Luke: You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and we have a special one today. Today we feature Charles Hoskinson, who’s co-founder of Ethereum, CEO, founder of Input Output behind the Cardona blockchain. He also owns and operates a state-of-the-art healthcare clinic in rural Wyoming and is the co-founder of the lab that is genetically engineering bioluminescent plants. And, and in this episode we discussed and I have a vision for how users will interact with the internet in 2035 and trillion dollar disruption ideas.

A lot of, charles thinking behind what brought about the Midnight Network, what specific problems are aiming to solve, how it works with the broader blockchain ecosystems and networks. and then also how it works with the practical world kind of becomes that connected tissue.

We went into detail on anti-aging. If everything from regenerative species and rethinking how we can approach this as humans do things like life extension and clinical trial networks and all that good stuff. and how we kind of bring the good world together in 2026 with the cooperation and, [00:01:00] collaboration.

And yeah, a bunch of other things too. I mean, we, doubled the episode link with this one, so I hope you all enjoyed it was a fascinating discussion and lots of things to take away. So, now for this week’s episode of The Brave Technologist, hope you like it.

Charles, welcome to the Brave Technologist. How you doing today? Loving life. How you been Luke? Doing well, doing well. I really appreciate you uh, making the time. I’ve been really excited for this one. let’s kinda start off. I think, you know, you built and shaped major ecosystems and blockchain space.

When you kind of look back, what originally brought you into crypto and what’s kind of kept you here through all the cycles and the madness.

Charles: Well, I mean, it’s never one thing, it’s a collection of experiences. You know, it’s like the question is like, how did you get radicalized, as well. Yeah.

They bombed my village and I was really angry. So there was a collection of things, you know, first uh, when I was very young, I was, remember the Ron Paul movement? And it was back in my early twenties. and there you know, there were three things that Ron Paul cared about in the [00:02:00] 2007 campaign.

He cared about sound money. He cared about humble foreign policy and choosing liberty. But the most important was sound money. You really, really cared about some concept that money has to be constrained by something in the physical world because you can’t trust politicians. So we didn’t have bitcoin back in 2007.

This was kind of like the olden days. So gold was the only thing we had, which where we were all gold bugs and gold standard. Well, through that campaign I read Lubi esis and you know, I read a lot of Austrian economics and I started really falling in love with the idea that we need some sort of physical constraining function to social behavior because human beings just can’t be trusted in the long term.

The second thing is I did a lot of work in cryptography and mathematics and I. Been kind of like a, a member of the open source community. And so I, knew a lot of these people floating around and I really like cryptography and I really like distributed systems and complex adaptive systems. And so many of my friends and heroes are like Steven Wolfram and others.

And so I’d read his new kind of science and these things, and I like this idea that simple rules can organically create a whole [00:03:00] system. So philosophically and scientifically, I was kind of aligned and I was in the right place, right time. And it’s also a generational thing where. I was young enough right when Bitcoin came out to be the kind of guy that Bitcoin would appeal to.

So I came on board with the slash dot revolution, which was late 2 20 10. I saw it on and I said, oh, that’s interesting. And I read the white paper and I started mining and buying and you know, these types of things. I had a Mount Gox account. And lost a lot of money in my Mount Gox account. You know, everybody has a story where they’ve like, gave away Bitcoin or lost Bitcoin or things like that.

And then the, the fourth thing was an event that happened. I used to eat at this one diner. And this Mexican gal would every two, three times a week would serve me breakfast. And one day I came in, she was in tears, and I said, what’s going on? And she said, they robbed my husband.

And I said, what are you talking about? So her husband was drywaller and he’d just been paid for about a month’s worth of work. The police pulled him over and they. He had a bunch of cash. They just took the money and said it was drug money. Yeah. And the civil asset forfeiture. And at the time I had [00:04:00] no idea about what, what was civil asset forfeiture and the thing, it’s like billions of dollars every year.

It’s legal theft. You have to sue the government to get back money that they’ve taken with no probable cause or due process. You know, they just say, oh, that looks like drug money. I’ll take it. And this guy’s an illegal immigrant, so you take, you know, money from him. He’s got no rights or due process.

Or ability to request. It’s basically legalized. Theft. And I said, that’s just so wrong. And it just, it stuck with me that even more than a decade later, you know, eats away at me. And I said, we just can’t allow this. And so it started that transition where I said, I want a financial system that goes from don’t be evil to can’t be evil.

I want a financial system that whatever the rules are about, how the supply function works and how we price it, and you know, how you use it. No government or a third party actor can come in and change those rules. ‘cause again and again and again and again, we see the rules being changed. And another thing is, I was coming of age right when the 2008 financial crisis happened.

I was in college and you know, all my friends were Wall Street [00:05:00] guys and they all got wiped out. then O Obama comes in and we’re all radicalized. We’re like, oh yeah, you know, too big to fail. We’re gonna get rid of all these garbage Wall Street people. And then his solution was to make Wall Street bigger and make all the too big to fail larger, you know?

And, and he had all this political power and he didn’t do anything. So that with Occupy Wall Street and other things, it’s like, it was a very ripe. Fertile philosophical time for a new monetary revolution. And I had the technical skills to be able to meaningfully participate. And, and I also was not encumbered, you know, I wasn’t married, didn’t have kids, I didn’t have any bills or financial debts or things like, I was always miserly.

So my lifestyle allowed me to basically join something and not be paid for, you know, a protracted period of time. So I was the perfect guy to get radicalized into the, into the cult of Satoshi. Awesome.

Luke: No, that’s great. And I mean, and what a journey is. Been right, like, Carano launch, it’s grown over the years.

what would you sum up, and this might be hard to answer, but I’m gonna ask it anyway, what would you see as your kind of biggest win [00:06:00] that you’ve experienced in the space when it comes to crypto?

Charles: Well, I mean, I’ve just had the luxury of being around for every generation.

I was there for the first generation of just let’s move money around without a middleman. And then the second generation, smart contracts, the third generation, make them scale, be interoperable and figure out on chain governance. And now the fourth generation where a. We’re talking about rational privacy and identity, and we’re talking about cooperation and cross chain communication and from a perspective like hybrid DAPs and these things.

So there’s a lot of moving pieces to all that. And what’s been fun is I’ve been able to meaningfully participate at every step. You know, I launched a Bitcoin education project way back in the day, and we brought, I had over 70,000 students with a Udemy course that I created. Wow. Bitcoin or how I learned to stop worrying and yeah, love crypto.

And that’s how I met Roger Ver and Eric Voorhees and Andreas Antonopoulos and all these early people. Then I launched actually four blockchains, so midnight’s the fourth. The first one I launched was with Dan Larimer of All People, and we did Bit shares, and that was the first algorithmic stablecoin in the first deck.

It was in 2013. So it gives you like how ahead of the [00:07:00] curve we were. And we had this thing called bit USD and all this other stuff, but it was a really innovative project. It was the first delegated proof of stake protocol. It had the first blockchain building kit, it was called graphene. There were a lot of ideas.

In bit shares that were phenomenally good ideas. They were just ahead of their time and not as well executed. But it was a great pedagogical project. Ethereum was the granddaddy of all of them. And the real lesson there is like founder governance is equally important to protocol governance and too quickly, and there was too many founders.

And so it’s like everybody’s an Ethereum founder, right? And seriously. Right, right. And, and so well who, who’s really in the club and who’s not. You know, we needed founder agreements. We needed actually a tighter thing. And I learned an enormous amount about what can go wrong in social dynamics.

Everything’s. Friends and rainbows until money’s involved. And then suddenly everybody becomes snakey and then they arbitrarily rewrite history to, you know, for winners and losers. But I learned a lot, you know, I learned about zao, I learned about smart contracts, programmable [00:08:00] transactions. There were a lot of models for how to do that.

And it was an intrinsically clear, and, you know, the EVM model so far seems to be the dominant standard, but now others are creeping up that are non EVM and then with card, you know, that was really. Where I got to do the whole thing myself. You know, with Cardona, you know, all the prior ones, I had co-founders and other people with card.

I was in charge of the roadmap and vision and mission, so I had to do everything from scratch. And I had raised the money, you know, I had to write the white paper, you know, I had to recruit. All the engineers had to. Be on the ground floor of the science. And, you know, it’s, it is just a testimony of dogged persistence.

I’ve been doing this for 10 years with Card O and we’ve written 250 plus papers, millions of lines of code. We’ve been in the top 10 pretty much consistently since it launched in 2017. You know, and, and so we’ve survived so many ups and downs. We’ve survived so many things that normally would. Kill a project and we thrived and we continue to reinvent ourselves.

And what’s fun is we’re starting to get to a point where we’re realizing the intent of the roadmap. We’re [00:09:00] starting to get to scalability. We’re starting to get to good governance, we’re starting to get to good programmability, and we’re starting to see you know, those, those flowers bloom. And it’s cool.

I was just in a roadmap workshop today that intersect the members based organization for Carano had. And they, they already came up with all these KPIs and they already came up with all these great ideas and I was sitting like, oh man, what should our 2026 KPIs be? And it’s like, they already have this list.

And I’m like, oh yeah, that’s pretty cool. You know that the community that’s F did that. I said, where’d you come up with this? They said, we did 11 workshops in eight countries and we talked to people for six months. Said, wow, that’s really remarkable that, you know, there’s a community project that’s like that.

And now I got midnight. Midnight has the potential to be the largest thing I’ve ever done. ‘cause it has the best product market fit for where the market is at right now. You know, it’s one of those things where. Every real world asset, every real business, every government, every, every enterprise, every user, they need privacy.

It’s super fucking important. And there’s no regulating layer that kind of figures out how to put all those pieces together in [00:10:00] a reasonable way. So for me, I, I feel very comfortable. You know, saying that I think we got the recipe right after doing this four times, and this recipe in particular is, is something we can give to everybody.

It’s a layer two to every piece of infrastructure like Ethereum and Solana and Avalanche. That’s the other reason why I enjoy the project so much is that to do the Glacier Drop, for example, I had to learn how brave worked. We actually airdropped the bats tokens, you know? Right, right. You know, we airdropped to eight different ecosystems.

So I had to learn how Solana worked and Ethereum worked, and you know, I learned how Avalanche worked at a very deep level and revisit things and, and because we actually had to figure out how to do an airdrop, I didn’t have to do that for Bit Shares or Ethereum or Cardonal, you know? I. Got the chance to do that with with this one.

So, that has forced me to learn a lot of new stuff, and that’s forced me to kind of look at the entire landscape differently, like the whole competitive equilibrium that we’ve fo focused on of, of multi resource consensus where validators from multi chains can run midnight. And also look at it for like [00:11:00] hybrid applications where you can run part of the app on Ethereum and part of the app on car on midnight, or part on Solana and part on midnight.

And you pay in any token you want. It means we’re no longer in this adversarial token, omics mindset of like my network versus your network. It’s like, I don’t care. Users are users. It’s like chat GPT, you know, you call the API and it doesn’t matter if it’s like a, a, a French application to learn how wine works or, you know, it can be you know, an AI girlfriend.

They’re both using chat GPT, you know, it’s just an API and you pay a fee for that. So that means I get to be friends with everybody. And this is the first product that I built where. I get to cooperate with everybody and talk to everybody, and that’s been very enjoyable ‘cause it’s gotten so toxic over the last 10 years.

Luke: It’s such just the right time for this. And I think, you know, I’d love to unpack midnight a little bit because you know, at Brave, a lot of what you said is resonating, mainly because, as a. User first kind of platform. We, we wanna work with everybody. We want everybody. If there’s gonna be tribalism, we want them all to duke it out in, in brave.

Right? Like, but you know, [00:12:00] with Midnight, it, it, it seems really interesting because you’re integrating these other support for these other networks inside. How, how does it work? Like, how will Midnight work in, in the, the blockchain ecosystem today with regard to privacy and just like interoperability and all that?

Charles: Well, that’s a big question. So you kind of, kind of take an order. So the privacy and interoperability are kind of separate topics. So first with privacy midnight libs embedded as does brave and other technologies in a broader ecosystem called pet privacy enhancing technologies. Of which you have a menu of things that are usually contextualized to what you’re operating over.

And what you’re trying to solve. So is it confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation, authentication? And are you trying to like active real time communicate with somebody or are you trying to transact with somebody and send them value? Are you trying to prove something to somebody? There’s a lot of different things that are there.

So the engine of midnight. What we did is we started with an old reliable idea, so plunk with Halo two, which came from the [00:13:00] Zcash world, and we highly optimized it and we added a recursion to it and a bunch of other things that are useful. And then we put a programming model on top of it and we said, all right, let’s let you write a smart contract.

And you separate it kind of into the private stuff and the public stuff. And the on chain stuff. And the off chain stuff. So you have like a quadrant and you basically with the programming language, which looks like TypeScript. So it’s like JavaScript. Thank you Brendan. You know, we, we have, we have basically a language that’s very accessible and it’s easy to integrate with any other dev flow looks, solidity or whatever you have.

And that gives us the ability to kind of reason about what’s. Off and on chain. What’s private, what’s non-private? Then what you do with Kachina Plus Halo is you now have a ZK engine that can create these nice, beautiful proofs and you can use those for selective disclosure and for privacy preserving systems.

And you typically use those with other PET technologies like MPC or trusted execution or homomorphic encryption or what have you. And then you have an [00:14:00] end-to-end stack. ‘cause So a great example would be a medical record system. It’s always helpful to look at a real life example, and then you can kinda walk through the privacy side of the situation.

So in a medical record system, you have kind of a fetty verse model. With tight regulated privacy requirements and tight access control requirements. So, fetti verse is like a term that comes from decentralized social networking and you see it’s like gab and mastodon and these other things where you wanna be decentralized in that you want users to be able to move between the different hubs, but you want the the hubs to have some concept of ownership.

Where there’s an operator of that hub. So medicines like that. You have your dentist office and you have your primary care physician, and then you have your hospital. They kind of own their medical record system and they kind of control that relationship. But you as a patient can go from your internist for your year, yearly physical to your dentist to get your dental work to the hospital because you have a kidney stone or something like that.

And that could all happen in the span of a week, you know? And and so your medical records have to be able to move because maybe they’re relevant for this type of thing. So. [00:15:00] When you look at a pet system, what that would do is say, okay, what’s off chain? What’s on chain? The on chain would be the routing and coordination layers.

That’s where midnight would basically come in. And you’d have a concept of your identity. So you’d be Luke and you’d have a did that represents that, and then you’d have some provability where you can. Basically using a non creds or a different standard BA prove to each person that you are who you say you are, and you have the right to move these records.

So midnight can act as the selective disclosure and the coordination layer to access these different arch chain repositories that have all the medical records. Then there’s some properties in the medical records you wanna know, like access control. Also talks about integrity, preservation, and access logs.

So every time someone looks at your medical records, you’d like in a timestamped and immutable way to have a log of that. So that peop your ex-girlfriend can’t look up, you know, what’s, what’s going on at the hospital with you? ‘cause she’s a nurse there or something like that, or whatever the heck, you know, it’s, it’s a tightly regulated marketplace.

So again, midnight Act is a coordinating layer for all of that on [00:16:00] the outside. No one knows what the hell’s going on. They don’t know your Luke. They don’t know you’re accessing your medical records. They don’t know any things, but you gain selective disclosure and provability. So the system has to prove to you integrity.

The system has to prove to you that nobody’s tampering with your medical records and prove to you that when they’re transited, they only have access to them for that period of time. And then after that it’s gone. Or if it is preserved, it’s used in a certain way and then you have to prove that the system, certain things you have to prove you are who you say you are and you have the right to do these types of things.

And also you have to be able to. Update the medical records as you have more encounters. So doctors need to be able to access the system. So that’s a complex problem and the reason why we haven’t solved it yet is because financial incentives basically keep people apart. And systems are out of date.

But this is an example where you have a regulating layer like midnight, then you can reason around the whole ecosystem. Then for the off chain stuff, you can go even further in the pet technology. You can put some of it in trusted execution environments. You can encrypt some of it with future crypto stuff like fully homomorphic encryption, and you can even do federated [00:17:00] computations amongst the off chain systems like MPC circuits.

And so when you put those things together, they give you new capabilities like secure erasure. So when it goes over somewhere, it’s gone forever. After three days or something like that, you know, ‘cause the hospital doesn’t need the medical record anymore. You’re not a permanent patient. Or when you do an MPC, you can do analytics on all of that off chain data, for example.

So for example I need to know if I’m a pharmaceutical company, how many people have this particular disease? ‘cause I wanna run a clinical trial and I’m trying to figure out a suitability guideline and send a message. Well, the minute you do that, you create a multi-sided marketplace. Because you, the doctor, the medical infrastructure have a product, your data, and then you have a consumer of that.

Well, for the first time ever you can use PET to remove the PII, but then create an offer to Luke and say, Hey Luke, by the way, when you were in the hospital, they noticed that you actually have a special condition that causes kidney stones or whatever, but there’s this clinical trials that will dissolve the stones and do all this really cool stuff.

Do you wanna sign up for it? They are paying five [00:18:00] grand for volunteers. Then you’re like, oh, that’s cool. But then you put the hospital in, then you cut the clinic in. So your clinic gets a little cut of the action, the hospital gets a little cut of the action. Well, that saves Pfizer massive amounts of money.

They have to spend millions and millions of dollars sourcing people, and it’s really expensive and time consuming. With a system like this, you just put a call to action. It’s like a bounty. You’ll saturate a clinical trial in 24 hours or something like that. Yeah. You see? So, so, so that’s how you create a marketplace for these types of things.

And so great systems, they give you. A reasoning capability where you can reason about the economy as a whole. You can reason about the privacy guarantees, and then they allow you for each member to satisfy your part of the bargain. In a provable way. And so that’s why we built midnight. ‘cause we noticed that in privacy there’s hundreds of these coordination problems that exist, whether it be in advertising or it be in health records or other things.

Well then when you look at like agentic commerce, this is another great example. In fact, this scares the hell out of Google and this scares the hell out of meta. These are like [00:19:00] in the Mag seven, they’re trillion dollar companies. They’re so powerful and their entire business model is about to get horrifically disrupted in the next 10 years.

And the reason being is that this example, I love giving, I went down to the Amazon. Earlier this year to do a bullet, an ritual called the Undara, where I put my hands in these gloves with bullet ants and they stung me for 10 minutes and it was the worst pain in human history. You check it out, it’s on YouTube if you guys wanna see it.

Oh yeah, I will, I will. Yeah. Exclusive on brave, you know. But but, but anyway, I was paranoid ‘cause I was gonna be in the jungle for 10 days about my hat. Because like it’s hot and there’s all this stuff and I’m gonna get sunburn. So I spent probably like 30 hours fucking shopping looking around for like the perfect jungle hat.

I spent so much time on this, I’m not proud of it. I was like in my underwear at two o’clock in the morning, just like, and I gave up, I bought, I bought like 10 hats and they all came and I brought them in a hat box and, and then none of them were right. And it is, I was just so frustrated. So here’s how that’s gonna work in the year 2035.

You, you’re going to declare [00:20:00] your intention. And then an agent that’s been special parameterized to be the best hat shopping agent of all time will go into the web on your behalf and come back either with options or using X four two, just directly buy ’em and have them delivered. Well, here’s the thing.

The agent bypasses ads. The agent doesn’t read all this garbage. It actually goes to the real stuff. So if you’re Google and Meta and your entire business model is showing human beings stuff to click to guide them in certain directions, how do you like now show agents stuff to click since they’re by their design supposed to not like click that they’re actually supposed to give you.

Real information. So that’s a trillion dollar disruption right there. So now that’s a multi-sided marketplace because that agent’s only effective if somebody programmed it to know everything about hats, and that’s the agent’s only effective if it’s been programmed to know everything about you. The more about it knows, the easier it is to make a purchasing decision for what type of hat you would like. The more about it, what knows about hats, the better it is for you. [00:21:00] So you wanna buy. A license to use the hat agent, I would’ve spent five bucks for a dedicated hat shopper to go and find me The ultimate thing, same for cars, right?

You’d have to decide like, should I get a Ford or a Honda or Toyota? You’re gonna buy a license to the car, the Consumer Reports car bought, and it’s gonna come back and make a recommendation. Well, here’s the problem. How does the author of that bot. Know that you’re not gonna steal all that parameterization and information.

So he needs to preserve the rack model and all the information he’s put in that secret sauce to make that bot basically a rental instead of a purchase. ‘cause you know, he doesn’t want you reselling and suddenly you have Luke’s hat bot. You know, to compete with his bot and you cut it down by 50 cents and then you wanna share all this information, but you don’t want the person who authored that hat bot to know everything about you.

You know, you don’t want ’em to know where you’re going or what you’re doing and all this other stuff. So you have a privacy problem at the end of the day. And if you solve it, you enable a multi-sided marketplace that basically radically disrupts [00:22:00] all commerce. You know, it creates a whole different way of, of those.

Types of transactions working and the hat is just an example, but it’s basically any marketplace where you’re trying to get expert advice on what to consume, how to consume it, or negotiate the best possible price on your behalf. So agents are coming, we all know it, everybody’s integrating it. They’re even web standards like Web and N that are trying to figure out how do we get an LLM directly into the browser.

You guys got Leo and you know, Chrome is working on stuff. You got you got Comet coming out as an agentic browser. With perplexity and and others are building these things. So, so basically midnight acts as a regulating layer. It can create economic agency for these, these agents allow people to buy them, but also it can create a situation where you can get the semantical value.

Your tastes and preferences in a way that the agent can understand without revealing the underlying personal, personally identifiable information.

Luke: It’s a fantastic explanation because I think that, you know, the thing I get excited about when, when I was digging into midnight is that it, it’s doing something that, no, [00:23:00] no one really else is in the way you guys are doing it.

Or it’s kind of like this connective tissue. Like people talk about upgrades to, you know, legacy systems a a lot. It, it’s a whole thing, but you know, there, there are so many things to factor in with that. That are being factored in that midnight will help facilitate. So I think the medical example is great that even the shopping example, right?

Like, I mean, it also seems like it’s, it’s gonna make the regulatory landscape a lot easier to navigate because of that layer that you’ve got there. Is that what, what’s your take on how regulation will help shape this evolution? You know?

Charles: Yeah. We haven’t even talked about the regulator.

That’s, that is the single most exciting thing for defi there. ‘Cause there’s this, there’s this $10 trillion. Reward if you solve the problem, but nobody solved it, which is real world assets. When you quantify, you look at the city group reports and what Goldman’s saying and all these big banks, BlackRock is another.

All of them are gravitating around five to 15. The average is $10 trillion worth of stocks, bonds, real estate, and real world [00:24:00] assets. Basically, they want to put into the blockchain space. The problem is that the square peg don’t fit in the round hole. When you put a regulated asset, you have KYC, you have a ML, you have broker dealers, you have selective disclosure, you have privacy considerations like bank secrecy Act.

There’s hundreds of considerations when you deal with regulated financial rails and regulated customers and securities are designed to live in fragmented exchanges and trade nine to five, not 24 7 globally. So. If you solve the problem, the payoff is $10 trillion in mass liquidity. So everybody in the financial industry wants to solve it, but you need a regulation layer, a selective disclosure and privacy layer.

So basically when you send the asset on, you have two workflows. Is it regulated or unregulated? So imagine unis, swp of the future. So unis, swp the future. All your normal tokens are unregulated. So they live there. You trade ’em just like you would. But then for the regulated tokens, you have a hybrid application.

So now we’re talking about interoperability. That second pillar, that cooperative economics. So we tell Unis, WAP, [00:25:00] you pay an Ether, you’re still writing Solidity code and through Open Zeppelin, ‘cause we have a partnership with them. You can write your compact stuff. And for the regulated stuff, the workflow goes through midnight first.

So you’ll have an address. It looks like Ethereum. They send their Ether there or whatever the asset is there, and then they go through kind of a series of compliance stuff and Midnight has a series of smart contracts to handle all of that. And then once you get the game of 21 questions done as a series of zero knowledge proofs and things like that, then it settles on unis.

So from Unis wasp’s perspective, they have a split book regulated, unregulated, but the code is the same. Everything trades the same way. They don’t have to treat it any differently and settlement as compliance.

Luke: Mm. And then

Charles: in the metadata, there’s an appending link to midnight. Midnight has all the provable information.

And so if there’s ever a subpoena or something like that. There’s selective disclosure to the parties that were relevant, like the company issuing the asset and the regulators and the jurisdiction the person was from. But from the Ethereum side, the users are indistinguishable. And from the [00:26:00] midnight side, it’s private on the outside.

That’s awesome, but you’ve now created an entire regulatory layer for that. And you’ve now created a marketplace for regulated assets to trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So there’s already jurisdictions like Abu Dhabi and uh, and the FCA at the uk, they’re actually talking about algorithmic regulation.

‘cause they realize the promise here is they get equal consideration with the United States. Because the big problem is when you’re a mid-sized country or a small country. Your regulators don’t get any say. Right. You know, it’s like the US basically the S-E-C-S-E-C-C-F-T-C. But when you have a system like this, that regulations, library driven developments, public-private partnership.

The regulator at the FCA will go to the developers and say, for UK customers, here are our requirements. The industry writes, whoever writes the smart contracts for it. Then they certify with the regulating agency and then basically just use a library. You call the API. So you say, okay, I have a German customer.

Go through the German contract. I have a UK customer go through the UK customer. So as a software developer, you no longer have [00:27:00] to hire a lawyer. You don’t have to think about anything. You just, you just take the library and,

Luke: well, this is why, I mean, this is what I love about it too. ‘cause I feel like we’re hitting this phase where privacy has gone from being an abstract question of whether we need it or not to now you’ve got all these competing interests around how privacy’s gonna be done.

And the thing I love about what you just said is that it doesn’t. Change the precedent that have been driving society forever. Presumption of innocence, for example, right? Like, it’s not this magical thinking that we’re gonna have some uniform monolith around good guys versus bad guys. ‘cause it’s just totally not how the world works.

So I really love this, like a really practical type of implementation that can work. And, and I mean the, the bit about lawyers too, I’m already love that. I think they’re the best benefactors of all these Yeah. Cycles that we’ve seen have been, have been the legal profession. And, and also

Charles: it’s untenable like.

How do you have a smart contract like unis, swp, where people from more than a hundred countries interface with it, right? Technically that’s under the regulation of a hundred countries. It can’t work, right? So what you’ve gotta do is you have to say, tell me where you’re from through a system of selective disclosure, [00:28:00] and then I route you through.

The the, the pipeline and when it settles on unis wap, it settles and then you trade just like you would a crypto asset. Then unis WAP doesn’t have to carry out. That’s why I used the chat GPT example. You’re like, when you think about chat GPT, you have two options. When you’re a developer, you can build your own chat, GPT, so you can get like hundreds of billions of dollars of servers and data and train for three years and build your own data center and run it.

You have to upgrade it every six months and have a huge business there. Or you can just pay a fucking API fee, right? So why don’t you build a privacy stack where you have rational privacy, selected disclosure, and then you can call it when you need it. You’re paying the what currency you wanna pay in like ether or that, and every six months it keeps getting better and more jurisdictions wire in, it gets more identity standards, it gets more capabilities, and then the scope of commerce that you can do grows over time.

And it and your user experience is great. You know, so they, they go through a funnel and if the wallet supports it and they’ve already done compliance at Coinbase or something like that, it’s really easy for them to not even notice it. They just click it in the little clock, spins for [00:29:00] 30 seconds, and then bing it settles and they’re in the market and they have the exact same user experience as Unis Wap and Unis.

Wap doesn’t have to think about God, how do we build this giant privacy McGuffin and do all this other stuff? It’s like building our own chat. GPT, as you guys know, you’re one of the few people we talk to that has this same experience. Privacy is so fucking hard. There’s so many dimensions to it and there’s so many angles to how to build these things the right way, and there’s very few companies and people over the arc of time that have done it historically really well.

We have. 250 publications in cryptography. We have armies of cryptographers. We’ve been doing this for eight years with carano and, and main net. We implement cryptographic protocols. We design our own zero knowledge systems. There’s an enormous brain trust to people at input output that are really domain experts in this.

In this game, we’re also easy for people to work with people. You know, it’s very easy for us to partner with people like we’re partners with nm. It’s a decent, centralized VPN provider. We, we know the people from Signal, we know a lot of these other people, so it’s very easy for us to reason about how you would put a [00:30:00] stack of privacy together.

We’re even a member of a consortium with Nvidia and Intel and. A MD and Microsoft and Google and others called the Confidential Compute Consortium at the Linux Foundation, where they talk about how to use trusted execution environments with graphics cards and CPUs for next generation privacy enhancement.

So we’re a member of all the clubs. You know, we’re a part of all the different standards bodies and these types of things, and we built a really specialized brain trust. And the key is how do you sell that in a way for everybody else? And so first, let people pay ’em what they want. Be like a layer two to everybody and make your infrastructure feel like an extension of their infrastructure.

And then you create canonical workflows. So you show how regulated decks would work. You create a regulated jurisdiction like Abu Dhabi that sandboxes is. So that’s how the compliance works. You show how the identity providers plug in, you show how selective disclosure works, you show how the regulator plugs in and so forth.

And so all about next year is turning on these capabilities and getting partners to turn on their capabilities so that people can see it end to end, and then the markets will organically grow. Because the payoff is you go from [00:31:00] a nine to five stock market in New York City to a global stock market that’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week with T zero settlement, very low fees and high trading with with rules that nobody confront, run you or cheat.

You’re not playing against Citadel and high frequency trading co-located inside the servers and they snipe you. You know, everybody plays by the same set of rules. That’s what the blockchain does for you.

Luke: That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, and, and, and it is great. Appreciate you getting into the detail on that. And I know that you’re working on several other things.

There’s something I, I’ve, it would pain me not to, to bring it up but I, I’ve heard about you, you working on like anti-aging clinic in, in Wyoming. And you’re pushing the frontier from Wyoming which is awesome. But why, what, what made Wyoming special the place you wanted to kind of, set up in and, and, and also, what, what are you most excited about with with longevity and, and the anti-aging side of things?

Charles: Yeah. So I come from a family of doctors. My grandfather was a doctor. My dad’s a doctor. Brother’s a doctor. Uncle’s a doctor. I was the weird one who liked, liked mathematics and radical right [00:32:00] wing politics and things like that.

Right? So, so I, I, I got to meet

Luke: your dad at VO for, by the way, he was a really, really awesome guy. Yeah.

Charles: Oh, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, very few people get to meet him, but he’s a great guy. So I always wanted to do something in medicine and there’s really two sides to it. One, I, I wanted to innovate the medical system and you just can’t do that from the inside the system.

You have to be an outsider and come in. ‘cause that system is so regulated and so bureaucratic and horrible and inefficient and it’s, it’s just filled with a bunch of bad BA actors. So I built a clinic, it’s 70,000 square feet. That’s about like 8,000 square meters or something like that. It’s a massive clinic and it has 40 providers and almost 20,000 patients now.

So we take care of the local community in Gillette, Wyoming. Wow. So we have MRI and CAT scan, a lab and a pharmacy and primary care physicians and specialists like neurologists and cardiologists and nephrologists. So we got all theologists. You know, there. And so we can just do really good healthcare and part of it’s a Petri dish to explore care delivery.

And how do you do that in a more efficient way? That’s AI enabled. So you can do like, real time, can use [00:33:00] chart auditing, and you can look at horizonal things like network medicine and genomic medicine and precision medicine. And you can also start talking around like how do you integrate lifestyle medicine into allopathic medicine?

So lifestyle is the four pillars of like, diet, exercise, mental health, and sleep. Turns out that. For every medical intervention that we’ve ever invented in the 20th and 21st century your lifespan is, is much more controlled by whether you sleep right, and you don’t have sleep apnea. Whether you eat right, you exercise, and if your mental health is good.

I can tell you with certainty that if those. Pillars are wrong, you will die early and you’ll die of, of cancer or chronic ailment. So that is mostly ignored by modern allopathic medicine. And and that’s sad. So I wanted to have a place to combine both those things together and figure out a practice model that’s sustainable for people and an experiment with direct primary care and you’re getting out of insurance companies and other things like that.

‘cause it’s just horrible entities. The other side of it is I’m very interested in geo therapeutics, like the whole art of longevity. [00:34:00] There’s a few things that I don’t think people fully understand. First off, whenever you design a biological system, or you’re asking, is it possible, you look for nature and say, is something in nature biologically immortal or hyper regenerative?

And the answer is yes. Tosis dny is a a jelly, a jellyfish. And you know, they float around or they’re I mortal jellyfish. So if you google immortal jellyfish, you can see what they look like. They’re trash bags that live forever. And so when they get old, they regenerate themselves and become young again, so they can just live forever.

And then there’s creatures in nature like salamanders and oxy bottles and other things. You chop off their tail or their legs, they grow them back. So there’s hyper regenerative creatures and there’s biologically immortal creatures. And I was reading a book on embryology and it just occurred to me like.

Humans are biologically immoral. If we weren’t, the human race would go extinct. Why? Because when you and a woman get together and have a baby, does the baby come out at 30 or 25 or whenever? No. That egg is 25 years old or 30 years old, but yet when the sperm touches it and forms an [00:35:00] embryo. It biologically resets, it comes out at zero.

So there’s already a mechanism to do a biological age reset inside your body, or else human humanity would die out if that wasn’t happen. ‘cause you would carry forward all the age of the tissue. Right. So we already have that. And actually for little kids, like under five, you cut off the tip of their fingertip, it usually grows back.

Hmm. You know, so we actually come out with hyper regenerative capabilities and an embryo. If you damage it, it’ll completely regenerate. So we have salamander like. Biologically immortality like capabilities because of embryology and in the early days of humans. So this is not a super complex problem.

It’s more of a programming problem. There’s something in the code that if you can program it right, you can probably make substantial progress very quickly on rejuvenation of a person. So I said, well. What is our unit of regeneration in building? It’s the stem cell and everybody’s chasing like modified stem cells and genetically engineered stem cells, [00:36:00] induced pluripotent stem cells.

They take Yamanaka factors and they do all this stuff to turn them into something, and I say, well. You know, what if I just take what you have? So you have three different mesenchymal stem cells that you can get. So you have your fat, your bone, and your blood hematopoietic bone derived and adipose derived.

And I said, well, the best is the adipose derived. So just take fat, you know, and then you have mesenchymal, autologous stem cells are you. So no chance of rejection, no chance of cancer. They’re there. They’re part of your natural regeneration system for your body. And then can I take that and change the programming language?

And if I do that, I probably can get them to go and do all kinds of really cool things. So I have some levers I can pull. There’s three levers I can pull. One is exosomes. So these are kind of like biological data packets and they tell stem cells to do stuff. So one experiment we’re conducting with autologous mesenchymal stem cells is to take bil cord blood exosomes.

Which are just the data packets that come off of the biological data packets that come off of umbilical cord blood stem cells, [00:37:00] which are like zero day. It’s right when you’re born. It’s the earliest you’re gonna get. And if I pair ’em together, so I took my own stem cells I extract them from my fat.

We, we. Cultured them with the exosomes, and guess what? They grow twice as fast and they have all this amazing gene of protein expression. So it looks like just having an exosome reprogram the stem cell makes it younger, more vibrant and more active. So now I can do tests to see if they do stuff. So another lever you can pull is the electron.

DNA doesn’t have spatial information in it. So you know, if you. You have some DNA, you know, it’s like how do we know we have two hands and the eyes and all this other stuff and we’re, we’re, we’re symmetry the way we are. Well, it’s actually electrical activity ion channels inside the cells that determine that.

So there’s a guy named Mike Levin over at Tufts University and he was fucking with embryos. With frogs and just by changing the electrical activity, he could make a frog have eyes in its ass or eyes in its mouth and all kinds of things like that. He was also using. Changes of the because every cell has an electrical fingerprint, so like neurons or 0.00 negative millivolts or [00:38:00] whatever.

And every cell’s different. Just by changing the ion channels, the voltage potentials in these, you actually can make cancer cells revert back to normal cells. So it’s groundbreaking research that he’s doing. Wow. So here’s another cool thing. When you, you, your skin, if you put a volter meter on it, it’s electrically neutral If you cut the skin.

You actually have an electrical charge where the wound is at the center of it, and it creates electro taxes. It tracks stem cells to go and heal the wound. Well, what’s interesting, the older you get, the electrical field reduces and, and strength, so if you take old people and you actually put a bandage with a battery in it, it’ll heal their wounds three to four times faster.

You go on Amazon, they sell bandages that actually have batteries to actually. Put a small charge, and DARPA even has a program where they’re doing is for battlefield medicine, trying to use electricity to accelerate healing. So the electro is an incredible thing and it’s, it’s a programming thing for cell differentiation and it’s a programming thing to tell cells where to go and what to do.

And the third thing is looks like pressure. Has an enormous amount to do with longevity. [00:39:00] So hyperbaric is where this comes up. So, you know, remember the Tonight Show with Jay Leno? You know, he, it’s a big car guy. His car exploded in his face and horribly burned one side of his face.

And so he used Hyperbarics and if you look at before and after pictures, it’s fully healed and fully regenerated. Yeah. So Hyperbarics, for whatever reason, has an epigenetic expression, and over 900 different genes are activated or silent. When you go into a high pressure, high oxygen environment for 90 minutes and it kind of programs the body saying, dump your stem cells and regenerate.

So just get all the stem cells running around and have them do things. So we’re experimenting right now with exosomes, electro, and hyperbarics with your stem cells. So we’re not doing any genetic modifications. We’re not like changing anything. There’s no chance of cancer or risk, and all these interventions are.

Very safe, like hyperbaric, have been around forever. The electro is something that we all have and it’s why we’re able to move around. And we have brainwaves and things like that. They’re all intrinsically electrical. And then on the exosome side, that’s that’s right now in, in the lab. And my hope is to come up with a.

[00:40:00] Package where I can get people on a subscription. We extract their stem cells, we culture expand ’em, so we have a lifetime supply of ’em, and they just get an IV bag. And then, then we just change the environment a little bit and we have, you enter into a hyper rejuvenative state, and the idea is that it’ll.

It’ll massively improve your biological health, assuming that your lifestyle is good, and assuming that there’s no chronic ailment that kind of gets in the way, and that’s kind of what we’re gonna do over the next 10 years. Then the 10 years after that is when you get into the gene therapies and the epigenetic reprogramming and.

The IPSC revolution really starts getting good and you know, then you have nanobots and you know, you know plasmids and you know, all the synthetic biology stuff. But you know, the problem is so far out there and you know, and already in nature if you have immortal jellyfish and salamanders and ox waals, let’s just try to chase that ‘cause it feels like that’s a lot easier.

‘cause we’re born with those systems. We’re common ancestors to these things. We just have to figure out a way to wake them up a little bit and jostling the environment, you know, and jostling the you know, the. [00:41:00] The, the, the chemical signals. I think that’s sufficient. And also there’s less things that can go wrong.

The other thing that we’re working right now is to kind of improve the state-of-the-art for stem cell extraction. ‘cause currently adipose derived stem cells, you extract them with liposuction. It’s painful. I did it myself. It was horrible.

Luke: Hmm.

Charles: So, so no, don’t do that. That, that’s, that’s, that’s too much.

So what we need to do is we need to have a different way of you know, of, of extracting cells. So we’re working on a device right now that, that’s just a patch and you put it on like a continuous glucose monitor. It has chemokines in it. It tracks the stem cells into it. And then those stem cells basically aggregate there over a few days and just take the patch off and then you culture expand those so you don’t have to do an invasive procedure for it.

‘cause you know, like how do you do liposuction on a 90-year-old? Right? Yeah. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not a viable thing. So getting non-invasive for extraction and then getting stem cells into standard of care, it’s a big goal of mine. And I think by 2030, my hope is every patient at my clinic, [00:42:00] we’ve.

Culture expanded their stem cells and we have a copy of them and we use them to almost like they use steroids and saline in the care of patients at the er. You know, like always give them stem cells and then we do a full genome sequence ‘cause it’s under $200 to do that now. And using ai, you can do precision medicine for all the other stuff.

These are two big things that I think are gonna radically transform how we think about patients and how do we plan the care. And it just gives us a regenerative medicine capability that we’ve never had before. The electro is so cool. They have a DARPA program right now where they’re cutting the feet off rats or mice, and they’re putting these boxes on and it runs a current and it regenerates the entire foot.

Whoa. That’s wild. Yeah.

Luke: Well, and, and, and. The thing that really jumps out too. I mean, you, you mentioned you got 20,000 patients, right? Yeah. Like if I, if I heard you correctly, like, how, what’s the, you know, how, how many of them are, are, are participating in some of these, I mean, like, some of these trials, is it, are, are you tapping into everybody?

Is it, is it something where a certain percentage of the population are small subset?

Charles: You know, your clinical trial [00:43:00] numbers are always small, you know? Yeah. When you look at like a phase one, you’re probably 20 to 60, you know, phase two, you’re probably about 60 to 200, depending upon the. Confounding factors inside the study.

You know, other things for determining the power phase three, it’s 500 to a thousand maybe. Maybe more, you know, but these are not massive numbers. And so what we built the clinic for was phase one and two, the safety and the first signals of efficacy, and then it’s of center of excellence to partner with other centers for phase three.

And we can do global trials at. At that point. So, you know, the nice part about starting with something that you understand very well, like, autologous, mesenchymal stem cells, this is not new stuff. It’s been around for decades, so the entire science of it is very well understood. You know, if everything from the extraction, the culture, expansion to injection protocols, it’s just, there’s debates on efficacy.

And I said, well, of course there’s debates on efficacy because my whole hypothesis is that they’re only effective if the environment is right. So if you’re, you’re [00:44:00] changing the environment as you’re variable. Some patients are gonna have a radically awesome outcome, like fully heals them and other patients.

It has no effect at all. So what I’m gonna do is, is standardize the environments that I inject. These things in, and then my hypothesis is we’re gonna get a great signal from all of that. I can verify that within one to two years from the, the data that we’re looking at, you know, and I don’t need more than probably a hundred to 200 patients and you know, we can collect everything.

You know, the fact that I have my own MRI, you know, I can do, it’s a three Tesla MRI with from Siemens, the Magome, and we have the AIOps scaling with it. So we have these beautiful seven Tesla pictures. I can do this nice full body scan. We can look at TBIs and we can look at heart scarring. We can look at all lung scarring, all kinds of stuff.

We can spi, oag the stem cells so we can actually see where they go. So, you know, we’re seeing electro taxes. It’s important to understand, can you use electricity or something to move stem cells from one part of the body to another? ‘cause some people think the first pass, they get stuck on the lungs and they can’t do much from there.

So let’s take a look and see see if we can move them to peripheral [00:45:00] tissue. Like I’m we’re gonna do a study for cancer. For when people get multiple rounds of chemotherapy, especially for later stage cancers, a lot of ’em develop peripheral neuropathies where they, they damage the vasculature nerves in their fingertips and toes, and then for the rest of their life it’s, it’s like hot and cold water is just really painful, and for the rest of their life, they have balance problems and other things.

My grandfather had peripheral neuropathies in his feet from the bends, so. That is something I think Hyperbarics and stem cells could treat. And actually and what’s cool is like there’s some unlimited supply of these post-cancer people. And basically the standard of care is to say, you know, take a salt tablet, you know, take your aspirin.

There’s nothing you can do with that. So it’s easy for me to build clinical trial. And what’s really cool is you can visually see the regrowth of the nerves and vasculature and you can visually see the restoration of function. TBIs are another one we’re very passionate about. You know, I I have a lot of.

Friends in the Special Forces community ‘cause I have a security detail that’s made up of Rangers and Navy Seals and Green Berets and the great. Paradox of it is the better [00:46:00] you are, the worse off you are. Right? Right. The real thing is you’re like, you’ve been in for 20 years as a SEAL team six guy. It means you’ve been shot and blown up like 40 times.

Yeah. So you have all these TBIs and all these things, so you’re like the ultimate badass, but your body’s starting to fall apart. So every one of these operations guys, they, they have problems and so. I have a deep bench of people in that community that I just pick up the phone and be like, Hey guys, you, you want to go see if I can fix your back?

Or, you know, fix your brain or, you know, solve that balance problem that you now have or that vertigo you now have because you’ve been shot so many times. They’re like, yeah, what, what plane do I have to get on to make that happen? I was like, yeah, go ahead. You know? So, the research problem’s not an issue.

It’s just building a diagnostic center of excellence and, and, and getting the translational medicine right? You have to have physicians paired with scientists. You can’t just have scientists. The biggest problem with all these billionaires, like Vitalik or other people that go into anti-aging, they think it’s a money problem and a science problem.

It’s neither. There’s too much money, there’s too much science. It’s a translational medicine problem. It’s how do you translate [00:47:00] what’s in a lab? Into a patient, right? And the gatekeeper there is a physician. So if you really want to do great geo therapeutic diagnostics and, and, and interventions, you have to have a clinical center of excellence that’s set up for that.

And then your doctors work with your scientists and they basically create rolling clinical trials, observational or otherwise, you know, cold standards, placebo controlled doubleblind. But you can set up trials really rapidly and every year you’re doing some form of research for it and you know, it makes you, and then, and then you know, just.

Pick your flavor of the week. You know, like this will be cancer week. You, you know, you know, this will be, this will be kidney week and we have a lot of kidney patients that have problems. Let’s go, you know, see if we can regenerate the kidneys or the liver. And it’s just a question of can you measure it?

And then, you know, can you conduct an experiment? Can you get a positive signal from it? And what’s really cool if it doesn’t work? Almost. Always, there’s no downside to the patient. Right? If I’m using your own stem cells, there’s a very low cancer rich, there’s, there’s no teratomas or, you know, and there’s, there’s no like weird on onco virus that’s coming [00:48:00] outta this.

It’s your tissue, you know, at the end of the day. So if, you know, if it works, it works wonderfully. If it doesn’t work, it typically just doesn’t work. You know, but you get that signal very rapidly within six months to a year.

Luke: Well, gosh, Charles, I mean like, we covered so much today, but I mean, and, and I had a question I was gonna ask you about, about moonshots, but I think that, like, looking at this like stepping back where, you know, all of that, like age extension, the, the, the clinical framework, all of that, and then also looking at what you all are doing with midnight and card, et cetera, it really seems like the moonshot is getting all of these things on a path to work together to really drive some change.

Is that a fair way to frame it up?

Charles: Yeah, I mean, there’s. Yeah, I, you know, sometimes you don’t know how the dots fit together in the beginning, but looking back you can see the web, you know? So now when I look back the last 10 years, there were a lot of things that I did that were just passion things that seemed to be random.

And now I’m starting to connect the dots and see how all the ventures play with each other and work with each other. Like how Cardonal works with midnight and midnight, works [00:49:00] with medicine, and medicine, works with, you know, where I want to go. And that’s awesome. And it’s, it’s the same with all of our external partners too, and people that we work with in the ecosystem.

There’s a lot of stuff we offer that I don’t think people understand. Our industry has become so obsessed with like Token Price and TVL and transactions that MA use, that they completely reduce a project into a series of numbers. And if those numbers, for whatever reason, don’t. Look good. Then they write off the entire ecosystem.

They say there’s nothing special there. That’s kind of like saying, you know, I guess it’s the ification of society, you know, elegant people. You know, there’s all this stuff here, but you look at a picture, you either swipe left or swipe right. So you know, we have a set of metrics in the crypto land and if the metrics look great, you just swipe right or or left.

I don’t know how it works with Tinder, but it’s one direction. Yeah. You know, it is like you sw you swipe in one direction or the other based on the metrics and and, and so, that’s what we’ve done. And when you actually take the time to listen to people and understand people, you say, wow, I disagree [00:50:00] with them on their philosophy about consensus, but I really like the anti-aging thing.

Or I really like this, or I really like that. I think there’s a collaboration point there. When you start talking that way, then everybody just starts working together and they start, you know, getting along. We need that in 2026. The world is so incredibly divided and the world is so polarized and it’s become very toxic and we can no longer feel like, have a conversation with each other.

Right. You know, and so, so my hope with midnight is that, you know, one of the third pillars of the fourth generation is cooperation. I, I, I wrote that down. It’s like cooperation. We have to work together. We have to find a way to do that. And so we did that with Glacier Drop, where we distributed to, it’s the largest of all time now at beat, arbitrary by, I think, two to three x depending on how many people the exchange is distributed to.

But we did that with the glacier drop. We did that with the hybrid DAP model. We did that with multi resource consensus, so it gives some, everybody a little something and it doesn’t take from anybody. It’s not like saying, well, by adopting midnight now Ethereum loses or Solana loses. You keep the users, you keep the liquidity, you keep the transactions, you just [00:51:00] using it as a service to enable something, and that service every six months basically gets better like chat, GPT or Gemini and just you get used to that and then you get superhuman capabilities over time.

Yeah.

Luke: That’s awesome. And, and I mean, for folks that you know, wanna dig in deeper on, on, on midnight or, or the anti-aging stuff, where, where should they follow you or follow, follow any of these things? Well,

Charles: midnight Network is the best place to go. It’s a one-stop shop, join the Discord, and you know, just become part of it.

We, we drop the. Eight ecosystems, seven blockchains. So the odds are that you’re probably in one of the chains that we dropped to and you can do stuff and it will be activating communities like every two months after everything gets launched and turned on and, and so I just hope the space likes it. We also didn’t do an ICO and you know, there was no VCs that were involved or anything like that.

We just gave it away, you know, and that was fun, you know, because, yeah, because all these, these came, they’re like, how do we get tokens? And I’m like, you don’t. They’re like, but, but we really want them. And I’m like, no, giving you retail, everybody gets it. And that was a lot of fun. [00:52:00] So, so I really enjoyed you know, doing that and also to be able to do a hybrid proof of work, proof of stake thing.

So you did a airdrop, but then we did a mining phase. The, the 20 days that we mined replicated like two and a half years worth of work activity from Bitcoin you know. So, so there was a lot of participation that, and we did some calculations ‘cause a lot of people were using cloud servers for it ‘cause they were CPU optimized.

We thought Microsoft and Google, ‘cause they were the cloud backend for a lot of people were making like a million to million and a half a day on just, just renting hardware for people to buy. And it was like, fuck, that’s a good business to be in. Like Azure was like, yeah, we really like these, these midnight guys and Google Cloud with Google’s one of the.

Partners, you know, they’re like, yeah, yeah, we really think midnight’s got a future. Like yeah, if you’re making a million dollars a day, I see that you’re like a fucking future there. Yeah, that’s good. And it reminded me how much people like mining. ‘cause I started as a miner and you know, back in the day when it was all CPU mining and I was part of slush pool and these other things, so I’d just completely forgotten about mining, you [00:53:00] know?

‘cause I’ve been in the proof of stake side of the world for so long. So it was cool that. Midnight was able to bring that back too. The, like the OG mining DGen thought process.

Luke: I love it, man. Well, Charles, I you’ve been really gracious with your time. Obviously. There’s so much going on. Really appreciate you, you making the time.

Also just love to get more folks from midnight, from the larger community on to as we, as we go along and, and get more updates on how things are going. But really, really thank you so much for, for making the time to join us today. Really appreciate it.

Charles: That’s a lot of fun. Thanks Luke. Alright, take care.

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