EP. 230 - Direct to Wallet Trading with SideShift.ai feat. Andreas Brekken

**Andreas Brekken** (0:00)
There's no convenient way for you to plug a credit card into an agent. Are you going to make a virtual card for each one? Whose name is it going to be in? Is it going to be your name? What if this is for like you and a friend of your sort? Or maybe it's for your 200 best friends and developer now. Whose card is it going to be?
So that doesn't scale.

**Narb** (0:24)
Welcome to the DevNTell Podcast, where founders, hackers and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech. GM, GM, welcome to the show Andreas. I'm ecstatic to have you on the show.

**Andreas Brekken** (0:36)
GM, thanks for having me on.

**Narb** (0:40)
My pleasure, my pleasure.

**Andreas Brekken** (0:41)
Yeah.

**Narb** (0:41)
I'm really excited for our audience to learn a little bit about you. I know you're quite the Crypto Web 3 OG researching your background, and SideShift is a very interesting and exciting product, especially for the CryptoPunks watching today.
But yeah, I guess before we get into all things SideShift, would you like to give a introduction about yourself?

**Andreas Brekken** (1:08)
Yeah, I mean, I just first want to say that I've heard about a developer now for ages. And so the only reason I don't hold my DED NFT right now is because we have a developer on the team who's really, really into hackathons and just like Web3 community. So I actually passed it on so they could get access to the Discord and so on. But I guess after this episode, we will have to start, I'll have to get a few more.
How's the DED NFT talker prize doing?

**Narb** (1:48)
Yeah, but-

**Andreas Brekken** (1:49)
Is it more affordable? It used to be pretty expensive.

**Narb** (1:52)
Yeah, when it first came out, it was right when that big jump in NFTs, that craze started with the board apes going for millions and whatnot. So even though the NFT itself was free, the gas was still very expensive.
But nowadays, yeah, it's kind of cooled down. It's not as crazy anymore. So certainly, yeah.

**Andreas Brekken** (2:23)
Well, if somebody needs to reach me and they don't want to use X, then I'm still in the developer now Discord. I just said hi in the GM channel, so you can get there.

**Narb** (2:33)
Excellent.
There we go. If you want some Q&A with Andreas after the fact, there you go. Just hit OK.

**Andreas Brekken** (2:40)
I'm on Discord.

**Narb** (2:42)
Excellent, man. Yeah. So very keen to learn a little bit more about your background as someone who's been in the space quite a bit.
As far as I know, you started your own exchange called JustCoin back in I think in 2013 it was, and then you joined Kraken. Yeah. Just curious to hear the background story on that.

**Andreas Brekken** (3:08)
Yeah. I got started in Bitcoin around 2011 So it was pretty new. There were not many people in it. There's a few. The only people who were in it before that into Bitcoin were people who were really hardcore libertarians. The people who moved to New Hampshire, people who go to the libertarian conferences, like in Archipelco, like the Freedom Festival, all this. They were in super early. People, yeah, all the libertarians, and some other people like Max Keiser, if anybody's ever heard of him and these. But then the second wave of people were people like me, who were people, just early adopters of tech, because he was posted on a website called Flashdot, which I don't know people read anymore, but it's like, it's kind of like boomer, hacker news kind of thing, where people, they actually posted about Bitcoin on their articles about it. So I just saw people writing about Bitcoin here and there, and slowly started buying some. And by 2012, I just saw crypto sound like the most amazing thing, because to me, there was only Bitcoin back then, right? But to me, this seemed like PayPal, but they can't block your account. You can just send your money to anybody. You don't need to be like a merchant or something. You just install literally a wallet on your computer, and you can send and receive with no limitations to anybody.
And back then, I didn't understand, you can send any amount. Today, this is natural for us, right? You go on the Block Explorer, you see people are moving like millions or tens of millions of dollars around on DeFi.
And you try to do that with PayPal. In fact, try to do that with your bank. Just forget about it. It's not happening. So even back then, it's like 2012 is so long ago. I totally, I saw that this was something different. I didn't think so much about the value because it was going up and down too much. But then I understood that if you hit in a Bitcoin wallet, you could click the menu and like choose debug or something, and it opened up the console, and you could type RPC commands, which is like making you deposit address or send funds. So then I understood you can remote control the wallet using any software, like program with anything that can speak JSON RPC.