The non financial use case of cryptocurrency or non financial use case of cryptographic or blockchain, it's just so undervalued, especially if you look into the social aspects, no matter social network or social impact, it's still largely undervalued. It

We found the utopia, but in order to go there, you need to abandon what you did for the, you know, the path of your life and abandon everything and, you know, leave your grandma and your college friend there. Right. And just let's go to the utopia. Don't bring them. We need to fund otherwise, systematically. We need to grant and invest and donate systematically and let the younger generation figure out this missing part. We need to build a censorship resistant, social network. We need to be more of a man. That's that's what we're trying to do. The very reason this decentralized, industry exists is we need to establish independent cyberspace.

Hi, everyone. And the audience of blockchain soldiers and Sujian here, founder and CEO of MASK Network. I jumped in crypto around like 2015, 2016 when I was like a student, like a freshman, sophomore student, like The US for my, undergrad study. And before that I was actually a journalist. I was independent journalist. I'm still writing a lot about like how I view, the internet relationship between internet and sovereign state. I wrote a lot about like political stuff and, and, and geopolitics, and then eventually I, become very interested in crypto. I also got background in, again, I got background in computer engineering. I studied my undergrad in the state. I figured out like, okay, crypto is very interesting. Bitcoin is very interesting. I was born in Shanghai. I was born in origin from Shanghai. And as some of, the crypto OG or east OG might know that Ethereum have its early days in Shanghai that, in the, in the, in the bear market of 2014, 2015, the EF almost round up money and they start to raise, try to raise, you know, try to try to try to like OGs from the East, they start to raise in Shanghai and there are several, early investor, institutional early investor, bought Ethereum, token around $1 And I was related and enclosed to this group of people and figured out, oh my god, Ethereum is also very interesting. You start, you can start to write something on top of blockchain and make it like a law, right? And make it immutable. And what if we can do other things, you know, other than financial activities? And I start to dig in this area more and more. And in '20 in late twenty sixteen, 2017, I just, you know, decided to drop off from my college. I was 21, started doing something on top of the decentralized web, which I believe in the replace somehow replace the Internet or or or build the Internet. And and I wanna do something about social network or like consumer network or like say non financial use case of crypto. And that's why I started MAS network. And in 2021, we are lucky that we launched our token and went really well in 2021 bull market. It went up to like 2,800,000,000.0 and it will definitely, it's a bubble. And, we also, you know, we are just like, relatively, we are like more, optimistic in long term, but less optimistic in short term. So we we we just told our shareholders and the investor, like, oh, if you wanna cash out, it's fine. But we wanted you guys to stay to help the younger generation to help this industry. And most of our, like, early investors stay and become, long term partner of us. And we start to start our own venture on that, now it's, like, quite common, like, every major chain is doing their own venture on. But as, decentralized social network DAO, it's still quite uncommon. We start our venture arm. Now it's over 100,000,000 AUM. And we do grants. We do donations. We definitely do more, also do more investing incubating, and invest and help the other projects. But overall, I think the the non financial use case of cryptocurrency or non financial use case of cryptographic or blockchain, it's just so undervalued, especially if you look into the, in the social aspects, no matter social network or social impact. It's still largely undervalued. So that's our story. We start in I got the idea in 2015, and then JobPal, 2017, started, you know, doing this thing as a full time project. And we were lucky then, we got a lot of return from the market. We're also here to stay and build many things. Yeah.

Like put it this way, so if, you know, just just say manage, what if, like, what if one day Elon just wakes up and says, hey, Twitter is going to be decentralized? You know, what? He's going to have he's going to have the resolve. He's going to have money to have the best engineer, right? Just just say he wakes up. And and and when when we start this thing, it's not Elon. It's Jack. And he already wake up. He already woke up with the Bitcoin dream. So let's say he wake up one day, and then Zuckerberg wake up one day with, like, Instagram and Seren. Right? Already have threads. And and back in our days when we start in 2016, there was no threads. There was no attempt of Instagram doing decentralization or Twitter or Facebook. But but they already somehow sign in wake up and just say one day they wake up early. And they have all different decentralized or relatively centralized protocols there. Threats using MatSTAM, ActivityPAP, and Twitter, I don't know what's going to use. Right? BlueSky, maybe, Noster, maybe. And then there's, like, Blockchain, like Silicon Valley people using, Verkastor and lens, like more creator economy and European people and Asian people, maybe it will be a disaster because like, how can you communicate between those guys? Those protocols? It are you actually making it worse? Yeah. I mean, I think it's actually making it worse. But it doesn't mean we should not do that. That means, like, someone should able to, connect that as a metadata of the networks and, and, and, and create a bridge between the web two and web three, no matter like web four or web five. And when we start this thing, we figure out that we need to create this bridge. And otherwise, most of the people just stack their data, stack their, you know. Not not only the data, your grandma and your grandpa, your friends, your college friends, your normal friends are gonna stack in the Web2 network. Are you gonna just leave or do what? Are you gonna just pay them $5 for account? I think it's a lot of problem to solve. We didn't expect that, you know, there will be Lance or Farkasster when we start in 2016, but we saw their Stimet. There there was Stimet, like, created by BM, the same CEO of the same creator of EOS. He was a he was a, you know, OG figure back in time. We know there's other attempts. We know there's activity path. Activity path is now it's part of the standard of Tim Berners Lee's, like, worldwide web consortium. And the largest and the largest, like that time, the largest app they're using, ActivityPad was Mattson, around 2036. And we saw there's different protocols. And then we figured out, oh my God, they probably need to be solved. And we need to create an overtop layer, on top of different things. Think about this way, like, a smart, a a smartphone system, like Web two point zero, like mobile internet or interactive internet, that create, that brain has the mobile phone, the smartphones, iPhones, and Androids. And these things extract away carriers and ISPs and different kind of, like, three letters, four letters, things you can they don't want to that the user has learned. You know, they don't need to learn what is modem, what is ISP. They just need to use something on top. And there's something on top can communicate between those phones, like, no matter it's a Google phone, Samsung phone, or iOS phone. But but but that's that's something smart that time. Right? You connect people, and you don't lock in people, because they use AT and T. But unfortunately that created more work garden, than we expected ten years ago. When when we saw the iPhone thing, we're like, oh my god, this is gonna crack down the work garden of, cell phone carrier. No. It created more work garden. So when I started the MAS network, I wanted to, I wanted to create something that I'm able to communicate between, between Instagram, Twitter, or over the top of Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook, or of like WeChat online. And, and ends up we start trying from Twitter because, because the, the, the trade community or nerdy community was on Twitter. And also because that Jack was the, was quite supportive, not only like our ideas, but like the general ideology of decentralization. But as today, we still view like MASQ is a missing piece, a missing part of the puzzle that, we'd love to, yeah, we definitely love to. We're trying to do our own social graph, social protocol. But when we do that, we try to make sure that we align and able to bridge to all the other platforms as long as they have, an endpoint, they have an API, they have, Westbury, like, open open DAO, we've been able to bridge them together. If they're super close ended, like we chat today, we might have no idea how we're gonna work, but our idea is try to connect everything and create a master and meta networks of people. So that's the goal of mass network, you know, they put a mask on every scene. So you're going to look to see them under the mask. Yeah. So that's our idea. Yeah. So it is, it is a social network, but it's also different that we try to connect different scenes. We try to mask Twitter, whatever. On top of it, we try to create a different layer.

but in order to, in order to just, you know, in order to go there, you need to abandon what you did for the, you know, the path of your life and abandon everything and, you know, leave your grandma and your college friend there. Right. And just let's go to the utopia. Don't bring them. And and there's no one offered a solution that, oh, you know, like it's not really 100% utopia, but connect to some utopia, but somehow there's a way you can pack them. And masks is the way to pack them. And then there's there's problem that, you know, if if somehow we just end up landing Verkastor, you know, it's cool. But it's it's Ethereum. I'm a big Ethereum fan. I love EVM. But, like, what if that guy really wants Solana or Tom? I mean, whatever, you know. And there's no way to say, hey, dude, we can actually pack you back to Solana. There's no one doing that. We didn't finish the whole roadmap but we are just trying to bridge everything as we can. And over the years we realized this is not a prop, this is not, this is not possible with just one single project. We need to fund other ones systematically. We need to grant and invest and donate systematically and let the younger generation figure out this missing part. But we are just building a master plan that, you know, people can people can create different piece of it and then connect them together. It's always about that. So that's the painful thing, when we asked me around decentralized social networks. It's doing better, way better than we expect in 2016. In 2016, there's only cement and a math stone on activity path. And over the years, we we are lucky that we are financially very successful. We've become one of the major donor of Matt Stone. And and then we are, you know, again, we are doing all these investment and public good things. But we also frustrated to see it's become very siloed. The decentralized social network become very siloed. If I'm on the roster, how can I talk to someone on Ethereum? Right? That's yeah. That's, that's that's our feeling. Yeah.

to allow these different protocols to come together. We have to, you know, it's many years of work. And now, now, like, MAS, the main product, the main product is the extension, right, on the, on the OG side. Because the young generation people definitely, like me, like my generation, definitely use more mobile phone. But for crypto traders and OG, PGP lever and cryptographic lever, they will use, desktop. So yeah, MASCAD, its extension is doing well. And, you know, we have some OG that really love us. They use our wallet to, or our infra to store, or custody a lot of money, self custody a lot of money and do that, you know, every day tipping on Twitter, RedPocket on Twitter, FLOP trading on Twitter. But on the other side, we have different, entities creating different new projects under, under the MAS style. We have the Firefly, Firefly. Social, which is an all you can win social app, trying to solve some of the problems. Like, what if I have all these accounts? What if I want to use my Twitter to to deal with my forecast or lens or blue sky or master? It's already, like, all in one. You can use your Twitter to log in, and it's, like, you know, compatible. You can do cross posting. And then we are likely to have Vitalik as one of the, I think he's at DAU now. Yeah. He's a he's a active DAU, and a lot of his posts, for Castor is using, Firefly. And on the other side, we're trying to, create, aggregating DID protocol. And, again, it's the same problem like, oh, I have ENS, and you have, like, the Solana thing or whatever you have in the Reddit and you have the GitHub, and there's other people have linking. You know, super professional people, they only use linking. How can we aggregate your IDs? There was some attempt from Keybase, if you remember the Keybase around 2014, 2015 Mhmm. That there's attempt to aggregating all of these things in a centralized way on Keybase. But we are, you know, we are more open minded when we make it like a protocol. So we spin off the NextID. It's still under mask. We haven't raised any money. It's still, like, 100% open source for free protocol right now. You can check out wesley, wesley.bio or Nexo ID because there's so many DID. You know, in in the bull market, there's, like, ten, twenty different projects doing DID. Again, it make it worse than email, you know, because even even the Google email, the Gmail and the Microsoft one, Hotmail, they can touch each other. But how how our DID touch each other, so we have to aggregate them. Then then we saw there's so many, like, Fox, and, you know, entrepreneurs and young engineers, they need help during the beer market. Because the VC just leave and they just disappear. They went to AI or something. And I was from AI. I was doing, I was doing autonomous car as my first job. I was doing AI a lot, computer vision stuff. So, yeah, I'm fine. It's fine. I love all these innovations. I personally have some, you know, have some enjoy investing in this area, but, I just feel like someone should stay and and using both nonprofit and for profit ways. Now we we have a nonprofit. We have DAO. So if you want to do something, right, as a grant, right, as grant or proposal, maybe we're gonna give you a grant. There's, you know, independent folks, and there's, teams that look look into those, proposals. We have granted over a few million dollars worth of token in many many MASK or CRM. And then what you you know, when you just, you know, realize this this might not be a a public project. Maybe this is gonna be a a new commercial project. You know, launch a project, launch a company, launch a token. You wanna raise money. We have our venture vehicle that that we can invest in this thing, and there's separate team running the venture vehicle. But, again, the largest holder of the venture vehicle, you know, by law is a nonprofit. But now we have to make it, like, separate payment entity, beauty entity because because the American, compliance American, I think, like, punch down of crypto. But eventually, it's gonna be, like, some endowment fund invest in nonprofit, invest in the for profit entity. And then we've been able to add the cash flow to keep doing this, like, donations. And over the years, we also realized there's so many, like, non Web3, non token, non crypto innovation are super important to, this community. People just, you know, ignore them. For example, like, Mattstown. It is not a crypto social network and they probably don't like cryptocurrency, but, it's a lot of, like, important things happen there. You know, even it's sad to say, but even, like, even Donald Trump is using that, right? So using the fork of Matt Stone. And, so we we donate to the Matt Stone new foundations, not really a super big donor, but I think we're one of the, one of the few, long term institutional big donors. We did the largest one time donation to them, but we're probably gonna do more to other non profit. The CMC applies more, journalism, you know. Because one of the reason Twitter tick off is terrorism. That's become the the the really the really source of news, right? No matter during the COVID, during the war, during a revolution, right? That's what happened. And we saw that the original Twitter team, no matter no matter, like, before Jack or after Jack come back or before Elon, even right now, even with Elon right now, they are still spending a lot of effort trying to keep the content as it is. Right? It's definitely not getting better. It's probably getting worse, but it's a lot of effort. And you see the the value of journalism, no matter if they don't like them or not. So we are donating to the J school. There there's not too much people donating to J school these days. We just announced, probably gonna announce a partnership with UK UC Berkeley, J school. And there's many other things we want to do as a long term donation because that's the people who wouldn't gonna use the social network. If you're building a decentralized social media social network and those most censored people are the journalists and activists if they don't even use it, okay, what's the point? You know? Let let your crypto friend trade something. So, we we don't. We we we we didn't figure out the the the ultimate, you know, secret sauce of success, but we just long term and here to, you know, figure out the different parts and try to put them together. And if we fail, we just donate to other people and invest in other folks. We might be able to, you know, hand over this part. Okay. We're not so professional. We're not really so smart on this part. Can't do that. So that's not what we do. Yeah.

is the protocol that you guys are Yes. It's one of our sub entity that we created, basically, identity, aggregation page for Warrior, web two, web three, web five identities. Like you can connect your, GitHub linking, like GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, Ethereum, Solana, Forkastor Lens, not starting to come in. So like no matter which chain you prefer, which social network, aggregate them together. The ultimate goal and one of the goal is like, we are one of the goal we get already testing on our Firefly app because Firefly is our reflection mobile app and we're aggregating social contents. One thing we're testing with NextID team is our internal team within TheMask. We're testing that is if I follow you or I follow the blockchain socialist account on Twitter, I may able to automatically follow you, whatever other social platform you want to use, you know, because you have the identities, your own identities. And then Agree. Then the follow relationship should be mapping to these networks. Just like if I email you, it's actually emailed to like, Gmail or Google, and they can forward this thing within their service. And that's, the same we wanna achieve for for the the master plan. Yeah. But, we can try, I think our audience, you know, your audience can love to have a try westuite.bio. You can search metalliceth or search sujiin.eth. Yeah. You're going to see my, GitHub keep base rated, you know?

Yeah. Because of course I have to. Yeah.

pressuring these kind of like large incumbents. Yeah, we did many like cool hacking things. Not really say hacking, but like tricky way. And it worked very well back in the days. And, recently there's many, similar attempts, right? Back in the days when, around 2019, 2020, we launched the first MASK version in 2019. Well yeah, coincidentally it's like July, of course. Yeah so it's the Independence Day and I'm a big believer of the, of the declaration of independence of cyberspace. If you if you remember that, it's not from the EFF founder. I'm a big believer of that, of that, decorations. So we launched, it's also like by accident, we launched on dried force. And 2020 was also our lucky year that we able to onboard many cool guys like Vitalik and Michal, who's also Michal is also cofounder of Ethereum. He he was donating us on Bitcoin. And then there's other MakerDAO. That time was before, again, before DeFi summer. So MakerDAO only have 5,000 user of DAI, 5,000 globally of the DAI token, DAI stablecoin on on on the whole internet. And we're just doing the red red pocket campaign. It was really amazing growth because people just love to like not only Chinese people, not only Asian, like all people would love to have like little jobs like air jobs whatever. They're just gonna say hey what's going on with the maker account? They have the Red Pocket. Oh Vital is tweeting, great. Oh sounds free money. And we're embedding in in Twitter, and we're also using the UI UX rendering in Twitter to make sure it's not a scam. It's it's not a fake because you can verify this is a cryptographic key signed by Vitalik or signed by some OGs. Right? It's like a blink today. It's like the blink of Solana. They also try to overtop of Twitter, but it's only on Solana. But it's also like the frame of Verkaster. But again, Verkaster's frame is only, only within the Verkaster and webcast on, like, apps. But we are trying to be more open at whatever chain. That time people still use EVM radio one. You can just whatever stable coin can just tip out their friends. It's one viral. And then we launched the Sloppy on, on Twitter, partnered with, you know, using Uniswap. And that was like before the, I think before Uniswap launched this token. And that was the perfect timing for, for people trying out. And ends up, I think, OG trader is going to use it, but, but like, you know, retail trader, they don't use it because they just, you know, still prefer to exchange, use exchange $10 no gas fee. But a lot of people love it and we then launch our own token on Twitter. You know, we call it initial Twitter offering. I do see a lot of, I mean, I can't disclose, but I know a lot of people in Twitter actually are aware of that. I'm quite surprising that time in in in time before Elon and how Twitter is open minded or maybe they just don't have any management. You know? I have no idea. They just think, oh, enough for Twitter offering. Kwee. Let's do it. And we launched the initial Twitter offering on Twitter. Not really on Twitter. It's over top of Twitter. It has nothing to do with Twitter, the company, or Twitter platform. But it has things to do with the people that are using Twitter. So it's over top of, Web two point zero. Just like Web two point zero is over top of Web one point zero or mobile phone carrier or, like, ISPs. And we're able to achieve the largest I think like the the moment we did ITO able to like, you know, round like press the the Ethereum blockchain efficiency and to ever win this in Ethereum history before the NFT hype. We're able to achieve like 4,000 gwei. Right now it's 1 gwei. That time was like 4,300 gwei for the IPO. People just love it. And also we prove that, you know, social network is larger than financial network. Because that time, you know, if you spend a lot of gas fee, you can still do things on Ethereum. You say, hey, I'm really rich. I want to deposit money on DeFi. Spend some gas so you can still do that. But if we monetize people on social network, boom, they're gonna jam. You know, instantly they're gonna jam. And that's the power of social network because people have mouths. Now more people have mouths and more people have bank account. And that's, that's gonna stay true for many centuries. And then, and we, we prove that it's gonna work and then we launched the MAS token. And now we saw the, the blanks and, and, frames. And that's really cool ideas. I think we should support them. But we don't want to see it to be platform locking or chain locking. I mean, there's no reason to have it like as a chain locking system. So we are, we're backing, David Fran, David Ferron. He's doing the open frame. We'll become the investor and helping them. I think he's doing great things with open standard frame. And and there's no one solving the problem of blank on mobile. Right? Because blank is say, hey. We inject some code base in the Twitter page, Chrome extension. But what if, you wanna just, you know, tip someone on the mobile phone Twitter? You cannot do that. But we managed to do that through Fireflies. And that in next version, this version you already can tip anyone. Next version, no matter it's blank or a friend, no matter it's, Twitter, then for Castor, you're being able to use that. Eventually you can own your social graph. So that's, our strategy. We have different things. I think one thing we learned, like one, one project we learned a lot is like analysis. Analysis is doing great. They have the door knob to save and they had a cow swab. Yeah. We might learn more strategy from them. But we wanna do like, oh, more about the social network, more about people using social things. Yeah. And that's our goals. And also more actively grinding and investing.

to understand, I guess. I also feel like, you know, if our industry only stuck with the financial revolution, it's, it's going to be, it's going to be boring. It's going to be like, then, then I would just say like Bitcoin is here, it's overhyped. If we only have financial innovations and over the past year, we've been doing financial innovations, like how how do Bitcoin replace gold, digital gold, you know, like ETFs, how you see them, pay, you know, become the best thing for your business to do a contract. But we should not just only do, business contract, we should create social contract. And then social contract create governments and government and the people, and they also bond the people and the state. That is the social contract. If Ethereum is using or like small contract and now other things are using for social contract, what is the way, what is the place you can discuss that? You can modify that on Twitter. But again, like Twitter is centralized and you are discussing a centralized place about, like, your election. Now it's not gonna be fun. Right? And and I think it's time that we need something like this. And it's also time to accept that we need to have, a place to connect everyone. You know, you don't you don't want to have different, like, small bars and say, hey, we're the for castor people. We're, you know, creating our own social network, but just join our bar, pay $5 at the front. We should have like a public forum. Yeah. And also that public forum should be able to connect everyone. That's what we're trying to do. It's definitely much more harder. And then that's why we have to create different vehicles for different parts of it. Yeah.

I think there's still like not enough indications of how to use it, right? Because like, again, decentralized come with responsibility, like come with freedom, but also responsibility and liabilities, right? You might just like wallet, self custody wallet, you might just lose account and decentralized social network you might lose your key. There's definitely people trying to create like tools of recovery, but the current, the current way of designing is actually contradicting with many, many laws like CCPA or GDPR. Like, oh shit my things are on chain. How can I delete it? Right? And then, it's okay right now we ignore them. It's okay right now that we ask like your early staff to ignore them. But but but there's a chart. There's a chart recently saw on the Twitter, and there's other, like, Asian Asian Internet. I saw there's a chart about social, like, top 10 social network by the amount of users. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, probably Instagram, close to TikTok and Telegram, WeChat WeChat Telegram line, Kakao line, Korea and Japan, and Weibo, which is also in China, and and Questia also in China. If you look into the numbers, if you look into the the valuations and and stock market, because a lot of them are, are listed. Right? A lot of them are listed. If you look into that, you figure out, like, the Weibo, New York Stocks Chain or Nasdaq, they're probably only, like, 2,000,000,000, 1,000,000,000 ish. And now like the venture capital is is, venture capital is is valuing the decentralized social network. No matter in the in the liquid market or or VC market valuing them as pretty high valuations even though the user number is quite small. This is okay as long as someone willing to pay the money. It's okay. But but as as we are catching up in in evaluations, as we are catching up in evaluations, we're not catching up in the user numbers. We're also not catching up telling them their liabilities and telling them, okay, this is not, you know, this is not, not possible to comply with CDPR. And and and we might need to work around. We might need to, have a movement and tell people if I own my data, I, you know, purposely put that on chain. I cannot delete it. Right? There's many things we need to do. I think there's not enough, preparation for that. And, a lot of, a lot of those side projects are, are, are really centralized, like, you know, and, and, and that's, again, I think that's not gonna win in the long term. Yeah. And a lot of these side projects are also like super certain chain maxi, Nasr, you know, like, if you ever mentioned to an Nasr guy, they oh, we're gonna support, Ethereum EBM tipping on Nasr. They're gonna just, you know, mad. Yeah. But, again, if you tell the forecaster, same guys, like, oh, what if I wanna do Lightning Network? They're gonna they're gonna yell at you for whatever reason. But, I mean, again, if you ever try Lightning Network, the the the the the the address is like email. Right? Address is like email, like a@b.com. It might compatible with MPC wallet. It might compatible with a not with a wallet, but you might may find out ways to do it. And then there's nothing to stop you, to do that. And then again, there's there's Russian Russian immigrants using Telegram. Right? And there's always, like, Southeast Asian, Middle East people, and Chinese people, like, even Korean people. A lot of people use Telegram, and they have this on chain tone. The the chain might be still, like, centralized. And by the way, we are investor of Tong, and we are trying to support them no matter the chain is centralized or not because it's just, like, two, three years old. We we need to give them some time. But everyone was talking about, like, oh, we need to build a censorship resistant, social network. In a way, like, Telegram is censorship resistant. Right? Because no matter they're they're not being back to forth end to end encrypted. But I did find the truth. At least in certain scenario, they prove that they don't want to collaborate with corrupt government to delete the activists. They prove several times And and and there's something they're doing. There's something Chen they're doing. There's something like Boss they're doing. But again, in in in the crypto decentralized social network, gangs of people, they don't they don't bother to say, hey, what if we're gonna integrate Telegram? No. They don't do that. For some reason, I cannot understand. Maybe because if they do that, people are gonna, you know, lower the valuation because it's become part of the time when consistent. So, but I think we need to be realistic, right? That's a long term struggle we need to face and we better not to pick a side too early. You know, there's only one side to pick whether you're supporting censorship or whether you're supporting centralization. If you support decentralized, censorship resistant, if you support free speech, you should be able to stand with every protocol that's trying to do that and learn the best and tell them not to do the Mexican thing. That's how it stands. And, you know, to do that, we are trying to structure our entity into many different vehicles, into nonprofit and for profit and developing, mentoring, donating team, granting. Yeah. Long term, I think it's a long term same. The first, the first stablecoin idea, like the first crypto backing stable coin idea, like, like fiat backing stable coin idea was not on Ethereum. It is, Bitshare. If, if you remember that was like many years ago, there's even BizCYN, like someone had big boss to do the RNB, crypto, RNB stablecoin. Definitely is not when when definitely is not going anywhere. But then the maker community learned that, you know, Ruined was part of that community and learned that and moved to decentralized ecosystem Ethereum, and that, that work. Yeah. I think we are in that process of consumer crypto or, or non financial social network. We are just still experimenting. It's more important to be open minded.

will react to that? I think they they're gonna definitely do their best to stop, stop, you know, the Web3. And they they have many vehicles to do that. So no. For now, honestly, Web3 social network or Web3 consumer, crypto network, that's too small to to bother the Web3, Web2 giants. But, you know, like, small example, AdBlock. AdBlock, it's a simple app. It's an extension. There's no fancy technology. Just, like, match the URL and match the HTML. If you found an HTML content, some ads just deleted and remove it, it it creates some problem for Google, right, for ads revenue. And they have a lot of problem with the publishers. Like, mostly the the The US publisher, like, what's the general in your times and also the European publisher, they don't like it either. You know, they don't like Google, but they don't like Adblock either because that's the way they can get the ad revenue. Combined together, there's some time, I think if I remember correctly, there's a certain time a few years ago, like, Google was trying to change Chromium. You know, code is Chromium, which is open source. Again, they control the open source standard because they they they have this thing as a standard. They don't make money, but they this is a standard. And they try to make it less user friendly for AppLoc to survive. And and I think I'm I'm afraid the same thing can happen for crypto, you know, web things like MetaMask. And you already we already saw the SEC, you know, pointing against consensus for MetaMask. But we are here to stay because we are, like, again, long term. And then we always we also realize that, you know, like, there's also, like, old standard committee you have to play play a role in. We become part of the, ECMA TC39, which is the standard committee for JavaScript. We're we're we've been there for, like, four years now. We're trying to say, hey. Okay. Maybe we just, you know, try to change some standard for JavaScript. Because JavaScript right now is pretty dangerous. There's no, sandbox, and there's some people doing the sandbox called Secure ECMAScript. They'll also be part of the TC39. We're trying to support these guys, say, hey, we can just create a more better standard. My latest theory, my latest feeling, like, is Ethereum Foundation is the new World Wide Web Consortium. Right? When the World Wide Web Consortium started, Tim Murphy was decent. He didn't take any, you know, amount of money. He just he's still, like, he's still living a decent life, but he's not really, like, millionaire or whatever, like Bill Gates, you know, or or Mark Anderson. He's the inventor. And I think I think, I agree like Vitalik. I I feel the same for him. You know, I didn't have chance to email Satoshi, so I don't really have too much personal feeling, but Vitalik, I have a lot of respect to him. But just like how the World Wide Web Consortium and ECMA and all the standard committee was now controlled largely influenced and controlled by Google, Apple, or no, Tencent, Facebook. I am afraid that, like, one day, say, foundation or the other, like, foundations will be will be largely influenced by that. And I think that's not gonna be solved by one, philosopher King, like Vitalik. And and we need to have backup plans. Mhmm. And we are doing backup plans. We're just allocating what we have, which we which we should have is it's quite limited. You know, we're we're we're in some sense resourceful, but compared to them, we're, you know, quite limited resources. But we're allocating what we can to just prevent this from happening. Make sure now make sure that we are not on the wrong side, just creating more siloed communities. Yeah, we need to be more of a man. That's, that's what we're trying to do. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, you know, like, it'll be, it'll be great for, any young founder that's from the West that really live in the in the East for a few years and speak some language like like metallic or like Satoshi. I don't know, he definitely speaks some Japanese, right? And and probably not Japanese, but he definitely speaks Japanese in some way. And it's going to be very helpful because you understand how the word and how society works in different ways. It may, it may look the same but it's very different internal and inside. In the core it's going to be far different from each other but still it's all humankind. It's all, like, you know, society and it's all politics and our, you know, money stuff. You need to spend some time to learn that. So I was, you know, I was born in China, so I was spending, like, my teenager, some of my teenage years in the state and then moved to Japan when I was, like, early 20s in Singapore, many other countries as a nomad. But on the other side, I don't think, a lot of those, super hot and top tier Westerner projects, they ever, they ever had chance to do that. And they better do it earlier, as a young, like as a young kid. Otherwise you always have like a fantasy of how the other part of the world look like, you know, like you're gonna only, you're gonna only realize career as part of the kimchi place, you can pop the token and realize the Chinese people have a lot of people buying my new machine. No, it's not. You have to, you know, you have to because because if if the whole ideology, if the whole I think this is my opinion, but I share this opinion with many other industry OGs. I think this the very reason this industry exists, the very reason this decentralized, industry exists is we need to establish independent cyberspace. You know, it's a little bit different from network state. It might not be a state at war, but in order to have a state, you need to have a space that is independent. Just like the American, North American continent, it should be independent from the British colonized state, right? That's that's and that's one of the end goals of our industry, to create the internet, the separate internet and state, create an independent space. If you want to create independent space, in a separate space, you need to figure out where is the weak spot. Where is the part that the government have less control or where is the part that government has a lot of control, a lot of info. Certainly you need to find the answer, you know, in both The US and China. And maybe the answer is not in there, but the answer is we really live to these places. That's what I'm trying to do. Like as a young kid, as a journalist, I was like wondering, oh what's going on in the state? It was like twenty sixteen election, right? I was, I was there and I was like wondering what's going on. And when, and then, and then when trying to change the constitution, I was there as well. So look into that and figure out that where's the weak spot. Right? And then figure out this weak weak weak spot and you create some things that are able to penetrate this weak spot and eventually leads to the independence of the cyberspace. Right? Like maybe financial network is the weak spot because most of the people in the world want to hold US dollar, but they don't have bank account. So, yeah, you know, decentralized gold, decentralized finance, they only have nice interest rate, but they don't trust local bank. That's a weak spot. Maybe they want to invest in some fancy project, but they cannot invest in The US stock market. So that's why people invest on chain. Maybe they want to put it on regulated stuff. That's why they want to do MIM. But these are the weak spot of the offline society of the government. And in order to find this weak spot, you need to travel a lot and be a nomad. Not really sit in your Valley office and just stick into the user numbers. That is that is wrong. That's not going to give you any anything meaningful. Right? That's that's what I'm feeling. Yeah. For for China and for the West, for The US. Because I've been living in both countries And then I'm exploring other, other countries as well. And I think that's very important that it will solve a lot of problems. It will solve a lot of questions. You don't you won't ask questions like why people still use Tron because, yeah, well, there's still people in Africa using that every day. Don't care about decentralization or right. You need to be there. You need to talk to these people. Yeah. And then just just think about, okay, like, China is China's, like, social networks definitely have a lot of problem with the censorship. Why these people are not moving to decentralized social network yet? And then you realize, how can they deposit the gas fee if there's no local exchange, right? There's more offshore exchange built by a Chinese farmer, but there will be no local exchange. If you charge people gas fee, how can you let them use them? Right? Use these social networks. That's why the most widely used decentralized social network by the Chinese, actually, is in Maison. There's several community and they've been cracked down several times. Yeah. And then you look into the thread, right? They're they're forking Maxtun. They're compatible try to be compatible with these Fediverse. If you really lose that, if you really want to talk to people, to users, you realize actually it's not a Taiwanese people using thread. And there's a lot of Korean people using thread. And there's a reason, right? And you need to figure out what is the reason and to build your social protocols or your, bridge between what you're doing in Brooks Week. So that's, I think, the thing MASC team, core team, and me, and now they're, like, our advisor and our community is doing very well. Because we're, we're here to study. We're here to really look into people's eyes to figure out what is the problem, what are things about SAP here to using that. And and I think I'm I'm I'm kind of certain to say that most of other projects, they're stuck in ideology wars. They never talk to the real people. Yeah. So that's, I think that's our advantage and that's why I love your podcast as well. Yeah.

protocols like Mastodon? Oh it's not against, but if you want to open I think this thing will come to The US. Because like, remember there's several quotes from Julia Sound that there's a, you know, dangerous slippery, dangerous slippage that the country is going to copy paste each other. And The US is definitely looking to China, China is looking to The US. And Australia has already banned, I think, if I remember correctly, Australia banned a lot of those cryptographic technologies, people are gonna follow. Say in China, in Mainland China, there's no thing that bans running maps down, but this law requires you to KYC the maintainer of the Maxtun service, right? And which which I think the Americans are copying as KYC everywhere wallet. And if you're the maintainer of a messed up service and there's some shit happening on your service, you'll be the one responsible for the content, which I think there's, there's argument about them, you know, like the argument about the fiction two seventy, right? That's the, that's the like, infra providers, whether they need to be responsible for the content. Yeah, there's a lot of argument and that's, that's the official way. It's not saying, oh, if you dare to post anything decentralized, you can't. No, it's just by KYC and KYB the maintainer. And then that's, that's the way it gradually cracked down those who want to create a decentralized social network. That's my feeling. And, and I was, I was like very careful, looking to what's going on in decentralized social network. I'm afraid that lots of these alternative decentralized social network, they did not understand the key of censorship resistant. Right? If you only allow certain white label maintainer of running your nodes or you want your haps or you want run your instance, like the RPC nodes, they were were were some sort of social network they were running haps. If we only allow, like, white label guys to run it. You're end up to have this problem. And and and basically, the Chinese government have the playbook for whoever wants this answer to copy. Hey, guys. Unfortunately,

One, one activist, like, group I was involved, like it was the ninety six ICU movement is around 2019 that, it's group of Chinese, like, not really Chinese, like, Asian, but many Chinese, well, including overseas Chinese, like, tech worker. They were, like, protesting against a super long working schedule, and also, they they probably don't receive the compensation for it over time, which is a which is a phenomenon. It's really bad, thing happening in the Asian country. Right? And and they protest on the GitHub. I think what GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft at that time, did is, like, they tried to make a thing survive. They tried to say, hey, we are not really friends with these governments. We tried to make you survive. And but they didn't expect that people were gonna use GitHub as a way to protest. And this thing this this this ripple called nine s x dot ICU. If I remember correctly, this is the largest the ripple with the largest, like, group of fork or the largest number of, like, star, ever existed in such a short time or period. And there's, there's a program run by GitHub that put every codebase in Atlantic, and then they actually include that thing. So in in two hundred years, when the historic you know, when when the when the when the future, like, you know, twenty first century historian is trying to look into the history, they're gonna figure out this very interesting stuff. But they this movement stuck when people tried to donate money. Because most of the donation, most of the transaction is KYC in most of the countries, no matter you're, like, overseas Chinese or whatever. And believe it or not, I don't think, like, Visa is gonna keep the secret if they do that Visa card. I don't think that's gonna keep it secret. They try to, like, they try to bow down, say, hey. Can we enter the Chinese market? I've been looking to again, I've been looking to Japan. There's local provider JCB, but Visa took, like, the the large majority of the share because they they do know how to play as a as a good boy to the governments. And they haven't achieved that in China. Doesn't mean they're not gonna copy paste the same idea. They're gonna be the good boy. So, yeah, there's nothing safe. And I was against I was against, the other members say we should send that donation. I think, no. Unless you will not accept crypto. Otherwise, I don't think there's a really safe way of donation. And with our proper funding, nothing didn't continue very well. And the Microsoft community, Microsoft employees very interestingly, Microsoft employees also created a repo that is a Microsoft worker for good, for support this movement. Say, people just, you know, tell the Microsoft executive that we should not remove this report from, GitHub. It works, and it's very fun. That's something I I participated. And and it's not on the in a decentralized social network. But, again, Git, the protocol of GitHub Git, it's decentralized because people can fork it. And even GitHub removed it, you can just fork it on your laptop and, you know, upload again. You can have the timestamp, which is not a blockchain, but you have some similar stuff. But I do think it will be a lot of, like, activist, activism activities we're gonna have in in blockchain through DAO. But in order to have that, we need to have a public forum that you can discuss. Right? And and and if we don't have that, we probably still rely on Telegram because it's still kind of reliable. We'll be a hard core in probably Cigna. But, again, we need to rely on respect these guys and try to integrate them. Not saying we've complained to do something

Yeah. If you're a developer, definitely take a look up at websuite.bio or api.websuite.bio and or or NextID. There's a lot of, like, open source free, developer tools that you can look up someone and you can see someone, like, in these aggregating together. If you're, like, a consumer or, like, audience, you wanna learn more about social network or decentralized social network, where you don't want to download, like, Kin apps, I would recommend firefly.social. It have, like, web page and mobile app on Android and iPhone. You can use your Twitter, like, for Castorhands, whatever, and we're gonna support all the major social network in one and then connect them together. Eventually, your social graph can merge into one, not including Twitter, but it will be a long term, long term play. So that's, I think if you're interested in social network, definitely have a try. Yeah.