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0:00I do believe that New York fundamentally is the financial capital of the world. And as we discussed earlier, crypto enables anybody in the world to participate in the global financial economy. And so that means that a lot of crypto companies and a lot of people that are interested in building the future of finance are all based in New York. And so I think it’s really, really special for a conference like this to be based in New York because it really is the convergence of people coming from all over the world to a like learn about what does it mean for us to build a frontier.
0:25and I think everybody who is in New York and everybody who wants to come to New York has sort of like a similar vision of basically bringing, improving the system and so I think being in New York is a very symbolic way of saying that like, okay, you know, the traditional rails have worked very, very well but now we’re gonna be back, we’re gonna go back to the same place that the traditional rails have sort of expanded and we’re gonna make that even better. People that love to be decentralized, you know what I’m saying? Just for y’all. And also rest in peace Sugar Plum, that’s my Shih Tzu, she died about 10 years ago. Appreciate you. Woohoo!
0:57Yeah, you have questions, right? Like, what did he just drink? Why is he honoring his late Shih Tzu at a basketball game? Who are the people even being decentralized? What does that mean? Well, that’s why I’m here. Let’s find out.
1:18New York doesn’t ease you in. You step out and you’re already in it. A few million strangers, all going somewhere all at once. I grew up a couple hours away in Tilly, close enough that New York was never some distant idea. It was a city you took the bus to or trained to, a place I get to go and see my friends from high school and college. That’s the thing about this city, it’s stacked. Bodegas under glass towers, old New York holding up the new one. And most new people have no idea what the old one even looked like. Oh, not you, sorry. This time I linked up with some friends out here in the city. People are already connected. Already part of what I came for. An Ethereum conference. The kind of room where we’re negotiating where technology is going.
1:58But before any of that, you eat. You walk. You let the city remind you why people around the world dream of being here. And somewhere between these streets and the conference floor, that’s where the story really starts My name is Maceo Whatley and I’m the founder of We Them Media Over the last five years, we’ve been researching how cryptocurrency and decentralized technology can empower everyday people around the world And that’s why I attended the Ethereum conference in New York City a couple weeks ago To better understand and share with you all how Ethereum is working to show Wall Street it is ready to be the global settlement layer for financial systems
2:32And we’re here to show you what it means, let’s go
2:36Alright, sick. And so what’s your name? My name is Maggie and I’m the COO at Unlink. Okay, so tell us about Unlink. So Unlink builds privacy infrastructure for companies that want to use blockchains privately and you can basically move money across any EVM blockchain fully privately and compliantly so it’s for companies that want to use, yeah, an EVM chain. Okay, and what is it to be a COO? What it means to be a COO, so our team is five people and there’s three engineers and then there’s a CEO who takes care of basically everything in the company And then there’s a COO who basically takes care of everything that’s not technical in the company.
3:09So everything from marketing, operations, go-to-market, partnerships, producing swag. We actually ran out of t-shirts, as you can see, and we also don’t have any more caps because everybody came and took the caps. So yeah, I basically do everything that’s related to building up our community, talking to clients, marketing, operations, just everything in between that’s not related to coding and and using cloud code or anything to like build our product. That’s me. So, yeah. Very cool. And so I talked to people obviously outside the conference earlier today and they want to know what is crypto? Oh, okay. That’s a really hard question to answer. What is crypto?
3:46It’s an expensive question. It’s a very expensive question. I need to think about how to answer this well. I think that first and foremost, the biggest value add of crypto, I think, is the ability for anyone anywhere in the world
4:06And I do think that crypto sort of enables anyone in the world to participate in the global financial system and whether you are in a country in Africa, whether you’re in a country in Asia, whether you’re from North America, wherever you are, you can really participate and be a part of the global financial economy without crypto, it would be really hard for you to do that because the rails in order to do that are very clunky and very slow. and very expensive. So I think that is what crypto enables people to do, is to participate in the global financial economy. Okay. And so what are ways that people could do that? Like if I’m 20, I’ve never used crypto
4:41in my life, or I’m 60, I’ve never used crypto in my life. What do I do with crypto as a New Yorker? Yeah. If you are a 20-year-old and you’ve never interacted with crypto before, I think first, there’s ways to actually make money in crypto. So there’s a lot of different
5:02There’s a lot of opportunities in crypto for a career and jobs where you can learn a lot of things about the frontier of like financial technology and then also be able to make money out of like building a career in this industry. And then the other way that you can interact with crypto is obviously by holding crypto. And so a lot of different assets are kind of like a store of value. And so, for instance, crypto really enables people to invest in things that you can interact with crypto. you previously cannot invest in, whether it’s because of your geographic location or whether it’s because of your age.
5:32If you’re 20 or even if you’re younger than 20 and you want to participate in certain investments and you want to put your money where your mouth is at, then you can actually use crypto to basically buy into things that you really believe in. So now there’s this whole trend of tokenized assets or just tokenized stocks. And so for instance, if you are not 21 or if you’re not of legal age wherever you are, maybe you can’t open an investing account. Maybe you can’t open a brokerage account because there’s limitations or restrictions
5:59So we can actually create a crypto wallet or create a crypto account and then actually be able to invest in different tokenized assets that you believe in or invest in companies that you believe in that are basically tokenized and put on chain if you believe in them. So that’s one thing that you could do. And then as a 60 year old, if you want to receive money from other countries, from your family, for instance, and it’s like really expensive. Like if your family wants to send you $5,000, oh my gosh, now they have to pay like an extra $1,000 just to send that $5,000 to you, as someone who’s receiving money across borders,
6:29your family can essentially now send money to you instantly and also without additional fees if they’re using crypto rails. So again, you can open like a crypto account and then basically send that crypto account address to your family who then can send you money directly from overseas instantaneously so you don’t even have to wait like three to five days for that to process. Okay. And then what is ETH specifically? What is ETH? Okay, so ETH is, it’s spelled E-T-H and ETH is basically a token, it’s the native token of the Ethereum network. And so essentially ETH is something that you can invest in, it’s an asset and it’s something
7:08that you can hold if you believe in the Ethereum blockchain network. And if you believe that the Ethereum blockchain network will continue to grow and scale. And then with ETH, you can also define ETH as the Ethereum ecosystem, where there’s a lot of different people that are building new applications on the Ethereum blockchain. And so in order to use these applications on this blockchain, you would have to have some amount of ETH in your wallet in order to pay for certain services for using these applications. Okay, very sick. And what would you say differentiates the builders in the Ethereum ecosystem from traditional tech builders? Ooh, okay, I think for traditional tech builders, they, so if you’re in traditional tech, you have access to a lot of different tools and services that you can use to build products, but sometimes these traditional tools and products are actually not compatible with each other, and so maybe if you use like one tech tool and you want to build something, maybe that tech tool is all of a sudden not compatible with another tech tool, and so you actually have to make a trade-off between like what tools you use, whereas if you’re a builder within
8:16within the Ethereum ecosystem, everything is mostly composable and compatible. So we talk about this concept of composability. And so if you’re a builder on the Ethereum ecosystem and you’re building applications on Ethereum, everything that you do, everything that you integrate or add into your product is actually fully composable. So you’re actually able to treat it as a puzzle piece or a building block of different elements that you can put together in order to build something interesting. Whereas in a traditional tech world, maybe there’s some things that actually don’t match with one another and then you’re not able to put these things together. Yeah. Okay, and your message for the ecosystem or the builders?
8:47My message for the builders is to get involved. If you want to be a part of crypto, if you want to learn about crypto, the best way is to just go out and meet people. And where you can do that is you can go to conferences. If you’re based in New York, you should definitely check out all the conferences that are happening around New York. So we’re currently at ETHconf. It’s at the Javits Center from June 8th to 10th. Today’s the last day, unfortunately. But if you want to learn more about Ethereum, you should go to the ETH Global Hackathon, which is happening June 12th to 14th. So this weekend.
9:13And there’s also a lot of other events that are happening all throughout the city all the time, and so I would just encourage anyone who’s interested to actually go on Luma, there’s a bunch of like side events that are in New York and all around the world and just get involved and talk to people and introduce yourself to people, talk to people, ask them what they do, how they got into the space, and also how you can get involved. Just keep talking to people. If I were going to ask you one more thing would be why do you think it’s important in this moment that this class is in New York and that each global is holding their first converse?
9:41Why is it important or unique? Why is this happening? Why is it significant?
9:48So I do believe that New York fundamentally is the financial capital of the world. And as we discussed earlier, crypto enables anybody in the world to participate in the global financial economy. And so that means that a lot of crypto companies and a lot of people that are interested in building the future of finance are all based in New York. And so I think it’s really, really special for a conference like this to be based in New York because it really is the convergence of people coming from all over the world to A, like learn about what does it mean for us to build a frontier
10:15and B, at the frontier of financial technology what does it mean to actually go from the traditional rails that we’ve had in the past the legacy systems and how do we actually go from that to building a better system and I think everybody who is in New York and everybody who wants to come to New York has sort of like a similar vision of basically bringing, improving the system And so I think being in New York is a very symbolic way of saying that, like, okay, you know, the traditional rails have worked very, very well, but now we’re going to be back, we’re going to go back to the same place that the traditional rails have sort of expanded and we’re going to make that even better. So I think New York is the best place to hold a conference like this for that reason.
10:46And so how will you describe this moment for like the ETH ecosystem and being someone who’s worked at ETH Global is here now, obviously thinking about how people can adopt this technology. How do I, sorry, what was the question? How would you think about like this moment for Ethereum? How do I think about, like where we’re at? Okay. Ethereum’s timeline. I think we’re at an inflection point. I think that it’s been obviously a lot of, it’s been tumultuous over the last couple of years and I think Ethereum has had its ups and downs and crypto has always had its ups and downs. And I think right now AI is obviously a really big topic of discussion, but I actually do think that crypto is at an inflection point and I do think that from here on out, it’s going to be even more obvious that crypto is going to be the center of finance.
11:25And I actually think that as we go from here until, you know, the future years from now, I think that there’s going to be more and more people that want to adopt this technology simply because it’s faster, it’s cheaper, and it’s more efficient, and it’s more decentralized, and it’s actually safer. And so I think that there’s going to be a lot more companies, there’s going to be a lot more institutions, there’s going to be a lot more users that want to participate and come on to CryptoRails. So I’m very excited, actually, for what’s to come. Okay, awesome. If you say hoo-yah, it’s like how we like, you are like, say like, three, two, one.
11:54Booyah! And where can we find you on socials? Where can we tag it? Me personally? You can do whichever you want. We’re going to tag whatever you tell us. Oh, okay. To learn more about Unlink, you can go to the website, unlink.xyz. And then our Twitter is unlink underscore xyz. And then my personal Twitter is CXQMaggie. Okay, boo.
