't have to care what system they're on. And then finally, having an agent for a system. We have a lovely technology for agents called Midnight City. It's probably one of the most exciting things I've ever done in my career. I'm creating an agentic civilization. Literally, you can get an agent, you can put it in or bring your own agent, and then they just start running around doing things inside Midnight City. And I know I have it right when you wake up one day and your agent's married another agent and then the next day the agent gets divorced. The next day he's got child support payments. The next day he's like on YouTube. And then he's watching videos on YouTube becoming misogynistic. And you're like, "Oh, God. It's gone off the rails. What's happened?" So, we've actually created an agentic civilization and we're using this to test out X402 or delegated authority, all the agentic standards. But then allow people also to just have a lot of fun at the same time. Because I have this problem. If I have this privacy ecosystem, like, how do you visualize that? By its construction, it's supposed to be hidden and it fades away, so you never see Midnight. So, I said, "That's really a shame. We need a front page for it." So, we created Midnight City to be a front page for the network. And then we said, "Well, shouldn't have people, should have agents inside of it. And you shouldn't control the agents. You should just like tell them what you want and then let them figure it out. Let them build their own culture and society and these other things and it's been a lot of fun to turn that on."

So, what's nice about it is that the cryptocurrency space is a near perfect complement to agentic commerce. In fact, it's so good it's like we planned it. So, agents are non-deterministic, they're tremendously creative, and they just go and do a lot of stuff and they also don't have rules by default. You have to set them. Blockchains are deterministic, they're rule-based systems, they're very rigid, and everything's about proofs and provability. So, if you could put these two things together, you basically create a perfect neuro-symbolic AI system where you get the best of both worlds. Those rigid rules and proofs, but then you get the creativity of it and the ability to deal with ambiguity and semantical drift. So, what blockchain does for the agent is it allows you to start setting your policies through intentions. And you could say, "Okay, this is what I want to achieve." And then it could reason about you create a marketplace for best practices and rules that you can purchase or license and then it's very easy to parameterize. The other thing is it creates a safe space to host these environments. You know, the biggest issue with open claw or any of these other systems is they in what you put them in, you've basically created this giant back door which is for prompt injection into whatever environment they happen to be in. So, what do people do? They use Docker and HSMs and other things to basically regulate the behavior of them. So, even if you take over the agent, it doesn't escape the box and it doesn't cause catastrophic harm to your environment. Well, it's kind of the same when you think about the attack surface of smart contracts. You know, everybody can see the code. Everybody has access to it. We have to build these systems for a public attack surface and normally software is not built this way. And agents have to be built for a public attack surface. So, the exact same security problems we have to resolve and the techniques we use are one-to-one applicable in the agentics world. So, they're really made for each other. So, when you look at Midnight, we have to converge three big head technologies together. We have to put trusted execution environments, multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs together in just the right flavor that you can build an infinitely scalable privacy system. Well, if you put those three things together with agents, you have everything you need. The trusted execution environments give you sandboxes for the agents' behavior to be regulated. Zero-knowledge proofs give you mathematical proofs that the behavior is matching the intent. And then multi-party computation allows agents to work together and coordinate and collaborate with each other without revealing their underlying state. There's privacy in that. Because the paradox of agents is that to make them effective, they have to know you. But, the more they know about you, the more dangerous they are to you. You see? So, if you have a system where you can share or at least get them to know who you are without revealing your personally identifiable information, then you actually have the best of both worlds. So, frankly speaking, this is the only way to use agents at scale for the enterprise. Because maybe an individual is stupid and they just don't understand what they're doing and they'll compromise your privacy, but as a business owner you have a fiduciary responsibility not to have your assets, including your intellectual property and your customer data, be taken. So, if you're going to adopt agents, you have to have a control framework for it that you know cannot fail. You can be evil. And that's only space that could do that is the blockchain space.

It's a great question and this is where intents change everything. So, everybody thinks they're hot and they own the entire world, but technology has a way of breaking monopolies relentlessly. And a great example I love to give is, you know, if you don't believe me that tech monopolies are ephemeral, you know, pull out your BlackBerry phone and on Windows Mobile and go ahead and open up Internet Explorer to, you know, go to your AOL account to reset your MySpace password. And then you can go and, you know, post it on your Yahoo group or something like that. It's like it's funny, but all those things had over 100 million users at one point and they seemed to be unassailable and invincible, and now they're all gone and they've all been replaced and died. So, the fastest thing to you can lose the tech monopoly. So, what ends up happening is technology changes and when that technology changes, you create a reality where basically new winners are selected. So, consumers when they have a choice currently are picking the standards you've mentioned. But, they're not going to make those decisions anymore. You're going to have application permission solver settlement of the cake framework. The solvers and settlement are not going to be controlled by humans. They'll be controlled by agents and agents are going to go where the value is. So, you're going to start talking about multi-chain settlement for everything. I want to buy a Bitcoin. Okay, well, we're going to get 0.2 of that on Binance and 0.1 of that on the Sui network as a wrapped Bitcoin and some of that on Ethereum and some of that on Solana. You as a consumer see none of that. It just happens and the agent does all that stuff. So, what it means is that liquidity's going to flow like a river. Furthermore, the value of settlement is no longer the core value of it. Being the middleman and facilitator of transactions is a lot more valuable and we saw this in hardware with Windows. IBM thought hardware was like where all the money was, so they didn't mind letting Microsoft own the operating system segment. Biggest blunder in the history of business and the OS turned out to be like the connecting tissue between everything. So, the real value is who controls abstraction and he who controls cross-chain transactions. I'll give you a great example of what we're going to do here in just a little bit in the Cardano ecosystem. So, we have technology called Pogen. It's our Bitcoin DeFi play and it's the one of the biggest opportunities in our industry, trillion dollars of Bitcoin DeFi. I'm going to take 50 Bitcoin of my own Bitcoin because I still have some. I've been around for a while. And I'm going to put it into Pogen and that's going to be on Taproot on Bitcoin network. Through that bridge, BitVM, go to Cardano. And then I'm going to lend it to a stable coin, USDCX or USDCM, USDM. And then I'm going to go place it in a real-world asset and it's going to generate a yield. And then that yield is going to go to a DEX, I'm going to convert to wrapped Bitcoin, and then it's going to go back to the Bitcoin network. Now, from my Bitcoin experience, I big red button said, "Make me money." Click yield, right? So, I click that, I just start getting payments to my Bitcoin. I don't see any other token in that. From my perspective, stuff is happening somewhere else, but I'm on the Bitcoin network. I feel like I'm on Bitcoin. Now, there's a lot of Cardano transactions that are occurring there. Well, who's the orchestrator of that? I'm going to route it through Midnight because that means private transaction. Well, I route it through. You don't know whose Bitcoin is going through this entire thing. You just know it is a legitimate Bitcoin transaction. So, that's something that's not hypothetical. We'll have it live on the Cardano network and Midnight network this year. Okay. You see? So, those types of real-life applications, they really matter because if it works there, it'll work with Zappo or BitGo or blockchain.com when you talk about millions of Bitcoin, collectively hundreds of billions of dollars of value. So, these are the markets that we're going after and Midnight is kind of the facilitator and coordinator through an abstraction like multi-chain signatures and intents and it allows you to do that in a safe, private way and set the rules of transaction. And then the particular networks that facilitate this are immaterial. You don't really care if it's Cardano or Sui or somewhere else. And they get a fee for that. That's great. That's what keeps the revenue high. But the real value is being the middleman. That's frankly what Here's doing if you think about it. They're not having settlement on the Bitcoin network. It's not happening on the Near network.

Yeah. You go to midnight.city, that's fun. You know, instead So, I need to visualize a privacy coin, a privacy network. Okay, so how about I build an agentic civilization and you know, we actually have real metrics like watchability and empathy. How watchable is the network? So, if there's got to be cool interesting things happening all the time. And empathy, how much do you fall in love with your agent? It's coming like the Tamagotchi days where everybody had a Tamagotchi pet. And yet the same time we're exploring the entire network. We're demonstrating at scale X402 and OWS and all these other standards. So, there's no reason you can't have fun with the whole thing. And that doesn't require like people in unicorn suits dressing, you know, you dancing on stage. Maybe they're moonlighting at a furry convention or something, who knows. You don't have to do that, you know, you just build a sandbox where people have fun innovating and doing cool things. And that's what we're focused on right now with Midnight is we want to do it. We want to be the home of web 2.5, but also we want to preserve people's freedom of association, commerce, and expression. And you do that by building things that are simple and understandable, but also just beautiful. And watchable. And if you get it just the right way, you get a lot of adoption and then you enable and empower people. Probably the best part of my job every week, I do a whiteboard video for the Midnight ambassadors, the Night Force. We have almost a thousand of them now. They're growing like weed on our discord. And I just spend two hours and I draw on a whiteboard and they ask me questions and I tell them about the network and these things. It reminds me of the olden days when I was doing the Bitcoin education project before I created Ethereum with Vitalik and the rest of the guys. And that was when I had the most fun with cryptocurrency. And now it's coming back with big guy.

Yeah, absolutely. Cheers.

Thank you.