GRTiQ Podcast: 185 José Betancourt

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José Betancourt (00:00:17):

We are using them just sort of through our data. It’s great for indexing probably the Google or the Mongo Compass search of web3, I suppose you could say, and is a necessary tool.

Nick (00:01:01):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with José Betancourt, founder and CEO of Virtual Labs, a cutting edge platform focused on decentralizing data and improving user experiences in web3. José made the bold decision to drop out of Yale to pursue his entrepreneurial journey full-time, driven by his passion for creating real world applications in the blockchain space.

(00:01:25):

During our conversation, José opens up about his path from Yale to becoming a founder, including the pivotal moments and decisions that shaped Virtual Labs. We discuss how he and his team continuously refine their ideas leading to the development of several innovative products like VDEX, the first omnichain perpDEX with no slippage and sustainable Bitcoin yield, combining the best of decentralized and centralized exchanges with sub-millisecond finality, full self-custody, and full chain abstraction.

(00:01:58):

José also shares his insights on the challenges of user experiences in web3, his vision for the future of the industry, his perspective and use of The Graph and why he believes real world applications will drive the next wave of adoption. We started our discussion by exploring José’s decision to leave Yale and to begin his entrepreneurial journey.

José Betancourt (00:02:21):

Well, thank you for having me, Nick. I am really happy to be here. For that question, there was no event. I would say possibly just the summer, so this was in the sophomore fall of my second year at Yale and I was working on this with some friends and we spent most of the fall working on it.

(00:02:41):

For better or worse, I won’t say thankfully, but there was a lot of COVID restrictions at that time, and so that sort of allowed us to channel our energy elsewhere when there wasn’t much of a social scene on campus. And then the summer happened, and we kept working on it, and then I decided just not to come back. I was having too much fun.

Nick (00:03:02):

It’s amazing that you passed upon a full education at Yale. I think about all the other entrepreneurs that exist in the world that did similar things, and so in a lot of ways this is the quintessential entrepreneur’s story. Was there an aha moment at Yale when you were studying and like you said, you were mentioning you were working on this with some friends, it was during COVID, so you had a lot more time in your dorm and probably to yourself to think about these things. But what was the aha moment where you said, “There’s something here, I’m going to launch this new program or this new entity called Virtual Labs”?

José Betancourt (00:03:35):

I still think there wasn’t so much of a moment. We had this idea, basically one idea after another to the point of making a paper and then making another paper, and it always felt like it was getting better. The trend line was so strong.

(00:03:53):

I actually developed a principle after this. It’s basically the principle of comparison. So say you have an idea and you really like this idea, but compare it to, for example, your friend who has a junior software role at Meta or your friend’s startup who’s just raised $2 million. And I imagine placing myself in this comparison point, and it really grounds you because you have to say, “Wow, would I really like my idea of verifiable randomness?” Which is what our idea was at the time. It sounds silly now, but we thought that was the best idea.

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Using this principle of comparison, we kept iterating on our idea and kept liking it more than the last one. This occurred over nine months. We started with random numbers and then it was decentralized data and then it was decentralized price feeds or eliminating oracles at web3, and it kept getting better and better that I thought, “At some point the idea we have is truly good enough to pass up a hypothetical role at Meta or another startup that has raised 2 million, I want this and I think it’s better.” And just seeing how things were going, I couldn’t stop.

Nick (00:05:02):

This idea of developing an idea, and I think more formally, these are sometimes referred to as pivots early on in a startup’s history, but I don’t know if these were dramatic enough as you talk about the principle of comparison there, to qualify maybe as a pivot or maybe just an iteration, but is that hard as an entrepreneur to sort of not know exactly where you’re heading, have a thesis and just keep developing it? Because I imagine that original vision is what fuels you early on, but it sounds like it kind of changes or morphs over time?

José Betancourt (00:05:33):

I would say that it’s yourself that motivates you, or your internal vision. Maybe it’s a bit more vague. For us, it was sort of decentralizing data. It was this idea of, “Well, we have users generate their own random data that can be used to generate backend encryptions, generate verifiably random numbers in poker games and lotteries as well.” And random number generation is not a very big business, but it was on that initial primitive that we developed the idea for users to be able to exchange and decentralize data so you could not only generate random numbers in a verifiable fashion, but verify the price of an asset.

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For those that are familiar with crypto, you would know Chainlink, RedStone, all of these different oracles that are used to give the price and they get hacked quite often. And the amount of these hacks is in excess of two to $3 billion over the course of the last few years. And so that was something that’s, “Hey, if we can fix that, then that’s big enough.”

(00:06:32):

And so I would definitely classify these as pivots, especially in the beginning, they were complete changes or ideas an order of magnitude larger, and so I would definitely say that was a pivot, but it’s both in the same vein of decentralizing data and in myself and doing something in web3 and really in these early ideas and teams for first time founders especially, it’s the founder, the team, and the initial scope of the idea that makes it investable, it’s expected that the product itself would change a lot.

Nick (00:07:10):

Well, Virtual Labs has been successful in receiving a lot of attention, but also some funding at an early stage, and I’m sure you and the team are super excited about this and it shows a lot of promise for impact, but I want to know about that experience. I mean, as someone that’s working on this in college, working out of your dorm, having the opportunity to develop an idea and then get in front of some potential VC money there, what is it that you think sort of tipped the scale in the favor of Virtual Lab in those days where you were seeking funding? I mean, take us inside there. What was that experience and what tipped the scale in your favor if you had to guess?

José Betancourt (00:07:46):

We got really lucky, that’s for sure. Well, I guess it starts with Binance. So soon after just a month after I dropped out, I got invited to the Binance Season 5 Incubator, and that was super exciting. Basically a validation for my parents at least that helped me convince them that it was the right decision to make. And I actually invited some friends on this trip because Binance was paying for the trip to go out to Paris and be in the Incubator, and one of these friends I made and became better friends with, he also ended up investing in the company, but he also invited me to a demo day in East Denver 2023.

(00:08:31):

I would say maybe my biggest strength as a founder is pitching. I’m a pretty good pitcher and I gave a good presentation and had a few VCs talk to me and the investor, Inception Capital, that eventually led her around was not even there, but one of their friends was and they got the pitch deck from them and they were the best leading agreement we got and we ended up having them as our investor.

Nick (00:08:59):

When you think about doing a pitch, and clearly as you said, you’ve been successful at it, there’s some sort of table stake items that you feel like should be in every pitch, and I’m mainly asking this for any listener that’s entrepreneurial themselves and maybe they don’t have this knack or they don’t really understand what goes into a pitch. But if you don’t mind, can you share a little bit about bare minimum everybody should have X, Y or Z in a pitch. How do you think through that?

José Betancourt (00:09:25):

There’s no list for what you should have. I think there’s definitely a list for what you shouldn’t have, but the best way to get to that conclusion, it has to be yourself, it has to be with your audience. I’m sure the web3 journey is very different than the one for new sources of energy, and that is going to be through iteration. You just need to fail a lot.

(00:09:47):

So pitch in front of your parents, pitch in front of your friends, pitch in front of anyone who will listen and be very critical. I would say that I am very internally critical and am pretty good at receiving advice in the form of something to change. And if you are open to that sort of thing, if you can be open to that sort of thing, then you’re going to basically just erase, sort of iron out all of the little nicks in your presentation, and so you have a very sharp deck and a sharp speech, no more than 30 seconds long for the elevator version and maybe five minutes for one at a event. So just iterate, iterate, iterate.

Nick (00:10:32):

That’s great advice. I appreciate you sort of taking us in your mind on that. So I want to ask you this question then about something that comes up on the podcast all the time, and of course it’s all over crypto, Twitter and anything else that’s sort of talking about the industry, and it’s the fact that the user experience is probably the biggest barrier to adoption right now throughout the world. And I don’t know how much you think about that and if I sort of narrowed down in your own mind what the biggest blockers are to more adoption, but how do you think through some of that?

José Betancourt (00:11:03):

That is what I think about as the last vision before I close my eyes and the first thing I see when I wake up, it is very much what drives us, user experience. I should say actually an introduction to Virtual Labs because that decentralizing data mindset we had back in 2022, I suppose it was, is still with us but in a very different fashion. So it’s been a lot of iteration as I’d say.

(00:11:31):

What we’re in the business of is user experience and we do it through decentralized data for the purposes of pushing through self verified transactions. And so if you wouldn’t mind, I’ll take a quick journey on how this protocol works and how it relates to UX. So right now, every transaction needs to be processed on the global blockchain, the global consensus layer. So if I want to buy a few Ethereum as I did earlier on today’s dip, you need to go to a AMM exchange, you need to sign your wallet interactions, and in my case, I had to sign a three of four multi-sig and take out three different wallets, sign it that many times. I had to basically pay a certain amount of gas and I had to wait a certain amount of time between a few seconds and a few minutes depending on the network activity.

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And this is the fundamental nature of a blockchain. So a blockchain is global and a blockchain is characterized by blocks. Blocks, if you can imagine them in your mind’s eye, is effectively squares that contain transaction hashes referring to your swap or your deposit, and it’s finite because it’s a square that occurs in Ethereum’s case, every 12 seconds and it occurs every 12 seconds and it has a certain amount of block transactions. So that’s one thing. It’s finite, right?

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Why is that important? It’s important because blocks being finite means that there is scarcity. And scarcity implies value and value we pay in gas. That means that to access this global network, we need to pay to change the data in it every single time we want to use it. The other thing that’s not so good about blocks is blocks are periodic, right? They occur every few seconds or few minutes depending on the chain. Some are even a few milliseconds, but I’ll get into why that doesn’t work.

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So these blockchains have an inherent periodic nature to it, which means an average latency. So in Ethereum’s case of 12 seconds, you would effectively have a minimum average latency of six seconds. And of course if there’s a lot of blocks more than 12 per second, a lot of transactions rather more than 12 per second, it’s going to be even more latent.

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And you’ll notice that Gatsby’s and transactions fail, Gatsby’s go high, transactions fail, waiting goes up as the network is busy, which is exactly when everyone wants to trade. Okay, so I’ve characterized the global nature of a blockchain with its finite characteristics and its periodic characteristics. What we like is a global escrow with local consensus. So we still use the blockchain to escrow funds. You have them locked there and they’re used for basically another decentralized network. And this decentralized network runs on local consensus. It’s called a zero knowledge state channel.

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It’s on the same backings of that user verified decentralized data mechanism we had for oracles and random numbers so long ago. But this basically allows us to, example, we each deposit 1,000 USDC, for instance, and say, I have a lot Coca-Cola, I’m a distributor, and you run a shop, maybe Stop & Shop would be my example. I’m from the Northeast of the United States, but it could be Kroger’s, it could be whoever needs Coca-Cola on a large volume of spaces. And every time we wanted to exchange a shipment, instead of using the global consensus network, which again has inherent latency and also a cost, we can transmit over this state channel.

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The state channel allows us to basically send a transaction to each other and verify it on our own blockchain that’s effectively between us. Think of it as a two of two blockchain with two nodes, me and you, and two users, me and you. And because we write on this as the only two participants, we sign every transaction, which means there’s no information asymmetry and it has 100% trust assumption, which is compared to blockchains, 51% trust assumption. And because you sign all the transactions, I sign all the transactions, it’s assured to be trustless.

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So that’s how it works. I’ll pause for a moment there before I get into some of the UX benefits of that, but that’s how the ZK state channel works.

Nick (00:16:01):

It’s a brilliant introduction and I appreciate taking the time there to break that down for us. So if we were then to assume we have some non-technical listeners, explain how that sort of addresses this challenge of user experience and driving more adoption of blockchain tech.

José Betancourt (00:16:22):

Yes. So those two things I mentioned, the periodic nature and the finite nature of blockchains I believe are the two root evils or at least the two root inefficiencies of blockchain and are responsible for why we have not on boarded even the first million users. There’s a rallying cry of on board the first billion. I don’t even think we’re at the first million yet. I think this industry is very nascent and there’s a lot of progress to be made.

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And so how does those solve them? How does, for instance, having a ZK state channel or something that can eliminate that latency and that gas cost? Well, because once you have no guest fee, you actually align incentives very well with the user because imagine you’re a user who wants to make a bet, say this is a sports book or a typical crypto exchange, whatever it is, people trade on Binance and Coinbase and Fanfare and all of those betting applications and centralized platforms.

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Why? Because it’s easier to use. You’re not getting paid or you actually are getting paid every time you want to use them, whereas in the crypto version, you actually need to pay. Whether it’s a few cents or a few dollars, that gas cost, that wallet MetaMask pop up, then you have to pay gas, you have to click, scroll down, you have to read this data. MetaMask will show you your transaction hash is 0x, 56, AB. That’s so confusing. It can also mostly only be done on your desktop because mobile user experience is very bad. You can’t safely store seed freezes and access browsers at the same time on your mobile device. And so it’s just a very bad user experience.

(00:18:02):

First, you have to incur this friction with your wallet and then you have to pay in order to make a transaction. Well, we need to make it so that we’re encouraging and the incentives are aligned with further transactions. If the user incurs the slightest bit of friction, that’s going to scare away most people. We need to understand how much attention, for example, in the Shopify menu goes into making it so easy to click the next button, to hit confirm selection or very famously Best Buy created the sign in as guest. You don’t need to have an account. It’s all about making it easier in order to allow the user to make that purchase because if there is the slightest friction, more and more people will not use it. And we’re currently at the stage where there is so much friction.

(00:18:47):

Even today, I wrote an article about chain abstraction and bridging frictions, and that’s another huge problem that we hope to address. And so that’s the gas portion. Of course, there’s latency as well. If you were to make, say, high frequency trading, that can only occur on Binance or Coinbase or of course other centralized exchanges, and that is around 40% of the trading and centralized exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange. So we’re basically losing out on 40% of the volume right there. So we need to make it faster, sub millisecond. We need to make it easier, zero friction, and there needs to be no reverse incentive such as gas fees that are discouraging users on a transaction basis.

Nick (00:19:29):

Amazing. Thank you, José. So I want to go back then to your personal story and your journey to where you are today. I want to talk about that decision you made initially to attend Yale and you were studying economics. Talk to us about what your vision was for your career at that time and how economics has sort of shaped the way you think about the work you’re doing now.

José Betancourt (00:19:50):

Oh, wow. My journey was to be probably a banker or hedge fund trader. So my line of work now is actually not too far removed from what it would’ve been just in the decentralized fashion. I’m able to bring a lot of my old background here. So I was a forex trader, then a crypto trader as well as an options trader, somewhere in between. And I had varying levels of success with forex more so, and I wanted to be a trader, so I came to Yale on a coin flip, actually, made it there, got into all the finance clubs and the internship with the bank, and that was my journey.

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And then I actually in my finance group, pitched the idea of crypto as one of the things we would trade, and they have something like $1 million under management, and they were more concerned with their macroeconomic and small cap and healthcare-related investment choices. And so I made my own trading group called the Yale Blockchain Investment Trust and had some friends in there. I got to rub shoulders with crypto people more, and I started getting interested in the non-trading fundamentals and took off from there, and that was in 2021. So I would say that’s the start of my building journey in crypto, although of course I was trading well before.

Nick (00:21:16):

At your time at Yale, were you the only one sort of championing blockchain and learning more about crypto or did you come across it in some of your classes? Were there some adventurous professors that were willing to talk about these things?

José Betancourt (00:21:29):

No, no adventurous professors at Yale. They’re all teaching the basics, the fundamentals, what’s proven. I think we now have maybe one or two courses. Actually, Ben Fisch, the founder of Espresso, which is a cross-chain sequencer, I believe, was the first to do any sort of blockchain course. Of course, now he’s doing a startup and that’s where most people who actually want to build at Yale go because there’s not so much innovation happening, at least in tech.

(00:21:59):

In terms of how I got into it, I was definitely not the only champion, although not as many as I would hope. There were, I would say five of us that were sort of really active in the scene. Now there’s a bit more, which is nice. There’s actually been a few startups come out, Virtual Labs included, but also Curio protocol. Believe Blast has a Yelp founder as well. There are a few of us, and I hope there to be more. We’ll have to wait for the cycle to see how the chips fall.

Nick (00:23:38):

So you mentioned you were already involved in trading, you were pursuing a degree in economics with sort of the intent of working in banking or maybe just traditional finance. Clearly, at some point in your life, in your history, you became aware of crypto and blockchain and you probably had an insight or some sort of aha moment that triggered your interest. Do you remember when that was and what the allure was for you?

José Betancourt (00:24:02):

Yeah, it was first in 2017 when I heard about Bitcoin, I think that was probably a pretty common year. I’m really interested in modern monetary theory, if you’ll call it a theory. It’s the idea that you can essentially print as much money as you like, and because the United States is a monetary sovereign, the debt will always be viable and you’re sort of able to almost have a set inflation limit. Of course, we target 2% and we don’t target 0%, so there actually should be more money year over year, assuming constants like the velocity of money are constant.

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And Bitcoin doesn’t have that. Of course, it’s 21,000 units and there are Bitcoins now that don’t have caps, but all I knew back then was Bitcoin. And so that was always an allure. It sort of flew in the face of traditional economics, and that was a sort of intrigue for me at first, but it was not something I wanted to touch because it went against the principles of MMT.

(00:25:09):

Yet in 2020 is when I really got interested in crypto because of the inflation crisis. I thought this whole idea of transitory inflation by J. Powell was a complete lie that he knew what was going to happen, but of course he needs to say the publicly facing thing, that there won’t be inflation, that it will go away without any significant financial movement. And I thought that to be complete baloney, and I chose Bitcoin as my vehicle to profit off of that, and it was a good year.

Nick (00:25:46):

I want to ask you this question then about where we are presently in terms of the economy. And it’s clear to me, and I’m sure it’s clear to all the listeners, that you’re a very sharp guy with some deep insight on economics and markets. And so I think where I’m confused is the US economy is perplexing. Are we in a recession? Are we on the mid recession? Are we entering a recession? And then you have this crypto cycle that’s sort of orbiting the perplexity of the US economy, and so I’m not an economist. Maybe there’s more clarity here than I’m saying, but I’d be curious to get your opinion on how do you make sense of the general market and this cycle that’s running parallel to it?

José Betancourt (00:26:35):

I’ll say one thing before I get into it as a bit of a disclaimer. Anytime economists speculate over something like this, it’s almost always priced in already. So then that’s the joke really, that everything is priced in from inception and it is kind of true, so it becomes very difficult to, of course, time any market.

(00:26:55):

But if I were to spew theory in a dark room, say with no implications to where things would go, here’s what I’m thinking, and I will tell you that unfortunately, a lot of people are confused right now because on the one hand, we have something like the Sahm Rule, which is when the moving average of unemployment increases at a certain rate, 50 basis points, and that would be the sign that a recession would follow. That’s been the case, I believe, six out six of the last recessions. You also have the person who came up with the Sahm Rule, a woman with a last name Sahm, saying that this time it’s not true and rules were meant to be broken.

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And then on the other hand, and here’s the thing that scares me the most, this is what keeps me up at night, is the yield curve has been inverted. The yield curve is the difference from the 10 and the two-year treasury. So basically you can go to the US government and say, “Hey, I want to buy some debt to give you money right now to pay your bills,” the US government has bills and you can do it in a 10-year or two-year time horizon. Typically, the 10-year would give a higher yield, meaning if you give them $1,000, they would maybe give you 30 bucks per year for 10 years, and then they’d give you your $1,000 back at the end of it. So you get your $1,999 back, then you get 30 every year before, with inflation say at a 2%, that $30 would be 3% and you’d make a small profit.

Of course, the yields right now are actually closer to I suppose $55 per year in that scenario, but there’s going to be some amount, right? Typically, the 10-year amount that yield is higher than the two-year. Currently that is not the case. I should say why is it typically higher? Well, because the future holds more uncertainty. So if I were to go to most people and I say, “Hey, give me your money for 10 years or give me your money for two years,” fewer people are going to give me their money for 10 years, and the US government needs to incentivize them with a higher yield.

(00:28:47):

Currently, the two-year is actually higher than the 10-year, which means investors are basically saying that I have more uncertainty about the next two years than the next 10 years, which is crazy, which basically means that we will enter a recession.

(00:29:03):

What’s interesting is that this inversion is nearly about to un-invert. They’re basically un-inverting, and you would say, “Hey, that’s probably good, right?” Well, for the last few recessions and for a reason I haven’t been able to detect, and I haven’t seen anyone pointed out yet, although I’m sure they have, in the last, I’d say three, maybe four recessions, the recession has actually occurred after it un-inverts. So not after it immediately inverts, it inverts, it stays inverted for some time, typically six months, and then it un-inverts, and that’s when the recession happens, not when it immediately inverts.

(00:29:40):

I would speculate that it could have something to do with maybe just a lag effect. It actually has nothing to do with the end version. It has more to do with the fact that after it inverts, it then takes some time. I don’t know, but that’s something that scares me. But then at the same time, we do have historically low unemployment rates. We have rate cuts coming. The federal fund rates will probably drop by 50 basis points in September. If this interview drops off after that, I would be very keen to see if I’m right. They’ll be able to check, and it’s really a mess. No one knows, and I would say probably at least of all economists now.

Nick (00:30:18):

One more question about the market and then I have a lot of more questions about Virtual Labs and things you’re working on there, but I had a guest on recently, and of course there’s been again, a lot of chatter on crypto, Twitter and other places about the evolution of the crypto market itself.

(00:30:33):

And so I don’t think, again, as a non-economist, I don’t think the crypto market and industry has sort of mirrored the traditional economy and market because it’s a nascent industry and there’s a lot of different things going on here. But over time, as it evolves, it seems more and more like it’s going to act to behave like a traditional market. And these days of like the gold rush where if you just show up, things will go well for you, might be over, and the crypto market’s matured and value as it is in sort of other contexts will be paramount. That’s my diatribe. What’s yours? I mean, how do you see the crypto market evolving?

José Betancourt (00:31:15):

I see it the same way. I will say that I’m actually very happy. One of my many hot takes… We can talk hot takes later if you’d like. I have loads of them. One of them is that I’m very excited to see the death of airdrops, the death of sort of these insert hype word here, whether it be NFT or AI or any of these trends along with web3. You launch a token, you get a bunch of money, the founder runs off.

(00:31:44):

That happens so often. It happens even with VC-backed companies. I know companies that have raised more than 20, $30 million that are complete scams where they’re just never going to accomplish anything, which I think is a scam. There’s a lot of froth. The joke in the industry is we call that a low interest rates phenomenon, which basically means that it only occurs when money is cheap. And now money is not cheap, and we’re seeing a lot of those die, and we’re seeing real use cases now because if you look on any sort of survey, crypto is about one of the least enjoyable or looked favorably upon industries or even hobbies.

(00:32:24):

I saw some poll on Twitter that I think crypto ranks worse than taxonomy for women as a taste they have in men. They’d rather be with someone that isn’t a taxonomy, which is crazy than crypto. That’s really bad and it’s warranted. I agree with it because if you don’t know this industry, we are known for FTX, we’re known for Celsius, we’re known for Terra Luna, we’re known for being absolutely violated by the SEC right now, which is something we can talk about. It’s all warranted, it’s all negative coverage, and will be popular again when Bitcoin hits a new all time high, of course, but there are no use cases right now, and there could be is the worst part.

(00:33:11):

It’s not like there isn’t a use case. It’s that we haven’t built them and we haven’t built them easy enough to access. Because if you build a really good application and it’s hard to use because you need a wallet and you need to write down a seed phrase and you need to get a gas token and you need to wait 12 seconds per transaction, no one’s going to use it.

Nick (00:33:29):

Let’s return to Virtual Labs and then if there’s time, I will love to get some hot takes on a couple of things you brought up there, but-

José Betancourt (00:33:35):

Okay.

Nick (00:33:37):

Where did the name Virtual Labs come from? Let’s start there. Do you remember that moment and how you sort of landed on that?

José Betancourt (00:33:43):

I do. So we were called Ontropy for the longest time, and we wanted to be known as something that was a bit easier to pronounce. It was misspelled, often. Ontropy, I really love the name. It came from entropy on chain, entropy, of course, referring to randomness, which was our first idea. And so we ran with that. Because randomness was no longer our idea, it wasn’t our core product, it didn’t make a lot of sense to focus on that, and we changed the name to be more focused on what we are now, which is the idea of making something virtual, which is making it something easy to use.

(00:34:19):

So we have, for example, one product called the Virtual Rollup, that’s a Turing complete application layer built on top of the ZK state channel. We have something called the Virtual Bridge, which is so easy that it isn’t even a bridge, right? The idea is like it’s, oh, it’s an application, it’s infrastructure that’s not even there. And you want to make it easy, so that’s where we came from. Labs is a common sort of surname in blockchain, so we were Virtual Labs. There was, I guess the handle was open, the domain was open and we just went for it.

Nick (00:34:51):

And tell us about the team. So as I was looking through some of the materials, I mean the pedigree and the people that are working on Virtual Labs are pretty impressive. What can you tell us about the team?

José Betancourt (00:35:00):

Yes, so we have really put a intelligent and ambitious group of people together to get this done. I’d say that I have no greater asset or joy than my team. We can accomplish anything. You mentioned pedigree, and we represent four Ivy League schools. We represent people from even IIT now. I’m not even sure that’s public yet. Hardest university to get in in the world. I will say I am not an easy person to work for. I’m very demanding and striving for perfection, and we have worked weekends, we have worked nights, and we’ve done so for the last several months and really several years. And that I think to me is more important than anything else. I like to have people that autonomously work together, self-motivated. Yeah, nothing but the best to say.

Nick (00:36:02):

And you mentioned some of the products that you’ve been working on there. You mentioned Virtual Bridge. I also know about VDEX. I don’t know if there’s a way you pronounce that other than sounding out the letters like I just did, but talk to us about some of the products and the things that the team’s working on.

José Betancourt (00:36:18):

Yes, we are primarily focused on cryptography, cryptography being that ZK state channel with the local consensus, the ability to make those transactions occur in under a millisecond and for no gaspies at all. That’s what we do. It’s what we would love to do for research and for all time. We have built an application on top to really demonstrate the value of the infrastructure.

(00:36:49):

One of the bad things about ZK state channels, at least our current version of them, is that they are very hard to use. And so we’ve, for example, talked with researchers or we’ve talked with consumers such as other applications that want to be powered by this technology because, which for example, gaming company would not want their transactions to be in the order of 200 times faster than they currently are and for less fees, and it’s also more trustless. Well, everyone would want that.

(00:37:18):

And so we had two dozen gaming applications that wanted to use the Virtual Rollup, and we delivered a lot of them, and they’re available on our website. Anything from Connect 4 to poker, to blackjack, to chess, to binary betting applications. And the cost of integrating these was so high that we eventually said, “Hey, we eventually need to build a full virtual machine, which we have not done. And then virtual machine will take a long time to build and we are adamant to build it.”

(00:37:52):

But in the meantime, we made a new team called VDEX. That’s how you would say that, of course, meaning DEX as in a decentralized exchange and V coming from Virtual Labs so VDEX. And VDEX Is very fast. VDEX is running on Virtual Rollups and inherits all of the features of the underlying technology that’s sub millisecond finality, full self custody, no gas fees, and more we’ll get into.

(00:38:22):

Now that we’ve built this product as just a demo, really, it’s blossomed into something a lot bigger. And we’ve actually said, “Hey, we’re not going to build this virtual machine right away. We’re actually going to build this consumer application, this exchange and show everyone what the Virtual Rollup is capable of.” We don’t need now to worry about the difficulty to work with the ZK state channel because this application is done and ready, and we show them what it does for a consumer because we’re a UX company and we are a cryptography company. But the best way to show off your benefits in UX is not by showing them lines of code or showing them formulas as we did before, it’s to show them the hands-on experience. And that’s now what we’re doing.

Nick (00:39:02):

For listeners who want to learn more about the Virtual Bridge or VDEX, I encourage you to visit the show notes. There’ll be links in there. You can read the docs and learn more about Virtual Labs and all the products and the team there as well. What’s your long-term vision for Virtual Labs and what you’re building there, José?

José Betancourt (00:39:20):

Right now, it’s about getting to the next step. It has been nights and weekends for my team and myself, pretty long nights for myself, and it’s really just getting VDEX to market. We plan to do that in late September for an invite only Mainnet, after Halborn, our wonderful auditing partner has completed their hacks to make sure we’re fully secure. Once that’s done, we launch and we let people start using it. And that’s the focus right now.

(00:39:53):

On our site, there are some roadmap items that are pretty cool, including building that full virtual machine, including making it accessible to new blockchains and making it work for other types of applications. Going back to gaming is something we want to do and fulfill those original orders, and also start to work with other exchanges. Like I mentioned, we are a cryptography company through and through. We are being a consumer application. This VDEX perpetual exchange is fun, but we want a chance to work with Hyperliquid UIDX and GMX, the biggest perpDEXs there are and onboard them.

(00:40:31):

And I think together with a shared order book, we can actually take on Binance and Coinbase. These are centralized feeling applications. And when you have a centralized feeling DEX such as VDEX and you have a CEX such as Coinbase, you really have no benefit in using decentralized platform.

(00:40:50):

We saw just today that Binance stole funds, froze funds from Palestinian people at the direction of Israel. I certainly won’t get into politics, but the idea of crypto is that you have true custody over your funds no matter who you are. And with the recent arrest of Durov, the founder of Telegram, also now holds most of his money in Bitcoin, and it’s good for him because that could be another case where funds could be stolen from him. So it really needs to be self-custodial, it’s the whole point of crypto, and CEXs do not adhere to that. And I think together, Hyperliquid UIDX, GMX, all of the other great PerpDEXs to start along with VDEX and more importantly the Virtual Rollup technology, we can achieve that and we can replace CEXs with DEXs.

Nick (00:41:40):

I’ve heard that refrain many times and obviously your position is my position and self-custody is incredibly important and it’s hard to imagine a web3/crypto industry without part of the ethos and the actual actions of people participating, it being self-custody. But these centralized exchanges did play, you could argue a role in the early stages of the industry as like an onboarding to it. I mean, despite the position you take, and I understand the necessity of it, do you at least sort of recognize that they had that early role as an onboard?

José Betancourt (00:42:19):

Oh, of course. They’re certainly not evil and they’re very positive for the industry. Coinbase is the biggest American lobbyer. Without it, Gensler would be having a far hotter fury than he does at us now. So we really have Brian Armstrong to thank for that.

(00:42:35):

But even these centralized exchanges, for example, Coinbase has launched Base for I think just over a year, maybe a year and a half now, why did they build Base? Eventually, I imagine Coinbase transactions will settle on Base. They too plan to be decentralized. It’s where everything is trending, and maybe instead of competing with them directly or taking them out, we fasten and hasten that timeline for them.

Nick (00:43:03):

I want to ask you this question because of where Virtual Labs sits in the industry and the vision that you’ve shared, where you come in on the debate between L1s and L2s, and some of these maxis we see in the industry. You’ve got Ethereum maxis right now. Solana is hot, everybody’s excited about Solana. Of course, Bitcoin’s been around forever and you have plenty of Bitcoin maxis. But given where you sit and sort of your view of how the industry needs to mature to greater adoption, how do you come in on these types of arguments?

José Betancourt (00:43:37):

Absolutely. So I hold BTC and ETH for disclosure. I think that the future is Ethereum and Bitcoin. L2s, let’s take a moment to talk about what they are. An L2 is basically a multi-sig. Imagine you have say 10 different signatures and you have to get seven of those 10 people to agree to make a transaction. That would be like your typical safe wallet, right?

(00:44:03):

Well, what if you actually had transactions settle on Ethereum and you made those final transaction batches? So basically say out of those 10 people, you had 100 people submit orders to them, and those 10 people then submit the order and you have seven of 10 people agree that it was a process in a valid way and then it submits it to Ethereum, and then you have the settlement of Ethereum and that as a periodic finalization. And then in the meantime, you do have some way that your transaction can go amiss, but you are sort of grounded to Ethereum.

(00:44:43):

That’s what an L2 actually is, in most cases. They claim to have their own sequencers and their own blocks, and all of that is technically true, but it’s all secured by a multi-sig on Ethereum. So that’s what L2s are and that’s what rollups are, right? I don’t like that. I mean, that is not where security is highest and that’s not where liquidity is highest. And those are probably the two most important things in crypto, liquidity and security. And so one of the things we want to do that we think is a battle for user experience is combining and unifying liquidity, one, and two, not introducing any more trust assumptions than we already have. So whatever you have on Ethereum, if you trust Ethereum, which I think you can’t not trust Ethereum. There’s I think now more than a million individual validators. Then you’re going to be secure and you’re going to be liquid because everything is combined.

(00:45:42):

So I’m not a huge fan of L2s. I think they again, also play an important role just as centralized exchanges do. I don’t think they’re going to go away, certainly not. Base, Polygon now holds some of the biggest applications.

(00:45:55):

In terms of Solana, I like Solana, but blockchains do three things. They process transactions, they hold funds and they reach consensus. Let’s say those are the three main things that a blockchain does. So okay, processing transactions, what else can process transactions? Oh, a computer. A computer can process transactions. What can hold a balance? Oh, well, a computer is pretty good at that. Any Excel spreadsheet can hold a ledger. Okay, and then well reach consensus? A computer can’t do that. You can’t reach decentralized consensus with a computer. That’s what a blockchain is for.

(00:46:38):

Solana is good at the first two. It’s good at processing transactions and it’s good at storing a balance. It’s not so good at that third part, which is the only thing that distinguishes blockchains from computers.

(00:46:51):

So I think that Solana absolutely has a place. I think proof of history is an absolutely great innovation, and I think that Solana will exist in a multi-chain future. Huge respect for a lot of the people there. But at the current state of the technology, Solana is centralized. Right now the people have decided that they like centralized, as long as it is a good UX, which Solana does. I personally do most of my trading on Solana. So a large innovation I suppose for VDEX is that it will basically have the same experience and even better experience in fact than Solana, but on EVM chains.

Nick (00:47:24):

How do you place the emergence of something like crypto and web3? And it’s a question I routinely ask, but is this industry a revolution against what I would call the sins of web2? This is a bunch of technologists and founders like yourself that are sort of angry about what the web2 monopolies did. Is this industry more about data sovereignty? Is there something economic about this industry about meritocracy and giving people an opportunity to be sovereign in terms of economics and financial? How do you place it?

José Betancourt (00:48:02):

I think every one of those things is true. I think sadly, the majority of the reason why we’ve been here has been because people like to scam other people and is effectively an internet casino. And not many people like to say that because it’s not good for their bags, but it’s a truth we need to reconcile before we move on to generating real value.

(00:48:22):

And I did not put my life in a different direction and effectively all in on blockchain to operate a casino or to be part of a culture that is like that. I think there’s nothing wrong with that. I think trading meme coins is fun and speculating on Ethereum and Solana is fun, but it can’t be the only thing we’re about. And that has by far been the majority, by far. Meritocracy is something I personally benefited from. No other 19-year-olds could raise $2 million in an industry other than in crypto, maybe AI, but I think it’s best with crypto and I’ve gotten to meet the top people in the space and everyone is so welcoming and kind. It’s a culture that really any industry could benefit from. So it’s absolutely meritocratic. It’s absolutely self-sovereign in terms of data and funds.

(00:49:22):

This idea, this notion of web3, I don’t think exists yet. I badly want it to, but it doesn’t exist yet. Blockchain and web3, as we know it, are only one thing, DeFi. DeFi does not just mean the casino. DeFi to me means two things, having self-custody of funds, which is good in many scenarios. As we mentioned, the Palestinians in finance, and as we mentioned Durov and the French government. There are many scenarios. For instance, I’ve had bank accounts shut down for arbitrary reasons before I was even in crypto, so it wasn’t related to that, just changes in policies and things, and you have to pay $40 every time you want to make a transfer to a different country, and it’s just that little bit better in terms of UX.

(00:50:10):

Surprisingly, crypto has some benefits to UX compared to traditional methods. So that’s one benefit. And the second is the perhaps one that will reach adoption faster. I’m not going to say more important, and that is the ability to profit from your own money. Many people don’t know this, but if you go to Bank of America and you put your money in there, why are they storing your money for free? They’re loaning it out. In fact, they’re only taking 25% as collateral. So if you put $1,000 in there, they’re loaning $4,000 out. Our current rates, they’re going to be earning five and a half percent of that $4,000 sometimes more if you include reverse repos and the overnight rate. That 5.5%, if you hold it in there for a year, is going to be around $220, $220 that you’re not getting a penny of. In fact, this bank may actually charge you for fees, like I mentioned, $40 for wires. You wait 40 days for an ACH to clear at its maximum.

(00:51:12):

Instead, you have a crypto account where you get your own profit, you automatically get your own profit, you’re profiting off your own money because you own it and you get to send it anywhere in the world for free or for near free. Those few cents or few dollars on blockchain networks I mentioned is bad when you’re doing something like, for example, processing bets, processing transactions, but compared to wires, that’s where we’ve reached product market fit.

Nick (00:51:37):

What motivates you as a founder, as an entrepreneur? I mean, clearly you have a vision for Virtual Labs and you’re on a mission there to create value in this industry. And I love the approach you’re taking to that, by the way. I love the way you talk about mass adoption and the things that must happen, and so it resonates with me. But as a person, as a human sort of navigating life, what motivates you?

José Betancourt (00:52:00):

Oh, navigating life. I am motivated by, at this point, really survival. Right now, my whole life is in in this and it absolutely has to work. What actually gets me up in the morning though is I see something here, something that for some reason not everyone sees, or maybe it’s not the most profitable option, and that’s genuine use cases of blockchain.

(00:52:28):

I’ll give you an example. I am actually a homeowner. And the process of buying my house was a mess. I had to wait two weeks for the transactions to clear, the paperwork to get sorted out. And what I had to do is pay, I think it was three to $4,000 in legal fees. And I see a future where we do code as law, and we use smart contracts as escrow devices, because that’s really what it was. I needed to deposit money, then sign the contract, so the contract could be signed and sent over to me and then my money was collected. The lawyer just needed to take it while this process was going out to make sure that it went through, as escrow.

(00:53:10):

And we could easily use smart contracts to replace this, and you could save around 1% of the price of the home per person, so anywhere between 75 basis points, around 2% total in the value of the home and several weeks of people’s time. And the housing market is the biggest market there is. There’s $180 trillion in the global housing market. It’s the biggest asset class there is, bigger than stocks, options, insurance. It’s bigger than anything. And we can make people’s lives easier and better, and that’s just America is the comparable process. In Montenegro where I thought of this idea after talking with residents there, it’s even worse. It’s sometimes months for the local ordinance board to approve it and the fees are even higher.

(00:53:58):

That’s just one example of a real use case that I’m not pursuing. Why am I not pursuing? Because we’re not there yet. People need to build so many layers of infrastructure and our reputation needs to improve to be able to take on these real clients.

(00:54:11):

So there’s a reason I’m building VDEX, which is a perpetual exchange. It has product market fit to crypto bros, and we’re going to slowly add features there such as trading treasury bonds, allowing users to natively get yield, that I mentioned in those bank accounts. So you can just have your funds sitting in our account, sitting in our wallet. And unlike MetaMask, which you do have self custody over, but there’s no yield, you have self custody over your funds in the Virtual Rollup and there’s yield for you.

(00:54:43):

So it’s just going to be a reason to have your funds there. It’ll be the equivalent of say, Venmo, or a bank or Robinhood all combined into one, and that’s the immediate goal, is to create something that has value for traders because the yield, where does the yield come from? Well, it comes from treasury bonds and it comes from trading fees. And so we need to have sort of that pragmatic approach to blockchain adoption. People like to trade, but also having these new things, what I call auto yield, people profiting from their own money.

Nick (00:55:18):

As you look at your experience in entrepreneurship, what are the one or two lessons that any listening or aspiring entrepreneur, you could save them a little heartache, a little heartburn? What are the one or two insights or lessons you’ve learned that you think are most important?

José Betancourt (00:55:33):

I’ll say to any listening founder right now, I am very accessible on Twitter. Sure that will be linked in the posting of this audio. And I had very good advisors when I started out, and I would not have been able to do without them. So I’ll be that resource for anyone who needs it.

(00:55:54):

For general advice, I would say fail fast, fail incredibly fast. It’s sort of with the pitch deck, iterate, just learn all the bad stuff and fail fast. Use that comparative principle to say, “Hey, is this idea really good?” Compare it to your friend who has a $200,000 a year job at Meta. Would you rather have the $200,000 salary or would you have your idea that you think could be the next big thing? It forces you to ground yourself and realize is what you have good, and the more critically you look at your idea and yourself, the better you get. So you need to be hard. You need to be really hard with yourself.

(00:56:30):

I’d also say that find a co-founder. I’m doing this as a solo founder. I highly recommend finding someone to support you. I wouldn’t recommend dropping out of college. Definitely take as few risks as you can. I think founders are often seen as risk-taking, and I think that’s somewhat true. We’re not as risk-averse as the average populace, but we are calculating in our risks. We never take sighing for the hell of it. There’s no impulsive behavior here. It’s all built on logic, not faith as it seems. And so I would think very carefully, be bored. Being bored is a great way. Put the phone away, delete your favorite applications, be bored more often. Ideas will come to you both in startup ideas, I mean, but also solutions to your current problems, and you’re going to face a lot of problems.

Nick (00:57:23):

Are you afraid of failure?

José Betancourt (00:57:26):

No.

Nick (00:57:27):

A lot of my listeners, José, are enthusiastic about web3 data. I’ve got a lot of Graf enthusiasts who listen to the podcast. You’ve talked a little bit about decentralized data. I’m just curious if you have an opinion on the Graf and the way it’s sort of positioning itself and trying to serve the industry.

José Betancourt (00:57:45):

Yes. I will say that I am actually not a technical person. Sometimes I can kid people into thinking that I am based on the explanations of my own technology, but I’m not a developer. And so I’ve never had the opportunity to use The Graph. But we are using them to sort through our data. It’s great for indexing probably the Google or the Mongo Compass search of web3, I suppose you could say, and is a necessary tool in order to, I think, make any company right now with the exception of exchanges. Exchanges are profitable, but these wonderful technologies such as oracles or like the Graf, they need real clients with real customers, with real users to be profitable. And I think we’re not there yet. And the more companies like that, that there are, the more that the economies of scale will start to make sense.

Nick (00:58:44):

José, a question I’ve been asking frequently here on the podcast recently is this question about this notion that in this industry, the token is the product. And I don’t think necessarily that people that hold that position totally discount the value of products and services, but they are either equally waiting or shifting more weight to this notion that token is the product. I’d love to get, given your background on trading and of course economics. I’d love to get your take on where you would come in on that debate.

José Betancourt (00:59:18):

I would firmly say that the token can be the product. The circumstances are very unique. So here’s where a token can be useful. Imagine you have say Uber. Uber is a web2 company. They went through traditional private financing. They went to all sorts of different local governments. They got more writers, they got more drivers, and then they profit finally after 10 years, Uber turned to their first profit.

(00:59:48):

Here’s an example of where a token could be beneficial and benefit the three distinct groups within Uber, those would be the investors and founders, so the shareholders. It would be the consumers that can actually be the driver or the rider, and it can also be the, let’s call it the core Uber identity. What actually is Uber? It’s right now a company. It could also be a DAO. So here’s why a decentralized model with a token could benefit those three groups. Again, it would be Uber, the shareholders and the consumers.

(01:00:22):

So it benefits the shareholders I think very easily. That’s the easiest one to imagine. If you had Uber as a decentralized, so imagine Uber DAO launching in 2024. Uber doesn’t exist yet and they’re launching in 2024, and they’re replacing taxis and that’s their goal.

(01:00:38):

So it’s useful for the investors because they get a two-year time horizon to receive a return on their funds. This is five times faster than the 10 years that is typically expected in an IPO. And if you have a five times faster turn around on your capital, that makes you have an 80% more efficient model, you have five times more money to invest because you can expect to turn it over and fund a new brilliant idea five times within 10 years, whereas you could previously only do it once, and of course they profit more. And I think that has been abused in crypto with false promises. But let’s stick to the theoretics now that this would be good for a decentralized Uber.

(01:01:22):

The second is that it’s good for the consumers. So imagine Uber, this decentralized web3 Uber is powered by Uber coin. So Uber coin of course is needed to give the shareholders their liquidity, but it’s also the token that is used to make transactions, and that means that it can actually rise to the top faster. So decentralized models are meritocratic as we discussed a little bit. And that means that, say Frankfurt was a city in Germany very against Uber because they have a strong taxi union. I think New York as well. I think a lot of cities were and still are.

(01:02:01):

If you had a public token from basically year one or year two, these firms could basically incentive align much easier. And all of a sudden, you have government officials, the taxi unions that are all bought into the idea of Uber because it’s decentralized and they are not going to be as adverse to Uber winning because they’re Delta neutral almost.

(01:02:24):

It’s also good for the early adopters because they can profit. And so say you have Alice in Idaho is going to petition her local government to get these Uber legalized or to become a driver, maybe. It’s almost like you see buy 10, have a $10 payment and you give a $10 gift card to your friend. You know those referral programs? It’s a lot easier to do it when you print the token. And that’s what we see with airdrops. And there’s a smart way to do airdrops, which is for real value such as that, as compared to just dropping it on everyone.

(01:03:00):

And the third group that can be benefited, I’ve already kind of touched on that, is the Uber entity itself. And that of course would be benefited by, one, you have taxi unions, and for example, competition will go away quicker. You sort of rise to the top quicker. And the other reason it’s decentralized and better for the Uber application is because there are less fees. Because right now, Uber needs to make a profit. But in the scenario where you have Uber is decentralized, we typically see a lot lower fees, right? Like Uniswap takes 30 basis points compared to Robinhoods, Citadels, Alliances, payments or order flow, taking a lot more than that.

(01:03:42):

And when you have no entity that needs to make profit for their investors on Wall Street, then you basically have lower fees, drivers and drivers receive more, a higher percentage of what they drive for and people pay less. And so that’s how a token could be useful for all three of those entities and therefore better for all of them. And the token isn’t really a product there, but the token is it’s an integral part of the protocol and that’s what’s missing. So there needs to be something else to make it justified, but it can work.

Nick (01:04:19):

And my last question before I ask you the GRTiQ 10, José, is this question about optimism. So what makes you optimistic about the future of web3? Clearly you have a great sense of some of the challenges presently and even those that lie right in front of us, but what about your long-term optimism? Where does that come from?

José Betancourt (01:04:41):

I first thought you meant the token optimism, the ecosystem optimism with regards to the abstract concept of the Glass Hustle, I will say I am very optimistic, I really am, both about our future, not only for myself but for the future of web3. I hope I don’t have too much hubris to say that I think Virtual Rollups will have an outsized impact on our industry and will I believe make this industry something to be more optimistic about. Maybe that’s big to say. We’ll see how history judges that. In regards to my optimism outside of that, I would say the dying of airdrops, sort of the influx of real builders and the focus more towards pragmatic applications, I think Polymarket is awesome. I think Polymarket is being referenced. My mom knows what Polymarket is. She sees it on the news. All these news networks from CNBC to Fox are saying that Harris is leading in the polls because of Polymarket. And that’s awesome.

(01:05:47):

We’ve never had anything like that. There’s been so rare… There’s been of course decentralized versions like Coinbase and Binance. There’s been a few that have achieved some success, but Polymarket has certainly been the biggest. And that is such a green light. It focuses on self custody of your funds and it focuses on being able to profit from your money, a different sort of profit than I mean with yield, but the ability to profit from bets, and it’s a source for truth in an industry or in rather a country or an atmosphere right now where there’s not a lot of truth and it’s product market fit. And I’m super optimistic about Polymarket and I’m super optimistic about what’s going to come after Polymarket.

Nick (01:06:33):

I now want to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions that I ask every guest each week, and I love them. It gives me an opportunity to get to know you a little bit more. And I think listeners also benefit because maybe they’ll learn something new, be encouraged to try something different or maybe just achieve more in their own life. So José, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

José Betancourt (01:06:52):

Ready as I’ll ever be.

Nick (01:07:04):

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

José Betancourt (01:07:09):

I would say at least for web3, the Cathie Wood Bitcoin fundamental valuation was very impactful to me. She sort of has a bad rap now in terms of her ARK Invest funds have not performed super well in the last two years. I’m still a believer in the value. I think it’s been solely as a result of interest rates, why growth stocks are not doing well.

(01:07:36):

The Bitcoin fundamental white paper, fundamental valuation, it valued it on Bitcoin replacing international bank transfers, replacing gold as a store of value, and replacing protection against the seizure of assets and gave a fundamental valuation to Bitcoin. And that was the first thing is like, “Hey, here’s a real person with real credentials saying that there’s a real valuation here.” When you hear people like Buffett saying that actually this is rat poison, and it is rat poison, if you think about it as a company, it’s not a company, it’s a currency. And currencies are valued as nation states, not as profit loss. And so that was really cool for me to see. And it has been basically the basis for why I’m in this industry.

Nick (01:08:23):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

José Betancourt (01:08:29):

I love Interstellar. It sounds like it’s everyone’s favorite movie, but I swear, I loved it before it was cool. In terms of TV shows, it’s been the most impactful TV show in my life. I really like Suits. I think Suits is probably good about teaching you negotiation and determination. And so I think there’s just good lessons there and it’s obviously very fun to watch as well.

Nick (01:08:53):

If you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

José Betancourt (01:08:59):

Maybe Lithium by Nirvana or Thriller by Michael Jackson is actually the most sold album. I think it went platinum 50 times. So maybe one of those two.

Nick (01:09:12):

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

José Betancourt (01:09:16):

Don’t listen to advice.

Nick (01:09:19):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know yet?

José Betancourt (01:09:24):

Oh, so much there. I think most people go through life not knowing how to live it. Myself, very much included, and I think people think they have it figured out way earlier than they do. It’s actually in effect much later.

Nick (01:09:44):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

José Betancourt (01:09:46):

Deleting apps. So I try to be very cognizant of my failings. One of them is total media addict, whether it’s TV shows or specifically YouTube since I was a kid or a teenager. I watch good stuff. It’s all very educational stuff. Actually helped me win the Geography Bowl in high school and compete nationally at Yale for geography because I watch a lot of history videos, but it’s still not the most productive thing. And I’ve been able to rectify that by deleting the YouTube app. I, for example, have to log in every time I want to use it on a browser, which is a much worse user experience. I have applications such as, it’s called Planty, Planty. And Planty disables use of my phone for an hour or two hours or however long I set. And those are the times I get the most productivity in.

Nick (01:10:40):

Based on your life experiences and observations, José, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in life?

José Betancourt (01:10:49):

Grit.

Nick (01:10:50):

And then the final three questions are complete the sentence type questions. The first one is, and I think I sort of asked you this earlier, but the thing that most excites me about the future of web3 is?

José Betancourt (01:11:01):

DeFi.

Nick (01:11:02):

And how about this one? If you’re on X, again, I always call it Twitter, then you should be following?

José Betancourt (01:11:07):

I like Mike Dudas. He’s a very unfiltered web3 character.

Nick (01:11:14):

And then the final question, I’m happiest when?

José Betancourt (01:11:17):

I have sunshine, warmth, and accomplishment. I like to say that’s three parts to my happiness, the sun, the heat. I’m very warm-blooded person. And then of course, I like celebrating the milestones.

Nick (01:11:41):

José, thank you so much for joining the GRTiQ Podcast. It was great to meet you and certainly impressed with not only the way you think about all the things happening in web3 and your depth of analysis and thoughtfulness on things like the economy, but also the vision for Virtual Labs and the team there. If listeners want to stay in touch with you, follow the things that you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

José Betancourt (01:12:04):

Yes, it would probably be my Twitter or X, which is JoséBetAndCourt. So it’s José, and then three words, bet and court, all in a one line. You’ll find me on Twitter there. You’ll find me on other platforms under that name. But Twitter is where I’m most active.