Lessons - The Ethereum Co-Founder Who Quit Crypto | Anthony Di Iorio - Built $1B Platform, Walked Away

In this lessons episode, examine how speculation and utility shape the evolution of crypto and influence its long-term value. Discover why early risk-taking sparked key innovation, understand how decentralization and multi-currency tools are redefining financial control, and explore how inclusive frameworks can support more sustainable technology ecosystems. And I guess the point that I'm trying to get to is the crypto as a market, it's really driven with a lot of speculation as well. So I'm wondering if it's more like the underlying tech and practical applications use cases that are driving the technology forward or is it more speculation and potential financial gain that's driving this industry forward? So it's a combination of both and over time I think you're going to see more and more of the utility aspect that's going to lead to more and more of the value increases and that's where the value comes from in my opinion. When we started off we had 9,000 people that entrusted us with their Bitcoin to then turn that into the technology that we were creating and they took a gamble in a risk by giving us that money upfront in a presale of a product that we didn't deliver till a year later, which was the plan, but they were speculating that or when it's speculation is just another term for taking a risk or it's a term for investing. There's a lot of it's just terminology but early on there was a lot of speculation, there's still a lot of speculation but more and more every month you're seeing utility come out of it. You're seeing how the different sectors and different industries are going to be radically changed from the technologies, so it is still speculation but it's people also that realize where it's going to go and it's always about thinking ahead of the curve and that's something that I pride myself on being able to see where things are heading in the future whether it be business models that are deficient or whether it be where the crypto space was going to come in and be able to start to offering potentially alternatives for government currencies, it's all about staying ahead of the curve and understanding where things are going based on where things have gone in the past and making sure you have the tools and assets that you can put it together in order to utilize what your knowledge is. So there is a lot of speculation, I'd say most of it is still on speculation but there's a lot of good utility coming out and there's a lot of good people realizing that their jobs and their areas of where they are in aren't going to be radically changed and it's important to stay on it and a lot of people are betting on a theory and other similar technologies and that's why it's growing, it's growing because there is a realization that these things are very powerful, they're very empowering, they could be really efficient and once they scale and grow beyond some of the barriers they may have now or not watching out, it's going to be really radical change in the world. Yeah and like now you see like obviously El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and these are more like actual fixing addition like existing currency problems that countries have. I know that Zimbabwe is looking at adopting Bitcoin as legal tender so you're starting to see some like practical application that are like that are really changing how a country can function but yeah okay so let's let's walk through you know your your story so after Ethereum I know that you worked on Decentral for a bit but then you left those or walked me through how you how you left what you're working on with Ethereum and Decentral and then what you wanted to focus on going forward because I know that you're working on a new project now and I think it's actually very interesting and it totally syncs up with like what your vision and your mission is so walk me through that process and what we're doing right now. So I left Ethereum in 2015 you know I was one of the initial funders we had also Joseph Lubin who runs a company called Consensus and Organization we kind of we funded the operations of it until the crowd sale and then the money came in from the crowd so it kind of came down to the developers carrying out the mission and there was there's a little bit of the restriction back in the day there was eight founders at that time it was difficult to get decisions made and what happened is kind of the developer team you know it was about them carrying things out and they kind of took things by the reins and worked towards getting the product out and Charles ended up leaving the project and a mere one of their founders and then over time Joseph and myself also knew that the rating was on the wall there and with Ethereum it kind of opened my doors to things or my mind to things other than Bitcoin which at the time before Ethereum everything was Bitcoin and then there was Ethereum and then it's like well Ethereum is going to spawn so many other organizations and projects that are going to be run on Ethereum and other technology so it's not just about one technology and I like to be very inclusive in my mindset with things and so the idea was there's going to be thousands of these things out there and they all need interfaces they all need ways to send and receive and connect to the network so I continued building the wallets that and creating the first multi currency multi platform wallets in the space that wouldn't just support Bitcoin or Ethereum but also would support Litecoin and dogecoin and eventually you know thousands of these technologies so in 2015 I continued building wallets and technology and infrastructure to connect it all together and I launched a product called Jax and Jax I think launched in 2016 we launched a successor called Jax Liberty and really again building the tools to empower to be in control of their digital lives their money their communication their identities the three pillars that I've always built things on I think it's really important own your identity it's really important to own your money it's really important to own your communications and those three together done in a decentralized fashion where the user is in full control it's a very powerful product and that's what we built is we built wallets that put the keys and allow the individual user to actually fully own his assets we don't ever take custodian ship of it of any of the digital assets it's actually fully owned by the users and they only they want the keys but what we do is connect into all the different protocols and the platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum so that's where that's kind of been my main focus is CEO of Decentral over the years and just just you know since 2018 when the market's really started hitting down in 2018 after the big ICO craze that happened in 2017 I started re-evaluating what it is I want to do with my life and I got into the point where in like I didn't need to be you know thinking about setting myself up for the rest of my life things were pretty good at the time but I realized that one more of the more freedom that I was seeking actually less freedom I actually had and what I mean by that is you know when you become your own bank you got certain responsibilities and you no longer have your your money sitting in a bank somewhere that that's being secured by a bank and it's not black and white one of the biggest lessons I've ever learned in my life is that nothing's black and white and there's kind of gray areas of everything there's always dials and you have to turn up and down and yes it's important to be in control of your life but also sometimes it can be good to have others that are that are offering services to help you along the way and it was it was an eye-opening experience when you know Ethereum started getting really really really big and just the attention that we were getting got really massive and it just you know it was I'm at a point in my life I'm like I don't want something to happen here that could really make a game-changing life on my family and things you know I make wallets we don't hold the keys but something could still happen there that could that could could cross some issue and there's other risk vectors to be considered of and I ended up rethinking what my mission was and spent a lot of time thinking about three things my what my why and my how and those three things I ended up figuring out where my what you know what is it I want to do with my life and now that I've done what I've done and I have the resource just to continue to do what I'm doing what is it that I really want to do and what and then it's like well why do I want to do the thing that I want to do and then how am I going to do it and over time I'm really thinking about this and I decided to you know what makes me happy is being in service it's it's it's the idea that you know what am I good at and what can I do to offer to the world that I that I with what I'm good at and and it's to be to serve as many people as possible and to help people and and that's a figured out why do I like to be in service not about posting events and doing things like that but it's generally because I it makes me happy to see other people happy so the idea what is it I want to do is to serve why I want to do it is because it makes me happy and then how do I do it is is something I call perfect formula it's a it's a general framework that I came up to solve problems it's a it's a general problem solving formula that runs around the basis of creating winning situations where as many stakeholders as you can possibly imagine what and what it is you're doing it's a framework that I've developed based on princess principles processes and tools I've developed over my lifetime and it just kind of revolves around you have a problem or there's something you want to achieve and it takes it I take a framework through where I say okay who are what what is the problem you're trying to do who are your stakeholders and by stakeholders I mean anybody that you could potentially have in the mix that could provide value to you with what you're trying to do something where you're trying to to create movements of people all aligned towards common interests and common goals so that people realize by joining you on what you're doing their life gets better so I spent time putting together this framework that kind of is how I've run my businesses in the past and and I ended up coming up with something that I think is pretty powerful and something that I that I think can I can utilize as a problem solver and as a leader to take my framework to the world and no matter what sector it's in and be able to utilize the framework to create better results that create more situations of winning for more people and doesn't exclude people from the equation because a lot of times a business formulas and business models they're they're not they're not they're not efficient enough for and they're they have deficiencies which exclude people and those decisions of people leads to people that aren't happy with what you're doing or leads to people that you're not creating a win for and if you're not thinking ahead of how you can actually provide value to as many stakeholders as possible over time you're either going to get disrupted with change that comes about because you haven't thought as good as someone else doesn't comes down the road or even get people that that are feeling that you're your mission whether it be to return maximum returns to shareholders which is what a lot of companies are kind of forced to do that's what their mandate is it usually comes at an expense of something else whether it's other people or comes at an expense to the planet and I think if we can move the dial from the efficient models which are maybe let's say 50% efficient and they're still not serving 50% of the population how do we move it to 60% or being served how do we move to 70% how do we create models of aligned people that come together to create 90% of models where people are realizing that by joining your product or joining your company or joining your mission their day-to-day life is getting better and that's kind of what I'm trying to do with with my framework is bring to the table that there are better ways to have business models there's better ways to do things that don't necessarily rely on advertising models which create in my opinion a lot of misinformation and people that are that are that are taken down these paths because advertisers are paying money to get eyeballs on something which leads to you know this this attention economy that we have and the amount of screen time that's out there and even models that collect user information and then are allowing that information somehow to get to get exposed and people are in control of their other stuff so I think there's a big deficiency in business models which usually stem from having to return money to investors and people having to squeeze things that eventually lead to problems and lead to a situation where like we've had with Facebook you know government's questioning hey your business models are leading to these problems here and and it's not good and why are you doing it this well it's like well that's all that's all what everyone does that's a status quo and we haven't thought differently and we need to think different you know I created models for my world that don't hold customer funds because I realized when you're holding stuff of other people's you're now responsible for it and I don't want to be responsible for it so how do you think differently to create wallets where the user is holding the key and I'm not holding the key we've never used advertising in our models I think generally people don't like advertising and there's better ways to do things so our models for our wallets are we create partnerships and provide services that connect individuals with with companies that provide good services and we provide the interface and kind of the thing that connects it all together so I believe there's better ways to do things in the business models that exist I think the business models that exist lead to a lot of problems of what has and it leads to the exclusion of people and it leads to a situation where a few are maybe being served but a lot aren't and when you have that type of situation we don't get a line people coming together to create movements when everybody feels that they're in this together so I kind of want to be a leader and a problem solver because I think that's two things that the world is totally lacking these days and using my frameworks that I developed and I want to serve as many people as possible with what I'm bringing out as perfect formula which is really a framework I want to get out to the world that has no other intention rather than to just be in service it's not something I'm doing going to plan on doing for profit in fact if I was to enter that into the game I think I would lose credibility from a lot of people that believe that it's the same type of motive that I'm trying to fix or trying to work with so it's really important to have trust it's really important to have social capital trust capital you need wealth capital you know these things to come together to create a perfect formula to be able to do what it is you want to do and check all the boxes in your business and create a situation where no one can say you didn't think of that and what you're doing and your your solutions are creating more inclusivity they're creating more people coming together to on common goals and interests and you're creating new solutions for incumbents to even come along because you can't exclude them in the mix either you have to bring everybody along in what you do it I want to help be a catalyst for that. 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