00:00 • Aansh
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Delphi Podcast. My name is Aansh Mehta. You may see me as a new face on the Delphi Pod. I work in the operations division of Delphi Ventures, and I’m also an in-house expert or an enthusiast on domestic politics and policy in the United States and elsewhere. That is exactly why I am hosting Mr. Matt West. He’s a candidate for Oregon’s sixth congressional district. He’s also somewhat of a DeFi degen. We hope to unpack a lot of his background and why he’s running for office, how he thinks DeFi and crypto will be able to facilitate or help some of the problems that he sees in government and elsewhere, and then we’ll have some rapid fire questions. Matt, welcome to the pod. Let’s start with you giving a quick introduction and background about yourself.

00:49 • Matt
Absolutely. Thank you so much. My name is Matt West for those of you who are not familiar with me. I have a bit of a storied background in terms of crypto. I started mining in 2009. I did some early mining on Bitcoin for like a week. Outside of that, I got back involved in mining in 2013 with one of the very few Butterfly Labs ASICs that were actually given to real human beings. It also came with a coffee mug for those of you who know what I’m talking about. Once that ASIC was no longer profitable, I became an investor and enthusiast/activist until 2020. At that time, I actually became a developer for Yearn during DeFi summer. I’ve been a strategist with Yearn ever since, but the rest of my history is different from that. I have my PhD in renewable energy research.

01:38 • Matt
I did research in fuel cells and batteries. Once I graduated from UT Austin with my degree, I came out to work at Intel’s R&D facility, the research and development facility out in the Portland Metro area where I’ve been my entire working adult life. During DeFi summer, when everyone was dealing with the pandemic and staying home, I took on a second full-time job essentially as a programmer with Yearn. I taught myself programming. I hadn’t done any since my first year of undergrad college. My teachers at Yearn were extremely patient with me. Thank you so much for that. I had basically been working full-time at both jobs which brought me here, running for Congress. I started running for office in early summer of 2021, but that is my very storied background with lots of different twists and turns along the way. I’m very proud to be running a race right now to represent Oregon’s brand new district.

02:43 • Aansh
Thank you for that intro. That’s super helpful. One thing I’ve been curious about, and not to hit you with a curve ball in the beginning, but what is it about frontier tech that really excites you and interests you? You got your PhD and were researching fuel cell technologies. Now you’re in crypto. Decentralized finance is very much the bleeding edge. What interests you about these sorts of tech?

03:05 • Matt
That’s a great question. Thank you so much. In all honesty, I think the answer is that these sorts of bleeding edge tech opportunities are all based on optimism for the future. I started researching renewable energy fuel cells. That was very specifically with a goal to combat climate change. That was always going to be my academic career. I went into undergrad specifically knowing that I wanted to work in renewable energy. My work at Intel was a bit of a sidestep into industrial life for a bit, working at their manufacturing facility and being on the tech floor, actually the fab floor with the heavy equipment and the machines, as well as in the office. In terms of blockchain, what was super fascinating about it to me is there’s always like that one moment where it suddenly clicks for you. I think that moment for me was not actually my first week mining it which I just saw as this cool, new, interesting concept.

04:03 • Matt
The moment was when I was trying to transfer my personal money from one bank to another bank and having to go through that very long period of checks and transactions with [inaudible], double checking that I did have that money and the other bank verifying that, “Yes, you do,” and it taking 3-4 days for it to go through. Whereas my first interaction on the blockchain was like that *snaps fingers*. Within a couple of minutes it went through and it settled. It was eye opening to me. Whether you’re talking about domestic money transfer or even international, it’s the same amount of time. Anyone who has done an international wire transfer remittance also knows that there’s even longer periods of wait there. That was my “Aha!” moment for what blockchain could really do for the very base case use – that original idea of Bitcoin in terms of being able to transfer money quickly and easily anywhere around the world without the need for government regulations getting in the way. Now, Ethereum is where I’ve done most of my work. That is a completely revolutionary idea in terms of turning a blockchain programmable.

05:13 • Aansh
I think that was my “Aha!” moment, understanding that you can actually do stuff with this.

05:17 • Matt
Absolutely. I was teaching some of my close friends courses on decentralized finance about how to become a Uniswap liquidity provider and how you can make money based on people trading against the pairs and other things that you could do in the space. I’ve told them about various different investment and saving protocols and how they could get interest rates far higher than they were able to get with their bank. The DeFi summer of 2020 was a complete game changer. We had these protocols specifically programmed in various ways that you could move the various money legos around and build strategies specifically where you could deploy money in one place, get a return on investment, and then pull it back. The farming heat was wild, whether you were talking about Yams or you were talking about Synthetix staking or so many brand new projects coming out every day.

06:16 • Matt
I was fascinated by the idea of being able to move these little legos around, say deposit ETH to Maker, get DAI, and then put that DAI to work at some other Yam farm or something of that nature. I just fell in love. When Yearn Finance came out and was trying to get different strategies for various vaults at the very beginning of the protocol, I was super interested. I started posting different ideas to their forums and I was reached out to by another member of the community who asked me if I wanted to join him in a hackathon, the ETH Online Hackathon, in I think it was October or August of 2020.

07:00 • Aansh
Could you speak more to that? Specifically, what made you say, “I’m going to post on some of these forums and really take a more active approach in the protocol itself,”? It seems like that’s how you fell down the stairs of becoming a strategy developer, right?

07:18 • Matt
Absolutely. I appreciate that. I was very much, at the very beginning, finding ways that I could deposit my money in one place to get a loan and put it somewhere else, and it was fascinating. It was really energizing trying to figure out how to play the game in order to get the highest return on investments. For me as an individual user, once gas became expensive, a lot of those optimizations of where to put your money became cost prohibitive, but with Yearn and the vaults that was a sort of a collectivized nature of moving money back and forth worth like a socialized gas fee, essentially, at the very beginning. That was the “Aha!” moment for me: regular users are going to put their money in this pool and say, “Hey you’re the expert. Figure out the best way for me to get a return on investment on it in a way that I don’t need to have a hundred thousand dollars to help cover the gas fees on this thing…

08:19 • Matt
…I can throw away my hundred dollars and it will actually earn an interest over time.” For me, that was when I really got excited for all the various things that I could do. I started coming up with ideas. I knew various protocols around the ecosystem. I proposed Synthetix staking vaults. I proposed some other stuff but the one that got picked up on was my Hegic proposal. That was a strategy to deposit ETH and wrapped Bitcoin into Hegic’s protocol to get staking lots. That was the one where a community member reached out to me and we teamed up for the hackathon. We won Yearn’s top prize for that hackathon, and we basically became strategists ever since. That strategy became Yearn’s very first V2 vault. It was really exciting to go from some random guy posting ideas on the forums to becoming a strategist. That was one of the really cool things.

09:17 • Aansh
That’s a testament to how quickly you could get involved, and also how horizontal some of these are in nature, right? If you have the idea and you have the expertise, you can participate in a very meaningful way right away. I believe when we last spoke you mentioned that you were even on the multisig for quite a while.

09:34 • Matt
I was a member of the Yearn strategist multisig from the multisig’s inception. I took a step back when I started running for office for multiple reasons: time for one, optics, and conflict of interest. But, I was happily a multisig member. I think there were six of us at the time.

09:55 • Aansh
It’s funny there’s members of Congress who don’t even want to not trade on possible insider information, then you have Matt West here running for office already ameliorating any conflicts of interest, just something I noticed there. From this brief introduction and hearing this path you’ve taken from learning crypto to becoming a strategist, I guess it’s fair to say you’re a little bit of a degen. I think when we last spoke, we mentioned your degen score. What was it? Was it 632?

10:31 • Matt
I thought it was in the seven hundreds. I can pull it up really fast because I definitely sent it to you.

10:38 • Aansh
I think when we last spoke I had mentioned the degen score and was curious to see based on your early DeFi experience and potentially even a rug or two, what the score looked like.

10:48 • Matt
You were correct. It was 625.

10:52 • Aansh
That’s still certifiably quite deep. For those at home that may not be familiar, it’s a score out of 750, taking into account your DeFi accolades or issues that you may have faced. Safe to say that Matt’s been involved. Now shifting to where the world needs me: where does policy intersect with this? I think it’s fair to say that we’re still in a phase of discovery of what this technology is, and there’s a bunch of reasons, whether they’re in the media or elsewhere, that point to the combative nature of some policymakers towards decentralized technologies, specifically crypto, and decentralized finance as well, particularly stablecoins. I want to now shift the discussion to focus on a lot of how you are thinking about these things. How do you think it would be helpful to explain this to people that hopefully might be working next to one day as colleagues? How do we explain some of this tech frontier or pain points?

11:53 • Matt
Absolutely. This is one of the biggest questions that we have to face as a community right now. Whether we’re talking about basically any technology, there are a few people currently on the Hill who are evidently not aware of the actual underlying technology. That can be said of science as well. Whether we’re talking about climate change or the pandemic, there are people who are in charge and in power right now who do not understand the core concepts of which they’re legislating on. This is one of the main reasons why I actually jumped into this race. This district is brand new in Oregon. We went from five to six, so it’s an open seat, but I was sitting around in summer of 2021 and I noticed a massive heat wave in Oregon. I think it got to 116 degrees, one degree shy of Las Vegas’s all-time high temperature. In my apartment, which does have one tiny little air conditioner,…

12:52 • Matt
…Got to 94 degrees Fahrenheit. It was excruciating. We also had these wildfires with crowding smoke, and then we had the ongoing pandemic and the new wave of the Delta variants which was overloading Oregon’s hospitals at the time. These were all things that a lot of people who are currently in power were not addressing as either real or were just saying nonsense. Whether it was from the media or from elected officials, I felt like I needed to do something. I needed to step in. I thought it was time for someone with an actual scientific background to help pass laws and regulations that would actually solve the core problem. A few weeks into building my team, that’s when the 605 provision came out in the infrastructure bill which did a host of things that essentially would make crypto and Web3 and blockchain, as we know it today, unworkable in the United States.

13:48 • Aansh
Yeah. I recall a lot of group chats talking about that in detail and how to respond and how to even think about it and what it ultimately means. I think there was a lot of confusion, quite frankly, even among us in the industry that are in it all the time.

14:04 • Matt
Absolutely. I mean this was something that was constantly coming up, not just on Crypto Twitter but also in my group chats at Yearn. People were trying to dissect it and figure out what the heck that means. Yearn is an international group of people, right? If it becomes hostile in the United States towards Yearn, Yearn won’t shut down, but it will not be good for the company. It won’t be good for the United States in general to ban crypto, certainly not good for any citizens who are using crypto as a way to invest or build their wealth in a way that hasn’t been possible for them before in their lives. It was just clear nonsense – the idea that you had to have every single transaction that goes through any node double checked and validated as though you’re a money transmitter. Anytime you wanted to have a personal sale of an NFT, say over $10,000, which to be clear is a private sale of art from one individual to another,…

16:01 • Matt
…Now you need to know that person’s social security number or tax ID number. These were very obviously rules and regulations that were being passed on extremely old ways of thinking about money transmitting and remittances. It was very clear from the beginning that this is a framework that will not work for crypto. It is based on outdated understanding and just became yet another instance of why I felt I needed to run. I have been here in space since the beginning. I’m a developer. I’ve studied how blockchains actually work, how the composability of the contracts work, and the people who are passing laws right now don’t understand the core concept of this technology. Here we are. I’m running for Congress. I feel like if we want people to actually pass laws that make sense for crypto, to help defend it and regulate it in a way that makes sense and is better for the industry as a whole, we need to get people like me inside so we can actually shape the discussion before it ever becomes public what the bill is supposed to say. We can have it tailored in a way that makes sense.

16:12 • Aansh
I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think you’re right. It starts first with education and then where I want to shift to is the use cases. This opens up a lot of use cases being that it is a frontier piece of tech that we’re still exploring. When you have things like DeFi that started to take off, especially with the financial motive, it’s easier to innovate rapidly and have that incentive there for folks. I’d like to sit for a minute and focus on the potential use cases. Even as far-fetched as they might seem today, that might be possible as a result of this tech. I think that’s really how to advocate for it, to bring in folks with otherwise disparate interests. Could you hit on one or two things you’re thinking about utilizing in your day-to-day being on the campaign or within some of the stuff you’ve seen in the private sector as far as what this opens up?

17:08 • Matt
Sure. We’re currently seeing new use cases come up on almost a weekly or monthly basis. Things that we never would have imagined before are introduced. Fractionalizing art to take loans out against it, for example, is a fairly new use case that I don’t think has ever existed before. If we’re trying to pass legislation or regulation based on something that you don’t even know what technology is able to open, it’s a really exciting time to be in the area. For me, what I have personally been drawn to is the DeFi space. Even if we want to go into the centralized aspects of it, say a BlockFi account, if you deposit money to a BlockFi account in crypto, you can take out a loan against it if you so choose, but also you get interest rates that are far superior to anything you can get in a traditional bank.

18:04 • Matt
I mean an 8% or so, not plugging BlockFi especially here, but 8% to 10% in the industry is fairly normal for a deposit on stablecoins. That is essentially a guaranteed return and is far better than what the average is for a stock market over this period of five to ten years, which averages between 5% or 7%, depending on what timescale you look at. We’re talking 8% to 10% as opposed to 0.1%. I distinctly remember a year ago when my bank sent me a, “Congratulations! Our new high interest accounts are bumped up to .15%.”

18:50 • Aansh
That was not worth the paper it’s printed on.

18:53 • Matt
Quite literally. We’re dealing with a complete disconnect in the idea of saving your money and building your wealth. In our current banking system as we have it today, that’s not possible unless you are to invest in risk-on assets. Right now, we’re seeing inflation at 7% or so. Compare that to .15% in your bank account. It’s insane. You’ll lose money every year and you will never be able to lift yourself up or improve your family’s future dealing with that sort of a system. When we’re talking about on the campaign, we are able to accept donations in cryptocurrency which is awesome. What we’re finding is the main use case here on the campaign trail is talking about what crypto can bring to people in their daily lives. There’s a sense of historical story about what crypto is. Whenever people I’m talking to, generally speaking, who are outside of the space, when they hear crypto they primarily think Bitcoin. They think of crypto anarchists.

20:01 • Matt
They think of, “Get the government out of my money,” talking points. While that’s all there, that’s been here ever since the beginning. There’s all these new networks and new use cases. A big talking point for people in the democratic party is banking the unbanked. There’s a certain subsection of our population, not just here but across the entire world, that do not have access to traditional financial systems. This changes that. 60% of the people in the United States who do not have a bank account have access to a smartphone. That is a massive population that we can tap into immediately and get them actual banking services and help to improve their financial lives with interest rates far better than they could at any commercial banks.

20:53 • Aansh
It makes a lot of sense. I think the data speaks to that, right? It’s the connection between how many people have smartphones and they still don’t have the basic financial pipes to be able to live their lives. Hopefully, that’s the gap we’re trying to mitigate, but that segues right into what I wanted to talk about next is: we can all sit here and talk about how much we love DeFi all day long, and we do sometimes, but we have to also be very honest about some of the challenges, right? I think some of those challenges or the fear of those challenges getting out of hand, such as the risk associated with hacking or what have you – that’s why crypto also gets a bad rap. In your eyes, what are some of the infrastructure or security or other frameworks that haven’t even come out yet…what are the pain points that need to be addressed for the adoption from the legislating public and the public at large that might be skeptical for a few reasons?

21:52 • Matt
Those are excellent questions. I think I may have to subdivide it because it was so broad. In terms of getting average everyday people into using these networks, the first hurdle they have to deal with is user experience, To be completely fair, a lot of the various protocols in DeFi right now, some of them that I love dearly, don’t have the user experience integrated that is necessary to onboard somebody in 5 to 10 minutes. That’s the whole core concept of introducing somebody to a brand new Apple product or introducing somebody to an old Linux machine without any graphical user interface whatsoever. There’s a huge learning curve there, and that’s why the iPhone has proved to be so popular. This is the exact sort of issue that we’re going to have when we’re talking about DeFi. What is the application that is going to connect people to all of these different end points to help them save their money, to invest their money, to loan their money in a way that doesn’t mean they have to learn code, that doesn’t mean they have to learn how to self-host their own wallets on Metamask, go to etherscan, sign these transactions themselves, or God forbid go into actual line editing and do some actual line programming of code themselves?

23:24 • Matt
That’s what we’ve had to learn being in the forefront: going to etherscan, reading the code ourselves, and determining whether or not this is going to get rugged. Is it a scam? Is it legitimate? These are all things that we can’t expect somebody to walk on and do within day one. There needs to be some onboarding process that makes that easy from a consumer perspective, because as much as I love this technology and the nerdy money legos, and as much as you do as well, there are plenty of people who want to say, “Here’s my money, make it work and go away.” That’s why we have hedge funds right now. That’s why we have money managers right now is because people want to live their lives in a way that they don’t have to worry about their finances constantly.

24:08 • Matt
I think that’s a huge issue when it comes to individual pain points. You can look at numerous different wallets right now on smartphones that are actually getting there. I know a few, say Argent, for example, is one that I’ve played around with personally. Even Coinbase has their own wallet which is trying to do something very similar. I think we are getting to that point, but I really do believe there’s going to be this killer app that basically turns this from enthusiasts all talking to each other in our own little Telegram chats into actual mass adoption.

24:49 • Aansh
I guess it’s really like, “What brings it to scale?” That’s probably what we’re trying to say. That makes a lot of sense. As someone who sits on the venture side of it, we see a lot of that every day. There’s a lot of people who are building really great financial use cases, but we definitely see some folks putting in the real work as far as UX goes. That’s huge, right? That’s how it’s going work.

25:14 • Matt
Absolutely. On the other side, when we’re talking about how to scale institutions and how to scale from the other perspective, it comes down to regulations. Right now there are tons and tons of people and institutions who want to get involved in this space but are afraid to dip their toes in the water because they don’t know what’s allowed. They don’t know what they can do. You have some groups who are more risk-on when it comes to that. You also have some large banks who are intentionally sitting out on the sidelines. They see 8% APY in some of these protocols and they want to be able to provide that, not just for their bottom line, but for their users as a way to get to them more value and bring more users to their bank, but they’re afraid. They’re locked because they don’t know if they will be breaking any money transmitter laws. Will they be infringing?

26:07 • Matt
There’s this huge gray area which is extremely dangerous for a lot of these regulated companies. The last thing they want to do is do something that they think is okay and then have a regulator or the government come by later and say, “No, actually you broke this law. There was no real guidance regulation there, but after the fact we have determined that you actually did break the law. Now we’re going to go through this whole process and punish you,” even though they were acting in good faith at the moment. There are numerous instances of that, and I’m sure you can name a few. I’m sure everyone watching this can name a few, but I think that’s the real risk when we’re talking about people passing these legislations and passing these regulations that will otherwise completely hinder the industry.

27:02 • Matt
The United States cannot destroy these networks. They can’t destroy Bitcoin. They can’t destroy Ethereum. What they can do is drive a lot of the development and innovation of these networks off shore. That’s a huge risk, not necessarily for the technology and the industry, but that’s a risk for us as a nation as well. By doing that, we don’t have the ability to be part of the solution in guiding these networks into a way that reflects our national values of getting everyone being on the same level playing field as everyone else and having access to the same tools. People need to be able to protect themselves when they go on the internet and have the knowledge that they’re not having their data scraped constantly by one of the big three or four tech companies that currently do that right now. That’s a huge risk for us as a nation if we become outright hostile towards this, which is why we need people,…

27:59 • Matt
…Once again, like me who understand these issues and understand the value they can bring inside the government in order to help crack that regulation, in order to make sure that these large institutions have that framework and have that level playing field where they know what they can do. That’s going to bring in tons of value to our community. It will really unlock a growth rate that we’ve never seen before, but I do need the help of the community in order to get into Washington and actually help pass these laws. For those of you who are listening, please do go to my website www.mattwestforcongress.com. Please take a look around, look at my policy and donate, especially, It does require donating in order to get in there. It’s a huge issue.

28:53 • Aansh
Definitely. I was going to hit on that multiple times, just have to give out your info to see how to support you. He’s active on Twitter, Crypto Twitter and Politics Twitter. Those are already two very active Twitter sub-sectors, but reach out to Matt on there, too. That’s actually how we met like so many other folks intersected in crypto through Twitter itself. You segwayed me perfectly into our next topic. Let’s fast forward exactly a year from now. Everything goes great this year and you are elected to Congress. Congrats! What is the general playbook for how you would help to regulate and get the word out there for exactly how to treat decentralized assets or decentralized blockchains and all of these different concepts we talked about? I know a lot of stuff has been thrown around like possible frameworks such as Safe Harbor. I would love to get your thoughts, hypothetically of course, as for what you would do hitting the ground next year.

29:54 • Matt
Sure. That’s great. Honestly, one of the biggest things that we can do is be an advocate for the space to other legislators and to the regulators themselves. When we’re looking at the current framework of how these various things are regulated and how they’re handled, it’s very clear that since we do not have any real legislation to describe these networks or to describe these assets, we’re using old regulations to try to become analogous to current bleeding edge technologies.

30:30 • Aansh
If I have to hear “Howie Test” one more time I might lose it. I might have to mute it from my Twitter soon.

30:37 • Matt
Exactly. It is fascinating how we’re trying to shove this square peg through a round hole, but that is what the regulators have to work with. They have the laws as they stand. They are obligated to work within that framework. I think this is a huge opportunity for us to get legislators to pass a new framework that will allow the regulators extra room on how they interpret these issues. One in particular you mentioned is Safe Harbor. This is exactly what I was talking about previously. When people are trying to build something brand new and they don’t really know what the laws are or what the regulations are so it’s kind of a gray area, a safe harbor would allow these new protocols to experiment and to develop, and they wouldn’t have to go under that regulatory scrutiny to that level until the end of that Safe Harbor period, say three years. At that point, you could then go and look at what they’ve built and say, “Is this centralized or is this decentralized?”

31:37 • Matt
“Is this a use token or is this an asset store of value token? Is this a voting right share token?” All of those things have to be looked at and determined. “Is this an asset? Is it a security? Is it a stablecoin?” There’s so many of those different knobs and small granular details that cannot really be understood until one protocol is built. The current language about how we talk about Bitcoin, for example, is very different from how we talked about it at the very beginning of a seamless, cash, peer-to-peer transfer. Now the language is that it’s a store of wealth, a sovereign store of wealth in order to hedge against inflation. That was always in the genesis block, but the core idea was making it easy to transfer money. Then, say in 2017, when the blockchain became really swollen and stagnated, suddenly people were talking about, “It’s a good thing that it’s hard to send this because it’s really hard to send gold physically.” That’s a huge issue for why I think Safe Harbor is crucial.

32:50 • Aansh
It’s almost as if Safe Harbor is outsourcing some of the research or due diligence that happens on other large issues where Congress will fund research, e.g. if it’s a medical research topic, and then figure out how to legislate it. Because it’s determined by market participants in a lot of ways, it’s kind of like, “Let’s just take the regulatory cooling effect out of there and just give them enough room to operate and then see how to put it in the guardrails, if any.”

33:19 • Matt
I think that’s a really great way of looking at it. The issue is that we do need regulations, but we don’t know what the use cases are always going to be for emerging protocols, especially for technology that is this nascent. Trying to legislate and regulate something that’s never been done before is tricky. You can try to do that in research and try to do those sorts of things through the CBO and all of those various think tanks, but a lot of those have frameworks of existing technologies or existing protocols or systems that they use across the world. If they want to research how single payer healthcare would look, we have other places in the world that we can take a look at, learn from, and extrapolate on. For a brand new technology that’s never existed before – we’re all flying in the dark together.

34:12 • Matt
That’s why I think, until we’ve become more established, a Safe Harbor is so crucial. That gives people the ability to start building new ideas without immediately wondering, “Will this be something that is found out to be illegal once I build it?” That really hampers a lot of these developers who are brought into this space through passion and skill and really wanting to create and asking them to do legal due diligence before they even start writing their first line of code.

34:46 • Aansh
I’d rather do anything else. They’re just going to pivot to some other project.

34:51 • Matt
Exactly. I think that is an absolutely key aspect in order to make this space continue to thrive and grow as it has been over the last decade. It’s a two plus trillion dollar industry and community that we’ve grown over the last 10-13 years. That is truly a bewildering amount of speed.

35:16 • Aansh
Like everyone always says – zoom out. I guess now we can let our hair down and ask some more lighthearted questions. What has been exciting you lately? In Yearn land, there’s been a lot going on with Fantom. I don’t know if you’re still writing any strategies. I’m sure you don’t have a ton of time but who knows, maybe you still are. What’s exciting to you these days in DeFi land or elsewhere?

35:40 • Matt
What’s really exciting right now in terms of blockchains as a whole is, whenever I go to a meeting or a convention and I start talking to people, they’ll ask me, “Have you heard about this project on this network?” In honesty, I get to say, “No, I haven’t. That’s awesome. Tell me more about it.” I think that we’re now growing to a point where keeping tabs on every project is now completely impossible. That would be like at the very beginning of the internet, you would know most of the sites that were on there, but right now if somebody asks you, “Hey, did you see this new website that went up two days ago?” Of course you haven’t. That’s what I’m super excited about when we are talking about this space is there’s always something new. There’s always some new use case. We’re constantly iterating on each other’s work and learning from each other’s work.

36:32 • Matt
We’re really in a very supportive environment in that sense, for the most part. People want to work together and they want to solve these problems together, and that’s truly amazing. There’s so few places that exist like that across the world these days. Here, we really have built something extremely special. As you mentioned, Fantom is growing at a clip that’s pretty impressive, especially with Yearn. The thing Andre’s working on, those new VE wars, that’s fun to watch and see how that’s evolving. I’m really excited by all of these new networks that are trying new things, all moving towards proof of stake – it seems like for many of them. Some of them are trying new proof of whatever you want to talk about.

37:17 • Aansh
What are your thoughts on DAOs, generally speaking? They’ve been getting so much hype the last few months. Of course, as people start their “Year of <X>” lists for 2022, DAOs are mentioned on most if not all of the main pieces that I had read, but what are your general first impressions or thoughts on the way DAOs are going? If you could speak on some of the possibilities you see as far as coordination, because that’s really what it is, right? It’s a resource coordination or an attention coordination exercise. How does that work, especially in the framework of NGOs and stuff that happens in the public sphere?

38:02 • Matt
I think you answered your own question there by asking. The growth of DAOs is fascinating. This is a way for people across the internet to engage with each other and to form their own community in a way that is awesome. We see DAOs about things like buying the U.S. Constitution.

38:24 • Aansh
Did you do the ConstitutionDAO?

38:27 • Matt
I was not involved in that one. I was not sure how that would work if I’m running for office and trying to buy the Constitution.

38:36 • Aansh
Fair point. Patriotic at least, right?

38:39 • Matt
Yeah. I can see that. I’m sure that would’ve been a few attack ads about how I’m trying to buy the government. I’m like, “I’ll stay away from that one.” Personally, the one that I was really excited by was buying the copy of Dune with DuneDAO that just went out. I’m a particularly nerdy fan of Dune. I have a few of the original series in first additions – that level of nerdiness.

39:03 • Aansh
It’s one of the books on my nightstand. It’s a copy of the first Dune book.

39:09 • Matt
Awesome. Truly, if you’ve not read it yet, it is a trip. It is dense but it’s wonderful. I remember I read it for the first time in middle school on vacation. As soon as I finished reading it, I immediately went back and started reading it a second time. It’s a masterpiece. Outside of that, DAOs are a perfect example of something that is emerging that we’ve never seen before that are evolving in a way that we couldn’t imagine, whether we’re talking about social DAOs or talking about investment DAOs or even we’ve seen people set up DAOs specifically to try to combat climate change. There’s so many of these different things that are emerging. Basically, what it really is at the core is a group of people working together on some task or some shared sense of whatever.

40:07 • Matt
Even if it’s just working together to create a community where they all get to hang out and be friends, it’s really the idea of formalizing groups. You could see DAOs in the future that are essentially regulated as corporations if they’re a for-profit institution. You could see some that are NGOs if they’re not-for-profit and they are trying to serve some public good. It’s awesome. I’m really excited to see how they continue to play out.

40:35 • Aansh
I feel like we’re going to see a 501-C3 organization, a non-profit for those of you who don’t study this US code, a 501-C3 that does yield farming with some of their donations. I could see that happening soon.

40:50 • Matt
Some projects probably do.

40:52 • Aansh
Yeah exactly. I can’t even keep up, but I’m saying even on a larger scale. I’m predicting that passive yield earning vehicles are going to be attractive to a lot of people.

41:06 • Matt
Absolutely. We’re going to see businesses work together to build these new things whether it’s for NGOs or whether it’s for their own users. Once again, that requires legislation that allows them to do this in a way that they know they’re not going to be infringing on any laws unintentionally.

41:25 • Aansh
Exactly. I think that’s the crux of the conversation. Please share any parting thoughts for the audience or anything else you wanted to highlight before we wrap up.

41:37 • Matt
For everyone who’s trying to get involved in this space, please do. Find something that interests you. Find some way to contribute. Most of the people in this space are incredibly kind and incredibly patient to people who are trying to get into it and trying to learn. I went from an enthusiast to a programmer simply because I wanted to chip in, and those communities exist all throughout this entire network. If there’s anything you’re interested in that’s at all related to crypto/Web3/DeFi, the first step is really trying to get your foot in the door by taking the time to learn and offering to help. That is a huge thing. I am still writing strategies at Yearn as I’m running for office, as a matter of fact. That’s just because I care about these protocols. I’m super interested in the money legos, so I’m still doing that.

42:36 • Aansh
You take off your campaign hat every day and you throw on your strategist hat, and I assume you don’t sleep most of the time. I don’t know how you can be involved in politics and crypto at the same time. It seems both of them take over a hundred percent of your time.

42:52 • Matt
I was the kind of person who actually took my sabbatical from Intel to launch my campaign for Congress. I’m not surprised that this is something that I’m trying to do.

43:02 • Matt
The first step is to get involved in crypto. Get involved in Web3. Second, get involved in politics. This is historically an apolitical space, but what we’ve seen over the last year is that politics happens to you whether you are engaging with it or not. Everything in some way is political. Right now our entire community, our entire industry is under very literal threat from overregulation or from outright being banned in certain countries. China has done it to many means. India is looking at doing it. The United States has flirted with the idea of banning it on and off again in a way that I think makes a lot of us here feel like it’s not going to happen. We’ll just feel like, “It’s another attempt. We’ll survive it.” What I literally think the takeaway from that is: it’s not that we’ll survive it and it’s just another attempt, it’s that they keep trying.

43:59 • Matt
Eventually, one of their attempts will stick. Public perception will be either so strongly in favor of it that it goes through, or they’ll find some legal loophole that finally stands when it gets challenged in court. At that point, we are in very serious water. Our entire industry and community will be subjected to shocks. Get involved, find those people who are actually supporting you and your community, especially in the crypto community, and ask them how you can help. Donate to their campaigns. This is a huge issue. By all means, support me. I am the first crypto/Web3 developer running for office. I’m running a campaign where my main opponent in the primary election is actually a state legislator who voted to ban the state of Oregon from interacting with any blockchain. That is now state law in Oregon.

45:03 • Matt
This is the actual field that we’re playing in right now. People are trying to ban our community and ban our industry. If we want to protect it, we really need to step up and support those of us who are fighting to defend it.

45:19 • Aansh
The TLDR seems to be: get up, get involved, and speak out. That’s probably a great way of summing it up. Matt, where should people go if they want to learn more about you?

45:28 • Matt
The first step would be my website www.mattwestforcongress.com. From there, you can find various policy positions. You can also donate either in U.S. dollars or in crypto through BitPay. You can also find me on Twitter @mattdwest and I am on there almost every day, reading through posts and reading through replies. I am pretty easy to get a hold of. There’s also info@mattwestforcongress.com. Send us an email and we will take a look and get back to you. We’re pretty out there. We’re pretty approachable, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

46:10 • Aansh
I can endorse the fact that you are very easy to reach out to. It was very easy to talk to you on Twitter to schedule this thing. It’s great that everyone’s going to know more about you.

46:22 • Matt
It’s exciting. Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast.

Page not found

Delphi Oracle

Latest on Delphi