Is Blockchain Still a Revolution or Becoming Another Upgrade? Ep.621

**Paul Dylan-Ennis** (0:00)
When I think about, say, Cypherpunk, when I think about decentralization, I'm more focused nowadays on the chains themselves, the protocols, that the real ineliminable core, as I like to think of it, of Cypherpunk, is primarily to be found on the chains, and that's where it really matters. And then you're probably fighting a losing battle if you want every application, every doubt. To have that same degree of commitment to these traditional values, I think those days might be coming to a close.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:27)
How do we stop Web3 from merely becoming an infrastructure upgrade for Wall Street?

**Dr. Nick Almond** (0:34)
I think we've seen a lot of this. I think that's already happened. If they understood more the level of micro-targeting and corporate surveillance that's happening under the hood, I think people would be more worried about it.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:50)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution.
I'm Friederike Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Paul Dylan-Ennis, who goes bipolar on Twitter, and Nick Almond, who's also super active on Twitter. Paul is an independent crypto philosopher and a lecturer at the College of Business at University College Dublin. And Nick thinks very deeply about governance and other aspects at the Gito Network as the head of governance there. And today, we want to be having a conversation whether we might have to adjust our intro in due course. So is the blockchain revolution really still a blockchain revolution, or is it becoming an upgrade for more legacy players? Before we dive into it, we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:45)
This episode has brought you my Gnosis, building the open internet one block at a time. Gnosis was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. Gnosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others, like Safe and Cowswap. At the center is Gnosis Chain. It's a low-fee layer one with zero downtime in 7 years and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real-world financial applications like Gnosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Gnosis DAO, a community-run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at gnosis.io.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:37)
Hey Paul and Nick. Super nice to have both of you on.

**Dr. Nick Almond** (2:41)
Hi. Nice to be here.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:44)
Cool. Maybe for everyone who doesn't know you, kind of who doesn't spend as much time on Twitter as I do, can we get brief backgrounds of who you are, why you are here and what you came for? Yeah.

**Dr. Nick Almond** (2:59)
Okay. I'll go first. Yeah. So I'm a physicist by background. I was actually an academic for a good chunk of my career. I sort of sailed from physics through to learning theory and governance research over about a decade or so. And then in 2020, I jumped into crypto full time, because I was obsessed on DAOs and the wonderful things this technology could do for the world. And I worked on prediction markets, DAO tooling, and now sort of govern a large DAO in the Solana ecosystem.

**Friederike Ernst** (3:30)
Cool. Thank you, Nick. It's interesting to have a fellow physics PhD on the show.
Just mostly for my benefit. Tell me what you did research on.

**Dr. Nick Almond** (3:45)
I ended up doing a PhD in biophysical surface science. So I was interested in, I was working on sort of photonic probes to try and understand how biological molecules and biological systems ordered at surfaces. So I was very interested in the emergence around like how life started, how sort of self-organized systems begin in biological systems, that kind of stuff.

**Friederike Ernst** (4:08)
That's fascinating. It's also not that much removed from governance and kind of like how it is. It is.

**Dr. Nick Almond** (4:17)
I think I got very, very obsessed on complex systems and self-organization. Yeah, for the last 20 years or so, it's been very much there. There's a lot of parallels.

**Friederike Ernst** (4:30)
100 percent. So I did my PhD in low-dimensional complex quantum systems, which is actually pretty, it's actually somewhat similar to what you did. So kind of like, I mean, work on surfaces and kind of I did, I mostly did carbon nanotubes and graphene and kind of like these sorts of systems.