GRTiQ Podcast: 203 Justin Banon

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Justin Banon (00:00:17):

Blockchain systems can be coded so that you can figure the rules and instead of like Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil”, you can have blockchain systems that can’t be evil. If you program them and then the founders throw away the keys and only the community can change the laws.

Nick (00:01:02):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast and the first Episode of 2025. Today I’m speaking with Justin Banon, founder of Boson Protocol. Boson Protocol is building decentralized commerce infrastructure that aims to replace traditional eCommerce intermediaries with minimally extractive protocols built on web3. A physics graduate from Imperial College London, Justin has a unique business background and pedigree, including once transforming a $50 million company into a billion dollar digital platform, before becoming fascinated with blockchain’s potential to create their economic systems. Justin provides a lot of unique insight and perspectives on how to scale business, and as you’ll hear, through Boson and Fermion protocols, Justin is working to pioneer hard tokenization, which is creating verifiable guarantees for physical asset transactions in the digital blockchain space.

(00:01:58):

I started the conversation with Justin by talking about his background growing up in London and how his early fascination with science shaped his professional journey.

Justin Banon (00:02:09):

Thanks for having me. Pleasure. So where I’m from geographically is from London in England. And parents, my mother was English and my father is from Mauritius, so a small island between Africa and India in sort of the middle of nowhere. What sparked my interest in science and technology, I was just one of those really geeky kids that would just stare at the stars and think, “Wow, what is that out there?” And just ask questions. You know, you get those kids, about plants, about how does this work, what is light? Just from, I don’t know, the age of three, three and a half, and it hasn’t really changed much since.

Nick (00:02:55):

How much of that early curiosity you had as a young person shaped your life and the things that you’ve pursued professionally, and the topics and issues that have interested you?

Justin Banon (00:03:07):

Massively. Well, a couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at DevCon with Professor Potts, this blockchain economist, who’s also a physicist who talks about the evolution of order in the universe and how blockchains enable this new computable economy, which is an evolution of order.

(00:03:29):

And so for me, this kind of common thread, which to be honest, only recently have I been able to draw a common thread, but it’s always been, “How do things work? What’s the nature of being the universe? These complex organisms formed, how did they start? Where is it heading?” Just this evolution of order and complexity through the universe and physics is a base level of that.

(00:03:58):

But then when you get to blockchains, for example, the thesis I have with Professor Potts on the computable economy is that blockchains are like going from RNA to DNA. Whereas RNA enables organisms like viruses, and DNA enables this ecology of multicellular life that sits on top of it. In the same way blockchains enable our traditional fuzzy economy to turn into what we call a computable economy, like a giant computer that will support vastly more complex economic life forms. And so that whole thread is, “How does complexity happen?”

Nick (00:04:42):

Do you see, when you think about the emergence of blockchain, and you brought it up there when you were talking about the evolution of order, but do you see the emergence of this technology as sort of an evolution of tech? Is it a revolution against the sins of web2? Is it something about economy, privacy, data? I mean, how do you frame the emergence of this thing?

Justin Banon (00:05:06):

Well, there’s a number of lenses. I mean one that got me into blockchain, I ended up heading up this billion dollar global company, which I’d done a digital transformation of and grew to this billion dollar platform, and kind of referred to myself as the chief extractionary officer. Because increasingly my job became extracting from customers, extracting from buyers, from sellers, and even from staff that had given their best years of their life, building this business. That was my job. Extract and send up to the owners.

(00:05:43):

Part of what blockchains enable is a new economic system where we can resist this runaway extraction that we see in the world economy. And I mean, in order for, I can’t remember whether it’s 50% or 80% of wealth to be with the top 1%, but in order for such a significant proportion of the world’s wealth to be concentrated in 1%, it’s not by chance you need an extraction pump on a global scale to pump all of the money out of our pockets into theirs. So that was my primary driver. But since then I’d sort of seen that blockchains, this is the thesis I have Professor Potts, that blockchains enable a new economic order, are fundamentally a different type of economy that is a giant computer. And because it’s more robust and reliable it supports vastly more complex applications and will unlock exponential wealth.

Nick (00:06:44):

We’re going to return to a few of those things as we continue this interview, but let’s return to your personal story here. So you decided at the age of university to pursue a degree at the Imperial College of London in physics. So take us back in time, how were you sort of thinking about career and what drew you to the field of physics?

Justin Banon (00:07:06):

And like I said, I was a very geeky child. I was reading Einstein’s general and special relativity about the age of six or seven, and quantum mechanics. I was a difficult child to get to school because I was up all night reading all this stuff and blowing my bedroom up with chemistry experiments and stuff. So I’d already written to Imperial College and worked out at the time they were best physics degree possibly in the world. I’m not sure if they are still. It was just I had this craving to understand how the world worked, and the basic operating system of the universe. That’s just pretty much my earliest memories. So it was very much just the natural, I couldn’t wait to get there, type thing.

Nick (00:07:58):

Is physics the best lens to understand the nature of reality and what that operating system of the world is? I mean certainly you thought about it at the time, you still think that’s right?

Justin Banon (00:08:10):

I think it’s an essential lens, but not a complete one. There’s been so much development in physics in the several decades since I stopped studying at university. Amazing developments. A lot of what I study now is metaphysics, the things outside of the realm, so philosophy of “Why is there anything at all?” “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is quite a big question. A mind-body problem, our real consciousness, the whole understanding of life, and lots of new developments and theories have come out on that. There are many areas of very important learning and knowledge that sit outside of physics as well. So yeah, that’s the operating system that runs my brain.

Nick (00:09:08):

So if we go back and visit you in time as a university student, you strike me as somebody that’s probably thinking about an academic pass. Am I right about that? Or what were you thinking about career at that time in your life?

Justin Banon (00:09:20):

Well, at the time I was running a couple of businesses in parallel. One of them was like a video production agency and one of them is like a model agency. I mean, my girlfriend was a model agency booker and she started her own agency. So I started running all the systems and technology, we built a electronic booking system and stuff. And that sort of business side of things in a way displaced or replaced… I mean, I kind of got to the stage with physics where all my burning questions had been answered and then I caught a different bug. And one was being mid-twenties, running a model agency, going out and having lots of fun. And the other was building businesses, and fun businesses as well. I mean, I’ve never really been interested in accountancy firms or anything, no offense to all the amazing accountants out there. But yeah, I mean I sort of then caught this new bug of business.

Nick (00:10:26):

Where did that come from? I mean, it seems like a leap, and maybe I’m naive to it, but it seems like a leap from physics to, “I want to be a startup and entrepreneur.”

Justin Banon (00:10:35):

Well, I mean the leap was thinking economic systems are very valuable systems and if you can solve economic problems, it leads to significant personal benefits. And how do you solve an economic system? I mean, basically what you’re trying to do with the business is create some sort of economic unit where the outputs exceed the inputs. I mean of course I just visualized it in terms of physics. And I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting problem to solve. If you can solve that problem you’d probably be able to pay your bills and do all the things that you want to do in life.”

(00:11:17):

And so I caught that bug and it was like this, “Okay, I’m sure…” Physicists have a certain degree of arrogance that they can solved every problem using first principles thinking. But at that time I suffered from a lot of business arrogance, now I don’t think that you can solve… I mean there’s many problems outside of realms of physics, which makes life more interesting. But at that time, then I thought, “Right, well how can I go and apply… What is the physics of business and things?”

(00:11:56):

And so I got into run of few of these companies. And then started doing a master’s in, at the time I think it was called Digital Innovation, but basically it was this emerging science or emerging theory of things like how to create digital platforms, and studying these early digital platforms and how they operated and scaled exponentially. I mean, platforms are like feedback systems really, that are driven by network effects and you need to set up the right feedback loops in order to get runaway growth. And I knew I’d wanted to do that, and so I took a role in a medium-sized business, about $50 million business at the time, whilst doing masters in the evening on Digital Innovation, because I wanted a patient to practice on.

(00:13:04):

And I took this at Priority Pass, because the company, it was part of a larger group, I ended up running quite a big chunk of the group. But basically they were selling lounge visits for airports via paper, or cards, or plastic vouchers. And I thought, “Okay, what happens if you digitize this?” So we started digitizing. So instead of having a plastic card or a paper voucher, you had a digital [inaudible 00:13:35]. I’m trying not to use the word “token” because that wasn’t used at the time, but a digital voucher for it. And so I kind of digitized it.

(00:13:45):

And initially that wasn’t really that successful because no one was interested in digital vouchers, until all the big banks suddenly realized that shutting branches and driving people to use online banking and mobile apps was vastly cheaper for them. But no one wanted to use a mobile app, people still wanted to go to banks and talk to people. So they realized that burying rewards inside mobile apps, like free lounge visits when you travel, would cause people to download the app, get the benefit, and once they’d download the app, they’d be hooked.

(00:14:21):

And so that trend, it’s strange how adoption trends happen when you’ve got all the right reasons for the technology, that trend saw that company grow from about 50 million to about a billion dollar turnover. And I digitized everything, it expanded beyond lounge visits, and we had these digitized products and services that we were plugging into MasterCard, Visa, American Express, JCB in China, Unipay, Diners, everything. [inaudible 00:14:52] had 90% or so market share of that market.

Nick (00:14:58):

If there is a physics to business, and it sounds like you would make the argument that there is, and I certainly would adhere to that, what were the lessons or laws of the physics of business you learned through this experience? And it sounds like it’s going to be somewhat related to things like platform and network effects and things like this, but what’s the insight?

Justin Banon (00:15:15):

Well, the insight is that there is a certain set of rules that you can apply with a platform where you position yourself between a buyer and a seller to coordinate transactions, but it gives you a unique market position which not only can you abuse, but you have a fiduciary responsibility to abuse in order to extract maximum value from all participants and send the money up to the owners. And I got quite good at that, but it didn’t sit morally with me. And I realized that what we were creating in this sort of physics of business were systems of extraction of value from people and communities to a shareholder elite.

(00:16:04):

Around the time when my wife had our daughter, also I just felt this strong urge that we all had a role in making the world a better place and I had real issues with doing this. And so I did a second master’s in crypto and I’d started to get into, through the path of this emerging science of tokenization… Oh, also Professor Potts was heavily involved in loyalty, so tokens, and loyalty, and points and all of that. And the moment I heard about tokens, I was like, “Wow, this is an economic toolkit.” And so I just got hooked. I have a mildly, maybe not mildly, but a slightly obsessive personality in terms of when I get hooked on something like that. So for me it was physics and business, then tokenizing and blockchains and stuff, and I just got absolutely hooked on that.

(00:17:05):

And I can remember when I used to try and keep up with all of the articles on crypto that were being published on Medium, and there was a time when it was almost like you could sort of. And I imagine there must’ve been a time back in the past where people tried to keep up with all the videos that were posted on YouTube. [inaudible 00:17:26] it was very early.

(00:17:28):

And so yeah, I did a master’s in crypto and then I left my job heading up this $5 billion company about three months after my wife had had our daughter. I mean, she thought I was pretty insane for doing that, a bit highly irresponsible. I didn’t blame her. And I had a concept which was, I had been at Priority Pass digitizing products and services into digital vouchers. It’s all about representation. They were representing products and services as paper vouchers. I did a digital transformation to represent them as digital vouchers. And I thought, “What happens if you represent them as blockchain vouchers?”

(00:18:18):

It’s not just to change your platform. And that’s what so many people get wrong. Now there’s this explosion and everyone’s interested in real world assets and all of it, but all they’re doing is representing physical assets on a blockchain in exactly the same way that you could represent them on a centralized system. The key thing is, why use a blockchain? What different property would it have? And that is, it’s like calling it a physical asset or a core property.

(00:18:46):

If I tokenize my car and you buy the token, how do you know you’re going to get the car? If it’s a digital voucher and I’m a centralized company, you don’t know you’re going to get the car, I could default on it. But if it’s a blockchain, you should have strong commitments, or why use a blockchain at all? Okay, transparency, auditability, those are fringe benefits. If I send a bitcoin to your wallet, I can’t then bounce that. It’s not like bouncing a check or rescind it. That was the core property. And at the time it wasn’t clear whether you could enable strong commitments on physical assets in a decentralized way without using an intermediary that might then capture the market.

(00:19:36):

So I was doing a bit of blockchain consulting for a company in Miami and they’d flown me over Business Class. It’s unusual if I get flown somewhere like that, that I wouldn’t enjoy a couple of glasses of wine or something, but I had this bug. And I thought, “Okay, it’s either possible or it’s not to enable strong commitments on a physical asset without a trusted intermediary, and what I’m going to do is maybe I can’t come up with a [inaudible 00:20:08], but let me see,” and it’s kind of a physics thing, “if I can disprove it.” Or do an impossibility proof. Prove it’s impossible and then I won’t have to worry about this anymore. I could just say, “This is impossible. You can’t do it. You always need centralized intermediaries to ensure you get the car.” And I kind of failed on the impossibility proof and ended up sketching out the first version of the Boson mechanism, and that’s how it all started.

Nick (00:20:40):

And where did that name come from? Boson?

Justin Banon (00:20:42):

Well, Boson is a type of fundamental particle, and yeah, I’ve just been geeky in physics. And it’s a kind of carrier particle, and so a Boson, the protocol links the physical and the digital. And then the actual logo for Boson, I went on to a website that I knew particle physics and used to do things called Feynman diagrams, which are like these little squiggity diagrams of how subatomic particles interact. And just created the logo and then gave it to the designer to just make it look nice and it’s stayed the same ever since.

Nick (00:21:22):

I want to go back a step to your introduction to crypto and blockchain. It’s not always the case, but sometimes in the interviews the first spark of interest is on the speculative nature of this asset and watching this price action. But in your case, it strikes me that there was something more fundamental here about the tech or about the thesis of the tech. Can you, in a non-technical way for listeners that are interested, why would someone like yourself who seems to be on a very successful career track and doing a lot of interesting things, what did they see in this tech that was a light bulb moment?

Justin Banon (00:22:00):

Yeah, so I mean like I said, there’s two things. One is I’d become this chief extractionary officer and I could see that extracting from people is, maybe it’s a strong word, but it’s kind of like a type of evil, and it’s something that I oppose. So blockchains and crypto technology and the whole thesis of this alternative financial system and alternative economy, is it enables you to do something that you cannot do with centralizing… The key innovation was that you could create systems that would operate as designed and even the founders couldn’t change them. Chris Dixon had a great article, “Why Decentralization Matters”, which says that all platforms start out wanting to share, and collaborate, and get lots of people on, and be all cooperative, and they inevitably end up competing and extracting because they have an imperative to do so. And blockchain systems can be coded so that you can figure the rules, and instead of like Google’s motto “Don’t be evil”, you can have blockchain systems that can’t be evil. If you program them and then the founders throw away the keys and only the community can change the laws.

(00:23:29):

So that was one, that was kind of a value type, a solution to this excessive extraction. But then the other part was these are economic toolkits. So in this whole physics of business, or physics of economics, these were systems that could be programmed, like a circuit board of economy. So it’s almost like this programmability, I’m talking about the physics of business, it’s almost like electronics for business. And that just fascinated me. And I’ve been exposed to platform strategies and this was all these kinds of runaway network effects. And all of it, it’s all like electronic circuits where you get feedback loops and it’s got the same underlying physics governing board. And so here we have these kinds of programmable systems that you could program so that they can’t be evil and they are building blocks of an entirely new finance system.

Nick (00:24:34):

Can you take a minute and just talk a little bit more about network effects? And you keep sort of double clicking on this concept of feedback loops, as the mechanism that drives that. Why is that true and what is the different types of network effects that exist in the world?

Justin Banon (00:24:50):

Well, I mean essentially what happens with platforms is that they will get network effects where, for example, if you’ve got a platform with no buyers… You’re testing me a bit now on the thing, but let’s see if I pass. I think you’ve got cross-side network effects where without buyers you don’t get sellers. And without sellers you don’t get buyers. But then you’ve got the same side network effects where if you’ve got lots of buyers, the more buyers you’ve got, the more sticky it becomes for sellers. Why? Because sellers go where the buyers are. And then the more sellers you’ve got, the more, “Okay, I might want to go to this other platform, but I always go back to Amazon because it’s got all the sellers and it’s got the range and variety.”

(00:25:40):

So those are a couple of examples. So these sorts of network effects are things that if you can get the firewall turning will get increasing returns and that will compound, until eventually you have this unassailable… Because people can’t compete with you and that creates customer longevity.

Nick (00:26:03):

And then one more question before we move on to Boson Protocol. Extraction is an interesting thing, because on the one hand I tend to agree with you that excessive extraction is one of the reasons why modernity is so problematic in a lot of the things we see in the world today that I find disheartening, are somewhat related to this idea of excessive extraction. However, it does seem that there is some level of extraction necessary to keep the lights on, to pay people a salary, and to grow the business. And so how do you think about this balance between, if you accept the argument that there must be some level of extraction, and of course this fact that excessive extraction’s problematic?

Justin Banon (00:26:49):

Yeah, I mean that’s why the phrase is “excessive extraction”. We’re all in business to make money. Few of us deny that there comes a point where companies act in an anti-competitive way. I mean Amazon has been accused of anti-competitive practices et cetera, again by the FTC, because they are using their privileged position to compete with sellers and to go and do… No one denies that, well, few people deny that that is anti-competitive, and that if you’re using your market dominance to be able to charge ridiculously excessive prices, and your market dominance means there isn’t the competition necessary to bring those prices down.

(00:27:39):

I mean if you go to Disneyland or Legoland, one of the things you’ll find is you have the combination of incredibly high-priced food, like $35 pasta and the worst food you’ve ever had, all-in-one. So I went to Disneyland Paris and 35 euros for a bowl of pasta and it was almost inedible. Right now if you went to a really nice restaurant and paid that and it was really nice, okay, you’re in Paris. But that combination, right? You get these market faders. And that’s what we mean by excessive extraction. We mean instead of one or two trillionaires, maybe it’s like many, many millionaires. Many, many people operating eCommerce businesses making money, rather than all of that money accruing to Jeff and his crew. That’s what we mean by… We don’t mean some sort of techno-communism where no one’s making any money and it’s all… No, no, no, we just mean fair markets with lots of people, the distribution amongst all of us. Let’s make all of us millionaires, or having a nice lifestyle, rather than someone with 500 billion.

Nick (00:29:03):

All right, so let’s then return back to Boson. So you’ve set a very nice foundation here for how you were thinking about blockchain and some of the things you identified in this technology that was different from the things you were working on, and the traditional or conventional approaches to economics and operating systems. Reset the table here for listeners that aren’t familiar with Boson, what it is and sort of what the vision of what the team there is trying to accomplish.

Justin Banon (00:29:30):

Sure. I mean as a general thesis that what we’re building is a new digital economy. It was built out of web3, where instead of having lots of intermediaries all sitting between buyers and sellers, sitting on the middle of transactions and abusing that market power to take excessive profits, we have just what are called “minimally extractive protocols”. It’s from Placeholder VC, Chris Burniske’s article on protocols as minimally extractive coordinators.

(00:30:13):

So instead of having platforms eating the world, you’ve just got layers. Like you’ve got SMTP for sending email, you’ve got TCPIP for transferring data, and that you will just have these protocols, blockchain protocols doing the… And these are what we call “public permissionless protocols” and they just do a specific job. Whether that job is compute, indexing blockchains, data storage, whatever. They will do that and they will charge a minimally extractive fee. That goes back to our point of whether it’s okay to make money. A minimally extractive fee processing all of the physical commercial transactions on the planet is massive amounts of value. But it’s also returning massive amounts of value to all the people, the buyers and sellers.

(00:31:09):

So that’s the kind of thesis of a stack of applications of web3 where you have these protocols and each one has got a purpose and they all are composable and interoperable. And so central thesis of Boson is that you see eBay, Amazon, all of these other eCommerce like platform intermediaries doing that job of enabling two non-trusting entities, Alice and Bob. Alice and Bob don’t trust each other so they need Amazon in the middle in order to do business. And let’s swap Amazon for a blockchain protocol that can’t be evil, that it does the same job, but it’s hard-coded not to screw anyone and not to start abusing its mafia pattern.

(00:31:56):

So that, I mean the core thesis and vision of Boson is always be web3′s decentralized commerce layer, to replace the need for things like Amazon and eBay with a neutral piece of technology. So if I want to sell something to you, I can sell it to you and you don’t need to trust me, I don’t need to trust you, and there’s a coordinator in the middle that takes AC for doing that. That’s the thesis for Boson.

Nick (00:32:23):

So Justin, I’m sure you’ve gathered this during the interview and my long-time listeners know this already, I’m non-technical so a lot of my questions are a little bit probably on the naive side, but I do want to ask this question. I hope it’s a good one, of why something like Boson needs to exist when there seems to be an ocean of L1s and L2s. And so help me understand, and maybe listeners with the same question, of if you’re solving that specific problem you just stated there, why can’t any other sort of L1 or a lot of these emerging L2′s handle that?

Justin Banon (00:32:56):

Well, if we wanted to swap an NFT or any other asset that it’s either originated on chain or can be transferred on chain. So for example, company equity is pretty much off chain at the moment, but it can be completely represented on chain, then that’s pretty trivial for a blockchain to handle. We can do an atomic swap where we can guarantee that you could buy an NFT from me, from [inaudible 00:33:33] and there’s no risk of default at all. We don’t need anything sophisticated in the middle.

(00:33:39):

But when there’s a physical asset involved, it can’t be fully represented on chain, as what we call a physical residue. And then you get two problems, you get the physical asset oracle problem. Which is if I tokenize my car, you buy the token, how do you know you’re going to get the car? And that’s one of the core problems Boson solves.

(00:34:01):

And then the other one is the economics problem of the fair exchange problem. How do two untrusting parties do commerce over the internet? That’s the core problem that we solve. And to give you a review of how we do it, a seller will list an item on Boson, a buyer will see the item, they like what they see, they will put their funds into Boson, Boson will lock up the funds, and then if the buyer doesn’t raise a dispute to say, “I haven’t received the item,” or, “It’s not to the necessary quality,” then the seller will get paid. I mean that’s a very simplistic description of what Boson does.

Nick (00:34:40):

Amazing. Okay, so help us think then about something that comes up on the podcast quite a bit, which is this total available market and where we are in the evolution of the web3 industry and the activity you’re seeing there. So this is, if I’m getting the vision right here, this is on the consumer facing side where you’re connecting buyers and sellers. And so this isn’t DeFi, this isn’t trading tokens, what are you seeing about the market and the growth of people that want to sort of use this type of technology in place of more traditional eCommerce type solutions?

Justin Banon (00:35:18):

Well, the thing is it happens in waves, and we are just wading into a huge upswell again. I mean the last big peak we had was, roundabout a couple of years ago, we had the whole kind of metaverse peak. And we had a huge number of brands, people like Tommy Hilfiger, lots of these other brands all wanting to do that. And there was two reasons. One, the technology was cool and these brands of seen waves of technology decimate their competitors. So people who didn’t catch on to eCommerce are not around to watch anymore, people that didn’t catch on to mobile and social. There’s been these mass extinction events in the markets like retail fashion. So they’re very keen to not get extinguished.

(00:36:14):

That’s one thing in terms of the technology, but the other is web3 and crypto when we have these big bull runs, big bull markets, suddenly you get this whole demographic of young, crypto rich consumers that want to spend their crypto and what can you spend crypto on? Oh, okay, we can trade in tokens. That’s buying more crypto. Paying with DeFi. That’s kind of buying more crypto. We can buy NFTs. Okay, so those are like digital things. But what do people, buyers spend their money on? Is it those three things? Not generally. It’s physical things, generally.

(00:36:52):

And so here’s a way for brands to directly access the money in crypto wallets and do that exchange without having to go through this fiat system and stuff. That’s really attractive, until it’s not. And then you get the bear market, and suddenly crypto, instead of being cool, is seen as a scam, fraud, illegal, all of these other things and a terrible reputation, and there’s no money in crypto. So the appetite for brands goes. But now with Trump getting in, and I’m not going to make any political comments, but purely from a crypto angle, crypto is suddenly now, instead of being Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler’s view on crypto prevailing, it’s now, “Let’s make crypto the core of the US.” And the US leads the world in terms of… This is now a massive technology that countries are wanting to embrace and that affects the view of everyone worldwide, including all the brands. It’s making it legitimate.

(00:38:11):

Because if the US says this is an illegitimate technology, you’re fighting a losing battle, but now it’s going to be you’ve legitimatized it. So that’s the one thing which means it’s legitimate again and it’s becoming cool again. So that’s one. That’s not enough. The second driver is look at the prices. We are going on this huge upsurge of pricing, of crypto prices. And it happens to coincide with lots of certainly luxury and fashion markets, for example, who kind of early adopters of these technologies, suffering reductions in their sales. So I mean LVMH posted a 7% negative growth last month. And so what are they doing? They’re looking for new markets. And so suddenly it’s like there’s this resurgence of this cool technology with, once again, an entirely new demographic of people that are going to have wallets full of value. And what is Boson? Boson is a way of connecting crypto wallets to physical things and enabling commerce in this web3 [inaudible 00:39:24].

Nick (00:39:25):

If there’s a listener out there that wants to learn more about Boson, kind get involved, potentially become a buyer or a seller in this environment, talk to us about how that process looks and what’s happening now.

Justin Banon (00:39:36):

Oh, I mean they can go to the BosonProtocol.io website and click through to the DApp, and if they’re a small seller they can set up their own web3 store. But there’s also widgets and stuff, and so if they’re largest sellers, they could just contact the Boson team and they will just be handheld through either creating their own store or plugging in widgets into their own site. We’ve got a global deal with WooCommerce, which is the biggest eCommerce platform system if you like, which is just completely plug-and-play.

(00:40:11):

What we’ve been doing during the bear market is just building up a product that I wish we would’ve had during the last bull. That’s why this bull market is going to be a lot of fun, because unlike last time where we were operating on basic a prototype, this time we are a kind of an enterprise grade solution.

Nick (00:40:37):

Amazing. And I’ll put links in the show notes for any listeners that want to get activated and get started. With the view that you have of the things that are happening in a Boson, and I don’t know if you can answer this question or not, but do you have a sense for what products, what brands are moving right now? What are people buying? What are people selling?

Justin Banon (00:40:55):

Yeah, I mean look, we’ve got quite a lot of conversations ongoing, but luxury and fashion is once again really interested in this technology. And it was dipping the toe in the water last time, I think this is going to become a major, major market for luxury and fashion, where a lot of the people that get rich from crypto, and a lot of those players, are interested in not only using crypto to access those markets, using web3 technology to access those markets, but actually creating products specifically targeted and web3 native. Products like fidget toys and all of these different things. So I mean that’s a really hot area.

(00:41:50):

Another hot area is the resurgence of crypto gaming. Boson developed a whole lot of applications that would plug into a crypto game. So you could be playing a crypto game, you’ve get to go and buy a physical item, like buying an NFT in-game that’s then redeemable for the physical in the real world, all completely seamlessly and natively web3.

(00:42:12):

Other things which may be a bit less sexy but massive as well are, in Europe we’ve got this regulation for digital product passports. So now more companies need to create these online archives of information about products, what they’re made from, what’s the supply chain proponents, and you have the pictures and all that. And so once you’ve done that effort, you’ve done 90% of the work to tokenize the thing. You’ve got all that data and stuff that you might do and that you can just have that wrapped within a Boson token and list it on Boson, and then you actually tokenize the assets as well. So we’re seeing that a lot of the companies now, they’ve already overcome the hurdle in terms of effort to do a lot of the work. So they may as well swap the asset.

Nick (00:43:06):

I want to ask you a couple other questions, to get your perspective on things that I know listeners will be interested on. So the first one is you’re clearly a very intelligent person, you’ve had this interesting background in physics and you think in systems and ask a lot of interesting questions. Where do you see the web3 industry presently, in this life cycle framing? Is it still emergent? Is it getting traction and the next jump is into that mass adoption? Are we still quite early, early and somewhere else?

Justin Banon (00:43:41):

I studied a lot of the work of a lady called Professor Carlota Perez, who’s spent most of her career studying the life cycles of technology waves like rail, steam, electricity, et cetera. And to me it’s normal, the technologies to go through a kind of wave, where initially there’s this big bubble where loads of money gets put in because they see these huge possibilities of this technology, but it’s too early. And so what happens is the technology fails to meet expectations and there’s a crash. But all that money that gets put in early, not all of it is wasted. A lot of it goes to the fundamental infrastructure. That means later there can be a second uptake and now that technology is mature enough that the canals are built, or the railroads are built where you can actually come and start running trains on them.

(00:44:51):

And I think that’s where we are. If you look at the internet, the web, there were two big booms and two big busts, and since then we’ve had, I don’t know what it is it? 20, or probably about 30 years worth of consistent growth since an adoption. And I think there’s a high probability that this won’t be a bull run, bull market, but this will be like… Because if you look back, and this is one of the things I studied in my first masters, after those busts, everyone was waiting for the next bust and stuff, and yeah okay, there were sort of waves, but there was never… It’s just been consistent growth ever since and consistent adoption.

(00:45:36):

So that’s where I think we’re at. But I’m also a strong believer in this post-web thesis that Outlier Ventures and Jamie Burke, their founder, is putting out. And I mean I’m actually a partner at Outlier Ventures now, we were on the first accelerator, and worked quite closely with Jamie on his thesis development and ours.

(00:46:01):

And basically what their thesis is that the next iteration of the web won’t be like Web4 or 5, it’s going to be post-web. Because the web is going to disappear. We’re not going to have web interfaces, we’re going to talk natural language because that’s just far easier and more natural than tapping at a keyboard or doing anything. We’re able to do it, we’ve got the technology now with AI that we can just talk and say, “Oh, I’m looking to for a holiday in Florida with my family, can you check schedules and find flights and come up…?” Natural language. And then behind that natural language interface, instead of having a platform, you’ll have these AI autonomous economic agents that will go and search and find.

(00:46:56):

So for example, and I’m one of the worst culprits, I mean a kind of confession, when I use Amazon, I mean I had to find the bolt, one particular screw the other day for one of my monitor stands. So I went and paid 6.99 for a hundred bolts and nuts. Now I don’t know if I’ve just paid five times the price that if I went to the hardware store for that same packet. It’s just so convenient, I just click, because my monitor’s hanging off, and it’s there. But these autonomous economic agents break all that, they can find you the best value because they work for you. It’s having all that convenience and various stuff, but with the optimized economics.

(00:47:45):

If you have AI agents, those AI agents don’t do business with your local store, they need verifiable execution, otherwise they’re not really smart. I mean because humans can defraud them, they need verifiable execution. So when they send their money, they’re going to get the goods. There’s not any kind of like [inaudible 00:48:14]. That is exactly what Boson, or our new protocol Fermion, do. Enable this kind of verifiable execution of economic requests to do commercial transaction in the physical sense.

Nick (00:48:32):

And this other question I want to ask you is about what you’ve learned about business. So you’ve had a successful career, you’ve worked in startups, you’ve worked in growing established firms, and now of course you’re working in web3 launching Boson and a lot of projects, as you mentioned there. My question is, what’s your advice to listeners who fancy themselves as an entrepreneur, or somebody that might be like you one day, what have you learned about business, maybe the one or two lessons that you would say, “Hey, if you want to get started, make sure you have these one or two things in place.”?

Justin Banon (00:49:04):

One of the things, I mean it’s a bit of cliche, they’re all kind of like… Well, they’re not all people, there’ll be a couple… Some of them [inaudible 00:49:14] that people sense.

(00:49:15):

Firstly, get the best advice and make your own decisions. You cannot build a business listening to other people and just doing some sort of democratic, “Oh, everybody put their hand up. What should we do?” You can’t build a business unless you get great advice and listen. When I was on the first Outlier base camp, that kind of accelerator, I was surprised that a lot of the teams there that were less experienced in me in business, were far less interested in hearing from the makers of the [inaudible 00:49:54]. Jamie Burke, Matt Law, we had Stephan who’s now the CEO. These people are like some of the most knowledgeable in web3 business on the planet, and I had direct contact with them and was really greedy on their time, and good friends with them now.

(00:50:12):

But a lot of founders think they know, and no matter how much you know, you never know enough. And so getting advice and surrounding yourself with people that know, but you’ve got to make your own decision. So that I think is a really big one. You’ve got to have an understanding both that to build things and do great things, you’ve got to assemble a team of amazing people. To do that, you’ve got to both look after people and be pretty harsh if people aren’t [inaudible 00:50:54]. When you’re doing startups and stuff, you’re not running a sandwich shop. You’re trying, literally sometimes, to send rockets to the moon and you meet the best people. And when you get them, you really look after them. And if not, you’re still kind of respectful, but there’s no room for this sort of passivism.

(00:51:17):

And then I think also as being adaptive and understanding these different trends and riding them, rather than just having a fixed view. I mean, over this bear market we’ve evolved massively at Boson. One of them is, and I’m not talking technology talk, to really, deeply understanding our markets and getting advisors in luxury, and some of the really highly networked and knowledgeable people to help introduce us to the right customers and inform the kind of language and positioning we should have.

(00:51:55):

And I mean the other classic one is do something you love. It is so much time and such long hours that if you don’t love it, you’re not going to be obsessed by it. And if you’re not obsessed by it, you will not be able to force yourself to spend the time on something that you’re not obsessed with.

Nick (00:52:16):

What sort of trends or storylines are you tracking as we see the broader web3 industry evolve? I know you’re working on something very important related to eCommerce and a very innovative approach to that, but if you zoom out a little bit, what storylines, narratives, milestones, are you watching for a signal that this thing is growing and getting adopted?

Justin Banon (00:52:42):

Well, I mean a big one for this next year is the tokenization of real world assets. It’s going to be massive. It’s core to our thesis for a computable economy. And in order to enable a computable economy, you’ve got to bring all assets on chain so they can be referenced, and bringing all data into the computer so that it can be [inaudible 00:53:10]. So that is a massive trend. And when you’ve got people like Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, saying all assets will be tokenized, that is a very big signal on that that’s the case.

(00:53:24):

However, I’m very much steeped in the kind of decentralized ethos, but I encourage the likes of BlackRock and all these big banks to come in and… Because it’s like all of these waves of adoption had all of the big newspapers getting involved in the web, we had all the big travel agents, eventually they got disrupted by that tech and none of them are around anymore. A lot of them. Blockchain technology is so powerful in its ability to disintermediate, especially those intermediaries that are taking massive control and excessive extraction.

(00:54:08):

So I encourage them to come and use the technology and stuff. It’s great. But we need to remember that blockchain is about preventing excessive extraction, enabling an economy where everyone gets to share in the value they create. And then also just fundamentally, the reason we use blockchain is to give us, so that when we have a blockchain asset, we have this far stronger level of commitment. If you’ve got a Bitcoin in your wallet, it’s different to even having money in the bank. If you remember what happened in the big financial crash where people like the Cypriots woke up to find out half their money had been taken by the bank. That doesn’t happen with blockchains.

(00:54:54):

So I think real world assets is a massive trend, but what we’re going to see is, I think it starts with lots of decentralized companies, but once things are on chain, people are like, “Okay, well I can do have this asset on chain without paying all these massive fees.” And the disruption then comes. And what I’m doing with Boson and Fermion, so Fermion is a second protocol, a separate network, separate token that works in tandem with Boson to add additional verification of high value assets. So you might send commerce assets like a pair of sneakers or whatever through the post, and that, like you do with Amazon, you do the same with Boson, but you wouldn’t send a gold bar, or the Mona Lisa. You’d need a higher level of verification and custody for these assets. And that’s what Fermion does. But also with these high value assets, you might want to fractionalize them. So it also enables things like fractionalizations and stuff like that.

(00:56:03):

What we’re building is basically the decentralized infrastructure to enable the decentralized tokenization, what we call the hard tokenization. By hard tokenization, we mean if you hold that token, you’ve got a strong commitment either you’re going to get the asset or your money back, you don’t need to trust anyone. And we’re building that infrastructure. We encourage all of this centralized blockchain infrastructure, but it’s not that much different. If you’ve got some gold bars held by a central bank and they give you a piece of paper to say you’ve got these gold bars, or a large merchant bank, it’s not that much different that they give you a piece of paper versus they give you a blockchain token. If you’re still relying on them to honor the paper or the token, the trust assumptions are the same.

(00:57:04):

But in property hard-tokenized, so if you think SPF, had he been offering some sort of, “Oh, we are tokenizing real world assets, so I’ve got a whole load of gold bars and I’m going to give you some tokens.” I mean, what’s the value? Or it varies. If you’re trusting him to want to… Hard tokenization is where you don’t have that trust. It’s like having Bitcoin in your wallet. There are strong verifiable guarantees that you will either get the asset or your money. And I think that is the game changer, and that’s also what enables this thing called a computable economy.

Nick (00:57:42):

Well Justin, now we’ve reached a point in the podcast where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week. It gives us a chance to get to know you a little bit better, but as I always say, I hope it inspires listeners to learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life. And so are you ready for the GRTiQ-10?

Justin Banon (00:57:59):

Let’s do it.

Nick (00:58:13):

What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Justin Banon (00:58:18):

A book called Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. A German author, and I’m not very religious or anything like that, but it’s a story about the life of Buddha as he goes through his different stages. At one stage he’s drinking a lot with courtesans and stuff, and he’s very wayward. And then another one he… And just all the phases of his life. And he just ends up at the end just sitting there by the river, listening to the sound of the river, reflecting on all of this. It’s a book I’ve given many times to friends when they’ve been in really bad or dark places, to kind of broaden their perspective that everyone has ups and downs and life is a journey. I think that’s an amazing book.

Nick (00:59:13):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody’s got to watch?

Justin Banon (00:59:18):

I wouldn’t say I’ve necessarily got one. I mean, I love sci-fi, so 2001: A Space Odyssey, I would think are one of my favorites.

Nick (00:59:33):

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

Justin Banon (00:59:37):

It would probably be Pink Lloyd, Echoes.

Nick (00:59:42):

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

Justin Banon (00:59:46):

Be yourself.

Nick (00:59:49):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you suspect most other people haven’t learned or know quite yet?

Justin Banon (00:59:56):

That the edges of physics and knowledge and the things that we definitely know, there are some things that are completely contradictory and contradict the whole, of like reality doesn’t make sense. And it’s not that we don’t understand it, it’s that there are paradoxes that just simply don’t make sense. IE this whole thing doesn’t add up, in a very fundamental way it’s… And for me, potentially that points to a simulation, or some sort of end of the programming where you get to the end and “Ah, that’s a glitch, that doesn’t work.”

Nick (01:00:39):

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

Justin Banon (01:00:43):

Well, I mean I don’t know if it’s a life hack, but you need to get to the stage where you trust yourself. If you say you’re going to do something tomorrow, you know you’ll do it and therefore you can relax today. You don’t need to be stressed because you’ve got a system of managing the mounting of to-do’s, and you’ve got the confidence that step-by-step you’ll do that. And then you can just be relaxed and climb the mountain.

Nick (01:01:13):

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

Justin Banon (01:01:24):

Well, I think this goes back to there’s this kind of thing in, I think it’s probably in economics or something, where if you were a blind man wandering a landscape, how would you find the highest peak? What’s it called? Like the local maximization problem or something. And one person could say, “Oh, I’ll just walk uphill and I’ll find the highest peak.” But you could just find a small hill and there could be a mountain next to you. So you need to do a combination of locally maximizing. Plus doing jumps.

(01:02:03):

And so this is kind of like the mathematical solution to optimizing this problem, which is kind of a proxy for success. So if you’re working for a company and sure you want to work hard and try and get promoted, but that might end up being a… Like for me working where I worked before, Priority Pass, was like a local maximum. And then I just did this random hop, I jumped into a complete wasteland, I was nowhere. But then I found a much bigger maximum.

Nick (01:02:44):

And then the final three questions are complete-the-sentence type questions. So the first one is, the thing that most excites me about the future of web3 is…?

Justin Banon (01:02:53):

A completely new economic order, a computable economy.

Nick (01:02:59):

How about this one? If you’re on X or Twitter, whatever people decide to call it, then you should be following…

Justin Banon (01:03:05):

Well, yeah, I don’t know, maybe Elon Musk or someone.

Nick (01:03:09):

And then finally, Justin, complete the sentence. I’m happiest when…

Justin Banon (01:03:13):

I’m spending time with my daughter.

Justin Banon (01:03:24):

Justin, this was a thrill to meet you. A lot of great ideas shared today and deep insights on some things that are super important, not only to the things you’re working on at Boson, but for the industry as a whole. Thanks for taking the time. 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?

(01:03:43):

Well, they can follow me on Twitter, @JustinBanon.