Lomesh Dutta, VP of Growth at DFINITY, on Internet Computer, Bitcoin DeFi, and ckBTC | Ep. 252
In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Lomesh Dutta, Vice President of Growth at DFINITY, talks about the Internet Computer (IC), the future of Bitcoin-based DeFi, and ckBTC.
About Lomesh Dutta
Lomesh Dutta is Vice President of Growth at DFINITY. Lomesh holds over 17 years of experience in building and scaling startups. Before DFINITY, he was the Head of Growth and Marketing at the crypto banking service, Abra. He has also served as the Vice President of Growth at Paytm, the largest fintech in India. He has previously founded and successfully sold two separate startups and is passionate about tackling innovative and unique problems. Lomesh has also been a TEDx speaker at Delhi Technological University, and in 2012 he was Awarded the title of India’s Hottest Young Entrepreneurs by Business World.
Lomesh Dutta gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- Internet Computer enables Bitcoin to be used in smart contracts by integrating with Bitcoin directly — eliminating the need for risky cross-chain bridges or wrapped tokens
- The Internet Computer (IC) utilizes smart contracts called canisters which can hold real Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain using Threshold ECDSA Signatures and Direct Integration with Bitcoin
- ckBTC is a bitcoin twin created by the Internet Computer smart contract that trustlessly holds Bitcoin directly
- Bitfinity Wallet, a wallet application optimized for use across the entire Internet Computer ecosystem has also announced support for ckBTC
- The future of Bitcoin based DeFi
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zehab. We’re buzzing as always, and I’m super pumped to have Lomesh Dutta on the show today. Vice President of Growth at DFINITY, Lomesh holds over 17 years of experience in building and scaling startups. Before DFINITY, he was the head of Growth and Marketing at the Crypto Banking Service Abra. He has also served as VP of Growth at Paytm, the largest fintech in India, and previously founded and successfully sold two separate startups and is passionate about tackling innovative and unique problems. Lomesh has also been a TEDx speaker at Delhi Technological University, and in 2012, he was awarded the title of India’s Hottest Young Entrepreneurs by Business World. Super pumped to have you on Lomesh, Welcome to the show, my friend. How are you?
Lomesh Dutta
Thank you, Matt. It’s a pleasure being here. I really appreciate you inviting me.
Matt Zahab
Pumped to have you on, man. Before the show, you told me that you spent a little bit of time in Toronto before jetting back to beautiful Delhi, where you reside right now. How much fun was your time in Toronto? I bet you love that.
Lomesh Dutta
It was super fun. I think it’s a wonderful city. As we were talking about, not so much in the weathers, especially for a person like me who’s not too much into cold weather. But it was an awesome city. As a part of my previous life with PTMI, they have research operations out of Toronto, so I spent some time there. Absolutely loved it.
Matt Zahab
Yeah, great time. Must have been quite the culture shock. I was telling you that I was in Chennai, India, on the southeast coast, probably three, four years ago, right before COVID and that was one of biggest culture shocks I ever experienced. Absolutely incredible. Nicest people I’ve ever encountered. Obviously, myself and my friends, we stood out like sore thumbs. As we know, the only white dudes running around Chennai. Which was quite something. But the traffic, the food, the smells, the culture, everything was incredible. And you and I were discussing as well. I will never be able to eat Indian food again. And mind you, Toronto has some pretty darn good Indian food, to my knowledge at least, and nothing will ever come close to how good that was in Chennai. I would do anything to have some of that curry or biryani again, it was so frigging mean.
Lomesh Dutta
Of course, the food is amazing. It’s very spicy, as you were talking about. So, yeah, next time try a little milder.
Matt Zahab
Yeah, you got it. Before we get into your past, and I’m very curious to hear some of the stories and lessons and tips, perhaps that you learned from successfully selling two separate startups. So before that, talk to me about the crypto scene in India. It’s been probably a hot minute since I’ve had someone from India on the show, or at least who resides in India. What’s the crypto scene there like right now?
Lomesh Dutta
I think it’s pretty vibrant. I think there’s a lot of activity, especially because there’s a very strong developer community in India. They’re delving into the crypto space, of course, like projects like Polygon InstaDP are from Indian founders origin. Things that are a little bit unclear are like, it’s the crypto regulation scene in India. So I think some of those people are also, I’ve known, have been kind of shifting to other places like Dubai and so on. And interestingly, I just landed in India, or I just relocated back to India in March of this year, so I’m still pretty new and fresh to the crypto scene in India. It’s been about, like, give and take four months. And before that, I spent most of my early crypto journey in the Bay Area where I was based.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Walk me through some of the lessons and stories that you had and learned from obviously growing and selling to successful startups. That’s a dream of many people. You’ve successfully done it twice. You were obviously a newer entrepreneur at the time. What are some of the biggest lessons that you learned? Some takeaways, perhaps some things that you do differently next time around if you were starting a company?
Lomesh Dutta
Sure. So, yeah, I’ve built two startups. One was essentially in the mobile tech space. We created a platform to make web content more accessible on mobile. We started this pre iPhone days. So we were doing apps before apps were the thing, and people didn’t used to even have mobile Internet back in the day. And my second startup was a services marketplace. I would say the biggest learning for me is that you have to be in the right market. That’s the number one thing, right? So if your market is large enough and if you’re doing a reasonable job, you should be able to make something out of it. On the other hand, even if you’re the smartest of entrepreneurs and the market is not right, you will struggle a lot. So, thankfully, I think we kind of learned the lesson. I mean, when we started in mobile application space, the market was super early, but we got lucky with iPhone, came in and we kind of rode the wave to a good degree. iPhone and Android, and that coming up. And also my second startup, I did that one, the first one was in the US. second one I did was in India. And there we wrote the startup scene was picking up in India. And I think that was certainly helpful for the booming ecosystem.
Matt Zahab
How did you know that apps were going to be a thing? I remember again, I’m a 95, I’m 28 years old. I remember I want to say it was grade seven or eight. Took my very minuscule amount of savings at the time and bought an iPod touch you know, a bunch of buddies also bought an iPod touch. We’re in grade seven and we all jailbroke. One of my buddies, Jeremy, incredibly intelligent lad, he knew how to jailbreak. So we’d all go to his house at lunch, he’d jailbreak all of our iPod touches and we’d screw around with all the apps and didn’t cost us any money. It was mind blowing. It was like, holy crap, this is the future. And then BlackBerry comes along, everyone uses BlackBerry and then the iPhone comes along and that revolutionized everything. But how did you know that apps were going to be the thing before they even started?
Lomesh Dutta
Yeah, so I’m obviously slightly older than you. So for me, when I was kind of doing the college at that point of time, all of those super early edge, early internet phones. So back in the days, Nokia used to be like a popular device manufacturer. And so the phones started to get colored, they started to get limited edge connectivity. That was the time when I was kind of doing my college. And what we realized was initially some of the applications started getting ported over in terms of like, primally was email. And then we realized, okay, if people want their emails on the phone, then they would want every form of content on the phone. But the problem right now is that you cannot just view a website that exists on the Internet or on the desktop today in a mobile setting. So people are trying to do all sorts of things. So what we came up was we came up like think of it as like a markup schema. So think of it as a language like HTML. And we said, okay, if you put our tags into a regular web page, which you make for a desktop, then what we wrote is like a browser on the phone which let you make the content and very readable on a phone. So you could see the core content of the phone on your screen. And then if you hit the menu button or option button, that’s where you could say, okay, imagine let’s say you are on Amazon.com. You could see the picture of a product, you could see the description and you hit the option or the menu button. And then you can see the option to review or buy now and stuff like that. So the idea was that how can we make all of this Internet that exists on desktop and how can we make it more accessible in a phone setting? And again, it was not so easy back in those days. Like, phones were super crappy. It was very fragmented. You test it on one device, it wouldn’t work on another. All sorts of challenges. But thankfully, iPhone and Android came and there was a lot of standardization after that. It’s still fragmented, but like, nowhere compared. To what was back in the day.
Matt Zahab
Of course. No, that’s super interesting. I’ll still never forget those days. And I guess that may have been the first time that I was perhaps mature enough or at least just present enough to realize that this technology would be something crazy. Because it was just going from remember the Motorola Razor? Remember when everyone had those? Going from a Razor to iPod touch. It was just like, wow, with the Razor you can only do so much. I don’t even think it had games. Right? You could just call and text your friends and family and then the iPod touch comes along and it’s like, holy shit, I could spend the 16 hours of my waking day on this thing. It was the coolest thing ever.
Lomesh Dutta
I have a fun thing about Razor. So Razor was one of the first devices for which we wrote our application. And the fun thing was, back in the day, you couldn’t even access a pick photo from your phone gallery in an application.
Matt Zahab
They were such a sleek and cool phone, though. Here’s my iPhone, they were so tiny.
Lomesh Dutta
They were amazing. I think I still have my of course it doesn’t work, but I have it in my collection of phones still.
Matt Zahab
Yeah, I love that. Let’s jump into the bread and butter the show here at DFINITY. And again, you guys are obviously very closely tied to Internet computer IC. We’ve had a couple of guests on the show who’ve spoke about IC before, and a lot of the protocols and solutions, product services that are being built around IC. IC does something really interesting and that is it allows Bitcoin to participate in DeFi. Before we get into that, give me the lowdown, give me the elevator pitch on DFINITY and what you and the team are currently moving and grooving on right now.
Lomesh Dutta
Yeah. So DFINITY is the foundation which is essentially a major contributor to the Internet Computer Protocol, as we mentioned, our ICP. So we are essentially a Layer-1 blockchain, just a quick, quick elevator pitch of why this is so different than anything else out there. If you think of any traditional blockchain, any Layer-1 today. So the goal is, let’s say Matt, transfer certain tokens to Lomesh. That’s the thing that gets recorded in a ledger and that’s the thing that lives on the blockchain. So when we say our NFTs on blockchain, it’s not that, it’s just a URL pointing to some JPEG living outside of the blockchain. What we are talking about is very different. We are saying, can you create a blockchain which can run complete software all on chain? So can you create a game or can you create a social network where every aspect of the user data, every single interaction that you do, all your photos, videos, whatever, they are living on chain and they’re also being served from chain. It’s like a cloud, like Amazon cloud. But this is all on the blockchain, which means it’s very trustless and it is like decentralized, so there’s no one party control it. And you can serve end to end software, whether it’s enterprise systems or this from chain. And it’s not just a ledger, it’s like way beyond that. So that’s the problem we’re trying to solve. And that’s what Internet Protocol is in a short nutshell.
Matt Zahab
Could you just for our listeners, I’d love if you could give a quick explanation on how IC is different than a couple of the other blockchains in which I don’t want to say competitors, because I don’t really think that’s the correct word, but at least give us an explanation of how you guys differ from similar protocols and blockchains.
Lomesh Dutta
Yeah, so let’s take an example, right? So imagine an Excel Sheet or Google Sheets. What is stored on most other blockchains is like imagine there are two columns, right? On one column you say here’s the sender address, here’s the recipient address and maybe there is a third column which shows what’s the token balance. So a ledger is basically just like those three columns and a record of what goes where. That’s the thing that’s on every other blockchain. Each of these is a transaction and it’s a record of a transaction. What we are thing is here’s a smart contract where you can store all your photos, videos, every form of transaction and it can basically serve the entire experience from the blockchain. Now, how are we able to do this is we made a few architectural design choices. So first is all the nodes that run the internet computer are actually server grade machines, similar to the servers that cloud like AWS would use. All of these are hosted out of data center by independent parties. So anybody can say okay, I want to run a node. So they will buy this server grid machine, put it in a data center. So what these kind of things ensure that we have very high availability, very high bandwidth. So let’s say 10gb/second, and we can club a bunch of those together to give you an experience similar to, let’s say Google Cloud or Amazon or stuff like that. And so what we are trying to do is not create just a simple ledger. Yes, ledger is just one part of it, but we are trying to say here’s a blockchain that can let you build a trustless world computer which can serve you anything that you want all from chain. So there is no parallel, at least in my mind, to what we are trying to solve. Actually you can see all those applications running and I’ll just add one more thing. So when someone says that they’re running this game on Solana or the social network is on Solana or some other blockchain, what they simply mean is the ledger is on Solana or Ethereum and the game is on a cloud somewhere. So imagine if you’re running the game and you take your credit card away from that AWS account. The game is done, there won’t be any game. So it depends on Matt’s basically it relies on Matt providing his credit card to that AWS account where the game is running. You take it out, that tokens will remain, but the game won’t.
Matt Zahab
That’s happened with a lot of NFT projects on like Pinata and IPFS where you know NFT project founder one, two or three will have their credit card on Pinata and let’s say founder one leaves and then all the NFTs online go blank. You can’t see them anymore. It’s crazy.
Lomesh Dutta
True. So the token remains on chain because that’s the only thing on chain. That’s what their nodes ensure, but nothing else is there. So we are saying like, we are that cloud, we are that crypto cloud where you can actually store all this data and you don’t need to be reliant on one person’s credit card. Rather it’s the entire network that is enabling you to serve these applications.
Matt Zahab
So true. You guys are doing a hell of a lot. When you go on the definitive foundation website or you go on internetcomputer.org, there’s so much data, it’s quite bananas. One of my favorite things that you and the team are doing are sort of creating this everything stack. I believe you have it marketed as like the public everything stack that will eat cloud and smart contracts will eat software. You guys are building an everything stack that does everything blockchain related. Was that the goal from day one? To just create a better, more efficient blockchain than anyone else? Or did it start with a specific niche in mind like gaming or DeFi or data management or something of the like?
Lomesh Dutta
No. So our founder, Dominic Williams, has been kind of working on this problem since I would say 2015 ish time frame. So 2016 is when the foundation was created, hired lots of smart researchers and engineers. So right now we have almost like a 270 person team. Majority of them are very strong cryptographers researchers. So the problem that he started on and I joined the foundation about two and a half years back. So that’s why I’m primarily Dominic and early teen that kind of drove that. But I think the big picture idea was like so Dominic was a lot involved with the Ethereum community back in the early days where this concept of the way computer came in. And when Dom spent time there, his idea was like when you really think of a world computer, then it should really be similar to how Internet is decentralized and it can serve messages. Can you really create a world computer which can actually host the entire humanity software? So that was always the idea. It took like almost five, six years of research to kind of create this. But at a high level. What we’ve done is here’s a cloud where anybody can provide their node or server and and you can really host complete applications and you don’t need to rely on any third party, any centralized cloud provider or something to build this. So that has been that idea that he started with.
Matt Zahab
I love that. One of the most sort of consumer enticing aspects that you guys offer is obviously the Bitcoin DeFi integration and ckBTC, which is a Bitcoin twin created by the Internet computer smart contract. It trustlessly holds Bitcoin directly and I can’t wait to get into that. But before that Lomesh, we do need to give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. That is PrimeXBT longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the show. We love these guys is they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. Again that’s CRYPTONEWS50. CRYPTONEWS50 All one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Lomesh. Lomesh let’s jump right into ckBTC and Bitcoin based DeFi. Two incredibly interesting topics that consumers, I feel like, love of as well. I’m going to throw the ball over to your court. I’d love if you could give us a deep dive into these two things.
Lomesh Dutta
Sure. So, like taking a segue from what I was kind of explaining. So our vision is that we are trying to create this crypto cloud which can let you host any form of services. Now when we think about the crypto cloud, I think one of the things problems we start to see in this space is like there are all sorts of these bridges which keep on getting hacked and so on and so forth. So we said, okay, how can you create this kind of cloud which trustlessly interoperates with other protocols which will continue to exist in our mind like Bitcoin Ethereum. They solve a very big problem. So these protocols are not going to go away. So how can we, as an Internet computer plug into each of these systems to make become the orchestration layer of this interoperability where people can come and host their applications on internet computer and then maybe interact with Bitcoin Ethereum in a manner that just makes everything seem like one big system. So in case of Bitcoin, as you know, traditionally Bitcoin, they have a smart contract layer which is missing and more or less it’s probably by design or that was like the thing back in the day. So what we are trying to solve for is like think of internet computer as a Layer-2 or a side chain for Bitcoin, which can essentially help work as a smart contract layer for Bitcoin. And what that means is what we have enabled is this Bitcoin integration. So what that does is I’m just using analogy, right? So imagine how you use your Bitcoin wallets, right? So your Bitcoin is on the Bitcoin blockchain, but you have a wallet which is obviously not on the Bitcoin blockchain. In your wallet you essentially have your private key which is used to sign Bitcoin transactions. So you have a Bitcoin address where you can send your Bitcoin to and your wallet essentially just have a private key which can sign signatures on your behalf to move or transfer Bitcoin, send it to someone and so on and so forth. So what we have done is we have implemented a similar concept in that sense that the internet computer can essentially read the entire Bitcoin state and store it on chain because we can store a lot of data, we can store gigabytes of data in a single contract. So we read all of these, what are called unspent transaction output UTXOs of Bitcoin. So just think of it as like a way to derive how much balance Matt has and how much balance the Lomesh has. All that information we pull out of Bitcoin blockchain, we keep on pulling it and we just store it so that any smart contract on internet computer can read it. So that’s one thing. So one piece is just keep on reading the Bitcoin blockchain constantly and have it with you, so that if anybody asks for what’s the balance of Matt, you can present that. The second thing we have implemented, similar to how a Bitcoin wallet works, is you need a private key to sign a Bitcoin transaction. So what that means is all the nodes of the internet computer, like subnet, they hold a share of the Bitcoin private key. So what that means is they can all come together, or a threshold number of them can come together to sign a Bitcoin transaction. So you can read Bitcoin and you can essentially sign a Bitcoin transaction. So you can say, here’s a smart contract and internal computer, you can send it a Bitcoin, it can have a Bitcoin address, and then you can say, take the Bitcoin, Matt can say, transfer this Bitcoin over to Lomesh, and then a bunch of nodes will come together, sign their transaction, and you can keep on sending that Bitcoin and then write any form of logic you want, any smart contract on top of it. But the underlying is that you can move Bitcoin around in this kind of a setup.
Matt Zahab
So you and the team essentially made Bitcoin compatible with smart contracts. Traditionally, it was always excluded from DeFi, and now this is totally a thing. And you pretty much makes internet computer a DeFi ready Layer-2 for Bitcoin.
Lomesh Dutta
Correct. And then we have all sorts of projects that are kind of being worked on. So we have social networks on our platform. They started Bitcoin tipping. There’s a chat app called OpenChat. You can essentially send Bitcoin as chat messages to your friends. Their point of sale offline acceptance. We have some demos that projects have done. People are trying to build these stable coins using Bitcoin or lending markets of Bitcoin. So all of those are basically happening as we speak. Multi SIG Bitcoin wallets, lots of activity in that space.
Matt Zahab
And what about ckBTC? Because that is, to my knowledge, and again, I wouldn’t say a deep dive, that would definitely be a bit of a boost, but definitely tried to read up on it. And to my knowledge, it’s a Bitcoin twin created by IC. That trustlessly holds Bitcoin directly. Is there anything else that sort of makes it different, or is it really just sort of a derivative twin of rip? Good old regular Bitcoin.
Lomesh Dutta
Yeah. So let me give you an example, right? So today, with a basic Bitcoin integration, what you’re saying is, so let’s say, Matt, you have one Bitcoin, so you can send that Bitcoin over to, let’s say, to Lomesh or to a lending protocol on ICP. So effectively, ICP smart contract will have a Bitcoin address, or Lomesh will have a Bitcoin address, and you can send one Bitcoin. Now, if I have to send that Bitcoin over to someone, I always have to pay that Bitcoin network fee because a real Bitcoin is moving. And so you have to pay whatever is the Bitcoin, because the Bitcoin is still on the Bitcoin network, right? So you pay a Bitcoin fee, you will have to wait for whatever finality time Bitcoin has, which is like several minutes. And so that still remains to be slow. Yes, you can do all of that, but Bitcoin inherently takes money and slow an s in terms of how Bitcoin gets transferred. So what we said is like, okay, how about we create a smart contract where you can send Bitcoin and you can create a digital twin version of it. So your proof that you have that Bitcoin is all on chain, and then you can say, because I have this Bitcoin on chain, take my Bitcoin as a collateral and give me this ckBTC, which is essentially a ledger on ICP. So you can keep on moving that ckBTC as long as you want. It takes like less than 1 second finality. It costs ten SATS as a fee, basically negligible. And then you can transfer that over from Matts to a smart contract to whatever. And anytime you want to withdraw, you just simply swap it back and take it all on Bitcoin. But that is always visible to you on chain. So ckBTC is just like Bitcoin on the ICP ledger that you can move around without having to wait for Bitcoin finality or pay the Bitcoin network fee every time.
Matt Zahab
Interesting. And you guys launched. ckBTC in April and total volume has reached 2 million worth of BTC, which obviously shows that there’s a real demand for functional Bitcoin in the DeFi world. Are there any further plans to revamp this even more or is the focus still pretty much strictly DeFi related Bitcoin and also just making it more community and everyday focus? Like you were talking about how you can send SATS in, chat with friends, anything else that the team plans to build on.
Lomesh Dutta
So we are thinking about four to five different kind of categories of at least the way at least I approach the problem is give some tools to the developers and that they’ll figure out they’re smarter than you, so they’ll figure out how they want to use it. Right? So what we are seeing is I can give you a few examples. So one is on the acceptance side of things. So the idea is that let’s say this chat application or a social tripping platform or in game currency, these guys are essentially accepting ckBTC. So they are paying the creator tip in, let’s say our version of Twitter in the form of ckBTC or people have demonstrated this like so scan a QR code, pay someone with ckBTC or integrate with a point of sale. So this is on the acceptance side of things. It’s just like payment acceptance, similar to what lightning does. The second is what we would look at like traditional DeFi as is on different protocols. So building a stable coin like makerdive backed by Bitcoin as a collateral. So deposit your Bitcoin and issue dollars against it. Or basically lend your Bitcoin and create like a lending market like Aave or Compound, stuff like that. That’s the DeFi layer. The third action is lot also on this ordinals and SRC-20 and all of those like BRC-20, all of the craze around this Bitcoin, NFTs and fungible tokens. So that’s what people are looking to explore on the internet computer. So you can maybe borrow money against an Ordinal that you own. Stuff like that. So that’s the kind of thing people are trying to kind of play with. And then fourth is also on the enterprise side of things where people are creating these multi signature wallets where they say you can define a certain set of rules. So an example would be like a dead man switch, right? So where you can say, okay, if I do not ping this contract every like at least once in a quarter and maybe default to sending this Bitcoin to some of my nominee, my wife or my kids or whatever. So you can write that kind of logic and basically build very smart wallets which gives you protection of money and stuff like that. So this is the kind of stuff that people have started to play and we are excited to see okay, what comes out of it.
Matt Zahab
So cool. So interesting. Lomesh, this has been a treat here. A couple more questions mate and then we will wrap up. What other areas of crypto are really tickling your fancy at the moment? Obviously, we just went over all, not all, but a good chunk of the things that you and the team are building both at DFINITY and Internet computer IC. Is there anything else, any other areas of crypto, ZK Tech, whatever the case may be that’s really tickling your fancy at the moment?
Lomesh Dutta
Yeah. So ZK is very interesting. I think this has been the talk of the town. I was at the ETC in Paris recently and I think from my point of view, apart from ZK, I think a couple of other areas which are super interesting. One of them is what I would call as this confidential computing. So how do you kind of bring encryption on chain? So today all of the data, let’s say if you look at on Ethereum and so on is kind of pretty public. So you can’t really store, let’s say keys in your smart contract. So one of the things that we are working on is how do you encrypt data similar to how we have this threshold idea where so the idea is like a bunch of those nodes can come together to create to encrypted some data so that you can then effectively leave all of that data on the blockchain and it’s in an encrypted state, nobody can kind of take it away. So we are working a lot on that side. And the second thing that we are also exploring in that same space is like things like fully homomorphic encryption. What that means is, can you compute on this encrypted data? So imagine you want to train a machine learning model so you can say, okay, take my encrypted data, perform certain computation over it, but never tell you what this data was. But you can still train the model. So stuff like that is like what our team of researchers are exploring and super cool. I think the second thing that we are working on or exploring is what do we do with AI on the blockchain? So we just launched a special grants program, $5 million for exploring decentralized artificial intelligence. How can you build models where you can prove that, okay, this was the data that went into training those models. That’s the kind of thing that’s very exciting and we are trying to explore that.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Any hot takes Lomesh before you leave us, doesn’t have to be crypto related, can be health, wealth, happiness, space exploration, AI, you name it. But any Lomesh hot takes before you depart today,
Lomesh Dutta
I would say the hottest thing that everybody is talking about right now is what is going to be the future of X or Twitter. This is an interesting topic. I’ve been kind of following a lot of different threads and what Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter is. Yeah, we don’t know if you are Tweeting anymore or X-ing or whatever, but that’s one of the things that’s super interesting, at least to me right now.
Matt Zahab
What do you think? I mean, me personally, I don’t know. Examples that I can relate to know I’m looking out my window and I see the Roger Center. You know, it used to be the SkyDome in Toronto, everyone still calls it the SkyDome or Scotiabank Arena, which people still call the Air Candace Center. A better example, a more famous example would be Staples Center, which is now Crypto.com Arena. No one calls it Crypto.com Arena or crypto arena. Everyone calls it the Staples Center in LA. That’s where the Lakers won tons of championships. Obviously, you had the Los Angeles Kings winning Stanley Cups there as well. It’s tough, right? People don’t do that. But then again, on the flip side, if there’s one person on the planet who I’m not going to bet against business wise, it’s probably Elon Musk, you know, there’s really maybe Peter Thiel, Zuck, but besides those three lads, I don’t think there’s another guy on the planet who I wouldn’t bet against maybe Buffett. So with that being know, if Musk has a vision, he’s probably going to execute on that. So very curious to see where things go there. Do you think he’ll succeed in his vision for creating a global marketplace for not just knowledge, but obviously monetary value as well? Do you think that’s in the cards or you think he’s out to lunch there?
Lomesh Dutta
So before I again, we’ll kind of try to make my prediction, but I think if I look at some of the cues right, some of the things he has done are super interesting and again, it would have been possible. But everybody’s talking about how these creators have started to get a share, a piece of the pie. And again, this was always possible on Twitter, but now it is really possible. So this is super exciting. Now it’s driving a lot of wrong incentives for people because people are now just trying to do engagement farming and stuff, which again is not so healthy. But I would say experiment is always good. And I’m of the opinion, same as with my crypto philosophy, you should be rationally optimist about everything. I don’t try to be a maxi on one thing and I’m always open to exploring different ideas. If he’s trying to do certain experiments which makes him want to do that, name change. Worth a shot. We may still like the case of stadiums, we may still continue to call it Twitter for all time to come, but experiments are always good. So I think with that, I’m certainly with the lawn on. Yeah, why not?
Matt Zahab
Can’t bet against the guy. Lomesh, really appreciate you coming on. Had a blast and learned a ton here, mates. Before you go, please let our listeners know where they can find you. And DFINITY, I guess. And IC online and on socials.
Lomesh Dutta
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you, Matt. It was a super fun conversation and a real pleasure being here so you can learn more about the Internet Computer. It’s the word Internet, internetcomputer.org and DFINITY It’s basically decentralizedinfinity dfinity.org. You can reach out to me on Twitter @lomeshdutta. My first name, last name and yeah, that’s the way to connect with me and look forward to connecting with you.
Matt Zahab
Love that Lomesh. Thanks again, man, really appreciate it. Wishing you and the team all the best and cannot wait for round two in the near future.
Lomesh Dutta
Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Lomesh Dutta, Vice President of Growth at the one and only DFINITY. Lomesh came in hot and dropped tons of knowledge bombs. We’d love to see that. If you guys enjoyed this one, I hope you did. Please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking to the team love you guys. Thank you so much for everything. To Justas, my amazing sound editor. Appreciate you as always and all your hard work. And to the listeners, love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll see you next episode.
