Founder/CEO Beniamin Mincu

Auren Hoffman (00:00.913) Hello fellow data nerds. guest today is Benjamin Mincu. Beniamin Mincu is the CEO of Multiverse X, a next generation blockchain protocol. Before that, he founded MediChain Capital, which was an early investor in projects like Polkadot and Binance. He's also the host of Fullshard Podcast, which is really one of the more followed voices of Web3. Benjamin, welcome to World of DaaS.

Beniamin Mincu (00:28.064) Auren, it's really great to be here. Pleasure.

Auren Hoffman (00:30.727) Great to have you. Now, why does AI need a trust layer? Like why are people talking about blockchain and AI together?

Beniamin Mincu (00:39.864) think the most important point here is AI is not stopping. It's accelerating and has increasing capabilities to the point where it will very soon feel like a genius and then almost gradually like an oracle that trends to a god. Of course, you could argue how long that will take and so on, but if you grant that AI will have this superhuman capabilities.

and that it will be able to do good and bad. The most important point is how do you ground that such that you know it's safe, especially when you imagine you have an AI assistant, it has access to your entire life, everything you do, everything you say and so on. Question is, how can you sleep well at night knowing that there's someone that's maybe brighter, smarter and so on?

And I think this is how you ground it, a kind of trust layer that sets some boundaries, some guardrails for what the AI can do and cannot do. Seems like a very...

Auren Hoffman (01:46.065) Why is that why is that overlap with the blockchain?

Beniamin Mincu (01:49.123) Well, blockchain, I've framed this in two ways. I thought in the future, you're going to only have two types of technologies. Creation machines, which are different versions of AI, where you can just take an AI and it will gradually do expanding capabilities to do almost everything we can do and then go beyond that. And then trust machines or truth machines, which is just...

a set of properties that a computation layer has, which incidentally is the blockchain, which is censorship resistance, verifiable, transparent, and then can scale with the scale of AI.

Auren Hoffman (02:33.649) So some sort of like digital signing type of thing or digital fingerprints or something.

Beniamin Mincu (02:39.368) Yeah, some type of digital fingerprinting is just a very simple form of it. Imagine that every interaction with AI, every kind of response, request and all of that can be verified, cannot be counterfeited. So neither the company nor the AI can then change the response to make it seem like they've answered something else and so on. If something bad happens, suppose that you have, let's say, kind of asking for

medical advice and then you listen to that and then someone dies. Well, who's at fault in that type of situation? So the point is just having a kind of accountability layer. So something that established the ground rules establishes who's at fault if something bad happens and then who's responsible for maintaining that type of transparency. That's what the blockchain can do in a way that has not been done up until this point.

Auren Hoffman (03:38.877) Now we're moving to a world very quickly where a very large portion of the content on the internet is AI generated. And maybe already we're at over 50 % today and soon we'll be at 80, 90 % of the content. Like how does that trust problem evolve as more and more of the content is not generated by a person?

Beniamin Mincu (04:03.488) You know, there's this dead internet theory that, interestingly enough, Sam Altman just discussed about recently, like the last few days, which just states that more and more of what you perceive and see there is actually generated by bots, some type of AI, like more sophisticated AIs that make it seem like this is humans speaking to you, but it's actually some type of bots.

Auren Hoffman (04:30.929) Yep. Yep.

Beniamin Mincu (04:32.802) So the question is, how do you ensure that there's someone there that you're not talking to a bot, that you understand the identity, and then again, can trace what the implications of what's happening.

Auren Hoffman (04:45.309) And by the way, sometimes I prefer to talk to a bot, but I might want them to let me know that I'm to a bot or something.

Beniamin Mincu (04:51.958) Yes, I think this is precisely the point. Knowing with whom you discuss is the very fine point that then makes you calibrate some of the things, what the bot should...

Auren Hoffman (05:02.941) Yeah, I was on a call the other day where I called like customer service and basically said, hi, like, by the way, I'm a bot, just so know, because it wasn't obvious. And so they, they, they let me know right out front and it was great. It was, it was an amazing experience and it was great because I didn't have to press. I didn't have to do the phone tree. I got to talk to someone like immediately and they were able to deal with my problem, you know, faster than potentially human would be.

Beniamin Mincu (05:29.74) Indeed, identity problem has been a very core problem to the internet. When something is fully digital, the question is how do you validate who's there?

Auren Hoffman (05:40.509) Yeah, by the way, like the first internet cartoon was, you no one knows you're a dog on the internet.

Beniamin Mincu (05:45.87) 100 % % 100 % and those meme have a great grounding in the reality because people tend to be something else and then how you solve this There's a kind of problem. That's called the Cibyl attack problem where someone can just direct thousands of bots Bots toward the website toward the registration form towards something and then overwhelm that and you don't even know so

As we scale to this sophisticated agents, the question is, how do we verify who's human, who's an agent, and then who's a malicious bot? Because if you do not have an identity, that's a way of creating this kind of separation between people or agents which have validated and identified as X. And then...

just these malicious actors that do not want to verify or identify because it's much more advantageous for them to have the pseudonymity there.

Auren Hoffman (06:49.719) I started my career in the ad tech world and in the ad tech world there's a lot of bots and the frustrating thing was so many legitimate companies in the ecosystem were benefiting from the bots. And so they had a disincentive to root out the bots because they were making more money because the bots were there. And even on social media, like that there's so many bots that are in social media, in some cases social media.

There's more bots commenting than real people. And often the social media companies benefit from these bots. And so how do you deal with those types of cases?

Beniamin Mincu (07:30.241) mean, you're very spot on because when you said add, the first thing I thought was like misaligned incentives, perverse incentives. And I think the next thing that you said is the social networks, like sometimes there may be 80 % with bots that looks so plausibly real that you never think, hey, this might be actually a bot. And this is why in some sense you want to ground

this solution independent of them, because if they make sufficient profits, they will not want to solve this problem, right? It's contrary to what their profits would be if they eliminate all the bots. And so having an independent, trusted, transparent, very provably verifiable layer like the blockchain is just a simple way of actually

solving this problem and then enabling anyone to just verify this because there you cannot modify the traces, you cannot delete the tracks and then that gives it a different kind of trust perspective.

Auren Hoffman (08:42.705) What is this idea of like an AI sovereign chain? Like how does that

Beniamin Mincu (08:48.097) The idea is very simple in some sense. If you think about AI and specifically agents, agents are these actors that can operate and do actions for some type of trusted party. The question is, is the internet built for agents? And so if you think about the internet, we had three phases, read, write, and own. And I think we...

can certainly see the agents going from page to page and so on. But we've not seen them have a great type of substrate where the actions can be tracked and verified deterministically, and then they can have objectives that then can be verified and so on. As you may know, AI as it is right now is probabilistic. It's non-deterministic, so it may or may not tell you the truth.

It may hallucinate from time to time. So you need to ground all the AI interactions in a substrate that is deterministic, where you say, A cannot be both A and non-A, and we're not sure. It can be either A or B, and then we're sure that it's A or B, and I can track, track, monitor, and so on. And the point with this is more to think, suppose that I have 100,000 agents.

one million or one billion agents. How do I facilitate this type of transparency and interaction with them? That's very common sense with identity and everything that comes through it. But then even more important, how do I facilitate a coordination between multiple such agents in a way that can be deterministic? And I can say in a chain of 10 agent interaction, I can say, no, this guy has actually stolen the money. He was

and so on. that's a way of... Yes, audit is one level, but then the second level is you can do it, you can think about it as multiplayer interactions. You just audit and verify. Single player, sorry. Single player interactions with agents are between you and them and you audit and verify them. Multiplayer interaction, they need to coordinate also between each other.

Auren Hoffman (10:46.301) It's like audit in a way.

Beniamin Mincu (11:10.305) they need to understand even more between each other because if they don't operate with a deterministic function, then you cannot actually instruct 100 agents to do something and discuss between them and so on.

Auren Hoffman (11:24.935) So many people today are talking about MCP, the Model Context Protocol. Can you help us understand like what that is?

Beniamin Mincu (11:31.757) 100%, maybe a simple way of looking at that is like the USB for AI interaction. And what does the USB actually mean? It's just this standard that translates what the AI can do and understands between the AI and any other application. So it's almost like in any other socket, in any other device, if you have a USB, you plug it in and then

it connects to the computer in the same way the MCP is plugged into what applications you have. And then they can interact in this predictable way with the agents, AIs and so on.

Auren Hoffman (12:14.907) And if they're, if like these agents start using like blockchain for everything, is that going to start like slowing everything down? You know, like, is it going to, or is it going to be like, okay, back in the day, like HTTPS where we thought it would slow everything down and then it just got fast enough for it just became the default for everything.

Beniamin Mincu (12:33.228) The point here is you can think about it as in HTTPS or which is more defensive and then offensive it's the TCP IP for like communication protocol between agents and so both of them in order to do them at scale you need a blockchain that can process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second that can scale and in some sense everything we've built is

built on this technology that we call sharding that is built for internet scale. If you have no adoption, then of course you don't need scalability. If you have adoption on this scale, at that point it's crucial to have the type of architecture that enables you to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second and eventually millions of transactions per second in this type of interactions.

Auren Hoffman (13:27.559) Now we're moving to world two where like every person, every application, every company is having, you know, dozens, potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of agents doing things on their behalf. And those agents are starting to interact with other agents. You know, we have a company that is helping doctors call the insurance companies to verify if somebody is insured for a specific thing. And

At first, like 100 % of the people that they were talking to were humans at the insurance. The AI was talking to was humans at the insurance company, but now already 10 % of the time, the AI is talking to another AI. They're still talking in English, but you can imagine at some point they'll talk in a more efficient language once they, you know, no reason just to talk in English to one another. Like how does that evolve over time?

Beniamin Mincu (14:21.584) look, I wanted to say before, when you asked me all this other questions that I think for, for maybe a simple users, this may sound very technical abstract and it's almost sci-fi, but now that you come and say, Hey, these are companies that are doing all this today, not in the future and discussing between each other. Like my AI is discussing with your AI on the phone to do something that tells you what world.

what crazy world we live in. And so I do agree with you that this will not stop and this will accelerate, but I think a guarding against AI switching to a much more efficient language that we don't understand anymore, that becomes a black box for us. I think that would be an important checkpoint because if it becomes super effective and where this just is

I've heard this metaphor where if you take the speed at which AI can process things and compare it to humans, humans will be like trees, almost in slow motion, doing something that seems so ridiculous that you're wondering why are we even having this conversation? So think a question that we should pose is how can we stay grounded and ahead?

do not be left behind, and then how we keep the AIs grounded. And that's the entire point with the accountability layer, that some things should be grounded such that the AI cannot sort of do whatever it wants to the point where it becomes malicious.

Auren Hoffman (16:04.253) As this kind of transition plays out, like who are the winners and losers?

Beniamin Mincu (16:11.53) I mean, you can see it in a few ways. Simple users or builders, I would just encourage to play with this technology because it's extraordinarily useful and valuable today. Like whatever may happen in the future, today they can unlock value out of it in whatever they're doing, whether it's just passionate, passion, hobbies and so on, or professional stuff. Second, companies even more.

There's an imperative in looking at this because if you're not using it, you risk leaving a lot of opportunity on the table and then being left behind. And I do think that there's also a kind of risk and challenge here that if these three, four biggest AI companies in the world race

and do not have any grounding, any supervision, they may become, to the extent that they may become dictators, just govern the entire world. So the question will be then, how do we ensure that it's a kind of benevolent dictator and you don't end up with China owning this technology and then the entire world going to communism and so on?

Auren Hoffman (17:36.957) Yeah, it's very interesting. So opening guy has recently said that they're going to lose about 20 to 20 to 30 billion per year that they're going to spend 20. That is that's going to be their deficit every year. And, you know, back in the day, not not that long ago, it was like a big deal to lose like 20 to 30 million a year as a startup. And then it became like a huge thing maybe for Uber to lose like 300 million dollars a year.

But, then maybe a billion dollars a year. So when we're talking about 20 to $30 billion every year, that's more than the market cap of most companies and even the biggest tech companies have a hard time competing with that amount of capital. How does that play out?

Beniamin Mincu (18:19.679) think the most important question is what would warrant, what would justify this type of insane investment of capital such that you bet everything you have and then some and you take more capital and you arm yourself because you almost perceive it. If this is the final war that you have to fight, then of course every investment is justified. And I think in practice,

this is what these companies are doing. They're recognizing that there is so vast reward and potential outcome that it's all or nothing in some sense and they want to do everything they

Auren Hoffman (19:01.307) It's potentially also existential for the other tech companies that are out there.

Beniamin Mincu (19:05.547) 100 % and they recognize it. I think this is the only plausible reason why someone would tell you that they'll lose 50 billion a year for the next few years because the outcome that justifies this is hey we're going to unlock a kind of Oracle or Genie or Demigod unlike anything that we've had up until this point.

Auren Hoffman (19:29.735) Now, to have this kind of like, whether it's an audit or digital signature or fingerprints or blockchain interacting with AI, there's this kind of like bottoms up approach. There could be like companies adopt certain things to, and maybe they get, because they get customers or certain standards like they do with the USB and stuff. But at some point, there's a regulatory state that gets involved. There's governments that get involved. How do you think those interactions start playing out?

Beniamin Mincu (19:59.308) believe that this is beyond a certain point, just a geopolitical national security issue for every country. Like when something is so important that it's comparable to an atomic bomb in terms of potential, both beneficial in some sense and negative, then me developing an atomic bomb would threaten any other country that doesn't have an atomic bomb.

I believe that bringing it down to grounding, every country will look at how they defend against this type of AI and they themselves have a weapon. Because if you're left without one, then you basically do not exist. You're not even at the table having a conversation. So I think there's, of course, the user perspective. How do you defend? How do you reason navigate that? There's the business perspective.

But the biggest perspective is the national security one, where the governments are.

Auren Hoffman (21:00.977) why, why do you have, mean, Germany doesn't have an atom bomb. Japan doesn't have an atom bomb. are very large countries. you know, Italy, et cetera. Like how, how do they, you know, somehow they're under someone's umbrella or someone's tutelage or some sort of thing to, for them to exist today. Right.

Beniamin Mincu (21:22.251) Sure, there's a kind of game theory that plays out here where you say in the the atomic bomb age it was mutually assured destruction. So you needed several big powers to arm themselves and then to say, hey, I'm allied with this guy. I'm with the US. I'm with Russia. I'm with China. And those being, let's say, big parties, whoever

with the other one, they know that there's going to be some repercussions. I think here the thing is in some sense playing in a similar way. So definitely US and China are in an arms race, publicly declared where everything goes and they're trying to attack and deceive themselves. You see new models coming up from China, deceiving people that they've been made with less money without

chips from the US and so on. But the point, the more practical point here is can you wield this technology today as a kind of positive, almost weapon? Can you use it in whatever you're doing as a user or as a business? And then what's the point at which you need to be able to defend yourself? Defend yourself as a business, defend yourself as a user, or defend your country.

as a kind of sovereign state because it's not only benevolent actors that get this technology. There's also terrorists. There's also thieves. There's also very malicious people that will try to harm you with 10x precision, less 10x less cost. And I think that's the, that's the, let's say huge

positive potential but then also huge negative potential that we should defend against.

Auren Hoffman (23:19.407) In the nuclear age, the governments were the ones who built it. They're the ones who created it. The core expertise, if you think of the US government, you have the Manhattan Project, you have the national labs. was something where really the government is the one with all of the expertise. In AI, it's really the opposite. It's really developed outside of government, sometimes even in opposition, sometimes to government. How does one like

know, government's really just a late adopter essentially when it comes to AI, when it comes to blockchain. How do they get involved in the right way to actually harness it? Because they could mess it up. They could impair it and allow another country. You know, there's a lot of different types of things that could be happening.

Beniamin Mincu (24:10.078) Yeah, so I think there's almost two types of games. There's this kind of clear arms race that is happening right now, where if you're one of the top countries in the world and you're not competing, you're already losing and you'll be losing more and more every day. So recognizing that and taking a stance around that when it comes to, let's say, the biggest two power players here are US and China.

one of them wants freedom, open markets and so on, the other one wants communism and it's a much more challenging scenario to just imagine what they want. Then the point is beyond being one of the top three, what options do you have to play? What are your advantages for actually playing this game and what are your costs or penalties for not playing this game? And I think

The advantages and disadvantages are very much tied to economic opportunity. So if you are not using AI, of course, everything takes more. Whatever you're doing in the knowledge space takes 10x more. Whatever you're building in terms of coding takes 10x more. Whatever you're doing in terms of automation that now gradually eats almost everything is just a very clear, immediate opportunity cost. But there's also some intangibles that are not

clear to people, which is the biggest outcome that these companies are targeting, for instance, is a kind of new understanding of the universe. Imagine that you unlock a new paradigm in physics, a new fundamental physics model. What would that enable? Would that enable faster than life travel? Would that enable some type of teleportation?

would the normal standard rules not apply anymore? Like, chemics, medicine, all that stuff that's much more fundamental than how I earn money today. I think that's the big outcome that these people are targeting where they're essentially saying it's not only a kind of war-like scenario where this is a weapon, but this is also the kind of most important breakthrough or discovery.

Beniamin Mincu (26:34.078) that if we solve would grant us kind of a new industrial revolution that we could apply across all the fields that we have. So I believe putting it short, there's the kind of very competitive offensive frame where there is an arms race and you need to be there because otherwise you don't matter and you'll not have a say and you'll not be able to wield this technology. And then there's a much more

let's say, creative value-driven frame where however you look at things, you would never in your right mind actually wish to go back in history before the Industrial Revolution. However nostalgic it may sound and interesting it may sound, actually having medicine is good. We know that it's good by now.

Having the basics, food and water and so on, having rights and liberties and so on. I think that's sort of the type of thing that we're fighting for and then we're expanding as countries, companies and users or citizens.

Auren Hoffman (27:48.701) The blockchain revolution was highly, in some ways, decentralized all over the world. You saw really interesting things and some of the most interesting developments on blockchain were just in random corners of the world that are out there. AI seems to be a bit different. It's not just in the US, it's in the Bay Area. It's not just in the Bay Area, it's in San Francisco. It's not just in San Francisco, it's in two or three neighborhoods of San Francisco.

I mean, it's so, so centralized in the very, very, very small corner. Like, why is that happening? Is it just the capital or like why, why it's so different than blockchain.

Beniamin Mincu (28:28.628) Yeah, I would say that there's a kind of outcome or reward driven arms race that's being understood by very few people at the scale that it really is. And there's very few companies and individuals that have the resources, capacity, talent to actually seize that opportunity and make it a reality. Because if you look at it,

To be very honest, there have been many AI summers and winters throughout the last 50 years. But then when OpenAI actually came with GPT-3, and then GPT-3.5 and so on, that was a breakthrough that took even the most important scientists by surprise. It was so surprising that at first they were denying it. They were actually minimizing it and saying, hey,

but yeah, this is not so important, blah, blah. We've been doing this for years. So I think there's a kind of element of insane talent density, capital requirements, because even if you have a few billions of dollars, you cannot compete in this anymore. It's not only human capital, like the most brilliant people in the world working on this, but it's the type of capital required to be deployed constantly.

to stay ahead ground that. And then you need an entire economy with legal and market structure to translate that into something that works. And I think you almost have a kind of missing chicken and egg problem in any other part of the world where if the US would not exist, many other technologies would never reach the market because there's not enough scale.

to actually ground them and sell them properly and make money out of them.

Auren Hoffman (30:26.031) like, so I mean, you're obviously a very ambitious person who cares about AI, but you started multiverse X in Romania, which is not just far from the US, also even further from from San Francisco from these neighborhoods in San Francisco. Like, why what are the kind of the advantages and disadvantages of kind of building a little bit more on the periphery?

Beniamin Mincu (30:46.441) So I think you can start anywhere in the world. That's the beauty of it. If you understand and have an insight, you don't need to be in Silicon Valley to start your stuff, to start doing some stuff. The more serious you are, the more ambitious you are, the larger the scale of what you're trying to build, the harder it will be anywhere else. And this is why I am in the U.S. right now. And everything we're doing is positioned for the U.S. because

we've sort of reached in Europe a kind of upper invisible ceiling toward what that ecosystem can offer. And I do believe that beyond a certain threshold, suppose you're multi-billion dollar already and so on, it's almost like the other parts of the world cannot satisfy the needs of growth that you want. And this is why you're doing it in the US.

Auren Hoffman (31:40.669) And so let's wind the clock back to 2007, which isn't that long ago. 2007, the GDP of the Europe zone is higher than the US. Europe's fast growing, as fast, if not faster growing than the US. Now we're in 2025, 18 years later, and there's just like a massive delta between the US

and the Eurozone. What happened? Why did that? If you asked my prediction back in the US, would have said, Europe's already bigger than the US, but Europe's maybe disjointed. I wouldn't have thought in 2025, it would have been so much smaller.

Beniamin Mincu (32:29.757) I think this is a very important and hard question that we should pose every once in a while because we'll understand some things, but then there's also some things that you almost, it's very hard to argue why they happened as they did. And then the grounded reasons that I would say are at the root of this is I feel in some sense, US

the European zone has lost the hunger. In some sense, you don't feel that type of ambitious, crazy drive where people believe in something and then go until the end of the world to make that happen. And I feel you don't feel that, you don't feel there's a national ambition in most of the countries. You don't feel there's a national project and let's say pride to make something happen. And

That then cascades into all these ways downstream. And I feel the alternative to that, if you look at Europe when it was in its heyday, hundreds of years ago, the most brilliant people in the world were all in Europe. The most brilliant people in physics, math, sciences, and so on. In fact, the US, in order to do the Manhattan Project, import 100 %

Auren Hoffman (33:53.511) They're all Europeans. Yeah. Yeah.

Beniamin Mincu (33:56.522) and Germany and all these people, they were living there and then they were migrated to the US. But all I'm saying is you need the type of insight and intentionality that's extraordinary to actually understand that those are the most brilliant people in the world, to fish for each of them, to get them a package to come here, and then to direct them to an ambitious project like the Manhattan Project, which is national security. There's several steps and it's almost

underrated how much effort goes before you get to execute them and have them project to have that type of resources. And I feel this is what's of missing in Europe. If I look at it, people, even when they're ambitious or successful, it's almost like there's a bit of complacency or maybe hate toward that.

where people do not understand that you do not get to have the benefits you have without someone fighting for them, without someone working their ass off at some point, without the revolutions happening at some point. And I feel that's for every generation, it's a puzzle. How do you convey that to your children? Let's say you have a good life now and you've worked your entire life and so on.

Auren Hoffman (35:12.636) Yeah.

Beniamin Mincu (35:18.707) How do you convey that struggle and message and challenge to your children? That's difficult.

Auren Hoffman (35:25.925) It's interesting because in, I would say there are more ambitious French people in the tiny city of San Francisco than there are in the large country of France. like somehow it's this magnet that, you know, the super smart eco polytechnique graduate just shows up in San Francisco. and, and then somehow ends up staying, I don't know why this happens.

Beniamin Mincu (35:55.527) I mean, Paul Graham had this brilliant essay where he framed it like this. He said, every city has a whisper. And if you listen carefully, in every city you may hear a whisper stronger or lighter. And then there are some cities in the world, very few, where you hear the whisper wherever you may be in the world. To the that you're ambitious.

You'll have very few cities in the world. And I think there's this example where the whisper of LA is be famous. Wherever you are, you come in the US specifically for that city because that's the place to be. If you're in New York, like New York has the whisper, make money, like money above everything. if you're in US, yeah, find it. Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (36:29.063) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (36:41.041) Yeah. Yeah, through finance, basically moving, make money through moving money.

Beniamin Mincu (36:48.253) And then San Francisco and the Bay Area and so on has this whisper like build a startup. That's the way to have an impact on the world. And I think people what's playing here is not only that the whispers locally are barely heard, but you have a whisper that's conveyed like very strongly everywhere in the world. And then people as they wake up, they just

want to be with other people that are ambitious, that are pursuing these goals, and that are aligned. And I feel that type of alignment will find you wherever you are. And that's the thing that ambitious and passionate people.

Auren Hoffman (37:31.005) also think it's hard to get that critical mass. like there's a lot of super smart tech people and talent, but basically a hundred percent of them are Estonian. There's a lot of super smart people in Stockholm, but basically a hundred percent of them are Swedish, right? There's a lot of super smart people. I mean, there's maybe even way, there's way more super smart people maybe than almost any other place in Tel Aviv, but they're all Israeli, right? You're not like moving. You're not going to, if you're

A Spaniard usually don't move to Stockholm. You don't move to Tel Aviv. You don't move to Tallinn, but you can still move to San Francisco. There's something about it where it's like, still, the U S is still this weird place where you can just show up. And I don't know why, but like, you know, it's like these other places are just not hospitable to bring in like random folks.

Beniamin Mincu (38:19.484) think it's not necessarily about hospitality because in some sense you all other places you can get easier in and out.

Auren Hoffman (38:23.313) Yeah.

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. And then we're going to show up in Lisbon or Burlitt or something. Right. Yeah.

Beniamin Mincu (38:30.406) Yeah, but it's not enough. In some sense, what you're saying is exactly this. The whisper of that place is so strong and comparatively stronger than anything else that it still is the top place to be if you're in that category. You're this young person, you wake up and then you say, I want to do AI. There's nothing like the Bay Area and gone for AI.

And I think that's the thing that the other countries cannot compete with. And the thing that every other country sort of ships in that region if the people are brilliant enough. yeah, that's a bit.

Auren Hoffman (39:13.085) Yeah. When I meet a super smart, ambitious 25 year old who's interested in tech, they are either staying where they are, which might be talent, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, know, wherever London, um, uh, Hyderabad, wherever they're either staying where they are to be close to family for whatever. That's fine. Or they're moving to San Francisco. There's no other place they're moving to. They're not moving to Berlin. They're not moving to Lisbon. They're not moving to Austin or Miami.

Like that is it. Like there's no other scenario that I have seen. I don't know if you disagree.

Beniamin Mincu (39:49.609) no, no, I very much agree. And this is just a compounded premium that you instantly unlock there. It's almost like in your place, what you're building is one X in this other place called SF. And so it's 100 X from the get go. Yeah, yeah, it can become 1 million X, but your 100 to 1000 X valued differently just because you're there. And so people understand that.

Auren Hoffman (40:06.031) Yes. Yeah, maybe even 1 million X.

Auren Hoffman (40:17.157) Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. What do think VC's venture capital firms are getting wrong about blockchain?

Beniamin Mincu (40:28.346) Look, I think they got some stuff wrong in the past more than right now. I think right now there's a kind of silent revolution where the entire US economy is doing something that was considered, let's say, illegal up until this point. Because the silent bottleneck of this entire space was what the US called Operation Choke Point. Imagine that a state, a government actually creates a program

that it calls operation checkpoint to stop it. Yeah, yeah. And that was the previous administration in the US. And so...

Auren Hoffman (40:59.229) Right, right, right. It's so ominous.

Auren Hoffman (41:06.737) Yeah, it's crazy, like, what? I can't even believe this happened. Like, it's just like so crazy.

Beniamin Mincu (41:13.424) It is. US, be also very honest, is capable of the craziest things on the spectrum. Both the best things in Yes. Yes. Yes. But I figure the most important advantage today is on other hand, the exact opposite, that you have a regulatory structure, that you have a market structure, and the US is all in on making the US the capital for crypto and AI. And I think

Auren Hoffman (41:20.079) US just, I mean, we do so like, like, I guess, like every country, we do so many stupid things. Yeah.

Beniamin Mincu (41:43.174) That's the thing that has now paved the way for Circle to go public and have a kind of 200x revenue to IPO ratio, multiple. That's in vain. And then that translating a bit into all these other stablecoin companies that are now the most profitable in the world per employee, like printing money better than Tesla, SpaceX, whoever.

And so I think as long as you have this great prospects of making money, VCs are in. And that's now the case, I think more and more. We just need the macro green light to kick in. And then with that macro green light, could, and this is definitely not an investment device, we could have...

one of the golden ages of the public markets like blockchain, AI and so on in a way that's significantly better and faster than everything we've seen up until this point.

Auren Hoffman (42:51.591) Now I'm super into blockchain. I've been into it for 12 plus years now, but I don't use it for anything. I own some coins, I don't really, you know, I own some crypto, I don't really, I don't use it for anything, literally nothing today in my life. Like when am I going to start using it? tech forward person who's, know, who can, who can code and you, other types of things. Like when, when will it actually help me beyond just like something in my portfolio?

Beniamin Mincu (43:21.448) I do agree with that and I appreciate the kind of sentiment. think two use cases will very, very likely prompt you to use it even without knowing in some sense and then to just seeing the benefits very, very concretely. One is stable coins being embedded in any type of payment that you do that settles instant anywhere in the world and so on.

Auren Hoffman (43:43.709) And just because like then because it's so cheap to settle, just becomes, it will just become more, it will become more of a way of settling transactions.

Beniamin Mincu (43:57.008) Yes. So I think money is just a packet of data, right? It's move at the speed of light. Why hasn't it? If we have all this, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was simply legal stuff, right? Because we did not have the, let's say foresight to see how we can integrate this and so on. So once you have this stable coins, then that would be a very simple use case where you don't have to think about it. But then maybe

Auren Hoffman (44:05.755) Yeah, why do I have to do ACH stuff?

Beniamin Mincu (44:25.559) all the interaction even with Rob.

Auren Hoffman (44:27.101) And stablecoins are already getting pretty big, still, I don't know that I've ever, maybe I have at some point in my life, but I don't know if I've ever paid for anything in stablecoins or anyone ever paid me or any of our companies. I mean, every once in a while, we might take it from somebody or something, but it's not a common thing today. Is it going to move quickly, you think, or do you think it's just going to be a very slow kind of moving thing?

Beniamin Mincu (44:54.791) point is, and we need to stress this, up until months, this was semi-illegal. was choked.

Auren Hoffman (45:02.417) Yes, true. Good point. Okay. So we're really just talking, we're really, we're really just a few months into this is being legal in the U.S.

Beniamin Mincu (45:07.429) Yeah. And then once it's legal, you have all the biggest companies like Stripe, Robinhood and so on. All of them racing to implement this because I would say that, yeah, the six to 12 months immediately, you'll see it integrated almost invisibly in many things and they just work faster.

Auren Hoffman (45:16.263) Yeah.

Yeah, even like NASDAQ's now all in on it and yeah, you start. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it's a good point.

Beniamin Mincu (45:33.297) But I also think that this kind of conversation around agents will rely so much more on blockchains. Again, in a way where you don't have to think about it. You'll not know that it's blockchains, but you can just verify everything that the agent has done. It comes back to you. You granted money to do some stuff and all of that will almost be done on a substrate that is blockchain focused.

Auren Hoffman (45:43.932) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (45:59.591) But you made two personal questions before we leave. First one, what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Beniamin Mincu (46:05.99) A conspiracy theory that I believe. I believe the idea that you can actually conspire to change the world and you can actually do it. I mean, that's so outrageous that in fact conspiracies, I believe, started from this idea that a few people just had this secret through which they moved some mountains in a way that was unf-

Auren Hoffman (46:33.106) Yeah.

Beniamin Mincu (46:34.341) And I think that's true and it can be done not only by the sharpest in Silicon Valley, but even bright young people anywhere in the world.

Auren Hoffman (46:44.733) Yeah, it's so interesting that like when people say, I don't believe in conspiracy theories, it's almost like saying, I don't believe things can change. Right. It's almost like a pessimistic view of change in the world. Like the, when people are like, believe in this conspiracy, like, Oh, I believe things can change.

Beniamin Mincu (46:53.999) Yeah.

Beniamin Mincu (46:59.663) And I do think people conspire. I do think people conspire, to be, some in a good way, some in a bad way. And I do think it's possible to both change

Auren Hoffman (47:09.627) Yeah, yep, yep.

In the crypto world, you see conspiracies all the time. There's always pump and dumps, everything's going. To me, there's classic conspiracies going on in the crypto world, more than almost anywhere. It's like these private telegram channels coordinating things and stuff.

Beniamin Mincu (47:25.4) Yes and

Beniamin Mincu (47:30.831) Yes, yes, but the one thing that looks like a conspiracy, but it's actually real is the operation checkpoint. It's that type of thing where you would think that the government would do it so in front of in front of your eyes and so on that actually

Auren Hoffman (47:38.641) Yep, that's right. That's right. It was looked like a conspiracy. Well, actually it was real. Yeah.

That was crazy. honestly like can't believe that. It's still hard for me to even believe that that happened.

Beniamin Mincu (47:54.137) and so unconstitutional and against everything that the US stands for. Right? This is not China or a random country that actually is...

Auren Hoffman (48:01.179) Yeah. It's, to me, it's interesting. Like, why do you think that even happened? Like, I don't think like the president of United States at the time, like even knew what was going on. Like, I don't think he directed it to happen. Like he probably couldn't care either way. Like, right. So like, like, I don't, I don't know that anyone like high up was like coordinating this, but like somehow it like, it really happened. Like, how do you think, like what's your, what's your conspiracy about how it happened?

Beniamin Mincu (48:27.847) I think there's a very simple explanation for this and that's financial incentive. Like the establishment, the entire banking space. The entire space has an incentive to keep it as it is and not muddy everything or not shake up everything.

Auren Hoffman (48:35.153) Got it. JP Morgan, those types of places. They have a lot of incentive to stop this. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (48:46.117) Yeah, that's true. Okay. Yeah. And so they had enough power to kind of push some things around, scare some people, et cetera.

Beniamin Mincu (48:55.441) Yeah, and the way just to be very honest to what the president, the previous president knew or did not know, I think he did not know many things. I'm not sure.

Auren Hoffman (49:04.166) That's right. I agree. I agree. He wasn't in control. So that was for sure. Yeah.

Beniamin Mincu (49:08.719) Not even in control of himself anymore, you would look at him and say, is this the strongest country in the world? Is this the person that governs the entire known world? What's up with this? And so it's very simple in that context.

Auren Hoffman (49:11.152) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:15.698) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:22.715) Yeah. Yeah. It makes me mad that that happened. because that just, to me, that is just doing something that's like clearly not in the best interest of the United States. and you know, very good for, you know, since his adversaries and, and just like, doesn't, it just, like, it just, it doesn't like actually make sense. And I have probably so many things happen that way because of fiefdoms and other stuff, but it does make me very upset that it did happen.

Beniamin Mincu (49:48.783) And the thing is that it almost seems too simple right now when I say that the strongest, like the strongest president in the world with the administration and so on has course corrected not to something neutral, but something where the US wants to lead. And I think that require both big respect, big brains and so on, but also balls, right? Because it's very, very rare that you see politicians actually taking this risk.

Auren Hoffman (50:06.683) Yeah, that's super cool.

Auren Hoffman (50:13.18) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (50:18.673) Yeah. And by the way, the current president did change his mind on crypto. that's also something you have to respect. He reassessed it and changed his mind.

Beniamin Mincu (50:18.789) and then putting everything.

100%. 100%. 100%.

100%. So I give a lot of credit to the US for where it is and where it continues to, let's say, push itself to be. Even after mistakes, because every country makes mistakes and so on. But the idea of having the presence of spirit to recognize an opportunity, to take risks and then define regulation and market structure and all of that, because you see how it will contribute to your people.

to your institutions and to businesses all around your country, I think that's a spirit that every country should try to emulate a bit more of.

Auren Hoffman (51:08.605) The last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Beniamin Mincu (51:15.994) Hmm. I do not believe in this idea of the work-life balance. If you're an ambitious person, like if you're not obsessed with something, you're not telling me anything.

Auren Hoffman (51:29.149) But isn't that the conventional advice that you don't have work-life balance if you're ambitious? That is the conventional advice, right?

Beniamin Mincu (51:37.158) You think I think most of the people still have not recognized what spectrum that can go to and I feel Musk in some sense again has demonstrated that you can sit and be the wealthiest man in the world and then go in your factory and slip on the floor and Until that problem is not solved. You'll not get there. So I think that's that's one version just that the

young people today maybe do not appreciate it today just because you have a good life especially you you do a famous university ivy league

Auren Hoffman (52:12.573) But look, even Elon Musk, usually you got to be all in on something. He's got like 10 jobs and then he also is like, he spends many hours a week becoming a great video game player in the world and he's got lots of other, and then he spends time thinking about government and other stuff and tweeting. In some ways you'd be like, no, you shouldn't be like, you shouldn't be tweeting, you shouldn't have other jobs, you shouldn't be playing video games, you should just be working. He's not working on...

anyone company more than 20 hours a week, right? On average, maybe it spikes, maybe it is 100 hours, one week and zero the next or something, right?

Beniamin Mincu (52:54.298) Yeah, I do agree that it's very, let's say unequal in that respect. I think it's much more on the extent of the energy outcome and dosage of what he puts in that then makes this again nearly impossible things seem possible. Like even Neural Link, very few people maybe realize how fundamental that may be for not only science, engineering and so on, but health.

and well-being and solving some terminal like illnesses that you could

Auren Hoffman (53:26.969) To me, the must thing is it shows that actually, you don't really need to spend that much time in your company if you're CEO. It turns out, weirdly, because in some ways, on any given company, he's not spending that much time. But you do need these weird bursts of concentrated time where you have to do 100 hours in one week sleeping on the floor and then you have to pick your spots.

Like, and then you have to super micromanage in this country, concentrated time. And then outside you're like, things are just going, and then you jump in again and you have to like super micromanage and jump out like in a weird way. Like he's the best at that thing. And most people like they're just, it's kind of like steady. Okay. I'm going to do 60 hours a week, every week. Very, very, very steady. I'm going to have the same meetings every Monday, the same meetings every Tuesday.

I'm to go fly to China, look at the supply chain on Wednesday, whatever it is. It's a different way of thinking about running company.

Beniamin Mincu (54:28.518) I do think that Musk points to almost a different model of living life, doing business, doing productive stuff, because without him, almost have this things figured out, right? There's conventionalism. This is what it dictates. You definitely don't do several companies. You'll blow up. It's painful to do one company. You'll die in the process. Why you do three companies or four companies? Take that type of risk and so on.

Auren Hoffman (54:43.228) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (54:51.365) Orally. Yeah.

Bye.

Beniamin Mincu (54:58.288) But I feel he almost in some sense at minimum, he was the type of guy that made me think, hey, in some sense conspiracies are not true as people think they're true. And then they are true in a very contrarian way than you think. Namely, it's not what people want to conspire to do. Not doesn't work out most of the times, even if they're ill-intended and so on.

And then you can conspire with two, three people to change something extraordinarily that seems impossible, like reusable rockets. And the entire field contests you and says, you're ludicrous and it will never happen. And then 20 years down the road, 20 years, not two years, not five years, like pain. If you survive, if you're still alive, if you can still burn that pain and look so stupid, so many years.

Auren Hoffman (55:32.028) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (55:36.669) It's basic, yeah.

Beniamin Mincu (55:55.014) I think you might have a chance to prove the world that he was wrong.

Auren Hoffman (56:00.125) Well, thank you, Beniamin Mincu for joining us on World of DaaS. I follow you at Beniamin Mincu at on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been super interesting, super enlightening and a ton of fun.

Beniamin Mincu (56:15.334) Thank you very much. Great pleasure being here.