Blockdaemon: Blockchain’s Path to Adoption and Utility

[00:00] Introduction

[0:13] Paul: Hello and welcome to the latest in the Blockchain Leaders Insights series brought to you by Blockchain Ireland. My name is Paul Hearns. I am co-chair of the Events and Comms Working Group and a member of the Steering Group of Blockchain Ireland. And I’m joined today by Amor Sexton, who is Chief Operating Officer with Blockdaemon. Welcome.

[0:33] Amor: Thank you.

[0:34] Paul: So we’re going to talk today about the development and adoption of blockchain technologies in the world and the industry generally. Because Amor, you’ve had quite a long and varied career in the industry and with the technology specifically. So you’ve seen its birth, you’ve seen significant developments in it. So we’re going to sort of take your career as a kind of set of milestones and developments in it and gain your insights and experiences as we go. So tell us a little bit about your role currently and a bit about Blockdaemon.

[1:18] Amor: So I’m COO, as you mentioned, of Blockdaemon. We’re one of the world’s largest blockchain infrastructure companies and it’s specifically for institutions. So basically if an institution is looking to do something with blockchain, we have a tool or a product that can help them, Whether it’s utilizing APIs to read, write to a blockchain, running their own dedicated node to participate in a network, staking validators, private key management technology and wallet infrastructure. We have a range of different products and services that suit institutional needs.

[1:53] Paul: Okay, well, that’s something we’ll come back to because specific use cases and business models are really useful in helping people understand how the technologies apply within the industry. But just going back a little bit, as I mentioned, you’ve had a long career around these technologies, so you’ve seen them develop. So take us back a little bit in your career. What did you start out as because it wasn’t really on the technology end was it.

[2:20] Amor: No no it wasn’t. So not quite at the beginning but I think bitcoin was a hundred dollars a bitcoin when I started, so a long long time ago. It was December 2013 I was working in a law firm in Australia that specialised with startups. We had a startup that walked through the door and said they were a bitcoin payment processing company and we were scratching our head wondering what bitcoin was. So that was really the start of it and I was just fascinated by the technology by the challenges that the technology presented because it was so paradigm shifting from a legal perspective moving from bilateral relationships to multilateral. The whole international aspect of it that you couldn’t pin it to a jurisdiction and that’s how I started. So I started as a lawyer advising clients. There wasn’t much there wasn’t much attention being paid from a legal perspective in Australia at the time but even on a global level it was very early days. So I was lucky enough to get involved in a broader community of academics of practicing lawyers like myself of tech technology experts who really wanted to understand the technology and how it would operate in the world in the context of everything. So smart contracts how could we have them actually recognized as legal contracts. The tokenization in the very early days, you know when the concept was only still being explored we were calling it bitcoin 2.0 at the time. It was such early days. That’s how I started in it and it was really the fascination with what people were trying to do with the technology and how it was really challenging some of the existing well-established legal constructs and business constructs.

[4:12] Paul: And what was the context like at the time in Australia specifically. Was there a recognition of perhaps the business value at that point? Was it bound up with Bitcoin or could people start to see that the underlying infrastructures like blockchain specifically, but also smart contracts, that there was more potential there beyond the cryptocurrency?

[4:39] Amor: When I first started out, it was definitely just Bitcoin. Smart contracts was something that was just starting to get a little bit of traction. So the first things we were looking at were trying to even understand from a legal perspective if bitcoin could be recognized as property. How would you tax it? It was very focused on that, and you know so we were writing to the government to look at sales tax versus CGT and then about a year later I think is when people really started to look more at smart contracts. I think the concept as well of being able to tokenize ownership and property started to come in probably about two years after I was involved and it was quite interesting in Australia in particular and in New South Wales in particular because we have the Torrens Title Land Registry. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a register that is the single golden source of truth for land ownership and there’s even cases where the register has been updated wrong and the law says, “tough luck” the register says this is the case therefore it is. And so I think from if you think about tokenization of underlying assets like real estate having that the existence of not just the register itself but all of the legal precedent that’s set up that around that register that’s been going for so long that establishes the source of truth means that moving a register like that onto the blockchain could theoretically be a lot easier because a blockchain is a digital record but if you’ve still got physical deeds hidden in an attic somewhere like you could have in some countries or a lot of off-chain or offline processes it’s not going to be as effective. So that was something that I remember at the time we were we were looking a lot out we were quite excited because we did think in Australia there was that legal framework that could help make the migration of land title to blockchain perhaps easier from an adoption perspective. So it started out at Bitcoin and it did start to evolve as the technology evolved. But it was still a lot of trying to convince people that, it wasn’t just dark web technology and that there was something behind it.

[7:05] Paul: We’re still having those conversations but no it’s interesting that land registry was seen as one of the early applications because since then several countries in Africa in South America have adopted blockchain behind national land registry projects. So it certainly seems to be one of the stronger institutional applications. But having started your career then in law, what was your first jump then into the, or away from law and into the deep end in this industry?

[7:45] Amor: Yeah, it was, I jumped from a small startup law firm to Citi. It was a bit of a jump. My husband’s Irish. He wanted to move back here to get the kids in the Irish schooling system. And I was scratching my head a little bit and trying to decide what to do. I loved law. I feel like it’s part of who I am. It’s the way my brain works. I miss it sometimes. I miss practicing just the intellectual process of the way that you approach problems and analyse them. But at the same time, I was open to seeing where my career would go. And I’d even started doing some consulting on the side in Australia because I found that a lot of the times when clients were coming to me, they thought they needed legal advice, but they didn’t. They needed commercial advice. So, it was something that I’d already started building that muscle. And I saw a job at Citibank for a head of their, what did we call it at the time? I think it was the National Digital Currency or National Digital Money Portfolio, which was essentially CBDCs. And I remember reaching out to Ken Moore, who’s head of innovation now at MasterCard on LinkedIn and promising him that a lawyer could be innovative if he gave me a shot and gave me an interview. So that was my first role with them. And I ended up leading blockchain strategy and being the head of blockchain for Citi’s wholesale banking division. So it was, look, it was a fantastic job. I absolutely loved it. We were embedded, in the office with a mixture of designers, really really smart blockchain engineers and computer scientists and then also product experts who knew banking really really well and just having that, that depth and breadth of knowledge meant that we were learning something every day and we were really able to bring a well-rounded view to the work that we were we were doing.

[9:42] Paul: And what were the early applications like you mentioned central bank digital currencies but what were the other business applications or institutional applications that you were seeing for the technologies at that early stage?

[9:55] Amor: Well there were a number of things the ones that used to excite me were in trade finance um the tokenization of different not just documents but different commercial constructs and how it could change the way that trade finance is run in the way that the different ecosystem players really interacted and the opportunities it could create for opening up the market to new, participants as well. That was something that I wasn’t very closely involved in that one of my colleagues Obey was leading more of that work but I really thought, I thought that had legs. I thought that was really exciting. I was doing a lot of work with payments. One of the big projects that I led was the City Connect for blockchain launch, where we actually connected City’s banking system with NASDAQ’s private blockchain. Because one of the biggest challenges, of course, is that last leg, the payment leg. Blockchain’s great for delivering that kind of instant settlement, but only if you can have the payment and the asset both swap at the same time for the atomic swap and so that’s what we did and showing that you could actually integrate a traditional banking system with a blockchain and get instant settlement was one of the big projects I worked on and I thought that was quite exciting too because it really did show that you could go full digitization end to end and that you could have that that seamless flow.

[11:33] Paul: So when was that, like how long ago is that?

[11:39] Amor: That was 2017, May 2017 we launched.

[11:43] Paul: Because that’s still one of the things that’s being talked about in terms of central bank digital currencies in particular is that you know faster settlement and as you said that the final steps that can still take several days depending on the jurisdictions it’s going between. So why are we waiting? Like if it’s been established and institutions as large as Citi and Nasdaq have established these principles, what do you think is inhibiting, what do you think is stalling others from doing the same?

[12:16] Amor: I think from a payments perspective it’s incredibly complex and I think that’s one of the things I really learned during my time at Citi. It’s not what we see as consumers you know. We used to wonder why would it take so long for money to get from one bank to another and there’s just, there’s an incredibly complex network of correspondent banks of different steps that need to be taken as well so depending on the jurisdiction the different compliance steps that need to be taken. Payments is essentially messaging systems with settlement done at different layers. So you’ve also got liquidity between a bank itself and their different branches and then you’ve got liquidity between banks. So I think it’s really, really complex. And a lot of money has been invested into making the existing payment systems that we have and then also trying to make them better and more efficient. So I think the challenge is, how do you, like blockchain is not going to solve the existing problems. So as long as you have inefficiencies and delays at some point unless everything’s put onto a blockchain. Putting blockchain on just one part of the payment system isn’t going to have the effect that you want. So you have to solve all of the challenges along the full journey and then at the same time if you wanted to replace it with blockchain that’s a massive investment cost. Upfront investment, ongoing investment and your banks and market participants have already spent so much money on setting up the existing payment system. So I think these are  the more practical challenges to adoption. People will say “oh well the banks just don’t want blockchain”. I don’t think that’s right, I think it’s more I mean it comes down to business at the end of the day. The barrier to adoption of having to completely throw away or replace the system you’re working with and invest in a new one whether it’s technology costs people costs because you have to get experts in. So I think there’s a lot of different challenges and I’ve seen an increasing progression of interest in the technology moving from proof of concept to actually live in production so people are understanding the technology especially in around tokenization and they’re understanding the benefits that it can bring but it’s going to be slow because institutions are running a business at the end of the day and they have to take into account these really kind of practical considerations about investment and competing priorities and things like that.

[15:00] Paul: Okay well just taking a sort of 30,000 feet view, where do you think the most progress has been made and where do you think the most work is still yet to be done?

[15:12] Amor: From a progress perspective there’s a few different things. I think definitely the, i mean the existence of so many different L1’s and so many different protocols to me that’s progress. I mean when I started out it was it was really just Bitcoin. Ethereum was just so new as well back then. So i think, i think the fact that there are so many different people who are looking at building a protocol that meets particular needs you know you’ve got, you’ve got a lot of different layer ones who are trying to understand how they can build a network that meets the particular needs of the ecosystem and makes it as efficient as possible or as secure as possible like dWallet Labs and their MPC protocol. So I think that’s been great the technological development there and the advancements of how things operate at a protocol level. I think my own personal opinion is that we will see that narrow down in the future. There’s a lot of them out there at the moment are they all going to get traction. Is it you know are we going to have that number of protocols in the future? I’m not sure. I think the ones that are really smart and operate really well will probably end up surviving. I think the technology from a tokenisation perspective has really progressed. That’s where we’re seeing things move out of proof of concept and live into the market. People are understanding that there are significant benefits to being able to utilize the technology for that use case. So I think that’s another great progression. And then I think the other thing that I’m seeing a lot of is for a long time the industry talked about it the importance of decentralisation and that’s the ethos but really under the under the hood everything was centralised and i think FTX showed that because it was a tangled web of companies falling down because they were centralised they didn’t look at counterparty risk. And I think what we’re seeing post FTX is an increased focus on, first of all, management of your own private keys. So removing the centralisation of that aspect of it, but also things like the distributed validator technology that’s coming out, looking at resilience of the network, looking at trying to make even at the protocol level, it more decentralised. And that’s a lot of progress that I’ve seen especially in the last year and a half that, makes me really happy because I’ve always struggled with the fact that it was the ethos of decentralisation but we were so centralised as an industry and I think for it to truly for the technology to truly be able to reach its potential you have to have true decentralisation at all levels, at the protocol level and the kind of node operator level, at the infrastructure application level, and then you also have it at the ecosystem participant level as well.

[18:26] Paul: Okay. And in terms of what’s exciting you, like what are the areas that you’re fascinated by or that you see kind of great potential in? What’s the bit that you really like to get involved in?

[18:41] Amor: Um so I play at the infrastructure level so a lot of it’s at that. From you know from a infrastructure level I mentioned earlier some of the DBT stuff that I think is great the NOR’s initiative I think is fantastic as well that’s an initiative looking at, creating validator standards so again you don’t need to be regulated to, want to operate with best practice standards and being able to actually take a step back and go what are the risks at the infrastructure level so not the business risks but the or not the kind of business use case risk but actually the infrastructure level and being able to make sure that we’re addressing resilience and operational security and things like that and that we’ve got this agreed level of standards across all the validator operators. I think that’s going to be fantastic for the industry as a whole. From a use case perspective, I can’t wait to see tokenisation when we’ve moved past the, the kind of low-hanging fruit, easy use cases that we’re looking at now. I mean, they’re perfect to start out, but I think it’s going to be really interesting. For me, it’s going to be interesting when we’re not just tokenizing existing assets and making it easier for reconciliation and from, I guess, an administrative perspective, but when we can actually look at starting to create new assets and to capture and tokenize legal agreements or legal constructs in that perspective so things that you would normally need, things that you would normally need a particular contract for it’s not actually an asset but it’s a relationship that you capture in a contract when we can start to tokenize that and have things that are tradable. That’s when I think we’re going to start to get some really interesting use cases because you’re now creating new types of assets and not just digitising existing ones.

[20:36] Paul: Very good. Okay. Tokenization of real-world assets is really a hot topic because, again, from our annual conference this year, but also in gathering feedback for what we should cover next year, It’s hovering in or around the sort of top topics for a lot of people. So it’s certainly something that’s of interest. But kind of going back a little bit, and again, from your sort of legal perspective, you mentioned even writing to the government in those early days, regulation is such a huge topic. And there’s been massive progress here in terms of authorizations, processes, the MiCAR coming into effect and all that sort of thing. What is your view on the regulatory environment generally? Because it seems as if the industry is at the point where certainty is what’s needed now. So it’s not necessarily whether regulation is required or not. It’s certainty in it and allowing them to build on that and to provide real services and surety. And so what’s your general view here? In terms of the regulatory environment, say, within the EU specifically, but also then in terms of between different jurisdictions around the world? Because, again, you mentioned that international settlement element as well.

[22:12] Amor: Yeah, I think certainty is always, you know, people talk about regulation being a barrier to adoption. I actually think it’s the lack of regulatory certainty that’s the true barrier.

[22:24] Amor: Once you have that, then compliance is a business cost. So it just means once you know what you need to do, then you know how to invest in your compliance program, getting the right people in places, processes, systems, and all of that. So that can be a bit of a barrier. I wouldn’t say a barrier to adoption, but it’s a cost of business that may not be accessible to all companies. But at least if you have regulatory certainty, at least you know whether or not you need to take those steps or you need to change your business model so that you’re not carrying out activities that are regulated. So I think we’re definitely getting increased certainty. I think especially outside of the US, I think there’s a lot more certainty and businesses are a lot more comfortable knowing where the lines are. There’s still grey areas. There’s always going to be grey areas because the technology just keeps evolving and the way that people are using the technology keeps evolving. So, you know, I feel for the policymakers who are trying to play catch up and they have a really hard job. You know, they’re trying to write legislation that meets the needs for today, but not write it in a way that’s either too broad or too narrow that they then have to come back and change it again in two years. I don’t know that they’ve had another instance of such rapid development in a technology that has presented this challenge.

[23:53] Amor: I’ve appreciated the approach that some regulators have taken where they’ve really stopped to consult the industry and learn about the technology. You know, we’ve had a lot of different interactions with regulators where they’ve come to us to learn about how the protocols work because that’s a level that we operate at. We support over 70 different protocols and taking them through and showing them that under the hood, things look different. They’re very familiar with Ethereum, but how do other protocols operate? Are they different? You know, we kind of talk about the five general types of reward distributions, for example, with proof of state protocols. And we’ve found that regulators and policymakers have been very open to sitting down and learning about it and wanting to make sure that they are thinking carefully about the approach they take. So I think that’s been fantastic. It’s definitely not, you know, when I first started out, people were only talking about AML risk. They were only, you know, that they couldn’t even get their head around the concept of this intangible digital asset. We’ve definitely seen a progression where they’re understanding the technology itself and some regulators even have like incredibly, incredibly deep experts in particular areas. Like I know, for example, I think the Swiss regulators have technologists on their staff that probably know more than a lot of people working in the industry at that technology level. So we’re definitely seeing that across some of the regulators which I think is fantastic because it’s not a knee-jerk response. It’s a very careful and thought-through response. The flip side of careful and thought-through is it takes a little while. And I think that’s where the frustration comes out sometimes with the industry because everyone wants to move quickly but… It’s just not the way things work I think you’ve got to balance the careful thought through approach versus um the need for speed and I think the regulators that have come out and have these consultation papers and have shared their thoughts or at least even if they don’t have absolute certainty they’re at least trying to give the industry a sense of the direction that they’ll take to provide a little bit of guidance in the meantime so I think that’s been a really um positive development um and once we have I think you know MiCA 2 coming out, once we start to look at their approaches to things like staking defi once that starts to become a lot clearer in the market I think we’ll start to see I think perhaps, I wouldn’t say necessarily greater adoption in Europe but I think that certainty there’s already been a lot of good adoption but I do think that certainty will allow businesses to just make quicker decisions and to kind of set up and understand how they’re going to grow through Europe using that framework.

[26:57] Paul: Okay, well that highlights another important point which is skills and talent and um there seems to have been a lot done say even here locally. There are now several masters in blockchain programs, but say, again, kind of taking the long view over your career and the various discipline changes you’ve had yourself. What’s your view on the availability and particularly the resources for skills and talent development in the industry?

[27:30] Amor: Um well i think Ireland is really interesting even if we you know if I zoom in even just to Ireland it’s got kind of two camps that are really unique. First of all most of the large I would say more crypto institutions rather than blockchain have a presence in Ireland because a lot of them are using Ireland as their base for doing business in Europe. So we have a lot of talent here that have a mixture of knowledge of financial services, technology and crypto at a business level, at a regulatory level. It’s early-ish days I think this is for kind of three-ish years three to four years in because a lot of the companies moved in around the same time but I think that’s something that’s really interesting and will continue to grow and that unique mix of understanding all the different industries and having that context. So I think Ireland’s a fantastic place for that. And I think what we’ll see moving forward and as the industry spends more time here and these companies have been established for longer, we’re going to start to see that depth of knowledge really come into play and that kind of depth of talent. But then the other side of it that we have in Ireland is we also have some amazing technology experts. They’re not as visible I’ve noticed at the events and in the industry it feels like um it feels like a lot of the industry events and a lot of the a lot of the more visible participants are more on that business side

[29:03] Paul: That’s some homework for us to do.

[29:05] Amor:  But I think that’s because like we have for example our company was started we’re a west coast company um but our first engineers were in Galway and we have a group of engineers that are in Galway and when I say they’re engineers they’re deep protocol experts. They understand because we support so many different protocols they really understand the technology and when I was at Citibank as well I worked with some phenomenal engineers who again really really understood the technology and I know there’s other companies out there in Ireland that have engineers based here that aren’t just building web two layers on top of web three, but are actual web three experts. And I think that is quite unique, that mix and I think the depth of talent on the technology side is something that not everybody realizes. And I think it’s something that, especially when you come from overseas I certainly think the depth on the engineering front is there is more than what I’ve seen in my experience in Australia for example and I think it’s something that we should as an industry, as an industry body and as you know key players in the industry really pay attention to and develop more you know, and look at how we can encourage you know, not just the different courses at the university level, but how we can feed that through and have intern programs and graduate programs and start to really build that, expertise because the makings of it are there and there’s already so many talented people, it’d be great to see that grow.

[30:45] Paul: No, it has been observed before that Ireland had been particularly successful at developing skills pipelines for the likes of the financial services industry when that was really being developed here and that similar models could be adapted for blockchain and Web3. But again, it’s really about that deep cooperation and constant communication between industry and academia, but also in terms of policy to make sure that the, say, the skills agencies that have been particularly good in the past are all coordinated in those efforts. So it’s interesting to hear you say that. But just as a slide aside, you mentioned Web3, and Web3 is probably the area where consumers in particular are probably going to have their greatest exposure to blockchain-based technologies and then the stack on that. What’s your feel for how developed is that at the moment? Because, again, you mentioned in the context of Web 2 layered on top, Web 3, and even that terrible term of the DeFi mullet, which I find particularly amusing. So what’s your perception of the development of Web 3 at the moment and even the term itself?

[32:13] Amor: Yeah, I mean, I use Web3 to basically say anything that’s utilising blockchain technology. I’m Australian, I like to find ways to say shorter words to say a lot. So I think from a development perspective, one of the things we struggle with, for example, at the Web3 level, is the maturity of the technology itself. So if you think about the services that we offer we offer tooling and services, that help other institutions utilize web3 technology or blockchains and what we’re, trying what we find is a lot of these technologies are still at beta level. The use cases that people want to use them for are way beyond that where you know we’re trying to provide five nines of service on top of beta technology. I think that’s something that we, we’re already seeing but I think that needs to continue to evolve so the maturity of the technology itself and also understanding the important things that will also impact adoption of the networks that are not just, you know there’s a lot of focus that’s put more on the tokenomics or the kind of more web three style considerations for a protocol but then there’s some other just really practical considerations too like how expensive is it for people to be able to run the servers that they need. You know do they need really expensive hardware? That’s going to impact the participation in your network if the cost of participation goes up. You know how do you send out network updates and do you give people enough notice and time to be able to do that? Ethereum did it fantastic with their mergers they proved that you can run these networks and you can make massive changes in the networks when you have distributed participants and node operators. So it can be done but I think these are the things the small things, what is the operational process for reward distribution. These are the small things that I think the people building the protocol layers need to understand that as exciting as a technology might be those practical smaller considerations like operational burden, financial cost of running the network they’re also going to impact the adoption and then I think we’re still bringing in a lot of web 2 concepts into web 3 that are you know controversially if I say this but stronger and better. So things like security resilience these are pretty basic concepts in web 2 and I think with web 3 sometimes there can be such a focus on moving fast and proving a model and you know you should do that but then you have to go back and you have to address key things if you want to be able to scale. So that there are other things like, you know, we’ve, we were one of the first to offer slashing insurance from a staking operator perspective. Again, something really practical that insurance is something that, that you would see all the time in web two environments. We were one of the first ones to operate, to offer it. And now it’s, it’s a pretty standard offering across the business. You know, we’ve things like ISO certification, like we have SOC2. These are all things these are all concepts and doing business um that are very established in web 2 and we’re bringing them in. Now we have to adapt them and make sure that they make sense in the concept but I think these are some of the challenges or some of the developments that need to happen with web 3 technology in order for it to be able to support the scale and these are things that you know we can, it’s a bit like I mentioned NORS  (Node Operator Risk Standard) earlier you can learn from the resilience that you know the resilience and the standards and the operational risk frameworks that you have in web 2 environments and then just adapt and make them relevant at the web 3 level. So I think we are maturing as an industry and we’re getting there. I think the bear market helps to be honest because that’s when people really focus on building, and shoring up the foundations, but we’re still definitely developing in a lot of areas.

[36:46] Paul: Okay. Well, just to circle back a little bit, we talked about business models and about good examples of applications of the technology. What are your favourite business models or applications that you’ve seen? What are the ones that have impressed you most?

[37:08] Amor: Um, the ones that have impressed me most, I think, so there’s, I have, I have a challenge because there’s one that I want to work, but I’m still not convinced that we’re there yet. I would love to see some of the identity use cases get up and running. Unfortunately, my legal background means that I’m still a sceptic on whether or not we can ever reach that proper state of utility with these. By that, I just mean that identity is not just a piece of paper or a government printed card. There’s so many other things that get taken into account in the creation of identity and the utility of those identity tokens and making sure that they are something that you can actually get full value out of from a utilisation perspective. So I love identity, tokenization of identity because I can see a real need for it whether or not we’ll ever be able to get to a point where we can really have tokenised identity in a truly useful way um is where I think I haven’t seen that yet. Again also sorry like identity is jurisdictional as well which is the big challenge so it might work in one country but not another. I’d really like to see that use case come up. I’ve also had a lot of talk about fractionalisation of ownership. I haven’t seen a lot of development there I’ve seen some but they’re the use cases again that I really like. I like the use cases where it’s not just taking something existing and putting it on the blockchain but we’re actually doing something different with it and I remember a few years ago people were looking at fractionalization of ownership for large infrastructure for national parks for the these kind of concepts are the use cases that I find fascinating at the same time I think the reason I find them fascinating is because they’re complex and they’re novel unfortunately the reason a lot of them haven’t yet found some traction in the market is because they’re complex and novel so it’s always going to be a little bit more difficult. But they’re yeah they’re the use cases that really make me interested because I can see even though, you know, there’s going to be a timeline for being able to get these up and running. They’re the ones that I think will really make a difference.

[39:35] Paul: Okay, thank you. Well, just to wrap up then, what do you think our audience should look out for, say in the sort of 12 to 18 months’ timeframe? What are the things that you’re seeing potentially coming down the line that they should take note of or, educate themselves about?

[39:55] Amor: Um I would say um I would say educate yourself about the technology itself, a lot of people who’ve had interactions with the technology it’s been through trading crypto which I’ll be honest with you is probably the most boring use case to me. It’s um look it’s proven there’s product market fit and it’s got traction but there’s so much more that we can do and I think I think the layer twos are interesting I worry a little bit about scalability and some of the challenges with there being too many layer twos but I think definitely just educating yourself about the technology itself and the basics of it because that will allow you to look at the use cases that are coming out in the market and have a more critical, eye and I don’t mean critical in thinking something’s bad but I mean critical and really understanding like critical thinking and really understanding, the value and  I think it’s about also understanding you know if you want to understand just the application of it some of the tokenization stuff even though I said earlier the stuff they’re tokenizing at the moment is quite low hanging fruit and very easy I think Like it does allow you to understand that basic concept of tokenization, and then you can kind of see where it would go in the future. So I’d say my main thing would be just to learn about the technology itself, spend more time learning about the technology than whether or not Bonk or Dogecoin will increase in price.

[41:44] Paul: I’m delighted you said Dogecoin because the pronunciation element of that has always been fascinating. As a man of letters, I’ve always corrected people on that. So thank you very much. That has been hugely interesting. So Amor Sexton, Chief Operating Officer of Blockdemon. Thank you very much. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us. please do watch out for the next in the series of blockchain leaders insights from blockchain Ireland and you can get all the details on blockchain ireland.ie or your favourite podcasting platform thank you.