#61: Hilmar Orth on Automating Smart Contracts

Hilmar Orth is the Founder and CEO of Gelato Network, a protocol that automates smart contract executions on Ethereum and beyond.

In this conversation, we discuss:
- Gelato Network solving dApps issues
- Automating smart contracts
- The history of dApps
- DeFi
- Web3 + NFTs
- dApps + Dexes
- L2 ETH solutions
- The importance of bots in DeFi

Gelato Network
Website: gelato.network
Twitter: @gelatonetwork
Instagram: @officialgelatonetwork

Hilmar Orth
Twitter: @hilmarxo

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Transcript

Matt Zahab: 0:14

Ladies and gentlemen, it's your host Matt Zahab and we are back with another incredible guests for today's episode. This gentleman co founded a blockchain consultancy back in 2017 that built EBM based permission networks for some of the biggest companies in the German speaking European area. After that our guests and his co founder decided it's time to transition to hack on exciting applications in the public Ethereum space, which led them to building gelato network, a protocol that automates smart contract executions on aetherium and beyond. I'm very pleased to welcome to the crypto news podcast. Hello Mr. Orth Helmer, welcome to the show.

Hilmar Orth: 0:53

Hey, man, thanks for having me.

Matt Zahab: 0:56

Very excited to have you on we got to start with two things right off the bat. Number one is the look you have you got quite a lot going on. You got the you got the nice flow, you got the hair, the heck you could be in a Pantene commercial and you got the stache too I love it. What's the what's the what's the inspiration from the flow in the stash?

Hilmar Orth: 1:17

Oh man it's just at some point in my mid 20s I was finally able to grow a beard taking 25 years for it roughly and so to feel more mature I kind of let it let the stash be there from time to time so am I my girlfriend seems to like it so that's actually

Matt Zahab: 1:41

I love it that's the reason why she loves it you know that you shave it off and what about the flow? Have you always had long luscious hair like that or is that a lockdown thing?

Hilmar Orth: 1:49

Yeah, I tried I tried different hairstyles you know I had some head shoulder but I was also like a pretty big nose in the face right and it kind of needs a counter counterbalance thing to have a decent decent look so yeah, my mother always told me long hair looks good on you and I think she's right so I keep it

Matt Zahab: 2:09

hey good Anya, you're rockin look I love it. And you are in Europe right now you're in beautiful Switzerland. What is that? Like?

Hilmar Orth: 2:16

Yes, Switzerland is awesome. It's awesome. It's We are located in Zoo also called krypto Valley here in Europe. And yeah, the awesome part of that is not only like the the Alps you have beautiful mountains and legs, but it's super crypto friendly. We incorporated our company only using crypto UCC as collateral at the registry or the official like town registry, and we're paying our taxes of our company in crypto. We are paying all of our employees in crypto, we literally are not touching the traditional banking sector at all. The only only time we needed to pay lawyers and even then we are convincing to accept crypto now. So yeah, we are living in like the full crypto life

Matt Zahab: 3:01

that's crazy. How far away are we from multiple European countries accepting crypto?

Hilmar Orth: 3:07

Wow it's like in Europe? I think Europe will probably be like most countries in Europe will be the last probably right so that's why we started also in Berlin Germany and like relocated to Switzerland because Switzerland is just much more proactive in these sort of things at the moment. And so I think we are proved still pretty far for for Europe to adopt it or like the EU countries at least to have like proper regulations around it and Switzerland as a non EU country can just move much quicker. And so they are much more practice and

Matt Zahab: 3:40

one of the tax evasion havens of the world maybe

Hilmar Orth: 3:44

they are proactive.

Matt Zahab: 3:46

They are what's the what's the golden trio? I think it's Bahamas or now it's Bahamas came in Malta, Singapore and Switzerland that's sort of your any

Hilmar Orth: 3:58

that's that's probably where 99% of the crypto cooperated.

Matt Zahab: 4:02

Yes. Yeah. And then like again, I'm in Toronto and in Canada and you try to set up a crypto company here and they'll literally walk you out the door like just like what you said how you went to the bank and use crypto as your collateral if I did that at the bank, they you know, they were they wouldn't even let me it. So bananas, but it is what it is. You You created an incredible company in gelato network. And we're definitely gonna get to that a couple minutes later, down the road. But I'm very curious to understand how you envision defy when you first got into it back in 2017. Did you know that it was going to blow up and be such a focal point of the crypto verse?

Hilmar Orth: 4:39

Yeah, so so when I got when I kind of like started going down where the theorem or crypto rabbit hole was in kind of like q2 2016. I think with the launch of the first style that was created back then, like I saw the newspaper and I had a finance background. So like cryptocurrency? I was aware of them but like the Dow really struck me because I went like we did some startups before I worked a couple of startups and all these company and regulatory issues you have to face talking to nurseries and stuff was always a pain and I was always thinking okay what is a company a company is just a bunch of people pooling money and collectively allocating resources to some common objective and the Dow for the first time ever enabled that for everyone in the world to just participate pooled money and like allocate resources collectively without needing a company completely cross border and that kind of like blew my mind and this is how I got into the space and then later only discovered defy and for me it was kind of like the first project that really blew my mind was maker dow I remember was a completely new to the space and I just like wanted to make it out and I didn't get anything and like like every day I had this aha I'm like, oh my god save a clinic oh my god collateral. So oh my god leverage and oh my god governance. And and yeah, that's why I'm even more excited like actually that this week we we announced our integration with maker dow and I'll make it I was using like, one of the integral one of the tools that we build schelotto as collateral and Dell systems can a couple of years later when I started d phi which was amazing. And so yeah, I think maker dow was for me, kind of like the first first big thing.

Matt Zahab: 6:25

It's, it's, it's funny the history of, of daps and defy like, up until I want to say a year ago, a year and a half ago it was just maker or compound. And now you have like what hundreds of apps like what's gonna happen five years down the road, it's gonna be like traditional finance, where there's millions of apps all over the place.

Hilmar Orth: 6:46

Like we strongly believe in this Cambrian explosion of decentralized applications not only defy but also were free gaming, NF T's everything. And this is just because like nowadays you like, we digitize an internet fight, like finance. And like last time this happens in industry was music and like what happened to music like you get like remakes of a remix of a remix over remake right? And everyone in the world can just build a song or mix together two songs right and you get something completely new out of it. And the amount of young artists appeared in the last couple of years like every week a new rapper seems right with a new style and exactly the same thing is gonna happen to to finance and every kid in the basement who's bored can just like build leverage trading for if they're interested in that right so easy and that's the that's the kind of like power we will see. And I think like the result is just like millions of applications, testing all experimenting different stuff. And that's also why we kind of decided to focus on like an infrastructure piece to make it easy for all these developers to kind of like outsource all of their like DevOps related to building these sophisticated financial applications to something like gelato and enable those creators basically

Matt Zahab: 8:07

I love the music analogy is the first time I've heard that. Is that like, is that a hallmark original? Or did you feel

Hilmar Orth: 8:14

like I don't know I might never know it I see I scroll through Twitter so often. I bet none of my ideas are original. They're all kind of like implanted by someone else. But I couldn't tell you

Matt Zahab: 8:26

hey, fair enough. I want to take a step back and talk about the history of defy and daps I have a very brief understanding of the history again, I'm aware that compound and maker were sort of the two main cogs in the wheel that made everything happen but can you give me just like a little two minute spiel on how it all started all the way up to where we are right now?

Hilmar Orth: 8:46

Yeah, sure. So this is just like probably from my perspective, what happened right and for me the whole thing started like how I when I was getting more involved it was kind of like 2017 and defy and I remember I was at DEF CON in Cancun in Mexico and I was at that make our pitch before they launched single collateral die back then. And I remember I was so hung over from the day before that I like just couldn't follow along the guy presenting and that was kind of like still too much for me back then. But they were kind of like the first ones to really to really talk about like finance stable coins they basically wants to build financial applications the guys behind it like rune and stuff but they realized hey, to enable all of that you need a stable coin because like was eath like all the products before they tried with Bitcoin and stuff and it was super volatile and you can't doesn't work like landed out or build any proper financial applications on top you need something stable and that's why they like Okay guys, we need something stable, obviously like a tether existed I think right so tether was already there. And you could call it like it was like adopted into defy theory and but it was already like transacted and then of course my compound came at the end of 20 2017 like Ico boom came where like a lot of people saw the potential of it in 2018 and then more projects in the lending and borrowing space came for example eastland right which later to transition into other also started back then and that they are the IC o thing and so the first wave was kind of like first of all it was decentralized exchanges right I think 20 2018 was connected to decentralize exchanges if I remember correctly, everyone wanted to build another name and back then it was like like order book exchanges was all the all the hype like 0x you have khiva Khyber was the largest exchange by far during 20 like at the end of 2018 beginning of 2019 I think and also my first project was built on Khyber back then I remember and then like uniswap was also released but was small but no one really traded on uniswap just a couple a bunch of weirdos put their money in there and and the transition from focusing on decentralized exchanges to lending protocols as compound gained traction and then like if and stuff converted to others and other learning protocols appeared and there were more and more learning protocols coming out and then from there onwards I think you had like the base of Okay, you could exchange the tokens then you could borrow and lend tokens and if you can do both what do you do you go leverage and then kind of like the leverage protocols appeared on top is edX and stuff like that these wrapper tokens which we integrated back then as well you had like synthetics with like synthetic tokens that are used to short eath and stuff you can hatch and then basically a lot of like more complex financial products appeared that just were mixing all of these small building blocks together and like weird stuff appeared right and then he'll farming came which is just how can you get your lending How can you get any protocols or to say just like really bootstrap and get a lot of liquidity in early and as soon as possible of course synthetics that kind of invented that and compound that not then like em I think kicked off the refi summer and then all like these crazy projects started and now you've got the multi chain verse with like four different chains and all of the applications on aetherium copy pasted over there and everyone competing for API and crazy whatever wallets and mix and matching appearing and it's a good thing right so open source everyone can copy it and try something new a lot of people get hacked because they they thought hey why do you think this line and the smart contract but the line is there for a reason? Right and you remove it and then all security is gone? So yeah, I think now we are entering a space where there's like it's so easy to deploy and build new applications that we will see even even greater like new innovations coming up in the next few years.

Matt Zahab: 13:06

That was a great UPL thank you for that. Now to someone like me I understand you know 90% of what you just said a couple couple words fly under the radar but I get I get the gist of it. How would you explain that to someone who doesn't understand defy are anything within the same umbrella? And a follow up question to that is where's the best place to learn about this for me I always say Twitter but then it's you know you have to curate your Twitter feed you have to follow the right defy gurus and sort of defy influencers. What's your take on that? How can people learn about this and where's the best place to learn?

Hilmar Orth: 13:39

Yeah, so I like you mean like the whole defy movement How can you break it down?

Matt Zahab: 13:44

I mean, like, I'm talking about a traditional someone who has very little financial experience wants to learn about crypto easiest thing would be learning about you know the main ones like your Bitcoin and your theorem and then maybe learn about stable coins like tether and then maybe get into NF T's and stuff until more non crypto people friendly but if I was like you know I want to go right into defy I see the potential where would you send them to?

Hilmar Orth: 14:09

When would I send them to Yeah, I would send them to probably a nice looking UI like the like insert fried or rosarian right where they can like abstract a lot of complexities for you you enter and you will have to have some some crypto right so probably the first place is uniswap you resolve the first place because you you get some he's probably on a central exchange like I like we had a token sale the other day and I on boarded my sister to crypto right and I okay, like she has euros she has to put them into like central exchange and he got to eat Okay, what do you do you eat it is boring. So you go to uniswap right and you select any of the tokens that you like, and then you buy them okay now what you do with them, you might have some you see some dyes and other tokens, you can lend them out right okay, you can earn some interest in them. So you go to an awesome like insert for example and you see okay, you have other compounds, you can go to them, you can compare rates, you can see all their like differences in them, some have liquidity management, some not. And you can just deposit them. And then you see your money kind of like everyday incrementing. A bit. And I think this gives you like, the, this already illustrates you quite well the power of defy because you can put your money to work and move them between different places with a click of a button in your browser, right? This was never possible before you only were able to do what you broke or your bank and like put in front of you. And they usually put just like boring, shady stuff in front of you, right? Because all the juicy stuff they are, they are kind of like reaping the benefits. So why would they write it's not in their interest. So you can move your money between protocols, it's yours, and it appears on this application. But if you switch applications appears there as well, right? There's one shared layer, which every all of these front ends on top plugins who saw this freedom of your money, you will find that but I will probably uniswap is always the first first place for you to be and then just, if you want to get started, just like probably the best thing is for people to invest because then they have skin in the game, right? So I think there's a there's a whole movement of investing outside of crypto like Robin Hood, all these things mother's sister bought some stocks the other day, she got in, and she's like, she tells me all the time, like Oh, look at that. And that's great. And like kryptos just investing on steroids. And that more like the roller coaster lives so if you like the adrenaline kryptos for you, and just like get in invest some and then you have then you check it constantly. And then you will find out yourself, you know exactly like why is it going up? Like what is the Remove liquidity on uniswap mean, and stuff like that and just ask questions, and a lot of helpful people out there,

Matt Zahab: 16:47

it can help again, well, very well said it's just so different, right? Like, if I put 100 grand in a bank, they're gonna be like, Hey, here's 0.5% it's like sweet, you know, I don't need 50 bucks. But thank you for 500 bucks, whatever. And then you want a crypto and even if going back to the banks, if I put a 10,000 bucks into a stock, that stock is rarely gonna fluctuate more than 5% a day, maybe a 10% swing. And then in crypto, it's like I can make 8% a month on, you know, on AP why, like, what what you don't I mean, it's absolute bananas. And I love that you brought up the Robin Hood point. I feel like with COVID everyone's sort of realized that their time is more valuable than society thought it was like a lot of people were settling on hourly job. And now the general society is under understanding that you can anyone can be an investor, right? And that's moving forward over to crypto. And then once you get into traditional crypto, you buy some BTC by some eath. And now you get into d phi. And it all blows up. I absolutely love it. But moving forward and talking about gelato. Give me the two minute elevator pitch on gelato. Because when I was doing research for the show absolutely love it. And I didn't really understand how important the automation part was defined. So you can explain 100 times better than me The floor is yours.

Hilmar Orth: 18:04

Yeah, so dumbed down or not dumbed down. But like the elevator pitches, Jetta gelato is a protocol to automate smart contract executions on aetherium and other networks. And the goal is to be the infrastructure that powers most of the transactions that are being executed on all blockchain networks that exist and have some traction basically. And and why do you need that maybe some some some some people that are not developers might not understand why you would need something to be automated in the land of smart contracts on aetherium. And the term smart contract is a bit misleading, because smart contracts are actually not that smart. They're pretty dumb. The only thing they do is they kind of like store some, some data, some information within them. And they define the rules by which you can alter that information. And information could be for example, your your balance and my balance, right? This is some information that is stored in a smart contract. For example, a token is nothing else than a smart contract that stores Okay, Matt has hundreds of token a and hilmar has 200 of token a Okay, and this is this is what the smart contract does nothing else. And if no one sends a transaction to that smart contract, these balances will never change, right? And now if I want to kind of like transfer you every week 10 of these tokens, right, what I would have to do is I would have to take my wallet, my meta mask on the browser, right and I have to click on the on the on the token, I will click on Send Matt 10 tokens, and then these tokens will be transferred to you. But if I won't do it myself with my wallet with me signing this transaction, because I'm the owner of the key, nothing will happen, right? And I can't just say hey, every seven days, please send Matt these tokens, right because only only I can execute transactions and in order to get actually in order to automate these sort of actions actions and say for example, weekly sent net 10 1010, all these tokens, you need some kind of like third party or like a network of bots, usually like servers that are running that you can basically instruct to do it on your behalf. And you can say, hey, please, and this is much louder is Hey, gelato, could you please take 10 of my tokens every week and send them to Matt, right? And then gelada will say, okay, you give a lot of permission to the to do that. And then gelato will transfer these tokens every week to you in that case, and this is just one example, you can think about, hey, please fill my order, or execute a trade on uniswap when the price goes up, or please refinance my loan, when the interest rates is better there or every week, please conduct the salary payments for your company. So all financial processes that are usually automated in the traditional markets are not kind of by default, automated in crypto, you need these bots in the background that actually do that. And geladas building like an infrastructure for all developers to just plug into and automate anything on any network, basically. And we are kind of like what Google Cloud Functions our AWS lambda functions are is like very technical products. But for crypto, so we enable developers to to automate anything for the users without having to run servers themselves.

Matt Zahab: 21:21

Hey, yeah, me so the guys looking for funding.

Hilmar Orth: 21:25

We just raised

Matt Zahab: 21:29

that was, that was a great pitch, though. You had the smile on there. And that did the trick. Whenever whenever someone hears the word bought, they always get that bad taste in their mouth. You know, they're like oh, bots, because I think of just regular bots on Twitter or bots on open sea just spamming me with offers way below the floor of NF T's anything bot related, I'm usually like, he bought. But then I just heard your pitch there. And it's like bots are an integral part of crypto. Where does that notion come from? And like, how can we change our negative ideology to bots into a positive one?

Hilmar Orth: 22:01

Yeah, so so maybe the question is, what what is the bot track? So what was the bottom one? What is the bottom the first place and a blog can be like borders, borders, like just a software program like this, this podcasting software we're using right now is kind of like a bot. And the bot is just a program. So the program is just something that continuously kind of like does something so humans don't have to do it themselves, right, so you don't have to execute this function that all the time records us like manually every five seconds, so it doesn't go down, right. So the bots just like constantly do it, and they wait for something to happen. And then they do it on our behalf as humans right. And this could be sending out messages right. And this could be used for spamming Of course, but but usually 99% of the bots in the world are in progress the world nice programs like in the matrix, we have some bad programs that do bad stuff. And also in crypto, you have bots that kind of like they are usually just like faster than you and better than you and calculating stuff, right. And so sometimes they're they're bad. But in our case, bots are actually more like your helper. They're kind of like you just always up and always there. So it's kind of like you clone yourself and you you say hey, I want to do this task every week, or every time the price goes up, I want to do that task. And then you can basically fly on holidays, or drink pina colada, and then the boss is just basically doing your job for you. And without having access to your funds, you only get that permission to transfer these funds out and do something if certain conditions then you can predefined and are fulfilled. So the pot cannot do anything maliciously. It can only serve you and for that for serving you they get paid basically this boss they say hey, I do it for you. And for that I want to have, I don't know $10 in transaction fees, and for that I will will do that for you. And then they do it. And so a part is just a software program. And it can be good or bad, but most bots are actually quite good.

Matt Zahab: 24:08

Wow. Never heard that explanation before on bots. I guess I'm gonna start liking bottle more. And How hard would it be for someone like me who has very little technical experience to shut up something on gelato?

Hilmar Orth: 24:25

Um, so at the moment, it will still be non trivial, I would say. But we actually like how we started maybe, is we actually started the first prototype of gelato was this easy user facing interface where you could actually as a user go and you can say hey, if like every two days please send token spoon to my mom right or if the price goes up, please sell my SSN uniswap or so like you can basically really like select something here and that's like another thing here and then based on the you can define the condition and then And then an action that will execute basically IFTTT. For web three or crypto like Zapier, like basically these automation tools for like normal human beings to automate their work their life. But it's actually quite hard to do that in a secure and scalable way. And not too many end users to one, like require having those very sophisticated financial, like applications that require that automation. And so we said, okay, let's, let's, but and we, at same time had a lot of developers saying, Hey, guys, can I use your API? Oh, can I use it infrastructure to also automate my stuff. And so we're like, okay, maybe it's more like a developer facing tool for starters. And then we will build this end user application at some point later. And so now for today, most of the developers use gelato as kind of like an on chain API to automate stuff. And yeah, they they like it a lot. Because basically, otherwise, they would have to build and run and maintain these bots themselves, which takes a lot of time and a lot of resources. And if they would do it themselves, then like, they would be super centralized. And if their bot, if their program would go down, the whole decentralized application on top, it goes down with it. And so it will be the central point of failure, which is of course really bad in the space. And so like what we provide them with is this, like a ready made disinterest network of bots that you can just plug into, don't have to worry about it. And it will just like execute the transactions on your behalf. But not to end user facing right now. But like if you're an end user and you went you went to quick swap you went to insert if you went to zerion, to a lot of other projects, like chances are very high that you interacted with our bots in one way or another without actually knowing it because they're doing like work in the background for you.

Matt Zahab: 26:47

Karcher makes sense function and take a quick break. I want to give a big shout out to our friend at prime x bt This episode is brought to you by our friends at prime x bt absolutely love these guys, as they have been partners of crypto news for years, and we're always excited about the products they have to offer. always reliable and super safe. Personally, I've been using primax, VT or last couple months and I absolutely love it, as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. Another great part is that traders of all experience levels can easily design and customize layouts and widgets to best fit their trading style. primax Vt is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions to all of their customers. And the best part is they are running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the pod after making your first deposit 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. This promotion is available for a month after activation and will give you the boost you need to hang out and trade very quickly and efficiently. The promo code is crypto news 50 that is crypto news 50 all one word to take advantage of this offer and you will get 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account folks, that's primax Vt go check them out as always links will be in the show notes. And now back to the show with Matt so we just talked a little bit about a lot of network I'm kicking myself in the butt because one of my first questions that I wanted to ask is why the name I love gelato and I don't know anyone who doesn't like to lotto like schelotto just the smooth and that oh it's so good. Why gelato by the name

Hilmar Orth: 28:26

yeah so they so basically and not for safe not not safe for work version of this and the NSF award version but I have to stick to the safer work version here. But yeah, so I like Louis and I like the second co founder of gelato we found out the project in Berlin at this crypto co working space called full node right and it's it's very cool spot and basically there's this amazing gelato place like a Sicilian gelato plays basically right below it which is probably like the best ice cream you will have in the world it sounds weird best ice in the world Berlin but it's like it's one of the best ones I have ever eaten and and yeah we were brainstorming a lot of names and and yeah so we like like pack them actually like nowadays we have a lot of like food inspired d fi products and stuff but back then like you had only compound trade whatever or like some crypto related names right maker dow so anyone and I'm pretty confident that like gelato was probably the first food name used in defy

Matt Zahab: 29:34

why not every food in the world in defy

Hilmar Orth: 29:40

I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure we were like if someone else can claim it yeah they have to prove it. We have some blog post stating backward pretty early and yeah that's why like we just wanted to like we couldn't have like we couldn't be are saying something like conditional transaction execution protocol or something. So that's why we just something natural out.

Matt Zahab: 29:59

Can you give me The NSFW versions story after the show, Okay, awesome. I'm looking forward to that. Maybe I'll sneakily record them after the show, thankfully. And in the gelato token, which went on sale on September 13, which is always or not always, excuse me, which is already doing great. Tell me about the utility of gel token.

Hilmar Orth: 30:24

Yeah, so the utility is pretty simple. Actually, what gel gelato is, is basically just, it's just a tool for Java developers to automate the transactions, right. And every new transaction that developers can channel through gelato and tasks lotta to automate for them, earns fees. And these fees goes to the operators of these bots that are kind of like the infrastructure of what the jalada network is, right, so these shilada bots, they're earning money, right, every transaction, they are usually making a profit, and they're earning really good money by constantly monitoring all the stuff and then executing these transactions on behalf of all the applications that are integrating data, right. So it's pretty cool to be about operator enchilada, because you're earning quite a good good amount of money. Now, the gel gel token will be used to make the whole system more resilient by actually requiring this board of registered infrastructure operators to stake the gel token within the system and then be able to help hold them accountable for actually if they do something that is not 100% aligned with kind of like the social contract within gelada which is always act in the best interest of the user always be a good bot, never be a bad bot right. And bots can do some weird stuff like front running and stuff so you have to be a good port and you have to be with monitored and you have to follow the protocol so to say right and if they don't follow the protocol that can be held accountable by by actually punishing them and slashing the deposits or the stake they put into gelato in the first place and basically in order to in order for them to gain access to that potential revenue they have to buy another token have to stake that token and then they only get access to that potential revenue and we estimate that the revenue will increase the more applications into intellectual auto the higher that revenue will be the more bought operators want to join with it because they want to earn part of these fees and the more they have to buy the token and put the mistake in the system and then of course it's also a governance token so everyone who has Gerardo tokens can vote on proposals on changes on regulating these bots and these are the two main functionalities

Matt Zahab: 32:34

How did you in the team get 10,000 plus waitlist users and 48 hours like again I know you guys have a great program but there must have been some type of growth hack or something else but it was

Hilmar Orth: 32:46

not a single one like we didn't we didn't spend a single penny on market like on paid marketing or like influencers or anything we like the truth the truth probably is like we've just been like we started about two years ago like formalizing it with we had we went live with our first audited version and June last year so we've been around and already had like live integrations with like awesome projects right so it's not like you're speculating on some weird stuff. You're buying something that is used today of course there's much more potential here but but already has some some usage so that's why it's not speculative. Not Not that speculative I would say and I think yeah, I think crypto just in general should do at home to say like people go crazy and also like a lot of like we had to weed out a lot of fake applications because they are bots like applying and I think there are books written like bad bots not good that's bad but written that want to like want to sneak in a position we had to like manually filter them out and it's like yeah, but like most of them were good decent applicant

Matt Zahab: 33:53

I love that. I want to talk about a couple of the hot and trendy topics right now especially defy related you cannot go anywhere in crypto verse without hearing about silica or avalanche Solon, a Vax are everywhere your smile and you got the smirk on your face right now. What's your what's your two cents on those two coins?

Hilmar Orth: 34:12

Wow, I think I'm not in a position to comment on these two coins in any good or bad way because I haven't delved into them that deeply so I'm I think I'm not qualified to say yes or no. I can only comment on like, basically gelato can work on any ETF based on petal chain right now. And we also discussing launching on avalanche or an ibex at some point, right. And I think people always just have to make sure that they differentiate hype and usage. And I haven't dug too deep into this ecosystem to comment on that. But I can only say that there are like layer twos or scaling networks that have some real like human usage, real people. On their transacting, right, because we see it every day on the logs on these bots, right? We see it like, like submitting limit orders doing this doing that. And we can identify which effect and which are real. And so there are definitely networks that have some these users which are not one of these two, and there are so many right now. polygon polygon has some real real users, so they are regular humans on their transacting and complaining something else works in our telegram, right, like real humans. There are also a bunch of Phantom definitely more on polygon. And, yeah, so because we haven't applied there on edX or Solana I can't comment I can't comment on that. But they seem to have really a good community right there's a lot of hype around this project. But like hype like this, like there was also hype they were hype around a lot of projects in the past So one has to always be careful that hype follows real adoption real users. And I I'm not a position to comment on that on these two projects. So yeah,

Matt Zahab: 36:07

I will Okay, well said there fair enough. I love this mark, too. I feel like you got something in the back on the back burner but you just want to tell me it's okay. Well, we'll get it out of you next time you come on. If he is the the apex predator of defy and web three. Taking over everything. The gas fees are insane. I meant that a couple NF T's earlier this week. 300 bucks, gone. smelly, never coming back. Every time I sell one every time I buy one tear shed. Is there a solution in the near future for this? Or are we just gonna get soaked by gas fees for eternity?

Hilmar Orth: 36:43

Yeah. aetherium gas fees I'm not I don't think they will go down anytime soon, like, been around for some time and like is to always around the corner. But as well, I think it's also one solid, like the demand will just go up, prices will remain high. You have to go through these layer tools right? In order to get cheap transactions and similar security to aetherium. And that's what we're seeing is what I meant with polygon polygon you have a fraction of a cent a fraction of a penny transaction fees on all these other networks you get that but on aetherium itself, Ethereum won't be the the chain that will offer you cheap transactions maybe if there's some technical breakthrough but but I don't see that coming in the next couple of years it will be the hub that provides the security of all these layer tools and all the networks plugging into aetherium so they don't have to worry about the security themselves they can just plug into aetherium for that they can implement the scaling they can they can have cheap transactions but aetherium will like this This meant the city in this urban development analogy right you get Manhattan Manhattan is too busy very expensive high rent place. This is aetherium right? usual like most people don't want to live or like inter transact Manhattan because everything is more expensive. You want to move to the suburbs right? You want to move to the villages around New York Manhattan and there things achieved a lot more space you can do what you want there different towns that specialize in different things and you can go to them but like the big money transfers the big money still isn't Manhattan right? And so if you want to go there if you want to cross something you have to go through Manhattan in order to do that. So that analogy I think is pretty accurate

Matt Zahab: 38:26

here the analogy can you get that before

Hilmar Orth: 38:31

this one I copied though right is not my

Matt Zahab: 38:34

crush it with the analogies all part long I love it. How am I this has been an absolute treat I really really love speaking with you and I can't wait to have you on for round two. I want to hear some defy heartaches give me some that's gonna go on the front page of the New York Times I know you have some coconut in there I can see the smile

Hilmar Orth: 38:52

wrong from page yes I'm I think I like AI in general I'm a big believer in towels I think like towels were just completely disrupt companies no one will create companies anymore because companies are also getting sued left and right now right by the SEC. Like you don't want to like I talked to a few crypto like foreigners that are gonna like me two years ago roughly. And and I just tell them don't create a company like if you if you can something don't do it just create a dow have all the rules be on chain and just go for it. And I think we will see a huge revolution just by by dollars in that regard. And it's already like picking up but it will be much much bigger and much like every project will only be $1 anymore. I wish I wouldn't have my company. Unfortunately. I wish I was just a doll and I tried to make it so that at some point it will be so I'm super I'm super bullish on this. And then there are a lot of other cool things that that are that are like I I'm very much into words so I sometimes the all the hot new things can fly over me and i don't i don't care like I just miss it but like cool things going on in the fire these with like leverage protocols and option trading so I think often trainings will some some of the new hot things will like will will be some of the new hot things because they are also enable a lot of like hedging possibilities which is hard right now and there I see like a lot of cool implementations that solve some of the critical issues that options usually have like liquidity by just plugging into universal for that so I think that there will be some really cool ones coming up there but not sure if they on top of the New York Times Wall Street Journal I'm sure about that but and this will definitely also blow up at some point

Matt Zahab: 40:48

love it. Last question is do you have any questions for me?

Hilmar Orth: 40:51

Oh man Yeah, how are you surviving the last couple of days you just ignore Are you able Are you at that stage where you can just ignore the markers and just move on and have such strong belief that it's just like nothing for you or you're still sometimes like waking up like

Matt Zahab: 41:09

I still check every day and I shouldn't I check multiple times a day but it's like earlier on in this year when I was growing my bag that's when I really cared and it would affect me it would affect my mentality but now it's just as water under the bridge like you know it goes down and always ends up going back up so I don't I'm over it but is it in the back of my mind at some point yes yeah, I guess I'm worried it's such a tough question right but yeah, I'm it worries me sometimes for me it's like the saving graces were like the 10x on this coin or the 10x on the NFT like if I was just if I just got into the space and I never experienced the setback before I'm sure I'd be shitting bricks but i have and i know it always goes back up so for me is water under the bridge you know so what I workout go for well I think that's the key it's like go for a nice long walks get some sun lift some weight, eat healthy fast if you do that shit the rest will take care of itself that's my thing. On the days where I'm Busan and eaten pizza it's like I'll think about it more but on the days where I'm healthy it's water under the bridge

Hilmar Orth: 42:11

and is also a matter of belief I think and like do you like Do you believe like if you are super confident in that you are also investing in stuff that you really believe will be there and we'll be like a key building block in the next 10 years I think then and of course like if you only invest what you can afford to lose like a sister premise of everything right? But then you are then you can just like I'm at the point where I just ignore everything and like I I'm still alive like most of my bags are just in the East still and I'm super confident with that I'm like hey I know he will be here in five years right? I know I won't get like the 1,000x that you might get somewhere else right but I like I'm like setbacks like that they don't affect me anymore because I I just use it every day I believe in it very much. And so it's just a matter of time so you just have to have a longer horizon and if you have a longer horizon you can ignore the day to day craziness.

Matt Zahab: 43:06

I'm a big believer of everything does what it does for reason there's a reason behind everything and there's a reason why once people get into crypto they never go back there's a reason why people find out about crypto late in the space for three months and they quit their jobs because of one how much they learn how much fun it is and you see the real world application like I tell my friends on like crypto is going to literally pillage every single industry within the next like five to 10 years like everything nothing will not be have one point of blockchain on it and you know if you're not in it you don't know but if you know you know right indeed indeed kalamar this was an absolute blast treat of an episode really appreciate you coming on and one of the best one of the best episodes and one of the best people I've ever heard at explaining defined app so thank you very much really appreciate it. before we let you go, please tell our guests where they can find you and gelato on socials

Hilmar Orth: 43:59

yeah sure like definitely come say hi and our socials it's usually Atul our network on Twitter on discord we have a telegram chat to know the name but you will find it on our Twitter handle and I'm at at hilma X on Twitter and then just hit my ex on all the other telegram channels just DM me if you want to if you have questions or whatever, always DM me back.

Matt Zahab: 44:23

Love that Omar thanks so much for jumping on definitely having me on for round two in the future. I'm sure you guys will be raising another couple 100 mil in a couple months. When you do I'll have Yon but until then really appreciate it and thanks again.

Hilmar Orth: 44:34

Thanks for having me, man.

Matt Zahab: 44:35

Folks. This was hell Omar or from the gelato network. Unreal episode. Great guy. great stories. Great explanations. Hope you enjoyed this one. I certainly did. we're dropping on Mondays and Thursdays. As always, we love you all appreciate you all. Stay safe, have fun, make some cake and we will see you all shortly. Thanks for coming and bye for now.