Lukas Seel: 0:02

Welcome everybody. This is Helios Horizons, episode 12, Accelerating Growth on MVX, with special guest Beniamin Mincu. Anyways, today's guest is a tech entrepreneur turned tech pioneer. After getting tired enough of everything that couldn't be done in Web3, he decided to just do it, and along with a team that, infamously, can build rockets, built Elrond and then Multivers X. So very pleased to welcome Beniamin Mincu . Hi, Beniamin.

Beniamin Mincu: 0:43

Hello, hello. It's a great pleasure to be here and have this conversation, so very much looking forward to the podcast and the way the ecosystem is expanding, not only from our view, but from the community view, xAlliance view. So thanks for having me, Lukas.

Lukas Seel: 1:08

Yeah, looking forward to speaking about that in a bit, but let's start with a little bit of personal life. Let's start with you and let's start with everything you did, or how you even first got involved with Web3, blockchain and all of this stuff, because you are one of these people the rare breeds that has really seen not just one or two bear markets, but basically seen everything that's been happening in the space. So let's talk a little bit about how you first heard about crypto, what drew you to the space and what has kept you around the space and what has kept you around.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:48

Yeah, so I was, interestingly enough, thinking the last few days a bit about this part and a bit also about how little I've actually discussed about the early days, because a lot of my life has been, let's say, super high pressure with all the things that are happening at every moment. But if I'm to zoom out and think a bit about the early days, it's surprising how difficult it was to actually have any type of conversation around the space, bitcoin and so forth. This was not even a discussion. So initially in 2012, I think, I stumbled into Bitcoin as a technology, was extremely intrigued about it because it almost seemed like a joke or a scam, could not say was it? Was it a kind of brilliant invention? Was it a bit of a joke that then dies out? Or was it something that looks fuzzy and then it's not clear if it's a, if it's a great greatest invention or some kind of scam?

Beniamin Mincu: 3:02

So this is the way I initially stumbled into the technology, then started digging for months into understanding some of the parts. It was extremely difficult to get information to navigate, to even buy, like one, bitcoin and all of that. So for a few years I essentially was just reading forums, trying to connect with some people, trying to discern what's happening, and then, once I got the idea rather rather quick, that this was sort of a very high impact, high potential technology, I tried to make the most, let's say, interesting mistakes possible that could accelerate me understanding what's happening beyond what I could read right. Engaging with the technology, trying to find some projects that I could put some effort in, trying to connect with some people, trying to meet some people in real life that had to do with this technology. It was very, very difficult and I remember, for instance, one conversation that I was having in 2014.

Lukas Seel: 4:31

I lost you for a second.

Beniamin Mincu: 4:33

Can you still hear me?

Lukas Seel: 4:36

Yeah, yeah, you were back for just a second, so yeah.

Beniamin Mincu: 4:43

Maybe the the, maybe the hard it is for the other people to understand if, let's say, even closer people to to me could not understand and I could not discuss this with anyone. So fast forward a bit. It was first a kind of intellectual and experimental pursuit that you could only tell your friends or people in real life about. Once you move to the next step, the next step, either having a kind of interesting engagement with projects or we're doing something more valuable as a kind of work. So from stumbling initially to then understanding the first ideas around what Bitcoin could do, to then engaging with some other projects that were building something similar but with improvements, to then trying to Lucian to to stop what he was doing and then jump on this bandwagon with me so that we can explore this space a bit more intentional, and so forth. It was a few years, it was actually something like three, four years and I cannot underscore how difficult that time was compared to what we're having right now.

Beniamin Mincu: 6:23

Maybe I'll just pause here and say once I got into the phase where I was investing in all the interesting projects and architecture architectures, I was already at a very different level from an understanding and learning perspective. Right, because at every point in time, I was trying to think what's the fastest way for me to learn this, even though I might make mistakes, even though it might be painful, and so forth. The most important part is how do I accelerate the learning process? Because that's what I should do next, the learning process, because that's what I should do next. So I'll stop, maybe, here.

Beniamin Mincu: 7:15

This was the sort of first chapter. I could tell you many, many different stories of how I lost money, how I got scammed, how I learned a lot of painful lessons that were critical afterwards, but in hindsight you can connect the dots. While things are happening, they're usually very difficult to connect, and so forth. Still, I'm extremely happy that that time passed and that I reached a point where the space was picking up, and that I reached a point where the space was picking up. We were doing something very, very interesting in the space, investing in other projects, and so forth and then coming closer to the moment where we initially started.

Lukas Seel: 8:01

Elrond, yeah, so interesting.

Lukas Seel: 8:14

Is there a key moment you could point to, sort of as the like I get it? This is the moment where it kind of

Beniamin Mincu: 8:21

So there were several moments like that but I think in 2014, maybe even 2015, I wrote an old blog post about Bitcoin, about the trajectory, about how I thought the space was going to turn up. This was before I started working on NEM and so forth, so at that point, things were already clear from a long-term perspective. Then, with NEM, of course, everything was experimental again. Everything was interaction with people I never met and did never meet in the real life. It was all on forums, just based on reputation you had on the forum and all of that.

Beniamin Mincu: 9:04

And I remember, even with NEM, that I had some very key insights where I said it's clear that if this and these problems are solved, then in theory, this should be very, very valuable and very interesting and it should pick up. And then, in a similar way, when we started investing, of course, the first investments are always very problematic because you have to learn many different aspects that do not have to do with technical aspects, but rather what people do, what incentives or people are, especially on sites, bitcoin talk and and all of that. So discerning what, what looks like a good theoretical model, from what is also something, something that people can build in practice was a very hard thing to do on bitcoin Talk, so I lost a lot of money like that, but again, I had some insights that were extremely valuable, such that in 2016, 2017, I came to a point where I could immediately discern what project was really innovative, what project also had the team to build stuff and take it out there, what project could also attract investors and move to the real world, and how fast this windows into participation, investment, and all of that would close once the ICO craze started.

Beniamin Mincu: 10:57

So, yeah, very different lessons, milestone of achievement, where we were investors in more than I think 100 platforms, made a good bunch of money, learned a lot of lessons, and I remember thinking that last year passed as if it were 10 years and it was so crazy and so fast and so, changing that I thought maybe this is a good moment to actually write a book about what I learned, because it's so crazy that if I, if I would state out loud what I've been through like, people would either not believe it or it would be like the most interesting movie in the world. That's the point where, then, we started discussing about Elrond and so forth and I skipped the book part because there was another chapter that was vastly more interesting than that.

Lukas Seel: 12:21

Yeah, very interesting. Are you considering writing that book still sometime in the future?

Beniamin Mincu: 12:27

I'm very much considering writing it. It might be, though, a different. It might be just a chapter out of a larger book. The amount of lessons, the experiences and compression of, let's say, stress, challenges, pain that I've been through during that period was something not seen or incomparable to everything else I've been throughout my life. I would even, right now, I would say it just signaled the transition from, let's say, even if you work somewhere, you're learning some lessons, but everything almost happens in slow motion Once you start doing these things in the blockchain or crypto space. Blockchain or crypto space, it's a very, very steep curve with a crazy transition process that you might not survive. If you survive it. There's, of course, a lot of opportunities, but the challenges are extreme.

Lukas Seel: 13:43

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I want to get to this point now where you saw all of this space. You had some experience investing in the space and found some great projects, made some mistakes, which I think is very important. Maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later in terms of this acceleration process and how you can really learn things deeply and from a different perspective by just diving in, allowing yourself to experiment, allowing yourself to make mistakes. But let's go to the part where you were like in this space, you saw what was lacking. You convinced your brother already to join this crazy space with you, and then take us to founding your own blockchain and what you were really looking to fix and how you did it.

Beniamin Mincu: 14:28

So, indeed, the entire point was that throughout this conversation, we had a very focused approach of one learning, understanding technologies, seeing how they would integrate and map into the real world and, if you have this in the back of your mind at every point in time, you're asking is this the final piece that's missing? And in 2017, we ended up investing in all the interesting architectures and blockchains that were being started during that period, discussing with the founders and so forth, and I was specifically reading everything on, both what was happening on the street, sort of with all the startups that were starting out, but also the academic literature, the different architectures, mechanisms and so forth, and it sort of came to me that there would be a much better, simpler solution to everything that's being tried. And it was not a kind of easy thing, because you first start by almost thinking about would this work, do these pieces fit together, and so forth. But from a first principles perspective, it was very simple, in that you really need a dial-up to broadband transition for the space to actually have a widespread adoption. And with every new iteration of blockchain that I saw, that I invested in, it was clear that people were not trying to bring kind of significant improvement. They were trying to bring the almost easiest path of least resistant architecture that would bring a 2x, a 5x and 10x improvement compared to what was being built. But they are not trying to take the, let's say, more crazy or ambitious path that would be a lot more difficult to build and so forth.

Beniamin Mincu: 16:59

So during that point I I had the insight and at first I wanted to have these conversations with some of the architectures. For instance, we were actually an investor in Zilliqa. That was one of the most ambitious sharding architecture during that period of that period. It was one of the first ones that had a version of sharding in in production but it was not going ambitious enough.

Beniamin Mincu: 17:37

And I had these conversations with Xin Xu and with some of the other team members to see what they were thinking about this, why they were not seeing the very obvious idea of a much better architecture. And after several discussions it was clear to me that, while they were really cool and nice people and we've had some great conversations they were not trying to even though they were seeing some directions, they were not trying to push things. It was almost them trying to take the safest path rather than the ambitious path that would really push the boundaries. This is how first Elrond came to be as an idea and then how it became clear that, compared to some of the alternatives, it would be a game changer. I'll again maybe pause here and let you maybe, if you have some questions around this, or then I can also double click on some ideas around this.

Lukas Seel: 18:51

Yeah, I think it's so interesting, this idea of really reinventing the architecture where it needs reinvention and then also taking over some ideas that are obviously working. But, as you were saying, there's so many people probably that you met early on and there's all these pictures of you, of course, that are circulating, with these tech giants that became these giant chains, etc. But you were trying to do something else, and I also think it's interesting how you probably perceived your peers, these other tech pioneers that were trying to build something that they thought was good enough or valuable enough.

Beniamin Mincu: 19:29

Maybe talk about that, like the people you encountered on the way, and how that helped shape your path and also the path of what would become Elrond and then MultiversX so I've, of course, I met a lot of people and, we had a lot of conversations and we were at many conferences, we were just discussing today, even with Lucian, that we were at like the key dev cons, present there, having some conversations with the builders, and so forth, and this idea was slowly being hatched in a way where it then became very, very obvious, and the conversations with all these great people just made the idea shine even more precisely because they were not random people that you had on the streets like. Each of them had, very deep technical backgrounds, very understanding generally around the different problems and challenges and so forth of what it would take to build an architecture. But I'm not even today, I'm not even sure what the obstacle was in their mind. I'm not even sure that they, as we discuss things, that they maybe did not believe that this could be done or they did not see the full implications of the ideas. But, in any case, the conversations with other bright people are always very productive, fruitful, even though they might not be, let's say, on the same page or they might not believe in something initially, because, just to underscore, it's very easy for me in some sense to discuss about this architecture today just because of how much we've actually delivered with architecture, how difficult it was, how it was perceived and considered for many, many years, and then how large the improvement and the milestone was.

Beniamin Mincu: 21:56

But that's only in hindsight and I still believe people have not understood yet how large of an improvement this was and that other projects with billion dollar pockets could not solve some of the technical problems that we've actually. So that was the, let's say, initial stage, after which we essentially started a very different type of conversation with the people that I always try to remind both inside the team and outside remind. Both inside the team and outside, we've made the choice to bring in very different type of people than maybe other teams and so forth, and this is why we were able to deliver, to make progress throughout the different crazy challenges that we encountered, because it was not a straight line. It was a very difficult process throughout Initially and then afterwards, and going through the market cycles while building this. It was much more challenging in some sense than how things are today. In some sense than how things are today and, yeah, I'm very, very happy if I think about the very early moments and how it all came together.

Lukas Seel: 23:36

Yeah, it's interesting like imagining something and then actually delivering it and having it out in the world, and this is what Elrond then became to be for you guys. But then you guys didn't stop. There was something, of course, like you wanted to further develop the space, and you probably again ended up seeing like, okay, well, this architecture exists now, we can build on this now, but what else can we build and where else do we want to take it? And so let's talk about this process of turning Elrond into Multivers X and really how this vision from solving the blockchain trilemma once that's delivered, where else do you go from there? So let's talk about that process and how you ended up on the idea of this Multiverse to the power of X, the Multivers X idea, and, yeah, how you, how you conceptualize that and how it's going as well indeed so.

Beniamin Mincu: 24:30

If I were to summarize, the initial idea, it was this idea that you would have, in any environment, you look, you had parallelization and at scale, there is no environment, whether in nature, computation or any other system, that scales without parallelization. This was the idea of sharding. And then the second part was can we do the consensus part in a much smarter way than just doing proof of work that might be energy intensive, that might have all these different issues in the long term? So then, adaptive state sharding was the solution. Not only would you have a parallel sharding network that can scale the number of shards and grow as demand grows, but then, in addition to that, you would also have this secure proof of stake consensus algorithm. With this, the improvement would be three orders of magnitude, so roughly 1000x, compared to what Bitcoin or Ethereum would do. Now, to claim this is an extraordinary achievement or milestone if it can be delivered on the, let's say, theoretical model, the research part, and concluding in a kind of hypothesis, after about one month of starting the conversations with the initial team, that we had a breakthrough, that it was indeed achievable and that we could actually do this, that we could actually do this. Then afterwards, of course, we built this prototype to validate things in practice. From prototype we built the testnet. From testnet we were gearing up to the mainnet, and it was all with very different types of challenges at every step of the way. There were things which you do not usually encounter, because at the first stage, for instance, what you're doing is a type of research with really fast pace and deadlines and a fast fitness function, such that you cannot only discuss theory but really apply theory. But you need to synthesize things, you need to discover the insights and integrate them. At the second stage, you're essentially transforming this type of theory into practice, but again in record time. A lot of things fail, a lot of things do not work. You need to iterate, improve. We've had many, many challenges during that period. And then prototype you usually throw away. You stumble on some dead ends. You hopefully improve, improve things, but then at some point things become so painful that you say, interesting, so we've, we've unlocked some things, we've learned a lot of lessons. But I think now is a good moment to actually start from scratch, in a completely different language, and see if we can bring another 10x or 100x improvement from what we've learned in the prototype phase. This is how we started the testnet.

Beniamin Mincu: 28:13

First the initial prototype was in Java, then the testnet and so forth were in Go. At that point, no one from the team had written, let's say, any line of code in Go. That was new. But they were again resourceful and sufficiently driven to very quickly pick up the thread and then also build a new type of architecture. Not only pick up the language, but build a new type of architecture in that language.

Beniamin Mincu: 28:51

Then, on top of that, taking the test net into production was a very different type of hell, because the level of security, the level of safety critical focus that you need to apply to not have bugs, to not have hacks, to have a network that can not only scale in terms of performance but also be secure and survive the different attacks that will inevitably happen, that was a very different type of challenge.

Beniamin Mincu: 29:27

So, if I zoom out, the idea of building this was undoubtedly the most challenging but also rewarding experience from anything I've done and the team had done up until that point, and having seeing that live was a really, really great, great moment and milestone. Now, from that standpoint, building the ecosystem, growing the community, learning and iterating on the different aspects that needed to happen in addition to the network, like a kind of mobile application that was Maya, a kind of other set of applications from the ecosystem that builders would come in and build and so forth. That was again a very different type of thing that you need to learn on the fly as things move forward. I'll maybe again pause here a bit to just see if there's something there that you want to focus on, or I should just transition from Elrond to Multivers X part.

Lukas Seel: 30:53

I actually love this part, and I'm already seeing we should probably sit down and have these chapters really in-depth discussed, because it feels like we're only like able to touch very little of the surface here. But maybe one thing that I that I want to um double click on there is this idea of, like, okay, you're building a test net and then you're pushing something to main net and all of a sudden, even though you've you've solved a lot of problems, with this new type of blockchain, this next generation blockchain, blockchain, you have new ones, right, all of a sudden, there's people building on top of it, there's people investing in the coin, there's all of these, let's say, social dynamics that before were very much contained in a small team that was building something, but all of a sudden it's out there in the world and people are interacting with it in very meaningful ways, right, how was that kind of transition? How much of a shock was that moment?

Beniamin Mincu: 31:52

I mean, it's precisely what I said when I said that it was shocking at, let's say, in several different ways At first, everything you thought you knew. So I started from the standpoint where I thought about writing the book, because I thought, like what I've experienced during the last one, two years was like something that most people will never see in their entire life. So I might as well just take this in process, the information and so forth. The complexity and set of problems and challenges that we've encountered were so difficult and overwhelming that at first almost everything was breaking in my mental model. There was no possible way of actually taking this in and then saying, hmm, this is straightforward, all simple, easy, we just need to do this.

Beniamin Mincu: 33:02

Imagine that you're in this country, that most people do not understand what you're doing, that they do not even believe that this can be done.

Beniamin Mincu: 33:11

Imagine that it's a bit worse, because most other people from other countries also do not believe this can be done and they do not believe that especially, you are going to do it and you have to go through this process of funding, this iterating with the team, making sure that you patch the different challenges, solve the different challenges and actually solve faster than new challenges appear and actually solve faster than new challenges appear.

Beniamin Mincu: 33:42

And at some points we had many different things with difficulties or challenges with people fighting or whatever challenges with the community, maybe learning to speak different languages of what people really need, want to hear, need to understand, and so forth. Challenges around how perception is managed, like most of the projects at that point were starting from the standpoint of it was considered almost a scam by default. You needed to fight with these influencers and almost prove a point, especially from this part of the world, and I don't think that there was a moment where things were easy during those years. In fact, I was very, very close to, let's say, losing it all, just in the sense of breaking, getting broken by the challenges, by the problems that were coming and hitting us and so forth. And it's again only in hindsight that you also look at the different moments and have a very different perspective on them, but during that period it was very, very difficult.

Lukas Seel: 35:23

Yeah, super interesting. And then you decided somehow it was time to put yourself through all of this again by, you know, changing the branding, by doing it all again and becoming Multivers X, you know, like, take us through that process and what led to that, while I tried to figure out the sound problems over there.

Beniamin Mincu: 35:44

Yeah. So one thing that we encountered essentially during the situation was just this idea of, I think maybe, if you can briefly mute the mic, can you hear me? So maybe a simple way to just go through this would be to exactly mute the mic during the pauses. I think it almost feels like someone is moving the furniture within the room. Maybe they're doing a great job, yeah. But so to come back to the point, the thing was that as we were building all this, of course there was a conflict with, at some point, while we were registering the trademarks, we discovered that we received some notifications from the Tolkien estate. We had some conversation with them for, I think, about two years, and then the conversation did not end in a very happy place, to say the least. And so we had this new challenge to actually find a new idea, a new concept, a new name that could capture the essence of what we were building. That this was a kind of layer one the most advanced in the world, through which you could essentially build a kind of engine for growth.

Beniamin Mincu: 38:04

At that point, we were stating that Elrond was the fundamental infrastructure for a high-bandwidth, low-latency financial system, and then we were also trying to give anyone anywhere easy access to this financial system. A nd then through, when we were thinking MultiversX. The idea was that I think most people right now, even even right now, still think about MultiversX as this brand tied to the metaverse, whereas the idea of the multiverse is this idea that comes from quantum physics, this idea that there are several universes unfolding at the same time and there is a kind of what is called in quantum physics, a superposition, where you're present in all these different worlds and then, just by making a decision, you're actuating a decision tree, like you're making the future happen by making this specific type of decision.

Beniamin Mincu: 39:19

In any case, the brand, the idea, was the essence of not only the fact that there are several different worlds and there will be several different products built on this, but that this will lead to accelerated growth. But that this will lead to accelerated growth and this was encompassed in the idea of growth to the power of X, because if you want to express growth, you express it in powers, and the power of X was this definition of growth, in sort of mathematical terms. It was a very tricky challenge again. It always in hindsight, I think, could have been managed very differently, but we've pushed as hard as we could to race to find a great idea around which we should compress and outline the essence of what we're trying to do.

Lukas Seel: 40:31

Yeah, I think such an interesting and so many good insights and, like honest insights and I think so, so interesting to hear that from the you know from the source as well. Well, let's talk about, like, how things have evolved since right, and also how things are going now and what the sort of new innovations that have been pushed, because just today, MultiversX obviously released this new dynamic roadmap that really makes things quite transparent and really kind of shows how much is being done and what ends and to what end as well. And so, um, you know, going from this MultiversX rebranding, one thing I think it enabled was, of course, this product suite like that could really be branded as like xP ortal, xF abric and all of these innovations. So let's talk about some of the products, um, and also um get to one of the or a couple of the newer things, like sovereign chains. How did you know, Elrond, once evolved into MultiversX, really kind of start accelerating, or where is this process now going and how is it going from your perspective?

Beniamin Mincu: 41:43

Yeah. So if I were to sum up where we are right now, MultiversX should be seen as the most advanced blockchain architecture in the world. That is, live right now, not in the future. It's not about scaling things in 10 years and solving this and that and hopefully everything coming together, but right now, today, there's an enormous opportunity that's not priced in into what Multivers X has under the hood and has built. I'll probably follow up during the next few days with one idea and one challenge. One insight that I think I've heard mentioned in several ways in my conversations with different people from the community is how large our contributions and how large the deliverables have been, that we've shipped throughout the years and that are live, and that this alone almost creates an elephant of an architecture that just is significantly better than perhaps anything that's out there. So this is extremely important to underscore and extremely important to better communicate, better express and then even stop after that and try to process what this really means because if it's really true, then this alone is a very, very significant step forward. Now, in addition to that, I think maybe what has been causing a kind of slight confusion and we will continuously try to improve this type of part is that if you define things in a way where MultiversX as this massive layer one is, then almost comparable to all the different applications that exist within the ecosystem, or all the different applications that we might build in addition to the layer one, that creates a confusion. So we've now come to a point where it's much clearer to us what is the core part of Multivers X and what is sort of extremely cool, extremely interesting, extremely necessary, but secondary, Secondary, in the sense that it should never be confused with this large elephant that is already live, that is already very high performance and that's working. And this, I think, is just much more intentionality, much more focus on what Multivers X is. And then all these products even though we have built some of them and some of them have been built from the community as long as we're very clear that this should never be sort of confused or compared with the key core architecture or network that sort of sustains the entire ecosystem, then the entire thought process can lead to something very healthy Growth and explorations and productive new iterations of products and so forth.

Beniamin Mincu: 45:21

So, having said this, of course, we've taken to build some very interesting, important and necessary products that we had to build. Ideally. We would not have built them Ideally. There would have been someone that would have taken the torch and would have said no, we are raising funds, we have these ideas, we want to take this technology and use it in products, to see this adoption happen in the world.

Beniamin Mincu: 45:55

Because this has not happened and because we were always sort of looking at the next step and the next step and the next step, we had to take initiative and build some of this product just to have one flywheel, because before you have a flywheel, some things do not fly, some things do not add together, some things are still missing and people will be complaining and all of that.

Beniamin Mincu: 46:23

So this is how we started initially with Maiar that now is xPortal and that has in itself, added a great amount of progress, even during the last period, than some of the other products, whether it's exchange, whether it's some other products in the ecosystem that we've built. But I will intentionally reinforce this idea that things should be very distinctly positioned and intentionally defined such that in any conversation we're having as the foundation, for instance, we should never confuse building the applications with building the layer one, seeing what, everything that we've delivered and we should communicate around the layer one should almost take all the energy and then all the other points should almost have parallel tracks, where parallel trajectories, with a lot of excitement, of course, with a lot of growth in them. But, outlining this distinction, I think, creates a very, very different type of clarity around which you can build things in a different way.

Lukas Seel: 47:46

Yeah, and I think that's so important and I think it's interesting how this is. Really. You can feel the deliberate attempt of doing this, and we spoke about this innovation. We spoke about the acceleration also through new products, this innovation. Let's talk about this adoption, this drive that MultiversX is on this year in particular, with with very clearly defined goals in terms of outreach, in terms of growth, in terms of starting this flywheel and really getting it going. And perhaps it's worth starting with a very interesting factor that we touched on before. It's like, once this product was out there, which was Elrond, you had this community right and this is such a defining factor of Web3. And now this can also be a factor in really driving the next chapter of growth, and let's talk about that a little bit, and then perhaps your thoughts on how to leverage that, but then also perhaps your thoughts on this new little tool in your toolbox, which is xAlliance.

Beniamin Mincu: 48:51

100% So I think we have one of the most robust foundations with this network that is live to really build on. We've made a lot of mistakes, we've learned a lot of lessons, we've iterated a lot and we're now at the point where a lot of the pieces have fallen into place, even with the current roadmap update. We're just making things sharper, clearer, more interesting, such that the community can engage, builders can build, tools can be used and there's a flywheel to really set this in motion. So brain chains are precisely the type of tool that give a new engine, a new growth engine to the entire ecosystem, where it's not only about us, but rather it is about connecting the chain or the technology with the outer world ecosystems, whether it's with other chains, whether it's with other applications or other businesses. That's the entire point of this technology. This technology we will know, has died if we stop bringing it out, if we stop going out to all the, let say, conversations with other people, with other ecosystems and so forth, then we'll know this is not put to great use and we'll not make progress as long as we're pushing on the outside to bring other people in, to bring new builders, to experiment and iterate and embrace the fact that things will forever be imperfect. They will never be finished. There will always be new things to build and new things to improve. That's the kind of insight that then gives us a different strength to iterate. And this also brings us to the step that we've taken, especially with xAlliance.

Beniamin Mincu: 51:00

And maybe here you want to add some ideas and some points. But one crucial idea is that you can build the best technology in the world. If the social layer, if the community layer, is not the best, is not cultivated, is not, let's say, growing, then it will not be the best situation, to say the least. It will be a very challenging situation. So I'm very happy that we're having this discussion not before but rather after. This is already set in motion and there's much more initiative and a lot of resourceful people that are pushing and adding new lenses and progress and contribution. So maybe you want to add something, especially on the xAlliance part, and I can, of course, also add some complementary comments.

Lukas Seel: 52:02

Yeah, I think it's very interesting, right, you see this as such a dynamic business and such a dynamic industry, and one of the main differences, I think, that you can see between the traditional industries or tech industries is that those are often quite insular and they develop in a very different way, of course, because they do their architecture, they create a product and then they release a product, but there isn't so much back and forth, right, and so there's so much to be gained from this close interaction with the community, with the builders in the community, and, of course, by finding and developing this talent that then really can push the chain to the next level.

Lukas Seel: 52:47

You were talking about all of these projects or products that the core team has built and, right, the ideal. In an ideal world, this would have been taken on by builders that were just like we need this product, we're going to build it. Instead, sometimes it's, of course, necessary to have closely align interests and connect them and start this iteration and feedback process that really accelerates everything that's been happening, and so I'm super curious. You know like it's been, I think, a month and a week, right, we've released some things with xAlliance and some things are really starting to take off there. I would say how does that feel from the core team perspective? What's the feedback, and is there any tangible difference you could point to?

Beniamin Mincu: 53:54

So I think there are some good signs that I think will trickle down and spill over into many different effects. One is better communication. Just explosions, outbursts, inconsistencies and so forth are lack of communications between different clusters, different people, different layers of the community, the builders and so forth. So having this kind of pipelines for better communication is extremely simple, stated, but extremely important and crucial for everything that's being built. In fact, entropy, I would say, almost kills you because of these simple things.

Beniamin Mincu: 54:56

The faster you scale with a kind of problem that you might have. That is not the problem at all with 10 people, with 100 people, with, let's say, 500 people. When it scales to thousands of people, tens of thousands of people and so forth, at that point you're almost immediately dead because of very small things like this, because of very small things like this. But communication is one thing and I've seen some very cool things happen precisely because of this change in communication Just better synchronization between the different people in the community. Much more interesting approaches, initiatives and so forth pop up, interesting discussions. I would still say that it's hard. Some things are hard to measure in practice, also because of this, let's say, market sentiment and where things are at this point, but I think this is the kind of structure that enables um a thousand flowers to bloom, and it's precisely this that we want to cultivate, nurture and sharpen even more

Lukas Seel: 56:14

yeah, I will.

Lukas Seel: 56:16

thank you so much. I think this is such an interesting insight, right? Also always curious to see the feedback and how things are changing inside the team and because of it, and all the processes that can really be improved, would say we have perhaps time for one person to come up here and ask a question of Beniamin. While you can request, I'll shift a little bit into the future, and you talked about sovereign chains and perhaps some ways of using that. What are some of the new products really that you want to or narratives also, that you want to push this year in particular, and how are you going to go about it? Perhaps with xAlliance's support?

Beniamin Mincu: 57:01

100%. So I think the the one thing that we need to do 1000 x better, more first and foremost, is just clarify how large, how big the contribution is that Multivers X has today, so not in the future, not in a few months, not in a few years, but just stopping and outlining how large these contributions are on so many different relevant aspects. This might be the most important exercise, whatever we're doing afterwards, because I think this is the largest value that has not been, let's say, communicated fully, communicated properly, that has not reached the right audiences yet and there's an enormous opportunity from people understanding this, taking it in and starting to open their eyes to what's already present. This I think we've done really well at some point with Elrond. This is why Elrond has exploded, because in some sense, being able to build a lot of things, being really good at building, can be both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because, of course, you're resourceful, you're just pushing through, you're building all these different things. But it's also a curse because you can start building 23 things and, before you know it, you're chewing on much more than you would have to and it takes some time until you realize that not all of the things you're building are equal. They should never be equal, and maybe one effort outweighs everything else in terms of impact, if done well, and then the other efforts need to be done in a kind of separate structural team, separated and then aligned differently and then communicated differently, and and yeah. So if I were to summarize things, I would almost say that for the next period, we just need to state clearly how large this innovation is and how far advanced it is compared to everything we have around us. This is, like, still surprising and astounding to state, but a 1000x improvement compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum. That's crazy. It's either crazy in the sense that it's not true or, if it's true, then it's extraordinary in the sense of what impact it can bring, it will have, and it's up to us to communicate that, first and foremost, properly.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:00:02

Now, will this be used and expanded to sovereign chains to be connected to other chains as a kind of interoperability layer, a massive network of networks that grants this benefits of technological performance to some of the other ecosystems? Will it be used to just make it a kind of acceleration layer? Will it be used to enable app chains that are super advanced, flexible, customizable and so forth. Will it be used to enable specialized enterprise, let's say, solutions and chains that are abstracted, and then solve some very particular solutions? Will it be used for AI or for something else? I think that's all going to happen, and again, even with sovereign chains.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:00:58

The fact that they're here, that people are building on them, is extremely exciting.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:01:05

There is a lot to be improved, there is a lot still to be built, but the fact that we have so much of this live, built, delivered, is the one thing that I will want, even for the next one or two months, to almost repeat 100 times a day.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:01:39

We're in sync, we understand what we have, we are starting to communicate it a lot simpler for the different audiences, and then it starts to click. Once this starts to click, it will be incredible how people start to play with the technology, build on the technology, use it for different layers, and I think this is also where xAlliance comes in, because many different things we can only unlock with new perspectives, with new people taking this, sharing their perspective, sharing what they see can be improved, sharing maybe a different way of stating things and adding new people into this, finding the most resourceful people that really push on contributions, that really believe in making this a reality. I think is just the best way to accelerate new insights coming in, new perspectives coming in and us creating this space where we also have the mental space to hear them out, to integrate them, to think through them and find our way in the strongest way possible.

Lukas Seel: 1:02:51

Yeah, such an insightful conversation Also such a great insight there. I think, in the end, and I think we've covered a lot of ground in all of this. It appears that nobody dares ask you a question here, but so I'll leave you with this. Like I said, we covered a lot of ground, but let's cover a little bit more. Where, as somebody who's been around in this space amazingly for more than 10 years now, right, where do you see us now in terms of the technology and where do you see this going in three, five, 10 years? What's sort of the outlook that you have in terms of where we're now and where we're going?

Beniamin Mincu: 1:03:29

I mean, I was just reading a lot these days to see what people perceive, let's say internally, almost in the ecosystem, in our ecosystem, what people perceive in the broader blockchain slash crypto ecosystem, and then how people look at the macro landscape. And there's, of course, a few perspectives that you could overlay, but I would say, from a technology standpoint, once you zoom out, there is a very clear and strong consensus, wherever we go, that Multivers X technology is remarkable. Like there's so much respect and so much good feedback, so many good ideas and great conversations that we're having wherever we are going, because people are amazed that this already exists and they somehow did not hear about it before. At the same time, what we discover is that it's not a problem of technology. This, right now, is a challenge of finding the right kind of communication to take this outside, to go outside with it in the different towns, in the different countries, in the different spaces where the technology is really needed. Either bring more builders and then bring more people within the blockchain space natively, but then also find ways to bring this technology completely outside of the blockchain space, in the traditional economy and ecosystem and so forth. So, in the grand scheme of things, it seems people are juggling about the idea that this might just be a kind of positive explosion and burst of energy. Things will go in a very, very positive direction.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:05:47

The bottom line, I believe, is this On a macro landscape, there is a very interesting opportunity, especially in the US, for things to become very positively bullish. Now I do not generally sit too much on politics, but what Trump is doing right now the way he rides the crypto and blockchain wave, the way he taps into the crypto community, the way he wants to overturn this wave that was full of negativity and so forth toward the entrepreneurs and so forth that are building this technology, and wants to make it hugely positive and impactful in the US might be triggering a very, very significant bull trend. Now we've seen a lot of positive adoption with the ETFs. We've seen improvements that are significant on every part of the infrastructure, every part of the application layers and every part of the, let's say, adoption space verticals that you could have, and yet it still feels like there is so much room to grow. And this is early. Sometimes this is a meme and I know that this meme is circulating a lot, with me saying that we're still day one and we're still so early, and there's a meme with me at 65 stating this.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:07:34

But I really do feel that, despite how much progress has been made, this type of cycle of technological adoption is much harder to navigate from a psychological standpoint than from a pragmatical standpoint, because if you would be a robot and would objectively just look at the facts, you'd say, hmm, there's actually not a big discussion here. We see a significant progress compared to last year, an even larger progress compared to two years back, an even larger progress compared to three years and so forth. So the only question is maybe what's the type of angle that might work best this year? Is there some kind of strategic opportunity to explore other countries? Is there some kind of strategic opportunity to bring in new community?

Beniamin Mincu: 1:08:29

Is there some kind of different play around, let's say something like meme coins, as some other ecosystems have been doing it? Is there some barbell strategy where you have this fun and playful strategies and explorations, but then also some much more advanced use cases that are being tried? I think all of this should happen and we're actually trying to push through this part. Despite the challenges, despite's say, positive cycle happens, and this is why it's even more important to push and make the pieces fit and make them much more focused and intentional, such that once things are in place and people start to look around at what has been built and what MultiverseX is, they should be almost shocked to how much value they discover and how this compares to some of the other ecosystems.

Lukas Seel: 1:09:51

Yeah, great note to end on. Thank you so much for taking the time, thank you so much for bearing with us through the construction here and the building in the background and, yeah, thank you. I think it's very exciting everything that's happening and I think, piece by piece, it's all really getting there and it's been very impressive to watch it and I'm very much looking forward to the next few weeks, months and the end of the year and really kind of come back to all of this and pick up this conversation in a few months, because everything might already look very, very different. Thank you so much, Beniamin.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:10:29

Thank you, Lukas, and looking forward to seeing some of the great things that builders build, that the community comes up with, and people just taking initiative and finding solutions and pushing through. There is no simple path or easy path, and even if there were, I'm not sure that's too much worth worth. So just finding a good way that, even though it takes a price from you it takes challenges and even pain sometimes that's the one thing that, after it passes, you look back to and say that's a worthwhile thing to pursue and push towards. So thank you and very much looking forward to what the community will come up with xAlliance and other builders in the community that have proven to be very resourceful and that we're looking forward to what they will be building and all of that.

Lukas Seel: 1:11:39

Thank you so much and thank you everybody for tuning in. This was Beniamin Mincu and Helios Horizons, episode 12. We'll see you next week with another great builder who's actually also building in this ecosystem. I'm looking forward to that conversation. Thank you again, Beniamin. Thank you.

Beniamin Mincu: 1:12:00

Bye-bye, thank you, thank you.