Lukas Seel: 0:00

Welcome everybody. This is Hill of Reasons, episode 17. Today, we are talking about developers, developers and developers with Mihaly Skilpu, the engineering manager at MultiverseX. I'm very excited because we've had some great conversations, I think, how to push the space forward in terms of innovation, getting more people to build in Web3 and on Multiverse X in particular. So very excited to be joined by you today, mihai. How are you?

Mihai Schiopu: 0:32

Hey, good evening. Thank you for inviting me. I'm fine Actually. Yeah, we had quite some interesting discussions, and some of them are parts of our strategy. And some of them are parts of our strategy, but I'm curious to also see what impressed you most, at least from what we talked. And then it's very nice to have this occasion to start sharing some of the plans that we have, and I can assure you that very soon hopefully tomorrow you will start also seeing some results.

Mihai Schiopu: 1:11

We've been cooking it for quite some long, given the fact that we experienced a thing or two in the past year probably past two years and I'm talking now from the perspective of growing the developers community and also improving the engagement with them. But some of the things that we did did not play out very well. Some of them had some very good results, but, as we are always saying, we are learning, we are improving and we are building, and this is the thing that I tried to enforce last X day about. So you brought Steve Palmer. They had this issue with how can they I don't know bring Microsoft back then, or C Sharp I think it was in the attention of all developers, or of everybody and Microsoft in general. It was like they needed developers, developers, developers and so on. Somehow they managed to do it.

Mihai Schiopu: 2:28

So I think there are around 4 million developers in the world Great success. And now it's our turn with blockchains. But we need builders, not only developers. We need developers with this sense of building products, solving problems, finding all kinds of problems that need solutions, and blockchain is the right solution for them. Otherwise, it's just and I think this is a saying that Benny always uses is like give a hammer to a developer and he sees only nails everywhere. So give a blockchain to a developer and he finds only problems that a blockchain can solve.

Lukas Seel: 3:16

Yeah, thank you for that intro. You did that for me. I love that. A lot of things, I think, yeah, foreshadowed there that we're going to talk about, but before we get to let's say the substance, I want to get a little bit personal and ask you about your journey, because I know that you started in Web 2 and made the transition into Web 3 with Elrond back in the day and now Multiverse X. So tell us a little bit about your personal journey, how you started and how you got involved in the Web and now multiversex. So, um, tell us a little bit, you know, about your personal journey, how you started and how you got involved in the in the web3 space yeah, so, um, web3.

Mihai Schiopu: 3:55

It started way before anyone thought about it, web3. So it started during my first year of university. I believe it was winter of 2009 or 2010. I was staying at this student dorm in Timisoara with other 11 students yeah, it was that packed and one of those colleagues was quite an interesting persona, to say so, character. His name is Eddie, and probably, if some of you stayed at student dorms during universities, you know that nobody sleeps at night. So during one night, after hours of playing Unreal Tournament we were playing quite a lot he said hey, dude, did you hear about this thing, bitcoin? No, I said so, and then he followed well, you should. Someone just bought some pizza with it. Ha ha ha, and it was quite funny. That was all. Yeah, in general, he's a very funny guy. Uh, he um, actually, he's building something on ethereum right now, um, with some other colleague from exactly that dorm. It was quite some strange some geeks in the same dorm room.

Mihai Schiopu: 5:17

Yeah, anyway, time passed by and, um, I moved from that university to another one in a different city, uh, and I was learning and playing hardcore Texas Hold'em with one of my friends. By the way, lucas, you owe me some. This is true. So, yeah, and all that we won? We were buying Bitcoin From this scammy Russian website. I don't know if you heard about it BTC, yeah. So I don't know what really happened with BTC, but I think I bought a few bitcoins, but and this was during 2013, I think and, uh, it fell from 1k to 10 dollars and I lost my faith in it as soon as this happened and I was like, okay, scammy, scammy, uh, money, internet money.

Mihai Schiopu: 6:20

I was not into the technology that much back then. Then I started working and studying in parallel for all kinds of companies corporations, most of them, but somehow other, like innovative technologies, grew on me. And during the spring, I think, I've met with my high school colleague, andrei. He's actually the lead engineer on SDKs at Multiverse X, andrei Bonchoiu, and we were quite good friends during the high school and he told me that he was working for this Romanian company with the headquarters in Sibiu. Well, I was not in Sibiu back then. I was in Cluj, called Elrond. They were building blockchains, yeah, and, fun fact, he was saying that they want to buy Google and close it someday. So I trust him so much and I really appreciate he's a very cool guy and he knows a lot.

Mihai Schiopu: 7:24

But you know, know, as I told you, with my experience in crypto world, um, I did not trust blockchains in general. Um, I did not buy um egld then, even though it was probably before the mainnet launch I was too busy with my work at this company, um, where I was working with Robert Sasu by the way, we were colleagues before Elrond so we were in the autonomous mobility department for a very big company in the automotive field. He was building the high level applications for radar sensors and I was developing and leading also the prototype software for it. And we had this cafeteria and everyone was installing myR. So, completely everyone was installing myR one day and at least everyone had an AGLD in their pocket and I said, okay, that's interesting, I found the opportunity that this technology can really reach the masses, and I believe I wrote a message tore and I congratulated him for the launch and he said something like um, yeah, you know what we're actually looking for, new colleagues.

Mihai Schiopu: 8:55

What do you think about having a talk with lucien? Um, and, yeah, I had the talk. You know, lucci, he's a very nice guy, high energy, and he's quite an impressive person to talk to. Of course, I went through the entire interview process that we have with the technical challenge, and so, and yeah, here I am.

Lukas Seel: 9:21

Challenge, and so, and um, yeah, here I am and that's so interesting about the, the work at this uh nameless large uh company. Uh, this, this idea of, like these, um, I assume mostly engineers or developers that you were hanging out with all uh trying out this new, you know, digital wallet and that technology, what like, was that something where you is that, where it clicked as in, like, oh, this is a technology that is not just like this abstract scammy bitcoin anymore, but it's something I can download to my phone and like, perhaps interact with peer-to-peer is that? Was there some moment where you thought, oh, this actually makes sense as a technology to to transact value with, or what was that kind of process?

Mihai Schiopu: 10:08

No, no, no, this is too far away. Everybody was thinking about an easy way to buy crypto. It really did not matter so much. It was EGLD. It mattered that it was a project that locates in Sibiu. That's what most of the people thought about. And then came the let's say, learning activity and the learning path of what blockchains really are.

Mihai Schiopu: 10:40

And I think I've listened to a space half a year ago or some time ago, and it was uh longin, the founder of one dex, and he said something very interesting and this, this is very important to know for everyone um, multiv or elrond multiverse x is is for most of the Romanians what Bitcoin is for everybody. I mean, egld was the first crypto project or blockchain project that Romanians in general learned about and found out about blockchains. Learned about and found out about blockchains, and I think this is what struck me it was like having engineers interacting so easily with a new technology but not thinking about building on top of it, and I was like, okay, okay, this is a big opportunity. This is an opportunity that will probably sometime transform into an opportunity for all developers and probably, if we are looking at the trends of the universities, technical universities, especially in the last 20 years, we can see that the areas that grew the most were the ones involving engineering.

Mihai Schiopu: 12:12

Right, engineers understand technology. Technology is basically the catalyst for humankind evolution in the late 50 to 60 years, probably more, and it's this need. I mean usually engineers not all of them. Some of them are doing engineering just because of the payment and they are not willing to improve a lot, but some of them are really in the search of something more meaningful. It's this pyramid of Maslow, you know, and it's this very basic need that serves you. It's a technology on which you can build. That's something that most of the engineers should love.

Lukas Seel: 12:59

Yeah, and I think that that's something that I always find with the engineering team at Multiprocess. Nobody is there to you know as a job like it's really a very different climate and I like maybe that as a question. When you joined Elrond, then what did you find in terms of the team Like how was everything structured and how did you get started in the company started?

Mihai Schiopu: 13:24

in the company. Yeah, when I joined the team, it was not as big as it is right now. I think it was somewhere around 80 to 85 in total people. Afterwards came the acquisition of Utrust and Twistpay and all of a sudden the team grew a lot the structure so back then it was a big. Also product teams. So if, for example, for X exchange, a team that composed knowledge from back end, front end, smart contract development and also architecture was needed, that was a product team that was working on tasks for X exchange, but also those members were taking part in the bigger team that I told you about before.

Mihai Schiopu: 14:27

With the time, because this is not scalable and it's not efficient too much, we somehow separated into smaller teams. To say so, you sharded the teams. Yeah, we sharded the teams and now we have the protocol theme, which I think is the biggest one. Then we have the VM and WASP theme, smart contract development theme, the services or API theme, how we call it, but it's actually the backend theme, the frontend theme, which is quite big as well.

Mihai Schiopu: 15:06

Devops and then the product teams like Xportal.

Mihai Schiopu: 15:12

We have some Xfabric engineers, xmoney, and we have them separated on fiat and crypto teams and each Xmoney, fiat and x money crypto, which with its own teams smaller teams, of course um, but there is one team and, uh, keeping the entire discussion around this subject of developers.

Mihai Schiopu: 15:38

There is one team that we started building, uh, six months ago. It's called developer relations or dev rel team. Um, so the developer relations activity, until creating this team, was done by by core team in general, by BD team sometimes, and we thought that we have to do it better. So, in general, what we do, we scan also the market and we look at other ecosystems and we try to learn from their mistakes or to learn from their success stories as well, trying to see what fits us best or what does not fit us, how it compares to what strategies we have and so on, and we observed that we really needed a team dedicated for bridging. We really needed a team dedicated for bridging the communication between the multiverse X core team, or the team in general, and also the developers building on top of it and easing, making a very easy process on coming and learning about our tech stack.

Lukas Seel: 17:07

Yeah, and let's start there, because I think there's a number of funnels right and one is the one that you took, which is the sort of Web 2 to Web 3 developer route. Is that one of the areas of focus? And then, what has been successful so far? One of the areas of focus?

Mihai Schiopu: 17:26

and and then, like what has been successful so far, what are you looking at in terms of program to to you know, uh, bait these people into coming and exploring this technology yeah, so, um, probably we would need days to discuss about this, um, and we quite analyze a lot, so, but what I would say is that probably, if we are looking at electric capital numbers in the space, we are around 80,000, or probably, let's say, up to 100K blockchain developers in the world. Should we fight for those 100k developers when we could fight for the other millions who are already developing products, or the other millions that are pursuing a career in this direction of becoming developers or builders? And now I want you to to stay with me in this story. So imagine so you are a developer on another layer one. You invested some time learning their tech stack. You know the important actors in their developer communities, how we have our own. You develop some relations with them and also with the community. You started building some products on this L1. So it grew on you, right, you like it. You feel like you on this L1. So it grew on you, right, you like it. You feel like you did this perfect choice. It was your choice. It's an achievement for you. Now someone, a random guy on Twitter, comes and tells you dude, you're wrong. This other layer one is much better because it solves this and that and all the other things, and you know what and your choice is so bad. Naturally, you will hear only that you were wrong. All the other things that they or he, she is mentioning are only problems that you have to solve for the choice that you already did. It's like yeah, okay, we have this problem but we have a solution for it, and I know for sure, I trust this ecosystem that will solve it. I'm staying here, and this is the majority.

Mihai Schiopu: 19:42

Then there are other developers that are looking for financial incentives, grants, and moving from one chain to another, grabbing grants and building the same product again and again. It's actually their business. It's not hard to acquire them, trust me, it's quite easy. It's not hard to acquire them, trust me, it's quite easy. You just award the grant. They come and build, but value brought is close to zero because it may probably become a product which nobody uses. Then there are those builders, the entrepreneurs, that are looking for financial indicators. So they're looking at liquidity, daily active users, number of products, impressions on socials, distributions and so on. They're looking for big numbers. So they're looking for those numbers just to make sure that they get the right exposure for their products or for their ideas. They're a separate category, and the smallest amount of developers are those ones that truly believe in the technology and will just choose the right protocol, but those probably are the smallest amount of them.

Mihai Schiopu: 20:58

It's hard, it's very hard, to bring masses of Web3 developers. Then, as I was mentioning, we have those web 2 developers. Millions of them majority of them, as I was saying in the beginning are first doing it for the money. So they see a financial opportunity, um, and they are trying to grab it, um, but let's see for how long AI will allow it. But it's not AI. The subject right.

Mihai Schiopu: 21:29

And a smaller percentage of those developers I was mentioning are always in search for solutions. Solutions may be for real problems or invented problems, but the idea is that they are looking for solutions that sometimes only new technologies can solve. So blockchain is one of those new technologies, and blockchains usually provide the technology to fix lots of problems, usually, let's say, the ones implying censorship, lack of transparency, centralization, cross-border payments and so on. Those developers will join an ecosystem that has an onboarding process that is cheap, fast and easy and I think Justin Bon as well said something about this a few days ago and those are actually the core values that we have in our dev rel team. And when I'm saying cheap, I mean that it should cost you nothing to start learning us a web to develop, to start learning blockchains. Even more about this.

Mihai Schiopu: 22:39

We will start a series of in person teaching classes around the world. I believe in August it starts in Buenos Aires with Radar Labs. We are in talks for France, germany, spain, uk, turkey and Asia. So hosting in-person workshops where people can come learn from zero to depth in maximum six hours, having fun, grabbing some pizza, receiving some merch, building an identity and with the possibility to earn some bounties. That's crazy. It's quite easy. It's cheap for them and also for us. To be honest, we just have to find the right developer ambassadors who are able to teach them.

Mihai Schiopu: 23:23

And coming back to the Maslow Pyramid of Needs us as humans, we need this. We need to be part of a community, we need to learn, we need to feel that we are doing something significant with the potential to change the world. And yeah, we have several other initiatives here, but probably we'll touch on them later or on a different space. Now, going back yeah, is it too long? I have fast and easy to go through. It's done. Yeah, so for FAST, probably most of the developers have seen that we posted on the Builder's Hub this tutorial building a DAP in 30 minutes. But actually anyone with a computer can deploy and interact with a smart contract in under 10 minutes. That's the hello world, how we call it. Just check the MX Playground repository and you'll see it's everything is playing there. It's quite easy. Several other foundational tutorials are going to be published in I don't know maximum one to two weeks in the same Builder's Hub. So, no matter what you want to build, it's going to be there and it's going to be very, very easy to reach to and fast.

Mihai Schiopu: 24:54

Um, actually, tomorrow we are intending to bring an important update to the documentation. By the way, we and and as a disclosure, it's a new structure, a very easy one, which theoretically should help any user identify himself and know exactly what he wants to do in minimum amount of clicks. It's like going there seeing the first structure, identifying yourself, click on the I don't know you're a developer, click on developers and from there you know exactly where to go. I want to build something, or I want to learn something, or I just want to solve one of the problems that I went into and after this, after receiving some feedback from you, of course, we will add crazy amount of content. And, yes, the AI assistant that we've been working at will probably reach the production, besides the Discord server support that we already have and the Visual Studio Code Assistant that we did not launch till now. Yeah and easy.

Mihai Schiopu: 25:53

Now the third word here is easy. One would say that Rust is hard. I cannot argue that it is, but it's also beautiful. By the way, I have this idea of starting a community project or a community game for quite some time. I know I have said left and right that I am going to do it. I do not have time to dig more into it, but I will do it After this podcast. I will do it and I will not delay it even further, and it will be in Rust. I'm not a Rust developers. I not developing anything in Rust. Rust is nice.

Mihai Schiopu: 26:33

I actually had some experience with TypeScript, python, c, c++, but for someone who did only Py development, it is a no go in the beginning, or at least in the first days. That's why we had these discussions with Quentin a few months ago about another framework, a framework that should be so easy that everyone will start using it. We talked about TypeScript, we talked about Py and all the problems around them, and that's when he said, yeah, what about Swift? And we said, yeah, what about Swift? I mean Apple. They are genius on a few. Apple, in general, is a very smart company. They are genius on the aspect of how to teach people or how to reach masses, and Swift may be one of the programming languages with the most appealing tutorials. Swift may be one of the programming languages with the most appealing tutorials. So what I can say?

Mihai Schiopu: 27:32

It's going to be very, very easy to develop smart contracts on Multiverse X. Either you love Rust for its security and efficiency, or you know Swift because it was easy to learn it. Then it will be easy to deploy a sovereign chain. It will be easy to build something on the sovereign chain. It will be easy to build something on the sovereign chain. It will be easy to link it to the main chain. It's easy to host multiverse X nodes. It's easy to build anything on multiverse X and we believe that we have the right recipes.

Mihai Schiopu: 28:07

With X-Rise probably you have seen, we have 15 students, let's say 15, 16 students. We experimented a lot. We've got some very, very important information and results and we will take those and improve them 100 times and we will deploy it everywhere, everywhere around the world. So Web 2 developers have to be one. They are not part of any ecosystem yet. They just have an idea and they want an easy way to build it An easy, fast and cheap way to build it. The question is, can we offer that to them? And yeah, we are building that funnel.

Lukas Seel: 28:56

Great. I mean so many interesting things here. I think I want to touch one more time on the X-Rise and the student and university outreach that you're doing, because I think it's one of the most important pillars when bringing in new builders, and I had the absolute pleasure of meeting some of these interns and I think one of the conversations that really struck me was one of the interns was like you know, I was interested in kind of fintech coming, you know, studying in school, and then I like chanced across, like blockchain and that technology, and then I like chanced across, like blockchain and that technology, and there was no, you know, no hesitation of just diving into that technology without any reservations, because you know they haven, with the focus on different university programs and also, perhaps, how the XRISE program is going.

Mihai Schiopu: 30:00

Yeah, so, because I was saying at the beginning that we are targeting Web2 developers and also future developers in general. We cannot put them in a category yet Web 2.0 or Web 3.0, just because we have discussions with quite a big number of universities to be honest, I think more than 20, about developing internal blockchain courses where us and also professors or students from those universities can also teach and the plan. So we started internally in Romania and then we thanks to Robert, because he's well connected in Hungary we also targeted Milton Friedman University in Hungary and also Elte, with which we already closed some partnerships, and we already planned initiatives for the starting of the next university year. We already planned initiatives for the starting of the next university year. In general, we teach students about the technology, so it's not teaching Multiverse X to students. It's about teaching blockchains. This is something very important for everybody to know, because blockchains are thought already in most of the universities technical universities but during laboratories, the examples that professors usually use are on Ethereum or something connected to Ethereum. What we want to change around that is to have blockchain still as a course in the university, but the laboratories to be on Multiverse X. Why? Because it implies more computer science subjects that may be of interest for them and because we will offer this funnel of getting an idea from idea to a product.

Mihai Schiopu: 32:24

So, besides teaching them, we are also going to host small hackathons, in-person hackathons with most of those universities. We do not expect huge projects to come out of this. That's why we will not allocate a huge amount of funding on that. It's just incentives that will bring motivation for them, for students to participate in and probably to earn some funds to come. I don't know if we are going to host a big hackathon somewhere away from them so that they can join, and the strategy around hackathons in general, we adapted it.

Mihai Schiopu: 33:13

So we are targeting to host two hackathons during 12 months two big hackathons, online hackathons, and several dozens and yes, you heard me well dozens of smaller hackathons, most of them in partnerships with universities, and those small hackathons should serve as funnel for big hackathons. So why? Because when we meet in person with students, we can talk about ideas with them, we can support them with the right architecture for their ideas, we can tunnel their energy into the direction of what is actually the market looking for and if there is a brilliant idea, we can incubate it and bring it as fast as possible in production. Yeah, and so, besides the hackathons, the small hackathons, we are also doing some research initiatives with some of the universities and also we are proposing diploma subjects for most of the universities, of course, subjects that are targeting and bringing some value to our ecosystem. And the last, and probably the most important one for good ideas is opportunities for participating in incubations, incubation programs that we have yeah, super interesting.

Lukas Seel: 35:01

So many developments and I think you know, given that the department of DevRel really only is six months old, there's so much in development already.

Lukas Seel: 35:10

I want to bring us back a little bit. You were talking about how Web2 is the obvious target, with millions of developers untapped, but I want to talk a little bit about the other Web3 ecosystems, because I think obviously one thing that I think has also been happening a little bit more is this realization from different ecosystems that were to some degree all in this together and like that, the way forward is an interoperable ecosystem where, you know, developers can easily transact, interact with various ecosystems. Obviously, the sovereign shard development has been, you know, a very, very important thing that that multiverse x has come out with. So let's talk a little bit about that experience, like how you know you, as devrel, interact with different ecosystems. If there's initiatives planned that reach across the aisle and, and you know, involve some other other layer ones or layer twos and all of these things, what is the status there and how do you see that, let's say as an overarching narrative, this emerging interoperability narrative?

Mihai Schiopu: 36:23

Yeah, so part of the DevRel. So yeah, devrel in general has lots of hats and part of them is also the integration activity. New, we have a successful Phantom to MultiverseX and MultiverseX to Phantom transfer communication, so probably we will also come with a demo on that soon. Anyway, so the DevRel team also is involved into creating the bridges to other ecosystems. And, by the way, kudos, lukas, for what you did with the super team from Solana in Berlin. It was quite a nice initiative.

Mihai Schiopu: 37:25

I'm still sorry that I or somebody from our team could not join Next time. We will definitely try to be there. I'm still sorry that I or somebody from our team could not join Next time. We will definitely try to be there. But these kind of initiatives, like the one that you initiated there, will bring awareness also from our ecosystem to the ecosystem of, in this case, solana and the other way around, and we may find some opportunities from Multiverse X to Solana and the other way around that we cannot build because, as I was saying, we are missing probably the users, but we have the security or we have the liquidity, but we don't have the, let's say, narratives, the right narratives, just because of the communities, and we have seen that it's very important to have, as I was saying, a worldwide awareness, because before starting changing and adapting to things, it's important to understand, and that's what we did. So we participated at conferences, we participated at workshops, devrel gatherings, where a DevRel gathering it's not you and others, it's you and the DevRels from Filecoin, you and the DevRels from Sui, from, say, from Solana, from any ecosystem out there, and you exchange experiences and you exchange ideas, and you are talking about hosting hackathons together, and probably people will think, okay, how can you host a hackathon together with I don't know, injective? And, by the way, I I was saying this because of the uh helios, of course, and also about the collabathon that's going to happen it's important to build bridges, not to burn them. I think this is something that's very important.

Mihai Schiopu: 39:37

I also stated quite a few times why? Because spying on what other ecosystems are doing, looking at their results, learning from their experiences as well, we get lots of valuable insights. We made mistakes and we also had successes. Right, it may be. So we are stating the Development Act on Multiverse X is way superior to 95% of other ecosystems. We committed to fast response on support channels and we are going to keep doing it. There is a solution for any problem on MultiverseX. Just because of the strong foundation and architecture on which Elrond started, and so on, we solved the blockchain trilemma. That's true. Those are things that we proved, we did, and they are in production, right, but in the same time, building a, because this is also something that I think we are going to touch later on.

Mihai Schiopu: 40:42

Mass adoption does not come only from one ecosystem, right? Yeah, anyway, we need real world use cases in order to bring masses by the way, and for real world use cases, we need several, several, let's say, powerhouses to be involved, or real world ecosystems to come expose their issues, expose their ideas and see which solution solves them all. Probably, multiverse X can be the security layer for all blockchains. Maybe, or probably, multiverse x can become the, let's say, settlement layer for all blockchains. Yeah, it may, but first we have to build it and we have to build bridges to other ecosystems. In order for that to happen, we we have to and again I'm coming back, we have to provide a fast, cheap and easy solution for problems that others have. Yeah, anyway, I hope I somehow answered your idea or question.

Lukas Seel: 42:09

No for sure. We're already going towards the end here. I saw some questions already. We'll get to them in a minute. I have two more things that perhaps we can quickly discuss, and you mentioned one of them already, which is this beyond the developer onboarding right, the idea really is to build applications that are useful, that will be used by millions and then billions of users, and where do you see us in this step of development? Are we ready for mass adoption? What do you see there, sort of in the broader Web3 ecosystem, not just Multiverse X? Where are we at and where is this going and how fast?

Mihai Schiopu: 42:58

um, yeah, so this is. This is one of the best questions and and and um with latest conference I've been and you were there, lucas, at Brussels. I've heard quite some a couple of times. This question it's about the real use case for blockchains and people are starting to ask even more and more about this and for real world use cases. We need Web2, or at least real world players or Web2 developers, to come with problems that only blockchains solve, and we need developers to develop those products solving those problems, because apps will bring users, users will bring liquidity and transactions transactions bring more developers and more users because of the incentives and so on. But what is that what we are doing on a daily basis, besides Twitter and developing for multiverse X? And this is a question for you what is that what we are doing on a daily basis, besides breathing? What?

Lukas Seel: 44:18

is it.

Mihai Schiopu: 44:19

It's payments. Every single person in this world has to pay for something that they need, for anything. An old school businessman would argue yeah, every man needs food, entertainment and medicines. You know, you can never go wrong with those. True, that's true, but for the world we are living in, so this 2024, with all the issues that we have in the world and all the conflicts and so on, all the and so on, it's a mess.

Mihai Schiopu: 44:53

Anyway, I would say that you have to pay for everything, even for going to the toilet, to be honest, and for each payment that you do, someone has some interest. Of course, for small amounts, the interest is negligible, but above $10, it begins to matter. And I'm not talking about Ethereum or Bitcoin or other dinosaurs like those, because they have their own use cases. They are valuable in their own way and we can, of course, make use of their own use cases. But Multiverse X, the first blockchain that solved the blockchain dilemma, fits perfectly as the solution to solve the payment settlement issue.

Mihai Schiopu: 45:37

And looking at the roadmap yeah, the roadmap, I have to update it, but looking at the roadmap, you would see that, having the sub-second finality that Adrian tweeted about yesterday, it's of utmost importance in order to be able to support payments and to become, as a payment, settlement for the entire world, just because of the scalability, speed and also security. And about the security, we are going to bring some very, very interesting updates on the guardians and on the ease, because, again, this is a very keyword easy, how easy is it to use it? Um, and, of course, um, there are other use cases with which we are in talks with institutions. Again, this is another question for you, lucas. What else do we need before reaching mass adoption?

Lukas Seel: 46:43

Do we need laws, mihai? Do we need compliance? Do we need regulations?

Mihai Schiopu: 46:48

Yes, so we need before that. We also need that. So we need KYCs, we need institutional engagement, we need lots of educational initiatives and the question is when is the right moment to onboard a persona? Because I don't know. In Romania, at 14 years old, you receive an ID card Lately I think one year ago. This ID card has also a chip on it, so you probably have also an ID, an electronical ID, there that you can check on POSs and other devices.

Mihai Schiopu: 47:35

But the question is when is the right moment to provide a person with a blockchain account? And I was thinking and that's why educational and I was mentioning educational probably when you interact with an educational institution is the right moment, like a school, probably school. You are too young to understand most of the things. College will provide you with an account and will teach you something about payments, something about data transfer, something about value transfer, something about blockchains, something about security, how you are responsible of what you are doing with your own account, and this has to be started as fast as possible. To be honest and you know, in order to become a student of a university, you have to be confirmed as an existing person that can guarantee for a certain address or account that it's a real person behind it and can prove which person is that without having the real identity of that person in public.

Mihai Schiopu: 49:02

Yeah, what else we need? Chain abstraction, right? We need privacy and we need easy onboarding. It has to be easy as clicking a button or authenticating through Gmail or Discord or Instagram and, by the way, that's coming this month probably, I have to see. Anyway, we are well aware of everything and we are working on everything. Everything is in work. We will have to update the roadmap as well.

Lukas Seel: 49:39

Yeah, there's so many things, you know, being worked on in parallel. It's a big team and it's a very, very good and, you know, fast team. Sometimes, obviously, these integrations take a little bit of time because there's always a bit of compliance and other things to take care of, especially if you're an institution that is watched by national banks and that provides these services. It's always good to be a little bit careful. One last question before we go to the questions from the audience, feel free to request right now if you want to come on stage and ask me hi, something.

Lukas Seel: 50:12

But I wanted to briefly touch on this thing, and you already mentioned these community events and you mentioned some of the cross-chain onboarding, but also just like onboarding new people onto the blockchain through educational initiatives, but also just to peer-to-peer onboarding, and that often goes hand-in-hand with fun events that people want to attend or easy use cases for blockchain, such as ticketing and all of these things. Where do you see this X factor of community come in for Web3 acceleration, for Web3 onboarding, for Web3 acceleration, for Web3 onboarding, for Web3 development? Also, what are the specific things that you're planning on doing to support builders from the community and especially the multi-versex community?

Mihai Schiopu: 51:05

Yeah, so there are quite some initiatives that we are working on. As you probably have seen, we started with the grants for sovereign chains One million in grants split into 50k per module. It has to cover some interoperability topics. This is that, and we are very much focusing on that. Then we are also thinking and working with the DevRel team that I was mentioning about. We are thinking about having some boot camps by identifying the most important builders from the community the existing community, not the community that we want to bring as new community and supporting them into building valuable products, like solving real issues, based on the challenges that we identify. Also, a list of challenges is going to be shared on. I don't know if it's Build's Hub or a separate area on the website, but we are intending on doing that so that people can identify if they can contribute in a way or another and, of course, those challenges are going to be also supported through funding if they really solve an issue.

Mihai Schiopu: 52:53

Now about the X factor I think we do have the X factor because, starting from MVX, the X is there, but I believe that Multiverse X has one of the strongest and the most united communities in the web3 space, and this is not hard to observe. It's partly because of what we talked before, because most of them I learned and found out about crypto and blockchains through MultiverseX and it's like a hard project and they will always probably be close to it. And the second one is because, probably, of the way how we communicate. We are every time trying to solve the UI UX first, to make it as easy as possible for everybody to understand the concept. We are listening for feedback and we are asking and continuously asking for feedback in order to improve and to learn how to improve, improve.

Mihai Schiopu: 54:14

We are running those quarterly surveys where we are looking at some metrics and, based on that, we are adapting the way how we communicate, the way how we act and the way how we interact and engage with everybody. We are, of course, trying to grow the presence into some other social channels that we are not using, so that much and see if things change there. But I think that the the most important thing is to listen. If you listen to the community, you know very well what the x factor should have, should be. It's like x factor. You know the, the tv show. You have to listen to the singer in order to see if the x factor is there and then to help them to prove and show that the X-Factory was really with them.

Lukas Seel: 55:15

The truth is out there too. Yeah, thanks so much. I think, great points. I have one question that I saw in the comments and perhaps we can address this in a succinct way in terms of like, bringing this back to, obviously, your um area there. Um, the question is always this this balance between like, how much is, you know, marketing to towards what communities? How much is marketing an effort that that brings in new builders? How much is marketing an effort that brings in institutions, businesses or just investors? How do you see this sort of, let's say, bd side of the DevRel efforts, and how far are we from entering the US market? What are the thoughts and ideas and initiatives that you're focusing on in terms of like, onboarding and, you know, let's just call it marketing.

Mihai Schiopu: 56:13

Um, let's call it marketing, but um, I was, and, quite funny, I was talking with uh drago these days. Um, we are looking for a marketing and we are trying to find a name for this position. We are looking for a marketing, devrel marketing person and it's very hard to define what the DevRel marketing person should do, because it's part of classical marketing, part of DevRel marketing, part of developer and also part of community builder or events manager and trying to understand the strategy behind it. I would not combine the DevRel marketing with the classical marketing or the, let's say, marketing which has to deal with the bd part. I'm I'm dealing only and I'm trying to cover only the devrel uh marketing part.

Mihai Schiopu: 57:17

Um, yes, we are doing it. We are actively looking for a person on the devrel marketing side. What he or she has to do is to try and understand the way, the direction the ecosystems are going in general and I'm saying ecosystems and to match the way how we communicate to the developers to find the right opportunities during the events. And, by the way, because you mentioned US, in blockchains there are two seasons it's the spring season and the autumn season, and usually the spring season is located around the US events and everything that happens there, and the autumn season is the one that is located around Asia. And, due to the fact that we have X Day in South Korea, if you did not know, so X-Day this year is going to be in Seoul.

Mihai Schiopu: 58:34

We are focusing a lot on Asia for the second part of the year. But because the DevRel plans are for, as I told you, for 12 months, hosting dozens of events, of course we will go to the US in a DevRel efficient manner. And what does it mean? It means that, for example, with the Cornell University, we had the eCornell teaching program, which is ongoing, by the way, and it lasts until October. I believe we had a teaching session with the University from Virginia and we also have some discussions with other universities, so we will spread the word about our technology there. We will spread the word about our technology there and about the other marketing initiatives that we have. Lucian said and stated several times that we are actively looking about growing the team also in the US.

Lukas Seel: 59:52

Very, very interesting. Well, I think the last question before we close and this is more of a general thing, you can interpret it as you want what are the next year, three years, five years, ten years? What do they look like in terms of Web3 development? If you want to make it more multiverse, x specific, feel free to do so, but where do you see the space going? I think we touched on some of the important things that are still needed to get ready for mass adoption, but how do you see the space develop over the next few years and then longer term as well?

Mihai Schiopu: 1:00:28

over the next few years and then longer term as well. Yeah, this is a very good question. So the blockchain space is changing very fast. I mean this year I think it was the year of meme coins, then very fast translated to clicker games and from clicker games, most probably we will see something else transforming into clicker meme games, clicker meme coins or something. So I would say that the next three years are likely to bring some significant changes and probably advancements, because lots and lots of funds are being invested into the technology.

Mihai Schiopu: 1:01:19

What we observed, and I appreciate a lot, is the way how Berkeley and Stanford is doing the teaching and is promoting the way how students are interacting with blockchains, coming with some crazy ideas about what can be implemented, from ZK rollups to all kind of sidechains in order to improve the transaction throughput and reduce costs for Ethereum. Of course, there are some other solutions that can be used, like multiverse, x, blink, blink, but everybody's is free to choose whatever they think. Then I believe that and this is something it's out of question Sharding is one of the things that will solve most of the scalability issues for blockchains in general. Then is the interoperability appear, a universal standard for, let's say, a standardized protocol for cross-chain data and asset transfers, and by saying a standardized protocol, I mean it will cover all blockchains. Some of the ecosystems are better positioned to serve that. Some of them are far away from that. We are in a position where we can tackle that. Also, I'm more than sure that we will see enhanced security. We are already looking into quantum solutions, post-quantum cryptography solutions and we are expecting that to come. We already have a running solution for zero-knowledge verifiers on local testnet and probably we will come up with something on the public testnet as soon as possible. I believe that AI is going to get some traction. Ai is probably going to become the biggest user of blockchains in general through AI agents. I think that we have to prepare for that and that's one of the areas that we have in discussions as well.

Mihai Schiopu: 1:04:23

Nfts under the way and the mode, how they were used until now, most probably won't continue. You have to go beyond art and collectibles. You have to think about the expansion of NFTs into real use cases, like into industries, like real estate. There are quite some interesting ideas and products being built around it. Intellectual property, like universities, can do a lot into that direction. And, of course, entertainment, if we're talking about gaming, and I'm quite, very, very looking towards cyber network to see what they are coming gaming with, and I'm quite, very, very looking towards Cyber Network to see what they are coming up with.

Mihai Schiopu: 1:05:14

Then there's one thing and I don't know how to call it. I believe that sometime soon, we have to be able to send NFTs from one chain to the other. It's something that we would need in order to, let's say, advance in this direction. Enterprise blockchains yes, I believe we have a solution for that. I believe that with sovereign chains, we can cover basically any enterprise use case out there, and it's just a matter of the institutions or the enterprises to have the courage to just start doing it. I don't know, in healthcare and identity, I believe will be the most useful solutions for blockchains, and then for the supply chain management, of course. But for the supply chain management, I believe that most of them already started looking around. I don't know. I think there are lots of things that we could discuss about, of things that we could discuss about, but from the looking from the chair, where we are now, I believe we are. We are in a favorable position, um, after reaching andromeda release with Consensus V3.

Lukas Seel: 1:06:51

Yeah, I mean, all of these use cases I think deserve their own space and their own podcast, right? So I'm super grateful for you to cover all of them briefly and, yeah, very happy to have you had on here to talk about developers, developers and developers and how to get them into the Web3 space. So, thank you so much, mihai, for spending time with us and, yeah, congratulations on everything you're doing and continue to do.

Mihai Schiopu: 1:07:20

Mihai Pohjaiević. Yeah, thank you very much for hosting this space. Lukas, we are going to start hosting spaces from Code Multiverse X more often, so probably sometime you will be the person who will be invited for a talk.

Lukas Seel: 1:07:47

I'm looking forward to that, looking forward to continuing the conversation everywhere that we can. Um, yeah, thank you so much, mihi. Thank you everybody for tuning in. This was helios horizons, episode 17, with mihi shiopu skopu. I'm so sorry about butchering that name. No worries, what is it really? Just for the listeners?

Mihai Schiopu: 1:08:10

With Shu Shikyopo.

Lukas Seel: 1:08:14

Shikyopo, mihaly Shikyopo from Multiverse X. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, everybody for tuning in. Make sure you subscribe to this podcast on all the channels that you're on. This is always a weekly live hosted space on Twitter that then becomes a podcast. Today we discussed developer experience and relationships and the growth of the Web3 ecosystem. Thank you so much for tuning in and we'll talk to you all soon. Bye-bye, bye-bye.